Search Results for: The Daily Beast

Power to the People

The words Pray and Obey on a chimney at the former home of Warren Jeffs in Hildale, Wednesday April 5, 2017. (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP)

For years, Hildale, Utah, was controlled by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and more specifically, by Warren Jeffs; under his watch, every element of civic and social life was dictated by the church, and powerful church families controlled the lion’s share of wealth, creating a steep economic divide. Jeffs is now in prison and Hildale is trying to redefine itself — last year it elected a secular mayor, a woman — but as Tarpley Hitt explains in her story for The Daily Beast, “redefining” is about a lot more than transferring government power back to the actual government.

For the new government, bridging that divide is a top priority. In a sense, they have a head start (most of their 1 percent is now incarcerated). But inequality in Hildale is not like inequality anywhere else in the United States, where disparity usually stems from an unbalanced capitalist system. For decades, Short Creek operated as a quasi-communist state. The original settlers wanted to establish a radical kind of cooperative society that adhered to the New Testament value of holding “all things in common.” They pooled all their resources in a collective trust, and for decades—the vast majority of Short Creek’s existence—everything in the town was shared: from homes, to food, to health care.

After Jeffs and his father, the communal trust crumpled. When the federal government seized all the town’s assets in 2005, it was valued at a staggering $110 million, much of which had been leached from apostates and less powerful families. Not long later, the feds ordered the town to subdivide, and in the years since, Hildale has been gradually—and painfully, for many townspeople—divvying up the land, establishing private property for the first time in history.

The new council has been tasked with overseeing the town’s transition to an entirely new economic system. But they’re trying to do that while nursing the wounds Warren left behind—in a deeply divided constituency, where the act of drawing lines in the sand (sometimes literally: the council had to draft zoning laws) runs the risk of driving people even further apart.

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Edward Gorey: A Highly Conjectural Man

Edward Gorey posing with a set piece he designed for the Broadway production of "Dracula," 1977. Jack Mitchell / Getty

Bridey Heing | Longreads | January 2019 | 8 minutes (2,151 words)

 

Edward Gorey’s small illustrated books, many of which are collected in his Amphigorey anthologies, are seemingly quite simple and often morbid. Children are befallen by terrible fates. Parents disappear and reappear too late. Danger lurks nearby, as dusk makes its way across the moors. All of this sinister mischief is told in black and white pen-and-ink drawings, with occasional color highlights thrown in (which somehow only serve to make the image more dreary and doom-laden). The characters differ little in appearance, and the prose — when there is any — is often a few rhyming lines near the bottom of the page. Looking closer, one can see the intricacy of the cross-hatching, the careful etching-like strokes that, alongside Gorey’s fragile humor, underpin the darkness.

Edward Gorey, like his art, was at once mercurial and precise. His interests, hobbies, dislikes, and habits are well documented, from his late-in-life love for TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer,to his devotion to George Balanchine’s work with the New York City Ballet, to his undying love for the cats with which he lived. His physical appearance — over six feet tall, with close-cropped hair and a long beard, draped in a huge fur coat, with rings on multiple fingers and scuffed up white sneakers on his feet — is as much part of the lore of Gorey’s work as the nonsensical creatures who populate his illustrations. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2018: Science and Technology

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

Deborah Blum
Director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT and author of The Poison Squad.

They Know Seas Are Rising, but They’re Not Abandoning Their Beloved Cape Cod (Meera Subramanian, InsideClimate News)

For more than a year, Meera Subramanian has been traversing the country for InsideClimate News, creating a series of vivid and wonderfully balanced portraits of small communities wrestling with the havoc of climate change (whether they admit it or not). This one from October, focused on an increasingly flood-washed area called Blish Point, stands out for me. It’s a tapestry-like picture woven of relentlessly rising seas, threatened homes and businesses, the politics of climate change science, and pure, stubborn human reluctance to give up on a beloved way of coastal living.

Subramanian never raises her voice or treats any viewpoint with less than respect — although she occasionally deftly slides in the scientific arguments that counter climate denialism. She has an elegant way of making both people and place live on the page. The result is a compelling and compassionate narrative in which this one small, beautiful, vanishing strip of Massachusetts, perched on the edge of an encroaching ocean, becomes a microcosm for the much bigger story of change — and its reckoning — now being realized around the world.


Aleszu Bajak
Freelance science journalist, former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, and lecturer at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

God Is in the Machine (Carl Miller, The Times Literary Supplement)

Whether it’s your social media feed, prison sentence, or driverless car, our world is increasingly governed by algorithms. The terrifying thing is that we’re quickly approaching a horizon after which no one will be able to explain the code used or decisions made to build these things. This sobering excerpt from Carl Miller’s book, The Death of the Gods: The new global power grab, makes startlingly clear our ignorance of the machines we’ve hacked together. “Truth is dead,” as one programmer tells him. “There is only output.”


Ashley Carman
Tech reporter at The Verge and co-host of Why’d You Push That Button?

How Forlini’s Survives the Instagram Horde (Alex Vadukul, The New York Times)

Instagram has fundamentally changed where and why we visit the places we do. Alex Vadukul’s piece on New York Italian restaurant Forlini’s taps into this idea. He perfectly captures how one establishment’s demographics can change over time. One group of patrons goes for the food and convenience — Forlini’s is next to the courthouse — while another prefers it as a backdrop for Instagram photos. Vadukul includes incredible quotes, too, especially the one in which a Forlini’s owner marvels at how influencers manage to drink alcohol and stay thin. I wonder that, too.


Meehan Crist
Writer-in-residence in biological sciences at Columbia University, previously editor at Nautilus and The Believer.

Survival of the Richest (Douglas Rushcoff, Medium)

There’s a lot of bad science writing about transhumanism − rich people wanting to live forever by uploading their minds to computers, etc. But Rushcoff explores the very human drive for a post-human future by elegantly tracing links between the failures of global capitalism, the growing divide between rich and poor, the ongoing climate catastrophe, and what transhumanism is really all about: escape. It’s the best thinking I’ve read on the subject, and the piece stands out as a clear articulation of how some imagine − or fail to imagine − our digital future. I’m still haunted by the moment when a super-wealthy CEO who has paid to pick Rushcoff’s brain about “the future of technology” asks, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”


Surya Mattu
Investigative data journalist at The Markup, research scientist at the Center for Civic Media at MIT.

See No Evil (Miriam Posner, Logic)

Posner’s piece on using software to make supply chains more transparent contains some powerful observations. It elegantly highlights how some characteristic features of modernity have harmed rather than helped this endeavor. Large scale, distributed networks like the internet and global supply chains might be more resilient and efficient than their predecessors, but they are almost impossible to regulate. Similarly, modular information design and the ‘black box architecture’ of software helps scale businesses, but they can also obfuscate the decision making process of those in charge, leading to a lack of accountability.

As we grapple with the challenge of how to hold algorithmic decision-making accountable for the harm it can cause, this piece reminds us that the harm is often a feature of these systems, not a bug.


Neel V. Patel
Science and tech journalist, contributor to The Daily Beast, The Verge, Slate, Wired, Popular Science, Foreign Policy, and New York Magazine.

How Duterte Used Facebook To Fuel the Philippine Drug War (Davey Alba, BuzzFeed News)

Facebook had a bad year, culminating most damningly in a New York Times’ report in November that showed the company’s inability to safeguard the platform from nefarious parties trying to influence the 2016 election, as well as its unwillingness to take responsibility and make fixes. But the insidiousness of Facebook in the U.S. dwarfs what’s happening overseas. Davey Alba, writing for BuzzFeed News, illustrates how Rodrigo Duterte and his autocratic regime in the Philippines leveraged the platform to disseminate false news and propaganda, exacerbating the carnage inflicted by his war on drugs and dismantling many of the country’s democratic structures. It’s a terrifying example of what happens when our biggest fears of the unregulated sprawl of Facebook are realized.


Catherine Cusick
Audience editor, Longreads

Can Dirt Save the Earth? (Moises Velasquez-Manoff, The New York Times Magazine)

Readers may be more familiar with Nathaniel Rich’s historic New York Times Magazine story from this summer, Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, than with this epic piece on dirt that came out back in April, but Moises Velasquez-Manoff literally redefined on-the-ground reporting — on soil itself. This story helped me dust off all of my murky grade school memories of nutrient cycles while teaching me anew why these basic, natural processes are so relevant to every sustainable challenge we face. Maybe I’m just a fan of solarpunk, but I love reading about known, practical mitigation methods that are worth doing anyway, even past all of our many missed opportunities and catastrophic points of no return. Carbon farming may not be enough, but what it can do might still be miraculous. Stories that neither sugarcoat real options nor deny that any exist at least give us some time back — if not enough for a full second chance, then enough to do something more meaningful, ultimately, than wait.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.

Longreads Best of 2018: Crime Reporting

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

Pamela Colloff
ProPublica senior reporter and New York Times Magazine writer-at-large.

The Disappeared (Hannah Dreier, ProPublica with Newsday)

When eleven high school students went missing in a single county on Long Island in just two years, law enforcement shrugged. Most of the teenagers who disappeared were recent transplants from Central America, and many of them were last seen heading into the woods, lured by the promise of weed. The Suffolk County police department responded with stomach-churning indifference, telling frantic parents that their children had simply run away.

Hannah Dreier chronicles an upside-down world in which one boy’s mother – an envelope factory employee who speaks no English – is left to piece together what happened to her son. Based on more than 100 interviews and voluminous public records, Hannah Dreier’s storytelling is as vivid as it is effortless. She builds upon an accumulation of damning details — like the fact that one Spanish-speaking mother, whose son was murdered, had to pay a taxi driver to interpret for her at the police station. (“He kept the clock running and charged her $70,” Dreier writes.) “The Disappeared,” which was turned into an episode of This American Life, is a devastating work of both relentless reporting and empathy.


Michael A. Gonzales
Contributor to Catapult, The Paris Review, and Longreads.

A Preacher, a Scam, and a Massacre in Brooklyn (Sarah Weinman, CrimeReads)

Fans of vintage New York crime stories will love Sarah Weinman’s brilliant Brooklyn-based tale, a sordid story that only gets worse the more you read. Weinman takes the reader into the mind and home of a con man named DeVernon LeGrand, a pretend preacher who kept a stable of women who dressed as nuns and begged on the streets. Of course, in true pimp fashion, LeGrand took most of their money. After moving his flock to 222 Brooklyn Avenue in 1966, things get worse for the crooked organization as it eventually becomes involved in kidnapping and murder. Although in the early 2000s I lived four blocks away from the scene of LeGrand’s various crimes for thirteen years, I had never heard of him or his house of pain and death until reading Weinman’s wonderfully written piece.


Jeff Maysh
Contributor to The Atlantic, Smithsonian MagazineLos Angeles Magazine, and The Daily Beast. Author of The Spy with No Name.

Jerry and Marge Go Large (Jason Fagone, Huffpost Highline)

I write about unusual heists from middle-America, so I was game for this Michigan lotto scam story from FOIA-bandit Jason Fagone. In crime writing it’s the characters who make for a good yarn, and I was all-in on this Mom and Pop who used brain-power to beat the system, and the odds.

The Man Who Captures Criminals for the DEA by Playing Them (Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, The New Yorker)

Why actor Spyros Enotiades told his story to Yudhijit Bhattacharjee I don’t know (there must surely be a bounty on his head), but the storytelling was extraordinary. Undercover capers don’t get better than this.


Jayati Vora
Managing editor at The Investigative Fund.

The Trauma of Everyday Gun Violence in New Orleans (Jimmie Briggs and Andre Lambertson, VICE)

This photojournalistic investigation into how gun violence affects black communities explores how living with that violence can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) just like experience with war can. But unlike with returning veterans, gun violence-plagued communities don’t get the funding or mental health resources to help them cope.


Alissa Quart
Executive Editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Author of five books including SqueezedBranded, and the poetry book, Monetized. She writes The Guardian’s Outclassed column.

Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out (Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Times Magazine)

This is fantastic longform that embodies what I think social justice reportage should be today. It combines an under-heard, first-person voice with a gripping true story about one of the most crucial issues in America today, incarceration. Betts, who is a lawyer and a poet, also gives his tale an unexpected literary feel, with a comprehensive gloss on the sociology behind juvenile crime, prisons, jailhouse lawyers, and the limited social possibilities for ex-felons.

Omnipresence (Ann Neumann, Virginia Quarterly Review)

This multimedia criminal justice story is about how too-bright, all-night lighting in housing projects, and faulty design overall, contributes to a troubling level of surveillance in poorer communities under the guise of fighting crime. It makes something as basic as sleeping uncomfortable for thousands upon thousands of law-abiding citizens. I really like this story’s taxonomic, poetic style, as well as how architectural photographer Elizabeth Felicella gives the story a more formalist visual valence than your typical housing piece.


Tori Telfer
Author of Lady Killers and host of the Criminal Broads podcast.

Blood Cries Out (Sean Patrick Cooper, The Atavist)

In the book Popular Crime by Bill James, the author writes that the phrase “something terrible has happened” is “the best title ever for a crime book…those words turn the ‘crime story’ inside out by exposing the human beings standing on what otherwise appears to be a vast and grisly stage.”

We’re hardly ten percent of the way into the story in “Blood Cries Out” before someone uses those words to tell her husband that the unthinkable has occurred: there’s been a murder right across the road. And the vast and grisly stage? Small-town Chillicothe, Missouri, where two men have amicably farmed the same land for years, until one of them wakes up in the middle of the night with a bullet in his face and his wife dead beside him. The wounded man initially suspects his daughter’s abusive boyfriend, but then changes his story and accuses his farming partner, and then his farming partner’s son, which results in the sort of twisty and utterly corrupt legal process worthy of Making a Murderer part three.

The piece is full of letters and depositions and secret meetings and a lot of paperwork, but on occasion, it vibrates with poignantly biblical/Americana-esque undertones, from the title (plucked from Genesis) to lines like, “[the victim’s] murder was an attack on a Christian matriarch, a cherished local archetype. Similarly, [the innocent man’s] conviction represented the denial of an eldest son’s right to live and work on his father’s land.”


Sarah Weinman
Author of The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World.

The End of Evil (Sarah Marshall, The Believer)

I published a book and wrote a lot of my own pieces in 2018 — including one for this site — so, oddly, I didn’t keep as good track of longform reporting produced by others (podcasts, however, that’s a different story, but this is Longreads, not Longlistens). But I keep returning to Sarah Marshall’s “The End of Evil” because it makes fresh a story long consigned to easy tropes. Marshall, who also co-hosts the stellar podcast You’re Wrong About… and is one of my favorite true crime writers, gives voice to the myriad of women and girls Bundy murdered, shows him as something far less than an evil mastermind, and demonstrates why, with particular clarity, “the longer you spend inside this story, the less sense you can find.”


Catherine Cusick
Audience editor, Longreads

Checkpoint Nation (Melissa del Bosque, Texas Observer)

When Americans think of “the border” as a narrow and specific line, we neglect the legal reality that the term actually applies to a border zone, a much larger halo covering up to 100 air miles from any U.S. land or coastal boundary. The zone touches parts of 38 states, covering 10 in their entirety — and within that wide rim, anyone can be subjected to a warrantless search at any time. In this signature longform reality check, Melissa del Bosque digs into the history of how Congress vested U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with alarming, far-reaching powers to search and detain even long-term residents who’ve never committed a crime at surprise, “suspicionless” checkpoints.

Japan’s Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women (Shiho Fukada, Bloomberg Businessweek)

In a series of sweet, anonymous snapshots, Shiho Fukada talks to and photographs a growing cohort of Japanese seniors: “otherwise law-abiding elderly women” who have found a solution to the loneliness of aging in the reliable comforts of prison. Almost 1 in 5 women in Japanese prisons is a senior, Fukada reports, and 90 percent of them are arrested for shoplifting. From the simple things they steal (rice, cold medicine, a frying pan) to the circumstances they’re trying to escape (bedridden or violent spouses, invisibility, loss, and financial strain), the details of this story make structural inadequacies to meet the unmet social and healthcare needs of an aging population all too clear.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.

The Queer Generation Gap

Express Syndication / Invision / Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,422 words)

Should I be married to a woman? If today were yesterday, if all this sexual fluidity were in the discourse when I was coming of age in the ‘90s, would I have been with a woman instead of a man? It is a question that “The Bisexual” creator Desiree Akhavan also poses in the second episode of her Hulu series, co-produced with Channel 4 because no U.S. network wanted it. Akhavan directed, co-wrote, and stars in the show in which her character, Leila, splits with her girlfriend of 10 years, Sadie (Maxine Peake), and starts having sex with men for the first time. So, Leila asks, if the opposite had happened to her — as it did to me — and a guy had swept her off her feet instead of a woman, would things have turned out differently? “Maybe I would’ve gone the path of least resistance,” Leila says. Maybe I did.

This is a conundrum that marks a previous generation — one that had to “fight for it,” as Akhavan’s heroine puts it, and is all the more self-conscious for being juxtaposed with the next one, the one populated by the fluid youth of social media idolizing the likes of pansexual Janelle Monáe, polyamorous Ezra Miller, undecided Lucas Hedges. Call it a queer generation gap (what’s one more label?). “I don’t know what it’s like to grow up with the Internet,” 32-year-old Akhavan explains to a younger self-described “queer woman” in her show. “I just get the sense that it’s changing your relationship to gender and to sexuality in a really good way, but in a way I can’t relate to.”

***

This Playboy bunny is chest out, lips open, legs wide. This Playboy bunny is every other Playboy bunny except for the flat hairy chest because this Playboy bunny is Ezra Miller. The star of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald calls himself “queer” but it’s hard to take him seriously. What was it Susan Sontag said: it’s not camp if it’s trying to be camp? And for the past few months, while promoting the Potterverse prequel no one asked for, this 26-year-old fashionisto has been trying his damndest, styling himself as a sort of latter day Ziggy Stardust — the monastic Moncler puffer cape, the glittering Givenchy feathers — minus the depth. Six months ago, Miller looked like every other guy on the red carpet and now, per his own request, models bunny ears, fishnets, and heels as a gender-fluid rabbit for a randy Playboy interview. Okay, I guess, but it reads disingenuous to someone who grew up surrounded by closets to see them plundered so flagrantly for publicity. Described as “attracted to men and women,” Miller is nevertheless quoted mostly on the subject of guys, the ones he jerked off and fell in love with. He claims his lack of romantic success has lead him to be a polycule: a “polyamorous molecule” involving multiple “queer beings who understand me as a queer being.”

The article hit two weeks after i-D published a feature in which heartthrob Harry Styles interviewed heartthrob Timothée Chalamet with — despite their supposed reframing of masculinity — the upshot, as always, being female genuflection. “I want to say you can be whatever you want to be,” Chalamet explains, styled as a sensitive greaser for the cover. “There isn’t a specific notion, or jean size, or muscle shirt, or affectation, or eyebrow raise, or dissolution, or drug use that you have to take part in to be masculine.” Styles, on brand, pushes it further. “I think there’s so much masculinity in being vulnerable and allowing yourself to be feminine,” the 24-year-old musician says, “and I’m very comfortable with that.” (Of course you are comfortable, white guy…did I say that out loud?) As part of the boy band One Direction, Styles was marketed as a female fantasy and became a kind of latter-day Mick Jagger, the playboy who gets all the girls. His subsequent refusal to label himself, the rumors about his close relationship with band mate Louis Tomlinson, and the elevation of his song “Medicine” to “bisexual anthem”– “The boys and the girls are in/I mess around with them/And I’m OK with it” — all build on a solid foundation of cis white male heterosexuality.

Timothée Chalamet’s sexuality, meanwhile, flows freely between fiction and fact. While the 22-year-old actor is “straight-identifying,” he acquires a queer veneer by virtue of his signature role as Call Me by Your Name’s Elio, a bisexual teen (or, at least, a boy who has had sex with both women and men). Yet off screen, as Timothée, he embodies a robust heterosexuality. On social media, the thirst for him skews overwhelmingly female, while reports about his romantic partners — Madonna’s daughter, Johnny Depp’s daughter — not only paint him straight but enviably so. Lucas Hedges, another straight-identified actor who plays gay in the conversion therapy drama Boy Erased, somewhat disrupts this narrative, returning fluidity to the ambiguous space it came from. The 21-year-old admitted in an interview with Vulture that he found it difficult to pin himself down, having been “infatuated with” close male friends but more often women. “I recognize myself as existing on that spectrum,” he says. “Not totally straight, but also not gay and not necessarily bisexual.” That he felt “ashamed” for not being binary despite having a sixth-grade health teacher who introduced him to the range of sexuality suggests how married our culture is to it.

As a woman familiar with the shame associated with female sexuality, it’s difficult to ignore the difference in tenor of the response to famous young white males like Miller, Styles, and Chalamet and famous black women like Janelle Monáe and Tessa Thompson not only discussing it, but making even more radical statements. Appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone in May, Monáe said straight up (so to speak): “Being a queer black woman in America — someone who has been in relationships with both men and women — I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker.” The same age as Desiree Akhavan, 32, Monáe identified as bisexual until she read about pansexuality. She initially came out through her music; her album, Dirty Computer, contains a song called “Q.U.E.E.N.” which was originally titled “Q.U.E.E.R.,” while the music video accompanying “Pynk” has actress Tessa Thompson emerging from Monáe’s Georgia O’Keeffe-esque pants. While neither one of them has discussed their relationship in detail, Thompson, who in Porter magazine’s July issue revealed she is attracted to men and women, said, “If people want to speculate about what we are, that’s okay.”

The mainstream press and what appeared to be a number of non-queer social media acolytes credited Chalamet and Styles with redefining their gender and trouncing toxic masculinity. “[H]arry styles, ezra miller, and timothee chalamet are going to save the world,” tweeted one woman, while The Guardian dubbed Miller the “hero we need right now.” Monáe, meanwhile, was predominantly championed by queer fans (“can we please talk about how our absolute monarch Janelle Monáe has been telegraphing her truth to the queers thru her art and fashion for YEARS and now this Rolling Stone interview is a delicious cherry on top + a ‘told u so’ to all the h*teros”) and eclipsed by questions about what pansexual actually means. While white male fluidity was held up as heroic, female fluidity, particularly black female fluidity, was somehow unremarkable. Why? Part of the answer was recently, eloquently, provided by “Younger” star Nico Tortorella, who identifies as gender-fluid, bisexual, and polyamorous. “I get to share my story,” he told The Daily Beast. “That’s a privilege that I have because of what I look like, the color of my skin, what I have between my legs, my straight passing-ness, everything.”

***

When I was growing up sex was not fun, it was fraught. Sex was AIDS, disease, death. The Supreme Court of Canada protected sexual orientation under the Charter when I was 15 but I went to school in Alberta, Canada’s version of Texas — my gym teacher was the face of Alberta beef. In my high school, no one was gay even if they were. All gender was binary. Sex was a penis in a vagina. Popular culture was as straight, and even Prince and David Bowie seemed to use their glam sparkle to sleep with more women rather than fewer. Bisexual women on film were murderers (Basic Instinct) or sluts (Chasing Amy) and in the end were united by their desire for “some serious deep dicking.” I saw no bisexual women on television (I didn’t watch “Buffy”) and LGBTQ characters were limited (“My So-Called Life”). Alanis Morissette was considered pop music’s feminist icon, but even she was singing about Dave Coulier. And the female celebrities who seemed to swing both ways — Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Bijou Phillips — were the kind who were already acting out, their sexuality a hallmark of their lack of control.

“I think unrealistic depictions of sex and relationships are harmful,” Akhavan told The New York Times. “I was raised on them and the first time I had sex, I had learned everything from film and television and I was like ‘Oh, this isn’t at all like I saw on the screen.’” Bisexuality has historically been passed over on screen for a more accessible binary depiction of relationships. In her 2013 book The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television, Maria San Filippo describes what has become known as “bisexual erasure” in pop culture: “Outside of the erotically transgressive realms of art cinema and pornography, screen as well as ‘real life’ bisexuality is effaced not only by what I’ve named compulsory monosexuality but also by compulsory monogamy,” she writes, adding, “the assumption remains that the gender of one’s current object choice indicates one’s sexuality.” So even high-profile films that include leads having sex with both genders — Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Carol, Call Me By Your Name — are coded “gay” rather than “bi.”

Despite the rise in bisexual women on the small screen like Annalise in “How to Get Away with Murder,” Syd in “Transparent,” and Ilana in “Broad City,” GLAAD’s latest report on inclusion cited continued underrepresentation. While 28 percent of LGBTQ characters on television are bisexual, the majority are women (75 versus 18) and they are often associated with harmful tropes — sex is used to move the plot forward and the characters scan amoral and manipulative. This despite an increase in the U.S.’s queer population to 4.5 percent in 2017 from 3.5 percent in 2012 (when Gallup started tracking it). A notable detail is the extreme generational divide in identification: “The percentage of millennials who identify as LGBT expanded from 7.3% to 8.1% from 2016 to 2017, and is up from 5.8% in 2012,” reported Gallup. “By contrast, the LGBT percentage in Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1979) was up only .2% from 2016 to 2017.”

Here’s the embarrassing part. While I am technically a millennial, I align more with Generation X (that’s not the embarrassing bit). I am attracted more to men, but I am attracted to women as well yet don’t identify as LGBTQ. How best to describe this? I remember a relative being relieved when I acquired my first boyfriend (it was late). “Oh good, I thought you were gay,” they said. I was angry at them for suggesting that being gay was a bad thing, but also relieved that I had dodged a bullet. This isn’t exactly the internalized homophobia that Hannah Gadsby talked about, but it isn’t exactly not. My parents and my brother would have been fine with me being gay. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the standard I grew up with — in the culture, in the world around me — was not homosexuality, it was heterosexuality. I don’t judge non-heterosexual relationships, but having one myself somehow falls short of ideal. For the same reason, I can’t shake the false belief that lesbian sex is less legitimate than gay sex between men. The ideal is penetration. “That’s some Chasing Amy shit,” my boyfriend, eight years younger, said. And, yeah, unfortunately, it is. I have company though.

In a survey released in June, billed as “the most comprehensive of its kind,” Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News polled 880 LGBTQ Americans, almost half of whom were between the ages of 18 and 29, and found that the majority, 46 percent, identified as bisexual. While women self-described as bi four times as often as men (79 to 19 percent), the report did not offer a single clear reason for the discrepancy. It did, however, suggest “phallocentrism,” the notion that the penis is the organizing principle for the world, the standard. In other words, sex is a penis in a vagina. “While bisexual women are often stereotyped as sleeping with women for male attention, or just going through a phase en route to permanent heterosexuality,” the report reads, “the opposite is presumed of bisexual men: that they are simply confused or semi-closeted gay men.” This explains why women who come out, like Monáe and Thompson, are considered less iconoclastic in the popular culture than men who even just make vague gestures towards fluidity — the stakes are considered higher for the guys. In truth, few feel comfortable being bi. Though the Pew Research Center’s survey of queer Americans in 2013 revealed that 40 percent of respondents identified as bisexual, this population was less likely to come out and more likely to be with a partner of the opposite sex. Famous women like Maria Bello, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristen Stewart have all come out, yet none of them really use the label.

“Not feeling gay enough, that’s something I felt a lot of guilt over,” Akhavan told the Times. It is guilt like this and the aforementioned shame which makes it all the more frustrating to watch the ease with which the younger generation publicly owns their fluidity. It is doubly hard to watch young white men being praised for wearing bunny ears in a magazine that has so long objectified women, simply because the expectations are so much lower for them. “I’m not looking down on the younger experience of being queer,” Akhavan said, “but I do think that there’s a resentment there that we gloss over.” In response, many of us react conservatively, with the feeling that they haven’t worked for it, that it is somehow less earned because of that. This is an acknowledgment of that resentment, of the eye rolling and the snickering with which we respond to the youth (ah, youth!). In the end we are not judging you for being empowered. We are judging ourselves for not being empowered enough.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Sarah Perry on ‘Melmoth,’ Monsters, and Making Her Readers Feel Responsible for Mass Atrocity

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Bridey Heing | Longreads | October 2018 | 8 minutes (2,039 words)

 

Sarah Perry’s novels have been praised for their distinctive voice and haunting subjects. Her atmospheric 2014 debut After Me Comes the Flood revealed Perry to be a unique writer of disquieting tales laced through with an aura of mystery, a reputation solidified by the 2016 publication of The Essex Serpent, a work of historical fiction. But her latest book, Melmoth, feels like more than just a novel; it feels like a call to action. In Melmoth, the nature of complicity and the manifestation of guilt are a central focus, spinning Perry’s eerie storytelling into important lessons and questions for our modern world.

Helen Franklin has been living in Prague for years, in a kind of self-imposed exile from her native England. She carries a significant sense of guilt for an unspecified wrongdoing in her youth, for which she tries to atone by isolating herself and living austerely. But even in this self-created loneliness, Helen meets and makes friends with a couple named Karel and Thea. When Karel suddenly begins talking about a mysterious woman monster called Melmoth the Witness, Helen and Thea dismiss her as a myth. But when Karel disappears and Helen begins reading the testimonies left behind by those who had been made to walk the Earth with Melmoth, witnessing alongside her the atrocities carried out by mankind, Helen wonders if she could be Melmoth’s next victim. Read more…

An Immoderate Novel for an Immoderate Season: An Interview with Olivia Laing

The great North American total eclipse of 2017. John Finney / Getty

Bridey Heing | Longreads | September 2018 | 10 minutes (2,761 words)

 

As a non-fiction writer, Olivia Laing has made a name for herself by writing deeply empathic explorations of creativity and the human condition. Her 2011 debut, To The River, situates the River Ouse, in North Yorkshire, within history and culture, from its role in 13th century battles to the death of Virginia Woolf. Her follow-up, 2013’s The Trip to Echo Spring, focused on American writers and alcoholism. Her 2015 book, The Lonely City, interrogated loneliness as a state of being and as a catalyst for art. But with her fiction debut, Laing has pulled back from the closely researched subjects that have been her wheelhouse; instead, she broadly documents a seven-week span of time. And yet her  penchant for research still peaks through — the narrative is written from the perspective of a fictionalized Kathy Acker-esque avatar, whose books Laing kept piled around her for inspiration while she wrote.

Crudo opens with the resignation of Steve Bannon, which Kathy, a soon-to-be newlywed, follows on social media from a Tuscan resort. Her attention ricochets between the rapidly unfolding news cycle playing out online and her private world of friends, her upcoming wedding, and, eventually, adjusting to life with her new husband. As she writes and prepares for her first trip overseas without her husband, Kathy charts the frenetic energy of the summer of 2017, unsure of whether the end of the world is truly approaching.

That sense of confusion was what Laing sought to capture. She wrote the book in real-time, with carefully outlined rules that were designed to ensure she didn’t deviate from the emotional responses to a specific whirlwind moment. Kathy, who is based in part on Kathy Acker, is also based on Laing, who turned forty and got married within the time frame of the novel. Crudo was conceived of as a means of understanding the impossible speed at which the news seemed to move, while also preserving the feeling of instability and uncertainty she saw in herself and those around her. Read more…

So Long, and Thanks for All the Value Meals

A cardboard soda cup from McDonald's sits on top of a black garbage can, surrounded by cigarette butts
Photo by Gwenael Piaser via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

All that time you spent trying to find a Boardwalk game piece on your McDonald’s fries was a waste: between 1989 and 2001, “Uncle Jerry” diverted over $24 million in cash and prizes from McDonald’s super-popular “Monopoly” promotion. The loot went to friends and family members, drug traffickers and strip-club owners, psychics and convicts and Mormons — all in exchange for a portion of the winnings. Jeff Maysh unravels the entire massive conspiracy in a piece at The Daily Beast.

Inside Hoover’s home, Amy Murray, a loyal McDonald’s spokesperson, encouraged him to tell the camera about the luckiest moment of his life. Nervously clutching his massive check, Hoover said he’d fallen asleep on the beach. When he bent over to wash off the sand, his People magazine fell into the sea. He bought another copy from a grocery store, he said, and inside was an advertising insert with the “Instant Win” game piece. The camera crew listened patiently to his rambling story, silently recognizing the inconsequential details found in stories told by liars. They suspected that Hoover was not a lucky winner, but part of a major criminal conspiracy to defraud the fast-food chain of millions of dollars. The two men behind the camera were not from McDonald’s. They were undercover agents from the FBI.

This was a McSting.

Who was Uncle Jerry? The man responsible for the security of the highest-value game pieces.

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Nathaniel Rich, Ronan Farrow, Jeff Maysh, Helen Rosner, and Nick Greene.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

What Ever Happened To the Truth?

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Bridey Heing | Longreads | July 2018 | 7 minutes (1,841)

It isn’t often that a book review makes headlines, but legendary New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani did just that in 2016. Published about six weeks before the presidential election — one day after the first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, when it seemed Clinton’s win was inevitable — Kakutani’s review of Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 by Volker Ullrich went viral when it was perceived as an attack on then-candidate Trump. The review itself was dominated by bullet-points drawing out ways in which Adolf Hitler went from a “‘Munich rabble-rouser’ — regarded by many as a self-obsessed ‘clown’ with a strangely ‘scattershot, impulsive style’” to Fuhrer in a country regarded as one of the poles of civilization. Trump’s name was nowhere in the review, but publications jumped on the apparent comparison. “Trump-Hitler comparison seen in New York Times book review,” said CNN; “This New York Times ‘Hitler’ book review sure reads like a thinly veiled Trump comparison,” from the Washington Post; “A review of a new Hitler biography is not so subtly all about Trump,” according to Vox. Even later reviews of the book itself were shaded by Kakutani’s seeming comparison.

Almost two years later, a subtle comparison between Hitler and now-President Trump feels incredibly tame and undeserving of such heavy scrutiny. But at the time, such comparisons weren’t altogether common in the mainstream; Trump seemed destined to lose and fade into whatever post-campaign activity he chose to channel his not-insignificant celebrity towards. Instead, of course, he won, and comparisons like Kakutani’s became far more common as it became clear that the presidency would not temper his stated goals and ambitions.

The review would prove to be one of Kakutani’s last in her position as the New York Times Book Critic, a role in which she proved a formidable force within the literary world. It was announced in July, 2017 that she would be stepping down after three and a half decades. Famously distant from the public eye, Kakutani’s seemingly abrupt departure so soon after causing a media firestorm left many questioning her next moves. Now, one year later, we have an answer: The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. Read more…