Last year TheNew York Times announced it was ending the public editor — a role created to help readers get accountability from the paper of record in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003 — and replacing it with the Reader Center.
Ever since, readers of the Times have lamented the loss whenever an article or op-ed comes out that draws consternation. The paper’s final public editor, Liz Spayd, was less than beloved, but her predecessor Margaret Sullivan, now a media columnist at TheWashington Post, earned the respect not just of readers, but of those inside the Times newsroom.
A friend at the Times recently asked me what I thought of the Reader Center. I replied that I didn’t know it had been set up or even what it did. I’m a home delivery subscriber to the Times, a native New Yorker who grew up writing detailed letters of admiration to Times reporters. Why hadn’t I heard about what the Reader Center had been up to? Read more…
I checked Twitter and Tumblr before I started writing this piece, and I’ll probably check them again as soon as I’ve finished. I keep telling myself that I should stop automatically turning to social media, and I’ve taken steps to reduce the amount of time I spend on the sites — I regularly cull my feeds, for example, and I’ve removed all push notifications from my phone — but the urge to take a break from my own thoughts and see what other people are thinking about is too strong. (Are my friends posting Google Arts & Culture selfies? Is everyone discussing a specific article? Did Lin-Manuel Miranda tweet something inspiring that’ll make me feel a little better about the world?)
Plus I like to keep up with the news.
But I don’t necessarily enjoy the time I spend on social media, and I doubt you do either. I used to compare it to hanging out in a library with friends — the sort of thing where you’d look up from whatever you were studying and say “hey, check this out!” — and now it feels like stepping into a room where everyone is shouting at each other. Even when the arguments are important, they still feel unproductive and unhealthy. To quote M. C. Mah, at LitHub: “Good-faith argument on social media is probably impractical, and definitely unclickable.”
So I want to spend less time on social media in 2018 — and I’m not alone. Read more…
Jamison examines women’s long-standing conditioning against owning and expressing anger, instead sublimating their rage in sadness, which has historically been more acceptable. I know this mechanism all too well. It long ago became second nature for me to respond to affronts and offenses of all kinds by bursting into tears and withdrawing deep into sorrow rather than raging or even just speaking up for myself in a firm and reasonable way. In my 50s, I’m only first learning how to do the latter, and usually only after first defaulting to the emotional bypass toward crying instead. For so many of us — maybe for most women — this is a conditioning that is difficult to root out because of a culture that taught us our anger makes us threatening.
The phenomenon of female anger has often been turned against itself, the figure of the angry woman reframed as threat — not the one who has been harmed, but the one bent on harming. She conjures a lineage of threatening archetypes: the harpy and her talons, the witch and her spells, the medusa and her writhing locks. The notion that female anger is unnatural or destructive is learned young; children report perceiving displays of anger as more acceptable from boys than from girls. According to a review of studies of gender and anger written in 2000 by Ann M. Kring, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, men and women self-report “anger episodes” with comparable degrees of frequency, but women report experiencing more shame and embarrassment in their aftermath. People are more likely to use words like “bitchy” and “hostile” to describe female anger, while male anger is more likely to be described as “strong.” Kring reported that men are more likely to express their anger by physically assaulting objects or verbally attacking other people, while women are more likely to cry when they get angry, as if their bodies are forcibly returning them to the appearance of the emotion — sadness — with which they are most commonly associated.
A 2016 study found that it took longer for people to correctly identify the gender of female faces displaying an angry expression, as if the emotion had wandered out of its natural habitat by finding its way to their features. A 1990 study conducted by the psychologists Ulf Dimberg and L.O. Lundquist found that when female faces are recognized as angry, their expressions are rated as more hostile than comparable expressions on the faces of men — as if their violation of social expectations had already made their anger seem more extreme, increasing its volume beyond what could be tolerated.
Left to right: Dan, the author, and Michael. (Photo courtesy of the author)
S. Kirk Walsh | Longreads | January 2018 | 27 minutes (6,711 words)
I first met Dan Cronin on an early spring evening in 1993. Michael, my new boyfriend, introduced us. We were standing on the southwest corner of 12th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. A stream of cabs, city buses, and cars surged toward the illuminated marble arch of Washington Square. The changing twilight danced through the rustling, pale-green leaves of the trees that shaded the grounds of the nearby church. “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you,” Dan said to me. His smile was angelic and mischievous, his eyes, a striking slate blue. He lit a Newport cigarette, a wisp of smoke releasing from the corner of his mouth.
That night, we decided on dinner at a family-run Italian restaurant in the West Village. The three of us talked about books (J. M. Synge, E. L. Doctorow), Catholicism (the religion of our childhoods), Arthur Ashe’s recent death from AIDS, Dan and Michael’s strong allegiances to Upper West Side. It was a memorable night. As I said goodbye to them at the 14th Street subway stop, I felt a kind of certainty and contentment as if I already knew that Dan and Michael were going to be a part of my life for a long time.
Prior to that night, Michael had also told me a lot about Dan: He was a professional tenor, who had performed on Broadway and national tours around the country. He was a voracious reader of American history, passionate about all things Abraham Lincoln, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan. He was religious in his daily purchasing of lottery tickets. (He always played the same numbers; the street address of his childhood home.) He was employed as a waiter at the famed Russian Tea Room. (He was the shop steward of the union, and the powerful position allowed him to work only when he felt up to it.) Having recently visited his ancestral town in County Kerry, Ireland, he told a story of encountering a man who could recite passages of Ulysses in Gaelic.
Over the past year, Dan and Michael had become close friends. They had many lively discussions about sports and politics, but their true bond centered on their experiences with recovery, addiction, pain, and abuse. “He’s a remarkable man with many talents,” Michael said when he first told me about Dan. “It’s sad because he’s HIV positive.” Shortly after his diagnosis seven years earlier, Dan started taking high doses of AZT (zidovudine, the first antiretroviral drug approved by the FDA in 1987) as a part of his treatment protocol.
Morgan Langley leans toward a large computer screen. He isn’t sure if the video clip is still there, posted to a random YouTube channel named after a ’90s punk-ska act, but after a few moments, he finds it. Out of a black screen flashes a white Ford Mustang with blacked-out windows and chrome rims. Langley, who is an executive producer of one of America’s longest-running reality shows, “Cops,” narrates. “This kid here is actually selling a thousand pills of ecstasy to an undercover cop,” he says excitedly.
On the screen, a skinny white kid with a straight-brim baseball cap and a collection of painful-looking face piercings has plunked down on the Mustang’s passenger seat. Next to him is a woman whose blurred face is framed by sandy blonde hair. They briefly discuss logistics, and a second guy with dark skin and wrap-around sunglasses hops in. He asks if she has the cash; she asks if he has the goods. He asks if she’s a cop; she laughs.
“Okay, we’re just gonna do it like this,” he says, grabbing a pistol from his waistband. “Just give me your money.” Seconds later, officers in green tactical gear swarm the car, and he’s nose-down on the pavement, handcuffed and delivering a tear-streaked explanation: “Sir, they gave me a gun and told me they were gonna kill me.” Read more…
Sara Eckel | Longreads | January 2018 | 19 minutes (4,774 words)
In the fall of 2016, I stood on the concrete steps of a mustard-colored ranch house off the New York State Thruway in Ulster County, a broken red umbrella hooked below my shoulder. The mustached man at the door — 50ish, in a t-shirt and khakis — had the stern, dry look of a high-school science teacher.
“Hi, Thomas?”
He nodded.
“Hi, Thomas, my name is Sara, and I’m a neighborhood volunteer for Zephyr Teachout for Congress.”
Thomas didn’t tell me to go away, didn’t slam the door or scold me for interrupting his day. He stoically endured my spiel about why I was spending my Sunday afternoon doing this — because Zephyr has been fighting corruption for her entire career, and I believe she’ll go to Washington and represent the people of New York’s 19th District, rather than corporations and billionaires.
“Okay, thank you,” he said, closing the door.
“Would you like some literature?” I asked, proffering some rain-dotted pamphlets.
More than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn wrote:
A few months ago, the American public, who in political theory and to some extent even in reality are “sovereign” in the United States, were given a group of pictures showing American soldiers tormenting desperate, naked, extremely thin people in chains — degrading them, mocking them, and physically torturing them. And so the question arose, How would the American public react to that? And the answer was that in their capacity as individuals, certain people definitely suffered or were shocked when they saw those pictures. But in their capacity as the sovereign public, they did not react. A cry of lamentation and outrage did not rise up across the land. The president and his highest officials were not compelled to abase themselves publicly, apologize, and resign, nor did they find themselves thrown out of office, nor did the political candidates from the party out of power grow hoarse with denouncing the astounding crimes which were witnessed by practically everyone throughout the entire world. As far as one could tell, over a period of weeks, the atrocities shown in the pictures had been assimilated into the list of things which the American public was willing to consider normal and which they could accept. And so now one has to ask, well, what does that portend?
Thirteen years later, we have a quite good idea of what such a thing portends. Thirteen years later we know much more than Shawn, or anyone, could have known at the time about just how much could be “assimilated into the list of things which the American public was willing to consider normal and which they could accept.” We know so much about this now that it is rather a wonder any of us can sleep at night. And in fact, some people tell me that they aren’t sleeping, that they have not been sleeping well for a while. Not since November. That’s what I keep hearing. Of course, there are those who lost the ability to enjoy an untroubled night’s sleep long before that. Read more…
There’s nothing I love more than an unreliable narrator, and the protagonist of Patty Yumi Cottrell’s debut novel is a doozy. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is the story of Helen, a school teacher from New York City, who casts herself in the role of lead detective on a very tough and personal case — her adopted brother’s suicide. When Helen returns to her childhood home of Milwaukee to investigate, truths about Helen and her family are slowly revealed, and we begin to realize that Helen may be worthy of scrutiny herself. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is both a clever and poignant exploration of the distance between how we imagine ourselves to be and who we truly are.
Dara Lurie | Longreads | January 2018 | 12 minutes (3,011 words)
This essay is published in collaboration with TMI Project, a non-profit organization offering transformative memoir workshops and performances that invite storytellers and audience members to explore new perspectives. By bravely and candidly sharing their personal stories, storytellers become agents of change for social justice movement building. Dara told an abbreviated version of this story onstage at TMI Project’s inaugural Black Stories Matter show in March 2017.
Peggi’s voice comes muffled through the closed door to her office. Her words come in rapid bursts with long silences in between. In the dance studio, my 6-year-old brother races his tiny Hot Wheels car across the floor. On Peggi’s daybed, I curl over the open pages of a worn fairy tale book kept on a shelf just for me. I keep my eyes fixed on the pages of the book, even when Peggi comes in the room. I am trying to forget the last two days of my life; the guttural terror of Mommy’s screams, my grandmother’s pitiful moaning and my Uncle Stanley’s grim-faced silence as he drove us back to New York. Now, Peggi is standing over me, speaking.
“Your mother had a cerebral aneurysm,” she says. “A blood vessel exploded in her head. She might not survive the operation.”
Peggi speaks in the flat tone of naked truth. One day, I will understand Peggi’s courage; her rare ability to look life straight in the eye. But at this moment, I hate her truthfulness, and I wish she would go away. I look back to my book to signal my lack of interest, but Peggi continues.
“Even if she does survive, the doctor says she might be a vegetable for the rest of her life.”
“When can I get my Halloween costume?” I ask when Peggi stops talking.
The slap comes as quick as lightning, scorching the side of my face.
“I hate you!” I shout, hurling my book into a corner.
One evening, a couple of weeks later, Peggi sits down on the edge of the daybed where, as usual, my 10-year-old face is buried in a book. “It’s impossible,” she begins, “for me to run this school and take care of you both.” I look up from my story. “I’ve found a place where you and your brother will stay for the time being.” Her voice is soft, asking me to understand. “It’ll only be for a little while,” she says. I look back down at my book. “Until your mother gets better…” she continues, but I let her words dissolve into the background rumble of distant traffic.
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