Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
The dark side of the transmigrante industry. A meditation on the true meaning of public safety. Staggering new health recommendations around alcohol consumption. Insight into the writers’ strike and an ode to the beauty of bees. For more great reading, be sure to check out our editors’ picks.
Through a special visa program, transmigrantes are able to drive goods and vehicles from the U.S. to Central America via Mexico, without paying for high import and export fees. These truckers, many originally from Central America, are able to connect with their home countries through this line of work, while the industry as a whole transforms America’s excess items into valuable goods abroad. In 2014, one trucker, Guatemalan-born Enrique Orlando León, took a contract job from a Colorado employer to deliver a truck, apparently full of furniture, to his homeland. It was a journey he’d taken many times before, but this time, it all went horribly wrong. Chris Walker recounts the kidnapping, explores the unknowns around Orlando’s capture that still plague him, and describes how this terrifying ordeal has affected his entire family. Through this one man’s story, Walker exposes a dark side of the transmigrante industry. —CLR
Katie Prout | Chicago Reader | April 20, 2023 | 2,890 words
I was going to pick a different story this week, but then a man named Jordan Neely, a beloved Michael Jackson impersonator, was killed on the New York subway. He was unhoused, hungry, tired, distressed. He said as much to a car of people. In response, another passenger put him in a choke hold until he died. The best thing I’ve read about this appalling crime is a short, poignant piece in Defector. As a companion, I recommend this essay by Katie Prout, who recently spent time on Chicago’s public transport system talking to people who live there because they don’t have much other choice. Prout interrogates what politicians, the media, and many American citizens mean when they talk about public safety. Safety for whom, and from what? Who counts as part of the public, and who is cast aside? Jordan Neely should still be alive. He deserved better. America owed him more. —SD
Tim Requarth | Slate | April 23, 2023 | 4,656 words
Not so long ago, a glass of red wine with dinner was considered a health benefit. Apparently there was research to back this moderate approach to tipple. New guidelines from the World Health Organization, the World Heart Federation, and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction tell us something anyone who imbibes, even just a little, already knows: Alcohol is essentially poison. (Did they really have to gang up on us?) “’Mainstream scientific opinion has flipped,’ said Tim Stockwell, a professor at the University of Victoria who was on the expert panel that rewrote Canada’s guidance on alcohol and health. Last month, Stockwell and others published a new major study rounding up nearly 40 years of research in some 5 million patients, concluding that previous research was so conceptually flawed that alcohol’s supposed health benefits were mostly a statistical mirage.” For Slate, science writer Tim Requarth does a great job investigating what led to this staggering discovery. (For more Tim Requarth, be sure to check out “The Final Five Percent,” his award-winning reported personal essay on traumatic brain injury.) —KS
Michael Schulman | The New Yorker | April 29, 2023 | 2,085 words
For the first chunk of adulthood, I thought about my TV-writer friends as having hit some sort of lottery. Here I was, writing about real people and real events like a chump, while they were sitting around a table with their friends, eating junk food and making up stories — and earning ungodly amounts of money (or so I imagined) in the process. Finish a season, go to another show, climb the ladder, rinse, repeat. Then streaming came to town, and my friends’ dispatches from the front started to change. Uncertainty. Anxiety. Short-term gigs with no sense of security. All of a sudden, TV writing started to sound a lot more like the journalism game than I’d thought. Michael Schulman’s recent New Yorker piece bears out that suspicion with a clear, anecdote-driven explanation of exactly how streaming accelerated the devaluation of the creative act. The writers’ strike that began this week isn’t solely about residuals and streaming, of course — AI’s ever-advancing inroads are maybe even more existentially concerning — but after reading this piece you’ll realize that the Final Draft crowd isn’t different from any other labor force whose bosses are privileging profits over people. Seeing your name on a screen doesn’t necessarily pay the rent. —PR
Celia Bell | Texas Highways | May 2, 2023 | 2,847 words
Celia Bell’s warm descriptions make bee society sound lovely, with her bees visiting “flowers or the quiet creek, or, on the hottest days, hang[ing] in clusters like elderberries on the outside of the hive, waiting for a breath of cool air.” The pleasure she finds in their world is not taken for granted. After entering beekeeping during the pandemic, Bell is conscious of how it grounds her and keeps her present. A video game fan, she draws thoughtful comparisons to the rendering of the natural world in gaming. While appreciating the artistry of game developers, she feels outside of her body in their virtual landscapes, whereas sweating in an apiary her body calls out its needs, forcing her to connect with her physical self. Although online life can creep in — a buzzing phone is never far away — the bees open up “the wonder and specificity of the world.” This reflective essay will make you consider which reality you choose to spend your time in. —CW
Audience Award
Do you hear timpani? Here’s the piece our readers loved most this week:
Tyler J. Kelley | Bloomberg Businesweek | April 28, 2023 | 4,851 words
Dave Chappelle has lived full-time in the tiny, idyllic Ohio town of Yellow Springs for more than 15 years; at this point, it’s as much a part of his personal brand as the everpresent cigarette. But as Tyler J. Kelley reports, Chappelle’s impact on Yellow Springs — including his many real estate purchases and a number of questionably zoned live shows — has become a point of contention among townspeople who fear the end of affordability and find themselves torn between pride and preservation. —PR
from Longreads https://ift.tt/kGHoMe3
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/3bKmog8
On May 2, a young man named Jordan Neely was killed on the New York City subway. Neely, who was an unhoused New Yorker, was reportedly behaving erratically, so a fellow passenger, an ex-Marine who as of this writing has not been arrested or named by law enforcement, put him in a choke hold until he died. In the wake of this shocking crime, Aaron Gordon of Vice‘s Motherboard vertical examines how public transit became the front line of America’s housing crisis:
[J]ust because it is a known problem doesn’t mean there is an intelligent, evidence-based public discourse on what to do about it. The fact is that transit agencies have, to varying degrees, been dealing with this question for decades. Paradoxically, many members of the public, politicians, and the political commentariat clamor that transit agencies do something, even though the root cause of homelessness is quite obviously a housing problem and not a transit problem. And that something usually involves the same short-term non-solution that hasn’t worked for decades — ramping up police presence and enforcement at great cost — while ignoring the cheaper and more effective long-term solution of investing in outreach workers, drop-in centers with food and facilities, shelter beds, and supportive housing.
For this article, I spoke to local and national housing and transportation experts, organizations that work closely with the homeless on a daily basis, and transit agencies around the country. I asked them: What are transit agencies doing about homelessness, and what should they be doing?
I found near-universal agreement that the old approach of relying on police-based enforcement — creating a code of conduct that bans specific things homeless people do in public, then arresting them for it — is losing favor. Instead, transit agencies have embraced a model of “partnerships” with existing city agencies and nonprofits that tackle homelessness, a move that sounds sensible on its face but is often used as another excuse to continue to invest little or no money in the problem.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/LXkf8uE
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/3bKmog8
It was a warm winter’s day in San Francisco, and the city’s main port, the Embarcadero, bustled with activity. Men dressed in waistcoats, blazers, and homburg and bowler hats smoked their pipes and fidgeted with their mustaches. Women in elegant blouses and skirts so long they touched the ground sheltered from the sun under broad-brimmed hats trimmed with feathers, ribbons, and flowers. Children clung to their mothers and watched wide-eyed as crewmen hauled more than 1,400 tons of cargo and freight—canned goods, fresh fruit and vegetables, crates of wine—into the forward hatch of the steamship Valencia, soon to depart for Seattle.
The Atavist Magazine, our sister site, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.
Frank Bunker and his family stood in the crowd waiting to board the ship. Today, January 20, 1906, marked the beginning of a new chapter in Bunker’s life. In his late thirties, with dark, neatly parted hair and a clean-shaven face, Bunker had recently accepted a prestigious job as assistant superintendent of the Seattle school district. He had built his reputation as a bright young teacher and administrator in San Francisco—one newspaper touted him as being among “the best educators in the state.” Seattle presented an exciting new opportunity. It was one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, with a population that had exploded from 3,553 people in 1880 to more than 80,000 by 1900. Bunker hoped to leave his mark on the city’s school system.
Seattle was thriving for one reason: gold. With the discovery of bullion in the Yukon and Alaska in the late 1800s, Seattle became known as the “gateway to gold” among prospectors looking to head north and make it rich. In a few short years, the frenzy had transformed Seattle from a frontier town into a metropolitan hub. Real estate, shipbuilding, and other economic sectors were booming.
Industry was why F. J. Campbell, his wife, and their 16-year-old daughter were traveling to Seattle on the Valencia. Campbell was of average build, with a finely groomed mustache. He had been employed as an agent by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in Alameda, just across the bay from San Francisco, until he struck up a friendship with an employee of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, who convinced him that they could start their own machine business in Seattle. Eager to chase his fortune, Campbell quit his job, packed up his family, and secured passage north.
The Bunkers and Campbells were among the roughly 100 passengers booked on the January 20 journey. Originally, a ship called City of Puebla was scheduled to carry them to Seattle, but the vessel’s tail shaft had snapped on a recent voyage, so the Pacific Coast Steamship Company commissioned the Valencia in its place. The iron-hulled ship boasted three decks, a single smokestack, and two masts, as well as a 1,000-horsepower engine that allowed it to reach a cruising speed of 11 knots. The ship looked sleek, with a bow stretching 100 feet long. Because the Valencia was designed to run the warm Atlantic waters between New York and Venezuela, however, it could be challenging to guide through the notoriously volatile seas of the Pacific Northwest, where it had been sailing for the past several years.
Tasked with getting the Valencia safely to port was a crew of more than 60, led by Captain Oscar Marcus Johnson. A man of slender, rigid frame, Johnson came from a family of mariners. Born in Norway, he had traveled to America as a teenager. He started as a common seaman and worked his way up. Now 40, Marcus had been married to his wife, Mary, for five years. The couple resided with their three-year-old daughter on Powell Street, which connected San Francisco’s main fishing wharf to Market Street. Mary worried about her husband when he went to sea; she looked forward to the moment when she could wave to him from their front window upon his return.
Mary wasn’t the only woman on Powell Street anxious for her husband’s well-being. Among the Johnsons’ neighbors were the Valencia’s fourth officer, Herman Aberg, and his wife. According to Mrs. Aberg, not long before Herman departed on the trip to Seattle, a fortune-teller arrived at their doorstep, knelt, and laid out what the Seattle Daily Times later called “ancient grease-covered cards.” The fortune-teller predicted that Herman would soon be shipwrecked, leaving Mrs. Aberg a widow. Herman laughed. Mrs. Aberg begged him not to go on the journey, but Herman went anyway.
Mrs. Aberg would describe the unheeded premonition later, when Herman did not return to Powell Street, meeting his end in the cold, cruel ocean hundreds of miles from home. It would prove just one haunting detail in a story full of them.
The fortune-teller predicted that Herman would soon be shipwrecked, leaving Mrs. Aberg a widow. Herman laughed. Mrs. Aberg begged him not to go on the journey.
A person prone to superstition might be forgiven for thinking that the Valencia was cursed. Built in 1882, the shipwas fired upon the following year near the island of Curaçao, and again four years later, this time by a Spanish warship just off the Cuban coast. During the Spanish-American War, it was leased to the U.S. Army and used to transport troops to the Philippines as part of an unofficial effort to aid rebels who, like their Cuban counterparts, were vying for independence from Spain. When the conflict ended, the Valencia’s owners put it to work transporting gold-crazed passengers to and from Alaska and the Yukon, but the ship’s luck didn’t change in the new environment. In March 1898, during its maiden voyage to Alaska’s Copper River, rough seas and poor food quality almost led to a mutiny. In February 1903, another steamship rammed into the Valencia a quarter-mile from Seattle’s harbor, nearly wrecking it. And in 1905, Captain Johnson ran it aground just outside St. Michael, Alaska; the crew had to move 75 tons of cargo onto another vessel before they could free the Valencia.
It is impossible to know if this legacy was on Captain Johnson’s mind after passengers finished boarding the Valencia and the ship sailed away from the Embarcadero, past Yerba Buena Island, and through the Golden Gate to the open ocean. Though Johnson occasionally commanded the Valencia, taking the ship up north during the summer months, he had only taken the route to Seattle as captain of a different steamship, called Queen. The trip required sailing through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, part of the stretch of ocean between southern Oregon and the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where hundreds if not thousands of ships had wrecked by the early 20th century, earning it an ominous moniker: Graveyard of the Pacific.
The region’s unpredictable weather and ocean currents often pushed ships toward the wet, rugged, foggy coastline, creating a navigational nightmare. The farther north a ship traveled, the worse the conditions tended to get, particularly in winter. Unlike the Atlantic coast, which had numerous harbors where ships could shelter during storms, the shore of the Pacific provided little refuge. Between San Francisco and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a distance of approximately 660 nautical miles, there were maybe ten harbors that could be used by ships the size of the Valencia, if conditions were favorable. If a vessel was in distress, running aground on a sandy beach was rarely an option, as there were few such beaches to speak of. Meanwhile, of the 279 U.S. coastal lifesaving stations, only a handful were on the Pacific.
Johnson and his crew planned to keep the ship between five and twenty miles of the coastline for the duration of the voyage. They hoped to reach the Cape Flattery lighthouse on Tatoosh Island, marking the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, within 48 hours. They hoped, too, for calm seas. In November 1875, the steamship Pacificsank 80 miles south of Cape Flattery in under an hour, taking as many as 300 souls to their deaths.
The first day of the Valencia’s voyage was uneventful; the ship steamed smoothly into the starry night. By roughly 5:15 a.m. on Sunday, it had traveled 190 miles and passed the lighthouse at Cape Mendocino, the westernmost point in California. It was the last time the people aboard would have a clear view of the shore until they reached Washington State. Upon passing Cape Mendocino, it was typical for a ship’s captain to chart a course to the Umatilla lightship, 477 miles north. The lightship was at a critical junction in the voyage to Seattle, a beacon signaling that Cape Flattery, and a ship’s necessary turn eastward, was just 14 miles away.
As the Valencia steamed up the coast, the weather worsened. On Sunday afternoon, the wind shifted from a northerly breeze to southeastern gusts. Gray clouds gathered over the ocean, and as the sky became hazy, the seas grew heavy.
At 5:30 p.m., Johnson noted in the Valencia’s logbook that the ship, then ten miles offshore, had passed Cape Blanco on the Oregon coast, meaning that it had traveled 335 miles from San Francisco. However, second officer Peter E. Peterson would later say that no one on the ship’s bridge could see the Cape Blanco lighthouse, perched atop 200-foot chalky-white cliffs.
The sun briefly appeared on Monday morning, but conditions declined as the day went on. Peterson later said that visibility reduced to the point that he could see only a couple of miles into the distance. It was evident that Captain Johnson was starting to feel anxious. That evening, around 8 p.m., he asked Peterson, “When do you think we are going to make Umatilla lightship?”
Peterson was an experienced seaman who had worked for the Pacific Coast Steamship Company for nearly a decade. He had started as a sailor on the ship Pomona, where he lost a finger. By 1906, Peterson knew the route from San Francisco to Seattle well, having traveled it more than 100 times, including on the City of Puebla as second mate.
Now Peterson studied the Valencia’s log, an instrument trailing behind the ship to help estimate its speed, and concluded that they had traveled 307 miles beyond Cape Blanco. In theory that meant the ship was only 13 miles away from the Umatilla lightship and should pass it sometime around 9:30 p.m. However, Johnson and first officer W. Holmes believed that the Valencia’s log was overrunning by approximately 6 percent—in other words, they thought that the ship was traveling slower than the log showed. It’s not clear why Johnson and Holmes held that belief, though Johnson’s previous experience in the area may have held a clue. He had commanded ships in the area during spring and summer, when northerly winds prevailed. In winter the opposite was true; winds from the south propelled ships up the Pacific coast at higher speeds.
Peterson told the captain that he trusted the log, given the weather conditions and his knowledge of the ocean at this time of year. If anything, he suspected that the log was underrunning. But he did not press the point. This was Peterson’s first trip on the Valencia; he had joined the ship’s crew at the last minute, to replace an officer who had been transferred to another vessel. Peterson knew virtually none of the men on board, save for a few servers, two cooks, and a fireman. He had never worked with any of the other officers, and it was a violation of the accepted order on any ship to defy the captain. Later Peterson would say that he took no part in the calculations required to plot the Valencia’s course—that was Johnson’s and Holmes’s responsibility.
By 9 p.m. on Monday, the Valencia’s logshowed that the ship had traveled 652 miles, which would have put it very close to the Umatilla lightship. However, Johnson was adamant that the lighthouse was still some 40 miles away. Privately, Peterson believed that the Valencia was likely past the lightship, nearing the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Around this time, Johnson ordered a course change that would bring the ship closer to the coastline. He also told the crew to gauge the depth of the ocean beneath the ship every half-hour by taking sounding measurements. To do this, the men dropped an 1,800-foot cable into the water until it hit bottom. At 9:30 p.m., the crew detected a sounding of 480 feet. An hour later, they measured 360 feet. The shallower water likely meant that the ship was getting closer to land.
By 11 p.m., the ship was moving dead slow, just four or five miles per hour. Johnson was sure the Valencia was approaching Cape Flattery. The captain stood on the bridge, waiting to hear a fog signal bellow from shore. No sound came.
Peterson later claimed that Johnson and Holmes had discussed taking the vessel west and waiting in the open ocean until daylight to figure out their exact location, but Johnson never gave that order. Instead, the Valencia continued chugging east. The sounding measurement at 11:15 p.m. was 240 feet. At 11:35 it was 180. Ten minutes later, the ocean’s depth was just over 140 feet.
These were not the expected readings for the area where Johnson thought the ship was—the water was getting too shallow too quickly. Panicked, he changed course again, plotting a northwest route. Soon after, Peterson spied a dark object on the ship’s starboard side. He ran across the bridge and pointed it out to the captain.
When Johnson saw the dark silhouette, he cried out, “In the name of God, where are we?” He ordered Peterson to direct the crew to turn the ship “hard to starboard.” Peterson sprinted to the telegraph to issue the instruction.
The ship turned sharply, but it was too late. Just a few minutes before midnight, the Valencia collided with a rocky reef.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/V0OFmiL
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/13ySXsm
In 1986, Barbara Lowe won five games of Jeopardy! in a row, qualifying for the Tournament of Champions. But she didn’t appear in the tournament, and her games vanished from reruns of the show — only recently did Jeopardy! uber-fans recover and digitize the only known recordings of her episodes. In pop culture lore, Lowe became a villain: Rumors circulated that she had lied on her application for the show, violated contestant policies, and behaved badly on set. Claire McNear, who published a book about Jeopardy! in 2020, tracked Lowe down to try to get the bottom of what happened and found that the short answer might be, well, sexism:
In 1993, Harry Eisenberg, a writer turned producer during the first seven years of the Jeopardy! reboot, published a dishy account of his time at the program. Inside Jeopardy!: What Really Goes on at TV’s Top Quiz Show swiftly landed Eisenberg in hot water with his former employer, chiefly over his description of the show systematically altering game material to provide easier clues for female contestants — an act that would amount to a violation of fairness rules enshrined by the Federal Communications Commission in the wake of the 1950s quiz show scandals. Jeopardy! denied that the show did any such thing; a later edition of Eisenberg’s book dropped the claim.
But both versions of the book featured Eisenberg’s reflections on Lowe. Eisenberg radiated a strong dislike: Lowe, he wrote, “appeared rather strange” and prompted the most letters objecting to a contestant’s “mannerisms and behavior” that the show had ever received. Eisenberg described a fractious moment after Lowe rang in on a clue reading: “Sons of millionaires who killed Bobby Franks as a ‘scientific experiment.’”
“Her response was, ‘Who were Leopold and Leeb?’” Eisenberg wrote. “Alex ruled her incorrect, at which point she immediately shot back, ‘Leeb is just the German pronunciation of Loeb.’ Rather than get into an argument with her right in the middle of the show, Alex went ahead and gave it to her.”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/rqvNnDX
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/13ySXsm
After turning to alcohol to cope with Bipolar Disorder and a series of personal losses, lawyer Craig Coyner ended up becoming homeless on the streets of Bend, Oregon, a town in which he once served as mayor.
He had known Craig Coyner for more than 50 years, watching with admiration as the man from one of the most prominent families in Bend, Ore., rose through an acclaimed career — as a prosecutor, a defense lawyer and then a mayor who helped turn the town into one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities.
Now, at age 75, Mr. Coyner was occupying a bed at the shelter on Second Street, his house lost to foreclosure, his toes gnarled by frostbite, his belongings limited to a tub of tattered clothing and books on the floor next to his bed.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/kzuRbit
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/13ySXsm
Through a special visa program, freelance truckers called transmigrantes are able to drive goods and vehicles from the U.S. to Central America via Mexico, without paying for high import-export fees. These truckers, many of whom have Central American roots, are able to connect with their home countries through this line of work, while the industry as a whole transforms America’s unwanted items into valuable goods abroad. One transmigrante, Guatemalan-born Enrique Orlando León, took a contract job in 2014 from his Colorado employer to drive a truck full of furniture to his homeland. It would be a routine trip like he’d done many times before. But this job went horribly wrong.
For 5280, Chris Walker recounts León’s kidnapping and its aftermath, and how this terrifying experience has affected León and his family. And it’s through León’s story that Walker is able to expose a very dark side of the transmigrante industry.
Even now—years later—Orlando still hears rumors about what may have been concealed in the truck’s cargo, including guns or even up to $2 million in cash hidden inside pieces of furniture. If that much money had gone missing, though, Orlando doesn’t think he’d be alive—or that he’d have been able to negotiate his release for such a comparatively small sum. While his kidnappers originally asked for $15,000, Orlando says he negotiated it down to $7,000 by telling his captors they could keep the school bus he’d driven down to sell in Guatemala. Only in retrospect does it appear that some outside factor—perhaps his family’s calls to local Guatemalan police—saved him from a shallow, unmarked grave.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/2YeyxaC
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/k43Cwiu
This is a very honest and personal account of a struggle with weight. After reaching 460 pounds, Mike Bowers felt like a prisoner in his own body and decided he needed to navigate the complicated path to weight loss surgery.
Here’s the thing about being overweight: It impacts every aspect of your life. Depending on the situation, a thousand questions run through my head. Will the seatbelts fit? Are we sitting at a booth — will the table be movable? A table with chairs? How close to other tables?
What airline are we flying — what’s their policy on customers of size? How much is a second seat? How does that compare to first class? How long is the flight? How much can I eat or drink on the flight without having to go to the bathroom? That’ll be a tight fit …
from Longreads https://ift.tt/imSkg5Q
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/k43Cwiu
Hammond, Indiana, a working-class suburb of 77,000, is essentially a parking lot and waiting area for Norfolk Southern trains. Sometimes these trains, many of them quite long, are parked for hours or days, and no one ever knows when they’ll start moving again. These trains disrupt and endanger the lives of all the people who live in Hammond, especially children, who end up crawling through or underneath trains in order to get to school.
The problem of stalled trains and blocked crossings has existed for decades, but as ProPublica and InvestigateTV report in this investigation — with shocking video and photography — it’s gotten worse.
Lamira Samson, Jeremiah’s mother, faced a choice she said she has to make several times a week. They could walk around the train, perhaps a mile out of the way; she could keep her 8-year-old son home, as she sometimes does; or they could try to climb over the train, risking severe injury or death, to reach Hess Elementary School four blocks away.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/X5FAKBD
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/k43Cwiu
When Khmer Rouge soldiers came to the village where Phoeun You and his family lived in Cambodia’s northwest, they fled on foot across the border to Thailand. At the time, You was just a toddler. In 1980, the family moved to the U.S. as refugees and were granted legal permanent resident status. Eventually, after relocating to Long Beach, California, You fell into gang life, and at 19, in 1995, he shot and killed a teenage boy. Over the years, You has felt deep remorse, has reformed himself, and has been able to mentor other men working through trauma. Still, after being granted parole after serving 26 years of a 35-to-life sentence, state prison officials handed him over to immigration agents, and he was deported back to Phnom Penh.
Joshua Sharpe’s piece about You’s life, deportation, and current transition to life in Cambodia for the San Francisco Chronicle is told with empathy and care. Sharpe’s narrative weaves You’s past and present, effectively telling a nuanced story of a man “caught in the gap between America’s ideals and the limits of its compassion.”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/3WF6SQM
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/k43Cwiu
New guidelines from the World Health Organization, the World Heart Federation, and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction have reversed the decades-old belief that alcohol in moderation offered some health benefits. Science writer Tim Requarth investigates this staggering new discovery.
The results live in all of our heads: There’s nothing wrong with a glass of wine with dinner every night, right? After all, years of studies have suggested that small amounts of alcohol can favorably tweak cholesterol levels, keeping arteries clear of gunk and reducing coronary heart disease. Moderate alcohol use has been endorsed by many doctors and public health officials for years. We’ve all seen the Times headlines.
Now, 25 years later, you’re likely feeling a fair bit of whiplash. According to new guidelines released in recent months by the World Health Organization, the World Heart Federation, and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction, the safest level of drinking is—brace yourself—not a single drop.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/rMAPoRa
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/k43Cwiu
Samuel Ernest| Longreads | May 2, 2023 | 19 minutes (4,261 words)
for Josh
In the dorm, friends were playing the new record of a local band, Too Bright by Perfume Genius, and I couldn’t tell if I liked it. The songs were tender and fierce, sometimes one or the other, but often both at once, the singer’s voice trembling like someone who has ever only whispered learning to shout.
Having followed their career, I can now see how tenderness and ferocity have characterized all of Perfume Genius’ albums in different ways as their sound has grown louder — from their first album, Learning, with songs like memories overheard from another room, through the most recent, Ugly Season. Mike Hadreas, the lead singer, has risen from the keys where he used to sit hunched over during their shows. Now, he dances while he sings, almost crumpling under the weight of sound, sex, and spirit — exuberant and free.
But when I first heard their music, Perfume Genius threatened the tentative treaty I was negotiating between gayness and faith. It was too confident in refusing purity and cleanness and whatever I believed about sex. “Queen” and “My Body” swelled from the speakers, pounding into my own carefully guarded body. “No family is safe when I sashay.” A warning. “I wear my body like a rotted peach. / You can have it if you can handle the stink.” A curdled cruise. I didn’t listen long.
I called my pastor before I came out. The blog post was drafted — a carefully written confession and acceptance of my gay desire — but I was sitting on it, unsure. For years, I had cultivated about my person the opposite of obscenity. Coming out would sex myself in public. I feared that almost as much as I craved it. “Sometimes telling one story now prevents us from telling a better story later,” my pastor told me (pastor speak for don’t do it). It felt like a rebuke. Over ice cream, a lesbian friend told me to ignore that advice, so I posted it. The story received over 2000 views by the following morning, surely proof that what my pastor said had been wrong or irrelevant: It was a good story.
Coming out would sex myself in public. I feared that almost as much as I craved it
This was my sophomore year of college. But as I’ve reflected on my coming-out story a decade later — not the blog post so much as what writing it and sharing it did to me — something about his words seems true. I made a self, and since then, I have struggled to make sense of myself. The meaning I found in my coming-out story — in repeating it to my family, friends, professors, therapists, anyone who asked me to coffee at my college, and the anonymous cloud of blog readers — the story and its meaning came to feel final, resistant to reinterpretation.
In coming out, my life ended. It was a personal apocalypse of many smaller revelations. The struggle that had defined me had reached its denouement of freedom — and what comes after freedom?
My mother says that I kicked her gut to the beat of the church organ when she was pregnant with me. At 6, I started playing violin in church. By high school, middle-aged women were approaching me after the service to tell me how my playing had lifted their spirits, had been the Spirit to them.
None of them knew I had discovered gay porn around 12 or 13. According to the orthodoxies of evangelical porn literature, the brief clips I watched rewired my brain from straight to gay: So great is the power of men on couches and beds and in forests, so powerful the idolatrous iconography of dick and ass and big ol’ man tiddies. Growing up in a rural suburb of Grand Rapids, porn was the only place I could reliably see glimpses of men together in any desirous way. Easy to contain, easy to hide. And necessary to hide in a subculture built on concealing sex and desire behind a bridal veil, so I split myself in two. I hated my body.
I made a self, and since then, I have struggled to make sense of myself.
Playing violin became the public counterpart to my private pleas that God would restore what I had ruined. When I prayed, I fell prostrate on my bedroom floor. God was a gentle pressure I felt surrounding my body, holding me together. When I played violin, God swept me into my sound, projecting me outward.
I experienced symptoms of anxiety throughout middle school and high school — sudden weight loss, mouthfuls of canker sores, spitting up bile — but the strain between my public and private lives pulled at my body in a new way during my freshman year of college. It came for my sound, my means of worship. Playing in the school orchestra or with piano accompaniment at department practicums, there were moments when I could hear nothing but my own instrument and heartbeat. The muscles in my bow arm would seize up, giving the graced and highly trained instrument of my wrist all the nuance of a falling ax, chopping out notes in a fucked forte.
The muscles in my bow arm would seize up, giving the graced and highly trained instrument of my wrist all the nuance of a falling ax, chopping out notes in a fucked forte.
Beta blockers calmed my heart, but they also wiped my memory. During a practicum performance of Tartini’s Violin Concerto in D minor, I forgot my cadenza — the second, long one. Although many are now codified in sheet music, historically, cadenzas are moments when the performer improvises, so I made up something on the spot. I followed an instinctive form of theme and variation, flowing through a modulation, out of D minor into D major. But I forgot to modulate back. The cadenza, intended to show off my mastery of technique in harmonic fireworks, ended on a wildly dissonant F#. To my shock and glee, no one noticed that I had accidentally performed my first true cadenza except for my accompanist, who drowned out my dissonance by pounding the tonic chord on her piano. It was both a failure and a discovery: Without my sheet music or memory, I could lurch forward anyway, relying on the technique I had spent most of my life internalizing.
It was both a failure and a discovery: Without my sheet music or memory, I could lurch forward anyway, relying on the technique I had spent most of my life internalizing.
Strike an A on the piano, and the third string of a well-tuned violin will sound. Or any two strings tuned to any one pitch. This is one way to check whether stringed instruments are in tune relative to each other. It’s called sympathetic resonance. Hermann von Helmholtz, a 19th-century German scientist who studied the physics of perception, offers a theory of it:
This phenomenon is always found in those bodies which when [] set in motion by any impulse, continue to perform a long series of vibrations before they come to rest. When these bodies are struck gently, but periodically, although each blow may be separately quite insufficient to produce a sensible motion in the vibratory body … very large and powerful oscillations may result.
“Vibratory body” sounds too accidentally animal to describe a musical instrument or a tuning fork, but animal bodies vibrate, too: At the gut punch of a loud bass, the fleshy viscera within you throbs. Incidentally, violin strings were once made with catgut, and you can still buy catgut strings. The name is a misnomer (the biological material in the core of these strings typically comes from sheep or goats) but tell a kid bored by stringed instruments or classical music, “They used to make strings from catgut. Go ahead — pluck it.” It resonates.
A 2015 article at Audioholics summarizes studies of the physical sensations produced by low-frequency sounds. Seventeen-hertz (Hz) tones cause anxiety. At 18.98 Hz, the human eye resonates, causing some people to see ghosts. Around 1980, an Air Force laboratory in Ohio anesthetized some animals and discovered that dogs, when “subjected to frequencies from 0.5 Hz to 8 Hz” at around 172 decibels, experience decreased respiration. Below 1 Hz, their independent breathing ceases. “The animals were not suffocating,” the reviewer, James Larson, assures us. “What was occurring was the pressure waves were so large that air molecules were being exchanged between the ambient air and the lungs of the dog, so, in a manner of speaking, the sound waves were breathing for the dog.” Artificial ventilation, or a gentle pet for the lungs.
Listening to Perfume Genius wasn’t difficult because the sound was antagonistic. It was the music’s sympathy that I was afraid of, the way it breathed for me. Is there a frequency to loose faggotry coiled deep in the gut?
It was the music’s sympathy that I was afraid of, the way it breathed for me.
A former lover of mine, a beautiful poet, saw Perfume Genius perform with a friend when they toured with Too Bright. The bass of “My Body” rattled his friend.
I wear my body like a rotted peach.
He couldn’t stand it.
You can have it if you handle the stink.
The performance left him visibly uncomfortable.
I’m as open as a gutted pig.
I imagine the two of them standing together,
On the small of every back,
his friend wilting, shaken by the sex of it —
you’ll see a picture of me
my lover alert, life gurgling up from his bowels.
wearing my body.
Spring break freshman year, my dad and I took a road trip, winding down the West Coast’s wormy highways from Seattle to Los Angeles and back. I had told my parents over winter break that I was addicted to gay porn, and we had spent considerable time processing together. In the rental car, my dad played a sermon our pastor had given on God’s will.
Get the Longreads Top 5 Email
Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
The sermon shifted something. I had always felt God’s will for me was in phantom futures: the violinist I could be, the straight man I could become. The relationship between now and then, a runaway train. But, according to the pastor, God’s will is not some rickety bridge we are to fear falling from. It is a field to enjoy.
I stopped praying for God to change me and started asking God to reveal to me who I am. I received the good news and began telling people I was gay. I shared my testimony. I came out again and again. My parents and friends didn’t disown me — I didn’t know that could happen. I began praying for God’s guidance in how to tell this story, and midway through my sophomore year, I wrote and shared the blog post.
In coming out, I found some of the freedom I was supposed to find. A new orientation to the world, allowing myself to look at men outside a computer screen for the first time, and it was springtime in Seattle, cutoffs and muscle shirts exposing limbs, the college boys playing on the hill behind the dorm, the fit and furry young father wearing only short shorts, bicycling with his baby in tow across the Fremont Bridge.
It wasn’t all revelation. I lost my sense of God’s close presence. At church, I no longer knew when to stand up and raise my hands in surrender to God, because I had surrendered the primary thing I believed that God had asked of me: the hatred of my body, my useless genitals and affections. I looked around the sanctuary, feeling odd, disconnected. My hands and arms could only pose.
I kept blogging for a while, but as I started to date, I became afraid to write about myself. Talking about my body, my love interests, my slow stumbling into sexual being would have scared away my audience. I was good at being respectable. A model gay Christian. An enthusiastic participant in college admissions panels. To say anything more would have discredited my experience as a godly one.
After college, I began my masters in religion and literature at a divinity school on the other coast. My divinity school was more mainline than evangelical. This made sense for me, as I had become an Episcopalian, but it felt strange not to speak regularly with others about my relationship with God. There was no appropriate occasion to share life stories with others, so the me who appeared in divinity classes was unknown and unconditioned by the story I had crafted. Starting over somewhere new could have been an opportunity for self-recreation, but I had just done that. My story was over. Life felt formless and void.
Help us fund our next story
We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.
It was strange to find myself still getting up and doing things, attending morning prayer, taking classes, experimenting with my wardrobe, getting on the hookup apps, meeting up with men, discovering I could be desired, wearing my body with increasing confidence, legs out, chest poppin’, pop music in my earbuds, pounding down the sidewalk like you knew I was fucking, returning stares with a glare of my own, on the way to Wednesday night mass in a frankly conservative wool pencil skirt that burst open as I carefully waddled up the div school stairs like a mermaid standing on her fins, my thighs, thick from exercise at the gym, escaping into their fullness, the mermaid tail torn in two. I had no idea how to make sense of who I was becoming.
At my div school, most of the queer work happened in theology, so I gradually shifted disciplines. From literature, I had wanted a model. I wanted to find that someone had written my story so I could know what came next. I followed the protagonists of James Baldwin, John Rechy, Jeanette Winterson, and Andrew Holleran into cities and rooms and beds and arms I never would have found in following Jesus as a straight boy. But where Christianity is present in these books, it is something to leave, and its God is, if anything, a persistent ghost, and that never felt possible to me.
I was living in the divinity school’s apartments, starting to read theology in earnest, when No Shape came out and I tried listening to Perfume Genius again.
While recording the first song, “Otherside,” the band set up the recording studio like a church. Shawn Everett, the album’s sound engineer, says, “We talked about how it could feel like a lonely church up in the Ozarks, this sad church where most of the town had died. There’s a few remaining people sadly singing the songs they’ve been singing forever.” Hadreas says, “We arranged lines of chairs like pews and had each person sing seated, facing a microphone at the front of the room. Everyone in the studio sang, including some friends of the engineer that were nearby.” The space is set up like a church, the chairs like pews, but the singing is reverent, the sound is holy — metaphor disperses into actuality — the lyrics are a prayer.
“Otherside” was recorded using a piece of technology called a binaural head. It captures the spatiality of sound. With earphones in, one takes the place of the head, experiencing the sounds as they were imparted to it. It begins with piano. Muffled broken triads descend from above at the listener’s left. Then from all sides, the congregation sings paradoxes of faith: that one may be lost,
Even your going,
yet found;
let it find you.
that one may be alone,
Even in hiding,
yet known;
find it knows you.
that the one who finds and knows you
Rocking you to sleep
is of a different order, a different kind, a different kind of place.
from the Otherside.
There is a beat of silence, then an explosion of sound like creation.
Perfume Genius’s religious aesthetics and lyrics fascinate critics. In a 2015 interview, Randy Shulman tells Hadreas, “At times [your songs] reach almost ecclesiastic height. The thing that kept popping into mind listening to [Too Bright] especially was religion. The arrangements at times evolve into an almost spiritual, heavenly rapture. Why that style?” Hadreas responds, “I’ve always really responded to hymns, choral music and spiritual music. Even though I’m not Christian, I’ve listened to Christian music. It’s weird to have a taste for that, but to not feel included in it. And so, I reconcile that with the music I make. I make music that feels old or spiritual, but I am included in it, people like me are included in it.” E. Alex Jung asks a similar question of Hadreas in a 2017 interview titled “Perfume Genius Wants to Take You to Queer Church,” and Hadreas says, “I like when people are singing about God and death and the Devil and like fucking big shit.”
There is a beat of silence, then an explosion of sound like creation.
In some sense, then, the spiritual grandeur of “Otherside” is no surprise. Like many queer artists, Perfume Genius makes the stories and art that have been withheld from queer people — they make sacred music for faggots. Churches often attempt to sweep queer people from the margins into the center through rituals of transformation, paring down desire and excess through ex-gay therapy or celibacy or marriage. What can’t be cut off is covered, like robes for the choir. But Hadreas disrobes. He sings his hymns with those the church marks sexually unclean, those who remain resistant to the shapes of queer life legitimized by the church, the shapeless and the taking shape. There is access for them, too. For us. There is grace in strange places, and knowledge of this grace is the catgut core of Perfume Genius.
Critics and Hadreas agree that No Shape marked a new moment for the band. Owen Myers writes, “If Perfume Genius’s previous albums acknowledged the scars we bear from the heteropatriarchy, this new record gestures towards how we might carve out space within it and flourish anyway.” In addition, Hadreas’s spiritual vision approaches clarity through No Shape. Robin Hilton interviewed Hadreas for NPR upon the album’s release. The singer walks through the album, song by song, providing commentary and backstory. About “Otherside,” he says,
Hymns have always sounded like sung spells to me. I never felt included in the magic of the God songs I heard growing up—I knew I was going to hell before anyone ever told me that I was. People found comfort in this all-knowing source, but I felt frightened and found out. I developed some weird and very dramatic complexes. It took me a long time to not think of the universe as a judgmental debit-credit system. I haven’t completely shaken it, but I no longer think that I am overdrawn with God. Grace is not something you earn, it’s always there. I find this idea a lot more fun.
The fascination with hymns and the feelings of exclusion from their world are familiar from earlier interviews, but there’s a new thought here, as well, or a revision. A sense that a debt to God has vanished. Perfume Genius’ music and interviews began to represent for me the possibility of living beyond my inherited world of heterosexed faith and life. The second song on No Shape, especially.
Following “Otherside,” “Slip Away” thrums with the excitement of hiding, finding, and being carried by queer love on the peripheries of a straight world. Hadreas sings,
Don’t hold back
I want to break free—
God is singing through your body
and I’m carried by the sound.
The joy of it hit first. I danced in my div school apartment’s kitchen.
Every drum,
every single beat—
they were born from your body
and I’m carried by the sound.
Hadreas has described the song as his version of a Springsteen song. It rollicks, taking you with it.
Oh love,
They’ll never break the shape we take.
Oh
Baby let all them voices slip away.
If from literature I had wanted a model for gay life, with theology, I’ve wanted to learn how to live in the wake of theological models that never quite fit. I want to slip, rather, into a new configuration of faithful life and narrate what this new life is that I’ve found in emancipation from heterosexuality — not what new life in Christ should be, but what it actually has been and might be.
If from literature I had wanted a model for gay life, with theology, I’ve wanted to learn how to live in the wake of theological models that never quite fit.
For Christians, the shape of new life is normed by the shape of one particular life. To be a Christian is to be remade in the shape of — did you know — Jesus Christ, both sacramentally, through participation in baptism and communion, as well as morally, through following his teachings. The goal is, in some way, to imitate Christ. But what does it look like to imitate Christ? It is not difficult to imagine the ways such a task could be either dangerous or, frankly, boring.
Around the time I was listening to “Slip Away” on repeat, I read Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology by Kathryn Tanner, one of my professors. In a chapter called “The Shape of Human Life,” Tanner says to imitate Christ does not mean replicating moments from Christ’s life or living by some formula. She writes,
We follow Christ where he leads in our own lives, shaped as those lives already are by the forces of contemporary times and cultures. Christ’s life is extended in new directions as it incorporates our lives within it. … exactly where we will be led in Christ is not easily foreseen from the specifics of Jesus’ own life as those reflect an historical distance of two thousand years. … we must do as Jesus did and live out a union with God in ways appropriate to our own circumstances.
I find Tanner’s theology freeing, particularly her refusal of conformity to Christ as an imposition of a pre-known form and her insistence on context. She doesn’t sever the relationship between Jesus’ life and the contemporary Christian’s; rather, she suggests that faith may lead to unobvious lives, in which a person’s particularities are preserved, not obliterated. Being somewhere unexpected does not mean one has been hewn from the body of Christ, but that Christ’s body is found … somewhere unexpected.
Tanner’s theology describes a life of grace, not debt. For theologians, grace is what the created being finds in God and is given by God, including and beyond the gift of creation. It is not only a response to sin, but it is that, too. As Hadreas says, it is not earned. God’s gifts are all that God bestows upon creation and to all people, regardless of any thinkable hierarchies of deservingness and faithfulness. Receiving them does not place one in debt to God, because, Tanner writes, “The gift of salvation in Christ has no conditions; there is nothing we must do or be in particular.” We are not, in fact, overdrawn with God. The universe is not a “judgmental debit-credit system.” The only fitting response, according to Tanner, is to give of one’s goods freely to others. And the body is one such good.
Following the first chorus of “Slip Away,” the drums break into a pounding sprint. The lovers are in flight.
Don’t look back,
I want to break free—
If you never see ’em coming,
You never have to hide
.
Not only are the lovers carried by God’s song within them, they are fleeing someone.
Take my hand,
take my everything.
If we only got a moment,
give it to me now.
The future is unsure; but at least a moment can be secured, so the singer offers himself to his lover for what time they have. “Slip Away” ends with the carnivalesque jangling of a piano modified to sound like an unhinged harpsichord — even the instruments must be transformed to tell of this love.
I am four years into my doctoral program — a decade since I first heard Perfume Genius — and I had never seen them in concert until recently, when a queer friend from religious studies invited me to go with them and their friends. The stage was strewn with tufts of white tulle and a chair covered in knotted rope. During an extended instrumental, Mike Hadreas grabbed the tulle and wrapped his body in it, part mummy, part bride, part spirit, part priest. Muttering to himself, Hadreas wormed around the stage, lap danced the knotted chair, crawled under it, threw it aside, still shrouded. The audience watched, captive, some with confusion, many with wonder and love. It was a strange and intimate struggle, an ecstatic ascent and descent at the same time. When he finally shed his tufts of tulle, we all shrieked.
A week or two after the concert, I had a vision while walking my dog. I saw a cocoon of shining translucent fibers, and I knew I was inside of it. I felt the physical presence of the prayers of those who love me. I knew the cocoon’s fibers were God’s will. As I neared home, I expanded against the boundaries of my skin, pushing outwards but not fully out.
Every testimony, every coming-out story, attempts a transformation of life. But narration is not life itself, exactly, or its transformation; it is a cocooning. From it, a truer shape may emerge. Which means our stories don’t end like we think they will. In lieu of an end, grace brings revision, a conversion of form. I don’t know how to tell a life under grace, but I’ve been taking notes:
sex, grace, and sin don’t work by formula
coming out is a gradual reckoning with what desiring men might do to my life
conversion is a gradual reckoning with what desiring God might do to my life
the two create new circumstances for each other to make sense of
it is ok to pose, to try out new postures while you acclimate to new revelations
faith can look like this
as I walk, I bounce, chest out, wrist upturned, and a world hangs from it
Samuel Ernest resides in New Haven, CT. He is a doctoral candidate in theology at Yale. More of his work may be found at samuelernest.com.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
from Longreads https://ift.tt/gu3B9TU
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/k43Cwiu
