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How To Build An Intellectual

High schools girls smoking outside their school in New York City, 1989. (Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images)

Hedia Anvar | Slice | Spring/Summer 2018 | 16 minutes (3,161 words)

On the day I constructed an intellectual from scratch, my mother, all high heels and tailored skirt, would’ve taken me to the supermarket with her. I wanted badly to go but hadn’t jumped to get ready, so she left while I was still in my underwear playing in the dirt.

We lived on the second floor of a two-story old-style complex in the Shemiran quarter of Tehran. My mother’s relatives occupied the unit below. We all shared the yard where I played. Their helpers, village women in colorful head wraps, used the yard to scrub clothes and pluck chicken feathers.

In the Tehran of 1970s, women in micro-minis walked alongside those wearing full hijab. If there was a cultural difference between a modern Iranian woman and a European one, it wasn’t exemplified by my mother with her crêpe de Chine style and mysterious — at least to preschooler me — social pursuits. The important click-clacking of her heels meant she had places to be. I wanted to be at those places with her, even the supermarket where I got to ride among the food in the cart, swinging happy feet toward her midsection.

I cherished my mother’s tummy even when her silk blouses covered it. Her stomach was the color of rice pudding. It was my father who dubbed her special complexion “rice.” Her eyes were green like ocean depths and a little dangerous, but her stomach was generous. She told me and my baby brother that we had come out of it and allowed us to knead it like dough for as long as we wanted.

The day she took off for the supermarket and left me in the yard, her voice reverberated down the stairway along with her fading steps. She was speaking to one of my uncles, and there was that word: intellectual. She pronounced it the French way, where “in” becomes “an.” In my language of Persian, “an” meant “shit.” So an an-te-lek-too-el sounded to me like something especially unpleasant.

Our yard had hard, damp soil, and between two trees yogurt drained in animal hide hanging like a hammock. I gathered twigs and clumps of earth. Then I yanked out handfuls of weed grass and found a sharp rock. I would finally figure out what an “intellectual” was because I was going to make one. I took all my soil, grass, and twigs to mash together with the rock. I kept crushing and grinding until I was left with a hairy, lumpy mass of misshapen brown, and I thought, There.

            That is an intellectual.

At almost 6 years old, I was used to being told I took after my father’s side of the family. My mother called them “artistic” and “intellectual” with enough contempt to bring substance to antelektooel before I ever constructed one out of grass and dirt.

A few years later, at the start of fourth grade, we moved to New York. Within a day of our arrival, a gust of wind in Midtown blew my mother’s skirt up in the air, but I missed it. I only caught a homeless man with a glossy face smiling and announcing, “I saw your panties.”

The four of us — my parents, my brother, and me — were waiting to cross an avenue overrun by fat checker cabs. A girl of 9, I was young enough that crossing the street brought me apprehension, but old enough for my parents to know better than to hold my hand, because who wanted to deal with the fury of an embarrassed kid? So I missed seeing my mother’s white hippie skirt, a remnant of the decade’s style, twirl above her head in a slow-motion dance — at least that’s how I would imagine it later.

She cocked her head brazenly at the homeless man, and with a Persian accent tinged with British, snickered, “Good for you.”

We were barely landed in the New York City of late-1970s crime and decrepitude, a point not lost on me, so I marveled at my mother, who was all of four-foot-eleven. My good-natured father was amused, as though both parties, his wife and the bum, were charming. My 5-year-old brother looked indignant and probably would’ve given up toys for good if it could have made that homeless man unsee his mother’s underwear.

We were heading to our hotel. The asphalt was very dark, and the lane lines bright white, which heightened the surreal quality of the city for me. We had taken leave of our country because my father, a theatrical director, had received a four-year grant to finish his doctorate at New York University — a happy accident removing us from Iran just before the fundamentalist regime took over.

New York, the greatest city in the world, had something set-like about it, not dissimilar to the sets in my father’s old productions. The buildings themselves were the unmistakable backdrops to the black-and-white Hollywood films I had watched throughout childhood in Tehran.

We slept in a gigantic king-size bed in our hotel room, the four of us in a row, jetlag waking us at four in the morning for several days. The hour was lonely and dark, so we took to turning on the TV and watching Tom and Jerry cartoons. My parents were grateful for the antics of the adorable mouse and foiled cat set to an excellent orchestra, while my brother and I didn’t want our sleep regulated because the pre-dawn ritual was an uncommon instance of solidarity for our family. My father would leave and bring back deli-hot bagels soaked with butter. Butter came to mean love and luxury for me.

When we settled into a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, rather than feeling excitement at having moved to famous New York City, I felt at attention and on edge. Learning a new language kept me in a constantly self-monitoring mode; communication was no longer second nature and had to be measured out. But I had always observed myself as if outside of my body, processing moments to transmit back fully editorialized. This activity simply multiplied once I was pried from the cozy, familiar reality of Iran and transplanted to New York.

My brother and I shared the bedroom while my parents partitioned the long living room for their own sleeping area. It felt like we were poor, but the smell of paint and parquet varnish gave the place an air of newness I associated with not being poor. “Poor” to me was the opposite of “new,” represented by frayed, faded slovenliness.

We had moved a couple of times before relocating to New York, and in our last home in Tehran, we each had our own bedroom in a modern, black-marble apartment. There, my father’s — rather than my mother’s — relatives had lived around us. His side of the family didn’t drain yogurt in animal hides or roll fruit into flat sheets outside to dry in the sun. They didn’t set up elaborate mosquito netting on the roof for sleeping in the summertime.

Sleeping on Tehran rooftops meant a mild smell of asphalt and glittering antenna branches lining the sky to the ends of the city. The nights were the blackest black and dusty with stars, balmy breezes hugging my body as I dozed next to my grandmother.

In the new, modern structure, even though my father’s relatives lived in identical apartments above and below us, I felt unprivileged compared to them. Mainly it was because they waxed their black-marble tiles to a reflective shine while ours remained dull and uncoated. This, I knew, must mean we were poor.

Although my mother wasn’t the homemaker type who’d entertain the notion of a waxing mop, we didn’t have a cleaning person either, while our relatives did. It was also the unironed, dingy collar of my school uniform — while the other girls’ collars were crisp and gleaming — that made me feel like an outsider in the private school I attended in Tehran.

I probably wouldn’t have had an inkling of poor or not-poor had my mother been good at “momming.” She, however, had little interest in most aspects of momming.

“How come you never go to the park with us?” we would ask her, and she’d smirk:

“Because I don’t like greenery.”

“Will you help us make a snowman?”

“No, snow is too white. But here’s a carrot for his nose.” She made these claims with such proud self-amusement that we couldn’t help but acknowledge her God-given right to dislike nature, or even child-rearing.

Now in New York, I no longer pined for her to take me along everywhere she went. I was too busy crossing off items from my growing-up list. I already knew how to whistle and light a match. I also clipped my own nails and was an old hand at reading books in Persian with adult-size type and no illustrations.

The four of us living in a one-bedroom apartment, albeit on the Upper East Side, expanded my definition of “poor.” Money did not flow freely to us. My parents couldn’t fool me; I was 9. We didn’t lack comfort or even trips abroad, but now I lived in the same neighborhood as rich New York families and attended school with their children, so I had occasion to compare more than just waxed tile. Those kids had country homes and tennis lessons. Us? We had floor mattresses. That’s how we’d always slept.

Even without bed frames, our bedroom was pleasing to me. The spare furnishings, an arty combination of unfinished wood and primary colors, smelled like fresh lumber and appealed to my sense of symmetry because everything was in identical pairs. My mother had been the one to choose the furniture and set up our room. This successful momming endeavor made me think of her as growing up, in the same way that I kept tabs on my own growing up.

My notion of “growing up” probably missed the mark as much as my original notion of “poor.” Aside from picking up the skills of walking, snapping my fingers, and lighting those matches without supervision, growing up to me meant becoming “nicer.” By the time I completed this unimpressive checklist, after which I could declare myself old enough to keep a passport in my own possession, it seemed not at all worth it. I would have given up being full-grown so I’d also be relieved of the daunting burden of taking care of myself. But this dismaying moment of truth lay in the future.

At not-quite 10, life had a shine to it, and no object was ordinary, not even the radiator encasement I used as a hiding place. So when I started the fourth grade, whether I or my mother was doing the growing up, it didn’t have to mean anything other than becoming nicer.

It also didn’t occur to me that coming from Iran would make me some sort of anomaly in school. New York was a big city, but being from Tehran, we were already from a big city. As a child, one is dragged around and placed in situations according to other people’s whims, and moving to America was no different. I only saw myself as a kid with too-curly hair and a secret sense of superiority, no more an outsider at school in Manhattan than I’d already been in Iran. Those who misunderstood my frown of intense thinking stayed away from me rather than picked on me, except during the next year when for a week my classmates called out “Ayatollah Khomeini” each time I walked by.

The American grade-schoolers somehow seemed to blame me for the Iran hostage crisis. I felt an active, churning hatred toward Khomeini, the deranged cleric who ruined my country. But taunting a young girl by yelling out the name of a despot didn’t cut too deep, and soon they dropped it. I worried instead about being judged for my too-short corduroys in the boy colors of brown or tan. My real self, new to English and buried beneath a shyness I couldn’t overcome, sank a little deeper because of the unfortunate clothing my mother picked out for me.

Around the time kids took to showing off the labels of their 80s jeans, my mother, too, went shopping on my behalf. She may have done right by our bedroom, but when it came to my clothes, she only managed to buy funny-looking off-brands. While other kids showcased ornate designer stitching on their butts, my new “poor people” jeans were plain and two sizes too big.

Still, the jeans represented my mother’s effort. Even though I no longer let on, I looked up to her, emotionally hoarding her momming gestures. Though the results of her cooking were inconsistent, never would I leave a morsel of uneaten food she had prepared. She buttered bread for me in the morning to go with my hot chocolate and packed fresh fruit in my lunch bag. I couldn’t fathom how other kids went through their snack bags and systematically threw out whole oranges and apples.

“Why not take home instead of wasting?” I’d ask, thinking I’d appeal to their logic but instead triggering their contempt. My accented, reluctant English also earned me the reputation of being “thick.” Those kids couldn’t have known that there was no greater insult to me than to attack my intellect — my antelekt that I’d come to regard with snickering pride, as if I were the only one my age in possession of it. For the duration of elementary school, I had to survive the wound of being considered the opposite of antelektooel while knowing its actual meaning.

On the rare occasion when kids troubled to befriend me, I was quick to alienate them. One stray new student who had joined the class midyear trotted up to me during recess before anyone had a chance to warn her of my status as weird.

“Hi, is purple your favorite color?” She was impish, and I was in awe of her ability to make her voice bright and heard.

“Not actually,” I replied with my accent and peculiar word choices, even though I knew every preteen girl’s favorite color was purple in 1980.

“Do you like Grease?” She asked. “Is it your favorite record?” She took out a big wad of purple bubblegum from her mouth and threw it on the ground.

“You should pick up that,” I said. “Someone can step. It won’t be nice for them.” She gave me a look that read, You weird, haughty little fuck, and walked away. Later I asked my father to take me to the record store.

“We are looking for the band Grease,” my father said to the store clerk. My father’s voice was deep and distinguished. He had a striking head of graying hair and eyes that seemed to reflect sunlight indoors.

“The band Grease?” The store clerk chortled. “No such band. There’s a musical. Movie came out last year.” I dropped my eyes, wondering how long it would take before my family and I stopped sticking out.

My father paid for the album, and as soon as we stepped onto the sidewalk, I tore off the cellophane. At home, I listened to the record on repeat and decided I liked Grease much better than purple.

Fifth grade was about the Ming Dynasty, Greek mythology, and sexism. Prior to my teacher’s explanation of gender inequality, I had no indication that a sane society might think less of me because I wasn’t a boy. After all, I was born to a mother who had never bothered with anyone else’s expectations and a father who had treated me with respect, not to mention that people who oppressed women were supposed to be backward fanatics like the ones who were spoiling my country.

By age 11, I also learned to smoke cigarettes under the bridge next to the East River. I hid my pack inside the radiator encasement in the bedroom I shared with my brother. Marlboro reds cost eighty-five cents at the newsstand down the street. The gruff old man with the paperboy hat didn’t miss a beat selling them to me, though I wasn’t physically developed and couldn’t have appeared more than eight. He ignored me with the same disdain he doled out to everyone else, which weirdly designated him the first New Yorker to make me feel like I was where I belonged.

Walking around my neighborhood, I would sometimes see teenage girls, tall, thin-legged, and dangerous in their heavy-metal shirts, their hair painstakingly feathered. Among us young ones the rumor ran that their gapped legs were due to sex and drugs. They wore jean jackets, extra-thick eyeliner, and a feather dangling from one ear. There was no hiding under the bridge for them — they smoked out in the open and ruled the sidewalk. At night they sat on top of the picnic tables in John Jay Park and drank beer, throwing the cans at their feet. It was hard to imagine them snuggling in bed with their parents and watching Tom and Jerry.

The next year during lunch, my sixth-grade class would walk half a block to the same John Jay Park. Us girls would sit on the swings while the boys stood on them, facing us with their legs on either side of our bodies.

“Can I ride you?” the boy would ask first, then hop onto the swing and prompt it back and forth by swaying his pelvis. So I learned what it felt like to have a boy near me, the little hairs all over my body standing at attention. Around the same time, I stopped comparing my family to other families — I was preoccupied with impending puberty and receiving my sex education from Judy Blume books.

Soon I began losing most of my Persian accent too.

A year later when I read Catcher in the Rye, the sheep fell over the cliff, and I thought of the teenage girls from my neighborhood, wondering what had become of them. One September they had disappeared from the streets, but in my mind, they remained forever those dangerous girls strutting down the block with too much eyeliner. After Catcher in the Rye, I envisioned them falling over a cliff, but somehow I was there too, falling upside down and wearing my own jean jacket.

Maybe among the truths of growing up piling around me, I grasped that happiness would never again be as uncomplicated as my mother taking me to the supermarket.

There had been a time when working out a problem — how to whistle, snap my fingers, or cross the street — took mere repetition. Back then I clumped together soil and grass to understand the nature of an antelektooel by making one. But by the time I picked up smoking under the bridge, I knew the means to satisfaction wouldn’t work the old way anymore. Living with that knowledge hurt as much as realizing we were never going back to live in Iran, that wonderland of rooftop nights and my childhood.

***

This essay first appeared in the Spring/Summer issue of SliceOur thanks to Hedia Anvar and the staff at Slice for allowing us to reprint it.

‘I Had Nothing To Do With It But Have Been Punished’: Issac Bailey On His Brother Moochie, the Murderer

Getty, composite by Katie Kosma

Tori Telfer | Longreads | June 2018 | 14 minutes (3,622 words)

Issac Bailey was nine when he watched his hero get taken away in handcuffs. It felt like a bad dream: the police were closing those handcuffs around the wrists of his older brother Moochie, the charming, athletic, charismatic father-figure who’d protected their mother from their dad’s beatings, whose checks from a stint in the army kept their large family afloat, and who was “like a god” to his little brothers. All that changed in the blink of an eye when he murdered a white man and was fed into the maw of the criminal justice system.

Moochie was a murderer. But he was also a person, a big brother, a black man who’d absorbed a thousand and one shocks for his little siblings, a kid born into the sort of soul-crushing racial environment that made it a sin to wear dark skin, as Bailey notes below. Had his worst act put him beyond the possibility of redemption? This is the question Bailey sets out to ask in his latest book, My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism in the American South (Other Press, May 2018).

Through a childhood and young adulthood spent with his beloved older brother behind bars, Bailey experienced firsthand how callously the families of perpetrators are ignored by the criminal justice system, and how little nuance is afforded both black men who’ve offended and the families who love them. “The more hideous, the more one-dimensional black men who kill…are portrayed, the better,” he writes. “It’s easier to hate them that way…and if they are monsters, they likely come from monstrous stock, meaning the broken families from which they hail aren’t worthy of the resources needed to repair them.” After thirty-two years behind bars, Moochie was unexpectedly released. By then, Issac had grown into a successful journalist who’d grappled with his brother’s crime for his entire adult life—a crime that had left Bailey himself with a stutter, and a bad case of PTSD, both remnants of the trauma that had radiated throughout his family for decades. Read more…

A Frustrating Year of Reporting on Black Maternal Health

Danielle Jackson | Longreads | June 2018 |3370 words (14 minutes)

“It’s in fashion to talk about black women’s maternal care,” Bilen Berhanu, a Brooklyn-based full-spectrum birth doula told me recently. I’d asked her about the outpouring of news stories, from multiple national outlets, about infant and maternal mortality over the past twelve months.

The reporting has added flesh and aching detail to what I’ve come to think of as an embarrassing public health crisis in the United States. Among industrialized countries, our nation has the highest rate of infant deaths. We’ve had dramatic declines since 1960, but we have not kept pace with other nations we’d consider peers. New American moms face similar danger: The rate of maternal mortality in the U.S. has been rising since 2000 while falling for most other nations in our subset.

Deep, persistent inequality — access to safe neighborhoods and hospitals, functioning schools, healthy food — plays a part. But across family income levels and educational attainment, the infant mortality rate for black babies is more than twice than it is for whites, according to data from 2007-2013. Black mothers are also more imperiled than white ones — they are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes leading up to or within a year after giving birth. In New York City, black mothers are 12 times more likely to die than their white counterparts. Read more…

This Month in Books: ‘We Have Nothing to Weigh Our Hearts Against’

Imagno / Getty

Dear Reader,

When I look at this month’s Books Newsletter, all I can think about are borders, crossings, the terrible distances between people who have been separated….

Of course, that’s almost certainly because those things are already on my mind. To read the news now is to be made aware of the perils and punishments reserved for people who have their heart set on something remote, who have faith in the faraway.

Qiu Miaojin, the first openly gay woman in Chinese literature, migrated halfway around the world, from Taiwan to Paris. In her second novel she writes of a character who has done the same, in a bid for self-actualization which ultimately fails. The character invents a non-binary imaginary friend to live out an idealized version of her life after she ceases to exist. As our reviewer Ankita Chakraborty says of this narrator, “She is willing to cross boundaries that define reality from imagination, woman from man, landscape from landscape, and life from death.” A profound sense of alienation, brought on by stigmatization, lies as the heart of Qiu’s queer classics — a breach that opens up between the self and others. The narrator crosses borders in order to become her true self, but ends up feeling like nothing more than a foreigner in a foreign land.

Of course, there’s feeling like a foreigner in a foreign land, and then there’s feeling like one in your homeland. Our reviewer Brittany Allen writes about two new short story collections that explore the inner lives of black Americans. The characters in these stories, “who tremble on the faultlines, and struggle to inhabit comfortably their impossible bodies,” suffer from the lived experience of “Otherhood,” which compels them to wage endless war inside their own heads, with their own selves.

In his interview with Hope Reese, Michael Pollan advocates for ditching the self altogether. He describes the healthy and grounding experience of seeing his own self “spread over the landscape like a coat of paint.” In his experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, he discovered that:

I wasn’t necessarily identical to my ego, which I had always assumed was the case. And that, you know, your ego is this interesting character. I mean, it really is a character. It’s a projection of someone who sort of stands for you and looks out for you and patrols the borders between you and others, and the border between you and your subconscious.

In his interview with Tobias Carroll, Sergio De La Pava expresses the opposite sentiment, a niggling fear that he might ever be mistaken for someone else, even the person most nearly identical to him who could possibly exist — a “Sergio De La Pava” in another dimension:

If there’s something in another universe that looks like me, has my name, that other people call Sergio De La Pava and is doing something, that’s great, but whatever that thing is, it’s not me… Whatever you want to say my physical body or whatever you want to call it — a mind, you want to call it, a soul, whatever you want to call it — it feels indivisible.

I suppose I’ve drifted from the subject of borders and crossings to the subject of selves and others. Maybe that’s because when I think about borders, I don’t think about the gaps between places, I think about the spaces between people. Nowadays, a border isn’t a division between two pieces of land, it’s a border between two people, repeated and repeated until every small trauma of division becomes a national one. It’s a way of dictating who gets to visit whom, who gets to live with their family and who gets their family taken away. It’s a global parole system, the prisonification of the planet….. The border is everywhere. The border is between you and the pizza delivery guy, you and your high school classmate, you and your child….

Like any border — the ones between nations, the ones between ourselves and others, ourselves and the landscape — even the boundary between our bodies is not a natural phenomenon, but an imagined one. Our bodies are porous. In novelist Christie Watson’s memoir of her nearly 20 years as a nurse, she remembers her awe at the special privilege of surgeons, who can reach a hand into another person’s body and touch that person’s heart. When caring for a boy who has received a heart transplant, whose beating heart she watched be removed and replaced with another child’s, the boy tells her that now he loves a new flavor of ice cream, strawberry, because he believes the previous owner of his heart had loved it. It seems to me like he was welcoming the stranger inside of him, by trying to love with the stranger’s heart — something we all fail to do at our own peril. In the next life, we may find ourselves wanderers on the wrong side of another type of border. As Watson goes on to say:

Ancient Egyptians believed that the heart symbolized truth; after death, they would weigh the heart against a feather of truth, to be eaten by a demon if the scales did not balance, leaving the person’s soul restless for eternity. In this post-truth world, I wonder what will happen to our souls. We have nothing to weigh our hearts against.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Behind The NYT Investigation into Prosecuting Overdoses as Homicides

Sonya Cradle holds a poem she wrote in memory of her friend Len Bias, during a wake for Bias at a church Sunday evening on June 22, 1986 in Washington. Bias died of an apparent heart attack in his University of Maryland dormitory. (AP photo/Tom Reed)

Last year, I spoke to a former cop and a public health policy expert, both of whom told me that the major failing of the “war on drugs” was prioritizing incarceration over treatment and prevention. Part of the problem today, the former cop told me, was that in many places where opioids are currently leading to deaths, the only resource available is law enforcement. He pointed to the Midwest town of East Liverpool, Ohio, where a photo of two adults overdosing in a car with a baby in the backseat had gone viral. The East Liverpool police chief had told NPR, “We don’t have any resources, and we don’t have a place. Even if somebody comes down here to the station, knocks on the door and asks for help, where do we send them? We have nothing here in our county.”

“Opioid crisis” has become a catchphrase in the United States. The word crisis points to the panic that authorities in government and law enforcement feel about the situation — panic that seems to be spurring a fevered response to the issue.

A recent New York Times investigation looked at the fervor that has seized prosecutors around the country attempting to do their part to address the problem — by bringing homicide charges against the friends, family, and fellow users of people who die by overdose.

“I look at it in a real micro way,” Pete Orput, the chief prosecutor in Washington County outside Minneapolis, told the reporter, Rosa Goldensohn. “You owe me for that dead kid.”

Goldensohn wrote:

As overdose deaths mount, prosecutors are increasingly treating them as homicide scenes and looking to hold someone criminally accountable. Using laws devised to go after drug dealers, they are charging friends, partners and siblings. The accused include young people who shared drugs at a party and a son who gave his mother heroin after her pain medication had been cut off. Many are fellow users, themselves struggling with addiction.

Goldensohn (who goes by Rosie) spent nearly a year exploring this issue, in several states around the country. Longreads spoke to her and her editor, Shaila Dewan, about the investigation and how it came together.

How did you come up with or find this story?

RG: In 2016, I heard New York City’s now-police commissioner, then the Chief of Department, James O’Neill, allude to opening overdose investigations on Staten Island during a City Council hearing. Then last year, I learned that the city was spending a lot of their opioid plan resources on detectives and amping up that approach. I set up a Google alert, “overdose charged murder.” I wasn’t necessarily thinking of doing a national story, but I was getting so many clips from all over that I set up a spreadsheet and started tracking them. I saw a lot of local articles saying, “This is the first such charge in this county,” that kind of thing, so I knew it was an emerging trend.

Shaila, What was your reaction when Rosie first brought this story to you? Did you have any hesitations? Did you immediately know what was needed, or was there more of a process in developing what it would ultimately be?

SD: Rosie’s story pitch was ​like Athena leaping from the head of Zeus full grown. I knew immediately that even though she had not written for us before, it was worth a full-fledged New York Times takeout. It was a staggering trend that had so many implications and said something important about how the country deals with crisis.

In terms of what was needed, what we talked about early on (and what I think Rosie achieved), was giving full voice to all sides of the issue — the accused, the victims’ families, the prosecutors, etc. We didn’t want it to be a gotcha piece; we wanted it to really grapple with responsibility and guilt.

What kind of resources and support did this story require?

RG: A lot. First off, a very experienced and fantastic editor and a supportive desk and institution. Shaila spent a ton of time with me, basically taught me how to do this kind of story while I was doing it. I had never done anything on this scale before and she had the map and knew where we were in the process even when I didn’t. We projected each section on a TV screen and worked through it line by line.

Second, time. Third, money. The Times invested a lot of money in this piece, flying me around to West Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin. Fourth, a brilliant data team that audited all my numbers and analysis to make sure I was doing it right. Fifth, the lack of desire for any extracurricular activities or social engagement.

SD: We needed time and travel. Time to do way more interviews than we would ever use, to become an expert on something that no one is an expert on yet because it’s too new, and travel to find and go deep with the right examples. Rosie actually went to Hibbing, MN, twice, but I’ll let her tell that story if she wants to.

We also needed to quantify the problem as best we could​. Data is a perennial problem in criminal justice stories because there are basically more than 3,000 local justice systems and many states don’t have reliable, centralized case tracking.

Rosie, can you talk about what you learned from this project, your biggest takeaways?

RG: One of my biggest takeaways is how much of the writing of a long feature like this is done in the reporting of it, getting the kind of details that will bring it to life. As Shaila mentioned, I went to Hibbing twice. I planned to go back secretly for a weekend night with frequent flyer miles because I was looking for a word to describe this town and I felt like I needed to see it again. I had a really nice breakfast at Sportsman’s Cafe and gabbed with the dishwasher there and tried to see the taconite mine but it was blocked off. Hibbing is not only the birthplace of Bob Dylan, but of the Greyhound bus, I learned. The word I came back with was “snowy.”

What were the biggest challenges in making this story happen?

SD: It was extraordinarily difficult to count cases because they were charged under various statutes and sometimes were impossible to separate from other homicide cases. The Times‘s data people and researchers were able to help Rosie clean up her database and determine what data was reliable enough to use. Also, in legal reporting, it’s just incredibly easy to misstep because there are so many finer points.

RG: The analysis of Pennsylvania cases had a lot of logistical pieces, because I needed to get court documents from all these counties and then speak to people involved in dozens of cases, many ongoing. But for me, the biggest challenge was wrangling this massive quantity of material. I interviewed, I think, 15 prosecutors and four are in the piece. I went to a whole trial that’s not in here. What to leave in, what to leave out, in the immortal words of Bob Seger.

Shaila, what advice do you have for reporters who want to undertake a story like this?

SD: Persistence is a good quality. ​I just think that good reporters are determined reporters.

A New Yorker, and a Sick Person

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

 

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

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

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

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Vacating Convictions from Crooked Chicago Cops

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A group of corrupt police officers on Chicago’s South Side had been framing and extorting residents for years. Then they planted drugs on the wrong people: Ben Baker and his girlfriend Clarissa Glenn.

In The New Yorker, Jennifer Gonnerman describes how Glenn’s determination to exonerate her husband helped build a case against police sergeant Ronald Watts and his brazenly crooked cronies. Glenn’s campaign consumed her, and Baker’s absence left their children without a father for too many years. Not only was Baker eventually freed, the state attorney overturned many of Watts’ other tainted convictions. One difficult question remains: how many more innocent people still wallow in prison?

No one knows how many men Watts and his officers framed, in part because so many of them pleaded guilty. Watts’s officers at times planted such large quantities of drugs on Wells residents that they were charged with a Class X felony, the highest-level felony after first-degree murder. If the defendant went to trial and lost, he faced up to thirty years in prison. Phillip Thomas, who sold candy from a cart in the Wells, recalled that when he told his public defender that Watts’s officers had planted drugs on him, “she made it quite clear that she didn’t believe me and that my best bet was to plead guilty.” Ignoring her advice, he represented himself at trial. He lost, and was sentenced to six years. Shaun James told his public defender a similar story, and, he said, “She’s looking at me like I’m crazy. She said, ‘Ain’t no judge is ever going to believe that.’ ” James and his co-defendant, Taurus Smith, both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to two years’ probation.

Clarissa and Ben decided to fight the cases against them: Ben’s, from when he was arrested alone, and Ben and Clarissa’s, from when they were arrested together. They assumed that, because the state’s attorney’s office was aware of Watts’s corruption, it would eventually drop the charges against them. David Navarro, the prosecutor who met with Clarissa and Ben in the spring of 2005, told me that he believed them, and spent months investigating their claims about Watts, but he couldn’t prove the allegations. “It’s very difficult to prove a case when your only witness is the guy who has a pending case against him, and that guy has a criminal background,” he said.

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Somewhere Under My Left Ribs: A Nurse’s Story

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Christie Watson | Excerpt from The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story | Tim Duggan Books | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,508 words)

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The landscape of theaters must be terrifying for patients, but it’s becoming normal for me. It’s amazing what you can get used to. Life wasn’t always like this.

The first operation that I watch is a heart-lung transplant. I am nineteen years old and still a student nurse. The operation takes so long: over twelve hours. It requires a team of surgeons to behave like a relay team; but instead of a baton, they pass between them a human heart and lungs. I’ve been looking after the patient waiting for the new set of lungs that day: a fourteen-year-old boy named Aaron suffering from cystic fibrosis, who is confined to bed, oxygen tubes inserted into his nose, with a tired, wet cough and sallow gray skin. I help him get ready for the operation. I rub cocoa butter onto his dry knees, take away his Game Boy and swear to guard it with my life. I wet his lips with a small salmon-pink sponge that I dip in sterile water, not wanting to risk the tiniest possibility of him being exposed to any germs.

Aaron’s room glows with lights in the shape of stars and moons surrounding his hospital bed and a journal is hidden under his pillow. There is a small corkboard next to his bed that his stepdad has Blu-tacked to the wall, covered in a mosaic of photographs of him with his friends, every single one of them smiling. It is a common thing for a child’s hospital room to be personalized. Aside from the oxygen piped through the wall and the suction canister with its thick transparent tubing, it could be a typical teenage bedroom. Read more…

‘I Was a Storm of Confetti’: Michael Pollan On Why It’s a Good Idea To Lose Your Self

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Hope Reese | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,468 words)

On April 19, 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann ingested a quarter milligram of LSD to confirm that it had caused the oddly fantastical journey he had experienced the day before. To his surprise and delight, he was not mistaken –– the drug opened up a new window of consciousness. The discovery caught the attention of other researchers, and by the 1950s, psychedelic testing was in full bloom, yielding promising results for people suffering from neurosis, schizophrenia, and psychopathy.

But as counter-cultural experimentation progressed and the drugs were taken out of the lab and into the wild –– think of Tim Leary, dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” by Nixon, and his controversial LSD experiments –– there was a backlash. According to the writer Michael Pollan, society “turned on a dime” against psychedelics. “You’d have to go back to the Inquisition and Galileo for a time when scientific inquiry was stigmatized quite the way this was,” he tells me. “And it’s a measure of how powerful that backlash was and how threatened powerful interests felt about what psychedelics were doing to society.” Read more…

It Isn’t That Shocking

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Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | May 2018 | 22 minutes (6,055 words)

 

It is a truth not nearly enough disseminated — despite all the discussion about depression and the recourses for those who suffer from it — that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) can work. I had it six times in the basement of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City in 2003 when I was 27 years old.

I’d awakened the morning before my first treatment in my mother’s apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. I remember staring into the mirror, mute. My mother said: “You look haunted.” What was my mother seeing? I remember seeing “it” too. My face was cradled in my hands, as though they held up its sagging contents. I looked captive, as though I were staring from behind prison bars.

For the previous six months, I had been unresponsive to a host of psychotropic drugs called in as a breakwater against a tidal wave of morbid depression. Who had I been? The details: I was a college graduate who had been a child actor. I was a chatty and expressive person, prone to melancholy moods but capable of romantic enthusiasm for life. I had been, simply, a human being, before illness descended and set off deterioration. Now, I was a clump of raw nerve endings.

It’s an old story. Much like prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, depression, I often think, is the world’s oldest ailment. But old or not, it is my story too.

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