Search Results for: Scientific American

25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez on the set of 'Hustlers' in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

As more publications pursue blockbuster stories with film and television potential, producers in Hollywood and the magazine industry are taking their inspiration from successful article-to-film adaptations of the past that have achieved box office success.

Here are 25 gold-standard film adaptations of magazine articles, published over the course of half a century as cover stories, features, or breaking news, as well as direct links to read all 25 stories online.

Legacy magazines with well-known print editions dominate this list, as do the nonfiction writers that legacy magazines accept and champion. Many of these writers’ names will be familiar to readers, as will the majority of the magazines and films themselves, in many cases because celebrated journalists inspired these major motion pictures at the peak of their careers as writers and reporters. Name recognition in one industry reinforces name recognition in another, and — despite the incredible diversity of feature-length nonfiction being published today by new voices most mainstream audiences have yet to discover — institutional support still tends to elevate known veterans.

While the talents of all of the writers on this list are undeniable, there are also well-documented structural biases that account for why so many of the writers represented here are overwhelmingly male, white, or Susan Orlean. These stories belong on any narrative nonfiction syllabus on their own merit, but I hope these samples are still just the beginning, and that new filmmakers and magazine writers can start to work together far more often on a greater breadth of material, with sufficient editorial guidance and studio backing to support them.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ve limited this roundup to favor adaptations (loosely defined) based primarily on magazine-style features, including only a couple of films based on award-winning newspaper investigations. The list of new film and television adaptations based on popular books or podcasts, let alone reporting that has helped support the explosion in streaming documentary formats, would run even longer.

It takes time, access, imagination, and resources to be able to realize ambitious true stories like these in their original form as narrative magazine features. It would be a welcome change to see greater diversity in the production pipeline in the coming years: in the subjects of narrative stories, in the publications considered for exclusive source material, in the creative teams that are given studio support, in the agencies brokering deals, in the awards and recognition that elevate new work, and in the storytellers who are given the resources to write long.

Writers are the lifeblood of all of these industries, and will always play a pivotal role in any production that is based on a true story.

* * *

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Based on Can You Say…Hero? by Tom Junod (Esquire, 1998)

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.”

Hustlers (2019)

Based on The Hustlers at Scores by Jessica Pressler (The Cut, 2015)

While evolutionary theory and The Bachelor would suggest that a room full of women hoping to attract the attention of a few men would be cutthroat-competitive, it’s actually better for strippers to work together, because while most men might be able keep their wits, and their wallets, around one scantily clad, sweet-smelling sylph, they tend to lose their grip around three or four. Which is why at Hustler, as elsewhere, the dancers worked in groups.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Based on My Addicted Son by David Sheff (The New York Times Magazine, 2005)

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, “That was that.” It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, said that methamphetamine makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on meth he became unrecognizable.

Read more…

Science Says Life is Better in Intentional Communities

(AP Photo/Missourian, Joshua A. Bickel)

Intentional communities geared to gender parity, equal division of labor, and a simpler way of life are proliferating in the United States. Rejecting consumerism and capitalism, communities tend their own livestock, gardens, and facilities, and share among themselves. And, according to researchers, members of intentional communities score highly on the Satisfaction with Life Scale — higher in fact than 30 of 31 different cohorts under study. Why? As Mike Mariani reports at The New York Times Style Magazine, intentional community members have strong social connections and a meaningful existence spent in nature, not to mention a much smaller carbon footprint than average people.

The members of East Wind, for example, range in age from infancy to 76: Some have lived here for more than three decades, but around half of the population is part of a new wave, people in their late 20s and early 30s who joined in the last four years. These newer residents moved to East Wind to wean themselves off fossil fuels, grow their own food, have a greater say in how their society is run and live in less precarious financial circumstances.

Even in the dead of winter, the property is stunning, with its undulating textures of ridges, glades and limestone escarpments. It was obvious how living here could reconnect people to the land, letting them hike, climb, swim and harvest in a way that is beyond reach for most Americans. As we passed a three-story dormitory painted Egyptian blue, Nichols told me that, as a college student in the late 2000s, he tumbled down what he calls the “climate change research hole,” reading websites that pored over grim scientific projections about an increasingly warmer planet. He’d joined the Bloomington, Indiana, chapter of the Occupy movement for a while, but saw the blaze of indignation dwindle to fumes without any lasting political victories. Afterward, Nichols felt wholly disillusioned by the corporations and government organizations that he felt had a stranglehold on his life. “It’s going to go how it goes,” he recalled thinking, so “how do you want to live in it?” After discovering several intentional communities online — many find East Wind and others through simple Google searches — he concluded that joining one was “just a more comfortable way of living right now.”

IN 2017 BJORN GRINDE and Ranghild Bang Nes, researchers with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, co-authored a paper on the quality of life among North Americans living in intentional communities. Along with David Sloan Wilson, director of the evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, and Ian MacDonald, a graduate assistant, they contacted more than 1,000 people living in 174 communities across the U.S. and Canada and asked them to rate their happiness level on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a globally recognized measurement tool. They compared these results to a widely cited 2008 study by the psychologists William Pavot and Ed Diener, which surveyed past studies that used the scale to analyze 31 disparate populations — including Dutch adults, French-Canadian university students and the Inuit of northern Greenland — and discovered that members of intentional communities scored higher than 30 of the 31 groups. Living in an intentional community, the authors concluded, “appears to offer a life less in discord with the nature of being human compared to mainstream society.” They then hypothesized why that might be: “One, social connections; two, sense of meaning; and three, closeness to nature.”

Read the story

Through a Glass, Tearfully

Illustration by Hannah Li

Maureen Stanton | Longreads | January 2020 | 26 minutes (6,448 words)

In the early 1990s I joined a stream of people strolling past the AIDS quilt spread across a gymnasium floor in Lansing, Michigan, the room quiet but for our muffled sniffling. I hadn’t expected the quilt — a patchwork of many quilts — to affect me so powerfully, the clothes and artifacts and mementos stitched into tapestries, with dates of births and premature deaths, soft beautiful tombstones.

Humans are the only creatures who cry for emotional reasons. Animals do not shed tears of emotion; apes have tear ducts but only to “bathe and heal” the eyes. Crying makes us human. In the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, people who’d been replaced by aliens could no longer cry, a telltale sign that they were not human. In one scene, a man carries a pod containing the alien replica of a small child. “There’ll be no more tears,” he tells the child’s mother.

***

Some people are super tasters or super smellers, or even super see-ers, with an uncanny ability to remember faces. I am a super crier, or maybe a super empathizer. An astrologer once said that my soul bears the karmic burden of feeling others’ pain as if it were my own. This is apparently because of the placement on my birth chart of the comet Chiron, “the wounded healer,” named after a Greek centaur who could heal everyone but himself.

Once, in Columbus, Ohio, I choked up at Taco John’s, a brand new mom and pop joint, all spiffy with shiny stainless steel, but empty of customers. I could see the work and sacrifice the family had made to realize their dream — opening a taco shop. I could feel their hope when I walked in the door, but I could calculate the meager profit from my order against the cost of utilities, salaries, supplies. I could see their dream failing.

I nearly lost it again at Karyn’s Kitchen, a food truck in someone’s yard along the road to my house in Maine. Karyn probably figured she’d snag summer traffic on the way to the beach, but who wants to eat in someone’s yard? I ate there once out of pity — her husband’s “famous” meatloaf, which she served with mashed potatoes, steamed carrots, and two slices of white bread with a pat of margarine. When I asked her to heat up the cold gravy, she microwaved it until the plastic container melted and handed it to me like that. When I drive by Karyn’s yard now, I can’t stand to look at the empty space where her dream failed.

A woman in a laundromat once yelled at her small son, “No one wants to hear you,” and I got a lump in my throat.
Read more…

What the World’s Most Controversial Herbicide Is Doing to Rural Argentina

A display of Roundup at Monsanto headquarters in St Louis. Brent Stirton/Getty Images.

Carey Gillam | Whitewash | Island Press | October 2017 | 21 minutes (4,832 words)

 

American farmland has long been the largest market for genetically engineered seeds and the glyphosate herbicides used on them, but the United States is by no means the only country to have adopted the new technology with open arms. Farmers in Argentina started using genetically engineered seeds about the same time farmers in the United States did, after regulators in Argentina approved Monsanto Company’s Roundup Ready soybeans in 1996. Soy production soared over the next decade as farmers who previously had been tending to grass-fed cattle, growing rice and potatoes, or running dairy farms shifted their focus to growing soybeans. Many farmers plowed up pastures to become part of what was billed as a biotech revolution. Because the beans tolerated direct sprays of glyphosate herbicide, controlling weeds was easier than ever, and, like the Americans, Argentine farmers quickly became eager buyers of both the specialty seeds and the glyphosate chemicals. The timing was perfect. Rising demand for protein — translation: meat — was fueling strong global demand for soy needed to feed livestock that would end up on dinner plates around the world. Argentina soon became the world’s third-largest soybean supplier, and genetically modified soybeans became Argentina’s most important export. Argentine farmers adopted biotech cotton and corn as well, with roughly 24 million acres of the nation’s farmland planted with biotech seeds by 2014, most of which were designed to be sprayed with glyphosate.

As in the United States, aggressive use of glyphosate year after year on farm fields led to a rise in glyphosate-resistant weeds, spurring many farmers to use more and more of the herbicide, often alongside other chemicals, to fight back. According to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, total pesticide use in Argentina rose by 90 percent between 1997, when the country was beginning to adopt the new type of farming, and 2011, when it was well established. Use of herbicides, including glyphosate, rose by 185 percent during that time frame. And, just as in the United States, concerns for human health and for the environment have emerged.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2019: Business Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in business writing.

Whitney Joiner
Articles editorThe Washington Post Magazine

The State With the Highest Suicide Rate Desperately Needs Shrinks (Monte Reel, Bloomberg Businessweek)

This isn’t a traditional business piece — in the sense that it’s not a profile of a kooky founder or a growing industry, or an investigation into corporate wrongdoing, or a capitalist reckoning. It’s a wrenching read about what happens when a job market/industry (in this case, mental health) slowly folds in on itself while demand for that industry’s services and providers grows dramatically. Monte Reel’s profile of the one psychiatrist in eastern Montana (Joan “Mutt” Dickson, whose grit will stick with you) covers so many other pressing American problems: addiction, guns, depression, anxiety, burnout. Reel’s portrait of Dickson’s work — and his mastery of the background forces at play — is a grim-but-captivating look at what the dearth of mental health resources in the rural and mountain West means.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2019: Science and Nature

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in science and nature.

Deborah Blum
Deborah Blum is the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and publisher of Undark magazine.

‘We Have Fire Everywhere’ (Jon Mooallem, The New York Times Magazine)

Our Secret Delta (Tony Bartelme and Glenn Smith, The Post and Courier)

One of the most interesting trends in climate change reporting is the way writers now quietly and deftly weave its effects into the background of natural disaster stories, from the rapid intensification of hurricanes in the Atlantic to the increasingly explosive wildfires in the west. I’d like to pay tribute to two outstanding examples of this in the past year.

One is environmental writer Jon Mooallem’s stunning narrative portrait of last year’s devastating Camp Fire in northern California, which killed at least 85 people, burned through nearly 240 square miles, and destroyed almost 20,000 buildings including almost all of the small, wooded town of Paradise. Mooallem’s story “We Have Fire Everywhere” is a vivid, terrifying, edge-of-your seat reconstruction of desperate attempts to escape a literal inferno. It moves so beautifully and is so well-paced that you almost don’t realize that he’s also slipping in a lot of very smart fire science, exploring the ways in which climate change is making wildfires exponentially more dangerous. Describing one harrowing moment in a line of burning cars, he writes, “Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a car; she was trapped in the 21st century.”

The other is “Our Secret Delta,” a haunting exploration of South Carolina’s threatened Santee River delta, published this September in the Charleston paper, The Post and Courier. It’s a real pleasure in these days when we worry so much about the fate of local journalism to see this paper shine in so many important ways. This project, led by Tony Bartelme and Glenn Smith, is visually gorgeous and told with the grace of an old-time Southern story, allowing the delta, its history and culture, its fragile waters, to gradually unspool like the winding path of a river itself. The writers create a memorable portrait of an old and essential ecosystem under new threats. Perhaps the most ominous threat is the rise of coastal waters as they reshape the state, yet another reminder that climate change stalks our present as well as our future.

Elizabeth Rush
Elizabeth Rush is the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore and instructor of creative nonfiction at Brown University.

Climate Signs (Emily Raboteau, The New York Review of Books)

When Emily Raboteau’s son becomes obsessed with extreme weather events after a family outing to the “Nature’s Fury” exhibition at the natural history museum in New York, she wonders how much she should shield her five-year-old from conversations around climate change. It is a query she carries with her as she embarks on a city-wide pilgrimage to visit each installation of a public art project called “Climate Signals” wherein the artist hijacks highway traffic signs, rewriting their commonplace warnings with uncanny proclamations of new hazards ahead. In Saint Nicolas Park in Harlem, the sign reads: CLIMATE CHANGE AT WORK. At Hudson River Yards, the yellow lettering spells out an even more dire threat: CLIMATE DENIAL KILLS. In this expertly rendered essay –– gracefully weaving between the personal and critical, the scientific and political –– Raboteau attempts to make sense of what it means to raise a child in a world that is coming apart. It is a question many have but that is all too often addressed in reductive, late capitalist logic in which our human hearts are not taken into consideration.

Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau is a professor of creative writing at the City College of New York, and the author of several nontraditional longform essays, including a year-long Twitter thread on climate change, @emilyraboteau.

After the Storm (Mary Annaïse Heglar, Guernica)

Mary Annaïse Heglar’s “After the Storm” stood out to me as a knockout personal essay on climate this year. Heglar is building a body of important work marrying climate awareness with social, environmental, and racial justice. In this piece, which ran in Guernica in October, she frames her harrowing experience of Hurricane Katrina, along with her family in the Mississippi River region, as the lens through which she now sees the climate movement as an activist and director of publications at the National Resources Defense Council. She weaves together the overtly racist news coverage of that storm, the fact that it made landfall the day after the 50th anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder, and the inequitable suffering of New Orleans’ Black population to illuminate the layers of historical injustice magnified by the climate crisis, “covered in the fingerprints of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and genocide and patriarchy. It’s what happens when large swaths of people are not only systematically ‘left out,’ but forced to be their own gravediggers and pallbearers.” This should be required reading for those interested in how equity and equality are pivotal to successful climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Mary Annaïse Heglar
Mary Annaïse Heglar is a climate justice writer and communications professional based in New York City.

The End Times Are Here, and I Am at Target (Hayes Brown, The Outline)

Perhaps the most perplexing paradox of climate change is its ability to be both overwhelmingly terrifying and mind-numbingly ordinary. Especially in the past few years, as denial has become less of a viable option and even delusion has slipped from our fingers, the climate crisis with its alarming headlines and horror stories has become… normal. The steady drumbeat to the banality of our lives. Hayes Brown manages to capture that drumbeat in this masterful essay, isolating its sound out of the symphony with surgical precision. As he runs regular errands in a regular Target on a regular, if unusually hot, summer day in Brooklyn, the climate crisis reverberates in the back of his mind, filtering into every choice of every item, if he allows himself to think of it. As someone who exists as a bonafide “climate person,” I love the fresh eye that Hayes brings to the subject. He gives voice to the haunting bewilderment, the guilt of surrender, and the uncertainty that lies within the cracks of the certainty. His essay reminds us of the dullness of our collective heartbreak as we stare into our manmade abyss.

Mikael Awake
Mikael Awake‘s work has appeared in GQ, Bookforum, ArtNews, The Common, and most recently McSweeney’s 58: 2040 A.D. He teaches at Lafayette College.

Indigenous Knowledge Has Been Warning Us About Climate Change for Centuries (Malcolm Harris, Pacific Standard)

This piece by Malcolm Harris has stuck with me for a few reasons. It came out in Pacific Standard, which was an important outlet for environmental writing before it was shut down this past August. (How the crisis in media has interacted with the climate crisis is a subject for another day.) The essay is an elegant synthesis of entomology, economics, and colonial history that places indigenous knowledge at the foundation of the climate conversation — not as ornament, but as central anti-capitalist critique, as timeless technology. Such a piece could inspire the allotment of more time and money — in academic, political, media, and cultural spaces — for deeper dives into indigenous environmentalism and systems of knowledge. It made me dream of a 1619 Project-style series devoted to un-suppressing those narratives, and made me think about Standing Rock and Mauna Kea and how the violent suppression of indigenous activism works hand-on-musket with the suppression of indigenous thought. Harris is a sharp and funny writer, which is why this story seemed something of a departure in approach and tone, and I appreciated it. I wasn’t familiar with the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who posits the crucial idea that what we call climate change is not a new challenge, but one as old as the New World, “part of a much longer series of ecological catastrophes caused by colonialism and accumulation-based society.” The piece resonated with my feeling that imagination is a function of collective human memory, or as Harris says, paraphrasing sociologist Nikitah Okembe-RA Imani, “[t]hose who study what has been suppressed can see the future.”

* * *

Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.

Longreads Best of 2019: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2019. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

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

My Brown Dad Voted for Trump

Illustration by Carson McNamara

Anjoli Roy | Longreads | November 2019 | 28 minutes (6,945 words)

For most of my life, I’ve been trying to make sense of my Southern-drawling, Tar Heels–loving, fiscally conservative, immigrant from India, gyno, deeply loving dad of three daughters. There have been some strange contradictions. When my sisters and I were little and our parents were still together, he and our mom would drop us off at Sunday school at a nondenominational Christian church in our hometown of Pasadena, CA, while they skipped service and went who knows where, enjoying the free babysitting. When I was 14 and he found out my friends were having sex, he gave me birth control pills to “help with my acne.” He answered my friends’ and my questions about bodily pathologies oftentimes connected to sex without judgment and always with a professionalism that told me I could count on him. But, for most of our childhoods, he was traveling on the lecture circuit. It wasn’t until I was an adult that he became more than the scruffy cheek kissing us goodbye in our sleep, or the dry-cleaned suits encased in soft plastic sleeves hanging on an empty door frame, not to be disturbed. Until then, he was the grumpy, tired person I mostly avoided on the rare occasions he was home. He was the distant guy my middle sister Maya and I drew countless pictures for, of shoes with a plus sign and then a bee — a visual representation of how to pronounce his name, Subi — which he’d hang dutifully in his office at county hospital.

Today, my dad, the source of our brownness, is a marker of how I understand myself. I grew up the lightest of my dad’s three girls — the one who looked least like him. Maybe that’s why I reach for him so much: I don’t want to get swallowed up with Mom’s side of the family, locked in with the white folks. I have learned to subject him to the same critiques I aim at my own body. In some ways, his story is my story. Sometimes, it feels like we’re both half-told, bleeding onto blank pages.

Read more…

The Speaking Length

Illustration by Fabio Consoli

Josh Roiland | Longreads | November, 2019 | 10 minutes (2,622 words)

I once lived in Delaware for two days. I had moved there under the pretext of graduate school, but soon fled back to Minnesota amidst the clanging static of a panic attack.

The morning of the move my car had a flat. Once the tire was patched, I headed east with an atlas and not much of a plan. After 15 hours, I stopped in a Walmart parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, and tried to sleep in my overstuffed car. At dawn, I pushed through the Ohio River Valley and emerged in Newark, Delaware, seven hours later.

It was my first time outside the Midwest.

I had booked my apartment online, and when I arrived, I saw that it sat next to a fire station. Inside, there was a woman painting my walls and singing songs from The Wizard of Oz. I unloaded my car as she packed up and left. My only furniture was an air mattress with a hand pump whose nozzle was too small for its opening.

Once my car was empty, and my apartment slightly less so, I stood surrounded by wet paint and cried. I scared myself by the force of everything pouring from me. I didn’t know where it was coming from, and I didn’t know how to stop it.

I tried to stay busy, distract myself from everything that was to come — whatever that may be. I went to Kmart. Because I was traveling, I thought I needed traveler’s checks. I paid for my home supplies with 15 10-dollar notes. The cashier had to call an 800-number to verify each one. The line grew while his patience shrank. My chest tightened. I fled back to my apartment where I plugged a random coaxial cable into my 13” television. I watched the Food Network until I passed out. In the morning, I awoke on the floor with the air mattress folded up around me.

***

There are, today, mornings when I wake up and my body vibrates like a piano string struck by a hammer. The musical term for the section of string that experiences these tremors is the “speaking length.” Preconscious, my feet knock together like boxers’ gloves. I lay there shimmering as pulses push me up off the bed, where I hover and tremble. Stretched tight across the bridge, I glint and wink like a snap of sunlight.

There are, today, mornings when I wake up and my body vibrates like a piano string struck by a hammer. The musical term for the section of string that experiences these tremors is the ‘speaking length.’

Or at least that’s what it feels like to wake up in the thrall of anxiety. I crackle and can’t communicate what’s going on, where these vibrations are coming from.

***

Day two in Delaware began with the rounded whine of fire trucks. I showered behind my new vinyl shower curtain then left for the grocery store where the briny stench of fresh seafood shocked my Midwestern sensitivity. I found a bank and set up an account. I went to the post office and bought stamps.

But the truth is that I was already plotting my escape.

That afternoon I went to campus and stood in front of my English department mailbox. Having seen what I would leave, I left. I went back to my apartment, which had transmogrified from alien to comforting. Everything was shape-shifting.


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

Sign up


The evening stretched and sprinted. I circled through my apartment, too afraid to leave but desperate not to stay. With everything unfamiliar and nothing certain, I didn’t know what to do. What were my options? Once again, I stood with my arms wrapped around myself, digging my fingernails into my triceps.

I called my dad. My sobs scared him, and he wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Well,” he finally said. “You can always come home.”

My car was packed before I hung up the phone.

Then, just before I left Delaware forever, my phone rang. A returning grad student called to welcome me and invite me out for a beer. I stood there in my again-empty living room, holding the phone, not knowing what to say.

***

The stories we tell are never wholly our own. Words, and the stories they create, have their own history, and we all work within their limits. Writers and speakers, all of us, constantly reorder and encode new meaning in what has already been said. Our words, as the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin put it, are always “half someone else’s.” This phenomenon came to be known as “metadiscourse.”

One reason we tell stories is so others can understand what we are seeing, thinking, and feeling. But often we misunderstand a basic premise, believing that the communicative norm is transparency when, in fact, it’s opacity. What is meant never fully transmits into what is understood. Linguists call this false belief the myth of perfect understanding.

The stories we tell are never wholly our own.

As much as we may desire to control both the narrative and its reception, meaning is always contingent and never inherent. There is no such thing, Bahktin says, as “neutral and impersonal language.” We merely offer, in the words of Bahktin scholars, “endless redescriptions of the world.”

***

I first saw a therapist early in my second bout with a Ph.D. There’d been break-ups, and I once again felt dislodged from everything I thought I knew. But the counselor and I had a great rapport to the point where he questioned why I was even there. He thought my hyperventilating about certain regrets and uncertainties was overmuch. Though I shared and shared, I could not get him to understand exactly what was going on inside of me.

Nearly every session, in an effort to make me feel better, he’d joke: “So what’s wrong with you again?”

Nonetheless, I went on to see a psychiatrist, and then another, in an effort to better explain myself. Or have myself explained to me. OCD? Bipolar? Plain old depression? Who could tell? Regardless, medications were prescribed and ingested. Klonopin for acute anxiety. Zoloft for depression. Then Effexor when the Zoloft didn’t work.

There was little oversight with these scripts, and I experienced all the ignominious side effects without much psychic relief. When I told the doctor that the Klonopin didn’t seem to quell any sudden panic, she said it was because of my high metabolism and urged me to up the dosage until I felt OK.

Then one night, I was carried out of a bar.

***

A few years ago, I gave a public talk about my mental health. Its title, “Almost Aloud,” was a line clipped from the short story “Good Old Neon,” by David Foster Wallace. For years I had researched and written about the history of Wallace’s nonfiction, and the talk’s nominal hook was describing what it was like to work in his archive.

My first-ever publication argued that Wallace’s journalism lacked what Nietzsche called “oblivion” — the psychic ability to filter good self-consciousness from bad. The piece somehow ended up wedged between some famous authors in an anthology. Essentially, though, I just mapped my own experience onto Wallace’s work, and it happened they overlapped.

And so it was that six months into a tenure-track job, I nervously told an audience of colleagues, neighbors, and friends how working on Wallace activated my own anxiety. Or was it that my already-activated anxiety was an a priori factor in my interest in Wallace’s work? How to tell?

I began the talk:

For me the sound of anxiety is silence. It’s an empty room where I sit, alone, and all I can hear are my thoughts, which quietly insist themselves upon me, both unbidden and unwanted. And after a time, a time when I get up and walk through other empty rooms, only to return, and get up and return, those thoughts begin to take the same shape as that recursive path through my apartment. Looping endlessly, relentlessly.

For six minutes I guided the audience through these seemingly overlapping maps. When I mentioned Wallace’s suicide — an act he himself described in Infinite Jest as “eliminating your map” — there was an audible gasp, then dead silence for several minutes.

I ended the talk darkly. I wanted to convey a desperation, even a resignation at the whole intellectual endeavor. At the absurdity of speaking and writing and teaching. Where did all that thinking, all those words get you anyhow? I closed with the last sentence from “Good Old Neon” — the only way, it seemed to me, to control a feral mind: “Not another word.”

Looking back, I misread that story completely.

***

I haven’t slept through the night in decades. Melatonin, meditation, booze, Benadryl — they’ve all pulled me under, but invariably my mind burns through the restraints and I surface. When I’m marooned in the middle of the night, legs scissoring and feet belting back and forth, I turn to all manner of sleep apps and ambient music. The song I come back to over and over again is “DLP 3,” by the avant-garde musician William Basinski. It is one of nine songs on his five-hour, four-record album The Disintegration Loops.

Writing in Pitchfork, Mark Richardson tells the album’s origin story:

In the 1980s, [Basinski] constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle.

The Disintegration Loops are literally disintegrating loops. They erode as you listen to them. The change from one revolution to the next is imperceptible, but the tape is falling apart. Each pass, a redescription of the past.

“DLP 3” is 42 minutes long. The loop, a three-note horn fugue that pushes forward over a ghost march before sucking back in on itself, is only eight seconds long. It repeats 310 times. My fibrillating mind trains on its respiratory rhythm.

Turning and turning, the song softly transforms from hypnotic to unsettling. The gradations are subtle, but the crackles widen and a buzzy silence fills the perforations. If I don’t fall asleep during its first half, I’m worse off than when I laid down. My mind catches on the crepitates and recollects all that I tried to cast off, like a needle dredging dust with each revolution of a record.

The longer I listen, the harder it is to hear.

***

A decade after my first foray into therapy, I tried it again. Academia had drawn me back to the East Coast and all of its familiar dislocations. Soon, a much more substantial break-up left me unmoored. My therapist gave me language to understand these upheavals, but when those words miscarried, she suggested medication.

The longer I listen, the harder it is to hear.

I met with a psych nurse and explained how meds hadn’t worked for me in the past. She suggested a genetic test. While I awaited the results of my cheek swabs, I started Lexapro. It did nothing. Six weeks later my GeneSight results came in. It sorted drugs into three categories: 1. Use As Directed; 2. Moderate Gene-Drug Interaction; and 3. Significant Gene-Drug Interaction. Many of my previously prescribed psychotropic medications were listed under the third category — meaning they were essentially incompatible. Below the drug columns were numbered notes headlined, “Clinical Considerations.” One referenced a high metabolic rate; another read: “Serum level may be too low, higher doses may be required.”

I was encouraged by these explanations.

My university health insurance, however, wouldn’t cover the test. The American Psychiatric Association says the science behind using biomarkers as a diagnostic tool is inconclusive. GeneSight’s website itself acknowledges these interpretive limits: “Psychiatric pharmacogenomics does not have an individual genetic marker or causative gene like is often typical in molecular diagnostic testing. … Instead of diagnosing the bimodal presence or absence of a disease state, the GeneSight test predicts patient response to medication.”

A year after starting Cymbalta, I finally felt I had a floor when I fell. But it did not eliminate the worry and doubt. I tried explaining to a friend the difference between my outward appearance and inward feeling; the incongruity between medication and the persistence of depressive symptoms.

“I guess that’s what makes it difficult to understand,” she said. “Because you have so many relationships and people to lean on and care about, and who care for you. But it’s so deeply seeded inside of you. I’m very sad about that, Josh.”

***

My life has nearly doubled since Delaware. The tenure track job’s gone. As are those colleagues and friends. Health insurance, medication, my retirement—none of it’s left. All stories too difficult to tell, yet harder still not to explain.

I now live in a camper, parked in the same driveway I departed two decades ago. The future feels weightier today than then, carrying everything that once was and the understanding of what can never again be. The strings still vibrate, louder sometimes than others, but I’ve learned, if not wholly accepted, that this is life. Or my life anyway.

A few weeks after I came home again, my dad nearly died in front of me. He’d recently been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and one day after lunch I followed him as he walked to his bedroom to take a nap. Climbing into bed he looked at me and said, “Here it comes.” His heart slowed to a near-stop, and he began gasping for breath.

Since then, my dad, sister, and I have spent countless hours in hospital rooms genuflecting to doctors as they dispense diagnoses, which stirs complicated feelings for an unemployed Ph.D. whose own work never resonated with his father.

I’ve filled my reporter’s notebook with words I never thought I’d know: Ejection fraction. Asystole. Metoprolol. Amiodarone. Cardioversion. As I sit there asking questions and taking notes — grasping for agency — I worry that someone is going to ask me what I do for a living.

No one, of course, does, preferring instead to lightly fill in the blanks themselves. During our third visit to the heart clinic, a two-hour drive away, my dad’s cardiologist again observed my constant scribbling and said, “Josh is writing a novel over here with all his notes.” Everyone laughed. Then he doubled down: “Josh is like a historian!”

As misbegotten as faith ever is, hospitals can engender hope with their clear-eyed promise of science to diagnose, explain, and treat. They can offer a map. In my dad’s case, recovery has meant a CRT-D implant, a suite of medication, and cardiac rehabilitation.

Three days a week I drive him, in his pickup, to a rehab clinic where he pedals on an elliptical bike for 40 minutes, while I sit in the back of the room and record his weight and blood pressures. The nurses and other patients regard me benignly. They think I’m a college student, home for the summer.

It takes us a half hour to get to the clinic, and we don’t really say much on the way there or back. Sometimes, on the way home, we stop for ice cream.

My dad is months removed from the fainting spells and physical restrictions that catalyzed my chauffeuring in the first place. He’s returned to his routine drives by himself every afternoon and evening to look at crops, talk to friends, and go fishing. But every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8:50 a.m. we head out to the truck, and he climbs into the passenger seat.

Sometimes I want to ask him why he still has me drive him to these sessions. But then, what really could he say?

* * *

Josh Roiland is a writer living in western Minnesota. He last wrote about Jonathan Richman’s mid-career hiatus to Maine for Popula.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Steven Cohen
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Living Nightmare of Homeownership

House obscured by fog
Toomas Tuul/FOCUS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Katy Kelleher, whose work readers will recognize from her popular Longreads series on the ugly history of beautiful things, has a new piece in Curbed on the ugly history of homeownership — and why the manmade dream of owning a home haunts so many prospective homebuyers.

A 30-year time horizon seems almost impossible to imagine anywhere now, but I did once live out the anachronism of coming home to the same house for more than a quarter of a century. The specter of security that I associate with my since-demolished childhood home follows me from apartment to apartment, dangling the emotional logic of future homeownership over most of the choices I make. I ask myself daily, almost unconsciously, what it might take to reconstruct that feeling, whether any home can fill the role that house played in comforting me as a child. A decade after the housing crisis, the idea of accessing emotional stability through homeownership still sounds like so much marketing copy.

Despite years of setbacks and disappointments, my husband and I haven’t wholly abandoned our mission to escape the rental market, but we’re still millennials. We’re both self-employed in precarious industries that do not look good on paper. The size of the downpayment we’d need continues to rise while ballooning rents and healthcare costs erode our ability to save. And like so many of our peers, our vision of homeownership has permanently shifted to accommodate the warnings from the scientific community. Over time, regional housing markets are destined to undergo painful, unpredictable adjustments to climate-driven migration. That beachfront property actually isn’t going to appreciate, no matter what Miami real estate agents may say.

Emotionally, I still imagine living out the length of another mortgage with my family. But I can also read the writing on the proverbial seawall. My generation’s housing choices are necessarily limited; we all need to take far more into account than just our own private emotions, means, and finances. We can hardly afford to let the built environment stand, as it is. Most homes weren’t constructed to weather ahistorical climate conditions. The majority of our buildings were not constructed to support nature; to protect the health, safety, or welfare of people; to generate energy; or to sustain life. Until the construction of ecological housing is put within reach of everyone, previous generations’ outsized monuments to privacy will continue to threaten global health, haunting would-be buyers who can’t even afford to set foot inside them.

If the filmic nightmare of homeownership has looked, so far, like the claustrophobic fear of being trapped, the living nightmare of homeownership is shapeshifting to confirm the childhood terror of being forever locked out.

There are two different tales we tell ourselves about houses. The primary story is not about ghosts or demons or red rooms or ghouls, but rather about bright futures, long lives, children, grandchildren, and hard-earned success. The second story, the darker story, is about the horror of being trapped. Throughout American history, these stories have existed side by side. For people with the resources to buy in, one once felt more “real” than the other, but as we learned after the real estate crash of 2008, there’s truth to be found in both of them, especially for members of the cash-poor, dream-rich millennial generation.

…most of our desires are culturally rooted, shaped by a set of factors beyond our control. They don’t spring into being organically. I own a house in the woods for reasons other than my husband’s dreams or my own vision of myself as a future radical homemaker. I own out here because I can’t own in Portland, because the market is rising too quickly in the city, because I couldn’t buy in Boston, because I watched the real estate crash decimate my mother’s savings, because I feel the same anxieties as my peers. I’m afraid that a more expensive house in a more convenient area would put me into debt should the market experience another massive failure. I’m afraid that I could become trapped in one place, unable to sell, unable to move, haunting my own home and dreaming of mobility.

Read the story