There’s a renewed interest to return humans to the moon. But to achieve this vision, one challenge of space travel—and a taboo topic even on Earth—needs to be solved. More than 50 years ago, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he’d stored his bodily waste in poo bags that were left behind—and, to this day, they still sit on the moon. In this entertaining essay, Becky Ferreira discusses the logistics of going to the bathroom in space—and what the entire process of waste management and disposal might look like.
At the dawn of the Space Age, American crews literally just taped a bag on their butts when they had to go, a system that infamously resulted in escaped turds floating through the Apollo 10 command module, and astronaut Frank Borman’s decision to simply not poop for more than a week on Gemini 7 to avoid the attendant indignities.
In other words, there’s a very small chance that human poop microbes could interfere with alien moon life. This is an exceedingly improbable outcome, given the inhospitable nature of the moon, but because it is a possibility, Mark Lupisella, an exploration integration manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, has proposed a robotic mission to procure samples from the poo bags at one of the Apollo landing sites.
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Educators on the Fort Apache Reservation have repeatedly condemned teenagers for participating in a sacred ritual known as the Sunrise Dance, marking the transition from childhood to maturity for young girls. This follows a pattern of Christian discipline begun more than a century ago, but people on the reservation grappling with the bigotry find themselves in a tough position:
Since 2020, Wels [the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod] has published 180 sermons on its YouTube channel, Native Christians. Thirty-one of the 190 videos—almost a fifth—include disparaging remarks about tribal practices including the Sunrise Dance or medicine men, including two completely dedicated to convincing the congregation of the evil within the Sunrise Dance.
Only two Christian denominations operating on the reservation told me they do not include anti-traditional-Apache rhetoric in their sermons and ideology: the Catholic church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church. Families on the reservation commonly have a similar understanding.
The influence of this religious teaching throughout the community affects the tribal government as well. Less than half of the 11-person White Mountain Apache tribal council participates in Apache ceremonies, according to the councilmember Annette Tenijieth. She believes seven council people do not participate in Sunrise Dances or support the work of medicine men.
Apache families who send their children to the East Fork Lutheran school face a complicated choice. Some families do so because students in Christian schools are seen as more successful than those attending the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools down the road. Others simply value a Christian education, and feel that their children might get on the “right path” with that background.
Still, many families have their children participate in Native ceremonies, ignoring the school’s racist policies. They just hope they do not get found out by the teachers.
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Paul Solotaroff | Rolling Stone | June 16, 2024 | 9,164 words
Snapchat’s clandestine features—notably, messages that vanish after they’re viewed—are especially appealing to its younger users, from tweens to college kids. Unfortunately, this makes it a perfect platform for drug dealers to sell lethal concoctions of Oxycontin, Xanax, and other sought-after pills to these younger users. In 2020, more than 950 kids died from drug overdose; in the first half of 2021, another 1,150 died. The majority of these deaths were from fentanyl and synthetics, both of which are used in fake pills sold online. Paul Solotaroff spent eight months reporting this harrowing feature, and presents two different perspectives: the heartbreaking accounts of families who lost children after they’d bought and ingested counterfeit pills from dealers on Snapchat, and then the version of this story from the social media giant itself, which points to its zero-tolerance policy regarding drug dealers and claims its teams are doing everything possible to make the platform safe. Alongside excellent reporting on the evolving drug trade (which is booming on social media) and the legal landscape (in which companies like Snapchat have immunity from crimes committed by their users), Solotaroff follows one activist mother who mobilized after losing her son, a bright 14-year-old boy named Alex Neville. She’s since connected with dozens of families of other victims, working with law firms on their case and fighting to hold Snapchat—and Big Tech—accountable. This is a nightmarish but important story, whether or not you’re a parent. (I also read a Noema interview with the author of The Anxious Generation this week—a very different yet complementary read that discusses mental health and anxiety in today’s youth and the rewiring of childhood due to apps like Snapchat.) —CLR
Maddie Oatman | Mother Jones | June 26, 2024 | 4,254 words
I’m a 38-year-old woman—nearly 39—and I started menstruating when I was about 12. Reading this feature by Maddie Oatman, I found myself wondering: how many gallons of blood have I expelled from my uterus over the last quarter century, and what vital information did it hold about my body and my health that I’ll never know about because my blood was treated as nothing more than waste? You might be thinking, “TMI!” To which I would say, “More like NEI—not enough information.” Oatman would agree. “Centuries of shame have ensured that periods have been understudied and underrepresented in medical literature,” she writes. “A PubMed search yields only about 400 papers referencing ‘menstrual blood’ in the last several decades, compared to around 10,000 related to erectile dysfunction.” Today a handful of researchers are pioneering the study of period blood, which they believe can help diagnose diseases like HPV, diabetes, and endometriosis, and possibly even prevent them; among other things, the blood is rich in stem cells. They’ve struggled at times to find support for their work because period blood is considered, in the actual words of other scientific professionals, “skanky,” “extremely toxic,” and “very low quality.” (Picture me banging my head against my desk.) But the researchers are forging ahead, seeking to unlock secrets that shouldn’t be secrets at all. “Every single day, hundreds of millions of people worldwide are menstruating,” Oatman writes. Imagine what we’d know about the human body if we hadn’t spent millennia shunning one of the most basic functions of an enormous chunk of the earth’s population? Imagine what we might soon learn about ourselves? This feature is as galling as it is exciting, a rare combination. —SD
Gabriel Smith | The Paris Review | June 24, 2024 | 3,621 words
Assuming you haven’t blocked out as much of 2020 as possible, you may remember a NYT Magazine profile of John and Mike Mew. The father and son, both dentists, were crusaders against traditional orthodontia, and espoused a series of practices they claimed would help children develop a strong jawline; they’d also found a willing adult audience when the so-called manosphere exploded online in the 2010s. Before Mike Mew found success on YouTube and TikTok, though, he treated a preteen boy named Gabriel Smith. Smith was a skinny kid with a longish face, which made him irresistible as a patient. He was also, as it turns out, highly observant and very, very funny—and now, almost 20 years later, he recounts his orthotropic tribulations in a deadpan essay for The Paris Review. If he weren’t funny, this piece would be difficult to read: Mew and his associate run through enough horrific and invasive techniques to make Orin Scrivello look like Mister Rogers. All the while, Smith sabotages them in small ways. “I had just learned about communism from a cassette of a Clash album,” he writes. “I’m Che Guevara, I thought. I am the Che Guevara of Dental Appliances.” Smith’s a clever enough writer to expand the scope beyond the dentist’s office, taking us from his childhood through his later addictions and into a healthier and happier (and ostensibly square-jawed) adulthood. But the centerpiece remains the undeniable violations he suffered at the hands of an incel idol in the making, and the grace with which he’s able to alchemize suffering into self-realization. —PR
Meg Bernhard asks: “What is a good death?” I’ve thought about this question a lot over the past couple of years. We all die, yet often individually and as a society we’re terrible at supporting the dying and those around them. For n+1, Bernhard recounts becoming a certified death doula, someone who supports people as they approach death. As she explains, doulas are like “personal assistants” to the dying; they handle both the official and unofficial tasks surrounding death, from funeral arrangements, logistics, and legal documents to creating the desired atmosphere for the final moments. They mind the grieving family, ensuring they get rest, food, and water—things that are easy to forget in trying times. They bring safety, comfort, and compassion to a process that defies order. This piece is beautiful and direct. There is no small talk here. Bernhard thinks deeply and critically about the process of becoming a death doula. She mines her own feelings about so-called good deaths and bad deaths as she searches for meaning in her training and in her life. “So much of the language around the burgeoning death doula movement, and its vision of what constitutes a ‘good death,’ feels too clean, too neat,” she writes. “But I left INELDA’s training wondering if there’s even such a thing as a good death, and what we stand to lose when we focus so much on trying to achieve it. Maybe death is always bad, even if you also think it’s beautiful, and we have to work with that. Maybe end of life doulas can only make bad deaths better.” I, too, struggle to embrace this notion of a good death. This piece is incredible at raising so many important questions—some that I will spend my life trying to answer. And perhaps what I loved most about this story is that there’s no neat and tidy ending. —KS
Alexandra Horowitz | The New Yorker | June 24, 2024 | 5,529 words
My lasting takeaway from this piece is that nearly 30 years (!!!) after Dolly the sheep, cloning mammals still feels like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel. Alexandra Horowitz’s excellent reporting on cloning pet dogs includes a sinister trifecta of creepy twins, a company with the Dr. Evil-sounding name of “ViaGen,” and hidden donor dogs. She starts with the twins, which are really clones: a pair of neatly trimmed dogs named Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine, part Shih Tzu and part Lhasa Apso, each with a different misaligned eye so that they mirror each other as they “pant in tandem.” They are clones of an original dog named Princess, rescued by retired police officer John Mendola. When Princess succumbed to cancer, Mendola contacted ViaGen, which has a patented dog cloning technique, to recreate her. To discover more about the process, Horowitz travels to the company’s hundred-acre ranch in Texas to meet its president, Blake Russell, who says things reminiscent of Jurassic Park’s John Hammond: “One day, my pastures are going to be filled with baby rhinos in draft mares[.] Would that not be the coolest thing ever?” The cloning process involves surgery on two other dogs—one to provide the eggs, one to be a surrogate. ViaGen doesn’t own these dogs; they rent them from what they call “production partners.” (It is not clear what later happens to these “production” dogs.) As a scientist who studies dog behavior and cognition, Horowitz is a worthy guide through this world, and her concern for “the unseen animals whose bodies are used in making a clone” is apparent. So, too, is her skepticism on whether the owners, longing for the return of a beloved pet, are getting a true replica, explaining that “[t]here can be no cloning of the world that shaped the original, no repetition of the scenes and smells they encountered. Life leaves its mark.” This thought-provoking piece will have you digging out your old copy of Brave New World. —CW
Katy Vine and Ana Worrel | Texas Monthly | June 17, 2024 | 7,430 words
A tale of bizarre goings-on in Austin, Texas. If you were blackmailed, would your first choice be to hire a hitman? It was for Erik Maund, which—unsurprisingly—escalated things further. With strong reporting from Katy Vine and Ana Worrel, this story races along to a tragic conclusion that could have easily been avoided. —CW
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This piece isn’t for the faint-hearted: a description of the cries of a stranded baby seal pup is accompanied by a video—to wring your emotions to the maximum. But, reporting from both land and sea in Cowichan Bay, British Columbia, Larry Pynn does some excellent investigation work into the problematic practice of storing logs in estuaries.
Seals often seek out log booms for haulouts and to give birth and raise their pups. Because booms float atop the water, they don’t submerge at high tide as offshore rocks often do. They also offer protection from land predators such as wolves, cougars, and bears. In some ways, “you couldn’t ask for a better maternity ward than a log boom,” says Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
The problem is, these platforms can also kill. In places like Cowichan Bay, booms sink onto the seafloor at low tide. Before they do, mother seals escape to deeper water, but newborn pups they leave behind can be crushed by shifting logs. No researcher has officially studied the issue, but a local resident has captured dozens of gruesome photos of pups that died this way in Cowichan Bay over the last decade. On my visit, I see several vultures perched on the boom and atop nearby wood pilings, as if they sense the possibility of this particular pup’s demise.
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For as long as there’s been the study of science, virtually no one has bothered to pay attention to period blood. This is in large part thanks to thousands of years of sexism, namely the belief that menstrual effluent is dirty or dangerous, something to be shunned or ignored. That’s finally changing, however slowly:
“Period blood is the most overlooked opportunity in medical research,” Qvin co-founder Dr. Sara Naseri likes to say. Collecting it is noninvasive. And data hidden in its cells might help scientists crack the code to some of the most cryptic reproductive ailments.
One of those is endometriosis, wherein tissue resembling the type that lines the uterus invades areas outside the womb. Given its complexity, frequent painfulness, mysterious etiology, and lack of a cure, the disease is a research white whale. Dr. Christine Metz, a professor at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health who co-directs a prominent endometriosis study, says she was shocked a decade ago when she realized menstrual effluent—which contains cells shed from the uterine lining—had rarely been considered as a window into a woman’s reproductive organs. It’s like “a biopsy of the endometrium,” she says.
Other researchers are examining period blood’s potential to treat diseases. The uterus is an incredible organ for many reasons, chief among them is that it repairs itself—without scarring—after shedding its tissue every month or so during a person’s reproductive years. It does this with the help of stem cells, some of which are present in menstrual effluent. There have recently been clinical trials testing the use of these stem cells for conditions such as infertility and severe COVID, and studies showed they helped with wound healing and stimulating insulin production in diabetic lab mice.
Even so, scientists studying menstrual blood say they have been met with a reluctance rooted in cultural taboos about menstruation. The queasiness continues to hamper research, obscuring discoveries that—considering every single day, hundreds of millions of people worldwide are menstruating—may be hiding in plain sight.
In 2014, when Naseri began to explore the possibility of using periods to diagnose disease, she approached the lab director at a high-ranking university hospital and asked if she could run some experiments. He refused. Naseri’s research partner, Stanford OB-GYN professor emeritus Dr. Paul Blumenthal, offered to spin the blood down, separating the serum from the red blood cells that give the substance its intense color. But the lab director still wouldn’t budge. “No, no, no, that can’t happen,” Blumenthal recalls him saying. “I’m not letting you put that skanky stuff in my machine.”
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Meg Bernhard attended certification training to become a death doula. In looking at her own experiences with death, she poses some hard questions about what it really means to have a “good death,” ostensibly one without pain, suffering, and surrounded by loved ones, in contrast with a bad death, one in which someone dies alone, in misery, and perhaps suddenly.
Nicole and Omni explained what work we’d be learning to do. A good death doula acts like a personal assistant to the dying. She sorts out funeral, insurance, and legal logistics; she keeps a binder of contacts at hospices, medical facilities, and massage therapists; she serves as a neutral liaison to spouses or children. She helps a dying person carry out their final projects, whether completing a memoir or making a video to show their children how to use power tools. She helps them create advanced directives, legal documents that outline medical decisions, and vigil plans for the moment they die: who they’d like at their bedside, what atmosphere they’d like to create. During the death, she watches over the family to make sure everyone has what they need, because it’s easy to forget to eat, and drink water, and rest. After the death, the doula helps family close social media and bank accounts, transfer car titles, hire people to clean a vacated apartment, tying all the loose ends of the recently living. She guides them through their grief.
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“You must not talk about the future. The future is a con. The tarot is a language that talks about the present. If you use it to see the future, you become a conman,” says Alejandro Jodorowsky, maker of cult films El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre, and the unmade psychedelic Dune; writer of the legendary graphic novel series The Incal; and practitioner of the tarot.
When the story opens in the dystopian world of The Incal, our hero John Difool, holder of a Class R private detective’s license, has been beaten up by a masked gang in Suicide Alley and is falling headlong into an acid lake. Difool and Deepo, his pet concrete seagull, are versions of The Fool and his dog from the tarot. Characters across the galaxy, several fashioned after other cards, converge around the Incal, an ancient artifact of untold power and beauty. The game “begins here, not with a bang, but a whimper.”
Teaching Jodorowsky the tarot, the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington said: “The tarot is a chameleon.” Salvador Dalí, fellow explorer of surreal realms, designed a deck featuring himself as The Magician. Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats, member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, wrote poetry rife with tarot symbolism. A few years ago, Sylvia Plath’s copy of the Marseilles deck fetched $206,886 at Sotheby’s—the one that Ted Hughes had gifted her, the one that had prompted her to write several poems including The Hanging Man, and from Cambridge, write to her mother that she was “on the road to becoming a seeress.” Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot had Madame Sosostris, “famous clairvoyante” and “the wisest woman in Europe,” lay down a “wicked pack of cards” in The Waste Land. More recently, author Erin Morgenstern hand-painted a black-and-white tarot deck to complement her fantasy novel, The Night Circus.
Calling the tarot a “machine for constructing stories,” Italo Calvino wrote a semiotic fantasy called The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Two groups of travelers cross a forest. One ends up in a castle, and the other in a tavern, both having lost their power of speech in the travails of the crossing. Using tarot cards, they tell tales through the night, but no tale is ever quite the truth, only a version of it. Booker winner Margaret Atwood, often accused of prophetic abilities herself, said: “Oracles in the ancient world were always ambiguous. They didn’t say, this will inevitably happen. They were like warnings—if this, then that. . . . There isn’t one The Future. There are an infinite number of possible futures, and which one you get is going to depend on what you do now.” Two-time Booker winner Hilary Mantel, who thought of writing as “the arena of peril,” kept a deck in a drawer of her writing desk. Her character Alison Hart in Beyond Black says of reading the tarot: “You don’t know what you’re going to say. You don’t even know your way to the end of the sentence. You don’t know anything. Then suddenly you do know. You have to walk blind. And you walk slap into the truth.”
I hold the old New Orleans deck in my hands. It has a perfectly satisfying aspect ratio. The syncretic vodun artwork is stunning. All decks have 78 cards, 22 of which comprise the Major Arcana. This deck has one extra, a wild card called Les Barons. Top-hatted, dark-glassed, cigar-smoking Baron Samedi and Baron Cimetière walk up some stairs with Manman Brigitte (to the French Quarter Police Station, I’m told). All grinning skeletons wearing long coats and carrying the respective accoutrements of their works—a curved walking stick, a headstone, a cross—they make me smile. Eros and Thanatos, awful without a few laughs. I shuffle the cards, a rustling hush. I hear the Sanskrit root śam that says pacifying, extinguishing; the root śi that says sharpening, focusing. If it’s all a game anyway, wouldn’t you like a deck of cards?
Against the context of the rising popularity of the tarot in the literary arts, Spencer curates a freewheeling conversation with Alexander Chee, Alia Curtis, Laurie Filipelli, Meg Hayertz, Cecily Sailer, Rachel Wright, and Maritess Zurbano, where they discuss how the tarot figures in their lives and writing practices. Among the discussions about its assorted applications in various fields is information about the creative uses they put it to.
Sailer: I was drawn to Tarot because it shares with writing a fundamental aspiration—to articulate the complexity of human experience. Writers must journey into the murky realms of the subconscious and return with material the conscious mind can digest. Tarot can enter this process as a collaborator and compliment [sic]: It shares a writer’s desire to interrogate while providing a different language and angle for doing so.
Chee: It develops a formidably dense amount of information about characters, but it also lends you distance from them, lets you see them in ways they won’t, and you need that. Also, it is useful for teaching students. I will give the Celtic Cross exercise in class and sometimes not explain the link to the Tarot until afterwards as not everyone finds the Tarot credible, even as a structural element with no cards. I find it helps them to start seeing the deck apart from the overly mystical way, by teaching them how to use the elements of the deck’s tradition to tap into their imagination—and power—before they meet the deck itself and assign it some authority it just doesn’t have.
Drawing elegant parallels between the girlhood game of folded-paper cootie catchers and the tarot as a literary form in itself, Nethercott suggests in this tender essay that the link between reading—or “reading”—as an act of divination and writing as an act of creation may not be so tenuous, seeing as language is involved. As “an occult power, a supernatural tool that must be wielded delicately,” it can read minds, transcend time, survive life and death, she suggests. Every card has a story to tell and that is a powerful act.
Like so many divinatory games, young women have long been the keepers and practitioners. In our patriarchal society, young men have been emboldened to select their own paths, to determine who and what they wanted to become—leaving boys with no true need for fortune telling or luck. Why bother with divination when you can control the future? Adolescent girls, however, were never afforded this promise. Thus, girls have long been drawn to games of chance, of luck, of peering into a future that seemed to already have been decided for them. If they couldn’t control the future, at least they could get a preview of what’s to come.
If something can tell a story, chances are that it can tell your story. The Fool who steps into the unknown… the Three of Swords bearing heartbreak… the patient, dangling Hanged Man… As any good writing teacher can tell you, the microcosm contains the macrocosm—within the tarot, we view an individual illustration and immediately it expands, jumpstarting associations with similar images in our own lives. And so, through these archetypal narrative images come tales. And tales lead to questions. And questions lead into the future.
A creative tool, a beautiful game, a clarity device for a confounding world? Or perhaps in our era of pervasive despair, where we endlessly medicalize nature and culture and press them into therapeutic service, should the tarot be seen as psychotherapy? Carl Jung did say in a 1930s seminar: “They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.” In this thoughtful essay, McConnachie tours the cultural history of the tarot, examining various origin theories and influences—it was a parlor game to begin with—and arriving at ways the tarot and the reading of it appear to operate. A tool of “cold tricksters or wise therapists,” he seems to ask, but is there a difference?
The poet William Empson, no less, wrote to the London Review of Books in September 1980 to protest that ‘nobody in the Renaissance would invent such a random thing without making it symbolical’; that ‘the picture cards of the tarot are rather aggressively mysterious’; and that the tarot pack was unlikely ‘used merely for games’. [The philosopher Michael] Dummett replied that: ‘Intellectuals, scholars and other serious-minded people are prone to consider playing games a trivial occupation,’ yet in the courts of early Renaissance Italy, by contrast, ‘men and women did not despise games as trifling, but cultivated them and took them seriously, by which I do not mean portentously.’
My original question: ‘Why does tarot survive?’ In a sense, tarot does encode wisdom – albeit within an invented tradition rather than a secret one. It is a system for describing aspirations and emotional concerns. It is a closed system rather than one based on evidence but, as such, it is not dissimilar to psychoanalysis, another highly systematised, invented tradition whose clinical efficacy depends ultimately on the relationship between client and practitioner.
The Querent (Alexander Chee, The Morning News, August 2011)
The querent is the person who asks the tarot—“78 windows into the secret life of the world, hidden somewhere beyond the air, under the skin of existence”—a question. In this moving personal essay, Chee starts with fortune telling, buying a deck that the (in)famous occultist Aleister Crowley designed together with Lady Frieda Harris, seeking “one of those mirrors, the ones positioned so you can see around a corner, but for my whole life.” He ends up with something else a lot harder to define, something he must meet with his eyes closed nonetheless.
On reflection, it seems to me much of what I love about literature is also what I love about the Tarot—archetypes at play, hidden forces, secrets brought to light. When I bought the deck, it was for the same reason I bought the car—I wanted to feel powerful in the face of my fate. I felt too much like a character in a novel, buffeted by cruel turns of fate. I wanted to look over the top of my life and see what was coming; I wanted to be its author.
On the subway home, I remembered the story of my own trip to a fortuneteller as an infant in Seoul. All she would say, apparently, was, “This one, he has much to do.”
If she said anything else, no one remembers. I think sometimes of asking, but it seems to me now, after my uncle’s story, that you think you want to know the future until you do. It would be like waiting for a bullet to pace its way to your side across the years.
In this luminous piece categorized as experimental-hybrid essay-memoir, Swift draws for us 22 deeply observed, deeply lived true stories laid out in the pattern of the 22 cards of the Major Arcana. Here is everything we have been talking about so far. Here is what the tarot can do for one who wants to see and make. As Yogi Berra famously said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
The Magician/1
One Christmas, when I was a child, my grandmother offered an unusual gift: she would make a donation to the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Desert, California, on my behalf. What animal did I want to sponsor? I said wolf. She was furious, I was later told, that I would pick a predator over something sweet and cuddly. But, probably after a long talk with my dad, who may have offered her some ecological reasoning, she sent me a card with a photo of the Mexican wolf. I was so proud of that card, not because she had donated a token sum of money in my name for the fund-raiser, but because I had allied myself with wolf.
The Moon/18
Anne Carson stated it confidently: “I do not believe in art as therapy.” Upon reading these words, I sighed with relief. She had said it. I had nodded. Art, the dedicated work of making. Therapy, the tenacious work of healing. Nodding, I realized two things about myself. One, I had matured as a writer, an artist. Two, I had healed some deep fissures in myself. Otherwise, I might have retreated at her comment, belligerently disagreed. There is no way around the curvature of grief; one must lean into it, buck the heavy swell. To write well is to name pain with beauty and strangeness. That’s the art of it. Creativity, which could just as well be a word for God. Learning these things was one of the greatest freedoms of all. Some people think writing is easy. I want to tell them, try to face yourself daily in the salt pan of the empty page. Try to go there and come back unscathed.
Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.
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There are many kinds of media burnout, but none are quite like “people who wrote about Game of Thrones.” For The Verge, Kevin Nguyen revisits the heady exhausting days when digital outlets would chase the fantasy saga’s page-view bounty. Say what you will about the death of monoculture, but at least such a phenomenon is unlikely to darken our doorsteps again.
“I would try and have at least one article published that night, if not more, if I could sleep for a few hours. It was an adrenaline rush on Sunday nights for sure,” she said, recounting the experience excitedly. “I would sleep a little bit, wake up early, get to the office, sometimes rewatch the episode again in the morning just to sort of soak it in, especially if it was a good one. And then, yeah, I would really try and write as many articles as I could between Sunday night and Tuesday evening” — the publishing “sweet spot,” according to Renfro.
That first season of her coverage, she published over 150 stories. As she continued, she kept pushing. By the end of the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones in 2019, she estimates she had published hundreds more.
. . .
Game of Thrones concluded in May 2019. Since then, Renfro says she has been “a consistent therapy attender.”
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Laura Kipnis recounts how she got involved with Rebind, an AI-powered service that seasons public domain classics with original human commentary so that readers can not just read, but be in conversation with a book. This service sprouted out of a plumbing magnate John Dubuque’s desire to better understand weighty tomes like Being and Time by Martin Heidegger and Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead.
My role, the email explained, would involve recording original commentary on a “great book”—Clancy suggested Romeo and Juliet, though it could be any classic in the public domain. This commentary would somehow be implanted in the text and made interactive: Readers would be able to ask questions and AI-me would engage in an “ongoing conversation” with them about the book. We’d be reading buddies. Proposing me for Romeo and Juliet did strike me as subversively funny—my “expertise” on romantic tragedy consists of having once written a somewhat controversial anti-marriage polemic titled Against Love. I’ve also written, a bit ironically, about the muddle of sexual consent codes, which I supposed could prove relevant. Juliet was, after all, only 13. These days, Romeo (probably around 16—we’re not precisely told) would risk being called a predator.
The Rebind catalog is evolving by the day: James Wood (Chekhov), Margaret Atwood (Tale of Two Cities), and Marlon James (Huck Finn) have recently been added. Dubuque and Kaag had been thinking mainly about philosophy titles, until they realized how many different kinds of books and conversations there could be. Which was when they realized how big Rebind could be: “Not just big,” Dubuque said, “but a landmark event.” The spiritual category will be especially huge, he thinks: Currently contracted luminaries include Deepak Chopra and Bessel van der Kolk, the trauma expert who wrote The Body Keeps the Score—five years on the bestseller list. They will also, of course, Rebind the Bible, probably from multiple vantages.
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Alexandra Horowitz will get you thinking with this piece that explores the process of cloning dogs. Are clones the same as the beloved pets owners are attempting to recreate? Is it a morally acceptable practice? In a world that borders on sci-fi, Horowitz is a decisive guide.
But, if it is dogs’ individuality that we value, what should we make of the idea that their unique and unreproducible selves can, in fact, be reproduced? Cloning is the ultimate expression of genetic determinism—chromosomes as character. ViaGen’s Web site declares that a cloned dog “is simply a genetic twin of your dog, born at a later date.” The assertion is not untrue, as far as it goes, but it’s a sales pitch that dodges a host of complicated ethical and identity issues. There are issues of exploitation—both of the bereaved owners whose desire to somehow cheat death is being monetized and, more viscerally, of the unseen animals whose bodies are used in making a clone. There’s the issue of supply: the production of bespoke dogs in a society when so many good, naturally born ones in shelters are in need of adoption. Finally, there’s an existential issue: who, exactly, is produced when a dog is cloned?
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At some point in Cedric Lodge’s nearly three decades at the Harvard Medical School morgue, he decided to steal body parts from cadavers and sell them to customers—and got away with it for at least four years. Lodge’s case reveals an expansive network of human remains trading and trafficking, much of it legal. While the subject is undoubtedly unsettling for some readers, Ally Jarmanning reports a fascinating story on this macabre market for human body parts—and poses interesting questions about property, collecting, and preservation.
In 2018, prosecutors say, Lodge began stealing body parts from the morgue and taking them home, in his orange Subaru that bore the license plate GRIM-R, to his tidy split-level in Goffstown, New Hampshire. His wife, Denise, would take it from there, handling logistics. She’s the one who packed up the goods and took them to the post office, prosecutors allege; she communicated with the buyers and took payments through her PayPal account.
It was a lucrative business. Court records show that one buyer paid Denise Lodge more than $37,000, sending his payments with memos like “head number 7” and “braiiiiiins.”
Collectors all have their own reasons and rationales for wanting to own these unusual items. One said displaying a skull was “a flex for any goth.” Some admire human remains as medical antiques. Others treat them like fine art. One collector showed off an altar of skulls, where he left Jolly Ranchers and cigarettes as offerings.
A Delaware couple, Justin Capps and Sonya Cobb, doesn’t like using the term “collector” at all. They consider themselves “rescuers” of human remains.
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Kids are overdosing and dying from fake pills sold online. Because of its clandestine features, Snapchat in particular is an ideal platform for dealers to connect with and sell drugs to teens and young kids. (If you’re not familiar with how the platform works, messages disappear within 24 hours, wiped clean by the app’s delete function.) Paul Solotaroff spent eight months reporting this must-read feature, showing how Snapchat has become a safe haven to sell kids lethal drugs, how the company has failed to ensure the safety of its users, and how grieving parents are coming together to fight back.
How could a kid so loved and alive get addicted to a surgical anesthetic? Sheriff’s deputies had no answers, and the DEA wouldn’t comment. So Neville got off her couch and started digging.
The first clue came from a girl Alex knew. She hadn’t met the dealer, but she’d seen his online handle: He went by AJ Smokxy on Snapchat. Other friends in middle school copped from him, too; he’d deliver the pills right to your door. The next penny dropped when a ping came in on Facebook. I know who killed your son, said the stranger. It’s the same guy on Snapchat who killed my Hector.
This was manna for kids, who could text (or sext) each other without fear of their parents’ prying eyes. But that disappearing ink was a godsend for dealers too — a chance to sell narcotics and leave no breadcrumbs for the cops and feds to follow. This made all the difference to fake-pill pushers, whose product was as lethal as it was deceptive. Two milligrams of fentanyl — think 10 grains of salt — would asphyxiate a teen in his bed. Why fentanyl? Because it’s so plentiful and potent that you can produce a fake Oxy for less than five cents a pill — and sell that pill to kids for $30. Dealers, as a rule, don’t try to kill their clients, but with fentanyl, it’s the cost of doing business. No home cook can process a batch of “Xanax” without peppering chunks of fentanyl in the mix. Those chunks get pressed into the random pill — or half-pill, as sometimes happens. I know of one kid who split a “Percocet” with his girlfriend, then suffocated while she slept soundly. Per the latest report from the DEA, roughly 70 percent of the fake pills seized by agents contain fatal doses of fenty. For every pill they flag, though, many more get through and wind up for sale online.
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Mewing, that Very Online mouth-positioning thing that people do in order to accentuate their jawline, happens to be named after the dentist who invented the practice. And nearly 20 years ago, that dentist apparently stumbled on this technique while treating an adolescent named Gabriel Smith. Now, Smith has written a chilling (and absolutely hilarious) account of his time in Mike Mew’s chair. Say “ow”!
Mike Mew is a small and bizarre-looking man. He has a perfectly square head which, when Mike was a child, his dentist father molded using prototypical orthotropic methods. He is very short, and very slim, which gives the impression of his skull being about the same width as his waist. He wore, during our sessions, a tight shirt tucked into tight trousers, paired with square-framed glasses. He is bald, but fashionably so, and his manicured remaining hair frames the top of his strange little head very neatly. The impression he leaves is of an almost total cubeness, like a minor antagonist in a PlayStation game. He undoubtedly believes that his own physical format is somehow inherently correct, and in what he is selling: he has made himself into an example of it. “Look at your lips,” he said in one session. “Too big, too droopy, ugly. Now look at mine.” He turned to my mother. “This is how lips are meant to look. Firm and tight. Attractive.”
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Lane Scott Jones| Longreads | June 25, 2024 | 3,835 words (13 minutes)
“At last! This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She will be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” —Genesis 2:23
In the seventh year of our marriage, on a cold day in October, my husband called me into the bathroom.
He was lying in the tub with his head submerged, but he sat up as I walked in, water splashing over the side. He wiped his face but didn’t look at me. From the halting way he began, I knew he was telling me something he’d been trying to say for a long time.
I watched the water lap around his edges, blurring and dissolving him. After 10 years together, I was so familiar with his body it had become an extension of my own. I could bring my eye to each point of him and know how it felt: the smooth skin of his shoulder, the surprising delicacy of his collarbones, the softness of his brown hair.
He never hid it from me. That surprises people. They ask, “Did you have any idea?” They imagine me walking in on him gazing into a full-length mirror, dressed in my clothes. They imagine the screaming, weeping, gnashing of teeth. But it wasn’t like that. As soon as he found the words, he laid them at my feet.
“I want to wear women’s clothes.”
Growing up in North Carolina, most of what I knew about sex and gender I learned in church. What to guard against: girls in spaghetti straps, girls in jean shorts, girls in low-cut tops. That girls who have sex are chewed gum, crumpled roses, licked candy bars. That boys will be boys.
I learned a surprising amount about oral sex from the Focus on the Family magazines stocked in the church library, with advice columns in the back where concerned parents wrote in about their teenagers. I read those scraps like a sacred text, carefully tearing out and ferreting away the pages to piece together a more complete picture.
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I met my first boyfriend at church. He was a lacrosse player and a recent convert. We had nothing in common apart from the fact that we couldn’t keep our hands off each other—in empty Sunday school classrooms, choir robe closets, altars, once the baptismal. We spent hours in the dark church parking lot in the halo of a street light. Exhaust fumes still taste like kissing to me.
It was nothing like they’d said. No one had mentioned how desire felt like power. How it coursed through you, animating you in new, unfamiliar ways. It scared him. He ran the treadmill of desire, guilt, repentance, and relapse. I took what was offered, then accepted the guilt of wanting it in the first place. A necessary flagellation.
I also met my future husband at church. I was 18.
After high school, I accepted a scholarship to Auburn University in Alabama. It was the first time I’d been away from home. I imagined reinventing myself, trying on imaginary identities like vellum dresses on a paper doll: a journalist, a visual artist, a published author. I saw myself moving abroad after graduation, or to New York City or the West Coast. I was ready to disentangle myself from my hometown church and all its restrictions. But college in the Deep South required a handbook I’d never been given. The rules and norms were incomprehensible to me—from everything that goes on during sorority rush to how my pageant queen roommate somehow always had the perfect powdered face of makeup.
My first college boyfriend was a Texan going through a quiet radicalization. God had told him to stop wearing V-neck T-shirts and shopping at thrift stores—a revelation somehow related to biblical manhood. We only ever kissed but, after we broke up, I heard how I featured prominently in his story of religious conversion: how I had led him into sexual temptation and how he’d triumphed over it. Instead of laughing at this, I absorbed it as a personal deficiency.
The day I met my future husband, our college minister had just finished his sermon, part of a series on Genesis. The ministry was housed in a white-steepled church that sat as the cornerstone of Opelika, Alabama, with a looming monument to Robert E. Lee and the Confederate cause in the courtyard. After the service, I was stacking chairs against the back wall when I saw a boy winding his way toward me. He was slim, with a mop of brown hair and a long stride. I’ll call him D. When he reached me, he stuck out an eager hand.
“Finally!” D said. “I’ve been waiting to meet you.”
D had been reading my music blog, full of album reviews and pirated songs. He was a musician studying piano and invited me to see a local band play the next night. At dinner before the show, his car got towed, and we spent the entire night tracking it down instead. We found it at an impound lot. He tried to talk me into buying bolt cutters.
We only ever kissed but, after we broke up, I heard how I featured prominently in his story of religious conversion: how I had led him into sexual temptation and how he’d triumphed over it.
D unlocked a sense of possibility in me. He did not make me feel ashamed. Only two years older than me, he seemed to have life figured out. He instructed me in lessons with the patience of a priest: Eating a banana calms the nerves, he told me. The key to making beautiful music is unwashed hair.
He grew up in an archetypal Alabama family—father a bank president, mother a homemaker—in a large brick house in a neighborhood of identical large brick houses. The family motto: “Don’t stand out.” But D had always been creative and strange, buzzing with dreamy romantic energy that chafed against his parents’ expectations. They worked hard to keep him contained. His mother wouldn’t let him try out for community theater. When he took up piano, they encouraged him to try sports.
D and I saw each other every day after the bolt-cutters incident. He would practice piano until late at night then climb the drain pipe to my second-story dorm room. I’d hear the velvety sound of my window opening and him hoisting himself in with practiced ease. He would shed his outer layers and burrow into my twin bed, pressing his icy hands against my warm body, fingers tapping against my hips, still silently practicing Bach.
A couple of months into dating, D arranged for a small four-seater airplane to fly us to the beach for a day. He loved sweeping gestures—always writing our love story in his head. We spent the day by the ocean and flew back to Auburn as the sun began to set in a blaze of orange and pink. The pilot leaned back and asked us, “Want to see that again?” Then he flew us up higher, westward, and gently back in time, where the sun hadn’t yet gone down.
That’s the only time I’ve ever seen the sun set twice.
We were in a hotel hot tub in Texas when D mentioned marriage for the first time. I was 19, in a red bikini, steam from the water making my skin flush pink. At first, I said no.
I’d never dreamt of marriage. I didn’t imagine a wedding, a dress, or a groom. My fantasies were of other things: the places I would go, the people I would meet, date, and break up with, the versions of myself I could become. No one single future captured me, but the breathtaking collective possibility of them all. Yet, over the years, the possibilities had seemed to narrow: a thousand small reprimands snuffing them out.
Marriage was a small box, within a series of increasingly smaller boxes that I’d been pressed into over the years—by every boyfriend, youth group, church service, and unspoken expectation of womanhood. But I accepted the shrinking, the need to make myself smaller to fit the life I was offered. The other futures I could imagine began to feel blurry and uncharted. Marriage, like religion, promised certainty. When I eventually said yes, it was the relief of acquiescence. It felt so easy to become the kind of woman I was supposed to be.
Religion had locked me into a competition of womanhood, the ring on my finger the final prize. On our wedding invitations, which I designed, there was a banner at the top with Adam’s words from Genesis, the moment he first met Eve: “At last!”
We married my senior year. I skipped graduation. We left the wedding reception on a motorcycle, running out of gas on a dark Alabama road. I got a ride from a man in a white pickup truck while my husband of three hours pushed the motorcycle up the hill toward the nearest gas station. We had sex for the first time at 4 a.m. in a cold hotel room. I cried afterward. D fell asleep immediately. I took a shower, trying to comb through the tangles of my bobby-pin-studded, shellacked wedding hair, and cried even harder.
I’d never dreamt of marriage. I didn’t imagine a wedding, a dress, or a groom. My fantasies were of other things: the places I would go, the people I would meet, date, and break up with, the versions of myself I could become.
On the honeymoon, we performed the roles of husband and wife like child actors in a play. We went to white tablecloth dinners in our nicest clothes. We lounged in beach chairs, slick with sunscreen. We floated alongside the swim-up bar, barely legal drinking age ourselves, ordering sugary cocktails with names like “Dirty Banana” that made us sick.
I experienced my first anxiety attacks over the strangest things: how dirty the hem of my dress had gotten at the wedding, the color of my hair in the photos, a pen mark on my leather bag. I took long walks around the manicured resort in white summer dresses, feeling ridiculous in my diamond ring. Dread settled over me as I realized the days of dreaming were over.
On the last day of our honeymoon, D and I took a small boat out to sea. We were pushed out beyond the wave break and released into the vast blue ocean. The current carried us away from the shore until we could no longer see the resort’s red umbrellas in the sand. We drifted for what felt like hours. When the wind finally picked up again, we didn’t care where it took us, as long as it was back toward solid ground. We ended up at a small cove a mile downshore from the resort. We left the boat capsized on its side, hiking back in our bathing suits and lifejackets, scrabbling barefoot over the rocky coastline.
When we returned home as newlyweds, we told this story as a hilarious anecdote. But I could never quite shake that feeling of immense helplessness.
Marriage required voluntary amnesia. My own thoughts suddenly seemed dangerous. They threatened to reveal my new life as an enormous mistake. To cope, I began to detach small pieces of myself, a little bit at a time. I stopped journaling. I stopped writing. I stayed as busy as possible, turning up the volume on the outside world to quiet that inner voice. I boxed away my old dreams and turned the lock. I would love being married. I would be a good wife.
This ritual dismemberment took place over a series of months, then years. D noticed the change. “It’s like a light turned off in you,” he told me, a couple of years in. I pretended not to know what he meant.
Still, D remained soft and steady. Gentle with me. He loved it when I sang to myself around the house. He knew how much I liked cardinals, so he bought a tiny bird feeder to put outside my window. I sat at my desk, watching him outside in the sun, golden and smiling at me, while he secured it to the glass. He was always doing that: bringing me little offerings of beauty, like consolations for the life we’d agreed to.
D’s gender identity did not emerge fully formed. It seeped into the edges like a developing Polaroid, both of us puzzling to make out the full picture. When he was a kid, he would dress up in his sister’s clothes when no one was home. He had always loved dresses and lace and long hair. He was drawn to the softness of womanhood, the parts of himself it allowed him to access. Neither of us was sure what it all meant.
We reached a tenuous agreement: D could explore his gender identity—but only so far. Only as long as it didn’t threaten the life we’d built. Where that line was, neither of us really knew. Nail polish, but no makeup? Jewelry, but no dresses? Would he shave his legs? Pierce his ears? Begin taking hormones? It would have seemed ridiculous to reduce gender down to such surface-level signifiers, some acceptable and some arbitrarily not, except that we’d been doing it our whole lives.
In public, D still wore his usual clothes and didn’t want to be called by new pronouns. He, too, had long ago locked part of himself away. He hated the feelings that were rising up now, decades of religious conditioning at war with the swelling music inside him. Near daily, he would swear off these feelings altogether, repeating never mind like a prayer. He started having panic attacks.
Nail polish, but no makeup? Jewelry, but no dresses? Would he shave his legs? Pierce his ears? Begin taking hormones? It would have seemed ridiculous to reduce gender down to such surface-level signifiers, some acceptable and some arbitrarily not, except that we’d been doing it our whole lives.
I watched him nervously for signs of femininity, chastising myself for my vigilance, but still fretting as his hair grew longer and I saw smudges of eyeliner. I found myself acting strangely territorial over womanhood. Possessive. I’d spent a lifetime trying to meet its exacting standards and feeling the shame of falling short. My alarm system had become highly attuned to any deviation. Now I couldn’t turn it off, even with my spouse. It was the meticulous pruning of aberrant ideas I’d been taught since girlhood. Except now I was the one demanding uniformity, both the prisoner and the guard.
One day that winter, I opened his underwear drawer to put the laundry away and noticed a flash of color and lace toward the bottom. My stomach jolted. There was that invisible line. The black ones were fine, but it was the tangles of red, pink, fuchsia—hidden the deepest—that alarmed me. I quickly closed the drawer.
I felt a churning unease at the renegotiation of the terms of our marriage. Until then, we had played our roles perfectly: good Christian man and woman, husband and wife. Resentment tightened in my throat. I had sacrificed so much of myself to fit into this marriage. So why couldn’t he? Of course, we both felt claustrophobic. Of course, we both felt stifled, suffocated, desperate with grief at the parts of ourselves marriage required us to abandon. I thought that’s what we’d agreed to.
That day in the bathtub, D broke the agreement, said the thing that couldn’t be spoken, the whispered possibility: What if there is more for us out there?
D decided to go back to church.
It had been seven months since the bathtub confession, and over a year since the pandemic lockdowns had begun. We had stopped attending church by that point. But we had gone to couples therapy on Zoom. We had been shopping in the women’s section of Goodwill in matching blue face masks. I had dressed D in my clothes and started a shared Pinterest board.
We were bumping up against that invisible line more often now, feeling its shock like an electric fence, its boundaries momentarily illuminated. D’s panic attacks became more frequent. The frantic beating against the locked door in my mind grew louder. We ignored it all with the desperation of two people who weren’t ready for their lives to change.
It was this desperation that led D back to church—the place we had always gone for assurance. Even condemnation is a kind of certainty. D went to the office of the unmasked pastor who gave D, unhelpfully, a book on how to resist the temptation of homosexuality. The pastor had a cough but told D, “Don’t worry. It’s just a cold.”
We were bumping up against that invisible line more often now, feeling its shock like an electric fence, its boundaries momentarily illuminated.
D got COVID first. I followed a few days later. Initially, it was almost a relief. The emotional torment of the existential identity questions was replaced with the more immediate, bodily torment of illness. After months of relentless talking and arguing, we were finally still. We lay together in our big white bed, exhausted and feverish, watching YouTube videos about the deep sea.
The deepest part of the known ocean is the hadal zone, named after the Greek god of the underworld. No light can penetrate. The pressure there would crush you immediately.
We relaxed into quiet companionship, letting our hot eyes rest on the unknowable black water.
Only five percent of the ocean is thought to be accurately mapped; the other 95 percent remains a mystery.
Over the last few months, new thoughts had begun to emerge from the depths of my mind like creatures from the abyss. I was surprised to find my resentment toward D had morphed into jealousy. Both marriage and religion had required exile from ourselves, a systematic suppression of our true identities. It was an adaptation that felt necessary for survival. But as I watched D explore, interrogate, and reinvent womanhood, changing the rules before my eyes, I wondered if I had been wrong.
Over the next few days, as D recovered, I grew increasingly worse. My breathing became irregular. I stopped eating. On the seventh night, I woke up at 3 a.m. with a sharp pain in my abdomen. Stumbling into the bathroom, I was so hot I tore off my clothes. In the mirror, my reflection seemed to glimmer like heat waves.
When I woke up on the cold bathroom tile, I was naked and terrified. I was certain this was what dying felt like. I had only one thought: to get back to D. I fought toward our bedroom, knocking into furniture as my vision went dark at the edges, and collapsed at our closet door. D found me there and laid me on the bed, stroking my damp face until my panicked breaths grew steady.
Our love had always been a balm for the ways we’d been forced to shrink over the years. We had entered into this marriage as confused evangelicals, barely in our 20s, trying so hard to play the roles of husband and wife. We had both changed so much in the past decade, but the shape of our marriage had stayed the same. The pressure was crushing us both. I thought of our first date, with the bolt cutters, the sense of freedom and possibility D had unlocked in me then. They were doing it again now.
I fell asleep with D watching over me, their cool fingers on my cheek. When I woke up the next morning, my fever had broken.
A month later, our marriage was over.
What I thought would feel like exile instead felt like escape.
We left the Garden and went in separate directions. D went west, to California, a land of lush abundance. I went east, to New York and New England, and then across an ocean to Portugal, Italy, and France.
We had entered into this marriage as confused evangelicals, barely in our 20s, trying so hard to play the roles of husband and wife.
Everything seemed open, all those glorious branching futures I’d seen when I left for school, back within arm’s reach. It was a time of freedom, confusion, and expansion. I would no longer tolerate exile from my own mind, not for a god, not for a marriage, not for a moment longer.
I walked along the Seine, summited the Swiss Alps in a swinging cable car, sunbathed naked on the rocky beaches of Croatia. I ate sticky figs in Tuscany, golden-yellow custard tarts in Lisbon, and buttery croissants in Biarritz.
In Orvieto, I visited a cathedral with the story of Genesis carved in bas-relief on its marble façade. In the panel Creation of Woman, Adam lies asleep on the ground, side cut open, rib removed. Eve has emerged from his body and sits upright, looking God directly in the eye. The tree’s branches drape heavily overhead, dense with fruit. This is before the serpent. Before the apple. Before knowledge. Before escape. Yet in the tilt of her head, I think I can already see the wild seed of desire beginning to grow.
I saw D again in San Diego. It was exactly a year after we’d both been so sick. Two years since the bathtub. Ten years since the bolt cutters. Her thick brown hair was long and pulled back, the California sun catching glints of gold. Champagne glitter fizzed on her eyelids. She had chosen a new name for herself, one that meant “beloved wife.”
We met near the water and walked past a hostel she had stayed at once, right after the divorce. She said, “I want to show you this,” and we snuck in as another guest was leaving. D went to the front desk and said, “This is my ex-wife. Ex-wife? Is that right?” She turned to me and we both laughed at the term. “I wanted to show her around.” They wouldn’t let us in, so we walked along the boardwalk. The sun was setting, illuminating the water on either side of us. We talked about D’s new life in California.
She had been in the art supply store recently, wearing a miniskirt and platform boots, and an older woman had approached her. D felt nervous, thinking of all the white-haired church ladies in Alabama and Tennessee, but instead, the woman had complimented her.
“Just look at those legs,” the woman said. “You could be a Rockette!”
D laughed, then dropped her paintbrushes to do a couple of kicks for her.
Listening to D tell the story, the barefaced joy of dancing for a stranger in the paint aisle, I was reminded of all the reasons I had fallen in love with her in the first place.
What do we call that thing that beckoned Eve? The promise of truth, of being able to look at one’s whole self—the full picture, not just the sanctioned parts—and to rest in the knowledge that it is good? Whatever it was that beckoned her, beckoned me too. It sought me like a serpent, whispering possibility. It tempted me with promises of knowledge and freedom, harmony with my mind, instead of constant battle.
We walked back along the boardwalk while the sun sank below the horizon. I thought back to our date on the airplane, that ridiculous show of love, when we had been flown gently back in time and discovered a second chance.
Womanhood as defined by the church, marriage, and the South had been such a tight box to fit into. It couldn’t hold the entirety of me or my spouse. I can’t say what was happening in D’s mind during all this—I witnessed her becoming but I will never understand what it was like.
What I do know is this: I didn’t realize we had permission to change until D showed me. She took the first bite. And then she extended it to me, gleaming like forbidden fruit, an offering from a beloved. Our eyes were finally opened. At last.
Lane Scott Jones is a writer from North Carolina now traveling the world full-time. She is currently working on a memoir. You can subscribe to her Substack newsletter here.
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A dive into the depths of the movie “Jaws.” Olivia Rutigliano has given a lot of thought to the themes and meaning of the film, analyzing it like a literary novel. This piece will make you think about this timeless classic differently.
Not unrelatedly, another reason I like watching Jaws amid all the fireworks is because it localizes so many of the depressing actualities about America—the movie features a mayor who cares more about the local economy than the lives of his citizens, a medical examiner who covers up inconvenient means of death for gain, a scientist no one listens to, and in a new and relevant reflection, beaches being open when they shouldn’t be. But these aspects are not incidental to Jaws; the film is very much a pointed criticism of our particular American condition, one which places greater value on the perks of convenience and capitalism than on human lives. Neatly dovetailing all of this is Jaws’s constant stressing the insignificance of human civilization and the puniness of human existence in the face of nature.
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