Search Results for: Recession

Living Differently: How the Feminist Utopia Is Something You Have to Be Doing Now

Cover of program for the National American Women's Suffrage Association procession. (Getty Images)

Lynne Segal | Verso | November 2017 | 32 minutes (8,100 words)

The following is an excerpt from Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, by Lynne Segal (Verso, November 2017). This essay is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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The utopian novel had become one of the most effective means of frightening people off it.

It is sometimes said that the twentieth century began with utopian dreaming and ended with nostalgia, as those alternative futures once envisioned seemed by then almost entirely discredited. However, it was never quite so straightforward. The challenge to envisage how to live differently, in ways that seem better than the present, never entirely disappears.

The most prominent American utopian studies scholar, Lyman Tower Sargent, notes that dystopian scenarios increasingly dominated the speculative literary form as the twentieth century progressed. In the UK, the equally eminent utopian studies scholar Ruth Levitas concurs, pointing out, for instance, that as sociology became institutionalized in the academy, it became ‘consistently hostile’ to any utopian content.

What stands out in speculative fantasies of the future arising towards the end of the twentieth century are their darkly dystopic leanings, whether in books, cinema, comics or elsewhere. The best known would include the mass surveillance depicted in the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s satirical novel We (1921).

Set in the future, it describes a scientifically managed totalitarian state, known as One State, governed by logic and reason, where people live in glass buildings, march in step, and are known by their numbers. England’s Aldous Huxley called his dystopic science fiction Brave New World (1932), where again all individuality has been conditioned out in the pursuit of happiness. Bleaker still was George Orwell’s terrifyingly totalitarian 1984 (1945): ‘If you want a picture of the future,’ Orwell wrote in 1984, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’

These imaginings serve primarily as warnings against futures that are often read, as with Zamyatin and Orwell, as condemnations of Soviet society. The happiness expressed in Huxley’s ‘utopic’ universe depicts a deformed or sinister version of the route where all utopias end up, as totalitarian regimes, in which free will is crushed. As the Marxist political scientist Bertell Ollman later noted: ‘From a means of winning people over to the ideal of socialism, the utopian novel had become one of the most effective means of frightening people off it.’

Post-1945, public intellectuals for the most part broadcast the view that democracy and utopic thinking were opposed, the latter declared both impossible and dangerous. The influential émigré and British philosopher of science Karl Popper argued in his classic essay ‘Utopia and Violence’ (1947) that while ‘Utopia’ may look desirable, all too desirable, it was in practice a ‘dangerous and pernicious’ idea, one that is ‘self‐defeating’ and ‘leads to violence’. There is no way of deciding rationally between competing utopian ideals, he suggested, since we cannot (contra Marxism) scientifically predict the future, which means our statements are not open to falsification and hence fail his test for any sort of reliability.

Indeed, accusations of ‘totalitarian’ thinking were the chief weapon of the Cold War, used by Western propaganda to see off any talk of communism. In the USA it was employed to undermine any left or labour movement affiliations, as through the fear and financial ruin inflicted upon hundreds of Americans hauled before Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s – over half of them Jewish Americans. Read more…

Unreal Estate: A Reading List About Our Shifting Vision of Home

Does anyone still remember Unhappy Hipsters, a Tumblr blog born in 2010, just months after the Great Recession officially ended? The concept was simple and irresistible. Each post contained a photo of a domestic interior from a Dwell-like magazine (or, just as often, from Dwell itself), and the photo had to include a person: a teenager lounging with a book on a nordic-looking wooden bed, a couple having a silent breakfast in a vast, concrete-floor kitchen. A caption accompanied each image, projecting a mix of smugness and existential angst onto the people occupying these impossibly streamlined spaces (“So focused on erecting a structure that would be impervious to atmospheric whims, he’d forgotten the obvious: an exit,” read a caption below an image of a man standing on a balcony of a glass-and-steel stilt house).

There’s nothing new about wanting to catch a glimpse of other people’s (nicer-than-yours) houses; what Unhappy Hipsters deftly added was an extra layer of vindictiveness to an otherwise common, aspirational voyeurism. Revisiting some of these old posts today, they feel at once naive and prophetic. In the intervening years, owning a house and designing one’s own space haven’t lost their allure as class markers and so-called #lifegoals. But they’ve also acquired a tinge of bitterness: you either can’t afford it (millennials, meet avocado toast!), can’t do it right (unlike everyone on Pinterest, Instagram, et al.), or risk trying too hard (at which point: surprise! You’re the Unhappy Hipster — in 2017, when both “unhappiness” and “hipsterism” have lost just about all meaning).

The way we organize and reshape our living quarters has always reflected, in some way, desires, hopes, and anxieties that transcended individuals. It was true when married couples started sharing the same bedroom and outhouses began to disappear in favor of indoor plumbing; it’s true today when we buy a vintage lamp or encounter a luxury bathroom almost the size of the bedroom it adjoins. Where does the current unease around the spaces we inhabit come from? What is unique about our attitude toward a supposedly universal concept like “home”? Here are four recent reads that try to address these questions.

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The Dead Man Fund

(Lambert/Archive Photos)

Jack El-Hai | Longreads | November 2017 | 7 minutes (1,672 words)

In 1989, Morningstar, Inc., an advisory service, issued a strongly worded and unusual recommendation to its clients who had placed money with a firm then called the Steadman Funds (later known as the Ameritor Funds). “We urge you to cut your losses and get out,” Morningstar counseled. Doubtless, some investors heeded this advice. Many couldn’t, though, because they were dead.

A few years ago, the fate of Ameritor— nicknamed “The Dead Man Fund” — and its unfortunate investors, became entangled with the history of my house. An envelope had landed in our mailbox containing a check in the amount of $10.32 made out to one Anna Mae Heilman. She was nobody we knew, but the name rang familiar to me for some reason. With the check was a letter explaining that the money was a final settlement of Heilman’s investment of 171 shares in the Ameritor Security Trust mutual fund, which had closed down.

It didn’t take long for me to remember how I knew Heilman’s name. When we bought the house, we acquired its abstract, a thick and crumbling packet of legal documents that chronicled more than a century of transactions involving the property. Heilman’s name was in there. She and her husband had owned our house for several years ending in 1971.

Heilman’s tiny payout at a rate of only six cents per share seemed strange, so I began looking into the history of Ameritor and the circumstances of the Heilmans’ sale of our house. I then learned of two terrible misfortunes that afflicted one family. Read more…

An Urban Planner Against the Developer Presidency

Trump Tower Chicago. Photo: Getty Images

Rachel Weber | The Avery Review | 11 minutes (2,885 words) 

The essay below originally appeared in The Avery Review, Issue 21 (January 2017) and was recently collected in a book called And Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency. This essay is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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Ego and social networks, more so than efficiency and expertise, are rewarded in the attention economy in which [real estate developers] operate.

Much has been made of having a corporate executive in the Oval Office. Donald Trump claims that, given his business experience, he will be able to be an effective negotiator, grow the economy, and make efficient allocation decisions with scarce resources. On the campaign trail, in tweets, and in televised debates, Trump has sold himself as a man of commerce, connected only to the material, productive economy and not the fictive, financialized one responsible for the Great Recession. He repeatedly criticized Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street ties, contrasting them to his own righteous independence, noting, “I don’t care about the Wall Street guys… I’m not taking any of their money.”

But real estate developers, particularly those in the high-stakes world of downtown commercial real estate, are not ordinary businessmen. Large-scale developers generally subscribe to a worldview that grants them considerable agency as strategic risk takers in an environment that is (according to them) largely of their own making. To see development potential that few others see, to take risks that few would want to shoulder, and to control the physical settings in which millions of people go about their daily lives—all this fosters a God complex to which few corporate CEOs would admit. Such sentiment is captured by Tom Wolfe in his novel A Man in Full, as the developer-protagonist admires the Atlanta skyline from his private plane. He mentally pats himself on the back: “I did that! That’s my handiwork! I’m one of the giants who built this city! I’m a star!” Ego and social networks, more so than efficiency and expertise, are rewarded in the attention economy in which they operate. Read more…

The Fallacy of the Olympics

The velodrome is seen from outside the Olympic Park, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, July 30, 2017. The velodrome built for last year's Rio de Janeiro Olympics suffered minor fire damage Sunday when it was struck by a small, hand-made hot-air balloon. (AP Photo/Renata Brito)

The Olympics have a problem. Countries that have bid and won the “honor” of hosting the games are finding it increasingly difficult to manage the after effects — from rampant growth to financial demands — that accompany inviting the world for a late summer visit every four years.

The last host city that substantially profited from hosting the Olympics was Los Angeles, which “earned” $93 million some thirty-plus years ago when it hosted the 1984 games. The southern California event set the template for Barcelona and Atlanta, two cities that re-envisioned their respective downtowns and central hubs thanks to the Olympics, but in the years since, it has been increasingly more difficult for host countries to justify pursuing the games, leaving too many empty and unusable stadiums in the wake.

Take Brazil. A thriving economy and a commitment to athletic excellence led Brazil to target landing the 2016 games, but the subsequent combination of a recession and various scandals have left the South American country — the first ever to land the Olympics — in tatters. Wayne Drehs and Mariana Lajolo of Doubletruck, ESPN.com’s longform vertical, explored what has happened to Brazil just one year after the Olympics left Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and its other cities:

The opening ceremony in Brazil’s famed Maracanã was the most watched in Olympic history. More than 2.5 billion people from around the globe tuned in as 11,000 athletes marched on the stadium floor holding a cartridge of soil and a seed from a native Brazilian tree. The athletes placed the cartridges into mirrored towers. Olympic organizers called the procession “Seeds of Hope,” explaining the containers would be planted as part of an Athlete’s Forest in the Deodoro neighborhood of Rio.

But now, just over a year later, there is perhaps no greater example of the Rio Games’ complicated legacy. The seedlings sit in planting pots under a sheer black canopy on a farm 100 kilometers from Rio. Prior to last week, Marcelo de Carvalho Silva, the director of Biovert, the company responsible for the seeds, hadn’t heard from Olympic organizers in months. He had no idea what the plans were for the seeds, but he painstakingly watched over them for free, knowing what it would mean for his company — and the country — if something happened to them.

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The Arsonist Was Like a Ghost

An abandoned house in Accomack County, Virginia. Beginning in 2012, dozens of fires were set in the area, where the poverty rate is around 20 percent. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Monica Hesse | American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land | LiverightAugust 2017 | 17 minutes (4,100 words) 

In the middle of the night on December 15, 2012, Lois Gomez sat up in bed. She thought she heard something. She listened. Nothing. Maybe she was wrong, maybe she hadn’t heard anything. She went to the kitchen for a drink of water. It was two or three in the morning, only a few hours before her shift at Perdue and her husband’s shift at Tyson. Now she definitely heard something. A banging on her front door — which in itself was odd; friends and family knew they always used the side entrance — and someone yelling: “Your garage is on fire! I’ve already called 911!”

She stood frozen in the kitchen trying to process the information. Christmas lights, she thought. Her outdoor Christmas lights were halfway up, but she and her husband had recently decided to visit his family in Texas for the holiday and she’d been trying to figure out whether to bother with the rest of the decorations, which were meanwhile stored in the family’s detached garage, which was now on fire. Christmas lights, along with the expensive music equipment for her son’s rock band.

It had been a rough couple of months. For one thing, she wasn’t getting along with her next-door neighbors. She’d been close with the woman who’d owned that house before, Susan Bundick. They brought each other dinner sometimes, or stood and chatted in their backyards. But one Sunday afternoon, Lois was outside emptying the aboveground backyard pool to close out the summer season, and she saw the police were at Susan’s house. They told Lois her neighbor had died. Now, Susan’s daughter lived in her mother’s old house and things weren’t as pleasant. Tonya was fine, kept to herself, but Lois had a few run-ins with Tonya’s new boyfriend, a squirrelly redheaded guy whose name she didn’t know. He’d done a few little things, like dumping a bunch of branches on their lawn instead of disposing of them like he was supposed to. Once he’d accused her of making racial slurs against Tonya’s kids. The accusation was ridiculous. Lois’s husband was from Mexico, and her four grandchildren were partly black.

She’d also been having nightmares about the arsonist. In one dream, she went into her kitchen late at night and saw someone racing through the yard, an intruder wearing dark-colored sweat pants and a hoodie. “What are you doing?” she called. The figure turned and looked at her but she still couldn’t see his face, and he eventually disappeared behind her detached garage. She woke up and realized it wasn’t real.

This night wasn’t a dream, though.

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Yearning for My Emo Days in Nostalgia-Inducing Asbury Park

Mabel Rosenheck | Longreads | July 2017 | 20 minutes (4,918 words)

 

On April 27, 2003, I sat with two friends in arena seats in Convention Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Inside, the building looks like a generic mid-size concert venue, but its lobby is a fantastic, mammoth arcade and exhibition space with polished floors, square arches trimmed by Corinthian columns, and wrought-iron windows that sunlight pours through in spades. It is industrial, yet elegant. It is American, yet with unmistakable allusions to European modernity, to beaux arts style. Overwhelming the boardwalk and the beach, it is urban architecture that rises dramatically from the ocean, jutting out into the breakers, bearing the brunt of Atlantic hurricanes. It is a hard place to describe, but it is also a hard place to forget and an easy place to romanticize.

I’d met my friends the year before on an internet message board for a shitty pop punk band from Chicago named Mest. The internet was still figuring out what it was; we were still figuring out who we were. We were lonely and isolated in the suburbs of Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey. We found something we needed in this music. We found something we needed in each other.

It was a Sunday, and some of our friends had to leave to catch buses and trains to finish term papers and make classes on Monday morning. I was there with Dena and Deirdre, but we felt deeply the absence of Jillian, the last of our essential quartet. Jillian’s leaving that morning made the moment more melancholy than a Sunday hangover or an emo song alone, because something was missing.

Inside, we were about halfway up the stands on the left side of the stage, or at least that’s how I remember it. The seats were blue. The room was kind of a hazy gray with sunshine struggling to find its way through windows nestled into the top row, or maybe that was just the hangover, or maybe that is just the nostalgia.

I’d met my friends the year before on an internet message board for a pop punk band. The internet was still figuring out what it was; we were still figuring out who we were.

The band on stage was Brand New. Before they were playing Madison Square Garden and headlining Coachella, before Deja Entendu came out, when it was only Your Favorite Weapon’s particular brand of angsty emo with songs about breaking up with girlfriends and best friends, Brand New was on stage on day three of Skate and Surf 2003, a music festival in Asbury Park. They promised us there that tonight would go on forever while we walked around this town like we owned the streets.

We’d been down the shore since Friday afternoon. Jillian came down from Boston and met me in New Haven, and though she wasn’t there for that Sunday moment, Asbury Park was nothing without her, and the trip down was nothing without her. I had left college in Massachusetts and moved back in with my parents in Connecticut a month before. Jillian was in college in Boston, but not happy. Dena was in Philadelphia, finding her way well enough, but not quite enough. Deirdre was always the most well-adjusted of all of us, but I guess even she was looking for something. We bonded over 18-year-old existential loneliness on an internet message board, and that weekend we, along with a few thousand other existential teenagers like us, drove down I-95 and the Garden State Parkway to the parking lot of the Berkeley Carteret Hotel.

The Used performing in Asbury Park in 2003 (Photo by David Pomponio/FilmMagic)

With Jillian and Dena and Deirdre and everyone else, I had sugary teenage drinks with the back of my car open before the hotel room was ready. I had more drinks in our hotel room that day and that night and the next day. We watched a parade of punk rock lineage including post-hardcore bands like Thrice, screamo bands like The Used, and indie performers like Onelinedrawing. We shared a bottle of tequila with a guy with a straight edge tattoo. Then I made out with him. It was a frenetic good time, but as much as I remember the red angel wings I paired with a wifebeater and black vinyl pants, as much as I remember the Home Grown drum head that I used as a cocktail tray, as much as I remember the Kiwis that crashed on our floor, I remember Sunday afternoon sitting about halfway up on the left side of those blue seats in that hazy gray room that the sunshine didn’t quite reach. Listening to that song, at that time, and in that place, I felt closer to the people who were there and the one who wasn’t than I maybe ever have to anyone. We were a few girls in a sea of teenagers, in a beachside town where we didn’t live, but as much as it was a moment shared with the thousands of people who were there, I remember this as a small moment between us; I remember this as a place that belonged to us.

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Millennial to Millionaire: Stop Blaming Avocado Toast for Why We’re Not Buying Houses

Photo Credit: T.Tseng/Flickr

Millennials rarely get a fair shake when it comes to, well, anything written about them, which is why it isn’t surprising to see a misguided post from TIME magazine today blaming the low rate of home ownership among millennials on their apparently voracious appetite for avocado toast.

“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” millionaire Tim Gurner says, also blaming millennials’ annual trips to Europe every year as the reason why they can’t afford to buy homes.

He continues, “The people that own homes today worked very, very hard for it, saved every dollar, did everything they could to get up the property investment ladder,” conveniently failing to mention the housing bubble and subsequent crash that occurred in the last decade due to poorly regulated banks that approved mortgages for millions of people who they knew could not afford to pay them back. For Gurner, it’s easier to blame rampant spending on avocados and lattes for today’s low home ownership rates than on post-recession regulation of predatory lending practices that have prevented banks from handing out mortgages like candy.

Guess what, Gurner: According to the New York Times, Federal Reserve data shows that the percentage of Americans under 35 who hold credit card debt has fallen to its lowest level since 1989, the year Taylor Swift was born into this world. If millennials are having trouble controlling their spending, the data does not show it. Read more…

Good Coffee Shouldn’t Have to Cost More Than $1

Credit: Associated Press

A funny thing happened after colonists, disguised as Native Americans, dumped 300-some chests containing tea into the Boston Harbor: The importance of tea—both politically and culturally—in the United States was over, and the people needed something else to drink. That void was filled by coffee, which first arrived in North America courtesy of Captain John Smith, but until the Boston Tea Party, coffee was a niche beverage: just .19 pounds per capita was consumed in 1772.

Following the Revolutionary War, a period in which John Adams wrote of the troubles “wean[ing]” himself off tea, Americans had fallen in love with the coffee bean, drinking 1.41 pounds per capita by 1799, and the infatuation skyrocketed for the next 150 years. Coffee was enjoyed by all classes—Park Avenue socialites and coal miners alike could take their coffee black or with a dash of cream. And as boiling the grounds with water gave way to the percolator and the electric drip coffeemaker, Americans put the pot on more and more often, drinking an astonishing 46 gallons per person a year—a record that will never be topped. Read more…

This Land Should Be Your Land: A National Parks Reading List

(Yellowstone National Park / Flickr)

When President Obama walked out of the Oval Office earlier this year, he left behind more land protected under federal law than any of his predecessors. President Trump appears intent on challenging that legacy, recently ordering a sweeping review of national monuments with an aim to “balance” the protection of these lands. (The Bureau of Land Management also recently added banners to its website to evoke the wondrous vistas of coal mining and oil drilling.)

It’s not yet clear whether Trump will actually try to revoke Obama-era designations—or whether he’d succeed if he does—but the land protected under federal law has been a mix of majesty and mystery ever since Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act designating the nation’s first national park. Writers have used their craft to ask fascinating questions and expose the weird underbellies of national parks, monuments, and federal lands since long before Trump ever expressed an antipathy toward them.

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