Search Results for: interview

The Classroom Origins of Toxic Masculinity

KC Noland / Youtube, Saul Loeb / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 8 minutes (1,974 words)

Covington Catholic High School, St. Michael’s College School, Georgetown Preparatory School. All three are Catholic, mostly white, mostly rich, all-boys, and all three have recently made the news. At Covington, student Nick Sandmann went viral after a video emerged showing him, surrounded by a bunch of white classmates in the same glaring MAGA hats fresh off the same anti-abortion rally, mocking Native American Indigenous Peoples March attendee Nathan Phillips. At St. Mike’s school — Canadian, suggesting we may be less nice than we are similar — several students were charged after a video appeared on social media in which their fellow classmates were assaulted, one with a broomstick. Eight boys were eventually expelled after several incidents were investigated, all, according to reports, involving football and basketball players. Georgetown Prep, meanwhile, made the news when Christine Blasey Ford accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when they were teenagers while fellow Georgetown student Mark Judge watched. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. The quote reverberated across social media once again after the Covington video went viral.

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Pam Houston on Coming Clean, Climate Change, and ‘Writing Deeply Into the Grasses’

Mike Blakeman / W. W. Norton & Company

Kim Steutermann Rogers | Longreads | January 2019 | 14 minutes (3,849 words)

As is typical with Pam Houston‘s books, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country is hard to define. Memoir? Collection of essays? Autofiction? But one thing clearly stands out: Deep Creek is an ode to Houston’s ranch, all of its 120 acres perched at 9,000 feet above sea level, seated in a horseshoe of mountain peaks near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, and five long hours from the nearest airport in Denver, Colorado.

You wouldn’t think having to post-hole through the snow to reach her barn, double-digit below-zero temperatures for weeks on end, droughts, and forest fires would result in the kind of poetic love that Houston has for a plot of land on which few people would last for even a single winter. But maybe it’s those very challenges that rooted Houston to the place and taught her how to keep loving in the face of adversity — an echo of a lesson she first encountered in childhood but didn’t quite understand then. Of course, not all days on the ranch are filled with sick sheep, broken fence lines, and frozen water pipes; just as not every moment of her childhood was taken over by drunks who physically and emotionally abused her.

When Houston published her best-selling debut collection of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, in 1992, she was asked over and over again, “How much of this really happened to you?” Now, for the first time, in Deep Creek, Houston comes clean. She shares intimate moments of her personal life, those same moments that many of her characters encounter in her short stories — the kind of experiences that shaped Houston into the woman she is today. She writes about her fraught relationship with her mother, the other women who stepped in and mothered her in her mom’s stead, and, of course, as we would expect from Houston, she writes about her relationship with the natural world and her concerns for our environment in the face of climate change.

But this is Houston, after all, who is “…happiest with one plane ticket in my hand and another in my underwear drawer.” So, Deep Creek isn’t solely a meditative look at ranch life and long descriptive passages of the sound of horses chomping on hay. “I love the ranch differently than someone who goes to bed and wakes up 365 times a year here, someone who was born and raised here, someone whose most regular routine does not involve TSA security and running for connecting flights,” she writes early on in Deep Creek. “You have to be a certain age, I think, to understand longing as scarcely distinguishable from pleasure, and my love affair with the ranch is defined by a thousand leavings and a thousand returns.”
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What Falls to Earth

Illustration by Cristina Daura

Susanna Space | Longreads | January 2019 | 13 minutes (3,200 words)

On June 30, 1908, a star-like body with a fiery tail tore through the clear morning sky above the vast Siberian forest. As it neared the ground, a column of light shot twelve miles into the air. Booms like artillery followed, and stones rained from the sky; houses shook and windows shattered. A wave of intense heat threw people from their chairs. Hundreds of reindeer scattered and burned.

I came upon the story of the Tunguska meteor by accident. It was 2014 and I had watched a documentary about Russian girls, children of 12 and 13, sent abroad by American modeling agents to work. The film made me curious about the girls’ home in the Siberian countryside, a backdrop they were eager to shed.

My interest in the girls receded as I read about the meteor. I was online, trying to learn more about Siberia when links to articles popped up about a similar event, this one a century later and 3,500 miles away in Chelyabinsk. A meteor had exploded over the city one February morning, the flash recorded by hundreds of smartphones and dashboard cameras.
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Sacrificed for the Super Bowl: The Wiping Out of an Atlanta Neighborhood

Mercedes-Benz Stadium with Georgia Dome remains in the foreground. Image by elisfkc (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Thirty years ago, the entire community of Lightning, on Atlanta’s west side, was demolished to build the Georgia Dome. The dome was then destroyed in 2017 to make way for Mercedes-Benz Stadium, host of this year’s Super Bowl LIII. At The Bitter Southerner, Max Blau compiles an oral history of a long-gone, forgotten neighborhood, told by the residents that were displaced.

To Atlantans, Monroe holds the title that always designates a native: He’s a “Grady baby,” born in Grady Memorial Hospital, the public institution that has cared for Atlantans of all classes since 1892. He is also a son of the west side. To west-siders, he’s a native of historic neighborhoods like Vine City or even Bankhead.

All are stand-ins, though, for where he’s really from — which is nowhere, looking at the current map of his hometown.

Ivory Young, the late Atlanta City Councilmember, said in a filmed interview with the Historic Westside Cultural Arts from 2015 that “the Georgia Dome, and the phase four expansion of the Georgia World Congress Center, took place on an approximately 90-acre tract. … In the shadow of all that downtown infrastructure, [Lightning] was a neighborhood with a lot of value.”

Michael Julian Bond: The first [business] to go away was the old lumber yard [run by the Frank G. Lake Lumber Co.]. It seemed permanent.

Rev. Jerome Banks: They got rid of all the companies. The Atlanta Casket Company. Bailey Coffee Company. They closed down [the factories]. Those buildings stood empty for months.

Michael Julian Bond: There were churches who had a dwindling population. By this time, in the mid-’80s, most of the residents of Lightning were gone. There were houses still.

Rev. Jerome Banks: Most of the residents [left] were renters. So [state officials] were talking to landlords. Residents got notices that you got to move. We moved because of that. I don’t think nobody would’ve left if we weren’t forced out.

Velma Coachman: My parents held out. Everyone in Atlanta knew they were buying us out. They didn’t want to give people in Lightning a fair price. They wanted the land. They were trying to run us out. Sell the home — or else.

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‘I Was Restricting Myself to This One Country All This Time’: An Immigrant’s Search for Work in the U.S.

As a result of Trump’s April 2017 “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, immigration policies have become more strict toward companies applying for H-1B visas, making it much harder for them to hire highly-skilled legal immigrants. And while the U.S. still attracts top talent from around the world, these more rigid policies make education and employment in other countries more feasible and attractive.

For Philadelphia magazine, Gina Tomaine describes the challenges her future brother-in-law, Akirt Sridharan, faced while looking for work in the U.S. Sridharan, a 26-year-old man from India, graduated from the University of Delaware with an MBA and a master’s in electrical engineering. He had spent $125,000 on tuition in the U.S., and after graduating in May 2017, had applied to 2,000 jobs — with no success.

After graduating, Akirt began an odyssey into the byzantine American job market. He had high hopes at first, with an early lead at a financial company in Delaware. But after a second interview, the company learned he needed visa sponsorship and stopped the conversation.

“I’ve been sleeping on so many couches, they’ve just become my bed,” says Akirt. “I obviously never wanted to burden anybody, and that feeling is always in the back of my head. When you’re at someone else’s place all the time, you don’t know where home is anymore.”

He applied to more jobs. Then more jobs. He moved to San Francisco, since that’s supposed to be where the tech jobs are centered. Many companies wanted to hire him. What they didn’t want? To sponsor a visa at a time when applications are often rejected and the lottery system is a gamble.

All of this has been happening, of course, as tech companies in particular are desperate for skilled workers.

With no prospects, Akirt began to look for work outside of the U.S., and after four years of living in the country, he left. And suddenly, he was getting job interviews.

Akirt landed on November 7th in Chennai, a burgeoning start-up hub — the city his parents are originally from and have retired to. Their white marble high-rise apartment, whose decor features Hindu gods and goddesses, African tribal artwork, and every Apple product imaginable, sits next to a huge technological park — one that’s currently hiring Americans. Now that he was looking beyond the United States, Akirt seemed to have opportunities everywhere.

“I was restricting myself to this one country all this time,” he said. “Now, I have hundreds of countries left to explore.”

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The Weather and the Wall

iStock / Getty Images Plus, Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Will Meyer | Longreads | January 2019 | 15 minutes (4,073 words)

“At the museum steps
Didn’t we establish
That all this blood is not a dream
This is progress
And we are not that high
We could almost be redeemed”

 — unreleased song by The Lentils

*

For years, changes in butterfly populations and migrations have been considered an “early warning indicator” of global warming. In 2006, a British butterfly specialist told The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert that of 10 species living in Southern England at the time, “Every single one has moved northward since 1982.”

Now, several years and many missed early warning indicators later, the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, has received a letter from Customs and Border Protection announcing the government’s intent to build a border wall through critical habitat for 240 species of butterflies and 300 types of birds. The letter explains that the wall will be 36-feet tall and 20-feet wide, and that an additional 150 feet south of the border will be cleared of all vegetation to create an “enforcement zone.” Comparing the wall’s construction with a calamitous weather event, the National American Butterfly Association president told the San-Antonio Express News that: “For us to financially survive and weather this storm, we’re trying to create a fund that will be kind of like an endowment.” As of this writing, a GoFundMe created to protect the Center has raised just over $24,000.

Meanwhile, given that Mexico hasn’t “paid for it” and won’t, a GoFundMe to finance the wall’s construction raised $20.5 million dollars before GoFundMe decided to offer refunds. That’s nowhere near enough money to actually build the thing, but enough to make you pretty sure the butterflies don’t stand a chance. Indeed, the president and the Republican-controlled Senate have shut down large swaths of the government for over a month, demanding that the Democrats in the House vote to pay for the wall before the government can be reopened. Still, it’s hard to believe the wall is really going up.
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The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives

Longreads Pick
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 21, 2019
Length: 45 minutes (11,432 words)

The Tale of Boozy Suzy and Her Hammer Fist

Elsa / Getty

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | January 2019 | 15 minutes (3,959 words)

In February 2006, Polly Esther answered a classified ad in NOW Magazine, Toronto’s alt-weekly. “The Pillow Fight League wants YOU,” the ad read. “Tryouts, Sat. February 18th. Ask for Suzanne.”

“I’m like, ‘Oh, this sounds interesting,’” Esther told me over the phone from her home in Toronto recently. “I literally have no idea why I looked in the back of the paper that day or why, for some reason, this spoke to me. I called and I asked a bit about it: ‘We’re gonna be this women’s fight league. It’s pillow fighting, but it’ll be a mix of boxing and wrestling and mixed martial arts as well.’”
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Traveling While Black Across the Atlantic Ocean

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Ethelene Whitmire | Longreads | January 2019 | 19 minutes (4,642 words)

“Welcome aboard!” the Cunard agent exclaimed, and I suddenly felt a clichéd warm tingling sensation. After hesitating for several weeks, I finally…booked a passage? I got a berth? I do not know the lingo. So let us say I got a ticket for a seven-day, eastbound, transatlantic crossing on Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 from New York City (technically the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal) to Southampton, England for June, 2018, the first leg of a trip to Denmark. I was committed — or semi-committed. I placed a 10% deposit (fully refundable for a few weeks) to hold my space, and immediately made a note in my electronic calendar for two days before the deadline to remind myself to cancel if I changed my mind. I’d visited Denmark 12 times since my initial trip in May and June, 2010, including a year as a Fulbright scholar, but I’d always flown there.

I am writing a book about African Americans in 20th century Denmark. During the past few years I followed in their footsteps by visiting Danish cities, towns, villages, islands, a prison, numerous castles, jazz clubs, an educational institution, and the homes and studios where they lived, visited, performed, toured, and studied. A friend suggested I more accurately recreate the experience of the people in my book who lived in the first half of the 20th century, when the only way to get to Denmark from the United States was to cross the Atlantic Ocean by ship. I’d read much of what they’d written about their experiences in letters home, in memoirs, and in one case, in a newspaper column.

They traveled abroad during the Jim Crow era in the United States, and many feared they would face racism and even possible segregation on the ships. Perhaps they were familiar with the oft-told tale of former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ 1845 crossing. He was almost thrown overboard by some Americans after the captain invited him to make an anti-slavery speech. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor called Douglass’ voyage “harrowing” in Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War. William M. Fowler, Jr. wrote in Steam Titans: Cunard, Collins, and the Epic Battle for Commerce on the North Atlantic that although Douglass booked a first-class cabin, once he was on the Cambria he “discovered that he had been reassigned to quarters in the forecastle, separate from the other passengers, and he was advised to remain secluded there during the crossing.”

I did not worry about segregation during my 21st century transatlantic crossing, but wondered about and anticipated possible microaggressions — slights and condescending comments often based on racial stereotypes. I did not see many images in Cunard’s brochures and website featuring Black people among the passengers. I was educated in predominantly white institutions and worked at similar institutions as an administrator and as a professor, so I was used to being in white spaces. And I live in Wisconsin — one of the whitest states in the nation. I wondered what would my journey be like on the Atlantic Ocean?
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When You Race Across Antarctica, Remember Your Spare Skis

Antarctica (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

At the New York Times, read Adam Skolnick‘s interview with Louis Rudd and Colin O’Brady, the two men who set out from the Ronne Ice Shelf on the western edge of Antarctica on November 3rd, 2018 in a two-man race. Pulling all the equipment they’d need to survive for two months on sleds called pulks, which man would be the first to traverse Antarctica — the coldest continent on earth — in a solo, unassisted journey of 921 miles?

[Louis Rudd] I couldn’t retrace my track. I went back on the compass bearing. Visibility was like 10 meters. I was thinking, “This is getting quite dangerous now.” I’ve got no tent and no sleeping bag. I’ve literally got a down jacket and I’ve got some food. I’ve got a sat phone, but nobody is coming to get me in these conditions. It could be a couple of days in this sort of thing.

Without my tent and sleeping bag, I’m instantly in a survival situation, and I was conscious as well that the winds were really strong. There was a ski sticking up, but if that fell over, the whole thing could have been buried. It took me a long time to do the two miles. I was scanning and looking. I’d almost gone past it, which would have been fatal, but by pure luck, I turned my head toward a gap in the spindrift and saw a black shadowy sort of shape. Instantly turned, skied a couple hundred meters, stumbled across it. Relief.

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