Rachel Yoder returns to the land of her family’s Amish roots, seeking folk medicine and answers. She finds them, in a way—but she also finds a different sort of homecoming, one that manages to be both uncomfortable and absolutely necessary. A lovely meshing of reporting and prose.
We talked about God because we did not want to talk about how I no longer go to church, how ten years ago I told him I didn’t believe in God, how twenty years ago I left home in love and on fire, causing extraordinary tumult, checked myself into a rehabilitation facility because I didn’t want to be alive and couldn’t articulate why, blamed my father for being too controlling and didn’t speak to him for months. We do not talk about how I have forsworn the Mennonites for decades.
It’s comforting to imagine that things go away if you leave them alone long enough. These are the questions I don’t ask my father: How did I hurt you? Are you still hurt? When you think of me, do you feel sad? Am I a failure? Can you forgive me? Can we be happy?
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A simple, yet lovely essay that connects you to the beautiful, rainy, landscape of Iceland. Pam Houston respects the horses she rides—even the stroppy mares—and her words are full of gratitude towards them.
Anna, our German guide, tall, strong, magnificently beautiful in her muck boots and men’s overalls, her thick blond hair tied in a mane-ish knot atop her head, is the horse girl we all wish we’d had the courage to be. She gathers us, says yes, that in spite of the gale and the worsening prediction (50 mph, gusting to 75), we need to saddle up and get ready to go.
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Emily Strasser discovered that for 30 years, her grandfather worked as a chemist in the Oak Ridge, Tennessee plant that was one of three secret cities involved in the Manhattan Project. Instead of turning away from this family secret, she went on a ten-year mission to bear witness not only to her grandfather’s work and the affect it had on him, but most importantly the horrific toll of the U.S.’s nuclear weapons program. For Bitter Southerner, Rachel Priest is in conversation with Strasser on her work and her memoir, Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning With a Hidden History.
Rachel Priest: How did this book come about?
Emily Strasser: I was about to graduate from college and, at this precipice of adulthood, thinking about what kind of person I was going to be in the world. What does it mean to live a good life? All of a sudden, this memory from childhood came back — very, very vibrantly — of this photograph of my grandfather standing in front of a nuclear test blast. This was a photograph that hung in my grandmother’s house above the bed where I slept when I was a child.
RP: Going off that, you said this is an ongoing history, and it just kind of reminded me of part of your title: Reckoning With a Hidden History. And then you have a section where you talk about trying to reckon with your whole family, and your grandfather specifically. You write, “A reckoning implies that the world may be set right with some sort of calculation; good and evil measured, justice meted, balance restored. I cannot make this equation come out. I count too many different kinds of things; my units are all mixed up.” Do you feel like you’re still reckoning with this family history and the broader implications of nuclear weapons? Do you feel like there is an end to a reckoning and, if there is an end, how do you get there?
ES: I don’t think the reckoning is finished. I mean, when we speak about nuclear weapons and we think about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ongoing production of nuclear weapons, the reckoning is so far from finished. It’s never happened, really, at all. There’s never been an apology. The 2023 G7 Summit was in Hiroshima and released a statement about nuclear weapons. They met with hibakusha [those who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] and released a statement that was really weak and made no promises about changing anything materially.
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To save the world, we have to decarbonize it. Enter the mineral-extraction industry, which is on a major upswing thanks to skyrocketing demand for substances such as lithium, cobalt, and cooper. But ending our reliance on fossil fuels by turning to a battery-powered way of life is a fraught path. Nick Bowlin attended a conference hosted by the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) to dig into the moral and environmental hazards of an electric future:
Even the most optimistic version of the future, involving reduced demand and robust recycling, will still require some mining. What this ought to look like increasingly preoccupies Patrick Donnelly, who works for the Center for Biological Diversity in Nevada. I know Donnelly—as do a lot of other journalists in the West who cover extractive industries—as a ferociously dedicated conservation advocate. A few years ago, Donnelly realized that no one was tracking all of the American lithium projects and decided to do so himself. His map now shows more than 115 potential mines, clustered in his home state. “It’s the biggest mineral rush of our lifetime,” he told me over the phone.
In an ideal world, Donnelly said, the U.S. government would put a moratorium on speculative claims and instead survey all of the country’s mineral deposits in order to identify the least harmful places to mine. This isn’t happening and won’t anytime soon. In May, the U.S. fast-tracked a manganese and zinc mine in Arizona, the first mining project added to a program designed to expedite the clean-energy transition and other infrastructure developments. But Donnelly also fears that anti-mining sentiment is turning people against electric cars—and against lithium extraction altogether. “There is zero chance we can recycle our way out of the problem,” he said. This is true. There isn’t enough lithium on the market for battery recycling to realistically meet present demand, let alone the expected increase.
“There is an element of the mining resistance movement that opposes not just particular mines but all lithium and all electric vehicles,” Donnelly went on. “Unless we’re talking about deindustrializing society, which I don’t think appeals to most people, we need to be thinking about how and where we’re getting our lithium, and critically examine our own use of these minerals, like the cell phone I’m speaking to you on now, with minerals from South America, where locals say the mines are destroying their environment and community.”
Such are the paradoxes of the globalized green economy, in which blocking a mine in one place means shifting extraction somewhere else. We want to decarbonize, yet our lives require ever-increasing supplies of energy. And so climate-minded consumers and the mining industry are locked in a self-justifying embrace. We buy an E.V. and think we are doing right by those vulnerable to rising temperatures and tides. But in trying to continue consuming as we are used to, buying stuff and zipping down the highway, we have exposed many of those same vulnerable people to another threat—the market’s readiness to kill, poison, and displace them to get minerals and metals. The mining industry, meanwhile, benefits from the self-satisfied consumerism of the E.V. buyer. For all of its disdain for environmentalists, the industry needs green consumers who seek absolution for their carbon-intensive ways of life. With their complacent inattention to the injustices inflicted by the green economy, these consumers not only fund the industry’s expansion but give it moral cover.
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Natasha Bridges blanketed the Facebook inboxes of men she didn’t know with the simplest of greetings:
hi hi
hi
Plenty of the men never replied to Natasha, but it was striking how many did. Even more striking was how quickly some of them seemed to fall for her.
Can you love an older man?
So wrote a guy named James* after just a few hours of messaging. James said that he was 56 and rode a Harley. After sending Natasha pictures of his bike, James told her, unprompted, how he would perform oral sex on her.
*Unless otherwise noted, the names of scam victims have been changed.
Other men were starry-eyed. They told Natasha that she was gorgeous, that they liked her smile and her flirtatious way of chatting, that they couldn’t wait to meet her one day. There were also sentimental types, like Brett:
I don’t know if I’ll ever be truly happy again. I think the only dream I have is if I had a special woman with me.
You know I mentioned it a couple of days ago, but I haven’t seen you for a very long time. Would you please send me a few of your pictures? I would really like to see you.
Natasha had yet to respond to Brett’s latest lovelorn message. Her silence would have been callous if she was who she said she was. But given the truth—that Natasha Bridges didn’t exist—the real cruelty might have been replying.
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The person sending messages to Brett, James, and dozens of other American men was named Richard, but he preferred to be called Biggy. He was 28 and from Nigeria. The photos he used in the Facebook account where he posed as Natasha—a 32-year-old single mother from Wisconsin, interested in economic development and cryptocurrency—were pilfered from the social media of a real woman named Jennifer. He’d used other accounts to pretend to be a gym instructor, and a lonely American soldier deployed abroad.
I knew all this because Biggy was sitting on a green sofa in my hotel room in Lagos, playing the video game Pro Evolution Soccer 17 as I read the private messages he’d sent to unsuspecting foreigners on his iPhone 6. When I asked why he was ghosting Brett, Biggy, scoring yet another goal for Australia in the Asian Cup final against Japan, shrugged. “Bro, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Being a Yahoo boy is very stressful,” he said without taking his eyes off the game. “Do you find it easy to make someone fall in love with you? The hustle is the same as real life, with just one difference: You have to pretend to be another person.”
In Nigeria, Yahoo boys are online fraudsters. Their nickname comes from the email service Yahoo, which became popular in Nigeria in the 2000s, and they are descendants of the infamous 419 scammers, who, first with letters, and later in emails, promised to help strangers get rich for a nominal advance fee. (The number is a reference to a section of the Nigerian criminal code pertaining to fraud.) Biggy is a particular kind of Yahoo boy: a romance scammer who pretends to be other people online to seduce foreigners into trusting him and giving him money.
Biggy’s game is all about intimacy. He invests time in building what seems like a real relationship with his victims. He flatters them, tells them jokes, asks intimate questions. “The most important thing about being a Yahoo boy is keeping the conversation alive,” Biggy told me. “Dating is all about patience. It takes a long time before a client starts trusting you.”
Yahoo boys, I was learning, love euphemisms.
Biggy estimated that over his ten years—and counting—as a romance scammer, he’d lined his pockets with $30,000 from people he conned. People yearning for love. People like my mother.
Hi Silvia,how are you? This is Brian. We contacted each other on Tinder, I hope you are having a wonderful day. It would be a delight for me if we can get to know more about each other, and to answer your question, I was once married, but now I am single after the divorce.
I would hope to hear from you soon
warm hugs Brian Adkins Carmel, NY 10512 bcmakins@aol.com
By a lot of metrics, my mother, Silvia, is a successful woman. She opened her own dental clinic in Spain before she was 30, and over the next two decades she served some 10,000 patients. She got married and gave birth to three boys, of which I am the youngest. But her divorce from my father in 2003, when she was 44, was turbulent and costly. After the split, my brothers and I lived mostly with our mom in various rented apartments around Madrid. For a long time, her only asset was an old Citroën C1. The bulk of her income was spent on food, education, and yearly vacations with us. “Books and travel—no matter what, there’s always going to be money for that in my house,” she’d say.
One day in December 2015, my mother’s face seemed brighter than usual. She told us at Sunday lunch that she’d met someone. They’d connected on Tinder, an app I’d encouraged her to use. The man was named Brian, and he was a handsome, divorced 52-year-old American soldier. My mother said that her feelings were real, and that Brian’s were, too.
At first my brothers and I didn’t pay any of this much attention. Jaime and Miguel were in their twenties, launching their careers. I was 19 at the time, the only one of us still living at home, but I was busy studying at university. My mother’s blossoming romance was background noise. But when she later told us that Brian was on a mission in Syria, Miguel, a pilot in the Spanish air force, scoffed. “Come on, you really believe that? It’s sketchy,” he said.
After that my mother shared updates about her new love more sparingly, and mostly with me. She showed me some of the long, passionate emails she and Brian exchanged. She’d studied English in high school but still used Google Translate to better express herself. Brian’s messages had grammatical mistakes, too—but I thought, so what?
“Sometimes I tell Brian, ‘You’re going too fast!’ ” my mother confided in me. She’d said as much in one of her messages to him:
I hope there will be many ends of the year together. I think the love of a couple is a way to go, I am sure our beginning is good and I like it. We are in different situation, my life is very comfortable, yours not, I am surrounded of friends and family, you are only with other men fed up like you. And so…and so. I understand you hang on me and in some way I appreciate it very much, but in other way it makes me feel a little bit anxious about responsibility of being what you expect of me.
Whatever doubts she had, the joy she felt overrode them. One day she came home with two rings: one for her, and one for Brian. “He’s coming to Spain,” she said, grinning. He’d told her that he wanted to leave the military and be with her.
Now my brothers and I were officially concerned. We asked her if she’d ever had a video call with Brian; when she said no, we told her we found it shady that, apart from a few photos, she’d never even seen the guy who claimed to love her. We argued, and my mom, hurt that her sons weren’t supporting her, shut herself in her bedroom. “I’m going to talk to my boyfriend,” she said before closing the door.
In early January 2016, about five weeks after my mother first connected with Brian, Jaime sent me a message while I was studying at the library for a microeconomics exam. “Carlos, we have to do something,” he wrote. I could feel his anxiety behind the typing bubble on my phone’s screen. “This guy told mum he’s going to ship her some bars of solid gold he’d found in a terrorist stash,” Jaime continued. “It’s a scam.”
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It’s hard to think of a more entertaining magazine story published thus far in 2023. With wit, style, and empathy, Reeves Wiedeman details the peculiar war that erupted between an IHOP kingpin named Domenic Broccoli and Revolutionary War history enthusiasts when a dead body was found on a plot of land in the Bronx:
On Memorial Day, Broccoli drove to his property in Fishkill, where a crowd was gathering to protest his planned development. These were the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the town’s Revolutionary War history and, in Broccoli’s view, to making his life hell. For more than a decade, the Friends have argued—based on some evidence, but not as much as they would like—that there are more Revolutionary War soldiers buried on Broccoli’s land than anywhere else in the United States. Broccoli argues that this is rubbish and accuses his foes—with some evidence, but not as much as he would like—of going so far as to plant human remains on his lot in their effort to make it seem more grave-stuffed than it actually is.
“Is Domenic Broccoli here?” Keith Reilly, a co-president of the Friends, asked the protesters through a microphone. “Mr. Broccoli, we dare you to be a profile in courage.” The crowd included a half-dozen Revolutionary War reenactors with muskets and several people Broccoli has sued, including Bill Sandy, the archaeologist who found the first dead body. The protesters marched up and down the edge of the property—careful not to trespass lest Broccoli call the police—while honks came in from passing cars.
Broccoli had told me that he had planned to crash the protest with “guns a-blazing” but ultimately thought better of it. “If I go there and then my Bronx comes out, it’s not gonna go well,” he said. His Bronx had come out plenty in his campaign to build the IHOP as part of a Colonial-themed strip mall he was calling Continental Commons. The Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot are a group of history buffs and retiree volunteers, and yet Broccoli claimed he had found it necessary to spend more than a million dollars battling them with archaeologists, lawyers, and the private investigators he hired as “spies” to infiltrate the Friends. As it happened, one of his spies was at the Memorial Day protest holding up a STOP CONTINENTAL COMMONS sign while surreptitiously recording the group in case anything might help the RICO case Broccoli was building.
Broccoli insists that he’s not anti-history. He doesn’t dispute the fact that people are buried on his land or that the area is steeped in Revolutionary significance; his vision for the IHOP involves a wait staff in tricorne hats and bonnets. But it was still a bit of a mystery exactly whose bones were buried on his property and who put them there. And, besides, if there really were hundreds of soldiers beneath the ground, Broccoli believed it to be self-evident that he was the one pursuing the vision of life, liberty, and happiness that George Washington’s troops had fought and died for: the right to sell pancakes where they were buried.
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At Granta, literary translators Mara Faye Lethem and Julia Sanches trade correspondence about the personalities of different languages, what it was like for Sanches when Boulder by Eva Baltasar was nominated for the International Booker Prize earlier this year, and what it’s like to “seep into others’ texts” as a translator.
Sanches:
I wonder if some of our physical responses to a particular word or scene are conveyed in our translations. If there’s a way to tell what the translator knows viscerally, or if it’s simply part of the job to create the illusion of that close, intimate knowledge and experience, just as it is (I assume) with poets and novelists. You’re a novelist too – tell me, are we doing very similar things in different ways (e.g. mapped and unmapped)?
Lethem:
I think we all inhabit various worlds at once, I think being a translator helps me to navigate those worlds, when they are separated by language. I was recently looking at some writing I did in college and the professor’s red marks removed all of the Brooklyn from my grammar. It took me a long time to trust my decision-making as a translator, to accept how I seep into others’ texts, but in the end I suppose that’s what makes a translation come alive, and eventually come into its own as a new book.
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