There’s little to be said about wholesale members’ club Costco than hasn’t been said already. (Including in our own pages.) Or so I thought. Simon Wu adds to that prodigious canon by organizing a family vacation to Costco Travel’s most popular and well-reviewed destination: the Mayan Riviera. The result: an essay as thoughtful and selective as a trip to Costco isn’t.
Here, however, in the Yucatan sun, stripped of this architecture, the Costco psychology (“Everything Is a Good Deal”) merges with the all-inclusive hotel psychology (“Everything Is Paid For”) in a sinister marriage of value and engorgement. This nexus of ensuring what you Paid For Is a Good Deal creates a relentless compulsion to feast: when the price of an experience has been prepaid, the value you derive from it is based on your ability to consume. Thus, you need to consume a lot to get your money’s worth. Sometimes consuming so much, for so little, is tiring. Sometimes constantly optimizing the best deal gets in the way of relaxing, particularly after the third or fourth all-you-can-eat meal. Or so I think. It is definitely fun the first few days. My parents treat the Paradisus like what it is: a buffet.
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Mary H.K. Choi is searingly honest in her portrayal of coming to terms with an autism diagnosis at the age of 43—not holding back in exposing what she finds uncomfortable. A moving account of finally feeling allowed to make things easier on yourself.
Some fixes revealed themselves quickly. Others required more trial and error. For most of my adult life, I dressed with great, highly strung care. But even when I put an outfit together, I’d sometimes leave whatever occasion early to take it off or not go to the event altogether because I knew I’d be uncomfortable. People with autism are known to have issues with textures, tags, and seams, and I began wearing a tissue-thin, very soft turtleneck or an undershirt as a barrier to textiles that I found objectionable. Turns out there are also silhouettes I adore aesthetically that I cannot abide proprioceptively. Any trench-coat-length garment that tugs when I sit. Poplin. Too-full skirts that create a sense of vagueness behind me. Brocade. Stiff jeans. Leg-of-mutton sleeves that bunch at my armpits. Accepting this took more self-persuasion, but once I did, I ransacked my style archive and parted ways with half of my wardrobe.
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Yesterday, the journalism world received the sad news that D Magazine writer and editor Zac Crain had died. His colleagues sent him off with a loving and affecting collection of memories; I’m using this space to celebrate his 2017 piece about Erykah Badu, a once-in-a-generation artist who, like Crain, is woven deeply into the city she lives in. As a profile, it’s a writearound like few others, though you leave with the satisfaction of knowing that when they finally did talk, it was well worth the wait.
There she is, in front of her house that overlooks White Rock Lake, sitting at a card table with her girls, passing out cups of water to runners and bikers on a hot summer day. She’s at Beauty Bar on a Thursday night, sitting in with DJ Sober at his Big Bang party, or visiting the kids at the Dallas International School. She’s stranded at DFW Airport during an ice storm, in a fur and “Badu in Japan” hoodie. You never really know when you’ll find her, and that’s the point.
Maybe you were there when she performed an aerial ring routine with the Lone Star Circus. Maybe you were at the Bad Boy Family Reunion show at the American Airlines Center, when she showed up unannounced and took over the stage near the end. Or maybe you happened to be at Dealey Plaza the day she filmed her video for “Window Seat,” slowly disrobing until she stood where JFK had been shot, naked, in and out in one take, here and gone so quickly you could hardly believe what you’d just seen.
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Nondisclosure agreements were once largely confined to the corporate world—they provided a way to prevent company secrets from getting into the wrong hands. Now NDAs are everywhere. Read this juicy story from Reeves Weideman to understand just how much these legal documents have become a part of many people’s everyday existence. We’re talking celebrities, yes, but as one of Weideman’s sources puts it, NDAs are also pro forma for “small-market newscasters, or hedge bros, [or] a medium-tier meteorologist”:
While NDAs were originally reserved for executives or employees with access to proprietary technical or financial information, the paperwork has flowed down the org chart. “They used to be confined to pretty rarefied worlds, and now you see companies imposing these on janitors,” Jodi Short, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said. This spring, I found job listings that required an NDA to work as a forklift driver in Virginia, an e-commerce associate at Island Beach Gear on the Jersey shore, and a “meat cutter” at a biltong shop in suburban Charlotte, North Carolina. The NDA is now a part of many job hunts—some companies require it in order to come in for an interview—and a meme went around TikTok that the document could be used to explain any gaps in your résumé: “Sorry, I signed an NDA.”
The next frontier for companies was to extend the web of secrecy to their customers. This year, a plastic surgeon in Seattle was found to have made more than 10,000 patients sign an NDA before their procedures that prohibited them from posting a “negative review,” which was defined as anything less than four stars. Julie Macfarlane, an emerita professor of law in Ontario and the co-founder of Can’t Buy My Silence, an organization that advocates for the regulation of NDAs, told me companies often use them to keep the public from learning about bad things they have done. “The first case in which a parent was compensated because of the impact of tainted baby formula was years before anyone knew about it,” Macfarlane said.
But even this consumer-facing use has expanded. Companies now deploy NDAs to conceal their own generosity. In April, I spoke to a man I’ll call Paul, a pseudonym he requested I use to avoid jeopardizing his status as a member of Marriott’s Ambassador Elite program. Paul is 37, works in real estate in Hong Kong, and travels a lot. He achieved his Ambassador Elite status by spending a hundred nights in Marriott hotels last year. Over Easter, when Paul checked in to the Royalton Chic Cancún, a Marriott on the beach, the receptionist greeted him with good news: a free upgrade! But there was a catch. The receptionist slid a piece of paper across the desk. Paul would need to promise not to brag about his upgrade at the pool bar. The NDA didn’t look very legal. It was half a page long, and the last words, in bold below the signature line, were “Please, have an amazing vacation.”
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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
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
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
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
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
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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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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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.
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