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If the Rich Really Want To ‘Do Good,’ They Should Become Class Traitors Like FDR

FPG / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Will Meyer | Longreads | October 2018 | 11 minutes (2,846 words)

In July of 2015, writer and ex-McKinsey consultant Anand Giridharadas addressed a room full of elites and their good company in Aspen, Colorado. He was a fellow with The Aspen Institute, a centrist think-tank, which was hosting an “ideas festival.” Giridharadas’ talk took aim at what he dubbed the “Aspen Consensus,” an ideological paradigm in which elites “talk a lot about giving more” and not “about taking less.” He earnestly questioned the social change efforts and “win-win” do-goodery promulgated at the business-friendly get-together. In the speech, Giridharadas walked a thin line: both praising the Aspen community which “meant so much” to him and his wife while also laying into its culture and commandments. He dropped the mic: “We know that enlightened capital didn’t get rid of the slave trade,” and suggested that the “rich fought for policies that helped them stack up, protect and bequeath [their] money: resisting taxes on inheritances and financial transactions, fighting for carried interest to be taxed differently from income, insisting on a sacred right to conceal money in trusts, shell companies and weird islands.”

The talk received a standing ovation, though certainly ruffled some feathers as well. An attendee confided in Giridharadas that he was speaking to their central struggle in life and others gave him icy glares and called him an “asshole” at the bar. The conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the speech — which had hardly prescribed any policies — and clearly felt so threatened by it that his resulting column was titled “Two Cheers for Capitalism,” and attempted, albeit poorly, to nip any systemic critique of his favored economic system in the bud. But Brooks too realized that there would be a “coming debate about capitalism,” and his column prompted Giridharadas to post his talk online, stirring lots of debate — not quelching it. Read more…

It was Mr. Henthorn on the Cliff with a Swift Shove

Yvonne Bertolet reacts during a news conference regarding a verdict for the death of her daughter, Toni Henthorn, outside federal court Monday, Sept. 21, 2015, in Denver. A federal jury convicted Toni Henthorn's husband, Harold Henthorn, of murder for pushing his wife to her death off a cliff in a remote part of Rocky Mountain National Park as they hiked to celebrate their wedding anniversary in 2012. AP Photo/David Zalubowski.

Did you know that the U.S. National Parks Service has its own specialized investigative bureau called the Investigative Services Branch (ISB)? The 33 agents within its ranks investigate all serious crimes on National Parks land including rape, murder, and even child pornography.

At Outside, Rachel Monroe offers a fascinating profile of the members of the ISB and the lengths they go to see justice served, much to the chagrin of Harold Henthorn, who thought he’d get away with pushing his wife to her death off of a sheer, 150-foot cliff for the insurance payout. Agent Beth Shott caught the case and painstakingly unravelled the false cover of a man who was keeping a backpack full of secrets.

At first, the accident seemed tragic in a routine way; many people fall to their deaths in national parks every year. But over the next few days, as Faherty dug deeper into the case, several things struck him as strange. For instance, the timeline Harold gave didn’t line up with the evidence. And other details seemed off, too, like how Harold insisted he’d given his wife CPR, but Faherty recalled that her lipstick had been unsmudged when he arrived on scene. Faherty asked Harold about his previous marriage. His first wife had died in an accident, Harold said. He was reluctant to talk about it.

The elite special agents assigned to the ISB—the National Park Service’s homegrown equivalent to the FBI—are charged with investigating the most complex crimes committed on the more than 85 million acres of national parks, monuments, historical sites, and preserves administered by the National Park Service, from Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. They have solved homicides, tracked serial rapists hiding in the backcountry, averted kidnappings, and interdicted thousands of pounds of drugs. They’ve busted a reality TV host who poached a grizzly bear and infiltrated theft rings trafficking in looted Native American artifacts. But the ISB remains relatively unknown to the general public and even to fellow law enforcement. Local cops and FBI agents are sometimes baffled when Yosemite-based ISB Special Agent Kristy McGee presents her badge in the course of an investigation. “They’ll say something like, ‘What do you guys investigate? Littering?’” she told me recently.

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Grief Network

Longreads Pick
Source: n+1
Published: Oct 11, 2018
Length: 24 minutes (6,005 words)

I’ll Have an Open-Face Nacho Sandwich With Extra Pork Fat and a Side of Mop Water, Please

AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Hannah Yoon

Why do chains like In-N-Out have secret menus? When the entire fast food industry relies on standardization for speed and consistency, what is the benefit of honoring complicated special requests? Do customers really need a grilled cheese with french fries on it? In her book excerpt at LitHub, cultural critic Alison Pearlman goes searching for answers to these surprisingly deep questions, peering between the proverbial buns, to examine the pros and cons of menu hacking. The answers, my friends, are hidden inside structurally unsound hamburgers made by overburdened workers. Please, enjoy your food, but also have some sympathy.

Restaurateurs who offer unlisted items also have several possible motives. They may want to exceed diners’ expectations, reward valued patrons, or prompt positive word of mouth for the restaurant. If those items were fixed, explicit, and promised to all, they wouldn’t serve these purposes. They’d also belong on the regular menu.

Keeping off-menu lists in the shadows also makes them easier to contain. If special ordering goes unchecked, it could jeopardize the economies of the regular menu. In essence, for secret menus to be socially and economically valuable, they must appear mysterious and negotiable. In dealings, however, not all follow the same rules.

So much depends on the way an establishment structures the relationship between restaurateur and diner. The kind of service a restaurant provides—not by vagaries of server personality or diner traffic, but at the planning level where the bones of a restaurant form—determines nearly everything about its off-menu deliberations. It can dictate how and why a menu deviation starts, who gets it, the composition of the item itself, and whether and how rumors about it spread. It can even decide the tattle’s tone. The chasm lies between standardization and personalization.

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Sarah Perry on ‘Melmoth,’ Monsters, and Making Her Readers Feel Responsible for Mass Atrocity

Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Bridey Heing | Longreads | October 2018 | 8 minutes (2,039 words)

 

Sarah Perry’s novels have been praised for their distinctive voice and haunting subjects. Her atmospheric 2014 debut After Me Comes the Flood revealed Perry to be a unique writer of disquieting tales laced through with an aura of mystery, a reputation solidified by the 2016 publication of The Essex Serpent, a work of historical fiction. But her latest book, Melmoth, feels like more than just a novel; it feels like a call to action. In Melmoth, the nature of complicity and the manifestation of guilt are a central focus, spinning Perry’s eerie storytelling into important lessons and questions for our modern world.

Helen Franklin has been living in Prague for years, in a kind of self-imposed exile from her native England. She carries a significant sense of guilt for an unspecified wrongdoing in her youth, for which she tries to atone by isolating herself and living austerely. But even in this self-created loneliness, Helen meets and makes friends with a couple named Karel and Thea. When Karel suddenly begins talking about a mysterious woman monster called Melmoth the Witness, Helen and Thea dismiss her as a myth. But when Karel disappears and Helen begins reading the testimonies left behind by those who had been made to walk the Earth with Melmoth, witnessing alongside her the atrocities carried out by mankind, Helen wonders if she could be Melmoth’s next victim. Read more…

Because Chernobyl is Safer Than a War Zone

A sign warns against going in the woods within the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Radiation is most concentrated in the soil and in the vegetation, making these areas particularly dangerous. Getty Images.

After four years in a war zone in eastern Ukraine where getting caught in mortar fire happened regularly, Maryna Kovalenko had had enough. As Zhanna Bezpiatchuk reports at BBC, Kovalenko moved her two daughters to relative safety: an abandoned farm just outside Chernobyl’s 30km exclusion zone.

The pro? A quiet existence free from crossfire. The con? Potentially deadly radiation in the soil, water, and trees.

“After what you witness in war, radiation is nothing. It was a miracle we survived.”

It’s not just the absence of war, but a special kind of peace.

Both Maryna and Vadim’s families talk about their love of taking long quiet walks in the forest.

Life may be basic, but neither family wants to move to a bigger town, even if it would mean more friends or opportunities. Their need for stillness after fleeing from the chaos of war is sobering.

“I don’t care about the radiation,” says Maryna. “I only care that there are no shells flying over my children. It’s quiet here. We sleep well and we don’t need to hide.”

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This Month In Books: “Once You Can See the Pattern”

Photo by Paul Schafer on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

A lot of what you’ll read in this month’s books newsletter is about things not seeming to be what they really are.

In an interview with Hope Reese, Rebecca Traister talks about how women’s anger is not recognized as a politically valid form of expression, even though history tells a different story — that women’s anger has the power to start revolutions! Moreover:

“Women are punished for expressing their anger… their anger is discouraged, and part of this punishment is that your having expressed anger can be turned against you to discredit you.”

The power women feel is not recognized for what it is. And not just the power — also the pain. In an interview with Wei Tchou, Tanya Marquardt discusses the process of interrogating her memories of sexual assault, and explains how writing her memoir forced her to finally describe events as they really happened:

“I found myself struggling with the language around consent and really asking myself, ‘What was happening in that scene?’… I had to come to terms with the fact that I hadn’t consented, and more than that, I thought it was my job to endure whatever he was going to do to me.”

In an interview with Victoria Namkung, Nicole Chung talks about how difficult it was, as a grown-up adoptee, to let go of her “origin story,” which, although it had always felt safe, was not real:

“Even though it wasn’t the whole truth, I was so comforted and so attached to this origin story I was given. I remember how difficult it was to start challenging that.”

Mr. Rogers was deeply concerned about children who believe in stories that are comforting but not real. He thought it could be downright dangerous for them. According to his biographer Maxwell King,

“When Fred Rogers and David Newell learned about the child who hurt himself trying to be a superhero, they came up with an idea: a special program to help kids grasp just what a fictional superhero is.”


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On the other hand, in her book Travelers in the Third Reich, Julia Boyd describes how, in the 1930s, the British establishment had a striking lack of concern when it came to exposing children to false ideas. The well-off continued to send their young-adult children to be educated in Germany once the Nazi regime was in power:

“That the British establishment should have seen fit to prepare its offspring for adult life by sending them to such a vile totalitarian regime is puzzling, to say the least…. despite the Great War and growing awareness of Nazi iconoclasm, Germany’s traditional grip on British intellectual imagination remained as strong as ever. Here, in the midst of Nazi barbarity and boorishness, these gilded youths were expected to deepen their education and broaden their outlook.”

(From Maxwell King’s biography of Mr. Rogers: “One of the few things that could raise anger — real, intense anger — in Mister Rogers was willfully misleading innocent, impressionable children. To him, it was immoral and completely unacceptable.”)

Boyd goes on to say: “Ariel Tennant, another teenager in Munich at the time, studying art, was struck by how many people in England refused to believe her accounts of Nazi aggression.”

(This past weekend, I saw a video online of a proto-fascist gang beating some people in New York. The police did not arrest them. After the beating, the gang members posed for a photograph, all of them making similar hand signs for the camera.)

(In her novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, Anna Moschovakis writes: “The feeling of closeness to a time before — the familiar melancholy that came from surfing the internet in the ways she used to — had receded and been replaced by the new feeling, the one she struggled to describe.”)

In her review of two recent books about immigrant families applying for asylum, Martha Pskowski writes about how, in her work with migrants, she would find that, the longer they talked to her, the more likely their stories were to change — because telling a story can be dangerous, and they were trying to keep people safe:

“Sometimes, migrants would tell me one story, and then as we talked over time, another story emerged. ….In Southern Mexico where I carry out interviews, coyotes and gang members often seek information about men and women on the migrant trail, to then threaten their family members. This doesn’t mean immigrants are unreliable sources, this means that as journalists we must work harder to earn their trust and prevent negative consequences of our work.”

Pskowski goes on to say: “Increasingly, and controversially, journalists are acknowledging and even embracing the concept that true ‘objectivity’ is both unachievable and undesirable.”

(This month a journalist named Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The story of how it happened has been revised many times. Changing stories are often a sign of danger — the journalist’s job is, sometimes, just to ask who is in danger for telling the story. Sometimes the answer is: the journalist.)

(Anna Moschovakis: “The new feeling: a flesh-eating virus expanding its appetite beneath the skin.”)

In her book How Does It Feel To Be Unwanted?, Eileen Truax writes about the re-categorization of asylum-seekers as threats to national security:

“Since the beginning of the Trump administration, policy changes in how immigration laws are applied indicate that authorities may use their discretion to qualify any violation of the law as a ‘crime,’ widely and arbitrarily broadening the spectrum of people who could be considered a ‘danger’ to the country. People like Yamil, who was charged with using false documents and has a previous deportation on his record, could be deemed a threat to national security.”

(Nicole Chung: “I’d been led to believe racism was something in the past. Even teachers at school presented racism as a thing we had conquered. It was very well-intentioned and wrong.”)

In his review of several new books about the opioid crisis, Zachary Siegel writes that the danger isn’t always where you think it is:

“A recent study out of Stanford that modeled public health policy shows that aggressively controlling the supply of prescriptions, in the short-term, is actually increasing overdose deaths by the thousands…. The fact is, injecting a regulated pharmaceutical of known dose and purity is less risky than injecting a bag of white powder purchased on the street. Bags of dope come with no proof of ingredients…. At the end of the day, an 80 milligram OxyContin is always 80 milligrams. It may not be pretty… but at least there was a measure of safety.”

And neither the heroes nor the villains are who you think they should be:

“A simplistic narrative yields cheap, simplistic solutions. America’s opioid reporting has the tendency to chronicle lengthy police investigations that feature cops, federal agents, and prosecutors high on the delusion that shutting down the right pill mill or locking up the right dealer will put addiction and overdoses to a grinding halt. They think they’re in an episode of The Wire.”

There are dire consequence for misunderstanding what the story is really about:

“Choking off the supply of prescription painkillers early on in the crisis, without first installing a safety net to catch the fallout, was a major policy failure that worsened America’s opioid problem by orders of magnitude.”

(Anna Moschovakis: “Or, the new feeling: a helixed grating, eternal return.”)

(Tanya Marquardt: “Once you can see the pattern and what you are repeating, you can see how it is abusive to you, and then you can change.”)

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Maybe Beauty Doesn’t Have to Mean Pain

Emma Blakley helps Gabby Sporleder with her position during an advanced ballet class at Midwest Dance Mechanix in Wichita, Kan. (Jesse Brothers/The Hutchinson News via AP)

At BuzzFeed, former dancer Ellen O’Connell Whittet interrogates ballet: a beautiful but demanding art form that exacts a high price from the bodies of the women who practice it — Whittet already lives with chronic pain stemming from a fractured spine she suffered during a rehearsal.

“I think you need to be asking whether you’ll ever walk without a limp,” the doctor told me. My parents drove three hours to come get me and bring me home, and I had to relearn how to do daily tasks with chronic and acute back pain, like drive a car or put on pants. A few years later, after I had healed enough, I joined a small dance company, but the pain in my back forced me daily to take stock of my own body, its needs and limitations, and to either continue hurting it or to use it to navigate through a world without ballet. Eventually, the culture of ballet was not inclusive enough for me to stay — it wouldn’t work with my limitations, and it required me to sacrifice my time and body in the name of art. Ballet was an austere and unrelenting master to me, one that asked more of me than I could give. I have missed ballet every day since, and yet I am disturbed by what, exactly I’m missing.

But the issues with ballet aren’t only around physical injuries from misstep or overuse. The physical pain is just the obvious symptom of a deeply sexist (and not a little racist) medium that regards women as implements rather than people.

Women’s contributions to ballet have historically been the most ephemeral: They are the archetypal ballerinas, whose careers depend on the constant vanishing point of dancing, over as soon as it happens. The parts of ballet that last past the moment of its occurrence — choreography, teaching, and artistic direction — have long been dominated by men. And this moment, which offers us a chance to have a mainstream conversation about the sexism of ballet, is also an opportunity to seriously consider what ballet’s future might look like. What needs to change to make it less damaging to women, while still preserving its value and beauty? And who needs to be more included in order to effect that change?

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‘Do you like scary movies?’

Image by Nicki Dugan Pogue via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In an essay in Electric Lit, Megan Pillow Davis explores horror movies — why we love them, how we experience them in our bodies, and how they can help us deal with our own real-world traumas — like Davis’ own near-rape at the hands of a former coworker.

I watched the taillights of Daniel’s truck recede into the darkness. I thought of how Paul was the only thing that had kept me from becoming Mari Collingwood or Phyllis Stone, the girls who are raped and killed in The Last House on the Left. Daniel did neither of those things. But I could still feel a scorching anger welling up inside me. In a matter of seconds, I became not Mari or Phyllis, but Jennifer Hills from I Spit on Your Grave, the rape and revenge film that had called up old memories and given me nightmares for a month the first time I watched it. I had tried to forget about that film. But now it felt like my territory, my home. I could feel Jennifer unzipping my skin like a dress and climbing inside me. I imagined cutting Daniel’s dick off, clean as Chuck cut off the head of the coral snake. I imagined spitting and pissing and shitting on Daniel’s grave. And then, just before his truck disappeared behind a dark curtain of trees, I became Charlie. I willed Daniel’s truck to explode. I wanted his body to sear in the white-hot flame of my fear and shame and rage until there was nothing left.

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Science Has Yet to Prove Mold Makes us Sick

Getty Images

As climate change chugs on and coastal cities endure hurricane flooding year after year, mold is flourishing in the hot, damp aftermath, bringing complaints of mold-induced illness. But is mold really what’s making us sick? As Peter Andrey Smith reports at Topic, even scientist Joan Bennett — who has dedicated her life to studying fungi — was unable to prove that the mold farm that invaded her home post-Hurricane Katrina caused her headaches.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, flooding the city of New Orleans. Bennett and her husband fled with their three Brittany spaniels, and, after temporarily finding refuge at a country home in southern Louisiana, they drove north to New Jersey with their carload of dogs, uncertain whether their home would be destroyed or if Bennett would still have a job when they returned. Five weeks later, in October, Bennett returned to find that the floodwaters had receded from her neighborhood of Broadmoor, and although the half-century-old azaleas remained, the once-green bushes that lined her street had shriveled up and turned brown. Inside her and her husband’s home, things were even worse: almost every surface had transformed into a fungal utopia, cloaked in a fuzzy blanket of mold.

Unsurprisingly, Bennett had brought along petri dishes and sterile sampling equipment. It took her hours to sample her home. “The part of the story that I didn’t expect was that it made me feel sick to be in the house,” she says. A rug disintegrated in her hands and she lamented the destruction of her personal items, including a four-volume set of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. “The house smelled horrible, horrible, horrible,” she continues. “It had been closed up for a month, and these fungi had been in there eating my carpets, eating my books, eating my furniture, and putting out their metabolites—some of which were aroma compounds.”

Bennett is cautious. “There’s a lot of, you know, smoke around this,” she says. “There are people who claim that their mold-damaged houses are what has caused memory loss and neurodegenerative symptoms. To my knowledge, there’s no solid science backing that up, but I wish there was.”

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