Search Results for: Spin

The Placeless and the Privileged

I last read about the startup Roam, which caters to affluent digital nomads seeking a ready-made community whether they’re in London, Tokyo, or Miami, in Jessa Crispin’s Outline story from last summer. Based on her experiences in the company’s compound in Bali, she questioned the possibility of an authentic communal experience in a place that depended on the cheap cost of living and stark income gaps between Roam patrons and the local labor force.

In the New York Times Magazine, Kyle Chayka revisits Roam, this time in Miami, where he observes different nuances of satisfaction and alienation — from the real, if temporary connections that people seem to make during their stays, to the growing sense that this was more “immersive group therapy” than a travel experience. Some of the most interesting moments in Chayka’s piece, however, go beyond the (easily parodied) surface of the wealthy-tech-nomad lifestyle. He also examines the deeper forces that have made a concept like Roam not just attractive to a subset of (mostly young) professionals, but almost a logical, necessary outcome of the current economic moment. As Roam founder Bruno Haid tells it, the startup is “a means of letting human capital find the path of least resistance, wherever it may be.”

There is a vicious plausibility to Haid’s vision. The macroeconomic pressures he describes in the urbanized West — a lack of affordable housing and linear careers — are particularly tough on millennials, who are also, incidentally or not, a historically unattached generation, with low rates of marriage, homeownership and childbearing. If the usual trappings of adulthood don’t seem attainable, and a permanent sense of precariousness seems unavoidable, why not embrace impermanence instead? Already there are partial nomads all around you; you just might not think of them that way yet. There’s the writer who spends a few months of every year in Berlin, making up for diminishing freelance wages with cheap Neukölln rent; the curator bouncing between New York and Los Angeles; the artist jumping from Tokyo residency to Istanbul fellowship. In the competitive freelance economy, geographic mobility has become a superficial sign of both success and creative freedom: the ability to do anything, anywhere, at any time.

Those in less artsy careers who chase that same sort of freedom may find it illusory. The new technologies that have liberated us from place have also made employers more comfortable with remote workers, but only because we can be so easily monitored. Combine this interconnectivity with an increasing population of freelancers — over a third of the American work force makes money in the so-called gig economy — and you have the makings of a nomad boom. Haid estimates his target customer base to be around 1.2 million people who make over $80,000 a year and could live anywhere. Pieter Levels, creator of the social network Nomad List, believes there to be a nomad population in the high hundreds of thousands.

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What Happens Between What Seems Like All the Facts: On Interviewing Artists

(Photo courtesy the Auping family)

Jonny Auping| Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (4,011 words)

Michael Auping recently retired after 25 years as the chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His 40-year curatorial career, which focused on the international development of postwar art, has resulted in numerous, critically-acclaimed exhibitions featuring many of the 20th century’s most prominent visual artists.

Before becoming a curator, Auping spent his post-graduate years in mid-70s Southern California trying to figure out how to break into the art world. Around 1975, he came across the book Workingby Studs Terkel, in which the author interviews various working people — from parking valets and cab drivers to gravediggers and pharmacists — about the meaning they find in their jobs. Auping began going to the studios of Los Angeles-based artists like Robert Irwin, Tony Delap, and Craig Kauffman to record conversations about their work, their background, and most importantly, their process.

His new book, Forty Years: Just Talking About Art, is a compilation of interviews ranging from 1977 to 2017 featuring artists such as Frank Stella, Lucian Freud, Susan Rothenberg, Bruce Nauman. Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and many others. Read more…

Alan Watts and the Eternal Present

Alan Watts
Alan Watts. (Photo by Pictorial Parade/Getty Images)

In 1950, both the world and Alan Watts were at a pivotal point. Russia had recently detonated its first atomic weapon, ushering in an age of global anxiety.

By the spring, Watts himself was undergoing a jarring transformation: his first wife had their marriage annulled because of an affair, and he resigned his position as an Episcopalian minister. Watts left the church, he later remembered, “not because it doesn’t practice what it preaches, but because it preaches.” Read more…

The Cities in Me

Wikimedia Commons, Wagner Cassimiro via Flickr Creative Commons.

Sorayya Khan | The Aleph Review | February 2018 | 8 minutes (2,085 words)

 

Our latest Exclusive is a new essay by Sorayya Khan, published with the permission of The Aleph Review, which has the piece in print.

Naeem was 16 and I was 11, but the real difference in 1973 was that I knew his name and he didn’t know mine. Neither of us knew then that our shared life began on a yellow school bus in Islamabad, he in the back, me in the front. His single recollection is that I was the younger sister of a soccer teammate. I have two memories of him. My first is of his wide-open grin while he sits with friends in the last row of bus seats. Curly hair falls in waves around his face and he carries himself with a sixteen-year-old’s swagger that is electrifying to those of us whose feet barely reach the floor. To be grown like that one day! My second is of a photograph. He is on the front page of the school newspaper at a sports banquet where he has won an award. The paper is unnaturally white, the black and white photo too dark. He is dressed in a suit, holding a microphone, smiling shyly at his lucky girlfriend. Buried in a box, the folded newspaper accompanied him to all his cities, and then ours, before it surfaced in Ithaca with a bundle of a girlfriend’s drawings. My memory was accurate, except there’s nothing shy about his smile.

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The Thing about Women from the River Is That Our Currents Are Endless

Counterpoint Press

Terese Marie Mailhot | Heart Berries | Counterpoint | February 2018 | 11 minutes (3,098 words)

Terese Marie Mailhot’s powerful, lyrical memoir is about a member of the Salish tribe reckoning with her past and mapping her future. 

***

Indian Condition

My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle. He marked it as solicitation. The man took me shopping with his pity. I was silenced by charity — like so many Indians. I kept my hand out. My story became the hustle.

Women asked me what my endgame was. I hadn’t thought about it. I considered marrying one of the men and sitting with my winnings, but I was too smart to sit. I took their money and went to school. I was hungry and took more. When I gained the faculty to speak my story, I realized I had given men too much.

The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless. We sometimes outrun ourselves. I stopped answering men’s questions or their calls.

Women asked me for my story.

My grandmother told me about Jesus. We knelt to pray. She told me to close my eyes. It was the only thing she asked me to do properly. She had conviction, but she also taught me to be mindless. We started recipes and lost track. We forgot ingredients. Our cakes never rose. We started an applehead doll — the shrunken, carved head sat on a bookshelf years after she left.

When she died nobody noticed me. Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves.

My mother brought healers to our home, and I thought she was trying to exorcise me — a little ghost. Psychics came. Our house was still ruptured. I started to craft ideas. I wrapped myself in a Pendleton blanket and picked blueberries. I pretended I was ancient. A healer looked at me. He was tall and his jeans were dirty.

He knelt down. I thought I was in trouble, so I told him that I had been good. He said, “You don’t need to be nice.”

My mother said that was when I became trouble.

That’s when my nightmares came. A spinning wheel, a white porcelain tooth, a snarling mouth, and lightning haunted me. My mother told me they were visions.

“Turn your shirt backward to confuse the ghosts,” she said, and sent me to bed.

My mother insisted that I embrace my power. On my first day of school I bound myself a small book. The teacher complimented my vocabulary, and my mother told me school was a choice.

She fed me traditional food. I went to bed early every night, but I never slept well.

I fell ill with tuberculosis. Mother brought back the healers. I told them my grandmother was speaking to me.

Zohar, a white mystic, a tarot reader, told me she spoke to spirits, too. “Your grandmother says she misses you,” she said.

“We could never make a cake,” I said.

“She was just telling me that. What ingredient did you usually forget?” Zohar asked.

I knew this was a test, but a strange one, because she didn’t speak to my grandmother either. I remember my mother was watching us, holding her breath.

“Eggs,” I said.

My spiritual fraud distanced my grandmother’s spirit from me. It became harder to stomach myself, and harder to eat.

“Does that happen to you,” I said.

“What?” Zohar asked.

“Did you ever want to stop eating?”

“No,” she said.

Zohar asked my mother if she could sleep next to my bed, on the floor. She listened to me all night. Storytelling. What potential there was in being awful. My mindlessness became a gift. I didn’t feel compelled to tell any moral tales or ancient ones. I learned how story was always meant to be for Indian women: immediate and necessary and fearless, like all good lies.

My story was maltreated. I was a teenager when I got married. I wanted a safe home. Despair isn’t a conduit for love. We ruined each other, and then my mother died. I had to leave the reservation. I had to get my GED. I left my home because welfare made me choose between necessities. I used a check and some cash I saved for a ticket away — and knew I would arrive with a deficit. That’s when I started to illustrate my story and exactly when it became a means of survival. The ugly truth is that I lost my son Isadore in court. The Hague Convention. The ugly of that truth is that I gave birth to my second son as I was losing my first. My court date and my delivery aligned. In the hospital, they told me that my first son would go with his father.

“What about this boy,” I said, with Isaiah in my arms.

“They don’t seem interested yet,” my lawyer said.

I brought Isaiah home from the hospital, and then packed Isadore’s bag. My ex-husband Vito took him, along with police escorts. Before they left, I asked Vito if he wanted to hold his new baby. I don’t know why I offered, but he didn’t kiss our baby or tell him goodbye. He didn’t say he was sorry, or that it was unfortunate. Who wants one boy and not another?

It’s too ugly — to speak this story. It sounds like a beggar. How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time?

I learned how to make a honey reduction of the ugly sentences. Still, my voice cracks.

I packed my baby and left my reservation. I came from the mountains to an infinite and flat brown to bury my grief. I left because I was hungry.

In my first writing classes, my professor told me that the human condition was misery. I’m a river widened by misery, and the potency of my language is more than human. It’s an Indian condition to be proud of survival but reluctant to call it resilience. Resilience seems ascribed to a human conditioning in white people.

The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless.

The Indian condition is my grandmother. She was a nursery teacher. There are stories that she brought children to our kitchen, gave them laxatives, and then put newspaper on the ground. She squatted before them and made faces to illustrate how hard they should push. She dewormed children this way, and she learned that in residential school — where parasites and nuns and priests contaminated generations of our people. Indians froze trying to run away, and many starved. Nuns and priests ran out of places to put bones, so they built us into the walls of new boarding schools.

I can see Grandmother’s face in front of those children. Her hands felt like rose petals, and her eyes were soft and round like buttons. She liked carnations and canned milk. She had a big heart for us kids. She transcended resilience and actualized what Indians weren’t taught to know: We are unmovable. Time seems measured by grief and anticipatory grief, but I don’t think she even measured time.

Indian Sick

They moved my release, and they want me to stay the full seven days, which means I’ll miss Christmas Eve with my son. I wish I could exchange my time with Laurie. She’s being released today. She told me that if she had insurance they would have kept her in the hospital, and that they’re keeping me longer because I have good insurance. I can’t say she’s wrong because an insurance representative works with my psychiatrist concerning my release and my progress.

I’m upset to stay here longer than I expected. But I think I like these walls. It feels artificial but good. The psychiatrist likes to speak to me more than she does the other women. She calls me in, and sometimes our discussions become more general and conversational. She wants to know whether I’ve considered contacting you after this. I told her that I don’t believe you’re a hindrance, and that I am not prideful in love.

“He isn’t telling me to leave him alone,” I said.

“You’re an intelligent and attractive woman. I doubt that this is easy for either of you,” she said.

“I think I could leave him alone.”

She gives me the full report of my conditions. I have post-traumatic stress disorder, and an eating disorder, and I have bipolar II.

“When you get out I hope you have a good Christmas,” she said.

The girl with the tight braids, Jackie, keeps looking at me and saying that something isn’t right. I ask her if I have crazy eyes, and she says no. She talks to me all day and French braids my hair. She likes to drink, and she doesn’t know why I can’t just find another man. “I guess it is that easy,” I say. “If I wasn’t sentimental.” She only dates thugs, she says. She runs down the ways she meets men, and it sounds exhausting.

Jackie encourages me to eat, and the things I’ve eaten today were reasonable. There was rice pilaf and broccoli, and I still drank the prune juice the cafeteria workers put aside for me.

I weigh a hundred and twenty-six pounds now. It is progress that I know my weight is not the issue. Still, I’ve obsessively weighed myself, and it’s inconvenient for the nurses because they have to escort me to and from the gym before meals.

On Christmas, I wake up at four in the morning. The nurses let me sit by a window, and I look out at the highway and imagine that the people driving to work are good. I feel like I could master containment that way.

Josue came from behind me and tapped me with an envelope.

“You’re getting out today,” he said.

“Santa,” I said.

“Can I give you a hug?” he asked.

He hugged me until the tension in my back relaxed. His Christmas card simply said that I had talent, and that part of what makes me a good person is that I can be struck by emotion. He also included the picture of me he took.

It’s an Indian condition to be proud of survival but reluctant to call it resilience. Resilience seems ascribed to a human conditioning in white people.

I’ve been released, but I am not better. I can’t work, and I won’t leave the house. Outpatient treatment: Because I am not crazy enough to be sedated in a madhouse. They think I’m better. I am a cat in heat — something my mother would say. I am unraveling in the dark kitchen. I am scattering my wet eyes looking for signs or something significant. I am incorrigible when I’m like this. I wish I could do anything but stand alone in a dark kitchen without you.

Every Christmas after Grandmother died, my mother locked herself in her room to cry. We always stood on the other side of her door, looking at each other as if she might never stop crying. Some years she didn’t come out until the morning. Some years she came out with red eyes, and she could barely speak. She’d motion to get the presents from under the tree. We passed them around, and I can’t remember a single present I ever received.

I lock myself away as she does. Some things seem too perfectly awful.

I only have crude things to say to you. I won’t fuck you anymore so it can mean less. I might be gone, but you can still see me with a black light in your mattress. There is permanence in physical craft. Laura isn’t absorbed in any beds. She barely perspires. She requires twenty-four-hour protection from her own scent. She keeps her bra on. She wears practical clothes. Her fleeces and cargo pants and that smell of non-scented goat’s milk lotion for dry skin — that must do something for you.

My body left resonance that can’t be dismantled or erased. I don’t know if men think about what seduction is. It was reading the work you love, and buying clothes, and making polite conversation with your friends—convincing your mother that I could mother you like she does. It was laying warm towels across my legs before I shaved so that when you touched me, I was soft. It was withholding from you at the right times, and listening to you with my eyes and ears. I worked hard to assert intent on your bed and your body. I’ve soiled all beds for you with my wanting and preparation. I prepared myself for you as if I wasn’t working as a server, going to college, or raising Isaiah. The weight and the dust of me are in every thread of your mattress. Love is tactile learning, always, first and foremost.

When you loved me it was degrading. Using me for love degraded me worse. You should have just fucked me. It was degenerative. You inside me, outside, then I leave, then I come back, get fucked, you look down at me and say, “I love you. I love you.” I go home and degenerate alone. The distinctness of my bed and its corners are fucked by my fucking you. My agency is degraded. For comfort, I remember my hospital bed and the neutrality of the room I had. I was safe from myself and from you. I’m stupid, waiting for the phone to ring, thinking you might call. I’d drive to you and be no better for it.

I want my grandmother’s eyes on me. I thought unseeing would be a cruel game to play with myself. But now I am reading the dark and knowing how my feet drag on every inch — feeling monstrous and tired. I’d like to have familiarity back, but all I see now is my father’s body over my mother, whose body is boneless like a rabbit’s. I’ve descended into my earliest memory. It is too horrible to know, and no work of unseeing will remove him from me, or turn the lights on in the kitchen. How could someone like you ever be on the other side of the door—on the other side of this?

I Know I’ll Go

After my mother died, I went to find him. He lived in a town called Hope. He had a new family, and our van sat on his front lawn on bricks. When he answered the door, he told me he knew who I was. He had a thin, dirty white shirt on. He looked ill, and his face was gaunt. His hair was still black in some parts.

His wife, Winnie, was my older sister’s childhood friend. My father had met her when she was a girl, visiting my sister. After years with Ken, her front teeth were gone. She smiled at me and said my father had old videotapes of theater work I had done in the community. I had five new brothers, so young. They looked like the archetypes my own family had formed in the presence of my father. I found myself in the youngest child, who formed bonds too quickly and needed holding.

I know that the whole rez was watching, even my sister, who knocked on my door after he left to look me in my eyes so I could see that I betrayed her.

My father and I sat across from each other in lawn chairs in his basement. I resisted the urge to sit poised like him. Instead, I held bad posture and slunk in my chair.

“You have my nose,” he said.

I said I missed him, feeling awful that it was true.

“The best thing I could do was leave.”

“I know,” I said.

“Your mother was a good woman. I told her I was an asshole, and she took me in — like a wounded bear.”

“I know,” I said.

A month after this, he showed up at my house with a white documentary filmmaker. I answered the door but could not let him in the house. My brother Ovila was still scared of him, still angry and confused.

“They’re doing a documentary about me,” he said. “About my art.”

I was anxious, standing there with him at my door.

“I know,” he said. “I’ll go.”

I hugged him in my driveway. I know that the whole rez was watching, even my sister, who knocked on my door after he left to look me in my eyes so I could see that I betrayed her. Even she, who was as tall as him, and bigger, had to come to my door with backup. Even she was scared of him. I didn’t know any better back then.

The National Film Board of Canada debuted the documentary as a piece with immediacy and no external narrative. I’m a woman wielding narrative now, weaving the parts of my father’s life with my own. I consider his work a testimony to his being. I have one of his paintings in my living room. “Man Emerging” is the depiction of a man riding a whale. The work is traditional and simplistic. Salish work calls for simplicity, because an animal or man should not be convoluted. My father was not a monster, although it was in his monstrous nature to leave my brother and I alone in his van while he drank at The Kent. Our breaths became visible in the cold. Ken came back to bring us fried mushrooms. We took to the bar fare like puppies to slop.

His smell was not monstrous, nor the crooks of his body. The invasive thought that he died alone in a hotel room is too much. It is dangerous to think about him, as it was dangerous to have him as my father, as it is dangerous to mourn someone I fear becoming.

I don’t write this to put him to rest but to resurrect him as a man, when public record portrays him as a drunk, a monster, and a transient.

I wish I could have known him as a child in his newness. I want to see him with the sheen of perfection, with skin unscathed by his mistakes or by his father’s. It’s in my nature to love him. And I can’t love who he was, but I can see him as a child.

Before my mother died I asked her if he had ever hurt me.

“I put you in double diapers,” she said. “There’s no way he hurt you. Did he ever hurt you?”

“No,” I said.

If rock is permeable in water, I wonder what that makes me in all of this? There is a picture of my brother, Ovi, and me next to Dad’s van. My chin is turned up, and at the bottom of my irises there is brightness. My brother has his hand on his hip, and he looks protective standing over me. I know, without remembering clearly, that my father took this picture and that we loved each other. I don’t think I can forgive myself for my compassion.

***

From Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot. Our thanks to Mailhot and Counterpoint for sharing it with the Longreads community. Published by Counterpoint. Copyright © 2017 by Terese Marie Mailhot. All rights reserved.

A Teen and a Toy Gun

(Illustration by Nicole Rifkin)

Leah Sottile | Longreads | February 2018 | 33 minutes (8,200 words)

I.

The night before Quanice Hayes was shot in the head by a police officer, the skinny 17-year-old was snapping selfies with his girlfriend in a seedy Portland, Oregon, motel room.

Bella Aguilar held her phone close when she clicked off the photos: In one, the 18-year-old girl pushes her tongue out through a smile, her boyfriend leaning over her right shoulder, lips pressed to her cheek, his dreads held back with one hand.

In another, Aguilar cradles her cheek against a black-and-sand-colored gun. It’s fake — the kind of air-powered toy that kids use to pop each other with plastic pellets in indoor arenas. Hayes peeks into the frame behind her.

If you know that the gun is fake, you see a snapshot of two kids playing tough; if you don’t, those photos looks like the beginning of a story about to go terribly wrong.

A few hours later, it did.

It was a cold night in February — a Wednesday. Aguilar and Hayes  snapped photos and danced when friends came by the motel room where the couple had been crashing. They drank cough syrup and booze. There were pills and pot and a bag of coke.

They fired the toy gun at the motel’s dirty bathroom mirror, laughing when they couldn’t get the glass to break.

When the long night caught up with Aguilar and she lay down to pass out on the room’s queen-size bed, Hayes yanked on her arm, nagging her to stay awake. Two friends crashed on a pullout couch; two more were on the floor. But Hayes didn’t want to sleep. He walked outside.

Hours passed. The sun came up. Aguilar jolted awake and felt the bed next to her, but her boyfriend wasn’t there. His phone was — it sat on the table next to the bed. She felt frantic. Panicked. Confused. “I don’t know why, but it was that moment. I just felt really, really bad,” she said last summer, sitting outside a Portland Starbucks where she took drags from a Black and Mild.

She couldn’t remember why Hayes had left. She couldn’t remember so much of the night.

She frantically tapped out a text to her boyfriend’s mother, Venus: Do you know where Quanice is? Read more…

How a Medical Catastrophe Can Bankrupt a Life

It started with a Lean Cuisine. After a night out catching up with a friend, I just made one of the last NJ Transit trains leaving Penn Station that April night, traveling the 20 or so minutes to the suburbs of New Jersey where my wife and I had moved two weeks prior in anticipation of welcoming our first child to what truly is NYC’s sixth borough (daycare and two-bedrooms aren’t cheap in the original five boroughs).

Dinner consumed and sleep completed, I awoke with one of the worst bouts of food poisoning I’ve ever encountered, a wasting that lasted through midway into the next week. Eventually, the illness subsided, but I wasn’t concerned when I woke the following Saturday with slight soreness in my right ankle and the inability to fully extend my left knee. Seemed odd, sure, but perhaps that was just a lingering side effect of the tainted Swedish meatballs. And there was a crib to be built along with final trips to Target and Buy Buy Baby.

On Sunday, though, I could barely put any pressure on my right leg, hugging walls as I walked in an effort to support myself. A nighttime sprained ankle, I thought, but I still went to the ER on Monday, while accompanying my wife for her final OBGYN appointment. The medical establishment’s consensus: must be a sprain. I spent four more days in sheer agony, unable to put any pressure on my right leg and unable to sleep because the pain was too intense. After our son was born, I was the one wheeled out of the hospital while my wife carried our nine-pound baby. By this point, my other ankle had started to tingle (both eventually swelled to the size of a grapefruit, and my left knee was significantly inflamed, looking as though a softball had lodged itself behind the kneecap).

Two days after our first child was born.

The first two weeks of my son’s life were a blur. Of course, there was no way I could help during feedings in the middle of the night — it took me 10 minutes just to navigate the short hallway between the bed and bathroom. And unless I was sitting on the couch RICEing my legs (for what I thought must be the two worst sprains in the history of orthopedics), I couldn’t hold my son. I was an invalid, completely useless to all around me at a time when those same people needed me the most. My brother had gotten married during this time period, and I recently looked at the photos from the ceremony, which was held at City Hall: shuffling along in crutches, my ankles are encased not only in compression wraps but also air casts.

The realization that my “sprains” had — HAD — to be something more significant arrived during my son’s third week on earth. My general practitioner was located in Manhattan, so I found a local doctor who, for the first time since this health scare began, had more than an inkling of what was plaguing my body: I had joined the roughly 20,000 Americans who suffer annually from reactive arthritis. This exceedingly rare form of arthritis, which shares symptoms with rheumatoid arthritis, was attracted to the genetic antigen I carried, passed down maternally, and had proceeded to attack all of my white blood cells. When I finally was able to see a rheumatologist, I was told that my CBC — complete blood count — was one of the lowest he’d ever seen.

As I read Molly Osberg’s harrowing essay for Splinter detailing her health catastrophe, the result of contracting a rare form of strep that began to wreak havoc on her internal organs, I found myself mentally transported to my own uncertainties this past summer. Her concerns about medical expenses, proxies, if her full-time job still exists, and whether or not any of the poking or prodding will work — all of those emotions became all the more real again. We even both made it into medical journals!

I encountered them all when I was admitted to a Brooklyn hospital, though I only remember a fraction of the people who tried to puzzle out what was sending my body into septic shock. According to my medical records I saw six specialists in 40 hours. There was the anesthesiologist who assuaged my terror when I was put under for a bronchoscopy (I was afraid I’d wake up with a camera down my larynx), the infectious disease doctors who asked me about my sex life, how often I got high, my last period, whether I’d been anywhere near livestock.

I also shared her feeling of invincibility. Before I contracted reactive arthritis, I rarely needed anything more than a hot shower and a few doses of Dayquil to right whatever was ailing me. I didn’t get sick. As Osberg writes,

As someone with a pack-a-day habit, I got a little sick every year, and my response was to sleep (or work, or drink) through it until the issue somehow resolved. Before 2017 I don’t think I’d been to a doctor in about five years—though as was later reiterated to me by one chagrined specialist after another, my abysmal life choices up to that point didn’t end up making much of a difference.

Like Osberg, I was fortunate to have insurance, but if I had been a freelancer, my bills would have been astronomical. One shot of Humira, the immunosuppressive drug I inject twice a month, costs upwards of $500 without coverage, and that doesn’t include the barrage of pills I take daily. As I was reading Osberg’s piece, I stumbled across the story of Donald Savastano, a 51-year-old from central New York who recently won the lottery—a $1 million prize. A construction contractor, he first decided to visit a doctor, something he hadn’t done in several years because of his lack of insurance, before lining up a vacation. Following a diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer, and just twenty-three days after winning the award, Savastano died. Osberg conveys the sheer terror that accompanies such a health scare; the worry isn’t so much about how to survive — it’s about how to recover.

Never mind recovering physically or financially in any of these scenarios: I can’t imagine surviving emotionally, fielding calls from collections agents, facing eviction, waiting for the pain meds to hit so I can keep at a futile job search with an IV still dangling from my side. I am 29 years old, with no pre-existing conditions before this moment, and I am unemployed and exhausted and in pain all the time.

It took one month before I could walk a distance greater than a hallway. It took another month before I could walk back and forth to the elevator bank in our apartment building. And it took three months before I regained my walking gait and balance, and didn’t feel any debilitating pain for the first 90 minutes of my morning. It’s now been eight months since the diagnosis, and my health has somewhat returned to normal — although my right Achilles still aches every day, and I’ve been told to limit my exercise to stretching and spinning (so as to not potentially tear the tendon). But I can walk, and just the normalcy of that activity is something I never thought that I would have taken for granted. It’s those actions that become the most significant.

Around mid-August they took the PICC line out. My white blood cell count went back to normal; I was cleared to drink by far the best beer of my life; the scabs left over from the drainage tube punctures in my torso fell off. I was pleased the surgical incision had missed my favorite tattoo, and less pleased when streaks of my hair turned gray and started coming out in clumps, or when my nails fell off—a months-delayed reminder of that time my body was preparing to die. I went back to work towards the end of the summer.

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Hurricane Harvey Made Strange Bedfellows in Texas

(AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Outside of Houston, Cambodian immigrants built a small community in the unincorporated town of Rosharon, growing water spinach, called trakuon, for the Cambodian community. Then Hurricane Harvey hit and flooded the town’s homes and its farms.

For the Texas Observer, Michael Hardy reports on a surprising, uneasy alliance in the rebuilding efforts: Volunteer assistance from white far-right groups wearing Confederate flag jackets and camouflage. These anti-government neo-Confederates arrived to help Rosharon before the local government or the Red Cross arrived, and they took over the rebuilding effort so firmly that they initially refused to let in FEMA. Who were these people, and did they really just want to help?

The groups are affiliated with the so-called Patriot movement, which emerged in the early ’90s from the ashes of Ruby Ridge and Waco’s Branch Davidian compound, and whose ranks expanded dramatically during the Obama administration. The Freedom Keepers are an Oregon-based group whose members appeared at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer brandishing assault rifles and wearing body armor. (Marion, the Freedom Keepers and the New York Light Foot Militia are among the defendants currently being sued by Charlottesville and Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection to prevent them from returning. They’re also being sued by two women injured in the car attack that killed Heather Heyer.) The Confederate Riders, a Missouri-based group, travel the country protesting the removal of Confederate monuments. The two groups share information and coordinate protests mainly through their Facebook pages, which each have 10,000-plus followers.

Both groups harbor extreme anti-government views and believe the Constitution is under siege by a range of nefarious forces. On the Freedom Keepers’ weekly Facebook Live broadcast, “The American Radio Show,” Marion rails against Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Muslims and undocumented immigrants. He portrays the Patriot movement as America’s last line of defense. “This country will fall if we don’t get into the middle of it and change it from within,” he said on the show in December. “We have to become a disease. Some bacteria and some infections are beneficial. And we need to become an infection inside the body.”

Having infected Little Cambodia, the far-right groups were not eager to give it up. They didn’t see an impoverished community that had been shamefully underserved for decades and abandoned by the government in its time of greatest need; they saw a proudly self-reliant people who had built a libertarian paradise. “It’s been a really awakening experience to see what it means for people to live on their own, live their way, make their choices,” Marion said in a Facebook Live video from Rosharon. “It really is the American dream.”

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You’re On Death Row, You’ve Asked to Die, But the State Won’t Kill You

(AP Photo/Pat Sullivan, File)

At the Marshall Project, Maurice Chammah reports on convicted murderer Scott Dozier who sits on death row in Nevada. Called a “volunteer” for abandoning his appeals, in October, 2016, Dozier hand-wrote a letter to a judge asking to be put to death. His actions have sparked controversy in the justice system, creating “a dilemma for states that want the harshness of death sentences without the messiness of carrying them out.” Meanwhile, as the wheels of justice spin in circles, Scott Dozier still waits to die.

On the day he had been scheduled to die, Scott Dozier arrived at the visiting room inside Ely State Prison looking edgy and exhausted. He’d been thwarted. For more than a year, he had worked to ensure his own execution, waiving his legal appeals and asking a Las Vegas judge to set a date. But with just days to go, the judge had issued a stay amid questions about the drugs Nevada planned to inject into him.

Of the more than 1,400 men and women who have been executed in the U.S. in the last four decades, roughly one in 10 have abandoned their appeals. In the legal community, they’re known as “volunteers.” But few volunteers have set off as much legal and political upheaval as Dozier. Like many death penalty states, Nevada hasn’t actually executed anyone in years. Dozier’s request spurred a frenzy of preparations involving state and federal lawyers, judges, political leaders and prison officials, who had to rev up an execution apparatus that had been dormant for a decade.

That a man deemed unfit to live in society — indeed, to live at all — could wield such influence is a testament to our country’s conflicted views on the death penalty. We have a president who has extolled capital punishment in tweets and full-page newspaper ads, while exonerations have fueled unease about the system’s flaws. Death sentences have plummeted, and as appeals drag on for years, many condemned prisoners die of old age before they can be executed. It can seem as though we like the idea of the ultimate punishment just so long as we don’t have to kill anyone. And then comes Scott Dozier, calling our bluff.

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The Many Acts of Keith Gordon

Keith Gordon circa 2008. (Photo: Rachel Griffin.)

David Obuchowski | The Awl and Longreads | January 2018 | 34 minutes (8,481 words)

Our latest feature is a new story by David Obuchowski and produced in partnership with The Awl.

“When I first met him the only thing I really remember is that he looked familiar to me,” cinematographer Tom Richmond told me about Keith Gordon, the director and former actor. “We would walk down the street…and people would recognize him all the time,” said Bob Weide, an executive producer, writer, director and one of Gordon’s oldest friends. “He has one of those faces where it would be, ‘Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you, but don’t I know you?’ …Keith would always give them the benefit of the doubt and say, ‘Um, I don’t know. Do we know each other?’ They’d say, “Did you go to Brandeis?’ And Keith would say, ‘No, no, no, I didn’t.’ …They’d say, ‘Wait a minute, did you grow up in Sacramento?’”

“You know what it’s like, when you see him from that time,” recalled Gordon’s wife, Rachel Griffin, a film producer and former actress. “He looked like somebody you knew.” And it was often true, sort of: many people know what he looked like in the mid 1980s, because Gordon had been a very visible, successful actor in teen comedies and thrillers.

“They would rarely say, ‘Oh my god, you’re the guy in Christine, or you’re the guy in Dressed to Kill or whatever,” Weide said. “Sometimes I would actually just jump in and say, ‘He’s an actor, you’ve probably just seen him in one of his films.’ …It was just really painful for him. People thought they knew him, but he was always way too embarrassed or humble to say ‘I’m an actor, maybe you’ve seen one of my movies’.”

Maybe you have seen one of his movies, and not just one he’s starred in. Gordon has directed five feature films, as well as some of the most prestigious of prestige television, including but not even remotely limited to “Fargo,” “The Leftovers,” and “Homeland.” Read more…