The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week, we recommend pieces about homelessness, mountaineering, geological memory and amnesia, critical health care in a post-COVID world, and fathers and stepfathers.

1. No Way to Live

Ethan Ward | Capital & Main | December 27-28, 2022 | 7,714 words

Last month, Karen Bass, the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles, declared a state of emergency with regard to homelessness in the city. In a matter of days, teams began moving unhoused people from outdoor encampments into hotel and motel rooms as part of a new government program called “Inside Safe.” But as this poignant three-part series shows, street homelessness accounts for only a fraction of LA’s housing crisis. People like Sarah Fay, the 28-year-old subject of the series, live on the precipice of homelessness, a position that requires a daily hustle to find a safe place to sleep. The reasons for this kind of housing insecurity are complex, going well beyond low incomes and soaring rents. Fay’s story, told so well by reporter Ethan Ward, is shaped by generational trauma, the burden of debt, maddening bureaucracy, and cultural stereotypes about what it means to be a person in need. Read this story, and send it to your elected officials, in Los Angeles and elsewhere. —SD

2. Three Falls in the Alps

Xenia Minder | Financial Times | December 21, 2022 | 4,475 words

At the end of this essay, there is a note stating that Xenia Minder told this story to her brother, Raphael Minder, the Financial Times’ central Europe correspondent. I imagine the support from her sibling enabled Minder to tell her extraordinary story with such honesty and thoughtfulness. Formerly a Swiss judge, a series of catastrophic falls in the mountains leads her to reevaluate her life and realize that while we may think we are choosing our direction, “the key events in our lives are unknown to us.” In the three falls detailed in this essay, she loses — for a time — her ability to move from her neck to her waist and two partners who she loved very much. It is an incredible amount of loss. Yet, Minder does not look for sympathy in this piece, instead telling her story with acceptance rather than complaint, displaying an inspiring resilience and ability to look within herself. It is a beautifully written personal essay that gripped me with every word. —CW

3. The Great Forgetting

Summer Praetorius | Nautilus | December 19, 2022 | 3,975 words

“It takes time to build memory, but it can be erased in a geological instant.” I didn’t read much the past few weeks, but paleoclimatologist Summer Praetorius on geological and human memory at Nautilus cut through the holiday noise and held my attention. Praetorius writes about what Earth knows and records over time by way of tree rings, ocean sediments, and other physical markers of time. (“Ice sheets themselves are some of the best memory banks,” she writes, and “mile-high mountains” are the “great brains of our planet.”) She also writes about geological amnesia, “resilience debt” and the planet’s inability to recover when its ecosystems have been pushed over the edge, and what’s been lost. Praetorius weaves this research with poignant personal insights about her late brother, whose health and memory deteriorated after a snowboarding accident, and by doing so, creates a beautiful piece on loss and resilience. —CLR

4. The Power and Peril of the ICU

Adam Gaffney | The Baffler | December 13, 2022 | 5,282 words

Having a loved one in the ICU is both hopeful and excruciating. You hold out hope that the most highly trained people and the most advanced technology must somehow tip the balance in their favor, buying crucial time their body needs to heal. But what happens when the most tragic outcome is almost certain? How do families and hospitals cope when hopes are slim and the costs of keeping a patient alive mount, perhaps even prolonging certain death? At The Baffler, Boston physician Adam Gaffney suggests that having all the training and technology at your disposal doesn’t mean that it’s always the most ethical and compassionate choice to use it. At what point does care become a horrific ordeal for the patient and their nurses? To what end? “I have seen family members overwhelmed by the magnitude of the decision: letting go might make sense (and they may realize it and even say so), but making the decision feels impossible because it threatens a lifetime of guilt over having been the one to say: ‘Stop the machines.’” —KS

5. Fighting the Tree

Davon Loeb | The Sun | January 2, 2023 | 2,678 words

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been mired in home repairs that rank somewhere south of Serious DIY but somewhere north of I Can Do This Without YouTube. Every time I cut a machine screw so that a new switchplate would fit, or replaced a toilet’s fill valve, I thought about my dad. Specifically, I thought about being 8 or 9 years old and standing with my dad while he embarked on those same types of repairs — me holding a handful of screws or tools, just trying to be helpful while he worked on whatever it was he was working on. I lost him a decade ago this year, but those memories have retained the same poignancy they had when my grief was fresh, and they came roaring back all over again when I read Davon Loeb’s essay in the latest issue of The Sun. Fathers aren’t easy, and neither are sons; when the two are constitutionally different, it only compounds the difficulty. “Give Dad a pencil, a piece of paper, and a ruler, and he could design a house,” Loeb writes. “Give me a pencil, a piece of paper, and a ruler, and I could draw our family.” This misalignment sets the stage for an episode that embodies nearly every competing facet of the father-son dynamic: pride and shame, validation and disappointment, love and fear. Yet, Loeb doesn’t write this to twang some hidden heartstring in the reader. Instead, he sinks back into that moment from his own childhood in order to square the circle of fraught kinship: No matter how much we may clash, it’s the moments of peace that stay with us. —PR

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Did I Tell You About David?

Age, race, personality; “opposites attract” can refer to any number of traits. But as Desiree Browne’s sly and self-aware essay illustrates all too well, sometimes it’s a different kind of disconnect that drives people apart.

He told me he was a bus driver for the city; I told him I was between jobs but was mostly a writer. As we talked, away from the roar of the party, I watched his desire over the top of my champagne glass, and I started drinking that in, too. He matched the pace of my quips and my laughter was real. I gave him my number because it was another night when it seemed like anything could happen.

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No Way to Live

Sarah Fay is 28 years old. She has a job at a non-profit, a dog, a car, and family close by. Too close, in fact, on the nights when Fay has nowhere to sleep but her grandmother’s garage, where her own mother has been living for the last 13 years. This three-part series examines the complexities of housing insecurity in Los Angeles, defying stereotypes about what it means to be vulnerable to the pressures of meager wages and rising rents:

Ideally, Sarah would not be looking for a place for the night; she wants a place to call home. She just can’t seem to convince landlords to give her a chance.

Her latest full-time job, as an executive assistant for a nonprofit focused on homelessness in West Los Angeles, pays her $24 per hour. She grosses around $4,000 per month. To people unaware of the surge in rental prices, that might seem like enough. But the median rent for a studio in Los Angeles on December 10 was $1,825 — a $275 increase over a year earlier. After taxes, the market-rate rent would consume most of what she earns. 

But in Los Angeles and other housing-squeezed cities, having the resources to pay the local median rent is a far cry from actually getting an apartment. There are, however, supports in place to help people like Sarah. 

In 2019, when she earned about $2 per hour less, she qualified for a Rapid Rehousing subsidy from the L.A. Homeless Services Agency, but that did not guarantee that she would receive it. The process struck her as complex. It involves working with a Rapid Rehousing case manager to find an apartment in the right price range, then connecting the case manager to the landlord and hoping that they could work it out. In theory, they agree to allow the subsidized tenant to rent the place based on various criteria, and then the tenant starts out paying a percentage of their rent that will grow in subsequent months and years. The exact amount of the subsidy depends on a variety of factors, including the tenant’s income and the rent, and the process involves the input of the case manager.

The problem for Sarah has been that she has needed to convince a landlord to choose a low-income tenant with mandatory bureaucratic processes over plenty of people in simpler circumstances with larger incomes and better credit applying. Nothing requires landlords to take on tenants like her, and the shortage of affordable lodging means that market forces have been blowing the other way.

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‘We Can’t Even Get Basic Care Done’: What it’s Like Doing 12-Hour Shifts on an Understaffed NHS Ward

This is a powerful and upsetting read on the NHS — the free healthcare service provided by the United Kingdom. Increasingly underfunded, the staff is facing incredible pressure. Reading this essay from a healthcare assistant, you realize what heroic personal efforts are now being called upon to provide patient care.

The family have been called in to say goodbye, but there’s no telling if they will arrive in time. The student nurse and I give him a wash and reposition him to make him more comfortable. I decide to give him a wet shave as well, which he seems to enjoy. Things appear to be under control for now, so I tell the student nurse I’m going to catch up on paperwork. She nods and tells me she will stay with the man who is passing away. She removes her gloves and holds his hand.

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More Than Just an Object: A Collector’s Reading List

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The bowerbird, which lives on the east coast of Australia, has an abiding eye for anything blue. Solitary males travel great distances to bring back all manner of blue objects to decorate their nests. Shells, flowers, plastic bottles, and feathers are all fair game, and bowerbirds have even been known to grind up blue pigments with their beaks and paint their homes accordingly. This chromatic fealty is less a matter of design sense than of courtship; the behavior is just one of the bowerbird’s mating tactics. And he has a spiritual brother in ostentatious accumulation: humans.

Collecting as a human practice dates back to at least the third millennium BCE, when the upper circles of Sumerian society gathered extensive hoards of luxury items. Later, the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt (350 – 30 BCE) sought out books from across the known world and housed them in the ill-fated Library of Alexandria. This is all a long way from beer cans, dolls, and genitalia — just some of the obsessions featured below — but the link isn’t too hard to discern. For Tom Hanks it’s typewriters; for Rod Stewart, it’s model trains. 

Although little research has been undertaken when it comes to humans, anecdotal evidence suggests that collectors of the homo sapiens variety also tend to be male. As a broad psychological explanation, a large collection indicates wealth, knowledge, and industry — all traits appealing to a potential partner. But while that explains amassing watches or antique furniture, it doesn’t do the same for those who seek out toenail clippings or soap bars. The collector’s drive, it seems, can suggest as many questions as answers. 

Indeed, reading through these illuminating pieces reveals the many deeper purposes to collecting. Bonding, fellowship, greed, and even education can play a role. There may even be something more mysterious, more primordial, at play: Unearthing a new “treasure” can release serotonin directly into our brains. This mood-boosting reward could well hearken back to our distant past. Some psychologists highlight a link between collecting and our in-built drive to create a safe, orderly environment. As Randy Frost muses in his book on the subject, Stuff, some scholars “suggest that collecting is a way of managing fears about death by creating a form of immortality.” There may be no simple answer, but the art of collecting can certainly provide a simple joy — and reading about it can provide that joy in some small measure as well.

The Men Who Meet Up in Motels Across America…to Trade Old Beer Cans (Deborah Ager, Narratively, July 2018)

In France, it’s wine; in Russia, vodka. China has baijiu, while in Madagascar, rum is the national tipple. But in Belgium, Germany, and the U.S. (the last of which provides the backdrop for this piece), beer stands at the top of the pile. Here, beer is a cultural marker and a personal identifier, an integral part of any meaningful event. With this fantastic article, we move away from the decorative and historical into what I feel is true collector territory: beer cans. 

When I look around at my piles of records and books, I justify these acquisitions as things that provide something definable beyond their physical selves. Beer cans, though, belong in a different category. While they serve a valid role as socioeconomic and aesthetic artifacts — as do all man-made objects —  it’s hard to consider used beer cans worth anything in terms of material value. The Brewery Collectibles Club of America, though, does not agree. This piece introduces you to them and other collectors across several continents, all of whom hold an abiding passion for items that most of us would throw in the recycling bin without a moment’s thought. This is the beating heart of the genuine collector exposed — a heart that quickens over a thing only their fellow brethren would understand.

Dave Larrazolo, an ex-Army drill sergeant, is wearing a bumblebee costume and adjusting his antennae when I speak with him at the canvention. He explains that he doesn’t bother with “rust,” which refers to rusty beer cans. Another collector tells me Larrazolo’s collection is known to be “squeaky clean.”

Despite the group’s communal nature, friendly divisions exist: rusty cans versus clean, new crowns versus old, plastic-lined versus vinyl-lined crowns. Other collectors specialize by geography, brand, or type — West Virginia or California, Ballantine’s Beer or Hamm’s, quarts or 12-ounce size. There are accessories, too, like can openers referred to as “I-7s.”

Wings of Desire: Why Is An Obsessive British Collector Risking Jail To Kill Rare Butterflies? (Tim Lewis, Esquire UK, February 2018)

England’s beautiful Cotswolds is not a place readily associated with international crime, but the picturesque region nonetheless serves as backdrop to this absorbing tale of the murky side of collecting. The practice of lepidoptery (collecting butterflies) has its roots in the 17th century, when explorers and scientists, largely from the West, journeyed thousands of miles under harsh conditions in order to discover new species of flora and fauna. These groups were almost exclusively composed of educated, wealthy white men who possessed the means and opportunity to travel — and who often took with them a sense of superiority and entitlement, together with a distinct lack of respect for the native populations in the lands where they quested. Yet, while lepidoptery’s colonial and ethical legacy remains questionable, its practitioners’ study and documentation advanced our collective understanding by leaps and bounds.

In its time, lepidoptery was a highly fashionable pursuit. You can count at least two 20th-century British prime ministers, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, among their number, along with highly respected author Vladimir Nabokov. These days, with much more attention focused on humanity’s interactions with nature, butterfly collecting is far from mainstream. Yet, in the U.S. and U.K., lepidoptery is still perfectly legal. There are important caveats — some species and certain designated areas are protected — but where there is prohibition, as this story makes clear, there is always money to be made.

A butterfly’s wings, their colours and patterns, are made up of tiny, overlapping scales. These are at their brightest for the first day or two, but over time, the scales fall out or rub off. No discerning collector would be interested in a faded specimen like this one, but there is still something pulse-quickening about seeing it. The large blue might be persnickety and ornery, but that is what has given this tiny insect its power over humans for centuries. As David Simcox says that day to a middle-aged couple who had driven more than 150 miles on a futile search for a large blue: “If it was easy, it wouldn’t be any fun at all.”

The Garbage Man: Why I Collect Racist Objects (David Pilgrim, Ferris State University News, 2005)

When David Pilgrim began acquiring racist memorabilia in his early teens at the beginning of the 1970s, he could not have known that he would become a sociologist, or that his collection would eventually lead to the founding of the Jim Crow Museum, an institution that may discomfit but whose educational importance cannot be understated. If it feels obvious that he writes “Racist imagery is propaganda,” consider that such imagery is the most powerful social tool in the world. As much as we might like to pretend otherwise, we are deeply susceptible to visual cues, most of which are intentionally designed for just that purpose — whether racist caricatures on 1950s product packaging or modern-day memes. This is what makes Pilgrim’s work so vital.

Perhaps the most telling (and most moving) moment in the piece comes when the author describes how many of the young people he talks to, both black and white, are at first skeptical about the atrocity of the Jim Crow era; when they see the items he has collected, though, the illusion falls away. When in the presence of a large number of such objects, Pilgrim writes, the overwhelming feeling is one of heavy sadness. It is one thing to read about history, and quite another to hold a living piece of it in your hands.

I suppose every sane black person must be angry, at least for a while. I was in the Sociology Department, a politically liberal department, and talk about improving race relations was common. There were five or six black students, and we clung together like frightened outsiders. I will not speak for my black colleagues, but I was sincerely doubtful of my white professors’ understanding of everyday racism. Their lectures were often brilliant, but never complete.

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Unboxing the Doll Collector (Jackie Powers, Slow Notion, July 2021)

This thought-provoking piece acknowledges another driving factor behind collecting: comfort. It’s telling that the author’s collection began at a difficult period in her adult life, and Power’s particular passion, dolls, links back to childhood — a time when, hopefully, we experienced the least stress, worry, and hurt. That said, there is surely an element of solace to all collecting, be it sneakers, records, or beer cans. Childhood memorabilia covers a wide area, and the practice of adults continuing to pursue their youthful obsessions has become, if not quite fashionable, then at least acceptable. As EmGo, a Transformer-collecting vlogger popular with my own son, reminds us: “You don’t stop playing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop playing.” It’s a sentiment eruditely echoed by the author here. 

Powers’ dolls intersect with her other great loves of fashion, art, and design, but she finds herself faced with an ethical dilemma. Dolls mean plastic and packaging. Buying brand-new items is inarguably bad for the environment. The solution, as she reasons, lies in concentrating on the second-hand market — seeking out and even restoring items that already exist. There’s much to be said for this approach, but the real fascination in this piece comes from Powers’ meditations on what it means to be “adult,” and the stigma that often surrounds holding on to our childhood loves.

Although there is no time in my life where I haven’t loved dolls, there was a time in my life when I felt like I wasn’t supposed to love dolls. I can trace this shift into shame to another rough transitional moment in life — age 12. As I’m sure it was for many, for me, being 12 was awful. It was a time when I felt like I was trapped between leaving childhood behind and facing the unknown world of being a teenager and all the social pressures that came along with it.

Welcome to the World’s Only Museum Devoted to Penises (Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2013)

The protagonist of this piece, Icelandic history teacher Sigurður Hjartarson, considers himself a collector just like any other. His chosen subject, however, stands out (pardon the pun) as one of the more unusual on this list, or any other. There is nothing salacious about Hjartarson’s hobby; his interest is scientific and, in a liberal country such as Iceland, largely accepted as such. Reading this absorbing piece, however, it’s hard not to sense that Hjartarson revels, even if just a bit, in the quirkiness of his particular field; the Folklore Section of his museum includes an empty glass jar labeled “Homo sapiens invisibilis.”

Again, though, the real interest lies in the genesis and pursuit of Hjartarson’s hobby. As I suspect is the case with many collections, the teacher received his first specimen as a gift — an entirely unexpected and serendipitous spark that started the Icelander on his unique journey. Think of your own obsessions and interests. Where did they come from, and how would you be different without them? In Hjartarson’s case, you can’t help but admire the extraordinary lengths (again, forgive me) taken to complete his museum, and the disarming charm its curator displays.

He has three more donation letters hanging on the wall—from a German, an American and a Brit who visited the museum and were moved to sign away their penises after death—but every year that passes makes them less valuable. “You’re still young,” he said, poking me in the shoulder forcefully, “but when you get older, your penis is going to start shrinking.”

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

Editor: Peter Rubin
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Fighting the Tree

Some things we pick up from our fathers — other things we yearn to absorb, but simply can’t. A lovely meditation from Davon Loeb, who finds the perfect symbolic childhood episode to plumb the gaps between a father’s love and a son’s need.

I wanted to be that kid. I wanted to like cars and the smell of gasoline. I wanted to like making trips to Home Depot to search the aisles as if looking for ourselves: our eyes in the shades of paint, our skin tones in the wood, and our hearts in the steel frames of rolling red tool chests. I wanted to look like Dad, to think like Dad, to be like Dad. I wanted to have the same last name as him. But none of those things were possible. 

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Violent Delights

Why does America love serial killers? That’s the question Sarah Marshall considers in this essay. She dives into pop culture, homicide statistics, stereotypes about criminals, and her own life to make the case that serial killers, as a frightful concept, reinforce what many Americans wish to believe about themselves and their country:

In the time of COVID, the right to invite death into your home and to spread it around to others became, somehow, the context of a presidential election. As far as I can tell, Americans love killing one another, and always have, but serial killers make us look a little better. The United States was built on the bones and blood of endless murder, of slavery, and of genocide; crucially, the FBI’s current classification of a serial killer stipulates “unlawful” killings, because otherwise, a lot of cops and federal agents would be serial killers too.

Before it hunted serial killers, the FBI busied itself with projects like trying to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into suicide, and to call that anything other than attempted murder seems pretty academic; to look at the FBI’s collaboration with the Chicago Police Department in the killing of Fred Hampton and call it anything other than murder would just be a lie. That I grew up thinking of the FBI as the good guys who caught serial killers, rather than as the organization that tried to stamp out the civil rights movement, is the result of many things, the limits of my own education chief among them. But serial killers — both the ones who were caught and the theoretical ones we could imagine were still out there — had a lot to offer the FBI, and the American legal system as a whole. David Schmid writes in Natural Born Celebrities that the serial killer is “the figure that, in a sense, [was] the FBI’s greatest ally.” A champion needs a monster to fight.

These are real crimes, and so are the people who commit them; what I wonder is why we focus so relentlessly on just one corner of the picture, as awful as it may be. In America, the most common cause of death for pregnant women is homicide. Isn’t this just as horrifying? Isn’t it worse? But to develop a cultural fixation on men who kill their pregnant partners is to acknowledge a problem bigger than a few inhuman specimens, born beyond redemption. It is to acknowledge that serial killers terrify us not because they are so different from normal people, but because they are so similar to normal men. They exonerate “normal” American violence because they will always be worse. They drive women back in from the open road and into the arms of a more probable killer.

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