Search Results for: The Nation

Why I Wanted To Finish My Father’s Life’s Work

Illustration by Homestead Studio, inspired by photo supplied by the author

Karen Brown | Longreads | December 2019 | 9 minutes (2,139 words)

“Do you think you’ll pursue more significant work one day?”

That’s the kind of casual barb my father would deliver over breakfast on my visits home after I was well into my career as a radio journalist.

That may seem unsupportive, which was not typical. He was the emotional rock in my life for 50 years. He chaperoned my elementary school dances, read every article I wrote for the high school newspaper, and later, sent around news of my journalism awards to his friends and colleagues. Every year, he wrote me a birthday card extolling all the ways he admired me.

And yet. He had this dream for my career, that I would become a nationally prominent journalist who might one day topple a presidency and change the world. Instead I became a regionally-respected public radio reporter who mostly does health-related features.

He made those comments about his tempered expectations to let me know he could be both loving and honest. But to me, they felt annoying and unfair. In the end, we’d reach a mutual understanding that no one gets to do exactly what they dream of.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those conversations as I put my own writing projects on the back burner to try to finish my father’s final book.
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Checking in on the Masculinity Crisis

Richard T Nowitz / Getty

Kelli María Korducki | Longreads | December 2019 | 14 minutes (3,786 words)

 

Not long ago, I noticed a woman reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life at my Manhattan yoga studio as we both waited for our Ashtanga class to begin. The sight took me aback. Despite the 2018 book’s many weeks as a nonfiction bestseller, I’d somehow never considered that the scope of Peterson’s audience might extend beyond sulky white men who like to outsource their thinking. That it might include women with the disposable income and leisure time to spend their Saturday afternoons doing sun salutations, whose lives probably look a lot like mine.

Peterson, a once-unassuming psychology professor at my Canadian alma mater (I’d never heard of him during the years we were both there), has emerged in the last few years as a puzzling figurehead among men’s rights aficionados and self-help enthusiasts alike. Wielding a trademark pastiche of literary references and cherry-picked sociological data points, his writing and, to a greater extent, public lectures broadcast via YouTube deliver what is, for many in this age of ‘toxic masculinity’ and #MeToo, a reassuring story: that men are natural rulers, white privilege is a farce, and if millennial men would just make their beds and assume their kingdoms, we’d all be better off.

Peterson speaks to a constellation of loosely connected concerns that have, in the last several years, dominated popular discourse on where boys and men fit into a society in which gender norms play less and less of a role in determining how people fit together. Conversations about rape culture and damaging gender constructs take place alongside global reports of female students outperforming their male classmates. We hear of a workforce that, at least in theory, rewards the “soft skills” women are purportedly socialized to possess. Meanwhile names like “Dylann Roof” and “Elliot Rodger” have become shorthand for an epidemic of male isolation and rage. A New York Times story that followed shortly after the deadly February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, included the observation that “about the only thing” nearly all U.S. mass shooters have in common “is that they are men.” Read more…

Bully for You

Maystra / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2019 |  14 minutes (3,476 words)

A few years ago I wrote an essay about my best friend having a baby and my inability to handle it. I wrote about the almost familial closeness of our friendship, about my difficulty parsing what we actually were (friends? more than friends?), and ultimately about the impossibility of accepting someone else getting in the way. I’m not going to relitigate the piece, that’s not what this is about, but I continue to stand by any writer who is sorting themself out in their work and who is self-aware enough to acknowledge their part in their mess. No one else did; I got about 600 comments, pretty much all of them negative: “Want to feel creeped out? Read this. So many issues in one person.” What I remember most, though, were the writers, more famous than me — one of them very famous — dismissing me — not my work, me. What the fuck was I even talking about? Who does that? Fuck no, they don’t want to read that. (Like I was some ancient untouchable, like I was contagious.) Almost all of them were women; all of them known for writing, among other things, about the intricacies of their lives; all of them claiming to make daily work out of forging a space for marginalized voices. But this, a woman wrestling with her feelings about another woman, seemed to be where they drew the line. I wasn’t a murderer, I wasn’t a psychopath, I wasn’t a white nationalist, I wasn’t a criminal, I wasn’t even a cheater, for God’s sake, and yet one of them was offended enough to actually block me on Twitter: “Wow, this is such selfish bullshit.”

Women may be encouraged to bleed out onto the page — there’s a reason the personal essay boom was predominantly populated by them — but it also opens them up to deeper cuts. Not only are they dissected in a way men are not, but the response to this writing, by people of all genders, skews more emotional as well. The motif is so well established by now that it’s almost a rule; at the very least it should be anticipated. And yet, the recent unprecedented pile-on of women writers hectoring a former university student who dared to critique a popular young adult novelist had one of these women telling me, “It never crossed my mind that people would look her up or harass her. That is … bizarre and wildly inappropriate.” 

In 2015, I didn’t expect most people to engage with the mechanics and anatomy of my writing, but I did expect the writers to. I was surprised when they didn’t. I was surprised that it all came down to a headline: This woman abandoned another woman. That I had spent months dissecting 14 years of emotions — that I had distilled them into 2,323 words — was beside the point. The point was that those writers were Good People, and Good People don’t abandon friends, much less friends who are mothers. I was not a Good Person, so there was nothing to consider beyond that. This is where being a writer, any artist really, can be at odds with being a human. Ideally, you meet the artist, the work, the ideas with no judgment. In reality, you meet them with yourself and all the limits of you. In this instance, that also entailed the particulars of being a female writer, which are very different from those of a male writer. Women not only have to withstand all the obstacles faced by every artist in a world that does not value art, but, within that, in a world that also devalues them as women, and therefore their — our — stories. They can’t just write, they have to fight to do it. And as subjugated populations have throughout history, they group together for strength, in order not only to defend themselves, but also other women who can’t — other women they choose, with whom they have a moral affinity, who are deemed worthy of representing their gender. 

This is the powerful woman’s fundamental hypocrisy. Not every powerful woman, but a healthy number. As aggressively as she clears a space for women she approves of is as aggressively as she rejects women she doesn’t. This isn’t so much about who she dislikes, though there’s that. It’s more about women she believes are espousing views that conflict with The Cause of Women™, which is what she and her circle are determined to protect. It’s understandable, yes, but it’s not excusable. A slew of apologies followed the YA mess, with all of the writers making the right sounds, but that was unsurprising. They think, they analyze, they write a good game, the best game, but their actions don’t track with their words. They say they are defending young women’s interests as they attack a young woman. They say they want women to be unlikable, but spurn them for that very same thing. “I am not a politician or a priest or a rabbi,” Roxane Gay, one of the YA supporters, wrote to me. “I’m allowed to make mistakes.” Sure, everyone makes mistakes, but who gets punished? Read more…

Bad Romance

Longreads Pick
Published: Nov 28, 2019
Length: 23 minutes (5,925 words)

A Beautiful, Rugged Place: Erosion of the Body

Photo by Jerry Zhang, Book Cover from Sarah Crichton Books

Terry Tempest Williams | Erosion | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | October 2019 | 39 minutes (7,820 words)

 

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves

 

We had just celebrated my father’s eighty-fifth birthday. Louis Gakumba and I were driving back up to Jackson Hole. My husband Brooke texted me, “I love you. Pull over to the side of the road. Call me.” I knew it was Dan. I had been thinking of him as I was mesmerized by the immense cumulus clouds building in the west.

“Is Dan dead?”

“Yes.”

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The Backcountry Prescription Experiment

Illustration by Natalie Nelson

Mathina Calliope | Longreads | December 2019 | 13 minutes (3,134 words)

In 2014 my doctor took me off the antidepressant I had credited with making life okay for the previous 16 years; at 41 I was trying to have a baby with my boyfriend, Inti. I didn’t get pregnant, but this story isn’t about my failure to become a mother. Instead it’s about how a break from my meds led, ultimately and circuitously, to another kind of birth; to a different life for myself.

My doctor’s orders seemed rash. Going off antidepressants is fraught, especially since so many people who want to stop taking them have been on them for so long. New guidelines are emerging that acknowledge this danger; a 2019 study in The Lancet Psychiatry recommended patients taper “over a period of months and down to amounts much lower than minimum therapeutic doses.” But my doctor was nonchalant. “You have something to be happy about now,” he quipped. “You’re trying to have a baby.” Skeptical, but with a tendency to assent to authority figures, I followed his command to stop cold turkey.

Wellbutrin (bupropion) had helped me leave a stifling marriage (though this story is also not about that). It let me dance salsa two to four nights a week through all my 30s. It gave me the energy to earn an MFA. It fueled ten-mile races, half marathons, and a marathon. It supported me throwing myself a 40th birthday party, my favorite night of my life. And the drug helped me have the clarity to see sweet, steady, easy-going Inti — my dear friend of 11 years — as more.

If the drugs didn’t fundamentally change my depression, did they, instead, by altering hormone levels, merely mask what might be a treatable source of discontent?

In addition to trying for parenthood, I had recently changed almost everything else about my life. In 2013 I had asked Inti to be my boyfriend and move in. To save money toward a house, in summer 2014, shortly after I quit meds, we put my place on Airbnb and went to live with his mother and brother. That fall I achieved a promotion at work, but the role presented unexpected challenges — not least the fact that the job itself, the career even, was not fulfilling. For the first time in more than a decade, anxiety appeared. The usual infelicities of intergenerational living — different standards of kitchen cleanliness, for example — set me on an edge that felt unwarranted. Fortunately my usual yoga, running, and dancing did a lot of the heavy lifting Wellbutrin used to do. Things were rocky, but they weren’t bleak.

A year after going off the drug, I was not quite depressed, but also not quite the same person I had been on the meds. It had become clear pregnancy wouldn’t happen without heroic measures we were disinclined to take. I grew restless and cast about for something meaningful, something, perhaps, to fill the hole I expected a baby would have filled.

Inti and I moved that January 2015 into a posher-than-necessary apartment of our own, and, with no fetus to protect, I started drinking wine socially and coffee daily again. Circumstances evened out and anxiety dissolved. Depression remained at bay, too, so there seemed no need to restart Wellbutrin. Still, something was off.

Although millions of people take antidepressants and are helped — saved, even — by them, psychoactive substances were not, in fact, first used to treat mental illness but to alter one’s state of mind, going at least as far back prehistory (e.g., chewing coca leaves). It was only later and “serendipitously,” as author and MD Marcia Angell writes in a 2011 New York Review of Books article, that scientists realized such drugs altered brain chemistry. They then hypothesized that since, for example, Thorazine, which helped patients who had schizophrenia, lowered dopamine levels, maybe a surplus of dopamine caused the condition. Similarly, since antidepressants increased serotonin and helped patients with depression, perhaps a serotonin shortage caused depression. “Thus, instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality,” she writes, “an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug.”

Psychologist Irving Kirsch writes in his 2011 book The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth that double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of antidepressants show the drugs to be infinitesimally more effective than placebos. In other words, although many people attest to the medicines’ good, they may in fact be responding only to the placebo effect. Jerome Groopman, an M.D., notes more recently in the New Yorker that clinical trials have “stirred up intense controversy about whether antidepressants greatly outperform the placebo effect. And, while SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] do boost serotonin, it doesn’t appear that people with depression have low serotonin levels.” (Bupropion is not an SSRI; rather, it inhibits the reuptake of norepinephrine and dopamine.)

And if so, I wondered, who cares? The placebo effect is real. But if the drugs didn’t fundamentally change my depression, did they, instead, by altering hormone levels, merely mask what might be a treatable source of discontent? What if my problem was never my brain chemistry to begin with? What if it was my life?

One day shortly after moving into the nice apartment, I ditched work for a day hike on the Appalachian Trail, where I met a couple of backpackers who were walking the whole thing, 2,189 miles from Georgia to Maine. I admired their audacity, and the man told me, “It’s never too late.” I had never backpacked, so I almost laughed out loud. But the idea took hold.

Day hiking had always induced unequaled tranquility, in short supply in the prior year. Surely full-time forest living would do more of the same. I had read and enjoyed Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Theoretically I was a fan of nature. All reasonableness to the contrary, I decided to try it: A thru-hike. I would quit my job, put my furniture in my parents’ basement, break the lease on our apartment (Inti would wait for me in the house he owned with his mother), and spend from mid-April 2016 until whenever I finished, sometime in October, living in and walking through the woods. It was preposterous.
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Obsession and Release: 10 Years to Write a Longread

Tim Requarth and James K. Williamson

Relative to the time required to read them, #longreads take far longer to write. In the first episode for a new series on The Longreads Podcast, Head of Fact-checking Matt Giles interviews James K. Williamson and Tim Requarth about pieces they recently published after years of incubation, research, and writing.

Tim Requarth is a science journalist and a lecturer in science and writing at New York University. Longreads published his essay, “The Final Five Percent,” in October. Requarth worked on the story for 10 years. It chronicles his brother Conway’s brain injury and subsequent change in personality, as he becomes more violent and eventually lands in jail. Requarth weaves in his own PhD studies in neuroscience and the ramifications of bringing neuroscience into the courtroom. Read more…

The Adaptation of Language Evolution

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Your speech, or thine speech as Shakespeare would have said, has evolved with each generation that preceded you. The bubbling melting pot of language absorbs new influences with alacrity. Every time we repeatedly interact with people, we have the chance to develop a shared vocabulary. In The Walrus Gretchen McCulloch explores whether the language mix is changing faster as a result of technology. People interacting on social media often end up using similar phrases, yet we tend to follow others with the same interests, with words jumping around between demographically similar cities, regardless of geography. It’s not a surprise, therefore, that Twitter, where you’re encouraged to follow people you don’t already know, has given rise to the most linguistic innovation. And other factors, such as community and gender, are still playing a part.

Young women are also consistently on the bleeding edge of those linguistic changes that periodically sweep through media trend sections, from uptalk (the distinctive rising intonation at the end of sentences?) to the use of “like” to introduce a quotation (“And then I was like, ‘Innovation’”). The role that young women play as language disruptors is so clearly established at this point that it’s practically boring to linguists who study this topic: well-known sociolinguist William Labov estimated that women lead 90 percent of linguistic change in a paper he wrote in 1990. (I’ve attended more than a few talks at sociolinguistics conferences about a particular change in vowels or vocabulary, and it barely gets even a full sentence of explanation: “And here, as expected, we can see that the women are more advanced on this change than the men. Next slide.”) Men tend to follow a generation later: in other words, women tend to learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers.

McCulloch also delves into some innovative ways past linguists have studied language.

The fieldworker he selected was a grocer named Edmond Edmont, who reportedly had a particularly astute ear (it’s not clear whether this referred to the acuity of his hearing or his attention to phonetic detail, but either way, it got him the job). Gilliéron trained Edmont in phonetic notation and sent him off on a bicycle with a list of 1,500 questions, such as, “What do you call a cup?” and “How do you say the number fifty?” Over the next four years, Edmont cycled to 639 French villages, sending results back to Gilliéron periodically. In each village, he interviewed an older person who had lived in the region for their entire life, counting them as representative of the history of the area.

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Let Me Show You the World

aladdin's magic lamp with human figures sharing stories in the background
Illustration by Cat Finnie

Iman Sultan | Longreads | November 2019 | 16 minutes (4,062 words)

 

In Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, released back in May, Princess Jasmine finds herself in the clutches of the palace guards after Jafar has taken over the throne and stripped her father, the rightful Sultan, of his majestic turban. Trapped in a moment of doe-eyed silence and unable to reverse her situation, Jasmine is dragged away in a dreamlike sequence. Then, in a striking departure from the 1992 animated film of the same name, she suddenly breaks out into song.

“Written in stone, every rule, every word,” she sings. “Centuries old and unbending. Stay in your place, better seen and not heard. But now that story is ending…”

In the age of Disney live-action remakes, Aladdin has shattered the box office and proven the commercial viability of the genre. Bringing in a little over a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales, and with a sequel already under discussion, Aladdin revealed to the public that a diverse cast, strong female leads, and a reformed Disney isn’t just good for the culture. It’s also — if not primarily — good for business.

A dizzying, colorful, and high-budget romp, 21st-century Aladdin tries to do it all: the leads are of Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian descent. Will Smith plays a genie who yearns for freedom. Naomi Scott reimagines Jasmine as an unbending, dignified princess who claims political agency and saves her kingdom from the impending doom of the evil Jafar.

“I saw her as a young woman, not a teenager, with a mature strength that can cut you down,” the British-Gujarati actress told British Vogue. “So I said to them, ‘Just to let you know, I want to play her strong, and if that’s not what you’re looking for, that’s okay, but it’s not for me.’”

Aladdin is seemingly designed to transcend feminist or antiracist criticism by embodying diversity and “strong” womanhood itself. The filmmakers created a near-identical copy of the animated film with tweaks that, in the words of producer Dan Lin, proved Disney “could create a movie that was both diverse and inclusive” as well as “wildly commercial.” Arabic interjections like yalla are casually heard in the background; the Genie seems to riff his dance moves off of Bollywood choreography; elaborate costumes echo elements from South Asian, Kurdish, and Turkish clothing; and the controversial lyrics of the opening song, “Arabian Nights,” shift from “barbaric” (in the 1992 version) to “chaotic.”

And yet, despite these touches, the essence of the remake remains near-identical: it blends cultures together, distorts the source material, and uses “Arabian Nights” as a song title that sets the atmosphere of a film that ultimately takes place in a fictional world. But the world of Aladdin, the storytelling behind it, and the rich tradition of orally passing down tales across generations in Southwest Asia are not fictional — they’re real.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A wooden empty chair in the middle of an empty room with a decorated checkerboard floor - stock photo (Photo By Busà Photography via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lakeidra Chavis, Jodi S. Cohen, Jennifer Smith Richards, Heidi Blake, Zandria F. Robinson, Michael Hall, and Eve Peyser.

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