Search Results for: The New Yorker

No Time Like the Present

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Robert Burke Warren | Longreads | April 2020 | 5 minutes (1,174 words)

What day is it?

In pre-pandemic days, I said those words, or heard them, most often when traveling. Now, I say and hear them (or read them) every day, while social distancing at home with my wife and son. Like Billy Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse Five, I am “unstuck in time.” Surely, many days have passed, but no, it’s been only one or two. A week seems a month, a month a season. Last week? No. Yesterday.

I know I’m not alone. “March was the shittiest year ever,” goes the meme.

Whereas once we lamented “Where does the time go?” meaning it’s racing too fast, now we move through denser space, longer minutes filled with yesterdays for which we pine, and tomorrows we either fear, or fixate on with rapacious longing. Or both. Routines — job, school, shopping, socializing — are disrupted, crippled, or gone. In this strange, new “now,” we fill space with worry and/or desperate hope, visiting a conjured future and/or hazy yesterdays, all out of our control. Unstuck in time. “The past is never dead,” Faulkner famously wrote. “It’s not even past.” Too true, Bill.

And we don’t know what day it is.
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Molly and the Unicorn

Rankin/Bass Productions / Topcraft / ITC Entertainment

Emily Flake | Longreads | April 2020 | 9 minutes (2185 words)

 

My parents took me to see The Last Unicorn in the theater when I was 5. The experience is seared into my mind for a number of reasons: Terrifying burning bull! Handsome prince says “damn!” Unicorn!!! But no scene hit me with quite the power of the one where the sad old bag Molly Grue meets the titular (last!) unicorn for the first time.

If you’re not familiar with this movie, allow me to express my condolences. It’s a batshit Rankin/Bass adaptation of the Peter S. Beagle novel of the same name, and it’s about a unicorn — but it’s not the magical creature that I’m interested in here. The character Molly Grue is a middle-aged woman, a scullery maid we meet as the unicorn is being led to safety by an inept wizard named Schmendrick (ha!) for reasons I won’t go into now (but really, stream it, you won’t be sorry). Her reaction to encountering an honest-to-goodness magical beast isn’t fear, or awe. It’s grief-stricken rage. “Where have you been?” she howls. “Where were you when I was new? How dare you come to me now, when I am this?” Even as a child I knew anguish and sorrow when I heard it — I’m pretty sure I didn’t know the word “melancholy,” but I understood that she was no longer the kind of woman to whom beautiful things happen, that to be a participant in a beautiful thing you had to be beautiful yourself. I felt that with every inch of my weirdo 5-year-old heart, and now, at 42, it resonates with a power that’s almost unbearable.

I am this, now. That feeling of loss, of being too old to be graced by magic — that’s no longer a hypothetical. My young maidenhood wasn’t spent sitting around under trees waiting for a unicorn to come to me, but I certainly looked for magic in places sacred and profane (mostly profane). I was blind to any beauty I might have possessed. I spent a lot of time apologizing for my body when I first started using it to have sex, a practice meant to head off any criticism my partner might have had, but which I now realize was insane and a perfect way to kill the mood. These days, I catch myself reflected in a window every now and again and feel uncomfortably sure that the tired-looking marshmallow with very dry hair squinting back at me no longer remotely qualifies as that kind of magic bait.

Mind you, youth doesn’t appeal to me, personally. Young men are sexual blanks to me — boring, unseasoned chicken breasts with nothing interesting to say. Give me your grizzled Gen Xers, your gray beards, your potbellies, your crinkled eyes. Give me your hearts heavy with regret, your gorgeous tattered men. I’ve always been more attracted to men at least a decade my senior, and once in my early 20s I slept with a man in his 40s because I wanted to see what that was like, to feel like I was giving my young body like a gift (for the record: it was lovely, bittersweet and poignant, yet deeply hot). Physically speaking, I no longer feel like a gift to anyone, not even to my own husband, a man contractually obliged to accept my body even if as a burden. In the increasingly rare instances where a comely stranger flirts with me, I hear Molly Grue’s voice: How dare you come to me now?
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We’re Not All in This Together

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2020 | 8 minutes (2,043 words)

Call it a dystopia, call it the apocalypse, whatever it is, the fact is, right now, we all have the capacity to kill each other. It’s not an exaggeration, it’s just a fact: We are literally holding each other’s lives in our hands. In a pandemic, every single person’s actions have the most extreme consequences for every single other person. I’m not sure how you can get more serious than that. I’m not sure how people can STILL not take that seriously.

Fuck. It’s hard to express anger without just expressing it. The second you write it down it loses that volatility. How do I convey the rage I’m feeling right now watching families continue to gather together, watching friends clandestinely meeting, laughing like they aren’t responsible for the rising death toll? Should I do it in physiological terms? Ok, I’ll list the symptoms like an illness, since that’s what we’re working with right now: Shallow breath, rapid heart rate, adrenalin. A fucking waterfall of expletives. Shaking. I’m literally shaking with rage. My face is permanently scrunched, my throat twisted, like I’m perpetually getting ready to scream — to shout and kick and yell and punch. Or maybe an analogy works better. Feral animals, threatened and fearful, can explode into bouts of wild insanity. One minute they’re calm, the next they’re thrashing and biting, their eyes bulging and unseeing, their entire body a fist. Blind rage: Uncontrolled, undirected, unstoppable.

I saw all of those unctuous half-naked bodies packed onto a sweltering beach in Australia, knowing there was a pandemic, and I thought of all the humid holes in the ground packed together in Iran, awaiting the same number of dead bodies. I saw all those stupid drunk kids in bars in the U.K. knowing there was a pandemic, and I thought of all those abandoned nursing homes in Spain full of the same number of scared seniors left to die on their own.

But I’m not feral. So I just sit here, in the most populous city in Canada, simmering. And when I walk outside, when I run on the road, and I see a park full of people, or strangers face to face, I fucking stare. And I fucking shake. And I don’t say, “What the FUCK are you doing?” Because when I’m told to stay away for everyone’s health, I do. Even if they don’t. Even if they are the 20 percent who believe this is all blown out of proportion, who have the power to sink the 80 percent of us who don’t. Even if they are the reason we went from 90 percent of coronavirus cases spread by travel to 90 percent spread by community. In an apocalypse, a stranger can be a comfort. In a pandemic, they’re nothing but a threat. The community that is left is found in the human beings who distance themselves, not for themselves alone, but for everyone else. Maybe so many people don’t get it because it’s a human paradox: That the further apart we are, the closer we become. Read more…

The Criminalization of the American Midwife

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Jennifer Block  |  March 2020  |  32 minutes (8,025 words)

Elizabeth Catlin had just stepped out of the shower when she heard banging on the door. It was around 10 a.m. on a chilly November Wednesday in Penn Yan, New York, about an hour southeast of Rochester. She asked her youngest child, Keziah, age 9, to answer while she threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. “There’s a man at the door,” Keziah told her mom.

“He said, ‘I’d like to question you,” Caitlin tells me. A woman also stood near the steps leading up to her front door; neither were in uniform. “I said, ‘About what?’” The man flashed a badge, but she wasn’t sure who he was. “He said, ‘About you pretending to be a midwife.’”

Catlin, a home-birth midwife, was open about her increasingly busy practice. She’d send birth announcements for her Mennonite clientele to the local paper. When she was pulled over for speeding, she’d tell the cop she was on her way to a birth. “I’ve babysat half of the state troopers,” she says.

It was 30 degrees. Catlin, 53, was barefoot. Her hair was wet. “Can I get my coat?” she asked. No. Boots? She wasn’t allowed to go back inside. Her older daughter shoved an old pair of boots, two sizes too big, through the doorway; Catlin stepped into them and followed the officer and woman to the car. At the state trooper barracks, she sat on a bench with one arm chained to the wall. There were fingerprints, mug shots, a state-issue uniform, lock-up. At 7:30 p.m. she was finally arraigned in a hearing room next to the jail, her wrists and ankles in chains, on the charge of practicing midwifery without a license. Local news quoted a joint investigation by state police and the Office of Professional Discipline that Catlin had been “posing as a midwife” and “exploiting pregnant women within the Mennonite community, in and around the Penn Yan area.”

Catlin’s apparent connection with a local OB-GYN practice, through which she had opened a lab account, would prompt a second arrest in December, the Friday before Christmas, and more felony charges: identity theft, falsifying business records, and second-degree criminal possession of a forged instrument. That time, she spent the night in jail watching the Hallmark Channel. When she walked into the hearing room at 8:00 a.m., again in chains, she was met by dozens of women in grey-and-blue dresses and white bonnets. The judge set bail at $15,000 (the state had asked for $30,000). Her supporters had it: Word of her arrest had quickly passed through the tech-free community, and in 12 hours they had collected nearly $8,000 for bail; Catlin’s mother made up the difference. She was free to go, but not free to be a midwife.

Several years back, a respected senior midwife faced felony charges in Indiana, and the county prosecutor allowed that although a baby she’d recently delivered had not survived, she had done nothing medically wrong — but she needed state approval for her work. The case, the New York Times wrote, “was not unlike one against a trucker caught driving without a license.” As prosecutor R. Kent Apsley told the paper, “He may be doing an awfully fine job of driving his truck. But the state requires him to go through training, have his license and be subject to review.”

But what if the state won’t recognize the training or grant a license? 

Catlin is a skilled, respected, credentialed midwife. She serves a rural, underserved, uninsured population. She’s everything the state would want in a care provider. But owing to a decades-old political fight over who can be licensed as a midwife, she’s breaking the law.  Read more…

How I Got My Shrink Back

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Susan Shapiro | Longreads | February 2020 | 28 minutes (7,036 words)

Rushing to see him that Friday evening in August, I turned the corner and was shocked to catch Haley leaving his brownstone. What the hell was she doing here? I prayed my eyes were wrong and it was another tall redhead, not my favorite student. Inching closer, I saw it definitely was her — in skinny jeans, heels and a pink blouse, her unmistakable auburn hair flapping down her back as she flounced away. I froze, so crushed I couldn’t breathe.

Darting inside, I shrieked, “I just saw Haley walk out of here. You lied to me!”

“I never lied to you,” he insisted, quickly closing his door.

“Don’t tell me you’re sleeping with her?”

“Of course not.” He looked horrified.

He wasn’t my lover, cheating with a younger woman. He was the long-term therapist who’d saved me from decades of drugs, alcohol, and self-destruction. I couldn’t believe that right before our session, Dr. Winters had met with my protégée, whom I’d loved like a daughter. For the past three years, she’d sat in my classroom, living room, beside me at literary events, and speed walking around the park. She was the only person I’d ever asked him not to see, and vice versa. I felt betrayed from both sides.

Earlier that day, Haley had emailed to see if I’d recommend my gynecologist, housekeeper and literary agency. “Want my husband too?” I’d joked. In the spring, when I’d first sensed she was ransacking my address book and life, I’d asked Dr. Winters about the eerie All About Eve aura.

“She sounds nuts,” he’d said.

“That’s your clinical assessment?” I asked, adding “Don’t be flippant. She’s important to me.”

He’d sworn he wouldn’t treat her, laughing off my paranoia.

Now I could barely speak as I realized she’d broken her vow. And he’d let her in, giving her the slot directly before mine, then ran late, as if he wanted me to catch her. Perched at the edge of his leather couch, I imagined Haley sitting right where I was, leaning on the embroidered cushions, spilling secrets she’d previously shared only with me to my confidante. His plush work space morphed from my safest haven for 15 years into the creepy crawly Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

“Then why was she here?” I couldn’t process her so out of context.

“That woman is not my patient,” he insisted.

His technical wordplay sounded like Bill denying Monica. I craved a drink, joint, and cigarette.
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The People We Love to Hate on Social Media

Marshall Ritzel via AP

If you’ve ever kept certain people visible in your social media feeds just because you loathed or envied them, or because you couldn’t tell the difference between envy and irritation, then Emily Flake’s New Yorker post is for you. In it, the talented cartoonist examines her unflattering insistence on following a certain artsy, nouveau-hippie family on Instagram who causes her constant side-eye. Flake is hilarious, and she’s as insightful in her drawings as she is in her writing. “There are so many ways to be a creep these days,” she says. “One of the easier ways is to follow people on social media toward whom you have feelings that are other than warm.” As she examines her pettiness, you might see yourself, as I have, in this snapshot of our cultural moment. But her attraction to this family is about a lot more simple envy.

My contemplation of the life of this rustically hip family takes on the “Is it this or is it that?” quality of those trick drawings: Is this an old woman in a babushka or a young one in a hat? Are the choices the hip family makes arrogant or inspiring? Stupid or brave? Maybe they’re both, in the way that my drawing is both, simultaneously. My side-eye at their neo-pioneer lifestyle is accompanied by a thrum of envy for the freedom of their life (Who works? Is there a trust fund at play here, or are they just that good at living off the land?) and a desperate, shame-filled recognition of the disparity between their towering competence and my obvious lack thereof. Who would you want to link up with in the coming apocalypse? The hot, fit, loving family who knows how to build a house by hand, or the tubby middle-aged broad who can’t even drive stick? Exactly. My ability to provide wry commentary about my own cervix is an asset useful only in a pre-collapsed society.

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Carly Rae Jepsen’s Exhilarating, Emotionally Intelligent Pop Music

Michael Tullberg / Getty

Rachel Vorona Cote | Longreads | February 2020 | 12 minutes (3,333 words)

 

Every now and then, in one of her music videos or during a heady, live performance, singer Carly Rae Jepsen will close her eyes, raise her hands above her head, and sway her hips. It’s not choreographed, or at least it doesn’t appear to be. Instead of crisp synchronicity, Jepsen opts for fluid, extemporaneous groove. She is singing to us and moving with us — until those fleeting moments between verses or at song’s end, when she seems to have retreated, not out of reach, but rather into a full-bodied state of emotive receptivity. In this brimful pause, she is both steward and beneficiary, theorist and pupil, basking in the superabundant, prismatic feelings her music elicits.

It might not seem especially illuminating to say that Jepsen’s pop repertoire lays bare the complexity of human emotions. All music does this, although with varying degrees of nuance and success, and one could say the same about every other art form, too. But over the course of Jepsen’s 12-year career, her evocation of big tricky feelings has shifted into something of an intentional artistic inquiry. She is fascinated by the vast, labyrinthine topic of human sentiment, so much so that she organized her 2015 album — the aptly titled Emotion — around it, although her exploration is by no means circumscribed to that particular release. From the time she released her first album, the oft-forgotten Tug of War, in 2008, Jepsen’s music has thrummed with idiosyncrasies. She expresses the extraordinary and the tragic within the day-to-day, whether her premise is unrequited love for someone she knew would never be interested in her (“Your Type”), toying with an illicit sexual fling (“This Kiss”), or solicitude about her emotional intensity and its impact on her relationship (“Too Much”). Any event, especially a romantic one, holds the possibility for maximalist sentiment: Jepsen roams these vistas of the heart, shepherding those of us whose thick, cumbersome emotions render us lonely and overwhelmed.

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“The Ugliness of Greatness”: A Kobe Bryant Reading List

OAKLAND, CA - JANUARY 14: Kobe Bryant #24 of the Los Angeles Lakers waves to the crowd after being taken out of the game in the fourth quarter against the Golden State Warriors at ORACLE Arena on January 14, 2016 in Oakland, California. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and or using this photograph, User is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

On the final Sunday in January, Kobe Bryant — a legendary and complex figure within not only basketball and sports but culture writ large — was killed in a helicopter crash on the hills surrounding Calabasas, California. More than three years into his retirement, the ex-Los Angeles Laker was traveling to the Mamba rec center with his teenage daughter, Gianna, for a basketball tournament (seven other individuals were killed as well).

Much has been written about Bryant’s loss, comparing his death to those of Thurman Munson or Roberto Clemente, but with Bryant, the impact — like a fog— is omnipresent. He was drafted by the NBA out of high school, and for certain generational demographics, like millenials and Gen Z, it feels as if there was never a time in which Bryant wasn’t a part of our everyday discourse.

Below is a reading list of articles published in the week-and-a-half since Bryant’s death that address both his sui generis athletic skillset, but also how to talk about a celebrity whose death is more than several paragraphs of any obituary:

1. It Is a Terrible Irony That Kobe Bryant Should Fall From the Sky (Charles P. Pierce, Esquire)

Kobe was the bridge from Michael Jordan to the present generation of NBA superstars, and Pierce explains the brilliance of the Lakers guard, who continually evolved on and off the court.

2. This Is Why Mothers Don’t Sleep (Henry Abbott, True Hoop)

Abbott’s True Hoop was essentially the first true NBA blog, a site you visited at least once a day (and — at maximum — kept open in a tab to continuously refresh), and he ruminates on the toll of Kobe’s death as a father, but also the emotional weight that his wife, Vanessa, must now carry.

3. Two Things Can Be True, But One Is Always Mentioned First (Jeremy Gordon, The Outline)

In 2003, Kobe was accused of raping a 19-year old employee of the Colorado hotel where he was staying. “Every time I said no he tightened his hold around me,” she told police. The case was litigated in public for the next year-and-a-half, a period in which the victim’s name was leaked, and ultimately, she chose not to testify at trial. (The Laker settled with his accuser out of court.) Gordon deep-dives into the case, and why it remains relevant — not only in the era of #MeToo, but also in Kobe’s death.

4. How To Talk About Kobe Bryant’s Legacy (Ashley Reese, Jezebel)

More than a decade after the settlement, the accusations became a blip in the life of Kobe Bryant, but the decisions made that night in 2003 need to be remembered, which is why the Washington Post‘s suspension of journalist Felicia Sonmez was so troubling. All Sonmez did was tweet a link to a comprehensive longread about the rape accusation and subsequent media and legal circus, and for that, she was dragged not only on social media but by WaPo’s editorial masthead. Reese manages to weave separate threads — on Kobe, his death, his legacy, and why it’s important to discuss troubling truths — in this compendium on the Lakers star.

5. Kobe Bryant Was Basketball’s Great Storyteller (Louisa Thomas, the New Yorker)

“The ugliness of greatness.” Kobe once mentioned that phrase to Ben McGrath in a 2014 profile for the magazine, and Thomas evaluates Kobe’s life within that context — how the basketball player evolved into the Black Mamba, and how that shift continued into his retirement and, for a moment, looked to alter the rest of his life.

6. What Made Kobe Different (Jonathan Abrams, B/R Mag)

Abrams, who has written extensively about the NBA (and covered Kobe as a cub reporter at the Los Angeles Times), reflects on what the star meant to a generation of not only admirers but also sports writers.

7. More than a number: College players tell their stories about Kobe Bryant inspiring them to wear No. 24 (Matt Norlander, CBS Sports)

During the 2019-2020 men’s college basketball season, there are 181 players who wear a No. 24 jersey. Norlander spoke with dozens of those players to ask how Kobe influenced not only their jersey number and playing styles, but also their lives. According to Vanderbilt’s Aaron Nesmith, a highly-recruited freshman who has worn No. 24 ever since he was in grade school, “One thing I read after Kobe’s passing was that he read the entire NBA rulebook. All of it, like he knew where the refs had to stand and look, so if he needed to get away with a cheap foul, he’d know how to do it. That stuff is admirable. He lived the game because he knew it.”

American Dirt: A Bridge to Nowhere

Flatiron Books / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2020 | 20 minutes (5,591 words)

I first heard about American Dirt from Myriam Gurba’s scathing critique of the novel on Tropics of Meta. Her take immediately made sense, and it jolted me. Back in graduate school, I — a white, American woman — had written a novel about Mexico. I had lived there with my husband, Jorge, who is from Oaxaca, for five years. Many of our friends are Mexican; my extended family is Mexican. I speak fluent Spanish. I normally write nonfiction, and this was the only piece of fiction I had ever felt pulled to write. It was about a pregnant 17-year-old Oaxacan woman who adopts a dog. Yes. Really. I very briefly flirted with the idea of trying to publish it and was told that no one would want to read a novel that featured a Mexican protagonist — could I find a way to make the main character American?

Later, as I worked on a nonfiction book about return migration to Oaxaca, I received the same response: Could I make an American — myself, possibly, or a “young girl” living in Mexico — the main character, instead of this 35-year-old indigenous man who’d moved from L.A. back to his tiny village in the Sierra? That book didn’t sell. I was too scared to send out the novel, and I still am. As a nonfiction writer I can position myself, inquire about the limits of my understanding, push on them by asking questions. Writing fiction, one is fully laying claim to a world.

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Sit Back, Relax, and Try Not To Think About the Hole We’re Making In Your Skull

Image by Hey Paul Studios via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Mary South’s New Yorker short story on rape trauma and recovery, “You Will Never Be Forgotten,” is being rightly praised, but her “Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy,” published in at The White Review, is equally gripping — a different kind of pain, a different kind of recovery, but the same clarity of voice and unsparing candor and dark wit. It starts with a bang and takes you along for the ride from there.

If you’re reading this page, chances are you’ve recently heard that you need to have a craniotomy. Try not to worry. Although, yes, this is brain surgery, you’re more likely to die from the underlying condition itself, such as a malignant tumour or subdural hematoma. Think of it this way: insomuch as being alive is safe, which it is not, having a craniotomy is safe. We fill our days with doing laundry, replacing our brake pads at the auto shop, or making a teeth-cleaning appointment with the dentist, in the expectation that everything will be fine. But it won’t. There will be a day that kills you or someone you love. Such a perspective is actually quite comforting. Taken in that light, a craniotomy can be a relaxing experience, rather than one of abject terror.

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