“The Merv Griffin Show” is a perfect Seinfeld episode: Kramer finds discarded pieces from the show in a dumpster and sets them up in his apartment, Jerry is obsessed with his girlfriend’s toy collection, Elaine is annoyed by a new coworker who “sidles” up behind her and takes credit for her work, and George . . . well, George. In one scene, he and his girlfriend are driving through the city. She asks him to watch out for pigeons in the road, but he dismisses her, saying they’ll get out of the way. They don’t, and he hits them. “Don’t we have a deal with the pigeons?” he later asks Jerry. On a subsequent ride, poor George faces the same predicament—but when he swerves to avoid a pigeon, he ends up hitting a squirrel. While reading this delightful piece by Benji Jones about the people in NYC who rehabilitate injured or abandoned creatures like rats, baby opossums, and stray birds, I couldn’t stop thinking about this pact that George mentions—the idea that we and the wild critters we live alongside in cities have some kind of understanding, one that favors humans: we’ll let you live on our streets as long as you don’t bother us or invade our personal spaces. In contrast, the rehabbers who care for these small animals out of their own pockets are incredibly kind and humane; after spending time with these folks, Jones begins to understand why they do this intense work, often for free. “They view these species not as pests but as part of nature—as part of the New York City ecosystem. As part of their home.” Sure, some critters can be dirty, destructive, or diseased. But is pigeon poop so terrible? Has the subway rat brought real harm to society? Why do humans hold such contempt and disgust for these tiny creatures? Jones shows how giving them respect, love, and the space to heal has, in turn, enriched these people’s lives. Personally, I’ve always felt a kinship with squirrels, but there’s an underlying dividing line between “us” and “them” that has somehow conditioned me, like most people, to think they are less worthy of compassion than, say, a cat or a dog. Jones writes that we need to be better stewards of our environment. But that can only happen when we truly see these critters as living beings, too, trying to survive just like us. So perhaps, the next time I’m driving and see a creature on the road, I won’t assume it’ll move. And better yet, I’ll slow down, even stop, to acknowledge it—and be grateful that our world is full of such a wonderful variety of life. —CLR
Howard Bryant | ESPN | April 23, 2024 | 8,079 words
Not many baseball writers are more experienced or accomplished than Howard Bryant, and he brings all his skills to bear on this story about a high school team fractured by racism. Beginning from a jaw-dropping scene in which the Fort Myers High Green Wave’s white coaches and players walk off the field, abandoning the team’s two Black players, Bryant expertly unpacks the festering effects of white grievance. The team’s issues may have started internally, but the flames were fanned by white players’ parents; when an assistant coach was fired for texting the team a message including the N-word, they all rushed to his defense, singing from the dog-eared hymnal known as Why Can’t White People Say It Too? The result: the team’s Black players became scapegoats for players and parents alike. Bryant’s deep reporting pulls together FOIA requests, personnel records, and interviews with parents to make the case that the whole gut-wrenching saga was an offshoot of “conservative mandates playing out in education in Florida and around the nation.” He smartly devotes an entire section to Lee County’s racial-political history, adding valuable context for those who might dismiss this as an isolated phenomenon. (And yes, that’s Lee as in Robert E.) This is only a sports story because it involves a sports team. In reality, it’s a story about how major swaths of this country—including state legislatures—have decided that other people catching up means you’re falling behind. —PR
Carey Baraka | 1843 | April 19, 2024 | 6,030 words
I love horror movies, and the opening of this story sounds like a sequence from a great one. A mysterious group of outsiders moves into a foreboding forest that no locals would dare try to live in. They won’t explain who they are or why they’re there; men with machetes tell observers who ask questions to mind their own business. Then people in the group start to disappear: first the children, then the women. Finally the truth emerges, in the form of chilling personal testimonies and shallow mass graves containing hundreds of bodies. The people were part of a cult called Good News International (GNI), and their charismatic leader, Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, had convinced them to kill themselves—not by drinking Kool-Aid, but by consuming nothing at all: Mackenzie’s followers starved themselves to death. Carey Baraka does fantastic work telling this story, which happened in his native Kenya. The writing is taut and evocative. Again in the vein of the best works of the horror genre, Baraka takes care to show how a seemingly outlandish tale of fear and suffering is the product of familiar social, political, and cultural forces—a fact, I would argue, that makes it all the more terrifying. Those forces include the legacy of white colonialism in Kenya, the enduring influence of evangelical Christianity on the country, the basic human desire to find community and purpose, and even the global spread of COVID-19, which accelerated cult recruitment. When Baraka asks one of the survivors of GNI what would make her life better now, she says money, land, food, and a home—essentially, security. “What she described was the life that Mackenzie offered to her and thousands of others,” Baraka writes, “before the fasting began.” —SD
Sally Jenkins | The Washington Post | April 20, 2024 | 7,807 words
Every May, there is a rodeo held near my house. It’s like entering a different world. Horses, cows, and cowboy hats wherever you turn, a muffled speaker adding its indiscernible drone to the noise of excited families (and their dogs and trucks). There is a general party atmosphere, which ramps up a notch when the bulls come out. Muscles rippling in the sun, sweat on their flanks, they kick up a tornado of dust as they rip across the ring, determinedly flinging their massive torsos back and forth to dislodge the intrepid rider clinging to their back. These bulls are celebrities in their own right, and, when I watched, they were the winners, with not one rider staying on for the eight seconds required to earn a score. I came to Sally Jenkins’ piece hoping to learn more about this alien world, and I was not disappointed: Jenkins is swift in pulling you into Texas rodeo life. She profiles J.B. Mauney, who was, as she writes, “arguably the greatest rodeo bull rider who ever lived and certainly the hardest-bodied, a man who never conceded to any power. Until a bull broke his neck.” Picture a cowboy and Mauney is it, his craggy features framing the Marlboro cigarette hanging from his lips. Jenkins describes him perfectly: “an arresting face, burnished by years of outdoor chores, smoke, roistering humor, and pain soothed by shots of Jägermeister.” She details his career, along with the harrowing beating his body has taken from years of falls, and her skill lies in describing this rough life with great beauty. She also explores the mentality of bull riders, undoubtedly forms of addicts, who need “doses of centrifugal and vertical speed as well as sluices of dopamine and epinephrine and a sense of conquering the well-nigh unconquerable.” That addiction is now over for Mauney, who spends his retirement with his family and Arctic Assasin, the last bull he ever rode—the one that broke his neck. Mauney bought Arctic Assasin and retired him to a quiet pasture on his ranch. He is oddly grateful to this bull. He may have ended his career, but he did it while Mauney could still stand up and walk away. —CW
Jeannette Cooperman | The Common Reader | March 26, 2024 | 4,575 words
Blessed silence. Quiet time. The absence of small, empty talk. That’s the kind of silence I had in mind as I read Jeanette Cooperman’s thoughtful essay for The Common Reader. I hadn’t contemplated other kinds of silences, but as she notes, there are many. Consider the silent treatment, where someone chooses to inflict pain by withholding their words. Silence becomes fraught and tense. Consider a moment of silence, usually for a life or lives lost. That silence signifies a deep, collective pain. “Silence like a cancer grows, whenever power refuses to hear truth,” she writes. “Silence is an unblown whistle, a disappeared activist, a dismembered journalist. Silence slides down one generation to the next, keeping pain a secret. Silence is what neighbors remember about the shooter.” I hadn’t considered the litany of ways in which silence harms. But in addition to giving me so much to think about, Cooperman reminds us of silence’s ability to heal, a welcome reprieve from the hollow cacophony of life which depletes me. “Yet as far as I can tell, every wisdom tradition since time began has praised silence. The stillness they urge is a letting-go, a slowing down, an unclenching of our hands and our stubborn, intractable desires. It empties us, yet is far from empty.” We often define silence by what is missing, an absence. But in many cases—mine included—silence is what fills us up. —KS
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Jessica Bateman | Politico | April 19, 2024 | 4,143 words
For Politico, Jessica Bateman shines a light on the secret history of politically motivated adoptions after the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949. Thousands of Greek kids were adopted abroad in the 1950s and ’60s; some children, whose parents were rebel leftist fighters, were orphaned or abandoned, while others were taken from mothers who were coerced or manipulated. Children were adopted mostly by Americans—ideally well-off and conservative families—during a time when Cold War politics softened immigration laws. Today, most of these Greek adoptees don’t know the truth about their past or who their biological parents are. —CLR
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Just over a year ago, the players and coaches of a high school baseball team walked off the field soon after the game began while the parents applauded. They weren’t protesting an umpire or the other team’s behavior, though; instead, they were abandoning their own team’s only two Black players. Over the course of 8,000 words, Howard Bryant tells the story of the Fort Myers High Green Wave’s sickening display—the fracture that led to it, and the chasm that resulted from it. An ire-inducing feat of reporting from one of baseball’s best.
While many team issues fell under the common soap opera of high school sports — a nationwide epidemic of meddling parents and overbearing coaches, the unending battle between fair participation and winning at all costs — virtually the entirety of the grievances that destroyed the 2023 baseball team can be traced to two specific areas: the internecine racial history of Fort Myers, and, more urgently, the enforcement of conservative mandates playing out in education in Florida and around the nation.
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Sally Jenkins gives us a searing portrait of the life of the bull-riding cowboy J.B. Mauney—a life filled with pain after sustaining multiple horrific injuries flung from bulls. Breaking his neck in his last ride was career-ending, and in this piece, he reflects on a his different future.
Mauney, too, cuts a black outline. From under a black felt cowboy hat, hair blacker than coffee runs to the collar of his black shirt. The impression of severity is relieved by blue eyes the color of his jeans and a smile crease from the habit of grinning around a Marlboro. It’s an arresting face, burnished by years of outdoor chores, smoke, roistering humor and pain soothed by shots of Jägermeister. It befits arguably the greatest rodeo bull rider who ever lived and certainly the hardest-bodied, a man who never conceded to any power. Until a bull broke his neck.
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In this deeply thoughtful essay for The Common Reader, Jeannette Cooperman considers silences both healing and harmful. This layered and nuanced piece will give you a much-needed pause; you may not think of the absence of sound quite the same again.
Most days, life’s demands come at me like flung Frisbees, but here, they cannot reach me. Here, I feel at home in a way I do not even feel at home, because here, all I need do is be. This is the silence I craved all along: not an absence of noise but a freedom from my tiny, petty self. As I move through the trees, I am listening, but not hard-focused for connotation or tone. In nature, I eavesdrop on what I once thought of as silence and realize it is only the gentle noise of a world going on without me. This world does not need me to hoist it on my shoulders, spin it dizzy, or yell instructions. I can let go.
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Pigeons. Rats. Opossums. Raccoons. Most people consider these critters as pests—they don’t belong in our homes and neighborhoods and should be exterminated instead. But there’s a group of people across New York City’s boroughs who rehabilitate these injured creatures, and their compassion makes you wonder: Why have humans become so disconnected from nature? Why do we despise these smaller living beings so much? Benji Jones spends time with some of the city’s amazing rehabbers, who are essentially volunteers and care for these creatures without pay.
You might be thinking: What are they thinking? People are commonly disgusted by the animals that have adapted to live alongside us — to eat our garbage, to sleep in our streets. We typically want them out of our homes, not in. Wild animals, no matter the species, can also be noisy, dirty, and sometimes diseased. (One of Martin’s pigeons pooped on her bed, and of course, I sat right in it.)
What’s even more puzzling is that most of these rehabbers work for free, often around the clock, to care for these animals until they’ve healed. They often spend what little money they have on feed, specialized equipment including syringes and IV bags, and medicine. One rehabber told me that she can’t afford to buy herself new clothes. “I’m so broke right now,” they said. “All of my money goes to the animals.”
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As COVID-19 swept across the world, a preacher in Kenya lured thousands of people into a remote forest, promising them safety and salvation. Then he told them to stop eating. In this feature*, Carey Baraka details the terrifying rise and fall of a cult:
On April 14th 2023—after weeks of bureaucratic delays—a group of police officers, pathologists, grave-diggers, human-rights activists, journalists and locals (including Mangi) descended on Shakahola forest. It had recently rained and the red soil was slippery, making the road impassable for their 4x4s. The group had to walk the last few kilometres in the heat, their eyes locked nervously on the ground. They were terrified of stepping on snakes, scorpions—or something more gruesome.
In the bushes, the group began finding bodies that had not yet been buried. Meanwhile, the five boys who had fled from the forest pointed out graves, now sprouting with vegetables. Many of them contained a number of corpses—one held 12. Some bodies had decayed so much that all that was left were bones.“When you saw a suspicious spot, you’d poke a long stick into the ground,” recalled Alex Kalama, a journalist who was present. “After two metres, a strong stench would waft up.”
A few people in the settlement were still alive. Some were inexplicably naked; others were lying on the ground or tied to trees with ropes. Many of these starving people refused the rescuers’ help, telling the group that they were on their way to heaven. Mangi remembered one woman asking him to leave her because she “wanted to meet Christ”. Mathias Shipeta, an employee of haki Africa, an ngo that promotes human rights, said that he started telling the victims he had been sent by Jesus to persuade them to accept his assistance.
Over the next two days, 67 adults and 27 children were taken back to town in ambulances, police vehicles, cars driven by journalists and aid workers, and the arms of rescuers. They were very weak—one woman died on Mangi’s back. Later he wondered whether the people in the forest had been “brainwashed” into killing themselves. Then he paused, his voice growing quiet. “But they were all very educated. You can’t say they don’t know the Bible. They had so many Bibles in their houses—and money.”
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Ramen that’s more than three times as expensive than it is at Target. Water prices that shot up 50 percent in a year. Peanut butter marked up 70 percent. These are just a few of the findings from a nine-month investigation of of prison commissaries. This project comes with a searchable database, so that you can get acquainted with the costs incarcerated individuals are forced to bear to access items they need:
The Appeal’s investigation reveals that incarcerated people in many states are charged significantly more for essential items than those outside prison even though they typically earn pennies an hour—or no wages at all. The Appeal found prison prices up to five times higher than in the community and markups as high as 600 percent. This financial burden, which can cost hundreds of dollars per month, is often passed onto prisoners’ loved ones.
In just one example, Indiana prisons charged about $33 for an 8-inch fan, even though a similar item sells online for about $23 at Lowe’s. Incarcerated people in the state, who are often confined to dangerously hot prisons in the summer, can earn as little as 30 cents an hour, meaning it could take more than 100 hours of work to afford the fan.
The Appeal’s investigation also shows that prisoners can be charged vastly different prices for similar religious items, depending on their faith, with wide variations across states. In Connecticut, the Bible sold for $4.55, but the only Quran available for sale, The Noble Quran, cost $25.99.
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For Politico, Jessica Bateman shines a light on the secret history of politically motivated adoptions after the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949. Thousands of Greek kids were adopted abroad in the 1950s and ’60s; some children, whose parents were rebel leftist fighters, were orphaned or abandoned, while others were taken from mothers who were coerced or manipulated. Children were adopted mostly by Americans—ideally well-off and conservative families—during a time when Cold War politics softened immigration laws. Today, most of these Greek adoptees don’t know the truth about their past or who their biological parents are.
From looking through the unpublished memoirs of Maria’s uncle, the Stanford professor, and comparing them to emails and interviews with her biological family in Greece, a different story emerged than the one Maria had been told. Maria’s mother was in her early 20s and became pregnant when she was raped by the owner of a farm she worked on. As an unwed mother she was shunned by her rural community and moved to the capital, Athens, where she took a job as a hospital cleaner. She placed Maria in an orphanage but visited her every single day. Crucially, she did not give permission for her to be adopted.
When Maria’s uncle came to browse the orphanage in 1953, he decided Maria looked like “one of the healthiest” children. The orphanage said he could take her as long as her mother agreed. He and a lawyer confronted her at her workplace and pressured her to sign the papers, telling her the child would have a better life in America than she could ever give it. In his memoir he describes tears rolling down the woman’s face.
The Orthodox Church in Greece was not happy that the family were Mormon, as Greek American parents were still prioritized at that time. But Maria’s uncle was friends with the U.S. ambassador, Cavendish W. Cannon, who knew the head of the Greek Orthodox Church personally, and intervened to complete the adoption.
“I’d been told my mother didn’t want me, but that wasn’t true,” says Maria. “None of it was true.” And there was more. Maria’s mother was still alive.
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When I introduce myself to a friend of a friend, I say, “I’m Montse [Mohnt-seh].” At the sight of his bewildered face, I try to help. “Or you can call me Mon-sea.” I’m accustomed to giving people in the United States options, to ensure they are comfortable.
“Wait, why do you have two names?” he asks.
Two names, two identities—this is what I’ve always known.
Though behind this name, there are more than two cultures. I grew up in a cultural stew with a Spanish-French mother, a Colombian-born American father, and an Argentine stepmother. Whether at my mother or father’s home, I was immersed in a blend of languages, accents, and traditions.
My parents briefly considered naming me Violette, a French name to match my mother’s first language, but instead I was named after a mountain—Montserrat—just outside Barcelona, Spain, where I spent my early childhood. After my French great-grandmother Andrée prematurely gave birth to my grandmother and her twin sister at six months, she went to the serrated mountains to pray to the Virgin of Montserrat, the patron saint of Catalonia, as her babies fought for their lives. The choir boys might have been singing. She must have lit a vela among hundreds of candles already lit, a peseta for a prayer. When her daughters recovered, she gave them twin middle names: Montserrat, after the Virgin who she believed had saved them.
Seven years later, during the Spanish Civil War, my great-grandmother, my grandmother Odette, and her twin sister Yvette fled to France. There, they would be separated. Odette, staying with the French side of the family, only spoke French, Spanish slowly slipping to become her secondary language. Yvette, living with the Spanish side of the family, spoke primarily Spanish. My late grandmother’s Spanish was forever French-accented. Her sister, now 95, still speaks her Spanish with a French accent. What does it feel like to speak your primary language in an accent from your secondary one? I would later find out.
At 5, I spoke all these languages fluently. Today, I only speak two of them, but understand all of them in some way, as they still live inside me.
Like my grandmother, I too was 7 when I left Spain for another country. As I settled into a new life in the US, I learned to change the pronunciation of my name to make it easier on my teachers and peers and to avoid embarrassing mispronunciations. Mon-sea. Telling my friends back in Spain about this, they think it’s cute: que mono! When I moved from Barcelona to Brattleboro, Vermont, with my parents, I started first grade with a thick Spanish accent. How adorable, people remarked to my father about my foreign accent. To assimilate, I worked to lose it as quickly as possible. Eventually, I’d swap accents like clothes—growing out of one and into another. Today, I speak Spanish with a slight slip of an American accent. It makes me feel like an outsider in my own family.
In Vermont, and later Boston, we celebrated all the Spanish holidays—holidays that held more familiarity to me than the American ones. On New Year’s Eve we stuffed peeled green grapes in our mouths to the crackling countdown on Radio Nacional de España in the background. Every January 6th we gathered around the table to cut the Roscón de Reyes, a brioche cake served on King’s Day in Spain, each hoping to find the fève hidden in our piece. We celebrated with golden crowns made from cardboard, flute glasses, and Cava nearby. We received gifts on our saint’s days, more so than on birthdays. At home, I was Spanish. At school, American. When mom got angry at us, the ultimate insult would be spewed: “Ay! That is so American!” But outside of the house, while in the presence of my peers, I wanted that to be true. Being so American would mean I would be allowed to wear shorts to school. I would not be asked “where are you from” regularly. I would blend in.
I am boarding the second leg of my flight from the US to Spain. With a hazy head from lack of sleep, I hear the flight attendant greet me as I step onto the plane. “Hola!” she says in a sing-songy voice, and I find myself slipping into the reality of my “other” self: more animated than I was a day ago, turning the excitement up a notch as if I were reuniting with a cherished friend I hadn’t seen in years. It is when I get to speak jugo de naranja por favor out loud, instead of just water please, which I said six hours ago. And also when the flight crew announces the safety instructions first in Spanish and then in English. In this space, I feel these two parts of me merging for a brief few hours. As I arrive at El Prat, Barcelona’s international airport with floor-to-wall windows that shimmer in the sun, I’ll hear my name and turn around for a moment, forgetting there are many Montses here. I’ll breathe in the language of my childhood being spoken all around me and exhale a sense of belonging.
Before I make my way to the welcome embrace of family, there is a long line through customs. It’s a familiar routine. I hand over my blue passport and the agent looks at my name and then at me: “Pero porque tienes un nombre Catalan?” he will ask, somewhat perplexed. I mention that I am half Spanish: “Soy media Española.” This is the short answer.
To speak my name out loud feels vastly different depending on where I’m standing. In the US, my insides splinter right before I open my mouth. Will the person laugh? Grossly mispronounce it? Misspell it? Insist that my name is not Spanish, it’s French? Or ask the most Frequently Asked Question of all: “But what is your first name?”
When I was a girl, my grandmother called me Aht because as I was learning to speak, even I couldn’t say the first part of my name. Now, when I introduce myself to someone, I notice how often I soften the edges of that last syllable, how I say my name as if it were a question. As if to say: Are you uncomfortable? Let me help.
At a café in Portland, Oregon, I wait to pick up my order. “Monster . . .” Pause. “RAT. ” I see him, the café owner among the chefs, but he doesn’t see me. He has mined and rearranged the letters in my name to find the ugliest words in English. When he hands me my bag and mispronounces my name again (not quite as exaggerated when he was doing it for an audience), I curtly correct him.
“Montse-rraht,” I say, with an emphasis on the rolling Rs.
“Oh, that’s beautiful.” His tune has changed, but I give him no grace—only a faint “thanks” tossed into the air. He has brought out a monster in me, I think.
Her first name is markedly American, whereas mine, Spanish. She grew up (mostly) in Spain, I grew up (mostly) in the US. We were a coin toss: hers fell one way, mine the other.
In my New England middle school, I fantasized about changing my name to Monica. Just three tiny letters changed and I would never again see the teacher’s finger linger on the class roster—that long pause after “Sarah” and before “Alex” would not be a familiar one. Besides, I have a childhood friend in Barcelona named Monica. Yes, Monica. A name that will make me belong in both places, I believed.
When I meet young children in the US with parents like mine, who gifted them names to match their origins, I wonder if they too recoil when hearing the class roll call. If, as adults, they will also feel misunderstood by their adopted country. “I love your name,” I make sure to tell them. I want them to feel special instead of unusual. To not take decades to (re)claim the beautiful complexity of their multiple identities. To believe their father when he says, like mine did, “Trust me, you’ll appreciate your name one day.”
In a Lyft in Los Angeles, my driver, originally from Mexico, tells me his daughter, too, is named Montserrat. I light up. “Really?!”
“Yes, but she hates her name and makes us call her by her middle name,” he says as I watch the cross sway from the rearview mirror. Please tell her, I say, that you met someone today named Montserrat, who also didn’t likehernamewhen she was a girl—but who now says it proudly.
In the US, when someone cares, when they actually want to know how to spell it, or where it comes from, or how to pronounce it, I will ease into the spelling, not exaggerate the rolling of my Rs. I will pinch my fingers together and conduct the letters of my name as if it were a score, or point them as if I were dipping a thin brush in vibrant color, painting on a canvas. I will take my time, because I no longer want to share a watered-down version of the name that runs through my lineage.
I walk into a café in Barrio Gótico and before I say a word, the hostess says, “Hello, what would you like?” in English decorated in a Spanish accent. She is used to seeing more tourists than locals through these doors. I wish to tell her: I know your language—it was once mine. I knew these streets before I knew any others. To convey something of this, I say instead, “Buenas! Un cortado por favor,” letting her know she doesn’t have to speak a foreign language with me.
Her shoulders loosen and a smile curls on her face. “Ah, claro!”
How did she know I don’t really belong here anymore? Is it my clothes or haircut? The way I walk? What tells her I am no longer a Spaniard? If my sister Claudia, who has stronger Spanish features, walked in, would the hostess have greeted her differently? If I never moved from Spain as a girl, would I still be perceived as American?
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There is a bakery in Deià, Mallorca, where I have been going since I was a little girl. Where the panadera will wrap my ensaïmadas in thin paper, passing them to me with hands dusted in powdered sugar. On a recent visit, I met a new panadera. I surmise we are around the same age. Every morning we exchange que tal estas and wish each other a good day after I put my euro on the counter. One of these mornings, I hear her speak in flawless English to a British customer. So, I hand over my own: “You speak perfect English!” She is American, she tells me. Her mother is Spanish, from Soller, it turns out, and her father is from California. Her first name is markedly American, whereas mine, Spanish. She grew up (mostly) in Spain, I grew up (mostly) in the US. We were a coin toss: hers fell one way, mine the other. What would my life have been if I hadn’t left Spain as a child? What would hers have been if she hadn’t left the US? Aside from not experiencing embarrassing roll calls at school, how else might our lives have unfolded? I want to ask her so many questions, but there is a long line wrapped around the store. It is tourist season.
Sometimes there is a fluidity between my languages that I cannot control. No matter where I am in the world, if I’m sleepy, I might catch myself saying, “Ouf, I’m cansadisima.” When I step on something slimy with bare feet, I’ll likely utter “ahh, que aaasco!” rather than “gross!” But also, in Spain—when we are long past sobremesa and the plates and wine glasses have been cleared—English will undoubtedly creep into a sentence in Spanish, too. Yes instead of si. Of course instead of claro.
What would it be to accept this blending of language as part of me, instead of fighting against it? Maybe I jumble these words because that’s what the brain does. Sort of like calling one child by another’s name by mistake. But I wonder: what if these words slip out unconsciously because they feel more authentic to me in Spanish than how they feel in English, or vice versa?
I learn from my father that our first language is stored in a different part of the brain. His first and only language until age 7 was Spanish. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, he lived in a casa in the barrio Chapinero with pet ocelots, deer, and his parents, both journalists. They were bilingual, but inside and outside the walls of his home, Spanish was all he heard.
In my mother’s upbringing, however, three languages were in rotation. To her mother she spoke Spanish, to her father French, and to her sister English. At the dinner table, when they were all together, they spoke French.
“What was your first language?” For many people, this is a question with a simple answer. But in my case, it’s not so clear. Unlike my father’s parents, mine did not worry about blending languages around me. I heard a trifecta of English, Spanish, and French at home, and Catalan at school. It was: Hi kiddo! Hola guapa. Look at the minou. Besos. Bisous. Kisses. Felicidades! Je t’aime chouchou. See you later.Adéu!
I have since lost most of my French and Catalan, and now as an adult, I make minor mistakes when speaking in Spanish. I often must search my mind, as if consulting a map for a neighborhood I used to live in, for the correct Spanish verb, or might be corrected when I say que tengasun buen noche by mistake instead of una buena noche. Once, after a cold, I lost my voice completely for six full days. Not even a whisper made its way out. I used exaggerated facial expressions and hand motions, gesturing toward salt shakers and doors to speak the language I felt but couldn’t voice. This is how it feels to sit around a family table where people are speaking French or Catalan. Like I’m holding a key that fits into a lock, but struggles to turn.
When my father’s parents left Colombia, they landed on the bustling streets of New York City, swapping el Chapinero for the Upper West Side. Not speaking a word of English, my father became mute for half a year. Among his most vivid memories is Antonio, a friend who was Italian and the only kid with whom he could communicate in school. They cobbled together a language between Italian and Spanish that became their own. When Antonio couldn’t go to my dad’s birthday party, my dad no longer wanted to celebrate. He preferred being alone instead of experiencing the discomfort of not having the words to communicate.
Today, my dad speaks perfect English and Spanish, along with Portuguese, but the way these languages live in him is not the same. He has always sensed that he expresses and carries himself differently depending on which language he speaks. Some years ago, when he was featured in a video for a nonprofit that promotes cross-cultural communication, that distinction became clear. They produced the video in both English and Spanish, and he tells me that when they filmed the English version, the producer told him to relax—to be less cerebral and to let things flow. There were a lot of retakes. But later, under the same pressure and bright lights, when it was time to do the Spanish version, the two people directing him were amazed at how much more natural and at ease he was. “The producer said I seemed like a different person,” he tells me. “Well, I guess I was.”
What does it feel like to speak your primary language in an accent from your secondary one? I would later find out.
We seek to become the truest version of ourselves, but what if there isn’t one true version, but multiple? Like father, like daughter, there are two versions of me. One stays up late and indulges in wine, daily meriendas, and cheese smothered across pan. She laughs loud and often and a vibrant energy accompanies her words. She is spontaneous and playful. But the other version is there, too. She covers her mouth when she laughs. She avoids large group gatherings, sticks to routines, and eats dinner at 6 p.m. She overthinks and worries over her words—and whether she misspeaks or is misunderstood.
I recently spent extended time in Spain and France. One day, I just noticed the duality. Noticed that I let my laughter echo, that I was more expressive with hand gestures when speaking, that I happily indulged in all the things I don’t often allow myself in the US. I was less anxious, and I sunk into a gentler part of myself. Does this happen because I’m assimilating to the part of my culture that lives an ocean’s length away? In the US, do I worry about laughing loudly lest I disturb someone? Why do I change my name to make others comfortable? Maybe I’m rejecting the culture that often rejects me, and the result is that I become a smaller version of myself.
I’m sitting at a traditional Spanish restaurant with my family in Sitges, a beach town just outside Barcelona. We begin with olivas and some pan con tomate––ripe tomatoes and olive oil drizzled atop thick crusted bread. I gaze to my left, my eyes settling on the pebble-lined shores of the Mediterranean. I begin to daydream, a favorite pastime, even when I’m in this place of my dreams. At the table, I hear the rapid sounds of the language I’d left behind, and my family momentarily forgets I am here, slipping from Castellano (Spanish) into Catalan. “Ay perdona, Montse!” In moments like these, I feel no kinship with that young girl who wanted to feel so American. What I don’t say aloud is how much I love hearing Catalan echo around me. That I understand nearly every word, even though I can no longer speak it. As I steep back into my blended world—not quite here, not quite there—I sit and revel in the ability to eavesdrop on all the conversations around me in Catalan, French, English, and Spanish. At 5, I spoke all these languages fluently. Today, I only speak two of them, but understand all of them in some way, as they still live inside me.
I am in Los Angeles, at the Spanish consulate. I am here to get my Spanish citizenship. I slide my papers over to the kind woman behind the glass that divides us. Montse, I hear, muffled, but she is not speaking to me. She turns to say something to the older woman next to her. A woman, I realize, who shares my name. She looks over my papers carefully, nodding her head as she goes along. Turns them over once, twice. Todo perfecto, she tells me through the tiny microphone on the other end of the glass. Now, she says, they will make me a Spanish birth certificate. As if I am being born again.
One balmy spring day, I am standing among the Montaña de Montserrat, where my great-grandmother stood all those years ago seeking a miracle. A miracle that delivered, and so the mountain became my namesake. There are few other places I feel more at peace than when I am held by these blushed mountains. El aire, las vistas, las sensaciones. The faint sound of Catalan and the choir boys singing in the distance. I look out at the wide expanse, enveloped by these mountains, and they feel like my mountains. They are part of me. I feel, at least for a moment, home.
Montserrat Andrée Carty is a writer, photographer, and the interviews editor for Hunger Mountain. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working on her first book. Find her online atwww.montseandree.com.
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• Keeping the internet alive via 800,000 miles of undersea cables
• What an auto trade show says about America
• Art framing as a lens into what we hold dear
• The (kinda) doomed voyage of the Snowdrop
• Life as an artist—the maddening, unvarnished version
Josh Dzieza | The Verge | April 16, 2024 | 8,856 words
I wouldn’t call myself a hardware geek, but lately I’ve been fascinated by stories that help me understand and appreciate the infrastructure that is essential for modern society to function. Hardware that physically sits somewhere on this Earth, hidden away and inert and seemingly lifeless, like the servers in a data center on the outskirts of Dublin that store Ireland’s memories. Or the expansive networks of underwater cable, traversing 800,000 miles along the ocean floor, that run the internet. This immersive feature by Josh Dzieza, packaged with art by Kristen Radtke and photography by Go Takayama, dives deeper into the latter, weaving a riveting account of a crew aboard the Ocean Link, one of 22 cable maintenance ships stationed around the world, that raced to repair a broken cable after the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in March 2011. The engineers on this aging ship are just a handful of the thousand or so people in this highly specialized industry, doing precise and physically demanding tasks that keep the internet (and every corporate, banking, and government entity) up and running every day. These workers spend most of their time at sea, away from home, and face precarious situations, performing invisible and underappreciated labor; given the current transoceanic cable boom, the demand for their skills will only continue to grow. But it’s the adventure, sense of purpose, and incredible scale of this work that keeps them in the field. Dzieza does a fantastic job showing how indispensable they are—yet you probably didn’t even know they existed. —CLR
Oddly, this is the second consecutive week I’ve recommended an n+1 story that takes place at a professional gathering. I’d usually avoid such egregious repetition, but you’re gonna have to take it up with n+1 for publishing work directly in the center of my personal Venn diagram. Mark Krotov’s dispatch from the New York International Auto Show (a premise you may have already gathered from the headline) is hilariously venomous, deeply knowledgeable, and unexpectedly mournful. In short, it’s the ideal version of this sort of feature. Krotov has been writing about cars for more than 30 years, and he’s seen the trend cycles up close, for better or worse. Now, though, he seems to be at his wits’ end—if not about each individual automobile, then about where the industry seems to be heading. After all, while he’s a driver like most of us, he’s also a human being like all of us: “Whenever a child walking along a four-lane exurban road is killed by a driver who swerves into the shoulder, whenever someone is simply able to drive 98 miles per hour in a 55 zone, whenever a family of seven in an ostensibly safe minivan is killed despite the self-evident technological ability to limit speeds, redesign roads, and enforce existing regulations, it seems reasonable to infer that what car culture is really about aren’t sexy concept cars or futuristic taillights. What car culture is really about is death.” You don’t read many pieces that open with a joke but darken steadily from there; that Krotov’s does without overwhelming you is a marvel in itself. —PR
Wendy Brenner | Oxford American | March 19, 2024 | 4,448 words
I am endlessly curious about and fascinated by others’ jobs. For Oxford American, Wendy Brenner writes about being an art framer, a role that might strike you as monotonous and boring. In reality, it is anything but. To frame something is to preserve it, to hold a small ceremony, if you will. And what do we choose to frame? Art both commercial and personal, our accomplishments, our treasures, our memories—things that offer insight into who we are and what we value as human beings. “Months into my new art-framing job, the stacks awaiting me on the worktable each day still feel like a miracle, a surprise party just for me,” she writes. “The art feels like a tornado whooshing through me. I feel euphoric and empty, cleaned out. Words and thoughts blasted away. My eyes scoured clean.” Brenner juxtaposes her work preserving what’s beautiful and precious for clients against her mother’s aging and decline, a period during which old grudges fade and their relationship softens. I love how Brenner describes her work; it’s tactile, all-consuming, and satisfying. The small injuries she sustains on the job are scars earned, rather than the ones families can inflict on one another. The shop itself is a fully realized character in this piece, complete with a quirky boss, walls festooned with art, and a satisfyingly analog way of doing business that itself has been deliberately preserved. Brenner’s essay is an evocative portrait of art framing as a fulfilling job, as well as a stark reminder that because humans are frail and temporary, our relationships are worth reframing. —KS
Paul Brown | Singular Discoveries | April 11, 2024 | 5,012 words
I am always fascinated by daring journeys, and it doesn’t get much more daring than a small whaling boat’s 1908 trip from Scotland to the Arctic. Paul Brown recounts the Snowdrop’s voyage vividly, leaning on the written and verbal records from her crew, most of whom would not return to Scotland for 18 months—after their little ship hits an iceberg and sinks. (The captain bemoans upon his return that he left his spectacles behind.) The main character is 21-year-old Alex Ritchie, brought to life from an oral account transcribed by a family member, who offhandedly relates that upon leaving the quay in Dundee, “The weather was good, but all our crew was drunk—from the captain to the cook.” Presumably sobering up at some point, the Scots went on to capture a rather distressing number of walruses and seals before the sinking of the Snowdrop stranded them, along with several Inuit families they had taken aboard for help, on a frozen peninsula in the Arctic Archipelago. The sailors relied on the Inuit for survival, and although it was Ritchie who went for help, he would not have made it had it not been for his Inuit companions. I appreciated Brown’s efforts to highlight the cohesion between the two groups, along with his tidbits on Inuit survival methods: frostbite treatment was knocking a patient out with a sandbag to the head before attacking “the frost-bitten limb with an ice saw.” (I took a brief moment to reflect on Prince Harry’s frostnip.) So pick up your rum, clutch your extremities, and enjoy this rip-roaring adventure story. —CW
Andrew Norman Wilson | The Baffler | April 4, 2024 | 5,166 words
In this episodic essay, Andrew Norman Wilson, a visual artist who works primarily in video, takes readers on a ride through several years of his career. If you think that sounds niche or dull, I assure you it is not. This is at once one of the funniest and most distressing stories I’ve read in months—I laughed, I cringed, it became a part of me. Year by year, exhibition by exhibition, housesit by housesit, Wilson shows how the art world left him dirt poor despite his ever-growing CV, took a toll on his mental and physical health, and killed his idealism. He anchors this journey in 2016, illustrating how, in the wake of Trump’s election, art-world gatekeepers eager to burnish their social justice bona fides have disingenuously circumscribed the industry definition of what art matters, and why. “It becomes trendy to believe that images within contemporary art contexts can directly achieve the goals of political struggle,” Wilson writes. “The proliferation of bad faith gestures toward political change and the aestheticized consumption of other people’s suffering sickens me, especially when these expressions still play into the financial objectives of oil barons, arms dealers, and other vampires.” That’s a distressing bit. A funny one involves Wilson putting images of Barney (the dinosaur) on the walls of a place where he’s staying when Barney’s (the department store) comes to shoot photos of him for some reason. Another comes during a snorkeling trip, when Wilson is surrounded by sea lions: “I’ve found what I was looking for on this island. Something that feels like the opposite of scrutinizing a nondescript object in a white room and then having to read a citation-heavy press release to find out that the object is the product of prison labor, and prison labor is bad.” This essay could read as the bitter whining of a person with a bone to pick, but it doesn’t. It’s too self-aware for that. Instead, it reads as a searing and darkly entertaining indictment of late-stage capitalism’s poisonous influence on art. —SD
Audience Award
What piece captured our readers’ curiosity this week? The envelope, please:
O.J. Simpson died this week. In light of this news, here’s radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin’s brilliant essay about Nicole Brown Simpson, the abuse she suffered at the hands of O.J., and how the help she needed never came. Dworkin, herself a survivor of domestic violence, originally published pieces of this essay in the Los Angeles Times; she then compiled and revised that writing for her 1997 book, Life and Death. The essay has since been republished by Evergreen Review. —SD
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Andrew Chapman | Longreads | April 18, 2024 | 3,755 words (13 minutes)
At first, it was simply a roast chicken recipe. Then it was everything.
I watched a man on YouTube cook the chicken, imagining what it would be like to taste it. Even if he had prepared it in front of me, I couldn’t have eaten it. Inflammation from Crohn’s disease had connected the tissues of my small intestine and my bladder together via fistula, and I did not want to pee out a roast chicken.
Instead, I was on a form of artificial food called total parenteral nutrition (TPN, for short). All my nutrition and water were pumped from an IV bag into my veins through a tube in my arm. Even though I had enough functional nutrition in my body my brain screamed, you’re hungry, constantly.
I watched Gordon Ramsay make French pan sauces and tuna with lime zest. I watched a man on Netflix who seemed to know nothing about food eating Khao soi in Thailand. Watching cooking shows felt like picking a scab—somehow like relief and suffering at the same time.
Eventually, my wife, Erica, became concerned for my mental health. “I can’t stop. It’s a compulsion,” I would say.
“I hate it,” she’d add.
To diminish her concern, I settled for watching Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, because the show’s travel element obscured the food.
Crohn’s is an inflammatory bowel disease. The cause is unknown, but it appears to be due to a haywire immune system that attacks the digestive tract—in my case, the end of the small bowel. Every Crohn’s patient experiences different symptoms. Some have daily mild belly aches and unruly diarrhea. I’ve always experienced near-normal health punctuated by periods of wild pain, nausea, and weight loss. The most common treatments are steroids, anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressant drugs, and, as a last resort, surgery to remove any bowel beyond repair. In my thirties, the combination of fresh inflammation and scar tissue from a teenage surgery had blocked up my bowel. Eating became like gambling—sometimes I won, but mostly I lost.
I was diagnosed at 11. Food had become repellant to me. I remember sitting, twig thin, in an emergency room waiting area with my worried parents. A cooking show was on TV. The show’s host was making a cheese omelet that looked as appealing to me as fried fertilizer. “I can’t even look at that,” I said.
“Oh? That looks good to me,” Mom said, aiming less to change my mind on the omelet than confirm to herself how sick I was.
The year after I was diagnosed my doctor, worried I was losing so much weight I wouldn’t get enough calories through regular eating, put me on a nutritional therapy called enteral nutrition—an infusion of milky formula into the belly. I had to snake a flexible rubber tube up my nose and into my stomach every night, tearing it out in a rush before school in the morning. The tube would sometimes disconnect from the IV bag while I was sleeping, the pump whirring away until morning. I’d wake up drenched in sticky formula with an empty stomach.
When my doctor gave me the option, I chose to guzzle the formula during the day to have extra hours without the tube at night (drinking the volume of formula required for nutrition would have been nearly impossible). I was also allowed to drink clear fluids, so my parents kept the fridge stocked with lemon-lime soda and JELL-O. But, without that shackle of a tube, I would not have stayed alive as a preteen.
Doctors have used enteral nutrition since the early 20th century, pumping broths and formulas directly into the stomach either through a tube placed into the nose and down into the stomach, like mine, or through an incision in the belly. However, enteral nutrition relies on patients having a working digestive system. Doctors thought it was impossible to bypass the digestive tract and get enough nutrition into patients through a vein, believing it required so much liquid, and such a high concentration of chemical nutrients, that it would cause inflammation and burning when administered.
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It was Stanley Dudrick, a strong-minded surgical resident at the University of Pennsylvania, who would change that. One weekend in November 1961, Dudrick was left to look after three surgical patients. The patients had had different procedures, but over the weekend, all three died. Having watched his supervisor, Dr. Rhoads, a revered surgeon, perform technically flawless surgeries on each of them, Dudrick concluded their deaths were his fault. When he told Rhoads on Monday, he was assured the patients were all frail from their operations, and their gastrointestinal tracts were struggling to absorb enough nutrients to overcome the weakness. The patients didn’t die from his ineptitude—they died of malnutrition.
A fire was lit in Dudrick. He requested leave from his surgical internship and worked out of a small lab in the hospital’s basement, determined to find a solution. For years, he honed the composition for a nutrition formula that could be delivered via veins, avoiding the intestines. By the late ’60s, he had finally found a stable mixture of water, carbohydrates, proteins, trace elements, fats, salts, and multivitamins—everything you need from a balanced meal, just with the color and smell of Elmer’s glue.
But the concentrated nutrients did burn. “I’ve actually put it in my own vein,” Dudrick told Dr. Rhoads, showing his forearm. “It burns like liquid fire.” To banish the blaze, he knew the formula would have to be injected close to the heart, to allow for fast dilution around the body. When he kept a beagle named Stinky alive, nourished only with the nutrient combination infused into his vena cava (a large vein that returns deoxygenated blood to the heart), Dudrick was convinced it would work for humans. He’d invented TPN. Since then, it has saved millions of lives.
A doctor once told me that when a tissue is inflamed for long enough, the connections that hold cells together start to break down, and the tissue softens. When that happens, tissues can merge, forming a little tunnel known as a fistula. A CT scan showed that my bowel had formed several fistulas looping on themselves—the path of digestion more a maze than a hallway.
By knocking back the immune system with immunosuppressants and nutrition from TPN—to rest the bowel by not eating or drinking—fistulas can sometimes close themselves. This was the hope for me.
A thin IV catheter called a peripherally inserted central catheter, or PICC—like the one Dudrick used in Stinky—was placed in a vein on the inside of my arm and threaded into my vena cava. A nurse named Stan inserted the PICC with the intense focus of a true craftsman. He wore earbuds and sang “I can’t get enough of your love” by Barry White under his breath.
Since I would be sent home with the TPN, a different nurse taught me how to rig it up myself. She explained how I would set up the TPN every night and run it over 12 hours. I had to inject a personalized pre-prepared slurry of multivitamins into an IV bag, prime the pump, and flush the PICC with saline. She explained the buttons and the beeps on the pump that squirted the mixture through the tubes and into my body. Everything was vigorously wiped with alcohol because any bacteria would be injected straight into my heart.
“You got all that?” the nurse asked after her demonstration.
I had been preoccupied thinking about how weird not eating would be at home. Like many thirty-something married couples in San Francisco, Erica and I lived with five other tirelessly social roommates. One ran a start-up from the living room. The house was often standing room only. And what did people do when they hung around in groups? They cooked and they drank. Early on in the flare-up, the group shared a rich and earthy-tasting homemade coq au vin. I helped to meticulously peel dozens of pearl onions. I paid the price later that night.
“I think we’ll be okay,” I said to the nurse.
We weren’t. At home that first night, we fumbled to inject the components into the bag and attach it to the pump and my arm. Then Erica spotted a bubble marching up the tube, and we mashed at the stop button on the pump.
“That’s fine, right?” I said.
“I don’t know. What if it explodes your heart?”
Out to the kitchen, Erica went.
Polling the two dozen or so people cooking in the house, she found one doctor and one nurse to choose from. The bubble could stay; the feeding began.
Early on in the flare-up, the group shared a rich and earthy-tasting homemade coq au vin. I helped to meticulously peel dozens of pearl onions. I paid the price later that night.
On one of the first nights at home, Erica’s best friend visited to apply therapeutic face masks to pass the time. In a selfie with our dingy-green masks, Erica beams with sweet enthusiasm. I look stone-faced and far away. Our housemate Rory later brought some puzzles for us to do together. Everyone in the house became obsessed with them. I could hear them celebrating a discovered piece long after I snuck away to lie down. I felt weak from being sick. But I also felt weak for not being stronger, for not executing a gracious interest in the ways people tried to help.
Those first weeks, I mostly slept. When I was awake, my brain was frighteningly alert. My body, on the other hand, looked and felt like wet cardboard. The anxiety of hunger settled under my ribs like the feeling you get when you’re about to burst into tears. The hum of the refrigerator alone was enough to make me want to bury my head in the backyard. I often dreamt of donuts, and once, of my sister-in-law’s mother, a tenacious Serbian woman, bringing me a roasting pan full of sausages. By the time I had my first dose of TPN, I had gone without eating for nearly a week and a half, sustained only by fluids in the hospital. Then, due to a holiday and clerical error, I was left on a dose half of what I required—intended to see how well I handled the slurry—for a week longer than expected. I assumed the hunger would subside with enough nutrition. But even after weeks on full TPN, I still could’ve eaten the plastic bags it came in.
Everyone starts with around 22 feet of small bowel, but if surgery cuts it down to less than 7 feet, the body can’t absorb water and nutrients anymore. With my bowel so badly matted together, surgeons might need to remove a lot, and if they removed enough—on top of the two feet I lost as a teenager—it could mean TPN for life. With the state my mind was in, that was unimaginable.
While scientists have figured out extraordinary ways to keep patients who can’t eat alive, they haven’t yet figured out how to deal with what it does to us mentally. I’d been through a lot with Crohn’s before, even believing that who I was as a person was largely the result of these struggles. But TPN was different. It was like I was sitting in a lawn chair (albeit a rickety one) at a picnic when somebody came along and kicked a leg out—the pasta salad that might’ve been in my hand, flung into oblivion.
Eating is an experience that humans share with all other animals. Organic material is consumed and broken down during digestion. In return, the body adapts nutritious molecules into a host of cellular processes and adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which cells turn into energy. During digestion, physiological responses are triggered in the brain by the vagus nerve, contributing to the feeling of fullness. Hormonal signals also act on the brain: leptin, a hormone produced by fat cells, sends signals to the hypothalamus to inhibit hunger. In patients on TPN or enteral nutrition, leptin does increase after infusions, but it doesn’t appear to be well correlated with decreased hunger.
While the hormones and neural signals are crucial to satiation, so is the sensory experience that takes place during the first phase of digestion—the cephalic phase—which begins at the sight of food. The pleasure that we take during this phase appears to be important to feeling satisfied. Monkeys on TPN continued to eat real food even when their caloric needs were met. Studies in healthy humans found that people on TPN reported being as hungry as those injected with only lactated Ringer’s, a solution designed to replenish electrolytes and fluid rather than calories. I asked an on-call gastroenterologist once what I could do for the hunger.
“You can try chewing meat and spitting it out,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
Of all the things doctors have said to me, this struck me as the most deranged. I never even considered her advice because I didn’t miss the taste of food, so much as I missed the social aspect and, more so, not feeling hungry. Carrying a spittoon to spit out chicken like a confused cowboy wasn’t going to accomplish either. But now I begrudgingly admit she was on to something. Chewing food, even without swallowing, helps to activate the cephalic phase, triggering a partial sense of satiation. The doctor never explained this to me.
Paul Smeets, a nutritional neuroscientist at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, told me that part of the problem is that patients on enteral and parenteral nutrition receive the infusion over such a long period. “They sneak nutrition into people so slowly that the brain is never aware it’s happening,” he told me. The homeostatic feedback produced from eating a meal, that allows the brain to feel satisfied, is missing. TPN and enteral nutrition are, in effect, a form of sensory deprivation. My hunger was a natural neurological reaction that could be traced back for millennia.
While on TPN, I stayed away from the kitchen as best I could, mostly because it felt as if I was gawking. In the evenings, Erica would come home from work and I’d close my laptop screen, where Bourdain was, say, fishing for dinner in southern Italy, and we’d lie on the bed. Erica would ask if I farted out my penis that day. I’d say not today, and then we’d laugh at the ridiculousness of what a good day looked like. She ended up eating less. Family members of patients on artificial nutrition often feel guilty about eating, some even lose weight, I learned. This unearthly relationship with food wasn’t what I wanted to offer her, but it was what I served, like pulling out a burnt tray of hors d’oeuvres just as the guests arrived. Even though she smiled and accepted our life the way it was, we hadn’t even been married for a year. I wondered if anything so young could thrive so undernourished.
Erica would ask if I farted out my penis that day. I’d say not today, and then we’d laugh at the ridiculousness of what a good day looked like.
While she was out, hidden in our room, I gorged on the cooking shows that caused her concern. In the late ’70s, doctors learned that patients on TPN often experience several stages of adaptation, including grief—mourning the loss of food rather than the death of someone close. Watching cooking shows seemed like a form of remembering and searching for what I had lost. When I tried to stop, I felt like I was from a different planet, separate from everyone else whose lives swirled around food. When watching cooking shows, I could fake being human. Since the cephalic phase of digestion begins at the sight of food, even before putting a crumb in one’s mouth, it’s also possible I was subconsciously attempting to veer onto an ancient road to satiety even if, for me, it didn’t lead anywhere.
When I went looking on the internet, I found I was not alone. I asked why people watched cooking shows on the Crohn’s disease subreddit. One user said they had no idea, but “the only show I watched was Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives with Guy Fieri, which is extra weird because I was a vegetarian.” Another bought cannoli and made their partner describe the taste in detail as if it were their own personal cooking show.
The things that I, and others on TPN, experienced, are not unlike the psychological effects seen in people who are physically deprived of food. In 1944, 36 men entered a study after seeing a brochure passed out at the University of Minnesota asking, Will you starve so that others will be better fed? The 36 participants were underfed until they lost 25% of their body weight. As the experiment progressed, Ancel Keys, the nutritionist running the study, noticed odd psychological effects. The participants became increasingly focused on food, collecting recipes, and taking down pin-ups of women to hang pictures of food. One even decided he would change careers and become a chef. After the study, most participants gorged themselves long after their weight returned to normal.
Without food, we become preoccupied with it. Food is as evolutionarily important as pain and sex. Animals that don’t take an interest in these stimuli don’t fare well. Research shows that noticing food and remembering its location is a base instinct for all humans that becomes heightened when hungry.
Patients on TPN are functionally fed but are perhaps not neurologically aware of it. Of course, physiological food deprivation is different (unimaginable, to me) from a psychological one, but we still seem to hyper-focus on what we can’t have rather than shy away from it. With the way appetite brain signaling works, Smeets says it makes sense that some overlapping effects of starvation might take place in the brain, causing an obsession with food and all the behavioral baggage that comes with it.
After nearly a month without anything, not even water, by mouth, my symptoms stabilized and my doctor said I could try drinking clear liquids. Since I had tasted only the inside of my mouth for three weeks, the white cranberry juice was electrifying. I ate raspberry JELL-O in a blaze of magnificent relief. With what I now attribute to the cephalic phase the world became slightly more bearable. Then, after two months on TPN and a clear liquid diet, the home care nurse pulled the PICC. I can’t remember exactly why this decision was made, because at the time I didn’t care. I was going to be a full-time eater again. Even though I went slow, everything was a feast.
Erica and I drove to her parents’ house in Southern California for Thanksgiving. I ate the turkey dinner cautiously as if it was still alive. Even then, Erica had to drive the whole seven hours back to San Francisco because I felt the familiar spasms of pain and gurgles of food going into my bladder. At the hospital, they decided the fistula likely wouldn’t close on its own. I was scheduled for surgery two days after Christmas.
Since I had tasted only the inside of my mouth for three weeks, the white cranberry juice was electrifying.
And so, after only three weeks without TPN, eating was out, and the PICC went back in. It was placed by two nurses who encouraged me to relax while saying things like, “Is that in? No, that doesn’t look right.”
Well, you’re no Stan, I thought.
Rory came to visit me in the hospital one night. “Did you know they make 3D puzzles?” he asked, passing Erica a cheeseburger that she took outside. When a nurse came in with medications on a tray decorated with red gingham, Rory stopped talking and stared. “The world is so twisted sometimes,” he said after the nurse left, laughing and shaking his head. “Who do they think they are bringing your drugs in on a French fry tray?” I’d considered this question myself hundreds of times. After Rory and Erica left that night, with the darkness outside swallowing my tiny hospital room, I opened my laptop and watched a show where hunters in Montana cooked deer ribs on a campfire.
At Christmas, Erica’s family came to San Francisco because it would’ve been impossible for me to travel. They cooked Swedish and Korean food —traditions from both sides of Erica’s family. I chose to walk our dog.
Humans diverge from animals when it comes to our social and cultural meaning behind food. As Sue McLaughlin, one of the authors of The Meaning of Food, said, “Like all animals, we eat to survive. But as humans, we transform simple feeding into the ritual art of dining, creating customs and rites that turn out to be as crucial to our well-being as are proteins and carbohydrates.”
In addition to sensory deprivation, not eating is social deprivation. In a survey of 51 patients on enteral nutrition, most patients complained that they were socially isolated and experienced a loss of identity. What you cook, how you cook for others, and when you eat provide structure to your days and a sense of self. Food is a form of communication. Without it, you are adrift and missing a functional language.
They mostly use qualitative surveys to study the impacts of nutritional therapy on patient quality of life. Even if the physiological need for food is met, there is undeniably a physical and psychological effect for patients on TPN. Up to half of patients report being constantly tired; up to one-third have anxiety; one quarter are clinically depressed.
I recently found a note on my computer titled “Food to Eat,” that listed what I was craving when I was on TPN: black pepper crabs, pecan waffles, meat pies, Turkish delight, and, of course, roast chicken. I have no memory of how I came to want these particular foods. Instead, I remember all the ways my body told me something was wrong. But the hunger, the sense of loss, and the search for connection in cooking shows were a perfectly normal response, as it turns out. Maybe as close to the human experience as you can get.
After the surgery, I woke up in a room on the hospital’s fifth floor that looked over the city’s tallest building, the newly built Salesforce Tower. Erica bounced as she told me the surgeon had performed a masterful operation. He removed only six inches of bowel and fixed the bladder. The surgery rescued me from any more TPN in the immediate future while nudging me ever so slightly closer to a future without food—again, relief and suffering at the same time.
My surgeon came in late one evening. “I hate that thing,” he said, nodding toward the Salesforce Tower out the window. “It looks like a giant penis.”
“Really?” I said. “I think it looks like a burrito.”
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