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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Matt Hamilton and Garrett Therolf, Lacy M. Johnson, Devin Kelly, Max Bell, and Rainesford Stauffer.

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1. How the State of California Failed Noah Cuatro

Matt Hamilton, Garrett Therolf | Los Angeles Times | August 19, 2021 | 5,000 words

“Before a 4-year-old boy’s killing, authorities wavered on rescuing him.”

2. What Slime Knows

Lacy M. Johnson | Orion Magazine | August 24, 2021 | 3,411

“There is no hierarchy in the web of life.”

3. From a Window

Devin Kelly | wildness | August 15, 2020 | 2,089 words

“Tonight, a dog holds a piece of cardboard in its mouth for an entire block. I don’t know what it finds in such a small, almost useless thing, but then again, I horde so much of what is small and useless, even to me, even to a dog. In most moments, there is something beautiful about trying, even if it’s impossible.”

4. The Bizarre and Tragic Ride of J Sw!ft

Max Bell | theLAnd Magazine | August 26, 2021 | 5,938 words

“What follows is the far more complicated story of how our country’s complex, disturbingly callous, and ever-shifting yet forever intractable immigration policies created years of hell and potentially permanent exile for one of hip-hop’s greatest producers.”

5. Her Name Is Not Honey Boo Boo

Rainesford Stauffer | Teen Vogue | August 25, 2021 | 2,300 words

She grew up on reality TV. Now she’d like you to call her Alana.

‘The City Just Lied’: Remembering the 1921 Tulsa Massacre

Greenwood Cultural Center

This Memorial Day marks the centennial of one of the worst instances of racist violence in U.S. history. On May 31, 1921, white mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, launched a campaign of terror in Greenwood, a prosperous African-American neighborhood nicknamed “Black Wall Street.” The spark of the violence was ugly, and all too familiar: the lie that a white woman had been assaulted by a Black man. It was perpetuated by a local paper, the Tulsa Tribune, which published a story with the headline — or, really, the instruction — “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator.”

When the dust settled, hundreds of Black residents had been killed. White rioters had looted Black businesses and destroyed Black homes. More than 30 blocks of Tulsa had been reduced to smoldering ruins. As is so often the case in a country where white power structures determine official history, the event soon slid into obscurity. For many decades, when it was recalled at all, it was referred to as a “race riot.” In truth, what happened was a massacre.

The centennial has occasioned widespread coverage of the massacre, much of it excellent. In The New Yorker, writer Victor Luckerson profiles two women who were committed to telling the full story of the violence when it seemed like no one else was:

As the centennial of the race massacre approaches, a raft of documentaries, along with a new thirty-million-dollar museum, are poised to make the story of Greenwood more widely known—and financially lucrative—than it has ever been. But the Black Tulsans who preserved the community’s history risk being forgotten, particularly the women who did the foundational heavy lifting. It’s not just Parrish—Eddie Faye Gates, an Oklahoma native and longtime Tulsa educator, continued Parrish’s work by interviewing massacre survivors more than seventy years later, recording their perspectives in books and video testimonials.

History lessons draw power from their perceived objective authority, but if you drill to the core of almost any narrative you will find a conversation between an interviewer and a subject. In Greenwood, Black women such as Parrish and Gates were the ones having those conversations. Now descendants of both women are working to insure that their legacies are recognized. “She was a Black woman in a patriarchal, racist society, and I think bringing all those elements together tells you exactly how she’s been erased,” Anneliese Bruner, a great-granddaughter of Parrish, said. “It’s convenient to use her work, but not to magnify and amplify her person.”

Luckerson himself is a dedicated chronicler of overlooked Black history: He is working on a book about Greenwood, and he publishes a newsletter, “Run It Back,” that documents his research findings.

In The New York Times Magazine, author Caleb Gayle, a Black Tulsa native, connects past to present, describing how the struggle for racial justice in his city continues. Recently, the last survivors of the 1921 massacre testified before a House subcommittee alongside Tiffany Crutcher, whose twin brother, Terence, was shot and killed in 2016 by Tulsa police:

She had started with hopes that justice would follow her brother’s killing. But it was in the dashing of those hopes that, Crutcher says, her “journey to justice” began. “We in Tulsa, Okla., aren’t going to sit by and say, ‘It is what it is,’” she said at one of the news conferences. The very narrative Crutcher has committed herself to undoing — one that says Black people are inherently bad people — is one that goes back a hundred years in her hometown, when one part of the community destroyed another part of the community, a place whose prosperity and potential belonged to, but was taken from, her ancestors.

Gayle’s article is part of a larger package about the Tulsa massacre, produced by The New York Times. Other components include an infographic revealing the extent of physical damage done during the event, and a visual feature about the excavation of victims’ gravesites.

For more on the centennial, here’s complete coverage from Tulsa World, a local newspaper.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Desiree Stennett and Caroline Glenn, Imani Perry, Bethany Marcel, Joshua Hunt, and David Alm.

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1. Locked Out

Desiree Stennett, Caroline Glenn | Orlando Sentinel | May 13, 2021 | 9,200 words

A three-part investigative series about how the pandemic exposed Florida’s eviction crisis.

2. Stop Hustling Black Death

Imani Perry | New York Magazine | May 24, 2021 | 4,300

“Samaria Rice is the mother of Tamir, not a ‘mother of the movement.'”

3. How to Tell a Trauma Story

Bethany Marcel | Midnight Breakfast | May 27, 2021 | 1,700 words

“For a decade I’ve been trying to write this story. This is always as far as I get.”

4. Did Paying a Ransom for a Stolen Magritte Painting Inadvertently Fund Terrorism?

Joshua Hunt | Vanity Fair | May 27, 2021 | 5,477 words

“Modern art crime, like the arms trade, still thrives in the shadow of global conflict, which gives rise to criminal networks that make from the detritus of war immensely profitable commodities.”

5. The Marathon Men Who Can’t Go Home

David Alm | GQ | May 21, 2021 | 4,800 words

“Each had come to America with the hope of making life-changing money that they could send back home to their families. What they found was an often desperate existence in their adopted homeland.”

All Flourishing Is Mutual

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In this beautiful piece for Hakai, ‘Cúagilákv (Jess Housty) talks about the importance of the salmonberry bush, whose fruit has nourished generations of her family. It is through salmonberries that the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) children first learn about the connections that run through nature — being told that a good crop of salmonberries corresponds to a good salmon run and luck in the harvest. The salmonberry bushes themselves also benefit from a good run — being fertilized with salmon remains “so that they will bloom and bear fruit again in a cycle much deeper than any one season.” A recent paper published in Ecosphere demonstrates the accuracy in the ecosystem links that the children are taught, with researchers determining that increased salmon density in one season leads to increased density of salmonberries per bush in the next season.

Salmonberries glisten like small bursts of orange and red fish roe, nestled in the greenery beside magenta flowers and the hard, green clusters of berries still to ripen. On these shrubs, at the height of the season, you can see a whole life cycle painted across the riverbank in jewel tones. The salmonberry, from the same genus as raspberries and blackberries, has fruits that are composed of a chaotic heap of juicy drupelets that set a table to nourish a whole host of human and nonhuman kin: songbirds, small mammals, and black and grizzly bears. And the delicate fragrance and flavor are as satisfying as the dull thud of berries hitting the bottom of my bucket.

I treasure so many gifts from the salmonberries that help me through every season of the year, and my life: the fresh leaves that helped me through childbirth, the new shoots in the spring that I gently peel before eating them like licorice strings, the deep blush of blossoms that give me hope in the dark of early spring. And of course, the berries that talk to me, lovingly, of salmon as I fill buckets and bowls to make jelly for my precious ǧáǧṃ́. Salmonberries are my definition of comfort food.

 

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No Escape from Online Memories

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In the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a couple uses a medical procedure to erase each other from their memories after the relationship ends. It was a simpler time — that wouldn’t work now. Memories of relationships (and all life events), don’t just exist in our heads anymore, they are online, and online memories are very tricky to destroy

Social media memory prompts popping up over the past year have been challenging for everyone — photos showing our former, blissfully unaware selves, hugging family, having dinner with friends, going to a concert — constant reminders that thanks to the pandemic, we are now sitting at home in our pajamas binge-watching Netflix. But what if social media thinks even bigger life events are still happening? In 2019 Lauren Goode called off her wedding. The internet didn’t get the memo. In this fascinating article for Wired Goode explores what it means to be stalked by “a digital ghost, that is still getting married.”

Even if I could permanently delete my WeddingWire account, I had already shared uncountable bits of data with marketers during the time I used the website. “It’s one thing to say ‘I want to buy shoes’ and then have that ad follow you across the internet,” says Jeremy Tillman. “But there are specific life events that are these exclamation points for marketers. Like, I’m going to get married! Or, I’m going to have a kid! And the more valuable that data is, the more intrusive it seems.”

Tillman is the president of Ghostery, which offers an open source browser extension that shows you how many trackers are receiving data from the websites you visit—a mere glimpse at the network of data brokers that are creating shadow profiles of you. While I was on the phone with Tillman, I punched WeddingWire.com into a Chrome browser, navigated to a page for a wedding DJ, then clicked on the Ghostery extension. At least 16 trackers were identified—including Google Ads, DoubleClick, and Facebook Custom Audience. I had browsed web pages like this dozens of times in 2019. And then, suddenly, I had stopped.

“In your case, you have the life cycle of somebody that you’re not, following you throughout the web and beyond,” Tillman says. “It’s like a ghost life cycle that you never had the chance to live out.”

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The Syrian Rebels Who Found Refuge in Books

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Darayya in Syria was rendered a ghost town by Asaad’s regime after civic resistance — becoming a town of rubble where a mere 12,000 starving survivors clung on. One of these survivors was Ahmad Muaddamani, who spoke to Delphine Minoui from The Guardian about a remarkable thing that he and his friends did to keep life in Darayya bearable — they built a library. In books, the people left in Darayya found a refuge and an “atmosphere of collective intimacy, as well as a sense of ethics, discipline and, oddly enough, normality” that was shared by both civilians and fighters of the Free Syrian Army alike.

Fearing reprisals from the regime, the organisers decided this library would be kept in the greatest of secrecy. It would have neither name nor sign. It would be an underground space, protected from radar and shells, where avid and novice readers alike could gather. Reading as refuge. A page opening to the world when every door is locked. After scouring the city, Muaddamani and his friends uncovered the basement of an abandoned building at the border of the frontline, not far from the snipers, but largely spared rocket fire. Its inhabitants were gone. The volunteers hurriedly constructed wooden shelves. They found paint to freshen the dusty walls. They reassembled two or three couches. Outside, they piled a few sandbags in front of the windows, and they brought a generator to provide electricity. For days, the book collectors busily dusted, glued, sorted, indexed and organised all these volumes. Now arranged by theme and in alphabetical order on overstuffed shelves, the books found a new, harmonious order.

These young Syrians cohabited with death night and day. Most of them had already lost everything – their homes, their friends, their parents. Amid the chaos, they clung to books as if to life, hoping for a better tomorrow, for a better political system. Driven by their thirst for culture, they were quietly developing an idea of what democracy should be. An idea that challenged the regime’s tyranny and Islamic State’s book burners. Muaddamani and his friends were true soldiers for peace.

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Stand By Your Dictator

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (foreground L), his wife Asma visit the exhibition dedicated to French painter Claude Monet at the Grand Palais on December 11, 2010 in Paris at the end of their official visit in France. AFP PHOTO MIGUEL MEDINA (Photo credit should read MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP via Getty Images)

For some historical background on the war in Syria, read “The Graffiti Kids Who Sparked the Syrian War,” by Mark MacKinnon at The Globe and Mail.

Asma Assad, wife of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, isn’t content to raise the kids while her husband oversees torture and violent attacks on his own citizens in a bid to squash a rebellion that has been ongoing for ten years. In this startling profile at 1843, Nicolas Pelham reveals that the London-born first lady of Syria has been ruthless in acquiring power, wealth, and influence at home with dubious “improvement” projects under a sham called the Syria Trust for Development, all while courting favor with the West, pretending to be someone other than a wife solely dedicated to her husband’s ongoing tyranny.

The UN gave up trying to count the war’s death toll in 2016, when it had already reached nearly half a million. More than 10m Syrians are refugees.

In the first year of the uprising she advertised for a gardener and spent £250,000 on furniture. To circumvent sanctions she sent her hairdresser shopping in Dubai and used an alias when ordering from Harrods.

As the war continued, Bashar became more ruthless. One Western diplomat recalls the slow escalation of violence – using artillery against civilians, then air raids, then barrel-bombs. “They would…use it once, there’d be an outcry, but not to the point of international intervention,” said the diplomat. “So they would roll it out, and that would become the new normal.” International condemnation of Bashar’s crimes grew, yet this incremental choking of Syria, rather than all-out attack, helped forestall intervention.

On August 21st 2013 new footage appeared, showing people in the rebel-held suburbs of Damascus with bubbles foaming at their noses and mouths, and their limbs jerking. Hundreds died. A UN investigation later confirmed that they had been killed by sarin, a nerve gas. It was the worst chemical-weapons attack anywhere since Saddam Hussein had gassed Kurds in Halabja in 1988.

The financial success and ruthless machinations have eroded Asma’s carefully cultivated image. “Some still love her, put her photo on their Instagram page. But most now perceive her as a sneaky greedy person,” said one Syrian businessman. These days, though, no one accuses Asma of failing to understand how Syria works.

Late last year residents of the Damascus neighbourhood where Asma lives noticed a surreal change in the landscape. An old statue depicting a lauded colonel was joined by a new one: a vast sculpture of a horse’s head, at the direction of Asma’s business associates. Locals complained about the extravagance. According to reports in Gulf newspapers, the authorities had the horse’s head removed. Hours later it was back. The message was clear: in post-war Syria, Asma calls the shots.

State media gives increasing air time to “the Lady of Jasmine”. Huge posters of her image have been spotted in her parents’ hometown of Homs, covering entire housing blocks. Uniquely for a Syrian First Lady, ministers have taken to displaying her portrait in their offices alongside Bashar’s.

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Forget the Sheep, Pass the Dog

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Dogs have long had a place by people’s side, and hundreds of years ago in southern British Columbia, small-sized domestic dogs were particularly abundant — although for a rather surprising reason: their fur.  Elders from the Nuu-chah-nulth communities on Vancouver Island’s west coast and Coast Salish elders on the island’s east coast and the mainland have an oral history detailing these dogs — which were small, white, fluffy, and loved. Women weavers would care for the dogs, who lived isolated on small islands to prevent interbreeding with hunting dogs. They were fed a special diet and a couple of times a year were sheered like sheep for their wool coats, out of which the women made blankets.

As Virginia Morell explains for Hakai Magazine, the arrival of the Hudson Bay company, and with it a supply of cheap blankets, gradually destroyed the need for the wool dogs, which merged with other domestic dogs and disappeared. Proving their existence has been a challenge for archaeologists. However, over the years new avenues of research have shown the importance of these dogs — with a particular breakthrough being made in 2002, when historian Candace Wellman in Bellingham, Washington opened a drawer and found a woollen pelt. The owner? A fluffy white dog from 1859 called Mutton.

Sometime before 1858, Mutton, a wooly dog, had found himself a new keeper, George Gibbs, a 19th-century ethnographer with the Pacific Railroad Survey and the Northwest Boundary Survey. Gibbs studied the customs and languages of peoples in the Pacific Northwest, and in his notes on the Nisqually language, he recorded the name of the dog wool blankets as Ko-matl’-ked. Mutton likely came from a Coast Salish village in British Columbia. Gibbs named the dog for his love of chasing sheep.

Not too much is known about Mutton in life, though apparently goats also attracted him. In 1859, Mutton ate the head off a mountain goat skin that was in Gibbs’s care, bringing a colleague to near tears. Naturalist C. B. R. Kennerly had meant to send the skin as a specimen to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. “[Gibbs] sent it to me yesterday & when I opened the bag & saw the injury I could almost have cried,” Kennerly wrote in a letter. And more ominously, he added, “Mutton was sheared a short time ago, & as soon as his hair grows out we will make a specimen of him.” Which they did, at some point. In death, Mutton has shared the very essence of himself—his pelt—likely the only known wool dog hide to exist.

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Taking Your Butt to a Higher Level

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A decade ago, a BBL (Brazilian Butt Lift) was a relatively rare occurrence, but in her piece for The Guardian, Sophie Elmhirst discovers that since 2015 the number of butt lifts performed globally has grown by a whopping 77.7%. Kim Kardashian can take a big chunk of the credit for this, as the proud owner of the most famous bottom in the world, “a bottom so scrutinized, so emulated, so monetized, that it no longer feels like a body part, but its own high-concept venture, its own startup turned major IPO.” However, no one knows how long the fashion for a bottom that resembles “a bauble wrapped in skin” will last, or what will happen when it ends. While it remains in vogue, there are many women willing to run the gauntlet of having fat strategically molded into their rear ends — and some have paid for it with their life.

A patient has to wait weeks before they know what their bottom will ultimately look like. The fat takes time to settle, and Glancey has to remind her patients that at best, only about 50% of the fat “takes”. The rest is absorbed by the body and ejected through the lymphatic system. To optimise the amount of fat that survives in the body requires a surgeon’s skill. Glancey compares it to creating a garden: you can’t put plants too close together, they need space to thrive. “When I say this to patients, they just say put more in,” she said. “And I say, well, it doesn’t work like that.” Glancey sticks to the UK guidelines and limits how much she will insert – 300cc per buttock, a little less than a can of Coke. She tells her patients to complete the BBL over more than one operation, adding a little at a time.

In Turkey, the most popular destination for cosmetic surgery patients travelling abroad in Europe – and the third most popular in the world, after Thailand and Mexico – the limits are less conservative. Some surgeons openly advertise on social media that they will insert more than 1,000cc into a patient’s buttocks. Glancey says that she regularly sees patients who have returned from Turkey unhappy with the results, often because a significant quantity of fat has died and left them lopsided or misshapen.

The risk involved in performing a BBL is not only about the quantity of fat, but how it is inserted. (Also, whether it is fat being inserted at all: a number of recent deaths associated with buttock augmentation occurred because the patient was being injected with silicone.) During the operation, the danger occurs at a very precise moment: the insertion of the cannula into the buttock. As it goes under the skin, the cannula has to remain above the gluteal muscle. If it goes below, and fat enters the bloodstream, fat droplets can then coalesce, travel through the blood and cause a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the lungs – the cause of death in the case of the British woman, Leah Cambridge, who had a BBL at a private clinic in Izmir in 2018.

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Life Goals: Power Couple Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON - JANUARY 27: Power couple, USWNT forward Megan Rapinoe and Seattle Storm guard Sue Bird enjoy the game at the Alaska Airlines Arena on January 27, 2019 in Seattle, Washington. (Photo by Alika Jenner/Getty Images)

Superstar athletes Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird have given their lives to soccer and basketball, respectively. At GQ, Emma Carmichael reports that now, as their sports careers reach their conclusion, the couple is using their considerable influence and profile to further equality — for women’s rights (in and out of sports), the Black Lives Matter movement, and for other members of the LGBTQI community.

There is no precedent for the pastel-haired international soccer star who courted the ponytailed all-American point guard and went on to live happily ever after. For now, the “cross-sport lesbian power couple” template begins and ends with Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird. And they are not just stars in their sports—they have set the standards to which future athletes will be held. Between them they have more championships and gold medals than most couples have steak knives: At 35, Rapinoe is one of the most decorated American soccer players of all time, with two World Cup titles and an Olympic gold medal to her name. Bird, 40, is considered one of the greatest basketball players of all time, having won multiple championships at every stage of her career—from her two championships during her fabled UConn days to her quartet of rings with the Seattle Storm and four Olympic golds with the national team.

They have set the agenda off the field too: Both have been active in the Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name movements as well as the ongoing fights for equal pay and treatment that have revolutionized their sports. In January, after months of campaigning that started at the WNBA’s pandemic site in Florida, Bird celebrated Rev. Raphael Warnock’s victory over Atlanta Dream co-owner Kelly Loeffler in one of Georgia’s crucial runoff Senate races. They are pushing things forward, as none other than Billie Jean King tells me. “We were always afraid of the unknown,” she says. King lost all of her sponsorships in 24 hours when she was involuntarily outed in 1981. Things are different now. “This is why having Megan and Sue out in front like this, being comfortable in their own skin, is so huge. It allows other people to be more comfortable.”

Every person I interviewed for this story is an LGBTQ+ professional (or formerly pro) woman athlete. All seemed to over-explain their work—Bird taking pains to describe why she and her fellow WNBA stars had to play in Russia, Harris and Krieger making sure I understood they’d spent many years playing with Rapinoe, even King laying out how she and the Original 9 of women’s tennis fought for better prize money in the ’70s. The tendency probably comes along with being a conscientious, media-trained athlete and public-facing woman, but I also wondered if the instinct was learned: from having to make the case for yourself constantly, from being forced to convince the skeptical that what you do has merit.

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