The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week, we’re sharing stories from Brittany Packnett, Rahima Nasa, Jordan Smith, Scott Korb, and Chris Heath.
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This week, we’re sharing stories from Brittany Packnett, Rahima Nasa, Jordan Smith, Scott Korb, and Chris Heath.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Adam Morgan | Longreads | September 2018 | 10 minutes (2,560 words)
In the summer of 1990, an Icelandic writer named Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson traveled to Czechoslovakia with his friend, the singer-songwriter Björk. Their alternative rock band, The Sugarcubes, was performing in Prague because of the city’s folk status as the birthplace of the sugar cube. But while they were in town, Sigurðsson made a pilgrimage to the Old Jewish Cemetery, where the legendary creator of the Golem of Prague had been buried more than four centuries earlier. After placing a stone on his grave, Sigurðsson asked the rabbi for help solving a personal problem, and in exchange, promised to bring the golem into Icelandic literature.
Today, Sigurðsson goes by the name Sjón. In 2013, when his surreal novels were first translated into English by Victoria Cribb, critics compared him to Borges, Calvino, and Kafka. Most of his books are less than 200 pages, but this week sees the publication of CoDex 1962, a labyrinthine epic that invites comparison to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Originally published as three separate novels in Iceland in 1994, 2001, and 2016, CoDex 1962 is Sjón’s fulfillment of the pact he made in the Old Jewish Cemetery almost three decades ago. Read more…
Wendell Lindsey is serving life prison for murdering his daughter. Maybe he did, or maybe he’s also a victim — of junk science, personal vendettas, weak investigation, and bad attorneys.

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | September 2018 | 15 minutes (3,859 words)
If given the choice to smell like whale excrement or delicate white flowers, few people would chose the first option. Bile, feces, vomit, and animal oils sound as though they would smell repulsive. The words conjure up scent memories of that time your dog released his anal glands on the duvet, or that summer you worked by the wharf and the August air was thick with the miasma of oily herring heads. Jasmine, on the other hand, sounds like a love song, a Disneyfied dream. Try, right now, to imagine the smell of blooming jasmine. Your memory, ill-equipped to locate scents in its baroque filing system, might pull up something syrupy sweet or softly floral. Is that how you want your body to smell?
Too bad: if you choose door number two, you’ll walk away reeking of sharp vegetal tones tempered by a slightly earthy, foul scent. Jasmine absolute is an oily, semi-viscid, dark amber fluid that is denser and more concentrated than jasmine essential oil. Essential oils come from distilled, boiled, or pressed plant matter, while absolutes are traditionally made through a processed called enfleurage, which involves submerging the delicate blossoms or spices in fat before extracting their fragrance molecules into a tincture of ethyl alcohol. While it’s a common ingredient in a natural perfumer’s tool kit, jasmine absolute smells strange: complicated, beautiful, not entirely pleasurable. It reeks of indole (rhymes with “enroll”), an organic chemical compound also found in coal tar, human feces, and decomposing bodies.
If you choose door number one, you’ll be blessed with the kiss of ambergris, a highly desirable natural substance that smells sweet yet rather marine, like vanilla and unrefined sugar mixed with seawater. The scent reminds me a little of the smell of my dog’s paws — pink and light and animal. It smells like cashmere feels. Smelling ambergris is an innate pleasure, one that even an infant would recognize as enjoyable, like the first sip of sweet milk.
For more than a thousand years, humans have been adorning our bodies with animal products like ambergris and putrid-smelling plant derivatives like jasmine absolute. We apply off-putting materials to our bodies to enhance and mask our natural scents. Like dogs that roll in deer carcasses, humans seek to change our olfactory emissions by borrowing from other creatures. It’s not always about simply smelling good: We want to smell complex, so that others will be compelled to keep coming back, like bees to a flower, to sniff us again and again, to revel in our scents, and draw ever closer to our warm, damp parts.
According to natural perfumer Charna Ethier, ambergris can smell like “golden light” or a “flannel shirt that has been dried on a clothes line on a warm summer day.” Although there are several types of ambergris (including gray, gold, and white), Ethier is referring to her own personal sample, which she characterizes as “soft, fresh, and ozonic.” Ethier is the owner of Providence Perfume Company in Rhode Island, and inside her well-stocked cabinet of olfactory curiosities, she keeps a single bottle of the precious stuff. Next to her 100-year-old cade oil (a foul-smelling liquid made from juniper trees, purchased at an estate sale) and below her collection of floral absolutes and herbal essences, she has stashed a bit of ambergris tincture. The clear glass vial contains a mixture of ambergris and alcohol that includes just 5 percent whale matter. In its pure form, this substance is a waxy gray ball of animal secretion, a floating fat-berg that is “more expensive than gold.” Unlike jasmine absolute, which plays a role in many of her perfumes, real ambergris is simply too expensive to use in a commercial product. “It’s considered the miracle ingredient for perfumes,” she says. “It makes everything better.”
It’s not always simply about smelling good: We want to smell complex, so that others will be compelled to keep coming back, like bees to a flower, to sniff us again and again, to revel in our scents, and draw ever closer to our warm, damp parts.
Ethier doesn’t use any synthetics in her perfume, nor does she use animal products, though animal scents are a traditional ingredient in perfumery. Not only are these compounds expensive, but true mammalian products like musk, civet, and ambergris often come at a cruel cost. Whales have been murdered for their oily blubber and concealed stomach bile, civets are caged and prodded for their fear-induced anal gland secretions, and musk is harvested from the glands of slaughtered deer. Many people know that perfumers build their trade on the graves of millions of tiny white flowers, but fewer people realize they also bottle and sell the byproducts of animal pain and suffering. Perfumers who use synthetic materials are exempt, in a sense, as are those who use found or vintage materials. Ethier’s ambergris is “quite old” and reportedly beach-found (“I hope it is,” she says). But even perfumes that use synthetic compounds or salvaged bile carry the whiff of death; the history of the industry is seeped in it, and that smell doesn’t wash out easily.
There’s a reason perfumers use these notes. They enhance the floral scents, undercutting lightness with a reminder of darkness. Animal products are the antiheroes in this drama — even when you hate them, you still, just a little, love them. That’s how siren songs work, and ambergris sings the loudest. Once, Ethier made a perfume using her most prized ingredients. She mixed 100-year-old sandalwood essence with ambergris tincture and frangipane and boronia absolutes, two flowers native to Central America and Tasmania, respectively. It was the first time she’d used ambergris, and this one-off perfume was so lovely that “it was like gold-washing something.” She remembers wistfully, “It was so beautiful.”
* * *
Smell is the most underrated and mysterious sense. In her 1908 autobiography, The World I Live In, Helen Keller called scent the “fallen angel.” “For some inexplicable reason, smell does not hold the high position it deserves amongst its sisters,” she wrote. Keller mapped her world by smell — she could smell a coming storm hours before it arrived and knew when lumber had been harvested from her favorite copse of trees by the sharp scent of pine. In contrast to touch, which she called “permanent and definite,” Keller experienced odors as “fugitive” sensations. Touch guided her; scent fed her. Without smell, Keller imagined her world would be lacking “light, color, and the Protean spark. The sensuous reality which interthreads and supports all the gropings of my imagination would be shattered.”
We don’t often think in terms of color and light when it comes to smell, perhaps because we have so few words for scent that we borrow from the lexicons of our other senses. Despite the fact that smell is our most ancient sense — our so-called “lizard brain” is also sometimes termed the rhinencephalon, literally the “nose brain” — it is also one that seems to elude language. “Smell is the mute sense, the one without words,” wrote Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses. “Lacking a vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasures and exaltation.” We’ve had eons to come up with words for the precise smell of fresh-turned earth or the exact scent of a blazing beach fire, and still the best we can do is earthy and smoky.
Perfumers have their own language, but their words have only recently begun to trickle down into popular culture through beauty magazines and blogs. Not only do perfumers and their superfans speak of absolutes, oils, and tinctures, but they can also rattle off compounds like coumarin and eugenol. A trained master perfumer (or “nose”) can pick out precise scents within a layered perfume. They don’t just call something foul — they can pick out the pungency of musk or the reek of tobacco, ingredients that are delicious in small doses but overwhelming when used out of balance.
In my quest to understand the appeal of seemingly repugnant ingredients, I spoke with doctors who study the nose, perfumers who feed the organ, and even a zookeeper who spends her days breathing in the pure, undiluted scent of civet discharge. While they had various theories as to why darkness seems to be an essential element of beauty, they all agreed on one thing: It’s all about context. In the right context, even the smell of death can be appealing. In the right context, vomit can be more desirable than gold. In the right context, with the right music playing in the background, you begin to root for the glamorous hit woman or the sardonic drug dealer.
They also agreed that sex is part of this equation, and it’s the easiest explanation to trot out. But perfumery is also about more than just smelling nice and attracting a mate. It’s about aesthetics, taste, and desire in a more general sense. We want to smell intoxicating, and truly intoxicating things are often a little bit nasty — they have an edge that cuts deeper than simple sensory pleasure. And despite how it may seem, encounters with the beautiful are rarely entirely enjoyable. If that were the case, Thomas Kinkade’s light-dappled cottages would be considered the height of fine art, and we would all walk around misted lightly with synthetic jasmine and fake orange blossom. Instead, we adore the luscious gore of Caravaggio’s canvases and dab our pulse points with concoctions containing the miasma of swamp rot, the cloying smell of feces, and the pungent, tonsil-kicking fetor of death. Beauty is sharp, it is intense, and it comes at a cost. Just as desire and repulsion walk through the same corridors of our minds, so too do beauty and destruction move hand in hand. Whenever you find something unbearably beautiful, look closer and you’ll see the familiar shadow of decay.
* * *
One of the first known perfumers in history was a woman named Tapputi-Belatekallim. According to clay cuneiform tablets dating back to 1200 BCE, Tapputi lived in ancient Babylon and likely worked for a king. The second part of her name, “Belatekallim,” indicates that she was head of her own household, in addition to holding a valued position at court. Thousands of years before the advent of the “SheEO,” Tapputi was leaning in and bossing around underlings. She was a master of her craft, and recognized as such by her peers. Much of what we know about her comes from secondary sources, but the process of distilling and refining ingredients to produce a fragrant balm — oil, flowers, water, and calamus, a reed-like plant similar to lemongrass — is described on surviving clay tablets. It’s miraculous how modern her scents seem — or rather, it’s surprising how little has changed. Tapputi used scent-extracting techniques like distillation, cold enfleurage, and tincture that natural perfumers still use today. She also mixed grain alcohol with her scents, creating perfumes that were brighter, lighter, and had more staying power than anything else available at the time. These scents may have played a religious role in ancient culture, but they may have simply been another way to prettify the body and please the senses.
Beauty is sharp, it is intense, and it comes at a cost.
Unfortunately, Tapputi’s story is a fragmented one — she’s possibly the first female chemist, and yet she’s been lost to history. There is much more evidence available about the perfumes of ancient Egypt, Persia, and Rome. In 2003, archeologists unearthed the world’s oldest known perfume factory in Cyprus. Archaeologists theorize that this mud-brick building and the perfumes it produced caused Greek worshippers to begin associating the island with Aphrodite, the goddess of sex and love. (Born from the magical remnants of the sky god’s testicles, which had been separated from his body and cast into the sea by Cronos, the Titan god of harvest, Aphrodite supposedly walked from the foaming waters of the sea and onto the beach at Paphos, an ancient settlement located on the southern coast of the island.) Analysis of the material found on-site revealed that these ancient perfumers were using plant-based ingredients like pine, coriander, bergamot, almond, and parsley, among others.
These perfumes all sound rather pleasant, don’t they? I can imagine dabbing almond oil mixed with a bit of bergamot on my wrists, catching a botanical draft of scent here and there as I move. It seems terribly obvious that people may want to smell like plants. Some of the earliest pieces of art represent flowers, leaves, and trees. Studies have shown that we crave symmetry on an unconscious level, and we’re drawn to color, so it makes perfect sense that flowers would hold our attention with their Fibonacci spirals and vivid hues. I can even understand why curiosity might compel someone walking along a beach to pick up a chunk of marine fat and sniff it. It’s a bit harder to understand the moment when medieval perfumers made the conceptual leap from smelling the glandular sacs of dead musk deer to dabbing it on their pulse points. Yet at some point, this must have happened, for starting after the Crusades, Europeans became obsessed with musk.
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Like many prized spices, fabrics, and luxury items, musk came to Europe from the Far East. Derived from the Sanskrit word for testicle, “musk” refers to the glandular products of small male Asian deer. These little sacs of animal juice were harvested from the bodies of slain deer and left to dry in the sun. In its raw form, musk smells like urine, pungent and sharp. But after being left to dry, musk develops a softer scent. The reek of ammonia fades, and it becomes mellow and leathery. It stops smelling like piss and begins to smell like fresh sweat, or the downy crown of a baby’s head. It gained a reputation as an aphrodisiac; according to some legends, Cleopatra used musk oils to seduce Mark Anthony into her bed. The size of musk molecules also contribute to its perfume popularity: Larger molecules oxidize slower, so musk’s comparatively large molecules last longer than other odors and allow it to extend the life of other scents. Its fixative property means musk is a base note in many perfumes, even ones that don’t smell overtly musky.
In 1979, musk deer were listed as an endangered species by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), so it’s no longer legal to use natural musk in commercial perfumes. However, Tibetian musk deer are still killed for their glands, and a brisk trade in poaching has resulted in some illegal musk showing up online. Musk is also used in some traditional Chinese and Korean remedies, which helps the substance remain one of the most valuable animal products on earth. In his book The Fly in the Ointment, Joe Schwarcz, director of the McGill University Office for Science and Society, points out that musk is “more valuable than gold.”
Civet is a more unknown fragrance, though it also appears frequently in perfumes. Made from the glands of a mammal that shares the name of the scent, civet is similar in structure to musk on a molecular level but smells even more animalistic, according to people who have actually sniffed it. “They have a general odor about them that is very pungent,” says Jacqueline Menish, curator of behavioral husbandry at the Nashville Zoo. Civets are uncommon zoo creatures. They are neither felines nor rodents, though they’re commonly mistaken for both. Although few visit the zoo just to glimpse these odd little nocturnal creatures, the Nashville Zoo has several banded palm civets because the zoo director “just loves them.” (You may have heard of civet coffee, a product made by force-feeding Asian palm civets coffee beans, then harvesting them from their poop. Society, it seems, has come up with several odd ways to make money from civet asses.) When they are startled, frightened, or excited, civets “express” their anal glands, and the greasy liquid “shoots right out.” The scent hangs in the air for days. “I guess I could see if it was diluted it might not smell as offensive,” Menish concedes. “But it can be really bad if it hits you.”
Unlike musk, civet can be collected without killing the animal, but it’s not a cruelty-free process. Civets are kept in tiny cages and poked with sticks or frightened with loud noises until they react and spray out their valuable secretions. Commercial perfumers no longer use genuine civet in their fragrances, but James Peterson, a perfumer based in Brooklyn, owns a very small vial of civet tincture. “It smells terrible when you first smell it,” he says. “But I have some that is five years old, and it gets this fruity quality as it ages. In a tincture, it gets this rich scent that works wonderful with florals.” On a few occasions, Peterson has used genuine musk or civet to make “tiny amounts” of specialty perfumes, and the resulting blends have an “intensely erotic draw.” Customers report that these dark and dirty smells are potent aphrodisiacs. “When it’s below the level of consciousness, that’s when it works best,” he adds.
The reek of ammonia fades, and it becomes mellow and leathery. It stops smelling like piss and begins to smell like fresh sweat, or the downy crown of a baby’s head.
Like musk and civet, ambergris comes from an animal, but making it doesn’t necessarily involve murdering whales. Whales have historically been killed for their bodily products, including their oil, spermaceti, and their stomach contents, but it’s more likely now that ambergris is beach-found since it is only produced by an endangered species, sperm whales. The waxy substance forms in the hindgut of a sperm whale to protect their soft interiors from hard, spiky squid beaks. According to Christopher Kemp, author of Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris, ambergris begins as a mass of claw-shaped horns that irritate the whale’s digestive systems. As the mass gets pushed through the whale’s hindgut, it grows and slowly becomes “a tangled indigestible solid, saturated with feces, which begins to obstruct the rectum.” Once it passes into the ocean, it begins to slowly mellow out. The black, tar-like wad is bleached by the ocean until it becomes smooth, pale, and fragrant. It ranges in color from butter to charcoal. The most valuable ambergris is white, then silver, and finally moon-gray and waxy. It’s believed that only 1 percent of the world’s sperm whale population produces ambergris. It’s very rare, very bizarre, and very valuable.
The human appetite for ambergris dates back to ancient times. The Chinese believed it was dragon spit that had fallen into the ocean and hardened, and the ancient Greeks liked to add powdered ambergris to drinks for an extra kick. King Charles II of England liked to eat ambergris with eggs, which was apparently a fairly common practice among the aristocracy in England and the Netherlands. It shouldn’t be surprising that people engaged in some light coprophagia — smell and taste are so deeply linked, and while I can’t attest to the taste of ambergris, I can say that it smells beguiling. Given the chance, I would sprinkle some silvery whale powder on my eggs, just to see what it was like. (It’s certainly no stranger than eating gold-coated chicken wings — another practice seemingly designed to destroy value by passing the desired object through a series of rectums until it reaches the inevitable white bowl.)
In perfume, ambergris is often used to boost other scents. It plays a supporting role rather than a starring one, for although the smell is fascinating, it isn’t very strong. It has an unearthly fragrance. It smells like the sea, but also like sweet grasses and fresh rain. It’s amazing that something made in the bowels of the whale could smell so pure. If you found fresh ambergris, midnight black and sticky and stinking, perhaps you wouldn’t want to eat it. But with distance and dilution, ambergris is transformed from animal garbage to human ambrosia.
* * *
Schwarcz’s book offers one reason why we’re drawn to these scents, citing studies that suggest people with ovaries be more sensitive to musk, particularly around ovulation. He cautiously speculates that musk might resemble chemicals produced in humans to attract potential mates.
Over the phone, he is even more wary of speculating about a possible evolutionary explanation for our fragrance preferences. “The sense of smell has been studied thoroughly with surprisingly little results in terms of what we actually know. It’s such a complicated business,” he said. “We don’t know why musk is more attractive to some people than others. We don’t know why it smells differently when it’s diluted, but we know that it does.” When I asked whether we like musk because we’re programmed to enjoy the smells of bodies, he was quick to turn our talk toward the “issue of pheromones, which “may not actually even exist at all” in humans, despite our desire to attribute various observed phenomenon to the invisible messengers. According to Schwarcz, much of what the general population knows about pheromones only applies to certain nonhuman species. For instance, boar pheromones are well understood, easy to replicate, and used by farmers to increase the farrowing rate amongst their stock. Some of the perfumes that boast “real pheromones,” like Jovan Musk and Paris Hilton’s eponymously named scent, may contain pheromone molecules — ones that pigs would find very enticing.
But where science fails to offer a satisfactory explanation, artists can step in, providing an illuminating tool to help understanding our relationship to desire and aesthetics. For perfumer Anne McClain, co-owner of MCMC Fragrances in Brooklyn, it is the tension between foul and sweet that elevates a fragrance from consumer product into the realm of art. This is key when it comes to repugnant ingredients, from indolic florals to musky secretions. The indecent element becomes a secret of sorts, a gruesome piece of marginalia scribbled alongside the recipe, visible to only those in the know but appreciated by all. The foulness whispers below the prettiness, and combined, these various elements create a scent that smells paradoxically clean and dirty, light and dark.
“Indole is what makes the scent of jasmine interesting,” she says. “It makes you want to come back and smell it again — it has an addictive quality to it.” Unlike citrus scents, which are one-note and rather simplistic, florals have an element of decay, a whiff of putridity. McClain rightfully points out that this is part of what makes flowers themselves attractive to bees and other pollinators. Corpse flowers famously smell like dead bodies, but so do many other blossoms, just to a lesser extent.
Plus, humans are by nature “just a little bit gross,” McClain says. Like civets, musk deer, and whales, we shit, we secrete, we mate, and sometimes we vomit. But we also give birth and create beauty, and for McClain, it’s this life-giving ability that links blossoms and humans. “I think there is a depth to anything that is made of life and creates life. There’s something inherently sexual in that,” she says. “Even though something like civet will smell gross on its own, it adds an element of reality.” When layered properly with other olfactory delights, this can create an evocative smell, one that you want to return to, to interrogate with your nostrils the same way you might pore over a painting. Through layering pleasure on top of disgust, perfumers can create something that resembles life — exquisite, fleeting, and mysterious.
* * *
Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine whose work has appeared in Art New England, Boston magazine, The Paris Review, The Hairpin, Eater, Jezebel, and The New York Times Magazine. She’s also the author of the book Handcrafted Maine.
Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Matt Giles
Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

“Why do we all not feel well? And what can we do about it?” asks GOOP, Gwyneth Paltrow’s much-mocked wellness empire. The answer might be “Visualize your aura and shove a rock into your vadge for good measure,” but it might also be “Get the medical community to realize how badly it’s failing women.” At The Baffler, Jessa Crispin wonders about the “curious feminist logic of GOOP” and how the internet is decentralizing and democratizing medicine, for better or worse.
This is, of course, the same internet that tells women their children’s autism is caused by vaccines and that Goop uses to distribute its theory that walking barefoot on the grass helps realign the electromagnetic fields of the body. It’s also the same internet I turned to when I was vomiting up the iron supplements the doctor prescribed for my chronic anemia. He refused to give me anything else, other than the suggestion to “eat more spinach,” but an online forum told me about the easily absorbed nettle tea, which I have been using effectively to control my anemia for years. It’s also the same internet that told me I had scabies or syphilis when really I had an allergic reaction to my soap, and the same internet that tells me my coffee beans carry a toxic mold and are slowly killing me…
Viewed against the sobering backdrop of Western medical history, the Goop turn in female self-treatment can be seen as more than just another jaded journalistic narrative about delusional women and their soft-headed disbelief in science. In important respects, it is also an attempt to wrest control and authority back from a medical community that has mistreated women for centuries. A male-dominated medical world is no longer the authority on the female body—I am, with the help of online message boards, Goop newsletters, and random Google searches for things like “why is my discharge like this” or “how do I get rid of wrinkles” or “can a person eat nightshades and not die.” We could be regressing, then, to something like the oral medical tradition of the medieval midwife, where knowledge is come across sporadically, where anecdote is given as much credence as experimentation, and the knowledge base is decentralized.

Anonymous | Longreads | September 2018 | 19 minutes (4,750 words)
An editor asked me for an essay about porches with an upbeat takeaway, and I thought about how porches let us navigate the zone between public and private life and connect. But I’d just sat on my porch in Texas and had conversations that sent me back inside, feeling scalded. My small talk had taken a dark turn, my fault. Most people can’t hear about trouble without suggesting a quick fix because they want you to feel better. I tried to write about porches and ended up writing about social life. I tried to write about social life and ended up writing about social media, where we also navigate the zone between public and private life and connect. Or don’t. On social media, our virtual porch, we converse with friends, friends of friends, the occasional somebody no one knows, and decide who to wave over and who to dodge. People to avoid weren’t easily detectable. I couldn’t tell except in meandering conversation. They seemed like people who might be companions, consolation. And they looked like me, white. My daughter is black.
***
An early inkling of trouble occurred on November 11, 2016, the first Friday night after the presidential election. She was two hours away, a college freshman in east Texas. While she was sleeping, her car was jumped on or slammed with a blunt instrument, painted with a slur (your first guess is correct), festooned with posters on which the slogan “Make America Great Again” had been altered to read “Make America White Again.”
The door to her college-owned student apartment was vandalized too. Other black students in the building woke to find their cars and doors vandalized. It seemed obvious that some white students, neighbors, had made note of black students coming and going, who lived where and drove what. Otherwise how could vandals (is that the word?) have known which cars and apartments to target? This inference might seem like overthinking it, a sin in the annals of self-help. But it was my first thought, and the first thought mothers of my daughter’s black college friends had too. Our children had been under surveillance, however inexpert, added to a list.
A friend: “But your insurance will cover it, right?”
Another: “Yes, we all feel bad the country is so misogynist it wouldn’t elect a woman.”
For months I’d watched as one candidate first descended into his campaign via an escalator, then deeper and deeper into auditoriums in small cities across America where black people were shoved and punched, sometimes at the candidate’s urging. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on February 1, 2016: “Knock the crap out of him. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.” About a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, on November 21, 2015: “He should have been roughed up.” Sometimes blacks were ejected for being black. In Valdosta, Georgia, on March 1, 2016, black college students with no plans to protest were removed as whites yelled, “Go home, nigger.”
Pundits called this “dog-whistle racism,” as in only dogs hear it and come running and so, it follows, only racists hear it and come running. But it wasn’t muted. My daughter was born in 1997, a time after name-calling and reserving spaces as white-only had diminished to the point that, as sociologist Lawrence Bobo found, a majority of white Americans believed racism was rare. By the time my daughter was 10, the term “post-racial” had gained currency. Social scientists began to study implicit, systemic inequality and those barely articulated prejudices by which, in Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s research, subjects describe themselves as not racist but explain lack of contact with people of color as “natural” and use terms like “unqualified” to describe them.
Eighteen years later, I worried my daughter wasn’t safe. Her property had been damaged. I hoped her corporeal self wouldn’t be. I hoped her incorporeal self wouldn’t be either, but concern for that shifted to the backburner. I was like the Ancient Mariner, who must have been good enough company once but can’t act normal now. As more bad events befell my daughter and people I knew, and people I ended up knowing, I ran into friends and neighbors whose lives proceeded as usual except for political outrage I shared, but theoretically not viscerally, and when they said “How are you?” en route to somewhere pleasant — like wedding guests on their way into a wedding — I detained them and recounted bad news.
My brain was overfilled with it and leaking.

Bradley Babendir | Longreads | September 2018 | 12 minutes (3,248 words)
At this point it seems self-evident that as the major technology companies like Facebook, Uber and Google continue to grow, they are gaining more influence over public life, while the ability of regular consumers or even governments to push back is diminishing. In Silicon States: The Power and Politics of Big Tech and What It Means for Our Future, a new book by Lucie Greene, the past and future consequences of this rapid change are laid out, and there’s plenty of bad news, from the decline of journalism to the rise of gender inequality, from endangered democracy at home to the new “tech imperialism” abroad.
Greene is a futurist for the in-house think tank at J. Walter Thompson, a historic advertising agency that is now a marketing communications company and a subsidiary of a multinational conglomerate, which has large and likewise historic accounts such as Unilever, Kraft, Nestlé and Kellog’s. Her professional focus is, as she put it, “connecting emerging cultural change in consumer sentiment to brand strategy” — that is, concerned more with stock futures than science fiction ones, and not typically the vantage point of someone you would expect to become a Cassandra warning against the deleterious effects of an entire industry on our civic life. Indeed, one could argue that throughout the 20th century and up to the present day, some of her company’s clients, or similar large multinantionals, have engaged in a great deal of political manipulation. But her argument — that the tenor of the tech companies’ rhetoric and goals are different, somehow more all-encompassing — is a compelling one. The book is a bracing read, and arguably her expertise makes her well-suited to write insightfully about the biggest brands with the most consumers.
Silicon States is a book fundamentally about the danger of concentrating so much power in so few hands. We spoke by phone about the people who have amassed huge amounts of wealth, the companies they run, what they’re doing with their money, and why they’re doing it. Read more…

Leah Dieterich | Vanishing Twins | Soft Skull | September 2018 | 21 minutes (4,145 words)
One-eighth of all natural pregnancies begin as twins, the book said, but early in pregnancy, one twin becomes less viable and is compressed against the wall of the uterus or absorbed by the other twin.
Of course, I thought. I lost my twin.
This was after I’d read all the other books. The books about sexuality. The books about marriage. The books about love. None of them comforted me like this book did.
The story followed a pair of identical twins who were struggling to grow up without growing apart. My husband and I were struggling with that too.
I read it in one day, in every room of the house, on my stomach, on my back, on my bed, in the yard. I didn’t worry about the ants scaling my thigh, or the black widows living under the outdoor furniture.
One-eighth. I tell people this statistic when I tell them I’m writing about my search for the twin I never had. The number makes me seem less crazy.
“Suspicion is a philosophy of hope,” Adam Phillips says in Monogamy. “It makes us believe that there is something to know and something worth knowing. It makes us believe there is something rather than nothing.” He’s referring to the suspicion that one’s partner is having an affair, but the same holds true for the existence of my twin.
I’ve always preferred being in the company of one other person to being in a group. I’d thought this meant I was antisocial, but maybe it’s a desire to return to the relationship I had with another person in the womb. That pre-person—my little mirror ball of cells.
Maybe my twin would have danced ballet too. I stopped when I was eighteen. Maybe my twin would have kept going.
Because of ballet, I spent a lot of time looking at my reflection. In class, we crowded each other to dance in front of the skinny mirror, the single panel in the wall of mirrors that inexplicably elongated the images of our bodies. The teacher tried to spread us out but it was no use. Our only other option was to lose enough weight to look skinny in any mirror, and we tried that too.
Twelve years later, I sit in the dark behind a two-way mirror with my ad agency colleagues, watching a focus group eat hamburgers and talk about how they taste. It feels deceitful to watch people when they think they are alone with their reflection.
We like to believe that a mirror shows our truest self, but it rarely does. If you’re right up against it, with your nose touching the glass, you don’t see anything at all.
That was the way I pressed myself to Eric. And Elena. And Ethan. I was too close and could not focus.
In all the articles, twins separated at birth always seem to share incredible similarities and quirks, no matter how differently they were raised. They hold their beer cans with just their thumb and index finger; they have moles on the left side of their rib cages. Neither of them likes ketchup.
I thought if I met someone with disgustingly fast-growing cuticles who liked the smell of burned toast more than anything in the world, it would prove I’d been missing my mate.
If my twin was identical, it would have been a girl, but if it was fraternal, it could have been a boy or a girl. All this is to say I didn’t know what I was looking for.
Giselle got a boyfriend at the donut shop where she worked and quickly experienced all of her sexual firsts without me. This threw off the comforting symmetry that had always made our friendship seem predestined. Suddenly I felt as if I were a foot shorter than she was. At sixteen, her parents allowed her to finish high school via correspondence courses so she could spend more of her day at the dance studio. She was gone. Jumped off the seesaw while I was still on it, letting me drop with tailbone-breaking speed to the dirt below.
Ever since we met in third grade, no one at school had uttered our first names separately. They were always linked with an and. Now there was an empty space next to that and, a vacancy. Sometimes the weather in that space was mild, just the breeze of her being whisked away. Other times it rained for days.
I needed to sandbag it.
But instead of filling this void, I chose to build a structure around it. I got up at 6:30 a.m., was at school by 7:25, drank a Diet Coke, ate a Granny Smith apple for lunch, and finished my homework during study hall before driving myself to the city for ballet. This schedule was a scaffolding around my terror of being alone.
Was it her I wanted? Him? The acts themselves? It was difficult to pinpoint the object of my jealousy. It was easier to imitate, so I got myself a boyfriend—a popular boy I snagged by fooling around with his friend to prove I was sexually available. It was an odd way to show my interest in him, but he was a teenager, and it worked. Anyway, I was just spackling the hole Giselle had left.
My boyfriend was a soccer player who wasn’t interested in ballet or any arts, but it didn’t matter. At the time, our mutual interest of sexual exploration was enough. He became part of my schedule too. We’d fool around from two to four o’clock in one of our bedrooms while our parents were at work. After that, I’d drive thirty minutes to my ballet school, stopping midway at a Dunkin’ Donuts near the regional airport to get an iced coffee, adding skim milk and three packets of Equal. This low-cal, high-caffeine cocktail typically sufficed to keep me awake during the drive. Ballet class ran from five thirty to seven, and after that we’d rehearse for whatever performance we were working on until about eight thirty. I suppose I ate dinner when I got home, but I don’t recall. In my memory, that part of the day drops o like a cliff.
Prior to the boyfriend, before I started spending my after-school hours giving long and poorly executed blow jobs and getting urinary tract infections from sex, I would eat snacks. Having a boyfriend took the place of those snacks. I no longer needed them.
We like to believe that a mirror shows our truest self, but it rarely does. If you’re right up against it, with your nose touching the glass, you don’t see anything at all.
And I got thinner. Da was all my Russian ballet teacher said as she poked my side, indicating she was pleased with my weight loss. We were always praised when we became less and less of ourselves.
The desire to dwindle was strong. It felt religious, cleansing, a penance for some sin I couldn’t pinpoint. At the same time, I felt like a contest winner. But I knew I couldn’t have done it alone. As I held the ballet barre, legs working furiously below the serene upper body, my teacher’s bony finger acknowledging my concavity, I attributed my success to having a sexual partner, a playmate who made it easier to not nourish myself.
In the 1950s, my ballet teacher had been the prima ballerina of the Kirov Ballet. She was the Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty, as well as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, but her signature role was The Dying Swan. It is a self-contained piece, a four-minute solo accompanied by piano and cello, depicting the last uttering movements of a dying swan. There is a flickery film of her dancing this piece on YouTube.
We often did The Dying Swan at the end of class. She tried to teach us how to die, but we were too young and too American. We were never doing it right. Nyet! she’d scream, and clap her hands for the pianist to stop. She’d shout corrections in French, our only shared language, and I’d translate for my classmates. And when language failed she was physical. She pulled on our arms and slapped our butts. When I think of her now, drawing her gnarled finger up the side of my ribs, she reminds me of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” wanting to eat me, though she rarely ate anything.
Vanishing Twin Syndrome. That’s what the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology calls it when a fetus in a multiple pregnancy dies in utero and is partially or completely reabsorbed by the surviving fetus.
This phenomenon has likely existed forever, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s, when ultrasounds became sophisticated enough to detect twins as early as five weeks, that doctors began having the unnerving experience of viewing twin embryos one month, only to find a singleton the next.
The term vanishing twin was coined in 1980, the year I was born.
In Lawrence Wright’s book Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are I read this: If the less viable twin is not consumed, it “exists in a kind of limbo, compressed by the other to a flattened, parchment-like state known as fetus papyraceus.”
Papyrus, like paper.
“Somewhere in the vicinity of twelve to fifteen percent of us—and that’s a minimum estimate—are walking around thinking we’re singletons, when in fact we’re only the big half.” That’s Wright quoting a geneticist, so of course I believe it. I believe in percentages, in pieces of pie. But I don’t like his choice of words: the big half.
I don’t want to be the big half. It sounds oafish and ugly.
And while it can’t be denied that the big half is the winner, the one who makes it out, it also means that losing someone is a consequence of growth.
Deadline.com: “VH1 Orders Competition Series for Identical Twins.” This headline appears in my browser. It is morning, and I’m in my office at the advertising agency. My friend Alex, who works in entertainment, has sent me this link because she knows I’m writing about my suspicion that I’ve lost a twin. Lately, everyone has been sending me these kinds of links, telling me about movies to watch and books to read, tagging me in the comments sections of news articles. It seems they’re all interested in twins now that they have someone to share their discoveries with.
I am alone in what used to be my shared office. On the other side of the room, the blinds are drawn and the desk is empty. I no longer have a partner, so there is no one to see that I’m reading this press release instead of working.
“VH1 is putting the bond between identical twins to the test with Twinning (working title), a 10-episode, hour-long competition reality series set to premiere next summer. The project, created and produced by Lighthearted Entertainment (Dating Naked), will feature 12 sets of twins going through challenges that will test their twin connection. (Reports of the incredible strength of the bond between identical twins include cases of siblings dating the same people, finishing each other’s sentences and feeling each other’s physical pain.) Through the challenges, sets of twins will be eliminated until one pair is named the twinners and walk away with the grand prize of $222,222.22.”
While I appreciate the cuteness of twinners, I’m annoyed by the grammar mistake. It should be “until one pair is named the twinner and walks away with the grand prize.”
A pair, while two people, is singular. This is the grammar I feel in my heart.
The fact that it’s called vanishing twin instead of vanished twin seems to indicate that the disappearance is perpetual, not completed, possibly not completable.
When one twin comes out and the other doesn’t, it’s over, in a certain sense. But grammatically, the vanishing twin is continually fading from existence. This makes it harder to mourn, because the disappearance never really ends.
Another friend tells me about a man she once worked with who had a pain in his ribs that wouldn’t go away. It turned out he had a cyst that needed to be removed. When they did the surgery, they found that the cyst was a teratoma—composed of bits of hair, teeth, and fetal bones—the remnant of a vanished twin. “He had his twin removed,” she said, and to underscore the reality of this unbelievable thing: “He took the day off work to have his twin removed.”
A pair, while two people, is singular. This is the grammar I feel in my heart.
I asked if she could put me in touch with him. I wanted to see if he’d ever wondered about having a twin or fantasized about it. Was the cyst a shock or did it somehow make sense? Did he ask to see what they’d removed? Did he have a scar?
“I don’t think he likes talking about it,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t have told you.”
“You have to meet Eric,” a ballet friend from high school told me over the phone. “You would love each other.” She was living in Colorado for the summer with her brother. Eric was their roommate.
“You’re exactly the same,” she said. “Artistic, smart, driven.” I was flattered. “You’re also both obsessed with your diets,” she said. I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment.
She built him up in such a way that I couldn’t imagine he’d be real. She told me he’d taught himself to write code during his last semester of college, even though he wasn’t a computer science major. She showed me his picture and said he’d done some modeling. He’d raced road bikes too, Tour de France–style. “He’s also the nicest person you’ll ever meet,” she said. It was too much. I didn’t believe one person could contain all these things.
A week after school ended, I flew to Denver, instead of home to Connecticut.
Would I know when I saw him? Would we finish each other’s sentences? Have moles in the same places?
Inside the apartment, the afternoon light was fading. We heard a key in the lock, and when the door opened, there was Eric, with his tan forearms and champagne-colored hair. Even the blue of his eyes was somehow golden.
He had my posture—straight-backed, as though he were being pulled by the crown of his head, skyward.
My friend and her brother got off the couch to hug him, and I stood up too. He extended his hand to shake mine, and the hem of his T-shirt sleeve hung away from his body near the tricep. I wanted to stick my finger between the fabric and the skin to see if I could do so without touching either.
There was still snow on the ground in Rocky Mountain National Park even though it was May, but we hiked in our sneakers because that was all we’d brought. Halfway up the mountain, I thought it would be fun to throw a snowball at my friend’s brother, whom I’d had a crush on in high school. I gathered a handful of snow, packed it into my palm, turned around, and threw it with all my might.
The snowball had barely left my fingertips when it hit Eric squarely in the face. He had been right behind me and had managed to turn his head at the last minute. His cheek was red and icy.
“That’s quite an arm you’ve got on you,” he said.
“I . . . don’t have great aim,” I said. “And I’m a lefty, so there was never a baseball glove that fit me in school, so . . .”
“I’m a lefty too,” he said.
The others were a few paces behind us. We kept hiking and when we got to the top, we all stood shoulder to shoulder looking down into the valley. I wanted to look at Eric’s face and was glad I had a reason to.
“Lemme see,” I said. He turned his face so I could see the red mark, but he kept his eyes on me.
We drank around the fire. Eric and I shotgunned beers, a trick I’d learned during my year in the Midwest. We both knew all the words to “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” and we rapped them with awkward bravado. When it got later and colder, our friends brushed their teeth and retired to the tent, while Eric and I went to his car to listen to music. He played me things I hadn’t heard: At the Drive-In, Digable Planets. We talked about our families, and while there were differences—his father was a teacher and mine a doctor; his mother went back to work (nights at a restaurant) when he was two and mine stayed home with us—there was one striking similarity: Both our parents had been married for twenty-five years. Most of our friends’ parents were divorced.
I don’t know how long we sat in the car. I was too infatuated to be tired. I wanted to touch his hand. I wanted to kiss him. But the armrest between us felt insurmountable. Eric said we should go to bed, so we quietly opened and shut his car doors. He found my hand in the darkness to lead me. His hand was warm and soft and firm and I felt a surge of relief. Hands, like kisses, could be bad, and ruin the chemistry. This is the perfect hand, I thought as we walked through the moonless night to the outhouse.
The trickle of my pee cut through the soundless air. I pulled my pants up, knowing Eric was waiting for me. The crotch of my underwear was cold. Wet with excitement.
We only had one tent for the four of us, and Eric and I lay beside our friends, who were either sleeping or pretending to. We began kissing and we did not stop, despite the siblings beside us.
We should have turned away and tried to sleep, but a magnetic energy held our bodies together as one body.
We spent the rest of the trip together. The siblings went about their business. My friend had to register for summer classes, and her brother was looking for a summer job. Eric was looking for a job too. Though he’d only graduated college a week ago, he couldn’t afford not to work, now that he didn’t have student loan money to cover his expenses. Luckily, it was the beginning of the first internet boom and anyone who could make a website could get a job.
One morning, Eric and I were alone in the apartment. After breakfast, he put on a collared shirt and I helped him tie his tie and wished him luck as he went off to an interview. It felt embarrassingly retro, as if I were a housewife sending my husband off to his job. But it was novel too, and I was grateful for a new role to play, now that I no longer had ballerina.
I was always looking for other lefties, watching people’s hands when they signed credit card slips at restaurants, threw balls, or cut with scissors. No one else in my family was left-handed, and neither were any of my friends, although this is not that surprising, since only ten percent of the population is left-handed.
“Both kinds of twins, fraternal and identical, have a higher rate of left-handedness,” Lawrence Wright says, “and some scientists . . . have suggested that left-handed singletons may be survivors of a vanished-twin pair.”
A card arrived in the mail from Eric. I opened it in my childhood bedroom and had to slow my eyes down to take in each part of the long rectangle. There was his tiny, almost illegible handwriting, and a collection of drawings he’d done in black ink and filled in with wide architectural markers. One drawing was of the Modular Man, a gestural outline of a man’s body created by the architect Le Corbusier, for scale in designs, and another was the Golden Spiral—a spiral drawn inside a rectangle whose length and height are proportionate to each other at a 3:2 ratio, the golden ratio. The math was sexy, because I didn’t fully grasp it, but also because it was rendered in muted golds and mauves, colors I was surprised a man had chosen.
I’d already sent him a card as well. Mine had a grid of squares I’d painted in watercolor. All but two were gray. We were the two matching red squares, I was trying to say. Everything else seemed drab by comparison.
Once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?
The next month, Eric came to see me at my parents’ house in Connecticut, where I was living for the summer. Any reservations my mother had had when I told her I’d fallen in love with someone on my one-week trip to Colorado disappeared when she met him. “He never stops smiling,” she said.
Eric hadn’t been to many museums. He’d been to national parks; he’d been to Indian reservations. During the week we spent together in Colorado, he told me about the tiny loom his dad bought him as a kid, and the beadwork he’d done on it. He pointed to a sculpture in the corner of the apartment that he’d made in architecture school—a red sawhorse with a suspension bridge made of piano wire hanging below it.
Eric had never considered majoring in art even though he loved drawing and painting. Like mine, his parents had directed him toward something you can make money at.
We’d lain on the futon in his living room after the first time we’d had sex, while the siblings graciously slept in the bedroom. I told him that in eighth grade, I’d considered becoming a performance artist instead of a dancer, after seeing a piece by Janine Antoni on a museum field trip. I recalled my twelve-year-old self watching a video of her performance, which involved using her head to paint the entire floor of the gallery with black hair dye. There was a video screen at the entrance to the gallery where she’d done the performance and a velvet rope across the doorway to prevent people from walking on the piece. I leaned into the room, my waist on the rope, trying to take it all in. The white walls, the large black strokes covering the wood floor. I would have liked to touch them, to trace my finger along their semicircular arcs, to get down on my knees and bend my head to the floor, to feel how it might have felt to do the performance, hair heavy and dripping, butt in the air, dragging the bucket of hair dye alongside me.
I took Eric to New York City because he’d never been, and suggested we go to the Guggenheim, knowing he’d studied the Frank Lloyd Wright building in architecture school. We didn’t know anything about the exhibition that was going on, only that it featured the work of a video artist from the ’70s and ’80s called Nam June Paik. We walked up and up through the museum, curving ever so slightly to the left, spiraling skyward.
We’d seen paintings and photos in art history classes, and some sculpture too, but this kind of art was new to us. Large sculptures made of old TVs buzzed with an aurora of colors, lava lamp cubes with no stories.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” Eric said. “I came to see the building. I hadn’t even considered there would be something inside it.”
Years later, he told me that this was the moment he decided to become an artist.
He sat on the edge of my bed, the one I’d slept in since I was five years old, and I went to him, putting my hands on his knees and parting them, to fit my body into the V they created.
“I love you,” I said.
We’d only known each other a month. But this I love you was in my mouth, and if I was going to speak, it was the only thing that was going to come out.
“I love you too,” he said.
The ligature œ has a special sound, the “open-mid-front-rounded vowel,” which is something between an uh and an er. In French, you need it to make words like sœur and cœur. Sister and heart. It is taught to schoolchildren as o et e collés—o and e glued together.
I identify with this ligature. I see it and think that’s me, though I realize this is strange. Why not my initials? The monogram that graced my grade-school L.L.Bean backpack?
In French class I had cast myself as Odile, the doppelgänger. The O looking for her E.
I had found him.
It’s like we’re the same person. We finish each other’s sentences. This is what we’ve been taught to desire and expect of love. But there’s a question underneath that’s never addressed: once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?
***
Excerpted from Vanishing Twins: A Marriage, copyright © 2018 by Leah Dieterich. Reprinted by permission of Soft Skull Press.

Laura Esther Wolfson | An essay from the collection For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors | University of Iowa Press | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,516 words)
When I was a very young woman, I spent many months working and traveling in the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War would soon take many people by surprise. I was far from my mother and from everyone else who mattered. In the Soviet hinterlands, I met a woman I’ll call Nadezhda. She treated me like a daughter. She had none of her own. She clearly wished she did.
Reader, I married her son.
—————
There was more to it than that, of course. I met the son first, and, in the usual way, he brought me home to meet his parents. And the son was actually delightful. When he spoke, he grew irresistible. Small children (there were many in his extended family) were especially susceptible to his charms. They would wrap themselves around his legs when he stood up from a chair to keep him from leaving.
Those months spent in another language, an experience both freeing and confining, the tectonic historical shifts I witnessed at close range — these things changed me. That the changes might fade with time was unthinkable. I needed a way to bring it all back home.
I was too big to wrap myself around his legs the way the children did.
—————
I hopped over to the States to take care of some personal business, then circled back to Nadezhda, her son, and the rest of the family in those hinterlands I mentioned, which were in Soviet Georgia. Nadezhda had just become a grandmother by her other son, who was the younger by four years. The household now consisted of Nadezhda and her husband, the baby and its parents, the older son (my intended) and me.
Julia, the baby’s mother, complained to me about what I could see for myself: the family did not welcome her. The pregnancy had been an accident, their second. I say their second, but both mistakes were of course seen as entirely hers.

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories (and some of her friends’ favorites, too).
Tonight the subject is…ghosts. (Cue “WoooOOOOOOOOOOOooooo” sound effect.) Ghost stories seem to point to a reality beyond our own — or, at the very least, to an expanded understanding of what exactly this plane of existence encompasses. And from a philosophical perspective, I’m half Mulder and half Scully, which means I can find deep spiritual fulfillment from things that I’m 100% sure are total bullshit.
I was raised in rural western New Jersey, right across the Delaware River from the beautiful farmlands and forests of eastern Pennsylvania. Both sides of the river are dotted with 17th and 18th century homes and outbuildings, and many people speak of ghosts as matter of factly as my old neighbors in New Mexico speak of aliens: Maybe they hadn’t personally seen one, but their cousin sure did, and he wasn’t nuts. I’ve never seen a ghost, but I, too, have met many reasonably rational people who report ghost stories. I had a friend whose mother, a salt-of-the-earth woman with common sense and a practical nature, told me with no tongue in cheek about the ghost that lived in their farmhouse.
“I think it’s a little boy,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I get that sense. He’ll leave cabinet doors open. I can feel when he’s in the room and when he isn’t. When we first bought the house, I sensed him here. I could hear him rattling around in the basement. After the cabinet doors thing kept happening, I said out loud, ‘Hey, we don’t mean you any harm. We are going to fix some things in the house but we aren’t going to mess anything up or tear anything down.’”
She said she felt things were very nice after that, and that he still did the cabinet thing sometimes and she would say “Hello!” out loud when he did. “Maybe he’s lonely,” she said. “He’s mischievous but not mean.”
Like my friend’s mother, I was raised Roman Catholic. My relationship with the religion today is tenuous at best — I dislike corruption and mass sexual assault in any internationally franchised corporate entity, whether or not they get nonprofit status due to centuries of political influence — but I give credit to my loving Irish-Catholic father for teaching me an important lesson about belief. (My father, it must be stated, is also not a fan of homophobia, financial misappropriation, abuse, or incense.) Along with giant curly hair, he passed on to me a nearly prayerful awe for science. But his approach to spiritual belief — and belief in spirits — is deeply respectful, more so than my own. He said, “I think it would be arrogant to assume we know everything about this world and if other worlds exist. We don’t know what happens after we die. Maybe elements of energy or what we call a soul do stick around. And I do believe people who say they’ve seen things. Whether or not they were real ghosts, I can’t say.”
My religious background and the relatively open-minded attitude of my parents also influenced my curiosity about telekinesis, astral projection, astrology, clairvoyance, and the bestselling Time-Life “Mysteries of the Unknown” books. It certainly vaulted me in the general direction of witchcraft. Though I am a member of no religion and have a healthy skepticism about many things, I retain the desire for spiritual fulfillment and a connection with the divine. I also like ritual; I recently paid someone a couple hundred bucks to do a healing ceremony with me in a beautiful old house in Los Angeles. (It involved tarot, prayer, and creating a spell bag. I got to write down a list of things and then set that list on fire. It was great! Ten out of ten, would recommend.)
There are many genres of paranormal tale, and I believe the greatest of these is the ghost story. Do we see the people who’ve died before us? Is this simply wishful thinking? And if it is wishful thinking, why do some people report terrifying apparitions none of us would ever wish to see? Is this a collective human tendency to hallucination, or mental illness, or are ghosts really real? I don’t know, but I do know I’ve gotten to read some very good stuff on the subject.
Wen leads with three anecdotes about women who believe they may have captured images of ghosts via iPhone camera. Wen herself is one of these examples, and she does a medium-deep dive into why folks in our modern world still believe in specters and ghouls.
Recent surveys have shown that a significant portion of the population believes in ghosts, leading some scholars to conclude that we are witnessing a revival of paranormal beliefs in Western society. A Harris poll from last year found that 42 percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts. The percentage is similar in the U.K., where 52 percent of respondents indicated that they believed in ghosts in a recent poll.
Wen cites examples from Asia and mainland Europe, and consults scholars and scientists to figure it all out. By the end of the article, I came to the conclusion that there’s simply something wrong with the iPhone camera and the way it captures images, and that it was probably something notorious asshole Steve Jobs knew about and couldn’t fix.
The headline alone is hilarious. Before reading this article I had no idea who Brian Cox was, but his photo told me this dude was wild, because he is giving us “deeply-moisturized Mads Mikkelsen on a casual science journey” realness. I’d also heard of the Large Hadron Collider, probably on an episode of Big Bang Theory or in an article I skimmed, but I didn’t know what the hell it was either. Now I do!
The LHC is the biggest particle accelerator ever built. It is includes a huge ring of superconducting magnets and accelerators that fling particles around, sending them into each other at such speed that they can be used to understand some of the most fundamental properties of the universe. In doing so, scientists can find out how elementary particles interact and behave, and understand how they work to compose the world that we see around us.
Sounds dope. What does all this have to do with ghosts? Well, Brian Cox, who is a TV-friendly professor at the University of Manchester, thinks the LHC would’ve seen a ghost if ghosts were real. It hasn’t, so ghosts are not real. Also important: Cox has a Beatles haircut, very on-brand for Manchester. And he was in a band, much like my friend Brian, who is a physicist but also half of the hilarious band Ninja Sex Party. Maybe they hang out.
Oh, Cox also has a podcast called the Infinite Monkey Cage, with which I plan to become obsessed. So he said some smart-sounding thing about all this on his show, and fellow TV-friendly scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson was all, “Friggin’ excuse me?” Except what he actually said was, “If I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts.” And Cox was like, “Yes.” Anyway, I’m going to become a Brian Cox fan, probably.
Lauren Oliver seems like a really neat person. She’s also a talented author. And while my columns here are reading lists and I don’t usually link to other lists, I’ll make an exception here. Oliver collects her favorite ghost stories, and I’m terribly embarrassed to say I’ve read none of them. I’ve certainly seen Kubrick’s screen adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, and I know it has key differences from the book. And I’ve seen any number of film, stage, and TV versions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Anyway, I’ve got to get my shit together and check out all of her recommendations before I myself am dust and ashes, at which point I’ll pass on to my next life, or stick around this plane as a lingering ghost, or simply be dead and gone. Regardless of what happens, I doubt I’ll have much time to read.
Robson opens with an anecdote about a naked Winston Churchill encountering the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. I am here for any and all naked Churchill stories, and to put it in the lede is a bold and brave move, so probably this article should get whatever the British Pulitzer is called. (It should be called the Bareass Churchill.)
His supposed contact with the supernatural puts Churchill in illustrious company. Arthur Conan Doyle spoke to ghosts through mediums, while Alan Turing believed in telepathy. Three men who were all known for their razor-sharp thinking, yet couldn’t stop themselves from believing in the impossible. You may well join them. According to recent surveys, as many as three quarters of Americans believe in the paranormal, in some form, while nearly one in five claim to have actually seen a ghost.
Read on for information on damage to visual processing centers in the right hemisphere of the brain, symptoms of epilepsy, and other reasons you might think you’ve seen a ghost when you haven’t. Turns out sometimes your brain tries to fill in missing information when, for example, you catch a glimpse of something unidentifiable in low light. Also turns out there are no more Churchill naked tales in this article, but you should still read it.
There are so many delightful stories here. I’m highlighting one from Connecticut, our nation’s dullest state, as a reward for being a nice place to stop for a pee at the many Dunkin’ Donuts shops between Boston and New York.
In 1970, famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren were called to combat the spirit of “Annabelle,” a demonic presence attached to a giant Raggedy Ann doll. For weeks the doll had thoroughly freaked out its owner, Donna, moving from room to room, leaving handwritten notes, and even attacking a friend who suggested Donna get rid of the doll, choking him in his sleep. Finally, a priest exorcised the doll and the Warrens locked it away in a special case designed to check its malevolent influence. But even that wasn’t enough to save one brash visitor to the Warrens’ museum, who reportedly taunted the doll and died in a motorcycle crash on his way home.
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In high school, my mom and her sister threw a party when their mom was away. My football-playing, pot-smoking, drag-racing (not in the RuPaul way, sadly), respectful-of-ghost-believers dad (remember him?) showed up with his giant cloud of curly red hair and found her Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls, and proceeded to arrange them into a coital tableau to make his dumbass football bro friends laugh. My mom was enraged and embarrassed because she was trying to impress some guy and my dad was stealing focus. The point is, adolescent boys are gross and my mom wouldn’t go out with my dad for another year.
I’d tie it back into spectral ghosts but I keep picturing Raggedy Ann humping Raggedy Andy at a hormonal teen house party in Bound Brook, New Jersey in 1973 and now I’m snort-laughing on a flight to Dallas. Because for me, the most compelling part of ghost stories will always be the tales of who we used to be. Pantomime doll sex is just a bonus.
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Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs, DC Trip, Great, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group,” which she also wrote.
Editor: Michelle Weber
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