Friday, July 19, 2024

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Marilyn Monroe looks over her shoulder at the camera.

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In this week’s Top 5:

  • The consequences of speaking out
  • The violence of Sean Combs
  • Marilyn Munroe vs. Palm Springs, CA
  • On caring for a partner with Alzheimer’s
  • Why pooping on the moon is crappy

1. Disposable Heroes

Moira Donegan | Bookforum | July 2, 2024 | 4,344 words

In 2022, I published a story about four women who, as teenagers, were groomed and sexually abused by teachers at their acclaimed public high school. I agonized about how the story would affect their lives. So did they. The teachers who hurt them—and other teachers who knew about the hurt—were beloved. How would the women’s peers react to their childhood mentors being exposed as predators? How would the subjects cope with seeing their pain committed to the page? I’m proud of the story and believe it had a positive impact. One of the women got the first letter of the pseudonym I used for her tattooed on her arm as a symbol of empowerment. I heard from dozens of readers who said the story prompted personal reckonings with the wrongdoing that persisted at the school in all but plain sight. An additional survivor of abuse came forward to file a lawsuit. But I also communicated with other victims, and with people aware of other victims, who didn’t want to come forward. I understand that decision, and I thought about it while reading this devastating essay by Moira Donegan. While technically a review of a memoir by Christine Blasey Ford, who testified that Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her during high school, Donegan’s piece is really a much larger project. It’s an indictment of the triumphalist narrative of the #MeToo movement, a reminder that for many survivors, the decision to speak out brought on new forms of pain: bullying, death threats, PTSD. Ford realized that she would forever be narrowly defined in the public eye by her testimony. “You can never be anything else now,” a PR rep told her. Meanwhile, justice has been elusive for many survivors, including Ford. Since his confirmation to the court, Kavanaugh has helped to restrict women’s rights. I fear—as I suspect Donegan does—that other abusers have only gotten savvier about avoiding scrutiny for both past and current wrongs. What, then, was the public spectacle of so much of #MeToo for? “The plundering of public survivors’ psyches…their vulnerability and humiliation, their drained emotions and bank accounts, their curtailed prospects and usurped identities, their rage and grief and degradation,” Donegan writes, “appears, in retrospect, to have been less about our edification than about our entertainment.” —SD

2. I Knew Diddy for Years. What I Now Remember Haunts Me.

Danyel Smith | The New York Times Magazine | July 12, 2024 | 5,724 words

Journalism rule #4080: if you wrote for hip-hop magazines long enough, you ended up with at least one cocktail-party story that involves the specter of violence, veiled or otherwise. (Mine involves Lil Wayne, a tour bus in Florida, and a massive jar full of White Widow.) Most of the time it was a momentary storm cloud, but sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it had more than weed smoke behind it. Sometimes it was physical. Sometimes it was all the above, as it was when Bad Boy Records founder Sean Combs told Vibe editor in chief Danyel Smith he’d see her “dead in the trunk of a car.” That’s the part of the story she’d always remembered; what she’d forgotten, until recently, is the prelude to the death threat. The part where her staff ushered her from office to office, eluding Combs and his security guards until she could escape the building. For Combs, 2024 has been a reckoning of sorts—multiple lawsuits, a federal raid connected with a sex-trafficking investigation, video surfacing of a truly horrific physical assault against R&B singer Cassie—but it’s also the culmination of years of whispers. Whispers that Smith regrets not heeding. Whispers that highlight the bind so many in the music industry, and women especially, found themselves in. “We became used to playing the game; we were conditioned to look the other way or, when looking at something straight ahead, to not see it for what it was,” she writes. As with so much of Smith’s writing, a mournful poetry peeks around every corner in this essay. Journalism is “an art tart with betrayal”; Smith has been “a fly on the wall, and a fly pinned to it”; she “could barely hear music for the tears in [her] ears.” Hers is not a story of journalism’s battle scars. It’s the story of being part of a world that holds you underwater, even as your gifts propel you upward. —PR

3. Huge in Palm Springs

Dan Kois | Slate | June 18, 2024 | 5,103 words

When I was staring at Marilyn Munroe’s uplifted skirt and giant embroidered underpants, I was unaware of the rumbling debate about their existence. It was 2023, I was in Palm Springs for work, and, heading to dinner, I was one of many who stopped to gawk at Seward Johnson’s 26-foot statue Forever Marilyn. It’s hard to miss: slap-bang in the middle of downtown Palm Springs on Museum Way. Marilyn eternally grins into space as she holds down her skirt, immortalizing that 1954 night on Lexington Avenue when a gust from a vent blew it up. (It was a gimmick—the gust came from an industrial fan installed below the sidewalk.) Looking at the five-times-larger-than-life Marilyn felt like an homage to kitsch, a fun embodiment of the heady atmosphere of Palm Springs. Some residents agree. But others think she is an unnecessary roadblock that needs moving, and a few consider her a monstrosity. Hearing about the wealthy Springsians arguing over a “colossal statue of a midcentury sex symbol,” Dan Kois asks: “As much of America is engaged in battles over very different statues that evoke its past, why is this one making so many fancy people so crazy?” Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be complicated. While the basic arguments center around whether or not it was okay to close Museum Way and whether Forever Marilyn is art, the situation has gone on for five years and involved “a litany of committee meetings, architectural designs, legal briefs, environmental reports, and legal demurrers.” I understand if you pause here, doubting your commitment to reading about “a litany of committee meetings,” but rest assured, Kois is well aware of the boredom pitfalls and deftly avoids them. He does not hold back in this highly entertaining piece, gleefully painting characters almost as large as Marilyn and throwing journalistic integrity to the wind to declare how he hates this “huge, tacky statue flashing its knickers at a perfectly nice art museum that doesn’t want it there.” Not just a story about Marilyn but also about Palm Springs, “a make-believe city” in the desert, where maybe, just maybe, she belongs. —CW

4. ‘It Comes for Your Very Soul’: How Alzheimer’s Undid My Dazzling, Creative Wife in Her 40s

Michael Aylwin | The Guardian | July 9, 2024 | 5,937 words

For The Guardian, Michael Aylwin recounts caring for his wife, Vanessa, a marketing professional who died at 53 after battling Alzheimer’s. Vanessa and Michael met by chance on a dance floor in their 30s. At the time she was caring for her mother who already had the disease, and Vanessa was convinced she’d one day have it too. At first Michael brushed off her prediction, but after misplaced keys turned into completely forgotten conversations, he knew she’d been right all along. His first-person account is refreshing and poignant. He cared for Vanessa at home for as long as possible, until she began to show signs of aggression toward their children. Aylwin found it difficult to find professional nursing home care for someone so young. “An angry 50-year-old strutting around the place is a threat they cannot afford to risk,” he says of facilities charged with looking after much older and more vulnerable residents. Aylwin reveals the vast care gaps that exist for people like Vanessa, those too young for traditional nursing homes, yet who require far more care than a loving spouse can provide while trying to raise children and earn a living. The costs of the disease are high and despite the fact it seems more and more prevalent among younger people, there is little public financial support. Aylwin fought for what he did receive, making appeal after appeal. It was hard on him, but he says it was much harder on Vanessa. She knew she had Alzheimer’s; she railed at it in lucid interludes that put the indignity of her decline in stark relief. “’It’s not a life. It’s not a life,’ Vanessa told Michael. ‘I was really vibrant once, going everywhere … ‘ She stopped to sob gently. ‘And now I’m not. I don’t know who I am.’” The Aylwins’ story reminds us that with every day, we must simply make the most of now. —KS

5. Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business

Becky Ferreira | WIRED | June 25, 2024 | 2,276 words

Ever thought about what might happen if you passed a bowel movement in space? (My guess is no.) Here on Earth, gravity pulls your poop down, and flush toilets immediately whisk it away. On the moon, where would it go? Let this squeamish thought sink in, and then buckle up as you read Becky Ferreira’s fun Wired story. “At the dawn of the Space Age,” she writes, “American crews literally just taped a bag on their butts when they had to go, a system that infamously resulted in escaped turds floating through the Apollo 10 command module.” More than 50 years ago, the first astronauts on the moon left nearly 100 “poo bags” across six landing sites—and they’re still sitting there today. I didn’t count how many unexpected phrases and laugh-out-loud lines there are in this piece, but I was thoroughly entertained from Ferreira’s opening paragraph to her last line. Potty humor aside, she provides a fascinating look into this less-appealing aspect of space travel. For NASA and other space agencies to return to the moon, and for companies and billionaires like Richard Branson to launch a new era of tourism, a solid waste management system (pun intended) must be in place. And what about those very old Apollo poo bags left on the lunar surface, teeming with microbiota? What can they tell us about the emergence of life in outer space? “Answers to some of the most profound and ancient questions about our place in the cosmos,” writes Ferreira, “may indeed be waiting in Neil Armstrong’s 55-year-old spent diapers.” A worthy addition to this 💩 reading list. —CLR

Audience Award

This week, our readers ate this piece up:

I Spent Three Years Inhaling Tacos and Corn Dogs in Eating Contests. Here’s Why I Stopped.

Cameron Maynard | Texas Monthly | July 3, 2024 | 1,879 words

Cameron Maynard recounts his time as an amateur competitive eater, an attempt to find the emotional fulfillment he sought by eating in bulk for a cheering crowd. —KS



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Thursday, July 18, 2024

I Knew Diddy for Years. What I Now Remember Haunts Me.

Twenty-seven years ago, not long after Danyel Smith became editor in chief of Vibe, Sean Combs threatened to have her killed. Some of the episode stuck with her, as you’d imagine, but not all of it—and her subsequent realization that she’d redacted details from her own memory prompted a larger reckoning with the legacy of her career. While Combs is undoubtedly the catalyst of this troubling essay, he’s also just a manifestation of a larger system that treats so many as disposable.

⁠The music industry was, and is, a mean place. Journalists were being threatened at recording studios and stomped in their own offices. In the spring of 1999, the music executive Steve Stoute claimed that Combs and two bodyguards attacked him over the way Combs was depicted in a music video. He said that Combs punched him in the face and hit him in the head with a telephone and a Champagne bottle. (Stoute later asked the court to drop the charges after Combs publicly apologized and pleaded guilty to harassment.) Not only were many rank-and-file workers in our business — men and women alike — jittery about our physical and emotional safety, we were enlisted to boost the egos of the very artists and executives who felt entitled to violate us. We became used to playing the game; we were conditioned to look the other way or, when looking at something straight ahead, to not see it for what it was. Or even to unsee it. In our 2006 interview, Combs said: “Somebody gave me multiple choices early on — having a smooth working relationship, having a personal life or being in the music industry. I chose the music industry.” Same, Puff. Same. Too many of us did. We wouldn’t have thought of ourselves as ambivalent or numb then, but that’s what we were. A lot of us women wanted our fair shot at winning. There were dues to pay. We paid dearly.



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Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Down and Out in Bedford Falls

Why does It’s a Wonderful Life maintain such a powerful grip on the American imagination? Writer Dean Bakopoulos details his personal experience with the movie, from his childhood through his adult years, when the life and times of George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart) hit painfully close to home:

I was thinking that my life had become a life I didn’t know how to live. 

I was in the middle of the worst major depressive episode of my life—a darkness I had known several times in the past but one that, at this moment, was threatening to kill me. I had never seriously considered ending my life before though, for some reason, in the darkening weeks of late autumn that led up to the moment on the bridge, I felt the pull acutely. I’d gone dizzy one morning on the roof of a parking structure in Iowa City a few weeks earlier; driving down a dark two-lane one night, I pictured the release of swerving my small pickup into the path of an oncoming hog truck. One night, I found myself in the emergency room at the University of Iowa telling a receptionist that I had chest pains, but once I was admitted, I finally told the attending physician the real reason I was there: I wanted to hurt myself and needed somewhere to get through the night.  

And yet, these moments didn’t feel like me. I didn’t feel like the kind of person who would consider suicide. My two kids needed me—I knew that and the thought of leaving them fatherless in this world while I moved into the underworld seemed unthinkable—but the voice in my head insisted they’d be better off, the world would be better off, the whole fact of my existence was—

I walked out to the bridge. 

There are stories you never tell anyone until you have to tell them. 

This is one of those stories. 

In the middle of the bridge, it was windy. Cold. The sky was steel gray, the cloud layer low. The water churned, choppy below me. I did the mental calculus. Would I die if I jumped? Would it be painless? Would it be—

And then I thought of George Bailey. And of Clarence. 

Fucking Clarence. 



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‘It Comes for Your Very Soul’: How Alzheimer’s Undid My Dazzling, Creative Wife in Her 40s

When Vanessa Aylwin was in her 30s, she was caring for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s. Vanessa knew that one day, the disease would come for her. Her husband Michael recounts caring for Vanessa, who died at 53 of the disease and the vast gaps in social and financial support for young Alzheimer’s patients.

What a dance it has been. Not as I might have expected, but expectations can only ever be thwarted, so I don’t have anything to do with them. I emerge with a touch of survivor’s guilt. To watch closely the deterioration of a mind of such vivacity and colour to its end point, sped up in that untimely fashion, has been difficult, but it has been a sort of privilege, too. For all the anguish she endured in expectation of her fate, I hope Vanessa would have looked back on her life, if she could, with fondness and pride. At 53, she died at least 20 years before her time, but there is much living to be had in 50 – and she had it.



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Tuesday, July 16, 2024

I Gave Myself a Month to Make One New Friend. How Hard Could That Be?

Kelly Stout has good, close friends. But she realized that she was struggling to find someone among the 8 million citizens of New York City willing to meet her for a beer on a Tuesday, someone who was up for a little low-key spontaneity. So, she gave herself a mission: to make a friend in one month.

First, I’d have to define “friend” for our purposes. Deceptively tough. Would meeting for one coffee do the trick? Surely not. What about four? What if we did something a little more involved, like seeing a concert or taking a cooking class? We’d have to develop some recurring jokes, memories, shared enemies for it to count. Friendship requires a knowledge base, too: Can you really declare yourself friends with someone if you don’t know their brother’s name or what their girlfriend does for a living? How much work should it take? I wound myself up trying to make a discursive distinction between that which makes someone a friend and that which makes someone a good friend before the damn project had even started. I had to cut my losses. I just needed someone I really—I mean, really—enjoyed hanging out with, someone whose problems I could take on as my own, someone who would take on mine as well.

Friends weren’t just going to happen to me. Babies may have been partly to blame for the disappearance of my old friends, but perhaps they could also be a solution. When we first had our baby, people went out of their way to tell us how easy it would be to make friends now that we had a kid. So I signed my daughter up for a parent-and-me swim class that met every Saturday morning at a high school. We arrived early so I could scope out the friend potential. She sat on my hip in her towel with a dinosaur tail and sucked her thumb. I felt the same way.

What I really wanted was something that, for some reason, despite its near-universal popularity, we’ve constructed society to make nearly impossible: hanging out casually when the mood strikes, with a bunch of people who know us deeply and love us anyway.



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Disposable Heroes

Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh, in which she credibly accused him of assaulting her in high school, failed to stop his ascension to the Supreme Court. Ford now has a new memoir that captures, as writer Moira Donegan puts it, the hazards of “coming forward.” Because the assault didn’t destroy Ford’s life—but talking about it almost did:

Nearly a decade beyond #MeToo, we still do not know much about the after. At least, not for the women. There is a seemingly bottomless popular interest in the experiences of abusive men and in the afterlives of powerful figures who have been accused of sexual misconduct. Fiction, nonfiction, and film have contemplated their humiliation and rage, their professional downfalls, their denials or repentance, their rehabilitation or exile. In 2019, Jane Mayer published a long profile in the New Yorker of former senator Al Franken, who resigned from office after being accused of groping and harassment by multiple women. Mayer’s piece dwelled sympathetically on Franken’s diminished circumstances, writing of how he puttered tragically around his home. In 2022, viewers were enthralled by Todd Field’s two-and-a-half-hour psychodrama Tár, about the exposure and downfall of a sexually predatory orchestra conductor, played by an exquisitely tailored Cate Blanchett. In the aftermath of #MeToo, a number of allegedly abusive men have written long essays contemplating their predicament. The radio host John Hockenberry, accused of sexual harassment by several colleagues, wrote a lengthy Harper’s Magazine piece, “Exile,” in which he mourned the death of a sort of yearning old-timey romance in which he is a noble true believer. In the New York Review of Books, the Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi’s “Reflections from a Hashtag” provided meandering thoughts on the author’s newfound infamy, which followed a criminal trial for multiple violent sexual assaults. But the piece ended hopefully, with Ghomeshi flirting with a pretty stranger on a train. The genre, by now, is an old one. Most of these works owe much to J. M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel, Disgrace, in which a South African professor’s impotent and humiliated life in the months after he is exposed for the rape of a student is mixed ominously with the end of apartheid. For these figures, too, it’s less what they’ve done that pains them. It’s what happens when people find out. 

Women do not typically receive this kind of prolonged attention in the aftermath of sexual violence. Their psychic life is not pried with pity or prurience; their paralysis or tragic humility is not mined for metaphor. Part of what makes One Way Back such an unusual book is the simple fact that the warped afterlives of public survivors are so rarely depicted at all. 

Women’s stories of what happened after their disclosures fail to capture the popular imagination in the way that stories of the accused do. Maybe one reason for this is simple misogyny, that reflexive form of narrative sexism that leads us to imagine men as protagonists and women as tertiary characters. But there is something, too, about the intractability of the survivor’s position that can preclude the narrative tension that so often animates accused men’s stories. She was wronged by the man, and then when she talks about it, she is wronged, too, by the society that refuses to care. No suspense is on offer here: the heroine has tried to change her world by telling a truth about herself, and she has failed. It is a story of narrative inaction, of a failure to effect change. A story, that is, about the futility of storytelling itself. 



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The Demon Slayers

“THE NEW SATANIC PANIC,” blares the August cover of Harper’s. “Exorcism in the age of TikTok.” What you’ll really find is Sam Kestenbaum’s behind-the-scenes account of working a tent revival in Tennessee—a fascinating read that’s gonzo and empathetic at the same time. Greg Locke learned how to court online outrage as a pastor in the 2010s, but he really hit his stride during the pandemic; now, he and his like-minded “Demon Slayers” hold events of mass exorcism, in which they drive demons from the faithful with one hand and sell merch with the other.

Onstage, the Demon Slayers pit themselves against a limp and sissified American church, deriding mainstream houses of worship as anemic Christian-in-name-alone places of fussy theological debates and snoozy Sunday worship, defeated and decayed, moldy and morose. In contrast, this here is an exhilarating, slap-you-in-the-face, roaringly Spirit-led, experiential thing, animated by that gutsy supernaturalism that has been forgotten for all too long. The miracles: Cancers evaporate. A woman is helped out of her wheelchair and takes several halting steps forward. Pow, pow! Yet the ills these Slayers diagnose and the demons they battle can also feel more modest and familiar, coming less from a distant Apostolic Age than from our present Therapeutic Age. Among more far-flung enemies are the spirits of codependency, ADHD, OCD, IBS, dyslexia, narcissism, procrastination, lactose intolerance. At one point, Locke roars, “Tell that gluten-free demon, Up and out, right now!



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