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The Wrong Pair

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lisa W. Rosenberg | Longreads | November 2018 | 15 minutes (3,844 words)

 

Dr. Alvarez furrowed his brow, crouching to view my right breast head-on, inscribing something on it with a dark blue marker — a map for his scalpel.

“You’ll notice a real laterality here,” he said, glancing up at one of his two male assistants, presumably residents. “Not so much on the left.”

“Yeah,” The younger physician concurred. “Wow.”

I bit my lip, amused. I was too giddy to be mortified. Nothing in life prepares you for a situation where three guys in white coats marvel at the nuances of, and the contrast between, your breasts. I sat, compliant, tolerant. My greatest wish was coming true. On the other side of this day would be relief from my aching middle back, from carrying around twin entities that had never felt like mine, and which had contributed to a struggle with body image that lasted through my mid-40s.

When Dr. Alvarez finished marking me up, he asked if I had any more questions before they wheeled me in for anesthesia. He had explained everything already: what kinds of I incisions would be made for minimal scarring, what the healing process would be like, how long before I’d be able to run.

“How small can we go?” I said, though we’d been over this as well.

“A C-cup,” he said. “Any smaller would compromise the integrity of the breast.”

Integrity and my breasts had never belonged in the same sentence as far as I was concerned. I felt no guilt about my choice, no reservations. A woman I’d met at physical therapy a few weeks before, who had overheard me talking about the upcoming surgery, had clicked her tongue at me.

“God don’t mess up,” she’d said.

But he did in my case, I’d wanted to tell her. I pictured a boob conveyor belt where God’s helpers — whoever they might be — awarded specially-selected, custom-designed boobs for every female in the queue. I imagined a woman in line before me: broad, tall and brash, with frosted, feathered, Barbara Mandrell hair, pausing to fix her slingback heel. Then me, pushed forward, forced to take the double E knockers that God had designed for her, instead of the nice, delicate A cups intended for my slight frame.

“A B-cup might be nice.” I told Dr. Alvarez.

“I’ll do my best,” he said.

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The City I Love Is Destroying Itself

All artwork by the author

Nicole Antebi | Longreads | November 2018 | 18 minutes (4,438 words)

For the past few years I’ve been working on a topographical film titled Fred’s Rainbow Bar and Other Stages on the International Border featuring a variety of animation styles along with live-action and archival imagery to interrogate histories, memories, and imaginings of the border landscapes of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the region where I grew up. During this time I’ve also been following the incredible story of “Paso Del Sur” a watch group in El Paso who have been fighting to save Duranguito, the oldest barrio in El Paso Texas.

At any time of day or night, a group of older residents can be seen patrolling the Duranguito neighborhood in downtown El Paso, Texas, located across the river from downtown Juárez, Mexico. Historian David Dorado Romo is one of several “Paso Del Sur” figureheads who have been fighting the City of El Paso, for over a decade, to preserve the spaces Romo has long been writing about. In his 2005 book, Ringside Seat to a Revolution, Romo tracked the footsteps of Mexican Revolutionary folk hero, Francisco “Pancho” Villa and other historical figures of the period throughout Duranguito and greater downtown El Paso. I visited Romo this summer in Duranguito where I interviewed him about their battle with the City and the El Paso Del Norte Group, a bi-national consortium of developers who disobeyed a court order and illegally paid people to demolish their own property. At the time of our interview the neighborhood was in a state of limbo with a section punched out of each of five buildings by orders issued by the City; giving the distinct anthropomorphic appearance of a body disemboweled and left for dead.

The day after the 2018 midterms, while awaiting edits on this piece, I got word that the City of El Paso had increased their police presence in the neighborhood and resumed fencing in properties to speed up an archaeological study, with plans to resume displacement and demolition within the next week.

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NICOLE ANTEBI: Where does the name Duranguito originate from?

DAVID DORADO ROMO: The provenance of the name is both anecdotal and historical. One of the stories Toñita Morales, who lives in the adobe-looking house over there, tells me, is that she first heard it when she was a young woman living in Segundo Barrio in the late ’40s. She told me that there was a family from the State of Durango with three daughters that lived here on one of the streets and when young men would go back to visit people would say “A donde vas?” and they would respond, “Vamos con las de Duranguito.”

What I’ve seen in some of the oral history records at the University of Texas at El Paso is that it was called Barrio Durango back around the turn of the 20th century and they don’t really say why, but I get the feeling that it may have been called that because one of the streets here is Durango street. So you can find all these streets in the Anson Mills plot map of 1859, even before the railroads came here, and these were all wagon destinations. So Chihuahua and Santa Fe streets were part of the old Camino Real and Durango was also one of those destinations where you would go.

Later, in the 1990s, you had the central business association led by Tanny Berg who had plans to gentrify this place and turn it into a destination with bars and a nightlife and he started calling this whole place Union Plaza based on the Union Depot. That’s a relatively new name. And so now the city is saying it’s not called Barrio Duranguito, its called Union Plaza.

Names and terrains have always been contested. That’s part of the identity of a place and that’s also part of the struggle. We are trying to revive what the neighbors themselves call it. But in fact, if you go back to 1827, it was called Ponce de Leon Rancho and it was the first land grant on this side of the river. In 1873, when El Paso was first incorporated, Duranguito was designated the First Ward. There’s an older parcel where the Chamizal or the Segundo Barrio used to be, that, it could be said, was the first, but it was still on the Mexican side of the border at that time. So in 1873, this became the first land grant on the El Paso side. And when they first broke ground, there were a lot of adobe structures that were designed to protect themselves from the Apaches. So that was also contested terrain. And even the Apaches were themselves contesting this place. There is archaeological evidence all around of Pueblo-style sedentary communities. So really, this is part of a long, long, history of contestation. But this isn’t the kind of history the City feels like it can promote.
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The Lasting Effects of the Lolita Complex

Florence Sally Horner, 1950 and Dominique Swain, 1997. Philadelphia Bulletin / Associated Press, Andrew Medichini / Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lacy Warner | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,431 words)

It feels like I’m watching porn. The video is grainy and cheap looking, like an old daytime soap shot with Vaseline over the lens. In the corner there is a grey couch that sits against a wall painted the desperate sand-beige color of every strip mall in America. This is a six-minute, twelve-second YouTube video of Dominique Swain’s screen test for the title role in the 1997 film adaptation of Lolita. At the four-minute mark, director Adrian Lyne gives a line reading of the word, “slut.” He says it over and over again. Jeremy Irons, 49 years old at the time, had already been cast as Humbert Humbert. In the video, Swain is 15 years old, playing 14, though in the novel, Lolita is 12. Seconds before the end, she looks toward the camera, smiles, and says in a bad, mock-English accent, “I’m a conniving little slut.”

***

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” In 1954, Lolita was rejected by five American publishing houses. Eventually, the down-market French publisher Olympia Press agreed to publish the first edition. Riddled with errors, this initial printing would be Nabokov’s albatross for the next three years. In 1958, Lolita finally saw its American debut, and became a bestseller overnight. Critics and readers alike have called Lolita many things: the great American novel; the great road novel; an allegory for the alienation caused by exile; a satirical tale of the incompatibility between European and American cultures; a great detective novel; smut; high-brow porn — but what it has never been called, until now, is true.

Last September saw the publication of Sarah Weinman’s nonfiction book, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World. Weinman investigates the 1948 case of Horner, who was abducted as a child by the con-artist and pedophile, Frank La Salle. Horner lived with La Salle as his captive for two years, spending her 12th and 13th birthdays on the road as he took her from her New Jersey hometown across the US to California. Horner’s story is also Dolores Haze’s story. Through careful critical investigation, Weinman maps out how Nabokov learned of, and developed Lolita around, reports of Horner’s kidnapping and abuse.

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Falling for My Booty Call

Illustration by Cat Finnie

Sarah Kasbeer | Longreads | November 2018 | 15 minutes (3,867 words)

 

His brown eyes trailed over my body in an exaggerated way. If it had occurred at work, it could have been considered sexual harassment. But at the bar, and uninhibited, I felt the rush of being seen.

At 22, I was lonely and working in a restaurant. Nic was a server I had a crush on who’d hardly ever spoken to me until we bumped into each other on a random night off. He walked into a Chicago dive bar where I happened to be getting drunk with a friend. I approached him from behind to order myself another round.

“Corona — with a lemon,” I said to the bartender. Somehow I’d gotten the impression that this was the sophisticated European way to drink cheap beer. I left a dollar and change on the bar before forcing my lemon wedge into the bottle, ready to make my move.

“Hi Nic,” I said to the half-moon formed by the adjustable snaps on the back of his hat. The half-moon turned. Nic set his Heineken down before slowly looking me up and down. He seemed to still be processing my identity.

Perhaps it was my off-duty attire that threw him. During shifts behind the restaurant bar, I was forced to wear black button-up shirts and dress pants, my shoulder-length hair in a ponytail. That evening, I had donned a dive-bar appropriate denim and pink tank top combo. My long bangs were swept to one side, my light hair down.

“Sa-rah,” he finally answered, his mouth widening into a smile. The slow, deliberate way he lingered over both syllables of my name made it seem as if he knew something about me that I didn’t, or at least not yet.

Instead of being offended by the once-over, I was awash in a familiar response: pleasure mixed with shame. Sexual objectification can trigger conflicting impulses. On the one hand, I wanted to be treated with respect. On the other hand, I wanted to be wanted. Getting laid was the easiest way to prove my desirability, even if the feeling only lasted a few fleeting hours.

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When You Carry All That You Love With You

Photos by Alice Driver

A photo essay by Alice Driver.

 


1. Your hands are still warm from walking dozens of miles under the scorching sun when you cradle your baby cousin. The two of you have walked 654 miles together since you left Honduras, your lives intertwined as you flee a territory where daily violence marked your life. You feel his heart beating as you cradle him and you know that you both made the right choice to walk toward the unknown.
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West Across the Sea

Illustration by J.O. Applegate

 Sam Riches / Longreads / October 2018 / 17 minutes (4,328 words)

The first thing you need to know about Iceland is that sheep are everywhere. In the pastures, on top of the mountains, next to the highway. They graze freely and abundantly and peacefully, most of the time. An approaching vehicle can cause them to scatter — bells clanging frantically, fuzzy butts bouncing wildly — into the countryside, where the only predator to worry about, other than humans, is the delightfully cute but sometimes fatal arctic fox.

Icelandic sheep are hardy creatures. They are farmed mostly for their meat but also for their wool, which provides insulated, waterproof protection against Iceland’s damp weather. For centuries, sheep have been fundamental to Icelandic life — so perhaps it is not surprising that one of the most intriguing basketball prospects the country has ever produced was, just four and a half years ago, focused on a more traditional career: sheep farmer. Read more…

To Heil, or Not To Heil, When Traveling in the Third Reich

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Julia Boyd | Travelers in the Third Reich | Pegasus Books | 16 minutes (4,230 words)

 

There can have been few foreigners who “Heiled Hitler” with more enthusiasm than Unity Valkyrie Mitford. Ever since she first became infatuated with the Führer at the 1933 Nuremberg Rally, her arm would shoot out on every possible occasion. Even Sir Eric and Lady Phipps, all too familiar with distressed upper-class parents whose daughters had fallen in love with “dreadful SS types,” were taken aback by Unity’s brisk “Heil Hitler” as she entered their Berlin drawing room. Sir Eric, who was a good head shorter than the strikingly built Unity, responded by standing on tiptoe and shaking her outstretched hand. Some months later, Jessica Mitford shared a cabin with her sister on a Mediterranean cruise. She described how Unity would lie on her bunk at night and after saying her prayers to Hitler would solemnly raise her arm in the Nazi salute before falling asleep. The story of Unity — the fifth of Lord and Lady Redesdale’s famous brood of seven — is that of an unhappy, not particularly bright young woman finding glamour and purpose in a cult religion. She might have become prey to any number of eccentric beliefs or deities but unfortunately for her, and those around her, she fell for the Führer.

An unsophisticated groupie, Unity was a famous special case but countless other young people of similar background traveled and studied in Germany between the wars, giving rise to the question — why were they there? That the British establishment should have seen fit to prepare its offspring for adult life by sending them to such a vile totalitarian regime is puzzling, to say the least. Even those in sympathy with Hitler’s aims of defeating communism and restoring his country to greatness would hardly have welcomed a Brown Shirt as a son-in-law. Yet, despite the Great War and growing awareness of Nazi iconoclasm, Germany’s traditional grip on British intellectual imagination remained as strong as ever. Here, in the midst of Nazi barbarity and boorishness, these gilded youths were expected to deepen their education and broaden their outlook. What better way for a young man to prepare for Oxford or the Foreign Office than to immerse himself in Goethe, Kant, Beethoven and German irregular verbs? Moreover he could do so very cheaply by lodging with one of the many impoverished Baroninnen [Baronesses] offering rooms in university towns such as Munich, Freiburg or Heidelberg. Read more…

Queens of Infamy: The Rise of Catherine de’ Medici

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | September 2018 | 18 minutes (4,588 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.

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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

The year was 1519. Henry VIII was king of England and still (mostly) happily married to Catherine of Aragon. The throne of France was held by Francis I, also known as “Francis of the Large Nose,” which may or may not have been a dick joke. Charles I of Spain had just become Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Martin Luther was stirring up shit in Germany. And in Florence, a couple whose union represented a last-ditch coalition between France and the Pope against the ever-expanding Holy Roman Empire welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Catarina Maria Romula de’ Medici (hereafter referred to as Catherine).

I like to think of the Medicis as the Kardashians of Renaissance Europe; at the very least, they had the same intuitive understanding of how to create and exploit a personal brand. Just the mention of the Medici name conjures up images of vulgar opulence, moral decay, and murderous treachery. Machiavelli’s The Prince — the so-called “textbook for tyrants” — was dedicated to Catherine de’ Medici’s father, and it was rumored that each of her children carried a copy with them at all times. Catherine herself inspired such nicknames as the Serpent Queen, the Black Queen, the Maggot from Italy’s Tomb, and (more flatteringly) the Mother of the Modern High-Heeled Shoe. She was also called the Merchant’s Daughter, a dig at her family’s nonaristocratic origins.

Whether or not Catherine was a basilisk who covered her shimmering scales with silk and velvet is up for debate, but it’s true that the Medici dynasty had decidedly common roots. In fact, a little over a century before Catherine’s birth, the Medicis were little more than casually wealthy textile traders. I mean, they had money, but not in mind-boggling amounts. That all changed in 1397, when they started a bank and discovered a latent talent for money management. By the mid-1400s, the Banco dei Medici was the biggest bank on the continent, and the Medicis themselves were the richest family in Europe.

Money can’t buy you happiness, but it sure can get you just about anything else, including various titles, marriages into noble families, a couple of popedoms, and the de facto lordship of the entire city-state of Florence. Also: a tomb designed by Michelangelo! The only problem with the Medici family’s scheme to dominate Europe was that supply couldn’t keep up with demand; even as they acquired all these positions of power, their ability to produce heirs veered into a steep decline. By the time Catherine was born, she was the only legitimate heir of the main branch of the family, and it soon became clear that she was quite possibly the last.

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‘The Very Top Guy in the Stasi was Personally Involved in Figuring Out How to Destroy Punk.’

"Punkers and policemen face each other during a demonstration against the census on the 9th of May in 1987." Chris Hoffmann/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images, Algonquin Books

Will Hermes | Longreads | September 2018 | 14 minutes (3,534 words)

Punk rock was revolution-minded from the get-go, at least about aesthetics. Its political consciousness bloomed later –- most vividly in the U.K., then in scenes around the world. Yet for all the anti-Thatcher, anti-Reagan bluster, punk can lay direct claim to just one full regime change. That’s the takeaway from Tim Mohr’s revelatory new book Burning Down The Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. It chronicles the rise of the scene — essentially seeded, Mohr writes, by a 15-year-old girl whose moniker became Major — in the Soviet Bloc German Democratic Republic in the ’80s. As its numbers swelled, it attracted the attention of the famously ruthless Stasi intelligence and security force (basically the KGB of the GDR), whose mandate included crushing any murmurs of rebelliousness or dissent, and who employed a psychological warfare strategy known as Zersetzung, or decomposition, towards those ends. Kids were picked up and interrogated, for hours and even days, for their haircuts, or clothing, or scraps of paper with song lyrics. For even minor transgressions, they lost college placements, government-controlled apartments, and jobs, their parents and relatives often punished in a similar manner. Kids were arrested and beaten, spent months in prison, threatened with expatriation.

Yet the scene kept growing. Bands like Namenlos and Schleim-Keim formed, playing gigs in church compounds — pretty much the only places alternative culture could exist, since church “open work” spaces were theoretically off-limits to the Stasi, at least initially. There, communities grew; punks connected with environmental activists and others working for change, sharing strategies and collaborating. They staged concerts and festivals, which the Stasi tried to suppress. When street protests began in force, swelling from thousands to hundreds of thousands, and the Berlin Wall finally came down in 1989, it was a culmination of the civil unrest that began in significant part, Mohr suggests, with a handful of strong-willed teenage punks hanging out at a park in Plänterwald.

Mohr encountered this history during his years in East Berlin, where he deejayed in clubs that had sprouted in the free-for-all communities of post-reunification Germany — clubs often created, staffed and attended by the same culture warriors that came up in the ’80s punk scene. Mohr spoke with us from his current home in Brooklyn, NY.

Listen to an audio version of this interview on the Longreads Podcast:

Longreads: So how did you first wind up in Berlin? This was after the wall fell, right?

Tim Mohr: Yeah, it was ‘92, so two years after unification. I was just determined to live abroad for a while, and I didn’t really have much of a clue about Germany. I guess I’d say I was a stupid American at the time. I thought Oktoberfest and Germany were the same thing, and I expected to get off the plane in Berlin and see everyone running around in lederhosen.

Chugging beer…

Yeah, out of giant mugs. And of course, it wasn’t the case. I ended up in a typical Eastern Bloc high rise, far in the East. This was somewhat disappointing. But pretty quickly I discovered the scene that was happening in crumbling old buildings in the central part of town, where people were squatting and the first generation of clubs and bars were up and running.

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Weighing the Costs — and Occasional Benefits — of Ethnic Ambiguity

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Aram Mrjoian | Longreads | September 2018 | 16 minutes (3,949 words)

 

At the beginning of 7th grade, sitting toward the back of a column of brown laminate desks, I was first told I had an emerging unibrow. Michigan still radiated of summer. The September air hugged my skin. I was lanky and undefined, a soon-to-be teenager who’d bought into the culture of extreme sports, so I wore oversized cargo shorts and a baggy t-shirt that hung down to my knees. At the time, skaters like me were prone to wearing clothes that didn’t fit well, as if swimming around in an extra large negated the fragility of our young bodies.

Our German class, an introductory course more focused on the country’s culture than language acquisition, was mostly filled with young men. It had the reputation for being a blow-off, less intellectually strenuous than Spanish or French. Originally from Deutschland, Mr. E liked to play old clips of Michael Schumacher celebrating Formula One racing victories in glamorous locales — Monaco or Barcelona. This pastime lent itself to the underlying masculinity of the classroom.

One morning, while we were supposed to read a conversation from the textbook aloud with a partner, the boy sitting in front of me pivoted around in his desk. “You have to shave that or something,” he goaded, pointing toward my forehead. I spent the next five minutes trying to convince him he was mistaken. We ignored the scripted dialogue in front of us. He didn’t let it go. From then on the shrinking gap between my eyebrows became a daily topic of conversation. He brought other kids in our area of the classroom in on the joke. I worried that if I removed the fuzz I would only set myself up for more ridicule.

A week or so into that school year, the Twin Towers fell. I was in math class, algebra, which was taught by a skeletal man with a thick mustache and ponytail. He wore corduroy pants most days, a mug of burnt-smelling coffee glued to his right hand. He was the type to squat down next to the desk and talk to students face to face. We knew something was wrong when he turned on the television while we scribbled proofs in our workbooks. The class watched the news in stunned silence. By lunchtime, we were sent home. A few days later, my neighbor in German class gave me a new nickname: “Arama bin Laden.”

By the end of the semester, I started plucking the mess of black hairs bridging the space above my nose. I couldn’t tolerate the worms wriggling toward each other across my face, hinting that I was different. I bleached my hair. I found numerous ways to blend in, but nothing could change the five foreign syllables of my full name, the simple alteration of the first that transformed me into a terrorist.

I did have something of an out, need be. My parents, with remarkable foresight, had given me the middle name Joseph so that I could go by AJ. It was a failsafe designed precisely for such circumstances. A last resort for retroactive assimilation. However, I never used my initials. It always felt unnatural to me, having been called by my given name since I was born. Seventh grade was the first time I realized my name could be used against me. I learned that to be an unknown was to be other, that to be difficult to pronounce was to be threatening, and that to be ethnically ambiguous was to be somehow less American.

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