Search Results for: Time Magazine

The Great Online School Scam

Photo: Getty Images.

Noliwe Rooks | Excerpt from Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education | The New Press | September 2017 | 18 minutes (5,064 words)

* * *

DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos said her ultimate goals in education reform encompassed not just charter schools and voucher programs, but also virtual education. She said these forms were important because they would allow “all parents, regardless of their zip code, to have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children.” Also in 2013, one of the organizations that she founded, the American Federation for Children, put out a sharply critical statement after New Jersey’s school chief, Chris Cerf, declined to authorize two virtual charter schools. The group said the decision “depriv[es] students of vital educational options.” Yet another group DeVos founded and funded, the Michigan-based Great Lakes Education Project, has also advocated for expansion of online schools, and in a 2015 speech available on YouTube DeVos praised “virtual schools [and] online learning” as part of an “open system of choices.” She then said, “We must open up the education industry—and let’s not kid ourselves that it isn’t an industry. We must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators.” DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

At the time of her nomination, charter schools were likely familiar to most listeners given their rapid growth and ubiquity. However, the press surrounding the DeVos nomination may have been one of the first times most became aware of a particular offshoot of the charter school movement—virtual or cyber schools. Despite flying somewhat under the mainstream radar, online charter schools have faced a wave of both negative press and poor results in research studies. One large-scale study from 2015 found that the “academic benefits from online charter schools are currently the exception rather than the rule.” By June of 2016, even a group that supports, runs, and owns charter schools published a report calling for more stringent oversight and regulation of online charter schools, saying, “The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action for state leaders and authorizers across the country.” The jointly authored research was sponsored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50Can, all groups that lobby state and federal agencies to loosen regulations to allow more robust charter-school growth. As one of the report’s backers said, “I’m not concerned that Betsy DeVos supports virtual schools, because we support them too—we just want them to be a lot better.” Such an upswing in quality seems highly unlikely to happen anytime soon. They are yet another trickle in the stream of apartheid forms of public education flowing down from the wealthy and politically well connected to communities that are poor, of color, or both.

In Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina, Ohio, and Florida, poor students from rural areas as well as those in underfunded urban schools that primarily educate students who are Black and Latino today face a new response to the question of how to solve the riddle of race, poverty, and educational underachievement. Increasingly, despite little supporting evidence, a growing number of states and local school districts no longer believe that the solution is merely about infrastructure, class size, funding, or hiring more teachers. In states with high levels of poverty and “hard to educate” Black and Latino students, virtual schools are on the rise. Such schools are not growing nearly as fast in school districts that are white and relatively wealthy, nor are they the educational strategy of choice in most private schools. As much a business strategy as one promoting learning, virtual education allows businesses to profit from racial inequality and poverty. Sadly, this particular cure to what ails our education system more often than not exacerbates the problems. Read more…

The Internet Isn’t Forever

Illustration by Shannon Freshwater

Maria Bustillos | Columbia Journalism Review | February 2018 |2900 words (12 minutes)

This story is published in collaboration with the Columbia Journalism Review, whose Winter 2018 issue covers threats to journalism.

The Honolulu Advertiser doesn’t exist anymore, but it used to publish a regular “Health Bureau Statistics” column in its back pages supplied with information from the Hawaii Department of Health detailing births, deaths, and other events. The paper, which began in 1856 as the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, since the end of World War II was merged, bought, sold, and then merged again with its local rival, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, to become in 2010 The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. But the Advertiser archive is still preserved on microfilm in the Honolulu State Library. Who could have guessed, when those reels were made, that the record of a tiny birth announcement would one day become a matter of national consequence? But there, on page B-6 of the August 13, 1961 edition of The Sunday Advertiser, set next to classified listings for carpenters and floor waxers, are two lines of agate type announcing that on August 4, a son had been born to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway.

In the absence of this impossible-to-fudge bit of plastic film, it would have been far easier for the so-called birther movement to persuade more Americans that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But that little roll of microfilm was and is still there, ready to be threaded on a reel and examined in the basement of the Honolulu State Library: An unfalsifiable record of “Births, Marriages, Deaths,” which immeasurably fortified the Hawaii government’s assertions regarding Obama’s original birth certificate. “We don’t destroy vital records,” Hawaii Health Department spokeswoman Janice Okubo says. “That’s our whole job, to maintain and retain vital records.” Read more…

Black Disabled Wonder Women Need Love, Too

Crutches from Shutterstock

Britney Wilson | Longreads | February 2018 | 25 minutes (6,304 words)

 

“You good?” you asked, pulling a gray wool blanket up tighter around your shoulders, yawning, and stretching your legs out on the worn blue couch in the corner of my apartment.

“Yeah,” I said, closing the bathroom door behind me and attempting to do my version of tiptoeing back over to my bed, hoping the slight clanking of my crutches wouldn’t wake anyone.

It was the weekend of my 24th birthday — four years ago. You had driven my friends Mia, Lisa, and Monique from D.C. to Philly and you’d all spent the weekend with me. I was in law school. I’d spent the hours before your arrival cursing the fact that I had been born in the middle of February, and praying for your safe journey as I watched the snowstorm that was beginning outside my window.

The night before, on the phone, I had been worried. The news had been forecasting that the accumulation might be pretty significant, and as sad as the thought had made me, I’d suggested that maybe you shouldn’t come after all. You’d promised it would be fine and that you would all be there. I was genuinely concerned, but equally relieved by your determination.

A lawyer friend of mine had perfectly summed up what my transition from college to law school had been like. She said undergrad was alma mater (as in “dear mother”) and graduate school was the stepmom. You initially hate her because she’s not your mother, and you resent the way she seems to be encroaching on your life. Eventually, as you each come to appreciate the other’s unique role, you develop your own separate relationship and become friends. I liked the analogy, but I was two years in, and still hadn’t gotten to the friendly part. I desperately needed that reunion.

The only guy in the bunch, you had offered to sleep on the floor and give someone else the couch, but they’d insisted you take it. They had put you through enough on the drive up. You deserved your rest.

Because I’d known it would take me the longest, I’d let everyone else get ready for bed before me. So, I was the last person to get in the bathroom after our personal updates and in-house karaoke sessions wound down in the early hours of the morning, after you all arrived. By the time I came out, everyone was asleep, except you. I could tell you’d been fighting it.

It was the weekend of my 24th birthday — four years ago. You had driven my friends Mia, Lisa, and Monique from D.C. to Philly and you’d all spent the weekend with me.

I stepped around Mia and Monique, who were lying across the floor old-school slumber party style on a pile of extra sheets. Bending down when I got to my bed, I gingerly placed my crutches on the floor next to it and moved an extra pillow to the head of my bed where Lisa was lying at its foot.

You leaned forward from the couch, craning your neck slightly to watch me climb onto the bed. When you were sure I was all set, you leaned back against the arm of the couch and yawned again.

“Alright, good night. I love you,” you said.

“Good night. I love you too.”

As I closed my eyes that morning, flanked by my friends on all sides, feeling supported and at ease for the first time in months, with your voice as the last one I heard before I fell asleep, I wondered where it had come from — the love.

Read more…

A Shot at Glory

Illustration by J.O. Applegate.

Sam Riches | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (3,309 words)

Peter Forsberg skates in slow, tense circles and waits for his chance at history. It’s the 1994 Olympics and the men’s gold medal hockey game has come down to a shootout. Dressed in Sweden’s vivid gold Tre Kronor, with the matching blue helmet and gloves, Forsberg is a burst of color atop the cold sheet of ice, an interruption to the routine. He has one shot to keep Sweden’s hockey hopes alive.

At the other end of the rink, as Canada’s Corey Hirsch bends forward at the knees, he momentarily drops his head. Then he reaches back with his right arm and knocks the barrel of his goalie stick against the crossbar, twice. The sound of heavy wood on hollow steel rings out and up and fills the arena.

The whistle blows. Forsberg’s skates dig in. Hirsch taps his stick against the crossbar again, confirms this is really happening, and then pushes out of his crease to meet Forsberg. The space between them shrinks.

Forsberg accelerates. He pushes past his own blue line, then over the center line, now he’s in the attack zone. He comes in wide. Hirsch angles to cut him off. Forsberg is out of position. He has no room to shoot.

But he does. He waits until the last possible second, then he reaches back, one glove on his stick, and slips a backhander past Hirsch, who watches helplessly as his momentum carries him in the opposite direction, out of the crease, out of the picture. The puck slides into the back of the net.

It is Sweden’s first Olympic hockey gold. It is their greatest hockey goal. It is a moment commemorated on a postage stamp. But not yet.

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The Great Stink

CSA Images/Mod Art Collection

Laurie Penny | Longreads | February 2018 | 17 minutes (4270 words)

My heart goes out to men right now. Actually, my heart goes out to all sorts of unsavory places these days, no matter how much I warn it. My heart goes out to men most nights, wearing precarious outfits, no doubt getting exactly what it deserves. It brings back stories.

In the past weeks and months I’ve spent a lot of time sitting across tables from men who have been accused of sexual assault and rape — men who are angry, and afraid, and have no idea what to do now. Men for whom the fast-changing code of sexual and romantic conduct is not the most immediate problem: theirs is that they have been called out, condemned, and are wondering what the next months and years of their lives are going to look like. And in their bitterness I can hear a backlash coming down the tracks.

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Hierarchy of Needs

(Severin Matusek / EyeEm)

Angela Palm | Creative Nonfiction | Winter 2017 | 10 minutes (2,732 words)

“You never laugh anymore,” my seven-year-old said from the backseat of the car while I was driving. It was early November.

“What did you say?” I asked, though I had heard him clearly.

* * *

I had been thinking about what it meant that Donald Trump had not yet stopped running for president. About the errands we still had to do that night. About the balance of my credit card, and about our new mortgage and all the furniture I couldn’t afford to fill the new house. About the cost of my kids’ college. About the most recent school shooting and the new statistic I’d read that said Americans in 21 states are more likely to die a gun-related death than as a result of a car accident. About heroin overdoses and prescription pill addictions that were hitting closer and closer to home. Food insecurity. Black lives and deaths in America. Overpopulation. Prison overcrowding. The Syrian refugee crisis. Global warming. Dying oceans. My aging parents, and my own mortality. E-mail that had gone unanswered for months because I was simply tired of typing. The state of my marriage. The quality of my teaching. The exercise I wasn’t getting.

If my brain were a computer, its internal fan would make that loud, warm, whirring sound that means it’s working too hard. It probably isn’t a coincidence that adult coloring books topped Amazon’s bestseller lists last year.

* * *

I wash my body each day with liquid soap I squeeze from a bottle that reads “happiness.” I buy this product again and again to no noticeable effect and keep quiet faith in the power of the subliminal.

If that power exists, then it follows that I am also subconsciously affected by the sponsored ads on Facebook. Should I buy that period underwear? I find myself wondering several times in a single day. No, no.

* * *

The most basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are physiological ones: air, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, and excretion of waste. Eating, fucking, snoozing, shitting. Happiness is not listed among any of the hierarchy’s tiered descriptions, but I imagine it floats somewhere above the uppermost point of the two-dimensional pyramid or surrounds the diagram’s boundaries like a cloud. Perhaps it appears intermittently as each level of the hierarchy clicks into place, and flickers out of focus again when the pyramid fluctuates. Or maybe it is measured differently altogether.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula.

Our independence, says the Declaration of Independence, guarantees a right to pursue happiness and bypasses the needs in Maslow’s hierarchy entirely. Though the document assures life and liberty in imprecise, yet enthusiastic terms, it cites no explicit guarantee of basic needs such as drinkable water or fresh air. Those are assumed here. For now.

I have everything in Maslow’s ground-floor level of needs, some things in the upper levels of needs, and many things that aren’t needs at all. But this assumes happiness relies on having as opposed to being.

* * *

Echoing Tolstoy’s assertion about happy families in Anna Karenina, a therapist wrote that unhappy people have vastly different reasons for being unhappy, but happy people all have one thing in common: They are grateful for what they have rather than being obsessed with what they want.

Through product messaging, I’ve come to believe soap might have the power to make me happy. A pill might make me happy. Stylish clothes might make me happy. Make-up. Skiing. Validation from the strangers of the Internet. Alcohol. Weight loss. Botox. Period underwear.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula. An Amazon search turns up over 92,000 books that focus on the subject. In 2008, a woman named Robyn Okrant embarked on a mission to live for a year according to Oprah Winfrey’s advice on happiness. Okrant changed her sex, her food, her clothing, her makeup, her philanthropic methods, and more. In a Forbes Magazine interview she says of the experience: “It was incredibly draining, and it made me really sad. It made me sad to think of how many hours I’ve lost — even when I wasn’t doing the project — to blindly following advice and listening to what other people tell me I should be doing to create my own happiness.”

* * *

Do you know how easy it is to mask unhappiness? Add exclamation points. That is how I text my mother: I’m great! Can’t wait for the holidays!

* * *

This past fall, Thanksgiving came and went quickly. Before my brother and his girlfriend flew back home, we spent a small fortune on lunch together at a trendy brick oven pizzeria and brewery. While we waited for our food to arrive, I heard a man at the table to my right tell another man about a gay bathhouse he recently visited. “The floor is covered in semen,” he said as he ate his salad. The other man nodded, his expression neutral and joyless. I imagined a place where men empty themselves into and around each other, and I mentally classified it as a combination of a fulfilled basic need and the freedom to pursue happiness.

To my left, beyond my brother, a large flat screen television broadcasted a continuous live video feed of a Ugandan village’s water pump, which the pizzeria had funded. I was the only person in the restaurant who watched it for longer than a few seconds. Between bites of thin crust pizza topped with speck and Brussels sprouts, I saw a young boy in red t-shirt carry a plastic jug to the pump and fill it. I saw a barefoot girl toddle across the screen, then bend over to rake her hands across the ground, her face placid and oblivious to the camera. A man crossed the screen somberly and approached the pump, filling his two jugs. Then a woman filled her jugs.

Beyond the pump was a row of homes. A telephone pole rose above them, presumably delivering electricity to the village from an unseen source beyond the camera’s lens. The area in view was free from debris, free from conflict, and nothing I could see in this tiny slice of rural Uganda echoed the violence of a twenty-year civil war. I was unsure whether to take this a sign of recovery, as I only saw what I saw, and nothing more. But whatever the context, this village remained. It moved me, though I could not articulate exactly why.

For a moment, I coveted the simplicity the live feed seemed to depict. I don’t really want to live in a world where lunch for four costs $100 and restaurant staff refills my glass more often than I need, where emotions are advertised as bath soap and adult coloring books are offered as tools for unburdening our saturated minds, but here I am.

During the 43 minutes or so that I witnessed their lives from the comparable extravagance of my own, none of the Ugandans that passed before the camera laughed, but none cried either. They drew their water from the well, and then they returned to their homes, aligned on either side of a narrow road, to clean and cook and live. I wondered whether they knew they were being watched by relatively well off and overwhelmingly white people in Vermont, day after day, and whether the cost of that water was their exploitation and subjection to an American pizzeria’s marketing plan during the restaurant’s business hours. Altruism doesn’t need a camera. Neither do the thirsty.

Carl Sagan said that there are no dumb questions, but I read an article that went one step farther. It said that happy people all ask dumb questions. Here’s one: who is the camera for, then?

* * *

Over Thanksgiving break, I graded my creative writing class’ personal essays and memoirs. Their nonfiction writing revealed wide-ranging pursuits of happiness and setbacks along the way. I never said, “Write about how you struggle,” but they did. Three women battled eating disorders. One of those three was also a cutter whose words about blood sloshing from her wrists read like intimate correspondence with a lover.

(Recently, I read a suicide prevention handbill that said the term committed suicide was offensive. Died by suicide is the preferred term. I made a mental note to remember that. But what is the appropriate term for a person who enjoys hurting themselves? Who obsesses over the color of blood and loves the pain associated with extracting it from her own veins? Who, for reasons I will never comprehend, cuts herself in pursuit of happiness?)

There were two other women whose mothers had died too young. Another student’s chronic illness forced her to withdraw from school. One young woman wrote mainly about other people’s heroin use, others’ sexual abuse, as though she was recasting a truth she couldn’t quite admit as her own. All semester, I cheered silently for her.

A young man with autism recently came out of the closet and didn’t want to be called brave for that. Another young man with ADHD was allowed, by the grace of a formal accommodation, to leave the room and use his phone whenever he felt like it. He employed this choice only when he became frustrated with the less talented writers in the class. At times, I wanted to walk out with him.

A young woman wrote a chronicle of her meaningless tattoos, detailing how being able to get inked up for no reason makes her happy. She ended her essay with the line, “This skull, if you have to believe it stands for something, means I’m dead inside.”

Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them.

One young man couldn’t be bothered to do the classwork I assigned. He assumed I’d let it slide without consequence. “I’m just really into dance right now,” he said when I asked why he wasn’t doing the work — not any of it. “Are you sure my grade is right?” he asked after grades were posted.

I need an extension, they said. I need you to repeat the assignment requirements, they said. I need an electronic reminder for homework or it won’t get done, they said. I’m overwhelmed, they said. They cried when printers jammed and when they were late to class. They cried when they were given an earned poor grade. They would write me to tell me their weekend was “just too much” and they wouldn’t be able to haul themselves into the classroom.

They would stare at me like guppies, open-mouthed, waiting to be fed, and I would often have the wrong kind of nourishment. I’d read articles about trigger warnings and about millennial attitudes and about millennial parents and millennial fear of failure and low tolerance for stress, and I still couldn’t completely formulate a way to educate them effectively.

They were happiest when I brought food to class.

* * *

Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them. During the prior semester alone, there had been seven shootings on American college campuses. Just after the Thanksgiving break, the following headlines populated my Facebook feed:

“Your Opinion on Gun Control Doesn’t Matter” (Daily Kos)

“‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” (The Onion)

“On Guns, We’re Not Even Trying” (The New York Times)

Toward the end of the semester, I had been stumbling about my house, talking nonsensically to myself instead of writing or grading. “Refrigerator. Frigerator. Fridge,” I said while walking through the kitchen. Then, as I entered my office, fragments from Horace’s Ars poetica: in medias res. Ab ovo. Which mean, respectively, “into the middle of things” and “from the beginning.” The poet never implied that endings exist. Only that poetry is somehow perpetually on its way from one understanding to another, altered understanding. It is in pursuit.

* * *

Recently, I tried for the hundredth time to explain the concept of infinity to my five-year-old. “No. It has to end,” he sobbed angrily, and then stomped away.

How do we begin receding from too much? As individuals, as a generation, as a nation?

The first sign taught in baby sign language is “more.” There is no sign for “less.”

Once, the average person only had words for a handful of colors. In 1903, Crayola crayons were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and black. By 1949, there were 48 colors available; 64 by 1958; 72 by 1972; 120 by 1998. We learned more names for colors than we ever dreamed: magenta, fuchsia, copper, periwinkle, cornflower, ochre, onyx, royal blue, sienna, peach, beige. A box of eight crayons becomes 16 becomes 24 becomes 48 becomes 64 becomes 72 becomes 120. A child who has had a box of 48 crayons is never again satisfied with only 8. Or maybe they don’t know how to ask for less in a society of more.

Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.

In 2003, Crayola officially added the colors inch worm, jazzberry jam, mango tango, and wild blue yonder and they retired the colors blizzard blue, magic mint, mulberry, and teal blue.

By that same year, it is estimated up to 20,000 children had been abducted and forced to enroll as soldiers in the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army.

* * *

I admit I have an adult coloring book. I limit myself to five colors for each picture to keep the process simple, but it takes forever to choose five from my kids’ 64 pack. I’m stressed before I even begin the supposedly meditative activity.

In the phenomenon referred to as Russian blues, we discriminate between colors faster when linguistic organization presorts them.

There must be more colors to discover than we have named. There must be a Crayola 286-pack in our future, containing the shades between fuchsia and magenta, cornflower and periwinkle. Or the purple that bees see in the space between yellow and ultraviolet light.

Can we want things that we do not know about?

* * *

After the semester ended, I attended a grant-funded writing residency in Massachusetts. The Cape in winter is nearly deserted. Many of the good restaurants close for the season, and a majority of the homes sit empty. I welcomed the stillness, the solitude. For a week, there was less of everything: less motion around me, fewer people with whom to interact, less to accomplish, less to buy. There was less noise, less mess without two children. Fewer distractions without Facebook and Amazon and political headlines. I had most of what I needed — food, water, shelter — and not much more. Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.

I took daily, silent walks to the vacant shore, meditatively listing to myself the places and things around me named for shells. Shellpoint Apartments, Shellhouse, Shell Inn, Shell Street. Repeat. I knelt in the cold sand and looked out across the bay. I examined the lifeless things that had washed ashore, raking my hands across the ground like that Ugandan child and gathering what the sea had discarded. A peace swept over me whenever I was near to the ground. I caught myself smiling for no reason.

At the Cape, I passed hours sitting quietly, needing nothing, wanting nothing. Pursing nothing but a few more words on a page. On the final night, four friends stopped by, including a couple with their new baby. The baby laughed and I laughed and soon we were all laughing together. All the fine dining restaurants were closed, so we ate at a Ninety Nine chain restaurant and did not make polite apologies to one another for it. We squeezed into a booth for four that was too small to accommodate our group of six. A hockey game played on the television in the bar, but we didn’t watch it. We had wine, but not water. We talked of punk music, but not war. Of banned books, but not guns. A comment about the unusually warm winter, but no mention of global warming.

I returned home the next morning, restored by fractions and of somewhat sounder body and mind. I threw away the happiness body wash. I deleted Facebook from my phone, deleted task managing apps, deleted emails, deleted unnecessary streams of information from wherever they made contact with me. I made a point to laugh in front of and with my children, and hoped it was not too late to unlearn all that I didn’t need to know.

* * *

This essay first appeared in the “Joy” issue of Creative Nonfiction, the print quarterly founded by nonfiction writer Lee Gutkind in 1993. Our thanks to Angela Palm and the staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

 

How Lobbyists Normalized the Use of Chemical Weapons on American Civilians

Ferguson, Missouri, November 24, 2014. Photo: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images.

Anna Feigenbaum | An Excerpt from: Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today | Verso | November 2017 | 22 minutes (6,015 words) 

* * *

Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology.

With his thick moustache and piercing, deep-set eyes, General Amos Fries’s passion shone through as he spoke. In a 1921 lecture to military officers at the General Staff College in Washington, DC, Fries lauded the Chemical Warfare Service for its wartime achievements. The US entered the chemical arms race “with no precedents, no materials, no literature and no personnel.” The 1920s became a golden age of tear gas. Fries capitalized on the US military’s enthusiastic development of chemical weapons during the war, turning these wartime technologies into everyday policing tools. As part of this task Fries developed an impressive PR campaign that turned tear gas from a toxic weapon into a “harmless” tool for repressing dissent.

Manufacturers maneuvered their way around the Geneva Protocol, navigating through international loopholes with ease. But these frontier pursuits could not last forever. The nascent tear gas industry would come to face its biggest challenge yet, in the unlikely form of US senators. In the 1930s two separate Senate subcommittees were tasked with investigating the dodgy sales practices of industrial munitions companies and their unlawful suppression of protest.

General Fries’s deep personal commitment to save the Chemical Warfare Service won him both allies and critics, often in the same breath. Already known for his staunch anticommunism and disdain for foreigners of all kinds, Fries was an unapologetic proponent of military solutions for dissent both at home and abroad. A journalist for the Evening Independent wrote that Fries was often “accused of being an absolute militarist anxious to develop a military caste in the United States.” But to those who shared his cause, Fries was an excellent figurehead for Chemical Warfare. A family man, a dedicated soldier, and a talented engineer, Fries was the perfect face of a more modern warfare.

Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology. They were a sign of the troops’ perseverance in World War I and an emblem of industrial modernity, showcasing the intersection of science and war. In an Armistice Day radio speech broadcast in 1924, Fries said, “The extent to which chemistry is used can almost be said today to be a barometer of the civilization of a country.” This was poised as a direct intervention to the international proposal for a ban on chemical weapons, as preparations for the Geneva Convention were well under way. If chemical weapons were banned, Fries knew it would likely mean the end of the CWS—and with it his blossoming postwar career. Read more…

The Placeless and the Privileged

I last read about the startup Roam, which caters to affluent digital nomads seeking a ready-made community whether they’re in London, Tokyo, or Miami, in Jessa Crispin’s Outline story from last summer. Based on her experiences in the company’s compound in Bali, she questioned the possibility of an authentic communal experience in a place that depended on the cheap cost of living and stark income gaps between Roam patrons and the local labor force.

In the New York Times Magazine, Kyle Chayka revisits Roam, this time in Miami, where he observes different nuances of satisfaction and alienation — from the real, if temporary connections that people seem to make during their stays, to the growing sense that this was more “immersive group therapy” than a travel experience. Some of the most interesting moments in Chayka’s piece, however, go beyond the (easily parodied) surface of the wealthy-tech-nomad lifestyle. He also examines the deeper forces that have made a concept like Roam not just attractive to a subset of (mostly young) professionals, but almost a logical, necessary outcome of the current economic moment. As Roam founder Bruno Haid tells it, the startup is “a means of letting human capital find the path of least resistance, wherever it may be.”

There is a vicious plausibility to Haid’s vision. The macroeconomic pressures he describes in the urbanized West — a lack of affordable housing and linear careers — are particularly tough on millennials, who are also, incidentally or not, a historically unattached generation, with low rates of marriage, homeownership and childbearing. If the usual trappings of adulthood don’t seem attainable, and a permanent sense of precariousness seems unavoidable, why not embrace impermanence instead? Already there are partial nomads all around you; you just might not think of them that way yet. There’s the writer who spends a few months of every year in Berlin, making up for diminishing freelance wages with cheap Neukölln rent; the curator bouncing between New York and Los Angeles; the artist jumping from Tokyo residency to Istanbul fellowship. In the competitive freelance economy, geographic mobility has become a superficial sign of both success and creative freedom: the ability to do anything, anywhere, at any time.

Those in less artsy careers who chase that same sort of freedom may find it illusory. The new technologies that have liberated us from place have also made employers more comfortable with remote workers, but only because we can be so easily monitored. Combine this interconnectivity with an increasing population of freelancers — over a third of the American work force makes money in the so-called gig economy — and you have the makings of a nomad boom. Haid estimates his target customer base to be around 1.2 million people who make over $80,000 a year and could live anywhere. Pieter Levels, creator of the social network Nomad List, believes there to be a nomad population in the high hundreds of thousands.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo by Brenton Geach / Gallo Images / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Mark Arax, David Grann, Stephanie Nolen, Eleanor Cummins, and David Marchese.

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What Happens Between What Seems Like All the Facts: On Interviewing Artists

(Photo courtesy the Auping family)

Jonny Auping| Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (4,011 words)

Michael Auping recently retired after 25 years as the chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His 40-year curatorial career, which focused on the international development of postwar art, has resulted in numerous, critically-acclaimed exhibitions featuring many of the 20th century’s most prominent visual artists.

Before becoming a curator, Auping spent his post-graduate years in mid-70s Southern California trying to figure out how to break into the art world. Around 1975, he came across the book Workingby Studs Terkel, in which the author interviews various working people — from parking valets and cab drivers to gravediggers and pharmacists — about the meaning they find in their jobs. Auping began going to the studios of Los Angeles-based artists like Robert Irwin, Tony Delap, and Craig Kauffman to record conversations about their work, their background, and most importantly, their process.

His new book, Forty Years: Just Talking About Art, is a compilation of interviews ranging from 1977 to 2017 featuring artists such as Frank Stella, Lucian Freud, Susan Rothenberg, Bruce Nauman. Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and many others. Read more…