This story from the New York Times and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism looks into years of torment and abuse at Ware Youth Center, one of Louisiana’s largest juvenile detention centers. Megan Shutzer and Rachel Lauren Mueller conducted more than 100 interviews with people previously held at the facility, as well as current and former staff members; they also examined security footage and thousands of pages of records and court documents. What they found: repeated abuse from staff members (30 have been accused of sexual abuse, including a manager), children held in prolonged isolation, guards bribing children to beat up other children, and an increase in suicidal attempts. For years, Ware’s leaders have not reported complaints of abuse, while local law enforcement has continued to brush off allegations. As Shutzer and Mueller’s reporting shows, this horrific place, meant to help and support children, has descended into “chaos and cruelty.”
In fact, while some of the children at Ware are held for violent crimes, a vast majority are girls and boys like Solan Peterson, sent there for nonviolent offenses or infractions as minor as skipping school. “We knew there would be consequences,” his mother said, “but my kid didn’t deserve to die because he set fire to a roll of toilet paper in a school.”
Thomas Hale’s account of his experience in a COVID-19 quarantine facility, inside China’s zero-Covid regime, offers a glimpse into an eerie, dystopian parallel world.
The daily rhythm went as follows. Early in the morning, we awoke to a lawnmower-like noise, which was in fact an industrial-grade disinfectant machine spraying our windows and front steps. Meals were provided at 8am, noon and 5pm. Around 9am, two nurses in blue hazmat suits came by to administer PCR tests. Once, I asked if I would be taken somewhere else if I tested positive. “Of course you’ll be taken away!” one of the nurses said. “A new life!” she added in English.
The first time I saw Gisoo tree, I thought it was a wish tree, people attaching their colorful offerings to it. But when I went close, I saw braided hairs hanging on the boughs.
The teenage girl stands at her mother’s grave, a middle-aged woman who was killed by the Iranian police during recent unrest in the nation. A white veil hangs around her neck. Her eyes shine with the same rage I’ve seen in the eyes of people who have lost a loved one during the Islamic regime’s brutal crackdowns. Her hair is shorn and she holds her long tresses in her hand. The other hand is obscured by gladiolas on the grave, but I can imagine the scissors she has used to cut her hair. She is from Kermanshah, the ancient city on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. She knows — like all Iranian women — that to mourn is to cut her hair.
Iranian women took to the streets on September 16, 2022, to protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. The Kurdish girl died in police custody after the “Morality Police” detained her for a loose hijab. Every day, I wake up anxious. I read the news, scrolling through horrifying scenes of police brutality against women who burn their scarves in the streets alongside the men who support them in cities all over the country. I go to the neonatal intensive care unit where I work as a doctor, and attend deliveries of premature and at-risk babies, but my heart flutters for yet another day of harrowing news emerging from Iran. Another day of police beating people with batons and shotguns, another day of high school girls shouting Woman Life Freedom in schools, another day of young women sauntering scarfless in front of Basiji militias in a country that has required women to cover their hair for more than 43 years. I am worried, like Iranians who live in Iran. I never thought that after 20 years of living in America, a day would come that I’d be troubled for the country I lived in during my adolescence and young adulthood. The news brings back doleful memories and a desolation that in all the years I’ve been outside Iran, I have tried to forget. But the shocking scenes are so powerful — they erupt remote, fading memories.
My mother didn’t wear hijab; neither did my grandmother or my aunts, like other modern families in Iran. But after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Islamic regime forced women to wear hijab outside the house in public. Even though I saw Maman grabbing a scarf and throwing it on her head before she went out, wearing hijab never materialized in my mind until the first day I attended school. I woke up early in the morning, calling Maman, ready to go to school. She smiled at my blue jumpsuit and said, “I’m afraid you’ve forgotten one thing.” She pointed to my hair and said, “They will need you to cover your hair at school.” All the way to school, I struggled to keep the scarf on my head. It was a small, square scarf Maman had given to me. The knot kept loosening under my chin and as the day went by, one side became shorter and shorter until it freed itself from the knot.
She knows — like all Iranian women — that to mourn is to cut her hair.
Hijab law strengthened over the years and the dress code for girls in school changed to a black scarf that covered shoulders and breasts, and an extra-long dark cloak. I remember a hot day in June, in the late ’80s. I was sitting on the low steps of our middle school yard in Tehran, wrapped head to toe in heavy hijab, trying to solve an algebra problem just before my final exam. I was writing the solution when I noticed our school principal’s shadow hovering over my head. I jumped up immediately and pulled my scarf forward. By that time, we were conditioned to shove our hair under our scarves as soon as we saw a school official, the revolutionary guard, or Basiji militia in the streets. The principal fixed her gaze on my veil and, without hesitation, snatched the scarf under my chin. “This is too loose. You need to sew a couple more stitches under your chin.” I forgot the solution I had sketched on the paper and took the test with trembling hands and an anxiety that never left me during the exam.
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After Reza Shah Pahlavi ordered mandatory unveiling of women in public in 1936, Iranian women who chose to step out of their homes and pursue higher education abandoned hijab, attended universities, and achieved an active role in society. In conservative families, women had no choice but to stay at home for their reluctance to show their hair in public. Even though the obligation to unveil was relaxed after Reza Shah abdicated in 1941, wearing hijab was dictated by the family’s core beliefs. Men in conservative families set the rules for women’s appearance in public. In those families, women continued to use chador (a long garment that covers a woman’s body from head to toe, but is open in front).
After the Islamic Revolution, the regime forced women to wear hijab and once again the government policed women’s attire. During the first decade after the Islamic government was established, Iranian society was extremely radicalized and girls were scrutinized everywhere outside the house. Even a single strand of hair could put them in trouble at school or in danger of having acid squirted in their faces in the streets. The Islamic regime defined hijab as a core value in a Muslim woman’s beliefs. Women could hardly say a word against obligatory hijab. The regime’s Morality Police enforced this core value, enshrined as a sacred family law. We are told we are sinners if we show our hair from under our scarves. Islamic regime teachers said that on Resurrection Day, women who disobeyed the hijab law would be hung from their hair over heaps of fire. They would feel their skin sizzle in hell, just to grow a new skin that would burn for eternity. We were brought up by a doctrine that humiliated and vilified female beauty and alienated us from our own hair and body.
Hijab and women’s hair was always on my mind and we discussed the subject among friends in high school. It was about that time that I read Savushun by Simin Daneshvar, a novel about the life of a landowning family in Shiraz during the British occupation of Southern Iran in World War II. The protagonist Zari, who is a quiet obedient housewife, transforms into an outspoken supporter of her husband’s cause after his death by the British occupier’s agents. In the novel, women mourn for a lost beloved by cutting their hair and attending a ritual deeply rooted in Persian culture. Zari mentions Gisoo tree — gisoo meaning long tresses of a woman in Farsi — and says, “The first time I saw Gisoo tree, I thought it was a wish tree, people attaching their colorful offerings to it. But when I went close, I saw braided hairs hanging on the boughs. The braids belonged to women who had lost a beloved young man, a husband, a brother, or a son.” The tradition of Savushun fascinated me for years. I read more and paid close attention to the symbolic actions Iranian women took during various mourning ceremonies.
In Shahnameh, the epic of Persian kings by 10th-century Persian poet Ferdowsi, Farangis cuts her black, musk-scented hair once she finds out the enemies of Iran have murdered her beloved husband, prince Siavash. She wraps the cut hair around her waist like a belt and starts the tradition of Savushun — women mourning the death of a Persian hero whose innocent blood is spilled in the valleys of the land. In the tragic story of Siavash, Farangis plays a seminal part by hiding and safekeeping her son, the next Shah of Iran, signaling her intention to remain abstinent of any sexual encounter with another hero or prince by fastening her long black hair around her waist. Her haircutting symbolizes her refusal to pursue a normal life after Siavash’s death. It is a protest against the sovereignty of Iran’s enemies.
It is not only in Shahnameh that we read about this tradition. In other literary works such as Darab-Nameh by Abu-Tahir Tarsusi, Burandokht cuts her long hair after the death of her husband, Alexander of Macedonia, and mourns him for 40 days. The tradition is so embedded in Persian literature that numerous poets after Ferdowsi — namely Hafiz, Khaghani, Salman Savoji — use cutting hair as a metaphor for mourning in their poems.
In many parts of Iran, the ritual is performed in different ways. In central Iran, when a young man dies, the close women of his family cut their tresses and hang them on an erect stone at his grave. The gray of the mother, the black of the wife, and the thin and frail hair of the daughter tangle in each other and dance with the wind. They remind the beholder of the silent mourning that continues for the young man. In Lorestan province, from ancient times, women have covered the croup of the dead man’s horse with a black veil and adorn the animal with a necklace of their tresses. In a ritual called Kotal, women sing in a procession following the horse through the streets. In Bakhtiari tribes of Iran, in a ritual called Pal Boran, women cut their hair, and either stamp on it and mourn, or put it in a clean garment belonging to the beloved and bury it with him, or gather around the hair and sing sad melodies.
In the kaleidoscope of rituals that vary based on geographical region, there seems to be a fundamental connection between hair and life. “Life” is woven among the strands of a young woman’s hair and cutting that hair implies her unwillingness that life can go on as before the loss of the beloved. Her liveliness is gone with the departure of the beloved, and so is the hair that once signified the beauty of life. She sends a clear message as she mourns: that she will appear and act differently after the tragic event.
Now for over four decades, in a culture where female hair is revered and linked to life, the Islamic regime is forcing women to wear a veil and cover their hair, degrading women’s most cherished beauty into an evil that seduces men and encourages them to commit great sins. Since the Islamic Republic was established, Iranian women have defied obligatory hijab and the patriarchal ideology that wants to oppress the female body. Women activists have challenged this government-imposed law many times, namely in the One Million Signatures campaign for gender equality in 2005. Almost always, the Islamic regime detains women activists to dampen such resistance movements. Women have turned to civil disobedience tactics like showing more of their body and minimizing their scarves to communicate their unhappiness and disapproval for the law.
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As another day of unrest unfolds in Iran, I think of the symbolic measures Iranian women are taking every day in this fight. Famous women writers, thinkers, and artists in the world have cut their hair in solidarity with them. Elif Shafak, Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, and many more are among the writers and artists who have cut their hair in protest.
In the kaleidoscope of rituals that vary based on geographical region, there seems to be a fundamental connection between hair and life.
I walk up the stairs to the third floor, to the NICU in our hospital, to care for premature babies. On my way to the unit, I think about those Iranian girls and their protest. This time seems to be different from the past. This time, high school and even elementary school girls are demanding what Iranian women have been asking for, for decades. The short clips that trickle from Iran’s heavily filtered, government-slowed internet picture young girls facing whiteboards, their backs to the camera, hair dancing in the air, shouting Woman Life Freedom in class. I am tongue-tied by their bravery in committing such protests in school without hijab. I was a teenage girl in that country — just like them — and I know the courage needed to take off the veil, when showing their hair could cause them to get beaten or detained. It could even cost them their life, and they know this. They shout in schoolyards that they can be the next Mahsa Amini. Their courageous act of letting their long hair flow loose shows they are fully aware of the power hidden in those tresses, and it is not accidental that they shout Woman Life Freedom with their backs to the camera. They know — like their mothers and grandmothers — that their strength lies within their hair.
Once again, I look at the girl standing at her mother’s grave. She is from Kermanshah, the ancient city on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. She is young, the same age as the schoolgirls who face the whiteboard. She is aware of the tradition of cutting hair. She cuts her hair to mourn, but above that, she acts at her beloved’s grave. She acts in defiance against the oppressor who has killed her mother and silenced her voice. She and all the schoolgirls who protest with their hair may not have read the story behind the Gisoo tree. The old women of Fars believe when they hang their braided hairs to the tree, and water it with tears, the loved departed comes back. They may not know the legend of the tree, but the collective wisdom shared by Iranian women for a thousand years runs in their veins. It whispers in their ears, and tells them that “Life” is stranded there, and to fight for freedom they must first free their hair.
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Mojgan Ghazirad is an assistant professor of pediatrics at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She has published three collections of short stories in Farsi in Iran and Europe. Her memoir, The House on Sun Street, depicts her memories of growing in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and the years of war between Iran and Iraq.
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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
A couple of weeks ago, New York Magazine‘s cover story explored the fate of “streeteries,” the ever-metastasizing parklets and covered patios that have come to define dining in the COVID era. But the cover photo, depicting an al fresco rat dinner date beneath the feet of unsuspecting humans, may have been the centerpiece. Now, media trade outfit The Fine Print goes inside the making of it, with plenty of detail about the arugula-loving hams who stole the show.
Taro and Mishi were tuckered out by the end of the day. “I was doing work while they were going through photos,” said Perez, “and I had both of them on my belly a little bit, just chilling out. I think they were really, really tired. They passed out in my little sweater and just stayed with me while I was doing work.” They headed home in an Uber around six, asleep most of the way. At the apartment, Perez streamed behind-the-scenes footage and pictures from the day for her roommates on their TV, but the rats were ready to return to their cage. “They just all went into a little cuddle pile and fell asleep again,” she said.
In Grace Loh Prasad’s essay at The Offing, she reflects on the bonds of family, even when loved ones are physically separated, and what happens when that family is gone. What is the alternative? What can take its place? Prasad’s musings on being a mother and finding a community of one’s own are moving and poignant.
The older he gets, the more I worry that I have not done enough to knit a tapestry that will enfold and protect him, that will open doors and give him room to stretch while keeping him out of harm’s way, that will imprint a pattern so deep and recognizable that he can always find his way home. This is what I am most afraid of: that I will be exposed as the mother who cannot weave, who cannot on her own produce the work of many hands, the unseen web that no one notices but everyone needs. Try as I might, there is no material stronger than kinship.
Suzanne Wooten did the impossible and became the first candidate to defeat a sitting judge in Collin County, the reddest of counties in a very red state. Then she was accused of a crime she didn’t commit, involving two people she’d never met. But it was more complicated than that — way more complicated. Kathy Wise, a lawyer and the executive editor of D Magazine, digs into one of the most bizarre legal cases imaginable:
Wooten tries another tack.
“One way I’ve tried to just explain it to people who don’t get it—lawyers don’t get it either—it’s like I was charged with walking my dog to my mailbox to get the mail when they knew for a fact that not only did I not walk to the mailbox, but it would not have been a crime. It was my mailbox, but I didn’t even own a dog.”
I’m a lawyer. And I still don’t get it.
I will spend the next six months and countless hours conducting interviews and reviewing hundreds of pages of court pleadings, testimony transcripts, and FBI investigation notes. I will lose myself in the crazy, corrupt, centuries-old history of the Collin County court system. But in the end, I will discover that no matter how hard people try to distort it, the truth tends to be clear at its core.
It just takes one jilted man and a few loyal henchmen to put a woman back in her permitted place. Everyone else is just collateral damage.
Here are five stories we recommend this week. Visit our editors’ picks to browse more recommendations, and sign up for our weekly newsletter if you haven’t already:
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Stacy Perman | Los Angeles Times | May 19, 2022 | 10,548 words
Barbara Wright Isaacs has been looking for her sister, Lora Lee Michel, for nearly 55 years. What makes her disappearance particularly baffling: Lora Lee once had the eyes of the world on her. In the ’40s, she appeared in films alongside Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Ford, and Olivia de Havilland. So what happened? Stacy Perman finds out in this meticulously researched piece for the Los Angeles Times, brought to life with photos and film clips of the adorable, precocious child star. Beginning with the well-known half of Lora Lee’s life, the story races along at whip-cracking speed, twisting and turning, before culminating in a high-profile custody battle between Lora Lee’s biological and adoptive mother. When Lora Lee leaves Hollywood for Texas, aged 10, things become hazier, forcing Perman to resort to her own research. By tracking down dozens of individuals and public records, she finds, as she writes, “a woman lost in a maze of short marriages and perpetual misfortunes.” Perman takes Lora Lee’s sad tale back to Wright Isaacs. It’s not the story she had hoped for, but still closure on what happened to her sister. I was impressed by Perman’s dogged determination to find answers for this family — and more impressed that she did. —CW
Azadeh Moaveni | London Review of Books | October 21, 2022 | 3,516 words
Over 200 people have been killed since September 16, 2022, when Iranians took to the streets to protest the death of Mahsa Amini, who died in suspicious circumstances after being detained for not wearing her hijab to government standards. In this piece at the London Review of Books, Azadeh Moaveni recounts a hastily erected government billboard depicting notable Iranian women, all wearing a hijab under the slogan, “Women of Our Land.” The billboard was removed just as quickly as it appeared after several of the women featured rebuked the government and demanded their images be removed. The government had gone so far as to feature Nooshin Jafari, a photojournalist currently serving a prison sentence for “insulting state sanctities.” Despite the short-lived government propaganda campaign and amid ongoing protests and clashes, change is happening in Iran. “Morality policing lies in ruins. No one knows what senior politicians are hearing from their wives, sisters and daughters, but never have the Islamic Republic’s political elite and its most dogmatic constituencies looked so divided at a time of crisis.” —KS
Jake Kring-Schreifels | The Ringer | November 3, 2022 | 4,500 words
I really wish this piece had come out any other week. Days ago, Atlanta rapper Takeoff — who as a teen helped create Migos’ trendsetting triplet flow — was fatally shot at the tender age of 28. He’s the artist we should be discussing right now; he’s whose influential work we should be remembering. There have been somewonderfulpieces already published praising him, and hopefully, the longform elegy he deserves will be published in the coming days. So it feels fraught, to say the least, to instead recommend this long Ringer feature detailing the creation and legacy of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” But anniversaries gonna anniversary, and if you thought The Ringer wasn’t going to commemorate the 20th birthday of Eight Mile and its soundtrack, you haven’tbeenpayingattention. And truthfully, Jake Kring-Schreifels reported the hell out of this thing, tracing the song’s evolution from Eminem’s metanarrative writing approach to its Oscar-worthy musical construction, while also illustrating its seismic impact. We’ve heard it in sports arenas for 20 years now, and will likely be hearing it for at least another 20; until then, this is a fascinating look at how an anthem happens. —PR
Kris Newby | Now This and Epic Magazine | October 27, 2022 | 7,784 words
Fourteen-year-old Michael suddenly starts to experience inexplicable psychotic episodes. He tells his father he’s the son of the devil. He claims his tabby cat is possessed by demons. Believing he’s no longer human, he says he’s becoming “Swamp Thing,” a green monster on one of the posters on his wall. As his condition worsens, Michael is diagnosed with schizophrenia multiple times, but his father refuses to accept the diagnosis, believing that there could be another trigger to his son’s mysterious illness. In a riveting piece that’s illustrated with comic book art by Mado Peña, Kris Newby retells this family’s hellish 18-month journey to uncover the cause. —CLR
Nikita Arora | Aeon | September 8, 2022 | 4,549 words
This beautiful essay is a letter of recommendation to go out and touch moss. Yes, the soft green stuff growing on walls and rocks and trees, patches and carpets that grow at a glacial pace, that harken back to an ancient, pre-human world. But Nikita Arora isn’t recommending that readers commune with moss because it’s good for the soul to connect with nature — that’s too pat, too easy. Rather, Arora urges a reimagining of what it means for humans to touch the world around us. “Touch” comes from toche, French for “blow” or “attack,” and as Arora elucidates, the ability to touch has often been an extension of power and its attendant violence. “Perhaps the apparent superficiality of touch is the fiction,” Arora writes. “The histories (colonial, racial, elitist) of human relationships with the nonhuman may have whitewashed and pigeonholed touch and its potential for radical reciprocity and for reckoning with the past and the present.” —SLD
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