"American Hustle," which won Best Picture in 2014 at the Academy Awards, was inspired by a real-life sting operation that took place in a house at 4407 W Street N.W. in #WashingtonDC. https://t.co/gxcM6yweNF "American Hustle," which won Best Picture in 2014 at the Academy Aw…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 5, 2021
When Alexandria's three high schools were consolidated into one in 1971, the new T.C. Williams High School football team suddenly had to let go of past rivalries and "concentrate on becoming a team." https://t.co/8w8PW8Tif5 #VAHistory When Alexandria's three high schools wer…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 4, 2021
#OnThisDay in 1902, WETA's late founder Elizabeth Campbell was born in Clemmons, North Carolina. https://t.co/4JTk4oh5uo #DCHistory #VAHistory #MDHistory #OnThisDay in 1902, WETA's late founder Elizabeth Campbell was born in Clemmons, North Carolina. https://t.co/4JTk4oh5uo…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 4, 2021
Before the famous Peking Restaurant opened in 1947, the Ho Toy Chinese Restaurant occupied the same space inside the Chevy Chase Arcade at 5522 Connecticut Ave NW. The Ho Toy opened by 1932 and continued into the 1940s. https://t.co/CzbDrDDZB9 Before the famous Peking Restaura…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 4, 2021
Today in History - December 4 https://t.co/KTY6hCva0H On December 4, 1619, thirty-eight colonists arrived from England and ventured ashore to settle the land grant along the James River that became known as the Berkeley Hundred(Berkeley Plantation). Continue reading. On Th…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 4, 2021
Quote of the Day: "We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do." - Mother Teresa
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 4, 2021
At the center of the "Petticoat War" between the women of #WashingtonDC in the early 1800s was Peggy Eaton, wife of a U.S. Senator. https://t.co/saSEa4yPNE At the center of the "Petticoat War" between the women of #WashingtonDC in the early 1800s was Peggy Eaton, wife of a U…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 3, 2021
The Georgia State Highway Department issued this map of Atlanta in 1964 as part of the Civil War Centennial. The map depicts major engagements which took place in the city a century prior. Have a look: https://t.co/t9FyqgF55Q https://t.co/btCsdr7aM5 The Georgia State Highway …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 3, 2021
https://t.co/kec3KxToZB
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 3, 2021
After one of the Washington Senators' baseball club owners passed away in 1968, Bob Hope was seriously considering buying 50% of the club from his estate. https://t.co/2c0uVMMRVK #DCHistory After one of the Washington Senators' baseball club owners passed away in 1968, Bob H…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 3, 2021
https://t.co/HS4glpIwhU
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 3, 2021
A late-18th century broadside by C. Colles proposed publishing a survey of roads of the nascent US, which would sell for ¼ of $1. See it and the accompanying 83 plates covering 1000 miles of road here: https://t.co/LXc3xITv31 https://t.co/zvbB3MyG0L A late-18th century broads…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 3, 2021
Circa 1940 postcard of F Street NW as seen facing east from 15th St NW. Rhodes Tavern is on the left and the Hotel Washington is on the right. Hear more about F Street's commercial history in this upcoming virtual tour: https://t.co/moteLLWb7X https://t.co/T4oji1CDqM Circa 19…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 3, 2021
Become a Flight Director ... And Perhaps a Legend via NASA https://t.co/nrI9kZqpVN https://t.co/Xb6JCXZ2ze
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 3, 2021
Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.
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Alex Skopic | Protean | November 29th, 2021 | 2,300 words
You’ve almost certainly heard about the disingenuous furor over critical race theory and about attempts by conservative politicians to ban books from school libraries. But what about the war on reading being waged behind bars? States are restricting prisoners’ access to cheap used books, forcing those who wish to read to place full-priced orders with the likes of Barnes & Noble. Authorities have banned “urban” novels and Angela Davis, but seem to have no problem with Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries. Protean is a proudly leftist publication, and Alex Skopic is a proponent of prison abolition, but limiting people’s access to knowledge and ideas should also alarm more politically moderate readers. “Legitimate power does not fear discussion and study,” Skopic writes. “Rather, the prohibition of those things is a tacit acknowledgment of its illegitimacy.” —SD
David Dayen | American Prospect | November 29, 2021 | 7,011 words
The pandemic didn’t mark the beginning of exploitative labor practices, but it certainly shined a 10,000-watt spotlight onto the issue. No matter how many exposés one reads of a single company’s draconian practices, though, sometimes it takes a cover-the-waterfront piece like Dayen’s to drive home how ubiquitous the nightmare is. This isn’t a piece that frames The Great Resignation as a rainbow path to greener pastures; rather, it’s a chorus of horror stories from those celebrated as essential workers, only to find themselves so overburdened that they have no choice but to walk away. But change may be on the horizon. As Dayen points out, the two largest labor uprisings in American history occurred in 1919 and 1946 — right after World Wars I and II, when infantrymen returned from Europe hailed as heroes and then found that their jobs were significantly less than heroic. They rebelled against menial work inappropriate to their sacrifice. Today’s low-wage workers, shattered by collective trauma, have similarly been punched once too often, after being exalted all too briefly as America’s backbone. And with more than 100,000 workers striking since March 2020, Dayen lays out the history and future of how these workers might just have more power than their corporate employers care to acknowledge. —PR
Chabeli Carrazana | The 19th | November 23, 2021 | 4,612 words
Imagine not being able to afford diapers for your child and using a sanitary pad or a towel instead. Imagine sending your toddler to school in a soiled overnight diaper. Imagine skipping meals throughout the week, or pawning belongings just to buy a new, fresh pack. This is the reality for many low-income families in rural Missouri — and across the U.S. At The 19th, Chabeli Carrazana reports on this silent struggle to provide diapers, which aren’t covered by federal assistance programs like food stamps or WIC. As Carrazana reports from the communities of the Ozarks, oftentimes local diaper banks are the only real solution — yet they, too, struggle to keep up and help the many families across dozens of counties in need. Excellently and empathetically reported, this piece is an important read on an invisible part of poverty. —CLR
Devin Kelly | Tracksmith | November 24, 2021 | 1,894 words
Devin Kelly is a writer to watch. I know this because I’ve had the great fortune to edit the essays he’s published here at Longreads. Kelly’s latest, for Tracksmith, brought me hope, here at the end of this long, stressful year. I felt tired and depleted when I read the piece, but the essay’s witness to celebration — to pure joy — filled me up. Kelly’s work exemplifies what truly great writing can do; how one thoughtful human being can spark an epiphany, simply with words on a page. Great essays like this remind me why I read — to discover a new way to connect with the world. “We are met, each day, with the various limits of our various individual existences. Maybe life is not about turning inward in the face of those challenges and trying to determine how we can each break those limits. No. Maybe life is about turning outward to acknowledge each person’s daily act of trying in this collectively trying world. Maybe life is, in part, about celebration.” —KS
Carla Ciccone | Romper | November 7, 2021 | 2,687 word
Carla Ciccone’s essay is as soothing as “the coziest and cutest stuffies” that it profiles. The uninitiated may not realize these stuffed toys are made by Jellycat, “a jaunty British soft toy company that’s been around since 1999,” but those in the know are regulars to their online store — sometimes rushing there when new releases are revealed on the subreddit Jellcatplush. These stuffies are not just for kids — adults have realized the “sweet solace” in cuddling a Bashful Puppy or Smudge Elephant. (Smudge’s biggest fan declaring in a review “I would die for this elephant.”) The company gives this a knowing nod on its website, describing a stuffie in the shape of a block of blue cheese as “a strong little scamp, with vintage vibes and dairy daring,” a line which, as Ciccone notes, “no millennial could possibly resist.” Ciccone takes a joyful dive into this phenomenon, fully embracing it after having her own love affair with a Bashful Duck. Take a look, it is a fun piece that will put a smile on your face, and maybe even a stuffie on your bed … personally I am considering the “daisy-chomping diva” that is Sherri Sheep. —CW
#OnThisDay in 1947, an "annex" policy went into effect at Browne Junior High, forcing Black students to commute several blocks to underequipped classrooms for the second half of their school day. https://t.co/EI7GS6ojU7 #DCHistory #OnThisDay in 1947, an "annex" policy went i…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 3, 2021
Today in History - December 3 https://t.co/we51pVhpfO Illinois entered the Union on December 3, 1818. Continue reading. Click here to search Today in History for other historic moments.
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 3, 2021
Quote of the Day: "When one teaches, two learn." - Robert Half
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 3, 2021
https://t.co/riB62PzBPs
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 3, 2021
#DidYouKnow that Charlie Byrd, a jazz guitarist from the D.C. area, brought bossa nova to the District after touring South America as part of a cultural exchange sponsored by the State Department? https://t.co/tyoGtdncQF #DCHistory #DidYouKnow that Charlie Byrd, a jazz guita…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 2, 2021
This geological map of New York and several surrounding states was included in a geology textbook from 1830. Explore the map here: https://t.co/2br28gMmQm https://t.co/239x6Z11Wg This geological map of New York and several surrounding states was included in a geology textbook…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 2, 2021
Photographing Mars via NASA https://t.co/UOdy1HQAKY https://t.co/JLPjOhnAHi
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 2, 2021
This bird's-eye view shows Madison, Wisconsin in 1867. The railway depot (9), center left, was used by Madison & Prairie du Chien. It operated between Wisconsin and N. Illinois until 1997. Zoom in here for a closer look: https://t.co/nKYOHTChj6 https://t.co/wUC12OqLoE This bi…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 2, 2021
Matchbook from the Washington Telephone Federal Credit Union, once located at 941 I St NW. This little mid-century building, along with all the other structures in the block and the street itself, were demolished to make way for the (old) Washington Convention Center in 1980. …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 2, 2021
In 1861, Union troops housed in the Capitol were underfed, so ovens were built right there in the building to bake loaves of bread. https://t.co/arkUMsToQu #DCHistory In 1861, Union troops housed in the Capitol were underfed, so ovens were built right there in the building t…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 2, 2021
Today in History - December 2 https://t.co/NrFRtLumWB On the afternoon of December 2, 1942, the Atomic Age began inside an enormous tent on a squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago's Stagg Field. Continue reading. On December 2, 1763, members of the Jew…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 2, 2021
If the 21st century has been great for one thing, it’s scams. That’s not to say that the last few have been scam-free; 1700s grifter Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy made off with a massive diamond necklace by pretending to be friends with Marie Antoinette, and the 1800s boasted so many charlatans that it gave us the phrase “con man.” But the art of the personal hoax — specifically, claiming to be something or someone you’re not, for personal gain that may not even be monetary — has truly entered a golden age.
The impulse, as in any discussion around causes and effects, might be to blame the internet. And in many cases that might actually be true. Distributed communication already rewards persona over personality, and for some the temptation to try on and discard different selves is undeniable. I’m not convinced, though, that the tools alone induce the trespass. I certainly expected them to be the culprit, especially after documentaries like Catfish and debacles like Fyre Festival, both of which hinged on social media’s ability to elasticize and obscure identity. But as I revisited some of my favorite stories and discovered new ones, I realized that the most compelling tales of grift aren’t the ones that depend on technology: the bottomless library of fraud-ready photos; the platforms that let anyone claim to be an epidemiologist or electoral fraud whistleblower; the software that can plop your face onto another person’s.
No, the tales that captivate us most almost always reveal a person’s longing. A longing for acceptance, or escape, or prestige, or some other intangible reward. In fact, some of the stories collected below only touch our online lives insofar as that’s how we first learned about them. (Where were you when you first heard about Rachel Dolezal? Probably Twitter.) It’s true that the internet has given us all the power to tell our own stories, and more than a few have twisted that power along with their story. But the reason we’re living in a flood of scams isn’t because we can reach strangers across distance — it’s because we’re feeling that distance more acutely than ever before.
If there’s a handier generational lit-world litmus test than “remember JT LeRoy?” I don’t want to know about it. Since the late ’90s, LeRoy had long been an enigma — a runaway teen sex worker turned writer who collected famous friends and co-signs like merit badges, yet never spoke in public. But Beachy, who hailed from the same San Francisco neighborhood that spawned LeRoy’s fiction career, did the journalistic due diligence that up to then had only surfaced as whisper and innuendo. The final dominoes fell mere months later, and other outlets would re-tell the tale (repeatedly) over the years, but the story crumbled in large part because of the dots Beachy connected.
Over time, his publishing friends experienced his transformation from a stammering, freaked-out child to a “cocky, sassy, ambition-driven megalomaniac,” as one literary contact put it. But how had a homeless teen developed both the writing skills and that endless ambition? How could somebody so pathologically shy be working as a prostitute? And how did he manage to send those faxes?
The joy of a good scammer story isn’t in the sentences or structure. It’s in the details. And the details Shafrir uncovered electrified the media world, from Kari Ferrell’s bizarre come-on lines to her increasingly graphic cancer story. This wasn’t a feature that punctured a myth; in Ferrell’s case, the jig was already up. But extensive interviews with the friends and exes she’d ensnared made for a jaw-dropping tale of deceit — and minted a legend of the Gawker Era.
Within the space of a half-hour, Ms. Ferrell was peppering him with questions about his sexual history—how many women he’d slept with and so on. “She was coming on to me, and I was super into it for the first part of it,” he said. “I realized I could have fun after work—but then I was like, ‘Let me check this girl out.’” He Googled her. Up popped a photo of his flirtatious new co-worker on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s Most Wanted list, wanted on five different warrants, including passing $60,000 in bad checks, forgery and retail theft.
Sometimes all it takes is two words to make someone laugh, roll their eyes, or storm off in anger: “Rachel Dolezal.” In 2015, a Spokane, Washington, news station confronted the city’s local NAACP chapter president with evidence that she was a white woman presenting herself as Black, and a punchline (and polemic punching bag) was born. But nearly two years after the controversy burned itself out, Dolezal changed her name — to Nkechi Amare Diallo — and Oluo found herself on a plane to Spokane.
Not that she particularly wanted to go. “For two years, I, like many other black women who talk or write about racial justice, have tried to avoid Rachel Dolezal — but she follows us wherever we go,” wrote Oluo. “So if I couldn’t get away from her, I was going to at least try to figure out why. I surprised myself by agreeing to the interview.” The result is an interview, yes, but it’s also much more: a scorching interplay between text and subtext that allows Oluo the space to unpack the very conversation that Dolezal resisted.
There was a moment before meeting Dolezal and reading her book that I thought that she genuinely loves black people but took it a little too far. But now I can see this is not the case. This is not a love gone mad. Something else, something even sinister is at work in her relationship and understanding of blackness.
Some children want to be police officers when they grow up; to grow up into an adult who habitually impersonates police officers (along with firefighters and federal agents) is rarer. But that’s exactly what happened with Steve Farzam, a California man who represented himself as “a former cop” and lived much of his life like one. As the years went by, though, and Farzam’s actions became more troubling and erratic — flashing forged federal credentials, keeping tactical equipment in his car, claiming he’d won a Medal of Valor — his friend and fellow police-head Christopher Darcel realized Farzam’s quirks weren’t entertaining anymore. We’ve all met people who play-acted for power, but in Simpson’s story we meet a man who redefines that phenomenon. When you’re done, check out Simpson’s 2020 postscript for a chilling follow-up.
McChesney, the former Santa Barbara cop, said that to his layman’s eye, Farzam suffered from a “self-identity crisis”—a need to “create this other persona just because he doesn’t like himself or he needs to feel like he’s somebody.” An investigator who worked a case against Farzam, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me, “He’s like a mosaic. You can’t understand him by looking at any one incident, but over the years, patterns emerge.”
Since the story doesn’t make you wait long for the truth, I won’t either: The man who for decades had claimed to be His Royal Highness Khalid bin al-Saud, son of the king of Saudi Arabia, was actually Anthony Enrique Gignac, a Michigan man who had been adopted as a Colombian orphan when he was a child. Seal unspools Gignac’s early life and long criminal career in luxurious detail, from his earliest grade-school lies to his increasingly ambitious scams. Hotels, car companies, boutiques: No one was safe from Gignac’s motor mouth and unshakeable kayfabe. Even American Express issued the guy a card with a $200 million credit line. Ultimately, of course, Gignac crossed the wrong person — a Miami billionaire whose lawyers worked up an intelligence dossier and delivered the imposter to federal agencies. If you’re looking for chutzpah on a global scale, you can’t do better than this.
“You mean the fake prince of Fisher Island?” the man told me. “To play the role he played so well for so long, he had to believe the lie. He actually believes he is Khalid, the prince of Saudi Arabia. I was sucked into absolute mayhem. He dangled such a carrot. Even though you knew he was full of shit, the carrot was so big, and there was a 2.2 percent chance that there was some truth in his asinine lies, that you kept going. He was so talented, and pulled off so much shit, I don’t even know where to begin.”
All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2021. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.
Timothy Snyder | The New York Times Magazine | January 9, 2021 | 18 minutes
“A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob, and what comes next.”
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Caitlin L. Chandler | Columbia Journalism Review | January 19, 2021 | 25 minutes
“How an HIV specialist in Germany is using media law to erase reporting of sexual abuse allegations against him.”
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Elizabeth Weil | ProPublica | January 25, 2021 | 17 minutes
“A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.”
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Gus Garcia-Roberts, David Heath | USA Today | January 26, 2021 | 35 minutes
Credit for the COVID-19 vaccine “belongs to a series of uncelebrated discoveries dating back at least 15 years – and a constellation of unsung scientists.”
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Clint Smith | The Atlantic | February 9, 2021 | 29 minutes
“The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past.”
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David Armstrong, Marshall Allen | ProPublica | February 18, 2021 | 22 minutes
“In Los Angeles County and around the country, doctors have had to decide who gets a lifesaving COVID-19 treatment and who doesn’t.”
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Ben Mauk, Matt Huynh | The New Yorker | February 26, 2021 | 28 minutes
“Survivors of China’s campaign of persecution reveal the scope of the devastation.”
Leah Sottile | High Country News | March 1, 2021 | 26 minutes
The toll of criminalizing homelessness in small cities and towns across the American West.
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Alec MacGillis | ProPublica | March 8, 2021 | 38 minutes
“In Hobbs, New Mexico, the high school closed and football was cancelled, while just across the state line in Texas, students seemed to be living nearly normal lives. Here’s how pandemic school closures exact their emotional toll on young people.”
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Alexander Chee | GEN Magazine | March 15, 2021 | 12 minutes
“White people still drive the narrative about Asian Americans. We have yet to have control over our own stories.”
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Max Blau | ProPublica | March 22, 2021 | 9,852 words
“Near America’s largest coal-fired power plant, toxins are showing up in drinking water and people have fallen ill. Thousands of pages of internal documents show how one giant energy company plans to avoid the cleanup costs.”
Megan Evershed | The New Republic | March 31, 2021 | 5,900 words
During the pandemic, men housed at the Lucerne hotel have seen the worst side of New York’s self-described liberals. They’ve also exposed a decades-long policy of neglect.
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Eli Murray, Rebecca Woolington, Corey G. Johnson | Tampa Bay Times | March 24, 2021 | 6,560 words
“Hundreds of workers at a Tampa lead smelter have been exposed to dangerous levels of the neurotoxin. The consequences have been profound.”
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Breai Mason-Campbell | Pipe Wrench | April 13, 2021 | 5,129 words
“I have to wear all of these dolls, you see, so that Whiteness does not have to wear any.”
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Nicole Lewis | The Marshall Project | April 22, 2021 | 3,610 words
“At the start of the pandemic, we asked four incarcerated people to chronicle daily life with the coronavirus.” Bruce Bryant, Jennifer Graves, James Ellis, and Christopher Walker “reveal what they witnessed and how they coped with the chaos, fear, isolation and deaths.”
Arundhati Roy | The Guardian | April 28, 2021 | 5,369 words
“The system has not collapsed. The ‘system’ barely existed. The government – this one, as well as the Congress government that preceded it – deliberately dismantled what little medical infrastructure there was.”
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Peter Beinart | Jewish Currents | May 11, 2021 | 6,500 words
“For Jews to tell Palestinians that peace requires them to forget the Nakba is grotesque. In our bones, Jews know that when you tell a people to forget its past you are not proposing peace. You are proposing extinction.”
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Nathan Thrall | New York Review of Books | March 19, 2021 | 20,500 words
“One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.”
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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.
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Victor Luckerson | The New Yorker | May 28, 2021 | 2,882 words
“Today, the work done by Parrish in the nineteen-twenties and Gates in the nineteen-nineties forms the bedrock for books, documentaries, and a renewed reparations push that, a century after the massacre, is experiencing a groundswell of support.”
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Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, Paul Kiel | ProPublica | June 8, 2021 | 5,717 words
“ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.”
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Jessica Schulberg | HuffPost | June 13, 2021 | 15,200 words
“At 15, he shot and killed his parents, two classmates at his school, and wounded 25 others. He’s been used as the reason to lock kids up for life ever since.”
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Lyle C. May | Scalawag Magazine | June 23, 2021 | 2,807 words
“There is little to no accountability behind the closed doors of police work.”
Jill McCabe Johnson | Slate | June 16, 2021 | 2,422 words
“It is not a normal thing to do—to acknowledge to yourself that you may have slept with a serial killer.”
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Sam Biddle | The Intercept | July 5, 2021 | 12,142 words
“The rise and fall of the ultimate doomsday prepper.”
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Wright Thompson | The Atlantic | July 22, 2021 | 7,350 words
“In 1955, just past daybreak, a Chevrolet truck pulled up to an unmarked building. A 14-year-old child was in the back. Hi name was Emmett Till.”
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Jason Fagone | San Francisco Chronicle | July 23, 2021 | 10,801 words
“The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more?”
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Ciara O’Rourke | Deseret News | August 2, 2021 | 6,154 words
“Mario’s father had gone by many names. Luis Archuleta. Lawrence Pusateri. The man the son knew as Ramon was just a fraction of his way into what may be one of the longest fugitive runs in U.S. history — a 50-year game of cat-and-mouse that played out across the West, from the streets of Colorado to the shores of California and many dusty, sun-bleached points in between.”
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Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 9, 2021 | 13,254 words
“Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11.”
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David Rohde | The New Yorker | August 17, 2021 | 2,539 words
“We saw the city full of these strange armed men. With strange clothing and hair styles. We are back in the nineties, you can’t believe these people are back.” The last time the Taliban had seized power, in 1996, their reign had begun with relative calm, but they quickly started conducting house raids, making arrests, and inflicting other abuses.”
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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.”
Robert Sanchez | 5280 Magazine | September 1, 2021 | 4,454 words
“In summer 2020, the nation’s attention turned to the killing of a 23-year-old Aurora man. His death prompted a flood of more than 8,500 letters from outside the state of Colorado—all begging Governor Jared Polis for justice. We read every one.”
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Anand Gopal | The New Yorker | September 6, 2021 | 9,900 words
“In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.”
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Diana Moskovitz | Defector | September 13, 2021 | 13,800 words
Diana Moskovitz’s investigation of Ohio State’s handling of domestic violence allegations against one of its football coaches centers the survivor, a young wife and mother named Courtney Smith. It shows how some of the most powerful people in Ohio, and in college football, worked to protect themselves and their reputations, all at Smith’s expense. In the dictionary, “Courtney’s Story” should be found under the listing for “damning.” —Seyward Darby
*Subscription required
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Michael Azerrad | The New Yorker| September 22, 2021| (7,102 words)
Music journalist Michael Azerrad’s piece about his friendship with Kurt Cobain is honest and lucid. Azerrad recounts a number of moments with the late Nirvana singer, starting with the first time they met in 1992, when he visits the small Los Angeles apartment Cobain shared with Courtney Love to interview him for Rolling Stone. As a journalist, Azerrad gains Cobain’s trust, and eventually goes on to write a book about the band, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, which was published in September 1993, the same month their third and final album, In Utero, was released. Azerrad remembers encounters over the next few years — an epic show at the Reading Festival, a business dinner with executives (“the grownups,” as Cobain referred to them), tense moments between band members while on tour, flashes of Cobain’s heroin addiction. My favorite bits, though, are Azerrad’s quiet, beautiful descriptions of Cobain away from the spotlight: the intimate hours the two spent in a Seattle hotel room as Cobain read Azerrad’s manuscript, and the time they wandered around an eerily empty downtown Dallas with daughter Frances, who was just 15 months old at the time. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Becca Andrews | Mother Jones | September 30, 2021 | 8,500 words
“But you drank the alcohol, right?” he asked. “What did you do to deserve to be hit?” That’s what Dean Timothy Arens of Moody Bible Institute asked student Anna Heyward when she described abuse, including rape, perpetrated by her boyfriend, who was also a student. That’s just the tip of the iceberg: Becca Andrews’ investigation into the impact of “purity culture” on MBI’s response to reports of sexual abuse and harassment on campus is deep and far-reaching. It’s enough to make your blood boil. Andrews exposes a robust culture of blaming victims and side-stepping accountability, all in the name of God. She describes the weakening of Title IX protections at religious institutions under Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, which makes future Anna Heywards more vulnerable to judgment, humiliation, or worse at MBI, Liberty University, and other evangelical colleges. “All the women I spoke to who were survivors of sexual violence at Moody say they experienced … difficulty in finding the language to express what had happened, because it was impossible to see beyond the constraints imposed by Moody’s specific interpretation of Christianity,” Andrews writes. “It can be hard to recognize harassment when it is at the hands of a brother or a sister in Christ.” —SD
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Laura Nahmias | New York Magazine | October 5, 2021 | 4,250 words
Did you know that in 1992, thousands of New York City cops rioted outside their own City Hall, shouting racist chants about the metropolis’ first-ever Black mayor, David Dinkins? Neither did I. This article refers to the riot as “forgotten” for good reason. But why did it slip from public memory? You could ask the same question about any number of events that have shaped the history of race and power in the United States, and find the same answers Laura Nahmias does in this fascinating story: entrenched power structures that bitterly resist change; a media apparatus that’s often complicit in maintaining the status quo; and a widespread inability among white Americans to view white violence as a real threat. “Somehow, police only identified 87 of the estimated 10,000 officers and their supporters who participated. Just 42 faced disciplinary charges. And only two officers were suspended,” Nahmias writes. In short, it’s easy to understand why today, “only some of what ailed the NYPD 30 years ago has been mended.” It’s also easy to understand why the same can be said about America. —SD
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Daniel Engber | The Atlantic | October 6, 2021 | 7,200 words
The best science stories are human stories, ones that show the impact of lab experiments, clinical investigations, and complicated data on people’s lives. Daniel Engber’s poignant profile of the Sulzer family falls squarely in this camp. When three-year-old Liviana suffered a traumatic brain injury in the Sulzers’ backyard, her mother and father — a bioengineer who specializes in regenerative medicine and a professor of rehabilitative robotics, respectively — were forced to bring their work home. They mustered their expertise to help Livie, but quickly met the limits of the technology they’d spent their careers developing and championing. How, then, could they heal her, and themselves? The answers are surprising. I was moved by Engber’s portrayal of scientific minds challenged to reconsider the lens through which they analyze the world; of a family navigating protracted trauma; and of the love, patience, and curiosity that keep the Sulzers’ hope alive. —SD
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Hannah Dreier | The Washington Post | October 17, 2021 | 4,400 words
Hannah Dreier spent a month on the ground reporting this story about a California couple on the verge of being kicked out of FEMA housing, their refuge in the wake of 2018’s devastating Camp Fire. With the clarity and compassion that are the hallmarks of her work, Dreier bears witness to what it means to suffer on the front lines of climate change, to grapple with a thinning social safety net, and — after all that — to stare down homelessness. She portrays the couple’s frustration and anger, as well as their love and resilience. But why, Dreier asks, is this happening at all? Doesn’t the government owe the displaced more, and better, than this? It’s a pressing question: More Americans will be soon displaced by fires, floods, and extreme weather. This is a quiet, intimate story, and seemingly small in scope, but don’t let it fool you — it offers a terrifying glimpse into the future. —SD
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Kathryn Miles | Boston Magazine | October 22, 2021 | 3,758 words
Modern-day witchcraft is big business, and Salem, Massachusetts, is its epicenter. Witch-themed boutiques along Essex Street sell everything a 21st-century witch needs, from tarot card decks and spell kits to $300 custom wands. Stores like these cater not only to self-identifying witches and warlocks, but also Halloween tourists making their pilgrimage to the city each October and people claiming ancestral ties to Colonial settlers (or those accused as heretics in the 1692 trials). Kathryn Miles captures a festive, bustling local scene, but are shop owners simply commodifying a spiritual practice? And is there a better way for Salem to address and educate people about its ugly past? Miles’ own ancestral history is marked with a dark moment in 1660 — one that has left generations of her family to make sense of their legacy. She examines present-day Salem from this perspective, and asks: “Is a witch-based tourism economy the best way to honor the legacy of executed individuals who weren’t even witches in the first place?” With Halloween just days away, this Boston magazine story is a fitting read, and offers a glimpse into Salem’s lively community — as well as the past that it grapples with. —CLR
Kevin Fagan, Sarah Ravani, Lauren Hepler, J.K. Dineen | San Francisco Chronicle | November 3, 2021 | 4,639 words
There’s not a major city in the state of California that hasn’t found itself grappling with a decade-long explosion of homelessness, and not a discussion that doesn’t devolve into blaming decades-older canards like deinstitutionalization and drug abuse. But as this exhaustively and empathically reported piece shows, it’s never as simple as a talking point. For the sixth in the Chronicle’s annual Homeless Project series, the paper crosses the Bay to profile four unhoused people in Oakland — all of whom grew up in the city, and all of whom owned their own home at one time. In their stories of loss and perseverance, accompanied by photography and data visualizations that are breathtaking for all the wrong reasons, we find ever-present reminders that there is no one cause for this epidemic. The only universal, it seems, is the tragedy and struggle that ensues when this country fails its own citizens. —PR
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George Chidi | The Intercept | October 31, 2021 | 8,064 words
This is a story of political indifference and a system woefully unequipped to truly help unhoused people with mental illness. It is also the story of Harmony, a woman living on the streets of Atlanta, Georgia in her own filth, in a state that ranks 51st in the U.S. for investment in mental health spending. “Harmony is unique,” writes George Chidi, “And yet there are at least 100 Harmonys on the streets of Atlanta. The county knows each of them by name. There’s a list.” Harmony does not want to be in hospital or incarcerated; she does want her story told. As Chidi grapples with Harmony’s living conditions, he unravels who might be able to help and who should be held accountable. And while various entities and government departments play “hot potato” with her life and liberty, Harmony’s wishes go mostly ignored. She would very much like to be left alone. “And yet despite millions in resources, much of which the state cannot figure out how to spend, Harmony remained unhoused at the foot of the iconic Coca-Cola sign above the Walgreens at Five Points — in the heart of Atlanta — as she has on and off for years, in a state of abject human degradation, with all of this misery taking place less than 100 yards from the very steps of Georgia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities headquarters.” —KS
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Skip Hollandsworth | Texas Monthly | November 17, 2021 | 12,033 words
Candace Mossler, mother of six, was a Houston socialite who lived in a mansion with a steam-heated pool. She loved to throw lavish parties. Charm and philanthropy were the super powers Mossler used to divert attention from rumours of a double life that included sex work, running her own escort service, and a clandestine affair with Mel Powers, her then 22-year-old nephew. The affair was heinous enough, but did Mossler conspire to commit murder — more than once? For this surreal whodunnit — complete with a salacious sideshow trial — Skip Hollandsworth pored over pages of old news clips, court records, and interviewed aging people in Mossler’s orbit to attempt to find out. “Rarely had circumstances converged to produce such a sensational story, one that, as the Houston Chronicle put it, was teeming with ‘love, heat, greed, savage passion, intrigue, incest and perversion.’” —KS
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Check out all the categories in our Best of 2021 year-end collection.
D.C.'s "Gentleman Gambler" Jimmy Lafontaine got his nickname from his random acts of philanthropy and the refunds he'd give on gambling losses. https://t.co/4UNNwPdjrr #DCHistory D.C.'s "Gentleman Gambler" Jimmy Lafontaine got his nickname from his random acts of philanthrop…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 2, 2021
During the AIDS epidemic, D.C.'s Whitman-Walker clinic provided education, testing, and even patient treatment. https://t.co/9kPJh72U9x #DCHistory During the AIDS epidemic, D.C.'s Whitman-Walker clinic provided education, testing, and even patient treatment. …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 1, 2021
America’s first opioid crisis grew out of the carnage of the Civil War https://t.co/iioRUbwpuq America’s first opioid crisis grew out of the carnage of the Civil War https://t.co/iioRUbwpuq — Streets of Washington (@StreetsOfDC) Dec 1, 2021
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 1, 2021
This map from 1945 features the locations of multiple campaigns and engagements in the European and African theaters during World War Two. Check it out: https://t.co/3HSv0R4j56 https://t.co/N6wg4adWFg This map from 1945 features the locations of multiple campaigns and engagem…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 1, 2021
This 1871 map by Albert Ruger shows Little Rock, Arkansas—named in the 18th century for the distinctive rock formation used by navigators in the Arkansas River. Use this link to zoom in and see the Little Rock outcropping near the bottom center of the map. …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 1, 2021
Eagle, Omega Nebula, Trifid, and Lagoon: Four Famous Nebulae via NASA https://t.co/Mm7GoLNMzR https://t.co/KegAfCtRbU
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 1, 2021
Matchbook cover from Barnhart's Restaurant at 5510 Connecticut Avenue NW in Chevy Chase DC. At the same location as the Parthenon Restaurant today. In between them was the Piccadilly, a British pub. https://t.co/ij11EhFen2 Matchbook cover from Barnhart's Restaurant at 5510 Con…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 1, 2021
Addison Scurlock and his sons made their living taking photographs of Black Washingtonians throughout the 20th century, insisting that "nobody was ordinary." https://t.co/nNSxPGKYvs #DCHistory #BlackHistory Addison Scurlock and his sons made their living taking photographs o…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 1, 2021
Today in History - December 1 https://t.co/ywkx4GR4sG On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested for not giving up her seat to white passengers on a crowded Montgomery, Alabama bus. Continue reading. On December 1, 1957, the New York …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 1, 2021
1930s postcard of Thomas Circle, facing north. The proliferation of automobiles changed everything. https://t.co/E6ytmyW4JM 1930s postcard of Thomas Circle, facing north. The proliferation of automobiles changed everything. https://t.co/E6ytmyW4JM — Streets of Washington (@S…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 1, 2021
Kristin Collier| Longreads | November 2021 | 6,596 words (21 minutes)
I open the email at 9:30 a.m. in my retrofitted, windowless office on the second floor of a high school in St. Paul. The fluorescent lights are so bright and the walls so white that sometimes I look up from my computer screen and feel as if I’m in a dream. Everything blurs and bends. Here, I shield myself from my students’ bodies, from their breath, in between teaching classes. I remove my mask, just briefly, to eat lunch while refreshing a COVID Tracking Map. November 3, 2020: 1,040 people died in the U.S. from COVID-19.
I read the email’s subject line: “The results of your request are now available in a paperless inbox,” before noticing the sender is American Education Services, a private student loan servicer. The body of the email informs me that AES has added a message to the inbox: something about new loan terms that will require me to begin payments in December. I minimize the screen and scan the room quickly as if the desk lamp and the growing stack of compostable knives can see the message. I pull the screen up and read the email again, willing the language to be different this time, but it’s not. My AES account, along with accounts from a handful of other private loan servicers, was settled in 2018 after protracted and painful negotiations that had begun years earlier. What remains, or what I thought remained, is $2,000 in federal student loan debt. But now there appears to be a new loan, something left unsettled. I close the computer screen. Elbows on white table. Head in hands. I cry.
***
The email from AES is the first I have received from them in over six years, part of a halted but lengthy correspondence that began, unbeknownst to me, on July 29, 2004, when I was 18 and my mother took out the first of many private student loans in my name. That July day was cold in southwest Michigan, a detail I researched years later when I wondered: What went on in her world that day? It rained. There was little sun. In the morning, my father drove to his corporate office to design washing machine parts, I drove to a golf club where I worked in their food shack, and sometime that day, my mother contacted Bank One, a student lending arm of Chase Bank, and requested $15,000 in my name using my birthdate and Social Security number. I’ve never been able to ask her how the fraud was committed — if she told the bank that she was applying on my behalf and would get my approval later, or if, pretending to be me, she filled out an application online. It’s unclear if Bank One, who partnered with AES for loan management and collection, asked her the questions they should have, the questions that might reveal that she did not have my approval or that she was not me. I’m unsure if the bank account she funneled the money to was one she opened in my name or hers. I do know that on the loan application she forged my signature, which I’ll see years later — the swoop of the cursive “K” larger and fuller than mine.
Over the course of the next three years, as my mother’s gambling addiction escalated, she took out another student loan, and then another, and then so many others that the amounts and institutions from which she borrowed knotted together into something big and impossible to disentangle, but the accumulation of which was about $125,000. It seems that none of the private lenders were alarmed by the rapid acquisition of increasingly large amounts of money — more than I would ever need for my state-school tuition — a record of lending they would have seen when they pulled my credit. It might be that they noticed and didn’t care.
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While I didn’t know about my fraudulent debt in those years, I did know that my mother had her own. At home during university breaks, I often fielded calls from credit card debt collectors, the phone company, or the internet company. I learned to recognize the callers’ scripts, and the moment they departed from them, becoming angry with me for refusing to put my mother on the phone, threatening to shut off our services if we didn’t pay. And there were other signs her gambling problem was growing big and wild. Bounced checks. Denied credit cards at the supermarket. My mother, home late with handfuls of cash, tipsily offering my friends and me $50 because she’d won on slots that night.
In my early 20s, I watched my debt total increase like some people watch an eroding shoreline. The interest rates on many of the loans were unfixed, so some years the shoreline stayed constant. Then, as if overnight, a wave touched my toes. At my debt’s peak, when I was 30, I owed about $386,000, and the water overwhelmed what little land was left. Thirty-five now, I recall the day I first learned of my debt in foggy, tender detail. I was 21 years old and graduating from college in two weeks. I was just applying for my first credit card, and then an hour later, I was learning that I was a victim of ongoing identity theft by my mother. Debt decides the future for you: At 26, I would be paying $600 a month in loan payments to barely cover the mounting interest. At 30: telling someone I loved that to be with me would mean entering into a life of economic peril. The future that debt chose for me — indeed the future it chooses for many people — included a lot of shame, confusion, and pain.
I walked home from the bank, rejected credit card application in hand, as if walking toward certain death. In place of the steady hum of college students commuting to class, all I heard was the hollow sound of the wind as I slid my boots across the slick sidewalk. Home now, seated on my bed in a new world, frozen still, I held the credit report in front of me, counting the listed debts: $10,000 owed to JPMorgan Chase, $20,000 to ACS Education Services, $15,0000 owed to someone else. I didn’t yet know that the majority of these were private loans protected by the federal government. This can’t be right, I said to myself over and over again. Part incantation, part desperate plea.
When I called my mother to tell her and ask for her advice, she begged me not to call the police. “I’m so sorry, honey. But it was me. All of it was me.”
***
In late March of 2020, as the first wave of the pandemic spread across the country, Congress passed the CARES Act, a $2 trillion aid package marketed as relief to struggling Americans. While the act provided much-needed relief for those most impacted by the pandemic, it didn’t provide enough. The $1,200 received by poor and working-class Americans was spent quickly on essential items, which, sadly, included debt.
As part of that act, Congress included several measures to support student debtors. First, their employers — if they were lucky enough to be employed — were able to provide them with up to $5,250 in tax-free student loan repayment benefits. Before the CARES Act, only about eight percent of employers were making contributions toward student loans, and as businesses and institutions closed, most employers reduced benefits rather than expanding them. During the first four months of the pandemic, at least four million workers had their pay cut, and nearly six million workers were forced to work part-time. In other words, though this measure could have helped student debtors, there’s very little evidence to suggest that it did.
The second measure affecting student debtors was an automatic suspension of payments on federal student loans, a relief extended several times and now set to expire after January 31st, 2022. As part of this moratorium, loan servicers cannot collect loan payments, including on defaulted loans, and interest rates remain at 0%. Roughly 35 million student debtors are eligible for this temporary relief, collectively owing $1.5 trillion. I’m one of them: Of the $14,000 I knowingly took out in federal student aid, about $2,000 remains. It’s worth noting that the many millions of borrowers whose debt is privately held are excluded from these benefits. Few private lenders, if any, deferred interest, and most offered only a three-month suspension on collection.
April 2020 marked the first month since I graduated college 13 years earlier that I didn’t pay a portion of my wage, at times nearly half of my wage, toward my student debt: either my own federal debt or the $125,000 that my mother took out in my name. For many people, the moratorium is a lifesaving pause. Those who are unemployed can perhaps afford a car payment or a home payment or the co-payment necessary to see a doctor. The employed can also make dignified decisions to care for themselves and others. They can fix the broken heater in their car. Buy medication and a working phone. Or something more banal and essential still: groceries.
Employed as a teacher and earning a living wage, my own debts didn’t force me to go without shelter, food, or basic utilities, a fact that was tested in my 20s when I had trouble finding landlords who’d rent to me because of my credit score. When the moratorium went into effect, I increased my contribution to my 401(k), which had recently sent me a message saying that based on my modest savings goals, I would not be able to sustain myself in old age. I also bought a winter coat, the first I’d purchased in seven years. The old one had thinned so much that it was porous, and the Minneapolis wind moved through me in the winter. This was not the first time in seven years I’d had enough money for a coat. Rather, having lived with financial anxiety for so long I struggle to decide what to spend money on, what’s worth depleting my small but growing savings account, even by a couple of hundred dollars.
***
I return to AES’s message, this time from my home, where I teach virtually the second half of the week. After attempting to log on to the account, I soon realize I no longer have the information. This account, like all of them, was created by my mother and managed in secret for the years I was in college. It was opened after her gambling problem bloomed into an addiction, after she’d spent her and my father’s savings, along with the money she’d borrowed from his mother and from her parents, and money she’d stolen from her employer. It would have made sense for me to reset everything once I learned of the account’s existence, but I never did. I wonder now if I conflated this step with an acknowledgment that the debt was mine. Often the tiny protests I waged in my 20s hurt me: I lost paperwork, passwords, loan correspondences. I missed details that would have made managing my mounting debt easier. But I didn’t want to manage it. I wanted to pretend that it wasn’t there.
April 2020 marked the first month since I graduated college 13 years earlier that I didn’t pay a portion of my wage, at times nearly half of my wage, toward my student debt: either my own federal debt or the $125,000 that my mother took out in my name.
After I discovered the debt, the boundaries between myself and everything else became cloudy. At first, it was just my mother begging me not to file criminal charges. She called me regularly in those days: “You can’t send me to jail,” she said over and over, her voice rushing around me, familiar as the sound of the wind.
I agreed not to, not so much because I believed that she would be capable of helping me like she promised, but because I didn’t have a clear sense of where I ended and my mother began. After she was released from her incarceration for workplace theft only a few months into her sentence, my father and grandparents asked me not to file charges. “Your mother won’t survive it again,” they told me. “She doesn’t deserve it.” “You’re young. You’re strong,” they said. “We’ll help you figure it out.” I didn’t want my mother to suffer and didn’t believe that her criminal conviction was a requirement for my justice and healing. But beyond my love and my politics was the sense that I was beginning to dissolve, and self-preservation felt impossible in the face of this rapid depletion.
Outside in Minneapolis, it’s 70 degrees: a warming earth in disguise as a lingering summer. I search through my email for clues to the account information. Nothing comes up in my search, so I make a guess at the username and am diverted to a series of security prompts: Name of first pet. Paternal grandfather. Name of elementary school. I’m not sure if my mother answered as me — Jesse, Jim, Brown — or herself. Sometimes, to navigate my debt is not to imagine myself as my mother, but to imagine myself as my mother imagining herself as me. If she loved me enough she wouldn’t have done it, I thought for much of my 20s. I wore that belief like a warm but itchy sweater. And even though at 35, I now understand that my young belief was not protective, but harmful and untrue, each failed guess feels like a rock in my stomach, a reminder of a personal betrayal within a systemic one.
Alas, I figure it out: She answered as me.
AES explains that I must begin to make payments on my loan, the first of which is due in early December. I’m surprised to realize that, unlike federal loans, private loans such as this one are not covered under the moratorium. More than that, I’m surprised this loan exists at all.
Looking at the details of my loan feels like looking at a hand that has appeared suddenly before me, attached to my own body. Part of me but not mine. The loan is through a private student loan program (ALPLN) that often requires young borrowers to enlist co-signers, locking both parties in for long repayment plans with variable interest rates that fluctuate according to the market, but rarely to the benefit of the borrower. The original balance of this loan was $25,000 (the equivalent of two semesters in-state at the University of Michigan in 2008, or a down payment on a home in a middle-class Minneapolis neighborhood today), but today I owe $30,549.08 (two semesters + living expenses) and were I to finish paying this loan, I would pay in total $40,051.86 (a nicer house, another semester).
For all of my 20s, I worked multiple jobs to keep up with the $600 monthly loan payments. In 2013, for example, I taught sophomore English at a high school in Chicago, working from 7:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. On Tuesdays, I led our school’s literary magazine club till 5:30 p.m., and for six weeks each semester, on Wednesdays and Thursdays, I taught night school classes till 6:30 p.m. for students who needed credit recovery. On Saturdays, I picked up ACT administration work, and on Mondays, I picked up ACT tutoring. After I got home at 7:00 or 7:30 p.m., or later, I wrote the next day’s lesson plan as I picked at my dinner. If I also had to give students feedback on essays, I worked until 10:00 pm, falling asleep with the next day’s schedule pulsing beside me. Up at 6:15 a.m. to do it all again. By the time I turned 30, I had paid off about $60,000 of the debt, an amount that barely touched the interest. It was not enough. The debt kept rising, not by $10,000, but by $100,000, and then another $100,000, more than doubling the principal balance.
***
In ancient civilizations, debt repayment was a promise secured by the body. In India an unpaid creditor could show up at his debtor’s door, sit on his doorstep, and stay there, indefinitely, publicly starving to death until he was given what he was owed. In Egypt, a debtor pledged their repayment on the dead body of a loved one.
You could maim someone according to ancient Hindu law, and if that did not yield repayment, you might take his cattle, his sons, or his wife — or simply enslave or kill him. The same punishments were allowed according to ancient Roman law, with an addendum: A debtor who was killed for unpaid debts might have his body divided for creditors, sliced up proportionate to the amount of each one’s claims. A severed head for the largest debt, I guess, and just a foot for something smaller. This Roman law would spawn the “pound of flesh” Shylock seeks to collect in The Merchant of Venice and all the cultural references it, in turn, generated. Though this grotesque form of accounting has little documentation, debt slavery was common.
So, too, was debt imprisonment, which existed in the barbarian kingdoms that followed the Roman Empire in the West. Still later, as feudalism declined, the Catholic Church encouraged and enforced imprisonment for unpaid debts. Those debtors who died without leaving enough money to cover their remaining debts were denied a Christian burial, their very bodies unwelcome on holy land.
Debtors’ prisons followed colonists from England to the Americas, where they remained in practice until the mid-1800s. According to many of the colonies’ laws, sentences had no fixed length: One could remain incarcerated for a month or years, whatever amount of time satisfied the creditors. While the prisons’ upper-class debtors were often assigned well-lit rooms where they could write or paint, the poorest prisoners slept in the cellar, sometimes sitting in near darkness day and night, hungry and cold, threatened by disease. In this case, the punishment was not labor or mutilation, but isolation and stagnation: a body left alone to rot.
***
Living in New York City in my early 20s, I began my first year of teaching, and my mother began her trial for workplace embezzlement. I’d learned of her arrest earlier that summer — standing in a dorm room in Queens where I was undergoing teacher training. Just out of the shower, my wet hair dripped into puddles on the floor as my aunt explained over the phone that my mother had been stealing from the dentist she managed medical billing for. When we hung up, I didn’t feel anything. I considered what my aunt thought she had stolen — around $40,000 — and all I could think of was, “that’s all?” It was nothing compared to what she owed me.
After my mother began her five-month sentence, I moved through my life as if I were underwater. On land, I was required to participate: laugh with colleagues, cook dinner with my roommates, engage in conversations about the future and the past, both of which I wanted to avoid. Submerged in the water, I was alone, stranded in a perpetual present. For weeks I lived like this, allowing the calls from debt collectors to hover over me like ships on the surface, and then suddenly, I would come in from the sea — awakened by a nightmare at 3:00 a.m., or sitting at a student-desk eating my lunch, I would suddenly be thrust back into the bright, loud world. And then I would feel the full weight of it all: hundreds of thousands of dollars that I’d pay until I died.
I slept poorly during those years, plagued by severe stomach pains and recurrent UTIs that sometimes reached my kidneys. Once, after a week of particularly distressing calls with debt collectors, I woke on a Saturday morning to a full stomach, even though I hadn’t eaten. Throughout the morning, the fullness increased, as did the pain, like barbed wire wrapping my insides. When I moved, I could hear acid swish inside me. I started puking in the afternoon, and when I hadn’t stopped by early evening, I walked to Mount Sinai Hospital, where I spent the night. I cried when a nurse held my hand, asking me to swallow the cool medication that would allow her to see inside of me. I didn’t tell anyone I was sick because, at the time, I was estranged from both my parents, and there was no one to tell.
And then I would feel the full weight of it all: hundreds of thousands of dollars that I’d pay until I died.
Debt was still a promise held by my body, and absent of the money, my body paid in other ways. I learned from the endoscopy that I had an ulcer and had developed gastritis. The cystoscopy was inconclusive, but years later, in my early 30s, I’d begin to notice pressure on my left side: the feeling of a tiny fist punching softly outward just below my ribcage. After doctors told me it was nothing for several years, I’d find the right doctors who gave the right tests, and I’d learn that my kidney had died. Perhaps, my doctor said, it had died when I was young, lost its blood supply through a misfire in design, or it might have died later as a result of the many escalating UTI infections. A stomach for AES, to which I owed $51k, a kidney for JPMorgan Chase to which I owed $30k.
Debt’s impact on our health is well-documented. Good debt — a manageable mortgage, for example — corresponds with positive health outcomes. It’s also indicative of a higher household income. But bad debt — debt that is or feels unpayable, debt incurred through unjust systems, predatory debt, debt that makes it hard to live — corresponds with high blood pressure, stress and depression, and overall worse health. Chronic stress can be especially dangerous because it continually triggers the body’s fight or flight response without allowing the body to recover when the stress has passed. The body’s attempt to protect itself impacts all of the body’s systems. It leads to hypertension, heart attacks, and strokes. It gives us stomach aches, bloating, heartburn, acid reflux, and weakens our intestines, making us vulnerable to bacterial infection. Professor Elizabeth Sweet, the author of a study on the relationship between debt and health in Social Science & Medicine, reminds us that in addition to all of that, chronic stress associated with debt can also suppress the immune system, impairing the body’s ability to fight infection.
***
As a market economy emerged in the 1700s, according to Jill Lepore in a New Yorker essay on the historical treatment of debtors, debt punishments shifted away from imprisonment — which also meant that punishments shifted away from the body. Individuals, she explains, had to take on debt to acquire the things they needed, a relationship that necessitated debt relief, which came in the form of bankruptcy.
However, that relief has come with limitations, especially in the field of student loans. Until 1978, students facing unmanageable debt could petition for bankruptcy — though it’s worth noting that in 1978 the semester tuition for a four-year public university was $777, so fewer students took on debt to begin with. Through the combination of the Education Amendment Act of 1976 and additional legislation in 1978, 1984, 1990, and 1998, students gradually lost more and more protections, a loss that coincided with a precipitous increase in tuition fees. First, students could have their federal debts discharged after they had made payments on them for five years, then that time period was extended to seven years, and then extended to the lifetime of the borrower. Finally, the lifetime sentence was extended to private student loans as well as federal.
What that means is that people are paying off their student debts into old age. People are dying with this debt based on decisions they or their families made when they were 18. Sometimes these decisions were made with counsel from for-profit colleges that promised salaries and degrees they couldn’t produce. Sometimes these decisions were made with counsel from private lenders, who offer predatory interest rates that make it nearly impossible to pay loans down. Other times, racial or structural inequality or bad luck forced students out of school, funneling them into jobs that would never yield the salaries necessary to pay off even relatively small amounts of debt. In other instances, students graduated and found employment, but because the cost of tuition has ballooned and wages have flattened, they are still stuck with this debt sentence, even after falling on the right side of luck, the right side of privilege, even after they did everything right.
Those who suffer most from the current student-lending structure are the same people who suffer because of historical and structural inequity: descendants of enslaved people, people of color, women, poor people. Black women hold the highest levels of student debt, and because they make 61 cents for every dollar that a white man makes, they struggle to pay this debt down, even as they work multiple jobs, even as debt extracts their health and their labor.
***
The decision to enter into my loan agreements was not mine, of course, but my mother’s, a fact that I communicated to the debt collectors with whom I tried to negotiate in my early 20s. In one of the many calls I remember, I’m standing at the corner of 78th Street in the early evening, just as day tips into night.
“You don’t understand,” I tell the debt collector. “This debt isn’t mine. I didn’t take it out. My mother did.”
“That’s not our problem,” he says, “You should take it up with the police.” He sounds young.
At the time, I didn’t know that collectors are required to verify contested debts. However, this requirement is widely ignored by debt collectors, one of the many abuses — along with harassment, threats, and the disclosure of debts to family and colleagues — that the Federal Trade Commission documents.
I cup my hand around the phone, to muffle not the wind but my own voice. I don’t want the couples leaning against the railing or the people running with their dogs to hear me. “Why would I need this much money in private loans to attend a school with an in-state tuition of $13,000 a year?”
Occasionally I did this, said things that required the collectors to imagine a human from the numbers listed in front of them: a one, a two, a five, and so many zeroes unwound into legs and arms. Sometimes, the collectors sounded sad for me. At least a few times, they said they were sorry. But, still, they recorded what they were required to, the distillation of which was that I couldn’t or wouldn’t pay. And then my name was added to the next escalation in collection efforts: another letter, another call, eventually a court order and wage garnishment.
The collectors’ emotional disengagement is a necessity of a cruel industry. To respond to me humanely would make the task nearly impossible. While debt cleaves to bodies, its collection requires severance from them. To them, I’m not a terrified 21-year-old too ashamed to take the call in her apartment, but a name, an interest rate, a monthly payment, a total debt paid, a number yet to collect.
***
I call AES a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving. It’s been years since I’ve last spoken with someone representing the lenders, and I’m haunted by all the conversations that I’ve already had. When I speak, my voice sounds distant and caffeinated.
“This can’t be right,” I say to her, the same thing I said sitting on my college bed 13 years earlier, holding the credit report printed for me by the bank. No longer an incantation, but an elegy.
My disbelief is an evolution of the original, a shared origin with a new context. At the nadir of my indebtedness, unable to save enough, unable to pay enough, I met with several lawyers who said they couldn’t help me. The first told me that to file a criminal charge and potentially transfer the debt would endanger my grandparents — my mother’s immigrant parents — who, unclear on the US lending system, had co-signed on many of the fraudulent loans. “The banks will go after them and they will likely lose their house,” he said, mapping an elaborate spider-like diagram of the debt. He called in several colleagues to consult with, explaining the complexities of my case. At the center of the drawing was me, alone in a thick, black circle. The second lawyer, who I met with a few years later, said criminal charges couldn’t work even if I wanted to pursue them because the statute of limitations had passed. Later, a lawyer friend recommended a bankruptcy attorney. I met the attorney, Todd, in his office in the middle of a late fall blizzard. I was buoyed by his fancy brass lamps and sprawling Persian carpet. I needed him to help me and he did.
While my loans were protected through the bankruptcy codes, we’d use my bankruptcy petition to pause collection while I could pay down the credit card debt my mother had also taken out through the Chapter 13 bankruptcy plan — a plan traditionally used to help people keep their homes. I’d also pay off the federal debt, which I had taken on knowingly. We’d use the legal framework to force a conversation with the lenders that refused to communicate with me otherwise. These conversations were logistical hurdles because locating all my lenders required piecing together credit reports, old statements my mother had sent me, and statements the lenders pulled. No one database records all private loan debt. At least once, we thought we’d found it all only to realize we’d missed $50,000 from a loan servicer I’d never heard of.
Debt was still a promise held by my body, and absent of the money, my body paid in other ways.
Our strategy was bifurcated: I moved through the traditional bankruptcy process, taking the required financial management classes, showing up to court dates, sending monthly checks to my trustee, and Todd ushered me through fraud proceedings according to the requirements of the lenders, proceedings which mostly relied on handwriting analysis. I signed my name a hundred times. I wrote addresses and numbers in cursive and print, or random men’s names, seemingly taken from a list of Dickens characters. When the lenders rejected my fraud claims on the basis of my handwriting, we hired our own expert. Eventually, my mother, shielded by the seven-year statute of limitations on criminal convictions, signed an affidavit that the debt was hers, and after a settlement with the lenders, the loans were moved from my body back to hers, though the lenders have never reached out to her. They’re likely aware that her economic position, as a minimum wage worker, makes the debt uncollectible.
“I have a legal agreement with the loan companies,” I tell the woman. My voice is thin and wet. “It’s from several years ago. I have the signature of someone representing AES. It’s a legal document,” I say again.
“I have you paused for bankruptcy but now you’re done and there is nothing about any settlement,” she says.
I catch my partner’s eye as he walks into the room, alerted by my rising voice that something is wrong. I’m self-conscious of how I sound, the way I’m escalating the conversation, begging her to put someone else on the phone, which she doesn’t do. When I ask her if I can email her the settlement, she says it’s impossible: They’ll only accept faxes and snail mail. Eventually, she suggests a convoluted form I might fill out that will put someone in touch with me over email.
“This isn’t fair,” I say to her before we hang up, a sentiment that startles me in its naivete and desperation. Of course it isn’t.
In my early 20s, I took a free poetry class through my teaching program, and when we practiced writing exercises for imagery and metaphor, I wrote about my debt. A red balloon for each dollar: 125,000 balloons, enough to fill a city block. They follow me as I walk around the city, west on 77th to the train station or east on 77th to the river. Cloud-like, but alive, each bobbing and swaying separately. The balloons cast a long shadow. Sometimes, I stand beneath them looking up. No more sunshine. They’ve ushered in a new world, a red sky.
***
After I speak to the collector, I ignore the new set of emails, the mail correspondence, the alarming language of delinquency. Already the last three years — the years without large monthly loan payments, without collectors — seem far away. A shadow gathers above.
My lawyer thinks this new debt is a forgotten one, a lost one now found. When I call him, he’s surprised to hear my voice.
“This can’t be right. We settled all of this,” he tells me. But we haven’t. After cross-checking the settlement details and the loan, I discover it’s not listed on the settlement. It’s also not on the list of all the private loans that we painstakingly gathered piece-meal to guide our strategy. When I explain this to my lawyer he says, “But that list came directly from AES. So, if there is an error, it’s theirs. Or they didn’t have the loan at the time.”
This new loan, this zombie loan as I’ve taken to calling it, belongs to National Collegiate Student Loan Trust (CSLT), which is neither a lender nor a servicer but an investment opportunity: It’s essentially a bucket of private loans, which are sold off as bonds to investors. Right now, the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts — which includes 15 trusts — holds nearly $12 billion in student debt, more than all the stars in the Milky Way.
When I learn that CSLT owns the loan, I imagine the people who have benefited from the events that upended my life. These investors are likely the same people that escaped to second homes during each of the pandemic’s sharp peaks. As ICUs filled up, as lungs broke down, as the poorest in the country struggled to breathe, they ordered in their groceries, worked from home offices with ergonomic chairs and stand-up desks. Their isolation tethered to the exposure of others. One body in exchange for another.
Those who’ve been most at risk in the pandemic are the same people with shifting red skies above their own heads: They are working class, they are Black people, Indigenous people, Latinx people; they are people whose race or economic position has forced them into frontline jobs. They are people whose debt makes their bodies more vulnerable to the virus to begin with.
“We’ll get this figured out,” Todd says to me before we hang up. His belief in justice encourages me, even though this time, he might be wrong.
***
These days, my mother and I see one another twice a year. Once, in mid-summer for a three-day weekend when we take walks along Lake Michigan, comment on how high the water is, how small the stretch of beach that guards the housing along the bluff. My mother is always tanned from the hours she spends walking along the lakeshore, collecting rocks that she’ll glue to picture frames, lamps, candleholders, and doormats. In the years following her incarceration, my sister moved away, and my father and her moved into a rental across town after losing their home to bankruptcy. Then he died of cancer, and so did one of her cats. Another disappeared into the purple-blue of the early evening, never to return. Now, on summer weekends, my mother sells these rock items at art fairs where mostly out-of-town rich people buy them to commemorate their vacations on the lake. To supplement her small art fair income, she cleans homes for other rich people, scrubbing away the memories of family BBQs and beach days to make room for the next. I wonder if the homes and her art are painful and constant reminders of a domestic life that’s been altered.
A red balloon for each dollar: 125,000 balloons, enough to fill a city block. They follow me as I walk around the city, west on 77th to the train station or east on 77th to the river.
I see her a second time at Christmas, driving 10 snowy hours from Minnesota to a house remade into a memory — each wall, shelf, and furniture decorated with a Christmas-something from my youth. As we prepare the deviled eggs for the family dinner, I compliment her on the Nativity scene or tree lights, and she always says, “It’s just not the same putting them out by myself. Next year, maybe I won’t.” My cousins, uncle, and sister join us for dinner, and we swap stories of our distant lives across the midwest. At some point in the evening, when I’m telling a funny or detailed story, I look up to find my mother watching me, hungrily taking in these narrative threads. For this has been the true cost of what she stole from me: She doesn’t really know me.
We talk on the phone once a month or so, and when people ask me why we still talk at all, I give them a constellation of incomplete but honest answers: I can’t bear her loneliness; she’s suffered enough; she, too, was a victim — of addiction and a predatory lending system; I love her. When she and I talk it’s not about much. Mostly, I ask her questions about her art or my grandmother who has Alzheimer’s and whom she cares for. We don’t talk about the debt that is all around us, trapping us, shouting at us so loud we can hardly hear. Despite trying my best to kill it so that we can escape, it lives, and though it was born from us — her decision acted upon my body — it seems to live beyond us now, dwelling in the data systems of lenders and banks and credit reports. Sometimes, I want to yell to my mother above its roar: I am so, so sorry. An apology big enough to hold it all, big enough for both of us. But I don’t.
***
Historically, there were ways to free us. The introduction of debt in Mesopotamia, in the form of interest-bearing loans, led to social fragmentation, according to David Graeber in Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. In years when the harvest collapsed, for example, farmers witnessed the seizure of their land by wealthy merchants who had lent them money. Unable to pay back what they owed, the farmers were forced to enlist their family members in debt bondage. These loved ones lived in exile, working to pay off their debts. Sometimes, exile was self-inflicted when people fled their homes before they could be sold off to debt peonage.
Families forced apart, scattered, ripped from their intimate bonds threatened to destabilize society, so it was tradition for kings to periodically issue massive “declarations of debt freedom,” called jubilees. Graeber reminds us that the earliest word for freedom came from the Sumerian word amargi, which means “return to mother.” It was only when debts were canceled that debt peons could drop their sickles, pack their small bags, and return to the place where they were not an engine of labor, of repayment, but a daughter.
***
COVID-19 has exposed and exacerbated existing crises — brought about by our economic, political, and healthcare systems, our inability to contend with and repair our history as a slave-state, and brought about by debt. Any ongoing relief efforts that don’t address the complex relationship between disease, vulnerability, and indebtedness don’t go far enough. Canceling student debt would be a start. As I type this, the total federal student loan debt is $1,811.629,805,092, but in a few seconds, that number will be inaccurate, and in a week or month even more so. The debt grows rapidly. Unable to exchange those numbers for narratives, all I can say is that those loans are owned by people who want to go to school, who want very badly to have agency, to lead meaningful lives.
Through an executive order, President Biden could cancel all federal student debt. At any moment of any day. This declaration won’t impact my private debt, but it could change the lives of millions of others. Though lenders, servicers, and trusts make students into investments, into delinquents, into lists of interest and payment, Biden’s jubilee can do the opposite: see us as humans.
Heal us, free us, give us back our bodies.
***
Kristin Collier is a Minneapolis-based educator and essayist. She’s currently at work on a book about student debt.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy Editor: Peter Rubin