Search Results for: mars

Nothing But Time and Tides and Salt and Mud and Warren Ellis

The Red Sands Maunsell sea fort in the Thames estuary, off the north coast of Kent. Photo by Russss via Flickr (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Graphic novelist Warren Ellis, of Transmetropolitan and Planetary fame, has a chapter in the new book Spirits of Place dedicated to the place where he lives: the Thames Estuary. It’s home to the Maunsell Sea Forts and the S.S. Richard Montgomery, a ship that sank in 1944 with cargo of thousands of pounds of undetonated ordinance; home to areas with Harry Potter-esque names like “Mucking Marshes” and “Foulness”; home to Viking settlements and pirate radio stations. Once described by 8th century Mercian King Offa as “a terrible place,” it’s an odd, out-of-the-way part of the world.

Even in the Eighties, R&B bands ruled Southend. I’d go some nights to an underground space between a bar, which would be rammed with bodies dancing to standards – this was the decadent point in the period, where a lot of bands were just playing stuff you knew from the Blues Brothers soundtrack album. And I’d stagger outside at some point for air or a cigarette or whatever, and the side door to the steps would open, and a plume of steam would belch out and rise up into the night, and I could pretend that I was in a real place, a real city with real history and culture where that happened a thousand times a night, every night.

Some nights, people would just stand around and watch that pillar of air and heat and sweat and kisses rise into the sky.

For a space that’s been close to a blank slate for as long as it’s been here – nothing but forest, settlements stuck to coasts and creeks – even an appropriated identity is an improvement. And not unsuitable for an island that’s barely even there and a delta that probably isn’t.

It’s his part of the world, though.

I live out here on the Thames Delta, still, a ten-minute walk from the shore. It’s a placeless place that tells stories about itself because it’s rarely existed in a dense enough form to generate its own history. It’s nothing but time and tides and salt and mud, and sometimes the mud reflects the sky and you just can’t see anything.

I tell stories for a living. I sit by the rivers and creeks with the ghosts of my ancestors, the Viking priests and dead writers and cunning folk, and I see the water run by and count the tides. We launch futures from here, but here we stay, as time flows by and the sea becomes the sky and a ship full of bombs ticks away.

Read the chapter

Taming the Great American Desert

A cowboy wearing chaps stands on Grandeur Point, East Rim Drive, overlooking the Grand Canyon, c. 1935. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

John F. Ross | The Promise of the Grand Canyon | Viking | July 2018 | 24 minutes (6,540 words)

In April 1877, the normally staid proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ annual meeting in Washington took a dramatic turn. For two weeks, members had listened to the nation’s most distinguished scientists speak on topics ranging from lunar theory to the structures of organic acids. Members enjoyed “Results of Deep Sea Dredging,” by the son of the recently deceased scientist Louis Agassiz. The Academy had invited G. K. Gilbert to deliver a paper, “On the Structure of the Henry Mountains,” so named in honor of the Academy’s president by Powell’s survey. On the final day, the geologists took the floor, whereupon erupted a furious discussion of the American West. The rub lay between those who studied the fossils and those who examined the rock strata, each drawing wildly different conclusions about the age of their subjects.

Such was the fervor of the discussion that the geologists soon jumped to their feet in animation and anger. “[W]hat they might do if they once went fairly on the rampage, it is impossible to say,” wrote one correspondent. Hayden rose to argue that no great degree of difference existed between the two sides, but others immediately shouted him down.

Yet while the rather scholarly debates over dating and provenance might animate the geologists, that day would be remembered not for these petty theatrics, but for an address Powell delivered. In it, the Major stepped away from the fields of geology and out of academic realms to address a topic that pressed right to the heart of American democracy. During the Townsend Hearings three years earlier, he had raised the issue of the West’s extreme aridity and the difficulty of irrigating much of it — but he had thought a lot more about it since then, and the map he now unrolled in front of America’s top scientists carried startling implications. He had bisected the map of the nation from Mexico to Canada with a vertical line rising from central Texas up through Kansas, east of Nebraska, and through Minnesota, roughly approximating the 100th meridian. At this line the arid West begins with startling consistency, the tall prairie grass cedes to short grass and less fertile soils. Trees appear rarely west of the line, except at high altitudes and in the Pacific Northwest, while forests dominate the east: The 100th meridian elegantly divides two separate lands, one composed of wide horizontal vistas, so much of the other defined by its vertical prospects.

The land west of the 100th meridian, Powell announced, could not support conventional agriculture. Surprise met this bold statement, for the line clearly indicated that much of the great plains — including all of Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, plus Arizona and New Mexico — was essentially unfarmable. Here was the professor at his best: clear, authoritative, dramatic. He had everyone’s attention.

Powell had drawn an isohyet, a line connecting areas that experience equal volumes of annual rainfall. The relatively humid lands to the east of this line experience twenty or more inches of annual rainfall, the unquestionably arid lands to the west receiving less than that, except some narrow strips on the Pacific coast. The twenty-inch isohyet offered a valuable generalization — conventional agriculture simply could not work without twenty or more inches a year, unless supplemented by irrigation. Except for some lands offering timber or pasturage, the far greater part of the land west of the line was by itself essentially not farmable. Access to the transformative powers of water, not the availability of plots of land, proved a far more valuable commodity. By now, any land through which streams passed had all been acquired, some of these owners charging those less fortunate for irrigation water. “All the good public lands fit for settlement are sold,” Powell warned. “There is not left unsold in the whole United States land which a poor man could turn into a farm enough to make one average county in Wisconsin.”

Much of what Powell reported was not exactly new, but no one had presented the data so comprehensively and convincingly — and not anyone so famous as the Major. Few, of course, doubted the region’s aridity. But in one powerful moment, Powell had claimed that the nation’s traditional system of land use and development — and thus America’s present push west — simply would not work. The debate that Powell provoked that late April day drew immediate and blistering response. The land agent for the Northern Pacific Railway, itself the beneficiary of a government grant of nearly four million acres, hammered back at Powell’s “grave errors.” “[P]ractical farmers, by actual occupancy and cultivation, have demonstrated that a very considerable part of this ‘arid’ region, declared by Major Powell as ‘entirely unfit for use as farming lands,’ is, in fact, unexcelled for agricultural purposes.” Others responded similarly. Powell clearly had touched a raw nerve. Over the next several years, he would have much more to say on the matter, igniting a veritable firestorm. While the other surveyors limited themselves to covering as much ground as possible, Powell now wrestled with the startling implications for the ongoing development of the West — and what that meant for the American democracy he had fought so hard to save.

***

For most of the first half of the 19th century, eastern America’s conception of the western portion of North America could be spelled out in three words: Great American Desert. That originated during the Long Expedition of 1819, when President James Monroe directed his secretary of war to send Stephen H. Long of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers with a small complement of soldiers and civilian scientists on a western reconnaissance. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had just negotiated a treaty with Spain that ceded Florida to the United States and drew a border between the two countries running across the Sabine River in Texas, west along the Red and Arkansas rivers, and all the way to the Pacific. Eager to know more about the border and the new western territory, Monroe had the secretary of war direct Long to follow the Platte River up to the Rocky Mountains, then trace south and back east along the new border.

The energetic New Hampshire–born West Pointer envisioned himself the successor to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark — indeed, over the course of five expeditions, he would cover 26,000 miles, and mount the first steamboat exploration up the Missouri into Louisiana Purchase territory. His name would grace the peak that Powell was first to climb. On this expedition, Long split his group into two, sending one party along the Arkansas while he with the rest headed south to chart the Red River. Long’s men, often parched and starving, battled a violent hailstorm, sometimes resorted to eating their horses, and negotiated their way past a band of Kiowa-Apaches. But the maps they carried were so atrociously inaccurate that the river they followed for weeks was not the Red at all.

***

Three years after Long’s party returned home, expedition member Edwin James published the three-volume Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains. Long’s ordeal imbued him with little affection for the “dreary plains” they had traversed. The Great Plains from Nebraska to Oklahoma he found were “wholly unfit for cultivation and of course uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture.” He added: “The traveler who shall at any time have traversed its desolate sands, will, we think, join us in the wish that this region may forever remain the unmolested haunt of the native hunter, the bison, the jackall.” The accompanying map labeled the area a “Great Desert,” terminology that soon fully flowered into the “Great American Desert,” a colorful appellation that would stick to the indefinable sections of the West for the next generation. Long believed that this desert wilderness served as a natural limitation on American western settlement, acting as an important buffer against the Mexican, British, and Russians, who claimed the western lands beyond. That compelling assertion seemed to resonate in the public imagination, locking into place the notion of a vast desert dominating the nation’s western midsection. “When I was a schoolboy,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge in 1877, “my map of the United States showed between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains a long and broad white blotch, upon which was printed in small capitals THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT — UNEXPLORED.

Even though some early trappers and mountain men had brought back word of a land often far from desertlike, the idea persisted. In 1844, when U.S. naval officer Charles Wilkes published his five-volume Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, it included a map of upper California. Inland from the well-detailed Pacific coast lay the Sierra Nevada, while the front range of the Rockies marked the map’s eastward extension. In between the ranges lay a vast, wedge-shaped blank space, without a single physical feature delineated. Unable to leave such a realm blank without remark, Wilkes had inserted a simple paragraph reading “This Plain is a waste of Sand. . . .” Like the sea monsters inhabiting the unknown sections of medieval maps, he — like Long — had condemned the entire region, the dead space not even worthy of a second look. Eleven years later, a Corps of Topographical Engineers map had sought to add additional detail, but could only insert a tenuous dotted line that indicated some cartographer’s wild guess about the Colorado River’s course.

Cracks started appearing in the notion of a Great American Desert during the early 1840s expeditions of Charles Frémont, son-in-law of that powerful advocate of Manifest Destiny, Senator Thomas Benton. With his backing, Frémont led both a four-month survey of the newly blazed Oregon Trail in 1841 and an audacious fourteen-month, 6,475-mile circuit of the West, beginning in 1843. Frémont’s subsequent reports combined a deft mix of hair-raising adventure with scientific discovery, thrilling its readers with images of guide Kit Carson and the so-called Pathfinder himself running up a flag atop a vertiginous Rocky Mountain peak. The maps accompanying the reports furnished emigrants with an accurate road map for the journeys that thousands would take west in the 1840s and 1850s. Frémont’s reports indicated that the intercontinental west certainly contained stretches of truly arid land, but that it was no unbroken Sahara. Yet even so, the pioneers and gold seekers understood that great opportunities lay not in this parched region, but beyond, at the end of the trails, in Oregon and California. Most of the West still remained no more than a place to get across.

In the late 1850s, a rather startling shift had turned the idea of the Great American Desert on its head. “These great Plains are not deserts,” wrote William Gilpin in a late 1857 edition of the National Intelligencer, “but the opposite, and are the cardinal basis of the future empire of commerce and industry now erecting itself upon the North American Continent.” Gilpin, the electric-tongued son of a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker paper merchant, would do more than any other single individual to persuade his fellow citizens that America’s great midsection was a garden only waiting to be plowed. Whereas the term Manifest Destiny had been coined as a justification for conquering great swaths of the continent at gunpoint, Gilpin transformed it into a more wholesome interpretation that pulled peoples across the nation. It also had the weight of the Enlightenment’s commandment, articulated by philosopher John Locke that God and reason commanded humans to subdue the earth and improve it. As Civil War soldiers returned home, all America could climb on board with Gilpin’s fantastical promises, any threatening idea of a great desert now disregarded. He had given America what it most wanted to hear: the promise that its growth was unlimited, its western lands a never-ending buffet of opportunity and growth, limited only by a lack of imagination and courage.

Gilpin had impressive credentials: Not only had he joined Frémont and Kit Carson on their expedition to Oregon in 1843, but as an army officer he had fought the Seminoles in Florida, served as a major in the First Missouri Volunteers during the Mexican War, and marched against the Comanche to keep the Santa Fe Trail open. A columnist for the Kansas City Star observed that “his enthusiasm over the future of the West was almost without limitation.” He became a disciple of Alexander von Humboldt, the great German geographer, who published the early volumes of his Cosmos in the late 1840s, elaborating the thesis that geography, climate, and biota incontrovertibly shaped the growth of human society. Gilpin pressed the Humboldtian idea that much of North America lay within an Isothermal Zodiac, a belt some thirty degrees wide running across the Northern Hemisphere, which contained climatic conditions ideal for human civilization to blossom. Herein lay the justification for Gilpin’s remarkable, if fanciful, theory that rationalized American exceptionalism. In three letters to the National Intelligencer in the late 1850s, later developed into an influential book, Gilpin outlined how North America’s convex shape had determined its grand destiny. The Mississippi Valley drained the bowl that was defined by the Appalachians to the east and the Sierra Nevada and Rockies to the west. By contrast, the Alps of Europe and the Himalayas of Asia rose in the center of their continents, forming insurmountable barriers to any continental unity. The geographical realities of Europe and Asia broke them up into small states and away from common centers, forcing upon them a history of unending warfare. North America, Gilpin grandly declaimed, had a national, unified personality. Thus endowed with a centripetal, unifying geography that encouraged a single language, the easy exchange of ideas, and favored the emergence of a continental power, North America stood ready to achieve world primacy.

Gilpin claimed that America would fulfill its destiny in the so-called Plateau of North America, the region between the main Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, “the most attractive, the most wonderful, and the most powerful department of their continent, of their country, and of the whole area of the globe.” Here Gilpin shone at his most incandescent, piling sheer fantasy built on pseudo-science and hope ever higher. As the war ended, most Americans had embraced the West as an untapped Eden, not as the barren edge bounding the American nation, but as the very place in which it would fulfill its national destiny.

Certainly, other forces supported such a change of heart about the West. The railroads — America’s most visible instrument of Manifest Destiny — adopted such sentiments with enthusiasm. To encourage the largely authentic, nation-building efforts of the railroad companies, the federal government bestowed vast swaths of public land abutting their tracks onto these rising great powers, many now laying track furiously across the continent. Their long-term interests hinged on the high value of the land they penetrated. The West as garden, rather than desert, suited their ambitions far better, and railroad publicists rolled out a relentless tide of promotional material. Utah was a promised land, proclaimed the Rio Grande and Western Railroad. “You can lay track through the Garden of Eden,” said Great Northern Railroad’s founder J. J. Hill, “[b]ut why bother if the only inhabitants are Adam and Eve?”

A new, supposedly scientific, idea arose to support the vision of productive dryland farming. The “rain follows the plow” theory became chaplain of the western movement. Simply cultivating the arid soil, this theory postulated, will bring about permanent changes in the local climate, turning it more humid and thus favorable to crops. The climatologist Cyrus Thomas, who had founded the Illinois Natural History Society that had given Powell his chance, became one of the theory’s strongest advocates. “Since the territory [of Colorado] has begun to be settled, towns and cities built up, farms cultivated, mines opened, and road made and travelled, there has been a gradual increase in moisture . . . ,” he wrote. “I therefore give it as my firm conviction that this increase is of a permanent nature.” Hayden, along with many other national personalities, endorsed this intoxicating, but deeply flawed theory.

In 1846, Gilpin addressed the U.S. Senate, asserting that “progress is God” and that the “destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean . . . to change darkness into light and confirm the destiny of the human race. . . . Divine task! Immortal mission!” Even at a time lit up by fiery eloquence, Gilpin stood out, his giddy pronouncements seismic in their appeal, emotionally resonate, wrapped in morality, and nationalistic in self-praise. Few could resist so powerful an appeal. And few did.

Gilpin and Powell had met at least once, in Denver City, on the Major’s first trip west in 1867. The ex-governor had probably waxed about the great promise of the West, perhaps even suggested that the Colorado River lay open to exploration. No record exists of their conversation, but Powell did not seek out his help or opinions after that. The Major found himself more comfortable with William Byers’s gritty practicality.

Indeed, Powell had no truck with the “rain follows the plow” theory. He believed that the Southwest was indeed a desert, one that could be cultivated, but only with the careful marshaling of the limited resource of water. Powell’s urging for caution solicited widespread groans and charges that he was backward-looking. That summer, he quietly ordered his senior investigators west to establish data on irrigation practices. Ostensibly traveling to northern Utah to classify land, Gilbert would examine Mormon water-delivery technology in the Great Salt Lake drainage area. Dutton would continue his geologic studies on the Colorado Plateau, but take some time off to survey irrigable lands in the Sevier River Valley and measure the river’s flow.

***

On March 8, 1878, Representative John Atkins of Tennessee, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, introduced a resolution that called for the secretary of the interior to submit a report summarizing the operations, expenses, and overlaps of the work conducted by geological and geographical surveys over the past ten years. During the consequent hearings, Wheeler, Hayden, and Powell testified about their surveys.

Powell’s young secretary would recall how Wheeler appeared dignified but aloof in his testimony. Hayden came on like a freight train, bitter and at length. He immodestly championed his work above the others and claimed that no duplication among the surveys had occurred. Once Hayden had finally finished his statement, the exhausted committee turned to Powell. In silence, the room of congressmen and a large assembled audience waited as Powell paced back and forth in the chamber, his stump clasped behind his back. All expected an impassioned speech denouncing Hayden’s claims one by one. But Powell ignored the earlier testimony. He gave a calm, even-keeled appraisal of his own work, applauded the achievements of the others, and then contended that much overlap between the surveys had occurred. Soon the entire committee was following his every word. “It was plain to see,” noted his assistant, “that the day was won.”

But even the ascendency he gained at the congressional hearings did not satisfy Powell. Never one to sit back, he prepared to make the riskiest, most brazen gamble of his career — even eclipsing the decision to run the Colorado. One of his greatest intrinsic strengths lay in realizing that opportunity so often arises out of good timing. The timing now — with the survey consolidation in full press and congressional discussion bubbling away— offered an optimal chance to take hold of the narrative and change its course. The report he would release was nothing less than explosive. He would reach far beyond his own survey work, indeed push so far beyond the bounds of a federal bureaucrat as to astound observers, seeming to shoulder the whole American experiment and bear it westward.

While Hayden and Wheeler conducted their fieldwork during the summer of 1877, Powell had stayed home, working assiduously on a document that built on the ideas he had presented to the National Academy of Sciences the year before. His Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, delivered to Interior Secretary Schurz on April 1, 1878, would be monumental and astonishing, and, in the words of a respected mid-twentieth-century historian, “[o]ne of the most remarkable books ever written by an American.” Starting with Charles A. Schott’s meteorological observations, buttressed by Gilbert’s and Dutton’s ground measurements of water requirements necessary for irrigation, Powell presented a formal, prescriptive plan for developing the West. In this report he integrated a lifetime of thought and observation, ranging from his childhood experiences in the Wisconsin grain fields to his close study of Mormon irrigation techniques, and informed by the network of ancient Pueblo canals and customs of Mexican water sharing. The thousands of miles he had walked, ridden, and climbed in the West keenly but invisibly shaped the document. At its core lay the realization battered into him on his first journey down the Colorado about humanity’s impermanence in the face of geologic time and how the Earth remained in a continual state of flux. It was more manifesto than scientific report, many of its conclusions based on incomplete evidence, much of the data hardly better than educated guesses.

Yet the conclusions have since proved ecologically sound and indeed remarkably spot-on. The report opened with a lengthy appraisal of the topography of the American West, including estimates of the amount of potentially irrigable land, timberland, and pasturage, before launching into a full-frontal assault on the current land-grant system, still rooted in the 1862 Homestead Act’s stipulation that any American adult could receive 160 acres, contingent upon demonstrating an ability to live on the land and improve it. While that system might work well in Wisconsin or Illinois, Powell argued, the arid West could not successfully support 160-acre homesteading. Those westgoers flocking into the arid lands beyond the 100th meridian would see their dreams dashed by spindly crops. Powell had directly contradicted Gilpin’s soaring promises. America could not have everything it wanted.

Powell’s recommendations focused first on classifying lands, then directing their use accordingly: Low-lying lands near water that were west of the 100th meridian should be available in 80-acre lots, while water-limited areas should be parceled into 2,560-acre units for pasturage. High mountain tracts under an abundance of timber should be made available to lumbermen.

He did not deny that drylands could be redeemed, but the limiting factor, as he noted before, was water. Irrigation could “perennially yield bountiful crops,” but the West contained few small streams that could be diverted by canal to fields, and those available were already being exploited to the limit in Utah and Arizona. Such large rivers as the Colorado ran through deep chasms and hostile ground, mostly far from any potential cropland. Only “extensive and comprehensive” actions — dams and distribution systems — could deliver the water, and only those with the means to undertake the task — not individual farmers, being poor men — could pursue it. If not carefully planned, wrote Powell, the control of agriculture would fall into the hands of water companies owned by rich men, who would eventually use their considerable power to oppress the people. He painted a truth that still rankles many today who believe in the myth of the rugged, independent westerner. He asserted that the development of the western lands depended not so much on the individual landowner as on the interdiction of the federal government, the only entity that could survey and map the land, build dams and other reclamation projects, administer vast swaths of public lands, oversee federal land grants, and tackle the displacement of the indigenous peoples. The lone cowboy taming the land with lasso and fortitude may fit the myth of the West, but the reality was quite different. Put simply, the West’s aridity required that overall public interest trump that of the individual.

The man who had previously limited himself to describing the topographic and geologic formations of the western lands had now waded directly into populist politics, driven by isohyets and tables of rainfall-per-acre statistics. Powell believed that the very republican dream of the small farmer was at risk under the crushing power of monopolistic interest. Such resistance aligned with his core childhood beliefs. He had seen the local grain operator in Wisconsin abuse powerless farmers with impunity. The stakes, as he saw them, were of the highest order, threatening the country’s very fulfillment. With the Arid Lands report, Powell had taken on not only Hayden and his congressional supporters, Wheeler and the army but also the General Land Office, the railroads, and the likes of William Gilpin — an overwhelming front of entrenched beliefs, myths, and nation-building passion, the very patrimony of Manifest Destiny. He had taken a hard shot directly at virtually unchallengeable assumptions about the unlimited wealth of American resources and the bright future of the great West — and also at who would have access to whatever wealth the West had to offer.

Powell saw that arid cultures stood or fell — and mostly fell — not on their absolute amounts of water, but on how equitably political and economic systems divided limited resources — and could evolve in the face of climatic and societal changes. To Powell, the Homestead Act, which imposed an arbitrarily eastern 160-acre parcel regardless of topography, rainfall, nearness to water, altitude, and other critical factors, appeared the height of folly, the blind, reflexive policy of a nation with outsized optimism drunk on the seemingly infinite resources available to it. Above all, he argued that the nation’s trustees needed to listen to the land itself — and respond accordingly.

Two days after Powell submitted his Arid Lands report to Schurz, the interior secretary forwarded it along to the House, which ordered 1,800 copies printed. After exhausting that print run quickly, another 5,000 copies printed afterward disappeared equally fast.

***

The Academy committee incorporated much of Powell’s report into their own, nevertheless watering it down considerably by passing over ethnology and his ideas about engineering the landscape. They recommended that the General Land Office’s surveyor generals, along with the three current federal surveys of Hayden, Wheeler, and Powell, be subsumed under two civilian-run agencies in the Interior Department. All land-measurement operation would fall under the Coast and Interior Survey, while all investigations of geology and natural resources, together with land classification, should fall under a new consolidated geological survey. It also recommended that the president appoint a blue-ribbon commission to investigate public-land laws in order to create a new land-parceling system in the arid West, where traditional homesteading was both impractical and undesirable.

On November 6, 1878, the entire Academy approved the report with only one dissenting vote, that of Marsh’s bitter rival Cope. Powell focused next on the congressional backlash that the Academy’s report would surely elicit. After all, it cut out the War Department—and diminished the power of the General Land Office’s sixteen surveyors general and their contractors. And then, of course, Hayden remained capable of hijacking all Powell’s work.

Powell launched a major lobbying effort, calling upon Newberry and Clarence King in late November to sway congressional opinion away from army management of the surveys. Ten days before the Academy presented its report to Congress on December 2, Powell decided not to seek the directorship of the new consolidated survey that Congress would most likely authorize. His deputy Clarence Dutton had written a friend ten days earlier with news that his boss “renounces all claim or desire or effort to be the head of a united survey.” A close observer much later wrote that “no one episode illustrates more strongly the character of the man—to pass voluntarily to another the cup of his own filling when it was  at his very lips.”

Noble sentiments may have in fact prompted Powell to step aside, but sheer fatigue with the political infighting could also have played a factor. But Powell had also grown shrewd in politics, anticipating full well that as architect of the survey and land-office reform approach, he would feel the wrath of the vested interests. A general awareness that he was seeking to take the directorship might put the whole endeavor at risk. He now carried great ambitions for two mighty unfolding powers—the nation and science—but not comparable ambitions for his own wealth, power, or glory. When fame came, as it had with the descent of the Colorado, he would harness it to help overcome his next challenge, not to leverage into higher speaking fees, a larger house, or political office. His distaste for self-aggrandizement embodied the Wesleyan requirement of modesty. Work done was for God’s glory, not the individual’s. While Powell worshipped at a different altar, his work, not himself, remained the center of his life. But that did not mean he had stopped fighting to get someone installed to carry on the mission of science in good form.

In his eyes, Hayden had come to stand for the culture of Grant-era corruption after the war. Hayden’s often shoddy science, Powell believed, sent the interests of the United States squarely in a damaging direction. Hayden’s ascent to the position of senior federal scientist would doom land-grant reform. With his willingness to play up to senators and his suspect optimism about the unlimited possibilities of the West, Hayden stood flatly in the way of Powell’s struggle to open minds as to what the West actually offered. In this contest, Powell felt that nothing less than democracy lay on the line.

When Congressman James Garfield asked Powell’s opinion of Hayden’s integrity as a scientist, the Major responded blisteringly that Hayden was “a charlatan who has bought his way to fame.” He was a “wretched geologist” who “rambled aimlessly over a region big enough for an empire,” shamelessly attempting to catch the attention of “the wonder-loving populace.”

Nor had Hayden stood idly by when Congress called upon the National Academy for an opinion: “I presume some great plan will be proposed that will obliterate the present order of things,” Hayden wrote a friend, “unless all our friends take hold and help.” In another letter Hayden told Joseph Hooker that “Hon. Abram Hewitt is an enemy of mine. . . . We had a hard time this last session and came near being decapitated. . . . We had to cultivate the good will of over 300 members to counteract the vicious influence of the [Appropriations] Committee.” Hayden had lobbied members of the Academy to keep John Strong Newberry off the committee. Clarence King topped Powell’s list to run a consolidated survey.

King lived in New York, comfortable with seeking his own fortune and happily above the fray as Hayden, Wheeler, and Powell battled it out. He would do little to seek the directorship, but would be only too happy to accept it if offered. On the other side, Hayden launched a forceful letter-lobbying campaign. Unbeknownst to others, he had begun to suffer the effects of syphilis, very likely contracted from his frequenting of prostitutes. The disease, which would kill him nine years later, had already begun to cloud his judgment. His letter writing, however, appeared to be working. Again Powell countered with more lobbying of his own. In early January, Marsh received a letter from Clarence King, letting him know that King felt it was time to submit his credentials for the job.

Hayden still saw Powell as his major competitor, until when—in the middle of January—a friend notified him of Powell’s withdrawal; ten days later, Hayden wrote a friend that “all looks well now.” Of all the national surveyors, Hayden had published the most, had received more appropriations, and had more friends in Congress—and indeed had the bright feather of Yellowstone in his hat. The directorship was his to lose.

In late December, Powell had finished drafting the legislation that Schurz had requested to turn the Academy’s proposals into law. Powell cleverly tied three of the four proposals to appropriations bills, clearly intending to skirt the Public Lands Committee, crowded with western congressmen who would never allow such issues a hearing. Schurz forwarded them to John Atkins, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, as well as to Abram Hewitt, the committee’s most influential member. Both strongly supported the measures. Atkins waited until February 10 to open congressional discussion, whereupon several weeks of vigorous debate ensued. Powell kept at work behind the scenes as a very public debate churned over the role of the federal government in the still largely undefined areas of science. He detailed his staff to bring Garfield books from the Library of Congress so he could cogently draft his position against proposed changes by General Humphreys and the Topographical Engineers.

The former Kansas shoe merchant, Representative Dudley C. Haskell, scoffed at federal dollars going to scientists collecting “bugs and fossils” and creating “bright and beautiful topographical maps that are to be used in the libraries of the rich.” Why would Congress reach into public coffers to pay these dubious scientists exorbitant sums to study the public lands? Other opponents of the Academy’s plan argued that the western public domain embraced much fine agricultural land. The West, the Montana newspaperman Martin Maginnis joyfully expounded, “contains in its rich valleys, in its endless rolling pastures, in its rugged mineral-seamed mountains, traversed by thousands of streams clear as crystal and cold as melting snow, all the elements of comfort, happiness, and prosperity to millions of men.” One congressman after another fumed at anyone so fainthearted as to criticize the extraordinary promise of the West. The “genius of our people,” wrote Representative John H. Baker of Indiana, was that they were “bold, independent, self-reliant, full of energy and intelligence,” who “do not need to rely on the arm of a paternal government to carve out their won fortunes or to develop the undiscovered wealth of the mountains.” Then he came to his real point: “I do not want them in their anxiety to perpetuate those or any other scientific surveys to interfere with our settlers upon the frontier.”

With Powell’s finger marks all over the Academy recommendations—much clearly pulled from his Arid Lands report—he now came under direct fire. Thomas Patterson, a former trial lawyer from Colorado, rose to decry Powell as a dangerous revolutionary, “this charlatan in science and intermeddler in affairs of which he has no proper conception.” Atkins’s proposal, he continued, was the work of one man, and threatened the West and its landed interests with disaster. Should Congress enlarge the land grants for grazing, then baronial estates would soon crowd the plains, an aristocratic few owning lands sufficient for a European principality and crowding out the small farmer upon which the nation depended. Powell must have been galled when the floor debate took this particular twist, especially when he had so consciously dedicated his efforts toward supporting the interests of the small farmer and preventing the aggregation of land and power that Patterson railed against. Patterson himself would go on to buy the Rocky Mountain News, making it a bullhorn for labor rights and the taming of corporate overreach. Indeed both men did not diverge much in their views. But at the heart of the matter lay a considerable foundational debate about who should be shaping the development of agricultural America and how much the government and scientific elite should be involved.

On February 18, 1879, Representative Horace Page of California offered a compromise that agreed to the consolidation of the scientific surveys but made no mention of reforming the land-survey system. Representative Haskell read a letter from a National Academy scientist, which submitted that the Academy debate was actually far more divisive than the one dissenting vote might indicate. The congressman would not reveal the letter’s author, most probably E. D. Cope, the missive a ploy by Hayden’s people to sow doubt about the Academy’s recommendations.

Atkins amended Page’s compromise to include the creation of a commission to investigate the land-grant system. The measure passed 98 to 79. The approved Sundry Bill went to the Senate, where no discussion took place. In the Appropriations Committee, Hayden’s supporters weighed in strongly, the committee amending the bill so that the scientific surveys were consolidated under Hayden, even taking $20,000 from Powell to finish up his work and giving it to Hayden. The bill then passed to conference committee. When it emerged on March 3, the last day of the session, the Senate’s emendations placing Hayden in charge had been cut out, but so had the House reformers’ bid to place all the competing agencies under the Interior Department. The last-minute collection of appropriation bills to keep the government functioning passed and the 45th Congress closed.

Hayden may well have considered this outcome a victory, the Senate indicating its interest in his running the consolidated survey. All he needed now was to take the directorship. But he had  not counted on Powell. The Major did not delay, writing at length to Atkins on March 4, pinning blame on Hayden for negatively influencing the tenor of the congressional discussion by raising false issues solely to advance himself personally. Powell then revealed his deepest concern: The appointment of Hayden would effectively end efforts to reform the system of land surveys. He asked Atkins to approach Schurz and President Hayes to obstruct Hayden’s bid and to sing the praises of King.

Two days later, Powell spoke with the president, Hayes questioning him in particular on Hayden’s methods of securing appropriations. Powell also wrote a lengthy letter to Garfield, furnishing him with a withering analysis of Hayden’s published work. He did not hold back, claiming that Hayden’s mind was utterly untrained and incoherent, leading him to fritter away federal money on work “intended purely for noise and show.” Powell also worked closely with O. C. Marsh, helping to coordinate the flow of letters in support of King. Marsh traveled to Washington and also met with the president.

Cope wrote Schurz in support of Hayden, claiming that “simply shameful” personal grudges had aroused the voices against his friend. As for King, Cope insinuated that his tenure in government service had been sullied by his taking fees from mining enterprises. But Cope’s letter could not stem the tide of questions raised against Hayden. King’s nomination was officially announced on March 20. “My blood was stirred,” wrote Hayden supporter and Brown University president Ezekiel G. Robinson, upon hearing the news. “There must have been some dexterous maneuvering to have brought about a change in the President’s mind.”

The Senate approved King’s nomination with the slightest opposition on April 3. Three days later Marsh wrote Powell, “Now that the battle is won we can go back to pure Science again,” then invited him and Gilbert to present papers to the upcoming National Academy annual meeting. When Powell told King he would be pleased to work for the new United States Geological Survey, King responded exuberantly. “I am more delighted than I can express. Hamlet with Hamlet left [out] is not to my taste. I am sure you will never regret your decision and for my part, it will be one of the greatest pleasures to forward your scientific work and to advance your personal interest.”

King did not last two years on the job.

Waiting in the wings would be John Wesley Powell, who would take over the directorship of the USGS, run it for 13 years, and fundamentally shape the role of science in the federal government.

***

From The Promise of the Grand Canyon by John F. Ross, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2018 by John F. Ross.

The Obsessive Search for the Tasmanian Tiger

Longreads Pick

The fox-like marsupial carnivore known as the Tasmanian Tiger was declared extinct in 1936, but some Australians have dedicated their lives to proving it still lurks in the Tasmanian bush. Don’t compare it to bigfoot. Unlike bigfoot, the tiger was real.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 25, 2018
Length: 26 minutes (6,626 words)

The Daughter as Detective

AP Photo/Heribert Proepper

Alice Bolin | Dead Girls | HarperCollins | June 2018 | 27 minutes (7,414 words)

My parents met as library students at the University of Kentucky in 1979. From my intimate point of view, library school is a bit of an academic catchall, sometimes a plan B, appealing to weirdos of many backgrounds. People assume that librarians love books, but that isn’t even it. University librarians like my parents love flying below the radar, omniscient about university curriculum but not bound by classroom teaching, grading, or even regular students. When she went to library school, my mom was a 25-year-old polyglot, very pretty and shy, who until then had been taking graduate German courses and hanging around Lincoln, Nebraska, listening to the Who. My dad was 32, starting a new career after years of working for the army as an Arabic translator. He is very loud and friendly, bubbly even. Contrary to the stereotype, he is a librarian who is constantly being shushed.

On their first date, he raced up the stairs to her apartment too enthusiastically and fell and broke his arm. He tried to deny that he had injured himself, and they went to a showing of Casablanca. He cradled his arm like a baby in the dark of the movie theater until the pain became too great, and my mom took him to the emergency room. The next day was Labor Day, and no pharmacies were open within walking distance of my dad’s house. He didn’t have a car, so he sheepishly called my mom to ask if she would drive him to get his prescription. She took him back to her house and made him grilled cheese and tomato soup.

The patently adorable and weird quality of their first date seems to have set the tone for their entire relationship. Early on, my dad gave my mom a copy of one of his favorite books: Roseanna, the first in a series of ten mystery novels by Swedish writers Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö that follow the detective Martin Beck. “You’ll find it ironic,” he told her coyly, and she did: the title character, whose murdered corpse washes up on the shores of a Swedish lake, is a librarian in her 20s from Lincoln, Nebraska. My mom was not put off by the implications of this macabre coincidence, and she and my dad are still together now, many decades later. Improbably, my parents’ marriage echoes the Dead Girl story, but with a happy ending.

***

Uncovering the origins of my dad’s Martin Beck obsession has been more of a project than I first anticipated. When I asked how he discovered the books, he first told me that he read about them in a footnote in Robin Winks’s 1969 essay collection The Historian as Detective, a study in the methods and pitfalls of the academic historian, imagining historians as sleuths solving thorny cases. Throughout the book, there are references to actual detective fiction, which my dad used as a syllabus. He talked to me at length about The Historian as Detective, but later was fuzzy on whether Winks had mentioned Sjöwall and Wahlöö at all. He was only certain that it was where he had heard about Robert Hans van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels, historical mysteries about Tang Dynasty China. (The last Judge Dee mystery is called Poets and Murder, a possible alternative title for this book.)

When that lead dried up, he launched into a story from when he was in the army, working a desk job in Charlottesville, Virginia, and, as he told me, “having a lot of fun.” Unexpectedly in 1973, he was called back from vacation and ordered to report to Fort Bragg. The Russians were in danger of joining the Arab-Israeli War, which might require reciprocal action from the United States. Nixon had put all of the 82nd Airborne, of which my dad was nominally a member, on alert. His superiors on the base refused to issue him a uniform because they didn’t know how long he would be staying there. Instead of having him run information in street clothes, they sent him to the library and told him to read whatever he wanted. “I asked them whether they could teach me to jump out of an airplane if we had to go to the Middle East,” he said of his time at Fort Bragg. “They told me, ‘Eh, no problem.’” He read several of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books there, but he was already very familiar with the series, so in the end, they were not very important to that story.

A few days later, he called to tell me he actually first read the Martin Beck books when he was a student at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. He had known he would be drafted and sent to Vietnam, so he joined the army and became an Arabic translator, an ironic way to avoid combat, considering our current geopolitical situation. In Monterey, he said, he had studied stupidly hard and had no fun, but he found a Martin Beck book on a rare trip into town. Later, he emailed me another confounding update: he visited a relative, a man named Jim who he claimed was his father’s “cousin/nephew,” the night Nixon had fired his attorney general. Jim had worked briefly in the Nixon White House, he told me. His stories unfold this way, full of the small, intriguing details that in a novel might work as foreshadowing. “I typically spent the first hour of the workday looking through The Washington Post to see what the latest Nixon news was,” he went on to say before circling back. “I think I was at Jim’s when I got a call instructing me to go to Fort Bragg.”

I have found his stories often share an eccentric focus on what he was reading during his somewhat Forrest Gumpy journey through the 20th century. Once he regaled me with memories of his time as a firefighter in Idaho in the late 1960s, when he lived with an agriculture student who was later a prisoner in the Iran hostage crisis. (Rory Cochrane, the guy who played Lucas in Empire Records, portrayed Dad’s roommate in the movie Argo.) Dad hitchhiked down to Jackson Hole during a day off and got The Twenty-Seventh Wife, Irving Wallace’s biography of Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young’s wife, and Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon from the library. He took issue with my saying in an early version of this essay that he checked out books about the Mormon Trail. “I was more interested in biography than the settler experience,” he wrote me. “I have since read books like Angle of Repose, and taken an interest in TV shows like Deadwood and Hell on Wheels.”

***

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were a pair of Swedish journalists, a married couple who wrote the Martin Beck novels over long nights after their kids were asleep, working on alternate chapters. Their ten novels, released between 1965 and 1975, were an unexpected sensation, popular worldwide and the subjects of dozens of film and TV adaptations. The books are violent, sexually frank, and political, updating the hard-boiled American noir for the liberal Scandinavian 60s. Nearly everyone acknowledges Sjöwall and Wahlöö as the origin point for Nordic noir, a regional genre that has produced international stars like Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and Jo Nesbø. But Sjöwall and Wahlöö didn’t just inspire other Scandinavian writers to embrace the murder mystery: they shaped the genre so completely that all of their descendants bear their eccentricities. The Martin Beck series is bizarre, a fitting starting point for what has become a multimillion-dollar industry selling other bizarre, exasperating books.

The novels follow the melancholy detective Beck and his cohort in the Swedish National  Police’s Homicide Division as they solve cases including a serial sex murderer preying on children, a mass shooting on a bus, a “locked room” mystery involving a corpse decayed beyond recognition, and the assassination of the Swedish prime minister. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books hold very little allegiance to the typical noir that is sparsely written and pessimistic, showing one man against the world. Beck is the putative hero, but in practice, the books are ensemble dramas, shading often into ensemble comedies. His colleagues are annoying misfits, described by their quirks, like the fastidious Fredrik Melander, who has a photographic memory, passionately loves his ugly wife, and spends too much time on the toilet. The series abounds with pairs of hapless bozos whose comedic value is underlined by their alliterative names. Bumbling beat cops named Kristiansson and Kvant wreak havoc at several crime scenes until Kristiansson is tragically killed. After that, Kvant gets a new partner named Kvastmo.

Sjöwall has said she and Wahlöö were influenced by “progressive” crime writers like Dashiell Hammett and Georges Simenon, but they took this progressive imperative rather further. Believing that “people read more mysteries than they do political pamphlets,” they set out to write a Marxist indictment of the failures of the Swedish welfare state disguised as a series of mystery novels. They titled their series “The Story of a Crime”—that is, the crime of a cruel and unequal society. They described their political agenda as “the project,” as if it were a covert mission of infiltration, when it could not have been more obvious. In book after book, the authors include pages-long polemics about the nationalization of the police system, Stockholm’s overdevelopment and the miseries of urban life, and the many demographics that had fallen through society’s cracks. Their political tirades are written in a strident, journalistic tone, fissures where narrative conceit drops out completely. A visit to Beck’s elderly mother becomes an occasion to bemoan (at length) the state of Swedish retirement homes:

Nowadays they were called “pensioners’ homes,” or even “pensioners’ hotels,” to gloss over the fact that in practice most people weren’t there voluntarily, but had quite simply been condemned to it by a so-called Welfare State that no longer wished to know about them. It was a cruel sentence, and the crime was being too old. As a worn-out cog in the social machine, one was dumped on the garbage heap.

My notes from the books are filled with comments like “so didactic” and, more to the point, “why didn’t somebody cut this?”

Critics revisiting Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books now are fawning, using that canonizing method of inverting their weaknesses instead of acknowledging them. A write-up in The Wall Street Journal from 2009 hilariously calls the Martin Beck books “anything but polemical.” Louise France writes in The Guardian that while the action in the books is “often slow,” they are addictive: “You want to block out a week of your life, lie to your boss, and stay in bed, gorging on one after another, as though eating packet upon packet of extra strong mints.” I admit that I don’t recognize the impulse to stay in bed for a week binging on mints, so maybe that’s why I found the experience of reading these slow books a bit slower than France. The sometimes-tedious lack of action in the books is often pointed to as a strength. In his introduction to Roseanna, Henning Mankell writes that “it’s probably one of the first crime novels in which time clearly plays a major role.” Sjöwall echoed this idea recently, saying that “slowness, and the tension that waiting, distance, and irritating gaps in communication create, became an aspect of the books’ realism.” This argument smacks of imitative fallacy to me, but the wonky pacing of the series does point to its redeeming strength: the utter wonkiness and unconventionality of their entire approach.

Roseanna is more wrapped up in Dead Girl genre tropes than the rest of the books. At first, the series seems less a treatise against corrosive changes in Swedish society than a darkly funny and melancholy meditation on the absurdity of Swedish bureaucracy. The novel opens by describing the administrative procedure for dredging the lake that eventually reveals Roseanna’s body: it is unclear who can okay plans for dredging, and papers for it move among agencies, “passed from one perplexed civil servant to another,” a process that takes months. This critique is more existential than political, a mirror for the frustration Martin Beck experiences in his marriage and his career. As a good Dead Girl should, Roseanna haunts and excites Beck, who for a time is unable to identify her. The case consumes him, so that “when he closed his eyes he saw her before him as she looked in the picture, naked and abandoned, with narrow shoulders and her dark hair in a coil across her throat.” Once he identifies Roseanna, though, his image of her is inevitably complicated.

In conversations with her roommate and her boyfriend, back in Nebraska, Beck learns that she was promiscuous and odd, that she looked messy and slept with her friend’s boyfriends. Where Beck thought he had found a Dead Girl, he had, in fact, found an ordinary dead woman.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books at first seem to follow the Dead Girl genre’s usual depiction of female sexuality as sinister and crazy. Women are constantly described as “nymphomaniacs,” including Roseanna and other female victims, seemingly indicating that they have been punished for their insatiability. There are the requisite femmes fatales, many of whom make attempts to seduce Martin Beck, who distractedly rebuffs them—like many noir detectives, Beck is at first little more than a neutered intellect. But especially as the series wears on, we see that many of the regular characters have adventurous and unconventional sex lives, like Beck’s detective friend who lives with his wife only on the weekends and has a girlfriend in Copenhagen. Beck releases himself from his unsatisfying marriage and finds new love with a magnetic and iconoclastic leftist. Unlike most detective series, which rely on the bleakness of their protagonists’ lives, Sjöwall and Wahlöö allowed their detective a journey of enlightenment and redemptive love.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö did not have a conventional relationship either: Wahlöö was married when they met, and Sjöwall was twice divorced. They lived together for 13 years but never legally married. Sjöwall has said that after Wahlöö died, shortly after the publication of the last Martin Beck novel, she was “kind of wild for a while.  With  guys, with pubs.” She has had relationships since then but maintained her independence. “I know many guys,” she said. “Some of them I have been together with for a while, some are just good friends. That is enough for me.” Considering the authors’ lifestyles, the books read as less judgmental of their promiscuous female characters. Despite my skepticism, I’ve come to believe Sjöwall and Wahlöö did what they set out to do: write a series of novels that are truly progressive, or, at least, that have fewer hang-ups.

***

My dad told me he had read the entire Martin Beck series “five or ten times.” “Why?” I asked him. “Because I love them,” he replied. I don’t know why it’s so frustrating that my dad refuses to say or even think about why he likes the things he does, when his preoccupations run so deep and are so consistent. When I ask him why he likes something, it’s a perverse exercise less to gain new insight than to trick him into admitting to his personality. It’s obvious to me why he likes the Martin Beck books. They are exactly the kind of thing he likes!

When I was a kid, the Martin Beck books were everywhere in my house, old duplicate copies my dad bought at garage sales and used-book stores, leering out at me with their incendiary titles: Cop Killer. The Terrorists. I had never read them until I began working on this book, when I read all of them over the course of several trying months, capping off that experience by reading another Swedish mystery series, the only one that has managed to supplant the Martin Beck books in my dad’s heart: Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. I thought I was reading them in a quest to understand him better, but I’m not so sure that’s true now. At worst, this essay seems like a Freudian patricidal project to ignore, then obsessively read, then talk shit in print about my dad’s favorite books.

My dad’s fixation on the Dragon Tattoo books began so quickly and has held for so long it is stunning. He listened to the audiobooks on his iPod over and over again, until he reached the point where he would listen to their chapters on shuffle. I am admittedly inclined to be frustrated with Stieg Larsson’s project, especially because after Larsson’s idols Sjöwall and Wahlöö so cleverly subverted Dead Girl tropes, he embraced them. His books have the Dead Girl story’s typical investigator with a good-guy complex, the crusading investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, whose career is dedicated to revealing fraud and corruption in the financial industry. In the first book, he is drawn into solving the 30-year-old disappearance of a wealthy industrialist’s niece, Harriet Vanger. The second and third have him trying to get to the bottom of an ever deeper conspiracy that begins with the smuggling of prostitutes from the Baltics and ends with a secret and all-powerful cabal in Sweden’s security police. Since Dead Girl stories are so psychologically fraught, harried by every demon Freud ever thought up, they often have the torturously complex plots of nightmares. The serial killer plot in the first book particularly has that frenzied kitchen-sink feel: there is not one but two killers, targeting scores of victims over many decades. Some of the murders are humiliating and bizarre, inspired by verses in Leviticus, and on top of this, the killers have ties to nascent Swedish Nazi organizations.

The key element of any Dead Girl story is the investigator’s haunted, semi-sexual obsession with the Dead Girl, or rather, the absence that she has left. Larsson plays with this overtly, as Blomkvist investigates Harriet Vanger’s case and he finds himself “hopelessly fascinated with the enigma of the dead girl’s disappearance.” A police officer he talks to also admits that he is still captivated by the Harriet Vanger “puzzle.” The implication of this choice of vocabulary, if I am being uncharitable, could not be more clear: that women are problems to be solved, and the problem of absence, a disappearance or a murder, is generally easier to deal with than the problem of a woman’s presence. True, Blomkvist (spoiler alert) eventually finds Harriet alive and has an affair with her, as he does with most of the women he comes into contact with in these novels, lending this Dead Girl story a stupefying and ambiguous denouement.

After Larsson’s death, one of his hangers-on, the Swedish journalist Kurdo Baksi, wrote a strange hagiography of him for the Daily Mail, in which he discusses Larsson’s passionate opposition to violence against women. When they discussed this violence, Baksi writes, “Stieg’s eyes would fill with tears. He could not accept someone could be denied their freedom simply because of their gender.” Larsson’s disgust at what he saw as a ubiquitous misogyny was supposedly the impetus for the Dragon Tattoo books, with the original Swedish version of the first novel being titled Men Who Hate Women. But forgive me if I find the Dragon Tattoo books to be something less than the feminist treatises they claim to be. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his characteristically rude piece on Larsson, their “moral righteousness comes in very useful for the action of the novels, because it allows the depiction of a great deal of cruelty to women, smuggled through customs under the disguise of a strong disapproval.”

More troubling to me than the books’ violence is a flaw at the core of Larsson’s anti-misogynist mission. Throughout the novels, characters insist that “men who hate women” are not monsters: they are everyday people. Blomkvist’s fellow investigator, Lisbeth Salander, says in the first book that their villain is “not some insane serial killer … he’s just a garden variety bastard who hates women.” But Larsson’s villains are as monstrous as he can make them, even though they may hide in plain sight. They are cruel, insatiable, and meticulous, with strange and deviant sexual appetites. The first book is obsessed with sexual sadism, ending with a flourish in a serial killer’s tricked-out torture chamber. This depiction sidesteps the complicated truth of sexual desire and fantasy, which is that in certain circumstances, a person can be turned on by the idea of violence that they would never commit or condone. In the same way, the books sidestep the true face of misogyny: if men who hate women are normal and common, then misogynist violence does not have to be so diabolical. Larsson’s partner, Eva Gabrielsson, has said that Larsson was inspired by comic books, and he obviously could not resist the temptation of the archvillain, a worthy foe for his hero. Where Sjöwall and Wahlöö succeeded in deromanticizing crime and criminals, in his mission to condemn violence against women, Larsson has ended up lionizing its perpetrators by exaggerating the same old prudish tropes.

The first Dragon Tattoo novel features what is in my eyes a maddeningly long final act, where Blomkvist, having solved the mystery of Harriet Vanger’s disappearance, seeks revenge on a corrupt Swedish billionaire who has sidelined his career. Later I came to see that this fight against corruption was exactly the point of Larsson’s books, with misogyny functioning more as an occasional thematic hobbyhorse. Larsson was a lauded  investigative journalist, having founded the anti-fascist Expo magazine, and his plots about corruption among CEOs and government agents gave him the opportunity to write random op-eds a la Sjöwall and Wahlöö on subjects including the injustice of the stock exchange, the Swedish police force’s use of hollow-point bullets, and inconsistencies in enforcing prostitution laws.

In fact, twisted misogyny often acts as a metaphor for other kinds of personal corruption, with fascism, authoritarian overreach, and greed manifesting as sexual malignancy. The political intrigue Blomkvist is investigating in the second and third books turns out to be a conspiracy of perverts, as a sadistic rapist lawyer, a security agent who consorts with prostitutes, and a pedophile psychiatrist conspire to get Salander institutionalized. Blomkvist and Salander hack the hard drive of the psychiatrist, Peter Teleborian, and discover masses of child pornography. This evidence is sprung upon him during his testimony against Salander in the third book, and he is led in handcuffs from the courtroom. After that, as if caught off guard by the implausibility of the book he has found himself in, the judge remarks, “I have never even heard of a case in which the prosecutor’s chief witness is arrested during a court in session.” My dad told me that the downfall of Peter Teleborian is “one of the great moments in literature.”

***

If I sound completely fed up with Larsson’s books, it’s because I have barely talked about Salander, the girl of the books’ titles, who is undeniably their soul and their selling point. When Blomkvist first meets her, she is working as a private investigator at a firm called Milton Security, a role she dispatches so brilliantly, we later learn, because she is one of the most skilled hackers in Sweden, as well as a polymath with a photographic memory. The books are as preoccupied with her unusual appearance as with her unusual talents: she is very small and looks very young, with tattoos, piercings, and a personal style that could be approximated as motorcycle Goth.

Larsson is seemingly in love with the trick of having his heroine judged as a child, a criminal, a deviant, only to have her prove everyone wrong with her unbelievable intellect. The longest arc of the novels is correcting the injustice she suffered from Sweden’s guardianship system. She was put in a mental hospital as a child, and when she was released was assigned a guardian within the government who had control of her legally and financially. An incorrect psychological assessment from when she was a teenager had the government believing she was mentally ill, with criminal tendencies and very low intelligence. Her edgy appearance did nothing to persuade the guardianship agency of her competency.

But despite the Dragon Tattoo books’ focus on Salander’s journey to seize self-determination, she is often constrained by the narrative’s own gaze, even when it is mediated through characters who will end up in the wrong. Descriptions of her are icky either in their prurience or disgust, with a creepy focus on her body. In the first book, I count six times where she is described as looking anorexic (she is not anorexic). Before we have gotten to know her at all, several pages are devoted to her boss’s coming to terms with his sexual attraction to her, a plot element that goes exactly nowhere. She later jumps into bed with Blomkvist, as she is (conveniently) into older men. Salander is, in many ways, a male fantasy of a rebel girl: she is bisexual, rides a motorcycle, works out at a boxing gym, and eats only junk food. Considering that she is only one of Blomkvist’s many paramours, her characterization works especially to distinguish her from his other girlfriends. As with so many detective series, the Dragon Tattoo books seem to be a study in every kind of woman the detective, as proxy for the writer, could possibly be attracted to.

Luckily, Salander is a more compelling, surprising, and complex character than Blomkvist, in his possessive and protective desire, can see. Salander, a classic avenging angel, has her own notion of justice, but it is hard to rationalize her actions, as Blomkvist repeatedly does, as stemming from some deep morality. She uses her computer skills to steal millions from the corrupt industrialist at the end of the first book because he is a bad guy, but also because the opportunity presents itself. When she was 12 years old, she attempted to kill her abusive deadbeat father by throwing a burning bottle of gasoline into his car. This violence is constantly justified by Blomkvist and others, who say that she was only trying to protect her mother, but I do wonder if she could have protected her in a way that did not involve a firebomb.

Larsson created a character so interesting that she wriggled from the grasp of his narrative, letting ambiguity and chaos into a world he set up as black and white, good guys versus bad. Larsson’s widow, Eva Gabrielsson, often speaks about the books like sacred tracts, seeing them as being didactic first, entertaining second. I would tend to agree. But with Salander, who is impulsive, intransigent, and sad, very often unable to be there for the people she cares about most, it is difficult to say what lesson is to be learned—fortunately for the reader. Without her, we would have only Blomkvist, a character as intolerably, triumphantly decent as Perry Mason. (Mason, the hero of Erle Stanley Gardner’s legendary detective series, is the smuggest, most well-adjusted milquetoast in the history of mysteries. In the early nineties, my dad recorded every episode of the Perry Mason TV series onto VHS tapes and cataloged them on our old DOS-prompt computer.)

***

Salander injects into Larsson’s matrix of morals some of the anarchy of children’s literature, and that was by design. Gabrielsson explains how Salander was inspired by Pippi Longstocking:

this delightful and formidable little girl has been a champion of equality between the sexes: she doesn’t depend on anyone, can use a revolver, has sailed the seven seas … But the main thing about Pippi is that she has her own ideas about right and wrong—and she lives by them, no matter what the law or adults say.

But Salander lends some of the melancholy of children’s literature, too. Pippi’s story, after all, is not only about how she brings excitement to a staid Swedish village but the problem of her loneliness, as she seeks friendship and understanding in a world that wasn’t made for her.

I am charmed by Gabrielsson’s description of Pippi Long- stocking, not only because it describes the near-superhero Salander so well, but because in spirit (though in not many practical details), it describes my dad, too. I always think of him as an impish mischief-maker, something of a manic pixie dream dad, whistling in public, sobbing at stories on NPR, flirting with babies, buying candy and stuffed animals, and generally pissing off uptight assholes. Once when he was walking with my brother, they saw a car with a “Who is John Galt?” bumper sticker, a reference to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. He stuck a notecard on the windshield that said you are an idiot.

As I think about my dad and Pippi, it illuminates another common feature of the films, books, and TV that he likes: girls who kick butt. He was an early fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (though he believes it took a downturn after she graduated from high school) and is even more ardently committed to the cult teen detective show Veronica Mars, whose plucky heroine wields a Taser almost as well as Salander does. I first told him to watch Veronica Mars, and later, after he had breathlessly emailed me about Veronica and Logan and Dick Casablancas enough times, I regretted ever watching it. I used to think that he only had some embarrassing pervy attraction to girls who kick butt, and, I mean, he definitely does. But after he told me through tears that “he only wants Veronica to be happy,” I should have gotten the picture that he sees himself in them, too. I guess it is no surprise that he identifies with teenage girls, when there is an illustrious tradition of grown men expertly crafting young women’s entertainment, from boy bands of all eras to Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink, to Buffy and Veronica Mars.

“I definitely think he relates to those girls,” my mom told me. She reminded me of a scene at the end of the first Dragon Tattoo book, when Salander realizes she has fallen in love with Blomkvist and resolves to confess her feelings to him. When she finds him, he is on a date with another woman, and Salander is crushed. This is the most affecting part of the books for my dad, my mom told me. “He’ll just cry and cry about that part,” she said. All along I thought he saw himself as the valiant everyman Blomkvist, who comes to the aid of the sexy girl who kicks butt. I was wrong about that, and I shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking I have figured him out again. I told him that I thought he identified more with Blomkvist, but then it occurred to me that he maybe identified with Salander. “I don’t think I’m like any of them,” he told me stubbornly. “I just think the books have the ring of realism,” a description that in my opinion could not be more incorrect.

***

When I complained to my mom about my dad describing books that strain plausibility in every way as having “the ring of realism,” she explained to me how this is one of the phrases he uses indiscriminately to describe works that grab his imagination (the other is “the spark of greatness”) in the manner of, for instance, the cop show Hill Street Blues. This shorthand praise is another way for him to avoid analyzing his own whims. It’s also, maybe, a defensive posture to keep us from analyzing him.

This could be why I have delayed addressing what was supposed to be one of the points of this essay: whether my dad has autism and if it matters. The therapist he works with has suggested that he has Asperger’s syndrome, based on his difficulty reading conversational cues and other people’s moods; his short temper; his many intense enthusiasms; and his almost complete lack of social inhibition, which often leads to totally inappropriate behavior. When I asked him about it for this essay, it was the first time we had ever spoken about it. “Why are you asking me about that?” he said incredulously, and I explained that it made me think of him when Blomkvist privately guesses that Salander has Asperger’s because of her savant-like skills and social awkwardness. “Yes, that is one possible diagnosis,” he said about Salander. Of his own diagnosis, he would only say, oddly, that he didn’t remember it, comparing it to the apparent amnesia he developed in the 1990s when he had bursitis of the elbow. I pressed him, but he stood by his “no comment.” “I have zero memory of anyone ever saying I have Asperger’s,” he said. “I’d completely forgotten that and I hadn’t thought about it. I don’t have any thoughts or any opinions.”

I really don’t blame him for having no thoughts or opinions. No one even raised the possibility that he was on the autism spectrum until he was 68, and charging someone that age with a condition we often associate with childhood is complicated by a lifetime of ambiguities and examples to the contrary. As he approached his eighth decade, the methods he had learned to navigate the world were just his personality, as they are, I assume, for everyone. He was also unwittingly encountering a fateful tendency in my family to monumentalize the eccentricities of its members, to talk and laugh about them among ourselves and with strangers—write about them, even—until the picture shifts into focus, and those eccentricities reveal themselves as dysfunction.

And no matter his age, I’ve come to see autism spectrum diagnosis as an alienating thicket, where there is no textbook case. At his therapist’s suggestion, he read David Finch’s memoir The Journal of Best Practices, the story of Finch being diagnosed with Asperger’s as an adult and using this new self-knowledge to become a better husband. Despite what would seem to be obvious commonalities between Finch and my dad, he found no applicable lessons in his story, and he thought the book made Finch look, frankly, like a jerk. Finch and his wife, Kristen, were on an episode of This American Life in 2012, where Kristen, a speech therapist who worked with disabled kids, says that she and her coworkers would always joke that their husbands were autistic. The stereotypes in that joke are uncomfortable for me in both directions. Joking about men’s emotional stuntedness seems at best inaccurate, at worst self-reinforcing, and joking about autistic people as socially retarded and robotic almost certainly increases their ostracization. But it also collapses the almost endless variation among people with autism spectrum disorders: my dad didn’t recognize Finch’s compulsions, which isn’t to say he has none of his own.

I found myself combing through websites about the autism spectrum, many of which are compiled by civilians who have the disorder themselves, who I think are also trying to come to terms with the many ways one can have autism. One particular website called Inside Perspectives of Asperger Syndrome and the Neurodiversity Spectrum describes possible autism spectrum symptoms across an exhaustive list of categories, including work, sex, eating, sleep, phone problems, “spacing out,” and even allergies and drug sensitivities. The primary sources on every page are testimonials from web users who identify as having autism and related conditions, like Asperger’s and ADHD, describing their own experiences. Many of these don’t describe my dad at all, while others do with eerie accuracy. During the conversation we had about his possibly being autistic, this description was dinging in my head: “Some have problems with reciprocity & timing and either talk on and on without letting anyone else get a word in edgewise, constantly interrupt others without realising that it’s disrespectful to do so, or say nothing at all unless asked a direct question.” There is of course also the claim that many with autism “are able to hyper-focus intently on the same thing for hours, days, sometimes weeks on end, and keep up a special interest for years”—see Sjöwall, Wahlöö, Larsson, et al.

One of the most helpful things I read on Inside Perspectives is this eloquent description from one of the site’s users of the problem with seeing autism as a disorder:

If you have one neurodiverse trait you are more likely to have additional neurodiverse traits. I am not sure why this is. The more of these traits you have, the more difficult it is to function . . . If you can’t function in society because you have too many of these traits and/or they are too intense then it becomes a disability. And when it becomes a disability then they have to put a label on it. . . . The ‘clump traits together and give them a name’ strategy is fundementally [sic] flawed . . . Labeling falsely claims you have one thing, not a group of things which may be better treated individually.

But viewing the autism spectrum as a matrix of possible traits evokes all the problems of mental health diagnosis, because, to put it simply, everyone has traits. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) does not seek to describe what a healthy person looks like: psychological “normalcy” is judged only by an absence of any of the dysfunctions it addresses. Considering the gargantuan length of the DSM, there are nearly as many ways to be crazy as there are to be alive. But despite the DSM’s attempt at exhaustiveness, it remains very difficult to wrangle a human being’s habits, thoughts, desires, quirks, and pain under the heading of a single diagnosis of mental illness. This is underlined by the manual’s primary use, which is not therapeutic, but clerical: a diagnosis of a disorder with a DSM classification is often the requirement for an insurance company to authorize treatment.

I gained the most insight from the wonderful autistic writer and rhetorician Melanie Yergeau, who discusses the problem of diagnosis on her blog autistext.com. As she writes, “For many, diagnosis is validating and/or leads to self-understanding. Diagnosis can explain a lot.” But a disease model of autism, where there are degrees of severity and some have it “worse” than others, effaces the individual value of autistic people. Yergeau writes powerfully for the model of disability that relies on disabled people’s rights to advocate for their own needs:

Whether your disabled child screams in the grocery checkout line or testifies in front of Congress, he is self-advocating. Whether your disabled child throws peas in your face or writes a snarky blog post or falls asleep during board game nights or says NO in all capital letters, she’s self-advocating. And none of these things is less noble or gutsy than the other.

All people have needs that flow from their humanity, not from a predetermined list of problems that we call disability. Diagnosis and the vocabulary that it trades in should be tools to help people understand themselves and ask for what they need. It follows, then, that if the language of disability doesn’t help someone advocate for himself or herself, he or she should be free to reject it.

For my dad, navigating the “neurodiverse traits” that make functioning more difficult individually—like  helping him to remember not to make too much noise around the house, to reflect more on his emotions, not to give in so quickly to frustration—is most helpful, and it doesn’t require him to align all the vagaries of his personality with a diagnostic label. The autism designation isn’t helpful for him. The autism spectrum is one more place I’ve looked for my dad, with only partial success. My mom told me that, library cataloger that she is, one of her greatest interests is in creating typologies, finding categories and seeing where things fit. But she has never been that good at categorizing the people close to her, not suspecting that there was anything in my dad’s weirdness that might be explained by someone else’s weirdness. “I tend to be accepting of the way that people are,” she told me helplessly, which might be another way of saying that love is blind.

***

Larsson died of a heart attack shortly after delivering the manuscript for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, never living to see his novels published, much less the worldwide sensation they would become. Per Wahlöö died after he and Sjöwall finished the tenth Martin Beck novel, blessedly missing most of the social degradation he had warned against. These deaths are both eerie in the same way: socially conscious writers not living to know how right they were. Sjöwall cheerily admits now that “the project” was a failure. “Everything we feared happened, faster,” she says. “People think of themselves not as human beings but consumers. The market rules, and it was not that obvious in the 1960s, but you could see it coming.” What would have been harder for them to see coming was the murder of the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986, 11 years after they wrote about a fictional Swedish prime minister being assassinated in The Terrorists. The most remarkable thing about reading the Dragon Tattoo books now, in the spring of 2017, is their overwhelming, prophetic resonance with the scandals of the 2016 election and the Trump administration, as they involve neofascists, computer hackers, sexual misconduct scandals,  Russian spies, government corruption, evil billionaires, and journalistic integrity. It makes me wish Larsson had lived to comment on it, although I assume the current era would immediately make him wish he were dead.

Many people have noted the marketing brilliance of changing the title of Larsson’s Men Who Hate Women for the English translation, shifting the focus from creepy men to always more salable “girls.” Men Who Hate Women could be another alternate title for my book, and I have chosen, maybe hypocritically, to sell it on girls instead. In the end, the careers of Larsson and Sjöwall and Wahlöö turn out to be Dead Man stories, where men leave their wives and collaborators to deal with their absence for decades. This female survival is probably the truer story and, I think Larsson, Sjöwall, and Wahlöö would agree, a better one, but it doesn’t have the same addictive glamour that comes with a Dead Girl. In Roseanna, one of Beck’s colleagues mentions a movie that the suspect they’re trailing goes to see. “It has a wonderful ending,” he says. “Everyone dies except the girl.”

Larsson died at 50, after years of working too much, eating too much junk food, drinking too much coffee, and smoking too many cigarettes. There has been extended drama involving his partner of 30 years, Gabrielsson, who, since they never legally married and Larsson left no will, is not entitled to any of his posthumous millions. His death was ironic and unjust, having happened at altogether the wrong time. I can’t help but think about my dad when I read about Larsson’s heart attack: how Larsson’s colleagues found him in a chair, breathing heavily and in a cold sweat, and even then he did not want to admit he was sick. My dad was probably in congestive heart failure for weeks before my brother and his boyfriend found him hunched over in a parking lot, gasping for air. I burst into terrified tears when I saw him on a gurney in the emergency room, looking so gray and puny. “It makes me cry, too,” he said and sobbed.

Insofar as this is a Dead Girl story with a happy ending, you know that my dad got better. His cardiac emergency became another episode in his life, another story underscored, appropriately, by reading. In the hospital after his angioplasty, he had a paradoxical reaction to a sedative that launched him into an hour-long panic attack. Every 60 seconds, he would jump out of bed and run around his hospital room, endangering his fresh stitches. At one point my mom, her nerves completely shot, picked up The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and began to read from Salander’s trial. This was the only thing that soothed my dad, and she read to him until he fell asleep.

* * *

From Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin. © 2018 by Alice Bolin. Published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

The Bungled Bank Robbery That Ended in a Landmark Legal Ruling

Illustrations by Juan Esteban, Archival illustrations by Alex Tatusian

Thomas L. Dybdahl | Longreads | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,642 words)

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

In early June 1958, 25-year-old John Leo Brady was in love. He was also in some trouble. His sweetheart, Nancy Boblit McGowan, had just told him she was pregnant, and he was the father. But she was only 19, married to another man. And Brady was broke.

He’d never had an easy life. He grew up poor in southern Maryland. His young parents, scraping their living from a small tobacco farm, couldn’t cope with a fussy baby. They gave him to his paternal grandparents and his Aunt Celeste, who raised him. From infancy through his late teens he suffered from serious otitis media, and his ears regularly oozed a thick, vile-smelling pus. At school, his classmates called him “stinkears.”

Brady gladly dropped out during the eighth grade to work full-time on his uncle’s farm. At 19, in 1951, he enlisted in the Air Force and served as a military policeman at bases in Washington state and Greenland. Then, over the space of four years, his otitis stopped, he got married, left the service, earned his high school equivalency, got divorced and returned home to Maryland.

In March of 1958, Brady met Nancy and her brother, Donald Boblit, because their parents were good friends with his aunt. Donald was 25, gawky, lonely and barely literate. Nancy was “just a dumb, good-looking blonde,” according to a friend, in the pre-feminist jargon of the ‘50s. Although both she and her husband, Slim, were living with her parents, they hardly spoke, and she let everyone know she intended to do whatever she wanted. Brady and the two siblings soon became close, and he and Nancy fell in love. Then Nancy got pregnant.

Brady didn’t know what to do. He was working at a local tobacco packing company for $1.50 an hour. He had recently bought a maroon 1947 Ford and was behind on his bills. But he wanted Nancy to know how much he was committed to her. She had planned a trip to New York to visit family for a week, leaving on Monday, June 23. That Sunday, when they were together, on an impulse he wrote her a check for $35,000, post-dated to July 6.

It was a dream sum—a huge number just pulled out of the air that he guessed could solve all their troubles, if he could only make it real. Nancy asked no questions; she put the check in her purse. Brady reminded her to wait. “Somehow,” he said, “in two weeks it’ll be in the bank.” Read more…

The Power in Knowing: Black Women, HIV, and the Realities of Safe Sex

Illustration by Janna Morton

Minda Honey | Longreads | June 2018 | 11 minutes (2,763 words)

 

In December, when a creative agency asked me to participate in a regional Volunteers of America public service announcement encouraging my fellow community members to “know your status,” I said yes. A hesitant yes, but a yes. At least once a year, I make it a point to enlighten myself by asking my gynecologist for a full screening for sexually transmitted infections, including an HIV test. But I’m more of a safe sex bronze medalist than an all-star. My 17-year track record of requiring men to wear condoms during intercourse is only nearly flawless, my trysts with unsafe sex more recent than I’d like to admit.

A retrospective on my vagina’s contact with bare penis: When I lost my virginity — It was over and done with before I could utter any questions about using protection. There was time the condom slipped off — it happens. Or at least it did that one time. In an encounter with that same man, who I’d casually been sleeping with for a long stretch, he sweet-talked me into letting him take the condom off mid-act. I want to feel you, he’d said — I’d felt terrible afterward. I knew better than to trust these hoes with my sexual health. There was the spontaneous Halloween makeup sex in the back of a minivan with a guy I was kinda in a relationship with. Immediately after, he accused me of trying to get knocked up because I’d always been so vigilant about condom use, nevermind that a jobless, carless rapper living with his brother’s girlfriend’s parents isn’t my ideal baby daddy material. There was the man I was seeing who made a fuss about it every single time, whining he couldn’t come with one on, so half-asleep, I finally just let it happen sans condom. Shortly after, I learned he’d been cheating on me. And, I assume, he’d been doing the same sort of whining in the other woman’s bed, being sexually reckless with us both.

And, more recently, when after a 12-hour stretch of drinking, I fell into bed with a man and nodded when he asked if it was OK, even though I knew I wasn’t OK with going without a condom. Every time we hooked up after that first time, I felt weird about insisting he wear one, so I didn’t ask him to. Even though changing your mind is totally allowed and asking can be so simple and I’m sure he would have complied, it just felt complicated in ways that feel dumb now. This lapse in judgement happened to overlap with my period deciding to be six weeks late and my new gyno calling to tell me my IUD might have shifted and might not be effective. After two intravaginal ultrasounds (and a negative pregnancy test) it was determined that, LOL, my IUD was actually where it was supposed to be all along.

I worried that doing the PSA would make me a hypocrite. Who was I to encourage others to engage in safe sex when there were times I hadn’t? I reasoned with myself that I’d read enough inspirational quotes on Instagram to know my humanity wasn’t a byproduct of my perfection but rather of my mistakes. So I decided to do the shoot anyway, because I was someone who knew what it was like to be so distracted worrying about the possible long-term consequences of my split-second decision not to require a condom that I couldn’t even enjoy the act itself. I was someone who’d felt bashful about asking to be tested because heaven forbid the medical professional I pay to look after my reproductive health, and who I was required to see once a year to re-up on my birth control pill prescription, know that I, an adult woman, was having sex outside of a monogamous marriage for purposes other than conceiving a child. I was someone who was tired of always being the enforcer in the bedroom. It made me feel like a finger-wagging mom-type: “Eat your Wheaties, do your homework, wrap it up!”

Read more…

Lettuce Try to Grow Dwarf Tomatoes Next

Commander Scott Kelly and lettuce grown and eaten in space. Image courtesy of NASA.

How do radiation and a gravity-free environment affect plant growth? How do we keep the plants free of microbes? How does fresh food affect astronaut morale? At Popular Science, Sarah Scoles writes about how learning to grow food in space is a critical milestone to furthering space exploration, because astronauts simply can’t haul all the food they’ll need to thrive during long absences from Earth.

On August 9, (Commander Scott) Kelly snapped a picture, standing in front of the unfurling greens. His brow was furrowed, faux serious. “­Tomorrow we’ll eat the anticipated veggie harvest on @space_station!” he tweeted. “But first, lettuce take a #selfie.” Soon he crunched the harvest live on NASA TV. It might seem like no big deal, but a single leaf can make a big difference to someone who’s been eating rehydrated fare for months. During a later harvest, astronaut Peggy Whitson would use them to wrap a reconstituted lobster salad. “Even with a really good diet with hundreds of items, there’s dietary fatigue,” Massa says. “People get bored. Adding a new flavor or texture—like something crisp and juicy—could spice up your regular meal.”

Read the story

The Mr. Memory of Jazz

AP Photo/Jean-Jacques Levy

I’m a huge fan of saxophone genius Charlie Parker, the man known as Bird. Recently I’ve been listening to live recordings instead of his studio work, most taken from scratchy acetates of ancient radio broadcasts or lo-fi private recordings made by fans like the legendary Dean Benedetti. Even in our internet era, it can be hard to find detailed, reliable information about live recordings from, say, 1947 at LA’s long-defunct Hi-De-Ho Club. In the process of researching, I found David Remnick‘s 2008 New Yorker article “Bird Watcher.”

In it, Remnick profiles jazz historian and Charlie Parker devotee Phil Schaap, who’s hosted “Bird Flight,” on Columbia University’s radio station for three decades. Although this article is a decade old, it remains relevant because Bird’s art remains relevant, or as Remnick puts it, “There is no getting to the end of Charlie Parker.” Parker died in 1955, yet new CDs keep coming out containing historic live recordings that have finally been remastered or re-sequenced. Schaap’s knowledge is so deep that when Dean Benedetti’s lost live recordings of Bird — one of jazz’s true holy grails — needed preserving and documentation, Schaap did the job, reinforcing eight miles worth of disintegrating tape by hand. A repository of information, he relishes minutia and arcana; his show’s winding, digressive style blurs, in Remnick’s words, “the line between exhaustive and exhausting.”

Schaap is not a musician, a critic, or, properly speaking, an academic, though he has held teaching positions at Columbia, Princeton, and Juilliard. And yet through “Bird Flight” and a Saturday-evening program he hosts called “Traditions in Swing,” through his live soliloquies and his illustrative recordings, commercial and bootlegged, he has provided an invaluable service to a dwindling art form: in the capital of jazz, he is its most passionate and voluble fan. He is the Bill James of his field, a master of history, hierarchies, personalities, anecdote, relics, dates, and events; but he is also a guardian, for, unlike baseball, jazz and the musicians who play it are endangered. Jazz today is responsible for only around three per cent of music sales in the United States, and what even that small slice contains is highly questionable. Among the current top sellers on Amazon in the jazz category are easy-listening acts like Kenny G and Michael Bublé.

For decades, jazz musicians have joked about Schaap’s adhesive memory, but countless performers have known the feeling that Schaap remembered more about their musical pasts than they did and was always willing to let them in on the forgotten secrets. “Phil is a walking history book about jazz,” Frank Foster, a tenor-sax player for the Basie Orchestra, told me. Wynton Marsalis says that Schaap is “an American classic.”

In the eyes of his critics, Schaap’s attention to detail and authenticity is irritating and extreme. He has won six Grammy Awards for his liner notes and producing efforts, but his encyclopedic sensibility is a matter of taste. When Schaap was put in charge of reissuing Benny Goodman’s landmark 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall for Columbia, he not only included lost cuts and Goodman’s long-winded introductions but also provided prolonged original applause tracks, and even the sounds of the stage crew dragging chairs and music stands across the Carnegie stage to set up for the larger band. His production work on a ten-disk set of Billie Holiday for Verve was similarly inclusive. Schaap wants us to know and hear everything. He seems to believe that the singer’s in-studio musings about what key to sing “Nice Work If You Can Get It” in are as worthy of preservation as a bootleg of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. Reviewing the Holiday set for the Village Voice, Gary Giddins called Schaap “that most obsessive of anal obsessives.”

When Charlie Bird died, fans painted “Bird Lives!” on buildings around New York City. Thanks to fans like Schaap, the epitaph holds true for fans like me.

Read the story

The ‘Treasonous’ Teens Living in One Nation Under Guns

A prayer vigil for the victims of Marshall County High School. (Alan Warren/The Messenger-Inquirer via AP)

Teens seem somehow wired for disagreement in their adolescent years. Sometimes this is simply a product of exercising one’s personhood, other times it seems connected to a sort of magic of youth that lies, in part, in their relative newness to the culture. They are old enough to know how to communicate and observe and think critically, but young enough to question the status quo.

This is evidenced beautifully in a recent Washington Post profile by Eli Saslow of Wyoming teen Moriah Engdahl, who seeks out every possible way to be the opposite of her father, Alan. Moriah is a student journalist, her father is a media-hating Trump supporter; she supports gay rights, he thinks “that stuff is better off staying hidden.” Moriah is the youngest and most headstrong of  Alan’s four daughters, and he calls her “the mouthy, hard-headed one” with pride, even though they butt heads— most recently over the issue of gun regulations.

Read more…

More than Make-Work

Jobs Guarantee
Illustration by Lily Padula

Livia Gershon | Longreads | May 2018 | 10 minutes (2,366 words)

In the past several weeks, a flurry of U.S. Senators have come out in support of a federal jobs guarantee. Bernie Sanders announced that his office will propose a plan; Cory Booker filed legislation for a pilot program with Jeff Merkley, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren as cosponsors. “Creating an employment guarantee would give all Americans a shot at a day’s work, and by introducing competition into the labor market, raise wages and improve benefits for all workers,” Booker said.

The idea—that the government should provide a job for anyone who wants one—is both radical and impressively well-liked. A recent study found that 52 percent of Americans support it, compared with just 29 percent who say they’re opposed. David Shor, a senior data scientist at Civis Analytics, which conducted the research, told The Nation, “This is one of the most popular issues we’ve ever polled.”

That’s not all that surprising. Americans overwhelmingly believe that everyone who can work should work, and the obvious corollary is that everyone who wants to work should be able to find a job. In its broadest form, this premise appeals across the political spectrum, not just to liberals who want to raise wages and improve labor’s bargaining power. A Trump supporter I met while covering the 2016 New Hampshire primary, a guy deeply convinced that the country is being ruined by lazy moochers, told me, “If you can work, maybe we need to put you to work in government offices or something.” Read more…