With De La Soul’s masterful catalog finally hitting streaming, Dan Charnas takes aim at the outmoded thinking that doomed the rap trio to digital purgatory. Throw on Buhloone Mindstate and enjoy.
The alternative to action is the chilling effect we are seeing right now, not only on sampling but on song creation itself. Some artists seek permission for the slightest of quotations or interpolations lest they leave themselves open to a claim. Other artists second-guess their work and squelch their impulses lest the natural and organic manifestations of their influences be seen as infringement. As I wrote in my book about J Dilla last year, even that great hip-hop producer—considered by some to be the paragon of sampled music production, and whose drum machine is on display in the Smithsonian—for a time abandoned the artform he mastered because of the legal and financial risks. Meanwhile, parasitic “sample trolls” snap up publishing and recording rights to songs often for the express purpose of suing other artists who have interpolated their music.
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An egg farm in Arizona making money off incarcerated women. An excerpt of David Grann’s new book about a disastrous 18th-century British naval expedition. A look into why people ski. And two reads on AI, a topic that none of us can currently escape.
Elizabeth Whitman | Cosmopolitan | February 15, 2023 | 3,897 words
Even during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that, as so often happens in America, the toll of the historic event would prove heaviest for the most vulnerable among us, including the elderly, disabled individuals, and essential workers. And the incarcerated. The virus tore through the country’s overcrowded prisons and cut their populations off from the outside world more than they were to begin with. Arizona decided to take these horrors a step further by agreeing to set up a prison labor camp — yes, you read that right — at Hickman’s Family Farms, a large egg producer. Hickman’s had long paid for incarcerated individuals to work in its facilities; the workers only got paid after the state took a huge chunk out of their wages. “This is groundbreaking,” a driver told a female prisoner as he transferred her to the camp, the first of its kind in Arizona and possibly the country, where she would live and work alongside other incarcerated women while COVID exploded. “You guys are gonna be a part of history.” Apparently, history included illness, injury, and indignity, as this investigation by Elizabeth Whitman shows — the women whose voices the story elevates were told they were necessary, and treated as if they were disposable. —SD
David Grann | The New Yorker | February 28, 2023 | 6,800 words
“The only impartial witness was the sun.” So much depends on these seven short words, and they do such a terrific job foreshadowing the mayhem to come. (I’m a sucker for survival/adventure stories. Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, published in 1959, was among my favorite books last year.) David Grann recounts the backstory of the Wager, a British man-o-war with a crew of over 250 that left Portsmouth, England, in 1740 as part of a squadron. Their mission: to find and loot a Spanish galleon, whose treasure was “known as ‘the prize of all the oceans.’” By the time a ship — in tatters — limps into an inlet off the southeastern coast of Brazil, only 30 men remain, “their bodies wasted almost to the bone. Their clothes had largely disintegrated. Their faces were enveloped in hair, tangled and salted like seaweed.” So, what the hell went wrong? Allow an excerpt of the prologue and first chapter of Grann’s forthcoming book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, to whet your appetite for this story of disaster and intrigue on the high seas. —KS
Jack Stilgoe | Aeon | February 28, 2023 | 5,576 words
With all the manic profiteering surrounding recent AI advances in art and writing, it’s hard not to think that someone’s cooking up a plan to make musicians obsolete. As technologist Jack Stilgoe points out, though, drumming has long resisted the creep of automation. That’s not to say we’re still pummeling calfskin with nothing but our own two hands: From the bass pedal to the Roland TR-808, we’ve sought to augment or even replace the rhythmic spine of popular music. But in genre after genre, from jazz to funk to samba, “swing” and its infinite interpretations reign supreme — and mechanization has yet to emulate soul. Stilgoe takes us through an engaging cultural history, punctuating his argument with clips of seminal moments from Clyde Stubblefield, Donna Summer, and others; it’s a paean to percussion that only a self-described “part-time mediocre drummer” could pull off. Yes, bedroom producers have all the (simulated) instruments of the world at their fingertips. And yes, in the near future we’ll probably see some horribly named AI startup that promises an improvisational predictive model that can out-Dilla Dilla. Whether any of that can move you — or make you move — remains another question. —PR
Gloria Liu | Outside | February 27, 2023 | 3,851 words
Last Sunday, I went skiing — by which I mean I largely stood in lift lines. Having forgotten my headphones, I was at the mercy of the conversations around me for entertainment. It ranged from people complaining about the traffic getting to the mountain to others ostentatiously using walkie-talkies — perhaps forgetting they were not in the military — to convey to those further afield that they were, in fact, still queuing. This piece from Gloria Liu about why people struggle through crowds for hours to pay exorbitant amounts for this limb-risking activity was, therefore, immediate catnip for me. As I devoured it, I chuckled at the characters conjured up by her vibrant prose, particularly the awkward Pit Viper-wearing couple on their first Tinder date. It’s a fun concept: Sit on a chairlift all day and see who you meet. There are no profound revelations here (besides that Jim Bob stashed some White Claws at the top of the lift), but each group is reveling in the time spent outdoors with their friends or family; the crippling amount of time and money spent worth it for these precious endorphins. When I eventually met up with friends and skied some runs, it felt worth it, too. —CW
Tony Rehagen | Experience Magazine | February 15, 2023 | 1,267 words
Is AI fatigue a thing? Because I’ve felt it for some time. Yes, there are noteworthy AI stories worth reading right now, like Ted Chiang on blurry JPEGs or the piece on drumming that Peter recommends above. But there are only so many stories about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence that I can absorb, so I’ve started to tune out. But when I came upon this story’s headline earlier this week, I couldn’t help but laugh — and decided to dive in and just surrender to it all: A data-driven IPA brewed in Australia, fine-tuned using consumer feedback collected through QR codes on cans. Genetically modified hops in the drought-plagued U.S. Pacific Northwest. An AI company ridiculously (perfectly?) called Deep Liquid. In this ultimately fun and timely read, Tony Rehagen reports on the trend of craft breweries harnessing technology, data, and research to refine their recipes. Let’s raise a glass to hops and bots. —CLR
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A hunt for treasure that ends in nautical disaster? Scurvy and mutiny on the high seas? I’m all in. At The New Yorker, read an excerpt of the prologue and the first chapter of David Grann’s forthcoming book, “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.”
For days, it watched as the strange object heaved up and down in the ocean, tossed mercilessly by the wind and the waves. Once or twice, the vessel nearly smashed into a reef, which might have ended our story. Yet somehow—whether through destiny, as some would later proclaim, or dumb luck—it drifted into an inlet, off the southeastern coast of Brazil, where several inhabitants laid eyes upon it.
More than fifty feet long and ten feet wide, it was a boat of some sort—though it looked as if it had been patched together from scraps of wood and cloth and then battered into oblivion. Its sails were shredded, its boom shattered. Seawater seeped through the hull, and a stench emanated from within. The bystanders, edging closer, heard unnerving sounds: thirty men were crammed on board, their bodies wasted almost to the bone. Their clothes had largely disintegrated.
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Growing up with movie-buff parents, the Academy Awards were required viewing, even when I was too young to watch any of the nominated films. The ceremony had an alluring sense of self-importance: All those beautiful people in their beautiful clothes, talking about the power of art, as millions of people around the world watched. I still vividly remember the year my parents shooed me off to bed when the show ran late (as it usually does), then hearing the muffled soundtrack of a movie I’d actually seen. Had it just won Best Picture? I tiptoed back to the living room to check, and my father beckoned me over to watch the acceptance speeches. Some milestones, it turns out, are more important than a good night’s sleep.
When I was older, I started hosting low-key Oscar parties for friends, having spent the preceding months catching up on as many nominated movies as I could. The show became less Hollywood spectacle and more highly contested sports playoff: We placed bets, cheered on our favorites, and groaned over what we saw as bad calls. No matter the results, we always had plenty to argue about, because there were always more losers than winners — people unjustly robbed of an honor they deserved.
But was it simply a matter of supply and demand? The Academy Awards stir up controversy because there’s too much talent fighting over too little recognition. The indignant coverage of each year’s Oscar “snubs” glosses over a humbling reality: Most professional actors, directors, and screenwriters will never be nominated for an Oscar, let alone win one. It’s a ruthless numbers game.
The Academy Awards are also a magnet for contentious social issues, the movies being a reflection of the society in which they’re made. The debate over whether the Oscars should be less “political” has gone on for more than 50 years (and has been mostly lost by the “non-political” side). When April Reign created the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite in 2015, she set off a discussion about representation that continues to this day. In 2017, there were calls to cancel the ceremony when some nominees couldn’t enter the country due to Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigration from certain —majority Muslim — countries. After Harvey Weinstein was finally called to account for his treatment of women, a group of actresses who’d gone public with their accusations introduced a #MeToo segment at the 2018 ceremony. It was a powerful statement that the movie industry, if (very) belatedly, was taking women’s concerns seriously.
The winners at this year’s Oscars will inevitably say something polarizing, odd, semi-incoherent, inspiring, and/or heartwarming in their acceptance speeches. And that’s why I keep watching. There’s a vulnerability in those moments that cuts through the Hollywood illusion, reminding me that everyone who makes it onto that stage is a person who has finally — improbably — had a dream come true. The Academy Awards have always been both inspiring and controversial, as the stories on this list make clear.
Hattie McDaniel made history by being the first Black performer to win an Academy Award in 1940. Unfortunately, that honor was complicated by the role she played: Scarlett O’Hara’s servant, the sassy but loving “Mammy,” in Gone with the Wind. The film was a hugely popular hit and won a then-record eight Oscars, including Best Picture. But even in the pre-Civil Rights era, McDaniel was criticized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP) for degrading her race, as cultural critic Lynda Cowell makes clear in this commentary about Black female stereotypes.
McDaniel’s response that she’d rather be “paid $700 a week playing a maid than $7 working as one” was tart and to the point. Sadly, the night of her greatest triumph was marred by the casual racism that was endemic even in supposedly open-minded California. At the dinner ceremony, McDaniel was forced to sit at a remote table, separate from her co-stars, and she wasn’t invited to the celebration party afterward, which was held at a “no Blacks allowed” nightclub.
Cowell used to dismiss McDaniel as “a funny Black woman who provided the light relief in a three-hour long film,” while the petite Dorothy Dandridge was “the kind of light-skinned lovely every Black girl should aspire to be.” In this enlightening piece, she explains how she eventually realized that both were subject to the same racist limitations in their careers.
Mammy, cartoon or otherwise, was a character that had been a part of America’s collective imagination for a while. After appearing in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mammy started to get around. Despite the fact that slaves were given very little to eat and were often worked into early graves, the notion of the large, middle-aged, dark-skinned Black woman who loved her owners more than life itself became cherished. And why wouldn’t it? With no husband, children or family to ever speak of, this loyal, motherly, sexless husk of a human being posed little threat to white society. It was McDaniel’s portrayal of Mammy that came to embody a character that still sets the standard for Black actresses today.
One of the first — and most controversial — political statements delivered at the Oscars was made in 1973 by a young woman named Sacheen Littlefeather. When Marlon Brando was announced as the winner for Best Actor in The Godfather, she strode onto the stage in a buckskin dress and announced that Brando had asked her to reject the award on his behalf, as a protest against Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans. She identified herself as being of Apache heritage, and though she was booed that evening, she soon became an inspirational figure in the Indian rights movement.
But what if all her years of activism were based on a lie? Whitaker, a lecturer on American Indian Studies at California State University, met with Littlefeather for a possible book project and ultimately came to doubt the woman’s claim of Native heritage, a doubt she kept to herself for fear of “outing” someone who’d become a role model for so many. After Littlefeather’s death in late 2022, two of her sisters confirmed Whitaker’s suspicions. Whitaker’s account is on the shorter side, but her personal experience with Littlefeather gives it particular resonance. Rather than shaming Littlefeather for lying, Whitaker explores the reasons why she did, and what she gained from it.
Littlefeather became a cultural icon in large part because she made a life playing to the Indian Princess stereotype, and she certainly looked the part. This was especially true during the Oscars incident, in which she adorned herself in full Native dress, for example, because it sent an unmistakable message about the image she was trying to portray. It should be noted that the outfit was not of traditional Apache or Yaqui design, nor was her hairstyle.
The stereotype Littlefeather embodied depended on non-Native people not knowing what they were looking at, or knowing what constitutes legitimate American Indian identity.
When Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture in 1970, it solidified a change that had been rippling through American culture throughout the 1960s: Shiny Hollywood escapism was out, gritty realism was in. But did an X-rated movie starring two relatively unknown actors really deserve the industry’s highest honor?
In this essay, film critic Koraljka Suton argues that Midnight Cowboy should be remembered for more than its edgy rating. “Midnight Cowboy [was] the first and only X-rated movie in history to have won an Oscar for Best Picture,” he writes. “Two years later, the rating was changed back to R without a single scene having been altered or cut.”
Why? Because the initial X rating had nothing to do with explicit sex scenes (there were none), but rather, the movie industry’s distaste for anything that hinted at homosexuality. The scene where Jon Voight’s character (Buck) gets paid to receive a blowjob was mostly implied, but it was shocking enough to make people walk out of the theater and create a public outcry. His co-star Dustin Hoffman was afraid he might never work again.
But the controversy might have also attracted curious moviegoers who discovered a more moving film than they expected — which might explain that Oscar. Suton makes a convincing case that Midnight Cowboy deserves to be remembered as a poignant story of two outsiders who find support in each other, not the supposedly shocking movie an X rating implies.
Schlesinger’s film is, ultimately, not at all about sexuality, although it did break new ground in terms of its acknowledgment of various sexual preferences and practices, but rather about the importance of connection and true intimacy. In a world that gave them nothing and expected nothing from them, Rizzo and Buck were, to steal a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, “each the other’s world entire”—and we were given the opportunity to take a glimpse inside and really feel what it means to survive, as opposed to thrive.
Saving Private Ryan entered the 1999 Academy Awards as the undisputed favorite. A huge commercial success, it also met all the expected criteria for a prestige drama: a beloved leading man (Tom Hanks), a respected director (Steven Spielberg), and a sweeping, emotional story that capitalized on nostalgia for World War II’s “Greatest Generation.”
When it lost Best Picture to the charming but relatively lightweight romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love, though, the ground beneath Hollywood shifted. This wasn’t simply a surprise upset, but proof that an Oscar could be won with the right marketing strategy. As David Crow explains in this entertaining, behind-the-scenes account, the now-notorious producer Harvey Weinstein crafted a relentless, no-holds-barred campaign to boost Shakespeare’s chances — and the fact that it worked convinced other studios to follow his lead.
Miramax started a whisper campaign saying everything good about Saving Private Ryan occurred within the first 15-20 minutes on the beaches of Normandy, and the rest was sentimental hokum. It worked. Spielberg did not campaign like it’s the Monday before election day, and Weinstein did.
While Weinstein is thankfully gone, the crude lessons learned by Shakespeare in Love’s win over Saving Private Ryan are not. Awards seasons generally begin in early September with the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival … It then continues with each film being released between October and December, mounting months-long rollouts that never really end until Oscar night. Coupled with corporate studio interests leaning ever more heavily on “four-quadrant” blockbusters that are built on franchises, this system has created an environment where Oscar movies are often little-seen limited releases, and mainstream populist films are more concerned with superpowers than prestige … The generally accepted wisdom that Oscar movies and popular movies are mutually exclusive remains intact.
Dargis, the Times’s co-chief film critic, remembers the 2010 Academy Awards as the “Bigelow Oscars,” with Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman to win Best Director for The Hurt Locker. “I hate the Oscars when I don’t love them,” she writes, “but that night I swooned.” Could Bigelow’s breakthrough inspire a wave of female filmmakers and producers to finally wield power behind the scenes?
It didn’t happen immediately, or all that smoothly. But as Dargis surveys the cultural landscape of the past 20 years, she sees undeniable progress. Female writers and directors who once would have been limited to romantic comedies are working on blockbuster action films, while creative powerhouses like Ava DuVernay have built their own versions of a mini-studio, directing, producing, and supporting other young creative talents.
Not all that long ago, I thought it would be best if the entire machine blew up, that the big studios just got it over with and died, making room for others to build something different and better. Certainly, the movie industry seems to be doing a fine job of self-combusting. Yet the truth is that despite the statistics and awards, the movie world looks different than it did 30, 20, even 10 years ago. The world looks different. There is, as I’ve suggested, no one reason for the shift in how we think about women and film, but it is a good and hopeful shift. Change has been slow. But change is here because women have followed their muses, honed their craft and heeded their voices no matter the hurdles before them and, in doing so, they have changed ideas about cinematic representation, about who gets to be the hero on set and onscreen.
Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day.
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With Kanye-dependency withdrawal at Adidas and engineered-scarcity blowback at Nike, the sneakerhead world has evolved into a legitimate plurality, and New Balance seems better equipped than anyone to capitalize. Joshua Hunt explains the company’s self-aware dadness with the context and verve to make this a rewarding read — even for those who never braved a predawn line outside Undefeated.
Understanding the evolution of the 990 is a useful way of appreciating how New Balance, America’s most sensible sneaker brand, has captured the zeitgeist in these decidedly nonsensical times. When the 990 was launched in 1982, its four years of development made it the first running shoe with a $100 retail price; a decade or so later, it found new life as a casual sneaker worn by dressed-down celebrities at red-carpet events; and by the turn of the millennium, the 990 had achieved a bizarre niche ubiquity among subcultures as disparate as straight-edge hardcore kids, underground hip-hop fans, and Upper West Side dads. Puzzling out how all of this came to be, and how New Balance managed to bridge the aesthetic gap between Bernie Sanders and Emily Ratajkowski to become one of the most coveted shoes on the planet—while in the process reordering the global pecking order in the $86 billion sneaker market—reveals one of the more improbable success stories in fashion right now.
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The competition between the nearly 10,000 craft breweries across the U.S. is stiff. With today’s emerging technologies, many brewers, especially smaller ones, are harnessing the power of AI and looking for more efficient ways to make their final products better. For Experience Magazine, Tony Rehagen reports on this trend: Beermakers in Australia are using consumer feedback collected via QR codes to fine-tune IPAs, while breweries in the U.S.’s drought-plagued Pacific Northwest are tweaking recipes with genetically modified hops.
Can AI deliver a perfectly hoppy concoction that’s fit for even the most discerning Benedictine monks of the past? This is a relatively shorter piece than most longreads we recommend, but it feels very of-the-moment (and entertaining, like other Experience Magazine stories I’ve recommended).
In 2021, Deep Liquid, an Adelaide-based company that partners with the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, helped nearby Barossa Valley Brewing create AI2PA: The Rodney, an AI-generated IPA. On each can of AI2PA, a QR code allows drinkers to submit their thoughts on the beer’s flavor, aroma, and mouthfeel. That real-time feedback goes straight into a data set that is then plugged into an algorithm that can adjust the recipe accordingly.
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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hickman’s had a problem. The massive egg farm in Arizona relied on the wildly undercompensated labor of incarcerated people. How would it operate during the looming lockdown? The solution, engineered by Hickman’s and the Arizona penal system, was a prison labor camp:
Hickman’s remained the only private company in Arizona allowed to use incarcerated workers on its own turf. Two national experts in prison labor who spoke with Cosmopolitan — Corene Kendrick and Jennifer Turner, both with the American Civil Liberties Union — could cite no other instance of a state corrections department detaining people on-site at a U.S. corporation for the corporation’s express use.
Within days of the plan’s approval, a roughly 6,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse on the Hickman’s lot at 6515 S Jackrabbit Trail in Buckeye, Arizona, had been repurposed from an apparent vehicle hangar into a bare-bones “dormitory.” It sat in plain sight, about 200 feet back from the road, near the Hickman’s corporate headquarters and retail store, where an electric signboard and giant 3D chicken beckon customers in for “local & fresh” eggs. Over the next 14 and a half months, some 300 women total would cycle through this prison outpost, their waking lives largely devoted to maintaining the farm’s operations while the pandemic raged.
Eleven of these women — all incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, which one could argue is beside the point — shared their firsthand accounts with Cosmopolitan. Our nearly yearlong investigation also turned up thousands of pages of internal ADCRR emails, incident reports, and other documents exposing a hastily launched labor experiment for which women were explicitly chosen. Housed in conditions described by many as hideous, the women performed dangerous work at base hourly wages as low as $4.25, working on skeleton crews decimated in part by COVID. At least one suffered an injury that left her permanently disfigured. These are their stories.
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Sophie Elmhirst takes an insightful look into the unique therapy options for the super-rich. Like many people, loneliness and a lack of connection lie at the root of their problems, but, as Elmhirst alludes to in this essay, if even rehab treats them differently from other people can they really hope to find what they need?
But beyond the desire for privacy, extreme wealth has an oddly separating effect. “If you put a billionaire in a group setting, even with well-off middle-class people, they will not be able to relate to each other,” Gerber told me. They are not like the rest of us, these people; their lives and minds have been transformed by their fortunes.
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What inspires people to contribute to a site for nothing? Stephen Luries goes on a mission to find the people determined to give credit where credit is due — and the automation getting ready to topple them.
Adams, now 88, has since written almost 7,000 plot summaries for films listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). In total, he’s contributed more than 890,000 pieces of information about film and TV, a chunk of which came straight from the files he hauled from Eastland. “If data was weighable,” he told me, “the IMDb owes a small ton of thank you kindly, sirs to Preston Smith and Victor Cornelius. I was only the messenger.”
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“Party Down,” the cult-classic comedy series about cater waiters in Los Angeles, is back for season three a dozen years after Starz cancelled it because, despite the show being brilliant, hilarious, and poignant, no one was watching it. Its revival is great news for anyone who likes to laugh. Here, The Ringer delivers a behind-the-scenes look at how “Party Down” came to be in the first place, a story that involves Paul Rudd, weed, and the British version of The Office, as told by the creators and stars themselves:
Starr: The one thing that was tough is we just didn’t have time for improv. And I think a lot of us were familiar with, and wanting, to play in that way. And when it came down to it, we just didn’t have the time for it. We didn’t have the budget for it. But luckily, Enbom is such an incredibly talented writer that you don’t need it.
Hansen: In fact, so many people are like, “That’s got to be improvised, right?” The way John writes, it just feels so natural.
Enbom: Martin’s character always resented Kyle, and that was their relationship. Originally, Kyle did not pay much attention to Roman, just because he didn’t think much of him. And so the fact that this kind of little weird relationship evolved has a lot to do with just how the two of them got on.
Starr: When it was in the dialogue a little bit, we leaned into it and it became kind of our natural on-screen/off-screen rapport. Because it’s also a fun place to play. I think we enjoy that kind of humor naturally, anyway. So we kind of end up doing it even when we’re not working.
Hansen: You know what wasn’t in the dialogue? Martin slapping me on camera.
Enbom: It became this running thing of — without him even knowing it was coming — just Martin whapping Kyle.
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“Deborah Dorbert is devoting the final days before her baby’s birth to planning the details of the infant’s death.” So begins this devastating feature about the impact of Florida’s abortion ban, implemented after Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer, on one woman and her family.
For much of the time, her pregnancy is disconcertingly normal, though she has stopped going in for regular checkups to escape the company of expectant mothers. Deborah can feel the baby pushing against her ribs and hips and deep into her pelvis, causing pain that she believes comes from the lack of fluid cushioning the baby. On occasion she pushes back, mother and child adjusting to the give-and-take of life together.
In December, Deborah says,she texted the coordinator at the maternal fetal medicine office regularly, hoping to schedule an induction by Christmas. The response stunned her: After consulting health-system administrators about the law, the specialist concluded Deborah would have to wait until close to full term, around 37 weeks gestation, she recalled the coordinator telling her.
The doctor made his determination after having “legal/administration look at the new law and the way it’s written,” the coordinator reiterated to Deborah in a recent text message she shared with The Post. “It’s horribly written,” the text continued.
For Deborah, that meant resigning herself to a two-month wait, during which her anxiety and depression built.
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Dan Hernandez | Longreads | February 28, 2023 | 16 minutes (4,503 words)
When a criminal defense attorney warns you not to view something — in this case, a suspicious VHS tape — it’s probably wise to listen. Dread filled my gut as I slid the tape into the VCR and pressed play. My car had been stolen in October 2022, and after the police recovered it, a lot of stuff belonging to the thief remained inside, including the VHS tape.
At first, I figured it would contain something sentimental. Home movies of a wedding, Christmas, or graduation. It crossed my mind, too, that it might contain something intimate. A sex tape, perhaps, recorded with an ex-lover. Sensual lovemaking between two consenting adults — that would be a relief. I soon started to fear, however, that the tape would contain something heinous, something I couldn’t unsee. The man had desecrated my car; now I worried my mind would be next. But that’s also why I felt obliged to watch it. Call it civic duty, or due diligence. Call it paranoid, rubbernecking voyeurism. It was all of the above.
It took a community effort to reach this point in my investigation. My neighbor lent the VCR. I borrowed the adapter chords from a friend’s coworker. And since I didn’t want to watch the tape alone, my friend Steph volunteered to join. Others had declined, some squeamishly, some flat out saying, “No fucking way!”
I told myself if anything disturbing showed up on the tape, I’d stop it immediately, though I knew that just to see a face on either side of a brutal act would haunt me for I don’t know how long, and you can’t mentally prepare for something like that. Steph has a fun, laid-back energy I can count on in every occasion, but even she said, “I’m scared!” as the VCR hummed to life, its plastic gears turned, and “PLAY” appeared in the corner of the television screen.
“Remember how as a kid, when you rented a movie you’d feel all giddy right before it started?” I said. “This is the opposite of that feeling.”
About the lawyer, the one who’d warned against viewing the tape. He’s a friend. I’d invited him over to watch basketball, Nuggets-Celtics, when this topic came up.
“Look, if the police wanted to know what was on that tape, they could’ve taken it when they arrested the guy,” he’d said.
I wondered if his antipathy for prosecutors and prisons had biased him against my expressed duty to review the tape. “Check this out,” I said, removing its cardboard sleeve. In between the reels was a handwritten label: Bad Tape.
“Keep that tape away from me! I don’t want anything to do with that tape!” he’d said.
Ultimately, he’s still a criminal defense attorney, and I’m a writer and a journalist. When a mysterious tape comes into my possession in a crime, however petty the offense, I’m going to watch it, and if I find something horrible on it, I’m not going to keep that to myself.
Recently, I had worked with a documentary team investigating a series of violent crimes in Las Vegas, some of which were “thrill killings.” In one case, a man filmed himself shooting a person asleep on the ground in a park. Days later, he filmed himself shooting a person walking their dog at the exact same location. The police gathered surveillance footage and identified him by interviewing people in the neighborhood. But the key evidence was the video content on his phone, which the police claim he recorded to relive his violence.
The tape in my possession didn’t contain anything like that. Watching it led to a different sort of reckoning, but to explain, I have to rewind a bit.
The tape in my possession didn’t contain anything like that. Watching it led to a different sort of reckoning, but to explain, I have to rewind a bit.
***
It feels almost disingenuous to say my car was stolen. It was not broken into. No one hotwired it. I was not carjacked at gunpoint. Nor was it stolen through the recent TikTok trend to boost Kias by sticking a USB drive down the throat of the ignition. Nothing so clever or destructive occurred.
I left Las Vegas, where I live, for a work trip to Phoenix. That morning, my father flew into Las Vegas for a weekend trip with his wife and her grandson. They borrowed my car. While out to dinner that evening, my father left it unlocked with the key inside in the parking lot of the Orleans Hotel and Casino, a budget resort west of the Strip.
I was out drinking with colleagues that night and missed a few calls. When I checked my phone, I saw my father had texted with weird punctuation and fragment sentences: “Call me It’s very important. It’s about important.”
It sounded important. I had also missed a call from the police. I got on the phone with my father first and, with a tone of pure shame, he said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, son. Your car is gone.”
If you love your parents, and they’re still with you when you reach middle age, you must navigate the occasional senior moment that makes you want to tear out your hair and scream, Dammit, how could you be so irresponsible?!
“It’s okay,” I said. It took incredible restraint not to turn the screws on a man who has not always patiently endured my dumbass mistakes. My wife says I need therapy for how severe my father could be at times, because now I’m the same way — a shouty, reactive jerk when deeply disappointed.
My calm response seemed to make him feel worse, knowing, as I’m sure he did, he would not be so forgiving. “I don’t know how, I just …” he trailed off, desperate to explain. “I have no excuse. I feel horrible.”
“Yeah,” I said, agreeing he had no excuse. But to be fair, my father did pull a key fob from his pocket and press lock before walking away from the vehicle. He just happened to use his key to his SUV back in Denver.
When I shared this news with my wife, she pointed out that our house keys were on the car key fob. We felt helpless to know that the thief could find our address on the documents in the glove compartment, drive over, and let himself in with no more resistance than a couple of barking dogs. We live about 20 minutes away from where the car disappeared. My wife was alone and, feeling unsafe, decided to leave and check into a hotel.
I stayed up that night listening for doorbell camera notifications on my phone. I’m used to receiving video clips of movements outside the house — a neighborhood cat, a tree swaying in the wind, a delivery man dropping off a package. None came, though I hardly slept. And the next morning, my father went to our house and changed the locks.
There’s a saying in South America that kept repeating in my mind: “Don’t give away the papaya.” It means, keep an eye on your shit if you don’t want it to get jacked. Mine was a 2017 Kia Optima hybrid, the first newish car I’d ever owned. My driving life up to that point had been a source of embarrassment. When I was 17, in the late ’90s, at a Catholic school where some students drove sports cars and luxury SUVs, the high school newspaper launched a series called “Hooptie of the Month,” and the columnist named my ’81 Honda coupe the inaugural winner, describing it snarkily as a rat-powered jalopy with cockroaches nested in the vents. It was all beaters, or no car at all, until the Kia, which by contrast made me proud.
This emotional connection to the basic four-door sedan led to anger and grief that it was being mistreated. Like a phantom backseat driver, I imagined the car thief weaving through traffic and wished somehow I could intervene.
I called a cop I know to hear what might happen next. “That’s a crime of opportunity,” he said. “Not the kind of person who takes the car to a chop shop, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s Halloween weekend. Probably someone’s out joyriding. My guess is they’ll abandon it in the next couple weeks. That or we’ll pull guns on them when we run the plates, because they don’t look like the sort of person who drives that type of vehicle.
“If we find it, we’ll give you a call right away,” he added. “Whether it’s three in the morning or whenever, you’ll hear from us.”
This was somewhat reassuring. Somewhat, because profiling car owners based on appearance sounds like a bigger problem than the one it’s meant to address.
For her part, my wife hoped the Kia would not be found. She had encouraged me to sell it and profit on the car shortage to pay off credit card debt, so the potential for a payout from my insurance provider sounded good to her. We began arguing, though, over shared use of her car.
I present these frustrations and inconveniences to survey the initial impact of the crime. It upset me, it led to tension and unease, and it rattled my father’s sense of himself as a fully functioning human being — not a fun way to start a vacation!
The experience also served as an exercise in patience and compassion, which proved important to maintain when the authorities reached out.
Before my father left Las Vegas, he texted me a photo of him and his wife and her grandson toasting beers at the Bellagio. I had told him not to let the incident ruin their trip. That didn’t mean I literally wanted to see selfies of him partying at a casino — which seems petty, I know. The man has bailed me out so many times in my life, it would’ve been indecent to act anything other than sympathetic. He cosigned on my car loan, for example, so I could receive a lower interest rate. And the vehicle was fully insured, more reason than any to move on. I texted him back, “Looks like fun!”
These events also reminded me of a crime that impacted my mother when I was a child, a formative episode in itself.
***
My mother worked as a bank teller for 36 years at a branch of World Savings and Loan, in Aurora, Colorado, and one day the bank was robbed. This was before ATMs, when bank tellers, most of whom were women, handled all of the cash, and before customer service was done through bullet-resistant plexiglass.
The man arrived on foot. He wore a hat, and according to reports he resembled Tom Selleck. He approached the counter like a typical customer — the bank was otherwise empty — and he pulled out a silver handgun and announced, “Ladies, this is a robbery.”
My mother, though startled, calmly worked with her colleagues to give the man everything he wanted, which in the end included my mother’s car. It was a station wagon — the family car for our family of six. My mother warned, “You don’t want my car. It hasn’t been running well lately.” Which was true. The man laughed and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll get it back.”
Indeed, that evening, the police found my mother’s car at a nearby shopping center, where the robber was assumed to have stashed his actual getaway vehicle. It was one many bank heists pulled by a man the FBI had nicknamed “the Gentleman Bandit” for his distinctly courteous and apologetic demeanor during stickups. He never used his weapon, and he often thanked bank tellers on his way out, leading many, including my mother, to comment afterward on how polite he was.
As a child riveted with mobsters and mafia movies, I was oddly proud of my mother’s poise and impressed by the grace she showed afterward. Her only complaint was that the FBI made a mess of our car in its search for clues.
I don’t recall my parents ever considering whether the Gentleman Bandit robbed banks out of a need for money or simply for the thrill, as in the movie Heat, where “the action is the juice.” I’ve since learned that the man, whose real name was Melvin Dellinger, had studied journalism and apparently explained his nontraditional work schedule to his neighbor by claiming to be writing a book. Now I wonder if he was motivated by monetary need and experience. He traveled well (he was a favored guest at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas) but had a modest middle-class lifestyle. Perhaps, he just had a vendetta against banks. Once, during a robbery, an elderly customer offered Dellinger the money in their wallet, yet he declined to accept it, saying, “I don’t want your money, I want theirs.”
Ultimately, the important thing to my family was that the Gentleman Bandit exercised kindness and restraint toward the innocent people he confronted in the process of targeting wealthy institutions.
The “victimless crime” trope may be simplistic. Having purchased auto insurance in a city with a staggering car theft problem, I know the burden is always transferred onto the consumer, punishing us all. Yet I’m still inclined to assess crimes differently when the impact is largely economic, nonviolent, and pursued more out of need than greed.
Inequality has made all manner of desperate deeds understandable, even when the results are infuriating.
Of course, armed robbery is always considered a violent crime, even when the people threatened at gunpoint walk away complimenting the perpetrator’s etiquette. It’s traumatizing, and my mother may be the exception for having gotten over it fast. Good Catholic that she is, she also felt sorry for Dellinger when he was fatally shot during a final heist attempt in Denver.
Despite his reputation for nonviolence and civility, the Gentleman Bandit was not given much chance to surrender. A police officer working undercover as a bank teller shot him in the chest immediately after announcing himself, when Dellinger turned to face him. By then, he had become the third most-prolific bank robber in FBI history, having attempted 49 heists, more than half of which occurred in Colorado, where he robbed some locations more than once.
A note in Dellinger’s pocket read: “My wife knew nothing about this. Please tell her I’m sorry. Thank you.”
***
As promised, I got a call from the police after midnight about two weeks after my car disappeared. The voicemail said it could be “recovered” at Ewing Bros. tow yard. I got a ride there not knowing whether the car would be drivable or not. The lot was north of downtown, and its office had the stagnant air of a toolshed. It felt stuffy with frustration and dread. Some customers — if one can call us that — had a car impounded for driving with expired plates. They had to renew their vehicle’s registration at the DMV before the tow yard could release it. The fee then would be $250, until 5 p.m. The price goes up by the day.
A short woman in a velour tracksuit said her dog was in her car when she parked it somewhere she wasn’t supposed to. “Where’s my dog now?” she asked. The clerk told her the driver should have dropped it off at the animal shelter and to look there. A tall, skinny man tried to endear himself to a clerk by announcing loudly that he’d once applied for a job there. “We could have been coworkers!” he howled, to no avail.
I wasn’t the only person whose car had been stolen. While I waited for my turn to be taken into the yard to inspect it, another Kia was dragged in with its frontend smashed, shedding shards of twisted metal.
There wasn’t a scratch on mine. Just a coat of desert dust. I got inside and caught a heavy whiff of body odor. There was clothing piled in the backseat — jeans, flannels, sweatpants. I saw loose cigarettes in the cupholder and a bottle of Smoke Blaster spray, which removes tobacco smell from hair, hands, and clothing, ostensibly to hide the habit from disapproving loved ones. On the floor lay a tray of decorated Halloween cookies. I wondered if they had a child with them. There was a box of Cheez-Its, a party-sized bag of Cheetos, and as a healthy alternative, fresh grapes.
The license plate was pulled. I found it stuffed under the front seat. I assumed that’s how they were pulled over and arrested — driving without a license plate in what was revealed to be a stolen vehicle. I found an EBT card, a food stamp card, and the mysterious videotape.
The cardboard sleeve with Scotch branding over a column of rectangles dated it to the ’80s or ’90s. Back then, I used these tapes to record episodes of The Simpsons, and it had been decades since I’d even held a VHS tape. Immediately, I wondered what recording could be so special that the person held onto it for that long, and in these transient circumstances. Before I could find out, I had to pay $250 to get my car out.
The gas tank was empty, but because it’s a hybrid the battery allowed me to drive out. The tow yard was next to the Corridor of Hope, a district of homeless shelters. Two freeways cut the neighborhood off from the Fremont Street tourism area, and even the air was gritty from the pollution. Hundreds of people were camped on the sidewalks. I had met some of them during the annual homeless count, which I covered once for a newspaper. They preferred not to sleep in shelters, they said, but still camped there to access the food banks and other social services. They called the area “The Corridor of Hopelessness.” Passing through put in perspective how lucky I was, not just to have my car back, but in life in general.
I called my friend Kelly to share the news.
“Did they leave the Creedence?” he asked. He’s one of those BigLebowski quoters.
“The car seems fine, but there’s a bunch of random stuff inside and it smells pretty rank.”
“Probably a vagrant used it as a toilet,” he went on.
“There’s a weird tape,” I interjected. “A videocassette. I have to watch it.” I was already seeking an accomplice. “Maybe the library has a TV-VCR.”
“You sure you want to play that thing in a public library?” Kelly said.
When I got home, I threw away the thief’s clothes. I noticed a pair of children’s sized jeans and a T-shirt for an Army unit that had all the soldiers’ names on the back. I also trashed the cookies and grapes, the unopened junk food I kept. The tape would sit on my mantel for a week while I worked up the will to find a VCR and the nerve to watch it. Noticing the Bad Tape label increased my urgency, but also intensified my dread. Like in The Ring, it felt as if watching the mysterious video would doom me.
***
After I pressed play, Steph and I waited through several minutes of a blank blue screen and white noise. Fast-forwarding, I saw it continued that way for a while. I pressed stop, fast-forward, play. “Bad Tape” was just a bad tape, until, halfway through the reel, a recognizable recording appeared — an ad for Crisco. Then we saw Angela Lansbury. “Is it Murder She Wrote?” I asked. Steph was dying with laughter. It was indeed a teaser for the novelist detective show. The commercials ended and a scene from a soap opera began: A young pregnant woman discussing plans to give up her baby for adoption. The next one showed a boy discussing his father’s murder. It was The Young and the Restless.
Through Google, I figured out that the episode aired in 1989.
Why hang onto soap opera reruns for more than three decades? I grasped for other motives or theories the car thief may have had for the tape, because it didn’t make sense. Over the next few days, I watched the rest. There were episodes of One Life to Live, General Hospital, and the Oprah Winfrey Show — an interview with Bill Cosby.
I was reminded of how my mother used to record Days of Our Lives during her workday. Sometimes, I’d watch it with her at night, me passively doing homework while she ironed and folded laundry. Maybe the car thief held onto the tape for similarly nostalgic reasons?
The 1989 commercials included endearing local ads for Vegas institutions like Circus Circus, the Golden Steer, and a casino school for card dealers and croupiers, suggesting that the tape’s owner was a longtime local.
“Are you sad it’s not a meth addict’s sex tape?” my wife teased.
I didn’t feel sad so much as embarrassed that I’d anticipated the most vile content imaginable when reality couldn’t have proven more banal. Two words, “Bad Tape,” had turned me into one of those people who believe that if a person has committed one crime, they’re capable of anything.
The daily bludgeon of political ads declaring violence an ever-present hazard may have gotten to me during the recent election cycle, though I believed myself immune to such fear-mongering. Working as a fixer for a true-crime investigation had certainly elevated my concerns. More than anything, though, the sudden disappearance of my car set off a fit of anxiety and suspicion that was both stronger and more subtle than I realized.
There was another factor I hated to acknowledge as a freelance journalist. The work biases me toward odd and surprising narratives, the more dangerous the potential story, the more powerful its draw. This sensibility can be helpful when finding and exposing wrongdoing. But there are also those occasions when I only catch myself behaving like an aggressive and mercenary cynic.
There was another factor I hated to acknowledge as a freelance journalist. The work biases me toward odd and surprising narratives, the more dangerous the potential story, the more powerful its draw.
I thought this little reckoning was the end of my stolen car-bad tape drama. But the district attorney’s office had other plans. They called a couple days after I reviewed the video. “Did you receive our subpoena?” a legal assistant said. It would arrive in the mail that afternoon. The D.A.’s office wanted me to testify against the man charged with stealing my car. “He may take a plea,” the individual explained, “but sometimes these public defenders like to play games and wait and see if the victim shows up.”
I was informed that the man had another stolen vehicle charge just a couple weeks earlier; he was out on bail for that offense when the police arrested him with my car. Later, using a court database, I looked him up and saw no other criminal offenses on his record in Nevada before October 2022. It appeared the guy was having a pretty bad month.
When I told my buddy Kelly about the subpoena, he said, “If someone stole my car, I’d go to court and demand the death penalty!” Kelly lost a truck recently in a hit and run, and he doesn’t have the means that I do to pay tow yard fees and car insurance deductibles. Nor does he have a partner who can lend him their vehicle, or a job he can work from home. So, I get it. (Well, not the death penalty part — I get the attitude.)
But I also understand through friends who were on the other side of these proceedings how a felony conviction can haunt a person for the rest of their life, impairing the ability to find work and housing. I’ve seen that derail addiction recovery as it sabotages hopes and dreams to overcome past mistakes.
A few days before the court hearing, I called the district attorney’s office to say that while I intended to honor the subpoena, I was not a tough-on-crime person, and if I could have it my way, the charges would be dropped. I’d gotten my car back undamaged — no harm, no foul, I figured. However, as I began to ramble on with my righteousness, the legal assistant cut me off.
“Let me make sure you understand how this works,” he said. “You’re not the one pressing charges. We are.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “I just want you to know, I’m not showing up to make sure you throw the book at him or whatever. For what it’s worth, I’d prefer the opposite.”
The legal assistant let me know that if the hearing went on as scheduled, I would have an opportunity beforehand to express these feelings to the prosecutor. I doubted that my opinion mattered. They subpoenaed me to confirm in court that the defendant did not have permission to take my car, even though I’d said that much already to the police. There also seemed to be an element of stagecraft going on by which my appearance would spook the defendant and his attorney into accepting a deal that they had thus far resisted. For the purposes of that negotiation, I had already notified a contact in the public defenders’ office that if pressed to speak in a trial as the victim, I would advocate for leniency. Now, the D.A. knew where I stood as well.
On the night before the court hearing, I called a hotline to check if the case was still on the docket. It was not. I assumed they had reached a plea agreement. However, when I looked it up a few weeks later, on that date it showed the case had been “continued for negotiations on possible dismissal.”
But I also understand through friends who were on the other side of these proceedings how a felony conviction can haunt a person for the rest of their life, impairing the ability to find work and housing.
What led to that result? I would hope that for something as minor as a property crime, the victim’s preferences would be secondary to sympathetic or “mitigating” factors, as the attorneys put it, such as duress in the man’s life and that he had a clean record until October, when he apparently decided to steal and live out of cars.
In any case, I was happy to see it moving toward leniency.
My wife pointed out that I had a harder time forgiving my father than the man who actually stole my car. “Well, I don’t know him,” I said. I’m not sure what that suggests about my relationship dynamics, but it can’t be good. For his part, my dad seems humbler and more passive since the incident occurred. We spent time with him and his wife in Denver over the holidays. He did not bring up the car theft, nor did I, but it hung in the air like an object lesson.
At one point, after I borrowed his SUV and refueled it with regular unleaded instead of premium gasoline, he started yelling at me. But he quickly caught himself and muttered something like, “Oh well, nothing to do about it now!”
This was progress. Ever since this all happened, we’re both getting better at letting petty stuff go.
Dan Hernandez is a writer based in Las Vegas. Links to his fiction, essays, and journalism can be found atdanhernandez-writer.com.
***
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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I have had some fascinating conversations on chairlifts — spending ten minutes dangling above a mountain with a stranger is a unique opportunity to get a snapshot into someone else’s life. Therefore, I loved the premise of this piece from Gloria Liu, who spends all day riding a lift and chatting with people. She may not uncover any deep revelations (besides the nightmare of ski traffic) but she does find a common denominator in her eclectic sample: Joy at being on the mountain.
But if few leisure activities demand as much of us, few, if any, match the reward. Over and over again, people told me that despite the effort, or the cost, skiing was worth it: for the time spent outdoors with loved ones, for the opportunities to challenge themselves, for the thrills and the pleasure. We do a lot for this sport, and yet it still delivers, at a payoff ratio that defies logic or rationality. One guy told me that a single untouched powder run last season made all the other lackluster snow-free days worth it. The math of skiing makes no sense to anyone but a skier.
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