Search Results for: tech

‘What Would Social Media Be Like As the World Is Ending?’

Hulton Archive / Getty, Greywolf Press

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | February 2019 | 22 minutes (6,069 words)

 

Mark Doten is a deranged seer, a mad scribe mapping the end of the world. In The Infernal, his wonderfully strange first novel, he tackled a host of twenty-first century horrors: Osama Bin Laden and his followers, the moral disaster of the War on Terror, the gravitational pull of the networked world on our minds, and a seemingly inevitable post-human future in which one of the few survivors is Mark Zuckerberg. Now, in Trump Sky Alpha, Doten’s produced a fierce, unexpectedly moving, and surprisingly quickly conceived book about the Trump presidency. The new novel begins with a nuclear conflagration that wipes out 90 percent of the global population. The protagonist, Rachel, a journalist steeped in the folkways of the internet, is one of the few survivors. In an effort to reboot American journalism, the New York Times Magazine, risen from the ashes, assigns her to write an article about internet humor at the end of the world. What were people tweeting as the bombs fell?

It may sound like a deliberately obscure assignment, but it soon takes Rachel into some of the darkest corners of the post-apocalyptic American landscape. Mourning her dead wife and child, Rachel is also searching for their final resting place; along the way she finds a new lover, encounters an American security state that seems just as malevolent as its pre-apocalyptic forebears, tangles with a frightful hacktivist-turned-cyber-villain, and meets a novelist dying of radiation exposure who may be the key to it all. Trump Sky Alpha begins as an elaborate farce and ends as something much more grim and compelling, covering issues of politics, resistance, identity, and what, after all these years of mindless info-consumption, the internet actually means to our society. Read more…

Alternative Reality: ‘Howard Buffett’s Border War’

Howard Buffett, laughs at his swearing-in ceremony as Macon County Sheriff, Friday, Sept. 15, 2017 at the Scovill Golf Course Banquet Facility in Decatur, Ill. Buffett will fill out the remaining term of retiring Sheriff Thomas Schneider, who confirmed earlier Friday he would step down. (Clay Jackson/Herald & Review via AP)

It’s been a rough month or so for news publications around the country, with recent layoffs at BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Gannett, along with impending cuts at Vice and McClatchy. In mid-January, too, almost the entire editorial staff of The East Bay Express, Oakland’s alt-weekly, was laid off.

Despite the carnage, though, alternative weeklies continue to publish ambitious, informative work, performing a vital service at a moment when local newspapers are disappearing at an alarming rate. The Phoenix New Times, for instance, published an aggressively reported two-part series on Warren Buffett’s son, Howard, who has earned a reputation as something of a border cowboy.

Seven Days, Burlington’s alt-weekly, profiled Charlie Morrow, the innovative musician and composer who is pioneering a new kind of immersive sound technology. Spokane’s Inlander published an in-depth story about grizzly bears, always an intriguing topic. Alex Woodward, in the New Orleans Gambit, documented the history of redlining in the Crescent City.

In Madison’s Isthmus, Howard Hardee took a look at a new effort to house the city’s homeless population. Nicholas Dolan wrote about the abolitionist John Brown for Iowa City’s Little Village. And Gabrielle Gopinath, in Humboldt County’s North Coast Journal, wrote an engaging piece on a recently restored church mural that had been hidden from view for a century.

1. “Howard Buffett’s Border War: A Billionaire’s Son Is Spending Millions in Cochise County” (Beau Hodai, January 13, 2019, Phoenix New Times)

Warren Buffett’s sexagenarian son, Howard, is cast in the first part of this jarring exposé as an aspiring border warrior who has purchased influence along the Mexico-Arizona dividing line, where he owns land, in order to act out what seems to be a dangerous, puerile fantasy as a desert vigilante.

Buffett describes his activities on the border using the language of humanitarianism and concern for the “rule of law.” But closer inspection shows he is using the same dog-eared playbook, and walking in the same well-worn circles, as infamous border warriors and vigilantes who have preceded him along southeastern Arizona’s border with Mexico. Setting Buffett aside from some of his more notorious predecessors is his extreme wealth, and not much more.

Read the second part here.

2. “Charlie Morrow Creates Soundscapes That Mimic How We Hear” (Dan Bolles, January 23, 2019, Seven Days)

Charlie Morrow, the musician, composer, and sound artist, has always straddled the mainstream and the avant-garde. In college, he played trumpet alongside the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and later worked in the advertising industry, perhaps most famously penning the jingle for Hefty trash bags.

Now, Morrow is knee-deep in developing his own 3D sound design technology through MorrowSound, the company he founded, creating immersive sound installations in seemingly random places such as the Kaiser Permanante health hub in Santa Monica, California. Dan Bolles, of Burlington’s Seven Days, paints a vivid portrait of this amusingly eccentric polymath.

When wearing the signature black bowler hat that often tops his round face, Morrow almost looks like a René Magritte painting come to life. And there’s a certain surrealism to what he does. Where the Belgian painter famously juxtaposed ordinary objects with extraordinary settings, Morrow uses ordinary sounds to create extraordinary environments—often, as in the case of the Santa Monica waiting room, in places where you’d least expect them.

3. “A WSU researcher lived with grizzly bears in Alaska. She came away convinced humans and grizzlies can coexist” (Wilson Criscione, January 17, 2019, Inlander)

If you know how Werner Herzog’s grim documentary Grizzly Man ends, then you might furrow your brow at this story about Joy Erlenbach, a bear biologist at Washington State University who has spent 300 days over the past four years living with grizzly bears in the remote Alaskan wilderness. She believes that, in the right environment, humans can live peacefully alongside grizzlies.

Erlenbach says she knows how to read bears’ body language. They are not much different than dogs in the way they express discomfort. She remembers once walking on a path through tall grass when she surprised a mama bear, whom Erlenbach called “Nina,” and two large cubs. Nina was almost within arm’s reach. Erlenbach took a step back, but that upset Nina. So instead, Erlenbach froze, and Nina decided to simply walk past Erlenbach.

Wilson Criscione’s profile for the Spokane Inlander doubles as an expansive look at the ways in which people are interacting with grizzlies in the lower 48 states — often violently.

4. “How ‘redlining’ shaped New Orleans neighborhoods — is it too late to be fixed?” (Alex Woodward, January 21, 2019, The Gambit)

Alex Woodward investigates the racist legacy of redlining in this vital piece, examining how the widespread practice of denying credit to African-Americans still shapes today’s housing market in New Orleans.

A 2016 report from the Center for Investigative Reporting found that people of color still are denied mortgages at higher rates than white homebuyers in 61 U.S. metro areas. And a 2018 report from National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that nearly 75 percent of redlined neighborhoods in the U.S. remain low- to moderate-income areas, and people of color live in nearly 64 percent of those neighborhoods.

Though redlining was eliminated with the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, its damage was never undone.

5. “Housing Madison’s homeless” (Howard Hardee, January 10, 2019, Isthmus)

In Madison, Wisconsin’s alt-weekly, Isthmus, Howard Hardee writes about a couple of new supportive housing facilities, built to help the city’s homeless, that have been managed — somewhat shakily, it seems — by a Chicago-based company named Heartland Housing. There’s a lot riding on how well Heartland does its job, as the facilities are the first two projects in a larger plan, known as Housing First, to address homelessness in Madison.

The failure of Housing First in Madison would be, first and foremost, a tragedy for people living on the razor’s edge of poverty. It’s hard to overstate how much it means for formerly homeless people such as Melisa, 52, to have a roof and four walls after spending countless nights under bridges, on riverbanks and in the woods.

Melisa grew up on Jenifer Street, played soccer for East High School, and studied graphic design in college. Either she doesn’t understand how she became homeless or doesn’t want to talk about it. “I went through some situations,” she says vaguely. But she knows the streets were harsh. She made and lost friends. Some died. And she was highly vulnerable herself: One night, she was kidnapped and sexually assaulted. “We just survived,” she says.

6. “‘Bright Radical Star’: When John Brown came to Iowa” (Nicholas Dolan, January 15, 2019, Little Village)

Before his failed raid on Harpers Ferry, the rugged revolutionary John Brown passed through Iowa, which Nicholas Dolan describes as a “bastion of the abolitionist movement” in his informative historical essay for Little Village, the publication serving Iowa City and Cedar Rapids.

Leading up to 1859 and that ill-fated scheme, Brown and his fellow insurgents spent several months preparing in a modest Iowa community, even recruiting some soldiers from its ranks. It’s a story that speaks to America’s complicated relationship with religion and violence, and Iowa’s unsung radical history.

7. “The Hidden Palace” (Gabrielle Gopinath, January 31, 2019, North Coast Journal)

Humboldt County’s North Coast Journal published this fascinating article about a recently restored mural in Ferndale’s Church of the Assumption, painted in 1896 by the little-known artist Franz Bernau. The mural had been hidden from sight under whitewash for about a century, but now churchgoers are treated to a vibrant display that, in Gabrielle Gopinath’s telling, recalls a painting by M.C. Escher.

When you enter the Church of the Assumption today, the effect is dazzling. It can be hard to tell where architecture ends and painting begins. This impression intensifies as you approach the rear of the church, where floor-to-ceiling murals frame the altar, reaching some 50 feet above the ground. Below the chancel window, the mural depicts a sanctuary curtain hanging along four bays separated by painted columns and topped by fan ornaments, all rendered in starchy trompe l’oeil.

Gopinath’s vivid descriptions leave you with a strong desire to see the mural in person.

8. “Ilhan Omar’s improbable journey from refugee camp to Minnesota Legislature” (Cory Zurowski, November 7, 2016, City Pages)

Ilhan Omar, the newly elected Minnesota congresswoman — and, along with Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib, one of the first Muslim women in the House of Representatives — has been the subject of a lot of intense scrutiny since she took office at the beginning of the year.

But that’s nothing new for the 37-year-old Somali-American, who got her start in politics in 2016, when she was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. That same year, the writer Cory Zurowski documented Omar’s somewhat tumultuous entry into politics, along with her circuitous route from Mogadishu to a refugee camp in Kenya to Arlington, Virginia, where her family first moved when they got to the United States — and where a young Omar struggled to fit in.

Classmates stuck gum to her headscarf when they weren’t trying to yank it off. None of her peers bothered to communicate, even to say hi. They stared instead. The new kid sat solo at lunch, a loner during recess as well. Omar’s English improved.

Then came her classmates’ questions: Does it feel good to wear shoes for the first time? Do you really have hair? Do you have a pet monkey? “I’d say the kids were curiously brutal,” says Omar, “but the lunch ladies were kind to me.”

Soon after her arrival in Virginia, Omar moved with to Minneapolis, and so marked the beginning of her rapid political ascent.

***

Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Columbia Journalism Review.

Preparing for a Post-Roe America

Ralph Grunewald / Getty

Laura Barcella | Longreads | February 2019 | 13 minutes (3,517 words)

The 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade just occurred on January 22 — but the days of relatively uncomplicated American abortion access are, most likely, numbered. In fact, author Robin Marty believes it’s not a matter of if Roe will be overturned, it’s a matter of when.

For more than ten years, the Minneapolis-based freelance reporter and author of the new book Handbook for a Post-Roe America has been diligently chronicling the twists and turns of both the pro-choice and anti-abortion movements. Ever since Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation, Marty — like many other pro-choice Americans — has been waiting for the proverbial pro-life shoe to drop. Losing Kennedy, the swing voter on a number of major abortion rulings, and gaining Brett Kavanaugh — a long-time pro-life ally — seems to all but ensure the end of Roe, as well as the downfall of abortion being considered a constitutional right.

Indeed, several weeks after Marty and I spoke in late January, Kavanaugh voted with a minority of Justices to overturn recent Court precedent in favor of a law that sought to impose a new form of undue burden on abortion-seekers in Louisiana. The Cut called Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion something verging on gaslighting. In it, he postulates that perhaps the undue burden — abortion providers being required to gain admitting privileges at local hospitals — could simply be met, when of course providers have already been trying to gain admitting privileges for years. The Court ultimately blocked the implementation of the law, but only because the conservative Chief Justice, John Roberts, voted with the liberals. The margin of safety has grown vanishingly thin.

Let’s consider what that means. If Roe were overturned, it wouldn’t necessarily make it impossible for a pregnant person to obtain an abortion, but it would potentially make an already challenging process even more daunting. As it stands, obtaining an abortion is already far from affordable or convenient for many women, even in blue states with a plethora of clinics. Despite Roe’s current status, and despite the fact that statistically, most Americans believe in a woman’s right to choose, abortion care is still often portrayed as a privilege instead of a right — or as a miserable “worst-case” scenario rather than a straightforward medical procedure. Read more…

Mothers of the Future

Corbis Historical / Getty

Thea Prieto | Longreads | February 2019 | 9 minutes (2,399 words)


“I got annihilated as a natural, as the real deal, as her truest, most important poem, her Lie Box. But she stuffed some torn-up papyrus in a crocodile; she taught me how to look for shards of a vase with a few words on it and piece together a story.”

—Sophia Shalmiyev, Mother Winter


When Anne Carson translated every tantalizingly incomplete snippet of Sappho’s poetry in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, she was continuing a centuries-long project: the excavation of our poetic fossils. In Carson’s translation, Sappo’s fragments are littered with empty brackets, which box off the blank spaces where words used to be, giving a reader the translator’s experience of “the free space of imaginal adventure… the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes.” These ancient relics of love and longing contain voids that can nowadays only be filled in, painstakingly, by imaginative poets and scholars; or by archaeologists lucky enough to exhume new slivers of Sappho’s poetry from antique garbage: cartonnage in mummy cases, packing for vases, or stuffing in mummified crocodile carcasses. “There can be no periods at the end of Sappho’s translations,” writes Sophia Shalmiyev in her debut memoir Mother Winter, “because she is forever unfinished business to us.”

In Mother Winter (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Shalmiyev describes many women who are yet unfinished business, most poignantly her own estranged mother. In 1978, in Leningrad — once and now again called Saint Petersburg — Shalmiyev was born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father. Widespread anti-Semitism drove her father to emigrate to America with his daughter, leaving Shalmiyev’s alcoholic mother, Elena, behind. From age eleven onward, Shalmiyev traveled new and unsafe worlds, navigating different cultures and subcultures, searching motherless for words to define her grief. Mother Winter is the result of her searching, a language of loss and longing that depicts in lyrical, fragmented vignettes her painful journeys, examining what it means to fill absences with words, like stuffing a crocodile with fragments of poetry. Read more…

The Ethical Dilemma Facing Silicon Valley’s Next Generation

Longreads Pick

At Stanford University, a farm system for tech giants, “students are reconsidering whether working at Google or Facebook is landing a dream job or selling out to craven corporate interests.”

Source: The Ringer
Published: Feb 6, 2019
Length: 21 minutes (5,462 words)

How Do You Get Help When No One Believes You?

In this Nov. 18, 2015, file photo, labels on a cabinet in a ward at the Western State Hospital in Lakewood, Wash., read "flashlights" and "restraints." (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)

Head to BuzzFeed for an excerpt from Esmé Weijun Wang‘s The Collected Schizophrenias, on her institutionalizations — some of them might have saved her life, but they were themselves traumatizing experiences that reveal the deep flaws in the way we approach psychiatric care. Told with flat-out candor and beautifully precise language, she dispels deep-seated misconceptions about schizophrenic disorders and the people who live with them.

During my second hospitalization, which occurred in the same location as my first, I passed a nurse.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said, which was true. My mania and subsequent depression seemed to have been exorcised by the overdose I’d taken immediately prior to being hospitalized, and other than being frustrated by my return to the WS2 ward, life no longer felt like an intolerable sentence.

The nurse smiled. “But how are you really doing?”

“I’m really doing okay.”

The notes I’ve acquired from Yale Psychiatric Institute read, among other things, “Patient shows lack of insight.”

Read the excerpt

Versage

Bénédicte Kurzen and Noor

Allyn Gaestel, Photos by Bénédicte Kurzen / Noor | Nataal | February 2019 | 16 minutes (4,113 words)

If you look closely you’ll notice
That the pattern on this soft broadcloth shirt
Is made of working man’s blood
And praying folks’ tears.

If you look closer you’ll notice
That this pattern resembles
Tenement row houses, project high rises,
Cell block tiers,
Discontinued stretches of elevated train tracks,
Slave ship gullies, acres of tombstones.

If you look closer, you’ll notice
That this fabric has been carefully blended
With an advanced new age polymer
To make the fabric lightweight
Weatherproof, and durable.

All this to give some sort of posture and dignity
To a broken body that is a host for scars.

— From ‘Soldier’s Dream’ by YASIIN BEY

Lagos

I took a photograph on election day in 2015. It was golden hour. I was new in town. Though I had a writing fellowship that had nothing to do with electoral politics, I was a recovering news journalist. So I registered with the electoral commission and got my press pass and badge and drove around the ghostly streets of Lagos with some local reporters. It was largely an exercise in futility. I felt adrift. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. The story I wrote rambles about the stories people tell. My fellowship editor thought it was useless.

But, driving home, I shot this photograph. In it, a teenager is crossing the road. We are in the neighbourhood of Ebute Metta, and he is wearing the most beautiful hoodie, covered in a twirling, swirling motif. He stares at me through glinting shades. Between the patterned sweatshirt and his shorts — also printed black and white but in a different design — he has layered a striped shirt. He stands in front of the Wasimi Community Mosque, a burnt-red building in the 1970s tropical modernist concrete that blankets much of mainland Lagos. Round concrete circles are embedded like a screen for privacy and ventilation at the top corner of the building. The pattern looks classically Lagosian now, but an architect once told me those cutout blocks were imported from Israel.

Photographs flatten reality. They squash three dimensions into two, and turn bodies and buildings into patterns and shapes. They still the world; they solidify a moment. You can breathe with a photograph, though the instant captured was briefer than your exhale. I was driving when I shot this, and my subject was walking; its stillness is stolen. And yet this split second is layered with everything inside the photograph and also everything ephemeral emanating from the image: emotion, history, foreshadowing. The photograph illustrates an obsession I had not yet noted; a string to a web I had yet to pull and untangle.

I liked it when I shot it. I thought: this looks like Lagos. (And I find Lagos beautiful.)

I later became transfixed by both this swirling pattern and by the thought, “This looks like Lagos.”

I saw the pattern everywhere. I took buses around town, little orbs bouncing through the city filled with uncountable lives, personalities, roles, all squished hip to hip on wooden benches. The clothes people wear express just a fragment of their personas. Sometimes it’s obligatory — white garments for Aladura churchgoers, pleated burgundy skirts for school — and sometimes it’s more loosely prescribed: suits and heels for office workers, individual designs in matching aso-ebi for weddings. But there is also a wide range of freedom both within and beyond this criteria, and cosmopolitan Lagosians are unrelentingly expressive and well-dressed. The sweatshirt in the photograph is of a style worn mostly by the young, fly dreamers of Lagos’ lower social strata — street hawkers, bus conductors, entrepreneurs with many hyphens: real estate agent-used car salesman-blogger of a fictional Yoruba playboy in Dubai. I came to call this style, and the concepts it encompasses, “Versage”. Read more…

Joe Scapellato on “The Made-Up Man” and the Myth of the Self

A skull painted gold stands out from amongst the 20,000 skeletons stored in an ossuary. Michael Probst / AP

Kathryn Watson | Longreads | February 2019 | 9 minutes (2,326 words)

 

Joseph Scapellato’s new book The Made-Up Man is a darkly comic, noir-styled novel powered by an energy that’s equal parts mischief, good humor, and measured cynicism. Based on conventions lifted out of the old detective story playbook, the novel is told from the perspective of a slippery narrator, whose sense of identity expands, collapses, and shatters against a series of nagging moral questions that are less situational than they are existential. The result is an intoxicating alchemy, something genre-blurring and philosophically riveting.

The Made-Up Man’s main character and pseudo-protagonist, Stanley, slips into a waking nightmare when he agrees to an apartment-sitting opportunity in Prague. Stanley knows in advance that, if he goes to Prague, he’ll become a pawn in a twisted compression of psychological torment and performance art that his Uncle Lech has waiting for him across the ocean. Lech is a man openly fascinated with figuring out how to exploit whoever he can, for the sake of his “art.” But Stanley opts to take the plane ticket Lech offers and go on the journey anyway, wherever it might lead. While he aims to outsmart his uncle’s plans, Stanley ends up unraveling something much more discomfiting: his definition of himself. There’s “a space at the center of myself that wasn’t me,” Stanley realizes early in his narration, and what lies inside of that space turns out to be a bloodthirst and anger that is both mysterious and intoxicating to him. Read more…

Atlantic City Is Really Going Down This Time

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,579 words)

Atlantic City covers the northern third of Absecon Island, a barrier island made up of an alarming amount of sand. It is a bad town to die in — there are plenty of vacant lots but no cemeteries. In many places, if you dig down more than eight feet you hit water. A couple blocks away from the beach, the Absecon Lighthouse is built on a submerged wooden foundation for exactly that reason — so long as you keep wood wet and away from oxygen, it won’t rot. “We haven’t tipped yet,” said Buddy Grover, the 91-year-old lighthouse keeper, “but it does sway in the wind sometimes.”

“The problem with barrier islands is that, sort of by definition, they move,” said Dan Heneghan. Heneghan covered the casino beat for the Press of Atlantic City for 20 years before moving to the Casino Control Commission in 1996. He retired this past May. He’s a big, friendly guy with a mustache like a push broom and a habit of lowering his voice and pausing near the end of his sentences, as if he’s telling you a ghost story. (“Atlantic City was, in mob parlance … a wide open city. No one family … controlled it.”) We were standing at the base of the lighthouse, which he clearly adores. He’s climbed it 71 times this year. “I don’t volunteer here, I just climb the steps,” he said. “It’s a lot more interesting than spending time on a Stairmaster.” The lighthouse was designed by George Meade, a Civil War general most famous for defeating Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg. It opened in 1857 but within 20 years the beach had eroded to such an extent that the water was only 75 feet away from the base. Jetties were added until the beach was built back out, but a large iron anchor sits at the old waterline, either as a reminder or a threat.

A little more than two years ago, when I was an intern at a now shuttered website called The Awl, I went out to Atlantic City to cover the Trump Taj Mahal’s last weekend before it closed for good. My first night there I met a woman named Juliana Lykins who told me about Tucker’s Island — New Jersey’s first seaside resort, which had been slowly overtaken by the sea until it disappeared completely. This was a month before the election. The “grab ’em by the pussy” tape had just broken, it was pouring rain, the city was on the verge of defaulting on its debts, and 2,000 casino workers were about to lose their jobs. At the time — my clothes soaking wet, falling asleep in a Super 8 to the sound of Scottie Nell Hughes on CNN — it was hard to understand what Lykins was saying as anything other than a metaphor for the country. I missed the larger menace and focused on the immediate. Trump was elected obviously, but Tucker’s Island wasn’t a figurative threat; it was a very straightforward story about what happens to coastal communities when the water moves in. Read more…

‘Leaving the Bay Area is the Best Thing You Can Do Right Now, If You Have a Dream’

In an essay at Curbed San Francisco, Diana Helmuth explores why so many young people have left California. It’s not normal, she writes, considering a dozen loved ones have moved away in the past two years.

We are witnessing two migrations. One is the continuation of the Californian dream, where young people flock here for gold and glory, ready to hustle and disrupt, hammering to hit the motherlode and laughing at the odds. The other is the migration of young people out of California, which seems to have affected everyone I know, but which I rarely hear examined. These people want to be artists, teachers, blacksmiths, therapists, mechanics, and musicians. They want to have children, open bakeries, own a house. But they can’t. There is no room here for those kinds of dreams anymore.

Eleanor, the twelfth person in Helmuth’s life that’s decided to leave, had moved back in with her parents a few years ago, to her little hometown of Stinson Beach. North of San Francisco, it had gradually become a getaway destination of Airbnbs for rich tourists and well-off city residents alike.

“Imagine working at Disneyland, then going home to your place in the back of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride while drunk frat grads puke into the water,” she told me.

To be clear, she loved her town and its bearing in the coastal California fantasy. She wanted to share it, brag about it, celebrate it. But selling bourgeoise yogurt crocks and $100 bottles of wine to people who didn’t see her as part of their shabby-chic fantasy was becoming difficult to bear.

After visiting Pittsburgh and witnessing the success of other friends who had relocated and were living their lives, Eleanor wanted to give it a shot there, too. But this exodus from the Golden State means an influx of Californians to more affordable cities like Pittsburgh — and not all in these places are welcoming. To these residents, Helmuth wants “the record set straight about who exactly is moving where and, above all, why.”

To the angry locals of Portland, Seattle, Denver, New Orleans, Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, and elsewhere, please hear this defense: The Californians who are coming in and “ruining” your cities are not snobs. They don’t have trust funds. They aren’t entitled. They are the opposite. They have been kicked out of their own backyards for not learning Python fast enough or not having a dad who could introduce them to VC firms or not wanting to live in their family’s in-law unit at age 30 or not being able to afford a $2,000/month studio on a $20/hour paycheck. They aren’t techies; they had the audacity to want something besides tech. They are some of our best, most creative, most hardworking people—and you are getting them. We are losing them.

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