Search Results for: Time

The Man Who Lived in a Hole in Hampstead Heath

A man walks across snow-covered Hampstead Heath, London, United Kingdom (Photo by Tim Graham/Getty Images)

He was a local handyman with a bone disease which ended his work as a stage hand. He was a regular at The Garden Gate pub who enjoyed an ale in the evenings. At the end of those pub evenings Dominic Van Allen went home — to a bunker he’d dug and fortified, well hidden in the brambly section of Hampstead Heath. It was warm, safe place to sleep and enjoy a bowl of soup re-heated on his stove.

As Tom Lamont reports in this fascinating piece at The Guardian, Van Allen wasn’t destitute. He earned a little money doing odd jobs, but there was no way he could earn enough to pay notoriously high rents in London. He wasn’t an addict or mentally ill, and because so many Londoners are far worse off, Van Allen ‘”never quite reached the top of anybody’s list, and was eventually told: “It’s unlikely you’ll get housed.”'”

Still: it came as a surprise, one ranger told me, when they came across a patch where steam was rising out of what ought to have been solid ground.

He would never plausibly make London rent. Social housing was just out of reach. A mortgage purest fantasy. Van Allen had taught himself, instead, how to borrow a piece of this expensive city, night by night, on unarranged loan.

Halfway along the footpath, he turned off again, this time stepping directly into dense bramble. He found a narrow gulley that had been cut between the thorns and followed it through a zigzag turn to a small clearing, where he bent in the dark and patted the earthy floor. There – a concealed hatch. Van Allen tugged it open with his fingers and descended into the ground, closing the hatch behind. Below, he flicked on lights at a switch. He hung up his coat.

There was space in the bunker for two camp beds, pushed against opposite walls. In the 4ft gulley between the beds, Van Allen could stand, comfortably enough, without his head scraping the trussed timber roof. The floor underneath him was poured concrete. He’d put up hooks for his coat, his bag and his cooking utensils, and there were shelves by the bed for odds and ends. Push-button LED lights were stuck to the walls using tape. There was a portable gas stove down here, and now that Van Allen was in for the night, he lit it and emptied a can of soup into a pan. After eating, he washed up with wet wipes. Litter was tied inside plastic bags, to be spirited away to a distant bin, early tomorrow, before the heath’s park rangers came on duty.

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“Follow Along,” or How to Learn Flamenco Guitar with a Tocaora

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For more from Lavinia Spalding, read her Longreads essay, The Cabin.

I’ve been studying guitar for three years now and electric bass for nine months. There’s something special about the happy hours of focus I spend to earn any proficiency, whether it’s to learn a new concept or chord voicing, improvise a jazz phrase, or glean a bass line from an old blues tune.

As a child guitar prodigy, Lavinia Spalding knows this love, devotion, and satisfaction well. She studied with her father — one of the few students of the greatest flamenco guitarist of all time, Paco de Lucía — until she became a teen and the need for friendship overshadowed her love of guitar. Spalding’s father had infused her not only with musical acumen but also possibility; he had wanted her to become the rarest of flamenco musicians, a tocaora — a female flamenco guitarist.

In this beautiful essay at AFAR about family, relationships, commitment, and above all, the love of studying and playing music, Spalding recounts how she travelled to Spain to study flamenco in person with three of the country’s most celebrated tocaoras.

Tell people in the United States that your dad studied with Paco de Lucía, and they’ll smile. Here in Andalusia, they’ll gasp. Their eyes will bug out. They’ll want to hug you. Pilar is no exception. When I show her my dad’s transcription, I might as well have unveiled a sacred relic. “It’s glorious,” she says, poring over it. “Magnífico.”

Leafing through my folder of sheet music, however, she acts like I’ve thrust rotten chicken under her nose. She’ll happily instruct me in the ways of soleares, but this?! No. When she demonstrates a compás, the rhythm she intends to teach me, her hands become birds—darting and fluttering, dipping and swooping, graceful, furious.

“OK,” she says. “Now follow along.”

To be clear, there is no chance I can do this.

And as I struggle, regret creeps in. How could I have quit—twice—such an important part of my life?

But during our second lesson, something happens. While showing me how to connect a compás to a falseta, Pilar suddenly begins playing a melody my father taught me 15 years ago. A delicate, lively string of single notes, it’s as familiar as a lullaby. “That!” I shout. Tears blur my eyes, and then my fingers are plucking along as fast as hers. It’s as if a spirit has been summoned to return me to guitar. It’s as if a missing piece of me is back.

But I do remember, finally, what it means to be musical. To concentrate deeply, practicing until something beautiful emerges. To live for the moment when it all connects and you are elevated. And mostly, to share that magic with someone else.

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8 Longreads by Will Storr on the Science of Storytelling

Author Will Storr (Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert / Getty Images)

“People change, don’t they?” journalist and author Will Storr asks at the beginning of an Aeon essay called “Plot Twist.” That question has been at the heart of Storr’s writing for years now, a question he carries with him throughout so many of his investigations into science, belief, and the human impulse to tell stories.

Storr has a knack for starting with a simple statement that anyone can intuitively understand, then revealing how deceptive both simplicity and intuition can be. Storr’s willingness to challenge even his most basic assumptions appears most often in his stories as curiosity, which he brings anew to all of his conversations with sometimes desperate story subjects who find themselves facing some of life’s most serious consequences.

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“We Are Not Lost Causes”

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Mark Obbie | Longreads | March 2020 | 45 minutes (12,427 words)

The three young men sauntering down a city sidewalk showed no signs of alarm as a thin man in a dark hoodie hopped out of the passenger side of a gold Honda minivan. They did not flinch as the man rushed toward them on foot while the van, its windows heavily tinted, continued on past.

This neighborhood on the northeast side of Rochester, New York, has ranked among one of the poorest and most violent in the United States. But it was the trio’s home. A year earlier, one of them, Lawrence Richardson, had been jumped and knifed nearby after exchanging insults with a group of guys he didn’t know. He hadn’t looked for that trouble, and the same was true today. Richardson and Cliff Gardner, his coworker at KFC, had spent the afternoon preparing to look for better jobs. On the city’s southwest side, they stopped at the Center for Teen Empowerment, a nonprofit where Richardson had worked for a year on anti-violence and community-improvement projects, and where he still volunteered now and then. After encouraging Cliff to create a résumé, Richardson suggested they catch a bus to the northeast side, where Richardson had grown up. He wanted to introduce Cliff to Kenny Mitchell, his best friend and fellow Teen Empowerment youth organizer.

The three hung out at Mitchell’s second-story apartment, then walked to a corner store for some snacks. They were just returning to Kenny’s when they encountered the van and its passenger.

Moments later, three calls hit 911 operators in quick succession. Callers described a chaotic scene with two bodies crumpled on the ground while a third, trailing blood up the stairs to Mitchell’s apartment, lay at the feet of his panicked father.

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How I Got My Shrink Back

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Susan Shapiro | Longreads | February 2020 | 28 minutes (7,036 words)

Rushing to see him that Friday evening in August, I turned the corner and was shocked to catch Haley leaving his brownstone. What the hell was she doing here? I prayed my eyes were wrong and it was another tall redhead, not my favorite student. Inching closer, I saw it definitely was her — in skinny jeans, heels and a pink blouse, her unmistakable auburn hair flapping down her back as she flounced away. I froze, so crushed I couldn’t breathe.

Darting inside, I shrieked, “I just saw Haley walk out of here. You lied to me!”

“I never lied to you,” he insisted, quickly closing his door.

“Don’t tell me you’re sleeping with her?”

“Of course not.” He looked horrified.

He wasn’t my lover, cheating with a younger woman. He was the long-term therapist who’d saved me from decades of drugs, alcohol, and self-destruction. I couldn’t believe that right before our session, Dr. Winters had met with my protégée, whom I’d loved like a daughter. For the past three years, she’d sat in my classroom, living room, beside me at literary events, and speed walking around the park. She was the only person I’d ever asked him not to see, and vice versa. I felt betrayed from both sides.

Earlier that day, Haley had emailed to see if I’d recommend my gynecologist, housekeeper and literary agency. “Want my husband too?” I’d joked. In the spring, when I’d first sensed she was ransacking my address book and life, I’d asked Dr. Winters about the eerie All About Eve aura.

“She sounds nuts,” he’d said.

“That’s your clinical assessment?” I asked, adding “Don’t be flippant. She’s important to me.”

He’d sworn he wouldn’t treat her, laughing off my paranoia.

Now I could barely speak as I realized she’d broken her vow. And he’d let her in, giving her the slot directly before mine, then ran late, as if he wanted me to catch her. Perched at the edge of his leather couch, I imagined Haley sitting right where I was, leaning on the embroidered cushions, spilling secrets she’d previously shared only with me to my confidante. His plush work space morphed from my safest haven for 15 years into the creepy crawly Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

“Then why was she here?” I couldn’t process her so out of context.

“That woman is not my patient,” he insisted.

His technical wordplay sounded like Bill denying Monica. I craved a drink, joint, and cigarette.
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A Survey of My Right Arm

Greenspe Huang/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)

Ge Gao The Threepenny Review | Fall 2019 | 15 minutes (3,057 words)

 

Last summer, I woke up one morning to find my right hand couldn’t grab the doorknob to turn it open. The next thing I knew was that no matter how many times I shook it, it remained numb. Soon, on a hot June night, a furtive pain traveled from my right elbow to my palm, back and forth, through and through, like a fractious child jumping between hopscotch courts with his full body gravity, determined and ferocious.

I am a Chinese woman. Two things I am good at are self-diagnosing and self-preservation. I went to a Chinese massage place the next morning. The lady there told me it was “tennis elbow.” Which seemed funny and unfair to me: I had never played tennis in my life. When I was eighteen and dreamed about my future self wearing a short white tennis skirt, running in a blue court, I signed up for a tennis class—and quit after the first session. My skinny right arm was not capable of holding a 9.4-ounce tennis racquet against a spinning ball. The lady at the massage place first used her arm, then her feet to dissolve the knots on my forearm. A day later, small black and blue bruises on my right arm left a message—there was pain; there was suffering. I consciously wore long sleeves to cover it up, afraid of being misunderstood as a domestic violence victim. But I would roll my sleeve up when I met my friends for coffee. It was show and tell: my pain needed to be noticeable to others as well.

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In Hot Pursuit of STS-50, High Seas Scofflaw

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The high seas begin 370 km from a nation’s shore and because it’s difficult for governments and organizations to patrol and police these waters, it’s the perfect place for pilfering the best the ocean has to offer while damaging fish stocks and marine ecosystems. At Hakai Magazine, Sarah Tory reports on the hunt for STS-50 — alias Andrey Dolgov, alias Sea Breeze, alias Ayda — a notorious longliner whose captain and crew had evaded and escaped capture to loot the seas of $50 million in fish over a ten year period.

The STS-50 was a 452-tonne, 1980s-era former longliner originally from Japan. It was well known in maritime circles…for poaching Antarctic and Patagonian toothfish (also called Chilean sea bass), two lucrative cod species from the Southern Ocean. Authorities believe the STS-50 operated illegally for 10 years or so and looted up to $50-million worth of the fish, which can grow to 120 kilograms and live for 60 years. Interpol had issued a purple notice for the vessel—an international request for information about the STS-50’s criminal activity. But the vessel’s owners and captain had been evading authorities for years with a typical bag of tricks: registering the boat to nations with lax rules; using shell companies to obscure ownership; forging documents; and spoofing the most advanced satellite surveillance.

Vessels that fish illegally are often involved in human trafficking and drug smuggling while contributing to plummeting fish stocks and degraded marine ecosystems. Experts estimate that up to 20 percent of the world’s total catch (fish and other marine fauna) falls under illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. That’s more than 23 million tonnes of seafood stolen from the seas annually—or one out of every five wild-caught fish sold on the market—worth $23.5-billion.

Selling the illegally caught fish is relatively easy to get away with if port inspectors do a poor job of investigating the vessel, explains Peter Horn, the project director for the Pew Charitable Trusts’ ending illegal fishing program. All the captain has to do is misreport the catch, claiming for instance that the crew caught one type of fish when in fact it caught another; lie about the quantity of fish caught; or pretend to have fished in a different area. The end result is a market with so many illegally caught fish that “there’s a reasonable chance that you have inadvertently bought some,” Horn says.

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Detective Fitbit

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The personal activity-tracking device, Fitbit, has become increasingly popular since it was first released in 2009. It was therefore only a matter of time until one would be worn by victims or suspects of crimes — and potentially be the key to finding out what had actually occurred. As Lauren Smiley explains for Wired, people are inadvertently wearing “a sort of black box for the body that reveals physiological truths that its wearer might prefer to conceal.”

At 90 years old, Tony Aiello was arrested for the murder of his stepdaughter, Karen Navarra. On the day of her death, Tony dropped by her house with a surprise treat of biscotti and pizza. He claimed she was alive when he left. Her Fitbit told a different story.

At a San Jose police station, Tony was hauled into a homicide interrogation room. “What the hell am I doing here?” he asked detectives Brian Meeker and Mike Montonye. Then he waived his right to remain silent and amiably rattled off his life history and answered questions about Karen, until one detective abruptly shifted the subject: Did Tony know what a Fitbit was? He shook his head. They told him that it was a watch with a step counter built into it. “Oh, nice,” Tony marveled, not seeing where the questioning was going. It also has a heart rate monitor, they said. “Oh, that’s better yet.”

The detectives continued: The data shows that Karen’s heart stopped at 3:28 pm, they told Tony. What’s more, they knew Tony was there at the time.

“Oh, no,” Tony said. “She was alive when I left.”

Should we be using Fitbit information in court cases? There are still no set legal standards for how and when this new type of data should be admitted. There are also no guarantees it can be relied on.

Smartwatches decipher heart rate using green LEDs that beam hundreds of times per second into capillaries through the skin. Those capillaries allow in more of the light when full of blood, and less between beats, and the device measures how much light is absorbed. That measurement is then siphoned through a proprietary algorithm to generate a heart rate figure. University of Wisconsin researchers looked at how well wrist-worn fitness trackers measured heart rate, comparing it to an electrocardiograph, the gold standard for heart monitoring. They found that the fitness trackers’ heart rate deviated more from the actual rate when a subject exercised on a treadmill than when at rest. (Fitbit won’t talk specifics about its accuracy, saying in a statement, “We are confident in the performance of all our devices” and that the company continues to test them.)

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How a Mom Penetrated the Pen to Hack the Warden’s Computer

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John Strand didn’t think it was a great idea to allow his mom to attempt to break in to a South Dakota prison as part of a “penetration” or “pen” test of their security systems. But as Lily Hay Newman reports at Wired, Rita Strand, age 58, insisted. Armed only with a fake badge and some confidence, she posed as a health inspector doing a surprise inspection and managed to gain access — unaccompanied! — throughout the facility where she planted “rubber duckies” (USB sticks with code used to compromise computer security systems) on several computers, including the one belonging to the warden.

“She takes off, and I’m thinking in the back of my head that this is a really bad idea,” Strand says. “She has no pen testing experience. No IT hacking experience. I had said, ‘Mom, if this gets bad you need to pick up the phone and call me immediately.'”

Pen testers usually try to get in and out of a facility as quickly as possible to avoid arousing suspicion. But after 45 minutes of waiting, there was no sign of Rita.

“It gets to be about an hour, and I’m panicking,” he says. “And I’m thinking I should have thought it through, because we all went in the same car so I’m out in the middle of nowhere at a pie shop with no way to get to her.”

Suddenly, the Black Hills laptops began blinking with activity. Rita had done it. The USB drives she had planted were creating so-called web shells, which gave the team at the café access to various computers and servers inside the prison. Strand remembers one colleague yelling out: “Your mom’s OK!”

In fact, Rita had encountered no resistance at all inside the prison. She told the guards at the entrance that she was conducting a surprise health inspection and they not only allowed her in, but let her keep her cell phone, with which she recorded the entire operation. In the facility’s kitchen, she checked the temperatures in refrigerators and freezers, pretended to swab for bacteria on the floors and counters, looked for expired food, and took photos.

But Rita also asked to see employee work areas and break areas, the prison’s network operations center, and even the server room—all allegedly to check for insect infestations, humidity levels, and mold. No one said no. She was even allowed to roam the prison alone, giving her ample time to take photos and plant her Rubber Duckies.

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The Hate Is Coming From Inside the House

Image from Quote Catalog via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Body positivity, fat activism, intuitive eating: all of these things are meant, in part, to free us from the tyranny of diet culture. But if you’ve spent 50 years living your life according to the Gospel of Jenny Craig — each of those 50 in a world that doesn’t hate fat people any less — it’s hard to keep the self-love switch in the “on” position. In the New York Times, Sarah Miller takes a hard look at her relationship to her body and to body positivity.

I am not saying that no one has accepted her body, that it’s all a lie. I am just saying that I’m pretty sure we haven’t “arrived” anywhere. And why would we have? The material conditions of being a woman have not been altered in any dramatic way, and seem to be getting worse, for everyone. And while there is certainly more of what is called a “celebration” of different shapes, it is rare that those shapes are not proportioned in a fairly universally attractive way.

Even if by some miracle I were to accept being not thin, as I have many times — for five or 10 minutes or three whole days like when I finished Lindy West’s excellent memoir, “Shrill,” and naïvely thought I had finally been cured of my sickness — I would remain the sort of person destined for re-infection.

That person is always prepared for contempt from men who don’t find her physically attractive, and has been on high alert to general woman hatred since she was 4. (Honestly, I pity the women who are not.) At any rate, I’m 50 and I am way too scared of the world to stop dieting.

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