Search Results for: crime

Kara Walker’s Subtlety

(Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Natalie Hopkinson | A Mouth Is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five Continents, and the Art of Resistance | The New Press | February 2016 | 14 minutes (3,721 words)

* * *

Like a web
is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed!
Martin Carter

Inside the abandoned Domino Sugar Refinery in New York, the first thing that hits you is the smell: over a century’s worth of industrial grime, clinging to black, molasses-coated walls. At first whiff, it is kind of sweet, like stale cake. As you go deeper into the cavernous brick building, it gives way to a sour curdling. As my ten-year-old daughter, Maven, describes it: “It’s like how my cat smells when he throws up.”

Maven, my friend Izetta, and I are among more than a hundred thousand people who make a pilgrimage in the summer of 2014 to pay homage to the “Sugar Sphinx,” the seventy-five-foot-long, forty-foot-high creation of Kara Walker, one of the most important and provocative artists working in the United States. The sculpture is forty tons of sugar molded into a ghostly white apparition, part mammy, part sphinx. The line to see her takes more than an hour to travel and stretches out for four long Brooklyn blocks. I spot the writer Gaiutra Bahadur, whose recent book, Coolie Woman, explores the history of indentured sugar workers in Guyana. Bahadur’s research on sugar plantation life and its bitter aftertaste among Guyanese women speaks forcefully to the exhibit we came to see. I wave Bahadur over to join us in line.

The installation’s title, displayed in bold black type painted along the Domino Sugar factory’s brick façade:

A Subtlety

or the Marvelous Sugar Baby

an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who
have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to
the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the
demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant

The original Domino factory—first built in 1850s Williamsburg— was being torn down, along with the stories of generations of lives that it touched around the world. The factory was just one stop in the sugar industry’s “triangular trade” that created the blueprint for the globalized economy. Investors came from Europe; labor came from Africa; the cane fields were located in points across the Global South. The Domino refinery was the final step before the sugar reached consumers. Raw sugar would arrive at Domino’s forty-thousand-square-foot facility. Through the magic of refinery, pristine white sugar would come out. The profits that followed made sugar a key fuel of Empire.

The title, A Subtlety, is taken straight from history. Centuries ago, “subtleties” referred to elaborate, edible toys made of sugar. These exotic treats and status symbols were first made in the Middle East and popularized among the seventeenth-century European aristocracy. These “subtleties” could be trees, architectural models, or depictions of peasants holding baskets of fruit. There was nothing subtle about them, given what a rare and expensive luxury sugar was at the time. Unveiled at dinner parties, these were ostentatious displays of the host’s clout. The sugar sculptures could also be used to send more subversive messages. “Sly rebukes to heretics and politicians were conveyed in these sugared emblems,” writes Sidney Mintz in Sweetness and Power. Read more…

Asking For It

Andrew Matthews/PA Wire

Piper J. Daniels | Hotel Amerika | Winter 2017 | 12 minutes (3,365 words)

When I was a girl, the thing I loved most was the game Light as a Feather. Back then, I felt weightless when any girl had her hands on me, so lying there with six girls’ fingers tucked beneath my body, I’d float to the ceiling, flushed and breathless. The touching was permissioned, so I could just enjoy it, though there was, of course, that fear of the occult. In the days that followed the game, I’d worry about the evil spirits that might’ve entered me. I would lie awake feeling something of the devil a-flicker inside.

Light As A Feather was a ritual performed in murmuring secrecy. It was sexy and witchy, but did not require me to invite anyone or anything inside. Ouija, on the other hand, was a kind of penetration I was not yet prepared for, a game my mother called the occult version of asking for it. 

There are many reasons why in girlhood, we become necessarily preoccupied with possession. It makes sense—the fascination, as you are trying so desperately to grow into your body, with the dark thing that would drag you away. For girls are taught that the zenith of our lives occurs when we are most deeply inhabited by another. It is no coincidence in The Exorcist that the devil selects Regan for writhing. She is a pre-teen, which means most poised to be entered.

Once upon a time, everything carnal or feral in me was made, by faith, moribund.  For fourteen years, my body remained this way — untouchable, untouched.

Once upon a time, I had no idea what I felt like inside. I’d lie in bed at night, fingers pinned beneath the small of my back so that God would not mistake a single movement for a sin.

It was only a matter of time before I was broken open.

***

He was, at the time, my best friend. When I wouldn’t let him kiss me, he shoved his fingers in my mouth. They were cold and smelled sharply of clementines.

And then it happened that he wormed my clothes away, and made me try things on, made me spin in a circle, motioning with his finger, a 360-degree humiliation.

He choked me out on the heart-shaped canopy bed my father built for me when I was a little girl. There was a Maglite under the mattress I used to read past my bedtime, and he fished it out and beat me with it until I agreed to lie still.

“I love you,” he said, like I was an idiot not to know it. “I love you.”

As he entered me, the room went black and filled with tiny stars. I had no idea I was so connected inside.

It was over for maybe minutes, and then it was never over. [1]

For months afterward, I avoided the eyes of my mother, father, and sister. I was worried they could tell by my face that I was changed. And then there was the feeling that everyone could see and smell my hymen ripped open, that the bruised triangle between my legs would point now only to what was missing.

I kept thinking, this creature, this monster, that my friend whom I loved turned out to be — was it there all along? Or was it culled from his body by my body, twirling as his finger guided me, tracing slow circles in the air?

***

In the game Bloody Mary, where girls summon a murderous spirit in the mirror, the point is not to invite evil, to stir the supernatural pot. To summon evil is to acknowledge its inevitability, to address that each moment spent in safety feels like holding your breath. If being a girl means leaving this world in little pieces, let’s get it over with. In chanting, let us exact some small control, let it be clear when and how we are asking for it.

It was over for maybe minutes, and then it was never over.

Sleep was something to be avoided then. Within sleep, all the hidden things choiring like starlings.

The dream in which the graveyard slides into the sea, and I drink the water clogged by corpses’ long, still-growing hair.

The dream where I feel safe from harm in a field of sunflowers until one by one, they give me up like a name they swore they’d take to the grave.

So much of my life was spent in that blue hour of morning, too early for waking and much too late to fall asleep. I’d put myself in a kind of trance watching bloody true crime television. Like melancholic music when your heart is broken, sometimes the only thing you can do with a feeling is lean into it.

Fictional shows in which rapists were captured and punished enraged me. I preferred survivors of torture talking straight to the camera. Stalked, abducted, raped, shot at point-blank range. Then burned, tossed in a trunk, tied with rebar to a desert stone. The actresses reenacting the story crawling so convincingly across lush lawns in blood-soaked nightgowns or running through a dark wood with only half of their heads attached.

A documentary about Seattle singer Mia Zapata, who wrote a song about being murdered and spread in pieces all over town just before being killed by a stranger who strangled her with her own sweatshirt.

A documentary about the Tate murders, in which the crime scene photo of Abigail Folgers shows her less heiress, more lawn stain. Her last words to the man stabbing her, “You’ve got me.  I’m already dead.”

Maybe I was morbid to find comfort or, at the very least, distraction in these stories which were gruesome beyond my imagination. But I needed a break from the narrative I was living. The one where girls in my town were fish that fill a manmade lake, or fair chase pheasants set loose in the forest. The narrative where being hunted was the only thing they ever had in mind for us.

On a popular daytime talk show, footage of a body being exhumed. There are machines to help with the unearthing of the burial vault and tools to break its seal, revealing a cherry colored casket still draped in withered white roses. The shock of these bright colors coming out of the dirt makes it seem as though the casket too could be pried open to reveal a girl who is more like a Russian doll than a decomposing body or even a girl who would open her eyes, like the murder never happened, and say: I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.[2]

When as children, my sister and I named Ken dolls after our enemies and buried them alive beneath the evergreens, and when we dug up dead frogs from the glittery coffins we made for them, praying over their tiny souls in tongues of necromancy, these were not merely games to us, though that is what we said. We knew survival would depend increasingly upon our relationship to resurrection.

***

And so, just as the corn was silking, all I could think about was driving till I hit the Pacific, becoming for all intents and purposes a ghost.

You see, I come from a town where no one leaves and there’s only one way a girl goes missing. Every few years, weighted to the bottom of a golf course pond or stuffed in a storm drain she will be discovered, made Legend.

You see, I come from a town where there’s only one way a girl is made Legend.

And in that town, that the air does not ring with them, that the new crocuses do not chatter with what has become of them, that the hushed ground is filled with them where they will remain forever, it is that more than anything that gave me the courage to leave.

Give me a world, I said aloud to no one.  You have taken the world I was.[3]

And a new world opened for me, by and by.

Each night in that blue light, they flickered across the ceiling. Pretty girls turned hungry ghosts who wanted to leave with me. I could see each of their lives like little boats upon the water, bright first, then burning, then snuffed out by the breakers of the sea.

I come from a town where no one leaves and there’s only one way a girl goes missing. Every few years, weighted to the bottom of a golf course pond or stuffed in a storm drain she will be discovered.

I will not say to you that the Legends as I experienced them were real, that I can prove how the room filled with strange heat, buoyed by their breath.

What I’m saying is whether they were real or mere projections of the mind seen with intense clarity, we belonged to one another. And knowing them, what was done to them, gave me one hundred new reasons to survive.

***

I began at dawn through the green maze of corn, an achingly familiar crop that dizzied suddenly with its vastness, its flickering infinity. I drove all day long, straight through Des Moines’ end-of-the-world darkness, where I made believe the few flickering lights were lanterns of the last survivors. Throughout Nebraska, day and night, earth and sky fused together, falling like a white sheet over me. That such monotony gave way to mountains was its own little miracle, though I couldn’t decide at first whether they made me feel sheltered or loomed over. By the time I got to Oregon, the clouds seemed close enough that you could reach your hand through the sunroof and come back with a fistful of nimbostratus.  And when at last I reached Seattle, lush and so fervently green it bordered upon narcotic, I knew for certain I would find heaven there.

The first thing I did was drive to the corner of 24th Avenue and South Washington Street, the place where Mia Zapata was made Legend. It felt like the only right place to start.  Twenty years had passed since her death, something like 5,520 days of rain, and it seemed to me she still smudged the earth, though there was nothing of her spirit there, which I knew would move through darkened rooms bright as aurora borealis.

I could see each of their lives like little boats upon the water, bright first, then burning, then snuffed out by the breakers of the sea

It was like stepping inside a house where you intuit immediately that something horrible has happened, except that there were no walls around it, making it that much harder to escape.

Aside from my books, I didn’t want anything that home had threaded through. Everything else I burned or left on the side of the road. What I needed, more than anything, was a perfect loneliness, pure and cold and bright. I found a studio two streets east of where Mia had lived when she’d been alive. With the apartment empty but for a mattress, windows clean, ceilings high, walls freshly white, I loved Seattle, which was more a city in the evening when its greenery folded into darkness. That first night, there was whiskey, and the Legends partnered and danced sweetly across the ceiling, and Nina Simone sang to a lover I hadn’t met yet: You’re spring to me / all things to me / don’t you know you’re life itself?

Back in high school, there were girls I loved for their beauty, and for their ability to receive pleasure without needing to return it. I would learn little things about them—a favorite song, a moon sign so I could joke that we were star-crossed or destined depending—but I did not use or remember their names. I wanted them for the way they kissed, the way they moved and sounded in the dark, that they smelled of rosehip and jasmine or Parliaments and Jameson, that beneath my tongue, they’d rise to the ceiling like steam. The only girls I named were the girls with whom things went terribly wrong.

For instance, there was I Should’ve Loved A Thunderbird Instead, who threw a brick through the window of my car, filled the driver’s seat with mayonnaise, and lit all of my shoes on fire before trying to fuck me in the driveway of my parents’ home.

There was What Spring Does To The Cherry Trees, who had feverish dreams I was the devil and tried, on more than one occasion, to spoon holy water into my hair before accosting me one day when I was at the dentist, marching right up to the chair to hit me in the face with the zippered end of her leather jacket.

In both instances, the authorities had to be called, and I authored wild explanations that absolved me entirely. I did not learn, in either instance, that for all the charm in the world, I would always be out of my depth until I could become a woman who could set her heart on something.

***

My favorite book as a girl was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. I found myself in the farewell letter Willie-Jay addresses to Perry, one the novel’s killers:

You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction.

The juxtaposition of individuality and conformity could be true of anyone, as could the notion of existing in a half-world. What frightened me then was the misplaced hunger, the way that Perry, pulled by confusion and desire, became a killer, a grown man who had yet to understand his appetite.

The trouble with being a girl is that you are expected to trade craving for hunger, hunger the specter that looms over you even as you sleep. And this makes you feel like a predator, a prowler in the lambs’ midst.

Being both evangelical and gay from birth, I worried at purity balls that my sinner’s skin would singe my satin gown. I was made to wear a purity ring that only a wedding ring could remove—this, an offering of love from my earthly and heavenly fathers.

What I knew that they did not: If God made me, he made me an aberration of nature.  Try as I might to people the wedding chapels of my imagination, there were other things consuming me, other fires, which burned the bridegrooms, and leveled the altars to ash.

It was with this same burning that I left my hometown, determined to find what I wanted and, for the first time in my life, to ask for it.

***

I learned Seattle by watching it like a television. Learned, for example, that I would need to trade my thick Midwestern skin for indifference. Learned that a morning’s bleariness was known to burn away like a marine layer, at which point the branches, hanging lush and wet and low, flickered for a bit in the wide pinking light. And on those days, people would stand in the street with reverence, or perhaps I imagined it that way. In any case, it made me feel that I was less alone.

I met her at a bar called Flowers, quiet and dark, three whiskies in.

From the start it was almost too much to look at her, so I stared instead out the windows, balmy with breath, tracing my fingers through their slow sweat.

The trouble with being a girl is that you are expected to trade craving for hunger, hunger the specter that looms over you even as you sleep.

When I worked up the nerve to be near her I was hooked right away by the friction between the few cautious words she afforded me and the way she knew, like no one had ever known, how to own me with her hot, hungry look. Those eyes that reduced continents to kindling, crisping planets of the Milky Way until the known universe scattered like ash from a cigarette’s sleeve and in that bar, it was only the two of us. And in that moment, I was the first woman ever made or the last one alive at the end of the world.

We compared scrapes born of war stories, and secretly, I named hers after summer constellations.

Southern Crown.
Northern Crown.
Arrow.
Archer.
Shield.

When I touched myself and was close to coming, I whispered her name, evoking her: a séance.

In the nights that followed, she was the specter. Bright, inscrutable orb darting the darkened room.

Every day the Legends got hungrier. I could hear the grinding of each twinkling maw. We were all starving in our own way, them because they’d been denied their rightful lives as women, me as a woman with the world before her too frightened and scarred to do a damn thing about it.

My days with them were lucid dreams. Their stories swirled around me, and if I wanted, I could pluck one from the air and ask her.

Legend who spoke of her body discovered in the dumpster behind Dot Liquor.

Legend who was murdered while playing Bloody Mary in the mirror.

Legends whose sweet mouths appeared still singing in the water, multiples of Millais’ Ophelia.

Legend three days shy of her sweet sixteen birthday party, who received instead the party where everyone searches and searches, finding nothing in the end but a crawl space filled with bone.

I say that I asked them for their stories, but over time, the room became cacophonous. It was sometimes hard to remember I wasn’t one of them. I was beginning to feel like my body was an Ouija board full of vague answers: yes, no, goodbye. Forever anticipating that moment where the wind shifts and the room moves from carefree to electric and malevolent.

The ghost I knew by heart was Mia. She was the only one who moved through the world with me. It was, after all, her neighborhood, and she was nice enough to show me around. We spoke through a kind of telekinesis, girl to ghost, and although it is strange to say so, Mia was my first Seattle friend. I would learn I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, that many girls in Seattle were descendants of Mia, beautiful and strange but because of her story, less innocent, walking home from the Comet Tavern, their keys tiny knives between their fingers, their eyes two fierce dogs gone hunting in the night.

In Buddhism, there is a creature known as the Hungry Ghost, a spirit characterized by great craving and eternal starvation. Small of mouth, narrow of throat, Hungry Ghosts are all desire, with no way to satiate. Sometimes they’ll receive a drop of water which evaporates upon the lips, or food, which bursts into flames before they can swallow. Each iota of desire comes with the consequence of pain, and being a woman had me like a Hungry Ghost. I am no longer willing to forfeit the wild and beautiful things I thirst for all for some craving gone quiet.

What I want now is a balance between woman and ghost.

A courage that has nothing to do with survival.

I want to eat a Clementine without thinking of his cold fingers.

I want Mia to eat my heart from cupped hands as Beatrice did Dante’s, and for everyone to vow on her behalf: I will not let him make of me a craven thing when bravery is so much sweeter.

I want to never forget the Legends, but to set them free, or to trap them in a lucid dream from which I will myself awake, so that I may finally see past them, see instead the first sailboats of morning upon the water, salty and cerulean, and wonder how I got so lucky. And wonder I am alive to know it at all.

“I want to be with someone who knows secret things,” Rilke said, “or else alone.” And I would like that to be my love letter to her.

I want her to see in perfect detail the things that might have destroyed me, and how I chose beauty instead. I want her to know so she never doubts it again, that she is commensurate of that beauty.

I want to move into the terror and the awe of this rare and beautiful thing between us, and hold there until we forget who we are, or how we might ruin one another, for as close and as long as she’ll let me.

And if ever she asks, without a word, I will gently
let her go.


[1] Heather McHugh
[2] William Faulkner
[3] Anne Carson

* * *

The essay first appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of Hotel Amerika, a biannual print literary journal based in Chicago, and is forthcoming in Daniels’ debut essay collection, Ladies Lazarus, from Tarpaulin Sky Press.

Grief is a Jumble Word

Ken Otterbourg | Longreads | February 2018 | 14 minutes (2,710 words)

 

I woke up sad today. I was sad when I got out of bed, and I was sad when I went downstairs to get the tiny can of wet cat food for the four cats. I was sad when I nearly stumbled on the bottom step of the first landing in the basement. I was sad as I thought about what would happen if I fell and lay in the basement for several hours with a broken leg or a concussion while the cats ate the cat food and licked my face and the dog wondered where I was after he had heard the pop top on the cat food can that signaled it was soon to be his turn. But I did not fall. So, I was sad when I let Bailey out of his crate and watched him scratch his face against the carpet while I got his leash.

I was sad when we walked outside as the sun was coming up in the east and I could still make out Venus in a morning sky that was the color of hope flecked with a few clouds off in the distance. Venus helped but not enough. I was sad when we walked down Fourth Street. I was sad crossing Broad Street and watching the morning traffic build and all the people on their cell phones even this early. I was sad after Bailey took his shit in the monkey grass even though it was a good shit that indicated the virus that nearly killed him two weeks ago and caused him to shit blood that was the color of raspberry juice was gone and that the $550 I had spent during four hours at the emergency vet between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. was definitely money well spent and necessary.

After we got home, I was sad scooping out his dog food into the bowl and giving him the remains of the cat food that stuck to the tiny can. The dog was happy and wagged his tail and swirled in delight. I emptied the dishwasher, and that didn’t make me happy or cause me to swirl in delight. It never does. I was sad drinking my coffee, which usually made me happy because it made me think of how much JoAnne loved coffee and how when I met her she used to drink a whole pot of it every day, so much that I wondered how she got any work done because she must have kept having to pee. But now things like that make me sad, and I would stop drinking coffee myself but I don’t think it would matter. I was sad eating my English muffin and banana and reading the newspaper and doing the Jumble and wondering if there is a list somewhere of all the five- and six-letter words that can only be arranged in one correct way and are therefore Jumble suitable. Those are the sorts of things that I think about, and many times a little nerdish insight or aha moment of that type is enough to make me smile. But they can also make me sad because there is nobody to share that insight with except the dog and the four cats and they don’t care, and it’s not the type of thing that you can save until later when you speak to an actual person because you would have to figure out how to slip it into a conversation so that it sounded natural and it never does. It’s the sort of utterance best delivered with no preamble across a kitchen table to the woman who loves you in spite of these tendencies and maybe even a little because of them.

Read more…

Little Führers Everywhere

Matthew Heimbach in front of court in Charlottesville, VA. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Vegas TenoldEverything You Love Will Burn | Nation Books | February 2018 | 20 minutes (5,442 words)

The first time I met Matthew Heimbach was in 2011, shortly after my trip to New Jersey with the National Socialist Moment. Our meeting was completely coincidental, and we would both forget about it for several years until we met again. That summer I found myself in the woods of northern North Carolina at the invitation of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. My experience with the NSM had resulted in more questions than answers, and I figured that if I wanted to understand the white supremacist movement in America, I might as well start with the “Original Boys in the Hood,” as one of their more popular t-shirts stated.

It took some driving around to find the location of the Loyal White Knights rally. This was another thing that had changed over the years. There was a time, only a few decades ago, when Klan rallies were, if not announced and attended by the public, certainly tolerated enough to be held in the open. In 2011, even in North Carolina, they had been relegated to the backwoods, as far from people as they were from relevance. At the turn-off to a narrow dirt road stood a decrepit old tractor that someone had taken the time to drape in a Confederate flag. It seemed like a clue, so I took a chance and turned left into the woods. Read more…

The Great Stink

CSA Images/Mod Art Collection

Laurie Penny | Longreads | February 2018 | 17 minutes (4270 words)

My heart goes out to men right now. Actually, my heart goes out to all sorts of unsavory places these days, no matter how much I warn it. My heart goes out to men most nights, wearing precarious outfits, no doubt getting exactly what it deserves. It brings back stories.

In the past weeks and months I’ve spent a lot of time sitting across tables from men who have been accused of sexual assault and rape — men who are angry, and afraid, and have no idea what to do now. Men for whom the fast-changing code of sexual and romantic conduct is not the most immediate problem: theirs is that they have been called out, condemned, and are wondering what the next months and years of their lives are going to look like. And in their bitterness I can hear a backlash coming down the tracks.

Read more…

How Lobbyists Normalized the Use of Chemical Weapons on American Civilians

Ferguson, Missouri, November 24, 2014. Photo: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images.

Anna Feigenbaum | An Excerpt from: Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today | Verso | November 2017 | 22 minutes (6,015 words) 

* * *

Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology.

With his thick moustache and piercing, deep-set eyes, General Amos Fries’s passion shone through as he spoke. In a 1921 lecture to military officers at the General Staff College in Washington, DC, Fries lauded the Chemical Warfare Service for its wartime achievements. The US entered the chemical arms race “with no precedents, no materials, no literature and no personnel.” The 1920s became a golden age of tear gas. Fries capitalized on the US military’s enthusiastic development of chemical weapons during the war, turning these wartime technologies into everyday policing tools. As part of this task Fries developed an impressive PR campaign that turned tear gas from a toxic weapon into a “harmless” tool for repressing dissent.

Manufacturers maneuvered their way around the Geneva Protocol, navigating through international loopholes with ease. But these frontier pursuits could not last forever. The nascent tear gas industry would come to face its biggest challenge yet, in the unlikely form of US senators. In the 1930s two separate Senate subcommittees were tasked with investigating the dodgy sales practices of industrial munitions companies and their unlawful suppression of protest.

General Fries’s deep personal commitment to save the Chemical Warfare Service won him both allies and critics, often in the same breath. Already known for his staunch anticommunism and disdain for foreigners of all kinds, Fries was an unapologetic proponent of military solutions for dissent both at home and abroad. A journalist for the Evening Independent wrote that Fries was often “accused of being an absolute militarist anxious to develop a military caste in the United States.” But to those who shared his cause, Fries was an excellent figurehead for Chemical Warfare. A family man, a dedicated soldier, and a talented engineer, Fries was the perfect face of a more modern warfare.

Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology. They were a sign of the troops’ perseverance in World War I and an emblem of industrial modernity, showcasing the intersection of science and war. In an Armistice Day radio speech broadcast in 1924, Fries said, “The extent to which chemistry is used can almost be said today to be a barometer of the civilization of a country.” This was poised as a direct intervention to the international proposal for a ban on chemical weapons, as preparations for the Geneva Convention were well under way. If chemical weapons were banned, Fries knew it would likely mean the end of the CWS—and with it his blossoming postwar career. Read more…

What If Forensic Science Isn’t Really Science?

(Busà Photography/Getty)

Forensic science — the kind that traces the grooves in bullets, the mark of a shoe, or the scrape of a tool — emerged in the early 20th century as a way to professionalize police work. But once its findings made their way into the court system, it became almost impossible to divide the good forensic science from the bad.

In an in-depth feature for The Nation, Meehan Christ and Tim Requarth look at the case of Jimmy Genrich, who was found guilty of a series of pipe bombings in the early 1990s after forensic evidence linked tools found in his apartment with markings on the bombs.

The evidence was circumstantial — Genrich was nowhere near the scene of the crime — and while the forensics specialist was able to show that the tools Genrich had in his possession could have made the marks, he was unable to show that similar tools would make the same marks. “Holy shit, this is not science,” remembers Genrich’s lawyer. “It’s like voodoo.”

Law enforcement borrowed terms from science, establishing crime “laboratories” staffed by forensic “scientists” who announced “theories” cloaked in their own specialized jargon. But forensic “science” focused on inventing clever ways to solve cases and win convictions; it was never about forming theories and testing them according to basic scientific standards. By adopting the trappings of science, the forensic disciplines co-opted its authority while abandoning its methods.

Once a technique has made it into court and survived appeals, subsequent judges, most of whom have no scientific training and little ability to assess the scientific validity of a technique, will continue to allow it by citing precedent. Forensic examiners, in turn, cite precedent in order to claim that their techniques are reliable science. Prosecutors point to guilty verdicts as evidence that the science brought to court was sound. In this circular way, legal rulings — which never really vetted the science to begin with — substitute for scientific proof … Nowhere in this process is anyone required to provide empirical evidence that the techniques work as advertised.

Read the story

 

A Teen and a Toy Gun

(Illustration by Nicole Rifkin)

Leah Sottile | Longreads | February 2018 | 33 minutes (8,200 words)

I.

The night before Quanice Hayes was shot in the head by a police officer, the skinny 17-year-old was snapping selfies with his girlfriend in a seedy Portland, Oregon, motel room.

Bella Aguilar held her phone close when she clicked off the photos: In one, the 18-year-old girl pushes her tongue out through a smile, her boyfriend leaning over her right shoulder, lips pressed to her cheek, his dreads held back with one hand.

In another, Aguilar cradles her cheek against a black-and-sand-colored gun. It’s fake — the kind of air-powered toy that kids use to pop each other with plastic pellets in indoor arenas. Hayes peeks into the frame behind her.

If you know that the gun is fake, you see a snapshot of two kids playing tough; if you don’t, those photos looks like the beginning of a story about to go terribly wrong.

A few hours later, it did.

It was a cold night in February — a Wednesday. Aguilar and Hayes  snapped photos and danced when friends came by the motel room where the couple had been crashing. They drank cough syrup and booze. There were pills and pot and a bag of coke.

They fired the toy gun at the motel’s dirty bathroom mirror, laughing when they couldn’t get the glass to break.

When the long night caught up with Aguilar and she lay down to pass out on the room’s queen-size bed, Hayes yanked on her arm, nagging her to stay awake. Two friends crashed on a pullout couch; two more were on the floor. But Hayes didn’t want to sleep. He walked outside.

Hours passed. The sun came up. Aguilar jolted awake and felt the bed next to her, but her boyfriend wasn’t there. His phone was — it sat on the table next to the bed. She felt frantic. Panicked. Confused. “I don’t know why, but it was that moment. I just felt really, really bad,” she said last summer, sitting outside a Portland Starbucks where she took drags from a Black and Mild.

She couldn’t remember why Hayes had left. She couldn’t remember so much of the night.

She frantically tapped out a text to her boyfriend’s mother, Venus: Do you know where Quanice is? Read more…

The Mutilated and the Disappeared

Kidnappers on the migrant trail murdered his two brothers, but Miguel Ángel Rápalo Piñeda, 20, survived. The two bullet entry scars on his back are still visible, and the bullets remain inside him. (Cambria Harkey)

Alice Driver | Longreads | January 2018 | 21 minutes (5,284 words)

DISPONIBLE EN ESPAÑOL

“It is very easy to disappear people.” — Aracy Matus Sánchez, director of Jesús el Buen Pastor del Pobre y el Migrante, the only shelter in Mexico for migrants who have been mutilated along the migrant trail

* * *

Through the fist-sized security opening, a mouth appeared, then an eye, surveying. The migrant, his body shaking, stood there, eyes wide, holding his arm, whimpering. “What do you want?” asked the voice behind the metal door. “I … I … Somebody beat me up,” said the migrant, who was maybe 25 and all folded into himself as if being compact could protect him.

The door closed with a click, and the migrant swayed from side to side, then crumpled neatly toward the ground. He kept his body just rigid enough at the last second to sit down, teetering on the cement steps. He held his left arm, which had a visible protrusion below the elbow, and although he took jerky breaths, his eyes remained dry. After several minutes, he got up again and went over to a second door on the side of the building and knocked timidly. Again, he waited, holding his arm, his eyes glassed over, and leaned against the door. He began to hyperventilate, his breath seemingly caught in his birdlike chest and desperately needing to escape. Still the door remained closed. He looked down at his muddy feet, toes spilling over thin flip-flops.

When the door opened a crack, the voice once again dispassionately asked him why he was there. As the door eventually opened wider, the migrant stumbled into an office and fell onto the nearest couch. The man who had been guarding the door disappeared and was replaced by a woman who looked at the migrant and said, “Are you hungry? You can go join the others at breakfast.” She didn’t seem to notice that he was in a state of shock. After a few seconds, a stuttered “Ye— yee— sss” escaped his mouth, and she pointed him in the direction of the dining room at the migrant shelter Jesús el Buen Pastor del Pobre y el Migrante, the only shelter in Mexico for migrants who have been mutilated along the migrant trail. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman
Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman. (Photo by Mireya Acierto / FilmMagic)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Aly Raisman, Joseph Williams, Jenna Wortham, Mayukh Sen, and Sirin Kale.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…