Search Results for: interview

Who Does She Think She Is?

Illustration from an 1883 journal, via Getty.

Laurie Penny | Longreads | March 2018 | 23 minutes (5,933 words)

 

Another day at the Telegraph and another attack on Laurie Penny.
— Nick Cohen, The Spectator, 2011

Do you think that red hair and makeup is used for anything other than attention? Her writing? Same. That bitch is a whore who needs to die choking on cocks.
— 4chan, 2016

I think that nice Laurie Penny over at the New Statesman must actually be a conservative mole dedicated to undermining leftism from within.
— Alex Massie, also at The Spectator, 2013

Hang this clown. Hang Laurie Penny.
— Urban75 (British left-wing forum), 2011

Now I don’t want to make light of her depression, but she has probably brought this on herself.
Desert Sun, “We Need to Talk about Laurie Penny,” September 2017

* * *

It’s a clammy summer night. You’re 24, and you call a suicide hotline.

The nice lady who answers is probably in her seventies. She is very understanding as you explain to her that hundreds of people, thousands of strangers, are saying awful things about you, that some of them seem to really want to hurt you. You don’t know why. You’re just a writer, and you didn’t expect this. But some of them tell you in detail their fantasies of your rape and murder.

The nice lady is very sweet as she asks you if these voices ever tell you to do things. Yes, they tell you to stop writing. You inform the nice lady about this in a creepy whisper because your family is sleeping nearby and you don’t want to wake or worry them. These strangers tell you you don’t deserve to live, let alone have a newspaper column. Do they tell you to hurt yourself? Yes, every day.

The nice lady tells you to hold the line, because if it’s alright, she’s going to transfer you to one of her colleagues with specialist training.

No, wait, you say. You’re not hearing voices. You’re not delusional.  The nice lady can Google you. This is really happening.

* * *

The internet hates women. Everyone knows that by now, and nobody precisely approves, but we’ve reached a point of collective tolerance. It’s just the way of the world, and if you can’t handle it, honey, delete your account. Stop engaging online. Cut yourself off from friends, family, and professional contacts, shut down your business, blow up your social capital, stop learning, stop talking, just stop. Or else.

The U.N. Broadband Commission tells us that one in five young women has been sexually harassed online. Amnesty International’s latest report suggested that over three-quarters of women and girls expected violence and abuse if they expressed an opinion online. “Online” is the least significant word in those sentences. I have been asked enough times if “the internet is bad for women.” And yes, there is reason enough to warn your daughter, your partner, your friend to watch out for herself online, to think twice before “putting herself out there.” You’d warn her in much the same way that you might warn her not to walk through town alone at night, not to wear a short skirt, not to let her guard down, not to relax, ever. And the message is the same: The future, like the past, is not for you. You may visit, but only if you behave.

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Are The Teens All Right?

Matt Deitsch and Ryan Deitsch, students from Parkland, FL's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, are pictured during a panel held to discuss changing the conversation on guns at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University's Institute for Politics in Cambridge, MA on March 20, 2018. (Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Danielle Tcholakian | Longreads | March 2018 | 14 minutes (3,629 words)

Over the past several weeks, many of us have been familiar with the voices and faces of the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the school in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were murdered on February 14. The students appeared to quickly shunt away their grief, giving adults across the U.S. a schooling on effective activism, taking to Twitter and effectively employing media outlets to push for policy change so that other teenagers won’t have to experience the terror they did.

In turn, many of the adults that other adults have elected to positions of power — adults we apparently decided were such worthy and good decision-makers that we would pay their salary out of our own pockets — have shown us what very small people they are, and how terribly unqualified they are to be people in the public eye, let alone leaders.

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David Chang’s ‘Ugly Delicious’ Pushes Food TV in the Right Direction

David Chang with South Philly Barbacoa's Cristina Martinez in 'Ugly Delicious.'

There’s no denying that David Chang’s new Netflix docuseries, “Ugly Delicious”, is aesthetically gorgeous. The show’s underlying concept—”ugly” food like tacos, barbecue, and fried rice all have intrinsic values that surpass its creation born out of necessity and a lowly legacy—is a sui generis angle for a well-worn genre that has long shifted to food porn rather that pursuing and examining the cultural and geopolitical value that food possesses.

In a recent interview with Grub Street, “Top Chef” judge and chef Tom Colicchio mentioned the rise of “unfussy” food on the program’s 15th season: “The chefs were doing more, I wouldn’t say rustic, but a much more conventional style of food.” Translation: This shift isn’t occurring in a vacuum.

As the New Yorker‘s Helen Rosner explains in her review of the eight-part series, “What makes “Ugly Delicious” compelling, ultimately, is Chang’s commitment to rejecting purity and piety within food culture…In food culture, particularly American food culture, the concept of authenticity is wielded like a hammer…[and] the problem with such rigid categorizations, according to “Ugly Delicious,” is, for one thing, creative stagnation.”

This certainly makes for a thoroughly interesting viewing experience; before I realized it, I had binge-watched four episodes. This sort of programming is also refreshing—Chang has subverted a genre. For a generation that has been bred on the gluttony of glossy networks and competitive cooking, “Ugly Delicious” throws up a middle finger, and instead asked questions that are relevant to how we should be thinking about food (and not just consuming for its sheer shock value). Read more…

It’s Time for Real Talk About Aliens

AP Photo/Roswell Daily Record, Mark Wilson

This December, The New York Times ran a front page story about the Pentagon program that investigated unexplained aerial phenomena. The US military recently had three prominent, documented encounters with unidentified flying objects. And the Chinese just built the world’s largest radar facility to listen for extraterrestrial life. What the hell is going on? I mean, Trump’s presidency seems like a dystopian sci-fi novel, but when did UFOs move from the Art Bell fringe into the mainstream?

At New York Magazine, a group of seven journalists dive deep into the realm of Ufology. Cataloguing the past and Ufology’s key players, they make a case that no time in human history has presented clearer, more compelling evidence that something unexplained is buzzing our skies, missile silos and nuclear facilities, if not aliens, then certainly things we have not yet identified. “In December,” the article says, “the Pentagon confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.”

The program was co-founded by then–Majority Leader Harry Reid, who tweeted, “We don’t know the answers, but we have plenty of evidence to support asking the questions.” It’s a convincing point. The funding supposedly ended in 2012, but sources say the program is going strong. Some of this information will be familiar to those of us who enjoy reading about unexplained phenomenon. The sense that some of this is just nuts-o is also familiar. What’s new is the Federal government’s transparency and mounting the burden of proof. Here’s the tip of the extraterrestrial iceberg as a teaser:

So much of what the program uncovered remains classified, but what little we know is tantalizing. Based on data it collected, the program identified five observations that showed mysterious objects displaying some level of “advanced physics,” also known as “stuff humans can’t do yet”: The objects would accelerate with g-forces too strong for the human body to withstand, or reach hypersonic speed with no heat trail or sonic boom, or they seemed to resist the effects of Earth’s gravity without any aerodynamic structures to provide thrust or lift. “No one has been able to figure out what these are,” said Luis Elizondo, who ran the program until last October, in a recent interview.

Elizondo has also talked about “metamaterials” that may have been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena and stored in buildings owned by a private aerospace contractor in Las Vegas; they apparently have material compositions that aren’t found naturally on Earth and would be exceptionally expensive to replicate. According to a 2009 Pentagon briefing summarized in the New York Times, “the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered.” This was a briefing by people trying to get more funding — but still.

Some of the accounts Elizondo and his team analyzed supposedly occurred near nuclear facilities like power plants or battleships. In November 2004, the USS Princeton, a Navy cruiser escorting the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, ordered two fighter jets to investigate mysterious aircraft the Navy had been tracking for weeks (meaning this was not just a trick of the eye or a momentary failure of perspective, the two things most often blamed for unexplained aerial phenomena). When the jets arrived at the location, one of the pilots, Commander David Fravor, saw a disturbance just below the ocean’s surface causing the water to roil around it. Then, suddenly, he saw a white, 40-foot Tic Tac–shaped craft moving like a Ping-Pong ball above the water. The vehicle began mirroring his plane’s movements, but when Fravor dove directly at the object, the Tic Tac zipped away.

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Drowning In a River of Murky Thought

Rebecca Droke/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP

Sometimes our minds play tricks on us. We fixate on mistakes. We justify indulging cravings we can’t control. We think we hear the baby crying, but it’s just the breeze.

At The Believer, Barrett Swanson examines how he got lost in a maze of conspiratorial thinking after his high school friend Luke drowned in the Mississippi River. An accidental death seemed too unlikely a scenario to believe, but questioning that explanation opened grieving locals up to the possibility that predatory forces lurked around their town. Swanson was still mourning his friend while earning a PhD, and his academic training and solitary hours soon had him clinging to unnerving explanations and theories culled online. He had to examine his own mind to move through the paranoia and properly grieve.

When you’re supposed to be working on your dissertation—its own arduous search for meaning—your days are a wilderness: unscheduled, improvised, free. You can spend whole afternoons trawling Instagram or binge-watching prestige television. In my case, entire days were lost to conjectures about Luke’s death. For hours on end I would watch clips of Larry King Live, Anderson Cooper 360, and Geraldo Rivera, all of which featured interviews with Detectives Gannon and Duarte, who often mentioned Luke by name. On After Hours AM, a true-crime podcast whose aesthetic could be described as Dude, Where’s My Car? meets Unsolved Mysteries, a retired FBI agent named John DeSouza maintained that the Smiley Face Killers were a cult of psychopaths who drowned alpha males as sacrificial offerings to the ancient dark gods Moloch and Baal. This is how my days passed: afternoons spent in the echo chamber of television and the thickets of comment-board conspiracy, evenings dedicated to The Archaeology of Knowledge and Simulacra and Simulation. Flipping through my course texts at night, I often highlighted any passage that seemed even tangentially related to my headspace. “In a life we are surrounded by death,” Wittgenstein writes. “So too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.”

Curiously, the amateur sleuths I encountered on the internet often deployed the same literary frameworks that guided my seminar on critical theory. Several Footprints at the River’s Edge commenters riffed on nautical folklore, suggesting that perhaps, like the sirens who tempted Odysseus, covens of attractive females were luring victims to the rivers. One East Coast gumshoe, posting under the screen name Undead Molly, offered a Marxist interpretation: a mob of blue-collar workers, resentful of rich college students, was carrying out the drownings as an act of class warfare. One company in particular had come under Undead Molly’s suspicions: a manufacturing outfit called Trane Heating & Cooling, whose headquarters were based in La Crosse, where six of the bodies, including Luke’s, had been found. “Trane technicians travel in vans,” Molly wrote, “and have access to substances which could stun a healthy young man into unconsciousness.”

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Seeking a Roadmap for the New American Middle Class

The next American middle class
Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Livia Gershon | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (1,950 words)

Over the past few months, Starbucks, CVS, and Walmart announced higher wages and a range of other benefits like paid parental leave and stock options. Despite what the brands say in their press releases, the changes probably had little to do with the Republican corporate tax cuts, but they do reflect a broader economic prosperity, complete with a tightening a labor market. In the past couple of years, real wages hit their highest levels ever, and even the lowest-paid workers started getting raises. As Matt Yglesias wrote at Vox, “for the first time in a long time, the underlying labor market is really healthy.”

But it doesn’t feel that way, does it? From the new college graduate facing an unstable contract job and mounds of debt to the 30-year-old in Detroit picking up an extra shift delivering pizzas this weekend, it just seems like we’re missing something we used to have.

In a 2016 Conference Board survey, only 50.8 percent of U.S. workers said they were satisfied with their jobs, compared with 61 percent in 1987 when the survey was first done. In fact, job satisfaction hasn’t come close to that first reading in this century. We’re also more anxious and depressed today than we’ve been since the depths of the recession, and we’re dying younger — particularly if we’re poor.

So maybe this is a good moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers. Imagine for a moment that everything goes right. The long, slow recovery from the Great Recession continues, rather than reversing itself and plunging us back into high unemployment. Increased automation doesn’t displace a million truck drivers but creates new, more skilled driving jobs. The retirement of the Baby Boomers reduces labor supply, driving up wages at nursing homes, call centers, and the rest of the gigantic portion of the economy where pay is low.

Would this restore dignity to work and a sense of optimism to the nation? Would it bring back the kind of pride we associate with the 1950s GM line worker?

I don’t think it would. I think it would take far more fundamental changes to win justice for American workers. But I also think it’s possible to strive for something way better than the postwar era we often remember as a Golden Age for workers.

Let’s start by dispelling the idea that postwar advances for American workers were some kind of natural inevitability that could never be replicated today. Yes, in the 1940s, the United States was in a commanding position of economic dominance over potential rivals decimated by war. And yes, companies were able to translate the manufacturing capacity and technological know-how built up through the military into astounding new bounty for consumers. But, when it comes to profitability, business has also had plenty of boom times in recent decades, with no parallel advances for workers.

This is the moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country. Page through Working, Studs Terkel’s classic 1972 book of interviews with a broad range of workers, and factories come across as a kind of hellscape. A spot welder at a Ford plant in Chicago describes standing in one place all day, with constant noise too loud to yell over, suffering frequent burns and blood poisoning from a broken drill, at risk of being fired if he leaves the line to use the bathroom. “Repetition is such that, if you were to think about the job itself, you’d slowly go out of your mind,” he told Terkel.

The stable, routine corporate office work that also thrived in the postwar era certainly wasn’t as unpleasant as that, but there’s a whole world of cultural figures, from Willy Loman to Michael Scott, that suggest it was never an inherent font of meaning.

The fact that the Golden Age brought greater wealth, pride, and status to American workers, both blue- and white-collar, wasn’t really about the booming economy or the nature of the work. It was a result of power politics and deliberate decisions. In the 1930s and ‘40s, unionized workers, having spent decades battling for power on the job, at severe risk to life and livelihood, were a powerful force. And CEOs of massive corporations like General Motors were scared enough of radical workers, and hopeful enough about the prospects of shared prosperity, to strike some deals.

A consensus about how jobs ought to work emerged from these years. Employers would provide decent pay, health insurance, and pensions for large swaths of the country’s workers. The federal government would build a legal framework to address labor disputes and keep corporate monopolies from getting out of control. Politicians from both parties would march in the Labor Day parade every year, and workers would get their fair share of the new American prosperity.

Today, of course, the postwar consensus has broken down. Even if average workers are making more money than we used to, the gap between average and super-rich makes us feel like we’re getting nowhere. We may be able to afford iPhones and big-screen TVs, but we’ve got minimal chances of getting our kids into the elite colleges that define the narrow road to success.

And elite shows of respect for workers ring more and more hollow. Unions, having drastically declined in membership, no longer have a seat at some of the tables they used to. Politicians celebrate businesses’ creation of jobs, not workers’ accomplishment of necessary and useful labor. A lot of today’s masters of industry clearly believe that workers are an afterthought, since robots will soon be able to do anyone’s jobs except theirs.

But let’s not get too nostalgic about the Golden Age. As many readers who are not white men may be shouting at me by this point, there was another side to these mid-century ideas about work. The entire ideological framework defining a job with dignity was inextricably tied up with race and gender.

From the start of the industrial revolution, employers used racism to divide workers. And union calls for respect and higher wages were often inseparable from demands that companies hire only white men. The Golden Age didn’t just provide white, male workers with higher wages than everyone else but also what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “public and psychological wage” of a sense of racial superiority.

Just as importantly, white men in the boom years also won stay-at-home wives. With rising male wages, many white women — and a much smaller number of women of other races — could now focus all their energy on caring for home and family. For the women, that meant escape from working at a mill or cooking meals and doing laundry for strangers. But it also meant greater economic dependence on their husbands. For the men, it was another boost to their living standard and status.

Golden Age corporate policies, union priorities, and laws didn’t create the ideal of the white, breadwinner-headed family, but they did reinforce it. Social Security offered benefits to workers and their dependents rather than to all citizens, and excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who were disproportionately black. The GI Bill helped black men far less than white ones and left out most women except to the extent that their husbands’ benefits trickled down to them.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country.

Today, aside from growing income inequality, unstable jobs, and the ever-skyward climb of housing and education costs, a part of the pain white, male workers are feeling is the loss of their unquestioned sense of superiority.

So, can we imagine a future Golden Age? Is there a way to make working for Starbucks fulfill all of us the way we remember line work at GM fulfilling white men? Maybe. With an incredible force of political will, it might be possible to rejigger the economy so that modern jobs keep getting better. It would start with attacking income inequality head-on. The government could bust up monopolistic tech giants, encourage profit-sharing, and maybe even take a step toward redistributing inherited wealth. We’d also need massive social change to ensure people of color and women equal access to the good new jobs, and men and white people would need to learn to live with a loss of the particular psychological wages of masculinity and whiteness.

But even all that would still fail to address one thing that made work in the Golden Age fulfilling for men: the wives. Stay-at-home moms of the mid-twentieth century weren’t just a handy status symbol for their men. They were household managers and caregivers, shouldering the vast majority of child-raising labor and creating a space where male workers could rest and be served. And supporting a family was a key ingredient that made otherwise draining, demeaning jobs into a source of meaning.

Few men or women see a return to that ideal as a good idea today. But try imagining what good, full-time work for everyone looks like without it. Feminist scholar Nancy Fraser describes that vision as the Universal Breadwinner model — well-paid jobs, with all the pride and status that come with them, for all men and women. She notes that it would take massive spending to outsource childcare and other traditionally unpaid “female” work — particularly since those jobs would need to be good jobs too. It would also leave out people with personal responsibilities that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hand over to strangers, as well as many with serious disabilities. And it certainly wouldn’t solve the problem many mothers and fathers report today of having too little time to spend with family.

A really universal solution to the problem of bad jobs would have to go beyond “good jobs” in the Golden Age model. It would be a world where we can take pride in our well-paid jobs at Starbucks without making them the center of our identities. That could mean many more part-time jobs with flexible hours, good pay, and room for advancement. It could mean decoupling benefits like health care and retirement earnings from employment and providing a hefty child allowance. Certainly, it would mean a social and psychological transformation that lets both men and women see caring work, and other things outside paid employment, as fully as valuable and meaningful as a job.

As a bonus, this kind of solution would also make sense when we do fall back into recession, or if the robots do finally come for a big chunk of our jobs.

All this might sound absurdly utopian. We are, after all, living in a world where celebrity business leaders claim to work 80-plus hour weeks while politicians enthusiastically deny health care to people who can’t work.

But the postwar economy didn’t happen on its own. It was the product of a brutal, decades-long fight led by workers with an inspiring, flawed vision. And today, despite everything, new possibilities are emerging. Single-payer health care is a popular idea, and “socialism” has rapidly swung from a slur to a legitimate part of the political spectrum. Self-help books like The 4-Hour Work Week — which posit the possibility of a radically different work-life balance, albeit based on individual moxie rather than social change — have become a popular genre. Young, black organizers in cities across the country are developing their own cooperative economic models. And if there’s any positive lesson we can take from the current political moment, it’s that you never know what could happen in America. Maybe a new Golden Age is possible. It’s at least worth taking some time to think about how we would want it to look.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other places.

 

‘Forgive Yourself. And Forgive Me.’

Uncle Lee, photo courtesy the author

Alice Driver | Longreads | March 2018 | 10 minutes (2,574 words)

“I didn’t choose. I walked backwards till it came around front.” — Uncle Lee

I sipped my Uncle Lee’s favorite gin martini made bitter with the taste of three pearly onions at The Alley Cantina in Taos, New Mexico. The mother of my long-lost cousin Julianne stepped up to the microphone in front of the gathered crowd and told the story of their brief love affair and how Lee “loved women.” I’ve never been to a funeral like the ones on TV where you go to a cemetery and cry while watching a casket go into the ground. My family does these storytelling gatherings with food and drink, and we bask in the memory of the ones we loved in sharp and detailed pain and glory.

I didn’t know that Julianne existed until I was in my 20s. My Uncle Lee, who died at 73, was a tall willowy, half-bent figure who had two sons and a daughter. As a young man, he had survived several diving accidents, which according to another uncle, Larry, left him a little bit crooked in posture. Uncle Lee disclosed Julianne’s existence to some of the family over the years, but that news reached me late. It hit me like a wave rolling me under the currents — took my breath away — because she had my green eyes, and the tall, lean Driver build. In another universe, she could have been my sister. We had followed parallel tracks, both spending much of our 20s living and working in Latin America. She eventually settled in Bolivia, married, and had a daughter.

At my Uncle Lee’s memorial, Julianne read a letter she had written to her 22-month-old daughter about Lee, who she came to know as her biological father when she was a teenager. Before his death, he had traveled to Bolivia to spend time with her, and she held close those memories of getting to know him as a father. Tears ran down my face and into my bourbon and ginger ale as I watched Julianne read from her journal. Following Julianne, a woman got up and told the story of my Uncle Lee making the French doors for her house. He was a fine woodworker specializing in spiral staircases. Before sitting down, she said, “We weren’t lovers.”
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Welcome to the Center of the Universe

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Shannon Stirone | LongreadsMarch 2018 | 22 minutes (5,546 words)

The power has just gone out in mission control. I look to Jim McClure, operations manager at the Space Flight Operations Facility, and he assures me that everything is fine. A power outage like this hasn’t happened at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nearly eight years, and while it’s only been out for a few seconds, the Deep Space Network is disconnected and NASA has temporarily lost contact with Cassini, the nearly 20-year-old space probe in orbit around Saturn, as well as all spacecraft beyond the moon.

We’re standing in JPL’s mission control, known simply as the Dark Room to those who work here. Five men and women are glued to their screens, the artificial pink-and-white glow highlighting their faces. I’ve been here twice before, but I have never seen this many people running the consoles. The operators are calm and hyper-focused despite the unexpected hiccup, both hands typing, eyes darting at one another’s screens.

While the quiet panic plays out, I walk over to a sunken plaque in the middle of the room that glows with blue neon lights: the center of the universe. Above it is a large metal coin embossed with the images of three spacecraft and a DSN antenna, below is JPL’s motto, “Dare Mighty Things.” Teddy Roosevelt offered these words during an 1899 speech in approbation of the virtues of a “strenuous life” and they are now synonymous with the risks taken when it comes to spaceflight. “Far better is it to dare mighty things,” he said, “to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

I catch a bit of conversation. “Are you having any luck over there?” the data controller asks the person sitting at the Tracking Support Specialist desk. “Not yet.” Above the consoles near the ceiling are six large television screens that curve around the room. Usually, these screens stream real-time telemetry from dishes around the world and are labeled with the name of the spacecraft they’re talking to. Right now, most of them are blacked out. The only active monitors display images of celebrities who’ve visited JPL: Matt Damon in the Mars Yard, William Shatner giving the Vulcan salute. Read more…

“Hey, Can I Sleep In Your Room?”: Studying Love with Elizabeth Flock

AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh

Jonny Auping | Longreads | March 2018 | 16 minutes (4,156 words)

 

In her recently published book, The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, Elizabeth Flock aims to tell authentic stories of love in the city of Mumbai. But in a place where the notion of flashy Bollywood romance is ubiquitous, Flock went about her mission as a diligent reporter, spending close to a decade observing the daily lives of married couples in the eighth largest city in the world — interviewing them, living with them — even sleeping on their bedroom floors.

Flock, who spent two years in Mumbai in her early twenties, returned in 2014 to embed with her book’s subjects — three couples she had previously met. “I liked them because they were romantics and rule breakers,” Flock writes. “They dreamed of being married for seven lifetimes, but they didn’t follow convention.”

The deeply reported chronicles of these middle-class Mumbai couples depict the sometimes painful push and pull between love, breaking convention, and the ingrained duty to generations of tradition.

True to the diversity of the city, the book follows three couples from different religious and cultural backgrounds: Maya and Veer are Marwari Hindus, Shahzad and Sabeena are Sunni Muslims, and Ashok and Parvati are Tamil Brahmin Hindus.

But as Flock’s writing illustrates, these backgrounds were contextual and monumentally significant to their circumstances, but not even close to wholly representative of their identities.

Although Flock removes herself from these narratives, the stories feel complete and candid in a way that seems remarkable considering they are told by an outsider. The years worth of trust she built with her subjects — at times even babysitting their children — led to revealed secrets and emotions that take the accounts from ordinary to captivating.

Some of the obstacles these six people face — religious restrictions, gender expectations, antiquated laws and practices — are unique to their cultural environment. But what all of them are after — a successful marriage — is universally relatable.

Flock took the time to speak with Longreads about her reporting process, the state of marriage in India, and how love does or does not transcend culture and region.

* * *
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“Hey, Can I Sleep In Your Room?”: Studying Love with Elizabeth Flock

Longreads Pick

An interview with Elizabeth Flock, author of The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, on the years she spent studying other people’s marriages in Mumbai.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 8, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,156 words)