Search Results for: crime

How I Got My Shrink Back

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Susan Shapiro | Longreads | February 2020 | 28 minutes (7,036 words)

Rushing to see him that Friday evening in August, I turned the corner and was shocked to catch Haley leaving his brownstone. What the hell was she doing here? I prayed my eyes were wrong and it was another tall redhead, not my favorite student. Inching closer, I saw it definitely was her — in skinny jeans, heels and a pink blouse, her unmistakable auburn hair flapping down her back as she flounced away. I froze, so crushed I couldn’t breathe.

Darting inside, I shrieked, “I just saw Haley walk out of here. You lied to me!”

“I never lied to you,” he insisted, quickly closing his door.

“Don’t tell me you’re sleeping with her?”

“Of course not.” He looked horrified.

He wasn’t my lover, cheating with a younger woman. He was the long-term therapist who’d saved me from decades of drugs, alcohol, and self-destruction. I couldn’t believe that right before our session, Dr. Winters had met with my protégée, whom I’d loved like a daughter. For the past three years, she’d sat in my classroom, living room, beside me at literary events, and speed walking around the park. She was the only person I’d ever asked him not to see, and vice versa. I felt betrayed from both sides.

Earlier that day, Haley had emailed to see if I’d recommend my gynecologist, housekeeper and literary agency. “Want my husband too?” I’d joked. In the spring, when I’d first sensed she was ransacking my address book and life, I’d asked Dr. Winters about the eerie All About Eve aura.

“She sounds nuts,” he’d said.

“That’s your clinical assessment?” I asked, adding “Don’t be flippant. She’s important to me.”

He’d sworn he wouldn’t treat her, laughing off my paranoia.

Now I could barely speak as I realized she’d broken her vow. And he’d let her in, giving her the slot directly before mine, then ran late, as if he wanted me to catch her. Perched at the edge of his leather couch, I imagined Haley sitting right where I was, leaning on the embroidered cushions, spilling secrets she’d previously shared only with me to my confidante. His plush work space morphed from my safest haven for 15 years into the creepy crawly Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

“Then why was she here?” I couldn’t process her so out of context.

“That woman is not my patient,” he insisted.

His technical wordplay sounded like Bill denying Monica. I craved a drink, joint, and cigarette.
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A Survey of My Right Arm

Greenspe Huang/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)

Ge Gao The Threepenny Review | Fall 2019 | 15 minutes (3,057 words)

 

Last summer, I woke up one morning to find my right hand couldn’t grab the doorknob to turn it open. The next thing I knew was that no matter how many times I shook it, it remained numb. Soon, on a hot June night, a furtive pain traveled from my right elbow to my palm, back and forth, through and through, like a fractious child jumping between hopscotch courts with his full body gravity, determined and ferocious.

I am a Chinese woman. Two things I am good at are self-diagnosing and self-preservation. I went to a Chinese massage place the next morning. The lady there told me it was “tennis elbow.” Which seemed funny and unfair to me: I had never played tennis in my life. When I was eighteen and dreamed about my future self wearing a short white tennis skirt, running in a blue court, I signed up for a tennis class—and quit after the first session. My skinny right arm was not capable of holding a 9.4-ounce tennis racquet against a spinning ball. The lady at the massage place first used her arm, then her feet to dissolve the knots on my forearm. A day later, small black and blue bruises on my right arm left a message—there was pain; there was suffering. I consciously wore long sleeves to cover it up, afraid of being misunderstood as a domestic violence victim. But I would roll my sleeve up when I met my friends for coffee. It was show and tell: my pain needed to be noticeable to others as well.

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Detective Fitbit

Courtesy of Getty Images

The personal activity-tracking device, Fitbit, has become increasingly popular since it was first released in 2009. It was therefore only a matter of time until one would be worn by victims or suspects of crimes — and potentially be the key to finding out what had actually occurred. As Lauren Smiley explains for Wired, people are inadvertently wearing “a sort of black box for the body that reveals physiological truths that its wearer might prefer to conceal.”

At 90 years old, Tony Aiello was arrested for the murder of his stepdaughter, Karen Navarra. On the day of her death, Tony dropped by her house with a surprise treat of biscotti and pizza. He claimed she was alive when he left. Her Fitbit told a different story.

At a San Jose police station, Tony was hauled into a homicide interrogation room. “What the hell am I doing here?” he asked detectives Brian Meeker and Mike Montonye. Then he waived his right to remain silent and amiably rattled off his life history and answered questions about Karen, until one detective abruptly shifted the subject: Did Tony know what a Fitbit was? He shook his head. They told him that it was a watch with a step counter built into it. “Oh, nice,” Tony marveled, not seeing where the questioning was going. It also has a heart rate monitor, they said. “Oh, that’s better yet.”

The detectives continued: The data shows that Karen’s heart stopped at 3:28 pm, they told Tony. What’s more, they knew Tony was there at the time.

“Oh, no,” Tony said. “She was alive when I left.”

Should we be using Fitbit information in court cases? There are still no set legal standards for how and when this new type of data should be admitted. There are also no guarantees it can be relied on.

Smartwatches decipher heart rate using green LEDs that beam hundreds of times per second into capillaries through the skin. Those capillaries allow in more of the light when full of blood, and less between beats, and the device measures how much light is absorbed. That measurement is then siphoned through a proprietary algorithm to generate a heart rate figure. University of Wisconsin researchers looked at how well wrist-worn fitness trackers measured heart rate, comparing it to an electrocardiograph, the gold standard for heart monitoring. They found that the fitness trackers’ heart rate deviated more from the actual rate when a subject exercised on a treadmill than when at rest. (Fitbit won’t talk specifics about its accuracy, saying in a statement, “We are confident in the performance of all our devices” and that the company continues to test them.)

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25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez on the set of 'Hustlers' in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

As more publications pursue blockbuster stories with film and television potential, producers in Hollywood and the magazine industry are taking their inspiration from successful article-to-film adaptations of the past that have achieved box office success.

Here are 25 gold-standard film adaptations of magazine articles, published over the course of half a century as cover stories, features, or breaking news, as well as direct links to read all 25 stories online.

Legacy magazines with well-known print editions dominate this list, as do the nonfiction writers that legacy magazines accept and champion. Many of these writers’ names will be familiar to readers, as will the majority of the magazines and films themselves, in many cases because celebrated journalists inspired these major motion pictures at the peak of their careers as writers and reporters. Name recognition in one industry reinforces name recognition in another, and — despite the incredible diversity of feature-length nonfiction being published today by new voices most mainstream audiences have yet to discover — institutional support still tends to elevate known veterans.

While the talents of all of the writers on this list are undeniable, there are also well-documented structural biases that account for why so many of the writers represented here are overwhelmingly male, white, or Susan Orlean. These stories belong on any narrative nonfiction syllabus on their own merit, but I hope these samples are still just the beginning, and that new filmmakers and magazine writers can start to work together far more often on a greater breadth of material, with sufficient editorial guidance and studio backing to support them.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ve limited this roundup to favor adaptations (loosely defined) based primarily on magazine-style features, including only a couple of films based on award-winning newspaper investigations. The list of new film and television adaptations based on popular books or podcasts, let alone reporting that has helped support the explosion in streaming documentary formats, would run even longer.

It takes time, access, imagination, and resources to be able to realize ambitious true stories like these in their original form as narrative magazine features. It would be a welcome change to see greater diversity in the production pipeline in the coming years: in the subjects of narrative stories, in the publications considered for exclusive source material, in the creative teams that are given studio support, in the agencies brokering deals, in the awards and recognition that elevate new work, and in the storytellers who are given the resources to write long.

Writers are the lifeblood of all of these industries, and will always play a pivotal role in any production that is based on a true story.

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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Based on Can You Say…Hero? by Tom Junod (Esquire, 1998)

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.”

Hustlers (2019)

Based on The Hustlers at Scores by Jessica Pressler (The Cut, 2015)

While evolutionary theory and The Bachelor would suggest that a room full of women hoping to attract the attention of a few men would be cutthroat-competitive, it’s actually better for strippers to work together, because while most men might be able keep their wits, and their wallets, around one scantily clad, sweet-smelling sylph, they tend to lose their grip around three or four. Which is why at Hustler, as elsewhere, the dancers worked in groups.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Based on My Addicted Son by David Sheff (The New York Times Magazine, 2005)

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, “That was that.” It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, said that methamphetamine makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on meth he became unrecognizable.

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‘What’s this guy doing loose in Malheur County?’

Image by Curtis Perry via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Anthony Montwheeler spent 20 years in an Oregon mental healthy facility after being found not guilty of kidnapping his ex-wife by reason of insanity. He was released after claiming that he’d been faking the whole time, then immediately kidnapped another ex-wife, eventually stabbing her and killing another person during an ensuing car chase, all in full view of witnesses. And yes, he’s going to plead insanity again. How did he get the “not guilty” verdict 20 years ago? How did he get out? Is he mentally ill; what even is “mental illness” in the criminal justice context? In Rolling Stone, Rob Fischer walks us through Montwheeler’s case and the many blurry lines and troubling policies around the insanity defense in the U.S.

The hearing lasted more than two hours, but Montwheeler testified for only eight and a half minutes. When a state official asked if he ever had trouble sleeping, Montwheeler said, “No. I’ve always been able to sleep at night.” Had he ever been depressed, or felt that life is not worth living? “I’ve always been happy,” Montwheeler said. “I mean, I’ve never been depressed.” So then, the official pressed, you’ve never had any trouble getting out of bed and going about your activities? “No,” Montwheeler replied. “I’ve always showed up for work. I’ve always been Johnny on the spot.”

After a brief recess, the review board found Montwheeler was “no longer affected by a qualifying mental disease or defect,” which meant the state was legally required to discharge him. Offenders who are discharged from the state hospital, even those, like Montwheeler, released before the completion of their full term, are not diverted into penitentiaries. They are set free without additional oversight or guaranteed access to state mental health care.

The board’s chair, Kate Lieber, a Portland-based attorney, was clearly upset. “I don’t even know where to start,” she said. While maintaining a lie for 20 years, she noted, Montwheeler had avoided prison, lived rent-free, and received expensive care from trained professionals. “I mean, that is troubling on all sorts of levels,” Lieber said. “I’m assuming somebody in the system might do a forensic look at this and figure out what the hell happened. But as of now, you’re discharged.” Before Montwheeler walked out the door, she added, “My hope is that you’ll do the right thing. I am sincerely worried that you won’t.”

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“What Do I Know To Be True?”: Emma Copley Eisenberg on Truth in Nonfiction, Writing Trauma, and The Dead Girl Newsroom

Sylvie Rosokoff / Hachette Books

Jacqueline Alnes | Longreads | February 2020 | 21 minutes (5,966 words)

 
Am I a journalist?” I found myself asking Emma Copley Eisenberg. On a sunny day in mid-October, Eisenberg sat adjacent to me at the dining room table in her West Philadelphia home, a spread of sliced tomatoes, chicken, and perfectly steamed asparagus she prepared on a plate between us. I am certainly not a journalist in any meaningful sense of the word — outside of an MFA in creative nonfiction, during which I learned to conduct research, I have no formal schooling or training — but Emma and I are both infatuated with the boundaries between subject and writer, research and lived experience, and how we classify it all. How does who we are and our own lived experiences affect the types of research we reach for? Is there such a thing as objectivity, or do we land closer to the truth if we expose our own flaws and biases and complicated histories on the page? And what is truth, after all? 

Eisenberg, in her debut book, The Third Rainbow Girl, wrestles meaningfully with these questions and many others. Though her book is marketed as true crime, and though a major thread within the narrative is the murder of Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero, two women on their way to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering, Eisenberg undermines many features of the subgenre by centering place as a major subject. Her descriptions of Pocahontas County, both in memoir sections, in which Eisenberg relays her time living in Appalachia, and reported sections, in which Eisenberg offers insight into the ways in which the murders of Durian and Santomero brought to the surface harmful stereotypes perpetuated against the region, complicate perceptions rather than flatten them into any packageable or easy narrative. In prose that brims with empathy, and through research that illuminates narratives that have long been hidden by problematic representation, Eisenberg exposes the kinds of fictions we tell ourselves often enough that we believe them to be true.  

During the course of our sprawling conversation, one punctuated only by friendly interruptions from a gray house cat named Gabriel, Eisenberg and I talked about what it means to seek truth in nonfiction, and how writing the personal can allow for more complicated realities to emerge; how undermining conventions of genre can impact the way a book is both marketed and read; and what it means to find clarity — or at least community — while writing into murky, and often traumatizing subject matter.  Read more…

Wait, What?

Chung Sung-Jun / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2020 |  9 minutes (2,335 words)

I used to think I was the only one who dealt with this particular existential crisis. It’s the one where every choice you make coincides with the torture of knowing that you didn’t choose something else. And that something else, by virtue of not being chosen, has infinite potential for being the right choice. It’s a fallacy, of course. Because usually there is no right or wrong decision, just a decision. And when that decision is made, it’s not as final as all that. It’s one option in a series of options your life is made up of, some of which have bigger consequences, most of which have smaller ones. But that fallacy is what we bring to any prize or award or, you know, any competition that culminates in a reward of some kind. It makes sense, because it’s binary — you get it or you don’t — but the consequences usually aren’t. It certainly feels like your life will fundamentally change if you win, but more often than not that’s not the case. The choice is made, everyone goes ballistic, and pretty soon after everything goes back to how it was.

A South Korean movie with subtitles was not supposed to win four Oscars, an 18-year-old girl who makes music in her brother’s bedroom wasn’t supposed to take home five Grammys, and a foul-mouthed British woman shouldn’t have bagged three Emmys. There’s a cognitive dissonance to all of this, because, by now, we expect our institutions — Hollywood or otherwise — to make the wrong choices, which we expect because these institutions are populated by people who don’t actually reflect the world, only its most privileged citizens. And what’s a greater distillation of an out-of-touch industry’s allegiances and exclusions than the awards it bestows? The Emmys are The Big Bang Theory, the Grammys are “Shape of You,” the Oscars are Green Book. Filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, the one who took home those four statuettes for Parasite, could have been speaking about any number of ceremonies when he infamously said last year of the Oscars, “They’re very local.” Which I took to mean that the Academy tends to reward not only Americans, but work that expresses the white capitalist values that form American society (and Hollywood within it). When Parasite won, the dissonance didn’t just suddenly resolve itself, because we knew underneath that win that Hollywood itself hadn’t actually changed. So we burdened what should have been a moment of unadulterated joy with analysis — about the work, about the winner, about the voters, about the audience, about cinema. In Parasite terms, we covered it in peach fuzz.

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It’s weird when deserving people win. It’s like a mindfuck. That’s what I thought (and tweeted) after Bong Joon-ho won the final Oscar of the year. What else do you say? It’s like being in the middle of a verbal sparring match with someone and they suddenly spit out something reasonable. You’re struck dumb. The Oscars almost never get it right, and when they get it wrong, it’s wrong (remember Crash?). This year, seeing the stage full of artists who are usually shut out of the ceremony — non-Americans, people of color, people with actual talent — accepting “Hollywood’s biggest honor” infected us all with such a severe case of cognitive dissonance I could hear our brains collectively short-circuit. And because of the way cognitive dissonance works, because it means we do everything we can to reconfigure the situation to align with what we believe to be true — in this case, that the Academy is “local” — Parasite’s Best Picture win was encumbered by mental acrobatics. It was as though no one wanted to get too intoxicated because they had experienced the sobering return to the status quo so many times before. The award became a spoil of war over identity politics, doubly here, because not only is Bong South Korean, but Parasite is also in Korean. That meant no one could just enjoy its triumphs outside the context of its ethnic dynamics.

It was barely more than a month ago that Issa Rae deadpanned, “Congratulations to those men,” while announcing the all-male Oscar nominees for Best Director. In the all-white-but-one category, the best we could hope for was a win by the Asian genius, who, as luck would have it, had also made the best film (enough about The Irishman). And when Bong’s film was announced after a suitably dramatic pause by Jane Fonda, it all went so smoothly, it was like it was meant to be. This wasn’t the Moonlight fiasco, that embarrassing stutter in 2017 where the ceremony juddered with a, yeah, no, the better one, the black one, that’s the one that won, sorry, where’s the trophy? But that historic faux pas is still so fresh that its shadow is still cast across the Academy’s stage. It’s a not-so-distant reminder that stories like those continue to be interlopers, and one that partially but inevitably eclipses wins like Bong’s, which, all things being fair, should not have to answer for it. But he does. Per Adam Nayman at The Ringer, “a skeptic might wonder about the enthusiasm of any filmmaker — even such an obviously wry, self-styled subversive — desiring membership to a club that’s not always open or accommodating.” It’s true, but it is also true that this is a wonder that does not tend to greet the likes of Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino. Because nothing they do, nothing they or their films represent, really clashes with this particular gentlemen’s club. They are white men presenting films focused on white men to a group of white men. There is no dissonance there to correct.

Unless you’re Joaquin Phoenix, who briefly shouldered the dissonance plaguing his marginalized peers. Prior to his Oscar win, the Joker star was extolled on social media for his self-flagellating speech at the diversity-blind BAFTAS. “I think that we send a very clear message to people of color that you’re not welcome here,” he said, reportedly to some uncomfortable silence. “This is not a self-righteous condemnation because I’m ashamed to say that I’m part of the problem.” While Phoenix initially walked off the BAFTAS stage leaving his trophy behind, picking up the Oscar so soon after that implied a tacit acceptance of Hollywood’s problematic politics, if not Britain’s. Engaging in the awards ceremony, being bowled over by a win of any kind,  implies that on some level you respect the institution, you believe in it. The only way around this, really, is full-out rejection.

Several actors have avoided any hint of hypocrisy by extricating themselves from awards proceedings entirely. Marlon Brando infamously sent an Indigenous woman to reject his Oscar on the grounds of the film industry’s mistreatment of the Indigenous community, while George C. Scott preceded him by refusing to participate in 1970 in what he called a “two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons.” (That he did engage later somewhat undercutting his stance.) This has bled outside the Academy, to other industries where awards act as the ultimate expression of their ideals: Julie Andrews snubbed the Tonys for snubbing the rest of her team, for one, while knighthood after knighthood has been passed over over the years to protest the enduring monarchy. After declining the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean-Paul Sartre outlined how an award is inextricable from its awarding body and the awarding body’s history. “The writer who accepts an honor of this kind involves as well as himself the association or institution which has honored him,” he wrote. “The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances, as in the present case.”

Increasingly aware that awards doled out by older institutions are misrepresentative of the culture and, in the case of the Grammys at least so committed to misconduct they will essentially fire even the CEO for confronting their sexism, artists have turned to smaller events for direction. Free of institutionalized myopia, they move more fluidly with the times. Before the Nobel committee announced it was awarding genocide denier Peter Handke the literature prize, for instance, The New York Times published a conversation among critics in which the Booker Prize (big in the industry, less outside of it) was floated as more indicative of the literary world’s proclivities; two women, Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo, shared the award the same year Handke won the Nobel. Meanwhile, the Independent Spirit Awards have openly owned their status as the official alternative, riffing this year — “we recognize female directors — all two of them!” — on the gaping lacunae the Oscar nominations left behind. Lulu Wang’s The Farewell won the top prize, while Adam Sandler secured a long-awaited win for his frenetic, lived-in performance in Uncut Gems. On the podium, the Sandman directly confronted the Academy he had only poked fun at on social media. He compared the situation to being passed over in high school for most good looking — in favor of a “feather-haired douchebag” — and winning best personality instead. “So let all of those feather-haired douchebag motherfuckers get their Oscars tomorrow night,” he said. “Their handsome good looks will fade in time, while our independent personalities will shine on forever.”  

Oscar winner Bong does happen to have feathered hair, but cognitive dissonance still accompanied his victory as a corrective for how unexpected it was. Parasite won four awards, yes, but why no acting prizes? Racism, obviously. The wider skeptical responses to what appeared to be attempts by the Academy to be a little “woker” further unmasked them as shallow performance, sometimes literally. The opening Janelle Monáe–led musical number? “Diversity,” a number of critics of color deadpanned. Natalie Portman’s cape festooned with the cursive names of overlooked female filmmakers? Hypocrisy. Her production company has worked mostly with men. Meanwhile, Renée Zellweger’s win was just a reminder of Judy Garland’s lack of wins, and Joaquin Phoenix’s speech was more like an ad for PETA. The complaints had varying levels of validity, but why the impulse to make them so expediently? There seemed to be this overarching need to expose the flaws in what appeared to be a precarious night based on a set of arbitrary choices — to cast aside these momentary remedies to reveal the foundational faults that cannot in the long run support them. 

This is the drive to push for deeper systemic change where we can, to protest where there is nothing apparent to protest, to miss no chances. To revel in a win is to fleetingly ignore everything that’s wrong, and there’s no time left for that. A symbol of progress like Parasite thus becomes shackled by its own symbolism, dragging along the wider sociocultural implications with its artistry. It then becomes not only a perfectly executed piece of filmmaking, but the Oscar anomaly, the one which bolsters our expectations of the Academy, the foreign film which secures a wider theatrical run post-win, the popular nonwhite release standing in for all the nonwhite releases.

* * *

“Cognitive dissonance is a motivating state of affairs,” wrote social psychologist Leon Festinger, who coined the term. “Just as hunger impels a person to eat, so does dissonance impel a person to change his opinions or his behavior.” Bong didn’t expect to win over the Oscars. The dissonance he felt was clear in the way he admired his trophy on stage, the way he proceeded to lead a standing ovation for fellow nominee Scorsese, who he quoted — “The most personal is the most creative” — and praised along with the remaining nominees: Tarantino, Todd Phillips, and Sam Mendes. “If the Academy allows,” he concluded. “I would like to get a Texas chainsaw, split the Oscar trophy into five and share it with all of you.” That the director from South Korea who made a quintessentially South Korean film felt the need to create a feeling of inclusivity on a quintessentially American stage says something about where America, if not the Oscars, is right now. That is to say, that marginalized communities, while protesting their historical treatment, can also recognize the merits of the institutions that have neglected them, deferring to aspects of their legacies despite their lack of diversity. 

But the opposite is rarely true. The institutions and the people who represent them should be deferring to the populations that they have overlooked for so long. But they don’t; just look at Tarantino’s refusal at Cannes to even engage in a question about gender politics with respect to Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Which is why Phoenix’s words at the BAFTAs were so powerful, because he was admitting that in some sense it is a zero-sum game, that his chance denied someone else’s, that he was complicit in this denial. It was groundbreaking when it really shouldn’t be, when for nonwhite filmmakers like Bong this level of discourse is expected.

Generally, it’s up to the outsiders to help other outsiders. On the Oscars red carpet, Bong made sure to mention Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, which had been overlooked, despite taking Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Awards. Insiders seem to miss this heightened urgency around inclusivity because it is not urgent for them. Critics clamored to determine what Parasite’s win could mean for American cinema, but that question was beside the point. The unexpected win by an international artist on domestic soil says less about the cracks in Hollywood’s traditions than it does about the world, which almost imperceptibly but certainly is changing both despite us and because of us, both for the worse and for the better, with marginalized populations leading the biggest changes of all. As always, Bong was already aware of this communal dissonance before everyone else. As he said at the Lumière Festival in October: “When I made Parasite, it was like trying to witness our world through a microscope. The film talks about two opposing families, about the rich versus the poor, and that is a universal theme, because we all live in the same country now: that of capitalism.”  

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

House of the Century

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Daisy Alioto | Longreads | February 2020 | 16 minutes (3,903 words)

“A house is the physical manifestation of the ego”

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, “My Very Own Dream House”

I. Security

I have always harbored suspicions about fire escape windows. When my mother was living in Boston in the 80s, her TV set sat across from the window that opened onto her fire escape. One night she woke up to a hairy leg entering the window and screamed loudly enough to wake her neighbors and scare away the television thief. An acquaintance who lives in Park Slope listened to an intruder pop the glass out of her fire escape window and watched their iPhone light sweep closer to the bedroom as she silently tried to shake her boyfriend awake. After an eternity, he sprung up and chased the intruder out with a hockey stick.

My boyfriend does not harbor suspicions about fire escape windows, so when he moved to a one bedroom apartment, security considerations became my own research project. The acquaintance in Park Slope sent a link to a $20 window alarm on Amazon. I watched a short video about the installation process and began to read the reviews. The top review was 5/5 stars, written by Mary in Florida and it broke my heart more than any thief ever could.

She writes that she debated buying a door alarm but never did, despite the fact that the rest of the house was baby proofed for two children under two years old. One day, after feeding a bird outside, the younger one slipped back out without her noticing — probably to chase the bird, she says. In a few minutes she sensed the lack of noise in the house, the too quietness. She found him in the pond across the street and he died the next day.

The review continues. “I am a good mom,” she writes, listing the other ways she baby-proofed the home. “I am a good mom.” I’ve forgotten why I’ve come to Amazon. Maybe this is someone’s idea of a sick joke, a manufacturer’s enthusiastic review of their own product gone too far but no… with a little Googling, I find Mary and the local reporting on the tragedy.

I want to reach through my screen and hold Mary. To tell her yes, you are a good mom. It’s not your fault that doors open and babies look at birds. Of course you are a good mother, there’s just so much that can go wrong with a home.

According to Robert Lee’s A Treatise On Hysteria (1871), Greek physician Aretaeus was one of the first thinkers to link hysteria to the female body. “In the middle of the flanks of a woman lies the womb, a female viscus closely resembling an animal.” The womb wanders the body, leaving a slew of undesirable symptoms in its wake. “On the whole it is like an animal within an animal,” Aretaeus writes.
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Shelved: Jeff Buckley’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk

Frans Schellekens / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,966 words)

 

On the evening of May 29, 1997, singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley and his roadie Keith Foti picked their way down the steep, weedy bank to Wolf River Harbor in Memphis, Tennessee. Buckley, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and heavy Doc Martens boots, waded into the water singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” After about 15 minutes, a boat passed. Concerned about their boom box getting wet, Foti moved it out of harm’s way. When he turned back around, Buckley was gone with the undertow. His body wouldn’t be found for days. He was 30 years old.

Jeff Buckley had mastered that most singular of instruments: his own voice. Possessing the same incredible range as opera icon Pavarotti, his phrasing could be anguished or exquisite; his breath control was phenomenal. Beyond that, he was the soul of eclecticism: Raised on prog rock, he dabbled in hair metal, gospel, country, and soul. Once, during a live performance, he improvised in the ecstatic style of Qawwali devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — someone Buckley once described as “my Elvis” — over the riff from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS - JANUARY 30:M-209 is a light-weight portable pin-and-lug cipher machine, developed at the beginning of World War II by Boris Hagelin. Crypto AG, a predecessor of Crypto International, was a Swiss company that emerged from World War II with complex and secure code-breaking machines. The firm made hundreds of millions of dollars, selling equipment to nearly 130 countries. What none of those customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with German intelligence. (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Greg Miller, Melissa del Bosque, Katherine Rosman, Laura Marsh, and Alexander Huls.

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1. ‘The intelligence coup of the century’

Greg Miller | The Washington Post | February 11, 2020 | 35 minutes (8,928 words)

The CIA, in a secret partnership with West Germany, used Crypto AG to sell encryption services to gullible governments and then promptly read all their clandestine communications.

2. A Group of Agents Rose Through the Ranks to Lead the Border Patrol. They’re Leaving It in Crisis.

Melissa del Bosque | Pro Publica | February 10, 2020 | 24 minutes (6,204 words)

How several agents from a small outpost in Arizona, including recently retired chief Carla Provost, climbed to the top of the Border Patrol, then one by one retired, leaving corruption, misconduct and a toxic culture in their wake.

3. The Chaos at Condé Nast

Katherine Rosman | The New York Times | February 12, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,135 words)

Responding to Details editor Dan Peres’s new recovery memoir, Katherine Rosman casts a jaundiced eye upon the lax culture and unquestioned expense accounts at Condé Nast Publications that allowed Peres (and several of his colleagues, who also have tell-alls in the works) to get away with gross acts of self-indulgence and mistreatment of their employees.

4. Infinite Jerk

Laura Marsh | The New Republic | February 12, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,859 words)

Within “the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and sexism in the publishing industry,” jerks are praised and women are erased. 

5. Family Business

Alexander Huls | Truly*Adventurous | January 28, 2020 | 31 minutes (7,773 words)

What do you do when all you ever really wanted was to be loved by your dad and all he wants is to use you to perpetrate crime? Vincent Moretti got wrapped up in his overbearing father’s penchant for organizing inside-job armoured car heists. When Archie Moretti refused to share the take fairly, Vincent decided he had had enough of the patriarchy.