Search Results for: interview

Wrestling With My Father

CSA-Archive/Getty

Brian Gresko | Longreads | June 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)

 

1.

When I was a child, it seemed my dad only touched to hurt. Hugs were scarce, and cuddles not an option for “big boys.”

My family ate dinner early, and when I was about 8 and my brother 4, we would beg Dad to wrestle after we cleared our plates. Most evenings he said no, choosing instead to do push-ups and sit-ups or, more often than not, watch the news. But occasionally, according to some calendar our childish minds couldn’t fathom, he agreed, and we’d take up position in the living room.

In our corner at the foot of the steps, my brother and I would huddle, ready to rush him. This was our only move. Swarm, then clasp our tiny bodies to his great one, hoping to drag him to the ground with our weight. A kind of violent embrace.

My dad, on his knees in sweats, gigantic mitts at his side, had a variety of assaults, which he would announce with monstrous growls.

The Scissors! Lying on his side with me between his thighs, he squeezed downward, crushing me in the middle. I was sure my insides were going to come out of my mouth or into my pants. My mom, dishes done, passing us on her way up the stairs, would chastise him. “You’re going to give them hernias!”

The Claw! With fingers splayed, he grabbed my chest, digging into the flesh as if he could rip out the heart, still beating. “No, Dad, no!” I screamed while my brother, tenacious as fuck, pummeled him from behind till Dad swatted him onto his ass. Then the claw would rain upon him, and I’d be at Dad’s back, trying futilely to rescue my wailing brother. Later, the bruises formed constellations around our nipples.

The Steamroller! Instead of pinning us, Dad would roll his whole body across ours, back and forth, again and again, the only time I recall touching parts of him like his thighs or his back or his hair. The force of his mass would mash us against the carpet, giving us rug burn, knocking the wind from our lungs.

Forget screaming“uncle”: with us trapped under his knees, Dad commanded we beg our mother for help. As the pressure built, we’d holler at the top of our lungs for her, the game no longer so fun. Sometimes she came to the top of the stairs, crying. “You’re hurting them!”

“Oh, lighten up,” he’d say. “We’re roughhousing.”
Read more…

Meet the New Mormons

Illustration by Lizzie Gill

Sarah Scoles| Longreads | June 2018 | 23 minutes (5,714 words)

It’s a summer day in Salt Lake City, and tourists are resting inside the Mormon Tabernacle, staring at the enormous, golden pipes of the Tabernacle organ, which are topped with carved wooden finials that appear to scrape the ceiling. These are the same pipes I stared at on a satellite feed from my hometown chapel in central Florida twice a year until I was 18. Although I’d remotely watched the church’s semiannual conference religiously as a kid, I’d never been inside the building until now, more than 12 years after leaving the church and becoming an atheist, and 10 after coming out as a lesbian. My parents have spent those years trying to come to terms with these shifts, but our détente has involved not talking much about any of it. This is the Mormon way.

It’s strange then to find myself in this Tabernacle, waiting for my mom’s plane to arrive in Salt Lake so that she and I can attend the Sunstone Symposium, a yearly gathering that includes liberal Mormons and ex-Mormons who are redefining their relationship with the church. But here I am.

Two young missionaries step up to the pulpit to demonstrate the building’s acoustics for those in attendance. One rips a newspaper, and I can hear the tear from my perch in the shadows at the back of the room. It sounds soft and wet, like the stories it contains might be smeared. The demonstration ends and the missionaries walk offstage, accompanied by a recording of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir: God be with you till we meet again. The harmonies burrow into my chest like they belong there, which in some sense they always will. The Mormon worldview shaped mine — I could speak in King James English at age 4 — even though the two now stand apart, like puzzle pieces where the outcropping of one is the cavern of the other. Only together do Mormonism and I make a full picture. Read more…

Storytelling the Flood: Elizabeth Rush on Empathy and Climate Change

Allard Schager / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Bradley Babendir | Longreads | June 2018 | 16 minutes (4,357 words)

In Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Milkweed Editions), Elizabeth Rush visits people and communities made immediately vulnerable by the rising sea levels that are brought on by climate change. She interviews people who have lost their homes, their loved ones, and the world they once knew to flooding and other disasters. Some just want to be able to afford to leave, while others are willing to withstand everything to stay.

Rush pushes through the rhetoric around climate change to look closely at the consequences. Not the ones that will happen at some point down the road, but the ones that are happening now. She travels from Louisiana to Florida to California and elsewhere to see and try her best to understand what it is like to lose the ground beneath your feet.

We talked by phone about what led her to this book, what carried her through this book, and what comes next for her and her subjects. Read more…

We Are Scientists

(AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

Kirtan NautiyalBoulevard | Spring 2018 | 25 minutes (6,903 words)

In 1969, my father traveled alone from India to Boston so that he could enroll in the master’s program in geophysics at MIT.

I don’t know whether he flew or came by boat, so when I try to picture him setting foot in America for the first time, I don’t know what to imagine. I’ve tried to find the photographic evidence, but there aren’t any pictures of the fifteen years he spent in this country before he married my mother. Maybe he just threw out the tattered albums when we were moving between houses, but it’s more likely that he never took any photos at all. He’s never been a sentimental man.

I also don’t know why he chose to come in the first place. He has never had any great fascination with money; despite his making a good living, we lived in shabby rentals for most of my childhood, and my mother shopped for us from department store discount racks. I never felt that professional success was what he was after either. He never advanced past middle management, and except for one late-night discussion in which he made clear that he felt there was a glass ceiling for people with our skin color, I never heard one word of frustration from him about work. Maybe it was to help his family – along with his brother who came to Kansas State University earlier in the 1960s, he supported his parents in India for years with the money he earned. When trying to make us feel guilty about our second-generation lassitude, which is often, he tells us of how at MIT he had to work all hours of the night in the cafeteria and library while keeping up a full courseload, so maybe we need to be a little more appreciative that he helped with the room and board during our own time in college. Read more…

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Reckons with Fame

(Monica Schipper/WireImage)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has published three novels and a short story collection; she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2008, and her latest novel, Americanah won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2013. Still, when Beyoncé quoted from Adichie’s TED talk “We Should All Be Feminists” for her song “Flawless,” the author ascended to a new level of fame. In a wide-ranging profile written by Larissa MacFarquhar for The New Yorker, Adichie addresses the increased scrutiny of her interviews and public statements, dives deep into the sights, sounds, and places that have inspired her work, and considers her legacy.

When she talks about feminism or gay rights in Nigeria, she knows what she’s getting into, and she does it on purpose. But her celebrity is such that even an offhand remark can set off a fracas that she did not anticipate. A few years ago, when asked by a journalist to comment on the shortlist for the Caine Prize, an English award for African fiction, she said she had no interest in the topic, although one of the nominees, she said, was “one of my boys in my workshop.” Her antipathy to the Caine Prize was long-standing, due to her dislike of a former administrator of the prize, whom she had found sexist and patronizing, and whom she venomously fictionalized in her short story “Jumping Monkey Hill.”

as though God, having created him, had slapped him flat against a wall and smeared his features all over his face

Asked where she went instead to find the best African fiction, she said, “My mailbox,” where she received her workshop students’ stories. On Nigerian Twitter, all hell broke loose. “It doesn’t take much brain juice to realize from her interviews that Ms CNA’s ego can sink an island,” wrote Manny. “So the best African fiction is in Chimamanda Adichie’s inbox?” Abubakar Ibrahim, a novelist, wrote. “I hail thee, queen-god mother. Go fuck yourself, Chimamanda.”

Earlier this year, Chimamanda commented to a reporter in France, “Post-colonial theory? I don’t know what it means. I think it’s something that professors made up because they needed to get jobs.” Nigerian academics reacted with hurt and outrage. “That’s it!” Difficult Northerner wrote. “We need to put Chimamanda in rice. How can you shit on postcolonial theory while claiming not to know what it means. The same postcolonial theorists who assign your books & videos in classes.”

She is O.K. in principle with not being liked: she thinks that the desire to be liked is something that women need to get over. A male friend of hers told her that Ifemelu, the main character of “Americanah,” was Chimamanda without her warmth, and she bristled at this, even though she thought it might be true. Why the hell are you judging her like that? she thought. If Ifemelu were a male, would you expect and want warmth? All the same, it is painful to be attacked. “Ta-Nehisi Coates said to me once that what hurt him the most, becoming successful, was how much it was black intellectuals who seemed to be out for him, and I know what that’s like. I told him that there’s a circle of Nigerians who are resentful of my international success, and it’s very hurtful, because I want my people to wish me well.”

Read the story

 

‘Unfettered Glamour’: The Legendary Career of André Leon Talley

NEW YORK, NY - 1979: Diana Ross and Andre Leon Talley dancing at Studio 54, c 1979 in New York City. (Photo by Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images)

New York Times fashion director and chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman profiles former Vogue creative director André Leon Talley upon the launch of “The Gospel According to André,” a feature-length documentary on Talley’s life. The film includes interviews with friends and former colleagues of Talley, such as Whoopi Goldberg, Fran Lebowitz, and Anna Wintour, and traces his love for fashion back to his early days in segregated Durham, North Carolina. It was the number one limited-release movie in box offices sales last weekend, according to Page Six.

For much of his career, Talley was the only black male editor of a top tier fashion publication. Goldberg says in the film that he was “so many things he wasn’t supposed to be,” but for most of the years of his rise, Talley did not publicly acknowledge the isolation and emotional strife that came with his influence. In a 1994 story for the New Yorker, Hilton Als described Talley, hauntingly, as “the only one.” Friedman’s profile illuminates the costs Talley paid for breaking ground.

When he tells this story in public, he often defangs it by rolling his eyes and pursing his lips, and then appending a joke about wanting to be in designers’ beds without the actual designer to see what kind of fancy sheets they had. But when he tells it in private, he doesn’t add the comic flourishes, and the muscle between his eyebrows contracts in an involuntary spasm.

For all the talk lately about the need for diversity on fashion runways, there has been much less about the fact that its executives and designers and editors in chief have been, and are still, largely white.

“Where are the black people?” Mr. Talley said. “I look around everywhere and say, ‘Where are the black people?’ I think fashion tries to skirt the issue and finds convenient ways to spin it. There are examples of evolution, but they are few and far between. The biggest leap of faith was Edward Enninful becoming editor of British Vogue — that was an extraordinary thing. Virgil Abloh getting Louis Vuitton men’s wear.”

Still, as far as progress made in the more than three decades Mr. Talley has been letting the insults bounce off his caftans, it doesn’t seem like very much. “As the world turns, it does not turn very fast,” he said.

He is hoping the film speeds it up. Mr. Enninful, for one, thinks it will. “It will mean a lot to a new generation to see that there was this man who grew up in the South and through all obstacles made it, because it will give young black kids hope and the aspiration to be in this industry,” he said.

Mr. Talley is also hoping it provides a platform to vault him to the next stage in his life.

“I could see myself being an Oscar Wilde and going on the road and sitting on stage and talking,” he said. When he said this, he was having lunch at Majorelle, a French restaurant on the Upper East Side that he loves because of its flower arrangements, its pistachio souffle and because it shares a name with Yves Saint Laurent’s garden in Marrakesh.

Read the story

Why Were We All So Upset About Jason Bateman?

Mitchell Hurwitz, Jeffrey Tambor, Jason Bateman, Jessica Walter, and Will Arnett at ceremony honoring Bateman with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo by Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP)

NPR’s Linda Holmes wrote about last week’s painful New York Times interview with the cast of “Arrested Development.” Why, in a time of constantly horrifying news about how men treat women, did this story — which is “only” about verbal abuse — strike a nerve?

But maybe it was this interview because the disrespect felt so benign in the delivery and so destructive in the effect. How can you have “zero complaints” about a workplace someone else remembers as containing the worst verbal abuse of her career? Is that not, itself, a complaint? Why is it important that over and above forgiveness, Tambor receives absolution from the utterly unaffected men in the cast, right in front of the woman who initially told the Hollywood Reporter she didn’t even want to talk about her history with him in the first place? Tambor brought all this up, put all of it out in public, just so everyone else could explain why it didn’t matter? Is this reverse roast, this closing argument by a self-appointed defense attorney — is this supposed to be his reckoning?

Many of us — yes, women, but humans in general — prepare for conflict by trying to toughen up. We build leathery skins and metal bones, and we learn how to fight back without being blamed for the force we used. Come at us throwing rocks, and we cross our forearms and hope they bounce off. Come at us in secret, we run for light. Come at us harder, we at least try to get away. But there is something about these gentle poisoned touches, where someone puts a hand on your shoulder and says, “I understand, but after all,” and an audience cheers, and something bad seeps underneath your skin and up your neck.

Read the essay

Farming a Warming Planet

AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi

California produces the bulk of America’s nuts, avocados, and citrus. Unfortunately, as the climate changes, no one’s sure how long those crops can grow. At Grist, Nathanael Johnson paints an unsettling portrait of California farmers struggling to balance their immediate need for annual income with the changing climate’s ability to support their trees in the future. California’s weather is increasingly erratic and it’s already confusing crops, ripening some fruits out of season and frying others in the sun. But as an experienced University of California extension agent put it: climate is only one of farmers’ many concerns.

“If you decide what to plant based on climate, but then can’t make the lease payment, that’s not sustainable,” Jarvis-Shean said.

If you are worried about water running out in 15 years, you might think it’s a good idea to cut down half the state’s almond groves — but if those almond trees are still putting money in your pockets, that wouldn’t make sense until the killer drought hits. That’s the crux of the matter for Sayer, and other farmers I interviewed. They’re concerned about the changing climate, but they always come up with ingenious plans to adapt to bad weather. It’s much harder for them to adapt to an overdrawn bank account.

Sayer grows mostly lemons right now, but they’re not long for this world. “You can see these lemon trees are getting a little rangy looking,” Sayer said, gesturing toward a leafless branch. “This is going to be their last harvest, then they’ve got a date with the chipper.”

Read the story

‘I Was a Storm of Confetti’: Michael Pollan On Why It’s a Good Idea To Lose Your Self

Getty

Hope Reese | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,468 words)

On April 19, 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann ingested a quarter milligram of LSD to confirm that it had caused the oddly fantastical journey he had experienced the day before. To his surprise and delight, he was not mistaken –– the drug opened up a new window of consciousness. The discovery caught the attention of other researchers, and by the 1950s, psychedelic testing was in full bloom, yielding promising results for people suffering from neurosis, schizophrenia, and psychopathy.

But as counter-cultural experimentation progressed and the drugs were taken out of the lab and into the wild –– think of Tim Leary, dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” by Nixon, and his controversial LSD experiments –– there was a backlash. According to the writer Michael Pollan, society “turned on a dime” against psychedelics. “You’d have to go back to the Inquisition and Galileo for a time when scientific inquiry was stigmatized quite the way this was,” he tells me. “And it’s a measure of how powerful that backlash was and how threatened powerful interests felt about what psychedelics were doing to society.” Read more…

An Oral History of the Muppets

Kermit the Frog and Jim Henson on set of "The Muppet Movie" in 1979. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.)

Studio 360, the public-radio show and Slate podcast, shares an oral history of the Muppets. In the early years, before Sesame Street and The Muppet Show made them famous with kids, creator Jim Henson struggled to find the right setting for his personality-packed foam-and-felt creations; their origins were in violent, adult-themed shorts, including a brief stint on Saturday Night Live.

Love the Muppets? Read an interview with the man behind Big Bird, or a story on the man who tried to keep the Muppets going after Jim Henson’s death.

Herships: Seitz says the Muppets remind us of ourselves.
Take the relationship at the show’s heart, between Kermit and Miss Piggy.

Seitz: It’s a really dysfunctional relationship. For starters, Miss Piggy, let’s be honest, here—Miss Piggy is a handful. There’s just no denying that Miss Piggy is about as high-maintenance as it gets. And also Miss Piggy is a pathological narcissist. She really is. Like, if I was going to diagnose her, that’s probably where I would start.

Herships: So what’s coming in to mind right now is, wow, they need to go to counseling. Like, marriage counseling.

Seitz: If Kermit were my friend, I would actually set some limits. I’d have to say, look Kermit, I love you man, but either you have to break up with Miss Piggy, or you need to never talk to me about your problems again. Those are your two choices. I can’t have any of this grey-scale anymore ’cause it’s killing me. But if they were actual people that you knew, it would be a nightmare. An absolute nightmare. You wouldn’t know which one of them to block first on your phone.

Read the story