Search Results for: crime

Other Rachel Lyons

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rachel Lyon | Longreads | April 2019 | 23 minutes (5,849 words)

 

I signed up for Gmail in 2005, a month after graduating college and outgrowing my .edu address. Technically the service was still in beta testing. It was early enough that I could claim my entire name, beginning to end, no numbers or crazy characters. The simplicity of my “OG handle”speaks to its vintage. I have to admit I’m rather proud of it. It also means I get a lot of correspondence not actually meant for me. Since I joined Gmail, it has grown to more than 1.5 billion active users: 20% of the world’s population. Since I joined Gmail, the world’s population itself has increased by 1+ billion! There are only so many words in the English language. There are only so many variations. Social media handles are stolen and sold like Uranium on the black market. IP addresses are finite.

I am included on the timesheet of a Melbourne store, Boost Juice — scheduled to work the closing shift on March 24 — and on the agenda for the 64th annual general meeting of the Citizens Advice Bureau in a small town outside of London. World Vision UK writes to thank me for my “donation of 10” (ten what, I don’t know). Kid to Kid Utah thanks me, too, for a donation of $9.32 worth of used children’s items. I am notified that my job application to teach at primary school in Leeds, UK, has been received. The school is rated 2.6 out of 5. One review reads: “Want your child to be bullied then send them there.”

One November I receive a note from Matt, who thinks he knows me from East High. “You Freshman Scum! A belated happy birthday this week. Hope all is going well.” (My birthday is in April, and no one would have called me “scum” when I was a high school freshman. I would have blushed. I might have cried.) December, I get a photo from Zoe — subject line: “SNOW,” body copy: “Happy Winter!” — of a courtyard, stone walls, and iron grate, blanketed in white. Adam sends me a photo, accompanied by no text at all, of three men in a lush, walled garden, one holding a Smart Water, the second holding a Starbucks cup, the third showing off three tickets to a Colts game. An American flag is stuck in a flowerpot.

Sophie writes to say how proud she is of my daughter, who “was such a sweet leader in the classroom today.” Marci tells me she signed up her son Cameron for the Abundant Life Garden Project, an after-school program at St. Philips Episcopal Church in Durham, NC, and she thinks my son Jack would have “a fabulous time” there, too. An automated message arrives from a public school in Cherryvale, KS, notifying me that my son Gary is failing English 11. His grade is 39%. What can you do with a kid like Gary? His future is looking bleak. I write to the school to let them know that the email address they’ve got on file for his mother, a different Rachel Lyon, is actually mine. They apologize and I don’t hear from them again — until the following year, when Marla writes to say she’s collecting pictures for a senior slideshow on graduation night, and will need photos of Gary no later than April 19. So Gary’s graduating after all! I’m glad he turned himself around.

One reason for all this misdirected correspondence is there are at least a few hundred people around the world who share my name. According to the dizzying website howmanyofme.com, there are 186 Rachel Lyons, Rachael Lyons, Rachel Lyonses, and Rachael Lyonses in the United States. The consonant-rich website uknames.gbgplc.com approximates 45 people in the UK, including spelling variations. (Canada — not known for its big egos, really — doesn’t seem to have an equivalent site; a search for an equivalent Australian site yielded suggestions for the following “related searches”: how many Daniels are in the world? how many people are named Mitchell? how many people in the world are named Humphrey? Apparently Daniels, Mitchells, and Humphreys are peculiarly given to egosurfing.) We Rachel Lyons are a not insignificant population.

Another reason I get so very much email, I suspect, is that when people are prompted to enter their email addresses to get something they want — free samples; access to 30 days of unlimited whatever — but don’t want to get all the spam that comes with doing so, they enter something else. What’s an easier address to think up than one’s-own-name@gmail? Given the number of digital receipts I get for things I didn’t buy, I know many Rachel Lyons have put my address down to misdirect their spam. If you’re a Rachel Lyon and you’re reading this, please know: I am here, I am real, I am receiving your correspondence, and I don’t want your spam any more than you do.

I do, however, very much enjoy the non-spam correspondence. An email is a glimpse into another life, a fragment of a story. Maybe I love getting other people’s mail because I am a fiction writer. Maybe I’m a fiction writer because I love getting other people’s mail. Chicken or egg, I do not know. All I know is it gives me a little rush. I read my misdirected correspondence carefully. I read it nosily. I read it with a little voyeuristic thrill and odd surprising pangs of envy. Rationally I know that to share a name with someone is a simple, random thing. Irrationally I can’t help but feel connected to the other Rachel Lyons of the world.

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‘I’m Always Writing Against This Idea That Denver’s a White Space.’

Adam Morgan | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,462 words)

 

There’s a section in Robert Bolaño’s 2666 — “The Part About the Crimes” — where women are raped and murdered for nearly 300 pages, their mutilated bodies abandoned in the deserts of northern Mexico. The violence is brutal enough to seem gratuitous, even sadistic, but Bolaño was merely fictionalizing the real-life female homicides of Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. And while 2666 circles these murders like a vulture, the women themselves barely get a chance to speak.

The women in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s debut collection of short stories, Sabrina & Corina — Chicana and Indigenous women living in Denver and southern Colorado — suffer similar fates. But we meet their sisters, mothers, and daughters. We meet the men who abuse them. And finally, we hear their voices.

In the title story, a teenaged cosmetology student is tasked with applying her murdered cousin’s funeral makeup. In “Sisters”, a double date leaves one sibling blind. In “Cheesman Park”, a bank teller flees Los Angeles for Denver after she and her mother are attacked, separately, by the men who claim to love them. And in “Any Further West,” a sex worker and her daughter travel in the opposite direction in search of a better life.

Sabrina & Corina is a moving, textured, masterful collection, saturated with a strong sense of place. I spoke with Kali Fajardo-Anstine about her book, the cycles of violence, and the gentrification of her hometown’s Chicano and Indigenous communities. Read more…

‘There’s Virtually No Conversation In Chicago … About the Aftershocks of the Violence.’

Residents, activists, and friends and family members of victims of gun violence march down Michigan Avenue carrying nearly 800 wooden crosses bearing the names of people murdered in the city in 2016 on December 31, 2016 in Chicago. (Scott Olson / Getty)

Hope Reese | Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (3,002 words)

 

In recent years Chicago has had more homicides than any other city in America. From 1990-2010, roughly 14,000 people were killed there — more than the combined number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, giving a horrifying legitimacy to the city’s infamous nickname Chiraq. It’s not clear, exactly, why this is so — the rest of the country is experiencing a period of historically low crime. In fact, Chicago contributed nearly half of the country’s overall uptick in homicides in 2016.

Veteran reporter Alex Kotlowitz, author of the bestseller There Are No Children Here and producer of the award-winning documentary The Interrupters, has been chronicling the effects of violence on the city’s neighborhoods for decades. Kotlowitz, whose recent book, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago, presents the cumulative effects of violence on the city through 14 vignettes. “For reasons I don’t fully understand, we just seem to be in the place where we have this extraordinarily tragic [violence],” he tells me. “Anybody who tells you they found the answer is just lying to you. Because nobody really knows.”

The book documents the complicated relationships between victims and perpetrators, the nature of the killing — how it is often cyclical and retributive — the way that violence scars communities, and his awe at surviors’ resiliency. Read more…

Honey Bees, Worker Bees, and the Economic Violence of Land Grabs

Don Farrall / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Melissa Chadburn | Longreads | April 2019 | 12 minutes (3,024 words)

 

This essay was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit organization.

“One bad thing about me is that I don’t give a shit about the environment.” That’s what I told my smart, edgy friend when we were walking to get coffee one day. I admitted that I suck at recycling, and that what I care about is workers, “not like, being vegan and shit.”

“Yea fuck those bumper stickers with the panda on them,” she replied.

The truth is I didn’t think those worries were for me, the type of planning and research it takes to be green. That was a concern for people living a different quality of life, people who carried around large glass bottles filled with distilled water, ladies in lululemon pants who consistently applied Burt’s bees lip balm, ate cacao energy balls, and drove hybrid vehicles. No, caring about the planet was off limits for me.
Read more…

The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | March 2019 | 11 minutes (3,057 words)

 

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

 
The antihero shows of the early aughts relied on wives as antagonists. A wife became another hurdle to leap in her husband’s quest to run a criminal organization/become an undisputed drug king/sleep with whomever he wanted in an attempt to outrun his past. More recently, however, there have been shows that seem to push back on the impulse to pit husbands and wives against each other. What if, they asked, an antihero and his wife were partners instead of rivals? But in giving their wives a promotion of sorts, shows like Ozark and House of Cards also open the door to female ambition, which can become as problematic for fictional women as it has been for their real-life counterparts.

The first post in this series, “The Blaming of the Shrew,” discusses Breaking Bad’s Skyler White, among other TV wives.

The first episode of Netflix’s Ozark follows the antihero script to a T. It’s all there: a talented main character, a sad backstory to which we slowly become privy, and foils more villainous by several degrees designed to make our main guy look good in comparison. That guy is Marty Byrde, a financial planner who launders money for the second largest drug cartel in Mexico. His wife Wendy is initially set up as the Skyler to Marty’s Walt: her days are all Costco, Zumba, and cheating on her husband with a man she calls “Sugarwood.” Soon after we meet Marty, he fantasizes about an encounter with a prostitute that gets oddly specific about his life: “Let me guess, your wife won’t do what you want her to do. If you were my man, working all day so I could stay at home — which, uh, let’s face it, it was a bitch when they were little but now they’re both teens and in school all day … not only would I not cheat on you, I’d let you do anything you wanted.” This is the kind of interiority, indispensable to the antihero genre, that lets us know that Marty is doing everything right despite Wendy’s worst efforts.

But when Marty is forced to move his family to southern Missouri and launder $8 million to save them from the cartel, Wendy shifts from antagonist to helpmate. She isn’t excited about the plan but, unlike antihero wives of yore, she hasn’t been kept in the dark about Marty’s criminality and she willingly presents a united front to their children and the FBI. The important thing, Wendy and Marty agree, is that the family stays together and safe, and they’re prepared to do anything to keep it that way. Family as sacrosanct, as the highest good, is a theme of this show. Versions of “I did it for our family” are repeated like a mantra throughout the series. Marty and Wendy both use it as a rhetorical justification and also as a kind of mystical prayer meant to insulate them from their own internal critics.

Ozark offers us an antihero team but finds a different way to humanize a flawed man, with a wife so helpful that she eclipses the antihero himself.

By season two, however, the family becomes a battleground, with Marty and Wendy developing a low-grade rivalry. They operate less as a team than as dueling pianos, each taking turns making decisions “for the good of the family” without consulting the other. It turns out that Wendy has her own expertise to contribute from her years working in Chicago politics, which makes their partnership more equal but also more fraught, and the show’s almost pathological focus on the family becomes yet another way to make an antagonist out of a wife. Ozark’s initial bait and switch turns Wendy from an antagonist into a helpmate who recognizes the necessity of her husband’s infelicities but a more cunning reversal has Marty become the one to stand in opposition to the show’s plotline. The final episodes of season two see him preparing an escape plan for his family only to be thwarted by his wife, who makes the unilateral decision that they will stay. It’s not clear when Wendy makes the decision because she doesn’t get the kind of interiority that Marty does — only long, meaningful looks out onto the horizon. Naturally, she frames the decision as the best thing for their family. But the show’s writers have already given Marty the insight that this kind of rationalization, the very premise of the show, has been undermined: “We’re not fit to be parents. It’s not even a family, it’s a goddamn group of criminals.”

Explaining her decision to stay in the Ozarks, in danger, in criminality, Wendy says: “This is who I am, and this is who I want to be.” Marty was only ever portrayed as a reluctant criminal, a serf in service to his family. Wendy’s first-person declaration is ambition, which we should know by now isn’t usually a good look on a woman. Ozark offers us an antihero team but finds a different way to humanize a flawed man, with a wife so helpful that she eclipses the antihero himself. It turns Marty into the hero who wants to save his family, if only his wife would let him.

* * *

Wendy Byrde isn’t the first wife of an antihero to have higher aspirations. House of Cards was always a show about two people with naked ambition. Frank and Claire Underwood didn’t have any children so their nefarious deeds were never in the service of providing for, or saving, anyone other than themselves. They wanted power and they were going to get it as a team. Until they weren’t. Things start to unravel at the end of season three. Frank walks into the Oval Office to find Claire sitting behind the desk: “Look at us, Francis, we used to make each other stronger, or at least I thought so, but that was a lie. We were making you strong and now I’m just weak and small and I can’t stand that feeling any longer.” House of Cards could be extremely woke about power and gender. More than any other antihero show, it seemed to be aware of the conventions of its genre and what those conventions meant for women. What family is for Ozark, power was for House of Cards, and it recognized what it meant to want power as a man and as a woman, that there was a difference between the two. The show could also be extremely meta, especially the final season, in which lines like “Are you telling me she knew nothing of what he was up to?” and “Are you even capable of defining her on her own terms?” could be talking about the characters, the actors who play them, or the tropes they were called on to embody for six seasons.

If nothing else, the power struggles between the two Underwoods over the course of the series can help us see how the roles of antihero’s wife and politician’s wife overlap. Both kinds of wives are at once essential to their husbands’ stories and outside of them. They are tasked with humanizing the men with whom they partner, but it is understood that the partnership is premised on a withholding of their own humanity; their story must remain the B plot. So when House of Cards suddenly found itself an antihero show without an antihero, you would think the solution would have been simple since, as it turned out, Claire’s ambition was to become a main character.

And an antihero marriage, like a political campaign, does not easily accommodate a woman at the top of the ticket.

Claire’s struggle to move beyond the helpmate/antagonist paradigm of her foremothers and become the antihero of her show is a major plot point of the show’s later seasons. The season four finale has Claire and Frank look at the camera together, her first fourth wall break. This is Frank’s signature move so there is reason to believe that Claire is finally gaining the strength she craves. And, indeed, season five in many ways seemed to be about setting the stage for Claire to eclipse her husband. This is signified, in the show’s mallet-to-the-head way, by Frank’s fascination with the app that turns his face into Claire’s and back again. But there continues to be friction: “We have one rule Francis,” Claire rails, “I cannot be your ally if I don’t know what you’re thinking … You should have talked to me instead of making a last-minute decision like this.” Frank has just let her in on his plan to resign the presidency and make Claire the leader of the free world. You would think Claire would be pleased with this turn of events but she knows, as we do from Ozark, that where you are matters less than who made the decision to put you there.


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Just as concepts like “leader” and “free world” don’t mean quite what they used to, so too Frank has emptied out the presidency of its power before handing it over to Claire. “Where does the real power lie? The power behind the power?” he asks. The answer is the private sector, the existence of which the supposedly brilliant politician Frank Underwood is apparently just learning. Exaggerated eyerolls aside, this show is one in which a woman finally gets her hands on some agency, only to discover that the rules have changed and she’s not holding anything at all. “It’s no longer about who lives in the White House,” Frank’s civic lesson continues, “it’s about who owns the White House … the real power isn’t here.” And when he says, “I wanted you to be the president, I’ve made you the president,” Claire realizes that for an antihero and his wife, there is no such thing as equal partnership. And an antihero marriage, like a political campaign, does not easily accommodate a woman at the top of the ticket. While wives may humanize presidents and antiheroes alike, for this wife at least, a husband is only a liability.

So season five ends with Claire ignoring Frank’s calls about a presidential pardon and turning to the camera to declare: “my turn.” This could have become more true than anyone had planned once the allegations against Kevin Spacey became public and Netflix cut ties with him when the show was already into production on season six. But the show wasn’t prepared to become a female antihero show. Frank had already told us that “If she doesn’t pardon me, I’ll kill her,” and season six was supposed to be a showdown between the two Underwoods. Instead of coming up with a new story line, we get Frank by proxy. Unable to use his face or his voice, the show’s writers turn Frank into a series of human horcruxes, transposing his malintent onto several new characters we are supposed to care about but don’t. Oh, and Doug. Poor loyal, murderous Doug, who is like if the legion of antihero fans sticking with Tony, Walt, and Don to the bitter end became one person with a weakness for sad brunettes. While the final season can identify the predicament of the antihero’s wife who yearns to break free — it begins with a reading of threatening tweets and other online content, including a contest for the most creative way to kill Claire — it never comes close to resolving it. Instead it centers on Frank’s absence. Claire spends most of her time as commander-in-chief trying to figure out how to distance herself from Frank’s crimes and escape Frank’s shadowy posthumous vendetta against her. She never gets a chance to be a president, or an antihero, on her own terms.

Even when Claire makes it to the Oval Office, she is only, as Frank tells her in their very last conversation, ‘the most powerful woman in the world.’

It wasn’t just the writers who couldn’t seem to let Frank go. In December of last year, Kevin Spacey, who had no qualms about using Frank’s face or voice, released a video in which he blurred the line between himself and the character he played for five seasons. Looking straight into the camera, he attempted to recreate the camaraderie with the audience that made his House of Cards character so unique and effective:

I know what you want. Oh sure, they may have tried to separate us but what we have is too strong, it’s too powerful. I mean after all, we shared everything, you and I. I told you my deepest darkest secrets. I showed you exactly what people are capable of. I shocked you with my honesty, but mostly I challenged you and made you think. And you trusted me even though you knew you shouldn’t.

This is Frank’s shtick of making us feel like we’re in on a secret while also implicating us in the violence necessary to keep it. Spacey’s inhabiting of his character as a response to the real-life allegations against him shines an unflattering light on the cultural power of the antihero, particularly our complicity in enabling bad behavior if the person is good enough at what they do. In taking his case to the public this way, Spacey was betting on the magnetism of the fictional Frank Underwood to insulate the real-life Kevin Spacey from the bad things he did, kind of like what must have happened during the first season of House of Cards, when he had only to participate in a “training process” after allegedly harassing someone on set, a training that does not seem to have had its desired effect. The sheer brazenness of the video, that it ends with a play for a Spacey-led House of Cards revival (“wait a minute, now that I think of it, you never actually saw me die, did you? Conclusions can be so deceiving”) and hit the internet on the very day that it was announced that he would be charged with indecent assault and battery, suggests that Spacey must have really believed that his character could save his career. The video has almost 250,000 likes, which isn’t enough to bring Frank Underwood back from the dead, but is yet another testament to the power of the male antihero — in this case the character and the man who plays him — to command adoration in spite of the destruction he leaves in his wake.

The Kevin Spacey/Frank Underwood mash-up video can’t help but point out that “all this presumption made for such an unsatisfying ending,” an opinion held by mostly everyone. But what was it that made the final season so anticlimactic? Was it, as Kevin/Frank implied, the absence of its antihero? Was it because, as FX network president John Landgraf argued back in 2013, a female antihero just isn’t the same? Is the antihero genre, ultimately, a male one? Kind of. Like presidential politics, antihero shows have been built for men. Claire never got a clean break and she spent the final season fighting off the ghost of Frank. But even if she had, the show was never calibrated to make her its centerpiece. In an interview with the magazine Capitol File, Robin Wright recounts that the only note David Fincher gave her when she started on the show was to be still:

People were suggesting to base the character on Hillary Clinton or other strong women personas, and I didn’t want to do that. When we shot the first couple of scenes, David would come over to me and say, “Don’t move. Don’t move. Claire is a bust.”

Statues are memories of heroes, not the heroes themselves. House of Cards was built around Frank’s dynamism; Claire’s steely mystery could stoke or temper that dynamism but was meant to always exist alongside it. The show was about seeing Frank work and he kept us close, bringing us in and making us complicit. Even after Claire promises us that it’s going to be different (“I’m going to tell you the truth”), she keeps us at a distance. This is partially because the show wants to preserve the mystery of who killed Frank until the very end, but it’s also because that’s who Claire has always been: a stoic and a secret keeper. Instead of finding the right formula that would allow her to become the antihero she’s always wanted to be, the show shoehorns her into Frank’s.

* * *

In writing wives who don’t fit neatly into the antagonist/enabler binary of shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, Ozark and House of Cards allow them to operate in the gray alongside their husbands. By bringing their wives into the fold instead of shutting them out, these shows get us thinking about what would have to be true for a woman to step into the role of an antihero herself. But while both give their wives more to do and the ability to exercise their own ambition, they ultimately handicap that ambition. Even when Claire makes it to the Oval Office, she is only, as Frank tells her in their very last conversation, “the most powerful woman in the world.” For the wife of an antihero, the glass ceiling is her husband. Perhaps Ozark will surprise us and turn Wendy into the show’s new antihero rather than an antagonist standing in the way of her family’s well-being, but season two hinted at the way a wife in control might go. Local drug lords Jacob and Darlene Snell are two of the more villainy foils who serve to humanize Marty and Wendy in season one. They initially operate as a well-oiled machine: when he asks for more lemonade, she knows it’s time to murder the man who launders their money through a strip club. But eventually, caught in a standoff with the cartel, the fissures appear. Darlene wants to keep fighting while Jacob wants to live in peace. “What do you do, Martin,” Jacob asks, “when the bride who took your breath away becomes the wife who makes you hold your breath in terror?” The show has already emphasized the parallels between the two couples: “What deals did you just make behind my back?” Darlene asks Jacob; “You made these plans without me?” Wendy demands of Marty. Darlene out-villains her husband, killing him before he can kill her, and the Snells’ storyline influences how we see Wendy’s season two arc. The lesson is that your helpmate can eventually become your killer and what is exciting and intoxicating in a man — quick thinking and smart, strategic maneuvering — is off-putting and unsettling in his wife.

Is there any hope for the wife of an antihero? Will we ever see a female antihero we can actually root for? Does having a family make a female antihero more effective, or less? Does Soviet Russia hold the key to one or all of these questions? Maybe! Tune in to the next installment on The Americans.
 

The first installment in this series: The Blaming of the Shrew

* * *

Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in LongreadsThe RumpusTablet, and Lilith.

 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

And They Do Not Stop Until Dusk

"Rats" (Ildikó Regényi / the György Román Estate)

Daisy Alioto | Longreads | March 2019 | 14 minutes (3,722 words)


“I beheld thee rich in sorrow,
Graceful in the bloom of youth,
Where, like gold within the mountain
In the heart lies faith and truth,
On the Danube,
On the Danube, bright and blue.”
—Karl Isidor Beck, “On the Danube”

“At last I penetrate into the distance, into the soundproof blue of nostalgias.” —Jean Arp

*

I have an adolescent memory of walking along a lake near my Massachusetts home and finding a child’s blackened shoe caught in the murky inch of water at the shore. I knew that not long ago a pilot had died crashing a single-seat Cessna into this same lake, and I had lately been looking at piles of shoes as part of the school’s Holocaust curriculum. The combination of these two facts — totally unrelated — filled me with deep dread, and I turned around and hurried back to my family.

Artist György Román’s childhood was characterized by such dread. The painter was born in Budapest in 1903 and suffered a bout of meningitis in 1905 which left him deaf and temporarily paralyzed in both legs. As a result, “his mind was swamped in the chaos of meanings around visual images,” writes Marianna Kolozsváry in her monograph of the artist. (Kolozsváry’s father was one of Román’s first collectors.) Although Román regained use of his legs, he was deaf for the rest of his life.

Out of vivid dreams and passive observation of the surrounding world, Román formed his own vernacular of symbols and omens. Cats, monkeys, carnivals, and men in mustaches were imbued with evil intentions and disease. The glowing red signage of shops and brothels were both indistinguishable and sinister. Toy soldiers were the protagonists of this world.

The Hungarian actor Miklós Gábor wrote of Román’s work, “He paints dreams, but he is not a surrealist. He paints naively, but he is not a naive painter. He is a clever man, but not intellectual. He sees nightmares, but he is no expressionist.” Read more…

The Day New York Rose Up Against the Nazis On the Hudson

A demonstration near the German ocean liner SS Bremen in New York, after Hugh Wilson, the American ambassador to Germany was recalled in the wake of Kristallnacht, 1938. (FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Peter Duffy | An excerpt adapted from The Agitator: William Bailey and the First American Uprising Against Nazism | PublicAffairs | March 2019 | 20 minutes (5,458 words)


Hear it, boys, hear it? Hell, listen to me! Coast to coast! HELLO AMERICA!
—Clifford Odets, Waiting For Lefty

Seven million New Yorkers, few of them in possession of the luxury item known as an electric fan, woke up to the best news in three weeks on Friday, July 26, 1935. During the overnight hours, the humidity plunged by 33 points. By sunrise, the temperate air from Canada had completed its work. The heat wave was over.

“Humidity Goes Into Tailspin,” the New York Post exulted. “Rain Ushers in Cool Spell,” declared the Brooklyn Eagle.

The New York Times and Herald Tribune didn’t make much of a fuss that morning over Varian Fry’s revelations about his conversation with Ernst Hanfstaengl. “Reich Divided on Way to Treat Jews, Says Fry,” was the cautious headline on page eleven of the Tribune. One faction of the Nazi Party, the paper went on in summary of Hanfstaengl’s comments to Fry, “were the radicals, who wanted to settle the matter by blood.” The other, “the self-styled moderate group,” wanted to “segregate the Jews and settle the question by legal methods.” The Times ran its version on page eight and devoted most of the article to Fry’s retelling of the Berlin Riots. “There were literally hundreds of policemen standing around but I did not see them do anything but protect certain cafés which I was told were owned by Nazis,” Fry was quoted as saying. The paper saved its preview of the Holocaust for the ninth of eleven paragraphs. The nation’s newspaper of record didn’t see the value in highlighting the disclosure that “the radical section” of Hitler’s regime “desired to solve the Jewish question with bloodshed.”

Reached for comment in Berlin, Hanfstaengl called Fry’s account “fictions and lies from start to finish.” Read more…

Irvine Welsh on Brexit, Existential Panic, and His Latest ‘Trainspotting’ Sequel

Workers on an assembly line inside the Ford Motor Company factory at Highland Park, Michigan, constructing steering systems, circa 1913. (Hulton Archive/Getty)

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | March 2019 | 12 minutes (3,284 words)

 

For many American readers, knowledge of Irvine Welsh came via his 1993 novel Trainspotting. The novel established Welsh as a daring prose stylist with a flair for the transgressive, while the subsequent film adaptation supercharged the careers of many involved, including director Danny Boyle and lead Ewan McGregor. Over the years, Welsh has revisited this world in several other works, including the novels Porno, Skagboys, and The Blade Artist. In each, he’s surveyed how time has changed his characters — and gradually expanded the scope of these books from Edinburgh to something more international.

In his latest novel Dead Men’s Trousers, Welsh has brought this fictional universe to its conclusion. Several of his long-running characters have become fathers of grown children; one of them will not survive to the end of the book. But that’s not the only bittersweet element to be found here: Welsh has set the novel on the eve of the Brexit vote, creating a growing sense of tension in the background even as his characters — including sociopath-turned-artist Frank Begbie and expatriate DJ manager Mark Renton — become embroiled in a cycle of old grievances. At stake is an interwoven pair of questions: to what extent can people change, and to what extent are people willing to allow others to change?

The temporal setting of the novel also allows for some other memorable setpieces, including a number of scenes set around Welsh’s beloved Hibernian F.C. winning the Scottish Cup in 2016. And Welsh, ever the stylist, has also come up with a resonant way of conveying several characters’ experience with the psychedelic DMT: prose pauses and suddenly, the mode shifts into a graphic novel for part of a page. While Welsh has revisited his characters repeatedly over time, each of these books has a distinct feel to it; this one is no exception. Read more…

An American City, Inhabited Yet Abandoned

BALTIMORE, MD - January 19: Empty buildings display graffiti on January 19, 2018, around the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in West Baltimore, Maryland. With 343 homicides last year, Baltimore hit the record for killings per capita. (AP Photo/The Christian Science Monitor, Ann Hermes)

Until 2015, Baltimore seemed to be on an upswing — population growth, investment, development, rising income, lowered crime rates. Then Freddie Gray died in police custody. But it wasn’t the community uprisings that marked the start of decline, it was the the reaction of the police when six of their own were charged in connected with Gray’s death.

“Cops don’t necessarily stop in their tracks because another cop is charged in a crime,” Kevin Davis, one of Batts’s deputies at the time, told me. “Typically it’s a bad cop, a crook, a drug dealer or a drunk or someone who abuses his wife. But when these cops got charged criminally and the probable cause was not easily understood by the rank and file — that gave them a sense of dread.”

The department’s officers responded swiftly, by doing nothing. In Baltimore it came to be known as “the pullback”: a monthslong retreat from policing, a protest that was at once undeclared and unmistakably deliberate — encouraged, some top officials in the department at the time believe, by the local police union. Many officers responded to calls for service but refused to undertake any “officer-initiated” action. Cruisers rolled by trouble spots without stopping or didn’t roll by at all. Compounding the situation, some of the officers hospitalized in the riot remained out on medical leave. Arrests plunged by more than half from the same month a year before. The head of the police union, Lt. Gene Ryan, called the pullback justifiable: “Officers may be second-guessing themselves,” he told The Sun. “Questioning, if I make this stop or this arrest, will I be prosecuted?”

Ray Kelly, a West Baltimore community activist, had achieved measured success in building relationships with officers along the drug-riddled Pennsylvania Avenue corridor, where his organization had an office. Suddenly, those officers were gone. “We saw a pullback in this community for over a month where it was up to the community to police the community,” Kelly told me. “And quite frankly, we were outgunned.” In the vacuum, crews took new corners and people settled old scores. Not a single person was killed on the day of the rioting. But the following month, May, would conclude with 41 homicides — the most the city had experienced in a month since the 1970s, and more than the city of Boston would have for the entire year.

The trials led to three acquittals and one hung jury, and the remaining cases were dropped. But then something else dropped: a 160+ page report from the U.S. Department of Justice finding that Baltimore police had engaged in “a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.” The aftermath, coupled with ever-dropping numbers of police officers, exacerbated the existing chaos and poor community/cop relations.

The Justice Department’s report, meanwhile, had led to the federal “consent decree” that the city negotiated with the department — a sweeping set of reforms of the Police Department that set out new rules governing stops and searches, internal discipline and much more. Gene Ryan, the leader of the police union, complained that his organization had been shut out of the process of drafting it. Tony Barksdale, who had been retired for three years and now spent his days trading stocks online, attacked it incessantly on Twitter, accusing city leaders of “handcuffing your own cops while turning the city over to criminals.”

One afternoon not long after Guy began her job as the consent-decree monitoring team’s community liaison, she strapped on a bulletproof vest and rode along with a city police officer to see the realities he and his colleagues faced. The officer started his shift at 9 a.m. and, because of the department’s shortage of officers, would work until 2:30 the next morning.

They cruised block after block of rowhouses in an especially drug-plagued area. The officer received a text message to disperse a cluster of young men — a frequent point of confrontation in the city. Young men often congregate in front of corner stores or liquor stores, sometimes just hanging out, other times selling drugs; the city would have a record 692 fatal opioid overdoses in 2017.

“I’m supposed to clear this corner,” the officer told Guy, showing her the address on the screen.

“Can you do that?” she asked.

“No,” he said. As he understood it, the consent decree barred him from dispersing the young men. So he didn’t. But then his phone rang. “I guess when I ignore a call, then I get a phone call telling me I need to do my [expletive] job,” he said. Which was indeed what the call was.

In a complex but comprehensive story in the New York Times MagazineAlec MacGillis takes us through the causes and consequences of Baltimore’s rising violent crime rates, the result of “a failure of order and governance the likes of which few American cities have seen in years.”

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The Fertility Doctor’s Secret Children

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As a fertility doctor in Indiana in the ’80s, Donald Cline helped bring many children into the world, though no one knew he was donating his own sperm to the cause. While this is clearly immoral, as Sarah Zhang reports at The Atlantic, Cline was only prosecuted for obstruction of justice — for attempting to cover up his crimes — because there is no law in Indiana or in many other states that prohibits a physician from using his own sperm in fertility treatment.

The people now sending her messages said they were Cline’s secret biological children. They said their parents had also been treated by Cline. They said that decades ago, without ever telling his patients, Cline had used his own sperm to impregnate women who came to him for artificial insemination.

According to her DNA, Woock, too, was one of his children.

In the time since Woock’s half siblings got in touch with her, they have broken the news dozens more times. The children Cline fathered with his patients now number at least 48, confirmed by DNA tests from 23andMe or Ancestry.com. (Several have a twin or other siblings who likely share the same biological father but haven’t been tested.) They keep in touch through a Facebook group. New siblings pop up in waves, timed perversely after holidays like Christmas or Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, when DNA tests are given as well-intentioned gifts.

Like Woock, many of her new siblings learned that they were donor-conceived from a DNA test. (Woock’s parents eventually told her they’d gone to Cline for donor insemination, but they’d had no idea he was the donor.) And in their shock, many also thought the initial messages explaining the situation were part of a scam. But eventually they found news clips laying out that, yes, this doctor deceived his patients, and yes, he used his own sperm, and yes, this is really happening.

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