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The Longreads 2018 Holiday Gift Book Guide

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Let Longreads help you with your holiday shopping! We’ve made a catalog of books we featured in 2018 that we think would make great gifts for everyone on your list.

Books about being alone and really owning it.

Patricia Hampl on the Ladies of Llangollen, who were famous for wanting to be left alone; Stephanie Rosenbloom on eating alone; and an interview with novelist Ottessa Moshfegh in which she strongly advises against leaning in.


Books about family. 

Meaghan O’Connell and Juan Vidal on the surprise and profundity of becoming new parents; Nicole Chung and Laura June on the complexities of family connection across the generations when grappling with adoption or estrangement; Christian Donlan on the grief and joy of parenting while gravely ill; and Issac Bailey on his family’s resilience in the wake of his brother’s imprisonment.


Books for the women in your life who are mad. 

Gemma Hartley on emotional labor, Brittney Cooper on black women’s eloquent rage, and Rebecca Traister on the political power of women’s anger.


Books of investigations, inquiries, and revelations. 

Karina Longworth reveals how Hollywood’s women were caught in Howard Hughes’ web of lies; Rachel Slade solves the sinking of El Faro; Alec Nevala-Lee unravels the joined-at-the-hip origin stories of Scientology and American science fiction; Susan Orlean investigates the mystery of the Los Angeles Public Library fire; Brantley Hargrove follows in the footsteps of a storm chaser killed by the largest tornado every recorded; and Tim Mohr chronicles the forgotten role of punk rock in the fall of the Berlin Wall.


Books that explore the bounds of physical and mental health, illness and medicine, mind and body.

Porochista Khakpour, in a searing memoir about surviving a misdiagnosed chronic illness, questions the possibility of total recovery; Terese Maire Mailhot, in a lyric memoir about PTSD as a result of childhood trauma, attempts to reclaim her narrative and reconnect with her people; Christie Watson remembers her twenty years as a nurse before becoming a novelist; Kristi Coulter meditates on her newfound sobriety and a culture of silence around women’s addiction; Marina Benjamin ruminates on insomnia, plumbing the depths of sleep and wakefulness; and Michele Lent Hirsch studies the invisible lives of young women with chronic illnesses


Histories that challenge our understanding of the past.

Colin G. Calloway‘s biography of George Washington conscientiously locates him in a very Indian world; Julia Boyd points out that the Third Reich was a popular tourist destination; Linda Gordon explains the sway the KKK held in state governments in the early 20th century; Shomari Wills chronicles America’s first black millionaires; Peter Ackroyd reveals the history of gay London; and Stefan Bradley remembers the fight for civil rights in the Ivy League.


Books about dating and marriage.

Elizabeth Flock on the years she spent living with married couples in Mumbai to better understand their marriages; Kelli María Korducki on the feminist history of breaking up; Viv Albertine on dating again in her fifties. 


Follow the money.

Anand Giridharadas on the elite, Disneyfied world of Ted Talks and philanthropy as self-help for rich people; David Montero on the global corporate bribery network; Sarah Smarsh on growing up rural and working class. 


Fiction and memoirs that reflect on the way we live now, illuminating our present and hinting at possible futures.

Nick Drnaso‘s Sabrina is haunted by the menace of conspiracy theories and fake news; Ling Ma‘s Severance imagines a world in which office drones keep going to work and posting on social media even though it’s the apocalypse; Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah‘s Friday Black points out that being black in America already is a dystopian nightmare; Olivia Laing‘s Crudo was written in real time during — and is about living through — the collective traumatic experience that was the year 2017; Jamel Brinkley‘s A Lucky Man revolves around the lucklessness of black boyhood and manhood; Nafissa Thompson-SpiresHeads of the Colored People is a witty, darkly comic look at a supposedly post-racial America; Kiese Laymon‘s Heavy critiques a nation unwilling to come to terms with its traumatic past; Thomas Page McBee‘s Amateur tries to understand why men fight; and Sharmila Sen‘s Not Quite Not White explores how integral whiteness can be to our idea of Americanness.


Books of journeys, adventures, and migrations.

Laurie Gwen Shapiro on the scrappy New York teen who stowed away on a 1928 expedition to Antarctica; Laura Smith on vanishing as a way to reclaim your life; William E. Glassley on his geological expeditions to Greeland to uncover the world’s oldest secret; Lauren Hilgers on Chinese political dissidents building a new life in New York; Eileen Truax on Mexican immigrants living in fear of deportation in America; and Lauren Markham on Salvadoran teens seeking safety far away from home.


Books about faith.

Meghan O’Gieblyn‘s essays hinge on faith and feeling left behind in the Midewst; R.O. Kwon‘s novel The Incendiaries tests the fault lines of lost faith and violence; Jessica Wilbanks‘ memoir is a search for her childhood faith’s origins.


Cultural studies and criticism.

Maya Rao on the patriarchal mentality in the oil boomtowns of North Dakota; Elizabeth Rush on the first areas of the U.S. affected by rising sea levels; Elizabeth Gillespie McRae on the white mothers who violently opposed school integration in the South; Rowan Moore Gerety on daily life in Mozambique, one of the world’s fastest growing economies; Christopher C. King on Europe’s oldest surviving folk music tradition; Agnès Poirer on the intellectual life that flourished in postwar Paris; Alice Bolin on our obsession with dead girls; Michelle Tea on the perils of queer memoir; and Natalie Hopkinson on art as political protest.


Books that are about just one specific thing.

Susan Hand Shetterly on seaweed, Richard Sugg on fairies, Michael Engelhard on polar bears. 

 

Happy holidays!
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Miami Herald

This week, we’re sharing stories from Julie K. Brown, Joe Sexton, Zachary R. Mider and Zeke Faux, Bruce Grierson, and Michael Hainey.

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Who Even Watches the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show Anymore?

Evan Agostini / Invision / AP, Jens Kreuter / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 9 minutes 2,184 words)

The most popular Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show picture on Instagram last year was of Bella Hadid. I burst out laughing when I saw it. It reminded me of that stereotypical image of the old-school flasher — beige trench, black trilby — ripping his coat open to reveal his anxious dick. Of course, Bella Hadid does not have a dick, but she’s posing like she does. The 5 foot 9 inch angel (if not capital-A Angel) stands legs akimbo in a room full of people minding their own business, splaying her petal pink robe to reveal hips jutting out of high-riding briefs and boobs pushed up so far they’re practically floating above her head. Read more…

Bruce Springsteen: Sadness, Love, Madness, and Soul

NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 12: Bruce Springsteen performs onstage during "Springsteen On Broadway" at Walter Kerr Theatre on October 12, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images)

At Esquire, Bruce Springsteen talks to Michael Hainey about Trump’s divisive politics, raising kids to become solid citizens, how to deal with the baggage of your upbringing to be the person you truly want to be, and how, at age 69 after two serious bouts of depression, he’s still figuring it all out, just like the rest of us.

“DNA.”

This is, curiously, the first word that Springsteen says when he takes the stage. An unlikely, unromantic, unpoetic choice for a man who has always been more about the sensory than science. Yet in many ways, DNA is Springsteen’s unrelenting antagonist, the costar that he battles against.

This is the central tension of Springsteen on Broadway: the self we feel doomed to be through blood and family versus the self we can—if we have the courage and desire—will into existence. Springsteen, as he reveals here, has spent his entire life wrestling with that question that haunts so many of us: Will I be confined by my DNA, or will I define who I am?

We ignore our demons, he says, at our peril. The show is, as he calls it, “a magic trick.” But in other ways, as I tell Springsteen, it is a revival show—not just him energizing the audience through the power of his life-affirming, raucous songs; it is also a self-revival show. This is the work of a man revealing his flaws so that he can inspire us to redeem ourselves.

You’re Bruce fucking Springsteen! How do you not know who you are?”

“Ugh.” Springsteen laughs and lets out a sigh. He drops his chin into his chest and then smiles and looks up. “Bruce fucking Springsteen is a creation. So it’s somewhat liquid—even though at this point you would imagine I have it pretty nailed down. But sometimes not necessarily. [Laughs] And personally—you’re in search of things like everybody else. Identity is a slippery thing no matter how long you’ve been at it. Parts of yourself can appear—like, whoa, who was that guy? Oh, he’s in the car with everybody else, but he doesn’t show his head too often, because he was so threatening to your stability. At the end of the day, identity is a construct we build to make ourselves feel at ease and at peace and reasonably stable in the world. But being is not a construct. Being is just being. In being, there’s a whole variety of wild and untamed things that remain in us. You bump into those in the night, and you can scare yourself.”

Read the story

Writing to Avoid Erasure

Photo courtesy the author

Aram Mrjoian | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2624 words)

On the periphery of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the basement of my parents’ house, resting on a pool table among spare tools, mildew-stained textbooks, and model trains, I recently found an overstuffed manila envelope fraying at the edges. Official letterhead from Wayne State University is stamped in the upper left corner. If not for the message written at the center, where an address would usually be scribbled out, it would be unassuming. Instead, penciled in neat capital letters, a message to my father reads:

MARC,

NEVER FORGET

NEVER FORGIVE

DAD,

3-30-88

The note’s lack of punctuation seems almost intentional, as if the author wanted the statement to remain open-ended. I was born 15 months after the date, late June of the following year. The well-informed historian might use context clues to gather what the folder holds. For me, as the author of this essay, my name, along with Wayne State University’s rough location, provide esoteric hints as to the envelope’s contents, but for the average reader there’s not enough to go on to come to a confident conclusion.

Q: So what’s in the folder?

A: Decades worth of newspaper clippings about the Armenian genocide.

Old school Armenians can be, to put it lightly, unwavering in their grudges. My grandfather, having been born in the United States to parents who fled Armenia as the Ottoman Empire attempted to murder their families, remained passionate in his hatred of Turkey until he passed away from complications of a heart attack in 1997, when I was 8 years old. I don’t know what year he began collecting newspaper clippings prior to 1988. I didn’t browse the articles in detail, because they’re not for me. At least, not yet.
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Home Field Disadvantage

Team USA and Canada face off during the super round of the Women's Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Kelsey McKinney | Longreads | November 2018 | 24 minutes (6,164 words)

The moment the members of Team USA disembarked their plane in Orlando, their fears were realized. This was the first Women’s Baseball World Cup ever played on United States soil, and they expected to be ignored.

At the last World Cup, played in 2016 in South Korea, Team USA didn’t make it to the final round of the only competition they ever play in. But at least in Korea they had been acknowledged. More than that, they’d felt important and beloved, barraged by reporters’ questions at every turn and hounded by fans: fans holding handmade signs with sparkling lettering, fans who knew their names and numbers, fans who sent love notes down to the dugout in the middle of their games.

For every day of the past two years each woman had trained, practiced, and dreamed about playing baseball. According to USA Baseball, the members of the U.S. women’s national baseball team are among the top 20 players in the country, but here at home, almost no one knows they exist.

“Everywhere we travel [in the States] we are in our USA jumpsuits and matching stuff, and everyone just thinks we’re the soccer team,” Marti Sementelli, a pitcher for Team USA, said before the tournament. “Everyone on our team is worried about what the atmosphere at the World Cup will be like.”

They were the hosts, after all, to 11 teams of women just like them, women who fought their way into a sport that constantly tried to push them out. As talented as any professional, they’d asked for time off work and school to play. They deserved a crowd. But they knew better than to expect one. No games sold out, and only two had more than 600 people in attendance.

Everyone on our team is worried about what the atmosphere at the World Cup will be like.

The World Cup took place over 10 days of oppressively muggy, late August Florida heat about an hour southeast of Orlando. Viera, Florida, is a sleepy, suburban town built on a swamp, where preteens drive around in golf carts. This is where the best women’s baseball in the world was played — not in Orlando or Miami, but in a town even people from Florida have never heard of.  

Team USA hadn’t won the gold since 2006, and had flopped in 2016, but this was home territory. Despite a lifetime of roadblocks, Team USA knew they were good enough to beat all the odds. Win gold here, several players hoped before the tournament began, and maybe — finally — Americans might pay attention, might notice how hard they are working for so little.

The USA women’s baseball team prepare to face Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Before Team USA played Team Japan, the defending, five-time World Champions, on the first night of the tournament’s second round, a five-year-old girl threw a ball back and forth with her father just outside the stadium. She wore a glove, and he caught her lobs with his bare hands. She said she wanted to play baseball. Her father said “hell yeah,” he’d let her play. “If she wants to fight for it, I’ll fight with her.” But to play baseball as a woman in America, you have to be willing to fight your entire life, because at every phase, you’re set up to fail.  

The Women’s Baseball World Cup is a relatively new tournament. Inaugurated in 2004, it takes place every two years. In the first week, 12 teams compete in groups and the top half of each group moves on to the Super Round. Every team in the Super Round plays the others once, and those standings determine which teams go to the gold medal and bronze medal games. This year, Japan, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Chinese Taipei, and Team USA made the Super Round. Ranked third coming into the tournament, Team USA hoped to medal after a disappointing performance in 2016.


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But they were at a disadvantage compared to teams like Japan and Canada, who practice together more than a month a year. The members of Team USA meet each other at tryouts, and train for five days together before the 10-day series. Returning players remember each other from past years, and a few weekends a year some former players fly to a common location to work together. But self-funded trainings aren’t officially organized, they’re the product of ambition and frustration.

It’s no wonder when Team USA played Japan on the first night of the Super Round, they made a couple mental errors: a ball not thrown on a steal, a miscommunication at second base. They are a team in uniform, but not in time spent on the diamond. They haven’t been given the time or resources to become a team the way Japan has.

In 2009, Kenichi Kakutani, a wealthy Japanese business owner, invested heavily in women’s baseball in Japan after watching a baseball tournament for high school girls. He formed what would eventually be called the Japanese Women’s Baseball League (JWBL), a tiny, four-team league that has made Team Japan an absolutely dominant force, taking gold at every WBWC in the past decade. Because more than 25 private high schools in Japan had women’s baseball teams, the talent was there to fuel the league, and the league itself encouraged more private high schools to start teams.

At first, it can seem easy to be a girl on the big diamond in the United States. Malaika Underwood, who has been on Team USA for more than a decade, grew up in San Diego playing tee-ball with kids in her neighborhood. Her team, the Brown Bears, had girls and boys on it, at least for a little while. Through tee-ball, machine-pitch, coach-pitch, even kid-pitch, no one questioned that Underwood was a baseball player; she was great.

“About age twelve or thirteen, D-Day came,” she says. “I had to decide whether I was going to try and play baseball in high school, or switch to softball.” Many people pressured her to switch, to try and hit the bigger, yellow softball thrown underhand on a smaller field. “They weren’t doing it with any malintent; they wanted to support me,” she says. “But at the same time, softball was a totally different sport. No disrespect to softball, but I didn’t want to play that.”

Federal courts have ruled under Title IX that baseball and softball are separate sports and that girls cannot be excluded from baseball teams just because a softball team exists at the same school. Softball is played on a smaller field, with a different ball, and different rules. In softball, runners cannot take a lead off bases. With a runner firmly on base, an infielder has to change her entire job, watch the pitcher for a throw-over, watch the runner for a steal, maybe even change her positioning. Without lead offs, there are far fewer steals, no balks, and far less nuance. “People come up to me and tell me on a daily basis that I should switch to softball,” Sementelli says. “You have to be the only girl on the team, or you have to switch to softball. It takes a lot for a little girl to fight to play on the big field.”

No disrespect to softball, but I didn’t want to play that.

Many girls do leave baseball for softball, often because there doesn’t seem to be any other choice. Unlike women’s basketball or women’s soccer, there aren’t national leagues for women’s baseball in the United States at any level: not Little League, not in high school, not in college, and not professionally. There are very few teams for girls to play baseball on together. Former player Justine Siegal runs an organization called Baseball for All, which coordinates tournaments and programs for girls to play. Sunrise, Florida, has a girl’s travel baseball team. Washington, D.C., has a team of all girls that plays in a boys’ league. Major League Baseball introduced a Trailblazers series in 2017, which offers competitive play and coaching for about 100 girls under age 13. “We believe these were necessary steps to send a message to our larger baseball audience that softball isn’t the only option for girls and women to play our game.” Tony Reagins, who is the executive vice president of baseball and softball development for Major League Baseball, wrote via email.

According to data gathered by Baseball for All, approximately 100,000 girls play baseball at the junior level making up about 2 percent of total players. Girls are playing baseball, or at least they want to. The problem isn’t demand; it’s supply. There are only a handful of opportunities for girls to play in the United States.

“The Trailblazers series is a great start,” Jennifer Ring, professor of political science at the University of Nevada and author of Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball, says. “[MLB] needs to make it known publicly that they want girls to play baseball. Not to play baseball in the major leagues, but to play professionally. I think if MLB really developed girls Little Leagues and youth leagues and added their brand to various tournaments throughout the country, it would take off.”

Playing baseball as a girl after puberty is even more difficult, because the game becomes entrenched in the school system. Underwood wrote letters to five high school baseball programs at magnet high schools she could attend with her baseball stats, and a single request: that she be given a fair chance to tryout for the team. Some coaches said no, the school had a softball team and she could play there; but a few schools said yes. Underwood went to the high school where she thought she’d have the best chance to play hardball. She played on the JV team her freshman and sophomore years, and her senior year started at second base on the varsity team.

“At ten years old, they tried to lie to keep me from playing in the league,” Ila Borders, a pitcher who was the first woman to win a game in a men’s professional baseball league, says. “I can tell you an instant where someone tried to keep me from playing every single year. When I was playing … I would have death threats.”

The USA women’s take batting practice ahead of their game against Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

By high school, most women still playing baseball are the only woman on their team. “Regardless of how much support you get, if you’re the only girl out there on the field, it’s pretty lonely,” Underwood says. “I had a supportive team and coaches all the way through high school, and it was still lonely.” According to a survey of high school athletics conducted by the National Federation of State High School Associations, almost half a million boys play baseball at the high school level. In the 2017–2018 school year, only 1,762 girls played baseball.

Puberty can also put girls at a disadvantage on teams and in leagues overwhelmingly populated by boys. “Growing up I was the fourth hitter and played shortstop, and now their testosterone has gone through the roof so I hit like seventh [or] eighth and play second,” Mia Valcke, who plays on Team Canada, says. “That’s the reality of being female in this sport. I’m still fighting and I’m competitive for sure, but it’s not the same.” When the only option is to play with boys, that isolation can kill a girl’s career.

Let’s say a young girl is willing to face all those battles and she wins. She plays varsity baseball in high school, loves the game. Maybe she even gets to attend the new Trailblazer series for women. “We have seen tremendous success in getting young men who have participated in our Breakthrough Series to play collegiately and so we wanted to apply the same approach for young women,” MLB’s Reagins says. There are no women’s baseball teams at any level of the American college system.

If a woman can reach the college level, she often can’t afford to fight her way onto a men’s team. Anna Kimbrell, a catcher for Team USA, played baseball through high school but switched to softball in college because she was offered a big scholarship to play. She returned to baseball after graduation. “You have to be pretty stubborn to refuse to play softball,” Ring says. “If you’re being rational and you want a college scholarship, it’s softball.”

Borders played baseball in college and describes it as “the toughest time in my life,” but also believes it taught her good instincts. “When girls switch over to play softball in college, they aren’t getting those four solid years of playing baseball,” she says. “Give me six collegiate teams in the U.S. and you can grow the sport, you can grow the talent right now.”

Underwood tried out for the national team for the first time in 2006. “I had no idea that this many girls and women played baseball,” she said when asked about her first tryout. She hadn’t played on a baseball team with another woman since Little League. That’s true for most of the women on Team USA. There are only 20 spots on the women’s national team. “One thing that hurts our team is we have these 16-year-olds that have so much potential [competing against] 28-year-old women who have trained and played college ball,” Veronica Alvarez, a coach for the 2018 Team USA and former player, says. “We lose them because they don’t make it at sixteen and then, because of the lack of opportunity, there’s nowhere else for them to go and play.”

For many ballplayers, the lack of funding keeps them from continuing their career. Borders played professional men’s baseball in independent leagues for three years. She had more than 50 innings, a 1.67 ERA, and a win: major league numbers. She could almost feel her name in blocky MLB uniform letters across her shoulder blades, but she was also poor. “I was homeless because I couldn’t afford rent. I couldn’t eat. I was sick and tired of it. I was tired of being broke,” Borders says. “Here I [was] doing all this really cool stuff, doing a lot of media, but they didn’t know that in the background I was dying.”

Give me six collegiate teams in the U.S. and you can grow the sport, you can grow the talent right now.

Borders did not play in this year’s World Cup because of a late injury, but doing so wouldn’t have earned her a paycheck anyway. None of the women on Team USA are paid to play. In fact, they lose money. They take vacation time from their jobs as firefighters and P.E. teachers, grad students and groundskeepers. Because there is no professional league for women in America, they have to earn paychecks from other jobs. Though most of Team USA’s baseball budget comes from MLB donations, it doesn’t go to the players. “We all make so many sacrifices to play,” Sementelli says. She notes that MLB players get paid millions of dollars to play baseball. “We would all play for a couple thousand dollars a month, just anything that would be some kind of income.”

No single entity is to blame for the century of decisions that have shut American women out of their own country’s pastime. But that also means that no one has to shoulder the responsibility to make this sport work for its players. The only institutions with the money and power to make a real, dramatic change in women’s baseball right now, though, are the WBSC and MLB.

By my count there were 42 people in the stands, not including press, to watch the Dominican Republic play Venezuela for the first game of the second day of the 2018 Super Round. It was 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, 90 degrees outside and almost 90 percent humidity. In the stands, Venezuela’s team chants ricocheted across sections of empty seats. The same was true for the 11 a.m. game, and again for three games on Thursday.

The Canadian women’s baseball team prepare for their game against Team USA during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Throughout the World Cup, the stadium remained  depressingly mostly empty. According to the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC), the total official attendance for all 50 games was 17,969. That puts the average attendance for each game at 359 people. The USSSA Space Coast stadium seats approximately 8,000 people.  I attended the 11 Super Round games, and counted fewer than 100 people at six of them. There were two billboards for the event off the highway nearby but no flyers in local bars or grocery stores. No one I spoke to over six days in the surrounding area had any idea the tournament was going on. Girls who do play baseball around the country, on travel teams and boys teams, cannot come to watch these games because they are held during the first weeks of school.

“There were 5,000 people in the stands [at the 2015 Pan-American Women’s Baseball Tournament held in Toronto]. So, I expected at least that many here,” Carol Sheldon, who played women’s baseball for more than 20 years and is in the online-only National Women’s Baseball Hall of Fame, says. Despite several sold-out games in its first and last year to include it, the Pan American Games dropped women’s baseball from their bill for 2019 because of a “lack of interest.” No one on Team USA understands why the game was dropped when it had sell-out crowds, and the Pan American Games did not return multiple requests for comment.

“Obviously, you want a bigger crowd. Ideally, you want every game to be sold out,” says DJ Wabick, a national program director for the host organization, the United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA), which is a sanctioning body for more than 85,000 baseball and softball teams in the country. USSSA provides rule guidelines and organizational support, but does not have power over the leagues. The WBSC sent the trophy on a tour of MLB stadiums to try to drum up attention. “We tried to share the stories of these players. That’s how you make a real connection with [the general public] and get them to care,” Wabick says.

Personal stories may help, but the same sort of yarns are told by announcers and PR offices in every sport to get fans to invest in individual players. But the sport sells itself. Baseball is a sport that people watch and love. The general public, everyone who cares about women’s baseball says, has no idea that women’s baseball exists.

Women’s baseball still has the diving catches, the home runs, and the bunts that make baseball a great sport, but it isn’t given the resources, financial or institutionally, to find fans.The infrastructure that pushes women out of baseball and into softball has also shaped the way the public thinks of the game. “It’s just ingrained in everybody’s head that when you think of a girl throwing a ball it’s a softball,” Sementelli says.“People just assume that we play softball even when I tell them that I throw overhand. It’s so frustrating.”

Fourteen current and former players at the Women’s World Cup told a version of the same anecdote. “I tell people all the time that I play for the USA women’s national baseball team,” Underwood says. “Ninety-five percent of the time they say ‘Oh, you mean softball?’”

That stereotype exists despite the fact that women have played baseball since the very beginning of its existence. Jennifer Ring argues in Stolen Bases that women played (and potentially even invented) an early ball-and-bat game called rounders that involved rocks being thrown at players to call them out. The first women’s professional team was the Dolly Vardens, one of two all-black women’s teams to play under the name in Philadelphia in the 1880s. Hall-of-famers Rogers Hornsby and Smoky Joe Wood received their first paychecks as professional players on teams with women. The full, 1908 version of the baseball anthem “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is about a girl named Nelly Kelly who loved baseball.

American women had been playing baseball in organized leagues for three decades before softball was created in the 1890s. Organized semi-pro women’s baseball leagues in the 1920s were successful across race, class, and geographical lines. Women’s colleges like Smith and Wellesley easily filled teams to play each other. Only when the game became worth money in the late 19th century were women pushed out of the sport.

Pitcher Michelle Cobb warms up ahead of Team USA’s game against Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Despite this deep history of women playing the game, though, the only reference point most Americans have for women in baseball is the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, which depicts the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which existed from 1943 to 1954 and had more than 600 female players. By my count, about a dozen former AAGPBL players attended the World Cup in Viera, Florida. They love women’s baseball. A few refused formal interviews because, they said, they wouldn’t have very many nice things to say about how the tournament was being run.

The two most prominent former AAGPL players to attend were Maybelle Blair, who played for the Peoria Redwings, and Shirley Burkovich, who played for the Rockford Peaches, the team popularized in A League of Their Own. At 91 and 85 years old, respectively, they were by far the most popular people at the tournament. They were constantly giving out hugs and signatures, and sat behind home plate to watch almost every game of the Super Round. They came, Blair told me, because they “wouldn’t miss women playing baseball for the world. There’s nothing like it.” From her seat behind the plate, Blair joked that she was going to go out there and pitch, that maybe she ought to go down to the dugout and talk to a team that couldn’t seem to stop making mental errors.

Before the United States played Canada on the second night of the Super Round, Blair and Burkovich made their way down to the field. Surrounded by a huddle of beaming Team USA players, holding her cane made out of a baseball bat, Blair pointed her finger up in their faces. “I flew all the way out here from California to see you guys win,” she said. “And I haven’t seen it yet.” That night, Team USA beat Canada 5–1.

Maybelle Blair, of the Rockford Peaches, gives the USA women’s baseball team a peptalk before facing the Canadian team during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Despite Burkovich and Blair’s popularity, and the excellent level of play on the field, women’s baseball still doesn’t get the media attention players feel they need to reach the next level. Every player past and present that I spoke with said that their number one concern for the future of the game is the lack of general awareness that they even exist. This year the Women’s Baseball World Cup made the SportsCenter Top 10 plays for the first time when Team USA second baseman Amanda “Red” Gianelloni snatched a smashed line drive out of the air and turned a hit into a double play. Before that play, the only time the tournament had been mentioned on the program was when a player was struck in the leg by a stray bullet during the 2010 Cup in Venezuela, a year Team USA won bronze. No plays from any medal games have ever been featured on SportsCenter.

All media loves when one woman plays baseball. As a child, Sementelli says, there were always reporters who wanted to talk to her, media on the sidelines of her Little League game. As soon as she got out of coach-pitch, her dad molded her into a pitcher. “I didn’t know any other girls playing,” she says. She went on CBS News and Jimmy Kimmel. “I say yes to every media outlet because I want people to know that there are women in this game.” She found a small college where she could play college baseball, and gave interviews there too. Alone, she’s been in the spotlight since 5 years old.

Borders’s story is even more extreme. She was covered so intensely and constantly by news outlets that the amount of media attention she received actually kept her from an opportunity to go to a MLB spring training camp. An MLB team wanted to give her a chance to tryout, but they didn’t want the cameras. Stories about women playing in men’s baseball leagues are constant. But when the women are successful together, the lights dim, the headlines fall away, and no one seems to care.

There’s no better example of this than Mo’ne Davis, who became the first girl to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series in 2014 despite baseball not even being her favorite sport. She received massive media attention, but few stories mentioned that other girls had played in the LLWS before her. “If one more person says ‘in a league of her own’ I’m going to lose it,” Borders says. “Women have played baseball forever. Girls are playing now.” On August 19, 2014, Mo’ne Davis was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. On September 1, about two weeks later, Team USA competed in the Women’s Baseball World Cup in Japan and won silver. They did not get any cover stories, or even national recognition.

This is despite the reality that women’s baseball is just as exciting, and often more engaging, than the men’s game. “Baseball is the perfect sport for women if you really understand the game,” Borders says. “We like technicality, and the game within the game.” Women’s baseball is faster than men’s both because they only play seven innings and pitchers don’t wield as much control over the pace of the game. The women’s game is less ego-driven, and more democratic. It’s not a game fixated on home runs and shutouts. “Women have to play the game much more technically correct,” Sheldon says. It is a game of sacrifice — the sacrifice bunt, the sacrifice fly. The focus is on team success instead of individual feats.

If one more person says ‘in a league of her own’ I’m going to lose it. Women have played baseball forever. Girls are playing now.

But it still has fireworks. Before the tournament, WBSC constructed a mesh fence inside the stadium to shorten the field’s depth. Instead of playing on the world tournament–size field set by WBSC’s own regulations (275 and 290 feet in left and right field, 400 in center), the World Cup was played on a field 325 feet in every direction. According to a spokesperson from the WBSC, the field size was shrunk to make sure that the tournament had home runs. It didn’t need to be. On August 25 versus Venezuela, Megan Baltzell hit a ball 363 feet over both right field fences. That ball went further than two home runs hit the same night in Major League Baseball ballparks.

On the last night of play before the medal games, Team USA played the Dominican Republic. There was nothing they could do to make the gold medal game after Canada’s afternoon loss to Chinese Taipei. But they came out, scored six runs in the first inning, and beat the Dominican Republic 8–1. As the teams shook hands, the on-field announcer came on the p.a. system. “We hope to see you tomorrow for one or both games,” he said. “Should be some great softball tomorrow.”

“We were all shaking hands with our mouths gaping open,” Sementelli says. “He watched seven innings of baseball and then said softball. That was something that stuck out really firmly. I don’t know if that’s something that will ever change.”

The USA women’s baseball team face Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

The day before the medal games the media room smelled like spray paint. In the middle of the room stood a wooden box a little more than four feet tall, the sides still shiny with black paint. Around it, a pile of small gauge PVC pipes was scattered. “There are posters going on these. Don’t worry,” A WBSC employee told me. The next morning, the posters — printed in a dulled out yellow and maroon — had been sloppily pasted onto the box, crinkled at the corners. The top paper had an X drawn on it. It needed to be replaced. This was the podium for the trophy.

The medal games took place on a Friday. At 1 p.m. Team USA played Canada for the bronze medal. At 6 p.m. Chinese Taipei played Japan for the title of World Champion.

The USA vs. Canada game started off mild. After four innings, USA was up 2–0. But Canada staged a comeback, scored three runs, and in the bottom of the 7th, the United States came back to tie. The game went to extra innings where (according to rules of the Women’s World Cup) each half-inning started with runners placed on second and third. Still, the game went ten innings before Canada clinched the bronze medal, winning 8–5.

This was baseball at its best: incredible defensive plays, starting pitchers being brought in as relievers, a true rivalry that goes back a decade. To watch it, you would have either had to travel an hour outside of Orlando on a Friday in August, or have known to visit the WBSC’s YouTube page. None of the games of the Women’s Baseball World Cup were televised in the United States.

“I wish people could see this,” Sementelli says. “I shouldn’t have to worry about this…Do you think Bryce Harper is worried about whether or not his game will be on TV?”

“We tried very hard to get the games on television,” says the USSSA’s Wabick. “That was the thing I wanted to accomplish most. I think there needed to probably be a little more runway to get it on TV, because by the time we were calling, TV schedules were already set.”

USSSA learned that they had won the bid for the 2018 World Cup in October 2017. Because of that, they had less than a year to coordinate when, where, and how the event could take place. The timeline, Wabick says, also made it difficult for him to get major advertisers to sign on, since they had to move so quickly. Because the host country and organization was decided so late, USSSA only had space for the two-week tournament in their schedule in late August. This timing has not been a problem in other countries where games have been located in cities and local populations value women’s baseball. “If we are fortunate enough to have another opportunity, we’d probably shift the dates.” Wabick says.

Do you think Bryce Harper is worried about whether or not his game will be on TV?

USSSA has a history of putting on good tournaments. The stadium had beautiful facilities. The players raved about getting to go to the Kennedy Space Center and being treated like professionals. But at the same time, no one seemed to know the tournament was happening despite the fact that the professional women’s softball team (the USSSA Pride), which normally plays in that stadium, average around 2,500 fans at each of their 25 home games every year. Only one shirt — a white shirt promoting the tournament with a smudged Canadian flag — was available to purchase. There was no merchandise available for any of the national teams: no hats, no jerseys, no rally towels.

(L-R) Buddy Brown, Owen Clarke, and Pierre Aubin support team Canada from he stands during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Team USA lost to Canada, a country where parents and coaches have only recently begun to build a Little League structure for all-girls baseball. After the game, none of the players were brought to the press room for the general press. “I leave it to their discretion,” the WBSC spokesperson said, mentioning that it was a tough loss and that he couldn’t make them do press because they weren’t professional athletes. “It was a very emotional loss,” the spokesperson said. One of the biggest criticisms of female athletes is that they are too emotional to play.

This gave Team USA the appearance of extremely poor losers, despite a more complex reality. Later, a player told me that they were scheduled so tightly they barely had time to do interviews after the game. They had 30 minutes from the minute their game ended to be on the bus back to their hotel — 30 minutes to eat, shower, say hi to loved ones, and maybe do media.

“It’s almost like sabotage,” Ring says when asked about whether the tournament could indeed increase awareness of the sport as everyone hoped. “They were set up for failure.”

I think we had the most talented team,” Coach Alvarez says. “I think our downfall is that we only get one week together before playing and then its game time. I wish that we had more time together.”

Losing a chance to medal, though, felt like more than just a personal loss for many players and fans of women’s baseball. It felt like a missed opportunity for the sport of women’s baseball overall. “The [United States medaling] would have been something that would have helped us get the United States sports people to go, OK. Let’s start girls baseball.’ Instead, of just having a tournament here or there for girls to come and play in,” Sheldon says.

Of the more than 25 people involved at all levels of women’s American baseball I spoke to, all agreed that the best thing that can be done for the sport is the creation of girls baseball leagues. They would love for something like what happened in Japan — a wealthy benefactor creating a small pro league — to happen in the States. But even if that were to happen there has to be a pipeline for women to reach that league. Right now there’s next to nothing.

As it relates to a women’s professional league, we have to ensure that a sustainable infrastructure is in place.” MLB’s Reagins says. In order to make this sort of investment a success, we need to make sure that what is put together will not only survive, but thrive. We don’t believe we are there yet, but who knows what could ultimately happen as women’s baseball gains more momentum.”

There is a village of people fighting for women’s baseball in America: the Rockford Peaches, the players, the parents of players, the fans. Former players are creating teams for girls and tournaments with their own money. “I have been involved as a player at every level, and I have never seen the amount of passion for this game as I did with the people I met in women’s baseball,” Wabick says. “If the right people get in the room, they can bring the right attention.”

I think our downfall is that we only get one week together before playing and then its game time. I wish that we had more time together.

But who are the right people? Currently, there are many proponents of the women’s game, but no real leadership. Francis Ford Coppola, the director of the Godfather series, was at the World Cup. He has consistently financially supported women’s baseball, pushing the Sonoma Stompers, a men’s professional team, to recruit and play women. There are no women on the Stompers roster at the moment, although two members of this year’s Team USA (Kelsie Whitmore and Stacy Piagno) played on the Stompers in the past. Coppola, though, is just one man. USSSA is a governing body, so while they could support girls Little Leagues financially and logistically, the organization doesn’t have the capability create them. USA Baseball could create a 14U — short for ages 14 and under — or a 20U team for women, but without WBSC tournaments (which exist at 23U, 18U, 15U, and 12U for men) there would be no one for them to play. According to WBSC spokesperson Oscar Lopez the “feasibility and rollout [of creating programs for girls are] under review” currently. There is no timeline for that decision to be made.

The vast divide that exists between the resources being given to men’s baseball and those being given to women’s baseball are almost cartoonishly illustrated at the only level where both exist: the World Cup. The 2017 Men’s Baseball World Championship game was played in 2017 in Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, averaged just over 27,000 attendees per game, and aired on MLB Network in America. Championship hats were immediately handed out to Team USA when they won the gold. On an erected blue stage, the team of men stood behind a shining circular podium that held their trophy.

A year later in Viera, Team Japan hoisted their trophy above their head. A platform less than a foot off the ground had been constructed for them to stand on, and each player warily eyed it as she stepped up, as if worried it might collapse. It is the same platform used for WBSC  tournaments except for the men’s World Championship, which has a real stage, champion hats, and confetti. The announcers mispronounced even the names of the players on the Canadian team for their bronze medal. And the posters on the spray painted podium were starting to peel from the humidity.

Team USA celebrate a home run during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 against Canada in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Most of the women on 2018’s Team USA won’t get to play again until the next World Cup in 2020. Underwood, at 37, is still deciding whether or not she’ll keep playing. They will return to their lives and their real jobs. They will dream about playing on the diamond again and wake up disappointed. Each year, thousands of girls will switch over to softball, or quit playing the game entirely because no one has made a path for them to go forward.

“That’s the story of women’s baseball,” Underwood said. “We don’t get to play in the same facilities. We don’t get the same attention. We don’t get the same opportunities.”

***

Kelsey McKinney is a writer living in Washington, D.C.

***

Editor: Ethan Chiel
Photographer: Cassi Alexandra
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Shelved: Jimmy Scott’s Falling In Love Is Wonderful

Frans Schellekens/Redferns /Getty

By 1962, Ray Charles had fully crossed over. It started with his 1959 Top 10 hit “What’d I Say,” continued with the Grammy-winning “Georgia On My Mind” and “Hit the Road, Jack,” and culminated in two smash country music albums, yielding the number one single “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Proficient at bebop, fluent in country, and having practically invented soul, it seemed there was no style of popular music Ray Charles couldn’t master. Beyond his prodigious songwriting and piano playing abilities, Charles was most famously a vocal interpreter. With his newfound wealth, he founded Tangerine Records in 1962. The first thing he did was produce and release a record by one of his favorite singers, Jimmy Scott.

Jimmy Scott had been recording since the late 1940s and made several notable if unprofitable albums with Savoy Records in the 1950s. His work was almost universally loved by the most influential vocalists of the era, a group that included Dinah Washington, Ruth Brown, and Billie Holiday. Ray Charles implicitly understood the singer’s potential and believed he had the key to Scott’s elusive success.

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The Rising Tide of Wrongful Convictions

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Lara Bazelon | an excerpt adapted from Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction | Beacon Press | 24 minutes (6,738 words)

The National Registry of Exonerations is a small, nonprofit research project founded in 2012. What the project lacks in manpower it makes up in zeal, documenting every known exoneration dating back to 1989, the first year that DNA exonerations were recorded in the United States. Staff members collect detailed information about each case from court documents and news reports, provide a comprehensive narrative about the case, and break down the data into numerous categories, including gender, race, geography, crime of conviction, factors that contributed to the wrongful conviction, and whether the case involved DNA. The registry’s website provides detailed graphs that set out the cause or causes of the wrongful convictions and chart their frequency over time.

On March 7, 2017, the registry released a report summarizing the data it had documented since its founding: 1,994 exonerations. (The number is now above 2,100.) Seventy-eight percent of the exonerations did not involve DNA evidence. This finding surprises many people, as it seems at odds with the way that crime is prosecuted on popular television shows and in movies, where the perpetrator inevitably leaves behind a tiny but undeniable bit of himself. Skin follicles are collected from under the victim’s fingernails, blood or semen is retrieved from a stain, a trace of saliva is lifted from a soda can or cigarette butt. In fictionalized accounts, diligent detectives and technicians rapidly collect and analyze this trace DNA evidence. More often than not, when the episode concludes, the bad guy has been conclusively identified, apprehended, and locked away.

The reality is much messier and more complicated. Even when DNA exists, backlogs and bureaucracy mean that it can take months, if not years, to test. Crime labs also come to erroneous conclusions, often because the technicians are incompetent, overwhelmed, or even corrupt. In 2010, at a San Francisco crime laboratory, a technician stole some of the cocaine she was supposed to be testing, resulting in a scandal that led to the dismissal of seventeen hundred pending criminal cases. Five years later, in the same laboratory, two other bad apples — a technician and her immediate supervisor — were discovered to have committed misconduct so serious it required the San Francisco district attorney’s office to review fourteen hundred criminal cases. Both employees had failed DNA proficiency testing examinations administered by a national crime lab accrediting agency a year earlier, but had kept their jobs. At least one found conclusive DNA matches where none existed. Read more…

The Organ Transplant Story You Don’t Hear

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Katya Cengel | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,847 words)

 

His arms are covered with the sticky gunk left after bandages come off. There is a blue bruise on the inside of his right forearm. A long plastic tube enters a hole near his belly button. When it’s not in use, James “Bo” Calvert tucks the tube that he uses for dialysis into a spandex “bra” that circles his chest.

Calvert has stage 4 kidney disease, which means his kidney function is only 15 to 30 percent. There are six stages of chronic kidney disease — stage 4 is the last stage before end-stage renal disease (ESRD), when the kidneys cannot filter waste and excess fluid from the blood. At this point, you need a transplant or dialysis to stay alive.

Calvert has had both.

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What Has Everyone Got Against Dave Matthews?

MONTGOMERY, AL - APRIL 27: Dave Matthews performs during The Concert for Peace and Justice celebrating the opening of The Legacy Museum at Riverwalk Amphitheater on April 27, 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama. (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images)

You may remember the Dave Matthews Band from your Gen X ’90s. Despite the fact that nobody seems to want to admit to enjoying their music, they continue to be wildly successful and Dave Matthews uses his fame to help support charitable causes on a regular basis. At Seattle Met, Allison Williams wonders why there’s a Dave Matthews “dad-bod”-shaped hole in Seattle’s idea of musical genius, overshadowed by bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana.

He married and moved to Seattle where his wife studied holistic medicine, buying a house on an unremarkable block of Wallingford in 2001. Today the tiny blue Craftsman, even with its finished basement and artfully overgrown front garden, would barely qualify as a Seattle starter home. Dave still owns the property, valued at less than a million dollars in a city where that barely buys a dog house. Seattleites do double takes when Dave pops up at QFC or an Eastlake punk show, but he seems to crave the anonymity he found here. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but in 2012 he told critic Gene Stout, “For the most part, I feel comfortably middle class in Seattle.”

Less quiet was the band’s growing philanthropic force. Dave became a director of Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid but his specialty is disaster relief; DMB played charity shows post-Katrina, post-tsunami, post-floods. And relief for human-borne disasters too: post-Standing Rock, post-Virginia Tech massacre. After white supremacists marched on Charlottesville, where he still has roots and real estate, the man who left South Africa’s apartheid headlined a unity concert in his adopted hometown.

Even as they faded from radio prominence, Dave Matthews Band racked up sales, dropping a whopping 96 total live releases on CD and digital. The most recent milestone: When the band released Come Tomorrow this June, its success marked the seventh consecutive number-one debut on the Billboard 200 list for studio albums — the first time it’s happened. To any band, ever.

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