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The Stories of Notre Dame, as Told by Timber and Limestone

PARIS, FRANCE - JANUARY 29: Notre Dame Cathedral is seen during restoration work more than nine months after the fire that ravaged the emblematic monument on January 29, 2020 in Paris, France. A fire broke out in Notre- Dame Cathedral in the evening of Monday April 15, 2019 and quickly spread to the building's wooden roof destroying the famous spire. The building cleaning and consolidation phase should continue for a few more months. (Photo by Chesnot / Getty Images)

On April 15th, 2019, a fire started in the attic of Notre Dame, an 850-year-old cathedral housing priceless art in the form of paintings, stained glass, and an organ boasting 8,000 pipes.

In this fascinating piece at Science Magazine, Christa Lesté-Lasserre describes the multi-disciplinary effort to decontaminate the structure and its artifacts from lead released during the fire and to evaluate every limestone block to determine whether, after the porous stone releases water absorbed during the blaze, it can be re-used to restore the structure.

Amid the destruction, scientists have discovered opportunities to learn where the limestone blocks were quarried, as well as how 13th century stonecutters chose each stone’s placement and the order in which portions of the church were built.

The charred remnants of attic timbers have stories of their own to tell, says Alexa Dufraisse, a CNRS researcher heading the wood group. Variations in thickness, density, and chemical composition of growth rings reveal climatic conditions year by year. “Wood registers absolutely everything while it’s growing,” she says. Notre Dame’s oak beams grew in the 12th and 13th centuries, a warm period known as the Medieval Climate Optimum. By connecting the growth ring record with what’s known about economic conditions at the time, researchers hope to see how climate variations affected medieval society, she says.

The shape of the beams also intrigues the wood team. Long and narrow, they clearly grew in a dense, competitive environment, Dufraisse says. That supports the “silviculture” hypothesis, the idea that the trees were purposefully reserved or farmed for the cathedral. Their age at cutting—about 100 years old—would suggest people were planning Notre Dame several generations before construction began.

The location of that forest is another mystery Dufraisse’s team is tackling, using the beams’ chemical composition. The Paris area is likely, but boats might have shipped wood along the Seine from farther away. Soils contain levels of strontium and neodymium isotopes that vary from region to region, but stay constant over the centuries—especially at the depths tapped by the roots of oak trees. So her group is seeking to match the wood’s isotopic makeup to that of soil in likely locations. “These questions will also be pertinent if we’re looking at meeting the requirement of reconstruction that’s identical to the original,” she says.

As for Maurin, he’s investigating the builders’ marks on the roof support beams. Applied by men shaping the beams on the ground, they were meant as instructions for the assembly team working more than 30 meters above them. “It was kind of the IKEA of the Middle Ages,” he says.

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Moving Literary Life Off the Page

Craig Barritt/Getty Images for New York Magazine

Before John Freeman became a respected editor of magazines such as Freeman’s and Granta, and edited multiple anthologies, he was an aspiring poet. Like many of us young writers, he couldn’t figure out how to get his writing life started, so he went into New York book publishing, thinking that might be the career route for him. For Poets & Writers magazine, Freeman writes a welcome personal narrative about how literary events were actually what provided the guidance and models he needed at that early stage of his career. He’d spent so much time in classrooms that he didn’t understand how writers conducted their professional and artistic lives. Interacting with authors offered the same kind of humanity that reading books did, except author events also inspired, educated, illuminated, humbled, and oriented him as a writer, giving him the directions he needed at that stage in his life. Candid, unscripted moments, pointed questions, casual off-the-cuff comments by everyone from Susan Sontag to David Foster Wallace – even the way they conducted themselves in front of the audience – it all left its mark on Freeman.

To this day, even after attending hundreds of readings, and giving hundreds more of my own, I find it hard to be cynical about gigs, readings, tours, and the like: Every single event holds the possibility that someone will leave changed—even the writer. The best writers on the road or onstage know that giving a reading or participating in an event isn’t simply a chance to say what they know. A good public event is more of a dialogue than that. An oral version of what writers do on the page, a reading has no predetermined outcome. In the sacred space of the public event, writers can try things out: a new idea, a way of seeing around what’s in front of us.

Having grown up in the heyday of post-structural criticism, which touted the idea of the abstract author, I was relieved when I started going to readings to see the forms I loved re-embodied, to see that the novel was made by a human hand, a heart, a mind. The more writers I saw onstage, the more physical the art form seemed to be, the more conceptual theory felt beside the point. John Ashbery seemed flattered by all the work done to figure out what his poems were about, but he also appeared, at good readings, just glad to be there. By the time I saw him read, much too late, he seemed to know his time was brief.

It’s funny reading this essay, because for me, it completes a circle. Freeman did the same for me at one AWP panel, where he and others spoke about how they think about editing, and how they came to it. I listened and filled pages of my tiny notebook with their ideas and anecdotes, and in turn, that simple panel shaped me. Such as: “If you’re not reading submissions that represent what America looks like, then you’re not presenting an accurate portrait of a time and place.”

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The Strange and Dangerous World of America’s Big Cat People

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Rachel Nuwer | Longreads | March 2020 | 28 minutes (7,033 words)

You can listen to our four-part “Cat People” podcast series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s a gloomy April afternoon in rural Oklahoma, and I’m sitting on the floor of a fluorescent-lit room at a roadside zoo with Nova, a 12-week-old tiliger. She looks like a tiger cub, but she’s actually a crossbreed, an unnatural combination of a tiger father and a mother born of a tiger and a lion. That unique genetic makeup places a higher price tag on cubs like Nova, and makes it easier, legally speaking, to abuse and exploit them. Endangered species protections don’t apply to artificial breeds such as tiligers. Hybridization, however, has done nothing to quell Nova’s predatory instincts. For the umpteenth time during the past six minutes, she lunges at my face, claws splayed and mouth ajar — only to be halted mid-leap as her handler jerks her harness. Unphased, Nova gets right back to pouncing.

With her dusty blue eyes, sherbet-colored paws, and prominent black stripes, Nova is adorable. But she also weighs 30 pounds and has teeth like a Doberman’s and claws the size of jumbo shrimp. Nova’s handler, a woman with long brown hair who tells me she recently retired from her IT job at a South Dakota bank to live out her dream of working with exotic cats, scolds the rambunctious tiliger in a goo-goo-ga-ga voice: “Nooooo, nooooo, you calms down!” Nova is teething, the handler explains, so she just wants something to chew on. The handler reaches for one of the tatty stuffed animals strewn around the room — a substitute, I guess, for my limbs. In that moment of distraction, Nova lunges. She lands her mark, chomping into the bicep of my producer, Graham Lee Brewer.

“Ooo, she got me!” Lee Brewer grimaces as he attempts to pull away from the determined predator. Nova’s handler has to pry the tiliger’s jaws open to detach her. After the incident, the woman conveniently checks her watch: “OK, you guys, time is up!”

I paid $80 for the pleasure of spending 12 minutes with Nova, but I’m glad the experience, billed as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, is over. On our way out, we pass more than a dozen adult tigers yowling and pacing cages the size of small classrooms. Nearby signs solicit donations. You are their only hope. Sponsor a cabin or compound today! In the safety of our car, Lee Brewer rolls up his sleeve, exposing a swollen red welt. “Look at my gnarly tiger bite,” he chuckles. “I tried to play it off but I was like, this fuckin’ hurts!”

It’s not the first time I’ve seen this world up-close; I spent the better part of eight years investigating wildlife trafficking around the world. During my travels, I visited farms in China and Laos where tigers are raised like pigs, examined traditional medicine in Vietnam, ate what I was told was tiger bone “cake,” and tracked some of the world’s last remaining wild tigers in India. Almost everywhere I went, tigers were suffering and their numbers were on the decline because of human behavior. Until recently, though, I had no idea the United States was part of the problem. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

BERKELEY, CA - MAY 1979: Sonny Rollins is seen waiting to take the stage during the Berkeley Jazz Festival at the Greek Theatre in May 1979 in Berkeley, California. (Photo by Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Rebecca Solnit, Aaron Gordon, Jason Daley, Maria T. Allocco, and David Marchese.

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1. The Storykiller and His Sentence: Rebecca Solnit on Harvey Weinstein

Rebecca Solnit | LitHub | March 12, 2020 | 11 minutes (2,765 words)

Rebecca Solnit considers Harvey Weinstein’s 23-year prison sentence through the lens of storytelling, and who gets to do it now that at least two men who were “in charge of stories” — Weinstein and Woody Allen — have in the past week lost so much of their power, and women are now finding their voices.

2. Why the US Sucks at Building Public Transit

Aaron Gordon | Motherboard | March 9, 2020 | 27 minutes (6,779 words)

“Whether it’s traditional subway and commuter rail systems, modern streetcars and light rails, high-speed intercity rail, or even the humble bus with dedicated lanes and train-like stops, the U.S. lags perilously behind. It is a national embarrassment and a major reason our cities are less pleasant, more expensive places to live.”

3. Dogs of War

Jason Daley | Truly*Adventurous | March 9, 2020 | 25 minutes (6,321 words)

“At the outbreak of WWII, a private poodle breeder and her dog show pals launch an outlandish scheme to recruit and train thousands of pets for war duty. In the face of military skepticism and the carnage of war, a new kind of hero emerged.”

4. Seaweed Soup (Miyuk Gook 미역국)

Maria T. Allocco | The Rumpus | March 10, 2020 | 18 minutes (4,639 words)

My mother told me seaweed has twenty-one different minerals. She sent me two kinds in a box. I put one in a teacup and added hot water. Sipped the wisdom of her. Used her to make broth. Broth is one step in the recipe.

5. The Jazz Icon Sonny Rollins Knows Life Is A Solo Trip.

David Marchese | The New York Times Magazine | February 24, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,531 words)

David Marchese talks to jazz genius Sonny Rollins about why he decided not to publish his ideas on saxophone technique and harmony and his distinct lack of nostalgia for jazz days gone by.

“The Anger of Women is an Earth-shattering Thing”: Lidia Yuknavitch on Resisting the Hero Narrative and the Body as a Generator of Stories.

https://lidiayuknavitch.net//Riverhead Books

Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | March 2020 | 15 minutes (3,519 words)

Lidia Yuknavitch’s disquieting new collection of short stories, Verge, is often bleak, yet also exquisitely hopeful. Her characters, largely women, are on the edge of death, humiliation, relocation, mercy, self-harm — as well as a new kinship with themselves.

In “The Pull,” two sisters flee their war-torn country. When their raft falters far from a safe shore, the sisters know their strong swimmer bodies are the only way to save both themselves and the “family of strangers” onboard with them. The young girl in “The Organ Runner” is transporting black-market human organs when she’s confronted with saving the life of a “donor,” who is a former bully. The woman in search of “the most perfect wound” in “A Woman Signifying” carefully, gloriously, burns her face on the radiator. These stories are taut and precise; at times like fairy tales in their measured yet majestic scope. They are hard punches and sweetheart hugs, somehow as one.

Yuknavitch often wiggles into those dark spaces so many of us prefer to avoid. Take her memoir The Chronology of Water, which opens with the stillbirth of her daughter and carries us, with unflinching intimacy, through physical and sexual abuse as well as drug and alcohol addiction. The Small Backs of Children delves into the brutal aftermath of war. And The Book of Joan depicts a decimated Earth with a pod of now-sexless humans living in a hodgepodge space station and carving stories into their own skin.

And yet there is beauty. Dazzling beauty. This Yuknavitch never lets us forget.

Her self-generated motto is “make art in the face of fuck” — meaning the harder the world becomes, the more we need to create art of any sort. And the upside of a lot of fuck these days is that we’re graced with more of Yuknavitch’s.

We spoke over Skype about different ways of communicating, the end of the hero, and how women can harness their anger. Read more…

“I miss my body when it was ferocious” The Transfiguration of Paul Curreri

Paul Curreri -- All photos by Aaron Farrington

Brendan Fitzgerald | Longreads | March 2020 | 47 minutes (12,973 words)

I had seen Paul Curreri a few times around Charlottesville — pushing a cart around the local Wegmans grocery, drinking seltzer at the brewery, holding his young daughter and wearing a brace on one hand — before I worked up the nerve to write to him.

“I’m not sure if you know I’ve been fairly sidelined for the past five years via hand and vocal problems,” he wrote back. “I shouldn’t necessarily assume you know that. Perhaps you just thought I’ve been lazy as shit.” I told him I didn’t want much of his time; I had kids of my own now, too. “Truly,” he wrote back, “there is always time.”

Over a decade, Curreri had released a body of music that should have made him one of America’s most esteemed songwriters. “Paul Curreri gives what few songwriters can,” Matt Dellinger wrote in The New Yorker in 2002. “It hits you soon and hard that you’re hearing something exquisite.” His first albums, built on country blues foundations, shook with dexterous picking and a voice that keened and yipped and roared. A few early songs functioned like artist statements, little revelations of ethos bound up in the tension between the limits of Curreri’s body and the demands of his music. “If your work is shouting, deep-breasted, from sun-up to sundown, take care,” he sang on 2003’s Songs for Devon Sproule, named for the musician he’d marry a few years later. “In time, a shouter you’ll become.”

For years, Curreri’s work had shouted, and so he became a shouter of singular beauty. Then, he went quiet — slowly, at first, then all of a sudden.

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15 True Crime Longreads and the Questions We Should Ask Ourselves When Reading Them

(Armin Weigel/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

“I think one of the reasons these stories are so popular — and they’ve been very popular since long before whatever true crime boom we’re currently in,” Rachel Monroe notes while discussing her book Savage Appetites, on our cultural fascination with crime, is that “they’re very emotionally engaging.”

“Whenever we’re telling these stories,” Monroe continues, “we’re participating in that emotional, social, political conversation, whether we want to admit it or not.”

For all that we can stream entire seasons of docudramas in a single day, true crime stories often take years to report out and get right. Whether the person facing the facts of any given case is a staff writer or a law enforcement official, even full-time, invested professionals can lack the bandwidth or the resources to investigate every life story that crosses their desks, with the undivided attention each of those lives deserves.

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Life Advice from Jazz Genius Sonny Rollins

Close-up of American jazz musician Sonny Rollins playing the tenor saxophone mid 1950s. (Photo by Bob Parent/Getty Images)

At age 89, after 70 years as a jazz saxophonist who played with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker (to name just a few), Sonny Rollins quietly gave up playing in 2014 due to pulmonary fibrosis. At The New York Times Magazine, David Marchese talks to Rollins about why he decided not to publish his ideas on saxophone technique and harmony, and his distinct lack of nostalgia for jazz days gone by.

When I had to stop playing it was quite traumatic. But I realized that instead of lamenting and crying, I should be grateful for the fact that I was able to do music all of my life. So I had that realization, plus my spiritual beliefs, which I’ve been cultivating for many years. All that work went into my accepting the fact that I couldn’t play my horn.

Does believing in the transience of life mean you’re not nostalgic for jazz’s past? Or your own life in jazz? Wayne Shorter’s still here, but Miles is not here. Max Roach is not here. Trane is not here. Monk is not here. Do I feel nostalgic about that? No. These guys are alive to me. I hear their music. OK, Charlie Parker is not in his body, but everything about Charlie Parker is here to me in spirit. Any time of day, any time of night, I might think of Miles, and the spirit is there. Occasionally I go, Gee, I can’t hang out with Dizzy Gillespie or Clifford Brown after a gig. I think about that, but it’s receding. Those guys — I don’t worry about them not being here in the flesh. I’m not going to be in the flesh, either. You’re not going to be in the flesh, either, David. So what? It’s OK.

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The Criminalization of the American Midwife

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Alexander Demianchuk/TASS (Photo by Alexander DemianchukTASS via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Malcolm Harris, Tom Lamont, Melissa Jeltsen, Moe Tkacik, and Lavinia Spalding.

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1. Shell Is Looking Forward

Malcolm Harris | New York Magazine | March 3, 2020 | 21 minutes (5,271 words)

The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes.

2. The Invisible City: How a Homeless Man Built a Life Underground

Tom Lamont | The Guardian | March 5, 2020 | 24 minutes (6,244 words)

“After decades among the hidden homeless, Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath a public park. But his life would get even more precarious.”

3. The Traveling Salesman Bringing Abortion Bans to a Texas Town Near You

Melissa Jeltsen | HuffPost | March 2, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,228 words)

Mark Lee Dickson came up with a plan. If cities could ban plastic straws, he asked, why not abortion?

4. Rebekah Neumann’s Search For Enlightenment Fueled WeWork’s Collapse

Moe Tkacik | Bustle | March 3, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,940 words)

Moe Tkacik takes a close look at the ways in which wealthy, new-agey Rebekah Paltrow Neumann — Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin, Adam Neumann’s wife — helped fuel WeWork’s rise and spectacular fall.

5. Meet the Revolutionary Women Strumming Their Way Into the World of Flamenco Guitar

Lavinia Spalding | AFAR| June 4, 2019 | 13 minutes (3,284 words)

“A former child prodigy travels to Spain to revisit the instrument of her youth—and to learn flamenco guitar from the tocaoras playing to the top of the male-dominated world.”