Search Results for: The Nation

Almost Undefeated: The Forgotten Football Upset of 1976

Meg Oliphant / Getty

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | February 2019 | 19 minutes (4,800 words)

Mitchi Collette has been playing football, in one form or another, for 46 years. The 5’7” spitfire with grey, spiky hair is the co-owner and coach of the Toledo Reign, a team in the Women’s Football Alliance.

Collette is an effective coach in part because she knows firsthand what it’s like to be on the gridiron — she understands how to execute a play. The 65-year-old former outside linebacker knows what it feels like to put on the pads and the helmet and slam your full body weight into another person. She knows what it sounds like when bodies connect and the smell of grass and dirt when you’re thrown to the ground.

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‘I Inherited Luck’: Bridgett M. Davis on Her Family’s Life in the Numbers

Little, Brown and Company

Sheila McClear | Longreads | January 2019 | 14 minutes (3,876 words)

 

Fannie Mae Davis migrated to Detroit from the South in 1955. By the time she started taking penny-bets from the neighbors, she was supporting five children and an ill husband who was unable to continue working at Detroit’s auto plants. The Numbers was an illegal underground betting scheme, a specific 3-digit system where players picked their own numbers. Born in Harlem in the 1920s, it spread throughout the country, mainly by way of African-American neighborhoods, although it was played by everyone and continues to be played in some communities today. It found particularly fertile ground in Detroit, due to booming industrial jobs and a large working- and middle-class African-American population. In 1970, police estimated that 1 in 15 Detroiters, or 100,000 people, played the Numbers every single day (except Sunday, when business was closed).

As the Numbers grew, so did Fannie Davis’s good fortune. As she climbed the ranks in bookmaking, from a bookmaker to a “banker,” she brought her family into the middle class and the American dream. Success came with a catch: she could tell no one outside her family how she made her money.

Even when Michigan started a legal lottery in 1972, Fannie found a way to keep the business going. Meanwhile, she was able to own property, raise her children in comfort, and provide them with an education. Still, she paid a price for her success in worry and instability, constantly girding herself against the next “hit” — a major payout for a winning number that could wipe her savings out completely. Read more…

The Weather and the Wall

iStock / Getty Images Plus, Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Will Meyer | Longreads | January 2019 | 15 minutes (4,073 words)

“At the museum steps
Didn’t we establish
That all this blood is not a dream
This is progress
And we are not that high
We could almost be redeemed”

 — unreleased song by The Lentils

*

For years, changes in butterfly populations and migrations have been considered an “early warning indicator” of global warming. In 2006, a British butterfly specialist told The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert that of 10 species living in Southern England at the time, “Every single one has moved northward since 1982.”

Now, several years and many missed early warning indicators later, the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, has received a letter from Customs and Border Protection announcing the government’s intent to build a border wall through critical habitat for 240 species of butterflies and 300 types of birds. The letter explains that the wall will be 36-feet tall and 20-feet wide, and that an additional 150 feet south of the border will be cleared of all vegetation to create an “enforcement zone.” Comparing the wall’s construction with a calamitous weather event, the National American Butterfly Association president told the San-Antonio Express News that: “For us to financially survive and weather this storm, we’re trying to create a fund that will be kind of like an endowment.” As of this writing, a GoFundMe created to protect the Center has raised just over $24,000.

Meanwhile, given that Mexico hasn’t “paid for it” and won’t, a GoFundMe to finance the wall’s construction raised $20.5 million dollars before GoFundMe decided to offer refunds. That’s nowhere near enough money to actually build the thing, but enough to make you pretty sure the butterflies don’t stand a chance. Indeed, the president and the Republican-controlled Senate have shut down large swaths of the government for over a month, demanding that the Democrats in the House vote to pay for the wall before the government can be reopened. Still, it’s hard to believe the wall is really going up.
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The Hunt for Planet Nine

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Shannon Stirone | Longreads | January 2019 | 37 minutes (9,047 words)

At 9,200 feet, there is 20 percent less oxygen than at sea level, enough to take all the air from my lungs after just three steps. But it didn’t stop Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin from hastily shuffling into the lobby of Hale Pōhaku to check the weather forecast. They stared at the TV monitor, craning their necks, suitcases in one hand, fingers pointing to the screens with the other. “It’s Sunday,” Brown said, “there’s no new forecast until tomorrow. Damn.” We were at base camp on the dormant volcano Mauna Kea, on the big Island of Hawaii. The pair were here to use one of the most powerful telescopes in the world, called Subaru. Tomorrow night, December 3, marked the start of their sixth observing run and their next attempt to find the biggest missing object in our solar system, called — for the moment — Planet Nine.

The Onizuka Center for International Astronomy, located at Hale Pōhaku, looked exactly as you might imagine a Hawaiian dormitory built in the early 1980s would. Each table was covered in an azure nylon tablecloth with salt and pepper shakers. The backs of the chairs depicted scenes from around the island: Mauna Kea, palm trees, snow-capped volcanoes, sandy beaches. It was 7 p.m. when we arrived, and most everyone who lived and worked at these dorms was asleep. (In astronomers’ quarters, most people sleep during the day or wake at odd hours of the night to go to work.) The cafeteria was empty. “Oh my god, they have Pop-Tarts! They haven’t had Pop-Tarts here for ten years!” said Brown as he unwrapped the shiny foil package to put one in the toaster. This was a good sign — Pop-Tarts are the nonsuperstitious tradition of astronomical observing — and also dinner.

We would have a snack and go over the game plan for tomorrow night. Brown and Batygin sat down at one of the round tables, laptops out. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, felt optimistic. Batygin, a theoretical astrophysicist and professor of Planetary Sciences at Caltech, guessed it would take them 10 more years of observing. This is their dynamic. If the planet they’re looking for exists, it is likely six times the mass of Earth, with an atmosphere made of hydrogen and helium covering its rock-and-ice core. What makes it hard to find is its likely location: at least 400 times further away from the sun than our own planet, and 15 to 20 times further out than Pluto. As a theorist Batygin feels that he’s already mathematically proven its existence. But it’s generally accepted that for a planet to be considered discovered in the field of astronomy, the theory must also be accompanied by a photograph. This is where the Subaru telescope comes in. They know that Planet Nine is somewhere in between the constellation Orion and Taurus, but that’s about as exact as they can get, and they’ll need good weather to locate it. Right now the last predicted forecast showed fog. Even at six times the mass of earth, Planet Nine is so far away that it would appear as a barely visible point of light, even through the lens of the most powerful telescope they could get their hands on.

Brown felt optimistic. Batygin guessed it would take them 10 more years of observing.

Though it was only 7 p.m. it was time to settle in for the night. We took a series of wooden bridges faintly illuminated with reddish light to the dorms. (Red light does not affect night vision). Because of the reduced oxygen, the carry-on-size suitcase I had with me might as well have been the dead body of a weightlifter. We stopped to take a break to catch our breath, and looked up. There is hardly any light at Hale Pōhaku after sundown. An hour away from Kona or Hilo, there are no streetlights, no real building lights, no car lights, it’s just dark. What can be easy to forget for anyone that lives in or around a city, is that the night sky is not black, but gray. We are drowning ourselves with so much light that we don’t realize how much light the darkness really contains. Wherever Planet Nine is–if Planet Nine even is–its surface is touched by the sun’s light just like our planet, and as a result some of it is illuminated. The physical particles of light that travel the billions of miles between both bodies also move through space. Their journey begins at the sun, stirring around deep inside the core for thousands of years, moving eventually to the surface where they are finally released. This newly exposed light travels out into the cosmos and to distant unknown worlds. This is why we came, we had to escape the light in order to find it.

We stood there for a moment and as our eyes adjusted, the galaxy turned on. Clusters of stars became the entire sky. Each speck of light had traveled its own distance; traversed its path through the dark void of space, some from the time of the earliest human civilizations, light that left at the dawn of the invention of agriculture and cities, at the time this mountain was last covered in lava. Mike pointed over the hills to a hazy cone of yellow light that shot up like a triangle from the Earth, explaining it was a rare astronomical phenomenon some people wait their whole lives to see: “That is the zodiacal light. It is the sunlight reflecting off of the dust that’s floating in the asteroid belt. This is the best I’ve ever seen it. Wow.” Across the sky to the right was the arm of the Milky Way galaxy. It was as though a painter had dipped their brush in starlight and clouds and smeared it ever so carefully across the universe.

***

With dozens of astronomical discoveries to his name, 53-year-old Mike Brown has the distinction of having found more dwarf planets than any other human in history. Dwarf planets are hundreds of times smaller than Earth, so detecting them when they orbit so far out is extremely tricky. (Pluto, for example, is 500 times less massive than our planet.) In 2001, Brown discovered two dwarf planets called 2001 YH140 and 2001 YJ140. Two years later, using the Palomar Observatory in the mountains outside of San Diego, he caught some light from a distant Kuiper Belt object that no one had ever seen before. It was three times farther away than Pluto, and smaller too. The object was so distant that the view of the sun from its surface could be blotted out with the tip of a pen if held at arm’s length. He named it Sedna. Then, in 2005, he found another object — more massive but just a bit smaller than Pluto. He would later name this dwarf planet Eris after the Greek goddess of strife and discord, and oh how much strife this thing caused.

The International Astronomical Union decided that if there were other “Pluto-size” objects out there then maybe the title “planet” was not a good one for Pluto. Brown became known as the “Pluto Killer” — though mostly by way of his adopted Twitter handle. (Brown said he actually finds Pluto quite interesting, but only admits it under his breath so as not to ruin his bad boy reputation.)

Years later, two astronomers, Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo, noticed that a dozen distant Kuiper Belt objects appeared as though they were all operating in concert in the Unknown Regions of space, sharing certain orbital characteristics. Brown was intrigued by their 2014 paper, but thought something wasn’t quite right with their hypothesis. That same year Batygin, his former student, was working down the hall. Brown asked Batygin if he wouldn’t mind looking at the data with him. Though Brown briefly wondered about the possibility of a planet, he and Batygin quickly pivoted to the idea that enough collective gravity might have put the objects in this orbit. “We tried to examine every hypothesis other than a planet and took it very seriously,” said Batygin. “This is not like you come in one day and think a little bit about it then you’re done. It takes a lot of time. I made almost complete models for every single other hypothesis before we allowed ourselves to consider the planetary explanation. You have to rule out every other possibility first.”

They are not the first to be puzzled by oddities in the outer solar system. Not long after the discovery of Uranus in the 18th century, astronomers observed that the planet’s orbit wasn’t moving at the rate that predictions said it should. The planet appeared to randomly accelerate in its orbit, then decelerate. In 1846, French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier suggested this was the result of another large planet orbiting beyond Uranus that had not yet been found. As in all astronomical observation, an image must be taken in order to consider an object discovered, and no one had ever seen a planet beyond Uranus. Not only did Le Verrier suggest a planet as the cause, he predicted what he thought to be the location. As an expert in mathematics and celestial mechanics, Le Verrier was confident in his claim, so much so that he wrote to German astronomer Johann Galle who was working at the Berlin Observatory at the time, and told him to look at a specific point in the sky. Galle opened the letter on September 23, 1846 and right away he and his assistant, fellow astronomer Heinrich Louis d’Arrest, took to the telescope. Using Le Verrier’s coordinates along with a recently updated star chart, they were able to finally compare this moving object against the tapestry of unmoving stars — they found Neptune less than one hour later.

Brown and Batygin faced a version of the same question Le Verrier asked of himself 169 years ago: What is happening beyond where we can see?

Planet Nine’s Le Verrier is Batygin, who, as 2014 turned into 2015, took to every blackboard and computer simulation he had at his disposal to think over Sheppard and Trujillo’s hypothesis using math that only few people in the world understand. He spent more than a year, along with Brown, trying to figure out why these objects were clustered together in space.

Before Planet Nine, Batygin knew little about observing and Brown didn’t know much about theory, but Planet Nine cannot be found without both. If anyone knew the theory behind how planetary bodies behaved in space, it was Batygin. By 2014, he was a renowned theoretical astrophysicist, and the following year, was named among Forbes 30 Under 30. He had first distinguished himself at the age of 22, when he proved mathematically that our solar system was unstable — a problem Isaac Newton himself had hoped to solve — and that eventually (a few billion years from now) Mercury could either fall into the sun or collide with Venus, which would result in Mars’s ejection from the solar system. Now Brown and Batygin faced a version of the same question Le Verrier asked of himself 169 years ago: What is happening beyond where we can see?

Part of their job was first to try to find a solution less extreme— like a passing star or a galactic anomaly —  than a giant undiscovered planet far off in the depths of the solar system, because, a hidden planet? That was absurd. But finally, in the spring of 2015, they both agreed, the only other explanation for this clustering of Kuiper Belt objects was indeed a planet — a big one. On January 20, 2016, they made the announcement proposing that our solar system has a giant planet orbiting far away from everything else. They told all astronomers with access to the most powerful telescopes to go and find it. They wanted to find it too.

***

Hale Pōhaku. Monday, December 3, 2018. 2:30 a.m.

We met in the cafeteria. It is suggested that all people observing on the summit spend several hours at base camp to adjust to the altitude to prevent dizziness, slurred speech, and death. The summit of the mountain is 13,796 feet and has only 60 percent of the oxygen found at sea level. We were up literally before dawn to begin adjusting to the observing schedule that would now be:

10:30 p.m.: Wake up and eat (Breakfast? Dinner?)

11 p.m.: Leave for the telescope

Midnight to 6 a.m.: Observe

Groggy and grunting, both Brown and Batygin dragged their feet down the stairs of the dorm’s living room. They do their thinking at base camp and their struggling at the summit. (According to Brown, “Thinking at 14,000 feet is not a good idea.”) Over Froot Loops and Cheerios, they carefully ran over their own computer simulations with updated search parameters, making inside jokes to each other and giggling. They sometimes debate the location of the planet for hours at a time. At this particular moment, Brown was not only certain that Planet Nine’s semimajor axis — that is the mean distance of the sun along its orbit — was 310, but he was just about willing to stake his life on it. Batygin disagreed: “The reason that we’re here right now is because it might not be at 310, it might be at 400.” Brown said, looking at me, “Like I said to Konstantin, if we don’t get any data, I’m done with this crap, I’m out.”

“Yeah, but you say that every time,” said Batygin.

To me, “He reminds me that I say that every time.”

“It’s not like you’re doing any actual work.”

“I’m actually doing a lot. It actually takes me a long time.”

It went on like this. At issue was how many data points they were using in their simulations. Brown had two, but Batygin thought this was wrong, and felt that Brown’s room for error (aka, “the wall”) was too small. While they consider themselves “regular Caltech nerds,” this was also reference to Game of Thrones, since all the distant Kuiper Belt objects are cold and living “beyond the wall.” Quick, someone hold the door for this fight:

“You know where else it could be?” said Batygin. “800 AU.”

“Pshhh.”

“What is the error bar wall? If you try to fit the wall—”

“I don’t try to fit the wall.”

If you did—”

I don’t try to fit the wall. You try to fit the wall.”

“If you tried to fit the wall.”

“I wouldn’t.”

This type of friendly, extremely nerdy, almost-marital bickering is typical of Brown and Batygin, and maybe even expected from two guys who have spent the past few years recreating the solar system together. They each run simulations that begin at some point in the past 4 billion years. Since we can’t go back in time to see what could have placed Planet Nine where it is or to actually find out where it is, they each recreate the growth of the planets over time. Their simulations can take from three days to three months to run, and they start them after all of the large planets have formed, some 3 to 4 billion years ago. In 2018 alone they ran more than 2,000 Planet Nine parameters with different masses and locations, averaging 38 new solar systems a week. As a result, the slight variations in data are what keep Brown and Batygin bickering and in check.

In order to find their planet, they need to use one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth to capture the light coming from such a great distance. The Subaru Telescope, which was first named the Japanese National Large Telescope, is owned and operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Among telescopes its size, Subaru has the largest field of view and magnification available of any Earth-based telescope, which is why this is their only hope of finding the planet. The special camera on Subaru, the Hyper Suprime-Cam, is the real trick. At 10 feet high and 870 megapixels, it is able to focus down to the width of a human hair. The next day, they would try after an entire year without any usable data. This is the search for Planet Nine.

At 4 p.m., we went to bed.

***

Hale Pōhaku. Monday, December 3, 2018 (still). 11:15 p.m.

Brown speedwalked into the cafeteria, threw his black messenger bag onto one of the chairs of the round table, and with wide eyes whisper-yelled, “HOW IS THE WEATHER AT THE SUMMIT!?” The 30-second walk from the dorms to the common building was not great. It was raining. There was fog. Batygin and Surhud More, an astronomer and collaborator from the Japanese science team were prepared with an answer. “Only 10 percent humidity at the summit,” More replied trying to settle Brown’s nerves. Over the past three years Brown and Batygin have made five trips to the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea. Of the 18 and a half days they have spent observing, only eight and a half nights have produced useful data. This was no time for fog, almost a four letter word but not quite.

The parking lot at Hale Pōhaku is paved, while most of the road to the summit is not. A sign at the edge of the parking lot reminds visitors to stop and switch into four-wheel drive for the 25-minute drive up the mountain. This delineation between paved road and unpaved road is a reminder that the journey is dangerous, it takes effort, caution. We must have patience, we must move slowly and remember this is a temporary visit. Our oxygen is about to be reduced by 40 percent, and we will see fewer stars because there is less oxygen in our blood to help our eyes focus. We drove at approximately four miles per hour with just the power of our headlights to prevent us from driving one foot to the right and plummeting down the mountain to our death.

I have been to the tops of mountains, but none like the summit of Mauna Kea. It is not just its meaning and value to the Hawaiian people that might influence the feeling there. When I stepped out of the car, I was grabbed by the wind, encircled, wrapped, and marked — human foreigner. It was cold, below freezing, and it was dark. Nearly the darkest part of any night is around midnight, but after my eyes adjusted, somehow there was a little light. Our bodies’ survival mechanisms kick in, pupils are automatically dilated, opened up as wide as possible. In darkness like this we are vulnerable and our animal brains know it. It is the same feeling I imagine I would have if suddenly placed on Mars. This land is not for humans. There is barely any oxygen, there is almost no water in the air. There is no life around, no plants, no birds, nothing — these rocks are the beginning and end of everything. Just enough light from the stars overhead reflected off the bright white paint of the domes. There were no smells. The wind hit me again like a giant palm to my body. Even the sound of the dirt and stone below my shoe was foreign, like stepping on glass but not quite. It was a sound I had never heard. I was not where I had been. I felt reverent and intrusive, almost disoriented. With each crunch of rock under my shoe I was reminded that this is old land. Original land. Volcanoes are monoliths formed from fire and water and air — a million-year-old history cracked and ached below my feet.

I have been to the tops of mountains, but none like the summit of Mauna Kea. I was grabbed by the wind, encircled, wrapped, and marked — human foreigner.

The mountain last saw fire from its peak 4,500 years ago. It was towards the end of the Bronze Age. Humans began to use the plow. The world’s population was only 25 million, and writing would soon begin in Sumeria and Egypt. I felt suddenly as though I had intruded on the past. Standing there being nearly blown over by the wind and pricked with the cold air felt like being in what in Celtic culture they call a “thin place.” The saying goes that the distance between heaven and earth is only three feet apart, but in a thin place, that distance collapses. Oftentimes it is used to describe the moment when a person is about to take their last breath, or right before they take their first. Where heaven meets the Earth — this is Mauna Kea.

For Hawaiians this mountain is sacred. The highest peak in all the Hawaiian islands, it is what they call a “wao akua,” which translates to “home of the gods.” The summit of the Mauna, or mountain, is the place where the gods live. Mauna Kea, in English, translates to “white mountain,” a nod to the snow-capped peaks, but the full name is Mauna a Wakea, or god of the sky. Traditionally, only religious leaders and Hawaiian royalty were allowed to travel to the top, the place for shrines, burials, and ceremonies. The summit has never been just for anyone — only those with the right could ascend the mountain and be in the presence of the gods. For this reason the use of the summit as a place for large telescopes and observing has been highly contested by the Native Hawaiian community, considering construction on the mountain as a desecration of their most sacred land. Now “science city” dominates it. Whether you believe in god, or the gods, or heaven or hell, or nothing at all, the summit of this ancient mountain and this sacred place felt as though the distance between the unreachable stars and the top of the Earth had collapsed and for as long as we were there, we existed in the thin place.

***

Mauna Kea, Subaru Observing Control Room. Tuesday, December 4, 2018. Midnight.

At 14,000 feet Brown’s fears of fog no longer mattered. “I can’t believe it’s so clear!” he said. After taking the elevator up to the third floor where the observing room is, they both nearly ran in, set down their stuff, and immediately got to work. Brown had his laptop open before his jacket was off and Batygin was already on a computer typing in a code that would deliver images to him during the night. They needed to get the telescope calibrated and focused on the patch of sky they would be observing. An engineer and support observer were each at their own computers next to the main screen, which had a countdown clock that read Time to Completion. In this instance, they were calibrating the telescope. It counted down: 136, 135, 134, 133. One computer screen hung from the top of the room that showed multiple views of various control rooms, one of which was in Tokyo where, every morning, they greet the Japanese team. Brown and Batygin had the last half of the night, midnight to 6 a.m., for observing. They would observe with half nights for four days, and the last three they would get the run of the telescope from sundown to sunrise.

The countdown reached zero, and the sound of a cuckoo clock went off. This sound marked the end of calibration. They were ready to observe. It also “cuckcooed!” every time an exposure finished. Their plan was to capture about 100 fields on every half night, weather permitting. The fields functioned like circles on a map, marking the total viewing area of the telescope: around 9 full moons worth. Every exposure lasted 60 seconds, and with each one came a new image of the sky. Batygin’s job was to look at random stars in the images to measure their width. The more circular the stars appeared in the camera, the better the seeing was. If he clicked on a star and it appeared jagged, it meant there was upper atmospheric turbulence; if it was slightly oval, the telescope was out of focus; if it appeared washed out, it meant that there was fog. All of this messed with their ability to capture a precise point of light. That’s a problem when your entire task is to capture a precise point of light. The windier the conditions, the more the stars’ light would smear across what is called an arc second. And to find Planet Nine they needed all arc second readings to be under 2.0, ideally under 1.0. Planet Nine likely travels — at the most — two arc seconds a night, so if the winds are too high in the upper atmosphere, so much that it’s smearing the stars into two or three arc seconds wide, the data become unusable. Think of zero arc seconds as being a perfect point in the sky; as the arc seconds creep up, the light gets blurrier, smearing out a little to the sides and blocking whatever possible planet might be hiding behind.

Brown named each field with four numbers in a spreadsheet and kept a log of stars’ arc seconds that Batygin randomly clicked on in that field. If the “seeing” was bad, Brown would make a note in the log and they would have to go back and reimage that field. This is where observing becomes less romantic and more like a creepy radio number station. They would wait to take about 10 images, and Batygin would then read off the numbers in batches: “4817 is 1.4. 4918 is 0.9. 4919 is 1.05. 5319 is 1.1. 5318 is 1.4,” and so on.

‘We have algorithms? Uh, no. I have spent most of my life writing these programs. This is not stuff you can get at the App Store.’

Minutes after starting up the cameras, they were collecting data. The weather was holding so spirits were high. Maybe a bit too high? Up at 14,000 feet one can get what is called an “altitude high,” which happens when the brain is deprived of oxygen. Some people get cranky, some get sleepy and mellow. Batygin gets happy. More, even, than normal. Every time he comes up to the summit, he has to use oxygen so he knew he was due for some air. There was a first aid cabinet with personal oxygen tanks that you strap around your waist with a belt and pre-wrapped plastic nose inserts. It was 12:45 a.m. and Batygin had not yet plugged in.

He was in the thick of collecting star data and writing down the next set of numbers to read off to Brown when he opened an image of stars. The sensors on the camera, all 116 of them, collect so much of the sky that as soon as you start to zoom in on any photo, not only do you fill the screen with so many stars that it looks like TV static, but galaxies appear, asteroids, you name it. The screen becomes littered with space stuff. With a black-and-white image open, he pointed to the screen and said, “I think I found Planet Nine!” He was joking, but to Brown’s ears, he sounded way too happy. Brown jumped up out of his seat, grumbled “Oh man” under his breath, and walked to the first aid cabinet for a monitor to test Batygin’s oxygen. It was below 70. His lips had turned a little purple, and he was way too excited to be up at midnight and working. Brown was worried about him, but Batygin laughed it off, with a facetious dying message to his wife: “Just tell Olga I love her.” He unwrapped the plastic tubes that strap around your head and placed them inside his nose. “I’m about to get way less happy,” Batygin said, half disappointed, half warning us all. He flipped the switch on the oxygen tank, the batteries started up and he took in one long deep breath.

The control room had more than two dozen computer monitors, most of which have specific readouts: the temperature of the telescope mirror, precipitation, wind speed, etc. Above the computers was a shelf with five speakers that each trace back to a microphone placed on the telescope. Every time the camera’s shutter opened and closed it made a sound like Optimus Prime mid-transformation. The volume was up loud so that staff could walk to the break room for coffee and still hear the shutter open and close, which is does every 60 seconds, followed by a cuckoo to mark the successful download of the exposure. Open, 60 seconds, close, “cuckoo!”

Subaru collects a lot of light and from a large swath of the sky. As a result, every night the team’s data contained hundreds of asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects, many that have never been seen before. Under normal circumstances, these appearances would warrant follow up, and even excitement, but there is an urgency to this search. Brown and Batygin don’t have time to chase these things night after night, which is what is required to “discover” something. These objects are just light that is collected and discarded. As Batygin and More sorted through images, measuring the seeing in each field, discussing numbers and computer codes, a new image came through and they zoomed in. Against the blue of the computer screen, a massive spiral galaxy appeared. It had a wispy ghostlike body with long almost jellyfish-like tendrils that stretched around on itself. We leaned over to look at the picture and said, “Oh wow!” which warranted a quick half-joking reply from Brown: “Ugh, galaxies. Those are the worst.”


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The trouble with looking for one thing in the sky is that our galaxy is full of stars, 100 billion of them, most of which annoy Brown to no end. If Planet Nine exists, it is so faint and so far away that it can easily get overpowered by a regular show-hogging ham of a star. The absolute worst place to look for Planet Nine is into the plane of our galaxy where a lot of those stars live. By 2 a.m., another package of Pop-Tarts had been opened. The numbers were coming in over 1.4 — not great. Brown decided they should move the telescope and begin observing on the other side of the galactic plane. They sent the request to the telescope operators to calculate how long the slew would take. They told him that because of the time of night, to get around the plane of the galaxy would take 40 minutes. “Forty minutes!” Brown exclaimed, “Shit, shit, fuck, fuck.”

Forty minutes is a long time. I was told that it costs a dollar a second to use this telescope, and 40 minutes is a lot of observing time lost when you only have six hours in one night to find a planet. He decided they would wait a few more hours until the galactic plane had moved overhead, so the slew that would have taken 40 minutes would only take 10. They would keep observing with the 1.4s until the 4 a.m. slew.

By 4:30, the slew was complete, and the brightness of the galactic plane was out of the way. Brown asked Batygin to read out the numbers.

“Yep! 7715 is 0.8. 7516 is 1.0. 7515 is 0.7. 7518 is 0.8.” They continued coming in under 1, a relief. Joking in the room resumed. An observer asked Batygin how they process the data after they return to Caltech, to which he replied, “Well, we have these algorithms—”

Brown interjected: “We have algorithms? Uh, no. I have spent most of my life writing these programs. This is not stuff you can get at the App Store.”

“You should sell your algorithms on Google Play,” joked Batygin.

“Ninety-nine cents,” said Brown, with a slight roll of his eyes. “Give me more numbers!”

At 5:50, we heard another “cuckoo!”. The dome began to close and the team packed up the Pop-Tarts and gear. Despite the 1.4s, the night marked the first successful collection of data in more than a year. All anyone could talk about was breakfast. There wasn’t any coffee at the summit, and warm eggs, potatoes, sausage, and enough coffee to fill a bucket was all that anyone wanted.

The beauty of leaving the summit after 6 a.m. was that it took around 25 minutes to get back to base camp: just enough time to watch the sun come up. In just under a minute the dark gray of twilight was swept away. The air was grayish blue, the rocks I had felt under my shoes earlier were a burnt umber, small and light. On Mauna Kea, the sun does not just rise, it cracks the sky open with an almost blinding yellow that is quickly seized and destroyed by an even brighter orange. Every second new colors appeared as banded layers of horizontal clouds. What I once understood to be light blue was slightly more light blue. It met and danced with lavender that bled like watercolor into mauve, then a soft pink. As we left the parking lot and started to drive down the mountain, other telescopes appeared. They were everywhere. Suddenly white and glossy silver, their towering domes stood atop the reddish soil of the peaks. They were massive. As we drove, the car shook from side to side from the road, like being in a paper airplane played with by the wind. We passed the red mounds of ancient volcanic vents that stood there, markers of lost time. The clouds, like the whitish gray of an old cobblestone street lingered in the valley below, and suddenly the purple sky began to turn.

***

Hale Pōhaku. Tuesday, December 4, 2018.7:30 a.m.

The living room just outside the cafeteria had a Christmas tree and completed jigsaw puzzle that looked like it had been baking in the sunlight since the dorms opened in 1983. There were three couches and cozy green chairs and a fireplace with red and white stockings, hung mostly with care. Batygin spent the day back at the dorm, first trying to figure out if a passing star could have perturbed Planet Nine, placing it into its weird orbit. Brown sorted through data from other telescopes trying to — surprise — find Planet Nine. He has spent nearly every free moment in Hawaii combing through data from the ZTF instrument on Palomar’s Samuel Oschin Telescope, the same telescope he used to find the dwarf planets that made him as famous as an astronomer can reasonably expect to be. So far anyway. Lunch was served at 1 p.m., but it would be our dinner. We would go to sleep at 3:30 p.m. and wake up at 11 p.m. to go back to the telescope.

The guys had no idea if they would find Planet Nine that week, and Brown’s mood oscillated accordingly. After they got back to Caltech and received the data from the headquarters in Tokyo, they would rely in large part on machine learning to sort through the roughly 160,000 images they’d have. They would take their list of candidates and run it through the computer, and any that came up as possible Planet Nines, as many as 1,000 images, would then be looked in the old school way: by eye. They would be looking for a tiny speck of moving light. “If ever there were one barely crawling across the screen,” Brown told me, “it would be an ‘Oh shit, that’s it moment.”

This search was different from Brown’s previous endeavors. “For my entire career what I feel like what I have been doing is exploring the solar system,” he told me. “It never occurred to me that there was more primary exploration left to do. So finding Planet Nine is the grandest exploration that can be done of the solar system right now. I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”

“I agree with everything Mike said,” added Batygin.

“First time today!” Brown replied.

“Cherish it. It’s not going to happen again.”

Batygin feels confident that the planet is there. It is not just the evidence of these clustered objects, but after four years of simulations and doing calculations that look like they are in some alien language, he feels that his equations confirm that this is a large mass object that is shepherding these objects into place. Planet Nine is doing this. He wants to know that his math is right, and the detection of Planet Nine would do that: “There’s a different thrill here for me which is actually the thrill of refutation of confirmation. With theory it’s almost like it emerges out of nothing. And really it’s only in our heads, it’s not something that we have seen before. It is a pure outcome of imagination and there’s a thrilling magnetism to that because that imagination might be right. For me that is the most amazing thing, being guided only by mathematics.”

‘The correct analogy is that there’s this singular somewhere in the ocean and you don’t know where — there is only one giant white whale and you need to go kill it because it bit your leg off.’

“I’ve never worked on a problem that’s taken this long,” Brown told me. “It is really difficult to sustain this effort for one singular purpose. It’s hard. Sometimes I think let’s just find it so I can do something else I’m tired of this stupid planet. That’s the hardest part for me other than the frustration of not knowing where to find it.” Batygin agreed. “There have been a few times in the last few years that I actually stopped working on Planet Nine,” he said. “I had moments where I felt like I was getting over-obsessed with this and kind of going in circles so I would make the conscious effort, for the next two months I’m not going to think about Planet Nine, how about magnetic fields of young giant planets or the Schrodinger equation? I took my mind off of things so I could come back with renewed enthusiasm.”

“There is only one way to win this survey, and that is to actually find it.” Brown continued. “The correct analogy is that there’s this singular somewhere in the ocean and you don’t know where — there is only one giant white whale and you need to go kill it because it bit your leg off. Sadly, I think that’s the right analogy.”

***

Hale Pōhaku. Tuesday, December 4, 2018. 11:15 p.m.

Every morning Brown selects a playlist for the drive to the summit. It is usually five songs long, which is about how long it takes to get to the telescope. Brown connected his phone as Batygin, who was driving, switched the car into four-wheel drive and Cake’s 1996 hit “The Distance” began playing. We climbed the rest of the way up the mountain listening to Eminem, Kanye West, Lynyrd Skynyrd (Brown is from Alabama), and Jon Bon Jovi (they attempted the high notes).

When we arrived at the summit it was windy, much more than the day before. These were 50-mile-an-hour gusts, close to the maximum the telescope could take. The upper atmosphere was turbulent too. The first batch of numbers came in all over 2.0, which was very, very bad. While they waited to see if the winds calmed down, Batygin sketched out a graph and an equation in Greek. He kneeled on the floor next to Brown and asked for his help. Despite the fact that when we arrived at the summit we were warned that the altitude would make it harder to do calculations, what Batygin had in his notebook was black-belt-level math, he solved it without seeming to break a sweat. Brown checked the numbers: “We’re getting these 2.6s and 2.9s, and these I declare to be shit.”

“Hold on, I’m still not oxygened up,” said Batygin.

“What is 4319?” Brown asked, referring to one of the fields they had just imaged.

“You’re showing 1.7, I’m showing 2.2. Can you check?”

“Yeah,” Batygin replied, “It’s 2.2. Sorry, got that wrong.”

“Please put on your oxygen.”

Batygin placed the plastic tubes into his nose and, like putting on a cool pair of life-saving sunglasses, slipped the rest of the plastic tubing over his ears, and took a deep breath of that “sweet, sweet oxygen.” The control room computers had read out charts on the screens that showed wind speed and upper atmosphere turbulence as a red spiky graph, literally off the charts. Because of Planet Nine’s slow pace across the cosmos, these 2.0s and higher were useless data. They were looking for a barely visible point of light; if the stars were blurring out all over the place, Planet Nine would remain hiding. “We are not collecting data that is worthwhile,” Brown said as he began putting together a back-up plan for his back-up plan. In their three years of using Subaru they’ve had, as Batygin puts it, “pretty shitty luck.” Not only has the weather been unpredictable and rainy, but, in May 2018, the nearby volcano Kilauea erupted, destroying more than 700 houses and displacing roughly 3,000 residents. There was concern that sustained seismic activity also meant that Subaru and its camera might be rendered useless for a good portion of the year, leaving the team without an opportunity to observe. Plus, sometimes the weather is so bad on the summit, they can’t even go up. “Last December we were sequestered in astronomers headquarters and hoped that it would stop hailing.” Batygin said. “We didn’t collect one image that whole run. It was really disappointing.”

The team checked on the numbers again, which were climbing beyond 2.5, nearly killing Brown every time. Just short of defeated he said, “Three arc seconds and I’m going to the beach,” then requested more numbers.

“OK, this is a record breaker, are you ready?” asked Batygin.

Brown, resigned: “Yeah.”

“3.3.”

The entire room shouted: “3.3!”

“In all my twenty-five years of observing on Mauna Kea I have never had three arc seconds,” Brown said. Numbers this bad were like turning this gigantic 8.2-meter telescope into a one-meter telescope; it would be impossible to find Planet Nine like this. Brown sat at his computer, arms crossed, and said, “The seeing is crappy, but the good news is clouds are coming in!” Indeed a ghostlike cloud was creeping over the valley and heading straight toward the summit. They waited another 20 minutes or so before Brown asked how it was looking.

Batygin: “Ok, now THIS is a record. Are you ready? 4919 is 3.8.”

Entire room: “3.8!”

Brown: “3.8!? 3.8! I think … I officially declare failure, which will significantly influence the music mix on the way down.”

At 4:10 a.m. Brown and Batygin decided to try the other side of the galactic plane, in the hope that the seeing would be better, and indeed the numbers improved — back down to 1.3s and 1.5s. One of the tricky and interesting things about if this planet exists, is that if they find it, they will have absolutely no idea how it got there. While snacks were consumed and the room filled with a symphony of yawns, Batygin stared into space. He was doing the opposite of what one should do at 14,000 feet — thinking, writing code, and doing some complex math to try to figure out how the movement of our galaxy and passing stars could have affected Planet Nine over time in order to determine the planet’s location. By 5:20 a.m. the numbers were staying low, which was just enough to save this batch. At 5:51 a.m. we heard a cuckoo. The morning’s drive-down-the-mountain playlist appropriately began with the Rolling Stones’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

On Mauna Kea, the sun does not just rise, it cracks the sky open with an almost blinding yellow that is quickly seized and destroyed by an even brighter orange.

As day broke, the sky filled again with purples and pinks, the colors of dreams. We drove down the road and watched the landscape change: Small reddish rocks turned into boulders remaining from the Ice Age, when these mountains were once covered in glaciers. A third of the way down, a random shrub appeared alone next to the road. As we approached Hale Pōhaku, small bee-size yellow wildflowers danced left to right in the breeze, and tall stalk-like plants nestled into the ancient volcanic rock. Anyone would say it was beautiful here, the thick marshmallow clouds hovering in the valley below, always threatening the mental well-being of the astronomers watching out the window.

Back at base camp, around the same round table with the nylon tablecloth, Batygin and Brown reflected on the previous four years. “We had this conversation about a year ago,” said Batygin. “We were driving up to Mauna Kea, and Mike was like, ‘I think … this is kind of weird,’ and it is at the end of the day. It is weird because we get on a plane and we go to a beautiful island and instead of spending time like normal people do in Hawaii, we go to the only part of the island that is completely dead, and we stay up all night looking at the sky trying to find something that basically we imagine to be there. It’s a strange behavior but man, it’s so satisfying.”

***

I left Mauna Kea on Wednesday afternoon, right as the team was due to go to sleep. They observed five more nights and the weather cooperated for all of them. It was the first meaningful collection of data in more than a year. I waited until they both got back home to call and find out how it went. I spoke to Brown first. It had been just over two weeks and all of the images collected from the week of observing had not yet reached his desk at Caltech. “I’m depressed,” he said. “I’m in my we’re-not-going-to-find-it mode.” If they don’t find it this time, Brown said, “It’s perfectly plausible that we’ve pointed in the right direction and we’ve missed it.”

Two more weeks passed, a new year arrived, and with it came their data. I asked if they found it but so far, Planet Nine has not made its big debut. They are just starting to sort through their data, though. There is still hope. The trip wasn’t exactly their last chance to find Planet Nine. They’ll return in February for another round of observing. If they don’t find it then? “We will just keep going,” Batygin told me, “and by ‘keep going’ what I mean is wait for LSST.” The LSST is the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is being constructed in the Chilean desert. It will be fully operational in 2022; its mirror will be even larger than Subaru and will scan the skies every possible clear night. If Planet Nine is out there, this thing will find it. And at first, it will likely discover 100’s more long-period Kuiper Belt objects that will point the team to the direction of Planet Nine.

“There’s a 5 or 10 percent chance anytime you look you’ll miss it because there’s a star in the way,” said Brown, “but you know, it just means — increasingly when you don’t find it you have to wonder what the heck is really going on here. I don’t think the answer is that there is no Planet Nine, certainly the phenomena that Planet Nine does are not going away. I don’t think there’s any other solution aside from Planet Nine to explain those phenomena so the question is why are we potentially failing in our prediction of where it is?”

Batygin said that finding Planet Nine is so difficult that it is not just like searching for a needle in a haystack, it is like “you’re also looking for it with the lights off and a bunch of fog and your calculations tell you that there should be one more needle in this room somewhere.” Can the effort be worth it? According to Brown, yes. “This is like first-level exploration of our solar system. This is like, finding a new continent,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine that any effort that I could actually put in would be ridiculous if we can actually find this thing that’s in our solar system that nobody knows about.”

Batygin said, “It’s really easy to miss something when you’re scanning the sky once, it’s true when you’re looking for the One Thing. We may or may not find Planet Nine, and of course if we find it, great, if we don’t find it then it doesn’t really mean anything.”

‘Finding Planet Nine is the grandest exploration that can be done of the solar system right now. I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.’

If they do find their planet, our daily life will mostly remain the same. Sure, mobiles over children’s beds might have nine planets putting them into a peaceful sleep; science textbooks will have to be edited and books about our solar system rewritten. But after the hullabaloo of the news cycle and the introduction of a new planet to all of humankind, things will go back to normal. But for science and the field of astronomy, it will help complete a puzzle and make for many new ones as well. If Planet Nine exists, and if it is found, not only will it serve as a way to understand the bulk of exoplanets that have been discovered around other stars, but it will also help us understand the history of our own solar system; it will help us understand more of how the planets came to be and why they settled where they did. It will be one of the 21st century’s greatest scientific discoveries. We have no idea what a six-Earth mass planet looks like. Uranus and Neptune are 14 and 17 Earth masses; Mars is 10 times less massive than Earth. There is nothing in our solar system that size. Six Earth masses could essentially be a core of a planet like Uranus and Neptune, and if Planet Nine exists that is likely its story. The team thinks that during the early days of the solar system, when the outer planets were forming, there was an additional planetary core, near where Uranus and Neptune were growing. But somewhere in those early days, the third core somehow got flung out by a gravitational interaction with Jupiter or Saturn, and as it was heading out of the solar system, became trapped by the gravity of the sun. Since that time it has been orbiting in the distant solar system, silently sculpting Kuiper Belt objects, marking evidence of its existence. If these objects do in fact point to Planet Nine, it will have been quite the planetary smoke signal, one so unlikely to be found.

And they’re not the only ones who’ve been scooped when searching for something. In January 1613, while observing Jupiter and its moons, Galileo caught a glimpse of what he thought was a “fixed star.” He marked a dark spot in his notebook and moved on. He had unknowingly detected the light from Neptune. And just months before Le Verrier predicted its existence, an observatory in England detected it three separate times, noting it as a star. Batygin takes comfort in facts like these. “When there is one thing you’re looking for in the night sky — even the world’s best astronomer, which certainly Galileo was really good — you’re going to miss it the first twenty-five times,” he said.

Many in the scientific community are still skeptical of Planet Nine’s existence. Batygin understands their skepticism: “Our firm belief is that only crazy people propose planets beyond Neptune.” But he and Brown have now joined the ranks of those throughout history who have said, “But what about a giant planet!” Only this time, they mean it, and they have the math to back it up. Batygin, being the theorist that he is, feels that he has already proven its existence, the same way Le Verrier predicted Neptune’s. Sure Galle was lucky that he happened to be using the telescope at the exact right time and that D’Arrest had brought a star chart with him, but even if he hadn’t, someone, someday would have found Neptune. For Planet Nine, its discovery day awaits. Until that day comes, if it ever does, they will keep searching.

After the observing run was complete, I asked the pair if they ever felt that trying to find Planet Nine was ridiculous, that the whole notion of a giant missing planet and the efforts they have gone to to find it ever make them feel defeated. They both gave me roughly the same response: no. Their answer brought to mind the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus. He thought a lot about the myth of Sisyphus and plucked his unfortunate mythical backstory away from the root of his actions, the eternal task of pushing a boulder up a mountain only to watch it fall back down again. For Camus, he symbolized the despair that can come from making consistent efforts only to be disappointed again and again with the outcome. However he saw this phenomenon with humankind. We have an ability to feel joy and find happiness in our tasks before a reward of completion ever arrives, even if it never does. “The struggle itself… is enough to fill a man’s heart,” he wrote.

Despite their constant disappointment and exhaustion, both Brown and Batygin find joy in the process of the search, in the not-knowing, in the wondering, and maybe sometimes even the waiting. “Man’s sole greatness is to fight against what is beyond him,” Camus said. So why do we bother going to the tops of mountains anyway? To see whatever is below, to understand if we are safe down there? We do it to feel bigger. To feel smaller. To get a new perspective, to do it and say we did it. There are many reasons to make that journey, to see what it is like on the other side, to get to know ourselves better. No one climbs a mountain without searching for an answer to something. So many hero stories begin or end at the top of a mountain. It is an act of completion, a marker of accomplishment, a reminder that one is alive and despite the absurdity of it all we can get ourselves to the top of the sky. Or maybe the attempt to reach the summit is in itself, enough. Camus said for this reason that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

* * *

Shannon Stirone Shannon Stirone is a freelance writer based in California focused on NASA, space policy, and space exploration. Her work has appeared in Popular Science, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

 

Editor: Kelly Stout

Fact checker: Matt Giles

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

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Traveling While Black Across the Atlantic Ocean

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Ethelene Whitmire | Longreads | January 2019 | 19 minutes (4,642 words)

“Welcome aboard!” the Cunard agent exclaimed, and I suddenly felt a clichéd warm tingling sensation. After hesitating for several weeks, I finally…booked a passage? I got a berth? I do not know the lingo. So let us say I got a ticket for a seven-day, eastbound, transatlantic crossing on Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 from New York City (technically the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal) to Southampton, England for June, 2018, the first leg of a trip to Denmark. I was committed — or semi-committed. I placed a 10% deposit (fully refundable for a few weeks) to hold my space, and immediately made a note in my electronic calendar for two days before the deadline to remind myself to cancel if I changed my mind. I’d visited Denmark 12 times since my initial trip in May and June, 2010, including a year as a Fulbright scholar, but I’d always flown there.

I am writing a book about African Americans in 20th century Denmark. During the past few years I followed in their footsteps by visiting Danish cities, towns, villages, islands, a prison, numerous castles, jazz clubs, an educational institution, and the homes and studios where they lived, visited, performed, toured, and studied. A friend suggested I more accurately recreate the experience of the people in my book who lived in the first half of the 20th century, when the only way to get to Denmark from the United States was to cross the Atlantic Ocean by ship. I’d read much of what they’d written about their experiences in letters home, in memoirs, and in one case, in a newspaper column.

They traveled abroad during the Jim Crow era in the United States, and many feared they would face racism and even possible segregation on the ships. Perhaps they were familiar with the oft-told tale of former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ 1845 crossing. He was almost thrown overboard by some Americans after the captain invited him to make an anti-slavery speech. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor called Douglass’ voyage “harrowing” in Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War. William M. Fowler, Jr. wrote in Steam Titans: Cunard, Collins, and the Epic Battle for Commerce on the North Atlantic that although Douglass booked a first-class cabin, once he was on the Cambria he “discovered that he had been reassigned to quarters in the forecastle, separate from the other passengers, and he was advised to remain secluded there during the crossing.”

I did not worry about segregation during my 21st century transatlantic crossing, but wondered about and anticipated possible microaggressions — slights and condescending comments often based on racial stereotypes. I did not see many images in Cunard’s brochures and website featuring Black people among the passengers. I was educated in predominantly white institutions and worked at similar institutions as an administrator and as a professor, so I was used to being in white spaces. And I live in Wisconsin — one of the whitest states in the nation. I wondered what would my journey be like on the Atlantic Ocean?
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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.

* * *

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.

* * *

“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.

Revisiting the #MeToo Movement: A Reading List

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In her TED Talk “Me Too is a movement, not a moment” at TED Women 2018, Tarana Burke paces across the stage, saying, “I’ve read article after article bemoaning wealthy white men who have landed softly with their golden parachutes following the disclosure of their terrible behavior. And we’re asked to consider their futures. But what of survivors?”

Burke’s TED Talk, which took place in late November 2018, came just after the one-year mark of the #MeToo hashtag going viral, giving Burke — and others — a chance to reflect on the history of the movement, and whether or not it’s headed in a direction that supports Burke’s original intent.

“This movement is constantly being called a watershed moment, or even a reckoning, but I wake up some days feeling like all evidence points to the contrary,” Burke says. She pauses, shaking her head. “We have moved so far away from the origins of this movement that started a decade ago, or even the intentions of the hashtag that started just a year ago, that sometimes, the Me Too movement that I hear some people talk about is unrecognizable to me.”

Roxane Gay, in a piece for Refinery 29 at the one-year mark of the #MeToo hashtag, expresses how the movement has diverged from the heart of Burke’s work, asking, “What will change for women? What, especially, will change for the most vulnerable women among us — the undocumented, women of color, working class women, single mothers? What will change for women who cannot afford to come forward when they are harassed or assaulted? As I consider this past year, what strikes me is how #MeToo has mostly benefited culturally prominent, mostly white women.”

Burke’s movement, which originally began in 2006, was originally intended, as Abby Ohlheiser reports in The Chicago Tribune, “to help women and girls — particularly women and girls of color — who had also survived sexual violence.” Beyond the one-year mark of the hashtag going viral and the decade of work Burke has done to support survivors of sexual assault, there exists a history of black women activists fighting against sexual violence. As Danielle McGuire writes in her essay “Recy Taylor, Oprah Winfrey, and the long history of black women saying #MeToo” for The Washington Post, “stories of subversion date from the 1830s, when Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman in North Carolina, lived in a crawl space for years to escape her owner’s sexual abuse.”

And Burke, in her TED Talk, emphasizes the true purpose of the #MeToo movement, which is “a movement about the far-reaching power of empathy. And so it’s about the millions and millions of people who, one year ago, raised their hands to say, ‘Me Too,’ and their hands are still raised while the media that they consume erases them and politicians who they elected to represent them pivot away from solutions.”

This erasure from media is noted by Salamishah Tillet and Scheherazade Tillet, in a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, “After the ‘Surviving R. Kelly’ Documentary, #MeToo Has Finally Returned to Black Girls.” Tillet and Tillet note, “even today, as #MeToo continues to dominate headlines, black girls have been invisible in the movement.” While the release of Surviving R. Kelly has pivoted attention toward black women, Tillet and Tillet write, “our optimism is tempered by history, which shows that social justice movements rarely center, for any meaningful period, on black girls, or anyone who has survived sexual violence. That’s because black girls experience racial, gender and economic oppressions at the same time, a phenomenon the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw calls intersectionality. As a result, their voices and experiences do not neatly fit into a single-issue narrative of gender or race.”

The collection of essays below seeks to heed Burke’s call for inclusivity and her vision of #MeToo as “a movement about the one-in-four girls and the one-in-six boys who are sexually assaulted every year and carry those wounds into adulthood. It’s about the 84 percent of trans women who will be sexually assaulted this year. And the indigenous women, who are three-and-a-half times more likely to be sexually assaulted than any other group. Or people with disabilities, who are seven times more likely to be sexually abused. It’s about the 60 percent of black girls like me who will be experiencing sexual violence before they turn 18. And the thousands and thousands of low-wage workers who are being sexually harassed right now on jobs that they can’t afford to quit.”

1. The Sexual Assault Epidemic That No One Is Talking About (Aviva Stahl, July, 25, 2018, The Village Voice)

Iffat and Mariam (second name changed for anonymity) are two New York City residents who have experienced Islamaphobia firsthand; both women have been assaulted while using public transportation. In this piece, Aviva Stahl reports that more than “one in four” “Muslim Arab hijab-wearing women…had been intentionally pushed or shoved on a subway platform.”

The #MeToo movement has brought new attention to street harassment of women, but Ahmad says she doesn’t think it’s done enough to address the experiences of Muslim women. “I don’t think they’re doing anything” to address gendered Islamophobia, she says. “As a survivor of that specific kind of [Islamophobic] violence, I don’t see myself in that movement. It doesn’t seem connected to the realities of Muslim women.”

2. Hotels See Panic Buttons as a #MeToo Solution for Workers. Guest Bans? Not So Fast. (Julia Jacobs, November 11, 2018, The New York Times)

After Ms. Melara, a housekeeper in Southern California, was accosted by a guest who exposed himself to her, she locked herself in a nearby room to escape, but wasn’t given assistance until nearly twenty minutes later. Her story is not an anomaly; many workers in the hotel industry are sexually assaulted and harassed by guests. Julia Jacobs reports on panic buttons, a solution proposed by the hotel industry to protect workers.

3. We Need to Include Black Women’s Experience in the Movement Against Campus Sexual Assault (Candace King, June 15, 2018, The Nation)

Only a few weeks after Venkayla Haynes received a rape whistle at her Spelman college freshman orientation, she was raped by a football player. Though Haynes reported the rape to a Dean at Spelman at the time, her situation was complicated by “institutional realities. Both Haynes and her assailant are black.”

Haynes believes the way college administrators responded to her assault reflects longstanding tendencies in the black community to shield black men from interactions with authorities.

“We always come to these situations where we can’t come forward because we want to protect black men or protect our black brothers because they’re already fighting against a system that further criminalizes them,” Haynes said.

4. #NotInvisible: Why are Native American women vanishing? (Sharon Cohen, September 6, 2018, The Associated Press)

 

Ashley HeavyRunner Loring has been missing since June 2017, and her family has embarked on around 40 searches in attempts to locate her. Ashley is one of many missing or murdered Native American women and girls, as Sharan Cohen reports in this piece, though the precise number is difficult to establish because “some cases go unreported, others aren’t documented thoroughly and there isn’t a specific government database tracking these cases.”

On some reservations, Native American women are murdered at a rate more than 10 times the national average and more than half of Alaska Native and Native women have experienced sexual violence at some point, according to the U.S. Justice Department. A 2016 study found more than 80 percent of Native women experience violence in their lifetimes.

5. In The #MeToo Conversation, Transgender People Face a Barrier to Belief (KC Clements, April 18, 2018, them.)

Much of the narrative about #MeToo has revolved around sexual assault between cisgender heterosexual people, and too many still believe that it is only experienced by conventionally attractive cisgender women, or that is only perpetrated by “bad” cisgender men.

I’ve wondered where exactly I fit into this dialogue, because I’m a nonbinary person who was assigned female at birth, and, well, #MeToo.

KC Clements recalls their own experiences with sexual harassment and assault, presents testimonies from other trans people, and urges inclusivity, emphasizing the need for more resources, support, and materials for trans survivors of assault and harassment.

Related Read: Trans Women and Femmes Are Shouting #MeToo – But Are You Listening? (Meredith Talusan, March 2, 2018, them.)

6. When will MeToo become WeToo? Some say voices of black women, working class left out (Charisse Jones, October 5, 2018, USA Today)

After being sexually harassed by coworkers at McDonald’s, her place of employment, Kim Lawson, along with nine other employees, filed a harassment complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

An analysis by the law center of complaints filed from 2012 to 2016 with the EEOC found that black women working in the private sector lodged sexual harassment charges at nearly three times the rate of white women.

While the media has focused extensively on the #MeToo movement in Hollywood, Lawson, as well as other activists, emphasize that the #MeToo movement needs to include women of color, particularly those working lower-wage jobs.

7. The Sexual Assault Epidemic No One Talks About (Joseph Shapiro, January 8, 2018, NPR)

In February 2016, Pauline, a 46-year old woman who lived with a longtime caretaker, was raped by two boys who were part of the family. In this piece, the product of a yearlong investigation by NPR, Joseph Shapiro details the staggering statistics related to sexual assault for people with intellectual disabilities, including the fact that women and men with intellectual disabilities are seven times more likely to be sexually assaulted than people without disabilities.

The federal numbers, and the results of our own database, show that people with intellectual disabilities are vulnerable everywhere, including in places where they should feel safest: where they live, work, go to school; on van rides to medical appointments and in public places.

Related read: The #MeToo Movement Hasn’t Been Inclusive of the Disability Community (Emily Flores, April 24, 2018, Teen Vogue)

8. R. Kelly and the Complexities of Race in the #MeToo Era (Jelani Cobb, January 11, 2019, The New Yorker)

 

Jelani Cobb opens this piece with a memory from childhood of a woman with a black eye who visits his mother. Cobb’s mother later tells him that the woman had been abused by her husband, and Cobb recalls the moment being a “lesson in the consequences of male brutality. It was an implicit instruction in how I was not to behave as a man.” By putting his personal experience in conversation with the recent public response to Surviving R. Kelly, Cobb delves into complexities of race and reporting violence, and what it means to bear witness to brutality in the era of #MeToo.

There’s a gulf between the accusations directed at Harvey WeinsteinMatt Lauer, and Les Moonves—wealthy white men whose alleged excesses were understood as a perquisite of their status—and those directed at Bill Cosby and R. Kelly, black men for whom success represented some broader communal hope that long odds in life could be surmounted. Cosby and Kelly know this, which is part of the reason that they were so effective at manipulating public sentiment around their various accusations.

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

Theatre of Wokeness

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | January 2019 | 7 minutes (1,942 words)

There’s a certain kind of conversation everybody seems to be having right now. It takes place most often online, but sometimes in real life. Specifics vary, and its frequency and level of intensity ebbs and flows with the news cycle. An awards show, a White House firing, a video of police misconduct, a local ballot initiative on medical marijuana — anything tangentially related to race or gender can be fodder. It starts out engaging enough. Then tensions mount; participants morph into archetypes. Its substance diminishes into the reduced, neutered language of the “moment” before disintegrating altogether.

In a would-be map of this phenomenon, the first Women’s March, held the day after President Trump’s inauguration, is an inflection point. On November 9, 2016, Teresa Shook, a white former attorney living in Hawaii, created a Facebook event for “a women’s march” that quickly drew several thousand RSVPs. Shook quickly enlisted a small group of women to help with early planning. Organizers were frightened the incoming administration would “threaten access to women’s healthcare, erode protection against sexual violence and roll back aid to struggling mothers.” Shook felt “shock and disbelief that this type of sentiment could win,” she told Reuters. “We had to let people know that is not who we are.” Yet, Trump’s victory wouldn’t have happened without heavy support from white women in the electorate. Terms like “intersectionality” entered the mass media’s lexicon to help explain the difficulty inherent in assembling women into a voting bloc. Along with the election’s results, the terms proliferated in a major way via Instagram, hashtags, and memes.

The march’s founders and early organizers soon appointed a diverse cadre  of women to leadership, with assistance from activist and political connector Michael Skolnik. The organizers also made sure an anti-racism agenda was part of their framework. Pulled together in just a few short months, the March was a resounding success. The central protest, in Washington, drew an estimated half a million attendees (yielding more than a million rides on DC’s Metro, the second largest crowd in its history, after the first inauguration of Barack Obama). When counting the well-attended “sister marches” held around the country, “1 percent to 1.6 percent of the U.S. population” participated in a demonstration, reported the Washington Post.

It isn’t exaggerating to say people who weren’t before are now concerned about race and social justice. According to a CNN / Kaiser poll, 49% of Americans said racism is “a big problem” in 2015, up from just over a quarter who said so in 2011. Gender inequality, too, seems top of mind: A Pew Research Center survey from 2018 said about half of Americans think men getting away with sexual harassment or assault is “a major problem.”

Some say we’re living through “a moment,” that we’re “having a reckoning.” I have a hard time with those words — they’re soundbite-y, naïve, and incomplete, as if the “moment” is for people who hadn’t even had to think about inequality or dealt with it in any large or small way — being followed around a store, or subjected to different standards on a job, or denied an apartment for no obvious reason. And if that’s the case, how’s it different from any other moment? Does it hold up, withstand rigor, or is it a surface-level reckoning, concerned with optics and the appearance of social justice and equality?

The Women’s March’s leaders have had to answer such questions. Under charges of administrative mismanagement as well as anti-Semitism, due to its alleged negligence toward Jewish women and interactions with the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, some leaders and sister groups have split off from the central organizing body. Last August, Black Women’s Blueprint, a Brooklyn-based organization focused on policy advocacy and grassroots organizing, wrote Women’s March, Inc. an open letter: “Rather than rubbing elbows and entreating known misogynist leaders… we charge you to meet us in the trenches.” Hastily organized and orchestrated in pursuit of an of-the-moment illusion of inclusion, or what I’ll call a “theatre of wokeness,” the Women’s March may be in danger of imploding. In November, the founder, Shook, called for all four co-chairs to step down, and over the past few weeks (leading up to the third march, taking place January 19), several former sponsors and partners walked away from the March, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, EMILY’s List, and the Democratic National Committee.

Along with institutional and personal reckonings, our “moment” has also birthed a category of creations and products that support, mirror, and mine it. Sitcom episodes, satirical bits, comedy specials, films, and music, and other performance art across and in between genres and mediums have attempted to mimic and explore our confusion, our dinner table banter, the rhythm of our outrage cycle, our anxieties, awakenings, and incipient healing. It’s a prolific time. The results, for me, have been mixed; sometimes, in an attempt to titillate or provoke, characterization, interiority, or reflection gets lost or weighed down in favor of an appropriate level of wokeness. Other times, I’ve questioned the motives of the creators, wondering if staying current and in tune with the “moment” is what it’s all about after all. More than anything I wonder what the whole point is of the reckoning. In our creative responses, are we, in some cases, reinscribing the same disappointments we’re trying to reconcile? Further, what comes after the problems get addressed? What happens if, when, and after a collective consciousness has been awakened?


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I had these and other questions watching Slave Play, a three-act satire that ran until January 13 at the New York Theater Workshop (I also heard whispers that it could be headed for Broadway). Director Robert O’Hara and playwright Jeremy O. Harris — a student at Yale’s School of Drama, and one of New York Times Style Magazine’s Black male writers of our time — imagines a world that, once fully revealed, looks very much like our own. Yet, we don’t know that at first. We see, instead, three interracial couples engaged in “slave play,” or sexual acts meant to simulate the race, gender, and class dynamics of antebellum America. Disorienting details hint that something is askew. The slave woman twerking on the floor to Rihanna while cleaning; the mistress twitchily summoning a tall, light-skinned fiddler to her bedside; the Black overseer crying frustrated tears through pleasure as his white indentured partner licks his boots. It titillates, it makes us (some of us, mostly the white folks) laugh. It, thankfully, ends quickly, giving way to a modern-day scene that sends up a certain kind of east coast, academic, therapeutic language, the language of our “moment,” to hilarious effect. It turns out the three interracial couples are all in therapy because the Black partners can no longer feel sexual pleasure in their respective relationships. And true to real life, the white partners (or those with closest proximity to whiteness) are emotive, externalized, and sometimes vocally annoyed, while the Black partners, for much of the time, simmer, stunned and silent.

All the actors play to some level of humiliation, but the Black woman in the therapeutic experiment, Kaneisha, played with a convincing prickliness by Teyonah Parris, seems to get especially short shrift: face down, she eats a busted cantaloupe off the floor in the first act, and by the third act, exorcises some trauma when her formerly petulant partner agrees to call her a “nasty negress” while they’re having sex. “Thank you for listening,” she says after the word play turns into several minutes of vigorous fucking.

The ending is an unsettling, confusing affair. I wasn’t sure if a rape had taken place or if it was, instead, a “breakthrough” achieved through consent. At any rate the labor of Parris, on whose character arc the entire show builds its human core, stayed heavy on my mind for days.

“I don’t want people to be able to walk away from a play about slavery and say, ‘Oh, well, that’s not about 2018,’” Slave Play’s playwright told an audience of donors, according to a Times profile. But who, exactly, doesn’t notice that the reverberations of slavery are still with us? If we’re really trying to wake up white people, I wish folks would say that. Slave Play’s Black cast members likely had to do heavier lifting — physically and psychically —  than the white (or white-ish) cast members in reimagining scenes drawn from America’s slave past. Do these interventions even work? And if they do, at what cost— to the audiences who may be harmed? To the cast and crew?

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The politics of pleasure are as ripe as any place to dig, for creative play, for exploration and elucidation, mapped as it is into the subconscious, and there’s a legacy of its exploration in the work of Frantz Fanon and Adrienne Kennedy, both apparently influences on Slave Play’s playwright. The goal is to unsettle, to probe, and I can get with that, up to a point. What about context[1], interiority, reflection within the fictive universe of a piece? Maybe more of that would have been helpful in constructing Kaneisha as more than a spectacle. She speaks a lot, especially in the third act, but mostly, her character is seen through the eyes of her partner, as she talks about herself in relation to him and other white people from her past.

Even a journalistic endeavor could be improved with an ethics of care. In the six-part docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly,” which aired January 3-5 on Lifetime (and is still available on demand), the drama of Kelly’s victims’ pain is the main event, drawn out  for the benefit of the collective consciousness. I was well-acquainted with the story, yet still not entirely prepared for the grotesque details I saw and heard.

The series has already brought what feels like a shift: a lawyer for one of the families accusing Kelly confirmed that senior investigators from Fulton County, Georgia interviewed his client. The state’s attorney in Cook County, Illinois has asked for victims to reach out. There have also been costs: survivors featured in the documentary have been doxxed, discredited, and disparaged online. I saw it in my own feeds, from people in my own family. I’ve seen Black women, unaffiliated with Kelly, report they’re “not ok” and had difficulty sleeping after watching or talking about the series. In the series, some survivors were visibly traumatized during their interviews. (Watching Asante McGee revist a room she recalled being held captive in reminded me of a question from In the Wake: “Where is the breaking point, the breath, the pause…?”) How, really, should you manage when confronted with the truth of just how vulnerable you are?[2] More context could help. The music industry has a history of sexually exploiting underage girls—critics Ann Powers and Nelson George explain this powerfully in the series— but so does, specifically, the tradition of Black music upon which Kelly built everything. He’s a hip-hop generation misogynist who learned from his peers and from soul music forebears like Marvin Gaye and Al Green and James Brown, all of whom have allegations from harmed women tainting their legacies. Black Gen X-ers didn’t handle R. Kelly before because their forebears didn’t handle their own.

In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love writes, “For groups constituted by historical injury, the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it.” Audiences and creators ask a great deal of people when they’re digging into the past, probing around the depths of ancient and not-so-ancient traumas. If the moment requires that the confusion of the present and the pain of the past get served up with realistic viscerality — if it’s about more than being current, and more than just theatre — special care should be taken with the subject matter as well as the casts, sources, and audiences most likely to be impacted.  

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[1] On January 14, 2019, Jonathan Square of the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom published a syllabus to help with processing Slave Play.

[2] Girls for Gender Equity and Black Women’s Blueprint produced and published reading guides and community toolkits for “Surviving R. Kelly.”

The Silence of Women

A scold's bridle. From The Strand Magazine:, July to December, 1894. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Jane Brox| an excerpt adapted from Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives| Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | Januray 2019 | 15 minutes (4,034 words)



What becometh a woman best, and first of all? Silence. What second? Silence. What third? Silence. What fourth? Silence. Yea, if a man should aske me till Domes daie I would still crie silence, silence.

Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, 1560


For women, silence within the world of judicial punishment has its own complex history. It’s less recorded than that of men, and fragmented. Details must be teased out of obscurity and can be distorted by what is absent. Often, there are more questions than answers for punishment that amounts to silencing on top of silence, since women have long been expected to govern their tongue.

In colonial America this presumption of silence was reinforced by women’s subordinate place in society, and bolstered by centuries of English common law. No woman had the right to vote and once she married — in an age when most women married — she became subject to the law of coverture, which meant that she not only became dependent on her husband but, as William Blackstone in his eighteenth-century work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, explains: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing, and is therefore called in our law — French, a femme covert… under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture.” Read more…

The Laws of the Awards Podium Protest

Getty Historical, John Shearer / AP, Matt Sayles / Invision / AP, Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 10 minutes (2,437 words)

Imagine Bradley Cooper won the Oscar for A Star Is Born. And imagine that, in his place, a beautiful young Mexican woman in traditional huipil dress — white tunic, floral embroidery — calmly approached the podium and held up her hand to block the award being extended to her. Imagine that woman stood at the microphone and told a room full of Hollywood celebrities and an audience of millions, “Bradley Cooper very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award and the reasons for this are the treatment of Mexicans today by America.” What would the response be? Would they boo like they did in 1973 when Marlon Brando sent activist Sacheen Littlefeather on his behalf and she basically said those same words but swap out Mexicans for Native Americans? Since then the Hollywood awards season podium has increasingly become a place of protest, though not without some parameters. It would not be unexpected over the next two months to see a woman of color holding the industry accountable on stage — Regina King did just that last week at the Golden Globes — but seeing a white man — a representative of the population largely responsible for oppression within Hollywood — addressing not only the problems within his world but his own complicity in it? That’s not the way things are done. But to quote Cooper himself in A Star is Born: “Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.” Read more…