In postwar Austria, a psychologist named Maria Nowak-Vogl ran a mysterious psychiatric facility where “difficult” children were sent. With help from a friend and journalist, Margaret Talbot, Evy Mages mines memories of her time at this child-observation station in the mid-seventies, remembering all the abuse that happened there. Nowak-Vogl was a well-respected academic; she was also trained by Nazis and believed in repressive practices and cruel punishments to make children compliant and “socially desirable,” including administering epiphysan, a shot meant to suppress sexual urges. Talbot accompanies Mages to Austria to learn more about Nowak-Vogl and the villa—which operated from the mid-fifties until the late-eighties—as well as her own family history. This story is as horrific and dark as it sounds. Amazingly, though, Mages has come out the other side, now helping other victims connect with each other and making it easier for them to report the abuse they experienced as children.
A news article about the commission’s findings described the villa as a combination of “home, prison, and testing clinic.” The commission had reviewed medical records and reported something shocking: children had been injected with epiphysan, an extract derived from the pineal glands of cattle which veterinarians used to suppress estrus in mares and cows. Nowak-Vogl, a conservative Catholic, had wanted to see if epiphysan would suppress sexual feelings in children, as well as discourage masturbation, thus rendering her charges more “manageable.” Masturbation—among both adolescents and young children, who use it to self-soothe—was a preoccupation of Nowak-Vogl’s. So was bed-wetting. Her staff was instructed to keep charts documenting urination and bowel movements, and to check children’s underwear “with the eyes or the nose.” Schreiber described her as being “on a crusade against masturbation and sexual excitedness.”
The more that Evy read, the angrier she became. Nearly four thousand children? Until 1987? Eight or so similar facilities had operated in Austria after the Second World War. How many thousands of children had spent time in repressive psychiatric institutions like hers? At all the facilities, confused children were brusquely evaluated for “misbehavior.” But only the Sonnenstrasse villa was so consumed with stamping out sexuality.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/idVfhsb
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/TKxfUaW
One man’s search into the surprising reasons why the beloved guerrilla cookie disappeared from store shelves in Madison, Wisconsin, a mere 20 years after they were introduced in the 1970s.
They were a dense, moist granola cookie. They had a sheen on top and were dark on the bottom. They were called “whole meal” cookies; usually one was enough. They came in a plastic bag of six—or was it four?—and the pale yellow label that I remember was hand-lettered with a couple of drawn asterisks or stars and the admonition: “chew slowly.” Everyone agrees that rolled oats were the main ingredient. I think they contained rolled wheat flakes, but others say cracked wheat. I remember raisins, and shredded coconut, and a mixture of honey and molasses. They were sweet enough to be addictive, but not in the way commercial cookies are, where you eat one and then another and another.
During our meeting, I failed to ask him the key question: What exactly were these “principles” he’d written about that were tied up with the creation of the Guerrilla Cookie? Of course, what I also wanted to know was: Would he share the recipe with a friend who gained his trust? A friend who had no intention of commercializing the recipe but just wanted to recreate a remembered taste?
In our unfolding correspondence and further conversations, it became clear the answer was no. We spoke by phone a month after our visit—he had a prepaid phone card he would use when he went into town. He revealed that he had been in touch with a local baker who was asking him to share the recipe. “In some ways, he’s a kindred spirit,” he said, but he was reluctant to describe the specifics of their negotiations. The conversation turned again to history, and then to technology. Citing Neil Postman, Ted said, “I’m not opposed to technology, I’m opposed to technopoly.” He understood that the convergence of big business with technology was the road to success for all consumer goods and seemed to take pride that he had run his bakery without increasing mechanization.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/dhjoKU0
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/TKxfUaW
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.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/34HwWlT
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/TKxfUaW
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.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/HOoCT86
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/TKxfUaW
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.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/dqaohVp
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/Mvc3bzd
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
from Longreads https://ift.tt/0TRkQNi
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/Mvc3bzd
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.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/aild6jL
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/Mvc3bzd
