Search Results for: Tin House

Peterson’s Complaint

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Laurie Penny | Longreads | July 2018 | 20 minutes (5,191 words)

“Incredible! One of the worst performances of my career, and they
never doubted it for a second!”
– Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

“Now that’s a scientific fact. There’s no real evidence
for it, but it is scientific fact.”
Brass Eye, “Paedogeddon” episode

“The eternal dragon is always giving our fallen down castles
a rough time.”
Jordan Peterson, “Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority”

***

“We have this tree, and we have this strange serpent. That’s a dragon-like form, there—a sphinx-like form that’s associated with the tree… And so the snake has been associated with the tree for a very, very long time. The lesson the snake tells people is, you bloody better well wake up, or something you don’t like will get you. And who’s going to be most susceptible to paying attention to the snake? That’s going to be Eve.”

That’s Professor Jordan Peterson, offering the “realistic and demanding practical wisdom” endorsed by David Brooks in the New York Times.

“The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and his authority — people worshipped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast.”

That’s the Book of Revelation.

“I could not understand why there was a half-man half-chicken statue outside. I spent the next six hours screaming. Non-stop screaming as loud as I could. I’d become convinced I was a dead body lying in a forest. I was in the afterlife, and more than that, I was in hell.”

And that’s a man from Vancouver describing a mishap with magic mushrooms in Vice. Of the three excerpts, it’s the only one that can convincingly claim to be non-fiction.

The first time I waded through the collected polemics and YouTube punditry of Professor Jordan Peterson — the unthinking man’s televangelist, inflated to the status of serious truth-seeker by respectable newspapers around the world — I was expecting to be at least slightly dazzled by his rhetoric. But no matter how long I stared at the magic-eye picture of jumbled platitudes, masturbatory nightmares about being devoured by an all-consuming mother figure, and occasional sensible tips about making your bed, it failed to resolve into a work of epoch-defining insight. Instead, it reads as if St. John the Divine of Patmos settled down and got a job selling insurance but occasionally had flashbacks to when he used to lick blue fungus off cave walls and babble about the Great Dragon. 

If every generation gets the intellectuals it deserves, we’re in serious trouble.

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Clocking Out

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Livia Gershon | Longreads | July 2018 | 9 minutes (2,261 words)

On May 1, 1886, 80,000 workers marched through the streets of Chicago. As soldiers and private police aimed their rifles into the crowd, “no smoke curled up from the tall chimneys of the factories and mills,” the Tribune reported. “Things had assumed a Sabbath-like appearance.” Chicago, an industrial boomtown, was the center of what became that day a mass labor action; more than 300,000 workers staged a strike across the country. The participants were skilled and unskilled, immigrant and native-born, revolutionary and reformist. What drew them together was a common demand, expressed in a popular labor song that many of the marchers sang: “We want to feel the sunshine / And we want to smell the flow’rs / We are sure that God has willed it / And we mean to have eight hours.

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Making Peace with the Site of a Suicide

Photo by Liz Arnold

Liz Arnold | The Common | Spring 2018 | 19 minutes (5,189 words)

Sixteen years ago, my mother found my father behind the shed on a Saturday morning in June. “Get up off the ground in your good shirt,” she told him, before she understood he was dead. “He looked like he was sleeping,” she told us. “The gun glinted in the grass.”

Seven years after my father’s suicide, I opened the envelope containing police photographs of the scene. He did not look like he was sleeping. Limbs: a swastika. Angles inhuman. Violence and velocity rendered in two hundred pounds of a six-foot man. The gun glinted in the grass — she was right about that.

Initially, I was upset she got it wrong. Did she get it wrong? Or she lied to protect her children, three grown adults. (I was 25 at the time.) Or shock wrote its own version. She says that shock drove her back into the house to start a load of whites. She watched her hand grasp the silver knob on the washing machine.

Maybe we’re trying to protect each other. I haven’t told her that I’ve read the autopsy report, or that I viewed photographs of the scene.

I remember how, on the night of his death, when I’d flown home to Michigan from Los Angeles, she tapped her temple twice, quickly. “Not a lot of blood,” she said. That was true, though I wouldn’t know until years later that the temple wasn’t the site of the entrance wound. “Intra-oral,” it said on the report. Of course. He was a dentist who collected guns, and his expertise in those two fields converged at the palate, the most vulnerable place in the skull. Bypassing bone, the impact destroys the control center for vital organs.

I’ve since revised my account to believe he was standing. He was standing behind the shed, and then—I can’t piece it together anymore. Read more…

An Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Reading List

NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 26: Progressive challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez celebrartes at a victory party in the Bronx after upsetting incumbent Democratic Representative Joseph Crowly on June 26, 2018 in New York City. Ocasio-Cortez upset Rep. Joseph Crowley in New York’s 14th Congressional District, which includes parts of the Bronx and Queens. (Photo by Scott Heins/Getty Images)

I was in Canada when I watched Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do what many, myself included, thought was the impossible: win the nomination as the Democratic Congressional candidate for New York’s District 14, beating incumbent party boss Joe Crowley, one of the most powerful machine Democrats in New York City, who hadn’t been challenged since he was essentially handed his congressional seat nearly two decades ago.

I watched it on Twitter, sensing the shock of my colleagues in the New York press corps. Those of us who were natives had grown up in, and continue to live in, a New York City that is ruled by money at every turn. Politics is no exception; if anything, it is the rule. Candidates in New York are typically taken seriously based on the weight of their “war chest,” how much money their campaign has accrued. In one campaign funding quarter, incumbent party boss Joe Crowley had out-raised her 30-to-1.

And yet. She had done the impossible. And in doing so, she had shown us — the press, and also voters — what is possible. It is hard to believe something is possible if you have never seen it happen before. Now we’ve seen it happen. Now we know.

I could not tear my eyes away from Twitter, from the impossible becoming real before my eyes. It felt too magical. I kept waiting for someone to say, no, we spoke too soon. No, we were wrong. Instead I saw video footage, filmed by NY1, the local news channel I grew up watching, depicting Ocasio-Cortez at the moment she realized it, too: That she had made the impossible a reality.

I watched it over and over. Ocasio-Cortez’s eyes widen, her hands flutter in agitation, then go to cover her mouth. She is overwhelmed. She reaches out one hand and grips the shoulder of the NY1 reporter, unconsciously, the way one reaches out blindly for any stability in a moment of reeling. Her other hand is still covering her mouth. She is still in shock, her eyes still so wide. She looks a little terrified, and who can blame her? How completely terrifying must it be to commit such magic, to make the impossible real for a generation who’d never seen it? A woman near her is crying now. It’s been only a matter of seconds so far. The NY1 reporter says something to her, and Ocasio-Cortez takes her hand from her mouth, looks at the reporter as if seeing her all of a sudden, and then she is back, and she is on, and she shakes her head with a little dip of conviction, a little dip that said, to me, I’m ready.

I wondered, what that must be like, to do something so tremendous, and then to have barely seconds to recover from it? I was awed by her grace and temerity. And I wasn’t scared for her, not even a little bit. She was ready.

***

That moment made me wonder, though, if some part of her had braced herself for the outcome so many people had said was inevitable: a stinging loss. All that effort for nothing — though it wouldn’t have been nothing, for she had activated voters, and pushed Crowley to the left, enough that he backed a Medicare for All bill that he’d previously scoffed at.

But still, how could she not have anticipated the possibility of losing? She had been ignored by television media, and by much of the mainstream political media. When they did write about her, her defeat seemed preordained. “It’s an understatement to say the underfunded Ocasio-Cortez has an uphill battle,” POLITICO wrote in February, near the end of a long piece about progressive candidates nationwide. Crowley was “heading into an all-but-certain victory,” POLITICO New York wrote in June, just before the primary.

But even those stories contained tacit hints about the potential for an Ocasio-Cortez victory. The June story reported:

“The No. 4 House Democrat’s longtime colleagues in the New York delegation say they’re not worried about his primary — and brushed aside any idea that the race could hurt Crowley’s ambitions to become Speaker one day.

‘Everybody is supportive of Joe and how he’s running the race,’ said Rep. Gregory Meeks, who represents parts of Queens and Nassau County. ‘The fact that Joe is the chair of the Queens Democratic Party and how he’s held that organization together — he’s got Democrats working together — works in his favor of his leadership as chair of the Democratic Caucus.'”

Perhaps voters finally asked: Working together for what? A sharply divided nation in which racists no longer feel the need to wear masks when they rally, safe with their hatred out fully in the open? A city in which economic disparity seems to widen year after year? Apartments that are affordable for few, if any, and healthcare out of reach for most, while this party boss takes cash from real estate and pharmaceutical companies?

Or, as Ocasio-Cortez herself told POLITICO in February:

“What this is about is that if we reelect the same Democratic Party that we had going into this mess, then we’re going to have the same exact result,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “In order for the country to move forward, the Democratic Party has to transform.”

And she wasn’t universally ignored by media outlets. She was profiled by the Village Voice as early as last year, in June 2017, and WNYC later that year. Mic profiled her in February of this year, and Splinter News in March 2018. Ozy, Elite Daily, Refinery29, The Cut and Vogue all followed. The Intercept wrote about her repeatedly, and Politico Media’s Michael Calderone quoted Intercept reporter Ryan Grim at her election night party:

“She represented the perfect contrast to Crowley’s model of politics,” Grim said. “Our theory is that big money corrupts politics. The corollary to that is there is another way to do politics. Otherwise you’re just nihilists. People like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are doing that kind of politics, are important to highlight, to show there is an alternative.”

I couldn’t help but recall here what an anonymous Democratic operative, fearful of offending Crowley, told POLITICO New York for their June article: “Once there is an initial threat, a challenge in his dominance, it changes people’s perception on the Hill about his power.”

Hopefully, others like Ocasio-Cortez will see this and feel emboldened to take on the political machines in their own communities. New York’s is powerful, with deep roots — but often lazy, a laziness that sometimes seems intentional, in light of the low voter turnout that results. (I wrote last year for The New York Times about efforts to counter this in Brooklyn.) Per POLITICO New York:

“Crowley’s dominance over the Queens machine — formally known as the Queens County Democratic Organization — remains unchallenged. He’s been in charge since 2006, shortly after former Rep. Tom Manton, who had molded Crowley as his political protege, died of cancer. Since then, both supporters and detractors say Crowley has run a well-oiled operation that controls everything from the Queens judicial system to who wins local city and state elections, who gets on the ballot and who can tap into the resources available at the disposal of the operation.

Still, interviews with several Democratic operatives, elected officials and political advisers show the Queens County operation’s bark may be worse than its bite. The county has power, but it has a nearly non-existent ground operation; it does not deliver votes or ensure that people hit the polls on election day. Rather, it offers candidates a friendly “how-to” map for running for office in Queens which includes everything from who to hire for consulting to ensuring a specific ballot line.”

It’s hard not to be hopeful that Ocasio-Cortez’s victory will extend to other candidates like her all over the country who are brave enough to challenge the antiquated machine politics around them.

After all, her victory was also one for “millennial” publications, according to HuffPost. POLITICO’s Calderone detailed how outrage at The New York Times’ dismissive characterization of Elite Daily, Mic and Refinery29 as “websites most often associated with millennial and female audiences” as opposed to “national” outlets provoked such outrage that “national” was changed to “traditional.”

Here is a reading list about Ocasio-Cortez, including González-Ramírez’s piece and others.

1. “The Most Powerful Democrat in Queens Must Finally Compete,” Ross Barkan, the Village Voice, June 19, 2017 

The Voice article gives crucial background on how Crowley came to power — as, essentially, a prodigal son of New York City machine politics. Most gallingly, and personally for Ocasio-Cortez, it shows how that same machine politics has brought wealth to only a select few, due to the hardship of those who most need their elected officials’ assistance — as Ocasio-Cortez and her mother did when her father died of cancer.

The day-to-day operations of the Queens party have remained in the hands of a trio of Crowley- and Manton-aligned lawyers for three decades.

These men — Gerard Sweeney, Michael Reich, and Frank Bolz — have a law firm that has earned millions in Surrogate’s Court, where the estates of people who die without wills are processed, and from representing banks foreclosing on people’s homes. The judicial system in Queens is effectively under Crowley’s control, since no one becomes a judge or receives a court appointment without staying in the county organization’s good graces.

2. “Can Local Candidates Ever Defeat the Political Machine?” Brigid Bergin, WNYC and CityLab, November 7, 2017

Bergin’s story looked at Ocasio-Cortez and three other women in Queens hoping to destabilize the borough’s entrenched political machine. Perhaps most interesting in her story is context she provides for the responses she gets from Crowley, like the following (among others):

“The way the Queens Democratic Party machine has worked, they operate on a politics of exclusion,” said Ocasio.

I asked Crowley what he says to people who see how the local party operates and say, the system is rigged.

“I think ‘rigged’ is an interesting word to use when the judges in this county are elected by the people,” Crowley replied. That’s technically true, but slightly misleading: Judicial candidates are nominated by the party. In a one-party town, voters don’t have much choice at the polls.

3. “Meet the young progressive Latina trying to oust one of the most powerful Democrats in the House,” A.P. Joyce, Mic.com, Feb. 28, 2018 

After Ocasio-Cortez’s primary victory, a Twitter user posted a photo of the suburban house where she grew up, claiming that it proved the urban roots she claimed were a lie.

But she’d never denied that she grew up in a privileged zip code. As far back as February, she told Mic that her father moved her family to a neighborhood with better opportunities, but most of her extended family remained in the Bronx, where her father continued to commute for work.

The experience of living between the two worlds of New York’s poorest borough and its more affluent suburbs gave Ocasio-Cortez an early firsthand look at some of the inequities facing the country.

“I grew up with this reality and understanding of income inequality as, ‘When I’m in this zip code I have these opportunities, and when I’m in that zip code I don’t have these opportunities,’” she said.

“At a very young age I knew it was wrong. I knew that the fact that my cousins didn’t have adequate resources or adequate public services and good schools, and I did, was something that just didn’t strike me as right.”

4. “Talking With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Woman Challenging One of New York’s Political Kingmakers,” Clio Chang, Splinter, March 22, 2018 

Chang’s Q&A with Ocasio-Cortez is thorough and well worth a read — particularly the context she provides on the call to abolish ICE, and the hopes she has for New York and national politics at large.

In order for our country to move forward both parties have to transform fundamentally. On the Democratic side, we need to be the party of working people again and no one has stepped up to the plate. People have been too scared in New York’s frankly very intimidating political environment.

5. “A Primary Against the Machine: A Bronx Activist Looks to Dethrone Joseph Crowley, The King of Queens,” Aida Chavez and Ryan Grim, The Intercept, May 22, 2018 

The Intercept did multiple stories on Ocasio-Cortez, but its initial profile is a really compelling retelling of the story of Ocasio-Cortez’s call to activism — in part due to the chaos that ensued after her father’s death — and a good explanation of how the Queens political machine flexes its power, especially when it comes to the court system.

“Crowley’s allies in the machine, Ocasio-Cortez charged, ‘defend him in court and they bump his opponents off the ballot,’ referring to ballot challenges filed with the Board of Elections against candidates Crowley did not support or who oppose the machine. Last year, as DNAInfo reported, a candidate in a City Council primary was booted from the ballot for not having enough valid signatures; she said she was bullied for not ‘kissing the ring’ of the party boss, Crowley. In that race, Crowley supported Assemblyman Francisco Moya, who went on to defeat Hiram Monserrate, a former council member and state senator who was expelled from the legislature after a 2009 conviction for assaulting his girlfriend.

The machine has a tight relationship with developers. Ocasio-Cortez noted in a follow-up email that Crowley’s organization reaped large sums of real estate money before the Queens machine installed the new City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, who has since led the council in rezoning neighborhoods for luxury developments — pricing out local families and constructing high rises when the city already has 275k vacant units.'”

6. “This Berniecrat Aims to Unseat a Queens Power Broker,” Daniel Malloy, Ozy, May 23, 2018

The update to this article states, “Ozy told you about her first,” which likely isn’t true — unless their readers don’t have access to the Village Voice, WNYC, CityLab, Mic, Splinter and The Intercept. But their profile is good nonetheless, opening with a glimpse into Ocasio-Cortez’s campaigning efforts and sweet details about her personality and background.

“There were times when Ocasio-Cortez would wonder whether it was worth it, especially when she’d drag herself home to her Bronx apartment after midnight, her campaign materials crammed into a Trader Joe’s bag. But this is the mid-February moment when she passes the point of no return: She’s quitting her day job to campaign full-time through the June Democratic primary, living off her savings and her partner’s income. Her social media and volunteer following, as well as the community members she meets, won’t let her quit. ‘It is simultaneously so exciting and terrifying,’ she says.”

7. “28-Year-Old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Pushing For Millennials’ Future Through Politics,” Hannah Golden, Elite Daily, June 12, 2018

Elite Daily’s look at Ocasio-Cortez emphasizes her youth, with good reason: to show the importance of having legislators who by necessity need to take a long view on complicated issues. As Ocasio-Cortez tells the publication, most members of Congress “won’t have to deal with 20-foot storm surges, but we will.”

“If elected, Ocasio-Cortez could be the youngest woman ever elected to the House. According to the Congressional Research Service, the average age of a House member at the beginning of this session was 57.8 years, and 61.8 years for a senator. That’s one of the highest averages in the legislature’s history. Under the U.S. Constitution, House representatives must be at least 25 years old (and senators 30) when they take office. The youngest member of Congress currently is fellow New Yorker Elise Stefanik, who was 30 years old when she took office in 2015.

In fact, it’s out of a sense of responsibility as a young person that Ocasio-Cortez is daring to take on a high-profile member of her own party. ‘Congress is too old, they don’t have a stake in the game,’ she says. Issues like climate change and the rising costs of higher education and housing, she adds, aren’t being addressed by the current representation.

8. “Meet The Bronx-Born Puerto Rican Challenging One Of The Most Powerful House Democrats,” Andrea González-Ramírez, Refinery29, June 13, 2018

Andrea González-Ramírez’s story is full of important and notable statistics and data and great quotes from Ocasio-Cortez, but perhaps the one that struck me the most was that Ocasio-Cortez had at one point decided she would not like to run for office.

“But Ocasio-Cortez argued that for all the power Crowley wields in Congress, he has failed to serve the people of Queens and the Bronx. Though she never planned to run for office because she didn’t like the culture behind it, she decided she couldn’t continue to stand-by.

‘While it’s not that nothing has happened in the Bronx, it feels that we are dealing with the same problems 20 years later,’ she said. ‘I’m an organizer here and I know no one ever sees him, he doesn’t have a presence in this community. It would be different if he was around.’

(In 2011, the New York Post reported that Crowley lived in Virginia and was raising his family there, though he maintains a house in Queens.)”

9. “The 28-Year-Old at the Center of One of This Year’s Most Exciting Primaries,” Gabriella Paiella, The Cut, June 25, 2018 

The Cut’s profile gives further context to Ocasio-Cortez’s previous stance against running for office.

“Ocasio-Cortez’s candidacy has made the race one of this year’s most buzzed-about primaries, even if she didn’t have political ambitions until recently. ‘I counted out that possibility because I felt that possibility had counted out me,’ she told the Cut. ‘I felt like the only way to effectively run for office is if you had access to a lot of wealth, high social influence, a lot of high dynastic power, and I knew that I didn’t have any of those things.’

And while she may be running a long-shot progressive campaign against a powerful old-guard opponent, she’s determined to run on her own terms. The weekend before the Democratic primary, for instance, Ocasio-Cortez opted to fly down to the U.S.-Mexico border to address the Trump administration’s child-separation policy instead of doing last-minute campaigning.”

10. “28-Year-Old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Might Just Be the Future of the Democratic Party,” Bridget Read, Vogue, June 25, 2018

Vogue’s Q&A with Ocasio-Cortez, a week before her victory and right before she left the city to visit a detention center in Texas, contains great answers about her background and political positions, including this on how abolishing ICE should not be a “fringe” position.

“One of the biggest dangers of this administration is the erosion of norms, which is pretty typical for authoritarian regimes. This is one of the problems when it comes to immigration. My opponent has literally called ICE “fascist”, yet he refuses to take the stance of abolishing it, which, to me, is morally incomprehensible. Words mean something, and the moment you have identified something as fascist, that with it carries a moral responsibility to abolish it. That’s what I’m talking about when we say that norms have been eroded: that we literally have elected officials arguing to basically retain fascist agencies.”

11. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Victory Has Striking Similarities to a 1972 Trailblazing Win,” Amanda Farinacci, NY1, June 27, 2018

My love for this little story is certainly related to being a local news nerd and native New Yorker, but I think it also proves my earlier point about how an entire generation of New Yorkers had never seen a win like Ocasio-Cortez’s in their lives: The last time anything like this happened was with Elizabeth Holtzman in 1972.

“There were no news cameras present when Elizabeth Holtzman did the unthinkable 46 years ago, beating Emanuel Celler in the Democratic primary for the congressional seat he held for a remarkable 50 years.

Tuesday night, Holtzman couldn’t help but think of that moment as she watched Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pull off an equally implausible victory.

‘I was excited for her and I felt obviously a real bond there,’ Holtzman said. ‘I said, “Oh my goodness, nobody gave her a chance.”‘”

12. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Driving New Energy and Money to Progressive Candidates,” Daniel Marans and Kevin Robillard, HuffPost, July 4, 2018

And now for a post-victory story, because of course Ocasio-Cortez’s work has only just begun. This HuffPost story opens with a candidate forum in Michigan, 600 miles from New York, where the mere mention of Ocasio-Cortez’s name elicits excited cheers from the crowd. Since her victory, established politicians who couldn’t be bothered to take the risk of endorsing her are now rushing to curry favor with her, while she is using her platform to endorse young, progressive candidates all over the country.

“Earlier in the day, Ocasio-Cortez had used her massive Twitter platform to endorse El-Sayed. He has since picked up an additional 2,500 Twitter followers and is awash in national press inquiries.

Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old former Bernie Sanders organizer who just a few short weeks ago was scolding establishment Democrats on Twitter for ignoring her campaign, now has 600,000 followers hanging on every 280-character missive ― far more than the typical rank-and-file member of Congress.

And those same establishment Democrats are now knocking on her door. A little over a week since her upset of Joe Crowley, the Democratic Party boss of Queens County, Ocasio-Cortez finds herself as an unlikely kingmaker.”

My Brother Comes to Moscow

Getty / Penguin Random House

Keith Gessen | A Terrible Country | July 2018 | 21 minutes (5,369 words)

 

All happy families are alike; ours, obviously, was not a happy family.

What had we done wrong? By most measures, you would have thought we’d done everything right. For a few years in the late 1970s, the Soviets allowed the emigration of their Jews. First they sent the criminals and critics (“Let them rob and criticize the Americans!”), but there were only so many criminals and critics, and they eventually started letting out computer programmers like my father and literary scholars like my mother. My parents weren’t stupid. When you are given a chance to emigrate from a poor, decrepit, crumbling country to a wealthy, powerful, dynamic one, you take it. They took it. They filed their application, bribed someone who said they’d help, sold all their stuff — and off we went.

It wasn’t easy. I was six years old when we came over, and even I could tell. We stayed with another family at first, then in a weird apartment in Brighton, at the very edge of respectable Boston. Someone stole our security deposit. With my father’s first substantial paycheck we bought a giant, ugly car. As my parents drove around Brighton visiting their Russian friends — all their friends were Russian — I sprawled on the backseat and slept.

Eventually they figured it out, my father went from good job to better, and my mother became one of the few literary Russians to actually find a literary job. We moved from Brighton to Brookline to aristocratic Newton. But through it all Dima expressed the frustrations and limitations of our new life. He denounced the Russians my parents hung out with as losers; he dismissed his new classmates as idiots. He had hated the Soviet Union, he said, but at least in the Soviet Union there were people you could talk to.

The only person he seemed to like was me. As he started making money in his first jobs in America — he got a job as a gas station attendant, which included, he told me proudly, both a wage and some tips — he always bought me little gifts and let me in on his theories about capitalism. He sought to enlist me in his ongoing battle with our parents, and let me in on all the (limited) family dirt.

As Dima moved out into the world — he left home the minute he turned eighteen, declared to my flabbergasted parents that he wasn’t going to college, and incorporated his first company before the year was out (they made some kind of video game) — I watched him with profound fascination. What was this new world and what could a Kaplan hope to do in it? How could you live? I had no idea. My parents were good people but they lived in a Russian ghetto. It wasn’t just their friends who were Russian, it was everyone: our doctor was Russian, our dentist was Russian, our car mechanic was Russian, the clown who came to our house for birthday parties was Russian, the guy who fixed the roof was Russian. How the fuck did they know so many Russian people? The thing is, I knew this world, this close-​­knit community, would not be available to me. It was as if, yes, my parents had emigrated, but only to the Russia that existed inside America; Dima and I would have to emigrate all over again into America itself. Dima was the one who went out into the world and figured it out. He was the advance party for the two of us. I did not have to do what he did — in fact in most ways I would do the exact opposite — but from him at least I could learn the possibilities. Until I was about sixteen there was no one I admired more.
Read more…

Gone Gray

Pierre-Joseph Redouté via Rawpixel / CC, Andreas Kuehn via Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jessica Berger Gross | Longreads | July 2018 | 21 minutes (5,335 words)

 

We’re in London, somewhere between the British Museum and Piccadilly Circus. It’s Thanksgiving week, and my then 9-year-old and I have been winding our way through the late November afternoon on a marathon walking tour of the city. But now we’re lost. I stop a woman who looks to be in her mid-40s, about my age, to ask for directions, and I quickly realize that she’s one of them: attractive, fashionable in an appealingly unconventional way — and with completely, unabashedly gray hair. Forget the directions. I peel off my hat to show her what’s doing underneath, where I have three months’ worth of roots. “Brilliant. Keep going,” she says. “You won’t regret it.”

For years, and more and more in the past year or two, I’d see them on the street — the striking silver hair on an artist type in her 40s on the sidewalk in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side; the shock of a long gray braid down the back of a fiftysomething woman at a thermal spa in Iceland; the short, gray bangs and bob on my sixtysomething neighbors at the farmers market in rural Maine. The surprising beauty of a woman in her 30s with unexpected, natural gray. Not to mention all the millennials — and Kim Kardashian — dying their hair bottle gray.

Throughout my 30s I’d been a vigilant hair colorer, doing whatever it took to remedy and right the gray roots growing out from my middle part. I can’t remember exactly how old I was when coloring my hair went from an occasional, even enjoyable, splurge — an optional luxury — to a required part of regular beauty maintenance and of my looking professional and pretty. But as I entered my 40s, I found my feminist and aesthetic selves at war each month when I sat in the salon chair.

Then the world changed. The New York Times needle impossibly tipped the wrong way: Trump was elected. During that bleak late autumn and winter, after the fall foliage–filled weekends of knocking on doors for Hillary, I cried myself to sleep and woke up to the steady drum of anger and disbelief. Then, almost a year later, the Harvey Weinstein story broke, and I spent my evenings half ignoring laundry and bath time and bedtime, so that I could keep up with the #MeToo news cycle. Twitter went from a procrastination time suck to a daily engagement in feminist dialogue, with a fervor the likes of which I hadn’t felt since Women Studies 101. We’d entered a time of resistance against our abuser and pussy-grabber in chief and his cronies, and like so many women, I’d absolutely had it with the constraints of patriarchy.

Now more than ever, I resented — even hated — the dye. Having to dye my hair was one more patriarchal rule I didn’t have time or patience for. And Trump’s ridiculous orange dye job made me see the deceptive element in hair color and want to run even farther from the bottle. It’s not just that I didn’t want to keep up with the hassle and expense of coloring my roots a dark brown every four weeks and highlighting the rest of my hair every few months. I wanted to become the kind of woman who could give myself permission to go gray, who’d embrace authenticity and realness, and stop running from the reality of aging and mortality. But could I do it?

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How Brooklyn Lost Itself

AP Photo/David Boe

For New Yorker Robert Sullivan, the act of giving directions functions as a barometer of a city’s health, because at the heart of all urban environments, both ones that thrive and ones that fail, is something very basic: human interactions.

At Places JournalSullivan looks at the way his post-industrial Brooklyn has become a lucrative real estate commodity and brand after its post-millennium revival, and he shows how the fabric of urban life has not necessarily strengthed along with the property values. He uses this idea of directions to direct readers’ attention to ways that the booming, “revitalized” Brooklyn has used post-industrial space and history for the benefit of business and real estate interests, and made public space a private commodity. Touring new and old Brooklyn, he shows how revitalized post-industrial spaces, like Brooklyn Bridge Park, depend, as he puts it, “upon the conception of the old city as being not only dead but also valueless: a wasteland.” This narrative erases people of color in many Brooklyn neighborhoods. It erases the contributions of blue collar workers. It downplays the city’s industrial past and historic vibrancy, suggesting that industry is the enemy of urbanity, and that true vibrant urban life began after industry died. This isn’t just happening in Brooklyn. It’s a problem for many urban neighborhoods, and “the more I give directions,” he says, “the more I worry that we are somehow terribly lost.”

To describe the park, and how in fact it does feel, it is necessary to borrow the terminology of the real estate industry and to refer to it as an amenity. Brooklyn Bridge Park is an amenity underwritten by the costly residences that overlook the recreational spaces, by the Pierhouse penthouse that cost more than $10 million and by the $1,000 per-night Liberty Suite with the “curated seating area” at the 1 Hotel. But when you spend time in the park, you begin to feel that the public has come up short in the partnership; that in return for the underwriting, the park has become an extension of the condos and the hotel. Which is completely understandable: the owners of multimillion-dollar condos might well want to feel that the expansive green spaces visible from their floor-to-ceiling windows somehow belong to them. But for the public, the community, the concept feels flawed. It’s as if the purpose of the park were to sell the condos, which would be like creating the Grand Canyon only after you have developed the lodge with the scenic views.

But what feels most disturbing to me is that in Brooklyn Bridge Park, history too has become an amenity. Here I would direct you to the signage, which is itself intended to direct you towards the history of the site — towards the narrative of decline and death, reclamation and revival. The park is filled with markers along the walkways and in front of buildings, markers that underscore the before and after of the narrative. If you read them casually, you might think they are genuine historic markers. But if you read them more closely, you recognize that they operate not as communal notes on local history but rather as points of brand awareness. And, crucially, the brand is not so much the park but rather the transformation of the old industrial wasteland into the new recreational amenity.

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The Wheel, the Woman, and the Human Body

CTK via AP Images

Margaret Guroff | The Mechanical Horse | University of Texas Press | April 2016 | 35 minutes (4,915 words)

Angeline Allen must have been pleased. On October 28, 1893, the 20-something divorcée, an aspiring model, made the cover of the country’s most popular men’s magazine, a titillating journal of crime, sport, and cheesecake called the National Police Gazette. Granted, the reason wasn’t Allen’s “wealth of golden hair” or “strikingly pretty face,” though the magazine mentioned both. Rather, the cover story was about Allen’s attire during a recent bicycle ride near her Newark, New Jersey, home. The “eccentric” young woman had ridden through town in “a costume that caused hundreds to turn and gaze in astonishment,” the Gazette reported.

The story’s headline summed up the cause of fascination: “She Wore Trousers” — dark blue corduroy bloomers, to be exact, snug around the calves and puffy above the knees. “She rode her wheel through the principal streets in a leisurely manner and appeared to be utterly oblivious of the sensation she was causing,” according to the reporter.

It is unlikely Allen was truly oblivious, having already shown an exhibitionistic streak over the summer when she appeared on an Asbury Park, New Jersey, beach in a bathing skirt that “did not reach within many inches of her knees,” according to a disapproving newspaper report. (“Her stockings or tights were of light blue silk,” the report added.) Allen didn’t mind people noticing her revealing outfits — “that’s what I wear them for,” she told one reporter — and she kept cycling around Newark in pants despite the journalistic scolding. As another paper reported that November, “The natives watch for her with bated breath, and her appearance is the signal for a rush to all the front windows along the street.”

For a grown woman to reveal so much leg in public was a staggeringly brazen act. What was noticeably unnoteworthy by then was Allen’s choice of vehicle. Ten years earlier, all bicycles had been high-wheelers, and riding one had been largely the province of daring, athletic men. The women who had attempted it were seen as acrobats, hussies, or freaks; one female performer who rode a high-wheeler in the early 1880s was perceived as “a sort of semi-monster,” another woman reported. But by the early 1890s, the bike had undergone a transformation. Allen’s machine — a so-called safety bicycle — had two thigh-high wheels; air-filled rubber tires; and rear-wheel drive, with a chain to transmit power from the pedals. In fact, it looked a lot like a 21st-century commuter bike, and it had become nearly as acceptable as one. Even the fashion police who scorned Allen’s riding outfit didn’t object to her riding.

What had happened to the bicycle in the interim? Market expansion. In the 1880s, when bicycle makers had begun to saturate the limited market for high-wheelers, they sought products to entice other would-be riders, particularly men who had aged out of the strenuous high-wheel lifestyle. In the United States, where bad roads made tricycle ridership impractical, the sales potential for an easy-to-ride bicycle looked stronger than in Europe. In response, manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic created a profusion of high-tech two-wheelers, including models with foot levers instead of pedals; “geared up” bikes with chains and sprockets that spun the driving wheel more than once for each rotation of the cycle’s cranks; and a supposedly header-proof version with the small wheel in the front and the big wheel in the rear. Riders and makers started calling the standard high-wheeler an “Ordinary” to distinguish it from experimental models.

Several of the new bikes used geared-up rear-wheel drive as a way to bring the rider closer to the ground. The most influential of these was the English Rover, with a rear driving wheel only thirty inches tall that had as much force as a 50-inch Ordinary wheel. (Even today, American bicycle gears are measured in “gear inches,” which indicate how tall an Ordinary wheel of equivalent force would be.) At 36 inches, the Rover’s front wheel was slightly bigger than its rear one, but apart from that, the machine looked as streamlined as some models of fifty or a hundred years later.

Introduced in England in 1885, the Rover Safety Bicycle delivered the speed of an Ordinary, but with a greatly diminished risk of skull fracture from flying over the handlebars. The Rover’s manufacturer made some quick refinements, and a model with same-sized wheels caught on in Britain and inspired a fleet of imitators: low-mount, rear-wheel-drive bikes also called “safeties.”

The major US manufacturers weren’t impressed by this new low profile, though; they dismissed the safety style as a mistake. In 1886, after a two-month tour of England’s bicycle factories, the US industry titan Albert Pope expressed confidence in his high-wheeler: “I looked at nearly all the principal [English] makes and I could not find a point that was in any way an improvement over our own.” Echoed his lieutenant, George H. Day, who also made the trip, “Every innovation is regarded as a trap.”

But when imported safeties hit the US market in the spring of 1887, the machines found eager buyers; Pope and other American cycle makers scrambled to put out their own versions of the header-resistant contraptions. By November, the safety bicycle was established in the United States as the modern option for men, even though its low wheels evoked the comically old-timey velocipede of 20 years prior, as one bard made clear in the accented voice of an immigrant child:

In days of old, full many a time
You’ve heard it told, in prose and rhyme,
How down the street a wheelman came,
And chanced to meet his beauteous flame
Just where a pup in ambush lay,
To tip him up upon the way,
And make him wish that he was dead,
While gyrating upon his head.
In days of old
You’ve heard it told.
But nowadays, it’s otherwise.
The safety craze new joy supplies;
The boulders lose their terrors grim,
Stray cans and shoes are naught to him;
He laughs at rocks, he kicks the pup,
But, in the end, things even up;
For, as his maid he gayly greets,
Some unwashed urchin always bleats —
“Hi, look at der big man on der melosipetes!”

For a short time, Ordinaries and safeties coexisted like Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, with the bigger, older species continuing to inhabit its traditional niche while the smaller, nimbler creature carved out a new one. “I do not think that [the safety] will hurt the sale of the Ordinary bicycle,” predicted one US industry watcher in late 1887. “It will open the pleasures of cycling to a great many who have been afraid to venture upon a high machine.” The writer was thinking of physicians and other “professional men” for whom an Ordinary was too dangerous, but some enthusiasts suspected that the safety would also appeal to female riders. Offering women “a clumsy wheelbarrow of a tricycle” to ride while men zip around on slender bikes, wrote one sympathetic man, “is offering a woman a stone to eat while men have soft biscuit.”

And the safety bicycle’s low profile did intrigue many American women, especially after the spring of 1888, when makers offered a drop-frame version, in which the bike’s top bar scooped downward to make room for a lady rider’s long skirts. As one woman reported that year, “A sudden desire began to awake in the feminine mind to ascertain for itself by personal experience, what were those joys of the two-wheeler which they had so often heard boastfully vaunted as superior, a thousand times, to the more sober delights of the staid tricycle.”

With the safety’s smaller wheels, its ride was bumpier than the Ordinary’s at first. But then came the pneumatic tire. Devised in Ireland in 1888 by a veterinarian named John Boyd Dunlop, who was seeking a faster ride for his son’s trike, the air-filled rubber tube cushioned the road’s ruts and bulges in a way that springs and other early shock-absorbing devices never could. This marvel arrived in the United States by 1890 and became standard equipment on American safeties within a few years. “It permitted travel on streets and roads previously thought unrideable,” recalled an American journalist of the time, “and added to cycling a degree of ease and comfort never dreamed of.”

In the 1890s, bikes got lighter as well as more comfortable. The average weight of a bicycle dropped by more than half during the decade’s first five years, falling from 50 pounds to 23. And since new gearings were able to mimic wheels larger than those of the largest Ordinary, speed records fell too. In 1894, while riding a pneumatic-tired safety around a track in Buffalo, New York, the racer John S. Johnson went a mile in just over one minute and thirty-five seconds, a rate of nearly thirty-eight miles an hour. He beat the previous mile record for a safety by fourteen seconds, and the record for an Ordinary by nearly a minute–and the record for a running horse by one-tenth of a second.

The Ordinary — which had by then acquired the derisive nickname of “penny-farthing,” after the old British penny and much smaller farthing (quarter-penny) coins ─ became obsolete. High-wheelers that had sold for $150 to $300 just a year or two earlier were going for as little as $10.

The first safeties, meanwhile, cost an average of $150 during a time when the average worker earned something like $12 a week. At such prices, the new bikes targeted the same upscale demographic as the tricycle. But a strong market for safeties among well-to-do women goosed production, and competition among manufacturers reduced prices, making the bikes affordable to more would-be riders — and further fueling demand. In 1895, America’s 300 bicycle companies produced 500,000 safeties at an average price of $75, according to one encyclopedia’s yearbook. Even manufacturers were surprised at the demand among women, who thrilled to the new machine’s exhilarating ride. As one female journalist wrote, “If a pitying Providence should suddenly fit light, strong wings to the back of a toiling tortoise, that patient cumberer of the ground could hardly feel a more astonishing sense of exhilaration than a woman experiences when first she becomes a mistress of her wheel.”

It wasn’t just that women enjoyed the physical sensation of riding — the rush of balancing and cruising. What made the bicycle truly liberating was its fundamental incompatibility with many of the limits placed on women. Take clothing, for example. Starting at puberty, women were expected to wear heavy floor-length skirts, rigid corsets, and tight, pointy-toed shoes. These garments made any sort of physical exertion difficult, as young girls sadly discovered. “I ‘ran wild’ until my 16th birthday, when the hampering long skirts were brought, with their accompanying corset and high heels,” recalled the temperance activist Frances Willard in an 1895 memoir. “I remember writing in my journal, in the first heartbreak of a young human colt taken from its pleasant pasture, ‘Altogether, I recognize that my occupation is gone.’” Reformers had been calling for more sensible clothing for women since the 1850s, when the newspaper editor Amelia Bloomer wore the baggy trousers that critics named after her, but rational arguments hadn’t made much headway.

Where reason failed, though, recreation succeeded. The drop-frame safety did allow women to ride in dresses, but not in the swagged, voluminous frocks of the Victorian parlor. Female cyclists had to don simple, “short” (that is, ankle-length) skirts in order to avoid getting them caught under the bicycle’s rear wheel. And to keep them from flying up, some women had tailors put weights in their hems or line their skirt fronts with leather. Other women, like Angeline Allen, shucked their dresses altogether and wore bloomers. The display that reporters had deemed shocking in 1893 became commonplace just a few years later as more and more women started riding. “The eye of the spectator has long since become accustomed to costumes once conspicuous,” wrote an American journalist in 1895. “Bloomer and tailor-made alike ride on unchallenged.” (For her part, Allen may well have given up riding, but not scandal; she progressed to posing onstage in scanty attire for re-creations of famous paintings, a risqué popular amusement.)

Bicyclists’ corsets changed too, though less publicly. The corset of the 1880s was an armpit-to-hip garment stiffened with whalebone stays, which helped the hips support heavy skirts that hung from the waist. But while corsets braced women’s torsos, they also weakened their wearers, squeezing women’s lungs and displacing other internal organs, making deep breaths impossible. Out of necessity, female cyclists looked for alternatives, and many chose another garment that had been advocated by dress reformers decades earlier: a sturdy, waist-length cotton camisole with shoulder straps. When introduced in the 1870s, this garment was called an “emancipation waist,” and it featured a horizontal band of buttons at the hem, to which drawers or a skirt could be attached. Later versions were named “health waist” or, finally, “bicycle waist.” One 1896 model included elastic insets; its maker promised the wearer “perfect comfort — a sound pair of lungs — a graceful figure and rosy cheeks.” All for $1, postpaid.

If women’s clothing constrained them, so did their role in society. More Americans than ever worked outside the home; by 1880, farmers made up a little less than half of the country’s labor force. But even among the urban working class, married women typically stayed home during the day to cook, clean, tend to children, and often manufacture homemade goods for sale. Meanwhile, their husbands, sons, and unmarried daughters toiled in factories, shops, offices, and other people’s houses. Many Americans came to believe that men and women naturally inhabited two separate spheres: men held sway in business, politics, and other public arenas, and women took charge of the home. For most middle-class women, respectability meant appearing in public only under certain circumstances ─ such as while shopping ─ and making as small an impression as possible. “A true lady walks the streets unostentatiously and with becoming reserve,” instructed an 1889 etiquette manual. “She appears unconscious of all sights and sounds which a lady ought not to perceive.”

In addition, an unmarried young woman didn’t go out without a chaperone, usually an older female relative. Being seen on an unchaperoned date, even at a restaurant or other public place, could be cause for social ruin. An 1887 etiquette guide warned against sailing excursions, for example, lest the boat be becalmed overnight: “A single careless act of this sort may be remembered spitefully against a girl for many years.”

The bicycle challenged all that. Wives who had stayed close to home — venturing out only on foot, by trolley, or, if wealthy, with a driver and horse-drawn carriage — were suddenly able to travel miles on their own. Being so mobile, and so visible, was a revelation to many. “The world is a new and another sphere under the bicyclist’s observation,” wrote one female journalist. “Here is a process of locomotion that is absolutely at her command.” If a woman’s sphere begins to feel too small, wrote another, “the sufferer can do no better than to flatten her sphere to a circle, mount it, and take to the road.”

As for unmarried women, manners mavens urged them to cycle only with chaperones, but the rule didn’t take. “New social laws have been enacted to meet the requirements of the new order,” reported one newspaper editor in 1896. “Parents who will not allow their daughters to accompany young men to the theatre without chaperonage allow them to go bicycle-riding alone with young men. This is considered perfectly proper.” According to the editor, the reason for this difference was the “good comradeship” of the bicycling set. Fellow enthusiasts looked out for one another on the road, he wrote ─ so in a way, every ride was supervised. The historian Ellen Gruber Garvey suggests a second possible reason: propriety already allowed unmarried women to ride horses unchaperoned. Bicycles, as a less costly equivalent, may simply have extended this freedom down the economic scale.

But the same things that made the bicycle liberating also made it threatening. Moralists warned that skimpy costumes and unsupervised travel would lead to wanton behavior. “Immodest bicycling by young women is to be deplored,” declared Charlotte Smith, founder of the Women’s Rescue League, a group that lobbied Congress on behalf of “fallen women.” “Bicycling by young women has helped to swell the ranks of reckless girls, who finally drift into the standing army of outcast women.” Smith reported that her tours of brothels and interviews with prostitutes confirmed this.

Physicians — who at the time shouldered responsibility for patients’ moral as well as physical well-being — had their own concerns. One visited New York’s Coney Island and saw a 16-year-old cyclist get drunk on wine provided by a beautiful but nefarious older woman. “She looked like an innocent child, but was away from home influence,” the doctor reported. Many physicians fretted that pressure from the bicycle seat would teach girls how to masturbate, a practice thought to lead to spiritual and psychological decline. Climbing hills on a bike could excite “feelings hitherto unknown to, and unrealized by, the young girl,” wrote one doctor in 1898. (Boys faced the same danger: pressure on the perineum would call their attention to the area, warned one doctor, “and so lead to a great increase in masturbation in the timid [and] to early sexual indulgence in the more venturous.”)

The bicycle’s peril was medical as well as moral. In the late nineteenth century, many saw physical energy as a finite resource that had to be carefully parceled out, not a power that could be renewed through exercise. The fashionable malaise of neurasthenia was only one of the disorders thought to be caused by a depletion of energies. Overexertion could also cause tuberculosis, scoliosis, hernias, heart disease, and other maladies, doctors believed. Safely sedentary middle-class women, who frequently suffered from varicose veins and other consequences of annual pregnancies, were prone to fatigue; one Boston writer called them “a sex which is born tired,” adding that “society sometimes seems little better than a hospital for invalid women.” Particularly for women in heavy dresses and constricting corsets, any activity that raised the heart rate could seem more likely to be the cause of fainting and listlessness than their remedy. Opponents of the bicycle latched onto this perception, arguing that riding would cost women more effort than they could afford. “The exertion necessary to riding with speed … is productive of an excitation of nervous and physical energy that is anything but beneficial,” Charlotte Smith warned. “If a halt is not called soon, 75 percent of the cyclists will be an army of invalids within the next ten years.”

But even as Smith made her dire predictions, Americans’ fear of cardiovascular exercise was beginning to lift. For decades, health reformers had trumpeted the benefits of fitness, and during the 1880s, the United States saw a spike in organized physical activity. Citizens of America’s growing cities tried new sports such as baseball and football, and exercise advocates built the first public playgrounds and pushed for physical education for both boys and girls. Doctors continued to caution against overexertion, but they acknowledged that, in moderation, fresh air and exercise tended to improve patients’ health. The high-wheel bicycle of the 1880s proved the benefits of regular exercise to those who could ride it; proponents made extravagant claims for the risky machine’s ability to restore well-being. “For constipation, sleeplessness, dyspepsia, and many other ills which flesh is heir to, not to speak of melancholy,─all are curable, or certainly to be improved, by the new remedy, ‘Bicycle,'” wrote a Texas physician in 1883. “It is always an excellent prescription for the convalescents, and nearly always for chronic invalids.”

Not everyone could take the prescription, though. High-wheeled cycling and rigorous team sports were acceptable only for young men. The new games deemed suitable for mixed company, such as lawn tennis and golf, were far less taxing — and therefore far less likely to lead to noticeable improvements in fitness. As for working out on your own, the recommended options were either too costly (horseback riding) or too boring (indoor calisthenics) to gain much popularity. As a result, many more Americans of the 1880s thought they ought to exercise than actually did it. So when the safety bicycle appeared at the end of the decade and Americans began riding in large numbers — an estimated two million by 1896, out of a population of about seventy million — few were certain how such vigorous physical activity would affect them.

Doctors were wary. Most US physicians believed that each patient’s condition was based largely on his or her habits and experiences, the weather, and other environmental factors. Good health was a reflection of proper balance among bodily systems and energies. “A distracted mind could curdle the stomach, a dyspeptic stomach could agitate the mind,” writes the medical historian Charles Rosenberg. It was a doctor’s job to know each patient well enough to restore balance when something was out of whack, using laxatives, diuretics, and other purging drugs to reboot the system. Even contagious diseases could not be treated in a cookie-cutter fashion, argued an 1883 medical journal editorial: “No two instances of typhoid fever, or of any other disease, are precisely alike … No ‘rule of thumb,’ no recourse to a formula-book, will avail for proper treatment even of the typical diseases.” To many doctors, advocating a specific drug to cure a specific disease seemed the height of quackery.

And just as there were no one-size-fits-all medical treatments, many physicians believed there were no one-size-fits-all exercise routines. While cycling enthusiasts rhapsodized about the safety bicycle’s benefits for riders of both sexes and all ages, doctors fretted that many of their patients would be harmed by the new machines. Even seeming success stories were suspect. In an 1895 paper on heart disease, one doctor reported that a patient who had panted for breath after climbing one flight of stairs was now able to cycle up hills with ease. “It would be wrong to conclude from this that cycling is not injurious,” the doctor wrote: there hadn’t yet been time to observe the bicycle’s long-term effects. Moreover, as an unfamiliar activity, cycling tended to catch the blame for pretty much anything bad that happened to a new rider afterward, up to and including death.

Logically, acute injuries were a concern. Though the safety bicycle did greatly reduce the risk of head wounds, it didn’t obliterate that risk, particularly among “scorchers” — thrill-seeking youngsters who hunched over their handlebars and pedaled as fast as they could. “It might seem almost impossible to fracture a skull thick enough to permit indulgence in such practices,” reported the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, “but the bicycle fool at full speed has been able to accomplish it.” Medical journals also noted the danger of road rash and broken bones.

More insidious than crash injuries, though, were new chronic complaints attributed to cycling. The bent-over posture of the scorcher was thought to cause a permanent hunch called “kyphosis bicyclistarum,” or, familiarly, “cyclist’s stoop.” Repeated stress to the cardiovascular system — that is, regular workouts — could lead to the irregular heartbeats and poor circulation of “bicycle heart.” Gripping the handlebars too tightly might cause finger numbness, or “bicycle hand,” and a dusty ride could trigger “cyclist’s sore throat.” Practically every body part seemed to have its own cycle-related malady; at least one New York doctor devoted his entire practice to treating such ailments.

Of all the physical woes attributed to the bike, the one that most strained credulity was the “bicycle face.” Characterized by wide, wild eyes; a grim set to the mouth; and a migration of facial features toward the center, the disorder was said to result from the stress of incessant balancing. A German philosopher claimed that the condition drained “every vestige of intelligence” from the sufferer’s appearance and rendered children unrecognizable to their own mothers. The bicycle face hung on, too, warned a journalist: “Once fixed upon the countenance, it can never be removed.”

The doctors raising these alarms were careful to state that many of the new diseases affected only cyclists predisposed to them — which would explain why so few of their fellow physicians might have encountered the disorders. “Whilst thousands ride immune, a small percentage will suffer,” wrote one doctor. Another, who blamed cases of appendicitis, inflammatory bowel disease, and the thyroid condition Graves’ disease on excessive riding, said it didn’t matter how many people believed that cycling had improved their health: “It would not affect my argument in the least if swarms of them had been rescued from the grave.”

Nevertheless, the more Americans took to bicycling, the more tenuous these claims of danger came to seem. The machine made physical activity both practical and fun. “The bicycle is inducing multitudes of people to take regular exercise who have long been in need of such exercise, but who could never be induced to take it by any means hitherto devised,” one doctor wrote in Harper’s Weekly in 1896. And all that activity had an effect. Riders quickly noticed improved muscle tone, increased strength, better sleep, and brighter moods. Women, especially, transformed themselves, wrote the novelist Maurice Thompson in 1897: “We have already become accustomed to seeing sunbrowned faces, once sallow and languid, whisk past us at every turn of the street. The magnetism of vivid health has overcome conservative barriers that were impregnable to every other force.”

The empirical evidence of cycling’s health value began to overtake conservative doctors’ concerns, as the rhetoric scholar Sarah Overbaugh Hallenbeck argues. Though many physicians continued to raise objections to the sport, their voices were increasingly drowned out by those of more observant — and pragmatic–practitioners. “The bicycle face, elbow, back, shoulders, neck, eroticism,” wrote one military doctor in 1896, “I pass as not worthy of serious consideration.” Rather than discourage bicycle use, most physicians came to cautiously endorse it. “So long as the cyclist can breathe with the mouth shut,” wrote one such doctor in 1895, “he is certainly perfectly safe.” Some went further, citing evidence of the bike’s benefits for heart patients, migraine sufferers, diabetics, and others with chronic conditions. In Chicago, the demand for injectable morphine dropped as patients with anxiety or insomnia “discovered that a long spin in the fresh air on a cycle induces sweet sleep better than their favorite drug,” the Bulletin of Pharmacy reported.

This shift paralleled a transformation in medical thinking during the 1890s, when American physicians increasingly embraced the scientific method. Some clinics in Continental Europe had adopted this evidence-based approach early in the nineteenth century, using statistics to determine the efficacy of treatments and evaluating patients’ conditions according to universal norms, rather than trying to divine what was normal for each individual patient. In the United States, however, doctors arguing for this approach were long in the minority. According to Rosenberg, the rift between medical traditionalists and empiricists “provided an emotional fault line which marked the profession throughout the last two-thirds of the century.” Only at the very end of the nineteenth century did a research-based, objective philosophy take hold at US medical schools.

It would be folly to suggest that the bicycle alone caused this transformation. Many other factors were at play, such as improved trans-Atlantic communication; an influx of European immigrants, including scientists; and a snowballing of evidence for new medical concepts such as the germ theory of disease. For centuries, Western healers had believed that contagion could erupt spontaneously, but between 1870 and 1900, researchers disproved this theory by isolating the microscopic causes of illnesses including typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, meningococcal meningitis, plague, and malaria.

But even if the bike did not independently modernize American medicine, its unprecedented impact on fitness — and the clash this revealed between what doctors said and what experience showed — may well have accelerated the shift. Much as the bicycle triggered changes in women’s dress that high-minded advocacy could not, it bolstered scientists’ then-radical argument that what is good for one human body tends to be just as good for another.

To the bicycle faithful of the 1890s, this seemed to be just the beginning of the changes that the machine would bring about. The gulf between social classes would recede under the influence of this “great leveler,” one enthusiast wrote in the Century Magazine: “It puts the poor man on a level with the rich, enabling him to ‘sing the song of the open road’ as freely as the millionaire, and to widen his knowledge by visiting the regions near to or far from his home, observing how other men live.”

And while women may not yet have had full access to higher education ─ or even the right to vote — the unchaperoned, self-propelled bloomer girl seemed to be pedaling in that direction. “In possession of her bicycle, the daughter of the 19th century feels that the declaration of her independence has been proclaimed,” wrote one female journalist, “and, in the fulness of time, all things will be added to complete her happiness and prosperity.”

The first-wave feminist Susan B. Anthony was born in 1820, the year after Charles Willson Peale built his iron draisine. By the time of the safety bicycle boom of the 1890s, she was a snowy-haired eminence, too old to risk riding, but she had an opinion of the sport. “I’ll tell you what I think of bicycling,” she said in an 1896 newspaper interview as she leaned forward to lay a hand on the reporter’s arm. “I think it has done more to emancipate woman than any one thing in the world.”

***

From The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life. Copyright © 2016 by Margaret Guroff. All rights reserved, with permission of the University of Texas Press.

The Good Guys Aren’t Always the Good Guys

Sadly, this issue is not a new one. Here, survivors of sexual violence, women’s rights advocates, students, jail reform advocates, transgender and gender non-conforming advocates, abolitionist organizers, and other community members and leaders rally on the steps of City Hall in New York on July 26, 2016 to call attention to the crisis of rape on Rikers Island. (Photo by Erik McGregor/Pacific Press)

At the women’s jail on Rikers Island, nicknamed “Rosie’s,” the lines separating criminals from victims from protectors are fungible: as John H. Tucker points out in his New York Magazine investigation into rape at Rikers, “about 50 of the 800 women housed at Rosie’s at any one time are being sexually victimized by staff,” leaving the women to try and look out for one another as best they can.

Any sex between an inmate and a guard, including so-called willing contact, is classified as victimization under federal rules, and under New York State law, it’s statutory rape. Darcell Marshall — who is for the first time telling her story, after anonymously suing the city and the guard she says assaulted her — had both consensual and nonconsensual experiences in the jail. Which in some ways isn’t a surprise: She arrived at Rikers having already spent years being sexually abused and bartering her body to get by. In the words of Dori Lewis, a supervising attorney for the Prisoner’s Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society, she was among the many Rosie’s inmates who “suffer an extraordinarily high incidence of trauma before entering jail” only to get locked up “and once again be subject to men taking advantage of their positions of power.”

This is precisely how Darcell Marshall’s abuse at the hands of Corrections Officer Santiago started: a woman who’d spent her teen years being pimped out, and an officer who knew that full well, and knew he had leverage.

“Your hair is so long and pretty. Your skin is smooth like chocolate — I love chocolate.” He told her he liked her lips. Then he said, “I’d like to see how they look wrapped around my dick,” according to Marshall’s deposition.

She was startled. Is he serious? Is this a setup by the prosecutor?

“What can you do for me?” she asked coyly, noting she needed commissary money for soap and deodorant.

“I’ll let you know,” Santiago replied.

Even if she were somehow being framed, Marshall wasn’t going to pass up the chance to get some things she needed. She’d gotten the standard-issue kit — a toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap with lye, which “burns your private parts up,” as one former Rosie’s inmate described it — but she had to depend on her commissary account for anything else. (That can include sanitary pads or tampons, access to which is controlled by guards who’ve reportedly rationed the supplies as a form of intimidation or punishment.) Inmates who don’t have friends or relatives to fund their commissary accounts, never mind to visit them, “have to hustle,” Marshall says, “like you’re on the street.”

Later that week, with most of the jail sound asleep, Marshall awoke to the pop of her cell door. Standing there was Santiago.

“You ready?” she remembers him saying. “I got the money.”

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Letters from Trenton

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Thomas Swick | Longreads | July 2018 | 19 minutes (4,829 words)

 

In the fall of 1976 I returned home to New Jersey after a year in France. I had been pursuing my dream of becoming a travel writer by studying French in Aix-en-Provence and working on a farm in Kutzenhausen, Alsace. Now I needed a byline, preferably a steady one. Making the rounds of newspaper offices, I stopped one day at the two-story brick building of the Trenton Times. I wasn’t allowed to see anyone. This was the state capital’s leading newspaper, after all, and I was simply handed a job application. There seemed little reason to play it straight.

What was your last employment?

“Working on a farm.”

What were your duties?

“Picking cherries, baling hay, milking cows.”

Why did you leave your last employment?

“I got tired of stepping in cow shit.”

May we contact your last employer?

“Sure, if you speak Alsatian.”

A few days later I got a call from the features editor asking me to come in for an interview — my reward for being original, and knowing my audience, or at least guessing at it correctly.

I drove the river road south from Phillipsburg, where I was then living with my parents, back to Trenton. The features editor looked like a young Virginia Woolf in tortoiseshell glasses. She told me the paper was owned by the Washington Post and that one of her writers, a young man by the name of Blaine Harden, was exceptionally talented. The gist of the interview was that the editor — who, I later learned, had posted my job application on a wall in the newsroom — could not hire someone with no experience, as everyone else had come to the Times from other newspapers. But they would give me a three-month trial writing feature stories.

This suited me fine for, without a place in the newsroom, I was able to conceal the fact that I still wrote in longhand. I was possibly the last American journalist to do so. I knew how to type, but the typewriter was not a friend to the undecided. It was good for deletions — a quick, brash row of superimposed x’s — but for additions, I had to scribble with my pencil between immovable lines and on virgin margins.

In the evening, back home in Phillipsburg, I would write my stories. Then in the morning I’d get in my mother’s car and drive the river road through Milford and Frenchtown (whose bridges I’d worked on during summers in college), Stockton and Lambertville, the docile Delaware often visible through the leafless trees. The scenery was not as dramatic as in Provence, and the towns were not as picturesque as in Alsace, but there was a quiet, unassuming beauty to the place that suited my temperament, no doubt because it had helped shape it.

Once in the newsroom, I’d borrow a desk and type from my half-hidden handwritten pages.

After I was hired full-time, I bought my first car, a sea-green Datsun, and rented a studio apartment in Trenton. Most of the people at the paper lived in the more attractive surrounding towns like Yardley, Lawrenceville, and Princeton. Daisy Fitch, a fellow feature writer, had grown up next door to Albert Einstein. She was one of a dwindling minority of locals at the paper, as it was increasingly being written by out-of-staters who swooped in for a spell, then left to careers at the Post or someplace equally grand. Many were Ivy Leaguers — this was a few years after Woodward and Bernstein made journalism as sexy as it was ever going to get — and some, like Daisy, had interesting backstories. Celestine Bohlen, a young reporter, was the daughter of Charles “Chip” Bohlen, who had served as the American ambassador to the Soviet Union in the ’50s. Mark Jaffe, a former fencer at Columbia, was living with the daughter of Lyle Stuart, the publisher made rich and famous for putting out the 1969 handbook for women’s sexual pleasure The Sensuous Woman. David Maraniss, who exuded a kind of drowsy gravitas, and for whom everyone predicted glory, was the product of a marriage of editors: mother, books; father, newspaper. I was told that I had just missed the Mercer County careers of John Katzenbach, soon-to-be crime novelist and son of the former U.S. Attorney General, and his wife, Madeleine Blais, both of whose auras still flickered in the brick building on Perry Street.

It was astonishing to find this assembly of near and future luminaries in Trenton, a city I had associated mainly with Champale, whose brewery we used to pass on family drives to the shore. Add the fact that everyone had previous newspaper experience and you can understand if I say I felt a bit out of place. All I brought to the party was an irreverent job application.

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