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

As I write this, there are two episodes left. Soon, there will be none. Although Jesse Armstrong’s decision to end Succession with its fourth season is doubtless wise — it’s a relief to know the show won’t dwindle past its sell-by date like so many other cultural behemoths — the thought of no more new installments to feverishly anticipate, and then devour, remains a deeply depressing one.

It’s in the very nature of episodic television, where you watch a group of characters face a distinct set of challenges week after week, year after year, that you come to care about the people you’re watching. After all, if you didn’t care, then why would you keep watching? That’s what I tell myself, anyway, whenever I’ve found myself worryingly invested in the lives of the Roys, the deeply dysfunctional family at the heart of the TV megahit. 

The Roys, by just about any measure, are awful people. The owners of a gargantuan right-wing media empire, perennially battling over who will inherit the kingdom from their ailing octogenarian patriarch, their concerns are borne of avarice and pride and immense self-interest. Almost every relationship depicted on the show is a transactional one, and any brief flicker of kindness is quick to be extinguished. We’re left in little doubt that none of the four adult Roy kids would have amassed any power under their own steam; that they’re afflicted with varying degrees of ineptitude has proven no barrier to their standing. 

Nevertheless, I’ve become fascinated by, and even — somewhat guiltily — fond of these dreadful, ruinous nepo babies. However much they wound each other and the poor souls unlucky enough to cross their paths, the richness with which they’re drawn by the virtuosic writers and played by the spectacular cast exposes the warped vulnerability beneath their obscene privilege. Succession is deeply, lavishly funny, and peppered with some of the silliest and most creative uses of profanity that television has ever hosted, but the whole series is built on a foundation of tremendous sadness. These people may have all the money in the world, but as the last four seasons have shown us in vivid, lacerating detail, their cold, loveless lives inspire little envy. 

Guessing how this whole internecine struggle will ultimately resolve feels like a futile task, although it hasn’t stopped me from doing so. When a happy ending for any of the show’s core characters would likely be disastrous for the world in general, it’s hard to even know who or what to root for. 

So in an attempt to escape pointless prognostication, I’ve been thinking about a different aspect of its massive success over the last five years — the many astute, amusing, and illuminating articles that it has inspired. After all, great writing begets great writing, so it stands to reason that the commentary around Succession would be some of the best around. Here are just five of the wonderful pieces written during the course of its phenomenal run, covering the show’s style, substance, and real-world inspiration. 

Twenty Per Cent Less Hope: The Very English Satire of Succession (Hannah Mackay, Sight and Sound, January 2020)

Succession is an American-set series with a largely British writers’ room, and Hannah Mackay’s essay posits that the push and pull between those broadly opposing national sensibilities is one of the chief factors in its success. Mackay describes how Succession has never followed the U.S. network tradition “of depict[ing] power in its most potent, aphrodisiacal form,” instead hewing more to the U.K.’s innate cynicism by depicting the frighteningly influential Roys as “inept, fragile, [and] lost.” She examines that theme through an aesthetic lens; with both the Roys’ sartorial choices and the spaces they inhabit exhibiting a distinct lack of character, this is not a show that makes being fabulously wealthy look all that fabulous.

Three exhausting years after Mackay’s piece was published, it’s fair to say that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are feeling far warier of the powerful than they were in January 2020. Still, positioning Succession as the product of utter disillusionment with the one percent is, if anything, more on point now than it was back then.

By contrast, nobody in Succession dresses well, a sign of the show’s refusal to sign up to traditional US TV aesthetics when it comes to depicting wealth and power – and a tribute to the show’s much-lauded costume designer Michelle Matland (it’s famously much harder to dress shows in which people have bad taste, or no taste, than it is to dress shows in which people make flamboyant and creative choices, which are more fun). Everybody in Succession has the means to dress well — but nobody has the confidence to make a flamboyant choice, sartorially or otherwise. Stepping out is too dangerous.

As the UK and US drift ever further into uncharted political territory, it has begun to feel that there are no longer any consequences to anything. The US president has been accused of sexual harassment by more than 20 women, and yet he is still the president. Both he and his British counterpart continue, so far, unhindered by the growing whiff of scandal and corruption. We can end up feeling like Reggie Perrin ourselves, running pointlessly into the sea to make a point nobody wants to hear. But at least we have Succession to watch while we’re doing it.

The Four F’s of Trauma Response and the Four Roy Kids of Succession (Emily St. James, Vox, November 2021)

However much their gargantuan privilege and venomous behavior patently suggests that they don’t deserve our pity, to be a fan of Succession is to find yourself, again and again, feeling sympathy for some immensely rich devils. 

Emily St. James had already written an essay for Vox about how the show depicts the effects of growing up with an abusive parent, and here she lays out how the four Roy kids’ dynamics with their father demonstrate a typology known as the four Fs of trauma response: fight, flight, fawn, and freeze. She also discusses how the show’s love of wide shots enables Succession to more fully display how the family drama affects and discomfits innocent bystanders. 

Kendall, meanwhile, takes and takes and takes his father’s abuse, but eventually, he gets frustrated and fights back, as he’s been doing all season. He’s the most ineffectual of his siblings in this episode, but there are still a few moments where his “fight” impulse engages: when he enters the family’s suite and tries to bully them into holding everything together, for example, or when he gets onstage to read the names of the victims of the cruise line scandal that’s plaguing the company. Kendall likes to make himself the biggest, easiest target — a fairly classic “fight” response that can also be attuned to protecting younger siblings.

After all, Succession’s wide shots often capture the random other people who end up trapped in a room with the Roys, forced to watch them play out their elaborate psychodramas. And most of the time, those other people are nowhere near as rich as the Roys, because who possibly could be? Their reactions to what the Roys say and do serve to deepen our understanding of the family’s many dysfunctions.

On “Succession,” Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke (Michael Schulman, The New Yorker, December 2021)

When Michael Schulman’s New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong was published just as the third season of Succession was drawing to a close, it seemed like the only thing anyone on the internet was talking about. That was not good news for Strong. 

Although not an out-and-out hit piece, it’s still difficult to read Schulman’s vivid, engrossing profile without wincing. It paints Strong as someone who at best approaches the role of Kendall Roy with a full-throatedness that borders on the unhealthy, and at worst applies a self-serious dedication to his craft that makes him almost impossible to work with. The profile is littered with painfully specific details about Strong’s intense acting philosophy — Strong calls his technique “identity diffusion” — along with quotes from cast and crew members who remain unconvinced of the technique’s necessity.

Strong, who is now forty-two, has the hangdog face of someone who wasn’t destined for stardom. But his mild appearance belies a relentless, sometimes preening intensity. He speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence, especially when talking about acting, which he does with a monk-like solemnity. “To me, the stakes are life and death,” he told me, about playing Kendall. “I take him as seriously as I take my own life.” He does not find the character funny, which is probably why he’s so funny in the role.

Last year, he played the Yippie activist Jerry Rubin in Aaron Sorkin’s film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” While shooting the 1968 protest scenes, Strong asked a stunt coördinator to rough him up; he also requested to be sprayed with real tear gas. “I don’t like saying no to Jeremy,” Sorkin told me. “But there were two hundred people in that scene and another seventy on the crew, so I declined to spray them with poison gas.”

Misery Loves Matrimony: The Beautiful, Bleak Science Behind ‘Succession’ Weddings (Alyssa Bereznak, The Ringer, April 2023)

Succession consistently questions whether any of its core characters are even capable of love — and yet there’s no set piece the show prefers to a wedding. Three of the four seasons have plotted their most vital events around these seemingly damned unions, the fairytale promise of happily ever after making a caustic backdrop to palace intrigue and corporate skullduggery. And with the Roys having almost limitless funds at their disposal, their weddings are always eye-wateringly extravagant.

In her piece for The Ringer, Alyssa Bereznak digs into the role these opulent affairs play on Succession, talking to the production designers who “adopted a role as a Roy family wedding planner” and exploring how the weddings are often our best shot at gleaning details from the Roy kids’ little-mentioned but tumultuous upbringings.

Just as far-flung family members fill in the blanks of the Roy progeny’s upbringing, so does the sprawling property chosen for Shiv’s wedding. “The house, Eastnor house, was, in the story line, a special one of the family’s country estates,” said Newman, who decorated the set for the episodes “Pre-nuptial” and “Nobody Is Ever Missing.” As Connor recounts to Willa when they arrive, one of the homes became a “thorn in Caroline’s side” because she was screwed out of inheriting it. Elsewhere, Caroline gestures at portraits of all of her “disreputable slave-owning ancestors.” “In Eastnor Castle there’s wonderful bits of art,” Newman said. “Even wallpapers and the furnishing, carpets and rugs and things like this, nothing is new. Everything has a personality, has a history and a provenance. … That’s the key, is that it’s layered.”

Inside Rupert Murdoch’s Succession Drama (Gabriel Sherman, Vanity Fair, April 2023)

While creator Jesse Armstrong has cited various inspirations for the Roy family, the one that comes up the most often by far is the Murdochs. From an elderly patriarch who refuses to acknowledge his mortality, to the two sons and a daughter battling over the crown, to the noxiousness of their right-wing media empire and its influence over a disturbingly demagogic presidential candidate, it’s hard not to see their shadow looming over Succession. 

Though Sherman’s piece contains only glancing mentions of the show (amusingly, one of the conditions of Rupert Murdoch’s recent settlement agreement from fourth wife Jerry Hall was that she wasn’t allowed to pitch story ideas to the writers), the details of how running a multibillion dollar company is so regularly entwined with the petty squabbles of a troubled family demonstrate that, despite its more ridiculous twists and turns, Succession has been far truer to life than one might think. 

He long wanted one of his three children from his second wife, Anna—Elisabeth, 54, Lachlan, 51, and James, 50—to take over the company one day. Murdoch believed a Darwinian struggle would produce the most capable heir. “He pitted his kids against each other their entire lives. It’s sad,” a person close to the family said. Elisabeth was by many accounts the sharpest, but she is a woman, and Murdoch subscribed to old-fashioned primogeniture. She quit the family business in 2000 and launched her own phenomenally successful television production company. Lachlan shared Murdoch’s right-wing politics and atavistic love for newsprint and their homeland, Australia. “Lachlan was the golden child,” the person close to the family said. But Murdoch worried that his easygoing son, who seemed happiest rock climbing, did not want the top job badly enough. 

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the U.K. She is a regular contributor to Paste Magazine and the BFI.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s very best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning—and keep up with all our picks by subscribing to our daily update.

• Longreads Newsletters
• Daily Updates

Everyone today is born with a kind of existential debt. From the moment you emerge, you’re in a space that belongs to someone else, and from then on, money is spent each day to give you access to the space you require to exist. Land ownership, and the accompanying system of sales and rentals, merely allows some people to make money by gatekeeping a resource that no more belongs to one of us than any of us. Economists call this “rent seeking,” and most of us call it “immoral.”

In Mont-Tremblant, the hotel nearest the starting line was the Ermitage du Lac, a rustic lodge nestled at the base of the stone footpath that bisects Mont-Tremblant’s candy-colored ski village, just a few hundred yards from the swim start on the shore of Lac Tremblant. There was a more luxurious hotel, the Fairmont, at the crest of the hill, but the Fairmont’s luxuries — spa services, swanky bar, fancy bathroom products — hold little appeal for the kind of people who spend their very limited leisure time competing in an Ironman. You’d have to schlep your gear all the way down that hill at 5 a.m.! That’s inefficient. That’s poor optimization. XC runs the way XCers like their businesses to run. For them, true luxury is everything in its right place, operating like clockwork.

Here are five standout pieces we read this week. You can always visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what other recommendations you may have missed.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. Meet the Lobbyist Next Door

Benjamin Wofford | WIRED | July 14th, 2022 | 5,000 words

A business feature that doubles as a horror story, Benjamin Wofford’s chilling piece could be the premise for a Black Mirror episode. Wofford profiles Urban Legend, a tech startup that has built “the Exchange,” an interface connecting advertisers looking to promote political ideologies with influencers ready to peddle for a price. Urban Legend’s CEO, Ory Rinat, who previously worked in the Trump White House, and his colleagues like to talk about trust, authenticity, and empowerment, but as Wofford skillfully shows, there’s no heart to their business model — there’s only a black hole, a moral vacuum. The dread of it all crept up on me as I read, which is a testament to the writing. Now excuse me while I go scream into the abyss. —SD

2. The Great Fiction of AI

Josh Dzieza | The Verge | July 20th, 2022 | 5,091 words

Could artificial intelligence help you write your next novel? Josh Dzieza dives into the world of AI-assisted genre fiction, and how independent authors are experimenting with tools powered by GPT-3 to write stories faster. Dzieza recounts Kindle novelist Jennifer Lepp’s experience with one such tool, Sudowrite, which, at first, generates strange and hilarious output. Eventually, as Lepp learns how to control the software’s quirks, she gets results that are more promising. But they are unsettling, too: When Lepp gives a finished chapter to her husband to read, he isn’t able to distinguish between her voice and the machine’s. Dzieza also talks with authors who view AI as a welcome disruption to the field, such as Joanna Penn, who envisions a future where writers will be left behind if they don’t embrace the technology. This is a fascinating read that explores ethics, creativity, and authorship, and is a complement to the stories in our reading list on the future of machine-written prose. I love the playful article design, too. —CLR

3. The Haves and the Have-Yachts

Evan Osnos | The New Yorker | July 18th, 2022 | 10,000 words

Inflation. Pandemic. Recession. Yet, since 2020, 573 more people have become billionaires — and the tres-comas club has seen its aggregate worth balloon by nearly $4 trillion. What do you do with all that money? Easy. You spend it on reminding people, as one interviewee memorably relates in this piece, that “I am in a different fucking category than you.” In this case, that means multi-hundred-foot, multi-hundred-million-dollar superyachts, the world of which Evan Osnos excavates over (exactly) 10,000 deliciously arch words. These aren’t just phallic manifestations of mind-boggling wealth. With their onboard IMAX theaters and 50-person staffs, they’re manifestations of the one thing their owners want desperately but can’t quite attain on land: absolute sovereignty. But while you and I and the rest of the hoi polloi might be seen as “ineligible visitors” to this ionosphere of luxury, that doesn’t mean that you’re not in for one hell of a read. —PR

4. What Counts as Seeing

Alice Wong and Ed Yong | Orion Magazine | July 12th, 2022 | 3,948 words

Are you as excited as I am to see these names side by side? Here, Wong and Yong engage in a wonderful conversation that celebrates the strange and unpredictable in nature and fosters empathy for all creatures. They discuss Yong’s books, the incredible senses of other organisms, and, in turn, the limits of our understanding for how rich and diverse the natural world really is. (I love the bit where Yong compares his dog going on a walk to sniff and pee on things as the pup’s version of checking his social media for the day.) As you’d expect, their dialogue is delightful and accessible, thanks to Wong’s ability to open people’s eyes to experiences that are not their own and Yong’s knack for explaining scientific and biological concepts in plain language. What a treat to read. —CLR

5. The 50 Greatest Fictional Deaths of All Time

Dan Kois (and Other Contributors) | Slate | July 20th, 2022 | 8,250 words

This list is so damn fun. Starting in 431 B.C. and progressing chronologically, it levels the cultural playing field, quoting passages from Beowulf and Macbeth while also reveling in the transgressive lyrics of “Goodbye Earl.” It reminded me of at least one brilliant cinematic death that I’d somehow forgotten — before using an inhaler, make sure it’s not a gun! — and made me tear up at its description of a groundbreaking storyline in Doonesbury. Like all the best GOAT lists, it also made me consider what I would include: one of the gruesome deaths in The Omen, Mr. Jingles’ demise and resurrection in The Green Mile, Alec’s murder in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (ooooh — or the raising of the black flag at the end!?). “We’ve made this list during a pandemic, as real-life death has stalked us all, more tangible than ever,” Dan Kois writes. “One of the many things art can do is to help us navigate the pitfalls of life, and there’s no deeper pitfall than the final one.” —SD

One boating guest told me about a conversation with a famous friend who keeps one of the world’s largest yachts. “He said, ‘The boat is the last vestige of what real wealth can do.’ What he meant is, You have a chef, and I have a chef. You have a driver, and I have a driver. You can fly privately, and I fly privately. So, the one place where I can make clear to the world that I am in a different fucking category than you is the boat.”

At OneZero, author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff asks: how much are the privileged allowed to use their wealth, fancy devices, and fully wired houses to insulate themselves from the troubles of today’s world?

The pool for my daughter wouldn’t have gotten here were it not for legions of Amazon workers behind the scenes, getting infected in warehouses or risking their health driving delivery trucks all summer. As with FreshDirect or Instacart, the externalized harm to people and places is kept out of sight. These apps are designed to be addictively fast and self-contained — push-button access to stuff that can be left at the front door without any human contact. The delivery people don’t even ring the bell; a photo of the package on the stoop automagically arrives in the inbox. Like with Thomas Jefferson’s ingenious dumbwaiter, there are no signs of the human labor that brought it.

Many of us once swore off Amazon after learning of the way it evades taxes, engages in anti-competitive practices, or abuses labor. But here we are, reluctantly re-upping our Prime delivery memberships to get the cables, webcams, and Bluetooth headsets we need to attend the Zoom meetings that now constitute our own work. Others are reactivating their long-forgotten Facebook accounts to connect with friends, all sharing highly curated depictions of their newfound appreciation for nature, sunsets, and family. And as we do, many of us are lulled further into digital isolation — being rewarded the more we accept the logic of the fully wired home, cut off from the rest of the world.

Read the story

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

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 |  9 minutes (2,261 words)

The image that struck me most was the empty piazza. That Italian square — I believe it was in Venice — with no one in it. Maybe a bird or two. It looked inviting but also wholly unnatural. A city square is made for people, lots of people, people from everywhere. If people aren’t there, does it cease to be a square? I wondered the same thing about the Louvre and its tens of thousands of objects with no one to look at them — is it still a museum, or is it just a warehouse? I wondered about all those Berlin concert halls with no one to hear their music, all those Indian cinemas with no one to watch their films, all those crumbling ruins everywhere, standing there with no tourists to behold them or to record that beholding for everyone else. At this particular point in history, does art exist if we aren’t sharing it? 

By sharing I mean not only sharing a moment with the art itself, but also sharing the space with other people, and more literally, sharing all of that online — posting updates on Facebook, photos on Twitter, videos on TikTok, stories on Instagram. This kind of “sharing” is constriction rather than expansion, regressing back to the word’s etymological root of “cutting apart.” This contortion of a selfless act into a selfish one is symptomatic of a society that expects everyone to fend for themselves: Sharing online is not so much about enlightening others as it is about spotlighting yourself. It’s impossible to disconnect the images of those now-empty spots from the continuous splash of reports about the coronavirus pandemic gouging the global economy. In America, the economy is the culture is the people. Americans are not citizens; they are, as the president recently put it, “consumers.” And on the web, consuming means sharing that consumption with everyone else. That the images suddenly being shared are empty exposes the big con — that in reality, no one has really been sharing anything. That social distancing is nothing new.

* * *

Even before Hollywood started postponing all of its blockbusters and talk shows started filming without audiences and festivals started to dismantle and bands canceled their tours and sports seasons suspended indefinitely, the public was turning on cultural institutions run by a subset of morally dubious elites. In December 2018, protesters at the Whitney Museum of American Art burned sage (“smoke that chokes the powerful but smells sweet to us”) and forced the departure of the board’s vice chairman, Warren Kanders, the CEO of the company that manufactures tear gas that has reportedly been used at the border. Two months later, artist Nan Goldin, who had a three-year opioid addiction, led a “die-in” at the Guggenheim over the museum’s financial ties to the Sackler family, the Purdue Pharma founders who many hold responsible for the opioid crisis. In the U.K., the Tate Modern and Tate Britain also dropped the Sacklers, while climate activists pulled a Trojan Horse into the courtyard of the British Museum to protest the sponsorship of an exhibition by oil and gas company BP. As performance artist Andrea Fraser, known for her institutional critiques, wrote in 2012, “It is clear that the contemporary art world has been a direct beneficiary of the inequality of which the outsized rewards of Wall Street are only the most visible example.” 

If that recent exhibition of impressionist paintings seemed oddly familiar, or that ballet you just saw appears to keep coming back around, or that one classical musician looks like he’s hired nonstop, it’s not your imagination. It’s a function of that exclusive control, of the same artists, the same works, the same ideas being circulated (“shared”?) by the same gatekeepers over and over and over again. “Far from becoming less elitist, ever-more-popular museums have become vehicles for the mass-marketing of elite tastes and practices,” wrote Fraser in Artforum in 2005. Which is why certain names you wouldn’t think would cross over — from contemporary artist Jeff Koons to art-house filmmaker Terrence Malick — are more widely known than others. According to The New York Times in 2018, only two of the top 10 all-white art museum chairs in the country are women. And almost half of the 500-plus people on the boards of the 10 most popular American museums have become rich off the finance industry, while many others owe their wealth to oil and gas; the small group that is responsible for exploiting the world is the same group that is responsible for its enlightenment. They determine which pieces of art are bought, how they are curated, and how they are disseminated — theirs are the tastes and practices we are sharing.

With this “increasingly monopolized market and increasing parochialism,” German artist Hito Steyerl explained last year, “a sense of international perspective gets lost, which is a wider sign of rampant isolationism.” And this doesn’t just apply to high arts, but “low” arts as well; movies, music, television, theater, books have all been corporatized to the extreme, with huge amounts of money going to a few while the majority lose out. This is how you get a never-ending Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Leslie Harris — the first African American woman to win a Dramatic Feature Competition special jury prize at Sundance for writing, directing, and producing her 1993 film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. — still can’t get a second feature off the ground. 

While public funding for the arts has plummeted since the ’80s, however, the web has increasingly encouraged public sharing of its consumption on social media. Online, we look more traveled, more cultured, more inclusive than ever before. And it’s difficult to argue that wider access to art, that our increasing proximity to foreign cultures, could be wrong. But if you look closer, you notice that all this connectivity is largely superficial — it is heavily prescribed and strongly overlaps. The latter-day bourgeoisie all travel to Portugal at the same time, all visit the same Marina Abramovic exhibit, all watch the same Agnes Varda films, attend the same Phoenix tour. They clamor less to immerse themselves than to record and reproduce everything they have experienced, their distraction expressed by the ever-growing collection of imagery memorializing all the different experiences they’ve had — the same kind of different as everyone else’s.

“An idea of progressive internationalism,” Steyerl told Ocula magazine, “is progressively abandoned or gets snowed under constant waves of affect and outrage manipulated by monopolist platforms, and solidarity is swapped for identity.” In other words, all of this supposed sharing is really a tech-sanctioned performance of capitalism to showcase one’s value in a toxic din of competing consumers. The more photogenic the better, which means the less nuance, the better; think the Museum of Ice Cream, which costs almost 40 bucks for access to photo-friendly adult playgrounds — “environments that foster IRL interaction and URL connections” — like a “Sprinkle Pool” of multi-colored biodegradable bits you can’t actually eat. And the more recognizable the look (see: the retro aesthetic of any teen Netflix show), the more heady words like “nostalgia” become a proxy for depth that isn’t actually there. As we speed online through Steyerl’s distracted fragmentary so-called “junktime,” we quickly compound what she dubs “circulationism,” propagating images with the most power, giving them even more power. Standing next to the Mona Lisa, for instance, offers greater token currency among a wider set than standing next to anything by Kara Walker, who speaks to a more immersed but smaller audience. Either way, online, currency is king.

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.

Sign up now

Culture has, above all, become a mark of personal wealth. When Americans share their experiences on social media, they are sharing their cultural capital with a neoliberal society that defines them by it. This is a result of the culture war Fraser recognized several years ago, which “has effectively identified class privilege and hierarchy with cultural and educational rather than economic capital.” But, again, economics ultimately rules. While the poor may be allowed to briefly occupy the space of cultural capital, it is the rich who own it, who offer it up for limited consumption.

Yet the desperation to share, to express one’s value in a world that is so intent on devaluing us all, is deeply human. Which is why you get people Photoshopping themselves onto famous backdrops, which, from a cultural capital perspective, is no different from being there — on social media a photograph is a photograph, and the real Sistine Chapel looks the same as the Etsy wallpaper reproduction. People have always consumed art partly for the cultural capital rather than just the personal enrichment, but now the goal is to broadcast the enrichment itself to the public: sharing one’s consumption of the aura has priority over one’s actual consumption of the aura. Though a hierarchy persists even here. The authentic art consumer, the one who actually experiences the work in person, looks down upon the forger. As Walter Benjamin wrote, the aura of a piece of art is tied to its presence, which can’t be replicated. Which is to say the essence of art can only be experienced through the art itself — a picture can’t recreate it, but it does make its shared image more valuable. 

It’s apt that right now, in the midst of a pandemic, the popularity of a cultural site can kill and that virtual tours are being encouraged over actual ones. What better way to illustrate that our increasingly insular art world has not in fact connected us at all, but has done the opposite? As Steyerl noted in e-flux magazine in 2015, the Louvre, that model of national culture, was a “feudal collection of spoils” before revolutionaries turned it into a public museum, “the cultural flagship of a colonial empire that tried to authoritatively seed that culture elsewhere, before more recently going into the business of trying to create franchises in feudal states, dictatorships, and combinations thereof.” Those with the means flock to symbols of elitism like this, not to widen their perspective in solidarity with the world, not to connect with a community of strangers, but to bolster their own value locally by sharing the encounter online. This is not globalism; this is the neoliberal stand-in for it.

All of that foot traffic, all of that online diffusion, is an expression of how we have commodified the individual consumption of art to the point that it looks like we are sharing it with others. We aren’t. We are instead dutifully promoting ourselves as valuable consumers in the capitalist community we are complicit in perpetuating. “It’s not a question of inside or outside, or the number and scale of various organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art,” wrote Fraser in Artforum. “It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution.”

* * *

One of the last movies I saw in the cinema before they started closing down was The Invisible Man. It was a perfect example of how a public screening can tell you what streaming cannot — in real time, you can gauge by the reactions around you whether or not it will be a hit. As with certain art installations, you are experiencing not only the art, but also simultaneously others’ experience with it. In that theater, we screamed and laughed and sat agog together. It was a spark of community that extinguished the moment the lights lifted. A few weeks later, these same strangers who shared that moment of emotion together, headed to supermarkets to empty out toilet roll aisles, buy up all the disinfectant, and clear out the fresh meat despite a collective need for it. These same strangers who in concert cheered on an oppressed heroine, went on to unashamedly side-eye the Asians in their community. Individuals in North American society can occasionally partake in a cultural experience with their neighbors, but in the end it’s to exhibit their own counterfeit edification. It’s telling that the big tech these individuals ultimately share their consumption on — Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr, Instagram — rarely funds the arts.

Which brings us back to those empty images from the start of this essay. Proliferating photographs of abandoned culture, of objects ignored, confront the hollowness of online sharing. Social media implies connection, but the context of its shares is as important as the context of art’s production and neither can be divorced from the hierarchies in which they reside. No wonder our meagre individual expressions of value dictated by capitalist enterprise fit perfectly within a capitalist enterprise that profits off our inability to ever sate ourselves. The only way to really share — with art, with each other — is to remove sharing from this construct. The only way to really connect — to support a collective of artists, to support a collective of human beings — is to distance ourselves from the misguided values we have internalized.

“At its most utopian, the digital revolution opens up a new dematerialized, deauthored, and unmarketable reality of collective culture,” writes Claire Bishop in Artforum. Under a worldwide pandemic, we see a move toward this — individuals freely leaking their cultural subscriptions, artists offering performances for nothing, even institutions waiving fees for access to their virtual collections. While the vulnerability spreading across America right now is ordinarily framed as weakness in the landscape of capitalist bravado, it is central to real sharing and offers a rare chance to dismantle the virulent elitism that has landed us here. It’s unfortunate that it takes a dystopia, a global interruption of the systems in place, to see what a utopia can be — one in which sharing is about the creation and cultivation of community, a reality that only exists outside the one we have built.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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

Michael Mount | Longreads | Month 2019 | 25 minutes (6,236 words)

The home I moved into was not what you might associate with Martha’s Vineyard: it wasn’t a sweeping palatial estate near the ocean with views of crispy white foam. It was a simple shingled house tucked far in the woods, sitting in a rustic subdivision near a graveyard and just beyond the commercial centers of the Island, with power lines cutting an artery through its backyard. I schlepped my things inside, bubbling with optimism about what my year of rest and revelation would bring. My housemate was a 70-year-old man who helped me move my luggage while screaming at the Patriots game every time he walked by. It wasn’t until the fourth quarter that he asked questions.

“Most people don’t move out here until May,” he said. “What are you running away from?”

“Just New York.”

“I don’t blame you,” he said, laughing.

It was September of 2013 and I had left everything in Brooklyn. All of the carefully assembled Ikea furniture. My job. It all seemed to recede behind me on that final glimpse from the ferry that morning as I watched Woods Hole, Massachusetts, shrinking to a pinhole. All of the chaos and the heartbreak of summer in New York was like a muted roar — Facebook would remind me, but I had every reason to forget.

Some families have houses on Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t. My friend from home (home is a distant place) had moved to the Island last year to work full time for an agricultural non-profit. I did not know her well but her suggestion came to me in a time of need:

“If you hate New York so much,” she said, “you should move out to the Island for a winter and write your book. There are tons of writers out here.”

I was 24 and as weightless as dandelion molt. Leaving a job meant nothing. My longest relationship had been eight months long. I knew one person on Martha’s Vineyard and — it seemed — only a few more in New York. It hardly felt like a sacrifice. Those in New York whom I told about my plan expressed two contrasting perspectives: “Why would you do that?” and “I’m so jealous.” I chose to listen to only the latter.

It only took two trips to the car to carry all my things into the old man’s house. He seemed fine with me renting the room for next to nothing — if anything he was enthused to continue renting past Labor Day, to have company at the end of the season.

That evening we watched Tom Brady smear the Jets. During commercial breaks he fiddled with a small police scanner sitting beside his armchair; there were distant calls for drunk driving or speeding incidents. When it was time to eat he walked slowly to the kitchen and boiled two hot dogs, piling them on a paper plate.

“No dishes this way,” he said. “Bachelor life.”

***

I started a job at a famous bakery you’ve probably heard of or even have a t-shirt from — it’s become emblematic of summer life on the Cape. The manager asked me if I had experience and I told her I’d worked at a bakery when I was in college. She let out a pensive sigh and swiveled in her chair, procuring a w-9.

The off-season economy mainly consists of a few jobs sustaining the year-round population. The fabulous summer lawn parties had ended. The seasonal workers had drifted away like confetti, headed to Thailand with twenty thousand dollars in their pockets, back to college, or to ski patrol jobs out West. Only the necessary workers — doctors, nurses, teachers, cops and carpenters — remained on the Island. Them, and the bakers.

“They put me in this office right next to the bathroom vent,” the bakery manager said, throwing up her arms.

Her office was a Kafke-esque tribute to bureaucracy — towering stacks of tax documents cascading into piles of yellowing recipes, a single small Microsoft desktop buried under all the paper.

“Do you think they’re trying to tell me something?” she asked, spinning around.

While I was filling out my employment verification, a small fight broke out in the front of the restaurant because someone didn’t realize our donuts weren’t gluten free. The manager seemed uninterested, and turned back to me.

“You start next week,” she said. And then as if by after-thought: “Why did you move out here in the middle of the off-season?”

“I was thinking about writing a book,” I said.

“Oh, one of those,” she said. “You know David McCullough lives here?”

“Who’s that?”

“David McCullough?” she said, scoffing. “He’s a famous writer.”

“What did he write?”

She paused for a moment.

“I don’t know.”

***

Fame and celebrity seemed to loom large. Islanders talked about conversations with and sightings of celebrities from the summer in the way that tribal elders weather myths through constant telling. The summer stories loom well into the fall, growing in magnitude with every reiteration.

But I saw not a single celebrity that first month. In fact, I hardly saw anyone at all. To get to work I walked through a graveyard, conversing with the dead Mayhews and Athearns and Allens, the old families who had come out to the Island and colonized it in sprawling family trees. My shift began in the evening, so it was dark by the time I made it through the rows of dead.

The Bakery seemed to employ only misfits and second-chancers, people who had failed career endeavors or been fired from other restaurants. Bam, my supervisor, was a stoner who claimed to have the largest DVD collection on the Island because the drugs he ordered from Silk Road (the now defunct dark web site) always came in DVD cases — less detectable that way. He had given up that career, however, after a horrendous acid trip that ended in hospitalization and shots of Thorazine. Anthony, the head baker, was a recovering alcoholic with a Karate passion. For hours he would silently tend to the sourdough starter and challah, his big hands braiding it artfully. Melvin, the dishwasher, looked like a career bodybuilder. He labored to walk, his gigantic body tight and lumbering.

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.

Sign up now

The life cycle of yeast dictated our eight-hour shifts. We mostly moved in silence, blasting NPR until 9pm, then classic rock until midnight. We produced everything in bulk: hundreds of donuts, dozens of loaves of bread, racks of cookies. We consumed flour by the barrel, yeast by the pound, chocolate one giant bag at a time. The industrial mixer twisted up 60 pounds of buoyant, golden dough and I cut it into what became hundreds of floating fritters. As the low notch on the totem pole, I started at the deep fryer, fishing the donuts out of hot oil. Everyone has to start somewhere.

We were technically allowed one break per shift, but after the manager — the thin woman with the bathroom office — left at 6pm we had free reign of the world. As long as the work got done, we could smoke as much weed as we wanted in the parking lot, which is exactly what we did.

On my first night I recall eating a donut in the darkening parking lot, listening to Melvin, sitting across from me on an overturned bucket of icing, describe his infatuation with the bowl of chowder in his hand.

“Best thing on the menu,” he said. “I would shoot it in my veins if I could.”

He knew, and didn’t care, that the clam chowder came in a bag, shipped straight from the Sysco factory in Houston, Texas. There was something emblematic about the flagship bakery of Martha’s Vineyard selling Texan chowder to New Englanders at a premium. But we all wanted to believe in the storied legacy of the Island, so we were willing to swallow the myth.

***

Martha’s Vineyard is nearly 25 miles wide at its widest, or about twice as wide as the length of Manhattan. Though the island loses surface area every year to erosion and hurricanes, it’s still 89 square miles, roughly the same as metropolitan Boston. It’s significantly larger than Washington D.C. (68 square miles) and Miami (55 square miles).

It’s easy to think of an island as a small, claustrophobic place, but Martha’s Vineyard is expansive and seemed to constantly yield secret roads and beaches. There are six small towns within it, and far more forested acreage than coastline. Within those fields of grain and old forests are hundreds of dormant vacation homes inhabited in the off-season by caretakers and Islanders. Some of them labored away the cold months at minimum-wage jobs while living in $10 million homes.

Dukes County (the single county of the Island) is the site of homes for Larry David, Jake Gyllenhaal, Spike Lee, Amy Schumer and many others. It’s the emblematic vacation destination for democratic presidents. It’s the site of Ted Kennedy’s famous Chappaquiddick murder — where a boozy night ended with a young woman drowning in a senator’s Oldsmobile. But the poverty of the Island isn’t revealed until the summer dissolves away and the service industry is laid bare.

In the vernacular of the Island,wash ashores (pronounced washashores, as one word) are migrant laborers like me who moved out for a season or for an extended period of time. Islanders were born here. Everyone else is a tourist. Custies. Visitors. Ferry trash. They landed at Oak Bluffs and Edgartown and bought the t-shirt that, when worn back on the mainland, proudly proclaimed “I’ve been there.” To the Islanders, all the scrubs who come over on the ferry are the same. It doesn’t matter how much money you bring — if you came over in the summer, you’re categorically the same. Even if you’re a Kennedy, you’re still a visitor.

I followed the migration path of the wash ashores, scuttling from one house to another, living month-by-month in search of something cheaper. After spending September with the old man, I moved into an old farmhouse with two women — Candace and Glory — two wash ashores in their 30s. We lived in Christiantown, a section of the northern part of the Island where the Wampanoags, the native Indian tribe, were forcefully converted to Christianity. Down the road from our house was an eerie white church sitting in the middle of a field, surrounded by stone Wampanoag graves.

Candace was an agricultural savant, a resourceful gardener and cook who made all of her money tending to greenhouses during the summer. She’d recently ended a 10-year relationship and was perfectly content spending evenings reading Game of Thrones and drinking scotch.

Glory was a permanent nomad, and for her this was just another stop. She traveled with a whole caravan of art projects in the works, paintings, instruments, small dog, fabulous arrays of clothing and costumes, a whole jewelry-making station complete with crystals and tools. Her projects in a band and projects as a jewelry designer and projects as a singer and as a dancer and as a performance artist had all, in their own special ways, gone astray. She had come to the Island from Portland from San Francisco from Boston from L.A. from New York. She told stories of celebrities she had met before they were famous and how ugly they were in real life. It was unclear what she was doing on the Island other than running from her last home, attempting to get her newest small-press project off the ground. Nothing ever came of it.

Help us fund our next story

We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.

Become a member

Through the fall we would sit on the spare couch that belonged to the wealthy landowners, and Glory would denounce the wealthy landowners. Candace would make a fire with one hand, a glass of scotch in her other. Glory would spout personal conjecture and conspiracy theory in the same breath.

“They actually blew up the levees in New Orleans during Katrina,” Glory said. “To drive all the poor people out. And now they’re doing the same thing here. Have you noticed the blast rock up by Lambert’s Cove?”

We would watch the fire burn in the wood stove, eating the leftover donuts that I brought home from work.

“I shouldn’t even be saying this,” she whispered. “The government is listening to us through our phones.”

But we knew no one was listening.

***

In New York I was pursuing dreams of getting ahead, attempting to climb some giant hill. But living on the Island was an exercise in maintaining — you could never go faster than 45mph on any of the Island roads, and you would end up exactly where you started if you never turned.

As more wash ashores washed ashore, I was able to move up in the production hierarchy. In October a young man named Max, who had flung away his past in Texas, became our new donut producer. He seemed perfectly content smoking weed in the parking lot with Bam and Melvin; by the end of our shifts they moved at a caterpillar pace, hypnotized by the beautiful radials of icing in the mixing pots.

Max was a wide-eyed 23-year-old who expected nothing from the Island and was gleefully surprised at what he found. This was the end of a long road trip for him. His cousin from Austin, who had been out here before, had promised Max some sort of illusory “wealth” or “success” on the Island, and they had road-tripped out together at the end of the season only to find the closed t-shirt shops and the vacant marinas and the first frosts creeping over wildflowers. It was reminiscent of the tragic vitality of a Steinbeck novel — of the poor migrant workers who chase some dream to a place they’ve never been, only to find more dust.

But Max fit in just fine. He loved the chowder and he didn’t really seem to mind being poor. He talked about Texas as a provincial backwards place — where he was pulled over by “coppers” for smoking “dope,” which made me wonder if this big-bearded man really was just the last of the hippies, who was only a few decades late on making the pilgrimage to the Cape.

Best of all, he didn’t complain about working the donut line. I gladly moved up to unleavened pastries and bread, while Max took the hot oil burns in stride. By the time Halloween rolled around, we were a well-oiled machine, a furnace of productivity.

The Island was kissed by fall in that spectacular way that so many writers had been enamored with — the self-immolating trees flared up and the graves were buried under red and yellow leaves. The big cold rains came. The sun was setting towards the South. The fields of grain in the middle of the Island turned an almost iridescent purple. Suddenly you could see farther. The specks of glowing white houses were distant placeholders on some unreachable horizon.

Giving up everything wasn’t that bad after all. Even though I had made virtually no progress on my “book,” work chugged along as one starry night passed into the next. With Max, the bakery climbed into a new gear of efficiency, and we were sometimes able to clock out early. But one cold evening he came to work late, covered in bruises. He explained, with casual aplomb, that he no longer had a car.

“I had to take the bus,” he said. “Last night I pinballed my ride through the woods.”

After eating a donut he added:

“I was pretty stoned.”

“What the fuck happened?” Anthony asked. We were all waiting for the juicy details.

“I just walked the rest of the way home.”

In the same way that his car did, Max seemed to pinball through life. But that easy freewheeling vibe would harden with the weather.

***

“People change over the winter,” Bam told me, his hand on the mixer. “The same people giving you hand-outs are suddenly reaching in your back pockets.”

Bam did not talk often. He moved quietly about his tasks, punching down dough. He started every shift with ruthless efficiency, working faster than anyone else to compensate for the copious smoke breaks he took. By the end of the shift, once he was properly stoned, he had slowed down to a crawl.

“How much did you make at your old job?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, embarrassed to talk about my pathetic executive assistant position in the city. “Like 35k a year.”

“After taxes?”

“Before.”

Leaning against a sack of flour, he whistled. “What I wouldn’t give to make 35k a year,” he said.

We made $12 an hour. A cocktail in Edgartown or Oak Bluffs — the only two wet towns on the Island — was $12. The off-season residents paid the prices set for the summer vacationers, only they did so without a billionaire’s salary. Rent was the only place that they could find a cut: the cost of housing fell drastically at the end of the summer, but, of course, shot back up after Memorial Day. Otherwise, everything cost the same in December as it did on the Fourth of July.

There’s a saying on the island: “If you bought it, someone brought it.” Factored into the cost of any commodity — gas, groceries, even flour and yeast — was the price of ferrying it across the channel. We paid premiums for anything that arrived on our shelves, as well as the premiums of carting out waste. The endeavor of living on the Island after September, therefore, seemed borderline insane: we were paying vacation-level prices to work for minimum-wage at a bakery that primarily sold t-shirts. Complaining, however, became mundane at some point. We had all chosen to be here, for one reason or another, to chase something past the water’s edge.

The Islanders like Bam, who were raised in the system, knew only this life. They could try moving to the mainland, living cheaply, pursuing dreams in a landlocked town. But where would they start? Often with no college education and few connections off Island, the locals seemed permanently marooned in vacationland. Besides, this was where their family and friends had grown around them, and it would be foolish to throw that away. It seemed like the ecosystem would sooner go extinct than evolve, but everyone was perfectly content with that inevitable future as long as we made a buck and ate well.

The nights would stumble forward, and sometimes, at 10pm, I would look at the stack of fritters that had materialized in front of me. Bam went to the parking lot in 30-minute intervals to get high and by the end of the night he returned with gunmetal gray eyes, hypnotized by the revolving dough. He was often silent for extended periods, but one night he was engaged in an unusually long staring match with the mixing bowl.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I lost a glove in the dough.”

We stood looking at the 60 pounds of swirling cookie dough in which, presumably, there was a latex glove.

“What should we do?” he asked, looking over his shoulder.

“If we throw it away we’ll have to start over,” I said. “We could be here until four in the morning.”

“Bake it,” he said. “No one will know the difference.”

***

Martha’s Vineyard shrinks every year — the Island loses its coastline and dunes to the forces of erosion. There’s really nothing keeping it there, anyway — no bedrock, no barriers. It’s just a big pile of sand.

During the tumultuous 2012-2013 hurricane season, the southern bluffs lost an average of a foot of ground a day. Houses that were built hundreds of feet inland from the shoreline were suddenly 10 feet away. It wasn’t the first torturous storm season for the Island, and certainly not the last: every year Martha’s Vineyard is shaped by the forces of storms and erosions, with new ponds and inlets forming. Chappaquiddick, a picturesque island within the Island, was created only because of disappearing sand bars. Now, the majority of Islanders see coastal erosion as the greatest threat in their lives on the Island.

Sediment transport and erosion are only being expedited by rising shorelines. The Gay Head lighthouse, an iconic monument at the Southwestern “Gay Head” cliffs (named long ago), was moved for the second time in 2015. All six Island towns contributed to the effort, and more than 1,000 individuals donated a combined $2,000,000 to move the lighthouse 134 feet back. The first time it was moved was in 1844, at a cost of $386.87. It will, no doubt, be moved again.

Islanders have created something temporary, beautiful, a desperate attempt at piling up enough sand to have something worth clinging to. It was all this constant fight against erosion, against the forces that sought to tear the Island apart.

Just as the physical topography of the Island changed, so did the social strata. Visitors and newly washed-ashore residents seemed to be still looking for that nebulous core of the Island where they kept all the celebrities and the spectacular parties, but in the winter none were to be found. There were occasional mentions of a sighting of James Taylor’s son or daughter (James himself had left the Island long ago), but not much else in the way of celebrity gossip. That famous ethos was washed away like the sand.

The summer brought money but, ironically, the fall and winter brought life. Most of the off-season wash-shores were farm kids, crunchy college graduates in Blundstones and Carhartts who worked at one of the many farms: Mermaid, Whippoorwill, Morning Glory, Tea Lane, North Tabor, GOOD. There weren’t any big parties, but there were potlucks heavy on gourds. On the weekends we shopped at the Dumptique, where the best of the regional landfill was salvaged and put on display in a makeshift thrift-store. You could walk away with as much as you could haul — all for free.

One night I got too stoned on pot cookies at a vegetarian potluck. Another night I went to a pop-up poetry reading. There were bonfires and live music was never in short supply. Pub trivia was a regular thing, as were jaunts up to the freezing fire tower in the Christiantown woods. One night I followed a farmer back to her cabin and we piled into the top bunk — at dawn I woke up alone, as the farm staff had all left at sunrise to dig up the last of the kale.

I seemed to have a harder time explaining to people why I’d come out there, and a harder time convincing my friends back home. I got better at saying, “I don’t know.” More importantly, I got better at letting go.

***

Anthony always referred to the Bakery as a t-shirt shop that also sold bread. As soon as you thought of the job in those terms it felt purposeless, absurd. But if you stopped thinking about what you were doing, it seemed to take care of itself. The flour kept coming and I returned to that gymnasium-sized bakery every day at four and left at midnight. Eight hours seemed to disappear in the form of inertia and entropy transferred to dough. Anthony was technically top of the chain of command, and I have no doubt that without his zen perspective on baking, the wheels would have long ago fallen off the operation.

In November a failed screenwriter named Jonah joined us. Jonah had flung away the noblesse spoils of New York in favor of a life of solitude and concentration — although how much noblesse and spoils he had thrown away we really never knew. It seemed like he had left nothing for nothing, idling away the second act of his career.

Jonah was a peculiar addition. He didn’t think of the bakery as a job; he thought of it is a creative residency. He talked to us like we were dying to hear about whom he knew from Hollywood. “Charlie Kaufman is actually shorter than you would imagine,” he might say. “Terrence Malick is actually a Harvard graduate, which you might not imagine.”

Night after night he dipped his hands in baby powder and diligently applied his own brand of gloves (he was allergic to latex). Max was able to move up from the donut line; Jonah, however, was hardly a replacement. He moved slowly and gave us impromptu lectures on cinema. Certain pieces on NPR would trigger long flashbacks and voluntary exposés about his experiences meeting an iconic actress, or otherwise tedious explanations of screenwriting that caused him to forget what he was doing — his pile of muffins were drastically smaller than anyone else’s. He bragged about having coffee with David McCullough, driving past McCoullough’s house every day on his way home.

One night Anthony put his muscled hands on top of Jonah’s, gently but forcefully guiding them to roll out another rope of fritter dough.

“This is how we work,” Anthony said. “Exactly like I would show my eight-year-old.”

Jonah worked silently for the rest of the shift, pausing only once in a while to put baby powder on his hands. He grabbed a croissant at break time, pronouncing it the way the French would, with the soft suffix.

When Melvin sauntered over from his dish cave, eyes bloodshot red, he watched Jonah slowly buttering his “cwassahn” with a bread knife. He turned to me, speaking in what he thought was a whisper:

“Who’s the retard?”

***

As it got colder, the production numbers at the bakery steadily decreased — by December we were no longer making hundreds of pastries, and we finished the shift well before midnight. Snow lined the roadways and was like frosting on the sparkling branches of trees. There was a sense, driving home at midnight, that I could be hurtling through space.

After the first cold snap Glory poured vodka down the drains to keep them from bursting. I watched the weather eagerly. Candace showed me how to split cords of wood. One night I helped my friends move their minivan out of a snowbank trench with an axe and a wedge — they’d skidded off the darkened road. Despite the difficulties, though, there was something magnificent about those months. It felt like the connections we forged were stronger than anything you could have made on a manicured lawn in August.

The Bakery stayed open all the way until New Year’s. Bam and Anthony and Melvin and Max seemed to love working near the ovens even more. Jonah, however, didn’t make it. He quit abruptly. It wasn’t the kind of grandiose exit you’d expect from his Act III: he just stopped coming to work, the pile of non-latex gloves sitting unused at his station.

No one demanded an explanation.

The winter and early spring ground forward in a delirious push, each day an exercise in waiting. We watched the icicles beginning to thaw into puddles. We smoked weed in the farmhouse and watched countless hours of Netflix. Glory’s premonitions about the ghosts of Wampanoag Indians seemed to come true when the paintings fell off my walls one night and I awoke to find them all on the floor.

“I told you so,” she said. “This place is haunted.”

The production numbers fell and so did our billable hours. In the end, I didn’t last much longer than Jonah at the bakery. By the spring, I hopped ship for a job with better pay and a better office environment: yard work.

Evelyn ran a landscaping crew. She was responsible for preparing vacation homes for the start of the season, mulching yards and edging beds. It wasn’t the most glamorous position, but after six months indoors, nothing compared to sunshine on my skin again.

We rolled countless wheelbarrow loads of mulch in March, and in April we started digging trenches for gardens. The cold days got warmer, not only because of the change in seasons, but because I spent all of them swinging a hoe or kicking a shovel.

Evelyn was a long-standing washashore who, like Anthony, had been on the Island so long now that it would be impossible to go anywhere else. Her strength was matched only by her seemingly unbreakable mental fortitude — she could go for hours at a time without saying a single word or taking a break, making countless trips with wheelbarrows across expansive yards.

The fugue state of her job never seemed to faze her. All of the houses were dark and empty, but she brought color and life to their gardens, turning up their soil in bursts. In the afternoons we took coffee and sandwich breaks on the long docks of multi-million dollar homes, watching the still surface of their bays.

One day, on break, she looked up from her novel, struck with a semi-sudden epiphany. “How’s your book going?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I forgot what I was writing.”

***

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion writes in The White Album. “We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.”

What is the story on Martha’s Vineyard, a disappearing sandstone cliff being gobbled at by myriad hands, a little outpost to sell t-shirts and indulge in myths? What are the three acts of a place where the Kennedys exist alongside the Anthonys and the Bams, where the donut oil is kept hot all night and some distant radio is constantly blaring an American ode to Tom Brady? What is the story for the people who remain after Labor Day, the ones who work to feed themselves and the others around them? Some of them were born there, the children of hippies and old-school settlers, and some of them were like Jonah and me — washashores who sought the photographic negative of everything that wasn’t New York or Los Angeles. We were all roommates, inextricably, between the passage of the last ferry and the first one in the morning, locked up on that embattled little spit of land.

But we all had to face the truth that there was nothing keeping us there. What was the pinnacle of the Island’s story? If it committed suicide, what would its sermon be? Perhaps it would be a meditation on the fact that bags of clam chowder from the Sysco factory in Houston could be repackaged and sold with a $30 t-shirt and a $4 donut and we could all go home rich. Perhaps it was that my brother would end up working the whole summer at Morning Glory farm, employed alongside other shirtless 18-year-olds in the road-facing field, and caramel-tanned housewives bought the boutique kale they grew. Perhaps it was the former Exxon oil executive who moved out to Martha’s Vineyard to bankroll a mobile-chicken-slaughter suite, or the giant named Monroe who played Scrabble and packaged hog meat. Perhaps it was this: the very Max who wrapped his car around a tree in the winter had a child with the girl who worked the front counter of the bakery; they’re together to this day.

The story told itself in food and drink, but rarely in money. I returned to the Bakery months later, near the beginning of summer. The parking lot was full of litter, the sky a bleached orange. The days were long again and it seemed like we watched the taillights racing to their homes long after the sky darkened. Anthony sat on the trunk of his car, burning a joint, talking about the starters that he cultivated over the winter months.

“What are you feeding tonight?” I asked.

“Sourdough,” he said. He had added new tattoos to his arms and they moved when he talked. “It basically feeds itself.”

***

In June, I moved out of the big house. Candace and Glory moved out of the big house too. The fabulous migration had already begun. The big people came back to their big houses, and the service industry shuffled back into bunk beds and little houses.

In the summer I worked at a restaurant that was, by any standards, better than the Bakery. And yet there wasn’t the same kind of drama. People were good at their jobs and the summer blessed us with so much capital that no shortcuts in production were ever necessary.

For three months our story wrote itself — we made money hand over fist. There were long shifts and long hangovers. My 25th birthday party was broken up by the police for a noise complaint but an Islander was able to talk to the officer — his friend from high school — about letting us carry on. Candace was twisted on liquor and we took a handful of fireworks to the sound and nearly set a boat on fire. July Fourth, a week later, was doused in rain and I remember dancing around a rich girl’s house in West Chop wearing only an American flag — the snow and woodsmoke seemed like part of another decade when we watched the hazy fireworks through the screen porch.

Knowing people on the Island meant you could cut billionaires in line at the bar. You could go to private beaches. You knew secret beaches that were better than the private beaches. Summer vacationers often gloated about their favorite hide-aways and coves — but those places were usually for ferry trash and MVHS kids looking to smoke weed and party. We were proud of our insider status and we wore it in vain, like a badge of honor.

Summer had obliterated two things: the sense of calm, and the sense of community. Yes, the parties were bigger and brighter and you saw far more people, spent the evenings drinking and moving. The dances were great and endless. But most Islanders’ favorite day is Labor Day — when the crowds clear out and the warm fall winds come in again, bringing with them the last of the thunderstorms.

It was a strange revolving door of wealth and privilege. I recall cooking for two of my friends from Brown who were on vacation. I don’t quite know what they assumed I was doing. Perhaps they thought I was doing either performance art or some type of cleanse. They made it clear that working a service job was utterly unthinkable two years out of college.

“How long have you been on this island?” one of them asked, stunned.

“About a year.”

“I would have killed myself by now,” he said.

***

The ending of the summer came too soon — it was one enduring iced coffee, a few long kisses, fourteen dances by the Chappaquiddick pier, dozens of fires on the sand and hundreds of oysters. Short nights trying to break the digital “Watch Your Speed” meter beside the Menemsha harbor, running 100-meter dashes like we might finally be able to stop the clock. I cooked thousands of eggs and burgers. I had countless fleeting conversations with customers who came from as far as the West Coast to resurrect memories they had as children on the Island. Candace and I laid the stakes and sheeting for a greenhouse of tomatoes and the Exxon oil man taught me how to bleed chickens. I learned how to hide Smirnoff Ice in a pile of potatoes and how to walk home in the absolute dark. I cut bushels of collard greens and biked underneath the soaring crescents of planes leaving the provincial runway. The cool fall wind came and brought with it storms. Eventually I had to say goodbye to all that, because I had gotten what I came for, or never found it, and that perhaps was better than the ontological process of finding anything at all.

An island is what you imagine it to be, and the group with the biggest shared vision was able to plow the others. The Wampanoags were plowed for Christianity; the small shops were plowed for the Bakery. Glory was plowed out of her home year after year by the capitalist forces she simultaneously loathed and suckled. Evelyn and I plowed the little saplings to make way for roses. And storms plowed all of the Island to sea, one wave at a time. There is a mystical vision that you can partake in, where, if your hands are strong enough, you can still work on that loom.

Loving someone is hard work. Loving a place is just as hard. You had to stop thinking about it in terms of winning or losing. People like Jonah came out hoping to get something. And I might have been like that too at one point. But I would learn that a community relationship is less like a movable feast and more like a sourdough starter — you have to feed it if you want anything in return.

On my last evening the little car was loaded once again with bags of clothing and possessions. I stood on the rocking port of the ferry, watching the Island shrink to a pinhole. I watched the mysterious crowning forest of Christiantown disappearing, and, with a sudden pang of guilt, I realized there was something I had forgotten to do all year:

I never met David McCullough.

* * *

Michael Mount, a novelist and screenwriter based in Asheville, is the recipient of grants and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, and The Orchard Project. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University North Carolina School of the Arts, as well as a “graduate” of the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails.

Editor: Sari Botton

I have a small booklet of illustrated postcards from National Parks, both ones I’ve been to and others I have yet to see: Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Acadia, Glacier, Olympic, and more. The cards are whimsical. Each in the set features an outline of a park, and a smattering of critters, landmarks, and flora and fauna in bright colors. There is a cartoon banana slug; a meadowlark, beak open in song; a sunny yellow coneflower, petals all the way unfurled; a bighorn sheep; a branch of a ponderosa pine; a hiking boot looming larger than a small illustrated tent; and a herd of antelope making their way toward Delicate Arch.

Whether because of the tiny size of the cards — a whole park scaled down to the size of a palm — or the natural world tuned to carefully blocked hues of teal and mustard and coral and lime green and blue, when I look at the postcards, I tend to daydream about the National Parks in a way that mirrors the illustrations themselves: my perception of the parks becomes two-dimensional, sanitized of any complication. I envision myself hiking along a dirt path, a Steller’s Jay swooping down to scavenge for seed, Ponderosa pines lining the way, the sky blue and open above the picture-perfect peaks of a mountain chain. In my daydreams, there is never anyone else around: there is just me moving through a landscape freckled with flowers, silence broken only by the chittering of birds.

Some parts of these daydreams are feasible, which I know from time spent in parks. I have followed a dirt trail for miles around a lake in Grand Teton, the woods quiet save for the stirring of small creatures. I have hiked down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back up in a day, the sun baking every shade of orange-red rock in sight. I have kept my body still in Yellowstone in hopes of watching a coyote limber across a field just a few moments longer. I have foraged for blueberries in Acadia, sat by the placid, shockingly-blue waters of Lake McDonald in Glacier, and hiked through parts of Denali, pink fireweed lining my way.

The time I’ve spent in National Parks has always seemed restorative, a reminder that there is wild beauty to be protected. But my perceptions can be complicated, underlying tensions teased from what I simplify. For example, as Terry Tempest Williams writes in The Hour of Land, she grew up with the myth of Yellowstone National Park being “void of people” when it was established in 1872, before learning as an adult that the lands where the park was created “was the seasonal and cyclic home of Blackfeet, Bannock, Shoshone, and Crow Nations.” She writes, “Like any good story with the muscle of privilege behind it, it seemed believable. And I never asked the question: ‘Who benefits from the telling of this particular story?’”

What stories have I told myself about the natural parks? Why do I imagine myself alone there, when I have rarely — if ever — experienced solitude on the trails? What kinds of privileges afford me the ability to travel to the parks, and who are parks truly accessible to? What types of harmful histories have I buried or blurred in the way I’ve narrativized the parks in my own mind? What environmental protections have the park lands been granted and what is at risk in a time of climate change and a president’s dangerous decisions? The essays curated here approach these questions — and more.

1. Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream (Kathryn Joyce, HuffPost)

As a child, the outdoors felt most like home to Cheyenne Szydlo, a trait she carried with her into her professional life as a wildlife biologist. But when she earned the chance to find the elusive — and possibly locally extinct — Southwestern willow flycatcher in The Grand Canyon, her experiences outdoors took a sinister turn, not because of any natural threats, but human. A man named Dave, her river guide, perpetually harassed her and threatened to sexually assault her. 

Szydlo’s story is far from uncommon, as Kathryn Joyce writes in this harrowing longform piece. From interviews with Szydlo, women firefighters, and other women park employees, as well as a bevy of researched statistics, Joyce emphasizes the dramatic scope of sexual assault and harassment that far too many women have experienced while working in national parks and other natural places.

The agencies that protect America’s natural heritage enjoy a reputation for a certain benign progressivism—but some of them have their own troubling history of hostility toward women.

In 2012 in Texas, members of the Parks and Wildlife Department complained about a “legacy” of racial and gender intolerance; only 8 percent of the state’s 500 game wardens were women. In 2014, in California, female employees of the U.S. Forest Service filed a class-action lawsuit—the fourth in 35 years—over what they described as an egregious, long-standing culture of sexual harassment, disparity in hiring and promotion, and retaliation against those who complained.

2. We’re Here. You Just Don’t See Us. (Latria Graham, May 1, 2018, Outside)

Number seven on a list of “22 Things Black Folks Don’t Do,” an article Latria Graham finds on BlackAmericaWeb.com, is “Go to national parks.” Graham, who encounters, both online and in life, an array of stereotypes about black people not liking the outdoors, explores the premise of those stereotypes by mapping the locations of national parks and discussing the ways in which historic practices of segregation still influence people’s perceptions today. 

By blending gorgeous ruminations of growing up on her own family’s land, reminiscing on the ways in which Zora Neale Hurston’s work helped her discover her own voice, recounting her trips to national parks and incorporating hard-hitting research, Graham’s essay asks readers to evaluate their own internal biases and work to make real change. 

The parks were designed to be clean and white, and if we let the data tell the story, that’s how they’ve stayed. In 2009, the National Park Service did a comprehensive survey of the American public, consisting of phone interviews with more than 4,000 participants. According to their data, African Americans comprised just 7 percent of visitors.

3. Dear Mr. Abbey (Amy Irvine, Autumn 2018, Orion)

In this direct address to Edward Abbey, Amy Irvine writes about how life within public lands has changed since Abbey’s death, and also ways that his work might be reconceived if thought about through a more contemporary lens. Irvine, as she reckons with who has the freedom to travel to natural lands — “a privilege that belongs to the able-bodied, upper classes” — tells Abbey about the destruction of natural lands that has occurred as a result of Trump’s decisions, and discusses the ways in which her experiences of natural parks and solitude differ than Abbey’s because she is a woman.

Can you imagine, in my own book about Utah, if I had called it “Amy’s country”? I could have justified it; my family has been there for seven generations and counting. Yet even with such credentials the clan of my surname doesn’t get to call it ours because it’s all stolen property: whatever the forefathers didn’t snatch from the region’s Native Americans on one occasion, they took from Mexico on another.

4. The Government Won’t Let Me Watch Them Kill Bison, so I’m Suing (Christopher Ketcham, May 20, 2015, Vice)

The history of bison in North America is a long and sordid one, which includes settler colonial violence that, at one point, led to there being only 23 bison left in existence. Though the population of bison has increased since then, there are still tensions surrounding their existence, as Christopher Ketcham reports in this piece. Most notably, Yellowstone National Park “culls” (through slaughter) bison from natural lands. The damning part? For over a decade, park officials haven’t allowed the public to watch, spurring the ACLU to file a letter of intent to sue. 

I once saw a video of bison being trapped in preparation for their sorting and slaughter. It had been filmed in 2004, in Yellowstone, the last year the Park Service permitted viewing of their bison operations. In the video, the bison are angry, bucking and kicking. The wranglers cry, ‘Hyah, hooee, yah yah, uhsh uhsh,’ smiling as they whip and beat the animals from catwalks. The camera angle shifts to the colliding bodies of the creatures, which cram in the bottleneck of the chutes.

5. From Yosemite to Bears Ears, Erasing Native Americans from U.S. National Parks (Hunter Oatman-Stanford, January 26, 2018, Collectors Weekly)

Though the National Park Service prevented wholesale industrialization, they still packaged the wilderness for consumption, creating a scenic, pre-historical fantasy surrounded by roads and tourist accommodations, all designed to mask the violence inherent to these parks’ creation. More than a century later, the United States has done little to acknowledge the government-led genocide of native populations, as well as the continued hardships they face because of the many bad-faith treaties enacted by the U.S. government.

Accompanied by photographs, maps, historic promotional materials, and other artifacts, Hunter Oatman-Stanford lays bare a multitude of violences and injustices perpetrated against native populations in the creation of National Parks, as well as chronicles the ways in which the harm of this history still affects people today.

6. Are We Losing the Grand Canyon? (Kevin Fedarko, September 2016, National Geographic)

During an end-to-end hike of the Grand Canyon, Kevin Fedarko notes how much of the landscape has been impacted by human development and ruminates on Edward Abbey’s prediction that the wilderness he was writing about “is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial.”

How much of the Grand Canyon should be developed? And in what ways? What tensions exist because of the Grand Canyon’s capacity to generate revenue? And who has been harmed in the process of development? Fedarko explores answers to these questions, and more, in this longform piece.

But according to U.S. Geological Survey data, 15 springs and five wells inside the Grand Canyon area have levels of uranium that are considered unsafe to drink, due in part to incidents in older mines, where erosion and problems with containment have allowed uranium to leach into the groundwater.

7. Clothing Companies Are Funding Our National Parks Because Our Government Won’t (Jen A. Miller, August 27, 2018, The Outline)

Jen A. Miller, who has a goal of visiting all 417 sites in the U.S. overseen by the National Park Service, began receiving Instagram ads for “Parks Project,” a company that seeks to fund NPS-related charities through their sales of shirts and other goods. Upon researching further, Miller discovers that “Parks Project” is not the only company attempting to help with NPS funding through the sale of merchandise, a noble goal, though one that still falls far from providing the kind of money NPS actually needs to thrive.

And while on paper it looks like the National Park Service budget has gone up from $3.276 billion for fiscal year 2009 to $3.460 billion for fiscal year 2018, when adjusted for inflation, it’s really an 8 percent drop. The New York Times has referred to this paradox of rising crowds and shrinking funds as a “crisis” — I was in Zion National Park in Utah right around the time their reporter was, and I don’t think the pictures do justice to the massive crowds I had to work through.

***