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Stacy Perman | Los Angeles Times | May 19, 2022 | 10,548 words
Barbara Wright Isaacs has been looking for her sister, Lora Lee Michel, for nearly 55 years. What makes her disappearance particularly baffling: Lora Lee once had the eyes of the world on her. In the ’40s, she appeared in films alongside Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Ford, and Olivia de Havilland. So what happened? Stacy Perman finds out in this meticulously researched piece for the Los Angeles Times, brought to life with photos and film clips of the adorable, precocious child star. Beginning with the well-known half of Lora Lee’s life, the story races along at whip-cracking speed, twisting and turning, before culminating in a high-profile custody battle between Lora Lee’s biological and adoptive mother. When Lora Lee leaves Hollywood for Texas, aged 10, things become hazier, forcing Perman to resort to her own research. By tracking down dozens of individuals and public records, she finds, as she writes, “a woman lost in a maze of short marriages and perpetual misfortunes.” Perman takes Lora Lee’s sad tale back to Wright Isaacs. It’s not the story she had hoped for, but still closure on what happened to her sister. I was impressed by Perman’s dogged determination to find answers for this family — and more impressed that she did. —CW
Azadeh Moaveni | London Review of Books | October 21, 2022 | 3,516 words
Over 200 people have been killed since September 16, 2022, when Iranians took to the streets to protest the death of Mahsa Amini, who died in suspicious circumstances after being detained for not wearing her hijab to government standards. In this piece at the London Review of Books, Azadeh Moaveni recounts a hastily erected government billboard depicting notable Iranian women, all wearing a hijab under the slogan, “Women of Our Land.” The billboard was removed just as quickly as it appeared after several of the women featured rebuked the government and demanded their images be removed. The government had gone so far as to feature Nooshin Jafari, a photojournalist currently serving a prison sentence for “insulting state sanctities.” Despite the short-lived government propaganda campaign and amid ongoing protests and clashes, change is happening in Iran. “Morality policing lies in ruins. No one knows what senior politicians are hearing from their wives, sisters and daughters, but never have the Islamic Republic’s political elite and its most dogmatic constituencies looked so divided at a time of crisis.” —KS
Jake Kring-Schreifels | The Ringer | November 3, 2022 | 4,500 words
I really wish this piece had come out any other week. Days ago, Atlanta rapper Takeoff — who as a teen helped create Migos’ trendsetting triplet flow — was fatally shot at the tender age of 28. He’s the artist we should be discussing right now; he’s whose influential work we should be remembering. There have been somewonderfulpieces already published praising him, and hopefully, the longform elegy he deserves will be published in the coming days. So it feels fraught, to say the least, to instead recommend this long Ringer feature detailing the creation and legacy of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” But anniversaries gonna anniversary, and if you thought The Ringer wasn’t going to commemorate the 20th birthday of Eight Mile and its soundtrack, you haven’tbeenpayingattention. And truthfully, Jake Kring-Schreifels reported the hell out of this thing, tracing the song’s evolution from Eminem’s metanarrative writing approach to its Oscar-worthy musical construction, while also illustrating its seismic impact. We’ve heard it in sports arenas for 20 years now, and will likely be hearing it for at least another 20; until then, this is a fascinating look at how an anthem happens. —PR
Kris Newby | Now This and Epic Magazine | October 27, 2022 | 7,784 words
Fourteen-year-old Michael suddenly starts to experience inexplicable psychotic episodes. He tells his father he’s the son of the devil. He claims his tabby cat is possessed by demons. Believing he’s no longer human, he says he’s becoming “Swamp Thing,” a green monster on one of the posters on his wall. As his condition worsens, Michael is diagnosed with schizophrenia multiple times, but his father refuses to accept the diagnosis, believing that there could be another trigger to his son’s mysterious illness. In a riveting piece that’s illustrated with comic book art by Mado Peña, Kris Newby retells this family’s hellish 18-month journey to uncover the cause. —CLR
Nikita Arora | Aeon | September 8, 2022 | 4,549 words
This beautiful essay is a letter of recommendation to go out and touch moss. Yes, the soft green stuff growing on walls and rocks and trees, patches and carpets that grow at a glacial pace, that harken back to an ancient, pre-human world. But Nikita Arora isn’t recommending that readers commune with moss because it’s good for the soul to connect with nature — that’s too pat, too easy. Rather, Arora urges a reimagining of what it means for humans to touch the world around us. “Touch” comes from toche, French for “blow” or “attack,” and as Arora elucidates, the ability to touch has often been an extension of power and its attendant violence. “Perhaps the apparent superficiality of touch is the fiction,” Arora writes. “The histories (colonial, racial, elitist) of human relationships with the nonhuman may have whitewashed and pigeonholed touch and its potential for radical reciprocity and for reckoning with the past and the present.” —SLD
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An essay about the importance of touching nature, and with it the realities of time and history — including the ugly and inconvenient:
Touch reorients us to the fundamental condition of being – to the inevitability of others, both human and nonhuman. In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back. The analogy that Merleau-Ponty uses in his posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), is this: when my one hand touches the other, which one is doing the touching, and which one is being touched? We have eyelids; we can pinch our noses and shut our ears; but there are no natural skin-covers. We cannot turn off our sense of touch. To be a human in the world is to be tactile, to always be touching and touched with every single pore of our bodies.
That touching nature could bridge interspecies borders makes sense intuitively. And is there any being in the plant kingdom that embodies touch more than moss and its family, the bryophytes? Moss is touch. It doesn’t poke the skin of the being it touches. And it takes practically nothing from the host it is in contact with: moss is no parasite. Yet it softens trees, prevents soil erosion, and shelters animals too small for us to notice. It is continuously in touch with Earth and all its beings, including us. Inside a rainforest and on the city pavement, moss beckons us. Moss isn’t everywhere and nowhere; moss is here.
Robert Barron used to work for the CIA, where he helped transform people beyond recognition. Now he makes prosthetics that do exactly the opposite:
His gifted hands move with remarkable precision. Each brush stroke is calculated. Each piece he sculpts is meticulously crafted, and sometimes re-crafted, to reach perfection.
Some of the tools he uses seem wildly out of place: two pasta rollers, orange peels, and dozens of large-gauge syringes filled with fluids of various colours. That’s what it takes to make this art imitate life.
Barron’s medium of choice is silicone.
His finished pieces will be worn as facial prosthetics by people who have been visibly disfigured through birth defect, disease or trauma — people like Steve Butler.
“I mastered the technique of making silicone look like skin,” explains Barron as he picks up the half-face with the moustache.
Inside the rent-to-own startup that’s putting aspiring homeowners in financial jeopardy:
Old-fashioned as it may seem, the association between homeownership and the American dream has endured—and with good reason. Homeownership remains the primary driver of wealth creation in the U.S. Conversely, Americans who rent have just one-fortieth of the household wealth that homeowners enjoy, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Soaring home price appreciation is further exacerbating this inequality—along with the wealth gap between white households and households of color, who are less likely to own.
The customers whom Divvy targets have been living in the shadow of these trend lines. They may not have good credit scores, steady employment histories, or 401(k)s, but they are well aware that their ability to retire depends on their homeownership status. When Divvy appears in a Facebook ad and offers them a chance at safety and security, they often stretch their finances and take a gamble. For half of Divvy customers, according to the company, the bet pays off, and they become homeowners. But others find themselves in over their heads. They deplete their emergency funds and borrow from family in order to cover Divvy’s down payment fee. While paying top-tier rental rates, they struggle to find the extra cash to cover surprise maintenance bills. If they want or need to exit their contracts early, they lose essential savings. And, as pandemic protections for renters expire, they face eviction in increasing numbers.
On the [checks notes, sighs] twentieth anniversary of Eight Mile, Jake Kring-Schriefels dives deep into the construction of its most lasting imprint—a soundtrack single that sat atop the charts for months and found eternal life as a sports-arena anthem. To quote the song, there’s no Mekhi Phifer, but Jake Kring-Schreifels pulls together the producers and musicians who helped make it happen. As good a songwriting feature as you’re likely to read.
Well before the movie was released, Martin remembers hearing a rough version of the song for the first time with a group of people. “It was a combination of the script and Marshall’s actual tale,” Martin says. “I was like, ‘What the fuck, are you kidding? How did you put that together?’” When Fenelon listened to the song before the final mix, she had a similar reaction. “It’s one of those moments—and it doesn’t happen very often, even though I was in the music business—where the hair stands up on the back of your neck,” Fenelon says. “You just know that this is going to be a huge song.”
When you’re a kid, sequels are fun. Easter eggs are mindblowing. The fractal unfolding of a fictional universe across ever-more-specific installments — each one informed by that universe’s previous incarnations — can feel like an infinite promise. But what starts as a thrill can curdle into obligation, as Westenfeld is the latest to point out. So how to undo the burden? Reject fealty.
Canon has a big problem, and the call is coming from inside the house. It’s not hard to see how this obsession with canonical fealty has hamstrung Marvel and Lucasfilm, two franchise juggernauts whose every innovation is punished by a fan meltdown. When storytellers are held hostage by their own audiences, it undermines their ability to do what artists do best: explore, revise, play. This is the problem with storytelling in the age of the mega-franchise—all too often, the impulses of abiding canon conflict with the impulses of making art.
A riveting story of a child star who went off the rails. Told by Stacy Perman with great sensitivity and care, the full story of Lora Lee Michel is finally pieced together.
Soon, I was watching Lora Lee’s films, excavating archives, sifting through old movie magazines, reading newspaper clippings, obituaries, county clerk records, letters and court filings. Like an anthropologist, I began tracing genealogy reports and tracking down anyone who crossed paths with her, trying to understand what they might tell me about who Lora Lee Michel was and what happened to her. Eventually, I discovered the many hidden threads of her life.
Anne P. Beatty never planned to move back to her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. But at 33, she did. In these lovely musings at The Rumpus, Beatty reflects on ambition, becoming a writer and an English teacher, and the fear of stasis when a person returns to the place they grew up. She also writes beautifully about adolescence and adulthood — what we hope for ourselves, and simply what is.
When we talk about our hometowns, we’re likely also talking about the rocky geography of adolescence: its intractable grip on our throats, which we might conflate with the landscape in which we were almost, but not quite, free. Adolescence is an age marked by deficit— what we don’t have, or don’t have yet.
My desk faces the wall; I don’t want to see the horizon when I write. As a kid, I was constantly looking beyond myself, beyond my world. What’s out there to see? To write about? Now, I just want one more hour, thirty minutes even, to work from within.
October may be in the rearview, but our love of the paranormal persists. In The Paris Review, Sadie Stein recounts her first visit to the New York Spiritualist Church — and her family’s longstanding relationship with the spectral. Less a ghost story itself than an ode to the thin veil.
So ghosts were an established fact of my life when I was growing up, maybe the only real religious certainty we inherited. My grandmother—also a churchgoing Christian—accepted their existence with the same serene passivity with which she did everything. My mother claims to have seen a few. I have not. I used to think I’d never see a ghost because I wanted it too much, as though the spirits of dead people behaved like an underwritten man from an early season of Sex and the City. I’d even lived after college in a converted brownstone that was widely considered to be haunted—former tenants had seen apparitions and my roommate had had unsettling experiences with slamming pocket doors and rogue electronics. I never felt anything at all. But my faith is solid.
Bees speak complex languages and, just like human communities, have dialects. Through body movements, vibrations, and dancing patterns, bees can communicate with other hive mates, and also exhibit sophisticated forms of democratic decision-making. In this fascinating piece, Karen Bakker explores how advancements in AI and robotics are enabling scientists to communicate with honeybees in their own language — which opens up a whole new world of research and science. Swarm robots! Smart hives! Militarized bees on search-and-rescue missions! “To witness biohybrid bees engaging in reciprocal (if rudimentary) interspecies communication gives me a numinous sense of awe. To witness bees being converted into disposable, militarized sensing devices gives me a sense of dread,” writes Bakker. “These two choices are emblematic of humanity’s relationship with nature. Will we choose dominion or kinship?” Bakker lays out some incredible possibilities.
Seeley’s findings bolstered the arguments of those who argued in favor of referring to honeybee communication as language. And by demonstrating that the “hive mind” was more than mere metaphor, Seeley also stimulated advances in swarm intelligence in robotics and engineering.
The wild horses all have names. Ronald, for example, and Becky and Clyde. The names sound mundane, even for horses, but each is something like a badge of honor. For years now, the people of Cedar Island, North Carolina, have named each foal born to the local herd of mustangs after the oldest living resident who hasn’t already had a horse named for them. Every island family of long standing has this connection to the herd.
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Cedar Island, located in a pocket of North Carolina known as Down East, is what passes for remote in the continental United States these days. Though it’s only 40 miles as the gull flies from the Cape Hatteras area, with its tourists and mortgage brokers, its restaurants with names like Dirty Dick’s Crab House, Cedar Island remains a place with only a scattering of people and businesses, where you can’t be certain of finding a restaurant meal—not so much as a plate of hush puppies—on a Sunday evening. Upon arrival you might not notice that Cedar Island is an island at all. Crossing the soaring Monroe Gaskill Memorial Bridge, which connects it to the mainland, what you pass over is easily mistaken for another of the region’s sleepy, curlicue rivers. In fact, this is the Thorofare, a skinny saltwater channel connecting the Pamlico Sound to the north and the Core Sound to the south. The Pamlico is one of the largest embayments on the U.S. coastline, while the Core is narrow and compact. Cedar Island stands between them, and all three are hemmed in by the Outer Banks.
I’ve just written that Cedar Island separates two sounds, and on maps this is true. Reality is less decisive. Swaths of the small island are sometimes underwater, depending on wind, tide, and season—in particular, hurricane season.
The shifting, amphibious nature of Cedar Island was never more apparent than on the morning of September 6, 2019. Under the whirling violence of Hurricane Dorian, maps lost all meaning. The Pamlico and Core Sounds joined to become a single, angry body of water, shrinking Cedar Island to a fraction of its acreage. It was no longer separated from the mainland by the thin blue line of the Thorofare, but by nearly six miles of ocean.
Most of the 250 or so people living on the island were safe, their homes built on a strip of not-very-high high ground precisely to weather the wrath of hurricanes. The wild horses—49 in all—were in much deeper trouble.
There were also some cows. The cows did not have names.
There is no such thing as a truly wild cow. While Cedar Island’s cattle range more or less freely, the technical term for them is feral—they are the descendants of escapees from domestication. The island’s mustangs are feral, too, but while visitors often come to Cedar Island solely in hopes of seeing the Banker horses, as the area’s herds are known, next to no one makes a special trip to photograph the “sea cows.”
The cows are striking to look at, though. While they vary in color, many have a bleached-blonde coat, blending in with the pale sand and the glare of the sun on Cedar Island’s hammerhead northern cape, where both cattle and horses roam. Tourists are happy to see the cows, just not as happy as they are to see the horses. Here and across America, a mustang—mane flowing, hooves pounding the earth—is an embodiment of beauty and freedom. Cows are not.
For Cedar Islanders, the cows are part of what makes their home distinctive, a fond and familiar part of the community and its history. In fact, the cattle have been on the island far longer than the mustangs, who were transferred from the more famous Shackleford Banks herd three decades ago. But the relationship people on the island have with horses is different than the one they have with cows, in much the same way it is for people nearly everywhere.
“This used to be horse country,” said Priscilla Styron, who has lived on or near Cedar Island for 30 years and works at its ferry terminal. “Everybody rode, they had pony pennings, they had all kinds of stuff. Everybody was always riding horses.” As for the cows, there was a time not so long ago when an islander might round one up from the beach, take it home to graze and fatten up, then butcher it for meat.
As Hurricane Dorian approached Cedar Island, no one troubled themselves about either kind of animal. One islander, who called himself a “simple country boy” and asked not to be named, scoffed at the idea that wild creatures would brook being corralled and taken off-island to wait out the storm. Not that anyone thought that was needed, according to Styron. “They usually protect themselves. You don’t have to worry about them,” she said. “They can sense more than we can.” Cedar Island had never lost more than one or two members of its wild herds to a storm—and Down East sees more than its fair share of those.
In 2019, there were perhaps a couple dozen cattle on the island—no one knew for sure, because no one was keeping count, not even residents who were fond of their bovine neighbors. For at least some of the cows, Dorian was nothing new. Few cows in America live longer than six years; many are slaughtered much younger. A Cedar Island cow, on the other hand, stands a good chance of living into its teens, and might even see its 30th birthday. A cow that was 20 years old in 2019 would have had close encounters with at least ten hurricanes: Dennis, Floyd, Isabel, Alex, Ophelia, Arthur, Matthew, Florence, and two named Irene. The herd could look to its elders for guidance.
Biologists only recently recognized that cows have complex social behaviors, involving depths of comprehension that we might not expect of animals stereotyped as grungy, placid, and dull-witted. A feral herd, for example, will organize nurseries by dividing calves into age groups, each usually overseen by one adult cow while the rest go out to graze. For this to work, the sitters need to understand that their role is to look after calves that are not their own, even if it means settling for low-grade fodder while others enjoy greener pastures. The calves have to grasp that they are under vigilance despite their mothers being out of sight.
No one documented how the cows responded as Dorian approached, but Mónica Padilla de la Torre, an evolutionary biologist, can give us a good idea. “They usually are not afraid of storms. They like storms,” Padilla said. “They like to be cool. They like shade. They appreciate when the rain comes.”
Even before the hurricane loomed on the southern horizon, the herd likely began to move—with that usual cattle slowness, that walking-on-the-moon gait—toward shelter. In the era before hurricanes were tracked by satellites and weather radar, cows were a useful predictor that one was coming. The migration, Padilla said, would have been initiated by the herd’s leaders. Cattle violently clash to establish a pecking order, and once that’s settled a benign dictatorship ensues. Leaders are granted the best places to eat and the best shade to lie in, and they make important decisions—like when to retreat to high ground in the face of a storm.
For Cedar Island’s cattle, high ground was a berm of brush-covered dunes between beach and marshland. There the cows grazed, chewed cud, and literally ruminated, passing rough forage through a digestive organ, the rumen, that humans lack. Far from appearing panicked, the herd was probably a bucolic sight, from the Greek word boukolos, meaning “cowherd.”
A close observer, Padilla said, might have noticed subtle differences among the animals: mothers that were watchful or unworried, calves that were playful or lazy, obvious loners or pairs licking or grooming each other. Padilla once spent several months studying cow communication—I found the urge to describe this as “cow-moo-nication” surprisingly strong—by memorizing the free-ranging animals she observed via nicknames like Dark Face and Black Udder. (She didn’t realize at the time that the latter was a perfect punning reference to the classic British TV comedy Blackadder. What is it about cows and puns?) On Cedar Island, Padilla said, there wasn’t simply a herd that was facing a storm. There was a group of individuals, each with its own relationships, including what Padilla doesn’t hesitate to call friendships.
Dorian arrived in the purest darkness of the first hours of September 6. Three days prior, it had ravaged the Bahamas with 185-mile-per-hour winds, tying the all-time landfall wind-speed record for an Atlantic cyclone. Some observers suggested giving it a rating of Category 6 on the five-point scale of hurricane strength. It had weakened by the time it reached North Carolina, but it was still a hurricane. Thick clouds blacked out the moon and stars; Cedar Island’s scattered lights hardly pierced the rain. Passing just offshore on its way to making true landfall at Cape Hatteras, the hurricane lashed the Pamlico and Core Sounds into froth and spray and sent sheets of sand screaming up the dunes. The scrubby canopy under which the cows likely took shelter, already permanently bowed by landward breezes, bent and shook in the teeth of the storm. A 110-mile-per hour gust on Cedar Island was the strongest measured anywhere in the state during Dorian’s passage.
When the eerie calm of Hurricane Dorian’s eye passed over the island, dropping wind speeds to only a strong breeze, there seemed to be little more to fear. There was still the back half of the storm to come, but Cedar Island residents, both human and not, had seen worse. Even in the off season, the North Carolina shore has hurricanes on its mind. If you see footage of a beach house collapsing in pounding surf, chances are it was shot on the Outer Banks. Drive around Down East and you’ll see many houses raised onto 12-foot stilts; in some homes, you reach the first floor by elevator. Maps show that much of the Outer Banks, including most of Cedar Island and huge swaths of mainland, will be underwater with a sea-level rise of just over a foot. Residents aren’t rushing to leave, though. A hardened sense of rolling with the punches prevails.
Yet with Dorian, something unusual happened as the center of the storm moved northward. At around 5:30 a.m., Sherman Goodwin, owner of Island’s Choice, the lone general store and gas station on Cedar Island, got a call from a friend who lived near the store. A storm surge was rising in the area, the friend said. Fifteen minutes later, as Goodwin drove through the dim first light of morning, the water was deep enough to splash over the hood of his Chevy truck, which was elevated by off-road suspension and mud-terrain tires. “It came in just like a tidal wave,” Goodwin said. “It came in fast.”
By the time Sherman and Velvet, his wife—“My mother really liked that movie National Velvet,” she told me—reached their shop, they had to shelter in the building. Velvet saw a frog blow past a window in the gale. A turtle washed up to the top of the entryway stairs. “It came to within one step of getting in the store,” Sherman said, referring to the water. A photograph shows the gas pumps flooded up to the price tickers.
To understand what happened on Cedar Island that morning, imagine blowing across the surface of hot soup, how the liquid ripples and then sloshes against the far side of the bowl. Dorian did the same thing to the Pamlico Sound, but with a steady, powerful wind that lasted hours.
The hurricane pushed water toward the mainland coast, which in the words of Chris Sherwood, an oceanographer with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is “absolutely perfect” for taking in wind-driven water. The Bay, Neuse, Pamlico, and Pungo Rivers all flow into the Pamlico Sound through wide mouths that inhale water as readily as they exhale it. Much of the rest of the shoreline is an enormous sponge of marshes. What accumulated in this series of reservoirs was, in effect, a pile of water held in place by the wind.
People who know North Carolina’s sounds are aware of the tricks fierce wind can play. Coastal historian David Stick once noted that, during a hurricane, half a mile of seafloor in the lee of the Outer Banks can be left exposed as sound water is pushed westward. When that happens, a bizarre phenomenon can occur: A storm surge can come from the landward side, striking offshore islands in what’s sometimes called sound-side flooding. Scientists know it as a seiche (pronounced saysh).
When Dorian’s eye passed the Pamlico Sound, the seiche the storm had created began to collapse. Then winds from the southern half of the hurricane, which blow in the opposite direction from the storm’s leading edge, drove the water back the way it came. In a sense, the seiche was also running downhill; the ocean tide was falling in the predawn hours, while the hurricane, still pressing down on the Atlantic, forced water eastward, leaving behind a depression. These forces combined to send the seiche pouring out of the Pamlico Sound east toward the Atlantic, nine feet above the water level in the ocean.
The avalanche of seawater was truly vast, equal to about one-third of the average flow of the Amazon River, by far the highest-volume river on earth. The Amazon, however, meets the sea through a gaping river mouth. Dorian’s sound-side surge was trying to reach the open Atlantic past what amounted to a levee of Outer Banks islands with just a handful of bottleneck channels between them. At the southern end of the Pamlico Sound, there was an added obstacle: Cedar Island.
The water didn’t go around the island. It washed right over it.
The surge left nearly as quickly as it arrived, carrying on to the Outer Banks, where it hit the island of Ocracoke with a wall of water higher than anyone there had ever seen before. Once Dorian passed, floodwaters began receding. On Cedar Island they left thick, greasy muck in buildings and debris on the roads, but no serious injuries were reported. More than a third of the buildings on Ocracoke were damaged, but there were no known deaths.
The first news of losses from Cedar Island’s herds of horses and cattle came as soon as the ocean had calmed enough for islanders to go back to sea in their boats. “That’s when they saw a lot of them,” Styron said. “You know—floating.” That Cedar Islanders do not wear their hearts on their sleeves about such things is strongly conveyed by an anonymous source’s reaction when I asked how people felt about the dead animals. After an uncomfortable pause, he said, “You can pretty much guess that.” Then he added, “Mother Nature allowed them to be here, and I guess Mother Nature can also take them away.”
If anyone witnessed what transpired with Cedar Island’s feral herds, they haven’t said so publicly. Most likely, though, no one saw it, since the surge came without warning in the darkness, and the horses and cows often roamed far from people’s homes. The animals would not have been sound asleep in the predawn—feral creatures, like wild ones, are more vigilant through the night than human beings tucked tight in their homes. Still, they may have dropped their guard, sensing that they’d survived another hurricane.
Then suddenly, the sea moved onto the land. Nine feet of water covered the beaches. It drowned the marshes where the cattle fed on sea oats and seagrass, and flowed over the lower dunes. We know from Padilla’s research what the scene must have sounded like: high-pitched, staccato mooing—cows’ alarm calls—ringing out in the humid air, the bawling of calves competing with the howl of wind and surf. In waters rising at startling speed, mother cattle would have raced to find their young, as bovine friends struggled not to be separated.
Twenty-eight horses were swept away. No one knows exactly how many cows were carried off—four of them managed to remain on land, and locals would later estimate that between 15 and 20 were taken by the flood. The water likely lifted the animals off their hooves one by one, first the foals and calves, then the adults. They disappeared into the tempest.
In the seventh week of Iranian protests in the wake of Mahsa Amini’s suspicious death for not wearing her hijab to government standards, change is happening in Iran as dissent and unrest spreads to more prosperous areas of Tehran and younger members of society shed their hijabs in solidarity. As Azadeh Moaveni observes at the London Review of Books, the movement is gaining momentum.
In Tehran, the nightly confrontations have spread into the squares and boulevards of northern areas, a sign that a less economically battered class is now also participating. In girls’ schools, the courage to scrawl a slogan on the blackboard is spreading to younger groups.
As dissent winds its way through different age groups and neighbourhoods, the movement has remained remarkably steady: it hasn’t become destructive or violent, lost public sympathy or its radical feminist spirit. Previous protests in Iran have swiftly descended into destructive rioting, been viciously crushed or have petered out, driven by too narrow a grievance.
“I now see how much more powerful stamina can be than talent,” writes poet Carl Phillips, “or to say it another way, how powerless talent is, on its own, without stamina—rather like what is said about the body once the soul has left it, though I don’t believe in the soul. I do believe in stamina.” In “Stamina,” a piece in The Sewanee Review‘s fall 2022 issue, Phillips reflects on writing over time, imposter syndrome, urgency, perspective, and transformation.
I stopped writing for myself some years ago, not because I chose to, but because I stopped feeling that deep urge to write. I spent my 20s obsessively thinking and writing about a part of my life, but after a certain point, I kept repeating the same things. Gradually, that redundancy not only dulled my prose, but my mind. Since then, there’s nothing new I’ve wanted to explore. So I was drawn to many lines in Phillips’ piece, in which he examines that necessary, automatic, can’t-do-anything-else act of writing, and the type of stamina that’s required to keep going.
Which is to say, stamina is not just persistence; stamina, in the way that I’m thinking of it, always includes perspective, the means by which we can contextualize doubt and, in giving it context, displace it somewhat, thereby clearing room again for shaken faith. Maybe the best way to think of stamina is as a fusion of perspective and will.
Phillips describes a prolific period of urgent writing, when he was exploring his own sexuality and writing poems that would eventually form his first book. I love what he says about the “urgency of youth itself” — the window deep within us that’s wide open when we’re younger, actively exploring who we are as adults and trying to understand our world.
[W]e have a lot to say, all of it still new, and we have the energy to say it. I remember feeling, at the time, that I couldn’t write fast enough to get all of my thoughts down.
Phillips goes on to say how a “crisis of identity” was the “catalyst for a productivity” he’s not experienced since — which very much reminds me of my own journey — and that as we go, we cannot rely on crisis alone to fuel us. How do we keep writing and interrogating while continually saying something new? How, over the decades, do we become a solid critic of our own work?
At the same time, it’s encouraging to know that, with age, in tandem with experience, our sensibilities deepen, which means that we don’t have to work at constantly changing how we see the world—that changes anyway, as does the world itself. A certain amount of the work of avoiding redundancy is just part of being alive.
👻 Happy Halloween! 📷 Advertisement of the Woodward & Lothrop Department Store, October 1929. General photograph collection, CHS 15366. https://t.co/t0ovfZbGS8 👻 Happy Halloween! 📷 Advertisement of the Woodward & Lothrop Department Store, October 1929. General photograph co…
Hirshhorn museum plans major renovation once sculpture garden reopens https://t.co/o82Df3QclG Hirshhorn museum plans major renovation once sculpture garden reopens https://t.co/o82Df3QclG — Streets of Washington (@StreetsOfDC) Oct 31, 2022
This colorful map of Ireland from 1797 is full of religious information. A legend on the left side of the map denotes the location of churches as well as the homes of local clergy leaders. See for yourself: https://t.co/52b2GcAiZ0 https://t.co/fLIZXOXjpC This colorful map of …
The Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress Jefferson Building, from a circa 1924 stereoview. A reckless proposal has been made to rip out the grand mahogany central distribution desk that has stood in the middle of the room since the building was finished in 1897. …
Anyone dressing up as a witch today? Take some inspiration from Rebecca Fowler, Maryland’s oldest local witch! 🧙♀️ #MarylandHistory https://t.co/LQNQ1EjLCL Anyone dressing up as a witch today? Take some inspiration from Rebecca Fowler, Maryland’s oldest local witch! 🧙♀️ #M…
Today in History - October 31 https://t.co/inYiM6KcBC On the night of October 31, many Americans celebrate the traditions of Halloween by dressing in costumes and telling tales of witches and ghosts. Continue reading. Click here to search Today in History for other historic…
In 1910 a bronze plated rock was dedicated to Colonel Ninian Beall, an early resident of Georgetown. Although, there is more than meets the eye with this simple monument… #DCHistory https://t.co/hvE9BtrtxV In 1910 a bronze plated rock was dedicated to Colonel Ninian Beall, a…
It may not seem all that scary today, but when Orson Welle’s War of the Worlds broadcast premiered #OTD 84 years ago, Washington residents really believed there was an alien invasion! #DCHistory https://t.co/0DFOtrdCHi It may not seem all that scary today, but when Orson Wel…
#OTD in 1860, the Lansburgh Department Store opened its doors, earning popularity and becoming “as closely identified with the people of the city as the Capitol.” #DCHistory https://t.co/mZsuMdXCiE #OTD in 1860, the Lansburgh Department Store opened its doors, earning popula…
If you happen to be out in Alexandria this weekend, make sure to keep your eyes (and ears!) open for some of Old Town’s ghastliest residents: #VirginiaHistory https://t.co/dpHEihp0Kf If you happen to be out in Alexandria this weekend, make sure to keep your eyes (and ears!) …
Today in History - October 30 https://t.co/c59MQmG3dX On October 30, 1735, John Adams--Revolutionary leader, Declaration of Independence signer, creator and theorist of constitutions, leading diplomat, first vice president, and second president of the United States--was born…
