The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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In this week’s edition:

• A remorseful juror decides to take a stand—more than 30 years later.
• A Palestinian writer considers what it means to bear witness to unrelenting atrocity.
• A look at the uncertain future of a once-captive beluga whale in Norway.
• A dive into weightlifting culture and the destigmatization of steroids.
• A coming-of-age tour of the early internet, before we were all Extremely Online.

1. The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty

Michael Hall | Texas Monthly | January 16, 2024 | 9,962 words

In this riveting braided feature for Texas Monthly, Michael Hall unravels how it all went wrong for Carlos Jaile. In the ’80s, Jaile had been living the American dream in Texas as a successful Kirby vacuum salesman who embraced the sales motto “persistence over resistance.” Suddenly, one day, the police showed up at his office to take him away, allegedly for raping a young girl. Estella Ybarra sat on Jaile’s jury. She’d voted him guilty, but felt pressured into the decision by two fellow jurors—pushy white men who could not be talked down. Hall gives you all of this up front: we’ve got a miscarriage of justice, a remorseful juror, and a man incarcerated for decades for a crime he did not commit. We think we know what happened, but we don’t know precisely how it happened. Hall’s brilliant pacing spurs your need to understand how egregious detective work, grievous police errors, and two loudmouth jurors put Jaile away for life plus 20 years; his exceptional storytelling rewards you for tracking Estella Ybarra as she confronts her conscience to embrace “persistence over resistance” to free an innocent man. “Everyone involved in Carlos’s case found a reason to look the other way,” writes Hall. “Everyone, that is, except for one woman determined to do the right thing.” A wrongful conviction overturned is always a bittersweet read. And while the most beautiful thing is that Carlos Jaile does go free, it’s Hall’s deep craft that does justice to his story and to an emotional and poignant conclusion you will not forget. —KS

2. The Work of the Witness

Sarah Aziza | Jewish Currents | January 12, 2024 | 2,587 words

It has been three months since Israel began a relentless campaign of violence in Gaza. Israeli forces have killed nearly 25,000 people, some 9,600 of whom were children. They have displaced roughly 85 percent of the remaining population and pushed survivors to the brink of famine. Day after day, the world has watched the devastation. We have seen bodies crushed by rubble, mothers weeping over dead babies, doctors tending to the injured in hospitals plunged into darkness by power cuts. What’s happening is unconscionable, unforgivable, and there is no end in sight. In a tremendous essay, Palestinian writer Sarah Aziza considers what it means to bear witness to a “livestreamed genocide,” to sit with our own horror and helplessness. “I have been pondering not the English, prosecutorial witness, but the Arabic,” Aziza writes. “In this, our, language, the verb to witness comes from the root شهد . This is also the source of the much-maligned word شهيد, shaheed, which means, literally, witnesser, but is often translated as martyr. . . . To be a witness is to make contact, to be touched, and to bear the marks of this touch.” In this sense, to witness atrocity is to be wounded by it. “We must make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut,” Aziza continues. “This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth, privacy, and singularity of each life. There, we might glimpse, if sidelong, how much of Gaza’s suffering we will never know. This is where real witness must begin: in mystery.” —SD

3. The Whale Who Went AWOL

Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine | January 14, 2024 | 6,434 words

When Hvaldimir the beluga whale first appeared in northern Norway, he was wearing a harness, apparently a leftover from his time in the Russian Navy. (Satellite photos of Russian naval bases around Murmansk—near the spot Hvaldimir turned up—show sea pens he may have escaped from.) That’s right, whales are captured and trained for use in the military. I knew we had been keeping cetaceans in tanks for entertainment since the 1860s, but I did not know we forced them into military service. A quote from this excellent piece by Ferris Jabr hit me hard: “Whales and dolphins are basically the last animals on Earth that have to perform seven days a week until they die while living in a completely barren box without even a rock to hide behind.” Hvaldimir is just one whale, but his story echoes those of thousands. Can a once-captive whale survive in the wild? Or, as Jabr writes, can a “severely traumatized victim of abduction reintegrate with society?” A tangle of humans are now involved with Hvaldimir’s welfare, a mess of ambition, ignorance, noble intentions, and bickering. Jabr’s writing is understated yet searing: we don’t really know what to do with captive whales. From the first line, this essay gripped me, but by the end, I felt like I did after watching the 2013 documentary Black Fish: deflated. If only we hadn’t taken them in the first place.  —CW

4. Steroid to Heaven

Adrian Nathan West | The Baffler | January 12, 2024 | 3,856 words

There’s joy in finding a story that engages with one of your core interests, and even more when that interest is generally ignored or disdained by the “literary” world. So it was almost a shock this week when two different pieces took on the world of physical culture and weightlifting. (The last time I came across one of those was nearly two years ago.) While I enjoyed Jordan Castro’s Harper’s piece, Adrian Nathan West’s Baffler story is a truly rare bird: an argument you don’t agree with, yet thoroughly enjoy. (If you happen to enjoy deadlifts, that’s a bonus, but I promise it’s not a prerequisite.) West, a longtime resident of the weight room and the jiujitsu dojo but also “a discreet man with modest bodily goals,” does his level best to destigmatize steroids, even yearn for them. But he does so smartly, both by picking apart the double standard of their demonization and by being honest about his own desires—all while casting a gimlet eye on the swollen idiocy of roided-out fitness influencers. “As Adorno noted in his writings on astrology,” he writes in one of many stunning passages, “individuals’ awareness of their dependence on knowledge systems that exceed their grasp is closely associated with authoritarian conformity; for the same reason, young steroid users, faced with the complexities of organic chemistry, are likely to turn away from the hundreds of studies on PubMed and seek out some loudmouth with nineteen-inch arms who tells them what they want to hear.” In fact, it’s probably not fair to call this an essay about lifting weights; it’s something else entirely. It’s a piece about danger and hysteria and self-delusion. About what happens when the fantasy of physical transformation becomes a little less fantastic. About making the illicit pedestrian. In other words: weird flex . . . but OK. —PR

5. Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet

Kyle Chayka | The New Yorker | January 13, 2024 | 3,986 words

In this excerpt from his new book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, Kyle Chayka recalls an early internet that allowed “creative possibility” and “self-definition”—a web that many of us miss. When he tells us his AOL Instant Messenger username, “Silk,” I immediately recall my first AOL screen name, “RsrvoirGrl.” (Yes, in high school I was obsessed with Quentin Tarantino films.) When he describes posting to LiveJournal, where his writing “became a kind of public performance,” I remember my own musings on Diaryland, another early publishing platform. Those diary entries make me cringe when I read them now, but they’re also so unfiltered and passionate; I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t written with such energy since. His later experiences are just as fun to read, and remind me of a few milestones in that evolving space: the way my MySpace profile suddenly fused my online “shadow” self to my physical IRL identity; the first virtual encounter with my future spouse (I’ll never forget the first tweets my husband and I exchanged); the way Instagram initially inspired the photographer in me, and then slowly sucked all of my creativity. As with a number of pieces I’ve read recently about the broken state of the web, this essay doesn’t really say anything about the internet we don’t already know—or already feel in our bodies, minds, and attention spans. But I always enjoy Chayka’s writing, and his thoughts here on what it was like to be online when “being online wasn’t yet a default state of existence” are relatable and served up with just the right amount of nostalgia. —CLR

Audience Award

Our most-read editor’s pick this week:

Joni Mitchell’s Best Album Is Turning Fifty. It’s Not Blue

KC Hoard | The Walrus | January 16, 2024 | 2,041 words

Joni Mitchell’s sixth album, Court and Spark, just turned 50. For The Walrus, KC Hoard shares their deep affinity for Mitchell’s music and its place in their life. For Hoard, Court and Spark marked Mitchell’s musical reinvention, where she distanced herself from her coffeehouse chanteuse image and the accessible, less complicated arrangements of her earlier work. —KS

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Steroid to Heaven

Over the past two decades—originally fueled by the Crossfit phenomenon—weight training has become more popular among more people than ever before. That’s led to a great many physical transformations, as with Adrian Nathan West; it’s also led more than a few people to the door marked illicit gains. But as West details with humor and candor, we might be making too much of the “illicit” part. You don’t have to agree to enjoy the piece.

As a youth, I thought exercise was for morons and looked at my body as I did at a car: a thing to rely upon, its needs ignored until it gave out in a future too distant to bother contemplating. But then, over the course of a single school year, I had bacterial pericarditis and viral pleurisy bookended by two bouts of bronchitis, and I got scared that if I kept smoking and taking drugs, I might die. I started weightlifting because Henry Rollins did it and because, at five-eleven and 125 pounds, I had no aptitude for any actual sport. I took as gospel the prevailing prejudices about steroids, listed here in order of veracity: they give you acne, shrink your balls, make your hair fall out, give you heart disease, make you aggressive, shrivel your penis. What changed my thinking ten years or so later was, ironically, reading an article about the death of Andreas Münzer, an Austrian bodybuilder, from multiple organ failure in 1996. Der Spiegel published Münzer’s drug cycle in the weeks leading up to his last contest, when he was on a smorgasbord of injectable steroids, as well as insulin, growth hormone, ephedrine, IGF-1, and dozens of tablets a day of Halotestin, Dianabol, and Winstrol. Due to their hepatoxicity, orals are often considered more dangerous than injectables, and the Munich doctor who performed Münzer’s autopsy described half his liver as crumbly “like Styrofoam,” and the other half as “full of masses the size of ping-pong balls.”

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Lost Highway

Trucking is an industry in crisis. There’s a shortage of drivers: In 2021, a record 81,000 jobs went unfilled. But the problem isn’t a lack of people who can drive a truck, as Emily Gogolak explains in this reported essay. Rather, it’s the lifestyle: Truckers work insanely long hours for low pay, and they often live out of their cabs. So what kind of person wants to become a trucker today? Gogolak meets several candidates at a training school in Texas, who together offer a window into the death of the American dream:

Yanis was younger than the rest of us, but she was already stressed about her future. She wanted to be out of her parents’ place by winter, but that meant she needed to graduate from Changing Lanes and start filling her nearly empty bank account. Her family lived on ten acres of land in an unincorporated pocket of Travis County that was still mostly rural but was being eaten up fast by developers. Yanis reckoned that her father—who was also a truck driver—could sell the land for a couple million, but he didn’t want to. The problem was that they didn’t have utilities, which was why she wanted to make enough money to move out before the cold set in. It was weird being surrounded by a boomtown but disconnected from it, she told me: “We kind of live like in the old times.”

Yanis had worked as a cleaner at an airport lounge; at a UPS warehouse; as a security guard at an Apple corporate office in the hill country. Then she started working security at Tesla’s nearby Gigafactory. It took a full hour to walk across; when Elon Musk came to visit, his dog apparently had its own security guard. Yanis and her boyfriend, who also worked there, figured out that electricians made the best money at the factory, so they became electricians. In all of her work, she’d often been one of the few women. “You have to show them that you can do things better than them,” she said. “If you’re doing an outlet, the outlet has to look beautiful.” Ultimately, though, Yanis’s jobs have taught her about how the world works—that “the job that you can die on,” she told me, “is where they’re gonna pay you the most.

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A Hunger for Strangeness: A Cryptids Reading List

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Late one night many years ago, my sister was driving home through the leafy roads of South East England when a strange animal bounded into the headlights of her car and swiftly disappeared into a hedgerow. She was certain, she said, that it had been a wallaby—despite the fact that the kangaroo relative was native to Australia and Papua New Guinea and decidedly not native to Oxfordshire. Our reaction was about what you’d expect from a British family: politely skeptical. It had been dark, the encounter fleeting, and the human brain is decidedly fallible. Surely, then, she must have been mistaken.

My sister would eventually be vindicated when the existence of wild wallabies in the UK was confirmed and even captured on film. Yet, her experience isn’t too different from those who claim to have encountered cryptids, creatures whose existence remains a matter of debate. Yeti, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster are only the beginning; a small but committed community of cryptid hunters is dedicated to proving the existence of doubted beasts like the Mongolian Death Worm, the Honey Island Swamp Monster, and the Skunk Ape. 

This is not a quest without victories. In the early 20th century, tales of a fearsome giant lizard living on an inhospitable island in Indonesia were dismissed as folklore until Jacques Karel Henri van Steyn van Hensbroek, an impressively named Dutch lieutenant stationed on nearby Flores Island, investigated and returned with a photograph of the now-famous Komodo Dragon. Other animals to make the switch from supposed myth to firm reality include the duck-billed platypus, the giant squid, and the okapi (or forest giraffe).

Nevertheless, although attitudes may be slowly changing, cryptozoology—to give the field its proper name—is still considered a pseudoscience. So why do cryptid hunters continue to put their reputations on the line, and what other legendary beasts might we discover to be not so legendary after all? In an age when species extinction has reached alarming proportions, perhaps this quest to discover new life carries extra poignancy. The articles collected below offer tantalizing insight into both questions.

Desperately Seeking Mothman (Tara Isabella Burton, The Hedgehog Review, May 2020)

There’s so much to enjoy in this wonderful piece by Tara Isabella Burton, which provides both a fascinating overview of the history of cryptozoology and an insightful exploration of the psychology that drives it. Burton writes with compelling flair, drawing links between our enduring desire to uncover the undiscoverable and the perceived decrease in mystery and magic that has accompanied the modern age. She argues convincingly that interest in cryptids ties into our innate, if often subjugated, wish to believe in something “other,” something beyond the confines of a rational, predictable world. 

Burton also explores cryptozoology as reflected in what she describes as its “parallel and opposite”—the rise throughout the Renaissance of the Wunderkammern, a room kept in any learned gentleman’s house dedicated to the documentation and categorization of scientific specimens. I would go even further and argue that modern cryptozoology occupies a unique place between the realms of science and the magical. Ultimately, it’s a pursuit that hinges more on faith than logic. Yet, it also seeks to move a subject from imagination into reality. Would we be happier if Bigfoot were proven to exist? Or would it fade into the everyday, the commonplace, the explainable, to finally become something less than it ever was? Such are the questions that this excellent article engenders.

Like its Enlightenment-era forebears, contemporary cryptozoology is rooted in that same hunger for strangeness, and for an enchanted world. It’s telling that the contemporary iteration of the phenomenon saw its first major resurgence during the wider postwar optimism of 1950s—when Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, often lauded as one of the forefathers of the field, published On the Track of Unknown Animals in 1955. (Heuvelmans also coined the terms cryptozoology and cryptid.) Featuring entries dedicated to the abominable snowman and Nandi bears alongside examinations of platypuses and gorillas, Heuvelmans’s book celebrates the potential of a world teeming with creatures the scientific record has not yet ossified into fact.

“The world is by no means thoroughly explored,” Heuvelmans writes in his introduction. “It is true that we know almost all its geography, there are no more large islands or continents to be discovered. But because a country is on the map it does not mean that we know all about its inhabitants. There are still more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy.”¹ Neither technological progress nor scientific expansion can expunge the delightful possibility that the abominable snowman (or Bigfoot, or the Mothman) might well be out there.

When Edmund Hillary Went in Search of the Yeti (Tom Ward, Atlas Obscura, February 2022)

This gripping tale takes us back to Nepal in 1960, and Tom Ward’s evocative prose does a splendid job of outlining the atmosphere that gripped a world still coming to terms with the repercussions of two devastating global wars. As Ward points out, one inadvertent result of the conflicts was that the public was used to hearing news from lands once considered intimidatingly remote, setting the stage for this first-class adventure story, which captured the imagination of people the world over. All such stories need a hero, a larger-than-life figure of courage and daring, and New Zealand mountaineer and philanthropist Sir Edmund Hillary fit the bill perfectly.

Seven years earlier, Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay had become the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest, a feat for which Hillary was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. (Coincidentally, news of the climber’s achievement reached England on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.) Prior to that, Hillary had served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force during World War II as a navigator on Catalina amphibious aircraft. 

But in 1960, the mountaineer found himself on quite a different mission. Rumors of the existence of the Yeti (a.k.a. the Abominable Snowman) date back centuries, if not millennia, and Hillary was well aware of the Sherpas’ belief that such a creature truly existed. Nowadays, the Yeti has become a B-movie staple, slipping into the “enjoyable nonsense” category alongside the Loch Ness Monster. Not so in 1960; Hillary’s was a well-funded and highly skilled expedition that marked the passing of a more credulous and mysterious time.

When the race to conquer Everest heated up in the 1950s, so too did the number of alleged yeti sightings. Western audiences were hooked, eager for news of this evolutionary hangover halfway between man and beast. Perhaps it was comforting to think that there were beings beyond comprehension surviving at the ends of the wilderness and that, crucially, there were still enough wild places left to hold them.

He Asked the FBI to Analyze ‘Bigfoot’ Hair 40 Years Ago and Never Heard Back. Until Now. (Reis Thebault, The Washington Post, June 2019)

For all its reputation as a pseudoscience, cryptozoology relies on scientific methods to verify evidence, whether that be expert analysis of images and footprints or, as is the case in this story, DNA testing. This decades-spanning piece draws together two fascinating threads: the tantalizing possibility of uncovering undeniable proof, certified by the very gatekeepers who look down upon this field, and the stories of those who go to extraordinary lengths attempting to secure such a thing. 

Bigfoot also figures prominently in “The Truth Is Out There,” a recent issue of our sister publication, The Atavist.

Our protagonist here is cryptid hunter Peter Byrne, a man whose tireless questing since the 1970s has earned him a special place in the Bigfoot research community. While Byrne first encountered the legendary creature via bedtime stories as a child, his awareness blossomed into passion while stationed in India at the end of WWII; that’s when he met Nepalese people for whom the existence of Bigfoot was a given. Over his lifetime, Byrne has undertaken five expeditions into the Himalayas, spending a total of 38 months in the mountains.

It would be churlish not to admire such dedication, but cryptid hunting is a high-stakes game: struggling for funding while working in a maligned field, all in hopes of one day vindicating your obsession and elevating your name to the history books. Back in 1977, Byrne rolled the dice, sending a sample of suspected Bigfoot hair to the FBI and urging them to test it. After four decades, the FBI wrote back. If you don’t want to know what happens yet, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.

When Byrne arrived, he noticed the trees stood close together — far too narrow a space for something with broad shoulders and big feet to make a clean egress. And there, between three and five feet off the ground, snagged in the bark, he spotted the tuft of hair and piece of skin he hoped would bring him one step closer to his idée fixe, the sasquatch itself, a towering hominid of North American lore.

Chasing the Chupacabras (Asher Elbein, Texas Observer, October 2016)

Like many mass social phenomena, widespread panic comes in waves and can often affect communities and individuals in surprising ways. A single sighting of something strange or disturbing often snowballs into many more, with the story growing and mutating via a feedback loop, one fed by sensational media reports and eyewitnesses who are primed and nervous. Such situations are common and stretch back into recorded history. In early Victorian London, a mysterious creature who came to be known as Spring-Heeled Jack terrorized the night-time streets. In medieval Alsace, a bizarre “dancing sickness” spread throughout the city. In possibly the most famous example, a strange being dubbed Mothman haunted 1960s Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Among followers of paranormal news, there’s even a name for such events: flaps.

At their heart, such events are more about human psychology than hard science, and are no less fascinating for it. For proof, let us turn to the mid-1990s flap around the Chupacabra, a doglike creature whose penchant for slaying cattle gave it a name rooted in the Spanish words chupar (suck) and cabra (goat). Stories of the Chupacabra persist, providing a fascinating example of how modern legends circulate and grow. Countless attempts have been made to document proof of this disturbing beast, and with many more surely to come. Asher Elbein’s excellent feature does a fine job of telling the tale.

But the chupacabra wasn’t always a resident of the Lone Star State, and it didn’t always look like a dog. In the 21 years since the first supposed sightings of the creature, it has been a spine-backed alien, a winged kangaroo or a goblin, a predatory monkey or an unusually ambitious mongoose. Only one facet of the tale has remained constant: The chupacabra is out there in dark thickets and empty deserts, and it wants your livestock.

The Devil Went Down To Jersey (Frank Lewis, Philadelphia City Paper, October 1997)

Journalist Frank Lewis has a rich tapestry of material to draw from in this piece about one of our most enduring cryptids. The Jersey Devil (sometimes known as the Leeds Devil) likely originates in the legends of the Lenape, an indigenous people whose historical territory ranges across the northeastern United States. The Lenape called “it” M’Sing—a mysterious deer-like creature with leathery wings. The beast owes its modern twist to pre-Revolutionary America, and a popular folktale concerning a woman named Jane Leeds (often referred to as Mother Leeds) who, after discovering she was pregnant for the 13th time, cursed the child, which transformed into a strange, twisted and winged creature following its birth. By the early 19th century, the legend was ubiquitous throughout New Jersey. In 1859, the Atlantic Monthly published a detailed and evocative account, and waves of sightings continue to this day. (As do pop-culture portrayals: like many of the other creatures on this list, the Jersey Devil became the focus of a popular X-Files episode.)

What fascinates here is that such tales persist, transmitted from generation to generation, despite the rise of scientific skepticism. Perhaps in part that’s due to our need for community, and therefore communal stories and myths, which have traditionally brought people together and fostered a sense of collective belonging. But can that explain why New Jersey residents continue to have close encounters with the Devil? Whatever you might believe, this splendid article is full of sumptuous detail and quotes drawn from across the long life of Jersey’s own cryptid, and will surely have you chasing down further articles in search of answers.

The nearly 6-foot-tall beast stood no more than 3 feet away from her front bumper; she couldn’t see its feet, that’s how close they were. Its fine coat was all one color, a light brown or beige, like a camel, but it had the forward-leaning shape, short front legs and long, thick tail of a kangaroo. Short, rounded horns sprouted from its head, small wings from its back. To this day, she can’t fully describe the face; the expression was almost human.

“It looked right at me,” she says. “He just looked like a sad little thing. I felt sorry for it, whatever it was.”

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Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, UK. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
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An American Girlhood in the Ozempic Era

Things are changing fast in the field of obesity, and a new generation of children are facing treatment choices that their parents never had. But are more options always better? It’s a question Lisa Miller takes great pains to explore whilst tracing one family’s decisions over several years. A considered, informative piece on a drug that has had its fair share of headlines.

But if Maggie was sheltered from the onslaught beyond her small town, her mother was not. Erika has also struggled with her weight her entire life and feels the experience defined her; she has done everything she can to reassure Maggie that she is beautiful as she is and to protect her from the casual cruelty of people she encounters. But she also knew from the time her daughter was young that there was something different about her. In a small, dark part of herself, Erika feared that, because of her parenting or her habits or her own history with food, she was the one at fault. Even now, after all the interventions — the doctors, the fighting with insurance companies, the overhaul of the family fridge — this worry has not left her. It has only evolved, because Erika knows her neighbors and people in the world beyond have things to say not just about Maggie’s body but about the treatments she has chosen for it, too.

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You Will Miss the Pizza Delivery Driver

If you’ve ever ordered dinner through one of the megaliths dominating the restaurant-delivery world, it’s hard not to be a little underwhelmed. Michael Graff puts on his tomato-sauce-colored glasses to remember his teenage days as a Domino’s driver, and to wonder what we’ve lost in the mass shift toward convenience. An unexpected dose of nostalgia that’s perfect for a dreary winter week.

This was the summer of 1998, and I needed work to fund a couple of new habits I’d picked up during my freshman year: dating, Bruce Springsteen CDs, Busch Light. The Domino’s gods had recently dropped a franchise alongside the main four-lane road that cut through the small community of Bryans Road in rural southern Maryland, where I grew up, lifting our culinary scene to new heights. The Domino’s was attached to a drive-through liquor store, which was next to a parking lot where a family sold steamed crabs out of the back of a truck. Also in the area was a Burger King, a McDonald’s, a Subway, and a Chinese restaurant.

But although customers had to drive to all of the others, Domino’s drove to the customers. Even in our strange attire, we delivery drivers were like kings who wore the jewel of a Domino’s sign on our crowns. Once, a police officer noticed me going 25 miles over the speed limit. He whipped around, but rather than ticket me, he pulled up beside me and wagged his finger, as if to say, Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

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The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty

Grievous police and legal negligence, a wrongful conviction, and a remorseful juror. These are the three building blocks Michael Hall uses to tell the moving story of how Carlos Jaile went from living the American dream as a successful salesman to life plus 20 years behind bars.

In 2017 Estella was throwing out some old papers when she came upon that 27-year-old envelope. Inside was the certificate. She called out to Johnny: “This is what I got for putting an innocent person in jail for life.” 

She was 75 now. For a generation she had suppressed the shame, the guilt. She had gone through a lot in that time. She’d become more engaged in the world around her. She had seen her children and grandchildren become active citizens. Most important, she’d become more assertive. “I found that you have more power if you talk,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong if you say what you think.” 

She knew how hard it was to take a stand. She knew how hard it was to do the right thing. And now she was going to do it. 

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Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet

In an excerpt from his new book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, Kyle Chayka recalls growing up on the early social internet, describing with his first brush with the online world as a teenager through AOL Instant Messenger, and the formative experience of expressing himself online via LiveJournal, an early publishing platform. It was an escape, and an exciting time that sparked creativity and possibility. Chayka then takes us on a tour of the first social networks he joined, from MySpace to Facebook, up to the very different and broken web that we navigate today—one of monopolies and algorithms and ads that only reinforces existing power structures.

I didn’t understand yet in middle school, but in the years that followed I began to think of my online presence as a shadow self. Those aware of it could see it, and I could see theirs—the reflection of their avatars and icons and away messages, the tone of their instant-message chats or L.J. posts. But, for other people who were not so online, it was still invisible, insignificant. I’ve been thinking a lot about this early version of my online self lately as I’ve been writing about latter-day digital culture and taking stock of just how much the landscape has changed.

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Joni Mitchell’s Best Album Is Turning Fifty. It’s Not Blue

Joanie Mitchell’s sixth album, Court and Spark, just turned 50. For the Walrus, KC Hoard shares their deep affinity for Mitchell’s music and its place in their life. For Hoard, Court and Spark marked Mitchell’s musical reinvention, where she distanced herself from her coffeehouse chanteuse image and the accessible, less complicated arrangements of her earlier work.

If you dropped a needle on Joni Mitchell’s brand-new LP in January of 1974, you might have expected yet another hour of her signature elegies. On her two previous records, 1971’s Blue and 1972’s For the Roses, Mitchell excavated arresting songs from deep within her psyche. They are complex but accessible, often pairing Mitchell’s lithe voice with her own accompaniment on sombre piano or supple dulcimer. They are melancholy and sparse. And they aren’t very fun.

Court and Spark starts in a familiar Jonian fashion: mournful piano chords, poetic lyrics, Mitchell’s skyscraper voice. “Love came to my door with a sleeping roll and a madman’s soul,” she coos. “He thought for sure I’d seen him dancing in a river in the dark, looking for a woman to court and spark.” But when she unfurls the title of the album, something unexpected appears: a stuttering hi-hat. A beat in a Joni Mitchell song. And with that rhythm, the Joni of the past was gone. Joni the Confessional Poet, Joni the Selfish and Sad, Joni the Lonely Painter was no more.

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To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare

This essay by writer and programmer Paul Ford is much shorter than a typical longread, yet very thoughtful. I’ve always enjoyed Ford’s writing, and here he argues that interdisciplinary life and learning, even and especially in this time of artificial intelligence, is worth pursuing.

When stuff gets out of hand, we don’t open disciplinary borders. We craft new disciplines: digital humanities, human geography, and yes, computer science (note that “science” glued to the end, to differentiate it from mere “engineering”). In time, these great new territories get their own boundaries, their own defenders. The interdisciplinarian is essentially an exile. Someone who respects no borders enjoys no citizenship.

All you have to do is look at a tree—any tree will do—to see how badly our disciplines serve us. Evolutionary theory, botany, geography, physics, hydrology, countless poems, paintings, essays, and stories—all trying to make sense of the tree. We need them all, the whole fragile, interdependent ecosystem. No one has got it right yet.

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We Got the Beat

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Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | January 16, 2024 | 16 minutes (2,000 words)

We’re delighted to publish an excerpt from Lisa Whittington-Hill’s new book, The Go-Go’s: Beauty and the Beat. Here, we’re featuring chapter 3, “From Punk to Pop.” For more of Lisa’s incisive cultural commentary, check out “The Women Who Built Grunge” and “Live Through This: Courtney Love at 55.”

The Go-Go’s signed to Miles Copeland’s label I.R.S. on April 1, 1981. It’s fitting that the band would sign their record deal on April Fool’s Day since for many record execs the idea of women playing music was nothing more than a joke. After signing their deal, the Go-Go’s headed to New York City to record their debut album. Copeland hired Richard Gottehrer to produce the album. Gottehrer was a songwriter and producer who had success with songs like “Hang on Sloopy,” “My Boyfriend’s Back,” and “I Want Candy” by the Strangeloves. Gottehrer also started Sire Records with Seymour Stein and the label had helped launch the careers of bands like Blondie and the Ramones, which appealed to the Go-Go’s and their punk roots. Gottehrer had even produced Blondie’s 1976 self-titled debut album.

Gottehrer wanted to polish the band’s sound, slow down their songs so you could hear the lyrics, and make their music more accessible to a pop audience. “I told them they had to slow down, put the songs into a groove. The songs deserved to be treated with respect,”¹

Gottehrer told Billboard in 2016. He had a small budget of $35,000 for the recording and ended up going over budget by $7,500, which he paid for out of his own pocket (not to worry, he later made it back in royalties). The Go-Go’s didn’t want to record a new version of “We Got the Beat” for the album. They argued they already had the Stiff Records version and people seemed to like it, but Gottehrer felt Beauty and the Beat needed a new recording of the song and finally convinced them. The album also included the hit single “Our Lips Are Sealed” for which Wiedlin wrote the lyrics and music. The song’s lyrics were based on lines from a love letter sent to Wiedlin by Terry Hall from the Specials, as Wiedlin and Hall had been romantically involved, while the Specials and the Go-Go’s were touring with Madness in the UK. Hall’s band Fun Boy Three would also end up recording a version of the song.

While Gottehrer tried to slow down the band’s songs, what he couldn’t slow down was the Go-Go’s partying. The girls made the most of their time in NYC, taking advantage of the city’s nightlife and everything it had to offer. “This was when I learned that girls can be as disruptive and dirty as boys. Who knew? It might have been drinking, it might’ve been going out, looking for booty—I’m not sure if they were into their drug phase yet. But that energy and personality came across on the record,”² Gottehrer told Billboard. When the Go-Go’s heard Beauty and the Beat for the first time they cried, but they weren’t exactly tears of joy. They thought they were making a punk record and expected the record to sound like the band did live. Their punk sound had been given a pop polish by Gottehrer. “A couple of us were concerned about how our peers in L.A. perceived us. With the small amount of success we’d had, people said we sold out, we weren’t punk after all, blah, blah, blah. Hearing the album made us feel like they were right—we sounded like we sold out,”³ Carlisle told Billboard in 2016. The Go-Go’s were not the only ones who were upset upon hearing the album. Copeland thought Gottehrer had ruined the band by delivering a pop album. Like the band, Copeland was under the misconception that Gottehrer was delivering a punk album. Later, when the album went to the number one spot all was forgiven. Suddenly, Gottehrer was being heralded as a genius and the best producer ever by both the band and Copeland.

When it came time to shoot the cover for Beauty and the Beat, photographer George DuBose got the job, accidentally. DuBose wanted to shoot the band for Andy Warhol’sInterview Magazine but was told the Go-Go’s didn’t have time because they needed a cover for their new album. He ended up photographing the cover. The band wanted a timeless feel to the Beauty and the Beat cover. They also wanted a cover concept that would save them the trouble of having to decide what to wear; the cover featuring the girls in white bath towels and face masks achieved both these goals. They tried several things on their faces but ended up with Noxzema because it was the only thing that didn’t crack immediately. The back of the album featured individual shots of the band members in the tub, shot in the bathroom of Wiedlin and Caffey’s room at the Wellington, the hotel they were staying at while recording Beauty and the Beat. The cover received criticism from journalists like New York Rocker’s Don Snowden who wrongly assumed record execs, and not the Go-Go’s, had developed the concept. “It’s a long way from the motley crew pictured on the Stiff single but if the Go-Go’s want to come across as new wave cutie-pie heart-throbs, that’s their business . . . But c’mon, the images—pouring bubbly in bubblebath, chocolates and trashy novels, hand on the telephone, the phallic rose—strike me as some 40-year old marketing exec’s fantasy,”⁴ Snowden wrote of the images on the album’s back cover.

The album cover was the first time I saw what the Go-Go’s looked like. I could finally put faces to my new heroes. In the days before social media, videos, and the internet, it was a lot harder to learn about your new favorite band. MTV would soon change that, but it wouldn’t launch until a month after Beauty and the Beat was released. Years after I first discovered the Go-Go’s, I was packing some records to move and noticed the similarities between the Beauty and the Beat cover and the cover of Cut, the debut album from the Slits. The Slits were naked except for loincloths and covered in mud, not Noxzema, but there was still the idea that both bands wanted to rebel against stereotypical, hypersexualized notions of what women should look like on an album cover. They were both powerful images that the bands chose themselves, which subverted the idea of how women should market their music. There was also the idea that the women wanted to conceal themselves, whether with face masks or mud, to keep a part hidden, especially from a music industry that wanted women to reveal themselves, and all of themselves, if they wanted to sell records.

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As soon as the album was done, the Go-Go’s hit the road. The tours and the venues kept getting bigger. The band went from being the house band at the Whisky and playing small clubs to opening for the Police for their Ghost in the Machine tour in less than a year. Miles Copeland also happened to be the manager of the Police. His brother, Stewart Copeland, was the drummer for the band. Not only would the Go-Go’s end up on tour with the Police, but some extra money left over from the budget for a music video by the Police—$6,000 to be exact—paid for the Go-Go’s first video, “Our Lips Are Sealed.” The Go-Go’s didn’t understand the importance of video at the time; but when MTV launched in August 1981, they saw the difference it made. The girls goofed around in the video, driving around Los Angeles in a convertible, and splashing in a fountain. They hoped to get arrested for playing in the fountain, which they thought would make an exciting end to the video. The police didn’t care, but the video would be played nonstop on MTV.

The album cover was the first time I saw what the Go-Go’s looked like. I could finally put faces to my new heroes. In the days before social media, videos, and the internet, it was a lot harder to learn about your new favorite band.

While the band was opening for the Police and playing sold-out stadiums, Beauty and the Beat went to number one on the Billboard album charts and would stay there for six weeks. Beauty and the Beat had passed Ghost in the Machine by tourmates the Police, which was at number six. Sting brought the girls a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Finally, the police were paying attention to the band, just not the ones they had hoped when they frolicked in that fountain in the “Our Lips Are Sealed” video. “We Got the Beat” went to number two and “Our Lips Are Sealed” to number twenty. The Go-Go’s were everywhere, and Beauty and the Beat would go on to sell more than two million copies, making it one of the few debut albums to top the charts and putting the band on the same level as the Beatles and Elvis. Beauty and the Beat made the Go-Go’s the first, and to date only, female band to have a number one album, who not only wrote their own songs but also played their own instruments. The album was not only a success, but “also a harbinger of what rock would become, and a bridge between punk, the movement whose rebelliousness had quashed the excesses of classic rock, and the genre-fusing music of the 1980s,”⁵ said Hilary Hughes in her introduction to NPR’s oral history of Beauty and the Beat.

On November 14, 1981, the Go-Go’s appeared on Saturday Night Live with host Bernadette Peters and Billy Joel. Having to wait around the studio all day to play, the Go-Go’s passed the time with alcohol and cocaine. By the time they took the stage, they were so drunk they could barely play. A clip of the performance is available online and worth the watch. The girls could not only hold their liquor on live TV, but the performance helped them sell a lot of records. All this attention helped to move the band’s fan base beyond just college radio listeners and new-wave clubgoers. The band’s fan base was now younger, especially attracting teen and pre-teen girls, who worshipped the band and didn’t know what punk was, let alone about the band’s punk roots. When the Go-Go’s started they dreamed of spitting on Valley Girls, but those girls would soon be part of the band’s fan base and the band would be part of a film that featured those girls they wanted to spit at. “We Got the Beat” would end up being the opening theme to the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a film that would popularize Valley Girls, mall culture, and Southern California teenage adolescence in the 1980s. The film launched Amy Heckerling’s career, as well as the teen comedies of the 1980s from Sixteen Candles to The Breakfast Club.

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A 1981 Village Voice poll put Beauty and the Beat in the number ten spot. Revisiting the album for an October 2019 review, Pitchfork gave it an 8.3. “Though it was a far cry from The Canterbury, Beauty and the Beat is about what’s underneath the surface of pop music. Rather than relishing the California sunshine, the Go-Go’s evoke their Los Angeles, a glittery, gritty place where punks rule the streets after dark.”⁶ Reviewing Beauty and the Beat in November 1981 for Musician magazine, Toby Goldstein said, “Beauty and the Beat is the album those of you who were embarrassed by pop music can use to say that pop’s okay.”⁷ Wiedlin agreed with Goldstein’s assessment. “One of my great quotes that I ever said, if I can quote myself, was I once compared The Go-Go’s to Twinkies. I said, ‘Everybody loves Twinkies, but they’re ashamed to admit it,’”⁸ she told Songfacts in 2007.

“I remember thinking if we sell 100,000 copies, that would be amazing. We had no idea it would do what it did. I look back even now and say wow. We went from zero to one hundred in about two years. And what happened with the album—its success—was beyond any of our expectations,”⁹ said Carlisle. And while I don’t like reducing the Go-Go’s to sugary, sweet baked goods, that’s a lot of Twinkies.

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1.  Rob Tannenbaum, “The Go-Go’s Recall the Debauched Days of Their Hit ‘We Got the Beat’ 35 Years Later,” Billboard, May 20, 2016.
2. Tannenbaum, “The Go-Go’s.”
3. Tannenbaum, “The Go-Go’s.”
4. Don Snowden, “The Go-Gos Go!!,” New York Rocker (1980). The Go-Go’s. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed July 13, 2022.
5. Hilary Hughes, “How The Go-Go’s Perfected Pop-Punk,” NPR, August 5, 2020.
6. Quinn Moreland, “Beauty and the Beat: The Go-Go’s,” Pitchfork, October 20, 2019.
7. Toby Goldstein, “The Go-Go’s: Beauty and the Beat (IRS),” Musician (1981). The Go-Go’s. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed August 1, 2022.
8. Carl Wiser, “Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s,” Songfacts (2007). The Go-Go’s, Jane Wiedlin. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed July 13, 2022.
9. Audrey Golden, “The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat: A 40th Anniversary Celebration,” Louder than War, July 8, 2021.

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© Lisa Whittington-Hill, 2024. From The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat by Lisa Whittington-Hill published by Bloomsbury Academic on September 7, 2023.

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The Whale Who Went AWOL

A beluga whale in Norway is getting a lot of people in a flap—whether they just want to photograph him, or save him. Escaped from the Russian navy (making him sound like an espionage star) he has been delighting people off the coast of Hammerfest. But what will his future hold? What does the future hold for any whale who has spent its life in captivity? In answering these questions, Ferris Jabr does not shy away from discussing the tragic world of captive whales and dolphins, some of the last animals to be forced to perform and live in “a barren box.”

The military conscription of a beluga whale might sound like a conceit plucked from less-than-convincing spy fiction, but it is actually a well-documented practice. Since the 1960s, Russia and the United States have trained dolphins, seals and other marine mammals to assist their naval forces by tagging enemy divers, detecting mines and recovering items from the seafloor. Satellite photos of Russian naval bases near Murmansk, not far from the spot where Norwegian fishermen first found Hvaldimir, reveal the type of sea pens often used to hold belugas. Audun Rikardsen, a professor of marine biology at the Arctic University of Norway, told me that international contacts have since confirmed that Hvaldimir belonged to the navy.

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