Plenty of ski towns run on the labor of year-rounders, the folks who actually live in the places most only visit. But not many ski towns are like Big Sky, Montana, where the average house runs $2.5 million and billionaires flock to private resorts in the mountains. Nick Bowlin reports from the land that time forgot—and private-equity firms bought—to tell the story of a 21st-century company town.
The immigrant workers tend to hold different jobs from the ski-slope employees, but some experiences cross these divides, notably that of having one’s employer for a landlord. Lone Mountain has spent more than $300 million on community housing and plans to build over one thousand more units. One of these projects is the Powder Light, a drab collection of stacked prefabricated boxes costing $1,700 a month per room, often shared, and backed by Lone Mountain; the 448-bed development was finished in 2023. A current Yellowstone Club employee, who had previously worked for the resort, was one of the first tenants, and he told me he experienced water pooling on the carpets and fuses blowing if the stove and oven were used at the same time. “Everything about the housing here is the most half-assed, cheaply built garbage that you can imagine,” he told me.
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Josuha Rigsby recounts his family visit to Cabbage Patch Kids’ Babyland General Hospital with understated humor. Although bemused by the experience, Rigsby still vividly describes the “birthing” of a Cabbage Patch doll. This is a highly entertaining read.
Along the back wall of the hospital, as in an ancient procession, the ground becomes more sacred. Here resides a faux-earthen mound, several feet high, made of painted plaster with geode caves recessed inside—the stuff of ‘60s-era TV sci-fi or Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Sprinkled around the mound are cabbage leaf sprouts from which protrude Cabbage Patch doll heads. If you pluck a baby from this mound, a cashier will ring it up for a mere $60, roughly double the doll’s retail price. It’s like apple picking, where you pay for the pleasure of harvesting your own pretend child.
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We are currently witnessing the largest, most consequential student protest movement in a generation. But mainstream media have given remarkably little space and airtime to the young people putting themselves on the line. Here, in their own words, gathered before the brutal crackdowns administrations and police authorized this week, are some of the protest leaders, articulating their carefully formed ideas and demands:
Nearly every student encampment has set out demands tailored to their campus. Yet common and central to each of these groups’ demands is divestment – that is, demanding their university withdraw its investments in companies that either do business with Israel or materially provide support for the occupation. Universities in the United States are massive financial institutions, who invest billions in assets to provide revenue. How big of a player are Universities in the world of finance? Columbia University’s endowment totaled $13.6 billion last year alone. Where does the money go? It goes into traditional investment portfolios meant to maximize returns; included in these portfolios are weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Some Universities have as much as $52.5 million invested in weapons manufacturing alone.
In targeting universities for divestment, student protests across the country are not about citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, nor are they a mere ideological struggle over a conflict the students themselves are divorced from; student encampments target institutions ostensibly accountable to them, in a way that aims to prevent their material support for the occupation. The ties between a university campus and the violence propagated by capital investment are close and tangible. Not only do universities pour billions of dollars into the companies providing the material means of Israeli occupation, but figures within those companies find themselves looped back into the university’s administration. For example, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, sits as an officer of the Board of Trustees for NYU, a university which violently swept its campuses own encampment demanding divestment from the company he heads. (Maeve Vitello, New York University)
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A few weeks before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Len Davis rose to face a jury. A former policeman, Davis was a big man who’d once exuded toughness and sometimes thrown himself in harm’s way on the streets. He became known around New Orleans’s Ninth Ward as Robocop, but that wasn’t his only nickname: People also called him the Desire Terrorist.
In the early 1990s, Davis earned a fearsome reputation in and around a public housing complex called the Desire Development for helping drug dealers move product and cover up violent crimes. Murder is what landed Davis in court, but the victim wasn’t in the drug game. She was a single mother who had filed a brutality complaint against Davis. The next day, he ordered a hit man to kill her.
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The murder is the most notorious of the 424 that were committed in New Orleans in 1994, the city’s deadliest year on record. After Davis was arrested, he became a national symbol of the depths of corruption and depravity the New Orleans Police Department had sunk to, and he was convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced to die. The verdict was affirmed on appeal, but the death sentence was tossed out. In 2005, a resentencing trial was scheduled to determine Davis’s fate once more.
Davis represented himself in court, delivering an opening argument and even cross-examining witnesses. Despite damning evidence to the contrary, including recorded phone conversations between him and the hit man immediately before and after the murder, Davis claimed that he was innocent, that the witnesses testifying against him were lying. “When this case is over,” he said, “you will be filled with reasonable doubt.”
The jury was unmoved. On August 9, it recommended the same punishment as the previous panel: death. A judge affirmed the recommendation two months later.
For many people in New Orleans, the resentencing marked the end of the saga of Len Davis, and news of it was all but swept from the headlines by the worst disaster in the city’s history—a disaster that spurred shocking new instances of police brutality. For at least five incarcerated men, however, the story wasn’t over. In their view, that high-profile murder case from 1994 only scratched the surface of Davis’s wrongdoing. Were it not for him, the men claimed, they might not be behind bars. In a sense, they were the Desire Terrorist’s other victims.
No one seemed interested in their side of the story. Their appeals stalled or failed. In time the men came to understand that their only chance of getting out of prison was for someone to recognize the wrong done to them and take the extraordinary steps necessary to make it right. So they waited. For 17 years after Davis’s resentencing they waited.
Part I
Locals like to point out that the most infamous cop in New Orleans history isn’t from Louisiana at all. Born in Chicago in 1964, Len Davis moved to the Crescent City with his mother upon his father’s untimely passing. After he graduated high school, Davis drove a candy truck for several years. He also racked up a criminal record, including battery charges.
At 22, Davis enrolled in the NOPD’s training academy. Amid the crack epidemic and white flight from the city, the department was desperate for recruits. It loosened employment standards, allowing some individuals with criminal histories to attend the academy, and made getting through training easier than ever. “They created a situation where if you could not pass the final exam, you could still graduate,” Felix Loicano, a former acting chief of detectives with the NOPD, said in an interview.
Davis wasn’t at the academy long before he got in trouble for unspecified reasons and was given the heave-ho. But after taking a job guarding academy property, he was allowed to reenroll. He graduated in 1988.
At the time, the NOPD was plagued by misconduct and graft. Deputies vying for the department’s top job had loyal factions committed to protecting their own. “We had the equivalent of four Mafia crime families running the police department,” a city official told The New York Times. Pay was so low—the starting salary for an officer was less than $20,000—that many cops worked security on the side. Enterprising officers known as detail brokers even hired fellow police to work gigs for clients and took a cut of their earnings. Moonlighting, which often paid well, created perverse incentives. “The allegiance becomes to this seedy, after-hours establishment that you are guarding,” historian Leonard Moore has said, “as opposed to your particular shift at the precinct.”
Meanwhile, among city residents the NOPD was known to be ruthless. Between 1985 and 1990, the federal government received 26 civil-rights complaints for every 1,000 officers on the force. That was more than 50 times the rate for the New York Police Department.
Davis landed in the NOPD’s Seventh District after finishing the academy, and in some ways he distinguished himself. Once, after responding to the scene of a mugging, the victim wrote a letter to the department praising his courtesy. In another instance, Davis talked a woman out of shooting herself and into giving him her gun. For his efforts, Davis received commendations but not promotions, a fact that may or may not have been related to the infractions that were beginning to accumulate on his employment record: ignoring orders, failing to complete paperwork.
In May 1989, Davis was transferred to the Fifth District, known as the Bloody Fifth. Violence was rising as gang recruitment and drug use proliferated in the district’s public housing, including the Desire Development. One criminal group did business out of a black pickup emblazoned with the word “Homicide” in gold lettering.
On July 19, 1991, while Davis was chasing three armed suspects, a bullet shattered the windshield of his cruiser, causing him to lose control of the vehicle. He spun into a fence, then burst out of the car with his gun raised and collared one of the suspects. A moment later, a gun fired and Davis crumpled, groaning from a gut shot. The suspect he’d grabbed tried to shake free, but Davis managed to pin him down until backup arrived, all while blood flooded the front of his uniform.
Davis received a medal for sustaining injury in the line of duty, and after three months of recovery he rejoined the force. His return was far from triumphant. He cycled through a succession of partners. He had an alcohol problem. He was accused of brutality, physical intimidation, and stealing from the department. Once, when he was stopped for driving on the shoulder of a road, Davis threatened to beat up the officer who’d pulled him over. In 1992, he was suspended from work for 51 days on battery charges after he assaulted a woman with his flashlight, leaving her with a head wound and two black eyes. According to Davis, she had criticized and hit him as he made a drug arrest outside her house.
Attorney Carol A. Kolinchak, who later represented Davis, would argue that no one could have emerged from her client’s tribulations as a cop unaffected. “It’s well documented. It’s in [the] literature, it’s been published by experts who have studied law enforcement,” Kolinchak said in court. “The symptoms are common and they’re universal: stress, irritability, aggression, depression, alcohol, substance abuse, and increases in citizen complaints.”
At some point, Davis’s behavior became devious. His cousins Little June and Charles Butan dealt drugs in New Orleans, and they began funneling cash to Davis for accompanying them as they transported their product. He came to these jobs armed and in his NOPD uniform. “I’m sure not the police no more,” Davis once told a girlfriend. “They lost me a long fucking time ago. I’m on this bitch strictly to get what I can get, use my job to benefit me.”
Davis wasn’t the only New Orleans cop who crossed the line between enforcing the law and breaking it. The NOPD’s vice squad, for instance, was well on its way to being disbanded for thefts and shakedowns—the deputy in charge would eventually be convicted of snatching cash from the till during raids on strip joints and bars in the French Quarter. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Davis found a co-conspirator, another corrupt cop to be his partner in crime.
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Writer Chloé Cooper Jones has sacral agenesis, a congenital disability that affects the lower spine. In this beautiful essay—in which she describes her participation in a dance work choreographed by her boyfriend, Matty Davis—she writes about fear and disgust as forms of self-protection, opening up to and trusting a partner, and expanding the definition of “movement.”
I asked him how limited he would be if the partner in the rehearsal room had a body like mine. I was shocked to hear my own question, and I felt as though someone else had asked it. “Easy Beauty,” the book I’d spent the last year promoting, was in part about my reluctance to acknowledge my disability, preferring to abandon the notion of a body altogether and lead instead with my ideas, words or accomplishments in conversations with others. I had charted my attempts to do this less, to be more in tune with my identity as a disabled woman. But the lessons of self-acceptance that I had learned and written about felt puny and distant in the face of this hypothetical — me in a room, dancing.
“Do you ever watch the New York City Marathon?” he asked. I did not. “I cry watching the runners,” he told me. It was not the ones who won or broke records that moved him so deeply, but the ones who were, regardless of their position in the pack, simply reaching for and ascending to their own personal physical pinnacle. This was the kind of movement he was interested in. Less compelling to him was a history of dance traditions that, like ballet, imposed a set of movements onto bodies — the movements themselves being the pinnacle to be attained, and attainment possible for a tiny sliver of existing human bodies, and even then, only briefly. That common practice, what I associated with dance, was not interesting to him and could not be further from the center of his approach.
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Stuart Potts lives in a one-bed flat in Middleton, a town in Greater Manchester, and ever since he moved in, he has let homeless people come and stay. This unregulated charity work is clearly a means for Potts to keep his own demons at bay, but his efforts for others still make for a heartwarming story.
Still, when someone from a local charity told them about a man putting homeless people up in his own house, they were suspicious. “I thought he was just going to be some fucking … ” Jade paused, looking for the right word, “teacher or something.” But when they met for a pint to scope him out, Jade was immediately reassured. “He’d been on the streets, and he’d been to prison. He was really normal, we just felt comfortable. He’s not judging.” They stayed at his flat that night.
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In this interview, acclaimed author Salman Rushdie speaks with Erica Wagner about the deeply personal costs of championing free speech, the process of writing his new memoir, Knife, optimism as a disease, and the comedic foreshadowing of the attack that nearly took his life.
The task you undertook is different from therapy, but what did you gain from writing in this way?
Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor says that you shouldn’t treat illness as metaphor: illness is illness and metaphor is metaphor. And I felt something the same about this: writing is writing and therapy is therapy, and I had a very good therapist. But what it did do, I feel, is it gave me back control of the narrative. So, instead of being a man lying on a stage in a pool of blood, I’m a man writing a book about a man lying on a stage in a pool of blood, and that felt like it gave me back the power, you know? My story. My story that I’m telling in my way. And that felt good.
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