Search Results for: interview

We’re Going Through Hell, and Men Need to Join Us There

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

I know what you’re thinking: Not another sexual harassment post. Bear with me.

I’ve spoken to many women over the past few weeks who feel exhausted by the current news cycle, I count myself among them: the endless onslaught of horrific stories, interspersed with the occasional, extremely bad non-apology.

I know it’s tempting to look away, and it’s fine if you have to; please take care of yourself. It doesn’t make you a bad person or a bad feminist. But it’s important the stories keep coming out, that the issue remains in the public discourse. It feels like we are in a moment of momentum, working our way towards something better, however clumsy, messy, and painful the process can be. It’s a little cheesy, but I keep thinking of the quote often misattributed to Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” This momentum feels like hell, and we have to keep going.

Read more…

Boko Haram Strapped Suicide Bombs to Them. Somehow These Teenage Girls Survived.

Longreads Pick

The New York Times interviewed 18 teen girls — all of whom were kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria to become suicide bombers for their cause. Unwilling to hurt and kill innocents, these girls — some as young as 13 years old — bravely defied the militants and sought help from citizens and soldiers alike to remove the bombs strapped to their bodies before anyone could be harmed.

Published: Oct 25, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,105 words)

“No Fatties”: When Health Care Hurts

Illustration by Hannah Perry

Carey Purcell  |  Longreads  |  October 2017  | 4280 words (16 minutes)

Kasey Smith began gaining weight as a teenager. The numbers on the scale started increasing overnight, and no matter how few calories she consumed, they continued to go up. “It will even out,” she thought, crediting the change to puberty and hormones. But it didn’t, and her hair and skin began changing as well. “Something was definitely wrong.”

Each medical appointment, and there were many, concluded with doctors telling her to go on a diet. Smith (not her real name) remembers telling the endocrinologist about her frustrations with burning off the 900 calories she consumed each day and still gaining weight. “He looked at me and said, ‘Maybe you can cut back your McDonald’s to twice a week.’ I was stunned silent, and I went into the bathroom and broke down. ‘He doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m just fucking with him.’”

As Smith’s weight went up, her food intake went down. Her mother signed her up for Nutrisystem, and her diet hung on the fridge for everyone in her family to see. Shame and humiliation narrowed her life down to three questions: what to eat, what not to eat, and how to burn more calories. She began to form dangerous habits, sometimes eating little more than lettuce.

Smith ultimately received a diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome, a hormonal disorder that can lead to excess male hormones, irregular menstrual cycles, and weight gain. She was prescribed Metformin and quickly began to lose weight, but the damage had been done. The 18-year-old developed anorexia, leaving for college at 130 pounds and coming back four months later and 30 pounds lighter, her hair falling out in clumps.

No one thought anything was wrong.

“I would go to the doctor, and there were no red flags. It was ‘You look fantastic!’ Not ‘This is alarming.’” Smith continued starving herself for another year until she ended up in the hospital, undergoing a colectomy to remove a foot and a half of her intestines, which had twisted as a result of her severe calorie restriction.

One year after the surgery, her worst nightmare returned: She was gaining weight. Celiac disease was the cause this time, but it wasn’t diagnosed until after Smith was in the habit of purging the little food she ate every day. She would regularly run in the park and pass out afterward. “I would starve all day, then I’d eat something at night, then I would purge it. In my head, I’m thinking, ‘I’m literally not consuming anything. The weight has to fall off.’”

She realized she needed professional help, and Smith found a therapist who specialized in eating disorders and began treatment at The Renfrew Center, a residential facility in Pennsylvania. She continues to struggle with discussing her weight at medical appointments. After she told her endocrinologist about her treatment at Renfrew, his reply was “I see you need to lose some weight.”

* * *

According to the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, one out of three doctors responds to obesity negatively and associates it with poor hygiene, hostility, dishonesty, and noncompliance, viewing fat patients as “lazy, lacking in self-control, non-compliant, unintelligent, weak-willed and dishonest.”

“Doctors may think they are doing their jobs by focusing on patients’ weights,” said Dr. Rebecca Puhl, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. But the effects of weight discrimination, both physical and mental, can be harmful to patients. “I do see this in health providers just as much as the general population, which is that maybe stigma isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe it will motivate people to lose weight. Maybe it will provide incentives for weight loss. But that is not what we see in research. We see the opposite — that in fact, stigmatizing people about their weight actually reinforces behaviors in health that increase body weight and obesity.”

The doctor looked at me and said, ‘Maybe you can cut back your McDonald’s to twice a week.’

As weight discrimination has increased in recent years — roughly 40 percent of adults report having experienced some form of weight stigma — so have obesity rates. A positive correlation between experiencing weight bias and developing eating disorders has been documented, and two studies have reported that overweight children are more likely to binge after being teased about their weight. Nor do these habits change as we age. In a 2006 study of more than 2,000 overweight and obese women who were part of a weight loss support group, 79 percent said they turned to food after experiencing weight stigma. Another common response: refusing to diet.

Johanna Tan encountered that stigma when she gained 80 pounds in three months after beginning the hormonal birth control Depo-Provera. Her doctor suggested weight loss, and she chose a weight loss clinic. In the weeks after undergoing her doctor-mediated diet of 500 to 800 calories a day, Tan began experiencing episodes of chest pain so severe she made more than one trip to the emergency room. Her general practitioner blamed her symptoms on her large breasts. “Never mind that my boobs have always been this big, and this was a new symptom,” Tan said, laughing wryly as she explained she had been performing special exercises and getting massage treatments to help ease the symptoms. But it wasn’t her breasts that were causing the pain, it was her gallbladder. Gallstones had blocked her common bile duct, and if left untreated it could cause acute liver failure. The cause of the gallstones? Rapid weight loss. Neither Tan’s weight gain nor her loss had been correctly assessed by her doctors. (Depo-Provera lists weight gain as a common side effect. When Tan voiced concerns to one doctor, she was told, “Everyone gets more hungry. You just need to not eat more.”)

The assumption that any health issues a fat person experiences can be chalked up to weight has not gone unnoticed by the fat community. Marilyn Wann was motivated to pursue fat activism after what she describes as her Really Bad Day, when a man she was dating told her he was embarrassed to introduce her to his friends because of her weight, and she was denied health insurance because Blue Shield of California deemed her morbidly obese.

“This double whammy of social and institutional exclusion based on my weight woke me up,” she said. “Until then, I had hoped to avoid the impact of anti-fat attitudes by avoiding the whole topic. But hiding and silence and avoidance didn’t keep the yuck from finding me. So I recognized that I had to come out as a fat person. The next day, I went to a copy store and made up business cards for my new print zine, which I decided to call FAT!SO? — ‘For People Who Don’t Apologize for Their Size!’ Immediately, my life became less stressful. Of course, I still encounter anti-fat attitudes and weight-based exclusions, but I have drawn a line between me and the hatefulness. It makes a huge difference.”

Wann still experiences bias, especially at the doctor. “I know before I enter the door that the whole system prioritizes its prejudice over my well-being,” she said. “The prejudice is what’s necessary to the institution as it stands. The medical establishment, the insurance agencies, public health agencies that are government-based have always advanced their agenda on the back of fat people. … The institutions of our supposed health systems — in the government agencies, in the insurance companies, in all of the medical practices — are saturated or have deeply ingrained anti-fat bigotry.”

Establishing the balance of information and compassion while discussing a patient’s weight is constantly on Rebecca Zuckerman’s mind. “It puts medical professionals in a weird catch-22,” said Zuckerman, a fourth-year medical student at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, who understands the motivation of fat activists but whose education includes the negative medical impacts of obesity. “It’s something I’ve struggled with personally. You can only explain it and tell people their options. You can ask if it’s OK to talk about weight loss or give more information. If they say, ‘No, I don’t want to hear it,’ you have to respect that.”

Still, the intense schedule of medical professionals, who are often allotted only 15 to 20 minutes per patient, often results in less-than-ideal communication. It’s easier to reach for the quickest conclusion: telling the patient to lose weight. Says Zuckerman, “A lot of doctors and nurses experience burnout, and they start losing empathy and don’t view the patients as people anymore. Your hands are tied to stay within those 20 minutes. Everyone’s trying to make more money, and the doctors are a cog in the wheel.”

That’s along with pervasive stereotyping about fat people in the medical community. In a study of 318 family physicians, two-thirds reported that their obese patients lacked self-control, and 39 percent stated that their obese patients were lazy. Even health care professionals specializing in nutrition thought poorly of their obese patients: “Attitudes toward obesity and the obese among professionals,” a study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, reports that 87 percent of health care professionals specializing in nutrition believe that obese persons are indulgent, 74 percent believe that they have family problems, and 32 percent believe that they lack willpower. In 2013, the American Medical Association labeled obesity a disease.

The misdiagnoses that occur lead directly to poor health outcomes. Johanna Tan ultimately spent three years in pain, leading to four weeks of hospitalization, a series of invasive surgical procedures, and lengthy rehab — procedures that wouldn’t have been necessary had the gallstones been caught earlier. While she was enduring severe pain following her first surgery and struggling to complete her postsurgical rehab, the hospital staff accused her of being lazy. “I spent two weeks in hospital post-surgery,” she said, “copping abuse for being lazy and not participating in my own rehab, before they realized they fucked up.” Tan said the nurses were condescending, saying, “I know it hurts. It’s major surgery. You still have to get up.” The pain didn’t ease until her doctors realized they had missed some gallstones and had to perform a second surgery. Tan wasn’t able to walk more than 10 feet at a time for the first month following her surgeries. It took six months for her to be able to walk further than a block.

* * *

Fat patients also often find themselves facing off with doctors who refuse to write prescriptions or referrals until patients lose an arbitrary amount of weight, a common scenario for those seeking joint replacement surgery. Despite being in “crazy amounts of pain,” Melinda Belles-Preston was required to lose 30 pounds before receiving an operation on her hips. Losing between one and two pounds a week, a healthy pace according to the Centers for Disease Control, would delay her surgery by several months. Heavier patients see longer lags. A required loss of 50 to 100 pounds can postpone a procedure for months or even years unless the patient undergoes weight loss surgery. Without surgery, the time spent in pain is prolonged, opening the door to painkiller dependence. It took Belles-Preston roughly six months to lose the weight, and she was in pain the entire time.

“Going in nutrient-deprived and starved is probably not a good way to send someone into heart surgery or major any surgery,” Wann said; her tone made it clear she was stating what she thought should be obvious. “Someone who’s been losing weight may have worse outcomes than someone who’s stayed the same weight. … It’s amazing how someone can just look at you and decide how a random number of pounds can shift you from someone who doesn’t deserve care to someone who does.”

Pain management was barely discussed when Virgie Tovar, activist and author of Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion, went to the doctor after being injured on an amusement park ride. Suffering what she described as “debilitating back spasms” that made movement “electrifyingly painful,” she was told she had to lose weight before anything could be done for her. “It was like this dogged commitment to not helping me until I was at a different weight,” she recalled. “Let’s say I lose weight at what is considered a normal pace that doesn’t endanger a person’s life. For me to get to the weight you’re talking about is like 10 years. So I just get to be in pain until I’m at that weight. And if I’m still in pain after a decade of weight loss, then you’ll think about taking care of this?”

Ideally, preventive care helps patients avoid catastrophic health problems, but it’s not always accessible to fat patients, whether because of issues with doctors, issues with technology, or both. Fat patients have been refused medical screenings, such as Pap smears, mammograms, and colonoscopies, that are considered routine and vital for thin patients. The American Cancer Society advises women to get mammograms yearly beginning at age 45 and colonoscopies every 10 years beginning at age 50, but fat people often struggle to find facilities that will perform the screenings and are told they cannot fit in the machines.

A required loss of 50 to 100 pounds can postpone a procedure for months or even years… It took Belles-Preston roughly six months to lose the weight, and she was in pain the entire time.

The importance of an MRI comes from its ability to provide higher-quality images. But the machines that provide those images are small, and other options, like CAT scans or ultrasound, don’t provide a comparable alternative. “All those scans need to penetrate the body to create an image. If a body is larger and has more fat tissue to penetrate, the image quality is poorer and blurrier, and it’s harder to make out structures,” Zuckerman explained. “It’s harder for skilled radiologists to diagnose things in patients who are larger for that reason. … The fact is, MRI machines are tiny. Some people literally cannot fit in them. So we do something else like an ultrasound or CT that is not quite as good. It’s better than nothing, but it doesn’t give us the image quality that an MRI does. You run the risk of missing something because the picture that you’re getting is not clear.”

The need for hospital equipment that can accommodate fat people has grown, and imaging devices are now available. This equipment is not available everywhere, however, and sometimes patients are referred to their local zoos. When Wann called the San Francisco Zoo’s medical department to ask about accessing its technology, the person on the phone sighed and said, “I wish people would stop saying that,” referring to requests to use the department’s CT and MRI scanners. While vet schools and zoos have larger-capacity devices, they can’t allow human subjects, and scanning humans in machines intended for animal subjects is banned by formal policies in most facilities. “That’s really beyond their certification,” explained Wann. They’re not licensed as an institution to practice medicine on people. Their entire institutional certification is being put on the line because our human medical system refuses to accommodate people above a certain size. It draws an arbitrary line and says, ‘Go beyond this line, and they’re monsters.’”

Without being properly screened, patients can’t be diagnosed. A 2008 review of previously published studies, 32 in total, reported that white, female, obese patients were less likely to be screened for breast and cervical cancer. A study from 2006 reported that only 68 percent of women with a BMI of greater than 55 were given Pap tests, while 86 percent of other women were tested.

In some cases, this is a result of fat patients opting out of health care entirely, even if they otherwise have the ability to access health care facilities and are insured: According to the International Journal of Obesity, 19 percent of participants reported that if they felt stigmatized about their weight by their doctor, they would avoid future medical appointments, and 21 percent said they would seek a new doctor.

“Fat people don’t go to the doctor often. They tend to avoid it,” writer and activist Kitty Stryker said. “A lot of fat people are ashamed of being naked. They don’t want to be touched. When I say I have a lower-back problem, I know they’re going to say, ‘Lose some weight, and that will go away.’ So what’s the point? Why bother continuing to try to get to the root of my health problems when I know the only thing they will ever tell me is ‘Lose weight’?”


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Patients often face added risk beyond concerns of being dismissed or the necessary treatment being denied: the possibility of weight loss treatments and procedures being strenuously suggested at inopportune or irrelevant moments. While the American Academy of Family Physicians recommends screening for obesity along with monthly sessions of counseling and behavioral interventions, the timing of these suggestions is crucial to the impact of motivational interviewing — and execution is often poor. Tan was mid-Pap smear when her doctor asked if she wanted a Weight Watchers pamphlet.

“The speculum’s already in and open. And she says, ‘I can tell you’re getting upset. Do you want me to continue?’” Tan recalled in disbelief. “I said yes because I didn’t want to have to make another appointment for my Pap smear. I was so mad, I was crying at this point. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t yell. She said, ‘I can tell I’ve made you upset, but weight is a serious issue.’”

Although familiar with the prejudice that came with her weight, Belles-Preston was still shocked when her general practitioner recommended weight loss surgery — while she was pregnant. “I walked out of the room. It was so incredibly offensive to me. I’m coming to you for medical advice about my pregnancy, and you’re talking to me about weight loss surgery, which is the furthest thing from my mind.”

“I have tons of resources and attitudes for confronting this kind of stuff, and it can still kill me,” Wann said as I marveled at her calm approach to discussing prejudice so severe it can result in death. “I understand not going [to the doctor]. I think it’s self-protective to some extent.… Every time I go to any kind of medical appointment I anticipate facing weight bias. I anticipate being denied the sort of services thin people would receive with no problem or being targeted for weight-based treatments that I don’t want and could harm me. I’m not interested in stomach amputation or stomach squeezing. I don’t think those are therapeutic practices in any sense. Every time I go see a doctor I’m aware they may casually say the only thing they want me to do is have my stomach cut off.”

* * *

The effects of that bias were traumatizing and long-lasting for Tan. Triggered by her uncomfortable experiences in hospital environments, Tan’s first job as an audiologist after graduate school provoked frequent panic attacks because of its location at a hospital. “I used to have to go to work early so that I could tamp down the panic associated with being in a hospital at all,” she said. “This fear of hospitals hasn’t quite gone away. Most recently, a few months ago, we had to spend a few days in ICU as my partner’s dad passed, and just being back in ICU rattled me so badly it was a month before I could stop popping several Valium a day.”

It was the adversarial relationship she had developed with doctors and nurses that contributed to Tan’s panic. And she’s not alone. For many, thin means healthy and fat means unhealthy. So small and slender equates with good health and is encouraged by medical providers, often resulting in strained relationships with their patients.

The idea that the lower the weight, the healthier the person, escalated into life-threatening conditions for Smith, who was frequently complimented on how healthy she looked while she was starving herself. “When you’re restricting [calories] you can brag about it,” she said, recalling her preparation for the colectomy. “[Doctors] asked, ‘Are you eating well and exercising?’ I said, ‘I’m very healthy. I exercise all the time. I only eat vegetables.’ It’s a funny dichotomy. Just because the scale is low does not mean that you’re healthy. A lot of doctors forget to be careful of that.”

But as the number on the scale climbs, the less flattering characteristics — greed, lack of control, messiness, lack of self-care, laziness, automatic unhealthiness — are associated with fat people, only to be furthered by the media’s portrayal of fat characters, who are typically the butt of jokes or seen as slovenly and undesirable. Women are often the punch lines, much more than men. BMI standards also are more harsh for women than for men, which is apparent in the statistics regarding weight loss surgery: Obesity rates in America are split fifty-fifty between genders, but 80 percent of bariatric surgeries are performed on women. In a 2014 study from Kansas State University, 72.8 percent to 94 percent of overweight and obese men were satisfied with their health as compared with 56.7 percent to 85 percent of overweight and obese women. There’s a reason all the stories and sources here are about and told by women.

“The truth is that there are reasons why fit people live longer, better lives,” Tovar said. “It’s because the entire culture is constructed to benefit them.” Weight discrimination is associated with an increase in mortality risk of nearly 60 percent for both women and men.

Fat activists are working to provide recourse at the community level; patients share the names of fat-friendly doctors or establishments, and Wann uses her social networks to help people get referrals for doctors and other medical providers. She also assists people with planning responses to doctors and providers who inflict weight bias. Fat activist Stef Maruch maintains a list of doctors who do not inflict bias or are fat positive, and Wann encourages people to update it whenever they can. NAAFA also publishes brochures and tool kits to assist fat people in navigating bias and fighting anti-fat legislation. A monthly newsletter updates recipients with the latest research and provides referrals to practical tools like products made for people of size. After Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas, NAAFA released a special-edition newsletter and sent plus-size clothing and supplies.

Obesity rates in America are split fifty-fifty between genders, but 80 percent of bariatric surgeries are performed on women.

The organization has also updated the brochure it gives health care providers treating fat patients. It was last updated in 2011, and per the recommendation of one of NAAFA’s advisers, its language is being revised to be much more aggressive when discussing weight bias with medical professionals. “Up until this point we’ve been trying to inform and be a little bit gentle,” explained Peggy Howell, NAAFA’s vice chairman and public relations director, citing the research scientists, Ph.D.s, and professors in medicine, law, nutrition, social work and more who serve on NAAFA’s advisory board. “The advisers came back and said, ‘I think we need to take a different approach. I think we need to be more assertive about this. There are lots of studies that support that this bias does more harm than good to the patients.’” The nonprofit’s 2011 brochure states, “NAAFA is working to help ensure that health care providers provide the best possible care by keeping in mind the special needs of their fat patients.” The new brochure reads, “We currently live in an environment that stigmatizes anyone who does not meet the aesthetic or medically defined categories of an ‘attractive’ or ‘healthy’ weight… [it] creates and sustains fat phobia and oppression, which includes weight bias, prejudice, stigma, discrimination, bullying, violence, and cultural imperialism. … Sometimes the internalized biases of health care providers directly contribute to further stigmatization of fat people.”

There is some movement on the medical end as well, driven by health care providers seeking training and resources. The Rudd Center has developed educational videos, which have been tested and found to reduce weight bias. Viewing the two 17-minute films — “Weight Prejudice: Myths and Facts” and “Weight Bias in Health Care” — resulted in improvement in attitudes toward obese people. The Rudd Center has also created a media repository of 400-plus photos and more than 80 B-roll videos that portray children and adults with obesity in non-stigmatizing ways, intended as a resource of respectful, rather than stereotypical, images for the media as well as scientists and health professionals to use when making educational presentations.

“We’ve created online courses and all different kinds of resources to use to try to increase awareness about this issue and educate providers that this is more than a social justice issue,” Puhl said. “This is a full public health issue. The stigma is making their patients’ health worse.”

For many fat people, the response is too little, too late. “I would rather doctors have signs on their door saying, ‘I don’t treat fat people,’” Wann said. “It would save everyone time and money if they had a sign on their door that said, ‘No fatties.’ At least they would be honest and own their bias.”

***

Carey Purcell is a New-York based writer who covers culture, politics and current events from a feminist perspective. She has been published in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Politico and other publications. She has been a featured guest on AM Joy and Good Morning America, and her writing can be read at CareyPurcell.com.

***

Editor: Michelle Weber
Illustrator: Hannah Perry
Fact checker: Matt Giles
Copy-editor: Sylvia Tan

Help Alice Driver Tell One of the Stories of Our Time

Photo credit: Cambria Harkey

With the support of Longreads, I have spent the past eight months traveling, living with and interviewing migrants in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. There are some 60 million displaced people worldwide, and they have become the slave labor of the future—a population at risk to human trafficking whose bodies are used for labor ranging from sex work, to packing drugs, to picking coffee.

I interviewed a 13-year-old Guatemalan girl whose leg had been amputated due to violence suffered on the migrant trail, a transgender woman fleeing attempted murder in El Salvador, and indigenous women migrating because they wanted better access to healthcare and sexual and reproductive rights. The reasons people migrate and the violence they suffer are the stories of our time.

Alice Driver

Help support the work of Alice Driver and journalists like her who are telling the stories of our time by contributing to our member drive. You can read the first part of Alice’s series on migration and human trafficking here.

Ahead by a Century: A Gord Downie Reading List

Gord Downie performs at WE Day in Toronto in 2016. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP)

I remember the day in 1987 when my then-boyfriend popped their first EP, “The Tragically Hip” into the cassette player of his dad’s Chrysler Cordoba. When “Last American Exit” came on, I loved it instantly. It’s been on my playlists for 30 years. I’ve seen the Hip at community colleges, hockey rinks, bars, summer festivals, and arenas. I’m part of a swath of Canadians for which the Hip’s music meant good times and Canadian pride; our stories, truths, and landscape writ large in songs with incisive lyrics and driving beats.

Among my favorite Hip songs, “50 Mission Cap” honors Bill Barilko, whose last goal won the 1951 Stanley Cup for the Toronto Maple Leafs. That spring, Barilko went missing on a fishing trip and the Leafs failed to win a cup until 1962, the year Barilko’s remains were discovered. Then of course, there’s “Ahead By A Century,” in which Gord asks us to embrace the moment, reminding us that “there’s no dress rehearsal, this is our life.” Part poet, part visionary, part activist, Gord Downie was a dervish on stage, growling those lyrics into the minds of audiences for three decades.

On October 17th, Downie passed away after battling glioblastoma for two years. In his moving tribute, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “We are less as a country without Gord Downie in it.”

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Downie is that he chose to spend the last two years of his life accelerating his contribution to social justice, working toward a better life for others, toward a better Canada. He used his profile and his songwriting to foster reconciliation between Canada and First Nations people by raising awareness of the atrocities and generational effects of residential schools. For his work, the Assembly of First Nations honored Downie with an eagle feather and a Lakota spirit name — Wicapi Omani — which means, “Man who walks among the stars.”

Here are five pieces about a man who used story and song to share his Canada and, through personal example, inspired and challenged us to be better as a nation.

1. “For Gord: 27 Short Essays About The Tragically Hip, Plus One Poem” (TheBelleJar, BuzzFeed, June 2016)

In this round-up, 28 fans share their earliest memories of The Tragically Hip and how Gord Downie and his lyrics became the soundtrack to important moments in their lives.

2. “Yer Favourites” (Eric Koreen, Hazlitt, August 2016)

After initial die-hard fandom, Eric Koreen gets turned off the Hip for a decade after getting fed up with a small, boorish, white male contingent of the group’s fan base, interested only in hearing the hits in concert — certainly not opening bands with thoughtful, though lesser-known songs. Koreen eventually reconciles the Hip’s dichotomous hold on Canada, in that they “combine the intellectual side of Canadians — that we’re thoughtful, smart people — with that humble, meat-and-potatoes side, too.” Koreen suggests his change of heart came as a direct result of Gord Downie, who he characterizes as someone who could “be frustrated by your country but not disown it; that you can be an intellectual and an everyman at the same time.”

3. “How I Learned to Love the Tragically Hip and Still Be Punk” (Damian Abraham, Vice, August 2016)

Damian Abraham, vocalist for Canadian hardcore punk band Fucked Up, recounts how he turned from lifelong Hip hater to friend of Gord Downie.

I met Gord properly for the first time in the summer of 2010 backstage at a Tegan and Sara/City and Colour concert. Gord was to join Dallas Green onstage to perform the song they did together on the latter’s Bring Me Your Love record, and I had brought my family with me to watch the show. My son was toddling his way around the backstage with us in tow when tumbled out in front of Gord. After helping him up and making sure he was OK, he picked up Holden’s flung and filthy soother and rushed over the sink to wash it. As he handed back the washed pacifier, I told him that he didn’t need to worry about doing that.

“Of course I did,” he responded.

Youthful exuberance can lead to rashness. In my rush to embrace punk and reject all that didn’t fit with my new world view, I ended up throwing out a lot of culture that I was thankfully able to rediscover later. Of all these bands, there are none I am more grateful to have awoken to the greatness of than the Tragically Hip.

4. “On the Tragically Hip, Blue Rodeo and a Shared Legacy” (Michael Barclay, Macleans, August 2016)

Jim Cuddy, of the legendary Canadian band Blue Rodeo, shares stories of times his band and the Hip crossed paths in their early years touring Canada.

We were supposed to be on right before the Hip, but the Eagles inserted some guy whose father owns the Knicks. It was a blues band, and he was terrible. But he had to go on then because it was his plane that the Eagles were flying on.

Then the Hip came on and they were on fire. Gord was in a big white outfit, totally drenched. At the side of the stage is Irving Azoff [longtime Eagles manager and former CEO of Ticketmaster and Live Nation] standing there with the Eagles, and he’s looking at Gord telling him to shorten the set, making gestures. It’s making me furious, because I know the Eagles only want to shorten the set so they can get on a plane and fly out, which they can’t do after midnight or something. So Gord’s doing his thing and continues on. Then the Eagles come on and do a miserable set, just sucking the joy out of the whole island. Afterwards I was sitting with Gord backstage and asked, “Didn’t that bug you?” He said, “Pfft, I never thought in my wildest dreams that I’d be playing and have Irving Azoff telling me to shorten my set.”

5. “Gord Downie opens up about battling cancer, says it’s ‘creating something'” (Peter Mansbridge, CBC News, October 2016)

In his first interview after his cancer diagnosis, Gord Downie talks with Peter Mansbridge about living with cancer.

When you see people now, you want to hug and a kiss. Why is that important to you now?

I do. Yeah. That was happening before, though, all this, strangely. My life was changing and I felt that everyone that hung in there with me, all these years, were still there — they didn’t write me off or anything like that. And they could have. So yes, hug and kiss. And my dad, Edgar, definitely kissed on the lips. And me and my brothers taught a lot of men how to do it.

Amy Tan on Writing and the Secrets of Her Past

Longreads Pick
Source: Shondaland
Published: Oct 16, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,556 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week, we’re sharing stories from Ronan Farrow, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, Vivian Ho, Christopher Goffard, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Alex Pappademas.

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How the Brazen Are Falling

Ronan Farrow’s recent piece in The New Yorker, the culmination of a 10-month investigation, tells the stories of 13 women — some named, others not — accusing movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault, including three who charge he raped them. Their accounts are supported by interviews with 16 current and former executives and assistants at Weinstein’s companies, showing how Weinstein’s abuse of women was systematic, facilitated with the cooperation of a team of producers and assistants who knowingly deposited young women into the hotel room of a despicable predator. As Farrow notes, the allegations “corroborate and overlap with” those published by the New York Times last week.

Like most serial predators, Weinstein had a pattern that the recent exposés have made clear. He or a producer or assistant lured women to his hotel room, where Weinstein would either be in or change into a bathrobe and then attempt to make the woman massage him or watch him shower. In some instances, as with actress Asia Argento, he would forcibly perform oral sex on them, force them to perform it on him, or force himself inside them.

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The Woman Who Smashed Codes: America’s Secret Weapon in World War II

  Jason Fagone | The Woman Who Smashed Codes | Harper Collins | October 2017 | 9 minutes (2,295 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from The Woman Who Smashed CodesJason Fagone’s riveting new book chronicling the work of Elizebeth Smith Friedman and William F. Friedman, a pair of “know-nothings” who invented the science of codebreaking and became the greatest codebreakers of their era. Their contributions continue to influence the U.S. intelligence community to this day. Our thanks to Jason Fagone and Harper Collins for allowing us to share a portion of this book with the Longreads community.

* * *

Sixty years after she got her first job in codebreaking, when Elizebeth was an old woman, the National Security Agency sent a female representative to her apartment in Washington, D.C. The NSA woman had a tape recorder and a list of questions. Elizebeth suddenly craved a cigarette.

It had been several days since she smoked.

“Do you want a cigarette, by the way?” Elizebeth asked her guest, then realized she was all out.

“No, do you smoke?”

Elizebeth was embarrassed. “No, no!” Then she admitted that she did smoke and just didn’t want a cigarette badly enough to leave the apartment.

The woman offered to go get some.

Oh, don’t worry, Elizebeth said, the liquor store was two blocks away, it wasn’t worth the trouble.

They started. The date was November 11, 1976, nine days after the election of Jimmy Carter. The wheels of the tape recorder spun. The agency was documenting Elizebeth’s responses for its classified history files. The interviewer, an NSA linguist named Virginia Valaki, wanted to know about certain events in the development of American codebreaking and intelligence, particularly in the early days, before the NSA and the CIA existed, and the FBI was a mere embryo — these mighty empires that grew to shocking size from nothing at all, like planets from grains of dust, and not so long ago.

Elizebeth had never given an interview to the NSA. She had always been wary of the agency, for reasons the agency knew well — reasons woven into her story and into theirs. But the interviewer was kind and respectful, and Elizebeth was eighty-four years old, and what did anything matter anymore? So she got to talking.

Her recall was impressive. Only one or two questions gave her trouble. Other things she remembered perfectly but couldn’t explain because the events remained mysterious in her own mind. “Nobody would believe it unless you had been there,” she said, and laughed.

The interviewer returned again and again to the topic of Riverbank Laboratories, a bizarre institution now abandoned, a place that helped create the modern NSA but which the NSA knew little about. Elizebeth and her future husband, William Friedman, had lived there when they were young, between 1916 and 1920, when they discovered a series of techniques and patterns that changed cryptology forever. Valaki wanted to know: What in the world happened at Riverbank? And how did two know-nothings in their early twenties turn into the best codebreakers the United States had ever seen — seemingly overnight? “I’d be grateful for any information you can give on Riverbank,” Valaki said. “You see, I don’t know enough to . . . even to ask the first questions.”

Over the course of several hours, Valaki kept pushing Elizebeth to peel back the layers of various Riverbank discoveries, to describe how the solution to puzzle A became new method B that pointed to the dawn of C, but Elizebeth lingered instead on descriptions of people and places. History had smoothed out all the weird edges. She figured she was the last person alive who might remember the crags of things, the moments of uncertainty and luck, the wild accelerations. The analyst asked about one particular scientific leap six different times; the old woman gave six slightly different answers, some meandering, some brief, including one that is written in the NSA transcript as “Hah! ((Laughs.))”

Toward the end of the conversation, Elizebeth asked if she had thought to tell the story of how she ended up at Riverbank in the first place, working for the man who built it, a man named George Fabyan. It was a story she had told a few times over the years, a memory outlined in black. Valaki said no, Elizebeth hadn’t already told this part. “Well, I better give you that,” Elizebeth said. “It’s not only very, very amusing, but it’s actually true syllable by syllable.”

“Alright.”

“You want me to do that now?” Elizebeth said.

“Absolutely.”

* * *

She met George Fabyan at a library in Chicago one day in June 1916, when she was 23. She went to the library alone to look at a rare volume of Shakespeare from 1623, the “First Folio,” and to ask the librarians if they knew of any open positions in Chicago in the field of literature or research.

* * *

During the library’s first decades, the masters of the Newberry acquired books with the single-mindedness of hog merchants. They bought hundreds of incunabula, printed volumes from before 1501, written by monks. They bought fragile, faded books written by hand on unusual materials, on leather and wood and parchment and vellum. They bought mysterious books of disputed patrimony, books whose past lives they did not know and could not explain. One book on the Newberry’s shelves featured Arabic script and a supple, leathery binding. Inside were two inscriptions. The first said that the book had been found “in the palace of the king of Delhi, September 21st, 1857,” seven days after a mutiny. The second inscription said, “Bound in human skin.”

In one especially significant transaction, the library acquired six thousand books from a Cincinnati hardware merchandiser, a haul that included a Fourth Folio of Shakespeare from 1685, a Second Folio from 1632, and most exceptional of all, the First Folio of 1623, the original printing of Shakespeare’s plays.

This is the book that Elizebeth Smith was determined to see.

Opening the glass front door of the Newberry, she walked through a small vestibule into a magnificent Romanesque lobby. A librarian at a desk stopped her and sized her up. Normally Elizebeth would have been required to fill out the form with her research topic, but she had gotten lucky. The year 1916 happened to be the three hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and libraries around the country, including the Newberry, were mounting exhibitions in celebration.

Elizebeth said she was here to see the First Folio. The librarian said it was part of the exhibition and pointed to a room on the first floor, to the left. Elizebeth approached. The Folio was on display under glass.

The book was large and dense, about 13 inches tall and 8 inches wide, and almost dictionary-thick, running to nine hundred pages. The binding was red and made of highly polished goatskin, with a large grain. The pages had gilded edges. It was opened to a pair of pages in the front, the light gray paper tinged with yellow due to age. She saw an engraving of a man in an Elizabethan-era collar and jacket, his head mostly bald except for two neatly combed hanks of hair that ended at his ears. The text said:

MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARES COMEDIES,
HISTORIES, &
TRAGEDIES.
Publifhed according to the True Originall Copies.
LONDON
Printed by Ifaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount. 1623.

Elizebeth later wrote that seeing the Folio gave her the same feeling “that an archaeologist has, when he suddenly realizes that he has discovered a tomb of a great pharaoh.”

One of the librarians, a young woman, must have noticed the expression of entrancement on her face, because now she walked over to Elizebeth and asked if she was interested in Shakespeare. They got to talking and realized they had a lot in common. The librarian had grown up in Richmond, Indiana, not far from Elizebeth’s hometown, and they were both from Quaker families.

Elizebeth felt comfortable enough to mention that she was looking for a job in literature or research. “I would like something unusual,” she said.

The librarian thought for a second. Yes, that reminded her of Mr. Fabyan. She pronounced the name with a long a, like “Faybe-yin.”

Elizebeth had never heard the name, so the librarian explained. George Fabyan was a wealthy Chicago businessman who often visited the library to examine the First Folio. He said he believed the book contained secret messages written in cipher, and he had made it known that he wished to hire an assistant, preferably a “young, personable, attractive college graduate who knew English literature,” to further this research. Would Elizebeth be interested in a position like that?

Elizebeth was too startled to know what to say.

“Shall I call him up?” the librarian asked.

“Well, yes, I wish you would, please,” Elizebeth said.

The librarian went off for a few moments, then signaled to Elizebeth. Mr. Fabyan would be right over, she said. Elizebeth thought: What?

Yes, Mr. Fabyan happened to be in Chicago today. He would be here any minute.


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Sure enough, Fabyan soon arrived in his limousine. He burst into the library, asked Elizebeth the question that so bewildered and stunned her — “Will you come to Riverbank and spend the night with me?” — and led her by the arm to the waiting vehicle.

“This is Bert,” he growled, nodding at his chauffeur, Bert Williams. Fabyan climbed in with Elizebeth in the back.

From the Newberry, the chauffeur drove them south and west for twenty blocks until they arrived at the soaring Roman columns of the Chicago & North Western Terminal, one of the busiest of the city’s five railway stations. Fabyan hurried her out of the limo, up the steps, between the columns, and into the nine-hundred-foot-long train shed, a vast, darkened shaft of platforms and train cars and people rushing every which way. She asked Fabyan if she could send a message to her family at the telegraph office in the station, letting them know her whereabouts. Fabyan said no, that wasn’t necessary, and there wasn’t any time.

She followed him toward a Union Pacific car. Fabyan and Elizebeth climbed aboard at the back end. Fabyan walked her all the way to the front of the car and told her to sit in the frontmost seat, by the window. Then he went galumphing back through the car saying hello to the other passengers, seeming to recognize several, gossiping with them about this and that, and joking with the conductor in a matey voice while Elizebeth waited in her window seat and the train did not move. It sat there, and sat there, and sat there, and a bubble of panic suddenly popped in her stomach, the hot acid rising to her throat.

“Where am I?” she thought to herself. “Who am I? Where am I going? I may be on the other side of the world tonight.” She wondered if she should get up, right that second, while Fabyan had his back turned, and run.

But she remained still until Fabyan had finished talking to the other passengers and came tramping back to the front of the car. He packed his big body into the seat opposite hers. She smiled at him, trying to be proper and polite, like she had been taught, and not wanting to offend a millionaire; she had grown up in modest enough circumstances to be wary of the rich and their power.

Then Fabyan did something she would remember all her life. He rocked forward, jabbed his reddened face to within inches of hers, fixed his blue eyes on her hazel ones, and thundered, loud enough for everyone in the car to hear, “Well, WHAT IN HELL DO YOU KNOW?”

Elizebeth leaned away from Fabyan and his question. It inflamed something stubborn in her. She turned her head away in a gesture of disrespect, resting her cheek against the window to create some distance. The pilgrim collar of her dress touched the cold glass. From that position she shot Fabyan a sphinxy, sidelong gaze.

“That remains, sir, for you to find out,” she said.

It occurred to her afterward that this was the most immoral remark she had ever made in her life. Fabyan loved it. He leaned way back, making the seat squeak with his weight, and unloosed a great roaring laugh that slammed through the train car and caromed off the thin steel walls.

Then his facial muscles slackened into an expression clearly meant to convey deep thought, and as the train lurched forward, finally leaving the station, he began to talk of Shakespeare, the reason he had sought her out.

Hamlet, he said. Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, the sonnets — the most famous written works in the world. Countless millions had read them, quoted them, memorized them, performed them, used pieces of them in everyday speech without even knowing. Yet all those readers had missed something. A hidden order, a secret of indescribable magnitude.

Out the train window, the grid of Chicago gave way to the silos and pale yellow vistas of the prairie. Each second she was getting pulled more deeply into the scheme of this stranger, destination unknown.

The First Folio, he continued. The Shakespeare book at the Newberry Library. It wasn’t what it seemed. The words on the page, which appeared to be describing the wounds and treacheries of lovers and kings, in fact told a completely different story, a secret story, using an ingenious system of secret writing. The messages revealed that the author of the plays was not William Shakespeare. The true author, and the man who had concealed the messages, was in fact Francis Bacon, the pioneering scientist and philosopher-king of Elizabethan England.

Elizebeth looked at the rich man. She could tell he believed what he was saying.

Fabyan went on. He said that a brilliant female scholar who worked for him, Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup, had already succeeded in unweaving the plays and isolating Bacon’s hidden threads. But for reasons that would become clear, Mrs. Gallup needed an assistant with youthful energy and sharp eyes. This is why Fabyan wanted Elizebeth to join him and Mrs. Gallup at Riverbank — his private home, his 350-acre estate, but also so much more.

* * *

From the book THE WOMAN WHO SMASHED CODES: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies by Jason Fagone. Copyright © 2017 by Jason Fagone. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street Books, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories

Longreads Pick

The culmination of a 10-month investigation, Ronan Farrow’s piece in The New Yorker tells the stories of 13 women accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment or assault, including three who said he raped them. Their stories are supported by interviews with 16 current and former executives and assistants at Weinstein’s companies.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 10, 2017
Length: 31 minutes (7,850 words)