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Almost Undefeated: The Forgotten Football Upset of 1976

Meg Oliphant / Getty

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | February 2019 | 19 minutes (4,800 words)

Mitchi Collette has been playing football, in one form or another, for 46 years. The 5’7” spitfire with grey, spiky hair is the co-owner and coach of the Toledo Reign, a team in the Women’s Football Alliance.

Collette is an effective coach in part because she knows firsthand what it’s like to be on the gridiron — she understands how to execute a play. The 65-year-old former outside linebacker knows what it feels like to put on the pads and the helmet and slam your full body weight into another person. She knows what it sounds like when bodies connect and the smell of grass and dirt when you’re thrown to the ground.

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A Second Passport

Photo courtesy of the author / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Pam Mandel | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,605 words)

In 1982 travelers’ wisdom dictated it was a liability to have a stamp on your passport for Israel. This traveler’s wisdom, we relied on it all the time, though I could not tell you where we picked it up, exactly. And it did not help us when we went to Greece, where we’d hoped to find work and found nothing but vacationers and a few abandoned construction sites. Traveler’s wisdom guided us to take the ferry to Haifa, Israel, where we picked up farm work, enough to line our pockets with what little cash we heard we’d need for our target destination. This unofficial information was how we’d planned our route, leaving London in winter, our sights set on India.

Word was India would not issue you a visa if you showed up with a passport covered in Israeli stamps. You could, however, get a second passport issued from the embassy in Cairo and use that for traveling in parts of the world that were anti-Israel. We had been working in Israel, harvesting bananas, cleaning houses. Egypt was the launch pad to nations further east, a stepping stone on the way to India. That’s why we were going to Cairo, to get new passports.

We. Me, a California girl of 18, swept up in the transient population of unemployed British and German 20-somethings after a summer tour of Israel. That thing where Jewish kids go to The Promised Land to become one with the tribe, to form a bond with Israel. It didn’t work on me. I was instead drawn to the backpackers, the first edition of Lonely Planet’s India guidebook, and a middle class English non-Jew, Alastair, in his 20s, tall and skinny with deep-set blue eyes and a simmering anger at the world. We worked, we saved, and one day we decided we had enough money to go to Cairo and get new passports, and from there, continue to New Delhi.
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The Paths of Rhythm

Pfife, Q-Tip, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest in the recording studio in New York City on September 10, 1991. Michael Ochs Archives / Getty

Hanif Abdurraqib Go Ahead in the Rain | University of Texas Press | February 2019 | 17 minutes (3,425 words)

 

In the beginning, from somewhere south of anywhere I come from, lips pressed the edge of a horn, and a horn was blown. In the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns, and a people carried here from another here, and a language stripped and a new one learned, with the songs to go with it. When slaves were carried to America, stolen from places like West Africa and the greater Congo River, with them came a musical tradition. The tradition, generally rooted in one-line melodies and call-and-response, existed to allow the rhythms within the music to reflect African speech patterns—in part so that everyone who had a voice could join in on the music making, which made music a community act instead of an exclusive one.

Once in America, where the slaves were sent to work in America’s South, this ethos was blended with the harmonic style of the Baptist church. Black slaves learned hymns, blended them with their own musical stylings that had been passed down through generations, and thus, the spiritual was born. In the early nineteenth century, free black musicians began picking up and playing European stringed instruments, particularly violin. It started as a joke—to mimic European dance music during black cakewalk dances.

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‘Black Flight’ out of Chicago

CHICAGO - AUGUST 23: Alison Saar's "Monument to the Great Northern Migration", sits on South King Drive in Chicago, Illinois on AUGUST 23, 2012. (Photo By Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

In a cover story for the Chicago Reader, urban planner Pete Saunders writes about how Black residents are fleeing Chicago in large numbers for suburbs and metropolitan areas in other regions as the city’s white, Asian American, Latinx, and multiracial populations increase. This “Black flight” reverses demographic trends of last century, which saw an estimated 7 million African Americans pouring into cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast from the rural South during the Great Migration. The Encyclopedia of Chicago says that more than 500,000 of those who left settled in Chicago; according to Curbed, “At some points during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, more than 1,000 new arrivals a week came through booming areas such as Bronzeville, many of them hoping to work in the heavy industry and steel plants on the city’s southeast side.”

Saunders suggests a combination of factors have caused the current exodus, including slow declines in Chicago’s violent crime rate, school closures and a lack of investment in important local institutions. Shifts in the kinds of jobs available and, perhaps, a pull to the South of generations before have driven Black Chicagoans to Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego are also losing Black population, but the decline in Chicago, at “four to ten times the rate of the other three,” has been most dramatic. According to the Urban Institute, by 2030, it’s estimated that Chicago will have lost more than 500,000 Black residents in 50 years. Saunders believes that systematic racial discrimination, the biggest driver of Blacks to cities during  the Great Migration, is the key driver of the new pattern as well:

Segregation has created a lack of economic mobility. I’d argue that Chicago is economically stratified to the extent that upward mobility for blacks here is particularly difficult. The CMAP [Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning] report noted that the unemployment rate for blacks in Chicagoland stubbornly stays at more than twice the region’s rate, and that more than 60 percent of blacks who left the region were without a local job when they did so. Networks are hard to penetrate. The power structure is rigid. There’s also a lack of residential mobility. Chicago and its suburbs are more open to people of color than ever before, but blacks here are acutely aware that people still attach stigmas to places we move to. This has the impact of stagnating or lowering property values and rents where blacks move in large numbers, often wiping whole chunks of the region from the minds of many. The south side and south and southwest burbs don’t even occur to many whites seeking affordable options.

The hallmark of Chicago (and rust-belt) segregation has been black avoidance. Since the Great Migration the practice has been to explicitly or implicitly contain blacks within certain areas. But as metro areas got bigger, transportation more of a challenge, and city living more desirable, new attention was given to long-forgotten places. Here in Chicago that started with former white ethnic areas (Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, etc). Within the last ten to 20 years that expanded to include largely Latino areas (Logan Square, Humboldt Park, Pilsen). But for the most part the pattern of black avoidance remains.

In places with stronger economies, like New York and Washington, D.C., there’s been more direct engagement—even conflict—between white newcomers and longtime black residents in many communities. Spike Lee famously ranted about gentrification arriving in black neighborhoods in Brooklyn five years ago, and the area surrounding D.C.’s historically black Howard University has witnessed significant change in the last decade. But the rust-belt pattern is one of indirect conflict. Places collapse, then new groups come in.

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‘I Inherited Luck’: Bridgett M. Davis on Her Family’s Life in the Numbers

Little, Brown and Company

Sheila McClear | Longreads | January 2019 | 14 minutes (3,876 words)

 

Fannie Mae Davis migrated to Detroit from the South in 1955. By the time she started taking penny-bets from the neighbors, she was supporting five children and an ill husband who was unable to continue working at Detroit’s auto plants. The Numbers was an illegal underground betting scheme, a specific 3-digit system where players picked their own numbers. Born in Harlem in the 1920s, it spread throughout the country, mainly by way of African-American neighborhoods, although it was played by everyone and continues to be played in some communities today. It found particularly fertile ground in Detroit, due to booming industrial jobs and a large working- and middle-class African-American population. In 1970, police estimated that 1 in 15 Detroiters, or 100,000 people, played the Numbers every single day (except Sunday, when business was closed).

As the Numbers grew, so did Fannie Davis’s good fortune. As she climbed the ranks in bookmaking, from a bookmaker to a “banker,” she brought her family into the middle class and the American dream. Success came with a catch: she could tell no one outside her family how she made her money.

Even when Michigan started a legal lottery in 1972, Fannie found a way to keep the business going. Meanwhile, she was able to own property, raise her children in comfort, and provide them with an education. Still, she paid a price for her success in worry and instability, constantly girding herself against the next “hit” — a major payout for a winning number that could wipe her savings out completely. Read more…

‘Salvini’s Decree’ Evicts Italian Migrants from Temporary Shelter

ROME, ITALY - JANUARY 23: A migrant waits the transfer to leave the migrants center of Castelnuovo di Porto, on January 23, 2019 in Rome, Italy. Following the last government's security law, by January 31, the second largest migrants reception centre (CARA) in Italy will be closed and about 350 migrants and refugees will be transferred. (Photo by Antonio Masiello/Getty Images)

For the New York Review of Books daily edition, Caitlin L. Chandler examines the fallout from Italy’s new law, the Security and Immigration Decree, known as “Salvini’s Decree,” after deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini. The measure, passed last November, eradicates a class of humanitarian protections for individuals who do not qualify for refugee status, but who needed to leave their countries due to “violence, famine, or human trafficking.” According to Chandler, before the Decree, 25% of Italy’s asylum seekers avoided deportation under this category of protections. The law’s implementation has meant a rash of evictions from squats, where it’s estimated that 10,000 migrants have taken up shelter.

Chandler notes how media portrayal and racist, anti-immigrant language from leaders of Italy’s far right manipulated public opinion and drove passage of the Decree:

Although immigrants comprise only 8 percent of Italy’s population, Salvini rails against “the invasion” and has blocked rescue ships from landing at Italian ports (“porti chiusi,” he likes to brag on Twitter and Instagram, meaning “harbors closed”). Despite the fact that, since 2014, the share of crimes committed by foreigners is decreasing within every single region in Italy, anti-immigrant sentiment, stoked by Salvini’s government, is at a dangerous, all-time high.

Salvini and his party stoke fears around migration by portraying migrants as criminals. Over the past ten years, overall crime has decreased in Italy by 8.3 percent, and crimes committed by foreigners have also fallen, with convictions at an all-time low. But each time a crime occurs in an immigrant neighborhood or when non-Italian citizens stand accused, Salvini exploits it. Such was the case with the brutal rape and murder of a sixteen-year-old girl, Desirée Mariottini, in a squat in San Lorenzo, an immigrant neighborhood in Rome. Two Senagalese men, one Nigerian man, and one Ghanaian man were arrested in connection with her assault and death. Salvini visited San Lorenzo and laid a rose at her memorial, then said he would come back with a bulldozer.

The Italian public grows ever more fearful. In a 2018 study, over half of Italians greatly overestimated how many migrants were in the country. Meanwhile, in the two months after Salvini became interior minister, Italian civil society groups recorded twelve shootings, two murders, and thirty-three physical assaults against immigrants.

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Power to the People

The words Pray and Obey on a chimney at the former home of Warren Jeffs in Hildale, Wednesday April 5, 2017. (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP)

For years, Hildale, Utah, was controlled by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and more specifically, by Warren Jeffs; under his watch, every element of civic and social life was dictated by the church, and powerful church families controlled the lion’s share of wealth, creating a steep economic divide. Jeffs is now in prison and Hildale is trying to redefine itself — last year it elected a secular mayor, a woman — but as Tarpley Hitt explains in her story for The Daily Beast, “redefining” is about a lot more than transferring government power back to the actual government.

For the new government, bridging that divide is a top priority. In a sense, they have a head start (most of their 1 percent is now incarcerated). But inequality in Hildale is not like inequality anywhere else in the United States, where disparity usually stems from an unbalanced capitalist system. For decades, Short Creek operated as a quasi-communist state. The original settlers wanted to establish a radical kind of cooperative society that adhered to the New Testament value of holding “all things in common.” They pooled all their resources in a collective trust, and for decades—the vast majority of Short Creek’s existence—everything in the town was shared: from homes, to food, to health care.

After Jeffs and his father, the communal trust crumpled. When the federal government seized all the town’s assets in 2005, it was valued at a staggering $110 million, much of which had been leached from apostates and less powerful families. Not long later, the feds ordered the town to subdivide, and in the years since, Hildale has been gradually—and painfully, for many townspeople—divvying up the land, establishing private property for the first time in history.

The new council has been tasked with overseeing the town’s transition to an entirely new economic system. But they’re trying to do that while nursing the wounds Warren left behind—in a deeply divided constituency, where the act of drawing lines in the sand (sometimes literally: the council had to draft zoning laws) runs the risk of driving people even further apart.

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How Diderot’s Encyclopedia Challenged the King

The encyclopedists meet at Diderot's home. Hulton Archive / Getty

Andrew Curran | an excerpt adapted from Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely | Other Press | January 2019 | 19 minutes (5,105 words)

Denis Diderot’s incarceration at Vincennes took place exactly halfway through his seventy years on earth. Prison became the dramatic pause that gave shape and meaning to both sides of his life. Before prison, Diderot had been a journeyman translator, the editor of an unpublished encyclopedia, and a relatively unknown author of clandestine works of heterodoxy; on the day that he walked out of Vincennes, he was forever branded as one of the most dangerous evangelists of freethinking and atheism in the country.

During Diderot’s three-month imprisonment, his jailer the Count d’Argenson and the count’s brother the marquis had looked on with amusement while this “insolent” philosophe had bowed and scraped before the authority of the state. In a diary entry from October 1749, the marquis related with glee how his brother the count had supposedly broken Diderot’s will. Solitary confinement and the prospect of a cold winter had succeeded where the police’s warnings had failed; in the end, the once-cheeky writer had not only begged for forgiveness, but his “weak mind,” “damaged imagination,” and “senseless brilliance” had been subdued. Diderot’s days as a writer of “entertaining but amoral books,” it seemed, were over. Read more…

The Burrito That Brought Enlightenment

Nico's burrito. Photo by John Burcham

Most people have their favorite late-night food to comfort them or hurl them back in time: Jack in the Box tacos; Denny’s Moons Over My Hammy. For writer Cord Jefferson, nostalgia is a huge pollo asada burrito from Tucson’s 24-hour joint Nico’s. In a feature for Eater, Jefferson admits these might not be the world’s best burritos, but his lifelong attachment to them means he will, in his words, “stand up for when its goodness is challenged.” The virtues he extols for Nico’s extend beyond their delicious food, to the things that make us all love our late-night spots: ambiance, reliability, memorable, slightly ugly interiors. But for him, Nico’s also helped break the monotony of the affluent, elderly, largely white Tucson suburb where he grew up, and the restaurant embodies what he now considers the real Tucson.

It was around this time that I started going to Nico’s a lot. People at Nico’s were mostly young, and not so many of them were white (Tucson gets slightly blacker and a lot more Latino the farther south you go). More exciting than that, though, was the atmosphere, a raucous energy generated by the confluence of drunks and teenagers and insomniacs and drag queens and college students and stoners and people just getting off work and old men in Hawaiian shirts and straight-edge vegan hardcore kids and cops, and various combinations of those things. Nico’s presented a different Tucson than I’d ever known before. One that stayed up late. One that was diverse and lively. It wasn’t just a clubhouse for me and my high school friends like the Max, or wherever the smoldering “teens” of Riverdale hang out. It was a flophouse into which we were funneled along with hundreds of other night owls in a town that largely shut down after 9 p.m. We’d put in our order at the counter and then try to find a booth from which to wait for our food and people-watch. If there was nowhere to sit, we’d stand in the parking lot and eat.

Before long, we became chummy with the Nico’s staff. They gave us free food and didn’t hassle us when we filled up our plastic cups for water, which was gratis, with soda, which was not. A few times they even gave us beers, which weren’t on the menu and were presumably part of their own stash. Some friends of mine asked if their band could play an impromptu show at Nico’s, which obliged. The crowd ate nachos a few feet away from the drum kit while the lead singer perched atop a table and wailed on his saxophone. The night we graduated high school, a bunch of my friends ended up at Nico’s just before dawn. They sang karaoke on the intercom system and helped the employees mop the floors in preparation for breakfast patrons. (I would have been there, but earlier that evening I broke up with my girlfriend for the last time and walked home from a kegger crying melodramatically, like I was in an Aaron Spelling teen drama.)

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“How common is the lightning?” Gabrielle Bellot on Yeats, Walcott, and Finding Inspiration

The poet Derek Walcott (Getty Images)

For anyone who does creative work, Gabrielle Bellot‘s poetic piece at LitHub is a salve for the times when we’re plagued by artistic self-doubt. In relaying her own struggles and in deconstructing the work of poets W.B. Yeats and Derek Walcott, Bellot finds solace and inspiration in two other writers who at times sought to shed the “thick coats of impostors.”

Further reading: on how poetry can become prophylactic against stressful days and lonely times.

I have always been struck by “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Not because it’s unusual for Yeats—it contains a bit of the mythic dreaminess many of his poems do, and its darkness is less apocalyptically tinted than some of his earlier pieces, like “The Second Coming”—but because it feels like such a twilight poem, a poem written when you feel a peculiar kind of lowness: frustrated in your writing but not so much that you cannot write at all, for you are, counterintuitively, inspired by your lack of inspiration, even if you think the work you produce is nothing. It’s a poem for those of us who feel we are no longer doing anything new, no longer accomplishing anything; we wear the thick coats of impostors and hate ourselves. We feel like, whether or not we’ve been published, we aren’t really writers. We’re failures.

I know the feeling well, the way the waves rock—or don’t—when your boat has drifted deep into the sargassum of self-doubt. I feel it often. When I tell friends this, sometimes they react with surprise, as I’ve had the fortune of my work being published in places I once never imagined I could see my name in. But being published doesn’t remove the feeling of failure. It’s an almost universal symptom of being a writer who isn’t ruled solely by their own arrogance that we will feel, at some point, like impostors, like one-trick ponies, like authors who will never amount to anything, or whose time has passed without us realizing how sacred and finite those clock-ticks were. I don’t pretend to feel quite what Yeats did, our ages and careers and lives so different, but I understand it, all the same.

Yet, ironically, I also read “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” as a kind of hopeful paean. It does not, after all, tell us to give up when we feel like we’ve lost the bit of dream our work comes from. Instead, it directs us, simply and powerfully, to go forth and find it again. Write, Yeats seems to suggest, even against death—the death of our inspiration, or the one who measures us, when our time is nearly up, without us knowing. It is a poem of death, yes—but not one of ending, but, instead, of new beginnings, painful and poignant as they may be.

But, with or without fame, we can never know if our work will live on. Perhaps it’s enough to sing, and keep singing, and hope, after our own night-shawl has closed around us, that someone else will hear it, and, hardest of all, remember it.

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