The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jason Fagone, Joe Zadeh, Victoria Myers, Andrew Dickson, and Steve Almond.
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This week, we’re sharing stories from Jason Fagone, Joe Zadeh, Victoria Myers, Andrew Dickson, and Steve Almond.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Nicole Chung | Longreads | March 2018 | 11 minutes (2,845 words)
I am writing a book my father will never see. Not in its entirety, not out in the world. He got through about half of my first draft, my mother said, or maybe a little bit more, sometimes using a magnifying glass to read the manuscript I’d sent in 12-point double-spaced Times. When I heard this, I berated myself — I should have thought of that; I should have sent a larger-print version. “Honey, it wouldn’t have mattered,” Mom said. “He had to use the magnifying glass for all his reading, even the bigger type.”
Why didn’t I know that? Because I was far away, across the country. Because he didn’t read books on the too-rare occasions when we were together; he was focused on spending time with me. Because, while I asked about his health all the time, I never asked, specifically, how does he read these days? One more thing I hadn’t known about my father. One more thing to reproach myself for.
He did read part of my book. I think about that every day. He and my mom would sometimes read it aloud, together, chapter by chapter, working their way through it in the evenings after she got home from work. When my dad died suddenly, six days into the new year, they were still several chapters from the end.

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (4,100 words)
The February issue of The California Sunday Magazine devoted its feature well to a single piece, 20 years in the making. Mark Arax, a native of California’s San Joaquin Valley and the son of a grape grower in Fresno, has spent the last several decades working on a story about billionaires Lynda and Stuart Resnick, who transformed an agricultural desert into a cornucopia of pistachios, pomegranates, and oranges — cleverly marketed as “Cuties” and “Halos” by their business, The Wonderful Company. In just a few decades, the Resnicks rebranded of San Joaquin Valley agriculture, and the impoverished community of Lost Hills, in their image, despite never having farmed a day in their lives. Arax is writing a book about water wars in California that will be published by Knopf.
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Aaron Gilbreath: You said you carried around notes about Stewart Resnick for nearly two decades. How did you first hear about him?
Mark Arax: When I was writing The King of California, about J.G. Boswell in the Tulare Lake Basin, I started hearing about this guy from Beverly Hills who had bought a bunch of farmland. This was around the late 1990s. People mentioned this guy in the next basin over who was attempting to be the new King of California. Boswell grew up in the San Joaquin Valley; this other guy came from the East Coast. I did a piece on Resnick’s capture of the Kern Water Bank right toward the tail end of finishing the Boswell book. That was twenty years after he’d arrived. This land is so big, so vast, that these stories go undetected for years and years.
AG: One of the strangest things about Resnick and Boswell is how they really wanted to remain invisible. You kept knocking on doors trying to get interviews. Resnick declined multiple times and finally agreed to sit down with you in 2008 because he wanted a book about himself. Then he lost interest.
MA: Today the Resnicks have a PR office that’s a million-dollar-plus operation. In 2008, they didn’t have anybody. You had to call the attorney, then the secretary would hang up the phone and the attorney would just say “No comment.” It was really secretive, but I was used to that. The Boswell family saying was “As long as the whale never surfaces, it’s never harpooned.” That’s the way these guys operated. Obviously, persistence paid off in getting Boswell to talk, so I figured the same thing would happen with Resnick.
AG: Even though you chipped away at Boswell to make that whale surface, did you just assume that Resnick’s story would take a long time? Did you ever think it wouldn’t come together?
MA: I told Resnick’s story in pieces as I got it. In 2003, I got the piece about the Kern Water Bank without his cooperation. I gathered some more notes, some more string as we call it, and did that piece in the opening of my third book West of West. I have this scene with Resnick in his mansion, so I started playing with that whole thing. It’s almost like a first stab at a painting. Then I decided for this new book that I had to tell as much of his whole story that I could, and that’s when I went back into it. Each time I’ve gone in and taken something out, written about it, and this was the time that I decided to do the definitive Resnick chapter, which became the magazine piece.
AG: So you’ve been working with this material for years.
MA: And the virtue of that is you get to see how a story and operation evolves. It’s been almost 20 years — had I done this piece back in the early 2000s, there would have been no philanthropy to write about, they weren’t doing that kind of philanthropy in Lost Hills yet. Writing about the Resnicks now, you see how they evolved as people, how their farming evolved, how Lost Hills and their engagement with the community evolved.
AG: That philanthropy is a huge part of your California Sunday piece. To me, it’s one of the most interesting things about their business, because as consumers we don’t often think about farmers as philanthropists. Yet the Resnicks have such keen marketing instincts that their philanthropy is designed to both indoctrinate their workers and to show the world that they’re a good company, growing healthy food and treating their employees well. Have you ever encountered any other farming company that does that sort of thing?
MA: Most of the big farmers that live in the Valley don’t actually reside in their communities. A lot of them live in Fresno and farm outside of town, and their idea of philanthropy is giving to the Valley Children’s Hospital or Fresno State Bulldogs, or maybe giving back to a university they attended, like Cal Poly. They rarely give back to the little rural towns they farm in, so very little of their philanthropy affects the Mexican farm worker. Boswell took the town of Corcoran as his company town: He built the football stadium and social services, senior citizen and community centers, but the level of philanthropy the Resnicks practice is unprecedented in American agriculture. You can’t help but be dazzled by it, but it also raises some disturbing questions.
You use the word “indoctrinate.” I never used that, but that’s actually a good word because the Resnicks are really trying to change everything, right down to the habits of the Mexican farmworker, including what they eat. It crosses over into a kind of a social engineering that raises troubling questions. They’re not just writing checks; Lynda Resnick is also running and helping design their charter schools’ educational programs. She’s working with doctors and dieticians to design their weight loss and exercise programs. That level of involvement is a very different kind of hands-on philanthropy.
AG: What do you think about the Resnick’s philanthropy and level of engagement signals about the future of the agriculture in the West? It’s strange to think of these white, rich, Whole Foods-types pushing their dietary values and philosophy on immigrant communities.
MA: It’s almost like Lynda Resnick wants to change the microbial content in their stomachs. Before the farmworkers eat lunch at the company restaurant, she encourages the workers to drink this little concoction she’s made from apple cider vinegar, turmeric, ginger and mandarin juice. All the times I’ve been in the restaurant I never saw any workers partake of this concoction, but that’s what she’s pushing. I drank it. It was nice. Apple cider vinegar is good for your stomach and all that, but when you read about that level of involvement, you’re very conflicted about all of this.
The level of philanthropy the Resnicks practice is unprecedented in American agriculture. You can’t help but be dazzled by it.
Lost Hills is now the ultimate company town; everything is branded. You see this incredible five-acre park with a playground with water fountains where kids can play. The Resnicks built soccer fields with artificial turf and lighting. The park itself is named the Wonderful Park. If you look at the ‘o’ on the ‘wonderful,’ it’s the same heart-shaped ‘o’ that stamps the Resnick’s brand of pomegranate juice, so that makes it a little creepy.
AG: It seems like Orwellian brainwashing. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, the word “wonderful” everywhere.
MA: That’s Lynda, she brands everything. She even changed the company name: It wasn’t enough that it was called Paramount, that’s a pretty grand name right there, it had to become The Wonderful Company. I think that’s the kind of nth degree of marketing that raises troubling questions.
AG: With Wonderful, it seems like she’s really trying to get into consumers’ heads, to make them think that this company, not just these products, is wonderful. Despite being born in the Valley, you did such a great job presenting the Resnicks’ complex story fairly, in a way that didn’t present an unjustified bias, and let readers draw their own conclusions.
MA: They’re tackling diabetes and obesity, and you can’t help but applaud those efforts. There’s what I call a tussle inside my head, between the skeptic and the believer, and I think that held through throughout the story is a need to constantly try to look at this through both of those sensibilities
They don’t know their own motives. When you ask them how this all began and why it began so late, the Resnicks talk about a lecture they attended in Aspen, where Harvard Professor Sandel comes out to talk about the moral obligations of wealth. Then they get in the car and look at each other and say, “Are we doing enough?” They decided that they were not. And yet, when they decided to jump in, they jumped in in a way that’s never been done in agriculture in the United States, certainly not in California.
AG: In the piece, you describe how the Bruce Springsteen played a show in Fresno, and how nobody at the concert put any money in the piggy bank he left at the front of the stage for the people who work the fields. Springsteen was so shocked he asked you, “What kind of place is this?” Do landowners care more about Mexican-American workers than they used to?
MA: In between songs at that concert, Springsteen talked about what motivated a particular song or where it came from, and some of the people in the audience got so upset that they walked out and demanded their money back. I’m not sure he understood the kind of place he was coming to, where there was this almost self-hatred about needing to rely on that labor.
It’s a really complex psychology, where you have to go into the rural heart of Mexico to pull your workforce, you’re dependent on these people, and yet you sort of hate yourself for being dependent on them, and there’s a certain hatred of them too, for them making you feel that shame. I’m not a psychologist, but there is something deeply broken psychically about this place, and I try to get at that in this California Sunday piece a little bit. The Springsteen anecdote helped me do that.
AG: The story also implied the way growers who rely on Mexican-American labor are people who would rather physically separate themselves from the workforce, so they don’t have to feel those bad feelings. And yet, Lynda Resnick engages them directly.
MA: What the farmer has done is put the labor contractor between him and the labor, to give himself that psychological distance. What Lynda Resnick is doing is getting intimately involved in their workers’ lives, breaking past that barrier. In my story, when she’s on stage talking to farmers about what they’re doing, there’s a real discomfort on the part of these farmers who are listening, because she’s challenging the whole way that they’d gone about this, challenging this relationship where they increasingly distance themselves, and don’t live in those farm communities, don’t deal with their own labor.
AG: Do you feel like the Resnicks might signal some sort of larger change in Valley agriculture?
MA: This place has been resistant to change for about a century and a half, so I don’t see that relationship changing. I see increasing mechanization replacing the usual farm labor, and that’s one of the reasons that these farmers are switching to growing nuts. Nuts are obviously high-dollar crops, but they can also be done with machines. What I see is the farmer now replacing human labor with mechanical labor. Ultimately they’re going to continue to dodge that issue and keep that distance between them and their workers.
You’re dependent on these people, and yet you sort of hate yourself for being dependent on them. There’s a certain hatred of them too, for them making you feel that shame.
AG: What happens to these workers who are living in shacks in Lost Hills? These good hard-working people who have families and ambitions and debts to coyotes? What do they do when mechanization replaces them?
MA:. You’ll still have the great fields that need to be handpicked, and you’ll still have citrus that’ll need to be handpicked, but mechanization is going to shrink the workforce. These folks will continue to work in kitchens, they’re going to work in the hotels, they’re going to be tending peoples’ front yards and backyards, but I think that is going to be a fundamental shift. I don’t see them discovering their labor in the way that the Resnicks have.
AG: Let’s talk about the scale of the landscape. J.G. Boswell and Resnick are superlative landowners. To me, the Valley itself is a land of superlatives, yet somehow you shrunk this land’s complexity down to two very condensed paragraphs early in the piece, setting the scene for people who don’t know this region.
MA: It’s almost taken me thirty years of writing and researching this place to do those two paragraphs in that kind of big distilled way. I found studies that said that the leveling of land that took place here, the alteration, was unprecedented in human history. This Valley is one of the most altered landscapes in human history. So how do you tell that in two paragraphs? That was the challenge there.
AG: Having explored this Valley a lot in the last twenty years, I could sense that this was the kind of introduction that only somebody who’s been working and living in this land for their whole lives could do this well. You set the stage as only a lifer could.
MA:. In each of my books, I try to reckon with the land, to describe it. I’ve described it from the vantage of the pass called the Grapevine, that last mountain road that divides L.A. from the Valley; I’ve called that a kind of a Mason-Dixon line, with the sprawl of L.A. giving way to the sprawl of the farmlands. I’ve told it from other vantages, and each time it’s gotten a little more precise and a little better, but this one certainly was a kind of telling that took a lot of years to try to nail down.
AG: One of the other things you did was demystify the invisible, misunderstood mechanics of Valley agriculture. In your piece, you say “I pity the outsider trying to make sense of” California’s Central Valley. What do you think mystifies outsiders most about this place?
MA: There’s a tendency to paint it broadly. The Central Valley is two valleys: It’s the San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento Valley, and they are very different. They have different relationships to water. The Sacramento River up north is a big, badass river. It flows. It still floods Our five rivers down here have been tamed. They follow the demands of agriculture.
The San Joaquin Valley’s water isn’t inside our rivers anymore. It’s inside the irrigation canals that take from those rivers, so it’s two different valleys. When you look at the San Joaquin Valley itself, there are three different Valleys within the San Joaquin Valley. There’s an east side that couldn’t be more different than the west side. Then there’s a middle center Valley that is different than the other two. They look different. The farms are vast on the west side, smaller in the center. Then there are communities on the east side and the center of the Valley, and no substantial communities in the west side. Making sense of this place is about being true to what this place is, and so much of those differences have to do with the relationship to water, how easy is it to access. Do you have to pump? Is there an extraction model at the heart of the agriculture, or is there a more sustainable model? That question has created different communities, different Valleys, inside the San Joaquin Valley.
AG: My sense is that few outsiders see any of that.
MA: I know it’s hard to see it. We’re all dumb to our place. John Keats talked about how we’re in these hallways between these chambers, and we’ve just left one where it’s pretty dark, we’re moving into another chamber where there’s a little more light, and we’re starting to understand our existence and who we are, and then we understand our place. The problem today is that so many folks are fixated on themselves, trying to understand themselves and their own internal journeys, that they don’t have any space leftover to really understand their place, and this is a big, big place.
I was dumb to this place at age fifteen, sixteen, literally. My family was living in town, and there these ditches that are shunting water from one side of the Valley to the other, and they’re just part of the landscape. We don’t even think where’s that water going? Who’s it going to? The only time you thought about an irrigation ditch was when some kid drowns in it during summer, so there’s a dumbness to place. Part of why I came back is to try to figure out this place. A lot of the big, great stories of migrations in America played out on this land.
AG: In your California Sunday story you mention how you “never stopped to wonder: How much was magic? How much was plunder?” Moving away helped you see the place more clearly.
We’re all dumb to our place. We don’t even think, where’s that water going? Who’s it going to?
MA: I left for a good ten or twelve years, came back, and that helped. As a writer, I moved from the state’s center where I grew up, to this new book, where I take on the entire kind of state of California, looking at how the bending of water created the state, so I worked my way from the middle outward. Then I came back in the middle because 80 percent of California’s water is used by agriculture, so I don’t apologize for telling the story of the farmer. I mean, can you own 25,000 acres and be a family farmer? It seems an absurd notion. Folks in San Francisco just can’t wrap their heads around that. But then when you go out with one of these farmers onto his land and his children are working it too, it’s a little harder to demonized that guy. What I’m trying to do is play with those notions of what a corporate farm is. What’s a mega-farm? What’s an absentee landowner? What’s a family farmer?
AG: This is where marketing like the Resnick’s really comes in to play. Branding helps manipulate the public’s perception of farms, farm values, family values.
MA: Yeah, that’s right.
AG: Despite how many urban Californians might love fancy meals and farmer’s markets, there seems to be a lot of animosity about the water farmers use outside of the cities.
MA: Oh, it got really ugly this last time. Los Angeles turned on the Valley, turned on the almond. The almond became the demon. They started doing these graphics, showing how many gallons it takes to make a single nut. These are absurd because it takes water to grow food, so there’s a real disconnect that allowed L.A., and in some degree San Francisco, to demonize the farmers here. Some of that is justified because what’s happened is that Valley farmland has gone from the best land to some of the worst land, and the greed of agriculture to grow and keep growing. When it’s a human body, we call that growth something else and try to arrest it with chemicals. Ours is kind of reverse: we use the chemicals to make it grow bigger. It’s a weird little metaphor for cancer.
AG: One of the things about the Valley that is so obviously staggering is how flat and how big it is. Visitors see the surface. It’s overwhelming what goes on out there. It’s hard to comprehend how deep a 2,500 foot well really is. But that’s as important as what’s happening above ground, maybe even more important now that people are pumping so much ancient water out of these shrinking aquifers. As a writer, how do you get people to understand what is happening at that depth underground?
MA: In the new book I have a chapter called “Sinking.” It takes the reader into this whole subsidence phenomenon, the science of it, how it happens, the pumping and sinking of the land. You’re right. You think, well, the crops are on the surface, but so much of the drama is playing out 2,000 feet below ground. To see a rig set up and drilling for water ─ it reminds me of the Texas oil fields. It’s that deep. These are million-dollar holes they’re digging.
AG: What do you think about this idea that water represents the next gold – not just a gold rush, but the source of riches, collapse, and wars, like petroleum?
MA: It is, and one of the things I do in the book is trace back the entire history of our bending of water, to show that the mining of gold was really the mining of water. The hydraulics of the system that we’re using today to move water up and down the state was developed during the Gold Rush. The first ditches, the web of ditches, that were built in California, were built during the Gold Rush, and where they couldn’t carve ditches into the land, they built these wooden irrigation ditches, called flumes, to move water across canyons. That extraction started very early on, and it just kept increasing in magnitude, moving up in degrees.
AG: It’s a really disturbing irony that, now that the Gold Rush is over, the same water that extracted gold could be worth more than gold.
MA: I mean, it’s going to get that way. Farming here is problematic, with the need to import labor, the need to import water from northern rivers, the chemical applications – oh, and they’re calling this place Parkinson’s Alley because there are so many cases of Parkinson’s Disease that can be traced back to pesticides and herbicides. And yet, as problematic as farming is, if you lived here all or most of your life, you don’t want to see that farmland turn into suburbia. You don’t want to see another Los Angeles or San Fernando Valley here. Ultimately what you fear is that the water is going to be worth so much, that the farmers are going to strip the water from the land and sell it to developers, so these rivers of agriculture that have been rivers of agriculture for more than a century are going to turn into these rivers of suburbia, and to me, that suburbanization is going to be the ultimate tragedy.
If this place ultimately gets paved over, I don’t know if it will be missed or not. The disconnect between people and the land, and the eater and his or her food, is so great, who knows if they’ll ever miss it?
AG: So is there a solution outside of market economics, like planting crops that can deal with salty soil, less water, less irrigation? Is there hope that the rural Valley won’t become more suburban?
MA: I have hope in this new Groundwater Sustainability Act we finally passed. California is the last state to allow the unregulated drilling of wells. For all of our progressiveness, California was the last state to regulate groundwater extraction. Well now that we’ve regulated groundwater, you’re going to see the issue of sustainable yield drive groundwater use. Meaning, how much can you take out of the ground and then have that water be replenished by snowmelt? That alone will probably idle a million and a half acres of Valley farmland. It’ll get it back to more a sustainable system.
We ended up taking a 100 percent of the rivers. We should have probably taken 60 to 70 percent of the rivers for agriculture and left the other 40 percent for the environment. We would have had fewer crop gluts, fewer surpluses. We would have farmed only the best land instead of now farming some of the worst land. That’s what we’re going to have to legislate ourselves back to, and if California can ever put together these urban growth boundaries, where you draw lines around cities the way Portland drew a line around itself, and you say Okay, this is the city, this is farmland, and you don’t violate that land, then that’s the way you can really develop a farm belt here that really makes sense: smaller, smarter.
AG: Talking about the aesthetic qualities of the Valley, there’s another aspect of the great loss of California to rampant suburbanization: irreplaceable local beauty. Do you as a resident feel that Californians always undervalued this region, that one day maybe they’ll recognize its beauty?
MA: It’s a kind of ugly beauty. The San Joaquin Valley doesn’t please the eyes like Napa and Sonoma, and so much of it is industrialized, but there are parts when you drive to the east side, in particular, the citrus belt, that are gorgeous. The citrus belt sits right there at the foot of the Sierra. When you go through parts of the Valley’s center and see these 40-acre vineyards, and the vines are all twisted and gnarled and have moss growing on them — there is a beauty there. You have to go looking for the little bits. It’s not so obvious. If this place ultimately gets paved over, I don’t know if it will be missed or not. The disconnect between people and the land, and the eater and his or her food, is so great, who knows if they’ll ever miss it?

Ken Otterbourg | Longreads | February 2018 | 14 minutes (2,710 words)
I woke up sad today. I was sad when I got out of bed, and I was sad when I went downstairs to get the tiny can of wet cat food for the four cats. I was sad when I nearly stumbled on the bottom step of the first landing in the basement. I was sad as I thought about what would happen if I fell and lay in the basement for several hours with a broken leg or a concussion while the cats ate the cat food and licked my face and the dog wondered where I was after he had heard the pop top on the cat food can that signaled it was soon to be his turn. But I did not fall. So, I was sad when I let Bailey out of his crate and watched him scratch his face against the carpet while I got his leash.
I was sad when we walked outside as the sun was coming up in the east and I could still make out Venus in a morning sky that was the color of hope flecked with a few clouds off in the distance. Venus helped but not enough. I was sad when we walked down Fourth Street. I was sad crossing Broad Street and watching the morning traffic build and all the people on their cell phones even this early. I was sad after Bailey took his shit in the monkey grass even though it was a good shit that indicated the virus that nearly killed him two weeks ago and caused him to shit blood that was the color of raspberry juice was gone and that the $550 I had spent during four hours at the emergency vet between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. was definitely money well spent and necessary.
After we got home, I was sad scooping out his dog food into the bowl and giving him the remains of the cat food that stuck to the tiny can. The dog was happy and wagged his tail and swirled in delight. I emptied the dishwasher, and that didn’t make me happy or cause me to swirl in delight. It never does. I was sad drinking my coffee, which usually made me happy because it made me think of how much JoAnne loved coffee and how when I met her she used to drink a whole pot of it every day, so much that I wondered how she got any work done because she must have kept having to pee. But now things like that make me sad, and I would stop drinking coffee myself but I don’t think it would matter. I was sad eating my English muffin and banana and reading the newspaper and doing the Jumble and wondering if there is a list somewhere of all the five- and six-letter words that can only be arranged in one correct way and are therefore Jumble suitable. Those are the sorts of things that I think about, and many times a little nerdish insight or aha moment of that type is enough to make me smile. But they can also make me sad because there is nobody to share that insight with except the dog and the four cats and they don’t care, and it’s not the type of thing that you can save until later when you speak to an actual person because you would have to figure out how to slip it into a conversation so that it sounded natural and it never does. It’s the sort of utterance best delivered with no preamble across a kitchen table to the woman who loves you in spite of these tendencies and maybe even a little because of them.

Emily Carter Roiphe | Longreads | February 2018 | 14 minutes (3,466 words)
The Waiting Room
I was leaning on my husband’s shoulder one day as we were walking through a lobby that seemed a bit crowded for the part of New Mexico where we lived. On the soundtrack there was some desultory chatter and the hum of fluorescent lights.
“Where are we NOW?” I asked in exasperation.
“You had a brain aneurysm, sweetheart, you had brain surgery.”
“Is the surgery over?” I asked.
“Yes, for a whole day,” he said.
“So, we can go now?”
We’d been planning to go camping in Monument Valley, and I didn’t want to complicate our schedule. I’d had something wrong, but they fixed it, I felt fine, could we please get on with it? Then I saw his face. Usually, my husband is pretty cocky in public, thinking that he has me, and I am so wonderful, that he wants to make sure people notice, so he keeps up a performative patter of flirtatious banter about how brilliant, sexy, infuriating, and baffling I am. It’s his routine. There was something about his tone of voice now, that made me turn to look at his face; it was ashen. He looked terrified.
“What?” I said. “I feel fine. There’s nothing wrong with me anymore. I want to go camping like you promised.”
His eyes filled and he said, “Let’s go back to your room.”
First I thought, I have to do whatever, say whatever, be whatever it takes to get that look off his face, it’s making a bouquet of broken glass bloom in the dark place behind my ribs.
Then I thought, Room? What room? Are we in a hotel?
Then I realized I wasn’t walking, but perhaps, sitting and floating along. How was this possible, I wondered analytically. Am I walking or riding, standing up or sitting, falling down or getting to my feet? I wasn’t alarmed by these questions but I knew one thing instinctively: keep those questions to yourself, tell no one you have questions, or you can forget about that camping trip. I was very focused on the idea of going camping, a tent, all the stars in the wide open sky out there.
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Noliwe Rooks | Excerpt from Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education | The New Press | September 2017 | 18 minutes (5,064 words)
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DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.
In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos said her ultimate goals in education reform encompassed not just charter schools and voucher programs, but also virtual education. She said these forms were important because they would allow “all parents, regardless of their zip code, to have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children.” Also in 2013, one of the organizations that she founded, the American Federation for Children, put out a sharply critical statement after New Jersey’s school chief, Chris Cerf, declined to authorize two virtual charter schools. The group said the decision “depriv[es] students of vital educational options.” Yet another group DeVos founded and funded, the Michigan-based Great Lakes Education Project, has also advocated for expansion of online schools, and in a 2015 speech available on YouTube DeVos praised “virtual schools [and] online learning” as part of an “open system of choices.” She then said, “We must open up the education industry—and let’s not kid ourselves that it isn’t an industry. We must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators.” DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.
At the time of her nomination, charter schools were likely familiar to most listeners given their rapid growth and ubiquity. However, the press surrounding the DeVos nomination may have been one of the first times most became aware of a particular offshoot of the charter school movement—virtual or cyber schools. Despite flying somewhat under the mainstream radar, online charter schools have faced a wave of both negative press and poor results in research studies. One large-scale study from 2015 found that the “academic benefits from online charter schools are currently the exception rather than the rule.” By June of 2016, even a group that supports, runs, and owns charter schools published a report calling for more stringent oversight and regulation of online charter schools, saying, “The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action for state leaders and authorizers across the country.” The jointly authored research was sponsored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50Can, all groups that lobby state and federal agencies to loosen regulations to allow more robust charter-school growth. As one of the report’s backers said, “I’m not concerned that Betsy DeVos supports virtual schools, because we support them too—we just want them to be a lot better.” Such an upswing in quality seems highly unlikely to happen anytime soon. They are yet another trickle in the stream of apartheid forms of public education flowing down from the wealthy and politically well connected to communities that are poor, of color, or both.
In Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina, Ohio, and Florida, poor students from rural areas as well as those in underfunded urban schools that primarily educate students who are Black and Latino today face a new response to the question of how to solve the riddle of race, poverty, and educational underachievement. Increasingly, despite little supporting evidence, a growing number of states and local school districts no longer believe that the solution is merely about infrastructure, class size, funding, or hiring more teachers. In states with high levels of poverty and “hard to educate” Black and Latino students, virtual schools are on the rise. Such schools are not growing nearly as fast in school districts that are white and relatively wealthy, nor are they the educational strategy of choice in most private schools. As much a business strategy as one promoting learning, virtual education allows businesses to profit from racial inequality and poverty. Sadly, this particular cure to what ails our education system more often than not exacerbates the problems. Read more…

Angela Palm | Creative Nonfiction | Winter 2017 | 10 minutes (2,732 words)
“You never laugh anymore,” my seven-year-old said from the backseat of the car while I was driving. It was early November.
“What did you say?” I asked, though I had heard him clearly.
* * *
I had been thinking about what it meant that Donald Trump had not yet stopped running for president. About the errands we still had to do that night. About the balance of my credit card, and about our new mortgage and all the furniture I couldn’t afford to fill the new house. About the cost of my kids’ college. About the most recent school shooting and the new statistic I’d read that said Americans in 21 states are more likely to die a gun-related death than as a result of a car accident. About heroin overdoses and prescription pill addictions that were hitting closer and closer to home. Food insecurity. Black lives and deaths in America. Overpopulation. Prison overcrowding. The Syrian refugee crisis. Global warming. Dying oceans. My aging parents, and my own mortality. E-mail that had gone unanswered for months because I was simply tired of typing. The state of my marriage. The quality of my teaching. The exercise I wasn’t getting.
If my brain were a computer, its internal fan would make that loud, warm, whirring sound that means it’s working too hard. It probably isn’t a coincidence that adult coloring books topped Amazon’s bestseller lists last year.
* * *
I wash my body each day with liquid soap I squeeze from a bottle that reads “happiness.” I buy this product again and again to no noticeable effect and keep quiet faith in the power of the subliminal.
If that power exists, then it follows that I am also subconsciously affected by the sponsored ads on Facebook. Should I buy that period underwear? I find myself wondering several times in a single day. No, no.
* * *
The most basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are physiological ones: air, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, and excretion of waste. Eating, fucking, snoozing, shitting. Happiness is not listed among any of the hierarchy’s tiered descriptions, but I imagine it floats somewhere above the uppermost point of the two-dimensional pyramid or surrounds the diagram’s boundaries like a cloud. Perhaps it appears intermittently as each level of the hierarchy clicks into place, and flickers out of focus again when the pyramid fluctuates. Or maybe it is measured differently altogether.
As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula.
Our independence, says the Declaration of Independence, guarantees a right to pursue happiness and bypasses the needs in Maslow’s hierarchy entirely. Though the document assures life and liberty in imprecise, yet enthusiastic terms, it cites no explicit guarantee of basic needs such as drinkable water or fresh air. Those are assumed here. For now.
I have everything in Maslow’s ground-floor level of needs, some things in the upper levels of needs, and many things that aren’t needs at all. But this assumes happiness relies on having as opposed to being.
* * *
Echoing Tolstoy’s assertion about happy families in Anna Karenina, a therapist wrote that unhappy people have vastly different reasons for being unhappy, but happy people all have one thing in common: They are grateful for what they have rather than being obsessed with what they want.
Through product messaging, I’ve come to believe soap might have the power to make me happy. A pill might make me happy. Stylish clothes might make me happy. Make-up. Skiing. Validation from the strangers of the Internet. Alcohol. Weight loss. Botox. Period underwear.
As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula. An Amazon search turns up over 92,000 books that focus on the subject. In 2008, a woman named Robyn Okrant embarked on a mission to live for a year according to Oprah Winfrey’s advice on happiness. Okrant changed her sex, her food, her clothing, her makeup, her philanthropic methods, and more. In a Forbes Magazine interview she says of the experience: “It was incredibly draining, and it made me really sad. It made me sad to think of how many hours I’ve lost — even when I wasn’t doing the project — to blindly following advice and listening to what other people tell me I should be doing to create my own happiness.”
* * *
Do you know how easy it is to mask unhappiness? Add exclamation points. That is how I text my mother: I’m great! Can’t wait for the holidays!
* * *
This past fall, Thanksgiving came and went quickly. Before my brother and his girlfriend flew back home, we spent a small fortune on lunch together at a trendy brick oven pizzeria and brewery. While we waited for our food to arrive, I heard a man at the table to my right tell another man about a gay bathhouse he recently visited. “The floor is covered in semen,” he said as he ate his salad. The other man nodded, his expression neutral and joyless. I imagined a place where men empty themselves into and around each other, and I mentally classified it as a combination of a fulfilled basic need and the freedom to pursue happiness.
To my left, beyond my brother, a large flat screen television broadcasted a continuous live video feed of a Ugandan village’s water pump, which the pizzeria had funded. I was the only person in the restaurant who watched it for longer than a few seconds. Between bites of thin crust pizza topped with speck and Brussels sprouts, I saw a young boy in red t-shirt carry a plastic jug to the pump and fill it. I saw a barefoot girl toddle across the screen, then bend over to rake her hands across the ground, her face placid and oblivious to the camera. A man crossed the screen somberly and approached the pump, filling his two jugs. Then a woman filled her jugs.
Beyond the pump was a row of homes. A telephone pole rose above them, presumably delivering electricity to the village from an unseen source beyond the camera’s lens. The area in view was free from debris, free from conflict, and nothing I could see in this tiny slice of rural Uganda echoed the violence of a twenty-year civil war. I was unsure whether to take this a sign of recovery, as I only saw what I saw, and nothing more. But whatever the context, this village remained. It moved me, though I could not articulate exactly why.
For a moment, I coveted the simplicity the live feed seemed to depict. I don’t really want to live in a world where lunch for four costs $100 and restaurant staff refills my glass more often than I need, where emotions are advertised as bath soap and adult coloring books are offered as tools for unburdening our saturated minds, but here I am.
During the 43 minutes or so that I witnessed their lives from the comparable extravagance of my own, none of the Ugandans that passed before the camera laughed, but none cried either. They drew their water from the well, and then they returned to their homes, aligned on either side of a narrow road, to clean and cook and live. I wondered whether they knew they were being watched by relatively well off and overwhelmingly white people in Vermont, day after day, and whether the cost of that water was their exploitation and subjection to an American pizzeria’s marketing plan during the restaurant’s business hours. Altruism doesn’t need a camera. Neither do the thirsty.
Carl Sagan said that there are no dumb questions, but I read an article that went one step farther. It said that happy people all ask dumb questions. Here’s one: who is the camera for, then?
* * *
Over Thanksgiving break, I graded my creative writing class’ personal essays and memoirs. Their nonfiction writing revealed wide-ranging pursuits of happiness and setbacks along the way. I never said, “Write about how you struggle,” but they did. Three women battled eating disorders. One of those three was also a cutter whose words about blood sloshing from her wrists read like intimate correspondence with a lover.
(Recently, I read a suicide prevention handbill that said the term committed suicide was offensive. Died by suicide is the preferred term. I made a mental note to remember that. But what is the appropriate term for a person who enjoys hurting themselves? Who obsesses over the color of blood and loves the pain associated with extracting it from her own veins? Who, for reasons I will never comprehend, cuts herself in pursuit of happiness?)
There were two other women whose mothers had died too young. Another student’s chronic illness forced her to withdraw from school. One young woman wrote mainly about other people’s heroin use, others’ sexual abuse, as though she was recasting a truth she couldn’t quite admit as her own. All semester, I cheered silently for her.
A young man with autism recently came out of the closet and didn’t want to be called brave for that. Another young man with ADHD was allowed, by the grace of a formal accommodation, to leave the room and use his phone whenever he felt like it. He employed this choice only when he became frustrated with the less talented writers in the class. At times, I wanted to walk out with him.
A young woman wrote a chronicle of her meaningless tattoos, detailing how being able to get inked up for no reason makes her happy. She ended her essay with the line, “This skull, if you have to believe it stands for something, means I’m dead inside.”
Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them.
One young man couldn’t be bothered to do the classwork I assigned. He assumed I’d let it slide without consequence. “I’m just really into dance right now,” he said when I asked why he wasn’t doing the work — not any of it. “Are you sure my grade is right?” he asked after grades were posted.
I need an extension, they said. I need you to repeat the assignment requirements, they said. I need an electronic reminder for homework or it won’t get done, they said. I’m overwhelmed, they said. They cried when printers jammed and when they were late to class. They cried when they were given an earned poor grade. They would write me to tell me their weekend was “just too much” and they wouldn’t be able to haul themselves into the classroom.
They would stare at me like guppies, open-mouthed, waiting to be fed, and I would often have the wrong kind of nourishment. I’d read articles about trigger warnings and about millennial attitudes and about millennial parents and millennial fear of failure and low tolerance for stress, and I still couldn’t completely formulate a way to educate them effectively.
They were happiest when I brought food to class.
* * *
Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them. During the prior semester alone, there had been seven shootings on American college campuses. Just after the Thanksgiving break, the following headlines populated my Facebook feed:
“Your Opinion on Gun Control Doesn’t Matter” (Daily Kos)
“‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” (The Onion)
“On Guns, We’re Not Even Trying” (The New York Times)
Toward the end of the semester, I had been stumbling about my house, talking nonsensically to myself instead of writing or grading. “Refrigerator. Frigerator. Fridge,” I said while walking through the kitchen. Then, as I entered my office, fragments from Horace’s Ars poetica: in medias res. Ab ovo. Which mean, respectively, “into the middle of things” and “from the beginning.” The poet never implied that endings exist. Only that poetry is somehow perpetually on its way from one understanding to another, altered understanding. It is in pursuit.
* * *
Recently, I tried for the hundredth time to explain the concept of infinity to my five-year-old. “No. It has to end,” he sobbed angrily, and then stomped away.
How do we begin receding from too much? As individuals, as a generation, as a nation?
The first sign taught in baby sign language is “more.” There is no sign for “less.”
Once, the average person only had words for a handful of colors. In 1903, Crayola crayons were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and black. By 1949, there were 48 colors available; 64 by 1958; 72 by 1972; 120 by 1998. We learned more names for colors than we ever dreamed: magenta, fuchsia, copper, periwinkle, cornflower, ochre, onyx, royal blue, sienna, peach, beige. A box of eight crayons becomes 16 becomes 24 becomes 48 becomes 64 becomes 72 becomes 120. A child who has had a box of 48 crayons is never again satisfied with only 8. Or maybe they don’t know how to ask for less in a society of more.
Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.
In 2003, Crayola officially added the colors inch worm, jazzberry jam, mango tango, and wild blue yonder and they retired the colors blizzard blue, magic mint, mulberry, and teal blue.
By that same year, it is estimated up to 20,000 children had been abducted and forced to enroll as soldiers in the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army.
* * *
I admit I have an adult coloring book. I limit myself to five colors for each picture to keep the process simple, but it takes forever to choose five from my kids’ 64 pack. I’m stressed before I even begin the supposedly meditative activity.
In the phenomenon referred to as Russian blues, we discriminate between colors faster when linguistic organization presorts them.
There must be more colors to discover than we have named. There must be a Crayola 286-pack in our future, containing the shades between fuchsia and magenta, cornflower and periwinkle. Or the purple that bees see in the space between yellow and ultraviolet light.
Can we want things that we do not know about?
* * *
After the semester ended, I attended a grant-funded writing residency in Massachusetts. The Cape in winter is nearly deserted. Many of the good restaurants close for the season, and a majority of the homes sit empty. I welcomed the stillness, the solitude. For a week, there was less of everything: less motion around me, fewer people with whom to interact, less to accomplish, less to buy. There was less noise, less mess without two children. Fewer distractions without Facebook and Amazon and political headlines. I had most of what I needed — food, water, shelter — and not much more. Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.
I took daily, silent walks to the vacant shore, meditatively listing to myself the places and things around me named for shells. Shellpoint Apartments, Shellhouse, Shell Inn, Shell Street. Repeat. I knelt in the cold sand and looked out across the bay. I examined the lifeless things that had washed ashore, raking my hands across the ground like that Ugandan child and gathering what the sea had discarded. A peace swept over me whenever I was near to the ground. I caught myself smiling for no reason.
At the Cape, I passed hours sitting quietly, needing nothing, wanting nothing. Pursing nothing but a few more words on a page. On the final night, four friends stopped by, including a couple with their new baby. The baby laughed and I laughed and soon we were all laughing together. All the fine dining restaurants were closed, so we ate at a Ninety Nine chain restaurant and did not make polite apologies to one another for it. We squeezed into a booth for four that was too small to accommodate our group of six. A hockey game played on the television in the bar, but we didn’t watch it. We had wine, but not water. We talked of punk music, but not war. Of banned books, but not guns. A comment about the unusually warm winter, but no mention of global warming.
I returned home the next morning, restored by fractions and of somewhat sounder body and mind. I threw away the happiness body wash. I deleted Facebook from my phone, deleted task managing apps, deleted emails, deleted unnecessary streams of information from wherever they made contact with me. I made a point to laugh in front of and with my children, and hoped it was not too late to unlearn all that I didn’t need to know.
* * *
This essay first appeared in the “Joy” issue of Creative Nonfiction, the print quarterly founded by nonfiction writer Lee Gutkind in 1993. Our thanks to Angela Palm and the staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

Anna Feigenbaum | An Excerpt from: Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today | Verso | November 2017 | 22 minutes (6,015 words)
* * *
Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology.
With his thick moustache and piercing, deep-set eyes, General Amos Fries’s passion shone through as he spoke. In a 1921 lecture to military officers at the General Staff College in Washington, DC, Fries lauded the Chemical Warfare Service for its wartime achievements. The US entered the chemical arms race “with no precedents, no materials, no literature and no personnel.” The 1920s became a golden age of tear gas. Fries capitalized on the US military’s enthusiastic development of chemical weapons during the war, turning these wartime technologies into everyday policing tools. As part of this task Fries developed an impressive PR campaign that turned tear gas from a toxic weapon into a “harmless” tool for repressing dissent.
Manufacturers maneuvered their way around the Geneva Protocol, navigating through international loopholes with ease. But these frontier pursuits could not last forever. The nascent tear gas industry would come to face its biggest challenge yet, in the unlikely form of US senators. In the 1930s two separate Senate subcommittees were tasked with investigating the dodgy sales practices of industrial munitions companies and their unlawful suppression of protest.
General Fries’s deep personal commitment to save the Chemical Warfare Service won him both allies and critics, often in the same breath. Already known for his staunch anticommunism and disdain for foreigners of all kinds, Fries was an unapologetic proponent of military solutions for dissent both at home and abroad. A journalist for the Evening Independent wrote that Fries was often “accused of being an absolute militarist anxious to develop a military caste in the United States.” But to those who shared his cause, Fries was an excellent figurehead for Chemical Warfare. A family man, a dedicated soldier, and a talented engineer, Fries was the perfect face of a more modern warfare.
Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology. They were a sign of the troops’ perseverance in World War I and an emblem of industrial modernity, showcasing the intersection of science and war. In an Armistice Day radio speech broadcast in 1924, Fries said, “The extent to which chemistry is used can almost be said today to be a barometer of the civilization of a country.” This was poised as a direct intervention to the international proposal for a ban on chemical weapons, as preparations for the Geneva Convention were well under way. If chemical weapons were banned, Fries knew it would likely mean the end of the CWS—and with it his blossoming postwar career. Read more…

Jonny Auping| Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (4,011 words)
Michael Auping recently retired after 25 years as the chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His 40-year curatorial career, which focused on the international development of postwar art, has resulted in numerous, critically-acclaimed exhibitions featuring many of the 20th century’s most prominent visual artists.
Before becoming a curator, Auping spent his post-graduate years in mid-70s Southern California trying to figure out how to break into the art world. Around 1975, he came across the book Working, by Studs Terkel, in which the author interviews various working people — from parking valets and cab drivers to gravediggers and pharmacists — about the meaning they find in their jobs. Auping began going to the studios of Los Angeles-based artists like Robert Irwin, Tony Delap, and Craig Kauffman to record conversations about their work, their background, and most importantly, their process.
His new book, Forty Years: Just Talking About Art, is a compilation of interviews ranging from 1977 to 2017 featuring artists such as Frank Stella, Lucian Freud, Susan Rothenberg, Bruce Nauman. Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and many others. Read more…

Leah Sottile | Longreads | February 2018 | 33 minutes (8,200 words)
The night before Quanice Hayes was shot in the head by a police officer, the skinny 17-year-old was snapping selfies with his girlfriend in a seedy Portland, Oregon, motel room.
Bella Aguilar held her phone close when she clicked off the photos: In one, the 18-year-old girl pushes her tongue out through a smile, her boyfriend leaning over her right shoulder, lips pressed to her cheek, his dreads held back with one hand.
In another, Aguilar cradles her cheek against a black-and-sand-colored gun. It’s fake — the kind of air-powered toy that kids use to pop each other with plastic pellets in indoor arenas. Hayes peeks into the frame behind her.
If you know that the gun is fake, you see a snapshot of two kids playing tough; if you don’t, those photos looks like the beginning of a story about to go terribly wrong.
A few hours later, it did.
It was a cold night in February — a Wednesday. Aguilar and Hayes snapped photos and danced when friends came by the motel room where the couple had been crashing. They drank cough syrup and booze. There were pills and pot and a bag of coke.
They fired the toy gun at the motel’s dirty bathroom mirror, laughing when they couldn’t get the glass to break.
When the long night caught up with Aguilar and she lay down to pass out on the room’s queen-size bed, Hayes yanked on her arm, nagging her to stay awake. Two friends crashed on a pullout couch; two more were on the floor. But Hayes didn’t want to sleep. He walked outside.
Hours passed. The sun came up. Aguilar jolted awake and felt the bed next to her, but her boyfriend wasn’t there. His phone was — it sat on the table next to the bed. She felt frantic. Panicked. Confused. “I don’t know why, but it was that moment. I just felt really, really bad,” she said last summer, sitting outside a Portland Starbucks where she took drags from a Black and Mild.
She couldn’t remember why Hayes had left. She couldn’t remember so much of the night.
She frantically tapped out a text to her boyfriend’s mother, Venus: Do you know where Quanice is? Read more…
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