Telegram, the messaging app created by Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, is said to be private and secure. So why does the Russian government seem to be able to read anything people share on it? At Wired, Darren Loucaides investigates.
Russians needed to consider the possibility that Telegram, the supposedly antiauthoritarian app cofounded by the mercurial Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, was now complying with the Kremlin’s legal requests.
Over the past year, numerous dissidents across Russia have found their Telegram accounts seemingly monitored or compromised. Hundreds have had their Telegram activity wielded against them in criminal cases. Perhaps most disturbingly, some activists have found their “secret chats”—Telegram’s purportedly ironclad, end-to-end encrypted feature—behaving strangely, in ways that suggest an unwelcome third party might be eavesdropping.
When Telegram emerged as one of the last remaining oases of information and discussion for Russians, it also became a kind of funnel for Kremlin agents. Agora’s Seleznev believes that Telegram’s API allows investigators to monitor public groups at a large scale and then zero in on potential suspects, who can subsequently be pursued into private channels by undercover agents—or perhaps via a court order to Telegram.
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The running industry is booming, and it seems like these days, running 26.2 miles is no big deal. The number of people running ultra-marathons has nearly quadrupled in the past decade, so for some competitors, even these longer-distance races aren’t challenging enough. For Experience, Brown reports on the rise of quirky and extreme running trends, and how some people, looking to stand out or do something different, find their niche. Beekeeper Farai Chinomwe runs backwards. Moshe Lederfien races while balancing a pineapple on his head. “The motives of these chain-smoking, backwards-moving, produce-aisle-masquerading runners are diverse,” writes Brown, “but weird running’s raisons d’ȇtre tend to exist at the intersection of personal growth and public spectacle.” This is a light and breezy read on how runners up their game and transform the act of running into something else entirely.
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A devastating e-bike tragedy. Children fired out of cannons. The media circus surrounding George Santos. A psychology professor studying the science of awe. And a deep dive into a beloved (and dirty) Peanuts character.
Peter Flax | Bicycling Magazine | January 31, 2023 | 8,136 words
Exactly two years ago, 12-year-old Molly Steinsapir got onto an e-bike with her best friend, crashed, and died. I remember when it happened — the tragedy was covered widely, in no small part because Molly’s mom took to social media to talk about it. Now, in a moving and nuanced feature, Peter Flax examines the question of who, if anyone, is liable for Molly’s death. Flax, who owns two bikes made by the manufacturer of the one Molly rode, a company her parents are now suing, illuminates how the explosive growth of the e-bike industry, while a seeming net good for people and the planet, isn’t without dangerous consequences. There aren’t a lot of industry regulations, and there are pressing concerns about the quality of popular equipment. “As a country we have decided we value entrepreneurship and business and letting people just go to market,” Molly’s mom, Kaye, tells Flax, “and then we find out if the thing is safe or not as it is sold and marketed and used.” This is one of my favorite kinds of magazine feature, the personal story that serves as a lens for a bigger one, which in turn asks people to wrestle with urgent questions. Molly is gone, but her death may well save another 12-year-old girl somewhere. —SD
Abigail Edge | Narratively | January 9, 2023 | 6,964 words
I was a child who had to endure being padded up to the hilt and a safety lecture just to get on a bike. So this story, about a family who happily fired their children out of cannons (starting around the ripe old age of 14), left me agog. An insight into a different world, it is a delightful read about what happens if you actually do run away with the circus. David Smith was 27 when he and his wife, Jean, joined a traveling circus — a surprising career move for a maths teacher. After a stint as a trapeze artist, where he would catch his wife as she hurtled through the air, he found cannon life and never looked back, continuing to be fired over 100 feet into his 70s. The couple’s children grew up immersed in circus culture, seeing it change over the years as circuses fell out of favor; David’s son, David Jr., is still being fired out of cannons today. Pragmatically told, this is a measured take on an extraordinary family. —CW
Jesús A. Rodríguez | Politico Magazine | January 31, 2023 | 4,248 words
Okay, so Politico doesn’t believe in Oxford commas. Demerit issued. But look past that, because Jesús Rodríguez turns on the gas for this scrum’s-eye view of what it’s like to have to cover George Santos, a man whose unrelenting mendacity is shocking even by Congressional standards. If Frank Sinatra had a cold, Santos has an allergy to anything resembling virtue. But he does have the feeble bribery of a box of donuts, which he leaves outside his office for the frustrated journalists — and the last of those donuts provides the apt (if obvious) literary device that fuels the piece. Empty calories, with a core of emptiness at its center: Is there a better culinary symbol for a man like this? Rodríguez knows you know the answer, so he just lets the question sit as he chases Santos around the Capitol and surrounding offices, chronicling every platitude, snipe, and muttered aside along the way. This may be a piece about an elected official, but to call it political journalism does it a disservice. Sometimes you need to laugh to keep from crying, so enjoy the punchlines while you can. —PR
Henry Wismayer | Noema | January 5, 2023 | 6,377 words
“To experience awe, to fully open ourselves up to it,” writes Henry Wismayer, “helps us to live happier, healthier lives.” But what is awe? How has the human sense of wonder over the centuries driven us toward various pursuits and ways of being? Wismayer spends time with Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley professor at the forefront of a scientific movement examining our least-understood emotional state. I’ve appreciated Wismayer’s recent contemplative essays on other subjects, like travel and tourism, and this hybrid of profile and reported essay is yet another thought-provoking read. It’s informative about this new field of psychology but not at all dense, and I came away from it fresh, open-minded, and ready to experience the small wonders of my day. —CLR
Elif Batuman | Astra Magazine | October 27, 2022 | 2,245 words
I’m still sad that Astra Magazine is no more. Maybe it’s because I’m seeing so much fervor for bot-written text lately (oh hi, ChatGPT) and I worry about its mind-boggling potential to pollute the internet with pap left unchecked, not to mention the repercussions of inevitable misuse. Thankfully Astra remains online for now, which allows you to read Elif Batuman’s terrific deep dive on the Peanuts character Pig-Pen. Through Pig-Pen, Batuman explores what Charles Schultz had to say about American values in the 1950s and beyond, most notably, commentary on the darker side of society and relationships. But, in wearing his messiness with pride, is Pig-Pen perhaps the most authentic Peanut of all? “Everyone, it turns out, has a Dirty version of themselves: mussed, unkempt, scribbled over. This feels true.” —KS
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Armed with a handy metaphor, Jesús Rodriguez braves the misery that is The Scrum Waiting Outside George Santos’ Office — and comes out with a gonzo-lite chronicle of futility and fuckery. Just burn it all to the ground, please.
But consider this last remaining donut. Deconstruct it, for a second, from the outside in. The glaze: a gooey, cloudy substance that varnishes the ring of cake, pure glucose soon to strike the palate. Then, the cake itself: yeast and enriched wheat flour and palm oil and more sugar, congealing and forcing one’s salivary glands to go into overdrive. Thirty-three grams of carbohydrates that fuel a sugar rush but leave your hunger totally unsated. At the literal center of it, a hole — emptiness.
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Is finding closure via grueling through-hike a new idea? Not even a little bit. But that doesn’t mean that Gunnar Lundberg’s account of remembrance and renewal isn’t a compelling read. It might just make you want to grab a map and some moleskin.
For me, to “finish” grieving meant making a choice. So many of my choices since his death were rooted in penance and shame: guilt for planning our hiking trip to Isle Royale, for swimming in Temperance River, for not jumping back in. Finishing grieving meant finally choosing to forgive myself and to celebrate, rather than mourn, his life. Those 144 days taught me to carry only the things I needed most and to leave behind what weighed me down.
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It’s only recently that I’ve started to read and become a lot more interested in literature in translation. To be completely trite, a whole new world has opened up for me. That’s why I was drawn to Wei Ting’s piece at Electric Lit in which she explores a little of the history of Eastern translation, looks at the differences between Eastern and Western children’s lit, and advocates for more books to be translated, so that we as readers can understand the world and others just a little bit better.
Translation holds a particular and peculiar power. It is how we come to understand the world outside our own; that is, the world that exists outside of our own language. The Latin root word for translation comes from latus, the past participle of ferre or “to carry”; in Teju Cole’s beautiful metaphor, the translator is a ferry operator, carrying words from one shore to the other. To take this metaphor further: if the translator is the ferry operator, language is a current.
Soon after I gave birth, my writer friends arrived at my house with piles of classic English picture books. Determined to have my children rooted in their own culture, I set out to find children’s books with characters that not only looked like them, but stories that would help them navigate the complex world they will inherit. Just by the act of searching, I came to read wonderful writers from Japan, South Korea, and China with a completely different sensibility from Western children’s literature.
Reading children’s literature again as an adult, the difference between Western and East Asian stories was startling: Western children’s books are often centered on the individual’s journey, while stories by Chinese, Japanese and Korean authors emphasize respecting other people’s feelings, patience, and acceptance. As a child, I found many of these old Chinese stories moralistic and preachy. But to my surprise, I also discovered many wonderful children’s books which conveyed these same values without being didactic, and helped me as a mother understand my own feelings and moderate my response towards my child’s behavior.
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There are things that able me. A chair. One person speaking to me at a time. Shoes that are not cute, but spare me nerve pain. A hot bath with epsom salts: so hot it would scald most, but my skin is like Kevlar. It craves the heat and wishes for it to dig deeper. These are simple but necessary things that make my life more livable.
They do not “enable,” marking conspiracy in a habit I am trying to quit; I am not done yet with my propensity for being alive in the world and I’m not ashamed of what these things offer. They able me. They render me capable of basic participation in my life in its myriad and fantastical forms: watching my child play soccer; eating dinner with my family; browsing through my favorite bookstore; coordinating a protest; hiking with my friends.
These accommodations — and others I require but have not named — are not merely comfortable, but necessary, an antidote to the ways the world, as it is, dis-ables me. The way the world tries to tell me that simple pleasures do not belong to me. Due to the burdensome inefficiencies of my body, I deserve exclusion.
When I train activists in street protests and direct action, which is my avocation in this lifetime, one of my rules is “One Diva, One Mic,” which is to say, “Please shut the fuck up when someone else is talking because my brain cannot process multiple sounds at once.” I talk about how a motorized scooter can make for an excellent blockade tool. Disability is not the same as vulnerability; I have been deemed broken, but am not fragile. And when I raise my voice in service of my needs, I am teaching others to do the same. When we meet our needs together, we are building the world we want to live in.
Disability is not the same as vulnerability; I have been deemed broken, but am not fragile. And when I raise my voice in service of my needs, I am teaching others to do the same. When we meet our needs together, we are building the world we want to live in.
Translation and interpretation take many forms. Sometimes, to make someone able and free to participate is simply to speak in a language they can understand. Sometimes, when my husband and son are both talking to me at the same time, I put up both hands and say, “Chotto matte, kudasai,” which means, “Please wait a moment” in Japanese (which means I am serious; when the white person starts snapping at them in Japanese, they know it’s serious). Auditory overwhelm means I need quiet and accommodation from my own family.
My son brings me a pillow for my back, and then climbs into my lap. I am cushioned and I am cushion. This is how care happens.
If my life were a cheesy ’80s movie, it would open in freeze frame: me, lying on a field, trapped underneath a pony who crashed to the ground with me as his only buffer; my exasperated voiceover saying, “You may be wondering how I got here.” I was 12, about to enter the seventh grade.
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In the film (as it was in life), the pony stands up on my left femur, righting itself. I have a concussion and a broken nose and a horseshoe print on my thigh. I am taken, in cervical collar, away in an ambulance. The horseshoe bruise is so thick I can’t fully zip up my chaps for a couple of weeks. The film speeds up, hurtling me through time. I cannot tell you when the pain began, but underneath the pony is a good time to start.
At 12, I did not have the context or the language to understand what I was becoming or, more specifically, what was becoming of me. It took years, decades of working with and through disability justice frameworks to fully give myself over to incorporating disability as a part of my identity and to understand how disability colors my life and my self-perception.
When I did, it became easy to catalog: scoliosis, clinical depression, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety, chronic headaches, auditory processing issues, ADHD. This is not exhaustive, but the rough sketch of things. This list does not account for my humanity — the person experiencing all of this — only how I am failing to measure up to the demands of capitalism. People want to know, without putting it quite this way, how I am compensating for these shortcomings. They very nearly ask for an apology that is not coming.
More than once, someone has told me they couldn’t “live like that.”
I have finally gained the fluency I needed to recognize and appreciate and celebrate myself as disabled. I do not embrace the term for having accomplished or overcome anything, and not as a signal of defeat (although there are plenty of people who love to see it that way), and certainly not as a beacon of “inspiration,” but as a loving gesture toward myself. To see myself as disabled is the entrypoint to access what some call self-care, but I call compassion.
Disability is not a sign of failure to care properly for myself, but as the beginning of meeting myself with the tenderness I require to move through the world. It is still a radical statement to meet your own needs without prerequisite, without means-testing your efficiency under capitalism. Acknowledging myself as disabled means I can then work to subvert the forces disabling me. Which begins with my worth and what goodness means. When I tell people, “I’m disabled,” they cock their heads to one side and frown. “Don’t say that,” they respond, bottom lip plump. I know I am supposed to comfort them, to take it all back, to smooth things over. Disability shames us both: the witness and the showgirl. Their embarrassment tells me I have subverted the unspoken contract. I do not want to soothe them; I am worth knowing myself.
At 12, all I knew was that other kids my age did not talk about pain in the way I did. Pain did not interfere with their experience of being 12. The other kids seemed limitless. I felt limitless in other ways: to ride bareback through the streams and ponds and fields and forests and hills of Maryland, without adult supervision, is the closest thing to pure, uncut freedom I can imagine for a middle-schooler.
The hardest thing is standing still. There is something about being upright, stuck in place, that is agony for my spine, my hips, my feet, my knees. Any arch support will ultimately fail if I am forced to be in one place without a chair for long. It feels like my brain is melting. I cannot form sentences and my peripheral vision grows dark.
Which is not to say in horseback riding I was immune to injury or consequence, but for a time, I was exempt from the force of gravity on my joints. I could find freedom in my partner. Together, we could fly. Part of freedom was the knowledge that our problems were ours to own, to fix or fumble.
In hindsight, it is difficult to untangle, like a well-plied yarn, what was chronic injury and what was the insidious beginning of chronic pain. When I was recovering from multiple concussions from horseback riding, I assumed if I simply stopped injuring myself, I would stop hurting. People would jokingly say, “Wait until you get to be my age!” As though pain is the exclusive domain of those over 40. As though I could not know agony at 12 or 14 or 16. I could. I thought, I am, right now. This kind of gaslighting is obviously harmful, when you say it out loud. Our society is so skilled at telling children not to trust themselves: to ignore their bodies’ signals, to focus on a body’s aesthetics, and to only value its abilities.
When my son says he is finished with dinner, I tell him the same thing each time: Thank you for listening to your body, no matter whether he’s had a fourth helping or eaten three bites. The quantity of food he consumes is not a goal in itself. I don’t care if he didn’t want to try the new thing I offered. What could be less my business than what another person eats?
***
Pain exhausts my mind. Stress and anxiety and depression exacerbate the pain. My disability keeps me so busy that I meet myself coming and going, like in the Dunkin’ Donuts commercial. It is both time to make the donuts; and I have already made the donuts.
What counts as disabled? (This is the same question I have been asking about my queerness since I knew enough shame to wonder: What is enough to count? To be worthy of being seen? To be real in the world?) I couldn’t tell you the answer, nor am I interested in policing anyone else’s experience of disability. I don’t really care anymore, if I’m honest, because I cannot know by looking at someone, and neither can you. What I do know is inquiry and identity give us access: to ourselves, to language, and finally to the accommodations that might actually grant us access. Identifying as disabled means I stand a chance of getting what I need. Much the way my pain is not static, being disabled is not a fixed position, necessarily. What if our needs were met? What if our unique way of being was honored?
I have never felt like enough. Not queer enough or disabled enough or mentally ill enough or enough like a mother, to qualify. It is not my reluctance, but my fear of taking someone else’s place, someone truly worthy. Someone who is enough. It is not internalized ableism, but my fear of claiming who I am as someone else decides I am a fraud; a heartbreak beyond words. There is stigma, of course. If I claim my disability, will it be turned against me? Like the boy in fifth grade, years after I knew I liked girls but years before I claimed a queer identity, who called me a dyke as though that’s a bad thing. I avoided getting sober for years because I wasn’t enough of a drunk; I hadn’t properly suffered.
I never reached the bottom. Or maybe there is no bottom — not really. At 40, I know who I am. Disabled, queer, mad as hell. Sober.
At 40, I know who I am. Disabled, queer, mad as hell. Sober.
When I was still riding, I was often asked to ride other people’s horses and, for lack of a better phrase, “Show them who was boss.” My father’s horse was an enormous black Trakehner, an East Prussian warmblood who did not always do what my father asked of him. So sometimes I, at 16 weighing 100 pounds, would hop aboard. Patrick would turn his head toward me, I would pet his nose, and then we would fly. Patrick would do whatever I asked. He was capable and athletic, and he knew despite my tiny size, I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. He also knew I wouldn’t ask him for anything he couldn’t do. I couldn’t muscle my way into making horses do what I wanted, but they learned to trust me all the same. I had a pony once who loved me so much he would come running across the field at the sound of my voice. I didn’t need to use a halter and lead-shank: He would heel like an overgrown golden retriever, eager to please. He would follow me to the barn, with his enormous head against my hip. He’d stand and rub his face against my rib cage as I tacked him up.
This is all to say my riding skill didn’t rest on authoritarianism or brute force. It was my intuition, compassion, and trust. It was a mutual effort. Horses, like most prey animals, can be tightly wound. My senses also had a hair trigger. One false move, and the muscles around my spine would spasm. Together, we could process an overwhelming amount of sensory input and turn it into something graceful and harmonious. In the face of the pain of daily life, this was my solace: working in tandem with another being, often just as terrified by the threat of disaster as I was.
Show-jumping has a steady rhythm: short outside lines, long diagonals. There are flower-boxes and soft dirt, birds in the rafters, a cool breeze, and an early sunset when you’re showing in October. Heels down, hands soft. Sometimes, you can walk the course with big strides, marking your lead change with a heel: a little hop to ease you around the corners.
I could read the subtle energy in my body more easily than my peers who hadn’t had to wonder why they woke up with neuropathy in their shoulder or why their spines sounded like breakfast cereal when they bent over. But those neural pathways also gave me information: Dig your heels in here, lift your hips now — and when I did, my pony would sail over the jump, lifting us both. Riding doled out injury and served as a balm for my more ordinary chronic pain.
My body gave its lessons early. This is not forever. For better or worse, this will not last.
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When I say I am disabled, this is what I mean: I am tired of not getting my needs met. I am tired of basic human needs being an afterthought. If I am “giving up,” the only thing I am truly sacrificing is the illusion of exceptionalism and individualism that got me into this mess in the first place. I am burning down the myth of self-sufficiency — or the idea that self-sufficiency should be a goal unto itself. I am surrendering the idea that I am a burden for having needs. I am demanding to be a part of the team and to be honored for what I bring to it.
It is expensive and time-consuming to be disabled. While I am not afraid to have my needs met, it is exhausting to have to advocate for myself every waking minute. It takes so much more time and energy and support to get what I need. It takes thought and preparation and resources to move through the world. Being disabled is also tremendously boring: Sometimes the days stretch out into weeks or months when I wish I were doing something besides my healing slog. I know the words will be back; I know one day my body will endure sitting at a desk again. Or maybe it won’t, and I will ponder that when it comes. There is no way to account for how I spend my days during those phases of necessary interiority.
For years, the person-first identity was pervasive. “People with disabilities,” they would say. But my disability is not luggage, separate from myself. And there is a kernel of truth inside me: Had the values of capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism not crept so pervasively into our collective consciousness, I would not have been rendered disabled in the same way. If we, collectively, engaged in mutual aid in more than fits and starts, then perhaps insisting on having my needs met would not seem so anachronistic. Instead, I am seen as entitled when I meet my needs, and yet pitied for having needs at all. How pathetic, they seem to say. How cringe.
When they tell us we’re people first — that we shouldn’t say “disabled people” — it feels as though they are worried that one day we will implicate who has disabled us and who continues to poison and maim us as we try to heal. Their brand of capitalism is the same one that demands endless growth, even from those of us who do best lying fallow in the afternoons. The ones who insist on ceaseless cheerfulness. I have pulled myself up by more bootstraps than I can count. But I know this: After you have pulled yourself up, the horse carries you.
Their brand of capitalism is the same one that demands endless growth, even from those of us who do best lying fallow in the afternoons.
Part of the trouble with invisible disabilities is that you keep having to explain yourself. I’m not lazy, I want to say. And yet, in certain contexts, I am, in turns, “a hearie,” “a walkie,” and so on. In those moments it is my turn to be a facilitator: to make space, to create connections, to meet needs where I can, to help patch the way between here and access. This means knowing who needs to leave at what time so they can make it to work; who needs to be on the left side of the stage to hear; or who might need the Advil or Clif Bar or extra pair of socks I have stashed in my bag. I move as deftly as I can, remembering to create for others the conditions for getting their needs met, one cell in the body of a complex organism. This is what community care can look like. Sometimes it means giving and other times, receiving. Sometimes, it simply means making sure that everyone in the group knows where I am and where to find me so that I can troubleshoot. At the very least, my work is to help create an atmosphere where those who have needs know they belong. All good activism, even street protests, begin with consent; people should be able to move back or away or into a different mode at any moment, without shame. The group’s work is to respond with care to the needs of its individuals, even when those needs shift.
I am still learning, fucking up, apologizing, fumbling forward. If inquiry offers me the gift of understanding myself as someone who has been disabled in certain contexts, it also yields this knowledge: In other contexts, I am not. And in those cases, I have the obligation to tear down barriers that, while not an issue for me personally, oppress others. While my disabilities’ invisibility in some contexts robs me of being taken seriously, at times being able to be covert, to fly under the radar, lends me a certain kind of power. It comes with responsibility.
Some of my favorite protests are the ones where I can play a specific role, one that feels well-worn and comfortable for me, without having to do the heavy lifting of organizing. Let me block traffic or wrangle reporters or talk to the cops, things that might feel scary for younger activists, without the actual, real work of logistics and getting people to show up. Often at protests, I feel like something between a camp counselor and a firefighter, spending my time handing out Clif Bars and extinguishing conflicts before they can overtake the group (and the message we’re trying to send).
In the summer of 2019, a coalition of groups staged protests outside of the ICE building — to protest family separation at the border and Trump’s draconian immigration policies — in downtown San Francisco every day during August, with a different group “adopting” a day during the month. I went to six or seven events. My favorite was when I was asked to be the police liaison for a coalition of disability justice groups who had committed to anchoring the action. I find freedom in being somewhat mercenary.
And yet, in certain contexts, I am, in turns, “a hearie,” “a walkie,” and so on. In those moments it is my turn to be a facilitator: to make space, to create connections, to meet needs where I can, to help patch the way between here and access.
I am not big or scary, but I have a set of skills. I know how to talk a security guard out of messing with our equipment. I know how to move the larger group to protect a higher-risk few. I know when a tense situation can be dissolved with singing or when to raise the energy of the group with a chant. I know how to watch the police and to recognize their gear. I can translate what they’re wearing into an understanding of how they are reading our action. Do they read us as a threat? Should we read them that way? I have learned to do this so that those who should be at the center can focus on the message. I am fluent enough in these to “Show them who’s boss.” I’m there to do my job invisibly: decentering myself and using my skills as a crowbar. My work in those moments is to leverage my experience and my credibility to create ease, a feeling of safety, and ample space, so the organizers can do their real work of delivering the message, rather than worrying about the cops.
The message is this: No body is disposable. No one is illegal. Migrant justice is inextricable from disability justice.
In the middle of the action, things are calm. What I know is activism in San Francisco is safer than most other places — especially places where they aren’t used to it. I’ve done actions in rural logging towns and in smaller cities like Charlotte, North Carolina, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I’ve learned: It’s more dangerous when the police are scared or surprised or don’t know what to expect. It’s riskier when they are excited to get to try out all their pretty, shiny toys on you, not knowing how they really work. Boring is the best case scenario. Everyone knew their role. I, as a “walkie,” roamed the crowd, to watch the police, communicate with them when necessary, translate information back to the group and keep folks from coloring too far outside the lines. Sometimes that means honoring our shared action agreements not just to protect ourselves from becoming targets, but protecting the more vulnerable folks we’re working with. Acting as a beacon and a deterrent.
Afterward, I went home and spent the next couple of days lying down as much as possible, feeling the impact of my heels on the asphalt radiating up into my lower back, the exhaustion of holding myself upright and alert. The residual adrenaline I feel from my PTSD needs time to dissipate, no matter how chill the cops are. Sometimes, this healing is private, but built-in recovery time is a necessary part of my activism. I am not as elastic as others.
If reminding people I am disabled is what it takes to let people know I have needs or they should quit being ableist, then so be it. If I have to out myself — to tattle on my chronic pain — to get a chair, fine. I will never apologize for it or undermine myself again. I will never downplay what I feel or what I need. I am worth getting my needs met, with or without a disability. I am worth taking up space. And, I have learned, if I do not take up space in the places I fear I am not enough, there will be no space for me at all.
***
Christy Tending (she/they) is an activist, writer, and mama living in Oakland, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Catapult, Electric Literature, Permafrost Magazine, Newsweek, and Insider, among many others. Her first book, High Priestess of the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions. You can learn more about her work at www.christytending.com or follow Christy on Twitter @christytending.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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Over time, some doctors have been quick to default to psychological explanations for medically unexplained illnesses. For Coda, David Tuller tells the story of Maeve Boothby O’Neill, a bright young woman in England who was diagnosed in 2012 with myalgic encephalomyelitis or ME — also known as chronic fatigue syndrome — after several years of constant exhaustion and poor health. Doctors said her symptoms were “normal for her age” and “all in her mind,” and continually shrugged off her illness as psychological, rather than biological. After a gradual decline in health, Maeve died at 27, essentially from malnutrition, because the hospital refused to tube-feed her. Through interviews with Maeve’s mother, access to Maeve’s diary, and other reporting, Tuller recounts Maeve’s journey and mistreatment from the NHS over the years, shining a harsh light on the medical establishment’s long history of ignoring patients whose illnesses they don’t understand. But, as Tuller writes, perhaps the similarities between ME and long COVID patients may finally bring about change.
Medicine has a long and sorry history of bias and discrimination on the basis of sex. Given that ME and other functional and medically unexplained disorders are known to be much more prevalent among women, it is not surprising that patients with these conditions routinely report receiving poor treatment and even abuse at the hands of the healthcare system.
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In January 2021, after a sleepover with her best friend, 12-year-old Molly Steinsapir got onto an e-bike in her Los Angeles neighborhood, crashed, and died. Who was responsible for the tragedy? Molly’s parents have sued Rad Power Bikes, a popular e-bike manufacturer. Author Peter Flax examines the thorny legal questions at the heart of the lawsuit and illuminates the potential pitfalls of the e-bike industry’s explosive, largely unregulated growth, in part by speaking with other Rad Power Bike users who, like Flax, have experienced worrying equipment problems:
I started talking to my neighbors. During the pandemic, hundreds of teenagers in my community took to the streets on RadRunners and other inexpensive DTC e-bikes with mechanical disc brakes, and I discovered that many of them were having similar issues. Some parents were clued into the problem and were either scheduling regular maintenance with local shops or learning how to make the fixes at home, while others had no idea that their kids were riding heavy electric bikes that couldn’t stop properly without frequent maintenance. I started a thread on Nextdoor with a summary of the problem and how to address it, and soon I was DMing with parents who wanted tips on barrel and caliper adjustments.
One of my neighbors — his name is Ezra Holland and he lives about five blocks from me — says that almost immediately he started noticing disturbing braking issues with the RadRunner he purchased early in 2022. Two or three weeks after he got it, Holland, an experienced road cyclist, noticed that the responsiveness of the brakes was poor, and he decided to remedy the problem by tightening the cables that run from the levers to the calipers. But he learned that this only bought him a few weeks, and that after tightening those cables a few times, one of the calipers clicked into a different position where there was zero braking action. “That is pretty scary,” he says.
Thus began a year of education, vigilance, maintenance, and communication with Rad. Holland now buys pads in bulk on Amazon; he checks and adjusts both calipers every two weeks, always on alert for a failure. He’s experienced the rear brake fail going downhill and is especially concerned about that happening while his 17-year-old is using the bike. Rad has sent him new brakes and new pads, but Holland says that in his ongoing phone calls with the brand, customer service reps and supervisors have told him that other customers aren’t experiencing braking issues like he has. But he alone knows a half dozen friends and neighbors struggling with the same problems. “I just got to a point where I started questioning my own thinking, because they keep saying I’m wrong,” he says. “I start thinking that maybe I’m just making a fuss here for no reason. Which I think is not fair, because I think it’s not true.”
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In 2013, Matthew Greene went missing while climbing in California. In researching the story of his disappearance, Jason Nark attempts to come to terms with his own grief over a dear friend’s suicide. This is a moving and ruminative piece on what it feels like to mourn after an event you’re powerless to prevent, and what it feels like as you give yourself permission to begin healing.
He didn’t tell anyone where he was going that day and never returned.
Anthony died on September 23, 2013, a few months after Matthew Greene disappeared.
Grief, we’re told, has distinct stages. We expect to pass through each one, like a doorway, from denial all the way to acceptance. I expected that too. As the months wore on, a sense of guilt metastasized inside me. Friends and family said I tried my best with him. I had no special power, they said, to keep him alive. I rejected those words and turned inward. Grief warped my ability to love, and to accept it, too. I spent a lot of time in bed, barely present with my kids. I sobbed in my car during commutes.
The flower I took from the Minaret trail was wilting on my hat. The colors still blazed burnt orange but it would never be this bright, this beautiful, again. So I left it there, draping it over the post at Matthew Greene’s campsite, and said goodbye.
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Ever question why your rent is so high? Lane Brown did, but instead of just wondering, he went on a mission to find out why. Carrying out meticulous research, he discovers that landlords may not be playing fair. An essay that teaches you not to just accept the status quo.
At Lux, Natalie Adler discusses two new books about disability: Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, and The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Both books, Adler explains, “share the underlying assumption that capitalism makes us sick.” Adler surfaces a number of interesting points that the authors lay out in Health Communism, like how we’re conditioned to view health as an end goal — something we could one day have, namely by paying for it — and disease as something temporary, or repairable with money. “I’ve come to realize that the bifurcation between the sick and the well, the disabled and the able-bodied, is capitalism’s intervention,” writes Adler. “In reality, there are just bodies, just us.”
Likewise, in The Future is Disabled, Piepzna-Samarasinha urges us to look beyond the binary between sickness and health, but is also focused on the mutual aid, community, and connection between disabled people and disability activists. “Disabled people are already weathering the end of the world and are keeping each other alive,” writes Adler, “and so disabled knowledge and skills are exactly what we need to survive the future.” Adler goes on to say that both of these books challenge us to view everyone’s lives as vulnerable. Only then can we overhaul, and adapt to, an unjust system.
We now live in a time where we could deal with or even cure many of our ailments, but we are priced out of care or don’t have the time to access it — or we choose not to seek it, because interacting with the medical establishment can be a degrading experience, marred by medical racism and sexism and ageism and homophobia and transphobia and fatphobia and more. So perhaps it’s more accurate to say that capitalism keeps us sick.
What is awe? And can experiencing awe lead to a happier, healthier life? Henry Wismayer spends time with Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychology professor at the forefront of a scientific movement examining our least-understood emotional state. I’ve appreciated Wismayer’s contemplative essays on other subjects, especially travel and tourism, and this profile-reported essay hybrid is yet another thought-provoking read. It’s informative but not dense, and I came away from it fresh, open-minded, and ready to experience the day’s small wonders.
Out of this trove of 2,600 personal narratives, the team at Berkeley distilled a definitive catalogue of awe’s elicitors. Keltner dubbed them “the eight wonders of life.” The most common source of awe was the moral beauty of other people, such as witnessing instances of compassion or courage. Also prevalent was “collective effervescence,” the sense of transcendent unity we might feel at a sporting event or when dancing in unison with others. Then came two predictable ones: nature and music, to which was added a third aesthetic stimulus, visual design. The last three could be lumped together by those of a romantic disposition as matters of the soul: spiritual awe, life and death, and epiphanies, like Archimedes’ Eureka moment, or the Damascene conversion of St. Paul.
When flyers began appearing around the University of Colorado Boulder, announcing that an enrolled student with ties to the white nationalist group Patriot Front, the campus’s independent student newspaper took notice. It secured an interview with the student, Patryck Durham, who admitted to being affiliated with Patriot Front and to publishing social media posts encouraging the killing of immigrants and Black people, but said UC officials were aware of all this before he enrolled and that it was “in the past.” Within hours, the story had taken a turn:
Durham did not definitively say whether he still held the violent beliefs that appeared in his social media posts, which were published in 2021.
“I can’t put an exact date on it because a lot of this stuff is messy. But it’s been, I think, a year or more by now,” since he was last affiliated with Patriot Front, Durham said.
Early Thursday morning, Jan. 26, several hours after Durham spoke with reporters for this story, the University of Colorado Police Department (CUPD) responded to reports of suspicious activity in Durham’s residence hall.
According to police records, officers found Durham with two people that police described as “older friends from Longmont,” just before 2 a.m. Durham failed to clarify to law enforcement how he knew the two individuals in his room, and witnesses told police they felt uncomfortable with the presence of Durham and the other adults.
One of the witnesses told police the pair of older adults were part of the white nationalist group Durham has been affiliated with. The two individuals were “told to leave the building” and did, according to police records.
According to the police report, witnesses also saw Patriot Front messages and propaganda on Durham’s laptop. Witnesses told police Durham was communicating with members of the hate group through the messaging app Telegram.
Sources who described the encounter to the CU Independent and The Bold did so on the condition of anonymity, as they were worried they would be harmed for coming forward. People familiar with the incident said Durham returned to the dorms the next day, Jan. 27, to move out.
In 1976, Nanda Devi Unsoeld, the daughter of legendary mountaineer Willi Unsoeld, died on the mountain for which she was named. This is the story of Devi’s life and of the historic climb that killed her. A riveting adventure read, it doesn’t shy away from highlighting the history of misogyny, cultural appropriation, and selfishness in mountaineering culture:
In late September of 1975, at the Unsoeld home in Olympia, Willi met with 26-year-old John Roskelley, another very accomplished American alpinist, putting plans in motion. They were of different minds about leadership and climbing, and women, too—namely, whether they belonged on major expeditions with men. Roskelley tried to convince Willi not to invite a female climber named Marty Hoey to join the group. He believed that the presence of women could complicate things; he worried that emotions could get out of hand when the two sexes were put together in high-stakes, high-altitude situations.
It didn’t help that Hoey had been dating Peter Lev, another veteran of the Dhaulagiri expedition who they wanted on the team; Roskelley hated the idea of a couple’s quarrels bleeding into the team’s daily demands. He also assumed the climb would be a traditional, equipment-heavy effort, relying on multiple camps and fixed ropes, while Willi and Lev seemed intent on an alpine-style ascent, lighter on ropes and happening fast.
As they wrangled over the climb’s fundamentals, Devi herself burst in, glowing with sweat. She’d just biked seven miles home from a soccer game. Roskelley would later recall his first impression in his 1987 book, Nanda Devi: The Tragic Expedition, saying that Devi “swept in like a small tornado after an obviously brutal game of soccer.”
In public speaking engagements for the next few years, Willi would sometimes describe this moment, too, including an extra detail about some of the first words out of Devi’s mouth that evening: “You’re Roskelley,” she said. “I understand you have trouble with women.”
At Astra Magazine, Elif Batuman looks at what Charles Schultz’s had to say about American values and society with a deep dive on the Peanuts character, Pig-Pen.
Pig-Pen first appears in 1954. Violet’s judgmental friend, Patty, sees him playing in the sand and asks his name. Pig-Pen replies that he doesn’t have one; people just call him “insulting things.” Patty asks for specifics. “I’ll tell you if you won’t laugh,” Pig-Pen says. His name is a punch line. For a long time, Pig-Pen’s name consistently appears in quotation marks, reminding us that it isn’t really a name — that he has, presumably, another one that he doesn’t know. From 1980 to 1997, the quotation marks disappear, blurring the line between Pig-Pen’s “true self” and a reductive description directed at him by other people, which is in effect what a name comes down to.
We think of being in the hospital as enduring isolation in a clinical setting, cut off from normal life. But what if being hospitalized meant something different? What if you could be receive hospital-quality care in your own home? Helen Ouyang profiles a movement of health care providers who, propelled by a range of factors, not least among them the COVID-19 pandemic, are working to redefine what hospitalization in America might look like:
Other countries, including Australia, Canada and several in Europe, had already been experimenting with this practice, some of them extensively. In Australia, which has been running home-hospitals for decades, these services provided in Victoria alone are the equivalent of what a 500-bed facility could offer in one year. Overall, the patients treated in this way do just as well, if not better, in their homes.
The obstacles impeding Leff and other hospital-at-home advocates in the United States were bound up with America’s labyrinthine health care system and particular medical culture. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (C.M.S.), which is the largest payer of hospitalizations, has required that nurses must be on site 24 hours a day, seven days a week, effectively keeping patients within the hospital walls. This matches how American society has come to regard hospitalization, too — nurses at the bedside, doctors making their rounds, in elaborate facilities pulsating with machines.
But Americans didn’t always convalesce in hospitals. Before the 20th century, treatment at home was the norm. “Only the most crowded and filthy dwellings were inferior to the hospital’s impersonal ward,” the historian Charles E. Rosenberg writes in his 1987 book “The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System.” “Ordinarily, home atmosphere and the nursing of family members provided the ideal conditions for restoring health.” As Rosenberg puts it, “Much of household medicine was, in fact, identical with hospital treatment.” As health care became more specialized and high-tech, however, diagnosis and treatment gradually moved into hospitals, and they evolved into institutions of science and technology.
“They’re a little eccentric” is a phrase I suspect most of us have heard used to describe a certain kind of memorable person. For me, it evokes my childhood dentist — an elderly man who favored colorful bow ties and humming loudly as he worked, and who once wagged his finger in my face and gravely advised, “never marry a woman who makes you chop wood.” I still don’t quite know what he was getting at.
But what do we really mean when we call someone eccentric? The word renders a verdict of harmlessness: A person’s style, conduct, or mannerisms may be memorable, but not concerning. And truthfully, we need people who are a bit of a character (to use an equally common euphemism). Their difference reinforces our sense of stability, their peculiarity a necessary splash of color in a landscape of conformity. We love to hear about them, to speculate why they are as they are — the odder, the better. Whether in documentaries like Grey Gardens or the five stories collected here, well-reported tales of quirkiness always invoke a small thrill, vaulting their subjects out of the realm of local gossip and into a wider imagination.
However, it’s no accident that every entry here concerns individuals who are, to varying degrees, rich or famous. The sad truth is that the lives of the everyday working class are seldom celebrated, and least of all those whose habits and personalities fall outside of the bounds of “normal.” To quote a character in Ellen Raskin’s novel The Westing Game, “the poor are crazy, the rich just eccentric.” Wealth affords many privileges in life, among them the indulgence of oddity, and such indulgence is only magnified in the face of celebrity. Behavior that would be considered problematic becomes acceptable, even admired as a natural by-product of genius. (See: Andy Kaufman; Bjork; and, at least up to a certain point, Kanye West).
Whatever your take on the meaning of “eccentric,” these stories — sad, inspiring, tragic, and incredible as they are — provide a fascinating glimpse into the minds of those whose lives are anything but conventional.
Every sport has its enigmatic geniuses, players of supreme natural talent whose volatile nature as often as not trips them up. Remarkably often, a pattern repeats: The young upstart appears as if they had ridden down on a lightning bolt, shakes up the landscape and transcends the limits of the sport, yet somehow never quite reaches the heights they could have, and should have, achieved. In boxing, “Prince” Naseem Hamed shot to fame on the back of extraordinary talent mixed with equally extraordinary theatrics, only to fall frustratingly short of all-time greatness, abruptly walking away from a sport he no longer loved. In soccer, mercurial French footballer-cum-poet Eric Cantona, an eccentric genius if ever there was one, lost the captaincy of his national team thanks to a bizarre display of temper. Basketball, of course, has Dennis Rodman, a player who eternally walked a tightrope between outrageous skill and self-implosion. Pick any sport you like and there will always be numerous examples; in chess, however, Bobby Fischer stands alone.
The World Chess Championships of 1972 were memorable for several reasons. Russia had dominated the competition for 24 years prior, and no American had won since the 19th century. The world was in the middle of a Cold War. The man who held the crown, 25-year-old Russian Boris Spassky, had learned how to play on a train while escaping Leningrad during World War II. Yet, Spassky’s opponent might have been the most memorable element. Bobby Fischer was the definition of a prodigy: At 14, he had won the U.S. Championship with the only recorded perfect score in the history of the tournament. Fifteen years later, he carried the hopes of a nation upon his shoulders. But which Bobby Fischer would turn up — the confident, happy young man, or the paranoid, furious recluse? Would he, in fact, turn up at all? Chess aficionados will already know this story, but Darrach writes with such insight and elegance, transporting us to a world of fantastic intrigue and unbelievable pressure, that even if you know the outcome, this article is a thrill from start to finish.
I was 2600 miles northeast of the Yale Club when the crisis broke. I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, waiting for Bobby to fly up for the match. Spassky was waiting, too—he had arrived eight days before—and so were 140–150 newspaper, magazine and television reporters from at least 32 countries. They were getting damn tired of waiting, in fact, and the stories out of Reykjavik were reflecting their irritation.
Those of us who grew up in England during the ’80s and ’90s will surely remember Frank Sidebottom, a bizarre character who appeared seemingly out of nowhere, lighting up various children’s TV shows and briefly enjoying his own series before disappearing back to the strange realm from which he had emerged. What made Sidebottom so singular was the fact that he wasn’t human. Rather, he was human, but his head wasn’t: Atop his shoulders sat an inflatable plastic oval, which Sidebottom never removed.
At the heart of this fantastical story, here recounted by firsthand witness Jon Ronson, lies an astonishing quote from George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” What begins as a tale about an eccentric, imaginative musician soon becomes one of identity, acceptance, and the blurring of the line between fiction and reality.
I never understood why Chris sometimes kept Frank’s head on for hours, even when it was only us in the van. Under the head Chris would wear a swimmer’s nose clip. Chris would be Frank for such long periods the clip had deformed him slightly, flattened his nose out of shape. When he’d remove the peg after a long stint I’d see him wince in pain.
The tech zillionaire class is a modern phenomenon that tends to divide opinion. Depending on which side you listen to, the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are either visionary gurus transforming our society into a better, more desirable model, or childlike narcissists who treat the world and everything in it as disposable playthings. As ever, the truth probably lies somewhere in between. The late John McAfee, who made a fortune from virus-protection software at a time when most had never even heard of the term, came to prominence in an era before the Tony Stark model of entrepreneur-as-hero entered the public imagination.
Again, we come to a crossroads. Was John McAfee a delusional paranoid or a tech-security messiah, hounded by government operatives and mysterious cartels desperate to protect their shadowy interests? Undeniably, he’s a fascinating figure, and the tales of guns, SWAT teams, wild flights, and deaths as recounted to journalist Stephen Rodrick are compelling, even as his readily apparent narcissism and deeply problematic trappings (such as his self-described “teenage harem”) are highly disturbing.
At dawn, we land in Atlanta, and the six-hour drive to Lexington passes in a haze. The Blazer fills up with cigarette smoke as Pool and McAfee check their arsenal: a Smith & Wesson .40, a .380 Ruger, and another three or four handguns in the front seat. “I like to have a small one in my waistband,” says McAfee. “Sitting on the toilet is a real vulnerable position.”
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Singer and dancer Josephine Baker would have been just as big a star, if not bigger, in the modern age of social media. Her talent, unconventionality, lifestyle, and beauty brought her fame and fortune at a time when few Black women could even dream of such a thing. She was the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, became a celebrated performer at the Folies Bergère in Paris, received a medal for her work assisting the French Resistance during World War II, and was rewarded by the NAACP for her activism.
Baker was also temperamental, unhappy, and the instigator of a bizarre and unethical plan to combat racism that almost defies belief. In this absorbing piece, we learn of a side to Baker’s character that is little known to many. It is, if we needed one, a sharp reminder that celebrities are just as flawed as the rest of us, that good intentions don’t always lead to good results, and that a life led with all limits removed rarely, if ever, turns out well.
In photos taken at the time, the chateau looks more like an orphanage than a real home. The children slept in a room in the attic, in eight small beds lined up in a row. Whenever Baker returned home, even if it happened to be at 3 a.m., she would wake the children and demand affection.
I suspect all parents find tales of unhappy childhoods difficult, even disturbing, to read. We want nothing but the best for our offspring, especially if we have not enjoyed a peaceful and stable upbringing ourselves. The saving grace of this piece is the beautiful prose with which poet Edith Sitwell recalls her formative years growing up in a famously eccentric and almost casually cruel household. The various characters and events as described by Sitwell resemble appalling fictions, their grotesquerie landing somewhere between Charles Dickens and H. P. Lovecraft.
During her adult life, Sitwell was divisive, controversial, flamboyant, gracious, and scornful. She possessed a heart capable of absorbing and displaying the most delicate beauty, hardened perhaps, by her upbringing in a family so well off that it was able to wallow in a pit of morbid peculiarity. Her poetry is wonderous; her literary analysis revelatory. Many thousands of words have been written concerning Edith and the Sitwells, but almost certainly none as moving and striking as those you will discover here, written by her own hand.
I remember little of Mr. Stout’s outward appearance, excepting that he looked like a statuette constructed of margarine, then frozen so stiff that no warmth, either from the outer world or human feeling, could begin to melt it. The statuette was then swaddled in padded wool, to give an impression of burliness.
Sometime in the 1990s, a small group of amateur historians in Liverpool, United Kingdom, made a startling discovery. Local rumors had long circulated concerning a network of tunnels, even an entire subterranean world, hidden beneath the streets of the city’s Edge Hill area. The group was able to verify that a number of underground entrances did indeed exist, on land previously owned by a mysterious recluse named Joseph Williamson. Excavating by hand, they could not possibly have imagined what they were about to discover.
Born in 1769, Williamson worked his way up through the ranks at a tobacco factory owned by the wealthy Tate family of sugar importers. Williamson married into that family, took ownership of the factory, and prospered. He retired when in his 40s, and here is where the story proper begins. For reasons that are still unclear (and still heavily debated), Williamson, utilizing a small army of employees, began carving out immense underground chambers beneath his homes. It must have taken a large amount of his fortune and a huge portion of his time. But why? When you’re rich, perhaps nobody asks. It’s known that Williamson was secretive about his tunneling activities, never revealing their true purpose. Fine arches led nowhere; certain passages were carved out and then filled in. All activity ceased with his death, and the labyrinth remained untouched until the locals whose voices you will hear in this excellent article rediscovered this giant conundrum.
“The whole place is so full of mysterious questions — an awful lot of questions that nobody will ever be able to answer,” Stapledon told The Post. “When you look at some of the structures underground, you think: How the hell did he create these? What the hell was he doing building all this stuff?”
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
In the final six months of the Trump presidency, the federal government executed 13 people. In January 2021, the same month he incited an insurrection at the Capitol, Trump oversaw three executions in just four days. There’s really no other way to put it: Trump was eager for the state to kill people on his watch. Two Rolling Stone reporters detail the unprecedented stretch of executions:
It was Sessions’ successor, Barr, who took the concrete step in July 2019 of ordering the Federal Bureau of Prisons to resume executions.
Barr wrote proudly of the decision in his book One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, published about a year after the Trump presidency ended, devoting a whole chapter — “Bringing Justice to Violent Predators” — to the blitz of federal executions. Not a shocking move from a man who, while George H.W. Bush’s attorney general in the early 1990s, praised the death penalty in a series of official recommendations, claiming that it works as a deterrent, “permanently incapacitate[s] extremely violent offenders,” and “serves the important societal goal of just retribution.” (Without a hint of irony, he added, “It reaffirms society’s moral outrage at the wanton destruction of innocent human life.”)
Trump, of course, was not so keen to engage with the subject intellectually. The sum total of his discussions of the death penalty with his top law-enforcement officer, Barr says, was a single, offhand conversation. After an unrelated White House meeting, Barr was preparing to leave the Oval Office when, he says, he gave Trump a “heads-up” that “we would be resuming the death penalty.” Trump — apparently unaware of his own AG’s longstanding philosophy on capital punishment — asked Barr if he personally supported the death penalty and why.
Trump’s lack of interest in the details had grave repercussions for the people whose fates were in his hands. According to multiple sources inside the administration, Trump completely disregarded the advice of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an administrative body designed to administer impartial pleas for clemency in death-penalty cases and other, lower-level offenses. And Barr says he does not recall discussing any of the 13 inmates who were eventually killed with the president who sent them to the death chamber.
That means Trump never talked with Barr about Lisa Montgomery, a deeply mentally ill and traumatized person who became the first woman executed by the federal government since 1953. Or Wesley Ira Purkey, whose execution was delayed a day by a judge who ruled that his advancing Alzheimer’s disease had left Purkey unaware of why he was being executed. (The Supreme Court reversed that ruling the next day.) Or Daniel Lewis Lee, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Charles Mitchell, Keith Dwayne Nelson, William Emmett LeCroy Jr., Christopher Andre Vialva, Orlando Cordia Hall, Alfred Bourgeois, Corey Johnson, and Dustin John Higgs.
And it means Trump never spoke with Barr about Brandon Bernard.
If you enjoy a decent nonalcoholic beer from time to time, you can thank Bill Shufelt. Back in 2012, wanting to train for an ultramarathon, Bill went sober, and surveying the sea of so-so nonalcoholic brews available from Big Brewing, decided to fill that market gap. At Punch, Jordan Michelman writes on the rise of nonalcoholic beer that actually tastes good.
But Shufelt was onto something. He linked up with an experienced brewer named John Walker, and together they tested and tinkered, brewing batch after batch in an attempt to create nonalcoholic beer from scratch—no boiling or osmosis or dealcoholization required. It took them years to get the recipe right, and its exact steps remain a closely guarded secret. But in 2018, Shufelt and Walker canned the first commercial shipment from their new nonalcoholic beer brand, dubbed Athletic Brewing Company—an aspirational bit of naming that speaks to the brand’s ongoing remit within the world of high-performance athletes.
Rarely in American consumer history are we given such a clear-cut case of a mono-brand industry disruption of measurable scale and influence. In less than five years, Athletic—no doubt aided by the fiduciary acumen and connections of its co-founder—has been able to raise $226 million and counting in venture capital, according to Crunch Base, including recent rounds from Keurig Dr Pepper ($50 million in 2022) and celebrity investors including David Chang, J.J. Watt and Toms Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie. (Shufelt disputes those numbers, noting that, to date, the brand has only raised $173.5 million across five rounds.) Athletic is, according to Inc. magazine, the 26th fastest growing company in America—that’s any company, not just beer—with an eye-popping three-year revenue growth metric in the neighborhood of 13,000 percent.
