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In the End, It’s All Just the Stories We Tell

The Monument to the Armenian Alphabet in the hills around the village of Artashavan, Armenia. Photo by Rita Willaert via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Diana Arterian published a sad, lyrical essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books on the legacy of the Armenian Genocide on descendants and diaspora members, skillfully weaving together family memories and verse by Armenian diasporic poets. At its center is a family story that everyone has heard — but that no one knows the truth of.

There is a story. A shepherd boy, 13 or so, has a dozen brothers. His family lives in a small village near a large mountain. One day the boy is gone — with his flock, or to complete a chore, or perhaps even to find a safer place for the family to stay. He returns and finds everyone in the village dead. His brothers are all decapitated, and his father, too. His mother raped by attackers and dead by suicide. Over many years, he makes his way, somehow, halfway across the earth, where he marries a woman from a country near his homeland. They have three sons, none of whom marry. Until one of them does, at the age of 41, to a woman who is 38. They have two daughters, one of whom tells this story to her children for as long as they can remember.

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Bundyville Chapter Two: By a Thread

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 26 minutes (6,578 words)

Part 2 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

It’s mid-November, the end of the first week of the trial in Las Vegas. I’ve found that my favorite time of day here is early morning, when the only people to talk to are those calling “good morning!” from the doorways and brick plazas where they’ve slept. It’s when Fremont Street is free of tourists and populated only by guys with hoses whose jobs are to wash away the things that seem always to fill this city street: spilled margaritas and cheap beer and puke.

I’m staying in a cheap casino on Fremont Street in a room that’s not expensive enough to have a coffee maker, which means I have to eject myself into the world without any caffeine, a thing I would never do at home but here I’ve come to look forward to. It’s the only time it’s quiet enough to think, to not lose yourself in the things Vegas asks you to become.

At night on Fremont, blocks from the federal courthouse, you will be offered whatever you need. Booze, drugs, money, beautiful women, beautiful men. Your fortune, told to you in cards. Your name etched on a bottle opener, a license plate, a flashing keychain, a pair of dice. Get drunk. Get high. Get wild. It’s Vegas, baby — a line people repeat here like a mantra in packed elevators, in coffee shops, in the security line of the “fed castle” where Bundy’s followers empty their pockets of change and pocket-size Constitutions before going through the metal detector. When Judge Gloria Navarro strolls to the bench each morning — always late, always carrying an iced coffee — people explain it with a shrug: “Vegas, baby.”

I’ve avoided the Vegas life this week, but on my last night — a Thursday — I stop into a bar on Fremont Street and take the only seat left at the bar, next to a Mr. T impersonator. There’s no court tomorrow, so I’m OK with staying out a little late and seeing what’s so appealing about this city. Vegas at night, despite my resistance to it, is fun — and I’ve had enough to drink with Mr. T that I strike up a conversation with a couple of guys who’ve traveled here from the East Coast to sample the legal marijuana. I ask them if they’ve heard of Cliven Bundy, and one responds immediately, “He’s that cowboy the government is trying to steal land from, right?”

This must be what poker face feels like.

The next morning, I’m a little hungover and way out in the suburbs of the city. I’m sitting in this bright-white, fluorescent-lit office, guzzling complimentary bottles of water. I’m in the office of an ex-Bundy follower who used to be close with the family, Melissa Laughter. She went to Bundy Ranch in 2014 and to Malheur in 2016. She has spent holidays with the Bundys.

She’s since become a vocal detractor of the Bundys and the wider Patriot movement that supports them. She says the Bundys demand loyalty, allegiance. She has come to think of them as cult leaders.

“A cult is is a blind following of some enigmatic leader,” she says. “They don’t question. They don’t act independently. They act as one.”

Laughter is a devout member of the Mormon church, and the granddaughter of a Utah dairy farmer. She explained what initially attracted her to the Bundys. “I’m like, OK, we have something in common. I’m interested in talking to them and hearing what they have to say,” she says. “So like many people, I was sympathetic to them to begin with.”

Laughter is a staunch conservative — a woman who has run for public office in Nevada as a Republican. She has bright white teeth and wears big cowboy boots with dresses. She’s pro-gun, vehemently anti-marijuana.

She grew up in the church and felt like something was off about how the Bundys talked about the Gospel to friends and family. “We would often have these philosophical religious debates where they would talk about LDS doctrine,” she says. According to Laughter, her differing perspective on church teachings wasn’t well received around the ranch. “They constantly take offense if you say anything against what they’re saying.”

But the Bundys were seeing things in the Gospel she couldn’t understand.

“I’m going to show you something else no one else has but the federal government,” she says. She reaches to grab something from the floor, then plunks a big black binder onto her desk.

“Have you heard about The Nay Book?”

Yeah, I’d heard murmurs of it. I just didn’t think it was real. Read more…

When the Movies Went West

A man looking into a Kinetoscope. (Photo: Getty)

Gary Krist | Excerpt adapted from The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles | Crown | May 2018 | 14 minutes (3,681 words)

Toward the end of 1907, two men showed up in Los Angeles with some strange luggage in tow. Their names were Francis Boggs and Thomas Persons, and together they constituted an entire traveling film crew from the Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago, one of the first motion picture studios in the country. Boggs, the director, and Persons, the cameraman, had come to finish work on a movie — an adaptation of the Dumas classic The Count of Monte Cristo — and were looking for outdoor locations to shoot a few key scenes. As it happened, the harsh midwestern winter had set in too early that year for them to complete the film’s exteriors in Illinois, so they had got permission to take their camera and other equipment west to southern California, where the winters were mild and pleasant. Since money was tight in the barely nascent business of moviemaking, the film’s cast could not come along. So Boggs intended to hire local talent to play the characters originated by actors in Chicago. Motion pictures were still such a new and makeshift medium that audiences, he figured, would never notice the difference.

In downtown Los Angeles, they found a handsome if somewhat disheveled young man — a sometime actor who supplemented his income by selling fake jewelry on Main Street — and took him to a beach outside the city. Here they filmed the famous scene of Edmond Dantès emerging from the waves after his escape from the island prison of the Château d’If. Boggs had a few technical problems to deal with during the shoot. For one, the jewelry hawker’s false beard had a tendency to wash off in the Pacific surf, requiring expensive retakes. But eventually the director and Persons got what they needed. After finishing a few more scenes at various locations up and down the coast, they wrapped up work, shipped the film back to Chicago to be developed and edited, and then left town. Read more…

Why Psilocybin and LSD Don’t Deserve Their Bad Rap

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In the context of some recent reads on psychedelic drugs, Laura Miller at Slate looks at Michael Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

In it, Pollan says that drugs such as psilocybin and LSD got a bad rap after some flawed scientific experimentation and images of burned-out, ’60s counter-culture hippies soured Americans on exploring the medical benefits these drugs might offer, suggesting that their mind-altering abilities might help free us from cognitive patterns that are holding us back.

After 40 years in the wilderness, psychedelics are once more the subject of serious scientific study, with early results suggesting that the drugs, when used under a therapist’s supervision, can help patients suffering from anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and both alcohol and nicotine addiction.

Pollan took a couple of research trips himself in the course of writing How to Change Your Mind, with results that are interesting only to the extent that they help him make sense of other people’s accounts of their own journeys. The meat of the book is its chapters on the neuroscience of the drugs and their evident ability to suppress activity in a brain system known as the “default mode network.” The DMN acts as our cerebral executive, coordinating and organizing competing signals from other systems. It is, as Pollan sees it, the “autobiographical brain,” and the site of our ego. The long history of people reporting the sensation of their egos dissolving while under the influence of psychedelics meshes with this interpretation. It’s an experience with the potential to both terrify and, paradoxically, comfort those who undergo it.

Why should this effect prove so helpful to the depressed, addicted, and anxious? As Pollan explains it, these disorders are the result of mental and emotional “grooves” in our thinking that have become, as the DMN’s name suggests, default. We are how we think. The right psychedelic experience can level out the grooves, enabling a person to make new cerebral connections and briefly escape from “a rigidity in our thinking that is psychologically destructive.”

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This Month in Books: ‘How Do We Stay the Right Distance Apart?’

Ladder on library bookcase
Julien McRoberts / Getty Images

Dear Reader,

At first glance, there’s a pretty stark divide in this month’s books newsletter.

In one corner, we have the isolationists. In her book The Art of the Wasted Day, Patricia Hampl writes about the Ladies of Llangollen, who became famous in the late 18th century for their intense desire to live a life of quiet “retirement” and “delicious seclusion.” They eschewed marriage, ran away from home, and, once they settled down, rarely traveled. They just wanted to be left alone. So too do the Patriot Movement-esque insurrectionists in Maxim Loskutoff’s new short story collection Come West and See, who rail against the federal government’s incursions.

In the other corner, we have the systematic thinkers, the big picture people, who are making impassioned calls for us to work — together — to change the system before the system’s collapse engulfs us all. Although, to be fair, William Vollmann, in an interview about his new book No Immediate Danger, tells us he’s pretty sure it’s already too late to stop climate change. The afrofuturist and activist adrienne maree brown, in an interview about her planet/self-help book Emergent Strategy, feels slightly more hopeful; she thinks it’s possible that we are on the cusp of a radical reckoning in self- and collective awareness. Through changes in perception and practice, her thinking goes, we will redirect our collective fate.

This same juxtaposition becomes the centerpiece of Rachel King’s review of two new books about the workplace: David Graeber, in his new book Bullshit Jobs, begs us to change the system, while Alison Green, in Ask a Manager, gives us sound advice about how to survive it.


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I think, though, that the two sides of this coin have a lot to offer one another. “I try not to have a schedule,” Vollmann tells us — useful advice for a polymath, but not so much for a regular person hoping to avert climate change, which, as adrienne maree brown rightly points out, likely requires us to engage in a new kind of “intentional” living. Meanwhile, the Ladies of Llangollen — oh, the Ladies! — lived by what they called “Our System,” managed down to the minute, exquisitely engineered to foster a productive life of the mind, healthful eating, and light exercise. For all their bourgeois moralizing (they were aghast at the French Revolution), their System was, unbeknownst to them, radically environmentalist, and, fully known to them, radically emotionally fulfilling.

And it turns out that Come West and See’s insurrectionists — or not the insurrectionists themselves, not the true believers, but rather those sympathetic to their protest — might be less interested in being left alone by the system than being recognized by it. Tori Telfer notices this in her review, pointing to the mother of one of the Cliven Bundy-like protesters, who insists, “We’re real people,” and to an angry young man envious of college athletes whom he thinks are destined to be become not only “bosses,” but “the boss’s bosses.” This is not a desire for freedom from a system, but a desire for inclusion within it.

Perhaps what I’m noticing is this: we can’t survive alone, not really. (Even the Ladies had a constant stream of visitors and volumes of correspondence. They also read books — which are, after all, just another way of talking to people.) But we won’t survive at all if we don’t each — individually — change how we live; if we don’t each become, in practice, survivalists. “This is what [we] learn from flocking,” adrienne maree brown says. “How do we stay the right distance apart and the right distance in touch with each other in order to actually move together as a unit and stay alive and make it as far as we can?”

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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The Dying Days of the New West

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Tori Telfer | Longreads | May 2018 | 15 minutes (3,912 words)

The American West brings out a hunger in people. I’ve felt it myself — an urge to disconnect from society, buy a horse, live next to a giant saguaro. My husband and I have talked for hours about moving to the town of Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, where we were invited to live by an elderly gay couple we met beside a Tucson, Arizona pool. They told us that houses were cheap and everyone was friends and they’d be our uncles; we took their business card home and spent nights looking at houses on Zillow, cooing over cacti. The destiny was almost made manifest, then real life intruded. Guess where we’re moving instead? New York City.

The urbane, European-inflected East Coast has looked at the West with a strange blend of envy and hope for most of United States history. While the United States was built partially on the idea that the West was our manifest destiny, an East/West rivalry has also been baked into our identity from the beginning; even the famous “Go west, young man!” dictum contained within it some eastward scorn. That cry came from an 1865 New York Times editorial, in which Horace Greeley, the newspaper’s editor, exclaimed that “Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”

In 1836, the writer Francis Grund speculated that westward expansion would only stop when some “physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress”; by the late 1800s, the ocean proved to be no such barrier, as America’s westward colonization encroached on the islands of the Pacific, reaching as far as the Philippines; in 2018, there is so little West left to discover that when we want to dream about the idea of the “frontier,” we look to Mars. Today’s West is a place of deep irony: lands that look wide-open to the naked eye but are actually choked by bureaucratic red tape. In fact, “the West” is more of a mirage than a reality, these days. But the hunger is still there. Read more…

Why Beyoncé Placed HBCU’s at the Center of American Life

(Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella)

When Beyoncé strolled onto Coachella’s desert stage like a drum major on the night of April 16, no one was prepared for the spectacle that was to come. There was, of course, the sheer magnitude of it: She wore a cape and crown of painstaking detail, bedazzled by Olivier Rousteing of Balmain, referencing the ageless black regality of Nefertiti and Michael Jackson. Dozens of monochromatically clad dancers joined Bey, along with a drumline with sousaphone and trombone players. It was an ocean of sound and color against the backdrop of bleachers. “‘Let’s do a homecoming,” she reportedly told her choreographers in early rehearsals.

Perhaps we should’ve been ready. Beyoncé, known for rigorous stagecraft, always promises a spectacle. She’s a pop star who sings soul, although she hasn’t ever tried to be earthy or minimalist like Erykah Badu or Jill Scott, two artists whose work I can tell she pays attention to. I’m sure Beyoncé could pull off a full-length, stripped down, acoustic album if she wanted, but she’s always seemed willfully extra. Her sound is emotive, melismatic, acrobatic, and her visuals are similarly bombastic — a lot of hair, plenty of ass and sweat, and more than a few wardrobe changes.

Yet some of my favorite moments of her career are when she’s focused on fundamentals. Keeping the beat on her lap while performing “Halo” at a children’s hospital, ad-libbing on Frank Ocean’s “Pink and White,” harmonizing on the relaxed, minor-note groove of Destiny’s Child deep cuts like “Get on the Bus,” and “Confessions”. You notice her ear for complex harmonies, the strength of her lower register, the sense of rhythm that makes the delivery of her hooks sticky, and the staccato of her cadences — along with everything else she’s capable of, she’s also more than competent as a rapper.

What I loved most about Bey at Coachella was how her performance drew out elements that have been important in her art for the past 20 years and took them to their logical conclusion — or rather, to their true beginning. She’s long had a brassiness in her voice and she’s always mined black, Southern ways of being for her work. When her sister’s meditative album A Seat at the Table climbed the charts alongside Lemonade in 2016, both of which explicitly pulsed with a brazen black consciousness, Solange told the public not to be surprised. “I’m really proud of my sister and I’m really proud of her record and her work and I’ve always been,” she said to Fader. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s always been an activist from the beginning of her career and she’s always been very, very black.”

If you’re black and from the South, it feels like the culture of HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) is in the ether. They are spaces you can’t ignore and wouldn’t want to. Beyoncé was born in Houston and her father graduated from Fisk University. When she was a child in the 1980s and 90s, Spike Lee joints came out almost every other year, and Lee never let us forget that he’d gone to Morehouse, the way Morehouse men are wont to do. The culture of HBCU’s and black Greek life was everywhere: Lee’s 1988 film School Daze and the 1987 TV series A Different World shared similar themes and a few principal cast members, including Jasmine Guy, who was head of the Gamma Ray sorority in the former and iconic B.A.P. Whitley Gilbert in the latter.

That Beyoncé chooses to highlight the specific culture of HBCUs and black Greek life shouldn’t really surprise us, either, and if it does, it feels to me as if we haven’t really been paying attention. A host of black artists have seen black college culture as ripe for the imaginary. At JSTOR Daily, Lavelle Porter reminds us that it was taken up by novelists Ralph Ellison and Nella Larsen at the beginning of the century, and later, by the creators of films and shows like Drumline, Stomp the Yard, and The Quad. To that list,we could add Janelle Monáe, who depicted HBCU life in her 2013 music video “Electric Lady,” as well as Kanye West, whose mother got degrees from Virginia Union and Atlanta University and was the head of the English department at Chicago State for six years.

Growing up, my older sister ran a small business selling Afrocentric gifts and black Greek paraphernalia at Classic ballgames and other events throughout the South. This was the early 90s, when Kenté cloth and Malcolm X fitted caps and medallions were everywhere. One of the T-shirts in our inventory read “The Blacker the College, the Sweeter the Knowledge,” a riff on an old saying about blackness and fecund soulfulness. At a well-attended event at Memphis’ Cook Convention Center, a customer looked me in the eyes and said she knew the future was secure since I’d been such an eloquent and competent salesperson for a fifth grader.

My sophomore year of high school, I visited a few Southern and East coast colleges, both HBCUs and PWIs, on a tour bus with a church group. Spelman felt like home in a way that I didn’t know a place of learning could. Missy Elliot videos played in a student center, women who looked and sounded like people I loved carried full backpacks, answered our questions. When we got to Howard, we were giddy. It was a Friday afternoon in the late spring, and we spent a long time out on the green, buzzing Yard.

Part of the reason I didn’t go to an HBCU was that I was so familiar with them. Now, I wonder what I could have been had I let myself bask in that kind of affirmation for a little bit longer. Nonetheless, I was pretty sure that who I was — a nerdy, bespectacled daughter of a poor-to-working class single mother, wouldn’t easily fit in at one those campuses.

My experiences with wealthier black families in Memphis — and watching Bill Cosby’s shows — made it clear that I needed to aspire to a pristine, black middle-class ideal. I think Cosby’s crimes have given us an opportunity to think about the limits of some of our sacred black spaces, how the pressure to be respectable can force you to abandon or question or edit yourself if you’re poor, or queer, or anything else. By associating herself with HBCUs, Beyoncé challenges those mores with her self-avowed feminist, queer-loving and blatantly sexual art. She helps expand the possibilities of what it looks like to be a black thinking person.

That she chose to share this at Coachella, with its largely wealthy, white audience, wasn’t exactly a disruption. I truly believe that her performance placed HBCUs and black Greek culture at the center of American life, and that’s where they belong. Today, there are 102 HBCUs, a mix of private and public institutions. Most have some relationship with federal or state funding, and none have endowments like those of the oldest, private universities in the northeast, many of which are uncovering their ties to slavery.  The share of black college students enrolled in HBCUs has declined in recent years, but the schools do more than their share of the work — enrolling about 9 percent of the nation’s black undergraduates and graduating about 15 percent of them.

They are also American institutions that have an important relationship with our nation’s long march towards democracy. According to W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1935 essay Black Reconstruction:

The first great mass movement for public education at the expense of the state, in the South, came from Negroes. Many leaders before the war had advocated general education, but few had been listened to. Schools for indigents and paupers were supported, here and there, and more or less spasmodically. Some states had elaborate plans, but they were not carried out. Public education for all at public expense, was, in the South, a Negro idea.

Before this mass movement, the South’s leadership did not believe in the “educability of the poor,” and much of the white laboring class in the region saw no need for it, mired as they were in the plantation system’s feudalism. State by state, Reconstruction governments set up tax-based schools that would be open to all. There was resistance to nearly all of this — to the idea of blacks becoming educated, to whites teaching blacks, to the black and white students sharing facilities. As a compromise, secondary schools and colleges were opened specifically to train black teachers. Fisk University opened in 1866, and Howard University was founded in 1867, partly funded by the Freedman’s Bureau. Du Bois said these institutions “became the centers of a training in leadership and ideals for the whole Negro race, and the only fine and natural field of contact between white and black culture.”

A few studies have shown that throughout the world, compulsory education increases voter participation, and increases in education predict social engagement in the sort of groups and organizations that do critical grassroots work. The push for education on the part of emancipated blacks, then, can be considered a driving force in the ever-widening democratization of American life.

Beyoncé’s Coachella sets were a correction to the erasure and historical amnesia that make us feel like she could possibly disrupt something that her forebears had such a heavy hand in creating.

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The Escapism of Bruce Springsteen

NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 14: Bruce Springsteen performs onstage during a special performance of "Springsteen on Broadway" in front of an audience of SiriusXM subscribers at Walter Kerr Theatre on March 14, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for SiriusXM)

There is a moment at the end of Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” his seminal hit from the 1975 album, Born to Run, in which New Jersey’s most famous son intones, “It’s a town for losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win.”

The lyric is classic Springsteen, a nod to the most consistent theme of his biggest hits throughout his early catalog, which spans seven records over a decade from the mid ’70s to the mid ’80s. From “Born to Run” to “Atlantic City,” Born in the USA to The River, Springsteen is constantly searching for the open road and thus fulfilling some inherent promise and potential. Springsteen was 26 when he recorded “Thunder Road,” and it’s not surprising that the musician’s promise that “these two lanes will take us anywhere” would appeal to fellow baby boomers, those trapped in contemplation between seeking out quarter-life ennui or something more.

But Springsteen’s evolution as an artist hasn’t been static. As fans age with the Boss, those same themes of entrapment and freedom have taken on new meaning while, at the same time, attracting new audiences, such as millennials and those who came of age during the recession. Born in New Jersey, Toniann Fernandez of The Paris Review grew up haunted by Springsteen’s specter:

The sound of “Born in the U.S.A.” used to conjure images of the muscular white boys of my high school years, drunk with testosterone and Natural Ice, clad in denim and American flags. They screamed along with E Street imitators in bars we were all too young to patronize. I had always found the Springsteen omnipresence in coastal New Jersey offensive.

That sentiment, though, changed recently, and Fernandez describes her quest to not only embrace the musical menace of her teenage years but to actually meet Springsteen during the Broadway run of Springsteen on Broadway.

I had exactly five hundred dollars in my savings account at the time, the last crumbs of my earnings from my days as a nine-to-fiver. He encouraged me to buy the ticket. I told him that he didn’t get it. The point was not just to see the show, the point was for the Boss to request my presence at the show, perhaps in the front row. I suppose I hadn’t been so clear to myself or to anyone else how much this was about me, not Bruce. When I went back to the ticket window, the clerk told me the ticket was in someone else’s cart on Ticketmaster and that I would have to wait three minutes to see if they released it. Of course, having the ticket withheld was all I needed to draw my debit card from my wallet. Three minutes of purgatory ended, and I paid for my ticket through tears.

Fernandez writes of finally understanding the Boss’ appeal once she left New Jersey, of realizing and appreciating what the open road feels like upon riding in the getaway car, and what’s fascinating is how this thread of escapism that Springsteen represents — his hook for all these years — is an oft-repeated thread through various forms of music. Take EDM — as Emily Yoshia explains in her recent essay for Vulture about Avicii’s reported suicide, the musician’s massive hit, “Levels,” spoke of attaining a level of both personal and professional success that seemed (and still seems) unattainable to anyone who celebrated their 21st birthday in the mid-2000s.

Like every apocalyptic radio pop song of that era, asking us to live like tomorrow will never come, there was an overwhelming need for the music of the era to freeze time, both to stave off adulthood, but also to deny every feeling of doubt and sadness and confusion that had come before, to will it away in order to start our lifestyle brands or build our Twitter following. I had managed to convince myself in 2011 that I could still get what I wanted, but in reality I had a very small reservoir left, constantly one disaster away from moving back home again.

There is a connection between Springsteen and Avicii, of escaping and living like tomorrow will never come, and it’s why Springsteen’s catalog still sounds fresh after all these years. Yes, many of his tracks are bangers, but that’s beside the point: the Boss’s lyrics connect us to a future that we may never know.

 

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A visiting room in the Federal ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado
A visiting room in the Federal ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. (Photo by Stephen J. Dubner / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Chris Outcalt, Corie Brown, Daniel Immerwahr, Toniann Fernandez, and Karen Abbott.

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A Kendrick Lamar Syllabus

Kendrick Lamar performs at the Grammys on January 28, 2018. (Christopher Polk/Getty Images for NARAS)

Last month, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth won the Pulitzer Prize in music for his 2017 album DAMN. It’s the first work of hip-hop to be commended since the award for musical composition was created in 1943. Most winners have been classical musicians, and a few, like Wynton Marsalis and Ornette Coleman, composers of jazz.

The Pulitzer board noted that DAMN. “offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” The album’s selection updates and redefines conceptions of music and high culture — it is canon expanding and its reverberations and aftershocks should be significant.

DAMN. is Lamar’s third album, and while it is spectacular, I don’t think it’s his most thrilling. good kid m.A.A.d. city, from 2012, succeeds more on the plane of hip-hop aesthetics, with its structurally sound story arc. To Pimp a Butterfly, from 2015, was more melodically lush, and it magnetized a rising tide of political fervor: The single “Alright” became a protest anthem, and every major release by a popular black musician afterward seemed to form a politically-charged chorus.

Lamar has made a career of delivering prescient, complex work that is sometimes fiery and discordant, and other times deeply meditative or grief-stricken. But his work always feels honest. With the significance of his Pulitzer in sight, I offer a small selection of the insightful writing on Lamar that has published in the years since his debut.
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