In this essay for We Are the Mutants, Michael A. Gonzales describes his experiences in the ’80s as both a patron and an employee of the Tower Records on Fourth and Broadway in New York City. The details in his piece immediately transported me back to my favorite summer of my youth, in 1998, when I worked at my local Tower in San Mateo, California, alongside a bunch of cool, creative, and rebellious teens and young adults. We were all so different from each other, steeped in various musical tastes and subcultures, yet all came together inside our store to sell records, CDs, cassettes, and VHS tapes — and to talk about and share a collective passion for music.
My Tower Records experience is vastly different from Gonzales’ — famous artists and celebrities didn’t come into our store, for instance, and our Bay Area suburban strip mall location pales in comparison to the bustling, legendary location in the Village. But still, I appreciate the small moments he recounts, like his interview for the job, or running the register, or how employees raced to the stereo to change the music. I have similar fond memories from that glorious summer, when music became really important to me, and — with the encouragement of very expressive, interesting coworkers-turned-friends — when I embarked on my own journey of self-discovery.
Though I lived in Harlem and Jerry dwelled in Brooklyn, we often met in front of Tower when we planned on “hangin’ in the village.” We’d flip through racks of records for an hour or so, which was usually followed by smoking a joint in Washington Square Park while watching comedian Charlie Barnett. Back in those days, I had a bad habit of running late and, on one occasion, he befriended a guy begging for change in front of the store. An aspiring playwright, Jerry wrote a one-act about the encounter. Years later, I heard how fallen Grandmaster Flowers, a pioneering DJ from Brooklyn, used to shake his coin cup on that spot and I just knew that’s who Jerry had met. That same year I hung out with Jerry as he waited in line overnight to buy tickets for The Police’s Synchronicity Tour. That year we both worked as messengers in Manhattan, but we were ready to splurge our minimum wages on Sting.
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Twenty years ago, when I was 10, my mom died of colon cancer. That’s how I like to tell people: as quickly as possible. I say it before I know them. I say it as fast as I can, usually shoving a second topic into the same sentence. My mom died when I was 10 — what have you been reading lately? My mom died when I was 10 — do you want to order another round? I’ve said it on first dates and in job interviews. I say it as fast as I can because I can’t stand the face people make. Their eyes get a little wider, their eyebrows raise and reach toward each other, their mouths tug down just the slightest bit. They pity. Their faces say, “Oh, honey,” and I want to bolt, so I bolt past that part of the conversation. They always make the same face; I have learned how to make that face disappear as quickly as possible.
But there is another face, sometimes. I recognize other “dead mom kids” almost instantly. They don’t pity — they laugh. They raise their hand for a high five. They respond with, “Mine too!” and my whole body relaxes.
In writing, I have found more and more dead mom kids. (You’re a dead mom kid no matter how old you were when your mother died, by the way.) I was in a slam poetry club in college and performed pieces about my mom’s death, hoping that I wouldn’t have to tell all my new college friends individually. Ideally they would come to a slam and get the information they needed but they couldn’t ask any questions, and I wouldn’t be able to see their faces. But in the poetry group, I was one of many who had lost a parent. I didn’t have to talk about the loss with them — I could just talk about the writing. Years later, I attended a writing conference and read part of an essay about my mom after a poet read a dead mom poem and before a fiction writer stood up to say, “I guess I’ll do dead mom stuff, too!”
With writers, I can laugh about grief. There are so many of us, and we are so used to searching for the right words for it, a shorthand comes easily. No grief is alike — even when I meet people whose moms died when they were young, of cancer, our griefs are completely different. I have never read anything that got it exactly right, but I have read plenty that reminds me that I’m not alone. That it is, really, a club, and no matter the specifics of our loss, we all share a language.
The essays in this list attempt to answer questions or explain something about the feeling of being a dead mom kid. If you’re not in the club, may they function as an interpreter. If you are, I hope you recognize something of yourself somewhere in here. I hope you know we speak your language, too.
Too many times to count, I have been in the middle of watching a children’s movie with a friend who turns to me to say, “I never noticed how often the mom dies in these movies!” Perhaps they only noticed because they’re next to me. I never notice it; I just expect it. I anticipate it so well that if I’m in a movie theater, I try to spot the other members of the club: who drops their M&Ms, who carefully searches for the perfect kernel of popcorn for as long as the mom is dying on screen. In “Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead,” Sarah Boxer deep-dives into the history of dead mom narratives. In fiction, dead moms go as far back as 9th century China. Boxer traces the dead mother plot through animated movies of the 2000s, offering a why for this constant assault of dead moms. She notices that in many of these dead mother movies, the single father becomes an almost supernaturally perfect dad, and reminds us that in 2014, only 8% of households were led by single fathers. Boxer’s analysis is wide-reaching and thorough. She treats the dead-mom-in-movies phenomenon as questionable instead of a given, a choice instead of a necessity in the genre, and flawed instead of natural.
And yet, in this medium where the creators have total control, we keep getting the same damned world—a world without mothers. Is this really the dearest wish of animation? Can mothers really be so threatening?
Our mothers are often our introduction to food: They feed us first, and they choose what kinds of food to put in front of us. Michelle Zauner explores the connection between food and grief, and how certain foods connect her to the memory of her mother. Zauner is a writer and musician who fronts Japanese Breakfast and “Crying in H Mart” is the opening essay of her 2021 memoir of the same name. Zauner is half Korean; her mother was and is her connection to her Korean identity. Food is the bridge between Zauner and her mother: “I remember the snacks Mom told me she ate when she was a kid and how I tried to imagine her at my age. I wanted to like all the things she did, to embody her completely.” Zauner captures the sometimes illogical nature of crying over loss: She can calmly describe her mother’s cancer but cries wandering the aisles of H Mart, the supermarket chain specializing in Asian foods. At H Mart, Zauner is removed from her life in Philadelphia, partially because these stores are far from city centers, but also because she is surrounded by reminders of her mother and by others searching for a reminder of people and places that are far away. She shows the power of food to connect us to the people we have lost, especially our mothers, who feed us from the start and shape our relationship to food.
H Mart is the bridge that guides me away from the memories that haunt me, of chemo head and skeletal bodies and logging milligrams of hydrocodone.
Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding into a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard wall that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.
Mothers leave notes. They leave voicemails, they slip scraps of paper into your lunchbox. When they’re gone, it seems unbelievable that their messages are gone too. My own mother tried to write me and my brother letters while she was sick, but they made her cry, and crying made her fall asleep. When Morgan Talty’s mother was alive, she recorded voicemails and wrote notes that revealed her mood, whether she was safe. He knew her by the notes she gave him. In “Messages,” Talty shows how much grief lives in the moment conversations become one-sided. He listens repeatedly to the 60 voicemails from his mother he has on his phone. He searches and searches for a final word from his mother, and then he finds it. He’s right to predict that I would be jealous of his story, but he also captures something essential about mother death: Once they’re gone, we are desperate for any trace of them at all. It seems impossible that just because they are gone, they can no longer communicate with us. Whether we find a final message or not, we search for one.
Mom could kick your ass with her words, spoken or written, but she could also heal you. I still have every letter she wrote me, and when she left this earth, I went through them all — each scrap of paper she had given to me or that I had plucked from her apartment while cleaning it with my sister — looking for something, anything, from her to tell me where she’d gone. Because she was good like that.
Meghan O’Rourke’s 2011 memoir The Long Goodbye details the death of her mother, and her subsequent realization that on a societal level, we are not equipped to properly grieve. Nothing prepares us, even when a mother is sick for a while. And then, we are on our own, with only their leftover objects to feel them close to us. O’Rourke’s essay “In My Mother’s Shoes” describes how much those objects — gifts she gave before she died, a scent she used, a scarf she wore years ago — can function as a bridge between the living and the person who is gone. Putting on her mother’s clothes is an adult game of dress-up for O’Rourke, as she simultaneously tries to wear her mother’s responsibilities, like picking up new socks when her brother forgets to pack them. She shows the weight that these objects take on once their owner is gone, and the process of deciding which objects are the ones that matter enough to keep.
If it breaks my heart that I can no longer learn about my mother’s life by asking her questions, it helps in those moments to have touchstones of hers around me, to look at, to wrap myself in. The ordinary beauty of a pair of earrings or a scarf, the utility of these things remind me of my mom, talismans that bring me real solace.
Maggie Grimason’s father died when she was 8. Years later, the news of Notre Dame burning interrupted her mother’s funeral. In Grimason’s essay “What a Ghost Sounds Like,” the fire in Paris could only be connected to her mother’s death. Notre Dame was discussed with a distinct “before” and “after,” the same absolute and irrevocable splicing of time that happens when a mother dies. Nothing could be, or sound, the same. After her father’s death, Grimason listened to a tape recording of his voice saying just one phrase. Her essay explores sounds, how sound remembered can never be exact, how the bells of Notre Dame can never sound the same again, how her father’s voice can’t be identical to that recording, or her memory of the recording. Sound is connected to the ghost she saw as a child, and to grief, and to fear. She wants to write in order to remember the people she has lost, but writing can’t help us remember what it all once sounded like.
People love to say, That’s just a coincidence. Those words try to pare down the event while simultaneously acknowledging—and brushing off—its meaning. Empty or not, the poetry of Notre Dame burning, the steeple falling—we watched it again and again.
And as I watched, heavy with the grief of losing my mother, I thought Good, or at least, That makes sense.
Claire Hodgdon is a Brooklyn-based writer and educator with an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia University. Her work has been published in journals Pidgeonholes and HAD and nominated for a Best of the Net award. She is working on her first book, an essay collection about the aftermath of loss at a young age. Find her at www.clairehodgdon.net or on Twitter @claire_hodgdon.
Editor: Krista Stevens Copy-editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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When politicians and media pundits talk about public safety, what do they mean? Safety for whom, and from what? Katie Prout’s essay implores readers in Chicago to see unhoused people living on the city’s trains as vulnerable members of the public, not as threats. She also urges readers to acknowledge the difference between safety and emotional comfort:
To my knowledge, no evidence exists that shows unhoused CTA riders are more likely to commit crime or exhibit “unruly behavior” (whatever that is) than their housed counterparts, and yet this narrative linking the presence of unhoused people to dangers and discomforts for housed riders has been repeated over the last couple years: “CTA is developing plans with social service agencies to address issues of mental health and homelessness that also affect safety on trains and buses,” reported WTTW after the memo’s release; “Enhance safety for riders by expanding police officer patrols with the Chicago Police Department, increase the number of security guards from 200 to 300, reintroduce canine units, target fare theft with new tall fare gates and collaborate with social services organizations for unhoused people,” reported the Sun-Times.
“[The CTA is] . . . a big, crashing mess at the moment, with the tubes filthy and stained with graffiti, elevators and escalators out of operation, cars converted into rolling homeless shelters, rules about eating and smoking seemingly forgotten, and police presence all but invisible,” wrote Crain’s Chicago Business’s Greg Hinz in 2021, with the cadence and restraint of Peter Venkman terrifying the mayor in Ghostbusters. In the accompanying photo, taken by Hinz, a Chicagoan is curled up across four seats, huddled under a dirty jacket. “People just aren’t going to ride a system that is dirty, dark and scary,” he continued. “Are you listening, Mayor Lori Lightfoot?” A quick Google search of “Chicago CTA homeless” pulls up other photos of people — asleep, unconscious, and presumably unconsenting to being the example of all that is “dirty, dark, and scary” — in stories from CBS News, ABC7, WBEZ, Medill, and the Chicago Defender, among others.
Not every person who is homeless is mentally ill or uses drugs, and having one of those traits — or all three — doesn’t make you dangerous; it makes you vulnerable. Indeed, study after study demonstrates that people without homes are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than they are to commit it.
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At its low points, Twitter has been a space to spread disinformation, a feed for doomscrolling, an outlet to intensify your anxiety. At its best, it has brought people together, created communities, launched careers, given voice to the previously voiceless, and galvanized movements. As Twitter continues to sputter, Willy Staley offers an insightful examination of what the birdsite has done to the brains of the Extremely Online, and what exactly people have been doing on it for the last decade and a half.
It’s hard to look back on nearly a decade and a half of posting without feeling something like regret. Not regret that I’ve harmed my reputation with countless people who don’t know me, and some who do — though there is that. Not regret that I’ve experienced all the psychic damage described herein — though there is that too. And not even regret that I could have been doing something more productive with my time — of course there’s that, but whatever. What’s disconcerting is how easy it was to pass all the hours this way. The world just sort of falls away when you’re looking at the feed. For all the time I spent, I didn’t even really put that much into it.
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I’ll get this out of the way: I’m not a fan of Frank Ocean, nor am I really familiar with his music. Ocean’s return to the stage wasn’t some long-awaited moment for me as it was for many festival-goers on the final night of Coachella’s first weekend. But that didn’t matter one bit as I dived into Jeff Weiss’ fantastic dispatch from the festival, in which he transports the reader into the desert as the crowd waits for the singer’s headlining performance. Ocean puts on a shaky, underwhelming, and chaotic show, which Weiss masterfully describes, but what makes this piece so good is the perfect encapsulation of the collective experience that is Coachella, which — for someone like me, who experienced its earliest iterations in 1999 and the early 2000s — is an insightful read not just on this specific performance, but a look at how the festival has evolved over the years, and a deep, thoughtful critique on the music industry, performance and artistry, and our culture today.
But this is all slightly hyperbolic. It’s reductive to describe it as a complete failure. There is something inherently compelling about watching a preternaturally talented artist struggle to stitch his vastly disparate ideas together. It may make for poor entertainment, but it’s fascinating as a document of unmet ambition. He appears trapped in something that we can’t understand, hounded by demons we can’t see. What most in the crowd are responding to is the death of something that Ocean cannot control. The outsized expectations that had made him infallible, a timeless avatar of their vanished youth, the dark reality that what comes unglued cannot always be repaired. For Frank Ocean to no longer be the same Frank Ocean who held them emotionally hostage for a decade meant that they would realize what Andre had told the previous generation: Heroes eventually die, horoscopes often lie.
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You might recall Thai Stick and Maui Waui from your misbegotten youth, but today, the legalization of marijuana has spawned an infinite number of strains, all with, it seems, a wacky name. For Esquire, Bill Shapiro goes behind the scenes of the weed industry to learn about naming practices and participate in a naming activity by partaking in some products.
But that was then and this is now, and the cannabis space has entered a fascinating, fast-flowing moment where legalization—which begat commercialization, which begat corporatization, which begat commodification—has created today’s modern dispensary where the choices for consumers can be dizzying. As it turns out, there may be no better gauge of the changes rippling through cannabis culture than the humble menu at your local dispensary. Weed names have always added to the fun and intrigue (as a teen, even the relatively straightforward Thai Stick sounded entrancingly exotic), but today, as the power dynamic shifts from seller to buyer, and as growers and retailers find themselves strategizing to make their products stand out on increasingly crowded shelves, the names are taking on even more importance.
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This week we are featuring stories from Renata Brito and Felipe Dana, Jeff Weiss, Maddy Crowell, Stephen Rodrick, and David Jenkins.
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In today’s edition, our editors recommend:
The tragic story behind one of the many boats that wash up to shore carrying the bodies of desperate migrants.
A profile of a Southern California rap legend with an underappreciated talent.
A glimpse into the life of a cybersecurity expert who rose to the top of her game.
Time in class with an Indian guru who boasts nine million social media followers.
The joy of soaking up the sights and sounds while walking in a desert.
Renata Brito and Felipe Dana | The Associated Press | April 12, 2023 | 4,355 words
People call them “ghost boats,” the small vessels — at least seven in 2021 alone — that have washed up in the Caribbean and Brazil carrying dead bodies. The boats come from West Africa carrying desperate people bound for Europe via the Canary Islands, a complex, treacherous route. Somehow, somewhere the boats were forced off course and drifted out into the Atlantic, all but ensuring the deaths of the people on board. But who are those people? What are their stories? Who back home is missing them? This years-long investigation uses a handful of clues — a SIM card and scraps of clothing, for instance — to identify the dead found in one ghost boat in Tobago. Renata Brito and Felipe Dana do an impressive job situating a sensitive story about the impacts of global policies and politics within the framework of a mystery. A moving feature, and beautifully designed too. —SD
Jeff Weiss | Los Angeles Times | April 17, 2023 | 3,271 words
One of hip-hop’s greatest conflicts, and I’m speaking for myself here, lies in the pimp persona. Careers have been built around it. National sweethearts have leveraged it. (Looking at you, Martha Stewart’s best friend!) Undeniable artistry has flowed from it. But it remains deeply discomfiting, a strain of misogyny that you can never quite unhear. That paradox lurks deep inside Jeff Weiss’ profile of Southern California rap legend Suga Free, a man whose prodigious talent couldn’t guarantee quantitative success. Suga’s impact and influence are undeniable; every time you’ve heard a hustle-culture tech bro say “if you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready,” this is where it came from. But other than a few indelible (and NSFW) guest appearances here and there, he’s all but disappeared. For him to pop up in a feature-length profile — happy, healthy, and seemingly finally at peace with his life and his creativity — is an unanticipated joy. One of Weiss’ great gifts as a music writer is evoking the intangible aspects of an artist’s style, and here he manages a near-perfect characterization of Suga’s silky breakneck patter: “He didn’t rap, he glided like a swan at the Player’s Ball, inventing his own unquantized, improvised rhythms,” he writes. But Weiss also doesn’t shy away from confronting the outlook that suffused Suga’s lyrics, and gnaws even more insistently at the listener’s ears and brain 20 years later. That conflict never takes center stage, thankfully, but to ignore it would be equally contrived. And so it sits there, peeking out from Suga’s aphorisms and overstuffed closet. It’s part of the art and part of the artist. What it means for his legacy is for you to decide. —PR
Maddy Crowell | Columbia Journalism Review | April 17, 2023 | 4,553 words
If my observations of people and their digital habits are any indication, most tend to have poor security and password hygiene. I suspect I wouldn’t pay as much attention to computer security practices if it weren’t for my job inside a tech company. “Being hacked is not just a possibility but a likelihood,” says cybersecurity expert Runa Sandvik. Simply existing on the web comes with risks. In this piece for CJR, Maddy Crowell gives us a glimpse into Sandvik’s work and focus on internet privacy and freedom: She advises reporters and other individuals at risk, like activists and lawyers, on how to protect themselves and their data online. Growing up in Oslo’s hacking community in the 2000s, when privacy wasn’t yet a thing, Sandvik found a job in ethical hacking, and later fell into her niche as a privacy and security researcher. (Crowell recounts Sandvik’s brush with a guy who simply introduced himself as “Ed,” and would later go on to rock the very foundations of the surveillance state.) I appreciate Crowell’s look into Sandvik’s fascinating life, and her path to becoming one of the world’s top information security experts. —CLR
Stephen Rodrick | British GQ | April 11, 2023 | 5,892 words
I clearly don’t spend enough time perusing influencers on TikTok, because I had never heard of this Indian guru with more than nine million followers. Luckily, Stephen Rodrick’s editor did know of him, shipping Rodrick off to Sadhguru’s Inner Engineering class to learn more about the media-savvy mystic. Rodrick arrives at the center in McMinnville, Tennessee, with a healthy dose of skepticism (and contraband caffeine pills and prosciutto), so it is perhaps unsurprising that inner peace remains elusive. However, the guru’s oddly harsh approach and occasionally inaccurate statements seem worthy of Rodrick’s questioning. While a picture of a strange and stubborn man emerges, Rodrick also recognizes how Sadhguru’s language and tone “appeals equally to the TED talk crowd and the climate-anxious suburban parent.” Some of this crowd are with Rodrick at the center and the characters he describes and secret alliances he forms create a highly entertaining read, whether or not you’re convinced about the guru’s message — or even sure what it is. —CW
David Jenkins | High Country News | April 17, 2023 | 1,343 words
When I run or walk alone outdoors I almost always listen to music, a podcast, or an audiobook. In this thoughtful piece for High Country News, David Jenkins remarks upon passing a runner while on a 10-hour walk in western Colorado, the man’s ears “clogged with headphones.” The word clogged stopped me short. How true that even in solitary pursuits we compromise the peace we seek by inviting others’ words into our heads. “I puzzled over the need to listen to something other than wind and raven, the scuttle of a lizard, the skittering of small rocks underfoot,” he writes. Less is so much more, and while you’ll revel in soaking up every sight and sound the desert has to offer, the greatest beauty of Jenkins’ piece is that because he’s fully present during his walk, you can’t help but be, too. —KS
Monica Potts | The Atlantic | April 6, 2023 | 3,436 words
This excerpt, from the forthcoming The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, captures how heartfelt Monica Pott’s exploration into small-town America is. By focusing on the women she grew up with, a story that is the same across many places becomes personal — and thus deeply resonates. —CW
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