An insider account of the battle to stop the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as “Cop City,” in a Georgia forest:
On a Tuesday in early September, the city council hosts a public meeting over Zoom where Atlantans speak on the record for seventeen hours. At least two-thirds object to the police academy plans. Neighbors hate the snap-crackle-pop of gunshots from the firing range the APF has already built on the property, and just imagine how much louder and more frequent this will be when the police move the whole arsenal over. A public school teacher asks why the police department let their last training center collapse. What are their priorities? DSA members pose the decision as an existential question, not only for Atlanta, but for America. The old ultimatum of socialism or barbarism has been reframed by young organizers as care or cops. They accuse the city council of divesting from public services, sowing poverty and desperation, and then swelling the ranks of the police to keep it under control.
The following day, the city council votes ten to four to approve the lease of the land to the Atlanta Police Foundation anyway. The mayor makes a statement: It “will give us physical space to ensure that our officers and firefighters are receiving 21st-century training, rooted in respect and regard for the communities they serve.” We blink past the obvious hypocrisy, drawn instead to that watchword training, deceptively neutral, the ostensible justification of a million liberal reforms, because who could argue against training? The police after all are like dogs: best when they obey. But obey what?
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Is loneliness a precondition of addiction, a byproduct, or both? In this beautiful essay at The Paris Review, Richard Deming looks at addiction as a “disease of the lonely.”
Phillip Seymour Hoffman?
He filled me in on the details, about how the actor, a man three years older than I, had been found in his apartment bathroom, a syringe hanging from his arm. Hoffman had been to rehab twice in the two years prior, but largely that had been kept quiet. Until that time, his more than twenty years of sobriety were often mentioned in articles and interviews, perhaps especially because Hoffman had a penchant for playing sad, lonely, sometimes desperate, sometimes rageful men, the very people who were drunk or about to go on a weekend bender after years of sobriety. He played those roles from the inside out.
Addiction is a disease of loneliness,” a recovering addict in Vancouver tells the journalist Johann Hari in Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. What isn’t clear is whether he meant that addiction, by its very nature, isolates a person from everyone else, or if loneliness is one of the preconditions for addiction. The loneliness that I had wrestled with since I was a little kid stood at the core of my substance abuse. In my own case, I felt that drinking was a way to stop fighting the loneliness that I could neither solve nor escape, neither outthink nor outrun.
What unnerved me about Hoffman’s death, then, was that I recognized the latent potency of loneliness and how it can continue to develop, even as it is being curbed or kept under wraps. It moves quietly and often exploits the fact that we are slow to recognize it in ourselves. His death was, for me, a catalyst. That’s why I’ve now begun to try to understand loneliness, why I am seeking out its themes and variations. I may not be able to cure it, but I can learn how it thinks; I can figure out what it thinks about, there in the dark.
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One of my favorite get-to-know-you questions is, “What’s the first concert you went to?” Whether a cool act or a cringy one, talking about that experience always stirs people’s emotions—and I get a better understanding of the person telling the story. At that moment, I see a glimpse of their younger self.
My first concert was Depeche Mode, the masters of 1980s industrial-tinged synth pop. I remember buzzing with anticipation alongside my sister Rachel, then howling with thousands of our fellow teenagers when the lights dropped. As the band walked on stage, a distinctive series of notes echoed through the suburban arena, and the song “Black Celebration” began. We were all dressed in black, ready to celebrate. It was perfect.
A few decades later, Rachel and I took our daughters to their first concert: the boy-band phenomenon One Direction. The girls liked their music but were hardly superfans; my sister and I were the ones who really wanted to go. (An attempt to recapture our lost youth, perhaps.) The band seemed aware of this intergenerational dynamic; at one point, Harry Styles took the mic and thanked all “the mums and grandmums who drove tonight.” It was both mortifying and hilarious. I hope my daughter enjoys telling that story one day.
Thanks to pent-up, post-COVID demand, it’s been a great year for concerts. Ed Sheeran set attendancerecords during his recent United States tour, and Taylor Swift and Beyoncé did their share of filling stadiums, with Swift’s The Eras Tour already the highest-grossing concert film of all time. There’s something about losing yourself in a communal experience that’s immensely appealing in this age of virtual meetings and not-so-social media. We want to see the artists we love in person. We want to believe they’re singing directly to us.
With streaming services paying minuscule amounts per song played, most musicians can no longer support themselves through recordings alone, so touring has become a financial necessity. While icons such as Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan can still draw a crowd by simply singing on a stage, other musical acts lure audiences with special effects, multiple costume changes, and eye-popping sets. The singer Pink even does high-flying aerial stunts during her shows.
This reading list takes you on a mini-tour of different concert experiences, from moments of emotional connection to high-tech extravaganzas that are creating an entirely new kind of show.
For Essence editor Malaika Jabali, Beyoncé’s album Renaissance was a lifeline, “a jolt of infectious energy pumped into our veins after two years of angst and despair.” She considered herself lucky to get tickets to see her musical idol in Toronto, but seeing the show only made her want to go again—and again. She even caught a last-minute flight from Atlanta to Tampa when she was able to get resale tickets hours before the Florida show.
Jabali’s essay starts with a confession: “My name is Malaika, and I have a problem.” By framing Beyoncé’s concerts as a form of addiction, she explains how fandom can turn into near-obsession. Why else would anyone pay so much for last-minute tickets, let alone a madcap rush to the airport?
Before reading this piece, I’d forgotten how much it means to see one of your musical idols in person. The Renaissance tour, Jabali writes, was a tribute to Beyoncé’s most die-hard followers, celebrating influences and references that resonated on a personal level.
Beyoncé’s appeal—especially for many Black people and queer people—extends beyond her stage performances. Outside of two conventional R&B/pop albums earlier in her career . . . Billboard hits haven’t been Beyoncé’s priority.
It’s easy to follow a formula to pop stardom. Instead, she started to take the harder, riskier routes. She made songs that elevated every corner of Black music geographically and sonically, keying in on genres that we revered from house parties and HBCU homecomings, to cookouts and queer ballrooms, from D.C. to Detroit. And she put them on world stages, regardless of their potential for commercial success.
How does one of the world’s longest-running rock bands keep themselves relevant? By performing a one-of-a-kind show in a one-of-a-kind venue. U2 was the debut act of the recently opened Sphere in Las Vegas, and music critic Chris Willman says it was an apt pairing, “the apotheosis of a bigger-is-better ethos that has regularly occurred throughout the band’s career, and which they are not about to give up now that they’re in their 60s for any back-to-basics false modesty.”
As a U2 listener from way back, I was curious about their latest reinvention; if money were no object, I’d have been dancing in the Sphere alongside Willman on opening night. Reading this account was the next best thing. Willman’s descriptions of the visuals that accompany each song are particularly vivid, but the show’s real brilliance, he writes, comes from the band’s ability to connect to its audience, despite the cavernous space.
The group that has spent so much of its recording output urging you to think about God, and other only slightly less weighty matters, is in Sin City mostly to make you say: “Oh my God.” And we can vouch that we were hearing that utterance, from people above, below and around us, in a kind of reactive, quadraphonic effect that nearly matched Sphere’s vaunted 22nd-century sound system.
This being U2, they would like to be seen as an overgrown club band at their core, at the same time they are producing the rock blockbuster to end all blockbusters. Wanting to have it both ways has worked for the group before, and it works again, in this setting. . . . It’s a cliche to say that U2 can achieve intimacy in the midst of the most ridiculous extravaganza, but nobody in rock history has done a better job of taking visual and aesthetic dynamics to extremes.
Like plenty of others in the COVID lockdown era, Padya Paramita dived into the music of K Pop superstars BTS as a form of escape. Even before the world shut down, she hadn’t been sure how to reconcile her conservative Bangladeshi upbringing with the gender non-conformity she’d experienced at her American college: “I struggled to share my pronouns and was confused about what they even were.” Being isolated at home only made that confusion catastrophically worse.
Then she watched BTS play an online concert that was live-streamed to almost a million fans around the world—and a performance of the song “Filter” by singer/dancer Park Jimin brought her to tears. For me, this piece was a moving example of the power live music can have, even when you’re watching a concert performed halfway around the world.
Jimin reminded me of myself — I was born 75 days before him, 2500 miles away. Yet both of us had tried hard to please society and performed gender in a way we weren’t meant to put on. It both took us time to realize that society’s gender norms weren’t the law, there was no “male” or “female” when it came to fashion and behavior. We would still be loved, even if we took the risk of expressing ourselves in a real way.
Woodstock in 1969 was an era-defining event, paving the way for a new kind of concert: multiple bands playing outside over multiple days, to an audience of young people who were willing to put up with rain, mud, sunburn, and questionable portable toilets. Today, festivals such as Coachella and Lollapalooza are big businesses, with VIP tents sponsored by corporate brands.
The Glastonbury Festival in England is one such success story, but as El Hunt writes in this appreciation, it started with “1500 hippies, five dogs, and one goat.” The festival’s co-creator, Michael Eavis, was a dairy farmer with “grand ambitions and a hefty overdraft,” who thought hosting an event on his land would be a good way to make money. (It didn’t quite work out that way.)
Interviewing some of the original attendees, Hunt paints a picture of a more carefree time, when festivalgoers not only didn’t worry about pulling together Instagram-worthy outfits but often arrived with no luggage at all. Their memories take us back to a long-gone spirit of open-minded adventure when no one was quite sure what they’d find when they reached the festival grounds.
Entry for punters cost £1, the equivalent of £5 in today’s money, and for that you got a carton of milk from the dairy farm.
There was no super fence to keep out gatecrashers. In fact, when a group of hippies walked all the way to the farm from London thinking it was a free festival, the crowd chipped in for their entry fees. Advertising for the event was minimal, and info was spread by word-of-mouth. Attendance was far lower than the 3000 people expected, and Eavis didn’t break even, let alone earn enough to clear his overdraft. “It hasn’t been a disaster,” he told the BBC afterwards. “But it hasn’t been as good as I hoped.”
Even at the height of their late-’70s/early-’80s fame, the Swedish pop phenomenon ABBA played relatively few live shows. As other nostalgia acts reunited in recent years, ABBA resisted the lure of a hefty comeback-tour paycheck; as music writer Paul Sinclair puts it, “45 years from their heyday, all four members are in their seventies and have concluded that no one wants, or needs, to see ‘old ABBA’ on stage, least of all them!”
But was there a way to get “young ABBA” back? Sinclair describes the journey that led to ABBA Voyage, a London show starring the “ABBAtars,” 3D virtual images that perform alongside a live band. Why would anyone want to sit through an entire concert’s worth of holograms, I wondered? Then I read Sinclair’s review of the opening-night performance. Like me, Sinclair went in full of doubts, which were quickly swept away by a wave of ABBA-licious magic.
ABBA Voyage is like some kind of wonderland. For 90 minutes you believe the unbelievable. I was concerned that I might have to work hard to enjoy the evening, but actually the suspension of disbelief is easy. Why? Because ABBA in their primes are standing right in front of you. Your brain might be trying to tell you it’s not real, but your heart, your databank of emotions – love, joy, regret, sadness – are tripping on overload. . . .
It seems inconceivable – and ultimately become irrelevant – that we are witnessing images on a 65-million-pixel flat screen. I’m still not sure I believe it. When the show starts, the lighting in the 3000-seat arena drops very low –but not so low that you can’t see the other people you are sitting amongst. This sense of a communal experience – laughing, singing, and crying and dancing to ABBA with other people – was very important to producer Svana Gisla, and I can understand why. Total darkness is too isolating. It’s these kinds of details that make all the difference.
Any time large numbers of people come together in a confined space, there’s a chance of things going wrong. When the Rolling Stones decided to play a show at the Altamont Speedway in California and hired the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang as security, it led to one of the first, most notorious concert disasters: a fan was stabbed to death while trying to rush the stage.
Sadly, the death toll has risen significantly since then. For this piece, Moreland interviewed the survivors of four different tragedies: the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan theater in Paris; the suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England; the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida; and the shooting at the Route 91 country-music festival in Las Vegas. In their own words, these witnesses describe how the experience affected the way they process large, public events. Some always look for an exit route when they go to a new venue; others check how much security is evident.
What’s striking is how many of those people still go to concerts. Before reading these accounts, I assumed that anyone who’d experienced such traumatic violence would stay away from crowded events entirely. A few have, of course, but I was touched and inspired by the stories of those who’ve refused to give up on live music. For Steve Munoz, a survivor of the Las Vegas shooting, going to concerts has even become a form of healing.
Before that weekend, I’d never been to a music festival before, but I’m definitely more obsessed with going to concerts now. Listening to country music was a big part of it. I have all kinds of tastes when it comes to music, but ever since Route 91, I’ve only really listened to country. I felt like if I did not listen to music, I was giving that guy control because I would be associating all the evil that had happened with the music of that night. We all heal and deal with things differently, but for me, the music was what helped me get past the darkness of that night.
Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day.
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Salmon stocks are declining in the Yukon. Could global warming be connected? For Grist, Max Graham talks to elders, harvesters, fishery officials, and scientists to learn more about this complicated problem and its potentially devastating repercussions.
There have been salmon in the Yukon, the fourth-longest river in North America, for as long as there have been people on its banks. The river’s abundance helped Alaska earn its reputation as one of the last refuges for wild salmon, a place where they once came every year by the millions to spawn in pristine rivers and lakes after migrating thousands of miles. But as temperatures in western Alaska and the Bering Sea creep higher, the Yukon’s salmon populations have plunged.
Salmon are vital to the river’s Yup’ik and Athabascan communities as a source of nutrients and a symbol of cultural identity. Dense with protein and fat, Yukon kings are highly nutritious. To swim as many as 2,000 miles upriver, against the current — the world’s longest salmon migration — the fish put on huge stores of fat, some bulking up to 90 pounds. (Their journey is equal to running an ultramarathon every day for a month without stopping for a snack.)
But salmon are notoriously difficult to study. They spawn in fresh water, then spend most of their lives far out in the Pacific, an area dubbed the “black box” because it’s so vast and poorly understood. Most salmon research — in Alaska and along the entire Pacific Coast — is focused on streams and lakes, where it’s easier to study their habitat, sample the water, and count stocks.
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Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry, is uniquely suited to attest to hallucinogens’ psychological benefits. But as it turns out, all that mind expansion might be completely independent of the whole melting-walls, I-see-the-oneness-of-everything experience. In The Atlantic, he details how and why that is—as well as some of the progress being made.
I don’t mean to discount the delight and power of a transcendent hallucination. Many people who’ve tripped on psychedelics describe the experience as among the most meaningful of their life. And in several studies of psilocybin for depression, the intensity of the trip correlates with the magnitude of the therapeutic effect. A trip is an extraordinary, consciousness-expanding experience that can offer the tripper new insight into her life and emotions. It also feels pretty damn good. But it’s far from the only effect the drugs have on the human brain.
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This week’s edition highlights a series of dispatches from Gaza, a true-crime story about a family of turtle hunters, an essay on the literal messiness of death, a portrait of the last lighthouse keeper in the US, and a can’t-miss profile of a legendary basketball coach with a complicated legacy.
Atef Abu Saif | The Washington Post | October 30, 2023 | 5,279 words
This week marks a month since, in response to attacks by Hamas, Israel launched a campaign of unconscionable violence against the Palestinian people. As of this writing, Israel has slaughtered more than 10,000 men, women, and children. Much has been written about the unfolding genocide—it should not be controversial to use that word—and this stark diary of life under siege is among the most arresting. A raw draft of history, its contents began as voice notes that Atef Abu Saif, a novelist and the minister of culture for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, sent to friends abroad. He was in Gaza, enjoying a morning swim, when the bombing began, and he describes the horrors of the present through the crucial lens of the past. “I often think about the time I was shot as a kid, during the first intifada, and how my mother told me I actually died for a few minutes before being brought back to life,” he says. “Maybe I can do the same this time.” This memory, like many in the diary, is a stark reminder that Israel has oppressed Palestinians in a system of apartheid built on the heels of the mass dispossession of their land 75 years ago. And that is the wellspring: the violence that begets more violence in a devastating cycle. “Just as life is a pause between two deaths,” Atef Abu Saif says, “Palestine, as a place and as an idea, is a timeout in the middle of many wars.” —SD
Sonia Smith | Texas Monthly | November 7, 2023 | 5,973 words
I was hooked from the first line of Sonia Smith’s true-crime tale about the elusive alligator snapper—a large species of turtle found in the southeast US—and the Louisiana family of prolific hunters who poached them for decades. The snapper was declared endangered in the ’70s in Texas, which allowed a protected population to multiply. But that didn’t stop the Dietzes from crossing the border to capture and smuggle them home to sell, the carloads of turtles so heavy they’d sometimes blow out the engine or overwhelm the brakes. Smith’s piece unravels like an engrossing movie. The Dietz relatives, whose lives are deeply embedded in the bayou, are fascinating characters, and so is the Marine-turned-wildlife inspector who grows determined to catch them. My favorites, though, are the two enormous turtles, Brutus and Caesar, who are undoubtedly the most memorable characters by far. —CLR
James McNaughton | Guernica | November 6, 2023 | 5,369 words
James McNaughton’s brother Conor died of an overdose at 27, relapsing after two years of sobriety during which he built a successful roofing business. McNaughton bookends this essay with scenes where he and his family are clearing out Conor’s apartment, literally cleaning up what his brother left behind. Death and grief are messy, and Conor’s passing was no different. But in the face of the sheer force of death, it’s the subtlety of McNaughton’s writing that will knock you flat: “We stopped by Publix and rented a Rug Doctor. We signed a contract on the counter that said we would return it clean.” That last sentence is filthy with nuance, as is the whole piece. McNaughton deftly juxtaposes those there to help with those who prey on vulnerable people like Conor, struggling to stay sober. He exposes the scurrying cockroaches using Conor to further their own agenda, those out to make a quick buck off a distressed sale, off the distressed family of the deceased. This is by no means an easy read, whether you’ve lost someone dear to you or not. But sometimes braving what’s dark and messy—equipped with only words as a beam of light to shine on the dirty work of grief—is the one way you can try to get clean. —KS
Dorothy Wickenden | The New Yorker | October 30, 2923 | 4,500 words
Sally Snowman is the 70th keeper in the history of Boston Light lighthouse. She is also the first woman. And the last. When Snowman retires, the station will be “unmanned”—“unwomaned,” as she puts it—and Boston Light will go the way of many a lighthouse before it. (The United States currently has about 850 lighthouses, but only half are active, and these use automated eclectic lamps.) In this lovely ode to a dying profession, Dorothy Wickenden looks at the history of Boston Light: tragic deaths, minimal pay, unbearable loneliness, and madness. It’s a ride. There’s also stuff on the mechanics of lighthouse lenses, if you’re into that sort of thing, but for me, it was Wickenden’s honest descriptions of lightkeeper life, with only the “moan of the foghorn and the ceaseless crashing of the waves” for company, that drew me in. A piece of history worth remembering. —CW
Kevin Koenig | GQ Magazine | November 7, 2023 | 6,248 words
I spent this past weekend in the college town where I grew up. This college town also happens to be where legendary basketball coach Bob Knight cemented his complicated legacy. (Yes, I was at the game where he threw the chair.) Through three national championships and more wins than any college coach at the time, he loomed over the place like a god—a temperamental, wrathful god, but a god all the same. After Knight died last week, a deluge of remembrances followed. To a one, they celebrated the man’s accomplishments and acknowledged his flaws. Yet none of them came close to capturing him the way Kevin Koenig’s 2015 profile in Angler’s Journal did. Three days with Knight fishing in the Bahamas. Three days of witnessing his locker-room joviality giving way to a tempest. Three days of conversation and combat, drama and détente. It’s a portrait that feels complete, and a portrait I never thought I’d read. I missed it the first time around; thankfully, GQ reprinted it this week, with a foreword from Koenig unpacking the aftermath of his warts-and-all approach. If you love sports, it’s a can’t-miss. Even if you don’t, it’s still mandatory reading. Rarely these days do profiles steep you in a sense of place, but Koenig’s bucks that trend. You’ll feel the spray in your face, the sun on your arms—and in the many moments where Koenig’s questions encounter Knight’s volatility, the burn of shame on your neck. —PR
Luc Rinaldi | Toronto Life | October 31, 2023 | 6,588 words
A detailed investigation into the ease of buying a “suicide kit” online and the forums that peddle them. Luc Rinaldi focuses on the case study of Kenneth Law—who built his business during the pandemic—and the people who have used his kits to die. A difficult read, but one that sheds light on a dark part of the web that needs awareness. —CW
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Chances are you didn’t read Kevin Koenig’s profile of legendary college basketball coach Bob Knight when it ran in Anglers Journal in 2015. Good thing, then, that GQ syndicated the piece this week after Knight’s recent death. Whether or not you’re a sports fan, this is the kind of profile that doesn’t come around often: intimate, unvarnished, and content to spool out a three-day encounter with all the patience of a fly fisher.
Think of the strongest, most charismatic personality you’ve ever met. Now multiply it by 10. That’s Bob Knight. He is constantly testing people. Bullying, cajoling, charming, asking pointed questions out loud so everyone can hear. One minute he will lean over conspiratorially and whisper a joke in your ear. You will laugh, because Knight really is a funny bastard. You will think, This man really likes me. Then you will ask him a question he doesn’t quite like the bend of. And he will look you square in the eye with nothing short of malice and go stone silent. You will think, Wow, this guy actually hates me. Truth be told, in my five days with Knight I was never quite sure where I stood with him, which is ironic, since Knight is famous for not mincing words. His naked contempt for the media is no secret. He calls us “the press,” and spits it out like it’s an epithet.
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