In this quiet yet illuminating essay at The Yale Review, essayist Steve Edwards reflects on how an autism diagnosis changed the way he saw himself, as well as his relationship to writing.
It was important to me that the last word of the longer paragraphs was farther to the righthand side of the page than the last word of the shorter paragraphs, but not so far as to crowd the edge. Flip any printed draft on its side and ideally what you would see was a kind of wave—like the graphic display of an audio file—that rose and dipped with changes in the story’s tempo and dynamic. I knew these rules didn’t actually matter. I knew if whatever I was working on got published, the formatting would change anyway. But it was a puzzle to solve. I imagined myself a wild quilter cutting up different-sized strips of fabric, laying out sentences in increasingly complex sequences and patterns, stitching them together, standing back, assessing and reassessing the whole. I got so good at counting lines it became second nature. It was meticulous and painstaking work. It left no room in my head for shame.
For years I had built a persona around imagining myself a novelist. I had worked to convince myself and others that, soon enough, I would emerge from my self-imposed exile transformed, with a literary masterpiece in hand. But one day, after an ordinary morning’s work, I saved the giant file containing my novel, hit close, and never opened it again.
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In this review of the new biography, Madonna: A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel, Joanna Biggs argues that Madonna is more than a singer, dancer, and an early champion of many causes. She’s an unapologetic artist—first, foremost, and above all else.
Madonna will not be with us forever: she dances much less vigorously onstage, she needs ever-longer periods of rest even to be able to perform, and she nearly died last June from a bacterial infection. Both Prince and Michael Jackson, her collaborators and rivals from the era before streaming, died from overdoses of pain medication to treat injuries from decades of performance. She has resolved, in one of the most conventional decisions in an unconventional career, that her face will no longer age. But we are lucky to have grown up in the age of Madonna. She has stood not for tradition but for freedom: to love who we love, to change at will, to say what we want, to earn money, to court fame, to desire more than we’re given. We should want our heroines to be bad girls like her. It leaves us, in the real world, freer.
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Former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher was court-martialed in 2018 on charges that he attempted to kill civilians and stabbed a teenage ISIS prisoner to death while deployed in Iraq. He was acquitted of six of the seven charges against him—for the full story of the case, listen to the incredible podcast The Line—and since then has built a brand as a culture warrior promoting warrior culture. As Jasper Craven reports, Gallagher is part of a trend:
Gallagher’s pivot also speaks to the trend of divisive right-wing figures harnessing backlash to build a brand. This weird world includes the likes of acquitted Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, who has written a memoir and recently partnered with a body armor company, and disgraced General Michael Flynn, who gives speeches, sells merch, and promotes a precious metals exchange. In Gallagher’s case, he has an expert helping him navigate this new landscape: his wife, Andrea, who has a background in marketing and portrait photography. While he was locked up in a Navy brig, she flooded social media with calls to support her husband and scored high-profile TV interviews on Fox & Friends and Good Morning America.
Along the way, Andrea [Gallagher’s wife] leveraged the positive brand of the SEALs—commonly considered America’s most elite special operations force—to establish Eddie’s public persona as an innocent victim of cancel culture, a leading enemy of the deep state, and the last alpha in a beta-fied America. This message attracted thousands of followers, who bought “Free Eddie” T-shirts and donated $750,000 for the family to use for legal and living costs. By the time Gallagher was cleared of the most gruesome allegations in July 2019 and freed, many had come to see him as a new soldier archetype: a righteous fighter unfairly restrained by corrupt generals and woke military dictates who, when confronted with evil, took matters into his own hands to mete out extrajudicial justice.
As his legend grew, a fourteen-year-old boy and his father made and sold Eddie Gallagher action figures, pledging to donate half their proceeds to the Gallaghers’ military justice reform charity, the Pipe Hitter Foundation. The nonprofit takes its name from military slang for a combative and increasingly emboldened sect of special forces that Eddie belongs to. (Some in this unofficial cadre also self-identify as “hunters” or “pirates.”) Pipe Hitter offers a simple mission: to “serve those who serve us.” In practice, this means fortifying the Congressional Justice for Warriors Caucus, which has supported an array of accused war criminals, including Gallagher, and pledges to discredit and reform the military justice system. Despite his vague gestures at institutional reform, Gallagher retains the blinkered philosophy of a SEAL—viciously targeting the individuals who wronged him and his clients rather than executing a comprehensive plan to topple the system itself. Such an approach may succeed in a few battles, but it’s surely not enough to win a war.
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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
Audience Award
Here’s the story our readers loved most this week:
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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