Search Results for: Time

How Does the Story End?

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At Harper’s Magazine, author Ann Patchett relates working with Tom Hanks, through which she meets and befriends his assistant, Sooki. After a series of emails, Sooki comes to live with Ann and her husband Karl in the early stages of the pandemic while receiving treatment for pancreatic cancer in Nashville, Tennessee. This is a beautiful essay, about the different shapes that friendship can take, and the limitations of truly knowing another human being, despite our best intentions.

When I’m putting together a novel, I leave all the doors and windows open so the characters can come in and just as easily leave. I don’t take notes. Once I start writing things down, I feel like I’m nailing the story in place. When I rely on my faulty memory, the pieces are free to move. The main character I was certain of starts to drift, and someone I’d barely noticed moves in to fill the space. The road forks and forks again. It becomes a path into the woods. It becomes the woods. I find a stream and follow it, the stream dries up, and I’m left to look for moss on the sides of trees.

Putting together a novel is essentially putting together the lives of strangers I’m coming to know. In some ways it’s not unlike putting together my own life. I think I know what I’m doing when in truth I have no idea. I just keep moving forward. By the time the book is written, there is little evidence of the initial spark or a long-ago conversation in California Pizza Kitchen.

This story—which begins and begins—starts again here. Of course we would exercise together; it was good for both of us. Kundalini is nothing if not an exercise in breath, and as it turned out, breath was what Sooki was craving. More breath. Almost from the moment we finished that first practice, she identified it as part of her recovery, the thing she needed to stay alive.

I had never found a way of asking what having cancer had been like for her, or what it meant to so vigorously refuse the hand you were dealt. With every passing day I seemed less able to say, Do you want to talk about this? Am I the person you’re talking to, or are you talking to someone else downstairs late at night? I was starting to understand that what she needed might have been color rather than conversation, breath rather than words.

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Quarantine Brain: How ‘the Internet Became More Internet’ in 2020

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I spent most of December buried in this year’s editors’ picks, working with the team to compile our Best of 2020 lists. As you can imagine, most of that reading was heavy, emotional, and mentally exhausting. The first essay I read after wrapping up my final list on investigative reporting was Alexandra Tanner’s hilarious deep-dive into the bizarre world of Mormon mommy bloggers on Instagram which, somehow and strangely, was a breath of fresh air. But what is fresh air in 2020, in a year of masks and poorly ventilated spaces and smoky skies and air filters?

While lighter than most anything I’d read in weeks, Tanner’s Jewish Currents essay on mad Mommy bloggers is still dark, yet it encapsulates 2020 in one entertaining dose, just like E. Alex Jung‘s Vulture piece on quarantine culture, published earlier this month. For those of us who have had the privilege of isolating and staying home with Wi-Fi, we’ve been online all the time: “hotboxing off bad weed,” writes Jung, “our brains smoothed into little pearls.” At first, there were attempts to return to normal, Jung explains, but in the end, nothing has made sense. Driven by a new and exciting generation of content creators on TikTok and the spirit of the Dadaists, the most memorable moments of the year were the most spontaneous, and the most resonant art “channeled the hive mind of the internet”: created, shaped, and owned by everyone and no one.

It was TikTok, the app Cooper made her name on, that became the most fertile storytelling medium of the pandemic — accomplishing what Quibi could not, which was to create bite-size entertainment people actually watched. In place of top-down decision-making, a more horizontal body — collaborative in an accidental and serendipitous way — appeared.

Formally, the Dadaists embraced chaos and nonsense. They favored collage and montage, whether through photography, typography, or sculpture; the collision of dissonant ideas and images was a way to jolt viewers out of their stupor. A common refrain was “Everybody can Dada.” In many ways, the internet has allowed for a realization of Dada without a centralized authority (which is so Dada). Just as it emerged from the bowels of World War I (and the 1918 influenza pandemic), you could see glimmers of a similarly absurdist sensibility reflecting the times — a Gen-Z/millennial cusp brand of disillusionment and anger. The coronavirus is the accelerant thrown on a fire that has long been burning: a for-profit news media, the erosion of our public institutions, a two-party political system made up of a white-supremacist death cult and corporate nostalgists.

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A Bit of Mud is Good for You

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In the Western world, humans spend 90% of their time indoors, more since the impact of COVID-19 — but disconnecting ourselves from the outside into sanitized boxes is not as safe as we may think. Caroline Winter explains in Bloomberg Businessweek that while light and air pollution are obvious issues, so is the microbiome of the built environment. The buildings we inhabit are full of microbes; inhale deeply and, “With each breath you bring oxygen deep into the alveoli of your lungs, along with hundreds or thousands of species.” Indoor microbe populations tend to be less healthy for us than those that exist outdoors — and, if you live in a green area, simply opening a window can promote a healthier environment. It may also help to be just a little less clean — ease up on the bleach and we won’t wipe out all the good bacteria with the bad. So don’t be afraid to breathe in a bit of the outside world, or get some mud on you: The microbes from species found on plants and leaves may actually be good for us.

Of course, the most urgent microbe-related question is where to find SARS-CoV-2 and how to kill it. Beyond that, there are also long-term questions. How can we promote indoor microbe populations that don’t make us chronically ill or harbor deadly pathogens? Can we actually cultivate beneficial microbes in our buildings the way a farmer cultivates a field? Experts including Van den Wymelenberg are confident all this is possible. “I really believe our building operators of the future and our designers will be thinking about how to shape the microbiome,” he says.

The term “microbiome” is most often used to refer to the population of microbes that inhabit our body, many of which help produce vitamins, hormones, and other chemicals vital to our immune system, metabolism, mood, and much more. In the typical person, microbial cells are as numerous as those containing human DNA and cumulatively weigh about 2 pounds. In recent decades our personal microbiomes have been altered by factors such as poor dietary habits, a rise in cesarean-section births, overprescription of antibiotics, overuse of disinfectants and other germ fighters, and dwindling contact with beneficial microbes on animals and in nature. According a 2015 study, Americans’ microbiomes are about half as diverse as those of the Yanomami, a remote Amazonian tribe.

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Neighborhood Watch: The Strange Aftermath of a ‘Karen’ Encounter

Roc Canals

As racial justice protests swept across America this summer, a handful of “Karen” videos — footage of white women calling the police on Black people, usually men, for no justifiable reason — went viral. Among them was a video shot in Montclair, New Jersey, a community about 40 minutes outside New York City that prides itself on being diverse and progressive. The people who filmed the scene were a Black husband and wife, both lawyers, whose backyard neighbor, a white woman, claimed they’d “pushed” her off their property for asking questions about the installation of a patio. As Allison P. Davis documents in her nuanced, provocative feature for The Cut, other white neighbors stood in solidarity with the Black couple:

While on the phone, Schulz paced in a circle. She approached a neighbor on the sidewalk, perhaps looking for someone to corroborate her story, perhaps just looking for sympathy. “Did you just see him physically push me?” she yelled.

“Oh, he absolutely didn’t push her,” reported the neighbor who had walked by. “I think she was looking to me — honestly, it did feel like a look of incredulity. Can you believe what he’s saying to me? I understand she was upset, but that’s just an insane trope that goes back so many hundreds of years of white women saying that Black men are assaulting them. And it was just really unbelievable she thought she would get away with that with witnesses.”

Over the phone, Schulz told the police, “I need an officer … the gentleman who is taller than me pushed me off his property.”

Neighbors began to yell things like “Shame on you” and “In this climate, you’re doing this?” while Schulz continued her defense, sometimes to the neighbors, sometimes to Norrinda and Fareed. “He pushed me ten feet … I came over here alone. I should have brought my son … Are you gonna say you didn’t put your hands on me?”

“It was like, Yo, this woman really believes what she’s saying,” Fareed recounted. “I feel like, in her mind, she really did start believing that she was assaulted. Maybe she was affronted by being told no. But for her, that affront was synonymous with me physically assaulting her. There was no difference in her mind.”

But when it came to neighbors supporting neighbors, the fallout of the incident was — in a word — complicated. There was a youth-led protest in front of the woman’s house, demands for a new ordinance about racist 911 calls, and letters that strangers sent to the Black family, apologizing for racism. In these, Davis saw something familiar:

That same summer, every white person I knew offered to march alongside me at rallies. I got texts from “Maybe: Susanna,” a person I didn’t really remember, dredging up a racial transgression I definitely didn’t remember. Borrowing the newly learned language of anti-racism, she apologized for any micro-aggression she had committed and apologized for making it my responsibility to explain HBCUs to her. I wrote back and told her “no sweat.” (It later turned out she had confused me with another Black colleague.) She was one of many who reached out to ask how they could be a good ally and wondered if there were times they hadn’t been. My phone was constantly buzzing with texts from white friends apologizing, checking on my well-being, offering me Venmo reparations and sympathy and empathy. I was appreciative but wary. They said they wanted to know about my experiences, but mostly they wanted to feel they had acknowledged that I’d had experiences with racism that they might have ignored, without exposure to all the grisly details.

In talking to Fareed, I often felt he was holding two opposing thoughts in his mind: relief that he lives in this intentional community that discusses race, that embraces the 24 percent, and loneliness at being at the center of a conversation in which everyone sees you and no one does. There can be an oppressiveness to sympathy, a way in which a newly galvanized community doesn’t let in room for doubt — for wondering whether the community would have been quite so galvanized if it hadn’t been the peak of a summer of racial-justice protests, if you still had locs or a shitty car in your driveway, or didn’t have a law degree, or your wife wasn’t the president of the PTA. When everyone is working so hard, when everyone is so vocally on your side, so apologetic for your experience, it’s easier to accept “Kumbaya” Montclair than to wrestle with those questions and ask other people to wrestle with them too.

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A Fugitive in Montana

Longreads Pick

“After learning to make fire with sticks and having my revelation about drugs, I decided I had gotten all I needed out of this camp and that it was time to go.”

Source: Beside
Published:
Length: 11 minutes (2,961 words)

Alzheimer’s Before Forty

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At the age of 37, Jo Giles was diagnosed with a form of Alzheimer’s disease. He first shared his story with Shannon Proudfoot for Maclean’s at the age of 38. In the three years since, the disease has progressed in “plateaus connected by sudden declines,” and in this latest piece, Proudfoot looks at the agonizing decision Jo’s wife Robin is now facing. Robin “knows a reckoning is imminent”— with Jo becoming more and more difficult to care for at home. She is considering a nursing home, but before Jo lost the ability to verbalize his thoughts he told her he despised that idea and would prefer to end his life. This is not possible: “… when medical assistance in dying became law in 2016, excluded were “advance requests” that would have permitted people with dementia to set out terms for their death while they still had capacity to consent.” And Robin herself is struggling to imagine a home without her husband — although they stopped being “husband and wife” a long time ago, he is still “her person,” even as his former self slips further and further away. 

Mostly, Jo looks like any guy in his early 40s and just like he always has, because even as he’s had to switch to comfortable clothing with no buttons or zippers, Robin has stuck close to his personal style; his wardrobe is still heavy on band T-shirts. But there’s a sort of veil in his gaze now and a relaxed softness in his facial features. When Instagram or Timehop present Robin with old photos, she can see some important source of light in Jo that’s gone now. A trip to the beach two years ago seemed ordinary, but when the photo appears, she can remember the day vividly: a postcard from another world where such things were possible. “It’s pretty devastating,” she says. “But also it’s nice to remember those times.”

Doctors often use the term “insight” to discuss whether a person with dementia is aware of their condition; some people come in for an appointment furious at a spouse who keeps insisting they’re losing track of things when they’re sure they’re not. Jo was acutely aware of his illness early on, and he and Robin talked about it often. “He was just frustrated by the hand he was dealt, and he was always, always worried about being a burden,” Robin says. “We would tell him, ‘You’re not.’ ” Jo stopped having those conversations about a year ago.

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The Racist Healthcare System that Failed JaMarcus Crews

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JaMarcus Crews’ mom was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes while she was pregnant with him, making him more likely to develop the condition himself. As Lizzie Presser reports at ProPublica, he worked hard to manage his health after being diagnosed as a teen. He did everything right, everything they told him to do. He watched what he ate. He exercised. He lost weight. He drove hours and hours, sometimes having to borrow gas money to attend life-saving dialysis after the disease progressed. His only mistake? Putting his trust in a system that was set up to fail him as a Black man with Type 2 diabetes.

A race-adjusted equation was also at play in JaMarcus’ case. The formula calculates kidney function by looking at what’s called “estimated glomerular filtration rate,” or eGFR. Creatinine is plugged into the formula along with age, sex and race. Doctors must note whether their patient is “Black” or not. By design, the equation assigns healthier scores to those who are listed as Black, because at a population level, a few studies found that this was more precise. With little investigation into why this might be the case, it was just accepted. That inflated score can mean a longer wait for a kidney because eGFR must drop to a certain level before you can start accumulating time on the transplant waitlist. The best-case scenario is to get a new kidney before needing dialysis, to avoid weathering the side effects of the machines. But those transplants are given on a first-come, first-served basis, and Black patients are less likely to get one.

The researchers and physicians behind the original formula, developed in 1999, wrote that Black patients had higher creatinine levels because “on average, black persons have higher muscle mass than white persons.” The assertion that Black bodies are different from all other bodies keeps company with generations of racist ideas that have infiltrated medicine, some of which were used to rationalize slavery. Researchers who developed the equation acknowledge that race is an imperfect variable, but even though they have updated the formula, they continue to adjust for race. The vast majority of clinical laboratories in the United States use such formulas today.

Dialysis is corporate healthcare on steroids: For-profit companies dominate the market, reap their revenues from Medicare and lobby hard against government reform. DaVita and Fresenius recently spent over $100 million to fight a ballot initiative in California that would have capped their profits, much of which are derived from taxpayer dollars, arguing that the initiative would lead to a shortage of doctors. They have lower staffing ratios and higher death rates than nonprofit facilities. And studies have found that patients at for-profit clinics are less likely to reach the transplant waiting list; they are 17% less likely to get a kidney from a deceased donor. Purnell, the Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, said the whole system is broken as long as corporate dialysis, which is financially incentivized to keep patients, is in charge of steering them to the better treatment of transplant: “Why would I walk into a Nissan dealership to tell me about a BMW?”

Dialysis facilities are responsible for transplant referrals, according to federal regulations, and JaMarcus’ DaVita social worker was assigned to educate and support him. When he was first assessed, a couple of weeks after he began, she wrote that he was suitable for referral and she would get him one when he got insurance. JaMarcus qualified for Medicare within three months. But more than a year later, he still hadn’t been referred.

By 2015, JaMarcus had a new DaVita social worker, Robbin Oswalt, who attributed the delay to a different prerequisite: “He is interested in getting a transplant referral if the Dr. approves after his wgt loss.” JaMarcus had lost 108 pounds since he started dialysis, and his body mass index had been hovering around the University of Alabama’s limit for months. At the time, he didn’t know that his height had been mistakenly entered into his DaVita records as 5-foot-11 — an inch and a half short of his actual height. Their incorrect number was then used to calculate his BMI, which made it look to his doctor that his weight was disqualifying, when it wasn’t.

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Longreads Best of 2020: Investigative Reporting

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our team picked and featured hundreds of in-depth investigations published across the web. Here are our top picks.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

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The Last Patrol (Nathaniel Penn, The California Sunday Magazine)

In July 2012, U.S. Army First Lieutenant Clint Lorance gave an order that killed two Afghan civilians on a motorcycle near an operating base outside of Kandahar, in a volatile region in Afghanistan. Lorance was convicted of murder. The narrative weaved by Sean Hannity and others at Fox News framed Lorance as a war hero; he was pardoned by Donald Trump in November 2019 and served six years of a 20-year sentence. The former Army officer, who had been advised to take interviews only from conservative media outlets, agreed to talk with Nathaniel Penn, and the result is an incredibly riveting and comprehensive piece on his case.

Arriving on the dirt road that led into the village, the patrol discovered two of the three Afghan men lying beside a ditch. They were dead. Their companion had run away. Near them, the motorcycle leaned on its kickstand.

It wasn’t at all the scene Lorance had imagined. “If I would have been up there,” he told me, “and would have known that they were stopped and off their motorcycle, I would never in a million years have said, ‘Fire at them.’ I would want to go talk to them and get intel out of them. I’d be like, ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’ I would want to know everything about them.”

A woman and two children stood near the bodies, weeping.

Holy shit, Lorance thought. Did we just kill good people?

The way to find out was to do a Battle Damage Assessment. Skelton was the intelligence specialist who carried the SEEK. But Lorance wanted Skelton to follow him into the village to carry out the mission and get the biometric enrollments. The engagement with the motorcycle had been necessary and unfortunate, but it wasn’t important. He ordered two of his men to conduct the Battle Damage Assessment while he proceeded into the village. They had the necessary training, even if they didn’t have the SEEK. They knelt by the bodies.

Captain Swanson, who had been alerted to the situation, was radioing Lorance from headquarters. What was happening? he asked. Were the dead men combatants or civilians? Had Lorance done the Battle Damage Assessment?

No, Lieutenant Lorance replied, they hadn’t been able to do the Battle Damage Assessment. The villagers had taken away the bodies.

As he spoke, he knew he had just made a critical mistake. He should have said that his men would get to the Battle Damage Assessment eventually, that they didn’t have time to do that shit right now. Because when you speak over the radio, “you might as well be putting your hand on the Bible,” as one member of the platoon told me.

In the years to come, Lorance’s decision not to use the SEEK device for the Battle Damage Assessment would prove to be crucial and polarizing. It would contribute both to his imprisonment and his pardon.

The weeping woman was screaming now. Lorance told himself that her tears didn’t necessarily mean he’d done anything wrong. The men whose bodies she was crying over could be insurgents. That shocked him — the idea that the Taliban had families, too. It had never occurred to him before.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Lizzie Presser, Greg Jaffe, Phillip Picardi, Amy Yee, and Paul Brown.

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1. Tethered to the Machine

Lizzie Presser | ProPublica | December 15, 2020 | 31 minutes (7,785 words)

“For years, JaMarcus Crews tried to get a new kidney, but corporate healthcare stood in the way. He needed dialysis to stay alive. He couldn’t miss a session, not even during a pandemic.”

2. ‘I Didn’t Make It’

Greg Jaffe | The Washington Post | December 11, 2020 | 16 minutes (4,206 words)

“Flaviana Decker, a waitress at Walt Disney World and single mother to two daughters, struggles to hold on to her middle-class life amid a pandemic and catastrophic layoff.”

3. An Oral History of Fashion’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic

Phillip Picardi | Vogue | December 16, 2020 | 62 minutes (15,500 words)

In the midst of a global pandemic, 25 fashion luminaries, including Marc Jacobs, Bethann Hardison, and Ralph Lauren, highlight a previously untold history of the AIDS crisis.

4. The Weight of the World

Amy Yee | Terrain.org | December 10, 2020 | 41 minutes (12,453 words)

“2021 kicks off the United Nations Decade on Ocean Science. Meanwhile, a local conservation group in Watamu, Kenya races to save endangered sea turtles—by enlisting human allies.”

5. The Obsessive Life and Mysterious Death of the Fisherman Who Discovered The Loch Ness Monster

Paul Brown | Narratively | December 10, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,504 words)

“A humble Scotsman saw something strange in the water — and daringly set out to catch it — only to have lecherous out-of-towners steal his fame and upend his quest.”

Longreads Best of 2020: Essays

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our editors picked and featured hundreds of beautifully written and poignant essays published on the web. Because of the wide range of writing across many topics and themes, it was a challenge to sift through them all over the past several weeks to compile a definitive Best of Essays list. As I shortlisted stories, I realized there could be many different versions of this list, but, in the end, these eight reads really spoke to me.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

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Mississippi: A Poem, in Days (Kiese Makeba Laymon, Vanity Fair)

Kiese Makeba Laymon was on a book tour when the pandemic hit in the U.S. In this stunner of a piece that unfolds over 14 days, the author writes on fear, racism, death, and home amid a moment of awakening. We follow along on the journey, from event to event in Ohio and West Virginia, with Laymon’s observations and thoughts interspersed with daily COVID-19 death counts and the latest words or orders from Donald Trump and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves. It’s a powerful meditation, one that will stop you in your tracks.

We are awakened, I want to believe.

75 miles from the armed confederate statue in Oxford, Emmett Till’s childish body was destroyed. 70 miles from that armed confederate statue, Fannie Lou Hamer was nearly beaten to death. 160 miles from that armed confederate statue, Medgar Evers was murdered as he enters his home. 80 miles from that armed confederate statue, Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis.

It took way too much Black death to get here.

I am wandering around the spiritual consequences of materially progressing at the expense of Black death. I want to be courageous. I wonder, though, when courage becomes contagious—when courage is credentialized, subsidized, and incentivized—if it is still courage at all.

Today, as I prepare to push send, and I lather my hands in sanitizer, it feels a bit too much like cowardice.

Maybe I’ll wait to send tomorrow. Maybe I won’t send at all.

The Lafayette County Board of Supervisors, a group of white men, unanimously vote to keep the armed confederate monument in the middle of Oxford, the town where I live, teach, and write.

Humiliation, agony, and death, are what I feel.

It could all be so much worse, is what the worst of white folks want us to recite.

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