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True Crime and the Trash Balance

Netflix, Noam Galai / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 9 minutes (2,514 words)

In his satirical 1827 essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” Thomas de Quincey called himself a connoisseur of murder before assuring us he hadn’t actually committed one himself. In her new book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, late author Michelle McNamara also ensures that we know her interest is personal, not prurient (it originated with an unsolved crime in her childhood neighborhood). Most of us have excuses for our interest in true crime, as though enjoying it offered real insight into our own predilections. The quasi-religious impulse to consider this a perversion of society’s innate morality has led to a flurry of theories about the source of our fascination, with four main hypotheses recurring: true crime can be a cathartic conduit for our primal urges, a source of schadenfreude, a controlled environment to experience the thrill of fear, and way to arm us (women particularly) with the knowledge to keep ourselves safe. A psychologist, speaking to NPR in 2009, provided the perfect précis: “our fascination with crime is equaled by our fear of crime. It’s two sides of the same story.”

True crime is less embarrassing, like so many things, when it’s scrubbed clean. On my shelf, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s News of a Kidnapping and Dave Cullen’s Columbine stick out for how unobtrusive they are amidst the loudly stylized spines of Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, among others. With their unadorned print (no drips) and minimalist art (no claret), these tasteful soft covers pass for literature. They are comparable to “prestige” podcasts like Serial and S-Town and series like Making a Murderer and The Keepers, Netflix shows in which the classic hallmarks of true crime programs — overly explicit, overly emotive — are massaged into character-driven narratives for the graduate set. In the midst of this influx of classy crime content, watching throwbacks like Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly, in which survivors are tasked with reliving their abuse and tear-stained grief is the closeup du jour, starts to feel like an ignominious act.

In 2016, at the beginning of the true crime renaissance, The New Yorker asked Popular Crime author Bill James whether, regardless of the highbrow livery, it was fundamentally “distasteful” (New Yorker for “trashy”) to transform tragedy into entertainment. “Well, certainly there is something distasteful about it,” James said, but, “When there is a car wreck, we ask what happened to cause the car wreck.” That is to say: The crime itself is distasteful (or trashy), therefore it’s necessarily distasteful (or trashy) when we address it. So, either we can refuse to interrogate crime, full stop, or we can ensure that the grief we cause is for a greater good. It is a sort of trash balance — less exploitation, more justice — with only one bad ending instead of two.

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True crime was lurid straight out of the birth canal. Born in the mid-sixteenth century, it was the offspring of

Elizabeth Brownrigg, seen here in action, was hanged in 1767 after one of her abused servants, Mary Clifford, died from her injuries. (Hulton Archive / Getty)

two relatively new developments: criminal justice and the printing press. Historic crime reports’ graphic nature is typically associated with a depravity believed to appeal to the unrefined, uneducated, and unmoneyed, but that was not the case with these early publications. Though they were often branded with explicit woodcuts that would have been understandable to even the illiterate, they also boasted rhyming text and only went to those who could afford them, predominantly the upper echelons. In “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism,” published in The American Historical Review, Joy Wiltenburg writes that “emotive language, direct dialogue, building of suspense through circumstantial detail, and graphic description of bloody violence were common in the genre.”

Favored cases were in-family and usually involved multiple deaths. The focus was on the victims, while the moral of the story was that sin begat punishment. “The combination of truth with appeals to the heart underlined the religious focus of these works,” writes Wiltenburg. “Virtually all crime accounts published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries connected their stories with an edifying Christian message.” This message associated brutality with the devil and positioned public order as the path to virtue. “[Sensationalism] has had religious, political, and cultural impact,” Wilternburg sums up, “promoting the ready acceptance of punitive government actions, the advancement of religious agendas, the internalization of mainstream emotional expectations, the habit of vicarious emotional experience, and the focus on distinctive individual identity.”

With a reputation for being insensitive to and financially exploiting both criminals and their victims, true crime is often accused of sensationalism, but that term wasn’t coined until the 19th century, a time that favored rational thought over the emotive prose of journalists. “While sexual scandals and other shocking events have become staples of modern sensationalism,” writes Wiltenburg, “its chief focus has always been crime, especially the most bloody and horrifying of murders.” The 1800s also gave us our first detectives, who inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the latter not only centering crime fiction as a genre, but granting it a modicum of respectability. The gutter was still within spitting distance, though. Penny dreadfuls arrived — demon barber Sweeney Todd in tow — as early versions of popular culture in the form cheap mass-produced serials for young, increasingly literate working-class men, featuring salacious gore; like the true crime paperbacks of today, they supplied affordable, digestible scandal to entertain tired people with no time. The last gasp of the penny dreadful coincided with the precursor to O.J. Simpson’s so-called trial of the century: The Lizzie Borden case. The 32-year-old Massachusetts woman’s trial for the axe murder of her parents spawned a media phenomenon and firmly established the mass appeal of true crime. The next century saw the trash-fired genre shooting off in various directions, from tabloids like The National Enquirer to paperbacks like Lacey Fosburgh’s Closing Time to shows like America’s Most Wanted.

Then there was In Cold Blood.

“Until one morning in mid-November 1959, few Americans — in fact, few Kansans — had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.” Before In Cold Blood, this is not how real crime stories read. What Arthur Conan Doyle did for crime fiction, Truman Capote did for true crime. His 1965 experiment was released as a four-part serial in The New Yorker and became the reference point for every other high-brow true crime work in every other medium. “The motivating factor in my choice of material — that is, choosing to write a true account of an actual murder case — was altogether literary,” Capote told The New York Times. “It seemed to me that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘nonfiction novel,’ as I thought of it.” He believed only those with the “fictional technical equipment” — novelists, not journalists — like him could do it. The factual inaccuracies that have since emerged suggest that Capote’s belief in his own skills — he neither taped nor took notes during interviews — were as sensational as the genre he was hoping to reinvent. His book is still, however, considered the pinnacle of crime lit.

It was Capote’s book that the Times referred to when designating Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line a “nonfiction feature film,” per its distributors, in 1988. This exercise in lyrical fact was groundbreaking in its own right: an elegant piece of true crime as an advocacy tool. The subject of a false conviction, Randall Dale Adams had his case thrown out with the help of evidence Morris uncovered. It’s a straight shot from The Thin Blue Line to Serial, which blew up true crime podcasting in 2014. But while an appeal followed this program’s highly subjective long-form reexamination of Adnan Syed’s conviction for killing Baltimore teen Hae Min Lee in 1999, it was Capote — “a leap in narrative innovation on the scale of In Cold Blood” — who was once again cited, this time in The New Yorker. Serial’s executive producer has said they were trying to avoid an exploitative “Nancy Grace type of a titillating thing,” but the program was serialized with its own version of a cliffhanger each week, and provided its own hero, the avatar in our ears, reporter Sarah Koenig. Yet Koenig bristled at the suggestion by the Times’ Magazine that this was entertainment. “I don’t think that’s fair,” she said. “I’m still reporting.”

As though the two were mutually exclusive. As though true crime could only be trash if it were

MP Christopher Atkinson in a pillory (with his hat) in London in 1783 after being convicted of perjury. (Hulton Archive / Getty)

entertainment, and could only be entertainment if it weren’t journalism. Of course, this negates the nature of media. To entertain — to entertain a thought, for instance — is merely to take it into consideration, to allow it to hold one’s attention. Journalism is made to entertain; if it weren’t, reports would not be called “stories” and there would be no need for inverted triangles or kickers or pull quotes or anything else to catch our attention. Because to deliver the news there has to be someone to deliver it to, and that necessitates their entertainment. Otherwise the news is nothing but fact; there is no story.

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“Many of the differences between trash culture and high culture show only that storytelling adapts to changing economic, social and political conditions,” Richard Keller Simon writes in Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition. It’s something to consider when watching Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly. The series was produced by a network for women branded by its schlocky aesthetic and penchant for frothy romance. An exec at Lifetime has admitted it has “erred on the tabloid side” and Surviving R. Kelly, which has a number of black women recounting the decades of abuse they say the singer has inflicted on them, exhibits the familiar tropes: the inflated score, the voyeuristic set pieces, the abused women on display. In an interview with Complex earlier this month, showrunner dream hampton revealed that she received a number of notes from Lifetime and that she was pushed to find more victims. “I didn’t like the salaciousness of stacking up all of these people who survived him,” she said, “but I got the corroboration part.” The result is a series that orchestrates rescue attempts and highlights the explicitness of Kelly’s brutality, while only gesturing vaguely at the cottage industry he has fostered over the past three decades in order to victimize black women and at our collective failure to see these women as victims at all.

When I watched it, I couldn’t shake a feeling of ickiness, particularly when one of the victims was asked to describe her abuse and dissolved into tears. We didn’t need to see that scene from the pee tape so many times, we didn’t need a tour by one victim of the room where she was allegedly tortured, we didn’t need to watch as one mother reunited with her daughter. (I’m not even including the questionable stylistic choices). The whole endeavor read trashy, old-school Lifetime. “I saw someone kind of try to drag me about why isn’t this on something more premium like Netflix. But this to me is the perfect place for it,” hampton told Complex. “I know that women watch Lifetime, and that black women make up the majority of those viewers.” Reading this made me doubly uncomfortable. It suggested that to get black women’s attention you had to feed them trash. And, okay, maybe black women weren’t trying to mute R. Kelly over The Chicago Sun-Times’ original reporting, but none of us were! The world has changed since 2002, and all of us — including black women — have become more sophisticated about predation.

“The average American today has greater familiarity with the legal process, thanks in part to procedural dramas and the round-the-clock media coverage of splashy crimes that began with the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s,” writes Lenika Cruz in The Atlantic. “And people are more aware than ever of flaws in the criminal-justice system, including police brutality and wrongful convictions.” This means that true crime has had to hustle to keep up with its audience, reframing from the crime itself to seeking its closure. NPR noticed the new true crime formula in 2015, with programs like Serial and HBO’s The Jinx (and later Netflix’s Making a Murderer and APM’s In the Dark) concentrating on ongoing cases that could be affected by new reporting. Andrew Jarecki, director of The Jinx, called this subject matter “live ball,” and so here we are in the live-ball era of true crime in which Robert Durst literally burps up a confession on camera before he is charged with murder. “Can the genre sustain this? Can they really sustain true crime as an advocacy medium?” Michael Arntfield, founder of the Cold Case Society, asked The Pacific Standard. “The success and the legitimacy of the medium hinges on being able to stay within this framework of advocacy ahead of strictly sensationalism or profitability.”

But even advocacy has its limits. Netflix’s runaway success Making a Murder eschewed Serial-like narration and Jinx-like reenactments, but contorted almost 700 hours of footage into supporting a theory that the filmmakers had already formulated, that convicted murderer Steven Avery was innocent despite everything pointing to the contrary. Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos told the Times they secured interviews where others didn’t because of their “tempered approach.” Like those books on my shelf, this refined series passed for high culture.

The most balanced true crime isn’t actually true crime. Last year, American Public Media launched the second season of their hit podcast In the Dark, hosted by Madeleine Baran. Over 11 episodes, it examined the six trials of Curtis Flowers for the same murders. Even though the precipitating incident was the crime, the attention was on everything else; the reporting team embedded itself in Flowers’ Mississippi hometown for a year, ultimately producing not only a strong — dare I say entertaining? — sense of place, but a rigorous analysis of the systemic failures of the investigation. “For us as reporters, we’re here to look at the people in power and look at the systems in place that raise questions about whether or not the criminal justice system is fair, whether it is just using facts,” Baran told NPR. “So what that results in is not our place to say. But certainly, in this case, what we’ve shown is that the evidence against Curtis Flowers is weak. So this becomes a question now for the courts.” While other podcasts rely on their relatability, this one doesn’t have to — the story is enough. In the aftermath of Baran’s team’s exhaustive reporting, the Supreme Court has agreed to reconsider Flowers’ conviction. It is a rare case in which the balance seems to be moot. It’s all justice.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Alternative Reality: ‘Inferno in Paradise’

Homes leveled by the Camp Fire line Valley Ridge Drive in Paradise, Calif., on Monday, Dec. 3, 2018. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

President Donald Trump has obliterated any notion of off-time for round-the-clock journalists, but it was still a relief to see that the alt-weeklies I read for this installment in my regular reading list were starting off the new year strong. The Chico News & Review, whose work I have previously highlighted here, can be forgiven, however, for publishing an old piece, from 1993, in which a reporter basically imagines the Camp Fire before it occurred.

Other stories were equally ambitious, if newer. Tucson Weekly published a lovely and unexpected ode to Interstate 10, which cuts across the southern portion of the United States, while the Chicago Reader drew attention to the work of an underappreciated free-jazz group with a longtime residency in the Roscoe Village neighborhood.

The East Bay Express — whose entire editorial staff was, sadly, laid off last week — and the Rochester City Newspaper both published probing pieces on police accountability. The Arkansas Times highlighted the work of a now-forgotten muralist named Joe Jones. The Salt Lake City Weekly gave readers a comprehensive history of a secluded neighborhood called Allen Park, or Hobbitville, and the Colorado Springs Independent set its scope on a public land issue in Colorado.

1. “Inferno in Paradise” (Jonathan Franks, August 12, 1993, Chico News & Review)

Twenty-six years before the deadliest wildfire in California history decimated the small town of Paradise, Jonathan Franks of the Chico News & Review filed a disturbingly prescient dispatch from the Paradise Ridge in which he imagined a conflagration of disastrous proportions. The piece, which came out in the summer of 1993, was recently re-published in print and online.

After interviewing a number of local fire officials, Franks came to a jarring conclusion:

These guys have spent half their lives learning everything there is to learn about wildfires—from the conditions that breed them to the military-like strategies used to fight them. Listening carefully to their cautious, technical language, one can’t help but realize they are predicting a disaster almost too horrible to imagine.

Ridge topography, with its steep canyons and narrow plateaus, makes access extremely difficult for fire crews and ground equipment, they say. It also creates natural bottlenecks where fleeing residents could be trapped by walls of flame.

During wildfires, this sort of terrain can create a “chimney effect” where flames go roaring down the canyons and swirling up the ridges at terrible speeds.

Franks’ prescient prediction? “It’s going to happen, and it’s going to be bad.”

2. “Interstate 10: A Personal History” (Tom Zoellner, January 10, 2019, Tucson Weekly)

For Tucson Weekly, Tom Zoellner, the author of Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World, wrote a soulful paean to the barren portion of Interstate 10 between Phoenix and Tucson, by his account an underappreciated stretch of asphalt that he refers to as “this most essential of Arizona’s rural arteries.”

Nobody writes a poem to this section of expressway, completed in the heyday of the optimism of the Kennedy-Johnson New Frontier between 1961-1971. I have lived in both Phoenix and Tucson off and on and have probably traversed this road more than 800 times, looking at the same sunbaked landmarks and thinking the same reliable thoughts: about old friends, old happenings, old mysteries of my life here. How many others mark their I-10 journeys with a mental libretto of musings on the roadside spectacle?

3. “Extraordinary Popular Delusions play free jazz two centuries deep” (Howard Mandel, January 10, 2019, Chicago Reader)

Like Zoellner’s I-10, the Chicago-based free-jazz group Extraordinary Popular Delusions, named after a 19th-century study by a Scottish journalist, is underappreciated. But the band, which has held a weekly residency at the Beat Kitchen in Roscoe Village for nearly the past decade, is given its due by Howard Mandel in this in-depth profile for the Chicago Reader.

Their shows are little heralded and often sparsely attended, but 13 years of continuous collaboration have turned this quartet into a beacon of Chicago’s indigenous avant-garde, with an unpredictable, provocative sound that arises from the commingling of its members’ diverse influences and experiences.

As Longreads contributor Aaron Gilbreath recently lamented in a thoughtful essay, music journalism has become something of an endangered genre — so it’s encouraging that the Reader is committed to robust coverage of the Chicago music scene.

4. “Oakland’s Lost Year of Police Accountability” (Darwin BondGraham, January 9, 2019, East Bay Express)

In 2016, Oakland residents voted to establish an independent commission to oversee the city’s scandal-ridden police department. The commission began operating last year, but so far it has proven ineffectual in holding the department to account, as Darwin BondGraham reveals in his thorough investigation for the East Bay Express. While some observers are hopeful that the commission will pull itself together in the new year, BondGraham writes that there is evidence to suggest that it will only further unravel in 2019.

Already, two of the best-qualified commissioners have resigned, one of them in frustration. In November, the commission suddenly and secretively fired its chief investigator after publicly clashing with him. Commissioners have also quarreled during public meetings with their legal counsel, and their first attorney quit after commissioners argued with her at meetings. The commissioners have also bickered amongst themselves, sometimes over email and text message, sometimes in public. And lacking experience with state open meetings laws, at least one of the commissioners committed a Brown Act violation in the form of unnoticed emails sent to a quorum of other commissioners.

Over the past year, the commission hasn’t made progress on the core work required of it under the city charter. They’ve yet to hold a single hearing in a police disciplinary case or participate in an OPD Executive Force Review Board to examine a shooting or similar critical incident. They’re ill-prepared to draft their evaluation of the police chief. They’ve yet to hold a community meeting.

5. “City Hall prepares to reform Rochester’s police oversight” (Mary Anna Towler and Tim Louis Macaluso, January 8, 2019, Rochester City Newspaper)

In Rochester, city council members are finalizing legislation that would create a police accountability board with the power to discipline police officers. The city’s mayor, Lovely Warren, has also submitted her own legislation, and a team of activists is advocating for the establishment of an independent civilian review board with broad investigatory and disciplinary powers.

The city council will be holding three forums to solicit comments from the public early this year, as Mary Anna Towler and Tim Louis Macaluso point out in their report for Rochester’s City Newspaper, one installment in an ongoing series on police-community relations.

The unveiling of Council’s legislation and the forums will be the start of what will likely be several months of emotional public discussion of a major community issue: how to handle citizen complaints about police officers’ conduct in a way that is fair to both the public and the officers. And how to do that in a way that builds trust rather than eroding it.

Perhaps Rochester can look to Oakland for lessons on what not to do.

6. “A mural to move Little Rock forward” (Leslie Newell Peacock, December 27, 2018, Arkansas Times)

A 1935 mural by the American painter Joe Jones — a triptych of sorts, which depicts, from left to right, sharecroppers, coal miners, and a lynching — probably shouldn’t still exist. But it does, thanks to a series of auspicious events that led to its restoration and installation at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s new downtown facility, as Leslie Newell Peacock details in an uplifting story for the Arkansas Times.

Jones, she writes, “could not have foreseen that the mural, painted on masonite, would survive intact for only five years before being dismantled — along with the college — and become Depression-era building material for a closet in a home in Mena.”

That it would be rediscovered 40 years after that and sold to a university. That 73 years after Jones put the last brush stroke on the painting, the mural, restored, would once again hang in an academic space, not in the dining room of a small left-wing college in a remote mountain town, but in a smashing new university venue on the bustling President Clinton Avenue in downtown Little Rock — where its story of Arkansas’s past sins will be seen by many, inspire conversation and, perhaps, show a way forward to Arkansas’s redemption.

7. “Hunters, hikers and anglers can’t access millions of acres of public land” (Faith Miller, January 9, 2019, Colorado Springs Independent)

A property battle ensues in Colorado Springs, where public land users are butting heads with private landowners who own property that connects with government land, reminiscent of an issue in California in which private properties block access to public beaches.

A recent study by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP) and onX sheds new light on how widespread the problem has become. Researchers mapped 13 Western states with technology supplied by onX, a mapping service for hunters, hikers and anglers that identifies which lands are legal to access for recreational purposes. They discovered 9.52 million acres of taxpayer-funded public land—an area larger than New Hampshire and Connecticut combined—that the public cannot legally enter because they’re surrounded by private property.

One interesting wrinkle in the Colorado Springs Independent piece by Faith Miller is that mapping technology has led hikers and other recreationalists to notice what land they are missing out on. Mapping, Miller writes, “leads to an increased sense of injustice, as outdoor enthusiasts realize how much public land remains inaccessible to them, particularly in rural areas.”

8. “Hobbitville’s Last Days” (David Hampshire, January 9, 2019, Salt Lake City Weekly)

David Hampshire, a longtime resident of Salt Lake City’s Allen Park, a secluded community also known as Hobbitville — though there are no hobbits to speak of — was recently evicted from his residence as the fate of the the neighborhood is decided in probate court. While it’s unclear what will happen to Hampshire and his neighbors, in a delightfully reported essay for Salt Lake City Weekly, he educates readers on the odd history of Allen Park, which is named after an eccentric doctor named George A. Allen, a bird lover who acquired the property in 1931.

“From time to time, Dr. Allen would also keep zoo animals on the property,” Hampshire writes—including “an elephant, a chimpanzee and several reindeer. The family also collected an unusual assortment of ‘pets’ including a coyote, a sandhill crane named Sandy and a raccoon that sometimes followed the girls to school.

Times have changed.

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Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Columbia Journalism Review.

Fruitland

Photo by David Black, via Light in the Attic Records

Steven KurutzTrue Story | December 2016 | 51 minutes (10,117 words)

 

Some years back, an unusual and astonishing album began circulating among record collectors and fans of lo-fi music. Will Louviere was one of the first to hear it. A Bay Area vinyl dealer, Louviere is an authority on private-press LPs from the 1960s and 1970s—records that were self-produced and released by amateur musicians and destined, in most cases, for the bins of thrift stores and flea markets. In a year, Louviere and his fellow collectors across the country might buy one thousand of these obscure albums between them. Of those, maybe ten would be artistically interesting. Maybe one would astonish.

This record had been sent to Louviere by a collector, but still, his expectations weren’t high. The group was a duo, Donnie and Joe Emerson. The cover featured a studio portrait of them: teenagers with feathered brown hair, faces dappled with acne, sincere eyes meeting the camera. They were posed against the swirly blue backdrop you’d see in a school photo, with the album’s title—Dreamin’ Wild—written above them in red bubble script. Both boys were dressed flamboyantly in matching spread-collared white jumpsuits, like the outfit Evel Knievel wore vaulting over Snake River Canyon, though the jumpsuits had name patches on the chest, like a mechanic’s work shirt, an odd counter to the attempt at showbiz slickness. Donnie, posed in the front, held a Les Paul and looked a little stoned.

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Sam Lipsyte on ‘Mental Archery,’ the Quest for Certainty, and Where All the Money Went

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, North Carolina, 1930. (George Rinhart / Corbis via Getty Images)

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | January 2019 | 15 minutes (4,079 words)

There’s an old Calvin & Hobbes comic strip where Calvin says, “Remember when ‘access’ was a thing? Now it’s something you do. It got verbed… Verbing weirds language.” With Hark, Sam Lipsyte’s sixth book and first novel in nine years, he has once again weirded language into an inimitable comic brio, capturing the roiling mess of late-capitalist/early-apocalypse America, and making us laugh while he pulls it off.

Here’s Lipsyte on Dieter Delgado, a titan of industry with a deep misreading of Naomi Klein: “Dieter hails from the throw-it-all-at-the-wall school. One war, one earthquake, one tsunami, one pandemic, one dating app and, assuming you are well positioned, you can cover your losses and get mega-rich all over again, ad mega-infinitum. Deets read a book about this that inspired him to seek out more catastrophe. The next hemoclysm may make him the world’s first trillionaire.” Read more…

Of Blackness and ‘Beauty’

Young Woman with Peonies by Frédéric Bazille, 1870 / The New Press

Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | January 2019 | 12 minutes (2,731 words)

Back in 2013, Miley Cyrus was in the hip-hop phase of her career, during which she consorted with rappers and attempted to twerk for more notoriety. The hit pieces calling out her cultural appropriation were ubiquitous. Everyone had an opinion on her new gimmick, including sociologist Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, who wrote an essay for Slate on the dangers of Miley’s now infamous MTV performance and inserted herself into the narrative by calling herself unattractive. The comments, some of which she included in her collection Thick: And Other Essays were “brutal.” White women were upset with her for believing that she was unattractive when in their eyes, she was the opposite, and black women were upset with her for what they assumed was self-hatred on display. Both groups, as far as McMillan Cottom was concerned, were wrong. Both were aghast that she would call the devil by its name in broad daylight. What she explains in one of the most compelling sections of Thick is that beauty is about capital and power. Predominant standards of beauty center the white female body, and as a dark-skinned black woman, she exists outside that kind of beauty. That’s not to say that she did not find herself beautiful by black standards, in the circles in which she travels — at the historically black institution of which she is an alumna, or Rudean’s, a legendary joint for black North Carolinians. However, beauty as we know it in Western civilization is exclusionary. It is not meant for everyone.

As a culture we have a tremendously difficult time with black women who are overwhelmingly honest about what the world has done to them. One of the first examples McMillan Cottom refers to is the SNL Weekend Update bit where Leslie Jones speaks of her desirability on a plantation vis-à-vis in the modern age:

“The way we view black beauty has changed,” Jones said. “See, I’m single right now, but back in the slave days, I would have never been single. I’m six feet tall and I’m strong, Colin. Strong! I mean, look at me, I’m a mandingo … I’m just saying that back in the slave days, my love life would have been way better. Massah would have hooked me up with the best brotha on the plantation. … I would be the No. 1 slave draft pick. Now, I can’t even get a brotha to take me out for a cheap dinner. I mean, damn. Can a b—– get a beef bowl?”

As McMillan Cottom points out, “It is full of personal pain that results from a structural reality that a woman like Jones — almost six feet tall, dark-complexioned, short-haired, black American — embodies.” Like McMillan Cottom, Jones was vilified by the public. People missed the point entirely. No one in white American culture enjoys it when a black woman lays bare her injuries. This entire section of the book gave me new language for a terrible, old feeling. While I am not dark-skinned, I have felt the pressure, like many other black girls and women, to adhere to a white female standard of beauty. Sure, I can look at my mother’s brown skin, or watch the black film canon for solace, but white female beauty is all-encompassing and terroristic. No one can walk can peruse the magazine aisle at a grocery store or flip through the options on a TV subscription service without being reminded that white women are at the center. Macmillan Cottom writes, “Beauty has an aesthetic, but it is not the same as aesthetics, not when it can be embodied, controlled by powerful interests, and when it can be commodified.” What better way to set the standard than through visual art?
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The Haväng Dolmen

,Jose More/VWPics via AP Images

Chris Power | A story from the collection Mothers | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | January 2019 | 25 minutes (5,051 words)

 

Several months ago, while travelling in Sweden, I experienced something I have given up trying to explain. In fact, since it happened I have tried to push it as far from my mind as possible. But yesterday afternoon, searching for an errant set of keys, I found, nestled deep in a coat pocket, an acorn that I plucked from its cap in the forest beneath the fortress of Stenshuvud. Then it was smooth and green, but now it is tawny, and ribbed like a little barrel. You wouldn’t know it was the same acorn I picked on a whim, but holding it I felt again the compulsion that propelled me, at the end of that strange day, into the burial chamber at Haväng.

It was the end of September. I was attending a three-day conference in Lund. It finished early on a Friday afternoon, and with the weekend ahead of me, and nothing to hurry back to London for, I elected to stay. My colleagues recommended some sites – Iron and Stone Age, neither era of particular interest to  me, but I thought why not. The only one I had heard of was Ale’s Stones, Sweden’s Stonehenge, built on a clifftop above the Baltic in the shape of a great ship.

I had presented a paper at the conference, ‘Digging Deeper: On the Aetiology of Archaeological Belief.’ It was good work, and I was excited about the presentation, but the few people who turned up lacked the ability to grasp even the simplest of the points I was making. It was a blessing when it was all over and I could leave Lund. I needed some time away from people.

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‘In a Marriage, You Grow Around Each Other’: An Interview with Tessa Hadley

Corbis Historical, HarperCollins

Sarah Boon | Longreads | January 2019 | 16 minutes (4,272 words)

 

Tessa Hadley is a late-bloomer in UK fiction, despite having wanted to be a writer since she was a child. “It chose me rather than me choosing it,” she says about writing. Hadley published her first novel at the age of 46. Since then, she’s been an unstoppable force, publishing five additional novels, two short story collections, and contributing regularly to The New Yorker. Her new novel, Late in the Day, delves into the institution of marriage, particularly long marriages. She explores how couples grow around each other, like trees, and how the sudden death of a partner can send life into a tailspin. Read more…

Land Not Theirs

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Madison Davis | The Common | December 2018 | 31 minutes (6,125 words)

 

We are driving through downtown Columbus, away from the Greyhound station. I spent fifteen hours on a bus traveling from New York City to visit for Christmas, a holiday, my mother reminds me, that is not even about Jesus anymore. This is a thought she has reiterated over the years, yet it never prevented her from partaking in the holiday during my lifetime. The absence of a decorative tree and gifts reflected a lack of money, not a rejection of the commodification of religion.

As kids, we were encouraged to list our wishes for Santa, and even now in a post-Christian adulthood, I fantasize about the relief a Christmas miracle would provide. Because I have just a few weeks to come up with eight thousand dollars in order to register for spring classes. The most obvious resolution would be that I take the semester off, move back to Ohio, work hard, and live frugally so I can save enough money to return in the fall. But I know that the likelihood of returning to school after a long break is small, because most who leave do not return.

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“I wanted to be someone else”: A Reading List about Con Artists, Grifters, and Imposters

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The documentary film The Imposter (2012) opens with footage from a handheld video camera. This is Carey’s room, a child’s voice narrates. This is the birthday girl’s mattress, and she even got a TV in her room, ain’t she lucky. The camera, tilted, focuses for just a moment on a girl who smiles widely, tossing back her teased shoulder-length hair. Ain’t she beautiful. The camera whirls away to a blur of lamp and wall before settling close up on the face of a blond boy who looks amused. The narrator introduces him, saying, and here, is our brother, Nick.

The screen fades to black, and text appears: In 1994, 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay disappeared from San Antonio, Texas.

Three years and four months after the disappearance, in Linares, Spain, a tourist couple called the local police station to say they’d found a kid, who they presumed to be about 14 or 15 years old, no I.D. or documents on him.

In documentary-style interviews years after the events, Nicholas’ remaining family — his mother, Beverly Dollarhide, his sister, Carey Gibson, and his brother-in-law, Bryan Gibson — remember their reactions to hearing that Nicholas had been found alive, in Spain.

“Of course it was mysterious,” Bryan says. “It was exciting, worrisome, it was all mixed emotions.”

“Ecstatic, bewildered, you know, Spain?” Carey wonders. “How did he get there? You have a hundred thousand questions that you want answered immediately.”

“I felt wonderful,” Beverly says.

After the title credit, the documentary rewinds to the moment when the police were first called. In a re-enacted scene, rain pours over a dimly lit street. Someone huddles with their knees pulled to their chest in a phone booth, face obscured by a hood. Police remark that “he seems very young,” “he’s very scared,” and “we tried to get him some food, but he doesn’t want it.”

The scene cuts to a man being interviewed alone, his brown eyes expressive. “From as long as I remember, I wanted to be someone else. Someone who was acceptable. The most important thing and what I learned very fast was to be convincing,” he says with a French accent. “When the police arrived, I have immediately to put into their minds that they have a kid in front of them, not an adult so it was very important for me to behave like one. I wanted to provoke on them a sense of guilt, of being adults that close to a kid who is that scared. When you see a kid that have nervous reflexes, you can’t touch him, you can’t approach him, then you understand that something is wrong,” the man says. He stares directly at the camera for emphasis. “I was not the one telling them I’ve been sexually abused — I had them asking me that. By my attitude, by my way of doing things they were the ones who were thinking about it, and that gave me power.”

The man being interviewed for the documentary is Frédéric Pierre Bourdin, a man who viewers later learn was a serial impostor, someone who frequently stole the identities of missing children. What’s interesting about the documentary, is that Bourdin narrates the reasoning behind his decisions while the events of his impersonation are re-enacted onscreen. As the events of the documentary unfurl, questions are raised. Who would steal the identity of a missing child? What family who lost a slender blond 13-year-old from the U.S. would accept a 23-year old man with a dark five-o’-clock shadow and an unshakeable French accent masquerading as their own 16-year-old family member just three years later? What is so appealing about adopting an identity — and a family — so far from one’s own? Who is harmed by an act of impersonation?

These questions are not unique to The Imposter. The following essays about con artists, grifters, and imposters are compelling in their attempts to answer why and how people deceive others.

1. Who is Anna March? (Melissa Chadburn and Carolyn Kellogg, July 26, 2018, LA Times)

Anna March — or a woman who goes by Anna March — who portrayed herself as a “spunky, apologetic, sex-positive feminist ready to raise hell” began to raise the suspicion of the literary community with her outlandish events and mysterious generosity. Melissa Chadburn and Carolyn Kellogg, in an immense feat of reporting, uncover Anna March’s past identities, reveal her significant debts, and detail how she harmed others through her deception.

2. The Secret Life of a Con Man (Dustin Grinnell, August 12, 2014, Narratively)

For a price of $75 and under the condition of anonymity, Dustin Grinnell interviews “GM,” who he describes “a con man with a conscience.” GM divulges how he came to be a grifter, his methods, and his anxieties.

“GM once spent three weeks casing a mother of three, learning everything he could about her life, routine and preferences. When he finally found a way in, he robbed her of over $1,000. It was a good score. And because she was a piece of shit, GM concluded, the crime was justifiable.”

3. The Rise and Fall of Toronto’s Classiest Con Man (Michael Lista, May 29, 2017, The Walrus)

Michael Lista, in this fascinating piece, exposes the breadth of James Regan’s swindling, which reaches many years back in time and covers a wide array of establishments.

“Regan is a man at war—with landlords, car dealers, courts, hotels, clubs, and civic institutions. He is at war with the NHL and the Catholic Church. He is at war with law, at war with facts, at war with human nature. He’s even at war with gravity—as his cons come crashing down, he refuses to do anything but pretend to rise.”

4. The Lives and Lies of a Professional Imposter (James C. McKinley Jr. and Rick Rojas, February 4, 2016, The New York Times)

Jeremy Wilson — if that’s even his real name — began his life as a con man in high school, when he showed up to class in a wheelchair in order to solicit money from peers. Since that time, he has assumed an alarming number of identities, leading to comparisons between his case and that of Frank Abagnale Jr., “the notorious con artist whose life was chronicled in the 2002 film ‘Catch Me if You Can.’”

“Investigators say Mr. Wilson is a professional impostor and a skilled forger. Though fraud has become an increasingly invisible offense in a digital world, Mr. Wilson has stuck with a decidedly old-fashioned approach, stealing checks and creating new personas, occasionally with accents and falsified papers, the police said.”

5. How Anna Delvey Tricked New York (Jessica Pressler, May 28, 2018, The Cut)

After Anna Delvey checks into 11 Howard hotel in Soho, New York for a month-long stay, she quickly makes an impression with her money, handing out $100 bills to nearly anyone who crossed her path. She befriends — or at least spends significant time with — Neffatari Davis, who goes by “Neff,” the concierge at the hotel, who became privy to Delvey’s wildly extravagant lifestyle, one that included $4,500 spent on a personal trainer, dinners with Macaulay Culkin, and party after party. In this widely-shared and captivating essay, Jessica Pressler unveils Anna Delvey’s elaborate money-related schemes and what happens when Delvey’s lies — and lifestyle — begin to collapse.

“WANNABE SOCIALITE BUSTED FOR SKIPPING OUT ON PRICEY HOTEL BILLS, blared the headline in the Post, which referenced an incident in which Anna attempted to leave the restaurant at Le Parker without paying. “Why are you making a big deal about this?” she’d protested to police. “Give me five minutes and I can get a friend to pay.””

Related Reading: “As an added bonus, she paid for everything”: My Bright-Lights Misadventure with a Magician of Manhattan (Rachel DeLoache Williams, April 13, 2018, Vanity Fair)

6. The Great High School Impostor (Daniel Riley, May 1, 2018, GQ)

At the age of nineteen, chasing his idea of the American dream, Artur Samarin paid an American couple two thousand dollars, changed his birthdate so he would appear five years younger, and just a few months later, started his first day as a freshman at Harrisburg High, in Pennsylvania. The ruse continued until just three months of Artur’s senior year, when police entered his classroom and escorted him away. In this riveting account, Daniel Riley explores the complicated relationship between Artur and the American couple who initially supported him, Artur’s intentions, and the legal issues that arose as a result of Artur’s deception.

“There was a suggestion that a sort of transference had occurred, a blurring of the lines between the real person and the fake, a sense that Artur Samarin actually was Asher Potts.”

7. A Con Man Reinvents Himself…As a Reality TV Magician (Jess Zimmerman, October 13, 2015, Atlas Obscura)

After spending five years in federal prison as a result of illegal schemes carried out as a con man, Aiden Sinclair asserts that he has changed his ways. Sinclair claims that, in place of deception, his only tricks now are acts of magic, ones he performs on stage at America’s Got Talent. But rather than accept Sinclair’s new life at face value, Jess Zimmerman, in this compelling piece, asks, “Sinclair has made his “grifter magician” background part of his performance persona, but is it just a performance? Can con men really change?”

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness.

Cowards and Accomplices

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Judith Hertog | Longreads | Month 2018 | 13 minutes (3,153 words)

The first thing I did when I learned the alphabet at age 6 was to spend a weekend writing out a stack of flyers that said, in large, uneven block letters: “Ret de weerelt!” a clumsily misspelled Dutch phrase that translates into English as something like “Sav the worlt!” I finally had a chance to express the urgency I felt when I discovered that, outside the idyllic life my parents had created for me in our small apartment in Amsterdam, the world was a dangerous and terrifying place where children starved to death in famines, innocents were killed in wars, factories poured chemicals into the water, and nuclear warheads stood ready to destroy everything in a flash. The world was in trouble and something needed to be done urgently.

So I copied the words “Sav the worlt” 50 times, folded my manifestos into paper airplanes and aimed them from our fourth-floor bathroom window down into the neighbors’ backyards at the center of our block. I assumed the neighbors were not aware of the state of the world, or else they would be busy trying to save it. I imagined my fliers would alert them to the seriousness of the situation and spark a worldwide activist movement under my leadership, even though I had not signed my name to the rallying cry or included a return address. Only when I saw the paper airplanes gliding into the neighbors’ yards, getting caught in tree branches or plunging into mud puddles, did I realize the futility of my act. I didn’t get any responses, and I never told anyone about it.

I recently thought back to this because I don’t know how I’d react now if I found one of my own paper planes in my yard.

I’m sitting here at the gym, waiting for my son’s tumbling class to end, and I just read a Facebook post by a friend in Gaza whose updates have become increasingly desperate amidst yet another Israeli bombing campaign on his city.

“Today I suffered a lot. I almost forgot what it means to be human. I was a THING,” he wrote. I have never met Mosab in person. A friend introduced me to him online because he is a poet who is trying to establish a library in Gaza, to take people’s minds off violence and desperation. I have sent him books and an occasional message to cheer on his project. But today I can’t even respond to his despair. Words seem inadequate. They can’t stop bombs from killing people. I should be back in Israel and doing something. But instead, I live in Vermont, where life is comfortable and my kids don’t have to face war. I’m aware the world is falling to pieces all around me. But for now, I just want to shield my children and keep them away from pain and evil. And I’m afraid I’ve become just as complacent as my old neighbors.

Nobody told me that this is what it means to be a parent: to have your soul placed inside another’s body. One mishap, and it can all be gone. My son is practicing his backflips. My heart stops each time I see his slender 14-year old body balanced in the air. He wants to become a circus clown, and I want him to live a life of razzle dazzle and applause. So I take him to tumbling class, even though I can almost see the world end just before he makes that last-second spin to land on his feet.
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