Search Results for: Scientific American

The Politics of UFOs

AP / Macmillan

Anna Merlan| Adapted from Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power| Metropolitan Books | April 2019 | 11 minutes (2,579 words)

Corey Goode was barely in grade school when he was classified as “an anomaly.”

“Apparently, I was identified as being on the intuitive empath spectrum,” he told a rapt audience one hot summer morning in 2017. Goode claims that he was soon placed in alternative classes. His parents, he says, gave permission for that. But what they didn’t know was that he’d been tapped to take part in a military program: Every morning he’d wait outside with his lunchbox to be picked up by a white van, which would drive him to Carswell Air Force Base, in Texas. From there, they’d go through a back gate, across two runways, through another security gate, and into a motor pool hangar, down a cargo elevator into a secret underground facility where nine to 15 other children would be waiting.

Some time around 1986, Goode says, he was drafted into the Secret Space Program, a purported hidden government entity doing clandestine research and fighting secret wars with extraterrestrials in outer space. He was not yet 17. Goode says that when his space military service came to an end, he returned to Earth, where his government handlers performed an “age regression.” He awoke as a child again, in his bedroom at home, with his mother unaware that he’d ever been gone.

There’s plenty more to Goode’s story, but a little of this goes a long way. Goode has told his account at many places, but I heard it at the annual meeting of the Mutual UFO Network, known as MUFON. It is the oldest UFO research group in the United States, active since 1969, and it presents itself as a scientific organization seeking hard evidence of the UFO phenomenon and pursuing that evidence wherever it might lead.

Most of the year, state MUFON chapters investigate tips of UFO sightings, hundreds of which pour into their email and voicemail each month. But on a blazing summer day in Summerlin, a wealthy suburb of northwest Las Vegas, the MUFON members were all together, and things were tense. Earlier, another well-respected speaker, Richard Dolan, called Goode a liar and quite possibly a plant. “I’m not accusing anybody of anything,” Dolan said delicately at the start of his talk, in the manner of someone about to accuse someone of something. “But it’s absolutely a fact of U.S. history that there’s been government interference in many organizations. Many of you have heard of COINTELPRO. And that goes on to this day.”

 

Although broad discussion of UFOs has been eclipsed in the general culture by fresher, shinier conspiratorial ideas — birtherism, false flags, pedophile rings — a remarkably high number of Americans believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life. The poll numbers can vary wildly and frustratingly. In 1997, a CNN/Time poll showed that a whopping 80 percent of the adult population believed the government was hiding “knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life-forms.” In 2015, a YouGov survey found that 54 percent of the adult population believed that alien life exists, while 30 percent were convinced, in the poll’s words, that “extra-terrestrial intelligent life has already contacted us but the government has covered it up.” According to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears that same year, 42.6 percent of respondents thought the government was concealing what it knows about alien encounters. The Chapman survey noted that more Americans believe in UFOs than believe in natural selection or that the earth is 4.5 billion years old.

The belief is strong, but, as with so many research communities, it’s not uniform or unaffected by controversy. In the past few years the UFO world has been afflicted by the kinds of conspiratorial cracks that have appeared throughout American culture: Who can be trusted? What is true? What constitutes an acceptable standard of proof? Who is a spy, a plant, an agent? Is the government engaged in covert actions to disrupt communities it deems dangerous?

Dolan has been a respected UFO researcher for a long time, which means the same thing here that it means in a lot of conspiracy subcultures: You might not know who he is, but he’s indisputably a giant in his field. He is far from the first of his kind to suggest that the government has planted misleading information to throw the field into chaos. And MUFON itself is frequently accused of pursuing and promoting pseudoscience. The Center for Skeptical Inquiry wrote in 2013 that local MUFON chapters were following “decidedly unscientific” avenues of inquiry, scheduling “talks on alien abduction, conspiracy theories, human-ET hybrids, hypnotic regression, and repressed memories.”

“There are a few very conservative people who want to just talk about the nuts and bolts of the crafts,” Jan Harzan, MUFON’s executive director, told me, referring to spacecraft. “But this is what people are interested in: the whistleblowers. They want to know what’s really going on.” The whistleblowers, as Harzan and others call them, are the men in the UFO world, Goode among them, who make colorful and eye-popping claims about the roles they played in the government’s secret space programs.

More Americans believe in UFOs than believe in natural selection or that the earth is 4.5 billion years old.

In conspiracy subcultures, “whistleblowing” is a common phenomenon. For every government plot and dark scheme, someone will eventually show up claiming to have been part of it. That happened during the 1980s Satanic panic; it began to occur with Pizzagate; and in the mid-2000s the newest crop arrived in the UFO world, when a man named Andrew Basiago claimed to have gone on a series of missions to Mars with a young Barack Obama. In 2014, Goode appeared on the scene. A year later, the two whistleblowers were joined by another man, Randy Kramer, who claims to be a former marine who served on Mars for 17 years and on a secret spaceship for three more.

Among earlier generations of UFO whistleblowers, the most famous was Bob Lazar, who maintained that he worked as a scientist at a subsidiary facility of Area 51 called S-4. His task was to “reverse-engineer” alien spaceships to figure out how they worked. But the new whistleblowers are in a league of their own, having apparently been to reaches of space that humans have never touched before, having had repeated and direct interaction with aliens, and, if I understand Basiago’s assertions correctly, having been chased around by dinosaurs on Mars. (I admit to leaving his lecture early due to a sudden, inexplicable headache.)

Goode has an unusual skill — the ability to make outlandish claims but to weave them together with common and popular UFO positions. Among the more fantastical threads that he manages to pull in: The engineers who work on secret space technologies are part of “secret societies and occult rituals.” But he also peddles the more traditional beliefs: The government isn’t just hiding what it knows about aliens and UFOs, but also about the advanced technologies that aliens have revealed to humans. Those include “healing and anti-aging technologies” and “zero-point energy,” or free energy.


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

Sign up


Next to the lecture hall where the talks took place, there was a big room filled with tables and merchandise. As I walked among the misshapen ceramic aliens and chatted with the vendors, it occurred to me that UFO lore might represent conspiracy culture at its best: our interest in the hidden, the unknown, the ineffable, the magic of what’s yet to be revealed. “The UFO mystery holds a mirror to our own fantasies,” famed UFO researcher and computer scientist Jacques Vallée once wrote. “It expresses our secret longings for a wisdom that might come down from the stars in new, improved, easy to-use packaging, to reveal the secrets of life and tell us, at long last, who we are.”

The alien world wasn’t always that exalted. Alien mythology was born, as many people know, in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, when something … crashed. One summer morning a ranch foreman working close to Roswell found something bizarre while walking the property. It was what Kathryn Olmsted in Real Enemies describes as “a pile of sticks, tinfoil thick paper, and smoky-gray rubber, all stuck together with scotch tape.”

The foreman called Roswell’s sheriff, who sent out two deputies, then phoned the Roswell Army Air Force Base, wondering if it was something of theirs. The base’s public information officer announced that a “flying disc” had been recovered. But by the next day, the story had changed: The region’s commanding general reported that what had actually been recovered was a “high altitude weather balloon.”

For every government plot and dark scheme, someone will eventually show up claiming to have been part of it.

Public interest in the story faded. But by the late 1970s, alien researchers started to suspect there had been a cover-up at Roswell. Around 1991, Glenn Dennis, a self-proclaimed eyewitness, came forward, saying that he had worked at a Roswell funeral home at the time and that the military had requested “child-sized caskets” for tiny alien bodies. Dennis’s version of the story took off, transforming the Roswell story as we all commonly know it. In later years, popular imagination moved the location of the little gray bodies, iced over like mysterious pearlescent fish sticks, to Area 51.

In 1994, a genuine conspiracy came to light: An Air Force report commissioned by the federal General Accounting Office revealed that the downed balloon was probably debris from a top secret surveillance program known as Project MOGUL, which sought to record audio evidence of Soviet atomic tests. And in 1997, a second report found a possible explanation for the witnesses who reported seeing alien bodies pulled from the wreckage: The crash-test dummies routinely dropped during other military test operations involving high-altitude balloons.

Most mainstream news sources presented the reports as evidence that there were definitively no UFOs. “No bodies. No bulbous heads,” wrote William J. Broad of the New York Times News Service in 1997. “No secret autopsies. No spaceship. No crash. No extraterrestrials or alien artifacts of any sort. And most emphatically of all, no Government cover-up.”

But the 1994 report did provide proof that the Air Force had lied about a top secret program, which fed certainty among UFO researchers that there were other cover-ups yet to be discovered. The history of UFOs is a perfect illustration of the way in which genuine government secrecy feeds citizen paranoia. The disclosure of hidden Air Force programs made just about anything seem possible, and over the next few decades, it was joined by wave after wave of revelations, some of them real and some imagined, until the field of ufology became a morass of competing claims and high suspicion that everyone is a government agent and no one is to be trusted. Read more…

Mystery Alaska

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Chris Outcalt | Longreads | March 2019 | 13 minutes (3,723 words)

The helicopter took off from a narrow patch of grass off the side of Route 2 about 30 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska. The two-lane highway runs like an artery through the heart of the Alaskan interior, connecting the state’s third-most populous city to the outer reaches of North America. I’m riding shotgun in the lightweight, four-passenger chopper; Colorado State University (CSU) archeologist Julie Esdale is seated behind me. Esdale, who earned her Ph.D. in anthropology at Brown University, has spent more than a decade in this part of the state, exploring centuries of soil with a community of other social scientists whose aim is to weave together the tangled origins of humanity.

Fifty feet up, as the booming whop-whop of the propeller blades cuts through the air overhead, we crest a row of trees along the edge of the road, revealing a spectacular view: a massive, tree-lined valley framed to the west by the peaks of the Alaska Range, one of the highest stretches of mountains in the world. These jagged hills formed millions of years ago; shifting tectonic plates collided along the Denali and Hines Creek Faults, pushing the earth 20,000 feet into the air. Our destination lies about 10 miles into this lowland known as the Tanana Flats. Esdale and her colleagues believe the spot, a vestige of a 14,000-year-old hunter-gatherer encampment hidden deep in the earth, could hold important clues to better understanding the behavior of North America’s earliest inhabitants.

Esdale helped discover and excavate this important ground known as McDonald Creek, which turned out to be one of the oldest archeological sites in the country. Field crews found fragments of stone tools, charcoal dust left behind by ancient firepits, and remains of bison, mammoth, elk, and waterfowl. Admittedly, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about those who pioneered the landmass I’d lived on my entire life, let alone the particulars of their livelihood; but my interest piqued at the thought of these scientists dedicating their professional lives to better understanding those who came before us, like a detective unit attempting to solve one of the first mysteries of mankind.


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

Sign up


Esdale, who’s in her mid-40s and has straight, shoulder-length blond hair she often tucks under a ball cap out in the field, explained that Alaska is a hot spot for this research — that it was both a matter of history and geography. The last ice age took hold about 2.6 million years ago. When it began to melt around 12,000 years ago, it covered a well-documented land bridge between what is now Russia and Alaska. But before the glaciers thawed, causing water levels in the Bering Strait to rise, submerging the area known as Beringia, early humans wandered east to west across this continental divide. They were the first people to set foot in the New World, and they walked straight into what is today central Alaska.

…my interest piqued at the thought of these scientists dedicating their professional lives to better understanding those who came before us, like a detective unit attempting to solve one of the first mysteries of mankind.

“Early sites are hit and miss in the lower forty-eight,” Esdale told me. “But in the interior, we’ve got lots and lots of them.” Still, perhaps too far-flung to have slipped into the mainstream, she said Alaskan archeology was often overlooked in favor of research in the continental United States. Esdale’s husband, Jeff Rasic, also an Alaskan archeologist, told me he’d attended numerous national meetings of top researchers in the field and had often been struck by how little they tracked new findings in Alaska. “These are full-time academic archeologists,” Rasic said, “and they’re behind.” If I ever wanted to have a look up close, Esdale said she’d be happy to show me around when I first contacted her by phone last year.

By chance, I flew into Fairbanks two days ahead of the summer solstice, which brings nearly 24 hours of daylight to the region. When I landed close to midnight the sky was bright enough it could’ve easily been noon. (Later, I overheard a popular American Legion baseball game was scheduled for the following night. First pitch: 12:01 a.m.) I met Esdale early the next morning. We stopped at the local Safeway for a coffee and to pack a lunch, then headed to the helicopter launch site. After about 15 minutes in the air, Esdale pointed to our landing spot, a prominent mound that jutted above the flat, wooded landscape.

As we approached, she explained the scenery would’ve looked a lot different 14,000 years ago; the ground was still recovering from the ice age’s deep freeze and the trees hadn’t grown in yet. Nevertheless, I could see what the people who camped here back then were thinking. Atop the high point of an otherwise flat area would’ve been a good place to lookout for predators, scout prey for their next meal, or to simply rest their legs and enjoy the view after a long walk. At least that last part, I thought, we had in common.

***

In Alaska, a state known for its expansive territory, the federal government is the largest landowner, controlling about 61 percent of the terrain. Most of that is allocated for public use and managed by the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service. There are other operators, however; notably, the United States Army oversees the use of about 1.5 million acres in the central part of the state.

Drawn to the open, undeveloped land and distinct climate, the military has maintained a presence in interior Alaska since the 1930s. Today, the local base is known as Fort Wainwright, “home of the Arctic Warriors.” During the frigid Alaskan winters, soldiers test gear, vehicles, and the limits of their own bodies in extreme cold. What’s more, with ample space, units can spread out and simulate wartime drills and construct practice bombing ranges. But although there are few neighbors to disturb, federal law — the National Historic Preservation Act and the Archeological Resources Protection Act — requires the military pay close attention to what might lie beneath the surface. In fact, given that the area is archaeologically rich, the Army funds a team of about half a dozen people who make sure it doesn’t trample any sensitive material — anything from stone tools or rock carvings to portions of structures or grave sites at least a century old. For the past eight years, Esdale has run the team.

Esdale first moved to Alaska in 2002 as a student, several years before getting the gig with the Army. She’d been conducting research for her Ph.D. in the far reaches of northwest Alaska when she met her husband out in the field. Not long after, Rasic got a job with the National Park Service based in Fairbanks; they made the move north together, two scientists in love headed for the Last Frontier. That first year they got a dog, a big, goofy lab who demanded a lot of time outside — even when it was 50 below and felt like your eyelids would freeze shut after a few minutes. Eventually, Esdale and Rasic had two boys and she got the contract with the Army. By then Fairbanks felt like home.

Although sharpshooting members of the armed forces and a crew of erudite scientists studying human history might seem like strange bedfellows, the partnership has identified hundreds of significant sites hidden in the Alaskan tundra. Take McDonald Creek, for example. Several years ago, the brass at Fort Wainwright proposed building a road through the Tanana Flats. A team headed by Colorado State’s Ned Gaines, which included Esdale, dug a few test pits while surveying in advance of the development. “Everywhere we put a shovel, we found artifacts,” Esdale said. The Army rerouted the planned road, and excavation of the site was turned over to Texas A&M researcher Kelly Graf.

Although sharpshooting members of the armed forces and a crew of pesky erudite scientists studying human history might seem like strange bedfellows, the partnership has identified hundreds of significant sites hidden in the Alaskan tundra.

I met Graf and her team of mostly graduate students last summer. From the clearing where our helicopter landed, Esdale and I walked a well-worn path to a sort of base camp — an area among the trees about 80 feet in diameter. The camp was surrounded by a small, pop-up electric fence designed to keep animals away, and there were dozens of water jugs and large plastic bear-proof storage containers that resembled beer kegs. About 10 people sat around in fold-out camping chairs and on tree stumps finishing their lunch. This was Graf’s fourth year digging at the remote location. One highlight, she said, was they’d recently found what appeared to be a bone from a dog. Graf said the discovery could amount to evidence of the earliest known domesticated canine in North America. While we were talking she wondered aloud whether these early people would have traversed Beringia via some sort of dogsled or used the animals to help shoulder the weight of their belongings.

After lunch, the group migrated to the nearby dig location, a large pit that looked as if someone had pressed a massive rectangular cookie cutter into the ground and discarded all the dirt in the middle. Excavating an archeological site is tedious work, a far cry from the escapades of the world’s most famous member of the trade, the fictional character Indiana Jones. Rather, it consists mainly of carefully scraping away layers of dirt with a trowel and cataloging any items for further examination and analysis. “Our goal as anthropologists — it’s not just about treasures, not just about finding stuff,” Esdale told me. “It’s to understand people.”

Scientists have learned a lot about the founding populations of Indigenous peoples who lived in this area, particularly about how they subsisted. These people were mobile, resourceful, and skilled — unquestionably successful big-game hunters who preyed on bison, elk, and maybe even mammoth. They used spears and a throwing device called an atlatl, a curved tool made from wood, bone, or ivory not unlike the plastic tennis ball throwers popular at dog parks today. Hunters used it to launch darts fashioned with a pointed stone tip. (The bow and arrow didn’t show up for another 12,000 years.) Flakes discarded during the sharpening of these points are often found in the soil at sites like McDonald Creek.

‘Our goal as anthropologists — it’s not just about treasures, not just about finding stuff,’ Esdale told me. ‘It’s to understand people.’

For her part, though, Graf hoped to find more than flakes. Carbon dating of charcoal left behind by campfires and preserved 10 feet underground suggested that people occupied this location three different times throughout history — 7,000, 13,000, and nearly 14,000 years ago — making it one of the oldest sites in Alaska. “It’s an interesting place,” Graf told me. “We’ve always been looking for the base camp of these people. There are a lot of hunting camps around, shorter-term sites, but somewhere they had to be hunkering down, where grandma and grandpa and the kids and the mom, where everyone was hanging out. That’s kind of what we’re wondering, because this is a nice, fixed spot.”

“So, this could be that type of place?” I asked.

“Could be,” she said. “Could be.”

***

On my second day in Fairbanks, Esdale introduced me to an archeologist in his mid-70s named Chuck Holmes. He had a full head of neatly parted gray hair and a trimmed white beard. Before we met, Esdale outlined Holmes’s long resume. He’d taught at multiple universities, enlightening undergrads and guiding Ph.D. candidates, and had held senior-level science jobs with both the state and federal governments. It all amounted to decades of research and discoveries in the region. Hearing Esdale, I got the impression she was describing a sort of grandfather of Alaskan archeology.

Holmes first came to Alaska via Florida, about as far away as you can get in the United States — a fact his mother made sure to note when Holmes told her he’d decided to enroll at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1970. Holmes had fallen for the state’s wide-open territory the year before. Thanks to a friend’s father who worked for one of the railroad companies, Holmes and his hometown pal landed summer jobs laying train track across the tundra. “My friend was a little less interested in doing that kind of work; I just saw it as an adventure,” Holmes said. “I got in good shape and got to see quite a bit of the state.” From that moment, aside from brief stopovers in Calgary, Canada, and Washington state, Holmes spent the rest of his life in Alaska.

Holmes told me that as a kid he’d always had a penchant for finding things, so it was perhaps no surprise that during his undergrad years in Fairbanks he found archeology. “I was hooked on Alaska at that point,” Holmes said. But it was something he discovered two decades later that Esdale wanted me to learn more about: another archeological site not too far from McDonald Creek. The spot was known as Swan Point, and it happened to be the oldest historical site with evidence of human activity not just in Alaska but in the rest of the United States as well.

Back then, in the early 1990s, Holmes worked for the Office of History and Archeology in Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources. One summer, he led a group of students digging at an already well-established site in the Tanana Valley. A couple of the kids involved in the excavation wanted to venture out to look for something new, so Holmes pulled out a couple of maps and a compass, essential tools for an archeologist in the days before Google Earth. He identified what looked like a promising topographic feature: a hill off in the woods that appeared high enough to function as a lookout point, but not so high that it would’ve deterred a group of hunter-gatherers from climbing to the top. Holmes told the students to check it out, dig a few holes, and see what they found.

On their first attempt, the kids had trouble pinpointing the right location. Holmes sent them back the next day with additional instructions, and this time they returned with wide grins. First, they handed Holmes a couple of small plastic bags containing flakes likely cleaved from a stone tool. Not bad, Holmes thought. That was enough to suggest the site was worthy of further exploration. The students, however, had one more bag to show off. This one contained a scrap of ivory. The hard, white material, typically part of a tooth or tusk, is much more difficult to find in the wild, particularly in a shallow test pit dug at a somewhat hastily selected point on a map. It was like plucking a needle you didn’t know existed from a haystack the size of Delaware.

Holmes and other researchers excavated Swan Point on and off for the next two decades. Carbon dating placed it at about 14,200 years old. Scientists uncovered all kinds of gems, including stone tools, bones from a baby mammoth, food-storage pits, and hearths that campfires were built upon. The findings from Swan Point have been documented and published in numerous scientific papers, and in 2008 the government listed the site on the National Register of Historic Places. As it turned out, Holmes explained, much of the Swan Point technology was similar to what had been commonly found by scientists on the other side of the land bridge in Siberia, suggesting these people were related in some way. “These guys, we’re not really sure who the heck they are,” Holmes said, referring to whomever camped at Swan Point so long ago.

“They’re basically Asian; they are ancient folk,” he said. “But their genes carried into the New World.”

***

Later that day, after meeting Holmes, Esdale and I bumped along an overgrown, two-lane Jeep road that ran deep into the woods. We were headed toward another archeological site on Army lands, this one dating back about 13,000 years. The road dead-ended at a clearing atop a ridge with a view of a river and an open forest below. Esdale explained this location, aptly named Delta River Overlook, marked the first time that archeologists had found a Beringian site that humans appeared to have occupied in the winter. They could tell, she said, based on the existence of a specific tooth that had belonged to a baby bison — a molar that only erupts in the cold season.

Winters were lean times for humans 13,000 years ago. In addition to tracking larger animals and storing the frozen meat under rocks, hunters in these tribes also set snares to trap small game for times when the weather made it challenging to venture too far from camp; at Delta River Overlook, for example, there’s evidence of grouse and ground squirrel. Staying warm was another challenge. Furs from big-game animals helped, but scientists are still piecing together the picture of what their shelters might’ve looked like that long ago. Best guess from ethnographic evidence, Esdale told me, is that families constructed dwellings by draping animal skins over a dome of flexible branches and packing the outside with snow for additional insulation.

The excavation of the Delta River site was led by a professor of archeology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks named Ben Potter. Potter was in China on a research trip when I visited Alaska, but I spoke with him on the phone later. Like Holmes, he’s made a number of important contributions to the Alaskan archeological canon. Potter’s body of work, however, contains one particularly unique entry: He uncovered the oldest human remains to date at an archeological site in Alaska. The first finding occurred in 2010, after years of work at an 11,500-year-old site known as Upward Sun River.

Potter and his team were contracted in 2005 to conduct a survey ahead of a proposed railway expansion through Army lands 40 miles from Fairbanks. His crew dug a few test pits and found evidence of human activity. The rail project was eventually rerouted, and in 2009 Potter received a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue excavating and investigating the site. He made the startling discovery the following year. About a meter down, Potter’s crew found parts of a human skull; later analysis determined the bones had come from a 3-year-old cremated child. In 2013, they went deeper into the site, and the team found the remains of two infants. Extracting human remains from the ground in Alaska necessitates consulting with local Indigenous tribes, which maintain a notable presence in their ancestral lands in the state — about 100,000 people spread across at least four groups. With the support and cooperation of local tribal leaders, his team removed the bones and sent out a sample for genetic analysis. They published the results last year.

The goal is just knowing more — to keep understanding.

The DNA makeup revealed an entirely new population of Native peoples, a group Potter labeled “Ancient Beringians.” There were other important findings at Upward Sun River. For example, they discovered fish bones buried in a hearth, where hunters would’ve cooked their meat, which helped Potter and his team establish the earliest known human consumption of salmon in the Americas. Previously, scientists had thought this occurred near the ocean. “It wasn’t on the coast, it was in the deep interior rivers,” Potter said. “That’s pretty exciting.” But the conclusions drawn from the DNA analysis were by far the most significant: a previously unknown branch of ancient humans.

It was a substantial addition to the archeology of the time. Although the general narrative about the early migration of people from Siberia to the Americas is mostly agreed upon, the specifics are subject to ongoing debate among social scientists. When exactly did these ancient people first arrive in Alaska? Did they settle down? If so, for how long? When did they colonize the rest of America? Did they travel inland or along the coast? What the DNA from Potter’s discovery and other analysis showed was that for a period of several thousand years the genetic code of early Indigenous people evolved in isolation, no longer mixing with the DNA of those who lived in eastern Asia. It also appeared that these Ancient Beringians were eventually separated from those who went on to colonize the rest of the Americas.

Two other groups of scientists have discovered new genetic evidence that he felt buttressed his work. The findings included, in part, a human DNA sample from a 12,600-year-old cave in Montana and a single tooth preserved from a 1949 dig at a 10,000-year-old site in western Alaska, hundreds of miles from Fairbanks. The tooth had long been forgotten, stashed away on a dusty shelf at a museum in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was found by, of all people, Esdale’s husband Rasic. Turned out, the genetic makeup of the tooth matched the children’s from Upward Sun River.

“This actually clarifies quite a bit,” Potter told me when I followed up with him after the new papers were released. He walked me through the scenario he saw taking shape: People were likely living in Asia around 16,000 years ago. The glaciers began to melt and tribes migrated from western Beringia to Alaska around, say, 15,000 years ago. Then you have a split: ancient Beringians sticking around Alaska and another group traveling south, either inland, along the coast, or both, entering the rest of the Americas. That second group, he said, looked to be a single population that spread quickly and later split into many lineages.

Talking with Potter about the DNA results and migration theories it reminded me of a conversation Esdale and I had on our drive out to Delta River Overlook, the day before I left Alaska and flew back to the rest of the United States. We’d been talking about how, based on the antique elements of the profession, archeologists are necessarily adept at spinning complex abstractions from limited evidence, whether it’s the shape of a microblade point or a scrap of an animal bone. It seemed to me, however, that that meant there was no endgame to this work — that it could go on forever, like trying to solve a massive jigsaw puzzle in which an untold number of pieces were destroyed eons ago. When I floated this thought to Esdale, she laughed. “Yeah, no, there’s never an endgame. The goal is just knowing more — to keep understanding.”

We continued along the Jeep road into the forest.

“I never really thought about it like that,” she said.

***

Chris Outcalt is a writer and editor based in Colorado.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Curious Tale of the Salish Sea Feet

Getty / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Kea Krause | LongreadsApril 2019| 16 minutes (3,905 words)

They come by way of similar discovery: A beachcomber, perhaps gathering shells or out for some exercise, spots a flashy, nonpelagic lump that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a human foot still nestled in its shoe. The feet, both lefts and rights, come in all sizes — sometimes wearing New Balance or Nike, occasionally a hiking boot, and sometimes still attached to leg bones, a tibia sticking out like a stake in the ground.

To the intrigue and often horror of Pacific Northwesterners, in 2007 feet began washing up along the shores of the Salish Sea, an inland ocean spanning nearly 500 miles from Olympia, Washington, the state’s capitol, to Desolation Sound, in British Columbia, Canada. Today the tally is 21 feet and counting (15 in BC, six in Washington). So prevalent are the gruesome discoveries that the BC coroner’s office has a map marked up with each new find: Foot #1 — a right — found in August 2007 floated up to Jedediah Island in a generic white sneaker with navy blue accents; Foot #5 in a muddy Nike; Foot #13 wore black with Velcro. New Year’s Day 2019 delivered the most recent foot, number 21, to a beach in Everett. It tumbled ashore in an aging boot, its condition indicating it had been out to sea for “some time,” according to local police.

A pattern of body parts washing ashore has all the trappings of a serial killer scenario or a horror movie or, in the very least, of an otherworldly phenomenon. Earned or not, the Pacific Northwest has a haunting prestige — the home of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, and Ted Bundy, and now also the land of Twilight’s Hollywood vampires in Forks, out on the peninsula. Some morbid element of the region has arrested our imaginations. It could be the skies: So gray and responsible for all the rain that keeps everything perennially damp. Or perhaps it’s the abundance of old-growth timber — plenty of dense and protected woods for stashing bodies. Rivers, branching across the state are another nature-made means of evidence disposal. It is rumored that Ridgway discarded the bodies of as many as 70 women around the Green River, 65 miles long descending from the Cascades and entering the Puget Sound just west of Seattle. In Washington State, geography and meteorology conspire to creep us out. But perhaps most lurid is the ocean itself, not just because it continues to spew body parts to its surface but also because of its infinite and perplexing nature. Its unknowability, though alluring to those in the script-writing business, has puzzled scientists and casual observers of the Sound for generations.

The southern portion of the Salish Sea is more familiarly known as Puget Sound, a body of water servicing the Seattle metropolitan area, home to about 3.8 million residents and plenty of industry — Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft, among others — all luxuriously settled in one of America’s most beautiful and diverse oceanic ecosystems. Seattle is rainy and weird, a place for artists and musicians to brood beneath weather-pregnant clouds, an offbeat city for both the creative and outdoorsy, resting in a hammock between two mountain ranges. But recently the area has seen changes out of its control: The tech industry is expected to expand the population of the Salish Sea region to 9 million people in the coming decades and has wiped away many of the city’s distinctive traits. The former home of Kurt Cobain and birthplace of grunge now has a median home value of more than $700,000 and mostly functions to accommodate well-compensated tech workers. It’s still weird though — after all, feet keep floating ashore.

A pattern of body parts washing ashore has all the trappings of a serial killer scenario or a horror movie or, in the very least, of an otherworldly phenomenon.

Last fall, I went looking for a foot. More specifically, I went to Crane’s Landing on Whidbey Island — a refuge in Puget Sound just north of Seattle — where a foot had been found, looking to see if the beach would tell me anything about why the sea had dropped the foot there. Off the ferry, I drove a narrow roadway so starved of sunshine that moss grew along its centerline. It wound through a collection of homes that petered out down by the water in a dead end. The pebble beach comprised of mostly smooth skipping stones, was lined with a row of ragged pilings, head-high with rotted bases, the remnants of the landing that had been the beach’s namesake.

When you’re from Seattle, it’s almost routine to be dazzled by the macabre sagas of the sea. As a child, my favorite story was one my uncle told about a body floating up behind his live-aboard sailboat on Lake Union. The idea of that bloated body floated into my imagination and from there on out, when visiting my family on their sailboat, I would keep my eyes glued to the water in the event another poor soul should bob up to the surface for my discovery. Read more…

Orwell’s Last Neighborhood

Barnhill on the Isle of Jura, Scotland. (David Brown)

David Brown | The American Scholar | April 2019 | 23 minutes (5,796 words)

It’s hard to know what would be a good place from which to imagine a future of bad smells and no privacy, deceit and propaganda, poverty and torture. Does a writer need to live in misery and ugliness to conjure up a dystopia?

Apparently not.

We’d been walking more than an hour. The road was two tracks of pebbled dirt separated by a strip of grass. The land was treeless as prairie, with wildflowers and the seedless tops of last year’s grass smudging the new growth.

We rounded a curve and looked down a hillside to the sea. A half mile in the distance, far back from the water, was a white house with three dormer windows. Behind it, a stone wall cut a diagonal to the water like a seam stitching mismatched pieces of green velvet. Far to the right, a boat moved along the shore, its sail as bright as the house.

This was where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. The house, called Barnhill, sits near the northern end of Jura, an island off Scotland’s west coast in the Inner Hebrides. It was June 2, sunny, short-sleeve warm, with the midges barely out, and couldn’t have been more beautiful.

Orwell lived here for parts of the last three years of his life. He left periodically (mostly in the winter) to do journalism in London and, for seven months in 1947 and 1948, to undergo treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis. Although he rented Barnhill and didn’t own it, he put in fruit trees and a garden, built a chicken house, bought a truck and a boat, and invested numberless hours of labor in what he believed would be his permanent home. When he left it for the last time, in January 1949, he never again lived outside a sanatorium or hospital.

I came to Jura after a two-week backpacking trip across Scotland. My purpose was to drink single-malt on Islay, the island to the south, and enjoy two nights of indulgence at Ardlussa House, where Orwell’s landlord had lived. I was not on a literary pilgrimage. Barnhill is not open to the public, and no one among the island’s 235 residents remembers Orwell. Read more…

Namwali Serpell on Doing the Responsible Thing — Writing an Irresponsible Novel

Peg Skorpinski / Hogarth

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | March 2019 | 18 minutes (4,830 words)

Namwali Serpell’s first novel, The Old Drift, tells the story of several families living in Zambia, encompassing over a century of their interwoven lives. The novel takes its title from a region located near Victoria Falls (otherwise known as Mosi-o-Tunya, which translates to “The Smoke That Thunders”), which is also where the novel begins. Along the way, The Old Drift touches on many moments in history, from the Second World War to Zambia’s foray into space exploration.

But Serpell isn’t content to simply tell the story of a nation through several generations of its residents. Instead, her narrative extends into the near future, and each of its sections is paired with a short passage written by a strange collective voice — one which doesn’t seem to be human. It’s a bold narrative choice, but it’s one that pays off brilliantly at novel’s end.

Serpell’s bibliography covers a broad range of styles and territories, from the theoretical to the metafictional. Her first book, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, explored the works of writers like Tom McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Ian McEwan. She’s contributed the introduction to Penguin Classics’ edition of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novel Devil on the Cross. And her short story “Company,” published in the “Cover Stories” issue of McSweeney’s, reimagines a Samuel Beckett narrative along Afrofuturist lines — a process that Serpell described in one interview as “a Janelle Monaé cover of a Philip Glass song.” Read more…

The Leaves, They Never Stop Falling

iStock / Getty Images Plus

Colin Dickey | Longreads | March 2019 | 15 minutes (3,788 words)

 

A month after we bought our first house in 2009, our friend Vanessa came over for her first and only visit. She was moving with great difficulty by then, and the three steps up to our front door were treacherous. When she made it to the chair closest to the door she sat down with visible relief. Scleroderma is a perverse disease where the body manically over-produces collagen: it gets in your joints, making moving painful, and at its worst overtakes the body’s organs themselves. It makes one’s movements slow and measured, as though suffering from advanced age or arthritis — and yet, as Vanessa was fond of pointing out, it also makes one’s skin smooth and radiant. It is as though one is simultaneously aging forwards and backwards at once.

“Is that a linden tree?” she asked, looking out the window. Now having sat down again, her eyes were flashing around the room — she was still very much alert and alive, still very much a moving part of this world.

I told her I didn’t know — I’ve never been good at identifying or remembering trees. I couldn’t tell you the difference between an oak and an elm, a maple or a poplar.

“I’m pretty sure,” she said, “that it’s a linden.”

She died a few weeks later. In the months that followed, I spent a good deal of time looking out the window at the linden tree.

Read more…

Irvine Welsh on Brexit, Existential Panic, and His Latest ‘Trainspotting’ Sequel

Workers on an assembly line inside the Ford Motor Company factory at Highland Park, Michigan, constructing steering systems, circa 1913. (Hulton Archive/Getty)

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | March 2019 | 12 minutes (3,284 words)

 

For many American readers, knowledge of Irvine Welsh came via his 1993 novel Trainspotting. The novel established Welsh as a daring prose stylist with a flair for the transgressive, while the subsequent film adaptation supercharged the careers of many involved, including director Danny Boyle and lead Ewan McGregor. Over the years, Welsh has revisited this world in several other works, including the novels Porno, Skagboys, and The Blade Artist. In each, he’s surveyed how time has changed his characters — and gradually expanded the scope of these books from Edinburgh to something more international.

In his latest novel Dead Men’s Trousers, Welsh has brought this fictional universe to its conclusion. Several of his long-running characters have become fathers of grown children; one of them will not survive to the end of the book. But that’s not the only bittersweet element to be found here: Welsh has set the novel on the eve of the Brexit vote, creating a growing sense of tension in the background even as his characters — including sociopath-turned-artist Frank Begbie and expatriate DJ manager Mark Renton — become embroiled in a cycle of old grievances. At stake is an interwoven pair of questions: to what extent can people change, and to what extent are people willing to allow others to change?

The temporal setting of the novel also allows for some other memorable setpieces, including a number of scenes set around Welsh’s beloved Hibernian F.C. winning the Scottish Cup in 2016. And Welsh, ever the stylist, has also come up with a resonant way of conveying several characters’ experience with the psychedelic DMT: prose pauses and suddenly, the mode shifts into a graphic novel for part of a page. While Welsh has revisited his characters repeatedly over time, each of these books has a distinct feel to it; this one is no exception. Read more…

The Blaming of the Shrew

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,982 words)

 

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

 
As night follows day, so must the announcement of a woman’s candidacy for high political office compel a verdict on her likability, a quality so ineffable that we can really only say we know it when we see it. And so rarely do we see it in people who aren’t men. Still, likability endures as our gold standard, our north star. Almost 20 years after Sam Adams polled voters on which candidate they would rather get a beer with, we are still obsessed with a candidate’s perceived likability and relatability, despite the fact that we now have the least conventionally likable or relatable president in history. This debating of female candidates’ likability while a man like Donald Trump occupies the Oval Office is confusing but it makes much more sense if you see the current political moment for what it is: our least compelling antihero show.

Whether the antihero show is in its twilight or we’re not quite ready to let it go, there is no doubt that it has been a huge cultural presence for the better part of two decades. As the proliferation of think-pieces around the 20th anniversary of The Sopranos premiere revealed that we’re still in the thrall of the show and the genre it spawned, it’s worth noting that the election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the land followed nearly two decades of tuning in to men who were supposed to be unlikable but whom we somehow liked enough to keep watching. Thinking about political likability and a world in which we say things like “President Trump” is kind of like looking at the wall of Homeland’s Carrie Mathison: it seems crazy but the connections are all there. And in this case, many of the threads lead back to television.

TV is a medium with a particular reliance on likability. Seeing a movie involves just one decision, but when we watch a TV show we must repeatedly make the choice to encounter its characters, tuning in week after week or, in the age of streaming, contributing to a show’s completion rate. When a show features a protagonist who is not conventionally “likable” — someone who does things we recognize as illegal, immoral, or just plain offensive — we must engage in some mental gymnastics. We either flip a switch and start seeing that character as a villain or we decide we’re going to excuse his behavior and continue to root for his success. With a television protagonist, if we choose the latter, it is something that we have to do over and over again, escalating our commitment to the character as his misdeeds pile up.

Trump’s path to the presidency was made smoother by a complex relationship to women and gender that finds its expression in pop culture, like television shows about bad dudes.

TV is also what brought us the concept of likability in politics in the first place because most of the time when we talk about likability, we’re really talking about the appearance of likability, and TV brought us unprecedented access to candidates’ appearances. Each emerging communication technology has changed the formula for successful candidacy and television’s contribution has been to reward a certain type of image. Most radio listeners called the first debate between Kennedy and Nixon a draw, but television viewers overwhelmingly perceived a Kennedy victory because of how Kennedy looked. When we consider TV’s role in the 2016 election, we should be thinking about the way in which television itself took Trump from a local D-lister to an icon of American success with a national profile, but also about the image that we now look for, how the medium has changed our expectations for main characters and, in doing so, changed our expectations for the main character of the country: the president.

And after an election in which we faced two very different potential main characters, we should acknowledge the role that gender plays, in politics and in television. Trump’s path to the presidency was made smoother by a complex relationship to women and gender that finds its expression in pop culture, like television shows about bad dudes. Understanding the mechanics of the antihero genre that came to redefine TV drama, particularly the ways in which the phenomenon of the likable unlikable man relies on the way that man interacts with women, might help us reckon with the politics of gender, and gendered politics, as we look toward another election cycle.

***

The mythology of the antihero has him spring from David Chase’s head like a late ’90s Athena. In his book on the transformative shows of the late ’90s and early 2000s, The Revolution was Televised, Alan Sepinwall writes that Chase was fighting against “the notion that a TV series had to have a likable character at its center.” It was important to Chase that this new kind of protagonist not be rehabilitated, like Detective Sipowicz of NYPD Blue. There would be no redemption arc but instead further descent into whatever nefarious activities had characterized him as unlikable in the first place.

But there was a disconnect between this vision and the way viewers reacted to Tony Soprano and the other unreformed Sipowiczes who would follow in his wake. Chase has been known to complain about his audience’s relationship to Tony, cheering him on one minute and wanting to see him punished the next; Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, similarly expressed his surprise that fans were still “rooting for” Walt as his misdeeds became ever more serious and destructive. These kinds of fans have been criticized as “bad readers” missing the point of a groundbreaking new form. But I have always found showrunners’ professions of bafflement at audience reception to be disingenuous at best because the whole enterprise of the antihero show was to create a bad guy people would like anyway. Gilligan seems more in touch with his intentions when he recalls that he cast Bryan Cranston as Walter White because he recalled Cranston’s ability to convey “a basic humanity” in another otherwise unappealing character. When thinking about casting Jon Hamm as Don Draper, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner made a similar observation: “I asked myself a question: ‘When this man goes home to his wife at the end of the pilot, are you going to hate him?’ And I said, ‘No, I will not hate him.’”

Feigned surprise at audience reactions aside, it seems likely that the men who created these “unlikable” men understood that they would still need an audience to invest in them, and that such an investment would not be a slam dunk but would instead require delicate rigging. I like to break down the mechanics of the antihero in the following way:

The antihero is marked as special.

David Chase has said that he used to quote Rockford Files creator Stephen Cannell in the Sopranos writers’ room: “Rockford can be a jerk-off and a fool, but he’s got to be the smartest guy in the room.” The other Golden Age antihero shows followed this formula. Don is a creative genius (“It’s Toasted!”) and Walt is a talented chemist who regularly outsmarts very dangerous people. This distinction of being set apart is something the antihero has in common with regular heroes.

The antihero has interiority.

If, as Chase declared, his character was not going to evolve toward to a more sympathetic future, the case for sympathy would have to be rooted in the past or justified by the present. These shows gave their protagonists an interiority that made sympathizing with them feel less icky. This is where the antiheroes of the early aughts differed from a character like J.R. Ewing, who was also a popular bad guy protagonist. Therapy sessions and flashbacks, revealing monologues, and contemplative moments set to music all softened the blow of the bad things they did. Whatever interiority Chase, Gilligan, and Weiner allowed other characters, it always paled in comparison to that given to their protagonists. Like their smarts and talent, this was another way of distinguishing characters who would have ordinarily coded as villains and instead marking them as the hero of their story.

The antihero is stacked up against antagonists slightly to exceedingly more unlikable than he is.

To me, this is the real key to the antihero’s appeal. Being special and having a sympathetic backstory will only take a traditionally “unlikable” character so far, and there are plenty of movie and TV villains who have been given similar treatment. What separates a true antihero from a villain is that we’re in his corner, we want him to succeed. If we are to root for Don Draper, an identity thief and rampant philanderer, we need to see him opposite, say, a Pete Campbell type: lothario sans charm and talent. Walter White is the small business owner to Gus Fring’s Amazon. Villainy is not a fixed point, it’s a sliding scale. Real people aren’t neatly divided into Supermans and Lex Luthors. Most of us are equal parts potential for good and propensity for shittiness, a heady brew of good instincts and bad inclinations. Our virtue is contextual. While the nature of these men’s misdeeds are (hopefully!) of a different magnitude than our own, part of their appeal is certainly, as Gilligan suspected, the way they mirror our own humanity, the good and the ugly both. And we are able to focus on the former and excuse the latter when showrunners give us other characters who are less multidimensional and therefore easier to hate.

But alongside the Phil Leotardos and Gus Frings, those easier-to-hate people often ended up being women. Skyler White is the most obvious example. Walt was stacked up against all kinds of villains but none inspired the kind of vitriolic responses Anna Gunn famously described in a 2013 New York Times op-ed: the thousands of people who liked the Facebook page “I Hate Skyler White,” the posts complaining that Skyler was “a shrieking, hypocritical harpy … a ball-and-chain, a drag, a shrew, an annoying bitch wife.” Some fans of the show even conflated Gunn and the character she played. One message board post read: “Could somebody tell me where I can find Anna Gunn so I can kill her?” Reddit boards still use her as the bar against which all bad wife characters should be measured. Even the neo-Nazis who killed Hank and made Jesse their slave never raised viewers’ hackles the way Skyler did and still does years later. Fan reaction to Betty Draper was similarly harsh (apparently, the only way to make her “likable” was to kill her) despite the fact that the show was premised on the fact that her life was a lie Don had to tell her over and over.

Women were the accidental antagonists of shows about ‘difficult men,’ but what does it look like when a woman steps into the antihero mold, when it is a difficult woman at the heart of a series?

Sopranos viewers rarely saw Carmela this way because for the most part she declines to take on the role of antagonist. She is instead, as the psychiatrist in season three points out, an enabler. She doesn’t stand in the way of our guy but the show is still built on the foundation of a woman who could wear a man down. In his very first conversation with Dr. Melfi, Tony talks about his parents’ relationship: “My dad was tough. He ran his own crew. Guy like that and my mother wore him down to a little nub. He was a squeaking little gerbil when he died.” Viewers dutifully saw Livia Soprano as an antagonist and a burden Tony had to overcome. In their just released book The Sopranos Sessions, Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller-Seitz write: “Tony adored the ducks in the pool because they were guarded by a mother who protected and nurtured them in a manner free of ulterior motive, of deceit and manipulation, of the urge to annihilate. Livia, for all her evident helplessness, is the most actively destructive force in the pilot, a black hole vacuuming up hope.” They’re talking about the episode where Tony runs over a guy who owes him money with his car but somehow it’s his elderly mother who is the most actively destructive force.

In interviewing Chase for The Sopranos Sessions, Sepinwall reminds him that he once said that The Sopranos, as an idea, began with his friends encouraging him to do a show about his mother. The Sopranos’ origin story is rooted in the trope of the “nagging harpy” and Chase himself suggests that the show was successful in large part because he imported domesticity into the mobster genre: “family shows were a women’s medium, and this was a family show. I thought this might be successful, or at least keep its head above water, because it would attract, unlike most Mob pictures, a female audience because of the family show aspect.” But the kind of domesticity of which he availed himself, one that would become a familiar element of shows about “difficult” men, was one in which women are set up to be either enablers or antagonists. Livia might have been the black hole, but all of the women in Tony’s life are implicated. In that same therapy session in episode one, Dr. Melfi asks Tony, “What’s the one thing your mother, your wife, your daughter all have in common?” His response? “They all break my balls.”


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

Sign up


Wives get the raw end of the deal in an antihero show. They are there to humanize the protagonist but we often see them as villains instead of the victims they truly are because, in opposing our guy, they stand in the way of the show’s plotline. Wives pose a problem in that they fail to deliver on what we perhaps subconsciously assume to be their role. These men provide for their families. They work hard — never mind how or what they do with their leisure time — so that their families can have what they need and all their wives have to do is not call them on it. Philosopher Kate Manne argues that a central dynamic of misogyny is the obligation by, or expectation of, women to give men “feminine-coded goods and service” like attention, care, sympathy, respect, admiration, security, and safe haven. There is, according to Manne, “the threat of withdrawal of social approval if those social duties are not performed, and the incentive of love and gratitude if they are done willingly and gladly.” Viewer response to characters like Skyler and Betty is the natural result of the expectation that wives are supposed to help, not hinder, their husbands. Carmela, on the other hand, explains to Dr. Krakower that her role is to “make sure he’s got clean clothes in his closet and dinner on his table.”

Once you see the degree to which the antihero show is dependent on marriage and heteronormativity, you can’t unsee it. The role of a wife in an antihero story is not incidental but integral: domestic antagonists are a large part of the reason we feel OK about rooting for bad guys like Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Don Draper. These shows taught us to look for the humanity in our male protagonists and ignore it in the women who stood in their way. Television audiences’ identification with and adoration of male antiheroes were the canaries in the coal mine, warning us of the ease with which we might see villains as victims and vice versa.

Looking back, it’s painful to admit that for many in the electorate, Hillary Clinton was the Skyler to Trump’s Walt, the Betty to his Don. We had already spent years seeing her as the Carmela to Bill’s Tony, implicated in her husband’s misdeeds by dint of staying with him, forever tainted by her own moral compromises that, while they paled in comparison to his, were for some reason less forgivable and rendered her eternally “unlikable.” It made sense, then, that when Clinton took a jab at Trump’s penchant for avoiding paying taxes while explaining her plan to raise taxes on the wealthy during the third debate, Trump interrupted to call her “such a nasty woman.” This one, he seemed to be telling viewers at home, is a Skyler.

So where does this leave us, in art and in politics? Are we ready for a female candidate who is – like all of the male candidates over the last 230 years, like all of us – human? As I write this, about half of the announced Democratic candidates for president are women so it is likely that gender will play a starring role this election cycle. Similarly, as television diffuses like so many essential oils over ever-increasing platforms, there are more opportunities than ever before for female-centered shows. How have we done with female characters? Have depictions of women sharing a screen with unlikable men changed at all? Are we able to see the “humanity” that Gilligan identified at the heart of Walter White’s appeal in people who aren’t men? Women were the accidental antagonists of shows about “difficult men,” but what does it look like when a woman steps into the antihero mold, when it is a difficult woman at the heart of a series? What is it, actually, that makes a woman difficult?

When we talk about antiheroes, we’re really talking about the kinds of bad behavior we can countenance and the kinds we can’t, the conditions that need to be met for us to overlook bad behavior; the way we take the sum of some people and not others. Thinking about when and how we extend our understanding and forgiveness is key to understanding the genre and our world. Deconstructing the antihero genre may help us better examine our own attitudes toward women.

This is the first installment of an unscientific and hardly exhaustive journey through shows about difficult people, many of whom are women. Next up? The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards.

* * *

Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in Longreads, The Rumpus, Tablet, and Lilith.

 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

Baring the Bones of the Lost Country: The Last Paleontologist in Venezuela

Photo courtesy of Ascanio Rincon / Tachiraptor admirabilis illustration by Maurílio Oliveira / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Zoe Valery | Longreads | February 2019 | 18 minutes (5,011 words)

 

— Orocual tar pit, northeastern Venezuela, 2007 C.E.

Ascanio Rincón was standing on a veritable fossil paradise when one of his students brought to his attention a tooth that was sticking out through the dirt. The site presented innumerable shards of prehistoric bones that had been fortuitously unearthed by a steamroller digging a trench for a pipeline. After assessing the value of the site, the young paleontologist stood his ground to protect the tar pit where millions of fossils have been preserved by the asphalt, eventually forcing the workers to redraw the course of the oil duct. When he cleaned around the tooth that was embedded in the trench wall, he found that it was attached to the skull of a creature that the steamroller had missed only by inches. He looked at the eye socket in disbelief: “A saber-toothed tiger was looking at me in the eye,” he recalls. This specimen would constitute a groundbreaking discovery for Rincón and a landmark for the field of paleontology in Venezuela and at large.

To this day, Richard Parker — named after the tiger in Life of Pi — remains one of the most remarkable findings in the country and one of Rincón’s dearest fossils. The sabre-toothed tiger has shed light on a migratory wave during the Ice Age that the scientific community previously had not been aware of. Due to the current mass migration of people from Venezuela, Rincón is one of the only scientists left in the country tapping into the overwhelming wealth of fossils yet to be uncovered at the Orocual tar pit. Like most of his colleagues, the eight students he had trained have all left the country, joining 3 million other Venezuelans fleeing the rampant economic crisis, creating what has been described by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees as the most dire refugee crisis on the continent. Rincón is an endling — the only extant individual of a species — in his field: the last vertebrate paleontologist in Venezuela.* Read more…

Behind the Writing: On Research

Type by Katie Kosma

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2019 | 29 minutes (7,983 words)

In December, I turned in the first draft of my second book. I assumed that when I finished it, I would stand up and scream. Actually scream “YES!” followed by a stream of sundry obscenities, then collapse on the floor and make my husband take a picture for Instagram.

Instead, I was in a quiet back room of Hillman Library, on the University of Pittsburgh campus, drinking a 99¢ mug of coffee, googling Erich Fromm quotes, when I suddenly realized I was done, and I just sat there mildly stupefied, then caught the bus and went home. It was an appropriate end to a writing process that felt a lot less like glorious creation and a lot more like survival and persistence: just getting through one day, one page to the next, trying to keep the pyramid of information, ideas, and sentences from collapsing into a wet heap. It sucked, but in the way most serious creative endeavors suck, with a lining of deep gratification that afterward allows one to pretend that it was all in the service of a mystical something and not really, at base, insane.

It was an appropriate end to a writing process that felt a lot less like glorious creation and a lot more like survival and persistence: just getting through one day, one page to the next, trying to keep the pyramid of information, ideas, and sentences from collapsing into a wet heap.

What made this second book so difficult was research: not the process of doing it, not compiling and organizing it, but the quandary of how to make it creative. How to write a book that felt like it spoke to huge questions — the meaning of life, what matters and why, all the things one gets misty-eyed about around a bonfire — via gobs of information.

Read more…