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I came to librarianship the way most other librarians do: I fell into it. After a full-time job that had thoroughly burned me out, I found a student job in the college library; this one was part-time and entailed reshelving large academic books and sitting at the big circulation desk with a stamper, ready to land that perfectly placed due date. It came with a lot of quiet and a lot of time to read—excellent for repairing burnout, terrible for teaching me what working in libraries was actually like. 

People who do not work in libraries tend to have a romanticized view of what it is to work in libraries, and I was no exception. Once I graduated and needed to find another job, I did the next best thing and applied to work at a public library as a library associate in the children’s department. 

Unlike my last library job, this one was not quiet, did not come with reading time, and after seven years, thoroughly re-burned me out so hard I would spend years unlearning toxic workaholic traits I’d picked up there (an unlearning that is still in process). This particular public library served a population of 200,000 well-educated, affluent, self-described library lovers. They were also Tea Party Texans who saw taxes as an affront to their personal liberty; they loved the library, just not enough to fund more branches or a larger staff. 

The place was as busy as a Target on Saturday every day of the week. And because we were the only library in town, we ran the place like an amusement park. Story time was a back-to-back affair—every half-hour from 10 a.m. to noon, Tuesday through Friday—and was filled to capacity for nearly every slot. 

While our patron base was mostly conservative, white, and straight, we wanted our collection to reflect the community it served—which also included a large immigrant population and a handful of queer families. With that in mind, one of our librarians used story time to read The Family Book by Todd Parr. The Family Book won a Scholastic Parent and Child Magazine Best of 2003 Award; it also contains a single page that says “Some families have two mommies; some families have two daddies.” One parent raised such a stink with our manager that we were told to stick with reading “noncontroversial” books at story time, lest we risk losing all the queer books in the collection. 

This was in 2013. Ten years later, things haven’t changed for the better. I still work as a librarian, albeit in a different major Southern city. But my work has changed drastically. I’m trained in violence de-escalation, trauma-informed reference, and medical and mental health first aid, which includes overdose prevention training. I have intervened in fights, talked people down from suicide, removed domestic violence victims from their abusers, hugged strangers, and been screamed at and threatened. My coworkers once solved a murder. 

Yes, sometimes I even recommend books. But increasingly, being a librarian is less and less about books and more and more about community survival. We are a lifeline for populations that have slipped through the spaces in a weakening social safety net; we are a target for organized harassment and censorship campaigns. Yet, people are grateful for our help. They hold our hands and thank us, they tell us we are blessed, they say they can’t believe someone so kind found them so deserving of love. 

In library school, the threats of censorship and propaganda were drilled into us constantly—but mostly in the context of past authoritarian regimes, and never with the idea that past might become present. The last three years, in particular, have been difficult ones in librarianship, but they are also the ones in which I have felt most committed to the job. The work I’m doing now is possibly the most important of my life. 

“Have you been to the library lately?” asked Nicholas Hune-Brown in The Walrus earlier this year. No, really—have you? Because whatever ideas you have about what it’s like to work in libraries these days, I can assure you it’s not like that. It’s frustrating, depressing, and underpaid. It’s also life-affirming. Some days feel like utopia; many days feel like war. That’s life on the library front lines. Welcome. 

Have You Been To The Library Lately? (Nicholas Hune-Brown, The Walrus, June 2023)

When I first read this piece, I saw something I hadn’t in a long time: a realistic portrayal of life in public libraries. In fact, it inspired this very reading list.

Hune-Brown doesn’t mince words, doesn’t shy away from hard truths, but also doesn’t only focus on the toxic mix of vocational awe and trauma porn that currently overshadows life in public librarianship. Yes, the job is necessary, even admirable. Yes, it’s extremely difficult and downright dangerous at times. No, none of us who got into libraries expected to be doing this kind of work. But what I love most about this piece is that Hune-Brown cuts right to the heart of the issue. If a society feels it acceptable to cut funding to social necessities like housing, education, and  healthcare, are we really that surprised that that same society wouldn’t see a problem with allowing an underpaid, women-driven profession such as librarianship to pick up the pieces? 

When people tell the story of this transformation, from book repository to social services hub, it’s usually as an uncomplicated triumph. A recent “love letter” to libraries in the New York Times has a typical capsule history: “As local safety nets shriveled, the library roof magically expanded from umbrella to tarp to circus tent to airplane hangar. The modern library keeps its citizens warm, safe, healthy, entertained, educated, hydrated and, above all, connected.”

That story, while heartwarming, obscures the reality of what has happened. No institution “magically” takes on the role of the entire welfare state, especially none as underfunded as the public library. If the library has managed to expand its protective umbrella, it has done so after a series of difficult decisions. And that expansion has come with costs.

The Small Town Library That Became a Culture War Battleground (Sasha Abramsky, The Nation, August 2023)

Let’s go back to the basics of the censorship conundrum libraries currently find themselves in. When I started working in libraries 15 years ago, we regularly talked about how librarians were some of our most trusted public servants, right behind firefighters and nurses. Book bans were vestiges of the past; when they came up, our minds would settle on imagery from Nazi book-burning parties and the cover of Fahrenheit 451. Phew, we said. At least we don’t have to deal with that anymore. 

Fast forward to 2023 and librarians are being cast as public enemy number one, pedophiles, and groomers-in-chief, courtesy of extremist groups like Moms For Liberty. The year 2022 saw a record 600-plus book challenges leveled against library collections, and 2023 is on track to beat that number handily. From the outside, this might appear to be a groundswell of public support for censorship—however, a recent Washington Post analysis of the American Library Association’s 2023 “State of America’s Libraries” report showed that the majority of book challenges being leveled at library boards around the country originated with eleven people. Eleven. 

Abramsky’s piece is a perfect cross section of the nationwide fight, distilled into one rural library’s story. Library lovers had better wake up, because the other side is currently going faster than we can drive. 

In the coming years, the conservative three-person Board of County Commissioners will likely continue to appoint people to the library’s board who reflect the values of Ruffcorn and her fellow petitioners. In other words, Ruffcorn could lose in November and yet still ultimately come out on top, setting a precedent in which a few angry citizens would get to dictate to librarians which books should carry warning labels, or be relegated to the top shelf of the adult section, or require parental approval for a child to check out.

The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries (Karawynn Long, Nine Lives, July 2023)

Speaking of library lovers needing to wake up to the myriad threats facing public libraries, I feel compelled to highlight this Substack from Karawynn Long that dives deep into the now-defunct user recommendation feature from OverDrive (the increasingly powerful middle man between e-books, libraries, and their patrons) and what it portends for the other outsourced reader services libraries have come to rely on. 

Long is a library lover herself, and she highlights an uncomfortable truth about libraries and how they must exist in this increasingly capitalistic world: we have to buy in to our exploitation in order to survive. And because we’re forced to buy in to this exploitation thanks to the popular tech business practice known as “functional monopolism,” libraries are vulnerable to the whims of those vulture businesses, such as KKR (who also recently purchased Simon & Schuster), who exist to extract ever more money from their customers—libraries. 

Every extra dollar that KKR sucks out of libraries is another dollar they don’t have for buying books, or for librarian staffing, or for supporting any of the dozens of other small but important services that public libraries provide their local communities, like free access to computers and the internet. Some libraries that already struggle for funding might be starved out of existence…. And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America. Between now and then, I expect the user experience to degrade precipitously. The removal of the recommendation feature, I believe, is the canary in the coal mine.

What They Didn’t Teach Us In Library School (Chip Ward, TomDispatch, April 2007)

Chip Ward’s heartbreaking essay has been cited by many in the library sciences tasked with advising new recruits. Written in 2007, it treats the idea of library as social safety net as a little-known concept. Ward talks about going to conferences on housing and homelessness, and other attendees wondering what in the world a librarian would be doing there. Now, librarians, housing advocates, social workers, and first responders are all too familiar with the work the others do; while I’d like to consider this a win, it only proves that we are more than 15 years down the road and conditions have only remained the same—that is, if they haven’t worsened. 

In the meantime, the Salt Lake City Public Library — Library Journal’s 2006 “Library of the Year” — has created a place where the diverse ideas and perspectives that sustain an open and inclusive civil society can be expressed safely, where disparate citizens can discover common ground, self-organize, and make wise choices together. We do not collect just books, we also gather voices. We empower citizens and invite them to engage one another in public dialogues. I like to think of our library as the civic ballroom of our community where citizens can practice that awkward dance of mutuality that is the very signature of a democratic culture.

And if the chronically homeless show up at the ball, looking worse than Cinderella after midnight? Well, in a democratic culture, even disturbing information is useful feedback. When the mentally ill whom we have thrown onto the streets haunt our public places, their presence tells us something important about the state of our union, our national character, our priorities, and our capacity to care for one another. That information is no less important than the information we provide through databases and books. The presence of the impoverished mentally ill among us is not an eloquent expression of civil discourse, like a lecture in the library’s auditorium, but it speaks volumes nonetheless.

Are Libraries the Future of Media? (Kate Harloe, Popula, August 2023)

I’d like to end a difficult reading list with this universal truth: public libraries and their librarians are scrappy. Always have been. Over and over again, the world proclaims the death of libraries; over and over again, libraries respond by ascending from the grave. Don’t count us out, and don’t call our resilience a comeback.

Kate Harloe’s piece provides a perfect example of a library understanding its role in a community and leveraging it to better serve the public. Here, the Albany Public Library pairs with the local newspaper to provide citizens with publicly funded, community-owned and accessible journalism, the library and local journalists reporting and publishing community stories together. As Harloe puts it, people may not trust the media but they “really, really love the library.” And why wouldn’t they? Libraries are the last place where “your ability to exist as a human being doesn’t depend on your ability to pay.” Combine that with quality community reporting that isn’t hidden behind a paywall and you’ve got a KO combination. 

As she finished speaking, the crowd was in tears. There were many reasons for that, but for me, one was the way in which Koepaomu captured how libraries feel—how, often, they can be experienced as places outside of space and time; as small territories to retreat from the unstable, transactional realities of the world, and as pathways to a sense of belonging, and even safety, in a deeply unsafe time. Libraries represent the best of our efforts to take care of one another. Their ongoing existence is a reminder that—not just in some far-off future, but even today—other ways of being are possible.

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Once upon a time, I wanted to be a doctor. Never mind my terrible grades in all things science. Never mind that I decided this in my second year of college, after deciding that the music school that I’d wanted for years wasn’t for me. It was 2006. It was the age of Dr. Gregory House. 

I love a good medical drama. My mother, a nurse, raised me on ER and General Hospital, always pointing out all the plot lines that “would never happen in real life” but were really cool to watch on TV. My mother credits ER with pushing her toward her decades-long career in the operating room. So when I, a poor lost college sophomore who had gone to school to play French horn (French horn!) and found it wasn’t what I thought it would be, I did what I knew best to do and turned to TV. And on TV, I found House. 

House had it all: a painkiller-addicted doctor with a smart mouth and a slap-worthy face, medical mysteries solved via CSI-style case-of-the-week format, and a beleaguered crew of sidekick physicians whose instincts were never quite as good as House’s. I would spend each episode studying the setup and trying to unravel what the medical culprit could be before the ultimate reveal. Instead of realizing that what I might want to be was a writer with a good plot, I missed the mark and decided I wanted to be a doctor. 

Reader, I did not become a doctor. (That fizzled out after one year of biology classes and a stint working in a local nursing home.) But I remain a lifelong medical mystery buff. Here, then, are a few of my recent long-form favorites — enjoy the game of whatdunnit. 

Swamp Boy (Kris Newby, Now This News, October 2022)

One day, a 14-year-old boy with no previous physical or mental issues informs his parents that he is the “evil, damned son of the devil” and he needs to kill himself before he destroys them all. Thus begins the onset of a massive medical manhunt to uncover exactly what is causing the boy’s psychosis and physical symptoms, which include OCD, shortness of breath, chronic pain, frequent urination, intense headaches, the belief that he had green vines growing under his skin, the belief that he was a bird, and the belief that the family cat was ordering him to kill everyone around him — including the family fish. 

Complete with vivid graphic-novel-styled art illustrating some of the reported hallucinations, this piece has it all, including a father’s fight against the medical establishment and an ending you’ll never see coming. In other words, it’s about as close as one can get to a real-life episode of House. 

Meanwhile, back at home, now more than seven months after his son’s first psychotic breakdown, Scott could finally clear his mind, and began to focus his analytical skills on Michael’s case.

To the medical experts, his son had been a ten-inch-tall stack of paper annotated with clinical notes. Each expert had examined one piece of Michael—his brain, his stomach, his heart, his immune system, his gut, his spine, his skin, his eyes. Scott, meanwhile, was determined to analyze Michael as a whole. “I knew I had to figure out what was wrong, or I’d lose my son,” he said.

It was during one of his many conversations with doctors about Michael’s potential treatment that Scott had an epiphany: Maybe no one could help their son because they were treating the wrong illness.

What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy (Susan Dominus, The New York Times Magazine, March 2012)

On an ordinary day in Le Roy, New York, a high school cheerleader begins twitching. Another cheerleader develops tics a week later. And another after that; and another after that. It spreads past the cheerleaders and on to the art kids, a boy, kids in neighboring schools. Is there something in the water? Is it those mysterious bins labeled with hazardous waste from a nearby factory? Is it that strange orange ooze coming up from the ground on the football field? Or is it all in their heads? 

Featuring media vans, Dr. Drew appearances, familial finger-pointing, women’s least favorite H-word (hysteria), and a cameo from legal crusader Erin Brockovich, Dominus’s reporting takes us into the mystery that consumed a small Northeastern town, while still making the science accessible to lay readers. 

How could one person’s illness be reflected in another person’s neural pathways, playing a trick on consciousness, convincing the host that it originated in her own body? In the last decade, scientists have begun to explore the concept that regions in our brain once thought to activate only our own activity or sensations are also firing what are known as mirror neurons when we witness someone else perform an action or feel a sensation. Mass psychogenic illness could be thought of as the maladaptive version of the kind of empathy that finds expression in actual physical sensation: the contagious yawn or sympathetic nausea or the sibling who grabs his own finger when he sees his brother’s bleed.

The Pre-Pandemic Puzzle (W. Pate McMichael, St. Louis Magazine, August 2007)

No, not that pandemic. Pate McMichael looks back at the teenager who may have died of AIDS more than a decade before HIV gripped the nation. But where did the virus come from? How did a young boy who was not a drug user, had not left the state, and never received a blood transfusion contract a virus that wouldn’t be detected in the United States for another decade? Furthermore, why did the news break in the mainstream media before the scientists who first identified the strain even had a chance to understand what was in their lab?  

This piece combines two of my favorite things: a medical mystery and an ethical quandary. It pulls back the curtain on how the scientific establishment studies new diseases and how and when they release that information to the public. Add in that historical lens — doctors seeing a new and potentially terrifying disease in the 1960s, the echoes of Hurricane Katrina in Pate McMichael’s 2007 writing — and you’ve got a winner. 

A few years later, in 1973, Elvin-Lewis and Witte presented Robert R.’s case at a lymphology conference and published a journal article on his systemic chlamydia in The Journal of Lymphology. The paper they presented actually raised as many questions as it answered. Why had Chlamydia spread throughout the body, when it normally stayed near the port of entry? And why did this young man have these purplish, malignant lesions called Kaposi’s sarcoma, as the alert pathologist had discovered during the autopsy? Kaposi’s sarcoma was known as an old man’s skin disease, typically affecting Jews and Italians. The pathologist decided that Robert R. had an African variant that affected children and primarily targeted the lymphatic system. That decision suggested an intriguing question: How did a black 15-year-old from St. Louis acquire Kaposi’s sarcoma?

Doctor Donor Fertility Fraud (Kudrat Wadhwa, The Verge, June 2022)

A woman seeking her familial DNA for a clinical trial learns that not only is her father not her biological father, but her bio dad is actually her mother’s fertility doctor. All together, now: Yikes. Worse, she finds out that she is not alone; several other children conceived via fertility clinics have also discovered that their fertility doctors are their real fathers. One doctor, featured in the Netflix documentary Our Father, sired over 90 children. 

This piece grapples with ethical questions and hard-to-draw lines: Is it medical rape to inseminate someone with fraudulent sperm? Do these doctor-fathers owe their scores of children anything? Should these children, once the fathers are discovered, seek a relationship with their bio dads? And what if the bio dad wants nothing to do with them? What if these men fail to see their behavior as a violation? 

Not a mystery, but still riveting — and a good case study around the meaning of consent. 

Not everyone who is watching Our Father has a personal connection at stake, but they are drawn in regardless. Fertility fraud rivets audiences because it channels the mysterious allure of genetic inheritance, crossing it with the perverse power relations between a doctor and their patient. Conception — so often an intimate act — is made impersonal and medicalized in the context of the fertility clinic, and then made intimate again through the abuse of the doctor-patient relationship. 

Every child of fertility fraud is a baby who was desperately and deeply wanted by their parents. The exploitation of that desire is devastating; the fact that the body becomes evidence of the transgression is all the worse.

Sick To Our Stomachs: Why Does Everyone Have IBS? (Natasha Boyd, The Drift, June 2022)

If Rule 34 of the internet is that there exists porn for every possible interest, then Rule 35, according to Jo Piazza of the podcast Under the Influence, is that there exists an influencer for every topic — including diarrhea. 

Why yes, Hot Girls do have IBS, and you can hear all about it on TikTok, Instagram, and pretty much anywhere else there is to make money off of “bloating positivity.” (Truly, if there was ever a sign that we really are in late-stage capitalism, this has to be it.) But really, why do so many hot girls (and other mortals) have IBS these days? This essay takes a look at the history of digestive discomforts, all the way back to the 1700s when The Gentleman’s Magazine examined why all the “well-to-do Ladies” complain of stomach “[d]iagnosticks … neither visible or certain” and to our new era of “normalizing bowel function” (finally!).

It has a name, but not much else. IBS is a so-called “functional disorder,” meaning that it is a condition without identifiable cause. Unlike with inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, patients diagnosed with IBS have no medically detectable signs of damage or disease in their digestive tracts. Essentially, IBS is diagnosed when tests come back normal; it’s what’s written down on a chart when there’s nothing else left to identify. Many people with IBS struggle with the implication that their symptoms are made up — especially as IBS both relies on self-reporting and presents differently from patient to patient. It is a catch-all term for a variety of gastrointestinal ailments, including cramping, bloating, intestinal gas, diarrhea, and constipation. Statistically, it affects more women than men, and is most common in people under 50. Regular exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, and meditation have all been shown to alleviate symptoms. Even so, “IBS is not a psychiatric illness,” says Dr. Arun Swaminath, director of the inflammatory bowel disease program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, “though stress and depression can make symptoms worse.” Despite its growing prevalence — IBS is the most frequently diagnosed gastrointestinal disorder — some doctors and digestive specialists question its utility as a medical construct, since the diagnosis does not elucidate anything about patients’ physiology or the causes of their discomfort. It is, however, very profitable: in the United States, the annual medical costs associated with IBS exceed $1 billion.

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

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The finest romances have the messiest stories. Not messy as in poorly written; au contraire, a good romance hits all the highest points of storytelling  — the meet cute, the ecstatic joy of turning enemies into lovers, the inevitable wrench in the works, middles full of will they-won’t they tension, and a resolution that’s either a happily ever after, happy enough for now, or a bittersweet goodbye.

I am feeling particularly entranced with the genre right now having just watched La La Land. Okay, look — it’s not going to be a movie for everyone. But me? I love a good musical. I love a good homage. And I love a good love story. The prospect of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone maybe not ending up together because of the calls of their differing careers, but agreeing they will always love each other … well, let’s just say I needed several moments. 

My husband is a working musician, and I’m a writer. This May, we will have been together for 16 years — eight in sin, eight married, and all 16 sharing creative careers that don’t always align. Ours has been a romance of nights apart, beautiful Sundays together, opposite schedules, and ships passing in the night. 

There is a montage in La La Land that shows this all-too-familiar lifestyle of two artists — Gosling lands a big gig and is gone nights, while Stone is wrapped up in writing her one-woman play, rising early and going to bed early, so over the course of their days they end up sharing only bed space. This is the moment I shout to my husband, in the bedroom preparing for his Friday night gig: “Oh shit, La La Land just got too real.” 

I go to the bedroom and tell him about the scene. He listens to me, buttoning his shirt and smiling his sad smile. We agree that his current Friday and Saturday night gig schedules are not ideal. He wraps me in a hug and we stand there, as I watch the time on our alarm clock over his shoulder. He is late.

That image of a long-haul couple eating breakfast together, sharing a morning coffee, splitting a bottle of wine after a long work day, reading books together in bed before falling asleep in each other’s arms — that has never been our reality. Do I wish it was? Certainly. But he will never ask me to give up my writing, and I will never ask him to stop playing music. The messier our lives, the more years we have together, the more we realize the value of writing our own story. Will we, won’t we make it? We’ll just have to wait and see. 

This is where the great, messy love stories come in handy — I don’t need our marriage to look a certain way to have hope. Because if I’ve learned anything from these stories, it’s the messiness, not the ideal, that strengthens a relationship. Our marriage survives because we appreciate the possibility that it may not. 

So don’t give me any of that happy ending bullshit. Give me the complicated, the missed connections, the big gestures, the bittersweet endings. Give me the struggle, because it’s the struggle that makes it love. 

My Parents Got Sick. It Changed How I Thought About My Marriage (Mary H.K. Choi, GQ Magazine, March 2021)

Anyone who has actually experienced marriage knows that the saying “marriage is bliss” is woefully incorrect. Not because marriage is about petty arguments or seeing sides of your spouse you’d rather not see (think the Seinfeld episode where Jerry dates a nudist and then opines on the difference between “good naked” and “bad naked.”) The truth of the matter is that marriage is a little bit of good naked and a whole lot of bad naked, especially during a pandemic when fears run high and aging in-laws who live across the country are deteriorating. 

Choi’s essay takes a singular comment from her husband and encapsulates it as a defining “bad naked” moment in their marriage. And, as she says, “I have never loved him more than in that moment.” As someone who has had her share of “bad naked” marriage moments, I can attest that this essay rings with glaring honesty. 

Everything he’d done in support of me and my family was noble. Selfless. Bodies are a constant fucking betrayal, and that he’d strapped himself to another one that was in turn attached to a whole human centipede of decrepitude was deeply affecting. But then he’d admitted not only his reservation but his scorn. How it ran counter to his most primal instincts of self-preservation. Were he alone, with his discipline, his self-sufficiency, his precious solitary walks on Far fucking Rockaway, he’d survive this. Meanwhile, I’d demanded we head to the airport. I dared him to say no, because I knew he couldn’t. This was marriage.

The Journalist and the Pharma Bro (Stephanie Clifford, ELLE, December 2020)

Just stick with me on this one. We all remember that one guy, Martin Shkreli, who became universally known as the biggest asshole on the face of the earth for raising the price of a life-saving pharmaceutical by 5,000% overnight. Top this objectively awful-for-humanity move with his love of trolling, his shit-eating grin, and his obscenely expensive purchase of a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album — because of course, a Wall Street Bro would spend an inordinate amount of money on that. Now add in a journalist who is damn determined to humanize him. Or is she also being trolled? 

I’m not saying this story is a great love story. But it will enrage you, confuse you, and make you question the patriarchy. (In a follow-up, Smythe, the journalist, insists she is acting of her own accord and that it is sexist to imply that she is in any way a “victim.”) Is she being used by the Pharma Bro to recoup his image? Is she using him to get a big-money book deal? Are they actually in love? Or has she, in the words of one of her journalism professors, ruined her life? Settle back with some popcorn for this one. 

When Shkreli found out about this article, though, he stopped communicating with her. He didn’t want her telling her story, she says. Smythe thinks it’s because he’s worried about fallout for her. While she waits to hear from him, she monitors Google Alerts for his name, posts in support groups for loved ones of inmates, and—because inmates must place outgoing calls and can’t accept incoming ones—hopes one day he will call or reply to one of her emails. “It’s completely out of her control,” Haak says; all she can do is “sit around and wait and hope.”

Smythe has only one photo of the two of them, propped next to her bed. Shkreli, his arm around Smythe, has a wide-open smile. “Doesn’t he look human there?” Smythe says, laughing. 

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Tinder Hearted (Allison P. Davis, The Cut, August 2022) 

God, there are so many good lines in this one, it’s difficult to figure out what I want to highlight the most. Davis, a wickedly funny writer, recounts her decade of Tinder dating and how the longest relationship she’s managed to be in from it is with Tinder itself. She downloads, has great sex, has terrible sex, falls hard with men who ghost her, ghosts men who fall hard for her, deletes the app, tries traditional dating, and re-downloads it again and again in a vicious but unrelenting circle of who gives a shit. As one of the “smug couples” who “sigh with relief when they say, ‘I’m glad I met my partner before there were apps,’” let me just say … I’m glad I met my partner before there were apps, but part of me has always wondered what it would be like to have the world as your sexual oyster in the way Tinder allows, delicious or rotten as it may be. If romance is messy, then Tinder romances take the cake. What is most apparent: Davis has a wealth of great stories to tell. 

I first downloaded Tinder in the spring of 2013, seven months after it launched. I’d heard about it as a concept (Grindr for straights) but felt exempt from needing it until one evening at the tail end of a drawn-out breakup with someone I’d told myself I would marry. We were at a restaurant in San Francisco, having one of too many brutal good-bye dinners that led to this-is-the-last-time-I-swear sex, and I put the app on my phone in front of him. He stoically chugged his negroni while I marveled at the hundreds, presumably thousands of men who were waiting for me on the other end, should he decide to go through with the breakup. “Look!” I said, waving my iPhone 5 in his face. (I didn’t mention that at this early point in the app’s history, it was mostly populated by 20-year-old college students and S.F. tech bros who exclusively wore free T-shirts from start-ups.) By June, my boyfriend had gone through with the breakup and moved on — quickly and not via app — to a woman he’d met through mutual friends. I wanted to die. But instead of the sweet relief of death: Tinder.

Taking The Knife* (Randa Jarrar, Gay Mag, October 2019)

“In kink, consent is queen,” thus you need to understand what you’re going to get into before you read this essay. The piece centers around Jarrar’s visit to a queer kink club where the first thing we see/read is Mx. Cele enjoying a knife in intimate spaces. At the club, everyone is asking permission to touch, taste, and harm. It’s a mind warp to think of harm and consent working with, not against, each other in the same sentence, but that is what this entire essay does. I loved it for its deft balancing act — the daily negotiations of asking for what we want, not being asked before something is taken, and the sexual freedom and safety of owning our own bodies in a culture that feels entitled to it.  

I didn’t have a lock on my door until I moved away from my parents’ house. The last time I was abused, I was sixteen years old, and my father chased me around the house with a knife. I ran outside and he came after me. I ran back inside, and he finally put the knife down. But afterwards, I called the police. I’ve written before about what happened when the police came- how I smoked a cigarette with the cop who drove me to the station; how that cop later told me that my father being Arab would be a problem. I understood that this meant it would be a problem for my mother, and for me. I dropped the charges against him a few weeks later. But that didn’t change that I had been very afraid of my father and very afraid of that knife.

They Found Love, Then They Found Gender (Francesca Mari, Matter, October 2015)

And to round out this reading list, I have for you a beautiful love story. Not traditional, definitely fluid, but more romantic than most of the other narratives out there. Boy, born biologically female, meets girl, born biologically male. It’s love at first sight. They throw caution to the wind to be together in the most honest way they can — genderqueer, fluid, trans, and finally, the first queer couple legally married in the state of Texas. Grab your tissues for this one. (And for you journalism nerds out there, enjoy a conversation in the comments about the editorial choices in names and pronouns as one character, Johnny, transitions over the course of the piece.) 

Now that there is marriage equality, they want to get married again, with a license that better reflects who they are — not husband and wife — but partner and partner. “When you give sexual consent, you cannot give a blanket consent at the beginning of an evening or for the rest of your life,” Johnny explains. “And we feel the same way about marriage.” So they continue to propose to one another nearly every day. Once Johnny fingered the question into the soot on Ashley’s back windshield. Just last month, Johnny wrote, “Will you marry me?” “Yes” and “No” in backwards cursive in different places on their body so that Ashley could snuggle up to her answer, letting it legibly transfer onto her skin. They write it in each other’s notebooks and songbooks to discover who knows how long later. With each proposal, they affirm their love and devotion to their partner in their current identity. For they know more than anyone else how fluid one’s identity can be.

***

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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

Lisa Bubert | Longreads | November 30, 2022 | 11 minutes (3,072 words)

When I was 19, a nursing home hired me to work as an aide. There wasn’t much to the interview that I remember, other than I agreed to come to work on time and take the certification course the home provided. In this course, I learned how to lift a frail person out of bed, how to wipe them, how to bathe them if bed-bound; how easily their skin tears, and how to touch so as not to cause a bruise. The head nurse was a short man with a thick north Texas accent and a handlebar mustache who finished the training with the advice to “treat each resident like they’re your grandmama.” The course lasted two weeks and came with the stipulation that I stay for at least six months. Employee turnover was high.

This job, caring for grandparents around the clock, paid $7.25 an hour — above minimum wage, the hiring manager boasted, which at the time in Texas was set at $5.15. This really was a great job, the other aides told me. It was steady work that came with a lunch break and health insurance for your kids, things that were lost on me. I was an anomaly in that job: a teenager, in college, white. 

None of my friends understood why I wanted to work there. Young people are scared of old people, which is to say all people are scared of old people, which is to say all people are scared of death. Death hung over the place like a ghost, the hospital smell embedded daily in my clothes. All I can say is that I wanted a real job and I liked old people. I’d already seen my share of dead bodies, thanks to the slew of open-casket funerals that came with a childhood spent in an aging rural community. Also, the home was the only place that called back when I applied.

The facility was broken into seven distinct hallways, with two aides assigned to each for their shifts. Each hall housed 15 or 20 residents, making each aide responsible for eight to 10 residents. There were no firm state or federal regulations on what the resident-aide ratio should be (and still aren’t), but 10-to-1 is considered easy street in most facilities. To be clear, this is still a terrible ratio. Imagine having to wake, bathe, dress, and hand-feed 10 elderly patients who need total assistance: buttoning shirts, brushing dentures, changing bedsheets for those who will have inevitably soiled the bed in the night. Imagine having to complete it all in an hour or less. It’s an impossible task. Which is why dentures don’t get brushed, baths don’t get offered, nightgowns are worn at the breakfast table. Now double it to 20 patients; this is what you have in many facilities across the country. 

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Hall One was for rehab patients, those who had suffered strokes or broken bones and were simply there until they could regain strength and rejoin the world (if they were lucky) or move to another wing (if they were less so). Hall Two was reserved for patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s. They were mostly ambulatory, which was great for those residents who liked to wander and terrible for the aides who had to keep track of them and everyone else. Halls Three and Four had a mean reputation, old folks who bit and scratched. One resident in that hall was a literal shit-flinger, known to keep her hands hidden until an aide was close enough to smear. Many of the Black residents were placed on these halls, creating a racist chicken-or-egg situation where the care was poor because the residents were difficult and the residents were difficult because the care was poor. Hall Five was a tale of two extremes — people who either needed a ton of help or none at all. Any aide was happy to get that assignment, though, because the extremes averaged out to something sustainable. Hall Six was for the bedridden. 

It was a toss-up whether Hall Three, Four, or Six was the worst assignment for aides — it depended on whether you felt like taking insults or blowing your back out. But Hall Seven was the hall everyone wanted: elderly people who were mostly lucid, mostly independent, who just needed a little help and some company. Hall Seven was heaven. And because I was young, too small to lift alone, and white, I got assigned to Hall Seven every time. 

I loved working Hall Seven because Hall Seven felt like home. I had grown up in the presence of old people, my grandparents some of my earliest caretakers. My father drove truck; my mother worked at the hospital by day, and had nursing school at night. She would dress me as I slept and shuffle me off to Granny K’s house at five in the morning, where my grandfather, Papa, was always awake and waiting, the local weather news segment on the TV glowing blue in the front window.

Granny K would make the meals, play with me, pick me up from school. We watched One Life to Live and General Hospital every summer day at 1 and 2 p.m. She was small and short, shrunken in her big, pink armchair. Papa was large, big-bellied, farted often, and smelled of peanuts and sweat. Granny K was sweet to me and harsh to everyone else; Papa was a teddy bear, grown soft in his old age. 

Papa died just a few years prior to my stint at the nursing home. The first sign of his illness was the loss of his round belly. He shrunk, then shrunk some more until he was confined to the hospital bed Granny K kept in the living room. Pancreatic cancer. We didn’t even try to fight. After he died, Granny K sank into a sullen, depressive loneliness I couldn’t understand, so I visited less and less until I moved to college and got work in the home that let me pretend everyone was my grandparent.

There was the lady who covered herself in beaded necklaces and split her secret stash of chocolate with me as we watched game shows and talked about boys. There was the man who wore a daily uniform of plaid shirt, khaki shorts, and Reeboks. There was the teeny tiny woman who couldn’t remember shit moment to moment but still thought all of this was pretty funny anyway. I’d take her to dinner with the other ladies who couldn’t remember shit and we’d sit and laugh about god knows what. She had no teeth so everything had to be pureed. I remember feeding her from piles of color on the dinner tray — green for peas, yellow for potatoes, brown for meat. 

Some of the residents refused to leave their rooms for dinner and would have their meals brought to them on a meal cart. Some of them had to be fed or they wouldn’t eat. Most of them refused even that, hell-bent on starving themselves out of existence. Take the food yourself, they’d tell the aide. You weren’t supposed to take the food, management said. That would be wrong. But things moved so fast that lunch breaks could pass untaken, and on days like that this was the only chance for food. An untouched butter roll, stale French fries, cold steak fingers, unopened cartons of juice. The chart truthfully updated — resident refused meal — the food in an aide’s mouth. Some wrapped the food to take home to children. You would take the food too, you just would. 

The entire elder care system operates on a mantra of out of sight, out of mind. Medical residencies feature little to no geriatric training; the profession experiences an annual turnover rate of 60 percent. A 2021 study found that turnover in nursing care facilities skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the average annual rate in 2020 at a shocking 128 percent. In other words, if you apply for a job at a nursing home, you can pretty well count on getting hired. For someone with little access to education living on the edge of poverty, this fact is a godsend. Yet, caveats lurk. There are countless reports of understaffing in nursing homes, underfunding, limited regulations where it matters (staff pay, patient ratio) and reels of red tape where it doesn’t (hours of required paperwork that detail how many ounces of water the resident drank, but not how they cry at night for their children). And while you may be trained on how to wipe from front to back, there’s no training to prepare you for the psychic toll of watching your people suffer until they die. 

There are plenty of reasons to see nursing homes as sad, neglectful places, and I’m sorry to say that my experience working in one did not change this perception. But I can also say that the perception has less to do with staffing, funding, and regulations (or lack thereof) and much more to do with our country’s fear of death, its rejection of vulnerability, and its subsequent inability to see the inherent dignity in people — especially in their vulnerable moments.

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Dying is a vulnerable act. There’s rarely the serenity we see in deathbed scenes. Instead, the pragmatic, much of which we view as shameful: the slow loss of function, the bowels loosed in bed, the sweat stench, the tonguing mouth, the hallucinatory terror, the whimpers, the rattle. You spent all this time learning how not to trip over your own feet and here you are now — older than anyone else in the room and forced to use a stroller, swaddled in diapers. You revert to a time when your mother held you, only your mother is gone. Your children (if you remember them) don’t visit, and why is that? 

Shame stems from a fear of disconnection. We live in a culture that increasingly connects old age with disconnection rather than dignity. Our friends pass on, our families visit less and less, we spend more time alone, helpless to arrest the breakdown of our own bodies. It’s no wonder the elderly — and those who care for the elderly — are steeped in a hot tea of shame. And because shame repels, it is no wonder our policies and priorities for eldercare are so lax as to be nearly criminal. Out of sight. Out of mind.

Granny K and Papa were both het up about “not being put into a home.” Papa didn’t have to, on account of the cancer. But no cancer came to save Granny K. She just got older and older and lonelier and lonelier until she couldn’t care for herself and my parents couldn’t leave their jobs to do it for her like she’d done for Papa. She went into assisted living, very reluctantly — though not until after I started working in my own facility. And by then, I’d seen how the sausage was made. 

I visited Granny K at the facility every time I came home. Short, quiet visits in her room that smelled of cough drops and Kleenex. The hum of her oxygen tank. The humidifier on high, turning the air wet. She would never say much past lamenting how terrible it all was, how she just wanted to die and be done with it. My visits grew shorter and shorter and then I took to calling her on Sunday mornings where I would hear more about how terrible everything was and how death would be a welcome ending. I called my mother crying, who then called Granny K and told her she couldn’t tell me those things anymore. My conversations with Granny K dwindled and dwindled, both of us playing a morbid waiting game to see how long it would take to get what we both wanted. 

Christmas 2012, I sprung Granny K from her facility for family dinner. As we drove home, the sun was setting across the fields in a dazzling display of purple and pink and rustling prairie grass and open, open pasture with room to run as far as the eye would allow. Live oaks with massive curling limbs cast long shadows in the hazy light. It was, by far, one of the more beautiful sunsets I’d ever seen, in a place that’s no stranger to such spectacle. Granny K sat up straight in the passenger seat, her eyes fixed out the window, taking in every sight, committing it to memory, presence. I wanted to say something, but stayed quiet. The moment was hers. 

We had Christmas dinner. We opened presents. My father offered to take Granny K back and the four of us — my mother, father, brother, and me — all went out to the car to see her off. It was the first time it had been just the four of us in years. A memory flickered to the surface of us eating around the dinner table when I wasn’t yet in grade school, before my brother got his first job and my mother worked nights. We said our goodbyes, watched Granny K’s small head disappear in the window as the car drove off. I already knew when I watched her watch that sunset that this would be the last time. 

It was; she died a week later. Just before, my mother called me and placed the phone at Granny K’s ear. I said I was glad to know her, that I enjoyed our time together. I could hear a clicking, the soft rattle in response. That was our last moment. But I prefer to remember the sunset. 

I worked at the nursing home until the six months were up and then I left. I’d had enough of the hours, the lifting, the side eye from the other aides who knew I wouldn’t stay. I didn’t need the job like they did. I was just a college kid. I was playing grown-up. 

A decade later, though, my training came in handy. May 2020, the height of the pandemic; my other grandmother, Granny Nawara, lay dying in a hospital bed. My mother had tried to keep Granny Nawara in her own home to care for her there, knowing the moment she went into a nursing facility would be the moment we could no longer sit with her. But it grew to be too much. My mother was a veteran nurse at our rural hospital; when the administration heard about Granny Nawara, they transferred her to a room there. I took my chances and flew to Texas to be with my mother as we watched Granny Nawara’s last days. 

For three days, we sat together in that room — my mother knitting a lovey for a new baby, me burying my head in work, Granny Nawara lying in bed, just breathing. Mom and I would trade off. Mom would check Granny for bedsores, sop a watery sponge to her cracked lips. I would rest a damp towel to Granny’s forehead and she would open her eyes for just a moment, see me, and smile. Mom spent the nights at the hospital, unwilling to leave. I went home to sleep in my childhood bed. The last night I told Granny good night, she gripped my hand with more strength than she’d had in weeks, pulled it to her chin, and wouldn’t let go. She blew a kiss and I stood there, letting her hold me until it grew late and I had to pry my hand out of her grasp. She would still be with us the next morning; she would only die after her older brother said his goodbye. Granny Nawara did always like to get permission. 

I have a hard time writing about this, not because it’s a traumatic memory, but because I got to do something so many others couldn’t in this pandemic. I sat with my grandmother as she died. And there is no act of love greater than to sit with someone as they face their deepest moment of vulnerability — an act of love denied to so many these last few years.

There’s plenty to be said about the ways the pandemic has laid bare the failures of our eldercare system, how our fear of weakness has driven our entire healthcare system to the brink, how we exorcise this fear through a cycle of abuse that directly impacts our old, young, and poor at alarming rates. How our abject terror of vulnerability robs us all of dignity. Dignity requires witness, to see and be seen; if we are too afraid to look, it slips away.

All I want to focus on now, then, is the sunset. A terribly beautiful sunset, one we all know is the last, one from which we cannot tear our eyes away. Commit that dazzling display to memory. Watch the light as we fade. 

One of my favorite tasks at the nursing home was supervising the 4 p.m. smoke break. Many of the residents were lifetime smokers and no nursing facility was going to curb that habit, so after breakfast and before dinner we’d wheel everyone to a small, glassed-in room off the corner of the dining hall. It stunk like only a room solely used by smokers could stink. Staff hated covering smoke time because of it. But it was also 15 minutes in which all you had to do was light cigarettes and make sure nobody burned themselves. I volunteered every time. 

Everyone’s assigned cigarettes were kept in locked cabinets. The families were responsible for keeping them stocked; no begging or borrowing loosies allowed. I’d separate the packs from their cartons, hand everyone their brand of choice, light them all with the management-issued lighter. Residents would relax back in their chairs, stare out the glass enclosure as though it was a window that looked outside, and drift off into some other beautiful world.

I loved smoke time for the pure peace and bliss of it; not just mine, but theirs. You could see their younger selves when it was smoke time, slouched back like a bunch of hoodlums, yakking and jawing like they were kids getting away with something. The muscle memory of the ritual — inhaling, holding, flicking into ashtrays, stubbing the smoke out when they were finished — transcended dementia. A few might forget, long lines of ash dangling at the ends of their lit cigarettes. But that’s why I was there. To remind them. 

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

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

By Lisa Bubert

When asked to picture a writer’s life, many people envision a cliché: someone holed up alone in a cabin in the woods, writing longhand on a yellow notepad, until they emerge months later with the next Great American Novel™. The coffee forever on brew; the cigarettes overflowing in the ashtray. Cliché or not, I’ve always been a sucker for this image. 

Who wouldn’t want to live a life of eccentric glamour where all you need to be a tortured genius is a pen, a notepad, and a complete disregard for time? Where you can lean into all of your weird idiosyncrasies that are probably a sign of poor mental health but that you insist are crucial to the creative process? Where you can reasonably tell your loved ones not to disturb you because you are daydreaming and they actually respect your daydreams as having literary merit? 

It’s a strange thing to be a writer, to argue with yourself about the way things are and should be, and committing those arguments to paper for others to read. It requires a level of self-awareness shaped by tireless observation of the world, and an internal dialogue picking that same world apart. The best writers out there, with the most recognizable voices and distinct styles, are writers who know exactly who they are: their flaws, their strengths, and most importantly, their oddities. 

Which is why I live for a good writer profile. Give me the weird tics, the turns of phrase, the strange beginnings. Give me the writer in their natural habitat. Give me that artistic magic, the writer as myth. Let me never forget that the voice is hard-won and earned through a commitment to self as art.

The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona, and Other Visions (William Kennedy, The Atlantic, January 1973)

A great literary profile is one that captures the subject both in setting and in voice. The profile feels embodied, as though the subject has written it themselves from the outside looking in. This one from William Kennedy captures everything that is Gabriel García Márquez; the debonair aloofness; a sense of humor that feels like an extended inside joke; long paragraphs of description and scene-setting that tell a whole story within a story; perfectly-placed single lines of dialogue that tie everything up in a beautiful literary bow; and, along with all that, wickedly funny lines aplenty. 

This piece is a blast from The Atlantic‘s archival past — originally published when Márquez had just released One Hundred Years of Solitude to great acclaim but was yet to realize the literary success that would be Love in the Time of Cholera. A time capsule at its best. 

It was in January, 1965, while driving from Mexico City to Acapulco, that he envisioned the first chapter of the book that was to become Cien Años. He later told an Argentinian writer that if he’d had a tape recorder, he could have dictated the entire chapter on the spot. He then went home and told Mercedes: Don’t bother me, especially don’t bother me about money. And he went to work at the desk he called the Cave of the Mafia, in a house at number 6 Calle de La Loma, Mexico City, and working eight to ten hours a day for eighteen months, he wrote the novel.

How Hank The Cowdog Made John R. Erickson King of the Canine Canon (Christian Wallace, Texas Monthly, March 2021)

Having grown up on a ranch in rural Texas, I couldn’t not be in love with Hank the Cowdog. There are two formative books I remember from my childhood: Joe Hayes’ adaptation of the La Llorona folktale, and John R. Erickson’s Hank the Cowdog series. La Llorona taught me that there can be ghosts and magic in all stories; Hank taught me that even a little cowdog from Texas belonged in literature. (And that we cowboy types are funnier than most.) 

This profile covers all the bases. It has all the Easter eggs Hank-ophiles have come to appreciate, like the 1980s picture of Erickson looking eerily like Slim Chance, the opening with Erickson face to face with a Western Diamondback, and the picture of Rosie, Erickson’s brown and bushy-tailed cowdog who looks an awful lot like another cowdog we know. The writer, Christian Wallace, perfectly captures the panhandle voice with its off-kilter lilt and understated humor — which in turn perfectly captures John R. Erickson, a panhandle cowboy who holds true to who he is, come hell or high water. 

(I once met John R. Erickson at a Texas Library Conference. I was so excited and verklempt at the sight of him when I shakily asked for an autograph that he signed it and sent me away without charging me, just to get me out of his booth. A truer cowboy there never was.)

Erickson rose early this morning, as he has almost every day for 54 years, to write, or, as he likes to say, “to pull the plow.” At 5:30 a.m. he made the short drive from his house to the one-room cabin that he uses as an office. His headlights shone in the predawn dark, and his two dogs—Rosie, a red heeler bounding with energy, and Daisy, a sweet yellow Lab with an age-stiffened gait—picked their way through tall grass and burned-out cedars alongside the pickup. At the cabin, Erickson made some coffee. Then he got to work.

Some mornings, “work” might mean scribbling replies to fan mail—piles of it—at the folding table that serves as his desk. Other days, he might jot some notes in his journal. But more often than not, he spends the next four or five hours sunk deep into a faded, dust-covered armchair, pecking at the keyboard of his laptop. He works on articles for livestock journals, essays for various websites, and nonfiction books about ranching, cowboying, Texas history, wildfires, and Panhandle archaeology. And twice a year, as the sun eases over the eastern rim of Picket Canyon, Erickson types these words: “It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog.” 

She Changed Black Literature Forever. Then She Disappeared (Imani Perry, New York Times Magazine, September 2021)

I love a literary recluse almost as much as I love a good literary profile. It is a romantic notion, the idea of a writer who has nothing to offer the world but their words. And words are all we will get from Gayl Jones. 

It’s no surprise if Jones’ name is not as familiar to you as other writers with such acclaim to their work. Perry describes her as “transformative,” a writer handpicked for publication by Toni Morrison herself, then editor at Random House. Her work utterly changed the face of Black women’s literature. But with that transformation came the spotlight, and a sense of public entitlement to know everything about Jones, to peek into her life no matter how much she would have preferred otherwise — an impulse to create a mythical story about the writer that was based partly in truth and mostly in assumption. Perry handles all of this with care, calling us out on our assumptions before we even realize we’ve made them, making her the correct choice to write about such a guarded subject. 

Jones’s novels have, from the beginning, cracked open something new in African American literature. Tasked with explaining how and why, without a glimpse or an interview, I sought an alternative. It was second nature to me. I’m a scholar and a writer. I work in archives. So I dug into Jones’s words, gathered from dozens of scattered sources. And there I found her, in cached papers like those of William Meredith, her mentor and friend at Connecticut College; of her Random House editor, Toni Morrison, at Princeton University. I sought out the poems, stories and essays she published in numerous small Black literary journals, the handful of interviews with cherished interlocutors (and some who raised her ire), as well as works she published abroad or by herself over the years. I also looked for her influence, a soul-searching exercise — because she has shaped me as a writer — as well as an exploratory one with my peers who agree that she is a writer’s writer, and more than that, a Black woman’s writer.

Smart Tartt (James Kaplan, Vanity Fair, September 1999)

Remember how I love a literary recluse? Well, Donna Tartt is another that fits the mold, with the added benefit of some Fran Lebowitz-styled fashion where the outfits are androgynous and the signature hair never changes. I may not be a huge fan of Tartt’s prose, but I have to admire her style and commitment to character. 

This profile is doubly interesting in that it’s a look at Donna Tartt before she was Donna Tartt. Even from the first line, Kaplan knows he’s dealing with a strange new literary star: “Donna Tartt, who is going to be very famous very soon — conceivably the moment you read this — also happens to be exceedingly small.” From there, it’s all you would expect from a writer hailing from small-town Mississippi who happens to write like the epitome of a highbrow East Coast WASP. I blame Bennington, clearly. 

Donna Tartt has her own secret history. Her childhood in Grenada should not, must not, be talked about. Bennington places, but no Bennington people, may be associated with her book. McGloin may not be spoken to. The novel itself is a thicket of literary references and inside jokes: the narrator’s surname is the same as that of the Weimar Republic chancellor who knuckled under to the Nazis; Bunny, whose real name is Edmund, has the same nickname as literary critic Edmund Wilson. The hotel where Henry and Camilla go off together, the Albemarle, has the same name as the English Channel hotel where T. S. Eliot, recuperating from a nervous breakdown, revised “The Waste Land.” What does this mean? Perhaps we shouldn’t overinterpret—but then, maybe we shouldn’t under interpret, either. When, pleased with my discovery, I point out the Albemarle correspondence to Tartt, she grows chilly. “I have nothing to say about that,” she says.

The Radical Woman Behind ‘Goodnight Moon’ (Anna Holmes, The New Yorker, January 2022)

As a children’s librarian, I know firsthand the depth of artistry and control of language it takes to write a picture book for children. I also know first-hand how often that artistry and ability is tossed aside by writers who mistakenly believe that picture books must be simple to write. Picture books are high art. And no one understood that better than Margaret Brown, author of the incomparable Goodnight Moon. 

I love this article not just because it does justice to picture book writers everywhere (and to Brown as a poet with a keen sense of how a child sees the world), but because it dispels the myth of picture book writing as “women’s work,” or as something only suitable for shy, quiet, child-friendly rule-followers. Margaret Brown was anything but. In fact, she was a queer rebel who blew right through expectations to create children’s literature still relevant today. She also happens to have had a feud with the most powerful children’s librarian of her time that lasted decades after both of their deaths — and this article has the tea. #TeamMargaret. 

Brown was most taken by the idea of writing for five-year-olds. “At five we reach a point not to be achieved again,” she once wrote in a notebook. In a paper on the topic, she argued that a child of that age enjoys a “keenness and awareness” that will likely be subdued out of him later in life. She went on, “Here, perhaps, is the stage of rhyme and reason. . . . ‘Big as the whole world,’ ‘Deep as a giant,’ ‘Quiet as electricity rushing about the world,’ ‘Quiet as mud.’ All these are five-year-old similes. Let the grown-up writer for children equal or better them if he can.”

***

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

***

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Peter Rubin

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By Lisa Bubert

The first novel I ever wrote had a mystery at its heart: a disappearance. It was never explained. It didn’t involve any kind of crime. The disappeared never reappeared. The mystery just … was. It was a storyline I was deeply committed to — and one that, as you may imagine, did not lead to a publishing contract.

Unsolved mysteries manage to be as irresistible as they are frustrating, stoking our imagination even while they tease our need for resolution. Faced with a story that refuses to tie everything into a neat bow, we chew on potential explanations until we find the one we like best — the one that satisfies all our biases, the one that allows us to bask in the knowledge that we (and only we) know what actually happened. A lack of answers may be maddening, but it also allows us to rewrite stories to our satisfaction.

As it turns out, not everyone feels that way. People reading my book maintained that the mystery simply couldn’t go unresolved, that there must be a why to the strange thing that had occurred. Was suspending disbelief suddenly something our brains couldn’t handle? Was it so impossible to believe that in this year of our Lord 2022, a mystery could persist?

In their minds, yes. After all, we have science. We have constant surveillance. We leave a digital self-portrait everywhere we go now, a mosaic sketched from location pings and security cameras and the constant tracking of our personal data. Infidelity in your family is no longer just a whispered theory; a DNA test proves it. So, in fiction especially, writing a story with an unsolved mystery often depends on a contrivance, some convenient loss of modern technology. (A character’s laptop died! A power surge took out the router! Someone threw their phone in the ocean!) Cause and effect skew, leaving the reader with a sinking feeling that things are happening because the writer needed them to happen that way — and nothing leaches the enjoyment from reading like awareness of the deus lurking in the machina.

Thankfully, in real life, unsolved mysteries still abound. Whatever happened to Amelia Earhart? What’s up with spontaneous human combustion? Who the heck was D.B. Cooper? Will anyone ever publish my book? (The world may never know!) From paranormal thrillers to fog-shrouded disasters to pedestrian oddities, let the modern mysteries chronicled herein bedevil your otherwise logical mind.

What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane (William Langewiesche, The Atlantic, July 2019)

The question of what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has long been a source of fascination for me. Is it because I still have trauma from that one time we hit turbulence on a flight back from Las Vegas and I was convinced we were all headed for a certain death so I cried to my mother and told her I loved her and then decided that the boy I’d just started seeing would have ended up being my husband if I’ve only had a bit more time? Maybe. (Though I did have more time and he did end up being my husband.) But it’s also because of the same paradox that Langewiesche tugs at in this meticulously reported piece: In a time when it’s nearly impossible for even one person to completely disappear, how is it that a plane full of 239 people could blink off of air traffic radar unnoticed, never to be seen again? The answer — and Langewiesche does propose one, satisfying and unsatisfying in equal measure — is long, complicated, and involves a necessary amount of conspiracy.

The mystery surrounding MH370 has been a focus of continued investigation and a source of sometimes feverish public speculation. The loss devastated families on four continents. The idea that a sophisticated machine, with its modern instruments and redundant communications, could simply vanish seems beyond the realm of possibility. It is hard to permanently delete an email, and living off the grid is nearly unachievable even when the attempt is deliberate. A Boeing 777 is meant to be electronically accessible at all times. The disappearance of the airplane has provoked a host of theories. Many are preposterous. All are given life by the fact that, in this age, commercial airplanes don’t just vanish.

We Two Made One (Hilton Als, The New Yorker, November 2000)

When writing, we’re always challenged to consider external conflicts that are pushing up against internal conflicts and vice versa. But sometimes truth is stranger than fiction — and the call really is coming from inside the house. This story of identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons, who would only communicate with each other, hits all the high notes of the deeply weird. Known as “The Silent Twins,” the pair led a strange and reserved existence from the beginning, which was exacerbated by the racist trauma and ostracization they experienced from being the only Black children in their Welsh community. (Hello, external conflicts!) As time went on, the two began to have trouble discerning themselves from each other. “You are Jennifer, you are me,” Jennifer would tell June. June later said, “One day, she [Jennifer] would wake up and be me, and one day I would wake up and be her.” I’d always heard people talk about the phenomenon like it was almost paranormal; however, upon reading Als’ essay, I was surprised to find that the story was less one of mystery and more one of self-preservation under untenable circumstances. The real mystery (or perhaps not, if we choose to look) is why so many storytellers are more willing to see this as a story of the unexplained rather one of oppression.

For most of their lives together, they refused to speak to anyone but each other — a refusal that led to their emotional exile, their institutionalization, and, eventually, to the misguided appropriation of their story by activists and theorists who used it to pose questions about the nature of identity and the strange birthright that twins are forced to bear.

The Exorcisms of Latoya Ammons (Marisa Kwiatkowski, Indianapolis Star, January 2014)

Imagine The Exorcist, but set it in 2010s Gary, Indiana, and add the Department of Child Services. Latoya Ammons’ three children are fatigued, bruised, and frequently missing school. Child abuse? No. Demons? Perhaps. What sounds like a plot perfect for the silver screen unfolds in a daily issue of the Indianapolis Star — a ghost story that comes with receipts. Reported with over 800 pages of official records and interviews with case managers, police officers, psychologists, and a priest, this piece is so fantastical it can hardly be believed — and yet there is so much official documentation that even the strongest of skeptics would have a hard time dismissing it.

According to Washington’s original DCS report — an account corroborated by Walker, the nurse — the 9-year-old had a “weird grin” and walked backward up a wall to the ceiling. He then flipped over Campbell, landing on his feet. He never let go of his grandmother’s hand.

“He walked up the wall, flipped over her and stood there,” Walker told The Star. “There’s no way he could’ve done that.”

Later, police asked Washington whether the boy had run up the wall, as though performing an acrobatic trick.

No, Washington told them. She said the boy “glided backward on the floor, wall, and ceiling,” according to a police report.

Who Shot Walker Daugherty? (Wes Ferguson, Texas Monthly, October 2021)

A classic Texas whodunnit, set against the backdrop of West Texas canyon country: Big game hunters clash with a Mexican drug cartel. Or was it a practical joke? Or a hoax for political and financial gain? Who shot first depends on who you ask; as Wes Ferguson describes it, “the question of who shot Walker Daugherty still feels like a political Rorschach test.” Of all the things Texas Monthly does well, true crime might be its strongest suit. Much of that lineage is due to the legendary Skip Hollandsworth, who has turned out more excellent investigative pieces than I can count. But Ferguson is no slouch himself — and this piece, which brings true crime to his usual outdoor beat, proves the tradition is in good hands.

They were nodding off when they were awakened by a frightening noise. The locked side door of the RV was rattling loudly. It sounded as if someone wanted in. Tinker Bell barked. Edwin jumped out of bed and grabbed his gun. “Who is it?” he later recalled asking. “Hey! I got a gun in here. Go away.”

The door handle shook again. He heard a man’s voice outside the RV: “All we want is the motor home.” The demand, he noted, was delivered in clear, unaccented English. Tinker Bell was growling loudly in Carol’s arms, and she didn’t hear the voice. But to Edwin, the man sounded sinister, terrible. “It was just like the devil was on the other side of that door,” he said later. Then he heard the door rattling again. He shot a single round through it.

The Ghostly Radio Station That No One Claims to Run (Zaria Gorvett, BBC Future, July 2020)

If you’re into Cold War history, espionage thrillers, secret Russian conspiracies, or all three, this story is absolute catnip. Apparently, a shortwave radio station that can be heard around the world has been broadcasting since the 1980s, and nobody knows who is running it — nor does anyone claim to own it. The station mostly broadcasts a long drone interrupted occasionally by a foghorn sound; once or twice a week, voices read out random phrases in Russian. (Russia says it’s not theirs, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .) There are many theories as to what’s behind the station, my favorite being the chilling “dead hand” theory, which states that the station is an automatic system scanning the airwaves for signs of life in the event of a nuclear detonation. If no signs of life are detected in the country of origin controlling the station, a retaliative attack is automatically triggered. Mutually assured destruction, shortwave style. Whatever it is, I’d love to read some spy fiction about it. Solved or not, the story practically writes itself.

Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.

It’s so enigmatic, it’s as if it was designed with conspiracy theorists in mind. Today the station has an online following numbering in the tens of thousands, who know it affectionately as “the Buzzer”. It joins two similar mystery stations, “the Pip” and the “Squeaky Wheel”. As their fans readily admit themselves, they have absolutely no idea what they are listening to.

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Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

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Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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By Lisa Bubert 

I’m on a mission to become human again. Not through good deeds, being in nature, or communing with the universe, etc., — no — for me the single most humane thing I felt that I could do was to get off of social media.

Deleting accounts seemed a simple, concrete action to take, but I found it anything but. I’m a freelance writer, reliant on Twitter for pitch calls, as well as the all-important Discourse of the Day. While Instagram’s main purpose appears to be to make me feel terrible, the stories remain helpful for getting eyes on my writing. While Facebook operates as my Rolodex of family and friends, my community bulletin board — increasingly, the only way to learn who’s still alive and who’s dead.

This is known as “social lock-in,” where social networks monopolize our experiences and make it impossible to live our lives outside of the purview of the platform. It’s also a feature of surveillance capitalism, a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff to showcase how capitalism no longer simply controls our purchasing power but manipulates our human behavior at scale. Every search query, every post liked, even the amount of time your eyes spend looking at a specific image on your screen is tracked, quantified, and mined to learn more about you, the decisions you make, and why. That information can then be used against you — to sell you more products, to make you more susceptible to suggestions, to know things about you before you even know them yourself. Thanks to social media, capitalism doesn’t just require cornering the market on household products; powerful, unknown players can now corner the market on democracy for the right price.

As scary as surveillance capitalism sounds, for me, the true fear resides in my slow loss of privacy, and with it my sense of sanctuary.

I’m a librarian — a notoriously privacy-obsessed profession. Librarians have always believed that it is your inalienable right to learn whatever it is you want without fear of anyone looking over your shoulder. We were some of the first to cry foul over seemingly small encroachments on digital privacy, such as individual search queries.

We like to believe that our own personal searches, such as “best exercises to improve back posture,” are small fry — too insignificant to matter. After all, we have nothing to hide. But we must look at the big picture, much the same way that surveillance capitalist companies, like Google, do. Our personal decisions about privacy are hardly private — they have always been a public affair. The more we allow tech and social media companies to chip away at our personal privacy, the more they can commercialize our privacy at scale. Everything, even our most interior sense of self, is for sale.

According to Jaron Lanier, computer scientist, futurist, and frequent tech critic, deleting our social media accounts is “the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times” — and it’s the only way to regain our humanity in an increasingly inhumane world.

Here’s some inspiration on going from Extremely Online to Extremely Offline.

You Are Now Remotely Controlled (Shoshana Zuboff, The New York Times, January 2020)

No one understands the importance of privacy as a public affair better than Shoshana Zuboff. Zuboff is the one person who has been repeatedly able to clock the tech economy and call it for what it is, before the rest of us even know what we’ve signed up for. Every time we agree to the mass of terms and conditions of a new digital service with personalization (read: data mining) at its core, we’ve agreed to what Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” Any time I sit down to read a piece by Shoshana Zuboff, I can expect it to be engrossing, brilliant, and frankly disturbing — and this piece (which is essentially a Cliff notes version of her banger of a book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,) takes no prisoners.

The lesson is that privacy is public — it is a collective good that is logically and morally inseparable from the values of human autonomy and self-determination upon which privacy depends and without which a democratic society is unimaginable.

…In the competition for scope, surveillance capitalists want your home and what you say and do within its walls. They want your car, your medical conditions, and the shows you stream; your location as well as all the streets and buildings in your path and all the behavior of all the people in your city. They want your voice and what you eat and what you buy; your children’s play time and their schooling; your brain waves and your bloodstream. Nothing is exempt.

The Conscience of Silicon Valley (Zach Baron, GQ, August 2020)

I love a good profile. Especially one on a person as strange, enigmatic, and offbeat as Jaron Lanier — the so-called “father of virtual reality,” and according to this piece, “the owner of the world’s largest flute.” Lanier wrote one of my favorite books, Ten Arguments to Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a slim little volume that contains just 10 chapters — 10 arguments — and reads like a Buddhist manual written by the dreadlocked Berkeley hippie with a pan flute that Lanier is.

In reading Baron’s profile of him, I am reminded of my own inner child. Lanier, a futurist by nature, is one of the more curious people I’ve come upon, his mind seemingly unadulterated by outside influence — which is why I love this profile showing the weird, wily human he is.

(Lanier) seemed to live somewhere off ahead of us, by the horizon. Now here the rest of us were too.

But all that was only part of the reason I had sought out Lanier, I told him. What I really hoped to do, I said, was to talk about the future and how to live in it. This year feels like a crossroads; I do not need to explain what I mean by this. We are on the precipice of ruin or revolution or both. We are sick of looking at social media, but social media is also maybe driving the most significant and necessary social movement of my entire life. I want to destroy my computer, through which I now work and “have drinks” and stare at blurry simulations of my parents sometimes; I want to kneel down and pray to it like a god. I want someone—I want Jaron Lanier—to tell me where we’re going, and whether it’s going to be okay when we get there.

Lanier just nodded. All right, then.

It’s Not Your Fault You’re a Jerk on Twitter (Katherine Cross, Wired, February 2020)

There are a lot of jerks on Twitter. I like this article because it doesn’t just look at the damaging effects of internet pile-ons propelled by tweet after tweet, it looks specifically at the effects of what Cross calls the “third order” of harassment, i.e., the Discourse.

You know the Discourse. Usually a subtweet about a new argument of the day. A commentary if you will. You have a Twitter account. A thing has happened. You comment on it to signal which side of the Discourse divide you’re on. It’s not a pile-on; it’s just a statement about the situation. But that subtweet, which usually doesn’t directly involve the target of the Discourse, and which may even be supportive of the target, only allows the harassment to continue and grow. Commentary provides longevity, and longevity extends the harmful episode, regardless of what is being said. Twitter’s design allows users to dissociate from the very real human harm they are inevitably causing just by being active on the platform.

The attacks directed at an individual are a metacommunicative shorthand—“I hate Neon Yang” isn’t about Yang, it’s about a suite of ideas that they discursively represent; you can’t @ an idea on Twitter, only a person… This is why even the numerous attempts at “constructive” callouts or criticism in the helicopter story saga, directed at both the original story and Neon Yang in later months, merely added to the pain and fury. The sheer weight and volume of so many people bearing down on an individual all at once becomes powerfully destructive, even if many of those people are being “nice.”

Welcome to Airspace (Kyle Chayka, The Verge, August 2016)

In order to write well, or to create any kind of art that cuts through the persistent noise of human experience, you have to first participate in that experience. There has to be diversity in the aesthetic around you. But the pandemic year left us looking for an aesthetic in an increasingly isolated, and online, world. I scroll through Instagram despite the fact that all the photos are increasingly similar. The algorithm has zeroed in on the aesthetic it thinks I like and serves me photo after photo of the same thing to keep my eyes glued, my time monetized for someone else. By this point, I can’t even tell the difference between what I like and what I’m being fed.

Of all the things I can’t stand about an Extremely Online life, the theft of a diverse and surprising aesthetic burns me the most. (Other than our lives becoming simple data points for someone else’s commodification.) No matter where I go, everything looks the same. This is why I love this article about the increasing “frictionlessness” of the various aesthetics popularized at large — open concept kitchens, industrial design, Edison bulbs over every table — and how the curation of a single aesthetic, specifically by AirBnb, has made it possible to travel from city to city, even internationally, without noticing a difference.

We could call this strange geography created by technology “AirSpace.” It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers like Schwarzmann take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.

Escape the Echo Chamber (C Thi Nguyen, Aeon, April 2018)

To me, social media increasingly feels like a cult. It doesn’t matter which platform I’m on; people exhibit the same linear thought necessary for cult indoctrination, regardless of topic. It doesn’t matter what I think about a topic; the Discourse has already been decided for me, for all of us. Now, virality, not facts, equals truth. Questioning out loud has become increasingly difficult. As Nguyen notes in this essay, two things are needed for cult thinking to bloom — epistemic bubbles combined with echo chambers — and social media has it in spades. So yeah, we’re in a cult. Time to call our dads.

In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.

Editor: Carolyn Wells