Search Results for: The New Republic

Baring the Bones of the Lost Country: The Last Paleontologist in Venezuela

Photo courtesy of Ascanio Rincon / Tachiraptor admirabilis illustration by Maurílio Oliveira / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Zoe Valery | Longreads | February 2019 | 18 minutes (5,011 words)

 

— Orocual tar pit, northeastern Venezuela, 2007 C.E.

Ascanio Rincón was standing on a veritable fossil paradise when one of his students brought to his attention a tooth that was sticking out through the dirt. The site presented innumerable shards of prehistoric bones that had been fortuitously unearthed by a steamroller digging a trench for a pipeline. After assessing the value of the site, the young paleontologist stood his ground to protect the tar pit where millions of fossils have been preserved by the asphalt, eventually forcing the workers to redraw the course of the oil duct. When he cleaned around the tooth that was embedded in the trench wall, he found that it was attached to the skull of a creature that the steamroller had missed only by inches. He looked at the eye socket in disbelief: “A saber-toothed tiger was looking at me in the eye,” he recalls. This specimen would constitute a groundbreaking discovery for Rincón and a landmark for the field of paleontology in Venezuela and at large.

To this day, Richard Parker — named after the tiger in Life of Pi — remains one of the most remarkable findings in the country and one of Rincón’s dearest fossils. The sabre-toothed tiger has shed light on a migratory wave during the Ice Age that the scientific community previously had not been aware of. Due to the current mass migration of people from Venezuela, Rincón is one of the only scientists left in the country tapping into the overwhelming wealth of fossils yet to be uncovered at the Orocual tar pit. Like most of his colleagues, the eight students he had trained have all left the country, joining 3 million other Venezuelans fleeing the rampant economic crisis, creating what has been described by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees as the most dire refugee crisis on the continent. Rincón is an endling — the only extant individual of a species — in his field: the last vertebrate paleontologist in Venezuela.* Read more…

A Citizen Is Obliged To Listen

Getty / Unsplash / Wikimedia Commons / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Ankita Chakraborty | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,522 words)

 

(1)

Refugees, or displaced migrants, are most visible in the places where they are most vulnerable: on the high seas while crossing the Mediterranean to Europe, or on TV next to a rolling clip of a nationalist insulting them. In war zones, so that they are shielded from airstrikes, they are made visible by the color of their camps — a uniform white, the same color as that of a doctor’s coat or that of a shroud. In places where they are relatively safe, they are difficult to come by. Refuge makes the refugee invisible. It is unlikely that you will meet a refugee on your way to work; on the off chance you do, they remind you that at this moment there is a war going on in some part of the world, and of your own complicity in that war. For instance, in Delhi, if I come across a Rohingya refugee, I might be reminded that India is, in fact, an ally of Myanmar. In London, in Paris, in Berlin, in New York, meeting a Yemeni refugee, one might be reminded of how long one’s respective country has been selling arms to Saudi Arabia. It is in the best interest of the state that the refugee be kept at a distance from the citizen. It is, as the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck writes, “a matter of…sparing the Land of Poets the indignity of being dubbed the Land of killers once more.”

Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Go, Went, Gone begins with the mention of a drowning incident in a lake near the protagonist’s home in Berlin. An unknown man had drowned while swimming; he waved his arm for help, but no one saved him. His body at the bottom of the lake, an allegory for the several thousand migrants who have drowned trying to cross the sea, works as a trigger throughout the rest of the novel, which unfolds in close proximity to his place of death — very much like the story of Europe in the past century. (In Europe, they have for some time been trying to track down where all the bodies are buried.) At one point in the novel, Richard, the protagonist, a professor emeritus, talks to an 18 year-old African refugee about Hitler, a former resident of Berlin. “Did you ever hear the name Hitler?” he asks. Read more…

Preparing for a Post-Roe America

Ralph Grunewald / Getty

Laura Barcella | Longreads | February 2019 | 13 minutes (3,517 words)

The 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade just occurred on January 22 — but the days of relatively uncomplicated American abortion access are, most likely, numbered. In fact, author Robin Marty believes it’s not a matter of if Roe will be overturned, it’s a matter of when.

For more than ten years, the Minneapolis-based freelance reporter and author of the new book Handbook for a Post-Roe America has been diligently chronicling the twists and turns of both the pro-choice and anti-abortion movements. Ever since Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation, Marty — like many other pro-choice Americans — has been waiting for the proverbial pro-life shoe to drop. Losing Kennedy, the swing voter on a number of major abortion rulings, and gaining Brett Kavanaugh — a long-time pro-life ally — seems to all but ensure the end of Roe, as well as the downfall of abortion being considered a constitutional right.

Indeed, several weeks after Marty and I spoke in late January, Kavanaugh voted with a minority of Justices to overturn recent Court precedent in favor of a law that sought to impose a new form of undue burden on abortion-seekers in Louisiana. The Cut called Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion something verging on gaslighting. In it, he postulates that perhaps the undue burden — abortion providers being required to gain admitting privileges at local hospitals — could simply be met, when of course providers have already been trying to gain admitting privileges for years. The Court ultimately blocked the implementation of the law, but only because the conservative Chief Justice, John Roberts, voted with the liberals. The margin of safety has grown vanishingly thin.

Let’s consider what that means. If Roe were overturned, it wouldn’t necessarily make it impossible for a pregnant person to obtain an abortion, but it would potentially make an already challenging process even more daunting. As it stands, obtaining an abortion is already far from affordable or convenient for many women, even in blue states with a plethora of clinics. Despite Roe’s current status, and despite the fact that statistically, most Americans believe in a woman’s right to choose, abortion care is still often portrayed as a privilege instead of a right — or as a miserable “worst-case” scenario rather than a straightforward medical procedure. Read more…

The Caviar Con

Wiki Commons / Thor via Flickr CC / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

David Gauvey Herbert | Longreads | February 2019 | 15 minutes (3,739 words)

Not long ago, Mike Reynolds was working at Cody’s Bait and Tackle when two men entered the shop with a jingle. He identified them right away by their accents as Russians. The two men began rifling through fishing poles that didn’t yet have price tags. Reynolds asked them to stop. They ignored him and continued to lay rods on the floor.

Reynolds, then 57, had seen plenty of Russians come through the shop, which sits on a quiet dam access road in Warsaw, Missouri, deep in the Ozarks. He was tired of them poaching the town’s beloved paddlefish. Sick of their entitled attitude, too.

So when he asked them to leave and they did not comply, there seemed only one option left. He removed a .40-caliber pistol from under the counter, chambered a round, and placed it on the counter.

“I fear for my life,” he said in a slow, deliberate drawl. He wanted to cover his bases, legally, for whatever came next.

The two men looked up, backed out of the store, and never returned.

It was just another dustup in the long-running war between caviar-mad Russians, local fishermen, and the feds that centers on this unlikely town in the Ozarks and a very curious fish. Read more…

Lean On

Getty / Bloomsbury Publishing

Briallen Hopper | excerpted from Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions | February 2019 | 25 minutes (6,215 words)

I like to lean. Too much of the time I have to hold myself up, so if an opportunity to swoon presents itself, I take it. When I’m getting a haircut and the lady asks me to lean back into the basin for a shampoo, I let myself melt. My muscles go slack, my eyes fall shut, and there is nothing holding me except gravity and the chair and the water and her hands on my head. I feel my tears of bliss slide into the suds.

In photos I am often leaning. When I’m not resting my head on someone’s shoulder, I am hugging a column in a haunted castle in Great Barrington or bracing myself against a big block of basalt on a pedestal in a Barcelona park. At home alone, I improvise with bookshelves and doorjambs, but sometimes I need to lean on something alive. Seeking support on a stormy night, I run out into the rain and lean against the dogwood tree in front of my house until the wet bark soaks through my coat. The world is my trellis.

Ten years ago, I bought a Gordon Parks print of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward leaning against each other by lamplight on a big brass bed. They are sitting side by side, eyes closed, serene. He is leaning more heavily, his body slanted into hers, his head on her shoulder. She is resting more gently, her cheek against the top of his head. Her face is half-illuminated, half-eclipsed. They seem solemn and private and young. He is quiet in her shadow.

I hung the photograph over my bed. Next to it I tacked another 1950s Paul and Joanne picture I tore out of a book. They are leaning on a bed again, and he is still slumped against her shoulder, but this time the lean seems more in league with an audience. They are both meeting the photographer’s gaze and smiling small smiles. Her eyebrows are slightly raised; she might be sly or smug. She is holding a cup of tea in one hand, and his head, proprietarily, with the other. He is supine and sated and holding a glass of wine.

Paul and Joanne liked to lean for the camera. For their 1968 LIFE cover promoting Rachel, Rachel (she starred, he directed), they are layered on wall-to-wall carpet; she is reclining in the foreground, and he is her blue-eyed backrest. In yet another famous photo from an earlier era (Joanne is still in gingham, not yet in Pucci), they are leaning back to back with their shoulders against each other, their mutual pressure holding each other up, with an isosceles triangle of space between them, and a sturdy baseline of brick patio beneath them.

I like to fall asleep under images of leaning every night and wake up beneath them every day.

I like to believe that leaning is love.
Read more…

How Diderot’s Encyclopedia Challenged the King

The encyclopedists meet at Diderot's home. Hulton Archive / Getty

Andrew Curran | an excerpt adapted from Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely | Other Press | January 2019 | 19 minutes (5,105 words)

Denis Diderot’s incarceration at Vincennes took place exactly halfway through his seventy years on earth. Prison became the dramatic pause that gave shape and meaning to both sides of his life. Before prison, Diderot had been a journeyman translator, the editor of an unpublished encyclopedia, and a relatively unknown author of clandestine works of heterodoxy; on the day that he walked out of Vincennes, he was forever branded as one of the most dangerous evangelists of freethinking and atheism in the country.

During Diderot’s three-month imprisonment, his jailer the Count d’Argenson and the count’s brother the marquis had looked on with amusement while this “insolent” philosophe had bowed and scraped before the authority of the state. In a diary entry from October 1749, the marquis related with glee how his brother the count had supposedly broken Diderot’s will. Solitary confinement and the prospect of a cold winter had succeeded where the police’s warnings had failed; in the end, the once-cheeky writer had not only begged for forgiveness, but his “weak mind,” “damaged imagination,” and “senseless brilliance” had been subdued. Diderot’s days as a writer of “entertaining but amoral books,” it seemed, were over. Read more…

The Classroom Origins of Toxic Masculinity

KC Noland / Youtube, Saul Loeb / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 8 minutes (1,974 words)

Covington Catholic High School, St. Michael’s College School, Georgetown Preparatory School. All three are Catholic, mostly white, mostly rich, all-boys, and all three have recently made the news. At Covington, student Nick Sandmann went viral after a video emerged showing him, surrounded by a bunch of white classmates in the same glaring MAGA hats fresh off the same anti-abortion rally, mocking Native American Indigenous Peoples March attendee Nathan Phillips. At St. Mike’s school — Canadian, suggesting we may be less nice than we are similar — several students were charged after a video appeared on social media in which their fellow classmates were assaulted, one with a broomstick. Eight boys were eventually expelled after several incidents were investigated, all, according to reports, involving football and basketball players. Georgetown Prep, meanwhile, made the news when Christine Blasey Ford accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when they were teenagers while fellow Georgetown student Mark Judge watched. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. The quote reverberated across social media once again after the Covington video went viral.

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.
Read more…

The Thrill (and the Heavy Emotional Burden) of Blazing a Trail for Black Women Journalists

Dorothy Butler Gilliam at her desk in the fall of 1961 or early in 1962, soon after she arrived at The Washington Post. (©1962, Harry Naltchayan, Washington Post)

Dorothy Butler Gilliam | an excerpt from Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America | Center Street | January 2019 | 17 minutes (4,927 words)

When I arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1961, the city, the entire country, and the African continent were all on the threshold of change. The dashing, young John F. Kennedy had just begun his presidency promising “a new frontier.” The Civil Rights Movement was kicking into high gear with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. now urging young people like me to pursue professions we’d been excluded from and to excel. It was thrilling to be in the nation’s capital to begin my career as a daily newspaper journalist in the white press.

I brought a pretty placid nature to that career. When I later looked back, I surprised myself. I was so conservative politically! For example, only six years earlier, when I wrote about school integration in the student newspaper while attending Lincoln University from 1955 to 1957 (the Negro college in Missouri that provided higher education for colored students, allowing the state to keep all its other colleges and universities white), I indicated reasons we should go slowly with integration. But reporting for The Tri-State Defender in Memphis as the Civil Rights Movement dawned had begun to change me. The bus boycott victories had begun to liberate my thinking. And added confidence came from my faith, strengthened my spirit, and pushed me to do things that other people in my family didn’t do. Read more…

Land Not Theirs

VWPics via AP Images

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

 

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

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

Read more…