Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent halfway house in Harlem, where she met convicts who were preparing for the outside world. Read more…
Our expectations with regard to privacy and secrecy. In 1844, the British government was accused of opening people’s mail. Lepore compares the case to the NSA’s alleged digging into our digital lives:
“The particular technology matters little; the axiom holds. It’s only a feature, though, of a centuries-long historical transformation: the secularization of mystery. A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe. Immortality, in this sense, is a mystery. So is the beginning of life, which is a good illustration of how much that was once mysterious became secret and then became private. Anciently invoked as one of God’s mysteries, the beginning of life was studied, by anatomists, as the ‘secret of generation.’ Finally, citizens, using the language of a constitutional ‘right to privacy,’ defended it against intrusion. Theologically, the beginning of life, the ensoulment of new flesh, remains a mystery. Empirically, uncovering the secret of generation required tools—microscopes, lenses, cameras—that made the creation of life both visible and knowable. Only after it was no longer a mystery, and no longer a secret, only after it was no longer invisible, did it become private. By then, it was too late: contraception was already in the hands of the state.”
The author on his experience aboard the “Top Chef Cruise” and seeing former “chef’testants”:
“There were also live Quickfires. There were two of these a night, and they were always packed to the gills. Audience volunteers joined chefs onstage for challenges familiar to anyone that’s watched the show. The MC was shaky, and the whole enterprise exposed the cracks in the entire conceit of this trip; cooking on TV is compelling because of editing and human drama. The live Quickfires had neither. The closest thing to human drama was during a late-night Quickfire when Italian chef Fabio Viviani showed up a bit inebriated and swore and yelled. I thought it was charming, but I overheard guests say that his off-color language had lost him a few fans. And there was certainly no editing. During a sandwich Quickfire, a timer appeared on the screen counting down twenty minutes. These chefs don’t need twenty minutes to cook a sandwich, and I certainly don’t want to spend twenty minutes watching them make one with an arm tied behind their backs, literally, from 28 rows back. I walked out.”
How Copeland went from European basketball unknown to 29-year-old rookie for the New York Knicks:
“You are never fully at ease, but you begin to transition. Maybe you date a local girl, or even marry her. You begin to buy tighter jeans, learn some of the language and before you can blink, you are in the twilight of your career. Eventually, you do move back home and tell anyone that will listen that you did, in fact, play pro basketball. You try to find a 9-to-5 job while fighting off the inevitable depression that comes from losing the only thing you’ve ever truly loved, and, over time, you forget you ever had a dream in the first place. It’s a good life, at times an amazing life, filled with peaks and valleys higher and lower than you could ever imagine. And then, it’s over.
“For Copeland, however, there remained a gnawing inside his gut. No matter how well he did, it wasn’t quite enough. ‘I was feeling sad even though I was having a lot of success. In my head,’ he said. ‘I just still believed I could do better. I knew if I didn’t make it, I’d look back with a lot of regrets.'”
A profile of California Gov. Jerry Brown, who just turned 75 and is ready to address the state’s problems:
“Unemployment in California is still higher than the national average and the state has billions of dollars of unfunded pension liabilities. He says there are some public workers in the state who can retire at 50 ‘and I think they’re going to live until they’re 100. So we have to pay for them for 50 years and they only work for 30 … how’s that going to work?’ He has other projects – ‘big ideas’, such as changing the distribution of new tax money to schools to help children who may not speak English as a first language, and developing a bullet train in the face of considerable opposition and a rising price tag. ‘You can’t be a great country without a big idea and without being able to have faith that the people who come after you will continue,’ he says, emphatically. ‘Otherwise it’s just shifting sands.'”
A father considers his young son’s life in the city of Boston, and wonders if his son would be better off with “a life in nature”:
“If it’s true that children raised in cities often grow into shrewd, incisive adults wise to the crooked ways of the world, that being exposed daily to a wealth of cultures, languages, libraries, bookstores, theaters, and museums can make impressive people, Wordsworth might argue that those individuals lack a ‘sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused’—that is, a sense of the unity, harmony, freedom, and ‘unwearied Joy’ exemplified by nature. Who doesn’t want ‘unwearied Joy’ for his child? Emerson might go a bit further and say that those divorced from nature have a thinking deficiency, because ‘Nature is the vehicle of thought.’ For Emerson, as for Wordsworth, Nature is synonymous with Life—our lives simply refuse to cohere outside the context of the natural world. Will Ethan the city boy forever lack something sacred in his mind and spirit? Will he lack a certain useful knowledge? When my paternal grandfather was in Korea during the war, his platoon mates from Manhattan ‘thought the crickets were North Korean soldiers sending evil signals to one another in the nighttime. They never got a good night’s sleep.”
“Dog Whisperer” Cesar Millan is turning his life back around after a series of bad business deals and a messy divorce caused him to attempt to take his own life:
“I visited Millan at the ranch a few months after his suicide attempt. When I arrived he was lying on a bench in the shade, sweating through a purple polo shirt, with a bottle of Maalox resting on his chest. ‘I’m still managing the depression, the anger, the insecurity,’ he told me, ‘but I am moving forward.’ A pair of hyperactive huskies belonging to his close friend Jada Pinkett Smith ran through the hills pulling a sled Millan had modified for the rocky terrain. Junior, a sleek, gray three-year-old pit bull he was grooming to take Daddy’s place, lay quietly under the bench, watching Millan’s every move. ‘I couldn’t have done what I do without Daddy,’ he said, ‘and now I can’t do it without Junior. There’s always a pit bull there supporting me.’
“Millan is a short, stocky guy – ‘like a burrito,’ he says – but he carries himself with a straight back, chest jutted out, a natural alpha. When he arrived in the United States 22 years ago, he knew only a single English word – ‘OK’ – and he still talks in a loose, colloquial SoCal Spanglish, rolling through sentences with mixed-up tenses, calling his dog Blizzard a ‘Jello Lab,’ pronouncing buffet with a hard t and sushi as ‘su-chi.’ On ‘Dog Whisperer,’ Millan uses the language deficit to his advantage, putting clients at ease with his always polite, effortlessly funny broken-English banter as he (often painfully) dissects their troubled relationships with their dogs. In person he’s just as charming – open, inquisitive, with a quick mind and a slightly rough edge that makes him even more likable. For all his alpha-male poise, Millan also possesses humility, which he says comes with the job. ‘In my field, working with animals, they detest egotistical people,’ he says. ‘Dogs are wise. They don’t buy BS. . . . When you are egotistical, you’re not grounded. So it’s not even an option for me to become disconnected or lose my grounding.'”
This week’s Longreads Member pick is “Contest of Words,” Ben Lerner‘s October 2012 essay from Harper’s Magazine. Lerner is author of the award-winning 2011 novel Leaving the Atocha Station and three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw and Mean Free Path.
The story comes recommended by Matt O’Rourke, a longtime Longreads community member and creative director for Wieden and Kennedy in Portland (he also runs the Twitter account @fuckyesreading). Matt writes:
Ben Lerner has such an easy way with words that you almost lose sight of the fact that the guy is clearly a genius. He takes incredibly complex observations, and delivers them in a way that makes you feel like he’s hardly working at it at all.
‘Contest of Words,’ which I discovered in Harper’s last year, is about Lerner’s experience with language as a member of his high school debate team. It’s a piece of writing I re-read every few weeks, as a reminder that the smartest person in the room is only relevant if they can get everyone else to listen. I hope you enjoy the story as much as I have.
“Emotional flexibility means that we could spread our feelings around promiscuously, extending them to our fellow humans in general and sustaining loyalties over great expanses of time. By comparison, other animals seem strictly concerned with specific threats and benefactors. We might have evolved our emotional plasticity in part because our brains keep developing for so long after our birth, and so the social environment constitutes a huge part of our mental and emotional formation. Our emotional systems had to be fluid, flexible, and general; they couldn’t just fasten on one animal or action pattern. But these stretchable emotions probably helped our social evolution as much as language and symbol manipulation ever did.”
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