Soraya Roberts | Longreads | July 2019 | 8 minutes (2,101 words)
The original cut of the Veronica Mars pilot had a cold open set to “La Femme d’Argent,” the first track from AIR’s 1998 debut album, Moon Safari. A neon take on noir, the scene has the 17-year-old titular blond (Kristen Bell) alone in her car in the middle of the night outside Camelot, one of her local “cheap motels on the wrong side of town.” Her camera — along with a calculus textbook — sits on the passenger side and her lips are glossed as she watches through the rain-streaked window of her convertible. The silhouette of a couple can be seen having sex in one of the motel rooms.“I’m never getting married,” she says.
Instead of this kick-ass intro — which accompanies the DVD version at least — the series, whenever it airs on television, opens on a brightly lit trio of cheerleaders tearing through a school parking lot to the pop-rock strums of the Wayouts’ “What You Want” (Bite, 1993), also under Veronica’s voice-over: “This is my school. If you go here your parents are either millionaires or your parents work for millionaires.” It’s simple exposition, with none of the mood or the bite of the original, and it sets Veronica Mars up as a teen show with a babe at the center, not the contemporary noir revolving around a precocious P.I. that it actually was. Rob Thomas’s series, which first aired on UPN in 2004, takes a typical sun-kissed California girl, murders her best friend, turns her sheriff dad — and eventually Veronica herself — into an outcast, has her mom abandon them both, and, as if that weren’t enough, has her raped at a class party (the network tried to get rid of that part), then the new sheriff laugh down her report. All of this happens in the pilot, by the way. The whole ordeal turns Veronica into a cynic and ultimately her dad’s sidekick at his newly launched private eye agency.
Every time Thomas sees the actual opening, it breaks his heart, he recently admitted to Vanity Fair. He was proud of his version, but Les Moonves, the chairman and CEO of CBS (owner of UPN), was not into a prologue in which the hottie appears as a hardboiled antihero. “It’s a high school show,” he said, according to Thomas. “It should start in a high school.” But it’s 15 years later and Moonves is out, havingresigned in disgrace amidst a series of sexual misconduct allegations, and there’s a new season of Veronica Mars, this time on Hulu, at the top of which Veronica is back outside a seedy motel, alone. The image of the lone woman is as strong as it ever was. And perhaps it is even more poignant these days as a symbol of transgression in the wake of our collective awareness around men’s control of the world. In this moment, the singular femme represents the possibility of a future without the trappings of the past. She’s less marshmallow than s’more.Read more…
Decades ago, Craig R. Stecyk III tagged the walls near his seedy surf spot at Pacific Ocean Park, then a crumbling pier of abandoned rides and amusement parlors straddling the Venice and Santa Monica border. Among the graffiti were the terms POP and DOGTOWN running horizontally and vertically in a cross, a rat’s head in the skull’s position over crossbones, with the warning, “death to invaders.” At first, these markings were little more -than youthful insolence, meant to stake territorial claim for his band of surfers and skateboarders, many of whom were recently glorified in the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. In the ’70s and ’80s, though, through enterprises like Jeff Ho’s Zephyr Surf Shop, Dogtown Skates and Powell Peralta skateboarding company, these images would become among the first widely disseminated skateboarder graphic art; the first icons of a radical, street-savvy youth culture that reflected the attitudes of Stecyk and his Dogtown peers. Meanwhile, in magazines like Skateboarder and Thrasher, Stecyk’s photos and essays about the scofflaw Z-Boys skateboarding team created and spread the Dogtown myth to eager adolescents across the country.
The small naked figure reclines on the arabesque sofa. Looking at the photograph, it is easy to mistake her for some other Negress, lump her with all the delinquent girls working Lombard Street and Middle Alley, lose sight of her among the surplus colored women in the city, condemn and pity the child whore. Everyone has a different story to share. Fragments of her life are woven with the stories of girls resembling her and girls nothing like her, stories held together by longing, betrayal, lies, and disappointment. The newspaper article confuses her with another girl, gets her name wrong. Photographs of the tenement where she lives regularly appear in the police briefs and the charity reports, but you can barely see her, peering out of the third-floor window. The caption makes no mention of her, noting only the moral hazard of the one-room kitchenette, the foul condition of the toilets, and the noise of the airshaft. The photograph taken of her in the attic studio is the one that is most familiar; it is how the world still remembers her. Had her name been scribbled on the back of the albumen print, there would be at least one fact I could convey with a measure of certainty, one detail that I would not have to guess, one less obstacle in retracing the girl’s path through the streets of the city. Had the photographer or one of the young men assisting him in the studio recorded her name, I might have been able to find her in the 1900 census, or discover if she ever resided at the Shelter for Colored Orphans, or danced on the stage of the Lafayette Theatre, or if she ended up at the Magdalene House when there was nowhere else to go.
Her friends refused to tell the authorities anything; but even they didn’t know how she arrived at the house on the outskirts of the Seventh Ward, or what happened in the studio that afternoon. The Irish housekeeper thought she was the black cook, Old Margaret’s, niece, and, neglecting her work as they were wont to do had wandered from the kitchen to the studio. Old Margaret, no kin to the girl, believed that Mr. Eakins had lured her to the attic with the promise of a few coins, but never said what she feared. The social worker later assigned to the girl’s case never saw the photograph. She blamed the girl’s mother and the slum for all the terrible things that happened and filled in the blanks on the personal history form, never listening for any other answer. Age of first sexual offense was the only question without certain reply.
From these bits and pieces, it has been difficult to know where to begin or even what to call her. The fiction of a proper name would evade the dilemma, not resolve it. It would only postpone the question: Who is she? I suppose I could call her Mattie or Kit or Ethel or Mabel. Any of these names would do and would be the kind of name common to a young colored woman at the beginning of the twentieth century. There are other names reserved for the dark: Sugar Plum, Peaches, Pretty Baby, and Little Bit — names imposed on girls like her that hint at the pleasures afforded by intimate acts performed in rented rooms and dimly lit hallways. And there are the aliases too, the identities slipped on and discarded — a Mrs. quickly affixed to a lover’s name, or one borrowed from a favorite actress to invent a new life, or the protective cover offered by the surname of a maternal grandmother’s dead cousin — all to elude the law, keep your name out of the police register, hold the past at a safe distance, forget what grown men did to girls behind closed doors. The names and the stories rush together. The singular life of this particular girl becomes interwoven with those of other young women who crossed her path, shared her circumstances, danced with her in the chorus, stayed in the room next door in a Harlem tenement, spent sixty days together at the workhouse, and made an errant path through the city. Read more…
Tom Maxwell | Longreads | March 2019 | 20 minutes (3,275 words)
On a blustery winter day in February 1970, Rolling Stone managing editor John Burksentered a New York apartment on East 37th street. “Inside his manager’s neo-turn-of-the-century apartment, on a sofa near the radiant fireplace, sat Jimi Hendrix, in a gentle, almost reticent frame of mind,”Burks wrote. “The light snow had begun to fall. You could see that through the narrow slits where the curtain allowed the merest sliver of daylight and streetscene to penetrate into the gloomy dark room.”
Burks was brought in to provide the centerpiece for a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign: a feature story about the reforming of the original Jimi Hendrix Experience. The group, consisting of Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding, and drummer Mitch Mitchell (both of whom were white) had disbanded the previous autumn. Since then, the rock ‘n’ roll guitar virtuoso had busied himself by befriending other African Americans: Trumpeter Miles Davis, jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and (according to Burks) “living and jamming with an all-purpose crew of musicians — everything from older black gentlemen from the South who played blues guitar, to a band of avant garde jazz/space musicians under the general leadership of a flute player named Juma — and talking about coming up with something new.”
Part 2 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.
I.
Bill Keebler dumps a sugar packet into his coffee and calmly explains that the government is after him. They’re always watching him — constantly surveilling his every move, he says. He’s even at risk here, inside a Denny’s attached to a Flying J truck stop, about a half hour outside Salt Lake City.
He’s also pretty sure that Bundyville producer Ryan Haas and I are federal agents, posing as journalists. “I’m gonna be honest with you, it wouldn’t surprise me if both of you pulled out a badge,” he says.
Just after 4 p.m. on a frigid February day, Keebler, 60, shuffles toward the back corner table we’d staked out for the interview. He’s about a half hour late, uttering his deepest apologies for getting the time wrong. He’s never late, he says.
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 Denny’s he’s 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 I’d 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. Keebler’s attorney told me he’s not allowed to say why. I’m at the Denny’s hoping Keebler might be willing to tell me anyway.
In reading about what happened that day in the desert with the bomb, I learned — through the few court documents available — that Keebler was close friends with LaVoy Finicum. He’s 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, we’ve 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, “We’re being watched.”
“Right now?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“By who?”
“A fed or an informant,” Keebler says.
Haas asks if he means the Denny’s server, who’s walking by to see if we need any refills on coffee. That’s the guy, Keebler says.
If there’s so much at risk, why meet us? Why tell your story?
“Because if I don’t it’s going to die with me,” he says. “I’ve been on borrowed time for years.” He says he survived cancer, a massive heart attack, and “four heart procedures, looking at a fifth.” That’s not to mention the other stuff — 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: I’m not a fed. Google me. And I tell him he’s in control of what he says. If I ask something he doesn’t want to answer, something he thinks might get him in trouble, he doesn’t 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 — 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.
***
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 couldn’t 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 “fake news,” to neglecting to hold the Saudi Arabian government accountable for putting into motion the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
In June 2019, Trump — in a meeting at the G20 Summit — laughed with Russian president Vladimir Putin about journalists. “Get rid of them,” he said. “Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia. We have that problem.” And Putin responded: “Yes, yes. We have it, too. It’s the same.” They both laughed.
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 — 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.
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 didn’t matter to them.
Under Trump, suddenly, anti-government groups are pro-government. Nearly everything about Trump’s rhetoric — from questioning Obama’s nationality, to draining the swamp of elites, to building a border wall, to pushing for anti-Muslim legislation, to zealous nationalism — is lifted from the anti-government handbook.
“It blows my mind. The Patriot militia movement, anti-government movement — however you want to refer to them — under Obama was so concerned about tyranny and executive power … and yet they’ve been some of the most vocal advocates for Trump unilaterally grabbing and exerting executive branch power,” 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 — he wrote his dissertation on the Oath Keepers.
“If Obama had talked about declaring a national emergency … they would have been up in arms in a heartbeat,” he said.
So what gives? How do the anti-government go pro-government?
“It makes it really hard to take them at their word,” Jackson told me. “It 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 — whether that’s Islamophobia or anti-immigration or whatever else they’re really interested in. It seems like perhaps now they’re willing to talk about these other things more blatantly than they were in the past.”
***
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 — he claims — that he placed third in the 1984 World Championships in Kung Fu.
It’s clear that he’s not the guy he used to be — or at least that the person I’m seeing before me at Denny’s isn’t the fighter he is in his head. Keebler claims that, after winning that championship, he created his own style of martial arts, called “Jung Shin Wu Kung Fu” before a “board of masters,” but the Bundyville team wasn’t able to confirm this.
After years of working on farms and ranches, Keebler found himself in Utah — far, far from home — 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.
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 he’d rescued.
Keebler spends a lot of time on the internet — has for years. Online, Keebler makes lots of dad jokes and even more jokes where a woman’s 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.
By 2013, Facebook had become a place for Keebler to vent about Obama — “I call him O-bummer,” he told me during one phone call — where he openly shared his belief in an encyclopedic number of conspiracy theories. “FEMA 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,” he wrote one February morning. “Anyone protesting Obama is assassinated and turned into a monster by our own media.”
None of this is true — 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. “Our 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,” he wrote in one such post. “I 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.”
He signed off on another post: “Stay safe, armed to the teeth, prepared and with God. Bill Keebler.”
Later that month, he wrote that “Someday 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.”
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 “shit hits the fan”). He signed his posts “th3hunt3r.” 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.
Much has been written about the algorithms employed by sites like YouTube, which keeps users on the site — generating more and more advertising dollars — 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 they’ll 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 who’d assembled at the Bundys’ side — 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.
“Well, I made it to the ranch, all is well, getting settled in, been intersting so far, and I aint shot no one, YET! lol” he wrote on his Facebook page on April 10 after he arrived.
Once there, Keebler solicited money online to help pay for supplies. He claims he kept hot tempers under control.
“I stopped some people wanted to shoot people,” he says to me at the truck stop. “One of them got mad about it and put a gun in my face. He wanted to start the war. … He said, ‘I’m gonna fire a shot just to get it started.’ … Things were that close. Volatile.”
Keebler also takes credit for ejecting Jerad and Amanda Miller — 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 wasn’t for him, Bundy Ranch would have been a bloodbath. Less than a year later — according to Keebler’s defense attorney’s presentencing memo — an undercover FBI agent was embedded in Keebler’s 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.
And yet, Keebler never kicked that guy out.
II.
After the militias assisted in preventing the BLM from seizing the Bundy family’s cattle, Keebler left feeling excited about the movement. He lived on Bundy Ranch for about two weeks. “To me it was one of the biggest events in this country … short of the Boston Tea Party,” he says. “It was a wake-up call.”
“After the standoff and everything, we had momentum,” he says, offering his mug to the waiter for a refill. “It started because Cliven Bundy, but we started a movement that had the potential to be tenfold what it was.”
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 group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes. Keebler claims he asked whether Rhodes would accept “radical Islamic Muslims” into the group; Rhodes said the Oath Keepers doesn’t discriminate. Back at home, he started his own militia: Patriots Defense Force (PDF).
At the height of its membership, PDF had just seven members including Keebler. They held “field training exercises” where they’d shoot targets. They’d talk about raising “backyard meat rabbits” and chickens, and living off-grid. Mostly, they were a bunch of preppers.
But before PDF was even formed — even had a name — the FBI began to monitor him, according to court documents submitted by Keebler’s 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 Davis — people Keebler believed to be other God-loving Patriots — were sworn into PDF in May 2015. Excluding Keebler, the FBI agents, and informants, there were — at most — three members of PDF.
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 — but he was so focused on the “deep state” that he didn’t seem to notice what was happening right in front of his face.
As the FBI surveilled Keebler, he frequently spoke about martial law. “Under marshal [sic] law, Mr. Keebler expected the federal government to turn against the people…” His attorney wrote in his sentencing memo, “He envisioned house-to-house gun confiscations and the government putting ‘undesirable’ and ‘unsalvageable’ people in FEMA camps.”
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 Bundy’s conspiracy theories about the federal government coming to get him.
Finicum, after seeing Cliven Bundy successfully get away with shirking his grazing costs, had recently violated the terms of his own BLM grazing permit — accruing fines for grazing his cattle out of season. Finicum spoke to Keebler about fortifying his property in case of a situation likeBundy Ranch — or maybe even Ruby Ridge or Waco.
“At the Bundy’s we got there after the fact. If we knew it was coming, we could be there prepared,” Keebler says. Finicum was expecting the same. He’d stopped paying his grazing fees after going to Bundy Ranch and assumed the BLM would come get him, too. “We were going to stop them from taking the cattle,” he says. “Now I don’t mean ambush assault and kill and shoot. None of that crap.”
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 — 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.
The group, without Finicum, drove toward Mt. Trumbull, where the government says Keebler got his first view of a building owned by the BLM — the remote property that, months later, he aimed to destroy with a bomb.
Over the course of our interview, Keebler mentioned several arguments with Miller. But he always let him stay.
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…
Climate change isn’t a future condition for many Californians. Right now, coastal residents sweep water from their garages. San Francisco tourists slosh through seawater at the Embarcadero. Condemned houses perch above crumbling cliffs in Pacifica, and a solitary sidewalk runs past the space where apartments once stood. So what will the most populous state in the U.S. do to protect the communities, train tracks, and roads that line its coast? For The Los Angeles Times, journalist Rosanna Xia goes deep into this enormous, developing crisis, mapping specific points from Del Mar to Pacifica to understand what’s at stake, and to listen to residents debate what to do. People talk about building bigger seawalls and building beaches with new sand, but each strategy has its limitations and undesirable consequences.
Then there’s what scientists and economists and number-crunching consultants call “managed retreat”: Move back, relocate, essentially cede the land to nature. These words alone have roiled the few cities bold enough to utter them. Mayors have been ousted, planning documents rewritten, campaigns waged over the very thought of turning prime real estate back into dunes and beaches.
Retreat is as un-American as it gets, neighborhood groups declared. To win, California must defend.
But at what cost? Should California become one long wall of concrete against the ocean? Will there still be sandy beaches or surf breaks to cherish in the future, oceanfront homes left to dream about? More than $150 billion in property could be at risk of flooding by 2100 — the economic damage far more devastating than the state’s worst earthquakes and wildfires. Salt marshes, home to shorebirds and endangered species, face extinction. In Southern California alone, two-thirds of beaches could vanish.
The state has both no time and too much time to act, spiraling into paralyzing battles over the why, who, when and how. It’s not too late for Californians to lead the way and plan ahead for sea level rise, experts say, if only there is the will to accept the bigger picture.
Returning after mudslides and wildfire. Rebuilding in flood zones. The human urge to outmatch nature is age-old. We scoff at the fabled frog that boiled to death in a pot of slowly warming water — but refuse to confront the reality of the sea as it pushes deeper into our cities.
Even though its grass surface is alive, and newly planted blooms of campanula, foxglove, and petunia blossom on the grounds, there is something distinctly ancient about Wimbledon, like a fossil that was somehow reanimated.
Wimbledon is keeping up with the times in many ways, technologically, using Hawk-Eye review systems on an increasing number of courts and installing tiny cameras inside the nets for a close-up glimpse at players on Centre Court. The tournament’s lushly designed mobile app and website are the most reliable and innovative in the sport, without ever feeling even remotely flashy or garish.
Still, nowhere in tennis is the past as present as Wimbledon. Matches are played on meticulously manicured grass courts, a throwback to when the sport was known as “lawn tennis.” Players are required to wear white, a rule that the All England Club has made stricter in recent years.
But perhaps most telling of Wimbledon’s archaism is that this year, for the first time, the Championships will pay the same total amount of prize money to men and women.
Yes, this year, 2019; yes, for the first time.
In past years there had been 32 more spots for men to enter Wimbledon’s qualifying event (128) than there were for women (96). This asymmetry may feel minor, but the discrepancy in job opportunities left a noticeable pay gap lingering; in 2018 it was £230,000 (about U.S. $300,000). A similar gap was also closed this year by the Australian Open, but still lingers at the French Open.
There was never a clear rationale for this stubborn remnant inequality, but nor was it anachronistic, At Wimbledon especially, women have often been waiting for equal treatment. And in many ways, culturally, they still are. Read more…
A Midsummer Night's Dream. Illustration by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). (Culture Club / Getty Images)
Alan Scherstuhl | Longreads | July 2019 | 19 minutes (5,080 words)
“Hic sunt dracones,” the 500 year-old Hunt-Lenox globe warns travelers off the coast of southeast Asia: Here be dragons. In the half millenium since that mysterious Euro-centric globe’s construction, dracones have evolved, in the popular imagination, from representatives of a dangerous, fantastical unknown to something like just another of the familiar beasts populating what we might call the Fantasy-Industrial Complex. Through big-budget TV and movies, video and pen-and-paper games, and hundreds of novels and short stories each year, fantasy rules like never before. Dragons reign over much of our pop-culture globe, not just one patch.
Diverse and often self-reflexive, today’s fantasy fiction varies wildly in quality and approach. Writers like N.K. Jemisin (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms), Sofia Samatar (A Stranger in Olondria), Ann Leckie (The Raven Tower), Kameron Hurley (The Mirror Empire), Seth Dickinson (The Traitor Baru Cormorant), Marlon James (Black Leopard, Red Wolf), Steven Erikson (the Malazan Book of the Fallen series), and many more have in recent years spun dazzling, forward-thinking variations on a genre that has at times been accused of wallowing in repetitive stories, simplistic good-versus-evil conflicts, and an inherent conservatism.
Now, with the publication of The Big Book of Classic Fantasy(Vintage), anthologists Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (she’s a Hugo Award-winning editor; he’s the bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy; and together they’ve edited The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Weird, and other collections) are declaring that fantasy has always been weird and wild, thoughtful and delightful. The Big Book covers a diverse array of fantasy fiction from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of World War II. It opens with a German fairy tale (Bettina von Armin’s “The Queen’s Son”) about a queen whose son, immediately upon sliding from the womb, is stolen by a she-bear; it closes, fittingly, with J.R.R. Tolkien, whose tale “Leaf by Niggle” concerns nothing less than an artist’s act of world-making. The almost 800 pages between these offer almost 90 stories from around the world, from the expected writers of fantasy (Fritz Lieber, Robert E. Howard, Lord Dunsany, L. Frank Baum), many unexpected fantasists (Zora Neal Hurston, E.M. Forester, W.E.B Du Bois, Edith Wharton), and a host of surprises from lesser-known writers. The Vandermeers approach is expansive. Half the stories in The Big Book are works in translation; fourteen have never before been published in English; few concern monster-slaying. Read more…
On March 21, the Amherst-Pelham Regional School District and Massachusetts Correctional Industries (MassCor) inked a contract that set up prisoners at MCI-Norfolk to reupholster the 1,105 badly worn auditorium seats at Amherst Regional High and Middle Schools, between April and June of this year, to the tune of $101,800.
The auditorium seats needed to be repaired, the district budget was limited, and using prison labor cut costs.
(For more on this investigative story by a high school newspaper, read this overview from The Marshall Project.)
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