Search Results for: The Nation

The Political Education of Killer Mike

Longreads Pick

“Mike is for Black banks, Black businesses, Black guns, Black colleges, Black homeownership—all things Black Americans can do here and now without passing a law or asking for permission. He’s also for using Black voting power to wrest everything we’re owed from the government. It’s Black nationalism with a hint of socialism and armed to the teeth.”

Source: GQ
Published: Jul 8, 2020
Length: 22 minutes (5,644 words)

Unlucky Charms: The Rise and Fall of Billion-Dollar Jewelry Empire Alex and Ani

Longreads Pick
Author: Aaron Gell
Source: Marker
Published: Jul 8, 2020
Length: 43 minutes (10,868 words)

I Don’t Wear Pink

Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/ Ukrinform/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

In this article for Parenting magazine, Alex Bliss (all names have been changed), explains with complete honesty the process she went through in order to embrace her child being transgender; initially struggling to accept that her four-year-old daughter identified as a boy. 

…My daughter, the nurse explained, had peed in her pants in the middle of the cafeteria.

I rushed to the school with a dry pair of pants and underwear.

“What happened?” I asked.

Isabel was silent.

“Did you wait too long? Are you feeling sick?”

It would be hours before she would tell me, “I couldn’t hold it.”

“Why do you think you have to hold it?” I asked.

“I can’t use the bathroom,” she said.

There was anger in my throat. What teacher doesn’t allow children to use the bathroom?

“I’ll talk to your teacher. This is crazy,” I said.

“No, mommy,” she said. “It’s not the teacher. I can’t go because I’m not allowed in the boys’ bathroom and I don’t belong in the girls’ bathroom.”

Even as I worked with the school to ensure that she could use a gender-neutral bathroom and even as I found myself saying “she might be transgender,” I harbored—and courted—doubts. My stomach turned whenever I thought of Boys Don’t Cry. How would I keep a transgender boy safe? How would a transgender boy find love? Happiness? Success?

Turning to therapy for answers, it became clear that this was not a “phase,” but reality.

Before our rear ends had even warmed the couch, I blurted, “I need to know if this is just a phase. If she’s transgender, I need to know for sure.” I wanted a test, a diagnostic tool like the Beck Depression Inventory, something definitive that would pronounce my child transgender or not. I learned that no such test exists.

Still, my husband and I left the room so the therapist could conduct an initial evaluation.

Twenty minutes later, we settled down on the same couch, my husband on one side of Isabel, me on the other.

“Your son said something interesting,” the psychologist said.

I heard the word “son” louder than the “your” and the “something interesting.” It was as if the therapist shouted that one word through a bullhorn and bolded and underlined it just before it traveled the distance from her mouth and to my ears.

He said he didn’t think his parents were ready yet.”

Gradually, Bliss started to refer to her son Shane, rather than her daughter Isobel. Explaining to more and more friends and family about his gender. As she embraced the situation, she realized that she had a son — and that she loved him.

About halfway through fifth grade, just before he went to bed one night, I looked at him. Really looked at him. There was that short hair and handsome face, the deep-ish voice and abrupt mannerisms, a bare chest, and arms folded behind his head.

There was no doubt. He was a boy.

He wasn’t just any boy, either. He was my boy. My incredibly smart, funny, quirky, kind, just-plain-awesome boy.

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Knowing Our ‘Mad’ Ancestors: Why It’s Time to Look Again at Mental Illness in History

Longreads Pick

“Can Joan be a heroine who, perhaps, also experienced hallucinations? I am trying to move towards a place where mental illness doesn’t fundamentally change her story to the point of delegitimising her successes or struggles. Can we accept that someone with mental illness might also be a competent hero?”

Published: Jul 6, 2020

‘Breonna deserved better’

ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND - JULY 05: In an aerial view from a drone, a large-scale ground mural depicting Breonna Taylor with the text 'Black Lives Matter' is seen being painted at Chambers Park on July 5, 2020 in Annapolis, Maryland. The mural was organized by Future History Now in partnership with Banneker-Douglass Museum and The Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture. The painting honors Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by members of the Louisville Metro Police Department in March 2020. (Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

In recounting her mother’s inability to remember her own grandmother’s name, and in considering her daughter Brianna, Louisville poet and activist Hannah L. Drake remembers and honors Breonna Taylor vowing that, “never again will a Black woman’s name be forgotten.” Read her essay and listen as she delivers her poem, “Formation” at The Bitter Southerner.

I had to search deeply for the names of Black women. I thought of my name, my daughter’s name, which just so happens to be Brianna. I thought of the name of my mother, the name of my great-grandmother lost forever, and something inside of me said, “Not today. Not now. Never again will a Black woman’s name be forgotten. Her name deserves to be remembered.” She would not be another Black woman, erased. She would not be another Black woman, similar to Alberta Jones, who never found justice in Louisville. She would not be a memory hidden underneath bluegrass and bourbon. She existed. She was here. She lived. She breathed. She had a future. And she had a name. A name that this city and this nation needs to remember.

It is in Louisville that I was reminded as a Black woman, I will always be screaming to be heard.

However, I refuse to be silent. This city, this state and this nation have silenced Black women long enough.

So, I say her name, Breonna Taylor. I say her name loudly. I say her name often, fighting back the tears. I find myself whispering her name. I find myself pausing as I say my own daughter’s name, Brianna. I find myself taking Breonna’s name in my mouth, chewing it and spitting it out boldly for the world to hear. I say her name along with the other Black women that have died and that have been forgotten in the dialogue about Black lives mattering. Shantel Davis, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, Yvette Smith, Shereese Francis, Aiyana Jones, Breonna Taylor. Women. All Black and all women, which at times is a double edge sword — race and gender — where rock and a hard place often collide.

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Sleeping with Amazon

(Photo by Uwe Zucchi/picture alliance via Getty Images)

David Gutowski | Longreads | July 2020 | 5 minutes (1,500 words)

“At the end of the day, I have to sleep with myself.” Over the 18 years of publishing my literature and music website Largehearted Boy, that has always been my creed. When offered sponsorships and advertising from products I didn’t believe in, that belief guided my advertising (and lifestyle) decisions. When my bed became crowded while working for Amazon Books, insomnia set in.

My world pivoted in the mid-2010s. Then shook. Then reversed on its axis. In 2014, I separated from my wife, got a divorce, and met the love of my life. I left Brooklyn for Manhattan. Website advertising, long in freefall, plummeted even more. In 2016, my personal life disintegrated along with my savings. I attempted suicide and was forced to finally deal with lifelong mental health issues including major depressive disorder and borderline personality disorder. I returned to school in 2018 to finish my undergraduate degree in creative writing. My mental health, at long last, improved, and with it, so did I.

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‘I Saw It on Instagram, I Had to Come’: The Desire to Document Ourselves in Nature

Visiting iconic tourist hotspots in Arizona like the Grand Canyon, Horseshoe Bend, and Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Outside writer Lisa Chase explores our obsession with documenting ourselves in the wild and the evolving art and process of photography in the time of Instagram.

Even when crowds aren’t destroying a place outright, the sight of countless people treating nature as the backdrop of their personal photo shoot is galling. It’s as if the Instagram tourists are performing the experience of being in nature rather than simply being in nature. Like those countless pictures of people jumping joyously in the wild: Why must they jump? Why can’t they let nature steal the show? Or the photo of a woman sitting in solitude at the edge of the cliff, when in reality she’s surrounded by throngs. That solitude and scenery used to be the purview of a club of outdoor purists. Now, it seems, any fool with a smartphone can have it for themselves.

But for as long people have been going into nature and documenting themselves doing so, tension has existed between the outdoors and the story we wish to tell about the journey. Our photos have always been edited, even deceptive, when it comes to ­acknowledging our civilizing tendencies. Ansel Adams, whose career spanned from the late 1920s until his death in 1984, was known to retouch his photos or shoot around evidence of man—logging roads, parking lots—for his primordial hero shots of Yosemite Valley. As art professor and landscape photographer Mark Klett said to writer Rebecca Solnit in a 2003 New York Times piece, it’s like the only legit take in an Adams photo is, “This is nature. And it’s beautiful because you’re not there.”

Klett identifies our messy paradox, the human desire to lose ourselves in the wild and also to extract, despoil, and package it.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Former US Army First Lieutenant Clint Lorance. (Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Greg Jaffe, Justine van der Leun, Diana Moskovitz, Katy Vine, and Brian VanHooker.

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1. The Cursed Platoon

Greg Jaffe | The Washington Post | July 2, 2020 | 40 minutes (10,000 words)

“Clint Lorance had been in charge of his platoon for only three days when he ordered his men to kill three Afghans stopped on a dirt road. A second-degree murder conviction and pardon followed. Today, Lorance is hailed as a hero by President Trump. His troops have suffered a very different fate.”

2. “I Hope Our Daughters Will Not Be Punished”

Justine van der Leun | Dissent | June 29, 2020 | 16 minutes (4,109 words)

“From a solitary cell in Texas, Kwaneta Yatrice Harris writes letters documenting the torturous conditions, despite the risk of retribution.”

3. Tie a Tourniquet on Your Heart

Diana Moskovitz | Popula | June 25, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,948 words)

Journalist Diana Moskovitz revisits Pulitzer-prize winning crime reporter Edna Buchanan’s memoir “The Corpse Had a Familiar Face,” enshrined as part of a “textbook collection of great works of literary journalism.” “I reached for it as America erupted this month, yet again, in protests over the killings of Black people at the hands of police, wondering what Edna Buchanan, one of the greatest influences on late 20th century crime writing, would have to offer this moment.”

4. Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Master Auctioneer?

Katy Vine | Texas Monthly | June 24, 2020 | 23 minutes (5,843 words)

‘Eight days inside America’s Auction Academy, learning the secrets of “the dynamo from Dallas.”’

5. An Oral History of the Onion’s 9/11 Issue

Brian VanHooker | MEL Magazine | June 29, 2020 | 37 minutes (9,395 words)

“Immediately after 9/11, humorists struggled with what many called ‘the death of irony.’ Then ‘The Onion’ returned and showed everyone the way.”

Death, Disembodied

Longreads Pick

In the wake of COVID-19, Ann Neumann asks on behalf of a nation in mourning: “how do we honor the dead when we can’t see them, touch them, gather to comfort ourselves?”

Source: The Baffler
Published: Jul 30, 2020
Length: 10 minutes (2,513 words)

1600 Days in Solitary Confinement, and Counting

Women's Prison (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Sygma via Getty Images)

The United Nations says that solitary confinement, otherwise known as “restrictive housing” or “administrative segregation, is a form of torture, yet incarcerated people are still subject to this, and many other forms of abuse. At Dissent, Justine van der Leun tells the story of Kwaneta Yatrice Harris, a registered nurse and mother of three incarcerated for killing her abusive partner. Her legal team was reluctant to recount her victim’s behavior because they didn’t want to disparage a veteran. Harris has been in solitary confinement for over 1600 days awaiting a hearing. “Harris did not push the attorneys. ‘The stigma and shame of allowing myself to continually accept abusive behavior is stronger than the shame of being a convicted murderer.’”

In a solitary cell in a central Texas prison, as a global pandemic and protests raged, Kwaneta Yatrice Harris was eating cold bologna sandwiches on the better days. On the worst days, she was given nutraloaf, also known as discipline cake: a rectangle of meat, potatoes, margarine, syrup, liquified egg, and anonymous vegetable.

The food was slid through the door of a windowless room the size of a walk-in closet where Harris has been held since 2015. Eventually, she will be returned to a general population unit to serve the rest of her sentence, the estimated end of which is in 2058, when she will be eighty-six. Throughout her time in prison, Harris, like many incarcerated people, has been subject to questionable disciplinary cases brought by guards, including, most recently, the offense of “aiding” me to telephone her under a fraudulent name. She did not do this, but she is still being penalized. Punishments vary: nutraloaf is one of them; more time in solitary is another.

Harris did not work because she was in “restrictive housing,” or “administrative segregation,” which is what Texas calls its solitary confinement. In late 2017, the state announced that it would do away with solitary confinement as a form of punishment, but the reform, in practicality, only affected seventy-five people, according to a 2019 report by the Texas Civil Rights Project. Solitary has been classified as torture by the United Nations, serves no rehabilitative purpose, and causes mental health to deteriorate in as few as ten days. After the pandemic lockdowns, many know this. Millions of people stayed at home for months, increasingly distressed, cut off from community. Those who were alone began to physically throb for human connection.

But true solitary is nothing like shelter-in-place: no quilts or sunlight, no fridges or Netflix or Zoom, no quick bike rides or walks around the block or brown-bag cocktails on the sidewalk at a six-foot distance. I’ve been told by several individuals who have lived in solitary for months and years that the experience magnifies the senses: You can smell the guard’s perfume, hear the click of shoes echoing from far away. You will clean every corner of your cell on your knees, which grow calloused. You’ll become desperate for touch. A woman in California kept a pet cricket and tore off one of its legs so it couldn’t leave her. A man in Minnesota nurtured a baby mouse and taught it to sleep by his head in a Folger’s jar.

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