Search Results for: oral history

The Olympian Who Believes He’s Always On TV

Mary PilonThe Kevin Show: An Olympic Athlete’s Battle with Mental Illness | Bloomsbury | March 2018 | 14 minutes (3,775 words)

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you.” –The Velveteen Rabbit

As Kevin Hall stood onboard the Artemis, a 72-foot catamaran, trying to help his teammates dredge Andrew Simpson’s body out of the water, he wasn’t entirely sure if the scene unfolding before him was really happening or not.

Andrew “Bart” Simpson, whose body might or might not have been in the water, was a stocky British Olympic gold medalist with short, spiky chestnut hair and a wide smile. One of the world’s best sailors, Simpson knew what to do in emergencies, which made his being trapped underwater for ten minutes all the more incomprehensible. The $140-million Artemis was supposed to be a technological wonder, so it made no sense to anyone onboard that it had crumpled so quickly into a taco shell, trapping Simpson in its fold.

Finally, Kevin and his teammates were able to pull Simpson’s soggy two hundred pounds out of the water and onto a floating backboard.

The emergency responders began to perform CPR, one officer cutting open Simpson’s wetsuit so he could apply a defibrillator to his chest. They pushed, the sailors waiting for Simpson to breathe, to show some sign of life. But Simpson was dead. He was 36 years old.

Months of preparation and millions of dollars had gone into the design of the Artemis, a vessel that had stunned other sailors with its foils and gadgets and that had seemed almost to fly over the water. Kevin suddenly felt lost. What had happened? Who, if anyone, was to blame? And why had Simpson, of all the sailors on the boat, been the one to die? Kevin had known Simpson for years, their sailing careers often overlapping, intersecting, and running in parallel. Simpson had something that Kevin and some of the other men on board the Artemis did not — an Olympic gold medal — and he represented something that all of the men on board aspired to be: a champion athlete and family man with a kind heart and generous spirit, seemingly unfazed by the success that he had attained.

Kevin thought about all this and more as the emergency workers took Simpson’s body away and everyone went home. In the days that followed, part of him wanted to talk to his teammates about what had happened, but part of him dared not. Because, if he was honest, he still wasn’t entirely sure that the crash and Simpson’s death had really happened. It seemed too horrifying to be real. And for a few moments, there had been that flash.

The Director. Cameras. Actors. Scripts.

Kevin wondered: Had it all just been part of The Show?
Read more…

Kara Walker’s Subtlety

(Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Natalie Hopkinson | A Mouth Is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five Continents, and the Art of Resistance | The New Press | February 2016 | 14 minutes (3,721 words)

* * *

Like a web
is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed!
Martin Carter

Inside the abandoned Domino Sugar Refinery in New York, the first thing that hits you is the smell: over a century’s worth of industrial grime, clinging to black, molasses-coated walls. At first whiff, it is kind of sweet, like stale cake. As you go deeper into the cavernous brick building, it gives way to a sour curdling. As my ten-year-old daughter, Maven, describes it: “It’s like how my cat smells when he throws up.”

Maven, my friend Izetta, and I are among more than a hundred thousand people who make a pilgrimage in the summer of 2014 to pay homage to the “Sugar Sphinx,” the seventy-five-foot-long, forty-foot-high creation of Kara Walker, one of the most important and provocative artists working in the United States. The sculpture is forty tons of sugar molded into a ghostly white apparition, part mammy, part sphinx. The line to see her takes more than an hour to travel and stretches out for four long Brooklyn blocks. I spot the writer Gaiutra Bahadur, whose recent book, Coolie Woman, explores the history of indentured sugar workers in Guyana. Bahadur’s research on sugar plantation life and its bitter aftertaste among Guyanese women speaks forcefully to the exhibit we came to see. I wave Bahadur over to join us in line.

The installation’s title, displayed in bold black type painted along the Domino Sugar factory’s brick façade:

A Subtlety

or the Marvelous Sugar Baby

an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who
have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to
the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the
demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant

The original Domino factory—first built in 1850s Williamsburg— was being torn down, along with the stories of generations of lives that it touched around the world. The factory was just one stop in the sugar industry’s “triangular trade” that created the blueprint for the globalized economy. Investors came from Europe; labor came from Africa; the cane fields were located in points across the Global South. The Domino refinery was the final step before the sugar reached consumers. Raw sugar would arrive at Domino’s forty-thousand-square-foot facility. Through the magic of refinery, pristine white sugar would come out. The profits that followed made sugar a key fuel of Empire.

The title, A Subtlety, is taken straight from history. Centuries ago, “subtleties” referred to elaborate, edible toys made of sugar. These exotic treats and status symbols were first made in the Middle East and popularized among the seventeenth-century European aristocracy. These “subtleties” could be trees, architectural models, or depictions of peasants holding baskets of fruit. There was nothing subtle about them, given what a rare and expensive luxury sugar was at the time. Unveiled at dinner parties, these were ostentatious displays of the host’s clout. The sugar sculptures could also be used to send more subversive messages. “Sly rebukes to heretics and politicians were conveyed in these sugared emblems,” writes Sidney Mintz in Sweetness and Power. Read more…

It’s a Wonderful World: The Remaking of California Agriculture

(Trent Davis Bailey/California Sunday)

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (4,100 words)

The February issue of The California Sunday Magazine devoted its feature well to a single piece, 20 years in the making. Mark Arax, a native of California’s San Joaquin Valley and the son of a grape grower in Fresno, has spent the last several decades working on a story about billionaires Lynda and Stuart Resnick, who transformed an agricultural desert into a cornucopia of pistachios, pomegranates, and oranges — cleverly marketed as “Cuties” and “Halos” by their business, The Wonderful Company. In just a few decades, the Resnicks rebranded of San Joaquin Valley agriculture, and the impoverished community of Lost Hills, in their image, despite never having farmed a day in their lives. Arax is writing a book about water wars in California that will be published by Knopf.

***

Aaron Gilbreath: You said you carried around notes about Stewart Resnick for nearly two decades. How did you first hear about him?

Mark Arax: When I was writing The King of California, about J.G. Boswell in the Tulare Lake Basin, I started hearing about this guy from Beverly Hills who had bought a bunch of farmland. This was around the late 1990s. People mentioned this guy in the next basin over who was attempting to be the new King of California. Boswell grew up in the San Joaquin Valley; this other guy came from the East Coast. I did a piece on Resnick’s capture of the Kern Water Bank right toward the tail end of finishing the Boswell book. That was twenty years after he’d arrived. This land is so big, so vast, that these stories go undetected for years and years.

AG: One of the strangest things about Resnick and Boswell is how they really wanted to remain invisible. You kept knocking on doors trying to get interviews. Resnick declined multiple times and finally agreed to sit down with you in 2008 because he wanted a book about himself. Then he lost interest.

MA: Today the Resnicks have a PR office that’s a million-dollar-plus operation. In 2008, they didn’t have anybody. You had to call the attorney, then the secretary would hang up the phone and the attorney would just say “No comment.” It was really secretive, but I was used to that. The Boswell family saying was “As long as the whale never surfaces, it’s never harpooned.” That’s the way these guys operated. Obviously, persistence paid off in getting Boswell to talk, so I figured the same thing would happen with Resnick.

AG: Even though you chipped away at Boswell to make that whale surface, did you just assume that Resnick’s story would take a long time? Did you ever think it wouldn’t come together?

MA: I told Resnick’s story in pieces as I got it. In 2003, I got the piece about the Kern Water Bank without his cooperation. I gathered some more notes, some more string as we call it, and did that piece in the opening of my third book West of West. I have this scene with Resnick in his mansion, so I started playing with that whole thing. It’s almost like a first stab at a painting. Then I decided for this new book that I had to tell as much of his whole story that I could, and that’s when I went back into it. Each time I’ve gone in and taken something out, written about it, and this was the time that I decided to do the definitive Resnick chapter, which became the magazine piece.

AG: So you’ve been working with this material for years.

MA: And the virtue of that is you get to see how a story and operation evolves. It’s been almost 20 years — had I done this piece back in the early 2000s, there would have been no philanthropy to write about, they weren’t doing that kind of philanthropy in Lost Hills yet. Writing about the Resnicks now, you see how they evolved as people, how their farming evolved, how Lost Hills and their engagement with the community evolved.

AG: That philanthropy is a huge part of your California Sunday piece. To me, it’s one of the most interesting things about their business, because as consumers we don’t often think about farmers as philanthropists. Yet the Resnicks have such keen marketing instincts that their philanthropy is designed to both indoctrinate their workers and to show the world that they’re a good company, growing healthy food and treating their employees well. Have you ever encountered any other farming company that does that sort of thing?

MA: Most of the big farmers that live in the Valley don’t actually reside in their communities. A lot of them live in Fresno and farm outside of town, and their idea of philanthropy is giving to the Valley Children’s Hospital or Fresno State Bulldogs, or maybe giving back to a university they attended, like Cal Poly. They rarely give back to the little rural towns they farm in, so very little of their philanthropy affects the Mexican farm worker. Boswell took the town of Corcoran as his company town: He built the football stadium and social services, senior citizen and community centers, but the level of philanthropy the Resnicks practice is unprecedented in American agriculture. You can’t help but be dazzled by it, but it also raises some disturbing questions.

You use the word “indoctrinate.” I never used that, but that’s actually a good word because the Resnicks are really trying to change everything, right down to the habits of the Mexican farmworker, including what they eat. It crosses over into a kind of a social engineering that raises troubling questions. They’re not just writing checks; Lynda Resnick is also running and helping design their charter schools’ educational programs. She’s working with doctors and dieticians to design their weight loss and exercise programs. That level of involvement is a very different kind of hands-on philanthropy.

AG: What do you think about the Resnick’s philanthropy and level of engagement signals about the future of the agriculture in the West? It’s strange to think of these white, rich, Whole Foods-types pushing their dietary values and philosophy on immigrant communities.

MA: It’s almost like Lynda Resnick wants to change the microbial content in their stomachs. Before the farmworkers eat lunch at the company restaurant, she encourages the workers to drink this little concoction she’s made from apple cider vinegar, turmeric, ginger and mandarin juice. All the times I’ve been in the restaurant I never saw any workers partake of this concoction, but that’s what she’s pushing. I drank it. It was nice. Apple cider vinegar is good for your stomach and all that, but when you read about that level of involvement, you’re very conflicted about all of this.

The level of philanthropy the Resnicks practice is unprecedented in American agriculture. You can’t help but be dazzled by it.

Lost Hills is now the ultimate company town; everything is branded. You see this incredible five-acre park with a playground with water fountains where kids can play. The Resnicks built soccer fields with artificial turf and lighting. The park itself is named the Wonderful Park. If you look at the ‘o’ on the ‘wonderful,’ it’s the same heart-shaped ‘o’ that stamps the Resnick’s brand of pomegranate juice, so that makes it a little creepy.

AG: It seems like Orwellian brainwashing. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, the word “wonderful” everywhere.

MA: That’s Lynda, she brands everything. She even changed the company name: It wasn’t enough that it was called Paramount, that’s a pretty grand name right there, it had to become The Wonderful Company. I think that’s the kind of nth degree of marketing that raises troubling questions.

AG: With Wonderful, it seems like she’s really trying to get into consumers’ heads, to make them think that this company, not just these products, is wonderful. Despite being born in the Valley, you did such a great job presenting the Resnicks’ complex story fairly, in a way that didn’t present an unjustified bias, and let readers draw their own conclusions.

MA: They’re tackling diabetes and obesity, and you can’t help but applaud those efforts. There’s what I call a tussle inside my head, between the skeptic and the believer, and I think that held through throughout the story is a need to constantly try to look at this through both of those sensibilities

They don’t know their own motives. When you ask them how this all began and why it began so late, the Resnicks talk about a lecture they attended in Aspen, where Harvard Professor Sandel comes out to talk about the moral obligations of wealth. Then they get in the car and look at each other and say, “Are we doing enough?” They decided that they were not. And yet, when they decided to jump in, they jumped in in a way that’s never been done in agriculture in the United States, certainly not in California.

AG: In the piece, you describe how the Bruce Springsteen played a show in Fresno, and how nobody at the concert put any money in the piggy bank he left at the front of the stage for the people who work the fields. Springsteen was so shocked he asked you, “What kind of place is this?” Do landowners care more about Mexican-American workers than they used to?

MA: In between songs at that concert, Springsteen talked about what motivated a particular song or where it came from, and some of the people in the audience got so upset that they walked out and demanded their money back. I’m not sure he understood the kind of place he was coming to, where there was this almost self-hatred about needing to rely on that labor.

It’s a really complex psychology, where you have to go into the rural heart of Mexico to pull your workforce, you’re dependent on these people, and yet you sort of hate yourself for being dependent on them, and there’s a certain hatred of them too, for them making you feel that shame. I’m not a psychologist, but there is something deeply broken psychically about this place, and I try to get at that in this California Sunday piece a little bit. The Springsteen anecdote helped me do that.

AG: The story also implied the way growers who rely on Mexican-American labor are people who would rather physically separate themselves from the workforce, so they don’t have to feel those bad feelings. And yet, Lynda Resnick engages them directly.

MA: What the farmer has done is put the labor contractor between him and the labor, to give himself that psychological distance. What Lynda Resnick is doing is getting intimately involved in their workers’ lives, breaking past that barrier. In my story, when she’s on stage talking to farmers about what they’re doing, there’s a real discomfort on the part of these farmers who are listening, because she’s challenging the whole way that they’d gone about this, challenging this relationship where they increasingly distance themselves, and don’t live in those farm communities, don’t deal with their own labor.

AG: Do you feel like the Resnicks might signal some sort of larger change in Valley agriculture?

MA: This place has been resistant to change for about a century and a half, so I don’t see that relationship changing. I see increasing mechanization replacing the usual farm labor, and that’s one of the reasons that these farmers are switching to growing nuts. Nuts are obviously high-dollar crops, but they can also be done with machines. What I see is the farmer now replacing human labor with mechanical labor. Ultimately they’re going to continue to dodge that issue and keep that distance between them and their workers.

You’re dependent on these people, and yet you sort of hate yourself for being dependent on them. There’s a certain hatred of them too, for them making you feel that shame.

AG: What happens to these workers who are living in shacks in Lost Hills? These good hard-working people who have families and ambitions and debts to coyotes? What do they do when mechanization replaces them?

MA:. You’ll still have the great fields that need to be handpicked, and you’ll still have citrus that’ll need to be handpicked, but mechanization is going to shrink the workforce. These folks will continue to work in kitchens, they’re going to work in the hotels, they’re going to be tending peoples’ front yards and backyards, but I think that is going to be a fundamental shift. I don’t see them discovering their labor in the way that the Resnicks have.

AG: Let’s talk about the scale of the landscape. J.G. Boswell and Resnick are superlative landowners. To me, the Valley itself is a land of superlatives, yet somehow you shrunk this land’s complexity down to two very condensed paragraphs early in the piece, setting the scene for people who don’t know this region.

MA: It’s almost taken me thirty years of writing and researching this place to do those two paragraphs in that kind of big distilled way. I found studies that said that the leveling of land that took place here, the alteration, was unprecedented in human history. This Valley is one of the most altered landscapes in human history. So how do you tell that in two paragraphs? That was the challenge there.

AG: Having explored this Valley a lot in the last twenty years, I could sense that this was the kind of introduction that only somebody who’s been working and living in this land for their whole lives could do this well. You set the stage as only a lifer could.

MA:. In each of my books, I try to reckon with the land, to describe it. I’ve described it from the vantage of the pass called the Grapevine, that last mountain road that divides L.A. from the Valley; I’ve called that a kind of a Mason-Dixon line, with the sprawl of L.A. giving way to the sprawl of the farmlands. I’ve told it from other vantages, and each time it’s gotten a little more precise and a little better, but this one certainly was a kind of telling that took a lot of years to try to nail down.

AG: One of the other things you did was demystify the invisible, misunderstood mechanics of Valley agriculture. In your piece, you say “I pity the outsider trying to make sense of” California’s Central Valley. What do you think mystifies outsiders most about this place?

MA: There’s a tendency to paint it broadly. The Central Valley is two valleys: It’s the San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento Valley, and they are very different. They have different relationships to water. The Sacramento River up north is a big, badass river. It flows. It still floods Our five rivers down here have been tamed. They follow the demands of agriculture.

The San Joaquin Valley’s water isn’t inside our rivers anymore. It’s inside the irrigation canals that take from those rivers, so it’s two different valleys. When you look at the San Joaquin Valley itself, there are three different Valleys within the San Joaquin Valley. There’s an east side that couldn’t be more different than the west side. Then there’s a middle center Valley that is different than the other two. They look different. The farms are vast on the west side, smaller in the center. Then there are communities on the east side and the center of the Valley, and no substantial communities in the west side. Making sense of this place is about being true to what this place is, and so much of those differences have to do with the relationship to water, how easy is it to access. Do you have to pump? Is there an extraction model at the heart of the agriculture, or is there a more sustainable model? That question has created different communities, different Valleys, inside the San Joaquin Valley.

AG: My sense is that few outsiders see any of that.

MA: I know it’s hard to see it. We’re all dumb to our place. John Keats talked about how we’re in these hallways between these chambers, and we’ve just left one where it’s pretty dark, we’re moving into another chamber where there’s a little more light, and we’re starting to understand our existence and who we are, and then we understand our place. The problem today is that so many folks are fixated on themselves, trying to understand themselves and their own internal journeys, that they don’t have any space leftover to really understand their place, and this is a big, big place.

I was dumb to this place at age fifteen, sixteen, literally. My family was living in town, and there these ditches that are shunting water from one side of the Valley to the other, and they’re just part of the landscape. We don’t even think where’s that water going? Who’s it going to? The only time you thought about an irrigation ditch was when some kid drowns in it during summer, so there’s a dumbness to place. Part of why I came back is to try to figure out this place. A lot of the big, great stories of migrations in America played out on this land.

AG: In your California Sunday story you mention how you “never stopped to wonder: How much was magic? How much was plunder?” Moving away helped you see the place more clearly.

We’re all dumb to our place. We don’t even think, where’s that water going? Who’s it going to?

MA: I left for a good ten or twelve years, came back, and that helped. As a writer, I moved from the state’s center where I grew up, to this new book, where I take on the entire kind of state of California, looking at how the bending of water created the state, so I worked my way from the middle outward. Then I came back in the middle because 80 percent of California’s water is used by agriculture, so I don’t apologize for telling the story of the farmer. I mean, can you own 25,000 acres and be a family farmer? It seems an absurd notion. Folks in San Francisco just can’t wrap their heads around that. But then when you go out with one of these farmers onto his land and his children are working it too, it’s a little harder to demonized that guy. What I’m trying to do is play with those notions of what a corporate farm is. What’s a mega-farm? What’s an absentee landowner? What’s a family farmer?

AG: This is where marketing like the Resnick’s really comes in to play. Branding helps manipulate the public’s perception of farms, farm values, family values.

MA: Yeah, that’s right.

AG: Despite how many urban Californians might love fancy meals and farmer’s markets, there seems to be a lot of animosity about the water farmers use outside of the cities.

MA: Oh, it got really ugly this last time. Los Angeles turned on the Valley, turned on the almond. The almond became the demon. They started doing these graphics, showing how many gallons it takes to make a single nut. These are absurd because it takes water to grow food, so there’s a real disconnect that allowed L.A., and in some degree San Francisco, to demonize the farmers here. Some of that is justified because what’s happened is that Valley farmland has gone from the best land to some of the worst land, and the greed of agriculture to grow and keep growing. When it’s a human body, we call that growth something else and try to arrest it with chemicals. Ours is kind of reverse: we use the chemicals to make it grow bigger. It’s a weird little metaphor for cancer.

AG: One of the things about the Valley that is so obviously staggering is how flat and how big it is. Visitors see the surface. It’s overwhelming what goes on out there. It’s hard to comprehend how deep a 2,500 foot well really is. But that’s as important as what’s happening above ground, maybe even more important now that people are pumping so much ancient water out of these shrinking aquifers. As a writer, how do you get people to understand what is happening at that depth underground?

MA: In the new book I have a chapter called “Sinking.” It takes the reader into this whole subsidence phenomenon, the science of it, how it happens, the pumping and sinking of the land. You’re right. You think, well, the crops are on the surface, but so much of the drama is playing out 2,000 feet below ground. To see a rig set up and drilling for water ─ it reminds me of the Texas oil fields. It’s that deep. These are million-dollar holes they’re digging.

AG: What do you think about this idea that water represents the next gold – not just a gold rush, but the source of riches, collapse, and wars, like petroleum?

MA: It is, and one of the things I do in the book is trace back the entire history of our bending of water, to show that the mining of gold was really the mining of water. The hydraulics of the system that we’re using today to move water up and down the state was developed during the Gold Rush. The first ditches, the web of ditches, that were built in California, were built during the Gold Rush, and where they couldn’t carve ditches into the land, they built these wooden irrigation ditches, called flumes, to move water across canyons. That extraction started very early on, and it just kept increasing in magnitude, moving up in degrees.

AG: It’s a really disturbing irony that, now that the Gold Rush is over, the same water that extracted gold could be worth more than gold.

MA: I mean, it’s going to get that way. Farming here is problematic, with the need to import labor, the need to import water from northern rivers, the chemical applications – oh, and they’re calling this place Parkinson’s Alley because there are so many cases of Parkinson’s Disease that can be traced back to pesticides and herbicides. And yet, as problematic as farming is, if you lived here all or most of your life, you don’t want to see that farmland turn into suburbia. You don’t want to see another Los Angeles or San Fernando Valley here. Ultimately what you fear is that the water is going to be worth so much, that the farmers are going to strip the water from the land and sell it to developers, so these rivers of agriculture that have been rivers of agriculture for more than a century are going to turn into these rivers of suburbia, and to me, that suburbanization is going to be the ultimate tragedy.

If this place ultimately gets paved over, I don’t know if it will be missed or not. The disconnect between people and the land, and the eater and his or her food, is so great, who knows if they’ll ever miss it?

AG: So is there a solution outside of market economics, like planting crops that can deal with salty soil, less water, less irrigation? Is there hope that the rural Valley won’t become more suburban?

MA: I have hope in this new Groundwater Sustainability Act we finally passed. California is the last state to allow the unregulated drilling of wells. For all of our progressiveness, California was the last state to regulate groundwater extraction. Well now that we’ve regulated groundwater, you’re going to see the issue of sustainable yield drive groundwater use. Meaning, how much can you take out of the ground and then have that water be replenished by snowmelt? That alone will probably idle a million and a half acres of Valley farmland. It’ll get it back to more a sustainable system.

We ended up taking a 100 percent of the rivers. We should have probably taken 60 to 70 percent of the rivers for agriculture and left the other 40 percent for the environment. We would have had fewer crop gluts, fewer surpluses. We would have farmed only the best land instead of now farming some of the worst land. That’s what we’re going to have to legislate ourselves back to, and if California can ever put together these urban growth boundaries, where you draw lines around cities the way Portland drew a line around itself, and you say Okay, this is the city, this is farmland, and you don’t violate that land, then that’s the way you can really develop a farm belt here that really makes sense: smaller, smarter.

AG: Talking about the aesthetic qualities of the Valley, there’s another aspect of the great loss of California to rampant suburbanization: irreplaceable local beauty. Do you as a resident feel that Californians always undervalued this region, that one day maybe they’ll recognize its beauty?

MA: It’s a kind of ugly beauty. The San Joaquin Valley doesn’t please the eyes like Napa and Sonoma, and so much of it is industrialized, but there are parts when you drive to the east side, in particular, the citrus belt, that are gorgeous. The citrus belt sits right there at the foot of the Sierra. When you go through parts of the Valley’s center and see these 40-acre vineyards, and the vines are all twisted and gnarled and have moss growing on them — there is a beauty there. You have to go looking for the little bits. It’s not so obvious. If this place ultimately gets paved over, I don’t know if it will be missed or not. The disconnect between people and the land, and the eater and his or her food, is so great, who knows if they’ll ever miss it?

To Live and Die in Utopian New Zealand

Kai Schwörer/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

If the world is going to end with a whimper not a bang, then some of the world’s richest people are going to whimper together in New Zealand. People like Trump supporter and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel have staked their claim on the small island nation as the ideal refuge during a global apocalypse. The narcissism involved in such survivalism is staggering but par for the course; capitalists like Thiel have destabilized our world economically and ecologically, and now they want to buy their way out of the destructive ramifications in someone else’s country. New Zealand has strict rules around citizenship and land ownership for foreign nationals, which is why Thiel’s secretive acquisition of piece of the South Island raised many concerns.

Curious himself, Irish writer Mark O’Connell searched for answers for The Guardian, to understand the peculiar ideological appeal of New Zealand to a certain class of Silicon Valley elite. What he found while touring the New Zealand countryside is unnerving and infuriating, particularly the way many billionaires plan to profit on global catastrophe, and the possibility that Thiel intends to turn New Zealand into his own country after its collapse. Fortunately, O’Connell sees the dark comedy of it all. He calls Thiel “a canary in capitalism’s coal mine who also happens to have profited lavishly from his stake in the mining concern itself.” He shows how Thiel is “a caricature of outsized villainy,” and “a human emblem of the moral vortex at the centre of the market.”

The Kiwis I spoke with were uncomfortably aware of what Thiel’s interest in their country represented, of how it seemed to figure more generally in the frontier fantasies of American libertarians. Max Harris – the author of The New Zealand Project, the book that informed the game-sculptures on the upper level of The Founder’s Paradox – pointed out that, for much of its history, the country tended to be viewed as a kind of political Petri dish (it was, for instance, the first nation to recognise women’s right to vote), and that this “perhaps makes Silicon Valley types think it’s a kind of blank canvas to splash ideas on”.

When we met in her office at the Auckland University of Technology, the legal scholar Khylee Quince insisted that any invocation of New Zealand as a utopia was a “giant red flag”, particularly to Māori like herself. “That is the language of emptiness and isolation that was always used about New Zealand during colonial times,” she said. And it was always, she stressed, a narrative that erased the presence of those who were already here: her own Māori ancestors. The first major colonial encounter for Māori in the 19th century was not with representatives of the British crown, she pointed out, but with private enterprise. The New Zealand Company was a private firm founded by a convicted English child kidnapper named Edward Gibbon Wakefield, with the aim of attracting wealthy investors with an abundant supply of inexpensive labour – migrant workers who could not themselves afford to buy land in the new colony, but who would travel there in the hope of eventually saving enough wages to buy in. The company embarked on a series of expeditions in the 1820s and 30s; it was only when the firm started drawing up plans to formally colonise New Zealand, and to set up a government of its own devising, that the British colonial office advised the crown to take steps to establish a formal colony. In the utopian fantasies of techno-libertarians like Thiel, Quince saw an echo of that period of her country’s history. “Business,” she said, “got here first.”

Read the story

Little Führers Everywhere

Matthew Heimbach in front of court in Charlottesville, VA. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Vegas TenoldEverything You Love Will Burn | Nation Books | February 2018 | 20 minutes (5,442 words)

The first time I met Matthew Heimbach was in 2011, shortly after my trip to New Jersey with the National Socialist Moment. Our meeting was completely coincidental, and we would both forget about it for several years until we met again. That summer I found myself in the woods of northern North Carolina at the invitation of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. My experience with the NSM had resulted in more questions than answers, and I figured that if I wanted to understand the white supremacist movement in America, I might as well start with the “Original Boys in the Hood,” as one of their more popular t-shirts stated.

It took some driving around to find the location of the Loyal White Knights rally. This was another thing that had changed over the years. There was a time, only a few decades ago, when Klan rallies were, if not announced and attended by the public, certainly tolerated enough to be held in the open. In 2011, even in North Carolina, they had been relegated to the backwoods, as far from people as they were from relevance. At the turn-off to a narrow dirt road stood a decrepit old tractor that someone had taken the time to drape in a Confederate flag. It seemed like a clue, so I took a chance and turned left into the woods. Read more…

The Great Online School Scam

Photo: Getty Images.

Noliwe Rooks | Excerpt from Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education | The New Press | September 2017 | 18 minutes (5,064 words)

* * *

DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos said her ultimate goals in education reform encompassed not just charter schools and voucher programs, but also virtual education. She said these forms were important because they would allow “all parents, regardless of their zip code, to have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children.” Also in 2013, one of the organizations that she founded, the American Federation for Children, put out a sharply critical statement after New Jersey’s school chief, Chris Cerf, declined to authorize two virtual charter schools. The group said the decision “depriv[es] students of vital educational options.” Yet another group DeVos founded and funded, the Michigan-based Great Lakes Education Project, has also advocated for expansion of online schools, and in a 2015 speech available on YouTube DeVos praised “virtual schools [and] online learning” as part of an “open system of choices.” She then said, “We must open up the education industry—and let’s not kid ourselves that it isn’t an industry. We must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators.” DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

At the time of her nomination, charter schools were likely familiar to most listeners given their rapid growth and ubiquity. However, the press surrounding the DeVos nomination may have been one of the first times most became aware of a particular offshoot of the charter school movement—virtual or cyber schools. Despite flying somewhat under the mainstream radar, online charter schools have faced a wave of both negative press and poor results in research studies. One large-scale study from 2015 found that the “academic benefits from online charter schools are currently the exception rather than the rule.” By June of 2016, even a group that supports, runs, and owns charter schools published a report calling for more stringent oversight and regulation of online charter schools, saying, “The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action for state leaders and authorizers across the country.” The jointly authored research was sponsored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50Can, all groups that lobby state and federal agencies to loosen regulations to allow more robust charter-school growth. As one of the report’s backers said, “I’m not concerned that Betsy DeVos supports virtual schools, because we support them too—we just want them to be a lot better.” Such an upswing in quality seems highly unlikely to happen anytime soon. They are yet another trickle in the stream of apartheid forms of public education flowing down from the wealthy and politically well connected to communities that are poor, of color, or both.

In Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina, Ohio, and Florida, poor students from rural areas as well as those in underfunded urban schools that primarily educate students who are Black and Latino today face a new response to the question of how to solve the riddle of race, poverty, and educational underachievement. Increasingly, despite little supporting evidence, a growing number of states and local school districts no longer believe that the solution is merely about infrastructure, class size, funding, or hiring more teachers. In states with high levels of poverty and “hard to educate” Black and Latino students, virtual schools are on the rise. Such schools are not growing nearly as fast in school districts that are white and relatively wealthy, nor are they the educational strategy of choice in most private schools. As much a business strategy as one promoting learning, virtual education allows businesses to profit from racial inequality and poverty. Sadly, this particular cure to what ails our education system more often than not exacerbates the problems. Read more…

The Unexpected Reemergence of an Elusive Strain of Rice

The rice mill at Middleton Place Plantation, South Carolina. Photo by Brian Zinnel (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The history of the African diaspora in the Americas is a patchwork of oral traditions and cultural practices that had to endure centuries of slavery and oppression. Major chunks of it might be lost forever, but then, unexpectedly, some elements might make an unlikely reappearance. Such is the case of hill rice — a strain that was a staple of slaves’ culinary tradition in South Carolina and elsewhere, before disappearing around the turn of the 20th century. At the New York Times, Kim Severson retraces the recent, surprising discovery of hill rice on the Caribbean island of Trinidad by B.J. Dennis, a Charleston-based Gullah chef.

Mr. Dennis had heard about hill rice — also known as upland red bearded rice or Moruga Hill rice — through the culinary organization Slow Food USA and the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, the group that brought back Carolina Gold in the early 2000s. He’d also heard stories about it from elderly cooks in his community. Like everyone else, he thought the hill rice of the African diaspora was lost forever.

But then, on a rainy morning in the Trinidad hills in December 2016, he walked past coconut trees and towering okra plants to the edge of a field with ripe stalks of rice, each grain covered in a reddish husk and sprouting spiky tufts.

“Here I am looking at this rice and I said: ‘Wow. Wait a minute. This is that rice that’s missing,'” he said.

It is hard to overstate how shocked the people who study rice were to learn that the long-lost American hill rice was alive and growing in the Caribbean. Horticulturists at the Smithsonian Institution want to grow it, rice geneticists at New York University are testing it and the United States Department of Agriculture is reviewing it. If all goes well, it may become a commercial crop in America, and a menu staple as diners develop a deeper appreciation for African-American food.

“It’s the most historically significant African diaspora grain in the Western Hemisphere,” said David S. Shields, a professor at the University of South Carolina and chairman of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, who works with Mr. Dennis on historical culinary projects and was with him that rainy day in Trinidad.

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Vanishing As a Way to Reclaim Your Life

(Sankai / Getty Images)

Laura Smith | The Art of Vanishing | Viking | February 2018 | 22 minutes (5,980 words)

I have long been in the habit of passing by houses and wondering about the people who live inside. I grew up in a residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the kind where the homes are close together and neighbors often wind up knowing more than they might like to. Before dinner, I would escape my house to walk our little white lapdog. The predictability of the ritual — setting the table, filling water glasses, the sight of my parents’ briefcases in the hall — filled me with dread. A day had ended exactly as it had the day before, and it would end the exact same way the next day and possibly forever.

This wasn’t how I wanted my life to be. I imagined that when I grew up, I would live all over the world. I would be an explorer of the wilderness, an observer of animals, a connoisseur of cultures, a collector of the unfamiliar. I envisioned hastily packed suitcases, maps, binoculars, huts in the mountains, spare hotel rooms in dusty cities, Jeeps tearing down muddy roads into the jungle.

As I wandered the streets of my neighborhood, I was shopping for other possibilities, other lives lived in other houses. But those lives appeared to be exactly the same as mine. In well-lit dining rooms and kitchens I saw other families setting the table, calling the children downstairs, washing their dishes in the sinks. Television screens illuminated family rooms where exhausted parents slumped on couches after a long day in the office. Children did their homework by the glow of Pottery Barn desk lamps. I imagined that after their parents went to sleep, when the loneliness of those quiet hours became too much to bear, they whispered to each other beneath their sheets.

During the day they roamed the perimeters of their neighborhoods on bicycles and were driven to soccer and piano practice. They learned about faraway places in textbooks and on the news, but it seemed as if there had never been anything but this, no other place than here. Thirty years on they would come back to houses like these and do the same things all over again.

I wasn’t sure what my mother did for a living, though I had memorized her job title because it sounded important and I was proud that it might be. “She’s a health policy analyst,” I told a friend. “What does that mean?” the friend asked. “It means she saves lives,” I said, feeling fairly confident that this wasn’t true, except perhaps in an abstract sense. But I wanted it to be true. I wanted the stakes of daily life to be more exciting than desks, screens, and fluorescent lights.

I passed by house after house, each one a nighttime domestic diorama: Homo sapiens suburbae. These people had nothing to do with the world of mystery, dark deeds, and wilderness that I was sure was out there somewhere. My house — if I had a house — would be different. It would be in the mountains, or the jungle, or maybe in the middle of a city. My children and I would eat ice cream before dinner and play freeze tag at night by the light of fireflies. We would have a menagerie of animals. If you stood outside our house at night, you would hear peals of laughter. You would see tickle wars and pillow fights in warm, glowing rooms. But then another thought struck me: what if the reason all these people lived the same lives was that this was the only way?

As I grew older, the fantasy began to erode. Where would the money come from? Would I have a partner, someone to help me? Where would the Jeep in the jungle take me and for what purpose? Where would my children go to school? Would I even have children?

When I was in my mid-20s, I heard a story about a young woman who had also dreamed of leading a life of adventure, and I could not get it out of my head. Her name was Barbara Newhall Follett. She was a child prodigy and had published an acclaimed novel at the age of 12. People called her a genius. A photograph was taken as she corrected her proofs with a quill, smiling proudly at someone to the left of the photographer. When she was 13, she left her parents and traveled the high seas with a hardened crew. Later that year she published a memoir about the experience. She was deeply knowledgeable about botany, butterflies, and much of the natural world. She was an accomplished violinist and a talented poet, but above all she was a writer. She had been writing short stories since the age of five.

“She’s your kind of person,” my friend Robert said when he pointed me to an article about her. I had led an ordinary childhood and no one has ever accused me of being a genius, but Barbara and I shared a love of literature and the outdoors. There was something else too: a certain temperamental similarity — a restlessness. Later I began to wonder about Robert’s true motivation for telling me about her. When she was almost exactly my age, she vanished without a trace. He knew I would want to find her.

***

It happened on December 7, 1939. The residents of Brookline, Massachusetts, were busily preparing for Christmas. Miss Ayers’s shop on Beacon Street was selling Christmas wrapping paper, ribbons, and stationery. Hendries’s offered ice cream sculpted in the shape of Santa Claus. The Village Flower Shop was stocked full of poinsettias, and all around town people were placing orders for turkeys at 19 cents a pound. As night set in, the temperature hovered around freezing and the gas lamps flickered in the darkness. Families prepared for dinner in their clapboard houses on Walnut Street and their Victorian houses with trellised porches on Cyprus Street.

For some, the looming holidays brought a twinge of pain, their sadness cast in sharp relief against the holiday cheer. A 15-year-old boy ran away from school that day. A middle-aged woman didn’t come home that night. Four people reported their dogs missing, and a 22-year-old girl slit her wrists and then disappeared.

On Kent Street, Barbara’s marriage was coming to an end. The young couple’s apartment was comfortable but modest, with a fireplace and a rounded row of windows overlooking the quiet street below. She was 25, fine-featured, and tomboyish, with a long auburn bob. She hadn’t planned on this kind of life. She hadn’t planned on bickering about who would hang the curtains or what music to play at a dinner party. She had never intended to sit in an office all day, a large round clock ticking the minutes away. She hadn’t  planned on having a husband or a house.

The Boston and Albany Railroad had a depot around the corner and Black Falcon station, with its enormous ships fastened in the harbors, was just five miles away. There were ways to escape from Brookline, to get out of a marriage, to alter the patterns of a life. Barbara gathered her notebook and $30. She walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night. She was never seen or heard from again.

***

The apartment was exactly as I had envisioned it: in a low-rise building with rounded turrets and a plain façade in a quiet neighborhood of small apartments and clapboard houses, with a few shops and restaurants. A few houses down, an old man in a neatly pressed button-down shirt was mowing his lawn. Brookline is a town that seems to belong to another time, giving it a Halloween feel regardless of the season. There was a whiff of mystery, a sense that something more was going on behind those well-kempt exteriors. Or maybe I was reading into it because I knew something had happened in that building 75 years before.

I was lurking in front of Barbara’s building when a middle-aged Australian woman came out to put her trash in the dumpster. We started talking. I explained that this was the last place Barbara had been seen. “Would you like to come inside?” she asked.

Barbara walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night.

A few moments later, I stood in front of the large, curved living-room windows, wondering if this very apartment had been Barbara’s. Below the window, I could hear the man mowing his lawn. I wondered how many Saturdays, for how many years, he had done exactly that. The mechanical hum of the mower was oddly comforting. The woman’s boxer, Harry, butted his snout against my legs while I answered her questions. I was looking for Barbara, I said. I doubted I would find her, but I hoped to gather clues and learn more. I had reason to believe that she was the vanishing type, capable of erasing one life and creating another. But there were other, more sinister possibilities to consider as well. I was just a year older than Barbara when she vanished, and this fact seemed significant to me. I had a sense that the decisions I was making then would determine the rest of my life. Like with a rocket ship, the trajectory set on the ground was critical; a fraction of a degree in the wrong direction could send me to a wildly different place.

Somewhere along the line, in ways barely perceptible at first, things went wrong for Barbara. From my vantage point, her life was both an inspiration and a warning. But I couldn’t think of how to explain this to the Australian woman, so I thanked her and left.

***

Life with P.J. was easy. We usually wanted to do the same things, which came as a huge relief. My previous relationship had been a constant battle over how to spend our time. My ex-boyfriend had mostly wanted to listen to lethargic jam bands stoned out of his mind. I wanted to hike, read, write, or go out with friends. A simple trip to the grocery store could cause an epic fight because we couldn’t agree on how we would get there, when we would go, or even what we would buy. But moving through the day with P.J. was effortless.

Four years later, on the roof of our apartment in Washington, D.C., P.J. asked me to marry him. He was nervous and had turned around to face me too suddenly, which startled me. Yes, I said. Obviously yes.

It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery. I told myself I would never do that. But when people asked me why I had chosen to get married, I had no answer. I don’t know, I said. Because sometimes people fall in love and want to announce to themselves and the world that they plan to stay together forever. Love was the factor I hadn’t considered.

I didn’t do a cost and benefit analysis. In fact, I hadn’t thought much about marriage at all because marrying P.J. hadn’t felt like a choice. He was a fact of life now. Questioning his place in it seemed as worthwhile as pondering whether I should keep my arms and legs. But I was squeamish about the wedding and skeptical of its meticulous choreography.

In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, there is a section on “bad faith” — behaving without sincerity, lying to oneself. Sartre describes a café scene in which a waiter is serving his customers: “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly…he is playing at being a waiter in a café.” The waiter, as Sartre describes him, is imprisoned in his performance, relegating himself to the singular role that society allows him, rather than allowing himself the freedom of a more honest manner of being. What troubled me most about the concept of bad faith was not that we might lie to others, but that we might lie to ourselves. Self-deception is degrading. You wish you could have just a smidge more integrity. Your falseness lingers in the air and follows you through the day.

It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery.

In the carefully scripted wedding rituals, I detected bad faith. I felt less like a bride and more like a person pretending to be a bride, the way a little girl might process through her living room with a pillowcase draped over her head toward some imaginary groom. I refused to take engagement photos because who would ever believe that we were spontaneously bounding through a field at sunset holding hands? Or making out in front of a brick wall? Who was this photo for? It couldn’t be for us because anytime we looked at it we would know all the work that went into it: a long afternoon spent smiling to the point of jaw exhaustion.

I sidestepped this icky feeling by outsourcing the wedding planning to my mother. I announced to everyone that I could not be bothered to care about napkin colors or floral arrangements. The only things P.J. and I would deign to opine on were the things that truly mattered: the beer selection, the music, and the wedding cake, which would not be wedding cake because wedding cake tastes bad. We would eat pie. We also cared about the wedding ceremony, which we designed ourselves. These things — the food, the drinks, the music, the ceremony — turned out to be most of the details of the wedding.

The problem was that I both wanted to avoid dealing with the particulars of the wedding and that I came to see each choice as symbolic of the kind of life we would live together. As my mother went about happily making her plans, if they veered toward the traditional or the frilly I would swiftly intervene, outraged.

One night, P.J. and I went to my parents’ house for dinner. We arrived with a pizza box in hand. I had decided that I wanted the wedding to be a pizza party (never mind that my father is gluten intolerant) held at the neighborhood bar, which was also a Ping-Pong hall. P.J. and my father sat silently at their ends of the table, looking wan, while my mother and I shouted viciously at each other. It was the kind of shouting that makes the neighbors wonder if they should call to see if everything is all right. My mother informed me in no uncertain terms that the family from Arkansas would not be coming all the way to D.C. for a pizza party at a Ping-Pong bar. She would have been more likely to agree to a wedding conducted on the moon in the nude. I informed her that, in that case, the family in Arkansas could attend a wedding at which the bride would not be present.

A few weeks later, my sister, my mother, P.J.’s mother, sister, and sister-in-law, and three of my friends gathered in a boutique for what was to be a long day of wedding dress shopping. The attention made me uncomfortable. I worried that they didn’t really want to be there. Why would anyone want to follow someone around all day while they shopped for a dress? I tried on the first dress and announced, “This is it. I want to buy this one.”

“What?” said the confused saleswoman. My friends and family (three of whom had traveled more than a hundred miles to be there) gaped. It would be the quickest wedding dress purchase in the history of wedding dresses, a staggering 15 seconds.

“Maybe you should try on another one, just to be sure,” my mom suggested.

“No,” I said. “I want this one.” I thought it was reasonably priced and didn’t want to drag the process out.

My mother suggested we move on to the bridesmaid dresses, but this too was contentious because I wanted the bridesmaids to wear whatever they wanted.

“Why must everyone match?” I asked.

“Why are you such a pain in the ass?” my sister shot back. “No, really, tell me why.” What she meant was, Why must everything be a statement?

But to me, the statement was the whole point. My wedding was becoming a demonstration of all the things P.J. and I were not. The dresses, the napkins, the seating charts seemed an initiation into a domestic life that frightened me, one I had observed as a child and had sworn never to take part in. The wedding was an opportunity to declare, most of all to myself, that I could live according to whatever rules I wanted.

So when a Cuisinart was delivered to our apartment, my stomach dropped. It wasn’t going to be that kind of marriage. My uncle had given us matching camping backpacks, and I had found that gift extremely gratifying. It aligned with the person I wanted to be: someone on the move, ready to jet off to some exciting adventure at barely a moment’s notice, someone unencumbered.

Yet if I truly hadn’t wanted the Cuisinart, I would have given it away. Instead, I left it in its box above the kitchen cabinets, where I eyed it with suspicion and, occasionally, longing. Domestic objects had a mysterious power over me. I was both attracted to them and repulsed by them. The Cuisinart was sort of beautiful, with its sleek metal base. It promised homemade salsas and soft serve made of bananas and Nutella. How bad can life be when you are making your own soft serve?

I purged my life of household items with fervor. In limiting my exposure to them, I was hoping to cauterize the desire at its source. The longing for a beautiful teacup would never be satisfied by buying just one teacup. Once I had it, I would want some other beautiful thing, setting off a chain of longing and acquisition that would drag down my whole life. Even a single day spent around the house made me nearly frantic. I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all. No beautiful teacups ever.

Other kinds of household items — the ones you need in order to live — filled me with joy. I enjoyed seeing my toothbrush beside P.J.’s, his shoes mixed in with mine. I enjoyed grocery shopping with him, knowing that he liked the grainy mustard more than the smooth kind, the hard cheeses more than Brie. I felt the seductive appeal of controlling my surroundings, of nesting among picturesque things.

I told myself that it didn’t matter if I was ambivalent about the wedding because I wasn’t ambivalent about P.J. And though I didn’t want to admit it, I craved the security of marriage. A handsome, kind man had agreed to tie his life to mine, to mix his shoes in with mine, to grocery shop with me, to list my name on his emergency contact forms forever. It was a vote of confidence in me and in my vision of how to live. The comfort that this knowledge provided released me from the pressure to find other forms of stability. I started taking on more ambitious writing projects because if they didn’t work out I would still have P.J. I could live anywhere in the world because P.J. would be there. We had very little money, but being broke with someone else is far preferable to being broke alone. Surely between the two of us we would figure out how to make enough money to scrape by. I did not view my impending marriage as a constraint. I told myself that it was a means of escape from the constraints of the rest of the world.

***

A year before our wedding, P.J. and I decided we needed to get out of D.C. Leaving would mean saying goodbye to nearly everyone we knew, which was, at least to me, exactly the point. Wanting to flee, if only for a time, is a fairly common fantasy. Anyone who has felt it will recognize that this feeling manages to coexist with the fact that you may love your friends and family very much. I love you. Please go away.

Many of our friends from our respective high schools, our college friends, our parents, and P.J.’s siblings and their combined five children lived within a five-mile radius of our home. There was an endless string of birthdays, happy hours, going-away or coming-home parties, soccer games, holiday and engagement parties. I often felt that rather than trying to actually spend time together in a meaningful way, we were crossing things — or people — off our to-do lists.

The total lack of spontaneity was making me fidgety. In college, I hadn’t done extracurricular activities, even ones I would have enjoyed, because I didn’t like the idea that I would have to agree to weekly meetings. As a result, I spent a lot of nights doing nothing when I could have been doing something constructive; but knowing I was free to do as I pleased was what I cared about most. Now I knew ahead of time what I would be doing every weekend for the next five months. I dreamed of saying to family and friends, “I don’t want to see you today because I need to be alone, or I need to write, or wander around without a plan, and that’s not a reflection of how I feel about you.”

I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all.

I might have enjoyed the merry-go-round of social events more had I not been working so much. I was running my family’s coffee shop, waking up at five in the morning to open the store in the dark, do inventory, organize and restock the line, brew coffee, order more, create the next week’s schedule, and serve food and drinks all day. Often I had to cover shifts for employees who had overslept or were sick. On the rare occasion when I wasn’t in the shop, my cell phone would ring incessantly with questions from the staff. “The sink is clogged and overflowing.” “There’s a crazy man shouting at himself in the bathroom.” “We’re out of peanut butter.” “There’s a weird smell coming from the basement.” Each time my phone rang, it reminded me that  I wasn’t a good manager. I had created an environment where people were helpless in my absence.

At night I came home with my jeans stained with coffee grounds, worrying about two employees who were fighting or a tense interaction with a customer. I was physically exhausted, but when I got in bed, instead of going to sleep, I cycled through the next day’s to-do list. We’re out of whole milk, I reminded myself. And don’t forget to order more bowls for the catering job next week. The new employee is coming in at 11; print her paperwork first thing.

I was beginning to see that when your days are all the same, your weeks, months, and years blend together. The alumni association of my high school asked for an update for the school magazine and I didn’t have one. “Nothing has changed,” I imagined writing. “Laura Smith, Class of 2004, is exactly the same.” I imagined that my classmates were climbing the Annapurna circuit, kayaking the length of the Nile, and rescuing earthquake victims in China. I longed to see other places. Even looking at a map was painful because it reminded me of how mired I was in my life. A National Geographic special about the pyramids came on, and I thought, I really might never get to Egypt. My world was small.

“When are you coming over?” my mother and P.J.’s would ask in rapid succession. “Let’s get a date on the calendar for something this week.”

“You’re smothering me,” I said to my mother. “That sounds nice,” I said to P.J.’s mother.

One night I looked into the bathroom mirror, feeling suddenly daunted by the task of flossing my teeth. How could I possibly bring myself to do one more thing I didn’t want to do? I slept fitfully that night and had a dream that I had fallen asleep at a dinner party and was surrounded by an endless cacophony of cocktail chatter and clinking glasses. I had never spent less time reading or writing in my life, probably since I had learned to read and write, and the lack of it made my life feel lusterless. “My brain is dying,” I told P.J. I was an automaton outputting work and taking in food and drink.

P.J. sometimes came in to help on the weekends, working behind the counter so I wouldn’t have to. He was teaching at a nearby high school and was often up grading papers until the early hours of the morning, but he never complained about the extra work. He memorized the smoothie recipes and sometimes made them wrong. I didn’t care because I was so grateful not to be the one making them.

His desire to please others was great when it worked in my favor. But when he wanted to please others at my expense I would grow irritated. “Of course we’ll be there!” I heard him say into the phone. I shot him a death stare, signaling that I was going to strangle him. He shrugged helplessly, whispering, “If we leave the dinner at nine we can be at the birthday party just half an hour after it starts.”

“Do you actually want to go?” I would ask him. Sometimes the answer was yes, sometimes it was no. When he would commit to things I didn’t want to do, I wouldn’t allow myself to blame him. It was the other person’s fault. I didn’t want to think about the fact that sometimes I felt trapped by him.

I wrote during any free moment I could get. After work, late at night, I would write in the darkness of our studio apartment while P.J. slept in the bed nearby. In between placing orders, I wrote in the coffee shop’s cavernous unfinished basement, which smelled like damp concrete. Sometimes I typed notes on my cell phone between shifts. But the moments snatched here and there were never enough. I could never really gather the intense concentration needed because I was constantly interrupted.

“I can’t live without writing,” a journalist friend told me. I rolled my eyes because the truth is that you can live without writing. In fact, often we must live without it.

If I wasn’t writing, I was simmering with frustration about how I should be. At a bar with friends, even if I was having a good time, I would silently berate myself for again being lured away from my work. I wanted to write more than I wanted to be near the people I loved. Sometimes I worried that this made me small-hearted or selfish, but it seemed constitutional and therefore unlikely to change.

I began writing about a woman who disappears. Not Barbara, but a fictional woman. She was a botanist who had vanished, perhaps deliberately, in the Burmese jungle in search of a rare, psychedelic mushroom. I wrote about her because, of course, I wanted to disappear. Often those who write about women who have vanished are men with an impulse to eviscerate women, or women with an impulse to eviscerate themselves. I was interested in a different kind of vanishing: the kind where you disentangle yourself from your life and start fresh. People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life. You hadn’t abandoned them. You were just gone. Mysterious rather than rejecting. Vanishing was a way to reclaim your life.

“Let’s leave the country,” P.J. said one night after work over burritos at a Mexican chain restaurant. We had been talking casually about moving abroad for a while, but the idea was tantalizing and somehow more urgent now that we were deep in the weeds of wedding planning. Moving away was another way to say no without having to say it. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I imagined myself saying. “We can’t go to dinner because we’ll be in Asia.” We had talked about traveling, but never in a way that felt like more than daydreaming. But a few months earlier a local restaurant owner had offered to buy our coffee shop, at a loss of course, and my dad and I jumped at the opportunity to be rid of what had once been a dream. Without the coffee shop, P.J. and I could shed everything that had burdened us in D.C.

“Can we please?” I said.

“We can do whatever we want,” P.J. said.

* * *

Two days after the wedding, P.J. and I were in his sister’s basement frantically packing. A book I wanted was nowhere to be found, a friend was dropping by with a last-minute wedding present, and we were trying to figure out what to do with $130 in coins another friend had given us as a generous gag gift. We had a plane to catch, I had a stress rash on my face, and somehow in the post-wedding rush I had strained my neck, making it painful to turn my head to the right. We were moving to Southeast Asia for a year, mostly because it was the farthest away we could get on the planet before coming back around again. The weather, the people, the sounds and smells would all be new to us. Days would be remarkable again.

We had saved some money and had a few freelance writing and research contracts that could be done remotely. That money would cover our expenses, which would be minimal: we had picked Southeast Asia because it was cheap.

People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life.

I ran upstairs, tore the cushions off the couch, didn’t find the book, then ran downstairs to my backpack and started ripping out the clothing I had neatly rolled inside. Our backpacks contained everything we would need for the next year, which it turned out wasn’t much. We’d each packed five shirts, two pairs of shorts, a pair of pants, and a couple of pairs of shoes. There were also our computers, books, and two notebooks. Other than knowing what I would wear for the next year, I had no real plan. Suddenly, I didn’t care about the book. We were leaving, and how little our old lives would overlap with our new one was thrilling.

We drove to Dulles International Airport with our respective parents because both sets wanted to take us. P.J.’s sister and her children followed behind in their minivan. This vast crowd stood in a knot at the international departures area to watch us check in. At the check-in counter, something appeared to be wrong.

“You don’t have return tickets?” the ticket taker asked.

“That’s correct,” P.J. said.

“What is your plan for exiting Thailand?”

“We’ll be leaving by bus.”

I turned around and looked at our families standing behind us. Their faces were hopeful. Had we botched the trip? Would we have to stay home forever?

A few months earlier, my mother-in-law had sat us down on her porch and said, “Maybe you should consider going away for a few months instead of a year.” I felt something constrict in my chest. She seemed to be asking us not to change, or to get onto some kind of track. To her, this was a trip. We would come back to our apartment in D.C., back to her house for dinner on Sundays, to “regular” (i.e., office) jobs and daily routines. The coffee shop had been a nice little digression, but that hadn’t turned out so well. Teaching — that was fine in your 20s, as long as it was a stepping-stone to something more prestigious. And now this “trip.” It was time to grow up and get serious. This line of thinking made me want to run screaming in the opposite direction. I couldn’t describe the life I wanted, but this was not it.

It was around this time that I read a passage in a novel about two old ladies, a mother and a daughter who lived alone together in some isolated place eating only potatoes. When a stranger came across them, he was struck by how the pair seemed to have withered mentally without outside stimulus. Having only each other to talk to, they were nearly mute. Without other minds, other sights, other experiences, they had grown dull. The passage had sent a jolt of fear through me. I was surrounded by people who loved me, people whom I loved, and yet I was wilting. I thought about Wilson Follett and the urgency he felt to end his “poisonous” marriage. Maybe Helen wasn’t poisonous, but something about family life was. I didn’t like the idea that I might be anything like Wilson, who was, in many ways, the villain of Barbara’s story.

You must be vigilant, Wilson argued, because even the best-intentioned love can strangle. You cannot protect the things you love by sealing them in airtight containers. When you pin a butterfly and put it behind glass, you kill it. Barbara put her butterflies in a sieve, studied them, and then released them back into the wild. Go outside, she seemed to be saying. Be fearless, life will be over soon.

Barbara once signed a letter to her father, “With love and love and love and love and LOVE and LOVE,” each inky love becoming larger and larger. When her father wasn’t there, she wrote, “I am longing to see you” and “I miss you terribly.” Where is the dividing line in a love like this? At some point, love crosses over from being the buoy that lifts you up to the tide that drags you under. My chest was pounding as I sat on the porch and P.J.’s mother asked us to stay, and it was pounding just as loudly in the airport as we tried to leave. Perhaps Wilson was just being who he was when he left his family. Maybe I was too. It wasn’t a question of wrong or right or ingratitude. It was a compulsion.

Standing at the check-in counter, I imagined failing to get our boarding passes and piling back into the family cars. I could picture our mothers’ looks of contented relief as we all drove home together. Put us on that fucking airplane, I thought.

“Listen,” P.J. said to the agent, “if when we land in Thailand they want us to turn back around, we’ll do that.”

The woman shrugged and processed our tickets.

We were running away not just from home but from a certain idea of what married life should be. Marriage is in many ways freedom’s opposite, the binding of one life to another—in theory at least—forever. So as I tied myself to P.J. with one hand, I untethered myself from the rest of my life—family, friends, my job, my apartment—with the other.

As the plane lifted off the tarmac, I felt I had escaped. But leaving the country for a year isn’t that unusual. People quit their jobs and move all the time. They travel. It’s an indulgence, but nothing truly revolutionary. Yet suspended in the night sky, surrounded by strangers reading, talking, and sleeping, I knew leaving meant much more than that. If you had asked me then what I would have been willing to risk to find freedom, I would have said everything — except P.J.

* * *

From The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust by Laura Smith. Published by Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Laura Smith.

The Month of Giving Dangerously

Illustration by Stephanie Kubo

Elizabeth Greenwood | Longreads | January 2018 | 25 minutes (6,900 words)

Another fit of insomnia. I reach for a book I’ve read before, in times both happy and sad: Sharon Salzberg’s Lovingkindness. I open at random to a chapter toward the end, on the subject of generosity. “When a strong urge comes up in my mind to give something — even though the next fifty thoughts may be ‘Oh, no, I can’t do that. I might need it!’— I give it,” Salzberg writes. “Even if fear or other considerations come up, my resolve is to honor that first impulse to give.” As I read these lines, my heart seizes. Something in this passage contained the remedy I’d been craving because everything in my life felt as if it was contracting.

My first book was hot off the presses. I’d heard about the cruel process from other authors: You expect your life to change dramatically. This will not happen. There will be a short-lived flurry of attention and things will go back to normal. I steeled myself, but a part of me thought maybe they are wrong. Maybe my life will change!

 Dear reader, I am here to tell you there was no such reversal of fortune. I’d spent the past six years researching people who had faked their deaths and I was back to the drawing board. Typically, I would have been teaching several writing classes, but due to the vicissitudes of the adjunct professor labor market I was underemployed, anxious, and blue.

I got a prescription for Klonopin and I started getting acupuncture, which left me weeping on the table for thirty minutes while the poker and her interns assured me this outsized reaction to tiny pinpricks was totally normal. I’d have loved to have indulged in some old-fashioned talk therapy, but my disaster health insurance didn’t cover it. I even tried equine therapy, which I wrote about for a travel magazine, and spent the afternoon corralling two miniature horses in order to learn to trust myself.

I was still questioning whether the choices I’d made over the past few years were worth it if all I had to show for it felt like a big nothing. The luxury of complaining about any of this — I’m a childless, educated woman in America — made it feel all the more shameful. So the cycle compounded. Something needed to change.

Then the election happened. In a confluence of a precipitous adrenalin crash, a gaping daily schedule, limited finances, and a political climate that had everyone adjusting their meds, I was crying almost every day at the pointlessness of it all. My sleepless nights stretched into twos and threes. I wanted to figure out the way I was going to help but had no clue as to how.

That’s when insomnia propelled me to open randomly to Salzberg’s lines about generosity. Something in this challenge to give blindly, to listen to the part of oneself that blithely seeks to contribute, instead of the cacophony of voices concerned with balancing the checkbook. Expanding beyond one’s postage-stamp reality seemed like it could be the antidote to the feelings of scarcity propelling my anxiety.

We all want to give, at least in theory. But when presented the opportunity, we come up with excuses as to why the time is not ripe. We imagine we’ll donate to charities when we are more financially secure. We consider getting up from our subway seat for the weary-looking woman, then demur. As if extending beyond ourselves even slightly will make our precarious balance of time, energy, and emotional resources come crashing down.

So I made a resolution — for the first month of 2017 I would give everything. The rules were simple: If I got the urge to be generous, I’d try to honor it. I would try to do this in every category of giving I could imagine — in time, in money, in undivided attention, in suspending judgment, in forgiveness, in giving people the benefit of a doubt. I’d volunteer, drop dollars in the most dubious panhandlers’ cups, I’d pick up the tab. I’d try to take generous interpretations of others’ baffling behavior, as I take most everything personally. I’d dispense unsolicited praise. For years I’d resisted the urge to invade other New Yorkers’ privacy. No more! I would compliment freely, and they could put my name on a registry if they wished. My great hope for this experiment was to plug back into my life and to brandish a big middle finger to a regime intent on making us feel separate from one another.

Then, just before Christmas, my dog decided to treat herself to a Ziploc of trail mix from my purse. The concoction contained raisins, which are lethal to canines. One $1500 vet bill later I was feeling exceptionally broke. This was the exact moment when excuses are made, when we chicken out. But I’d already committed to my experiment. With utter terror in my heart, I stepped off the ledge. It was time to give dangerously.

Day 1

I wake up in Oakland, having spent a few days with my best friend from college who is tremendously pregnant. Our daily routine consists of binge-watching shows, doing a light activity, and then returning home to rest. I’ve been giving Zoë shoulder rubs all week and paying for whatever she’ll let me — ice cream, gas, Mexican takeout.

What isn’t as easy is lunch with Krista, a longtime family friend, something of a cousin to me. We have a strained relationship and have little in common, but get together when I’m out west due to a misplaced sense of obligation. We were raised high WASP, and the conversation glides along the surface of things like a figure skater. Resentment? What resentment! Isn’t this cheese divine? We meet at a loud, overpriced restaurant in the Ferry Building. We discuss her kids, her “personal brand,” and Marin County real estate, all of which she has achieved. She takes a tone with the busboy when our food takes over half an hour to arrive. When the bill comes, I pick it up, much to her surprise and mine. The total comes to just over a hundred dollars because I tip extra.

I get back on BART in a disassociated state as I often do after spending any amount of time with Krista. Zoë picks me up, and we repair to an outdoor mall, my favorite California institution, and I spend over $200 dollars on various serums and unguents at Sephora. This doesn’t feel like self-care or generosity. This feels like mania.

Day 3

Back in New York I have ten dollars out for the cabbie on the way home from JFK and put two back in my wallet. Shameful. I go to a crowded resolutions-fresh yoga class. I typically set up in the front row, not because I am good at yoga but because I want as few toned yoga bodies in my line of sight as possible. A Lululemon doyenne with the triceps to show for it takes her place to my right, and I wedge into the front corner with the wall to my left. Perfect, I think. Just one other human in my peripheral vision, the rest of the class a jam-packed sweaty moving organism of good intentions. I will really kick this year off right.

Once the sun salutations begin, my neighbor flings her arms out to the side to Namaste the morning. She makes strong contact with me and gives not a nod of apology or acknowledgment. Oh well, I think. Round two, smacks me again! Every New Yorker knows well and good that in a crowded yoga studio you throw your arms up, not out. Round three, full on bopped this time! My heart starts pounding. She’s interrupting my flow with zero regard! After exchanging sweat with this precious soul several more times, and audibly sighing with each brush of her manicured hand, I decide: Fuck it.

I will extend generosity to her by allowing her to hit me. I will offer my body to her as a battering ram for full sun salutation. This requires much deep breathing on my part in lieu of biting her, but I am shifting my mind toward expansive acceptance rather than anger at a person oblivious to my moral outrage. I still want to bite her.

Day 4

I go to work on my laptop at a coffee shop near my house. I usually tip my beloved baristas $1 — and only about half the time, depending on my feelings of poverty that day. I will do this only if the coffee slinger sees me, in the sad hope that maybe she’ll give me an extra shot of espresso for free. But not today! I slip two dollars into the jar while the woman working the counter grabs my drink. She doesn’t even see me do it. I am basically Mother Teresa.

Day 5

The super in my building is a lanky fellow named Junior. He runs a small racket out of the recycling in the basement, distributing cans and bottles to neighborhood vagrants who line up around 10 a.m. every other day, for which I imagine Junior is taking a cut. Since I work from home and walk the dog around this time, I have a front row seat to the cottage industry. Junior will often stop me to kvetch about the weather for a while, then ask me “to hold ten dollars” so he can buy cigarettes. I rarely carry cash as part of an ill-advised ploy to spend less. I instead offer cigarettes from my own aging stash. He refuses, preferring Kools. Today we go through the same rigmarole, and in my wallet, I have a twenty, not a ten. “Here, take this,” I say, my hand quivering in giving over an Andrew Jackson. Junior is pumped and promises to get me back in the next few days. I never see the money again.

If I claimed this was an act of selfless generosity, I’d be lying. Junior lives in the apartment above me and often cares for his toddler granddaughter, whose bedtime is around 1 am. Junior seems to be prepping for his Riverdance audition both day and night. It is not infrequent that I will stomp upstairs after midnight in my housecoat asking in my white girl voice to “Please be mindful, as I am trying to get some sleep.” I’m hoping the crisp $20 will buy me some quiet. It does not.

Day 7

I’ve been meditating for a few years now, and not because I am virtuous. I have to meditate for 15 minutes each day in order to not get arrested. I bust out my meditation technique prior to nerve-wracking situations, like giving a talk. I’ll begin to summon the feeling I’d like to exude, sit on a few couch cushions, take some deep breaths and visualize myself fielding questions and criticisms with a smile and élan.

I’ve been trying the same strategy in the morning for the past week or so to psyche myself up to be generous. I close my eyes, picture an exhausted mother with bratty children entering the subway and see myself magnanimously, selflessly, standing up for her. Other passengers notice my benevolence, maybe even rousing inspiration. I see myself standing aside in line, letting some harried citizen to cut me. The bill comes after a big dinner with friends, and I quietly pick it up. The waitress even writes a small note on the receipt: If only there were more people like you.

But today it isn’t working. Seeing the slideshow of generous events only makes me feel stricken with anxiety, more aware of my limitations.

So I try something different. I instead conjure the feeling of having enough, visualizing what that would look like. I see myself engaged in each moment of my life — the tedious answering of emails, listening to my boyfriend instead of unloading on him, responding to prison letters for my new book project with the utmost care. My bank account doesn’t contain a certain target number, but I engage a feeling of peace toward it. I try to sit in the sensation of having enough, feeling generosity move through me. I am the conduit — the thing I am giving away was never mine in the first place. My chest begins to swell and my limbs experience a pleasant, groggy glow. I feel rooted to the ground in a way that doesn’t seem ponderous. I feel bolstered instead of weighed down.

Rather than picturing myself giving, I reverse engineer the feeling of abundance to make that the baseline for the day. I manage to:

  • Drop off my boyfriend’s bags of detritus that had been lingering in the hallway to Goodwill
  • Respond to all correspondences and queries, even ones I’ve been avoiding
  • Try to be extra nice to all customer service people I speak with, even the trifling representatives of New York Sports Club
  • Give a $20 tip (double the amount I normally would!) to the aesthetician who lasers my bikini line. She basically works with genitals all day and didn’t go to medical school for the privilege.
  • Let my dad lament my failure to procreate without rebuff
  • Drop $1 bills into four different panhandler’s cups

I felt a little surge, a little electrical current of belonging, each time. Belonging to what? I’m not quite sure, but it was something bigger than my own plight.

Day 8

There’s a homeless woman who sits in front of the falafel place near my boyfriend’s apartment. I can understand the words she says individually, but collectively they make no sense. She has a kindly way about her, so I call her Eunice.

Today I pack up a sack of food to give her on my way to the gym — clementines, granola bars, bananas, trail mix — a cornucopia of organic Brooklyn fare. I hand it to her, and she is gracious. I see her carefully stuff it into the innards of several bags nestled inside one another like skins. She smiles, I smile back. She thanks me, and I say “you’re welcome.” It’s all so easy. I could do this every day. I am a motherfucking saint.

On my way back to Scott’s building, I see his neighbor. She’s wheeling a little grocery cart, closes in on Eunice, and…she’s giving it to her! Goddamn her! Here’s something Eunice can actually use! I was supposed to be the good person today, and here she goes, showing me up.

Perhaps I still have a few dark and petty corners where the light of generosity could give a good scrub.

Day 11

I have volunteered to subject myself to something called MulchFest.

It’s Sunday. I’m hungover, it’s freezing, and Scott is sprawled out on the couch with coffee and The New York Times. I sit with him and debate the relative merits of submitting myself to the elements, and to the perky knowingness of the Park Slope canvas bag-toting crowd. Scott is from the Midwest and believes that life should be difficult. I put on two pairs of socks and my heaviest coat and head out.

I’m several hours late and somebody in a neon pinafore hands me a clicker counter to tick off the trees as they get mulched. I have the overwhelming urge to punch my thumb down, to feel the satisfying click click click but know this will irretrievably fuck up the count. So I stand at attention, desperately resisting the urge to pull out my phone and appear occupied. The point of MulchFest, I have decided, is to commune with my surroundings, my neighbors, to behold the circle of life as manifested by browning pine needles, the melancholy stench of decomposition signaling the promise of a new year. A fellow who looks to me like a human hacky sack sees me with my brow furrowed and waiting to count trees that never arrive. Everyone is still at lunch, he informs me. I return the clicker and he gently ushers me over to a little white tent and presents me with a new task: creating pine sachets from freshly mulched trees to distribute to park patrons.

For years I’d resisted the urge to invade other New Yorkers’ privacy. No more! I would compliment freely. They could put my name on a registry if they wished.

The rhythm of dipping a trowel into the needles and tying off the bag is lulling, relaxing. I merchandise my wares attractively on a card table. Park goers stop by and ask, “May I take one?” “Take TWO!” I implore, “and a snack!” chucking an apple and a granola bar at them. I am giving people something they want, for free, something crafted by these two hands. I’m loving this. An hour and a half passes and it feels like but a moment. I’m in love with Brooklyn, with humanity.

I once dated a journalist who never stopped giving — to strangers, to the less fortunate, to people he was writing about, mostly. Every Sunday morning, Rob would throw back the comforter and go to prepare lunch for homeless people in a church basement. He became close with one of the regulars, helping him advocate to get his VA benefits reinstated, putting his name on housing lottery lists, taking him to doctor’s appointments for his chronic pain. Rob was widely regarded as someone who would interrupt his life for the benefit of others, one of the most generous people anyone had ever known. But I could never get him to open up to me, not in any deepening intimacy. A frustrating part of our relationship was how his service made him somehow unimpeachable.

To whom are we generous, and why? For Rob, caring for strangers came second nature. For me, not so much. Looking back, I think Rob threw himself into others because he was a little scared of his own life, and of people getting close. Giving, for him, was, in part, a way to hide. This is an ungenerous interpretation, I realize — but on which side of the ledger does our giving fall? And who is keeping score?

Day 12

The worst words a New Yorker can hear on the subway: What time is it? SHOWTIME! Out-of-town visitors film the acrobatics with glee while I contract further into myself. I give a dollar to Showtime, which I loathe. But giving the dollar somehow makes me loathe them less.

Day 15

I am still meditating in my new style, conjuring a sense of abundance. The phrase that came to me today was “less afraid.” In that tiny moment in the morning, I certainly feel a wash of quiet confidence. Getting up off my meditation cushion, well, that’s a different story.

Day 18

I understand my little experiment is made possible by the fact of my privileges: I enjoy a degree of freedom and mobility unknown any time in previous human history. I am in charge of keeping alive no one but myself and a 15-pound dog. My career choices may not pay in money, but I am wealthy in time, flexibility, and multiple breakfasts. I’m healthy and able-bodied. Perhaps my generosity experiment is a foray into a kind of first-world problem, manufacturing a false sense of adversity. What would, say, a single mom think of my enterprise? I ask the best one I know: my own.

I give her a call and explain the project. “What would you have said to somebody embarking on such a journey back when my sister and I were younger?”

“Well, I can tell you what I would’ve thought,” she says laughing with the irreverence that is my genetic inheritance. “My whole life is about being generous to my children. I use up my finite supply of generosity in keeping the household together.” It’s true. I remember her falling asleep on the couch by 9 p.m. every night of my childhood.

“But generosity can also be about receiving, allowing others to be generous to you,” I counter.

“When I was raising you guys, I had to convince myself of my own strength. I had to get into the mindset that I was capable of doing this on my own. If the spark plug went out on the lawnmower, then I needed to know how to fix it myself.”

Then she tells me something I didn’t know: “I also felt so alone, and I didn’t want to depend on anyone else. And then you start to build up walls, and even a martyr complex, like, ‘I’m the good responsible one, I have to be sensible.’”

“It does seem we expect more automatic generosity from women, and are then delightfully surprised when men go beyond themselves, huh?” I say.

“Hell, yes! Women are always putting other people first. All our energy goes into other people. Think about Grammy, her life was cut short because of it,” my mom says breathlessly. My grandmother had three kids, a paraplegic husband, a rural mail route as a postal worker, her elderly parents across the street, a dozen grandchildren, and innumerable wayward souls she cared for. She literally worked herself to death.

“If you could go back in time, what generosity would you have offered yourself?” I ask.

“I would’ve just allowed myself to take more time for me, I suppose. I could’ve hired a babysitter for the night, but that seemed unthinkable. Same too with little splurges, like a facial or a massage. Those lines just seemed so clear to me then, and I couldn’t cross them. It’s not selfish to take care of yourself.” she says. 

Day 20

One of the greatest generosities I’ve known is when strangers reach out to let me know they’ve enjoyed my book. This means more to me than any review or professional accolade; it buoys me during the rough times and makes my whole day. I think about how many books I’ve devoured and recommended to anyone who will listen — save the author. So today I send laudatory notes, thanking writers whose work has meant much to me.

When you truly love something, there is nothing easier or more natural in the world than to say so. I write my friend Amitava, letting him know I will teach his essay about performing Hindu burial rites for his mother, and how moving I found his recollection. I send an earnest letter of gratitude to a beloved actress thanking her for a recent personal essay she wrote about her relationship with reviews, and how it made me feel less alone. I write an Irish fellow about how much I enjoyed an excerpt of his book. Though it feels a bit awkward to telegraph admiration to total strangers, the feeling of lift far outweighs the embarrassment. It feels like an unburdening.

Day 21

Generosity, thus far, has proved illuminating when giving comes easily — giving compliments, sending texts to friends trying to brighten their day, in little gestures like getting up to offer a lady in nurse’s scrubs my subway seat.

But money is where I am stuck. Scarcity is the heart of my fear. Being in deep student loan debt and in precarious employment, my inner monologue is a stream of calculations, always trying to suss out how many more months I can exist in New York. Instead of getting a real handle on my finances, like by following a budget, I adhere to Coinstar, consigning clothes, cooking big batches of chili to eat throughout the week, and prayer.

So today I decide to give away money. I send $10 to a friend of a friend’s GoFundMe to help replace clothes and furniture lost in a fire. I then notice more calls for help which I skillfully tend to ignore — $10 to a friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s sister’s fundraiser to get a seeing-eye dog, $10 to my second cousin who wants to record a demo of songs. And because we live in end times I send $10 to the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Planned Parenthood. Then I give a whopping $50 to WNYC because it’s pledge drive time and every little bit helps. That’s $110 in total. Turns out that donating via the internet is pretty much like any kind of online shopping: You end up spending far more than you would if the cold currency were to physically depart from your wallet.

By evening I receive an email from a former tutoring client about starting sessions with her younger son, and another query about subletting my room. Did parting with my funds send a rupture of wealth through the universe? Did I just manifest money by giving it away? Steeped in the culture of The Secret and living in late capitalism, it’s tough to imagine giving without getting anything back in return. Does this mean my project is sullied?

Day 24

I decide to take this line of inquiry to somebody who may know. I meet Richard Bascetta, a senior Buddhist teacher at the Shambhala Center of New York, for coffee. He’s a bit of a silver fox and wears cool square-framed glasses. I explain my project and my query — how can we give selflessly without expecting anything back? Since this giving thing has been feeling pretty good, is it okay to use generosity as a panacea to feeling bad?

Richard has lived in New York and practiced Buddhism here for decades, and realizes generosity’s challenges: “In this environment, we are fighting for space, for money, for status, for a fear of not having that money and status. People come here to accomplish. I’m sure you’re a good writer, but there are at least a hundred people here who are as good or better.” Damn, Richard.

To whom are we generous, and why? For Rob, caring for strangers came second nature. I think Rob threw himself into others because he was a little scared of his own life, and of people getting close.

“Our inertia typically prevents us from acting for others,” he says, his eyes never wavering from my gaze. “We buffer ourselves through our lives. Through parenting, running a business, careers, chasing one love after another, our anger — whatever buffers us from the rawness of the moment. The more layers we put on like an itchy coat, the more difficult it is to access a sense of generosity. Generosity, in its most powerful form, is breaking through the inertia.”

Richard tells me that a few years back he started carrying a stack of ones in his front pocket. Each time he’d pass a panhandler or street musician whose tunes he admired, he’d drop a dollar in their cup. But lately, he’s been pulling his hand back. And he’s not sure why. “It’s been a pinching reminder that I’m compromising my original intention—to give regardless of my inner commentary about the person,” he says. But he doesn’t see this as all bad: “It’s given me the chance to reflect and see how my judgments get in the way and clog the flow of generosity.”

Richard assures me this is okay, because the benefit of generosity — beyond how good it feels, beyond helping someone else — is that it reveals to us where we are stuck. “We are working with that resistance. Where does that mistrust and worry reside in you? That’s the investigation.”

Buddhists believe that one moment of presence is a moment of enlightenment. And when I think back over the past month, I see I’ve built a repository of these moments: connecting with Eunice before I was shown up; becoming hypnotized by the rhythm of filling a cloth bag with pine needles; hearing about a time in my mom’s life that was a struggle. Enlightenment is a distant shore for me but these moments are undeniably fractals of a larger mosaic.

Day 27

On Inauguration Day I take a train to Philadelphia to rendezvous with my sister, mom, and aunt, where we will set out for the Women’s March before dawn the next day. I expect to have many opportunities to exercise generosity, what with thousands of strangers vying for catharsis and a bathroom. The last time I saw my sister was over Christmas, when she called me a sausage, referring to the growing weight differential between us. I close my eyes on the train and silently release that hardened gem of hurt. The release is more gestural than actual, a bit of fake-it-till-you-make-it.

Day 28

We are on the road and our excitement swells as we pass dozens of charter buses at rest stops and see pink floppy hats all around. But when we go to drop our bags at our hotel, it hits me. The inauguration crowd is still in town. Staying at our Marriott Courtyard just outside the Pentagon are not only protesters of the new regime but supporters as well. I see whole families decked out in matching red hats and commemorative t-shirts. My body seizes up. I actually feel terrified of these people, even though I think the fear is irrational. I’d been envisioning practicing my giving toward allies, my family, people as outraged as me. Now I have to dive deep into the wells of whatever reserves of compassion I’ve been cultivating over the month toward my perceived enemies. How can I engage those from the other side? What will be my part in making things better? I decide today will be about extending generosity to these folks, to people who took off work and spent their hard-earned money to bear witness and lend their enthusiasm to the installation of our new president.

The march itself is magical, and exhausting, and inspiring. I behold so much generosity around me: There are people passing around bags of trail mix and carrot sticks; people creating a human microphone to reunite a lost child with her mother; there are cops and medics rushing to help the fallen in the crush of humans. But what impresses me most about the day is the new reality we live in. I feel safe and secure in the sea of witty signs and like-minded representatives of the popular vote. But the second we break away and walk along the Mall we pass more Trump supporters. What would my generosity even look like to them? Would it register? Right now the most generous thing I can do is to not push them into traffic on Independence Avenue. But I think about a quote, supposedly from the Dalai Lama: “If you can, help others; if you cannot do that, at least do not harm them.”

As we walk back across the bridge toward Arlington Cemetery, where my grandfather, a veteran of World War II and Korea is buried, I lag behind. The day is gray, thick, and unseasonably warm. We are all hungry and cranky, legs achy from standing for hours. In the distance, I see a pack of white boys in red caps walking toward us. My body responds before my brain, sensing a threat. They pass my mom and sister, who are still wearing their pink hats, ahead of me. I took mine off when we left the March because I am an actual pussy, fearful a Trump supporter would hurl an epithet or punch me in the face. When I catch up with them, my mom and sister seem shaken and tired, trying to be stoic.

“They called us ‘clits,’” my mom says, shaking her head.

Now my limbic system is just confused, outraged that these assholes would dare speak to anyone, let alone two women. But I’m doubly confused because “clit” is perhaps the most bizarre term they could have lobbed. “They wouldn’t know where to locate one on a human female!” I counter. I try to make light of it, but we are all on edge.

Back at the hotel, the air conditioning is blasting and we devour our burgers. More white people are milling around in stars-and-stripes gear. It occurs to me I have a choice. I can treat all of these people as a monolith of hatred and ignorance, or try to see them as individuals. The results are nothing stunning: I allow a Trump-supporting couple to enter the elevator ahead of me. I move my bag at breakfast the next morning so a teenage girl in a red cap can sit down. I leave a tip for the housekeeper, her political affiliations unknown. I let the same Trump-supporting couple board the airport courtesy van first. It doesn’t matter, we’re all going to the same place anyway.

***

The month ends. By my count I’ve given away 19 subway seats, picked up the check at dinner and drinks half a dozen times, sent 36 “I just called to say I love you” texts to friends, sent $320 dollars to different fundraisers and organizations, given $47 to the homeless, and spent 15 hours of my life volunteering. I’ve let Scott’s innocent yet potentially inflammatory comments slide more times than my ego is comfortable with. I bought coffee and a sandwich for my ex without sending a Venmo request for the privilege. I traveled to distant neighborhoods to meet friends for dinner closer to where they live. I’ve left notes in Scott’s pockets for him to discover during the day. I’ve bought bouquets of flowers to bestow upon unsuspecting pals. I’ve done nothing but listen on the phone, seated, taking it in, when usually doing household chores simultaneously. I’ve stayed past my office hours to meet a student who was freaking out about an assignment. I’ve sent e-books to a friend to use while nursing. I’ve been generous to myself by wearing the good underwear at the back of my drawer that I save for a special occasion that never comes. I’ve tried to do only one thing at a time.

We buffer ourselves through our lives. Through parenting, running a business, chasing one love after another — whatever buffers us from the rawness of the moment. The more layers we put on, the more difficult it is to access a sense of generosity.

But the experiment doesn’t feel like it’s over — I didn’t do this perfectly. There were times when I grabbed a subway seat like manifest destiny. There was a time I decided to get offended by a friend’s offhanded remark. I spent an afternoon at the Brooklyn Food Bank silently cursing the project director, who I took to be an imperious asshole. I noticed I have the hardest time letting things slide from the people closest to me. Like Richard said, examining oneself through the lens of generosity can be illuminating. At the beginning of the month I was listing all my generous acts. But by the end of the month, I was listing opportunities to be generous that I didn’t take up. Those moments taught me more about myself. Instead of feeling defeated by my imperfection, I feel curious, inspired even.

You make yourself vulnerable by making an offering the other may or may not take. You extend yourself in giving praise, attention, patience. You let the other in. You see the sky does not fall. You do it again. Giving becomes easier. Defensiveness can soften because you’re not fighting to preserve what little you feel you have to protect. From the constant gnaw of scarcity, you realize there is enough.

I’m still grouchy as hell. But I’ve found giving to be the easiest, quickest, even cheapest way to feel good, better than therapy, equine or otherwise. If I want to reset the chemistry of my brain on a particularly down day, I’ll just try to listen to what someone is telling me. I’ll text friends telling them how much I adore them. I’ll buy coffee for the person behind me in line. And a little bit of the weight lifts.

When I think back to the first day of my experiment, when I endured and paid for a frustrating lunch with Krista, I see it differently now. The truest generosity I could’ve offered wouldn’t have been in picking up the tab, but in looking directly in her eyes and meeting her where she is, where we all are: imperfect, flawed, all-too-human, locked into our own stories of what is going on, the only story we understand to be true. For all I know, she had to do deep breathing just to be around me.

I haven’t mastered generosity and the fearlessness that comes with it. But I’ve touched it in moments. I want to experience more of those moments. And because life always gives us a heaping helping of stress and awkward lunches and unexpected vet bills, I know I will have more to do. Because I didn’t die this month, nor did I go into the poorhouse, nor did I feel overextended. Instead, I felt connected. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by how much further I have to go, I feel ready. Instead of feeling stretched thin, I feel full.

***

Elizabeth Greenwood is the author of Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud, a nonfiction book about people who have faked their deaths.

 

Recovering My Fifth Sense

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Kavita Das | Longreads | January 2018 | 18 minutes (4,512 words)

Just two weeks before my birth in November 1974, my parents moved into their first house, a split-level ranch in Bayside, Queens. They had been in America for less than a year, having first emigrated to England from their homeland of India so that my father, a gastroenterologist, could pursue his Ph.D., and my mother, an obstetrician-gynecologist, could receive additional medical training.

While my mother was giving birth to me my father was home raking leaves, because it was fall and leaves need raking, and because fathers were not considered crucial to child birthing in Indian culture. I came into the world around midday, a glowing, healthy, baby of six pounds, seven ounces.

In the hospital, after the nurses had brought me to my mother’s bedside, she began to give me my first feeding. As soon as I started to hungrily suck on the bottle, milky formula began trickling out of my nose. She wiped it away and began again, but the formula, once again, leaked from my nostril. That’s when she suspected that, although I had been spared the perceivable deformity of a cleft lip, nestled between my plump cheeks and hidden behind my rosebud lips, was a cleft palate.

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