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The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 | 8 minutes (2,228 words)

“Well, that’s a really important thing to investigate.” While Naomi Wolf’s intellectual side failed her last week, her public side did not. That first line was her measured response when a BBC interviewer pointed out — on live radio — that cursory research had disproven a major thesis in her new book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love (she misinterpreted a Victorian legal term, “death recorded,” to mean execution — the term actually meant the person was pardoned). Hearing this go down, journalists like me theorized how we would react in similar circumstances (defenestration) and decried the lack of fact-checkers in publishing (fact: Authors often have to pay for their own). The mistake did, however, ironically, offer one corrective: It turned Wolf from cerebral superhero into mere mortal. No longer was she an otherworldly intellect who could suddenly complete her Ph.D. — abandoned at Oxford when she was a Rhodes Scholar in the mid-’80s, Outrages is a reworking of her second, successful, attempt — while juggling columns for outlets like The Guardian, a speaking circuit, an institute for ethical leadership, and her own site, DailyClout, not to mention a new marriage. Something had to give, and it was the Victorians.

Once, the public intellectual had the deserved reputation of a scholarly individual who steered the public discourse: I always think of Oscar Wilde, the perfect dinner wit who could riff on any subject on command and always had the presence of mind to come up with an immortal line like, “One can survive everything nowadays except death.” The public intellectual now has no time for dinner. Wolf, for instance, parlayed the success of her 1991 book The Beauty Myth into an intellectual career that has spanned three decades, multiple books, and a couple of political advisory jobs, in which time her supposed expertise has spread far beyond third-wave feminism. She has become a symbol of intellectual rigor that spans everything from vaginas to dictatorships — a sort of lifestyle brand for the brain. Other thought leaders like her include Jordan Peterson, Fareed Zakaria, and Jill Abramson. Their minds have hijacked the public trust, each one acting as the pinnacle of intellect, an individual example of brilliance to cut through all the dullness, before sacrificing the very rigor that put them there in order to maintain the illusion floated by the media, by them, even by us. The public intellectual once meant public action, a voice from the outside shifting the inside, but then it became personal, populated by self-serving insiders. The public intellectual thus became an extension — rather than an indictment — of the American Dream, the idea that one person, on their own, can achieve anything, including being the smartest person in the room as well as the richest.

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I accuse the Age of Enlightenment of being indirectly responsible for 12 Rules for Life. The increasingly literate population of the 18th century was primed to live up to the era’s ultimate aspiration: an increasingly informed public. This was a time of debates, public lectures, and publications and fame for the academics behind them. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for one. In his celebrated “The American Scholar” speech from 1837, Emerson provided a framework for an American cultural identity — distinct from Europe’s — which was composed of a multifaceted intellect (the One Man theory). “The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future,” he said. “In yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.” While Emerson argued that the intellectual was bound to action, the “public intellectual” really arrived at the end of the 19th century, when French novelist Émile Zola publicly accused the French military of antisemitism over the Dreyfus Affair in an open letter published in  L’Aurore newspaper in 1898. With  “J’Accuse…!,” the social commentary Zola spread through his naturalist novels was transformed into a direct appeal to the public: Observational wisdom became intellectual action. “I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness,” he wrote. “My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.”

The public intellectual thenceforth became the individual who used scholarship for social justice. But only briefly. After the Second World War, universities opened up to serve those who had served America, which lead to a boost in educated citizens and a captive audience for philosophers and other scholars. By the end of the ’60s, television commanded our attention further with learned debates on The Dick Cavett Show — where autodidact James Baldwin famously dressed down Yale philosopher Paul Weiss — and Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. (also famously destroyed by Baldwin), which would go on to host academics like Camille Paglia in the ’90s. But Culture Trip editor Michael Barron dates the “splintering of televised American intellectualism” to a 1968 debate between Gore Vidal — “I want to make 200 million people change their minds,” the “writer-hero” once said — and Buckley, which devolved into playground insults. A decade later, the public intellectual reached its celebrity peak, with Susan Sontag introducing the branded brain in People magazine (“I’m a book junkie. … I buy special editions like other women shop for designer originals at Saks.”)

As television lost patience with Vidal’s verbose bravado, he was replaced with more telegenic — angrier, stupider, more right-wing — white men like Bill O’Reilly, who did not clarify nuance but blustered over the issues of the day; the public intellectual was now all public, no intellect. Which is to say, the celebrity pushed out the scholar, but it was on its way out anyway. By the ’80s, the communal philosophical and political conversations of the post-war era slunk back to the confines of academia, which became increasingly professionalized, specialized, and insular, producing experts with less general and public-facing knowledge. “Anyone who engages in public debate as a scholar is at risk of being labelled not a serious scholar, someone who is diverting their attention and resources away from research and publicly seeking personal aggrandizement,” one professor told University Affairs in 2014. “It discourages people from participating at a time when public issues are more complicated and ethically fraught, more requiring of diverse voices than ever before.” Diversity rarely got past the ivy, with the towering brilliance of trespassers like Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston, among other marginalized writers, limited by their circumstances. “The white audience does not seek out black public intellectuals to challenge their worldview,” wrote Mychal Denzel Smith in Harper’s last year, “instead they are meant to serve as tour guides through a foreign experience that the white audience wishes to keep at a comfortable distance.”

Speaking of white audiences … here’s where I mention the intellectual dark web even though I would rather not. It’s the place — online, outside the academy, in pseudo-intellectual “free thought” mag Quillette — where reactionary “intellectuals” flash their advanced degrees while claiming their views are too edgy for the schools that graduated them. These are your Petersons, your Sam Harrises, your Ben Shapiros, the white (non)thinkers, usually men, tied in some vague way to academia, which they use to validate their anti-intellectualism while passing their feelings off as philosophy and, worse, as (mis)guides for the misguided. Last month, a hyped debate between psychology professor Peterson and philosopher Slavoj Žižek had the former spending his opening remarks stumbling around Marxism, having only just read The Communist Manifesto for the first time since high school. As Andray Domise wrote in Maclean’s, “The good professor hadn’t done his homework.” But neither have his fans.

But it’s not just the conservative public intellectuals who are slacking off. Earlier this year, Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, published Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts. She was the foremost mind on journalism in the Trump era for roughly two seconds before being accused of plagiarizing parts of her book. Her response revealed that the authorship wasn’t exactly hers alone, a fact which only came to light in order for her to blame others for her mistakes. “I did have fact-checking, I did have assistants in research, and in some cases, the drafting of parts of the book,” she told NPR. “I certainly did spend money. But maybe it wasn’t enough.” Abramson’s explanation implied a tradition in which, if you are smart enough to be rich enough, you can pay to uphold your intellectual reputation, no matter how artificial it may be.

That certainly wasn’t the first time a public intellectual overrepresented their abilities. CNN host Fareed Zakaria, a specialist in foreign policy with a Ph.D. from Harvard — a marker of intelligence that can almost stand in for actual acumen these days — has been accused multiple times of plagiarism, despite “stripping down” his extensive workload (books, speeches, columns, tweets). Yet he continues to host his own show and to write a column for The Washington Post in the midst of a growing number of unemployed journalists and dwindling number of outlets. Which is part of the problem. “What happens in the media is the cult of personality,” said Charles R. Eisendrath, director of the Livingston Awards and Knight-Wallace Fellowship, in the Times. “As long as it’s cheaper to brand individual personalities than to build staff and bolster their brand, they will do it.” Which is why Wolf, and even Abramson, are unlikely to be gone for good.

To be honest, we want them around. Media output hasn’t contracted along with the industry, so it’s easier to follow an individual than a sprawling media site, just like it’s easier to consult a YouTube beauty influencer than it is to browse an entire Sephora. With public intellectuals concealing the amount of work required of them, the pressure to live up to the myth we are all helping to maintain only increases, since the rest of us have given up on trying to keep pace with these superstars. They think better than we ever could, so why should we bother? Except that, like the human beings they are, they’re cutting corners and making errors and no longer have room to think the way they did when they first got noticed. It takes significant strength of character in this economy of nonstop (and precarious) work to bow out, but Ta-Nehisi Coates did when he stepped down last year from his columnist gig at The Atlantic, where he had worked long before he started writing books and comics. “I became the public face of the magazine in many ways and I don’t really want to be that,” he told The Washington Post. “I want to be a writer. I’m not a symbol of what The Atlantic wants to do or whatever.”

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Of course a public intellectual saw this coming. In a 1968 discussion between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on identity in the technology age (which explains the rise in STEM-based public intellectuals), the latter said, “When you give people too much information, they resort to pattern recognition.” The individuals who have since become symbols of thought — from the right (Christina Hoff Sommers) to the left (Roxane Gay) — are overrepresented in the media, contravening the original definition of their role as outsiders who spur public action against the insiders. In a capitalist system that promotes branded individualism at the expense of collective action, the public intellectual becomes a myth of impossible aspiration that not even it can live up to, which is the point — to keep selling a dream that is easier to buy than to engage in reality. But an increasingly intelligent public is gaining ground.

The “Public Intellectual” entry in Urban Dictionary defines it as, “A professor who spends too much time on Twitter,” citing Peterson as an example. Ha? The entry is by OrinKerr, who may or may not be (I am leaning toward the former) a legal scholar who writes for the conservative Volokh Conspiracy blog. His bad joke is facetious, but not entirely inaccurate — there’s a shift afoot, from the traditional individual public intellectual toward a collective model. That includes online activists and writers like Mikki Kendall, who regularly leads discussions about feminism and race on Twitter; Bill McKibben, who cofounded 360.org, an online community of climate change activists; and YouTubers like Natalie Wynn, whose ContraPoints video essays respond to real questions from alt-right men. In both models, complex thought does not reside solely with the individual, but engages the community. This is a reversion to one of the early definitions of public intellectualism by philosopher Antonio Gramsci. “The traditional and vulgarized type of the intellectual is given by the man of letters, the philosopher, the artist,” he wrote in his Prison Notebooks — first published in 1971. “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator.” It doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest person in the room, as long as you can make it move.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Year of the Cat

Illustration by Homestead

Elisabeth Donnelly | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,392 words)

In an old photo from when I lived in a house in Catskill, New York, on the edge of the Hudson River, I am asleep on the couch with a small cat curled up on my chest. The casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that it was my cat in this still life tableau: snoring woman, mouth wide open, head flung to the side, a red plaid blanket, and a cat in a circle as if it is right at home.

But the thing was, she wasn’t my cat. I didn’t feed her, I didn’t scoop her poop, I didn’t consistently provide her with a home and shelter. She was like a weedy, persistent, besotted lover who wouldn’t listen to the word “no,” who spent every night outside my house with a boombox in the air, playing “In Your Eyes.” Yet to explain it properly — my relationship with my fake cat — we have to back things up slightly.
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Born to Be Eaten

Illustration by Glenn Harvey

Eva Holland | Longreads | May 30, 2019 | 26 minutes (7,122 words)

Calving

The caribou cow gives birth on her feet. She stands with legs wide apart, or turns on the spot, shuffling in slow circles, craning her long neck to watch as her calf emerges inch by inch from below her tail, between her hips. It’s oddly calm, this process — a strange thing to witness for us two-legged mammals, more accustomed to the stirrups and the struggle and the white-knuckled screaming of a Hollywood birth scene.

The calf, when he comes, emerges hooves first. He climbs into the world fully extended, like a diver stretching toward the water. Out come the front pair of hooves, capping spindly legs, then the long narrow head, the lean, wet-furred body, and finally, another set of bony legs and sharp little hooves. His divergence from his mother leaves behind nothing but some strings of sticky fluid and a small patch of bloody fur. He doesn’t know it, but the land he is born on is one of the most contentious stretches of wilderness in North America.

The calf, when he comes, emerges hooves first…He doesn’t know it, but the land he is born on is one of the most contentious stretches of wilderness in North America.

Still slick with mucus, the calf takes his first steps within minutes, stumbling awkwardly to his feet as his mother licks him clean. Within 24 hours, he is able to walk a mile or more. Soon, if he survives long enough, he will be capable of swimming white-water rivers, outrunning wolves, and trotting overland for miles upon miles every day. His life will offer myriad dangers and only the rarest respite; for the caribou, staying alive means staying on the move.

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Oklahoma: A Reading List

A stunning lightning bolt at sunset under a severe thunderstorm with a dirt road vanishing into the distance, taken near Magnum, Oklahoma, Tornado Alley, USA. Getty Images

A few nights ago I filled my bathtub with blankets and every pillow in my house, set a lantern and four bottles of water beside me, and took shelter. On my laptop, I watched the local news, where weathermen urged drivers to clear the roads and pointed at cloud rotations. The skies, through the screen, looked like oceans inverted: clouds rolled like tidal waves at too fast a pace and swirled like aerial eddies. Usually I love the openness of Oklahoma, the way a sunrise here can tinge the world any number of sherbet hues, but that night, from my tub, the heavens only looked ominous.

For an hour I watched the color-coded markings on the map, scanning for my small city, and only went to bed after the red and green splotched signs of danger had passed north, to Kansas. Even then, I didn’t sleep. I listened to the hail and rain pound my roof. I worried for people, animals, and houses in the storm’s path. I wondered if there would be an undetected storm moving toward me in the night, a tornado that might whip through the cover of dark as one had when I was in college, hitting my home when none of us were inside.

The morning after the storm, robins emerged from hiding and hopped across my yard with spiky hair and tussled feathers. Rain drained across the red clay in rivulets. Gray skies cleared into sun, and a soft summer breeze rustled honeysuckle, stirring the scent. This is Oklahoma in spring: mercurial, dangerous, beautiful. Here, I feel closer to the elements than I ever have before. Watching a bird prey upon a baby snake from my kitchen window, tearing the red inner meat into shreds, or witnessing the sky meld from blue to the shade of a bruise in moments, I have grown attuned to the thin line between awe and fear.

I am leaving this state very soon, and it’s filled me with the kind of ache for understanding that so often accompanies a goodbye, a sense that I can never know quite enough. Though I’ve explored great swaths of the state; learned the habits of starlings that murmur at daybreak and dusk; taught students from a variety of different towns; listened to Dear Oklahoma, a podcast where writers ruminate and examine the way in which Oklahoma is a part of their work; and tried my best to understand the histories of this place, this state still escapes my description. As a way of getting outside my own experience, I have turned to the words of others. I don’t think there’s any way to capture the vastness of this place — and this is by no means a comprehensive list — but below is a collection of stories that offer a glimpse.

1. Pawhuska or Bust: A Journey to the Heart of Pioneer Woman Country (Khushbu Shah, October 5, 2017, Thrillist)

With only oil and cattle to rely on as industries, rural Pawhuska, Oklahoma was at risk of becoming a ghost town until Ree Drummond stepped in. Also known as “The Pioneer Woman,” Drummond is a Food Network Star known for her marriage to a cattle-rancher and what fans describe as her “real” food. After Drummond opens a restaurant called “The Mercantile” in Pawhuska, Khushbu Shah flies from New York to better understand Drummond’s influence on Oklahoma’s cultural scene and economy, and why so many visitors flock to a restaurant seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

Similar sentiments were later echoed by every Pioneer Woman fan I spoke to, the vast majority of whom were white and from the Midwest or the South, like the three tall and husky female friends who told me they’d driven 13 hours from Indiana because Drummond makes ‘real American food’ and ‘the stuff you actually want to eat.’

2. They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants. (Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, October 4, 2017, Reveal)

Given the option between prison and a rehab program called CAAIR (nicknamed “the Chicken Farm”), Brad McGahey chose the latter. Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, in this harrowing piece of investigative journalism, reveal that CAAIR, located in northeastern Oklahoma, relies on unpaid labor from thousands of defendants. Additionally, though marketed as a rehab program, participants receive very little medical care or treatment.

‘They came up with a hell of an idea,’ said Parker Grindstaff, who graduated earlier this year. ‘They’re making a killing off of us.’

3. A Bend in the River (Pamela Colloff, July 2002, Texas Monthly)

Newspaper accounts of the escape focused on the manhunt, paying scant attention to the original crime or the victim, invariably described as a ‘sixteen-year-old Waurika, Okla., cheerleader.’ Only along the river did people know what the crime had done to their isolated slice of the world, the illusions it had cruelly stripped away.

In this riveting, haunting longform piece, Pamela Colloff writes about the murder of Heather Rich, and the impact her death had on the community of Waurika, Oklahoma, as well as the ways in which place and landscape influenced the investigation and subsequent events.

4. Why Black People Own Guns (Julia Craven, December 26, 2017, Huffpost)

Julia Craven interviewed 11 black gun owners in order to better understand their relationships to firearms. Though each of these accounts are important in their own right, RJ Young speaks specifically about his experiences with gun ownership as a black man in Oklahoma.

If I could walk around Oklahoma and not count how many black folks were in the room, I’d probably feel better about firearms as a black man. I’d probably feel safer walking around with one. But the fact is, most people have a narrow view of who I am.

Young’s book, Let It Bang: A Young Black Man’s Reluctant Odyssey into Guns offers more thorough insight his personal experiences with guns in Oklahoma within the context of a well-researched, larger cultural framework.

5. Spiritual Affliction: A Thank You Note to Oklahoma (Kate Strum, October 1, 2018, Hippocampus)

After moving to Oklahoma for graduate school, Kate Strum becomes fervent to understand the landscape: she travels to various parts of the state, engages politically, experiences the severity of elements, and makes meaningful relationships with people who have been here longer than she. And still, Oklahoma is somewhat elusive, though this essay is a beautiful rumination on Strum’s time spent here.

I am at once furious about what is wrong here and losing patience with the opinions of outsiders. I am home. I am marching at the capitol in the morning and late night on social media I am telling my friends on the coasts that they don’t get it. I shake my head when they read articles about rural America and think they know us.

6. Grace in Broken Arrow (Kiera Feldman, May 23, 2012, This Land)

Rather than taking reports of child molestation to the police or the Department of Human Services, the leaders of Grace Church, a Christian school that featured amenities like a ball pit, soda shoppe, and an antique carousel, instead held meetings to address what they didn’t believe to be that serious of an issue. Kiera Feldman, by interviewing survivors, former employees, and conducting immense amounts of research, brings to light a sickening tale of how Aaron Thompson, a former PE teacher at the school, molested boys there for years.

Grace Church was Oklahoma’s Penn State of 2002. After such things come to light, we always wonder: how on earth did that ever happen?

Here is how it happened.

7. Landlocked Islanders (Krista Langlois, November 16, 2016, Hakai Magazine)

Marshallese citizens, granted indefinite permission to live and work in the U.S. as a result of an agreement made with the U.S. during Marshallese independence, are leaving the Marshall Islands due to factors like climate change and lack of opportunities. As Krista Langlois writes, “by the year 2100, it’s conceivable that climate change will force the entire population of the Marshall Islands to US shores.” Many Marshallese migrants are ending up in Enid, Oklahoma.

Though Enid seems like an improbable place for Pacific Islanders to settle, it is, in a way, familiar. The first Marshallese came here with missionaries about 40 years ago, and wrote home about the jobs that could be had in meat-processing factories, and the public schools their children could attend. Eventually, family joined family.

8. The Teachers’ Strike and the Democratic Revival in Oklahoma (Rivka Galchen, May 28, 2018, The New Yorker)

Oklahoma teachers, rightfully tired of working multiple jobs to provide for their families and paying large sums of money for their own school supplies, walked out of school in April 2018. Some teachers drove to the capitol, where they asked for pay raises and better funding for their schools. Others walked in protest, making their way through “snow, lightning, and an earthquake.” Rivka Galchen examines the unique political composition of Oklahoma and chronicles the events of the two-week teachers’ walkout in Oklahoma in this longform piece.

The state’s license plates once read “Native America,” though almost no tribes are native to the area; they were sent there in the Trail of Tears. And Oklahomans are proud to be called Okies, a term coined by Californians to disparage people who were fleeing the Dust Bowl.

Related read: How Oklahoma’s Low Pay Dashed My Hopes of Teaching in My Tribal Community, March 28, 2018, Education Week

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

How Brands Get their Names, Explained By a Professional Namer

Longreads Pick

This is a very interesting conversation about how companies pay experts to shape their images, and it’s one that this professional namer might describe this interview’s title as descriptive rather than disruptive, because it “is tied to an expected functional benefit of the product.”

Source: Vox
Published: May 16, 2019
Length: 10 minutes (2,578 words)

Confessions of a Lapsed Catholic Dancer

Getty, Stephen Arnold, Illustration by Homestead

Kate Branca | Longreads | May 2019 | 22 minutes (5,497 words)

 

You hear the drums before you see us, a circle of figures facing inward, our arms rigid, our feet pounding the stage in an even, rhythmic, side-stepping march. The circle bobs up and down with our forcefulness. Our costumes are geometric bodysuits, designed not to contour to our human bodies, but to transform them into something more angular, hardened, like a shell. They have V-neck fronts and stiff cap sleeves and straight pant legs that stop suddenly at the shin, transforming our bodies into great Xs of yellow, purple, and black. We wear strips of black tape on our cheeks, like war paint. Our costumes make us look like ancient Aztecs or alien warriors — beings of a past or future time.

When I am wearing that costume and bound to that ring, I am transported back nine years; suddenly I am a 19-year-old performing the choreography of Robert Battle with my college dance company — and also none of those things. It feels like I am nothing, or that we are collectively something else, emptied, but electric, maybe capable of boring a hole in space or time. During a performance, when I catch sight of something mundane among us, like a wisp of hair sprung from Brittany’s bun, or a nervous twitch in Erin’s fingers, my chest blooms with love for the moment: for the startling gift of feeling like I am many people, in many places, traversing many times all at once.

We twist and extend our arms into wide, heavenward Vs and beckon the stage lights with flicks of our hands. We tuck and splay and smack our thighs. Then the pace of the drumming quickens with a RAPAPAPAPAP! and one in our company enters the center of the circle where a spotlight appears. She spins wildly in one direction, then the other, her feet stamping the ground as fast as the mallets hitting the drums. Meanwhile, those of us around her shoot our arms into the air like crops hit by a sudden gust of wind. She rejoins the circle so that only the light remains inside the ring made up of our bodies, and now that it’s there, finally there, we are frenzied by it. Hopping, slamming, jumping, falling, flinging ourselves in patterns around its edges. With a final pound, the drums stop, leaving us standing around the light’s rim with our feet wide, arch to arch with one another, arms by our sides, chests heaving, but open to the sky, our necks craned toward whatever bulb or star gave us this brightness. We lower our chins as the stage fades to black.

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How Refugees Die

AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris

John Psaropoulos | The Sewanee Review | Spring 2019 | 17 minutes (3.361 words)

 

This essay first appeared in The Sewanee Review, the oldest continuously published literary quarterly in the country, which you can subscribe to here. Our thanks to the author and The Sewanee Review staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads

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I met Doa Shukrizan at the harbormaster’s office in the port of Chania, in western Crete. She sat with her back to a balcony overlooking the street, and the strong morning light enveloped her delicate figure, so that there appeared to be even less of her than there was after her ordeal with the sea. Doa’s face had peeled from extreme sunburn; she spoke softly. Between the cavernous ceiling and polished concrete floor, the only furnishings were tables, chairs, and ring binders, so that voices, however slender, resounded. There were no secrets in this room. During the hour that we spoke, three coast guard officers sat at their desks not doing any work, transfixed by what she said.

Doa and her fiancé had been among some five hundred people who boarded a fishing trawler at the port of Damietta in the Nile Delta on September 6, 2014. Many, like Doa, were Syrian. Others were Palestinian or Sudanese. All were fleeing war and had paid smugglers to ferry them, illegally, to Italy.

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An Audience of Athletes: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Sports

womenSports, Bettmann / Getty

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | May 2019 | 26 minutes (6,609 words)

The idea for womenSports magazine was born in a car suspended over the San Francisco Bay by beams of steel. Several weeks before she captivated the nation by beating Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match in the fall of 1973, Billie Jean King sat in the passenger seat of a car and stewed. At the wheel was her then-husband, Larry, driving the couple from Emeryville near Oakland toward San Francisco on the Bay Bridge, and as Billie Jean flipped through an issue of Sports Illustrated, she complained, which is what she always did whenever she picked up an issue of SI. Read more…

Odetta Holmes’ Album One Grain of Sand

David Corio/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images

Matthew Frye Jacobson | One Grain of Sand| Bloomsbury Academic | April 2019 | 19 minutes (3,117 words)

 

When twenty-year-old Odetta Felious Holmes — classically trained as a vocalist and poised to become “the next Marian Anderson” — veered away from both opera and musical theater in favor of performing politically charged field hollers, prison songs, work songs, and spirituals before mixed-race audiences in 1950s’ coffeehouses, she was making a portentous decision for both American music and Civil Rights culture. Released the same year as her famous rendition of “I’m on My Way” at the March on Washington, One Grain of Sand captures the social justice project that was Odetta’s voice. “There was no way I could say the things I was thinking, but I could sing them,” she later remarked. In pieces like “Midnight Special,” “Moses, Moses,” “Ain’t No Grave,” and “Ramblin’ Round Your City,” One Grain of Sand embodies Odetta’s approach to the folk repertoire as both an archive of black history and a vehicle for radical expression. For many among her audience, a song like “Cotton Fields” represented a first introduction to black history at a time when there was as yet no academic discipline going by this name, and when history books themselves still peddled convenient fictions of a fundamentally “happy” plantation past. And for many among her audience, black and white, this young woman’s pride in black artistry and resolve, and her open rage and her challenge to whites to recognize who they were and who they had been, too, modeled the very honesty and courage that the movement now called for.

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‘Give It Up For My Sister’: Beyonce, Solange, and The History of Sibling Acts in Pop

Frank Micelotta, Frank Leonhardt, Evan Agostini, Chris Pizzello, Jordan Strauss, Hubert Boesl / AP, Illustration by Homestead

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,597 words)

Houston-born sisters Beyoncé and Solange Knowles couldn’t be more different. They emit different energies, seem to vibrate at different frequencies. Solange is the emo Cancerian who lunged at her brother-in-law in an elevator. Beyoncé, the preternaturally polished Virgo, clung to the corner and fixed her dress. Lately, I’ve been hung up on how they’re similar. I think it’s because, for people who’ve paid attention, it’s their differences that got drilled into us over the years. By the time Solange released her first record in December 2002, Beyoncé, with Destiny’s Child, had released four albums, earned three Grammy Awards, and was in the final recording sessions for her solo debut. Focusing on their differences was probably a strategic move dreamed up by their father, and, at the time, manager, Matthew Knowles, to maximize the commercial viability of the two artists. Yet, seventeen years later, in the spring of this year, both siblings released albums and accompanying films with musings on “home.”

The two projects are like fraternal twins—individually interesting, but fun and compelling to think about in relation. Both follow albums that were career highlights. Both build their foundations on rhythm, the voice, and vocal harmony. Both marry light and sound and knit their soundscapes into images. Both depend on the improvisational skill of a cohort of contributors. Beyoncé’s project, the live album companion to her Netflix documentary “Homecoming,” documented her two headlining sets at last year’s Coachella and layered the visuals and sonics of HBCU pageantry atop references to a specific, Southern emanation of blackness. Solange’s fifth studio album, When I Get Home, traveled the exact same terrain, but in a far-out, deconstructed way, with references to cosmic jazz and psychedelic R&B, black cowboys, undulating hips and mudras, and the skyscrapers and wide, green lawns of the sisters’ hometown.

It’s logical that if two people share a childhood home, they grow up to be into the same things. But it’s taken time — for us, as audiences, to widen our perspectives enough so that we can see, in the same frame, how they’re similar and how they’re not. It’s taken time for the two sisters to grow comfortable enough being themselves while publicly navigating the music industry as black women. To differentiate herself from her sister’s glamorous pop image, Solange initially emanated an alterna-vibe that resonated with those who may have liked Beyoncé, but felt hemmed in by her R&B fantasy, lead-girl-in-a-video perfection. While Bey rocked the trendy low-slung denim of the early aughts, went blonde, and mostly kept a huge mane of loose, blown out curls, Solange wore red box braids, and in her first video, a floor length patchwork skirt. She was the earthier sister, positioned in alignment with the diasporic neo soul scene of the late 90s. She had a baby, got married early, and lived with her young family, for a while, in Idaho. Then she sheared her long locks and quietly rented a brownstone in Carroll Gardens.


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We didn’t linger on or make much meaning from Solange’s time as a background dancer for her sister’s group, or how she’d replaced Kelly Rowland in the lineup for some tour dates when they opened for Christina Aguilera in 2000. But it did raise eyebrows when, during Solange’s Brooklyn years, Beyoncé began showing up at concerts of indie acts her sister put her on to.

Solange’s first album Solo Star covered a lot of musical ground, but didn’t make much of an impact commercially or otherwise. She was then 16. Between 2001 and early 2003, a number of female R&B vocalists made big Top 10 pop albums: Alicia Keys, Janet Jackson, Ameriie, Ashanti, Mya. Beyoncé’s 2003 debut (coupled with the rapid deterioration of the recording industry) seemed to flatten out the pop-R&B landscape like a grenade. Five years later, Solange released the Motown-influenced Sol-Angel and the Hadley Street Dreams, then left her label. She independently released the 2012 EP “True.” Its lead single “Losing You,” a buoyant breakup bop, was a breakthrough. A Seat at the Table, with spoken word interludes that include interviews with her parents about black history and family, came out in the fall of 2016. It was Solange’s first album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200. By then, Beyoncé was talking about her mama’s and daddy’s roots, too, most explicitly, on Lemonade, her sixth studio project as a solo artist, which, just five months before, earned the same chart placement.  

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According to Billboard, besides the Knowles sisters, in the history of the chart there have been only two other pairs of sibling solo artists in which each sibling has earned a number one pop album: Master P and Silkk the Shocker during a run of releases in the late nineties, and Janet and Michael Jackson. The Jacksons’ older brother, Jermaine, The Braxton sisters, Toni and Tamar, and the Simpson sisters, Jessica and Ashlee, have all earned albums in the Top 10. But the only solo siblings to earn number ones during the same calendar year have been Janet and Michael, Solange and Beyoncé.

The two projects are like fraternal twins—individually interesting, but fun and compelling to think about in relation.

Michael famously got his start in a band of brothers, The Jackson Five. After signing to Motown in 1969, their first four singles — “I Want You Back”, “ABC”, “The Love You Save”, and “I’ll Be There” — all went to number one. Their father, Joseph Jackson, a former boxer and steelworker born in Arkansas, managed the band with reportedly horrid methods. Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, and Marlon all became capable musicians individually. But it was Janet, born eight years after Michael and too young to join her brothers’ band, who truly absorbed their ascent. She performed in the family’s variety show and TV sitcoms throughout the 70s, and beginning in the late 80s, released music that, arguably, approached Michael’s impact. Control, Rhythm Nation, Janet., and The Velvet Rope are gorgeous, singular statements that define pop-R&B and still sound alive.

Janet has earned more number one albums than Michael (seven to his six) and her singles have been in the Top 10 for more weeks than his (“That’s the Way Love Goes” was the longest running number one for either of them). For a while, the fiasco of Super Bowl 2004 derailed Janet’s career. She lost endorsement deals and had a long, marked decline in album sales. “Nipplegate” angered then CBS chairman Les Moonves so much that he’d reportedly ordered MTV and VH1 to stop playing her videos. Janet’s black fans always suspected something sinister at play. Last year, the New Yorker and New York Times published sexual assault allegations against Moonves, and his pattern of derailing women’s careers became public knowledge. Janet got inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this past March, and while that’s somewhat palliative, it doesn’t give back the lost years, or acknowledge her sprawling, multi-medium contributions to entertainment. Still, her reputation hasn’t had the kind of epic blemishes Michael’s has, and our current ferment of empowered, black women singers owes everything to her.

Though they’re starting to, Solange and Beyoncé haven’t leaned all the way in to their shared origin in the way of Michael and Janet in the ”Scream” video, where their charisma and similar, long-limbed, open hip-jointed athleticism is foregrounded in nearly every frame. We got glimpses at Solange’s set at Coachella in 2014, when Bey joined in for a dance break, and its reprise in Bey’s sets, a highlight of the 2019 film. Solange has, like Janet, who sang backup on Thriller, been all over Beyoncé’s catalog. And while coverage of black pop has evolved from the 90s and early 2000s, when Janet got blackballed and Beyoncé and Solange seemed to represent poles on a restricted continuum of what a black woman in pop could be (the glamorous diva vs. the earthy bohemian), it still hasn’t gone far enough.

In Interview, Beyoncé asked her younger sister where she got her inspiration, and she answered,“For one, I got to have a lot of practice. Growing up in a household with a master class such as yourself definitely didn’t hurt.” She also namechecked Missy Elliot, who produced and provided vocals for some of Destiny’s Child’s finest tracks. In other words, she claimed her proximity to her older sister’s career, as nourishment, cultivation, as part of what undergirds her artistry. When Solange’s latest album launched, the NPR music critic Ann Powers made a playlist of its antecedents called the “mamas of Solange.” It included Alice Coltrane, Minnie Riperton, Tweet, Aaliyah, and TLC. It did not include Beyoncé or Destiny’s Child, contemporaries of some of the women who did make the list. Maybe it’s taken for granted? Stevie Wonder’s ambient album The Secret Life of Plants is brought up a lot in relation to When I Get Home, but The Writings on the Wall and Dangerously in Love are also important building blocks of the music Solange and most contemporary pop and R&B artists make. It feels incomplete to not say so. Similarly, when talking about Beyoncé, something’s missing when we don’t acknowledge how indebted she is to the cluster of women around her. Perhaps that’s leftover residue from the marketing machine of the late 90s and early aughts, too — an overemphasis on singularity.

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When I Get Home’s interlude “S. MacGregor,” named after an avenue in Houston’s Third Ward, contains snippets of Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen performing a poem their mother, Vivian Ayers-Allen, wrote. Rashad and Allen make up another culturally significant sibling pair. There’s Fame!, The Cosby Show, and A Different World, but also the stage — Rashad is the first black woman to win a lead actress Tony, and Allen was nominated for Tony Awards for West Side Story and Sweet Charity.

Both sisters also had short-lived recording careers. Rashad released a tribute album to Josephine Baker in 1978 and an album of nursery rhymes in 1991. She memorably sang on multiple episodes of The Cosby Show. Allen released Special Look in 1989. It was a pop, dance-R&B concoction that sounds like a harder edged Paula Abdul, whose blockbuster Forever Your Girl had come out the year before. Today, Allen directs for TV and runs Los Angeles’ Debbie Allen Dance Academy, while Rashad directs for the stage.

Allen’s younger than Rashad by 2 years, and they have two older brothers: the jazz musician Andrew Arthur Allen, and Hugh Allen, a banker. Their parents’ nasty divorce in the mid-’80s got covered in Jet. I often wonder about the dynamics in high-intensity, high-achieving households like theirs. Some accounts say Solange felt neglected for parts of her childhood when her older sister’s group became the family business. The five-year age difference is too wide for straightforward competition, but not so for resentment. Some of my earliest memories are the legendary fights between my two older, high-achieving siblings. It still annoys me to think about how much time and energy their rivalry took up (and continues to take up) in our family. In an interview with Maria Shriver last year, Tina Knowles Lawson said she deliberately taught her daughters not to be intimidated by another woman’s shine and sent them to therapy early on to learn to protect and support each other. From the perspective of an outsider, it seems to have worked.

While coverage of black pop has evolved from the 90s and early 2000s, when Janet got blackballed and Beyoncé and Solange seemed to represent poles on a restricted continuum of what a black woman in pop could be, it still hasn’t gone far enough.

Family dynasties are neither new nor newly influential in pop. My mother adored the voice of Karen Carpenter, who’d gotten her start in a duo with her brother, Richard. The LPs of the Emotions, the Pointer Sisters, the Jones Girls, and Sister Sledge were in my  mother’s racks, too, — all vocal groups with at least one pair of siblings. The early years of rock and roll, the doo wop era, is full of crews of schoolmates, like the Chantels, the Marvelettes or the Supremes, or sibling groups like The Andrews Sisters, the Shangri-Las, and the Ronettes. Later, there’s DeBarge, the Emotions, The Sylvers, the Five Stairsteps, Wilson Phillips, the Winans, Ace of Base, Xscape, the Beach Boys, the Bee Gees, the Isley Brothers. Part of me wants to say it’s because of the genre’s origins in domestic spaces like the living room or the stoop, a refuge of creativity against the backdrop of chaotic 20th century urban life. Music education in schools provided training, as did the subtle rigor of the church, where troupes, quartets, and choirs led worship. When describing what’s special about “that sibling sound,” in 2014, Linda Ronstadt told the BBC: “The information of your DNA is carried in your voice, and you can get a sound [with family] that you never get with someone who’s not blood-related to you.” What a voice sounds like, in large part, depends on biology and anatomy—the shape of the head, chest, the construction of the sinus cavities. It makes sense that the sweetest, most seamless harmonizing could happen between people who share DNA. And as audiences, we like being witness to the chemistry of our performers. It can feel fun and somewhat uncanny to watch people who look a little bit alike sing and dance in formation.

None of this completely explains how much popular music has historically been “A Family Affair” (a number one in 1971 for Sly and the Family Stone, a group comprised of Sylvester Stewart and his siblings Freddie and Rose, with baby sister, Vaetta, in charge of the backing vocalists). Or how much, aside from the Jonas Brothers, the top 40 of the past few months is absent sibling groups, or, really, groups of any kind. Haim, the trio of sisters Este, Danielle, and Alana from the San Fernando Valley, had Top 10 albums in 2013 and 2017, and will co-headline this year’s Pitchfork’s festival with the Isley Brothers and Robyn. They sing in effortless three-part harmony, are aggressive on guitar, bass, and percussion, and write their own songs. A New York Times critic called them proudly “anachronistic,” because their sound is a throwback to earlier eras and bands like Fleetwood Mac and Destiny’s Child, whose Stevie Nicks-sampling “Bootylicious,” was the last pop number one from a girl group. In a 2011 piece for The Root, Akoto Ofori-Atta attributed the decline of vocal groups to, among other factors, reduced record label budgets and the “me-first” narcissism of social media. She also suggested the cyclical nature of music trends could mean that audiences will want to hear tight vocal harmonies again. I’d think that was impossible since digitization has meant that people don’t have to sing together anymore. But singing itself has gotten new life from young R&B artists like Ella Mai, Moses Sumney, and H.E.R., so who knows.

In 2015, Beyonce signed the sister duo Chloe+ Halle to her record label. She’d seen them on YouTube performing covers and accompanying themselves on keys in their living room.  The young women sing ethereal, soul-inflected harmonies, play multiple instruments and compose and produce their own music. They’re also actresses with recurring roles on “grown-ish.” Their first studio album The Kids are Alright released last year and earned the group two Grammy nominations. They performed at the ceremony, memorably, in the tribute to Donny Hathaway, and at the Grammy’s tribute to Motown, they performed the Marvelette’s “Please Mr. Postman,” Motown’s first number one. None of the singles from Chloe + Halle’s record have made much of a commercial impact or stuck with me yet, but, based on history, the incubation potential of the vocal group, the sibling group in particular, bodes well for longevity.