Search Results for: profile

How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making

Longreads Pick

Accompanied by photographs taken by Mickalene Thomas, The New York Times’ T Magazine profiles Carrie Mae Weems for its 2018 Greats issue.

Published: Oct 15, 2018
Length: 26 minutes (6,547 words)

The Canadian Bonsai Star of YouTube

Bonsai of Ficus Religiosa -- Getty Images

Unsatisfied with his own efforts at growing Ficus religiosa, bonsai enthusiast Harley Rustad totes his too-tall tree to Ontario to seek advice from Canadian bonsai expert Nigel Saunders. For The Walrus, Rustad profiles Saunders, who tends over 180 bonsais and has attracted a cult following for his instructive YouTube videos. His miniature lemon tree alone has earned 1.5 million views.

Then the bonsai master steps forward. My tree is indeed big, Saunders says, which is fine if I have space. Some bonsai, known as imperial bonsai, are, in fact, large. A 1,000-year-old tree at the Omiya Bonsai Art Museum in Japan is more than five feet tall—though that height’s not exactly practical in my 350-square-foot apartment. Kneeling at his workbench, Saunders confirms that the issue with my tree is that it is completely out of proportion. He squints through his glasses, his eyes scanning up and down. “There is the opportunity here to start it over,” he says, chuckling. “If you want.” The importance in any bonsai, he tells me, is roots, trunk, and branches, in that order. People may focus on the canopy of leaves or the stylized branches, but Saunders says the most important feature is actually underground. I realize what I have to do.

Saunders hands me a pair of “bypass pruners,” named as if they were tools for open-heart surgery. My hand trembles with worry that this won’t be a new beginning but a tragic conclusion. You have to be brave in bonsai, Saunders says. He recites a bonsai mantra, often attributed to John Yoshio Naka: “Me chicken. You chicken. No bonsai.” I take the pruners and, in one snip, decapitate my tree. I nearly yell, “Timber!” as the leafy crown I’d spent four years growing falls away from its trunk. “Done! It’s bleeding,” Saunders says with a laugh, noting the milky liquid oozing from the cut. He quickly gets to work, shaking my tree out of its pot, washing it of its soil, and splaying its roots out on the table. I feel oddly exposed. After an hour, my tree is pruned, its roots trimmed, and it’s been replanted back in its pot. My beloved tree now resembles a sad, foot-tall stump. “It won’t look the greatest for a while,” Saunders says. In bonsai terms, though, I’m not sure how long “a while” will be.

A bonsai tree is a lifelong project,” Saunders says. “It is a hobby you can practise right to the end.” The end is something he thinks about often. There is a point in any artistic field known as completion, when the sculptor puts down her chisel or the painter washes his brushes and they step back to gaze upon their finished work. But this moment does not exist for the bonsai artist. “The closest thing to coming to a finished bonsai is when you put it in a show,” Saunders says. “It’s temporarily as good as it’s going to get at that particular point in time.”

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The Specialized Field of Fetal Surgery

Press Association via AP Images

Do you have trouble stacking Jenga blocks? Do your hands quiver when you try to tighten the tiny screws on your glasses? Well, meet Dr. Timothy Crombleholme, a surgeon with hands steady enough to operate on patients as young as 15 weeks. For D Magazine, Shawn Shinneman profiles Crombleholme and his growing field of fetal surgery, a field as small as the people it operates on. It’s delicate work and the stakes are very high, but for many parents, fetal surgeons are the only hope their children have. Right now, the field is so new that it’s a kind of frontier.

Crombleholme was able to problem-solve Shayla’s complications because he has so much experience in the field. The challenge with starting a fetal surgery center—why there are so few of them across the country—is that the types of procedures these surgeons perform are both exceedingly specialized and relatively rare, says Dr. Sean Blackwell, a Houston-based maternal-fetal medicine specialist who serves as president of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine. “You want to have people that are higher-volume surgeons,” Blackwell says. “It’s no different than doing a heart transplant or a brain surgery—if you do six in a year, that’s different than if you do 60 in a year.”

The operations are not without controversy in the medical community. While in Cincinnati, Crombleholme pioneered an “amnioport” procedure, where a surgeon places a catheter inside the amniotic sac, attaching it to a port that remains on the mother’s abdomen throughout the pregnancy. That way, doctors can control the fluid volume in a baby that is otherwise, for whatever reason, deficient—cases that previously had no course of action.

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Heart Doctor

Longreads Pick

Novelist Angela Flournoy profiles Barry Jenkins, Academy Award-winning director of “Moonlight,” as he prepares to release his newest feature — an adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel, “If Beale Street Could Talk.”

Published: Oct 4, 2018
Length: 21 minutes (5,343 words)

Remembering G. Dep, the Rapper Who Confessed to a 17-Year Old Cold Case

(Photo by Suzi Pratt/WireImage)

Among the standout tracks on Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter V, the long awaited and oft delayed fifth album in the rapper’s conceptual discography, the highlight might just be “Uproar,” a ridiculously bouncy track that is as much of a throwback to Wayne’s glory days as it is a sign of the musician’s continued evolution.

Of note, though, isn’t just the song’s lyrics — but also the beat, produced by Swizz Beatz and a reimagining of G. Dep’s “Special Delivery” beat, a 17-year old song that reigned supreme over the NYC airwaves in the early 2000s (signed to Bad Boy Records, G. Dep was a Harlem native). What’s so fascinating about a remixed “Special Delivery” is two-fold: Wayne uses the beat as he would a freestyle, nimbly interweaving bars throughout the boombap-cum-keyboard laden sample; and the release of “Uproar” brings G. Dep (born Trevell Coleman) back to the current pop culture fold.

As chronicled by Jennifer Gonnerman for New York Magazine, Coleman confessed in 2010 to a cold case murder committed in 1993; Coleman pled guilty to second-degree murder, revealing how he shot a man three times and fled the scene without knowing whether the individual died. In his confession, Coleman outlined why he decided to suddenly come forward: “The reason I turned myself in was because I felt awful about what I did and I wanted to make it right for this guy’s family.”

Gonnerman deftly reports on Coleman, his rise to G. Dep fame, and his current incarceration (at Elmira Correctional Facility until at least 2025), and it’s worth revisiting the 2012 profile in light of Lil Wayne’s “Special Delivery” revival.

At times, his life felt like a series of endless internal calculations, all part of an effort to, as he later explained, “balance myself out.” If he bought a coat, he might scribble on one pocket with a marker before putting it on, just to deprive himself of the chance to wear something completely new. He never had much money, and he was so determined to give away what he did have that a few times he stuffed bills into the coin slots of pay phones, then walked away. Afterward, he’d feel a little better—“I did think, Well, okay, now I don’t have to feel like I have too much regret,” he says—but the relief was only temporary.

Coleman and his wife had separated, but he still stopped by to visit his 7-year-old sons. Some days, he’d be seated with them at the table, sharing a meal, thinking how blessed he was to have such beautiful boys, and suddenly be seized by guilt. Did the man he shot at have any kids? What happened to them? And why should he get to spend time with his kids if there was a chance he’d robbed another child of his father?

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Lady Gaga Isn’t Done Shape-Shifting Yet

Longreads Pick
Published: Oct 3, 2018
Length: 19 minutes (4,971 words)

The Return of the Face

From The Delinquent Man: Types of Offenders, 1897. Wikimedia Commons, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Adrian Daub | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,170 words)

 

Physiognomy — the attempt to interpret a person’s character by means of their face — was one of those things that educated 19th-century Europeans knew wasn’t supposed to work. In his 1806 work The Phenomenology of Spirit, philosopher G.W.F. Hegel devoted a lengthy, indecipherable chapter to explain why physiognomy, and its cousin phrenology, had to be hokum. But even if Europeans knew they shouldn’t put stock in physiognomy, they found it incredibly difficult to resist the impulse.

To some extent this remains true today. During the Obama years, many of us were sensitive to representations of the new president, knowing full well that the way faces are read and analyzed could easily encode very old and deeply embedded racist ideas. Then Trump was elected. In a heartbeat, we were back to reading his face, playing with his face, and displaying it next to animal faces. Where does this temptation come from?

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Banished

Photo by Emily Kassie.

Beth Schwartzapfel and Emily Kassie / The Marshall Project / October 2018 / 13 minutes (3,412 words)

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

Part 1: NO MERCY

The sun has barely risen over Miami, and Dale Brown loads an orange shopping cart with everything he owns. Through the morning’s swampy heat, he pushes the cart to the edge of the railroad tracks, where he hauls the items one at a time into some overgrowth and covers them with branches. His tent from Walmart, meticulously rolled and packed. A garbage bag with clothes and a blanket. He unscrews the lid to a plastic gallon jug and empties his urine into the brush.

“You feel like an animal,” says Brown, 63.

This industrial neighborhood just beyond Miami’s far western edge is home to lumber yards, auto parts warehouses, and, in recent months, roving encampments of homeless sex offenders. This summer, Brown and a half-dozen other men were living beside a chain-link fence outside a hardware company. Five blocks away, more lived in tents and makeshift shacks. And 12 blocks from there, about a dozen arrived in cars each night.

A combination of federal, state and local laws has rendered almost all of Miami-Dade County off-limits to sex offenders with young victims. The feds say they’re not allowed in public housing. The state says they can’t live within 1,000 feet of a day care center, park, playground, or school. The county says they can’t live within 2,500 feet of a school. In a place so densely populated, forbidden zones are everywhere. And in the narrow slivers of permitted space, affordable apartments with open-minded landlords are nearly impossible to come by. Read more…

How Does It Feel To Be Unwanted?

Undocumented immigrants await deportation at Arizona detention centers, John Moore / Getty

Eileen Truax | translated by Diane Stockwell | An excerpt from How Does It Feel To Be Unwanted? | Beacon Press | September 2018 | 19 minutes (5,083 words)

How many times can you start your life all over again from zero? If there’s anyone who knows the answer to that question, it’s Claudia Amaro. She had to do it for the first time when her father was murdered, when she was ten years old. She started over again for a second time when she was thirteen and her mother decided to move the whole family, including Claudia and her three sisters, to the United States, fleeing violence. She had to hit the reset button again when she was thirty and a deportation order for her husband destroyed her family and the life she had built over the past two decades, sending him, Claudia, and their US-citizen son back to Mexico, a place she no longer felt was home.

And with nothing left to lose, in the hope of getting back a little of the life that had been hers, in 2013, at thirty-seven, Claudia started over for the fourth time. She was prepared to spend as much time as necessary in a detention center in the US. She crossed the border north and at the entry gate said she wished to apply for political asylum. A few months later, her husband, Yamil, did the same. Claudia spent three weeks in detention. Yamil was locked up for two years and three months.

Back in Kansas, a place they both consider their home, Claudia and Yamil live under the ever-present shadow of possible deportation. Neither of them knows if they would be able to start over from nothing for a fifth time. Read more…

City Girls Are More Like You Than You Think

Longreads Pick
Source: The Cut
Published: Sep 26, 2018
Length: 17 minutes (4,350 words)