• The cartels making millions off sand
• How change actually happens
• Considering the history and handwringing behind the hooded sweatshirt
• A woman who spent more than a year alone in a lightless cave
• Reclaiming a fruit that’s both a summer staple and a fraught symbol
David A. Taylor | Scientific American | February 1, 2024 | 3,485 words
My favorite subplot of Barry? The romantic relationship between Chechen mafioso NoHo Hank and Bolivian crime boss Cristobal. In season four, ostensibly in an attempt to move away from criminal life, they decide to import sand. When I watched the episode in which they hatch a plan, I’d thought it was an inspired comic bit; only once I read David A. Taylor’s story did I realize that sand mafias are very real. Sand is one of the main ingredients in concrete, and given that construction worldwide has been booming for decades, we could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. In this piece, Taylor writes about the devastating impact of sand mining and looting on ecosystems that are already fragile, and on vulnerable communities in places like Mozambique and Kenya (and how one woman in Kenya’s Makueni County successfully fought the sand cartel in Nairobi and introduced a regulated, sustainable approach). Stories of organized crime aside, it’s really the simple yet eye-opening details that make this piece, like the fact that China used more cement in just three years than the United States used in the entire 20th century. Or that half of Morocco’s sand is illegally mined. Or that sand from rivers and lakebeds, not coastal areas, is ideal for building, and builders who skimp on better sand end up constructing buildings that are flat-out dangerous (just look at the destruction in Turkey and Syria from the February 2023 earthquake, one expert tells Taylor). A fascinating story on a global issue that more people should be talking about. —CLR
Rebecca Solnit | Literary Hub | January 11, 2024 | 1,745 words
Whenever I plant seeds, I want immediate payoff. Notoriously impatient, I’ll check on them mere hours after planting to see if they’ve sprouted. Now? (No.) Now? (No.) How about now? With all things, I need evidence that my actions will take root and bear fruit. Rebecca Solnit’s recent piece at Lit Hub gave me some much-needed perspective on the slow pace of change, be it personal or political. Popular culture suggests that all-important turning points come after the impassioned speech or the meet cute, but in reality, true change is imperceptible and incremental, and progress is hard to pinpoint. In this piece, Solnit focuses on the years of advocacy and baby steps that, taken one after another, can lead to a shift in government policy that benefits the environment. What I appreciated most about this piece is Solnit’s gentle reminder that, for the most part, change happens when you’re not looking. For me, that not-looking is both a solution and a problem to be solved. At its best, not looking means keeping the faith that action will beget change; at its worst, it means avoiding the personal reflection necessary to achieve those tiny, cumulative changes that add up to real progress. “A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient,” she writes. According to Solnit, if you take it slow, over time you’ll find perspective. It just depends on how you look at it. —KS
Nicholas Russell | The Point | January 23, 2024 | 3,053 words
“At a glance,” Nicholas Russell writes, “there is no coherent history of the hood as a symbol for anything.” As we know all too well, that changed in our lifetimes—first with the arrival of hip-hop, and then irrevocably with Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012. But as Russell deftly unpacks in The Point, the hood’s unique position as a cultural signifier exposes far more than this country’s cancerous paranoia about young Black men. Even if this isn’t a piece he wanted to write, having cars swerve at you on two separate occasions while you’re running in a hoodie has a way of changing things. So Russell considers the garment from every angle imaginable. As a guarantor of boy-genius tech-world wizardry. A flashpoint of respectability politics. An easy shorthand for crime-show producers. And of course, in its pointed variant, as an icon of American hatred and bigotry. None of them, though, seem likely to eclipse its current mournful status. Russell is as resigned to that fact as he is resentful: “The hoodie is redolent with meaning no matter what I do, no matter what anyone does. Its legacy is a divorced one, operatic and ugly.” —PR
D.T. Max | The New Yorker | January 21, 2024 | 7,430 words
Spelunking (a delightful word—go on, say it out loud) means cave exploration, but Beatriz Falmini took it to a whole new level. After realizing she’d “never had a bad time in a cave,” as D.T. Max writes, Falmini decides to spend 500 days in one, neither seeing nor speaking to another human being. If you struggled during COVID-19 lockdowns, imagine nearly a year and a half alone . . . in the dark. In some intense reporting, Max pushes Flamini to dive deep into her experience. Even the logistics of organizing 500 days in a cave is more gripping than most thrillers; I have never found facts about food delivery and hygiene more fascinating. Moving on to Flamini outside the cave, Max realizes “she spoke about her happiness underground so adamantly, and repeatedly, that it was a little hard to believe.” The more time he spends with her, the more reality he uncovers: This experience was anything but a breeze. The darkness sapped life. The cave nearly broke her. It’s hard to fathom the psychology of spending so long underground, but Max does an excellent job of getting beneath Falmini’s bravado to do so. —CW
Jori Lewis | Switchyard | November 25, 2023 | 4,744 words
Watermelon has been in the zeitgeist lately. The humble fruit is an important emblem of Palestinian resistance, which means that, over the last three months, images of it have appeared at everything from street protests to Paris fashion week. In the context of US cultural history, however, watermelon carries different connotations—racist ones. Jori Lewis examines these crude and cruel associations in her essay for Switchyard, an exciting new magazine based at the University of Tulsa. She draws on her family’s experiences to show the complicated relationship many Black Americans have with watermelon, but her piece is about much more than the harm stereotypes can do. Lewis is interested in reclaiming meaning, and as is so often the case, that requires looking beyond US borders and deep into the past. This essay is beautifully rendered, taking readers from the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt, to a roadside fruit stand in Senegal, to the agricultural fields of China, in search of watermelon as both sustenance and symbol. “The watermelon is a generous fruit: the flesh of one can feed a dozen people and can parent hundreds of melons with its seeds,” Lewis writes. Cultures have associated it with fertility, solidarity, and luck. Watermelon can both cure hunger and quench thirst, and Lewis bookends her essay with scenes where she lets a juicy slice do the latter. By the time she gets to the second instance, watermelon feels to the reader like a thing transformed. “I felt an ever so slight twinge about me in this Black body in a white man’s field and all that has ever meant. But it was hot, and I was thirsty,” Lewis writes. “I took it with my fingers, and I ate.” —SD
Audience Award
What editor’s pick was our readers’ favorite this week?
Jasper Craven | The New Republic | January 16, 2024 | 5,484 words
At age 38, Janikka Perry died of a heart attack at work, on her bakery shift at Walmart in North Little Rock, Arkansas, but you will not find her death recorded by OSHA as workplace-related. The New Republic‘s investigation has revealed that while Walmart touts an enlightened approach to time off, it expects associates to work while sick, or in Perry’s case, deathly ill. “The store was short-staffed, and her manager allegedly told her to ‘pull herself together.’” —KS
from Longreads https://ift.tt/b7N0rV9
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/pZbfU7C
Alastair Humphreys has been everywhere imaginable, it seems. He’s even made a career out of pushing other people to follow their own exploratory spirits. But as he tells us in this Noēma piece, one day he realized he’d never applied his philosophy of “microadventures” to his own backyard. So he ordered a map of the 20 square kilometers around his house in England—and what follows is a lovely meditation on finding wonder in the everyday.
I studied my map for a while and found what appeared to be its most boring grid square: no roads, houses or rivers, just a single footpath, one pond and the merest flutter of a lonely contour line. Here, it seemed, was nothing at all, neatly outlined within crisp blue lines.
It was the ideal place to begin.
I folded up the map and headed out to have a look at nothing.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/acNnSvs
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/JpMBe4N
Hoods themselves have no overarching meaning as a signifier. As Nicholas Russell points out in this probing essay for The Point, they can evoke everyone from Emperor Palpatine to tech bros. But the hooded sweatshirt is another matter entirely; it completed its trajectory with Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, lodging inextricably in our collective consciousness.
Rankine knew the hoodie would forever be associated with the murder of Trayvon Martin, that that association redirects but doesn’t necessarily reframe the hoodie as a symbol of black masculinity. There can be no other political association attached to it after the numbing scrutiny thrust onto it—first after Martin’s murder, again during the protests of 2020, and once more after that, on the tenth anniversary of Martin’s death. The hood, politicized, commented upon, reclaimed, commodified, floats in space like it does on Citizen’s jacket, as powerful and defanged as an abstraction. Which is what it remained for me, for so long. A hood is a piece of clothing, an object of no importance. And yet, somehow, stubbornly, even though I wish it didn’t, it remains a haunted emblem.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/Ir6KUE0
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/JpMBe4N
In this excerpt of her forthcoming book, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Leslie Jamison recounts the early months of her daughter’s life. During that period, Jamison juggled a book tour, a teaching career, and the demands of a newborn—amid the growing realization that she wanted to leave her marriage.
Because I could not hurl myself constantly into work and trips and teaching and deadlines, I had to look more closely at the life I’d built: this husband, this marriage. It was impossible to ignore my daily desire to leave—to wander the cold streets of our neighborhood with our baby, making ceaseless, ever-widening loops away from home.
Every day that fall, I asked myself some permutation of the same questions. Did honoring my vows mean figuring out how to make a home with C’s anger? What did I owe his pain? What did I owe my daughter? When I told myself she would get better versions of both her parents if we did not live together, was I simply telling myself a story that would justify the choice I already wanted to make?
During a conversation years earlier, when I was already unhappy enough to consider leaving, I told my friend Harriet that I was worried about the harm I would cause if I left. She told me I was right to worry. I would cause harm. She also told me no one moves through this world without causing harm. I’d wanted her to say, Don’t be crazy! You won’t cause any harm! Or, at least, You’re in so much pain, you deserve to cause harm!
But she hadn’t said either of those things. What she said instead was neither condemnation nor absolution. It was just this: You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause. You have to believe it’s necessary.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/bjruRKV
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/JpMBe4N
Emily Latimer | Longreads | January 18, 2024 | 4,924 words (17 minutes)
Last summer, I was struck with a decade-old memory: I was hypnotized as a teenager.
“Remember when they hypnotized us at that school event?” I asked my sister, Jessica. “What was all that about?”
“That was kinda weird, actually,” she laughed.
The weird part is no one questioned hypnotizing a bunch of teenagers. They still don’t. Every year, teens are brought on stage and hypnotized in front of their peers. My time came when I was 17 years old. I had stayed up all night at Safe Grad, an organized event that ran from midnight to 6 a.m. at our local university’s gymnasium—to save us kids from the perils of drinking after prom. Ostensibly, it was better to sleep-deprive students than let them pass out in a field from alcohol poisoning.
There was heaps of food, organized games, a blow-up slide, and, the main event: Ian Stewart—Master Hypnotist. All night we asked each other, in a state of overtired excitement, Are you gonna get hypnotized? It wasn’t like any of us knew what that actually meant. We were just game for whatever. Each year, hilarious tales of on-stage hypnosis trickled down through the grades. We were ready for our turn.
The hypnotist was speaking in a dull monotone, performing a test to see who to bring on stage.
Focus on your hands locking together.
They won’t come apart no matter how hard you try to pull them.
Concentrate.
My hands felt vise-gripped together. I strained to free them. Then, the hypnotist said: “On the count of three, your hands will come apart. One, two, three.” Hands flew apart all around the room. The crowd laughed nervously, exchanging side-eyes. I guess I did something right; I was brought on stage.
I remember the squeak of classroom chairs. Dozens of high school kids sat on the stage wearing red grad shirts, popping against a black backdrop. We slumped excessively. Sleep, the hypnotist said. We dropped our heads on the shoulders of the person next to us. I think one person even fell out of their chair. Someone was told to sing karaoke in Chinese. Another classmate acted as an interpreter. “Can you ask him what was the name of the song he was singing?” the hypnotist asked. The two exchange words in unintelligible gobbledygook, like Sims speaking their native language, Simlish. “Single Ladies,” she deadpans. The laughter was next-level.
I look back on the event now with a huge question mark. What was I doing up there acting like a fool? Was I just going along with whatever the guy told me to do? Is that what hypnotism is? Is this even ethical?
I find myself on the flashy websites of stage hypnotists. They have names that ooze confidence: “The Incredible Boris,” “The Jeff West Experience,” and “The World’s Greatest Hypnotist.” I stumble naively into their world, blindly fumbling to understand the rules that govern who you can turn into a pig. Turns out, it’s complicated.
There’s so much questionable information when it comes to hypnosis—and language is paramount. I was scolded for using words like “trance” and “susceptibility.” Semantics is everything. Words are the cornerstone, the hypnotist’s main tool, and are carefully selected and peppered throughout the act. Of course they are: words are how people are coaxed into a state of hypnosis, after all. (I probably shouldn’t say “coax.”)
“Sleep” is another one. “We use the word sleep a lot and truth to be known it has nothing to do with sleep,” one hypnotist told me. “When people are hypnotized, they look asleep. In reality, they’re very much awake.” After each interview with one of these fancy-named hypnotists, I heave a big sigh and read my notes to suss out the sometimes contradictory information. “The hypnotists keep confusing me,” I complained to my sister. “Maybe they hypnotized you,” she said.
Before I went any further, I needed to understand how someone is actually hypnotized. Trusty WikiHow informed me to “Smile at the audience and speak in a calm, even-toned voice while you introduce yourself and explain what you’re going to do.” I watched YouTube videos. I tried it out on my cat (who, upon being commanded to sit, promptly stalked out of the room).
But despite my cat’s—and the seemingly widespread—belief that hypnosis is bullshit; it appears to be real. Simply put, hypnosis is just a state of focused concentration and deep relaxation happening simultaneously. Hypnotists give verbal suggestions to willing participants who are gradually lulled into a state of altered awareness in which they’re more open to behavior changes. During hypnosis, the critical nature of the mind is bypassed and the subconscious mind is in a more suggestible state, hence why subjects act so silly and uninhibited on stage. Hypnotists hush our brains’ analytic tendencies: Shhhh, stop worrying about your tax return and cluck like a chicken.
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.
Stage hypnotists, researchers, and government web pages all agree: you cannot be hypnotized against your will. An amenable participant is a vital ingredient—the hypnotized person must agree to go along with suggestions. I was surprised to learn that you can’t be forced into a hypnotic state. I blame the ridiculous hypnosis scene in Zoolander that suggests otherwise. (“You can help these children Derek, by killing the prime minister of Malaysia!”)
In reality, you allow yourself to be hypnotized by voluntarily altering your consciousness. Like improv, it’s a sort of suggestibility dance between hypnotist and subject: the hypnotist gives you a prompt; you say “Yes, and…” In other words, you are hypnotizing yourself. Just as some people are musically gifted, some of us are more easily hypnotized. About 10 to 15 percent of us are highly hypnotizable. Another 15 to 20 percent struggle to be hypnotized or can’t experience it at all. The rest lie somewhere in between.
While it may be tempting to suggest that those of us who fall easily into a state of hypnosis are weak-willed, that’s not true. I got called out for it: “Everybody is suggestible,” hypnotist Gerard V told me via email. “Just take a look at the variety of obvious misinformation and ridiculous beliefs people have picked up off the internet and you’ll see that we are all easily influenced,” he says. “Compared to politics and advertising, hypnotists are amateur.”
Studies have shown that hypnotizability is not correlated with intelligence, persuasibility, personality, or even neuroticism or psychoticism. What is important is a person’s ability to fully attend to a narrowly focused task, like reading. Researchers in the 1960s found that hypnotizability was correlated with the subjects’ tendency to have hypnosis-like experiences in their everyday lives. Modern-day equivalents, like playing video games or watching TikToks, can all drop you into a quasi-state of hypnosis. Turns out that mindlessly watching videos of women organizing their spotless refrigerators is excellent hypnotic training. But I was curious how the pros did it.
There are two main elements to hypnosis. First up is the induction, cues given to a participant to put them into a suggestible state, like “Take a deep breath.” Then come the actual suggestions, like “You’ll imagine yourself stuck to your chair.” There are also deepeners, like counting down from three, which help lead volunteers further into hypnosis.
Turns out that mindlessly watching videos of women organizing their spotless refrigerators is excellent hypnotic training.
Trained stage hypnotists typically lean on gags and skits. In Las Vegas casinos, expect adult humor and off-color jokes. On cruise ships, vacationers mime swimming through shark-infested waters. At university orientations, students bob their heads along with a stuffed doll. Hypnosis can transform a tough redneck cowboy into a flirtatious lady racking up men’s phone numbers. It can encourage a camp counselor to admit they would spend $1,000 on marijuana—in front of all of their bosses. But don’t try anything with the suits: at corporate retreats, engineers, lawyers, and accountants resist hypnosis. “They’re too analytical,” says Jeff Oatman, a stage hypnotist in Ontario with the stage name Jeff West. “They’re the worst to hypnotize.”
Dirk Bernhardt-Walther, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, told me that while he knows hypnosis as a phenomenon exists, he thinks that all stage hypnosis for entertainment relies on stagecraft and tricks rather than something real. He covers hypnosis in his course, The Psychology of Magic. “Effects of stage ‘hypnosis’ are likely due to psychological factors, participant selection, suggestibility (wanting to have a good time in front of friends), physical manipulation, occasionally intoxication, and stagecraft (trickery),” he told me via email.
Could people really be faking it for laughs? As a stage-hypnotized teen myself, I can say I definitely wasn’t an audience plant, and hypnotists are quick to point out that they can easily spot fakers and remove them from the stage. One hypnotist says truly hypnotized volunteers are easy to spot. “There’s a look—an eye fixation and a slump to the cheekbones,” he says. My hypnosis felt similar to the time I steered an Ouija board with my two best friends when I was 13. It didn’t feel like I was the person moving it—though it was conveniently spelling the word I had projected in my mind. (“Recklessly,” for the record.) Was it a spirit, something bigger than me? All I knew was that I was focusing hard, channeling my energy to see what would come up. I believed in the task at hand and thought it into existence. This physical manifestation is the closest thing I can liken to my experience of being hypnotized. I made a push towards the unknown, going with the vibe to see what would happen.
I needed a true faker’s perspective. My good friend Mitchell was a total clown when he was hypnotized at his safe grad event. He’s also a skeptic. “I definitely faked my hypnosis,” he says. He went into it thinking it was complete bullshit but thought he could make people laugh. “I like to humiliate myself for the amusement of others, but it got me thinking. Maybe hypnosis is just that—a chill person to say ‘yes and’ to your bits.” By the end of our conversation, he was less sure that he had “definitely” faked the hypnosis. Doubt lingers. “I’ve been stuck on it,” he admits. “Would I even know if I was hypnotized? It sounds too crazy to be true.”
Gerard V told me people often think they’re faking, but they’re not. “It gets complex because people often come with some preconceived ideas about what it must be like to be hypnotized, and then when their experience is different to that expectation, claim they were not under at all,” he says. “This can be funny when someone after a show claims they weren’t really under and were just ‘going along with it,’ but then cannot remember doing an epic air guitar solo until you show them the video.”
Stage hypnosis is a wild profession. A traveling comedian mixed with a magician. The five comedy hypnotists I spoke to also dabbled in side-quests, like video game characters: chainsaw juggling, hypnotizing daytime talk show guests, or using hypnosis to treat addiction. They were patient with me, debunking myths as I questioned their field of work.
“One of the problems with hypnosis is that it was once perceived as a sort of fiefdom of—I don’t know how to describe them—but maybe, creepy guys?” says hypnotist and hypnotherapist Albert Nerenberg. “Men who want power over people and think that hypnosis is a way to do that.” But that’s changing, he says. At this year’s Hypnothoughts—allegedly the largest hypnosis conference in the world—Nerenberg says it was almost gender equal, with women making up nearly half of the speakers and participants.
Worldwide, there are more than 16,000 hypnotists registered with the National Guild of Hypnotists, a not-for-profit to advance the practice of hypnosis. Perhaps not a profession regularly suggested by a high school guidance counselor, but stage hypnotists are a dedicated bunch. They travel far and wide to do hundreds of shows each year to make people laugh. But that wasn’t always the goal.
“One of the problems with hypnosis is that it was once perceived as a sort of fiefdom of—I don’t know how to describe them—but maybe, creepy guys?” says hypnotist and hypnotherapist Albert Nerenberg.
It’s taken 200 years for hypnotism to evolve from a medical treatment to stage gag. The first use of hypnotism dates back to the 1770s, when Franz Mesmer, a German physician, put people into “trances” to realign their magnetic fields and cure their ailments. In his 1779 work, Dissertation on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism, Mesmer describes 27-year-old Franzel Oesterline, a woman suffering from a “convulsive malady” in which “blood rushed to her head and there set up the most cruel toothaches and earaches.” He used a magnet to “disrupt the gravitational tides adversely affecting” her and induce the sensation of fluid draining from her body, and with it, the illness. Her recovery was instant. (The magnet, of course, had nothing to do with the cure. It was just a prop.) The hypnotic suggestion did the trick. “Mesmerism,” as it became known, was popular for about 10 years before France’s “greatest medical rogue” was discredited by Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier through a series of experiments.
Fifty-some years later, a Scottish surgeon, James Braid, used a similar technique of fixed attention that he called “hypnosis” after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, to cure headaches and even anesthetize patients. Remarkably, hypnosis is still used to sedate people undergoing minor surgeries today. At a hospital in Brussels in 2019, one patient was fully awake while surgeons removed two parathyroid glands from her throat, while an anesthesiologist asked her to imagine Thanksgiving dinner at home, candles flickering in a windowsill. And in the US, some hospitals offer hypnosis to combat pre-operative anxiety and to manage post-operative pain. It’s not a magic trick, but more like a sleight of hand to distract the patient from what’s going on around them.
I’m told it’s not as prominent these days, but there has been an ongoing rift between stage hypnotists and medical practitioners. (Though, notably, some stage hypnotists dabble in both.) Devin Terhune, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies suggestion and hypnosis, says there are “disagreements” among academic researchers when it comes to the use of hypnosis for entertainment’s sake. “The vast majority of stage hypnotists have good intentions,” he says. “But it’s a bit unfortunate that stage hypnosis contributes to a lot of these negative and unrealistic ideas.” Terhune feels the practice has “lingering negative consequences for the depiction of hypnosis that I think are harmful to its clinical application in a wide range of contexts.”
Meanwhile, Ian Stewart, the entertainer who hypnotized me, maintains that without stage hypnotists, the whole craft would be dead in the water. “The general psychologist crew didn’t like hypnosis shows because they said we were degrading it, making it a spectacle,” Stewart says. “But we actually do a lot of advertising.”
Many of the stage hypnotists said their fascination started as teenagers. Young and impressionable, they stumbled upon a hypnosis book, watched a hypnotist get laughs on TV, or saw someone perform a hypnotic induction as a party trick. The draw for many would-be hypnotists was the ability to make people laugh, amaze their friends, or stand out from the crowd.
Boris Cherniak has been hypnotizing audiences as “The Incredible Boris” for 41 years. His obsession with hypnosis began in the library stacks at York University in Ontario, Canada. Enrolled in a psychology course at night, he picked up a book at random off a shelf: The Search for Bridey Murphy, a 1956 story that chronicles an experiment in deep-trance hypnosis. “I needed to know more,” Cherniak says. “That started me on a wave of reading absolutely everything I could on the subject.”
Eventually, he started playing around with hypnosis at teenage parties. He was paid $150 for his first show: a friend’s dad invited him to perform at his nightclub in Toronto, though he was only 17—not even old enough to drink. “It was exhilarating. That’s the best way I could put it,” he says. “It’s like, I did not know that was even possible.” Cherniak went on to own comedy clubs in Toronto, hypnotize guests out of their phobias on Maury Povich’s tabloid talk show, and even entertain troops in Afghanistan. “I want to make sure that everybody has such a good time. I’m all about empowerment,” he says.
Out of all audiences and participants, the hypnotists I spoke to all agreed that teenagers are the most reliably enthusiastic group. “High school students are so open-minded,” says hypnotist Jeff Oatman. “They are right into it.” It’s no coincidence that hypnotists tend to take up the craft while they’re teens and teens are the best audiences. Teenagers have natural hypnotic abilities. Compared to adults, they enter hypnotic states easily and rapidly and are highly responsive to suggestions. Studies show that most adolescents are used to spontaneous hypnotic-like states of focused concentration of some type—remember the hypnotic power of TikTok? Their openness and imaginative capacity make them prime candidates for hypnosis. Plus it’s fun to be silly.
But just because they can be, should teens be hypnotized? Sure, they agree to the hypnotizability test, and if they weren’t down to clown, they wouldn’t volunteer to begin with. But you still don’t consent to any precise behaviors you may perform before getting up on that stage.
I asked my now grown-up friends about their experience of being hypnotized, and most chalked it up to low-brow entertainment that’s not worthy of intense scrutiny. It’s a social contract and it’s not inherently unethical, since at its base hypnosis is just a suggestion. Participants can choose to ignore it. Intellectually, this argument made sense. But I wanted to speak to someone who was freshly hypnotized.
My high school isn’t one to switch up programming. Ten years after I sat in those chairs in front of my classmates in a hypnotic state, 18-year-old Tristan Bonnell did the same at his after-grad party. He had finished a game of basketball with friends and was looking forward to what he thought was a magic show. “Then he said he was a hypnotist,” he told me. “A bunch of my buddies just looked at me and said, ‘You should go do it.’” Alongside a dozen or so classmates, Bonnell sat in a chair at the front of the room. “I thought I was gonna go down and like, screw around. Just try to put on a show for everyone as much as I could,” he says. But it turns out Bonnell was an excellent subject.
Imagine you’re standing on the top of a staircase, the hypnotist said.
Close your eyes. Get really relaxed.
I’m going to count down from 10 to one.
As I count down, you’re going to go deeper down that staircase.
Bonnell was dedicated: “I focused really hard to follow the steps very correctly because I wanted to see if it actually worked,” he says, noting that his positive mindset was likely what helped him get to a state of deep hypnosis. By the time the hypnotist got to number one, Bonnell was out like a light. “I felt like I was in my own bed at home, but I just took like, three melatonin and then listened to sleep music on YouTube,” he says. “I thought I was in a deep, deep sleep.”
In reality, classmates watched as Bonnell acted as a security guard on stage. He was instructed that laughing was illegal, and he had to police those who broke the rule. Bonnell yelled at the crowd to stop laughing, which only prompted more of it. “My stomach was in pain from laughing so hard,” my younger cousin Jenna, who witnessed the show, told me. Bonnell says he remembers none of it. When the hypnotic suggestions were canceled and he came to, he was mortified. Not by his actions—but because he thought he fell asleep in front of his grad class. His classmates said he was hypnotized, doing all these hilarious things on stage. “I didn’t believe them. But then they started showing me videos.” I watched one of the videos. “Stop laughing!” he yelled at his classmates, to screams of laughter. They didn’t stop.
Troubling reports of hypnosis gone wrong have surfaced throughout the years. In 2012, a gaggle of 14-year-old girls from Quebec felt nauseous and dazed for hours after they participated in a hypnotism show at their school. “The young hypnotist had to bring in his mentor to snap people back to normal,” the Canadian Press reported at the time. And in a strange legal case circa 1998, Christopher Gates sued a stage hypnotist after taking part in a show for more than two hours, in which he pretended to be Mick Jagger, a ballet dancer, an interpreter for aliens from outer space, a contestant on the show Blind Date, an orchestra conductor, and a naughty schoolboy. The mild-mannered furniture polisher said the show left him fearing for his life, too scared to take a shower, and hearing secret commands from the TV soap Coronation Street. Four years later, Gates alleged in court that the show triggered acute schizophrenia that landed him in hospital (although a judge ruled that hypnotism did not cause his mental illness and it was just an unfortunate coincidence).
Ingrid Libera, an actor in Vancouver, Canada, was also hypnotized at her dry grad party, 10 years ago. The stage show itself was pretty typical, if a little weird. “He had me doing stand-up comedy in German, and like, pretending to fart all over the place,” she says. But the truly strange part came after the show was over. Libera felt off, overwhelmed, and had trouble being around people. Inexplicably, she felt a curious link to the man who hypnotized her. “I wanted him to be around. I just felt so attached to him. I needed him to be there with me, but he was gone. I felt like I was in love with him,” she says. Attracted? To the middle-aged man with dark hair and mustache, adorned in a purple crushed velvet suit? Yup.
Libera hid away in a room with parental chaperones and two close friends, bawling. “I got really, really emotional because I was frustrated and scared,” she says. “I was like, Why do I feel like this? What is happening?” She felt a little better the next day, but it took a few weeks for the embarrassment of what she did on stage and afterward to wear off. Libera still struggles with what happened, because it brought up questions about her suggestibility. “What’s wrong with me though? That I am so suggestible to just listen to somebody like that. It was honestly a lot of introspection to get over that.”
Though she is aware her experience was likely out of the ordinary, when I asked Libera whether teens should be hypnotized on stage, it was a huge no. “This shouldn’t just be a normal sideshow attraction. I don’t think people understand how intense it can be for some of us.”
Inexplicably, she felt a curious link to the man who hypnotized her. “I wanted him to be around. I just felt so attached to him. I needed him to be there with me, but he was gone. I felt like I was in love with him,” she says.
In a 1987 study in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, researchers surveyed participants after a university stage show. About one-fifth of subjects reported both a negative experience during the trance and some negative after effects. “Stage hypnosis poses risks that are unacceptable and outweigh its potential entertainment value and therapeutic benefits,” the researchers concluded. But hypnotists I spoke to maintain that ethical performers spend a great deal of time thinking about integrity, obtaining participants’ consent, and reminding participants they are in control of their experience. Still, when it comes to the mind, we know very little about how it works and what goes on between our ears. “Anyone who tells you with absolute certainty ‘this is how the mind works’ is fooling themselves,” Gerard V reminds me.
I’m down south, sitting on a beach. It’s too hot. I’m sweating, fanning myself with my hands. Suddenly, it’s too cold. I’m shivering, my teeth are chattering. Did the temperature just drop 30 degrees? I cuddle up next to my best friend. Relief is brief. Now it smells terrible. We jump away from each other, shatter our embrace. The audience goes wild. That’s the moment I remember most about my hypnosis.
Stewart, the man behind the gag, is a kindly Nova Scotian who has lived and breathed hypnosis since he graduated high school in 2000. A magician turned hypnotist, turned world-record-holding chainsaw juggler, Stewart is a self-described entertainer. In junior high, he read the Encyclopedia of Genuine Stage Hypnotism by Ormond McGill and became obsessed. Since then, he’s done more than 2,000 shows. While the basics of the craft have remained stable, Stewart says it’s “fallen out of fashion to bring people up on stage and make fun of them.” For a time, hypnotists would have people do ridiculous racist or sexist stereotypes—like singing in Chinese or men pretending they were Miss America contestants. “There’s stuff I wouldn’t do anymore,” Stewart says. “Society has moved away from laughing at people.” Now, rather than embarrassing participants, Stewart’s gags show off the power of the mind.
The craft is evolving. Beyond updating bits to stay current politically and socially, some stage hypnotists are even trying to leave their participants better off than they were before the show. Nerenberg says responsible stage hypnotists should move away from public humiliation and instead usher in positive changes. “The fact that you can feel hot and cold is actually interesting because that also means you can feel confident, capable, or intelligent,” he says. “You can make positive suggestions that change people’s lives.”
Hypnotists told me stories of all kinds of miracles that came from stage shows: chronic pain vanished or a years-long mutism reversed. But many feel that hypnotists shouldn’t meddle with people’s psyches at all. The subreddit for hypnosis is essentially ground zero for disagreements about the craft. It seems there is no cohesion—even among stage hypnotists. I watch as they battle it out online: “Stage hypnosis is damaging the public’s views on hypnosis,” one Reddit post reads. A commenter offered an opposing take: “Even in the most silly high school stage show, or most R-rated Vegas hypnosis show, those hypnotists have the option to always add personal improvement suggestions at some point in the show—such as optimism for the future, or having more self-confidence. . . .”
Another commenter was vehemently against this line of thinking. “A stage show is consent to participate in a comedy routine, a raunchy display, or what-have-you. That is the expectation. It is not consent for therapeutic suggestion,” they wrote. I fall into that camp. A careless, if good-natured, suggestion could torpedo an ongoing healing process the stage hypnotist is not privy to. And doing therapy without explicit informed consent, especially in front of a crowd, is inherently unethical. Make me quack like a duck, sure, but let’s leave therapeutic treatments to the privacy of a hypnotherapy office.
In Europe, stage hypnosis has been viewed as a public concern since the 1880s—resulting in national, regional, and local bans on public hypnotism in Denmark, Austria, Germany, Italy, and France. (The Belgian law was enforced as recently as 2017.) So am I okay that my school in Canada was prepared to run the risk and have me hypnotized? That they still hypnotize a bunch of teens every year? A bevy of conflicting information swirls in my head as I try to make sense of it all.
My fingers hesitate and hover over my keyboard. I try to take a stance. Don’t piss off the stage hypnotists, I tell myself, their hearts are in the right place. I’m torn. To make a blanket statement that all stage hypnosis is damaging isn’t fair to those hypnotists who make an effort to approach subjects with compassion and sidestep offensive tropes. (And make people laugh!) In front of huge crowds, hypnotists command a room and engage with strangers from all walks of life—who, amazingly, trust them. They mold the mind, coddle it, and ratchet up roars of laughter as each beat of the sketch unfolds. They are no strangers to extreme reactions: angry skeptics, incredulous onlookers, awestruck teenagers. They’re innovators, rebranding themselves as psychics, mesmerists, or mentalists depending on the decade. They open themselves up to criticism and still answer interview requests from a nosey journalist unpacking a decades-old experience. And, after all, there will always be unfortunate acts that perpetuate negative stereotypes and do a disservice to the broader industry. (I’m sure other stage hypnotists whisper about them in their own tight circles.)
But to brush past those who had bizarre aftereffects, even if rare, would be irresponsible. It would be wise to tell audiences that even carefree stage hypnosis could be emotionally difficult or disturb existing mental health conditions. Ingrid Libera suggests participants sign a waiver that explicitly mentions potential side effects—and perhaps she is on the right track.
Confusion is rife in stage hypnosis, especially for participants. A knowledge gap is evident. There’s a veil of obscuration where transparency would be best. “Where do you think your mind went when you were hypnotized?” I asked 18-year-old Bonnell.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I thought maybe it was a form of hallucination almost— playing mind tricks.”
“Were you freaked out at all?” I pressed. “Were you like, who is operating my body?”
“I’ve actually never thought of it like that. But that’s actually a good point,” he says. “I wonder where my mind was at to even do those things.”
I hoped that after my weeks of research and interviews, I would be able to tell him. Instead, I open another web page—rife with contradictions—and continue down the rabbit hole.
Emily Latimer is a journalist and fact-checker in Nova Scotia. She’s written for the CBC, Canadian Business, Maclean’s, and elsewhere. You can find her stories at www.emilylatimer.com.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/9XhuxsA
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/JpMBe4N
After water, sand is the world’s most widely consumed natural resource—it’s the main ingredient in concrete, and a booming global construction industry means a soaring (yet hidden) demand for it. For Scientific American, David A. Taylor offers a fascinating look at the world of sand-smuggling mafias and the devastating impact of sand mining on ecosystems and communities.
Sand in riverbeds, lake beds and shorelines is the best for construction, but scarcity opens the market to less suitable sand from beaches and dunes, much of it scraped illegally and cheaply. With a shortage looming and prices rising, sand from Moroccan beaches and dunes is sold inside the country and is also shipped abroad, using organized crime’s extensive transport networks, Abderrahmane has found. More than half of Morocco’s sand is illegally mined, he says.
The greatest demand comes from China, which used more cement in three years (6.6 gigatons from 2011 through 2013) than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons), notes Vince Beiser, author of The World in a Grain. Most sand gets used in the country where it is mined, but with some national supplies dwindling, imports reached $1.9 billion in 2018, according to Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/W7skPab
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/JpMBe4N
For LitHub, Rebecca Solnit offers a salve to those fighting for change, be it personal or political. Dramatic turning points are rare and happen most often in the movies; the change we seek only comes after years and years of dedication, baby step after baby step taken on faith.
Anyone who’s gotten over a heartbreak or a bereavement knows that there aren’t five stages of grief you pass through like they were five whistlestop towns on the train route. You are more this way one day and more that way the other, looping and regressing, and maybe building reconciliation or acceptance like a log cabin while living in sorrow, rather than sliding into it like you were stealing third base.
You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient.
And we are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now, and sometimes too impatient to learn the stories of how what is best in our era was made by long, slow campaigns of change. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” but whichever way it bends you have to be able to see the arc (and I’m pretty sure by arc he meant a gradual curve, not an acute angle as if history suddenly took a sharp left). Sometimes seeing it is sudden, because change has been going on all along but you finally recognize it.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/S2lJB5i
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/EucjCo4
How was watermelon conscripted in service of a racist agenda, and how can it be reclaimed? A Black writer traces the biological history and cultural significance of the humble fruit, in America and elsewhere:
Martin Luther King, Jr., remembered refusing to eat watermelon in mixed company when he was at seminary in Pennsylvania: “I didn’t want to be seen eating it because of the association in many people’s minds between Negroes and watermelon,” he told a journalist from Redbook in 1956. “It was silly, I know, but it shows how white prejudices can affect a Negro.”
And Dr. King was not alone. It was enough to make whole generations of Black people self-conscious about eating watermelon. Psyche Williams-Forson, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland and the author of Eating While Black, said it is still common for people of a certain age to have reservations about eating watermelon—or, rather, to be seen eating watermelon. “I cite Black people who are absolutely, in some instances, adamant that they would not eat watermelon in public, unless it’s cut up in cubes or unless it’s served a very particular way,” she told me.
On my latest visit to my parents’ house in Illinois at the tail end of the watermelon season, we bought a big melon in Beardstown, and my father did yeoman’s work cutting most of it into irregular cubes to stash in the refrigerator. The rest he cut into tiny wedges to eat right away. But even when presented with this, the most modest and daintiest wedge of rind-on watermelon, my mother will slice the flesh away with a knife and fork and cut it up before eating it. When I ask why she bothers, she just says that’s how she likes to do it.
In Senegal, where I moved a decade ago, watermelons are a winter fruit, reaching peak ripeness in November or December when the weather cools, so I have started to associate them with the end of the year holidays. No Senegalese Christmas or New Year’s celebration at my mother-in-law’s house would be complete without one or two watermelons cut into manageable wedges so we can eat them directly from the rind.
I wonder about these small differences between my husband’s family in Senegal where the watermelon is simply enjoyed, and my own family in the United States where the watermelon isn’t just a luscious fruit, but also a symbol of violence, a metaphorical weapon whose cut still stings and sometimes burns.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/B632oqc
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/EucjCo4
When Jordan Neely was choked to death by a fellow passenger on the New York City subway in May 2023, his death became a political talking point. In this profile, Lisa Miller looks beyond and behind Neely’s killing, telling the young man’s life story in intimate detail. It starts with his mother’s murder at the hands of her boyfriend when Neely was barely a teenager:
The following day, a Monday, Jordan, together with his maternal grandparents, an uncle, and his great-aunt Mildred, was back at the house in Bayonne. A police officer was there too, to help them file a missing-person report. When Jordan’s uncle Christopher reached Southerland by phone, Southerland said Christie had gone on vacation. He bought her a suitcase, he said. But Jordan knew this couldn’t be right because his mother would never leave town without letting him know. All the while, the TV was on in the living room, and amid the confusion, a news broadcast came on: A woman’s body had been found in a black expandable duffel bag by the side of the Henry Hudson Parkway in the Bronx. Wrapped in black plastic, clad in jeans and a T-shirt, the corpse was decomposed, and the police were trying to make an ID. There, on the television screen, flashed Christie’s belongings: a black-and-silver belt and a turquoise ring. Jordan began bellowing and beating the walls.
By the time Jordan testified at Southerland’s trial, he was 19 years old. He had built a new life as a Michael Jackson tribute artist in New York City. He owned a Michael wig, which he kept neatly styled; military-type jackets in red and black with gilded trim and epaulets; a white glove. At the trial, Southerland was representing himself pro se, which meant that during his cross-examination, Jordan had to answer questions posed by the same man who had intimidated him and lied to him as a child and who would later be convicted of murdering his mother. Under oath and appearing composed, Jordan relived the morning his mother didn’t wake him for school. Southerland referred to himself as “the defendant” or “Mr. Southerland,” but Jordan refused to play along, addressing his questioner as “you.” It was agonizing to watch, recalls Kristen Brewer, then a young assistant prosecutor who observed the trial. Jordan had bounced around in the five years since his mother’s murder, and Brewer was struck by the earnest truthfulness with which he took the stand. She says she remembers thinking, “If this young man can even manage stability, we’ll have asked a lot of him.”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/DYmy3jC
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/EucjCo4
D.T. Max manages to get deep below the surface (excuse the pun) in this fascinating piece. Cutting through Beatriz Flamini’s initial bravado, we find out the true psychological impact of spending a remarkable 500 days in a cave.
After graduating, Flamini taught aerobics in Madrid. She was admired for her charisma and commitment. “Everyone wanted me for their classes,” she says. “They fought over me.” By the time she turned forty, in 2013, she had a partner, a car, and a house. But she felt unsatisfied. She didn’t really care about financial stability, and, unlike most people she knew, she didn’t want children. She experienced an existential crisis. “You know you’re going to die—today, tomorrow, within fifty years,” Flamini told herself. “What is it that you want to do with your life before that happens?” The immediate answer, she remembers, was to “grab my knapsack and go and live in the mountains.”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/cQNIGC3
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/EucjCo4
This Nautilus interview with neuropsychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones explores freedom of thought in a time of fast-changing technology and AI. Freedom of thought, says McCarthy-Jones, is “as close to an absolute right as there is in the Constitution.” But even as this right has been explored and lauded through the ages, it hasn’t actually been defined. McCarthy-Jones also discusses how smartly designed public places help to promote group thinking, from green spaces to spacious, well-lit buildings. A conversation with thought-provoking remarks and ideas to chew on.
I think what’s maybe a more immediate threat from new technologies is not brain-reading but more what is called behavior-reading. That is, the idea of measuring our observable behavior—what we like on Facebook, what websites we visit, what music we like, etcetera—that from knowing those facts about us, people could impute our mental states and can have a good idea of what it is we’re thinking—and knowing what kinds of buttons they should press to get us to act in a certain way. The combination of that knowledge with AI technologies could be a really huge threat to our autonomy.
One of my colleagues from Brazil and I were talking at a conference, and he was telling me about how the design of their capital city, Brasília, was intentionally put together by planners to try to avoid street corners—because street corners were places where people would be able to assemble and potentially think things together, which could be threatening to the ruling regime. So city planning can have an important effect upon the public’s ability to think together.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/dTrle4Y
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/EucjCo4
At age 38, Janikka Perry died of a heart attack at work, on her bakery shift at Walmart in North Little Rock, Arkansas, but you will not find her death recorded by OSHA as workplace-related. The New Republic‘s investigation has revealed that while Walmart touts an enlightened approach to time off, it expects associates to work while sick, or in Perry’s case, deathly ill. “The store was short-staffed, and her manager allegedly told her to ‘pull herself together.’”
Janikka had heart problems and diabetes—conditions management was aware of—and had worked through ailments before, because that’s the norm at Walmart. As recently as 2019, the company allowed employees to accrue nine penalizing points every six months before firing them. Today, it’s five. Workers receive those points for a whole host of reasons, like showing up late, leaving early, or taking unplanned time off, even if they’re sick or need to attend an important family function.
But Janikka rarely missed work or went home early. She once left her own birthday party to go to work, leaving loved ones to vent that Walmart was taking too much of her time. One of her sons, Austin, once pleaded with his mom to quit. “She was like, ‘Who else is going to pay the bills and put clothes on your back?’” he said. “I couldn’t say nothing else.”
Her commitment to Walmart came second only to church. No matter her schedule, Janikka never missed Sunday service at her local congregation. Each week, she would sing and pray in front of the pulpit’s large illuminated cross. On the morning of that shift in January, she attended mass with her mother, Fay, then wished her goodbye. “Mommy, I love you,” she said on her way out the door. “I’ll see you later.”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/abhoKxZ
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/iY2Hykn
For years now, Nike’s nostalgia “retro” Air Jordan reissues—with a healthy boost from engineered scarcity—have been the 800-pound behemoth of the sneakerhead market. All things must end, though, and Jordans have gone from so-hot-you-can’t-get-’em to so-not-hot-resellers-are-actually-losing-money. It’s not a done deal for the Jumpman logo, but Ross Andersen pulls together some nice reporting and analysis to see why the iconic shoe’s cultural dominance seems to be on the wane.
No trend can last forever. Fashion is cyclical. The question is whether we can expect Jordan fever to return, and whether it will be as intense the next time it strikes. Bengtson is bearish. “We’re moving further away from Jordan’s playing career,” he told me. “It’s gone from consumers having direct memory of watching him play, to stories from older brothers and friends, to stories from parents.” Jordan’s highlight packages still do numbers on TikTok, but there is something qualitatively different about consuming an algorithmic drip feed of 30-year-old clips while you’re on your iPhone in bed. That’s not an experience that imprints visceral memories. Gen Xers and even some Millennials can remember where they were when Jordan elevated, according to some higher physics, and stuck a game winner on the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Craig Ehlo. They can still hear the involuntary way that announcer Marv Albert’s voice rose—“ a spectacular move”—as Jordan soared through a forest of Lakers, moving the ball fluidly from his right hand to his left.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/CMfV7dE
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/iY2Hykn
In my dream, I’m dressed in uniform—black ski pants and a red vest with a white cross—when I find a man lying in the snow. The late afternoon sun lights up the wispy blond hair that’s escaped his helmet. He looks at peace, like he’s sleeping, yet the angle his hips make with his thighs is cartoonish and grotesque.
I kneel at his side and work quickly, looking for clues. He’s breathing but not moving. I reach inside his jacket to apply a painful sternum rub—my attempt to rouse him—and the smell of weed envelops me. I key my radio, but my rapid-fire screams of I need help, backboard, oxygen, ambulance! don’t transmit. This is where I wake up: alone, sticky with anxiety, its grip firm in the back of my throat. And each time I remember the permanence of that day: the man lying in the snow never walked again.
I’d had this dream for almost a decade, and there are others—each an endless scroll of the anguish I’ve seen. Like the college kid who skied well beyond his ability. His epic fall left his pupils looking like two mismatched drops of motor oil. Smokey, dark, and unequal. Or the tiny girl who’d fallen from the chair lift at a span five times her height. Her offense? Playing pattycake with her friend without the protection of the comfort bar. Luckily, the fall only broke her femur.
As a seasoned ski patroller, I thrived in this rescue culture. Until I didn’t. And that’s when my dreams became nightmares.
Growing up in rural, central New York, I spent my free time outdoors. Summers on the network of rivers that crisscrossed the region and winters on Labrador Mountain, an hour’s drive from my family’s home. I preferred the cold. Between weekend trips to ski with my family, I jogged at night, making laps of my neighborhood after dinner. When I grew too warm, I’d sit in a snowbank and, in the cool stillness, enjoy the anonymity of the night. In this space, cold and snow became synonymous with joy and freedom.
As a seasoned ski patroller, I thrived in this rescue culture. Until I didn’t. And that’s when my dreams became nightmares.
At 33, I became a ski patroller. I had wanted this career since I was a child; I committed to the profession while other kids dreamed of being an astronaut, doctor, or scientist. My reverence for this work came from admiring the men who patrolled the nighttime slopes of Labrador Mountain. When I was a teenager, busloads of kids took over the resort every Thursday evening. The ski patrol was always ready to save us from ourselves.
My two friends and I liked to ski the treed glade that separated the designated night runs. Populated and thick with red bark willow and eastern white pine, only a narrow, winding trail sliced through the shadows. It was dark and off-limits, and we thought that was cool.
In the middle of the forest sat a small clearing with three knee-high tree stumps. It was our secret spot and, in the quiet of the night, we inhaled the cold. We also passed a joint and sipped from a flask filled with Southern Comfort stolen from my parent’s liquor cabinet. We were three adolescents caught in the reckless theater of our young lives. But someone always noticed our absence from the safety of the lighted slopes.
At the edge of the forest, a college-aged guy wearing a red vest with a white cross waited. Warm from the liquor and more than a little stoned, we’d come to a jumbled stop in front of him. He’d ask our names, our school, and what we were doing in the woods. “I’m showing my friends the trail I ski with my dad,” I’d say. It worked every time. He would admonish us to “stay out of the trees” and let us go. We were his usual Thursday night offenders.
My career as a ski patroller took shape after a conversation I had with a stranger on a pay phone in Reds Meadow, just outside California’s Yosemite National Park. I was on day five of a thru-hike on the John Muir Trail. Freshly showered and lubricated with a German-style pilsner, I confessed to Joe, my hiking partner, that I wanted to quit my corporate job and become a ski patroller. Joe, it turned out, was best friends with Cristof, who recruited patrollers at Mount Waterman, a small ski resort that sits close to downtown Los Angeles. We scraped together quarters from other hikers so Joe could call Cristof before handing the phone to me.
Two months later, I sat in the first aid course Cristof had recommended with 20 other enthusiastic want-to-be patrollers. The course was EMT-equivalent and designed for the professional rescuer. For five months we sat through biweekly training in lifesaving techniques, studying our ABCs—airway, breathing, and circulation. We also studied our D and Es. A deformity, like abnormal swelling or a bump on the skin caused by a broken bone, signaled us to expose the deformity to see the extent of the injury.
While there was no strict procedure for providing lifesaving first aid, the process for treating injuries is somewhat formulaic. As we became skilled at recognizing injuries based on their mechanism, or cause, we’d also become adept at the care to provide. Each mechanism had a lockstep response. For a skier hitting a tree, the mechanism was sudden deceleration. While the range of injuries was vast, the lifesaving action was simple: backboard and transport.
The violence of injury is remarkable. The class scared me. I remembered the evening I drank too much on a Thursday night foray into the forest with my friends. I was skiing too fast for the icy conditions. The tracks had frozen in the trail that zigzagged through the trees, making it nearly impossible to check my speed. I hit a tree. Hard. The impact gave me a lump on my temple the size of a silver dollar and left the right side of my rib cage feeling spongy. I didn’t sleep that night, and my head pounded for days.
I had come close to sustaining permanent injury, but a future lost to my youth was never my intention. Skiing equaled freedom, autonomy, and power. It represented unchecked permission to glide through each moment and make my own decisions. Perhaps it was this early negligence that compelled adult me to want to help others who found themselves in situations they had never intended.
Six months after my phone conversation with Cristof, we met in person on my first day as a ski patrol rookie at Mount Waterman. By then, I’d passed my first aid test and was ready to work on real injuries and put my new skills to use.
The first time I witnessed respiratory arrest, I was six years into my career as a ski patroller.
There is nothing more fundamental to life than breathing, and the college kid who lay below me had stopped. The dull, leaden blue of his lips was creeping to his cheeks. It was as if a watercolorist had swiped the soaked tip of her brush across his jaw and the pigment had begun to bleed and then dry.
As my coworker methodically looked for clues to his injury, I knelt in the spring-soft snow and held C-spine, a life-sustaining measure for suspected spinal trauma. An uncomfortable position to hold for long, I was leaning over the boy’s face—my nose hovering above his—as my knees lightly touched his shoulders and I cupped my gloved hands on either side of his head. “He’s not breathing,” I whispered, as if I were afraid the boy would hear me. Feeling helpless, I mumbled, “We need to move quicker,” in judgment only of myself.
The boy lay motionless on the snow as other skiers and snowboarders slid past. Snippets of their conversations filled the air above us. Let’s hit that again, the snow is really good today. Ready for lunch? Trivial. Unimportant. Memorable. While time stood as still as the boy on the snow, the movement around us continued to swell.
A moment later, we repositioned his jaw and the boy took a breath. He also opened his eyes. Relief swept through me as oxygen returned color to his skin, and I no longer worried that mine was the last face this boy would ever see.
The alchemy between rescuer and rescued is strange: like a romantic relationship, only faster moving. The euphoria of starting simply at hello, I’m here to help before moving on and culminating at what feels like deep attachment. We say my patient, as in they transported my patient to the hospital, or my patient opted to return to the slopes, or my patient is in the bar. I felt possessive of those I spent so little time with because our paths crossed at a moment they needed my help. Perhaps I cared too much.
A moment later, we repositioned his jaw and the boy took a breath. He also opened his eyes. Relief swept through me as oxygen returned color to his skin, and I no longer worried that mine was the last face this boy would ever see.
I used to wonder how the people I’d assisted were doing. Like the college student who snagged first chair to get on the snow early so he could make it home before his afternoon class. He didn’t look like a skier. His cheap snow pants were too big, his cotton hoodie soaked. I remember how crumpled he looked when I skied up to him and how his inaudible moans grew louder when we secured him to the backboard. Had his injury prevented him from leading the life he wanted?
During my third year, I assisted an older woman who was sitting at the edge of a wide run on the mountain’s upper slopes. She couldn’t stand and seemed resigned to the fact that she would never ski again. Between long draws on a cigarette, she explained in detail the pop she heard and felt in the back of her left knee. The snow was new and wet and heavy; it had prevented her uphill ski from turning in tandem with her downhill ski. A sport-ending injury, she couldn’t move without excruciating pain. As I skied her down the mountain in the toboggan, I listened as she softly cried into the blanket I’d wrapped her in. For years after, I’d occasionally see her at the grocery store, where I would watch from a distance and convince myself her gait was better than the last time I’d seen her.
As I experienced both trivial and traumatic moments day after day, an emotional narrative emerged, and I began to confront the falsehood that I too would be okay. My thinning confidence overshadowed my passion to rescue others, and seven years into my career, I became terrified to do my job.
I was anxious that I’d be tasked to do something I couldn’t do, like misinterpret a patient’s rapid pulse and shallow respirations for something else when their distended jugular vein (signaling a collapsed lung) was buried beneath layers of clothing. I worried that I’d cause more injury to the injured; or that I’d fail, and failure had repercussions I couldn’t entertain.
Even on my days off, it was an endless loop of pointless dialogue that rarely paused, causing sleepless nights and nightmares. The cracks in my readiness already visible.
On most shifts, I felt transcendence, especially with the care I gave: an ice pack to a 5-year-old whose knee had an invisible ache. A splint to a dad whose wrist resembled a fork. A wheelchair ride to a teenager who’d ascended the mountains too quickly, only to collapse on the slopes from altitude sickness. More than a string of kind words to a woman whose ankle was likely fractured beyond repair.
I was confident because those injuries felt routine. I’d experienced each one enough times to grow comfortable with what I needed to do. I wasn’t flawed and someone else’s experience—their fear, their pain, their reaction—was theirs. And I didn’t take my work home with me when we parted ways.
Except, I was mistaken. Even those experiences eventually became too much.
As a patroller, I have a front row seat to someone in pain, and pain causes people to behave and react erratically. Screaming is distracting and, at work, I wanted it to stop. That’s when my patience wore thin. To someone shrieking at the top of their lungs, I’d demand they calm down. To someone I couldn’t understand because their sobbing made it hard to hear their words, I told them I couldn’t help if they didn’t stop crying. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, it was that I didn’t want to feel—prioritizing my pain over theirs. Those interactions only added to my mounting guilt and shame.
My empathy waning, I was constantly on edge and amped. My burnout singed other areas of my life too. I picked fights with my husband about the most innocuous things. I’d yell and argue about the coats he’d allow to pile up on the hook by the front door until I couldn’t breathe. I’d berate him for leaving an empty coffee mug in my car, never satisfied with his reaction or apology. I was negative and moody and unhinged. I normalized my behavior—it was who I was. But it wasn’t who I wanted to be.
A cowboy-esque, I’m-as-tough-as-they-come attitude has shaped the culture of ski patrol. As professionals, we bring calm to a chaotic rescue scene. The end goal: to ensure the injured remain resilient. But that resiliency is one-sided. Until recent years, caring for a ski patroller who works one gruesome incident after another has not been on anyone’s agenda.
Talking about the toll working grim scenes and witnessing life-ending injuries takes on us is seen as weak. In fact, the trauma ski patrollers face is cumulative and can cause a stress injury, a specific ache invisible to everyone, including ourselves. There’s never been a consistent approach, or even acceptance, to say “I’m not feeling it today.” Instead, we are expected to forget yesterday’s gory details and show up for our shift unaffected by the past. But that exposure to nonstop trauma catches you.
Holly Christensen, an Idaho-based master clinician in Accelerated Resolution Therapy, a form of psychotherapy used to treat traumatic stress, explains cumulative trauma like this: “We think we have a reservoir to hold and to tolerate every traumatic experience, and that our reservoir is limitless. But if you don’t pay attention to what’s happening—to the warning signs—we risk hitting a threshold we didn’t even know was approaching.” This is when stress injury forms and, Christensen says, we often don’t know what the trigger will be.
Understandably, we think that spark will be the next big incident we see. But when our reservoir is close to full, the brain doesn’t differentiate between death or a twisted knee. In practice, the thing likely to tip the balance is more benign; it’s less shocking and more ordinary, and as insignificant as a drop in the already full bucket. This is why we, as rescuers, don’t recognize when we need help.
The brain’s amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex help us respond to stressful situations. When our brain is healthy, the amygdala, our most primitive region, categorizes our experiences into sensory fragments, while the hippocampus acts as the brain’s camcorder: recording an event so we can remember it accurately to make sense of it later. But Christensen emphasizes, when we hit our trauma threshold, that sensory record—sounds, smells, colors—gets coded incorrectly.
When these sensory experiences overload, they lock up our logical brain, or prefrontal cortex, which is the most sophisticated region Christiansen says. Often the incident that pushes a rescuer over the threshold is something mundane, a situation we’ve handled countless times before. Or the trigger is a color—like a guest’s red jacket, or a blue hat. “Logically, our brain questions why this situation bothers us, why these seemingly insignificant things are what sideline us as rescuers.” It doesn’t take much, Christiansen adds. “While the prefrontal cortex tells us we can handle it, we actually can’t without clearing stuff out, which requires a way to process and release the cumulation of our trauma.” In essence, our brain tricks us into thinking we’re okay, when really, we’re not.
The signs were there long before I noticed them; I was better at burying the trauma than dealing with it. One Saturday, at the end of a particularly long shift, I remember feeling like I had the bottled-up energy of a storm. There was an intensity I knew I needed to dissipate. Vivid, violent, and untamable. Drinking did the trick. So did sitting alongside my coworkers and sharing our gore stories.
It wasn’t unusual for us to talk about our work experiences to get over them. We discussed how a guest had pulled their OPA, a device used to maintain an airway in an unconscious patient, out of their mouth mid-transport to the first-aid room. We reenacted the foul language a teen with a bad concussion had used when responding to our questions. We made fun of how the injured were dressed and judged them by the equipment they used.
To laugh in the face of calamity is cathartic. But to anyone else, our playful banter about the injured would have seemed callous, monstrous even. But for us, it was meaningless and our way to release the day’s intense stress and anxiety. Along with drinking, our discourse became routine.
To laugh in the face of calamity is cathartic. But to anyone else, our playful banter about the injured would have seemed callous, monstrous even.
However, alcohol was a crutch and I didn’t stop once the tab was paid. It continued at home and my strategy was to hold onto the buzz to cope. But drinking to excess gave me a false sense of hope, akin to using a Band-Aid to hold a gaping wound closed. Booze merely masked my symptoms and did nothing to curb the fervor of my rising anxiety. The next morning, hungover and rough from a poor night’s sleep, I’d return to work to face and feel the same stresses as the day before.
It was only during the off season that I prioritized self-care. Then I had the time to catch up and tend to both the visible and invisible injuries of ski patrolling. From April through November, I traded plastic ski boots for flip-flops to heal my mangled feet, practiced yoga to calm my central nervous system, chased endurance adventures to retain my physical strength, and tried to drink less frequently. All to reset my resilience so I could be capable and clear-minded when winter rolled around.
But taking care of myself felt more like something else I needed to overcome. And by the end of fall, there were still deep-seated issues that I simply could not mend without expressing the angst I felt, and that was years away.
As ski patrollers, we are trained to anticipate something bad happening during our shift. We’re taught to be ready, quick, and calm, which in a classroom is easy. But in reality, it’s harder than expected.
But taking care of myself felt more like something else I needed to overcome. And by the end of fall, there were still deep-seated issues that I simply could not mend without expressing the angst I felt, and that was years away.
It’s imperative we show up physically ready and emotionally whole. Luckily, the majority of the first aid we deliver is easy to provide—a sling for a dislocated shoulder or a ride down the mountain in a rescue toboggan. We walk away from those incidents as saviors; the ones who confidently told them they would be okay. But for the bigger, more tragic events that require every synapse firing at a level hard to sustain, we, as rescuers, are impacted, and there is no one to tell us we’ll be okay.
I wasn’t warned that working traumatic scenes came with a separate set of risks. I wasn’t taught to recognize my own emotional trauma. I was trained to save others, tend to their injuries, and develop the muscle memory to react quickly. I was prepared to ensure a scene was safe to enter, to mitigate the possibility that I’d sustain a season-ending injury. And that is easy to do—it relies on my senses and intuition and experience, something I am attuned to. I didn’t know flashbacks and nightmares, anxiety and avoidance, negative thoughts and a change in my mood were also part of what I’d signed up for.
There’s a paradox to ski patrol—you’re essential but forgotten. Vital then invisible. Moved aside when an ambulance arrives, left to silently heal as your patient is wheeled away. Even worse, we are replaced as the rescuer so we can deal with the physical and emotional mess the injured have left behind, like capturing every detail in a written report, delivering the bad news to a family member, comforting a grieving friend, tagging the equipment and clothing left behind, removing the bloodied bandages from the floor, and completing your shift so you can sit at the bar and drink your day away.
We think we’re good after talking about our shift’s events over a beer. We feel seen and heard. Alcohol heals our wounds temporarily and, in a group context, that’s okay. But often, the self-destruction escalates and continues when we’re alone. The cumulative trauma ski patrollers face is considered a stress injury, and it alters the way we move through life, the way we respond, think, and feel.
For me, anger became a problem, and I was angry at the injured. Their careless horseplay, their determined recklessness, and their simple ignorance—everything that led up to a full-blown rescue reflected a series of poor decisions and a certain self-centeredness I couldn’t forgive.
By the time I arrived on scene for the guy in my dream, my colleague had discovered he didn’t have any feeling below his waist. Her sleuthing was a gift. Now it was simple: get him on a backboard and off the mountain. Between bouts of brief consciousness, he landed a few heavy punches as we worked to secure him for transport, and when we lifted him off the snow, an empty fifth of gin fell from an interior coat pocket. At least he had movement of his upper limbs, I told myself. Thirty minutes later we loaded him into a waiting ambulance.
When the door of the ambulance closed, I didn’t feel the relief that delivering a person to a higher level of care could provide. Him heading to a hospital should have left me feeling certain. Certain in the care we’d provided, certain he’d be okay, certain he’d overcome the lasting effects of his injury. Instead, I asked myself: is this all there is to it, to never walk again? Severing your spinal cord seemed so simple; swift yet incomprehensible. And it took no more time than it takes to hit send on an email.
Get the Longreads Top 5 Email
Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s very best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning—and keep up with all our picks by subscribing to our daily update.
That day, I returned to the scene where it had happened. I was there to document the depth of his error. I recorded the marks in the snow, measured the width of the run, triangulated the tree’s location so we could find the exact spot he lost movement in his legs should we need to. After, to clear my head, I took a lap. I hoped the act of skiing, the thing that gave me the most joy in life, would take my mind off what had happened.
Instead, caught in a cloud of my thoughts, I hooked my ski on something in the snow and fell face forward with a thud so hard I expected the pain to never end. That day, my patrol director sent me home. The mild concussion I sustained only added to my anger and difficulty to emotionally heal. It was the first time I’d had an injury at work acknowledged by someone else. I’d been so careful about my physical health and so negligent about my psychological well-being.
Our body and mind provide the absolute representation of ourselves. To lose life or mobility or the capacity to think well is unimaginable and challenges everything familiar. Sustaining permanent injury is not the intent of the millions of skiers and snowboarders who flock to America’s winter resorts looking only for a day of fun. Yet the unthinkable happens at a frequency that terrifies me.
During the 2021–22 season, 57 people lost their lives and 54 people sustained catastrophic trauma, like permanent head, spine, or neurological injury. A high percentage of those who died were young men who had collided with a tree. Even when you consider that 61 million skiers and riders visited US ski areas during that same period, I find these statistics staggering. Staggering because for every lost life or catastrophic injury, I know there were countless ski patrollers who bore witness to that pain and suffering.
For a ski patroller, performing consequential rescues is a bit like playing roulette. Christensen says it is only a matter of time before we, too, become injured beyond repair. Pain is tricky and affects us all differently. Relieving the pain of cumulative trauma is exhausting if you don’t know its signs and symptoms. But this is changing as more resorts address the challenges ski patrollers face. While psychological first aid, PFA for short, is not new—it came into prominence after 9/11—ski resorts are only starting to adopt it. But to do PFA well, to address your stress injury, you must share your truth, and being vulnerable is complicated and hard.
It means admitting you are flawed to the people who rely on you. Signaling failure and conceding to your coworkers that you may not have their back, and that trust is vital. In my 17th year, I took a two-year sabbatical, choosing to be a skier only. I became part of the masses who go to the mountains to shred the powder, enjoy the vibe, and find joy in the groomed corduroy runs, never exposed to the sadness when someone else gets hurt. I also moved to a resort where the terrain—natural, soft, and forgiving, with open pitches and less people and snowpack—was less likely to contribute to injury, and I joined a patrol that made an effort to safeguard my emotional well-being.
The first time I experienced PFA, I wasn’t invested in the outcome. We were asked to assign ourselves a color that matched our mood, and our choices were green, yellow, orange, and red. The colors held meaning: choosing green meant I was emotionally and physically ready for whatever happens, that my team could count on me no matter what. Choosing yellow, orange, or red signaled something was amiss: I was less than capable of stepping up to whatever the day threw my way.
I was entrenched in the old ways, and I blurted “green,” even though I was clearly yellow—tired, dehydrated, and slightly hungover from the party the night before. In my mind, I was paid to show up ready, and giving voice to vulnerability of my own making wasn’t an option. By not taking care of myself, I let everyone else down, including me.
But something happened in the persistence and practice of honestly describing how I was feeling. As I watched others open up, I did too. That alone was cathartic—creating a safe space to share our feelings of helplessness, anger, and depression. Admitting I was yellow helped me see I was wounded and begin to address my own stress injury. In those moments, I finally realized there was a lockstep approach to rescuing the rescuer and it started with becoming mindful and trusting and willing to heal.
Now my dreams are formulaic. When a situation I’ve experienced shows up, I calm myself by floating above the chaos. I recognize the sad narrative and skip to the end. In one, I’m in the locker room, changing from my uniform into my street clothes. I twist the radio in my chest pocket to off, as if it has significance beyond silencing the chatter. In another, I close my eyes and exhale. My breath looks heavy, and it holds the activity of my day. I watch as familiar shapes—a skier, an ambulance, a rescue toboggan—become less recognizable. In each, the lightness returns. I smile and leave. And then it goes dark, and I wake up rested and relieved and ready.
Cathleen Calkins is a freelance writer and ski patroller and sits on the Board of Women of Patrol. She lives outside Bend, Oregon, with her husband and temperamental dog, Betty.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/sSXHCcM
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/iY2Hykn
