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We Have Always Lived in the House

Spiffy J / Getty

Victoria Comella | Longreads | July 2018 | 16 minutes (3,784 words)

 

It was a good house, the one where we lived together as a family. It was — still is — a white colonial with black shutters in Loudonville, New York, a small suburban hamlet just outside Albany. Built in the 1920s, it was old but solid with a strong foundation and sturdy walls that housed a perfectly wonderful childhood. I was happy there with my parents and my older sister, and we did what most families do in their houses: We built memories. We built them not knowing at the time they would become memories. That someday in the not-too-distant future we’d look back on those times in the house and wonder where it all went. Wonder who we were in that house, and if those people living that life could have in fact been us.

But it was us. In that house.

And the house would be the last place I’d see my mother alive.

***

A week before I left the house, set to head east to Boston to start my freshman year at Northeastern University, the twin towers fell 150 miles south of where I was standing. The floodgates opened then as I hovered on the brink of adulthood, and in rushed the awareness of just how rocky the terrain of life outside the house could be. How big the world was but also how untenable, how volatile, and how those strong, sturdy walls I had been so desperate to break free of as a teenager were also, perhaps, more important than I’d thought.

During college I would move into three different apartments — Back Bay to Allston then back again. I would see the depression of an entire city the day after the Red Sox lost the 2003 American League Championship Series against the Yankees, and I would be there the following year to watch the city break an 86-year curse to win the World Series before graduating eight months later. In January 2006, I left Boston for New York City after having landed a dream publishing job as a publicity assistant at Penguin. I slept on the floor in an apartment in Williamsburg — before Williamsburg was cool — that belonged to two friends who were in a band. We’d brush our teeth in the kitchen because the bathroom didn’t have a sink.

Everything I had was in a duffel bag. It wasn’t home, but it was New York and it was where my stuff was.

Read more…

An Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Reading List

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Crushing, Ever-Present Weight of Debt

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After both of M.H. Miller’s parents lost their jobs during the financial crisis and his mother was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, Chase bank foreclosed on the family home. To create a better life for their son, the family had borrowed to cover his education, resulting in crushing student loan debt to faceless financial institutions unwilling to refinance to help the family make ends meet. In this harrowing piece at The Baffler, M.H. Miller shares his family’s story of financial collapse and explores the crippling effects of long-term debt.

After the dust settled on the collapse of the economy, on my family’s lives, we found ourselves in an impossible situation: we owed more each month than we could collectively pay. And so we wrote letters to Citibank’s mysterious P.O. Box address in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, begging for help, letters that I doubt ever met a human being. We grew to accept Citibank as a detestable Moloch that we feared and hated but were made to worship. The letters began to comprise a diary for my father in particular, a way to communicate a private anguish that he mostly bottled up, as if he was storing it for later. In one letter, addressed “Dear Citi,” he pleaded for a longer-term plan with lower monthly payments. He described how my mother’s mounting medical bills, as well as Chase Bank’s collection on our foreclosed home, had forced the family into bankruptcy, which provided no protection in the case of private student loans. We were not asking, in the end, for relief or forgiveness, but merely to pay them an amount we could still barely afford. “This is an appeal to Citi asking you to work with us on this loan,” he wrote to no one at all.

Still, following completion of this degree, I enrolled in night school because the cost of a French class at New York’s Cooper Union, an action that deferred my having to start paying off the debt, was cheaper than making the monthly payments I owed. Once I could no longer delay and the payments began, a question echoed through my head from the moment the day began, and often jolted me awake at night. I would look at the number on my paycheck and obsessively subtract my rent, the cost of a carton of eggs and a can of beans (my sustenance during the first lean year of this mess), and the price of a loan payment. The question was: What will you do when the money from the paycheck is gone?

I never arrived at an answer to this question. At my lowest points, I began fantasizing about dying, not because I was suicidal, but because death would have meant relief from having to come up with an answer.

Read the story

The Road to Asylum

As dawn arrives, Marfil Estrella looks out the window of the bus that will take her from San Salvador, El Salvador to Guatemala City, Guatemala. Photos by Danielle Villasana.

Alice Driver | Longreads | June 2018 | 21 minutes (5,300 words)

DISPONIBLE EN ESPAÑOL

“I want to finish elementary school.” — Karla Avelar, 40, founder of the Comcavis Trans Association, which advocates for LGBTI rights in El Salvador

* * *

“Women, don’t be deceived,” boomed the weary, yellow-eyed preacher, his sombrero tipped forward with a drama fitting for his bus-ride sermon, one that would last all the way from San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, to Guatemala City. As he made his way down the aisle of the bus, he stopped to touch women and girls on the head or the arm. “Don’t let men trick you,” he shouted, holding his bible up so high its well-worn pages brushed the roof of the bus. He didn’t touch Marfil Estrella Pérez Méndoza, 26, whose chosen name translates to Ivory Star. As she rested her round, hopeful face on the bus window, dark eyes peering out into the rainy grayness of early morning, the preacher passed by without laying a hand. “How do you say asylum in English?” she whispered.

Marfil Estrella was born in Cuscatlán, El Salvador, in a body that never felt like her own. She was assigned male at birth, and at 15, she came out as gay to her family. Their response was to disown her. “They told me that I brought shame on the family, that I should forget about them, and that I needed to leave,” explained Marfil Estrella. Like many members of the LGBTI community in El Salvador, her family forced her onto the street, and her schooling ended abruptly at ninth grade because she had no money to continue. She fled to San Salvador and slept in a park where she met other gay boys. “I saw a transsexual, and I said, ‘I want to be like her! I want to be like her!’” she recalled. She lived on the street, grew out her hair, and began to dress in women’s clothes, but she had no way to earn a living and consequently became very thin. Eventually she started to do sex work, one of the only options available to trans women in El Salvador to earn money. Read more…

A Woman’s Work: Home Economics* (*I Took Woodworking Instead)

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,600 words)

By the time I was 44 I’d never lived with a boyfriend, a fact that I, a woman living under a patriarchy and not getting any younger, sometimes thought should be bothering me more, but which didn’t.

I even had fond memories of a day when I was 41 and freshly dumped, on which I woke up alone in bed, stretched out, and had a remarkable, quite unexpected realization…

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The Cold War and its Fallout

Photo courtesy the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Vincent Czyz | Longreads | June 2018 | 21 minutes (5,418 words)

 

I was born into Cold War America, 1963: Brezhnev, the Kremlin, the KGB, ICBMs, the Warsaw Pact. My father was a hard-line Republican, a Rough Rider looking for his Roosevelt. Reentry vehicles, NATO, first-strike capability, limited strike, and hardened silos were all part of my vocabulary by the time I was 12. He dismissed with contempt liberals who wanted to cut the defense budget and showed me bar graphs comparing U.S. and Soviet military hardware. The red bars representing Soviet numbers always towered alarmingly over the blue ones, except when it came to helicopters; the United States had a lot of those.

The stalemate between the superpowers has been over for a long time, but every now and then I still catch some of the fallout. While making a furniture run, for example, with a friend — Danny had mothballed a bedroom set at his mother’s house and needed a hand getting it into his truck. We went to the front porch in jeans, construction boots, jackets. It was a chilly March afternoon. He rang the bell.

Danny’s mother, a small Korean woman, opened the door. She gasped when she saw me, then covered her mouth. I almost stepped back, wondering what I’d done wrong.

Mrs. Lo Cascio lowered her hands. “You look just like your father!”

From his early 20s on, my father had had a mustache, and this was the first time Mrs. Lo Cascio had seen me with a beard. Her reaction was a rerun of an incident at my father’s wake in June 1983, a couple of weeks before I turned 20. Uncle Eddy, an adopted member of the family, put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You’re the ghost of your father when he was 17.” As often happens at funerals, his face performed a high-wire act between smiling and crying.

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A New Yorker, and a Sick Person

David Malan/Getty

Porochista Khakpour | Sick: A Memoir | June 2018 | 9 minutes (2,300 words)

 

Ever since I can remember, I dreamed of escaping. Escaping what was always the question, but my life had been one of escape since I was born — revolution and war sent us through Asia and Europe and eventually to America. We were in exile, my parents always reminded me, we had escaped. It was temporary. But escape was also something I longed for in eighties Southern California, which constantly felt foreign to me, a place of temporary settling but no home. Everything was tan in a way my brown skin could not compete with. Everything was blond in a way my bottle-blond mother could not recreate, gilt upon gold upon gilt. Everything was carefree and smiles, gloss and glitter, and money to no end. We, meanwhile, were poor and anxious and alone. When my brother was born in our neighboring city Arcadia, California, in 1983, I watched his pink squirming body stowed into a giant felt red heart — it was Valentine’s Day — and even stuffed in all that makeshift American affection I thought he didn’t have a chance. None of us did.

As the tremors continued, as my body somehow grew smaller rather than larger — my mother always quick to slap my hand when I reached for the leftover cake batter the way sitcom kids did, her ritual baking more American obligation than motherly delight — I also began feeling a need to escape the body. All my few friends got their periods before they were teenagers, but mine waited deep into my first teenage year, on the brink of fourteen, like an afterthought. Everything about my body felt wrong to me, especially as California went from the eighties to the nineties, and I knew escape would have to be a real revolution of presence.

My mind always went to literal distance, eyes on the globe landing without fail on New York. It’s hard to know if all the movies of the era did it, Fame and its many knockoffs, Annie and all the stories of rags-to-riches miracles in Manhattan, told me New York was the motherland for misfit creatives to thrive, for foreigners with big dreams, for girl authors. But I think where it really came from was my aunt Simin, who was the only living role model I ever had. My mother’s world, as it sought to merge with the average American woman’s more and more, spoke to me less and less — I found myself cooling from her endless mall outings, Estée Lauder free gifts, diet everything, soap operas, and department store catalogues. Instead my eyes went to my father’s sister.

Read more…

We Are Scientists

(AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

Kirtan NautiyalBoulevard | Spring 2018 | 25 minutes (6,903 words)

In 1969, my father traveled alone from India to Boston so that he could enroll in the master’s program in geophysics at MIT.

I don’t know whether he flew or came by boat, so when I try to picture him setting foot in America for the first time, I don’t know what to imagine. I’ve tried to find the photographic evidence, but there aren’t any pictures of the fifteen years he spent in this country before he married my mother. Maybe he just threw out the tattered albums when we were moving between houses, but it’s more likely that he never took any photos at all. He’s never been a sentimental man.

I also don’t know why he chose to come in the first place. He has never had any great fascination with money; despite his making a good living, we lived in shabby rentals for most of my childhood, and my mother shopped for us from department store discount racks. I never felt that professional success was what he was after either. He never advanced past middle management, and except for one late-night discussion in which he made clear that he felt there was a glass ceiling for people with our skin color, I never heard one word of frustration from him about work. Maybe it was to help his family – along with his brother who came to Kansas State University earlier in the 1960s, he supported his parents in India for years with the money he earned. When trying to make us feel guilty about our second-generation lassitude, which is often, he tells us of how at MIT he had to work all hours of the night in the cafeteria and library while keeping up a full courseload, so maybe we need to be a little more appreciative that he helped with the room and board during our own time in college. Read more…

Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose

AP Photo / CSA-Printstock, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Elisa Albert | How This Night Is Different | May 2018 | 23 minutes (5,706 words)

October 2004

Dear Philip,

You must be aware of the intimidation factor inherent in anyone’s writing to you, but I wonder if maybe the paradigm is similar to what happens when a stunning woman walks into a room: no one approaches her, she’s simply too beautiful; everyone assumes they have no shot. Maybe you don’t get many letters. Maybe you haven’t received a truly balls-out, bare-assed communiqué since 1959.

You once signed a book for me. That’s the extent of our connection thus far, but it’s something, isn’t it? The book was The Counterlife, but I had yet to read it when I presented it to you for signature. You were unsure of the spelling of my name, and so there’s an endearing awkwardness, a lack of flow, to the inscription. For E, you wrote, and the pen held still too long on the page, leaving a mark at the point of the lowest horizontal’s completion while you waited for me to continue spelling. L, you continued on, and then, again, a spot of bleeding, hesitant ink before the i and the s and the a, which proceed as they should before your slanted, rote, wonderful autograph. I remember being all too aware of the impatient line behind me, people clutching their copies of Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, The Human Stain, the odd Zuckerman Unbound. I tried to meet your eye, I tried to communicate something meaningful. The others, of course, didn’t get it. I wanted you to know: I got it. Later, when I found my way to reading the book, I actually purchased a whole new copy so I wouldn’t sully my signed paperback. I cherish our moment of eye contact, your pen hovering over the title page, my name circulating in that colossal mind of yours.

But wait. This is no mere fan letter; no mere exercise in soft-core intellectual erotica constructed for your amusement. I have an objective. How old are you now, Philip? Early seventies, is it? You are, of course, notoriously private. I have the books, sure, like everyone else. And the reviews of the books, each of which mentions the notorious privacy. And there’s the Claire Bloom debacle, which I hesitate even to mention, given its complete disrespect of the notorious privacy (though you might be happy to know that I couldn’t find “Leaving A Doll’s House” in any of the four sizable bookstores I checked and had to finally order it on Amazon). And The Facts, which I made a point of reading after the Claire Bloom, for balance. A graduate school friend of mine was your research assistant for a few years while we pursued our MFAs and it took her almost a year of post-workshop drinking to slyly confess, to a rapt audience of salivating young writers, her association to you. (Otherwise you’ll be happy to know she was loyal; she professed total ignorance of your life, your private matters, even your address. She seemed, in retrospect, somewhat terrified of you. I half-seriously offered her boyfriend a blow job if he’d get me your address. The table of young writers giggled madly and took big sips of beer.)

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A Chance to Rewrite History: The Women Fighters of the Tamil Tigers

Illustration by Cornelia Li

Kim Wall | Mansi Choksi | Longreads | May 2018 | 22 minutes (5,980 words)

Kim Wall and Mansi Choksi met at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2012. Mansi returned to India after graduation and Kim soon followed; it was the start of a writing partnership that took the pair on reporting trips to Africa and Sri Lanka.

“We went on our first reporting trip together to write about an emerging Chinatown in Kampala in 2015,” says Mansi. “And then the next year, I moved to New York, where she was living, so we would spend our afternoons working together.”

Mansi and Kim traveled to Sri Lanka in 2016. Mansi recalls Kim’s dedication to telling the story of the women who fought with the Tamil Tigers during Sri Lanka’s brutal, 25-year civil war.

“Kim genuinely fell in love with the women we were writing about,” says Mansi. “You can hear it in her voice, in the tapes of our interviews.”

Not long after Mansi and Kim filed this story, Kim Wall was murdered while on another reporting assignment. The story of the Tamil Tiger women became the last piece she wrote. We have been humbled to work with Mansi over the past several months to give this story a home at Longreads.

To honor Kim’s memory, the Kim Wall Memorial Fund was created to “fund a female reporter to cover subculture, broadly defined, and what Kim liked to call ‘the undercurrents of rebellion.'”

–Krista Stevens, Editor

* * *

Velu Chandra Kala was 17 when she charged into her school principal’s office with a bag of milk toffees. She was small and jumpy, with dimpled cheeks and a woolly fringe. The principal took a toffee, briefly looking up from his desk, and assumed it was her birthday. Next, she was in science class, surrounded by howling classmates. They were hugging her, weeping into her palms, begging her not to leave. The cookery teacher took a toffee, and teared up. Next, the vice principal. Afterward she left the toffees in her mother’s kitchen, by the stove. She was on her way to join an armed conflict.

* * *

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