Generation Connie

For some immigrant families in the U.S., Connie Chung — the first Asian and second woman to be an anchor of a major news program — was a symbol of success and the American dream. Connie Wang and her family came to the U.S. in the early ’90s when she was a little girl, and at 3, she told them what name she wanted to choose for herself in this new country: Connie, named after the woman — the “pretty auntie” — on TV. In this piece for The New York Times, Wang recounts how she discovered many other Connies like her — an entire generation of American-born Asian women named after the journalist — and shares bits of their families’ stories, as well as insights from the “original” Connie herself on her path to journalism in a white- and male-dominated field.

But the names these parents gave their children represented so many different approaches to handling this shock: holding on, letting go, diving in, reaching out for a lifeline. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all the Connies I spoke to describe their mothers in similar terms: as leaders, brave, athletic, creative, successful, idealistic, capable. These moms were architects, editors and medical professionals, who’d often had to abandon their careers and reinvent themselves upon moving to a new country, who looked at the television and saw how things might be different for their daughters.

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Sincerely, Your Sister

After a bout of post-surgical meningitis in the early 1970s, Dr. Jillian Horton’s sister Wendy was left with severe mental and physical disabilities. In this gutting essay, she recounts her mother’s struggles to get assistance with Wendy’s care. Jean Horton wrote letter after letter to provincial politicians in Manitoba, pleas for help for her daughter that went mostly ignored. “Wendy needed a residence that was capable of managing the complex medical needs of adults with brain injuries,” writes Dr. Jillian Horton. “The problem was that in Manitoba there was no such thing.”

Wendy’s surgery years earlier had been a “success”; her brain tumour had been completely excised. But in the days after that surgery, she developed bacterial meningitis. That infection changed the course of her life. Over a few cruel days, Wendy lost the ability to talk, write, walk, regulate her emotions and control her body. Eventually, when she was conscious, she often raged and fought, unable to speak or communicate her terror, pain and frustration.

As soon as it became clear that Wendy would be left severely physically and mentally disabled, many medical professionals began suggesting to my parents that everyone would be “better off” if she were in an institution.

But who exactly would be better off? My parents’ dream for Wendy’s life did not include separation from her family. They railed against ableism long before it had a name. They knew Wendy’s worth as a person with a disability was unchanged from her worth as a child born without one. But as is so often the case when parents fight and advocate tirelessly for disabled children, they were often branded “the problem.”

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Dark Waters: How the Adventure of a Lifetime Turned to Tragedy

Adventure tourism is big business, whether it’s climbing Everest, or sailing around the world. But it can come at a cost. In this piece, Sally Williams investigates the death of Simon Speirs, a customer who was swept overboard while on the Clipper Round the World yacht race. Exploring the investigation into his death, along with first-person testimonies from other crew members, Williams meticulously uncovers the flaws in the Clipper operation.

Simon Speirs is exactly the sort of person Robin Knox-Johnston, the veteran sailor, had in mind when he founded the Clipper Round the World yacht race more than 25 years ago. At that time, the only people who got to race boats around the world were professional sailors. Clipper was designed for ordinary people: offering training and the opportunity to join a mixed-ability crew, it would enable customers to achieve the ambition of a lifetime.

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My Mother, the Poker Shark

At Esquire, Ian Frisch writes of the love he and his mom share for poker, and of how his mother turned to the game not only as a way to deal with the hand life dealt her, but also to attempt to support him and his sister after the sudden death of their father.

My mother had first started playing poker for the fun and for the intellectual challenge. Returning to competition twenty years later, she rediscovered old pleasures. She was playing not only to make money but also as an emotional escape. At the table, she wasn’t a single mother without a steady job mourning her husband’s death. It was the only place she felt comfortable playing the villain, cutthroat and cruel, lying to strangers’ faces and getting paid for it. “I love having a nemesis at the table,” she once told me. “It gives me purpose.” To this day, at every table, she picks a player and slowly, steadily, hand by hand, tries to destroy them.

Playing poker with my mother has made me realize that life isn’t anything more than a series of well-timed bets, and that sometimes things don’t work out and there’s nothing you can do about it. A run of bad cards—during a poker game or in life—cannot be escaped, only endured.

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The Long, Strange History of the Baseball Cap

A baseball hat is more than just protection for your noggin and shade for your eyes. That structured object of cotton, wool, and/or polyester can speak volumes. Michael Clair’s fascinating dive into the simple headwear explores how teams came to adopt it in the first place, and — most interestingly — how a utilitarian piece of uniform crossed over into the fashion realm. (The visuals are great, too. From older styles to portraits of rappers donning their favorite caps, there’s a nice mix of vintage and modern.) I won’t look at my own collection quite the same.  

“We can go to a seminal moment in the late ’80s when NWA emerges, particularly when Eazy E emerges in the White Sox hat,” Dr. Jabari Evans, an Assistant Professor of Race and Media at the University of South Carolina, said. “It’s one of those things that went from being something that was associated very strongly with where you’re from, and very strongly with being a fan of the sport, to transcending that and saying a statement about cool and saying a statement about aesthetics and saying a statement about athleisure and lifestyle.”

No longer was the cap merely a way to talk about your favorite ballclub, or even about the city you were from. It had now become a piece of fashion — one that was often synonymous with the people wearing them.

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The Last Gamble of Tokyo Joe

Ken Eto was a numbers kingpin for Chicago’s biggest organized-crime syndicate — until that syndicate sent two hitmen after him in an empty parking lot. From an Idaho detainment camp to the streets of the Windy City, Dan O’Sullivan serves up an absolute barnburner of a story about the man known as Tokyo Joe.

“The sole goal of organized crime is to enrich the members. That’s all they care about,” says John J. Binder, author of Al Capone’s Beer Wars. And, while not Italian, Ken Eto was one of its biggest moneymakers. Eto’s lofty position in the Chicago underworld was unusual for an outsider, but the syndicate had always been more farsighted than other crime families in promoting gangsters of other ethnicities. 

It was less a mark of tolerance than proof of its ambition. Ever since Capone first employed his squad of “American Boys” — a gang of Midwestern killers who looked more like police officers than Mafia hit men — non-Italians had occupied important positions in the Outfit. But all these men had been white. Ken Eto was not. And he wasn’t some despised underling; he was one of the bosses.

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Lost Ones

Talk to any music journalist and you’ll hear a story of a song that entranced them on first listen, only to disappear into the ether forever. For The Believer — welcome back! — Ross Scarano pulls together a veritable Moth session of such stories, from a lost Johnny Cash number to a Kelis track that lives only on YouTube. A perfect reminder that for any cultural text we consume, an iceberg of what-could’ve-been lurks below.

In 2013, her favorite artist at the time, the Atlanta rapper and heart-on-his-sleeve balladeer Future, played an in-progress version of his sophomore album Honest for the magazine’s staff. One track, a gem of brooding horniness called “Good Morning,” imprinted on her in such a way that when a version of the song, with a similar melody and different lyrics, appeared months later as the Beyoncé single “Drunk in Love,” she felt as heartsick as she did proud. Both songs were produced by Detail and seemingly written around the same time, with the bigger star unsurprisingly winning rights to its release. (Future does not have a writing credit on Beyoncé’s song.) “‘Drunk in Love’ is an incredible song,” she says, “but it felt tragic that Future never released his version, which I thought proved his talent beautifully and which I had been waiting to hear again for months.” “Good Morning” was never commercially released, but there are rips and performances of it online. A decade later, Future remains a chart topper, but the real heads will always wonder about the path not taken. 

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