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The Man Who’s Going to Save Your Neighborhood Grocery Store

Illustration by Vinnie Neuberg

Joe Fassler | The Counter & Longreads | April 2019 | 8,802 words (33 minutes)

This story is published in partnership with The Counter, with reporting supported by the 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.  


In 2014, Rich Niemann, president and CEO of the Midwestern grocery company Niemann Foods, made the most important phone call of his career. He dialed the Los Angeles office of Shook Kelley, an architectural design firm, and admitted he saw no future in the traditional grocery business. He was ready to put aside a century of family knowledge, throw away all his assumptions, completely rethink his brand and strategy — whatever it would take to carry Niemann Foods deep into the 21st century.

“I need a last great hope strategy,” he told Kevin Kelley, the firm’s cofounder and principal. “I need a white knight.”

Part square-jawed cattle rancher, part folksy CEO, Niemann is the last person you’d expect to ask for a fresh start. He’s spent his whole life in the business, transforming the grocery chain his grandfather founded in 1917 into a regional powerhouse with more than 100 supermarkets and convenience stores across four states. In 2014, he was elected chair of the National Grocery Association. It’s probably fair to say no one alive knows how to run a grocery store better than Rich Niemann. Yet Niemann was no longer sure the future had a place for stores like his.

He was right to be worried. The traditional American supermarket is dying. It’s not just Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, an acquisition that trade publication Supermarket News says marked “a new era” for the grocery business — or the fact that Amazon hopes to launch a second new grocery chain in 2019, according to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, with a potential plan to scale quickly by buying up floundering supermarkets. Even in plush times, grocery is a classic red oceanindustry, highly undifferentiated and intensely competitive. (The term summons the image of a sea stained with the gore of countless skirmishes.) Now, the industrys stodgy old playbook — “buy one, get onesales, coupons in the weekly circular is hurtling toward obsolescence. And with new ways to sell food ascendant, legacy grocers like Rich Niemann are failing to bring back the customers they once took for granted. You no longer need grocery stores to buy groceries.

Niemann hired Kelley in the context of this imminent doom. The assignment: to conceive, design, and build the grocery store of the future. Niemann was ready to entertain any idea and invest heavily. And for Kelley, a man whos worked for decades honing his vision for what the grocery store should do and be, it was the opportunity of a lifetime carte blanche to build the working model hes long envisioned, one he believes can save the neighborhood supermarket from obscurity.

Kevin Kelley, illustration by Vinnie Neuberg

Rich Niemann, illustration by Vinnie Neuberg

The store that resulted is called Harvest Market, which opened in 2016. Its south of downtown Champaign, Illinois, out by the car dealerships and strip malls; 58,000 square feet of floor space mostly housed inside a huge, high-ceilinged glass barn. Its bulk calls to mind both the arch of a hayloft and the heavenward jut of a church. But you could also say its shaped like an ark, because its meant to survive an apocalypse.

Harvest Market is the anti-Amazon. Its designed to excel at what e-commerce can’t do: convene people over the mouth-watering appeal of prize ingredients and freshly prepared food. The proportion of groceries sold online is expected to swell over the next five or six years, but Harvest is a bet that behavioral psychology, spatial design, and narrative panache can get people excited about supermarkets again. Kelley isnt asking grocers to be more like Jeff Bezos or Sam Walton. Hes not asking them to be ruthless, race-to-the-bottom merchants. In fact, he thinks that grocery stores can be something far greater than we ever imagined a place where farmers and their urban customers can meet, a crucial link between the city and the country.

But first, if theyre going to survive, Kelley says, grocers need to start thinking like Alfred Hitchcock.

* * *

Kevin Kelley is an athletic-looking man in his mid-50s , with a piercing hazel gaze that radiates thoughtful intensity. In the morning, he often bikes two miles to Shook Kelley’s office in Hollywood — a rehabbed former film production studio on an unremarkable stretch of Melrose Avenue, nestled between Bogie’s Liquors and a driving school. Four nights a week, he visits a boxing gym to practice Muay Thai, a form of martial arts sometimes called “the art of eight limbs” for the way it combines fist, elbow, knee, and shin attacks. “Martial arts,” Kelley tells me, “are a framework for handling the unexpected.” That’s not so different from his main mission in life: He helps grocery stores develop frameworks for the unexpected, too.

You’ve never heard of him, but then it’s his job to be invisible. Kelley calls himself a supermarket ghostwriter: His contributions are felt more than seen, and the brands that hire him get all the credit. Countless Americans have interacted with his work in intimate ways, but will never know his name. Such is the thankless lot of the supermarket architect.

A film buff equally fascinated by advertising and the psychology of religion, Kelley has radical theories about how grocery stores should be built, theories that involve terms like emotional opportunity,” “brain activity,” “climax,and “mise-en-scène.But before he can talk to grocers about those concepts, he has to convince them of something far more elemental: that their businesses face near-certain annihilation and must change fundamentally to avoid going extinct.

It is the most daunting feeling when you go to a grocery store chain, and you meet with these starched-white-shirt executives,Kelley tells me. When we get a new job, we sit around this table we do it twenty, thirty times a year. Old men, generally. Don’t love food, progressive food. Just love their old food like Archie Bunkers, essentially. You meet these people and then you tour their stores. Then I’ve got to go convince Archie Bunker that there’s something called emotions, that there are these ideas about branding and feeling. It is a crazy assignment. I can’t get them to forget that they’re no longer in a situation where they’ve got plenty of customers. That its do-or-die time now.

Forget branding. Forget sales. Kelley’s main challenge is redirecting the attention of older male executives, scared of the future and yet stuck in their ways, to the things that really matter.

I make my living convincing male skeptics of the power of emotions,he says.

Human beings, it turns out, aren’t very good at avoiding large-scale disaster. As you read this, the climate is changing, thanks to the destructively planet-altering activities of our species. The past four years have been the hottest on record. If the trend continues — and virtually all experts agree it will — we’re likely to experience mass disruptions on a scale never before seen in human history. Drought will be epidemic. The ocean will acidify. Islands will be swallowed by the sea. People could be displaced by the millions, creating a new generation of climate refugees. And all because we didn’t move quickly enough when we still had time.

You know this already. But I bet you’re not doing much about it — not enough, at least, to help avert catastrophe. I’ll bet your approach looks a lot like mine: worry too much, accomplish too little. The sheer size of the problem is paralyzing. Vast, systemic challenges tend to short-circuit our primate brains. So we go on, as the grim future bears down.

Grocers, in their own workaday way, fall prey to the same inertia. They got used to an environment of relative stability. They don’t know how to prepare for an uncertain future. And they can’t force themselves to behave as if the good times are really going to go away — even if, deep down, they know it’s true.

I make my living convincing male skeptics of the power of emotions.

In the 1980s, you could still visit almost any community in the U.S. and find a thriving supermarket. Typically, it would be a dynasty family grocery store, one that had been in business for a few generations. Larger markets usually had two or three players, small chains that sorted themselves out along socioeconomic lines: fancy, middlebrow, thrifty. Competition was slack and demand — this is the beautiful thing about selling food — never waned. For decades, times were good in the grocery business. Roads and schools were named after local supermarket moguls, who often chaired their local chambers of commerce. “When you have that much demand, and not much competition, nothing gets tested. Kind of like a country with a military that really doesn’t know whether their bullets work,” Kelley says. “They’d never really been in a dogfight.”

It’s hard to believe now, but there was not a single Walmart on the West Coast until 1990. That decade saw the birth of the “hypermarket” and the beginning of the end for traditional grocery stores — Walmarts, Costcos, and Kmarts became the first aggressive competition supermarkets ever really faced, luring customers in with the promise of one-stop shopping on everything from Discmen to watermelon.

The other bright red flag: Americans started cooking at home less and eating out more. In 2010, Americans dined out more than in for the first time on record, the culmination of a slow shift away from home cooking that had been going on since at least the 1960s. That trend is likely to continue. According to a 2017 report from the USDA’s Economic Research Service, millennials shop at food stores less than any other age group, spend less time preparing food, and are more likely to eat carry-out, delivery, or fast food even when they do eat at home. But even within the shrinking market for groceries, competition has stiffened. Retailers not known for selling food increasingly specialize in it, a phenomenon called “channel blurring”; today, pharmacies like CVS sell pantry staples and packaged foods, while 99-cent stores like Dollar General are a primary source of groceries for a growing number of Americans. Then there’s e-commerce. Though only about 3 percent of groceries are currently bought online, that figure could rocket to 20 percent by 2025. From subscription meal-kit services like Blue Apron to online markets like FreshDirect and Amazon Fresh, shopping for food has become an increasingly digital endeavor — one that sidesteps traditional grocery stores entirely.

A cursory glance might suggest grocery stores are in no immediate danger. According to the data analytics company Inmar, traditional supermarkets still have a 44.6 percent market share among brick-and-mortar food retailers. And though a spate of bankruptcies has recently hit the news, there are actually more grocery stores today than there were in 2005. Compared to many industries — internet service, for example — the grocery industry is still a diverse, highly varied ecosystem. Forty-three percent of grocery companies have fewer than four stores, according to a recent USDA report. These independent stores sold 11 percent of the nation’s groceries in 2015, a larger collective market share than successful chains like Albertson’s (4.5 percent), Publix (2.25 percent), and Whole Foods (1.2 percent).

But looking at this snapshot without context is misleading — a little like saying that the earth can’t be warming because it’s snowing outside. Not long ago, grocery stores sold the vast majority of the food that was prepared and eaten at home — about 90 percent in 1988, according to Inmar. Today, their market share has fallen by more than half, even as groceries represent a diminished proportion of overall food sold. Their slice of the pie is steadily shrinking, as is the pie itself.

By 2025, the thinking goes, most Americans will rarely enter a grocery store. That’s according to a report called “Surviving the Brave New World of Food Retailing,” published by the Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council — a think tank sponsored by the soft drink giant to help retailers prepare for major changes. The report describes a retail marketplace in the throes of massive change, where supermarkets as we know them are functionally obsolete. Disposables and nonperishables, from paper towels to laundry detergent and peanut butter, will replenish themselves automatically, thanks to smart-home sensors that reorder when supplies are low. Online recipes from publishers like Epicurious will sync directly to digital shopping carts operated by e-retailers like Amazon. Impulse buys and last-minute errands will be fulfilled via Instacart and whisked over in self-driving Ubers. In other words, food — for the most part — will be controlled by a small handful of powerful tech companies.

The Coca-Cola report, written in consultation with a handful of influential grocery executives, including Rich Niemann, acknowledges that the challenges are dire. To remain relevant, it concludes, supermarkets will need to become more like tech platforms: develop a “robust set of e-commerce capabilities,” take “a mobile-first approach,” and leverage “enhanced digital assets.” They’ll need infrastructure for “click and collect” purchasing, allowing customers to order online and pick up in a jiffy. They’ll want to establish a social media presence, as well as a “chatbot strategy.” In short, they’ll need to become Amazon, and they’ll need to do it all while competing with Walmart — and its e-commerce platform, Jet.com — on convenience and price.

That’s why Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods Market was terrifying to so many grocers, sending the stocks of national chains like Kroger tumbling: It represents a future they can’t really compete in. Since August 2017, Amazon has masterfully integrated e-commerce and physical shopping, creating a muscular hybrid that represents an existential threat to traditional grocery stores. The acquisition was partially a real estate play: Whole Foods stores with Prime lockers now act as a convenient pickup depot for Amazon goods. But Amazon’s also doing its best to make it too expensive and inconvenient for its Prime members, who pay $129 a year for free two-day shipping and a host of other perks, to shop anywhere else. Prime members receive additional 10 percent discounts on select goods at Whole Foods, and Amazon is rolling out home grocery delivery in select areas. With the Whole Foods acquisition, then, Amazon cornered two markets: the thrift-driven world of e-commerce and the pleasure-seeking universe of high-end grocery. Order dish soap and paper towels in bulk on Amazon, and pick them up at Whole Foods with your grass-fed steak.

Traditional grocers are now expected to offer the same combination of convenience, flexibility, selection, and value. They’re understandably terrified by this scenario, which would require fundamental, complex, and very expensive changes. And Kelley is terrified of it, too, though for a different reason: He simply thinks it wont work. In his view, supermarkets will never beat Walmart and Amazon at what they do best. If they try to succeed by that strategy alone, theyll fail. That prospect keeps Kelley up at night because it could mean a highly consolidated marketplace overseen by just a handful of players, one at stark contrast to the regional, highly varied food retail landscape America enjoyed throughout the 20th century.

I’m afraid of what could happen if Walmart and Amazon and Lidl are running our food system, the players trying to get everything down to the lowest price possible,he tells me. What gives me hope is the upstarts who will do the opposite. Who arent going to sell convenience or efficiency, but fidelity.

The approach Kelley’s suggesting still means completely overhauling everything, with no guarantee of success. It’s a strategy that’s decidedly low-tech, though it’s no less radical. It’s more about people than new platforms. It means making grocery shopping more like going to the movies.

* * *

Nobody grows up daydreaming about designing grocery stores, including Kelley. As a student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, he was just like every other architect-in-training: He wanted to be a figure like Frank Gehry, building celebrated skyscrapers and cultural centers. But he came to feel dissatisfied with the culture of his profession. In his view, architects coldly fixate on the aesthetics of buildings and aren’t concerned enough with the people inside.

“Architecture worships objects, and Capital-A architects are object makers,” Kelley tells me. “They aren’t trying to fix social issues. People and their experience and their perceptions and behaviors don’t matter to them. They don’t even really want people in their photographs—or if they have to, they’ll blur them out.” What interested Kelley most was how people would use his buildings, not how the structures would fit into the skyline. He wanted to shape spaces in ways that could actually affect our emotions and personalities, bringing out the better angels of our nature. To his surprise, no one had really quantified a set of rules for how environment could influence behavior. Wasn’t it strange that advertising agencies spent so much time thinking about the links between storytelling, emotions, and decision-making — while commercial spaces, the places where we actually go to buy, often had no design principle beyond brute utility?

My ultimate goal was to create a truly multidisciplinary firm that was comprised of designers, social scientists and marketing types,” he says. “It was so unorthodox and so bizarrely new in terms of approach that everyone thought I was crazy.”

In 1992, when he was 28, Kelley cofounded Shook Kelley with the Charlotte, North Carolina–based architect and urban planner Terry Shook. Their idea was to offer a suite of services that bridged social science, branding, and design, a new field they called “perception management.” They were convinced space could be used to manage emotion, just the way cinema leads us through a guided sequence of feelings, and wanted to turn that abstract idea into actionable principles. While Shook focused on bigger, community-oriented spaces like downtown centers and malls, Kelley focused on the smaller, everyday commercial spaces overlooked by fancy architecture firms: dry cleaners, convenience stores, eateries, bars. One avant-garde restaurant Kelley designed in Charlotte, called Props, was an homage to the sitcom craze of the 1990s. It was built to look like a series of living rooms, based on the apartment scenes in shows like Seinfeld and Friends and featured couches and easy chairs instead of dining tables to encourage guests to mingle during dinner.

The shift to grocery stores didn’t happen until a few years later, almost by accident. In the mid-’90s, Americans still spent about 55 percent of their food dollars on meals eaten at home — but that share was declining quickly enough to concern top corporate brass at Harris Teeter, a Charlotte-area, North Carolina–based grocery chain with stores throughout the Southwestern United States. (Today, Harris Teeter is owned by Kroger, the country’s second-largest seller of groceries behind Walmart.) Harris Teeter execs reached out to Shook Kelley. “We hear you’re good with design, and you’re good with food,” Kelley remembers Harris Teeter reps saying. “Maybe you could help us.”

At first, it was Terry Shook’s account. He rebuilt each section of the store into a distinct “scene” that reinforced the themes and aesthetics of the type of food it sold. The deli counter became a mocked-up urban delicatessen, complete with awning and neon sign. The produce section resembled a roadside farmstand. The dairy cases were corrugated steel silos, emblazoned with the logo of a local milk supplier. And he introduced full-service cafés, a novelty for grocery stores at the time, with chrome siding like a vintage diner. It was pioneering work, winning that year’s Outstanding Achievement Award from the International Interior Design Association — according to Kelley, it was the first time the prestigious award had ever been given to a grocery store.

Shook backed off of grocery stores after launching the new Harris Teeter, but the experience sparked Kelley’s lifelong fascination with grocery stores, which he realized were ideal proving grounds for his ideas about design and behavior. Supermarkets contain thousands of products, and consumers make dozens of decisions inside them — decisions about health, safety, family, and tradition that get to the core of who they are. He largely took over the Harris Teeter account and redesigned nearly 100 of the chain’s stores, work that would go on to influence the way the industry saw itself and ultimately change the way stores are built and navigated.

Since then, Kelley has worked to show grocery stores that they don’t have to worship at the altar of supply-side economics. He urges grocers to appeal instead to our humanity. Kelley asks them to think more imaginatively about their stores, using physical space to evoke nostalgia, delight our senses, and appeal to the parts of us motivated by something bigger and more generous than plain old thrift. Shopping, for him, is all about navigating our personal hopes and fears, and grocery stores will only succeed when they play to those emotions.

When it works, the results are dramatic. Between 2003 and 2007, Whole Foods hired Shook Kelley for brand strategy and store design, working with the firm throughout a crucial period of the chain’s development. The fear was that as Whole Foods grew, its image would become too diffuse, harder to differentiate from other health food stores; at the same time, the company wanted to attract more mainstream shoppers. Kelley’s team was tasked with finding new ways to telegraph the brand’s singular value. Their solution was a hierarchical system of signage that would streamline the store’s crowded field of competing health and wellness claims.

Kelley’s view is that most grocery stores are “addicted” to signage, cramming their spaces with so many pricing details, promotions, navigational signs, ads, and brand assets that it “functionally shuts down [the customer’s] ability to digest the information in front of them.”

Kelley’s team stipulated that Whole Foods could only have seven layers of information, which ranged from evocative signage 60 feet away to descriptive displays six feet from customers to promotional info just six inches from their hands. Everything else was “noise,” and jettisoned from the stores entirely. If you’ve ever shopped at Whole Foods, you probably recognize the way that the store’s particular brand of feel-good, hippie sanctimony seems to permeate your consciousness at every turn. Kelley helped invent that. The system he created for pilot stores in Princeton, New Jersey, and Louisville, Kentucky, were scaled throughout the chain and are still in use today, he says. (Whole Foods did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

With a carefully delineated set of core values guiding its purchasing and brand, Whole Foods was ripe for the kind of visual overhaul Kelley specializes in. But most regional grocery chains have a different set of problems: They don’t really have values to telegraph in the first place. Shook Kelley’s approach is about getting buttoned-down grocers to reflect on their beliefs, tapping into deeper, more primal reasons for wanting to sell food.

* * *

Today, Kelley and his team have developed a playbook for clients, a finely tuned process to get shoppers to think in terms that go beyond bargain-hunting. It embraces what he calls “the theater of retail” and draws inspiration from an unlikely place: the emotionally laden visual language of cinema. His goal is to convince grocers to stop thinking like Willy Loman — like depressed, dejected salesmen forever peddling broken-down goods, fixated on the past and losing touch with the present. In order to survive, Kelley says, grocers can’t be satisfied with providing a place to complete a chore. They’ll need to direct an experience.


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Today’s successful retail brands establish what Kelley calls a “brand realm,” or what screenwriters would call a story’s “setting.” We don’t usually think consciously about them, but realms subtly shape our attitude toward shopping the same way the foggy, noirishly lit streets in a Batman movie tell us something about Gotham City. Cracker Barrel is set in a nostalgic rural house. Urban Outfitters is set on a graffitied urban street. Tommy Bahama takes place on a resort island. It’s a well-known industry secret that Costco stores are hugely expensive to construct — they’re designed to resemble fantasy versions of real-life warehouses, and the appearance of thrift doesn’t come cheap. Some realms are even more specific and fanciful: Anthropologie is an enchanted attic, complete with enticing cupboards and drawers. Trader Joe’s is a crew of carefree, hippie traders shipping bulk goods across the sea. A strong sense of place helps immerse us in a store, getting us emotionally invested and (perhaps) ready to suspend the critical faculties that prevent a shopping spree.

Kelley takes this a few steps further. The Shook Kelly team, which includes a cultural anthropologist with a Ph.D., begins by conducting interviews with executives, staff, and locals, looking for the storytelling hooks they call “emotional opportunities.” These can stem from core brand values, but often revolve around the most intense, place-specific feelings locals have about food. Then Kelley finds ways to place emotional opportunities inside a larger realm with an overarching narrative, helping retailers tell those stories — not with shelves of product, but through a series of affecting “scenes.”

In Alberta, Canada, Shook Kelley redesigned a small, regional grocery chain now called Freson Bros. Fresh Market. In interviews, the team discovered that meat-smoking is a beloved pastime there, so Shook Kelley built huge, in-store smokers at each new location — a scene called “Banj’s Smokehouse” — that crank out pound after pound of the province’s signature beef, as well as elk, deer, and other kinds of meat (customers can even BYO meat to be smoked in-house). Kelley also designed stylized root cellars in each produce section, a cooler, darker corner of each store that nods to the technique Albertans use to keep vegetables fresh. These elements aren’t just novel ways to taste, touch, and buy. They reference cultural set points, triggering memories and personal associations. Kelley uses these open, aisle-less spaces, which he calls “perceptual rooms,” to draw customers through an implied sequence of actions, tempting them towards a specific purchase.

Something magical happens when you engage customers this way. Behavior changes in visible, quantifiable ways. People move differently. They browse differently. And they buy differently. Rather than progressing in a linear fashion, the way a harried customer might shoot down an aisle — Kelley hates aisles, which he says encourage rushed, menial shopping — customers zig-zag, meander, revisit. These behaviors are a sign a customer is “experimenting,” engaging with curiosity and pleasure rather than just trying to complete a task. “If I was doing a case study presentation to you, I would show you exact conditions where we don’t change the product, the price, the service. We just change the environment and we’ll change the behavior,” Kelley tells me. “That always shocks retailers. They’re like ‘Holy cow.’ They don’t realize how much environment really affects behavior.”

A strong sense of place helps immerse us in a store, getting us emotionally invested and (perhaps) ready to suspend the critical faculties that prevent a shopping spree.

In the mid-2000s, Nabisco approached Kelley’s firm, complaining that sales were down 16 percent in the cookie-and-cracker aisle. In response, Shook Kelley designed “Mom’s Kitchen,” which was piloted at Buehler’s, a 15-store chain in northern Ohio. Kelley took Nabisco’s products out of the center aisles entirely and installed them in a self-contained zone: a perceptual room built out to look like a nostalgic vision of suburban childhood, all wooden countertops, tile, and hanging copper pans. Shelves of Nabisco products from Ritz Crackers to Oreos lined the walls. Miniature packs of Animal Crackers waited out in a large bowl, drawers opened to reveal boxes of Saltines. The finishing touch had nothing to do with Nabisco and everything to do with childhood associations: Kelley had the retailers install fridge cases filled with milk, backlit and glowing. Who wants to eat Oreos without a refreshing glass of milk to wash them down?

The store operators weren’t sold. They found it confusing and inconvenient to stock milk in two places at once. But from a sales perspective, the experiment was a smash. Sales of Nabisco products increased by as much as 32 percent, and the entire cookie-and-cracker segment experienced a halo effect, seeing double-digit jumps. Then, the unthinkable: The stores started selling out of milk. They simply couldn’t keep it on the shelves.

You’d think that the grocery stores would be thrilled, that it would have them scrambling to knock over their aisles of goods, building suites of perceptual rooms. Instead, they retreated. Nabisco’s parent company at the time, Kraft, was excited by the results and kicked the idea over to a higher-up corporate division where it stalled. And Buehler’s, for its part, never did anything to capitalize on its success. When the Nabisco took “Mom’s Kitchen” displays down, Kelley says, the stores didn’t replace them.

Mom’s Kitchen, fully stocked. (Photo by Tim Buchman)

“We were always asking a different question: What is the problem you’re trying to solve through food?” Kelley says. “It’s not just a refueling exercise — instead, what is the social, emotional issue that food is solving for us? We started trying to work that into grocery. But we probably did it a little too early, because they weren’t afraid enough.”

Since then, Kelley has continued to build his case to unreceptive audiences of male executives with mixed success. He tells them that when customers experiment — when the process of sampling, engaging, interacting, and evaluating an array of options becomes a source of pleasure — they tend to take more time shopping. And that the more time customers spend in-store, the more they buy. In the industry, this all-important metric is called “dwell time.” Most retail experts agree that increasing dwell without increasing frustration (say, with long checkout times) will be key to the survival of brick-and-mortar retail. Estimates vary on how much dwell time increases sales; according to Davinder Jheeta, creative brand director of the British supermarket Simply Fresh, customers spent 1.3 percent more for every 1 percent increase in dwell time in 2015.

Another way to increase dwell time? Offer prepared foods. Delis, cafes, and in-store restaurants increase dwell time and facilitate pleasure while operating with much higher profit margins and recapturing some of the dining-out dollar that grocers are now losing. “I tell my clients, ‘In five years, you’re going to be in the restaurant business,” Kelley says, “‘or you’re going to be out of business.’”

Kelley’s job, then, is to use design in ways that get customers to linger, touch, taste, scrutinize, explore. The stakes are high, but the ambitions are startlingly low. Kelley often asks clients what he calls a provocative question: Rather than trying to bring in new customers, would it solve their problems if 20 percent of customers increased their basket size by just two dollars? The answer, he says, is typically an enthusiastic yes.

Just two more dollars per trip for every fifth customer — that’s what victory looks like. And failure? That looks like a food marketplace dominated by Walmart and Amazon, a world where the neighborhood supermarket is a thing of the past.

* * *

When Shook Kelley started working on Niemann’s account, things began the way they always did: looking for emotional opportunities. But the team was stumped. Niemann’s stores were clean and expertly run. There was nothing wrong with them. Niemann’s problem was that he had no obvious problem. There was no there there.

Many of the regionals Kelley works with have no obvious emotional hook; all they know is that they’ve sold groceries for a long time and would like to keep on selling them. When he asks clients what they believe in, they show him grainy black-and-white photos of the stores their parents and grandparents ran, but they can articulate little beyond the universal goal of self-perpetuation. So part of Shook Kelley’s specialty is locating the distinguishing spark in brands that do nothing especially well, which isn’t always easy. At Buehler’s Fresh Foods, the chain where “Mom’s Kitchen” was piloted, the store’s Shook Kelley–supplied emotional theme is “Harnessing the Power of Nice.”

Still, Niemann Foods was an especially challenging case. “We were like, ‘Is there any core asset here?’” Kelley told me. “And we were like, ‘No. You really don’t have anything.’”

What Kelley noticed most was how depressed Niemann seemed, how gloomy about the fate of grocery stores in general. Nothing excited him — with one exception. Niemann runs a cattle ranch, a family operation in northeast Missouri. “Whenever he talked about cattle and feed and antibiotics and meat qualities, his physical body would change. We’re like, ‘My god. This guy loves ranching.’ He only had three hundred cattle or something, but he had a thousand pounds of interest in it.”

Niemann’s farm now has about 600 cattle, though it’s still more hobby farm than full-time gig — but it ended up being a revelation. During an early phase of the process, someone brought up “So God Made a Farmer” — a speech radio host Paul Harvey gave at the 1978 Future Farmers of America Convention that had been used in an ad for Ram trucks in the previous year’s Super Bowl. It’s a short poem that imagines the eighth day of the biblical creation, where God looks down from paradise and realizes his new world needs a caretaker. What kind of credentials is God looking for? Someone “willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.” God needs “somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, ‘Maybe next year.’” God needs “somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to yean lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark.” In other words, God needs a farmer.

Part denim psalm, part Whitmanesque catalogue, it’s a quintessential piece of Americana — hokey and humbling like a Norman Rockwell painting, and a bit behind the times (of course, the archetypal farmer is male). And when Kelley’s team played the crackling audio over the speakers in a conference room in Quincy, Illinois, something completely unexpected happened. Something that convinced Kelley that his client’s stores had an emotional core after all, one strong enough to provide the thematic backbone for a new approach to the grocery store.

Rich Niemann, the jaded supermarket elder statesman, broke down and wept.

* * *

I have never been a fan of shopping. Spending money stresses me out. I worry too much to enjoy it. So I wanted to see if a Kelley store could really be what he said it was, a meaningful experience, or if it would just feel fake and hokey. You know, like the movies. When I asked if there was one store I could visit to see his full design principles in action, he told me to go to Harvest, the most interesting store in America.

Champaign is two hours south of O’Hare by car. Crossing its vast landscape of unrelenting farmland, you appreciate the sheer scale of Illinois, how far the state’s lower half is from Chicago. It’s a college town, which comes with the usual trappings — progressive politics, cafes and bars, young people lugging backpacks with their earbuds in — but you forget that fast outside the city limits. In 2016, some townships in Champaign county voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by 50 points.

I was greeted in the parking lot by Gerry Kettler, Niemann Foods’ director of consumer affairs. Vintage John Deere tractors formed a caravan outside the store. The shopping cart vestibules were adorned with images of huge combines roving across fields of commodity crops. Outside the wide-mouthed entryway, local produce waited in picket-fence crates — in-season tomatoes from Johnstonville, sweet onions from Warrensburg.

And then we stepped inside.

Everywhere, sunlight poured in through the tall, glass facade, illuminating a sequence of discrete, airy, and largely aisle-less zones. Kettler bounded around the store, pointing out displays with surprised joy on his face, as if he couldn’t believe his luck. The flowers by the door come from local growers like Delight Flower Farm and Illinois Willows. “Can’t keep this shit in stock,” he said. He makes me hold an enormous jackfruit to admire its heft. The produce was beautiful, he was right, with more local options than I’ve ever seen in a grocery store. The Warrensville sweet corn is eye-poppingly cheap: two bucks a dozen. There were purple broccolini and clamshells filled with squash blossoms, a delicacy so temperamental that they’re rarely sold outside of farmers’ markets. Early on, they had to explain to some teenage cashiers what they were — they’d never seen squash blossoms before.

I started to sense the “realm” Harvest inhabits: a distinctly red-state brand of America, local food for fans of faith and the free market. It’s hunting gear. It’s Chevys. It’s people for whom commercial-scale pig barns bring back memories of home. Everywhere, Shook Kelley signage — a hierarchy of cues like what Kelley dreamed up for Whole Foods — drives the message home. A large, evocative sign on the far wall reads Pure Farm Flavor, buttressed by the silhouettes of livestock, so large it almost feels subliminal. Folksy slogans hang on the walls, sayings like FULL OF THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS and THE CREAM ALWAYS RISES TO THE TOP.

Then there are the informational placards that point out suppliers and methods.

There are at least a half dozen varieties of small-batch honey; you can find pastured eggs for $3.69. The liquor section includes local selections, like whiskey distilled in DeKalb and a display with cutting boards made from local wood by Niemann Foods’ HR Manager. “Turns out we had some talent in our backyard,” Kettler said. Niemann’s willingness to look right under his nose, sidestepping middlemen distributors to offer reasonably priced, local goods, is a hallmark of Harvest Market.

That shortened chain of custody is only possible because of Niemann and the lifetime of supply-side know-how he brings to table. But finding ways to offer better, more affordable food has been a long-term goal of Kelley — who strained his relationship with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey over the issue. As obsessed as Kelley is with appearances, he insists to me that his work must be grounded in something “real”: that grocery stores only succeed when they really try to make the world a better place through food. In his view, Whole Foods wasn’t doing enough to address its notoriously high prices — opening itself up to be undercut by cheaper competition, and missing a kind of ethical opportunity to make better food available to more people.

“When,” Kelley remembers asking, “did you start to mistake opulence for success?”

In Kelley’s telling, demand slackened so much during the Great Recession that it nearly lead to Whole Foods’ downfall, a financial setback that the company never fully recovered from — and, one could argue, ultimately led to its acquisition. Harvest Market, for its part, has none of Whole Foods’ clean-label sanctimony. It takes an “all-of-the-above” approach: There’s local produce, but there’re also Oreos and Doritos and Coca-Cola; at Thanksgiving, you can buy a pastured turkey from Triple S Farms or a 20-pound Butterball. But that strong emphasis on making local food more accessible and affordable makes it an interesting counterpart to Kelley’s former client.

The most Willy Wonka–esque touch is the hulking piece of dairy processing equipment in a glass room by the cheese case. It’s a commercial-scale butter churner — the first one ever, Kettler told me, to grace the inside of a grocery store.

“So this was a Shook Kelley idea,” he said, “We said yes, without knowing how much it would cost. And the costs just kept accelerating. But we’re thrilled. People love it.”Harvest Market isn’t just a grocery store — it’s also a federally inspected dairy plant. The store buys sweet cream from a local dairy, which it churns into house-made butter, available for purchase by the brick and used throughout Harvest’s bakery and restaurant. The butter sells out as fast as they can make it. Unlike the grocers who objected to “Mom’s Kitchen,” the staff don’t seem to mind.

As I walked through the store, I couldn’t help wondering how impressed I really was. I found Harvest to be a beautiful example of a grocery store, no doubt, and a very unusual one. What was it that made me want to encounter something more outrageous, more radical, more theatrical and bizarre? I wanted animatronic puppets. I wanted fog machines.

I should have known better — Kelley had warned me that you can’t take the theater of retail too far without breaking the dream. He’d told me that he admires stores where “you’re just not even aware of the wonder of the scene, you’re just totally engrossed in it” — stores a universe away from the overwrought, hokey feel of Disneyland. But I had Amazon’s new stores in the back up my mind as a counterpoint, with all their cashierless bells and whistles, their ability to click and collect, their ability to test-drive Alexa and play a song or switch on a fan. I guess, deep down, I was wondering if something this subtle really could work.

“Here, this is Rich Niemann,” Kettler said, and I found myself face-to-face with Niemann himself. We shook hands and he asked if I’d ever been to Illinois before. Many times, I told him. My wife is from Chicago, so we’ve visited the city often.

He grinned at me.

“That’s not Illinois,” he said.

We walked to Harvest’s restaurant, a 40-person seating area plus an adjacent bar with a row of stools, that offers standards like burgers, salads, and flatbreads. There’s an additional 80-person seating area on the second-floor mezzanine, a simulated living room complete with couches and board games. Beyond that, they pointed out the brand-new wine bar — open, like the rest of the space, until midnight. There’s a cooking classroom by the corporate offices. Through the window, I saw a classroom full of children doing something to vegetables. Adult Cooking classes run two or three nights every week, plus special events for schools and other groups.

For a summer weekday at noon in a grocery store I’m amazed how many people are eating and working on laptops. One guy has his machine hooked up to a full-sized monitor he lugged up the stairs — he’s made a customized wooden piece that hooks into Harvest’s wrought-iron support beams to create a platform for his plus-size screen. He comes every day, like it’s his office. He’s a dwell-time dream.

We sit down, and Kettler insists I eat the corn first, slathering it with the house-made butter and eating it while it’s hot. He reminds me that it’s grown by the Maddoxes, a family in Warrensburg, about 50 miles west of Champaign.

The corn was good, but I wanted to ask Niemann if the grocery industry was really that bad, and he told me it is. I assume he’ll want to talk about Amazon and its acquisition of Whole Foods and the way e-commerce has changed the game. He acknowledges that, but to my surprise he said the biggest factor is something else entirely — a massive shift happening in the world of consumer packaged goods, or CPGs.

For years, grocery stores never had to advertise, because the largest companies in the world — Proctor and Gamble, Coca-Cola, Nestle — did their advertising for them, just the way Nabisco helped finance “Mom’s Kitchen” to benefit the stores. People came to supermarkets to buy the foods they saw on TV. But Americans are falling out of love with legacy brands. They’re looking for something different, locality, a sense of novelty and adventure. Kellogg’s and General Mills don’t have the pull they once had.

When their sales flag, grocery sales do too — and the once-bulletproof alliance between food brands and supermarkets is splitting. For the past two years, the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association, an influential trade group representing the biggest food companies in the world, started to lose members. It began with Campbell’s Soup. Dean Foods, Mars, Tyson Foods, Unilever, Hershey Company, the Kraft Heinz Company, and others followed. That profound betrayal was a rude awakening: CPG companies don’t need grocery stores. They have Amazon. They can sell directly through their websites. They can launch their own pop-ups.

It’s only then that I realized how dire the predicament of grocery stores really is, and why Niemann was so frustrated when he first called Kevin Kelley. It’s one thing when you can’t sell as cheaply and conveniently as your competitors. But it’s another thing when no one wants what you’re selling.

Harvest doesn’t feel obviously futuristic in the way an Amazon store might. If I went there as a regular shopper and not as a journalist sniffing around for a story, I’m sure I’d find it to be a lovely and transporting way to buy food. But what’s going on behind the scenes is, frankly, unheard of.

Grocery stores have two ironclad rules. First, that grocers set the prices, and farmers do what they can within those mandates. And second, that everyone works with distributors who oversee the aggregation and transport of all goods. Harvest has traditional relationships with companies like Coca-Cola, but it breaks those rules with local farmers and foodmakers. Suppliers — from the locally milled wheat to the local produce to the Kilgus Farms sweet cream that goes into the churner — truck their products right to the back. By avoiding middlemen and their surcharges, Harvest is able to pay suppliers more directly and charge customers less. And it keeps costs low. You can still find $4.29 pints of Halo Top ice cream in the freezer, but the produce section features stunning bargains. When the Maddox family pulls up with its latest shipment of corn, people sometimes start buying it off the back of the truck in the parking lot. Thats massive change, and its virtually unheard of in supermarkets. At the same time, suppliers get to set their own prices. Niemann’s suppliers tell him what they need to charge; Niemann adds a standard margin and lets customers decide if they’re willing to pay.

If there’s a reason Harvest matters, it’s only partly because of the aesthetics. It’s mainly because the model of what a grocery store is has been tossed out and rebuilt. And why not? The world as Rich Niemann knows it is ending.

* * *

In 2017, just months after Harvest Market’s opening, Niemann won the Thomas K. Zaucha Entrepreneurial Excellence Award — the National Grocers Association’s top honor, given for “persistence, vision, and creative entrepreneurship.” That spring, Harvest was spotlighted in a “Store of the Month” cover feature in the influential trade magazine Progressive Grocer. Characteristically, the contributions of Kelley and his firm were not mentioned in the piece.

Niemann tells me his company is currently planning to open a second Harvest Market in Springfield, Illinois, about 90 minutes west of Champaign, in 2020. Without sharing specifics about profitability or sales numbers, he says the store was everything he’d hoped it would be as far as the metrics that most matter — year-over-year sales growth and customer engagement. His only complaint about the store, has to do with parking. For years, Niemann has relied on the same golden ratio to determine the size of parking lot needed for his stores — a certain number of spots for every thousand dollars of expected sales. Harvest’s lot uses the same logic, and it’s nowhere near enough space.

“In any grocery store, the customer’s first objective is pantry fill — to take care of my needs as best I can on my budget,” Niemann says. “But we created a different atmosphere. These customers want to talk. They want to know. They want to experience. They want to taste. They’re there because it’s an adventure.”

They stay so much longer than expected that the parking lot sometimes struggles to fit all their cars at once. Unlike the Amazon stores that may soon be cropping up in a neighborhood near you — reportedly, the company is considering plans to open 3,000 of them in by 2021 — it’s not about getting in and out quickly without interacting with another human being. At Harvest, you stay awhile. And that’s the point.

But Americans are falling out of love with legacy brands. They’re looking for something different, locality, a sense of novelty and adventure. Kellogg’s and General Mills don’t have the pull they once had.

So far, Harvest’s success hasn’t made it any easier for Kelley, who still struggles to persuade clients to make fundamental changes. They’re still as scared as they’ve always been, clinging to the same old ideas. He tells them that, above all else, they need to develop a food philosophy — a reason why they do this in the first place, something that goes beyond mere nostalgia or the need to make money. They need to build something that means something, a store people return to not just to complete a task but because it somehow sustains them. For some, that’s too tall an order. “They go, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ I’m like, ‘Then what are you going to do?’ And they literally tell me: ‘I’m going to retire.’” It’s easier to cash out. Pass the buck, and consign the fate of the world to younger people with bolder dreams.

Does it even matter? The world existed before supermarkets, and it won’t end if they vanish. And in the ongoing story of American food, the 20th-century grocery store is no great hero. A&P — the once titanic chain, now itself defunct — was a great mechanizer, undercutting the countless smaller, local businesses that used to populate the landscape. More generally, the supermarket made it easier for Americans to distance ourselves from what we eat, shrouding food production behind a veil and letting us convince ourselves that price and convenience matter above all else. We let ourselves be satisfied with the appearance of abundance — even if great stacks of unblemished fruit contribute to waste and spoilage, even if the array of brightly colored packages are all owned by the same handful of multinational corporations.

But whatever springs up to replace grocery stores will have consequences, too, and the truth is that brick-and-mortar is not going away any time soon — far from it. Instead, the most powerful retailers in the world have realized that physical spaces have advantages they want to capitalize on. It’s not just that stores in residential neighborhoods work well as distribution depots, ones that help facilitate the home delivery of packages. And it’s not just that we can’t always be home to pick up the shipments we ordered when they arrive, so stores remain useful. The world’s biggest brands are now beginning to realize what Kelley has long argued: Physical stores are a way to capture attention, to subject customers to an experience, to influence the way they feel and think. What could be more useful? And what are Amazon’s proposed cashierless stores, but an illustration of Kelley’s argument? They take a brand thesis, a set of core values — that shopping should be quick and easy and highly mechanized — and seduce us with it, letting us feel the sweep and power of that vision as we pass with our goods through the doors without paying, flushed with the thrill a thief feels.

This is where new troubles start. Only a few companies in the world will be able to compete at Amazon’s scale — the scale where building 3,000 futuristic convenience stores in three years may be a realistic proposition. Unlike in the golden age of grocery, where different family owned chains catered to different demographics, we’ll have only a handful of players. We’ll have companies that own the whole value chain, low to high. Amazon owns the e-commerce site where you can find almost anything in the world for the cheapest price. And for when you want to feel the heft of an heirloom tomato in your hand or sample some manchego before buying, there is Whole Foods. Online retail for thrift, in-person shopping for pleasure. Except one massive company now owns them both.

If this new landscape comes to dominate, we may find there are things we miss about the past. For all its problems, the grocery industry is at least decentralized, owned by no one dominant company and carved up into more players than you could ever count. It’s run by people who often live alongside the communities they serve and share their concerns. We might miss that competition, that community. They are small. They are nimble. They are independently, sometimes even cooperatively, owned. They employ people. And if they are scrappy, and ingenious, and willing to change, there’s no telling what they might do. It is not impossible that they could use their assets — financial resources, industry connections, prime real estate — to find new ways to supply what we all want most: to be happier, to be healthier, to feel more connected. To be better people. To do the right thing.

I want to believe that, anyway. That stores — at least in theory — could be about something bigger, and better than mere commerce. The way Harvest seems to want to be, with some success. But I wonder if that’s just a fantasy, too: the dream that we can buy and sell our way to a better world, that it will take no more than that.

Which one is right?

I guess it depends on how you feel about the movies.

Maybe a film is just a diversion, a way to feel briefly better about our lives, the limitations and disappointments that define us, the things we cannot change. Most of us leave the theater, after all, and just go on being ourselves.

Still, maybe something else is possible. Maybe in the moment when the music swells, and our hearts beat faster, and we feel overcome by the beauty of an image — in the instant that we feel newly brave and noble, and ready to be different, braver versions of ourselves — that we are who we really are.

* * *

Joe Fassler, The Counter’s deputy editor, has covered the intersection of food, policy, technology, and culture for the magazine since 2015. His food reporting has twice been a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism. He’s also editor of Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Creative Process (Penguin, 2017), a book based on “By Heart,” his ongoing series of literary conversations for The Atlantic

Editor: Michelle Weber
Fact checker: Matt Giles
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

In Defense of Schadenfreude

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Jessica Gross | Longreads | February 2019 | 16 minutes (4,130 words)

Tiffany Watt Smith is a historian of emotions. How’s that for a profession? In The Book of Human Emotions, which came out in 2016, Smith profiles 154 emotions in sharp, concise bursts. Torschlusspanik, she writes, “describes the agitated, fretful feeling we get when we notice time is running out.” (The German term translates as “gate-closing panic.”) The Japanese word amae refers to the “sensation of temporary surrender in perfect safety.” And there is a two page–long entry on schadenfreude—“from the German Schaden (harm) and Freude (pleasure)”—that often-shameful feeling of pleasure at another’s pain.

In her new book, Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune, Smith—who is a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London—takes a close look at the various flavors of this feeling. There is the schadenfreude we feel witnessing someone else’s accident, the burst of joy when our rival falters, the satisfaction when justice is served, the pleasure of watching the morally superior get their comeuppance. There is sibling rivalry (and sibling-esqure rivalry in the workplace). There is the guilty pleasure when a friend we envy suffers a disappointment.

Smith makes reading about schadenfreude fun. She also convincingly levies the broad argument that, although there are circumstances in which it can be dangerous, schadenfreude is a vital part of the way we relate to one another and doesn’t deserve to be held in such poor esteem. I spoke with Smith by phone about the nuances of schadenfreude and her experience writing about this much-judged emotion.   Read more…

‘Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body’ and Other Lies I’ve Been Told: A Reading List on Mental Health and Sport

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Over two miles into my first Division I cross country race, I felt buoyant. My legs turned over like a well-oiled machine and my chest fluttered with promise: as a freshman, I was in third place for my team. I dug the metal teeth of my spikes into dirt and focused on maintaining an even clip. Lost in the reverie of the race, I almost didn’t see my coach standing on the sideline, her blond hair pulled back, face shadowed in a hat.

“Get your shit together,” she seethed as I ran past. Focused and faster than anyone anticipated, I glanced over at her, unsure whether she was speaking to me or someone else. But I was alone. “Move your fucking ass.”

The feeling of calm in my chest dissipated with her words, as if a balloon had been pricked, all the air let loose. Rather than ruminating on the strength in my legs, the smooth swish of my uniform against inner arm, my mind reeled. What was I doing wrong? I was already on pace for a significant personal record — was I supposed to be running faster? Had I appeared unfocused as I ran past?

When I look back at that first race, I always remember those words, the way the tension crept into my limbs. And the feeling stayed throughout the season. Nothing ever seemed good enough for Coach — she’d tell us we were a fucking shit show as a team when we didn’t run as fast as anticipated or when our outfits didn’t match or when we took too long on warmup. Before a race, we could either be a fucking hero and get our shit together or not. There was no in-between. I was 17 years old at the time, adjusting to life halfway across the country from my family, new food, a new sleep schedule, higher mileage, and learning the contours of socializing with my team, but those were not factored into my performance, nor was there any acknowledgment that adjusting to college — especially as a Division I athlete — can be a difficult, and stress-inducing situation.

My coach’s words were not unfamiliar to me. As an athlete, I’d been told iterations of get your shit together my entire career. In high school, no matter what our emotional state was, we were trained to say every day is a great day! The phrase, one my coach used to yell into the sunrise while he biked next to me, is scrawled all over the margins of my training journals, even when the descriptions of my runs read “hurt a lot,” “windy,” or “bloody toe.” Shirts at cross country meets featured sayings like pain is weakness leaving the body; champions train, losers complain; and seven days without running makes one weak. These slogans, intended to be humorous in some cases, emphasized the mentality that many sports do: athletes should be tough enough to overcome anything. If you don’t, it means you’re weak.

I internalized that way of thinking while growing up. I’ve been competitive as an athlete since I was in third grade, and I learned to ignore my emotions, focusing instead on external measures of time, pace, and mileage. My strategy earned me respect from coaches as someone who would train through anything — sickness, shin splints, a bone that grew threw my big toe — and place well in races, no matter what was happening in my personal life. When I placed well, I told myself I was satisfied. And when I didn’t, my entire sense of self-worth came tumbling down. I’d vow to work harder in practice, and the whole cycle would repeat itself ad nauseam; I was always chasing an invisible goal that remained just out of reach.

Midway through my freshman year, I began experiencing neurological issues. As I’d learned to do throughout my years of training, I tried running through the symptoms. Even when this ended in me collapsing on the track, I’d try and try again. To quit seemed unthinkable, but eventually I did. I experienced an acute bout of depression. Without running, who was I? Why hadn’t I been strong enough to push through? I berated myself for being weak, for symptoms out of my control, for losing a sport that had been my entire identity.

Eight years have passed since then, and I am finally learning to run in a way that honors both my physical and emotional health. I am growing more comfortable talking about my experiences with depression, and the way that running played a role in my self-worth for such a long period of time. In speaking about it, I have also realized that I’m not alone. Many athletes struggle with mental health issues, but the culture of sport — especially at the top tiers of competition — often emphasizes physical performance over holistic wellbeing. The culture is changing in ways, yes, but the rhetoric of athlete’s “overcoming” anything is still deeply ingrained in the language of coaches, and the way athletes speak to themselves.

In the following essays, athletes testify on their experiences with mental illness, factors that exacerbate mental illness in sport, and ways that we as a culture can begin to change our language and training in an attempt to support wellness emotionally as well as physically.

1. When athletes share their battles with mental illness (Scott Gleeson and Erik Brady, August 30, 2017, USA Today)

As Scott Gleeson and Erik Brady report, nearly one in five Americans experience some form of mental illness and, for athletes, because of the stressors of the sport, experiences with injuries, and overtraining, the percentage may be even higher. Testimony from a range of athletes — Michael Phelps, Jerry West, Brandon Marshall, Allison Schmitt, among others — about their experiences with mental illness and sport are featured in this piece, all of them urging athletes to speak up about their experiences, seek professional help, and change the culture of sport for the better.

“Sometimes, I walk in a room and regret being so naked and vulnerable, but this is bigger than me,” Imani Boyette says. “I believe my purpose is to talk about the things that people are uncomfortable or afraid to talk about.”

2. Everyone Is Going Through Something (Kevin Love, March 6, 2018, The Players’ Tribune)

On November 5th, at a home basketball game against the Hawks, 29-year-old Cleveland Cavalier Kevin Love began to experience what he now knows was a panic attack. In the days and weeks that followed, after medical testing and conversations with his team, he began to see a therapist, which is something he never envisioned himself doing, particularly because of his identity as a pro basketball player.

“Nobody talked about what they were struggling with on the inside. I remember thinking, What are my problems? I’m healthy. I play basketball for a living. What do I have to worry about? I’d never heard of any pro athlete talking about mental health, and I didn’t want to be the only one. I didn’t want to look weak. Honestly, I just didn’t think I needed it. It’s like the playbook said — figure it out on your own, like everyone else around me always had.”

In this candid and moving essay, Love breaks the silence surrounding mental health, particularly in regard to sport, and, as the title of his essay makes clear, recognizes that “everyone is going through something.”

3. U.S. Athletes Need Better Mental Health Care (Martin Fritz Huber, May 16, 2018, Outside)

After DeMar DeRozan of the Toronto Raptors tweeted about his depression and Kevin Love of the Cleveland Cavaliers penned a viral essay about his experience with panic attacks, the NBA, as Martin Fritz Huber reports, created a position for a director of mental health and wellness.

“I think that’s the biggest burden on American sport culture,” says Brent Walker, an executive board member with the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. “I’ve heard repeatedly from professional and elite athletes how they don’t want to admit having to having a weakness—mental [illness] being one of those.”

Huber breaks down how other countries approach mental health in relation to sport, and asks what it might take to adjust the current system in the U.S. so that athletes are supported.

4. No, Running Isn’t Always the Best Therapy (Erin Kelly, July 23, 2018, Runner’s World)

“Phrases like ‘Running is cheaper than therapy!’ and ‘I run because punching people is frowned upon,’ are routinely splashed on running-themed bumper stickers, social memes, and apparel, and reinforce the idea that running offers a healthy mental outlet.”

Though studies show that running has positive benefits on wellbeing and mood, Erin Kelly, in this well-researched personal essay, pushes back against the notion that running can cure everything. Instead, she advocates that athletes reflect on why they’re participating in sport, and seek therapy when needed in addition to logging miles.

Related Read: When a Stress Expert Battles Mental Illness (Brad Stulberg, March 7, 2018, Outside)

5. The WNBA Needs Liz Cambage, but She May Not Need It (Lindsay Gibbs, August 20, 2018, The Ringer)

As Lindsay Gibbs reports, toxic effects of systemic racism, unequal pay in the WNBA, and a string of losses left Australian Liz Cambage, who plays for the WNBA’s Dallas Wings, depressed.

“When she returned to Melbourne, Cambage ghosted almost everyone in her life and retreated into a world of depression and anxiety. She said she heavily self-medicated with prescription pills and alcohol. She said that she isn’t surprised by her on-court success this season.”

Cambage credits honesty — with herself and others — as the reason she’s emerged from the dark place where she was.

6. Split Image (Kate Fagan, May 7, 2015, ESPN)

Social media allows us to curate images that tell a certain narrative — one that’s not always the most honest. As Kate Fagan reports, Madison Holleran, formerly a runner at Penn, seemed like she had the perfect life based on her Instagram and texts.

“But she was also a perfectionist who struggled when she performed poorly. She was a deep thinker, someone who was aware of the image she presented to the world, and someone who often struggled with what that image conveyed about her, with how people superficially read who she was, what her life was like.”

After Madison committed suicide, her family and friends scoured old posts and texts for clues about what was wrong and the warning signs they missed. Ultimately, this piece asks us to consider what lurks beneath the surface of social media’s veneer.

Related read: Are Female Long-Distance Runners More Prone to Suicidal Depression? (Emily De La Bruyere, February 3, 2014, The Daily Beast)

7. Talent. A Football Scholarship. Then Crushing Depression. (Kurt Streeter, November 15, 2018, The New York Times)

“What experts know is this: Recent studies place suicide as the third leading cause of death for college athletes, behind motor vehicle accidents and medical issues.

And nearly 25 percent of college athletes who participated in a widely touted 2016 study led by researchers at Drexel University displayed signs of depressive symptoms.”

In this profile of Isaiah Renfro, a top freshman wide receiver at the University of Washington who attempted suicide, Kurt Streeter writes about the pressures placed on NCAA athletes, what it means to quit sport after building an identity as a high-performing athlete, the important role that coaches play in supporting athletes off the field and on, and the hope that Renfro now feels for his life after seeking treatment.

8. Sports Stats May Be an Ideal Measure of Mental Health (B. David Zarley, October 17, 2016, The Atlantic)

At the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, associate professor Daniel Eisenberg is leading a team of researchers at Athletes Connected in order to help athletes understand mental-health problems and track concrete data on the subject. As B. David Zarley reports, Eisenberg and other researchers collect weekly mental-health surveys which focus on academic and athletic performances and levels of anxiety and depression in order to pinpoint connections between the two.

“I think sports and celebrity are two places where we can begin to lift the mental-health stigma, by showing that real people who perform, and who are well valued by society through their athletic contributions, do also suffer from symptoms of ill mental health,” says Chris Gibbons, a post-doctoral fellow and the director of health assessment and innovation at the University of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre.”

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about neurological illness and running. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

‘I Knew It Was Not My Correct Life, Because It Asked Me To Mute My Voice.’

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Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | February 2019 | 15 minutes (4,177 words)

 

I first stumbled across Reema Zaman on Facebook where each week she posts Love Letter Monday in which she discusses her life, both the hardships and successes, in an unabashedly self-loving manner. At first it caught me by surprise. I was so unaccustomed to hearing a woman speak well of herself — it felt, well, wrong. But soon enough I found myself sneaking back as if the words were contraband and the act of reading them a necessary revolution. The posts also contain an outpouring of love for the reader. A clarion call for women to turn “wound into wisdom” and “pain into poetry.” To be the authors of their own lives.

Her new memoir I Am Yours continues the call. In an evolving age-specific voice, Reema guides the reader through her life from a childhood in Bangladesh and Thailand with a domineering and unpredictable father, through anorexia and rape while living with roommates in Manhattan and navigating an often degrading and even dangerous life as an actress and model, to emotional abuse while living in a dilapidated barn in the middle of no-cell-phone-service woods with her then husband until, at age thirty, she at last lands a room of her own.

Reema’s prose is as ablaze as her heart. Lyrical, precise, in places frothing with desire or rage or faith, Reema’s unbridling of her tightly-watched self-suppressed voice is not an easy task. Yet it’s an essential one. These are hard stories, let loose at last with grace, sagacity, and dollops of clever humor. At its heart, I Am Yours is a story of hope. Read more…

Take Script, Add Snow

Still from Christmas in Evergreen. Front Street Pictures / The Hallmark Channel / Getty Images / Composite by Katie Kosma

Jane Borden | Longreads | December 2018 | 12 minutes (3,211 words)

In a big city, a woman lives a fast-paced life until something forces her to visit a small town, just before Christmas. Shortly after arriving, she connects with a charming small-town man. Commence ice-skating, hot chocolate, a tree lot, tree decorating, caroling, gift giving, charity work, big family meals, snow, snowmen, snowballs, snowball fights, red scarves, cookie decorating, a grand old house or country inn, sleigh bells, giddy children, and the soft plucking of stringed instruments whenever a character delivers a joke.

Every made-for-TV Christmas movie tracks the above plot. And yet, the uniformity does not prevent proliferation: This year alone, Hallmark made 38 holiday films across its two channels. Lifetime made 14. “The word is insatiable,” says Meghan Hooper, senior vice president at Lifetime and Lifetime Movie Network. “We don’t seem to be able to do enough to make the audience happy.”

“Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure,“ says writer-director Ron Oliver, who has made 13 Christmas movies for TV since 2004, mostly for Hallmark, which has become synonymous with heartfelt, holiday romantic comedies (it’s the Xerox of them, or, if you will, the Kleenex). “I have not seen this happen until this year. Everybody jumped on board.“

In 2017, 83 million people watched at least one Hallmark Christmas movie during their Countdown to Christmas and Miracle of Christmas events. The Hallmark Channel was last year’s number one cable network among women 25 to 54 in quarter four, and is shaping up to remain in that spot for 2018. Both Hallmark and Lifetime boast double-digit ratings increases during December. And the field is getting crowded: UPtv produced seven original holiday movies this year, Netflix made four, and Freeform made three.

How did America become obsessed with sappy, predictable, low-budget Christmas movies? Before we delve into history and psychology, let’s finish the plot:

Our protagonist falls in love, of course. She also rights an ethical wrong, always something from the past awaiting resolution and absolution. “It all goes back to Dickens,” Oliver says, referencing Scrooge’s transformation in A Christmas Carol. Like Scrooge, our modern-day heroine receives help, her three ghosts being her new love interest, the small-town community, and a stranger who slightly resembles Santa (what Hooper calls “a Santa-like”). At the film’s end, she and the love interest kiss, usually for the first time (these are family films), and she either moves to the small town or is forever changed by it. No one asks why the moms and aunts look only 10 years older than the protagonist. Roll credits, start the next one, begin to confuse which characters are in what.

It’s easy to assume that viewers enjoy these movies in spite of the repetitive plotlines, as if the networks greedily scam us. But Hallmark and Lifetime both do extensive focus grouping and ratings analysis. They know what works — we watch these movies because the plots are the same. In fact, Oliver calls the plots peripheral: “The real elements of these movies that make people love them is this sense of returning to your own past, your own childhood and sense of innocence from that era.” The slightly varying setups and environs must be similar to deliver us. These films are not art or even entertainment — they serve a function. They are ritual, a ritual as pagan as Christmas’s origins. And their key piece of iconography is the kind of American small town that’s quickly disappearing.

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IMAGINARY AMERICA

“Small towns have always been the iconic image for human relationships,” says Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College, whose work specializes in nostalgia. “The older woman lives here and the nice young family lives here. When you present the imagery of the small town, it’s portraying how we can get along in peaceful ways and help one another.”

Oliver grew up in one of these towns. He recalls, “It was this absolute Norman Rockwell Christmas town.” However, he adds, “I went back, maybe 20 years ago, and it is now strip malls. There is nothing to hold onto from there, so you hold the memories and recreate them in stories.”

He uses his hometown as a template when designing scenes and sets, but admits a challenge: “A few places exist, but they are getting harder and harder to find. We have to make them. We use every trick in the book.” Christmas Everlasting, one of this year’s Hallmark films, is partially shot in Covington, Georgia, because Oliver was drawn to its charming town square. “But when you go two blocks from there, it’s Walmart and CVS,” he says. Ultimately, the setting of the film is an amalgamation of three different small towns, plus a healthy dose of CGI.

Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure.

So these movies deliver a fantasy of a memory — except, for most of us, it’s a false memory we internalized through Norman Rockwell art, and Rockwell was also delivering the fantasy of a memory. You can trace the line of American Christmas imagery all the way to Queen Victoria: In 1848, The Illustrated London News published an etching of Victoria and Prince Albert standing around a Christmas tree with their family. It was published two years later in the States, and had a lasting impact of popularizing the tradition. “Christmas was not always a family-centered celebration,” explains Bruce Forbes, professor emeritus of Religious Studies at Morningside College, and author of Christmas: A Candid History. It became a family holiday in the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the wild popularity of Queen Victoria, and to Charles Dickens, who published A Christmas Carol in 1843. “Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet,” says Forbes. “When we talk about the ‘spirit of Christmas’ now, we talk about generosity. That’s a Dickens creation.“

What did exist prior? In England, not much. As a result of the lasting effects of the Puritan revolution in the 1600s, the English hardly celebrated Christmas at all. The Puritans’ beef was twofold: Christmas was not celebrated by early Christians (the holiday didn’t appear until the 300s) and those who did celebrate Christmas, Forbes says, “went to midnight mass and then to the tavern and got drunk.” So Puritans wiped it from the English consciousness.

The Illustrated London News (1848)

Taking the baton from the Victorian image was Currier and Ives. The phenomenal success of this New York City lithography firm in the mid- and late-19th century put affordable prints of snowy landscapes into the hands of a nation. Then in the 20th century, Norman Rockwell paired nostalgia for 19th-century Christmas with images of our mid-century obsessions: the nuclear family and suburban life. It was a powder keg. Today, pulp-like TV Christmas movies recreate these images again — in their own way as prolifically as Currier and Ives — but this time they’re more reflective of our modern world. Additions include both the mundane (texting) and the imperative (finally, after years of criticism, we see characters of color). Nostalgia is meta by nature.

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ART IMITATES ART

A few years ago, Hallmark Cards, Inc., the parent company of the two Hallmark networks (aka Crown Media), tapped one of its senior illustrators, Geoff Greenleaf, to create a series of images about a fictional town called Evergreen. The series of snowy scenes in a small town, featuring quaint shops and an iconic vintage red truck, became a bestseller. In response, Crown Media turned the cards into a 2017 film titled Christmas in Evergreen. The movie, and its 2018 sequel, Christmas in Evergreen: Letters to Santa, were shot at Burnaby Village Museum in British Columbia, itself a fictional setting designed to preserve and romanticize small towns of yore.

Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet.

Oliver believes the mid-century American imagery that these films capitalize on is so effective because it speaks to a time “when America was truly powerful and firing with all six cylinders: making great cars and great music, going to the moon, for crying out loud.” But, of course, Rockwell and his ilk rarely painted the whole picture. “It’s sanitized,” says Forbes. “It ignores all kinds of things: race, teenage pregnancy, poverty. But it was the image that white Americans had of themselves.”

TV Christmas movies have certainly perpetuated this brand of whitewashed nostalgia. As the films’ popularity rose, networks received ample criticism. Still, just five of Hallmark’s 38 holiday films this year feature leads of color. This includes Christmas Everlasting, starring Tatyana Ali, who also stars in this year’s Jingle Belle on Lifetime. “It speaks to a shift in our culture, that suddenly there is a move afoot to have more and more of our real world look like our television world,” says Oliver. Still missing in the genre are LGBTQ love stories; no lead to date has been gay. 

As American as a proclivity towards heteronormative whitewashing, so too is the tendency towards consumerism — some of the imagery within the films is for sale. Christmas in Evergreen has an adjacent product line: a keepsake ornament of the red truck, a magic snow globe, a mystery key, Santa’s mailbox. “We worked in partnership to look at a couple of the products they had that we could weave into the overall storyline,” says Michelle Vicary, executive vice president of programming and network publicity for Crown Media Family Networks, which owns the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. And of course they did: Hallmark was a retailer long before it got into content creation. “Not all brands evoke emotional connections,” Vicary says, “but that is at the top of what this brand promises and it has been since the beginning.”

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CAPTIVE ON THE CAROUSEL OF TIME

These films are not merely delivering the past; the stories achieve a delicate balance between familiarity and novelty. In them, we see a “constant struggle between wanting to hold onto certain things from the past but wanting a new beginning,” says Batcho. That new beginning is provided primarily by the love interest — TV Christmas movies are never not romantic comedies. Hooper says her team at Lifetime learned the importance of adding a romance element, after trying other versions of holiday films without it.

This makes sense to Batcho. “Like nostalgia, romantic stories focus on relationships and the sense of the ideal,” she says, adding that early brain imaging studies suggest that romance and nostalgia produce similar hormonal releases in the brain, “the loving, feel-good, pro-social feelings.” Plus, of course, as important as it is for us to protect the village, we need new relationships to strengthen the gene pool. But Batcho also says novelty is intrinsically linked to nostalgia. She likens cyclical markings of time, such as holiday celebrations, to a carousel: Each time it goes around, the horses look the same, but different people may be sitting in different places. “By being different and new, [novelty] allows you to escape so you’re not trapped in the past,” Batcho says. “Nostalgic people tend to be more optimistic, forward-looking people.”


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Although nostalgia was originally defined as homesickness and categorized as a disease, scientists now understand its healthy and profound psychological function. Studies suggest that exercising nostalgia enhances mood, reduces stress, and increases both social connectedness and self-regard. “Nostalgia helps us rediscover aspects of our authentic self, by going into our past,” says Batcho. Studies even suggest it helps us ascertain a meaning or purpose to our lives. Batcho also describes nostalgia as a social experience, since we identify ourselves in terms of relationships. “Nostalgia actually helps diminish loneliness by reminding people that, even if you are not physically with those who have loved you, you were once loved,” she says. Further, the process isn’t random. We specifically seek past memories that will help our current state.

“Every time you turn the television on,” Oliver says, “you’re seeing news about another betrayal of an ideal that America held close for a long time. I think the country is trying to find its moral center again. There’s a consistency to these stories that people hold onto like a life raft in the middle of a cultural storm.” Perhaps, as viewers, we also try to right a wrong.

The makers of TV Christmas movies wisely trigger nostalgia in several ways. “We certainly have gone after a certain type of talent, in terms of recognizable faces we grew up with from ’80s and ’90s shows,” says Lifetime exec Hooper. Nostalgia serves us. A 2018 survey by Cigna reports that most adults are lonely — as in, the average score, on a scale from one to lonely, was at least lonely. Other studies have shown loneliness to be a major predictor of poor physical health, leading some researchers to declare loneliness both a health crisis and an epidemic.

Further, cohorts aged 18 to 22 and 23 to 37 reported more loneliness than older generations. “That’s new,“ Batcho says. A press representative for Hallmark identifies the network’s demographic as women 25 to 54, but says that during the fourth quarter – our holiday season – “our women and adults 18 to 34 are through the roof,” suggesting a potential link between loneliness and viewership. 

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WE ARE ALL JUST PAGANS BY A FIRE

Nostalgia TV has been booming for a few years now, and the seemingly endless reboots and remakes premiere all year long. So why this huge surge in viewers around Christmas? Even otherwise prestige-TV-obsessed viewers, who turn up their noses at predictable schmaltz, now indulge in made-for-TV Christmas movies. “I don’t know if the season causes it as much as the season gives you permission,” opines Oliver. “From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.”

“It’s something about the holidays that is just built in: indulgence. Drink the hot chocolate, eat the food, lay on the couch, enjoy your family,” says Hooper.

And when Batcho is asked why people insatiably consume this kind of content during the holidays, she says, “Winter represents nature dying and taking a pause. It makes you feel very sad and hoping to look forward to a rebirth in the spring, which tells us that it is very fundamental and natural for people to like cycles. Bears hibernate. Even human beings need to take a pause.”

In one way or another, they are all saying the same thing, which is that we watch Hallmark around Christmas for the same reason Christmas happens at Christmas: the solstice. In the 300s, when the church designated the holiday, it likely chose December 25th for a litany of savvy reasons: some political and some for convenience, some building off already established pagan rituals. “You could guess them even if you didn’t study the cultures,“ says Forbes. “If it’s a midwinter festival, it would be a festival of lights to push back the darkness. It would feature evergreens because they look alive when everything else has died. To get past the isolation of winter, you would have feasts. And you would have dancing, singing, and drinking.“

From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.

Part of why we’ve celebrated midwinter festivals since before recorded time is because, as Batcho said, we like cycles. They help us predict regular change: It’s cold and dark now, but abundant spring will come again, and we know it. They also help us deal with the constancy of change, with whatever on the carousel is new. “We can’t stop change. What do we do instead? Build cycles,” Batcho says. These cycles come in the form of temporal landmarks, which trigger nostalgia: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays … holiday movies. “We anchor ourselves. It is important for psychological well-being to have a sense that we are not out of control.”

The consistency of plot and its predictable ending therefore serve an important purpose: we need the films to be predictable because they are another icon of the midwinter festival. We see one and our brains not only know what to expect, but also what to do. If we seek this iconography now more than ever, then we must feel especially out of control.

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THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS

It would be easy to attribute the popularity of these films to a kind of escapism resulting from the current division in our country, from the fear and hatred that many feel on both sides. But the rise of both Lifetime and Hallmark TV holiday movies started ramping up around 2012 (see graph). Perhaps the division in our country and the popularity of holiday films (and nostalgia programming in general) are effects of the same cause: an almost unfathomable acceleration of rates of cultural change.

In the 1980s, architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller (he of Dymaxion House and Geodesic Dome fame) posited a theory known as the knowledge-doubling curve. This sort of stuff isn’t 100 percent measurable, but the basic idea is: The amount of information we know, as a species, doubled about every 1500 years back when we were cavemen, and every 100 years in the modern era, up until World War I, at which point, it started doubling at an ever increasing rate. In the ‘90s, Artificial Intelligence researchers estimated the amount of information in the world doubles every 20 months. Today, varying estimates suggest that the amount of information in the world doubles every 10 to 13 months, and that, in our lifetimes, it could begin to double every 11 hours.

Change is coming at a furiously accelerating rate, providing us with greater and greater dominion. However, Yuval Noah Harari argues in his bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, evolution did not equip us to handle this kind of rapidly increasing power. For millions of years, Genus Homo was positioned in the middle of the food chain. Only in the past 100,000 years did we jump to the top. “Humankind ascended … so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence.” Our genus, by contrast, stumbles along with far less than a majestic prowess: “many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this overhasty jump.”

We need help adapting to cataclysmic change. Nostalgia provides aid, and so does story. Researchers discovered that character-driven narratives cause the brain to release oxytocin, which can enhance empathy, thereby motivating cooperation and leading us to trust strangers. The study, led by Paul J. Zak at Claremont Graduate University, also found that we continue to mimic the actions and feelings of characters after the story ends. If a protagonist accepts shifts in her life and finds optimism for the future, then so may we.

We know that loneliness is on the rise. We know that both nostalgia and story help us create and sustain relationships. And we know that more than 83 million of us are turning to nostalgic stories during the annual month when humans anchor themselves against change, all during a time in history when the pace of change threatens to destroy us. Maybe we’re obsessed with schmaltzy TV Christmas movies because humans understand, deep down, that the real savior, this season and every season, is each other. Come on, you knew this article would have a Hallmark ending.

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Jane Borden is a freelance culture writer based in Los Angeles.

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Editor: Katie Kosma

Fact checker: Sam Schulyer

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Double, Double, Toil and Trouble: A Reading List About Witches

The Witches Sabbath, by Frans Francken II, 1607.

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories (and some of her friends’ favorites, too). 

What is a witch, anyway? Is it an old woman with green skin stirring a pot of something weird and stinky in an animated fairy tale? Is it a man who lives in the wilderness in isolation and emerges only to perform specific rituals to bring the rains? Is it a hippie chick in Berkeley in flowing fabrics appropriating cultural totems and symbols in order to get a desperate wealthy tech couple fertile and baby-ready? Based on my research, the answers seem to be “sure,” “yes,” and “I mean, I guess so.”

Read more…

Theater of Forgiveness

Illustration by Buff Ross

Hafizah Geter | Longreads | November 2018 | 32 minutes (8,050 words)

 

On Wednesday, October 24th, 2018, a white man who tried and failed to unleash his violent mission on a black church, fatally killed the next black people of convenience, Vickie Lee Jones, 67, and Maurice E. Stallard, 69, in a Jeffersontown, Kentucky Kroger. Today, I am thinking of the families and loved ones of Stallard and Jones, who the media reports, along with their grief, their anger, their lack of true recourse, have taken on the heavy work of forgiveness.

***

June 17, 2015, two hours outside my hometown, a sandy blonde-haired Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. That night, Roof, surely looking like an injured wolf, someone already on fire, sat with an intimate group of churchgoers, and I have no doubt, was prayed for. If history repeats itself, then surely so does religion: the 12 churchgoers like Jesus’s 12 apostles in a 21st century fable. Roof the Judas at this last supper. As we know, Roof would wait a full hour until heads were bowed in prayer and God had filled every corner of the room before reaching into his fanny pack.

By June 19, 2015, two narrow days beyond the shooting, there would already be reports of absolution. “I forgive you,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of 70-year-old victim Ethel Lance, said to Roof at his bond-hearing. “I forgive you,” said Felicia Sanders, mother of one of the nine dead, her son, Tywanza Sanders, 26, not yet buried.

Intimately, I have been held by this wing of southern Black religiosity. My father is of Black southern Baptists who, originating in Georgia and Alabama, found themselves one day in Dayton, Ohio. Growing up, I was as curious about my Black American family’s white God as I was about my Nigerian mother’s African Allah. Much of my childhood was spent either at the foot of my mother’s prayer rug or beneath the nook of my paternal grandmother’s arm — grandma’s fingers pinching my thighs to keep me still, awake, and quiet in the church pews. At the church I attended with my Black American family, they were always praying to be gracious enough to receive forgiveness or humble enough to give it. A turn-the-other-cheek kind of church, it was full with products of the Great Migration and they were always trying to forgive white people.

As a child, though I could never quite name the offenses of white people, I could sense the wounds they had left all over the Black people who surrounded me. The wounds were in the lilt of Black women’s voices, in the stiffened swagger of our men; it was there in the sometimes ragged ways my boy cousins would be disciplined. And I knew this work of forgiving had somehow left bruises on my aunts so deep it made their skin shine. In church, we prayed and forgave white people like our prayers were the only thing between them, heaven, and damnation.

It’s left me wondering: Does forgiveness take advantage of my people?

Read more…

Did We Learn From Anita Hill?

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

In the early 1980s, probably the summer of 1982, a teenage girl was at a party in a Maryland suburb near D.C. It was a memorable night, one which she could recall in detail almost forty years later. Two boys pushed her into a bedroom. One pinned her to the bed and groped her, his body writhing on top of hers, clumsily attempting to pull off her clothes and the one-piece bathing suit underneath them. When she tried to scream, he put his hand over her mouth. The boys were laughing. The girl was afraid the boy on top of her might accidentally kill her. His friend watched, then tried to join in, jumping on top of them. All three went tumbling to the ground and the girl fled, locking herself in a bathroom until she heard the boys stumbling away.

The girl — around 15 at the time — did what many girls who find themselves in this situation do: She told no one. In the next few years, she struggled academically and socially, unable to form romantic relationships.

It’s possible she watched on television almost ten years later when Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about being sexually harassed by her former boss, Clarence Thomas, then a Supreme Court nominee. It’s possible she saw Hill accused of being delusional, or a vengeful woman scorned. “She wanted it” is likely something she heard said of this poised and polished scholarly woman. It’s possible that two years after that, in 1993, she watched as David Brock gained plaudits and wealth for a character-assassinating book claiming to show “the Real Anita Hill,” watched when GOP operatives referred to his mansion as the house that Anita built.” It’s possible she again noticed a decade later, in 2001, when Brock quietly disavowed his entire book and said his writing on Hill was gleaned not from reporting, but from rumors intended to destroy her reputation. He faced exactly zero repercussions. It’s possible she watched Hill, an accomplished legal scholar and lawyer, get reduced forever in history to a woman in the shadow of a man for whom consequences proved to be purely theoretical.

A year later, in 2002, the formerly teenaged girl, now a successful professor herself, married. Early in their relationship, she told her husband she’d been physically abused, but it took ten years of struggling in their marriage before the details came out in couples counseling.

It’s unclear whether she noticed that the boy who watched in that room on the night in question published a book, chronicling his history of alcoholism, and including anecdotes about a friend named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who partied at the beach with him as a teen. According to her husband, she did remember the last name of the boy who held her down: Kavanaugh. In the 2012 therapy session when she revealed the details of the night that traumatized her as a teen, she told her husband that the boy who attacked her was now a federal judge, and she feared he might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.

That day came earlier this year. Hesitantly, the woman contacted the Washington Post’s tipline and her congresswoman. Through her congresswoman, she sent a letter describing the incident, and requesting confidentiality, to the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Frightened of the repercussions of going public with her story, she ignored efforts from the Post and others to speak with her. She hired a lawyer who specializes in sexual harassment cases, and took a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent. The test concluded she was telling the truth.

It’s unlikely that gave her much comfort, if she remembered Anita Hill’s experience. After all, Hill took and passed a polygraph test. The man she accused, Clarence Thomas, refused to, was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, and remains on the court to this day.

Those are the details of the story provided by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser thus far, and some of the historical context surrounding them. There are other cultural realities to consider, of course: the current #MeToo movement, which has some women feeling slightly less afraid to speak up about experiences of abuse, and many powerful figures on the defensive, accusing supporters of the movement of going too far. We are in “the year of the woman,” some say. Will that help Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor accusing Kavanaugh? Consider this: 1992 was also “the year of the woman.” It was a year after Anita Hill testified, the same year as the Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, allowing states to regulate abortion as early as the first trimester, a ruling that reaffirmed central tenets of Roe v. Wade while beginning the gradual process of eroding the rights granted to women in the 1973 landmark decision.

Ford initially agreed to testify before Congress, just as Anita Hill did after statements she gave to FBI agents doing background checks on Thomas were leaked to the press. Women from her high school have circulated a letter of support. Of the 65 high school acquaintances of Kavanaugh’s who signed a letter of support for him last week, only four have stood by their signatures since Ford came forward. (Many of those 65, though, did not respond when POLITICO contacted them.) Mark Judge, the friend who Ford says was with Kavanaugh when he attacked her, has since written that he never saw Kavanaugh behave as Ford described and he would prefer not to testify. The Senate Judiciary Committee has subpoena power to compel him to do so, but it’s unclear whether the committee will pursue that route. Meanwhile, a woman who says she went to school with Ford tweeted that she knew about the incident when it happened, though she has since deleted the tweet and declined to discuss it further.

Hill had support back in 1991 too. She had four women waiting to support her credibility, but they were not allowed to speak — because Joe Biden, a Democrat, made a deal with his Republican colleagues. Biden has of late taken up the cause of affirmative consent and campus sexual assault, and has twice come close to apologizing to Hill — though not for suppressing her supporters, or for his own role in the attacks she received (he claims he wishes he’d done more to tone down his colleagues’ attacks on her). As Hill herself said: “He said, ‘I am sorry if she felt she didn’t get a fair hearing.’ That’s sort of an ‘I’m sorry if you were offended.’”

Biden has pointed out he voted against Thomas’ confirmation, but if he suppressed her witnesses, how much does that single vote really matter?

Biden has long been praised for his ability to “reach across the aisle” and work amicably with his Republican colleagues. Many of today’s top Democrats have the same reputation. Does that mean Ford can expect to be undermined in back-door dealings the way Hill was? The vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation was scheduled for this Thursday, but after three Republican senators said they thought it should be postponed, Sen. Chuck Grassley canceled the vote. A new date has not yet been set.

At first, Ford’s lawyer said on television that Ford would testify before the committee. But after receiving death threats, having her email hacked and identity impersonated online, Ford said an FBI investigation should occur before she is forced to go “on national television to relive this traumatic and harrowing incident.” While Ford and her family had to relocate from their home for safety reasons, Kavanaugh’s wife was handing out cupcakes to the reporters outside their house. (Hill’s experience predated the internet age, but she too received harassing phone calls from strangers.)

Sen. Orrin Hatch has claimed the FBI doesn’t conduct such investigations, even though they did investigate Hill’s statements about Thomas. Hatch should know this: During Thomas’ hearing, he praised Biden and Strom Thurmond for ordering an FBI investigation “which was the very right thing to do, and they did what every other chairman and ranking member have done.” (The Justice Department has said the allegation against Kavanaugh “does not involve any potential federal crime” for the FBI to investigate, and that the FBI’s role during background investigations is specifically to look for natural security risks.) The Utah senator even doubled down in recent days: When Sen. Schumer criticized the White House for not ordering an FBI investigation, Hatch said his complaint “does not hold water” because Senate Democrats had withheld Ford’s letter from Republicans and the FBI for two months. Hatch’s accusation comes off a little hypocritical, however, considering the White House and Republicans have withheld the majority of Kavanaugh’s record, only releasing about 7 percent of it and blocking subpoenas seeking answers to a variety of questions. (For comparison, when Justice Elena Kagan was nominated, the Obama White House released about 99 percent of her record.)

Why do these details about Hatch matter? He sits on the committee that will question Ford — and was on it back in 1991 when they questioned Hill. He was one of her most aggressive interrogators, and accused her of plagiarizing her statements about Thomas from “The Exorcist” and an obscure decision by a federal appeals court in Tulsa, Okla. He doesn’t seem to have changed much since then: Ford hasn’t even testified yet and he and Grassley (also on the committee when it questioned Hill) have already said she is “mistaken” and “mixed up.” As Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has sat on the committee for at least a decade, told The Washington Post, “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close,” which hardly suggests any plan to actually consider any testimony from Ford.

It’s odd that Hatch’s blatant, seemingly blind support for Kavanaugh doesn’t disqualify him from being on the committee considering his appointment. It’s especially worrisome in light of a David Brock tweet claiming that it was Hatch’s staff who selectively leaked part of the FBI investigation into Hill’s claims about Thomas to him. It would not be surprising to hear that Brock is experiencing deja vu these days, harkening back to the days when he was determined to help make Hill appear “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” by printing “virtually every derogatory and often contradictory allegation” he heard about her. Contradictory claims are making a comeback, it seems: Kavanaugh’s defenders have mounted a wild array of excuses for the man. Sometimes it’s that he wasn’t at the party; other times that there never was a party. Or he was at the party but the incident didn’t happen; or it happened but it doesn’t matter because it was a long time ago and apparently teenage boys categorically sexually assault their female peers and that’s acceptable. Or something happened but it was “rough horse play.”

Hill herself penned an op-ed in the New York Times this week, writing that “the public expects better from our government than we got in 1991.” But will we get it? She doesn’t sound so sure: “That the Senate Judiciary Committee still lacks a protocol for vetting sexual harassment and assault claims that surface during a confirmation hearing suggests that the committee has learned little from the Thomas hearing, much less the more recent #MeToo movement.”

It’s fair to wonder why Republicans wouldn’t want to just pick a new nominee. Ford’s accusation is, after all, not the only problem that has come up during the judge’s hearings. He is accused of lying under oath not only this year, but also in 2004 and 2006. The thing he was allegedly lied about: allegedly stolen documents. (A former staffer for Sen. Hatch now claims that Kavanaugh “knew nothing of the source” of the documents he was provided.) It’s also unclear whether he was truthful about his involvement in the vetting of a judicial nominee whom he recommended for the seat. He may have also lied about his involvement with the appeals court nomination of a lawyer who helped develop the Bush-era interrogation torture policies, and another judge who suggested a reduction of the sentence of a man who helped to burn a cross in front of a mixed-race couple’s home. He may have even lied about his knowledge of the interrogation torture policies themselves (according to Sen. Richard Durbin, to whom Kavanaugh professed his ignorance of the Bush administration’s detention and torture policies during his nomination to the D.C. Circuit court, “…[Kavanaugh] had to know he was misleading me and the committee and the people who were following this controversial nomination”).

While legal scholars say Kavanaugh’s actions likely don’t meet the very high bar for perjury, it’s hardly commendable to give someone who apparently struggles to tell the truth under oath — or fully understand the documents he is given or the actions of people he promotes — a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court. There are more than 3,000 federal judges in this country. Is it really not possible for Republicans to find one who has not, willfully or otherwise, said untrue things under oath? The Supreme Court is, after all, the highest court in the land. Wouldn’t it be reasonable, then, to hold the people we put on it to the highest standards?

Moreover, is being the party who insisted on putting not just one, but two men accused of sexual misconduct on the Supreme Court really how the GOP wants to define itself?

Apparently, it is. POLITICO quoted a lawyer “close to the White House” insisting Kavanaugh’s nomination would never be withdrawn. “No way,” the lawyer reportedly said. “If anything, it’s the opposite.” Apparently, the White House is concerned that “if somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.”

This is perhaps not a surprising view from a White House that stands behind a president caught bragging on tape that he doesn’t wait before forcing himself on women because “when you’re a star, they let you do it… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” A president accused of sexual assault by at least 22 women. A president who defended his White House staff secretary after claims of the man’s history of intimate partner violence — which the White House knew about for months — was exposed. Or who said, of child predation allegations against Republican senate candidate Roy Moore, “forty years is a long time.” Or who defended Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Corey Lewandowski and so on. In effect, an endorsement from the Trump White House doesn’t do much to dispel the idea that his chosen nominee may have committed sexual predation.

If anything, it’s the opposite.

 

People Sorting: An Interview With ‘Personality Brokers’ Author Merve Emre

Jessica Gross | Longreads | September 2018 | 23 minutes (5,900 words)

If you haven’t yet read Merve Emre’s writing on the history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, you might assume that Myers and Briggs were men. In fact, as Emre documented first in a 2015 piece for Digg and with great depth in her new book The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing, the indicator was the brainchild of Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. Over the course of decades starting in the early twentieth century, and shaped by their interests in childrearing and the theories of Carl Jung—if not formal training in psychology—Katharine and Isabel created what has become one of our preeminent means of categorizing, and thus conceiving, people.

Though her writing ultimately accrues into a critique of the MBTI along several dimensions, including the way it upholds extant social, racial, and class inequalities and its perpetuation of insidious capitalistic values, Emre excavates the history of the indicator from its inception through its modern expression with tremendous rigor, nuance and, ultimately, empathy. It seems as important to her to honor these two women’s work as both inventors and mothers—as well as the profound meaning the MBTI can hold for people—as it is to examine the intent and effects of their creation. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Szalai described the book as “history that reads like biography that reads like a novel — a fluid narrative that defies expectations and plays against type.”

Emre, an associate professor of English at Oxford University, has written prolifically for both academic and popular literary outlets. (Her first book, Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, came out last year.) She is, in my estimation, one of the sharpest critics working today. But we first met long before she published her first piece—in fifth grade.

This past June, when I visited Emre in New Haven, where she was staying with her family before moving to the U.K., we spoke not only about the MBTI but also about our own history. Though we were friendly and moved in similar circles during our childhoods, we didn’t become close until our early twenties, by which point both of us had changed enough that we were able to become real friends. If the MBTI is predicated on the understanding that a person’s personality type never changes, how does one account for personal evolution?

* * *

Even though parts of your Digg piece are incorporated into this book, there’s a great tonal difference overall. The Digg piece is acerbic in a way that was kind of fun, so I assumed the book was going to be more of an outright critique. But it’s much more biographical than critical, and tonally much more subdued. Can you talk about that choice?

The Digg piece was sharper and a little bit snarkier, you’re right. Part of what that was registering was my frustration that I had gone to these great lengths to follow the directions of CAPT [the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, which holds the personal papers of founder Isabel Briggs Myers] in order to get access to their archives, and then they denied me access for no discernible reason or purpose. Or rather, the purpose was discernible, and it was that they wanted to protect this person’s image and they didn’t want anybody to write anything that might be even a little bit critical.

So the Digg piece was in some ways excavating those frustrations. But when you sit with any subject for long enough, certain nodes of sympathy begin to open up that you might not have anticipated.

Once I got access to Katharine’s papers, I saw that there was that there was a real struggle for her and for her daughter to figure out how to take what at times seemed to them like the banal and unpromising labor of motherhood and domestic care and transform that into something that they felt was self-actualizing, and self-actualizing in a very professional way. It’s hard for me not to feel sympathy for that. The more I sat with their materials, with their letters—the more I learned about their lives from primary sources—the less I wanted to write a straightforward critique. Or, I felt that I had written a straightforward critique for Digg, and that it had served its purpose.

For the book, I wanted something that would make a little bit more sense of why we continue to be drawn to an instrument like the MBTI even when I think many of us know that it’s not valid or reliable, that it’s a flat and unspecific understanding of human personality. It seemed to me that I couldn’t answer that question with critique alone—or that critique alone would only answer half of that question and leave the other half, which was about the human desire to know ourselves and to know our intimates, unanswered. Read more…

The 17-Year Itch

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Laura Jean Baker | Longreads | August 2018 | 10 minutes (2,590 words)

 

5.

Four years ago, in the nook of our L-shaped kitchen on Hazel Street, my husband Ryan — equal partner in marriage — proclaimed, “I think I’m probably a little bit smarter than you.” He paused, remembering to cut me a compliment sandwich. “You just have a better work ethic.”

To what did I owe the pleasure of this rare expression of sexism? In our family, men and women belonged at the hearth. Ryan washed dishes, burped babies, and curried meals. We’d just pulled our fifth bun from the oven, a little boy, exactly what Dad had ordered to tip the balance in our two-boy-two-girl household. Are you hoping for a boy or a girl? With the first four pregnancies, he’d dare only to say, “a healthy baby,” but with Gustav, he’d openly declared his preference for the Y chromosome. My husband was sometimes a stranger to me, a throwback, a modern man sprung from an old seed.

Experts in family studies predict that by 2050, men in heterosexual partnerships will share equally in housework. That will be a year shy of what may — or may not — be our golden wedding anniversary. But can sociologists predict when men will totally reconfigure their mindsets? Is there such a thing as a blank slate, free from the ghost outlines of patriarchal history?

Household chores are tangible problems we solve together. How to empty the sink trap; how to polish the countertops; how to make a bed and sleep in it, alongside your wife. Implicit bias is a much more sinister thing, a bad omen for any marriage founded on equality.

On the day of Ryan’s regrettable comment — his decree of superiority — we’d foolishly cycled back around to an old conversation. As childhood sweethearts, we’d taken the ACT exam together — same test, same day. After two hours and 55 minutes, the proctor had authoritatively announced, “Time’s up.” Our equitability — our gender equality — had been examined and documented by American College Testing. We both scored 28 (very good but not impressive, according to the internet, which didn’t yet exist). We’d landed together in the 90th percentile. Our brains matched. We planned to become in real life what we represented on paper: equal-opportunity partners, relishing our shared smarts.

But as with athletes demoralized by a tie game, we were left longing for something definitive. We wanted to know who was smarter, and as it turned out, he still believed, on some deeply ingrained and unquestioning level, that I was just a “try-hard.” This is how my 12-year-old son, Leo, describes classmates, often girls, who labor over extra-credit projects. He’s talking about me, I concede internally, nearly surrendering to a new generation of boys and men.

“Teachers like girls better,” Leo says. “It’s reverse sexism.” He too believes he has something to prove. At least twice a week, he sends a cryptic message from his school-appointed Chromebook: “Come pick me up. I hate it here.”

One day, the message just reads, “Help.”

Read more…