Search Results for: Psychology Today

How Lobbyists Normalized the Use of Chemical Weapons on American Civilians

Ferguson, Missouri, November 24, 2014. Photo: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images.

Anna Feigenbaum | An Excerpt from: Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today | Verso | November 2017 | 22 minutes (6,015 words) 

* * *

Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology.

With his thick moustache and piercing, deep-set eyes, General Amos Fries’s passion shone through as he spoke. In a 1921 lecture to military officers at the General Staff College in Washington, DC, Fries lauded the Chemical Warfare Service for its wartime achievements. The US entered the chemical arms race “with no precedents, no materials, no literature and no personnel.” The 1920s became a golden age of tear gas. Fries capitalized on the US military’s enthusiastic development of chemical weapons during the war, turning these wartime technologies into everyday policing tools. As part of this task Fries developed an impressive PR campaign that turned tear gas from a toxic weapon into a “harmless” tool for repressing dissent.

Manufacturers maneuvered their way around the Geneva Protocol, navigating through international loopholes with ease. But these frontier pursuits could not last forever. The nascent tear gas industry would come to face its biggest challenge yet, in the unlikely form of US senators. In the 1930s two separate Senate subcommittees were tasked with investigating the dodgy sales practices of industrial munitions companies and their unlawful suppression of protest.

General Fries’s deep personal commitment to save the Chemical Warfare Service won him both allies and critics, often in the same breath. Already known for his staunch anticommunism and disdain for foreigners of all kinds, Fries was an unapologetic proponent of military solutions for dissent both at home and abroad. A journalist for the Evening Independent wrote that Fries was often “accused of being an absolute militarist anxious to develop a military caste in the United States.” But to those who shared his cause, Fries was an excellent figurehead for Chemical Warfare. A family man, a dedicated soldier, and a talented engineer, Fries was the perfect face of a more modern warfare.

Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology. They were a sign of the troops’ perseverance in World War I and an emblem of industrial modernity, showcasing the intersection of science and war. In an Armistice Day radio speech broadcast in 1924, Fries said, “The extent to which chemistry is used can almost be said today to be a barometer of the civilization of a country.” This was poised as a direct intervention to the international proposal for a ban on chemical weapons, as preparations for the Geneva Convention were well under way. If chemical weapons were banned, Fries knew it would likely mean the end of the CWS—and with it his blossoming postwar career. Read more…

Responses

We’re delighted to share three responses to Scott’s essay “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story” from Paul Bloom, William Gatewood, and Daniel Raeburn.

Jump to responses by Paul, William, and Daniel.

* * *

The Arrogance of Empathy by Paul Bloom

I don’t regret calling my last book, Against Empathy, even when people tell me they are embarrassed to read it in public. But this in-your-face title does force me to do a lot of explaining.

The first problem lies with “empathy” — a word with far too many meanings. Some people take it to refer to morality and kindness and love, to everything good. And so I spend a lot of time explaining that I’m not against that — I’m not a psychopath! Empathy also has to do with understanding other people, and I’m not against that either, though we often forget how much damage this sort of understanding can do in the hands of a bully, a con man, or a sadist. Empathy in this sense of understanding is morally neutral; it is a form of intelligence and like any other form of intelligence, it can be used for good or evil.

The notion of empathy that I’m interested in is more visceral. It involves experiencing the world as others do, when you feel the pain of others. This capacity has a lot of fans, but I argue that it is a moral train wreck. It is narrow and biased and innumerate, giving rise to selfish and irrational and often cruel decisions. I won’t make the argument here; it’s in my book and elsewhere.

The second problem with the title has to do with the word “Against.” I’m against empathy, sure, but only its moral effects. It has other merits, and I end my book by describing one of them:

Empathy can be an immense source of pleasure. Most obviously, we feel joy at the joy of others. I’ve noted elsewhere that here lies one of the pleasures of having children: You can have experiences that you’ve long become used to—eating ice cream, watching Hitchcock movies, riding a roller coaster—for the first time all over again. Empathy amplifies the pleasures of friendship and community, of sports and games, and of sex and romance. And it’s not just empathy for positive feelings that engages us. There is a fascination we have with seeing the world through the eyes of another, even when the other is suffering. Most of us are intensely curious about the lives of other people and find the act of trying to simulate these lives to be engaging and transformative.

In the last couple of sentences, I was talking about the pleasure of stories, and this brings me to Scott Korb’s fascinating discussion. I’m pleased to see that my work has had such an influence on his thinking — now it’s mutual.

Korb distinguishes between empathic engagement and “the sympathetic imagination.” Empathy is all about the other, while sympathetic imagination implicates the self; we lose ourselves in empathy, while the sympathetic imagination lets us retain some valuable distance — it gives rise to “an aloofness about the self that makes possible the very self-implication or dramatic irony, or what have you, that turns life into art, our ideas into stories.” In life and in art, such aloofness is better than the selfish immersion of empathy.

Korb talks about the moral problems of empathic engagement, and I agree with him too much to have a good discussion on this issue. But his analysis leads me to look at another worry about empathy, nicely illustrated by his remarkable quote from the novel Elizabeth Costello, by J.M. Coetzee. Much of the book is about a controversial lecture series given by Costello — an elderly Australian novelist — and Coetzee’s book includes long excerpts from Costello’s lectures, including one in which she justifies her claim about appreciating the inner lives of animals.

“If you want proof, consider the following. Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write that book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom. Either I succeeded or I did not. If I did not, I cannot imagine why you invited me here today. In any event, the point is, Marion Bloom never existed. Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce’s imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.”

Elizabeth Costello is an arrogant character, and this is an arrogant claim. How does she know that she has succeeded in thinking her way into the existence of Joyce’s character? She thinks it’s obvious from the fact that she has been invited to present in such a prestigious lecture series, but this just pushes the question back — how can she know that her audience knows that she got things right? But it’s the final sentence that really shocks. Perhaps we can have some success figuring out what it’s like to be someone very much like us (perhaps even someone imaginary), but it hardly follows from this that we can think our way into the mental life of bats or chimpanzees or oysters. (If I were in the audience, I’d ask, “So, fine, answer Thomas Nagel’s question: What’s it like to be a bat?”)

I’ve written about this arrogance elsewhere, describing psychological research by Nicholas Epley and his colleagues showing that while people are often highly confident in their ability to appreciate the thoughts of others — even highly similar others — they are wrong much of the time. The philosopher Laurie Paul, in her book Transformative Experience, takes this further, arguing that it’s impossible to know what it’s like to be a person who has had certain deeply significant experiences that you haven’t yourself experienced, such as becoming a parent, changing your religion or fighting a war. You not only can’t successfully think your way into a similar other, then, you also can’t even think your way into your own future self. Even the best descriptions won’t do the trick — you really have to be there.

I’m a fiction skeptic, then. I think novels and short stories and movies and the like can give us some glimmerings of the minds of others, some approximation of the inner life of — to give some examples from my favorite recently-read books — an autistic teenager, a black boy growing up in the South, or a small-town sheriff. But this understanding is nowhere near as much as we would hope. As for the claim that reading fiction somehow makes us better people, well, anything is possible, and the right fiction might lead certain moral qualities to flourish. But we should be mindful of Richard Posner’s point that there were no better readers than the Nazis.

With all of my cynicism about empathy, one might think, then, that I would resonate with Nabokov’s advice on how to read, quoted by Korb: “We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy — passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers — the inner weave of a given masterpiece.”

But I’m not. Such advice reminds me of this series in Slate called “You’re Doing It Wrong.” (Typical article: “Stop Pretending Banana Bread Can Be Healthy. It Is Basically Cake”). It turns out that we love doing precisely what Nabokov tells us to avoid, becoming immersed in the lives of others, imagining ourselves (or better, foolishly believing that we are imagining ourselves) as Anna Karenina or Tony Soprano or Nabokov’s own Humbert Humbert.

Maintaining aloofness may be excellent advice for writers, and is likely the better moral stance. But as readers we are naturally compelled to ignore this advice and lose ourselves in the minds of others. We like our cake and we should be left alone to enjoy it.

* * *

Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. Dr. Bloom has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.


Nothing But the Writing by William Gatewood

I’ve long operated under this assumption: not only is empathy inherent in good writing, but writing itself will make you more empathetic. Empathy is like a muscle, teachers, students, and blogs say (e.g., “Why Empathy is Key to Story”— the first Google result!). It can be trained, built up. Strengthened until the whole world fits on your shoulders. And writing, real high-minded literary writing, is the best way to get your reps in. Unfortunately for all of us, these beliefs are dogmatic in the purest sense, both in that they seem right and good, and that there’s no evidence to support them.

The idea that writing is empathy is so pervasive that I’ve yet to meet the beginning writer immune to its charms. I was especially guilty of this. For years, I wanted to believe that the more I wrote, the better person I’d become: less self-obsessed, more communal, hell, friendlier. So I wrote fiction that made it look like I was these things. I still do.

After two years engaged in an MFA, I’ve learned that what a writing workshop really teaches you is how to portray empathy. Whether the work is actually empathetic (can work even be empathetic?) is impossible to know. Peers and teachers in workshop can only judge and react to the performance. “This seems lived,” someone might say. Or, “You really captured this person’s essence.” And the tricks are always the same (they’ve been standardized over the last hundred years): specificity, proper names, the sensorium — “A Tropicana and a Kind Bar.” This is mimicry wearing empathy’s boots. But that doesn’t make it less beautiful, less meaningful, or less moving art.

There’s a fantastic moment in “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass”: “when we write, we’re engaged in another sort of activity, tapping into a different…mode of being.” Yes, we are, if we’re lucky, but terms like “sympathetic imagination” lean too close to those value judgments meant to validate writing, to explain the why of it all: after-the-fact explanations. Instead, what happens to me once in a while is what Paul Bloom has described experiencing himself: a “flow state,” wherein all that exists is the next word, the next sentence. Gone is the self, gone the room. Gone, especially, are other people. My mind amalgamates its stolen ideas wildly, haphazardly, rearranging them piece by piece. How could any kind of relationship survive in this vacuum? Sure, everything comes back, but for a time: nothing but the writing.

I suspect that “aloof detachment” (to the self, to others, to the work) is only truly possible following a lifetime of obsession and isolation. It’s the best possible outcome (and there are a million terrible ones). The swordsmith folds steel for decades until they’re lost in folding. The baker in baking. The painter in painting. So too should it come for the writer, lost in her verb. That trick Scott recommends at the end, “resisting whatever need I have to know immediately what a thing means to me” — this is important. Since hearing this line when he first delivered his talk, it’s become my standard definition of artistry. This is how you lose yourself in the work, and it is the getting lost that matters.

* * *

William is a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA program. He lives in Hillsboro, Oregon, with his wife and Cocker Spaniel.


Can Empathy Lead to Theft? by Daniel Raeburn

Before I read Scott’s piece I felt certain I’d start my response with my long-standing distinction between sympathy and empathy, one I explain to my writing students. Sympathy, I always say, is fellow-feeling. Commiseration. Empathy, on the other hand, is understanding. It’s not only putting yourself in another person’s shoes, but her head, as well. It allows you to see her point of view without necessarily sharing it. It allows you to have shared emotions — despite, perhaps, not knowing whether the emotions are actually shared — but it’s ultimately more cerebral than sympathizing, and I’ve long maintained that it’s what you’re really after in writing.

But after reading “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story,” I think I might have it backward. Perhaps my confusion boils down to semantics: if you draw a Venn diagram of sympathy and empathy there’s a lot of overlap. The two are like fraternal twins, similar enough that their differences seem magnified by comparison. I’d call it the narcissism of minor differences except that Scott’s a) making a crucial distinction and b) clearly arguing on behalf of a mindset that’s the opposite of narcissism. When he says empathy I think he means what’s sometimes called emotional empathy: feeling, almost against your will, what the other guy is feeling — which is what I meant by the word sympathy. When he argues on behalf of what he calls sympathy I think he’s arguing for what’s sometimes called cognitive empathy: thinking what the other guy is thinking. Grasping his perspective. Going from reading the words on the page to reading someone’s mind — which is what I want in writing, and what I meant by empathy.

In other words, Scott and I agree. At least I think so. I think he’s arguing on behalf of Coetzee’s “sympathetic imagination” for the same reasons that Bloom argued, in Against Empathy, the book that apparently started all this, for replacing emotional empathy with rational compassion. With a cooler, more distant care and concern. Caring that keeps your identity, and thus your ability to function (and write), intact. One of the many problems with purely emotional empathy is that that way lies identification with or, God help you, confusion of your self with the other. That way lies all kinds of sins, including Rachel Dolezal — remember her? — and other white people with dreadlocks.

I think this is what identity politics is pointing out, at least in literature: the inherent limits of empathy. People pride themselves on it a bit too much, and readers and writers are especially susceptible. Especially so-called liberal readers and writers like me. I think what traditionally marginalized writers are saying is that you may think you feel me, Straight Man or White Woman, and therefore may in fact feel me, but you don’t know me. You can’t. Try as you might, you can’t, and that’s why you need to listen to me and my story. Writing it required less empathy of me, its author, than your version of it would, and that’s why it’s better. No, not better: more integral. More authentic. Truer.

Or not. Any diehard believer in imaginative truth — what Tim O’Brien famously called story-truth — can and perhaps should come back at the identity politicians with Elizabeth Costello’s maxim: “There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. I can think my way into the existence of . . . any being with whom I share the substrate of life.” The problem is, that way lies others’ sins, including Lionel Shriver — remember her? — and other white people in sombreros and glue-on Zapata mustaches.

So where do we draw the line? When does the sympathetic imagination become a kind of minstrelsy? The truth is that I don’t know and probably never will. Which is the most exciting place to be, as Scott pointed out, and I’m grateful to be put in it by his piece. If I had to draw one conclusion, and I guess I do, this being a response, I’d say that some kinds of empathy are arguably theft. Let’s take fiction, for example. It’s theft to write what you don’t know, to pretend to be someone you’re not. Which isn’t a bad thing—fiction is lying, after all. The question is whether or not you can get away with it, and that depends on how good you are, not just technically but morally. By morally I mean tonally. Tone makes the difference between borrowing and stealing. When Walt Whitman said, in 1855, in Song of Myself, that he was a runaway slave, it was cultural appropriation, sure. But it was also an act of radical empathy:

I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

This is appropriation insofar as Whitman’s borrowing the African-American’s experience, but his horrified—and horrifying—tone makes it plain that he’s repaying that debt with interest. With empathy. As Whitman put it one line later, “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” That’s what happens when we read, and it’s radical.

Then there’s Lionel Shriver. When I read her speech on paper her words seemed reasonable; it wasn’t until I listened to her speak them aloud that I understood why people were upset. Her tone wasn’t just snarky, it was sneering. Whitman’s tone made it clear he was inhabiting someone else, but when Shriver put on that sombrero, her body language made it clear: she wasn’t advocating becoming a Mexican, she was advocating impersonating him. Using him. It was the difference between emulating someone and plagiarizing him. Between good writing and bad writing.

Speaking of which, I’m off now to draw up my own course on empathy, called On Empathy, to teach my writing students next year. Because this is a debate that should never die.

* * *

Daniel Raeburn is the author of Vessels: A Love Story and the monograph Chris Ware.

The Consent of the (Un)governed

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Laurie Penny | Longreads | December 2017 | 15 minutes (3,881 words)

And when you’re a star, they let you do it.
You can do anything… Grab ’em by the pussy.
You can do anything.
— Donald Trump

What civilization has done to women’s bodies is no different than what
it’s done to the earth, to children, to the sick, to the proletariat;
in short, to everything that isn’t supposed to “talk.”
— Tiqqun, “Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl” 

Something has snapped. In early autumn, women and men finally began to come forward to speak, in numbers too big to dismiss, about sexual harassment and abuse. It started in Hollywood. It spread, under the #metoo hashtag — first coined 10 years ago by Tarana Burke — across industries, across oceans, to the very heart of politics. Powerful men are losing their jobs. We’re having consent conversations at the highest levels, with varying degrees of retrospective panic.

Something broke, is breaking still. Not like a glass breaks or like a heart breaks, but like the shell of an egg breaks — inexorably, and from the inside. Something wet and angry is fighting its way out of the dark, and it has claws.

A great many abusers and their allies have begged us to step back and examine the context in which they may or may not have sexually intimidated or physically threatened or forcibly penetrated one or several female irrelevances who have suddenly decided to tell the world their experiences as if they mattered.

Look at the whole picture, these powerful men say. Consider the context. I agree. Context is vital. It is crucial to consider the context in which this all-out uprising against toxic male entitlement is taking place. The context being, of course, a historical moment where it has become obvious that toxic male entitlement is the greatest collective threat to the survival of the species.

Read more…

We’re All Mad Here: Weinstein, Women, and the Language of Lunacy

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Laurie Penny | Longreads | October 2017 | 13 minutes (3,709 words)

We’re through the looking glass now. As women all over the world come forward to talk about their experiences of sexual violence, all our old certainties about what was and was not normal are peeling away like dead skin.

It’s not just Hollywood and it’s not just Silicon Valley. It’s not just the White House or Fox News.

It’s everywhere.

It’s happening in the art world and in mainstream political parties. It’s happening in the London radical left and in the Bay Area burner community. It’s happening in academia and in the media and in the legal profession. I recently heard that it was happening in the goddamn Lindy Hop dance scene, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Men with influence and status who have spent years or decades treating their community like an all-you-can-grope sexual-harassment buffet are suddenly being presented with the bill. Names are being named. A lot of women have realized that they were never crazy, that even if they were crazy they were also right all along, and — how shall I put this? — they (we) are pissed.

“It’s like finding out aliens exist,” said a friend of mine last night. He was two gins in and trying to process why he never spoke up, over a twenty-year period, about a mutual friend who is facing public allegations of sexual violence. “Back in the day we’d all heard stories about it, but… well, the people telling them were all a bit crazy. You know, messed up. So nobody believed them.”

I took a sip of tea to calm down, and suggested that perhaps the reason these people were messed up — if they were messed up — was because they had been, you know, sexually assaulted. I reminded him that some of us had always known. I knew. But then, what did I know? I’m just some crazy girl.

Read more…

The NBA’s Great Positionless Shift

Royce White speaks with the media at a press conference on June 29, 2012, in Houston. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)

By now, it is evident that the NBA is undergoing a significant evolution when it comes to lineup formations. Gone are the days of hulking centers and long two-point field goals. The game has become more refined, more dependent on perimeter offense and spacing, and more prone to players who are multi-skilled and versatile.

This is an NBA tailor-made for Royce White’s skillset. As Sam Riches details in his latest piece for Longreads, White drew comparisons ranging from Charles Barkley to LeBron James during his lone collegiate season at Iowa State; his passing acumen, when coupled with his basketball IQ and inherent touch, transformed White into a nearly indefensible player:

White, who stands 6’8” and weighs 270 pounds, moves with a lumbering fluidity, a grace that belies his size. He dribbles the ball like a guard, with hands that measure nearly a foot in width. He clears space with his frame, sometimes backing down his opponents from beyond the three point line, and then flicks passes to teammates at impossible angles. He rips rebounds from the sky and then floats the ball back into the basket with a feathery touch.

However, White isn’t perfect: The forward also suffers from generalized anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the NBA—like many professional sports leagues—has long been ill-equipped to meet the demands that come with mental illness. Larry Sanders, fresh off signing a four-year, $44 million contract with the Milwaukee Bucks in 2013, walked away from the league as a consequence of repeated bouts with anxiety and depression, and sports psychology is transforming into a burgeoning field for high-level athletes.

Though the NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement now has a mental health clause, there wasn’t a safety net in place when White was drafted by the Houston Rockets in 2012, which is why the forward is currently the MVP of the National Basketball League of Canada rather than an All-Star in the NBA.

In late July, he announces that he’s returning to [the] London [Lightning]. “Why wouldn’t I just play in London?” he says, when asked about this decision. “We won the championship for christ’s sake. We made history. Why would I leave defending my title? Why would I leave where I’m a champion at? To go where? Not only do I not know if I’m going to get a fair shot, I don’t know what the team I’m going to is going to do, what their priorities are, if winning is important.

This past season, Nikola Jokic, a 6-foot-10 Serbian forward for the Denver Nuggets, enjoyed a breakout season thanks to a skillset that mirrors White’s, wowing both crowds and fellow teammates with his passing touch and vision. Jokic, like White, anticipates the action several plays ahead, and has a deft touch to thread slight openings in the defense while also finding openings at the exact moment (and he can score in bunches).

The success of players like Jokic and Draymond Green (selected the same draft as White) have changed how general managers and NBA executives construct the lineups—the word “tweener” is no longer an NBA draft death knell—and it is within this environment that White should have shined. Lineups are no longer viewed within the rigid confines of positions, and players—like White, Green, Jokic, and many others—who can fill multiple spots on the floor are highly coveted.

White’s success north of the border is commendable, but his talent is too good for a mere cup of Gatorade in the NBA:

Asked about White’s ability on the basketball court, [Matt] Abdelmassih draws in a deep breath. “He’s so talented,” he exhales. “So talented. I wish that the experience he had in the NBA turned out to be better because I think he belongs in the NBA, he’s talented enough to be in the NBA, but at the end of the day I don’t know if he’ll have that opportunity again because I think that bridge has been burnt one too many times.”

Near the end of our conversation Abdelmassih asks if I’ve had a chance to talk to anyone in the NBA about White. I tell him that I’ve been trying, but every call and email has gone unreturned.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “Yeah. That’s what I figured.”

Read the story

Innocence Abroad

US passport pages with visa stamps
US Passport via Wikimedia (CC0 1.0)

Do Americans have a unified identity and if so, how is it defined? I remember a summer party in Seattle where, under a twilight sky, a friend insisted it was television that provided our common vernacular. I’d been without TV for a while. Mine had burst into flames (really!) and this was pre-internet everywhere — was my American cred at risk? Travel in the flyover states has shown me how different I am — a textbook “creative class” lefty — from the restrained Midwesterners I encountered. Such disparate characters, yet the same American passports.

At The Guardian, Suzy Hansen considers American identity, partly through the lens of race, partly from the perspective she gained living abroad.

For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans and has a history unique to the US. In recent years, however, this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. Americans can no longer travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with us. In these years after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the many wars that followed, it has become more difficult to gallivant across the world absorbing its wisdom and resources for one’s own personal use. Americans abroad now do not have the same swagger, the easy, enormous smiles. You no longer want to speak so loud. There is always the vague risk of breaking something.

Some years after I moved to Istanbul, I bought a notebook, and unlike that confident child, I wrote down not plans but a question: who do we become if we don’t become Americans? If we discover that our identity as we understood it had been a myth? I asked it because my years as an American abroad in the 21st century were not a joyous romp of self-discovery and romance. Mine were more of a shattering and a shame, and even now, I still don’t know myself.

Read the story

Harry Potter and the Long-Term Global Impact

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first offering in J.K. Rowling’s billion dollar literary juggernaut, was published in Britain 20 years ago today and its impact has since been hotly debated. Did the Harry Potter series produce a generation of empathetic individuals? Did it increase literacy, infuse life into young adult book publishing, and help dyslexic children overcome their disability? Or was its impact overblown? Do Potterheads really just need to “read another book”?

Ten years ago, the  New York Times argued for “overblown.” While getting middle-grade readers to plow through a 700-page book was encouraging to educators, it wasn’t a magic pill for declining readership. However, the statistics cited by the Times were US-focused, making the argument a little myopic given the series’ international renown. U.K. and Australian statistics made the opposite case, with one Australian outlet quoting a government official crediting Rowling with making reading cool: “Literature is no longer seen as the province of the nerd.”

Read more…

Twinless in Twinsburg

Illustration by Laura McCabe

Anya Groner | Longreads | June 2017 | 20 minutes (5,065 words)

I’m stopped at a red light in Twinsburg, Ohio, when I spot my first pair riding in the Jeep behind me. Matching blond hair, bug-eye sunglasses, and pink chins fill the rearview mirror of my rental car. I glance and glance again before texting my sister. “It’s begun,” I type. “They’re here and you’re not.” I erase the last three words and press send. No point in guilting her for a decision she can’t reverse.

When the light turns green, I press the gas, heading to the local high school where a wiener picnic and silent auction will kick-off the 41st annual Twins Days festival. An identical twin myself, I’ll be eating my hot dog alone tonight. My sister, a marine biologist, has opted not to join me, instead signing up for a dive certification class the same weekend. Though she apologized for the timing, she didn’t offer to reschedule. Twins Days doesn’t interest her much.

I’m not sure what to expect or even why I’ve decided to come. The website tells me the three-day fete is patriotic and sweet, a massive show-and-tell where the attendees are also the main attraction. Last year, 2,053 sets of twins, triplets, and quads journeyed here from as far away as South Korea and Australia. The revelry includes competitive cornhole, look-alike and un-lookalike contests, talent shows, and a research plaza where scientists collect data from volunteers. My surface excuse for flying out is that I’m a writer, trying my hand at journalism, but even a rookie like me knows the event is far too personal for objectivity. I’ve known about the fest for as long as I can remember, and for most of those years I wouldn’t even consider attending. Lying on stacked bunks in our childhood bedroom well before our age reached double digits, my sister and I put Twins Days somewhere on the continuum between obnoxious and offensive, a gathering of voyeurs looking to celebrate sameness, the facet of our identity that frustrated us most. The best parts of twinhood we knew to be exclusive, shaped by our two unique personalities, shareable only with each other. For us, the festival held no appeal.

Read more…

Wrestling With the Truth

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich | The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir | Flatiron Books | May 2017 | 22 minutes (6,102 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the first four chapters of The Fact of a Body, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s gripping hybrid memoir of a murder case and family secrets. Blending crime reportage with first-person narrative of her own struggles, the braided story wrestles with trauma, violence, and the ways we try to understand the past, especially when those we trust betray us. Our thanks to Marzano-Lesnevich and Flatiron for sharing it with the Longreads community.

Note: This work is not authorized or approved by the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center or its clients, and the views expressed by the author do not reflect the views or positions of anyone other than the author. The author’s description of any legal proceedings, including her description of the positions of the parties and the circumstances and events of the crimes charged, are drawn solely from the court record, other publicly available information, and her own research.

One

Louisiana, 1992

The boy wears sweatpants the color of a Louisiana lake. Later, the police report will note them as blue, though in every description his mother gives thereafter she will always insist on calling them aqua or teal. On his feet are the muddy hiking boots every boy wears in this part of the state, perfect for playing in the woods. In one small fist, he grips a BB gun half as tall as he is. The BB gun is the Daisy brand, with a long, brown plastic barrel the boy keeps as shiny as if it were real metal. The only child of a single mother, Jeremy Guillory is used to moving often, sleeping in bedrooms that aren’t his. His mother’s friends all rent houses along the same dead-end street the landlord calls Watson Road whenever he wants to charge higher rent, though it doesn’t really have a name and even the town police department will need directions to find it. Settlers from Iowa named the town after their home state but, wanting a fresh start, pronounced the name Io-way, even as they kept the spelling. The town has always been a place people come for new starts, always been a place they can’t quite leave the past behind. There, the boy and his mother stay with whoever can pay the electricity bill one month, whoever can keep the gas on the next. Wherever the boy lands, he takes his BB gun with him. It is his most prized possession.

Now it is the first week in February. The leaves are green and lush on the trees, but the temperature dips at night. Lorilei, Jeremy’s mother, isn’t working. She rented a home just for the two of them—their first—but the electricity’s been turned off. Her brother Richard lives in a sprawling house up on the hill, but she isn’t staying with Richard. Instead, Lorilei and Jeremy are staying with Lorilei’s friend Melissa, Melissa’s boyfriend, Michael, and their baby. The baby is two years old, old enough that he wants to play with the boy and screams when he doesn’t get his way.

Read more…

You’re Fired! The Unemployable Trump Administration

Wikimedia Commona

UPDATE: There are firings, and then there are firings, and former FBI Director James Comey was informed of his by Donald Trump’s favorite messenger: television. Comey saw the news flash on screen as he as giving a speech to FBI employees in Los Angeles, and he thought it was a prank, at first. But a letter was hand-delivered by Trump’s personal bodyguard to FBI headquarters informing Comey that he was indeed out. It was a classic Trump firing, and also a deeply disconcerting one, as a third offense should be added to our list: investigating Russian connections to Donald Trump. 

At the one-month mark, we now have a working theory of what makes an employee fireable (or not even hireable) in the Trump administration. There are two main types.

Fireable Offense Type #1: Be Drop Dead Scandalous

1. In December, Jason Miller, who was tapped to be the White House communications director, quit after another transition official, A.J. Delgado, tweeted her jilted love at him. Miller and his wife were expecting a new baby, so, via Twitter, “Delgado congratulated ‘the baby-daddy’ on his promotion,” ominously adding: “The 2016 version of John Edwards.”

“When people need to resign graciously and refuse to, it’s a bit … spooky,” Delgado then wrote. When an old law school friend asked on Twitter to whom she was referring, Delgado replied: “Jason Miller. Who needed to resign … yesterday.”

Delgado then deleted her Twitter account and, after Politico reported on the rumored affair, privately disclosed the details of the relationship to the transition team.

If you reach back into the deep part of yourself where you catalog other people’s misbehavior, you may even recall that Page Six reported back in October that, the night before the last presidential debate, Delgado and Miller, along with several journalists, were spotted together at the world’s largest strip club. Read more…