This week’s top 5:
- The consequences of speaking up
- Sean Combs’ Violence
- Marilyn Munro v. Palm Springs, California
- Caring for a Partner with Alzheimer’s
- Why pooping on the moon is bad
Moira Donegan | Book Forum | July 2, 2024 | 4,344 words
In 2022, I published a story about four women who, as teenagers, were sexually abused and seduced by a teacher at a prestigious public high school. I agonized over how this story would impact their lives. They did too. The teacher who hurt them, and others who knew that hurt, was beloved. How would their peers react to their childhood mentor being exposed as a predator? How would the subjects cope with seeing their pain written on paper? I am proud of this story and believe it has had a positive impact. One of the women even got the first letters of the pen name I used for her tattooed on her arm as a symbol of empowerment. Dozens of readers told me the story prompted personal reckoning for the misconduct that had continued in their schools, almost invisibly. Further victims of abuse came forward to sue. But I also reached out to other victims and people who knew other victims who didn’t want to come forward. I understand that decision, and I thought about it while reading this shocking essay by Moira Donegan. Though technically a review of the memoir of Christine Blasey Ford, who testified that she was sexually assaulted by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in high school, Donegan’s piece is actually a much larger project. It’s an indictment of the #MeToo movement’s triumphalist narrative and a reminder that for many victims, the decision to speak out brought new forms of pain: bullying, death threats, PTSD. Ford realized that her testimony would forever narrowly define her in the public eye. “You can’t be anything else now,” a spokesperson told her. Meanwhile, for many victims, including Ford, justice remains elusive. Since his Supreme Court confirmation, Kavanaugh has helped to restrict women’s rights. I fear that, like Donegan, other abusers are becoming increasingly adept at avoiding scrutiny for both past and present wrongs. So what was #MeToo’s many public spectacle for? “Plundering the psyches of public victims…their vulnerability and humiliation, their depleted emotions and bank accounts, their diminished prospects and stolen identities, their anger and grief and humiliation,” Donegan wrote. “In retrospect, it seems like it was more for our amusement than for our edification.”—SD
Daniel Smith | The New York Times Magazine | July 12, 2024 | 5,724 words
Journalism Rule #4080: If you’ve written for a hip-hop magazine for any length of time, you’ve probably done at least one cocktail party story where the specter of violence, hidden or not, was involved. (In my case, it involved Lil Wayne, a Florida tour bus, and a giant jar full of White Widow.) Most of the time, it was a temporary storm cloud, but sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes there was more than marijuana smoke behind it. Sometimes it was physical. Sometimes it was all of these things intertwined. Such was the case when Bad Boy Records founder Sean Combs said: atmosphere He told editor-in-chief Daniel Smith that he would find her “dead in the trunk of a car.” That was the part she always remembered. What she’d forgotten until recently was the precursor to the death threats. It was the part where staffers escorted her from office to office, evading Combs and security and escaping the building. For Combs, 2024 has been a year of reckoning of sorts: multiple lawsuits, a federal investigation linked to a sex trafficking investigation, the surfacing of a downright horrific assault on R&B singer Cassie. But it’s also the culmination of years of whispers. Whispers that Smith regrets not heeding. Whispers that highlight the predicament in which many in the music industry find themselves, especially women. “We’ve become used to the game. We’re conditioned to not see something when it’s right in front of us, or to not see it for what it is,” she writes. Like much of Smith’s writing, mournful poetry peeks out around every corner of this essay. He said journalism was “an art full of betrayal” and Smith was “a fly on the wall, a fly on the wall” who “can hardly hear the music through his tears.” [her] Her story, “Hearable,” is not one of the battle scars of journalism, but of being part of a world that keeps you underwater even as your talents soar above you.public relations
Dan Kois | Slate | June 18, 2024 | 5,103 words
As I gazed upon Marilyn Munroe’s tucked-up skirt and giant embroidered pants, I was unaware of the debate swirling about their existence. In 2023, I was in Palm Springs on business and one of many people gazing intently at the 26-foot statue of Seward Johnson on my way to dinner. Forever MarilynIt’s hard to miss. It’s on Museum Way, right in the middle of downtown Palm Springs. Marilyn stares off into space, holding her skirt in place, immortalizing the image of a night on Lexington Avenue in 1954 when a gust of wind from a vent blew it away. (It was a gimmick; the gust came from an industrial fan mounted under the sidewalk.) Seeing Marilyn, five times her life size, felt like a homage to kitsch and a fun embodiment of Palm Springs’ intoxicating atmosphere. Some residents agree. But others think she’s an unnecessary obstacle that should be moved, and a few think she’s a monster. Hearing that wealthy Springs residents are arguing over a “giant statue of a midcentury sex symbol,” Dan Kois asks: “Why is this statue getting so many fashionable people so excited, when so much of the American public is fighting over so many different statues that evoke its past?” As expected, it turns out to be complicated.The basic debate is whether it is appropriate to close Museum Way; Forever Marilyn Despite being art, this situation has been going on for five years, with “committee meetings, architectural designs, legal briefs, environmental reports, legal challenges” over and over again. You might stop here and wonder if you want to read about “committee meetings,” but rest assured. Kois understands the pitfalls of boredom well and avoids them deftly. He doesn’t hold back in this very funny article, happily portraying a character as big as Marilyn, abandoning journalistic integrity to proclaim how much he hates this “giant, cheesy statue that you wouldn’t want to put in a very nice museum, flashing her underwear.” This is not only a story about Marilyn, but also about Palm Springs, a “fictional city” in the desert. Maybe that’s where she belongs. —The CW
Michael Aylwin | The Guardian | July 9, 2024 | 5,937 words
for ParentsMichael Aylwin talks about caring for his wife Vanessa, a marketing professional who died at age 53 after battling Alzheimer’s. Vanessa and Michael met by chance on a dance floor when they were in their 30s. At the time, Vanessa was already caring for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s, and Vanessa was convinced that she too would one day get it. Michael initially ignored her prophecy, but after a conversation about leaving his keys behind turned into a completely forgotten one, he knew she’d been right all along. His first-person account is fresh and poignant. He continued to care for Vanessa at home for as long as he could, until she began to show signs of aggression towards her children. Aylwin found it difficult to get someone so young to be cared for in a specialized care facility. “It’s dangerous for them to have an angry 50-year-old walking around,” he says of the facilities tasked with caring for much older and more frail residents. Aylwin reveals a huge gap in care for people like Vanessa. These are people who are too young for traditional nursing homes, but who need far more care than a loving spouse can provide while also raising children and trying to make a living. There is little public financial support, even though the disease is expensive and seems increasingly prevalent among younger people. Aylwin appealed multiple times to get the benefits he received. As hard as it was for him, he says, it was even harder for Vanessa. She knew she had Alzheimer’s. She lashed out at it, in intervals of lucidity that brought the humiliation of her decline into stark relief. “‘This is not life. This is not life,’ Vanessa told Michael. ‘I used to be really energetic and I used to go everywhere…’ She paused, sobbing quietly. ‘And now I’m not. I don’t know who I am.'” The Aylwins’ story reminds us that we must make the most of every day in the present. —KS
Becky Ferreira | WIRED | June 25, 2024 | 2,276 words
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you pooped in space? (Probably not.) On Earth, gravity would pull the poop downwards, where it would be flushed right away down the toilet. Where would it go on the Moon? Ponder this creepy thought, then buckle up with this fun article from Becky Ferreira. Wired Story. “At the dawn of the space age, American crew members literally just taped bags to their butts when they had to relieve themselves, a system that infamously resulted in poop splattering from the Apollo 10 command module,” she writes. More than 50 years ago, the first astronauts on the Moon left nearly 100 “poop bags” at six landing sites. And they’re still there. I’m not counting how many unexpected phrases and laugh-out-loud lines there are in this article, but I was thoroughly entertained from Ferreira’s opening paragraph to the last line. Vulgar jokes aside, she paints an interesting picture of this less glamorous side of space travel. For NASA and other space agencies to return to the Moon, and for corporations and billionaires like Richard Branson to start a new era of tourism, a solid waste management system (pun intended) must be in place. And what about those old Apollo poop bags left on the Moon, full of microbes? What might it tell us about the emergence of life in the universe? “The answers to some of the deepest and oldest questions about our place in the universe may lie in Neil Armstrong’s 55-year-old diaper,” Ferreira writes. Worth adding to this 💩 reading list. —CLR
Audience Award
This week, our readers eagerly read: