This week’s top 5 long reads

This week’s featured features are:

• Student demonstrators speak in their own words.
• Dancing as freedom from obstacles.
• The wealth gap in Big Sky, Montana.
• The Anthropocene as the last era on Earth.
• A cabbage patch doll is born.

student at Columbia University School of Law for Palestine. State University of New York law student against genocide. Maeve Vitello. Rita W. Wang; Mehrdad Darish, Chisato Kimura, Chloe Miller, Rachel Vogel.Allah Hajahia and Seetha Tan | Law and Political Economy Project | May 2, 2024 | 4,342 words

If you’ve read anything this week about the protests sweeping American college campuses, read this. Overshadowed by hysterical concerns about campus safety and anti-Semitism, which mainstream media largely (and irresponsibly) allow opponents of the movement to define, are the voices of protesters and the concrete It’s a request. Despite what CNN would have you think, these are not some rash kids screaming about conflict on the other side of the world. They know little and have no way of influencing it. They are well aware that in the tradition of student protests against South Africa’s apartheid and other abhorrent regimes of the past, they are: can It is now gaining influence by demanding organizations divest from weapons manufacturers and other organizations that are enabling the massacre in Gaza. They accept police brutality, thanks in no small part to the education they received in school, and they clearly understand how different systems of violence and exploitation, such as colonialism and capitalism, are intertwined. It represents the current generation. In this collection of short stories, protesters from Columbia University, New York University, Yale University, and City University of New York explain in their own words why they are putting themselves at risk. They know the risks and they know what they’re capable of. “If students join forces with faculty, staff, residents of New Haven, and camps across the country united behind the vision of a “Popular University for Gaza,” in ultimate solidarity with the Palestinians, the current administration and “They are very afraid,” four Yale law students wrote. —SD

Chloe Cooper Jones | New York Times Magazine | April 19, 2024 | 4,755 words

Normally I would ignore articles with headlines like this, but the combination of dance and disability made me stop and stare. I’m glad I did, because Cooper-Jones’ script is brilliant and the perspective she shares with her partner, choreographer Matty Davis, is inspirational. Cooper-Jones has sacral dysplasia, a congenital condition that affects the lower spine. Before she met Davis, she believed, she was living in a body excluded from most types of movement, finding refuge in fear and loathing as a form of self-defense. Ta. (When introduced to Davis’s work in her online video, she describes her reaction as a mixture of disgust and fascination.) In his memoirs he says: easy beauty, she talks about not wanting to admit her disability. In this work, she focuses less on the physical limitations of her own body. She uses simple but understandable words like “clenched” and “curled up” to describe the default position. She reflects honestly on the sorrows in her own life, including her mother’s deterioration due to cancer, the death of her stepfather, and her husband’s infidelity, but it is also the She writes about Davis rehearsing and his definition of free movement. Really enlightening. “The movement doesn’t have to involve a lot of leg swinging or jumping,” he tells her. “It’s walking the dog. It’s us in love. It can include thoughts, loss, and change.” I often save my favorite passages from essays in the Notes app But after reading this piece, the pages were filled with so many insights that made me question my ideas about dance, mobility, and the interaction of bodies within physical spaces. —CLR

nick bolin | harpers magazine | April 15, 2024 | 5,450 words

It wasn’t that long ago that the unequal distribution of wealth became somewhat evenly distributed across the Mountain West, including in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Sun Valley, Idaho. Telluride, Colorado. However, as Nick Bowlin outlines in this harpers There’s nothing like Big Sky, Montana. Hidden above town, the private resort has many millionaire members among its members, and even though it’s below average home prices, it sells for $2.5 million. However, boom times aren’t really the point for Gulfstream audiences. Instead, Bolin scrapes away the varnish of private equity and reveals the gulf between the haves and have-nots. Big His Sky has always been run by a workforce of ski resort employees, but now that workforce is squeezed into company-owned converted motels and far-flung towns. still As the cost of living rises rapidly, many people have to work multiple jobs to maintain their footing. On the other hand, towns themselves are not really towns, but a collection of homeowners associations and other organizations that are close to the work of the mayor and city council. Big Sky has neither. This is his vision of a 21st century corporate city. It’s not just a place where residents live and work for giant corporations, it’s also a place where the Tres Comas Club’s service efforts scrape by in exchange for access to the natural resources that drew them. It’s there in the first place. —PR

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Bathsheba Demuth | Emergence Magazine | September 16, 2021 | 4,011 words

Most stories follow a familiar pattern: a beginning, middle, and end. As Bathsheba Demuth writes in this sharply observed essay, our place in the Earth’s story is unclear. emergence magazine. Demuth is an author I follow and I was glad to find him with this story that I had missed in 2021. She has an uncanny ability to spot and convey the beauty she encounters in the northern outdoors. Her work not only educates me; They temporarily satisfy my never-ending thirst for good writing. Demuth will accompany Stanley Gnotoli on a trip to Old Crow, Yukon Territory, to hunt elk that feed them and other local residents. While traveling along the Ch’izhìn Njik River, they notice significant erosion occurring along the banks, the collapse of which is washing plants and trees into the water and washing away the loam. “The bank was losing all consistency, like a sack of flour cut open. . . . The earth is losing its consistency. How do we stay consistent? The way I do this is , by using narrative patterns,” she writes. “But there’s no end to what we see on the river. We’re talking from the middle, or from the beginning, and there’s no visibility at all as to where it’s going to end.” Operating in the North for decades Demuth, a white environmental historian, recognizes his position as a relative newcomer. She wonders if the Anthropocene (Earth’s current era, the first to be irreversibly affected by human activity) will be the end of that story. She says, “’Anthropocene’ is both a word and a story. A story in which the protagonist is not an individual but a species. Initialization, homo sapiens Although unmanageable, they can bring about tectonic shifts and uniquely shape the fate of all life. It can bring the earth itself to its knees. ” If only we could learn from female elk, female elk eat their “favorite felt-leaf willow” even while pregnant, and the plant thrives when it is gently pruned rather than cut down. If only we could give back more to the earth than we received. Perhaps the Anthropocene may not be the end of this story, but the middle of a larger one. —K.S.

Joshua Rigsby | Thrillist | April 19, 2024 | 1,713 words

When I read this piece, my first reaction was, “Huh?” Joshua Rigsby’s visit to Cabbage Patch Kids Babyland General Hospital was a strange one indeed. But the strange is often the wonderful, and Rigsby’s account of how Cabbage Patch Doll’s “babies” are “born” in a plantation house-like building in Cleveland, Georgia; My ears were glued to it. For just $120, you can have the complete birth experience (Planned Parenthood option). Rigsby, not quite ready to parent in a cabbage patch, takes a free tour instead, but still ends up witnessing a birthing ritual, the description of which makes me wonder fundamental questions about humanity. I held it. When the birth is announced on the tannoy, the guests gather around a tree on top of a plaster mound, in which, as Rigsby describes, the electronic cabbage patch children are buried up to their necks in “Dante’s Animatronic Inferno.” Their heads are smiling with eternal smiles, just like in a scene from the movie.” ” A hospital scrub employee declares that Mother Cabbage is fully expanded (it is unclear whether Mother Cabbage is a tree, a mound burying a doll, or some other deity). unknown). Everyone yells, “Push!” and the “followers pump infant fists and shake, begging the stuffed baby to come out of the expanded wooden vagina as Dante’s robot head spins and writhes.” do”. It was a sentence that I had to read twice. Rigsby is at pains to emphasize that this was all done ironically. Kudos to the staff here. Cabbage Patch Kids sells a lot of dolls. Their marketing including this experience is clearly working (reiterating my question about humanity). I’m not going to visit a dilated tree vagina, but I’m glad Rigsby did. He enjoys talking about this special place. —C.W.

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