Search Results for: This Land Press

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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25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez on the set of 'Hustlers' in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

As more publications pursue blockbuster stories with film and television potential, producers in Hollywood and the magazine industry are taking their inspiration from successful article-to-film adaptations of the past that have achieved box office success.

Here are 25 gold-standard film adaptations of magazine articles, published over the course of half a century as cover stories, features, or breaking news, as well as direct links to read all 25 stories online.

Legacy magazines with well-known print editions dominate this list, as do the nonfiction writers that legacy magazines accept and champion. Many of these writers’ names will be familiar to readers, as will the majority of the magazines and films themselves, in many cases because celebrated journalists inspired these major motion pictures at the peak of their careers as writers and reporters. Name recognition in one industry reinforces name recognition in another, and — despite the incredible diversity of feature-length nonfiction being published today by new voices most mainstream audiences have yet to discover — institutional support still tends to elevate known veterans.

While the talents of all of the writers on this list are undeniable, there are also well-documented structural biases that account for why so many of the writers represented here are overwhelmingly male, white, or Susan Orlean. These stories belong on any narrative nonfiction syllabus on their own merit, but I hope these samples are still just the beginning, and that new filmmakers and magazine writers can start to work together far more often on a greater breadth of material, with sufficient editorial guidance and studio backing to support them.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ve limited this roundup to favor adaptations (loosely defined) based primarily on magazine-style features, including only a couple of films based on award-winning newspaper investigations. The list of new film and television adaptations based on popular books or podcasts, let alone reporting that has helped support the explosion in streaming documentary formats, would run even longer.

It takes time, access, imagination, and resources to be able to realize ambitious true stories like these in their original form as narrative magazine features. It would be a welcome change to see greater diversity in the production pipeline in the coming years: in the subjects of narrative stories, in the publications considered for exclusive source material, in the creative teams that are given studio support, in the agencies brokering deals, in the awards and recognition that elevate new work, and in the storytellers who are given the resources to write long.

Writers are the lifeblood of all of these industries, and will always play a pivotal role in any production that is based on a true story.

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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Based on Can You Say…Hero? by Tom Junod (Esquire, 1998)

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.”

Hustlers (2019)

Based on The Hustlers at Scores by Jessica Pressler (The Cut, 2015)

While evolutionary theory and The Bachelor would suggest that a room full of women hoping to attract the attention of a few men would be cutthroat-competitive, it’s actually better for strippers to work together, because while most men might be able keep their wits, and their wallets, around one scantily clad, sweet-smelling sylph, they tend to lose their grip around three or four. Which is why at Hustler, as elsewhere, the dancers worked in groups.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Based on My Addicted Son by David Sheff (The New York Times Magazine, 2005)

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, “That was that.” It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, said that methamphetamine makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on meth he became unrecognizable.

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Miami: A Beginning

William Gottlieb / Getty / Design by Katie Kosma

Read an introduction to the series.

Jessica Lynne | Longreads | February 2020 | 10 minutes (2,737 words)

Hive is a Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

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Much has been written about certain cities and their landscapes that conjure a particular sentimentality or feeling within those who live there or those who chose to visit. At times, the lore is so great that it overwhelms. New York, for instance, ignites a peculiar sense of inertia, a stagnancy that cannot be perfectly described even though when you are there, it presses itself onto you and it is hard to ignore. We have come to know Paris as a city of love; it seems impossible to escape a looming sense of romance. The poems and the essays and the paintings and the photography and even the songs have given to us this mirage. As any young, eager traveler to Paris might be inclined, I once searched, many years ago, hoping to find love in the first, sixth, or 13th arrondissement.

I did not, however, fall in love in Paris. I fell in love, instead, in Miami. 

When I tell people that I fell in love in Miami, I have noticed a reaction that first takes the form of surprise then quickly turns to intrigue. One friend responded with a smile and a curt, Sexy. I imagine, for most people unfamiliar with the vastness of  Miami-Dade County, when one hears love and Miami, one might be inclined to think of Miami Beach — a denizen of glamour, glitz, nightlife — and thus picture a scene incongruent with that which we dream up when we say love. This imagining does not include the walks I have taken throughout Opa Locka, ambling along without a plan. It does not include Adelita’s Café on NE 2nd Avenue where dear friends once took me to eat breakfast while Honduran music videos played in the background. It does not include the many concerns of climate catastrophe that hover. Perhaps, it is because I grew up in a region defined, in part, by swampland and coastline, beaches and a nebulous hurricane season — a region that in certain aspects of its topography reminds me of Miami — but I have never been surprised by what happened to me. I have always understood the water to carry forth potencies.

Time is a mysterious phenomenon because when I fell in love in Miami, I was floating through a period of depression and having difficulty communicating this to friends and loved ones. I had traveled to the city for a research residency hoping to read or write or work myself out of it. That moment in my life feels as though it was decades ago and also as though it just happened last week. It, in actuality, unfolded in the middle of a Lenten season about two years ago. As I packed my suitcase, anxious to leave a still winter New York, I texted the person with whom I would eventually fall in love a selfie of me wearing a wool winter coat, frowning in the back of a taxi, on my way to JFK airport. When I look at that photo now (I have not been able to, not wanted to delete it), I wonder if that Jessica knew what awaited her.

Miami humidity is a familiar sensation to me, comforting in fact. It reminds me to move slowly. To breathe deeply. It reminds me that water, in each of its three states, has something to teach us about how we should be in our bodies, what we should do to best care for ourselves. There are those who loathe the excess of moisture in the air. I revel in the stickiness. 

It is possible that as I texted the person with whom I would fall in love on my way from Miami International Airport to the residency home in Little Haiti where I would spend the week, I said something like this to them about the city. It is possible that they responded back to me with an affirmation of sorts, because though they did not live in Miami either, they too were from a place of humidity and hurricanes. They too understood the ways in which those forces rumble through the body. Maybe this is why, on that night, the night that feels like it occurred both decades ago and just last week, as we settled into a nervous then tranquil video chat, I knew that love was happening to us.

As I packed my suitcase, anxious to leave a still winter New York, I texted the person with whom I would eventually fall in love a selfie of me wearing a wool winter coat, frowning in the back of a taxi, on my way to JFK airport.

Isn’t love just as mysterious as time? I am not sure how to recount the beginning except to say that our beginning was cliché even if I knew it was special: We met on social media. Isn’t this how it tends to go nowadays? They think you’re cute. They follow. You think they’re cute. You comment. The dance ensues until that first encounter or touch or night spent together. That night, the person with whom I would fall in love and I laughed through our screens because we did not yet know what or when that first encounter would be and somehow that was alright for the moment. Even then, I recognized that serendipity rarely shows up in relationships of distance. So instead, we talked about other things: sargassum, the sea, salt-water, roosters, the moon. 


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This is another thing I have come to love about Miami when I visit: the moon. Though Miami is a big city and it is sometimes difficult to see the stars, the moon that night was a waning crescent. In this phase, the moon is most visible right before sunrise as it points eastward. A waning crescent moon is seen right before a new moon which is in itself, a time for clarity, rebirth, revision. During the new moon, the gravitational pulls of the sun and moon are aligned and if you are near coastline, you will notice the extremities of high and low tides. That night, we were both, quietly, preparing to receive each other, in spite of the distance — moon, water, heart in dialogue. 

En Route

On February 12, 2019, as NASA’s Mars rover, Opportunity, died, the team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory effectively gave the robot a resting tribute by playing Billie Holiday’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Opportunity first landed on Mars in 2004 as the search for water on the red planet began in earnest. Engineers last received a communication from the robot during a dust storm on the planet in the summer of 2018. According to one NASA dispatch from that June, high amounts of dust prevented Opportunity from receiving the solar power necessary for recharging: 

NASA engineers attempted to contact the Opportunity rover today but did not hear back from the nearly 15-year-old rover. The team is now operating under the assumption that the charge in Opportunity’s batteries has dipped below 24 volts and the rover has entered low power fault mode, a condition where all subsystems, except a mission clock, are turned off. The rover’s mission clock is programmed to wake the computer so it can check power levels.

If the rover’s computer determines that its batteries don’t have enough charge, it will again put itself back to sleep. Due to an extreme amount of dust over Perseverance Valley, mission engineers believe it is unlikely the rover has enough sunlight to charge back up for at least the next several days.

By February, it had become clear that Opportunity’s data transmission from the summer of 2018 would be its last. Holiday’s voice became the voice of final goodbye. 

I was in New Orleans, another coastal ecology always contending with the water, when I read this news. Away from this person I now loved as Valentine’s Day crept up, I had never considered Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” to be a song of farewell. It has always been, for me, an amorous sonic epistle, a way of saying, here, you are where my heart belongs. Away from this person I loved as Valentine’s Day approached, unable to figure out how to be in person together, separated still by an ocean and time, I played this song if only to remind myself that distance would not become a permanent impasse. By that February, we had almost perfected a system: one month here, one month there. There being, at first, the small island where the person I loved was born, a short trip from my Brooklyn home. This was our rhythm soon after Miami. Then, as the person I loved relocated for school, there became a big, gray European City. Here morphed into a series of different cities in which I took up residence after moving out of Brooklyn. I had decided I needed to travel as I figured out the terms of a book project I wanted to take on. 

And so, guided by the desire to sharpen ourselves, we leapt in different directions as we still attempted to hold onto each other, transience best understood as the context for our love.

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If you have heard “I’ll Be Seeing You” at any point in your life (and chances are that you have), you have most likely listened to the version Holiday recorded in 1944 — the version played for Opportunity, in fact — though it was not originally her song. Composer Sammy Fain and songwriter Irvin Kahal wrote the song in 1938 and as WWII began, it gradually personified the ache and hope of a generation that watched their loved ones leave without an assurance of return. Fain and Kahal’s tune was a hit; Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra each recorded their own renditions. Yet, it took a Black woman to lend the song its gravitas. 

If Aretha Franklin is the singer who first taught me how to see God, it has been Holiday who has taught me how to name a kind of romantic love. 

I was a few months shy of 14 when I first heard Holiday’s version of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” It was summer 2004 and the film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’s novel The Notebook had just been released in the U.S. The film tells the story of an unlikely pairing of two white South Carolinians — Allie and Noah — in the 1940s who, in spite of their class differences, fall in love one summer against the backdrop of the Second World War. We learn of the drama of their romance via flashbacks of an older couple eventually revealed to be the elder Allie and Noah. 

That night, we were both, quietly, preparing to receive each other, in spite of the distance — moon, water, heart in dialogue.

In the scene I found most striking, the scene that defines the film for me, Noah and Allie are on their first date and begin to dance in the middle of the street. Slowly, they move as Holiday starts to croon. I did not know anything profound about romance then as a teenager, but I knew that I had never heard a love song like that before. I’d heard few voices that hummed through me like Holiday’s did that afternoon. 

Kahal’s lyrics embody the familiar longing that occurs between lovers separated. As Holiday’s voice eases into that opening horn melody, steady and deliberate, each lyric pronounced and clear, she carries those words into a significant emotional, poetic plane.  Holiday’s lento performance stands in for all of us who have just as slowly and tenderly opened that anticipated letter with “I love you,” or “I am always thinking of you,” awaiting. And in the distinctive fortitude that defined a hallmark era of jazz and the blues as musical genres, it was Holiday who offered an unmatched vocal rhythm and inventiveness. Perhaps she has taught us all how to love: her 1956 rendition of Vernon Duke’s “April in Paris,” evoking sentiments I once hoped to find in that very city but could not quite grasp at the time. Her version of Duke’s similarly classic standard, “Autumn in New York,” conjuring the lurking beauty of the fall season in a city that can be hard to embrace in moments. To listen to Holiday is to listen to a woman who has lived and loved, and that acute transmission of heartache, of a resolute knowing, is her potency, like the water. 

“I’ll Be Seeing You” is not about one city. It is about the moon; it is about everywhere. It is about all the locations in which we have yearned. When I think of the person I loved, I fold myself inside of Holiday’s transmission. 

* * *

There is so much about a long-distance relationship that can seem fleeting, and because the moments of physical togetherness and intimacy become planned in a meticulous manner, it always feels as if you are chasing time. Trying to get it to not just slow down, but to stop. Trying to extend a day into a week, a week into a month. In a long-distance relationship you are constantly grappling with the tension between aloneness and loneliness because the threat of being overwhelmed by nostalgia feels palpable. That night in Miami, under the waning crescent moon, when I knew that I would indeed love the person who I loved, in spite of a distance that I could not yet see reconciled, I thought to myself, Billie will steady us. 

I carried that song with me everywhere. On the New York City subway, at the Acropolis in Athens, in a quiet bar in Bonn, at the Souk of Marrakech. I learned how to find the person I loved in the poetry section of a New Orleans bookstore, that vintage shop in Baltimore, a Lisbon pastelaria. Each new place, Lady Day in my head, on my heart, reminding me to look at the moon before sleep, that I would always find a reflection of the person I loved there, too, until the next visit. 

An Ending

I keep coming back to three lines in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

When you travel everything goes with you, even the things you do not know.
They travel; they take up space; they remain the things you do not know;
they become the things you will never know.

I tell myself that when you are in a long-distance relationship, especially one that requires crossing water as commute, travel can become burdensome and exhausting and the last thing you want is to carry excess. Brand does not speak of romantic love, I know, but recently, I cannot read these words without thinking about the unknown excesses that traveled with me as love took me back and forth across an ocean. I only knew, instead, how to name what was becoming my loneliness. I am sure the person I loved was unraveling in this way too. 

Here are some items that I would regularly pack: a raincoat, two books, a comfortable pair of sneakers, a laptop, a purple caftan, five T-shirts, a few sweaters, three pairs of jeans, multiple love notes. 

Even now, I am worried that I have exposed too much. 

I didn’t know what to do with myself after the person I loved and I decided that it had become too heavy to carry the distance anymore, so I went back to Miami. 

Greeted by friends at the airport, I temporarily swallowed the lump in my throat that had swelled as I stepped off the plane that August morning. Even in my delusional attempts to not think about my last visit — the visit when I fell in love — my body remembered the humidity which meant it wouldn’t let me forget what this city held for me. I wasn’t ready to divulge the details of the breakup, so I smiled my widest smile and let my friends take me to Jimmy’s Diner for breakfast. The entire conversation, an exercise of restraint for me. When you travel, heartbreak travels with you, whether you want it to or not.  

I didn’t unpack my suitcase when I arrived at my hotel later that day. A storm was lurking, I knew, but I wanted to wander about Little Havana for a moment, even if it meant getting caught in the rain. I grabbed my clutch, my phone, my headphones. I greeted the older women having lunch in the lobby before exiting and turning left on SW 9th Street. I pressed play and let Billie wash over me, and I walked and walked and walked.

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Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Art in America, The Believer, BOMB Magazine, The Nation and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about love, faith, and the American South.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Fact checker: Matt Giles

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

 

‘What’s this guy doing loose in Malheur County?’

Image by Curtis Perry via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Anthony Montwheeler spent 20 years in an Oregon mental healthy facility after being found not guilty of kidnapping his ex-wife by reason of insanity. He was released after claiming that he’d been faking the whole time, then immediately kidnapped another ex-wife, eventually stabbing her and killing another person during an ensuing car chase, all in full view of witnesses. And yes, he’s going to plead insanity again. How did he get the “not guilty” verdict 20 years ago? How did he get out? Is he mentally ill; what even is “mental illness” in the criminal justice context? In Rolling Stone, Rob Fischer walks us through Montwheeler’s case and the many blurry lines and troubling policies around the insanity defense in the U.S.

The hearing lasted more than two hours, but Montwheeler testified for only eight and a half minutes. When a state official asked if he ever had trouble sleeping, Montwheeler said, “No. I’ve always been able to sleep at night.” Had he ever been depressed, or felt that life is not worth living? “I’ve always been happy,” Montwheeler said. “I mean, I’ve never been depressed.” So then, the official pressed, you’ve never had any trouble getting out of bed and going about your activities? “No,” Montwheeler replied. “I’ve always showed up for work. I’ve always been Johnny on the spot.”

After a brief recess, the review board found Montwheeler was “no longer affected by a qualifying mental disease or defect,” which meant the state was legally required to discharge him. Offenders who are discharged from the state hospital, even those, like Montwheeler, released before the completion of their full term, are not diverted into penitentiaries. They are set free without additional oversight or guaranteed access to state mental health care.

The board’s chair, Kate Lieber, a Portland-based attorney, was clearly upset. “I don’t even know where to start,” she said. While maintaining a lie for 20 years, she noted, Montwheeler had avoided prison, lived rent-free, and received expensive care from trained professionals. “I mean, that is troubling on all sorts of levels,” Lieber said. “I’m assuming somebody in the system might do a forensic look at this and figure out what the hell happened. But as of now, you’re discharged.” Before Montwheeler walked out the door, she added, “My hope is that you’ll do the right thing. I am sincerely worried that you won’t.”

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“What Do I Know To Be True?”: Emma Copley Eisenberg on Truth in Nonfiction, Writing Trauma, and The Dead Girl Newsroom

Sylvie Rosokoff / Hachette Books

Jacqueline Alnes | Longreads | February 2020 | 21 minutes (5,966 words)

 
Am I a journalist?” I found myself asking Emma Copley Eisenberg. On a sunny day in mid-October, Eisenberg sat adjacent to me at the dining room table in her West Philadelphia home, a spread of sliced tomatoes, chicken, and perfectly steamed asparagus she prepared on a plate between us. I am certainly not a journalist in any meaningful sense of the word — outside of an MFA in creative nonfiction, during which I learned to conduct research, I have no formal schooling or training — but Emma and I are both infatuated with the boundaries between subject and writer, research and lived experience, and how we classify it all. How does who we are and our own lived experiences affect the types of research we reach for? Is there such a thing as objectivity, or do we land closer to the truth if we expose our own flaws and biases and complicated histories on the page? And what is truth, after all? 

Eisenberg, in her debut book, The Third Rainbow Girl, wrestles meaningfully with these questions and many others. Though her book is marketed as true crime, and though a major thread within the narrative is the murder of Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero, two women on their way to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering, Eisenberg undermines many features of the subgenre by centering place as a major subject. Her descriptions of Pocahontas County, both in memoir sections, in which Eisenberg relays her time living in Appalachia, and reported sections, in which Eisenberg offers insight into the ways in which the murders of Durian and Santomero brought to the surface harmful stereotypes perpetuated against the region, complicate perceptions rather than flatten them into any packageable or easy narrative. In prose that brims with empathy, and through research that illuminates narratives that have long been hidden by problematic representation, Eisenberg exposes the kinds of fictions we tell ourselves often enough that we believe them to be true.  

During the course of our sprawling conversation, one punctuated only by friendly interruptions from a gray house cat named Gabriel, Eisenberg and I talked about what it means to seek truth in nonfiction, and how writing the personal can allow for more complicated realities to emerge; how undermining conventions of genre can impact the way a book is both marketed and read; and what it means to find clarity — or at least community — while writing into murky, and often traumatizing subject matter.  Read more…

Can Mickey Mouse Coexist with Bears, Panthers, and Alligators?

Further reading: How pet reptiles are flourishing in Florida by preying on bird populations.

In Florida, 12 acres are developed each hour. In the land of snow birds, theme parks, golf courses, and ever-expanding terra cotta tract housing, is there a way for wetlands and wild animals to not just survive, but thrive alongside man’s ravenous appetite for development?

At The Bitter Southerner, Will Wellman follows a small team and their documentary crew through forests and swamps as they study the potential to create a wildlife corridor connecting the last remaining wild places in the Sunshine State.

Even in my own Floridian imagination, my home state has shifted from wild green to lifeless gray. Florida is no longer “dotted” with development, but with wilderness. Come to Florida, the advertisements say, there are gators, tropical flowers, wide open oceans. BUT DON’T WORRY, they can’t reach you from your air-conditioned hotel room, restaurant, Disney vacation. Come and look! You definitely don’t have to touch.

Joe continued his research on a small bear population in Glades and Highlands counties, attempting to understand how these bears managed to live in an area so heavily affected by human development. One of the bears Joe was tracking, a male given the colorful name M34, went on a journey of nearly 500 miles — wandering from Lake Placid through the Everglades Headwaters, then toward Celebration, a planned community outside of Disney World. M34 bumped up against I-4 many times but was never able to cross; he eventually made his way back south to the ranches and natural land of the Lake Wales Ridge area.

M34’s problem is a common issue for animals throughout the state of Florida. Growing development and infrastructure across the state means isolated habitats, and there are scant pathways connecting these wild areas.

The swamp along Reedy Creek is relatively dry. The trunks of trees throughout the swamp bear the marks of both seasonal flooding and drought. In a month, when the summer rains begin, the waters will quickly rise to the higher water lines. For now, though, the ground is a mucky labyrinth of dead vegetation, fallen trees, and downed branches. The humidity here is palpable; it presses against you, as does the heat.

This is no place for claustrophobics. But of all the landscapes I’ve had the good fortune to explore, none makes me feel as alive as a swamp does. I don’t mean exuberance or joy. It is a sense of life fed by ever-present danger. Swamps are marked by death — all the rotting organic matter that mars its floor and gives it life — and by risk — every nook and cranny could hide snakes, gators, and more. A swamp jars you from default, autopilot amble and into an alertness of a dark, living world around you. Rilke’s words reverberate as a mantra for this wooden morass: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.”

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Wait, What?

Chung Sung-Jun / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2020 |  9 minutes (2,335 words)

I used to think I was the only one who dealt with this particular existential crisis. It’s the one where every choice you make coincides with the torture of knowing that you didn’t choose something else. And that something else, by virtue of not being chosen, has infinite potential for being the right choice. It’s a fallacy, of course. Because usually there is no right or wrong decision, just a decision. And when that decision is made, it’s not as final as all that. It’s one option in a series of options your life is made up of, some of which have bigger consequences, most of which have smaller ones. But that fallacy is what we bring to any prize or award or, you know, any competition that culminates in a reward of some kind. It makes sense, because it’s binary — you get it or you don’t — but the consequences usually aren’t. It certainly feels like your life will fundamentally change if you win, but more often than not that’s not the case. The choice is made, everyone goes ballistic, and pretty soon after everything goes back to how it was.

A South Korean movie with subtitles was not supposed to win four Oscars, an 18-year-old girl who makes music in her brother’s bedroom wasn’t supposed to take home five Grammys, and a foul-mouthed British woman shouldn’t have bagged three Emmys. There’s a cognitive dissonance to all of this, because, by now, we expect our institutions — Hollywood or otherwise — to make the wrong choices, which we expect because these institutions are populated by people who don’t actually reflect the world, only its most privileged citizens. And what’s a greater distillation of an out-of-touch industry’s allegiances and exclusions than the awards it bestows? The Emmys are The Big Bang Theory, the Grammys are “Shape of You,” the Oscars are Green Book. Filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, the one who took home those four statuettes for Parasite, could have been speaking about any number of ceremonies when he infamously said last year of the Oscars, “They’re very local.” Which I took to mean that the Academy tends to reward not only Americans, but work that expresses the white capitalist values that form American society (and Hollywood within it). When Parasite won, the dissonance didn’t just suddenly resolve itself, because we knew underneath that win that Hollywood itself hadn’t actually changed. So we burdened what should have been a moment of unadulterated joy with analysis — about the work, about the winner, about the voters, about the audience, about cinema. In Parasite terms, we covered it in peach fuzz.

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It’s weird when deserving people win. It’s like a mindfuck. That’s what I thought (and tweeted) after Bong Joon-ho won the final Oscar of the year. What else do you say? It’s like being in the middle of a verbal sparring match with someone and they suddenly spit out something reasonable. You’re struck dumb. The Oscars almost never get it right, and when they get it wrong, it’s wrong (remember Crash?). This year, seeing the stage full of artists who are usually shut out of the ceremony — non-Americans, people of color, people with actual talent — accepting “Hollywood’s biggest honor” infected us all with such a severe case of cognitive dissonance I could hear our brains collectively short-circuit. And because of the way cognitive dissonance works, because it means we do everything we can to reconfigure the situation to align with what we believe to be true — in this case, that the Academy is “local” — Parasite’s Best Picture win was encumbered by mental acrobatics. It was as though no one wanted to get too intoxicated because they had experienced the sobering return to the status quo so many times before. The award became a spoil of war over identity politics, doubly here, because not only is Bong South Korean, but Parasite is also in Korean. That meant no one could just enjoy its triumphs outside the context of its ethnic dynamics.

It was barely more than a month ago that Issa Rae deadpanned, “Congratulations to those men,” while announcing the all-male Oscar nominees for Best Director. In the all-white-but-one category, the best we could hope for was a win by the Asian genius, who, as luck would have it, had also made the best film (enough about The Irishman). And when Bong’s film was announced after a suitably dramatic pause by Jane Fonda, it all went so smoothly, it was like it was meant to be. This wasn’t the Moonlight fiasco, that embarrassing stutter in 2017 where the ceremony juddered with a, yeah, no, the better one, the black one, that’s the one that won, sorry, where’s the trophy? But that historic faux pas is still so fresh that its shadow is still cast across the Academy’s stage. It’s a not-so-distant reminder that stories like those continue to be interlopers, and one that partially but inevitably eclipses wins like Bong’s, which, all things being fair, should not have to answer for it. But he does. Per Adam Nayman at The Ringer, “a skeptic might wonder about the enthusiasm of any filmmaker — even such an obviously wry, self-styled subversive — desiring membership to a club that’s not always open or accommodating.” It’s true, but it is also true that this is a wonder that does not tend to greet the likes of Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino. Because nothing they do, nothing they or their films represent, really clashes with this particular gentlemen’s club. They are white men presenting films focused on white men to a group of white men. There is no dissonance there to correct.

Unless you’re Joaquin Phoenix, who briefly shouldered the dissonance plaguing his marginalized peers. Prior to his Oscar win, the Joker star was extolled on social media for his self-flagellating speech at the diversity-blind BAFTAS. “I think that we send a very clear message to people of color that you’re not welcome here,” he said, reportedly to some uncomfortable silence. “This is not a self-righteous condemnation because I’m ashamed to say that I’m part of the problem.” While Phoenix initially walked off the BAFTAS stage leaving his trophy behind, picking up the Oscar so soon after that implied a tacit acceptance of Hollywood’s problematic politics, if not Britain’s. Engaging in the awards ceremony, being bowled over by a win of any kind,  implies that on some level you respect the institution, you believe in it. The only way around this, really, is full-out rejection.

Several actors have avoided any hint of hypocrisy by extricating themselves from awards proceedings entirely. Marlon Brando infamously sent an Indigenous woman to reject his Oscar on the grounds of the film industry’s mistreatment of the Indigenous community, while George C. Scott preceded him by refusing to participate in 1970 in what he called a “two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons.” (That he did engage later somewhat undercutting his stance.) This has bled outside the Academy, to other industries where awards act as the ultimate expression of their ideals: Julie Andrews snubbed the Tonys for snubbing the rest of her team, for one, while knighthood after knighthood has been passed over over the years to protest the enduring monarchy. After declining the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean-Paul Sartre outlined how an award is inextricable from its awarding body and the awarding body’s history. “The writer who accepts an honor of this kind involves as well as himself the association or institution which has honored him,” he wrote. “The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances, as in the present case.”

Increasingly aware that awards doled out by older institutions are misrepresentative of the culture and, in the case of the Grammys at least so committed to misconduct they will essentially fire even the CEO for confronting their sexism, artists have turned to smaller events for direction. Free of institutionalized myopia, they move more fluidly with the times. Before the Nobel committee announced it was awarding genocide denier Peter Handke the literature prize, for instance, The New York Times published a conversation among critics in which the Booker Prize (big in the industry, less outside of it) was floated as more indicative of the literary world’s proclivities; two women, Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo, shared the award the same year Handke won the Nobel. Meanwhile, the Independent Spirit Awards have openly owned their status as the official alternative, riffing this year — “we recognize female directors — all two of them!” — on the gaping lacunae the Oscar nominations left behind. Lulu Wang’s The Farewell won the top prize, while Adam Sandler secured a long-awaited win for his frenetic, lived-in performance in Uncut Gems. On the podium, the Sandman directly confronted the Academy he had only poked fun at on social media. He compared the situation to being passed over in high school for most good looking — in favor of a “feather-haired douchebag” — and winning best personality instead. “So let all of those feather-haired douchebag motherfuckers get their Oscars tomorrow night,” he said. “Their handsome good looks will fade in time, while our independent personalities will shine on forever.”  

Oscar winner Bong does happen to have feathered hair, but cognitive dissonance still accompanied his victory as a corrective for how unexpected it was. Parasite won four awards, yes, but why no acting prizes? Racism, obviously. The wider skeptical responses to what appeared to be attempts by the Academy to be a little “woker” further unmasked them as shallow performance, sometimes literally. The opening Janelle Monáe–led musical number? “Diversity,” a number of critics of color deadpanned. Natalie Portman’s cape festooned with the cursive names of overlooked female filmmakers? Hypocrisy. Her production company has worked mostly with men. Meanwhile, Renée Zellweger’s win was just a reminder of Judy Garland’s lack of wins, and Joaquin Phoenix’s speech was more like an ad for PETA. The complaints had varying levels of validity, but why the impulse to make them so expediently? There seemed to be this overarching need to expose the flaws in what appeared to be a precarious night based on a set of arbitrary choices — to cast aside these momentary remedies to reveal the foundational faults that cannot in the long run support them. 

This is the drive to push for deeper systemic change where we can, to protest where there is nothing apparent to protest, to miss no chances. To revel in a win is to fleetingly ignore everything that’s wrong, and there’s no time left for that. A symbol of progress like Parasite thus becomes shackled by its own symbolism, dragging along the wider sociocultural implications with its artistry. It then becomes not only a perfectly executed piece of filmmaking, but the Oscar anomaly, the one which bolsters our expectations of the Academy, the foreign film which secures a wider theatrical run post-win, the popular nonwhite release standing in for all the nonwhite releases.

* * *

“Cognitive dissonance is a motivating state of affairs,” wrote social psychologist Leon Festinger, who coined the term. “Just as hunger impels a person to eat, so does dissonance impel a person to change his opinions or his behavior.” Bong didn’t expect to win over the Oscars. The dissonance he felt was clear in the way he admired his trophy on stage, the way he proceeded to lead a standing ovation for fellow nominee Scorsese, who he quoted — “The most personal is the most creative” — and praised along with the remaining nominees: Tarantino, Todd Phillips, and Sam Mendes. “If the Academy allows,” he concluded. “I would like to get a Texas chainsaw, split the Oscar trophy into five and share it with all of you.” That the director from South Korea who made a quintessentially South Korean film felt the need to create a feeling of inclusivity on a quintessentially American stage says something about where America, if not the Oscars, is right now. That is to say, that marginalized communities, while protesting their historical treatment, can also recognize the merits of the institutions that have neglected them, deferring to aspects of their legacies despite their lack of diversity. 

But the opposite is rarely true. The institutions and the people who represent them should be deferring to the populations that they have overlooked for so long. But they don’t; just look at Tarantino’s refusal at Cannes to even engage in a question about gender politics with respect to Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Which is why Phoenix’s words at the BAFTAs were so powerful, because he was admitting that in some sense it is a zero-sum game, that his chance denied someone else’s, that he was complicit in this denial. It was groundbreaking when it really shouldn’t be, when for nonwhite filmmakers like Bong this level of discourse is expected.

Generally, it’s up to the outsiders to help other outsiders. On the Oscars red carpet, Bong made sure to mention Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, which had been overlooked, despite taking Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Awards. Insiders seem to miss this heightened urgency around inclusivity because it is not urgent for them. Critics clamored to determine what Parasite’s win could mean for American cinema, but that question was beside the point. The unexpected win by an international artist on domestic soil says less about the cracks in Hollywood’s traditions than it does about the world, which almost imperceptibly but certainly is changing both despite us and because of us, both for the worse and for the better, with marginalized populations leading the biggest changes of all. As always, Bong was already aware of this communal dissonance before everyone else. As he said at the Lumière Festival in October: “When I made Parasite, it was like trying to witness our world through a microscope. The film talks about two opposing families, about the rich versus the poor, and that is a universal theme, because we all live in the same country now: that of capitalism.”  

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Soli/dairy/ty

The Image Bank / Getty Images Plus, Luis Villasmil / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Liza Monroy | Longreads | February 2020 | 15 minutes (3,637 words)

On the verge of turning 40, all my habits felt ingrained. So I was surprised when, late last February, I became vegan one morning, following an intuitive stab out of the ether. It made no sense, not yet, and Joaquin Phoenix’s viral Oscar speech was still a year into the future, but I’d promised myself to always follow my instincts after, 10 years prior, that little voice within had attempted to warn me to hide my laptop before leaving my apartment. Perplexed by the absurdity of this non-thought, I’d ignored it only to return to find the laptop submerged in the bathtub, fallen victim to a vengeful ex-boyfriend’s rage. Life had since quieted and so had the little voice, until it resurfaced whispering, be vegan for the month of March.

As a 20-year ovo-lacto vegetarian-with-a-sushi-exemption, I found the hunch puzzling. Still, the voice had spoken, so I didn’t question it, though I did start searching for reasons. As a second-time mother to an infant, then seven months old, I felt lacking in structure, focus, and goals, and veganism gave me a way to try and put some version of that back into my life. Or perhaps, like a culinary Oulipian, further constraints would spike creativity, breaking my egg-and-cheese-bagel,-salmon-nigiri routine with more colorful vegetables. What I definitely wasn’t thinking: dairy cows, other than to joke that, hooked up to my mechanical breast pump, I felt like one.

Though I couldn’t pinpoint a rationale for my non-choice, I knew what I wasn’t and would never become: one of those unpleasant extremists who espoused “radical vegan propaganda,” who harass you with pamphlets depicting horrifying conditions of factory farms.

And then I went to VegFest. The pamphlet was lying on a table with others containing recipe ideas and shopping lists. But this one, about the practices of the dairy industry, caught my nursing-mama attention in a new way: “A cow must regularly give birth to produce profitable amounts of milk,” it read. Though I was against killing animals, I’d believed dairy was only a matter of taking something that was already there. I’d operated under the assumption that milking a cow was taking a nutritionally beneficial substance that would otherwise go to waste, as if all dairy cows were overproducers like me, milk running in streams. I’d never encountered this simple information about their pregnancy. “Similar to humans,” the pamphlet continued, “a cow’s gestation period is about nine months. In that time she develops a strong desire to nurture her baby calf — a calf that will be taken from her hours or days after birth. Cows can live more than 20 years, however they’re usually slaughtered once lactation decreases at about 5 years of age.”

At first it was the babies being taken away that got me. Motherhood had instilled in me an understanding of the deep, cellular-level, biological attachment to the calf. It must not be entirely true, I insisted to myself. This pamphlet was the dreaded “militant vegan propaganda.” I went online in search of contradictory information, but even meat-industry trade publications indicated this process is but simple fact-of-the-matter, nothing to get worked up about.

An article by rancher Heather Smith Thomas in Beef Magazine states that, “There’s a complex hormone system involved in causing birth and initiating lactation.” Pregnancy and birth for a cow entails a physiological process nearly identical to humans’. The mother’s body produces oxytocin during labor, bonding her to her calf and bringing on a strong desire to nurse. Exactly like the pamphlet said. Exactly like my own experience.

Suddenly, I felt a little, well, militant in spite of myself. The timing of having recently become a small-scale milk producer again made it obvious in retrospect: milk wasn’t just there, in mammals’ mammary glands. You had to have a baby to get it there. I didn’t just happen to have milk in my udders either — I had to get pregnant and give birth before it came and turned my breasts into hot, painful footballs only my baby or a horrible breast-pump could relieve. I’d had no idea my beloved ice cream and pizza were the cause of suffering. But dairy cows with lower production rates are not economically viable. They are sent sooner to slaughter.

Sailesh Rao, a Stanford PhD and former systems engineer who founded Climate Healers, a nonprofit fighting climate change, told me: “During a visit to the Kumbalgarh Wildlife sanctuary in India I observed how the forest was being destroyed by cows eating anything new growing out of the ground while old-growth trees were being cut down. I realized it was even better to eat some beef to finish off the cows after I had exploited them for milk. I resolved to go vegan on the spot.”

Environmental reasons were obvious, but on the compassion front, for years I’d taken imagery on dairy-milk cartons literally: peaceful cows standing in fields beside gentle farmers seated on stools, red barn in the background under a vast open sky. Was that the real propaganda? In YouTube videos of the routine dairy-farm practice of taking newborn calves from their mothers, the distress cries sound chillingly like daycare drop-off, except the afternoon reunion will never come.

I grabbed a couple of magnets and affixed the pamphlet to the fridge.
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Sight and Insight

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Liane Kupferberg Carter | Longreads | February 2020 | 16 minutes (4,092 words)

I was born with strabismus, an imbalance in the muscles that position the eyes. Strabismus: from the Greek strabismós, meaning “to squint.” People sometimes call it cross-eyed, wall-eyed, or lazy-eyed.

I was still a toddler when my mother started taking me to doctors. They prescribed drops, eye exercises, and, eventually, glasses when I was 4. Mom chose blue and white striped cat eye frames for me. “These are adorable,” she said. If she said they were pretty, I assumed they must be. I wasn’t sure I wanted to wear them. But my mother wore glasses too, and I wanted to please her.

When the glasses didn’t help enough, the doctor instructed her to put a patch over one lens to force my weaker right eye to work better. That afternoon I went down the street to play with the neighborhood kids. There was a new girl with them. She asked, “Why are you wearing that patch?”

“I’m a pirate,” I said.

“That’s stupid,” she replied. “Girls can’t be pirates. You look ugly.”

I pushed her. She tumbled back onto the lawn and started to wail. A door flew open, and an enormous dog bounded at me, nipping and snapping. Frantic, I tried to get away, but a woman who must have been the girl’s mother grabbed me, her nails digging into my shoulder. She wrenched my arm behind my back and hissed in my ear, “Who’s your mother? You’re a very bad little girl.”

Sobbing and ashamed, I stumbled down the sidewalk, desperate for my mom. By the time I burst through the back door I was panting. Mom looked angry. The scary lady must have telephoned. “You know better than that,” Mom scolded. “I’m disappointed in your behavior.”

I was awash in incoherent misery. Why wasn’t she taking my side?

But I knew. It was because I was bad. An ugly, bad girl.
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House of the Century

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Daisy Alioto | Longreads | February 2020 | 16 minutes (3,903 words)

“A house is the physical manifestation of the ego”

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, “My Very Own Dream House”

I. Security

I have always harbored suspicions about fire escape windows. When my mother was living in Boston in the 80s, her TV set sat across from the window that opened onto her fire escape. One night she woke up to a hairy leg entering the window and screamed loudly enough to wake her neighbors and scare away the television thief. An acquaintance who lives in Park Slope listened to an intruder pop the glass out of her fire escape window and watched their iPhone light sweep closer to the bedroom as she silently tried to shake her boyfriend awake. After an eternity, he sprung up and chased the intruder out with a hockey stick.

My boyfriend does not harbor suspicions about fire escape windows, so when he moved to a one bedroom apartment, security considerations became my own research project. The acquaintance in Park Slope sent a link to a $20 window alarm on Amazon. I watched a short video about the installation process and began to read the reviews. The top review was 5/5 stars, written by Mary in Florida and it broke my heart more than any thief ever could.

She writes that she debated buying a door alarm but never did, despite the fact that the rest of the house was baby proofed for two children under two years old. One day, after feeding a bird outside, the younger one slipped back out without her noticing — probably to chase the bird, she says. In a few minutes she sensed the lack of noise in the house, the too quietness. She found him in the pond across the street and he died the next day.

The review continues. “I am a good mom,” she writes, listing the other ways she baby-proofed the home. “I am a good mom.” I’ve forgotten why I’ve come to Amazon. Maybe this is someone’s idea of a sick joke, a manufacturer’s enthusiastic review of their own product gone too far but no… with a little Googling, I find Mary and the local reporting on the tragedy.

I want to reach through my screen and hold Mary. To tell her yes, you are a good mom. It’s not your fault that doors open and babies look at birds. Of course you are a good mother, there’s just so much that can go wrong with a home.

According to Robert Lee’s A Treatise On Hysteria (1871), Greek physician Aretaeus was one of the first thinkers to link hysteria to the female body. “In the middle of the flanks of a woman lies the womb, a female viscus closely resembling an animal.” The womb wanders the body, leaving a slew of undesirable symptoms in its wake. “On the whole it is like an animal within an animal,” Aretaeus writes.
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