As Gary Shteyngart is quick to remind you, he’s far from the first writer to chronicle a cruise ship voyage. He may, however, be the first to do so while wearing a daddy’s little meatball t-shirt. And for more than 9,000 words, he adds a worthy entry to the participatory subgenre. It helps that he punches up (and in) more than down, though the result is the same: making you savor terra firma.
The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say icon inaugural ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: warning! may start talking about cruising. Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “husband and wifeCruising Partnersfor life we may not have itAll Togetherbut together we have it all.” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.
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• How Israel uses AI for assassination in the Gaza War.
• A father reflects on his son’s development.
• The rise of the term, “gaslighting.”
• Toni Morrison’s expansive rejection letters.
• The history of PostSecret.
Yuval Abraham | +972 and Local Call | April 3, 2024 | 8,066 words
The biggest news out of Gaza this week was the deaths of seven aid workers affiliated with the non-profit organization World Central Kitchen. The incident was nothing short of perverse: Israel targeted and killed people trying to make a dent in the imminent famine that Israel itself has engineered as part of its strategy to demoralize and destroy, in whole or in part*, the Palestinian population. (*Yes, this is a reference to the international community’s codified definition of genocide.) Perverse was the word that again came to mind when, shortly after the attack on WCK, +972 and Local Call published a blockbuster investigation revealing the extent of Israel’s reliance on artificial intelligence to select targets in Gaza for assassination. Except select and assassination make it sound like the AI systems are precise, which they decidedly are not. Lavender, as the main program is called, “clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants” in the early weeks of the siege, and “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.” Israel is also using AI—including a system named, I kid you not, “Where’s Daddy?”—to track targets into their homes and then drop bombs, no matter the risk of collateral damage. Which is to say, no matter the risk of killing other people who happen to be in the home, including children. As technology journalist Sam Biddle wisely put it on social media, this essential investigation, one of the finest published since the war began, shows that “the value of military ‘AI’ systems … doesn’t lie in decision-making, but in the ability to use the sheen of computerized ‘intelligence’ to justify the actions you already wanted.” —SD
Paul Tough | The New York Times Magazine | March 17, 2024 | 4,987 words
Lured by the headline, I dove into Paul Tough’s essay out of curiosity, not sure what to expect. He writes about his son learning to speak Russian, but the larger journey he shares, as a parent full of worry and wonder and emotion, surprised me. By the end, I was in tears. He recalls his son as young child, and how he completely lost himself in his interests, from toys to games to entertainment: “Max would go deep, finding satisfaction not just in the playing but also in the experience of plunging himself into a new and unfamiliar world and mastering all of its contours.” He was shy, and as he got older, these explorations made him more solitary than social. But Max emerges from his shell, first during the pandemic, when he takes up birding as a hobby. To Tough’s surprise, Max interacts with the adult birders around him, finding his way into conversations. When Max turns 12, he decides to learn Russian, a seemingly random choice, but grows more confident and comfortable after he enrolls at a Russian-language school. When they embark on a father-son trip to Uzbekistan so Max can immerse himself in the language, Tough watches as Max navigates his new surroundings with ease. He recounts this beautifully, and it’s a delight to witness a parent learning to sit back as their grown child takes the wheel and engages with the world on their own: “As I watched Max walk off with a group of foreign strangers into an unknown land, it felt like a glimpse of my future, and his. I was slowing down, and he was speeding up.” I’m early in my journey as a mother—challenging and uncertain as it is, with a 5-year-old daughter who is beginning to blossom and discover her own interests. Who will she become? This piece doesn’t have that answer, but Tough’s perspective is comforting and exactly what I needed to read this week. —CLR
Leslie Jamison | The New Yorker | April 1, 2023 | 6,157 words
In recent years, the term “gaslighting” has become increasingly popular in everyday conversation. (Leslie Jamison notes that in 2022, there was a staggering 1,740% increase in people searching for the term.) While language is continually shifting and evolving, we’ve adopted this phrase with particular enthusiasm. Why does a word for someone causing us to question our reality resonate so heavily? Jamison’s exploration into our love for this diagnosis goes deep—from the first use of the word to current case studies to questioning whether she herself is a gaslighter. (She is, to some extent. Most of us are.) As Jamison notes, gaslighting is a spectrum that “happens on many scales, from extremely toxic to undeniably commonplace.” While I came to this piece to read about the development of language, Jamison’s look at the human psyche is what gripped me. A mix of linguistics and psychoanalysis? Count me in. —CW
Melina Moe | Los Angeles Review of Books | March 26, 2024 | 2,493 words
For many younger readers, the fact that Toni Morrison was a book editor before (and during) her legendary fiction career is one of literature’s great “today I learned” moments. This fascinating piece from Melina Moe digs past Morrison’s trailblazer status and glittering roster to focus on that crucial but underconsidered aspect of an editor’s life: rejection. Letting writers down is never easy, or fun, but it’s something editors have to do. A lot. And what Moe found in Morrison’s correspondence—”an asymmetrical archive,” as she calls it, housed in Columbia’s Rare Books & Manuscript Library—illuminates how gifted Morrison was in unfortunate art. Any writer or editor will appreciate her warmth and empathy, her grasp of craft, and her willingness to help writers get a foothold even when not accepting their manuscript. But Morrison also gave submitting writers precious insight into the industry itself. “Often,” Moe writes, “she supplements her rejections with diagnoses of an ailing publishing business, growing frustrations with unimaginative taste, the industry’s aversion to risk-taking, and her own sense of creative constraint working at a commercial press.” Editing is often imagined as a singular art; your talent lies in honing a given work into its best, shining self. That can be as frustrating as it is gratifying, but it’s also just one element of many. Moe’s portrait stands as a rare accounting of editing in all its fullness. No notes. —PR
Meg Bernhard | Hazlitt | April 3, 2024 | 5,908 words
Meet Frank Warren, the creator and curator of PostSecret.com, a site that displays the most private thoughts of anonymous contributors in postcard form. As Meg Bernhard reports for Hazlitt, the project emerged out of deep pain: not long after college a close friend took his own life, Warren began volunteering at a suicide prevention hotline. There, he learned how to listen carefully to callers as they recounted their despair. “Frank realized that people needed a way to talk about the messy topics often off limits in everyday conversation,” writes Bernhard. PostSecret became an in-person art exhibit and a website devoted to the cultural taboos that keep us silent, a way for us to unburden ourselves of what’s unspeakable in public and within our closest relationships. Bernhard’s piece is part profile, part delightfully nerdy deep dive into what secrets mean and why we keep them. “What is a secret?” she asks. “Knowledge kept hidden from others, etymologically linked to the words seduction and excrement. To entice someone to look closer; to force them to look away.” In revealing some of her own secrets, she invites us as readers to look closer, at the risk of us turning away. Since beginning the project in 2004 by distributing 3,000 self-addressed postcards at metro stations in Washington, D.C., Warren has collected and curated over 1 million fears, desires, and quirky notions for public display. Over time, he’s expanded the project into books and public events where attendees share their secrets with the audience, breaking that all-important fourth wall of the project’s anonymity. PostSecret arose out of a life lost tragically to inner turmoil; for those who crave judgement-free emotional release, it’s a lifeline. —KS
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Peter Hartlaub | San Francisco Chronicle | March 26, 2024 | 4,597 words
In 1992, mirroring the plot of the romantic comedy “Never Been Kissed,” San Francisco Chronicle reporter Shann Nix went undercover at a high school. Peter Hartlaub looks back at her reporting and the ethics of this scheme. Imposing our current values on previous work can be fraught, but Hartlaub comes at this with important questions, not judgment. —CW
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In May 1991, Michael Jordan visited Atlanta, Georgia, to revel in the city’s social scene. Jordan, who was 21 and lived in Florida, came on vacation and ended up in a neighborhood called Midtown. If the Deep South had a gay mecca, Midtown was it. The bars there were legendary; among the busiest were the Phoenix, a brick-walled dive, and the Gallus, a sprawling three-floor property transformed from a private home into a piano bar, restaurant, and hustler haunt. Piedmont Park, situated in Midtown’s northeast, was a popular cruising spot, thanks to the privacy offered by its dense vegetation. Cars lined up in droves there, bearing license plates from as far away as California and Michigan. Local residents complained about the traffic, and arborists put up fences to “protect” the trees. A cop once told a reporter that the park was “so busy” with gay men, “you’d think they were having a drive-in movie.”
Note: This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.
But Midtown’s freedoms and pleasures had limits. Sodomy was illegal in Georgia, and cops routinely detained gay men, sometimes by going undercover and posing as hustlers. “One of the television stations would scroll the names of all the people who had been arrested for soliciting sodomy,” recalled Cliff Bostock, a longtime journalist in Atlanta. The HIV/AIDS crisis was approaching its zenith, and testing positive was a near certain death sentence that some Americans, especially in the South, believed gay men deserved. Prominent Atlanta preacher Charles Stanley had made national headlines in 1986 when he declared that the epidemic was a way of “God indicating his displeasure” with homosexuality.
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On the evening of May 12, his first day in the city, Jordan was milling around Midtown when he was approached by a man in a white Lincoln Town Car who asked if he wanted to make some money. “What do I have to do?” Jordan replied. The man said he was conducting a study and would pay Jordan $50 to drink vodka. “I’m going to watch as you become more and more inebriated, and I’ll take notes,” the man said. Jordan jumped at the chance to earn some easy cash and agreed to meet the man at the corner of Fifth and Juniper Streets.
Jordan was already there when the man arrived. The man motioned for Jordan to get into his car, handed him a fifth of vodka, and told him to drink it fast. Jordan downed about half the bottle, at which point the man left the car for a few minutes to get something to mix the alcohol with. When he came back, the man asked Jordan to get hard because he wanted to see him masturbate. Jordan said he was too drunk to get hard quickly. Then he drank more and blacked out.
Early the next morning, a man named David Atkins found someone curled up in the fetal position on the ground of the parking lot behind the Ponce de Leon Hotel, where Atkins worked as a clerk. “At first I thought he was 30 to 35 and very dirty. I nudged him with my foot, told him to wake up,” Atkins told Southern Voice, a gay newspaper in Atlanta. “Then I realized it was blisters all over his body and he was just a kid.”
The person on the ground was Jordan. He was naked, and his genitals had been wrapped in a rubber band and set on fire. Burns extended to his buttocks and legs, and his nose and mouth were filled with blood.
Atkins called 911, and Jordan was rushed in an ambulance to the hospital, where he would remain for a month. When the police were slow to respond to the scene, Atkins reached out to Cathy Woolard, a gay-rights advocate working with Georgia’s chapter of the ACLU. Woolard sprang into action and contacted the police investigator assigned to the case. In her words, she got “nothing but runaround.” Because of the victim’s profile, the police had designated the attack a bias crime. For the same reason, Woolard sensed, they weren’t taking the incident seriously.
Woolard urged law enforcement to talk to a potential witness: Bill Adamson, a bartender at the Phoenix. Adamson said that Jordan had come into the bar before going to Fifth and Juniper and had described his conversation with the stranger in the Town Car. Adamson issued a warning: “Stay away from him. He’s dangerous.”
Adamson didn’t know the driver’s name, only that people around Midtown called him the Handcuff Man. He was a serial predator who approached gay men, offered to pay them to drink liquor, then beat or burned them and left them for dead. Sometimes he handcuffed his victims to poles—hence his sinister nickname.
There were men who said they’d narrowly escaped the Handcuff Man, and rumors that some of his victims hadn’t survived. But there were also people who thought that he was nothing more than an urban legend. Jordan’s assault would bring the truth to light: Not only did the Handcuff Man exist, but there were people in Atlanta who knew his name, including members of the police force. He hadn’t been caught because, it seemed, no one was trying in earnest to catch him.
That was about to change.
No one could be certain when the Handcuff Man had staged his first attack. Adamson claimed that he’d been terrorizing Midtown since the late 1960s, that he drove a white Lincoln, was about five foot ten, and had black hair and glasses. A sex worker said that the Handcuff Man had picked him up in Piedmont Park in 1977, asked him to take shots of liquor, then assaulted him. The victim managed to flee with a stab wound to the shoulder, and later saw the man again at the park eyeing other male hustlers. He didn’t report the crime because he was afraid of being outed to loved ones.
In 1984, Susan Faludi, then a twentysomething reporter a few years out from becoming a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, wrote a front-page story about gay hustlers for the AtlantaJournal-Constitution. She asked her sources about the dangers of their lifestyle and learned that “the greatest fear on the street right now is invoked by the specter of ‘The Handcuff Man,’ a man who reportedly picks up hustlers, offers them a pint of vodka spiked with sleeping pills and then handcuffs and beats them.”
The following year, in April 1985, a thin man rolled down his car window on Ponce de Leon Avenue and asked Max Shrader if he wanted to make some money. Shrader, 21, had been hustling since he was 13, turning tricks for out and closeted men alike, including a married Baptist preacher. He knew that what he did was dangerous; someone had pulled a gun on him, and a female sex worker who was his friend had been killed. “They found her head in one dumpster, her arms in another,” Shrader said. “She was a nice person.” Shrader knew about the Handcuff Man, who had attacked another of his friends. But the man in the car on Ponce, as the thoroughfare is commonly known, didn’t come off like a predator. He wore glasses and a pressed shirt; he seemed normal.
The man asked Shrader to drink some alcohol with him, and Shrader obliged. But after a little while he started to feel funny. Had the man slipped him something? Shrader collapsed to the ground. “Don’t hurt me!” he begged, as the man pulled him into his car.
The man drove to a wooded area, parked, and dragged an intoxicated Shrader into a patch of kudzu. He then poured a liquid onto Shrader’s groin and lit a match, illuminating his face in a ghoulish way Shrader would never forget. When the man dropped the match, Shrader caught fire.
Shrader lay in the woods for hours, drifting in and out of consciousness. He cried out for help when he had the energy. Around 9:30 p.m., a man who happened to be a nurse was driving home with his girlfriend when he spotted a naked figure on the side of the road. The nurse stopped, saw Shrader’s condition, and rushed home to call the police and to get some blankets to wrap Shrader in. “I guess God sent him,” Shrader said.
Shrader was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, the same place Michael Jordan would go six years later. He stayed there six weeks, during which the police came to see him once. They left a business card and said to call if he wanted to talk. He misplaced the card and never heard from the cops again.
Shrader wasn’t surprised. Atlanta cops seemed more interested in harassing and arresting gay men than in protecting them. Sometimes they wrote down the numbers on license plates in Piedmont Park and blackmailed drivers terrified of having their sexual orientation exposed—it could cost them their families, their jobs, possibly their lives. Incidents of gay bashing often went unsolved, if they were investigated at all. Etcetera, a gay and lesbian magazine in Atlanta, reported that between 1984 and 1986, at least 18 gay men died at the hands of unidentified perpetrators. The publication noted with frustration that police had “little understanding” of homophobic crimes. The Atlanta Gay Center began offering sensitivity training for cops, but feedback was mixed. “I think what you told us will be helpful in the longrun and should be expressed more often in police work,” one participant wrote in an evaluation of the training, “but I still think gays are disgusting and a disgrace to our country.” George Napper, Atlanta’s public safety commissioner, refused to make a statement condemning crimes against the gay community because it might be construed as favoritism.
After healing for two years, Shrader went back to hustling, scars and all. He’d grown up poor, and selling sex was one of the only ways he’d ever made money. At least now he knew what the Handcuff Man looked like and could steer clear of him.
J.D. Kirkland suspected that he’d seen the Handcuff Man’s face, too. Kirkland, an Atlanta cop, worked security a few nights a week at the Gallus. According to Don Hunnewell, one of the owners of the Gallus, Kirkland was a combination of Dirty Harry and the sheriff from Gunsmoke—a “kick-ass, cowboy type of tough cop.” In his free time, he trained horses on a large piece of property outside the city and worked on a novel about a time-traveling cop. Kirkland was married with kids; he wasn’t gay, but he was compassionate toward the Gallus’s clientele. “He really cared,” Hunnewell said. “I don’t think he was judgmental at all on what they were doing.” (Kirkland died in 1996.)
Patrons had told Kirkland about the Handcuff Man, including what he looked like, and on November 4, 1983, a man came into the Gallus who matched the description. Kirkland wrote a trespass notice, then snapped a polaroid of the man. The Gallus had a “barred book” filled with photos of people who weren’t allowed on the premises; bartenders were supposed to check it at the start of their shifts so they could eject any banned patrons. Kirkland put the man’s photo in the book.
Before kicking him out for good, Kirkland asked for his name. The man said he was Robert Lee Bennett Jr. “I’m an attorney,” he added, “and I’m going to sue you.”
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For Hazlitt, Meg Bernhard profiles Frank Warren and PostSecret.com, a project that began in 2004 as an outlet for strangers to anonymously unburden themselves of quirky thoughts, deep fears, and unspeakable desires in a public space, free of judgement. Bernhard reveals the surprising genesis of the project—one which has attracted over 1 million secrets since its inception 20 years ago.
“In the fall of 2004, Frank came up with an idea for a project. After he finished delivering documents for the day, he’d drive through the darkened streets of Washington, D.C., with stacks of self-addressed postcards—three thousand in total.” At metro stops, he’d approach strangers. ‘Hi,’ he’d say. ‘I’m Frank. And I collect secrets.’
Others were amused, or intrigued. They took cards and, following instructions he’d left next to the address, decorated them, wrote down secrets they’d never told anyone before, and mailed them back to Frank. All the secrets were anonymous.
Initially, Frank received about one hundred postcards back. They told stories of infidelity, longing, abuse. Some were erotic. Some were funny. He displayed them at a local art exhibition and included an anonymous secret of his own. After the exhibition ended, though, the postcards kept coming. By 2024, Frank would have more than a million.”
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The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties. Yuval Abraham reveals the details of the system for the first time:
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing—just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes—usually at night while their whole families were present—rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians—most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting—were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
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Oguzhan Sert was 17 when he walked into a Toronto massage parlor and killed a female employee with a sword. The government argued the attack wasn’t just murder, but an act of terror against women. The hard part would be proving it. Writer Lana Hall, who once worked in massage parlors, examines the “watershed” case:
The case came at a time when the perception of the incel movement, and of the crimes committed by its adherents, was changing fast among lawmakers. In February of 2020, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague retroactively described Elliot Rodger’s murders as acts of misogynist terrorism. That same year, a domestic terrorism threat assessment produced by the Texas Department of Public Safety described incel violence as a serious risk. “Once viewed as a criminal threat by many law enforcement authorities,” it read, “incels are now seen as a growing domestic terrorism concern due to the ideological nature of recent incel attacks internationally, nationwide, and in Texas.” It said the threat could potentially eclipse other domestic terrorism threats.
Still, no one, anywhere, had ever been convicted of terrorism based on incel ideology. Such a conviction, says Leah West, could help prevent such crimes in the future: law enforcement might allocate counter-terrorism resources to the incel threat and improve data collection and tracking of incel-related crimes. It could also begin to shift public perception of the perpetrators. “It helps the public understand that these are terrorist movements,” says West, “not just wacky things that people are saying online.” Mathews and Pashuk would need to put that argument to a judge, however, with little precedent, domestically or otherwise.
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The term “gaslit” is thrown around a lot nowadays, but where did it come from, and why do we use it so much? Leslie Jamison explores our love affair with the term in a fascinating piece that merges language and psychology.
The popularity of the term testifies to a widespread hunger to name a certain kind of harm. But what are the implications of diagnosing it everywhere? When I put out a call on X (formerly known as Twitter) for experiences of gaslighting, I immediately received a flood of responses, Leah’s among them. The stories offered proof of the term’s broad resonance, but they also suggested the ways in which it has effectively become an umbrella that shelters a wide variety of experiences under the same name.
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