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Amory Rowe Salem | Longreads | January 9, 2024 | 2,909 words (10 minutes)

Chances are Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sick long before the rest of us discovered her illness. When we did, the news hit us like a boxer’s mitt to the heart. Not just because her tiny frame seemed so completely incapable of carrying the weight of a serious diagnosis, but also because of the unfairness of it all. The injustice.

Ruth was small but feisty, often taking on adversaries of twice her heft. She was our David in an arena of Goliaths. Though she wasn’t spoiling for fights, she was skilled at ending them, rarely failing to punctuate her victories with a small show of rhetorical force. Ruth was unrelenting, vigilant, and inquisitive. We loved her for all of those traits. And because she laid blue eggs.

Only two of our chickens—Ruth and her flockmate Michelle Obama—laid blue eggs. The rest of our feathered badass lady gang—Simone Biles, Megan Rapinoe, Scarlett Johansson, Kamala Harris, and Aliphine Tuliamuk—all laid brown eggs, which were lovely and appreciated. But finding a blue egg in the nesting box surfaced memories of unearthing that rare piece of blue sea glass on the windswept winter beaches of my childhood. It felt like a treasure.

So when the tide of blue eggs ebbed, a sure sign of chicken illness, my children and I loaded Ruth and Michelle into the family van and drove them 45 minutes out of the city to the Tufts Hospital for Small Animals in Grafton, Massachusetts, the only place within 50 miles that will provide care to a chicken.

We were not veteran chicken keepers. We’d stumbled upon the delight of raising chickens entirely by accident when we traded a 50 lb. bag of flour and a jar of sourdough starter for a bucket of day-old chicks. It was the sort of barter people were making in the early days of the pandemic, when the unthinkable and the absurd upstaged the logical and the predictable.

We had no prior experience with poultry; we didn’t have a coop or a brooder lamp or the faintest idea of how to raise a palmful of down into an egg-laying hen. We needed to learn. Not just for the sake of the birds, but for our own sakes: we craved a learning curve. The world was going two-dimensional on us—all screens and games and apps—but those tiny feathered bodies, each one housing a beating heart the size of an infant’s thumbnail, demanded our attention. We became dedicated keepers of those hearts; and the flock, in turn, shocked our family’s flatlining system, giving us back the gift of emotional amplitude that had been compressed by our escalating attention to the glossy artifice of the staged and surface-level.

The coop was its own classroom. Our early chicken lessons were learned on the fly as we tried to stay a half-step ahead of our growing flock, keeping them fed, clean, warm, and safe. In that way, my children were initiated in parenting: balancing birthday parties and playdates with regular feedings and weekly “house cleanings,” summoning an uncommon vigilance over their brood.

Over time, we extracted bespoke wisdom from our gallinaceous charges. My son, whose outsized capacity for empathy was at odds with his narrow 10 years of experience, divined that a chicken was a fair barometer for human character. “If you can’t figure out how to hold a chicken right, you’re not a very kind person,” he’d concluded. He wasn’t wrong. You hold a chicken much the same way you hold an infant, with your forearm tucked under the length of its body so it feels supported. If you’re in the business of vetting people, there are worse metrics. At least one would-be boyfriend of his oldest half-sister has been summarily dismissed based on failing the chicken-cradling exam.

My daughter, an introvert with a preternatural instinct for hibernation, admired the chickens’ unerring sense of home. For weeks after we moved their coop from the muddy corner of the yard to slightly higher ground, the birds would return to the site of their original coop at sundown, standing with their prehistoric feet sunk in the muck as if their house was just about to materialize around them. What adolescent girl hasn’t stood, Dorothy-like in the Oz of the schoolyard, silently intoning: “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home”?

For my part, I watched with recognition as our rasorial creatures bent their heads to the ground and brought the full force of their attention to a single square inch of grass. They were excellent excavators of the granular, masters of the microscopic, capable of quarrying the tiniest insects and grubs. But they paid a price for their ground-level monomania, sometimes missing a juicy worm just a few feet away—or a predator overhead—because they simply weren’t seeing the bigger picture. As a mother, a teacher, a citizen, I also knew the opportunity cost of becoming mired in the details. It behooves all of us, every now and then, to turn our faces to the sun lest we lose sight of the magnitude of the stage on which we are playing.

Our first year of chicken-keeping had been full of tiny wonders and short on heartache. But as we rounded the bend into year two, with a flock of a dozen, the poultry actuarial tables were turning and the parade of covetable “firsts”—first flight feathers, first dust bath, first eggs—changed tenor. We had our first sick chicken.

In Grafton, the fourth-year veterinary student gave us a diagnosis for Ruth within 15 minutes of our arrival.

“It’s the first thing we check in backyard chickens,” she told me over the phone from deep inside the hospital, while the kids and I waited in the parking lot. 

Ruth was suffering from lead poisoning. Michelle, too—and likely the entire flock. But Ruth was presenting as the most ill because she was our smallest chicken and our best forager. I learned then that what is true for so many of us is also true for chickens: we are often drawn to what is not good for us. Even to what can kill us. The vet explained that lead tastes good to chickens: it tastes sweet. So if a hen finds an industrial-era cache buried just below the surface of our urban backyard, she’ll return to it again and again, sampling until the lead has permeated every muscle, organ, bone, and feather.

“Ruth’s lead levels were too high to read,” the vet explained. “She’s probably been sick for a long time. Chickens are very good at hiding their illness.”

My daughter, sitting cross-legged in the passenger seat of our idling van, cocked an ear in my direction. As a middle school-age girl she, too, knew something about hiding weaknesses for fear of having them exploited. Recently I had found her crumpled deep in the covers of her bed. Despite the fact that it was spring in New England, the sun still shockingly high in the sky for the late afternoon hour, she had burrowed into the darkest corner of her room the way a hen seeks the dim, still seclusion of the nesting box to endure her daily egg-laying effort.

Her story had come out in messy exhaled fragments hyphenated by tears. A classmate rebuked by a teacher for an outfit deemed inappropriate for school. The predictable adolescent backlash. A girl-led campaign to wear crop tops and short shorts to school in rebellion. My daughter’s discomfort and refusal. Her choice not to sign the offender’s dress code petition. A parade of protesting peers observed from a careful and conservatively clothed distance. The fallout. She had been exiled from the flock, hen-pecked in hallways and corridors of the internet—her pandemic cohort, recently reunited, now fumbling with the fizzy power of sudden togetherness.

Lead lodged deep in a body is easier to extract than loneliness. Many times over the next two weeks, as my daughter and I corralled our flock twice daily to inject each chicken with a chelating agent, I wished for as straightforward a solution as a hypodermic needle sunk into soft muscle to cure my adolescent girl’s unhappiness. A pinch of pain every 12 hours seemed a small price to pay to restore balance.

Every parent of double-digit-age children craves a return to the obvious fixes of infancy and toddlerhood when tears could be quelled with a diaper change, a snack, or a nap. But the grand bargain of parenting holds that as our children grow wondrously more complicated, so do their problems. Those simple early solutions get shelved with the board books and Duplos, as obsolete as last year’s ice skates. So I was surprised—as the late spring days lengthened and we extracted the last of the medication from its glass vials and injected it into Ruth and her flockmates—to see that both the birds and my daughter were improving.

Maybe it was just time. Maybe some other tween-age scandal moved onto the front page of her classmates’ attention. But I like to think that the caretaking of other hearts was its own slow-working salve for her adolescent injuries. My daughter needed something—affection, attention, patience—so she gave those things away. And in return, she got better.

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A month after our first visit to Tufts, we boomeranged back to Grafton to have the flock’s lead levels rechecked. Ruth’s numbers were much improved—as were the rest of the birds’—but the vet palpated a mass in Aliphine’s coelom and suggested she take a closer look. Aliphine, a tall Lavender Orpington with a gentle manner and eyes more elephantine than reptilian, was named after distance-running phenom Aliphine Tuliamuk, winner of the 2020 US Olympic Marathon Trials. Befitting her namesake, our Aliphine went on to endure an odyssey of diagnostics in the subsequent weeks: blood draws, X-rays, ultrasounds, and a fine-needle biopsy. The news was neither encouraging nor conclusive.

By the time the last of the tests was done, Aliphine was spending most of her days perched quietly in a corner of the run, an introvert in a flock of socialites. Unlike her fellow chickens, who were always busy scratching in the dirt, squabbling over the prime nesting box, and preening in the afternoon sun, she kept to herself. Short of invasive surgery, which the vet wasn’t sure she’d survive, our best option was to keep her comfortable and to try to catch the falling knife of divining precisely when she stopped behaving like a happy chicken and started behaving like an animal in pain.

That day came in late summer, when Aliphine failed to defend herself from a flurry of unwarranted pecks delivered by a cranky flockmate. Her will—and maybe her capacity for self-preservation—had waned. I called the vet.

It was an awful errand. Every prior trip to Grafton had been undertaken with the hope of a diagnosis or at least some new measure of understanding. But there was no avoiding the fact that this was a different journey altogether. My children, then 10 and 12, were not unaccustomed to loss. In roughly a decade they had lost two grandparents and 18 months of their childhoods, ideas made abstract by distance and time. Aliphine was theirs, though: a feathered beating heart for which they felt deeply responsible.

No parent wishes pain upon their child; but every parent wants the next generation to be able to bear up under its inevitable burden. I wanted so much for my children to avoid being among those who spent their lives carving routes around difficult emotional obstacles. While I wasn’t a trained educator capable of making cetaceans and early American history and square roots come alive for them, I was still a person equipped to teach my children about the living and, when necessary, the dying.

Before we left the house I sat the children down and laid out the path: we would take Aliphine to Grafton; the veterinary staff would bring us into a private room; we’d have a chance to say goodbye; and then the doctor would put her to sleep. There were several exits off the road ahead, I explained to the kids. They didn’t have to go to Grafton at all. Or they could keep Aliphine company on the drive to Grafton and not go into the hospital. Or they could say their goodbyes in the room itself. It was important to me that they made and owned their choices in this process, that they looked at this moment directly and felt it for what it was: a loss.

“We want to go,” my daughter said.

“But we’ll decide when we get there if we go into the hospital,” my son added.

While my daughter walked out to the coop to retrieve Aliphine, my son packed an ear of corn, a wedge of watermelon, and a fistful of blueberries—all of the chicken’s favorite foods—and carried them to the van. Aliphine sat quietly in my daughter’s lap for the drive, each one seemingly happy to feel the warmth of the other. As we made our way west, my daughter’s eyes welled with tears, emptied, filled again. Every few minutes Aliphine vocalized a chicken syllable or two, a sweet low sound that made each of us turn our gaze to her, and then to one another. It was hard not to hear those notes as questions.

When we exited the Mass Pike and began to slalom through the small town rotaries and farmland adjacent to Grafton, I felt that familiar tug, a nearly irrepressible urge to yank the wheel and change the direction of our distressed quartet. It felt so heavy, the weight of what we were carrying. The temptation to cast it off, even if only for a day or a week, to distract ourselves with the fleeting giddiness that comes from shirking responsibility, was overwhelming. But there was no outrunning this particular outcome and the inevitable impact it was going to have on each of us. We’d all done so much looking away: from grown men being choked to death on city streets, from riots and mass shootings, from atrocities at home and across oceans. The way forward had to be with open eyes and with hearts exposed to injury. We’d seen the price we paid when we failed to bear witness.

Once at the hospital, I pulled the van into a parking spot near the entrance. Aliphine perked up and preened a feather or two, seemingly animated, as infants are, by the transition from automotive movement to stillness. Without explicitly asking my children what their choice was—to enter the hospital or not—I simply opened the sliding door, an invitation. Each of my children stepped out onto the curb, my daughter still holding Aliphine and my son carrying her bag of treats.

As we began our slow procession up the walkway, my son reached for my hand. Thinking he was seeking a small physical reassurance, I turned my open palm toward him, but instead of slipping his hand into mine, he dropped into my palm a tiny ivory-colored tooth, still wet and rimmed with blood. Before I could ask the question, he bared his teeth at me: less smile, more grimace. There, in the front, on the bottom, I could see the newly vacated gap. I noted the loss, slipped the tooth into the pocket of my overalls, and walked on with my boy, my girl, and our chicken.

I said many things to my children in the low light of the room where Aliphine was euthanized. And my children said many things to her as they fed her corn and blueberries and watermelon for the last time. The vet spoke to all of us, told us we were making the right choice, that it was time. She spoke to Aliphine, too, as she pushed the Pentobarbital into the catheter she’d inserted into her leg bone. I watched closely, a hand on her feathered breast, as Aliphine’s body bucked once, twice, and then went limp. Of all of the words exhaled in that room, though, the ones that stick with me form what I think of now as our family’s most intimate catechism.

“We were lucky to love her,” I said to my children.

“And she was lucky to be loved,” my daughter replied.

“That’s not nothing,” my son added.

All true. Maybe the most important truths we can know.

The hospital was good at grief. There was no price or paperwork for the dead. Within minutes of Aliphine’s death we pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road that would take us back to the city. As the emptiness of the van settled around us, the still and chirpless space yawning wide, I watched out of the corner of my eye as my son’s face twitched and then contorted. At first I thought he might be fighting back tears. But then I realized he was poking his tongue into the space where his tooth used to be, gently exploring the vacancy where something familiar had been and was no longer.

I saw him wince. I imagine it hurt. I imagine, too, that in that tiny moment he learned he could bear the pain. Then the pain ebbed. And he learned the shape of pain, its tidal behavior. And that understanding made him someone wiser and more durable. And I knew, over time, and his countless recoveries from those small waves of hurt, he would feel something new break the surface.

Amory Rowe Salem reads, writes, coaches, parents, and tends to her flock in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can read her work at amoryrowesalem.com.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

At three weeks old, Izidor was abandoned at a state-run hospital for “unsalvageables” in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania — left behind by his family because one of his legs was deformed. Estimates say that under Ceaușescu’s regime, 170,000 babies, children, and teens lived in “child gulags” subsisting on thin gruel, often in filthy, horrific conditions. Deprived of loving care of any kind, those that lived were often under-developed physically and mentally, and found it difficult to form attachments with other people. At The Atlantic, Melissa Fay Greene reports on how growing up at the hospital affected Izidor’s capacity for empathy and attachment and how his emotional makeup has affected the American family that adopted him as a teen.

Like all the boys and girls who lived in the hospital for “irrecoverables,” Izidor was served nearly inedible, watered-down food at long tables where naked children on benches banged their tin bowls. He grew up in overcrowded rooms where his fellow orphans endlessly rocked, or punched themselves in the face, or shrieked. Out-of-control children were dosed with adult tranquilizers, administered through unsterilized needles, while many who fell ill received transfusions of unscreened blood. Hepatitis B and HIV/AIDS ravaged the Romanian orphanages.

At age 3, abandoned children were sorted. Future workers would get clothes, shoes, food, and some schooling in Case de copii—“children’s homes”—while “deficient” children wouldn’t get much of anything in their Cămine Spitale. The Soviet “science of defectology” viewed disabilities in infants as intrinsic and uncurable. Even children with treatable issues—perhaps they were cross-eyed or anemic, or had a cleft lip—were classified as “unsalvageable.”

Neural pathways thrive in the brain of a baby showered with loving attention; the pathways multiply, intersect, and loop through remote regions of the brain like a national highway system under construction. But in the brain of a neglected baby—a baby lying alone and unwanted every week, every year—fewer connections get built. The baby’s wet diaper isn’t changed. The baby’s smiles aren’t answered. The baby falls silent. The door is closing, but a sliver of light shines around the frame.

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Scott Korb | Longreads | May 2020 | 18 minutes (4,490 words)

1.

Our time is nearly up, but we’ve been living in our building on East 19th Street, in New York City, for more than a decade. It’s six stories, 24 units, built in 1920. A walkup. To arrive home we walk up to the fifth floor. The stone stairs grow smoother and more slippery as you descend, because more people over the years have trod the lower steps; that is, fewer people have had to climb so high as us. On the way down one has felt inclined, landing-by-landing, to step more gingerly, to grip the bannister — until these days, when we try not to touch anything or anyone outside the apartment, or when we wipe those things down before we do. Our lives will be this way until we leave, because, again, our time is nearly up.

The roof is off limits and armed with an air-raid siren that would make the dog howl.

The paint in the stairwell, a light, creamy green, bubbles and sometimes flakes off in chunks, sometimes peels, exposing paint and plaster from decades ago. For most of the time we’ve lived here, on the wall just above the landing as you ascend between the third and fourth floors, the paint was cracked and had folded itself to form the shape of a woman, nude, from beneath the breasts to just below the hips, somehow including a navel. I suspected I was the only one in the building to see her, and I was too embarrassed to alert my wife.

Not long after we moved in, in 2009, before we were married, I painted the lower half of one wall in our kitchen a clean and deep red, which now matches several striped hand towels and the new teapot. (We’ve continued making improvements.) The same day I painted in the kitchen, I also covered a wall in the living room a bright, flat blue, though we could tell right away that was a mistake — to live in a lesser Mondrian — and I repainted the wall in white just as soon as the blue was dry. For now, there’s a pair of bright red paintings, the work of a friend, centered on that wall above the blue sleeper-sofa. We’ll soon take them down. The kitchen table we use today once belonged to a woman I briefly dated and was friends with off and on for years, though I don’t recall exactly why or when I came to own the table. (My memory is not what it once was.) I seem to remember its being offered, and then loading it into a U-Haul truck beneath her loft in SoHo the same day I helped another woman move to Inwood, in Manhattan’s northern reaches, before returning home to Brooklyn late that night. Together, that other woman and I must have carried the table up to my apartment before settling in for a few hours on my mattress. This is how we lived.

The kitchen table is an antique, and for a time, in several apartments (including this one on 19th Street), I used it as an office desk. Hanging above the table these days is a bookshelf that once belonged to a couple of radical publishers, relatives of a friend who, in 2016, organized an estate sale in the couple’s warreny West Village apartment, advertising “art, furniture, lamps, tableware, a multitude of unusual curios, loads of books (especially cookbooks).” The day we left with the bookshelf and hung it on our wall we also carried away cookbooks by Molly O’Neill and Joyce Chen. Our other kitchen bookshelf once belonged to two men whose apartment we rented on 29th Street, also on the East Side, near the hospital where our son was born. This apartment had deep blue carpeting and a balcony, a pass-through from the kitchen to where we ate, and when we lived there we also owned a guinea pig. When we arrived where we live now — with the dog who came with me, the cat who came with my wife, and before our son — we posted on Craigslist an advertisement putting the guinea pig up for adoption: “Free to a good home. Full set-up.” As it grew and ate more hay, the rodent had become too messy; my wife was allergic. So after some emails, one afternoon two girls came from the Upper West Side with their mother, who insisted we take her daughters’ twenty dollars before they carried him away with his cage, which I must have lugged down the stairs and loaded into their hatchback.

Over the years, many people have come and gone from our building on 19th Street. During the pandemic, the building has more or less emptied out — some, no doubt, for good. Who knows who’ll return? And yet, throughout our tenure, mostly we’ve complained — to each other and the more durable neighbors — about the turnover, which for a spate about five years ago, involved renovations to apartments in the lower floors that turned one-bedrooms into two- and two-bedrooms into three-. More bedrooms make apartments easier to share with other college students, which has been at the root of our grumbling: Our landlord’s fostering of transience. Dorm-life. (How soon we forget.) Even so, we twice wandered into these renovations, always on the lookout in New York for a little more room, but it never made sense when we considered the deal we’ve always had: our overall space isn’t much and the bathroom’s a puzzle, but there are two bedrooms and our rent remains below what the market will bear, for now, in the neighborhood.

***

When we first moved into our building, in our early 30s, there was a mother and two boys on the third floor. On Fridays, the boys’ father would appear and the mother would be free until he dropped them off again on Sunday. The boys must now be teenagers. I have no idea what she ever did with her alone-time. There was also a world-weary writer named Tom across the hall, who kept fit at the nearby city rec center and whom we liked quite a lot to talk to briefly, and who liked our son when he was just learning to walk. Tom was encouraged to vacate by the landlord’s offer of a buy-out, and we don’t know where he’s gone, but we miss Tom. The longtime tenant in 12A — we’re triskaidekaphobic in our building — was keeping his rent-controlled place as a second home, living there less than half the year, which the eviction notice taped face-down to his door said was against the law. Over time the legal notice grew worn and folded and ragged from all us curious neighbors. Now the tenant doesn’t live there at all. At the moment, no one does.

There was John, a military vet; we don’t know what branch. He was old, but we don’t know how old. No family that we could tell. John seemed to like me, called me guy, fella, or a word like that, when we met at the front door or mailboxes. For a few years we had the business card of a social worker under a magnet on the refrigerator; she had been knocking at John’s door one day and was about to give up when I took her card and said I’d call her in an emergency. Who knows who buzzed her in. John lived in apartment 5 and rarely left and seemed not to clean. Our building’s super affixed a plastic air deodorizer atop the doorframe of the apartment that I suppose John never noticed — one indignity spared — since, unlike those of us who come from the upper floors, he had no occasion to view his apartment door from above. He also had a crooked spine, which kept him constantly looking down. We knew, because of gossip, that over the years John spent time in the Veterans Affairs hospital on 23rd Street, and one of those times he didn’t come back. His mail piled up, was bundled with a rubber band and set on a ledge in the vestibule, and eventually that disappeared, too. We removed the social worker’s card from under the magnet probably around then.

This was a few years after Superstorm Sandy, in October 2012, when the building seemed to shift on its foundation and went dark for a few days along with everything else in our neighborhood and so many others downtown. From the backyard, where the trash goes, today you can see through the seam between our building and the neighboring one. It may always have been like that, but we only noticed after the violence of the storm. For the days the lights and the boiler were out, we bathed our son, who was a year-and-a-half then, with water heated on the range, like in the old days, and made daily trips from 19th Street to a hotel on 42nd Street, where the power worked. We charged our phones and our laptops, read the news and watched the bar television, had lunches and beers, and when we got home, after the baths, my wife and I played DVDs and ate all the food we could from the thawing freezer, before it went bad. Then we had the idea to make up plates of Bolognese for John and another older, single man on the third floor named Lloyd, which, looking back, is the only time we’ve had this idea.

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Like with John, Lloyd and I got along. He’s among those people who’ve left, who may be among the dead. We never had conversations and he never gave me a nickname, but he appreciated when I stepped aside to offer my place in line at the local grocery chain, and we nodded or greeted each other on the street, when he rode by on his bike or returned home with a bag from Petland. Yet most everything about Lloyd remained mysterious. He sometimes seemed very old and unkempt, but he also displayed occasional vigor. He had good days and bad days, like any of us, yet with Lloyd the bad days always seemed to be leading somewhere worse, part of a decline, until a few days later he’d be robust again, his hair smoothed, or he’d shaved.

***

One Sunday, in an autumn that now seems very long ago, a couple perhaps a generation older than me shoved a rotten mattress around the banister at the bottom of the stairs in our building; they were headed to the back yard. This mattress was Lloyd’s. His door apparently still open, he was shuffling upstairs. I’d come home with lunch from the new LA-styled taqueria on 3rd Avenue, and meeting the couple on my way in, they were resting, debating, in silence, the best way to proceed down the steps, out to the trash.

At the foot of the stairs, I made eye contact with the woman in the couple, then eyed the mattress, deciding whether to help, recalling a moment early in our relationship when my wife and I, alone, moved a dark brown couch down the narrow staircase leading from a Brooklyn studio I had for a year. There was yelling that day and we were still young.

Lloyd’s mattress was heavily stained: evidence of injury and illness, night sweats, incontinence, maybe violence. The mattress was torn along its side. Lloyd owned dogs, and perhaps some of the evidence was of them. But I’d also seen him bleeding from his shin after a fall on our stoop. I’d seen his shoulder dislocated under a tank top. There were moans sometimes from the apartment. Once, we heard him rattle his rear window and then call out in distress. “Don’t jump!” I said from two stories above, rattling our own window cage, looking down through the fire escape. My wife sensed I was overreacting. Back then, someone called 9-1-1 and a group of us from the building assembled outside Lloyd’s apartment, whispering, until the EMTs arrived to coax him out.

Moving the mattress would have taken only a few minutes. The hard work was already done by people older than me, who may or may not have been related to Lloyd. To help would have meant putting down a sack of warm tacos. To help would have meant embracing and lifting that mattress. Maybe rolling it down the back stairs into the yard, where I later saw it, spread out like a murder scene.

I did not help. Some social psychology and moral philosophy I’ve been reading lately has helped explain this away: with compassion, I’ve learned, the “tendency toward helping behavior is quite powerful, if the helpful action is ready at hand and not very costly.” Big if. Nonetheless, this moment is another thing from the hallway, like the nude, that I’ve found myself too embarrassed to tell my wife about.

Instead, I said, I’ve got the tacos.

Here is a question: How is it possible, and what does it mean, that I have been drawn to some chance cracks and drips of paint in the shape of a naked body, while at the same time disgusted, it seems, by some actual bodies in the building where I live? All this before we were all told — before it was, in some way, right — to be fearful of everyone (and someone like Lloyd, or John, to be very fearful, given their age and preconditions, of someone like me). It’s age, the passing of time and the crumbling of plaster, that formed the apparition of a young woman who lived, without aging, frozen between the third and fourth floors. Who knows how long she’d been there. It’s also age that formed the men who lived below us into who they had been, or were. (We simply don’t know. We assume.) And it must be age, too, I see, that’s made me increasingly aware and now wary of the aged, now vanishing, bodies below me in the building, to say nothing of the aging body below me in myself.

“Disgust,” says philosopher Martha Nussbaum, “is a strong aversion to aspects of the body that are seen as ‘animal reminders’ — that is, aspects of ourselves that remind us that we are mortal and animal. … The core idea in disgust is that of (potential) contamination through contact or ingestion: if I take in what is base, that debases me.” The action was ready at hand. The tacos would not have suffered one bit. My wife and son would have waited without knowing the difference. But the cost was simply too high, even then, even before the costs of touching, of being fewer than six feet apart, became the reason none of us could touch.

***

2.

Speaking of animals, I miss the dog, who died a couple years ago now. We’d never done this before with a dog: my wife held her as I looked on, our son in the vet’s waiting room, while the chemicals were released, one by one, into her ankle. We all had taken the day off, and left her behind at the office and decided we could live without ashes. Arriving home today, when the key scratches the lock (my hands have a minor tremor), I still anticipate the jangle of her licenses and vaccination tags as she bangs the wall of the hallway on her way to greet me at the door. In the days after she died we told our son to stop playing with the collar, to hang it on his wall and leave it there. The light ringing sound he produced was creating ghosts.

I remember walking her down the dark stairwell and into the wet, leafy, dark streets in the evenings after Sandy. One winter morning, in a year either before or after the storm, I situated her between me and a man who’d found his way to the landing just beyond our door for a night’s sleep; in a crouch, I roused him by the foot, holding the dog by the leash, and said it was time to go.

The cat, who is also gone, scratched at her ear a few years ago and developed an infection that turned into a large, furless mass on the side of her head. It grew and shrunk week-by-week and grossed me out. I worried about bacteria. I sprayed where she bled. The vet had told us there was little he could do given her age — just as there was little to be done for the dog and her tumor — and so for those last years, the cat rubbed the growth against our feet in the evenings to relieve some irritation, and seemed, to me, humiliated. This is how we lived.

We’ve counted ourselves among the durable neighbors, though in January we learned our lease would not be renewed. We live on the fifth floor. We’ve taught a child to walk up, have watched a dog pass on, and then ushered out the cat.

We’ve lasted while college kids moved in and out, and I resent them for being loud and being young. For sleeping around on strange mattresses belonging to strangers they met by swiping right, the way we met strangers through friends and asked their help to move a table, a whole apartment, before crashing together, and maybe seeing each other once, twice more. Maybe getting serious before later breaking up. Maybe getting serious and bringing pets together to live and die, having a kid, getting married. (That’s how we did it.) I see the apparition of youth, of sex, in the cracks in the wall; I was once her age. She’ll be here forever, I once thought, painted over and over again.

***

3.

Along with the social psychology and moral philosophy I’ve been reading lately for comfort has been a 2013 essay by Zadie Smith, “Man Versus Corpse.” Smith opens the essay with an anecdote of riding the elevator one night to relieve the babysitter and encountering a charcoal drawing titled Nude Man from the Back Carrying a Corpse on His Shoulders in a book of Italian masterpieces she’s found discarded in the lobby of her New York building. Compared with the man — “an ideal back in which every muscle is delineated. His buttocks are vigorous, monumental” — the corpse is drawn like an apparition. And despite this, Smith proceeds with a thought experiment: “I tried to identify with the corpse.”

Her effort proves difficult, and what she does first is telling of the horror of being dead — she imagines being the man: “Oh, I can very easily imagine carrying a corpse!” The scene she envisions unfolds in post-apocalyptic terms we know from poems and novels and the movies — a wasteland, a highway — until Smith unloads the body. “And it’s child’s play,” she says, “to hear a neck bone crack as I lay the corpse — a little too forcefully — on the ground.”

The larger point of Smith’s essay is to get us to see that we (including her) are living far less urgently than we would if our future as corpses was more readily apparent. We’d also construct lives more “worthy of an adult,” she says, if we weren’t so easily tricked, somehow, into believing that what happens to others — “often brown, often poor” people, people who live in “a death-dealing place” — will not also happen to us. (“We,” she writes, “seem to come from a land where people, generally speaking, live.”) For Smith, then, our problem is really two-fold: we quail at the prospect of imagining our own selves as corpses, and we’re not mindful enough of the corpses that gather in the distance to prevent them from gathering there. “It’s argued that the gap between this local care and distant indifference is a natural instinct,” she writes, echoing the philosophers and psychologists on the universal difficulty of compassion and of imagining other people. “Natural or not,” she continues, “the indifference grows, until we approach a point at which the conceptual gap between the local and the distant corpse is almost as large as the one that exists between the living and the dead.”

Until now in my life there was almost no arguing with her on this point. But what of Lloyd? What of the growing thousands — disproportionately brown, poor — now all dying in this city of this one thing? What of all those other older people, seen as the most vulnerable?

What of the gap that was not at all conceptual, but real, the one that kept me from hefting a local mattress? What of the distance between the living and the living? All of us six feet apart.

To start, I must say, having walked across an abandoned Brooklyn Bridge on a weekend in April, that I’m far less confident in my own post-apocalyptic vigor and resilience than Smith seems to be in hers. Oh, I can very easily imagine carrying a corpse! She’s not disgusted at all!

But me? My cowardice when confronted with Lloyd’s mattress was almost certainly related to the traces of animal life in a living person that a brand new corpse would also bear: evidence of injury and illness, maybe violence. A dislocated shoulder. A bloodied leg. And what’s also true is that the thought that did not quite form before I registered Lloyd’s shuffles upstairs — signs of life! — was that he had, in fact, died. That he was dead. That I was witness to this couple carrying out what’s pleasantly known as bioremediation.

Before I knew it, Lloyd was first dead and then alive, a source of sorrow and then, suddenly — instantly — relief. But then there, in that mattress, with that couple, was the evidence that we were right to expect sorrow again now — a sorrow that already resided in me then, it seems.

So then, how large really is the gap between the living and the dead? There’s no question that my life is arranged around the other living beings in my life, and that thoughts of losing them grow increasingly more painful and disorienting as the circle of my concern narrows to include only those two people I most often share sacks of tacos with. The ones, these days, whose masks I wash. Indeed, Smith expands on this reality in another 2013 essay, “Joy.” “Sometimes joy multiplies itself dangerously,” she says.

“Children are the infamous example. Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation?”

Here I think Smith and I are equally convinced that in this version of the apocalypse, we’d be reduced to nothing, resilient and vigorous no more. That our current plague seems mainly to let the children be has been its one source of relief.

But my own experiences watching those close to me die suggests, at the end, a kind of porousness between the two states. When beings die they’re said to slip away. My step-father did. So did the dog. And it often feels as I ease into middle age that now is when the slipping actually starts. Isn’t that the wrinkles? The hairline? The half-caf? The hemorrhoids?

Then there’s Lloyd, who, it seems, slipped away a little faster than me in the weeks we last saw each other, more obviously. Faster even than John ever did. And it must be the speed at which I watched him slip, and the further slippage he’s made evident in my unconscious between living and dying — proof that we always do both at the same time, and maybe ghosts are real — that makes his mattress so offensive to me.

Still, the truth is that no matter my fear, Lloyd’s mattress would not have contaminated or debased me. Not the way I’ve worried about every container I’ve brought in from the store through the spring, nor the tub containing margaritas I marched up from the taqueria our second week sheltered at home. Our own moment, the world’s fear — and my own — of catching now what’s been going around, disproves nothing of how I behaved back then.

To do what I did (what I did not do), that’s what’s truly mortifying. Or, mortifying — “causing death” — would seem like the right word if, in fact, my marching by with lunch, leaving those two older people with the dirty work, wasn’t just the result of a kind of magical thinking — disgust — that promises with fingers crossed to protect us from all the causes of dying.

4.

Months after meeting the couple with Lloyd’s mattress, I returned to the building one morning with ice packs from the hardware store to find an industrial black trash bag — collapsed, deflated, tied off — propping open the door to the yard. At every landing was a dusting of rubble. The landlord had begun demolition and the interior strip-out of a corner apartment on the sixth floor. This apartment could easily be transformed from a two-bed into a three-bed; this is where it’s happened before in the building, up and down this northeast corner line. This is certainly what will happen to ours, someday, now that we’ve been asked to leave.

Later that morning, a man with two-by-fours over his shoulder marched past me as I carried down the recycling. Renovations would soon begin. With bags slumped at each landing and still more rubble, the person responsible for demolition seemed to be carrying on a one-man bucket-brigade, moving four or five loads to the landing just below, then repeating this pattern all the way down. This is how I would do it, too, I thought. A bit at a time.

This renovation project must have upset the building. Sliding bags along the stone floor at each landing did some minor damage; or maybe it was the two-by-fours, carried carelessly, that left the new marks. Maybe sledgehammers and crowbars shook the inner workings of the upper floors and loosened the plaster down the stairwell. Because among the dust and rubble that spilled from the bags, I noticed, were paint chips, one the size of a dime, which had fallen from the crotch of the woman on the wall.

It’d be easy, I thought, a little Krazy Glue. It would fit like a puzzle piece. We’ve continued making improvements. But imagine that: me on my knees, stooped low in the stairwell, a tube of adhesive in my fingers, pressing the wall with my thumb. There, I’d think.

That’s unthinkable. And plus, the construction created more peeling in a new crack along her inner thigh anyway. It’d be an uphill battle. Soon she’ll be unrecognizable. Or just gone.

* * *

Scott Korb directs the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University. His books include The Faith Between Us, Life in Year One, and Light without Fire. He lives with his wife and son in Portland, Oregon.

Editor: Sari Botton

Bradley Babendir | Longreads | June 2018 | 16 minutes (4,357 words)

In Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Milkweed Editions), Elizabeth Rush visits people and communities made immediately vulnerable by the rising sea levels that are brought on by climate change. She interviews people who have lost their homes, their loved ones, and the world they once knew to flooding and other disasters. Some just want to be able to afford to leave, while others are willing to withstand everything to stay.

Rush pushes through the rhetoric around climate change to look closely at the consequences. Not the ones that will happen at some point down the road, but the ones that are happening now. She travels from Louisiana to Florida to California and elsewhere to see and try her best to understand what it is like to lose the ground beneath your feet.

We talked by phone about what led her to this book, what carried her through this book, and what comes next for her and her subjects.

Bradley Babendir: Before we get to Rising, I’d like to hear about your background. You’re not a writer who has specifically focused on the environment or climate change.

Elizabeth Rush: I studied poetry as an undergrad at Reed College. Reed is this really hyper intellectual school and if you want to write a creative thesis you have to petition to do so. I remember having to put together a 10-page application to spend a year writing poetry. And I got it.

I studied under this really amazing poet named Katie Ford. I think I’ve always loved and written lyric poems, and started out often writing lyric poems about, in particular, women and their relationship to the environment and how they use their body to navigate space. But graduating from Reed in Oregon in 2006, I realized me and every other citizen of Oregon wants to write poems about the environment. So I left, and moved to Vietnam.

I lived in Vietnam for two and a half years and then in New York City. I still wrote about Southeast Asia primarily during that time. My first job out of college was as the arts writer for an art foundation in North Vietnam that supported controversial North Vietnamese Artists. So I got to meet all these artists and write publicity material and profiles and stuff.

Staten Island was really severely hit by [Hurricane Sandy]. Our campus closed for a while. When we reopened a lot of my students were just gone…. There is a way in which the early impacts of sea level rise and stronger storms are manifesting that are really different than they are in Bangladesh. But it’s also leading to displacement.

And how did your first book, Still Lifes from a Vanishing City come about?

I was living in Southeast Asia and a publisher approached me and said, “I know that you really like Myanmar.” I often went there on my breaks from work. He was like, “I really like your writing. Do You want to write a book about Myanmar.” And I did.

The publisher did a lot of travel writing and I didn’t really want to write a standard travel narrative. What was really fascinating to me was that I had just read this article that said that the military Junta was auctioning off all of their state owned assets. That meant that a lot of the buildings that I loved in downtown Yangon were going to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Yangon is a city that has been relatively untouched by the Western development that has descended on various parts of Asia over the past couple of decades. Because the country was socialist, you had all different sorts of classes of people living downtown. The city itself felt like a fairly egalitarian space, as far as cities go. I figured all of that was going to disappear.

I got a list of every single building that was on the auction block and spent two years on and off, going door to door and interviewing everyone who is being evicted by the Junta through the auction process. And I talked to them about what their home meant to them and what it meant to them to be leaving their homes and how they were making peace with that and what parts of their community they were going to try to continue somehow. I took photos in every single home interview.

And so the first book is like this interesting, strange, super esoteric mash-up of photographs from inside these homes that are about to be auctioned and demolished. And then lyric essays meditate from the perspective of the homeowner on what it means to lose their home. It might seem really different from Rising on the surface but I think a lot of the questions that I was interested in then are not that dissimilar from the one’s I’m asking in Rising.

How did you come to the project that turned into Rising? In the introduction you mention that a reporting trip in Bangladesh got you thinking about sea level rise.

I was in New York part time when I was finishing Still Life from a Vanishing City. Because all of my professional connections were in Southeast Asia I often traveled back for work. I got hired to do a story on the completion of the world’s longest border fence between India and Bangladesh.

What was really fascinating to me was that in Bangladesh, you could bribe your way through, you could pass through the fence in the middle of the night. The fence was a technicality, and water was the real problem. It turned out that India had been diverting a lot of the Ganges River’s flow to aid in upstream irrigation and the growth of crops in areas that might not necessarily be super suited to agriculture. That was having this really profound negative impact on farmers in Bangladesh because the disappearance of fresh water in the aquifer meant that saltwater was able to seep in even further inland and more quickly.

In Bangladesh, I remember walking for hours behinds this really young boy who was telling me they used to be able to farm close to their village and now they can’t because the saline has already arrived in the water. So now they have to walk two hours to get to this area and it’s already showing signs of a saline inundation in the aquifer. They’re probably going to have to leave their family’s land. I realized then that of course sea level rise is with us now in the present. But it’s also very much exacerbated by human interventions in the environment. Diversions in the Ganges River’s flow is accelerating sea level rise in Bangladesh in its early impact.

What made you want to write about cities in the United States as opposed to city’s in other countries?

I also realized when I got back to the U.S. that if I write another story about how Bangladesh is drowning, it’s very easy for people here to tune out. It was a couple of months after that research trip that Hurricane Sandy inundated 400,000 people in New York City. And while I wasn’t one of them, I was teaching at the College of Staten Island at the time and Staten Island was really severely hit by the storm. Our campus closed for a while.

When we reopened a lot of my students were just gone. A lot of them were students who were working through college. They would be living in temporary housing in Jersey and have to commute to work. Commuting to work and to school became too much and school took a back seat to keeping an income coming in. There is a way in which the early impacts of sea level rise and stronger storms are manifesting that are really different than they are in Bangladesh. But it’s also leading to displacement. Some of my students never would return to Staten Island. Some would participate in this huge buyout that took place across Staten Island’s eastern shore where entire neighborhoods were bulldozed. I think that’s the moment when the book as a possibility opened up for me.

What was the biggest change between your original idea of how the book would be structured and how it turned out?

The most fundamental way its changed is up until about a year ago there were testimonies from scientists as well as citizens. So the book oscillates between first person lyric reportage in different coastal communities coming to terms with sea level rise and firsthand accounts written entirely in the voice of residents of the communities about the moment that woke them up to the reality of sea level rise and its aftermath, and what they’ve decided to do with that knowledge. For a while I also had testimonies from scientists, talking in a personal way about the different ways in which the science of sea level rise was impacting those communities and their idea of what community was and what plants and animals could live there and my very wise editor at Milkweed said, listen if you want to keep the testimonies and we have to pare them down.

One of my primary concerns when writing this book was how to reach an audience that isn’t necessarily going to pick up a climate change book and it seemed to me like talking about carbon taxes and mitigation and offsets is language that we deploy in an insider’s game of baseball or something like that.

That was a choice I found really interesting. There’s not a lot of talk about energy or decarbonizing or other more jargony concepts.

I definitely believe in mitigation and I think it’s a really important part of the whole equation. I also think it’s very easy for us to tune that language out. I think it does sound a bit jargony. One of my primary concerns when writing this book was how to reach an audience that isn’t necessarily going to pick up a climate change book and it seemed to me like talking about carbon taxes and mitigation and offsets is language that we deploy in an insider’s game of baseball or something like that. I was trying to reach a new audience and I didn’t want to use language that I think is so easily and often politicized.

Instead, I decided to centralize the lived experience of people in these communities, the lived experience of people who aren’t going to be poster children for environmental movements but who have to make really difficult decisions about what you do when your community is under water multiple times every year.

I thought that the prose in the book was really interesting and it seems like very little writing on climate changes tries —

To be good writing first? [Laughs] I agree.

So I was wondering if that was just your writing style that you were going to bring to any kind of project that you were working on, or if you had a specific approach stylistically with this book?

I exist on the poles. I trained as a poet and when I was living in Southeast Asia I could make my living as a journalist. I definitely wrote some early, pretty straightforward pieces on sea level rise in a much more journalistic register. That allowed me to get comfortable with the terminology and to steep myself in the subject matter.

About a year and half into working that beat I started to feel like I was fatigued with the language. I also thought, maybe this project could help me return to both the poetic roots and the environmental writing roots that have always been a big part of who I read and why I read. I applied for a fellowship at Bates College that would have me teach only one class a semester and get full pay for it and I used that time to write Rising and to go back to my early research trips around sea level rise and also conduct some new interviews in different communities.

As the project itself took shape, I found out how to write with prose that is, on its own, deeply engaging. I didn’t want to write a book that leaned into the facts. I wanted to make the language itself part of what helped keep a person reading. And I think Milkweed was also a really great collaborator in that undertaking. My editor there was amazing. Small independent presses can also pay attention to your book through its various stages of development.

Speaking of your research trips, I was wondering how you initially learned about the places you cover in the book and how you decided which ones to write about.

Primarily, I was looking for places that weren’t going to get funding for big infrastructure projects. For instance, if you go down to Miami Beach, they’re doing a lot to raise roads and to pump salt water out of the street. The areas that are most interesting to me are places like Shorecrest and Hialeah where you have majority Latinx communities that are flooded — just like, there’s flooding on the beach — but instead of it getting pumped out, residents are expected to take off their shoes and walk through the water. Their houses are losing value as a result of that.

Some of it is a little bit of chance and circumstance, like I was teaching at the College of Staten Island and there was this amazing grassroots buyout movement where residents were asking for their homes to be bulldozed after Sandy.

One of the things that I thought was great in the book was your focus on communities of color, and I’m interested in how you built the book’s political world. You express a political argument through examples, which is an interesting thing, and separates it from other climate writing that might have been more forceful or polemical. How did you strike that balance?

In some ways, it is similar to how I felt about whether or not to put mitigation and language around mitigation at the center of the book. I think that we have a moment where we’re waking up to an awareness of racism and environmental justice and climate change and how these concerns overlap in ways that are really important and can pave the way for, if we don’t do anything about them, increasingly unjust and inequitable futures. And yet, I think a lot of the writing about those subjects exists in exactly the register I just used. I felt like I had to find a way to write about them that could break through.

So I think I was just sort of using my same old writer’s awareness of ‘don’t say the same thing that’s been said before.’ If you’re going to say it, you have to say it in some way that’s fundamentally new or at least makes the reader pay attention. Grounding a lot of the discussions in deeply personal experiences told verbatim by people in these situations was one way that I worked to cut through the thickness of that language. That’s what moved me when I was in those communities, was to hear the very specific and personal and difficult set of decisions that people face and to hear the stories that surround them. Then I could back up and understand the larger structural reasons that people find themselves in their own shoes, making those difficult decisions.

For me, when I arrived, those stories are what cut through the noise. So I wanted to carry my readers into that experience.

I was in those communities… to hear the very specific and personal and difficult set of decisions that people face and to hear the stories that surround them… For me, those stories are what cut through the noise. So I wanted to carry my readers into that experience.

You obviously have a background in reporting on difficult topics and talking to people that are going through things that are really difficult. I was wondering what the emotional experience of writing this book was for you. It’s certainly something that I feel like I wouldn’t have the stomach for.

That’s a question I’ve thought a lot about, actually. People are also really curious about it. It is a really heavy subject and the thing that carried me through the research process intact were those same stories. Yes, hearing firsthand about what it’s like to live through multiple storms and, in one case, to lose a family member in those storms or to completely lose a home to those storms was hard. I was really just impressed by how fundamental storytelling can be to the recovery of an individual and also a community.

What struck me as really profound is that when faced with a set of really difficult decisions human beings have the ability to make a choice. And often, I think that our government has a responsibility to help, in particular disadvantaged communities, make those choices. They’re more difficult to make in certain situations than in others. But they’re also not always the same decisions available to plants and animals who live in our wetland communities. And so in this weird way, I was also repeatedly reminded of the choices that human beings have and the stories that we can tell ourselves, our families, our neighbors or fellow citizens that can serve as guiding examples and help us navigate through periods of tremendous grief and loss and mourning.

That feels like an adaptive ability that might be fairly unique to humans. I don’t think we’re the only species that can communicate but I sometimes wonder if we have the most robust storytelling capability. And so I guess that was the thing that kept me — horrible water pun — kept me afloat. That and lots of really regular exercise. Like, chemical endorphins pumping in my brain also help.

Rising also contains some information about your personal life, including a few details about a break-up and how you were subjected to sexual harassment, and I was wondering if you were always planning on including that in the book? Or did they work their way in?

In one case, I’m writing about being sexually harassed in the workplace and, in the other, I’m writing about leaving a fairly abusive relationship. In the most immediate sense, those things refused to not be in the book. I definitely tried to keep them out of the book for a long time. As happens with any essay that you work on, you work on it again and again and again and revise and expand and revise and expand. Especially with the two different parts that you’re referencing, as soon as I let that little sliver of my personal life into the essay, the logic behind the essay started to reveal itself to me in a way that then made the inclusion of that personal information feel integral to the way that essay functioned.

I was, at first, really reticent because I didn’t want to say, ‘oh, you know, leaving your island community is the same as leaving your fiancé.’ I don’t think they’re synonymous. I was very cautious because I didn’t want readers to feel that I was making exactly that parallel or comparison. But I also felt like, here’s how I was thinking about vulnerability and risk. In a lot of the communities, I found that, as a white person of privilege who gets to leave, a way for me to get to know the people that I was writing about was also to expose myself to them, to not just be a reporter who was mining the community for stories, but to be a human being in conversation with them and to talk about, you know, [how] they understand vulnerability this way or I understand risk this way.

That creation of a common ground was really important to the research process. There’s the logic in which that’s the closest I can come to understand what it’s like to be penniless and continuously under threat. My goal is also to help folks who don’t necessarily live under the stress of constant flooding understand what it might be like.

It has many reasons for being there but the most fundamental is that it refused to not be there.

There are a few quotes in the book from Leslie Jamison’s essay “The Empathy Exams” and you use them to write more broadly on empathy as an emotion and craft. How did the idea of empathy change for you over the course of writing the book? What does it mean to you now?

I don’t really have an answer. I don’t think I’ve reached the final point with what empathy means to me. It’s an ongoing journey. One thing that I became more keenly aware of through writing Rising — and this is definitely something that Leslie Jamison speaks to and of — was that I started to become suspicious of the emotional satisfaction. Like, I am going to and reporting on these underprivileged communities and I’m working to share their stories about not having the same options as residents of Lower Manhattan or wherever. And I’m also working on getting their voices — not my interpretation of their voice but their actual voice — in the conversation. In which case, I’m just sort of like a conduit. Over the course of writing the book, I became a little bit more skeptical and aware of how I can feel that doing this work is an end in and of itself. It can sort of be appeasing emotionally, in terms of thinking about how do you combat inequality and persistent racial and class structures that exist in the United States. The book, as a project, helped me feel like I was speaking directly to and into those conversations.

And yet, as soon as I stopped writing it, I was very aware that it was one form of activism and one form of empathy but that I wanted to feel like I was doing more to help the communities that I write about have better access to information and resources and funding. I have been teaming up with a group called Flood Forum USA. It’s the first nationwide coalition of flood survivors. It’s working really hard to inform public policy at the local, state and federal level around how we deal with disaster recovery and flooding in particular. Empathy is a practice and for I while I was practicing empathy through my writing. But by the end of Rising that no longer felt like enough.

What struck me as really profound is that when faced with a set of really difficult decisions human beings have the ability to make a choice… I was also repeatedly reminded of the choices that human beings have and the stories that we can tell… that can serve as guiding examples and help us navigate through periods of tremendous grief and loss and mourning.

One of the things that fascinated me was towards the end when you were writing about California and the person you were talking to who was working to preserve the wetlands didn’t know that there had been retreat from other places, like Staten Island which you mentioned earlier.

In a weird way that is also part of why I wanted to write this book. As I started five years ago just researching these communities and spending time in them, the thing I heard again and again was ‘we feel so alone with this, no one else is going through what we’re going through. There aren’t a lot of clear cut blueprints for how to deal with this set of issues.’ And I would always be like… but you aren’t alone. There are other communities. A lot of them. You’re all around the country. I think that needle is starting to shift. Like with the advent of this nationwide organization of flood survivors. They started like six months ago. I mean it’s really new to have folks in disadvantaged coastal communities aware of one another and come together and using their collective will or might. That was part of what fascinated me and made me feel like there was a deep need for this book.

Is there something local about how people see their wetlands that makes that type of thing more likely?

I’ve never really thought of it that way exactly, but when you put it that way, I think it could make sense. Wetlands are just not a very sexy topic. In our set of environmental sublime they don’t ever appear because they tend to be categorized as gross or muddy or yucky or sulfurous. And also unfit for human habitation. They have this bad or nonexistent reputation. That could certainly be part of why they don’t get a lot of attention in a way that would amplify the concerns of communities in these spaces. Does a story about a local wetland in the Providence Journal get picked up by the New York Times? No. The nature of these spaces themselves and where these communities are located could also contribute to the lack of communication that’s taking place amongst and between them for sure.

A vicious circle kind of wrapped up in this is the way that a lot of climate change writing is theoretical and jargony, like we talked about, and it’s about what is going to happen later.

Yes. “Your children are going to inherit an unlivable planet.”

Yes exactly. And the whole thrust of this book is that it’s not just a problem for tomorrow. It’s something that’s happening to people right now. It’s also going to get worse, but it’s something that people are dealing with right now. I don’t see that many articles or essays that take that track. Do you have any ideas about why people are attracted to writing about it like it’s not already happening and there aren’t already people being displaced?

That needle is starting to move a little bit as well. But certainly when I started writing Rising, almost all of the writing was future oriented. One of the reasons that was happening was because when you write about the future of climate change you can imagine yourself 200 years out and when you imagine yourself 200 years out the oceans are 10 feet higher or 15 feet higher. It opens up the possibility of speaking in really catastrophic terms. For a while people thought we just had to make the future sound horrible and apocalyptic and that’s what’s going to wake people up and spur them into action.

I think, often, that apocalyptic register led to feelings of despair and inability to take any kind of action. In some ways, the public conversation was often taking place in that register five years ago, four years ago, or three years ago. Maybe with the hurricane season of last year it started to shift more into the present. I also think as the general level of climate change awareness has gone up, people are starting to realize that the apocalyptic register might undermine the “so what do we do now?” question. If it’s the end of the world, let’s party on a sinking ship. So I think that in general climate change communicators are starting to walk back and away from that narrative as well. Which I think is a good thing.

* * *

Bradley Babendir is a freelancer and fiction writer living in Boston. His work has been published by The Washington Post, The Nation, and elsewhere.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Comedian Sarah Silverman — known for racist bits and language that were a regular part of her act — is rejecting her controversial, adversarial past to embrace empathy. In this profile of Silverman at GQ, Drew Magary attempts to cleanse his own “calcified soul” with her new brand of compassion.

I am not as willing as Silverman to forgive Middle America for Trump. There are limits to my empathy. I am on the more shrill end of the liberal spectrum: the guy who bitches every time The New York Times ventures out into Trump country to talk to REAL FOLK, the way Silverman occasionally does on her own show. I fume that it’s always incumbent on blue-state America to reach out to red-state America, and not the other way around. I delight in conservatives showing their asses online. I have given up on trying to politely convince the most conservative members of my own family that they are wrong, and try to steer the conversation toward, like, clouds instead. I am, in other words, hardened, perhaps even more so than the rednecks Silverman is aiming to convert.

Silverman can see this, and what she desperately wants people to know is that finding out you’re wrong about something won’t kill you.

When I first started comedy, my male comic friends would say, ‘You have to focus on making the men laugh. The women only laugh if their date laughs.’ It’s something I actually accepted as an 18-year-old comedian. It took a while for me to say, That’s fucking insane. We’re all complicit in this fucked-up society; it’s just that men actually, truly benefited from it and women didn’t.”

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Longreads is delighted to share this mini-course exploring empathy created by Scott Korb,
with contributions from Paul Bloom, William Gatewood, and Daniel Raeburn. In addition to Scott’s essay, “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story,” be sure to read the responses, delve into the questions for deeper discussion, and check out the suggested readings — featuring the work of Leslie Jamison, Vivian Gornick, J.M. Coetzee, Sheila Heti, and more.

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I teach in Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program. Twice a year — once in January, once in June — the faculty and students gather in Oregon for 10 days of lectures, workshops, and readings. My wife is not wrong when she jokes that this is like camp for grown-ups.

Still, I like to think that serious work gets done when we get together. While some of the best talks at the residencies deal with the nuts-and-bolts of writing, the talks I prepare tend to address topics related to the writer’s mindset, or the fine-ish line between factual writing and fiction, or the writer’s role in civic life. I developed one such talk, “The Courage to Sound Like Ourselves,” into semester-long courses at universities where I otherwise teach.

On June 16, 2017, in Forest Grove, Oregon, I delivered a talk called “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story.” The title comes from Nabokov. The subject is the place of empathy in the moment of writing. Rather than develop a semester-long class for a university based on the talk, we’ve decided to present a version of it here at Longreads as a mini-course on empathy with a reading list, discussion questions, useful links, and a few critical responses.

One of the early lines of thinking in what follows stresses that education is a constant reminder of all that one does not know and that at its best, learning with others requires a good-faith effort to puzzle over ideas together. You’ll see that, like many people, I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy in recent years, especially where my writing and my teaching are concerned. “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story” is my best recent attempt to say what I think.

The course takes up a recent useful book where my thinking is concerned, Against Empathy by psychologist Paul Bloom, who offers his own response alongside memoirist Daniel Raeburn and Pacific MFA student William Gatewood. Like Bloom, I know that empathy is often taken “to refer to morality and kindness and love, to everything good.” And like Bloom, I can see empathy this way, and I’m not opposed to kindness, love, or goodness. Seeing empathy only this way is, however, I’ve come to believe, a problem morally and also limiting to our potential as artists. This course is mainly focused on the dubious place of empathy in art.

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Read the full course

Scott Korb directs the first-year writing program at The New School’s Eugene Lang College and is on the faculty at Pacific University’s low-residency MFA in Writing Program. He is the author and editor of several books, including Light without Fire: The Making of America’s First Muslim College, now out in paperback.

Contributors: Paul Bloom, William Gatewood, and Daniel Raeburn.

Editor: Krista Stevens | Creative Director: Kjell Reigstad | Illustrator: J.D. Reeves

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Jeremy Lybarger | Longreads | 4,160 words (17 minutes)

From the outside, it’s just another mobile home in a neighborhood of mobile homes on the northwest side of Fort Wayne, Indiana. There’s the same carport, the same wedge of grass out front, the same dreamy suburban soundtrack of wind chimes and air conditioners. Nothing suggests this particular home belongs to a 32-year-old woman whose encyclopedic knowledge of missing persons has earned her a cult following online. The FBI knows who she is. So do detectives and police departments across the country. Desperate families sometimes seek her out. Chances are that if you mention someone who has disappeared in America, Meaghan Good can tell you the circumstances from memory — the who, what, when, and where. The why is almost always a mystery.

A week after she turned 19, Good started the Charley Project, an ever-expanding online database that features the stories and photographs of people who’ve been missing in the United States for at least a year. She named the site after Charles Brewster Ross, a 4-year-old boy kidnapped in 1874 from the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. His body was never found, and his abduction prompted the first known ransom note in America. Like Charles Brewster Ross, the nearly 10,000 people profiled on Good’s site are cold cases. Many fit the cliché of having vanished without a trace, and if it weren’t for Meaghan Good, most of these cases would have faded into oblivion.

Good’s website is a record of what some in law enforcement have described as a “mass disaster over time.” Almost 2,000 people are reported missing every day in America, well over a half a million each year. The majority are eventually found, either dead or alive — teen runaways, down-on-their-lucks hoping to make a clean start somewhere else, the mentally ill who stray out of their neighborhoods and onto the evening news. But tens of thousands more remain missing, often for decades. The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) currently lists more than 88,000 active missing persons cases. And Nancy Ritter of the National Institute of Justice estimated in the mid-2000s that 40,000 unidentified remains have turned up in the United States. The actual number could be far higher.

As the cold cases have multiplied, so have sites like the Charley Project, offering armchair detectives an opportunity to flex their investigative muscles and crowdsource leads. The best known are WebSleuths and NamUs, the latter of which is operated by the federal Department of Justice, as well as the many missing persons groups on Reddit. There are also start-ups like the Murder Accountability Project, which tracks unsolved homicides via computer algorithm. But unlike these sites, the Charley Project isn’t updated by a ragtag army of volunteers or paid staffers. It’s entirely the work — the obsession, really — of Meaghan Good, who has been known to log 14-hour days in front of Orville, the computer that fans of the site raised $1,000 for her to buy.

Good does not investigate cases herself. Instead, the Charley Project’s “irregulars” — Good’s nickname for the site’s diehards, an homage to Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street Irregulars — have helped match a handful of previously unidentified bodies to missing persons. In a dramatic finding from 2014, a woman in Ireland matched a man who’d gone missing in Texas 10 years before to the body of a John Doe in Arizona. It was a bittersweet occasion, the woman said. Solving the puzzle was gratifying, but it also meant that parents on the other side of the world were notified that their son would never come home.

“I hope she continues to run the site for as long as she’s on this earth, because the true crime community needs her,” says Ed Dentzel, a friend of Good’s who hosts a weekly podcast about missing persons. That sentiment is echoed on Reddit, where entire threads are devoted to the strangest Charley Project cases. Users of the site are also active on Good’s personal blog, where they’re granted unfettered, sometimes harrowing access to Good’s inner life. “I was going to do a [list] yesterday of people who disappeared on the Fourth of July, but life intervened,” she wrote last summer. “I got more and more manic over the weekend and as a result I was awake for two and a half days in spite of lying quietly in bed most of the time.”

Good is candid about her mental and physical illnesses, which include autism, bipolar disorder, suicidal ideation, insomnia, and the bouts of “stark raving madness,” as she calls them, that trigger hallucinations and paranoid delusions. She’s also outspoken about being raped in 2009 and the PTSD that followed. As alarming as these conditions are for Good, they’re also necessary for her work. One of the conditions experienced by people with autism is all-consuming interest in a narrow or esoteric topic. Good’s exceptional focus has helped the Charley Project become the second-largest missing persons database online behind NamUs. Her attention to detail is also why researchers, reporters, and even the FBI consider the site a living archive of information that might otherwise be forgotten.

When I meet Meaghan Good at her home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on a hot weekend last June, she’s just returned from a tour of Nazi death camps in Poland. Books from the Auschwitz gift shop line a shelf, and a shard of pottery from Treblinka sits on her desk. We settle into her home office, which looks out onto a sun-scorched street and a neighbor’s flag-bedecked house. Good’s cats, Aria and Carmen, weave around empty Pepsi bottles stockpiled for her father’s home winery, cheekily named “Chateau Good.”

Good seems to have her mind on mortality — not her own, but that of the Charley Project. Recently, she’s begun to think about recruiting other writers to help expand the database. “Ninety-five hundred cases is a lot, but it’s not enough,” she says of the site’s current archive. Her boyfriend, Michael, relates a terrifying thought that gnawed at him during their flight to Poland: If their plane crashed, that would be the end of the Charley Project.

Despite 14 years of work, and anywhere between five and 20 new case files added per day, Good has barely begun to capture the scale of America’s missing persons. By the end of our two days together, another 4,000 people had disappeared. It’s a cycle that never ends — it barely even slows. Yet the prospect of inviting outsiders into her inner sanctum makes Good uneasy. There’s the threat of a coup, or of shoddy research, fates that have befallen other missing persons databases over the years. Still, she knows that an entire shadow nation of distraught families looks to the Charley Project and the grassroots investigations it inspires.

Sometimes it seems like every small town in America is home to someone searching for a lost loved one. “I’ve never been a big believer in the idea that that sort of thing doesn’t happen here,” Good says of people who seemingly vanish into thin air. “That sort of thing happens everywhere.”

It can also happen to anyone. Good considers herself the kind of person — vulnerable and mentally ill — who could disappear without much fanfare. Comparing her life to the lives of the missing persons on her site, she is often struck by the survivor’s proverb: “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Browsing the site’s case files, I’m struck by the eerie randomness of the disappearances; how easily missing people can stay missing, even in an age of smartphones, GPS tracking, surveillance, and almost constant contact online. The stories rattle some primitive part of our brain, one where the world is bigger, more mysterious, and more inexplicable than our daily grind suggests. The Charley Project reminds us it’s still possible to fall off the face of the earth.

Consider the case of Brian Shaffer, whose disappearance from Columbus, Ohio, in 2006 reads like grim Midwest folklore. He was partying with friends at a bar near the Ohio State University campus in the late hours of April 1. He was last seen speaking to two college-aged women inside the bar, but security cameras don’t show him leaving it. His personal belongings disappeared along with him; his cell phone, credit cards, and bank accounts weren’t used after that night. Some speculate that Shaffer’s body is still in the bar, perhaps interred in the walls.

Or consider Christene Seal, a 22-year-old wife and mother who vanished from her Verona, Missouri, home in 1972. “Bloodhounds traced her scent only as far as the driveway,” writes Good — many of her descriptions have the pacing of a thriller. “The mailman had stopped by the Seal home at 9:30 a.m. and saw their child just inside the screen door crying, indicating Seal disappeared sometime before that.”

Then there’s Korrina Malinoski, who disappeared from Mount Holly, South Carolina, in the winter of 1987. A year later, her 11-year-old daughter, Annette, also disappeared. Her stepfather discovered a penciled note left behind at a bus stop: “Dad, momma came back. Give the boys a hug.”

Charlotte Heimann, a 27-year-old Ph.D. student, checked herself into a Rochester, New York, psychiatric hospital in 1981 to get away from a man who she claimed was stalking her. She told nurses she was afraid to go home, but they released her 72 hours later, and she was never seen again.

There’s Maria De Los Angeles Martinez, a 17-year-old from Phoenix who advertised her babysitting service on the radio in 1990. An unidentified man responded and picked her up, presumably so she could look after his kids. She’s been missing ever since.

And there’s 9-year-old Asha Degree, who disappeared from her Shelby, North Carolina, bedroom early Valentine’s Day morning, in 2000. Truck drivers “reported seeing her walking south on Highway 18 north of Shelby between 3:30 a.m. and 4:15 a.m.,” writes Good. “She left the highway at this point and walked off into the darkness. It was the last confirmed sighting of the child.”

There are thousands more stories like these, many of them banal in their particulars: A man goes to the grocery store and never comes home; a woman enters a phone booth to call her boyfriend and vanishes. What gives the stories the frisson of campfire tales are the three haunting words embedded in the heart of each: they were “never seen again.” Good’s retellings are addictive because she casts herself as the omniscient narrator who has interrogated every witness and knows everything except where the cold trail leads. Her descriptions have a literary tone, but remain neutral and objective, as if a short story writer tried her hand at police reports instead.

It’s impossible not to feel spooked by the Charley Project’s vision of America as a vast black hole. And it’s impossible not to wonder what kind of person would choose to spend her life immersed in other people’s tragedies.

Meaghan Good grew up in Venedocia, Ohio, a village of fewer than 200 people, about an hour from Fort Wayne. There’s not much by way of scenery in Venedocia: miles of flat cropland broken by a huddle of houses and wind-tossed trees, all of it seeming to emanate from the century-old Salem Presbyterian Church on Main Street. A sign in the rambling graveyard on the edge of town notes that “wolves, panthers, and other wild beasts” used to scratch at settlers’ doors in the night. It’s possible they still do.

Although Good describes the town as being “safe as a cradle,” her childhood there was unhappy. Children bullied her, both because they sensed her then-undiagnosed mental illnesses, and because of her peculiar pastimes. She liked to hang out alone in the cemetery, straightening lopsided headstones and buying flowers for the dead people she’d adopt as confidants. Her half-brother, killed in a car accident in 1988, is buried there too. “Every stone tells a story,” Good explains to me, likening these unknown narratives to those of the missing persons she profiles.

She traces her fascination with death to a near-drowning in Lake Michigan when she was 5 years old. She was clinically dead when the adults dragged her to shore. “It was like falling asleep,” she recalls. Good was supposed to start kindergarten the following week and finally learn how to read; none of that would happen if she was six feet underground. She still remembers the trauma of coming back to life.  “I was a very strange person,” Good says. “Rural Ohio is not a nice place to very strange people.”

The whole Good clan was strange, as far as locals were concerned. Colin Good, Meaghan’s older bother, carved swastikas into his arm and slept in a coffin that he made in his high school woodshop. A local Christian TV station filmed the coffin for a segment about goth teenagers, which was innocuous enough, until the station rebroadcast the program the week after the Columbine High School shooting. Like the gunmen, Colin often wore a trench coat to school.

When a student told the high school principal that Colin threatened to bring a gun to class and commit “suicide by police,” Charles Good was instructed to seek professional help for his son. Without his father’s consent, Colin was admitted to a psych ward in western Ohio. “It took me three days to get the kid sprung,” Charles says, still outraged years later. “And so I had a very, very dim view of mental health professionals.”

Colin also verbally abused Meaghan on a regular basis, while their mother had her own toxic issues. After a boy touched Meaghan inappropriately on the bus, she complained to her mother but was met with a shrug. “She didn’t ask any questions.” (Good’s parents are now divorced.)

Sometimes Good stayed up all night to chat with strange men online. One of those men sent Good his credit card number and encouraged her to buy whatever she wanted. Packages arrived at the door, mostly books, and Good’s parents never asked what they were or how she paid for them.

Good eventually dropped out of public school because of the relentless bullying. “This probably doesn’t sound like it has to do with missing people, but it does,” she says about her experiences of family neglect and abuse. “That kind of thing is what leads to kids dropping out of sight and nobody noticing for years.”

Good calls the mass disappearance of children a “modern day horror story,” and it’s clear that she sees herself in these lost kids. When she was around 12, Good became obsessed with the late writer Robert Cormier, whose young adult novels are unusually pessimistic and defy happy endings. She soon began writing her own stories about children in peril. It was while searching online for pictures to use as illustrations that she stumbled on a website that featured missing kids.

A light went on inside of her.

In the 1990s, the world of amateur web sleuths was on the rise. Hit TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries and America’s Most Wanted, which debuted in the late 80s, had whet the public’s appetite for DIY investigations. One of the most important of the early missing persons sites, the Doe Network, went online around 1999, the brainchild of a self-described former journalist from Michigan named Jennifer Marra.

In 2001, Marra founded the Missing Persons Cold Case Network, and Good began sending in newspaper articles and updates about missing persons from across the country, becoming one of Marra’s most trusted and prolific contributors. A year later, Marra turned over control of the website to Good, who was then only 17 years old. About 10 months later, the database was hacked, and its 4,000 case files had to be taken offline. By October 2004, the site was resurrected and rebranded by Meaghan Good as the Charley Project. (Marra is no longer in contact with Good, nor active in the missing persons community.)

Good threw herself into the website but couldn’t ignore what was happening in her brain. Her depression lingered, and she struggled to connect with other people. “I was much more interested in spending time with a book than I was spending time with a person,” she says. The exception was Michael Lianez, a fellow student she met in an English class at Ohio State when he was 27 and she was 16. They were introduced during a heated argument about the death penalty: Good called him an asshole, but he was charmed by her, and his intelligence was undeniable. (Lianez says that he also falls somewhere on the autism spectrum.) They shared a taste for books and dry British humor, and they soon began dating.

In those days Good preferred to sleep fully clothed on a bare mattress. “I had to help make her into a person,” Lianez says, recalling how he taught her how to wear pajamas and use bed sheets. She learned how to wash dishes and to have a back-and-forth conversation rather than what Lianez dubbed the “Meaghan Report,” in which she would update him about her mental or physical state in a rushed monologue and then retreat.

When Good was 23 she had a breakdown that required hospitalization. Doctors diagnosed her with autism, finally giving a name to the introversion and compulsive behaviors that had perplexed her family. Finding the right medical regimen proved tricky, however; drugs interacted in unpredictable ways. In one episode during the dead of winter, Good tried to walk through a plate glass door several times wearing only a turtleneck and underpants. In other instances, she thought she had multiple phone conversations that she later discovered never happened. Once, the police called Good’s father to say that she had been in a fender bender and wouldn’t stop throwing herself against a tree.

“I’m afraid she’s going to end up dead,” her father says. “She could walk into a gun store, buy a gun, and shoot herself.” In 2014, Good wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper in which she argued that mentally ill people like herself shouldn’t have the right to bear arms. Discussing the letter on her blog, she added, “I’ve found that there are more good things that come from being open about my conditions than bad things … I can connect with people who have similar problems.”

That connection also extends to the trolls who harass Good online. She has been stalked online for months at a time, criticized because of her appearance, and threatened with more than a dozen lawsuits. She’s received at least one death threat, and her website has been plagiarized so often that she finally disabled copying and pasting. But the most painful situations, and the most delicate, are those in which the families of missing persons object to an unflattering detail in a case file.

In one example, Good suggested that a woman who worked at a strip club, and who was last seen leaving that club with a suspicious man, was herself a stripper. The missing woman’s sister asked Good to remove the “trashy” information, and when Good refused, arguing that it was relevant to the disappearance, the woman badmouthed Good on other websites. These incidents are rare but not exceptional. If you Google Meaghan Good’s name, one of the top results condemns the Charley Project as a site that exploits missing and abused children, the “morbid obsession of a mentally ill young woman.”

“I try not to take any of this personally because I don’t know what they’re going through,” Good says of the families of missing persons. “That kind of stress would make a person a little bit irrational.”

Donald Ross knows what it’s like to search for a missing loved one. His son, Jesse, was last seen alive in the early hours of November 21, 2006. The 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Missouri–Kansas City was in Chicago for a mock United Nations summit, along with a thousand other college students from across the country. At approximately 2:30 a.m., Ross left a conference room in a Sheraton hotel downtown and was never seen again. None of the surveillance cameras outside captured him, and his cell phone and credit cards haven’t registered any activity since that morning.

“It’s almost indescribable,” Ross says. “You have families like us all over the country who are just waiting for something. And you’ve got police waiting for somebody to walk through the door and give them the answer.”

The Rosses have been waiting for more than a decade. Despite several leads over the years, the Chicago Police Department hasn’t made much headway. The case has bounced from one overworked detective to another. The family’s $10,000 reward sits unclaimed. The best explanation police have offered is that Jesse, possibly intoxicated, drowned in the nearby Chicago River. His father doesn’t buy it.

“If that’s your theory, get out there and prove it,” he says. “Anything you can prove to us is fine, but if you think that, as his parents, we’re willing to accept something that is unsubstantiated …” His voice trails off.

Ross looks to sites like the Charley Project for help. He believes that if Jesse is found, it will be through the legwork of amateur sleuths. The Rosses now have a network with the families of other missing persons, and every year they host a gathering on the anniversary of Jesse’s disappearance to shine a light on cold cases. In May 2017, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office in Chicago held their first Missing Persons Day to help families provide DNA samples and receive counseling.

Ross considers missing persons to be an “epidemic” in America, and like other so-called epidemics that require law enforcement’s vigilance, there’s a hierarchy to which cases get pursued. If Chicago cops had investigated Jesse’s disappearance as if he were the son of the mayor or one of their own, Ross argues, perhaps there’d be some solid leads by now. Instead, Ross remains in a state of permanent standby. He used to send postcards to detectives to remind them that Jesse is still out there, until the police department asked him to stop.

Henrike Hoeren, a Charley Project follower from Germany who lives in Ireland, has her own suspicions about how police prioritize missing persons. She echoes what the late PBS newscaster Gwen Ifill famously defined as “missing white woman syndrome”: first come young children, then beautiful women (“blondes get a lot of attention,” Hoeren says), followed by mediocre-looking women, young white males, older white males, Asian males, and, finally, at the bottom, young black men. Sites like the Charley Project exist, at least in part, to countervail the pattern of police bias and indifference. “The internet opens up the world,” Hoeren says, adding that she looks for older cases that detectives have likely sidelined because of heavy caseloads or shrinking budgets.

Not all police departments are blasé about solving decades-old cases. In May 2017, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office in Florida conducted an unusual experiment in the investigation of Marjorie Christina Luna, an 8-year-old girl who vanished from Greenacres City, Florida, in 1984. On the 33rd anniversary of the girl’s disappearance, the Sheriff’s Office sent a series of tweets in Christy’s voice, sketching a ghostly real-time simulation of her possible abduction. “Wait, something doesn’t feel right…Someone keeps looking at me…Something is wrong; my heart is pounding…#Justice4Luna,” read one tweet. Others included photos of Luna, along with pleas to share her story. Such tactics aren’t far removed from how some police departments uploaded photos of unidentified bodies in the early 2000s — a controversial practice at the time that nonetheless helped resolve some cases. According to Deborah Halber’s 2015 book Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America’s Coldest Cases, one independent website, Las Vegas Unidentified, matched nearly 30 John Does to missing persons.

Each year Good purges hundreds of resolved cases from the Charley Project, either because a missing person was found safe or because their body was recovered. The latter scenario offers an answer but doesn’t necessarily bring peace. “I think closure is a myth,” Good says. “After certain things happen, you’re never going to be the same person again.”

Donald Ross says something nearly identical: “I’m a different person. I’m not that person I was before. Now, everything is colored by Jesse.”

Ross has no option but to wake each morning and begin his long vigil all over again. Just as Good has no option but to settle in front of her computer for another long day of combing through newspapers and police databases, cataloging a national catastrophe that’s hidden in plain sight. And her irregulars all over the world seem to have no option but to chase whatever scattered clues they find in hopes that the missing will finally be brought home, one way or another.

“I always believe that answers are on the internet,” says Hoeren, who has helped resolve three cases.

You just have to know where to look.

Jeremy Lybarger is the features editor at the Poetry Foundation. His journalism and essays have appeared in Rolling Stone, New York, Esquire, The New Republic, Pacific Standard, The California Sunday Magazine, and more. 

James Hosking is a San Francisco-based documentary photographer and filmmaker. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Mother Jones, The California Sunday Magazine, San Francisco Magazine, The Advocate, and many other publications. His films include Beautiful by Night and Even in Darkness. 

Editor: Michelle Legro
Photography and video: James Hosking
Fact checker: Matt Giles
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

I was going to begin this post by apologizing to anyone who follows me on Twitter for the way in which my feed has, for the past two weeks, read like a non-stop public radio fund drive.

Then I remembered that a) I am the person who added the Unapologetic Women story category here at Longreads, in part to help me check myself in this regard, and b) I have zero regrets for spreading the word about our current member drive, through which we’re trying to raise $25,000 not only for original journalism by great reporters like Alice Driver, but also for personal essays.

In some corners of the internet, personal essays are derided as frivolous and narcissistic, but I couldn’t disagree more. I find personal narratives to be deeply compelling and important. I believe they can be as effective as hard reporting in conveying important ideas, and sometimes even more so in terms of opening people’s minds by engendering empathy, first for the person telling the story.

I consider myself very fortunate to serve as Essays Editor for a publication that recognizes the value of personal essays, pays writers fairly for them, and makes room in its editorial calendar for at least two of them each week.

Member support — which WordPress.com is matching times three! — makes this possible. (All the money in Longreads’ story fund goes toward paying writers, illustrators, photographers, copyeditors and fact-checkers.)

While it’s difficult to single out particular essays as favorites, or most important, in the interest of possibly persuading some of you to contribute, I’d like to point to a few that have made me especially proud to have the opportunity to do this work and be part of the incredible Longreads team.

Our Well Regulated Militia, by Alexander Chee

It was an honor to work with brilliant novelist and essayist Alexander Chee. After one of the many senseless shootings in this country, Alex wrote this piece for us about his feelings regarding gun control as the son of a late firearms enthusiast. It was recognized as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2017.

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On NYC’s Paratransit, Fighting for Safety, Respect and Human Dignity, by Britney Wilson

Civil rights attorney Britney Wilson recalls a ride home from work on NYC’s paratransit that exposed her vulnerabilities as a Black disabled woman. It was recently picked up by This American Life and adapted as a segment. When I emailed Britney to congratulate her, she wrote back, “Thank you for seeing the value in this story. I pitched this essay to seven different outlets, some of which told me things like, ‘It’s a beautifully told, horrible story, but we don’t think it would generate national interest.’”

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Woman of Color in Wide Open Spaces, by Minda Honey

While visiting national parks to detox from the oppressive whiteness of the MFA experience, Minda Honey is reminded the only places to retreat from whiteness in this country are the spaces women of color hold for each other. Personal narratives by people of color are especially important right now, when we have a racist president who serves as a painful mirror through which even the most liberal in our country must view ourselves, and our difficulties in confronting our country’s deeply rooted racism.

***

I Want to Persuade You to Care About Other People, by Danielle Tcholakian

This piece gave me hope. After changing her conservative grandfather’s mind about affirmative action, Danielle Tcholakian commits to trying to get through to people whose politics are very different from her own. Danielle is a great reporter, but she’d never written a personal essay before. She could have fooled me.

***

What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, by Michele Filgate

Michele Filgate reflects on her teen years with an abusive stepfather and a mother whose silence protected him. It’s a story she says she had been struggling to tell for 14 years. Unfortunately, it remains painfully relevant now.

***

Feeling Unsafe at Every Size, by Eva Tenuto

Here’s another story that spans back many years but remains unfortunately relevant. Months before women were emboldened to join the the viral #metoo campaign on social media that was inspired by Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men getting busted as sexual predators, Eva Tenuto found the courage to share this story with us. She’d been living with shame about it for decades. Then, around the election, hearing Trump’s predatory attitudes towards women transported her straight back to a high school teacher’s abuse of power and the relentless criticism of her junior high peers that made her an ideal target.

***

Raising Brown Boys in Post-9/11 America, by Sorayya Khan

Sorayya Khan recalls racist threats to her young sons after the 2001 attacks, and worries about them as young men living in “Trumpistan.” (Seeing a recurring theme here? It’s stunning how many subjects are affected by the election of our current president.)

***

From a Hawk to a Dove, by Ray Cocks

Vietnam Veteran Ray Cocks, who’d eagerly enlisted in 1967, writes about how he was forever changed by the realities of war. After struggling with alcoholism and PTSD, he becomes a pacifist, and later returns to Vietnam to offer healing there. I find that to be incredibly inspiring, especially at this difficult moment in our country.

***

Unprepared: The Difficulty of Getting a Prescription for a Drug That Effectively Prevents HIV Infection, by Spenser Mestel

Spenser Mestel finds it difficult to get a prescription for Truvada in Iowa City. It provides an eye-opening look into the politics around HIV prevention.

***

The Pleasures of Protest: Taking on Gentrification in Chinatown, by Esther Wang.

Working as a tenant organizer in New York’s Chinatown opened Esther Wang’s eyes to the ugly—and complicated—realities of gentrification in New York City.

***

Curing My Flight Anxiety, One Book Tour at a Time, by Jami Attenberg

Yet another brilliant novelist, Jami Attenberg, discovers a surprise antidote to the anxiety that has plagued her each time she’s had to get on a plane to promote a book. Some of my favorite personal essays and memoirs are those in which great writers take familiar experiences and deliver them in a way that crystallizes your own, or helps you too see them in a different way.

***

My Bad Parenting Advice Addiction, by Emily Gould.

I’m a longstanding fan of Emily Gould’s writing — fiction and non-fiction — not to mention her taste in books. She observes life’s mundanities with a sharp eye, allowing the reader to identify, but also see things in a slightly different light. In this piece, she writes about the time after her son was born, when she read 25 books about babies and sleep, but wound up only more confused.

***

Flying Solo, by Jen Doll

Memoirist and YA author Jen Doll tries to make sense of a breakup that happened the day before a romantic vacation — and blindsided her in the same ways the presidential election did. Jen applies humor and absurdity to a painful breakup in a way that is imminently resonant, and fun to read.

***

The Doctor Will See You Now, by Sarah Miller.

Sometimes it’s incredibly refreshing to read essays that take a less serious view of even the most serious matters. In this one, Sarah Miller uses dry wit to eulogize a relative who was kind of a jerk, and whose death, frankly, doesn’t faze her.

***

I could go on and on. I’m really proud of all the personal essays we’ve published. (You can find a complete list here.) With your help, we can publish many more.

Danielle Tcholakian | Longreads | August 2017 | 23 minutes (5,681 words)

A few years ago, my middle brother and I were in Boca Raton, Fla. for Thanksgiving, visiting my mother’s parents. We’re very close with my grandparents, and one of the things I appreciate about my grandfather is that he has taken me — us — seriously for as long as I can remember. I spent every summer with him and my grandmother out on Long Island from when I was born into my teenage years, and I still can’t recall a time when I didn’t feel entitled to vigorously share my opinion with my grandfather, regardless of whether he would agree with it. When he would include me on forwarded political or (debatably) humorous e-mails with his Boca Raton pals — mostly politically conservative, Jewish guys like him — I would reply-all to any I found false or offensive in any way, lecturing men at least half a century older than me. He never yelled at me for telling off his friends and never took me off the email list for those forwards.

During the 2008 presidential election, I was in college, and I convinced him and my grandmother to vote for Barack Obama. It was the first time in our relationship, as far as I can recall, when my opinion wasn’t only given consideration, but prompted real change. I vividly remember running out to my friend’s Chicago porch after watching the vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin to call my grandpa and crow, “Who you gonna vote for now, Papa?” And I remember his good-natured laugh, his heavy sigh, his admission that yes, I was right. He was going to vote for my guy — in Florida, where it mattered.

Another thing I love about my grandfather is how he’s open-minded in a way that’s unusual among men of his generation. He’s no free-love hippie: This is a man who will drink at least one Coca-Cola a day for the rest of his life; who wears his socks pulled up so tautly, I don’t understand how they never fall; who worked hard for every dime he earned; who to this day insists Costco hot dogs are a great lunch; who plays tennis six days a week and pickle ball the seventh; and who spends a good two to three hours every day reading the paper. My grandfather lived through segregation, quietly. He is not a rabble rouser. But he has always been tickled by the rabble rouser in me, always willing to hear my liberal side out. After I worked as a journalist for Metro New York covering Mike Bloomberg as mayor of New York City, the things I learned of Bloomberg from his staff reminded me of my grandpa in that way. Make a convincing argument, and he’ll listen to it.

So, a few years ago, on Thanksgiving, my brother picked me up from the airport and brought me to the kitchen of my grandparents’ condo in Boca Raton, where my grandpa was eager for discussion. Somehow, affirmative action came up. My grandpa questioned why it was necessary, if it was necessary. Things are so different now, he said. My brother and I, rather than dismissing him as an old racist who couldn’t possibly understand if he didn’t just know, engaged with him. My brother described how he and his white friends would be boisterous on New York City streets as teens, yelling and being rowdy. Being boys. Their black friends didn’t have that luxury. They were quieter, more aware of any police around. When they were were stopped by police once, only the black kid in the group was searched.

I asked my grandpa to think about how hard he worked to give his three daughters, including my mother, every opportunity. A Jewish boy from Flatbush, Brooklyn, who figured he’d just go into the family business, laying down linoleum floors, until his father let him work with him one summer, and forced him to do all the hardest, most annoying labor, to silently persuade him to aim higher. He did, joining the Air Force to help pay for college. He went to college in Alabama, where I know he experienced some discrimination as a Jew, though those anecdotes never make it into his many stories. He followed work wherever it was, devoting so much time to it that he missed out on a lot of parenting and husbanding — something I learned only recently that he regretted, after watching him urgently try to explain to a workaholic boyfriend of mine not to follow his path.

During the 2008 presidential election, I convinced my grandfather to vote for Barack Obama. It was the first time in our relationship, as far as I can recall, when my opinion wasn’t only given consideration, but prompted real change.

Sitting under a canopy of trees on the back deck of my grandfather’s second home — yes, the boy who’d slept in a hallway in Flatbush, Brooklyn grew up to be able to afford not one but two homes — I cringed and hissed “Papa!” as he called my then-boyfriend over. I had just finished explaining to him that things were fine, my boyfriend was just stressed, he had a lot on his plate at work. My boyfriend came over, smiling amicably. My grandfather asked him, in his low, deep drone, about work.

“Can you delegate?” he asked.

My boyfriend demurred, said he worked for a small operation and had to step in because his boss had three kids — he only had me, though he didn’t mention that.

My grandpa looked thoughtful and a little sad. “I didn’t delegate as much as I could have,” he said. “Looking back now, would any of those companies have gone under if I’d let someone else take care of something? I don’t think so.”

My boyfriend nodded, but my grandpa didn’t release him. Instead, he looked right at him. “I loved work. I don’t think I ever had a bad day. So it’s hard to say I regret any of it. But I missed out on a lot. I wasn’t a very good husband, and I could’ve been around more for my kids.”

Age is a funny thing, and so are grandkids. In my experience, grandkids let you be self-critical in a way you might not be inclined to normally. I worried when I broke up with that boyfriend that my grandpa would be offended, because they’d been so similar. But he was relieved. He referenced more than once a compromise the boyfriend had been unwilling to make for our relationship, something I’d thought was small. My grandpa agreed. Don’t give anyone your love if they won’t give back in kind, he signaled without saying. Out loud he said only, “You’ll be fine,” then lovingly lied, “I don’t worry about you.”

He worries a lot, you see, about all of us. So I asked him that Thanksgiving to think about how all the opportunities he created for my mother, all the money he was able to earn and save because of the career advancements he sought and earned, carried on down the line to my brothers and me. How his whole life had helped shape the lives we would have, the comfort we would take for granted, the relative ease with which we could try and sometimes succeed and sometimes fuck up, and still rebound.

Then I asked him to imagine if he’d been black. I knew he worked hard for everything he had, that wasn’t a question. But if he’d been black, would he have even had access to the opportunities in the places where he worked so hard? Would my mother have had access to the opportunities she did? And if they hadn’t had that access, where would I be, today?

He listened and considered and then nodded, smiling a small, impressed smile of understanding and recognition.

***

After the 2016 presidential election, I reeled. I reeled the night of it, when, as a local news reporter, I was parked at the New York City Board of Elections headquarters from 9 p.m. onward and my boss called to tell me the “How to Celebrate the First Female President in New York City” feature some colleagues and I had pre-emptively compiled probably wouldn’t run. He reassigned me, directing me to find a bar where I could get quotes from shell-shocked Democrat voters. I stood outside a bar in Central Brooklyn, typing the forlorn words of fellow smokers into emails on my phone to send to the newsroom. I went into the bar once all my quotes were in, and saw a graphic projected onto a screen showing that 53 percent of white women had voted for Donald Trump, a man who I, as a native New Yorker, had grown up thinking of as a joke, a man who said terrible things about women and had reportedly done even worse things to them, whose campaign promised awful outcomes for Muslims, Mexicans, and immigrants in general. I looked at that 53 percent statistic and felt a tremendous sense of personal responsibility and guilt.

In the days after the election, news outlets rained down analyses and think pieces illustrating the ways in which journalists had failed, and were continuing to fail, at the most fundamental aim of our profession: communication. These complaints predated Election Night, but they surged in its wake. It was not journalists’ fault in a vacuum, most media-savvy people understood. Journalists were up against at least one candidate who lied more blatantly than politicians normally do and was intent on dismissing anything he didn’t like as “fake news,” and his supporters were perplexingly on board with that behavior. “Journalists ran into a combination of falsehoods and media bashing that set 2016 apart from other U.S. presidential campaigns,” Kristen Hare and Alexios Mantzarlis wrote at Poynter.

“The job of journalism is to inform the public,” Jeff Jarvis wrote in to Poynter. “The candidacy of Donald Trump and the quality of political discourse is evidence of our failure. That should be no surprise given that we devote most (of our) journalistic resources to predicting races, not to informing voters.”

My grandfather lived through segregation, quietly. He is not a rabble rouser. But he has always been tickled by the rabble rouser in me, always willing to hear my liberal side out.

The plague of “fake news,” particularly on Facebook, was partly to blame, but it isn’t true that good reporting wasn’t done during the election. As Joshua Benton wrote for Nieman Lab, “The problem is that not enough people sought it out. And of those who did, not enough of them trusted it to inform their political decisions.”

Trust was the real problem. In September 2016, a Gallup poll found that Americans’ trust in the media was at its lowest in the polling organization’s history, with a mere 32 percent saying they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust.

I reeled because I love journalism. I love it in a way that, especially for the first few years I did it, I’ve never loved any person. Doing it has made me happier than I’d previously thought was possible. It was the glass slipper to my Cinderella, a calling I’d fallen into relatively late in life, at 26, but which I felt so acutely lucky to do. The idea that it was broken horrified me. I was intent on figuring out how to do it effectively, how to achieve that fundamental goal of communication.

But everything I encountered told me it was a lost cause. I read a book, Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism, by Thomas E. Patterson, published in October, 2013, which served mostly to show me how so-called “fake news” had been a problem well before this disastrous election cycle. I learned from the book how reluctant people are to even consider straight reporting — not even opinion pieces — that contradict their own personal views. The book was informative, but it didn’t answer the critical question keeping me up at night, and I couldn’t bear the thought that there was no real answer to it. There has to be a way to communicate with people who think differently than you do.

***

For a while, I had a “quality filter” on my Twitter notifications. It allowed Twitter’s algorithm to decide whose responses I saw, ostensibly to weed out internet trolls, people who are vile and vulgar seemingly just for the sake of being that way. A male friend who also works in media told me that he didn’t use that Twitter feature because he wanted to decide for himself who was a troll and who wasn’t — who to listen and respond to, and who wasn’t worth engaging. I decided to disable my quality filter and unmute and unblock most of the accounts I’d been protecting myself from. I knew the consequences were likely worse for me than for him — women who write publicly on the internet face much more aggressive and hostile criticism than men who do the same — but it struck me that if I really cared about communication as the fundamental mission of journalism, I had to be willing to communicate with everyone.

Four months in, I can report that it hasn’t been as bad as you might expect. I had a sort of political, joking tweet go viral and followed its consumption long enough to see it retweeted by Billy Bragg, before muting the notifications for it and subsequently missing most of the hateful responses. (I’ve learned there’s generally a bit of lag time before haters discover something to pile onto.)

When President Trump made awkward comments to an Irish female reporter in the Oval Office, I opted not to tweet about it, instead tweeting at the reporter that I was sorry she had to deal with that experience and that she handled it well.

Trump supporters lashed out at me, and I decided to respond. I made an effort not to be snarky, to make real points, to address their arguments seriously. They argued that Trump was just being nice when he commented on the woman’s appearance, that I had no right to assume she was uncomfortable in that moment, being objectified by the most powerful man in the world in his office while she was trying to do her job. I tried to explain how frustrating it is, as a woman, to feel as if your appearance both supersedes and discounts your credibility, how uncomfortable it is to have someone compliment your appearance in a setting where you’re trying to be professional, how her eyes at the end of the video clip conveyed to me a visceral discomfort that gave me deja vu. They argued that she smiled and laughed; I replied that laughter is often employed to diffuse uncomfortable situations. They argued that her relatively conservatively-cut red dress was meant to get the president’s attention; I gritted my teeth and continued to try to reply as calmly as I could. A male friend of mine also interjected, tweeting less respectfully to some of my more aggressive critics.

I ended up muting that thread later, when the notifications became too much of a distraction, but it appeared some of the people who were angry with me predicted that move, so they either emailed me their screeds or took to tweeting replies at my pinned tweet, or other tweets.

“Lucky that you are not representing women, if women would be like you, humanity would [be] extinct in a decade,” one Twitter user said, in what I assume was a comment meant to insult my physical desirability.

“You are an IDIOT if what the President said to her was wrong !!!! Was a compliment !!!!!” tweeted another.

“Kill yourself,” tweeted a third.

I showed my male friend one of the hateful emails and jokingly asked if he’d gotten as much vitriol or if it was “a ladies only kind of thing.” He replied that he had gotten almost no backlash. The worst anyone had called him was “a foul-mouthed punk,” which, if you knew this particular friend, is an accurate description he probably revelled in. Meanwhile, I had gotten more tweets and emails than either of us could count, almost all telling me I was ugly, stupid or both, as well as the catalyst for the decline of Western civilization. (It’s a heavy cross to bear, being so wrong and hideous and yet so powerful, like if Atlas were replaced with Quasimodo.)

Somehow, affirmative action came up. My grandpa questioned why it was necessary, if it was necessary. Things are so different now, he said. My brother and I, rather than dismissing him as an old racist who couldn’t possibly understand if he didn’t just know, engaged with him.

This scenario is not new to anyone who spends much time on the internet, especially not to women. But my earnest desire to communicate was somewhat naive. And I found I was censoring myself in a different way: I was swallowing the emotional response I had to that Irish reporter’s video clip, the surging of long-swallowed anger from various professional encounters with men who made me feel uncomfortable, and then all the self-protective anger that surged at people’s tweets accusing the reporter of asking for it, of wanting it, of enjoying it. Those tweets reminded me of my own response after being in similar situations, of all the times I told myself I should’ve worn a different shirt, or not worn lipstick, or not been so friendly, all the times my own default was to blame the woman in this situation, when that woman was me.

Part of me wanted to yell at her detractors that they were stupid and wrong and just didn’t get it and should be ashamed of themselves. But a bigger part of me really, really wanted them to understand. I wanted to believe that I could convince them, that if my writer-brain could just come up with the perfect string of words, the internet heavens would break open, visible sunbeams would shine down, and at least one person saying mean things on Twitter would suddenly stop discounting women’s experiences — or even just this one woman’s experience. I would take that as a win.

I probably didn’t persuade anyone that day, though I got a couple of slightly nicer responses from a few people. I’ve kept my notification settings open, though, and haven’t blocked or muted anyone new. Sometimes it feels like an exercise in developing thicker skin, like when therapists make patients confront something that upsets them over and over until it doesn’t affect them anymore. But most of the time, it’s fine, and I’ve realized that I really want to know what people think of what I say and write, even people with 22 Twitter followers. That guy still gets to vote, you know? That guy is still a reader; I still want to communicate with him. The number of Twitter followers you have doesn’t make you any less or more valuable to our current electoral system or to me as a writer.

Then I noticed a Huffington Post article being shared a lot by my liberal friends, with the headline, “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People.” They often shared it with some variation of “THIS” or “YES.” It made me sad when I read it.

The writer, an NYC-based video editor named Kayla Chadwick, was battling “arguing-about-politics fatigue,” understandably. She felt that the difference between her and people who disagreed with her on politics was that her opponents lacked empathy. She wrote:

If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.

I’m perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools, even though I’m childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education. If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye…

If you’re okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.

I empathized with her frustration, but I disagreed with her premise. I believe there are people who support charter schools or who oppose a higher minimum wage who aren’t sociopaths devoid of feeling. I may not agree with people who don’t prioritize public school funding or universal healthcare, but I don’t think their reasons begin and end with, “Keep your hands off my money.” In her post, Chadwick provides excellent reasons for her values, ones that resonate with me, and which I’m eager to test out on the next conservative I meet. Maybe they’ll be interested in the evidence that workers who make a decent wage perform better, that not being able to read by third grade is strongly correlated with future incarceration, that the government providing universal health care could actually save businesses money and time and keep our employers away from our medical records.

After the 2016 election, the idea that journalsm was broken horrified me. I was intent on figuring out how to do it effectively, how to achieve that fundamental goal of communication.

Or maybe they won’t! I won’t know until I try to have the conversation. Maybe it will be exhausting and frustrating. But I want to try, both in-person and online, with people who have thousands of followers and people who have a handful. Because it’s my job and I love my job, because they are colleagues and neighbors and voters, and because we all have to live here on this Earth together, and if we’re not communicating, what the hell are we doing?

***

I spent a weekend with my grandparents recently, a few days after The New York Times reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, would devote civil rights resources to investigating “discrimination” against white applicants by colleges with affirmative action policies.

My grandpa didn’t bring up that report, though I’m sure he read it, as he reads the Times cover-to-cover every single day, devoting a couple hours to being one of the most well-informed people I know. But the first night we sat down to dinner, he said, apropos of nothing, “There’s no question that the whites in this country are at an advantage and have been for a long time.”

I looked up, put my fork down. He was looking at my youngest brother and me, and he gestured at my grandmother as he continued, “During my and grandma’s lifetime, the Blacks and Latinos have made great progress.” (Should I have corrected his use of “Blacks” as a proper noun? Perhaps, but my writer-brain was distracted by how pleased I was that his sentence construction gave credit for progress to the people who had really fought for it, rather than the nation that had only sometimes begrudgingly ceded it.)

He went on to explain how even though that progress had been great, it was so very, very recent. Implied was the sense that there was still so much corrective work to be done. “Whites used to only have to compete for jobs with other whites,” he said. “There’s more competition now.” My grandpa had isolated the reason why progress was inextricably linked to a spike in racism, in grasping desperately at the straws of old ways: Progress and fairness are a threat to that relative white ease, all that unearned access to opportunity that had enabled my grandpa to be the patriarch he was so proud to be. He could see why other whites balked at losing it, even as he disagreed with fighting to maintain it.

Here’s the thing about my grandpa. Even though he wants everyone to be able to see doctors and go to good schools and drive on safe roads, he still insists he’s a “socially liberal fiscal conservative,” a political archetype that I recall being extremely common in my Bill Clinton era youth, but which seems to have since gone extinct or at least become endangered. I don’t want to mislead: He’s not some woke old man unicorn. He doesn’t listen to Frank Ocean, I’m positive he would never even consider attending a march, and he probably doesn’t know how to refer to any of my transgender friends (though he would happily welcome all of them to his home because, as an extreme extrovert, the man lives for new people to talk with). When I told him the tennis player Andy Murray was a great feminist ally, he was confused. He doesn’t do dishes or cook, has never laundered so much as a sock, and would really appreciate it if I would stop getting tattoos. The day after that dinner conversation about white privilege, we were in the car, and he told us of a friend’s son, “He’s studying to be a male nurse,” prompting my middle brother, whose wit is Sahara-level arid, to interject, “Technically, I think it’s just ‘a nurse.’”

He’s basically a normal American octogenarian, if somewhat unusually well-informed about current events.

Even so, I know not everyone is like my grandpa. Not the people online, not the people I’ll meet in person. Last Thanksgiving, after the presidential election, I was in Boca Raton again, but without him. My grandmother’s brother had died, and they had to abruptly go to Iceland, where my grandmother was born and raised and met my grandfather. One afternoon, I decided to go to the hot tub in their condo complex. I tried to wait out the other grandpas in the hot tub, but Florida men of a certain age have an uncanny ability to remain in a hot tub well past the recommended 15 to 30 minutes. Eventually I gave up, and got in. There were two older men in there already, one with his grandson. We got to talking, mostly about New York City real estate.

“How do you know so much about this stuff?” one of them asked me. “You’re what, 22?”

I was 30, and I told him so. “I’m a reporter,” I confessed. “I cover local news, and politics and real estate are very closely connected in New York City.”

The older men smiled at each other knowingly, then made comments about how our politics were probably different. They professed to having both voted for Trump.

More than half of the women in this country who look like me and voted chose to maintain their racial superiority. I think my privilege, as a white-appearing albeit multiethnic woman, means I can and should shoulder this attempt at communication.

That 53-percent-of-white-women-voters statistic floated to the top of my overheated brain in that hot tub. I smiled tightly and shouldered my duty to engage in earnest. I felt an obligation to try and break through. I asked them how they thought things were going. We were in the thick of Trump’s first Cabinet appointments, in which it appeared the swamp he was so set on purging was being welcomed in with open arms. They dismissed me, insisting that to get anywhere in politics, you need people who know politics. Same with money. The man whose grandson was with him responded to everything I raised with “Of course you’d say that!” At one point I mentioned that unemployment was at a low and jobs were at a high. He replied by telling me those numbers were cooked. I asked him why he could believe Trump’s numbers, but not Obama’s.

“Of course you’d say that!”

I lost my patience a little then. With a forced smile that I doubt looked sincere, I said, “You know, it’s interesting. I’m trying to listen to you, and engage with you, but anything I say, you reply, ‘Of course you’d say that.’” He sputtered; his grandson announced that the conversation had probably run its course; and I nodded, got up, and vacated the septuagenarian stew in which I’d been simmering.

I felt as if I’d failed. I wondered if I could have tried harder, if I could have broken through. It left me feeling existentially anxious and sad to think it was impossible, that it would never have worked, so I decided that it was just too soon. Tensions were high; they were still reeling from their surprising win as much their opponents were reeling from a stunning loss. I still wonder if now, nine months later, I might be able to make more progress. I think about how the other older man, the one without a grandson to mediate the conversation, stopped by my deck chair on his way upstairs to his own condo and asked me if I wanted to join his family for dinner, since I’d mentioned that my grandparents had been called away. He was worried that I was all alone. I declined — my brothers and I were enjoying what I’d dubbed “Boxcar Children Thanksgiving,” hearkening back to my favorite childhood books about four orphaned siblings surviving on their own — but I am comforted by the memory of his openness and generosity, his willingness to expose his family to my liberal ways. Given the chance to have the hot tub conversation again or skip it, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

***

This essay was written before white supremacists, galvanized to leave the shadows and show their faces, took to the streets of Charlottesville, Va. and chanted about Jews and gay people, beat a black man with poles, and rammed a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a young woman and injuring 19 other people, including children, on a sunny Saturday in August 2017. Fewer than 50 years after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Fifty-three years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and King was awarded the Nobel Prize. Sixty-two years after 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi.

After that weekend, I reeled once again, and felt that weighty 53 percent guilt drape itself around me. Nobody needs a white woman writing that we should engage in discussion with people who disagree with us right now. I watched the Vice News Tonight special on Charlottesville and sobbed, twice, hard enough to incur a disdainful glance from a previously sleeping cat. I watched people thirsty for violence, fueled by a hate I could not comprehend, and felt scared and confused and sad. And I called my grandpa.

He had just come home from playing pickle ball. No, wait, tennis. It was tennis he played that morning. He laughed. He confessed to being tired.

“I’m tired now, when I come home from tennis, or pickle ball.” He sounded fatigued and also a little worried, the way he sounds when awareness of his age strikes him suddenly.

I encouraged him. “You get more exercise than I do!” My voice cracked and he asked what was wrong. I told him I was sad about Charlottesville. He murmured sympathetically and I thought about the differences between us. Our voices: his a little droning, deep, slow, considered; mine thinner, higher, smaller, faster. I pictured us suddenly as animals: him a lumbering bear, big and solid and steady; me a flighty butterfly, flitting around him, jabbering, fast-talking, wise-cracking. I thought about our different lives: him as a little boy in Brooklyn, educated in a neighborhood public school, his whole world spanning just as far as the local bus ran (“All the way to Jacob Riis Park!” he tells me today, still sounding awestruck, as if the Queens peninsula were a distant Atlantis); me as a little girl in Manhattan, educated in an international private school, surrounded by technology that enabled my world to span farther even than the edges of the globe I lived on. I cried a little, quietly, and asked him, “What did you think, when you saw what happened this weekend?”

My grandpa is measured, thoughtful, rational. He cleared his throat. “It’s kind of ugly to see.” He criticized Trump’s response. “He could have expressed himself better. You don’t hold back because these are your voters.”

He reminded me that this rise of the ultra-nationalism isn’t only happening in America, but in Europe, too. I didn’t find that to be much of a comfort. I struggled to figure out what I wanted to ask him, how to phrase it. Are we going back? Is this it, is this who we are forever? Are we doomed to get worse every time we get marginally better? Finally I blurted, “Does it feel like watching what you lived through before?”

He paused. “I didn’t see it when it was happening before,” he said finally. “I lived in a neighborhood with Italians, Irish, Jews. We didn’t have media access like we do now.” I remembered asking him recently if there were segregated bathrooms for black people when he went to school, and how he thought for a while before he said, “There weren’t any Blacks in my neighborhood, and everyone at my school was from the neighborhood.”

He tried to come up with some sort of explanation of that weekend for me, something that meant the world wasn’t just a dark and incomprehensible mess. He speculated, like the northern city boy he is, that those white supremacists were all people from the rural South, uneducated and without much money. I pointed out that wasn’t true, many of them came from cities or nearby suburbs, had wealthy parents, graduated from good colleges, had jobs. He was tired and I needed too much. He thought for a while then said, “You know, there’s a lot of wealth now, actually. There wasn’t so much, when I was younger. Maybe people weren’t so inclined to their own bottom line? There wasn’t such a great difference between the people who had money and didn’t.”

I thought about that, about the new wave of socialism, about the wealthy Americans who glommed on to the president and didn’t let go even after he said journalists were bad people but Nazis weren’t. I let my grandpa go because he was tired, and I kept thinking, about privilege and communication and how more than half of the women in this country who look like me and voted chose to maintain their racial superiority. And I still think that my privilege, as a white-appearing albeit multiethnic woman, means I can and should shoulder this attempt at communication. I watched the Vice News Tonight reporter Elle Reeve, white and blond and young and pretty, set her jaw over and over and ask question after question to reveal interesting truths about the intentions and plans of these desperately misguided people and I saw a good faith attempt in a dark time. People of color, black women, Muslims and refugees and immigrants, have to field this toxicity all the time, whether they want to or not. The least I can do with my privilege is attempt to take some of it on, to engage, to try.

* * *

Danielle Tcholakian is a freelance reporter and writer based in New York City.

Editor: Sari Botton

Danielle Tcholakian | Longreads | August 2017 | 23 minutes (5,681 words)

A few years ago, my middle brother and I were in Boca Raton, Fla. for Thanksgiving, visiting my mother’s parents. We’re very close with my grandparents, and one of the things I appreciate about my grandfather is that he has taken me — us — seriously for as long as I can remember. I spent every summer with him and my grandmother out on Long Island from when I was born into my teenage years, and I still can’t recall a time when I didn’t feel entitled to vigorously share my opinion with my grandfather, regardless of whether he would agree with it. When he would include me on forwarded political or (debatably) humorous e-mails with his Boca Raton pals — mostly politically conservative, Jewish guys like him — I would reply-all to any I found false or offensive in any way, lecturing men at least half a century older than me. He never yelled at me for telling off his friends and never took me off the email list for those forwards.

During the 2008 presidential election, I was in college, and I convinced him and my grandmother to vote for Barack Obama. It was the first time in our relationship, as far as I can recall, when my opinion wasn’t only given consideration, but prompted real change. I vividly remember running out to my friend’s Chicago porch after watching the vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin to call my grandpa and crow, “Who you gonna vote for now, Papa?” And I remember his good-natured laugh, his heavy sigh, his admission that yes, I was right. He was going to vote for my guy — in Florida, where it mattered.

Another thing I love about my grandfather is how he’s open-minded in a way that’s unusual among men of his generation. He’s no free-love hippie: This is a man who will drink at least one Coca-Cola a day for the rest of his life; who wears his socks pulled up so tautly, I don’t understand how they never fall; who worked hard for every dime he earned; who to this day insists Costco hot dogs are a great lunch; who plays tennis six days a week and pickle ball the seventh; and who spends a good two to three hours every day reading the paper. My grandfather lived through segregation, quietly. He is not a rabble rouser. But he has always been tickled by the rabble rouser in me, always willing to hear my liberal side out. After I worked as a journalist for Metro New York covering Mike Bloomberg as mayor of New York City, the things I learned of Bloomberg from his staff reminded me of my grandpa in that way. Make a convincing argument, and he’ll listen to it.

So, a few years ago, on Thanksgiving, my brother picked me up from the airport and brought me to the kitchen of my grandparents’ condo in Boca Raton, where my grandpa was eager for discussion. Somehow, affirmative action came up. My grandpa questioned why it was necessary, if it was necessary. Things are so different now, he said. My brother and I, rather than dismissing him as an old racist who couldn’t possibly understand if he didn’t just know, engaged with him. My brother described how he and his white friends would be boisterous on New York City streets as teens, yelling and being rowdy. Being boys. Their black friends didn’t have that luxury. They were quieter, more aware of any police around. When they were were stopped by police once, only the black kid in the group was searched.

I asked my grandpa to think about how hard he worked to give his three daughters, including my mother, every opportunity. A Jewish boy from Flatbush, Brooklyn, who figured he’d just go into the family business, laying down linoleum floors, until his father let him work with him one summer, and forced him to do all the hardest, most annoying labor, to silently persuade him to aim higher. He did, joining the Air Force to help pay for college. He went to college in Alabama, where I know he experienced some discrimination as a Jew, though those anecdotes never make it into his many stories. He followed work wherever it was, devoting so much time to it that he missed out on a lot of parenting and husbanding — something I learned only recently that he regretted, after watching him urgently try to explain to a workaholic boyfriend of mine not to follow his path.

During the 2008 presidential election, I convinced my grandfather to vote for Barack Obama. It was the first time in our relationship, as far as I can recall, when my opinion wasn’t only given consideration, but prompted real change.

Sitting under a canopy of trees on the back deck of my grandfather’s second home — yes, the boy who’d slept in a hallway in Flatbush, Brooklyn grew up to be able to afford not one but two homes — I cringed and hissed “Papa!” as he called my then-boyfriend over. I had just finished explaining to him that things were fine, my boyfriend was just stressed, he had a lot on his plate at work. My boyfriend came over, smiling amicably. My grandfather asked him, in his low, deep drone, about work.

“Can you delegate?” he asked.

My boyfriend demurred, said he worked for a small operation and had to step in because his boss had three kids — he only had me, though he didn’t mention that.

My grandpa looked thoughtful and a little sad. “I didn’t delegate as much as I could have,” he said. “Looking back now, would any of those companies have gone under if I’d let someone else take care of something? I don’t think so.”

My boyfriend nodded, but my grandpa didn’t release him. Instead, he looked right at him. “I loved work. I don’t think I ever had a bad day. So it’s hard to say I regret any of it. But I missed out on a lot. I wasn’t a very good husband, and I could’ve been around more for my kids.”

Age is a funny thing, and so are grandkids. In my experience, grandkids let you be self-critical in a way you might not be inclined to normally. I worried when I broke up with that boyfriend that my grandpa would be offended, because they’d been so similar. But he was relieved. He referenced more than once a compromise the boyfriend had been unwilling to make for our relationship, something I’d thought was small. My grandpa agreed. Don’t give anyone your love if they won’t give back in kind, he signaled without saying. Out loud he said only, “You’ll be fine,” then lovingly lied, “I don’t worry about you.”

He worries a lot, you see, about all of us. So I asked him that Thanksgiving to think about how all the opportunities he created for my mother, all the money he was able to earn and save because of the career advancements he sought and earned, carried on down the line to my brothers and me. How his whole life had helped shape the lives we would have, the comfort we would take for granted, the relative ease with which we could try and sometimes succeed and sometimes fuck up, and still rebound.

Then I asked him to imagine if he’d been black. I knew he worked hard for everything he had, that wasn’t a question. But if he’d been black, would he have even had access to the opportunities in the places where he worked so hard? Would my mother have had access to the opportunities she did? And if they hadn’t had that access, where would I be, today?

He listened and considered and then nodded, smiling a small, impressed smile of understanding and recognition.

***

After the 2016 presidential election, I reeled. I reeled the night of it, when, as a local news reporter, I was parked at the New York City Board of Elections headquarters from 9 p.m. onward and my boss called to tell me the “How to Celebrate the First Female President in New York City” feature some colleagues and I had pre-emptively compiled probably wouldn’t run. He reassigned me, directing me to find a bar where I could get quotes from shell-shocked Democrat voters. I stood outside a bar in Central Brooklyn, typing the forlorn words of fellow smokers into emails on my phone to send to the newsroom. I went into the bar once all my quotes were in, and saw a graphic projected onto a screen showing that 53 percent of white women had voted for Donald Trump, a man who I, as a native New Yorker, had grown up thinking of as a joke, a man who said terrible things about women and had reportedly done even worse things to them, whose campaign promised awful outcomes for Muslims, Mexicans, and immigrants in general. I looked at that 53 percent statistic and felt a tremendous sense of personal responsibility and guilt.

In the days after the election, news outlets rained down analyses and think pieces illustrating the ways in which journalists had failed, and were continuing to fail, at the most fundamental aim of our profession: communication. These complaints predated Election Night, but they surged in its wake. It was not journalists’ fault in a vacuum, most media-savvy people understood. Journalists were up against at least one candidate who lied more blatantly than politicians normally do and was intent on dismissing anything he didn’t like as “fake news,” and his supporters were perplexingly on board with that behavior. “Journalists ran into a combination of falsehoods and media bashing that set 2016 apart from other U.S. presidential campaigns,” Kristen Hare and Alexios Mantzarlis wrote at Poynter.

“The job of journalism is to inform the public,” Jeff Jarvis wrote in to Poynter. “The candidacy of Donald Trump and the quality of political discourse is evidence of our failure. That should be no surprise given that we devote most (of our) journalistic resources to predicting races, not to informing voters.”

My grandfather lived through segregation, quietly. He is not a rabble rouser. But he has always been tickled by the rabble rouser in me, always willing to hear my liberal side out.

The plague of “fake news,” particularly on Facebook, was partly to blame, but it isn’t true that good reporting wasn’t done during the election. As Joshua Benton wrote for Nieman Lab, “The problem is that not enough people sought it out. And of those who did, not enough of them trusted it to inform their political decisions.”

Trust was the real problem. In September 2016, a Gallup poll found that Americans’ trust in the media was at its lowest in the polling organization’s history, with a mere 32 percent saying they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust.

I reeled because I love journalism. I love it in a way that, especially for the first few years I did it, I’ve never loved any person. Doing it has made me happier than I’d previously thought was possible. It was the glass slipper to my Cinderella, a calling I’d fallen into relatively late in life, at 26, but which I felt so acutely lucky to do. The idea that it was broken horrified me. I was intent on figuring out how to do it effectively, how to achieve that fundamental goal of communication.

But everything I encountered told me it was a lost cause. I read a book, Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism, by Thomas E. Patterson, published in October, 2013, which served mostly to show me how so-called “fake news” had been a problem well before this disastrous election cycle. I learned from the book how reluctant people are to even consider straight reporting — not even opinion pieces — that contradict their own personal views. The book was informative, but it didn’t answer the critical question keeping me up at night, and I couldn’t bear the thought that there was no real answer to it. There has to be a way to communicate with people who think differently than you do.

***

For a while, I had a “quality filter” on my Twitter notifications. It allowed Twitter’s algorithm to decide whose responses I saw, ostensibly to weed out internet trolls, people who are vile and vulgar seemingly just for the sake of being that way. A male friend who also works in media told me that he didn’t use that Twitter feature because he wanted to decide for himself who was a troll and who wasn’t — who to listen and respond to, and who wasn’t worth engaging. I decided to disable my quality filter and unmute and unblock most of the accounts I’d been protecting myself from. I knew the consequences were likely worse for me than for him — women who write publicly on the internet face much more aggressive and hostile criticism than men who do the same — but it struck me that if I really cared about communication as the fundamental mission of journalism, I had to be willing to communicate with everyone.

Four months in, I can report that it hasn’t been as bad as you might expect. I had a sort of political, joking tweet go viral and followed its consumption long enough to see it retweeted by Billy Bragg, before muting the notifications for it and subsequently missing most of the hateful responses. (I’ve learned there’s generally a bit of lag time before haters discover something to pile onto.)

When President Trump made awkward comments to an Irish female reporter in the Oval Office, I opted not to tweet about it, instead tweeting at the reporter that I was sorry she had to deal with that experience and that she handled it well.

Trump supporters lashed out at me, and I decided to respond. I made an effort not to be snarky, to make real points, to address their arguments seriously. They argued that Trump was just being nice when he commented on the woman’s appearance, that I had no right to assume she was uncomfortable in that moment, being objectified by the most powerful man in the world in his office while she was trying to do her job. I tried to explain how frustrating it is, as a woman, to feel as if your appearance both supersedes and discounts your credibility, how uncomfortable it is to have someone compliment your appearance in a setting where you’re trying to be professional, how her eyes at the end of the video clip conveyed to me a visceral discomfort that gave me deja vu. They argued that she smiled and laughed; I replied that laughter is often employed to diffuse uncomfortable situations. They argued that her relatively conservatively-cut red dress was meant to get the president’s attention; I gritted my teeth and continued to try to reply as calmly as I could. A male friend of mine also interjected, tweeting less respectfully to some of my more aggressive critics.

I ended up muting that thread later, when the notifications became too much of a distraction, but it appeared some of the people who were angry with me predicted that move, so they either emailed me their screeds or took to tweeting replies at my pinned tweet, or other tweets.

“Lucky that you are not representing women, if women would be like you, humanity would [be] extinct in a decade,” one Twitter user said, in what I assume was a comment meant to insult my physical desirability.

“You are an IDIOT if what the President said to her was wrong !!!! Was a compliment !!!!!” tweeted another.

“Kill yourself,” tweeted a third.

I showed my male friend one of the hateful emails and jokingly asked if he’d gotten as much vitriol or if it was “a ladies only kind of thing.” He replied that he had gotten almost no backlash. The worst anyone had called him was “a foul-mouthed punk,” which, if you knew this particular friend, is an accurate description he probably revelled in. Meanwhile, I had gotten more tweets and emails than either of us could count, almost all telling me I was ugly, stupid or both, as well as the catalyst for the decline of Western civilization. (It’s a heavy cross to bear, being so wrong and hideous and yet so powerful, like if Atlas were replaced with Quasimodo.)

Somehow, affirmative action came up. My grandpa questioned why it was necessary, if it was necessary. Things are so different now, he said. My brother and I, rather than dismissing him as an old racist who couldn’t possibly understand if he didn’t just know, engaged with him.

This scenario is not new to anyone who spends much time on the internet, especially not to women. But my earnest desire to communicate was somewhat naive. And I found I was censoring myself in a different way: I was swallowing the emotional response I had to that Irish reporter’s video clip, the surging of long-swallowed anger from various professional encounters with men who made me feel uncomfortable, and then all the self-protective anger that surged at people’s tweets accusing the reporter of asking for it, of wanting it, of enjoying it. Those tweets reminded me of my own response after being in similar situations, of all the times I told myself I should’ve worn a different shirt, or not worn lipstick, or not been so friendly, all the times my own default was to blame the woman in this situation, when that woman was me.

Part of me wanted to yell at her detractors that they were stupid and wrong and just didn’t get it and should be ashamed of themselves. But a bigger part of me really, really wanted them to understand. I wanted to believe that I could convince them, that if my writer-brain could just come up with the perfect string of words, the internet heavens would break open, visible sunbeams would shine down, and at least one person saying mean things on Twitter would suddenly stop discounting women’s experiences — or even just this one woman’s experience. I would take that as a win.

I probably didn’t persuade anyone that day, though I got a couple of slightly nicer responses from a few people. I’ve kept my notification settings open, though, and haven’t blocked or muted anyone new. Sometimes it feels like an exercise in developing thicker skin, like when therapists make patients confront something that upsets them over and over until it doesn’t affect them anymore. But most of the time, it’s fine, and I’ve realized that I really want to know what people think of what I say and write, even people with 22 Twitter followers. That guy still gets to vote, you know? That guy is still a reader; I still want to communicate with him. The number of Twitter followers you have doesn’t make you any less or more valuable to our current electoral system or to me as a writer.

Then I noticed a Huffington Post article being shared a lot by my liberal friends, with the headline, “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People.” They often shared it with some variation of “THIS” or “YES.” It made me sad when I read it.

The writer, an NYC-based video editor named Kayla Chadwick, was battling “arguing-about-politics fatigue,” understandably. She felt that the difference between her and people who disagreed with her on politics was that her opponents lacked empathy. She wrote:

If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.

I’m perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools, even though I’m childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education. If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye…

If you’re okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.

I empathized with her frustration, but I disagreed with her premise. I believe there are people who support charter schools or who oppose a higher minimum wage who aren’t sociopaths devoid of feeling. I may not agree with people who don’t prioritize public school funding or universal healthcare, but I don’t think their reasons begin and end with, “Keep your hands off my money.” In her post, Chadwick provides excellent reasons for her values, ones that resonate with me, and which I’m eager to test out on the next conservative I meet. Maybe they’ll be interested in the evidence that workers who make a decent wage perform better, that not being able to read by third grade is strongly correlated with future incarceration, that the government providing universal health care could actually save businesses money and time and keep our employers away from our medical records.

After the 2016 election, the idea that journalsm was broken horrified me. I was intent on figuring out how to do it effectively, how to achieve that fundamental goal of communication.

Or maybe they won’t! I won’t know until I try to have the conversation. Maybe it will be exhausting and frustrating. But I want to try, both in-person and online, with people who have thousands of followers and people who have a handful. Because it’s my job and I love my job, because they are colleagues and neighbors and voters, and because we all have to live here on this Earth together, and if we’re not communicating, what the hell are we doing?

***

I spent a weekend with my grandparents recently, a few days after The New York Times reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, would devote civil rights resources to investigating “discrimination” against white applicants by colleges with affirmative action policies.

My grandpa didn’t bring up that report, though I’m sure he read it, as he reads the Times cover-to-cover every single day, devoting a couple hours to being one of the most well-informed people I know. But the first night we sat down to dinner, he said, apropos of nothing, “There’s no question that the whites in this country are at an advantage and have been for a long time.”

I looked up, put my fork down. He was looking at my youngest brother and me, and he gestured at my grandmother as he continued, “During my and grandma’s lifetime, the Blacks and Latinos have made great progress.” (Should I have corrected his use of “Blacks” as a proper noun? Perhaps, but my writer-brain was distracted by how pleased I was that his sentence construction gave credit for progress to the people who had really fought for it, rather than the nation that had only sometimes begrudgingly ceded it.)

He went on to explain how even though that progress had been great, it was so very, very recent. Implied was the sense that there was still so much corrective work to be done. “Whites used to only have to compete for jobs with other whites,” he said. “There’s more competition now.” My grandpa had isolated the reason why progress was inextricably linked to a spike in racism, in grasping desperately at the straws of old ways: Progress and fairness are a threat to that relative white ease, all that unearned access to opportunity that had enabled my grandpa to be the patriarch he was so proud to be. He could see why other whites balked at losing it, even as he disagreed with fighting to maintain it.

Here’s the thing about my grandpa. Even though he wants everyone to be able to see doctors and go to good schools and drive on safe roads, he still insists he’s a “socially liberal fiscal conservative,” a political archetype that I recall being extremely common in my Bill Clinton era youth, but which seems to have since gone extinct or at least become endangered. I don’t want to mislead: He’s not some woke old man unicorn. He doesn’t listen to Frank Ocean, I’m positive he would never even consider attending a march, and he probably doesn’t know how to refer to any of my transgender friends (though he would happily welcome all of them to his home because, as an extreme extrovert, the man lives for new people to talk with). When I told him the tennis player Andy Murray was a great feminist ally, he was confused. He doesn’t do dishes or cook, has never laundered so much as a sock, and would really appreciate it if I would stop getting tattoos. The day after that dinner conversation about white privilege, we were in the car, and he told us of a friend’s son, “He’s studying to be a male nurse,” prompting my middle brother, whose wit is Sahara-level arid, to interject, “Technically, I think it’s just ‘a nurse.’”

He’s basically a normal American octogenarian, if somewhat unusually well-informed about current events.

Even so, I know not everyone is like my grandpa. Not the people online, not the people I’ll meet in person. Last Thanksgiving, after the presidential election, I was in Boca Raton again, but without him. My grandmother’s brother had died, and they had to abruptly go to Iceland, where my grandmother was born and raised and met my grandfather. One afternoon, I decided to go to the hot tub in their condo complex. I tried to wait out the other grandpas in the hot tub, but Florida men of a certain age have an uncanny ability to remain in a hot tub well past the recommended 15 to 30 minutes. Eventually I gave up, and got in. There were two older men in there already, one with his grandson. We got to talking, mostly about New York City real estate.

“How do you know so much about this stuff?” one of them asked me. “You’re what, 22?”

I was 30, and I told him so. “I’m a reporter,” I confessed. “I cover local news, and politics and real estate are very closely connected in New York City.”

The older men smiled at each other knowingly, then made comments about how our politics were probably different. They professed to having both voted for Trump.

More than half of the women in this country who look like me and voted chose to maintain their racial superiority. I think my privilege, as a white-appearing albeit multiethnic woman, means I can and should shoulder this attempt at communication.

That 53-percent-of-white-women-voters statistic floated to the top of my overheated brain in that hot tub. I smiled tightly and shouldered my duty to engage in earnest. I felt an obligation to try and break through. I asked them how they thought things were going. We were in the thick of Trump’s first Cabinet appointments, in which it appeared the swamp he was so set on purging was being welcomed in with open arms. They dismissed me, insisting that to get anywhere in politics, you need people who know politics. Same with money. The man whose grandson was with him responded to everything I raised with “Of course you’d say that!” At one point I mentioned that unemployment was at a low and jobs were at a high. He replied by telling me those numbers were cooked. I asked him why he could believe Trump’s numbers, but not Obama’s.

“Of course you’d say that!”

I lost my patience a little then. With a forced smile that I doubt looked sincere, I said, “You know, it’s interesting. I’m trying to listen to you, and engage with you, but anything I say, you reply, ‘Of course you’d say that.’” He sputtered; his grandson announced that the conversation had probably run its course; and I nodded, got up, and vacated the septuagenarian stew in which I’d been simmering.

I felt as if I’d failed. I wondered if I could have tried harder, if I could have broken through. It left me feeling existentially anxious and sad to think it was impossible, that it would never have worked, so I decided that it was just too soon. Tensions were high; they were still reeling from their surprising win as much their opponents were reeling from a stunning loss. I still wonder if now, nine months later, I might be able to make more progress. I think about how the other older man, the one without a grandson to mediate the conversation, stopped by my deck chair on his way upstairs to his own condo and asked me if I wanted to join his family for dinner, since I’d mentioned that my grandparents had been called away. He was worried that I was all alone. I declined — my brothers and I were enjoying what I’d dubbed “Boxcar Children Thanksgiving,” hearkening back to my favorite childhood books about four orphaned siblings surviving on their own — but I am comforted by the memory of his openness and generosity, his willingness to expose his family to my liberal ways. Given the chance to have the hot tub conversation again or skip it, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

***

This essay was written before white supremacists, galvanized to leave the shadows and show their faces, took to the streets of Charlottesville, Va. and chanted about Jews and gay people, beat a black man with poles, and rammed a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a young woman and injuring 19 other people, including children, on a sunny Saturday in August 2017. Fewer than 50 years after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Fifty-three years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and King was awarded the Nobel Prize. Sixty-two years after 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi.

After that weekend, I reeled once again, and felt that weighty 53 percent guilt drape itself around me. Nobody needs a white woman writing that we should engage in discussion with people who disagree with us right now. I watched the Vice News Tonight special on Charlottesville and sobbed, twice, hard enough to incur a disdainful glance from a previously sleeping cat. I watched people thirsty for violence, fueled by a hate I could not comprehend, and felt scared and confused and sad. And I called my grandpa.

He had just come home from playing pickle ball. No, wait, tennis. It was tennis he played that morning. He laughed. He confessed to being tired.

“I’m tired now, when I come home from tennis, or pickle ball.” He sounded fatigued and also a little worried, the way he sounds when awareness of his age strikes him suddenly.

I encouraged him. “You get more exercise than I do!” My voice cracked and he asked what was wrong. I told him I was sad about Charlottesville. He murmured sympathetically and I thought about the differences between us. Our voices: his a little droning, deep, slow, considered; mine thinner, higher, smaller, faster. I pictured us suddenly as animals: him a lumbering bear, big and solid and steady; me a flighty butterfly, flitting around him, jabbering, fast-talking, wise-cracking. I thought about our different lives: him as a little boy in Brooklyn, educated in a neighborhood public school, his whole world spanning just as far as the local bus ran (“All the way to Jacob Riis Park!” he tells me today, still sounding awestruck, as if the Queens peninsula were a distant Atlantis); me as a little girl in Manhattan, educated in an international private school, surrounded by technology that enabled my world to span farther even than the edges of the globe I lived on. I cried a little, quietly, and asked him, “What did you think, when you saw what happened this weekend?”

My grandpa is measured, thoughtful, rational. He cleared his throat. “It’s kind of ugly to see.” He criticized Trump’s response. “He could have expressed himself better. You don’t hold back because these are your voters.”

He reminded me that this rise of the ultra-nationalism isn’t only happening in America, but in Europe, too. I didn’t find that to be much of a comfort. I struggled to figure out what I wanted to ask him, how to phrase it. Are we going back? Is this it, is this who we are forever? Are we doomed to get worse every time we get marginally better? Finally I blurted, “Does it feel like watching what you lived through before?”

He paused. “I didn’t see it when it was happening before,” he said finally. “I lived in a neighborhood with Italians, Irish, Jews. We didn’t have media access like we do now.” I remembered asking him recently if there were segregated bathrooms for black people when he went to school, and how he thought for a while before he said, “There weren’t any Blacks in my neighborhood, and everyone at my school was from the neighborhood.”

He tried to come up with some sort of explanation of that weekend for me, something that meant the world wasn’t just a dark and incomprehensible mess. He speculated, like the northern city boy he is, that those white supremacists were all people from the rural South, uneducated and without much money. I pointed out that wasn’t true, many of them came from cities or nearby suburbs, had wealthy parents, graduated from good colleges, had jobs. He was tired and I needed too much. He thought for a while then said, “You know, there’s a lot of wealth now, actually. There wasn’t so much, when I was younger. Maybe people weren’t so inclined to their own bottom line? There wasn’t such a great difference between the people who had money and didn’t.”

I thought about that, about the new wave of socialism, about the wealthy Americans who glommed on to the president and didn’t let go even after he said journalists were bad people but Nazis weren’t. I let my grandpa go because he was tired, and I kept thinking, about privilege and communication and how more than half of the women in this country who look like me and voted chose to maintain their racial superiority. And I still think that my privilege, as a white-appearing albeit multiethnic woman, means I can and should shoulder this attempt at communication. I watched the Vice News Tonight reporter Elle Reeve, white and blond and young and pretty, set her jaw over and over and ask question after question to reveal interesting truths about the intentions and plans of these desperately misguided people and I saw a good faith attempt in a dark time. People of color, black women, Muslims and refugees and immigrants, have to field this toxicity all the time, whether they want to or not. The least I can do with my privilege is attempt to take some of it on, to engage, to try.

* * *

Danielle Tcholakian is a freelance reporter and writer based in New York City.

Editor: Sari Botton