Search Results for: Scientific American

The State We Are In: Neither Here, There, nor in Heaven

Image courtesy of Madhushree Ghosh. Illustration by Carolyn Wells.

Madhushree Ghosh | Longreads | May 2021 | 16 minutes (4,261 words)

Seventeen years ago, I receive the call most immigrants dread. It is inevitable, and yet. The call announces that my Baba, my indefatigable, extroverted, positively enthusiastic father, was felled by a massive cardiac arrest. On a heart that was the most giving one among all the people I’ve known. Life in America at that second continues without a ripple. Only, my life changes, divided into before-the-call and after-the-call.

I ask my now-ex. “Will you come with me?” — like a child.

Awkwardly, he says, “Do you want me to?” — like he has an option and he could escape this uncomfortable moment. I call him my now-ex for a reason.

“My Baba is dead,” I say mournfully. As if saying it over and over would make it real. It wasn’t real. It still isn’t.

Journalist Aman Sethi talks about the burning funeral pyres that light up India’s cremation grounds in the New York Times. With over 300,000 new daily infections and over 21,000 dead in the last week in April, the pyres are lit in the parking lots of crematoriums. Author Rani Neutill writes about the pyres and her own journey back to cremate her mother five years ago. We both acknowledge these images transport us back to our own trauma of losing our parents, our loved ones. PTSD all over again.

***

On an August evening last year, now Vice President Harris tells the world, “Family is my uncles, my aunts and my chittis.” — as she accepts the Democratic nomination. I — and I am sure, millions of Indians, Indian Americans like me — weep with unbridled joy. To me, this kvelling was surprising, because I didn’t realize the depth of unbelonging I had felt. I have lived in America longer than in India, my birth country. I’m not even Tamil, and yet, that word, “chitti” — younger sister of an aunt, mausi, mashi, moushi in other Desi languages — reverberates in bursts of validation all through our immigrant communities. Two months later, author, host, and activist Padma Lakshmi notes what that ripple effect would be when a woman of color is vice president. Padma articulates what we all felt — we may not agree with everything Vice President Harris said/did, but we do like what she represents. We are hopeful.

As Indian Americans who have lived most of our lives outside our birth country, we abide by unwritten rules. We work hard, we internalize racism by being “model” immigrants. We follow American rules and norms, in effect, we try to create very large waves of “good immigrants.” We sympathize with other people of color but try not to draw too much attention to ourselves, except when we are excelling at academics, Spelling Bees, or inventions. To say we have internalized our colorism and racism is minimizing what we feel — we try so hard to “fit in.”

***

For Hindus, death is the final stage of life, the next journey where the soul travels different levels of earth, the nether lands, and on to heaven. The concept of reincarnation is an idea one grows up on, even if we have moved far away from it.

It takes me almost 36 hours to get to my Baba. A layover in Kuala Lumpur watching a somewhat famous Bollywood star hamming it up for his fans in the lounge, waiting for Didi, my sister to join at the airport connection area, both of us now fatherless, rudderless. I do not remember those 36 hours. I remember every moment of those 36 hours.

In the lounge, waiting for Didi, my sister to join at the airport connection area, both of us now fatherless, rudderless. I do not remember those 36 hours. I remember every moment of those 36 hours.

When we reach Chittaranjan Park, the Bengali neighborhood of middle-class former refugees of the 1947 Partition of India, my Ma is already waiting, eyes swimming in tears, but a hopeful smile on her tired lips. Her daughters are home. She isn’t alone in her grief anymore.

The house is filled with neighbors and strangers. Everyone looks at Didi and me, expecting us to collapse, weep, wail, because only a frantic acknowledgment of loss matters to the neighbors. Didi and I don’t cry, though we hug our Ma despite us not being a hugging family.

The neighbors want to know, “Who will give mukhagni?” — only menfolk are allowed to go with the dead to the cremation grounds. Only sons or designated male family members are allowed to light the pyre, mukhagni (adding fire to the mouth of the dead). Women are second-class, not permitted. Women are to bear children — souls may get attached to them when they return from the cremation grounds — not allowed, not allowed.

Didi tells the crowd and to no one in particular, “Ma will give mukhagni. We will be there with her.”

I hear the collective soft gasp of horror. But no one says anything. The Ghosh daughters are foreign-returned, with Western ideas. They don’t see how wrong this is. How men and women aren’t equal.

We have my father to cremate. We have no time to worry about what the neighbors think.

We have my father to cremate. We have no time to worry about what the neighbors think.

***

In a country that brought in immigrants and slaves for centuries, Indians are the “good” ones, who are still shocked in the ‘80s when the Dotbusters attack them in Jersey City. “We are Americans too,” we say, the hatred is incomprehensible.

Post-9/11, the first immigrant to be gunned down in Mesa, Arizona, isn’t a Muslim but a Sikh. Balbir Singh Sodhi is killed at the gas station he managed by a man who didn’t want “towel heads” in his country. As Indians who give up their birth country’s citizenship when we become U.S. citizens, we gulp down that discrimination, that unnamed fear, to pay taxes, buy property, wave the U.S. flag, vote in elections, because we have earned it. We are model citizens, even when we remain entwined with what our birth country does. What we become is casual observers of what’s happening in “desh,” but very involved in the American way of life. We choose, because we are made to.

***

As the years go by in a country not our own, we spend time teaching non-Indians what India represents. Soon it is descriptions of the festivals, the cuisines, the food, our saris, politics, and minimizing how much cricket is a religion. We minimize because it’s easier to do that than push Americans to explore cultures other than American. We minimize sports, religion, food, life.


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But then, when we interact with Indians in India, our attitudes are of condescension toward those we left behind, mixed with cultural respect for elders as we were taught. We roll our eyes at WhatsApp Good Mornings and rose gifs from family and classmates pinging at midnight. We send back things like Costco cashews, or thick socks for the family, and college advice for future generations. We are stuck in the decade we left desh — for me it’s the ‘90s, the advent of Madhuri, Rani, Shahrukh, and revenge movies.

We still hate the social media forwards, but surreptitiously sign up for Signal because the WhatsApp gang told us to. However, we dare not leave the high school group of middle-aged classmates because they connect us to our long lost childhood. We post pictures of dishes we’ve created during the pandemic, but secretly, we crave the spicy paapri-chaat mix of crunchy goodness from the stall next to the bus stop at Delhi University. We scroll online sites for the Desi dhurrie, spices, fabrics. We’re more up to date with the politics from desh than ever.

After a few decades in America, we miss the things we consider ours. We may return “home,” armed with U.S. citizenship because we have the freedom to do so. But lately, we go home, not because we can afford to but because we’ve reached a stage in life where our people are getting older, sick, or dying. Guilt that we abandoned our parents, our extended family, our home for better lives in America, is what usually guides us back. But even then, we visit for two weeks at most, because work in America beckons like an angry, righteous, and indignant spouse.

But lately, we go home, not because we can afford to but because we’ve reached a stage in life where our people are getting older, sick, or dying. Guilt that we abandoned our parents, our extended family, our home for better lives in America, is what usually guides us back.

***

In 2004 when Didi and I get to the Lodhi cremation grounds, we are part of a handful waiting. The priest and the “body handlers” ask for cash to expedite the services. They speak only with the menfolk who accompany us. When we go in, with Baba — his body clad in a new dhoti and kurta hurriedly bought to make him look good on his last journey on a flat wooden bed covered with marigolds and rajnigandha — Baba looks like he’s sleeping. We sprinkle him with his favorite aftershave, as if we want him to arrive at the heavenly gates like it’s his first day at his new job.

We sprinkle him with his favorite aftershave, as if we want him to arrive at the heavenly gates like it’s his first day at his new job.

The priest says the prayers that guide the soul on its journey. They ask us to throw flowers at the body. They sprinkle ghee all the while chanting shlokas that mean nothing to us. Then they ask Ma to hold a bunch of incense, and place them on Baba. She does, howling, because among the Ghosh survivors, she knows what comes next. They light camphor and place it near Baba’s head. Handing a small fragrant sandalwood piece, they tell Ma, “Isko yahaan lagaaiyeh.” — put this here, pointing at Baba’s chest. I know they mean his mouth. Mukhagni. Fire to the mouth.

Handing a small fragrant sandalwood piece, they tell Ma, “Isko yahaan lagaaiyeh.” — put this here, pointing at Baba’s chest. I know they mean his mouth. Mukhagni. Fire to the mouth.

Ma does that. Didi and I hold her between us. Those cries haunt me. They will haunt me till I die. The wood bier trundles away from us as if he’s on a makeshift train ride. I did not realize that would be the last time I’ll see Baba. The crematorium fire roars like a hungry dragon at the far end. Baba enters the flames, the orange fire taking over our world.

That is the last time my family is together.

***

The Great Pause has thrown that nostalgia out like trash. The vaccines cannot be developed fast enough. Being part of the scientific community gives me the privilege of receiving the Moderna vaccine within the first month of 2021. I haven’t seen my extended family and friends in India for over three years — life, then work, and then the pandemic happened. Staying alive in a pandemic has been the reason to stay put.

My life, as it is for many of us immigrants, revolves around phone calls to India early on weekend mornings. India, roughly half a day ahead of us, is also used to those calls. There were times when those calls were short, maybe 10 minutes, our eyes on the clock indicating the $2/minute price on a calling card. Not anymore. Our privilege is calling our cousin for a masur dal vada recipe. Our privilege is us tweeting anti-Indian government comments without concern for whether our families will be harassed by Modi-bhakts. Our privilege is that we are Americans and our bravado too, is American.

***

India watches us in 2020 grappling with the virus racing through New York, L.A., Texas, and Florida like the California fires usually ravage our canyons, jumping highways, towns, and roads resembling acrobatic dragons.

“Ah, we can’t afford shutdowns. We had the BCG vaccine, we’re immune,” my former classmates say, noting why the TB vaccine may lead to a lower coronavirus infection rate.

The first wave doesn’t phase India. It’s Modi’s India — brash, young, arrogant, and complacent. In May 2021, the Lancet notes the government’s response of “[f]ully opening society with unrestrained crowding, mass gatherings, large scale travel, and lack of personal protective measures such as masks” gave the public a false sense of healthcare and vaccine security — that the pandemic had passed India by, much like the first wave.

Madhushree Ghosh’s high school classmates.

During the first and many waves in America meanwhile, we stay home. “Hunkering down” is a phrase I never want to hear again. Then religious places, movie theaters, stores, and restaurants shut down. The owners and workers protest.

Our Indian families and friends find the outrage amusing, “Ah, you’re all such rule-followers!” The condescension we had shown Indians as green card holders, as Indians who’d escaped to a better life, returns against us with a vengeance. The public, our extended families, and friends laugh at our caution.

“Yes, but this will contain the virus,” I counter.

“Sure, but in India, we’re so many people, nothing will work. We’re done with the pandemic here, Madhu,” my WhatsApp classmates opine.

***

During the first wave, in 2020 at the end of March, a 21-day lockdown is established by the Modi government to curb the virus. Over 120 million migrant workers left stranded, walk back to their villages and homes, making it a migration ten times larger than when Hindus and Muslims moved between British-divided India and Pakistan during the 1947 Partition. The Desis who can stay home are the privileged ones.

Indian-Americans have our own lockdown issues to handle. Beside a few articles, tweets, prayers, and thoughts, we don’t worry about the migrants. A very well-known American activist tells me that Americans get “crisis-fatigued” quickly, and not to expect them to think much about issues outside of America.

During a WhatsApp call, architect and high-school friend Anuj Arya says, “Migrants who I’ve worked with as daily wage construction workers, can’t survive without their wages. If they live in a 20X20 foot space with 10 more people, one of them getting COVID means the rest of them do too.”

He adds, “A COVID QPCR test is 1500 rupees (about $20). It’s beyond their reach.”

***

When the second wave hits India in April 2021, no one is prepared. Not the government. Not the healthcare system. Not the people.

When the second wave hits India in April 2021, no one is prepared. Not the government. Not the healthcare system. Not the people.

A country of 1.3 billion is now gasping for air. By April 21st, 2021, the oxygen requirement is over 8000 metric tons per day. India, as per the government, produces 7127 tons daily. People aren’t dying because of the virus. The COVID-compromised patients are dying of suffocation.

***

We sit outside the crematorium in October, watching Baba’s remains burn at high heat. The chimney above the oven spews out hot carbon air.

“That’s my Baba in the air,” I think, feeling nothing.

A few hours later they call us.

They tell us, “Hold your palms to receive the ashes.”

Didi and I hold the clay matka with the ashes and bones. It is harsh, real, immediate. There aren’t pretty urns priced according to your financial ability. It’s a reddish clay pot, with gray ashes. A priest-helper adds, “Yeh dekhiya, your babuji’s nerves are connected at the nabhi.”

Baba’s nerves are knotted near the navel — which never burns completely. This is why Hindu philosophy says we are connected to our ancestors through our nabhi, navel. This is added to a separate dish, covered with another clay plate. We are to take it to the Ganges, the holy river that will connect my father’s soul to the gods. Much as we don’t believe any of it, we do what we are told to.

Didi and I head to the Yamuna river in her best friend’s car. My father’s ashes rest on my lap. The clay pot is still hot from the crematorium. It is surreal and yet, here we are. Here we are.

We get out of the car close to the Yamuna, a tributary that connects to the Ganges. The river is thick with grease, decaying animal corpses, feces, and industrial effluents. The smell is nauseating and yet, Hindu religion tells us this river will connect Baba to the gods. And who are we to deny that?

The river is thick with grease, decaying animal corpses, feces, and industrial effluents. The smell is nauseating and yet, Hindu religion tells us this river will connect Baba to the gods. And who are we to deny that?

Ma gets out of the other car, her arthritis makes her older than she is. She waits silently for us as Didi and I climb over rocks slick with dirt, shit, and dead animals. Didi looks ahead, one step at a time, no words. I follow. This isn’t what Baba would have wanted. This is all we can give him.

The priest stands next to us, chanting hymns. “Put the ashes here,” he points.

Didi lets the pot float. We have the nabhi in its clay dish. He points at it and tells me to throw it inside the turgid river. I do.

“Walk, walk! Don’t look back,” the priest says like we are suddenly in an adventure movie.

It must have something to do with the soul latching onto live people. I don’t know. I don’t care. I want to look back, but I don’t.

At the car, my now-ex says, “Uff, that river sucks, doesn’t it?” — like a naïve American would.

I ignore him. My Baba is dead.

***

Twelve months after the first wave, before the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela encourages millions to congregate at Haridwar, near the Ganges river bank, the B.1.617 double mutant is already circulating among the people. The Mela is held every 12 years, but the Hindutva nationalist government appeases Hindu astrologers to allow a super spreader event to happen a year earlier. On April 1st, millions descended. The Mela was stopped two weeks later. A double mutant with an exponentially increased infectivity rate has now taken over the entire country — larger metropolitan cities like Delhi reached a COVID positivity rate of 30% in 12 days. Only 9% of the total population has been vaccinated.

On WhatsApp group messages, I now see posts about where one can buy more oxygen, or how to kill the virus by drinking water. Vaccine hesitancy, and misinformation circulates as rampantly as the virus through uneducated guesses, pro-government media rumor mills, and government silence on the total failure of the hospital and healthcare system. There’s a vaccine shortage which was expected to abate by May 1. It hasn’t.

A month ago, citizens and the Indian government were complacent enough to not mandate masks, nor ban large gatherings. The political rallies to pander to the public and gain votes took place like 2021 was a normal year.

***

On my high-school and middle-school WhatsApp groups, there are no rose gifs anymore, nor are there midnight pings of “Good morning!” The threads are somber, humming with stress, slow panic, and calls for help. The only requests are pleas for oxygen cylinders and hospital beds in Delhi suburbs. We hear of patients gasping for breath in hospital hallways and parking lots, dying in ambulances. Neighbors help neighbors cremate their loved ones.

A relative dies in Hyderabad and his family waits for hours to get the paperwork completed before he is hurriedly cremated. Crematoriums and cemeteries operate beyond capacity. Families wait for hours at cremation grounds in lines snaking through Noida and Ghaziabad to cremate their own. The Noida Hindon crematorium sets 14 funeral pyre platforms on the sidewalk for the COVID-19 dead to perform the last rites there instead. Dead and dying line hospital pathways. There is no respite.

***

Meanwhile in America, for us, India feels like what New York did in 2020. But Modi continues to punt to states to determine healthcare logistics, while he and his administration have created one of the largest humanitarian crises in this pandemic. On Twitter, we watch an interesting trend of the entire world going about their lives as Indians gasp for breath. It’s as if India isn’t a country that needs to be helped. We hear that the U.S. government didn’t allow for vaccine raw materials to reach India but the blame lies with the internal decisions made at the Indian government level.

We see “trauma porn” photos of funeral pyres burning through the night skies in India. The Western world watches those images over and over, and the Western people react to it. This is showing TV ads of malnourished African babies for us to donate instantly. This is Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” playing for animal shelters and pulling at our heartstrings.

But where does one donate? Does it go to the PM Cares Fund, run by the nationalist Prime Minister with no way of knowing how your money was used? Where there is no guarantee that the money reaches the migrants dying hungry, or the patients waiting for oxygen or Remdesivir?

I wonder if daughters were able to accompany their dead father’s body to the pyre. The cremations are taking place morning through sundown. Overworked priests are charging more. The lower-class Dalit funeral grounds helpers work round the clock, as do the hospital ward workers, the caregivers. Are the family members able to pay their last respects like I was able to? Do they know if the dignity expected of the dead was given to theirs?

***

Hospitals shouldn’t be overburdened. Oxygen supplies should have been available. Vaccines in the world’s largest manufacturing country, should be, well, available. And yet, the latest news cycle asks not to blame but to unite, to blame America for holding the raw materials for vaccine production instead. It’s easier to hate the Western country, hand-wave over the flouting of social distancing rules, because religion and elections are more important than gasping-for-breath Indians.

***

As an Indian who is a U.S. citizen, the guilt I feel is one that paralyzes me. I have abandoned my country of birth to choose the country of citizenship for personal material gain. Of that I am sure. How am I to assuage this guilt? The American way is to donate. But where do I donate? Not to the government that has systematically pushed against unity, religious, and caste freedom creating a Hindutva country. What do I do? How do I amplify this without tokenizing Indian grief?

We hold onto phone calls, reach out to friends, family members, find out ways, or “jugaad” as we call it in India, to make sure our people are safe. Others want to donate, but don’t know how. They See Blue GA circulates a Google doc of places that’ll accept our dollars. We want to do anything, something, something to help. Because if we can’t help, and if we can’t be there, and if we can’t do anything, the guilt we’ve always felt as Indians who became Americans will be fueled enough to rage on further.

As immigrants who love this country, we are grateful for the privilege and we also love our birth country that’s in such hell. Behind the scenes, my group of Desi authors text each other bemoaning the state we are in, neither in desh/home, nor in heaven. COVID is definitely a stark reminder of the choices we made. Feeling guilty is our state of being, besides a state of exhaustion and fear.

It’ll take India decades to recover from this and I am but a bystander, whether I like it or not.

Twitter asks about the use of funeral pyres and how disrespectful it is — do you not rage when they do this to your people, Twitter asks. No, I say, no — because what is disrespectful is how and why Indians are dying.

It takes President Biden two weeks before he does a U-turn and announces millions of AstraZeneca vaccine doses to be routed to India. Two weeks, with thousands dying daily. America and American leaders are silent. Only with social media outrage, behind-the-scenes negotiations lead to Biden behaving like the leader he says he is. Those pyres speak much more than the world’s largest humanitarian country. Are those photos disrespectful? Not if they coaxed my country of choice to act like the leader it says it is.

***

I hope Vice President Harris comments, perhaps shows solidarity with the country her mother comes from. It isn’t her job, but I’d like to think her chittis would be doubly proud of her if she did.

Right now, as an Indian American, the guilt propels me to doomscroll like I did with other Americans last year. Now I call my friends, and I tell them, “Stay safe,” like it’s a mantra that’ll save them all when their government has failed them.

My Baba’s cremation has stayed with me for decades since he left. The families losing their loved ones can’t even touch their dead as they’re whisked to the cremation grounds. COVID-19 has destroyed life in ways unimaginable.

The guilt I feel, buzzes like a loud bee.

***

Madhushree Ghosh‘s work has received an Honorable Mention in Best American Essays in Food Writing. Her work is Pushcart-nominated, and has been published in the Washington Post, The New York Times, Longreads, the Rumpus, Catapult, Hippocampus, Atlas Obscura, Unearth Women, Panorama, Garnet News, DAME, and others. As a woman in science, an immigrant, and daughter of refugees, her work reflects her roots and her activism. Her food narrative, “Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey” is forthcoming Spring 2022 from University of Iowa Press. She can be reached @writemadhushree.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact checker: Lisa Whittington-Hill

 

Is the Cure for Cancer Locked in Shrunken Heads from the Amazon?

Simon Prades

There’s a photo from the 1960s, of a young boy in California holding two shrunken human heads. The boy is the stepfather of writer Steven Lance, and the heads came from a family friend named Wilburn Ferguson. He had gotten them from an Amazonian tribe called the Shuar, who shriveled the heads of their enemies using a fluid derived from jungle plants. Ferguson, a nurse, former religious missionary, and lifelong dreamer who had moved his family to South American in the 1930s to pursue medical research in the Amazon, believed that the fluid could do something else—something life-giving. In his Atavist Magazine* feature “The Secret Formula,” Lance explains the root of Ferguson’s theory, which was shared by his devoted wife, Ruth:

Soldiers who fought the Shuar, according to stories Ferguson heard, might wake up one morning to find a stack of [heads] in their camp, shriveled but still recognizable as those of fallen comrades. It was powerful propaganda, a warning to steer clear. Head shrinking was “the most effective national defense ever devised,” Ferguson wrote.

He suspected that it might be much more than that…. “The thought occurred to me,” Ferguson recalled, “that perhaps the active ingredients of this process could be in some way adapted to shrink, or at least check, the wild growth of cancer cells.”

By that time, as Siddhartha Mukherjee explains in his 2010 book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, scourges like smallpox and tuberculosis were yielding to medical advances. “But of all diseases,” Mukherjee writes, “cancer had refused to fall into step in this march of progress.” Cancer is out-of-control division and growth of abnormal cells that can destroy healthy tissue and spread through the body. As Americans escaped other ailments and lived longer, more of them developed the disease. By 1926, it had become the nation’s second leading cause of death.

Long stigmatized and little understood, cancer now drew widespread attention. One senator proposed a $5 million reward for “information leading to the arrest of human cancer.” Americans dreamed of finding what Fortune called a “new principle of treatment.” The Fergusons were caught up in the zeitgeist. The thought inspired by the shriveled head was simple enough: If cancer killed by growing, shrinking was a way to fight it. For the Fergusons to test their theory, they needed access to whatever the Shuar were using on their enemies’ heads.

What followed was a saga spanning several decades and countries, and more disappointments than successes. Ferguson tried to prove his hypothesis, mustering evidence from lab experiments and patients (some consenting, others not). The scientific establishment rejected him. Yet today, more than 20 years after his death, he still has acolytes—people who told Lance that they believe Ferguson discovered something world-changing:

Ferguson wasn’t a snake-oil salesman or a con artist. Outlandish though some of his stories still seem, the details contained within them were consistent. The people I spoke to who knew Ferguson were struck by his sincerity. He could be stubborn and impractical, but as my stepdad recalled, Ferguson was always careful to point out that he hadn’t discovered a silver bullet, merely a promising treatment that needed more study. What he wanted most of all was a real scientific shot.

Ferguson was an outsider his whole life. Like a modern-day Don Quixote, he chased an impossible dream based more on faith than evidence. He wandered the wilderness seeking a miracle. The doctors and scientists who doubted him had every reason to. But what if they missed a bark or root of medical importance? What if Ferguson saw something they couldn’t? What if he was right?

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*The author of this post is the editor in chief of The Atavist, which is Longreads’ sister publication.

The Dark Side of Birding

A common loon readies to launch from Cupsuptic Lake, part of the Rangeley Lakes Heriteage Trust, on Saturday June 23, 2012 (Photo by Carl D. Walsh/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

Avid birders are no longer all kindly septuagenarians bedecked in Tilly hats and multi-pocket vests, binoculars glued to their eyes. For some, birding has even become a competitive sport. At Outside, Jessie Williamson reports on how birding has evolved with the advent of eBird, an online platform where birders can register to report sightings. The app has been instrumental in helping scientists “understand species distributions, population trends, migration pathways, and even habitat use,” but because it is used by humans who are not nearly as magnificent as birds, participation can have its downsides, including being publicly mocked and shamed for mis-identifying a species.

Birders are typically friendly, both in person and online, with email exchanges often ending in well-wishes of “Good birding!” But a code of ethics is necessary because, as with any activity that can become competitive, birding has a dark side. Rivalry, animosity, and ego have long been hallmarks of the bird world. Even the famous naturalist John James Audubon plagiarized and invented species to convince members of the English nobility to promote his work. Birders sometimes go to semi-desperate lengths to track down birds, and online platforms like eBird that rank birders and sightings, akin to athletes on leaderboards, can amplify competition.

Although eBird is primarily an observation tool and a scientific database, the site still allows users to size each other up: anyone can view rankings of the top eBirders in different hot spots, counties, states, and entire countries. You can even peruse a list of the top 100 eBirders in the world. These types of competitive lists have birthed trends like endless Big Years, in which birders constantly compete to see who can spot the most species in a year. In turn, such fads have spurred counterinitiatives, like the five-mile-radius challenge, which encourages birders to enjoy birds in local areas rather than seeking them out in far-flung places. Local birding has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, as many work from home and explore their own backyards.

I had my own run-in with bad behavior on eBird last November. I’d gotten wind via the eBird Rare Bird Alert that a vagrant woodcock had been spotted along the Rio Grande near Albuquerque, New Mexico, just 15 minutes from my house. American woodcocks are iconic little solitary shorebirds that live in forests and constantly bob while they walk, and they’re rarely seen out west. Naturally, I had to chase this bird. At 7 A.M. on a Sunday, I found myself walking along the river, kicking up piles of dead leaves in an attempt to flush the woodcock.

After a few hours, I’d had no luck. As I headed back to my car, I passed a group of birders also searching for the woodcock. We chatted for a bit before a well-known birder—the one who misidentified the DICK—recognized me. With a facetious smile, he asked, “How’s your goose ID going?”

The other birders stared blankly while I brimmed with silent shock and anger. He was publicly mocking me—a week before, he’d emailed me about a misidentified Ross’s goose I posted on eBird. Embarrassed, I quickly updated my observation. Our interaction should have ended there, but instead he was now calling me out for my mistake—gleefully—in front of others.

“Fine,” I said curtly, before walking back to my car.

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Longreads Best of 2020: Writing on COVID-19

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our editors featured many COVID-19 stories from across the web, and below, we’ve narrowed down 11 picks that really resonated with us. This roundup is focused on reported features; we initially included a few pandemic essays in this category, but those will instead appear in the upcoming Best of Essays list. 

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

* * *

How the Pandemic Defeated America (Ed Yong, The Atlantic)

The Atlantic‘s coverage of COVID-19 was exceptional this year, and Yong’s deep, thoughtful September feature lays it all out. How did the U.S. get here? Everything that went wrong was predictable and preventable, and despite all of its resources and scientific expertise, America’s leaders failed monumentally to control the virus at every turn.

The coronavirus found, exploited, and widened every inequity that the U.S. had to offer. Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shouldered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. Thousands of people endured months of COVID‑19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a “great equalizer,” the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nation’s history.

Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the Diamond Princess (Doug Bock Clark, GQ)

Another devastating read, “The Pariah Ship” by Michael Smith, Drake Bennett, and K. Oanh Haat, recounts the nightmare journey of Holland America’s MS Zaandam.

The pandemic has exposed the flaws of tourism, and cruise ships are a symbol of the disastrous effects that COVID-19 has had on the travel industry as a whole. Princess Cruises’ Diamond Princess, which departed on January 20 this year from Japan’s Port of Yokohama, was the first ship to suffer a major outbreak. Clark’s account of the voyage and subsequent quarantine of the ship’s 3,711 passengers and crew is riveting yet terrifying. He weaves stories of numerous people on board, from the more-privileged (a pair of traveling couples called the “Four Amigos”) to the overworked and underprotected (like security crewmember Sonali Thakkar). His reporting of the U.S. government’s response is superb, especially from the perspective of Dr. James Lawler, the infectious-disease expert called in to lead the evacuation of American passengers back to the U.S. We also get a glimpse of what the experience is like for the ship’s captain, Gennaro Arma, who was eventually the last person to disembark.

The Amigos, reduced now to three, along with the 325 other American evacuees, were still waiting on the buses. They had spent three hours idling on the pier and then, once they drove to the airport, sat on the tarmac for two more hours. Now, as the delay extended into a sixth hour, the passengers were nearing revolt. They were exhausted. And more problematically for the largely elderly passengers: The buses had no bathrooms.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., where it was still Sunday afternoon, the fate of the waylaid evacuees was being decided. Around the time the passengers were exiting the Diamond Princess, Japanese officials had blindsided their American counterparts with the news that some of the passengers boarding the buses had actually tested positive several days before. Soon many of the highest-level members of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response team, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, were arguing about what to do. Representatives from the CDC continued to fear spreading the virus. William Walters, the deputy chief medical officer for the State Department, wanted to bring everyone home anyway. Those urging the evacuation noted that the planes had been prepared with isolation units to contain the sick.

As the debate raged, the evacuees were demanding to be let off the buses, quarantine be damned, to find a bathroom. Carl was breathing so hard his masked breath fogged his glasses as he strained to control his bladder. Some seniors were crying. Finally, a few were allowed to relieve themselves in bottles beside the bus or were brought to a nearby terminal.

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Down the Rabbit Hole: A Psychedelic Reading List

Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“On psychedelics,” Dr. John Halpern, head of the Laboratory for Integrative Psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, told The New York Times Magazine, “you have an experience in which you feel there is something you are a part of, something else is out there that’s bigger than you, that there is a dazzling unity you belong to, that love is possible and all these realizations are imbued with deep meaning. I’m telling you that you’re not going to forget that six months from now.” That rings true to me.

For the record, I’m not encouraging anyone to take psychedelics. Powerful substances such as LSD, D.M.T., and psilocybin are not for everyone, and they are illegal. That said, these substances behave in the body very different than opioids, alcohol, and cocaine, and they offer what many people view as the possibility for enlightenment, for constructive personal revelations, and insight into the cosmos. The stories collected here offer insight into this idea.

Not long ago, residents of affluent Western countries began traveling to the jungles of South America to have profound psychedelic experiences with the hallucinogen ayahuasca. And workers in Silicon Valley started taking small doses of psilocybin and LSD, called microdoses, to enhance their work and creativity in tech. Tripping got trendy. It also received more scientific attention. As Lauren Slater wrote in her New York Times piece, a new generation of researchers are studying the therapeutic effects of psychedelic substances and their potential for treating everything from depression, alcoholism, and PTSD, to confronting our own mortality. These researchers have differentiated themselves from the questionable, Timothy Leary-style drug studies of the ’60s. It’s exciting to live in a time when scientists are taking a serious, objective look at the way psychedelics work on not only the human body, but the human experience. After the legalization of cannabis in many US states, activists are now working to legalize psilocybin mushrooms. Like all outlawed psychoactive substances, psychedelics come with a lot of cultural baggage. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan stated that “anyone that would engage or indulge in [LSD] is just a plain fool.”

For those who haven’t tripped and want to understand the experience, or those who want to relive past trips without having to fit new six-to-ten-hour journeys into their adult work and parenting schedules, this reading list is for you. For those who prefer to never to ingest psychedelic substances, these stories will take that trip so you don’t have to. It’s nice to travel into another dimension from the comfort of your own couch, especially now that COVID-19 keeps most of us indoors at home. Anyway, shelter-in-place isn’t the best time to trip. Psychedelics are better suited to nature, if not a camping trip then at least a city park. Apartments are too small. They smother the cosmic consciousness we’re trying to expand. Also, things get weird in familiar environments, especially familiar environments where family portraits hang above piles of dirty laundry that need washing. (Hi Mom, my face is melting!) Maybe the best trip now is one others have already taken. Either way, safe travels my friends. See you on the other side.

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The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale” (Ariel Levy, The New Yorker, September 5, 2016)

The ancient South American hallucinogen ayahuasca has become America’s psychedelic drug du jour, with everyone from Baby Boomers and Millennials to the Silicon Valley set seeking its potent revelations about harmony and interspecies unity. To hear the plants speak, all you need is money and some strength of mind.

One at a time, we went into the front room to be smudged with sage on the wrestling mats by a woman in her sixties with the silver hair and beatific smile of a Latina Mrs. Claus. When she finished waving her smoking sage at me and said, “I hope you have a beautiful journey,” I was so moved by her radiant good will that I nearly burst into tears.

Once we were all smudged and back in our circle, Little Owl dimmed the lights. “You are the real shaman,” she said. “I am just your servant.”

When it was my turn to drink the little Dixie cup of muck she presented, I was stunned that divine consciousness—or really anything—could smell quite so foul: as if it had already been vomited up, by someone who’d been on a steady dieta of tar, bile, and fermented wood pulp. But I forced it down, and I was stoked. I was going to visit the swampland of my soul, make peace with death, and become one with the universe.

Tourists of Consciousness” (Jeff Warren, Maisonneuve, April 29, 2011)

Before The New Yorker spotted ayahuasca as a subject, the Canadian quarterly Maisonneuve covered the increasing popularity of hallucinogen tourisism. Jeff Warren’s reporting makes a fascinating companion to Ariel Levy’s above.

As if on cue, the Estonian psychologist, Alar, vomited into his bucket, setting off a domino effect of throaty purges around the room. Susan began humping the air. The Mountie groaned and raised his arm, as if to ward off an assailant. Someone else started barking. The Finnish professor—also in his sixties—came spinning in from the sidelines, hair shocked upwards in an Elvis-style pompadour, and pranced around Susan’s undulating body.

It was all too much. I struggled to my feet, teetered, and fell sideways over a chair. On my hands and knees I managed to crawl to the bathroom, where I was noisily ill. I spent the next two hours slumped next to the toilet, disappointed by my lack of visions, but also giggling at the whole bizarre circus. Behavioural reality, at least, was beginning to shift.

How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death” (Lauren Slater, The New York Times Magazine, April 20, 2012)

Researchers are exploring whether certain drugs can help patients cope with fear of death. Pam Sakuda, who was given six to 14 months to live, was administered psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms.

Norbert Litzingerremembers picking up his wife from the medical center after her first session and seeing that this deeply distressed woman was now “glowing from the inside out.” Before Pam Sakuda died, she described her psilocybin experience on video: “I felt this lump of emotions welling up . . . almost like an entity,” Sakuda said, as she spoke straight into the camera. “I started to cry. . . . Everything was concentrated and came welling up and then . . . it started to dissipate, and I started to look at it differently. . . . I began to realize that all of this negative fear and guilt was such a hindrance . . . to making the most of and enjoying the healthy time that I’m having.” Sakuda went on to explain that, under the influence of the psilocybin, she came to a very visceral understanding that there was a present, a now, and that it was hers to have.

Turn On, Tune In, Drop by the Office” (Emma Hogan, 1843, August 31, 2017)

Emma Hogan reports that in Silicon Valley, microdosing LSD is the new “body-hacking” tool everyone from engineers to CEOs are using to boost productivity and creativity. Interestingly, while apparently everyone is doing it, users are reluctant to have their real names appear in print.

San Francisco appears to be at the epicentre of the new trend, just as it was during the original craze five decades ago. Tim Ferriss, an angel investor and author, claimed in 2015 in an interview with CNN that “the billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis.” Few billionaires are as open about their usage as Ferriss suggests. Steve Jobs was an exception: he spoke frequently about how “taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life”. In Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography, the Apple CEO is quoted as joking that Microsoft would be a more original company if Bill Gates, its founder, had experienced psychedelics.

As Silicon Valley is a place full of people whose most fervent desire is to be Steve Jobs, individuals are gradually opening up about their usage – or talking about trying LSD for the first time. According to Chris Kantrowitz, the CEO of Gobbler, a cloud-storage company, and the head of a new fund investing in psychedelic research, people were refusing to talk about psychedelics as recently as three years ago. “It was very hush hush, even if they did it.” Now, in some circles, it seems hard to find someone who has never tried it.

The Trip Treatment” (Michael Pollan, The New Yorker, February 2, 2015)

Research into psychedelics has been demonized and shut down for decades. But recent psilocybin trials from Johns Hopkins and New York University are helping researchers reconsider the therapeutic potential of the drugs.

The Trippy Science of Psychedelic Studies” (Elitsa Dermendzhiyska, Elemental, August 22, 2019)

Psychedelic substances show great promise treating everything from cancer to depression, anxiety to alcoholism. To help understand this burgeoning field of inquiry, one writer participates in a study. Tripping taught her as much about the promises as the dangers of medical psychedelics.

The brain on psychedelics is not only susceptible to cues, but it also exaggerates their meanings. And here’s the problem with that: We can debate what’s real and what is an illusion, but we can’t ignore the power of the drugs, or the power of the people who administer them to us, and we can’t ignore our own vulnerability to both. This is what chills me.

The Plot to Turn On the World: The Leary/Ginsberg Acid Conspiracy” (Steve Silberman, PLoS/Maps.org, April 21, 2011)

As the public faces of the psychedelic revolution, Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg made a dynamic duo. The charming, boyish, Irish Harvard professor and the ecstatic, boldly gay, bearded Jersey bard became the de facto gurus of the movement they’d helped create — father figures for a generation of lysergic pilgrims who temporarily jettisoned their own fathers in their quest for renewable revelation. (Note that this piece, originally published at PLoS, is no longer available there. Some digging discovered it online at maps.org.)

A Psychedelic Murder Story” (John Paul Rathbone, Financial Times, June 19, 2015)

Ayahuasca tea has long played a religious role in Brazil, but did it also contribute to the brutal death of a celebrated Brazilian artist? A dark twist on the question for enlightenment.

There have been many other reports of mental and physical healing following ayahuasca ceremonies, as well as occasional stories of delusion, cultism and worse. Early last year, Henry Miller, a 19-year-old Briton, died after apparently taking part in a shamanic ayahuasca ritual in Colombia — a terrible accident which played in the British press as a cautionary tale of a gap-year adventure that went horribly wrong. And then there is Glauco’s story, largely unreported outside Brazil, although it is one of the most curious cases of them all.

Riding the Highs and Lows with My Mom” (Valentina Valentini, Longreads, August 21, 2019)

Valentina Valentini’s life-long role-reversal with her mother gets up-ended one psychedelic night in the Hollywood Hills, giving her the chance to become the daughter, once again.

She handed me the pipe. I politely refused. We went back to listening to the girl croon.

Not many minutes later I began to feel lightheaded. And warm. I knew it would get hot in that tiny room. My first thought was that I might be inhaling some second-hand smoke, therefore creating a bit of a contact high. I wasn’t altogether opposed to that, so I sat still a little while longer. Then my eyes started to feel heavy. Very heavy. I whispered to my mother that I was going to take a step outside and get some air. She seemed concerned, but only mildly. I assured her I’d be fine, snuck through the haphazard chairs with swaying wannabe hippies in them, and stepped out the shop door.

The Trip of a Lifetime” (Laura Miller, Slate, May 14, 2018)

In the context of some reads on psychedelic drugs, Laura Miller looks at Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. In it, Pollan says that drugs such as psilocybin and LSD got a bad rap after some flawed scientific experimentation and images of burned-out, ’60s counter-culture hippies soured Americans on exploring the medical benefits these drugs might offer, suggesting that their mind-altering abilities might help free us from cognitive patterns that are holding us back.

If How to Change Your Mind furthers the popular acceptance of psychedelics as much as I suspect it will, it will be by capsizing the long association, dating from Leary’s time, between the drugs and young people. Pollan observes that the young have had less time to establish the cognitive patterns that psychedelics temporarily overturn. But “by middle age,” he writes, “the sway of habitual thinking over the operations of the mind is nearly absolute.” What he sought in his own trips was not communion with a higher consciousness so much as the opportunity to “renovate my everyday mental life.” He felt that the experience made him more emotionally open and appreciative of his relationships. Both Waldman and Lin report similar effects, even though Waldman never actually tripped. The promise of hyperlight travel, revolution, and spiritual transcendence be damned: If psychedelics can help cure the midlife crises of disaffected baby boomers and Gen Xers, then it’s only a matter of time until we’ll be able to pick them up with a prescription at our local pharmacy.

The Grieving Landscape

RJ Sangosti / Getty / Fulcrum Publishing

Heidi Hutner | Fulcrum Publishing | June 2020 | 16 minutes (4,305 words)

We’re delighted to bring you an excerpt by Heidi Hutner from the anthology Doom With A View: Historical and Cultural Contexts of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. Edited by Kristen Iverson, with E. Warren Perry and Shannon Perry, the anthology arrives from Fulcrum Publishing in August, 2020.

* * *

At thirty-five, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. One year before my diagnosis, my mother died from complications after heart surgery. At the time of her death, my mother had cancer — lymphoma. Five years prior to Mom’s death, my father passed away from a brain tumor, a metastasis from the cancer melanoma.

Two years after I had completed my chemotherapy treatment for cancer, I gave birth to Olivia. My miracle baby.

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Snapshot of Canada: An Accidental Reading List

ürgen Schwenkenbecher/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Cleaning our basement recently, I found a box of old Canadian magazines. The covers were crisp, the bindings intact. Published between 2011 and 2013, I’d gathered these issues of The Walrus and Maisonneuve as research for an abandoned book project. Curious about what was inside, I sat down with them and a pot of very British black tea — the kind The Empress Hotel serves with tiny sandwiches in Victoria, British Columbia.

People call The Walrus the Canadian New Yorker. Maisonneuve was named Magazine of the Year in 2005, 2012, and 2016. Between their striking glossy covers I found the stylish, substantial writing these magazines are still known for, and stories both evergreen and of their time: stories about food, sex, drugs, immigration, politics, Indigenous rights, art, and the environment.

Thumbing through old magazines can be fun. Dated advertisements reveal bizarre worldviews and outdated thinking, like the doctors who famously preferred Camel cigarettes, and a mid-century ad I found featuring two poodles smoking the Old Gold brand. Those were the days. Back issues also capture a country’s struggles, its psyche, mythology, and national narratives, and these Canadian issues returned me to a particular time in my own life.

Years ago, I pitched an idea for a book called Canphilia to a literary agent. Philia is a suffix denoting love or an affection for something, and I loved Canada. The title was too scientific for a first-person narrative travelogue in search of the Canadian national identity, but I was younger then, and that was the best I could come up with.

Covering 3,854,085 square miles, Canada is the second-largest country in the world. Canada and the United States share the world’s longest international border, yet few Americans can name half of the 10 provinces let alone name beloved Canadian icons or defining cultural characteristics. “To outsiders,” my proposal said, “Canada seems like the perfect country: scenic, peaceful, friendly, progressive. Its national parks are the envy of the developed world. The country has one of the highest standards of living on earth, a functioning public health system, and it’s the only G8 country with balanced books. Canada legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, outlawed the death penalty, and operates North America’s only federally authorized drug injection site. Naturally, when people talk about it, most utter some variation of, Ah, I love Canada. But beyond vague notions of Britishness, hockey, and maple syrup production, what do we really know about it?” One thing I knew was that living next to one of the most loud-mouthed, aggressive, arrogant countries in history could make any neighboring country appear quiet, peaceful, and humble. Or maybe their voice was drowned out by all of our patriotic, idiotic, saber-rattling nonsense.

The vast majority of Canada’s 38 million inhabitants lived in larger urban centers within 125 miles of the US border, so I planned to drive, hike, and ferry across the entire country, from west to east, sticking to the border, to investigate. “More importantly,” my proposal said, “do we even know what makes a Canadian a Canadian? What they stand for? How they think and act? And what do they think of us, anyway?”

I was ambitious and slightly bananas, and I wanted to do for Canada what Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones did for China, and Ian Frazier’s The Great Plains did for the American Midwest: write a vivid, nuanced, humorous portrait of a people and their homeland, that would appeal to a general readership and enlighten myself as much as my fellow Americans. In addition to Canada’s national character, I would interrogate my own interest, search for the reasons so many of us disgruntled Americans fall under the country’s spell. Obviously Canada wasn’t perfect, with its clear-cut logging and historically egregious treatment of Indigenous people. I wanted to examine Canada’s contradictions, and debunk popular stereotypes. I wasn’t interested so much in defining “constitutional monarchy” or “parliamentary democracy” for American readers, or helping them reconcile Canada’s independence with its connection to the Queen. I was interested in profiling the personality of the Canadian people and their culture while trying to figure out why I longed to live somewhere I knew so little about.

The agent loved the idea, but we never shopped it to publishers. I couldn’t afford to take enough of the trip to write any sample chapters, and supposedly, Americans don’t care enough about Canada to read books about it. I filed “the Canada book” away in the back of my mind as I developed other niche book ideas that never sold, because that’s the kind of writer I am. As I moved around, my Canada books and back issues came with me.

After reading these issues, I thought it’d be fun to assemble some of their stories, which reveal new sides of Canada to outsiders like me (and maybe you). This is not meant as a definitive Canada reading list. It’s a sample of what I pulled from one stack of issues from 2011 — 2013. That makes this collection more of a tiny time capsule, an incomplete portrait of a particular place in time. Actual Canadians can gather more wide-ranging, complete lists that capture the totality of Canada, its breadth and depth. These older stories also provide an interesting baseline to compare Canada now with Canada then. After reading them, I wondered: Has Canadian secondary education improved? Is Kraft mac ’n cheese still Canada’s national dish? What happened to that hyped comedy troupe Picnicface? Here they are in chronological order, with their subheads included as description. None of these stories feature hockey or The Tragically Hip, but one is about Labatt beer. Part of Canada’s identity involves outsiders’ reliance on cliché. Enjoy, eh?

* * *

Going Viral” (Maisonneuve, Kaitlin Fontana, Summer 2011)

“This fall, the sketch comedy group and online-video machine Picnicface will simultaneously launch a feature-length movie, a TV show, and a book. Can eight nerds from Halifax resuscitate Canada’s ailing comedy scene?”

In Halifax, far from the showbiz machine, Picnicface has been free to both develop a unique voice in front of a warm audience, and to cultivate a show without fear of high-profile failure. McKinney likes that the group is from Halifax—it reminds him of his early days in Calgary, before he moved to Toronto. “If they’d been born in LA, they’d have all been poached before they could create this voice that develops between like-minded people, this ecosystem that happens in smaller places,” he says. Halifax, for Picnicface, is an incubator. Little goes further: “We’ve done some garbage here, but I’m really happy we did, because it helped mold us.”

Canada’s Most Unwanted” (The Walrus, Jasmine Budak, December 2011)

“Domestic adoption is rarely the first choice for prospective parents. But with rising infertility rates and the availability of foreign infants declining, some 30,000 children in government care have a better shot at finding a family.”

Canadians have long adopted from abroad, but largely for humanitarian reasons, in spurts and small numbers: orphans of the Irish famine, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars; and, later, in the mid-’70s, from orphanages in Cambodia, Bangladesh, India, and Latin America, through Ottawa’s newly established national Adoption Desk. But over the next two decades, as adoption became normalized and the supply of domestic infants began to wane, inter-country adoption became less about finding parents for destitute babies and more about finding babies for hopeful parents. It was no longer motivated by goodwill, but rather became a transaction in the business of fulfilling the developed world’s growing demand for infants.

Visions of the Future” (Maisonneuve, Chandler Levack, Summer 2012)

“A twenty-four-year-old singer named Grimes is the world’s hottest independent pop star, and her fame has cast Montreal into the spotlight yet again.”

Grimes’ success and the exposure she’s brought her Arbutus label-mates—Sean Nicholas Savage, TOPS and TONSTARTSSBANDHT, among others—have made Montreal a high-profile indie-rock hotspot once again, reminiscent of the time, several years ago, when Arcade Fire attracted the world’s attention to the city. Although Montreal has plenty of other worthy independent labels, like Secret City and Alien8, the rise of Grimes has made Arbutus a litmus test for the promise of the city’s young musicians. Today’s tastemakers are fickle, and too much hype can cause a community to cannibalize itself—especially one as small and tight-knit as Montreal’s music scene. As Morrissey once said, “We hate it when our friends become successful.”

Calgary Reconsidered” (The Walrus, Chris Turner, June 2012)

“Six truths about the city that’s no longer, simply, Cowtown.”

Even if you love the city deep down, you sometimes feel as if you’re merely putting up with it, waiting for it to grow all the way up and become what it pretends to be. Calgary is an overnight millionaire fresh from the sale of a gas exploration company, complaining about the greed of all those farmers who jacked up the lease rates. Calgary is the home riding of the prime minister abutting the home riding of the premier, and still insisting that it doesn’t get a fair shake in Ottawa or Edmonton. Calgary is the highest per capita income in Canada in a province with no sales tax, indignant that its property taxes are going up. Its conservatism sometimes scans as a youngster’s I-got-mine insolence. Its emerging power and prominence come across from some angles as pure teenage bluster.

The Hunter Artist” (The Walrus, Sarah Milroy, July/August 2012)

“In Cape Dorset, Nunavut, a new generation is redefining Inuit art, preserving northern traditions as it adapts to southern ways of life. One of these artists is Tim Pitsiulak.”

Whites imagine Inuit, and Inuit imagine whites; Inuit art is where their fantasies meet, but the interface is changing. Kinngait continues to release its annual portfolio of about forty prints, as it has for more than fifty years. Despite stars like Kenojuak, prices for the prints have remained fairly consistent and modest, in the $500 to $2,500 range. But one-of-a-kind drawings are gaining a following and, as with the prints, the prices are regulated by Dorset Fine Arts, the co-op’s Toronto distributor, which sends the art to dealers across Canada and around the world, who then charge what the market will bear. Pitsiulak’s largest and best drawings can now sell for as much as $12,500, making him one of the most successful artists in the North. His aunt Kenojuak’s best works sell for around $16,000. Shuvinai Ashoona’s prices are close behind Pitsiulak’s and rising fast. This phenomenon of individual artists’ commanding widely differing levels of remuneration could someday lead to a break with the old co-op way of doing things, in which the revenue from higher-priced artists supports the costs of maintaining the studio and distribution, helping to fund the production of those artists who are less likely to sell. Inuit artists in Cape Dorset may hesitate to abandon a system that has afforded them predictable prices for pieces on completion (as well as studio space and material costs), irrespective of the vagaries of the southern art market.

Manufacturing Taste” (The Walrus, Sasha Chapman, September 2012)

“The (un)natural history of Kraft Dinner — a dish that has shaped not only what we eat, but also who we are.”

The point is, it’s nearly impossible to live in Canada without forming an opinion about one of the world’s first and most successful convenience foods. In 1997, sixty years after the first box promised “dinner in seven minutes — no baking required,” we celebrated by making Kraft Dinner the top-selling grocery item in the country.

This makes KD, not poutine, our de facto national dish. We eat 3.2 boxes each in an average year, about 55 percent more than Americans do. We are also the only people to refer to Kraft Dinner as a generic for instant mac and cheese. The Barenaked Ladies sang wistfully about eating the stuff: “If I had a million dollars / we wouldn’t have to eat Kraft Dinner / But we would eat Kraft Dinner / Of course we would, we’d just eat more.” In response, fans threw boxes of KD at the band members as they performed. This was an act of veneration.

John Cage’s Canada” (Maisonneuve, Crystal Chan, Fall 2012)

“The twentieth century’s most important avant-garde composer may have been American, Crystal Chan writes, but he found his greatest inspiration north of the border.”

On a Thursday night in August 1961, Cage took the podium at Montreal’s Théâtre de la Comédie-Canadienne and moved his arms in a circle, imitating the hands of a clock. In response, eighteen musicians began to play. The piece, called Atlas Eclipticalis, was Cage’s first Canadian premiere, and he had written it by matching notes to star positions in an astronomical atlas. At the time, the whole world had its eyes on the stars; earlier that spring, a Soviet cosmonaut had beaten the Americans to space. Composing music with the help of astronomy was still an eccentric method, though, and one that marked an important shift in Cage’s career. After Atlas Eclipticalis, Cage moved away from writing music with notes, rests and other conventional symbols. Instead, he went on to create graphic scores—essentially, drawn music—and write textual instructions. He started to see himself as a creator of experiences through sound, rather than a composer of music.

The Place Where Art Sleeps” (Maisonneuve, Chris Hampton, Fall 2012)

“The vast majority of the art gallery of Ontario’s priceless collection isn’t on display — it’s tucked away in high-security, top-secret vaults.”

Of the AGO’s eighty-five-thousand-piece permanent collection, only about 3,900 works are on display right now. At any given time, 95 percent of the collection is in storage. Paintings, sculptures and installations account for roughly eleven thousand pieces in the vaults, while photography and works on paper make up the other seventy thousand. This isn’t unique to the AGO. Art institutions are a bit like icebergs; the public sees less than a tenth of their holdings. But that may finally be changing. While security and conservation remain top priorities, galleries are beginning to experiment with new ways for the public to engage with their broader collections. Visitors increasingly want to see everything—including what’s behind the scenes.

Doppel Gang: Why Canada Needs Quebec” (The Walrus, Mark Kingwell, January/February 2013)

“Why Canada needs Quebec.”

Yes, there it is. Quebec is Canada’s familiar-strange double, a return of the repressed, so like the rest of the country and yet so minutely, eerily different. Are they plotting something large and secretive, some kind of surprise secession? Probably not. No, they probably just want things to go on like this more or less forever, teetering between passive entitlement and passionate outrage, sketching a glorious future free of any reality principle.

Unmasked” (Maisonneuve, Andrea Bennet, March, 2013)

“Before the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto, police infiltrated activist communities as part of a massive, costly campaign that resulted in high-profile arrests and prosecutors. Who were these undercovers, and how did they avoid scrutiny?”

Guelph was also home, in the lead-up to the G20 summit, to a branch of one of the largest undercover police operations in Canadian history. The $676 million security bill for the G20 summit and its G8 counterpart—which was held on June 25 and 26 in Huntsville, Ontario—included funding for an eighteen-month-long infiltration of activist communities, from January 2009 through June 2010. The Joint Intelligence Group, a well-staffed network of OPP and RCMP officers based in Barrie, Ontario, carried out this investigation. According to the JIG Operational Plan, the effort included twelve “trained covered  investigators,” as well as commanders, managers, and technical and office support. Over the course of those eighteen months, JIG made $8 million worth of capital purchases and had a $297 million operational budget. It set up commander offices, a project room, workstations—and, during the G20 summit itself, an operational “War Room.”

Fight of the Bumblebee” (The Walrus, Sasha Chapman, March 2013)

“Honeybee colonies are collapsing around the world, putting food production in danger. We may need Canada’s indigenous pollinators to save the day.”

South of Detroit and Windsor, sandwiched between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair, the flat lines of Essex County farmland carve the southern tip of Ontario into tidy rectangular parcels of fertile, well-drained soil. When you approach Leamington from Highway 401, it is difficult to imagine this area as the nearly impenetrable forest it once was, or that the fires lit by would-be farmers to clear the land once burned so brightly they could be seen 500 kilometres west in Chicago. Today the aerial view looks more like a semi-industrial park, because the area is dominated by gunmetal grey–framed greenhouses. With some 355 hectares under greenhouse vegetable production, more than anywhere else in North America, the region’s output is larger than the entire industry in the US, and growing much faster than other types of agriculture.

First Do No Harm” (Maisonneuve, Ann Silversides, April 2013)

“Are doctors and drug companies to blame for the opioid-abuse crisis? After two shocking deaths in small-town Ontario, Ann Silversides reports from one of the largest coroner’s inquests in Canadian history.“

Under the Influence” (The Walrus, Matthew J. Bellamy, June 2013)

“Beer is to Canada as wine is to France. How Labatt and its allies brewed up a nation of beer drinkers.”

Before the Black Christmas of 1936, Mackenzie approached J. Walter Thompson Co., a major global advertising agency. Mark Napier of the Toronto office had an uncanny feel for the cultural logic of the age, and wanted to portray brewers like Labatt as instrumental, not detrimental, to the nation’s development. In a series of advertisements published in the national monthly Canadian Homes and Gardens, he highlighted Labatt’s long, influential past. “It really all began 70 years ago,” read the text of one ad in 1937, under the tag line “Then As Now.” In others, he linked the company’s evolution to watershed moments in our history, such as Confederation and the Boer War, when “soldiers knew good ale.” As Canadians searched for uniquely Canadian ideas, events, experiences, and commodities—the makings of a national identity—Napier served up Labatt’s product as an age-old piece of Canadiana.

The Marineland Dreamland” (The Walrus, Craig Davidson, July/August 2013

“Deconstructing memories of a scandal-ridden theme park.”

I worked at Marineland for eight summers. Brendan Kelly, six years. Phil Demers, twelve. It paid our rent and put beer in our fridges. Best summers of my life. To a man, we spoke those words.

It makes you wonder. What if, rather than fabrication, “The Tale of the Frozen Sea Lion” was an act of erasure? My unconscious mind embarking on a sly mission of disburdenment, of purposeful forgetting? If I forget enough, if my own story fills with holes, I can tell myself it’s a lie. And that’s easier, overall. Easier than holding on to the knowledge for twenty-plus years, doing nothing meaningful about it. Easier than remembering how I laughed as my supervisor kicked a dead sea lion.

This Week in Books: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

Theatrical masks of tragedy and comedy depicted in a Roman mosaic. (Photo By DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini via Getty Images)

[If you’d like to browse all the books mentioned in the newsletter this week, you can do it on our Bookshop page, because I enjoy lists, especially lists about other lists, so I spent a few hours making one. -DS]

Dear Reader,

On Mother’s Day my mom told me that, still, no one in her office is wearing a mask — not when the employees are alone together. She has a public-facing job at a cemetery; through the clientele, as well, calamity stalks her. Grieving families during an epidemic should arouse our empathy, but there is one family that has done its best to test the limits of my pity: a large family of seven, unmasked, who all at once entered the little cemetery office where my mother works, and grew belligerent when asked to leave, and spoke angrily, and spread pestilence and decay upon her, the woman helping them grieve.

Alone together, the cemetery workers don’t wear masks; they do not wear masks unless customers enter; the customers who enter are often unmasked. The masks come on and off like sock and buskin in a Greek play. When it ends, I will know for sure whether it’s been a tragedy or a comedy.

In these inconstant times, I have been thinking of giving up on all these measured scientific and sociological studies of plague times that I ordered a few weeks ago, and which rest on my desk in a talismanic pile to ward off disease, and instead reading only comedies of suffering; well, I guess all comedy derives from suffering, but I mean the very blackest humor written about the very worst of times. It seems to be the only mood that fits as the virus spreads through the White House and the states “open” and my mother masks and unmasks at the cemetery. I could reread Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon, which I’ve mentioned before in the newsletter, although I didn’t mention that it’s funny. (Maybe then it didn’t seem so funny.) I could reread Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, which is about exactly what it sounds like it’s about. You could read them, too, if you’re in the mood to laugh at something that isn’t funny.

Or if not comedy, then horror. A phrase from a book occurs to me when I think of my mother and the mourners at her cemetery. Or when I see anyone without a mask. In R.W. Chambers’ seminal work of cosmic horror The King in Yellow, four of the stories are interlocking; they each reference a play called The King in Yellow that, rumor has it, drives readers insane when they get to the second act. Only two brief excerpts from the play appear in the book, which makes sense: in the book, the play is banned all over the world, but spreading nonetheless.

The phrase that recurs to me is from this fragment of the play:

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed, it’s time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

I’m sure you can guess the part that strikes a nerve. But anyway that’s just me. I’m sure we all have one. Some strange little phrase that keeps coming back, again and again, to our growing horror.

1. “Cooking with Giovanni Boccaccio” by Valerie Stivers, The Paris Review

Valerie Stivers prepares a fascinating spread from The Decameron and consults The Black Death: A Turning Point in History? to find out exactly what kind of turning point one could expect a global pandemic to be. “‘The Decameron’ loathes sanctimony, tramples sacred cows, and punishes corruption. It takes elites less seriously and celebrates a cast of characters much more diverse than would previously have been allowed. By observing humanity and the world more realistically, it ushers in a new era of scholarship and reason—the Renaissance, no less.”

2. “Sleight of Hand: On Meena Kandasamy’s ‘When I Hit You’ and ‘Exquisite Cadavers’” by Stephanie Sy-Quia, The Los Angeles Review of Books

A review of two novels by Meena Kandasamy. The first, When I Hit You, “reveal[s] abusive homes as the absurdist performance sets they are: where everyday objects drift loose from their original uses …. where the players know their parts are a matter of life or death”; the second, Exquisite Cadavers, as reviewer Stephanie Sy-Quia writes, is a clever critique of how the first book was received. Reminiscent of Suki Kim’s complaint that her excellent Without You There Is No Us was labeled a memoir rather than a work of journalism, rendering it ineligible for certain journalism prizes, among other concrete consequences, Exquisite Cadavers reacts to the delegitimizing way in which When I Hit You was received as a memoir rather than a novel; “its content was valorized over its form… all too frequently, the fate of women and people of color.”

3. “When James Baldwin Wrote About the Atlanta Child Murders” by Casey Cep, The New Yorker

In light of a new HBO documentary about the Atlanta Child Murders, Casey Cep revisits James Baldwin’s writing on the case, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Cep looks at how the piece came to be (it was no small feat for a black editor at Playboy to lure Baldwin back to the American South) and how prescient, as always, Baldwin’s argument was. He did not believe that the police’s suspect, a young gay black man, was guilty; he wasn’t sure there was a serial killer at work at all. Instead “Baldwin…. used his coverage of the child murders to argue that the crimes were representative of the way that the city and the country still failed to protect black lives. In the eyes of David Leeming, Baldwin’s biographer, ‘The Evidence of Things Not Seen’ is ‘to the aftermath of the “civil rights” movement what “The Fire Next Time” had been to its heyday.’”

4. “Making a Mess of the World: On Hao Jingfang’s ‘Vagabonds’” by Virginia L. Conn, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Virginia L. Conn writes that Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds may be the first work of Chinese sci-fi marketed in the West that has incorporated the fact that “Chinese sci-fi” is now being marketed in the West (ever since the runaway success of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem) into its social commentary; the story features “an aggressively communitarian Mars” and an Earth defined by “insularity and possessive intellectual property laws,” and it revolves around the ways in which characters from each world seem to misunderstand the alien world as well as their own. Conn says this bifurcated effect makes Vagabonds a genuinely Sino-Western work of sci-fi, written with both audiences in mind.

5. “Annie Ernaux’s Object Lessons: Braiding Identity Through Time” by Mary Hawthorne, Lit Hub

Mary Hawthorne’s review of Annie Ernaux’s The Years seems a little late out of the gate, since the book was first published in translation several years ago, but I found its reflections on consumerism to be really interesting during this time. Like all of us, I’ve been shocked by the spectacle of some (mostly white seems like?) Americans claiming they have a dire need to consume remarkably trivial things (and to be served, but I think that’s a separate, particularly racialized aspect of this uniquely American madness), a need which feels so urgent to them that they think it must be a human right. Hawthrone writes that, in The Years, a novel about a family’s evolution over the course of the 20th century, consumerism is a mechanism which erases the past and the family members’ connection to one another. “….objects, especially long-held ones, contain memories, grounding us implicitly in reality; once discarded, so, too, are the memories, along with the reality. [Ernaux] writes: ‘The increasingly rapid arrival of new things drove the past away. People did not question their usefulness, they just wanted to possess them and suffered when they didn’t earn enough to buy them outright.’” Strange to think that being surrounded by their own memories for too long is driving my countrymen insane.


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6. “The Weight of Certain News” by André Naffis-Sahely, Poetry

Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour “is a page-turner,” writes André Naffis-Sahely, which is always a promising epithet for a collection of poetry. “‘One-Way Ticket,’ for instance, is prompted by the discovery of a bunch of one-way train tickets inside the speaker’s pocket. At first, the poem focuses on the lyricism inspired by this unexpected find: ‘Oh, all the one-way tickets! / I haven’t found anything / more sorrowful than you / in the pockets of the world.’ But then it concludes with this arresting image: ‘—You pound the windowpanes of this train to no avail. / In vain you hurl your voice to the other side of the window. / We / are the actors in a silent film.’”

7. “‘Unless We Make Some Place’: On Andy Croft’s ‘The Years of Anger: The Life of Randall Swingler’” by Robert Chandler, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Robert Chandler reviews Andy Croft’s The Years of Anger, a biography of Randall Swingler, a British poet who Chandler writes has long been erased from the British canon because of his commitment to communism. Swingler is best remembered for the poetry he wrote as a soldier in WWII. Shortly after the war was over, he wrote:

It is only the bone that is dead. The earth is their flesh
And every year grows green in the sloughing of grief.
All they have lost is fear and the crooked bone.

But in me only the bone is alive, must watch
The slow decay of the will, the inch by inch
Retreat of the nerves, the death by shame.

8. “The Defender of Differences” by Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books

A lively review of recent books about or featuring Franz Boas, the father of cultural anthropology. It begins, “Franz Boas fought his first duel in 1877, when he was nineteen,” and then the reader discovers, delightfully, that the father of cultural anthropology was more or less ritually scarified all over his face. Because apparently the point of duels was to just slice the other person’s face up. Oh, also he was dueling proto-nazis! (Thought I’d try to end on a positive note this week.)

Stay safe,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets])

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Sarah Fay | Longreads | March 2020 | 18 minutes (5,122 words)

 

The change came less as a chrysalis moment, an instant of emergence and blossoming, than after weeks of distress. My apartment at the time was in the rear of the building, away from the street. Even by studio standards, it was tiny — the kitchen too close to the bed, the bed practically touching the bookshelf and the desk. It had a slight view of the Chicago skyline but mainly looked onto a brick wall. My immediate neighbors kept to themselves. They were presences, a series of doors opening and closing. I’d lived contentedly in that remove. It suited me. Then it didn’t. 

Naturally, I blamed my apartment — the claustrophobic lack of square footage, the oppressive brick wall. The moment I walked in the door, I felt a crushing weight on my chest, followed by a pit in my stomach. My environment had to be the cause.

In his essay on solitude, the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne disagrees: “Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself.” Finding contentment in solitude requires self-reliance. (Ralph Waldo Emerson would later agree, though he remained very much engaged in public life.) Montaigne advises us to keep a “back shop,” a private room within the self, where others can’t enter. Plaster and wood have nothing to do with it. We must have “a mind pliable in itself, that will be company.” My inner back shop had somehow transformed from a place of solitude to one of isolation and loneliness.

The ideal of solitude is strength. It’s a skill to be mastered: the ability to be alone without feeling lonely.  Read more…

8 Longreads by Will Storr on the Science of Storytelling

Author Will Storr (Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert / Getty Images)

“People change, don’t they?” journalist and author Will Storr asks at the beginning of an Aeon essay called “Plot Twist.” That question has been at the heart of Storr’s writing for years now, a question he carries with him throughout so many of his investigations into science, belief, and the human impulse to tell stories.

Storr has a knack for starting with a simple statement that anyone can intuitively understand, then revealing how deceptive both simplicity and intuition can be. Storr’s willingness to challenge even his most basic assumptions appears most often in his stories as curiosity, which he brings anew to all of his conversations with sometimes desperate story subjects who find themselves facing some of life’s most serious consequences.

Read more…