Search Results for: Time

The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in Combat

Longreads Pick

At Wired, Garrett M. Graff reports on how serving in Vietnam instilled a discipline and relentlessness in Robert S. Mueller that underpins his approach to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Source: Wired
Published: May 15, 2018
Length: 33 minutes (8,279 words)

The Trip of a Lifetime

Longreads Pick

In the context of some recent reads on psychedelic drugs, Laura Miller looks at Michael Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. In it, Pollan says that drugs such as psilocybin and LSD got a bad rap after some flawed scientific experimentation and images of burned-out, ’60s counter-culture hippies soured Americans on exploring the medical benefits these drugs might offer, suggesting that their mind-altering abilities might help free us from cognitive patterns that are holding us back.

Source: Slate
Published: May 14, 2018
Length: 9 minutes (2,320 words)

Unearthing the History of Lynching, One Story at a Time

MONTGOMERY, AL - APRIL 20: Names and dates of lynching victims are inscribed on corten steel monuments at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice on April 20, 2018 in Montgomery, Al. More than 800 corten steel monuments are on display representing each county in the United States where a lynching took place. More than four thousand victims are honored at the memorial. (Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

On April 26, 2018, the first national memorial to honor victims of lynchings opens in Montgomery, Alabama. The memorial’s main feature is an installation of more than 800 suspended columns made of steel, one for each U.S. county where the murders occurred. The names of victims are etched into the markers — in places, the engravings simply read, “unknown.” Bryan Stevenson, whose Montgomery-based Equal Justice Institute,  compiled an official tally of burnings, hangings, shootings, and drownings of black Americans by white mobs from 1877 – 1950 and created the memorial, said he wanted to capture the “scale” of the 20th century’s racial terrorism.

The story of lynchings in the U.S can also be told on a smaller scale. Mob violence against blacks was wrought on communities, families and individual bodies. Throughout the memorial, details of some of the killings are listed along a walkway. But documentation of many of the murders is scarce: newspaper accounts are missing or unreliable, and memories of many witnesses and bystanders has been lost to silence and grief.

For New York Times magazine, journalist Vanessa Gregory unearths one story as she follows the descendants of Elwood Higginbotham, to Oxford, Mississippi, where they learn the details of the events surrounding his 1935 murder by a white mob and visit his possible burial site in an attempt to come to terms with their family history.

Higginbottom was 4 when the mob came for his father. He is now 87, with eyes set in a perpetual glaucoma squint and the strong voice of a younger man. He is the last remaining family member to have seen his father alive, and the thought of returning to Oxford was gnawing at him. The anxiety began when his daughters first proposed the trip, and it intensified that morning when he woke. And now Washington, the youngest of his six children, was peppering him with questions.

“So, who is your daddy’s mama?”

“I don’t know my grandmother on my daddy’s side,” he said.

“When did granddaddy and grandmama get married?”

“I don’t know when my parents got married.”

Higginbottom knew little because his mother and extended family fled Mississippi after the lynching. They raised E.W., the eldest, and his siblings, Flora and Willie Wade, in Forrest City, Ark., and later in Memphis. Higginbottom’s mother told the children their father had been hanged but didn’t share many details. And she almost never spoke of her dead husband’s character, habits or looks — the stories of his life. Maybe grief kept her quiet. Or fear. Either way, Higginbottom knew better than to mention his daddy. Sometimes he asked his cousins Dorothy and Olivia about him, but they told him to leave it alone. Don’t mess around in that, they said. You might get hurt.

Higginbottom had occasionally returned to Oxford when he was younger, chaperoned by uncles who wanted to visit relatives or take in a service at the family’s former church. But it had been a long time. He stared at the fields consumed by kudzu, the gravel drives, the hardwoods lush with summer growth, and saw only a foreign country. “I was trying to see something I recognized around here, but I don’t,” he said. “It don’t look like I ever lived down here.” As they sped closer to Oxford, he kept gazing out the window, scanning the landscape for even a spark of memory.

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Sometimes the Story Finds You: An Interview With Rachel Monroe

Rocky outcrop in the desert near Shiprock in far northwestern New Mexico. (Education Images/UIG via Getty Images)

For Esquire, Rachel Monroe spent time on the enormous Navajo reservation to examine how the Amber Alert system failed to protect a missing girl. Typically, child abductions launch immediate responses from local law enforcement, but when a Navajo sister and brother, Ashlynne and Ian Mike, went missing in Shiprock in 2016, the Navajo Nation Police Department didn’t put out an Amber Alert for eight hours after the girl went reported missing. Jurisdiction, a lack of resources, and confusion about procedure wasted vital time, and Ashlynne was found dead.

Monroe spent two years speaking with sources and unraveling the bureaucratic and cultural threads that kept the Navajo Nation Amber Alert system from working as well as is does off the reservation. Monroe tells a chilling story, especially to parents, but it honors Ashlynne’s memory and offers hope that the bipartisan bill that Ashlynne’s mother helped pass, a bill to fund a Amber Alert in Indian Country system, and renamed it after Ashlynne, will help save the lives of other Indigenous children when they go missing. I spoke with Monroe about the years it took to bring this story to publication, and why a complex story often needs to take the time.

***

You’ve been writing features for a long time and covered everything from the culture of living in vans to a West Texas fertilizer plant explosion. How did you find out about the abduction on the Navajo reservation?

In 2016, my editor, the wonderful Whitney Joiner, asked me to find an Amber Alert story since it was the program’s 20th anniversary. I dug around a bit and found the Amber Alert in Indian Country program, and went to Taos for a conference in April 2016. At the conference, I heard people talking about the mistrust, underfunding, racism and jurisdictional tangles that make it so challenging to deal with abductions on reservations. I just got kind of obsessed with how knotty and complicated it all was. And then, a few weeks later, Ashlynne and Ian were kidnapped. It was a perfect, awful illustration of all these issues I’d been thinking about.

One structural issue this kidnapping illustrated was an issue unique to many tribes: that talking about abductions and doing training exercises invites these particular evils into the tribal community. Were there other culture-specific issues that you wish you could have explored further?

There are more than 500 different federally recognized tribes in the U.S., and they’re all distinct, even though the issues they’re grappling with are similar. The story kept shrinking and ballooning and shrinking again as I tried to figure out how much to include about the specifics of this case, and of the Navajo Nation. A lot of the struggles with writing it had to do with questions of scale — how to write about this one child and colonialism without writing a 20 million word story. I also thought a lot about how to portray the culture-specific challenges, which many people discussed with me, without playing into tropes of Native people being exotic or mystical. I really didn’t want to do that.

Many Americans have little opportunity to interact with Indigenous people, so many don’t understand how tribal sovereignty works, or what life on reservations is like. It was interesting to learn about how accepting federal money to improve things like the Amber Alert system on Navajo land could undermine tribal sovereignty. What other things did you learn about the Navajo Nation that surprised you?

The community was so shaken by this crime, and I wanted to make sure that came across in the story. When it works well, crime writing can give you a portrait of a community and a place — the horror of a murder brings internal conflicts and debates into relief as people try to negotiate what happened, how it happened, what it means, what should be done.

I was surprised by the layers of bureaucracy that has to be negotiated to get anything taken care of on the reservation. Gary Mike told me about how he helped the FBI agents plan the raid on the sweat lodge where they arrested the man who was eventually convicted of Ashlynne’s murder. Gary was so anxious that they might mess it up, because the sweat lodge was on a patch of land that technically wasn’t a part of the reservation, so the jurisdictional rules and responsibilities were different in that particular spot. And he knew all of that just because in his daily life he’d had to deal with all these overlapping systems all the time.

How do you write a story of this size and complexity? What’s your process, from reporting to writing?

I started by going to that conference in Taos, which was useful in that it provided an overview of the various issues at play, and it also helped me connect with people working in the field. After Ashlynne was abducted, I knew I had to go to Shiprock. It was difficult to find contact information for anyone in advance, so I just crossed my fingers and drove out there, hoping it would all work out. I started by going through local leaders like Rick Nez and Chili Yazzie. It’s a very tight-knit community, so when those people met me and saw that I was sincere and committed to telling the story in its full complexity, they helped put me in touch with others.

Eventually I was introduced to Ashlynne’s dad. I also had one really intense, long off-the-record interview that I wasn’t able to use, but that proved to be really crucial in helping me understand the dynamics at play in Shiprock. Jim Walters, who has been involved with Amber Alert in Indian Country for over a decade now, was very patient in explaining the intricacies of the system to me over and over again. He also helped facilitate the connection with Pamela, Ashlynne’s mom. Basically all the important connections I made with this story were person-to-person. It’s always so daunting to approach a story like this and not know whether or not people will give you access, but I was fortunate that so many people were so generous and willing to share. After that visit to Shiprock, I just kept following the case through the court system, got all the documents I could get my hands on, FOIA’d some police departments, and attended various court proceedings.

 

Ashlynne’s mother helped get a bill passed to improve the Amber Alert system on tribal lands, and the alerts are named after Ashlynne. In the long-run, do you think the improvements will stick?

I try to avoid prognosticating. In one sense, I’m optimistic. People are paying more attention to violence committed against Indigenous women and children. At the same time, everyone working in this field is fighting such intense headwinds — poverty, trauma, racism, just to name a few. Even so, I have so much admiration for those fighting the good fight, and I think that their work does make a difference over time.

 

It’s OK to Say if You Went Back in Time and Killed Baby Hitler

Longreads Pick
Source: Big Echo
Published: Apr 15, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,792 words)

Protecting Your Writing Time In This Weird Time of Ours

AP Photo/The Dominion-Post,Jason DeProspero

Things are nuts. How do writers concentrate now? How do we not let the toxicity of the news feed steal our minds completely away from the page? How do we not sink into despair, because really, does writing or poetry or anything matter anymore? At Tin House, poet Patricia Lockwood has a few ideas. Get a physical book, a diary, and some coffee, find a window to sit by, and read this before you look at Twitter. Do not look at Twitter yet!

The first necessity is to claim the morning, which is mine. If I look at a phone first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day. If I don’t look out a window right away the day will be windowless, it will be like one of those dreams where you crawl into a series of smaller and smaller boxes, or like an escape room that contains everyone and that you’ll pay twelve hours of your life for. If I open up Twitter and the first thing I see is the president’s weird bunched ass above a sand dune as he swings a golf club I am doomed. The ass will take up residence in my mind. It will install a gold toilet there. It will turn on shark week as foreplay and then cheat on its wife.

English will come out of it wrong, and then English will come wrong out of me.

The scaramucci is not just a unit of time, it is also a unit of conspiracy against you, and the work you were put here to do.

The feeling you get after hours of scrolling that all your thoughts have been replaced with cotton candy — or something even nastier, like Runts or circus peanuts — as opposed to the feeling of being open to poetry, to being inside the poem, which is the feeling of being honey in the hive.

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“We All Had the Same Acid Flashback at the Same Time”: The New American Cuisine

Getty / 123RF images, Composite by Katie Kosma

Andrew Friedman | Excerpt adapted from Chefs, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession | Ecco | February 2018 | 17 minutes (4,560 words)

* * *

He spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him.

You could begin this story in any number of places, so why not in the back of a dinged-up VW van parked on a Moroccan camping beach, a commune of tents and makeshift domiciles? It’s Christmas 1972. Inside the van is Bruce Marder, an American college dropout. He’s a Los Angelino, a hippy, and he looks the part: Vagabonding for six months has left him scrawny and dead broke. His jeans are stitched together, hanging on for dear life. Oh, and this being Christmas, somebody has gifted him some LSD, and he’s tripping.

The van belongs to a couple — French woman, Dutch man — who have taken him in. It boasts a curious feature: a built-in kitchen. It’s not much, just a set of burners and a drawer stocked with mustard and cornichons. But they make magic there. The couple has adventured as far as India, amassing recipes instead of Polaroids, sharing memories with new friends through food. To Marder, raised in the Eisenhower era on processed, industrialized grub, each dish is a revelation. When the lid comes off a tagine, he inhales the steam redolent of an exotic and unfamiliar herb: cilantro. The same with curry, also unknown to him before the van.

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Marder fled the United States. “People wanted to get away,” he says. Away from the Vietnam War. Away from home and the divorce epidemic. The greater world beckoned, the kaleidoscopic, tambourine-backed utopia promised by invading British rockers and spiritual sideshows like the Maharishi. The price of admission was cheap: For a few hundred bucks on a no-frills carrier such as Icelandic Airlines — nicknamed “the Hippie Airline” and “Hippie Express” — you could be strolling Piccadilly Circus or the Champs-Élysées, your life stuffed into a backpack, your Eurail Pass a ticket to ride.

Marder flew to London alone, with $800 and a leather jacket to his name, and improvised, crashing in parks and on any friendly sofa and — if he couldn’t score any of that — splurging on a hostel. He let himself go, smoking ungodly amounts of pot, growing his hair out to shoulder length. In crowds, he sensed kindred spirits, young creatures of the road, mostly from Spain and Finland. Few Americans.

Food, unexpectedly, dominated life overseas. Delicious, simple food that awakened his senses and imagination. Amsterdam brought him his first french fries with mayonnaise: an epiphany. The souks (markets) of Marrakech, with their food stalls and communal seating, haunt him. Within five months, he landed on that camping beach, in Agadir, still a wasteland after an earthquake twelve years prior. He lived on his wits: Back home, he’d become fluent in hippy cuisine; now he spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him, like the couple in whose van he was nesting. Food was as much a part of life on the beach as volleyball and marijuana. People cooked for each other, spinning the yarns behind the meals — where they’d picked them up and what they meant in their native habitats. Some campers developed specializations, like the tent that baked cakes over an open burner. Often meals were improvised: You’d go to town, buy a pail, fill it with a chicken, maybe some yogurt, or some vegetables and spices, and figure out what to do with it when you got back.

Marder might as well have been on another planet. “This was so un-American at that time,” he says.
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It’s Time for Real Talk About Aliens

AP Photo/Roswell Daily Record, Mark Wilson

This December, The New York Times ran a front page story about the Pentagon program that investigated unexplained aerial phenomena. The US military recently had three prominent, documented encounters with unidentified flying objects. And the Chinese just built the world’s largest radar facility to listen for extraterrestrial life. What the hell is going on? I mean, Trump’s presidency seems like a dystopian sci-fi novel, but when did UFOs move from the Art Bell fringe into the mainstream?

At New York Magazine, a group of seven journalists dive deep into the realm of Ufology. Cataloguing the past and Ufology’s key players, they make a case that no time in human history has presented clearer, more compelling evidence that something unexplained is buzzing our skies, missile silos and nuclear facilities, if not aliens, then certainly things we have not yet identified. “In December,” the article says, “the Pentagon confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.”

The program was co-founded by then–Majority Leader Harry Reid, who tweeted, “We don’t know the answers, but we have plenty of evidence to support asking the questions.” It’s a convincing point. The funding supposedly ended in 2012, but sources say the program is going strong. Some of this information will be familiar to those of us who enjoy reading about unexplained phenomenon. The sense that some of this is just nuts-o is also familiar. What’s new is the Federal government’s transparency and mounting the burden of proof. Here’s the tip of the extraterrestrial iceberg as a teaser:

So much of what the program uncovered remains classified, but what little we know is tantalizing. Based on data it collected, the program identified five observations that showed mysterious objects displaying some level of “advanced physics,” also known as “stuff humans can’t do yet”: The objects would accelerate with g-forces too strong for the human body to withstand, or reach hypersonic speed with no heat trail or sonic boom, or they seemed to resist the effects of Earth’s gravity without any aerodynamic structures to provide thrust or lift. “No one has been able to figure out what these are,” said Luis Elizondo, who ran the program until last October, in a recent interview.

Elizondo has also talked about “metamaterials” that may have been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena and stored in buildings owned by a private aerospace contractor in Las Vegas; they apparently have material compositions that aren’t found naturally on Earth and would be exceptionally expensive to replicate. According to a 2009 Pentagon briefing summarized in the New York Times, “the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered.” This was a briefing by people trying to get more funding — but still.

Some of the accounts Elizondo and his team analyzed supposedly occurred near nuclear facilities like power plants or battleships. In November 2004, the USS Princeton, a Navy cruiser escorting the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, ordered two fighter jets to investigate mysterious aircraft the Navy had been tracking for weeks (meaning this was not just a trick of the eye or a momentary failure of perspective, the two things most often blamed for unexplained aerial phenomena). When the jets arrived at the location, one of the pilots, Commander David Fravor, saw a disturbance just below the ocean’s surface causing the water to roil around it. Then, suddenly, he saw a white, 40-foot Tic Tac–shaped craft moving like a Ping-Pong ball above the water. The vehicle began mirroring his plane’s movements, but when Fravor dove directly at the object, the Tic Tac zipped away.

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Invaders on Holiday (or, The Consequences of Time Travel at the International Stone Skipping Competition)

Longreads Pick
Published: Mar 1, 2018
Length: 15 minutes (3,942 words)

As the World Ends, Has the Time for Grieving Arrived?

Longreads Pick
Source: LitHub
Published: Dec 1, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,510 words)