Search Results for: health

Announcing the 2018 Longreads Member Drive

I’m Mike Dang, editor-in-chief of Longreads.

Today we’re launching the 2018 Longreads Member Drive with the goal of raising $50,000 from readers by November 2. All of this money will go directly into a story fund that’s exclusively used to support work from writers, photographers, and illustrators from all around the world.

In addition, for every dollar you give, WordPress.com will generously match with $3. This means that if we raise $50,000, we have the potential to add $200,000 to our story fund for upcoming writing and investigative projects. This is why your support during our drive is so crucial. Read more…

The Last Puerto Rican Social Club in Brooklyn

Still from the documentary Toñita’s. Used with permission.

Carl-Johan Karlsson | Longreads | October 2018 | 13 minutes (3,603 words)

Nestled within the brown, red, and yellow gingerbread houses that line Williamsburg’s Grand Street in Brooklyn, Toñita’s (technically named Caribbean Social Club) is easy to miss, unless you spot the neon Corona sign and the weathered sticker that says We’re open. Inside, there’s a disco ball, a reindeer head mounted on the wall, and a palm tree wrapped in Christmas tinsel. A pool table surrounded by plastic chairs stands in the center of the wood-patterned vinyl floor. Photos of baseball players in eclectic frames festoon the walls. Gilt baseball trophies jostle one another on high shelves. The biggest frame is dedicated to Roberto Clemente — the sainted Puerto Rican right fielder who died in a plane crash in 1972. On the walls, posters for salsa shows and domino tournaments compete for space. A wooden plaque — from the City Council of New York thanking Maria Antonia (Toñita) Cay for her service to the community — hangs on the wall by the little bar in the corner.

By 9 p.m. on a Saturday, darkness has rolled across New York, but Toñita’s is just waking up. Little tornados of smiling people dance around the pool table. Salsa tones mingle with conversations in pattering Spanish. Occasional cheers ring out as a pool player sinks a ball. In the corner, two 80-something men in baseball caps meditate over a game of dominoes — oblivious to the tumult from the TV on the wall, where a Spanish-speaking Arnold Schwarzenegger guns down a group of assailants.

Behind the bar, serving Corona and Heineken, stands Cay. She wears a black silk jacket. Colorful rings adorn her fingers. She is 77, with curly reddish hair, dark eyes under carefully plucked brows, and a vague smile.

“It used to be several social clubs just on Grand Street,” Cay says as she opens a beer. “But one after one, they all disappeared.”

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West Across the Sea

Illustration by J.O. Applegate

 Sam Riches / Longreads / October 2018 / 17 minutes (4,328 words)

The first thing you need to know about Iceland is that sheep are everywhere. In the pastures, on top of the mountains, next to the highway. They graze freely and abundantly and peacefully, most of the time. An approaching vehicle can cause them to scatter — bells clanging frantically, fuzzy butts bouncing wildly — into the countryside, where the only predator to worry about, other than humans, is the delightfully cute but sometimes fatal arctic fox.

Icelandic sheep are hardy creatures. They are farmed mostly for their meat but also for their wool, which provides insulated, waterproof protection against Iceland’s damp weather. For centuries, sheep have been fundamental to Icelandic life — so perhaps it is not surprising that one of the most intriguing basketball prospects the country has ever produced was, just four and a half years ago, focused on a more traditional career: sheep farmer. Read more…

This Month In Books: “Once You Can See the Pattern”

Photo by Paul Schafer on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

A lot of what you’ll read in this month’s books newsletter is about things not seeming to be what they really are.

In an interview with Hope Reese, Rebecca Traister talks about how women’s anger is not recognized as a politically valid form of expression, even though history tells a different story — that women’s anger has the power to start revolutions! Moreover:

“Women are punished for expressing their anger… their anger is discouraged, and part of this punishment is that your having expressed anger can be turned against you to discredit you.”

The power women feel is not recognized for what it is. And not just the power — also the pain. In an interview with Wei Tchou, Tanya Marquardt discusses the process of interrogating her memories of sexual assault, and explains how writing her memoir forced her to finally describe events as they really happened:

“I found myself struggling with the language around consent and really asking myself, ‘What was happening in that scene?’… I had to come to terms with the fact that I hadn’t consented, and more than that, I thought it was my job to endure whatever he was going to do to me.”

In an interview with Victoria Namkung, Nicole Chung talks about how difficult it was, as a grown-up adoptee, to let go of her “origin story,” which, although it had always felt safe, was not real:

“Even though it wasn’t the whole truth, I was so comforted and so attached to this origin story I was given. I remember how difficult it was to start challenging that.”

Mr. Rogers was deeply concerned about children who believe in stories that are comforting but not real. He thought it could be downright dangerous for them. According to his biographer Maxwell King,

“When Fred Rogers and David Newell learned about the child who hurt himself trying to be a superhero, they came up with an idea: a special program to help kids grasp just what a fictional superhero is.”


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On the other hand, in her book Travelers in the Third Reich, Julia Boyd describes how, in the 1930s, the British establishment had a striking lack of concern when it came to exposing children to false ideas. The well-off continued to send their young-adult children to be educated in Germany once the Nazi regime was in power:

“That the British establishment should have seen fit to prepare its offspring for adult life by sending them to such a vile totalitarian regime is puzzling, to say the least…. despite the Great War and growing awareness of Nazi iconoclasm, Germany’s traditional grip on British intellectual imagination remained as strong as ever. Here, in the midst of Nazi barbarity and boorishness, these gilded youths were expected to deepen their education and broaden their outlook.”

(From Maxwell King’s biography of Mr. Rogers: “One of the few things that could raise anger — real, intense anger — in Mister Rogers was willfully misleading innocent, impressionable children. To him, it was immoral and completely unacceptable.”)

Boyd goes on to say: “Ariel Tennant, another teenager in Munich at the time, studying art, was struck by how many people in England refused to believe her accounts of Nazi aggression.”

(This past weekend, I saw a video online of a proto-fascist gang beating some people in New York. The police did not arrest them. After the beating, the gang members posed for a photograph, all of them making similar hand signs for the camera.)

(In her novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, Anna Moschovakis writes: “The feeling of closeness to a time before — the familiar melancholy that came from surfing the internet in the ways she used to — had receded and been replaced by the new feeling, the one she struggled to describe.”)

In her review of two recent books about immigrant families applying for asylum, Martha Pskowski writes about how, in her work with migrants, she would find that, the longer they talked to her, the more likely their stories were to change — because telling a story can be dangerous, and they were trying to keep people safe:

“Sometimes, migrants would tell me one story, and then as we talked over time, another story emerged. ….In Southern Mexico where I carry out interviews, coyotes and gang members often seek information about men and women on the migrant trail, to then threaten their family members. This doesn’t mean immigrants are unreliable sources, this means that as journalists we must work harder to earn their trust and prevent negative consequences of our work.”

Pskowski goes on to say: “Increasingly, and controversially, journalists are acknowledging and even embracing the concept that true ‘objectivity’ is both unachievable and undesirable.”

(This month a journalist named Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The story of how it happened has been revised many times. Changing stories are often a sign of danger — the journalist’s job is, sometimes, just to ask who is in danger for telling the story. Sometimes the answer is: the journalist.)

(Anna Moschovakis: “The new feeling: a flesh-eating virus expanding its appetite beneath the skin.”)

In her book How Does It Feel To Be Unwanted?, Eileen Truax writes about the re-categorization of asylum-seekers as threats to national security:

“Since the beginning of the Trump administration, policy changes in how immigration laws are applied indicate that authorities may use their discretion to qualify any violation of the law as a ‘crime,’ widely and arbitrarily broadening the spectrum of people who could be considered a ‘danger’ to the country. People like Yamil, who was charged with using false documents and has a previous deportation on his record, could be deemed a threat to national security.”

(Nicole Chung: “I’d been led to believe racism was something in the past. Even teachers at school presented racism as a thing we had conquered. It was very well-intentioned and wrong.”)

In his review of several new books about the opioid crisis, Zachary Siegel writes that the danger isn’t always where you think it is:

“A recent study out of Stanford that modeled public health policy shows that aggressively controlling the supply of prescriptions, in the short-term, is actually increasing overdose deaths by the thousands…. The fact is, injecting a regulated pharmaceutical of known dose and purity is less risky than injecting a bag of white powder purchased on the street. Bags of dope come with no proof of ingredients…. At the end of the day, an 80 milligram OxyContin is always 80 milligrams. It may not be pretty… but at least there was a measure of safety.”

And neither the heroes nor the villains are who you think they should be:

“A simplistic narrative yields cheap, simplistic solutions. America’s opioid reporting has the tendency to chronicle lengthy police investigations that feature cops, federal agents, and prosecutors high on the delusion that shutting down the right pill mill or locking up the right dealer will put addiction and overdoses to a grinding halt. They think they’re in an episode of The Wire.”

There are dire consequence for misunderstanding what the story is really about:

“Choking off the supply of prescription painkillers early on in the crisis, without first installing a safety net to catch the fallout, was a major policy failure that worsened America’s opioid problem by orders of magnitude.”

(Anna Moschovakis: “Or, the new feeling: a helixed grating, eternal return.”)

(Tanya Marquardt: “Once you can see the pattern and what you are repeating, you can see how it is abusive to you, and then you can change.”)

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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The Women Who Help Immigrant Women Escape Domestic Abuse

AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

Many undocumented women fear that reporting their husbands’ abuse will get their children deported and cause retaliatory violence, so many Latina farm-workers keep quiet. For The California Sunday Magazine, Lizzie Presser writes about Mily Treviño-Sauceda and Valentina, part of the growing network of women who have stepped in to help empower these victims and end their silence. These women aren’t social workers. They are people who empathize, often from their shared experience as victims of rape, wage theft, racism, and violence, and they take risks by letting women stay in their homes, learn their rights, and connect with social services.

Valentina began waking up at dawn to drive to Santa Maria, more than 100 miles away, two or three times each week. She set up appointments at health clinics, food pantries, and churches, and Elena watched as Valentina took down numbers and asked questions. Elena had felt confined by the street Spanish she spoke and started learning words she hadn’t known. Valentina took her window-shopping at the mall or belted Mexican folk songs, dancing in her seat, when Elena seemed down. After several months, Elena took the lead. She held meetings with women in homes across the city, Valentina sitting by her side.

Within a year, Elena was taking women in. She was nervous about the strangers, reminding her 10-year-old daughter to stay in her bedroom and lock the door, but after the first few came and went with their kids, she loosened up. In the morning, she woke up early to make breakfast and scouted for apartment listings. At her peak, 20 people stayed in the house at once, kids’ arms dangling off the leather sofas. Her daughter slept in the bathtub.

Around the same time that she opened her home, Elena told Valentina why she had been interested. She sat across from her on a bright afternoon at an outdoor table of a coffee shop. “I think I was in a worse situation than you,” she started. Elena began to tell Valentina about the father of her child. She explained how he had raped her at work when she was a teenager and how her parents had pressured her to be with him afterward. She talked about how he would treat her like a piece of paper that he could do whatever he liked to. She said that, after they had a child together, he tried to kill her, running the blade of a knife across her neck.

When she decided to go to the police a week later, they didn’t help. She felt paralyzed, as if her mind had dissolved. She hadn’t known her rights or that she qualified for a U visa. Instead, she kept quiet and hid out at her sister’s house for a year, working 13-hour days picking strawberries and peppers. “How stupid I was,” she said over and over. Valentina wrapped her arms around Elena. “Chaparrita,” she said, “we didn’t have any experience.”

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Living with Dolly Parton

Mark Humphrey / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jessica Wilkerson | Longreads | October 2018 | 43 minutes (7,851 words)

Dolly Parton was one of two women I learned to admire growing up in East Tennessee. The other was Pat Summitt, head coach of the Lady Volunteers, the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. One flamboyantly female, the other a masculine woman. Both were arguably the best at what they did, had fantastic origins stories of hardscrabble lives in rural Tennessee, and told us that with enough grit and determination, we could succeed. Queer kids and nerdy girls, effeminate boys and boyish girls who desired something more than home took comfort in their boundary crossing. From these women they learned that they too could strike out on their own while maintaining both their authenticity and ties to home.

For years, I found solace in “Wildflowers,” written by Parton and performed with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris on their record Trio. The song’s instrumentation is spare, with the tinny chords of the autoharp and Ronstadt and Harris’s harmonies. In a near warble, Dolly sang of a “rambling rose” who didn’t “regret the path” she chose.

I moved away from home in ways more profound than the physical leaving, and it sometimes caused me to feel the pain of committing a betrayal. My grandmother Laverne warned me: “Don’t forget where you come from.”

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A Place to Stay, Untouched by Death

Unsplash / Pexels / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | October 2018 | 12 minutes (2,950 words)

 

A place to stay untouched by death
Does not exist.
It does not exist in space, it does not exist in the ocean,
Nor if you stay in the middle of a mountain. 

-Buddha

When my mother grew quite ill and it became clear she would soon die, we brought her from the hospital to my parents’ house where they’d lived for nearly 50 years. My father, brother, niece, and I moved the dining-room table and chairs into the living room and hospice came in and set up one of those heavy, mechanical beds with cold metal side rails and a device that moved the head and feet up and down. It was an ugly bed. How many people before my mom had died in it, I wondered. It came with a sparse, lumpy mattress. My mom was skinny as a blade of grass by then and needed padding for her jutting bones. So we purchased an additional mattress to rest on top of her existing one; a mattress that would be hers alone, upon which no one, besides her, would die.

My parents grew up working class in London during World War II where they acquired a lifelong frugality. Inspire by one of the more popular war slogans, “Make Do and Mend,” they reused cooking oil, saved aluminum foil, and sewed up holes in our socks. So, it wasn’t a surprise to discover the Marimekko sheets of my late teen years in my parents’ linen closet. I was 54 then, but the background white on those sheets was still crisp and bright; the pinks and oranges and yellows of the flowers still exuberant. There were no other twin sheets in the house, so as my mom rested in her favorite velvet chair in the family room, my dad and I made up the bed with them. It was February, so we placed one blanket on top and folded another near where her feet, now tender in their slouchy socks, would rest.

And there it was: My mother’s death bed. All done up in my college dorm sheets.

My mind raced through the things that had happened on those sheets. Things that didn’t belong to this moment. I remembered my parents moving me into my college dorm in 1980. My mom always said that the moment all my belongings were in my room, I shushed them away. But I don’t think that’s entirely true. I remember unpacking my brand-new sheets, freshly laundered by my mom, and together, the three of us, making my bed. I remember them being so proud of me: There I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. My mom’s education had ended at age 12 when her school was bombed and my dad’s at 14 when he began his apprenticeship in the tool and dye trade. Such was England in those days.

I was struck by this repurposing of an object for a completely unexpected use. Back when I was 18, screwing my boyfriend on those sheets, slipping between them after a late night at the clubs, over-sleeping for classes sandwiched in them, eating junk food and studying for exams, books sprawled on top of them, sharing secrets with best friends with the sheets tucked around our knees, I could never have imagined my mom would die nestled between them.

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Queens of Infamy: The Reign of Catherine de’ Medici

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | October 2018 | 26 minutes (6,557 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.

* * *

Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

When we last left the Serpent Queen, things were looking dire. She had been married to Henri, the heir to the French throne, for nearly five years. Although the Dauphin and Dauphine were both young and healthy, Catherine was failing in her most fundamental duty: providing the country with an heir. Rumors had spread throughout the court that she was incapable of conceiving. Since her husband’s only living brother was unmarried and childless, the entire fate of the Valois dynasty rested on Catherine’s ability to produce a child.

Faced with a rival noble faction, the Guises, who wanted to replace the apparently barren queen-to-be with one of their own, Catherine had thrown aside her pride and made a risky preemptive strike. Swooning pathetically at Francis I’s feet, the young woman tearfully begged the king to go ahead and replace her, saying that she loved Henri beyond measure and just wanted him to have a wife who could give him heirs. Catherine asked only that she be allowed to stay in France and humbly serve her beloved’s new bride.

It was a risky move, but Catherine had banked on the fact that the aging king couldn’t bear to see a young woman crying. Francis, nearly in tears himself, declared that it was God’s will that Catherine be the Dauphin’s wife. The question of replacing the Dauphine was resolved, for now.

But Catherine knew that this amnesty was only temporary; just across the English channel, Henry VIII was ditching his wives all over the place for not giving him a son. How long would it be before the Valois family decided to follow suit?

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A Woman, Tree or Not

Mohammad Alizade / Unsplash, Getty Images, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Terese Marie Mailhot | Longreads | October 2018 | 10 minutes (2,419 words)

I never became a woman formally in my culture. The ceremony I had once believed was promised to me didn’t come. I can’t tell you much about what a woman’s coming of age ceremony entails — not because I don’t know, but because we keep some things secret, in case the government comes after us again. The federal governments in the US and Canada implemented policies to annihilate Indigenous languages and cultures. The policies forbade many of our most significant practices. To become a woman, I’ve had to search for the truth and ritual that should have been handed down to me openly, from a grandmother and mother who had both learned to value and teach in quietude. They taught me that there is nothing stagnant about a secret; it grows and wills itself into the light, every time.

My grandmother didn’t speak much because she favored implicit instruction. She worked in the nursery school I went to, and, when she was not there, a well-meaning white teacher named Ms. Hardy used to drag us by our arms back to class. My grandmother used her gentleness to show me the possibilities of love. People who knew her might think she showed affection to us grandchildren with pinches and food, but I think of other things. When she dressed me as a child, I remember how she helped me put my tights on. She bunched each leg slowly to put my toes inside — toes she had trimmed and rubbed her thumbs along. My tights never tore and I was always clean during that time before she passed. After she died, my mother was always in a frantic rush without her help and guidance. Sometimes I tried to wear tights, but they split in the hem, or my toes caught the nylon. I could never exact her slowness. My mother valued speed — she was a bolt of a woman.

When I get my son ready for daycare, I whisper him awake. I distract him with jokes and silly voices as I dress him, and although my hands are quick, I believe he will remember them as warm. In this way, kindness can undo years of subjugation — it can turn the tide of inherited grief.

My grandmother went to St. George’s residential school as a child, which was notoriously brutal to Indians. She did not speak our language out loud, nor did she pray in our language — she prayed to Jesus in English. She learned how to pray kneeling before a Matron in a dormitory for Indian girls, who were most likely separated into groups 1, 2, or 3. They wore stiff, thin, green uniforms. In my research, I’ve seen film footage of little Indian girls filing out of the school, following their caregivers, and I can’t see any nylons or stockings; I wonder if anyone showed my grandmother gentleness. There are stories from survivors of residential schools who recall wetting their beds night after night, and then being ridiculed by the Indians and whites alike as they hung their clothes and bedding on the line the next day. The children learned military-style marches, and how to stiffen their backs at “Attenshun!” They slept in rooms under lock and key. I don’t know how anyone could herd children this way without losing their soul. In some cases, children said they felt like employees or worse. They were given work assignments like “barn-boy.” Girls had kitchen assignments, and, when they stole cookies or apples, they were punished with ridicule and abuse. When I review testimony from Native people about this time, I always look at their eyes. Kindness can survive cruelty. It’s a lesson my grandmother taught, and never had to speak. She never needed to say what happened to her, we knew not to ask. I wanted to ask her how she became a woman, but I feared the answer.

Some children were brought there in the backs of trucks. Some children wanted to be there with their cousins, and some Indian Agents convinced parents they were harming their children if they didn’t send them away to school. Some children were given Nlaka’pamux names before they left. My grandmother’s name was Little Bird. I resist telling you in her language for political and personal reasons. I don’t know what you’ll do with deep insights into my culture, and I don’t pronounce names well.
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A New View of Crime in America

Pat Sutphin / The Times-News via AP

Fox Butterfield | In My Father’s House | Knopf | October 2018 | 37 minutes (7,317 words)

 

Tracey

A Fateful Compulsion

At precisely 8:00 a.m. on August 10, 2009, a solitary figure emerged from the front gate of the sprawling Oregon State Correctional Institution. The man looked small set against the immensity of the yellow-painted prison complex, sheathed by coils of gleaming razor wire. It was Tracey Bogle. He had just finished serving his full sixteen-year sentence for the attack on Dave Fijalka and Sandra Jackson, and he was carrying a large plastic trash bag that held all his worldly possessions: a well-thumbed Bible, a few other books, his copious legal file and a change of clothes. Tracey was wearing black slacks and a dark collared shirt that had been donated to him by two volunteers from the Seventh Day Adventist Church. They had also given him $25, the only money he had.

No members of Tracey’s family were waiting to meet him. His brothers were all in prison themselves. His two sisters were leading vagabond lives, doing drugs and panhandling where they could. His mother, Kathy, was about to go on trial and then go to jail too. So Tracey had asked me—knowing that I was working on a book about the Bogle family—if I would pick him up. He needed a ride to the halfway house for newly released sex offenders where he would be required to live by state law, and he needed to be driven to meet his new parole officer and to a state office to get his allowance of food stamps so he could buy food. He also had to report to the Oregon State Police office to register as a sex offender.

At first I was reluctant. As a correspondent for The New York Times for thirty-six years, I had followed the paper’s strict code of not becoming personally involved with a source to get a story. But Tracey had no one else to turn to, and I knew from reporting on criminal justice for the past fifteen years that the odds of a newly released inmate making a successful transition back to life outside prison were bleak. In fact, a comprehensive national survey of state prison inmates by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that two-thirds of the 600,000 inmates released every year are rearrested within three years, and three-quarters of all inmates are rearrested within five years. Our prisons have become a giant, expensive recycling machine that feeds on itself. Repeated findings by criminologists about this high level of failure had led one leading sociologist, Robert Martinson, to conclude, “With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitation efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.”

Martinson’s conclusion was so damning that it soon became known as the “nothing works” doctrine in trying to rehabilitate inmates. Later research by other criminologists questioned Martinson’s findings, but the “nothing works” notion helped lay the groundwork for America’s great social experiment with mass incarceration in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as the way to solve our crime problem. So I thought that picking Tracey up on his release from prison and following him around for a week or two might give me an insight into why so few convicts were able to make a successful reentry into civilian life.

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