Sally Montgomery takes us on a fascinating journey of self-discovery as she learns how to free dive. In pushing the limits of her physical abilities, she discovers a new identity and redefines her relationship with the sea.
I was anthropologically fascinated by why people might want to do something that seemed so counterintuitive: to hold their breath and fight all instincts to breathe in order to reach a new level of immersion.
I AM MOVING DOWN slowly. At times I close my eyes to relax. There is no rush to the bottom.
Compared to scuba divers, who are laden with heavy oxygen tanks and take breaths that reverberate bubbles and noise, I move quietly, freely, gracefully. “It makes you feel like you are from the sea,” Liv says.
At around 10 meters deep, I reach a point where my buoyancy cancels out. I neither sink nor float. Below that, the water starts pulling me down. At these depths, freedivers can enter a free fall.
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If you’ve seen any docuseries set in jails or prisons recently, you may have seen incarcerated people holding tablets. As Philip Vance Smith II writes from inside a medium-security prison, these aren’t just telecom devices to handle phone and payment services. They also deliver movies and television—at costs that vary from facility to facility, but are consistent in their exorbitance.
The high cost of entertainment falls on families of the incarcerated more than us because we can’t earn much money behind bars. Most jobs in North Carolina prisons pay 40¢, 70¢, or $1 per day—so a streaming bundle could cost a prisoner two weeks’ worth of income, or more. We simply can’t afford the price of entertainment. The astronomical fees that prison-tech companies charge are aimed at our families, who want to help us while we are incarcerated.
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Columbia Law Students for Palestine; CUNY Law Student Against Genocide; Maeve Vitello; Rita W. Wang; Mehrdad Dariush, Chisato Kimura, Chloe Miller, and Rachel Vogel; Alaa Hajyahia and Seetha Tan | The Law and Political Economy Project | May 2, 2024 | 4,342 words
If you read one thing this week about the protest movement sweeping US college campuses, make it this. Drowned out by hysterical concerns about campus safety and anti-Semitism—terms that the mainstream media is largely (and irresponsibly) allowing the opposition to the movement to define—are the protesters’ voices and specific demands. Despite what CNN would have you think, these aren’t impetuous children screaming about a conflict halfway across the world they know little about and have no way of influencing. These are young people who, in the tradition of student opposition to South African apartheid and other odious regimes of the past, know full well that they can have an impact by demanding that their institutions divest from weapons manufacturers and other entities that are currently enabling the genocide in Gaza. They represent a generation that, in no small part thanks to the education they’ve received at the schools now inviting police to brutalize them, sees clearly how various systems of violence and extraction—colonialism and capitalism, for instance—are intertwined. In this collection of short pieces, protesters at Columbia, NYU, Yale, and the City College of New York explain in their own words why they are putting themselves on the line. They know the stakes, and they know what they are capable of. “When students link arms with faculty, New Haven residents, encampments nationwide united under the vision of the ‘Popular University for Gaza,’ and in ultimate solidarity with Palestinians, they make possible a different kind of university that leaves the current administration and Trustees behind—to their great fear,” write four Yale law students. —SD
Chloé Cooper Jones | The New York Times Magazine | April 19, 2024 | 4,755 words
I would normally dismiss a story with such a headline, but the combination of dance and disability in the dek made me stop and look. I’m glad I did, because Cooper Jones’ writing is gorgeous, and the perspective she shares of her partner, choreographer Matty Davis, is inspiring. Cooper Jones has sacral agenesis, a congenital condition that affects the lower spine. Before she met Davis, she believed she lived in a body excluded from most types of movement, finding refuge in fear and disgust as forms of self-protection. (When she’s introduced to Davis’ work in a video online, she describes her response as a mix of disgust and fascination.) In her 2023 memoir, Easy Beauty, she discusses her reluctance to acknowledge her disability. In this piece, she doesn’t focus so much on her body’s physical limitations; she uses simple yet telling words like “clenched” and “curled” to describe its default position. She reflects honestly about the grief in her life—her mother’s deterioration from cancer, her stepfather’s death, her husband’s infidelity—but it’s her writing of Davis as she rehearses with him in preparation for a dance performance, and his freeing definition of movement, that’s truly enlightening. “Movement doesn’t need to be some big leg swing or jump,” he tells her. “It’s walking the dog. It’s us making love. It can include thinking and loss and change.” I tend to save favorite lines from essays in a note app, and after reading this piece, I filled a page with so many insights—ones that challenge my own ideas about dance, mobility, and the interplay of bodies within a physical space. —CLR
Nick Bowlin | Harper’s Magazine | April 15, 2024 | 5,450 words
It wasn’t so long ago that the uneven distribution of wealth had distributed itself somewhat evenly across the Mountain West: Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Sun Valley, Idaho; Telluride, Colorado. But as Nick Bowlin sketches out in this Harper’s feature, nothing quite stacks up to Big Sky, Montana. A private resort socked away above the town counts numerous billionaires among its members, and even down below the average home price clocks in at $2.5 million. Boom times for the Gulfstream crowd aren’t the real point, though. Instead, Bowlin chips away the private-equity varnish to reveal the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Big Sky has always run on the labor of ski-resort employees, but now, those employees are pushed into company-owned converted motels or faraway towns where they still need to work multiple jobs to keep a foothold as the cost of living rises precipitously. Meanwhile, the town itself isn’t really a town at all, but a hodgepodge of homeowners’ associations and other organizations that approximate the work of a mayor or city council—neither of which exist in Big Sky. This is what a company town looks like in the 21st century: not just a place where inhabitants live and work for a corporate behemoth, but where they scrape by in service of the Tres Comas Club in exchange for access to the natural resource that drew them there in the first place. —PR
Bathsheba Demuth | Emergence Magazine | September 16, 2021 | 4,011 words
Most stories follow a familiar pattern, with a beginning, middle, and end. Our place in the story of the earth is unclear, as Bathsheba Demuth writes in this keenly observed essay for Emergence Magazine. Demuth is an author I follow and I was happy to stumble on this story I missed in 2021. She has an uncanny ability to find and convey the beauty she encounters outdoors in the North. Her pieces not only educate me; they, for a time, satiate my never-ending hunger for excellent writing. Demuth accompanies Stanley Njootli on a trip to hunt a moose that will feed them and other members of the community in Old Crow, Yukon. Traveling the Ch’izhìn Njik river, they notice significant erosion along the banks, the collapse of which sends plants and trees and loam into the water. “Banks had lost all coherence, like a bag of flour slashed open. . . . The earth is ceasing to cohere: how to make that coherent? The way I know to do this is with the pattern of a story,” she writes. “But what we see on the river has no end. We are telling from a middle or a beginning, with no view of where it will resolve.” As a white environmental historian with a couple of decades under her belt in the North, Demuth recognizes her position as a relative newcomer. She questions whether the Anthropocene—earth’s current epoch, the first irrevocably influenced by human activity—will become the end of its story. “‘Anthropocene’ is a word but also a story. A story where the hero is not an individual but a species. In it, Homo sapiens carry a tectonic if unruly power, singularly able to shape the fate of all life. Able to make the land itself kneel down.” If only we could learn from the female moose, who, even while pregnant, consumes the “feltleaf willows she prefers” in such a way that the plant flourishes from being gently pruned, rather than razed. If only we returned more to the earth than what we take. Perhaps then, the Anthropocene might become the middle of a larger story, rather than the end of this one. —KS
Joshua Rigsby | Thrillist | April 19, 2024 | 1,713 words
Reading this piece, my first reaction was: “What?” Joshua Rigsby’s visit to the Cabbage Patch Kids Babyland General Hospital is truly bizarre. But bizarre is often brilliant, and Rigsby had my rapt attention as he explained how, in a building that looks like a plantation house in Cleveland, Georgia, Cabbage Patch doll “babies” are “born.” For the measly sum of $120, you can have a complete birthing experience (the “Planned Parenthood” option). Rigsby, not ready for full Cabbage Patch parentage, takes the free tour instead—but still gets to witness a birthing ceremony, his description of which left me with fundamental questions about the human race. Upon the birthing announcement over the tannoy, guests gather around a tree on a plaster mound, in which, as Rigsby explains, electronic Cabbage Patch Kids are buried neck-deep, swiveling “their heads in permanent smiles like a scene from Dante’s Animatronic Inferno.” An employee in hospital scrubs declares Mother Cabbage fully dilated (it remains unclear if Mother Cabbage is the tree, the mound entombing the dolls, or some other deity). Everyone has to shout “push” and the “faithful pump their toddler fists and sway, pleading with the plush baby to emerge from the dilated tree vagina, as the Dante robot heads swivel and writhe.” That was a sentence I needed to read twice. Rigsby takes pains to emphasize that this is all done unironically. Kudos to the staff here. Cabbage Patch Kids sells a lot of dolls: their marketing, including this experience, obviously works (I refer again to my questions about humanity). While I am never going to visit the dilated tree vagina, I am glad Rigsby did—he recounts this extraordinary place delightfully. —CW
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Set in the San Joaquin Valley, Jessica Garrison’s LA Times feature is about an irrigation official named Dennis Falaschi who’s been accused of stealing more than $25 million worth of water from the federal government over the past two decades. Garrison details how Falaschi siphoned water out of the Delta-Mendota Canal—one of the main channels delivering water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to Fresno and Merced counties—with a secret pipe. Some farmers considered him “the Robin Hood of irrigation”; others were outraged that a water official had been stealing and selling “liquid gold” to farmers and other districts, and using public funds to pay for everything from housing remodels to car repairs to concert tickets for himself and his employees. A very wild, very California tale. —CLR
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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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