Add this one to the You Know You’re Old When files: Saturday marked the 20th anniversary of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, Outkast’s double-solo album that proved to be the Atlanta duo’s last hurrah. (Please don’t mention Idlewild.) To mark the occasion, Paul Thompson goes deep into the circumstances around the project—and then, as he so often does, excavates its disjointed, transcendent result with so much acuity that you’ll wish he wrote about every album you loved. And every album you hated. And even the ones that you’re kinda conflicted about.
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was released on September 23, 2003, and tempting as it may be to frame it as the end of one era—in Outkast’s career, of course, but also an era of hip-hop, and of the CD-sales economy—it could be more accurately understood as the beginning of their long, drawn-out separation. A conscious uncoupling. The delicate balance that made the first four Outkast LPs so tantalizing had been upset and could never be recovered; in the years since this bizarre quasi-climax, each half of the group has come to sound more like the focus-grouped idea of himself than the frequently conflicted young man who appeared from Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik through Stankonia. Some of this can be ascribed to aging, some to the shifting economic incentives of music in the streaming era, and some to the way nearly all artists hit a point of diminishing invention. But for a group so frequently misread, it’s fitting that the irreparable fissure was mistaken for a crowning success.
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In which a writer falls down a rabbit hole—and into the lives of a pulp-fiction-obsessed Brooklyn couple straight out of central casting. Welcome to the world of used book collectors. A shaggy-dog story for the ages (a shaggy-cat one, at least), and a true delight.
I visited Gary at his house later that week, on one of the coldest days of the year. He was seated at the table in an Animaniacs shirt while Lucille made coffee in the kitchen, where books were not permitted. “Not even a cookbook!” she declared, like the commander of a doomed battalion.
I scanned the room. We were surrounded by glass cabinets. I spotted the first two volumes of The Sicilian, Gary’s historical saga about a boy raised by Apollodorus during the early days of the Roman Empire. The meat of the collection was in the basement, he told me.
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John Koopman worked at the San Francisco Chronicle for years—until one day, he didn’t anymore. That’s when he started learning about himself. A tight, terse, almost hard-boiled piece of remembrance that started with Economic Hardship Reporting Project and ended up at Rolling Stone.
It would be more noble to say that I smuggled drugs out of economic desperation, but that’s not true. I liked the rush. I also liked the people I dealt with, and the exposure to the human condition. Even after twenty-five years in journalism, I never knew humanity the way I did working at a strip club and moving product. In the dark, you see people close up. You learn who has a good soul and whose is muddy. You have to trust your gut. People will show themselves to you and it’s important that you listen.
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A fearless investigation into child migrant labor. Reconstructing an activist’s tragic killing. A trip back to the place you once called home. A character study dressed as a plumbing mystery. A new look at an old trope. All that and more in this week’s installment.
Jason Fagone and Julie Johnson | San Francisco Chronicle | September 19, 2023 | 9,717 words
In 1969, charismatic Mohawk activist Richard Oakes led the occupation of Alcatraz, an island that was once Ohlone land. The “invasion” was in protest of the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans, and an act of reclamation. Oakes became the face of the “Red Power” movement, inspiring protests across the country and laying the groundwork for expanding Indigenous rights. Decades later, however, his name is largely unknown. In 1972, at just 30, he was fatally shot in the woods north of San Francisco, unarmed, by a wilderness camp caretaker who claimed self-defense. After a trial in which his shooter was acquitted, his loved ones believed that Oakes had been targeted because of his Native identity and activism. Jason Fagone and Julie Johnson dig deep to reconstruct, with meticulous detail, the events leading up to Oakes’ death. (Kudos to the whole Chronicle team for the immersive design, placing the reader right there in Oakes’ final moments in the woods.) They interview family, prosecutors, and law enforcement, and draw from hundreds of government records and secret FBI files obtained through FOIA—information never revealed during the trial—to fill in the gaps. Their words alone are powerful, but the digital presentation, including portraits of fellow activists, officials who were involved in the case, and Oakes’ living family members, come together to tell an important story about a forgotten civil rights leader. —CLR
Shruti Swamy | AFAR | September 19, 2023 | 2,173 words
Shruti Swamy plumbs childhood memories of Mumbai, India, as she returns for the first time as a wife and mother. This is a lovely, striking meditation on what it means to return to a place you once knew—and to show it to those you love. Swamy’s dissonance is palpable when she struggles to be understood in Hindi and to navigate a city altered by time. She asks: “But is there a moment, a meal, an exchange that will make Mumbai legible to us?” As the young family visits markets, beaches, and street vendors, Swamy revels in the smells, sights, sounds, and tastes of the city. She recounts the pleasure of promised coconut cream for her four-year-old daughter and the street bite that made me want to book a plane ticket: “My husband will tear into a lifafa wrap from Swati Snacks, the both of us nearly shouting at the exquisite mix of mint and fat, the slow burn of chili. Like biting into art.”As a reader, it’s wonderful to watch as her persistence is rewarded: “Moment by moment, this city will teach me to stay awake to the present, to pay attention, to follow the thread of human connection, to take pleasure where it’s found.” If this is what it means to go home again, count me in. —KS
John Jeremiah Sullivan | Harper’s Magazine | August 14, 2023 | 3,700 words
I have a fear of needing to call a plumber to my house. Experience has taught me they will inevitably sigh, then inform me that whoever last ventured near my dodgy pipes was a cowboy, with hundreds of dollars now needing to be spent. My anxiety is so great that—to my immense pride—I recently fixed a running toilet myself, tying down the ballcock with a sparkly purple ribbon I found in the knickknack drawer. (A cowboy job indeed.) Obviously, I leapt to read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s delightful piece about his own plumbing woes. His innocuous opening sentence, “Here is the tale of something plumbing-related that happened at my house[,]” belies the rollercoaster journey you are about to embark on. Halfway through, I was just as invested in where that mysterious sewage smell was coming from as Sullivan. To find the solution, we have to go rogue, bringing in Greg and Fran, plumbers with “crackhead power” from the underbelly of the contractor world. Having never known of this mysterious plumber stratum, I devoured the glorious descriptions of these two men, Sullivan conjuring them from the page until I felt they stood in front of me: Fran with his buzzcut and denim culottes, bitching about Greg; Greg with his “formidable gray mustache, strong hands, and wild, piercing eyes” talking at length about bowel movements. Sullivan may be as flummoxed by plumbing issues as I am, but he is a master in character study. —CW
Kristen Arnett | Vox | September 18, 2023 | 1,634 words
Have you played the game Florida Man? It’s simple: type your birthday (month, date) and “Florida Man” into a search bar. You will be regaled (as I was) with not one, but several inane crimes committed over the years by men in Florida. As Kristen Arnett explains, “These crimes are odd and incomprehensible; the kind of behavior that someone might associate with a badly behaved toddler whose brain has yet to fully develop.” I had several to choose from; my favorite was the Florida Man who was caught on video driving down I-4 while standing up, his upper body poking through the sunroof. Arnett explains that the game is made possible because of the Sunshine Law, which makes arrest records and mugshots “readily available online for the general public to gawk and point at. If you’ve committed a crime in the Sunshine State, that information becomes accessible to everyone, everywhere, immediately.” This piece is far more than just a litany of bizarre behavior. Arnett, a third-generation Floridian, suggests that while the Florida Man meme makes it easy for outsiders to dismiss the state as the epicenter of America’s ills, we need to look deeper. “I think the harder lesson is that Florida is no different from anywhere else; the headlines just turn our hardships into a joke to make things more palatable,” she writes. “We can’t and won’t disregard the fact that we’re going to stay strange and continue to be completely, authentically ourselves; we also can’t forget the wonderful alongside the troubles.” Maybe it’s time we embraced that little bit of Florida Man in all of us. —KS
Audience Award
What was our readers’ favorite this week? The envelope, please.
Bianca Fortis and Laura Beil | ProPublica | September 12, 2023 | 8,522 words
For more than two decades, patients of an OB/GYN named Robert Hadden warned Columbia University that he was sexually inappropriate and abusive. One woman even called the police and had him arrested, but Hadden was allowed to return to work days later. In other disturbing incidents, patients describe Hadden’s colleagues brushing off his behavior, or even looking away while in the exam room. Over the years, Hadden’s superiors failed to take action. To date, more than 245 patients have alleged that the obstetrician abused them, and Columbia—a prestigious institution committed to “the highest standards of ethical conduct”—continues to aggressively fight new lawsuits from his victims. This is a piece of tremendous reporting—but it’s also deeply triggering and upsetting. —CLR
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Vauhini Vara is no stranger to AI-assisted writing: her 2021 Believer essay, “Ghosts,” was widely read and hit a nerve in so many readers, including all of us at Longreads. More than two years after publishing that piece, Vara reflects on the whole experience: what drove her to experiment with OpenAI’s GPT-3 in the first place; what she learned about text generators from co-writing the Believer essay with AI and tinkering with Sudowrite; and what she’s realized about the limitations of AI, and our current language models, in creating literature. Vara also warns us about Big Tech swallowing language itself—in the same way it’s transformed Very Human Things like friendship and community. These are poignant reflections and questions from a thoughtful writer.
In my opinion, GPT-3 had produced the best lines in “Ghosts.” At one point in the essay, I wrote about going with my sister to Clarke Beach near our home in the Seattle suburbs, where she wanted her ashes spread after she died. GPT-3 came up with this:
We were driving home from Clarke Beach, and we were stopped at a red light, and she took my hand and held it. This is the hand she held: the hand I write with, the hand I am writing this with.
My essay was about the impossibility of reconciling the version of myself that had coexisted alongside my sister with the one left behind after she died. In that last line, GPT-3 made physical the fact of that impossibility, by referring to the hand—my hand—that existed both then and now. I’d often heard the argument that AI could never write quite like a human precisely because it was a disembodied machine. And yet, here was as nuanced and profound a reference to embodiment as I’d ever read. Artificial intelligence had succeeded in moving me with a sentence about the most important experience of my life.
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In 1969, gifted and charismatic Native American activist Richard Oakes led the nonviolent occupation of Alcatraz, an act protesting the U.S. government’s treatment of Indigenous people and reclaiming of Ohlone land. Oakes became the face of the “Red Power” movement, inspiring other protests across the country. In 1972, he was shot and killed in the woods of rural Sonoma County. Through interviews with family members and law enforcement officials and access to hundreds of government documents and FBI files, Jason Fagone and Julie Johnson meticulously tell Oakes’ story, including his early activist years at San Francisco State, the events leading up to this death, and the aftermath of the manslaughter trial of Michael Oliver Morgan, the man who shot him. Fagone and Johnson’s words alone are powerful, but the animation, illustration, and photography in the story’s digital version add an effective visual layer.
Dispatches from a fracturing America spread across the front page of the Chronicle on Nov. 11, 1969. Richard Nixon’s administration railed against anti-war protesters; police in Memphis sprayed tear gas into a crowd of young Black people opposing segregation. But the lead story that day was Alcatraz. “A war party” of 14 “young Indian invaders” had claimed the island, calling themselves the Indians of All Tribes and naming Oakes their “president-elect.”
Celebrities including Jane Fonda and Anthony Quinn soon declared their support, sailing to Alcatraz one day on a boat purchased for the protesters by the band Creedence Clearwater Revival. The occupation was becoming a ’60s event, tugging at politics and pop culture. But another set of visitors went largely unnoticed by the media. In the last weeks of 1969, delegations from tribes across the country journeyed to the island, curious to see what this new nation looked like. Oakes asked these elders for guidance, and they in turn asked for advice on land fights in their own territories.
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Shruti Swamy returns to Mumbai as a wife and a mother after many childhood trips to spend time with family. In a voice that’s evocative and lyrical, Swamy braves the dissonance that time and distance can impose on those who return and is rewarded with fond, newly minted memories of food and time shared.
I remember every inch of it: the mineral smell of the staircase, the daybed where I spent hours as a child reading piles of Reader’s Digests. The cool tile floor I’d lie on when the heat was overwhelming, the dark kitchen in which some of the most spectacular meals of my life were created. The almirah in the bedroom that held my grandmother’s starched, mothball-scented saris.
There is no city more beautiful and richer with personal history to me than this one—where my parents grew up, fell in love, and left in their twenties for America. And yet, there is also no city in which I feel more out of my depth. Growing up, I’d visit for weeks at a time but rarely see anything of Mumbai. Passed like a parcel between family members, I never touched money, never went anywhere alone, and spent most of my time in the rooms of my relatives.
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