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Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | January 16, 2024 | 16 minutes (2,000 words)

The Go-Go’s signed to Miles Copeland’s label I.R.S. on April 1, 1981. It’s fitting that the band would sign their record deal on April Fool’s Day since for many record execs the idea of women playing music was nothing more than a joke. After signing their deal, the Go-Go’s headed to New York City to record their debut album. Copeland hired Richard Gottehrer to produce the album. Gottehrer was a songwriter and producer who had success with songs like “Hang on Sloopy,” “My Boyfriend’s Back,” and “I Want Candy” by the Strangeloves. Gottehrer also started Sire Records with Seymour Stein and the label had helped launch the careers of bands like Blondie and the Ramones, which appealed to the Go-Go’s and their punk roots. Gottehrer had even produced Blondie’s 1976 self-titled debut album.

Gottehrer wanted to polish the band’s sound, slow down their songs so you could hear the lyrics, and make their music more accessible to a pop audience. “I told them they had to slow down, put the songs into a groove. The songs deserved to be treated with respect,”¹

Gottehrer told Billboard in 2016. He had a small budget of $35,000 for the recording and ended up going over budget by $7,500, which he paid for out of his own pocket (not to worry, he later made it back in royalties). The Go-Go’s didn’t want to record a new version of “We Got the Beat” for the album. They argued they already had the Stiff Records version and people seemed to like it, but Gottehrer felt Beauty and the Beat needed a new recording of the song and finally convinced them. The album also included the hit single “Our Lips Are Sealed” for which Wiedlin wrote the lyrics and music. The song’s lyrics were based on lines from a love letter sent to Wiedlin by Terry Hall from the Specials, as Wiedlin and Hall had been romantically involved, while the Specials and the Go-Go’s were touring with Madness in the UK. Hall’s band Fun Boy Three would also end up recording a version of the song.

While Gottehrer tried to slow down the band’s songs, what he couldn’t slow down was the Go-Go’s partying. The girls made the most of their time in NYC, taking advantage of the city’s nightlife and everything it had to offer. “This was when I learned that girls can be as disruptive and dirty as boys. Who knew? It might have been drinking, it might’ve been going out, looking for booty—I’m not sure if they were into their drug phase yet. But that energy and personality came across on the record,”² Gottehrer told Billboard. When the Go-Go’s heard Beauty and the Beat for the first time they cried, but they weren’t exactly tears of joy. They thought they were making a punk record and expected the record to sound like the band did live. Their punk sound had been given a pop polish by Gottehrer. “A couple of us were concerned about how our peers in L.A. perceived us. With the small amount of success we’d had, people said we sold out, we weren’t punk after all, blah, blah, blah. Hearing the album made us feel like they were right—we sounded like we sold out,”³ Carlisle told Billboard in 2016. The Go-Go’s were not the only ones who were upset upon hearing the album. Copeland thought Gottehrer had ruined the band by delivering a pop album. Like the band, Copeland was under the misconception that Gottehrer was delivering a punk album. Later, when the album went to the number one spot all was forgiven. Suddenly, Gottehrer was being heralded as a genius and the best producer ever by both the band and Copeland.

When it came time to shoot the cover for Beauty and the Beat, photographer George DuBose got the job, accidentally. DuBose wanted to shoot the band for Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine but was told the Go-Go’s didn’t have time because they needed a cover for their new album. He ended up photographing the cover. The band wanted a timeless feel to the Beauty and the Beat cover. They also wanted a cover concept that would save them the trouble of having to decide what to wear; the cover featuring the girls in white bath towels and face masks achieved both these goals. They tried several things on their faces but ended up with Noxzema because it was the only thing that didn’t crack immediately. The back of the album featured individual shots of the band members in the tub, shot in the bathroom of Wiedlin and Caffey’s room at the Wellington, the hotel they were staying at while recording Beauty and the Beat. The cover received criticism from journalists like New York Rocker’s Don Snowden who wrongly assumed record execs, and not the Go-Go’s, had developed the concept. “It’s a long way from the motley crew pictured on the Stiff single but if the Go-Go’s want to come across as new wave cutie-pie heart-throbs, that’s their business . . . But c’mon, the images—pouring bubbly in bubblebath, chocolates and trashy novels, hand on the telephone, the phallic rose—strike me as some 40-year old marketing exec’s fantasy,”⁴ Snowden wrote of the images on the album’s back cover.

The album cover was the first time I saw what the Go-Go’s looked like. I could finally put faces to my new heroes. In the days before social media, videos, and the internet, it was a lot harder to learn about your new favorite band. MTV would soon change that, but it wouldn’t launch until a month after Beauty and the Beat was released. Years after I first discovered the Go-Go’s, I was packing some records to move and noticed the similarities between the Beauty and the Beat cover and the cover of Cut, the debut album from the Slits. The Slits were naked except for loincloths and covered in mud, not Noxzema, but there was still the idea that both bands wanted to rebel against stereotypical, hypersexualized notions of what women should look like on an album cover. They were both powerful images that the bands chose themselves, which subverted the idea of how women should market their music. There was also the idea that the women wanted to conceal themselves, whether with face masks or mud, to keep a part hidden, especially from a music industry that wanted women to reveal themselves, and all of themselves, if they wanted to sell records.

As soon as the album was done, the Go-Go’s hit the road. The tours and the venues kept getting bigger. The band went from being the house band at the Whisky and playing small clubs to opening for the Police for their Ghost in the Machine tour in less than a year. Miles Copeland also happened to be the manager of the Police. His brother, Stewart Copeland, was the drummer for the band. Not only would the Go-Go’s end up on tour with the Police, but some extra money left over from the budget for a music video by the Police—$6,000 to be exact—paid for the Go-Go’s first video, “Our Lips Are Sealed.” The Go-Go’s didn’t understand the importance of video at the time; but when MTV launched in August 1981, they saw the difference it made. The girls goofed around in the video, driving around Los Angeles in a convertible, and splashing in a fountain. They hoped to get arrested for playing in the fountain, which they thought would make an exciting end to the video. The police didn’t care, but the video would be played nonstop on MTV.

While the band was opening for the Police and playing sold-out stadiums, Beauty and the Beat went to number one on the Billboard album charts and would stay there for six weeks. Beauty and the Beat had passed Ghost in the Machine by tourmates the Police, which was at number six. Sting brought the girls a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Finally, the police were paying attention to the band, just not the ones they had hoped when they frolicked in that fountain in the “Our Lips Are Sealed” video. “We Got the Beat” went to number two and “Our Lips Are Sealed” to number twenty. The Go-Go’s were everywhere, and Beauty and the Beat would go on to sell more than two million copies, making it one of the few debut albums to top the charts and putting the band on the same level as the Beatles and Elvis. Beauty and the Beat made the Go-Go’s the first, and to date only, female band to have a number one album, who not only wrote their own songs but also played their own instruments. The album was not only a success, but “also a harbinger of what rock would become, and a bridge between punk, the movement whose rebelliousness had quashed the excesses of classic rock, and the genre-fusing music of the 1980s,”⁵ said Hilary Hughes in her introduction to NPR’s oral history of Beauty and the Beat.

On November 14, 1981, the Go-Go’s appeared on Saturday Night Live with host Bernadette Peters and Billy Joel. Having to wait around the studio all day to play, the Go-Go’s passed the time with alcohol and cocaine. By the time they took the stage, they were so drunk they could barely play. A clip of the performance is available online and worth the watch. The girls could not only hold their liquor on live TV, but the performance helped them sell a lot of records. All this attention helped to move the band’s fan base beyond just college radio listeners and new-wave clubgoers. The band’s fan base was now younger, especially attracting teen and pre-teen girls, who worshipped the band and didn’t know what punk was, let alone about the band’s punk roots. When the Go-Go’s started they dreamed of spitting on Valley Girls, but those girls would soon be part of the band’s fan base and the band would be part of a film that featured those girls they wanted to spit at. “We Got the Beat” would end up being the opening theme to the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a film that would popularize Valley Girls, mall culture, and Southern California teenage adolescence in the 1980s. The film launched Amy Heckerling’s career, as well as the teen comedies of the 1980s from Sixteen Candles to The Breakfast Club.

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A 1981 Village Voice poll put Beauty and the Beat in the number ten spot. Revisiting the album for an October 2019 review, Pitchfork gave it an 8.3. “Though it was a far cry from The Canterbury, Beauty and the Beat is about what’s underneath the surface of pop music. Rather than relishing the California sunshine, the Go-Go’s evoke their Los Angeles, a glittery, gritty place where punks rule the streets after dark.”⁶ Reviewing Beauty and the Beat in November 1981 for Musician magazine, Toby Goldstein said, “Beauty and the Beat is the album those of you who were embarrassed by pop music can use to say that pop’s okay.”⁷ Wiedlin agreed with Goldstein’s assessment. “One of my great quotes that I ever said, if I can quote myself, was I once compared The Go-Go’s to Twinkies. I said, ‘Everybody loves Twinkies, but they’re ashamed to admit it,’”⁸ she told Songfacts in 2007.

“I remember thinking if we sell 100,000 copies, that would be amazing. We had no idea it would do what it did. I look back even now and say wow. We went from zero to one hundred in about two years. And what happened with the album—its success—was beyond any of our expectations,”⁹ said Carlisle. And while I don’t like reducing the Go-Go’s to sugary, sweet baked goods, that’s a lot of Twinkies.

1.  Rob Tannenbaum, “The Go-Go’s Recall the Debauched Days of Their Hit ‘We Got the Beat’ 35 Years Later,” Billboard, May 20, 2016.
2. Tannenbaum, “The Go-Go’s.”
3. Tannenbaum, “The Go-Go’s.”
4. Don Snowden, “The Go-Gos Go!!,” New York Rocker (1980). The Go-Go’s. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed July 13, 2022.
5. Hilary Hughes, “How The Go-Go’s Perfected Pop-Punk,” NPR, August 5, 2020.
6. Quinn Moreland, “Beauty and the Beat: The Go-Go’s,” Pitchfork, October 20, 2019.
7. Toby Goldstein, “The Go-Go’s: Beauty and the Beat (IRS),” Musician (1981). The Go-Go’s. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed August 1, 2022.
8. Carl Wiser, “Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s,” Songfacts (2007). The Go-Go’s, Jane Wiedlin. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed July 13, 2022.
9. Audrey Golden, “The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat: A 40th Anniversary Celebration,” Louder than War, July 8, 2021.

© Lisa Whittington-Hill, 2024. From The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat by Lisa Whittington-Hill published by Bloomsbury Academic on September 7, 2023.

Back when I was feeling lost in Los Angeles with Bourdain as my guide, that’s exactly what I did. I moved. I explored my new city with an open mind and an appetite. I familiarized myself with its limited and underutilized public transit system, traveling every direction off the metro line that city bus routes would allow. As I trekked farther and farther away from home, each stop introduced me to a new corner of the city, from the untamed stretches of the Los Angeles river to the thriving ramen shops off Sawtelle Boulevard.

When I traveled through Morocco, I never felt as if I were that unwelcome or disruptive presence that seems foundational to influencer culture, but I know that, if I ever go back, there are other things I would do to more deeply engage with the people I meet. At the very least, I would be less concerned with developing my own narrative and more concerned with understanding the narratives of those around me, and that’s largely thanks to the way Bourdain reoriented my attitude to the city I live in today.

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A year in the life of a grieving mother. An afternoon of outcry. A peek into the life of a celebrity ghostwriter. A witness to a monarch migration. And the friendship behind sushi’s arrival in the U.S. Our favorite reads of the week (and a bit of pickled ginger for after), chosen from all of our editors’ picks.

1. Amor Eterno

Skip Hollandsworth | Texas Monthly | May 8, 2023 | 7,580 words

Years from now, when I think about this story — which will happen, because it’s that good — I will hear, no, feel the pounding of feet. Skip Hollandsworth’s profile of Kimberly Mata-Rubio opens with the subject jogging through Uvalde, Texas, pausing at a mural of her daughter, Lexi. The scene echoes the moment when, immediately after learning that there had been a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, Mata-Rubio began to run, barefoot over asphalt and through traffic, toward the building where her daughter was in the fourth grade, only to learn that Lexi was dead. “Kim could feel her feet throbbing,” Hollandsworth writes. “They were so bloodied and bruised she could barely walk.” A year after the massacre, the jog past Lexi’s mural is one of several ritual motions Mata-Rubio has adopted. She also goes to her daughter’s grave once, sometimes twice a day, never leaving Lexi alone for more than 24 hours, and regularly drives to the state Capitol to lobby for gun control. Mural, grave, Austin: Mata-Rubio goes and returns, again and again, like the tide. Other Uvalde parents do the same. Their patterns, like those of so many people who have lost loved ones in mass shootings, remind me of a Robert Frost poem: “The heart can think of no devotion / Greater than being shore to ocean / Holding the curve of one position / Counting an endless repetition.” How many more parents, children, spouses, friends will join this grieving army in their aching, unspeakable form of love? Will you be one of them? Will I? —SD

2. I’m F***ing Agitated, Are You Going to Murder Me?

Arielle Isack | n+1 | May 9, 2023 | 3,059 words

When Jordan Neely was killed on a New York City subway car last week, a special kind of ugliness broke the surface of our society. I don’t mean afterward, when columnists and commentators used Daniel Penny’s lethal chokehold as some kind of ideological litmus test. I mean the killing itself. At the time, it was hard for me to articulate what exactly that ugliness was, but Arielle Isack clearly had no such difficulty: Her searing piece for n+1, which chronicles a subway platform vigil-turned-demonstration, makes no secret of her anger and hurt, and is all the better for it. Isack manages to render events and emotions with equal clarity, even as her sentences careen headlong through the afternoon, propelled by their own power. “A man in a faded Saints cap and glasses that magnified his eyes into giant watery lakes wailed 450,000 EMPTY APARTMENTS IN NEW YORK CITY! a figure that arced over the commotion and landed in the very center of our rage,” she writes of one moment. “I heard that number again and again throughout the afternoon; it focused everything into a dizzying lucidity we were thankful for, and furious about.” This isn’t argument, it’s testimony. It’s catharsis even in the absence of redemption or justice. And above all, it’s a call to remember that agitation — the very thing that supposedly made Jordan Neely a threat — is sometimes the only possible human reaction. —PR

3. Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter

J.R. Moehringer | The New Yorker | May 8, 2023 | 6,850 words

In mid-January, you may have noticed a little memoir called Spare hit the shelves. (If you were perusing certain Spanish bookshops, you might have noticed it even earlier.) The accompanying giant roar of publicity meant that even if you didn’t read the book, you couldn’t escape Prince Harry’s tales of fisticuffs with his brother, behind-the-pub escapades, and even his frostbitten penis. While the stories may have been his, though, the words were distinctly collaborative — and in this fascinating essay, ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer illuminates what it’s like to write for somebody else. Yes, he talks about Harry stuff, but he also addresses his own writing career and struggles with the anonymity of ghostwriting (at one point screaming “Say my name!” at a TV in a B&B). I enjoyed Moehringer’s honesty, self-awareness, and thoughtful analysis of the particular psychology this sort of writing requires — as well as the tidbits of gossip about people who are hell to work with. Moehringer got lucky with Harry; they had the right chemistry, and the success of Spare has brought the art of ghostwriting out of the shadows. (If you want to read about Harry’s blink-and-you-miss-it appearance at King Charles III’s coronation last weekend, along with some joyful descriptions of hats, I recommend Helen Lewis’ wonderfully amusing “King Charles’ Very Hobbity Coronation” from The Atlantic.) —CW

4. Saving the Monarch Butterfly Migration

Romina Cenisio | Atmos | May 8, 2023 | 3,526 words

I once visited the butterfly garden at our local zoo. Witnessing so many of these colorful, delicate beings in person was a magical experience. The peace and tranquility in that space was palpable, something I wanted to bottle and release as needed. Romina Cenisio’s Atmos piece on the monarch butterfly migration recalls the singular joy that butterflies bring, along with critically important reminders of our role as humans to ensure the well-being of butterflies for generations to come. “As I lie on the ground with my eyes closed, a sound reminiscent of light rain surrounds me, subdues me,” she writes. “Yet unlike the steady drum of rain, the sound seems to move around from left to right, up and down, in both unison and disorder. At times a ticklish, ASMR sensation overcomes me as the sound gets closer, but no raindrops land on me. Opening my eyes moves me out of this gentle trance, reminding me that there is no rain; rather, there are millions of monarch butterflies shimmering overhead.” —KS

5. How Two Friends Sparked L.A.’s Sushi Obsession — and Changed the Way America Eats

Daniel Miller | Los Angeles Times | May 3, 2023 | 3,855 words

In 1965, Noritoshi Kanai and Harry Wolff Jr. were on a trip to Japan, looking for an interesting food product to import to the U.S. Instead, one of their dinners in Tokyo led them to another idea: sushi. Daniel Miller recounts how the two men brought the Japanese cuisine to Los Angeles, at a time when the city felt primed for something new. Which restauranteurs and chefs were the first to add sushi to their menus? When were the sushi bar and the California roll invented? Accompanied by lovely illustrations by Yuko Shimuzu, this is a fun piece of regional foodie history — one that ultimately explores whether food can truly bring different people and cultures together. —CLR

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Sushi was, of course, known to Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in L.A. well before the efforts of Wolff and Kanai, but it was typically simple and homespun. Among the items frequently served in Japanese American homes, Matsumoto said, were inari sushi, a fried tofu pocket stuffed with rice; and futomaki sushi, a thick roll usually filled with vegetables and sometimes cooked seafood.

Their timing was impeccable. In the 1950s and ’60s, Rath said, three innovations made it much easier to import products from Japan: refrigerated shipping containers, regular and direct transpacific flights, and the globalization of Japan’s fishing fleet.

There is a YouTube video from around 1995 that goes viral just about every time someone posts it on social media. It’s alternately known as the Suga Free “Pen and Nickel” or “Kitchen Table” freestyle. Filmed with a handheld camera at a Compton dope house, Suga Free performs the rap equivalent of hitting a full court shot backward and following it up with a 720-degree slam dunk. Using a nickel as a kick drum, a pen as a hi-hat, Suga Free floats like he had never experienced gravity. He’s Gregory Hines in alligator shoes, Cab Calloway on a mission to make money with Minnie the Moocher. The voice pirouettes and crip walks, flows and bends like alien cadences from an advanced civilization where “Dolemite” is revered as sacred text. When Questlove posted the clip last month, the reactions were typical: thousands marveling at the level of difficulty, describing it as the pure essence of hip-hop creativity. Or as A$AP Ferg chimed in: “Unbelievable 🔥.”

Starr: The one thing that was tough is we just didn’t have time for improv. And I think a lot of us were familiar with, and wanting, to play in that way. And when it came down to it, we just didn’t have the time for it. We didn’t have the budget for it. But luckily, Enbom is such an incredibly talented writer that you don’t need it.

Hansen: In fact, so many people are like, “That’s got to be improvised, right?” The way John writes, it just feels so natural.

Enbom: Martin’s character always resented Kyle, and that was their relationship. Originally, Kyle did not pay much attention to Roman, just because he didn’t think much of him. And so the fact that this kind of little weird relationship evolved has a lot to do with just how the two of them got on.

Starr: When it was in the dialogue a little bit, we leaned into it and it became kind of our natural on-screen/off-screen rapport. Because it’s also a fun place to play. I think we enjoy that kind of humor naturally, anyway. So we kind of end up doing it even when we’re not working.

Hansen: You know what wasn’t in the dialogue? Martin slapping me on camera.

Enbom: It became this running thing of — without him even knowing it was coming — just Martin whapping Kyle.

Starr: It wasn’t in the face. It was mostly …

Hansen: A lot of nut shots.

The suspect was first identified as a person of interest in Newton’s murder not by detectives but by Clark Williams, a stay-at-home dad turned empty-nester. Williams became obsessed with the case after seeing so many similarities between the dead man and himself: He and Newton were born just a week apart in 1965 in the same part of northern Wisconsin, where homophobia was rampant, and each had fled to a bigger city to find a better life.

How Williams figured it all out, said lead Det. John Lamberti, was amazing.

“I like to think I’m a pretty good detective — been doing homicide for a while — and I never would have made this connection,” Lamberti said. “Not in a million years would I have come up with what Clark came up with.”

“The hair on the back of my neck stood up,” Williams said of the moment it all clicked. “I’m like, ‘What the f—? How is this possible?’”

I started talking to my neighbors. During the pandemic, hundreds of teenagers in my community took to the streets on RadRunners and other inexpensive DTC e-bikes with mechanical disc brakes, and I discovered that many of them were having similar issues. Some parents were clued into the problem and were either scheduling regular maintenance with local shops or learning how to make the fixes at home, while others had no idea that their kids were riding heavy electric bikes that couldn’t stop properly without frequent maintenance. I started a thread on Nextdoor with a summary of the problem and how to address it, and soon I was DMing with parents who wanted tips on barrel and caliper adjustments.

One of my neighbors — his name is Ezra Holland and he lives about five blocks from me — says that almost immediately he started noticing disturbing braking issues with the RadRunner he purchased early in 2022. Two or three weeks after he got it, Holland, an experienced road cyclist, noticed that the responsiveness of the brakes was poor, and he decided to remedy the problem by tightening the cables that run from the levers to the calipers. But he learned that this only bought him a few weeks, and that after tightening those cables a few times, one of the calipers clicked into a different position where there was zero braking action. “That is pretty scary,” he says.

Thus began a year of education, vigilance, maintenance, and communication with Rad. Holland now buys pads in bulk on Amazon; he checks and adjusts both calipers every two weeks, always on alert for a failure. He’s experienced the rear brake fail going downhill and is especially concerned about that happening while his 17-year-old is using the bike. Rad has sent him new brakes and new pads, but Holland says that in his ongoing phone calls with the brand, customer service reps and supervisors have told him that other customers aren’t experiencing braking issues like he has. But he alone knows a half dozen friends and neighbors struggling with the same problems. “I just got to a point where I started questioning my own thinking, because they keep saying I’m wrong,” he says. “I start thinking that maybe I’m just making a fuss here for no reason. Which I think is not fair, because I think it’s not true.”

Ideally, Sarah would not be looking for a place for the night; she wants a place to call home. She just can’t seem to convince landlords to give her a chance.

Her latest full-time job, as an executive assistant for a nonprofit focused on homelessness in West Los Angeles, pays her $24 per hour. She grosses around $4,000 per month. To people unaware of the surge in rental prices, that might seem like enough. But the median rent for a studio in Los Angeles on December 10 was $1,825 — a $275 increase over a year earlier. After taxes, the market-rate rent would consume most of what she earns. 

But in Los Angeles and other housing-squeezed cities, having the resources to pay the local median rent is a far cry from actually getting an apartment. There are, however, supports in place to help people like Sarah. 

In 2019, when she earned about $2 per hour less, she qualified for a Rapid Rehousing subsidy from the L.A. Homeless Services Agency, but that did not guarantee that she would receive it. The process struck her as complex. It involves working with a Rapid Rehousing case manager to find an apartment in the right price range, then connecting the case manager to the landlord and hoping that they could work it out. In theory, they agree to allow the subsidized tenant to rent the place based on various criteria, and then the tenant starts out paying a percentage of their rent that will grow in subsequent months and years. The exact amount of the subsidy depends on a variety of factors, including the tenant’s income and the rent, and the process involves the input of the case manager.

The problem for Sarah has been that she has needed to convince a landlord to choose a low-income tenant with mandatory bureaucratic processes over plenty of people in simpler circumstances with larger incomes and better credit applying. Nothing requires landlords to take on tenants like her, and the shortage of affordable lodging means that market forces have been blowing the other way.

Seyward Darby  |  The Atavist Magazine  |  August 2022 | 10 minutes (2,937 words)

This is an excerpt from The Atavist’s issue no. 130, “Fault Lines.”

The Atavist Magazine, our sister site, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.

The earthquake hit at 4:31 a.m. For the next 20 seconds the ground shook, rippled, and roared. Cracks tore up the sides of buildings, and higher floors pancaked onto lower ones. Steel-reinforced concrete beams buckled as sections of elevated roadway collapsed. Transformers exploded, and burst water mains flooded residential streets.

People were jolted awake by what felt like a freight train barreling through their homes. When it stopped, before the aftershocks began rolling in, survivors saw stars. “They were so close to me and very bright,” one man remembered. The earthquake had killed electrical power in the San Fernando Valley, plunging it into darkness. For the first time many Valley residents could remember, they saw the night sky in luminous detail.

The earthquake of January 17, 1994, which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale, left 72 people dead, thousands injured, and tens of thousands homeless across the greater Los Angeles area. Damage was estimated in the billions of dollars. The event was dubbed the Northridge earthquake, named for a hard-hit part of the Valley, but the epicenter was actually farther south in Reseda, a diverse working-class neighborhood.

Some 11 miles beneath Reseda lay a blind thrust fault, so called because it can’t be seen on the earth’s surface. Unlike visible fissures such as the San Andreas Fault, blind thrust faults are difficult to detect and map. But where there’s one, there are likely to be many: By the early 1990s, according to the urban theorist Mike Davis in his book Ecology of Fear, scientists believed there was a “dense thicket” of hidden faults underneath Los Angeles, threatening to convulse the city.

* * *

Grover Cleveland High School sat a few blocks from the epicenter of the Northridge earthquake. The school’s low-slung buildings suffered so much damage that students couldn’t attend classes for several weeks afterward. When they returned, they couldn’t eat lunch in the cafeteria because the facility had been condemned. Instead they ate in whatever nooks and crannies they could find—in hallway corners, on concrete quads, or in classrooms, sometimes with their teachers.

In E Hall, part of the northernmost section of campus, eating lunch in a teacher’s room was a badge of honor. The faculty of E Hall were celebrity educators, rock stars of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). They ran Cleveland’s renowned humanities magnet, an interdisciplinary program combining instruction in history, literature, art, and philosophy. “We were like a little Sarah Lawrence in the middle of a Title I school,” an alum told me, referring to the federal program that provides financial assistance for schools with a large population of low-income students. Since its founding in 1981, the magnet had been the subject of glowing news stories, and schools across Los Angeles had replicated its curriculum. The program, which called itself Core, produced so many graduates bound for top-notch colleges that some alumni referred to the University of California at Berkeley as “Core north.”

Core teachers prided themselves on being radicals. They encouraged students to eschew taboos, expand their horizons, and question conventional wisdom. They lectured on systemic racism and postmodernism, and they treated the teenagers they were tasked with educating as “young men and women,” a phrase the program’s founder, Neil Anstead, was fond of using. In turn, the students worshipped them.

Chris Miller was an object of particularly intense adoration. Miller, who taught American history and social studies to juniors, had been with Core since its founding. His students read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. They discussed the imperative of dismantling white supremacy and the patriarchy. A white man approaching fifty, Miller wore Birkenstocks and jewelry, and had a long ponytail that he adorned with a threaded hair wrap, the kind popular among aging hippies and teenage girls. He hugged students and urged them to talk about their feelings; crying wasn’t unusual in his classes.

* Asterisks denote pseudonyms The Atavist is using for women who requested that they not be identified in this story.

The fall semester after the Northridge earthquake, Jackie* began eating lunch in Miller’s room. Jackie was petite, with dark hair and a wide, winning smile. But, entering the 11th grade, she felt insecure. “I basically advertised within those first few weeks that I was an incredibly vulnerable 16-year-old girl,” Jackie told me. She assumed that her friends were smarter than she was, and her parents’ rocky marriage was taking an emotional toll. Meanwhile, she struggled to navigate the sexual attention that men and boys had begun showing her.

Miller made Jackie feel comfortable in his class right away. “He was teaching us things other people were afraid to teach us,” she said. “He was brave, he was a pioneer.” When they talked one on one, she felt that he treated her like an adult, asking her about her life and listening when she spoke. He gave her The Celestine Prophecy, a popular novel about a man’s spiritual awakening, to read and discuss with him. Barely a month into school, Jackie wrote in her diary that Miller was “so fucking cool”—and also a “big flirt” and “very sexual.”

One day, Miller asked Jackie if he was right in sensing an attraction between them. Jackie felt like she had to say yes or he would be disappointed. Besides, maybe she did like him, or should. When Miller asked if she’d ever had sex, Jackie told him she had, which was true. In response, Miller drove her to get an HIV test. Jackie felt like he was taking care of her.

They started seeing each other off campus—teachers and students in Core often interacted outside school, so Jackie didn’t think twice about it. But then, according to Jackie, Miller began sexually abusing her. Once, while giving her a ride to a friend’s house, he pulled over and lunged across the console between them. As Miller kissed Jackie, he placed her hand on his erection. On another occasion, he took her to the beach with two of her friends, both male Core students. The group sat on the sand, with Jackie leaning against Miller’s legs, his arms wrapped around her, and his hands on her breasts. That night, as Miller drove Jackie home, he told her that she could “use” him to work through the problems in her life. He suggested that they write letters to each other and leave them in a filing cabinet in his classroom. He told her to call him “Journey” in the correspondence.

Miller said he loved her. Jackie wanted to believe him. It would be more than two decades before she learned that she wasn’t the only student Miller pursued—and that Miller wasn’t the only Core teacher who allegedly targeted students for abuse.

‘They put the magnet program’s reputation over a student’s well-being,’ Kate said. ‘That hurts, you know?’

In 2021, Jackie and three other Jane Does filed lawsuits claiming they were groomed and sexually abused while they were students in Core. Four former teachers, including Miller, are named in the suits as perpetrators. The alleged abuse happened between 1994 and 2009; during that same time frame, according to public records, two additional Core teachers were convicted of crimes involving students, including statutory rape, and a third Cleveland teacher whose classes were popular with magnet students was convicted of possession of child pornography.

Read the legal complaints filed by the four Jane Does and an open letter written by the first woman to come forward to report abuse.

An estimated 10 percent of U.S. students suffer sexual misconduct at the hands of a school employee before they leave high school. Over the past decade, LAUSD has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in response to abuse and harassment claims. What makes Core unique is the number of teachers accused of misconduct over a prolonged period, and the apparent use of the magnet’s curriculum itself to groom students. There is also evidence that some of the teachers’ colleagues and school officials were aware of what was happening but did little or nothing to stop it. “They put the magnet program’s reputation over a student’s well-being. That hurts, you know?” said Kate*, a classmate of Jackie’s and another plaintiff in the lawsuits. “At the end of the day, it was almost like they didn’t care.”

Like the blind thrust faults beneath Los Angeles, the network of suspected wrongdoing at Core is dense, and its capacity for devastation is enormous. This story is based on extensive interviews with the four Jane Does, dozens of other Core alumni, and multiple educators with knowledge of the program. It draws from hundreds of pages of depositions and other legal documents, as well as personal correspondence, yearbooks, journals, and social media postings shared by Core graduates. Two of the accused teachers, including Miller, are deceased; the others either declined to comment for this story or did not respond to interview requests. A spokesperson for LAUSD, which is named as a defendant in the lawsuits, said in a statement that the district “does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.”

In 2021, Core celebrated its 40th anniversary. The program remains a crown jewel of LA’s public education system. The women who have come forward understand why: Core taught them to disrupt the status quo, expose injustice, and demand accountability for harm. Now they are doing just that.

Magnet programs were created to right wrongs. In the late 1960s, U.S. cities responded to persistent racial segregation by launching specialized courses of study—science and math, for instance, or language immersion—in public schools. Students throughout a district were invited to apply; acceptance was contingent on factors such as racial background and socioeconomic status. The programs were called magnets because they were intended to attract students from all walks of life.

In 1981, Cleveland’s principal asked Neil Anstead to develop a magnet program inside the high school. A Renaissance man, Anstead had been teaching social studies, economics, and art history at Cleveland for more than twenty years; he loved opera so much, he eventually offered a class in that, too. Anstead designed a program predicated on the idea that the humanities were for everyone—not just, in his words, “upper- and middle-class students,” or those of “higher ability.” Magnet students were bused in from across the Valley and other parts of Los Angeles.

The magnet’s curriculum was organized thematically: 9th grade focused on world cultures, 10th on Western civilization, 11th on American studies, and 12th on philosophy and modern thought. “Core” became shorthand for the program because magnet pupils took a nucleus of humanities courses together and attended classes in other subjects alongside the rest of the Cleveland student body. Magnet courses focused on writing—lots of essays, few tests—and were rooted in discussions of what Anstead described as questions “important to living more meaningful lives.” Among them: Is there free will? What is art? Should people be guided more by reason or by emotion? “In the hands of flexible and sensitive teachers,” Anstead wrote in a paper for the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, these questions “keep students hooked from bell to bell.”

Technically, Core was subject to the authority of Cleveland’s main office. In practice, however, it was a school within a school. Anstead served as the de facto administrator, making hiring decisions, managing budgets, and overseeing curriculum development. But magnet faculty enjoyed a great deal of autonomy—Anstead, who developed a reputation among Core students for being gentle and brilliant, if a bit absentminded, gave teachers free rein over their classes. Each grade had a faculty team led by a coordinator; the team co-taught some class sessions and graded students’ essays together. “Teachers must be workaholics,” Anstead once told the Los Angeles Times. “They must be prepared to spend evenings, weekends, and part of their summers together.” Magnet faculty tended to be charismatic: Some teachers were personable in class, forging friendships with students, while others engaged in argumentative dialogue or maintained the cool detachment of an august college professor.

The program was an instant hit. One early alum wrote in a testimonial for the magnet that graduate school “began where … Core classes left off.” Another alum told me that when she got to UCLA, her essays were of such high quality that her professors thought she was plagiarizing. Core became so beloved that before long there was a robust pipeline of alumni who, after finishing college, came back to teach in the program.

In 1986, the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, a nonprofit organization, decided to build on Core’s success by installing similar programs at public schools throughout the city. LAEP called the initiative Humanitas, and participating teachers shadowed Core faculty to learn how to craft and implement a humanities curriculum. Within five years, Humanitas had chapters in 29 schools, involving some 3,500 students and 180 teachers. “In most high schools, you just pass from class to class. If you’re lucky, you might have a teacher who understands you and tries to help you with stuff. But that was not the case here,” Judith Johnson, a former LAEP administrator, told me. “By bringing people into teams, the teachers had a community, and the kids had a community.”

‘Stay away from Miller,’ an older female student told Kappes at lunch one day. ‘He tries to sleep with students.’

When Kasia Kappes entered Core as a freshman in 1991, she was nervous. Bright and artistic, Kappes had attended a Catholic middle school, where she wore a uniform and the teachers ran a tight ship. Public school seemed chaotic by comparison. But in E Hall, in the bubble of Core, Kappes felt at home. The teachers were engaging, the classes were inspiring, and the students were enthusiastic. “I just thought sending me there was the best thing my parents ever did for me,” Kappes told me.

Like any high school, however, Cleveland had a rumor mill, and teachers were often the subject of gossip. There were stories about Core instructors who smoked with students. Two longtime faculty members were said to be having an affair. Students talked about an art teacher who was “creepy” with male students. Girls whispered about a math instructor who looked up their skirts in class.

One rumor gave Kappes pause, because it was accompanied by a warning. “Stay away from Miller,” an older female student told her at lunch one day. “He tries to sleep with students.”

Kappes decided to do what the student said, just in case she was right. That worked well enough until 11th grade, when she was in Miller’s class. One day he pulled Kappes aside and asked why she wouldn’t talk to him. “I wasn’t going to accuse a teacher of sleeping with a student,” Kappes said. “So I made something up.” He was friendly, and Kappes felt like he was being genuine. She decided to give him a chance.

Soon she was spending a lot of time in Miller’s classroom, a standalone building on a corner of campus facing an adjoining street. Miller was known to let students ditch school by climbing out his window. The room had Malcolm X and Bob Marley posters. When teenagers hung out there between classes, at lunch, or after school, Miller asked about their friendships and their crushes.

In class, Miller did more than ask questions: He encouraged students to talk about their personal lives in relation to the Core curriculum. Miller was the 11th-grade coordinator, overseeing units on classism, racism, and gender and sexuality, and when it came to sharing about those topics, nothing seemed off limits. Kids described trauma, anxiety, and problems at home. Students of color talked about encountering bias, a topic that was the subject of an annual class exercise called the power pyramid. Core juniors were corralled into a room and instructed to organize themselves according to race: Black and Latino students were on the floor, Asian students were on chairs, and white students stood over everyone. This, the kids were told, was how society saw them.

Miller also showed students provocative movies, including Oleanna, a David Mamet film based on his play of the same name, which depicts a female college student who accuses a male professor of sexual harassment. According to Kappes, Miller wanted to know what the class thought of the plot: “Was there inappropriateness going on between the two? Where do you draw the line on that kind of stuff?”

Kappes trusted Miller and confided in him. Once, after she got in a fight with her parents, he picked her up at home and drove her to a friend’s place. It wasn’t unusual for Core teachers to go above and beyond for a student. Kappes said that one teacher, Rene Shufelt, helped pay for her art school applications. Kappes also considered Richard Coleman, Core’s 10th-grade coordinator, a “legit friend.” She took care of his cats when he was out of town, and Coleman joined Kappes and her friends at movies, concerts, and Disneyland. Over Thanksgiving break in 1994, Kappes’s senior year, she and a few other girls went on a camping trip to Arizona led by Coleman, an avid hiker. According to depositions from Kappes and other students on the trip, the only other chaperone was Coleman’s friend David DeMetz, a paramedic in his mid-twenties.

Kappes and her friends weren’t sneaking around. “We’d come back to school and be like, ‘Oh yeah, we went hiking with Coleman.’ No one batted an eyelash at any of this,” Kappes said. “As weird as things seemed at times, it was also just kind of normal.”

Normal is a word many Core alumni use to talk about things that were anything but. A better word, perhaps, is pervasive. The blurring of lines between students and teachers was everywhere. So was speculation about lines being crossed outright. But a rumor is just a rumor, until the moment it isn’t.

Read the full story at The Atavist.