Nile Cappello | The Atavist Magazine | January 2023 | 1,867 words (7 minutes)

This is an excerpt from The Atavist’s issue no. 135, “Crushed.” 

Hollywood is the last place you’d expect to meet Johna Kay Ramirez. She doesn’t come across as cutthroat. Thin, with auburn hair and warm eyes, Johna is thoughtful when she speaks and quick to apologize when she goes on a tangent. She’s the kind of person who knows that “bless your heart” is often a veiled insult. Hollywood, with all its glitz, glam, and high drama, became part of Johna’s story because of her children.

Born and raised in the Great Plains, Johna met Nelson Ramirez at a department store in Enid, Oklahoma; she sold shoes, he worked in menswear. They married, and in 1991, when Nelson got a job as a tech recruiter in Texas, the Ramirezes moved to Austin. Johna did video production for a local news station, then worked for a state agency. In 1998, when the Ramirezes had their first child, a daughter they named Liana, Johna became a stay-at-home mom. A son, Jentzen, came along eight years later.

Liana caught the entertainment bug first. What started as recreational dance classes quickly evolved into a passion for the performing arts. Liana loved being under bright stage lights, and Johna was proud to watch her precocious toddler blossom into a talented young girl. Liana appeared in local dance and theater productions, and by the time she was 13, her ambitions had surpassed the scope of what Austin could offer. She dreamed of being on the Disney Channel, of making it big in Hollywood. If Selena Gomez, a half-Latina teenager from Texas just like her, could become a star, Liana was sure she could, too. She had the talent and she had Johna, her chauffeur, line-reading partner, meal deliverer, videographer, and number one fan. “I knew how much my daughter wanted this, how much it meant to her,” Johna said. “So whatever I could do, whatever skills I had, I would use them to help.”

In September 2011, Johna snapped a photo of Liana at an airport gate. Her smile is all teeth, and a black bow holds back a portion of her curly brown hair. Mother and daughter were on their way to Los Angeles for Liana’s first Hollywood audition. The role was in a production of A Snow White Christmas, a stage musical. If cast, Liana would appear with Neil Patrick Harris, then a fan favorite on TV’s How I Met Your Mother, and with Lindsay Pearce of The Glee Project.

The audition was held at the Westfield Culver City mall on a Saturday morning. Kids and their guardians hustled inside and waited near a stage situated between Macy’s and Victoria’s Secret. Liana received her audition number and practiced the dance routine she’d be performing. She breezed through the first cut and kept going. In the final round, she danced to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” At the end of the number, right as the audience began to applaud, Liana looked over at her mom, beaming.

Johna announced the good news on Facebook. “She nailed it and she got a role as a dancer,” Johna wrote. “Can you hear us screaming?” Back in Texas, the Austin American–Statesman ran a piece about Liana. “Teen heads to Hollywood to dance in her dramatic debut,” the headline read.

The Ramirezes decided that Nelson would stay in Texas, where he had recently started his own business, while Johna took Liana and five-year-old Jentzen to California for the duration of the production. They would be joined by Johna’s mother, Martha, who would help with child care and managing Liana’s obligations. Johna drove her kids and mom to Los Angeles, a more than 20-hour trip mostly through dry, flat rattlesnake country. She’d never taken a leap like this—never lived somewhere like Los Angeles, been around serious entertainment people, or parented without Nelson. Johna was leaving her comfort zone in the rearview mirror.

She was surprised by how much she liked Los Angeles. Within a few days of arriving, she and Martha had their first celebrity encounter, an exchange with Kiefer Sutherland over potatoes at a Whole Foods. The city’s traffic was a pain, but they managed to sightsee, visiting the Hard Rock Cafe and Universal Studios, where Jentzen posed with actors dressed up as Dora the Explorer and the donkey from Shrek. Liana stayed busy with the stage production, and Johna spent long hours at the theater, watching as her daughter rehearsed and had costume fittings. Liana would appear in 32 performances over two months, working straight through the holidays. 

When the show wrapped, the Ramirezes reunited in Austin. Within a year, however, they decided to resume living as a split family. The musical had led to auditions and bookings for Liana, and she needed to be closer to LA to take advantage of them. Johna relocated to California full-time with her kids and tended to their day-to-day needs, while Nelson provided financial support from afar. Liana made appearances on Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, and the prime-time network shows Criminal Minds and The Goldbergs.

As it turned out, Liana wasn’t the only family member who had star potential. With a smattering of freckles and a megawatt smile, Jentzen drew attention from casting directors, talent, and other industry insiders when Johna brought him on set with his sister. “You’ve got to put him in commercials,” stage moms told Johna, pinching Jentzen’s cheeks and ruffling his shaggy brown hair. He was in the sweet spot for child actors: old enough to memorize lines, but still young enough to be considered cute. Soon Jentzen was building out his own IMDb page, appearing in web series, short films, and the Lifetime movie Babysitter’s Black Book. 

For Johna, Jentzen’s success further validated her decision to move to Los Angeles. Every parent hopes that a child will find their thing. Other families travel to soccer tournaments, move across the country to train with gymnastics coaches, or spend thousands on STEM camps where kids learn to code and build robots. Liana and Jentzen didn’t just like acting—they were good at it. Plus, their budding careers allowed Johna to spend time with them, whether that was backstage at rehearsals, stuck in gridlock on the 101, or putting together audition tapes at home. “It wasn’t just something they did,” Johna said. “It was something we all did together.”

Without auditioning for it, Johna had been cast in a new role: “momager.” She played it well, surprising even herself with how easily she toggled between cooking meals and attending movie premieres. She learned how to advocate for her kids’ needs and when to say no on their behalf.

As Jentzen approached his teenage years, he began kicking around the idea of getting into YouTube. A child actor’s presence on social media was increasingly important to casting agents and directors. Johna, whose experience with social media was limited largely to updating her Facebook account, wasn’t convinced. “I just didn’t know what we’d post,” she said with a shrug.

Then, eight years after arriving in Hollywood, the Ramirezes saw a promising ad, known as a breakdown, on LA Casting, a website that film, TV, and online productions use to enlist talent. A breakdown typically includes a description of the project, the parts to be cast, and the pay rate, along with information about how to audition. The breakdown the Ramirezes saw was for something called the “Piper Rockeele Show,” which was planning to shoot a YouTube video on the Venice Beach boardwalk. Described as taking inspiration from the movie Grease, the shoot would involve a tween character named Chase brushing off Piper, the show’s eponymous star, to look cool in front of his friends. Chase seemed like a good fit for Jentzen; the listing offered $1,500 for eight hours of work, a very good rate.

The Ramirezes weren’t familiar with Piper Rockelle—her name was spelled wrong in the breakdown—but an internet search led to a tween girl with a YouTube channel boasting hundreds of hours of video content, including original songs, makeup tutorials, and staged pranks and challenges like “24 Hours HANDCUFFED to my ‘BOYFRIEND.’ ” Jentzen showed Johna his iPhone screen. “Mom, she’s got a lot of subscribers,” he said—more than two million.

Johna didn’t have a problem with Jentzen participating in another kid’s social media content. It was easier than striking out on his own in the wilds of YouTube. Jentzen replied to the ad and was asked to come in for an audition.

The day of the tryout, the Ramirezes had another appointment across town and were running late. Johna tracked down a number for the person, a voice coach, who’d posted the breakdown on LA Casting. According to Johna, the coach assured her there wouldn’t be a problem. “They really wanted him at the callback,” he said. “They really liked him.”

It is one of many moments that now haunt Johna. “Can you imagine if we would have missed the callback?” she said, shaking her head. “How maybe life would’ve been different?”

More than three years later, Piper Rockelle’s popularity has exploded. She has more than 25 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fan pages dedicated to her. Piper has staged live meet-and-greets and musical performances around the world, and she sells her own line of merchandise. She lives in a pink and purple house worth $2.3 million in Sherman Oaks, previously owned by the actress Bella Thorne.

But all is not well in Piper’s world. Her own momager, Tiffany Smith, is being sued by 11 former members of the Squad, the name given to the circle of child actors who appear in Piper’s videos and ostensibly are her friends. Two of the plaintiffs are cousins of Piper’s. The kids allege that, when they were in the Squad, Smith verbally, physically, and in some cases sexually abused them. They also claim that Smith knowingly produced exploitative content featuring her daughter and other minors. “Smith would often boast to Plaintiffs and others about being the ‘Madam of YouTube’ and a ‘Pimp of YouTube,’ and that she ‘makes kiddie porn,’ ” states the lawsuit, which was filed in January 2022. Smith’s boyfriend, Hunter Hill, and Piper Rockelle Inc. are also defendants in the suit. Hill, who works behind the scenes to produce Piper’s YouTube videos, is accused of conspiring with Smith to “sabotage” the plaintiffs’ careers after they left the Squad.  

Johna knows the plaintiffs and their parents personally. She doesn’t doubt their claims. However, she isn’t part of the lawsuit. For the past few years, Johna has been fighting a legal battle of her own. It began after Jentzen auditioned for Piper’s team, and it has pitted her against Smith as well as her own family. Today, according to Johna, all she wants is to have a relationship with her children again.

This story is based on interviews with Johna and Nelson Ramirez; two of the plaintiffs’ mothers, Steevy Areeco and Angela Sharbino; and the plaintiffs’ attorney, Matthew Sarelson. It draws on hundreds of pages of court documents, personal communications shared by sources, and the trove of social media content produced by Piper and the Squad. Smith and Hill did not respond to requests for comment. They have denied the allegations against them.

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

Maggie Donahue | Longreads | October 2022 | 5,479 words (19 minutes)

Heide Hatry’s home is a testament to mortality.

Amid the knickknacks, wine glasses, paintings, and art supplies scattered about the artist’s Manhattan apartment are stacks of books: Death’s Door, Man’s Concern with Death, Man Answers Death, A Brief History of Death, Design for Dying, Death to Dust, Japanese Death Poems. Curiosities like animal skulls, abandoned shells, and dried flower bouquets line her shelves, including a bouquet she says is from a friend’s memorial service. A print of a plump pig hangs on one wall — a nod, perhaps, to Hatry’s childhood growing up on a pig farm. A few taxidermied rats appear to crawl about the space, and a soft-eyed stuffed baboon stands in one corner, the hint of a grin peeking out under its long nose.

Hatry is slender, with a face that is all edges — sharp cheekbones, angled brows, inverted triangle lips drawn tightly together above a strong jaw. Her raven-black hair, threaded with silver, is teased up into an intricate mass atop her head, drawing a dramatic contrast to her fair skin. Her green eyes are rendered almost stern by the glint of her rectangular spectacles. 

And yet there is nothing severe about her appearance as she moves about the room. Her steady, warm smile softens her features as she picks up items and shares their stories with me. First, a cherrywood shadow box, encasing two Japanese lantern flies stuck to a hand-painted flower stem on a 19th-century print. Then, a cream-colored taxidermied rat, frozen in a slightly splayed stance, his curved teeth poking out of his mouth.

But the objects that have the most presence — that, in a place filled with nods to death, seem to contribute an assertion of life — are the hyperrealistic black-and-white portraits on her walls. Some depict pets: a dog, some cats, a bird, a snake. Others are of people. A series of three portraits show Hatry’s friend, the late writer James Purdy, at three different stages of his life, growing older from frame to frame. 

From where I stand, each lifelike face looks as if it was created from charcoal, brought to life with pointillistic specks and dark strokes. 

But Hatry doesn’t use charcoal. She depicts humans and animals using their ashes.

These artworks are part of Hatry’s “Icons in Ash” project. Since her first piece made of cremated remains in 2009, hundreds of bereaved individuals have approached her to create a memorial portrait of their loved one. Those left behind can look upon the deceased, talk to them, sit with them and, perhaps, come to better process their death. 

Death is one of the few truly universal experiences of humanity. We all die. We all lose loved ones. And yet it’s a subject many of us would prefer to bury in the back of our minds. 

But here I was, sitting in this artist’s apartment on a spring day in 2022, face to face with countless reminders of my own mortality. After years of pushing death away, I was beginning to think there might be some value in integrating it into my life. 

It used to be that we were much more connected to our dead. 

In her book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, mortician and “good death” advocate Caitlin Doughty writes that “not being forced to see corpses is a privilege of the developed world.” For most of human existence, death was not only an everyday occurrence, more prevalent due to disease and war, but something that happened at home. People died at home, cared for the body at home, had funerals at home. Death was more familiar and seen as a natural part of life.

In some cultures, keeping the dead nearby is a sacred and profound experience. In Sulawesi, one of Indonesia’s largest islands, the Toraja people live with the corpses of their loved ones, sometimes for years. They bathe, exhume, and dry the bodies in the sun, before dressing them and inviting them back into the home, where they’ll remain among the family until they’ve saved enough money for an elaborate funeral. In the Philippines, the Tinguian people engage in a similar practice. After a loved one dies, they clean and dress the corpse, sit them up on a chair, surround them with offerings, and protect them from evil spirits. Sometimes they place a cigarette in the corpse’s mouth. In Bolivia, some people house and care for ñatitas: human skulls that are thought to bestow good luck, protection, and fertility on those who look after them. They are brought out for an annual celebration called the Día de las Ñatitas.

Throughout history, people have kept loved ones close after they’ve died. In the 19th century, people across Europe and the U.S. saved pieces of a decedent’s hair and worked them into earrings, brooches, or intricate memorial wreaths. Since ancient times, death masks — cast molds of a corpse’s face — were also a way to create permanent mementos of the dead, from political leaders and royalty to artists and scientists. Bereaved families sometimes commissioned posthumous portraits of their dead — paintings of the body designed to look as though the subject were alive. 

In 19th-century America, the high death toll during the Civil War contributed to the rise of disposition techniques like embalming, which preserved the bodies of soldiers who were transported home to their families. Over time, embalming became popular with the general public, and the responsibility of caring for dead bodies shifted to funeral practitioners. The death industry standardized, transforming into a commercial machine. Meanwhile, new medical technology pushed death further out of sight as people started dying in hospitals rather than at home.

Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Boston University who has written extensively on death and bereavement, says that people didn’t struggle as much with death in the past as they do today, in part because death was swift. Now, modern medicine extends the process. “The sorrow — that’s persistent,” she says. “But the fear, the discomfort, is a product of the technological end-of-life care that we’ve had for much of contemporary history.” This evolving approach to care hardened the line between the living and the dead, separating Americans from everyday reminders of mortality.

As a child, Heide Hatry was immersed in a world of meat and flesh. 

There, on a patch of farmland on the outskirts of Holzgerlingen, Germany, death was not only commonplace but commodified. There was no room to be squeamish when she had to face violence daily, when that violence was a way of life for her family. Before Hatry turned 6, her grandfather taught her how to kill chickens and to skin rabbits. At one point, her father moved the family to a pig farm in Schlosshof. There, she was raised under the immense pressure to work, and to work hard. 

“In my family there was no talking, basically,” she tells me. “Only orders. ‘Do this, do that.’” Interactions were mostly utilitarian. There were no hugs, and no one ever said “I love you.” She remembers being very small and overwhelmed, laboring alone in a field in the afternoon, sometimes in the rain, waiting for her father to come and relieve her. He never thanked or complimented her on hard work. It was what was expected. 

The only creature on the farm she felt she could really confide in was the family chain dog, Prince, a massive German Shepherd-St. Bernard mix who guarded the entrance of the property. Hatry felt sorry for him, seeing him chained up alone every day. She started talking to him, telling him her problems. She called him her “psychologist.”

“It was a very weird relationship,” she says. “We became friends. And I felt like he totally understood me.”  

One day, Prince seemed unhappy. Hatry knew that in front of the stable there were dead pigs, lined up in rows, that would be taken to the factory. Hatry asked her father if she could cut some meat from one of the pigs and feed it to her dog. 

“He gave me this huge knife,” she tells me. “And I cut a piece off of the pig’s ass.” 

Hatry’s father, seeing how comfortable she was with the meat, put her to work. He brought her down to the basement of the house, to a little room joined to the walk-in freezer, and taught her how to cut up a pig carcass. He showed her which parts of the pig were good, and how to slice, package, and label the meat. He offered her a job to cut the pigs into pieces that their family would eat. 

While theirs was a busy and hardworking household, Hatry recalls some calm and formative moments. Her father had a quiet appreciation for art, and on rare slow afternoons, he’d lift her onto his lap and show her how to draw animals using numbers. She remembers how he’d turned the long curve of the number “2” into the neck of a swan. These lessons were her first introduction to art. 

When Hatry was in her late 20s, her father died. She was devastated: She felt like she lost a part of herself. She couldn’t believe he was gone and couldn’t understand why he had to die. Circumstances around his death also felt strange, and she came to suspect that it might have been a suicide.   

For many years, she buried her grief.

After a painful divorce, in 2003 Hatry moved from Germany to New York, brimming with ideas. She made a name for herself as a conceptual artist and provocateur, introducing her work at MoMA PS1 and the New Museum in New York City, and exhibiting at many galleries and museums all over the world, from London to Beijing, from L.A. to Berlin. Still, her art is controversial, often steeped in the macabre, examining what it is to be human — what it means to be alive — by examining what is not.  

For most of her career, Hatry has worked with recycled flesh acquired from slaughterhouses: materials with a history, a significance. Like the skulls and taxidermied animals scattered about her apartment, these materials were once part of a living thing. Now, they give life to her art. 

In her early projects, Hatry sculpted human figures — alter egos for herself — using pig parts. She gave them names and backstories. In 2012, she created hyperrealistic flowers out of offal: fish tails, crab claws, deer eyelashes, and chicken combs. She named the project “Not a Rose” after one particularly apt depiction of a rose that she made from the tips of duck tongues. She photographed these flowers outside in natural settings — nestled in bushes, floating on lily pads, blooming out of a tangle of grass — attempting to trick spectators into believing they were natural plants.

“When they found out what they were, they felt trapped, or disgusted, or tricked,” she says. And that was the point: to question our understanding of beauty.  

A few years after moving to New York, Hatry visited a friend and saw that he kept his wife’s ashes in an urn on his mantle. Germany has strict burial regulations, and it’s still illegal in most places for families to keep the cremated remains of their loved ones. It was the first time Hatry had encountered ashes in someone’s home. She felt extremely touched. 

At first, she didn’t know what to do with herself. But the answer came to her quickly, as if something were forcing her to do it, and she felt a strange calm:

I have to make portraits out of my father’s and Stefan’s ashes.  

For most of my childhood, unlike Hatry’s, death was a distant and abstract concern.

I didn’t consider the pain of death itself, the uncertainty of what might follow, or the realities of its impact on those left behind — what it might be like to lose loved ones, or for my loved ones to lose me.

In the summer of 2019, when I was 23 and working as a guide at a remote lodge in Alaska, I watched a float plane, carrying a family, take off from the dock. It was something I’d seen a dozen times before, but this time I heard a loud metallic clang. When I looked up, the plane was bobbing upside-down in the water. One of the passengers, a man whose hand I’d shaken only an hour before, died in the crash. 

The experience left me with a pressing, uncomfortable awareness of the thin line between life and death. I became all too conscious of my body’s frailty, of my eventual disappearance from this world, and the fact that those I love would one day disappear, too.

And then, a few months after that accident, I was confronted with a loss of my own.

Grandma Zona had been suffering from dementia for years. Most of my clearest memories of her are from her final years, rather than the time before her dementia set in. As I processed the news of her death, I struggled to piece together my memories of the person I’d known and loved as a child. 

Her name was Bonnie, but we called her Grandma Zona because, when I was young, she had lived in Arizona. Her biannual trips to our home in the Chicago suburbs were some of my happiest times. I remember our many family games, and how she moved about the house, beaming, belting out old show tunes. I remember how she brimmed with love for us, doling out compliments about how beautiful and smart and talented we were. I remember her warm, infectious laugh — and how she laughed with her whole body. 

She had a necklace of 18 little figures that represented each of her grandkids: triangles and circles to represent girls and boys, strung up in order of birth on the chain, each embedded with their corresponding birthstone. She often marveled at the family she had built, how lucky she was. That sentiment remained in her final years, even as a disease ate her memories. 

When my family came together for her funeral, sharing stories from her life, it troubled me that there was so much of her I had not known, or had forgotten. And I thought, too, about how she had gone. She was as full of life as anyone I’d ever known, yet she disintegrated, bit by bit, as her brain failed her. When she was cremated, it seemed she was gone altogether, reduced to ash. 

I had no foundational understanding of death. I feared it. I wanted to pick apart my fear to understand it — and maybe feel less afraid. Yet I’ve struggled to find others who are interested in having that conversation. In their absence, I’ve turned to people who’ve made careers out of asking these kinds of questions. 

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Christina Staudt, who trained as a death doula and uses those skills in her work as a hospice volunteer, says studying a variety of philosophical and practical approaches to mortality may help some people feel less fearful of death, once they realize there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong way to cope.

“It can be very helpful to look at that fear,” says Staudt, who is also a co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Death. “Anytime we name something, it seems a little bit less scary.”

While I didn’t know it at the time, this is exactly what I did in the months following the plane crash and my grandma’s death. I began to lean into my discomfort, desperate to learn how others face death so that I might find ways to deal with it, too.

That’s how I first came face to face with Hatry’s cremation portraits. 

The pain of loss — and the impact of seeing ashes on a mantle for the first time — drove Hatry to launch “Icons in Ash.”   

For Hatry, creating portraits of her father and her best friend were immediate ways to face her grief: a feeling she’d pushed deep down for many years.

But when Hatry undertook these first pieces, she didn’t actually have her father’s or Stefan’s ashes. So she used a substitute — ashes of cremated pets that owners chose not to take home — and convinced herself that it really was them​​. It took her about six months just to develop the right technique. Ultimately, she landed on mosaic, but instead of manipulating pieces of rock or glass, she used tiny particles of ash. 

To create her surface, she covered a piece of wood in hot beeswax. After the wax cooled, she applied a small amount of ash to the tip of a scalpel. After heating a section of the portrait so that the wax became sticky, she inserted ash into the wax. For particularly detailed parts of the face, like the eyes or mouth, she placed each ash particle into the wax one by one. To complete her palette, she incorporated black birch ash, a symbol of life, and white marble dust, a symbol of death. 

Speck by speck, the face of each man emerged, almost lifesize on the canvas. The process was a meditation, so intricate that it monopolized her attention, which otherwise might have returned to her sadness. Through the process, she found herself talking to them, expressing all the anger and guilt she had felt over their deaths, all the unsaid things the men as she’d known them would never hear.

When she completed their portraits, she felt that she had overcome her grief. She still missed them, but she was able to function again. She could look at them, talk to them, feel their presence as she moved about her home. She saw each man’s portrait as a way to merge their memory and their physicality — a way to recreate their essence. Making the portraits had given her a slower and more complete way of saying goodbye.

Hatry’s father, now perched prominently on a shelf in her apartment, certainly looks alive, his image surprisingly warm and full of character. His face is hard and angled like hers — sharp cheeks and a familiarly strong jaw further contoured by a shadow of a beard. He’ll spend eternity squinting open-mouthed at something to his right, his aquiline nose permanently scrunched, his felt cap pointing in the direction of whatever has held his gaze. 

He had been lost to Hatry for decades. Now, he’s always with her.  

Hatry knew that no one would offer up the remains of their loved ones to be hung or sold in a gallery. Instead, she saw “Icons In Ash” as a social project: a service she could provide to people in mourning, a business she could market to funeral homes. To date, she’s been commissioned to create hundreds of portraits. They are not necessarily portrayals of people as they looked when they died, but rather how their loved ones best remembered them, or wanted to remember them. 

I wonder what a cremation portrait of Grandma Zona might look like — her animated smile frozen in time — and what it would be like to have an image of her younger self in my home. Would it help me feel more connected to the grandma I knew from my childhood? 

Hatry tells me that those who commission her are invariably the inconsolable, people who have loved someone so deeply that they don’t want to ever be without them. One woman, Hatry says, contacted her to create a portrait of her sick daughter who had not yet died. The mother sent Hatry a photo in advance, so that Hatry could quickly get to work when the time came. This woman didn’t want to be without her child. Not even for one day. 

While hundreds of commissions may be evidence that there’s a market for these portraits, many of the people I’ve introduced to Hatry’s work quail at the idea.

“There are, of course, people who find it horrifying,” Hatry has said of her work. “But they find, rather, death horrifying — not so much what I’m doing.” 

Death is something we push away, she has said. “It happens in the hospital, in the funeral home. We don’t want to have to do anything with it. And I think our lives would be very much enriched if we changed that.” 

I spoke with Gary Laderman, a religion professor at Emory University studying death and funeral rituals, who says that adverse reactions to Hatry’s work might be primal, stemming from deep confusion or repulsion related to the body. There may also be cultural considerations. While in some cultures, like the Torajans in Indonesia, keeping the dead close is a longtime practice, many traditions demand that dead bodies be kept separate from the living. Many Jewish and Christian traditions still hold that bodies should be returned to the ground, and in Islam, burial typically happens as soon as possible. Members of the Zoroastrian faith in India believe dead bodies are so unclean that they contaminate everything they touch. To prevent contamination, they place bodies on towers, leaving them to be devoured by vultures and other scavengers, before their sunbleached skeletons are moved to designated pits to disintegrate. 

But some experts sense a shift in people’s attitudes about death. The hospice movement helped to bring the act of dying back into the home. Large-scale tragedies, like 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic, have helped make death feel more immediate and integrated into daily American life. And Western society has shown growing attitudinal support for things like physician-assisted suicide, Carr told me. More people, particularly younger people or those who don’t belong to conservative religious faiths or hold conservative political beliefs, believe that if someone is suffering, with no hope of recovery, they should be allowed the option of a self-determined death. 

As the thinking around death shifts, so have trends in disposition. In the last couple of decades, cremation has supplanted traditional burial as the most common funerary practice in America. Catholics have been allowed to cremate their loved ones since the ’60s, and while the adoption of the practice has been slow, some say the trend is picking up as it becomes more socially acceptable among them. Others believe the rise of cremation correlates with the rise of the “Nones” — people with no religious affiliation, whose growing prevalence may also contribute to shifts in cultural ideas about rituals and the body. 

Among other reasons for cremation’s popularity, as suggested in this Washington Post piece, is an ongoing cultural fear of death. Cremation is appealing because it sanitizes it, quickly disappearing bodies so that the bereaved don’t need to engage with them. Carr says there may be a bit of truth to this theory. “You just get a box of ashes,” she says. “It takes the body out of death.” But she also cites other reasons for the rise in cremation, including factors like cost and a growing concern for the environment.

Laderman is less convinced that the spike in cremation is a symptom of death denial. He also attributes it to cost, as well as convenience and practicality — all of which are deeply American considerations. Urban areas have limited burial space, and cremation is far cheaper than burial. “Why shouldn’t American characteristics and capitalist realities that we all live by be also informing a part of the death industry?” he asks me. 

In the presence of Hatry and all these artifacts in her apartment, I consider what it means to think proactively about death, to participate more consciously in the end of life. Many of us will choose from a growing number of green burial options. We may be buried beneath a tree, placed in a simple compostable casket, or enshrouded in a mushroom suit that reduces the release of harmful pollutants from the body. A new technology in development at Columbia University’s DeathLab could decompose a corpse using anaerobic microbial digestion, a process that can release enough energy to generate light. 

There are also movements to deeply personalize disposition, to send someone off in a way that is intimate and meaningful. Your remains may be shot up in a cannon amid fireworks. They can be worked into Eternal Reefs, a sea burial alternative that incorporates cremains into concrete memorials that then become permanent habitats for marine life. Or, your ashes might be turned into memorial diamonds to be worn by loved ones and later passed down to your descendants. “We’re in a state — because of the internet, social media, general cultural zeitgeist we’re in — of this proliferation of different ways that people can keep their dead close by, in a very material sense,” says Laderman.

His words rang true as I continued to research emerging trends. I discovered that a bereaved lover can keep the ashes of their spouse in a glass dildo. A child can cuddle with a teddy bear containing the ashes of a deceased parent. There’s also a way to embed ashes into tattoo ink, so you can “wear” your loved one permanently in your skin. We’re living in a time when people are more open to experiment, says Laderman, customizing rituals based on personalities.

Staudt says these trends are part of a bigger movement toward more active participation in the process of death, and establishing new rituals. Some people are becoming more engaged in end-of-life care, or starting to explore after-death care — closing the mouth, washing the body, combing the hair, straightening the clothes. Others are opting to attend cremations, hosting ceremonies at the crematorium or even being present when the body is pushed into the retort. Staudt says all of these forms of participation can be very meaningful for the bereaved, and that these positive interactions can sometimes function as a gain alongside the loss. “People seem to really integrate that experience,” she says. “It’s something beautiful that becomes part of the loss.”

Seeing some of Hatry’s cremation portraits up close, I can see how they could transform a loss into something more positive over time. If some people view cremation as a disintegration of the body — a person reduced to ashes, scattered in the wind — Hatry’s portraits do the opposite. These cremains become permanent, forever present in the lives of those left behind.

Despite growing up on a pig farm and working with organic materials for much of her art career, Hatry tells me that working on these portraits was the first time she’d successfully confronted and accepted death. As we talk openly in her home, her smile steady and movements gentle as she shows me her unusual possessions, it strikes me that this is someone who isn’t just facing mortality. She’s leaning all the way in — and emerging all the better for it. 

“People never think about their own death,” she says. “And that was so exciting, to realize, at a pretty young age, that I have to die.” Death was normal. It could happen to anyone, she realized, even if they were young or healthy. This early awareness has shaped her worldview — and molded her into the artist she is today. 

“I am a very happy person,” she tells me. “I am able to see positive things in almost everything.” Engaging with death as deeply as she does has not pulled her into a dark state. Far from it. It has made her think more consciously about what she wants from life  — about how to use her time for what she wants to accomplish, what she wants to be remembered for, what makes her happy.

“It’s just something that is at the end of everybody’s life,” she says. “The first time I could imagine it, that was powerful.”

I say goodbye to Hatry, step outside into the dark, and walk to catch my bus. The warm faces immortalized on her walls seem to swim before my vision, and I can’t stop thinking about the tender way she looked at them, the reverence with which she spoke of them as she told their stories. Sitting on the bus, I am hurtling through the night, surrounded by strangers, nothing but black and faint blurs of light out the window. But I am not afraid. 

Throughout the pandemic, we’ve lived in a state of constant memento mori, inundated with daily reminders that we will die. 

It’s unclear how the pandemic will impact our relationship to death in the long term. The early months in 2020 complicated and dramatically altered the process of loss and grief. Funerals were delayed, at least one last breath was livestreamed, and many bereaved families were deprived of the finality of service altogether. The pandemic made death more visible and inescapable for anyone tapped into the news. Three years in, death feels much more quotidian — but collectively, we’ve still not reached a point where we’re talking about it openly, as Hatry and I had been.   

“On some deeper, spiritual, existential, unconscious level, we’re all kind of just grieving,” Laderman tells me. “Death is so close.” He says the line between the living and the dead is blurring, and he hopes that means we’ll continue to shift toward more frank conversations about death.

New resources and community forums point in this direction. In 2011, Caitlin Doughty founded The Order of the Good Death, a death positive movement working to reframe conversations about mortality so that people can engage with the topic in a healthy, honest way; the site also shares end-of-life planning and green burial resources. And Doughty has a YouTube channel, “Ask a Mortician,” which reaches nearly two million subscribers.

Virtual and in-person Death Cafes have formed around the world, in 82 countries and counting, where strangers come together to “eat cake, drink tea, and discuss death.”  I’ve also downloaded WeCroak, an app that reminds me, at intervals throughout the day, of my own mortality. “Don’t forget, you’re going to die,” it alerts me, and then shares a quote like this one from E. M. Forster: “Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.”  

I don’t have a portrait or keepsake made of the ashes from a loved one, but I’ve begun to sprinkle mementos of death into my own home — which, naturally, are also reminders of life: An Icons in Ash book that Hatry gave me when I visited her apartment. A tiny, ruby-embedded figure — a representation of me — that Grandma Zona wore on her necklace. A photo of her surrounded by all of her grandchildren during a trip to Lake Michigan. 

I keep her close, in my own way, so that she won’t disappear. 

The summer after she died, my family gave her a final sendoff. She’d wanted a version of a Viking funeral, in which one’s remains are set out on a flaming ship at sunset, alongside objects that they might need in the afterlife. In a Harper’s essay, “To Be a Field of Poppies,” Lisa Wells writes about how, as a child, she’d wanted a Viking funeral herself after seeing one depicted in the film Rocket Gibraltar. 

“Legend has it,” a narrator says in the film, “that if the color of the setting sun and the color of the burning ship were the same, then that Viking had led a good life.”

We gathered at Grandma Zona’s favorite beach along Lake Michigan. We signed our names on a box of her ashes and placed it on a tiny Viking ship my cousin had built, alongside M&Ms and chocolate chip cookies — a few things she loved — for the journey. 

We cast the boat out into the water, set it on fire, and watched it burn as the sky blazed  yellow, orange, and red. 

* * *

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Fact checker: Tina Knezevic

Copy editor: Krista Stevens

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By Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Monday night’s Emmy Awards ceremony was an unsurprising mix of boring and strange and mostly forgettable, with the occasional funny moment or moving speech. (The video clip of Abbott Elementary star Sheryl Lee Ralph accepting her Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series — singing powerfully into the mic on stage — was impossible to miss in your social feed.)

As you wade through Emmys takes this week, we’d love to recommend the recent work from Scalawag’s newsletter “Pop Justice,” which examines popular culture through an abolitionist lens. This week’s essays take smart and critical looks at several Emmy-winning or nominated shows: Abbott Elementary, The White Lotus, The Dropout, Yellowjackets, and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Here are three favorites.

Abbott Elementary and the Promise of Schools Without Cops

“With Abbott Elementary, what I got was not only a cheerful single-camera mockumentary, but also an unexpectedly abolitionist storyline,” writes Eteng Ettah. Black schools in the U.S. are heavily policed, and schools in Philadelphia — where the show’s titular, predominantly Black Abbott Elementary is located — are among the most segregated. Eteng Ettah commends Quinta Brunson, the show’s creator, lead actress, and now Emmy-winning writer, for keeping cops out of Abbott’s storylines; in Brunson’s universe, the protection and care of Black children comes instead from a community of patient, risk-taking, and challenging teachers. Ettah’s piece, however, is not without criticism: She also points out how the ABC sitcom occasionally “falls into the easy trap of copaganda,” citing an episode in which the teachers — discussing a social media trend among the students called desking — divide into “good cops” and “bad cops.” But overall, Ettah is elated to see in Abbott Elementary a portrait of a different — and better — world.

Still, without cops or school resource officers roaming the hallway, Abbott invites us into a world that’s possibility-laden and imaginative. It asks us both: What does it actually feel like to be a Black student? And: What should it feel like? Simultaneously grappling with how to move through an antiblack world designed to oppress Black peoples globally while imagining, organizing, and building a new world that ushers in Black liberation is one of the many central challenges of abolitionist organizing.

But our imaginations have been so flattened by media mimicking our reality that we find ourselves asking entertainers to reflect back our violence instead of offering a portrait of a better world.

The White Lotus Is Supposed To Be Satire. Hawaiians Deserve the Last Laugh.

In this essay, Mariah Rigg outlines the many problems within The White Lotus, HBO’s dramedy (and Emmy winner for Best Limited Series) about a group of guests and employees at an exclusive resort in Hawaii — and how their lives intertwine over the course of a week. Creator Mike White has claimed the show is an indictment of white American privilege and settler colonialism, but as Rigg digs into its use of policing and stereotypes, it’s anything but. Consider how all the Native characters are either sidelined (Lani, the employee who goes into labor); exoticized (the male paddlers who venture out to sea); or vilified (Kai, the staff member who falls for Paula and is arrested for attempting to steal from the Mossbachers). The show “[sanitizes] the moral failures of white capitalists at the cost of Kānaka Maoli and locals,” writes Rigg, and missed an opportunity to critique the systemic harm, targeted policing, and cultural obliteration of Native Hawaiians throughout history to today.

It’s hard to see political or cultural critique in a show that was filmed in Hawai`i during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Kānaka Maoli and politicians alike were asking visitors not to come to Hawai`i. It’s even harder when the writer and director himself was comfortable saying that his idea for the show came from a desire to “get out of L.A.” during quarantine.

If the show is satire, it’s the wealthy white elite who get the last laugh. Because while Kānaka Maoli characters like Kai are arrested for attempted robbery, white characters like Shane get away with “accidental” murder, reinforcing the white American idea of Hawai`i as an amusement park to be exploited for pleasure—much like Westworld—an adventure they can buy and abandon for their privileged lives on the continent.

The Dropout Dramatizes Elizabeth Holmes’ Fraudulent Rise. Endless Military Funding Is Also a Scam.

Bria Massey examines the rise of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, portrayed in The Dropout by Amanda Seyfried, who won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series. She asks: How could a dropout raise $945 million and win the support of important investors and public figures with fraudulent technology? And what can bring political opponents together? “The answer to both questions: U.S. imperialism, or the promise to advance it.” Massey explains that Holmes got as far as she did because she “[played] into the illusion that a portable blood-testing device could be used on the battlefield to save American lives,” and appealed to public figures and political leaders — some of them on Theranos’ board of directors — who have historically supported war, military expansion, and mass incarceration. “We deserve so much more than police, prisons, and jails,” writes Massey. “We deserve so much more than Theranos and companies alike, or the shows that glamorize this terror.”

It’s hard to fathom that someone could rack in billions of dollars from investors without evidence of a viable, working product. Nevertheless, history shows us that the budget and support for police and military funding is limitless. Technology has always been a tool used to advance western imperialism; the implications of this oftentimes result in the death and destruction of our most vulnerable and under-resourced communities. So it’s unsurprising to learn that the billionaires and public figures who supported Theranos didn’t do their due diligence to better examine the company’s claims. These same individuals have shown us, time and time again, that there’s no expense too great, including the lives of poor and working-class people, to expand the military and prison-industrial complex further.

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By Chris Wheatley

Call them recluses, hermits, or even solitudinarians, examples of folk choosing to live a life apart from their fellow humans are as old as the written word. Many, but not all, of these ancient hermits were motivated by spiritual reasons; in medieval times, anchoresses and anchorites volunteered to be physically sealed into stone chambers abutting churches or monasteries, providing themselves with a literal barrier from the world. Such intentional isolation, in the religious sphere, is often associated with profound wisdom and spiritual pureness — qualities said to arise from a renunciation of material comforts. Hermits have never been confined to the theological world, however. There have always been instances of “ordinary” people living purposefully solitary existences, be it in the remote wilderness or amid the hustle and bustle of modern cities.

To some of us, the idea of such isolation seems terrifying. To others, the thought of an extended period of peace and quiet, a chance to step back and reconnect with ourselves, holds an undeniable appeal. How many of us, though, would be comfortable with the notion of living in solitude for weeks, months, years, even decades? It has long been held that humans are social creatures, and mental health experts are quick to warn against the debilitating effects of loneliness. But weighted against this are numerous stories of those who have discovered great solace in the solitary life.

What remains inarguable is that our fascination with those who chose to live a life removed endures to this day. How can someone exist in this manner, we feel compelled to ask, and why would they choose to do so, considering (or perhaps because of) the modern world’s affordances? The articles curated below delve deep into the mysterious and compelling world of hermits, and surface with some surprising, even moving answers to that very question.

Day of a Stranger (Thomas Merton, Hudson Review, July 1967)

The writer, theologian, social activist, and monk Thomas Merton makes for an unlikely example of a maverick, but certainly that is how he was regarded among many of his peers in the Christian faith. Merton was born in France, his father a New Zealand-born painter, his mother an American Quaker and artist. The family soon settled in the United States, where Merton would eventually enter into the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Catholic monastery in Kentucky. For the last few years of his life he lived alone as a hermit within the Abbey grounds.

A gentle, peaceful character with a deeply poetic soul, Merton was a man ahead of his time, a proponent of interfaith understanding during an era in which such an enterprise could be considered provocative, even heretical. Merton engaged in spiritual dialogue with the Dalai Lama, esteemed Japanese Buddhist D. T. Suzuki, and Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, doing much to bring these figures and their philosophies to the attention of the Western world. His 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, caused a seismic shift in the collective consciousness of the American public. In the piece below, the theologian himself writes with moving simplicity, eloquence, and passion on the solitary life and the madness of the modern world.

One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.

The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit (Michael Finkel, GQ, August 2014)

Many of us, I suspect, have experienced a disconnect during a social encounter, whether it be because of a generational gap, a difference in socioeconomic backgrounds, or because the person with whom you are communicating hails from an entirely different part of the globe, with an unfamiliar language and unknown customs. In today’s hyper-connected world, however, it’s almost impossible not to find commonalities of experience. Most of us share the same daily concerns, and the majority are aware of significant global and cultural events. Imagine, however, that you had intentionally cut yourself off from “history” for close to three decades. What would it be like to find yourself thrust back into society, forced to live among people with whom you share little to no common ground?

This is exactly what happened to Christopher Knight, who spent 27 years living in a tent in the wilderness in Maine, only venturing forth at night to steal food and other items necessary for his survival, before his eventual capture and arrest. What followed, as recounted in this article, tells us much about the modern world, but perhaps the most fascinating element here is the question of exactly why Knight disappeared into the woods, and why he never willingly returned. In order to discover more about the man and his story, writer Michael Finkel had to gain the trust, and eventual friendship of sorts, of a man who could barely recall how to communicate with his fellow humans, or tolerate such interaction for long. Finkel writes movingly of his efforts and emotions during this process.

“I don’t know your world,” he said. “Only my world, and memories of the world before I went into the woods. What life is today? What is proper? I have to figure out how to live.” He wished he could return to his camp—”I miss the woods”—but he knew by the rules of his release that this was impossible. “Sitting here in jail, I don’t like what I see in the society I’m about to enter. I don’t think I’m going to fit in. It’s too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia.”

The Peculiar Case of a Modern-Day Hermit (Paul Willis, Vice, November 2015)

In this essay, writer Paul Willis chronicles a time in his life when he felt driven to escape a hectic New York existence — not just to experience the hermit life, but to reconcile the contrasting views of the phenomenon itself. Why is it, he asks, that although psychologists have long been aware of the mental health risks of isolation, stories persist of individuals thriving in such conditions? Could it be that some of us are simply more suited to a solitary existence? Moreover, if humans are social creatures, why do many hermits report feelings of profound peace, freedom, and oneness arising from a life bereft of social interaction?

To attempt to answer these questions, Willis headed out in search of Arizona’s ghost towns, abandoned relics of the mid-1800’s copper rush, and the hermits rumored to inhabit them. In our minds, recluses tend to fall into one of two categories — those with a tragic backstory, deserving of our compassion and understanding, and those who are perfectly content with their solitary lives, whose privacy we dare not interfere with. In the person of Virgil Snyder, Willis finds a soul who seems to exhibit both extremes. Everyone has a story; this is a cliché, but also a truth. Who we are now is the culmination of the events that have shaped our history. Virgil Snyder’s story is as touching and troubling as it is commonplace. Perhaps that is exactly what makes him so interesting.

His beard was shorter than in the photo and he wore a grey pullover that hung limp over his sleight frame. He wanted to know if I had brought him beer and when I told him I had, he said he knew he liked me from the moment he saw me. I told him about a woman I met in Cleator, who had told me she thought Virgil was more free than anyone she knew. He shrugged and said he couldn’t care less what others thought.

Mystery Man: Will Anyone Ever Know the Real Story Behind the Leatherman? (Jon Campbell, Village Voice, June 2015)

Hermits have always been considered mysterious, unpredictable, even dangerous. This speaks to our innate fear of difference. How can we trust someone who refuses to live a “normal” life? The reality, of course, is that those who live in “civilized” society, dressing to our standards and abiding by our ways, are no more or less likely to prove treacherous. Nevertheless, hermits, by wont of their unconventionality, continue to be figures of enduring fascination, attracting distrust and curiosity in equal measure.

In this article, Jon Campbell meets a man obsessed with unknotting the riddle of one such character: the “Leatherman,” who, over a 30-year period in the mid-to-late 1800s, caused such a stir in the northeastern United States that stories and myths pertaining to him endure to this day. The Leatherman story reveals much about our need to understand the hermit’s motives and thoughts. What we don’t know about someone, we are likely to invent, and so it is proven here. Will we ever know the truth? Perhaps the real question at the heart of the Leatherman legend is why we remain so driven to find out.

Leatherman was frequently described in newspaper accounts as intelligent. His eyes would light up as if he understood what people said to him; he simply chose not to respond. Recently some researchers have posited the idea that Leatherman may have fallen somewhere along the autism spectrum. They cite as evidence his obvious discomfort around people, his rigid adherence to a schedule, his meticulous craftsmanship.

The Oracle of Oyster River (Brian Payton, Hakai Magazine, September 2018)

The subject of this piece by journalist Brian Payton is an extraordinary man named Charles Brandt. At the time of the writing of this piece, Brandt, a Catholic priest, had been living in his self-made hermitage off Canada’s Pacific Coast for nearly 50 years. Despite this isolation, Brandt kept in touch with the world on his own terms, working as a writer, naturalist, ornithologist, and book conservator. What makes this story especially poignant is that Brandt’s personal journey was very much inspired by the author of the first entry on this list, Thomas Merton — a beautiful circularity. So large has Merton’s influence been on Brandt that the latter even named his hermitage Merton House. The two men even met once, at the Abbey of Gethsemani, before Brandt settled into his island home.

It is fascinating to see that, unlike many of the other hermits on this list, Brandt managed to find a balance, enjoying a life of peace, meditation, and quiet reflection, while still engaging with society in vital ways. His work preserving treasured books, and seeking to preserve the natural ecology he treasured to an even greater extent, is as moving as it is inspiring.

“We really have to fall in love with the natural world”—this is Brandt’s refrain. To save something you need to love it, to love something you need to consider it sacred, he says. “Your wife or your children or the natural world. Only the sense of the sacred will save us.”

***

Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, UK. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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

By Chris Wheatley

“Before Elvis there was nothing,” John Lennon famously once said about his own musical awakening — but, as Presley himself frequently acknowledged, there would have been no Elvis without the blues.  It’s no exaggeration to state that the blues underpins almost all modern music. Beyoncé, Kanye, Ed Sheeran: None of these artists would exist without it, and the musical ancestors of all three can be precisely traced back to the Deep South of the United States during the antebellum period.

But what exactly is the blues? We know it when we hear it, thanks to certain definable musical elements like chord progressions, yet arguments still exist as to the ancestry, lineage, and “true” nature of the genre. It’s an art form wrapped in myth and mythology, from the otherworldly provenance of Robert Johnson’s sublime gifts to Afro-Christian notions of evil and the poignant folklore found in the songs of Mississippi John Hurt. Yet this is part of the blues’ enduring appeal: Untangling the webs and uncovering truths, in a search for a genuine understanding of the history and origins of the blues, is almost a requirement for being a fan. Alongside hip-hop, reggae, and grime, this is music indelibly linked to the conditions from which it arose, an art form that also serves as social commentary, communal history, and cathartic release.

Blues songs speak of the joy and suffering of being alive. They also remind us of one of the darkest periods in human history, of the terrible depths to which we are capable of sinking should we abandon the notion that all people are equal in value. This is a message that, in all likelihood, will never cease to be relevant. A hundred years on from its birth, the blues continue to speak to the heart. The articles below collectively do a fine job of capturing the essence, meaning, history, and importance of this most singular sound.

Searching for Robert Johnson (Frank Digiacomo, Vanity Fair, October 2008)

Perhaps more than any other bluesman, Robert Leroy Johnson epitomizes the lasting allure and deep mythology of the genre. The legendary artist recorded just 29 tracks before dying at age 27, performing mostly in bars and on street corners across Mississippi in the 1930s. His physical presence feels as spectral as his music. Just two extant photos of the man exist, and very little firsthand information. Much of Johnson’s enduring fame centers on the perennial blues myth that the musician owed his guitar skills to the devil, to whom he traded his soul at a crossroads outside of Clarksdale. In fact, this particular tale predates Johnson, and has been attributed to many other bluesmen over the years, yet it sticks to Johnson like no other.

Digiacomo’s feature explores the continuing fascination and mystery surrounding this singular artist, though it does so obliquely: The incredible and convoluted story begins one day in 2005, when Steven “Zeke” Schein, a guitar expert and Delta blues obsessive, stumbles upon what he believes to be a never-before-seen photograph of Johnson. The ensuing tale illustrates in compelling prose the intriguing intangibility of the musician’s life and work.

With the eBay photo still on his computer monitor, Schein dug up his copy of the Johnson boxed set and took another look. Not only was he more confident than ever that he had found a photo of Robert Johnson, he had a hunch who the other man in the photo was, too: Johnny Shines, a respected Delta blues artist in his own right, and one of the handful of musicians who, in the early 1930s and again in the months before Johnson’s death, had traveled with him from town to town to look for gigs or stand on busy street corners and engage in a competitive practice known as “cuttin’ heads,” whereby one blues musician tries to draw away the crowd (and their money) gathered around another musician by standing on a nearby corner and outplaying him.

Jackie Kay on Bessie Smith: ‘My Libidinous, Raunchy, Fearless Blueswoman’ (Jackie Kay, The Guardian, February 2021)

Jacqueline “Jackie” Kay is a remarkable figure. A writer who holds both an MBE and CBE for services to literature, her many other achievements include winning the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and becoming poet laureate of Scotland. All this despite the considerable challenges of her personal background.

In this moving piece, Kay talks fondly and with passion about the inspiration she found, as a gay Black girl growing up in 1970s Glasgow, in the life and music of blues singer Bessie Smith. Kay transports us back to her formative years, welcoming the reader inside the mind of her younger self to encounter the feelings, strengths, and flights of fantasy that sprang from her internal relationship with the legendary singer. Later, in 1997, Kay would publish her own critically acclaimed biography of the artist: Bessie Smith: A Poet’s Biography of a Blues Legend.

On the front cover she was smiling. Every feature of her face lit up by a huge grin bursting with personality. Her eyes full of hilarity. Her wide mouth full of laughing teeth. On the back she was sad. Her mouth shut. Eyes closed. Eyebrows furrowed. The album cover was like a strange two-sided coin. The two faces of Bessie Smith. I knew from that first album that I had made a friend for life. I would never forget her.

J. R.’s Jook and the Authenticity Mirage (Greg Brownderville, Southwest Review, 2017)

Musician and writer Greg Brownderville takes a literal step back into the mythical blues landscape in this evocative piece about friendship, music, and an almost-forgotten way of life, when a chance encounter leads him to a blues-jam party hosted by a character who lingers large in the author’s memory.

For many blues aficionados, nothing matters more than “authenticity,” whatever that nebulous term is taken to mean. This article discusses that, for sure, but the love and passion at the heart of this essay is to be discerned in thoughts about friendship, community, and the true warts-and-all history of a music that will forever be entangled with the socioeconomic conditions from which it arose.

Pudding slung her arm around me and shouted, “J. R.! If this boy can blues, remember: I’m the one invited him. If he can’t blues, it’s all your fault for handing him this guitar.” J. R. howled a boisterous laugh. But then he said with a serious, almost-preacherly voice, “Listen. We tickled to have this young man here tonight. I believe we done found us a new friend in blues.”

Keeping the Blues Alive (Touré, Smithsonian, September 2016)

The current state of the blues landscape continues to provoke arguments, introspection, and fears. Some would even contest that “real” blues is a thing of the past, its present-day protagonists serving up a distilled version of an art form forever frozen in time. Such conditions make this piece by renowned music critic Touré a fascinating read, as he documents a visit to the 32nd International Blues Challenge in Memphis, Tennessee.

While Memphis in recent years has become home to a celebrated rap movement, Touré discovers a city in which the blues are very much alive and kicking. Fans will find much to celebrate and find themselves able to take a hatful of hope from this beautifully written piece, which covers blues from all angles, from the deeply personal to the highly pragmatic. To hear modern advocates speak with such passion, knowledge, and reverence is as inspirational as it is moving.

“The blues is an antipsychotic to keep my people from losing their minds,” she begins. “It started with the moans and groans of agony, the slave roots of it all.” Then she sings, “There’s a man goin’ ’round takin’ names! There’s a man goin’ ’round takin’ names!” She shoots us a coldblooded look.

What the Mississippi Delta Teaches Me About Home—and Hope (Wright Thompson, National Geographic, June 2020)

Wright Thompson grew up in Clarksdale, a town in Mississippi that strongly asserts its claim as “the birthplace of the blues.” It certainly has a wealth of history to back this up: Muddy Waters, Ike Turner, Sam Cooke, and a host of other musicians were born there, and the town remains an enticing draw for modern blues fans.

I suspect that this article, in which Wright Thompson and his young family take a short trip through the Mississippi Delta, will resonate with many. COVID has changed some more than others, but for all of us, the world will never be quite the same. Here, Thompson explores how blues music — full of life, longing, hope, and pain — resonates across the decades. The blues frequently evoke suffering and heartbreak, but it should be remembered that it is, at its core, a purging, and in many ways a purifying force.

I’ve been thinking recently about how these specific blues could be the soundtrack for a country trying to emerge from quarantine in one piece. A friend I trust told me that sentiment sounds like a kumbaya, and I know what he means. There is real pain and irreducible violence in the music. It records a very particular history.

When Young Elvis Met the Legendary B.B. King (Daniel de Visé, Lit Hub, November 2021)

Two “kings” meet here in this illuminating piece — an excerpt of de Visé’s book King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King — which does a fine job of capturing the magic and majesty of two stars from different sides of the blues line. Presley’s music and heritage is every bit as caught up in the blues as B.B.’s. To modern eyes and ears, the legacy of Elvis can seem problematic. For some it is a clear-cut case: Elvis stole Black music. The reality is far more nuanced. Presley was very much aware of his overwhelming debt to the blues, an art form he loved and admired above all others, and this piece offers a telling glimpse into the complicated and bigoted world of the music industry in ’50s/’60s America.

B.B. himself is one of the few “classic” bluesmen to have extended his professional work into the modern age. He began his career at the tail end of the ’40s, and played his final live show in 2014. A living link to the past and revered by countless musicians from the ’60s onwards, King remains one of the greatest exponents of electric blues. There is another vital link here: Producer Sam Phillips, the man who “discovered” Elvis, also produced many of King’s early recordings.

You’ll find a striking line in this article in the form of a quote from Phillips: “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.” Whether Phillips truly said this is up for debate. Many have argued that if Phillips did say such a thing, it would have been in the spirit of frustration, and bemoaning such racism. This is a man who championed Black musicians long before — and long after — the coming of Elvis. Regardless, the sentiment lays bare the appalling racism that was endemic to the business at that time.

“But Elvis was different. He was friendly. I remember Elvis distinctly,” B.B. recalled, “because he was handsome and quiet and polite to a fault”—not unlike B.B. himself. “Spoke with this thick molasses Southern accent and always called me ‘sir.’ I liked that. In the early days, I heard him strictly as a country singer,” which is how most people regarded Elvis in the early years. Elvis made his first television appearance on a program titled Louisiana Hayride. “I liked his voice, though I had no idea he was getting ready to conquer the world.”

***

Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, UK. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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By Annalisa Bolin 

Years ago, during a stop in Phnom Penh while on a backpacking trip through Southeast Asia, I visited Tuol Sleng, a museum of the Cambodian genocide, and Choeung Ek, the killing fields. Both were places where thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge had been murdered; now, tourists moved along their hallways and paths, mostly in silence. I still remember staring down at my toes in dusty sandals, stopped just short of the human bone fragments coming up through the dirt, as a guide held his hand out to keep me moving.

After leaving, I couldn’t stop thinking about my visit. The terrible history of what had happened at these sites haunted me, as did their material remains, but so did the troubling decision I made to be there at all. Why had I chosen to go to these places? It felt like a responsibility, in a way — to learn about the country I was traveling through, to pay my respects, clumsily, to the dead — but I was disturbed, too, by what I had done. Was I just a voyeur of other people’s pain?

Sites like these fall under the umbrella of what can be called difficult heritage: the places, artifacts, stories, and practices that we have inherited from the past, and use, in some fashion, today. We tangle our presents together with our pasts. As an American I know the stories we tell about our history as a nation, and the icons in which they are rooted: the Liberty Bell; the Mayflower; the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that are on display in the National Archives. People often think of heritage as something they’re proud of, a unifying point around which to coalesce. But heritage comprises the horrible parts of history, too, the ones many would prefer to forget, or over which societies continue to come into conflict. In America, plantations and buildings still standing today, built by enslaved people, are part of our heritage; so are the sites of battles and the stolen lands that were part of the genocide against Native populations. And even more heritage has been lost through neglect and deliberate destruction, as Jill Lepore explains in a story below.

After that trip to Cambodia, I went on to study difficult heritage professionally as an archaeologist and anthropologist of Rwanda. I learned how Rwandans were using the remains of their terrible past — the genocide committed against the Tutsi population in 1994 — in memorials that served as sites of mourning but also places of memory and education (and, for that matter, tourism, just like the Cambodian ones). In a way, the next decade of my life was shaped by those questions to which I had no good answers. Not only the ones about what I was doing there as a tourist encountering mass atrocity, but even broader ones, too: What do we do now with heritage that raises questions about pain, suffering, and our human pasts as both victims and perpetrators? How do we make these decisions today, and who has the right to do so? What kinds of values and politics guide our choices?

Even purportedly straightforward and “unifying” heritage has its faultlines: The Declaration of Independence’s “We the People” can mean something quite different to the descendants of Americans who weren’t counted as fully human in 1776 than to the descendants of those who were. Once you start digging, as the pieces in this reading list do, you find difficult heritage all around you. Museums are full of art and artifacts taken by colonial and genocidal forces. Public monuments commemorate people whose legacies are often, to put it gently, conflicted. Even cultural practices that are today seen as cheerful or entertaining can mask darker pasts, like Sweden’s Easter witches, who bring something like Halloween to springtime.

As the global protests calling for the removal of controversial statues and monuments in recent years have shown, people care deeply about what we do with the objects and places that make up our heritage — what we save, and what we destroy. What we do with heritage reflects how we understand ourselves: who we were, who we are, and who we want to be.

“The Worst Day of My Life Is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction” (Steve Kandell, Buzzfeed News, May 2014)

Sites that memorialize tragedy and atrocity can be found all over the world, from Phnom Penh to Auschwitz to Rwanda, and these sites are visited by survivors, mourners, and tourists. The tension between paying respects and bearing witness, and exploiting or gawking, is unresolved; maybe it’s unresolvable. Steve Kandell’s essay about the opening of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City is a raw personal account of confronting this tension. After his sister’s death in the Twin Towers, Kandell and his family did not participate in the development of the memorial museum; his story here recounts what happened when he decided to visit. His powerful, painful ambivalence about the memorial reminds us that even when history has been packaged up for public consumption, it also remains very present, personal, and agonizing for so many.

I think now of every war memorial I ever yawned through on a class trip, how someone else’s past horror was my vacant diversion and maybe I learned something but I didn’t feel anything. Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark. Annotated divorce papers blown up and mounted, interactive exhibits detailing how your mom’s last round of chemo didn’t take, souvenir T-shirts emblazoned with your best friend’s last words before the car crash. And you should have to see for yourself how little your pain matters to a family of five who need to get some food before the kids melt down. Or maybe worse, watch it be co-opted by people who want, for whatever reason, to feel that connection so acutely.

“The Swedish Witch Trials Teach Us How to Confront Dark Heritage” (Jennie Tiderman-Österberg, Smithsonian Magazine, October 2021)

In spring, the historic core of Karlskrona, a city on Sweden’s southern coast, was decorated for Easter. Multicolored feathers were tied to bushes and, if I’d been there at the right time, a colleague told me, I could’ve seen little girls walking around in long, flowing clothes, with round red spots of makeup on their cheeks. “They’re the Easter witches!” she explained. “We used to love dressing up like that when we were kids.” I’d never heard of an Easter witch, so I pressed her. “Like Halloween!” she offered, adding that with the importation of that holiday from the U.S., Swedish children now have two run-around-town-demanding-candy festivals per year.

The Easter witches are called “påskkärringar,” and in this piece, Jennie Tiderman-Österberg traces the history of Swedish witches — or, rather, the country’s history of accusations of witchcraft, which resulted in the brutal deaths of a horrifying number of people (almost entirely women), particularly in the late 17th-century period called the Great Noise. The påskkärringar of today are charmingly attired kids who wear headscarves and carry baskets, but they owe their existence to a dark and terrible past. Tiderman-Österberg takes aim at a tradition that has neatly defanged itself, and asks us to consider the ways we transform, and even domesticate, pasts replete with suffering and pain.

Now, what do we do with this dark and difficult part of our history that caused so much suffering? How do we manage the memories of such ordeals?

In Sweden, we meet the suffering by basically playing around with the Easter Hag. Since the 1800s, she is the tradition. She has become our heritage, not the events which lie hidden in her background. Do Swedes do this to cope with a difficult recollection? Or to reminisce over the times before the witch trials when spells were not an evil act and the cunning women of the forest an important part of our healthcare system? Or do we dress our children as witches because we prefer to make quaint a wildness we still secretly fear?

“The Colonized World Wants Its Artifacts Back” (Tarisai Ngangura, Vice, December 2020)

When the news broke several months ago that the Smithsonian planned to return its collection of Benin Bronzes, it was met with relief from the Nigerian claimants — and surprise from observers who thought major Western museums would continue to fight tooth and nail to retain every item in their collections. These stunning bronze figures had been looted from the Kingdom of Benin by attacking British forces in the late 19th century, and they have been held in Western museums and private collections ever since. Requests for their return have mainly fallen upon deaf ears, as cultural institutions assert that returns would devastate their collections, or that the objects could not be adequately cared for elsewhere. Still, the Smithsonian’s change of position is not unique: Perhaps reflecting the start of a reckoning with colonial histories, recent years have seen an increasing number of returns, even as the total amount remains small.

In this piece, Tarisai Ngangura takes us through those requests. The article focuses on Africa, a continent whose cultural heritage has been stolen in massive quantities for the benefit of museums and collectors elsewhere. Ngangura considers what is lost when heritage is taken away; what claimants want returned (and how they hope to use what is returned); and how the beneficiaries of these collections — especially Western museums that have charged admission fees and built reputations on the backs of items gathered by colonial forces — have fought change. Whether museums in the Western world as we know them will exist in precisely the same form after such a reckoning is an open question. But if our status quo is dependent on ignoring how those museum collections came to be, that’s hardly a bad thing.

“They come into your house while you are sleeping, or when you are awake. They kill half your family. They steal from you. Take your art and your belongings to their country,” said Nana Oforiatta Ayim, curator, filmmaker, and author of The Godchild. “Then they showcase them like, look what I have. I am more powerful than you. Years later, when the world has somewhat righted itself, you ask for them back and they refuse.”

“The Ghosts in the Museum” (Lizzie Wade, Science, July 2021) 

I still remember the first time I saw a mummy. It was in the St. Louis Art Museum, in the 1990s, and I was on a field trip, small enough to be about eye height with the supine mummy’s wrapped feet. As we filed past, I dragged my own feet and had to be ushered along. The mummy’s painted cartonnage was certainly beautiful, with its delicate illustrations and its carved, serious face. But the wrappings were what transfixed me: a little decayed, a few scattered holes, the dirt of several thousand years. You mean there’s a person in there?

Like the Benin Bronzes, human remains are subject to repatriation claims. Bodies populate museum exhibitions around the world, from Egyptian mummies to those pulled from Europe’s peat bogs, and they serve as the subjects of scientific research, like the bones that are the focus of this story by Lizzie Wade. The Penn Museum’s Morton collection, an assemblage of human skulls, is named after the scientist Samuel Morton, who used cranial measurements to support his ideas about racial hierarchy and race “science.” Like many other institutions, the Morton collection accumulated its human remains in a process laced with structural violence, targeting those who had less power to prevent their bones from being collected: Black people, Indigenous communities, the enslaved. Over time, physical and biological anthropologists have tried to use new research approaches to reckon with their discipline’s former efforts to prove white supremacy through bone. Still, using the collection differently doesn’t solve the essential problem: Can museums still hold and study human remains when their owners didn’t give consent? And what should we do with those collections, like the Morton, whose origins are saturated with racism?

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked protests for racial justice around the country, more and more people within and outside Penn began to see the Morton collection as a present-day perpetuation of racism and its harms, rather than just a historic example. Until last summer, most researchers thought “the science is justified because we’re doing it thoughtfully. And this moment brought to bear, no, that’s not enough,” says Rachel Watkins, a Black biological anthropologist at American University.

Even with recent research that strove to be respectful, it was almost always scientists who decided how and why to study the skulls, not their descendant communities, Athreya notes. “We were speaking for people without them at the table,” she says. To move forward ethically, “Those of us in power are going to have to give up some.”

“When Black History Is Unearthed, Who Gets to Speak For the Dead?” (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, September 2021)

Sometimes we handle difficult heritage by changing or removing it. In order to stop honoring perpetrators of racist violence, activists have taken down Confederate monuments in the U.S., along with statues of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, King Leopold II in Belgium, and Edward Colston in the U.K. But the other side of the coin is what we choose to support instead. What lost histories and ignored people can we bring back into, and honor in, our social and political lives? What forgotten heritage sites deserve attention? As we consider what to remove, we might also consider what to restore.

In this piece, Jill Lepore traces attempts to save Black American heritage in the form of burial grounds and human remains. But these efforts are also faced with challenges: Who, for example, gets to make the decisions? (It’s a question Wade also touches on in her story about the Morton skull collection.) As Howard University professor Fatimah Jackson asks, referring to another actor in these debates: “Does he speak for Black America? Or do I speak for Black America?”

Examining the idea of “descendant communities” and the work of descendants, activists, scholars, and archaeologists, Lepore carefully untangles the complicated sociopolitics involved in trying to treat Black heritage, and Black communities, with the respect and dignity they have long been denied in the American public sphere.

It isn’t merely an academic dispute. The proposed burial-grounds network and graves-protection acts are parts of a larger public deliberation, less the always elusive “national conversation” than a quieter collective act of conscientious mourning, expressed, too, in new monuments and museum exhibits. History gets written down in books but, like archeology, it can seep up from the earth itself, from a loamy underground of sacred, ancient things: gravestones tucked under elms and tangled by vines; iron-nailed coffins trapped beneath pavement and parking lots and highway overpasses. How and whether the debates over human remains get resolved holds consequences not only for how Americans understand the country’s past but also for how they picture its future. The dispute itself, along the razor’s edge between archeology and history, is beset by a horrible irony. Enslavement and segregation denied people property and ancestry. But much here appears to turn on inheritance and title: Who owns these graveyards? Who owns these bones? Who owns, and what is owed?

Further Reading:

• “Grave Injustice” (Lyndsie Bourgon, The Walrus, March 2013)
• “Redrawing the Boundaries” (SAPIENS, February 2022) (Podcast transcript)
• “She Warned the Grain Elevator Would Disrupt Sacred Black History. They Deleted Her Findings.” (ProPublica, Seth Freed Wessler, May 2022)
• “Where Are the Indigenous Children Who Never Came Home?” (High Country News, Nick Estes and Alleen Brown, September 2018)
• “Emancipation” (Aeon, Casey Cep, October 2013)  

***

Annalisa Bolin is an anthropologist and archaeologist who studies the uses and politics of the past, from material objects and sites to human remains, in post-genocide Rwanda. She holds a PhD from Stanford University. Her literary nonfiction has been published in the Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Epoiesen, and elsewhere. Her academic articles can be found in Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Social Archaeology, and Journal of Eastern African Studies, among others, and she has also written for the magazine SAPIENS and Africa Is a Country. Her essay “A Ghost Map of Kigali,” which appeared in Anthropology and Humanism, won the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s award for creative nonfiction. Currently based in St. Louis, Missouri, she is writing a book that mixes her research in Rwanda with essays and memoir. She can be found on her website and Twitter.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy Editor: Peter Rubin

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

Yuxi Lin | Longreads | June 2022 | 12 minutes (3,311 words)

It’s 2004 and my first year in America. I type the word “wholesale” into my digital translator. 

noun 

definition: the selling of goods in large quantities to be retailed by others. 

I’m 12 years old and all I want to be is whole and wholesome. The ability to buy it is even more appealing. 

In front of me, the glass display case contains all the luxury I’ve ever known. Watches, earrings, and necklaces, all sleeping under the fingerprints of strangers. At this point in my life, I can’t imagine anything costing more than a Costco diamond. During ESL class, my teacher asks how I would like to be proposed to one day. I tell her that I want my future husband to take me to Costco, where I would ask the salesperson to open the case and take out the $1999 ring. My future husband will have also made reservations at a nearby Pizza Hut, my favorite restaurant, and kneel down on its fake wooden tiles. 

While my parents and their friends peruse the enormous shelves, I prowl the sample stands. This is one of the only times I get to eat American food. My parents don’t patronize American restaurants out of a combination of fear and disdain. For a while at lunch I was dumping out the fried rice my mother cooked because the white kids said it looked funny, but I quickly ran out of allowance money to buy chicken nuggets. 

I make a beeline for the old ladies in hairnets doling out cut-up Hot Pockets or lone nachos with salsa. More than anything, I lust after the microwavable cheese-filled pierogies. “Trash food,” my mother calls them. I tell her that I aspire to be a trash can. 

Almost always, the samples come in grease-stained cupcake liners. I fold them into halves, then quarters, hide them in my palm, then wait a few minutes before circling back for another round. I don’t want to appear too greedy, too needy, the way immigrants feel starved for that unnamable thing, no matter how many years they live in their chosen country. I go back for thirds, sometimes even fourths, unable to stop myself. The aproned ladies occasionally look askance in my direction but never stop me, and to this day I am grateful for their silence.

My parents are self-satisfied at Costco in a way that I rarely see except when they return to China. Their coworker sometimes joins us on our trips, picking up a 15-pound sack of flour so he can make mantous and noodles for every meal, less expensive than rice. After we drop him at his house, my mother makes fun of the guy for being cheap. 

“These northerners don’t know how to enjoy seafood like we do,” she says smugly from the front seat. 

My father agrees. “Let’s invite them over next time and show them a proper feast.”

“They’ll talk about it for weeks after!” 

“How do you know he doesn’t just like lots of mantous and noodles?” I ask. 

My mother whips her head around and casts me a disdainful look. “Because that’s food for poor people. We are different.” 

***

2005 is the year Keira Knightley plays Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. It’s my favorite movie. I enjoy watching the Bennets complain about their poverty while being waited on by five servants. When my Korean American friend Stephanie mentions that she has the movie on DVD, I don’t believe her. I’ve seen the price tag for the movie at Costco, $25.99, and multiplied it by eight in my head, the approximate exchange rate between USD and RMB. In China, I could have eaten out for a whole week on that money. It seems impossibly luxurious for a 13-year-old to own such a thing. How could she afford it, even if her father is white? 

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“Do you want to borrow it?” She offers. 

“Sure, if you can bring it.” 

She hands it to me the next day. “You’re so funny. Why didn’t you believe that I had it?” Stephanie asks, puzzled at my look of surprise. 

I stroke the smooth plastic cover over Keira’s half-turned face and shrug, wishing I could disappear. 

***

Once a year, I look forward to the most special time. By the Costco entrance, there are pianos for sale. Just a few Kawai and Roland uprights so beautiful that I fear touching them, uprights that make me tear up with nostalgia for the piano I’d left in China, the bench on which I wept from fatigue as I practiced for recitals over and over again until my fingers would carry the music, even if my brain shut off. When I sit down at a Costco piano, my former self wakes up inside me. Awkwardly and slurring, my fingers get to speak a language that they’d almost forgotten. I know that I don’t have much time with them, just a song or two at most before the sales lady asks where my parents are. 

The pianos stay for a week, maybe two. Inevitably, the next time we go, they are gone. 

 ***

I am 14 when I buy my first American CD. Against a silver background, Britney glows in a black bra and leather shorts, her face haloed by a black fur hood. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. My Prerogative, says the cover. I look up the word in my dictionary and understand that it’s something along the lines of “rights and privilege.” I rub the glossy cover against my cheek as my parents complain about how much it had cost. I’d snuck it into their Costco shopping cart and refused to put it back. We drive home blasting “Boys,” my parents awkwardly silent while Britney whispers “Okay nasty” against Pharell’s heavy breathing.

***

I learn in first grade that the greatest sin is leaving food on the table. This message is reinforced both publicly and privately in China. One of the first sentences I learn to read in my Chinese textbook is that every drop of a farmer’s sweat turns into a pellet of rice in my bowl. That is how my food comes to be, and it is a disgrace to the farmers who toil in the fields should I leave even a single pellet of rice uneaten. This discipline is drilled into everyone in my family. My mother would stay at the table until every speck of flesh is picked from the bone. Then she would break the bone to suck out the marrow. Then she’d simmer the bone fragments to make broth. 

Whenever I express distaste for any food, my father says, “You’re so lucky. Back when I was your age, I would have given anything for a bite of that.” 

I believe him. 

 ***

While researching nutrition in my adult life, I keep encountering the China Study conducted by the Campbells in the 1960s, where two American scientists conclude that Chinese people had fewer cases of heart disease because they didn’t eat meat and relied mostly on vegetables. I roll my eyes. Most of the lauded healthy Chinese eating habits back then were probably involuntary. 

Chinese people like to say that they are a culture obsessed with food, and it’s true. It never occurs to me until adulthood just how much of that obsession stems from intergenerational trauma. Once I see the privation on my parents’ faces while chewing on a piece of chicken, I cannot unsee it. Who are they eating for? Their former selves perhaps, which, like ghosts, could never be satiated. And then, is this what I look like, too, when I’m eating?

***

After graduating from college, I live alone in North Carolina, loathing my first job where I travel four days out of the week to corporate client sites in obscure cities. I make more money than my parents and spend it mostly on clothes and heels. Some days I drive to Costco and order a Coke and pizza. I eat it next to a family with small kids who cannot sit still. They climb down and over the benches, smearing their greasy, ketchupy hands everywhere. I call my parents on the phone so they can ask me what I’d bought, how much I’d paid, and I can tell them that I’d eaten the same thing that they’d eaten last week when they’d gone on their own Costco run. 

***

Two years later, I quit my corporate job and move to Texas to teach English. While unloading my bags from a weekend shopping trip, I realize that my wallet is missing. Where had I seen it last? 

I call the San Antonio Costco, and a calm Texan accent on the other end reassures me that my wallet has been found. I had dropped it while putting groceries into my car in the parking lot. When I pick it up, I want to hug the man in his silly-looking red vest. 

***

Sometimes I go to Costco in Texas just to see other Asians, where I project my past and future onto the families there. I watch sensible middle-aged Asian parents strolling through the aisles, scanning for Kirkland products for their relatives back home, gifts such as vitamins, salted walnuts, and anti-aging creams. Like my parents, they look for the cheapest thing with a Made in the USA sticker that would simultaneously convey their own success and justify their abandonment of a former home. I make up stories about them in my head. Do they, like my family, pull up with their Asian neighbors in a row of Toyotas each Sunday at the Costco parking lot? Do they buy in bulk the favorite food of their adult children and freeze it until they come home? Do they feel in some way that this is the safest place in America? 

My favorite people to watch are the young Asian couples pushing carts piled high with toilet paper and granola bars, doing mental arithmetic on cost-per-unit comparisons. They’re absorbed in the comfortable tasks of mundanity. In a stroller next to them, a baby sucks his thumb and gazes out at the mountains of things around him. 

***

My parents are born in 1962, the tail end of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Chinese Famine. The fields lie barren. All the shoots dug up. The trees stripped of bark. Caused partly by natural disasters, and partly by terrible agricultural policies, the famine left roughly 35 million people dead, but my parents don’t know that yet. Nobody knows the real body count. One only hears whispers of bodies lying in the streets of villages; some of them disappear and are never found. Nobody speaks of what happens to them. 

Food shortages and poverty continue to haunt the country for decades. In a grainy photo taken at the beach, my young father and his college friends are so thin that I can easily count their ribs.     

My father grows up drinking rice porridge, and, being the younger son of six children, occasionally has a desiccated olive to suck on while my aunts watch with envy. This is what it means to be the favorite. This is what it means to be a son. He nurses that olive for an entire meal because it is the only dish. When guests visit, his parents boil an egg and serve it to the practical stranger or obnoxious neighbor while their own children watch from behind the door frame, imagining the burst of yolk amid the soft white crumble. 

The family, like almost all families in China at the time, couldn’t get enough food even if they’d had all the gold to sell, but my grandmother would still hoard gold for the rest of her life. Her last gift to me is a single gold earring, taken off her left earlobe at her 94th-birthday banquet. She mumbles something with her toothless mouth in the regional dialect I never learned. My aunt translates for us, “She says, for your dowry.” My grandmother nods fiercely, puts it in my palm, and closes my fingers over it. 

During the famine, unable to feed six children, my grandparents send my third aunt, my dad’s older sister, to the countryside to be raised by distant relatives. She will survive there somehow, they tell themselves. But the conditions outside the city are even worse. Along with other starved and desperate farmers, my aunt pulls wild grasses and weeds from the cracked soil and eats them boiled. Years later, when she finally returns to the family, no one thanks her. 

“Why is third aunt so fat?” I ask my father when I’m in elementary school. 

“She’s not really fat.”

“So does she eat a lot?” 

“It has nothing to do with eating.”

My aunt lives the rest of her life with a bloated face and a body turgid from the plant poisons she’d ingested. Every year she sews me pajama pants in the ugliest fabric with elastic waistbands, and each night I still go to sleep under the duvet covers she made for me. She works at a crematorium and uses her connections to help everyone in our family get a nice plot. In her early 60s, she is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We hide it from her so she can die in ignorance. Within six weeks, she does. 

 ***

Whenever I tell my parents that I want to write about them, they say, “Why? Our lives are so ordinary. There’s a billion of us and nothing worth telling.” Maybe they’re right on some level, that human suffering in its various forms is no great secret. Yet, when I sit down at a meal sometimes, I feel a void inside, like I’m merely a mouth for generations of mouths, and I’m eating for my parents, my aunts, my uncles, and ancestors; while other people, the ones who do not walk around being gnawed by ghosts, watch with horror at my insatiable glut. 

***

After a decade in the States, my parents move from the northeast to a town in Florida and begin cultivating the land behind their house. It’s swamp land, low in nutrients with loose sandy soil. Each month they make a one-hour drive to a horse farm to collect manure. They ask the local Asian grocery store to give them the Kikkoman soy sauce buckets to use as planters for radishes and carrots. My father nails together planks of wood and builds trellises to anchor the cucumber vines and snow peas, then winter squashes and bitter melons. Their efforts yield so much harvest that they buy a $3000 industrial freezer for storage. It still jars me to see their petite Asian figures standing next to a freezer twice the size of them combined. 

Despite their ability to buy or grow most vegetables, they still love going to Costco, out of habit rather than need, driving two hours to Orlando and back. It gives them satisfaction to walk the familiar aisles, to load and unload the car. My father always buys more than they need, and my mother spends days stressing over what’s going bad so she can determine the order in which to cook the meals. But sometimes, they come back with just a jug of milk and some fruits, things they could easily find in a grocery store down the road.  

On our way to a family trip to Miami that I had planned and booked, we drive past a Costco. My mother wants to go in. 

“Now? We’re trying to get to the hotel while there’s no traffic,” I explain, irritated. “Is there something you need to buy?”

“No, but I want to go,” my mother says, staring longingly at the warehouse. “Maybe pick up some groceries.”

“We’re staying at the Hyatt Regency, Mom. There’s nowhere for you to cook.” I’d forbidden my parents from bringing their electric stove, which they brought on road trips and plugged into the electric outlet at a Motel 8 to cook Chinese food. But this time, I am determined to vacation like an American. I hit the gas. 

“Well, maybe I’ll just look…” My mom’s voice trails off. The store shrinks from sight just as quickly as it had come into view. 

 ***

One night, I receive a video call from my father out of the blue. He wants to know how one goes about eating jamón.

“Where are you getting jamón in Florida?” I ask. 

“Costco.” He pans the camera to a whole bone-in jamón lying on the living room floor. 

“Are you having people over?”

“No. Just for your mom and me.”

My parents have never been to Spain or enjoyed Spanish food. In fact, the one time I’d taken them to a Spanish restaurant, they’d commented how much better the seafood paella would have tasted if only the chef had cooked it as Chinese fried rice. What they said about the flamenco dancers at the restaurant was even worse. 

Staring at the giant leg of cured meat on my screen, I don’t know what to say. 

My father switches back the camera to face him. “I thought I’d ask you since you went to Spain.” 

“I’ve only had jamón when it’s been sliced at a restaurant.” 

“Well, what’s the point of going all the way to Spain when you can have perfectly good jamón right from Costco?” 

“Is this about my going to Spain a few months ago instead of visiting you and mom in Florida?”

“No. Don’t be immature.” 

We are quiet for a few beats. 

“Want us to save some jamón for you in the freezer?” He offers. “You can try it when you come back.” 

“Okay.” I hang up, not sure what defrosted jamón would taste like. 

 ***

Over the years and our continuous fights about my increasing Americanness, food has become the only safe subject between my parents and me. It is also the only language through which they can tell me that they love me. While my white friends receive care packages of cookies and candles from home, my parents offer to overnight me live lobsters that they bulk-order. 

Pushing a cart along the massive aisles in the Orlando Costco, my father loads up boxes of oranges and blueberries that he tries to force-feed me over the next few days. I do my best to act grateful because I know the people he’s trying to feed are no longer alive. 

“I never had this growing up,” he’d say and dump another 5-pound box of fruit in the cart, ignoring my mother’s scowl. It’s an act that they’ve perfected and carried out for years. 

I look up at the stadium lights shining down on us. In the great halls of Costco, two of our greatest fears are assuaged — that of not having enough, and that of not being enough. 

Ten miles away, children are lining up at Orlando’s Disney World to live their dreams. Here in Kirkland, my parents are lining up to checkout. Here is where I feel most American. Here is a home where I can touch everything that lives in yours. When we walk out the door, a white woman smiles and waves, “Please come back soon.”

***

Yuxi Lin is a poet and writer living and teaching in New York City.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

By Bekah Waalkes

It’s a question for getting dressed, getting ready, getting prepared: What’s the vibe? We mean lots of things by this question, like what do I wear? Will it be worth leaving the house? What will it be like, what will it feel like to be there? What kind of energy are we bringing? “I love your vibe,” a girl told me last summer, in the restroom of a bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I never asked, but I immediately wondered: What is my vibe? Try-hard woman on a date? Exhausted graduate student? Pandemic shut-in wondering when she can go home? What are you getting from me?

This reading list picks up the question I never asked. What is the vibe, after all? Short for “vibration,” the vibe is largely intangible: It’s more than a feeling, less than a fact. A vibe can be manufactured but also alterable — to an extent. The vibe can change. The vibe can, suddenly, be off. There are good vibes, bad vibes, and just plain old vibes. It can be collective thought (“we vibing”) or the absence of thinking (“no thoughts, just vibes”), can be intensely personal (“I love her vibe”) or atmospheric feeling (“caught a vibe”).

And, now infamously, the vibe can shift, too. In The Cut, Allison P. Davis wrote that a vibe shift is coming, borrowing entrepreneur Sean Monahan’s language to describe eras where something suddenly seems hopelessly outdated. It’s mostly about fashion, a little bit about lifestyle. Davis imagines that next vibe shift might be the return of early aughts clothing — but she wonders if she will “survive” it. Inflected by two years of her prime spent in the throes of a pandemic, Davis wonders, “Do I try to opt in to whatever trend comes next, or do I choose to accept that my last two good years were spent on my couch gobbling antidepressants and wearing ‘cute house pants’ and UGGs?”

The vibe here is amorphous and intangible. It is manifested through clothes and accessories and life lived through material talismans. People who don’t adapt get left behind: “The ones still clinging to authenticity and fairy lights are the ones who crystallized in their hipsterdom while the culture moved on. They ‘bunkered down in Greenpoint and got married’ or took their waxed beards and nautical tattoo sleeves and relocated to Hudson.” But the concept of the vibe — what it names, how it means something, why we use it —  is so much larger than the concept that a vibe shift imagines. The vibe is so much more than just what clothes are cool or what cocktails are cute to order or what this year’s hot girl summer will look like.

The pieces on this list imagine what vibes are, but just as much, they chart a sort of central absence in our terminology. The diffuse nature of the vibe makes writing about its contours extremely challenging, yet the writers on this list do so in vivid ways, imagining which aspects of our lives make the language of vibes so appealing: forms of being online, social presence changed in the wake of the pandemic, capitalism and its strictures, structures of knowing what we know and living how we live. In the hands of the writers on this list, the vibe comes into clearer focus: The vibe has style and form, it has a history and a theory, it has lovers and haters.

TikTok and the Vibes Revival (Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker, April 2021)

The vibe is a deeply digital and contemporary phenomenon, and Kyle Chayka turns to the vibe videos of TikTok to consider how social media, and TikTok in particular, is responsible for the “vibes revival” of the 2020s. TikTok’s visual platform — the montage of images strung together — is perfectly equipped to deal with the affects and feelings of a vibe, favoring aesthetics over narrative. Vibes can be curated, but they can also be made. What I find most exciting about Chayka’s comment is that he notes the two-way street between vibes and the world: The TikTok vibe determines real life just as much as real life determines the vibe.

Vibes are a medium for feeling, the kind of abstract understanding that comes before words put a name to experience. That pre-linguistic quality makes them well suited to a social-media landscape that is increasingly prioritizing audio, video, and images over text. Through our screens, vibes are being constantly emitted and received.

Vibe, Mood, Energy​ | Or, Bust-Time Reenchantment (Mitch Therieau, The Drift, January 2022)

If this list imagines what vibes are and are not, Mitch Therieau’s essay in The Drift is a masterful attempt to catalog how words like “vibe,” “mood,” and “energy” first emerged as countercultural terms and are reemerging in an era not of plenty, but of little. In this time of austerity, of climate change and loan repayments and a sweeping pandemic, what do the concepts of “vibe,” “mood,” and “energy” offer us? These terms give shape to our feelings and desires, yet Therieau carefully argues that these terms don’t point us to a better world, so much as giving us vocabulary to keep living where we are now. The vibe? A survival technique.

The objects of derision for the counterculture have reversed polarity and become objects of desire, of hope against hope. If only we could — maybe we can once again — don the gray flannel suit, even if just for a few years, to pay back our student loans. This longing for normalcy plays a faint counterpoint to a steady background hum of no future, no future, no future. All the more surprising, then, to see vibe/mood/energy, that utopian, countercultural triad, reemerge in recent years. It is the puzzle of the resurrection of a boom-time form in a bust time. A bust time, no less, when words of magic are no longer unambiguously on the side of rebellion, resistance, vitality; when they are wielded by the platform and the individual alike.

On Vibing (Mary Retta, close but not quite, January 2021)

I love this Substack newsletter by Mary Retta, where she thinks through vibing as an antidote to capitalist time. Vibing for Retta is a way of resisting the grindset, the constant self-improvement plan of the contemporary moment, one that was particularly exacerbated by the beginning of the pandemic. Vibes for her are a presence of an absence, not an absence of presence — to be just vibing is to be doing something, something amorphous, something shimmering off the edge of the capitalist framework that orders our experience of time.

This notion of time as an “economic resource” is exactly what vibing aims to break away from. It is not a coincidence that the last year has brought both the collapse of capitalism and an upending of time. This year of stillness and retreat has made it plain that time is not an empty thing we have to fill but a living thing that we must shape. Time changes. Because the world changes, and we change with it. To vibe is to shape time into pleasure, to mold it into something that feels soft and tastes sweet. It is to take a pause that bleeds into another. “Until finally,” writes Githere, “the space between the dream and the memory collapses into being your reality—now.”

A Theory of Vibe (Peli Grietzer, Glass Bead, 2017)

In an interview, Grietzer notes: “Learning vibes is crucial for all kinds of knowledge-how, but it’s a slow, long process, and communicating learned vibes to each other is a problem — a vibe has the structure of a trained autoencoder, which is mathematically and conceptually intractable.”

The vibe eludes us — but only to an extent. So how do we know a vibe? Peli Grietzer turns to math-informed literary theory — autoencoders, a type of neural network — to name a “theory of vibe” in Modernist writing and in general. The vibe, like style, has a structure that can be studied — not so amorphous or immaterial as it may seem. The aesthetics of the vibe, considered in writing through these mathematical terms, has a kind of logic, one that helps us conceptualize the kind of knowing we do when we know the vibe. While the specifics of Grietzer’s mathematical model might elude me, I appreciate the fundamental logic of his claim: The vibe is mappable in its meaning-making. We can see it, track it, make some kind of sense out of it, and where better to start than literature?

The meaning of a literary work like Dante’s “Inferno,” Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” or Stein’s “Tender Buttons”, we would like to say, lies at least partly in an aesthetic ‘vibe’ or a ‘style’ that we can sense when we consider all the myriad objects and phenomena that make up the imaginative landscape of the work as a kind of curated set. The meaning of Dante’s “Inferno,” let us say, lies in part in that certain je ne sais quoi that makes every soul, demon, and machine in Dante’s vision of hell a good fit for Dante’s vision of hell. Similarly, the meaning of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” lies partly in what limits our space of thinkable things for Vladimir and Estragon to say and do to a small set of possibilities the play nearly exhausts. Part of the meaning of Stein’s “Tender Buttons” lies in the set of (possibly inherently linguistic) ‘tender buttons’—conforming objects and phenomena.

What is A Vibe? (Robin James, its her factory, January 2021)

The vibe is a mood, but it’s never only a mood — it’s also a model. In her Substack newsletter, philosopher Robin James writes on the vibe as the horizon of contemporary finance capitalism. If speculative finance uses the intangibility of vibes as a way of disciplining and orienting us to the world, the vibe might not be as liberatory as other writers imagine. The vibe might, after all, amplify frequencies that we might rather go quiet. This is exactly what I find compelling about James’ work with the vibe — as a scholar of sound studies, her attention to the musical valences of the vibe, its “resonance” and “frequency,” remind us of where the concept of vibe started, as vibration.

As a being and falling in line, orientation isn’t disciplinary conformity to a norm, but a directionality or course or tendency to have capacities that will contribute positively to the reproduction of hegemonic society. Orientation is having the capacities to augment the capacities of the world that oriented you and that you in turn orient, building wealth/capacity that can pay forward what has been invested in you. In other words, being oriented means having a vibe that is sufficiently attuned to our white supremacist capitalist patriarchal world to induce and amplify sympathetic resonances with it.

***

Bekah Waalkes is a writer and PhD candidate at Tufts University. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Cleveland Review of Books, Bon Appétit, and more.

By Lindsay Eanet

I’m writing this to the blissful soundtrack of potatoes hissing in a cast-iron pan, the smell of caramelization beginning to permeate our apartment. My wife is preparing for a sacred day of obligation in our house — the first home match of our local soccer club. Tomorrow morning, the potatoes will fill her artfully-wrapped breakfast burritos, be stacked into a cooler, and ultimately line the Malört-addled bellies of our friends and community members at the massive pre-match tailgate. Her burritos are a display of care to friends and scarf-wearing strangers alike, all bound together by our love for (and frustration with) 11 men wearing the same crest on their chests.

That crest proved to be my conduit to the experience of being part of a fan community. In the years since I first attended a Chicago Fire match on a date and got swept up in the exhilaration of the supporters’ section, I’ve made lifelong friends (one of whom even stood up in our wedding), traveled to exotic places (like Minneapolis), and participated in service days and fundraisers (and, yes, tailgates). I’ve also watched grown adults argue with each other for days on end over years-old petty grievances and engage in intricate mental gymnastics to explain why the homophobic chant they kept using is not, in fact, homophobic. I’ve even imbibed a cocktail of Malört and mojito mix — a combination I wish on no one.

As it turns out, I love learning about other people’s experiences with fandom almost as much as I love experiencing it firsthand: the passion, the enthusiasm, the feeling of belonging to something greater, just the extremity of it all. Have I ever seen a full episode of the BBC series Sherlock? No. Have I spent half a day tumbling down a YouTube-and-Tumblr rabbit hole learning everything I possibly can about the Johnlock Conspiracy? Yes, absolutely yes.

I love talking and reading about fandom because it is the very best and worst of us. It’s joy and toxicity, pleasure and heartbreak, bond and betrayal. It gets at our most human urges: to share the things we love with others, to seek community among like-minded peers, especially at a time when we are all still too far apart. It can inspire the best and worst beyond its own confines as well — whether that’s a community food drive or a violent insurrection.

Such duality informs some of my favorite recent writings about fandom and fan communities — pieces that celebrate the curiosity, joy, and intrigue of fandom, but also illuminate what fandom can teach us about ourselves and our relationships with each other. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Slash and Burn (Amanda Hess, Tomorrow, April 2013)

Amanda Hess wasn’t the first person to write about straight women writing slash fanfic, but the insights here last long after the lads of One Direction have gone off in several different … well, you know.

Specifically, the piece focuses on “Larry shippers” — 1D fans who wanted band members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson to be a romantic couple (and, in some cases, spread a conspiracy theory that the two were secretly together). Hess thoughtfully calls out a conflict at the heart of the phenomenon: a 2010s boy band that’s cut from the musical cloth of its ‘90s predecessors, but also clinging to that era’s reductive attitudes around gender and sexuality. She suggests that as society changes, writing romantic stories involving two men (in this case, “Larry”) gives young female fans an opportunity to explore an equitable, loving relationship.

But never before has the straight girl’s queer imagination so totally disrupted the intended purpose of the men marketed to her: Five straight boys designed to appeal to straight girls, heterosexually. Now, the fantasies of girls like Cassady are threatening to redefine the teeny-bopper sexual dynamic forever, one chapter at a time.

Guys in ‘Disney Social Clubs’ Are Wilding Out at the Happiest Place on Earth (EJ Dickson, MEL, January 2019)

So-called “Disney adults” have long been the subject of fascination and derision, often ridiculed for their fevered nostalgia for a large entertainment conglomerate, for waiting seven hours for a Figment popcorn bucket, or for committing that grave internet sin of being indefinably cringe. This fascination can be seen in the rash of reporting over the past few years on the Disneyland Social Clubs: groups of adults with biker-gang cosplay aesthetics and names like “Neverlanders” and “Main Street Elite” joyfully roaming the park.

EJ Dickson’s feature goes beyond the usual rubbernecking of the social clubs’ aesthetics and internecine drama. Instead, she grounds their existence within larger cultural contexts, such as the unique relationship Southern California locals have to Disneyland.

No one can really agree on who came up with the jackets, or the denim garments that differentiate social club members from your average theme park attendee. But Taylor says that the general outsider aesthetic… is very much rooted in Southern California culture… Taylor also draws parallels between the cheery recklessness of the West Coast punk and ska scene and the relentlessly sunny push toward growth and innovation embodied by Walt Disney himself: “They have an appreciation for what Disney built there — this utopia with fantastical optimism.”

Hanson is Facing a Mutiny From Its Own Fans (Ashley Spencer, Vice, November 2020)

The past few years have led to rifts in many fan communities over the harmful actions or beliefs of the creators they once loved — the betrayal felt by many devoted Harry Potter fans at J.K. Rowling’s transphobic remarks being perhaps the most discussed example.

But similar reckonings are happening in fandoms all over popular culture. In the community devoted to ‘90s pop trio Hanson, many fans are leaving after feeling alienated or betrayed by the band’s responses (or, rather, lack thereof) to the murder of George Floyd and subsequent nationwide protests, as well as to COVID-19 public health measures.

Spencer’s article explores another increasingly important conversation. Fan communities can be a hotbed for destructive, harmful behavior — and some of the fans Spencer interviewed expressed anger and frustration that the brothers didn’t intervene when their Black fans were being attacked. How should fans respond when a creator reinforces a toxic ingroup/outgroup dynamic?

While those marketing tactics have bred fierce loyalty, they’ve also proven exclusionary. “Hanson set up this cult mentality of either you’re in or you’re out,” said Janice, who threw her fan club CD straight in the trash when it arrived this summer before she could cancel her membership. “It’s just a bubble now. If you’re outspoken, you’re not in it — or you’re attacked by other fans.”

How Furries Are Making Virtual Reality Worth Visiting (Matt Baume, Input, July 2021)

Remember back when the internet was fun, before “doomscrolling” was a word and strangers with “.eth” in their screennames would start talking at you about crypto? That’s how the burgeoning world of virtual reality is now, thanks in part to the generosity, creativity, and technological know-how of one fan community in particular: furries. “You look up some old internet thing, there was always a furry running it,” Changa, a VR creator and longtime member of the furry community, tells Matt Baume.

Baume’s cinematic, whirlwind journey into the furry VR world takes us from Kentucky to Tuscany to a giant replica of the 20th Century Studios logo — all simulacra, of course. Along the way, we learn about the history of the furry fandom as an internet vanguard, and how VR served as a lifeline for this community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout our voyage, we make new friends and take in the sites.

My evening with the furries that began in a Louisville basement concludes at a bowling alley dance party — the batteries on my Quest 2 are nearly depleted. As my new friends hasten off to the colorful dance floor, I take one more look around: A gaggle of anthropomorphic animals are throwing each other down bowling lanes; a man with the head of a Fiji water bottle draws flowers in the air; and a trio of dogs are rollerskating in a circle, laughing and barking.

Just Write It! (Laura Miller, The New Yorker, April 2011)

What do creators and fans owe to each other? Social media and convention culture have made creators more accessible than ever — especially in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy — and with that comes the pressure for creators to stay in constant conversation with their fans and produce and maintain a supplemental “brand.”

Miller goes deep on the impassioned fanbase of author George R.R. Martin and his A Song of Ice and Fire series (this article originally dropped a week before Game of Thrones premiered on HBO), the joy of building community and the pressure of maintaining it, and the frustration and hostility directed at Martin when fans had to wait years for him to finish the latest installment of the series. It’s an incisive look at the pull between fan and customer, and what happens when fans base their expectations of a creator based on what came before.

Martin told me that many of his fans assume that he is as meticulous a world-builder as Tolkien was. “They write to say, ‘I’m fascinated by the languages. I would like to do a study of High Valyrian’” — an ancient tongue. ‘Could you send me a glossary and a dictionary and the syntax?’ I have to write back and say, ‘I’ve invented seven words of High Valyrian.’”

Kamala Harris Dropped Out, But The #KHive And Stan Culture Aren’t Leaving Politics (Ryan Brooks, Buzzfeed, December 2019)

Fandom dynamics can have consequences beyond merely propelling one’s faves up the streaming charts: in one famed recent example, Twitter-using K-pop stans were credited with sabotaging a Trump rally in Tulsa. And in the exhausting 2020 Democratic presidential primary, stan culture and impassioned communities coalesced around their favorite candidates and forged online communities to try to push their candidate forward. While the current political moment makes the 2020 Democratic primary already feel almost quaint, Brooks chronicles the relationship between candidates’ campaigns and their most fervent, most Online, supporters, and contexualizes why and how their support manifests in this particular manner.

The relationship has become symbiotic. When I talked to stans, they told me about their interactions with campaign staffers who solicited their feedback. When I talked to campaign staffers, they sometimes spoke warily about off-the-rails grassroots campaigns and urged that they couldn’t control everything their fans do online. But everyone is watching what happens on Twitter, where press narratives take shape.

Lifelong Quests! Lawsuits! Feuds! A Super-Serious Story About Cereal (Hallie Lieberman, Narratively, March 2020)

When the world is a nightmare, there are few things more satisfying to read about than low-stakes beef in an ultra-niche hobby that you would otherwise know nothing about. But this colorful deep dive into the sugary frenzy of vintage cereal box collecting is about far more than highly specific enthusiast scuffles. After the initial gleeful haze of remembering the Ghostbusters cereal comes a nutritionally dense and satisfying feature touching on the dynamics of communities forged by nostalgia, sense memory, and the corporate symbiosis between fandom “influencers” and the companies that make the products they love. All part of a balanced breakfast read.

The intensity of the Dimock-Bruce feud may seem odd to outsiders, but it begins to make sense when you consider how much of this subculture is built around nostalgia. Cereal can be a connection to the past. Eating a bowl of a decades-old classic, like Lucky Charms or Cinnamon Toast Crunch, can be a Proustian experience, with one bite of a sugary square mixed with milk bringing back a rush of happy childhood emotions.

The Last Fanfiction I Ever Wrote (Hannah Cohen, The Offing, November 2020)

There is a large gap in my reading life between being a Very Online Child who browsed fanfiction.net for Redwall-inspired epics — wherein bright-eyed young writers conjured brawny otter original characters to fight alongside Martin the Warrior — and quarantine, when I began spending inordinate amounts of time on the sprawling fanfiction repository known as Archive of Our Own, or AO3. My interim dalliances with fanfic were mostly for irony’s sake (think giving dramatic readings of My Immortal), but in seeking a rabbit hole to escape down while the world was going to shit, I learned to stop worrying and love fanfiction.

There’s a lot I love about this piece by Hannah Cohen, but in particular I love her assertion that fanfiction is fiction at its core. On AO3, writers write hundreds of thousands of words — the equivalent of multiple novels — and share them with the world, simply for the love of writing and engaging with a work they adore.

I never want to forget the feeling of writing for the sake of creative freedom. I want a release from the productivity mill. No more racing to the top of the pyramid writing scheme. We are living during a fucking pandemic in a world on fire, so if I want to write self-indulgent bullshit, I’ll write self-indulgent bullshit.

***

Lindsay Eanet is a Chicago-based writer and editor whose work has been featured in Broccoli Magazine, Autostraddle, Serious Eats, Block Club Chicago, and others. She once wrote and ran a Dungeons & Dragons adventure based on the episode of Making the Band where Diddy made the band walk across New York to buy cheesecake. But enough about her, let’s talk about you.

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By Hallel Yadin

Countless philosophers have posited that what we keep determines what we remember. The material we deliberately preserve provides insight into what we value, and what we expect to value in an unknowable future. This raises the question: Why do we keep what we keep? Who decides? And, how does what we keep affect what we collectively remember in practice? If what we collect determines what we remember, we have to be mindful about what we’re willing to lose. These are questions I consider regularly as an archivist.

This is a collection of articles about the objects — and the people collecting and interpreting them — which constitute our shared material heritage. “Archive” is loosely defined here: Some of these are formal institutional archives, while others are public Flickr albums or simple websites maintained by a single person. But all of them are in some way lost or inaccessible. What we let slip away is just as instructive as what we labor to collect.

The Day the Music Burned (Jody Rosen, The New York Times Magazine, June 2019)

Appraisal is the process by which archivists decide if an item or a collection fits into their repository’s collection. Many factors go into this, but one of them is whether the material in question is archival at all — is it rare, or even unique? And if so, is it original? There’s a lot wrapped up in the mystique of the original, but in this article, Jody Rosen offers some exceptionally practical reasons that originals are valuable. Investigating the 2008 Universal Studios fire, which destroyed tens of thousands of music masters, Rosen’s article examines how this loss was also a destruction of our shared culture.  

The result is a crisis, a slow-motion assault on our musical heritage that is poorly understood by many within the record industry, to say nothing of the public at large. Had a loss of comparable magnitude to the Universal fire occurred at a different cultural institution — say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art — there might have been wider awareness of the event, perhaps some form of accountability. Yet the conservation mission faced by record labels may be no less vital than those of museums and libraries. Recorded music is arguably America’s great artistic patrimony, our supreme gift to world culture. How should it be safeguarded? And by whom?

The People Trying to Save Scents From Extinction (Miguel Trancozo Travino, BBC Future, January 2020)

Scent is a fundamental element of our environments. It may seem impossible to archive, but Miguel Trancozo Travino explores projects that are attempting to do it. One graduate student is attempting to create an archive of scents, for instance, while a researcher and visual artist is creating “smellmaps” which interpret the scents of a landscape. As these projects demonstrate, it’s very possible to break scents down and record their component elements. The challenge lies in also capturing the human element, or what a scent means in context. There is a long-standing framework for preserving “intangible” cultural heritage, and researchers and artists working on scent projects argue that they are doing just that.

But why does a town’s smell matter? What valuable information is written into the odour of a city, street or building? It runs a lot deeper than just preserving a scent for its novelty, says Alex Rhys-Taylor of Goldsmiths University, who specialises in the multisensory experience of urban space. “I would say, through my research, that you can learn a lot about a city’s economy, a lot about its culture, through the sense of smell.”

The Queer Past Gets Deleted on eBay (Jesse Dorris, The New Yorker, August 2021)

Jesse Dorris prompts us to consider the “why” and “how” behind the material that never ends up in an archive at all. The history of archiving from ordinary people is mixed at best, and further complicated when the ordinary people in question are perceived as “deviant.” Records from marginalized groups are often collected by community archives, which are typically under-resourced compared to their more established counterparts. Sites like eBay are treasure troves for those records that may not be collected by traditional institutional archives. That means, though, that key historical material is vulnerable to the whims of a major corporation. 

This was put in stark relief when eBay banned the sale of “sexually oriented” materials, much of which was queer books, periodicals, photographs, and more. Dorris focuses on queer leather and kink publications, but the archival exclusion he discusses is true of many queer publications, whether they contain sexual content or are sexualized by virtue of being queer. As Dorris points out, the history at stake is of interest to more than just archivists and historians; curators, filmmakers, and other cultural workers draw from eBay as well, as do queer people trying to salvage their own historical legacies.

As marginalized communities become more assimilated into the mainstream, Johnson’s archive stands as “proof of who did it, what was done, and who was there.” But no one knows how much more of this history remains to be discovered and preserved. “My biggest fear,” Purchell said, “is that people who come into possession of this material will not know what to do with it. They won’t think it has value. And they’ll throw it in the trash.”

The Kept and the Killed (Erica X Eisen, The Public Domain Review, January 2022)

This is a fascinating investigation by Erica X Eisen of “killed” photographs from the U.S. Farm Security Administration’s attempt to document the Great Depression. Killed photographs were meant to be excluded from the collection and demarcated with a “merciless” hole punch through the middle. (Photographs were killed at the discretion of the project’s head, Roy Emerson Stryker, and it seems that most of the ones destroyed were redundancies of some sort. That said, a number of his colleagues — and photographers — felt that he killed with a little too much abandon.)

Eisen examines what was lost when the photographs were killed, and what we learn from the hole-punched pictures. Archival material doesn’t just tell the story of what it is representing. In other words, the FSA photographs provide historical clues about their subjects, but the objects themselves have a history as well. The visible efforts to obscure the objects add another layer to their history, one that is legible.

In the killed negatives, we find Barthes’ dictum literalized: it is the little hole or holes themselves that arrest our eyes and imagination. The strange contradiction at the heart of the killed negatives — as the very existence of this essay attests — is that in an important sense they weren’t killed: the hole-punched photos remain in the Library of Congress, preserved by Stryker himself, and the Pittsburgh Photography Library images deemed unfit for the archives have instead come to comprise their own separate archive in the same building, a sort of Salon des Refusés … In the subtle but unmistakable way that Stryker’s puncture marks reveal the three-dimensional negative from which each two-dimensional image is printed, they call our attention to the fact that a photograph is a physical object and a fragile one at that.

The Brink of Erasure (Narayani Basu, Contingent Magazine, July 2021)

Archives and power, especially state power, have a complex reciprocal relationship. Narayani Basu explores the challenges of doing research at the National Archives of India, where these two topics collide. These challenges — byzantine catalogs, an inscrutable internal language, a lack of access to materials — impact historians along with anyone whose field benefits from an understanding of the past. This highlights the fact that those who hold archives, and by extension knowledge, also hold power. State actors can wield this power in part by controlling who can access knowledge. 

This is by no means limited to India; for instance, the National Archives and Records Administration in the United States was set to close and sell the National Archives at Seattle, until a successful grassroots campaign reversed the decision. If the sale had gone through, it would have been a double whammy of sorts, because the National Archives at Seattle contains records transferred from the National Archives at Anchorage when that institution was shut down in 2016.

Uninhibited access to archives is — and should be — an essential characteristic of a democracy. There is much to glean from the study of the past. I say this not just with regard to history, but to politics, law, society, culture, economy, and science. Researchers who use an archive are usually from varied academic backgrounds. In itself, this brings a considerable nuance to an archive: of pluralism and diversity of interests. The records of past choices are proof of the fact that every decision has a consequence. Citizens of a democratic society hold the right to understand their past as well as the right to learn truths governments may find uncomfortable or contentious. In this sense, an archive holds a government and society accountable. It helps a people understand the motivations of previous public officials and the workings of older regimes. In its best form, then, a nation’s archive is much more than a keeper of its records and memories. It is a living testament to the many facets of national identity and history.

Who Will Save the Food Timeline? (Dayna Evans, Eater, July 2020)

Dayna Evans tells the story of a remarkable project by New Jersey librarian Lynne Olver. For decades, Olver single-handedly built the largest resource on food history on the internet, in direct response to the topics admirers asked her to research over the decades. This is a story about what access to historical materials looks like. It is one thing to amass a personal library of 2,300 books going back to the 17th century; it’s entirely another to make that  information public, legible, and useful. Evans explores the impact that the Food Timeline had on its users, from podcast hosts to home cooks. This is also a story about how precarious and unsustainable these undertakings often are. After Olver passed away in 2015, her family struggled to find somebody to maintain the Food Timeline. That is where the Eater story ends. Never fear, though — the project ended up finding a home at Virginia Tech University Libraries.

When you look past the Times Roman font and taupe background, the Food Timeline happens to be the single most comprehensive inventory of food knowledge on the internet, with thousands upon thousands of pages of primary sources, cross-checked research, and obsessively detailed food history presented in chronological order. Every entry on the Food Timeline, which begins with “water” in pre-17,000 B.C. and ends with “test tube burgers” in 2013, is sourced from “old cook books, newspapers, magazines, National Historic Parks, government agencies, universities, cultural organizations, culinary historians, and company/restaurant web sites.” 

What Are COVID Archivists Keeping for Tomorrow’s Historians? (Laura Spinney, Nature, December 2020)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been intensely researched and documented, especially in contrast to historical pandemics like the 1918 influenza outbreak. At Nature, Laura Spinney gives a good overview of COVID collecting efforts. What are 21st-century archivists collecting and saving? What are the risks and concerns of archiving, especially in our age of misinformation and an oversaturation of data? Spinney also touches on groups and countries that are less likely to have the resources to collect — and why.

Others are storing souvenirs of people’s lived experience — video diaries, mask fashion, recordings of the quiet of locked-down streets. Or they’re salting away objects that the pandemic has rendered iconic: the signage around the lectern from which UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke to the press; a wooden spoon that a little girl broke while banging her family’s cooking pots in support of medical personnel. For the first time, a pandemic has triggered institutional plans for rapid-response collecting — an initiative pioneered by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (its virtual COVID-19 collection even includes a toilet roll).

Raiders of the Lost Web (Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic, October 2015)

The internet is big, and it may seem permanent, but the sheer prevalence of link rot suggests otherwise. Unless websites are actively archived, they are subject to be lost forever. However, web archiving is a complicated and expensive undertaking; even with the presence of major projects like the Internet Archive, a critical mass of material is lost every day. Adrienne LaFrance details how access to knowledge is, in some ways, knowledge itself, and how much is at stake when we misunderstand the internet as a stable entity.

The promise of the web is that Alexandria’s library might be resurrected for the modern world. But today’s great library is being destroyed even as it is being built. Until you lose something big on the Internet, something truly valuable, this paradox can be difficult to understand.

The Archivists of Extinction (Kate Wagner, The Baffler, October 2018)

How do you archive a landscape? Architectural historians and others interested in the built environment must rely on representations of their object of study. As Kate Wagner explains, the built environment around us changes more quickly than we may expect. Who is saving records of ordinary buildings, the ones where average people live their lives? As it turns out, at least in the case of America’s vanishing Kmart, it’s Flickr users.

This is the ice-cold reality of the retail death spiral. It’s why people feel the need to collect motel postcards, share old photos of their hometowns, and document the finale of Kmart. The end time is always lurking; the only thing you can do is take pictures and post stories before it happens. There is no alternative, there is no saving your childhood home after it’s caught in the crosshairs of the developer; there is no salvaging the hotel ballroom where you held your wedding reception; there is no rescuing the Sears where you worked your first job. These photographs and stories are not celebrations of great architecture, but they are an epilogue born of existing and preemptive grief for beloved objects and spaces ground up in the gears of money and progress. For these populist archivists, the project would not be so urgent if there were a scintilla of hope for a future without the ceaseless, inevitable ruination of so many landscapes, buildings, and cultural artifacts.

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Hallel Yadin is an archivist and writer in New York City. 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands