š July 17 is šŗļø Emoji Day! To š this ever-changing visual language that we use on our š± and š» and across social media, here are five š recommendations — including a delightful post series on a blog about punctuation — on the history and evolution of the emoji. š
1. A Series on Emoji (Keith Houston, August 2018-January 2020, Shady Characters)
Don’t have time to read 10 posts? š Adam Sternbergh’s 2014 New York magazine piece, “š, You’re Speaking Emoji,” covers the emoji’s evolution.
It was into this text-only world that emojiās first true anĀcestor was born. ComĀprisĀing only a colon, a hyĀphen and a closĀing parĀenĀthesis, the emoticon, or :-), was perĀfectly deĀsigned to pierce the disĀinĀterĀested blankĀness of a crt monĀitor. GranĀted, so-called emoticons have been disĀcovered in many pre-diĀgital sources, such as sevĀenĀteenth cenĀtury poems:
Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruĀins, (smilĀing yet:)
Tear me to tatĀters, yet Iāll be
PaĀtient in my neĀcesĀsity.
and tranĀscripĀtions of AbĀraĀham LinĀcolĀnās speeches:
ā¦there is no preĀcedĀent for your beĀing here yourselves, (apĀplause and laughter;) and I ofĀfer, in jusĀtiĀficĀaĀtion of myĀself and you, that I have found nothĀing in the ConĀstiĀtuĀtion against.
but these are alĀmost cerĀtainly tyĀpoĀgraphic misĀsteps rather than inĀtenĀtional smiĀleys. The conĀsensus is that emoticons proper arĀrived in 1982 in reĀsponse to a joke gone wrong on an elecĀtronic bulĀletin board at CarneĀgie MelĀlon UniĀversity.
Blagdon tracks the beginnings of this digital communication through the š of Shigetaka Kurita, the š”šØš» of emoji.
Windows 95 had just launched, and email was taking off in Japan alongside the pager boom. But Kurita says people had a hard time getting used to the new methods of communication. In Japanese, personal letters are long and verbose, full of seasonal greetings and honorific expressions that convey the senderās goodwill to the recipient. The shorter, more casual nature of email lead to a breakdown in communication. āIf someone says Wakarimashita you donāt know whether itās a kind of warm, soft āI understandā or a āyeah, I get itā kind of cool, negative feeling,ā says Kurita. āYou donāt know whatās in the writerās head.ā
Face to face conversation, and even the telephone, let you gauge the other personās mood from vocal cues, and more familiar, longer letters gave people important contextual information. Their absence from these new mediums meant that the promise of digital communication ā being able to stay in closer touch with people ā was being offset by this accompanying increase in miscommunication.
āSo thatās when we thought, if we had something like emoji, we can probably do faces. We already had the experience with the heart symbol, so we thought it was possible.ā ASCII art kaomoji were already around at the time, but they were a pain to enter on a cellphone since they were composed with multiple characters. Kurita was looking for a simpler solution.
And of course emojis are inherently silly, but thatās not in and of itself a bad thing. Silliness is not necessarily an indication of shallowness. In fact, Iād argue the opposite: A capacity for real silliness is usually born out of pain. Weāre attracted to silliness because we need it. We need it because life isnāt easy.
Your mom is sick.
Your grandfather died.
You got laid off.
Your company folded.
Your rent went up.
Your husband left.
He didnāt call.
She didnāt call.
They never call.
All these things happen every day, to billions of people all over the world. And if a stupid cartoon of smiling poop makes you feel better, well, thatās:
Darick [Tong, Google šØš»āš» and šŗšølead of its emoji project]: It struck me as a particularly flexible and effective emoji. It provides a way to say shit or crap in an email without explicitly typing the words, and it catches the readerās attention in a way that smiley faces donāt. Most importantly, it always elicits a smile from the reader and the writer, which is ultimately the purest purpose of emoji: to add emotional expressiveness to written communication.
While it makes sense for emoji to cover the range of the human experience, Bogost āš» that “more specificity means less flexibility,” and that this visual language has shifted away from the abstract. More choices at our š±fingertips changes the way we select and use emoji, viewing them more as š¼ļø rather than š”. “Counterintuitively, all these emoji are less applicable because they contain more information.”
A skull (š) almost never means that the speaker has a braincase in hand, Hamlet-like, but rather offers an ashen reaction or a lol, Iām dead sentiment. An emoji originally designed to signify an Eastern bow of greeting or politesse (šāāļø) takes on the more abstract meaning of mild subjugation or psychic deflation in the West. Fire (š„) could mean a campfire or house fire, but more often it suggests enthusiasm, ferocity, or even spice. Eggplant (š) could denote a nightshade, but more likely it suggests, well, something else. These and other meanings are possible because the emoji function primarily as ideograms.
But as emoji have become more specific in both their appearance and their meaning, their ideographic flexibility has eroded.
Part 2 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads andĀ OPB.Ā
I.
Bill Keebler dumps a sugar packet into his coffee and calmly explains that the government is after him. Theyāre always watching him āĀ constantly surveilling his every move, he says. Heās even at risk here, inside a Dennyās attached to a Flying J truck stop, about a half hour outside Salt Lake City.
Heās also pretty sure that Bundyville producer Ryan Haas and I are federal agents, posing as journalists. āI’m gonna be honest with you, it wouldn’t surprise me if both of you pulled out a badge,ā he says.Ā
Just after 4 p.m. on a frigid February day, Keebler, 60, shuffles toward the back corner table weād staked out for the interview.Ā Heās about a half hour late, uttering his deepest apologies for getting the time wrong. Heās never late, he says.Ā
Keebler is a raspy-voiced Southerner with skin that looks brittle from working in the sun all his life as a horse wrangler, ranch hand, hunting outfitter, and construction worker. At Dennyās heās wearing a sandstone-colored canvas work jacket, and his hair sprouts from underneath a khaki Oath Keepers hat, which covers a shiny bald spot on the top of his head. He smokes a lot. Drinks a lot of coffee.
On the phone a few days before, I told him that Iād read the court documents for his case and was surprised by what I saw. I wanted to hear his version of what happened in June 2016 on the day three years before when Keebler believed he was detonating a bomb at a building owned by the Bureau of Land Management, only to find that the bomb was a fake given to him by undercover FBI agents embedded in his militia group.
The bombing itself was shocking. But the part that surprised me at the time was that, despite having pleaded guilty, serving 25 months in jail, and being released on probation, most of his case was still under federal protective order. Keeblerās attorney told me heās not allowed to say why. Iām at the Dennyās hoping Keebler might be willing to tell me anyway.
In reading about what happened that day in the desert with the bomb, I learned āĀ through the few court documents available ā that Keebler was close friends with LaVoy Finicum. Heās the rancher who was a leader at the Malheur occupation, in Oregon, and was shot and killed by authorities after fleeing from a traffic stop.
But before we can talk about that, weāve got to calm him down. He nudges his head in the direction of a young waiter, walking in a loop around by our table. Under his breath, Keebler says, āWeāre being watched.āĀ
āRight now?ā I ask.Ā
āYeah.āĀ
āBy who?āĀ
āA fed or an informant,ā Keebler says.Ā
Haas asks if he means the Dennyās server, whoās walking by to see if we need any refills on coffee. Thatās the guy, Keebler says.
If thereās so much at risk, why meet us? Why tell your story?
āBecause if I don’t itās going to die with me,ā he says. āIāve been on borrowed time for years.ā He says he survived cancer, a massive heart attack, and āfour heart procedures, looking at a fifth.ā Thatās not to mention the other stuff āĀ things much harder to believe but that Keebler swears up and down are real, like the federally organized hits on him by the gang MS-13 while he was behind bars.
So I assure him: Iām not a fed. Google me. And I tell him heās in control of what he says. If I ask something he doesnāt want to answer, something he thinks might get him in trouble, he doesnāt need to respond. He agrees, and for three hours, Bill Keebler gives his side of what happened leading up to that day in the desert with the bomb āĀ a version of the story in which he is the hero, the government is the enemy, and where America is so rapidly nearing its demise, he can almost taste it.Ā
***
In the three years since the Bundys mobilized a force to take over the Malheur National Wildlife refuge in Oregon, the world has morphed in ways I couldnāt have imagined. For one thing, Donald Trump became the president of the United States. He has increased his attacks on media, stepping up from calling the very newspapers I write for āfake news,ā to neglecting to hold the Saudi Arabian government accountable for putting into motion the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
In June 2019, Trump ā in a meeting at the G20 Summit ā laughed with Russian president Vladimir Putin about journalists. āGet rid of them,ā he said. āFake news is a great term, isnāt it? You donāt have this problem in Russia. We have that problem.ā And Putin responded: āYes, yes. We have it, too. Itās the same.ā They both laughed.Ā
Oft-cited research collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center has shown that since 1996, anti-government activity surged when Democratic presidents were in office. Militia groups that claimed to see proof of tyranny thrived in the 1990s ā specifically when Vicki Weaver and her teenage son were killed during a standoff with federal agents at Ruby Ridge in 1992, and when the feds stormed into the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993.Ā
In President Obama, the anti-government movement saw the embodiment of tyranny: someone upon whom they could project their worst fears. They called him a socialist globalist Muslim who, after ascending to the highest seat of power, would bring Sharia law upon the people. There was no proof or evidence to support this. But that didnāt matter to them.
Under Trump, suddenly, anti-government groups are pro-government. Nearly everything about Trumpās rhetoric āĀ from questioning Obamaās nationality, to draining the swamp of elites, to building a border wall, to pushing for anti-Muslim legislation, to zealous nationalism āĀ is lifted from the anti-government handbook.
āIt blows my mind. The Patriot militia movement, anti-government movement āĀ however you want to refer to them āĀ under Obama was so concerned about tyranny and executive power ⦠and yet theyāve been some of the most vocal advocates for Trump unilaterally grabbing and exerting executive branch power,ā said Sam Jackson, an assistant professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany-SUNY. Jackson researches the militia movement ā he wrote his dissertation on the Oath Keepers.Ā
āIf Obama had talked about declaring a national emergency ⦠they would have been up in arms in a heartbeat,ā he said.
So what gives? How do the anti-government go pro-government?Ā
āIt makes it really hard to take them at their word,ā Jackson told me. āIt really makes it seem like all of that was just rhetoric that they deployed in pursuit of other goals that perhaps they perceived would be less popular amongst the American public āĀ whether thatās Islamophobia or anti-immigration or whatever else theyāre really interested in. It seems like perhaps now theyāre willing to talk about these other things more blatantly than they were in the past.āĀ
***
Bill Keebler tells us he was born in Mississippi and grew up in Georgia the descendant of a long line of military veterans. During the Cold War in the early 1980s, Keebler says he enlisted in the Army and served in Aschaffenburg, Germany. There, he says, he was on the frontlines of the fight against communism. And it was also during this time āĀ he claims āĀ that he placed third in the 1984 World Championships in Kung Fu.
Itās clear that heās not the guy he used to be ā or at least that the person Iām seeing before me at Dennyās isnāt the fighter he is in his head. Keebler claims that, after winning that championship, he created his own style of martial arts, called āJung Shin Wu Kung Fuā before a āboard of masters,ā but the Bundyville team wasnāt able to confirm this.
After years of working on farms and ranches, Keebler found himself in Utah ā far, far from home ā where he worked as a hunting outfitter, trained horses, and says he became a member of the Utah Oath Keepers. Around Tooele County, Utah, he was so well-known as an ardent prepper and varmint hunter that the Salt Lake Tribune ran a story on his coyote hunting skills. In one scene in the story, Keebler crouches in underbrush and wears camouflage that’s been drenched in coyote-urine scent.Ā
In 2011, he was running a hunting outfitting business called Critter Gitter Outfitters and often posted photos on social media of his excursions into the wild. In one, a muscled, tanned Keebler poses with a baby deer heād rescued.Ā
Keebler spends a lot of time on the internet ā has for years. Online, Keebler makes lots of dad jokes and even more jokes where a womanās demise is the punchline. In one video he shared on his Facebook page, a blond woman in a white robe pleads with her husband until he hands her the keys of a black SUV with an oversize bow on the hood. When she starts the car, it explodes, the man smiles, and the words Merry Christmas, Bitch fill the screen.Ā
By 2013, Facebook had become a place for Keebler to vent about Obama ā āI call him O-bummer,ā he told me during one phone call ā where he openly shared his belief in an encyclopedic number of conspiracy theories. āFEMA camps are everywhere, Muslims and illegals are taking over, Obama is the biggest Traitor this country has ever known, No Jobs, 16 trillion in [debt] and no relief in sight,ā he wrote one February morning. āAnyone protesting Obama is assassinated and turned into a monster by our own media.ā
None of this is true āĀ his sources are websites that are notorious for generating fake content. His words dipped in and out of coherence, in and out of overt racism. āOur jobs have all gone over seas to other country’s as they get Fat off our money and we send them aid, weapons and anything else they desire for free. Jets, food what ever they want because we OWE it to them somehow,ā he wrote in one such post. āI have been patient, tolerant and offended too much for any more. I am an American, have lived as I will die as my ancestors did, As A FREE MAN. I speak fucking English and you can press 1 and kiss my ass ya muslim, communist Jackasses! If this offends you then I have succeeded in my intentions.āĀ
He signed off on another post: āStay safe, armed to the teeth, prepared and with God. Bill Keebler.ā
Later that month, he wrote that āSomeday SOON chit is gonna happen and this country will l;iterally EXPLODE, and when it does it will be a very messy situation⦠soon BOOM, we will explode. Hope you are prepared.ā
Keebler hunting coyotes in 2011. (AP Photo/Al Hartmann – The Salt Lake Tribune)
By spring 2014, Keebler seemed to have a new personality altogether. He wrote near-constantly about what to do when SHTF (prepper-speak for āshit hits the fanā). He signed his posts āth3hunt3r.ā He breathed in false information about the Bureau of Land Management killing endangered species and exhaled posts about the hypocrisy of not letting Cliven Bundy graze his cattle.Ā
Much has been written about the algorithms employed by sites like YouTube, which keeps users on the site āĀ generating more and more advertising dollars āĀ by directing them toward more extreme content. Reporters and analysts often reflect on how this affects young people. But the algorithmic drive toward extreme content has taken hold with a much older generation, too, with guys like Keebler. Online, they can fantasize about who theyāll be when the end finally comes. They water their ignorance and hatred at an online trough with others who think just like them.
In April 2014, Keebler sprung into action after seeing a video on Facebook of a confrontation between Bureau of Land Management agents and protesters whoād assembled at the Bundysā side āĀ that video I mentioned way back at the beginning of this story, of Ammon Bundy being tased in the midst of a chaotic confrontation. Keebler loaded up his camper and drove several hours south to Bunkerville, Nevada, where he says he set up a mess hall and provided supplies.
āWell, I made it to the ranch, all is well, getting settled in, been intersting so far, and I aint shot no one, YET! lolā he wrote on his Facebook page on April 10 after he arrived.Ā
Once there, Keebler solicited money online to help pay for supplies. He claims he kept hot tempers under control.Ā
āI stopped some people wanted to shoot people,ā he says to me at the truck stop. āOne of them got mad about it and put a gun in my face. He wanted to start the war. ⦠He said, āI’m gonna fire a shot just to get it started.ā ⦠Things were that close. Volatile.ā
Keebler also takes credit for ejecting Jerad and Amanda Miller ā who would go on to murder two police officers in Las Vegas and die in the midst of a shoot-out with officers inside a Walmart. He claims that if it wasnāt for him, Bundy Ranch would have been a bloodbath. Less than a year later ā according to Keeblerās defense attorneyās presentencing memo ā an undercover FBI agent was embedded in Keeblerās own militia and then began to regularly talk about stepping into action, about blowing up federal agents and federal properties, and scouting a mosque as a potential target alongside Keebler.Ā
And yet, Keebler never kicked that guy out.Ā
II.
After the militias assisted in preventing the BLM from seizing the Bundy familyās cattle, Keebler left feeling excited about the movement. He lived on Bundy Ranch for about two weeks. āTo me it was one of the biggest events in this country ⦠short of the Boston Tea Party,ā he says. āIt was a wake-up call.ā
āAfter the standoff and everything, we had momentum,ā he says, offering his mug to the waiter for a refill. āIt started because Cliven Bundy, but we started a movement that had the potential to be tenfold what it was.ā
When he came back home to Utah, he quit the Oath Keepers. He proudly recounts a story about trading heated words at Bunkerville with the groupās founder, Stewart Rhodes. Keebler claims he asked whether Rhodes would accept āradical Islamic Muslimsā into the group; Rhodes said the Oath Keepers doesnāt discriminate. Back at home, he started his own militia: Patriots Defense Force (PDF).Ā
At the height of its membership, PDF had just seven membersĀ including Keebler. They held āfield training exercisesā where theyād shoot targets. Theyād talk about raising ābackyard meat rabbitsā and chickens, and living off-grid. Mostly, they were a bunch of preppers.Ā
But before PDF was even formed ā even had a name ā the FBI began to monitor him, according to court documents submitted by Keeblerās defense team. They began immediately upon his return home from Bundy Ranch. The Bureau eventually embedded three confidential informants in his militia and three undercover agents, including two men who went by the names Brad Miller and Jake Davis. Miller and DavisĀ ā people Keebler believed to be other God-loving Patriots ā were sworn into PDF in May 2015. Excluding Keebler, the FBI agents, and informants, there were ā at most ā three members of PDF.Ā
According to the defense, one informant was paid $60,000 for his undercover work inside the militia. The stories the FBI agents gave to Keebler must have seemed like he found a gold mine: Davis told stories of his expertise in hand-to-hand combat; Miller positioned himself as an expert in mining and explosives. Another FBI agent played the part of a successful business guy interested in funding a militia.
Unlike all the other times Keebler imagined the government conspiring to snoop on him, this time they actually were ā but he was so focused on the ādeep stateā that he didnāt seem to notice what was happening right in front of his face.Ā
As the FBI surveilled Keebler, he frequently spoke about martial law. āUnder marshal [sic] law, Mr. Keebler expected the federal government to turn against the peopleā¦ā His attorney wrote in his sentencing memo, āHe envisioned house-to-house gun confiscations and the government putting āundesirableā and āunsalvageableā people in FEMA camps.ā
By fall 2015, Keebler was meeting with LaVoy Finicum. Finicum, too, had been excited by what he had encountered at Bundy Ranch: a group of citizens who believed in Cliven Bundyās conspiracy theories about the federal government coming to get him.Ā
Finicum, after seeing Cliven Bundy successfully get away with shirking his grazing costs,Ā had recently violated the terms of his own BLM grazing permit ā accruing fines for grazing his cattle out of season. Finicum spoke to Keebler about fortifying his property in case of a situation likeĀ Bundy Ranch āĀ or maybe even Ruby Ridge or Waco.
āAt the Bundyās we got there after the fact. If we knew it was coming, we could be there prepared,ā Keebler says. Finicum was expecting the same. Heād stopped paying his grazing fees after going to Bundy Ranch and assumed the BLM would come get him, too. āWe were going to stop them from taking the cattle,ā he says. āNow I don’t mean ambush assault and kill and shoot. None of that crap.āĀ
Keebler walks Haas and I through the plan: When the BLM came in, apparently the group planned to dig out the road the agents came in on with a backhoe āĀ making it impossible for them to leave. Miller pushed for the group to instead explode the road, he says. Keebler said that was crazy, and the two traded words over it.Ā
The group, without Finicum, drove toward Mt. Trumbull,Ā where the government says Keebler got his first view of a building owned by the BLM āĀ the remote property that, months later, he aimed to destroy with a bomb.Ā
Over the course of our interview, Keebler mentioned several arguments with Miller. But he always let him stay.Ā
If he was so extreme, such a loose cannon, I had to wonder, why keep him?
Because Miller, Keebler says, paid for gas to go to Arizona to meet with Finicum, and Keebler alleges, even to Washington State for a secret ceremony in which he was inducted into a Coalition of Western States militia by Washington state representative Matt Shea. Read more…
In the lobby of a heavy-stone building in central Moscow, Iām greeted by a friendly young woman in a pantsuit who, she explains, is working āin the field of geopolitics.ā She takes me to the security desk, where my passport is carefully, minutely inspected before Iām granted access. As we head upstairs the woman slowly whispers a joke: āThis is what will save us from the terrorists.ā
We walk down a long, high hallway that looks or bare or unfinished or forgotten, like maybe someone was planning on shutting down this wing of the office but never got around to it. There are linoleum floors, cracking and peeling, and bits of mismatched tile in the style of sixties Americana. Rank-and-file office clerks shuffle through, and no one pays attention to a faint buzzing emanating from somewhere near.
We stop in front of a heavy wooden door. Inside is Aleksandr Dugin.
The man is an ideologue with a convoluted, bizarre, unsettling worldview. He believes the world is divided into two spheres of influence ā sea powers, which he calls Eternal Carthage, and land powers, which he calls Eternal Rome. He believes it has always been so. Today, those spheres are represented by America, the Carthage, and Russia, the Rome. He believes that Carthage and Rome are locked in a forever war that will only end with the destruction of one or the other. Read more…
The roosters started at 4:30 in the pasture behind the inn. On the second crow, I rolled onto my back and blinked at the jalousie windowās slatted light, considering my first day at The Casa. We were allowed to ask three questions, no more. A visit with the worldās most famous spiritual surgeon was like going to see the wizard.
Mariana was silent in the bed next to me, the sleep falling in loose spirals across her face. I pulled back the sheets and slipped inside. āBom dia.ā
āBom dia, meu amor.ā A soft sound from a distant place.
The demonstration tunnel approximately 420 meters underground at Onkalo, a spent nuclear fuel repository in Finland. (Antti Yrjonen/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
āYouāve seen it through a bunch of women who come forward, where people almost police the way they come forward, and how they should be reflecting on their own experience.ā Soraya Roberts
The team discusses The Cutās excerpt of E. Jean Carrollās new memoir What Do We Need Men For?Ā and the way the media handled coverage of this story. The excerpt revealed some of the instances of sexual assault Carroll experienced in her life, including an allegation that Donald Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.
The editors discuss why the New York Times initially buried the story, and how not breaking the story appears to have impacted its coverage. They also question whether where a story is published ā in this case, a womenās website ā impacts how seriously that story is taken.Ā
āAll of us are part of an inequitable system. She just happens to be benefiting from it.ā – Soraya Roberts
The team discusses issues of compensation, access, and privilege in journalism. Longreads culture columnist Soraya Roberts shares her reaction to systemic inequality in an industry where most seasoned, talented writers are lucky to get $0.50 per word ā a small fraction of what a select few of their peers are making. The team questions why Roberts’ attack on a broken system was misinterpreted as an attack on an individual, and weighs the relative benefits of not rocking a media boat that is clearly sinking.Ā
āHow can we be good ancestors?ā – Catherine CusickĀ
In Pacific Standard, Robert MacFarlane visits a Finnish nuclear waste site and explores the difficulty of communicating its danger to future generations in today’s languages or symbology.Ā
Rose Eveleth | Longreads | July 2019 | 12 minutes (2,883 words)
Sarah Howeās early life is mostly a mystery. There are no surviving photographs or sketches of her, so itās impossible to know what she looked like. She may, at one point, have been married, but by 1877 she was single and working as a fortune-teller in Boston. It was a time of boom and invention in the United States. The country was rebuilding after the Civil War, industrial development was starting to take off, and immigration and urbanization were both increasing steadily. Money was flowing freely (to white people anyway), and men and women alike were putting that money into the nationās burgeoning banks. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and in 1879 Thomas Edison created the lightbulb. In between those innovations, Sarah Howe opened the Ladiesā Deposit Company, a bank run by women, for women.Ā
The companyās mission was simple: help white women gain access to the booming world of banking. The bank only accepted deposits from so-called āunprotected females,ā women who did not have a husband or guardian handling their money. These women were largely overlooked by banks who saw them ā and their smaller pots of money ā as a waste of time. In return for their investment, Howe promised incredible results: an 8 percent interest rate. Deposit $100 now, and she promised an additional $96 back by the end of the year. And to sweeten the deal, new depositors got their first three months interest in advance. When skeptics expressed doubts that Howe could really guarantee such high returns, she offered an explanation: The Ladiesā Deposit Company was no ordinary bank, but instead was a charity for women, bankrolled by Quaker philanthropists.Ā
Word of the bank spread quickly among single women ā housekeepers, schoolteachers, widows. Howe, often dressed in the finest clothes, enticed ladies to join, and encouraged them to spread the news among their friends and family. This word-of-mouth marketing strategy worked, Howeās bank gathered investments from across the country in a time before easy long-distance communication. Money came in from Buffalo, Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Washington, all without Howe taking out a single newspaper advertisement. She opened a branch of the bank in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and had plans to add offices in Philadelphia and New York to keep up with the demand. Many of the women who deposited with the Ladiesā Deposit Company reinvested their profits back in the bank, putting their faith, and entire life savings, in Howeās enterprise. All told, the Ladies Deposit would gather at least $250,000 from 800 women ā although historians think far more women were involved. Some estimate that Howe collected more like $500,000, the equivalent of about $13 million today.Ā
It didnāt take long for the press to notice a woman encroaching on a manās space. And not just any woman, a single woman who had once been a fortune-teller! āWho can believe for a moment that this woman, who a few years ago was picking up a living by clairvoyance and fortune-telling, is now the almoner of one of the greatest charities in the country?ā asked the Boston Daily Advertiser. Reporters were particularly put off by their inability to access even the lobby of Howeās bank, turned away at the door for being men. One particularly intrepid reporter, determined to find out what Howeās secret was, returned dressed as a woman to gain entry and more information.Ā
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Then, in 1880, it all came crashing down. On September 25, 1880, the Boston Daily Advertiser began a series of stories that exposed Howeās bank as a fraud. Her 8 percent returns were too good to be true. Howe was operating what we now know as a Ponzi scheme ā 40 years before Ponzi would try his hand at it.Ā
Hereās how it worked: When a new depositor arrived, Howe would use their money to pay out older clients, so the whole scheme required a constant influx of new depositors to pay out the old ones. Like every other Ponzi fraudster, Howeās bank would have eventually run out of new money. The run of stories in the Boston Daily Advertiser instilled enough fear in the bankās investors that they began to withdraw their money, and eventually there was a run on Howeās bank.Ā
Sarah Howe was the most unfathomable and outrageous character: a woman villain.
It took two weeks and five days from the first story published in the Advertiser uncovering Howeās fraud before she was arrested. The press extended her victims a modicum of sympathy, describing their plights while also reminding the reader that they deserved their pain for trusting a woman with their money. āI put every dollar I had into the bank, and if I lose it I am a beggar,ā one depositor told the Boston Globe at the time. āI wanted the interest so badly, that I placed a mortgage on my furniture to secure the principal to deposit. Oh! I wish I hadnāt now, for I shall have my goods sold from under my head,ā said another.Ā
Howe, on the other hand, was spared no remorse. The Boston Herald claimed that Howe was ānearly as deaf as a postā and cross-eyed. Bankerās Magazine described Howe as āshort, fat, very ugly, and so illiterate as to be unable to write an English sentence, or to speak without making shameful blunders.ā This is all untrue, as Howeās own statements to the press before her downfall suggest that, in fact, she had a sharp wit. In response to one newspaperās critique of the Ladiesā Deposit Bank, Howe wrote: āThe fact is, my dear man, you really know nothing of the basis, means or methods on which our affairs are conducted, and when shut up in the meshes of your savings-bank notions, you attempt an exposition of the impossibility of our existence, you boggle and flounder about like a bat in a fly trap.āĀ
Ā Nevertheless, as soon as she was caught, a backstory for Howe emerged in the papers. The Boston Herald published a story with the headline āMrs. Howeās Unsavory Record,ā claiming she was born out of wedlock and ran away at 15 to marry an āIndian physician,ā who they also referred to as āher dark-skinned Othello.ā The paper claimed the marriage caused her mother such distress that she wound up dying in an asylum āraving over the heartlessness of her daughter.ā The story also alleged that she then left her first husband, married two house painters in quick succession, had been in and out of prison, and even tried to lure a young girl into prostitution. Basically none of this can be confirmed by historians, but it didnāt matter. Sarah Howe was the most unfathomable and outrageous character: a woman villain. As historian George Robb writes in his paper about Sarah Howe, āShe had to be ugly, vulgar and immoral.ā The only way her story could make sense to readers was if Howe was some kind of abomination ā a complete outlier both physically and mentally.Ā Ā
Ā āIām sure she was just a normal-looking person,ā Robb told me. āUntil the whole thing unraveled, when people talked about her, no one described her as anything other than an ordinary person.ā But in Victorian-era Boston, the idea that a woman criminal could be an āordinary personā was impossible. āPeople were comfortable with the idea of women as victims,ā Robb told me. āThe men were the crooks, the men were doing the manipulation. The women were the victims. They needed to be protected by other men.āĀ
Howe wound up standing trial in Boston, and was ultimately convicted (although not of fraud, but soliciting money under false pretenses ā for claiming that a Quaker charity was backing the venture). She spent three years in prison, and when she got out, in classic scammer fashion, she tried the whole thing again.
āI think thereās a similarity between being a fortune-teller and making money on the stock market, making predictions about the futureā
Next, Howe opened up a new Womanās Bank on West Concord Street in Boston. She kept the scheme going from 1884 to 1886, offering depositors 7 percent interest and gathering at least $50,000, although historians think the number might be far higher. This time, however, Howe was never prosecuted. After being caught and closing down her bank, she gave up the game and returned to fortune-telling and doing astrology readings for 25 cents each. She died in 1892, at the age of 65, no longer wealthy, but still notorious enough to warrant an obituary in the New York Timesthat read: āFor three months she had been living in a boarding and lodging house, carefully keeping from those whom she met the knowledge that she was the notorious Mrs. Howe of Womanās Bank memory.āĀ
***
Sarah Howe was, in some ways, a product of her time. In the late 1800s, the United States was moving out of a period marked by āfree banks,ā in which there were very limited rules governing banks, and into a system of national banking more familiar to us today. Money was flowing into the economy, and financial advisers were telling their clients to put their cash in banks that were now more stable than they had been in the past. This advice was often targeted at women, who couldnāt use their money to, say, start their own endeavors. But they could put their money in stocks and banks, and many of them did. In fact, during that time, women were often the majority of depositors and shareholders.
But there were very few regulations on banks. The stock market was relatively new. For women like Howe, it presented an unregulated place where money was changing hands purely on the basis of confidence. And as a fortune-teller, Howe had plenty. āI think thereās a similarity between being a fortune-teller and making money on the stock market, making predictions about the future, and getting people to believe that you know something about how the trends are going to play,ā Robb said.Ā
At the time there was little fear when it came to watchdogs or regulators. Howe could start her own bank with no real procedure or oversight. āAnybody could form a bank!ā Robb said, āIf you could get people to give you money you could call it a bank. You advertise, you rent a fancy office space, people come and give you money. It was amazing how much money you could make before anybody caught you.ā As much as people love to point fingers at Howe, very rarely do people consider the complete lack of oversight that allowed her to prey upon these women. āItās so much easier to pick individual villains and say, āOh itās these nasty scheming people who are the problem, the capitalist system can do no wrong, itās perfect and self-regulating and we donāt want to mess with that. Itās these individual crooks that are the problem.āāĀ
***
In spite of her crimes, Sarah Howe is not a household name. Itās not called a Howe scheme after all, itās a Ponzi scheme. When Howe is mentioned at all, it’s as a punchline.Ā She’s forever stuck as a historical fun fact. āSheās become an anecdote in history, but she should be as famous or more famous than Ponzi,ā historian Robyn Hulsart told me. āThereās nothing about what she did that doesnāt fit the definition of a Ponzi scheme.ā (In fact, Howe wasnāt even the first to execute this type of scam. At least two other women pulled off Ponzi schemes before her ā one in Berlin, the other in Madrid.)Ā
Itās become popular now to say that weāre living through the golden era of the scammer. “We’re living in a scammer’s paradise,” Sarah Jeong told Willamette Week recently about our current era, “not just economic scams, but intellectual scams, too.” Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey, Fyre Fest, Ailey OāToole, Jennifer Lee, Anna March ā the list is long enough that everybody from WIRED toThe Cut called 2018 āthe year of the scam.ā As the United States recovers from the fraud that was that housing market bubble, weāre in another era of deregulation. President Donald Trump and the Republican run Senate, have gone on what has been called a āderegulation spree,āĀ increasing the cap at which banks become subject to more stringent rules from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion. Robb pointed out that we never seem to actually learn. āWhenever thereās a big boom cycle in the economy everybody screams to deregulate,ā he told me, and with deregulation comes increased risk for frauds like Howeās.Ā
Howeās case also demonstrates a struggle in feminist circles that persists today: How do you balance the desire to celebrate women with the need to hold bad behavior accountable?
Howeās legacy could and should be one that we can learn from today in the so-called era of the scam. Howeās success was one that tells us something not just about fraud, but about economics and the conditions under which fraud can blossom into a $17 million scam. Howe was aided and abetted by the economic conditions, but she was also a wizard at her craft. What Howe mastered, beyond the Ponzi scheme, is what experts call an āaffinity fraudā ā going after a group of people who have something in common, and most often who the scammer has something in common with too. As an āunprotectedā woman herself, Howe understood what might appeal to her clientele. She decorated the bank to create a mood and aesthetic that would appeal to her ideal mark. The Advertiser described the Ladiesā Deposit Bank this way: āThe furniture, of which there are many pieces, is upholstered in raw silk of old gold figured patterns, and corresponds in tone and design with the walls. ⦠The carpets are of a deep warm tone, and all the ornaments are rich and in good taste.ā She used language that drew women in, talking about her commitment to the āoverworked, ill-paid sisterhood.ā Hulsart points out that itās not unlike the language used by multilevel marketing companies like Mary Kay and Amway, which generally advertise to women throughĀ word of mouth. āThey really like to say things like āweāre in this together,ā Hulsart says.Ā Read more…
It was one of his many takeaway pieces, one of the stacks of paper ā a heavy stack of large, poster-size paper, each printed with the same image ā and the public was invited to take a sheet. I remember Nicole explaining to me how the weight of the stack of paper was the same as GonzĆ”lez-Torresās lover, and slowly, one by one, the stack would be diminished by visitors taking sheets away one at a time. GonzĆ”lez-Torresās lover, who had died of AIDS, as would, eventually, GonzĆ”lez-Torres himself. The stack would wither and diminish but it could be replenished by the museumās curators. Nicole took one of the prints ā I canāt remember what was on it, which image or block of text ā and we moved on.
Don Kulick | Longreads | June 2019 | 14 minutes (3,788 words)
A few months ago, in April 2019, an eyebrow-raising headline appeared in the British newspaper the Guardian: āBotched penis enlargements: Papua New Guinea doctors warn of nationwide problem.ā
The article reported that over the past two years the General Hospital in the countryās capital city, Port Moresby, has treated more than five hundred men whoĀ injected baby oil and other foreign substances into their penises to make them bigger. The medical professionals who sounded the alarm about this practice warned that it seems to be widespread and is a growing threat to menās health throughout the country.
I read this story and sighed. I knew that those doctors were glimpsing only the tip of a ghastly iceberg.
*
Only a few weeks before the Guardian article appeared, I had returned to Gapun, a remote village in an all-but-forgotten corner of Papua New Guinea where I have been doing anthropological research for the past thirty years. The village is much further off the beaten path than any doctor working at Port Moresby General Hospital is likely to have traveled. Getting there from the nearest town can take two days, but this time I made it in a record fourteen hours.
Leaving from the nearest town withĀ my traveling companions ā three health workers from a local NGO ā I rodeĀ in the back of a truck with no shock absorbers on an unpaved road cratered with potholes. For nine hours. At the end of the road we climbed into a flimsy outboard motor-powered canoe, bobbing on ocean waves up the coast before entering an immense mangrove lagoon and, after three hours, arriving at the end of a shallow, narrow creek. From there, we shouldered our bags and trekked for an hour, through viscous mud and clouds of mosquitoes, across slim slippery waterlogged poles that villagers call ābridges.ā
Finally we arrived in the small windless slit in the rainforest that is Gapun; a village with a usual population of about two hundred people. Read more…
Until very recently in its relatively young life, television was considered to have the same creative merit as any other household appliance ā perhaps less, since the device itself was referred to as the āIdiot Boxā and āchewing gum for the eyes.ā Having a passionate debate about television would have been like having a passionate debate about the microwave.
But in her new book, I Like to Watch, Emily Nussbaum, the New Yorkerās Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic, makes the same argument sheās been making, consciously and unconsciously, for 20 years: Television is worth thinking and talking about.
I Like to Watch is a collection of essays that Nussbaum has written, most of them originally for New York magazine and the New Yorker, about television shows that served as cultural touchstones in their time as well as short-lived programs that had more to say than anybody but their loyal fan bases ever realized.
Taken as one, Nussbaumās essays represent her perspectives and experiences traveling through decades of TV shows that were intentionally and unintentionally commenting on the moments they were being created in. Her writing doesnāt necessarily demand that you take her point of view as much as it brings to focus how clearly you could form your own point of view through a deeper examination of the characters, plots, and themes of the shows you love. I Like to Watch is, fundamentally, an argument for television as art. Read more…
The Manic Street Preachers at Castle roundabout, London, 1990. Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images
David EvansĀ |The Holy Bible| Bloomsbury Academic | May 2019 | 17Ā minutes (2.781 words)
Manic Street Preachers never exactly fit in. When they emerged from South Wales with their debut album Generation Terrorists in 1992, their leopard-print outfits, political sloganeering and widdly-woo guitar riffs already seemed out of date amid the musical movements du jour: Madchester, Shoegaze, Grunge. Critics tended to dismiss them as a quirk of pop history, about as relevant to the zeitgeist as that other Welsh throwback, Shakinā Stevens.
But when The Holy Bible came out, in August 1994, it felt more than just anachronistic. Rarely has a major record been so spectacularly out of step with its cultural moment. This, after all, was the year Britpop took off; the year of girls-who-do-boys and boys-who-do-girls; the year of the New Lad and his lairy pursuit of sex and drink; the year a former barrister named Anthony Blair began remaking the Labor Party in his own primped, twinkle-toothed image. The dominant mood was a sort of willed optimism. “Things Can Only Get Better,” as D:Ream helpfully put it.
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