Search Results for: The New Yorker

Hollywood and ‘Disaster Feminism’

LOS ANGELES, CA - DECEMBER 04: A view of the Hollywood Sign on December 04, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by PG/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

According to a recent piece in The New Yorker by Dana Goodyear, Hollywood’s most powerful women are joining forces in a bit of “disaster feminism,” a riff on Naomi Klein’s notion of “disaster capitalism” — when governments seize a moment of vulnerability after a natural disaster or political or economic crisis to pass sweeping changes that the polity otherwise wouldn’t agree to.

Goodyear’s sprawling “Letter From California” asks as early as its headline the critical question: Can Hollywood change its ways?

She delves into the past, through an incredible, expansive interview with an unnamed nonagenarian, a former child actress who left the business at 16 horrified by the things men expected her to do.

And she talks to myriad current Hollywood-based sources, some named and others not, who recount anecdotes ranging from office conversations to overheard “come to Jesus” moments among men at a birthday party. The snapshots come together to form a picture of the reckoning ravaging that industry over the last few months.

One of the most striking anecdotes involves an unnamed man who, like many men and women right now, sees a difference between, in his words, “those who have done something really terrible” and, in Goodyear’s words, “the murky, in-between behavior — remarks or innuendos that at the time seemed fine, to the one initiating them.”

“I’ve never done anything like those guys,” he says, reminiscent of the way Weinstein said he was no Bill Cosby, and of the commenter on a story about Warner Bros. exec Andrew Kreisberg, who in Kreisberg’s name, wrote:

Nobody has accused me of rape like Weinstein.
Nobody has accused me of drugging them like Guillod.
Nobody has accused me of groping like Landesman.
Nobody has accused me of abusing minors like Spacey.
Nobody has accused me of exposing myself like Louis CK.
Nobody has accused me of asking for favors in exchange for work like Ratner.

“Men are living as Jews in Germany,” the unnamed man tells Goodyear. Listening to the audio version of this story, I blurted out an expletive at this line, accompanied by a sound like a dog laughing through torture. I had to pause it to give myself a chance to recover.

But then a few minutes later, Goodyear interviews “a Hollywood sexual-harassment investigator” who says that the new “zero tolerance” approach to harassment, in which names of abusive men are taken down off of buildings and other sites that once exalted them, is resulting in a “Soviet Union-style erasure.” Goodyear then writes: “Siberia, in this case, might be defined by what one fired agent told a former client: he was ‘pivoting away from representation’ and planning to reinvent himself in tech.”

Sure, tech might still, for a little while at least, be a good refuge for those who would prefer to continue protecting and even exalting abusive men.

There has been significant attention paid to the fear that we might be swinging the pendulum too far in one direction, that we might be catching innocents in our angry, raging nets of comeuppance. But less attention has been paid to a consequence of focusing so heavily on obvious monsters: What about the abusers we are letting off the hook because they’re just not vile enough? Or because their abuse wasn’t sexual?

Suki Kim’s exposé of public radio’s John Hockenberry was an exception to this: she gave equal weight to his racism and bullying as she did to his sexual overtures. But it’s much more common lately to hear people make excuses for workplace bullies whose behavior isn’t sexual, especially in “creative” industries like Hollywood and the media, which often glorify people with “passion” and “tempers” and “big personalities.” A friend told me about an effort to address harassment in radio and podcasting, and how when one person suggested the harassment include all workplace bullying, not only of a sexual nature, another person said that was impossible. “The whole industry will die,” we keep hearing, as if it is somehow physically impossible to do these jobs without abusing the people around you.

Even focusing on bullying excludes other behaviors that engender toxic work environments. An editor friend of mine, when this reckoning began, speculated that the fixation with monsters would allow some of his peers to not have to scrutinize their own behavior — actions that seem benign but are damaging, such as only mentoring young male reporters.

Much of Goodyear’s piece, especially the latter half, is devoted to questions like this. How can real change happen? She interviews Katherine Pope, a television executive who interviews women and people of color as a rule when hiring directors, who points out that even in companies that have women in senior positions, “there are layers of white men with veto power above them.”

Pope highlights the problem of “unconscious biases” as one element that prevents companies from taking chances on women the same way they do with charismatic men:

“The women have to be the most qualified, brilliant, perfect people in the world, and men get to grow into the job,” Pope said. “You hear code—‘You have to mature. You’re still learning.’ Or ‘I know she’s a great development executive, but does she know the business?’”

Goodyear notes that studios and networks haven’t done much beyond “applying reactive zero-tolerance policies and adding a few hotlines,” and quotes a former studio head who says he’s urged old colleagues “to implement some quick fixes —s ay, no more meetings in hotel rooms, on pain of firing — but they have ignored him.”

This is a rare bit of good news. Quick fixes are not the answer. Quick fixes allow problems to be swept under the rug; they allow people to move on and pretend that everything is okay when it very much is not. That’s what’s so heartening about some of the measures being pursued and proposed by powerful women in Hollywood, like the “inclusion clause” Women in Film is pitching studios and agencies to change the skewed ratio of women and men in writing, directing and producing positions “with an accompanying stamp to signify “gender parity in decision-making.'”

Goodyear also reveals how some of Hollywood’s most powerful women have been meeting for months “in secret,” resulting in an “action plan” detailed in a Jan. 1 New York Times story. The action plan includes the push for gender parity, but also reaches beyond Hollywood to “fight systemic sexual harassment… in blue-collar workplaces nationwide.” These scions of culture are promising “a legal defense fund, backed by $13 million in donations, to help less privileged women — like janitors, nurses and workers at farms, factories, restaurants and hotels — protect themselves from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it.” This is especially poignant in light of the letter written in November, signed by approximately 700,000 women farmworkers, in support of the women of Hollywood coming forward to name and shame their abusers.

An unnamed attendee at those secret meetings told Goodyear that the Hollywood women were inspired by Naomi Klein’s concept of “disaster capitalism.” “We’re doing disaster feminism,” the attendee told Goodyear. “In the chaos that is ensuing, how can we create institutional, structural change, so if the moment passes those things will be in place?”

Longreads Best of 2017: Local Reporting

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

Sarah Smarsh
Writer covering socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy for The New Yorker and Harper’s online, The Guardian, Guernica, and many others.

The #MeToo Movement in Kansas (Hunter Woodall, Kelsey Ryan, and Bryan Lowry, The Kansas City Star)

While the spotlight falls on sexual-misconduct allegations in the nation’s centers of power — Washington, New York, Hollywood — reporters across the country localized the revolutionary #MeToo moment on their own turf, including often overlooked and unglamorous places like my home state of Kansas. When I opened my morning newspaper to this lengthy feature on alleged sexual misconduct at the Kansas State Capitol, I was struck by the tenacity of the reporting in a digital-media era rife with emotional, partisan opinion pieces. Kansas City Star reporters Hunter Woodall, Kelsey Ryan, and Bryan Lowry spared neither side of the aisle as they hounded male legislators and gave voice to women who were previously silenced.

As a personal essayist who began as an investigative reporter, I hold no writing in higher esteem than that which does the hard work of digging for obscured facts, without which a million think pieces could never exist. This single installment of the ongoing coverage of the statehouse scandal quotes some fifteen interviewed sources: four female former interns (two named and two anonymous), two male Democratic representatives, a male intern-program director, two university spokespersons, a female Republican senate president, a male Republican house speaker, a female former Democratic staffer, the male director of the legislature’s human resources department, a second Republican state senator, and a male Democratic house minority leader.

This last source, a Democratic candidate for governor in the state’s crowded 2018 gubernatorial race, is some liberals’ best hope to defeat far-right candidate Kris Kobach. Even if the reporters’ own politics might be liberal, as journalists do perhaps lean, they didn’t allow the legislator a pass, giving readers not just his statements but also when he “tried to change the topic,” “refused to answer the question” and “demanded to know” whether he’d been accused of harassment. This is local reporting at its finest and bravest — government watchdogs shining a light where secrets might live. This is the work of a free press that sets its society free, no opinion required.


Gustavo Arellano
Former editor-in-chief, OC Weekly, contributor to Curbed LA.

Orange County’s Informant Scandal Yields Evidence of Forensic Science Deception in Murder Trials (R. Scott Moxley, OC Weekly)

My former colleague at OC Weekly, R. Scott Moxley, is the most underrated investigative reporter in the United States. His work at the paper over the past 21 years has resulted in a six-year prison sentence for our former sheriff, the end of congressional and state assemblymen’s careers, and the freeing of at least three people wrongfully convicted of crimes. Last year alone, six murder convictions covered by Moxley were overturned.

And he continues. In December, Moxley published this blockbuster exposé in which forensic scientists switched their conclusions to help prosecutors win shoddy murder cases. It was the latest Moxley blockbuster in the so-called “Orange County Snitch Scandal,” which saw prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies use jailhouse informants to illegally get information and win cases. Moxley’s work proves again the value in local news, and especially in the alt-weekly world. Long may Mox reign!


Katie Honan
Former DNAinfo reporter

Dignity In Danger (Kristin Dalton, Staten Island Advance)

In February, the Staten Island Advance published a multimedia package focused on the borough’s developmentally-disabled adults. “Dignity in Danger” is a well-reported piece of advocacy journalism, featuring the stories of those struggling, as well as the response of the city and state. It was compassionate journalism that held officials accountable for their lack of support.  

What made this piece of local journalism stand out to me was how comprehensive it was. For any local paper struggling to keep audiences and stay on top of what’s happening, it was an impressive project on an often-overlooked subject.

For their coverage, the Advance also dug into their archive of their coverage of the Willowbrook State School, where hundreds of developmentally-disabled children were abused for decades. It says a lot about local journalism to have people on staff to recognize that and have the familiarity with a place’s history.


Simon Bredin
Editor-in-chief, Torontoist

Where the Small Town American Dream Lives On (Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker)

After the presidential election, there was a sudden vogue for profiles of small towns in the grips of despair. So it was a pleasure to read Larissa MacFarquhar’s feature about Orange City, Iowa, and its “pure, hermetic culture.” MacFarquhar’s article is a delight for many reasons, not least its depiction of the endearing eccentricities of the town’s Dutch heritage. The author clearly grasps the centripetal and centrifugal forces at work, driving some townspeople away and luring others back.  But what makes the article profound is the way it describes Orange City’s sense of place, which inspires a loyalty among the residents critical to the town’s continued success.


James Ross Gardner
Editor-in-chief, Seattle Met

A Washington County That Went for Trump Is Shaken as Immigrant Neighbors Start Disappearing (Nina Shapiro, The Seattle Times)

Voting has consequences, as story after story in the wake of last November’s surprising electoral outcome has endeavored to show. Yet to my mind, few if any of the attempts to explain the Trump voter have landed. This one does. That’s because Nina Shapiro doesn’t let her sources off the hook. The people in this story say they didn’t know they were voting so cruelly, but their friends and neighbors — arrested or deported or both — nevertheless paid the price. Shapiro, to her credit, is able to find the humanity amid the folly.


Bethany Barnes
Education reporter for The Oregonian

Overlooked (Cary Aspinwall, The Dallas Morning News)

Praise for journalism has a standard repertoire. The old chestnuts include “shine a light” and “give voice to the voiceless.” Cary Aspinwall’s investigation for The Dallas Morning News truly earned such appraisal. Aspinwall looked where no one else was looking and showed her readers the human face of a problem that wasn’t being considered. Her investigation revealed that more mothers are going to jail in Texas, and that no one pays attention to what happens to their children when they do.

“Overlooked” is deftly told through an intimate portrait of five sisters:

The voices of these children are rarely heard — which is why the five Booker sisters agreed to tell the story of their mother’s arrests and their own abandonment by the criminal justice system. They told it over months, chatting in a bug-infested apartment complex, sharing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at a QuikTrip, trying tacos near the juvenile courthouse, driving almost three hours to visit their mother in prison.

Aspinwall’s extensive survey of mothers in jail gives readers a chance to hear perspectives we almost never hear. Her shoe-leather reporting to find people who could speak to the problem makes the data she found meaningful and personal.


Julia Wick
Former editor-in-chief, LAist

Behind a $13 shirt, a $6-an-hour worker (Natalie Kitroteff and Victoria Kim, The Los Angeles Times)

Natalie Kitroeff and Victoria Kim’s damning exposé nails how fast fashion giants like Forever 21 avoid liability for wage theft violations at the factories where their clothes are made. The piece, which explains how the retailer “avoids paying factory workers’ wage claims through a tangled labyrinth of middlemen,” has national and international implications. It is also very much a local story.

Garment workers making $6 an hour “pinning Forever 21 tags on trendy little shirts” in stifling factories right here in Los Angeles. Although most manufacturing has migrated overseas, L.A. still holds onto a small production niche, which is largely staffed by underpaid, immigrant workers. (Little-known fact: Southern California is the nation’s garment manufacturing capitol). Forever 21 itself is a Los Angeles-based company and an immigrant story: It was founded in Los Angeles in 1984 by a couple who had emigrated from South Korea.

Kitroeff and Kim’s piece masterfully illustrates the layered steps behind the production of every garment, explaining labor law and humanizing the lives and wage claims of workers. Their reporting offered a powerful indictment of a massive retailer — and our own complicity every time we buy that $13 shirt — drawing much-needed attention to worker abuses in our own backyard.


Michelle Legro
Senior editor, Longreads

Lawrence Tabak’s reporting on Foxconn in Wisconsin for Belt Magazine

It began as a shady deal with a big promise: Wisconsin taxpayers would give Foxconn $3 billion to open a plant that would provide 13,000 jobs, ostensibly for locals. Belt Magazine’s Lawrence Tabak has been following the deal for months: He tracked down workers at a Foxconn plant in Indiana and discovered that the quality of these jobs was low for locals, and that management favored Taiwanese nationals in management, and also relied on undocumented workers hidden during ICE raids. In a series of stories, he explained step-by-step how governor Scott Walker was taken in by Foxconn’s deal and sold it to the state legislature:

The proposed plant combined everything that an ambitious Republican governor could want. Not only a lot of jobs, but manufacturing jobs. Never mind that these were not the sort of jobs that would revive the Rust Belt, let alone jobs that would employ a significant number of Wisconsinites.

Tabak’s reporting was journalism in action, even making its way to the Wisconsin State Senate, “which used Belt’s reporting in railing against Foxconn’s heavy reliance on H-1B visa holders for skilled positions at its stateside facilities.”

Tabak also did one of the best man-on-the-ground reports that had nothing in common with the kind of parachute reporting on Trump voters that was so reviled this year. Staking out an apple orchard next door to the proposed plant in Racine County, he asked the workers there what they thought of Foxconn and it’s promise of jobs. The workers of Apple Holler saw only environmental pollution on the horizon, and the betrayal of what this area of Wisconsin does best, and has always done best: agriculture.


Ethan Chiel
Contributing editor and fact checker, Longreads

How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley Empire (Andrew Granato, Stanford Politics)

Campus politics is local politics par excellence, and while Peter Thiel may be mediocre at his secondary pursuits, like investing and vampirism, he is by all accounts an excellent right-wing campus political operative. Thiel has spent nearly three decades trying to trigger libs at his alma mater, Stanford, not least by continuing to support the Stanford Review, a conservative publication he founded as an undergraduate in the late ‘80s. Andrew Granato really got the goods in his smart, even-handed account of how Thiel has cultivated the Review as both a source for hires and business associates and a way to try and keep his own, largely contrarianism-based sense of politics alive at a liberal university. It also serves as a reminder that Silicon Valley is very much a place and not just a metonymic device.

Longreads Best of 2017: Crime Reporting

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

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

Dirty John (Christopher Goffard, The Los Angeles Times)

I love a good villain, and my baddie of the year was John Meehan, a hazel-eyed Casanova who hid his murky past behind fake surgeon’s scrubs and a kaleidoscope of lies. This wannabe mobster lured a moneyed Orange County divorcée into a toxic relationship, creating an elevated psychodrama that recalled Gone Girl. Delivered as a six-part narrative on the web, Dirty John was also accompanied by a six-part podcast. Both were irresistible. Goffard’s spare prose kept this thriller racing towards its bloody end — the kind of murderous climax we were promised at the start of S-Town but never received — one that made an unlikely hero of a seemingly meek fan of The Walking Dead. Bravo to Goffard for divining this epic yarn from local news to national attention, and for his terrifying portrait of Meehan told through the eyes of his victims. This is the genius of the domestic horror genre: The monster is no longer under the bed but between the sheets.


Rachel Monroe
Contributor to The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The New Republic. Author a book on women, crime, and obsession will be published by Scribner in 2019.

The Tragic Story of a Texas Teen and the Marines Who Killed Him for No Reason (Sasha von Oldershausen, Splinter)

 This May marked 20 years since a Marine sniper shot and killed Esequiel Hernandez, Jr., a soft-spoken teenager who was tending his goats in the rural border outpost of Redford, Texas. Von Oldershausen not only does an admirable job of attempting to reconstruct what happened that day in 1997, she also explores the ramifications of the fatal shooting on the community and uses it as a springboard to discuss how militarization inflects daily life along the border. “The moment you employ the rhetoric of war, it becomes a battle zone,” one of von Oldershausen’s sources tells her. “And this is what they did in Redford. They made war on the United States by killing Esequiel.”

Sarah Marshall
Contributor to Buzzfeed, The New Republic, and the Life of the Law podcast.

‘I Am a Girl Now,’ Sage Smith Wrote. Then She Went Missing (Emma Eisenberg, Splinter)

Eisenberg describes in heartbreaking detail how both the police department and the broader community of Charlottesville failed to adequately investigate the disappearance of a trans girl of color. Her reporting illuminates systemic injustice by taking the reader into the hearts and minds of the family and friends Sage Smith left behind. The article is both deeply reported and deeply felt and gives the reader the space to reckon with the questions they cannot answer. Yet perhaps the most remarkable thing about Eisenberg’s work here is her ability to show Sage Smith to the reader not as a victim, but as a person. “Every clubgoer leaned closer when Sage spoke,” Eisenberg writes, “as if they were campers pulled to a fire.”

Reyhan Harmanci
Editor, Topic

Carl Ichan’s Failed Raid on Washington (Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker)

While it may not have been the juiciest crime story this year, Patrick Radden Keefe’s precise and damning piece on Carl Icahn’s stint in the Trump Administration chilled me more than I could have imagined. This is how the world works: We’re being taken for fools while the Masters of the Universe move from private to public positions. I can only hope to read about more financial crimes in 2018 that get appropriately punished.


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The Other People in Springfield

Photo by Alonzo via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Imran Siddiquee | Longreads | December 2017 | 15 minutes (3,638 words)

When I was 2 years old, my family moved from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Springfield, Illinois. My parents had come to Canada as graduate students in the early 1980s to attend the University of Manitoba, thousands of miles from their homes in Bangladesh. They were raising me and my two older sisters there when my dad received a job offer to teach economics at a small university in the middle of Illinois. So in 1987, they traveled across another border, embarking on a journey to becoming not only Americans, but Springfielders.

It was just a coincidence that soon after we had settled in the Land of Lincoln, around the same time I started at Carl Sandburg Elementary School, another family, much more famous than us, would move into a place called Springfield. Suddenly the name of our town would become synonymous with some larger American story, or at the very least, the absurdities of American culture.

***

The Simpsons debuted in 1989 when I was 5 years old, less than a year after my baby brother was born in Springfield. I recall my parents being wary of any of us watching this strange cartoon with its adult humor and reputation for vulgarity. But by the time I was in fourth grade I had managed to record a couple episodes on VHS, and my brother and I would occasionally watch life unfold in the fantasy Springfield in between chapters of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

By then The Simpsons was a global phenomenon, and regardless of whether you watched the show or not, its influence was pervasive. There were the enviable “Cowabunga” t-shirts at the mall, the ubiquitous TV ads featuring Homer being Homer, and the persistent echo of “D’Oh” and “Don’t have a cow, man” on the school playground. Lots of little boys wanted to be Bart and I was no exception, repeating risqué lines from a show I didn’t really understand. Even when we would visit family in Bangladesh, I remember people asking me about that strange-looking family from Springfield. Is that what’s it’s really like there?

But of course, in the real Springfield, in its classrooms and shopping malls, football games and state fairs, we were the strange-looking ones. And in truth, I was never going to be as rebellious as Bart, or be allowed to complete that journey across the border which my parents had set out on in the 80s. Because, when it came down to it, I was already someone else in the imaginary Springfield, the imaginary America.

As Hari Kondabolu explains in his new documentary The Problem With Apu, my family and I had been assigned a role by white culture — the foreign, strange, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon — as people like us had been assigned many times before, and would continue to be assigned many times after. On those same playgrounds, kids would soon ask me to do the famous accent or to nod my head from side-to-side like Apu did. I would learn that in order for white people to remain in their roles — people whose bumbling inadequacy never quite moves them from the center of American life — they needed me and my family to remain in the Kwik-e-Mart.

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The Teens Trapped Between a Gang and the Law

Longreads Pick

More than 200,000 children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras came to the U.S. unaccompanied between 2014 and 2016. Allowed to enter the country while awaiting deportation proceedings or asylum decisions, many settled with relatives in parts of Suffolk County, Long Island. For The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer writes of the precarious course the children must walk — enduring threats of gang violence and a local power structure hostile to their existence.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 1, 2018
Length: 25 minutes (6,475 words)

Longreads Best of 2017: Political Writing

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

Gabriel Sherman

Special correspondent for Vanity Fair and author of the New York Times best-selling biography of Roger Ailes.

The French Origins of ‘You Will Not Replace Us’ (Thomas Chatterton Williams, The New Yorker)

Anyone wanting to understand the forces that propelled Donald Trump to power needs to read Thomas Chatterton Williams’s fascinating profile of the French racial theorist Renaud Camus. Camus — no relation to Albert — popularized the alt-right theory that Muslim immigrants are reverse colonizing “white” Western Europe through mass migration. He is an unlikely progenitor of a political movement built around closing borders and preserving traditional culture. Camus works out of a 14th-century chateau and once wrote a travel book that describes itself as “a sexual odyssey — man-to-man.” Allan Ginsberg once said, “Camus’s world is completely that of a new urban homosexual; at ease in half a dozen countries.” While Williams doesn’t shy away from shining a light on the ugly racism that underpins Camus’s writings, he challenges liberals to reckon with the social and cultural effects of immigration in an increasingly globalized world. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: Essays

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

Nicole Chung
Editor in chief of Catapult magazine, author of the forthcoming memoir All You Can Ever Know.

Going It Alone (Rahawa Haile, Outside Magazine)

One of my favorite personal essays published this year was Rahawa Haile’s stunning “Going It Alone,” for Outside.  She uses a personal story, her own journey on Appalachian Trail, to try and answer a larger question: Just who is the outdoors for? To answer this, Haile doesn’t just rely on her own experiences on the trail, she also does a ton of research, bringing in past interviews and stories, and interweaving anecdotes from other through-hikers she meets along the way. I really appreciated how, with all these other voices in play, we get a clearer vision of Rahawa and her journey, too. At the conclusion of this piece, which is so gorgeously written and urgent and honest and full of life, Rahawa closes with the perfect ode to those she met on her way: “It is no understatement to say that the friends I made, and the experiences I had with strangers who, at times, literally gave me the shirt off their back, saved my life. I owe a great debt to the through-hiking community that welcomed me with open arms, that showed me what I could be and helped me when I faltered. There is no impossible, they taught me: only good ideas of extraordinary magnitude.” Read more…

Is Estonia Leading the Way to the Future Digital World?

Lucas Vallecillos / VWPics via AP Images

Although you might not be able to find Estonia on a map, physical locations are less important in this country’s vision of the future. For The New Yorker, Nathan Heller visits this small Baltic nation to see how they’re transforming themselves into a borderless digital society.

Health records, banking information, student and car and voting registration, police reports, court cases ─ they’re all linked across digital platforms. To reduce breaches, the information is held locally, but a government-owned platform ultimately links data, even to other countries who use the platform. The goal isn’t to simply improve efficiency, it’s to save money and encourage business that will generate money. Having a porous digital society that uses a remote model attracts investors and entrepreneurs to Estonia, both physically and as e-residents. Heller’s story starts with Taavi Kotka, the chief information officer who helped roll out the e-Estonia project. As they spoke, a robot mowed Kotka’s lawn. “Everything here is robots,” Kotka told Heller. “Robots here, robots there.” But digitization has less to do with automation than it does with embracing the transient nature of labor in the European marketplace.

“I am President to a digital society,” she declared in her address. The leaders of Europe were arrayed in folding chairs, with Angela Merkel, in front, slumped wearily in a red leather jacket. “Simple people suffer in the hands of heavy bureaucracies,” Kaljulaid told them. “We must go for inclusiveness, not high end. And we must go for reliability, not complex.”

Kaljulaid urged the leaders to consider a transient population. Theresa May had told her people, after Brexit, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” With May in the audience, Kaljulaid staked out the opposite view. “Our citizens will be global soon,” she said. “We have to fly like bees from flower to flower to gather those taxes from citizens working in the morning in France, in the evening in the U.K., living half a year in Estonia and then going to Australia.” Citizens had to remain connected, she said, as the French President, Emmanuel Macron, began nodding vigorously and whispering to an associate. When Kaljulaid finished, Merkel came up to the podium.

“You’re so much further than we are,” she said. Later, the E.U. member states announced an agreement to work toward digital government and, as the Estonian Prime Minister put it in a statement, “rethink our entire labor market.”

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Longreads Best of 2017: Arts & Culture Writing

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

Kyle Chayka

Writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Curbed, Racked, and many others.

Julian Eastman’s Guerrilla Minimalism (Alex Ross, The New Yorker)

How does one write about culture when culture seems to be ending? The question plagued 2017, when each day brought its own small apocalypse. What I appreciated most this year was cultural criticism that turned into acts of construction rather than deconstruction, helping us to better understand our collective predicament. A line from John Kelsey’s “Halftime Vibes” in Texte zur Kunst stuck in my head: “Strange new forms are being tested every minute as news and advertising metabolize the very image of global precarity.” (Evan Osnos’s New Yorker feature “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich” uncovered some of the aesthetics of this forever-incipient apocalypse.)

But my favorite feature was an act of rediscovery. Alex Ross’s New Yorker essay on the almost-lost Minimalist composer Julius Eastman was revelatory. Eastman was a gay, African-American musician in the all-white halls of the iconic Minimalists. His life and art were messy and unresolved; his work was clashing and autobiographical. What better figure for our time of reclamation? Eastman’s “Stay On It” is a repeated slamming on a disco-like hook, poppy and addictive until it becomes sinister: a portrait of America’s violent ambivalence as potent now as 1973.


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‘Cat Person’ and the Young Person

(Remains/Getty)

The year of our Lord 2017 was an overfull one, in which many things, both wretched and good and sometimes wretched-but-ultimately-good, happened. It was also the year a short story went viral.

“Cat Person,” a short story by Kristen Roupenian published in The New Yorker, was an unlikely viral sensation. Countless outlets produced think pieces and reactions. There were hordes of women for whom the story resonated, juxtaposed against the men who had such an aversion to the story, many could not even recognize it for what it was, frequently referring to it as an “essay” or an “article” when it was clearly short fiction. A Twitter account popped up to chronicle some of the male takes. The Cut put together a delightful video of cats responding to the story and the Awl published a version of the story from the cat’s perspective. The photo accompanying the story was, to some, off-putting: An extreme close-up of two mouths about to kiss. After reading the story, I agreed that it is perfectly suited to the story, but every time it showed up in my Twitter feed, I shuddered, said a mental “HARD PASS” and scrolled hurriedly.

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