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Surviving False Dawns: On Joy Division and Life in a Far Distant Suburb

Longreads Pick

Growing up in what she calls “the bleak Sydney suburbs,” a depressed Australian teenager finds solace in Joy Division and her fellow music fans, which led her to the literature that shaped her as an adult ─ an adult for whom Joy Division and uncertainty continue to define her.

Source: LitHub
Published: Apr 12, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,472 words)

The 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winners

Part of Reuters' Pulitzer-winning series for Breaking News Photography. Mateo, a two-year-old migrant boy from Honduras, is led through dense brush by his mother Juana Maria after a group of two dozen families members illegally crossed the Rio Grande river into the United States from Mexico, in Fronton, Texas October 18, 2018. REUTERS/Adrees Latif

The winners of the Pulitzer Prize have been announced and recipients include The Los Angeles Times’ investigation into George Tyndall, a former USC gynecologist accused of sexually abusing students, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s breaking news coverage of the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue, and Hannah Dreier, who won for feature writing for her powerful series at ProPublica following Salvadoran immigrants “whose lives were shattered by a botched federal crackdown on the international criminal gang MS-13.”

The full list of the Pulitzer recipients can be found here, and we’ve highlighted some of the winners and honored works below. Read more…

Edible Complex

Getty, Alberto E. Tamargo / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jen Doll | Longreads | April 2019 | 18 minutes (4,598 words)

According to those jaded but constant belief systems that keep the worst romantic comedies in business, the third date is the make-or-break one. In these busy times, the idea goes, by date three you’ve spent enough time together to determine if either of you is a serial killer, or hiding something very bad in your closet (metaphorical or otherwise), or has the tendency to type “hehehe” when laughing by text. And if the relationship by date three veers toward make rather than break, well, finally the “rules” have lifted: It is THE MOMENT to get naked (not at the restaurant, please). The thinking is based in some combination of propriety and sexual policing and also sheer time management: You haven’t put so much energy or effort into this budding romance that uncovering an in-the-sheets incompatibility ruins your entire life — but it’s also not so soon it’s considered “rushing in,” which, when applied to women, of course, means “being too slutty.”

No matter that “slutty” is an outmoded, sexist concept and that you should sleep with a person if and when you feel like it (and if and when they consent), I grew up with “the third date’s the sex date!” pressed upon me as, if not law, then at least a kind of informed ideology: Do it then to uncover any latent micropenises or irrecoverable technique problems; do it then to get it over with because would you look at that elephant in the room?; do it then to get the rest of your relationship started; do it then because by the third date, what else is there to do?

So, when it came time for the third date with a man I’d been seeing — a guy who lived in upstate New York, which meant our third date would be more of a weekend visit; did each night count as a date, I wondered, or was it the whole package, a kind of Club Med situation with dinners and entertainment included? — there was a certain amount of buried internal stress and anticipation related to the event. Not that I was going to go get a Brazilian, or anything. I was in my 40s. Those days of paying a stranger to rip large swathes of hair from my nether regions had blessedly gone by the by. (Yes, I said “nether regions.”) But in my brain, a place far more difficult for strangers to reach, my thoughts were going a little bit wild. I’d been dumped earlier in the year, I’d gotten back up and shaken myself off, I’d tried again, and I’d actually met someone. But how many rounds of the dating game was I prepared to endure? If things went in the direction of “break” — what next, not only for me and this guy, but maybe for me and anyone? This is what rom-coms never really tackle: What happens when you get so tired of dating, so disappointed by all the prospects, you just give up?

In the absence of answers, I sought to occupy myself. I took a train to Beacon, New York, a town about an hour away from where my date lived — he’d pick me up there the next day, and our third date would begin — and met some friends I was just getting to know. We watched a poet read from her impressive collection in a garden, surrounded by trees and flowers and sunshine. I wasn’t even so sure how I felt about poetry readings, but I liked this version of me, trying new things, with different people. I bought several of the poet’s books, and had her sign one, even though I’d not known much of her work until that moment.
Read more…

For the Thirsty Girl

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,387 words)

“She’s got the nerve to say / She wants to fuck that boy so badly.” These are the lyrics to the titular track from Third Eye Blind’s 2003 album Out of the Vein (stay with me). They are written by Stephan Jenkins, who has admitted his three-year relationship with Charlize Theron acted as inspiration. Whether or not that particular song is about her, one thing is clear: Charlize Theron knows she wants to fuck a specific boy, even if she is uncertain who that boy is. “I’ve been single for ten years, it’s not a long shot,” she said recently in some interview, dorkily referencing the title of her new film, which is about a presidential hopeful who falls for Seth Rogen (why not?). “Somebody just needs to grow a pair and step up.”

Charlize Theron is thirsty. That surprises people. And by people, I mean me. How is it possible that Charlize Theron has to desire at all, considering she is so desired herself? (Doesn’t one negate the other?) You could sense an army of unworthy men clutching their collective pearls in response to her statement. That this statuesque blond with the kind of face you only see carved out of marble not only has to, God forbid, ask for it, but that she can speak like a sailor about it, shatters the pristine image of beauty — no wants, no desires — she otherwise projects. Theron’s words jolted us back to her humanity. The balls she asked for were the balls to approach her with desire, knowing that she has the power not to desire in return. Charlize Theron is dictating the expression of her thirst, but also the man who is worthy of it.

If the original iteration of “thirst” was a plunging desperation, this one is an uplifting affirmation. NPR traced its root, “thirst trap,” back to 2011; but Jezebel actually defined the singular “thirst” first in 2014, as lust “for sex, for fame, for approval. It’s unseemly striving for an unrealistic goal, or an unnecessary amount of praise.” This was the definition picked up in 2017 by The New York Times Magazine, imbuing thirst with negativity. But in the intervening years, women got a hold of it. These women, objects for so long within an atmosphere of men’s ambient lust, emerged to twist thirst from a cloying wish into full-bodied desire. Out of the wreckage of male toxicity, they used thirst to mark the men who remained worthy. There’s a reason Theron is still single — few men can step up. What’s more, in a world run by female desire, some are terrified of being left unwanted if they do.

* * *

It’s hard to get a clear picture of female desire across a history mostly seen through the male gaze, afflicted as it was with the rare myopia that focuses only on the virgin and the whore. So you had virtuous, prim, usually classier orderly women who were worth marrying, and sinful, messy, gutter-dwelling hysterics who were worth a quick screw, and that’s it. If a woman expressed desire and wasn’t faking it for money, she was a deranged man-eater, like a witch or a harpy. Men’s lust was natural, women’s was the most unnatural. Eventually, fandom offered a means of escape. “While it was risky for individual women to lose control or to surrender to passion, there could be safety in numbers,” wrote Carol Dyhouse in Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire. So women swooned all over the place for Franz Liszt in the mid-19th century before having a collective orgasm over Vaslav Nijinsky, then Rudolph Valentino — the first man (the first person) for whom the word “sexy” was deemed worthy of use. What these men had in common was fluidity — of gender, of sexuality, of race. “I hate [him],” cartoonist Dick Dorgan wrote of Valentino. “The women are all dizzy over him.” Real men hated this new masculine ideal because real women wanted it and they couldn’t deliver. So they took sexy back. The Hays Code put women who wanted sex in movie jail and in their place installed women with whom men wanted to have sex.

The new “sexy” icon became Marilyn Monroe, described by Molly Haskell (From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies) as “the lie that a woman has no sexual needs, that she is there to cater to, or enhance, a man’s needs.” It is a meandering but fairly unbroken line from Monroe to reality star and one-time child bride Courtney Stodden, who has not only physically fashioned herself into her idol, but also appears as troubled. In a recent interview with BuzzFeed, the now 24-year-old pitied her boyfriend for not cashing in on his expectations. “He thought he was going to get in a relationship with this hot young celebrity who’s all sexual and fun,” she said. “He gets in there and I don’t have sex, I’m a mess, and I’m crazy.” So, not really much change from the original dichotomy, the one which limits big-busted babes like her, like Kim Kardashian-West, to conduits for sex. The latter can launch her career off a sex tape, while Jennifer Lawrence, the slapstick virginal non-bottle blonde, can almost be undone by a couple of photos. And forget being a woman who has sex with more than one man; Kristen Stewart had to apologize publicly for that, forced to do a glorified perp walk in a world where husbands have had mistresses longer than Edward Cullen has been undead.

Almost every article I read about female sexuality cited Freud — specifically his inability to figure out what women want. It says a lot that on this subject we are still deferring to a psychoanalyst who predates women’s liberation. It served men like Freud and those who followed him to theorize that women had a lower sex drive (unproven and kind of the opposite), were more romantic than randy (unproven and kind of the opposite), because it meant women could not use men for sex the way men used women. Yet, as Psychology Today reported back in 2013, “If women believe that they will not be harmed and that the sex will be good, their willingness to engage in casual sex equals that of men.” Relax, bros, rape culture keeps that in check. “It is anti-sex and anti-pleasure,” writes Laurie Penny. “It teaches us to deny our own desire as an adaptive strategy for surviving a sexist world.” And now you can stop relaxing; since women have begun dismantling that world, they have also begun releasing their desire — these days better known as thirst.

Some men think the objectification of women has simply turned into women’s objectification of men, but that’s not what thirst is: Where the male gaze limits women to the flesh, the female gaze fleshes men out. Famous guys provide an aspirational model, with women filling in the holes with their wants, showing real guys how to enhance themselves to satisfy women like Charlize.

We have women of color to thank for pushing men to meet us halfway. Their brand of lady thirst went mainstream in 2017, the year ELLE announced “the Golden Age of Thirst Journalism,” and BuzzFeed got celebrities to read “thirst tweets” — their fans’ horny messages — and launched the “Thirst Aid Kit” podcast. That show centered on the famous crushes of hosts Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins, from established hunks like Chris Evans to pensive actors of color like John Cho. “We are two straight black women talking about lust and desire and sexuality,” Adewunmi told Salon last year, “and all these expressions of humanity [are] not something that has traditionally been given to black women.” In their wake, black Canadian writer Kyrell Grant quietly articulated the concept of “big dick energy” (in reference to recently deceased chef Anthony Bourdain). “It’s a phrase I’d used with friends to refer to guys who aren’t that great but for whatever reason you still find attractive,” she wrote in The Guardian. But while black women are stereotyped for being game, they aren’t expected to set the rules. The Cut sought to profit off the term without crediting Grant, effectively muting her, though it was writer Hunter Harris whose desire was more directly silenced.

Vulture’s resident thirst critic — “i have something adam can drive” — was suspended by Twitter last week amid protests by fellow writers. “JUSTICE FOR HUNTER HARRIS, a thirst maestro and one of the funniest people on this hellsite,” Alanna Bennett tweeted. I DM’d Harris for the details of her suspension and she told me that a photographer had issued a copyright complaint about an image she used last summer in a tweet on the “secret romance” between Rihanna and Leonardo DiCaprio (she can’t remember the exact words and, because Twitter removed it, she can’t check). Around the same time that this happened, Quinn Hough, the editor of a tiny online film and music publication, Vague Visages, went viral (in a bad way) after pulling a strong anti-thirst stance on Twitter. The tweet in question has since been deleted, but Hough told me via email that he’d written “a poorly worded thread after seeing tweets from young critics that I thought were excessive and wouldn’t necessarily be acceptable in a professional environment.”

With women being the ones who thirst tweet most visibly, Hough’s comments were interpreted as an attempt to police women’s desire. “I just get very angry at any kind of sex-shaming because I’ve been told my whole life that if I express sexual desire, I’m a slut or dirty,” Danielle Ryan tweeted in response. “It really comes across differently to women.” While Hough’s site may be small, he still acts as a gatekeeper in the world of criticism, a conduit to larger more established outlets. His discrimination against what appeared to be young female writers, was a microcosm of a wider systemic double standard, particularly when he claimed, “Critics can say anything they want, but expressing sexual desire for subjects will minimize their chances for a staff position somewhere.”

This is where Hunter Harris resurfaces. The simultaneous timing of her suspension with the Vague Visages pile-on acted as a trigger for women accustomed to being muted, turning a copyright notice into a symbol of the suppression of black women’s desire. Meanwhile, other Twitter users expressed their delight at Harris’s expulsion. “It’s sad that @vulture encouraged her psychosis, but will probably be looking to dump her, now that @hunteryharris got her twitter account suspended,” wrote one guy who goes by Street Poetics (“PhD in These Streets”). A man he referenced in that same tweet, Jurg Bajiour, responded, “It’s true. @hunteryharris seemed to want to show me that it was *her job* to endlessly horny-tweet about actors.” (Harris denies this).

The missives were rich considering male film critics readily maintain staff positions despite waving around their boners in their actual reviews. “I didn’t miss Lynda Carter’s buxom, apple-cheeked pinup,” New York’s David Edelstein wrote in his Wonder Woman review. You may remember him also writing of Harry Potter, “prepubescent Watson is absurdly alluring,” in a review that originally appeared in Slate in 2001 and resurfaced after his Wonder Woman hard-on. Compare this to famously thirsty film critic Pauline Kael, whose books boast titles like I Lost It at the Movies and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: “There is a thick, raw sensuality that some adolescents have which seems almost preconscious. In Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta has this rawness to such a degree that he seems naturally exaggerated.” There is a lot of sex here, but Kael is not the subject, Travolta not the object, and it layers rather than reduces. In fact, Female Film Critics’ Twitter poll on critical thirst — “What do you think of ‘thirst’ in film criticism?” — which followed the Vague Visages controversy, attracted 468 votes with a runaway 44 percent responding, “A grand tradition (Kael!)” Still, Hunter Harris admits she felt odd being erroneously credited as its icon. “i dont want to be like a martyr for the horny cause lmao,” she told me via DM, “but it is very nice that ppl are defensive of woc being openly desirous !”

* * *

While thirst is most common in the field of Hollywood celebrity — ground zero for idolatry — it has recently moved into politics, a place where masculinity has increasingly become a bone of contention. At one time we thirsted for Justin Trudeau’s “it’s 2019” yoga moves; more recently that thirst turned toward an emo crossdressing Beto. “Ojeda and Avenatti as candidates are like the guy who thinks good sex is pumping away while you’re making a grocery list in your head wondering when he’ll be done,” political analyst Leah McElrath tweeted in November 2018. “O’Rourke is like the guy who is all sweet and nerdy but holds you down and makes you cum until your calves cramp.” While politicians have an extensive history of abusing their positions for their own sexual gratification, this explicit dispatch from the beltway still left a number of us open-mouthed. Yet this is where we are — in the context of a presidency rife with toxic masculinity oft expressed in terms of sexual harassment, good sex acts as an analogy for progressive politics.

Over the past couple of years, women have also elected Noah Centineo, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeff Goldblum, and Mahershala Ali as worthy of their thirst. Like the men who have historically inflamed female desire, they represent an aspirational form of masculinity, one which counteracts the retrograde misogyny trumpeted by the president. The thirst women express for these men’s physical form is informed by the men’s insides as much as their outsides. And the strongest men do not shrink at the prospect of not measuring up, but adapt the way women always have. In this new world, on the red carpet for their shared movie, Long Shot, Charlize Theron’s Alexander McQueen gown is matched by Seth Rogen’s Prada suit. “I was highly aware I was going to be standing next to Charlize for a lot of pictures,” Rogen said at the time. “I always have that image in my head of Beyoncé next to Ed Sheeran in a T-shirt, and I don’t want that.” Finally, it’s no longer about what a guy wants.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

‘What Is Missing Is Her Soul’: Women and Art, Girls and Men

John Stillwell / PA Wire / Press Association via AP Images

Alana Mohamed | Longreads | April 2019 | 10 minutes (2,756 words)

 

Tracy Chevalier’s 1999 novel, Girl With a Pearl Earring, was a surprise best-seller. “Who was going to read a book about a Dutch painter?” Chevalier remembers wondering. But her fictional, highly compelling heroine, Griet, made for a popular window into Vermeer’s world. As the maid sent to work for Vermeer’s family in 17th century Delft, Griet elucidates many of the divisions of the time — between rich and poor, man and woman, and Catholic and Protestant. Chevalier said she was compelled to write the novel after wondering “what Vermeer did to her [the model] to make her look like that … I saw it as a portrait of a relationship rather than a portrait of a girl.” Readers praised Chevalier’s research, which took her to Amsterdam and the Hague while pregnant. “Chevalier’s writing skill and her knowledge of seventeenth-century Delft are such that she creates a world reminiscent of a Vermeer interior,” a brief New Yorker review reads. The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor were both similarly impressed with Chevalier’s world-building.

Some readers were, however, resistant to the idea that Griet, who in the novel possesses a keen artistic eye, would become an integral part of Vermeer’s work. In its review, Publisher’s Weekly claimed these details “demands one stretch of the reader’s imagination,” and “threaten to rob the novel of its credibility.” In 2017, Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel rankled feathers in the historical literature community when she criticized the proclivity of modern writers to empower their historical subjects in such a way. She asked, “If we write about the victims of history, are we reinforcing their status by detailing it? Or shall we rework history so victims are the winners?” The question is reductive and misleads, but does point to the impossibility of writing about women forgotten by history as just themselves. Like Griet, they become conduits by which we dissect their cultures.

Today, uncovering women’s lives has become a mainstream project. The Paris Review has started a “Feminize Your Canon” series dedicated to underappreciated women writers. The New York Times’Overlooked” series is a retrograde edit of its obituary section, long dominated by white men. Both projects seek to increase the visibility of women who have long been rendered invisible by historical ambivalence. However, these are women who accomplished the extraordinary, women who may have been waylaid from greatness. As the Telegraph also notes, for Chevalier, “Research failed to make good the gaps Chevalier’s imagination was already painting in like a picture restorer.” Read more…

Bracing for the Silence of an Empty Nest

Ronnie Kaufman / Getty

Michelle Cruz Gonzales | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2199 words)

I tap lightly on the computer on my lap, trying to go unnoticed. I’m on the couch in the living room, and my only child Luis Manuel, who is 17, is playing the piano in the dining room. I can see him from where I’m seated, his head down, engrossed in a solo, playing licks I’ve heard him play before and some that sound new. I try not to stare, to stay focused on my work, because I know he’ll see me from the corner of his eye, and I’ll have broken the spell.

I hate when he asks me to leave — “Can’t you go upstairs?”

He used to cry whenever I was out of sight, wouldn’t let anyone but his dad or me hold him, and cried incessantly when babysat. He did this until he was 4. When I’d take him to the park, he’d play for only a minute or two at a time before looking up to make sure I was still there. His difficult case of stranger anxiety made it so he wouldn’t walk on his own until he was 16 months, even though I knew he could. He held onto my index finger and walked confidently, but he wouldn’t let go. If I tried to get him to release my finger and walk unattached, he’d sit straight down on the floor. When I couldn’t stoop over to let him hold my finger any longer, he’d happily go back to being carried in a sling on my hip, one dimpled baby-hand resting on my chest.

Many suggested I was coddling him, that I was not letting my-small-for-his-age, shy, only 1-and-a-half-year-old child be independent.

I watch him play piano when I’m cooking, too. In the kitchen on the other side of the dining room, his back to me, it’s easier for him not to notice me there listening for a song I haven’t heard him play before, straining my eyes to make out the title at the top of the sheet music. Sometimes, I’ll pour a glass of wine and lean on the counter, and just listen while the food simmers on the stove. He is astoundingly good. It feels more like hanging in a jazz club than cooking dinner.

When he’s out at one of his many rehearsals or gigs, on nights when I’m preparing a meal and waiting for him to get home, I stand in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, and look at the piano, dark red-brown in a high gloss with gold hinges, no piano light, no head full of black hair hanging over the keyboard, no music. I try not to think about the long stretches of time the piano will sit unplayed. Like death, I force the thought out of my head and put on a record instead, because sooner than his dada and I can handle, the time with our son, as we have known it, is coming to an end. If all goes as planned, in a hand-full of months, he’ll be gone, playing piano at some college for teachers who will help him improve his technique, and teach him to compose, but nobody will ever appreciate the way he plays like we do, at all hours of the day and night.
Read more…

‘Writers tell’: The Devastating Contrasts in Life, Death, and West Virginia

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As her son Keats is born in West Virginia, a state of stark contrast between the beauty of the natural surroundings and the desecration of some of the land in never-ending hunt for oil, Christa Parravani considers his arrival and the death of her twin sister Cara, who died of a heroin overdose in the aftermath of a horrifying, brutal rape. In this haunting and beautiful essay at Guernica, she writes of the fragility of life and the state’s complicity in violence toward women and in pillaging the earth for its natural resources.

I pushed my son out in the late morning, into my husband’s hands. Keats was born limp and purple and quiet. I pulled him atop my chest, cord and all, rubbing him into his voice. We both cried out; him from the shock of life; me from the shock of that life colliding with something close to death. My husband passed our son to a mountain midwife and officially into Appalachia. Keats was born face up. The midwife had needed to twist his body to get him out of me; his collarbone broke from that turn. I wouldn’t know this until weeks later.

I’ve learned that when people from the coasts think of West Virginia at all, they think about banjo music, and Trump country, and sad miners and blown-apart mountains. What I observed as I settled in didn’t exactly match those stereotypes. There are progressive activists, and live-off-the-land farmers, and a vibrant community of artists. There are people living high off old money from coal, and people living even higher off new money from fracking. It’s a place with a long history of taking. The people and the earth carry that pain.

In the last days of Cara’s life, she and I weren’t speaking. I’d thrown her out of my Massachusetts home after I caught her shooting heroin in my bathroom. On the day she died, seven days after I’d told her to leave, Cara was living back at home with our mother. I woke that morning with a feeling of terrible remorse. I had the keen worry that I had abandoned my sister; I’d left her thinking I didn’t want her in my life. All I ever wanted was for the sober her to come back to me.

I dialed Cara’s number right after breakfast. She didn’t answer. I kept calling. I called more than thirty times. She never answered; she was already gone, her head tipped forward, her face purple and still with blood. The sun shone through a window behind her; in death, her body was warm with light. When I heard the news, it was sundown. I screamed so hard that the force of my voice, and the tension of my body, tore the straps of the dress I was wearing.

Twelve years later, I birthed my son on my sister’s death day.

What remains: Keats was born into a world that hurts women—through physical violence and politicized restrictions, through scorn and blame and silence. I can take my experience of that fact and let it break me like it broke my sister, or I can release it with faith that someone hears.

Writers tell.

Read the essay

Against Hustle: Jenny Odell Is Taking Her Time at the End of the World

"Orb of Ambivalence," Jenny Odell, digital print, 2017. "This print collects people from 1980s-era computer ads and catalog images. In the original image from which each person was taken, he or she was touching a computer, keyboard, or mouse."

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | April 2019 | 14 minutes (3,693 words)

“I almost got locked in here once,” Jenny Odell tells me as we step into a mausoleum. We’re at the Chapel of the Chimes, which sits at the base of Oakland’s sprawling Mountain View Cemetery. The chapel first opened in 1909, and was redesigned in 1928 by Julia Morgan (the architect of Hearst Castle) with Gothic flourishes that mirror the Alhambra in Spain — rooms are filled with glass bookshelves, marbled hallways spill out into courtyards, skylights abound, and once you’re inside it’s difficult to find your way out even if you, like Odell, come here on an almost weekly basis. The books that line the walls are not actually books, they are urns. It’s essentially a library of the dead — the acoustics are perfect and there’s no sound inside save for our footsteps. The Chapel used to keep cages of canaries scattered around, but people wouldn’t stop setting them free. Read more…

The Curious Tale of the Salish Sea Feet

Getty / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Kea Krause | LongreadsApril 2019| 16 minutes (3,905 words)

They come by way of similar discovery: A beachcomber, perhaps gathering shells or out for some exercise, spots a flashy, nonpelagic lump that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a human foot still nestled in its shoe. The feet, both lefts and rights, come in all sizes — sometimes wearing New Balance or Nike, occasionally a hiking boot, and sometimes still attached to leg bones, a tibia sticking out like a stake in the ground.

To the intrigue and often horror of Pacific Northwesterners, in 2007 feet began washing up along the shores of the Salish Sea, an inland ocean spanning nearly 500 miles from Olympia, Washington, the state’s capitol, to Desolation Sound, in British Columbia, Canada. Today the tally is 21 feet and counting (15 in BC, six in Washington). So prevalent are the gruesome discoveries that the BC coroner’s office has a map marked up with each new find: Foot #1 — a right — found in August 2007 floated up to Jedediah Island in a generic white sneaker with navy blue accents; Foot #5 in a muddy Nike; Foot #13 wore black with Velcro. New Year’s Day 2019 delivered the most recent foot, number 21, to a beach in Everett. It tumbled ashore in an aging boot, its condition indicating it had been out to sea for “some time,” according to local police.

A pattern of body parts washing ashore has all the trappings of a serial killer scenario or a horror movie or, in the very least, of an otherworldly phenomenon. Earned or not, the Pacific Northwest has a haunting prestige — the home of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, and Ted Bundy, and now also the land of Twilight’s Hollywood vampires in Forks, out on the peninsula. Some morbid element of the region has arrested our imaginations. It could be the skies: So gray and responsible for all the rain that keeps everything perennially damp. Or perhaps it’s the abundance of old-growth timber — plenty of dense and protected woods for stashing bodies. Rivers, branching across the state are another nature-made means of evidence disposal. It is rumored that Ridgway discarded the bodies of as many as 70 women around the Green River, 65 miles long descending from the Cascades and entering the Puget Sound just west of Seattle. In Washington State, geography and meteorology conspire to creep us out. But perhaps most lurid is the ocean itself, not just because it continues to spew body parts to its surface but also because of its infinite and perplexing nature. Its unknowability, though alluring to those in the script-writing business, has puzzled scientists and casual observers of the Sound for generations.

The southern portion of the Salish Sea is more familiarly known as Puget Sound, a body of water servicing the Seattle metropolitan area, home to about 3.8 million residents and plenty of industry — Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft, among others — all luxuriously settled in one of America’s most beautiful and diverse oceanic ecosystems. Seattle is rainy and weird, a place for artists and musicians to brood beneath weather-pregnant clouds, an offbeat city for both the creative and outdoorsy, resting in a hammock between two mountain ranges. But recently the area has seen changes out of its control: The tech industry is expected to expand the population of the Salish Sea region to 9 million people in the coming decades and has wiped away many of the city’s distinctive traits. The former home of Kurt Cobain and birthplace of grunge now has a median home value of more than $700,000 and mostly functions to accommodate well-compensated tech workers. It’s still weird though — after all, feet keep floating ashore.

A pattern of body parts washing ashore has all the trappings of a serial killer scenario or a horror movie or, in the very least, of an otherworldly phenomenon.

Last fall, I went looking for a foot. More specifically, I went to Crane’s Landing on Whidbey Island — a refuge in Puget Sound just north of Seattle — where a foot had been found, looking to see if the beach would tell me anything about why the sea had dropped the foot there. Off the ferry, I drove a narrow roadway so starved of sunshine that moss grew along its centerline. It wound through a collection of homes that petered out down by the water in a dead end. The pebble beach comprised of mostly smooth skipping stones, was lined with a row of ragged pilings, head-high with rotted bases, the remnants of the landing that had been the beach’s namesake.

When you’re from Seattle, it’s almost routine to be dazzled by the macabre sagas of the sea. As a child, my favorite story was one my uncle told about a body floating up behind his live-aboard sailboat on Lake Union. The idea of that bloated body floated into my imagination and from there on out, when visiting my family on their sailboat, I would keep my eyes glued to the water in the event another poor soul should bob up to the surface for my discovery. Read more…

A Rich Awakening

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,392 words)

We all the know the stats, that by 2030 the richest 1 percent could be hoarding two-thirds of the world’s wealth. Tax the rich! Redistribute to the poor! It’s the kind of thing you hear lately set to some lame music in a weirdly cut NowThis News video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Rutger Bregman. (It’s always some scrappy progressive, not some bloated billionaire because, I don’t know, *yawns, eats some cake.*) Perhaps the rich will be moved by the fact that income equality is not only bad for the collective mental health, but their own? No? That the 10 percent’s multiplying accessories — private jets and yachts and enormous holiday homes — hogs nearly half the world’s emissions, killing the earth we all share? No? Nothing? What’s that you say, infrastructure investment started plummeting just as inequality began rising? But all the philanthropy! Which, sure, America’s largest donors may give a little more than before, but they also make way more than they used to. And as Jacobin magazine recently noted, “those nations — mostly in Scandinavia — that have the highest levels of equality and social well-being have the tiniest philanthropic sectors.” When you have equality, you don’t need long Greek words.

To recognize this, as a rich person, you need to have a sort of reverse double consciousness. “Double consciousness” originates with W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, who coined it in 1897 as one way to describe the experience of  being an African American in a white supremacist world. In The Atlantic Monthly he defined it as, “…this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others….” The concept is based on being oppressed. What I’m talking about is an inverted version based on being the oppressor. It is the recognition that not only do you have outsized means, but that they come at the expense of others. It requires not only self awareness, but other awareness, and it’s a prerequisite for change.

Roy Disney’s granddaughter, Abigail, for instance, has given $70 million away over the past four decades, which is more than she ever inherited. “The problem is that there’s a systematic favoring of people who have accumulated an enormous amount of wealth,” she tweeted after a viral appearance on CNBC last month in which she said CEOs were overpaid. “The U.S. must make structural changes by taxing the wealthy.” To say that, she had to have had some kind of awakening — but what was it? In her case it was a sudden burst of extraordinary wealth and its human toll — not on others, but on the wealthy themselves. In 1984, when the heiress was in college, Michael Eisner became the chairman and CEO of Disney and launched its stocks into the stratosphere. Abigail’s father embraced the excess income — the too-big private jet, the too-much drinking — and no one questioned him, not even about his alcoholism. “That’s when I feel that my dad really lost his way in life. And that’s why I feel hyperconscious about what wealth does to people,” she recently told The Cut. “I lived in one family as a child, and then I didn’t even recognize the family as I got older.” Read more…