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Under the Influence: Deeper Than Beauty

courtesy of Jakiya N. Brown / courtesy of Mina Gerges

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | October 2019 |  8 minutes (2,145 words)

Part two in a three-part series on the influencer economy. Read part one, “White Lies.”

* * *

It’s hard to find an influencer who doesn’t fit the profile. I could’ve spoken to a blond female beauty Instagrammer easily. Or a blond male gamer, even. Everything else was a nightmare. Try coming up with a tech influencer who is not a man. Or a man of color who is anywhere near grooming but not drag. In order to find the Travelingfro, Jakiya Brown, an African American woman Instagramming the globe, I had to go to a series of black culture sites. I might have discovered Mina Gerges, who lives in Toronto like me, if I ever walked rather than ran through a Sephora (he’s in the new Canadian campaign), but it was a Twitter callout that eventually brought us together. Surprise: “gay, genderqueer Egyptian beauty influencer” isn’t much of an archetype. Now I’m actually questioning whether being an influencer is a real thing either.

“You don’t do influencing,” Brown explains. “That, to me, that’s not a job.” She sees influencing as a side effect of admirable skill in one area (or, in the famous cases — from Kim Kardashian to Gigi Hadid — of having a name already), a way of selling brands on the attention you already have. She remembers working in beauty marketing several years ago and getting a flood of barely legible, text-style emails from beauty bloggers demanding free products. It was an easy no every time. Speaking of easy nos, I slogged through a sea of influencer-speak — I am now immunized from ever using the word “journey” again — to parse how Brown and Gerges slogged their way through a sea of sameness to get the influencing industry to say yes to them. Here’s how they got past the filters by appealing to reality.

* * *

You may already know Gerges for his “celebrity recreations,” a series prompted by a break up. Some guy ditched him in 2014, but not before mocking Gerges for being effeminate, and the first thing he thought of was that image of Beyoncé with mascara running down her face from her “Why Don’t You Love Me” video. “So I did that,” he says. The response was polarized. Social media stars were big with The Youth at the time, but they weren’t as pervasive in the mainstream as they are now. Gerges had some people thinking he was hilarious, others thinking he was weird: “When I saw peoples’ reactions, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I think I’m on to something.’” So he went nuts, producing scrappy imitations of everything from Kim Kardashian’s intricate Cavalli at the 2015 Met Gala (beige curtain, paint) to Beyonce’s twinkling Givenchy (garbage bag, rhinestones). In January 2015, Buzzfeed’s David Mack picked up his site — “Bow down, Instagram bitches” — and that was it. Gerges’s discount replicas were everywhere from Time magazine to Kim Kardashian’s fingertips, and people even started to copy them (that part was annoying, he says). He began to think he could make a living from this thing.

At the same time, Gerges was in recovery, having started his account while struggling with anorexia. “It became so amplified by the culture around Instagram,” he tells me. “Thin, muscular, white men having hundreds of thousands of followers.” He was proof that looking right could make you popular. As if to double down on this cliché, as he got well and gained weight, commenters stopped praising his work and started criticizing his body. It got to the point that he couldn’t look at his own reflection without comments like “What the fuck happened to you?” running through his head. He searched online for other men who might be struggling like him — nothing. “I realized there were no men talking about it,” Gerges says. “We’re conditioned to just take it and be quiet because men shouldn’t be vulnerable.”

He tried to figure out a way to work with Instagram so he didn’t have to hate both the platform and himself. After five months, on February 19, 2018, he had it: Gerges posted a series of images of himself shirtless and disclosed his eating disorder to his followers. He explained how he got sick at the age of 20, how he would starve himself, how he would spend hours at the gym, how he never felt satisfied. The post was covered in Teen Vogue and Paper and has since received almost 11,000 likes. “It took a very long time, because I was horrified to do it,” Gerges explains. But it wasn’t a fairytale ending. A year later he was considering deleting his Instagram account entirely. His work had turned increasingly vulnerable and he was increasingly bullied. And he would later find it impossible to make a living off his site, having sent out media kits and getting rejected left and right. He had a bad experience with an agent (he jokes that he’s now both Kris Jenner and Kim Kardashian in one). On top of all that, he felt discouraged watching all these white cis influencers constantly being hired. “There was not a single brand that wanted to work with me,” Gerges says, “not a single one.”

Then the brands got a kick in the ass. As the media awoke to representation, it confronted various industries, including the fashion and beauty machines, on their lack of diversity. Up-and-coming designers of color were more inclusive in their campaigns and on the runway, and old-school companies were shamed into progress. Fashion magazines started approaching Gerges; he landed the gig with Sephora and, more recently, an underwear campaign with Calvin Klein. That which had isolated him then — his gender, his sexuality, his race, his body type — now made him indispensable. In the aftermath of the Sephora campaign, Gerges told me he was researching Egyptian culture through history in order to come up with ways to queer traditionally straight historical narratives. He plans to get a friend to photograph him on film — “I don’t edit any of my photos,” he says, “I think that’s another way for me to introduce an element of vulnerability and honesty” — which he hopes to unveil as an Instagram series, probably at a scientifically suboptimal time for maxing out the likes. Because aside from not Facetuning his images, he doesn’t rely on apps to tell him when to post or how to hashtag. “My value is not that I have, like, a, fucking whatever percent engagement rate,” he says. “My value is my story, my value is who I am.”

* * *

Before Jakiya Browne started @travelingfro, she had a lucrative marketing career in New York with L’Oréal and Coty, for which she scouted talent online. “I would stay on YouTube, like, all day watching these bloggers,” she tells me. But even back in 2014, finding influencers who weren’t interchangeable was a bit of a chore. “The ‘I just got out of college, I fell into YouTubing, now I’m a millionaire’ — we didn’t really want those types of girls,” Brown explains. On one of the influencer trips she hosted, however, she met the kind of woman she realized she herself wanted to be, the kind of woman who creates and sustains a brand outside the confines of an office. “It wasn’t like, ‘I want to become an influencer,’” she clarifies (she will repeat this a few times during our interview), but she was tired of the corporate grind and wanted to travel.

Brown quit her job in 2016. She roamed the world for a year, which sounds impossible, but she supported herself with the “substantial” savings she had amassed over her career and supplemented that with consulting gigs for smaller beauty brands. Still, she had a strict budget: $1,000 a month. In places with a lower cost of living, like Mexico and Eastern Europe, it wasn’t hard to stick to that. Otherwise, she stayed with people she had met during her marketing career. “I just started getting scrappy,” she says, “which is like: creative on how not to spend money.” Once Brown grew a following, her room, board, and transit were covered by sponsored posts. “People were always like, ‘How did you get these brand partnerships when you had like 3,000 followers?’” she says. “I know how to convince them that it’s more than just numbers.” That she was a black female traveler was “low hanging fruit” — there weren’t that many women of color in the travel space — but her high engagement helped too. She only had a few thousand followers but got hundreds of comments per post, which means that a brand could appeal to a market that wasn’t entirely white, and this market would bring sustained attention. Brown thinks she earned her audience’s loyalty by being honest not only about the good, but also about the bad, like whether or not she had the stamina to keep traveling indefinitely. That, and she was good on camera (Brown was an early Instagram Stories adopter), which many influencers weren’t: “If you couldn’t talk to your audience like your friend, and you were super awkward, people disconnected.”

The Travelingfro is now a brand that has had more than 100 clients, offering courses, consulting, and workshops to help “tired nine-to-fivers” find the freedom to “do the things they love, like travel the world.” Last fall, Brown took some time to refine her brand, which included researching literature on digital marketing. In that time, she realized she could marry her marketing and social media experience in order to teach influencers the business side of things. As she wrote in a recent post sponsored by Numi Organic Tea, “Keep building. Show up even when no one shows up. Keep going when everyone thinks you should stop. Keep following whatever it is inside that keeps you from giving up. Watch what happens.” Why a tea company? Because tea is part of her morning routine. Brown only works with brands as long as they work with hers. “If you’re working with, like, detergent one day, and then like plant food the next day, and then like these boots the next day, and then AmEx cards the next day, you’re a walking billboard,” she says. “I’m not about that.” She’s about keeping expenses down, rolling contracts, spacing out your earnings to account for dry spells — in short, being practical. “No exchanges,” she adds. “Like a backpack? I can’t eat that.”

As a marketing veteran, Brown used to know the industry standards, such as they were — companies apparently have piles of cash for influencing that they divvy out arbitrarily — but she doesn’t care anymore. She prices according to how much time and work goes into her posts. “If I feel like I am worth $2,000 for two Instagram stories, that’s what I feel,” she says, to which I say: Jesus. But that’s not even on the high side: at one point, Brown revealed that within a recent quarter she made $50,000, which happens to be my annual income. “You’re like, ‘Oh, my God, things are great, I’m rich,’” she says. “Then something happens and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m broke.” (Usually I’m just broke.) Apparently influencers serially undervalue their worth, particularly influencers of color who see an overrepresentation of white faces. Brown thinks the opposite should be true — in any other industry, the rarer something is, the more valuable it tends to be.

* * *

Neither Brown nor Gerges set out to be influencers, which is probably why they are so good at it. Instead of conforming to the industry standard, they exploded it. Gerges injects the beauty field, which has been largely marketed as white and female, with Middle Eastern queerness. Brown, a black woman traveling the world, also dominates a space that has been overrepresented by white bodies. Which makes her all the more savvy about how precarious it all is. “Instagram can pack up and go any day,” she says. “You do not own that space. You don’t even own the content on there.” I hate to use this term (especially since she didn’t), but Brown diversified in order not to stake her entire livelihood on one platform. Most influencers, however, in her experience don’t have a plan B — a book or a workshop or some other source of income. “They’re all kind of riding this wave,” she says. “Until there is no more wave.” Gerges is doing everything he can to ensure that he is not one of those people. For him, the work goes way beyond appearances. “It’s not just an aesthetic or a filter that you toss on every photo,” he says. “It’s about a larger idea.” Whether or not anyone else can see that is out of his control. But influencing on its own is definitely precarious considering the dilution of the industry by superficial infiltrators who pose as something more. “I hope that people can get to a point where they can differentiate between what’s actually authentic,” Gerges says. “And what is just fabricated to look authentic.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Why Lhasa de Sela Matters

Lionel FLUSIN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Fred Goodman | Why Lhasa de Sela Matters | University of Texas Press | November 2019 | 27 minutes (5,471 words)

 

A sorceress of the soul, the multi-lingual singer Lhasa de Sela captivated music fanatics around the world with her spellbinding songs and other-worldly performances. Yet ten years after her tragic death from breast cancer in Montreal at 37, America’s first world music chanteuse remains largely and inexplicably unknown here, an under-the-radar icon in her own country. Why Lhasa de Sela Matters, her first biography, charts Lhasa’s road to musical maturity. —Fred Goodman

 

The slowest nights for bars and clubs come early in the week, which is why many clubs are closed on Mondays, leaving Tuesday as the lightest night of the week. As a result, Lhasa de Sela didn’t waitress on Tuesdays. Instead, she found local Montreal bars that would let her sing a set a cappella. Wearing a black dress and a long knit hat, she cut a figure that was both striking and subdued.

Working on assorted standards and the Billie Holiday songs she loved, Lhasa was primarily focused on two tasks: overcoming her own shyness and learning how to hold a listener’s attention. She had a ways to go.

Read more…

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Orchids

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | October 2019 | 18 minutes (4,621 words)

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

Previously: the grisly sides of perfumeangora, pearls, and mirrors.

* * *

Everyone thought it was gone. The woods would no longer welcome the late-spring appearance of its pendulous yellow lip, twisted maroon petals, and thick green foliage. Although lady’s slipper orchids continued to bloom throughout the wild woods of Europe and North America, this particular species (Cypripedium calceolus) had been declared extinct in England as of 1917. Collectors had destroyed the plant in the early 20th century, suffering from what was then known as “orchidelirium,” an incurable psychological illness marked by a need to pillage and possess, to strip the landscape bare and imprison one’s precious findings behind the four walls of a personal greenhouse. 

But Cypripedium calceolus wasn’t entirely lost. There were a few small plants growing wild from seed, working their thick white roots into the forest soil. It grew slowly and survived in secret. When a botanist found one growing in Yorkshire in the ’30s, it was kept secret. Botanists feared the plant would be poached again, and so for four decades, no one knew about the lady’s slipper’s return to Britain. 

Eventually, the secret got out. While botanists worked to reintroduce the flower to the wild and start a new population of yellow-lobed blossoms, collectors caught wind of the miraculous return of the lady’s slipper. For a while, the specimen — growing on the Silverdale Golf Course  — was relatively safe, thanks to its obscurity. Then, in 2004, someone got greedy. A thief stole onto the grounds in the middle of the night and attempted to steal an entire plant. It was found later, mangled, but still alive; the thief got away with a small cutting. In 2009, another poacher got away with a large piece of orchid, leaving just six flowers behind. 

The orchid is now under police protection during its flowering months, from late May to early July. As far as I can tell, they set up police tape around the growing area, assign an officer to regularly patrol the course on foot, and considered putting in CCTV cameras, though it’s unclear whether they actually ever began to film the plant. The tape and the patrolman, however, remain as a deterrent, and the plant, one of about a dozen in the U.K., continues to flower annually. 

Orchid mania didn’t begin with lady’s slippers. It began with exotic specimens, introduced to English gardeners and noblemen in the late 18th century. While many of them had seen botanical drawings of tropical orchids, the live specimens were something else entirely. Their strangely shaped flowers and bright colors sparked a fixation that came to exemplify the values of the period, for the heroic white adventurer who risks his life to harvest the knowledge and beauty of other lands, returning victorious to his home after striding across harsh landscapes, battling his way through jungles, and fighting man and beast to achieve his goals. The orchid stood for supremacy — of knowledge, of culture, of whiteness. It stood for expansion and colonialism. The way Western countries have treated orchids reflects how we’ve come to understand entire sections of the map. Instead of the old saying, “Here there be dragons,” Western explorers looked at the blank areas of their maps and thought, Here there be loot. 

If Cypripedium calceolus is afforded official privileges, it’s not because of its beauty. It’s for its symbolism: It’s a stand-in for Britain’s native wildlife. Visiting this rare flower is a way for people to show their fealty to the land itself, to participate in a romantic rewriting of history, where they always loved their green islands and white cliffs and were only ever trying to extend those same gifts to others.

* * *

It is not often that a plant inspires pilgrimages or gets police protection; for the most part, we view plants as one of the lowest forms of life. The hierarchy is usually: human, animal, insect, plant, fungi, bacteria, virus. We assumed for centuries that plants were stationary, unthinking, unfeeling, and unable to send even rudimentary messages to one another (we now have evidence that this is untrue — plants do talk, plants do listen). For centuries, we’ve valued plants primarily based on how good they are for eating, or for looking at. Until we began to understand more complex scientific ideas like ecological diversity, carbon sequestering, and rewilding, those were our primary motivations for growing plants: taste and beauty. 

Orchids have no taste, though many are edible. (Orchid petals taste, I can report, like water.) What they have by the boatload are looks. I think of orchids like little dandies, dressed in different outfits for different occasions. There are sturdy orchids that grow from swamps and would seem to enjoy long meandering walks through the countryside in tweed and green wellies. There are delicate orchids that do not like to be moved and restrict themselves to flashing their colors at passersby from their perch in the trees, like a glam wedding guest toasting the bride from a corner. There are orchids that look like ballerinas, dressed in tutus for their next performance, and orchids that look like businessmen, stiff and upright and ready to work. 

Orchids, as a plant, may date back as far as 50 to 100 million years, making both the Victorian orchid craze and the contemporary passion for orchids a blip in their overall history. While we weren’t paying attention, they were evolving complex pollination mechanisms. They were forging relationships with bees and other insects, becoming increasingly specialized. They were growing in ever more fantastic shapes and developing ever more unlikely adaptations. Members of the orchid family grow absolutely everywhere — on every inhabitable continent, which just means they haven’t figured out a way to thrive in Antarctica yet. There are about 28,000 currently accepted species of orchid (which doesn’t include 100,000 or so hybrids and cultivars introduced since the Victorian period). They live in the temperate woodlands of Sweden and in the arid rocky soil of Arizona. They hang from trees in humid tropical jungles and decorate the mountains of the Middle East. 

There are orchids that look like ballerinas, dressed in tutus for their next performance, and orchids that look like businessmen, stiff and upright and ready to work. 

Yet when most people close their eyes and imagine an orchid, they picture a tropical variety. Perhaps the moth orchid, which you can buy in almost any grocery store or gift shop. These orchids have big fuchsia or white petals and sepals surrounding a delicately proportioned “lip” and “throat” (i.e., the flower’s sex organs). Or maybe they picture the pale and eerie ghost orchid, the subject of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, a book that served as source material for the Academy Award–winning movie Adaptation. Meme lovers might know about the monkey-faced Dracula orchid, whose flowers resemble little simian faces, or the Italian orchid, which looks like a big-dicked stick figure (thus earning the nickname the “naked man orchid”). And there are plenty more orchids that you wouldn’t even know are orchids. I had a weird little plant growing in a pot in my bathroom; I’d dug it up from my backyard because I liked its broad variegated leaves. Only in researching this piece did I discover that I, a known killer of potted orchids, have been growing one for months — the downy rattlesnake plantain. But these ordinary orchids — the spiky green bog orchids and plain pale ladies’ tresses — didn’t change the history of knowledge. Not like those flashy tropical flowers did. North American and English native orchids are important to their ecosystems, but they’re not the ones that caught Charles Darwin’s eye. 

Darwin’s admiration for fauna is well documented in On the Origin of Species (1859), but people often forget about his devotion to flora. Even Darwin calls his 1862 orchid study a “little book,” but it was a little book with a long name — On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing — and a big impact. The dense book argued that “every trifling detail” of orchid structure was not necessarily the result of “the direct interposition of the Creator,” but of centuries of wooing insects into their hairy parts. Although orchids have both “male” and “female” organs (stamens and pistils) contained within one flower, they don’t pollinate their own ova. Instead, they work with insects to get the job done, ensuring intercrossing rather than inbreeding. (Darwin may have had a personal stake in his argument; he felt quite a lot of guilt over marrying his first cousin, an act that he thought may have contributed to the deaths of his “rather sickly” children. “If inbreeding was bad for Charles and Emma’s offspring,” Jim Endersby writes in in Orchid, a Cultural History, “self-fertilization (the ultimate form of inbreeding) ought to be especially bad.”) 

In efforts to attract insects and spread their pollen, orchids have developed some truly wild shapes. Oncidium henekenii is an iridescent red flower with yellow ruffled petals that looks quite a lot like a “fetching female bee,” according to David Horak of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The orchid not only looks like a bee, it smells like one. “When the male lands on the flower, it grabs the labellum and attempts to copulate with it,” writes Horak. “In the process, the flower deposits pollinia on the insect’s head, to be carried to the next flower he visits.” Other orchids lure in insects with colors and shapes that mimic those of more nutritious flowers. Orchids pollinated by flies or carrion beetles are often brown and reek of rotting flesh. Slipper orchids are some of the most devious; they use their big, bucket-shaped labellum to trap bees and bugs. The bugs fly in, thinking they’re going to get some nice sweet nectar, and find themselves stuck in an empty cavity. The only way out is through a hairy hole, just big enough for the insect to sneak through. As the still-hungry insects climb out, they brush against the pollen-covered hairs and leave decorated with the orchid version of semen. 

These adaptations have compelled Micheal Pollan to call orchids “the inflatable love dolls of the floral kingdom,” skilled practitioners of “sexual deception.” Orchids are, according to Pollan, rather fantastic liars who evolved alongside insects, luring them in time and again with the promise of “very weird sex.” Thanks to this long-term fuck-buddy relationship, there are plenty of orchid species that can only be pollinated by a specific corresponding insect species. After learning a few of their adaptations, you can spot patterns, see which lock will fit which key. Darwin’s study of orchids lead him to prophesize the existence of a long-tongued moth when an orchid grower in Madagascar sent him a sample of a star-shaped white orchid with a long, dangling nectary that could grow to almost a full foot long. Upon seeing it, he wrote a friend, “Good Heavens what insect can suck it?” before going on to suggest that, “in Madagascar there must be moths with probosces capable of extension to a length of between ten and eleven inches.” Two decades after Darwin died, scientists found a subspecies of Congo moth (commonly known as Morgan’s spinx moth) with a prolonged proboscis. 

It wouldn’t have been possible for Darwin to examine orchids so closely without access to orchids. While his other works had him trotting around the globe, he researched his little orchid book while hanging out with his family in England. At this time, growing tropical orchids in backyard greenhouses was an incredibly popular pastime for upper- and middle-class men. It supposedly started in the early 1800s, when British naturalist named William John Swainson sent a bunch of orchid tubers back from Brazil. Ironically, Swainson had used the tubers to package other specimens, but the tubers grew and blossomed, surprising everyone. The 1800s also saw the golden era of the modern greenhouse, an architectural movement spearheaded in England by Sir Joseph Paxton. A gardener who rose to knighthood, Paxton created one of the first modern English greenhouses for the Duke of Devonshire in the 1830s (Paxton later designed the famous Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851). The visibility of these elegant glass structures inspired a proliferation of greenhouse building among the upper classes. Made with iron bars and cheap, factory-made glass, these grow houses gave people a place to grow tropical plants that wouldn’t otherwise thrive in England’s temperate climate. This was also a period of rapid imperial growth and expansion that brought more orchid varieties to English shores. “Local networks of colonists, missionaries, and traders made it easier to recruit indigenous guides and porters, and to obtain information and supplies that allowed expeditions to reach and explore previously un-botanized areas,” writes Endersby. 

As more and more orchids arrived in England, the flower became further coded. Any old gardener could grow a rose bush, but to grow an orchid you needed a greenhouse — and connections. James Bateman’s 1845 book The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala speculated that “Orchido-Mania” pervaded all classes, but especially the “upper.” Bateman also suggested that orchids were nature’s green patricians. According to Endersby, Bateman wanted hobbyist gardeners to stay in their lane. Aristocratic people should grow aristocratic flowers, for “the happiness of the community at large.” This is but one reading of Bateman’s argument — he also makes it clear that all of society can benefit from seeing greater plant diversity — yet Bateman’s words still reflect a certain sense of noblesse oblige. It was inevitable, Bateman thought, that the upper classes would grow orchids and the lower classes would grow humbler flowers like tulips and carnations. It may not have been ideal, but it was the way of the world.

The high expense of orchid-rearing didn’t much deter the rise of floral madness. Those who couldn’t participate firsthand were able to live vicariously through the legendary antics of plant poachers. People were hungry for exotic flowers, and equally hungry for stories of their capture. Dozens of orchid hunters died abroad, killed by illness, accident, or foul play. “In 1901, eight orchid hunters went on an expedition to the Philippines,” writes Orlean in The Orchid Thief. “Within a month one of them had been eaten by a tiger; another had been drenched with oil and burned alive; five had vanished into thin air; and one had managed to stay alive.” The last man standing walked out of the jungle with either 47,000 or 7,000 orchids, depending on the source. In 1891, an Englishman named Albert Millican published a memoir of his time spent orchid-hunting in the Andes, Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter. As he travels through the Andes, he meets Native men and women who he disparages and lusts after, respectively. He sees his companions pierced with poison arrows and doesn’t seem particularly bothered by their passing. He also doesn’t seem to love orchids all that much: They were a means to an end. Poachers would harvest as many specimens as they could, leaving no tubers left to regrow the population. Some orchid hunters cared about scientific advancements, certainly, but most were after more money and fame. They could come back with both high-priced stock and tales of wild panthers and wild women, cannibals and conquests.  

Dozens of orchid hunters died abroad, killed by illness, accident, or foul play.

As the 19th century wore on, orchids and death became more explicitly associated. It wasn’t just that people died in their quests to procure them; orchids themselves were also seen as deadly. Stories circulated about orchids found growing in graveyards and on human remains. “In the late 1800s an Englishman in New Guinea discovered a new variety of orchid growing in a cemetery,” writes Orlean. “Without bothering to get permission he dug up the graves and collected the flowers.” (He gave the people of the nearby town a few glass beads to pay for his desecration of their ancestors.) Another orchid hunter sent home plants attached to shin bones and ribs, and still another brought a flower growing from a human skull. This last find was auctioned off at Protheroe’s of London, sparking a series of think pieces on these gothic curiosities, these bloody orchids. 

As in life so in fiction, and 19th- and 20th-century pulp literature is awash with dangerous flowers. My favorite entry into this highly specific canon is The Flowering of the Strange Orchid by H.G. Wells. First published in 1894, it tells of a short, nebbishy orchid collector named Winter Wedderburn who laments to his housekeeper that, “nothing ever happens to me.” Later that day, he goes into London and returns with several orchid roots. Most of them are identified by the sellers, but one is not. “I don’t like the look of it,” says his housekeeper, comparing it to a “a spider shamming dead” or “fingers trying to get at you,” before defensively telling her boss, “I can’t help my likes and dislikes.” But to Wedderburn, this root is an opportunity. Something, he hopes, might happen.

Of course, something does happen. After time in his overly hot greenhouse, the orchid blossoms. The “rich, intensely sweet” scent of the flowers makes him dizzy; it overpowers all other smells in the greenhouse. It also overpowers Wedderburn who passes out, to be found later by his trusty housekeeper. He is alive, but barely: Fingerlike aerial roots have swarmed over his body, “a tangle of grey ropes, stretched tight” attached by “leech-like suckers.” The housekeeper saves poor Wedderburn by breaking the windows and dragging him outside. The bloodthirsty orchid is left to die in the cold with all of Weddernburn’s other plants. 

Once he recovers, Weddernburn finds himself thrilled by his little adventure. He’s had a brush with the exotic, hypermasculine world of orchid hunting, and he came out on top. What a feat for such a quiet, milquetoast little man. 

* * * 

At the age of 7, I became an orchid mangler, like the unnamed thief of Silverdale. I suppose I could claim I was struck by orchidelirium — it wasn’t my fault, officer! — but that’s not quite true. I had flower delirium in general; I picked flowers from my neighbor’s gardens and ate the violets that dotted our yards. I stole flowerheads from grocery store bouquets. I liked the colors. I wanted to keep them all, even the dyed carnations wrapped in cellophane, even the jewelweed that grew in the swampy parts of our neighborhood. I didn’t know that orchids were rare, nor would I have cared. I wanted one of those pink, bulbous flowers — a pale ballet pink, like the inside of a seashell or my mother’s fingernails — so I picked it. (When my mother found out she sat me down and explained endangered species. I never picked another lady’s slipper.)

Looking back, it shouldn’t have been hard to resist the call of the lady’s slipper. Lady’s slippers are, in my opinion, kind of ugly. Our New England variety reminds me of human testicles, covered in spiderlike veins, more fleshy than flashy. 

This isn’t a terribly imaginative comparison; orchids have been associated with balls since ancient times. The word “orchid” comes from the Greek word for testicle, órkhis. The Greeks were inspired by the plant’s rounded tubers, which often grow in a pair, one larger and one smaller. Ancient physicians believed that these roots could both cause erections and stop them, depending on which tuber you picked. (The aphrodisiac and the boner-killer followed the same recipe: Stew in goat’s milk, drink hot root broth, wait. The big one would make the organ swell, the small one would quell lust.) In medieval Europe, orchids often went by folk names, like fox stones, hares-bollocks, sweet cullions, dogstones, and goat’s stones. (In case further clarification is required: Stones, bollocks, and cullions are all vulgar synonyms for the family jewels.) 


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It’s difficult to say precisely when orchids became more closely associated with the female body, but during the height of orchid mania, these flowers were often understood as somehow feminine. This makes some visual sense: Aside from the roots, orchids tend to look more vaginal than phallic. But it’s not really about what the flower looks like. It’s about how they were collected, harvested, conquered, bred. And (as usual) it’s about sexism. Flowers were, like women, passive players in procreation. (Darwin didn’t have this hang-up, a small point in his favor.) A 19th-century growing manual would deem orchids “marvelously docile … as with women and chameleons, their life is the reflection of what is around them.” 

When orchids were given agency, they were seen as treacherous. Their sweet scent could lure you in, their beauty might trick you into doing something foolhardy, their silent presence was enough to drive a man wild. Orchids were the femme fatales of the flower world. Popular short stories like “The Purple Terror” by Fred M. White (1898) and “The Orchid Horror” by John Blunt (1911), as well as novels like Woman of the Orchids by Marvin Hill Dana (1901) blur the line between blossom and woman. In each of these narratives, the reader is cast in the role of the male explorer who is seduced by both the promise of fabulous flowers and the hope to get closer to an alluring, exotic woman. For Endersby, these stories show not only the fear of women’s shifting societal roles, but also the fear of (and desire for) the tropics, “ripe with sickness and scheming natives, embodied in seductive exotic women.” He goes on to suggest that dangerous orchids like Wedderburns’ “seem to imbue women with qualities that were simultaneously repellant and seductive.” 

The role of the orchid collector, then, was to tame the dangerous woman. To own her, to coax forth her beauty in a safe, contained space. To take her out of her natural habitat and show her how to live; growing orchids as wish-fulfillment. It allowed these men to feel virile and manly, as though they had imposed their will on nature itself. Inside the tidy walls of a steel-reinforced greenhouse, they could be masters of their own little harem. If Hugh Hefner had been born 100 years earlier, I imagine he would have kept orchids. 

* * * 

As we slide further into the 21st century, the echoes of orchid mania still reverberate. The contemporary collector still dreams of a chance to play Columbus, to discover a new species and slap his name on it. I didn’t know this when I first visited the Montreal Botanical Garden in winter of 2019. I only knew that I wanted to get warm and to see some interesting greenery. I saw yellow orchids and pink orchids and so many white frilly orchids. I also saw the fuchsia petals of the famous Phragmipedium kovachii slipper orchid. 

The story of the kovachii flower is covered at length in Craig Pittman’s riveting book The Scent of Scandal, but in short: In 2002, an American orchid collector named Michael Kovach was traveling with his friend, “The Adventurer” Lee Moore (this nickname is printed on his business cards, so he’s that kind of guy), when the duo came across a roadside stand selling huge magenta orchids. The slipper orchids had brightly colored labellum surrounded by two massive petals and were about the size of a hand, fairly large for an orchid. Kovach was psyched to have discovered an undocumented species, bought several of the plants, and brought them back to America. He didn’t, however, get the proper permission to do so. He didn’t fill out the paperwork, he didn’t wait to get approval. He just packed them in his suitcase and brought them to America. 

Inside the tidy walls of a steel-reinforced greenhouse, they could be masters of their own little harem. If Hugh Hefner had been born 100 years earlier, I imagine he would have kept orchids. 

You can’t just take wild orchids from one country to another — there are rules about these things. Orchids are covered by an international treaty called the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which specifies that you can only export orchids that were grown in a nursery or a laboratory. It’s illegal to fly out of the country with a wild orchid and bring it to your favorite botanical garden, where you hand it over to the researchers and suggest that they name the new species after you. 

That’s exactly what Kovach did, with widespread repercussions for both the botanical garden and other orchid importers. Kovach was punished, as was another importer from Texas, who also brought in illegal plants (while Kovach didn’t receive jail time — only probation and a fine — others weren’t so fortunate). It was a huge legal case, though Stéphane M. Bailleul of the Montreal Botanical Garden says it’s just “human nature that prevented everything from being done properly.” (Tell that to the scientists in Peru, who were pretty pissed that an American got to name one of their native species.) The case, Bailleul says, “highlights the difficulty of getting new species out and describing new species. The intention wasn’t to plunder the population, the intention was to describe the species, to examine it, to take the measurements,” which may be both true and the most generous reading of events.

Pittman, author of The Scent of Scandal, has a slightly different take. Orchid people, he explains, “tend to be obsessive, fairly well educated, and somewhat opinionated.” Pittman believes that orchid collectors lust after rare plants primarily because they “want to feel special. They want to feel superior to others.” Even if no one else sees your collection, you know you have something special, something exotic and singular and strange. But Pittman also seems to suggest that Kovach, Moore, and the team of scientists at Selby all believed that they were doing the right thing, at least to some extent, by describing the species. They were making the plant known. They were adding to scientific knowledge, expanding our collective understanding of the wild world of plants. 

Yet this is precisely what stuck with me after I closed Pittman’s book and picked up my next orchid-centric read, Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. It seems to make sense that scientific advancement is worth it, that it is for the good of all humanity that we dig as deeply into the natural world as possible, understanding every nook and cranny and leaf and bee. Even if it means we’re steamrolling over other countries’ rights to “discover” their own plants. Kovachii is a rare, prized species of orchid, one that you can visit at many major botanical gardens. I, personally, have benefited from this theft, even if I didn’t know it at the time. I saw something rare, something special, something new to the world of science.

And yet, what would have happened if we’d left orchids where they were? What would have happened if we’d left countries as they were, people as they were? The lust for orchids is fueled by our appreciation for beauty, our love of bright colors. But lots of flowers are pretty, so it’s safe to say this particular phenomenon isn’t just about prettiness. Orchid mania is an ongoing illness that reflects a sickness at the heart of Western culture where white scientists know best, Western countries deserve to rule over realms of knowledge and beauty and truth, and America and England get to write the stories of the world and determine what species gets which name. The story of orchid madness isn’t just a story of quirky adventurers and daring British men facing down tigers. It’s also a story of masculinity, white supremacy, and entitlement. It doesn’t matter whether the first tropical orchid sailed into England thanks to a packing mistake. It doesn’t even matter whether all the orchids we collect now are coming here by the book. Orchid madness persists and has spread to local plants and endangered species on golf courses and in backyards. When you boil it down, it’s all about the impulse to pull something up, root and stem, to possess a piece of beauty even as you know, logically, that you’re going to kill it. It’s not a story of loving something to death, as I first thought. It’s a story about the fetid swamp of desire that grows within all of us, a place where entitlement festers in deep water polluted by history, by cultural forces we don’t dare to name. 

* * *

Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine whose work has appeared in Art New England, Boston magazine, The Paris ReviewThe Hairpin, Eater, Jezebel, and The New York Times Magazine. She’s also the author of the book Handcrafted Maine.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Jason Stavers
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

It’s Time To Talk About Solar Geoengineering

Kamachai Charoenpongchai / EyeEm / Getty

Holly Jean Buck | an excerpt adapted from After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration | Verso | 2019 | 24 minutes (6,467 words)

December in California at one degree of warming: ash motes float lazily through the afternoon light as distant wildfires rage. This smoky “winter” follows a brutal autumn at one degree of warming: a wayward hurricane roared toward Ireland, while Puerto Rico’s grid, lashed by winds, remains dark. This winter, the stratospheric winds break down. The polar jet splits and warps, shoving cold air into the middle of the United States. Then, summer again: drought grips Europe, forests in Sweden are burning, the Rhine is drying up. And so on.

One degree of warming has already revealed itself to be about more than just elevated temperatures. Wild variability is the new normal. Atmospheric patterns get stuck in place, creating multiweek spells of weather that are out of place. Megafires and extreme events are also the new normal — or the new abnormal, as Jerry Brown, California’s former governor, put it. One degree is more than one unit of measurement. One degree is about the uncanny, and the unfamiliar.

If this is one degree, what will three degrees be like? Four?

At some point — maybe it will be two, or three, or four degrees of warming — people will lose hope in the capacity of current emissions-reduction measures to avert climate upheaval. On one hand, there is a personal threshold at which one loses hope: many of the climate scientists I know are there already. But there ’s also a societal threshold: a turning point, after which the collective discourse of ambition will slip into something else. A shift of narrative. Voices that say, “Let’s be realistic; we’re not going to make it.” Whatever making it means: perhaps limiting warming to 2°C, or 1.5, as the Paris Agreement urged the world to strive for. There will be a moment where “we,” in some kind of implied community, decide that something else must be tried. Where “we” say: Okay, it’s too late. We didn’t try our best, and now we are in that bad future. Then, there will be grappling for something that can be done. Read more…

Mathematics as a Cultural Force

Tuileries Garden in 1680, Paris, France, engraving from Les Promenades de Paris (The promenades of Paris), by Adolphe Alphand, published by J Rothschild, Paris, 1867-1873. (Photo by Icas94 / De Agostini via Getty Images)

Jessica Gross | Longreads | Sept. 2019 | 14 minutes (3,556 words)

In his new book, Proof!: How the World Became Geometrical, historian Amir Alexander advances an audacious claim: that Euclidean geometry profoundly influenced not just the history of mathematics, but also broader sociopolitical reality. In prose that makes his passion for the material both clear and catching, he describes how Euclid’s Elements present a vision of a perfectly rational order, but one that was viewed as purely theoretical: There was no place for geometrical ideals in messy reality. In the 1400s, Leon Battista Alberti, an Italian polymath, upended that understanding, countering that the world was, in fact, fundamentally geometrical. Other thinkers, from Copernicus to Galileo, followed. And, as Alexander argues, this sea change had profound implications: If the world was geometrical—not only rational, but also hierarchical and permanent—then that was the divinely ordained social order, too. Euclidean geometry, that is, was used to justify monarchy.

Explaining the interconnectedness between mathematics and culture—how mathematical principles aren’t separate from or even just born into a culture, but profoundly shape it—is nothing new for Alexander, whose previous books include Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World and Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs, and the Rise of Modern Mathematics. When we spoke by phone in August, we discussed French gardens’ geometrical designs as propaganda; how cities’ structures advance their ideals; and how Euclidean geometry’s decline had as deep an effect as its rise.

Because I struggled with history in school, I am always curious when people choose to make it their life’s work. So maybe we can start there: What do you love about studying, writing about and now, at UCLA, teaching history?

I do love history, and I think it has something to do with growing up in Israel, in Jerusalem. There, it’s not just the one history, but layer upon layer upon layer of history—different histories, competing histories. Every stone and every building there has its own story. You can go back 100 years, you can go back 1,000 years, sometimes thousands of years, and everybody is very much invested in their version of history, often to the exclusion of others.

Also, especially the years that I was growing up in Israel, archaeology was huge because it was seen through a Zionist perspective. That is, you’re digging up Biblical history, you’re digging up the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. It was all around; the air was imbued with it. I think in some ways, whatever your politics—whether you’re a Zionist or an anti-Zionist, whatever your view of the occupation—in some ways, living there, you feel like it is just the latest chapter of a story that began a very long time ago.

So I think that was the origins of my fascination with history, although, as for my work, it went in a very different direction. Read more…

Truly Seeing the River: An Interview with Writer Boyce Upholt

Photo of the campsite on the Mississippi River Rory Doyle.

The Mississippi Delta is the name of the vast swampy bottomland that runs for 200 miles between Memphis, Tennessee and Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Mississippi, North America’s second-longest river, mostly created this alluvial landscape. Dense forests covered it. White money, forced Black labor, and government engineering seized, farmed, and tried to control it. For many people, the name evokes images of Tom Sawyer or the Blues or roadside barbecue joints. Author James C. Cobb’s book described the Delta as “The Most Southern Place on Earth.” Even though populous Memphis sits on its northeastern edge, and many Blues festivals take place there, for its size, the Delta is not a region many outsiders visit. It contains some of the US’s most searing poverty, some of its greatest natural beauty, the origins of Blues and rock ‘n’ roll, and some America’s most violent, racist history. Writer Boyce Upholt has made it his beat.

A Connecticut native who found himself in Mississippi, Upholt has written about the Delta’s groundwater for The Atlantic, about the Delta’s Indigenous cultures for Roads & Kingdoms, profiled Po’ Monkey’s Lounge, the Delta’s last rural juke joint, for The Believer, and has explored one Delta island for the Oxford American. Once home to a murderous, moonshining frontiersman name Perry Martin, the legends associated with Martin cloak Big Island as much as its thick woods. This mix of wildness, lore, and neglect drew Upholt back for many trips, where he camped and brewed his morning coffee with Mississippi River water. His resulting travel dispatch “Beyond the Levee” brings this far corner of the nearby world to life, partly through Martin, a character who embodies the land itself. In a few brief pages, the piece explores two huge topics ─ America’s most iconic river, and the idea of wildness ─ and satisfies itself with providing not a volume but a window, a tantalizing glimpse, just big and deep enough. Upholt took the time to speak with me about this story, his work, and the Delta he loves.

***

I grew up in Arizona, and first learned about the Delta on a visit to an ex-girlfriend’s family farm in the floodplain in eastern Arkansas. It was pure chance I traveled there, but that vast land’s lush, tarnished beauty immediately gripped me. You grew up in Connecticut. How’d you get interested in the Delta?

It was chance, for me, too. After college, I wasn’t sure how to become a writer, so I joined Teach for America and took a job as a math teacher on a Native American reservation in South Dakota. Then, after an unsatisfying yearlong stint in journalism, I decided to go work for TFA coaching teachers. I wanted to get somewhere “new” ─ to me at least ─ so when they offered me a job in the Delta I jumped. I wound up staying  for nine years, and I credit the place with getting me writing for real. There is such a rich history of storytelling and literature. I began writing a blog, then local magazines. Eventually I got an MFA and managed to find a way to write full-time.

In this Oxford American story, one person, Perry Martin, embodies this regrown patch of Delta, and then you become a new character in that story of development and environmental degradation, because you rewrite how we view the Delta’s character: wild or tame? Ugly or magical? How’d you first hear about Perry Martin and Big Island?

As someone who grew up hiking and camping, I found the Delta’s farmland beautiful but orderly: it’s a giant garden, nature contained and restrained. Then, in 2015, I wrote a profile of John Ruskey, a Mississippi River guide who is based in the Delta. We went out on the river, and I became obsessed.

The Mississippi sits amid a vast, wild landscape that almost no one knows is there; the river is at once a national icon and something we have completely forgotten. I kept writing about the river, kept exploring. In 2016, I did a weekend canoe trip with three friends down the backchannel along the west side of Big Island, which is one of the wildest, quietest stretches on the river. As a guide, I used Rivergator, an online text that John compiled. He offhandedly mentions a history of moonshiners on the island, and eventually, though conversations with locals, I began to fill in the details.

Back to that 2015 profile you wrote: What about the River fueled your initial obsession?

I will always remember that first campsite: we were on this wide sandbar that was covered with coyote and bird tracks. All night, I could hear the sound of trucks driving on the levee, which was just a stone’s throw away; I could see a glow on the horizon that was Angola Prison. And yet I felt completely remote and isolated, surrounded by the water, in this un-human space. I wanted more of that. But I also just kept finding interesting little tidbits: abandoned steamboats sitting along the riverside; attempts to catch and process invasive carp; a rapidly changing ecosystem. It still blows my mind that no one has written the book I’m working on: a look at what we’ve done to this river and the effects we’re seeing now.

There’s no real process besides paying attention: paying attention to what sparks my own curiosity; paying attention to what small dramas connect with bigger issues and questions.

Let me ask you about that book you’re working on: Why haven’t other people written it yet? Would it fit into the distinctive literary nonfiction cannon that includes Eddy L. Harris’ memoir Mississippi Solo, Mary Morris’s memoir The River Queen, or more like John M. Barry’s Rising Tide, and John McPhee’s River chapter in Control of Nature

The latter books, definitely. I’m not a huge fan of the adventure memoir. The landscape has so much to tell us, so why focus so narrowly on ourselves? There’s a difference, in my mind, between a trip ─ a paddle downriver, a hike along a trail ─ and a ramble. In the latter, your path is unclear; you make unexpected detours; you return to the same places, sometimes, looking at them in new ways. This, in my mind, makes for a much more interesting book. Great Plains has been a huge inspiration: Ian Frazier spent a few seasons driving around the middle of the country, often seemingly at random, and from that mess he pulls out this compelling history of a forgotten place. Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams is another great example; he sees this wide swath of the Arctic on various scientific expeditions.

As for why that book hasn’t been written, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe because people don’t think of the river as a place, just a line of water. But there is a whole valley around it, that was a part of it, and was regarded as the country’s first Wild West. That valley was cut off by the levees; now even people who live just a few miles away rarely see it. It’s easy to overlook the environmental problems there, until they well up into floods, like this year.

Your Twitter bio says “i wander around and write stuff.” People often wonder how writers find their stories. So you found the Big Island story by writing another story. But as a wanderer, do you find many stories by chance, or do you have some process that lets wandering lead to discovery?

There’s no real process besides paying attention: paying attention to what sparks my own curiosity; paying attention to what small dramas connect with bigger issues and questions. I have a lot of Google Alerts. I read blogs and newsletters. I flip through newspapers and listen for what people are saying when I’m on the road. (Latif Nassar’s ideas on where to find stories are spot-on, by the way.) Honestly, the hardest part can be deciding which of many ideas deserve my commitment. Lately, I’ve been spending more time reporting before I even decide to pitch, to make sure stories have depth.

You describe your interest as a writer as “how we shape place, how place shapes us.” Lots of writers have beats or themes they fixate on: music; sexual politics; war. What does your interest in place say about your nature or worldview? Or your approach to writing and reporting?  

Really, I wish I had a clearer beat. I’ve always been fascinated by landscapes, both human-made and “wild” (though that’s a problematic word). Scratch the surface of a landscape and you find all kinds of history. Paying attention to the history of places often reveals connections: we are connected to the land itself, to a larger ecosystem, and to a long chain of people who, through the generations, have crisscrossed the world. In terms of how I write and report, these sorts of stories often demand that I get out and be on the ground, so I can be a tour-guide through strange, misunderstood corners of the world. It also means I have to find a way to include myself in the story without becoming too solipsistic. I’m not sure I always succeed.

Travel writing used to be a very popular genre, filling many magazines’ pages. That’s changed a lot. But some of my favorite kinds of travel stories are the kind you just described: where a bit of the author’s personal narrative leads readers to unfamiliar parts of our world and reveal larger connections. What are your thoughts on travel writing and the travel dispatch as a form, one not pegged to any news or event, but that has something to say?

It’s among my favorites, too, though when done poorly it’s awful. There are many pitfalls. I  try to stay particularly aware of my privilege: as a middle-class, cis-gendered, heterosexual white guy, I have so many legs up in terms of getting a publication to pay me to write about a place. Often, we’d all be better served to hear from someone from that place. The river, as a place, poses less of this conundrum, though I try to honor indigenous traditions that existed along the Mississippi ─ and in many cases persist ─ as well as the way Black laborers, often enslaved, did so much of the physical remaking of this place.

Yes, the Black labor that cleared the dense Delta hardwoods also drove America’s lucrative cotton economy: the legacy of their forced labor and dehumanization remains. Poverty still plagues so many people of color here. Is it difficult to explore nature apart from humanity in this region?

In any region. I don’t really believe there is such a thing as “nature” apart from humanity. Humans are animals, after all. And human beings have been living on this continent for tens of thousands of years. They cleared forests, built monumental structures, actively manipulated the environment. The idea of an empty wildness came later. (John Muir argued that the Native and Hispano migrants should be kept out of his beloved Yosemite by soldiers; they spoiled the view, he thought.) I always come back to a quote from the critic Raymond Williams, from the “Ideas of Nature”: “[T]he conquest of nature . . . will always include the conquest, the domination or the exploitation of some men by others. If we alienate the living processes of which we are a part, we end, though unequally, by alienating ourselves.”

Also, have you seen the photo of the lush old-growth bottomland forests in Lucy Braun’s canonical 1950 book The Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America? A towering canopy with vines trailing down the stout sweet gum trees. Makes me wish I could tramp through just a few acres of woods like that, though just a few. It’d be exhausting.

I haven’t, but it’s gorgeous. You can do it, though! It’s not old-growth, but there are plenty of acres that look much like this inside the levees, along the river. I wish there were more of them, and what we’ve got left is at risk. The only way we’ll get there is if more folks go out and explore and appreciate them!

How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance

A close-up of a human eye on an IBM computer monitor, 1983. (Photo by Alfred Gescheidt/Getty Images)

Shoshana Zuboff | An excerpt adapted from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power | PublicAffairs | 2019 | 23 minutes (6,281 words)

 

In 2000 a group of computer scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech collaborated on a project called the “Aware Home.” It was meant to be a “living laboratory” for the study of “ubiquitous computing.” They imagined a “human-home symbiosis” in which many animate and inanimate processes would be captured by an elaborate network of “context aware sensors” embedded in the house and by wearable computers worn by the home’s occupants. The design called for an “automated wireless collaboration” between the platform that hosted personal information from the occupants’ wearables and a second one that hosted the environmental information from the sensors.

There were three working assumptions: first, the scientists and engineers understood that the new data systems would produce an entirely new knowledge domain. Second, it was assumed that the rights to that new knowledge and the power to use it to improve one’s life would belong exclusively to the people who live in the house. Third, the team assumed that for all of its digital wizardry, the Aware Home would take its place as a modern incarnation of the ancient conventions that understand “home” as the private sanctuary of those who dwell within its walls.

All of this was expressed in the engineering plan. It emphasized trust, simplicity, the sovereignty of the individual, and the inviolability of the home as a private domain. The Aware Home information system was imagined as a simple “closed loop” with only two nodes and controlled entirely by the home’s occupants. Because the house would be “constantly monitoring the occupants’ whereabouts and activities…even tracing its inhabitants’ medical conditions,” the team concluded, “there is a clear need to give the occupants knowledge and control of the distribution of this information.” All the information was to be stored on the occupants’ wearable computers “to insure the privacy of an individual’s information.”

By 2018, the global “smart-home” market was valued at $36 billion and expected to reach $151 billion by 2023. The numbers betray an earthquake beneath their surface. Consider just one smart-home device: the Nest thermostat, which was made by a company that was owned by Alphabet, the Google holding company, and then merged with Google in 2018. The Nest thermostat does many things imagined in the Aware Home. It collects data about its uses and environment. It uses motion sensors and computation to “learn” the behaviors of a home’s inhabitants. Nest’s apps can gather data from other connected products such as cars, ovens, fitness trackers, and beds. Such systems can, for example, trigger lights if an anomalous motion is detected, signal video and audio recording, and even send notifications to homeowners or others. As a result of the merger with Google, the thermostat, like other Nest products, will be built with Google’s artificial intelligence capabilities, including its personal digital “assistant.” Like the Aware Home, the thermostat and its brethren devices create immense new stores of knowledge and therefore new power — but for whom? Read more…

In the Age of the Psychonauts

Frank R. Paul, 1924. Forrest J. Ackerman Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images.

Erik Davis | An excerpt adapted from High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies | The MIT Press | 2019 | 35 minutes (9,207 words)

Early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophet of the future discovers a tightrope walker preparing to perform in front of a crowd. It is here, crucially, that Zarathustra announces his famous doctrine of the übermensch, the overman, the superhero of the spirit. Humanity, he says, is merely a rope “fastened between animal and Overman,” a rope that passes over the abyss.

Elsewhere Nietzsche describes the spiritual acrobats who can rise to the call of the Overman as “philosophers of the future.” Nondogmatic, often solitary, with a predilection for risky behavior, these radical free thinkers are “curious to a fault, researchers to the point of cruelty, with unmindful fingers for the incomprehensible.” Nietzsche simply calls them those who attempt. Their truths are their own, rather than general facts, and they are “at home in many countries of the spirit, at least as guests.”

Sounds to me like Nietzsche is talking about psychonauts. After all, while we are used to comparing drug visionaries to mystical seekers, from another angle, they more resemble philosophers or mad scientists compelled, beyond reason but with some sense, to put themselves on the line, risking both paranoia and pathology through their anthropotechnics. Read more…

On, In, or Near the Sea: A Book List

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Alison Fields | Longreads | July 2019 | 7 minutes (1,753 words)

My peak beach read moment came in 1999. I sat third in a line of chaise lounges — my grandmother Nana, my Mom, me, my younger sister — beside the pool at the Lowcountry beach resort we’d visited every summer since time immemorial. All four of us were sun drunk. Three of us were at least tipsy from cabana cocktails. Nana, Mom, and my sister glistened with Hawaiian Tropic — a trio of golden-tanned nereids in black swimsuits and designer sunglasses. I was lobster pink, slathered in 50+, and cowering under long-sleeved shirts and towels like I was going out for a part in a zero budget Lawrence of Arabia because genetics are cruel.

Nana wasn’t much of a reader. Her preferred tomes were pricing guides for antique Japanese porcelain and the Horchow catalog. That year, however, she’d packed a paperback copy of The Starr Report amidst her Breton tees and linen shorts. Nana was a vocal critic of the Clinton administration, a fact that surprised no one as her personal politics ran slightly to the right of Divine Right Monarchy. I supposed she thought the book would bolster her already outspoken arguments. All of us knew better than to ask. We had a gentleman’s agreement with regard to politics on family vacations, the central conceits of which were: 1. Don’t bring it up and 2. When Nana does — and she will — change the subject as quickly as possible.

In that moment by the pool, I was lost in a dream of Conquest-era Mexico, wading through a particularly muddy chapter of Terra Nostra, and I could tell Nana was on the verge of saying a thing. My sister had put on headphones and securely hid her face in her college summer reading. Mom, reading an epistolary novel about Empress Josephine, was sitting next to Nana, so she was the most easily available when Nana finally sighed dramatically and tapped her Virginia Slim impatiently against the resort-branded ashtray.

She said Mom’s name about three times. Mom might have been engrossed in her book, but Nana was persistent. When she knew she had Mom’s attention, she shoved The Starr Report toward Mom and tapped a manicured fingernail against the page.

“Honey, would you mind telling me what this is?”

There was a long pause. I listened to the splashing of swimmers in the pool, the ice clinking at the bar, the wheels on a catering tray bound for some beachside fête. I wondered Are they playing the Cardigans at the tiki bar? Mom’s pause stretched, long enough for me to realize with dawning horror that whatever text had stymied my then seventy-three-year-old grandmother was probably not a legal term.

“Anybody want another round?” I stood up and asked.

Nana waved me off, looking expectantly at my mother. Mom gave me a pleading look and told me to add the drinks to her tab.

As I walked down the boardwalk toward the bar, I could hear Mom in the same halting, careful words I remember her using when she explained certain things to me, “Well, Mother, when a man and a woman love each other very, very much . . .” I made a mental note to order Mom a double.

***

Two things I like: 1. Sitting on, in, or near enough to the sea that I can sense it, and 2. Reading books.

My inner pirate captain is a bit of a librarian. And my inner librarian is only ever a breath away from raising the sails and lighting out for ports unknown. She knows that nothing improves the reading of a novel like a salty breeze and sand on the toes, even if said salt and sand are sticky murder on a paperback. I suppose there are people that go to the beach without a book. Those people are perverse. What do they do instead, exactly? How much bocce can a human play?

This time of year friends ask me for beach books because I read more than is probably healthy. Sometimes people even want to know, specifically, what I will be reading at the beach. That’s a gamble, because it’s basically just my TO READ stack and there be monsters. Case in point: I spent the vast majority of a week at the beach some years back with Britain in Revolution, Austin Woolrych’s history of the English Civil War (the book was excellent).

I think I do okay with recommendations. The better I know you, the closer I’ll get to the mark. But critical to the whole endeavor is what you mean by Beach Book. Some people define the genre as a slightly better class of an airport bookstore read — something breezy, either plot-heavy, funny, or both, not too serious, not too academic. Some people see the Beach Book as literal — a book set on or near a beach. Sometimes these two categories overlap and that’s awesome, but you have to be very, very careful or you’ll summon Nicholas Sparks, the literary equivalent of the dude who brings a Filet -O-Fish to a Lowcountry Boil.

For today, I’m going with the second category. Books about beaches, seas, sand, and coastal destinations to accompany the end of the summer season and the first stirrings of the fall.

Let’s start close to home. Many of us end up at the beach on family vacations, always awkward, which Colson Whitehead’s sly, autobiographical Sag Harbor pretty much nails. While vacationing, questions of love and class can arise, especially if there’s marriage on the horizon as is the case in Dorothy West’s The Wedding. In Jill McCorkle’s Ferris Beach, friendships (and friendships with a romantic possibility) blossom around the various impediments of small-town prejudice and adolescence.

Oceanside theme parks and roadside attractions give tourists the chance to mingle with full time carnival-types, like Karen Russell’s Bigtree dynasty at their alligator wrestling park in Swamplandia, or at the eponymous, possibly haunted North Carolina theme park in Stephen King’s slim, enjoyable Joyland. Hotels can also occupy the seaside, and JG Farrell’s extraordinary Troubles offers a darkly humorous critique of colonialism and its obliviousness in face of revolution within a sprawling, cat-infested resort on the Irish coast. If you prefer your seaside hotel on the fancier end, and for your mysterious IRA man to have ‘80s hair, there’s Jonathan Lee’s haunting High Dive.

Moving to a more tropical locale does not guarantee a more peaceful plotline. Proximity to both spectacular island sunsets and titans of Reggae do not prevent against the violence and conspiracy at the heart of Marlon James gorgeous, epic A Brief History of Seven Killings. The ghosts of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic haunt the landscape in Julia Alvarez’s fictionalized recounting of the Maribal sister in her In the Time of the Butterflies. And the generations of Indonesian women inhabiting the lush, fictional port city of Eka Kuniawan’s Beauty Is a Wound survive decades of war and political upheaval amid a landscape buffeted by trade winds and a bit of magical realism.

Islands have always been ripe for troublemakers and hijinks — actual pirate captains, not just imaginary ones ideated in suburbia. Richard Hughes’ deft, surprising (based on a true story!) High Wind in Jamaica, with its pint-sized pirate ship mutineers is just about the best thing ever. Anyone who finished Lord of the Flies back in the day will not be surprised to see kids going very dark in tropical environments. Ugly things can even happen in suburban, post climate-crisis, dystopian Florida in Donald Antrim’s Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. Things get a little weird in Florida, as in Lauren Groff’s marvelous short story collection, Florida, and really, really weird in Jeff VanDerMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy.

We’ve always known the sea is home to monsters. Sometimes the literary ones have their own perspective on events, such as in Madeline Miller’s wonderful, magical Circe. Some of those who spend their lives conjuring monsters from the deep have their own particularly monstrous ideas. Certainly that was the case with HP Lovecraft, and Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean is a great novel that tries to make sense of that. On the other hand, sometimes monsters end up being something quite unexpected, as in Sarah Perry’s gorgeous The Essex Serpent, a historical novel about science, faith, and love. Rarely do monsters end up being as wholly and completely hilarious as they do in Mat Johnson’s richly-imagined Pym, which takes on both Edgar Allen Poe and Little Debbie Cakes in its satirical journey through the (very) cold heart of American racial politics, past and present.

Of course, it’s never the destination when it comes to sea voyages, as much as the journey. I like journeys that say something about both the people making them and the world they are traveling through. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies assembles a fascinating, multinational cast of characters to sail upon ships carrying indentured servants between India, and continues them through the next two books of his Ibis trilogy. Charles R. Johnson’s Middle Passage recounts the horrors of the slave ship from the unlikely perspective of a newly freed slave who boards for its last journey. The title character of Esi Edugyan’s masterful Washington Black begins his journey in Caribbean slavery and then travels a path through several continents and scientific discoveries.

Seaside journeys also offer people an opportunity to meditate — sometimes philosophically — on their various troubles, as is the case in Rachel Cusk’s Faye Trilogy or John Banville’s grieving narrator in The Sea. Dealing with romantic disappointment might provoke an escape to the seaside, even if it happens that your ex is already there, as is the case in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. It’s also possible you might be forced to leave your seaside home, and there’s usually a price to that. Just ask the Little Mermaid or Antoinette in Jean Rhys’ dreamy Jane Eyre “prequel,” Wide Sargasso Sea.

Finally, if you’re the sort of person that demands a dense history to while away your days, might I recommend David Abulafia’s The Great Sea, a survey of the Mediterranean from antiquity to present. It’s well-written, informative, and offers a wider lens view of one of the world’s most fascinating places than, say, your fourth reread of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley or that copy of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins your friend from book club loaned you. Though, indeed, both of those are peak beach reads.

Don’t forget your sunscreen, and happy reading.

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Alison Fields is a writer in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Editor: Katie Kosma

The Offer of a Two-Night Stand, When Just One Would Do

Illustration by Courtney Kuebler

Suzanne Roberts | Longreads | Month 2019 | 18 minutes (4,525 words)

“I crossed the ocean and then the island for you,” Sancho said when he found me at the bar in Rincon, his white teeth shining like the keys of a piano. His small blue backpack was slung over his shoulder. He pushed back his long dread-locks and kissed me. “And it wasn’t easy,” he continued. “I had to take the ferry and then the wah-wah, and finally hitch a ride to Rincon. So here I am.”

“Here you are,” I said and smiled. We stood on the deck of the small noisy bar. The band had just taken a break, and my friend Tracy was inside talking to the guitarist.

“You called me, and I knew I had to come,” he added.

“How did you know I’d be at the Tamboo bar?” I asked.

“I knew,” he said and smiled. “This is the place to be.”

“And I’m always in the place to be,” I joked.

“You are,” he said with a seriousness that made me laugh harder.

I felt giddy at the idea of a man crossing an ocean and then an island for me, even as small as Puerto Rico was. We walked from the deck and into the sand, and under the palms watched the waves roll, crash, foam, and retreat onto the beach. I carried my sandals. The night filled with the sounds of crickets and coquis, the tiny singing frogs, and the smells of salt and the sweet decay of seaweed. Each wave shined blue-green, the crashing causing the bioluminescence, the same flash we’d seen while kayaking in the bay a few days earlier in the “Bio Bay” of Vieques.A blue-green glow zippered across the sand with each wave, the foam a patchwork of neon.

That’s when Sancho kissed me, and his broad mouth and soft lips took me by surprise, even though I’d been waiting two days, or maybe my lifetime, for a kiss to happen like that, on the edge of an island, between two palms, under a sky canvassed with stars. My toes splayed out onto the sand, the ground below me, shifting.
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