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Editors Roundtable: 170 Million Pieces of Trash Orbiting the Earth and No One Knows How to Use an Apostrophe (Podcast)

David McNew / Stringer / Getty Images

On our May 17, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Essays Editor Sari Botton, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, and Senior Editor Krista Stevens share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in Outside Magazine, Wired’s Backchannel, The New York Times Styles, and Longreads.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


00:20 “This Gen X Mess” (May 14, 2019, The New York Times

“We were in the digital stone age.” – Krista Stevens

This week’s New York Times Styles package on Generation X in 1994 inspired a wave of nostalgia.

Our editors discuss Alex Williams‘ piece on the impossibility of summing up an entire generation’s experiences in one label. (Caity Weaver‘s attempt at spending a week living with technology available in 1994 sends Sari down a memory lane of modems, payphones, and calling in her notes to the New York Times tape room.) They laugh at “The Rules,”a dating guide that looks to your grandma for advice, and discuss two more sections in the Gen X Styles package on John Singleton and Evan Dando.

12:30 “He Trots the Air” (Pam Houston, May 13, 2019, Outside Magazine)

“The first thing that I would caution about this piece is that you should not read it in a public space.” – Krista Stevens

The team discusses Pam Houston’s beautiful style in this personal essay about Houston’s 39-year-old horse, Roany, their quarter-century long bond, and having to say goodbye. We think we know family animals well — and that we have the power to delay when their time will come — but life makes its own decisions.

15:51The Curious History of Crap—From Space Junk to Actual Poop” (Ziya Tong, May 14, 2019, Wired)

This excerpt from Tong’s book The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions That Shape Our World, examines what, despite our propensity to record everything, we still don’t see: where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste is going.

The team discusses some of the excerpt’s truth bombs, like how one person’s poop is enough to fertilize 200 kilograms of cereals per year, and how orbiting space garbage as small as a lens cap can hit a spacecraft like a grenade. Luckily, the piece also explores how we can repurpose some of humanity’s trash to our advantage.

22:24The Omen of the Wasps’ Nest” (Marlene Adelstein, May 2019, Longreads)

A collector of nests, Adelstein becomes fixated on a wasp nest as an omen, while her relationship and family nests deteriorate around her. 

24:10 Editor Q&A: Are you a reader or an editor first?

“If my internal editor doesn’t pipe in, is that a sign that something is good?”- Sari Botton

A behind-the-scenes look at whether the editor brain ever turns off, how editorial sensibilities are forever evolving, and a recommendation for Jenny Zhang’s Annotations newsletter, which deconstructs what works in popular articles.

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

Becoming Family

Illustration by Tom Peake

Jennifer Berney | Longreads | May 2019 | 16 minutes (4,486 words)

 
“He’s really cute,” my partner Kellie whispered to me, moments after our first son arrived. He had a head of black hair and a pug nose. His eyes were alarmingly bright. Kellie rested one hand on the top of his head as he lay across my chest. “So cute,” she said.

Her declaration meant something to me. Because the baby wasn’t of her body, because he was of my egg and my womb and a donor’s sperm, I’d been haunted by the worry that she’d struggle to claim him as hers — that he’d seem to her like a foreign entity, like someone else’s newborn, red-faced and squirming.

Hours later, in the middle of the night, a nurse came into our room, tapped Kellie on the shoulder, and asked her to bring our newborn to the lab for a routine test. Kellie cradled the baby as the nurse poked his heel with a needle and squeezed drops of his blood onto a test card. Our baby, who was still nameless, wailed and shook. In that moment, she tells me, she was overwhelmed by biology, by the physical need to protect a tiny life.

* * *

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle proposed a theory of reproduction that would persist for thousands of years. It’s a theory that, while scientifically inaccurate, still informs our cultural thinking about parenthood.

According to Aristotle, the man, via intercourse, planted his seed in the woman’s womb. The woman’s menstrual blood nourished that seed and allowed it to grow. She provided the habitat, he supplied the content. The resulting child was the product of the father, nourished by the mother.

When it came to parenthood, the woman’s essential role was to nurture what the man had planted within her. To father was simply to provide the material — a momentary job. Fathering was ejaculating. But mothering was nurturing. This job was ongoing, never-ending. Her care began at the moment of conception and continued into adulthood and beyond.

* * *

When Kellie and I came home from the hospital with our newborn, our house felt strangely quiet and bare. In the days preceding delivery, Kellie had cleaned and organized as a way of getting ready for the baby, and our house was now unusually tidy. We sat on the couch with our sleeping baby and admired him. We smoothed his hair so that it crested at the center of his forehead, Napoleon style, then we smoothed it to the side. We said his name — West — over and over, trying to teach ourselves the word for this new being. Every so often he twitched. I had the sense that our world was about to transform, that the quiet of the first newborn days was temporary.

In the days that followed, I roamed the house in mismatched pajamas and snacked on casseroles that friends had brought over. I nursed the baby and rocked the baby and watched the baby while he slept. Meanwhile, Kellie, wearing her daily uniform of work pants and a worn-out T-shirt, built walls around our back porch to create a mudroom for our house. In the months leading up to our baby’s birth, we’d agreed that our dogs would need such a room, a place set away from a baby who would one day be crawling and drooling and grabbing, and so we called Jesse — a carpenter acquaintance whom we had once, long ago, asked to be our donor, and who had considered it for two months before turning us down. He wasn’t game to donate sperm, but he was game to bang out some walls. All day, I heard Kellie and Jesse’s hammering and muffled conversation.

In this way we entered parenthood. I was the full-time nurser and the guardian of sleep; Kellie was the builder, the house-maintainer. At night, the baby slept between us.

* * *

The idea that paternity is primarily a genetic contribution, that a father’s role is simply to provide the seed, is a very stubborn one. An absent father is still considered a father. When we use father as a verb, we usually mean the physical act of conception, while to mother more often describes the act of tending to. When a father takes on some of the active parenting, when he drives the kids to school or makes them breakfast, we often refer to these acts as “helping,” as if he were doing tasks assigned to someone else. “He’s a good father,” I’ve heard people say, bemoaning a wife’s lack of gratitude. “He helps.”

“Who’s the dad?” is a question friends of friends ask at parties when they learn that my children have two mothers. It’s a question that distant relatives ask, eager for the inside scoop.

The idea that my son doesn’t have a dad, that it is indeed possible to not have a father, is a hard thing for people to wrap their minds around. They may understand the process of donor insemination, but still, they think, because conception requires sperm, every child must have a father. Even for me, it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. When I say that my child has no father, I feel like I’m not telling the whole truth.

“Why doesn’t West have a father?” a wide-eyed boy asked me one day as he sat at a classroom table with West and three other first graders. I was helping them make illustrated pages, and somehow the topic of our family had come up. West looked at me anxiously.

“He has two moms,” I told the boy.

“But why?” he insisted.

Of the kids I knew in West’s class, one was being raised by grandparents and several more had stepparents or were being raised by a single mom. But I could see that our situation was the most confounding.

“That’s just the way our family works,” I said before rattling the crayon box and offering it around the table. The curious boy did not look satisfied, and West remained steady and silent.

* * *

* Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

By the time our donor, Daniel*, met our baby, he and his wife Rebecca had a baby of their own and had resettled on the other side of the state. We met them at a pizza place on a weekday afternoon. It was spring in the Pacific Northwest and the sun glared on fresh puddles. They had come to town to visit family and meet with longtime friends who wanted to meet their new child. At the time, our relationships with one another were still undefined, and we counted more as friends than family.

I remember that meeting in fragments, like bits of color held up to the light: Trays of half-eaten pizza. Plastic cups filled with ice water. Rebecca holding her newborn, Wren, against her, a burp cloth draped over her shoulder. Wren’s bare baby feet and the creases in his chubby ankles. My own baby, old enough to crane his head, looking around with wide eyes and a two-tooth smile. All of us in constant motion — standing to rock the baby, sitting to feed the baby, slipping into the bathroom to change the baby’s wet diaper. We passed our babies from one parent to the other, then across the table. We lifted the babies, assessing their heft, then tried to meet their eyes so that we could bombard them with smiles.

I remember it this way: We were neither distant nor close, neither awkward nor easy. We’d all been remade by parenthood, and it was like we were meeting for the first time.

I had wondered before our meeting if West, at 6 months old, would connect to Daniel especially, if there really was some magic carried in their shared DNA, if our son would recognize him, cling to him, fall asleep against his chest. But he didn’t. West greeted Daniel with joyful curiosity, the same way he greeted any stranger, and then returned to my arms to nurse.

* * *

Several months later, Kellie and I drove six hours across the state — baby tucked in his infant car seat in the back — to meet Daniel and Rebecca again, in their new home.

The fog of new parenthood had lifted, and this time, the ease between us was instant. Rebecca and I each claimed a spot at her kitchen table, sat with coffee, and watched as our children chewed on toys and pulled themselves across the wood floors. Conversation between us was continuous. We found a rhythm of interrupting one thought with another, then picking up where we left off, all the while tending to our babies as needed — rising to lift and nurse them, to change a diaper on the floor, to pull a board book from a mouth. Time with Rebecca was a respite from the solitude and repetition of early motherhood, a dose of medicine I needed.

So I found something deeply healing in having an extended family that was at once chosen, but also truly family, tied by blood.

Kellie and Daniel found their places just as easily. They spent their time rewiring Daniel’s carpentry studio, or salvaging beams from a nearby teardown, or driving to the forest to cut up fallen trees for firewood. Each of them, I imagine, had experienced their own kind of solitude as they watched their partners devote themselves fully to another human, and they both, I imagine, felt relief in working side by side.

We became parallel, symbiotic. Two families on either side of the Cascade Mountains. Sometimes they traveled to us; other times we traveled to them. Our boys knew and remembered each other. They splashed each other in a steel trough in Daniel and Rebecca’s backyard, climbed trees that had grown sideways over the shore of Puget Sound, built forts together out of cardboard in our kitchen.

The beauty of our new extended family had little to do with anything we had asked for or planned. Two years earlier, a friend had suggested that Kellie and I ask Daniel to consider being our donor. We had met him only a handful of times, but we knew that we liked him. He was strong but soft-spoken, handsome but unassuming. We were nervous to ask him. We’d explored the prospect with several men already — with Jesse the carpenter, with a coworker, with other peripheral friends — but two ghosted, one said no, and another seemed to think that the resulting child would be his own. Daniel turned out to be different. When he and Rebecca showed up at our house to discuss the possibility, it seemed he was already clear. “What kind of involvement would you want?” he asked us. We had agreed only to stay in some kind of touch over the years, to not become strangers to one another.

And yet we wound up with something I’d never had and never would’ve thought to plan for. I grew up with cousins, but none my age. They were five years older, or 12 years older, or three years younger, or 20 years younger. They were also scattered far and wide across the country. My brother was seven years younger than me, and my half-siblings were so much older that they were almost like aunts and an uncle. So I found something deeply healing in having an extended family that was at once chosen, but also truly family, tied by blood.

Or was it even blood that tied us? In theory, we wanted to know Daniel forever because questions might arise about the DNA he’d shared with us. We might someday need to ask him about some rare disease or mental illness, to probe beyond the brief set of questions we’d asked over dinner that first night we talked. And then there was the way we’d been trained to see blood as a legitimizing factor, trained to understand that blood equals family. Like many queer families, Kellie and I, while challenging this notion, unconsciously embraced it. Daniel was blood-tied to our children and therefore he was kin.

But, even more than blood, it was fate that tied us. It was like that film cliché where one stranger saves another’s life and they are therefore bound to each other forever. Rebecca and Daniel had agreed to help us build a family, and their choice had a moral weight. Gratitude would forever bind me to them. The love that I felt for West contained a love for them. I couldn’t imagine it any other way.

So it made sense to me when, four years after we’d first shared a meal and talked about becoming family, three years after our sons were born, Rebecca called us to ask if we’d considered having another baby. We had.

“Do you guys want to get pregnant again?” Rebecca asked me that day on the phone. “Because, you know, we are.”


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We went to visit them two weeks later and stayed in a motel two miles away. On our first morning, Kellie woke up before me and left in search of coffee. She came back with two paper cups filled with coffee, and also a small mason jar that held a quarter inch of semen. Later she showed me the text that Rebecca had sent: “Good morning! Donation is ready. Cum on over.”

Rebecca delivered a second son, Ryan, in November. I delivered a second son, Cedar, in January.

* * *

I am a gestational and biological parent. Kellie is an adoptive parent. We come to our roles differently.

That I gestated and breastfed my sons carries immediate, clear meaning for me. When they were babies, my smell, my voice, my touch meant sustenance. Kellie held them and bathed them and changed them, but she did not offer milk. In the middle of the night, it was my body they reached for. My role as gestational parent had immediate consequence: for the first three years, my children’s need for me was more urgent, more connected to their survival.

The other difference, the difference of biology, is far less clear. What does it mean to my family that Kellie shares no DNA with our children? Does it mean next to nothing? Or does it mean more than I want to admit?

In the 10 years that Kellie and I have raised children together, I’ve avoided asking her how she feels about being the adoptive parent. I’ve avoided it because I was afraid — afraid that she would confide that our children never fully felt like her own. I’ve been worried she might say that they felt more like small people she lived with and cared about, but that if our own relationship ended she wouldn’t know exactly where they fit.

In my own community of lesbians, there’s a legacy of loosely defined second parents. I know a number of women who conceived in the ’80s (back when artificial insemination was just beginning to be available to lesbians) and planned to be single parents. But then, during pregnancy or early in the child’s life, a partner entered the picture, stayed for a year or two, then left. The partner had no legal claim to the child, but in many cases continued to parent from a distance. I’ve spoken to some of their children — grown now — who have trouble defining their role with a single term. “She’s certainly my other parent,” one of them told me over beers, then went on to explain that the word Mom doesn’t feel right when her gestational mom “did every load of laundry, packed every lunch, and cooked every meal.”

“We had no blueprint,” she told me. “She was kind of like a weekend dad.”

Though Kellie is much more than a weekend dad, I’ve long worried about the ways in which her role as other-mother remain ambiguous and undefined.

“I feel like they’re mine” is the first thing Kellie told me when I finally summoned the nerve to ask her. But sometimes she worries that if I died, the world would not recognize her as a parent, and that our own kids might reject her. She feels secure in her own attachment, but the role the world assigns her is a tenuous one.

What does it mean to my family that Kellie shares no DNA with our children? Does it mean next to nothing? Or does it mean more than I want to admit?

In her book Recreating Motherhood, Barbara Katz Rothman writes that the value our society places on genetic relationships is inherently patriarchal, tied to our initial false belief — based in Aristotle’s “flowerpot theory” — that men were the sole genetic contributors. Because the child was of the man, he belonged to the man. Once we recognized that mothers contribute half of the genetic material, we began to see mother and father as having equal claim to their child. Rothman asserts that this is still an inherently patriarchal position, one in which blood ties indicate a kind of ownership, and one in which the work of nurturance is not accounted for.

In our own contemporary culture, we may sometimes act as though we value nurture over nature. These days I see the truism “love is love” everywhere I turn — on signs, in social media, spoken aloud by celebrities and friends. The statement suggests that love alone is the element that legitimizes a couple or a family. Still, we track our ancestry and meet new genetic relatives — strangers whom we’ve been told are family — through services like 23andMe, and we marvel at the overlapping traits and mannerisms of close relatives raised apart from one another.

We’ve learned to be careful, when speaking of adoptees, to use terms like “birth mother” instead of “real mother,” acknowledging that genes and gestation are not the only thing that make a parent real. And yet, when someone does say “real mother,” we know exactly what they mean.

“Kellie’s not your real mom,” a neighborhood kid once told Cedar, who stood there agape because he had not yet thought to wonder too hard about his origins. At the time, he already understood that his family was different. When other people asked about his father, he had learned to explain, “I have two moms.” But as far as I could tell, this was the first moment someone had invited him to wonder about the actual legitimacy of his family — its realness.

* * *

Rebecca and I are tied by blood tangentially, but not directly. Our children are blood-related. She and I are not. Still, she feels more like family than many of my actual blood relations. Rebecca’s sister and nieces feel like family too, though they are not tied to my family by heredity. We live in the same community, so when Rebecca and Daniel come to town we have large family get-togethers: picnics at parks and birthday celebrations at restaurants. Sometimes Rebecca’s mom joins us too. When we meet she always hugs me and says my first name sweetly. She knows about what ties us, and so she feels tied to me too.

Meanwhile, Daniel’s family of origin is a mystery to me, for reasons of geographical distance and family culture. I see pictures of his relatives on Facebook and have to remind myself that his kin are also my children’s blood kin. My children’s faces may grow to bear resemblance to the faces I see in these photos: the long jawline, the aquiline nose. Or, pieces of these relatives’ histories may give clues to my own children’s futures — special talents and obsessions, illnesses and struggles. Even when I remind myself of this, it feels distant, hard to reach.

Why do I look so hard to find my reflection in blood kin, as if seeing myself in my ancestors will somehow legitimize me?

Kin: Your mother who birthed and nursed you, your father who bore witness to your childhood. Your grandmother who let you sleep beside her in the bed when you came to visit. Your aunt who drove you to her home for long weekends, where you lay alongside her golden retriever and looked at the forest through her windows.

Kin: The grandfather you never met who was a ne’er-do-well, whose legacy is a stack of letters and a rainbow painted on a barn. The uncle who joked around with you in childhood, but became distant as you got older. Your second cousin who discovered you online and now sends you a Christmas card every year.

Kin: Your brother who you speak to only a few times a year, but who you carry in your heart. Your aunt by marriage (then lost through divorce) who delighted you with her easy brand of sarcasm.

Kin: The cousins you’ve only met once or twice in a lifetime. When you see photos of them, some of them look like people you might easily know. Others look like strangers, like someone you might pass in a grocery store and immediately forget.

* * *

Kellie told me once that she hesitates when telling our kids about her family’s history. It’s not quite clear to her: Is her history their history, or is it something else? Long before she spoke this aloud to me the same question hung in my mind. Does her history matter to our kids because it’s their mother’s history, or because it is, somehow, their own?

When I look at my own ancestral family photos, I seek clues to who I am, traces of a self that predate me. Are these connections real, I wonder, or are they lore? Why does ancestral connection hold a sense of magic? Why do I look so hard to find my reflection in blood kin, as if seeing myself in my ancestors will somehow legitimize me?

And yet it turns out that some of my ancestors are not related to me genetically any more than Kellie is genetically related to our sons. Over the course of generations, our genetic ties to individual ancestors dissolve. Geneticist Graham Coop writes that if you trace your genetic heritage, after seven generations “many of your ancestors make no major genetic contribution to you.” In other words, your cells carry no trace of their DNA. They are no longer your genetic relatives, and yet they are still, of course, your ancestors. “Genetics is not genealogy,” he writes.

What if, more than heredity, families are really a collection of stories, some of them spoken, some of them withheld? Kellie’s ancestors were pioneers. My boys spent the first years of their lives in a house that her grandfather and great-grandfather built together. Kellie spends most of her free time splitting wood, building fences and sheds, capturing bee swarms. Cedar can now spot a swarm from a great distance. West is learning to measure wood and use a chop saw. They may one day raise their own families on the same land they grew up on. They may add new walls, new buildings, new fixtures. They do not require Kellie’s genes to carry on her legacy.

* * *

Four years after West was born, he asked me where he came from. It was a bright summer day and his brother — a baby then — was on a walk with Kellie, strapped against her chest. We were staying at a ranch in Colorado and the land was expansive: trails that went over bare hills and into forests, rocks and brush under wide blue sky. That afternoon West and I were inside our dark cabin, with light streaming through the windows and making patches on the floor.

I asked if he wanted to know who his donor was. “Do you want to guess?” I asked him. I was curious to see if he already had a sense.

“JoAnn?” he said, referring to a close family friend.

“The person who helped us is a man,” I said.

“Oh right,” he said. He thought and guessed some more, until I finally told him.

“It’s Daniel,” I said. “Wren’s dad.”

I watched him closely to see how he’d respond, but I detected neither joy nor surprise nor disappointment.

“Did Daniel help make Cedar too?”

“Yes,” I said.

He smiled. It didn’t surprise me that this was the thing that mattered to him — that he and his brother had the same origin story, that he wasn’t alone in the world.

* * *

We tend to understand our DNA as a simple blueprint for who we are and what we might become. We see experience as the tool that can push a person toward or away from their full potential, yet we see the potential itself as innate and fixed.

But in truth DNA and experience interact with each other. The field of epigenetics tells us that genes are turned on and off by experience, that the food we consume, the air we breathe, and how we are nurtured help determine which genes are expressed and which ones are repressed. Our DNA coding isn’t static. For instance, drinking green tea may help regulate the genes that suppress tumors. A sudden loss may trigger depression. And the amount of nurturing and physical contact a child receives in the early years may help determine whether or not he’ll suffer from anxiety as an adult. Currently researchers are investigating to what degree trauma in one person’s experience can cause a change in DNA that is transmitted from one generation to the next. Experience might become a legacy carried in blood.

Frances Champagne, a psychologist and genetic researcher, writes that “tactile interaction,” physical contact between parent and child, “is so important for the developing brain.” Her research shows that “the quality of the early-life environment can change the activity of genes.”

When Kellie held our newborn sons against her chest, when she bounced them and rocked them until they slept, she was not simply soothing them in the moment. She was helping program their DNA, contributing to their genetic legacy. Parents, through the way they nurture, contribute to the child’s nature. There is no clear line between the two.

* * *

In her memoir on adoption, Nicole Chung discusses the concept of family lineage and writes that she has been “grafted” onto her adoptive parents’ family tree. The graft strikes me as an apt metaphor. The scion is not of the receiving tree, and yet it is nourished and sustained by the tree. In the process of grafting, the tree is changed. The scion is changed. Through a process called vascular connection, they become one body.

The rootstock does not automatically reject the scion. The human body does not automatically reject an embryo conceived with a donor egg and sperm. A baby is comforted by warm skin, a smell, a heartbeat. A body loves a body. The baby may care that the source is familiar, but not that the DNA matches his own.

When Kellie’s mother visits with us, she often compares our boys to other members of her family. “It’s funny how Cedar’s blonde just like Noah, and wild like him too,” she’ll say, or, “West’s eyes are that same shade of hazel your grandpa’s were.”

I used to think she was forgetting that our children are donor conceived, or maybe just being silly. Now I realize it’s the opposite. Kellie’s mother doesn’t forget. She knows. She’s claiming them: tying her family’s present, past, and future, like stringing lights around the branches of her family tree, affirming that we belong to one another.
 

Jennifer Berney’s essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Offing, Tin House, and Brevity. She is currently working on a memoir that examines the patriarchal roots of the fertility industry, and the ways that queer families have both engaged with and avoided it.

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Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Psychiatrist in My Writing Class and His ‘Gift’ of Hate

Illustration by Olivia Waller

Rani Neutill | Longreads | May 2019 | 11 minutes (2,723 words)

It is day three of the writing workshop. I sit in a small room with a table fit for ten. The chairs, blue and plastic, are uncomfortable. The table, smooth. The walls, buttercream. I cram writing, reading, and workshopping into four hours a day. Each morning a slight wind breaks through the New England summer heat and wafts salt through the air. It reminds me that the ocean is not far away. I am grateful to have five days away from waiting tables and teaching so I can learn and write.

Covered in greens, reds, and orange, I wear tank tops that expose my tattoos, that make eyes follow the lines of my decorated arms. My skin has grown into a deep brown from the sun’s finesse, from the batches of melanin that lay under my flesh, from my mother’s Indian blood.

All my classmates are white.

I have meticulously selected this date, smack in the middle of the week to present my work. I wanted time to get acclimated, to know my fellow classmates, to feel comfortable around them. When I walked into the room on the first day, I felt my difference, my race, my arms marked with color. I knew my story would be different. How questions of racism and immigration might not pertain to the other members of my class. The eight pages I workshop are from the memoir I’ve been writing for three years about my mentally ill Bengali immigrant mother and the way she tragically died. A memoir about the silence around mental illness within South Asian communities. A memoir about the costs of beauty defined by racism, a quintessential Bengali story about the impact of the forces of migration and colonialism.

The teacher is intelligent and kind and has encouraged helpful criticism, beginning with an author’s strengths. She does not like the Iowa Workshop type of annihilating appraisal. Students talk about what they like. Then a fellow workshopper says,

“I guess I’m the only one who hated this piece.”

I recoil.

My skin combusts into tendrils from the force of his statement. My back sharpens. Eyes wide, I turn towards this man. I am thankful there is a student between us so I don’t have to be near his translucent skin, his bald head shimmering under the fluorescent lights. Sweat beading on his brow. His long grey and red beard, his attempt to look distinct. His small silver earrings, his attempt to look edgy.

The class takes a quick breath, exhaling after two Mississippi seconds. It is a pause and silence that registers what was said. That impenetrable word, hate.

He continues.

“I found myself furiously crossing things out and correcting grammar, fixing sentences and wondering when this writer learned to speak English.”

I wonder if he has British blood. I was a professor of postcolonial literature for sixteen years. I am familiar with the white man’s interrogation of colonized peoples’ ability to speak English. I read and taught Freud and Lacan to analyze the white man’s words; Kipling, Macaulay, EM Forster all come to mind.

I am livid. I was born in the United States. English is my first language and I speak it fluently, but am embarrassed because my relationship with the language is fraught. My mother’s English was fractured. Her accent muddled white people’s perception of her. She tried hard to rid herself of that accent, to sound like a “real” American. As she grew older, her Indian accent crept back in and her English became broken.
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‘Give It Up For My Sister’: Beyonce, Solange, and The History of Sibling Acts in Pop

Frank Micelotta, Frank Leonhardt, Evan Agostini, Chris Pizzello, Jordan Strauss, Hubert Boesl / AP, Illustration by Homestead

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,597 words)

Houston-born sisters Beyoncé and Solange Knowles couldn’t be more different. They emit different energies, seem to vibrate at different frequencies. Solange is the emo Cancerian who lunged at her brother-in-law in an elevator. Beyoncé, the preternaturally polished Virgo, clung to the corner and fixed her dress. Lately, I’ve been hung up on how they’re similar. I think it’s because, for people who’ve paid attention, it’s their differences that got drilled into us over the years. By the time Solange released her first record in December 2002, Beyoncé, with Destiny’s Child, had released four albums, earned three Grammy Awards, and was in the final recording sessions for her solo debut. Focusing on their differences was probably a strategic move dreamed up by their father, and, at the time, manager, Matthew Knowles, to maximize the commercial viability of the two artists. Yet, seventeen years later, in the spring of this year, both siblings released albums and accompanying films with musings on “home.”

The two projects are like fraternal twins—individually interesting, but fun and compelling to think about in relation. Both follow albums that were career highlights. Both build their foundations on rhythm, the voice, and vocal harmony. Both marry light and sound and knit their soundscapes into images. Both depend on the improvisational skill of a cohort of contributors. Beyoncé’s project, the live album companion to her Netflix documentary “Homecoming,” documented her two headlining sets at last year’s Coachella and layered the visuals and sonics of HBCU pageantry atop references to a specific, Southern emanation of blackness. Solange’s fifth studio album, When I Get Home, traveled the exact same terrain, but in a far-out, deconstructed way, with references to cosmic jazz and psychedelic R&B, black cowboys, undulating hips and mudras, and the skyscrapers and wide, green lawns of the sisters’ hometown.

It’s logical that if two people share a childhood home, they grow up to be into the same things. But it’s taken time — for us, as audiences, to widen our perspectives enough so that we can see, in the same frame, how they’re similar and how they’re not. It’s taken time for the two sisters to grow comfortable enough being themselves while publicly navigating the music industry as black women. To differentiate herself from her sister’s glamorous pop image, Solange initially emanated an alterna-vibe that resonated with those who may have liked Beyoncé, but felt hemmed in by her R&B fantasy, lead-girl-in-a-video perfection. While Bey rocked the trendy low-slung denim of the early aughts, went blonde, and mostly kept a huge mane of loose, blown out curls, Solange wore red box braids, and in her first video, a floor length patchwork skirt. She was the earthier sister, positioned in alignment with the diasporic neo soul scene of the late 90s. She had a baby, got married early, and lived with her young family, for a while, in Idaho. Then she sheared her long locks and quietly rented a brownstone in Carroll Gardens.


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We didn’t linger on or make much meaning from Solange’s time as a background dancer for her sister’s group, or how she’d replaced Kelly Rowland in the lineup for some tour dates when they opened for Christina Aguilera in 2000. But it did raise eyebrows when, during Solange’s Brooklyn years, Beyoncé began showing up at concerts of indie acts her sister put her on to.

Solange’s first album Solo Star covered a lot of musical ground, but didn’t make much of an impact commercially or otherwise. She was then 16. Between 2001 and early 2003, a number of female R&B vocalists made big Top 10 pop albums: Alicia Keys, Janet Jackson, Ameriie, Ashanti, Mya. Beyoncé’s 2003 debut (coupled with the rapid deterioration of the recording industry) seemed to flatten out the pop-R&B landscape like a grenade. Five years later, Solange released the Motown-influenced Sol-Angel and the Hadley Street Dreams, then left her label. She independently released the 2012 EP “True.” Its lead single “Losing You,” a buoyant breakup bop, was a breakthrough. A Seat at the Table, with spoken word interludes that include interviews with her parents about black history and family, came out in the fall of 2016. It was Solange’s first album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200. By then, Beyoncé was talking about her mama’s and daddy’s roots, too, most explicitly, on Lemonade, her sixth studio project as a solo artist, which, just five months before, earned the same chart placement.  

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According to Billboard, besides the Knowles sisters, in the history of the chart there have been only two other pairs of sibling solo artists in which each sibling has earned a number one pop album: Master P and Silkk the Shocker during a run of releases in the late nineties, and Janet and Michael Jackson. The Jacksons’ older brother, Jermaine, The Braxton sisters, Toni and Tamar, and the Simpson sisters, Jessica and Ashlee, have all earned albums in the Top 10. But the only solo siblings to earn number ones during the same calendar year have been Janet and Michael, Solange and Beyoncé.

The two projects are like fraternal twins—individually interesting, but fun and compelling to think about in relation.

Michael famously got his start in a band of brothers, The Jackson Five. After signing to Motown in 1969, their first four singles — “I Want You Back”, “ABC”, “The Love You Save”, and “I’ll Be There” — all went to number one. Their father, Joseph Jackson, a former boxer and steelworker born in Arkansas, managed the band with reportedly horrid methods. Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, and Marlon all became capable musicians individually. But it was Janet, born eight years after Michael and too young to join her brothers’ band, who truly absorbed their ascent. She performed in the family’s variety show and TV sitcoms throughout the 70s, and beginning in the late 80s, released music that, arguably, approached Michael’s impact. Control, Rhythm Nation, Janet., and The Velvet Rope are gorgeous, singular statements that define pop-R&B and still sound alive.

Janet has earned more number one albums than Michael (seven to his six) and her singles have been in the Top 10 for more weeks than his (“That’s the Way Love Goes” was the longest running number one for either of them). For a while, the fiasco of Super Bowl 2004 derailed Janet’s career. She lost endorsement deals and had a long, marked decline in album sales. “Nipplegate” angered then CBS chairman Les Moonves so much that he’d reportedly ordered MTV and VH1 to stop playing her videos. Janet’s black fans always suspected something sinister at play. Last year, the New Yorker and New York Times published sexual assault allegations against Moonves, and his pattern of derailing women’s careers became public knowledge. Janet got inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this past March, and while that’s somewhat palliative, it doesn’t give back the lost years, or acknowledge her sprawling, multi-medium contributions to entertainment. Still, her reputation hasn’t had the kind of epic blemishes Michael’s has, and our current ferment of empowered, black women singers owes everything to her.

Though they’re starting to, Solange and Beyoncé haven’t leaned all the way in to their shared origin in the way of Michael and Janet in the ”Scream” video, where their charisma and similar, long-limbed, open hip-jointed athleticism is foregrounded in nearly every frame. We got glimpses at Solange’s set at Coachella in 2014, when Bey joined in for a dance break, and its reprise in Bey’s sets, a highlight of the 2019 film. Solange has, like Janet, who sang backup on Thriller, been all over Beyoncé’s catalog. And while coverage of black pop has evolved from the 90s and early 2000s, when Janet got blackballed and Beyoncé and Solange seemed to represent poles on a restricted continuum of what a black woman in pop could be (the glamorous diva vs. the earthy bohemian), it still hasn’t gone far enough.

In Interview, Beyoncé asked her younger sister where she got her inspiration, and she answered,“For one, I got to have a lot of practice. Growing up in a household with a master class such as yourself definitely didn’t hurt.” She also namechecked Missy Elliot, who produced and provided vocals for some of Destiny’s Child’s finest tracks. In other words, she claimed her proximity to her older sister’s career, as nourishment, cultivation, as part of what undergirds her artistry. When Solange’s latest album launched, the NPR music critic Ann Powers made a playlist of its antecedents called the “mamas of Solange.” It included Alice Coltrane, Minnie Riperton, Tweet, Aaliyah, and TLC. It did not include Beyoncé or Destiny’s Child, contemporaries of some of the women who did make the list. Maybe it’s taken for granted? Stevie Wonder’s ambient album The Secret Life of Plants is brought up a lot in relation to When I Get Home, but The Writings on the Wall and Dangerously in Love are also important building blocks of the music Solange and most contemporary pop and R&B artists make. It feels incomplete to not say so. Similarly, when talking about Beyoncé, something’s missing when we don’t acknowledge how indebted she is to the cluster of women around her. Perhaps that’s leftover residue from the marketing machine of the late 90s and early aughts, too — an overemphasis on singularity.

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When I Get Home’s interlude “S. MacGregor,” named after an avenue in Houston’s Third Ward, contains snippets of Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen performing a poem their mother, Vivian Ayers-Allen, wrote. Rashad and Allen make up another culturally significant sibling pair. There’s Fame!, The Cosby Show, and A Different World, but also the stage — Rashad is the first black woman to win a lead actress Tony, and Allen was nominated for Tony Awards for West Side Story and Sweet Charity.

Both sisters also had short-lived recording careers. Rashad released a tribute album to Josephine Baker in 1978 and an album of nursery rhymes in 1991. She memorably sang on multiple episodes of The Cosby Show. Allen released Special Look in 1989. It was a pop, dance-R&B concoction that sounds like a harder edged Paula Abdul, whose blockbuster Forever Your Girl had come out the year before. Today, Allen directs for TV and runs Los Angeles’ Debbie Allen Dance Academy, while Rashad directs for the stage.

Allen’s younger than Rashad by 2 years, and they have two older brothers: the jazz musician Andrew Arthur Allen, and Hugh Allen, a banker. Their parents’ nasty divorce in the mid-’80s got covered in Jet. I often wonder about the dynamics in high-intensity, high-achieving households like theirs. Some accounts say Solange felt neglected for parts of her childhood when her older sister’s group became the family business. The five-year age difference is too wide for straightforward competition, but not so for resentment. Some of my earliest memories are the legendary fights between my two older, high-achieving siblings. It still annoys me to think about how much time and energy their rivalry took up (and continues to take up) in our family. In an interview with Maria Shriver last year, Tina Knowles Lawson said she deliberately taught her daughters not to be intimidated by another woman’s shine and sent them to therapy early on to learn to protect and support each other. From the perspective of an outsider, it seems to have worked.

While coverage of black pop has evolved from the 90s and early 2000s, when Janet got blackballed and Beyoncé and Solange seemed to represent poles on a restricted continuum of what a black woman in pop could be, it still hasn’t gone far enough.

Family dynasties are neither new nor newly influential in pop. My mother adored the voice of Karen Carpenter, who’d gotten her start in a duo with her brother, Richard. The LPs of the Emotions, the Pointer Sisters, the Jones Girls, and Sister Sledge were in my  mother’s racks, too, — all vocal groups with at least one pair of siblings. The early years of rock and roll, the doo wop era, is full of crews of schoolmates, like the Chantels, the Marvelettes or the Supremes, or sibling groups like The Andrews Sisters, the Shangri-Las, and the Ronettes. Later, there’s DeBarge, the Emotions, The Sylvers, the Five Stairsteps, Wilson Phillips, the Winans, Ace of Base, Xscape, the Beach Boys, the Bee Gees, the Isley Brothers. Part of me wants to say it’s because of the genre’s origins in domestic spaces like the living room or the stoop, a refuge of creativity against the backdrop of chaotic 20th century urban life. Music education in schools provided training, as did the subtle rigor of the church, where troupes, quartets, and choirs led worship. When describing what’s special about “that sibling sound,” in 2014, Linda Ronstadt told the BBC: “The information of your DNA is carried in your voice, and you can get a sound [with family] that you never get with someone who’s not blood-related to you.” What a voice sounds like, in large part, depends on biology and anatomy—the shape of the head, chest, the construction of the sinus cavities. It makes sense that the sweetest, most seamless harmonizing could happen between people who share DNA. And as audiences, we like being witness to the chemistry of our performers. It can feel fun and somewhat uncanny to watch people who look a little bit alike sing and dance in formation.

None of this completely explains how much popular music has historically been “A Family Affair” (a number one in 1971 for Sly and the Family Stone, a group comprised of Sylvester Stewart and his siblings Freddie and Rose, with baby sister, Vaetta, in charge of the backing vocalists). Or how much, aside from the Jonas Brothers, the top 40 of the past few months is absent sibling groups, or, really, groups of any kind. Haim, the trio of sisters Este, Danielle, and Alana from the San Fernando Valley, had Top 10 albums in 2013 and 2017, and will co-headline this year’s Pitchfork’s festival with the Isley Brothers and Robyn. They sing in effortless three-part harmony, are aggressive on guitar, bass, and percussion, and write their own songs. A New York Times critic called them proudly “anachronistic,” because their sound is a throwback to earlier eras and bands like Fleetwood Mac and Destiny’s Child, whose Stevie Nicks-sampling “Bootylicious,” was the last pop number one from a girl group. In a 2011 piece for The Root, Akoto Ofori-Atta attributed the decline of vocal groups to, among other factors, reduced record label budgets and the “me-first” narcissism of social media. She also suggested the cyclical nature of music trends could mean that audiences will want to hear tight vocal harmonies again. I’d think that was impossible since digitization has meant that people don’t have to sing together anymore. But singing itself has gotten new life from young R&B artists like Ella Mai, Moses Sumney, and H.E.R., so who knows.

In 2015, Beyonce signed the sister duo Chloe+ Halle to her record label. She’d seen them on YouTube performing covers and accompanying themselves on keys in their living room.  The young women sing ethereal, soul-inflected harmonies, play multiple instruments and compose and produce their own music. They’re also actresses with recurring roles on “grown-ish.” Their first studio album The Kids are Alright released last year and earned the group two Grammy nominations. They performed at the ceremony, memorably, in the tribute to Donny Hathaway, and at the Grammy’s tribute to Motown, they performed the Marvelette’s “Please Mr. Postman,” Motown’s first number one. None of the singles from Chloe + Halle’s record have made much of a commercial impact or stuck with me yet, but, based on history, the incubation potential of the vocal group, the sibling group in particular, bodes well for longevity.

 

 

Reimagining Harper Lee’s Lost True Crime Novel: An Interview with Casey Cep

Ben Martin / HarperCollins

Adam Morgan  | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,793 words)

 

Four years ago, when the news broke that a second Harper Lee novel had been discovered fifty years after To Kill a Mockingbird, the literary world was shocked. Some readers were thrilled by the prospect of returning to the world of Scout, Atticus Finch, and Boo Radley. Others were concerned the 88-year-old Lee might have been pressured to publish an unfinished draft. But Casey Cep, an investigative reporter for the New Yorker and the New York Times, drove down to Alabama to get to the bottom of it. And what she found wasn’t a publishing conspiracy, but another lost book Lee had attempted to write for more than a decade, but never finished.

The book was called The Reverend. It would have been a true-crime novel like In Cold Blood (a book Lee helped Truman Capote research, write, and edit, despite his failure to give her any credit). The Reverend would have told the story of Willie Maxwell, a black preacher who murdered five members of his own family in the 1970s in order to collect life insurance money. It would have touched on voodoo, racial politics in post-industrial Alabama, and a courtroom setpiece that rivaled To Kill a Mockingbird for drama. But Harper Lee never finished writing The Reverend, and now, thanks to Casey Cep, we know why.

Cep’s debut, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, is fascinating, addicting, and unbearably suspenseful. Cep actually tells three concentric stories: the crimes of Willie Maxwell, the trials of his lawyer Tom Radney, and Harper Lee’s failed attempt to write about them. When I called Cep from “a Southern phone number” on an unseasonably hot spring afternoon, she initially thought I was one of her sources calling with a “some bombshell thing they want to show me, far too late to help with the book.”

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There Is No Other Way To Say This

Tony Comiti / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Melissa Batchelor Warnke | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,668 words)

 

“What you have heard is true. I was in his house.” So begins one of the most famous poems of the late twentieth century, Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” which was part of an early body of work that seemed to contemporary admirers as if it had “reinvent[ed] the political lyric at a moment of profound depoliticization.” The poem describes a meeting Forché had with a Salvadoran military leader in his home in 1978, a year before the coup that sparked that country’s extraordinarily brutal civil war, which lasted for more than twelve years. The poem’s power lies in the quick juxtaposition of quotidian details — the colonel’s daughter filing her nails, a cop show playing on TV, mangoes being served — with his sudden sadistic flourish:

…………..The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air………..

“Something for your poetry, no?” the colonel says next. The implication is clear; the young human rights advocate’s writing is pointless, the colonel’s position will forever afford him impunity. Read more…

Technology Is as Biased as Its Makers

"Patty Ramge appears dejected as she looks at her Ford Pinto." Bettmann / Getty

Lizzie O’Shea | an excerpt adapted from Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Teach Us about Digital Technology | Verso | May 2019 | 30 minutes (8,211 words)

In the late spring of 1972, Lily Gray was driving her new Ford Pinto on a freeway in Los Angeles, and her thirteen-year-old neighbor, Richard Grimshaw, was in the passenger seat. The car stalled and was struck from behind at around 30 mph. The Pinto burst into flames, killing Gray and seriously injuring Grimshaw. He suffered permanent and disfiguring burns to his face and body, lost several fingers and required multiple surgeries.

Six years later, in Indiana, three teenaged girls died in a Ford Pinto that had been rammed from behind by a van. The body of the car reportedly collapsed “like an accordion,” trapping them inside. The fuel tank ruptured and ignited into a fireball.

Both incidents were the subject of legal proceedings, which now bookend the history of one of the greatest scandals in American consumer history. The claim, made in these cases and most famously in an exposé in Mother Jones by Mike Dowie in 1977, was that Ford had shown a callous recklessness for the lives of its customers. The weakness in the design of the Pinto — which made it susceptible to fuel leaks and hence fires — was known to the company. So too were the potential solutions to the problem. This included a number of possible design alterations, one of which was the insertion of a plastic buffer between the bumper and the fuel tank that would have cost around a dollar. For a variety of reasons, related to costs and the absence of rigorous safety regulations, Ford mass-produced the Pinto without the buffer.

Most galling, Dowie documented through internal memos how at one point the company prepared a cost-benefit analysis of the design process. Burn injuries and burn deaths were assigned a price ($67,000 and $200,000 respectively), and these prices were measured against the costs of implementing various options that could have improved the safety of the Pinto. It turned out to be a monumental miscalculation, but, that aside, the morality of this approach was what captured the public’s attention. “Ford knows the Pinto is a firetrap,” Dowie wrote, “yet it has paid out millions to settle damage suits out of court, and it is prepared to spend millions more lobbying against safety standards.” Read more…

Shelved: Tupac and MC Hammer’s Promising Collaboration

Illustration by Homestead

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | April 2019 | 14 minutes (2,898 words)

 

In 1990, rapper Stanley “MC Hammer” Burrell stood at the pinnacle of popular culture. His stage show featured 32 musicians and dancers, all of whom attended a rigorous boot camp. According to an Ebony magazine article from that year, the boot camp consisted of “four miles of jogging, weight training, and at least six hours of dancing daily.” “Hammer Time” cultural saturation included demonstrations of his athletic “Hammer Dance” on Oprah and appearances in commercials for British Knights athletic shoes and Pepsi. Hammer owned 2,000 pairs of baggy “Arabian pants,” which, along with gold lamé vests, made up his distinctive stage image.

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Editors Roundtable: Violence of Men, Money, and Space (Podcast)

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On our May 10, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Fact-checker Ethan Chiel, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and The New Yorker.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


00:26 My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.
(Wil S. Hylton, May 8, 2019, The New York Times Magazine

“These are often snapshots or frames in the film of your life, and they don’t often take into account the frames that come after…something like this that is both personal and societal, you certainly should get applause for stepping forward and saying I did these things, I am responsible in this way, but the work continues forever and I agree that the applause can sound like absolution and it should not be.” –Aaron Gilbreath

In his essay, Hylton recounts being physically beaten by his cousin in an unprovoked attack. The piece also weaves in the deterioration, over a decade, of Hilton’s marriage, and examines how masculinity and the ideas around masculinity were a factor in both events.

The team discusses why these types of intimate family violence stories elicit a different reaction when written by women versus men and the tension surrounding the question of whom toxic masculinity hurts more: men or women?

11:06 “Going Under at the Playboy Club
(Josephine Livingstone, May 8, 2019, The New Republic)

“I think the thing we’re struggling over is intentional. Whether it was in 1963 or now, the idea that these women, these waiters, might sleep with you, is a big part of the business that is being sold.” –Kelly Stout

A follow-up to Gloria Steinem’s “A Bunny’s Tale” written in 1963, Livingstone’s piece is in explicit conversation with Steinem’s while grappling with gender performance at a place like The Playboy Club. The piece looks at how both writers examine how the playboy culture and the public conversation around it have changed in the ensuing years.

The team touches on the economic dynamics at play in the piece and “the strange thorny mix of labor and gender representation issues.” They talk about performances of gender and interrogating our reactions to these performances. Finally they look at Livingstone’s and Steinem’s roles as both participants and observers and the inherent reductionist problem of journalism’s assumption that a particular glimpse into a world is more full than it is.

23:20How America’s Oldest Gun Maker Went Bankrupt: A Financial Engineering Mystery”
(Jesse Barron, May 1, 2019, The New York Times Magazine)

“A story nominally about guns that really isn’t about guns at all.” –Ethan Chiel

Gun manufacturer Remington was bought by a private equity firm who moved manufacturing to Alabama and, in the process, pushed the company to bankruptcy. It’s a story about debt and finance and municipal government that looks at how when debt transfer is dressed up as job creation, responsibility is lost.

The team discusses the complex machinations of American finance and how the actual functioning of a company doesn’t always have to do with whether they live or die. Meanwhile, people’s belief that these things are happening in the free market, that meritocracy and supply and demand are the only things dictating whether companies survive, obscures what is really happening while allowing us to feel protected.

33:10The Race to Develop the Moon
(Rivka Galchen, April 29, 2019, The New Yorker)

“For fresh starts we used to have California, go west. Now we go up to the moon.” –Aaron Gilbreath

Galchen explores a renewed interest in the moon by China, Japan, Isreal, India, the EU, and the US. Not as a place to stake a claim for political reasons, as it was in the 60s and 70s, but as a place to exploit and monetize resources and start businesses.

The team discusses what might happen if we take our capitalist, resource-exploiting culture beyond our planet and whether we can bring our ability to observe and reflect on the human experience with us as well.

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Glass, Pie, Candle, Gun

Henry Griffin / AP

Sean Howe | Longreads | May 2019 |  15 minutes (3,853 words)

In November 2018, after the Secret Service seized the security credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta, the White House Press Secretary stated the reason for the revocation was that the administration would “never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.” Within hours, attorney Ted Boutrous responded on Twitter:
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