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The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Mirrors

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | July 2019 | 21 minutes (5,409 words)

In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, Katy Kelleher lays bare the dark underbellies of the objects and substances we adorn ourselves with.

Previously: the grisly sides of perfume, angora, and pearls.

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Eight thousand years ago, a craftsperson sat inside their mud-brick house in Turkey and rubbed a piece of obsidian with their hands, smoothing the surface carefully, polishing the stone until it shone darkly in the hot sun, burning a piece of volcanic rock into something miraculous. In this piece of black stone, they could see their reflection, surrounded by the walls of their dwelling, built on the bones of their ancestors, the painted plaster walls rendered colorless by the obsidian’s deep gloss. But they weren’t done. They took white plaster and applied it to one side of this stone disk in a conical shape. Eventually this stone came to rest in a grave, alongside a woman from the early agricultural society. There it stayed until archeologists found it in the 1960s. It is, as far as we know, one of humankind’s first mirrors.

According to archeologist Ian Hodder, who oversees the hilly, 34-acre archeological site at Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, there have been “five or six” obsidian mirrors found there, all located in the northeast corners of tombs belonging to women. “They are beautiful things,” he says of the Neolithic mirrors. “Nobody really expected there would be things like mirrors in those early days. These are the first sort of settlements after people have been living as hunters and gathers. In many ways, these were quite simple societies, so it is odd.” Yet these early proto-urban people clearly wanted to look at themselves — or at something. It’s possible they were used in rituals by shamans or other religious figures. “One of the most commonly suggested for the time period is that they’re something to do with predicting the future or understanding the spirit world through reading images in the mirrors,” says Hodder. We just don’t know. We’ll probably never know.

With a name taken from the Latin mirare and mirari (“to look at” and “to wonder at, admire,” respectively), a mirror can be any reflective surface created for the purpose of seeing oneself. They can be made of stone, metal, glass, plastic, or even water. Throughout history, we’ve constructed mirrors from all those substances, to a varying degree of efficacy, for various reasons. Some were used as ceremonial items, others were used to repel malevolent spirits, and still others were used for the simple pleasure of examining one’s countenance.

But no matter what they’re made of, mirrors are objects of mystery, obsession, and fear. They’re simple yet complex. They’ve been used for purposes both sacred and profane. We love them, yet we’re loath to admit it. Even their creation has been shrouded in secrecy and aided by willful ignorance and sometimes outright violence; mirror making was once a toxic affair, and its secrets were guarded by laws and punishable by death. Long reserved for the wealthy few, we now walk around with compact mirrors in our pockets, and even if you left yours at home, there’s always a cell phone screen that can function, if you want it to, if the light is right, as a mirror.

Often, when objects become mundane, they lose some of their luster. But mirrors retain their ability to hold our attention, and they retain a certain amount of power over us. We’re still interested in seeing our reflections, and we still want to know what the future holds. Yet we’ve lost the reverence we once had for them. We no longer bury our dead with hand mirrors, and we don’t often speak of the control a mirror can exert over a person. Instead, we allow this force to alter our perceptions, to diminish our happiness, while denying its power. Looking in a mirror is just something you do — just something women do. We’re so used to seeing this impulse as vanity that most of us have forgotten the innate sense of awe that comes with looking. We’ve forgotten how to face our reflections not with judgment or fear, but with a sense of joyful discovery, a sense of hope. We can see our reflections anywhere, yet still face the mirror with a certain amount of suspicion, as though desiring knowledge of how the world sees you is somehow wrong. Read more…

Bundyville: The Remnant — Character List

The reporting path that led to the formation of Bundyville: The Remnant was one that wound thousands of miles around the American West — from Nevada to Utah, Arizona to Oregon and Washington. It’s a story of martyrdom and mystery, told through the eyes of a long list of characters — people who, in many cases, don’t know each other, or even cross paths in this series. These biographical sketches can be used as a tool to keep names and stories straight as you read.



Barry Byrd

The pastor of Marble Community Fellowship, in Stevens County, Washington. Byrd was also the singer in the bands Legacy and the Watchman, and was one of 15 signers of a Christian Identity manifesto called the “Remnant Resolves.” Byrd attended The Ark — a known Christian Identity church in Stevens County — for years before founding Marble Country, a “Christian covenant community” with his wife, Anne.

Stella Anne Byrd

A North Carolina native, Stella Anne Byrd (nee Bulla) is married to Barry Byrd, and helped found Marble Community Fellowship. Anne often preaches from the pulpit as well, and is seen by many people raised at Marble as someone who believes she is a prophet. Two of her brothers also believe they are prophets.

Brad Bulla

Brother of Anne Byrd. Brad Bulla was one of the fifteen authors of the Christian Identity manifesto, the Remnant Resolves, alongside his brother-in-law, Barry Byrd. He also played in the band Legacy with the Byrds. Bulla was excommunicated from Marble by his sister, and now is a traveling musician.

Ammon Bundy

Son of Cliven Bundy, Ammon Bundy was considered the leader of the 2016 Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation in Southeastern Oregon. Bundy, who lives in Idaho, has since become a public speaker on his theories about the federal government and his anti-environmentalism stance. In 2018, he made headlines when he spoke out against President Trump’s remarks about a migrant caravan at the US/Mexico border.

Cliven Bundy

A Nevada cattle rancher, Cliven Bundy became a national name when, in 2014, he led an armed standoff between his militia supporters and employees of the US Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. By that point, Bundy had not paid the required fees to graze his cattle on public land for nearly 20 years, on the basis of his claim that the federal government could not actually own land. Bundy is the father of Ammon Bundy and Ryan Bundy, who led the 2016 armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Bundy was held in federal prison for two years for charges related to the 2014 standoff, but was freed when the judge dismissed the case after determining that government prosecutors had failed to turn over relevant evidence to Bundy’s lawyers.  The government has appealed the dismissal

Richard Butler

As the founder of the neo-Nazi compound, the Aryan Nations, Butler established the group in North Idaho during the 1970s — which became a hub for white supremacists from around the country to gather. Butler was also an ardent believer in Christian Identity, and also ran a church devoted to the ideology at the Aryan Nations, called the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. Butler lost his compound in a 2000 lawsuit, and died in his sleep in 2004.

Joshua Cluff

A nurse and former colleague of Glenn Jones, Cluff and his family were the victims of the 2016 Panaca bombing committed by Jones. Cluff is a cousin of LaVoy Finicum, and is married to Tiffany Cluff, who was home when the bombing occurred with the couple’s three daughters.  

Glenn Jones

A 59-year-old former nurse at the Grover C. Dils Medical Center in Caliente, Nevada, Jones detonated two bombs at the Panaca, Nevada home of his former co-workers, Joshua and Tiffany Cluff on July 13, 2016. Jones shot himself before the bombs exploded, and died at the scene. At the end of his life, Jones lived at an RV park in Kingman, Arizona.

Robert LaVoy Finicum

In January 2016, 54-year-old Robert LaVoy Finicum was considered a leader of the 41-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Southeastern Oregon. Preferred to be called LaVoy, Finicum was an Arizona native who became a rancher late in life. He was the father of 11 children, and numerous foster children, and was married to Dorothea Jeanette Finicum. He was shot and killed after fleeing from police during a traffic stop on January 26, 2016 that was intended to arrest the leaders of the refuge occupation. Finicum is widely considered a martyr in the anti-government Patriot movement.  

Sheriff Kerry Lee

A Panaca native, Kerry Lee has been the sheriff of Lincoln County, Nevada — one of the largest counties by square foot in America — for 13 years. He is also the chief of the Panaca volunteer fire department and the county coroner. He lives down the street from the 2016 bomb site, and was one of the first people to respond to the scene.  

William Keebler

An ardent hunter and Utah militiaman, William “Bill” Keebler spent two weeks at the 2014 Bundy Ranch standoff, providing supplies for Bundy’s supporters and acting as a bodyguard to the family. Keebler was an associate of LaVoy Finicum. After the standoff, Keebler returned home to Utah and founded the Patriots Defense Force (PDF) militia. In June 2016, Keebler pushed the button to detonate a fake bomb at a Arizona Bureau of Land Management building. The explosive was supplied by a PDF member who was actually an undercover FBI agent. After two years of court proceedings, Keebler was sentenced to time served and is out on parole.

Stewart Rhodes

The founder of the Oath Keepers militia, which is considered to be an anti-government group formed out of conspiratorial beliefs. Rhodes is a graduate of Yale Law School and is a former staffer for Ron Paul. During a February 2019 Trump campaign rally, Rhodes appeared in the front row of the crowd.

“Brad Miller” and “Jake Davis”

Two undercover FBI agents who infiltrated William Keebler’s Patriots Defense Force militia.

Washington State Representative Matt Shea

A six-term Washington state house member representing Spokane Valley, Matt Shea has aligned himself at the far-right of the state’s Republican party. He made headlines in 2018 when he claimed to have distributed a document called the Biblical Basis for War, which spelled out a battle plan for a holy war. Shea has long been vocal about his conspiratorial views, and has been a guest on Alex Jones’s broadcast InfoWars. He is an annual speaker at the God and Country Celebration at Marble Community Fellowship, a secretive religious community. He is a leader of the 51st State movement, which advocates for Eastern Washington to break off from the more liberal west side of the state. The new state would be called “Liberty.”

Timothy McVeigh

The perpetrator of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which left 168 people dead. McVeigh was known to hold anti-government beliefs, and said the bombing was revenge for the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents.

Dorothea Jeanette Finicum

The widow of Robert LaVoy Finicum and mother of 11, Jeanette became an activist and popular Patriot Movement speaker after her husband’s death. She filed a wrongful death lawsuit against several defendants, including the State of Oregon, because of his death, and helped create a movie about her husband called LaVoy: Dead Man Talking.

Mark Herr

Founder of the Center for Self-Governance, Herr is also the producer of LaVoy: Dead Man Talking.

Guy Finicum

LaVoy Finicum’s younger brother. A licensed mental health counselor.

Paul Glanville

A Colorado doctor who lived at Marble Country during the 1990s, but left the community after coming to believe it was a religious cult.

Jay Grimstead

Founder of the Coalition on Revival, which advocates for laws to be restructured to follow Biblical law. Grimstead briefly lived at Marble Community Fellowship, and later became a critic of the Byrds’ authoritarian structure. 

Chevie Kehoe

Kehoe, who attended The Ark, a Christian Identity church in Stevens County, WA, believed he could create the white American bastion in the Northwest that racists before him, like Bob Mathews, believed in. Kehoe went on a multi-state crime spree, which included murders, robberies, and a shootout with police before he was arrested and sentenced to three life sentences. He is currently incarcerated at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado.

Kevin Harpham

A Stevens County, Washington white supremacist who planted a bomb in 2011 on the route of the Spokane, Washington Martin Luther King Jr Day Unity March. Currently in prison.

Dan Henry

A Christian Identity pastor at The Ark, now called Our Place Fellowship, in Stevens County, Washington.

Jesse Johnson

Was raised at Marble Country before being excommunicated as a teenager.

Israel Keyes

A childhood acquaintance of Kehoe who also reportedly attended the Ark, Keyes confessed to committing murders around the United States shortly before killing himself in jail.

Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich

The sheriff of Spokane County, Washington since 2006, Knezovich — a Republican — has risen as one of the loudest voices against State Rep. Matt Shea.

Robert “Bob” Mathews

A former anti-government militia leader, in 1983 Mathews formed The Order: a white supremacist group that committed bombings, robberies, and a murder around the American West in hopes of sparking a race war. Mathews hoped to turn the Northwest into a “white American bastion.”

Pete Peters

A Christian Identity pastor and radio host, Pete Peters ran a small Colorado church devoted to anti-homosexual, anti-Jewish and racist teachings in the 1980s. Peters spoke at conferences and to groups of Christian Identity adherents around the country, including at The Ark in Stevens County and the Aryan Nations compound in North Idaho. Although Peters tried to shed the Christian Identity label, he continued to preach the ideology throughout his life. Peters hosted a radio and online ministry called Scriptures for America, which still continues today in his absence. He died in 2011.

Dennis Peacocke

A California political activist-turned-spiritual leader, Peacocke is an advocate for dominionism and is something of a spiritual advisor to the Byrds.

Jay Pounder

A devout Christian and former security staffer for State Rep. Matt Shea, Pounder helped leaked the Biblical Basis for War document in 2018.

Tanner Rowe

Rowe worked security for State Rep. Matt Shea on Election Night 2016. In 2018, alongside Jay Pounder, Rowe would release a document called The Biblical Basis for War — which Shea had distributed. The paper advocates for a holy war. Rowe is also a loud critic of Shea’s 51st State Movement.

John Smith

Former Washington state representative, representing Stevens County, Washington. As a young man, Smith attended The Ark, a Christian Identity church in the county, but has since disavowed his past and become one of the loudest voices in the county against the ideology. In 2018, Smith collaborated with Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich on a three-part podcast about the presence of white supremacist ideologies in the region.

Glen Wadsworth

A native Panacan who is both a prison conservation crew supervisor and a member of the volunteer Fire Department in Panaca, Nevada. He was mowing the lawn of his childhood home on July 13, 2016, when Glenn Jones detonated two massive bombs next door.  

Pastor John Weaver

A longtime neo-Confederate speaker who opposes interracial marriage, Weaver was a featured guest at the 2015 God and Country Celebration at Marble Community Fellowship.


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PHOTO CREDITS Guy Finicum, Tanner Rowe, Glen Wadsworth, Kerry Lee: Ryan Haas; Jesse Johnson: Leah Sottile; Joshua Cluff: Facebook; Cliven Bundy: Gage Skidmore; Robert Finicum: The Realist Report; Ammon Bundy: Rob Kerr–AFP/Getty Images; William Keebler: Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office; Stewart Rhodes: Course Correction; Glenn Jones: KTNV; Representative Matt Shea: Ted S. Warren/AP/REX Shutterstock; Timothy McVeigh: AP Handout; Dorothea Finicum: Dave Blanchard/OPB; Mark Herr: Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action; Barry Byrd: Marble Country; Stella Byrd: Facebook; Brad Bulla: Facebook; Richard Butler: Southern Poverty Law Center; Pete Peters: Blair Godbout/The Coloradoan; John Smith: Washington State Legislature; Robert Matthews: Wiki Fair Use; Chevie Kehoe: Homeschooling’s Invisible Children; Israel Keyes: HOPD; Pastor John Weaver: Immortal 600; Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich: Spokane County; Jay Pounder: Exceptional Gent; Jay Grimstead: Reformation; FBI Badges: Getty; Dan Henry: SonPlace; Dennis Peacocke: Go Strategic; Paul Glanville: Eagles Wing Medical; Kevin Harpham: Associated Press.

My Unsexual Revolution

Illustration by Chloe Cushman

Diane Shipley | Longreads | July 2019 | 17 minutes (4,293 words)

In November 1998, I had sex for the first and last time. I was 19, my boyfriend was 21, and we’d been together for 10 months, long-distance. I was at university in Lancaster, a small town in the north west of England, and he lived in Essex, in the south east. I had a week off from classes, so I spent six hours taking two trains to stay in the sporadically-tidied house he shared with friends from work. On Wednesday morning, I walked to the pharmacy down the street to buy condoms and KY Jelly, shaking slightly as I handed over the cash. That night, with Ally McBeal on TV in the background, we lay on his narrow twin bed, kissing and touching each other before we slipped under the covers. I worried it might hurt, or feel awkward, or be over quickly, but it was great. Afterward, we ate chocolates, drank Coke, and swore we’d have sex all the time from then on.

We tried. Later that night; the next day; a couple of months later, on vacation in Florida. Each time, it was as if my vagina had snapped shut and no matter how hard he pushed or how vividly I pictured a tulip’s petals unfurling, nothing could convince it to open. Eventually, we gave up and went back to the heavy petting and blowjobs we’d each enjoyed, respectively, before. We were best friends, we were in love, we both had orgasms. In theory, I knew that penis-in-vagina intercourse wasn’t the only way to define sex. But it seemed like the most important, and I felt like a failure for not being a “proper” girlfriend; for being unfuckable.
Read more…

Remembering João Gilberto

Dario Zalis/Contexto/Getty Images

Music is contradictory. Highly personal expressions can become hugely popular. Tradition can be reinvented as something completely new. Understatement can often get a point across the most forcefully. Few musicians embody these contradictions more than composer, singer, and guitarist João Gilberto, who died on July 6, at age 88.

Gilberto almost single-handedly invented bossa nova — which translates from Portuguese as “new wave” — in the mid-1950s. He did so while isolated, during an ebb in his developing career. His intimate way of singing and playing would inspire every composer in the bossa nova genre, leading to incredible commercial success and the brief, if dazzling, resuscitation of jazz as a popular art form in America.

João Gilberto do Prado Pereira de Oliveira was born in Juazeiro, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, on June 10, 1931. From an early age he was utterly charming and only concerned with music. Singer Maria Bethânia described him as “simply … music. He plays. He sings. Without stopping. Day and night. He is very, very strange. But he is the most fascinating being, the most fascinating person, that I have encountered on the surface of the earth. João, he is mystery. He hypnotizes.”

After moving to Rio de Janeiro, Gilberto sang with the vocal group Garotos da Lua for a while, but in 1951 he was fired for turning up late for gigs — or sometimes not turning up at all. Never having a place of his own, he was a permanent houseguest for a revolving set of friends. “It was always understood by his hosts that he would never be asked to participate in paying the rent or covering other household expenses,” Daniella Thomposon wrote for Brazil magazine. “Occasionally he would bring home some fruit (tangerines were his favorites), but his most significant contributions were his surpassingly intelligent conversation and the captivating music he played.” Gilberto grew out his hair, wore shabby clothes, continually smoked marijuana, and refused to get a real job.

By 1956, Gilberto began an eight-month stay with his sister and her husband in Diamantina. Seldom changing out of his pajamas, he installed himself in the tiled bathroom, as much for privacy as acoustics, practicing guitar and voice nonstop. It was here at age 25 that he created bossa nova, largely by reducing the older musical form of samba down to its essence.

“I think João Gilberto did it like this,” guitarist Baden Powell once said. “He just took the rhythm of the tamborims [a small tambourine-like drum] of the Samba Schools to the exclusion of the other percussion instruments. That’s the clearest rhythm you hear in it all. He took out all the rest.”

Gilberto also began singing more quietly and without vibrato. He changed his phrasing and used his voice as its own percussion instrument — sometimes as a complement to the guitar, sometimes creating rhythmic tension.

Despite the musical breakthrough he accomplished in his sister’s bathroom, Gilberto’s obsessiveness caused concern. His sister and her husband sent him to live with his parents in Juazeiro.

Afraid of being ridiculed for his new vocal style, Gilberto practiced on the banks of the São Francisco river, where he wrote a song mimicking the sway of the washerwomen as they walked by, carrying baskets of laundry on their heads. He used his new vocal and rhythm techniques to compose “Bim-Bom,” and so it is considered by some to be the first bossa nova song.

Gilberto’s father, unimpressed with his abilities and embarrassed by his son’s lack of respectability, had him committed to an asylum. During one interview, Gilberto stared out the window. “Look at the wind depilating the trees,” he said. When reminded that trees have no hair, he responded, “And there are people who have no poetry.” He was released after one week.

Gilberto returned to Rio and renewed his friendship with musician Antônio Carlos “Tom” Jobim, then a composer and arranger for Odeon Records. Jobim arranged his song “Chega de Saudade” for Gilberto to record, but the artist’s perfectionist streak held up the process: Gilberto chided the musicians for little mistakes, made the unheard-of demand for separate microphones for his voice and guitar, and argued with Jobim about the chord progression. “Chega de Saudade” and “Bim-Bom” were finally cut on July 10, 1958. After a slow start, the single became a regional success.

American guitarist Charlie Byrd heard Gilberto’s music in 1961 while on a Jazz Ambassador tour organized by the State Department. Byrd returned home with some Gilberto/Jobim bossa nova albums, which he played for saxophonist Stan Getz. “I immediately fell in love with it,” Getz remembered. “Charlie Byrd had tried to sell a record of it with I don’t know how many [record] companies, and none of ‘em wanted it. What they needed was the voice — the horn.”

Getz and Byrd released Jazz Samba in April 1962. It entered the Billboard pop album chart in early March and ultimately peaked at No. 40. Getz earned a Grammy for his performance of Jobim’s “Desafinado.” The bossa nova craze had begun, and its definitive statement would come two years later, when Getz collaborated with the genre’s originator.

 

“I’m not a sociologist, but it was a time when people in the States wanted to turn to something other than their troubles,” João’s wife Astrud Gilberto said in 1996. “There was a feeling of dissatisfaction, possibly the hint of war to come, and people needed some romance, something dreamy for distraction.” The eight tracks on the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto provided just that. Getz’s lyrical phrasing was a match for Gilberto’s intimate vocal. Jobim’s understated piano proved a perfect complement. Jazz critic Howard Mandel called the album “another tonic for the [Kennedy] assassination’s disruption, akin for adults to the salve upbeat the Beatles had provided for teenagers after their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.”

Jobim cowrote several compositions on the album, most notably its opener “The Girl From Ipanema.” João sang the first verse in Portugese; Astrud the second in an English translation.

Both the single and the album were an astonishing success. Getz/Gilberto spent almost 100 weeks on the charts and won four Grammys, including Album of the Year. “The Girl From Ipanema” is second only to the Beatles’ “Yesterday” as the most recorded song.

Gilberto went on to release albums for five more decades, making solo records as well as collaborating with American jazz greats like Herbie Mann, and a new generation of Brazilian musicians including Gelberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. He became a cult figure in Japan.

What might be hard to understand is that the João Gilberto who locked himself away in a bathroom and eschewed a day job is the same man who would go on to change Brazilian — and popular — music. He was fortunate to have been surrounded by people who valued him and trusted his artistic vision.

In the mid-’50s, Gilberto played, or sometimes just held court, at the Clube de Chave in Porto Alegre, appearing at any hour with his guitar. After being asked why he never finished a song, he admitted to not liking his guitar’s steel strings. The patrons, many of whom had changed their sleeping habits to conform to his, chipped in and bought him a nylon-stringed instrument. This one also wasn’t quite to Gilberto’s taste. When it was exchanged for another, he began a months-long residency.

Musicians, like music, can be contradictory. Sometimes their most idiosyncratic expressions are reflections of the universal. “João Gilberto does not underestimate people’s sensitivity,” Jobim wrote in the liner notes to Gilberto’s first album. “He believes that there is always room for something new, different and pure which — although it may not seem so at first sight — may become, as they say in the jargon, highly commercial. Because people understand love, musical notes, simplicity, and sincerity, I believe in João Gilberto, because he is simple, sincere, and extraordinarily musical.”

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

Live Through This: Courtney Love at 55

Mick Hudson / Getty, istock / Getty Images Plus, Michael Ochs Archive / Getty, Vinnie Zuffante / Getty, pidjoe / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | July 9th, 2019 | 24 minutes (6,539 words)

It’s hard to tell whether Thurston Moore is being sarcastic or sincere. It’s probably a bit of both. “The biggest star in this room is Courtney Love,” says the Sonic Youth singer and guitarist in a scene from 1991: The Year Punk Broke. The documentary follows Sonic Youth’s summer 1991 European tour and features performances and backstage antics from their tourmates, including a pre-Nevermind Nirvana, Babes in Toyland, and Dinosaur Jr.

Moore comments during an interview with 120 Minutes, an MTV program that spotlighted alternative music in the days before the music channel became the home of teen moms and spoiled Laguna Beach brats. As Moore declares his love of English food to the host — most definitely sarcasm — Love is behind him trying to get the camera’s attention. She waves and appears to stand on something to make herself taller. Her efforts pay off and soon she is in front of the host, all brazen, blond, and sporting blue baby doll barrettes.

Tongue-in-cheek or not, Moore was right. Love’s band Hole wasn’t on the European tour bill that summer and their debut album Pretty on the Inside hadn’t even been released yet, but Love was already on MTV.

Read more…

Out of Toon

Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | July 2019 |  8 minutes ( 2,193 words)

 

More than 11,000 people retweeted Michael de Adder’s controversial cartoon of Donald Trump next to a golf cart, asking the drowned bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria if he could “play through.” Had each of those people paid the cartoonist the same $100 reprint fee as the daily comic site The Nib, de Adder would have made at least $1.1 million off a single drawing. As it stands the cartoon was shared widely and the cartoonist did a slew of press spots, but probably did virtually no business, maybe only that $100. “They rush to grab it and post it and get the traffic, but they don’t pay for it,” says Matt Bors, founder of The Nib. “Never would they consider actually paying the cartoonist.” The Nib did.

But it’s apparent how people with money feel about The Nib. At the end of June, First Look Media, owned by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, announced it was closing the digital long-form magazine Topic and would no longer be funding The Nib, a haven for cartoonists that, unlike newspapers with their piecemeal offerings, gathered together the work of a group of artists, many of whom were neither white nor male. Contributing editor Sarah Mirk told me that the site actively worked to find diverse contributors — women, artists of color, nonbinary artists — and paid them a living wage. “We are elevating the voice of the people who are marginalized in our society and who don’t get the chance to get published in traditional media outlets,” she says, adding, “that’s part of why it’s so especially disappointing and frustrating to have our funding cut out of the blue.” In almost six years, The Nib has published 4,000 comics and paid cartoonists $1.5 million. It was first backed by Medium, then, starting in 2016, by First Look, where the staff was working toward subscriber-based funding before it was dropped.

“After three and a half years, we will no longer provide funding for The Nib, however, we are working to transition it back to Matt Bors so he can continue to publish independently,” Jeannie Kedas, the chief communications officer at First Look Media, wrote to me in an email. “We have been honored to support and provide a home for The Nib during the last few years and are thankful to Matt and his fantastic team for their provocative and impactful work. We look forward to seeing where he takes The Nib and its unique brand of comics next.”

Mirk believes First Look’s decision had to do with The Nib’s modest revenue even though, within four days of the announcement, they had 1,000 new members. “There’s a huge demand for this,” Mirk says. “That’s not the problem. The problem is the people who are deciding the funding levels of media don’t understand comics, don’t see their potential, don’t want to fund them, and don’t get what we do.” Read more…

Holding the Pain

Illustration by Lily Padula

Amye Archer | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,422 words)

On the morning of December 14th, 2012, one of my twin daughters stayed home from school. Warm from fever, Samantha drifted in and out of sleep as I cleaned around her. The house was still out of sorts from the girls’ 6th birthday party only two days prior. Shortly after 10 a.m., I started receiving texts from my more news-conscious friends alerting me to a school shooting unfolding at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Sandy Hook. It would be the first and last time I would ever hear those two words and not feel an ache somewhere inside of me.

I turned on the news and saw dozens of children with terror on their faces, walking in connected ropes, hands on shoulders through the parking lot. As the minutes ticked by, reporters began saying numbers. Two, four, six, twelve. I remember thinking that’s a dozen. A dozen children are dead. I tried hard to busy myself. I washed the same dish three times, dismantled the bathroom faucet and scrubbed every part with an old toothbrush, anything to keep from thinking of that number. Then, a CNN text alert: Dozens dead. They had added an “s.”

I couldn’t hide any longer. I turned the television on low. There it was on the Chiron: 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 were dead. I struggled to breathe. Twenty. Twenty children the same age as my twin daughters. I pressed my spine against the doorframe of my kitchen and sobbed. I prayed the frame would hold my pain.

I watched the coverage in drips as Samantha was waking up. I remember thinking she should not associate first grade with murder. She will never go back. I came up with explanations I would use if she woke and discovered the news. I came up empty. I worried that I would never be able to adequately explain what happened at Sandy Hook. I also worried about school. I prayed my other daughter, Penelope, who was tucked away in the safety of her Kindergarten classroom, didn’t know. Can I ever assume she is safely tucked away there ever again? I wondered if I should call the principal and ask him not to tell her. Not to tell any of them? I made a promise to myself right then and there that I would be a bucket for my daughters, and that I would carry this for as long as I could so they didn’t have to.

Shortly before 2:30 pm, I dressed a groggy Samantha and took her with me to pick up Penelope. The school was only blocks away, and we rode in silence. As we waited outside the elementary school exit for the students to emerge, I scanned the other parents’ faces for any sign of worry or anguish. They seemed fine, relaxed, smiling. Did they know? Many looked like they came right from work. I envied them in that moment, in that place, the not-knowing. I wished I could warn them. There was a bomb of heartache waiting for them at home. Tick, tick, tick.

By the time we got home, the country knew more. Six educators were also killed. We learned it was a lone gunman. We learned what collective heartbreak felt like. Shortly after 3 p.m., President Obama spoke to a stunned and grieving nation. I set the girls up with some Legos in the other room so I could watch. He fought to hold back tears at first. Then, he let them fall. In that moment, he wasn’t our President, he was also Sasha and Malia’s dad. I ran into the small guest bathroom, locked the door and called my mother. I cried harder than I ever have in my life.
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The Brazilian Healer and the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes

Illustration by Aimee Flom

Leigh Hopkins | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (6,131 words)

 

The roosters started at 4:30 in the pasture behind the inn. On the second crow, I rolled onto my back and blinked at the jalousie window’s slatted light, considering my first day at The Casa. We were allowed to ask three questions, no more. A visit with the world’s most famous spiritual surgeon was like going to see the wizard.

Mariana was silent in the bed next to me, the sleep falling in loose spirals across her face. I pulled back the sheets and slipped inside. “Bom dia.”

“Bom dia, meu amor.” A soft sound from a distant place.

Seven and a half years later, I receive a text from a friend in Rio: “Did you see the news?” She links to a New York Times article: “Celebrity Healer in Brazil Is Accused of Sexually Abusing Followers.”

***

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‘If an Animal Talks, I’m Sold’: An Interview with Ann and Jeff Vandermeer

A Midsummer Night's Dream. Illustration by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). (Culture Club / Getty Images)

Alan Scherstuhl | Longreads | July 2019 | 19 minutes (5,080 words)

“Hic sunt dracones,” the 500 year-old Hunt-Lenox globe warns travelers off the coast of southeast Asia: Here be dragons. In the half millenium since that mysterious Euro-centric globe’s construction, dracones have evolved, in the popular imagination, from representatives of a dangerous, fantastical unknown to something like just another of the familiar beasts populating what we might call the Fantasy-Industrial Complex. Through big-budget TV and movies, video and pen-and-paper games, and hundreds of novels and short stories each year, fantasy rules like never before. Dragons reign over much of our pop-culture globe, not just one patch.

Diverse and often self-reflexive, today’s fantasy fiction varies wildly in quality and approach. Writers like N.K. Jemisin (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms), Sofia Samatar (A Stranger in Olondria), Ann Leckie (The Raven Tower), Kameron Hurley (The Mirror Empire), Seth Dickinson (The Traitor Baru Cormorant), Marlon James (Black Leopard, Red Wolf), Steven Erikson (the Malazan Book of the Fallen series), and many more have in recent years spun dazzling, forward-thinking variations on a genre that has at times been accused of wallowing in repetitive stories, simplistic good-versus-evil conflicts, and an inherent conservatism.

Now, with the publication of The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (Vintage), anthologists Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (shes a Hugo Award-winning editor; hes the bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy; and together theyve edited The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Weird, and other collections) are declaring that fantasy has always been weird and wild, thoughtful and delightful. The Big Book covers a diverse array of fantasy fiction from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of World War II. It opens with a German fairy tale (Bettina von Armin’s “The Queens Son”) about a queen whose son, immediately upon sliding from the womb, is stolen by a she-bear; it closes, fittingly, with J.R.R. Tolkien, whose tale “Leaf by Niggle” concerns nothing less than an artist’s act of world-making. The almost 800 pages between these offer almost 90 stories from around the world, from the expected writers of fantasy (Fritz Lieber, Robert E. Howard, Lord Dunsany, L. Frank Baum), many unexpected fantasists (Zora Neal Hurston, E.M. Forester, W.E.B Du Bois, Edith Wharton), and a host of surprises from lesser-known writers. The Vandermeers approach is expansive. Half the stories in The Big Book are works in translation; fourteen have never before been published in English; few concern monster-slaying. Read more…

The No. 1 Ladies’ Defrauding Agency

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Rose Eveleth | Longreads | July 2019 | 12 minutes (2,883 words)

Sarah Howe’s early life is mostly a mystery. There are no surviving photographs or sketches of her, so it’s impossible to know what she looked like. She may, at one point, have been married, but by 1877 she was single and working as a fortune-teller in Boston. It was a time of boom and invention in the United States. The country was rebuilding after the Civil War, industrial development was starting to take off, and immigration and urbanization were both increasing steadily. Money was flowing freely (to white people anyway), and men and women alike were putting that money into the nation’s burgeoning banks. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and in 1879 Thomas Edison created the lightbulb. In between those innovations, Sarah Howe opened the Ladies’ Deposit Company, a bank run by women, for women. 

The company’s mission was simple: help white women gain access to the booming world of banking. The bank only accepted deposits from so-called “unprotected females,” women who did not have a husband or guardian handling their money. These women were largely overlooked by banks who saw them — and their smaller pots of money — as a waste of time. In return for their investment, Howe promised incredible results: an 8 percent interest rate. Deposit $100 now, and she promised an additional $96 back by the end of the year. And to sweeten the deal, new depositors got their first three months interest in advance. When skeptics expressed doubts that Howe could really guarantee such high returns, she offered an explanation: The Ladies’ Deposit Company was no ordinary bank, but instead was a charity for women, bankrolled by Quaker philanthropists. 

Word of the bank spread quickly among single women — housekeepers, schoolteachers, widows. Howe, often dressed in the finest clothes, enticed ladies to join, and encouraged them to spread the news among their friends and family. This word-of-mouth marketing strategy worked, Howe’s bank gathered investments from across the country in a time before easy long-distance communication. Money came in from Buffalo, Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Washington, all without Howe taking out a single newspaper advertisement. She opened a branch of the bank in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and had plans to add offices in Philadelphia and New York to keep up with the demand. Many of the women who deposited with the Ladies’ Deposit Company reinvested their profits back in the bank, putting their faith, and entire life savings, in Howe’s enterprise. All told, the Ladies Deposit would gather at least $250,000 from 800 women — although historians think far more women were involved. Some estimate that Howe collected more like $500,000, the equivalent of about $13 million today. 

It didn’t take long for the press to notice a woman encroaching on a man’s space. And not just any woman, a single woman who had once been a fortune-teller! “Who can believe for a moment that this woman, who a few years ago was picking up a living by clairvoyance and fortune-telling, is now the almoner of one of the greatest charities in the country?” asked the Boston Daily Advertiser. Reporters were particularly put off by their inability to access even the lobby of Howe’s bank, turned away at the door for being men. One particularly intrepid reporter, determined to find out what Howe’s secret was, returned dressed as a woman to gain entry and more information. 


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Then, in 1880, it all came crashing down. On September 25, 1880, the Boston Daily Advertiser began a series of stories that exposed Howe’s bank as a fraud. Her 8 percent returns were too good to be true. Howe was operating what we now know as a Ponzi scheme — 40 years before Ponzi would try his hand at it. 

Here’s how it worked: When a new depositor arrived, Howe would use their money to pay out older clients, so the whole scheme required a constant influx of new depositors to pay out the old ones. Like every other Ponzi fraudster, Howe’s bank would have eventually run out of new money. The run of stories in the Boston Daily Advertiser instilled enough fear in the bank’s investors that they began to withdraw their money, and eventually there was a run on Howe’s bank. 

Sarah Howe was the most unfathomable and outrageous character: a woman villain.

It took two weeks and five days from the first story published in the Advertiser uncovering Howe’s fraud before she was arrested. The press extended her victims a modicum of sympathy, describing their plights while also reminding the reader that they deserved their pain for trusting a woman with their money. “I put every dollar I had into the bank, and if I lose it I am a beggar,” one depositor told the Boston Globe at the time. “I wanted the interest so badly, that I placed a mortgage on my furniture to secure the principal to deposit. Oh! I wish I hadn’t now, for I shall have my goods sold from under my head,” said another. 

Howe, on the other hand, was spared no remorse. The Boston Herald claimed that Howe was “nearly as deaf as a post” and cross-eyed. Banker’s Magazine described Howe as “short, fat, very ugly, and so illiterate as to be unable to write an English sentence, or to speak without making shameful blunders.” This is all untrue, as Howe’s own statements to the press before her downfall suggest that, in fact, she had a sharp wit. In response to one newspaper’s critique of the Ladies’ Deposit Bank, Howe wrote: “The fact is, my dear man, you really know nothing of the basis, means or methods on which our affairs are conducted, and when shut up in the meshes of your savings-bank notions, you attempt an exposition of the impossibility of our existence, you boggle and flounder about like a bat in a fly trap.” 

 Nevertheless, as soon as she was caught, a backstory for Howe emerged in the papers. The Boston Herald published a story with the headline “Mrs. Howe’s Unsavory Record,” claiming she was born out of wedlock and ran away at 15 to marry an “Indian physician,” who they also referred to as “her dark-skinned Othello.” The paper claimed the marriage caused her mother such distress that she wound up dying in an asylum “raving over the heartlessness of her daughter.” The story also alleged that she then left her first husband, married two house painters in quick succession, had been in and out of prison, and even tried to lure a young girl into prostitution. Basically none of this can be confirmed by historians, but it didn’t matter. Sarah Howe was the most unfathomable and outrageous character: a woman villain. As historian George Robb writes in his paper about Sarah Howe, “She had to be ugly, vulgar and immoral.” The only way her story could make sense to readers was if Howe was some kind of abomination — a complete outlier both physically and mentally.  

 “I’m sure she was just a normal-looking person,” Robb told me. “Until the whole thing unraveled, when people talked about her, no one described her as anything other than an ordinary person.” But in Victorian-era Boston, the idea that a woman criminal could be an “ordinary person” was impossible. “People were comfortable with the idea of women as victims,” Robb told me. “The men were the crooks, the men were doing the manipulation. The women were the victims. They needed to be protected by other men.” 

Howe wound up standing trial in Boston, and was ultimately convicted (although not of fraud, but soliciting money under false pretenses — for claiming that a Quaker charity was backing the venture). She spent three years in prison, and when she got out, in classic scammer fashion, she tried the whole thing again.

“I think there’s a similarity between being a fortune-teller and making money on the stock market, making predictions about the future”

Next, Howe opened up a new Woman’s Bank on West Concord Street in Boston. She kept the scheme going from 1884 to 1886, offering depositors 7 percent interest and gathering at least $50,000, although historians think the number might be far higher. This time, however, Howe was never prosecuted. After being caught and closing down her bank, she gave up the game and returned to fortune-telling and doing astrology readings for 25 cents each. She died in 1892, at the age of 65, no longer wealthy, but still notorious enough to warrant an obituary in the New York Times that read: “For three months she had been living in a boarding and lodging house, carefully keeping from those whom she met the knowledge that she was the notorious Mrs. Howe of Woman’s Bank memory.” 

***

Sarah Howe was, in some ways, a product of her time. In the late 1800s, the United States was moving out of a period marked by “free banks,” in which there were very limited rules governing banks, and into a system of national banking more familiar to us today. Money was flowing into the economy, and financial advisers were telling their clients to put their cash in banks that were now more stable than they had been in the past. This advice was often targeted at women, who couldn’t use their money to, say, start their own endeavors. But they could put their money in stocks and banks, and many of them did. In fact, during that time, women were often the majority of depositors and shareholders.

But there were very few regulations on banks. The stock market was relatively new. For women like Howe, it presented an unregulated place where money was changing hands purely on the basis of confidence. And as a fortune-teller, Howe had plenty. “I think there’s a similarity between being a fortune-teller and making money on the stock market, making predictions about the future, and getting people to believe that you know something about how the trends are going to play,” Robb said. 

At the time there was little fear when it came to watchdogs or regulators. Howe could start her own bank with no real procedure or oversight. “Anybody could form a bank!” Robb said, “If you could get people to give you money you could call it a bank. You advertise, you rent a fancy office space, people come and give you money. It was amazing how much money you could make before anybody caught you.” As much as people love to point fingers at Howe, very rarely do people consider the complete lack of oversight that allowed her to prey upon these women. “It’s so much easier to pick individual villains and say, ‘Oh it’s these nasty scheming people who are the problem, the capitalist system can do no wrong, it’s perfect and self-regulating and we don’t want to mess with that. It’s these individual crooks that are the problem.’” 

***

In spite of her crimes, Sarah Howe is not a household name. It’s not called a Howe scheme after all, it’s a Ponzi scheme. When Howe is mentioned at all, it’s as a punchline. She’s forever stuck as a historical fun fact. “She’s become an anecdote in history, but she should be as famous or more famous than Ponzi,” historian Robyn Hulsart told me. “There’s nothing about what she did that doesn’t fit the definition of a Ponzi scheme.” (In fact, Howe wasn’t even the first to execute this type of scam. At least two other women pulled off Ponzi schemes before her — one in Berlin, the other in Madrid.) 

It’s become popular now to say that we’re living through the golden era of the scammer. “We’re living in a scammer’s paradise,” Sarah Jeong told Willamette Week recently about our current era, “not just economic scams, but intellectual scams, too.” Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey, Fyre Fest, Ailey O’Toole, Jennifer Lee, Anna March — the list is long enough that everybody from WIRED to The Cut called 2018 “the year of the scam.” As the United States recovers from the fraud that was that housing market bubble, we’re in another era of deregulation. President Donald Trump and the Republican run Senate, have gone on what has been called a “deregulation spree,” increasing the cap at which banks become subject to more stringent rules from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion. Robb pointed out that we never seem to actually learn. “Whenever there’s a big boom cycle in the economy everybody screams to deregulate,” he told me, and with deregulation comes increased risk for frauds like Howe’s. 

Howe’s case also demonstrates a struggle in feminist circles that persists today: How do you balance the desire to celebrate women with the need to hold bad behavior accountable?

Howe’s legacy could and should be one that we can learn from today in the so-called era of the scam. Howe’s success was one that tells us something not just about fraud, but about economics and the conditions under which fraud can blossom into a $17 million scam. Howe was aided and abetted by the economic conditions, but she was also a wizard at her craft. What Howe mastered, beyond the Ponzi scheme, is what experts call an “affinity fraud” — going after a group of people who have something in common, and most often who the scammer has something in common with too. As an “unprotected” woman herself, Howe understood what might appeal to her clientele. She decorated the bank to create a mood and aesthetic that would appeal to her ideal mark. The Advertiser described the Ladies’ Deposit Bank this way: “The furniture, of which there are many pieces, is upholstered in raw silk of old gold figured patterns, and corresponds in tone and design with the walls. … The carpets are of a deep warm tone, and all the ornaments are rich and in good taste.” She used language that drew women in, talking about her commitment to the “overworked, ill-paid sisterhood.” Hulsart points out that it’s not unlike the language used by multilevel marketing companies like Mary Kay and Amway, which generally advertise to women through  word of mouth. “They really like to say things like ‘we’re in this together,” Hulsart says.  Read more…