Writing an obituary is such a hard thing to do. In this one, Jeremy B. Jones manages to honor his grandfather, demonstrate what is important in life, and show us how beautiful prose can be.
When the notable figures of our day pass away, they wind up on our screens, short clips documenting their achievements, talking heads discussing their influence. The quiet lives, though, pass on soundlessly in the background. And yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/z52KfxD
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/xJHT1oa
Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
A close look into a Texas murder. The annotators who train language models. A profile of the man who rode this year’s biggest wave. A personal essay that deep dives into the wreck of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, and an ode to U.S. Army’s new tactical bra.
Bryan Burrough | Texas Monthly | June 20, 2023 | 15,736 words
Looking back over the past couple of years, I realize I don’t often recommend true-crime investigations. Make no mistake: I like a killer-on-the-loose podcast or docuseries as much as the next media omnivore, but the explosion of the genre has sent a lot of true-crime writing into that uncanny valley of journalism that I internally call Please Option This Story and Make Me Rich, Hollywood. All that said, Bryan Burroughs’ lengthy cover story for Texas Monthly falls into no such traps. It’s a curveball that you know is a curveball, yet still dips and weaves and otherwise stymies your expectations. There’s not much I can say by way of synopsis that distills more or reveals less than the story’s headline, so I’ll leave it there; however, know that part of the piece’s excellence lies in its reserve. Another writer might have made Susan Woods’ murder more lurid. Another magazine might have tried to tell the tale in half the length, robbing the characters of their depth. And another form—like the aforementioned podcast or docuseries—might have overweighted the narrative with ominous music cues or hacky video transitions. (Don’t worry: the story also exists as a podcast.) Instead, you get what true-crime journalism can and should be: unsparing, revelatory, and human. A monster’s death doesn’t undo the damage they inflicted, but Burrough’s reporting manages to wring a measure of redemption from the unseemly proceedings. —PR
Josh Dzieza | The Verge / New York Magazine | June 20, 2023 | 7,123 words
I love my work: There’s a singular thrill in discovering excellent writing and/or a new writer and sharing that work with others. It’s like stumbling on a secret. (A former colleague once told me that within 10 years I’d be replaced by a bot able to evaluate great writing at a far faster pace than any human ever could. Then I was skeptical, but now I’m not so sure.) What is certain is that with the rise of AI, jobs are changing. You need actual humans to train the bots so that the bots can become more proficient at what they do. The problem with this work—mostly identifying things in photographs, a process called annotation—is that it’s dull, repetitive, and extremely low-paid. What I loved about Josh Dzieza’s piece at The Verge (in partnership with New York Magazine) is that Dzieza just doesn’t talk to annotators for the story, he becomes one to experience the job for himself. What emerges is a very satisfying read about a particularly unsatisfying aspect of AI’s ever-changing influence on humans and their work. —KS
Gabriella Paiella | GQ | June 13, 2023 | 5,175 words
Gabriella Paiella opens her profile with, “The most remarkable day of Luke Shepardson’s life started in traffic. So much traffic.” With that, Shepardson becomes instantly relatable. We’ve all been there. Most of us don’t beat traffic into work and then go on to win The Eddie, the most prestigious big-wave competition on the planet. Shepardson won it during his breaks, still working his job as the beach lifeguard. This down-to-earth approach suffuses Paiella’s heart-warming piece. While her tender accounts of Shepardson’s family life do not shy away from reality—the family struggles to make ends meet on the expensive North Shore—the focus is on the joy they take in each other. She delights in finding that Shepardson truly appreciates what he has, and remains content with his present successes rather than continually searching for his next big thing. Many of us could benefit from a day at the beach with Casual Luke. —CW
Martha Lundin | Orion Magazine | October 25, 2022 | 2,874 words
When I originally stumbled across Martha Lundin’s piece, I had been hoping for a mention of the late Gordon Lightfoot. The celebrated Canadian musician wrote an epic song to commemorate the wreck of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which went down in a storm on Lake Superior on November 9, 1975. Lightfoot gets no mention but this piece does not disappoint. Lundin turns Lake Superior into a character by deftly weaving facts and observations about the lake and the ship’s many ill-fated portents, clove-hitched together with the often foreboding female nomenclature used with ships and sailing: “There were omens from the start. At the christening, Elizabeth Fitzgerald had trouble with the champagne bottle. She swung and swung and the bottle would not break. Then the Fitz refused to launch.” What you get is one part education, one part lyrical personal essay in which all hands will find something to savor. —KS
Patricia Marx | The New Yorker | June 19, 2023 | 3,735 words
Who wouldn’t be grabbed by this title (combined with its cartoon illustration of a female soldier hanging from the air by her bra straps)? I certainly was, and Patricia Marx delivers on the promise of fun with her slightly tongue-in-cheek account of all things female military uniform. I could not help but envision Edna Mode (superhero fashion designer from The Incredibles) as Marx heads into the Design Pattern Protype Shop at the Soldier’s Centre in Massachusetts. After all, the designers she meets are in “chic black civvies,” there are areas designated to the Tropics and to the Arctic, and projects “have included a uniform that can change color and one that would enable troops to leap over twenty-foot walls.” These projects make a fire-resistant bra seem a touch tame, but the designers are as earnest about this brassiere as they are reluctant to let Marx squeeze herself into a prototype. (Spoiler: She persuades them.) Marx intermixes her snoop around the center with a deep dive into the history of military uniforms—which is surprisingly fascinating, full of bizarre (and sexist) tidbits such as the fact that in 1943 “[t]he government asked Elizabeth Arden to concoct a lipstick to match the red piping on women’s Marine Corps uniforms.” Neither clothes nor the military usually captures my attention, but I am glad I got sucked into this piece: A thoroughly entertaining read. —CW
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our readers loved most this week:
Carly Lewis | Maclean’s | June 12, 2023 | 5,763 words
Carly Lewis’ report on the murder of Ashley Wadsworth is intense and devastating. But it also demonstrates the standard playbook of abusive men. Lewis is clear: Any history of abuse must be made public and early warning signs must be taken seriously. Wadsworth didn’t need to die. —CW
*Subscription required
from Longreads https://ift.tt/Hryg6Vn
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/xJHT1oa
The past few years have drastically changed how we think about our relationship to work, perhaps permanently. However, they haven’t changed the fact that billions of people on this planet spend about half their waking hours exchanging labor for money in order to secure food and shelter. As such, work has remained an inescapable part of one’s identity. “What do you do?” is still a small-talk question not because the answer is usually interesting, but because the answer tells you something about the skills and knowledge that person has amassed. And when the answer is interesting, it’s hard not to feel some measure of admiration for someone whose experience falls so outside your own.
I’ve always been fascinated by those whose daily occupations carry meaning, promise adventure, or are in any way out of the ordinary. Of course, everybody’s dream job is different, but imagine swapping sitting at a computer or working on a production line for clearing landmines, dodging tornadoes, or braving the icy waters of the Bering Sea. Not for everyone, of course—but what astonishing ways to earn a living.
The examples you’ll encounter below range from the inspirational to the unfathomable. Who would want to toil 18-hour days, or climb to dizzying heights with little to no protection? For some, that sort of life holds a deep appeal, and herein lies the hook that draws you into these stories: In attempting to understand the motivations of others, we are by reflex attempting to understand ourselves. Each of these pieces moved me in some way, and I hope that they move you also.
Chasing Tornadoes (Priit J. Vesilind, National Geographic, April 2004)
As this mesmerizing article points out, it was the 1996 film Twister that first brought the occupation of “tornado chaser” to widespread public attention. Twister was a big deal upon its release, and I can vividly recall being spellbound by the then-cutting-edge special effects: dark and furious tendrils reaching down from the sky to pluck people, cars, and houses into the sky, spinning like toys, seemingly cut adrift from gravity itself. That film, as all movies do, exaggerated the hazards faced by its protagonists—but, judging by this primary account, not by very much. That meteorologists are still throwing themselves at deadly storms nearly 30 years on tells much of the complexity behind this destructive and spectacular weather phenomenon.
In order to study tornados, you have to get close enough to manually drop heavy probes in their path, sometimes less than 100 meters from an approaching maelstrom. In a way, it’s comforting to know that, for all our technology and sophistication, we are in no way removed from the natural systems that surround us. Nature can always outdo us, will always win. That’s not to minimize the human cost, however, nor the bravery and determination of the tornado chasers. From the very beginning, in which an entire village is sucked into the air, this piece delivers mind-boggling drama, immersing us in a disparate group of specialists who race across the United States to seek out something most others would sooner avoid—all in the interest of furthering our understanding of an uncontrollable phenomenon.
But we’re late, and out of position. If we try to drive around the storm, we won’t have enough daylight left to see it. So we decide to “punch the core” of the thunderstorm, forcing our way into the “bear’s cage,” an area between the main updraft and the hail. It’s an apt name: Chasing tornadoes is like hunting grizzlies—you want to get close, but not on the same side of the river. Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you.
And so we head straight into the storm and find ourselves splattering mud at 60 miles an hour (97 kilometers an hour) on a two-lane road, threatening to hydroplane, visibility near zero. Anton is less than comforting. “The hail in the bear’s cage smashes windows and car tops,” he shouts, grinning. “The smaller stuff is kept aloft by the updraft, and only the large chunks fall. It’s like small meteorites banging down. Ha-ha-ha!”
Once again, we encounter a piece that draws aside the invisible curtain to glimpse the grueling efforts that enable our everyday creature comforts—in this case, the world of mobile communications networks. If you’ve ever shuddered at a TikTok video of a worker balanced precariously atop a tower at vertigo-inducing heights, this article probably isn’t for you. Yet, for such a dangerous job—cell tower climbing routinely claims up to 10 times the number of human lives as the conventional construction industry—it pays a relatively modest wage. What is it, then, that drives people to take up such work?
As a project manager quoted in the piece says, “You’ve got to have a problem to hang 150 feet in the air on an eight-inch strap.” Yet the workers featured in this piece, despite some suffering horrible injuries, clearly love their jobs. It’s not hard to understand the buzz that must come from routinely doing something that most people could not (and would not) do, along with sense of freedom that must come with climbing aloft to look down upon the world. As with the cobalt mining industry—itself the subject of another story in this list—there is a dark underside to this business, as sub-contractors routinely cut corners and take risks in the quest for a few extra dollars.
The greatness in Knutson and Day’s article, as with others collected here, lies in its ability to bring to life the stories and personalities of the people whose hard work makes life easier for us all. If you’re reading this on your smartphone, take a moment to consider the often-obscured reality behind mobile technology—a technology that, by its very nature, is largely invisible.
The surge of cell work forever altered tower climbing, an obscure field of no more than 10,000 workers. It attracted newcomers, including outfits known within the business as “two guys and a rope.” It also exacerbated the industry’s transient, high-flying culture.
Climbers live out of motel rooms, installing antennas in Oklahoma one day, building a tower in Tennessee the next. The work attracts risk-takers and rebels. Of the 33 tower fatalities for which autopsy records were available, 10 showed climbers had drugs or alcohol in their systems.
This is where mobile technology begins: the dangerous and dirty business of mining for cobalt, a mineral essential to the construction of smartphones and laptops. As a species we are finally becoming aware that every modern amenity carries an ecological price, and that price is often paid most dearly (and ironically) by nations that are monetarily poor but resource-rich. In our relentless drive “forward,” it is often the most vulnerable who pay the price. Mining is not a calling for these men; it is a necessity.
However, there is hope to be found in this troubling story—specifically, the very fact of its existence. The best journalism reduces global issues to a human scale, and by taking us into the lives of Congolese miners risking life and limb in pursuit of the rare metal, writer Todd C. Frankel forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions.
But Mayamba, 35, knew nothing about his role in this sprawling global supply chain. He grabbed his metal shovel and broken-headed hammer from a corner of the room he shares with his wife and child. He pulled on a dust-stained jacket. A proud man, he likes to wear a button-down shirt even to mine. And he planned to mine by hand all day and through the night. He would nap in the underground tunnels. No industrial tools. Not even a hard hat. The risk of a cave-in is constant.
“Do you have enough money to buy flour today?” he asked his wife.
She did. But now a debt collector stood at the door. The family owed money for salt. Flour would have to wait.
Mayamba tried to reassure his wife. He said goodbye to his son. Then he slung his shovel over his shoulder. It was time.
War leaves scars on every country it touches, sometimes literally: one of its most insidious instruments is buried explosives, set to trigger at the touch of a human foot. Land mines have been a topic of discussion for many years, catapulted to the front of the news in 1997, when Princess Diana raised awareness by walking through a field of live explosives in Angola. (She was a guest of the Halo Trust, an organization that undertakes the arduous and dangerous task of clearing such places for the local populace.)
Little can be more terrifying than the knowledge that each step you take could be your last. It’s a sudden, senseless, death, one without discernment or mercy. But in this inspiring story, life comes full circle, as Hana Khider returns to her ancestral homeland of the Sinjar mountains in northwestern Iraq. When Khider was a child, her mother told her stories of the family homeland they were forced to flee; now, as an adult, she works as part of a team of deminers, making that homeland safe once again. As meaningful as this work is, it also carries with it the deadliest of dangers: an average of nine people a day still fall victim to these terrible remnants of conflict.
At the start of this month, a 24-year-old man working for MAG was killed in an explosion at a munitions storage facility in Iraq’s Telefar district – a reminder of the dangers these deminers face every single day. Iraq has around 1,800 sq km of contaminated land (an area bigger than Greater London) stemming from multiple conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Gulf War, the 2003 US-led invasion, and the Isis occupation of 2014. The Iraqi government has a target deadline of February 2028 to clear the country, which Morgan thinks is optimistic. “Last year, operators cleared just over 15 sq km,” he says. Covid-19 hasn’t helped. This year MAG has managed to disarm 1,200 mines; usually it would be 6,750 mines.
We have always projected a certain romance onto the idea of working on the high seas, and a dignity upon those individuals brave enough to do so. For this piece, journalist Andy Cochrane signs up for a week’s work on the fishing boat Silver Spray, one of just 60 such vessels responsible for supplying all of North America with snow crab. Facing long hours, rough water, and freezing conditions, the work is as grueling as could be imagined, but surprisingly Cochrane encounters only good humor, pragmatism, and an inspiring sense of brotherhood amongst the crew.
This is work that is as fundamental to human existence as can be found. People have to eat, after all. But what really strikes me about this piece—and is a sentiment echoed by its author—is the remarkable positivity of the fishermen, which surely can’t be put down to a sense of pride and decent wages alone. Perhaps it’s the extreme conditions and the hardships that help foster such a sense of togetherness and wry determination. Whatever the cause, this is another absorbing peek into a job few of us would wish to undertake.
I was curious how these guys found their way to the industry and how they hadn’t burned out. Attrition is incredibly high, for obvious reasons—freezing temperatures, rough seas and long, exhausting hours. All three laughed off my greenhorn question, and we returned to tips on how I would survive the week.
Jose, an immigrant from El Salvador and father of two, has lived in Anchorage since the ’90s. Quiet, always smiling, and always working, he’s fished his entire career. Leo, raised in Samoa and now living in Vegas, also has two kids. Even with frozen fingers and toes, he never stopped making jokes. Jeffery, who lives half the year in the Philippines with his wife and three kids, would often give me a fist bump and say “you’ll be all right, everyone goes through this” after I puked, which happened 11 more times the first day.
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/COPXMqW
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/86lv3Uu
A delightfully fun—yet informative—reported essay on female military garments. Patricia Marx’s breezy tone whips you through this piece and provides a few chuckles along the way.
Today, the Soldier Center’s labs are more Willy Wonka-ish than ever. There are two climate chambers—one designated Tropics, the other Arctic—which can re-create just about any environment on earth in order to test products and the responses of human beings. Want to have your vitals monitored while you cycle on a stationary bike with forty-m.p.h. winds gusting your way, at temperatures of up to a hundred and sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit? You can do it here. Copper mannequins equipped with more than a hundred sensors are used to test hopefully protective garments, to see how soldiers would weather flash-fire scenarios similar to those resulting from an I.E.D.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/e5svtVM
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/86lv3Uu
This excerpt —adapted from A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention and Murder by Mark O’Connell, published by Granta on 6 July—shows O’Connell’s attempts to uncover the psychology behind two brutal murders. In doing so, he begins to question his own role as the reporter of the story. Beautifully written and a real mind-twister.
He gave me a look of almost cartoonish wariness; he knew that I knew who he was. What he could not have known was that my reaction was not just to seeing a famous murderer walking around campus, but to encountering a character from a novel in the realm of supposed reality. It was as though the fabric separating fact from fiction had been torn.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/I0MuQmH
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/yAeP0z1
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald is just one of about 350 ships resting on the bottom of Lake Superior, but it may be the most famous. The ship set sail from northwestern Wisconsin on November 9, 1975 but sadly did not make it to port. Twenty-nine men—including captain Ernest McSorley, who happened to be on his last voyage before retirement—lost their lives after the ship sank in bad weather. For Orion Magazine, Martha Lundin recalls the power of Lake Superior, the ship’s many ill-fated omens, and the sometimes foreboding feminine mystique around sailing nomenclature.
It starts snowing hard in the afternoon, and the Fitzgerald is seventeen miles ahead of the Anderson, visible only on radar. A wave crashes over the deck and breaks one of the fences. The water drags the screeching, twisted metal into the mouth of her, swallows it. Superior presses against the belly of the ship, pushes her sideways. McSorley radios Anderson captain Bernie Cooper: “I have a fence rail down, two vents lost or damaged, and a list. I’m checking down. Will you stay by me till I get to Whitefish?” The Fitz slows down, lets the Anderson gain on her again. There is a sense of safety in proximity.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/PW3wO84
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/yAeP0z1
Everyone in Amanda Barrett’s immediate family is dead: her husband, her parents, her brother, and her sister, Melissa. This essay is about Melissa—her struggle with addiction, her ugly death, and Amanda’s struggle to come to terms with what happened to Melissa, and why:
When Melissa was using, worry hovered just below the threshold of my conscious thoughts, never not there. When she was sober, especially after our parents died, I mostly liked having a sister. She taught me rehab slang like “future tripping,” which meant focusing on uncontrollable things to come rather than one day at a time. She told me stories about the people she met, like the roommate who asked her about the difference between arugula and a rugelach. The actor I had never heard of who got kicked out for having heroin mailed to him in a bottle of shampoo. The woman who got three DUIs in twenty-four hours—I said I didn’t think that’s what “one day at a time” meant. Melissa laughed and said, “She ended up in prison. Not jail. Prison.”
Sam told me that when the texts from Melissa stopped on Christmas Eve, he knew she was dead. He had been visiting his family in England for the holidays, and though he had returned to San Diego on New Year’s Eve, he couldn’t bring himself to check on her until the next day. He asked the police to go with him because he thought he didn’t have a key to her new apartment, but when they got there, he remembered he did. They made him wait by the door, and when they saw her, they told him not to go inside. As the gurney passed through the doorway, he placed his hand on the black body bag shrouding Melissa’s leg. Even now, he recounts this scene with a strange, tender smile.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/upDZTNg
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/yAeP0z1
For nearly 30 years, no one was charged for the murder of a young woman in a small Texas town—but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t a prime suspect. There was just one problem: the prime suspect didn’t do it. But who did? Bryan Burrough unwinds the fascinating history in a doorstop of a cover story for Texas Monthly.
What frustrated the Stephenville police most was their inability to secure Michael’s fingerprints. Had the visiting Texans tried a gentler approach, they might have left with them. Court records confirm that Michael would have had no problem handing them over—as long as it occurred in Indiana. “I volunteered to give them blood samples, hair samples, fingerprints,” he recalls. “They insisted it be done in Texas, where the cops have full rein. I felt like if I went to Texas, I’d for sure get shot and police would claim it was an escape attempt.”
Hensley badly needed those prints. By this point, he had no other suspects. He was certain that Michael’s prints would match those found beside Susan’s body—if only he could get them.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/vmFiXIQ
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/yAeP0z1
For an AI language model to be effective, it needs to be trained by a human doing a job called annotation: the tedious, low-paid work of labelling zillions of image examples so that the model can accurately identify an object in a variety of settings. (Think of a polo shirt on a human, hanging in a closet, against a backdrop outside, etc., etc.) Josh Dzieza took a few shifts as an annotator and spoke to over two dozen of them to find out exactly how the bots learn.
Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/RVYiKtM
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/h2IsFvz
Two years ago, I made myself a meal I often think about. It was an iteration of a ragù recipe, one I had pretended to learn watching my friend Isacco cook for me in Schaerbeek, the Brussels neighborhood where we both then lived. Isacco’s ragù was one of my favorite meals in the world, but I hadn’t learned anything as he stood over his pot and enunciated every single word of the recipe with special emphasis. When Isacco gave me instructions, I nodded amicably like a trained tourist, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was instead looking outside, as Youcef, our 8-year-old neighbor, chased pigeons in the street.
As I heard the tomatoes sputter in Isacco’s pot, I regarded Schaerbeek’s sloping hills, walking up which my calves would tighten pleasurably, through which I had learned to claim this part of Brussels as a temporary home. I looked out at its Turkish bakeries filled with mountains of simit; a large Romanian church a short distance away that housed the city’s young and foreign on its steps. I often sat there, eating half kofte sandwiches and stuffing the remaining half into my bag. I told Isacco this, proud of my resourcefulness, but he scolded me, asking me to eat better. “Now, consider this ragù!” he said, sternly, demanding my attention back to his stove.
But I cooked the ragù anyway, adding carrots and celery to hot oil in a pan. I added red onion, lamb mince, Guntur Sannam chili powder, cumin, sour Indian tomatoes. Because I had them in the fridge, I dropped in cooked red kidney beans. I added some red wine from the fridge and drank the rest. I watched the pot with these things cooking, played music videos on my phone, and texted my sister. I remembered Isacco’s puritanism and was joyful to disobey it. I stirred the pot and congratulated myself, as if this was the point of cooking this dish, to disobey the process I had been taught—to infuriate the memory of my friend.
I stirred the pot and congratulated myself, as if this was the point of cooking this dish, to disobey the process I had been taught—to infuriate the memory of my friend.
In two hours, the mince turned to its edible form: somewhat swampy but aromatic, but also nothing like it was supposed to be. But that didn’t matter; the world outside had ceased to exist, and I only had myself to feed. Despite its imperfections, I ate the ragù on pasta, in between bread, and once with white rice. I ate consistently and happily for three whole days.
The first time I cooked for myself was also in Belgium. It was in Leuven, a town outside Brussels where I rented my first flat in Europe. I had just moved into it with Chiara—then a new housemate, soon to be my best friend.
I had responded to Chiara’s post for a housemate on a university Facebook group, where we talked without stopping, moving quickly from polite questions about our origins to cheeky judgements of others in the group, arranging to live together in less than 15 minutes. She told me about her plans for the year—a holiday in Rome to visit her grandmother, a road trip through Armenia to see friends. “We’ll have fun!!!!” she typed to me, including me in her plans automatically, even though we hadn’t met.
In my first days in Leuven, with no one to bicker with on the street, nobody to turn into imaginative anecdotes, I wilted and shrank. Everything was so lacking in animation and friendliness that it froze me from within. In no time, first-world pleasures like boxed wine and IKEA visits had become as limp as they were imposing when I hadn’t known them in Delhi. I meandered in the town’s center, sitting under bleached, imperial churches, eating bags of fries and looking inside them for the things that my flashy, overpowering aspiration had promised, searching for the liberty that I thought lay in this continent of the free.
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.
But however I felt, I had Chiara. And even though we had just met, we had become belted together at the hip as people do when they fall in love. In our first months together, we talked for hours, and went to parties linking arms, making jokes, and leaving together, as people called us to stay. We thrilled to each other’s stories, telling about our friends using only first names, turning our parents into caricatures, pushing carts around the supermarket and making sweeping anthropological statements about everything we saw.
I had Chiara, and she was always cooking. We went diving inside dumpsters to find expensive chocolate that she turned into frosting; we met Italians on street corners from whom she managed to source bottles of sundried tomatoes and olive oil. Our shelves were always full, unlike the other students we knew. We had tall, slim bottles of oil that she was precious with, good tomatoes that she used more freely, pistachios no one was allowed to touch, and grains, her absolute penchant, that she turned into majestic salads, colorful and entirely out of place in my otherwise greasy life. While I still remember everything she cooked for us in those initial months—a sandwich with provolone and sundried tomatoes, a pasta with yogurt, and small green beans—I was disappointed in the fervor, the emotional wringing, that surrounded our kitchen. I had expected a carefree life, answerable to no one. I desired the hardened emancipation and uncaring banter that I thought defined the lives of young white people in these frozen, faraway places I had dreamed of.
When Chiara and I met on Facebook, I scanned her photos—of her friends leaning against one another, sitting on the street drinking from cans in London, of European teenagers scouring cities that we thought so grand, so universal in the metaphors of their youth. “These guys have it all, dude” I wrote to Vans, my best friend back home, with a link to Chiara’s photos. They lived much like we did in Delhi, but with special sheen. I painted them with the coated appeal, that particular authority that I attributed to whiteness through my young life.
When we met, I was also—as Chiara was quick to note and I hardened to admit—a dependent, high-functioning drinker. I spent most of the days between bottles of beer, glasses of dusty-tasting wine from boxes, and eventually, shots of vodka with new colleagues at the bar where I worked. Before I left Delhi to move to the Northern hemisphere, I had just lost a friend—a beautiful boy who existed with the vigor of those who live to fight the sadness in their bones. He was a loud talker, an enthusiastic hugger, an awestruck storyteller. And one autumn morning, as if making a cataclysmic joke, he had taken his own life.
Like my friend, many of the boys I grew up with were fledgling addicts. They depended on frequent escapes to battle familial pressures, seeking the anonymity that came from burying ourselves in the city’s destructive nooks. My own drinking was limp compared to the boys I knew but it was still persistent. It awakened now and then on crutches, becoming lively and lit up when stoked. When my friend died, it made me feel dispossessed. I needed to get away, not to get better, but to be wrecked as usual. I needed to get away, to be without surveillance. I needed to wring free of love, concern, and scrutiny, of anything that kept me moderately afloat.
When I arrived in Europe, it seemed logical to forget, to drown in drink, to get high when the opportunity presented itself. Wasn’t this the point of this place? I thought. Supposed emancipation? No parental concern? Wasn’t this where people lived footloose from societal rules?
To nurse my stewing addiction, I found people who cared little about me and saw me as a number at the table. I tolerated their bad quality chat and racialized mockery, and I surrounded myself with them. Chiara hated these people, and was constantly enraged at them being my primary company. She would cycle through the large, open bars where we sat, shouting “Vive la France!” or singing the Dutch national anthem to provoke comical inter-European rivalry. She pushed casseroles into my bag, roaring at me about when I would be home, knocking at the tables of my companions with her bike handles and long, green coat.
Like Chiara, I hated these people. But I was safer with them, I thought. I could hide here, I could be half a person. Since half of me was always filled with drink.
Every time I returned to our flat, Chiara would be at the door, cradling a meal like an American housewife. She filled it with people that would soon be our friends—Neapolitan couch-surfers playing loud classic love songs on a plastic synthesizer; a duo of tall, poetic boys from Galway who had what they considered an embarrassing obsession with daal. I would wait by the door, sniffing the air when she buzzed me in. “Try this,” she would say, pushing a ladle filled with roasted vegetables, stewy sauces, and buttery bits of bread into my mouth before I entered. “Good, no?” she would ask, and I would nod. It always was, but I didn’t want it. I wanted to be alone, unwanted, uncared for, but here was Chiara in her big maternal apron and her Doc Martens in the kitchen, always waving a scent over the stove, never leaving me alone.
Like Chiara, I hated these people. But I was safer with them, I thought. I could hide here, I could be half a person. Since half of me was always filled with drink.
One day, I returned to our flat to a kitchen scant of Chiara. I was especially sour from drink, shrunk from being bullied by the people I was out with that night. I opened our cabinet and ate rapidly from a jar of pesto that Chiara had cooked for our friends. I spooned it into my mouth, I smothered crackers with it. I finished it quickly, relishing its fattiness, greedy with spite. When Chiara found me in the kitchen, we erupted into our first big fight. That night, she was inconsolable. By bringing my drinking inside our kitchen, I had broken her spirit, her keenness to build a home for us. And I had done it because I thought a home wasn’t what I wanted, that all I wanted was to be forgotten, to be entirely ignored. That night, we were equally aghast at one another, united in uncanny affection, but also in mutual confirmation. In that moment, neither of us got what we imagined we would from the other when we first met.
The next morning, I cleaned, and left for my bar job as Chiara shouted from the shower, telling me she was leaving for Rome. When I returned that day, anything I had neatened was reversed into dynamic disarray, but with no sign of Chiara. The blandness of our cheap IKEA furniture, the poor views we had outside our windows—without her, all of this suddenly stood out.
When I walked into the kitchen, bare for nourishment, I picked up a pink Post-it that had fluttered to the floor. sry it said, and I walked to where it had been stuck to the fridge door. Lined on the door were more yellow and pink Post-its with messages for me to read. I opened the fridge and saw that Chiara had stacked small boxes with little things, all half- prepared. Small aubergines salted and dried; a jar of chunky marinara; thin slivers of pink pork, marinated, ready to be put in the pan and in between bread for a snack. I made myself a cup of hot water and lemon, and heated a couple of pork slices, smoking half a cigarette as I ate them from the pan. I removed the Post-it that Chiara had stuck on the fridge, and read them in her voice. Don’t Be A Dickhead they said. Just Cook For Urself.
A year ago, at my paternal grandmother’s funeral, people praised her cooking. In crowded rooms on a summer day, relatives described her hospitality in the kitchen. Men came to announce their validation for her cooking as she lay in an icebox, dressed as a bride, bereft of her own identity even in death. “What sambhar! What daal!” they crowed as she lay there in her blue silk sari, sucked of life. “What sweets she would make for us all!”
By bringing my drinking inside our kitchen, I had broken her spirit, her keenness to build a home for us. And I had done it because I thought a home wasn’t what I wanted, that all I wanted was to be forgotten, to be entirely ignored.
The praises were especially perplexing to me because they were untrue. My grandmother was a terrible cook, disinterested and mischievous. She cooked because she had to, often dishing out swampy rice and burned vegetables, leading us to depend on nearby dhabas for food, birthing in everyone in my family a huge reliance on toast and eggs, on fried rice from the Masala-Chinese stall outside our house. I remembered my grandmother from the times she stole sweets she was forbidden, the time I emptied her pillowcase to find scores of toffee wrappers stuck between its layers, the grime sticking to the sheets. I thought of her in the kitchen, at the onset of her dementia, staring at the fire on the stove, watching its colors change as her brain turned to dusty grain. I wondered then why these others couldn’t admit to her poor housekeeping. To them, if a woman did not decorate the world with cuisine, did she not exist?
To them, if a woman did not decorate the world with cuisine, did she not exist?
The cuisines of dominant-caste Hindus, like the families I am born to, depend on the labor of women to keep their cuisines afloat. They are made up of rituals so obscure, recipes so complicated, that they act as a maze in which the oppression they espouse becomes codified as culture, and the abundant appetites of dominant-caste men and families become the normalized, nationalized ways in which to eat. In these cuisines, deviance from method and hierarchy is often punished, with the knowledge that even fleeting disruption will illuminate the discrepant cruelties that are held sacrosanct within caste-owned food. When these foods are documented, labor in the kitchen is romanticized. To put a meal together requires the work of several women, farmers, porters, workers, many of whom go hungry because of the hierarchies in cuisine. This hunger is often neglected and ignored.
As at my grandmother’s funeral, the passing of my other grandparents led my distant relatives to question my fertility and familial abilities. The passing of a generation awakens the need for another one, and at every funeral or wedding, I was interrogated by assemblies of aunts and uncles about plans to create a family into which these people could insert legacies of exclusion. I had lived abroad, I worked the job I desired. Now what else did I want? they asked. How many children? When would I have them? Most importantly, what will I have them eat?
In the summer of 2022, one year after my grandmother died, I moved into a flat by myself in the neighborhood I grew up in. In India, I hadn’t yet lived on my own. I had been raised in a family and community woven together like tight bamboo. Nothing—the pitch of my voice, my dialect, my opinions, my appetite—was formed without other people, some welcome, others invasive presences in my life. In the last few years, I desired solitude almost constantly, even though I was the kind of person never found alone. “I wish I could be underwater,” I wrote several times in my journal during the pandemic, weighed down by the incessant communication that defined our times in isolation. I became fatigued by my performances for those that I loved, the expectations of my family, the needs of my friends. I wanted to be shrouded in quiet, to be able to hear myself think.
When I moved in, it was daunting to have a flat that reeked of me. My books, three jars of honey in the condiment cabinet, my shelves painted a messy blue with no one to combat my choices or tell me otherwise. In my first month there, I was overwhelmed by everything my flat lacked: shadows of my dog who had just died, my father darting across rooms and dusting furniture in a sleepless haze, my sister sitting with bad posture, eating fruit from a bowl on her belly on the couch. I wilted here too, under the tedious expanse of myself, my naive dreams laid bare in this brightly lit flat.
And then I had to cook—in this place, on my own. There was no one else’s appetite or desires to determine, nobody with demands to concede to or disobey. Just myself, searching inside me for what I wanted to eat. Unlike outside in Delhi, where I always knew what kebab I wanted and which samosa stall had fresher oil, my palate had little identity in domestic spaces. I was raised to eat in alliance with other people, nodding along if someone offered me toast and butter, reaching my arms out when I sensed raw mangoes being salted in the kitchen, agreeing casually when asked if I wanted a second garlic naan.
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.
A week after I moved into my flat, I bought the book Real Fast Food by Nigel Slater. Even though he was beloved in Britain, I was only mildly familiar with Slater’s work. In the subcontinent, after all, it was only the shouting white male cooks who made their way to our bookshelves and screens. For decades, we made way for the schmuckery of these men, consuming them in post-colonial malaise. But when Real Fast Food arrived, I read it like a short novel, sitting on the divan and weeping stupidly at words like “haricot” and “warm tomato salad.” I was used to cookbooks consisting of mountains of ingredients, of meals being large affairs. When I cooked Indian food, the smallest number I cooked for was four. But the book suggested that I could cook for myself. Meals for one. It advocated gentle ease as a way of making myself a meal.
But the book suggested that I could cook for myself. Meals for one. It advocated gentle ease as a way of making myself a meal.
After I got Real Fast Food, I stocked my cabinet with what it needed: tomatoes, beans, salt, meat, and some basic spices, perhaps considered lavish for a British pantry, but automatic in mine. As I stuck postcards around and brought out my grandfather’s things, Real Fast Food proved to be a suitable companion; I could get into the kitchen and spend 20 minutes there. Then I could paint walls and unpack crockery, I could set up lamps and stack shelves. The meals I cooked were short respites from the larger ordeal of setting up the house. It seemed fitting that in this house full of me, I had this book. With it, I shared what I didn’t with my family. A devotion to warm fat on crusty bread, a deep obsession with vinegar, and buttered, fried beans.
In Delhi, an “akeli ladki,” or a woman alone, is called a “khuli tijori,” an open casket of jewels. This phrase, often used when talking about sexual assault and murder, works in the favor of the person who steals from the tijori. What kind of fool, the metaphor seems to suggest, would leave a mountain of diamonds untaken? If there is an uncloaked opportunity lying around, what fault is it of men when they collect the loot?
When I was 10 years old, I heard about the man who shot a woman in the head because she wouldn’t serve him a drink. It was a story I would remember for the rest of my life, but I remember watching the news with my father sometime in early 2001, as he ate a plate of rajma chawal on the cold floor, occasionally burying his head in his hands. The man, Manu Sharma, who was rich and powerful, had killed bartender and model Jessica Lal when she refused to bring him a drink after hours. To the man with the gun, it was a breach of the natural order he was raised on: A woman had denied him hospitality and refused to yield to his pleasure. And for this, he thought, she must die.
A decade after she was murdered, her case resurfaced, and gossip about Jessica Lal crowded our screens. What was she doing in the bar? Why did she work a job like that? Was she married? Why not? And why didn’t she just serve him that drink?
Like many women, I inhabited the city on my own as Jessica Lal did. I stood on street corners eating kebab rolls and throwing their foil wrappers at lingering boys who asked to join me. When my friends and I went to drink around our university campus we carried big sweatshirts to wear over our clothes, the angrier ones of us lining the sides of the couches we sat on, ready to fight off any incoming threats.
One day, in my first year at university, I sat in a restaurant eating a brownie with my friend. Near us, two men took out a small knife to brandish at a woman who refused to take a photograph with them. “Husband hai kya?” they asked her, smiling, as they played with her long hair and tried to hold her hand as she ate a piece of cake. “Do you have a husband?” When she replied that she did not, one man become dumbstruck and childlike. “Then what’s the problem?” he said, his weapon flailing around in his left hand. “If you don’t belong to anybody, why can’t you belong to me?”
As soon as she walked out the door, my friend and I, embarrassed, ordered two more pieces of cake. One rainbow-colored affair with frosting and a sprinkled donut with custard bursting out of its rims.
These days, I think about the various meals for one that I have watched women eat in my lifetime. I have cheered silently watching young students strut to cigarette stalls and ask for their preferred brand, rattling their bangles at the vendor to get his attention if he dared entertain the gangs of smirking boys smoking raspberry-flavored straights near them. I think about women bolting inside the Delhi Metro’s women’s compartment, and opening up boxes of parathas, or snacks stored away from tea-time at work. I watch them sigh into their boxes, as they eat in the solace of safe transit in the city; preparing for the several duties that will face them when they arrive home.
I also think about katoris filled with forbidden things, like pickles during a menstrual cycle, and sweets stolen during times of mourning, when widows are disallowed any inkling of pleasure. I think often of Annu Aunty, a momo vendor in Delhi’s Taimur Nagar, who I spent a week with when I interviewed her for work one winter. Like most people, I defined her through the labor she performed, her ability to churn out thousands of momos a day for the students who flocked to her stall.
What I didn’t write about was Annu Aunty’s evening snack, which she ate every day when she finished work. I left out what she made for herself, for her own pleasure: a chutney-cheese sandwich, heavily buttered and fried in a pan, which she ate at her window, near a sea buckthorn plant from her native Nepal.
One day during the pandemic I walked under my building to smoke a cigarette when I spotted Vimla Aunty, my 75-year-old neighbor, shuffling in a corner, hiding behind a tree. I stubbed my cigarette so I could chat to her, noticing that she ate hurriedly from a small bowl, as she came out of her hiding and sat on the bench close to where we stood. When I asked her what was in her bowl, she grinned, bringing it under a street light, showing me the large scoop of ice cream she ate topped with peanuts and thick waves of chocolate sauce. “Chocolate ice cream” she said to me in whispers, even though no one was around. “Unkay Bina,” she added, giggling. “Chocolate ice cream, without my husband. Chocolate ice cream. Only for me.”
I don’t like to give my current position of oneness a sitcom-like gleam. I do not consider it so permanent as to be radical and I don’t think of it as so fleeting to entirely dismiss it altogether. I cannot pretend that emancipation is what I desire, or that in our worlds, it is possible at all. More than anything, I like to regard it, to look at it from the outside. To recognize it, to exercise my right to sometimes think, cook, and eat alone. Besides, how alone am I when I cook for myself? When I make a peanut-chili oil and drizzle it on noodles like my cousin Arya, or when I add dahi to my qeema like my friend Dr. Masoodi, thinking of her feeding the birds as she cooked. I like it this way, when the economy of the kitchen belongs to other people. A hot sauce left by my best friend Vani when she discovered an endless penchant for fermenting; a 25g jar of honey made by an artistic man I have a crush on, which I refuse to let anybody else eat.
The kitchen is a memory keeper, crowded with recipes and prompts from the people of my life. But what is mine is the choice to get it right or fuck it up. When I cook for myself, I am “underwater” in a way. I am genderless, childless, a person without any hinges. I am, fleetingly, nobody, or whoever I want to be.
The kitchen is a memory keeper, crowded with recipes and prompts from the people of my life.
By now, I have cooked for myself several times. What I cook most is fried rice with eggs, green onions, and a mixture of dark and light soy sauce. I like the idea of bringing something sad out of the fridge and giving it new life. I cook my eggs separately, and don’t skimp on the oil, submerging the voice in my head that always tells me I don’t deserve to eat. I often cook very quickly, almost manically. I eat quickly too, sometimes as I cook, spooning the crusty bits of rice out of the hot wok with a spoon. Sometimes I stand back and inspect the incongruency of my process, like an artist looking at a canvas, amazed and satisfied with all this sudden disarray. I imagine someone lofty calling my kitchen a crime scene, and it makes me laugh. But it doesn’t matter; I have only myself to feed. The world outside has come back to life. But here, it is still just me.
I find that domesticity, because it is stored in the bodies of women, is often considered an instinct. It is thought of as something supernatural, automatic, and easy to perform. But it is an education, I thought, as I stacked boxes in correct order and distanced my potatoes from my onions, so they wouldn’t sprout and rot. It is, among many things, labor, and memorialization. It is hard work, lived and learned.
Now, when I cook, it is after I have read Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires, which teaches me to focus on my gestures. I avoid the need to text her every time I am moved by how she recalls action. Instead, I slice a malta orange. I watch my hand dip into the cut-glass box with chaat masala I stole from my mother and watch the masala emerge, tucked into a small steel spoon. I watch myself take the cluster off a head of garlic, I watch myself heat butter and mix honey in with it to put on toast. I watch myself.
In these gestures, a new person emerges, a person that understands sensory preferences, who can witness herself move. I have never known this person. I like her. I tell her about how I always thought that pleasure belonged to someone else.
Recently, I witnessed one of my favorite meals for one, cooked by my aunt in her flat. She lives alone, escaping the years of matchmaking that she went through when we were children and she was a young woman, when we lived together. When mustachioed uncles would come to the house as potential suitors for her, my sister and I, in our practiced routine—me crying uncontrollably, her glaring at them with her hands on her hips—would drive them away. Through our theatrics and her determination, my aunt got what she wanted, and what no one else understood: to grow older by herself, and to be completely, and entirely on her own.
In her meal for herself in her flat, I watched her blacken daal and add cut cabbage. I saw her pour an unmeasured amount of rasam powder into a pot of simmering water, nowhere close to a boil. Unlike me, who used everything I did to politically posture, my aunt—the first queer, opinionated person I knew—had no interest in curated rebellion. But here she was, cooking in a bizarre sequence, disobeying every culinary and societal rule that either of us knew.
“You don’t have to, like, burn it, you know” I said lazily from the couch as she cooked.
“Oh no?” she asked. “But it’s done now, what to do?” She smiled at me, and did a little jig to illustrate she didn’t care. She joined me on the couch, her meal in a bowl, all kinds of techniques overruled. It was a kind of mush, like my ragù, but it had come together anyway. “Come,” she said, as we sat down to watch Outlander on her TV, digging her spoon into her bowl enthusiastically. “It is Sunday. Let us do what we want. Let us give ourselves a treat.”
Sharanya Deepak is a writer and editor from and currently in New Delhi, India. She is a co-editor atVittles Magazine. She is currently working on a book of essays. You can read more of her work on her website https://www.sharanyadeepak.com/.
Editor: Krista Stevens Copy editor: Peter Rubin
from Longreads https://ift.tt/ZuTFA95
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/h2IsFvz
Carly Lewis’ report on the murder of Ashley Wadsworth is intense and devastating. But it also demonstrates the standard playbook of abusive men. Lewis is clear: Any history of abuse must be made public and early warning signs must be taken seriously. Wadsworth didn’t need to die.
For seven years, Wadsworth looked at Sepple’s face intently, through computer screens and smartphones, at the airport when they finally met, every day of their short cohabitation and in the last moments of her life. Under his right eye, for some of that time, was a tattoo: “hope” in cursive writing—the holy premise she clung to, staring back at her, as though a sign that perfect brightness would come.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/23RVPjL
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/h2IsFvz
The next time I pass a gas station, I’ll wonder about what’s happening beneath it. The underground tanks that hold fuel can corrode and fail, allowing toxic chemicals to contaminate soil and water. Big oil has known about this problem for decades but has largely ignored it by attempting to pass the cleanup buck to independent owners. When that tactic started to fail and insurance companies refused to insure tanks against leaks and environmental damage, you might wonder who got stuck with the tab. If you guessed “the tax payer,” you’d be correct. Kate Yoder takes into the history of gas stations and the ever-present environmental costs, noting that while many leaking gas station sites have been cleaned up, there is much yet to do.
The number of stations overall has been in decline for decades thanks to mediocre profits, rising land values in cities, and more fuel-efficient cars. An analysis from Boston Consulting Group found that between 25 and 80 percent of gas stations nationwide could be unprofitable in 12 years — and that analysis was conducted in 2019, before a slate of new policies, including federal tax credits, were passed to promote electric vehicles. Under vehicle-emissions rules unveiled by the Biden administration in April, EVs would make up as much as two-thirds of all U.S. car sales by 2031. Last year, Washington state set a target of ending the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2030, just seven years away; it has also adopted California’s stricter deadline of 2035, along with five other states.
That shift could lead to a pileup of vacant gas stations that the existing cleanup programs won’t be able to handle. There are more than 145,000 fueling stations in the U.S., according to the National Association of Convenience Stores. Even if the country manages to break off its century-long attachment to gasoline, the fuel’s legacy may live on in the soil and water. The question of who pays to clean up the contamination is a mess in itself: In theory, station owners are supposed to pick up the tab, but sometimes they’re unable to pay — or unable to be found — when the bill comes due. So then, who pays? Sometimes it’s an insurance company, sometimes it’s an oil company, and sometimes it’s the government. It’s up to lawyers and courts to hash it out.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/mjKM2bc
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/h2IsFvz
