The American West holds an endless fascination—and a fair bit of exaggeration. (I doubt pistols at dawn were really that regular an occurrence.) Andrew Chamings explores the appeal of a violent past and how the location of any gruesome tale becomes a tourist attraction. There are some fascinating historical accounts here, but also a realistic approach to what may have been adjusted to fit a narrative that appeals to our bizarrely dark psyche.
The American West is full of these once-violent places now polished for tourism and consumption. On my way here from California, I passed a marker for the site of the last camp of the Donner Party, a notorious group of pioneers caught in a winter storm. More than 40 of them died, and some of the survivors consumed the dead. The tragedy is now memorialized in a park, a museum, a ski resort, movies and a musical.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/TSxcUFR
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/YG4zyIU
Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
In this week’s installment:
How Canada is failing its most vulnerable citizens.
Teju Cole considers the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
The toxic workplace culture behind the hit TV show Lost.
A piece highlighting Succession‘s excellent writing.
The enduring popularity of Guinness World Records.
Meagan Gillmore | The Walrus | May 30, 2023 | 5,422 words
What does it say about a country where it’s easier to request medically assisted death than it is to get support for a disability? Tarra Carlson lives with autism and ADHD. Her provincial disability benefits ceased because her husband earns too much money. She receives about $800 CDN per month from the Canada Pension Plan. “If her husband dies before her, she may have no way to access financial support,” writes Meagan Gillmore for The Walrus. “She’ll lose her biggest advocate and support system—and her home.” We already know that Canada has explored expanding the Medical Assistance in Death (MAiD) program to include those with disabilities, angering disability advocates. Gillmore’s terrifying piece reveals that some with disabilities facing poverty from the margins of Canadian society may choose MAiD, failed by a crumbling and byzantine Canadian health care system. For the government of Canada, what started as a program to allow the terminally ill to die on their own terms is starting to become a way for the government to legally rid itself of those they have failed: their most vulnerable citizens. —KS
Teju Cole | The New York Times Magazine | May 25, 2023 | 3,212 words
I’ve wrestled with what to emphasize about Teju Cole’s excellent essay on Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, the subject of a museum exhibition so popular that Vogue compared the clamor for tickets to Beyoncé fans reacting to news of the Renaissance tour. I could talk about Cole’s evocative language. (“Vermeer tightens his cord of suggestion around us.”) Or his argument for why it’s imperative to “look for trouble”—meaning, the influence of brutality—in classic European paintings. (“It opens them up, and what used to be mere surface becomes a portal.”) Or his ability to capture the feeling of looking at Vermeer’s quotidian scenes. (“Our breath as viewers is collectively held because we don’t want to interrupt whatever this is.”) But no—my favorite part of Cole’s essay is his quiet indictment of mass appreciation and art-world dogma. He considers both the marketing of and response to the Vermeer exhibition. “That it represented a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience was taken as gospel,” he writes. “(And yet, how many of our best encounters with art have happened in a minor museum on a quiet day? What moment, fully inhabited, isn’t ‘once in a lifetime’?)” In Cole’s telling, interfacing with art is a singular act, defined by the quiddities of context and a viewer’s existence, and to suggest otherwise is to miss the point of what art can do to us, and for us. It’s fitting that he ends the piece by describing a Vermeer painting in which the subject looks out of the frame, seeming to single out each individual who passes before it. “This gaze has held yours for centuries,” Cole writes, “suspending time on your behalf.” —SD
Maureen Ryan | Vanity Fair | May 30, 2023 | 8,682 words
Characters of color sidelined to secondary storylines. Writers punished for standout scripts. Casual racism. Bullying. In Maureen Ryan’s piece for Vanity Fair—which is an excerpt from Burn It Down, her new book about power and complicity in Hollywood—she digs into what went wrong behind the scenes of Lost, particularly in the writers room. Onscreen, the hit TV show had a diverse set of characters, but its workplace culture was extremely toxic. Drawing on years of conversations with some of the show’s actors and writers—including Harold Perrineau, the Black actor who played Michael—Ryan paints an ugly picture of a show loved by many, me included. While reading this, it’s hard not to recall the things that didn’t sit quite right when I first watched the show: What happened to Michael? Why, despite the international cast, did the show never fully feel inclusive? How, after such a promising start, did the show eventually devolve into a battle between two white dudes? Lost changed TV as we knew it, placing brilliant writing and showrunners in the spotlight. But these “genius” minds—Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof—enabled this toxic environment, while their responses to these allegations today are disappointing yet sadly unsurprising. —CLR
Katie Baker | The Ringer | May 31, 2023 | 2,415 words
Yes, Succession has run its course. Yes, you might be tired of talking or thinking about the beloved HBO drama. You might even wonder why, having edited a whole reading list about the show that we ran last week, I’m including yet another piece about it. The answer is because it’s exactly the kind of writing TV criticism deserves. It’s not yet another recap, not another piece about the show’s #iykyk costuming choices or grandiose real-estate porn. Instead, it takes on the show’s fundamental substrate: the writing. Much has already been made of Succession‘s Veep-level profanity, but Katie Baker dives past the f-bombs (and the deceptively circular plotting) to praise how creator Jesse Armstrong and the rest of the show’s writers capture the inconsistent cadences of actual human communication, hyperarticulate one moment, elliptical the next. Even the stage directions, she points out, breathe life into the show: “Alongside all the unforgettable quips that viewers have heard and chuckled at and turned into fancams or memes, there are also lots of lasting turns of phrase—ones written between the lines—that represent conversations not between the show’s characters, but between the show’s writers and its actors. And some of that language might be the most illuminating of all.” So sure, you might only enjoy this piece if you watched the show. But even if you didn’t, the fact that you’re reading this shows you care about good writing—and good writing about good writing is some of the best good writing of all. —PR
Imogen West-Knights | The Guardian | May 25, 2023 | 5,775 words
I grew up watching people break world records. Not because I am from a family whose skillset includes spinning basketballs on toothbrushes or sticking spoons to their chest (actual records), but because I watched a show called Record Breakers. It was all very wholesome: Enthusiastic presenters oversaw members of the public trying to earn a place in the book of Guinness World Records. The upbeat theme song confidently declared that Dedication is all you need. Perhaps it is. In this piece, Imogen West-Knights writes that her failure to beat the record for the longest time standing on one leg blindfolded “was not because I was incapable of doing it. It was because I didn’t want it enough.” She meets plenty of people who do want it (and want it a lot), her delightful account peppered with humans who have caught the most marshmallows fired from a homemade catapult in one minute or jumped the most consecutive cars on a pogo stick. But in recent years, things at Guinness World Records have become a little less joyful and a little more corporate. West-Knights explains how GWR Consultancy now helps brands to find a way to break a record—for a fee. (Perhaps unsurprising in the TikTok age.) But even if record-breaking is not what it once was, it is lovely to know that diehard record-breakers are still out there on their pogo sticks “celebrating achievement in the abstract.” —CW
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our readers loved most this week:
David Kushner | Insider | May 21, 2023 | 4,634 words
A young French man named Louis came home one day in 2018 and saw a small red plastic brick sitting in his driveway. Right away, he knew something was wrong. Dive into the world of AFOLs—Adult Fans of Lego—and a crime that pitted two childhood friends against one another. —SD
from Longreads https://ift.tt/Z0YBypE
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/YG4zyIU
In March 2020, the FDA relaxed its regulations on hand sanitizer to meet unprecedented demand in the face of a new pandemic. Companies everywhere began making and selling the stuff—and creating at least one airborne toxic event in the process. In Wired, Amy Martyn details the environmental nightmare visited upon unsuspecting residents of Carson, California.
By the second week of the odor, a resident noticed that the mailboxes in her condo had turned black overnight, a sign of a chemical reaction between aluminum and hydrogen sulfide. Others spotted workers spraying something from hoses into the channel. LA County Public Works began applying a deodorizer called Epoleon and said the smell would clear within five days.
On October 14, the Department of Public Health sent a notice to local doctors that people were reporting dizziness, vomiting, and shortness of breath. It still described the hydrogen sulfide levels as “elevated, but not toxic” and maintained that “the source appears to be naturally decaying organic material.”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/JUfs2dC
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/YG4zyIU
Anne P. Beatty | Longreads | June 2023 | 4,667 words (17 minutes)
The street divides us, one group of protesters on one sidewalk, one on the other. Two sets of signs: Masks are child abuse, Masks keep our children safe. No CRT in our schools, Teach our children the truth!You work for us, We support our teachers. A man with a clipboard guards the plate-glass double doors of the building. He knows our numbers and tells us when we’re allowed inside to speak.
I’m looking at all these signs as I think about what I’ll say, ideas I’ve typed up and folded inside my back pocket. Down the street, I can see the corner of Eugene and Florence where, as an elementary school student, I waited for my bus.
Here in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I grew up, people have been gathering monthly for protests outside school board meetings. Here, as elsewhere, people disagree about banning books, teaching critical race theory, and arming teachers. This is a city where first a high school, then the district, upheld a teacher’s decision to assign Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones after parents challenged it, but this is also a city where, a few months later, a former Marine intentionally drove his car into a woman escorting patients inside our county’s sole abortion clinic. This is a Southern city, where some things bloom, and others are buried.
Because I want my three kids to know sooner than I did what happens and has happened in our town, I usually make them come to the protests organized by a local anti-racism alliance to which I belong. Sometimes I bribe them: Dum-Dums in their coat pockets, Razzmatazz smoothies from the Juice Shop. Sometimes they surprise me and join in all the chants, especially my eighth grader, the oldest, who yells, Power to the people! and What do we want? The truth. When do we want it? Now! But they aren’t here with me tonight.
Across the street, the other group of protesters have a trifold pasted with the faces of smiling children killed at Sandy Hook, because they believe that if there were more police officers in the school that day, or teachers with guns, those children would still be alive. They are a local chapter of a national movement called Take Back Our Schools, a name that suggests a possessive nostalgia for a mythical past, a territory to defend against invaders. Once I looked up the website for their local school board candidate and found her blog post titled, “Seriously, Who Are These People and How Did They Get in Our Schools?” I’m a high school English teacher, so it was hard not to take this personally.
To speak to the school board, you must email your name and address to the clerk before the meeting, and she will reply to confirm your place in the speaking order. I am number 28.
One year, after reading George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he skewers the intentional obfuscation of political rhetoric, my class discussed the title of a bill proposed by our state legislature that spring. The bill, called the Youth Health Protection Act, targeted trans kids and would require that teachers disclose anything students say about their gender identity to the student’s parents. One of my students snorted, “They should call it the ‘Teachers Are Narcs’ Law.” The bill didn’t pass, but this year a similar bill is before the legislature, and it also includes provisions about what teachers can teach with regard to LGBTQ issues. Its goal is curriculum suppression, a member of the anti-racism alliance pointed out.
Figuring out what to teach and how is getting harder in North Carolina for many reasons. In 2021, our Republican lieutenant governor created a reporting portal called F.A.C.T.S. (Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students — a name Orwell would love.) The website offers a space for parents to report, among other things, “examples of students being subjected to indoctrination according to a political agenda or ideology” and “examples of students being exposed to inappropriate content or subject matter in the classroom.”
When two white mothers mounted a campaign against Ward’s 2011 National Book Award-winning novel, Salvage the Bones, they claimed that it was “trash” and “pornography.” Esch, the narrator, is a pregnant teenager, and there are scenes of coercive sex in the book, which mostly focuses on the love and resilience of Esch’s working-class Black family on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as she and her brothers prepare for Hurricane Katrina. The white mothers questioned whether this family was worthy of reading about, coded language that seemed designed to trigger racial implications without saying the word “race.” My students are good at sniffing out implicit messages. It’s my job to help them get even better.
The Take Back Our Schools folks seized upon this book-banning hearing. Their school board candidate urged supporters to attend and pack the audience. On her blog she wrote wryly, “Apparently, the young 15-year-old finds her strength and her voice through the unfolding tragedies and her sexual trysts.” I want my students to be able to read that sentence and see the lip curl around the word “apparently.”
At the hearing in the (mostly white) school’s media center, the AP English teacher defended her choice to teach this work of literary merit, claiming, “Silencing this book would be silencing the voice of a young, teenage girl who learned to stick up for herself.” She cautioned, “We cannot pick and choose the parts of our histories and cultures within our comfort zones. Imagine how empty these shelves would be.” I wasn’t there to hear her — I was teaching my own students that morning — but I read her quote and pictured her gesturing to the library walls. It was easy to picture, because five years ago, I taught at that school. I had been the senior AP teacher.
Her students showed up to support her. Some held signs like Banning Books = Hiding the Truth. One Black female student explained to reporters, “Silencing the voice of young African American women won’t silence the experiences they go through.” I admire these students for their political awareness and sense of their own voices as necessary to the conversation. They remind me of my own students a few miles away.
This is a Southern city, where some things bloom, and others are buried.
What is taught has always been policed. Though it’s also true the level of scrutiny depends on your state, your school, and your courses — in other words, it depends on which side of the street you stand on. In my experience, people rarely question what’s being taught in the low-performing school, or in the standard classes at the high-performing school. And sometimes teachers police themselves. When I was hired at that previous school, in that white, mostly affluent community, other teachers described the uproar a few years prior when parents had challenged Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa, allegedly over a passage describing sexual assault. Teachers remembered news vans stationed outside the school, meetings with district officials and administrators, harassment from parents. “Don’t teach it,” they warned, even though the book’s standing in the curriculum had been upheld. Hundreds of copies lined the shelves of the bookroom, hidden, mute. Nothing is more silent than an unread book.
As with my children, I want my students to know what happened here, in our city, our country, our world. I have taught Invisible Man and Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Fences, all of which have been challenged or banned somewhere. Still, some things I have never taught, even though I have lamented their conspicuous absence in my own education, like the Greensboro Massacre of 1979. I’m an English teacher, not a history teacher, I rationalized. It was easy to stay silent, to think that’s not my job.
The massacre began on November 3 as another protest, with people chanting and singing in the streets two miles from where I grew up. Video footage shows posters aloft, children chanting. The political rally had been planned by a multiracial coalition, many of whom were organizing textile workers here, and most of whom were Communist Workers Party members. It was billed as a “Death to the Klan” march — and the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis showed up. In photographs you can see the Klan members unloading shotguns and rifles from the trunk of a finned Ford Fairlane. The word that comes to mind is brazen: efficient but unhurried. In minutes the Klan members and Nazis had killed four people and wounded 11 others. A fifth victim died the next day.
The Klan members arrived in a slow-cruising caravan as the march was about to start. The caravan included an informant who had told the police department of the plans, yet no police were present when the shooting began. Although a few protesters had guns and fired back, no Klan members were killed. Police arrived shortly after, arresting 12 Klansmen and Nazis in a van, but not apprehending any of the other vehicles. Instead, they arrested protesters.
In the two criminal trials, all Klan members were acquitted by all-white juries. In the one civil trial, the defendants — the Klan members along with the Greensboro Police Department — were found guilty of a wrongful death charge, but only in the case of the one victim who was not a member of the Communist Workers Party. In 2004, before I’d moved back home, the city began holding Truth and Reconciliation hearings modeled on those of South Africa. Survivors, victims’ widows, community members, and police officers spoke about their understanding of what had happened that day to try to move forward with an increased awareness of why the tragedy had unfolded. Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop of Cape Town, came. These hearings were the first of their kind to be held in this country. People had a sense that we were facing our history in a new way.
It might be easier to recall that sense of reckoning — optimism, even — during the hearings if the public schools had followed the commission’s eventual recommendation, in 2006, to develop curriculum to teach local students about the massacre. Now, 17 years later, teaching and raising my kids here, I know that students still only learn about the massacre in pockets, from individuals who feel compelled to teach it. Most students still graduate from this district of 70,000 kids knowing nothing about what happened here that day — just as I did.
Hundreds of copies lined the shelves of the bookroom, hidden, mute. Nothing is more silent than an unread book.
In eighth-grade social studies — state and local history — I was handed a blank map and told to identify all hundred counties in the state. We practiced so much before the test that I can still see the photocopied map of elongated North Carolina, the outlines growing fuzzier with each duplicate away from the original. I’m sure I aced the test, though I’d be hard-pressed now to name more than 20 counties. I never learned about the massacre, or the bloody white supremacist coup in Wilmington in 1898.
Such omissions from the history curriculum inspire our protest signs. Our group came up with slogans like Teach our children the truth and Racism divides and True history unites. Scrutinizing these placards in our front yard, though, my husband Adam points out that this language is so ambiguous, so dependent upon one’s assumptions about what “truth” or “teach” means, that either side could claim them. Orwell would agree.
Adam’s observation is corroborated the following month when a friend tells me he wasn’t sure, driving up to the protest, whether to stand with us or against us based on our signs. It was only when he saw we were masked and multiracial that he knew he wanted to be on our side of the street.
Outside the December school board meeting, a rangy white man from the other side crosses the street, past our row of protesters, to the door of the school building. In jeans and boots, with the look of a past-his-prime country singer, he demands that the man with the clipboard let him inside. The man calmly says, “Your name isn’t on the list.”
“All I know,” yells Angry Man, “is that Tom told me to come down tonight and speak, and I’m here!”
“Sir, you have to sign up to speak, and your name isn’t on the list.”
Angry Man moves in, menacing, and two police officers in the lobby step through the doors to intervene. He screams at them; they are calm but insistent; he eventually goes back across the street, still screaming, to stand beside the sign advocating for a stronger police presence in schools.
I can’t think of any other time I’ve been so close to such a volatile adult in public. It’s his anger, even more than the cold, that I’m glad has been omitted from my kids’ experience of the protests. Yet I know it is this protective urge that shields our children from the blunt facts of the world.
A woman across the street is shouting into her bullhorn, ostensibly to school board members, “You work for us!” A half-hour later, I see her huddled with another woman around Angry Man’s cell phone, on which he appears to be, if I’m eavesdropping correctly, displaying images of a man’s face he had punched in a bar in some chivalrous act on behalf of a girl. I’m not sure what this bragging — “see those bruises?” — has to do with the Board of Education or the history curriculum or our children or why we’re all standing out in the cold, watching our breath bloom outside our lungs. But I understand that even on these sidewalks we are pushing up against the serrated edge of violence.
At home after one of the protests, my eighth grader and I read some of the tenets for Take Back Our Schools online:
Teaching students or training educators that they are oppressors or oppressed is wrong.
You cannot judge a child by their parents [sic] sins and you cannot hold today’s society responsible for the ancestor’s [sic] past.
Politics DO NOT have a place in our schools. We LOVE America and believe our children should too.
To read this last proclamation is to be reminded of a line from the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation proceedings for the Greensboro Massacre. At one hearing, the KKK’s Grand Wizard in 1979, Virgil Griffin, who had been in the caravan, surprised people by agreeing to come talk about his memories. He claimed the Klan didn’t come to the march looking for violence, but when the protesters began beating on their cars, they got out and unloaded their guns. The Klan came, he said, “to fly the flags and let ’em know we was proud of America.”
I’m an English teacher, not a history teacher, I rationalized. It was easy to stay silent, to think that’s not my job.
It seems impossible to disentangle this grim patriotism from the policing of schools and teachers, from the desire to dictate what people learn or believe about this country. I care about this problem as a teacher, as a mother, as a citizen. And yet I always have a moment when I don’t want to go to the protests. The kids are on the couch or playing outside with friends, dinner isn’t sorted, an annoying work email has just popped up on my phone that I don’t want to read, much less answer. What are we doing, anyway? Holding a sign, stamping our feet in the cold, waving at the cars that honk in support. It’s not enough, which makes it easy to think it means nothing. It’s harder to believe it might mean something.
In her speech “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde warns of the danger of being “mute as bottles.” She tells us, “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” I think a lot about the silences I have been handed, and the silences I hand off, as a parent or teacher. Who or what were these silences meant to protect?
Most months, I find myself hollering at the kids to find their shoes. I will get the lollipops and the smoothies and keep yanking the signs out of the yard on the second Tuesday of the month, even though every time I replant them, they get more crooked, even though every time I shove the coat-hanger metal back into those maddening holes, each jab threatens to puncture the words “true history.” It’s good to show up, I tell my kids. We get in the car and go.
How do we learn the true history of where we come from, if not in school or at home? I was on the other side of the world when I learned of the Greensboro Massacre. Adam and I, while living in Asia for several years, had flown to Vietnam from Thailand to travel with Adam’s dad, whom I had never met before. Over dinner one night, my future father-in-law said, “So, you’re from Greensboro. What do you know about the Greensboro Massacre?”
His question hung in the air, gelatinous, as I fumbled with my chopsticks. I was 24. I’d never heard of it. He explained what had happened and why he knew about it. One of the victims, Jim Waller, had been a friend who had invited Adam’s parents to the protest. They were living in West Virginia at the time, raising three little boys, and decided not to attend the rally.
Because the story was told as part of his parents’ history, Adam had already known about the Greensboro Massacre, even though he grew up in Seattle, even though his parents never visited Greensboro before our wedding. The massacre took place a few miles from my house, yet the story was not told as part of my family’s history, or mentioned in my public schools, from kindergarten to university. It was not even publicly memorialized until a historical marker was erected on a street corner in 2015. Doubtless some kids from Greensboro grew up knowing about it, but not me.
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.
On that trip, too, I finally learned more about the Vietnam War, seeing as my AP U.S. History course didn’t go past WWII. Flying into the country, I knew so little. I knew my dad had been in the war. I knew he was drafted and didn’t want to go. I knew he was in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps because he had already graduated from law school. I knew he went to Bangkok on R&R and bought my grandmother two rings, a star sapphire and a fire opal, both of which I inherited. Even though the rings were from Thailand, they made me think of Vietnam, along with my father’s Army fatigues that I’d appropriated for a jacket in high school. My best friend did the same with her dad’s jacket. We walked the halls with our last names stitched over our hearts. In class, we had memorized something called the Gulf of Tonkin but I could no longer tell you what that was. Like most kids of the ’80s, from movies as much as school, I had a vague sense that the Vietnam War had been a tragic mishap, a blot of shame.
My vague sense of the war became an acute understanding as we traveled up the country to Hội An and Da Nang. We climbed through the Củ Chi tunnels the Viet Cong had used to move throughout the country. We ate pho on the sidewalk, perched on plastic squat stools, and watched uniformed Vietnamese kids stream past us when school let out. Their backpacks were adorned with Cinderella and Belle and Ariel, a blur of communist Disneyfication. As we toured the country by day and read history by night, in bootleg copies of books we bought at street markets, I kept wondering why I had never known anything more about the war than the bits dribbled down to me by pop culture and family history. The experience of being elsewhere magnified my understanding of here — my home. It was disorienting, like looking at myself from across the street.
This dislocation, a sense of the world as entirely different than I’d previously thought, crystallized at the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi, where I saw the war I’d always referred to as the Vietnam War listed on every plaque as the American War. Twenty years later I will remember this — that who you are and where you’re from dictates what you call something — when I see the campaign posters for the local conservative school board candidate that read Education, not indoctrination. I agree with the slogan, though I know, from reading the woman’s blog, that we don’t mean the same thing.
Years after my trip, while teaching The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, I would tell my 10th graders about the American War, which doesn’t exist in America, and the Vietnam War, which doesn’t exist in Vietnam. They would be as surprised as I’d been to learn this, and then, a moment later, as bewildered by their own surprise. It’s hard to create the dizzying sense of history’s interconnectedness for students sitting at a desk, staring out the smudged window in Greensboro, even for teachers who want to.
Only once I start going to the protests do I decide I must teach the Greensboro Massacre. I’m 44, and not a history teacher, but whether the district tells me to or not, I will work it into my course on rhetoric. I’m lucky to have a trusting principal and supportive parents, both of which give me a kind of freedom not all teachers here have. Still, it feels risky. When I ask my 52 10th graders how many have heard of the massacre, only three raise their hands. I give my students photographs, newspaper articles, and essays about the event, and ask them to write an argument answering the question adults should be wrestling with: Should the Greensboro Massacre be taught in local schools, and if so, how?
In their essays, my students all argue that the massacre should be taught. Their opinions vary about when and how and to whom, but none of them advocate for silence. Many draw links between what happened here in 1979 and what happened in Charlottesville in 2017, when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of protesters, or what happened on January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol — similarly brazen, confident in their knowledge of who will be punished in this country and who won’t. My students see the patterns: that what happens here happens elsewhere, and what happens elsewhere also happens here.
They are strong enough to handle this truth. In fact, they’re hungry for it. And when students realize they have not learned the full truth, they feel betrayed.
Good teachers teach students how to find the pattern, and how to find the deviance: how to see that different things are actually the same thing, or, sometimes, that what look like the same things are in fact different. I want my students to know what I hope other people are also teaching my children: that the world is manifold, and that their place in this world is fraught and implicated and full of potential power.
Although the scope and impact of the Greensboro Massacre pales compared to that of the Vietnam War, the two are now forever linked in my mind, in part for reasons that Griffin, the KKK’s Grand Wizard, also saw: What happened here in 1979 was directly connected to the larger political tensions of the time.
There’s this that he said, in one of his several tirades about communism during the hearings: “And I think every time a Senator or a Congressman walks by the Vietnam Wall, they oughta hang their damn heads in shame for allowing the Communist Party to be in this country. Our boys went over there fightin’ Communism, came back here and got off the planes, and them that they call the CWP was out there spittin’ on ’em, callin’ ’em babykillers, cursin’ ’em. If the city and Congress’d been worth a damn, they would told them soldiers turn your guns on them, we whooped Communists over there, we’ll whoop it in the United States and clean it up here.”
Or there’s the fact that on the funeral march route seven days after the massacre, an enormous sign posted to the back of a parked pickup truck read: Greensboro People Don’t Want You Communist Bastards In Our Town.
But mostly I suspect these events are linked for me because I learned about the Greensboro Massacre in Vietnam, where I also learned, finally, about the Vietnam — the American — War, and both revelations kindled the same feeling of betrayal over not knowing what I should’ve known about the place I call home.
Number 26 is called. Then number 27. I’m nervous. I’ve never done anything like this before. I am informed I have three minutes to speak. I begin, “I come to you tonight with this message: Our students are stronger and more resilient than we might think. We must teach our children the whole truth about our country’s history of racial injustice. They are strong enough to handle this truth. In fact, they’re hungry for it. And when students realize they have not learned the full truth, they feel betrayed.”
I explain my own sense of betrayal when I learned about historical events only as an adult, and I ask the school board members to trust teachers to facilitate these conversations, to teach students how to think, not what to think. When I walk outside, Angry Man is gone. The woman with the bullhorn is gone. Most protesters on both sides are gone. Leaving, I drive past that corner where I used to wait for the school bus on distant mornings, neighborhood kids jeering, a stick skittering across the road into the gutter.
Later that night, I will replay in my head Angry Man’s demands to be allowed inside, his boasts about the bruises he inflicted. The more I scroll through the law-and-order comments that Take Back Our Schools sympathizers post under viral Facebook videos of high school fights, and the more I recall the screech of the bullhorn — the woman’s long pink nails clacking against its plastic handle with a magnified roughness — the more I see how that man’s violence and aggression fits a pattern. He was angry way before he got here. This night is just another beat in this country’s long exhalation of anger and fear.
At the end of her speech, Lorde says, “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. … And there are so many silences to be broken.”
Eventually, I’ll go back to speak to the school board again. I’ll be less nervous. The Take Back Our Schools candidate will lose her race, and then the county’s local chapter will disband. This will feel like a victory. But months later, state legislators will propose a bill called Equality in Education to regulate what teachers can and cannot say about race and the American government. The threat of silence remains.
Meanwhile, every weekday morning, the buses will come, and students all over this city will herd onto them and unload into classrooms, where some days they will be handed a blank map and some days they will be mute as bottles. But other days they will learn how to become the wind whistling over the lips of bottles. A teacher demonstrates how a wet mouth over a glass O can make it sing, and then listens as her students carry the sound.
Anne P. Beatty writes and teaches in Greensboro, North Carolina.More of her work can be found atwww.annepbeatty.com.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/YUHefKz
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/tDmjEaA
Over the five years that HBO’s Succession ruled Sunday night television, countless pixels have been spilled in praise of its writing. Here, though, Katie Baker celebrates the show’s culmination by laying bare exactly what it is that makes the writing so incredible: an unshakeable devotion to the way people actually communicate.
The other blending that Succession manages to pull off is the mix between its characters’ hyper-articulate moments and the frequent moments when they’re at a loss for words. One minute Kendall is name-checking Zadie Smith, the next he’s “just here to say: ‘yo.’” One minute Shiv is smooth-talking strategy about the India numbers, the next she’s having this simple conversation, to devastating effect:
Shiv: Yeah, you are not the most important one.
Kendall: I don’t think I am.
Shiv: Yes, you do. You do. You do. You fucking do. You do.
It’s a kind of verbal version of the way stylish people can pull off high-low fashion mixes, like Kristen Stewart pairing Chanel with Vans, and it’s a duality that the Succession writers can understand: They may love language, but that doesn’t mean they can always command it on cue.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/hEzp0QI
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/tDmjEaA
“Tarra Carlson’s plan for her old age is simple: to die before her husband.” This statement might seem like a light-hearted joke, but Carlson is deadly serious. Should her husband pass before her, Carlson plans on choosing a medically assisted death in Canada to avoid living in poverty while trying to navigate a crumbling healthcare system as a person living with a disability.
“I’m petrified of growing old with a disability,” she says. If her husband dies before her, she may have no way to access financial support. She’ll lose her biggest advocate and support system—and her home. She’s worked in long-term care facilities and never wants to live in one. Applying for disability support programs, such as home care, can be cumbersome. There’s no one-stop shop for disability services; they’re spread across government agencies and ministries. Wait lists are long. Paperwork can be complicated. Carlson doesn’t think she’ll be able to understand how to navigate social assistance programs without her husband to explain them to her. But if she dies first, she reckons, she won’t have to.
Compared with disability support, medical assistance in dying, or MAID, seems relatively easy to request. Written applications differ by province or territory but are fairly straightforward; most are only a few pages long. For some of them, to confirm eligibility, an applicant simply has to sign and initial certain statements—for example, that they have an irremediable and grievous medical condition and are in a state of advanced decline. If any more health conditions were to crop up on top of her disability, eroding her independence completely, says Carlson, she’s pretty sure she’d qualify for MAID. “It’s a one-way ticket,” she says, “because you have no choice.”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/uMWVQNc
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/YN6hAPL
Evan Osnos somehow manages to take a peek under the cover of an industry normally shrouded by NDAs — private gigs. The days of being regarded as a “sellout” for taking on a private party are dwindling, with stars increasingly embracing the ludicrous money that can come with playing songs about strippers at a Bar Mitzvah. Osnos tags along with Flo Rida for a couple of these events, and it’s quite the ride.
It wasn’t all that different from Flo’s big years; it’s just that the audience was smaller and the fee larger. Seven years after his last Top Ten hit, the crowds still get loopy when they hear a song from their high-school prom, and some of the erstwhile club kids are now entering middle management, with the power to book the entertainment for the holiday party.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/at8VPoO
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/YN6hAPL
This excerpt from Maureen Ryan’s new book, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, goes deep into what went wrong in the Lost writers room. The beloved hit changed TV as we knew it, with a diverse ensemble cast and incredible writing. But a toxic workplace brewed offscreen: bullying, inappropriate comments, and racist and sexist remarks. Drawing on years of conversations with sources close to the show — actors like Harold Perrineau (who played Michael), writer-producers including Monica Owusu-Breen and Melinda Hsu Taylor, and even showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof — Ryan reveals an uncomfortable and grueling environment.
These revelations explain a lot—namely, why a show promising an inclusive, globe-trotting adventure ended up being, in its final season, about a small group of men on interlocking epic quests. This is not a critique of the show’s reliably excellent actors; this is about who got the onscreen focus and why. Of course, characters of color had notable or heroic moments, but over time, they were generally shipped off the island or killed off, and white male characters like Ben Linus and the Man in Black became ever more vital. The showrunners’ “cold” treatment of Michelle Rodriguez and her character certainly stuck with Gretchen: After Rodriguez was arrested in a drunken driving incident, “instead of having empathy or sympathy for her situation, they were just like, ‘Well, we’ll just get rid of her.’ ”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/pSV4wfM
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/YN6hAPL
It’s been a difficult few years for Michael J. Fox; in this profile, he shares his challenges with Brent Lang with honesty and self-awareness. There is a heavy focus on Fox’s Parkinson’s disease — but this represents the reality of living with a condition that affects so much.
‘I’m still happy to join the day and be a part of things,” he says. “I just enjoy the little math problems of existence. I love waking up and figuring that stuff out and at the same time being with my family. My problem is I fall down. I trip over things and fall down and break things. And that’s part of having this. But I hope that, and I feel that, I won’t break as many bones tomorrow. So that’s being optimistic.’
from Longreads https://ift.tt/JZpovxG
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/YN6hAPL
What place does religion have in public schools in America? The U.S. has a long history of battles over prayer in schools. Currently, religious minorities and atheists in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, have become uncomfortable and fearful with the way religion is promoted in classrooms and public gatherings, like sports events. Wertheimer examines what’s happening in Bossier Parish, and how the community could represent a harbinger of what’s to come in schools across the U.S.
In Bossier Parish schools, parents, teachers, and students told me, the court order stalled, but didn’t entirely stop, Christian prayer. Now, with a Supreme Court friendly to school prayer, educators and state lawmakers around the country are testing the limits of the strict separation of church and state written into the Constitution. In a handful of states, including Kentucky, Montana and Texas, lawmakers have recently proposed or passed measures attempting to promote faith in schools. In Kentucky, for example, the legislature passed a law in March that would allow teachers to share their religious beliefs in school. A Kentucky lawmaker who sponsored the House bill told local television station Lex 18 that he hoped the measure would “embolden these Christian teachers” who may have been afraid to express themselves in public schools.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/ovwgBz3
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/YN6hAPL
Serene. Precise. Beautiful. These are the kind of glorifying words typically associated with the light-filled work of Johannes Vermeer, best known for his painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” Reflecting on the largest Vermeer exhibition in history, now on display at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Teju Cole points to the violence in the artist’s work and questions the dogma surrounding his aesthetic legacy:
But let us find the trouble now. All through Vermeer’s oeuvre are objects like those in “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” that remind us the world is large. This was the world that was emerging after the protracted struggle by the Netherlands for independence from Spanish rule. During the 80-Years war and in its immediate aftermath, the Dutch established trading posts in Asia, Africa and in the Americas. An efflorescence of capitalism at home and overseas followed, and with it the beginnings of a colonial empire. Their own experience of subjugation did nothing to temper their desire to subjugate others. The Dutch East India Company dominated maritime routes and its shareholders raked in profits. The Dutch West India Company, meanwhile, was a significant force in the trade in enslaved people. Ordinary Dutch citizens grew wealthy from these criminal enterprises. With a renewed sense of who they were in the world, they filled their homes with rare objects and far-fetched finery. You could have luxurious things, and you could also have them depicted in paintings. The paintings were helpful reminders that you were mortal, yes, but also that you were rich.
In his perceptive book “Vermeer’s Hat” (2008), the historian Timothy Brook draws out some of the global provenances of the things we see in Vermeer’s paintings. He suggests, for instance, that the silver on the table in the “Woman Holding a Balance” could have had its origin in the notorious Potosí silver mine, a hellish place run on the labor of enslaved people in what was then Peru and is now Bolivia. The felt lining the hat of the soldier in “Officer and Laughing Girl” almost certainly came from beaver pelts sourced by French adventurers from the violent trade networks of 17th-century Canada. Brook traces a connection between this lighthearted genre scene and the bitter history of the “starvation winter of 1649-50,” when European greed for pelts led to expulsions, wars and the mass deaths of Huron Indian children.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/wIauDKe
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/YN6hAPL
The Oath Keepers are a far-right militia, the leader of which, Stewart Rhodes, was recently convicted of sedition for his role in the January 6 insurrection. The Oath Keepers also believe in the strategy of winning hearts and minds. To that end, they show up to “protect” and “serve” communities in the wake of disaster (or what they perceive as such). As climate change becomes more devastating and the government struggles to respond, extremists are stepping in to fill the gaps — and potentially gain followers in the process:
In 2013, Rhodes launched a program aimed at preparing communities for a natural disaster, a civil war, or anything in between. He originally said the program — a national network of community groups akin to neighborhood watches — was intended to create “civilization preservation teams.” He soon gave them a far more innocuous-sounding new name: “community preparedness teams,” or CPTs. CPTs provide volunteers with medical, disaster, and fire safety training. As the Oath Keepers grew, changed, and increasingly made themselves known in the public sphere, the CPT program remained a relative constant — something “the group seems to view as core to its identity,” Jackson wrote in his book.
The CPTs kept their eye on events with potential for conflict with government agencies. In 2014, they responded to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s call to arms, after he refused to pay federal land management agencies millions of dollars in required fees to graze his herd of cattle on public land. They defended a gold mine from the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon in 2015. They were present that same year in Ferguson, Missouri, providing security, according to the group, for business owners during widespread protests on the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager who was killed by police in 2014. And they provided relief in Conroe after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017.
That year saw the dawn of a new era for FEMA. Harvey and two other hurricanes called Irma and Maria made landfall on U.S. soil in the same 30-day period, claiming thousands of lives, causing widespread destruction, and generating hundreds of billions of dollars in cumulative costs. The back-to-back disasters made it exceedingly clear that the federal government is unprepared for the consequences of climate change — more intense hurricanes, heavier floods, rising sea levels.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/Xg7qNAH
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/YN6hAPL
In 2022, Peter Jakubowicz suffered a massive heart attack while playing hockey and died on the ice. For Slate, he recounts watching his death in a recording of the game and waking up in the ICU in the aftermath, the afterlife’s murky depths in his peripheral vision.
My death occurred while playing beer-league hockey at the Winterhawks Skating Center in Beaverton, Oregon. My signs of life—breath, heartbeat, movement, the ability to perceive and form memories—left me. When I came back, I became fixated on the period I’d lost, what had happened to me and where I’d gone. It turned out there was more out there than I bargained for.
This is the forgotten story of my forgotten death.
My memories were wiped by luck, ketamine, fentanyl, midazolam, and propofol. I had passed through the pain and terror that haunted other survivors and emerged brain and wicked wrister intact. But what I’ve realized is that watching myself die was liberating, like watching the death of my stand-in, who was later reassembled as a new version of myself.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/lk1sTW9
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/ieMTxRl
Maybe it’s because of the assumptions I fear people will make about me based on the cultural stereotype. Maybe it’s because I feel other childhood obsessions — sled dogs, Greek mythology, the Redwall series, various Nintendo franchises — had a more formative impact on the adult I became. Maybe it’s because my time as a Horse Girl felt so brief and casual compared to the denim-jacketed diehards that define said stereotype; as if I was merely a pony poseur, not a true Horse Girl.
But I cannot deny that from the ages of roughly 7 to 10, I was fully, unapologetically, a Horse Girl.
Here’s what I remember: Listening to the audiobook (back when they truly were “books on tape”) of Misty of Chincoteague on a family road trip. The trail ride in Estes Park, Colorado when I was 7 — probably the happiest day of my life. The sirenic allure of the bright pink and blue Grand Champions collectible boxes. The thick Dorling Kindersley breed guide I read over and over again, cover to cover, memorizing every detail; I could tell you the difference between a Russian Don and a Budyonny, although I definitely couldn’t today. The one summer I attempted a riding camp, with the mustiness, the satisfaction of cleaning the muck from a hoof, and Coley, the small, curmudgeonly black mare who kicked if you didn’t approach her right and who I loved with every fiber of my head-in-the-clouds being.
Over the past several years, there’s been plenty of writing exploring our cultural obsession with the idea of the Horse Girl. This identity holds so much — in examinations of Horse Girls, we find odes to untamed femininity, searing indictments of insularity and privilege, and a swinging pendulum between romantic nostalgia and reality. She is both the awkward and O-M-G-relatable Tina Belcher from Bob’s Burgers and a stirring voice in the poetry of Ada Limón. In 2021, Electric Literature executive editor Halimah Marcus edited a collection of essays reclaiming and recasting the stereotype; two pieces from that collection are included on this list, along with some other favorites that explore the idea of the Horse Girl and the bond at its center. So saddle up and enjoy.
Katie Rose Pryal was diagnosed with autism in 2020, at the age of 44. Upon receiving her diagnosis, she writes, much of her childhood “came into focus,” particularly her special interest in horses. Around the same time as she recognized her autism, she was learning how to ride again, with her horse, Leroy. Her bond with Leroy intertwines with her further understanding of her own self and experiences. The resulting reflection is introspective and healing.
For an autistic person, to be able to communicate, to touch, to care, all without fear, is a gift. Too often, our words, our very actualities, are rejected. With Leroy, I could share all of my secrets, spoken or unspoken, and he would listen with one fuzzy ear cocked in my direction. I could drape my body across his back and rest my head on his side, listening to the slow beat of his heart, steady as the dirt beneath our feet. Even when his coat was glossy, I could brush him, aligning each tiny red hair across his flank.
Beason profiles riders of all genders for this gorgeous feature for the Times’ “My Country” series, so I’m choosing to count it for this list. This piece takes readers on a journey from the bucking thrill of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, an event celebrating Black cowboys and cowgirls, to a peaceful morning at the end of a trail ride on a Northern California farm — a painful past being reclaimed to the celebratory current zeitgeist of Lil Nas X and Beyonce. Come for the stories of Black joy and community; stay for Jason Armond’s stunning photos.
It originated as an epithet used to demean Black cattle drivers and ranch hands, who made up as much as a quarter of all such workers in the Southwest in the late 1800s, says Boyd-Pates. When Black men call themselves ‘cowboys’ and Black women refer to themselves as ‘cowgirls,’ Boyd-Pates says, they take pride in being able to transform a painful history into something they can glorify.
Barry’s dispatch from Helsinki is not the first exploration of the community around hobbyhorsing, a sport in which adolescent girls trot, hurdle, and race astride wooden toy horses. The hobbyhorse girls of Finland have been the subject of viral videos, documentaries, and trend pieces — both praised as unique confidence-builders, and derided for being too childish, or worse, cringe.
What happens when the hobbyhorse girl grows up, though? One of the key voices in Barry’s exploration is Alisa Aarniomaki, a spokeswoman for the sport who is now in her early twenties. Through profiling those who have stuck with the hobby, even as they grow into teenagers and young adults, Barry highlights the importance of the community to its members and how we may all need a space to safely rekindle our sense of childlike joy. Cringe is dead, the earth above it tamped by thousands of imagined hoofbeats. Long live the earnest pursuit of wonder.
Once, she was invited to a party in France where adult guests were given hobbyhorses, provided as a way, she said, ‘to run away from your boring and maybe exhausting normal life.’ The one thing that drives her crazy, she added, is when people describe her hobbyhorse pursuit as playing. ‘If someone says we are playing, it strips away everything we made, it strips away the reality.’
Horse Girl (Heather Radtke, The Believer, February 2019)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if one is a Horse Girl, one must have a favored Horse Girl book or series. These are often pillars of the genre, standalones like Black Beauty or series like The Saddle Club, Pony Pals, or Thoroughbred.
As a former Marguerite Henry girlie (if you were also a big King of the Wind fan as a child, know that I see you and I love you), I was thrilled to see a dispatch from the famed Chincoteague Island Pony Swim, an event that has captured the imaginations of Horse Girls ever since its appearance in the iconic Horse Girl novel Misty of Chincoteague.
In its encapsulation of the wild, murky, and sometimes uncomfortable space between two ideas, Radtke’s reflection on her visit to Chincoteague feels like the pony swim itself. As the horses make their perilous journey between islands, we find ourselves in the messy middle space between hazy nostalgia and harsh reality, wonder and horror, the desire for something to exist in our imaginations as both unclaimable and wild, and as an accepting friend.
Watching the scene asked me to hold two truths at once. The ponies are wild creatures that, like deer or raccoons, need to be managed. But in the mythology of the swim, the ponies are also presented as transcendent companions, animals who might offer up their manes for braiding and their backs for riding. Here, the ponies were both docile pets and feral beasts, animals that need to be convinced to swim so they might be ridden by little girls.
Horse Girl: An Inquiry (Carmen Maria Machado, excerpted for Them from Horse Girls, edited by Halimah Marcus, August 2021)
The Horse Girl stereotype is associated with privilege — whiteness, wealth, thinness, hyper-femininity — despite, as Carmen Maria Machado points out, a multitude of non-white riding cultures and traditions. Typically, when thinking of Horse Girls, we project our collective assumptions about what a Horse Girl is or isn’t, and mix in our own desires or insecurities.
Machado’s contribution to Marcus’s anthology explores identities and desire — those we cultivate, like the author’s wish to be around horses and burgeoning queerness, and those projected onto us as an assumption, fetishization, or other intrusion. (In one section, she notes she is “exasperated” that this essay includes, among other things, inappropriate comments from older men and sexual innuendo.) In a stunning personal inquiry, Machado tracks that desire, from a covert moment with a coveted toy horse to briefly revisiting riding as an out queer adult.
There are so many moments that will stick with me from reading this that it’s hard to pick just one, but a particularly intriguing parallel she makes is between horses having barn names and show names and the magic people find in names for drag or roller derby.
Are Unicorns Horses? Unicorns are horses that can only be ridden by virgins.
Are Horses Unicorns? Horses don’t care what you’ve done, or what’s been done to you.
What Are Horses? A species of odd-toed, ungulate mammal, primarily domesticated, belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. Useful, expensive, dangerous. Beautiful.
Braudie Blais-Billie’s connection to horses derives from both sides of her family: She describes the thrill of watching barrel racing at the Seminole rodeo with her paternal grandmother and feeding apples to her maternal grandparents’ horses at their home in rural Québec. Her great-grandfather, she learns, was a prominent Seminole cattleman.
In addition to reflecting on her family’s deep connection to horses and how it shaped her identity, Blais-Billie digs deeper into the history of Seminole resistance to colonization, and the role that the shared knowledge of horses and cattle husbandry played in their survival. It’s a reminder that the bond between humans and horses has been about more than childhood fantasy as displayed on Trapper-Keeper stickers — it’s been a means of resistance and resilience, of deep connection to one’s history, culture, and community. (Also, at a time of attempts to repress teaching histories of non-white and other marginalized peoples in the U.S., it’s a reminder of the power that comes in keeping those histories and stories accessible.)
Tia and I have settled on the loose term ‘Seminole horse girl.’ It seems simple, but the specificity allows just enough space for the intricacies of our biracial identity. Like the Seminole peoples, ‘Seminole horse girls’ originates from a conglomeration of cultures adapting to their environment; sometimes not belonging to one group exclusively can be empowering. I’ve found that, in our family, horseback riding is more than show titles and prestigious stables — horses are how we survive.
The Mongol Derby is a test of will for even the most experienced rider, a grueling 1000-kilometer (621-mile) run recreating the messenger route of Genghis Khan through a variety of terrain on semi-wild horses. Riders change horses every 40 km, which means less exhaustion for the horses but an even greater challenge for the riders, who switch horses just as they’ve grown accustomed to the quarter-ton beast under them. In 2013, British equestrian Lara Prior-Palmer became the first woman to win this equine gauntlet, which she writes about in her memoir, Rough Magic, excerpted here for Longreads.
Those looking for the visceral awe of the race itself will have to read Prior-Palmer’s memoir in its entirety, but what makes this section so engrossing is the strong sense of place. We’re with her as she finds herself lost in the “concrete nowheres” of London, then in the green expanse outside Ulaanbaatar, and inside her mind as she longs for the adventure and freedom so often romanticized within the Horse Girl canon. As she trains by riding bareback through a field of ragwort — at full gallop, gripping the horse with all her strength — it’s hard not to feel that dangerous thrill, that reminder of why these animals have such a chokehold on our imaginations.
I was expecting quite the holiday — a green steppe stuffed full of feisty ponies, with hunky riders from all over the world. One to trump the sightseeing and sunbathing holidays I was used to… By the time I applied for the Derby, I was no longer keen on touring the world’s buildings with awestruck stares. My thighs were strong and my heart was raw, yearning for my own motion.
As there is for all the semi-universal phenomena of millennial and Gen-Z childhoods, there’s a TikTok about this. In a clip that has been seen more than 1.5 million times, user @funkyfrogbait compares how people think girls play with toys (bubbly, idle chat about shopping) with how they actually play with toys, wherein wide-eyed plastic critters become players in a harrowing trial before a shadowy council. The comments are full of affirmations, memories of Barbies in divorce court, Polly Pocket murder mysteries, and even re-enacting the sinking of the Titanic with Littlest Pet Shop toys.
It’s difficult for a child of the ’80s or later to imagine this kind of narrative-heavy pretend play, full of high fantasy and even higher stakes, as being out of reach. My own childhood memories are spotted with dramatic courtroom scenes with stuffed animals and battlefield epics with Beanie Babies. But in this essay for Polygon’s“Horse Girl Canon” package, Seanan McGuire explores how My Little Pony, a fantasy-focused toy line “for girls,” shaped the way we still play today. It’s a fascinating look at the cultural significance of the toys, and their evolution from a realistic companion for horse girls with aspirations of stables to juggernaut — a rainbow-tinted powerhouse that sparked imaginations at a time when only “boy toys” were centered on this kind of fantastical play. (Of course, as McGuire correctly notes, the American toy industry still enforces a rigid gender binary, but kids of all genders have always enjoyed “girl toys” like My Little Pony.)
The 1980s were a time of fantasy adventures for children, with little attention paid by the censors to anything that had been preemptively dismissed as an attempt to sell toys… Death was generally off-screen, but it was present, and dangers were both real and manifest in the worlds we were told our toys and imaginary friends inhabited. But at the time of My Little Pony’s launch, all the grand, sweeping adventure was reserved for the blue side of the toy aisle, intended for the male** audience. Toys aimed at girls were much more likely to be domestic in nature, filled with baby dolls and pretend kitchens — in other words, training them for adulthood.
Author Adrienne Celt achieved what most Horse Girls only manifest in fantastical notebook scribblings: owning a real live horse. But like most things romanticized from afar, reality can be bumpy — horse ownership is messy, expensive, and can be heartbreaking. Celt tenderly reflects on what draws “rational adults” to horses, and on her emboldening bond and uncertain future with her own horse, Lady.
Celt admits that reflecting on the pain points of horse ownership sounds like #ChampagneProblems, but it’s, as always, about more than that. It’s an essay on horses and their romanticization, but also an essay about seeking and pursuing joy, digging your heels in and spurring it on, chasing it cantering into the wind.
Of course, when I say that horses are romantic, I mean for people who don’t spend much time with them. To most actual horse people, the animals lose their mystique rather quickly. On farms and ranches they’re beasts of burden, livestock of the same order as cows or pigs or dogs or goats. To a pleasure rider like me, they’re funny and corporeal: they fart in your face when you try to pick their back feet, and get scared when they see things out of the corners of their eyes, thinking that any abandoned truck tire or garden hose is about to kill them.
As millions of people took to the streets following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, so began a reckoning over anti-Black racism in many sectors and communities, including equestrians. In June 2020, teen equestrian Sophie Gochman wrote an essay for The Chronicle of the Horse, calling out the race and class privilege of the community; a white trainer responded in the same publication with defensiveness and condescension while quoting MLK. Rita Omokha continues this necessary conversation, speaking with Black women equestrians about the discrimination they face — both overt and systemic — and how they are working to make the sport more welcoming.
Omokha’s thoughtful profile of Black equestrians serves as a reminder that should undergird conversations about representation in any community or sport. Behind this discourse, you’ll find real people with real passion and expertise, paying a real human cost (be it financial, emotional, or otherwise) that they should never have had to pay. Omokha takes care to discuss the struggle of being “one of the few,” and the conflict between excelling in the world you love, and, as equestrian Shaquilla Blake puts it, “whitewashing [yourself]” to do so.
Under the shade, the air thick with the scent of manure, they take a moment to catch their breath before the day’s trail rides begin. As Blake cools off, she feels a tug at her dreadlocks. “Can you feel that?” a giddy voice says from behind her. It belongs to a 13-year-old girl whose profile matches what Blake calls “your typical equestrian”—namely, wealthy and white. Can I feel that?? Of course I can! You just yanked the hell out of my dreads!
Lindsay Eanet is a Chicago-based writer, editor & performer. Her writing has been featured at Polygon, Longreads, Serious Eats, Block Club Chicago & others. But enough about her, let’s talk about you.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/YGPNQU5
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/ieMTxRl
