The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week, we’re sharing stories from Mark Arax, David Grann, Stephanie Nolen, Eleanor Cummins, and David Marchese.
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This week, we’re sharing stories from Mark Arax, David Grann, Stephanie Nolen, Eleanor Cummins, and David Marchese.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Laura Smith | The Art of Vanishing | Viking | February 2018 | 22 minutes (5,980 words)
I have long been in the habit of passing by houses and wondering about the people who live inside. I grew up in a residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the kind where the homes are close together and neighbors often wind up knowing more than they might like to. Before dinner, I would escape my house to walk our little white lapdog. The predictability of the ritual — setting the table, filling water glasses, the sight of my parents’ briefcases in the hall — filled me with dread. A day had ended exactly as it had the day before, and it would end the exact same way the next day and possibly forever.
This wasn’t how I wanted my life to be. I imagined that when I grew up, I would live all over the world. I would be an explorer of the wilderness, an observer of animals, a connoisseur of cultures, a collector of the unfamiliar. I envisioned hastily packed suitcases, maps, binoculars, huts in the mountains, spare hotel rooms in dusty cities, Jeeps tearing down muddy roads into the jungle.
As I wandered the streets of my neighborhood, I was shopping for other possibilities, other lives lived in other houses. But those lives appeared to be exactly the same as mine. In well-lit dining rooms and kitchens I saw other families setting the table, calling the children downstairs, washing their dishes in the sinks. Television screens illuminated family rooms where exhausted parents slumped on couches after a long day in the office. Children did their homework by the glow of Pottery Barn desk lamps. I imagined that after their parents went to sleep, when the loneliness of those quiet hours became too much to bear, they whispered to each other beneath their sheets.
During the day they roamed the perimeters of their neighborhoods on bicycles and were driven to soccer and piano practice. They learned about faraway places in textbooks and on the news, but it seemed as if there had never been anything but this, no other place than here. Thirty years on they would come back to houses like these and do the same things all over again.
I wasn’t sure what my mother did for a living, though I had memorized her job title because it sounded important and I was proud that it might be. “She’s a health policy analyst,” I told a friend. “What does that mean?” the friend asked. “It means she saves lives,” I said, feeling fairly confident that this wasn’t true, except perhaps in an abstract sense. But I wanted it to be true. I wanted the stakes of daily life to be more exciting than desks, screens, and fluorescent lights.
I passed by house after house, each one a nighttime domestic diorama: Homo sapiens suburbae. These people had nothing to do with the world of mystery, dark deeds, and wilderness that I was sure was out there somewhere. My house — if I had a house — would be different. It would be in the mountains, or the jungle, or maybe in the middle of a city. My children and I would eat ice cream before dinner and play freeze tag at night by the light of fireflies. We would have a menagerie of animals. If you stood outside our house at night, you would hear peals of laughter. You would see tickle wars and pillow fights in warm, glowing rooms. But then another thought struck me: what if the reason all these people lived the same lives was that this was the only way?
As I grew older, the fantasy began to erode. Where would the money come from? Would I have a partner, someone to help me? Where would the Jeep in the jungle take me and for what purpose? Where would my children go to school? Would I even have children?
When I was in my mid-20s, I heard a story about a young woman who had also dreamed of leading a life of adventure, and I could not get it out of my head. Her name was Barbara Newhall Follett. She was a child prodigy and had published an acclaimed novel at the age of 12. People called her a genius. A photograph was taken as she corrected her proofs with a quill, smiling proudly at someone to the left of the photographer. When she was 13, she left her parents and traveled the high seas with a hardened crew. Later that year she published a memoir about the experience. She was deeply knowledgeable about botany, butterflies, and much of the natural world. She was an accomplished violinist and a talented poet, but above all she was a writer. She had been writing short stories since the age of five.
“She’s your kind of person,” my friend Robert said when he pointed me to an article about her. I had led an ordinary childhood and no one has ever accused me of being a genius, but Barbara and I shared a love of literature and the outdoors. There was something else too: a certain temperamental similarity — a restlessness. Later I began to wonder about Robert’s true motivation for telling me about her. When she was almost exactly my age, she vanished without a trace. He knew I would want to find her.
***
It happened on December 7, 1939. The residents of Brookline, Massachusetts, were busily preparing for Christmas. Miss Ayers’s shop on Beacon Street was selling Christmas wrapping paper, ribbons, and stationery. Hendries’s offered ice cream sculpted in the shape of Santa Claus. The Village Flower Shop was stocked full of poinsettias, and all around town people were placing orders for turkeys at 19 cents a pound. As night set in, the temperature hovered around freezing and the gas lamps flickered in the darkness. Families prepared for dinner in their clapboard houses on Walnut Street and their Victorian houses with trellised porches on Cyprus Street.
For some, the looming holidays brought a twinge of pain, their sadness cast in sharp relief against the holiday cheer. A 15-year-old boy ran away from school that day. A middle-aged woman didn’t come home that night. Four people reported their dogs missing, and a 22-year-old girl slit her wrists and then disappeared.
On Kent Street, Barbara’s marriage was coming to an end. The young couple’s apartment was comfortable but modest, with a fireplace and a rounded row of windows overlooking the quiet street below. She was 25, fine-featured, and tomboyish, with a long auburn bob. She hadn’t planned on this kind of life. She hadn’t planned on bickering about who would hang the curtains or what music to play at a dinner party. She had never intended to sit in an office all day, a large round clock ticking the minutes away. She hadn’t planned on having a husband or a house.
The Boston and Albany Railroad had a depot around the corner and Black Falcon station, with its enormous ships fastened in the harbors, was just five miles away. There were ways to escape from Brookline, to get out of a marriage, to alter the patterns of a life. Barbara gathered her notebook and $30. She walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night. She was never seen or heard from again.
***
The apartment was exactly as I had envisioned it: in a low-rise building with rounded turrets and a plain façade in a quiet neighborhood of small apartments and clapboard houses, with a few shops and restaurants. A few houses down, an old man in a neatly pressed button-down shirt was mowing his lawn. Brookline is a town that seems to belong to another time, giving it a Halloween feel regardless of the season. There was a whiff of mystery, a sense that something more was going on behind those well-kempt exteriors. Or maybe I was reading into it because I knew something had happened in that building 75 years before.
I was lurking in front of Barbara’s building when a middle-aged Australian woman came out to put her trash in the dumpster. We started talking. I explained that this was the last place Barbara had been seen. “Would you like to come inside?” she asked.
Barbara walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night.
A few moments later, I stood in front of the large, curved living-room windows, wondering if this very apartment had been Barbara’s. Below the window, I could hear the man mowing his lawn. I wondered how many Saturdays, for how many years, he had done exactly that. The mechanical hum of the mower was oddly comforting. The woman’s boxer, Harry, butted his snout against my legs while I answered her questions. I was looking for Barbara, I said. I doubted I would find her, but I hoped to gather clues and learn more. I had reason to believe that she was the vanishing type, capable of erasing one life and creating another. But there were other, more sinister possibilities to consider as well. I was just a year older than Barbara when she vanished, and this fact seemed significant to me. I had a sense that the decisions I was making then would determine the rest of my life. Like with a rocket ship, the trajectory set on the ground was critical; a fraction of a degree in the wrong direction could send me to a wildly different place.
Somewhere along the line, in ways barely perceptible at first, things went wrong for Barbara. From my vantage point, her life was both an inspiration and a warning. But I couldn’t think of how to explain this to the Australian woman, so I thanked her and left.
***
Life with P.J. was easy. We usually wanted to do the same things, which came as a huge relief. My previous relationship had been a constant battle over how to spend our time. My ex-boyfriend had mostly wanted to listen to lethargic jam bands stoned out of his mind. I wanted to hike, read, write, or go out with friends. A simple trip to the grocery store could cause an epic fight because we couldn’t agree on how we would get there, when we would go, or even what we would buy. But moving through the day with P.J. was effortless.
Four years later, on the roof of our apartment in Washington, D.C., P.J. asked me to marry him. He was nervous and had turned around to face me too suddenly, which startled me. Yes, I said. Obviously yes.
It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery. I told myself I would never do that. But when people asked me why I had chosen to get married, I had no answer. I don’t know, I said. Because sometimes people fall in love and want to announce to themselves and the world that they plan to stay together forever. Love was the factor I hadn’t considered.
I didn’t do a cost and benefit analysis. In fact, I hadn’t thought much about marriage at all because marrying P.J. hadn’t felt like a choice. He was a fact of life now. Questioning his place in it seemed as worthwhile as pondering whether I should keep my arms and legs. But I was squeamish about the wedding and skeptical of its meticulous choreography.
In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, there is a section on “bad faith” — behaving without sincerity, lying to oneself. Sartre describes a café scene in which a waiter is serving his customers: “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly…he is playing at being a waiter in a café.” The waiter, as Sartre describes him, is imprisoned in his performance, relegating himself to the singular role that society allows him, rather than allowing himself the freedom of a more honest manner of being. What troubled me most about the concept of bad faith was not that we might lie to others, but that we might lie to ourselves. Self-deception is degrading. You wish you could have just a smidge more integrity. Your falseness lingers in the air and follows you through the day.
It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery.
In the carefully scripted wedding rituals, I detected bad faith. I felt less like a bride and more like a person pretending to be a bride, the way a little girl might process through her living room with a pillowcase draped over her head toward some imaginary groom. I refused to take engagement photos because who would ever believe that we were spontaneously bounding through a field at sunset holding hands? Or making out in front of a brick wall? Who was this photo for? It couldn’t be for us because anytime we looked at it we would know all the work that went into it: a long afternoon spent smiling to the point of jaw exhaustion.
I sidestepped this icky feeling by outsourcing the wedding planning to my mother. I announced to everyone that I could not be bothered to care about napkin colors or floral arrangements. The only things P.J. and I would deign to opine on were the things that truly mattered: the beer selection, the music, and the wedding cake, which would not be wedding cake because wedding cake tastes bad. We would eat pie. We also cared about the wedding ceremony, which we designed ourselves. These things — the food, the drinks, the music, the ceremony — turned out to be most of the details of the wedding.
The problem was that I both wanted to avoid dealing with the particulars of the wedding and that I came to see each choice as symbolic of the kind of life we would live together. As my mother went about happily making her plans, if they veered toward the traditional or the frilly I would swiftly intervene, outraged.
One night, P.J. and I went to my parents’ house for dinner. We arrived with a pizza box in hand. I had decided that I wanted the wedding to be a pizza party (never mind that my father is gluten intolerant) held at the neighborhood bar, which was also a Ping-Pong hall. P.J. and my father sat silently at their ends of the table, looking wan, while my mother and I shouted viciously at each other. It was the kind of shouting that makes the neighbors wonder if they should call to see if everything is all right. My mother informed me in no uncertain terms that the family from Arkansas would not be coming all the way to D.C. for a pizza party at a Ping-Pong bar. She would have been more likely to agree to a wedding conducted on the moon in the nude. I informed her that, in that case, the family in Arkansas could attend a wedding at which the bride would not be present.
A few weeks later, my sister, my mother, P.J.’s mother, sister, and sister-in-law, and three of my friends gathered in a boutique for what was to be a long day of wedding dress shopping. The attention made me uncomfortable. I worried that they didn’t really want to be there. Why would anyone want to follow someone around all day while they shopped for a dress? I tried on the first dress and announced, “This is it. I want to buy this one.”
“What?” said the confused saleswoman. My friends and family (three of whom had traveled more than a hundred miles to be there) gaped. It would be the quickest wedding dress purchase in the history of wedding dresses, a staggering 15 seconds.
“Maybe you should try on another one, just to be sure,” my mom suggested.
“No,” I said. “I want this one.” I thought it was reasonably priced and didn’t want to drag the process out.
My mother suggested we move on to the bridesmaid dresses, but this too was contentious because I wanted the bridesmaids to wear whatever they wanted.
“Why must everyone match?” I asked.
“Why are you such a pain in the ass?” my sister shot back. “No, really, tell me why.” What she meant was, Why must everything be a statement?
But to me, the statement was the whole point. My wedding was becoming a demonstration of all the things P.J. and I were not. The dresses, the napkins, the seating charts seemed an initiation into a domestic life that frightened me, one I had observed as a child and had sworn never to take part in. The wedding was an opportunity to declare, most of all to myself, that I could live according to whatever rules I wanted.
So when a Cuisinart was delivered to our apartment, my stomach dropped. It wasn’t going to be that kind of marriage. My uncle had given us matching camping backpacks, and I had found that gift extremely gratifying. It aligned with the person I wanted to be: someone on the move, ready to jet off to some exciting adventure at barely a moment’s notice, someone unencumbered.
Yet if I truly hadn’t wanted the Cuisinart, I would have given it away. Instead, I left it in its box above the kitchen cabinets, where I eyed it with suspicion and, occasionally, longing. Domestic objects had a mysterious power over me. I was both attracted to them and repulsed by them. The Cuisinart was sort of beautiful, with its sleek metal base. It promised homemade salsas and soft serve made of bananas and Nutella. How bad can life be when you are making your own soft serve?
I purged my life of household items with fervor. In limiting my exposure to them, I was hoping to cauterize the desire at its source. The longing for a beautiful teacup would never be satisfied by buying just one teacup. Once I had it, I would want some other beautiful thing, setting off a chain of longing and acquisition that would drag down my whole life. Even a single day spent around the house made me nearly frantic. I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all. No beautiful teacups ever.
Other kinds of household items — the ones you need in order to live — filled me with joy. I enjoyed seeing my toothbrush beside P.J.’s, his shoes mixed in with mine. I enjoyed grocery shopping with him, knowing that he liked the grainy mustard more than the smooth kind, the hard cheeses more than Brie. I felt the seductive appeal of controlling my surroundings, of nesting among picturesque things.
I told myself that it didn’t matter if I was ambivalent about the wedding because I wasn’t ambivalent about P.J. And though I didn’t want to admit it, I craved the security of marriage. A handsome, kind man had agreed to tie his life to mine, to mix his shoes in with mine, to grocery shop with me, to list my name on his emergency contact forms forever. It was a vote of confidence in me and in my vision of how to live. The comfort that this knowledge provided released me from the pressure to find other forms of stability. I started taking on more ambitious writing projects because if they didn’t work out I would still have P.J. I could live anywhere in the world because P.J. would be there. We had very little money, but being broke with someone else is far preferable to being broke alone. Surely between the two of us we would figure out how to make enough money to scrape by. I did not view my impending marriage as a constraint. I told myself that it was a means of escape from the constraints of the rest of the world.
***
A year before our wedding, P.J. and I decided we needed to get out of D.C. Leaving would mean saying goodbye to nearly everyone we knew, which was, at least to me, exactly the point. Wanting to flee, if only for a time, is a fairly common fantasy. Anyone who has felt it will recognize that this feeling manages to coexist with the fact that you may love your friends and family very much. I love you. Please go away.
Many of our friends from our respective high schools, our college friends, our parents, and P.J.’s siblings and their combined five children lived within a five-mile radius of our home. There was an endless string of birthdays, happy hours, going-away or coming-home parties, soccer games, holiday and engagement parties. I often felt that rather than trying to actually spend time together in a meaningful way, we were crossing things — or people — off our to-do lists.
The total lack of spontaneity was making me fidgety. In college, I hadn’t done extracurricular activities, even ones I would have enjoyed, because I didn’t like the idea that I would have to agree to weekly meetings. As a result, I spent a lot of nights doing nothing when I could have been doing something constructive; but knowing I was free to do as I pleased was what I cared about most. Now I knew ahead of time what I would be doing every weekend for the next five months. I dreamed of saying to family and friends, “I don’t want to see you today because I need to be alone, or I need to write, or wander around without a plan, and that’s not a reflection of how I feel about you.”
I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all.
I might have enjoyed the merry-go-round of social events more had I not been working so much. I was running my family’s coffee shop, waking up at five in the morning to open the store in the dark, do inventory, organize and restock the line, brew coffee, order more, create the next week’s schedule, and serve food and drinks all day. Often I had to cover shifts for employees who had overslept or were sick. On the rare occasion when I wasn’t in the shop, my cell phone would ring incessantly with questions from the staff. “The sink is clogged and overflowing.” “There’s a crazy man shouting at himself in the bathroom.” “We’re out of peanut butter.” “There’s a weird smell coming from the basement.” Each time my phone rang, it reminded me that I wasn’t a good manager. I had created an environment where people were helpless in my absence.
At night I came home with my jeans stained with coffee grounds, worrying about two employees who were fighting or a tense interaction with a customer. I was physically exhausted, but when I got in bed, instead of going to sleep, I cycled through the next day’s to-do list. We’re out of whole milk, I reminded myself. And don’t forget to order more bowls for the catering job next week. The new employee is coming in at 11; print her paperwork first thing.
I was beginning to see that when your days are all the same, your weeks, months, and years blend together. The alumni association of my high school asked for an update for the school magazine and I didn’t have one. “Nothing has changed,” I imagined writing. “Laura Smith, Class of 2004, is exactly the same.” I imagined that my classmates were climbing the Annapurna circuit, kayaking the length of the Nile, and rescuing earthquake victims in China. I longed to see other places. Even looking at a map was painful because it reminded me of how mired I was in my life. A National Geographic special about the pyramids came on, and I thought, I really might never get to Egypt. My world was small.
“When are you coming over?” my mother and P.J.’s would ask in rapid succession. “Let’s get a date on the calendar for something this week.”
“You’re smothering me,” I said to my mother. “That sounds nice,” I said to P.J.’s mother.
One night I looked into the bathroom mirror, feeling suddenly daunted by the task of flossing my teeth. How could I possibly bring myself to do one more thing I didn’t want to do? I slept fitfully that night and had a dream that I had fallen asleep at a dinner party and was surrounded by an endless cacophony of cocktail chatter and clinking glasses. I had never spent less time reading or writing in my life, probably since I had learned to read and write, and the lack of it made my life feel lusterless. “My brain is dying,” I told P.J. I was an automaton outputting work and taking in food and drink.
P.J. sometimes came in to help on the weekends, working behind the counter so I wouldn’t have to. He was teaching at a nearby high school and was often up grading papers until the early hours of the morning, but he never complained about the extra work. He memorized the smoothie recipes and sometimes made them wrong. I didn’t care because I was so grateful not to be the one making them.
His desire to please others was great when it worked in my favor. But when he wanted to please others at my expense I would grow irritated. “Of course we’ll be there!” I heard him say into the phone. I shot him a death stare, signaling that I was going to strangle him. He shrugged helplessly, whispering, “If we leave the dinner at nine we can be at the birthday party just half an hour after it starts.”
“Do you actually want to go?” I would ask him. Sometimes the answer was yes, sometimes it was no. When he would commit to things I didn’t want to do, I wouldn’t allow myself to blame him. It was the other person’s fault. I didn’t want to think about the fact that sometimes I felt trapped by him.
I wrote during any free moment I could get. After work, late at night, I would write in the darkness of our studio apartment while P.J. slept in the bed nearby. In between placing orders, I wrote in the coffee shop’s cavernous unfinished basement, which smelled like damp concrete. Sometimes I typed notes on my cell phone between shifts. But the moments snatched here and there were never enough. I could never really gather the intense concentration needed because I was constantly interrupted.
“I can’t live without writing,” a journalist friend told me. I rolled my eyes because the truth is that you can live without writing. In fact, often we must live without it.
If I wasn’t writing, I was simmering with frustration about how I should be. At a bar with friends, even if I was having a good time, I would silently berate myself for again being lured away from my work. I wanted to write more than I wanted to be near the people I loved. Sometimes I worried that this made me small-hearted or selfish, but it seemed constitutional and therefore unlikely to change.
I began writing about a woman who disappears. Not Barbara, but a fictional woman. She was a botanist who had vanished, perhaps deliberately, in the Burmese jungle in search of a rare, psychedelic mushroom. I wrote about her because, of course, I wanted to disappear. Often those who write about women who have vanished are men with an impulse to eviscerate women, or women with an impulse to eviscerate themselves. I was interested in a different kind of vanishing: the kind where you disentangle yourself from your life and start fresh. People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life. You hadn’t abandoned them. You were just gone. Mysterious rather than rejecting. Vanishing was a way to reclaim your life.
“Let’s leave the country,” P.J. said one night after work over burritos at a Mexican chain restaurant. We had been talking casually about moving abroad for a while, but the idea was tantalizing and somehow more urgent now that we were deep in the weeds of wedding planning. Moving away was another way to say no without having to say it. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I imagined myself saying. “We can’t go to dinner because we’ll be in Asia.” We had talked about traveling, but never in a way that felt like more than daydreaming. But a few months earlier a local restaurant owner had offered to buy our coffee shop, at a loss of course, and my dad and I jumped at the opportunity to be rid of what had once been a dream. Without the coffee shop, P.J. and I could shed everything that had burdened us in D.C.
“Can we please?” I said.
“We can do whatever we want,” P.J. said.
* * *
Two days after the wedding, P.J. and I were in his sister’s basement frantically packing. A book I wanted was nowhere to be found, a friend was dropping by with a last-minute wedding present, and we were trying to figure out what to do with $130 in coins another friend had given us as a generous gag gift. We had a plane to catch, I had a stress rash on my face, and somehow in the post-wedding rush I had strained my neck, making it painful to turn my head to the right. We were moving to Southeast Asia for a year, mostly because it was the farthest away we could get on the planet before coming back around again. The weather, the people, the sounds and smells would all be new to us. Days would be remarkable again.
We had saved some money and had a few freelance writing and research contracts that could be done remotely. That money would cover our expenses, which would be minimal: we had picked Southeast Asia because it was cheap.
People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life.
I ran upstairs, tore the cushions off the couch, didn’t find the book, then ran downstairs to my backpack and started ripping out the clothing I had neatly rolled inside. Our backpacks contained everything we would need for the next year, which it turned out wasn’t much. We’d each packed five shirts, two pairs of shorts, a pair of pants, and a couple of pairs of shoes. There were also our computers, books, and two notebooks. Other than knowing what I would wear for the next year, I had no real plan. Suddenly, I didn’t care about the book. We were leaving, and how little our old lives would overlap with our new one was thrilling.
We drove to Dulles International Airport with our respective parents because both sets wanted to take us. P.J.’s sister and her children followed behind in their minivan. This vast crowd stood in a knot at the international departures area to watch us check in. At the check-in counter, something appeared to be wrong.
“You don’t have return tickets?” the ticket taker asked.
“That’s correct,” P.J. said.
“What is your plan for exiting Thailand?”
“We’ll be leaving by bus.”
I turned around and looked at our families standing behind us. Their faces were hopeful. Had we botched the trip? Would we have to stay home forever?
A few months earlier, my mother-in-law had sat us down on her porch and said, “Maybe you should consider going away for a few months instead of a year.” I felt something constrict in my chest. She seemed to be asking us not to change, or to get onto some kind of track. To her, this was a trip. We would come back to our apartment in D.C., back to her house for dinner on Sundays, to “regular” (i.e., office) jobs and daily routines. The coffee shop had been a nice little digression, but that hadn’t turned out so well. Teaching — that was fine in your 20s, as long as it was a stepping-stone to something more prestigious. And now this “trip.” It was time to grow up and get serious. This line of thinking made me want to run screaming in the opposite direction. I couldn’t describe the life I wanted, but this was not it.
It was around this time that I read a passage in a novel about two old ladies, a mother and a daughter who lived alone together in some isolated place eating only potatoes. When a stranger came across them, he was struck by how the pair seemed to have withered mentally without outside stimulus. Having only each other to talk to, they were nearly mute. Without other minds, other sights, other experiences, they had grown dull. The passage had sent a jolt of fear through me. I was surrounded by people who loved me, people whom I loved, and yet I was wilting. I thought about Wilson Follett and the urgency he felt to end his “poisonous” marriage. Maybe Helen wasn’t poisonous, but something about family life was. I didn’t like the idea that I might be anything like Wilson, who was, in many ways, the villain of Barbara’s story.
You must be vigilant, Wilson argued, because even the best-intentioned love can strangle. You cannot protect the things you love by sealing them in airtight containers. When you pin a butterfly and put it behind glass, you kill it. Barbara put her butterflies in a sieve, studied them, and then released them back into the wild. Go outside, she seemed to be saying. Be fearless, life will be over soon.
Barbara once signed a letter to her father, “With love and love and love and love and LOVE and LOVE,” each inky love becoming larger and larger. When her father wasn’t there, she wrote, “I am longing to see you” and “I miss you terribly.” Where is the dividing line in a love like this? At some point, love crosses over from being the buoy that lifts you up to the tide that drags you under. My chest was pounding as I sat on the porch and P.J.’s mother asked us to stay, and it was pounding just as loudly in the airport as we tried to leave. Perhaps Wilson was just being who he was when he left his family. Maybe I was too. It wasn’t a question of wrong or right or ingratitude. It was a compulsion.
Standing at the check-in counter, I imagined failing to get our boarding passes and piling back into the family cars. I could picture our mothers’ looks of contented relief as we all drove home together. Put us on that fucking airplane, I thought.
“Listen,” P.J. said to the agent, “if when we land in Thailand they want us to turn back around, we’ll do that.”
The woman shrugged and processed our tickets.
We were running away not just from home but from a certain idea of what married life should be. Marriage is in many ways freedom’s opposite, the binding of one life to another—in theory at least—forever. So as I tied myself to P.J. with one hand, I untethered myself from the rest of my life—family, friends, my job, my apartment—with the other.
As the plane lifted off the tarmac, I felt I had escaped. But leaving the country for a year isn’t that unusual. People quit their jobs and move all the time. They travel. It’s an indulgence, but nothing truly revolutionary. Yet suspended in the night sky, surrounded by strangers reading, talking, and sleeping, I knew leaving meant much more than that. If you had asked me then what I would have been willing to risk to find freedom, I would have said everything — except P.J.
* * *
From The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust by Laura Smith. Published by Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Laura Smith.

When Jaya Saxena and her husband visited his grandparents in their Florida retirement community, they found what the author calls “the early bird life.” Early bed time, inexpensive meals, look-alike housing, this was a land where predictability isn’t a dreary monotony to avoid. It’s a sign of success. For Eater, Saxena describes how they experienced this Florida by embracing its comforting routine, rest and the early bird special, the lifestyle’s affordable, predictable, culinary centerpiece. Surprisingly, they found a meal in decline. Once beloved by retirees, aging Boomers don’t take the same interest in this meal, or need to save money, or share previous generations’ visions of retirement, and their disinterest threatens this culinary icon. As diners pass away, will their early bird special go with them?
Whether rich, poor, or merely one of the declining middle class, though, few of the new Olds want to embrace their age. “Your generation is definitely not headed for bingo night,” the actor Dennis Hopper says in an Ameriprise ad about retirement investment for boomers, backed by a soundtrack of “Gimme Some Lovin.’” For boomers, a retirement of shuffling between kitchenless apartments and the local soup counter is hell, and you’re not going to drag them there yet. “The baby boomers who are coming of age these days, in part they’re healthier for longer into their lives, view old age in very different terms,” Haley said. “And don’t want to be seen as the men with the hiked-up pants and rolled-up cuffs, and the little old lady on a cane.”
Rosie Ross, a snowbird — though she prefers the term “sunbird” — who spends summers in upstate New York and winters in South Florida with her husband Bernard, told me that “the notion of early bird specials is something we attribute to older seniors, the same ones who sneak leftover rolls and sugar packets in their purses.” Though Bernard’s mother lives in North Miami, the Rosses didn’t want to live like she does. “We settled on a very cool active-adult community in the very cool city of Delray Beach,” Rosie said. The Rosses dine out multiple times a week, eat everything from Japanese to vegan, prefer to eat around 7 p.m., and “do not eat out based on early bird specials at all.” I could feel the pride emanating from her email.

You’d have to be hiding deep under a rock, with the president of the United States’ Twitter account on mute, not to know that the stock market had some good days at the end of last year and beginning of this one.
“Stock Market just hit another record high! Jobs looking very good,” he tweeted in October. “Stock Market hits new Record High. Confidence and enthusiasm abound,” he gushed in November. “Things are going really well for our economy,” he enthused in December. “Stock Market hit another RECORD HIGH, unemployment is now at a 17 year low and companies are coming back to the USA. Really good news, and much more to come!”
“All signs are that business is looking really good for next year,” he predicted the day before Christmas. “Will be a great year for Companies and JOBS! Stock Market is poised for another year of SUCCESS!”
At first, it seemed his market forecast was right — and as it soared in the first month of 2018, so did his tweets. “Yesterday was a big day for the stock market,” Trump tweeted in mid-January. “American business is hot again!” He took credit for the stock market at least 25 times last month. Read more…

Have you eaten a California almond lately? Or drank one of those pomegranate juices in the orb-shaped bottle, or enjoyed a “Halo” brand mandarin? Well, thank a California farmer and read Mark Arax’s 20,000-word feature in The California Sunday Magazine to understand your role in draining the groundwater of California’s interior.
In the works for 20 years, Arax’s phenomenal story, “A Kingdom From Dust,” profiles Stewart and Lynda Resnick, billionaires who grow almonds, pistachios, citrus and pomegranates on desert land they have never tilled or irrigated themselves, land that taxpayers and state and federal water have helped them turn into a dangerous and lucrative agricultural gamble. Stewart is the landowner and Lynda the brains behind the marketing of their company, providing employee-friendly brands with healthy snacks. After all, the Los Angeles market sits just 130 miles from their San Joaquin Valley fields.
When Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman co-wrote the 2003 book The King of California, it was J.G. Boswell who owned more land and water than anyone else in the San Joaquin Valley. Today, Stewart Resnick is the world’s largest irrigated farmer. Arax’s new piece examines the methods of Boswell’s de facto heir. The Resnicks are people who, in Arax’s words, “control more land and water — 130 billion gallons a year — than any other man and woman in California and still believe it isn’t enough.” So how much land does Resnick have?
Last time he checked, he told me he owned 180,000 acres of California. That’s 281 square miles. He is irrigating 121,000 of those acres. This doesn’t count the 21,000 acres of grapefruits and limes he’s growing in Texas and Mexico. He uses more water than any other person in the West. His 15 million trees in the San Joaquin Valley consume more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. The city of Los Angeles, by comparison, consumes 587,000 acre-feet.
It’s hard to comprehend this sense of scale, and equally hard to understand this huge rural valley itself. Arax is a native of the San Joaquin Valley; his family farmed the land. If you eat California produce — and you likely do — you need to read this to appreciate the economic and ecological cost of that food and the way private interests increasingly control the liquid commodity we all need to survive.
But Arax does more than profile America’s biggest farmer. This piece offers an intimate portrait of life in a region ignored by most outsiders, an area considered the flyover country of the Golden State, what Bakersfield author Gerald Haslam calls the “Other California.” Few outsiders really take the time to look at the Valley. It mystifies those who do. To help, Arax collapses four hundred years of history in prose both poetic and concise.
There’s a mountain range to my left and a mountain range to my right and in between a plain flatter than Kansas where crop and sky meet. One of the most dramatic alterations of the earth’s surface in human history took place here. The hillocks that existed back in Yokut Indian days were flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. The farmer corralled the snowmelt and erased the valley, its desert and marsh. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush, and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk. He emptied the sky of tens of millions of geese and drained the 800 square miles of Tulare Lake dry.
He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. Once he finished grabbing the flow of the five rivers that ran across the plain, he used his turbine pumps to seize the water beneath the ground. As he bled the aquifer dry, he called on the government to bring him an even mightier river from afar. Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacramento River. The farmer moved the rain. The more water he got, the more crops he planted, and the more crops he planted, the more water he needed to plant more crops, and on and on. One million acres of the valley floor, greater than the size of Rhode Island, are now covered in almond trees.
After establishing this peculiar setting, Arax pursues one central question: How did the Resnick’s irrigated acres thrive during the catastrophic five-year drought, when irrigation water was scarce to non-existent, and overpumping kept dropping the water table? Arax finds the answer in the kind of off-limits area whose “vastness makes you feel safe and in jeopardy at the same time.”
I pull over into the dirt of a pomegranate orchard, the ancient fruit that the Resnicks have turned into POMWonderful, the sweet purple juice inside a swell-upon-swell bottle. The shiny red orbs, three months shy of harvest, pop out from the bright green leaves like bulbs on a Christmas tree. I study the terrain. This must be the spot the Wonderful field man was describing. Sure enough, cozied up next to the bank of the aqueduct, I see a glint. I get out of the car and walk down an embankment. There before me, two aluminum pipes, side by side, 12 inches in diameter each, slither in the sun.
The Resnicks control 65 percent of the American pistachio market, processing nuts at a facility the size of seven super Walmarts. Farming on a large scale in California involves a caste system: Off-site landowners hire Mexican families to irrigate, fumigate, pick, and prune to generate profits. So where will all these farm workers go — men and women who paid coyotes thousands to smuggle them from Mexico to Lost Hills — when the water can longer support these crops? Despite the Resnick’s contentious use of water, their fields create a lot of jobs. They pour a lot of money into Lost Hills, where their parent farm company, Wonderful, has branded their new additions the Wonderful Park and Wonderful Community Center. Arax talked to one farm worker outside El Toro Loco supermarket.
Inside sits a young man named Pablo. The oldest of five children, he came from Mexico when he was 18. He had no papers, like so many others, just an image of what this side of the border looked like. When he was told there were fields upon fields, he did not believe there could be this many fields. That was eight or nine years ago. He lives down the road in Wasco, the “Rose Capital of America,” though the roses, too, have turned to nuts. He works year-round for Wonderful. This means he can avoid the thievery of a labor contractor who acts as a middleman between the farmer and the farmworker and charges for rides and drinks and doesn’t always pay minimum wage. Pablo prunes and irrigates the almond and pistachio trees and applies the chemicals that cannot be applied by helicopter. He makes $10.50 an hour, and the company provides him with a 401(k) plan and medical insurance.
He’s thankful to the Resnicks, especially “Lady Lynda,” for that. “I saw her a few months ago. She is here and there, but I have never seen her up close. She owns this place.” He goes on to explain what he means by own. Most everything that can be touched in this corner of California belongs to Wonderful. Four thousand people — more than double the number on the highway sign — live in town, and three out of every four rely on a payday from Wonderful. All but a handful come from Mexico. In the Wonderful fields, he tells me, at least 80 percent of the workers carry no documents or documents that are not real. U.S. immigration has little say-so here. Rather, it is the authority vested in Wonderful that counts. It was Lynda who teamed up with the USDA to develop 21 new single-family homes and 60 new townhouses on a couple of acres of almonds that Wonderful tore out. The neighborhoods didn’t have sidewalks; when it rained, the kids had to walk to school in the mud. Lynda built sidewalks and storm drains, the new park and community center, and repaved the roads. So the way Pablo uses own isn’t necessarily a pejorative. “When I crossed the border and found Lost Hills, there was nothing here,” he says. “Now there’s something here. We had gangs and murders, but that’s better, too.”
In addition to 401(k)s, the Resnick’s Wonderful factory pushes a healthy lifestyle on its workers, from cafeteria food to a free wellness center that includes a gym, dietician, doctors, and therapists. This level of care — or control — is unprecedented among Valley farm workers. So are the Resnicks shaping the future of agriculture, by treating laborers as more than disposable cheap labor? Or are they simply savvy business people who know that equitable treatment of employees means a stronger company and better brand?
To the Resnicks, crops are no different than the Franklin Mint dolls they once sold, or the keepsake teapots their flower-delivery company sold roses in. “I’m from Beverly Hills,” Stewart says. “I didn’t know good land from bad land.” The difference, now that they’re dealing with public water and California’s ability to continue to feed the country, is to generate more revenue than most countries and support its growing cities. Agriculture is not just any other product. Yes, it deals in fruit and nuts, but it really deals in water. And that commodity has a large enough socio-economic impact that governments cannot leave it in the hands of a few wealthy landowners.
If you think this is just a California problem, you’re wrong. One day water will be more valuable than oil, and like oil it will start wars. It’s already the source of battles between farmers whose wells reach for the same diminishing groundwater. The big players know this. That’s why they buy land that has water they can sell to the highest bidders, be they farmers or cities, especially during a drought. And in California, global warming or not, there will always be another drought.
Stewart Resnick is the world’s largest irrigated farmer. He lives in Beverly Hills and has never driven a tractor. His California empire of fruit, almonds and pistachios helped turn the state’s nut boom into a national controversy, thanks in part to his wife Lynda Resnick’s ingenious branding of their crops as healthy snacks. Despite the catastrophic five-year drought and a lack of state and federal irrigation water, the Resnick’s acres in Kern County continued to thrive. So how were they able to outsmart Mother Nature? And what was the true cost to California? San Joaquin Valley native and journalist Marx Arax travels to the company town of Lost Hills, where he follows a secret pipeline to the truth. Arax was been trying to write Stewart Resnick’s story for twenty years. Resnick declined all interview requests, until old age and cancer changed his mind.

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

When my other half was pregnant last year, she relied on Zofran and pants with stretchy waistlines to survive. Her policy on maternity clothes was: “To buy things that I would still be able to wear after, and to buy secondhand.” Why invest in an expensive niche wardrobe for a body that won’t even be around next season?
At Racked, Stephie Grob Plante writes the ultimate cultural history of maternity clothes, what she calls the “temporary wardrobe” that cause endless stress, self-loathing and irritation for pregnant women. Seamlessly weaving the personal with the reportorial, Plante wrote this piece while eight months pregnant between doctor’s visits, staring into various mirrors, examining her concerns. She isn’t what she calls “the glamorous pregnant person you’ve seen on Instagram,” though she speaks with the people behind new fashionable maternity brands to understand how this $2 billion industry is and is not evolving. For centuries in Western countries, pregnancy was something women were supposed to hide. The first commercial maternity items arrived in 1904 with the Lane Bryant brand’s drawstring waistband dresses, designed to disguise. Plante shows how the pendulum has swung, so that maternity clothes accentuate and celebrate what pop culture has named the baby bump. America has become bump-obsessed. But the old fear of looking “dowdy” in these clothes, the expenses and cultural pressures to stay both healthy and trendy, to read all the baby books and keep working, persist.
If clothes designed specifically for maternity are a relatively new phenomenon, maternity clothes that meet trends head-on are even newer. After all, this is an apparel segment that retail has long tackled as a nuisance, not an opportunity.
“Fashion doesn’t want to acknowledge women with changing figures,” Goldman told Elle in a 2016 interview. “What I’m trying to do is defy the perception that this is a dreaded year of your life where you’re not allowed to look good. I’m trying to make it sexy and okay and lovely and interesting because that’s what it is. How cool is it? You’re having a baby!”
I do feel powerful, I must admit. It’s not just me that I speak for now; I have backup. At 24 weeks, I use some birthday money I’d squirreled away in my desk drawer for a prenatal massage, justifying the expense to my husband, “We need this.” During my session, the massage therapist confides that he loves doing prenatal massage because it’s like working on two people at once.
I laugh and the baby pummels my side. Every decision I’ve made over the past months — washing my hands until they chap and bleed, rescheduling a dental appointment from the chair when the hygienist reveals that she’s “a little under the weather” — I’ve made not for my own benefit, but for the kicking, punching, blood sugar-spiking creature wreaking havoc beneath my skin. To me, wearing body-hugging clothing right now is a declaration of dependence. Here we are! Please don’t sneeze on us!

It started with a Lean Cuisine. After a night out catching up with a friend, I just made one of the last NJ Transit trains leaving Penn Station that April night, traveling the 20 or so minutes to the suburbs of New Jersey where my wife and I had moved two weeks prior in anticipation of welcoming our first child to what truly is NYC’s sixth borough (daycare and two-bedrooms aren’t cheap in the original five boroughs).
Dinner consumed and sleep completed, I awoke with one of the worst bouts of food poisoning I’ve ever encountered, a wasting that lasted through midway into the next week. Eventually, the illness subsided, but I wasn’t concerned when I woke the following Saturday with slight soreness in my right ankle and the inability to fully extend my left knee. Seemed odd, sure, but perhaps that was just a lingering side effect of the tainted Swedish meatballs. And there was a crib to be built along with final trips to Target and Buy Buy Baby.
On Sunday, though, I could barely put any pressure on my right leg, hugging walls as I walked in an effort to support myself. A nighttime sprained ankle, I thought, but I still went to the ER on Monday, while accompanying my wife for her final OBGYN appointment. The medical establishment’s consensus: must be a sprain. I spent four more days in sheer agony, unable to put any pressure on my right leg and unable to sleep because the pain was too intense. After our son was born, I was the one wheeled out of the hospital while my wife carried our nine-pound baby. By this point, my other ankle had started to tingle (both eventually swelled to the size of a grapefruit, and my left knee was significantly inflamed, looking as though a softball had lodged itself behind the kneecap).
The first two weeks of my son’s life were a blur. Of course, there was no way I could help during feedings in the middle of the night — it took me 10 minutes just to navigate the short hallway between the bed and bathroom. And unless I was sitting on the couch RICEing my legs (for what I thought must be the two worst sprains in the history of orthopedics), I couldn’t hold my son. I was an invalid, completely useless to all around me at a time when those same people needed me the most. My brother had gotten married during this time period, and I recently looked at the photos from the ceremony, which was held at City Hall: shuffling along in crutches, my ankles are encased not only in compression wraps but also air casts.
The realization that my “sprains” had — HAD — to be something more significant arrived during my son’s third week on earth. My general practitioner was located in Manhattan, so I found a local doctor who, for the first time since this health scare began, had more than an inkling of what was plaguing my body: I had joined the roughly 20,000 Americans who suffer annually from reactive arthritis. This exceedingly rare form of arthritis, which shares symptoms with rheumatoid arthritis, was attracted to the genetic antigen I carried, passed down maternally, and had proceeded to attack all of my white blood cells. When I finally was able to see a rheumatologist, I was told that my CBC — complete blood count — was one of the lowest he’d ever seen.
As I read Molly Osberg’s harrowing essay for Splinter detailing her health catastrophe, the result of contracting a rare form of strep that began to wreak havoc on her internal organs, I found myself mentally transported to my own uncertainties this past summer. Her concerns about medical expenses, proxies, if her full-time job still exists, and whether or not any of the poking or prodding will work — all of those emotions became all the more real again. We even both made it into medical journals!
I encountered them all when I was admitted to a Brooklyn hospital, though I only remember a fraction of the people who tried to puzzle out what was sending my body into septic shock. According to my medical records I saw six specialists in 40 hours. There was the anesthesiologist who assuaged my terror when I was put under for a bronchoscopy (I was afraid I’d wake up with a camera down my larynx), the infectious disease doctors who asked me about my sex life, how often I got high, my last period, whether I’d been anywhere near livestock.
I also shared her feeling of invincibility. Before I contracted reactive arthritis, I rarely needed anything more than a hot shower and a few doses of Dayquil to right whatever was ailing me. I didn’t get sick. As Osberg writes,
As someone with a pack-a-day habit, I got a little sick every year, and my response was to sleep (or work, or drink) through it until the issue somehow resolved. Before 2017 I don’t think I’d been to a doctor in about five years—though as was later reiterated to me by one chagrined specialist after another, my abysmal life choices up to that point didn’t end up making much of a difference.
Like Osberg, I was fortunate to have insurance, but if I had been a freelancer, my bills would have been astronomical. One shot of Humira, the immunosuppressive drug I inject twice a month, costs upwards of $500 without coverage, and that doesn’t include the barrage of pills I take daily. As I was reading Osberg’s piece, I stumbled across the story of Donald Savastano, a 51-year-old from central New York who recently won the lottery—a $1 million prize. A construction contractor, he first decided to visit a doctor, something he hadn’t done in several years because of his lack of insurance, before lining up a vacation. Following a diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer, and just twenty-three days after winning the award, Savastano died. Osberg conveys the sheer terror that accompanies such a health scare; the worry isn’t so much about how to survive — it’s about how to recover.
Never mind recovering physically or financially in any of these scenarios: I can’t imagine surviving emotionally, fielding calls from collections agents, facing eviction, waiting for the pain meds to hit so I can keep at a futile job search with an IV still dangling from my side. I am 29 years old, with no pre-existing conditions before this moment, and I am unemployed and exhausted and in pain all the time.
It took one month before I could walk a distance greater than a hallway. It took another month before I could walk back and forth to the elevator bank in our apartment building. And it took three months before I regained my walking gait and balance, and didn’t feel any debilitating pain for the first 90 minutes of my morning. It’s now been eight months since the diagnosis, and my health has somewhat returned to normal — although my right Achilles still aches every day, and I’ve been told to limit my exercise to stretching and spinning (so as to not potentially tear the tendon). But I can walk, and just the normalcy of that activity is something I never thought that I would have taken for granted. It’s those actions that become the most significant.
Around mid-August they took the PICC line out. My white blood cell count went back to normal; I was cleared to drink by far the best beer of my life; the scabs left over from the drainage tube punctures in my torso fell off. I was pleased the surgical incision had missed my favorite tattoo, and less pleased when streaks of my hair turned gray and started coming out in clumps, or when my nails fell off—a months-delayed reminder of that time my body was preparing to die. I went back to work towards the end of the summer.

In today’s attention economy, ideas don’t need to be deleted or redacted to be silenced. They can be drowned out privately, screen by screen, by unchecked noise from decoy bots, doxxing campaigns, and filter bubbles.
In WIRED‘s Free Speech issue, Zeynep Tufekci describes how so many of the “most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t compute in the age of social media.”
The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.
These tactics usually don’t break any laws or set off any First Amendment alarm bells. But they all serve the same purpose that the old forms of censorship did: They are the best available tools to stop ideas from spreading and gaining purchase.
John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no means to target the same audience that received the original message?
Freedom of speech continues to be an important democratic value, Tufekci writes, “but it’s not the only one.” The First Amendment isn’t even the only amendment to the Constitution, let alone our only vision for a functioning democracy. Ideally, we’d also have a knowledgeable public, a capacity for informed debate, an atmosphere of honesty and respect, and a transparent system for holding powerful people and institutions accountable to their constituents.
But constituents aren’t users, and today’s giants of search and social are hardly bastions of free speech. Algorithms promote democratic ideals about as often as they safeguard friendships from advertisers. While social media platforms may feel like vibrant public spheres, they’re more like operating theaters. Procedures are expertly monitored in a controlled environment, and the glass only goes one way.
“To be clear, no public sphere has ever fully achieved these ideal conditions,” Tufekci reminds us, “but at least they were ideals to fail from. Today’s engagement algorithms, by contrast, espouse no ideals about a healthy public sphere.”
But we don’t have to be resigned to the status quo. Facebook is only 13 years old, Twitter 11, and even Google is but 19. At this moment in the evolution of the auto industry, there were still no seat belts, airbags, emission controls, or mandatory crumple zones. The rules and incentive structures underlying how attention and surveillance work on the internet need to change. But in fairness to Facebook and Google and Twitter, while there’s a lot they could do better, the public outcry demanding that they fix all these problems is fundamentally mistaken. There are few solutions to the problems of digital discourse that don’t involve huge trade-offs—and those are not choices for Mark Zuckerberg alone to make. These are deeply political decisions. In the 20th century, the US passed laws that outlawed lead in paint and gasoline, that defined how much privacy a landlord needs to give his tenants, and that determined how much a phone company can surveil its customers. We can decide how we want to handle digital surveillance, attention-channeling, harassment, data collection, and algorithmic decisionmaking. We just need to start the discussion.
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