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Tennis vs. Tennis

Andrea Petkovic and Tennis.

Text and Polaroids by Andrea Petkovic

Racquet and Longreads | July 2018 | 16 minutes (4,000 words)

This story is produced in partnership with Racquet magazine.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — When I exit the plane in Albuquerque, the first thing I see is space. So much space and so few people. I’ve come from New York, and the minute I step onto New Mexican soil everything feels like it’s in slow motion. I speak slower, my steps are grander, my breath deeper. The desert landscape is a stark contrast to the crowds that I have become accustomed to in the city, and the landscape resembles nothing we have at home in Germany.

I’m on my way to Sister Bar, where Tennis will be playing. Tennis, in this instance, is a band, and I will be touring New Mexico, Arizona, and California with them. In a bus. I am wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a faux leopard fur coat, despite the 90-degree heat. Perhaps I’ve overthought my Rock Tour Ensemble because I’m feeling uncharacteristically self-aware about being thrown into this alternate reality. In my real life, I am a tennis player. Full-time. How should I know what’s cool these days?

We will be traveling in a bus, from venue to venue, waking up early, seeking out breakfast burritos, eating too many, sitting on the bus, driving through the desert, six hours, seven hours, arriving at the theater. Cities and states and landscapes become one, unloading the gear, sound-checking, eating dinner, waiting for the show, the show, THE SHOW, the adrenaline-fueled banter after the concert, one beer, two beers, whiskey then vocal rest for Alaina, the lead singer, too little sleep, too little time for basic hygiene but it’s okay because the others have forsaken theirs too, then waking up early and doing it all again.

I’ve decided to do this because I have a hunger for throwing myself into the art world, the music world, the TV and movie world. I’m obsessed with contemporary culture in the widest sense. Are we tennis players part of it? Does experiencing an extraordinary intensity of emotion in your day-to-day job place you outside of conventional reality? And if it does, why do I try to understand it, why can’t I just accept it as it is? That’s why I’m here. Read more…

Eating Alone

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Stephanie Rosenbloom | Excerpt adapted from Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude | Viking | June 2018 |14 minutes (3,719 words)

Comptoir Turenne is on the ground floor of a nineteenth-century building with battered shutters in the Haut-Marais, on the less fashionable end of rue de Turenne. On the more fashionable end, Glow on the Go! serves concoctions like the Lolita with organic cherries and “superfoods adaptogens,” Baby Beluga sells bikinis and matching sunglasses for Capri-bound toddlers, and the windows of Delphine Pariente’s jewelry shop (now known as Nouvel Amour) advise: Soyez heureux, be happy.

Comptoir Turenne has no such panache. Its sidewalk views are mainly of a real estate agency and a men’s suit shop. It is not on “must-eat” lists. Visitors are not burdened by the ghosts of Hemingway and Sartre to have an indelible experience. All of  this makes Turenne a laid-back spot for breakfast pour un. You can sit under its cheerful red awnings, mere blocks from the action, and fancy yourself Parisian.

Portions, however, appear to be measured with Americans in mind. A croque madame arrived at the table looking as if it had been flown in from the Cheesecake Factory. A sunny-side-up egg was as big as a pancake. Beneath it, thick, crusty bread was covered in toasted cheese. Beside it, french fries were piled in a little deep-fryer basket. A salad was already beginning to migrate off the plate. There was barely room on the table for my café crème and the speculoos tucked between the cup and saucer.

When you’re not sitting across from someone, you’re sitting across from the world.

I eyed the speculoos. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells a story in Peace Is Every Step about being a child and taking half an hour, sometimes forty-five minutes, to finish a cookie that his mother bought him. “I would take a small bite and look up at the sky,” he wrote. “Then I would touch the dog with my feet and take another small bite. I just enjoyed being there, with the sky, the earth, the bamboo thickets, the cat, the dog, the flowers.”

I can polish off a speculoos in less time than it takes to say “speculoos.” Nonetheless, Nhat Hanh’s story resonates in an age when it’s not unusual for a meal to be eaten with one hand while the other is posting a photo of it to Instagram. Men in suits stopped for coffee and cigarettes. Children were being walked to school. For the solo diner, no view is better than the one from the sidewalk, even the one from Comptoir Turenne. When you’re not sitting across from someone, you’re sitting across from the world. Read more…

A Beginner’s Guide to Fly Fishing With Your Father

Illustration by Steven Weinberg

Heather Radke | Longreads | June 2018 | 6,282 words (25 minutes)

In front of the cash register at the fishing shop in Grayling, Michigan, between the Trout Unlimited maps of the river and the hats that say size matters, there is a small shelf lined with business cards. Each of the stacks of cards, save one, are for fishing guides, men who will take you to the good spots on the river and teach you how to cast a fly rod. The final stack of cards is for a local urologist.

I am here with my dad, trying to finally learn to fish. We have driven three hours up the middle of the state from Lansing to Grayling, one struggling city to another. Camp Grayling, just outside of town, is the training ground for the Michigan National Guard. There is only one expressway that far north in Michigan, and as we approached Grayling on the two-lane highway that runs to the Upper Peninsula, tanks and camo Humvees slowed us down, too big to pass.

Michigan is a state of struggling towns, places that depend on a trickle of tourism, small farms, or a single industry. There was a time when the promise of the unions and the auto industry was this: You can make enough money working on the line to have a house in town, a car in the driveway, and a cottage on the lake. It feels ludicrous now to think that a blue-collar job could propel you so far into the middle class, particularly as we drove through the desiccated remains of the failure of that once-true promise. Grayling was the kind of place where you might have built the cottage. Now the tanks, the Family Dollar, and the boarded-up bow-and-arrow factory hint at the presence of another Michigan cliché — the Michigan Militia, a right-wing paramilitary group that was once rumored to be affiliated with the Oklahoma City bombing.

As we turn off the main road into the gravel parking lot, the fishing shop stands before us in contrast to much of the rest of town. Fly-fishing is a gentleman’s sport. It is literary and beautiful, historic and manly. Elegant in the simplicity of its mechanism, it suggests stewardship and stalwartness. This shop does not sell florescent orange camouflage vests or mechanized crossbows. It sells fishing baskets and slouchy hats, signs that say catch and release, volumes of poetry from local authors, millions of tiny hooks and feathers meant to be ordered neatly into small boxes, collected and organized taxonomically for ready response to myriad conditions. Read more…

Drought In Post-Apartheid Cape Town: An Interview with Eve Fairbanks

(Morgana Wingard/Getty Images)

Cape Town, South Africa has been suffering a three-year drought. Despite government intervention, citizens have taken matters into their own hands, tapping springs and modifying their homes and behavior. Their innovations prove the necessity of civic involvement and DIY innovation to endure the kind of natural disasters that will increasingly plague civilization due to climate change.

United in a common struggle, the drought has also leveled the racially divided city’s physical and social barriers in profound ways. At HuffPost Highline, Johannesburg-based journalist Eve Fairbanks examines the way Cape Town residents of different classes are using the opportunity to help and learn from each other—with white privileged residents expanding their concept of “community” to include the black South Africans previously known as “them.”

The drought has dissolved what Fairbanks calls the “infrastructure of privilege,” luxuries like pools, gardens and long showers, as well as a sense of security.  Some people in Cape Town view the drought as the inevitable reckoning with apartheid. But is this new camaraderie also a fantasy?

***

In your piece, you report on the aquifer of meaning below the story’s surface, examining the surprising psychological and social dimensions of the city’s relationship to its resources.  At what point during your reporting did these layers of meaning emerge?

I love your word “aquifer.” Table Mountain, the crag that lords over Cape Town, has unusual aquifers whose depth and abundance of water are still unplumbed. Cape Town was designed for a relatively small white population, and for centuries it relied, unlike other cities, only on surface dams. Some scientists believe that tapping the Cape Flats aquifer — a vein of water that runs from the mountain to the sea ─ would solve the city’s water issues, at least in the medium term. The problem is the aquifer runs straight through several of the largest townships in the city. So to tap the aquifer would mean displacing a population. Experts said that they had to be kicked out of their homes. So these people have very good reasons not to trust experts.

It struck me that no technocratic solution to a problem like drought or climate change, or exists in a vacuum. You can’t sit in an office — as the Cape Town government has tried to do make their drought plan as neutral as possible — and diagram a solution. People have feelings and commitments about things like water that are many, many-layered.

I also really love science. I often find metaphors for social life buried in apparently technical scientific aspects of the stories I cover — the geology of the landscape of a political piece, the weather, the biome, and so on. Scientists still don’t know the contours of the Table Mountain aquifer, or what outcome tapping it would have; it parallels the profound psychological disconnect between the experts and the people they serve.

Are there other reporters or science writers whose work inspires you?

I kind of wish there wasn’t the category of science writing! So much great classical writing didn’t see itself as separate from science, since science is how we interpret the world, and we’re in the world.

One of my favorite Shakespeare passages is Mercutio’s monologue where he mentions the atom to make more vivid a riff on blame and responsibility. My favorite John Donne poems use the compass and map as visual metaphors for vague things like love or the soul. In Donne, tying those things to objects of scientific inquiry is part of the argument that they’re real.

Every writer needs science, even novelists. Once you’re making any kind of description of a landscape, or even reflecting on human motivations in politics or love, you’re entering the territories of geology, botany, physics, and psychology. I think people are sometimes scared of science, though, because it’s become a specialty. Some of the most vivid, moving conversations I’ve had related to my writing were with scientists who told me about uncertainty in physics, about botany, or about the way objects’ behavior changes according to their size.  These relate to deep questions about the scalability of projects, the singularity of truth, and so on, and give me a different way to think about abstractions like relationships or class, to make them real as forces.

Science writing today, in some cases, seems pretty specialized, and the presumption is that the science writer in a magazine is responsible for transmitting the findings of studies to the layman. This can remove the writer from the story. In some science writing, I don’t see a lot of confidence on the part of the author to ask, “Does this accord with my experience? Could this finding be wrong?” My favorite writers who incorporate science are working with science over the longer term, and they tend to be really interested in the essence of science — the history, the scientific method — rather than super excited by what it can prove.

I love Atul Gawande and Oliver Sacks because they incorporate their own journeys and doubts into their science writing. They aren’t making proofs or touting answers to social problems offered by a hot new study. Simon Schama, the historian, actually uses science obliquely but wonderfully in his writings on how landscape formed cultures. I was inspired by Ann Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. She invested years in understanding the science, but at heart it was a story about science’s limits. I also love Ben Adler at City & State. He’s doing what used to just be called geography. He writes things like landscape and infrastructure in a scientific way, but he’s deeply interested in how these things influence politics and vice versa.

It’s interesting how your story suggests that technology won’t necessarily solve all of humanity’s resource problems — that a change in simple civilian behavior is necessary. Doesn’t that contradict the ongoing fantasy of industrial civilization?

I think most of us feel the limits of the industrial fantasy now. But we’ve also built our civilization on it to the extent that we don’t know what we would do without it. The solutions we’ve imagined tend towards a rewinding of the tape back to a purer, more natural innocence. But that isn’t possible. In my own life, change has often come through some unintended break in the plan: a breakup or a firing or whatever, something that throws things into disarray and makes me live a different way. That was what I hoped to suggest with the Highline piece: that accelerating climate change, in some ways, may force its own solutions by making certain ways of life literally untenable.

I do foresee a growing conflict between government and its citizens. Governments, including in Cape Town, are tired of “politics.” They want to get away from criticisms by becoming increasingly technocratic, in the hopes that technocratic solutions will be perceived as neutral. In Cape Town, though, this desire translated into dictatorial, smug, and detached behavior, a deep distrust, and even rejection, of solutions that came from the public.

After I published the piece, the government closed the spring I highlighted in it, cementing the whole thing over, a real “paved paradise and put up a parking lot” move. It amazed me, because the spring was so small, but it was such a symbol of people’s capacities to rise above social divisions and entitlement. It amazed me the government couldn’t see how important that would be to people in the city. But I think the possibility that citizens could create their own solutions to social problems, however much governments play lip service to this ideal, really threatened the Cape Town government insofar as it suggested it might be dispensable.

You grew up in Virginia, a region still imprinted by slavery and segregation. Thinking of Cape Town’s drought, do you see any analogs in America for the way natural disaster can help build community relationships or dismantle racial divisions?

I’ve lived in South Africa for nine years. After a few years, I began to get the impression that whites here are really uncomfortable with their rarefied position in society. They know that it is both unsustainable and unjust. We tend to think of elites as evil, selfish automatons. But they’re also human, with innate moral intuitions.

In South Africa this moral intuition has tussled with a powerful fear of loss. So I was surprised by the explosion of joy in Cape Town when the drought forced elites into a somewhat less privileged position. I also wasn’t surprised. It was like disaster freed people to do what they had longed to do but, in the reigning political language and interpretation of human self-interest, could barely articulate to themselves that they wanted, which was to be more equal, and closer to everyone in their community.

It’s hard to imagine such a scenario in America. We’re such a lucky country, and we’ve managed to insulate ourselves so much from all kinds of bad fortune. In the 1980s, before white rule in South Africa ended, the novelist J.M. Coetzee wrote a book called Waiting for the Barbarians. I think that’s how we feel in America ─ we’re waiting for some kind of extraordinary shift or upending of inequality and subtle segregations; we’re in a state of terrified hypervigiliance. I can’t imagine what exactly will break it. But I do think that more people will be happy with a sea change in the American way of life than currently expect themselves to be.

Do you think the Cape Town’s reclaimed sense of self — and the changed norms drought has brought — will stick?

I talked to a middle-aged Californian recently who grew up during a drought in the state, and he told me he still feels a visceral horror when he sees a tap running and implores his wife and children not to flush every time. I think we should also recognize the more drastic attitudinal shifts probably take work to maintain — public messaging, continual nudges from the more ardent citizens to their family and friends. I worry more about the permanence of the social changes, partly because the government is set against social flux it doesn’t control.

You’re writing a book about post-apartheid South Africa. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

I think there are really strong parallels between South Africa and America — between the conflict some people in the West feel between maintaining their society and letting newcomers in. Post-apartheid South Africa is that tension in miniature. For decades, a physical barrier was erected between white and non-white South Africa and that barrier has fallen. It’s an incredible place to witness some of the tensions and changes that face the whole world, but in a contained environment, it’s almost like an experiment.

My book is about two people — a black former freedom fighter and a white lawyer who fought for the apartheid regime in the most elite army unit — confronting those changes. It doesn’t really make an argument rather but tries to show us, like a play would, what happens when people try to leave their pasts behind while living in a world that offers constant reminders, nostalgic and painful, of those pasts.

The physical environment of South Africa becomes a ghost that can’t be exorcised: the informal segregation that still exists with housing and the neighborhoods people live in; the sense of nonbelonging and alienation in the cities — new in demographics, old in visual symbols and patterns of human association — that haunts both blacks and whites alike. Both blacks and whites here feel that the other group holds the real power in society, which is so reminiscent of America right now. I’m hoping the book will leave a lasting image of a particular country, but also hold a mirror up to America and Europe.

Meet the New Mormons

Illustration by Lizzie Gill

Sarah Scoles| Longreads | June 2018 | 23 minutes (5,714 words)

It’s a summer day in Salt Lake City, and tourists are resting inside the Mormon Tabernacle, staring at the enormous, golden pipes of the Tabernacle organ, which are topped with carved wooden finials that appear to scrape the ceiling. These are the same pipes I stared at on a satellite feed from my hometown chapel in central Florida twice a year until I was 18. Although I’d remotely watched the church’s semiannual conference religiously as a kid, I’d never been inside the building until now, more than 12 years after leaving the church and becoming an atheist, and 10 after coming out as a lesbian. My parents have spent those years trying to come to terms with these shifts, but our détente has involved not talking much about any of it. This is the Mormon way.

It’s strange then to find myself in this Tabernacle, waiting for my mom’s plane to arrive in Salt Lake so that she and I can attend the Sunstone Symposium, a yearly gathering that includes liberal Mormons and ex-Mormons who are redefining their relationship with the church. But here I am.

Two young missionaries step up to the pulpit to demonstrate the building’s acoustics for those in attendance. One rips a newspaper, and I can hear the tear from my perch in the shadows at the back of the room. It sounds soft and wet, like the stories it contains might be smeared. The demonstration ends and the missionaries walk offstage, accompanied by a recording of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir: God be with you till we meet again. The harmonies burrow into my chest like they belong there, which in some sense they always will. The Mormon worldview shaped mine — I could speak in King James English at age 4 — even though the two now stand apart, like puzzle pieces where the outcropping of one is the cavern of the other. Only together do Mormonism and I make a full picture. Read more…

A Crocodile In Paris: The Queer Classics of Qiu Miaojin

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Ankita Chakraborty | Longreads | June 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)

(1)

D. H. Lawrence once used chickens to describe the two types of women. “A really up-to-date woman is a cocksure woman,” he wrote. “She is the modern type.” The other type is the hensure woman, “the old-fashioned demure woman who was sure as a hen is sure, that is, without knowing about it.’’ He made other references to animals and birds in his work. He often used animal lives to describe sex and male desire. “The desire rose again, his penis began to stir like a live bird,” he wrote of a man in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence seemed to have thrived on the animal spirit. Three of his novels are called The Fox, Kangaroo and The White Peacock. The more the woods and the old mining towns of his childhood seemed to give way to industrial landscapes, the more easily animals seemed to have crept into his work. Often animals from these woods were imagined as insensible beasts. The chapter called “Rabbit” in Women in Love comes to mind, where a pet sustains society’s adulation until the moment it turns against its owners.

The beast in Qiu Miaojin’s modernist novels is the consciousness in women that is aware of a deviant lust for women’s bodies. Their sexuality is their bestiality. They are not necessarily hiding behind their animal pseudonyms; but like any animal on the fringes of human settlement, they are loath to be seen. The narrator of Qiu’s cult classic Notes of a Crocodile declares very early in the novel, “I’m a woman who loves women.” Yet a few pages later, she thinks she should carry her shoes and tiptoe down the streets of Taipei so that no one will notice her. In the industrial Taiwanese society where these women live, the self-discovery of their own sexuality is considered to be a social condition and an epidemic. It made for cheap television and for trash talk. In Taiwan in 1987, everybody seemed very interested in knowing who among them was a “crocodile.” Read more…

The Prosperity Plea

Poor People's Campaign

Livia Gershon | Longreads | May 2018 | 10 minutes (2,395 words)

On Monday, May 14, I was among some ninety people gathered at the capitol building in Concord, New Hampshire. We sang old Civil Rights songs and held signs with slogans like “Starving a Child is Violence,” and “Systemic Racism is Immoral.” People told harrowing stories about growing up anxious over acquiring basic necessities and brushes with disaster when a child got sick and needed a parent at home. David Jadlocki, a pastor, gave a fire-and-brimstone sermon. “We will never be free, we will never be whole, we will never be happy, as long as our fullness is bought at the expense of another’s existence,” he said. “As long as there are children living in our nation who wake up each morning and go to bed each night gripped by the pains of hunger and the shame of poverty, we are not free.”

The crowd comprised mostly the kinds of people you would expect to find at 2 p.m. on a weekday—retirees, students, workers who could duck out early—and the civil disobedience was less dogs-and-firehoses than a polite exchange with Officer Friendly; when a group blocked a street, we were gently escorted for a brief stay in jail. None of this may have appeared particularly extreme. But the message on display was something radical, a national revival of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, taking place over 40 days, in 39 states plus Washington, D.C., with the slogan “a new and unsettling force.” The movement aims to challenge the way most Americans view the economy, by overthrowing the treasured, toxic American ideal of personal responsibility. There’s no personal shame in being poor, the campaign’s leaders argue, what’s shameful is maintaining a society in which poverty exists.

Read more…

Born Again

Illustrations by Karen Barbour

Michelle Dean Topic | April 2017 | 13 minutes (3,100 words)

This story is featured in collaboration with Topic, a digital storytelling platform that delivers an original story to your inbox each and every week. Sign up for Topic’s newsletter now.

Candace Newmaker was 10 years old when she died in 2000. There are only a few pictures of her, and even fewer biographical details. Here is what we do know: she had dark brown hair and eyes, she liked dogs and horses, and she enjoyed arts and crafts. Candace had been a ward of the state of North Carolina since she was about 5 the daughter of a very young mother who hadn’t been able to hold her own life together, and who had lost her very young children to the Department of Children and Family Services. Jeane Newmaker, a kindly nurse-practitioner who was single and in her early 40s, found Candace in the system when she was 6 and adopted her in 1996. It’s not clear exactly when things got difficult between Newmaker and her adopted daughter. Maybe things were difficult from the start. (Newmaker declined to comment for this article; this account is based on contemporaneous press reports in the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News.) Candace, one of the girl’s therapists later said, could be sweet, but she could also be “mean.” One therapist said it just seemed like Candace had a “defense mechanism for being through so many places” — that “it was like having the average 18-year-old adolescent in your house,” one who was trapped in a 10-year-old’s body. Read more…

Is Your Job Lynchian, or Is It More Kafkaesque?

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Rachel Paige King | Longreads | April 2018 | 14 minutes (3,753 words)

 

When Richard Bolles, Episcopal minister and author of What Color Is Your Parachute?, died last year at age 90, the New York Times explained his best-selling career guide’s success this way: “‘Parachute’ had come along at the beginning of a historic shift, when corporate strategies like outsourcing, subcontracting, downsizing and mergers were starting to erode traditional notions of job security. The idea that you could stay in one job for a lifetime began coming undone in the early 1970s, and ‘Parachute’s’ perennial sales reflected, at least in part, this new reality.”

Given the tumultuous climate for job seekers over the last half-century — Bolles’s book originally came out in 1970 — the various editions of Parachute have, unsurprisingly, sold a lot of copies (roughly 10 million). In the 2005 edition, for example, Bolles demonstrates why generations of job seekers found his work helpful, with its combination of straight talk and spiritual uplift. For example, he writes, “The typical job in the new millennium is best viewed as a temp job …You must always be mentally prepared to go job-hunting again, at the drop of a hat.” Although the various editions were constantly being updated and revised, we see Bolles (in the mid-aughts at least) spinning the parlous state of job-hunting as not just an inevitable part of modern business but an opportunity for personal transformation. He asks workers to stop expecting not only security, but also stability or even any kind of appreciation for their efforts. At the same time, he presents the world of work as a thrilling adventure (or at the very least a fun challenge) involving short-term gigs with steep learning curves and workplaces characterized by interpersonal drama and managerial indifference to personal struggles. Still, he appears to believe that finding a “dream job” is possible if you stop hoping for any kind of external reward. For Bolles, the job seeker should not be looking not for a single position or even for a traditional career, but for a vocation. Secular people sometimes forget that that word was originally synonymous with the concept of a religious calling, but Bolles, with his seminary training, most likely never did.
Read more…

It’s a Wonderful World: The Remaking of California Agriculture

(Trent Davis Bailey/California Sunday)

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (4,100 words)

The February issue of The California Sunday Magazine devoted its feature well to a single piece, 20 years in the making. Mark Arax, a native of California’s San Joaquin Valley and the son of a grape grower in Fresno, has spent the last several decades working on a story about billionaires Lynda and Stuart Resnick, who transformed an agricultural desert into a cornucopia of pistachios, pomegranates, and oranges — cleverly marketed as “Cuties” and “Halos” by their business, The Wonderful Company. In just a few decades, the Resnicks rebranded of San Joaquin Valley agriculture, and the impoverished community of Lost Hills, in their image, despite never having farmed a day in their lives. Arax is writing a book about water wars in California that will be published by Knopf.

***

Aaron Gilbreath: You said you carried around notes about Stewart Resnick for nearly two decades. How did you first hear about him?

Mark Arax: When I was writing The King of California, about J.G. Boswell in the Tulare Lake Basin, I started hearing about this guy from Beverly Hills who had bought a bunch of farmland. This was around the late 1990s. People mentioned this guy in the next basin over who was attempting to be the new King of California. Boswell grew up in the San Joaquin Valley; this other guy came from the East Coast. I did a piece on Resnick’s capture of the Kern Water Bank right toward the tail end of finishing the Boswell book. That was twenty years after he’d arrived. This land is so big, so vast, that these stories go undetected for years and years.

AG: One of the strangest things about Resnick and Boswell is how they really wanted to remain invisible. You kept knocking on doors trying to get interviews. Resnick declined multiple times and finally agreed to sit down with you in 2008 because he wanted a book about himself. Then he lost interest.

MA: Today the Resnicks have a PR office that’s a million-dollar-plus operation. In 2008, they didn’t have anybody. You had to call the attorney, then the secretary would hang up the phone and the attorney would just say “No comment.” It was really secretive, but I was used to that. The Boswell family saying was “As long as the whale never surfaces, it’s never harpooned.” That’s the way these guys operated. Obviously, persistence paid off in getting Boswell to talk, so I figured the same thing would happen with Resnick.

AG: Even though you chipped away at Boswell to make that whale surface, did you just assume that Resnick’s story would take a long time? Did you ever think it wouldn’t come together?

MA: I told Resnick’s story in pieces as I got it. In 2003, I got the piece about the Kern Water Bank without his cooperation. I gathered some more notes, some more string as we call it, and did that piece in the opening of my third book West of West. I have this scene with Resnick in his mansion, so I started playing with that whole thing. It’s almost like a first stab at a painting. Then I decided for this new book that I had to tell as much of his whole story that I could, and that’s when I went back into it. Each time I’ve gone in and taken something out, written about it, and this was the time that I decided to do the definitive Resnick chapter, which became the magazine piece.

AG: So you’ve been working with this material for years.

MA: And the virtue of that is you get to see how a story and operation evolves. It’s been almost 20 years — had I done this piece back in the early 2000s, there would have been no philanthropy to write about, they weren’t doing that kind of philanthropy in Lost Hills yet. Writing about the Resnicks now, you see how they evolved as people, how their farming evolved, how Lost Hills and their engagement with the community evolved.

AG: That philanthropy is a huge part of your California Sunday piece. To me, it’s one of the most interesting things about their business, because as consumers we don’t often think about farmers as philanthropists. Yet the Resnicks have such keen marketing instincts that their philanthropy is designed to both indoctrinate their workers and to show the world that they’re a good company, growing healthy food and treating their employees well. Have you ever encountered any other farming company that does that sort of thing?

MA: Most of the big farmers that live in the Valley don’t actually reside in their communities. A lot of them live in Fresno and farm outside of town, and their idea of philanthropy is giving to the Valley Children’s Hospital or Fresno State Bulldogs, or maybe giving back to a university they attended, like Cal Poly. They rarely give back to the little rural towns they farm in, so very little of their philanthropy affects the Mexican farm worker. Boswell took the town of Corcoran as his company town: He built the football stadium and social services, senior citizen and community centers, but the level of philanthropy the Resnicks practice is unprecedented in American agriculture. You can’t help but be dazzled by it, but it also raises some disturbing questions.

You use the word “indoctrinate.” I never used that, but that’s actually a good word because the Resnicks are really trying to change everything, right down to the habits of the Mexican farmworker, including what they eat. It crosses over into a kind of a social engineering that raises troubling questions. They’re not just writing checks; Lynda Resnick is also running and helping design their charter schools’ educational programs. She’s working with doctors and dieticians to design their weight loss and exercise programs. That level of involvement is a very different kind of hands-on philanthropy.

AG: What do you think about the Resnick’s philanthropy and level of engagement signals about the future of the agriculture in the West? It’s strange to think of these white, rich, Whole Foods-types pushing their dietary values and philosophy on immigrant communities.

MA: It’s almost like Lynda Resnick wants to change the microbial content in their stomachs. Before the farmworkers eat lunch at the company restaurant, she encourages the workers to drink this little concoction she’s made from apple cider vinegar, turmeric, ginger and mandarin juice. All the times I’ve been in the restaurant I never saw any workers partake of this concoction, but that’s what she’s pushing. I drank it. It was nice. Apple cider vinegar is good for your stomach and all that, but when you read about that level of involvement, you’re very conflicted about all of this.

The level of philanthropy the Resnicks practice is unprecedented in American agriculture. You can’t help but be dazzled by it.

Lost Hills is now the ultimate company town; everything is branded. You see this incredible five-acre park with a playground with water fountains where kids can play. The Resnicks built soccer fields with artificial turf and lighting. The park itself is named the Wonderful Park. If you look at the ‘o’ on the ‘wonderful,’ it’s the same heart-shaped ‘o’ that stamps the Resnick’s brand of pomegranate juice, so that makes it a little creepy.

AG: It seems like Orwellian brainwashing. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, the word “wonderful” everywhere.

MA: That’s Lynda, she brands everything. She even changed the company name: It wasn’t enough that it was called Paramount, that’s a pretty grand name right there, it had to become The Wonderful Company. I think that’s the kind of nth degree of marketing that raises troubling questions.

AG: With Wonderful, it seems like she’s really trying to get into consumers’ heads, to make them think that this company, not just these products, is wonderful. Despite being born in the Valley, you did such a great job presenting the Resnicks’ complex story fairly, in a way that didn’t present an unjustified bias, and let readers draw their own conclusions.

MA: They’re tackling diabetes and obesity, and you can’t help but applaud those efforts. There’s what I call a tussle inside my head, between the skeptic and the believer, and I think that held through throughout the story is a need to constantly try to look at this through both of those sensibilities

They don’t know their own motives. When you ask them how this all began and why it began so late, the Resnicks talk about a lecture they attended in Aspen, where Harvard Professor Sandel comes out to talk about the moral obligations of wealth. Then they get in the car and look at each other and say, “Are we doing enough?” They decided that they were not. And yet, when they decided to jump in, they jumped in in a way that’s never been done in agriculture in the United States, certainly not in California.

AG: In the piece, you describe how the Bruce Springsteen played a show in Fresno, and how nobody at the concert put any money in the piggy bank he left at the front of the stage for the people who work the fields. Springsteen was so shocked he asked you, “What kind of place is this?” Do landowners care more about Mexican-American workers than they used to?

MA: In between songs at that concert, Springsteen talked about what motivated a particular song or where it came from, and some of the people in the audience got so upset that they walked out and demanded their money back. I’m not sure he understood the kind of place he was coming to, where there was this almost self-hatred about needing to rely on that labor.

It’s a really complex psychology, where you have to go into the rural heart of Mexico to pull your workforce, you’re dependent on these people, and yet you sort of hate yourself for being dependent on them, and there’s a certain hatred of them too, for them making you feel that shame. I’m not a psychologist, but there is something deeply broken psychically about this place, and I try to get at that in this California Sunday piece a little bit. The Springsteen anecdote helped me do that.

AG: The story also implied the way growers who rely on Mexican-American labor are people who would rather physically separate themselves from the workforce, so they don’t have to feel those bad feelings. And yet, Lynda Resnick engages them directly.

MA: What the farmer has done is put the labor contractor between him and the labor, to give himself that psychological distance. What Lynda Resnick is doing is getting intimately involved in their workers’ lives, breaking past that barrier. In my story, when she’s on stage talking to farmers about what they’re doing, there’s a real discomfort on the part of these farmers who are listening, because she’s challenging the whole way that they’d gone about this, challenging this relationship where they increasingly distance themselves, and don’t live in those farm communities, don’t deal with their own labor.

AG: Do you feel like the Resnicks might signal some sort of larger change in Valley agriculture?

MA: This place has been resistant to change for about a century and a half, so I don’t see that relationship changing. I see increasing mechanization replacing the usual farm labor, and that’s one of the reasons that these farmers are switching to growing nuts. Nuts are obviously high-dollar crops, but they can also be done with machines. What I see is the farmer now replacing human labor with mechanical labor. Ultimately they’re going to continue to dodge that issue and keep that distance between them and their workers.

You’re dependent on these people, and yet you sort of hate yourself for being dependent on them. There’s a certain hatred of them too, for them making you feel that shame.

AG: What happens to these workers who are living in shacks in Lost Hills? These good hard-working people who have families and ambitions and debts to coyotes? What do they do when mechanization replaces them?

MA:. You’ll still have the great fields that need to be handpicked, and you’ll still have citrus that’ll need to be handpicked, but mechanization is going to shrink the workforce. These folks will continue to work in kitchens, they’re going to work in the hotels, they’re going to be tending peoples’ front yards and backyards, but I think that is going to be a fundamental shift. I don’t see them discovering their labor in the way that the Resnicks have.

AG: Let’s talk about the scale of the landscape. J.G. Boswell and Resnick are superlative landowners. To me, the Valley itself is a land of superlatives, yet somehow you shrunk this land’s complexity down to two very condensed paragraphs early in the piece, setting the scene for people who don’t know this region.

MA: It’s almost taken me thirty years of writing and researching this place to do those two paragraphs in that kind of big distilled way. I found studies that said that the leveling of land that took place here, the alteration, was unprecedented in human history. This Valley is one of the most altered landscapes in human history. So how do you tell that in two paragraphs? That was the challenge there.

AG: Having explored this Valley a lot in the last twenty years, I could sense that this was the kind of introduction that only somebody who’s been working and living in this land for their whole lives could do this well. You set the stage as only a lifer could.

MA:. In each of my books, I try to reckon with the land, to describe it. I’ve described it from the vantage of the pass called the Grapevine, that last mountain road that divides L.A. from the Valley; I’ve called that a kind of a Mason-Dixon line, with the sprawl of L.A. giving way to the sprawl of the farmlands. I’ve told it from other vantages, and each time it’s gotten a little more precise and a little better, but this one certainly was a kind of telling that took a lot of years to try to nail down.

AG: One of the other things you did was demystify the invisible, misunderstood mechanics of Valley agriculture. In your piece, you say “I pity the outsider trying to make sense of” California’s Central Valley. What do you think mystifies outsiders most about this place?

MA: There’s a tendency to paint it broadly. The Central Valley is two valleys: It’s the San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento Valley, and they are very different. They have different relationships to water. The Sacramento River up north is a big, badass river. It flows. It still floods Our five rivers down here have been tamed. They follow the demands of agriculture.

The San Joaquin Valley’s water isn’t inside our rivers anymore. It’s inside the irrigation canals that take from those rivers, so it’s two different valleys. When you look at the San Joaquin Valley itself, there are three different Valleys within the San Joaquin Valley. There’s an east side that couldn’t be more different than the west side. Then there’s a middle center Valley that is different than the other two. They look different. The farms are vast on the west side, smaller in the center. Then there are communities on the east side and the center of the Valley, and no substantial communities in the west side. Making sense of this place is about being true to what this place is, and so much of those differences have to do with the relationship to water, how easy is it to access. Do you have to pump? Is there an extraction model at the heart of the agriculture, or is there a more sustainable model? That question has created different communities, different Valleys, inside the San Joaquin Valley.

AG: My sense is that few outsiders see any of that.

MA: I know it’s hard to see it. We’re all dumb to our place. John Keats talked about how we’re in these hallways between these chambers, and we’ve just left one where it’s pretty dark, we’re moving into another chamber where there’s a little more light, and we’re starting to understand our existence and who we are, and then we understand our place. The problem today is that so many folks are fixated on themselves, trying to understand themselves and their own internal journeys, that they don’t have any space leftover to really understand their place, and this is a big, big place.

I was dumb to this place at age fifteen, sixteen, literally. My family was living in town, and there these ditches that are shunting water from one side of the Valley to the other, and they’re just part of the landscape. We don’t even think where’s that water going? Who’s it going to? The only time you thought about an irrigation ditch was when some kid drowns in it during summer, so there’s a dumbness to place. Part of why I came back is to try to figure out this place. A lot of the big, great stories of migrations in America played out on this land.

AG: In your California Sunday story you mention how you “never stopped to wonder: How much was magic? How much was plunder?” Moving away helped you see the place more clearly.

We’re all dumb to our place. We don’t even think, where’s that water going? Who’s it going to?

MA: I left for a good ten or twelve years, came back, and that helped. As a writer, I moved from the state’s center where I grew up, to this new book, where I take on the entire kind of state of California, looking at how the bending of water created the state, so I worked my way from the middle outward. Then I came back in the middle because 80 percent of California’s water is used by agriculture, so I don’t apologize for telling the story of the farmer. I mean, can you own 25,000 acres and be a family farmer? It seems an absurd notion. Folks in San Francisco just can’t wrap their heads around that. But then when you go out with one of these farmers onto his land and his children are working it too, it’s a little harder to demonized that guy. What I’m trying to do is play with those notions of what a corporate farm is. What’s a mega-farm? What’s an absentee landowner? What’s a family farmer?

AG: This is where marketing like the Resnick’s really comes in to play. Branding helps manipulate the public’s perception of farms, farm values, family values.

MA: Yeah, that’s right.

AG: Despite how many urban Californians might love fancy meals and farmer’s markets, there seems to be a lot of animosity about the water farmers use outside of the cities.

MA: Oh, it got really ugly this last time. Los Angeles turned on the Valley, turned on the almond. The almond became the demon. They started doing these graphics, showing how many gallons it takes to make a single nut. These are absurd because it takes water to grow food, so there’s a real disconnect that allowed L.A., and in some degree San Francisco, to demonize the farmers here. Some of that is justified because what’s happened is that Valley farmland has gone from the best land to some of the worst land, and the greed of agriculture to grow and keep growing. When it’s a human body, we call that growth something else and try to arrest it with chemicals. Ours is kind of reverse: we use the chemicals to make it grow bigger. It’s a weird little metaphor for cancer.

AG: One of the things about the Valley that is so obviously staggering is how flat and how big it is. Visitors see the surface. It’s overwhelming what goes on out there. It’s hard to comprehend how deep a 2,500 foot well really is. But that’s as important as what’s happening above ground, maybe even more important now that people are pumping so much ancient water out of these shrinking aquifers. As a writer, how do you get people to understand what is happening at that depth underground?

MA: In the new book I have a chapter called “Sinking.” It takes the reader into this whole subsidence phenomenon, the science of it, how it happens, the pumping and sinking of the land. You’re right. You think, well, the crops are on the surface, but so much of the drama is playing out 2,000 feet below ground. To see a rig set up and drilling for water ─ it reminds me of the Texas oil fields. It’s that deep. These are million-dollar holes they’re digging.

AG: What do you think about this idea that water represents the next gold – not just a gold rush, but the source of riches, collapse, and wars, like petroleum?

MA: It is, and one of the things I do in the book is trace back the entire history of our bending of water, to show that the mining of gold was really the mining of water. The hydraulics of the system that we’re using today to move water up and down the state was developed during the Gold Rush. The first ditches, the web of ditches, that were built in California, were built during the Gold Rush, and where they couldn’t carve ditches into the land, they built these wooden irrigation ditches, called flumes, to move water across canyons. That extraction started very early on, and it just kept increasing in magnitude, moving up in degrees.

AG: It’s a really disturbing irony that, now that the Gold Rush is over, the same water that extracted gold could be worth more than gold.

MA: I mean, it’s going to get that way. Farming here is problematic, with the need to import labor, the need to import water from northern rivers, the chemical applications – oh, and they’re calling this place Parkinson’s Alley because there are so many cases of Parkinson’s Disease that can be traced back to pesticides and herbicides. And yet, as problematic as farming is, if you lived here all or most of your life, you don’t want to see that farmland turn into suburbia. You don’t want to see another Los Angeles or San Fernando Valley here. Ultimately what you fear is that the water is going to be worth so much, that the farmers are going to strip the water from the land and sell it to developers, so these rivers of agriculture that have been rivers of agriculture for more than a century are going to turn into these rivers of suburbia, and to me, that suburbanization is going to be the ultimate tragedy.

If this place ultimately gets paved over, I don’t know if it will be missed or not. The disconnect between people and the land, and the eater and his or her food, is so great, who knows if they’ll ever miss it?

AG: So is there a solution outside of market economics, like planting crops that can deal with salty soil, less water, less irrigation? Is there hope that the rural Valley won’t become more suburban?

MA: I have hope in this new Groundwater Sustainability Act we finally passed. California is the last state to allow the unregulated drilling of wells. For all of our progressiveness, California was the last state to regulate groundwater extraction. Well now that we’ve regulated groundwater, you’re going to see the issue of sustainable yield drive groundwater use. Meaning, how much can you take out of the ground and then have that water be replenished by snowmelt? That alone will probably idle a million and a half acres of Valley farmland. It’ll get it back to more a sustainable system.

We ended up taking a 100 percent of the rivers. We should have probably taken 60 to 70 percent of the rivers for agriculture and left the other 40 percent for the environment. We would have had fewer crop gluts, fewer surpluses. We would have farmed only the best land instead of now farming some of the worst land. That’s what we’re going to have to legislate ourselves back to, and if California can ever put together these urban growth boundaries, where you draw lines around cities the way Portland drew a line around itself, and you say Okay, this is the city, this is farmland, and you don’t violate that land, then that’s the way you can really develop a farm belt here that really makes sense: smaller, smarter.

AG: Talking about the aesthetic qualities of the Valley, there’s another aspect of the great loss of California to rampant suburbanization: irreplaceable local beauty. Do you as a resident feel that Californians always undervalued this region, that one day maybe they’ll recognize its beauty?

MA: It’s a kind of ugly beauty. The San Joaquin Valley doesn’t please the eyes like Napa and Sonoma, and so much of it is industrialized, but there are parts when you drive to the east side, in particular, the citrus belt, that are gorgeous. The citrus belt sits right there at the foot of the Sierra. When you go through parts of the Valley’s center and see these 40-acre vineyards, and the vines are all twisted and gnarled and have moss growing on them — there is a beauty there. You have to go looking for the little bits. It’s not so obvious. If this place ultimately gets paved over, I don’t know if it will be missed or not. The disconnect between people and the land, and the eater and his or her food, is so great, who knows if they’ll ever miss it?