Search Results for: Time

California Is Preparing for Extreme Weather. It’s Time to Plant Some Trees.

Longreads Pick

Restoring river floodplains to forest and wetland habitat is a proven method for reducing flood damage to towns and cities, because these habitats absorb floodwater. To ready itself for climate change, the state is beginning to revegetate some of its riverbanks in central rural California.

Published: Jul 15, 2018
Length: 5 minutes (1,464 words)

Another Voyage for Madmen (And, This Time, One Woman)

Longreads Pick

Fifty years after the the first Golden Globe Race, 17 sailors are once again setting out for the most ambitious — and loneliest — regatta on the planet.

Source: Outside
Published: Jul 18, 2018
Length: 18 minutes (4,652 words)

A Crime and a Pastime

Longreads Pick
Source: The Baffler
Published: Jul 3, 2018
Length: 13 minutes (3,442 words)

Nothing But Time and Tides and Salt and Mud and Warren Ellis

The Red Sands Maunsell sea fort in the Thames estuary, off the north coast of Kent. Photo by Russss via Flickr (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Graphic novelist Warren Ellis, of Transmetropolitan and Planetary fame, has a chapter in the new book Spirits of Place dedicated to the place where he lives: the Thames Estuary. It’s home to the Maunsell Sea Forts and the S.S. Richard Montgomery, a ship that sank in 1944 with cargo of thousands of pounds of undetonated ordinance; home to areas with Harry Potter-esque names like “Mucking Marshes” and “Foulness”; home to Viking settlements and pirate radio stations. Once described by 8th century Mercian King Offa as “a terrible place,” it’s an odd, out-of-the-way part of the world.

Even in the Eighties, R&B bands ruled Southend. I’d go some nights to an underground space between a bar, which would be rammed with bodies dancing to standards – this was the decadent point in the period, where a lot of bands were just playing stuff you knew from the Blues Brothers soundtrack album. And I’d stagger outside at some point for air or a cigarette or whatever, and the side door to the steps would open, and a plume of steam would belch out and rise up into the night, and I could pretend that I was in a real place, a real city with real history and culture where that happened a thousand times a night, every night.

Some nights, people would just stand around and watch that pillar of air and heat and sweat and kisses rise into the sky.

For a space that’s been close to a blank slate for as long as it’s been here – nothing but forest, settlements stuck to coasts and creeks – even an appropriated identity is an improvement. And not unsuitable for an island that’s barely even there and a delta that probably isn’t.

It’s his part of the world, though.

I live out here on the Thames Delta, still, a ten-minute walk from the shore. It’s a placeless place that tells stories about itself because it’s rarely existed in a dense enough form to generate its own history. It’s nothing but time and tides and salt and mud, and sometimes the mud reflects the sky and you just can’t see anything.

I tell stories for a living. I sit by the rivers and creeks with the ghosts of my ancestors, the Viking priests and dead writers and cunning folk, and I see the water run by and count the tides. We launch futures from here, but here we stay, as time flows by and the sea becomes the sky and a ship full of bombs ticks away.

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Sometimes a Coat Is Just a Coat, and Sometimes It Ruins a Kid’s Life

A black trench coat hangs on a mannequin against a light gray background
Photo by Housing Works Thrift Shops (CC BY 2.0).

For The Oregonian, Bethany Barnes takes an in-depth look at the experience of 16-year-old Sanders, an autistic high school student put through an extensive “threat assessment” (aka, “We think you might be the next school shooter”). Are threat assessments effective? What happens when the behaviors flagged for a threat assessment overlap the symptoms with totally separate physical or neurological issues?

It was easy to figure out why the teen’s attire worried people. Sanders’ signature piece of clothing was a big black trench coat.

Years ago, Mark gave Sanders the riding coat he picked up on a youthful adventure in Australia. Sanders loved the weight of the coat. As a person on the autism spectrum, he welcomed the heaviness. It provided comfort in a world that often overwhelmed him. He wore it no matter the weather. With pride, he would note that when it gets above 85 degrees, it will be 104 degrees inside the coat, a fact he learned in science class. He was so associated with the coat that one time he didn’t wear it, he was marked absent by mistake. Sanders eventually wore out Mark’s old coat and his grandma got him a new one for Christmas.

Now, what had begun as a beloved hand-me-down, an armor that made Sanders feel secure and protected from the world, made him vulnerable.

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It’s Time for Hooters to GTFO

AP Photo/The Oregonian, Michael Lloyd

The common line about Hooters restaurants is that customers “just go there for the wings,” wink, wink. But no one’s unclear about the Hooters business model: sell sub-par food, invite clientele to objectify the female wait staff, tolerate sexual harassment, and present this all as “a family restaurant” where it’s all just fun and games, relax!

At GQJaya Saxena reexamines the boob-branded chain of sexist wing-slingers to see why our modern world, flushed with new life by the #MeToo movement, still has a place for this kind of business. Of course it shouldn’t, Saxena shows. But as long as the business model remains profitable and men dehumanize women, Hooters will continue operating as a place where men can ogle women in low cut shirts and short-shorts.

Strip clubs and sex work are still stigmatized in America. Waitresses everywhere are routinely harassed by customers, and are often told to suck it up or risk losing tips, but for Hooters Girls, there is significant job overlap with the stripping industry. Writer and stripper Janis Luna recently described her job as “to flirt and make them feel like a man.” Strippers look cute, they interact with you for tips, they listen, they laugh. The main difference for Hooters Girls is the parameters of the transaction are never clearly articulated.

If Hooters proves anything, it’s that women’s sexualized bodies aren’t actually offensive to the concept of “family fun.” But what Hooters lacks is transparency, and they use the plausible deniability to keep employees from complaining. “​Back then, my reaction to [Hooters being called a family restaurant] was more like, sure it is! We see families all the time! ​But I was definitely being defensive,” said Hubbard. “In reality, customers were 90 percent men, and we only saw a kid every few shifts. I don’t find it cute at all now, just gross and manipulative. It lets them say: We’re just playing around! Don’t be so uptight! It can’t be THAT offensive if kids are here!”

According to Anderson, she even had to sign away her right to sue if she was sexually harassed on the job. “When you are hired you sign a ton of documents, including one that basically states that you will not file a sexual harassment lawsuit against Hooters,” she said. “It also says that if you ever file any kind of legal claim against the company you forfeit your rights to go to court and instead will handle it within the company in arbitration.”

My recommendation: a complete rebrand, where all Hooters restaurants are converted into owl sanctuaries that house rehabilitated and/or endangered owls that children can learn about, interact with, and help rehabilitate. Fire all the male managers and let any of the cooks and female waitresses stay on as docents and biologists. Then when visitors rehash the old line about just coming for the wings, they’ll mean it. Until then, Saxena shows us how Hooters remains, like one of their lecherous male customers, on the wrong side of history.

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Sign O’ The Times: Paisley Park Offers A Public Tour

Prince performs during the halftime show at Super Bowl XLI on February 4, 2007 at Dolphin Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)

For The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich tours Paisley Park, the home and recording studio of the late Prince. What she learns is that no matter how close you may get in physical proximity, even in death Prince maintains a carefully curated distance between him, his fans, and the world.

Mostly, the tour made me feel lonesome. Absent its owner, Paisley Park is a husk. In 2004, when Prince briefly rented a mansion in Los Angeles from the basketball player Carlos Boozer, he redesigned the place, putting his logo on the front gate, painting pillars purple, installing all-black carpet, and adding a night club. (Boozer threatened to sue, but Prince restored the house before he moved out.) Yet Paisley Park feels anonymous. His studios are beautiful, but unremarkable. There are many photos of him, and his symbol is omnipresent, but I was hoping for evidence of his outsized quirks and affectations—clues to some bigger truth. I found little that seemed especially personal. Paisley Park presents Prince only as a visionary—not as a father, a husband, a friend, or a son.

Although Prince’s estate has disregarded some of his preferences—his discography is now available on Spotify, a platform he pulled his music from in 2015, in part because he believed that the company didn’t compensate artists properly—there’s something profound about how Paisley Park insists on maintaining Prince’s privacy. It does not need to modernize him (which feels unnecessary), or even to humanize him (which feels impossible). In 2016, the most common response to Prince’s death was disbelief. His self-presentation was so carefully controlled that he never once betrayed his own mortality. He’d done nothing to make us think he was like us. During parties, Prince sometimes stood in a dark corner of the balcony and watched other people dance. Visiting Paisley Park now evokes a similar sensation—of being near Prince, but never quite with him.

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In Guatemala, a Solo Traveler Learns It’s Sometimes Best to Leap Before You Look

Longreads Pick

A travel essay in which, during a last-minute solo excursion to Lake Atitlan, Jami Attenberg considers the advantages to taking more risks and opening up to the unfamiliar, and the differences between healthy solitude and isolation.

Source: AFAR
Published: May 30, 2018
Length: 10 minutes (2,560 words)

The Last Place Where No One Is Looking: Embracing the End Times of Snapchat

Ever since I password-protected my Diaryland site 15 years ago, I’ve slowly amassed a collection of now-abandoned online spaces in an effort to create a public, professional web presence. I hopped over to LiveJournal, where a few of my friends spilled their thoughts on a daily basis, then Typepad to create an early version of an online resume, then to a short-lived stint on Blogger, and finally to WordPress, where a significant part of my self still lives, albeit in fragments and forgotten drafts. Initially, I was bothered that these sites floated in the void, as I’ve tried to keep a tidy, tightly curated presence across the internet. Yet over time, as I’ve ditched Twitter, stopped blogging, posted less on Instagram, and made other accounts private, I feel strangely satisfied watching these profiles and sites languish, as my posts and updates harden into artifacts in the Museum of Me. I now wait for the moment when I can use them again solely for myself — when there are no readers left and no one is looking.

I thought about these deteriorating, forgotten spaces while reading Helena Fitzgerald’s thoughts at The Verge on one of the internet’s big ghost towns, Snapchat. Celebrities and the non-famous have abandoned the platform, and the ephemerality that had made the app popular is no longer a unique selling point, rendering Snapchat irrelevant and useless.

But it is this uselessness, Fitzgerald writes, that now makes Snapchat a compelling space for her again: a private hangout for a handful of people, far from the crowd, where they can yell out their secrets, be unseen, and disappear.

Perhaps more than anything else, what has sucked all of the joy out of the social internet in its current form is its exhortation to be useful. We have arrived at a version where everything seems to be just another version of LinkedIn. Every online space is supposed to get you a job or a partner or a stronger personal brand so you can accomplish the big, public-record goals of life. The public marketplace is everywhere. It’s an interactive and immersive CV, an archive. It all counts, and it all matters.

First in the era of America Online, and then in the era of LiveJournal and micro-blogging, the internet was at least partly an escape. It was a place where the boundaries of real life, in which everything was more or less a job interview, could be sloughed off and one could imagine the internet as a quiet, uninhabited space of whispered intimacies. In this era of hyper-usefulness, what seems rarest and most valuable online are spaces that offer, however illusorily, a return to this original uselessness. There are places where, against the constant obligation to be seen and remembered, we might get to be unseen, unrecorded, and forgotten.

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