Search Results for: Science

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Gabriel Thompson, Tim Murphy, Deborah Netburn, Tove Danovich, and Sirin Kale.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Mirrors

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | July 2019 | 21 minutes (5,409 words)

In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, Katy Kelleher lays bare the dark underbellies of the objects and substances we adorn ourselves with.

Previously: the grisly sides of perfume, angora, and pearls.

* * *

Eight thousand years ago, a craftsperson sat inside their mud-brick house in Turkey and rubbed a piece of obsidian with their hands, smoothing the surface carefully, polishing the stone until it shone darkly in the hot sun, burning a piece of volcanic rock into something miraculous. In this piece of black stone, they could see their reflection, surrounded by the walls of their dwelling, built on the bones of their ancestors, the painted plaster walls rendered colorless by the obsidian’s deep gloss. But they weren’t done. They took white plaster and applied it to one side of this stone disk in a conical shape. Eventually this stone came to rest in a grave, alongside a woman from the early agricultural society. There it stayed until archeologists found it in the 1960s. It is, as far as we know, one of humankind’s first mirrors.

According to archeologist Ian Hodder, who oversees the hilly, 34-acre archeological site at Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, there have been “five or six” obsidian mirrors found there, all located in the northeast corners of tombs belonging to women. “They are beautiful things,” he says of the Neolithic mirrors. “Nobody really expected there would be things like mirrors in those early days. These are the first sort of settlements after people have been living as hunters and gathers. In many ways, these were quite simple societies, so it is odd.” Yet these early proto-urban people clearly wanted to look at themselves — or at something. It’s possible they were used in rituals by shamans or other religious figures. “One of the most commonly suggested for the time period is that they’re something to do with predicting the future or understanding the spirit world through reading images in the mirrors,” says Hodder. We just don’t know. We’ll probably never know.

With a name taken from the Latin mirare and mirari (“to look at” and “to wonder at, admire,” respectively), a mirror can be any reflective surface created for the purpose of seeing oneself. They can be made of stone, metal, glass, plastic, or even water. Throughout history, we’ve constructed mirrors from all those substances, to a varying degree of efficacy, for various reasons. Some were used as ceremonial items, others were used to repel malevolent spirits, and still others were used for the simple pleasure of examining one’s countenance.

But no matter what they’re made of, mirrors are objects of mystery, obsession, and fear. They’re simple yet complex. They’ve been used for purposes both sacred and profane. We love them, yet we’re loath to admit it. Even their creation has been shrouded in secrecy and aided by willful ignorance and sometimes outright violence; mirror making was once a toxic affair, and its secrets were guarded by laws and punishable by death. Long reserved for the wealthy few, we now walk around with compact mirrors in our pockets, and even if you left yours at home, there’s always a cell phone screen that can function, if you want it to, if the light is right, as a mirror.

Often, when objects become mundane, they lose some of their luster. But mirrors retain their ability to hold our attention, and they retain a certain amount of power over us. We’re still interested in seeing our reflections, and we still want to know what the future holds. Yet we’ve lost the reverence we once had for them. We no longer bury our dead with hand mirrors, and we don’t often speak of the control a mirror can exert over a person. Instead, we allow this force to alter our perceptions, to diminish our happiness, while denying its power. Looking in a mirror is just something you do — just something women do. We’re so used to seeing this impulse as vanity that most of us have forgotten the innate sense of awe that comes with looking. We’ve forgotten how to face our reflections not with judgment or fear, but with a sense of joyful discovery, a sense of hope. We can see our reflections anywhere, yet still face the mirror with a certain amount of suspicion, as though desiring knowledge of how the world sees you is somehow wrong. Read more…

Putin’s Rasputin

St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square; Moscow, Russia. (Rickson Liebano/Getty)

Amos Barshad | An excerpt adapted from No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World | Harry N. Abrams | 17 minutes (4,490 words)

 

In the lobby of a heavy-stone building in central Moscow, I’m greeted by a friendly young woman in a pantsuit who, she explains, is working “in the field of geopolitics.” She takes me to the security desk, where my passport is carefully, minutely inspected before I’m granted access. As we head upstairs the woman slowly whispers a joke: “This is what will save us from the terrorists.”

We walk down a long, high hallway that looks or bare or unfinished or forgotten, like maybe someone was planning on shutting down this wing of the office but never got around to it. There are linoleum floors, cracking and peeling, and bits of mismatched tile in the style of sixties Americana. Rank-and-file office clerks shuffle through, and no one pays attention to a faint buzzing emanating from somewhere near.

We stop in front of a heavy wooden door. Inside is Aleksandr Dugin.

The man is an ideologue with a convoluted, bizarre, unsettling worldview. He believes the world is divided into two spheres of influence — sea powers, which he calls Eternal Carthage, and land powers, which he calls Eternal Rome. He believes it has always been so. Today, those spheres are represented by America, the Carthage, and Russia, the Rome. He believes that Carthage and Rome are locked in a forever war that will only end with the destruction of one or the other. Read more…

Protecting the Unicorns Beneath the Sea: The Secret Seahorse Colony of Long Beach

A Pacific seahorse in a red gorgonian sea fan. Getty Images.

Every five days for the past three years, Rog Hanson has driven two hours in the middle of the night to visit his colony of four Pacific seahorses, dubbed Bathsheba, Deep Blue, Daphne, and CD Street. As Deborah Netburn reports at the Los Angeles Times, the colony’s location in the waters off Long Beach, California is a guarded secret. Together, he and fellow seahorse enthusiast Ashley Arnold have spent hours upon hours under the sea observing and documenting the colony’s behavior and sharing what they learn with scientists. For him, it’s a calling he was drawn to after a close, very personal encounter with a whale; for her, diving is a way to do good and help manage the PTSD she has as a result of her military service.

If you get Hanson talking about his seahorses, he’ll tell you exactly how many times he’s seen them (997), who is dating whom, and describe their personalities with intimate familiarity. Bathsheba is stoic, Daphne a runner. Deep Blue is chill.

Hanson makes careful notes after all his dives in a colorful handmade log book he stores in a three-ring binder. On this Wednesday he dutifully records the water temperature (62 degrees), the length of the dive (58 minutes), the greatest depth (15 feet) and visibility (3 feet), as well as the precise location of each seahorse. His notes also include phase of the moon, the tidal currents and the strength of the UV rays.

“Scientists will tell you that sunlight is an important statistic to keep down,” he says.

He has given each of his four seahorses a unique logo that he draws with markers in his log book. Bathsheba’s is a purple star outlined in red, Daphne’s is a brown striped star in a yellow circle.

Now, Arnold and her boyfriend, Jake Fitzgerald, check in on the seahorses about once a week and help Roger rebuild the city he created for them.

“We call them our kids because we love them so much,” Arnold says.

Hanson and Arnold are very protective of their seahorse family. They tell visitors to remove GPS tags from their photos. They swear them to secrecy.

Read the story

Lions, Tigers, and a Rabbit Named Bugs: A Reading List on Animal-Human Interactions

Getty Images

I don’t remember how I first met her — did I catch a glimpse of her shimmying through a gap in the fence? — but I know that it was love at first sight, at least on my end. Part of my joy, I think, came from the fact that I never expected to see a rabbit within 10 feet of my kitchen window. At the time, I lived in a house on the corner of a small-town neighborhood street, and my backyard was relatively plain. No brush or trees shaded any part of the yard from the Oklahoma sun, trucks regularly revved past, and a number of kites and hawks threaded patterns in the sky above. Why would a rabbit visit a balding patch of fenced-in lawn rather than take cover in the murmuring field of tall grass nearby?

After that first sighting, years ago now, I searched for her within the movement of shadows at sunrise and sunset. Sure enough, she returned. I began learning her patterns: clover by the kitchen window until the sky painted itself into the color of morning, clover near the back corner of the lawn just before sunset, and occasionally, a nap near the fence post to escape the late afternoon heat. One morning while she was out, I eased the back door open and stepped in slow-motion, out onto the patio. Her ears perked up and swiveled, marking the source of the sound. She drew her feet close and twitched her nose. I took a seat on the concrete and, before long, she returned to eating.

As the summer months wore on, I sat with her often, and I also began buying carrots that I would throw in her direction. Timid at first, she crept closer and closer to me until I could feed her from an arms-length away. She would let me sit in the yard nearby while she rolled around in a sandy spot, her way of bathing, and when I returned from my morning runs, she would often sniff the air, stretch her body like a cat who’s just risen from a nap, and then hop in my direction. I named her Bugs.

After she disappeared that first fall, I didn’t fully expect to ever see her again, but Bugs returned for two summers. Sitting with her day after day, morning and night, encouraged me to engage with parts of the natural world I otherwise would have ignored. Over the course of our time together, I watched a pair of kites build a nest in a tree overhead, hoping that I’d never catch the sight of their shadow if they decided to swoop down one day. I studied the nuances in what I thought had been a plain lawn: purple flowers speckling the space in spring, dandelions during the height of summer, a flurry of minute insects hovering and crawling in the heat. I watched the sun melt down over powerlines and neighboring roofs, starlings and skeins of geese alternating overhead.

Over the years, my relationship with Bugs prompted me to think more critically about how I treated the natural world. I fed Bugs carrots daily and began videoing our encounters for Instagram, so that even strangers became invested. The second summer I knew her, she had a baby, and the two of them frequented my yard. There, Bugs taught her offspring to crouch low when the form of a hawk passed overhead, roll in the sand pit, and wriggle lightning-like through the slats in the fence. Though my intentions were borne from love and respect — and a desire to be close to another creature — was I harming Bugs by giving her food? Would she think other humans were safe or did she only know my scent? By inserting myself into her routine, was I disrupting an ecological web I had no right to be part of?

There are bigger questions that arise from those encounters, too. How have animals adapted to survive in a world increasingly overrun with humans? What kinds of relationships exist between humans and animals, and what well-intentioned actions from humans bring harm? The following essays address the oft-complicated connections between animals and humans, explore fascinating forms of adaptations that have sprung from living in increasingly inhospitable environments, and wonder about the future of us all.

1. Are Cities Making Animals Smarter? (Paul Bisceglio, August 16, 2018, The Atlantic)

Night after night, goldfish and koi began disappearing from an office pond protected by concrete walls. Worried, the landlord installed security cameras, only to find that the intruder was a surprising one: a fishing cat, better known for living in swamps than in the center of a bustling city.

In this fascinating read, Paul Bisceglio chronicles the work of Anya Ratnayaka, a conservationist who started tracking several fishing cats in the heart of Colombo, and wonders about how — and which — animals will successfully adapt to life as cities continue to infringe on natural habitats.

Mizuchi’s GPS-collar data had placed him not only in local ponds and canals, but also in the parking lot of a neon-lit movie theater and in the middle of a multilane traffic circle. His territory, which stretched about two square miles, was mostly covered with asphalt and packed with cars.

2. Horseshoe Crabs Have Survived All of History – and Remind Us How We Could Too (Lenora Todaro, July 3, 2019, Catapult)

Lenora Todaro meditates on intersections between human life and the natural world in New York City in her monthly Sidewalk Naturalist column. In this riveting installment, Todaro writes about horseshoe crabs, who somehow continue their “450 million-year-old lineage” despite “ice ages and asteroids,” low survival rates, and currently, in New York City, harrowing encroachments by humans on already too-small hospitable environments.

So here is New York city water, not at its best: a swirling mass of plastic bottles, glass shards of airplane size liquor bottles, coffee cups, candy wrappers, plastic straws, abandoned IHOP sugar packets. To find horseshoe crabs, we had to peel aside the sewage to see if any creatures were stirring beneath, oblivious and perhaps impervious to the garbage.

3. The ‘Othering’ of Animals and Cultural Underdogs: Debut author Pajtim Statovci on Kosovo, migration and cats (Pajtim Statovci interviewed by Carolina Leavitt, April 27, 2017, Electric Lit)

Pajtim Statovci, author of the novel My Cat Yugoslavia, speaks with Caroline Leavitt about the othering of people and animals; ways animals are used as symbols in literature and life; and his attempts to undermine conventional means of representation in his work.

We place animals in different contexts, such as literary works, where they are anthropomorphized and interpreted through the human world, for example as symbols of human characteristics, even though we don’t have access to animal consciousness, and we certainly don’t know what it’s like to be an animal.

4. How rats became an inescapable part of city living (Emma Marris, April 2019, National Geographic)

With urban rat populations on the rise, Emma Marris visits several cities around the globe, meets with rat experts, and studies the history of the rodents to give a better understanding of their immense capacity for adaptability, as well as the ways they mirror the way we as humans live.

Some of the things we hate most about rats—their dirtiness, their fecundity, their undeniable grit and knack for survival—are qualities that could describe us as well. Their filth is really our own: In most places rats are thriving on our trash and our carelessly tossed leftovers.

5. The Man Who Made Animal Friends (Ian S. Port, September 21, 2015, Rolling Stone)

At The Institute for Greatly Endangered and Rare Species (T.I.G.E.R.S.) in South Carolina, visitors can pay to take pictures with lion, tiger, and liger cubs, and visit apes, elephants, and other animals during tours through the park. Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, the founder and director of T.I.G.E.R.S., views his establishment as a community where animals and people live in harmony. Others, like zoo experts, view his park as being harmful to animals.

All of T.I.G.E.R.S. staff members must complete an intensive apprenticeship. No formal education is required, but recruits must be single and childless. They cannot expect any time off for any reason. They must be within 20 pounds of their “perfect athletic weight or working to get there,” able to do push-ups, pull-ups, and run a 12-minute mile.

6. Animal magnetism (David P Barash, May 13, 2014, aeon)

Why are humans fascinated by animals? How do our interactions with animals change depending on the context in which we observe them? What do we see of ourselves in other species? David P Barash, in considering animals in zoos, in veterinarian offices, as pets, in the wild, and across time, hypothesizes a variety of reasons why we remain enthralled by other creatures.

We are living, breathing, perspiring, seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, eating, defecating, urinating, copulating, child-rearing, and ultimately dying animals ourselves. It is plausible that deep in the human psyche there resides the simple yet profound recognition of a relationship between Us and Them.

7. Can Elephants Be Persons? (Sarah Kasbeer, Summer 2019, Dissent Magazine)

Does only harm come from anthropomorphizing animals, or can respect for other living beings stem from the inclination? Are zoos an ethical place for creatures to reside, or is it better we let them free, even while we destroy their natural homes? What makes a person a person instead of an animal, and where do we draw the boundary between the two?

Sarah Kasbeer considers these questions and more in this nuanced and vital essay, one that centers around the predicament of Happy, an elephant living alone at the Bronx Zoo.

It has long been said that to anthropomorphize—ascribe human characteristics to animals—while intuitive and enjoyable, is unscientific and misguided. But given the recent research into animal consciousness, what was once considered a cardinal sin of ethology has since returned to favor, so long as it’s implemented responsibly.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, GuernicaTin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

My Unsexual Revolution

Illustration by Chloe Cushman

Diane Shipley | Longreads | July 2019 | 17 minutes (4,293 words)

In November 1998, I had sex for the first and last time. I was 19, my boyfriend was 21, and we’d been together for 10 months, long-distance. I was at university in Lancaster, a small town in the north west of England, and he lived in Essex, in the south east. I had a week off from classes, so I spent six hours taking two trains to stay in the sporadically-tidied house he shared with friends from work. On Wednesday morning, I walked to the pharmacy down the street to buy condoms and KY Jelly, shaking slightly as I handed over the cash. That night, with Ally McBeal on TV in the background, we lay on his narrow twin bed, kissing and touching each other before we slipped under the covers. I worried it might hurt, or feel awkward, or be over quickly, but it was great. Afterward, we ate chocolates, drank Coke, and swore we’d have sex all the time from then on.

We tried. Later that night; the next day; a couple of months later, on vacation in Florida. Each time, it was as if my vagina had snapped shut and no matter how hard he pushed or how vividly I pictured a tulip’s petals unfurling, nothing could convince it to open. Eventually, we gave up and went back to the heavy petting and blowjobs we’d each enjoyed, respectively, before. We were best friends, we were in love, we both had orgasms. In theory, I knew that penis-in-vagina intercourse wasn’t the only way to define sex. But it seemed like the most important, and I felt like a failure for not being a “proper” girlfriend; for being unfuckable.
Read more…

What Is Elizabeth Rush Reading? : Books on Antarctic Adventure, Ice, Motherhood

Map of Roald Amundsen's and Robert Falcon Scott's South Pole expedition routes; lithograph, 1925. (GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

Take a listen to my recent conversation with Elizabeth Rush, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shoreabout what she’s been reading — the first in a series of talks I’ll be having with authors about what books they’re into lately!

Elizabeth is currently serving as the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artist and Writer, and just a few weeks before we spoke, she returned from a 55-day scientific cruise to the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. We spoke about polar adventures, ice, motherhood; how specific narrative structures and expectations can become attached to certain places over time; and how looking to different written forms, like poetry, can help us see beyond those narrative restrictions when telling important new stories, like the story of the climate crisis. Below is a list of all the books that Elizabeth brought up during our conversation.

Ernest Shackleton, South
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Sur,” collected in The Real and the Unreal
Sheila Heti, Motherhood
Angela Garbes, Like a Mother
Meaghan O’Connell, And Now We Have Everything (Read an excerpt on Longreads)
Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions
Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement
Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode
Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing
Craig Childs, Virga & Bone
Sarah Wheeler, Terra Incognita

Happy reading!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


 

‘If an Animal Talks, I’m Sold’: An Interview with Ann and Jeff Vandermeer

A Midsummer Night's Dream. Illustration by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). (Culture Club / Getty Images)

Alan Scherstuhl | Longreads | July 2019 | 19 minutes (5,080 words)

“Hic sunt dracones,” the 500 year-old Hunt-Lenox globe warns travelers off the coast of southeast Asia: Here be dragons. In the half millenium since that mysterious Euro-centric globe’s construction, dracones have evolved, in the popular imagination, from representatives of a dangerous, fantastical unknown to something like just another of the familiar beasts populating what we might call the Fantasy-Industrial Complex. Through big-budget TV and movies, video and pen-and-paper games, and hundreds of novels and short stories each year, fantasy rules like never before. Dragons reign over much of our pop-culture globe, not just one patch.

Diverse and often self-reflexive, today’s fantasy fiction varies wildly in quality and approach. Writers like N.K. Jemisin (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms), Sofia Samatar (A Stranger in Olondria), Ann Leckie (The Raven Tower), Kameron Hurley (The Mirror Empire), Seth Dickinson (The Traitor Baru Cormorant), Marlon James (Black Leopard, Red Wolf), Steven Erikson (the Malazan Book of the Fallen series), and many more have in recent years spun dazzling, forward-thinking variations on a genre that has at times been accused of wallowing in repetitive stories, simplistic good-versus-evil conflicts, and an inherent conservatism.

Now, with the publication of The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (Vintage), anthologists Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (shes a Hugo Award-winning editor; hes the bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy; and together theyve edited The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Weird, and other collections) are declaring that fantasy has always been weird and wild, thoughtful and delightful. The Big Book covers a diverse array of fantasy fiction from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of World War II. It opens with a German fairy tale (Bettina von Armin’s “The Queens Son”) about a queen whose son, immediately upon sliding from the womb, is stolen by a she-bear; it closes, fittingly, with J.R.R. Tolkien, whose tale “Leaf by Niggle” concerns nothing less than an artist’s act of world-making. The almost 800 pages between these offer almost 90 stories from around the world, from the expected writers of fantasy (Fritz Lieber, Robert E. Howard, Lord Dunsany, L. Frank Baum), many unexpected fantasists (Zora Neal Hurston, E.M. Forester, W.E.B Du Bois, Edith Wharton), and a host of surprises from lesser-known writers. The Vandermeers approach is expansive. Half the stories in The Big Book are works in translation; fourteen have never before been published in English; few concern monster-slaying. Read more…

The No. 1 Ladies’ Defrauding Agency

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Rose Eveleth | Longreads | July 2019 | 12 minutes (2,883 words)

Sarah Howe’s early life is mostly a mystery. There are no surviving photographs or sketches of her, so it’s impossible to know what she looked like. She may, at one point, have been married, but by 1877 she was single and working as a fortune-teller in Boston. It was a time of boom and invention in the United States. The country was rebuilding after the Civil War, industrial development was starting to take off, and immigration and urbanization were both increasing steadily. Money was flowing freely (to white people anyway), and men and women alike were putting that money into the nation’s burgeoning banks. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and in 1879 Thomas Edison created the lightbulb. In between those innovations, Sarah Howe opened the Ladies’ Deposit Company, a bank run by women, for women. 

The company’s mission was simple: help white women gain access to the booming world of banking. The bank only accepted deposits from so-called “unprotected females,” women who did not have a husband or guardian handling their money. These women were largely overlooked by banks who saw them — and their smaller pots of money — as a waste of time. In return for their investment, Howe promised incredible results: an 8 percent interest rate. Deposit $100 now, and she promised an additional $96 back by the end of the year. And to sweeten the deal, new depositors got their first three months interest in advance. When skeptics expressed doubts that Howe could really guarantee such high returns, she offered an explanation: The Ladies’ Deposit Company was no ordinary bank, but instead was a charity for women, bankrolled by Quaker philanthropists. 

Word of the bank spread quickly among single women — housekeepers, schoolteachers, widows. Howe, often dressed in the finest clothes, enticed ladies to join, and encouraged them to spread the news among their friends and family. This word-of-mouth marketing strategy worked, Howe’s bank gathered investments from across the country in a time before easy long-distance communication. Money came in from Buffalo, Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Washington, all without Howe taking out a single newspaper advertisement. She opened a branch of the bank in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and had plans to add offices in Philadelphia and New York to keep up with the demand. Many of the women who deposited with the Ladies’ Deposit Company reinvested their profits back in the bank, putting their faith, and entire life savings, in Howe’s enterprise. All told, the Ladies Deposit would gather at least $250,000 from 800 women — although historians think far more women were involved. Some estimate that Howe collected more like $500,000, the equivalent of about $13 million today. 

It didn’t take long for the press to notice a woman encroaching on a man’s space. And not just any woman, a single woman who had once been a fortune-teller! “Who can believe for a moment that this woman, who a few years ago was picking up a living by clairvoyance and fortune-telling, is now the almoner of one of the greatest charities in the country?” asked the Boston Daily Advertiser. Reporters were particularly put off by their inability to access even the lobby of Howe’s bank, turned away at the door for being men. One particularly intrepid reporter, determined to find out what Howe’s secret was, returned dressed as a woman to gain entry and more information. 


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


Then, in 1880, it all came crashing down. On September 25, 1880, the Boston Daily Advertiser began a series of stories that exposed Howe’s bank as a fraud. Her 8 percent returns were too good to be true. Howe was operating what we now know as a Ponzi scheme — 40 years before Ponzi would try his hand at it. 

Here’s how it worked: When a new depositor arrived, Howe would use their money to pay out older clients, so the whole scheme required a constant influx of new depositors to pay out the old ones. Like every other Ponzi fraudster, Howe’s bank would have eventually run out of new money. The run of stories in the Boston Daily Advertiser instilled enough fear in the bank’s investors that they began to withdraw their money, and eventually there was a run on Howe’s bank. 

Sarah Howe was the most unfathomable and outrageous character: a woman villain.

It took two weeks and five days from the first story published in the Advertiser uncovering Howe’s fraud before she was arrested. The press extended her victims a modicum of sympathy, describing their plights while also reminding the reader that they deserved their pain for trusting a woman with their money. “I put every dollar I had into the bank, and if I lose it I am a beggar,” one depositor told the Boston Globe at the time. “I wanted the interest so badly, that I placed a mortgage on my furniture to secure the principal to deposit. Oh! I wish I hadn’t now, for I shall have my goods sold from under my head,” said another. 

Howe, on the other hand, was spared no remorse. The Boston Herald claimed that Howe was “nearly as deaf as a post” and cross-eyed. Banker’s Magazine described Howe as “short, fat, very ugly, and so illiterate as to be unable to write an English sentence, or to speak without making shameful blunders.” This is all untrue, as Howe’s own statements to the press before her downfall suggest that, in fact, she had a sharp wit. In response to one newspaper’s critique of the Ladies’ Deposit Bank, Howe wrote: “The fact is, my dear man, you really know nothing of the basis, means or methods on which our affairs are conducted, and when shut up in the meshes of your savings-bank notions, you attempt an exposition of the impossibility of our existence, you boggle and flounder about like a bat in a fly trap.” 

 Nevertheless, as soon as she was caught, a backstory for Howe emerged in the papers. The Boston Herald published a story with the headline “Mrs. Howe’s Unsavory Record,” claiming she was born out of wedlock and ran away at 15 to marry an “Indian physician,” who they also referred to as “her dark-skinned Othello.” The paper claimed the marriage caused her mother such distress that she wound up dying in an asylum “raving over the heartlessness of her daughter.” The story also alleged that she then left her first husband, married two house painters in quick succession, had been in and out of prison, and even tried to lure a young girl into prostitution. Basically none of this can be confirmed by historians, but it didn’t matter. Sarah Howe was the most unfathomable and outrageous character: a woman villain. As historian George Robb writes in his paper about Sarah Howe, “She had to be ugly, vulgar and immoral.” The only way her story could make sense to readers was if Howe was some kind of abomination — a complete outlier both physically and mentally.  

 “I’m sure she was just a normal-looking person,” Robb told me. “Until the whole thing unraveled, when people talked about her, no one described her as anything other than an ordinary person.” But in Victorian-era Boston, the idea that a woman criminal could be an “ordinary person” was impossible. “People were comfortable with the idea of women as victims,” Robb told me. “The men were the crooks, the men were doing the manipulation. The women were the victims. They needed to be protected by other men.” 

Howe wound up standing trial in Boston, and was ultimately convicted (although not of fraud, but soliciting money under false pretenses — for claiming that a Quaker charity was backing the venture). She spent three years in prison, and when she got out, in classic scammer fashion, she tried the whole thing again.

“I think there’s a similarity between being a fortune-teller and making money on the stock market, making predictions about the future”

Next, Howe opened up a new Woman’s Bank on West Concord Street in Boston. She kept the scheme going from 1884 to 1886, offering depositors 7 percent interest and gathering at least $50,000, although historians think the number might be far higher. This time, however, Howe was never prosecuted. After being caught and closing down her bank, she gave up the game and returned to fortune-telling and doing astrology readings for 25 cents each. She died in 1892, at the age of 65, no longer wealthy, but still notorious enough to warrant an obituary in the New York Times that read: “For three months she had been living in a boarding and lodging house, carefully keeping from those whom she met the knowledge that she was the notorious Mrs. Howe of Woman’s Bank memory.” 

***

Sarah Howe was, in some ways, a product of her time. In the late 1800s, the United States was moving out of a period marked by “free banks,” in which there were very limited rules governing banks, and into a system of national banking more familiar to us today. Money was flowing into the economy, and financial advisers were telling their clients to put their cash in banks that were now more stable than they had been in the past. This advice was often targeted at women, who couldn’t use their money to, say, start their own endeavors. But they could put their money in stocks and banks, and many of them did. In fact, during that time, women were often the majority of depositors and shareholders.

But there were very few regulations on banks. The stock market was relatively new. For women like Howe, it presented an unregulated place where money was changing hands purely on the basis of confidence. And as a fortune-teller, Howe had plenty. “I think there’s a similarity between being a fortune-teller and making money on the stock market, making predictions about the future, and getting people to believe that you know something about how the trends are going to play,” Robb said. 

At the time there was little fear when it came to watchdogs or regulators. Howe could start her own bank with no real procedure or oversight. “Anybody could form a bank!” Robb said, “If you could get people to give you money you could call it a bank. You advertise, you rent a fancy office space, people come and give you money. It was amazing how much money you could make before anybody caught you.” As much as people love to point fingers at Howe, very rarely do people consider the complete lack of oversight that allowed her to prey upon these women. “It’s so much easier to pick individual villains and say, ‘Oh it’s these nasty scheming people who are the problem, the capitalist system can do no wrong, it’s perfect and self-regulating and we don’t want to mess with that. It’s these individual crooks that are the problem.’” 

***

In spite of her crimes, Sarah Howe is not a household name. It’s not called a Howe scheme after all, it’s a Ponzi scheme. When Howe is mentioned at all, it’s as a punchline. She’s forever stuck as a historical fun fact. “She’s become an anecdote in history, but she should be as famous or more famous than Ponzi,” historian Robyn Hulsart told me. “There’s nothing about what she did that doesn’t fit the definition of a Ponzi scheme.” (In fact, Howe wasn’t even the first to execute this type of scam. At least two other women pulled off Ponzi schemes before her — one in Berlin, the other in Madrid.) 

It’s become popular now to say that we’re living through the golden era of the scammer. “We’re living in a scammer’s paradise,” Sarah Jeong told Willamette Week recently about our current era, “not just economic scams, but intellectual scams, too.” Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey, Fyre Fest, Ailey O’Toole, Jennifer Lee, Anna March — the list is long enough that everybody from WIRED to The Cut called 2018 “the year of the scam.” As the United States recovers from the fraud that was that housing market bubble, we’re in another era of deregulation. President Donald Trump and the Republican run Senate, have gone on what has been called a “deregulation spree,” increasing the cap at which banks become subject to more stringent rules from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion. Robb pointed out that we never seem to actually learn. “Whenever there’s a big boom cycle in the economy everybody screams to deregulate,” he told me, and with deregulation comes increased risk for frauds like Howe’s. 

Howe’s case also demonstrates a struggle in feminist circles that persists today: How do you balance the desire to celebrate women with the need to hold bad behavior accountable?

Howe’s legacy could and should be one that we can learn from today in the so-called era of the scam. Howe’s success was one that tells us something not just about fraud, but about economics and the conditions under which fraud can blossom into a $17 million scam. Howe was aided and abetted by the economic conditions, but she was also a wizard at her craft. What Howe mastered, beyond the Ponzi scheme, is what experts call an “affinity fraud” — going after a group of people who have something in common, and most often who the scammer has something in common with too. As an “unprotected” woman herself, Howe understood what might appeal to her clientele. She decorated the bank to create a mood and aesthetic that would appeal to her ideal mark. The Advertiser described the Ladies’ Deposit Bank this way: “The furniture, of which there are many pieces, is upholstered in raw silk of old gold figured patterns, and corresponds in tone and design with the walls. … The carpets are of a deep warm tone, and all the ornaments are rich and in good taste.” She used language that drew women in, talking about her commitment to the “overworked, ill-paid sisterhood.” Hulsart points out that it’s not unlike the language used by multilevel marketing companies like Mary Kay and Amway, which generally advertise to women through  word of mouth. “They really like to say things like ‘we’re in this together,” Hulsart says.  Read more…

Why Bugs Deserve Our Respect

Insect hotel with male Osmia bicornis wild bees. (Getty Images)

Jessica Gross | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,842 words)

The ants arrived with the heat in May, streaming into my bedroom through my air conditioner. My roommate had covered hers in tape earlier that week, and I used her supplies to block any and all points of entry. Me: in. Insects: out. I can imagine the disgusted grimace I wore on my face as I taped and taped. One of the ants got caught underneath, and I remember feeling a perverse sense of retribution.

I thought about this stance a lot while reading ecologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s new book, Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects, which first came out in her native Norway last year. With a combination of delight and passion, Sverdrup-Thygeson makes the case that, first, insects are fascinating creatures who deserve our curiosity, and, second, they are essential to our survival and deserve our protection. As I considered the multitude of impressive and strange facts she presents (there’s a species of swallowtail butterfly with eyes on its penis, and spiders’ silk is, on a per-weight basis, six times as strong as steel!), I was transported back to childhood. I remembered how, when my parents lay new sod in the backyard, my brother and I peeled it back to find the worms slithering underneath. I remembered plucking cicada shells off trees and storing them in a shoebox, which I kept in my closet for years. Back then, bugs didn’t disgust me — they filled me with a sense of wonder.

When we spoke over the phone in early June, Sverdrup-Thygeson suggested that the disdain for insects that I and so many others have grown into isn’t natural or necessary, but a learned response. Witnessing her awe, as she put it, for these tiny creatures, it was hard not to feel that she was right. I haven’t stripped the tape from my air conditioner, but when I saw a little bug crawling up the wall of my shower a few weeks ago, I let it be, and took a moment to marvel at the way it moved with such delicate grace.

You describe in the book how, when your children were in elementary school, you would turn brown mud over with a metal sieve for them to see all the bugs, and get excited about them. So I wondered if you could start by talking about your own childhood relationship with insects. Was that something your parents instilled in you? When did this fascination begin?

Yes, I think it started when I was a kid. My family spent a lot of time in the outdoors — we picked berries and mushrooms in the fall, and we went skiing and slept out in a snow cave in the winter. We did all these things together. We also had this very simple cabin on a tiny forested island in a lake. There were no other houses on this island, and there was no electricity, so no television, of course. You pretty much had to play with whatever was there, which was nature.

So I got used to having bugs around me. Even if I sat reading, I would still sit in nature: bugs would crawl over me or fly past. When we put fire on the firewood, which was how we kept warm if it was cold, there would always be bugs in these pieces of wood. It was part of life to have bugs around, and it never occurred to me it was supposed to be annoying, or something to fear.

I also had a grandfather who was really good at showing me not insects, really, but other things in nature. He told me the names of flowers; he taught me birdcalls so I could recognize them. And I think that meant something. If someone you love shows you that nature means something to them, that transfers and has a lot of impact on a small kid. Read more…