Last summer, I put my old Roan horse in the ground.

But there’s way more to the story than that. Thirty-nine years on the planet, 25 of those with me. I bought Roany the same year I moved to a ranch in Creede, Colorado, because Deseo, my alarmist Paso Fino, who had lived outside Fresno, California, most of his young life, was deciding that Colorado was the scariest place he’d ever been. First off, there was snow—a whole damn lot of it. The predator-to-livestock ratio was not to his liking, and the pasture was surrounded by hundred-foot spruce trees that often sang in the wind.

The first thing I noticed about Roany was that he had a kind eye; the second was his size—just under 17 hands at the shoulder. The Santa Fe cowboy who sold him didn’t tell me much apart from his age, which likely had a year or two shaved off, and that he went better away from the barn if you wore spurs. Within days, I came to understand Roany’s intensely good nature. Each morning when I went out to feed him, he greeted me with a just-happy-to-be-here chortle.

He was as solid a trail horse as I’ve ever ridden, never flinching in big wind, or while crossing water, or when mule deer twins who’d been stashed by their mother in some willows leaped to their feet right in front of him. He was so bombproof that the county search and rescue team enlisted his help a few times a year to find and deliver a wayward hiker. Because I grew up in an unpredictably violent household, my temperament ran a little closer to Deseo’s. I counted on Roany to keep the whole barnyard calm, not just Deseo and the mini donkeys, but also the ewes and lambs, the recalcitrant rams, the aging chickens, and me.

I called Roany “the horse of a different color.” In the dead of winter, he was burgundy wine with tiny white flecks. In March, he would shed to a dappled gray with rust highlights. By midsummer he was red again, but not such a rich red as in wintertime, and when his heavy coat grew back in October, he was solid gray for most of a month.

For two and a half decades at the ranch, Roany’s coat marked the changing of the seasons. I stopped riding him when he turned 33, because I thought he deserved a lengthy retirement, though he stayed well muscled and strong until a few months before his death. He had a bout of lameness in April and a longer one in May, and by late June he was limping more often than not. When Doc Howard came for a ranch call he said, “There’s a number associated with this lameness, Pam, and it’s 39.”

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I did the things there are to do: supplements, an ice boot, DMSO, Adequan shots, even phenylbutazone on the most painful days. We’d had very little snow and no spring rain, and for the first time in my tenure the pasture stayed dormant all summer, the ground extra-hard on sore hooves. Roany loved nothing more than the return of the spring grass, and it seemed radically unfair that, in what was looking to be his last year, there wouldn’t be any. I watered, daily, a thin strip of ground between the corral and the chicken coop and named it Roany’s golf course. He had some good days there, even some when he ambled over toward the house to eat the grass that grew over the septic tank, but mostly he hung around the corral.

The downside of Roany having the best head on his shoulders of any animal I’d ever owned was that he never got the bulk of my attention. But last summer, between me, my fiancé, Mike, and my ranch helpers, Kyle and Emma, he hardly had a moment’s peace. We iced his legs and groomed him twice daily, mixed canola oil into his grain to help keep weight on him, and hugged him constantly. We carried five-gallon buckets of water to him eight times a day, though on all but the very worst days he could have made it to the trough himself. He seemed bemused, maybe even touched, by all the attention. Every time we set the water in front of him, he took a giant drink, and I suspect it was more for our sake than his. One day, Kyle, not knowing I was out there, set a bucket down next to Roany not three minutes after he had drunk three-fourths of a fresh bucket for me. Roany looked at Kyle for a minute, glanced over at me, then lowered his head to drink again.

My biggest fear was that he would fall and break something during one of the weeks I was away from the ranch and would have to be put down immediately. This was accompanied by a lesser, but still palpable, fear that the same thing would happen on a day when I was there all alone. As his condition deteriorated, I worried that we would pass the point where we could ask him to walk far enough across the pasture to a burial site where his grave wouldn’t invite all kinds of trouble to the remaining animals who lived in and around the barn. I had made difficult decisions a dozen times in my life with beloved dogs, but the length of a horse’s life and the sheer size of its body made the timing even trickier. I knew I didn’t want Roany rendered with a chainsaw. I knew that if we had to drag his body across the pasture behind a piece of heavy equipment, it would tear him all to hell.

Roany was stoicism defined. As his condition worsened, he learned to pivot on his good front leg—and would, for an apple or a carrot or to sneak into the barn to get at the winter’s stash of alfalfa. He blew bubbles in his water bucket because it made me laugh, and he would sometimes even give himself a bird bath by splashing his still mighty head. I also knew that just because he could handle the discomfort didn’t mean he should. He had been so strong so recently, such a force of nature thundering back and forth across the pasture. There was no chance I was going to ask him to make another winter, but as long as he was hobbling to his golf course and chortling to me each morning, it seemed too early to end his life.

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That summer, I was getting ready to marry Mike, a U.S. Forest Service lifer who was teaching me, in my 56th year, what it meant for a man to show up in a relationship. More than one of my friends suggested that Roany had held on so long to deliver me safely to Mike, and I had no reason to argue. Among Mike’s other gifts is a deep intuition about the suffering of people and animals, so I paid attention when he said, on a Monday night in mid-August, less than two weeks before the wedding, “This is entirely your decision, but if you want to put Roany down this week, I could take Wednesday afternoon off.”

I was not surprised, on Tuesday morning, to see a slight downturn in Roany’s condition. He ate his food, drank his water, stood for his treatments, but there was something a little lost in that kind eye, in the way he held his body up over his aching feet. I called Doc and made the appointment for Wednesday afternoon, with the caveat that I could cancel if Roany’s condition improved or I lost my nerve.

By Tuesday night, Roany was swaying just slightly over his feet. He ate his gruel of Equine Senior, bute powder, and oil, but with a little less enthusiasm than usual. I went out to check on him at 8 P.M. and then at ten. The moon was bright and the coyotes were singing; there was a tinge in the air that suggested a light morning frost. Even by moonlight I could see that Roany was holding his body like he didn’t feel right inside of it.

I woke at 4:30 with the kind of start that always means something has happened. The moon had set by then, so I grabbed a flashlight and rushed to the corral, but Roany wasn’t there, nor on his golf course, nor in the yard. I called his name and heard hoofbeats coming hard across the pasture, and I allowed myself to indulge the fantasy, just for a moment, that after all these weeks of suffering he was miraculously cured. Then I heard Deseo’s high whinny. My hot-blooded alarmist, my early-warning system, my tsunami siren. Deseo skidded to a stop in front of me and butted his head against my chest, seeming to say: About time you got here.

The flashlight batteries were already dying, but my eyes were adjusting to the dark. I started out across the pasture with Deseo beside me, heading for one of Roany’s favorite spots—the wetland (though dry this year) at the back of the property. When I turned at the quarter pole, Deseo whinnied again: Not that way, human. By this time, Mike was dressed and crossing the pasture to meet me. Deseo whinnied again, and we followed him to another favorite spot—a shady stand of blue spruce at the base of the hill where the ranch’s original homesteaders are buried. It was the first time since last summer Roany had been out that far.

He was still standing when I got there. But the minute he saw me he went to the ground with relief. He curled up like a fawn, and I could hear that his breathing wasn’t right. Mike and I sat beside him and petted his handsome neck. Above us, stragglers from the Perseid meteor shower, which had peaked over the weekend, streaked the blackness. Directly overhead, Pegasus, the biggest horse of all, galloped across the sky, carrying Princess Andromeda away from her mother, Queen Cassiopeia, whose bragging about Andromeda’s beauty invoked the wrath of the sea monster, and her father, King Cepheus, who promised that whoever rescued his daughter from the monster could have his daughter’s hand. Andromeda married Perseus, Pegasus’s creator, and they rode off into the forever of the night sky.

Eventually, a lighter blue tinted the eastern horizon. Deseo stood nearby, head lowered. We listened to Roany’s breathing and the coming of dawn. In the distance, the hoot of a great horned owl, the sheep stirring in their pen clear across the pasture; even farther away, tires crossing a cattle guard. In the gathering light, Roany stretched out his long legs and put his head in my lap. I thanked him for taking good care of the ranch animals, including the humans, including me. I told him I’d be OK, that we’d all be OK, and he could go whenever he needed to, but he went on taking one slow breath after another.

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On one of Roany’s first bad days, back in May, a bank teller in town, a compassionate horse woman named Debbie Lagan, had quite innocently asked me how I was. My answer was no doubt more than she bargained for, but on that day she became my adviser and advocate in horse eldercare and pain relief. She also promised that, when the time came, she would send her husband out on his track hoe to dig the hole, never mind that they lived off the grid more than 20 miles away.

It was finally daylight, but the sun hadn’t risen, and Mike and I were shivering hard, so he slid into my place to hold Roany’s head and I ran back to the house to get sleeping bags. I called Debbie to say I thought we were close and Doc to say I thought we might not need him. When I got back across the pasture, Roany’s head was still in Mike’s lap, but now he was struggling for breath.

“Touch him,” Mike said. I knelt and put my hand on his big red neck, and he took one breath and then another and then the last breath he would take forever.

“I was helping him go,” Mike said. “I was with him in that place, you know?” I nodded. I did know. I had been in that place with several dogs and more than one human. Mike said, “I think he was waiting until you got back.”

A moment later, the first rays of sun came over the hill, turning the sky electric. I crossed the pasture one more time to get Roany’s brushes to groom him up for burial. I grabbed a flake of hay for Deseo so that if he wanted an excuse to stay near his old friend for a while, he would have one.

Debbie’s husband, Billy Joe Dilley, had a dozen things to do that morning, but he arrived at the ranch before the first vulture (or even fly) made its appearance. I don’t know Debbie very well, and Billy Joe hardly at all, but as much as anything else this is a story about them and about the way people in my town care for each other. When I tried to pay Billy Joe for his time, or even for gas, he shook his head and said, “An old cowboy doesn’t take money to bury an old horse.” He buried Roany respectfully and efficiently, the cowboy way, with his tail to the wind.

If there is such a thing in the world as a good death, Roany had one. It was almost as if he had heard Mike’s offer, looked at his watch, and said, Alright then, Wednesday, and how about in that stand of spruce on the other side of the hill? What I’ve always said about Roany is that he was a horse who never wanted to cause anybody trouble, and he remained that horse till the last second of his life and beyond.

Late that night, I watched the Perseids burn past my bedroom window, and imagined my old Roany up there, muscles ­restored to their prime and shining, burgundy coat alongside the white of Pegasus, both of them with their heads held high, and galloping.

Pam Houston’s new collection of essays, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, was published in January by W.W. Norton. 

Until the last moment of her life, no matter what challenges and tragedies she faced, she always figured out a way to survive, to carry on. Then in late November, just a mile outside Yellowstone National Park, a hunter’s bullet struck and killed wolf 926.

I knew her well, starting with her days as a pup. I also knew her parents and other ancestors, back to two of her great-great-grandmothers. Rather than dwell on her death, let me tell you about the extraordinary life she lived and why so many people cared about her.

Born in the spring of 2011, wolf 926 lived seven and a half years (that’s about 60 in human years). Her famous mother, known as the “06 Female,” the founder of the Lamar Canyon pack, was shot and killed in the Wyoming wolf hunt, in late 2012. Her daughter eventually became the pack’s alpha female and had her first litter in the spring of 2014. The only other adult in the family was wolf 925, her mate and the father of their six pups.

Life was hard for the two young adults as they struggled to feed and protect the large litter. By March 2015, the 11-month-old pups were healthy and strong. Their mother was halfway through a new pregnancy at that time. The pack left the safety of its territory—one of the smallest ranges of the park’s nine packs, at roughly 88 square miles—and traveled west, into the land of a rival pack, looking for elk to hunt. The alpha pair were undertaking a dangerous mission, but they had to feed their pups, so they took on the risk.

When she was apart from the rest of her family, 926 spotted a cow elk and chased her. The cow ran to the top of a 100-foot cliff and turned to defend herself. Wolf 926 repeatedly lunged and snapped at her. The cow, who was five times bigger than her opponent, charged forward each time the wolf approached and tried to kick and trample her. Then 926 darted in one more time, and the cow reflexively took a few steps back. Her hind legs slipped past the edge of the cliff, and she fell to her death.

The wolf ran around the far end of the cliff, raced down to the flats, confirmed the cow was dead, ran back uphill, got her mate and pups, and led them back to her kill. After feeding, the pack needed to get back to its own territory. The alpha male led the family east. I saw them coming through a pass, just west of Slough Creek. A few more miles of traveling would get them home.

Suddenly, 925 stopped and intently looked down at the creek. I turned that way and saw the Prospect Peak pack, a group of 12 wolves. They were resting after feeding on a bison carcass. The rival pack was between the Lamar Canyon wolves and their territory.

Something caused the Prospect wolves to jump up and see the other pack. Wolf 926, doing exactly the right thing, spun around and ran back through the pass. The six pups ran after their mother. But 925 stayed in place and calmly watched as the 12 wolves ran uphill at 35 miles per hour, directly at him. His primary responsibility was protecting his family, so he defiantly stood there, between the charging pack and his mate and pups.

When the other wolves were about to reach him, 925 finally ran off, not away from them but past them and toward the creek. They fell for his strategy and pursued him, not understanding that he was leading them away from his family. The Prospect wolves caught up with 925, pulled him down, and attacked him. He died from the wounds they inflicted, but he had saved his family.

Soon 926 and her pups were back in the middle of their territory. She was due to have her new litter in a few weeks, and her existing pups were too inexperienced to support her. As a single mother, 926’s chances of keeping her new pups alive were slim.

Then four of the big Prospect males found her den. The mother wolf desperately tried to save her current pups by taking them deeper into her territory. Early the next morning, I found her in a meadow five miles from her den. None of the pups were with her. A few yards away, the biggest of the rival wolves was glaring at her. As I watched the confrontation, I could not see any way out for 926. The male was far larger and stronger than she was. She could not win if they fought. And due to her advanced pregnancy, she could not outrun him.

Doing the unexpected, 926 suddenly relaxed. That confused the big male. Then she slowly wagged her tail. The other wolf was now even more bewildered. She romped over to him and started the wolf version of flirting. After a few moments of taking in the situation, he responded in kind. That was it—she got him to join her pack as the new alpha male. He brought in the three males that had come with him into her territory. Wolf 926 took four of the wolves that had killed her mate and got them to help her raise the new pups that had been sired by 925.

There are many other stories to tell of 926, but the ones I just related give you a sense of what she was like. She had a long, exciting life and overcame great difficulties. Tens of thousands of people got to see her live that life and were inspired by her grit and determination. Her family is carrying on. Next April, her adult daughter will likely have a litter of new pups at the pack’s den.

In my attempt to deal with the death of a wolf I knew so well and admired so greatly, I thought of something I could do. Wolf 926 was shot about a mile from my cabin. I found the site where she had bled out and collected some of her frozen blood. I trudged through the snow to where 926 had been born, and where I had seen her play with her pups, and left her remains there. I did it for her family, but mostly I did it for her. She deserved to come back home.

Rick McIntyre worked for the National Park Service in Yellowstone National Park as a naturalist and wolf researcher from 1994 through early 2018. His forthcoming book The Rise of Wolf 8: Witnessing the Triumph of Yellowstone's Underdog will be published by Greystone Books in October.

Tori Telfer | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,226 words)

Before the Zodiac Killer named himself, before someone strangled poor JonBenét, before the Black Dahlia was sliced open, and before Tupac and Biggie were shot six months apart under eerily similar circumstances, someone was slinking through the slums of London, killing women.

This someone — a shadowy aichmomaniac, possibly wearing a bloody apron — left the women of the Whitechapel district in shocking disarray. Their intestines were thrown over their shoulders; cultish markings were carved into their cheeks. One of them was found without her heart. To most people who saw the crime scenes or read the papers, everything about this appeared to be the work of a man — the brutality, the strength, the misogyny. And so in 1888, when people started looking for the Ripper, they were looking for…well, for a Jack. Was he a mad doctor? A butcher? Queen Victoria’s weak-minded son? Everyone in Whitechapel found themselves peering nervously into the fog, wondering which normal-looking male passerby was actually a maniac.

Everyone, that is, except for a few lone voices, suggesting something totally radical: what if they should actually be looking for a Jill?

 

The “Jill the Ripper” theory has a surprisingly legitimate origin story. Right after the murder of Mary Kelly — the victim with the missing heart — people started arguing about the time of her death. The police surgeon said that she died in the wee small hours of the morning, but a woman named Caroline Maxwell swore up and down that that was impossible, because she’d seen Mary Kelly a good five hours after she was supposed to have been chopped up into little pieces. Caroline had recognized Mary’s outfit, and even spoken to her. This weird little discrepancy caught the ear of Frederick George Abberline, a Chief Inspector for the London Metropolitan Police, who remembered seeing burnt women’s clothing in the fireplace of Mary Kelly’s room. What if the killer had burned their own blood-soaked clothes and changed into Mary’s clean clothes as a means of disguise? What if Caroline Maxwell had unwittingly talked to the actual murderer that morning, dressed up as the victim? And if so — if the clothes in the fireplace were women’s clothes, and Caroline Maxwell had spoken to someone with a women’s voice — well, Abberline suggested, perhaps they were dealing with a murderess.

After all, the Ripper was never caught.

Over the next hundred-plus years, a tiny handful of books expounded on Abberline’s theory, though few credited him. In the meantime, the legend of Jack the Ripper grew and grew, becoming a cornerstone of the true crime genre and a classic trope of horror (not to mention a costume that you can find at Party City for $49.99, though, at the moment, it is grievously out of stock.) To this day, passionate Ripperologists pore over the autopsies and debate the various suspects. Most don’t take the Jill the Ripper theory very seriously (“Jack the Ripper being a woman is one of the most crackpot theories if not the most crackpot theory about Jack the Ripper,” writes user John Wheat in a forum on the Ripper site Casebook.org). But sometimes a nagging doubt creeps in. After all, the Ripper was never caught. What if we were looking at the wrong sort of person all along?

—

Conspiracy theories are notoriously wacky, but true crime conspiracy theories really take the (moldering, arsenic-laced) cake. There’s something about the potent blend of serial murder and whodunnit-ness that makes these theories both vigorously insane and morbidly delightful, like the theory that Ted Cruz’s father was linked to the JFK assassination, or that John Ramsey had ties to 9/11, or — my personal favorite — that George W. Bush and Ted Bundy swapped places when Bundy was on death row, meaning that Bush got the electric chair and Bundy ran the country for eight years. These theories may not be, ahem, accepted in polite society, but it can feel strangely liberating to turn them over in your mind. Isn’t some explanation, no matter how zany, better than nothing at all?

In the fog-filled world of the Ripper, you can’t throw a brick without clunking a conspiracy theorist on the head. (Note: every Jack the Ripper suspect is at this point a “theory,” but the ones I’m calling “conspiracy theories” are the ones that have been widely discredited and/or aren’t taken seriously by the Ripperology community in general.) One of the most deliciously mad theories about the Ripper is found in Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend, in which author Richard Wallace insists that the killer was none other than the beloved children’s author Lewis Carroll. How does Wallace prove this? Through the magic of anagrams! First, Carroll writes:

So we went to the cook, and we got her to make a saucerful of nice oatmeal porridge. And then we called Dash into the house, and we said, “Now, Dash, you’re going to have your birthday treat!” We expected Dash would jump for joy; but it didn’t, one bit!

Then, Wallace scrambles the words a bit and comes up with the following confession, featuring that most common of animals, the “goat hog”:

Oh, we, Thomas Bayne, Charles Dodgson, coited into the slain, nude body, expected to taste, devour, enjoy a nice meal of a dead whore’s uterus. We made do, found it awful — wan and tough like a worn, dirty, goat hog. We both threw it out. – Jack the Ripper

(After Light-Hearted Friend was published, two puzzle experts found that Richard Wallace himself was also hiding some terrible secrets. A passage from the intro to his own book can be anagrammed into a confession that he himself killed Nicole Brown, framed OJ Simpson, and wrote Shakespeare’s sonnets.)

Is the Jill theory a conspiracy? Kinda sorta. I would argue that the baseline idea — that the Ripper may have been a woman, which is why the killer was never caught — is worth considering. But the idea becomes a conspiracy theory when someone tries to pin it onto a specific woman, or to prove it by going on long, painful digressions about what women in general are “capable of.”

That most common of animals, the ‘goat hog.’

In 1939, a quirky, passionate designer of theater sets named William Stewart published a book called Jack the Ripper, in which he plays coy — referring to the Ripper as “he” and “him” — until the last chapter, titled “A Startling Theory.” Stewart was nothing if not dedicated to (his version of) the case; he would ask his daughter to lie down at the sites of the murders so that he could take a photo of the crime scene as it might have been, and once, while building a miniature model of a crime scene, he snuck into her boyfriend’s closet and snipped off the end of his favorite tie to create a miniature paisley shawl.

Stewart believed that four questions would lead us to the Ripper — or at least to the type of person who might be a Ripper:

1. What sort of person could be out at night without exciting the suspicion of the household or neighbors who were keyed up with suspicion on account of the mysterious crimes?

2. What sort of person, heavily blood-stained, could pass through the streets without exciting suspicion?

3. What sort of person could have the elementary anatomical knowledge which was evidenced by the mutilations, and the skill to perform them in such a way as to make some think a doctor was responsible?

4. What sort of murderer could have risked being found by the dead body and yet have a complete and perfect alibi?

“My answer to all these questions is,” he thunders, “a woman who was or had been a midwife.”

The midwife theory isn’t terrible. (Apparently Sir Arthur Conan Doyle subscribed to it, too. Then again, he also believed in fairies.) People have always been puzzled by the “surgery” that had been performed on the victims: it seemed too deranged to be the work of a highly-trained doctor, but too specific to be the work of just any old maniac. (As the police surgeon who examined the body of Catherine Eddowes wrote in his post-mortem report, “I believe the perpetrator of the act must have had considerable knowledge of the position of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them.”) The midwife theory solves this problem nicely. As Stewart writes, “These mutilations could have been performed only by a hand unpracticed in surgery, but at the same time possessing a knowledgeable and manipulative dexterity which the calling of a midwife calls for.” Additionally, the Ripper’s seeming obsession with removing uteruses makes sense if her day job was spent dealing with the female reproductive system.

Midwifery would also be the perfect alibi for Jill, says Stewart. If anyone caught her with blood on her clothes, well, that was just part of her job! If anyone stumbled across her in the process of, say, kidney-removal, she could sweetly declare that she was just checking to see if the disemboweled corpse needed her help. Stewart also notes that the skirts and cloaks of the Victorian era could be turned inside-out, making it possible for Jill to murder someone, flip her clothes around, and disappear into the crowd looking as fresh as a homicidal daisy.

But why is our crazed midwife removing kidneys and filching uteri in the first place? Stewart’s theory is that she went insane because of betrayal. Jill would have been accustomed to performing secret, illegal abortions, but perhaps one of her clients had ratted her out to police (according to Stewart, this sort of betrayal wasn’t uncommon in 1888, especially if a woman was trying to get out of trouble for having had an abortion in the first place). Tossed into prison, Jill would “consider herself a martyr…brooding over what she would consider to be an act of treachery, she would eventually convince herself that she had every justification for the murder of such women as those who had denounced her.” In other words, she would decide to kill not only the woman who betrayed her, but all the women like the one who had betrayed her.

This is a great premise for a horror movie, and someone should make it immediately. But given what we know about female serial killers today, Stewart’s idea fails to convince. There have been plenty of female serial killers throughout history, and plenty of women who killed for revenge, but the deranged serial killer who hunts down and mutilates a specific “type” of victim to avenge some personal grievance is almost always a man (think of Gary Ridgway, who explicitly targeted sex workers because he hated them), whereas female serial killers (especially the ones who work alone) tend to kill family members and others with whom they’ve had a previous relationship, and almost never mutilate their victims’ bodies.

Stewart knows that readers will be naturally skeptical, so he gives us several real-life examples of women gone bad. He mentions Mary Ann Cotton, a serial poisoner who killed her husbands, lovers, children, and stepchildren, as proof positive that women can be vicious. Of course women can be vicious (as anyone who’s survived sixth grade can attest to), but there are huge differences in technique and motivation and psychopathology between poisoning your own child at home and slashing up a stranger in the street. Stewart gets closer when he tells the tale of Mary Pearcey, a depressed alcoholic who slashed the throat of her lover’s wife and killed her baby — he even suggests that Pearcy could have been the Ripper — but again, killing a rival in a one-off act of ferocity is completely different than hunting down sex workers in the street.

Ah, yes, ripping out kidneys — that quintessentially ‘spiteful’ act!

His theorizing gets worse when he starts making sweeping statements about how women in general behave. He spends some time reflecting on how women enjoy mutilating bodies more than men do: “Criminal history proves that a man does not wantonly mutilate a person he has murdered, for, almost without exception, when a man does mutilate his victim it is for the sole object of making the disposal of the body an easier matter.” (Has a more pre-Jeffrey Dahmer sentence ever been written?) He continues: “Mutilation is the supreme expression of spitefulness and spitefulness is a vice to which female criminals are addicts.” Ah, yes, ripping out kidneys — that quintessentially “spiteful” act!

Stewart’s energetic reaching here raises an interesting question: is it sexist to imagine that Jack the Ripper was a spiteful, mutilation-happy woman, or sexist to imagine that Jack the Ripper could never be a spiteful, mutilation-happy woman? The world of “overkill” — the utilization of far more violence than is necessary to end a life — certainly has a glass ceiling that few female sadists have ever come close to shattering. But isn’t that a good thing? Do we need more female mutilators in the world? True crime is the upside-down world of feminism, a place where the massive gender gap (95% of murderers are male!) isn’t really one that needs fixing. At points, Jill the Ripper theories feel nuanced and progressive, especially when they mention how a female Ripper would have been practically invisible to the cops and the media of the day. But inevitably they veer into long digressions about what women “are like,” which end up making women in general sound ridiculous, and Jill the Ripper in particular sound strangely unformidable.

—

About seventy years after William Stewart asked his daughter to pose as a corpse, another impassioned guy came along to tackle the Jill theory. His name was John Morris, he was a legal consultant specializing in immigration, and in 2012, he and his father published a book called Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman. Unlike Stewart, Morris gives away his big twist in the title, and insists early on that he and his father have solved the case and so “over 120 years of traditional thinking has to be set aside.”

While Stewart never claimed to know definitively who Jill was, Morris boldly goes where no Ripperologist has gone before, proclaiming that Jack the Ripper was none other than a wealthy doctor’s wife with a rudimentary knowledge of anatomy and a serious problem with the green-eyed monster.

Let’s backtrack for a second: in 2005, a man named Tony Williams published a book called Uncle Jack, in which he claimed that his grandmother’s great-great-uncle, Doctor John Williams, was Jack the Ripper. Tony’s theory was that Dr. Williams’ wife, Lizzie, was infertile, and so the good doctor took to the streets of Whitechapel, ripping out uteri wherever he could find them in order to study them back at his laboratory and cure his wife’s sterility. Also, he was having an affair with Mary Kelly, the final Ripper victim (or so says Tony, the world’s most ungrateful nephew).

In The Hand of a Woman, Morris leaps off the Uncle Jack theory and begins wildly slaloming downhill. His pick for the Ripper? Not Doctor John Williams, but Lizzie, his infertile wife. Taking the (unproven) theory about Dr. Williams’ affair with Mary Kelly as one of his starting points, Morris paints a picture of a rich wife driven mad with insecurity about her own uterus and jealousy over her rival’s fertile womb. He muses that Lizzie may have learned surgery at her husband’s side. (“He might have shown her how to operate, isolate, and remove a diseased organ swiftly, though there is no actual evidence that he did.”) He rhapsodizes about her feelings of self-loathing that may have developed. (“She may have harboured emotions of hatred, or even disgust, toward her own body…Lizzie’s uterus, this most significant of all female organs, was useless to her.”) And he declares that Lizzie would have resented the women who may have come to her husband for abortions. (“She would have seen it as grossly unjust that the…gin-soaked alcoholics…were fertile and produced babies by the score.”)

Lizzie’s main goal was to kill Mary Kelly, but first she had to practice the art of murder. In the grand tradition of dedicated workaholics like Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan, she applied herself, learned from her mistakes, and perfected her craft. When killing Mary Ann Nichols: “She drew out the knife, pressed it against her victim’s neck…she cut her victim’s throat a second time, just to be sure that she could do it….” When following up on Annie Chapman: “This was to be her final rehearsal, and now she was determined to kill a woman, and tear her uterus from her dead body.” She then killed Elizabeth Stride after asking Stride where she could find Mary Kelly; she mistakenly killed Catherine Eddowes because Eddowes sometimes went by the name Mary Kelly (this is true); and finally, she found her husband’s succulent mistress, and wreaked havoc on her body: “We think that [Lizzie Williams] hacked off her victim’s breasts, not only because she believed her husband frequently reveled in fondling them, but because those breasts might one day have suckled his baby.”

No one would have seen her, because no one would have been looking for her.

Now, there’s nothing inherently moral about rich doctor’s wives. Wealth, status, and gender do not make one immune to violence, evil, or the desire to “hack off” a breast (sorry). The problem with the Lizzie theory isn’t that Jack couldn’t have been a jealous rich woman, it’s that every scrap of Ripper evidence has been forced into a gynocentric form here. Breasts cut off? Female jealousy! Uterus removed? Female self-loathing! By claiming that the Ripper was a woman bent on killing her rival (and who happened to kill four more women along the way), Morris makes the crimes far too orderly. From what we know about serial killers in a post-Mindhunter world, their crimes are rarely so easily explainable. Most of them, no matter their gender, kill because they’ve been bubbling in some horrible soup of nature and nurture for far too long: abuse, childhood head injuries, a pernicious sense of alienation from the world, hatred of the other, unbelievable narcissism, and so on. Lizzie Williams’ reasons for killing are too neat and too gendered. Woman marries husband. Husband has affair. Serial killing ensues.

Speaking of gendered explanations, both Stewart and Morris obsess over the fact that Annie Chapman was found with several personal items arranged at her feet. We now know that serial killers can be weirdly meticulous and are often obsessed with taking trophies from their victims, leaving some sort of signature, or otherwise behaving in an eerily fussy manner. And yet both authors describe the arrangement of Annie Chapman’s things as something only a woman would do. Stewart writes, “Such an impulsive action is typically feminine, so much so that there is cause for wonderment when one ponders over the reasons why a woman was never suspected.” Morris chalks it up to feminine neatness: “Was it rather more likely that the culprit might have been a woman acting out of habit: a careful, meticulous woman?”

If Jill existed, she would have been deranged and cruel. She would have arranged Annie’s pitiful possessions to taunt the cops, or to strike fear into people’s hearts, or to humiliate her victim, or to create some sort of strange altar. To imply that she fussed with Annie Chapman’s things because she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her murder scenes cluttered is to imply that even at the height of her murderous madness, Jill couldn’t help acting like a housewife. Not to become a Ripper apologist, but doesn’t that seem a bit…unfair?

—

My favorite Jill the Ripper argument is found in a terse 1889 monologue made by a grouchy male gynecologist. About a year after the murders, Dr. Lawson Tait spotted some mention of the Jill theory in an evening paper called the Pall Mall Gazette, and instantly contacted the paper to chime in with his own concurring opinion. It turned out that he’d been thinking Jack was actually Jill for quite some time. (This interview was re-published across the West; a Montana newspaper called The Anaconda Standard used the headline, “JACK (?) THE RIPPER.”)

Lawson’s argument was deliciously crisp, his opinions uncompromising. “The crimes are the work of a lunatic. The absolute motivelessness of the whole business shows this,” he said. “The operator must have been a person accustomed to use a sharp knife upon meat. The work was done by no surgeon. A surgeon cuts in a niggling kind of way. The murderer in these cases has worked in a free, slashing manner…the cuts are made in a fashion peculiar to the London butcher. They would have been made quite differently if the operator had hailed from Dublin or Edinburgh.”

The Ripper’s lunacy, said Lawson, came from epilepsy. (The idea that people with epilepsy could be prone to violent outbursts was quite popular for decades, though totally unsupported by science. Four years after the Ripper murders, when Andrew and Abby Borden were killed in Massachusetts, some people would wonder if Lizzie Borden had done it in two epileptic fits spaced ninety minutes apart.) Lawson continued: since female epileptics suffer from more regular fits than males do, the epileptic Ripper had to be a woman. “Nothing is more likely than that ‘Jack the Ripper’ is some big, strong woman engaged at a slaughter house in cleaning up, now and then actually cutting up meat,” he roared. A woman would have escaped the notice of police, a woman would have been able to roll up her bloody skirt and drape herself in her shawl to escape detection, and a woman would have known to wash out the bloody clothes in cold water, whereas a man would definitely wash them in hot water, accidentally setting the stains. “A woman is always at the washing tub!” Lawson thundered.

I find Lawson’s argument appealing, despite its flawed science and weird emphasis on laundry, because it lines up with one thing we do know about female serial killers: that there’s a practicality to their violence. They’re good at being serial killers. They know how to clean up after themselves. When the cops show up, they play dumb, make excuses. You’ll rarely find them standing in the street, ranting and raving and covered in blood. Where Stewart’s Jill is a deranged midwife, roaming around London on a revenge mission from God, and Morris’ Jill is a cantankerous housewife, consumed by jealousy and body image issues, Lawson’s Jill is strong and efficient, with a method to her madness. She slaughters cows, she slaughters women, she rolls up her bloody skirt, she heads straight for the washing tub. She knows the right sort of water to use during cleanup. She’s great at her job.

—

If it is someday proven that Jack the Ripper was a woman, it will be one of the biggest twists in history. Imagine the books, the movies, the bobblehead dolls, the sheer amount of rebranding that we’d all have to do. Jill the Ripper would become an instant celebrity: I see a tight corset, high-heeled boots with complicated laces, and perhaps a jaunty little Victorian-era hat on top of a luxurious pile of hair? Perhaps the hatpin was her weapon all along?! We’d have to reconsider everything we know about overkill. There would be so many think pieces to write (“Jill the Ripper: Anti-Misogynist Performance Art or Just as Bad as Bundy?”). So many Buzzfeed quizzes (“You Might Be a Deranged Midwife If…” ). It would be chaos.

To me, the most compelling argument for Jill is the idea that if she existed, no one would have seen her, because no one would have been looking for her. It’s also the most frustrating and insubstantial argument, and it’s awfully close to a logical fallacy — the “appeal to ignorance,” or the idea that your conclusion must be true, because there is no evidence that it’s false. (Jack the Ripper must be a woman because we can’t prove that she’s not a woman.) In The Hand of a Woman, Morris writes, “There is no police record of any person matching Lizzie Williams’s description being stopped or questioned by the many police patrols and detectives who searched the streets and alleyways of Whitechapel” — in other words, the very absence of Lizzie in the streets of Whitechapel means that she could have been there. That sort of argumentation holds no water. And yet.

We know, now, that serial killers like to return to the scene of the crime, and sometimes they even try to get involved with the investigation. It’s not so hard to imagine a woman with icy eyes and an inside-out apron standing among the bystanders, watching the police swarm around the bodies. Can’t you see her, standing there? A strong woman with an emotionless face? A woman who works in the slaughterhouse nearby and has been angry at the entire world for about forty-five years? And no one sees her, because no one’s looking for her? It’s a chilling picture, right? — but when you reach out for it, your hands close on nothing but the fog of Whitechapel. The Ripper has slipped away yet again.

* * *

Tori Telfer is the author of Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History, and the host of the podcast Criminal Broads. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, Vulture, Smithsonian, The Awl, Vice, theatlantic.com, and rollingstone.com, She is currently working on her second book, which will cover the tricky antics of real-life con women.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Factchecker: Ethan Chiel

Photo Gallery: Raising 2 Kids (and 60 Dogs) in Rural America

Airline loyalty programs are pretty complicated, and, let’s be honest—you’re never sure you’re actually getting “rewarded” for your loyalty to a certain airline. Or if it’s really worth it.

But what if airlines really had to try hard to impress us? And get creative about it? Instead of “After flying X qualifying segments or X miles and spending $X,000 on flights, you will potentially earn one possible free upgrade to somewhere closer to the front of the plane, if the flight is pretty empty on that day,” what if it was something like, “Hey, looks like you’ve flown a ton of miles with us, so we fixed that leak in the roof of your house and got your kids a puppy,” or “Thanks for booking your last 30 flights with us, we’ve arranged for you to have an empty seat next to you for your next ten flights”?

Here’s an altogether unrealistic, but I think pretty persuasive, suggested list of airline loyalty benefits, using a simple formula:

5,000 miles

You get upgraded to a whole can of soda all to yourself on every flight for the next year, instead of five ounces poured into a plastic cup full of ice.

10,000 miles

The Wi-Fi will work for the entire flight, every flight, for the next year.

12,000 miles

You get a free beer every flight for the next year.

15,000 miles

You get a comfortable seat sized for an actual human being, like they had in the 1970s (but no one is smoking on the plane like in the ’70s), for the next year.

20,000 miles

No one manspreads into your area and you have exclusive armrest rights for a year of flights.

25,000 miles

You get to de-plane first no matter where you’re sitting, for one year.

30,000 miles

You get a whole row to yourself for every flight, for one year.

35,000 miles

No one cries, talks loudly, or uses their smartphone’s external speaker during your flights for the next two years.

40,000 miles

No one sneezes, coughs, or farts on your flights for the next two years.

45,000 miles

You receive a pizza, a whole pizza, from a pizza place not in the airport. It’s all yours. Also, the seat next to you is empty, so you can put the pizza there while you eat it. Here are some extra napkins.

50,000 miles

We answered all your emails for the rest of the month. Please enjoy a movie or a nap.

60,000 miles

You get a private bathroom on your next international flight, and—it’s clean. No one has blown it up, or flushed the toilet with the lid open, or even peed on the floor. But you can do all that stuff if you want to.

70,000 miles

A car and driver is parked on the tarmac for you, just hop out the rear exit door at the end of the flight here and go home. Your bags are already in the car.

80,000 miles

Surprise, we have re-routed your flight so instead of going to that conference for work, you’re going skiing. All your friends are there, and they have new skis for you, and it’s snowing. Also your boss is paying you to be there for four days and you got a raise.

90,000 miles

You get to sit in the cockpit for the entire flight.

100,000 miles

You are bumped up to first class and all the the other first class seats are occupied by golden retriever puppies.

125,000 miles

You are teleported to your destination this time.

150,000 miles

None of your flights are delayed, ever, for the rest of your lifetime.

175,000 miles

You will receive the ability to play any musical instrument; most people agree that you are also pretty good-looking.

200,000 miles

Here’s a private plane and pilot who will take care of all your air travel needs for the next five years.

250,000 miles

You can fly all by yourself, without a plane, like Superman.

500,000 miles

Immortality.

Joy Lanzendorfer| Longreads | February 2019 | 12 minutes (3,300 words)

On February 6, 1885, David Kendall, a city councilman in Eureka, California, was shot. Two Chinese men, possibly from rival gangs, were firing at each other from across the street when a bullet hit Kendall and killed him. Within 20 minutes of his death, a mob of 600 white men marched into Chinatown, intending to burn it to the ground.

Disturbingly, this wasn’t unusual. Violence against Chinese people and Chinese-Americans was a regular occurrence on the West Coast. However, this event was different because of what happened next. Instead of destroying Chinatown, the city decided to order the Chinese to leave. Within 48 hours, most of the Chinese residents were forced onto boats bound for San Francisco. This “peaceful” method of expelling them from their homes was quickly imitated. Towns up and down America’s West Coast, but also as far north as Vancouver, Canada, and as far east as Augusta, Georgia, began forcing out their Chinese populations. Jean Pfaelzer, author of Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans, considers it ethnic cleansing.

“The intentions of the round ups … was to round up all the Chinese people in over 200 towns across the Pacific Northwest and drive them out so they would never come back,” she says.

Today, Eureka is a predominantly white coastal town situated between redwood forests and the Humboldt Bay. In 1885, about 200 Chinese people — including 20 women — lived downtown. Anti-Chinese sentiments had been brewing in the United States for some time. Three years before, the Chinese Exclusion Act had barred laborers from entering the US. Before that, the Page Act of 1875 banned Chinese women.

In Eureka, the Chinese were the focus of government-sanctioned vitriol. They were blamed for stealing jobs from white people, and for the slummy state of Chinatown, which they had little control over. Since they weren’t allowed to own property, they rented low-quality shacks made out of remnants from lumber mills. A slough of filthy water ran through the center of town. A local described the Chinese “huddled together in small tenements, a great number of which were closely built upon a single block of ground called ‘Chinatown.’ … [It] had no sewer system, and all the sewage remained with them on the surface of the ground.”

Kendall’s death gave the white residents the excuse they wanted to get rid of the Chinese. But as the mob gathered, a bell ringer went through town, shouting to assemble at Centennial Hall. There, the throngs were convinced to hold off violence for 24 hours while the Chinese were driven out. A committee of 15 men, including a city councilor and prominent businessmen, strode through Chinatown informing residents they must be on the dock to leave by 3 o’clock the next day.

That night, the mob looted Chinatown. Teams went into the countryside to inform Chinese people living there that they too had to leave. When some 60 men fled into the forests, they were tracked down and dragged back to the dock. By morning, gallows had been erected with an effigy hanging from it. A sign read: “Any Chinese Seen on the Street After Three O’clock Today Will Be Hung to This Gallows.”

The white townspeople … celebrated the anniversary of the expulsion of their Chinese neighbors with a festival.

The next day, between 310 and 480 Chinese people — depending on the account — were herded to the wharf. They stayed in a warehouse under guard to protect them from the mob as skiffs transferred them from the docks to two boats anchored in the bay. It took 23 trips to get them all on board. Then the tide went out, forcing them to spend the night in the harbor. Meanwhile, the white mob ransacked Chinatown, stealing their remaining belongings. On February 8, the boats sailed for San Francisco.

The white townspeople congratulated themselves for their “civilized” actions. A year later, they celebrated the anniversary of the expulsion of their Chinese neighbors with a festival. Towns in the area, including Arcata, Ferndale, Fortuna, and Crescent City, began driving out Chinese residents too. By 1890, the Humboldt County business directory boasted that it was “the only county in the state containing no Chinamen.”

But it wasn’t only local towns that took note of Eureka’s actions. Other cities followed their lead.

“By this point there was a telegraph,” says Pfaelzer. “And actually the telegraph officers’ union was very racist, and they just kept spreading the word and spreading the word. My image of it is people like us sending out emails or posting it on Facebook. It spread very quickly.”

Like many other immigrant groups, the Chinese came to California during the 1849 Gold Rush. They experienced persecution from the beginning — the Foreign Miners’ Tax was largely aimed at them and made up half the state’s revenue until 1870. Later, more Chinese came over to help build the railroads. By the time it was completed in 1869, 63,000 Chinese people lived in the United States.

Now out of work, most of them moved to the West Coast looking for employment. At the same time, the economy slumped. Tense racial relationships were fanned by labor unions and the Chinese became scapegoats as white people blamed them for the low wages and the lack of jobs.

“The rhetoric of the anti-Chinese movement focused a lot on Chinese immigrants as an economic threat — that ‘cheap coolie labor’ would undercut the American workingman,” says Beth Lew-Williams, author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. “But behind these economic fears were racial assumptions. At the time, most white Americans believe the Chinese were an innately servile race that could never assimilate and become upstanding American citizens.”

Racists also stoked the fear that if the Chinese stayed, they would overtake the white population. In 1869, The Workingman’s Advocate, a newspaper in Chicago, wrote that a “new and dangerous foe looms up in the far west” and that the Chinese would soon “swarm through the Rocky Mountains, like devouring locusts and spread out over the country.” Governments on every level began passing laws restricting the Chinese. San Francisco, for example, made it illegal Chinese people to live in small spaces or peddle wares in baskets attached to a pole. In California, Chinese citizens couldn’t own land, testify against a white person in court, or attend public school. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 came after years of regional restrictions.

With these laws came violence. One of the worst cases happened in 1871 in Los Angeles. Like in Eureka, it began when a white man was wounded in a gunfight between Chinese tongs, or gangs. A mob descended on Calle de los Negros, a poor, diverse neighborhood where Chinese people lived. A frenzy of violence followed as Chinese residents were seized and hanged by the neck. They included a well-respected doctor, a woman, and a 14-year-old boy. By morning, 18 people were dead. According to Doug Chan of the Chinese Historical Society of America, the Los Angeles Massacre of 1871 is probably “the largest number of lynchings in a single day in United States history.”

After these murders, eight men were convicted of manslaughter and sent to San Quentin, but they were released after only three weeks.

In 1885, however, as the “Eureka Method” spread, anti-Chinese violence exploded. In that year alone, over 100 towns followed Eureka’s lead. According to Driven Out, this included “Riverside, Santa Cruz, Stockton, Napa, San Buenaventura, Tulare, Antioch, Wheatland, Bloomfield, Sonora, Sumner, Washington Territory, and East Portland, Oregon.”

The No Place Project is a website devoted to documenting anti-Chinese violence. Tim Greyhavens travels the West Coast photographing the locations of vanished Chinatowns and other locations of recorded violence against Chinese people. His pictures speak volumes in what they’re not showing. Instead of homes and businesses, they often depict parking lots or grassy fields — places of emptiness.

“One of the first things I had to get past in my own mind was that there was nothing of interest to photograph,” says Greyhavens. “I would sit on a corner [where the Chinese had been], looking around, going, ‘This is the most mundane, boring street corner you could find.’ Then I realized that’s the story. These incidents are so far buried in the past that it’s right under our own noses and we don’t even know it.”

For Greyhavens, the worst case of violence was in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where he says the white people resorted to “almost feral viciousness” against the Chinese. A week after the Eureka purge, coal miners attacked Chinese workers who wouldn’t join them in a strike over low wages. The white mob went on a rampage, burning 79 buildings, killing at least 28 people, and injuring 15 others.

Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans continued fighting for their rights. In the process, they helped define civil rights that we depend on today.

In an 1885 letter, Chinese witnesses described the white hoard descending on the Chinatown in Rock Springs, where they attacked everyone in sight.

… Some of the rioters would let a Chinese go after depriving him of all his gold and silver, while another Chinese would be beaten with the butt ends of the weapons before being let go. Some of the rioters, when they could not stop a Chinese, would shoot him dead on the spot, and then search and rob him. … Some, who took no part either in beating or robbing the Chinese, stood by, shouting loudly and laughing and clapping their hands. There was a gang of women that stood at the ‘Chinatown’ end of the plank bridge and cheered; among the women, two of them each fired successive shots at the Chinese.

… After having been killed, the dead bodies of some were carried to the burning buildings and thrown into the flames. Some of the Chinese, who had hid themselves in the houses, were killed and their bodies burned; some, who on account of sickness could not run, were burned alive in the houses.

According to these witnesses, Chinese who fled the mob returned to find their homes “burned to ashes, and there was then no place of shelter for them; they were obliged to run blindly from hill to hill.” US troops finally intervened and escorted the Chinese back to Rock Springs. There, they were met with a gruesome sight.

Some of the dead bodies had been buried by the company, while others, mangled and decomposed, were strewn on the ground and were being eaten by dogs and hogs. Some of the bodies were not found until they were dug out of the ruins of the buildings. Some had been burned beyond recognition. It was a sad and painful sight to see the son crying for the father, the brother for the brother, the uncle for the nephew, and friend for friend.

While 22 people were arrested for these crimes, no witnesses would testify against them, and they were all acquitted. To smooth over trade relations, President Grover Cleveland paid the Chinese government $147,748 in damages for Rock Springs, but the money didn’t go to the victims.

The violence spread into Oregon and Washington as well. Tacoma consciously imitated Eureka and elected a committee, called a Committee of Fifteen, to demand the 350 Chinese residents leave. At 9:30 in the morning on November 3, 1885, mill whistles blew and hundreds of white people descended on Tacoma’s Chinatown. As it was raining, this “mob in raincoats” marched through the streets, hammering on doors and ordering residents be gone by that afternoon.

Lum May, a merchant who had lived in Tacoma for ten years, described the mob in a statement where he requested $45,532 in lost property:

…A large crowd of citizens of Tacoma marched down to Chinatown and told all the Chinese that the whole Chinese population of Tacoma must leave town by half past one o’clock in the afternoon of that day. There must have been in the neighborhood of 1000 people in the crowd of white people… Where the doors were locked they broke forcibly into the houses, smashing in doors and breaking windows. Some of the crowd was armed with pistols, some with clubs. They acted in a rude and threatening manner, dragging and kicking the Chinese out of their houses.

My wife refused to go and some of the white persons dragged her out of the house. From the excitement, the fright, and the losses we sustained through the riot, she lost her reason, and has ever since been hopelessly insane. She threatens to kill people with a hatchet or any other weapon she can get hold of. The outrages I and my family suffered at the hands of the mob have utterly ruined me… My wife was perfectly sane before the riot.

I saw my countrymen marched out of Tacoma on November 3rd. They presented a sad spectacle. Some had lost their trunks, some their blankets, some were crying for their things.

Armed white men were behind the Chinese, on horseback sternly urging them on. It was raining and blowing hard. On the 5th of November all the Chinese houses situated on the wharf were burnt down by incendiaries.

 

On that rainy day, the expelled Chinese residents walked nine miles through the mud to a train depot. Those who had money for tickets got on a train to Portland, while others walked on through the storm.

But the incidents of violence along the Puget Sound were far from over. On February 7, 1886, as Eureka got ready to celebrate one year without a Chinatown, Seattle turned on its Chinese population. Some 300 to 400 people were forced onto the dock to be put on a steamer called Queen of the Pacific. Among these was a merchant, Chin Gee Hee, and his pregnant wife, who had been “dragged downstairs from the second story [of their house] and out on the street by the hair of her head,” according to an 1888 letter by a witness, Chang Yen Hoon. Three days later, she miscarried the child.

The history of Chinese Exclusion … illustrates how racist laws work hand in hand with violent and racist attacks.

The armed mob was surprised to learn that the captain wouldn’t allow anyone on the boat without a paid fare. They took up a collection and raised money to force many of the Chinese people on board. The boat, full to bursting, sailed to San Francisco.

When militia accompanied the remaining people back to Chinatown, they encountered a huge mob blocking their path. Violence erupted, and five white men were shot. The governor declared martial law and sentinels were placed in Chinatown. Two days later, federal troops arrived to restore order. But while the Chinese were allowed to return home, their lives were constantly in danger. On February 14, many of the remaining residents left Seattle on a steamer. Later, six men were tried on charges of unlawful conspiracy, but the jury judged them not guilty.

* * *

As for the Chinese refugees from Eureka, when the boats docked in San Francisco, they fled into Chinatown and immediately called what today would be a press conference.

“They invite the local press and they invite the San Francisco mayor and they make this bold announcement that someone will have to pay for what has been done to them,” says Pfaelzer. “And the reason it’s a demand for reparations is that they’re not just suing for their property. They’re suing for being the victims of mob violence.”

Banding together, 52 expelled Eureka residents hired a lawyer. The lawsuit, Wing Hing vs. the City of Eureka, was a threat that gave anti-Chinese groups pause. By May, reporters were asking citizens in Eureka about it. Attorney AJ Bledsoe, a member of Eureka’s Committee of Fifteen, which had been responsible for facilitating the expulsion, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “The talk about actions for millions of dollars is the sheerest nonsense.” Then, as if to convince himself, he added that the city couldn’t owe the Chinese more than $2,000. “The people of Eureka are aware that, as a matter of law, they are liable for actual damages inflicted upon the Chinese but if … anyone else undertakes to collect more, they will have their hands full.”

With legal repercussions looming, some adjusted their tactics. Truckee, a small town in the Sierra Mountains, had one of the largest Chinese populations in California. Around a thousand lived in the woods working as woodchoppers for the railroad. Still others lived in Chinatown, which, by 1886, had burned down more than once and relocated across the river.

Newspaper editor Charles McGlashan came up with a new way to attack the Chinese: Starve them out. He formed the Truckee Anti-Chinese Boycotting Committee and sent around a petition pressuring people not to have economic or social interactions with Chinese people. This meant no hiring, renting, or selling to them — including basics like food.

The results were slow, but effective. As Chinese people lost their jobs or lodgings, they began getting on trains going down to Sacramento. It got so bad that the lumbermen in the woods were starving and white butchers started leaving them packets of food to eat. By June 1886, Truckee was thought to be rid of its Chinese residents and Chinatown again burst into flames. Fire engines rained water on the white part of town and people gathered on the balcony of the Truckee Hotel to watch the buildings burn. Unknown to them, two men, Tem Ah Yeck and Ah Juy, were hiding in a Chinatown basement with their valuables. They died in the fire.

McGlashan, who wanted a political career, began peddling his new “Truckee Method” around California. He was an organizer of the two anti-Chinese conventions that were held in Sacramento. Delegates from all over the state met to discuss “the Chinese question,” and people like McGlashan gave speeches. In 1886, more towns expelled part or all of their Chinese community. In California, this included San Jose, Redding, Placerville, and Petaluma. Some towns held anti-Chinese fundraisers or balls to raise money for their fares out of town. In Red Bluff, a children’s anti-Chinese club paraded through the street “armed with cotton bats,” according to Pfaelzer.

* * *

The courts ruled against Eureka’s expelled Chinese residents in Wing Hing v. The City of Eureka. Even though they had lost furniture, boats, vegetable crops, and other belongings when driven from their homes, the judge said that since they couldn’t own land, they had lost no property.

Still, Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans continued fighting for their rights. In the process, they helped define civil rights that we depend on today. Some of these include equal protection under the law, the right to education, and birthright citizenship, which guarantees that everyone born in the United States is a citizen. This law is currently under attack by Donald Trump, who last October said that a plan to do away with birthright citizenship was “in the process.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act was finally repealed in 1943 when China became a U.S. ally in World War II. Today, attacks on immigrants, ranging from the Muslim Ban to the border wall, have made the history of Chinese Exclusion feel startlingly relevant. Among other things, it illustrates how racist laws work hand in hand with violent and racist attacks.

“One of the things that the history of Chinese Exclusion teaches us is that border control policies have effects far beyond the border,” says Lew-Williams. “By declaring Chinese immigrants undesirable in the nineteenth century, Congress made [them] vulnerable to local prejudice and violence.”

The full extent of the Chinese-American experience in the West is still unknown, largely because their voices were ignored or dismissed by the dominant culture. Still, what is known of their experiences point to a broader, more complex, and often ugly picture of the American West. Greyhavens encourages people to investigate their local histories.

“Regardless of what town or city you live in, small or large, throughout the west, there’s probably some part of Chinese history in that town, and people aren’t aware of it,” he says. “And you could do the same thing for African-Americans or Latin-American people. There are all these histories that are part of what it took for cities and towns to become what they are now.”

For Chan, the study of Chinese-American history is essential to understanding the formation of the West. But uncovering that history is a challenge, since the contributions of non-white people have been erased.

“It’s the kind of history where people frankly try to avert their eyes, because the truth is so harsh,” says Chan. “And to understand that truth is to call into question the myth of the American frontier.”

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Joy Lanzendorfer‘s work has been featured in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Smithsonian, Tin House, The Guardian, NPR, Poetry Foundation, and many others.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Factchecker: Ethan Chiel

Laura Barcella | Longreads | February 2019 | 13 minutes (3,517 words)

The 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade just occurred on January 22 — but the days of relatively uncomplicated American abortion access are, most likely, numbered. In fact, author Robin Marty believes it’s not a matter of if Roe will be overturned, it’s a matter of when.

For more than ten years, the Minneapolis-based freelance reporter and author of the new book Handbook for a Post-Roe America has been diligently chronicling the twists and turns of both the pro-choice and anti-abortion movements. Ever since Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation, Marty — like many other pro-choice Americans — has been waiting for the proverbial pro-life shoe to drop. Losing Kennedy, the swing voter on a number of major abortion rulings, and gaining Brett Kavanaugh — a long-time pro-life ally — seems to all but ensure the end of Roe, as well as the downfall of abortion being considered a constitutional right.

Indeed, several weeks after Marty and I spoke in late January, Kavanaugh voted with a minority of Justices to overturn recent Court precedent in favor of a law that sought to impose a new form of undue burden on abortion-seekers in Louisiana. The Cut called Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion something verging on gaslighting. In it, he postulates that perhaps the undue burden — abortion providers being required to gain admitting privileges at local hospitals — could simply be met, when of course providers have already been trying to gain admitting privileges for years. The Court ultimately blocked the implementation of the law, but only because the conservative Chief Justice, John Roberts, voted with the liberals. The margin of safety has grown vanishingly thin.

Let’s consider what that means. If Roe were overturned, it wouldn’t necessarily make it impossible for a pregnant person to obtain an abortion, but it would potentially make an already challenging process even more daunting. As it stands, obtaining an abortion is already far from affordable or convenient for many women, even in blue states with a plethora of clinics. Despite Roe’s current status, and despite the fact that statistically, most Americans believe in a woman’s right to choose, abortion care is still often portrayed as a privilege instead of a right — or as a miserable “worst-case” scenario rather than a straightforward medical procedure.

Marty’s new book (available now from Seven Stories Press) lays out various scenarios for exactly what a Roe-less future might look like. More importantly, it explains exactly how we should prepare for this reality. As Marty writes in Handbook, “While Roe and the cases that preceded it made birth control and abortion legal, they did nothing to curtail the coercive power our government wields over the bodies of those who can give birth.”

For the liberal naysayers who can’t fathom America sinking quite so far into Handmaid-land, Marty reminds readers that not only have anti-choice laws and restrictions been ramping up in recent years, but the pro-life contingent has been emboldened under Trump’s presidency in frightening new ways. In the following interview, Marty further explains the possible dangers of what lies ahead, and how we can start protecting ourselves now.

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Can you tell me a little bit about how the book came about? It traces back to a Twitter thread, is that right?

Right. Anthony Kennedy announced that he would be retiring. As soon as that happened, my first thought was, ‘Okay, this is basically the end of Roe.’ And even if this isn’t exactly the end of Roe, it’s enough of a push and enough of a change that all the people who had been quiet before and hadn’t seen this as a real threat, finally understand that it’s a turning point.

Part of the reason I started the Twitter thread was because the first two things that I saw people saying as soon as Kennedy announced his retirement were, A) ‘I’m going to donate to Planned Parenthood,’ and B) ‘I’m going to stockpile emergency contraception.’ And my first thought was okay, donating to Planned Parenthood is always good, but there are so many clinics in states that only have one clinic that are not run by Planned Parenthood, and that doesn’t help them. And getting emergency contraception for yourself is always good, but the idea of stockpiling can be done in such a way that it actually harms access.

I talked to a number of people who are very high in the pro-life movement. Many of them assured me that Kavanaugh will be the vote, and that Roe will be overturned as soon as they can get a case up there.

My thought was ‘Here are all these things that you can do that would be better actions than what people are describing.’ And so it turned into…a 30-tweet thread of [suggestions for] places you can donate to and actions you can take instead; groups that you should be working with on the ground.

As I was doing this, I was getting a lot of really good responses. One of them was from … a woman book agent, who said, ‘I think there’s actually a book there; can you write a proposal and I will see what I can do?’

Within about a month, I had a book deal with the understanding that I had to write a book in three months, because they wanted it out before the anniversary of Roe.

I was going to ask you about the timeline because I knew it must have been tight. Was that stressful?

Yeah, it was definitely a challenge. Especially because it was summer, so I had children at home. My first book, Crow After Roe, was sort of … I accepted a proposal with my co-author and we didn’t really expect the first publisher that we sent it to, to say ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’ But they did, and then they said, ‘We’re going to move a book aside so we can run this right away. Can you have it done for us in three months?’

There seems to be something about three months! It’s always three months for me.

But I wrote this book in about eight weeks.

That sounds stressful.

I would like to say I wrote a lot, but most of what I did [for the handbook] was compiling all of the different information that was already out there. And I did that for two reasons — one was so that it was in one accessible place so it’s easy to get to, and the other … was because people don’t always know where to look for this information. We’ve already seen with the Trump administration how information disappears. Health and Human Services re-wrote some of their rules, they disappeared trans language from a lot of things. Nothing on the internet is completely safe, [whether] because of censorship or anti-abortion activists who decide that they want to do some attacks online to try and bring down websites; there’s always the [chance] that you might not be able to get to information when you need it.

How did you get involved in covering abortion care and abortion access as one of your primary beats?

That evolved out of being a progressive blogger. I started anonymously blogging in 2004 while I was working for an investment banking firm. I ended up working for a progressive news site that was setting up state-based news sites. I got more aware of the abortion issue, especially what was going on in [various] states.

In 2009, I ended up writing specifically for a reproductive health website. They picked me up after I was laid off, right after the Affordable Care Act debate and … trying to get all abortion coverage removed from the insurance plans. I had just had a miscarriage, and I had to go into a hospital for a DNC in order to have everything removed. I had this very in-your-face ‘what if’ moment of [wondering], ‘Would that be something my insurance will cover under the new plan?’ Because it was coded in the hospital bills as abortion.

After that I was working for RH Reality Check, as it was called back then (now it’s Rewire News), and I spent a few years tracking all of these bills as they were popping up through the states, and it grew from there.

Can you walk me through the scenarios that you see as the most likely and least likely when it comes to legal abortion access?

If you had asked me a week ago [we had this conversation in late January -LB], I would have said the most likely thing that was going to happen would be that the Supreme Court would keep Roe intact; that it would not overturn the verdict. The court would allow states to pass whatever bills they wanted to pass, as long as they did not explicitly completely ban the procedure.

Can you explain that a bit more?

What I [believed would] happen was that you would have a state like Mississippi, which only has one abortion clinic, and it would finally be allowed to enact rules that would close that one clinic. But because it didn’t actually ban abortion outright in the state, and the state would still [technically] allow abortion, that it would still be considered constitutional.

But now I actually believe that Roe will be overturned completely — and that states will be allowed to make it completely illegal.

Why do you believe that now?

I was at the March for Life [recently], and I talked to a number of people who are very high in the pro-life movement. Many of them assured me that Kavanaugh will be the vote, and that Roe will be overturned as soon as they can get a case up there.

I believe that Roe will be overturned, that we’ll have at least 10 to 15 states that will not have any abortion [access] at all. There will be a number of states that might go completely without abortion or otherwise will pass laws that will make it extraordinarily difficult to get an abortion at all, and then there will be about 10 to 15 states that will have abortion access and will probably expand it.

The problem with this scenario is that all the states that are going to either ban, or are going to make abortion nearly impossible to get, are all in the same place. They’re in the Midwest, and the entirety of the Southeast, except for maybe Florida, will be without any sort of legal abortion. That’s scary and alarming, and something that we have to plan for.

It sounds horrible to say ‘Plan for an abortion now,’ but the reality is, if you are capable of getting pregnant, [planning] is something that you should do.

How do we plan for that? What do you suggest people start doing now?

The first thing that I tell everybody is that the best thing to do is plan for what will happen if Roe is overturned and abortion is illegal. What a person can do is figure out what is going on in their state first — will their state be one that will make abortion illegal or will they have some sort of access? Which is going to be the closest state to you that will have abortion access?

It sounds horrible to say ‘Plan for an abortion now,’ but the reality is, if you are capable of getting pregnant, [planning] is something that you should do. We’re looking at huge travel that will have to happen, and trying to get through waiting periods in some of the states that remain. The clinics that are going to be left are going to be overbooked, and abortion is not going to be covered by insurance. It will be extremely expensive, so if you plan for that and don’t need it, that’s fantastic. But if you suddenly find yourself with an unexpected pregnancy that you don’t want to carry to term, trying to figure all of that out at the last minute is going to be extraordinarily daunting.

People plan for retirement; people plan for all sorts of things in their life. You should also plan for an abortion.

I know there’s no way to explicitly predict this, but what sort of timeline do you think this might happen in?

I would say that Roe will probably be overturned … after the 2020 election. It would be that soon. We have a number of cases already in the federal court system that have circuit splits [in which two federal courts don’t agree about whether similar laws are constitutional]. Any one of those can be taken up to the Supreme Court for them to make a final ruling, and through that can overturn Roe.

Also, something that people don’t understand is that the courts can technically take any case that’s about abortion and use that to overturn Roe. So for instance, the Indiana Down Syndrome ban. Basically every time the court meets again to see if they’re going to take up a case, it could be the one that would overturn Roe, if they chose to use it that way.

But … I don’t see the courts doing it before 2020 just because of election impact. I hate to say it, but our Supreme Court has become so partisan at this point that I see them taking that as a consideration.

Which state restrictions are you monitoring the most closely right now?

Depending on scenario, heartbeat bans are really alarming because they make it almost impossible to get an abortion before it’s too late to get an abortion. But for the most part, courts have been saying that [those are] unconstitutional.

One of the [other] things really alarming me right now is the idea of abortion restrictions on top of abortion restrictions, especially when it comes to states that are expanding their waiting periods. There’s two different ways that waiting periods work. In some states, waiting periods start from the point at which you call a clinic, and so they’ll give you information on the phone and you don’t have to make two trips into the clinic. But a lot of states are now having them in a way that you have to come in to the clinic, get the information, then walk away, come back and have your next appointment anywhere from 24 to 72 hours afterwards.

When you take a state that has a waiting period of 72 hours or more, has only one clinic, and then the clinic only performs [abortions] up to 12 weeks, then you have basically [created] a situation where a person is going to spend at least a week just going back and forth, trying to get an abortion knowing that there’s a cutoff, plus knowing that there’s an immense wait to get into that clinic to start with.

[This is how] they’re really strangling the system altogether. None of these things on their own necessarily look unreasonable, but stacked on top of each other, they’ve made abortion almost impossible to get.

You recently attended the March for Life. Did you notice a bigger turnout, or more fervency among the pro-life faction there?

Yes, yes, yes. I’ve been to the March for Life four times now. At the march I went to before the 2016 election, abortion opponents thought they had lost. They believed that Hillary Clinton was going to be elected. They believed they were losing the entirety of the Supreme Court, so it was a very dejected feeling there, but [there was] also a sense of ‘what can we do in order to make tiny gains around the edges?’

Being at the march over the last two years, it has changed so dramatically. Their people are in the administration, they’re in the HHS, their elected leaders are everywhere. They have so much right now, and they know that. They feel that Roe is on the rocks, that they are about to have that win.

Also, the March for Life has become increasingly political ever since President Trump was elected. There’s signs saying “Make Babies Great Again” and, like the Covington students, everyone’s wearing MAGA hats. It’s become so intertwined with politics, and especially with the Republican party, that it has in many ways turned into a rally for social conservatives and for the religious right.

If abortion is made illegal again … people are, frankly, unlikely to die  … Our problem now is that abortion … done outside the legal system is going to get you thrown in jail.

You touched on third-trimester abortion a little bit in the book, which is already not readily accessible throughout the country. What will happen to that if Roe is overturned?

We just had New York pass the Reproductive Health Act, which basically removed all abortion from the criminal code, which means that New York providers can now offer third-trimester abortions in cases where there is a significant medical need for it. So if a person is having mental health issues, if a person has a fetus with an anomaly that they can’t or don’t want to carry to term, third-trimester abortion has been opened up as long as there is a valid medical reason for it. And that’s not something that was happening in New York before. Before, we had a clinic in Colorado that would do it, and a clinic in Maryland, and a clinic in New Mexico.

There’s a section of your handbook about privacy concerns. Why was that important for you to include?

One of the things that we’re already seeing when people induce their own abortions or have bad pregnancy outcomes that make the hospitals or the authorities suspect that they induced their own abortions, is that when they’re investigated their computers get seized. Their phones get looked at. One of the things that happened to Purvi Patel, who was arrested for feticide and homicide in Indiana, was that they looked at her text messages and saw that she said she had taken something. That was what they used to prosecute her.

If a person’s going to work outside of the legal clinic system in order to end a pregnancy…we just have to be aware of what sort of information could get out there, especially when a person might be going outside of the legal clinic system, and anybody else who has talked to them could be seen as an accessory in either having helped them obtain medication or [other] ways.

Can you talk a little bit more about self-managed abortion? Were there legal challenges to publishing that particular chapter of your book?

Not specifically, although I did have it vetted by a lawyer. One of the things that’s very interesting about the publisher that I ended up with, and probably one of the reasons that the book exists at all, is that Seven Stories Press actually published a book called A Woman’s Book of Choices by Carol Downer. One of the things she did was explain how to do menstrual extraction. That was considered mind-blowing at the time, that there was a publisher that would actually give instructions on how to make this and do this.

So the publisher was really good about wanting to include all of this information, that this is information that needs to be public. And honestly, all of this information is online; it’s available everywhere, it’s just not compiled in one space. I’m not encouraging anybody to do this, and I think that the best way is always going to be going through the legal system. It’s just, if people are going to do it, they need to have information on how to do it safely.

Do you think we’ll see an uptick in DIY abortions? Is there already an uptick?

My understanding is that there probably is. The fact that we can’t verify that or actually prove that in any way, shape, or form is good because that means that people are doing it the right way, protecting their privacy and making sure that their caches are not being found. When they do speak to people at hospitals, making sure that it’s understood that this is a miscarriage and that’s all the information that a person needs to give.

What are some of the biggest misconceptions that you keep hearing or seeing regarding abortion access lately?

I see a lot of people saying that they still don’t believe that Roe is going to be overturned. I also see people — on our side as well — [repeat] the idea that people [will die] if abortion is made illegal again.

When we go into a post-Roe landscape, people are, frankly, unlikely to die if they get illegal abortions. Because we can get medications online, and these medications have been proven to be very safe. If there is a rare complication, it can be taken care of at a hospital, if necessary.

Our problem now is that abortion … done outside the legal system is going to get you thrown in jail.

We need to, as a movement, make sure that people understand that doing your own self-induced abortion is not medically any more dangerous than a [medically supervised] abortion would be. The only difference is that because this is not legal, people are afraid to report when something goes wrong. And in some cases it’s not even anything going wrong, it’s just too many people don’t know exactly what the process is like, so they think something is going wrong.

We have to make sure that everybody understands what a self-managed abortion looks like; what’s normal, what’s not normal, what will get them in trouble, what will not get them in trouble, what to say to a hospital, what not to say to a hospital.

People need to be aware of all of that because when we go into a post-Roe future … we aren’t generally going to see [people] bleeding out and dying in their homes, but we could see [people] going in for help because they think something’s wrong, and ending up in jail instead.

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Laura Barcella is an NYC-based journalist and author.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Every year, more than a million people visit Muir Woods, one of the most popular attractions in the San Francisco Bay Area and the country, to walk among the giant redwoods and experience a unique slice of forest still containing the ancient trees.

Until last June, few people knew that even taller and older redwoods soared just 2.5 hours north of San Francisco, off the coast of Sonoma County, on land owned by a family who rarely let people in on their secret stash of exceptional trees.

“The property always had a sense of legend, an aura around it, because no one had seen it—not even in 2018,” said Sam Hodder, CEO of the Save the Redwoods League, a 100-year-old nonprofit that works to protect California’s redwood and sequoias.

News of the forest came out last summer when the league announced it had acquired the land from its owners, the Richardson family, after nearly a decade of trust building and quiet negotiations. Now named the Harold Richardson Redwoods Reserve, the forest is set to open to the public in 2021. Researchers have discovered that it’s one-third larger than Muir Woods, with trees much taller and older, including the McApin Tree—at 1,640 years old, it’s the oldest-known redwood south of Mendocino County and has a trunk diameter as wide as a two-lane street. That’s compared to the oldest tree (roughly 1,200 years) in Muir Woods.

For years, rumors about the trees existed among conservationists, but virtually no one knew exactly what the property contained. “On my first day on the job, volunteer leaders took me aside to tell me about the prize of all conservation projects,” Hodder said. “But because [the family was] so private and took so much pride in the land, we never expected it to happen.”

The 730 acres of old growth that make up this new reserve had been part of the Richardson Ranch: 8,000 acres that operated as a vineyard, cattle ranch, and regional timber business. The timber mill, still in operation today, sits just a mile down the road from the ranch.

The land has been in the Richardson family since the 1870s, when Harold Richardson’s grandfather, Herbert Archer “H.A.” Richardson, acquired it after moving west from New Hampshire. At one point, the elder Richardson owned 50,000 acres of forestland in western Sonoma County, including the entire town of Stewarts Point and eight miles of coastline, and employed more than 100 men. During this time, California was coated with redwoods and sequoias—it’s estimated the trees made up more than 2.2 million acres of land from southern Oregon to Big Sur. Today, they account for only about 113,000 acres in the state.

The Richardsons maintained the trees during a time when the vast majority were being cut down and overharvested by other timber mills. Since logging began in the 1850s, 95 percent of old-growth coast redwoods have been cut down. Of the 1.6 million acres of redwood forest left, only 7 percent are old growth.

Harold inherited the land in the 1960s and maintained his ancestor’s efforts toward conservation, taking just enough timber to make a living. He left the old-growth trees alone—chopping only those that were dead or dying, said Dan Falk, one of Harold Richardson’s great-nephews who inherited the land. “Harold thought of himself as a timberman and logger, but he also was a proud steward of the land and a conservationist at heart,” Falk said. “He made sure to harvest only the amount of trees he needed to get by. He constantly taught us about about stewardship, hard work, living simply, and not being greedy.”

Talks started between the Richardsons and Save the Redwoods about ten years ago when the family began to consider ways they could continue their timber business and maintain their land in the future. The deal was finalized after Harold passed away in 2016, at the age of 96, and the inheritance tax proved too expensive for the new owners to keep up with. His obituary read that he is “survived by his Old Growth Redwood forest” and then listed his relatives.

In the end, Save the Redwoods paid the family $9.6 million, raised largely through donations, in addition to giving them back 870 acres of coastal land near Stewarts Point that the league had acquired in 2010 from a separate member of the Richardson family. On that property, the league negotiated three easements that will conserve it in perpetuity—with those, the timber business can continue to operate, but with certain restrictions. In addition to the land the family got back, the Richardsons will continue to own and operate their business on the 8,000 acres of surrounding forest.

While the final outcome was a bit complex, Save the Redwoods believed the innovative solution was a win-win—the family could avoid paying taxes they couldn’t afford while continuing their business, and the league could manage the largest batch of unprotected old growth left in the world.

“It was a true trust-building exercise,” Hodder said. “Harold wasn’t particularly comfortable with government regulation or conservation. But as we went through, he became more comfortable with the transaction and eventually blessed it.”

Harold was known to have an aversion to outside intervention—he saw it as his job to be the steward of the land and took it seriously, said Stephanie Martin, senior project manager and wildlife biologist at North Coast Resource Management, which is contracting with Save the Redwoods to study and survey the reserve.

“Harold was kind of a conservation cowboy. He was known to just come out here and drop a match and let the fire resolve itself for the health of the trees,” Martin said, noting that while this tactic would be pretty much unheard of today, it was a smart move in those days, as Harold knew that fire is a natural and healthy part of how redwood forests survive and grow.

Martin is heading up the surveying of the land and its wildlife to better understand where to lay trails when the park opens to the public in two to three years. The property could also be critical for researching how climate change affects redwoods, because these trees are growing farther from the coast than most other redwoods.

“They’ve been able to figure out how to survive in the warmer, drier environment with less of a fog layer, so these may be the redwoods of the future,” Martin said.

Save the Redwoods will manage the park rather than turn it over to a state or federal system. When the reserve opens to the public, it will be the largest redwood park in Sonoma County. The league wants to emphasize educating visitors about forest ecology and the land’s cultural importance to the Kashia Band Native American tribe.

Blueprints are still in early stages, but the group plans to include several walking trails and wildlife-viewing overlooks, all designed to be as undisruptive as possible to the ecosystem.

Given recent concerns about overtourism and the toll it can take on natural landscapes, Save the Redwoods is envisioning more of a light-touch approach with this redwood reserve. National parks and other popular outdoor attractions have started to make changes to help mitigate damage that too many visitors can make. In January, for example, Muir Woods began requiring that visitors obtain secure time entry tickets to cap the number of tourists, which has risen by 30 percent over the past decade.

“While any diffusing of some of the pressures of Muir Woods is a good thing, I don’t see the reserve as being a heavily trafficked place,” Hodder said. “It will be more of a local and regional park for people to enjoy.”

In the end, it was a difficult but necessary decision for the Richardson family to give up their long-cherished land, said Falk, who looks back fondly on his childhood spent playing, fishing, and camping in his private, majestic natural playground. He said he finds comfort in the fact that the land will be preserved for generations to come.

“I remember that when I’d go out there with Harold as a kid, he wouldn’t say more than two or three words,” Falk added. “He’d just tell us to quit talking and listen to the woods—to hear the sounds of nothing and everything and be part of the land.”

Just before noon on May 3, 2010, John Struczynski, a janitor at Birmingham Airport in the British Midlands, observed something peculiar. A balding, middle-aged passenger had entered the shower room in the Emirates Airlines first-class departure lounge and emerged after what seemed like a long time. But when Struczynski stepped inside the facility to check it, he saw that the shower and floor were bone-dry. Then he noticed, at the bottom of a diaper bin, a cardboard carton containing a single egg, dyed blood red. Mystified, and suspecting that something illegal was afoot, Struczynski alerted airport security.

A few minutes later, a pair of plainclothes counterterrorism agents accosted the passenger, led him to a private room, and searched him. Beneath his shirt, they discovered ribbons of surgical tape wound around his abdomen. The tape encased three woolen socks containing a total of 14 smallish eggs ranging in color from brick red to marbled brown. The man claimed they were duck eggs, and he offered the police a curious explanation: his physiotherapist had recommended that he wear the eggs pressed against his belly to force him to keep his muscles taut and strengthen his lower back.

At that point the police phoned Andy McWilliam, a veteran investigator with the National Wildlife Crime Unit, a branch of the British police established in 2006 to combat offenses ranging from badger baiting to ivory trading. From the officer’s description, McWilliam felt all but certain that the eggs were those of the peregrine falcon, the fastest animal alive, a bird of prey that nests, in the UK, in cliffs along the west coast from Wales to Scotland. Peregrines suffered a dramatic decline in population during the fifties and sixties, largely because of the widespread use of the pesticide DDT; by the early seventies, only about 350 breeding pairs were left in Great Britain. The pesticide was banned throughout the world beginning in the early seventies, and since then the population has climbed back to about 1,500 pairs. But the birds are still protected in the UK, and the theft of their eggs in the wild can be punishable by jail time.

“I suggested to the police that they arrest him on suspicion of possessing wild bird eggs,” McWilliam says, “and I told them that I’d be down there in two hours.”

McWilliam contacted a well-known raptor breeder named Lee Featherstone and asked him to head to the airport. Featherstone confirmed that the eggs strapped to the man’s body were indeed peregrine and, using a digital monitor called an Egg Buddy, determined that 13 of the 14 were alive, two weeks from hatching. (The remaining egg, the dyed one, was a chicken egg, presumably a decoy in case the man had been stopped on his way through security.) The next morning, as the chicks-to-be continued to incubate, McWilliam and two counterterrorism agents interrogated the suspect in a room near his holding cell. “We let him string us along about the duck eggs, and then I took over the interview,” McWilliam recalls. “I said, ‘You and I both know these are not duck eggs, they are falcon eggs.’ ”

“At that point,” McWilliam says, “he realized that he couldn’t pull the wool over us any longer.” The detained man, who carried Irish and South African passports identifying him as 48-year-old Jeffrey Paul Len­drum, reluctantly admitted over the course of several interviews that he had taken peregrine eggs from cliff ledges in the Rhondda Valley, in southern Wales. Lendrum insisted that he believed the eggs he’d pilfered were no longer alive and said that he had been transporting them, via Dubai, to his father’s home in Zimbabwe to add to the family egg collection. It wouldn’t take McWilliam long to conclude, though, that this was no ordinary trophy hunter.

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Interpol estimates that the illegal wildlife trade is worth as much as $20 billion a year, among the world’s most lucrative black markets. But that trade extends well beyond elephant ivory and rhino horn. Back in November 2009, police in Rio de Janeiro stopped a British pet-shop owner who was trying to smuggle a thousand large Amazonian spiders out of the country in his suitcases. In May 2017, police in East Java rescued about two dozen critically endangered yellow-crested cockatoos that a smuggler had stuffed inside water bottles. And multiple people have been arrested over the years for moving finches from Guyana to New York, where finch “races” in Queens pit the songbirds against each other to see which one sings fastest. One common smuggling M.O. is to dope the birds with rum and stuff them inside hair curlers.

Falcons, which encompass 39 species, are distributed on all continents except Antarctica. In some parts of the world, particularly in the UK, the threat posed by DDT gave way to a new menace: compulsive collectors who stole the eggs of protected species from their nests, blowing out the contents and mounting the shells. The thefts threatened numerous species—red-backed shrikes, ospreys, golden eagles, peregrines—before the Scottish police, in coordination with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, launched Operation Easter in 1997. Many of the perpetrators, it turned out, were middle-aged men driven by a need that even they ­struggled to understand. “Certain individuals just become obsessed with it,” McWilliam said in an interview for the 2015 documentary Poached. “It’s a self-obsessive, self-indulging crime. And why people risk going to prison for a bird’s egg, it just beats me.”

Those crimes seem quaint next to the illegal raptor trade in the Middle East, where devotees of falconry—the age-old sport of hunting quarry with a trained bird of prey—pay dearly for rare birds. “These falcons are worth a lot of money,” says Mark Jeter, a recently retired assistant chief at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who follows the trade. “I always say, If there is a $50,000 bill flying around, someone is going to try to catch it.” In 2013 in Doha, Qatar, for example, a man reportedly paid $250,000 on the legal market for a pure white gyrfalcon, the world’s largest raptor and a bird so prized for its power and beauty that medieval kings used to hunt with them.

Demand in the Middle East is now mostly fueled by the spread of falcon racing, a sport that puts a premium on larger, stronger, and faster birds. But the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species—to which the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are signatories—bans the import and export of peregrines and gyrfalcons, and since 2002, the UAE has required falcons to travel with a passport proving their legal provenance. Because of these restrictions and thanks to recent genetic advances, captive breeding has become much more popular.

Many enthusiasts in the Middle East, however, still believe that wild birds are genetically superior, and unscrupulous falconers have spent hundreds of thousands for birds acquired by “trappers” in Siberia, Kamchatka, and other raptor-rich environments. In 2005, for example, the illegal smuggling of saker falcons from Central Asia became so bad that the bird was declared endangered. By many accounts, the UAE has cracked down; according to a 2018 report on illegal wildlife trafficking by air transport, conducted by the nonprofit Center for Advanced Defense Studies, the UAE had the highest number of bird-trafficking seizures between 2009 and 2017, with the emirate of Dubai as the world’s most common destination.

“It’s not something that they shout about,” I was told by a leading breeder. “I’ve seen falcons come in when I was there last time. They had been hooded, and they were in a horrible state. The trappers had driven 3,000 miles from Siberia with the birds. The Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the Saudis are getting involved. The Saudis make the Emirates look like beggars.”

The smuggling of eggs is much less common. And investigators believe Lendrum is essentially a highly specialized trapper—a daredevil with the skills to locate wild eggs in the most inhospitable places on earth and travel thousands of miles across international borders to deliver his prizes.

I spent more than a year on Lendrum’s trail, meeting acquaintances, family members, breeders, law-enforcement officials—and finally Lendrum himself. He insisted that his misdeeds have been grossly exaggerated. He told me that he’d only stolen live eggs out of nests twice in his adult life, both times to rescue the unhatched chicks from grave danger. He claimed that he had never traded with Arabs and that the actual prices for birds of prey on both the legal and illegal markets are so low that nobody could make a living smuggling eggs.

“The way Andy McWilliam blew the whole thing out of proportion, and got the media involved, they might as well have erected a gallows for me,” he said. But the more I learned, the more Lendrum’s denials failed to stand up to scrutiny.

The path that led me to Jeffrey Lendrum began at the central train station in Cardiff, Wales, when I met Ian Guildford, a Welsh investigator with the National Wildlife Crime Unit, on a windy, unseasonably frigid May morning. We followed a four-lane highway north and picked up McWilliam at a McDonald’s at a shopping center in Merthyr Tydfil. McWilliam is a stocky 61-year-old with a square jaw and thinning silver hair. He hopped in the car and we drove on past Aberdare, a coal-mining town sunk into ruin since the industry’s collapse in the 1960s.

Southwest of Aberdare, we switchbacked up through denuded pale-green hills, covered in places with netting to prevent landslides. Below us lay the stark and treeless Rhondda Valley, carved by glaciers during the Ice Age and bordered to the north by the red-sandstone peaks of Brecon Beacons National Park, dotted with the burial cairns of Bronze Age tribes. When we reached the top of the escarpment and got out of the car, I was nearly blown off my feet by a gust of wind. I righted myself and followed the two officers across a treeless meadow, sinking to my knees in spongy tufts of grass. Bent against the gale, we arrived at the edge of the cliffs. The ground fell away sharply, exposing gray-black outcroppings divided into steplike ledges sheltered from the wind: perfect spots for peregrines to lay their eggs.

“We’re at the end of the bloody world,” shouted Guildford, a rangy, bespectacled Londoner with tousled brown hair, who has lived in Wales for three decades. We walked around the edge of the cliffs to another overlook, this one providing a panoramic view of the entire escarpment. McWilliam and Guildford scanned the sky with their binoculars, searching for peregrines, but weren’t able to spot any.

During his interrogation of Lendrum in May 2010, McWilliam became increasingly certain that he was covering up more than he admitted. Yet he also knew that, under British law, the police could keep Lendrum in custody for just 36 hours before charging or releasing him. With the clock ticking, McWilliam searched Len­drum’s baggage and located his Vauxhall sedan in the airport’s long-term parking lot. He found carabiners, ropes, GPS devices, a satellite navigation unit that confirmed Lendrum’s movements in the Rhondda Valley—and, most incriminating, an incubator that had been adapted to plug into the car’s cigarette lighter.

Lendrum, he discovered, had roamed these cliffs for days, armed with grid points that narrowed the search zone, keeping an eye out for male falcons returning to their nests. “We tracked Lendrum’s vehicle,” McWilliam said, still shouting into the wind, “and we were able to say that he’d been down here in early April, three weeks before the nests were robbed.” After locating the ledges where the females laid their eggs, Lendrum had picked four different aeries and stole live eggs, according to his own admission to investigators. To pull off the theft, he would have had to set a fixed rope at the top of the escarpment and rappel down, scooping the eggs into an insulated bag as the peregrines flew off in terror.

Lendrum’s trial was set for August 2010, and McWilliam used the summer to gather more evidence. Prosecutors would detail in court how the detective located Lendrum’s locker in a Midlands storage facility, finding more incubators (purchased on eBay before his mission), a copy of a letter from Len­drum to the author of a newspaper account describing his arrest in Canada in 2002 for stealing falcon eggs, and correspondence concerning a 1980s scheme to smuggle eagle eggs from southern Africa to a buyer in the United Kingdom.

As McWilliam described to me, he played a DVD confiscated from Lendrum’s carry-on and watched as he dangled by a rope from a helicopter over cliffside gyrfalcon nests, later found to be near Kuujjuaq, in Inuit territory in northeastern Quebec. He pored over laptop files that chronicled in minute detail a reconnaissance trip made to Sri Lanka in February 2010 in search of the eggs of the rare black shaheen peregrine falcon. “One seen flying off rock … good site with large overhang, several places with droppings,” an observation read. “Military guarding elephants in area and every time [you] step [from] the car, they come out of the trees to ask what you are doing. Hard access to rock and military make this a no go.”

Lendrum—or whoever had written the entries in his possession—had also cased the international airport in Colombo. “A few meters inside doors to departure area there is a security checkpoint consisting of a row of standard baggage X-ray units, walk-through metal detector,” the file read. “The guy who patted me down was very good at it and had been well trained.” McWilliam’s hunch, he believed, had been correct: he was in the presence of a sophisticated and prolific wildlife criminal.

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Jeffrey Lendrum was born in 1961 in what was then white-ruled Northern Rhodesia. (His grandfather was apparently Irish, which enabled him to obtain an Irish passport.) The family soon moved to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, a bustling railway center on the highveld, the vast grasslands covering southern Africa. As the oldest of three children, Jeffrey sometimes joined his father, Adrian, a human-resources manager at Dunlop Tires, on trips to nearby Matobo National Park, a game-rich wilderness of granite outcroppings with an unmatched concentration of raptors. From the age of eight, he earned a reputation as a nimble climber, scrambling up trees and rock faces studded with bird’s nests. In the seventies and eighties, Matobo was the site of one of the world’s most ambitious ornithological field projects. Run by a retired math teacher and bird enthusiast named Valerie Gargett, the African Black Eagle Survey recruited volunteers to observe large Verreaux’s eagles, a protected species, through courtship, nesting, and incubation, then watch the chicks fledge and venture out on their own.

Invited to assist on that project, and later to lead peripheral surveys of augur buzzards and African hawk-eagles, the Lendrums gained access to hundreds of nesting sites compiled by the Rhodesian Ornithological Society (now BirdLife Zimbabwe). For nearly a decade, while guerrilla war raged in the bush between the white-minority regime and black rebels led by Robert Mugabe, father and son roamed the park together. “It was derring-do stuff,” says Pat Lorber, a former Black Eagle Survey member. “They would throw a claw into a tree and climb up as high as they could. It required a lot of skill and not a little risk.” Yet many team members eventually became suspicious of the Lendrums. They would report that a chick had fledged, recalls Lorber, “and we would drive by and there was nothing in the nest, and it didn’t look like it had been touched for a year. There were lies, inconsistencies. After a while, Val said to me, ‘There is something going on.’ ”

In October 1983, police raided the Lendrums’ home and discovered more than 800 eggs stashed in drawers, as well as live peregrine eggs refrigerated into a state of suspended development. Prosecutors charged that many had been stolen from nests inside Matobo. In court, witnesses made allegations—never proven—that Jeffrey Lendrum was selling live raptor eggs on the black market. The Lendrums insisted that they were only gathering dead eggs for their collection.

Jeffrey’s mother, a schoolteacher, and his younger sister and brother were not implicated in the scam. But after a three-month trial, father and son were found guilty of fraud and possession and theft of specially protected wildlife, fined thousands of dollars, and given four-month suspended sentences. Adrian Lendrum was also ordered to surrender his Toyota pickup truck, incubators, and egg collection. Shortly after, Jeffrey, now 23 and a pariah in his hometown, left Bulawayo and resettled in South Africa.

Lendrum would say that he gave up egg collecting once he settled in South Africa. For more than a decade, as the newly independent country of Zimbabwe economically disintegrated under President Mugabe, he moved mining equipment and spare auto parts into the country. Word got around—and would later be widely  reported—that he’d been a member of the Rhodesian Special Air Service, an elite unit during the civil war. But Lendrum’s name does not appear on any SAS rolls.

Around 1998, a girlfriend introduced him to Paul Mullin, a British expat who worked for an American company building internet infrastructure in southern Africa. Mullin has since changed his name—for reasons that will soon become clear—and now lives in Hampshire, in southern England. (At his request, Outside is identifying him by his former name.)

“We used to have coffee and a chat about Africa,” he told me. “Jeff would say, ‘Come up to Zimbabwe, we’ll go on safari.’ We started driving frequently to Bulawayo, Matobo, and Hwange National Park.” The pair became business partners, traveling from Botswana to Kenya buying tribal art and shipping it to England, where they set up a couple of African crafts shops that ultimately failed. But the two men complemented one another well, Mullin says: “Jeff could speak the local lingo, he knew the areas, he knew how to barter, and I had the money.”

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This is where, Mullin alleges, their adventures began. According to him, Lendrum didn’t immediately reveal his more controversial activities. But by the early 2000s, Mullin claims, he began joining Lendrum on illegal trafficking journeys.

Here we should pause to state that Mullin and Lendrum are no longer friends. In 2008, Lendrum took up romantically with Mullin’s ex, who’d recently had a child with Mullin. Lendrum and the woman are no longer together, but the two men have spoken only a handful of times since.

Lendrum maintains that Mullin’s allegations are lies born of that grudge. Regardless of his motives, however, Mullin does have evidence of their exploits—plane tickets, diaries, notes, and video, including the one McWilliam watched in 2010—that clearly shows Lendrum approaching falcon nests and the pair’s helicopter pilot laughingly describing them as “fucking criminals.”

According to Mullin, Lendrum frequently offered a rationale for his work, arguing that the chicks would be better off being cared for by wealthy Arab falconers in a protected environment than exposed to harsh conditions in the wild. “What is the mortality rate of a bird in the wilderness?” he would ask. (In fact, nearly 80 percent of Verreaux’s eagles, for example, die during their first year in Matobo National Park, usually starving to death in the fierce battle for territory.) “Jeff took those chicks and eggs and brought them to Dubai, where they have wildlife hospitals better than human hospitals,” Mullin says.

He’s not far wrong: the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital treats more than 11,000 raptors a year and boasts its own ophthalmology wing and intensive care unit. Dubai’s leading falcon conservationist, Sheikh Butti bin Maktoum bin Juma Al Maktoum, a nephew of ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has his own personal falcon breeder, Howard Waller, a leader in the field who also happens to be from Bulawayo.

Because Waller has known Lendrum since their school days together, he has long had to dodge accusations that he must be Lendrum’s buyer. “It’s always assumed it’s me,” Waller said when I visited him in northern Scotland, where he is based much of the year, “and there’s nothing I can do about that. I can’t change my childhood. What I can say is that we took different paths. My path was falconry and breeding falcons, and his path was collecting eggs. It’s always been a thrill for Jeff. He likes to beat the system.”

Lendrum’s younger brother, Richard, echoed that sentiment. I met him in Johannesburg during the South African summer. He’s a lean, tan outdoorsman who for years has published the successful hunting and conservation magazine African Hunting Gazette. “We both love wildlife. It’s just that Jeff has gone a slightly different way,” he said with the trace of a smile.

From the time they were boys in Rhodesia, Richard said, he took little interest in the family egg collection, “turning a blind eye,” as he put it, to Jeffrey’s activities in the parks. But he was close enough to believe that, at some point, his brother went into illegal business with Middle Eastern buyers. “There are breeders who want these birds from around the world, so they get ­intermediaries to do their dirty work for them,” he says. “It’s well-documented that Jeff got caught.” Richard wasn’t certain when his brother began stealing eggs. He first learned about it in 2002, he said, when Jeff was arrested in Canada.

Like Waller, Richard believes that his older brother was mostly in it for the thrill. “It’s a high-adventure, high-adrenaline way of eking out a living,” he told me. “It’s just gone a little wrong.”

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Over time, Lendrum’s missions became increasingly audacious. In June 2001, Mullin says, he accompanied Lendrum on the first of two trips to snatch gyrfalcon eggs in Canada. The massive raptor, whose plumage ranges from gray to snowy white, dwells in the far northern latitudes, laying its creamy pink eggs, four or five to a clutch, in depressions at the edge of cliffs.

“It was a military-style operation,” Mullin told me. Lendrum recruited an old pilot friend, and in Montreal the men loaded a rented Bell 206 JetRanger helicopter with cold-weather gear, power units, lights, cameras, a professional video recorder, GPS devices, climbing equipment, and mobile incubators. For cover, they posed as filmmakers with the National Geographic Society.

The pilot, when I later reached him, refused to talk. Lendrum himself admitted to traveling to northern Canada with Mullin and the pilot, but he claims it was a sightseeing trip. Regardless, the trio flew 900 miles north to Kuujjuaq, an Inuit village at the northern edge of Quebec, choppering deep into uninhabited wilderness. The pilot hovered next to cliffs that towered above lakes south of Ungava Bay. In Mullin’s video, Lendrum can be seen coolly approaching a gyrfalcon nest by dangling from a fixed line fastened to the helicopter, and carrying an insulated bag, presumably for eggs.

Mullin didn’t film any actual snatches, but he claims that Lendrum grabbed eggs from nests as female gyrs anxiously circled nearby (another allegation that Lendrum disputes). Over the course of a week, Mullin estimates, the men raided 19 gyrfalcon nests and gathered about a dozen live eggs, then flew safely back to Montreal and on to Heathrow Airport. “All the eggs were wrapped in socks and stashed in Jeffrey’s carry-on, surrounded by other material to keep the temperature right,” Mullin says. “Jeff kept monitoring the temperatures, making sure they were still alive.” The pair parted ways at Heathrow, where, according to Mullin, Lendrum flew on to Dubai. Lendrum says that all of this is “rubbish.”

What’s not in dispute is that Lendrum and Mullin returned to the Arctic a year later. This time they hired a helicopter and a local pilot in Kuujjuaq. Again they flew into the wilderness, but Lendrum had the pilot leave them at various cliff ledges and return every couple of hours to ferry them to new spots—a plan that raised the pilot’s suspicions. “Any wildlife photographer who’s serious would ask to be dropped off at sunrise and picked up at sunset,” the pilot told me, requesting anonymity to avoid further association with the caper. “Who in the hell keeps asking me to go back to town?” He remembered the pair from their trip the year before, and now Mullin’s amateurishness with the camera made him even more wary. “I’ve worked with wildlife photographers a lot,” he said, “but the guy in the back seat was just playing with the camera.”

On their third day in the field, the two men stumbled around for hours in whiteout conditions. “We were freezing to death,” Mullin says. “We got a total of seven eggs, and that was enough.”

The next afternoon, Mullin says, brought disaster. “We were in our room at the inn, shooting the shit, and then out of the blue there’s a knock on the door. I looked at Jeff. I said, ‘This is it.’ I opened the door, and in rushed four guys from provincial wildlife protection and the Sûreté du Québec. They said, ‘Are you Jeffrey Lendrum and Paul Mullin? You’re under arrest.’ ” The authorities, who had been tipped off by the pilot, seized the eggs, as well as two incubators and the rest of the men’s equipment. According to law-enforcement sources, the men were fined a total of $7,250 for six counts related to illegal possession of wildlife.

This was when Mullin decided to change his name, which had been published in Canadian newspapers. He ended his telecommunications gig in Africa and moved home to southern England. Lendrum went to England as well, marrying a French-Algerian woman in 2002 and moving in with her and her two teenage daughters in a quiet Northamptonshire village. Mullin was best man at their wedding.

The egg thief had—ostensibly—­settled down. But a few years later the marriage ended, and in 2008, Lendrum took up with Mullin’s ex, triggering the bitter falling-out between the longtime friends.

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When Lendrum was busted in Birmingham in 2010, he was dividing his time ­between England and Johannesburg. That August, he pleaded guilty to one count of theft of a protected species and one count of attempting to export a protected species. “We had a chat beforehand,” McWilliam recalls. “He knew he was going to prison, and when they said two and a half years, he looked at me and shrugged. I think his attitude was you win some, you lose some.”

At Hewell Prison in the Midlands, Lendrum was known by fellow inmates as the Bird Man. McWilliam visited him, hoping to gather intelligence about egg-smuggling networks in Great Britain and the Middle East, but Lendrum would surrender no information, insisting again that his operation in the Rhondda Valley had been a one-off.

Nonetheless, the two men continued talking, in phone calls that Lendrum would make to the investigator every few months from prison, and then on parole after he was released nine months into his sentence, with the requirement that he remain in the United Kingdom for another nine months. “He was staying somewhere down south in England, he was quite bored, and he’d ring me up to talk,” McWilliam recalls. “He might see something in the newspaper about elephant ivory or call me about a parking ticket. He talked about rhino horn and how regulators were going at it all wrong. I had a bit of a rapport with him. I respected him without wanting to condone what he did.”

Lendrum was 51 by the time he completed his parole in 2012. He headed back to South Africa, chastened and determined to make amends. His brother helped him get back on his feet, giving him a job at African Hunting Gazette, verifying hunting lodges’ claims about how much game they had on offer. But the Bird Man’s attempt to go straight quickly encountered obstacles. Subscribers besieged a popular online hunting forum, protesting the hiring of a convicted wildlife criminal. Jeffrey begged readers to keep an open mind. “Obviously, I am not perfect,” he wrote. “I was judged by a judge and paid the price.... Do I have to keep paying? I am sincerely sorry. Is there no place in your thoughts to give a criminal a chance after doing his time?” But Len­drum’s note of contrition failed to stem the steady pressure from Gazette subscribers and advertisers, and in 2014, his brother had to cut him loose.

It was perhaps inevitable that Lendrum would be drawn back to the aeries. In Octo­ber 2015, he traveled to southern Chile, registering under his own name at a hotel in Punta Arenas, in Patagonia, and carrying his usual array of incubators and climbing equipment. This time, however, a suspicious clerk had done a Google search and turned up articles about his arrests. He alerted Chilean authorities that Lendrum was flying out of South America via São Paulo, and the trap was set. On October 21, in a bizarre echo of his arrest five years earlier, Brazilian police detained Lendrum in the Emirates Airlines lounge in São Paulo as he waited for a flight to Dubai. According to Brazilian court records, he was carrying an incubator containing four eggs of a rare peregrine that lives in Tierra del Fuego.

“I don’t know how it happened or what was involved. It took us all by surprise,” says Richard, who surmised that his brother’s lack of legitimate employment drove him to return to his old ways.

As it turned out, Lendrum had one more trick up his sleeve. The court sentenced him to four and a half years in prison for theft and smuggling, but his lawyer persuaded the judge to release him on bail pending appeal. Lendrum surrendered his Irish passport. Then the egg thief slipped out of Brazil and dropped from sight.

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In May 2017, shortly after my trip to Wales, I reached out to Mullin for help tracking Lendrum down. Their mutual friends thought that he had resurfaced in South Africa, which has no extradition treaty with Brazil, and was holed up at his sister’s house in Cape Town. Mullin gave me a cell number.

I reached Lendrum on the first try, identifying myself as a journalist who had just spent a day with McWilliam in the Rhondda Valley in Wales. He was wary, defensive. “Andy McWilliam is telling people that I was selling birds for a fortune,” he said in a pronounced southern African accent. “Everybody writes absolute rubbish about me. The whole media has portrayed me as the Pablo Escobar of the falcon-egg trade. Now I can understand why Trump calls it the fake media.”

Lendrum insisted he had nothing to do with the Arab falcon trade. “I must have climbed to a thousand nests and found an egg failure rate of 45 percent,” he told me. “I collected nothing but rotten eggs in Matobo, but that was used in evidence against me in England.” McWilliam, he insisted, had blown the case out of proportion to inflate the importance of the National Wildlife Crime Unit. “Andy said to me, ‘Your case was like manna from heaven for us,’ ” Lendrum said (a quote McWilliam roundly denies). “Soon after my trial, a law-enforcement officer was caught with an egg collection and got a 14-week suspended sentence. I got two and a half years in prison. How unfair is that?”

I asked Lendrum if I could visit him, and he said he would consider it. But when I called back a few days later, he told me that he had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. “It’s a bad deal,” he said. He didn’t feel up for talking further.

Seven months later, I flew to Johannesburg on assignment and decided to seek out Lendrum one last time. Through friends of his family, I learned that his life had continued to spiral down. He was unemployed and living alone in a small rented home near Pretoria. Radiation treatment had weakened him, and he’d also been badly injured in a car accident in Johannesburg. Whatever money he might have made smuggling falcon eggs had been spent long ago.

“He’s got a very tough life,” Richard told me when I met him at a coffee shop in northern Johannesburg. “Nothing great at all.” Richard doubted that he would talk to me. His brother had ambitions to write a book, he said, and didn’t want to give away his trade secrets—or betray his powerful clients.

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Two hours later I got Jeffrey Lendrum on the phone, and he suggested we meet south of Pretoria at the Forest Hill City Mall in Centurion—a town formerly known as Verwoerdberg, after Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid. An Uber drove me across the parched plains of the highveld, past farms and tin-roofed shacks, to a giant shopping complex near a highway interchange. I made my way, as Lendrum had directed, to an Ocean Basket seafood restaurant overlooking an indoor ice-skating rink. He walked up to me minutes later, stuck out his hand, and introduced himself.

“You probably recognized me from my photos,” he said affably.

Lendrum’s receding hairline, black-framed glasses, and striped button-down shirt, hanging loosely over a pair of khaki shorts, made him look more like a clerk in a sporting-goods store than a daredevil adventurer. But he was tanner and healthier looking than I expected.

“I haven’t been doing anything, just trying to get better,” he told me. “I haven’t been well at all.”

Sitting across from me in a booth, sipping a cappuccino, Lendrum maintained again that, with rare exceptions, he had taken only addled (meaning dead) eggs and said that it made no sense that he would smuggle live falcon eggs for profit. “There’s no money in it,” he told me. “Listen, if falcon eggs were worth, say, $20,000, I’d have a Bell 407 helicopter parked outside, OK? To me it’s nonsensical.”

He characterized his 2001 trip to northern Canada as an innocent adventure. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world,” he said. “In a week, it changed from a place where you could land your helicopter on the lakes to greenness and bears and all the rest of it. If you had come out with me, you would have had such good fun.” Lendrum admitted that he’d raided gyrfalcon nests, but only to retrieve dead eggs for research. He had no explanation for why he was traveling with an incubator. “I thought to myself, I’m going there to check and see which eggs are addled, and to take the infertile ones to a Montreal museum,” he said. “I thought maybe I’d expose something like the DDT problem that happened with peregrines in the 1960s.” But his arrest—a misunderstanding, he said—forced him to abandon his plans. Likewise, he claimed, his nest-raiding trip to Wales nine years later had been a conservation mission.

The South American escapade was another well-intentioned lark gone wrong. Lendrum said that he’d been going down to Chile on a regular basis—six visits in a decade—drawn by some of the most bountiful and varied birdlife on the planet. “Magellans, oystercatchers, flamingos, peregrines—it’s incredible,” he said. On this trip, as with the others, he flew to Punta Arenas and drove to the tip of the continent, where he climbed inside volcanoes and rappelled down cliff faces to inspect some 18 peregrine nests. He admitted raiding one nest of live eggs—but only because the “female peregrine had died,” he said. “I took four eggs out of the nest,” he told me. “I honestly didn’t think that there would be a problem, maybe just a fine. I really wanted to get those birds into greater kestrel nests in South Africa.”

The escape from Brazil was relatively easy, he said. He traveled south to the country’s border with Argentina, then walked through the jungle for a day, carrying a GPS and a backpack full of food and water, evading patrols. He said he got a new passport from the Irish embassy and flew back to Johannesburg. (His Brazilian lawyer, Rod­rigo Tomei, cast doubt on that account, saying that it’s more likely his former client simply grabbed a bus across the border and flew home on his South African passport. “Nobody was looking for him at the time,” he said.)

Lendrum told his story persuasively, looking me straight in the eye and leaving me to wonder, for a few moments at least, whether he had been wrongly judged. But many elements of his account were contradicted by the facts: the eggs seized in Quebec were live eggs, not addled, and he had no explanation for the incubators that the police had confiscated. He was flying to Dubai with those Patagonian falcon eggs, not to South Africa to get them into kestrel nests.

At one point in our conversation, out of the blue, Lendrum did make a startling assertion. “Look, I was asked to steal live eggs,” he said. “And I said it’s 99 percent unlikely that it would work. The length of time the eggs would be out of the nest, keeping them warm, keeping them on me—it’s just too long. A lot of people have asked me. In my book I will expose a lot of people.”

As our meeting wound down, I found myself wondering why Lendrum had agreed to talk to me at all. Perhaps he reasoned I already knew so much about his life that his only recourse was to bombard me with alternate facts. Maybe he hoped he could charm me into believing that all his convictions were bogus. But the weight of the evidence was overwhelming.

Still, Lendrum struck me as a tragic figure in some ways. A wildlife lover, ornithological expert, and master outdoorsman, he had followed a twisted path, driven by his misplaced obsessions and the thrill of the chase. Now, despised by conservationists, deserted by friends, broke, and sick, he had lost almost everything.

I asked Lendrum if he envisioned returning to a life of egg-hunting adventures. “I’m getting too old for it,” he replied, a little wistfully. The prostate cancer had depleted his energy, and the car accident had damaged the nerves in his neck and limbs. “I can barely raise my arms,” he said.

Lendrum shook my hand and slowly moved off. Then, before disappearing around the corner, he turned and hit me with a mock proposition. “Do you want to steal some eggs sometime?” he asked, grinning. “We’ll go into the Rhondda Valley and see how many peregrines we can get—right under Andy McWilliam’s nose. You do the climbing. We’ll make millions.”

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That, I thought, would be the last I’d see of Jeffrey Lendrum.

I was wrong. Six months later, on June 29, the UK’s Home Office issued a press release: “Rare Bird Eggs Importation Prevented by Border Force at Heathrow.” A passenger from South Africa identified as a 56-year-old Irish national had aroused the suspicion of customs agents, who’d stopped him, searched him, and discovered 19 eggs from protected birds of prey—reportedly African fish eagles and black sparrow hawks, as well as two newly hatched vulture chicks—in a customized belt hidden beneath his clothing. Under British policy, a suspect is not identified until he is charged in court, but I had little doubt who it was.

Sure enough, a month later, British newspapers reported that Jeffrey Lendrum had been arraigned near Heathrow and charged with three counts of fraudulently evading prohibition—i.e., importing protected wildlife—then packed off to the Dickensian-sounding Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London to await a plea hearing in August. The details from the court appearance were skimpy—Lendrum’s defense had reportedly argued before the judge that his client was on his way to declare the eggs and chicks stashed in his hidden belt before he was intercepted—and I had a wealth of questions that, for the moment, couldn’t be answered. How had he procured the eggs? Who was he delivering them to? Why had the Border Force stopped him? And, most of all, what the hell was he thinking?

I flew up to London for Lendrum’s pretrial hearing on August 23. His attorney, Keith Astbury, had told me that his client intended to plead not guilty. But a jury trial would be a huge risk and could result in a far tougher jail sentence—up to seven years—than a plea bargain would. Did he really think he could get away with it? Astbury wouldn’t comment.

At Isleworth Crown Court, in a drab London suburb a few miles from Heathrow, I sat in the empty public gallery of a tiny second-floor courtroom, waiting for Lendrum to appear. I knew from Astbury that Lendrum had no interest in talking to me. But I hoped to make eye contact at least.

It wasn’t to be. Court officers escorted Lendrum from a holding cell to a bulletproof booth at the rear of the courtroom, completely out of sight of the gallery. I heard his disembodied voice—faint, downcast—say “I’m not guilty.” When I stood and craned my neck in an attempt to get a look at him, a court officer motioned furiously for me to sit back down. Lendrum’s solicitor promised to provide the judge with records about his client’s ongoing cancer treatment to expedite a request for bail. Then his trial was set for January 7, 2019.

Lendrum was taken out of the courtroom and put in a van back to Wormwood Scrubs to await the latest gamble of his risk-filled life. Given his record of the past few years, it was a bet he seemed destined to lose.

Contributing editor Joshua ­Hammer (@Joshuaiveshamme) is a longtime foreign corre­spondent and the author, most recently, of The Badass Librarians of Timbuktu.

At HuffPost, Lauren Hough recounts a decade of bizarre, bittersweet, and dangerous jobs she was assigned as one of the few women cable technicians in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Maybe next I had the woman with the bull mastiff named Otto. I don’t remember much about her because I like bull mastiffs with their giant stupid heads. I told her I needed to get to her basement. She said, “Do you really? It’s just it’s a mess.” (That’s never why.) I explained the signal behind her television was crap. The signal outside her house was great. With only one line going through the cinderblock wall, there was probably a splitter. She was taller than I am. That’s something I remember because, like I said, I’m tall. And probably a useful trait for her considering what I found next. I told her what I told everyone who balked about their privacy being invaded: “Unless you have a kid in a cage, I don’t fucking care.” Kids in cages were an unimaginable horror then. A good place to draw a line.

This is a good time to say, if you’re planning on growing massive quantities of marijuana, look, I respect it. But don’t use a $3 splitter from CVS when you run your own cable line. Sooner or later, you’ll have a cable tech in your basement. And you’ll feel the need to give them a freezer bag full of pot to relieve your paranoia. Which is appreciated, don’t get me wrong. Stoners, I adore you. I mean it. You never yell. I can ask to use your bathroom because you’re stoned. You never call in complaints. But maybe behind the television isn’t the most effective place to hide your bong when the cable guy’s coming over.

Anyway, Otto’s mom laughed and said, “Not a kid.” It took me a second. She went down to get his permission. And I was allowed down into a dungeon where she had a man in a cage. I don’t remember if she had a bad splitter. So that was probably early on. After a few years, not even a dungeon was interesting. Sex workers tip, though.

(Special thanks to late-nineties era Nickelodeon for the headline inspiration.)

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Lara Bazelon | an excerpt adapted from Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction | Beacon Press | 24 minutes (6,738 words)

The National Registry of Exonerations is a small, nonprofit research project founded in 2012. What the project lacks in manpower it makes up in zeal, documenting every known exoneration dating back to 1989, the first year that DNA exonerations were recorded in the United States. Staff members collect detailed information about each case from court documents and news reports, provide a comprehensive narrative about the case, and break down the data into numerous categories, including gender, race, geography, crime of conviction, factors that contributed to the wrongful conviction, and whether the case involved DNA. The registry’s website provides detailed graphs that set out the cause or causes of the wrongful convictions and chart their frequency over time.

On March 7, 2017, the registry released a report summarizing the data it had documented since its founding: 1,994 exonerations. (The number is now above 2,100.) Seventy-eight percent of the exonerations did not involve DNA evidence. This finding surprises many people, as it seems at odds with the way that crime is prosecuted on popular television shows and in movies, where the perpetrator inevitably leaves behind a tiny but undeniable bit of himself. Skin follicles are collected from under the victim’s fingernails, blood or semen is retrieved from a stain, a trace of saliva is lifted from a soda can or cigarette butt. In fictionalized accounts, diligent detectives and technicians rapidly collect and analyze this trace DNA evidence. More often than not, when the episode concludes, the bad guy has been conclusively identified, apprehended, and locked away.

The reality is much messier and more complicated. Even when DNA exists, backlogs and bureaucracy mean that it can take months, if not years, to test. Crime labs also come to erroneous conclusions, often because the technicians are incompetent, overwhelmed, or even corrupt. In 2010, at a San Francisco crime laboratory, a technician stole some of the cocaine she was supposed to be testing, resulting in a scandal that led to the dismissal of seventeen hundred pending criminal cases. Five years later, in the same laboratory, two other bad apples — a technician and her immediate supervisor — were discovered to have committed misconduct so serious it required the San Francisco district attorney’s office to review fourteen hundred criminal cases. Both employees had failed DNA proficiency testing examinations administered by a national crime lab accrediting agency a year earlier, but had kept their jobs. At least one found conclusive DNA matches where none existed.

San Francisco is just one example. Similar and worse corruption has been exposed in Massachusetts. In April 2017, state authorities overturned twenty thousand convictions after a crime lab technician was caught falsifying test results; in November of the same year, another six thousand convictions were thrown out when it was discovered that a lab technician in a different laboratory was on drugs when she performed the testing.

Even if DNA evidence is competently collected and properly tested in every case where it exists, it will do little to stem the rising tide of false convictions. And it is a tide — a rising one.

But most crucial, and most fundamentally misunderstood, is the fact that there is no DNA to test in the vast majority of criminal cases. What this means is that even if DNA evidence is competently collected and properly tested in every case where it exists, it will do little to stem the tide of false convictions.

And it is a tide — a rising one. In 2014, a record-setting 147 people were exonerated. That record was broken in 2015, when 160 people were freed. It was broken again in 2016, when the number rose to 168, an average of more than three people per week. In a 2017 report, the National Registry of Exonerations came to this sobering conclusion: “Exonerations used to be unusual; now they are commonplace.” Yet, “the record numbers of exonerations we have seen in recent years have not made a dent in the number of innocent defendants who have been convicted and punished.”

Experts believe that the men and women who have been exonerated are only a small fraction of those who deserve to be. Many wrongful convictions remain hidden or, if known, unprovable. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, “By any reasonable accounting, there are tens of thousands of false convictions each year across the country.” A 2015 study by the University of Michigan found that 4.1 percent of those on death row were falsely convicted, and conservative estimates in noncapital cases range from 2 to 5 percent. According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), in 2015 — the most recent year that BJS data were available — there were approximately 1,530,000 people in prison in the United States. Using the most conservative estimate of wrongful convictions — 1 percent — means that on any given day, 15,300 innocent people are sitting in prison. If, as with death row inmates, it is 4 percent, that number climbs to 61,200, which is roughly the capacity of Soldier Field, the stadium where the Chicago Bears play football.

Lies

In 2015, the National Registry of Exonerations released a comprehensive report titled The First 1,600 Exonerations, which analyzed the data by crime, causation, race, gender, and geography. Fifty-five percent of the first sixteen hundred exoneration cases involve false testimony — not mistaken identifications, but flat-out lies. Witnesses lie for many reasons: some to protect themselves or someone else, some because law enforcement has coached, coerced, or promised them a reward. Some witnesses lie out of plain malice. Lying under oath is perjury, which is a state and federal crime, though it is among the least prosecuted.

Hannah Quick is one jarring example. In 1981, three Hispanic men — William Vasquez, Amaury Villalobos, and Raymond Mora — were convicted of burning down a Brooklyn building Quick owned. Left inside to die were Elizabeth Kinsey and her five small children. The night of the fire, Quick told the jury, she was awakened by the whispers of Vasquez, Villalobos, and Mora outside her door. Through her bedroom window, she watched them leave the building. Quick said that she heard an explosion and ran from the building as it burst into flames.

Quick was a shady character. A drug addict and known liar, she herself had been charged with using her apartment — located on the first floor of the same building — as an opium den where people came to use the heroin she sold them. And Quick had every incentive to deflect attention away from herself. She could have been held liable for the unsafe conditions that likely had led to the fire: what the New York Times described as “an illegal hookup to the electrical grid” and allowing the addicts who used her apartment to light candles when they got high. But the jury believed her. On November 24, 1981, Villalobos, Vasquez, and Mora were each convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years to life.

In 2014, on her deathbed, Quick confessed to her daughter that she lied about what she saw and sent three innocent men to prison. Vasquez (blind from untreated glaucoma) and Villalobos had been released on parole two years earlier, after more than three decades behind bars. At sixty-six and seventy years old, respectively, they celebrated with their families at their exoneration hearing, held on December 16, 2015. Mora could not. He had died in prison in 1989. His widow and daughter came in his stead, holding a framed photograph taken of him before he was sent away. Collectively, the three exonerees had served seventy-one years in prison.

Mistakes

An additional 34 percent of wrongful convictions among the first sixteen hundred arise from good faith but mistaken eyewitness identifications. These often occur in rape cases. While many involve cross-racial identification, not all do. On June 7, 1998, Clarence Elkins and his wife, Melinda, were living in Barberton, Ohio, with their two young sons when they received horrifying news. Melinda’s fifty-eight-year-old mother, Judith Johnson, had been beaten, raped, and murdered in her home, and Melinda’s six-year-old niece, Brooke Sutton, had been raped and beaten to the point where she lost consciousness. But Brooke survived and told police that the killer “looked like Uncle Clarence.” Based on Brooke’s statement, Elkins was arrested. In 1999, after Brooke identified him in court, he was convicted of both rapes, Judith’s murder, and given a life sentence.

Brooke’s identification was the only evidence against Elkins, and there was reason to doubt its validity from the outset. Not only was Brooke a small and traumatized child, but the police had interviewed Judith’s neighbor, convicted felon Earl Gene Mann, shortly after arresting Elkins. According to the detectives’ notes, Mann asked, “Why don’t you charge me with the Judy Johnson murder?” In 2002, three years after Elkins was sent to prison, Mann was convicted for raping three girls, all under the age of ten.

The most recent and dramatic unraveling of junk science has been in the area of hair analysis… Experts believe that there are at least twenty-one thousand cases — state and federal — that used this discredited science and therefore must be reexamined.

But in a stroke of luck that followed years of unending misery, Mann landed in the same prison as Elkins. Melinda, who had long suspected Mann, urged Elkins to collect any evidence he could find. In 2005, Elkins retrieved one of Mann’s discarded cigarette butts and mailed it to his attorneys at the Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati College of the Law. The DNA on the cigarette butt matched the DNA left at the crime scene. Brooke Sutton had long since recanted, stating that the police had coached her testimony. But the local prosecutor dug in and refused to agree to Elkins’s release. Under pressure from the Ohio attorney general — the top prosecutor in the state — Elkins was released on December 15, 2005. Three years later, in 2008, Mann pleaded guilty to aggravated murder, attempted murder, burglary, and rape in the crimes against Judith Johnson and Brooke Sutton. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Elkins and Melinda divorced shortly after his release. “The media expected us to be happy,” she told reporters, “but it was at that point that I started grieving for my mom.” Elkins, who told the US Senate Judiciary Committee in a written statement that, after several stints in solitary confinement, “I pretty much lost my mind,” won several settlements in the millions of dollars, but most of the money went to Melinda, their sons, and his attorneys. Elkins has remarried. After suffering periods of unemployment and setbacks from post-traumatic stress disorder, he is trying to start a new life.

Police Misconduct

A shocking 45 percent of the documented sixteen hundred wrongful convictions are the result of bad acts or omissions by police and prosecutors. This misconduct turns what is supposed to be a level playing field into a ski slope, with the state gliding to victory by running over the defendant’s right to a fair trial. It includes, but is not limited to coercing, coaching, or threatening witnesses; physically beating defendants until they give false confessions; neglecting to turn over exculpatory evidence or actively hiding it altogether; making false representations to the court and to the jury; and committing perjury. The percentage of false convictions arising from official misconduct often overlaps with percentages involving perjury; that is, many wrongful convictions are due, at least in part, to false testimony that is coerced or partially fabricated by the police.

Consider Debra Milke. In 1989, she was a divorced single mother living in Phoenix, Arizona, with her four-year-old son, Christopher, and roommate James Styer. On December 2, 1989, Styer left their apartment with Christopher, ostensibly to take him to the mall to see Santa Claus. Instead, he picked up his friend Roger Scott. Styer and Scott drove the little boy deep into the desert where they shot him three times in the back of the head and left him in a ravine. They reported Christopher missing, but under questioning by the police, Scott confessed and led them to Christopher’s body. The lead detective, Armando Saldate Jr., suspected that Milke was involved after Scott apparently implicated her in one of his statements.

Milke was taken to a police station and put in a cell. Saldate entered, placed her under arrest, and proceeded to interrogate her. No one else was present in the room or observed the interview. Ignoring the instructions of his supervisor, Saldate did not tape-record it. According to Saldate, Milke waived her right to remain silent and her right to an attorney before providing a full confession, stating that she masterminded her son’s murder.

Because there was no physical or other evidence linking Milke to the crime and no independent way to verify Saldate’s account, the trial boiled down to “he said, she said.” Saldate testified to Milke’s confession, but neither Styer nor Scott would implicate her. Milke denied any involvement in her son’s death, testifying that Saldate had ignored her requests for a lawyer and fabricated her confession. The state’s case was dependent on Saldate’s word, so it was crucial to bring out any facts that might show he was an unreliable witness. Milke’s trial lawyer subpoenaed Saldate’s personnel file, but the trial prosecutor refused to provide it and the trial judge quashed the subpoena. In the end, the jury believed Saldate’s account. Milke was convicted of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, child abuse, and kidnapping. In 1990, the judge sentenced her to death.

Years later, after spending thousands of hours searching old court records, Milke’s lawyers were able to show that Saldate was a liar and a reprobate long before and well after Milke’s trial. In 1973, internal affairs for the Phoenix Police Department had disciplined Şaldate after he released a female driver with a possible outstanding warrant in exchange for sexual favors and then lied about it to his superiors. In 1986 and again in 1989, Saldate lied to a grand jury, which forced the judges in both cases to dismiss the indictments.

In 1990 — the same year Milke was convicted and sentenced to die — a judge threw out another case after Saldate admitted that he lied under oath and continued to question the defendant after he invoked his right to remain silent. That same year, a different judge threw out a confession that Saldate had obtained through “flagrant misconduct.” In 1984 and 1992, Saldate obtained so-called confessions from defendants who were in the hospital, semiconscious and seriously injured. In one case, the defendant did not know his own name, the year, or the name of the president of the United States. In the other case, even Saldate admitted that the suspect was “in pain” and possibly had not responded to the reading of his Miranda rights “because of the medication he was on.”

The jury in Milke’s case knew nothing about Saldate’s lengthy history of doing whatever it took — including perjuring himself — to obtain so-called confessions from the men and women in his custody. In 2013, twenty-three years after Milke was sent to death row, the Ninth Circuit overturned her conviction. Even then, the state vowed to retry her, deterred only when the Arizona Court of Appeals forbade it, calling the case “a severe stain on the Arizona justice system.” Saldate, now retired, has never been charged or convicted of any crime. According to Phoenix City records, he was collecting a monthly pension in excess of $4,300 as recently as 2014.

Prosecutorial Misconduct

Prosecutors also commit misconduct. Often, it is the result of overzealousness, inadvertence, or negligence, as win-at-all-costs prosecutors are often rewarded with promotions and many offices lack the resources to properly train them in their constitutional and ethical obligations. But sometimes prosecutorial misconduct is calculated and even malicious. The two most notorious cases in recent memory — and perhaps not coincidentally, among only a handful in which the prosecutor faced consequences — targeted innocent white men.

In 2006, Michael B. Nifong, then the district attorney for Durham, North Carolina, indicted three Duke University lacrosse players for raping an African American stripper who had danced at a team party. When the woman was unable to identify her attackers, Nifong showed her photographs only of lacrosse players, an extremely suggestive practice that violated the guidelines of his own office. The players all had strong alibis, which Nifong discounted. When the DNA evidence did not point to the defendants, Nifong withheld it from them. Even after the woman changed her story, Nifong insisted on going forward with the kidnapping charges.

The case made national headlines from the start because of the salaciousness of the crime and the fact that the defendants were white and largely came from wealthy families. This distinguished them from the vast majority of people accused of serious, life-ending crimes. The money bought them excellent lawyers, who diligently investigated the allegations and were able to disprove them, sparing the men the horror of convictions that could have sent them to prison and labeled them lifelong sex offenders.

When Anderson Cooper asked, ‘How many of you believe that an innocent client went to jail because you didn’t have enough time to spend on their case?’ every single hand went up.

The case remained in the spotlight for months, and political pressure on Nifong mounted. Before the defendants could be brought to trial, Nifong was forced to turn the case over to the state attorney general, who concluded that all three lacrosse players were innocent and Nifong was a “rogue prosecutor.” After the charges were dropped, the North Carolina state bar brought charges against Nifong and disbarred him. Then Nifong was himself prosecuted for withholding DNA evidence from the defense and lying about it in court. He received a one-day jail sentence.

Most people do not have the resources the Duke lacrosse players had. For Michael Morton of Williamson County, Texas, justice proved elusive for twenty-five years. In 1985, Ken Anderson, then the district attorney and a former Texas Prosecutor of the Year, charged Morton with the murder of his wife, telling the jury that Morton masturbated over her dead body before leaving the house to go to work. Morton was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Anderson obtained the conviction by withholding crucial evidence that showed Morton was not the killer. He never told Morton’s attorneys that Morton’s young son, Eric, told his grandmother that a “monster with a moustache” had killed his mother while his father was not home, or that the victim’s mother told police in a recorded phone call that Morton could not have committed the crime after recounting Eric’s statement. Other vital leads — the sighting of a stranger and a green van, the use of the victim’s credit card in the days after the murder — were never followed up. In 2011, Morton was released after the Innocence Project demanded the retesting of a bloody bandanna found a hundred yards from the crime scene. The results matched those of the true attacker, Mark Alan Norwood, who had gone on to murder another woman under similar circumstances. For most of his life, including when he killed Morton’s wife and at his arrest decades later, he had a droopy horseshoe-shaped moustache.

Meanwhile, Ken Anderson had become a judge. At the insistence of Morton’s lawyers, a special court of inquiry was convened to investigate Anderson. At the end of the process, a judge ruled that Anderson had broken state law and committed perjury by lying to the court. After Anderson was convicted and sentenced to serve ten days in jail, his license to practice law was revoked and he resigned from the bench.

While it is true that Nifong and Anderson were disgraced and prevented from practicing law, their respective one- and ten-day jail sentences are paltry in comparison to the massive damage they caused, particularly Anderson. Yet, these are exceptional cases because there was any punishment at all. The majority of prosecutors who commit misconduct are never disciplined, much less disbarred or charged with crimes.

Junk Science

Nearly one quarter of the sixteen hundred exoneration cases involve what we now know to be “junk science” — that is, methods of analyzing physical evidence to implicate a specific person or diagnose a particular type of crime that are deeply flawed and, in some cases, are based on little more than guesswork and conjecture. Junk science — usually physical in nature and often explained by seemingly well-credentialed experts — is a particularly pernicious kind of evidence because it is so persuasive to jurors, who are fed a steady diet of crime-show procedurals that portray these methods as unfailingly accurate and central to catching the bad guy.

Examples of junk science include expert testimony that bite marks on a victim’s body were almost certainly made by the defendant’s teeth; that a hair found at a crime scene can be examined under a microscope and linked to a particular person; or that fire patterns inside a burned building point to arson rather than an accidental fire. After decades of its use in state and federal courtrooms across the country, much of this “science” has been called into question as error-prone, empirically unverified, and based on false assumptions or outright speculation. Yet junk science has led to convictions that haunt the public as wrongful.

Take Cameron Todd Willingham. So-called arson experts were used to convict Willingham of setting a fire that killed his three small children in Corsicana, Texas, in 1991. Year later, lawyers for Willingham were able to present compelling evidence that these “experts” had no idea what they were talking about. But the state declined to review the case. All of Willingham’s appeals were denied, and he was executed on February 17, 2004, at the age of thirty-six. Questions about his case continue to swirl. In August 2009, the Chicago Tribune reported: “Over the past five years, the Willingham case has been reviewed by nine of the nation’s top fire scientists — first for the Tribune, then for the Innocence Project, and now for the [Texas] commission. All concluded that the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore to justify the determination of arson.” (The state also relied on a jailhouse snitch, who told the jury Willingham confessed. He later recanted.)

The most recent and dramatic unraveling of junk science has been in the area of hair analysis, that is, expert testimony that hair found at the scene of the crime is similar to or indistinguishable from the defendant’s hair based on characteristics such as its color, texture, and length. (This is different from DNA evidence retrieved from a hair follicle, which embeds the hair in the skin and can point conclusively at a single perpetrator.) In the 1990s, the United States Department of Justice undertook an investigation into allegations that some of the hair analysis work by an FBI crime lab was error-ridden.

Over the years, the investigation expanded, morphing into an indictment of an entire system of collecting, testing, and relying on so-called hair science evidence. In April 2015, the Washington Post published this shocking disclosure by the Justice Department: “Of 28 examiners with the FBI’s Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far.” In thirty-two of the cases, the defendants received the death penalty. By the time the news became public, fourteen of them had been executed or died in prison. Experts believe that there are at least twenty-one thousand additional cases — state and federal — that used this discredited science and therefore must be reexamined.

Group exonerations are alarming for three reasons. First, they are underreported… Second, it is profoundly disturbing to realize that individual or small-group misconduct can have such exponential impact.

That is what happened with Kirk Odom’s case in 2009. A black man, he was convicted in 1981 of raping, robbing, and sodomizing a white woman in Washington, DC, and then sentenced to a minimum of twenty years in prison. Odom, who was raped in prison and contracted HIV, was paroled in March 2003, but forced to register as a sex offender, which placed severe restrictions upon where he could live, work, and travel.

The victim identified Odom, and the state bolstered the conviction with what appeared to be irrefutable forensic science. An FBI special agent told the jury that a hair found on the victim’s nightgown was microscopically indistinguishable from Odom’s hair and that he had found such matches only ten times over decades of performing thousands of such tests. Not only was the FBI agent’s testimony grossly exaggerated, it was unsupported by his own notes, which identified the nightgown hair only by color, length, and the part of the body it appeared to come from.

Once the federal investigation into the FBI lab became public, Odom’s lawyers demanded that the evidence collected at the crime scene, including the offender’s semen and the supposedly indistinguishable nightgown hair, undergo rigorous DNA analysis. The retesting resulted in a genetic profile of the rapist that categorically excluded Odom and pointed to another man. A judge exonerated Odom and signed a certification proclaiming his innocence on July 13, 2012. It was Odom’s fiftieth birthday. More than thirty years had passed since his conviction, twenty-two of which he spent in prison. Because the statute of limitations had long since run out, the real perpetrator could not be prosecuted.

In the case of Villalobos, Vasquez, and Mora — convicted of starting the Brooklyn opium den fire because of Hannah Quick’s perjured testimony — prosecutors also relied heavily on junk science to convince the jury that the fire had been deliberately set. Adele Bernhard, the lawyer who advocated successfully for Villalobos, retained an expert named John Lentini to pore over the old forensic evidence. Lentini explained, “The science of fire dynamics was poorly understood in 1980, and much of what was believed by well-meaning investigators was, unfortunately, false.” He concluded, “If today’s standards and knowledge of fire dynamics were applied to this investigation, the results would have been significantly different.” Bernhard and her co-counsel approached prosecutors at the Brooklyn County district attorney’s office. After reexamining the case, they came to the same conclusion: the fire that Quick testified the men had set deliberately was almost certainly an accident. It wasn’t a question of having convicted the wrong people, the district attorney explained, but rather convicting them of “a crime, which did not in fact occur.”

False Confessions

Thirteen percent of the first sixteen hundred exonerees falsely confessed to crimes they did not commit. Understandably, this statistic is difficult to accept. “Innocent people do not confess,” prosecutors often tell juries, an assertion that carries enormous weight because, as a matter of logic and intuition, it makes perfect sense. What sane person would ever admit to committing a heinous crime unless he was guilty? Yet, people do.

There is no single explanation for this phenomenon, but many of the people who give false confessions are vulnerable to police coercion because they are young, unsophisticated, poorly educated, of below-average intelligence, or some combination of the four. The law allows police to lie to suspects, and many suspects admit to wrongdoing after being told they will be allowed to go home, avoid charges, or plead to a minor offense.

A recent example involves the notorious Central Park jogger case. In 1989, five young black and Latino teenagers, ranging from fourteen to sixteen years old, confessed to raping a young white woman out for a nighttime run in New York’s Central Park, then beating her and leaving her for dead. At trial, the defendants insisted that they were innocent. Their lawyers argued that the boys’ admissions were the result of hardball tactics by detectives desperate to make an arrest in a city convulsed with fear over images of marauding groups of black and brown youths out to wreak havoc and assault innocent civilians.

All five teenagers were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. In 2002, DNA retested from the jogger’s rape kit identified a single unrelated suspect who then confessed, stating that he acted alone. The defendants, now adult men known as “the Central Park Five,” were exonerated. They sued the city of New York and, in 2014, received a global $40 million settlement.

Police coercion usually involves psychological tactics that prey on a vulnerable suspect, but it can also be physical. Severe beatings that detectives in the Chicago Police Department administered to black suspects throughout the 1980s and 1990s under the direction of Lieutenant Jon Burge were so common that the state of Illinois set up the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission to investigate them. One victim was Shawn Whirl, who, in 1990, was arrested and charged with the murder of a cab driver on Chicago’s South Side. Whirl explained that he had jumped into the victim’s cab after being chased by gang members after falling and scraping his leg; the cabbie, he said, dropped him off at his girlfriend’s house. The torture commission found that a detective working under Burge’s direction handcuffed Whirl to the wall, gouged at the open wound on his leg with a car key, hit him repeatedly, used racial epithets, and put a bag over his head to drown out the sound of his screams.

But the torture commission did not issue its finding until 2012. In the interim, Whirl, charged with first-degree murder and facing the death penalty, had pleaded guilty and received a sentence of sixty years. His first three petitions to overturn his conviction were denied for lack of evidence. In 2015, the Illinois appellate court granted Whirl relief. At that point, Burge had been convicted of lying under oath about denying the existence of his torture regime and was serving his own prison term. The detective who had interrogated Whirl, meanwhile, invoked his privilege against self-incrimination when asked about the tactics he had used to secure the confession. Whirl, who had no criminal record before his arrest, was released after serving twenty years in prison.

No Defense

In 2012, the National Registry of Exonerations found that 17 percent of non-DNA exonerations involved poor defense lawyering. According to Samuel Gross, the cofounder of the registry, the actual percentage is likely much higher: “[W]e believe that many of the exonerated defendants — perhaps a clear majority — would not have been convicted in the first instance if their lawyers had done good work.”

Most exonerees were represented by public defenders or other court-appointed lawyers. It is no secret that indigent criminal defense in this country is in crisis and has been for decades. In December 2004, the American Bar Association published a groundbreaking, comprehensive study entitled Gideon’s Broken Promise: America’s Continuing Quest for Equal Justice. The report, which was written to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision establishing the right to counsel in Gideon v. Wainwright, is a stunning indictment: “[G]laring deficiencies in indigent defense services result in a fundamentally unfair criminal justice system that constantly risks convicting persons who are actually innocent of the charges lodged against them.”

As the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Gideon decision approaches, little has changed. Indeed, it is arguable that the problems afflicting the delivery of indigent defense services are even more dire. Derwyn Bunton, the chief district defender for Orleans Parish in New Orleans, instructed his deputies to stop taking serious felony cases in January 2016. By requiring Bunton’s staff of fifty to handle twenty-two thousand filings a year, the state had made it impossible to investigate any of the cases, much less mount a defense. Instead, the public defenders at Orleans Parish resembled workers on an assembly line that swiftly delivered poor people, mostly African Americans — to prison regardless of guilt or innocence.

The average time spent by an innocent person behind bars is nine years and three months.

In an opinion editorial for the New York Times, Bunton said that his decision came after a troubling development in a particular high-profile case. Following a mass shooting in Bunny Friend Park on November 22, 2015, that left seventeen people injured, police arrested thirty-two-year-old Joseph “Moe” Allen, based on eyewitness identification. Allen was jailed, and bail was set at $7 million. His family was able to hire a lawyer and investigator who retrieved a video from a Walmart in Houston, Texas, which showed Allen and his pregnant wife shopping for baby clothes when the crime occurred. The prosecution dismissed the charges, and Allen was released after spending twelve days in jail.

Reading about the case, Bunton realized Allen would have faced far greater jeopardy had he been assigned one of his public defenders, who lacked the time and funds to obtain the video footage before Walmart would have erased it in the regular course of business. Bunton wrote, “That would have left an innocent man to face trial for his life for what was labeled an act of domestic terrorism’ by the mayor of New Orleans.”

Allen was lucky, considering the circumstances. Having an alibi and the means to corroborate it meant he was not convicted. Unfortunately, for defendants who lack access to paid attorneys, the price of freedom is set too high. In April 2017, with Bunton’s prohibition still in place, nine of the Orleans Parish public defenders were interviewed by Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes. When Cooper asked, “How many of you believe that an innocent client went to jail because you didn’t have enough time to spend on their case?” every single hand went up.

Consider Alabama, which has no statewide public defender system and largely leaves the representation of the poor to the discretion of individual judges, who decide whom to appoint and what to pay. The results can be catastrophic. Anthony Ray Hinton was charged in 1985 with robbing and killing two convenience store clerks in Birmingham, Alabama. A third clerk, who was shot and survived, identified Hinton in a lineup. Police detectives collected two bullets from each crime scene. A search of the home Hinton shared with his mother turned up an ancient .38 caliber gun she stored under her mattress. Forensic experts from the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences concluded that all six bullets from the three crimes were fired from Mrs. Hinton’s revolver.

The linchpin of the state’s case was the forensic evidence. Seeking to counter the prosecution’s experts, Hinton’s court-appointed attorney asked for money from the court to hire his own expert. The trial judge gave him a thousand dollars, stating that “if it’s necessary we can go beyond that.” But Hinton’s attorney made no additional motions. Instead, he used the thousand dollars at his disposal to hire the only expert who would testify at that price. The cross-examination was withering. The witness had little expertise in bullet comparisons. Because he had only one eye, he had to get help from the prosecution experts when operating the microscope to perform the necessary tests.

On September 17, 1986, Hinton was convicted of both murders. In December 1986, he was sentenced to death. Decades later, Hinton’s postconviction lawyers retained three renowned firearms experts to review the evidence against Hinton. All three found that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that any of the six bullets had been fired from Mrs. Hinton’s revolver. In 2014, the US Supreme Court reversed Hinton’s conviction and death sentence due to the poor performance of his trial attorney. In preparing for the retrial, experts retained by the prosecution came to the same conclusion as Hinton’s postconviction experts: there was no match. On April 2, 2015, almost thirty years after he had been convicted and sentenced to die, the state of Alabama dismissed all of the charges against Anthony Ray Hinton and he was freed.

Too Late

Then there are exonerees who died before their names could be cleared. In addition to Raymond Mora — one of the men exonerated in the opium den fire case — there are at least thirteen people on record who have been exonerated posthumously. One of them was Timothy Cole, an African American army veteran who was a student at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. A white rape victim named Michelle Mallin picked his photograph out of an array that was highly suggestive. Cole’s photograph was the only Polaroid picture; the others were mug shots. Cole was the only suspect facing the camera; the others were in profile. In 1986, Cole was tried and convicted based on the victim’s positive in-court identification and an expert’s testimony that his blood type, A, matched the blood type of the rapist. Cole was convicted and sentenced to serve twenty-five years in prison.

Nine years later, Jerry Wayne Johnson, a prisoner who was serving ninety-nine years for two rapes, wrote letters to the police and prosecutors in Lubbock County in which he admitted to raping Mallin. Johnson’s confession was corroborated by the striking similarity between his rape convictions and what had happened to Mallin. His letters were ignored.

In 1999, Timothy Cole died in prison due to complications from asthma. Johnson then wrote to a judge, making the same confession. The judge also ignored the letter, but it eventually made its way to the Innocence Project, which successfully sought DNA testing on the Mallin rape kit. The DNA was a match to Johnson. Mallin, shattered by the news, worked with Cole’s attorneys to ensure that his name was cleared. Cole was posthumously exonerated in 2009 and officially pardoned by Texas governor Rick Perry in 2010.

Group Exonerations and the Role of Race

The registry keeps a second, parallel list of “group exonerations,” which occur when a single corrupt police officer or a gang of officers systemically plant evidence, perjure themselves, and commit other crimes to frame innocent people.

In 2017, the registry released a report, Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States, which found 15 group exonerations totaling more than 1,840 people in 13 cities and counties in the United States. The best-known group exoneration is the Rampart scandal. From 1990 to 2000, a gang of Los Angeles police officers in the Rampart division routinely framed innocent people and then lied in court to convict them. In some instances, this occurred after the defendant had been shot and wounded by an officer; the evidence was then planted at the crime scene to suggest that the suspect had been the aggressor. When the officers’ crimes were brought to light, 156 convictions were thrown out and the Los Angeles Police Department was placed under a federal consent decree.

The most egregious group exonerations, however, are also among the most obscure. These include two separate group exonerations in Philadelphia-one in 1995–1998 and another in 2013-2016 — in which corrupt police officers targeted a total of 1,042 innocent people.

Group exonerations are alarming for three reasons. First, they are underreported; according to the National Registry of Exonerations, “[T]here are clearly many more false convictions of drug defendants who were framed by police than we have identified in these 15 groups.” Second, it is profoundly disturbing to realize that individual or small-group misconduct can have such exponential impact. It is difficult enough to comprehend a single case of wrongful conviction involving a corrupt police officer. It is quite another to be told that some police officers are serial predators, returning over and over again to the communities they were charged with protecting to extract new victims.

Third, the group exoneration population is overwhelmingly black and Latino, leading to the inescapable conclusion that the targeting is racially motivated. Corrupt police officers train their sights on people of color for a number of reasons, including that they are more likely to be poor and disbelieved. But the main reason, according to the registry, is that law enforcement efforts concentrate disproportionately on minority populations. African Americans, who constitute only 13 percent of the US population, make up the majority of group exonerees and nearly 50 percent of exonerated individuals. “Race is central to every aspect of criminal justice in the United States,” the registry reports. “The conviction of innocent defendants is no exception.”

*

In the vast majority of cases, the criminal justice system gets it right. The witnesses who lie or make mistakes, the police and prosecutors who commit misconduct, the defense lawyers who fall down on the job, the experts who testify using junk science are a small percentage of the men and women in these professions who ably perform their jobs.

Yet, the number of exonerations, the reasons why they happen, and the people to whom they happen reveal grotesque and shameful problems with the way that we administer justice in the United States. The average time spent by an innocent person behind bars is nine years and three months; a significant number of exonerees have spent decades in prison. Wrongful convictions are not isolated instances. They happen in every state; they happen multiple times a week. In 2015, the National Registry of Exonerations’ report The First 1,600 Exonerations delved into the data it had collected on more than a thousand exonerations. As a group, the exonerees in the report were imprisoned for more than 14,750 years. According to report author Samuel Gross, since the year the report was published, more than four hundred men and women have joined the list.

We say we have the best criminal justice system in the world. But like any system, it fails, and when it does, the failures are spectacular. The work of the innocence movement has exposed many of these failures and provided the narratives and propulsive energy behind many important reforms. But there is more work to be done, and not by the lawyers. Too often, the voices of the harmed go unheard, and they speak a brutal truth that should not be ignored.

* * *

Lara Bazelon is a writer and associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she is the director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinics. A 2016 MacDowell Fellow and a 2017 Mesa Refuge Langeloth Fellow, she is the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent. Bazelon is also a nonresident fellow with Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Politico, and Slate, where she is a contributing writer and has a long-running series about wrongful conviction cases. This is her first book.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

Livia Gershon | Longreads | October 2018 | 9 minutes (2,206 words)

In May, Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, declared that, if Democrats win power in Congress this fall, they will work to repeal the $1.5 trillion tax cut package passed last year by Republicans. Sen. Cory Gardner, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, responded with apparent glee. “I wish Nancy Pelosi the biggest platform ever to talk about her desire to increase tax revenue,” he told NBC News. “I hope she shouts it from the mountain top.”

For nearly 40 years, the GOP has relied on cutting taxes as an easy way to win votes, even when their plans—like the most recent package—benefit only the rich. Now, as Democrats are looking to compete in 2018 and 2020, many are embracing ambitious, expensive ideas like Medicare for all, free college, and universal pre-kindergarten—while proclaiming the necessity of higher taxes on the wealthy. In a July interview, Sen. Elizabeth Warren pushed back against an idea, articulated by John Harwood of CNBC, that it’s “wrong for more than half of somebody’s marginal income to be taken.” Using equally moralistic language, Warren insisted that taxes are “an expression of our values” and said that the essential question about tax policy is: “What constitutes a fair share in this economy?”

Bill De Blasio, the mayor of New York City, has gone as far as to argue that “tax the wealthy” should be the centerpiece of a progressive Democratic agenda. “I think if you say, ‘We’ll tax the wealthy’ you are both being honest about how you’ll pay for it and about real power dynamics,” he told NBC. “It shows a willingness to stand up for people’s interests against those who hold all the power right now.”

Between 1979 and 2014, income (before taxes and government benefits) rose 28 percent for the middle 60 percent of earners in the United States—and 221 percent for the top 1 percent. In 2017, that top 1-in-100 elite brought in 22 percent of total pretax income in the country, more than the collective incomes of the bottom 60 percent. When it comes to overall wealth—the stocks, real estate and everything else we own—the picture is even starker. The top 1 percent controls 40 percent of the nation’s riches, compared with 10 percent owned by the bottom 80 percent.

What it means for the wealthy to pay their “fair share” gets at the heart of how we understand the economy. When you add up taxes at the federal, state, and local levels, the top 1 percent pays 24 percent of the total tax bill in the country. That’s a bit more than its 22 percent share of income. (That’s also only considering reported income, but let’s set that aside for the moment.) Is it fair to ask the rich to pay more—perhaps much more—than a proportional amount?

Taxing the rich more is a popular idea, but it’s commonly offset in policy discussions by a notion that it’s ultimately not fair—that, as Harwood put it, it’s simply “wrong” to tax the rich at really high rates relative to the rest of the population. That logic is based on what Lawrence Zelenak, a professor of tax law at Duke University, has called the “myth of pretax income.” In a 2002 essay, Zelenak wrote that “in the absence of taxes there would be no government, in the absence of government there would be anarchy, and in a state of anarchy no one would have any income.” Americans tend to hold a view, “everyday libertarianism”—coined by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, professors of law and philosophy at New York University—that government is an outside force imposing itself on an existing web of social and economic relationships. But in reality, Zelenak explains, the government helps weave that web.

***

The federal income tax as we know it came into being with the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, in 1913. It emerged during a time when the government’s role in economic institutions was far more obvious, in part because the economy was changing fast. Railroads were spreading across the country as the federal government gave land away to corporate barons. Money was in short supply—the gold standard was giving more power to wealthy lenders and less to small farmers and other borrowers. New vagrancy laws were forcing people, particularly black workers in the post-Reconstruction South, into low-paid labor. Government troops—as well as private forces using violence with the implicit blessing of the state—beat and killed those who went on strike.

In 1892, the Populist Party called for an income tax on the rich along with a variety of other reforms, such as the direct election of senators and an end to government subsidization of corporations. The aim, in addition to raising money for federal programs, was curbing illegitimate uses of power by the ultra rich. If this power were not “met and overthrown at once,” the party platform warned, “it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism.”

Eighteen years later, Theodore Roosevelt, out of the White House and in Osawatomie, Kansas, dedicating the John Brown Memorial Park, demanded a “square deal” for American taxpayers. In what came to be called his “New Nationalism” speech, Roosevelt introduced himself as a populist firebrand, arguing not only for “fair play under the present rules of the game,” but also for “having those rules changed.” He called for a graduated income tax and an inheritance tax for the richest Americans, so that they would pay for a fair share of government and keep their influence in check. “The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means,” he said.

What it means for the wealthy to pay their ‘fair share’ gets at the heart of how we understand the economy.

Around this time, newspapers, particularly in communities far from the northeastern centers of capital power, were filled with cartoons that illustrated the concern Roosevelt described. “The Bosses of the Senate,” published in 1889 by Joseph Keppler, depicts top-hatted giants from big money interests—Standard Oil Trust, Sugar Trust—towering over lawmakers. “The Road to Dividends,” drawn around 1895 by Thomas Dorgan, shows stern-faced industrialists in fur-lined coats walking behind a girl weighed down by an enormous bundle.

Monica Prasad, a historical sociologist at Northwestern University who studies the development of tax systems, told me that these illustrations reflected an assumption, growing in popularity among Americans, that the wealth of the very rich was essentially stolen from workers, consumers, and small farmers. “They did not think it was legitimate at all,” she said.

Still, it took some maneuvering for an income tax to go into effect. In 1894, Congress imposed a 2 percent income tax on the wealthiest Americans, but the Supreme Court—at the time, a staunch defender of corporate property rights, even in the face of populist anger—quickly struck it down. The verdict meant that such a tax would require a Constitutional amendment. With the support of populists and progressives in both parties—and in the new Progressive Party, formed by Roosevelt in 1912—advocates managed to do it.

When the first income tax was imposed, it was supported widely, Prasad said. “The wealthy certainly didn’t want to be taxed, but everybody else was very happy with it,” she explained. “I think we have a general sense that in the U.S. we support the rich, we don’t believe in taxing the rich. And, in fact, the history is exactly backward. We are the country that started taxing the rich before any other country did.”

Just a few years after it went into effect, the tax, combined with a new tax on “excess profits,” raised enough money, according to one estimate, to cover 22 percent of the cost of America’s efforts in World War I. Later, when World War II demanded even more cash, the income tax morphed from a tax on the rich to something most people pay. But that didn’t stir controversy or spark campaign feuding—thanks largely to the success of populist reforms, most people’s incomes were rising and, compared to today, the government was still taking most of its revenue from corporations and the wealthiest citizens.

***

The turn to everyday libertarianism as we now know it came in 1978. That’s when Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, two retired businessmen, successfully organized a campaign to pass “Proposition 13,” which would drastically cut property taxes in California, their home state. Jarvis, a bombastic conservative, embraced the scorn of the political establishment and spouted hard-right rhetoric that elevated property rights above all other values. “The most important thing in this country is not the school system, nor the police department, nor the fire department,” he once said. “The right to preserve, the right to have property in this country, the right to have a home in this country—that’s important.”

Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank, explained that Jarvis constructed a worldview in which middle-class workers were on the same side as millionaire business owners. “He’d go around and say ‘in the battle of us against them, I’m for us,’” Baker told me. The campaign appealed to middle-income homeowners suffering from the era’s stagflation, which kept home values rising while incomes languished. Jarvis and Gann’s target audience consisted mostly of white voters who associated paying taxes with funding government benefits that they believed, wrongly, went mainly to black and Latinx people.

At the time, the GOP was post-Watergate and desperately seeking a platform that would win back disillusioned constituents. In 1980, Ronald Reagan made tax cuts the centerpiece of his presidential run. Five months before the election, the journalist Robert G. Kaiser wrote in the Washington Post that the promise of “huge cuts in federal taxes” was one of the few novel ideas to emerge in the campaign—an “unconventional and politically potent” plan that just might help win Reagan the election.

It did. And between 1980 and 1988, Reagan helped bring the top marginal income tax rate down from 70 percent to 28 percent. (The rate that the rich really paid didn’t fall that much, since lower rates were accompanied by the closing of some loopholes, but it did drop.)

Even with the all the methods of evasion, tax policy remains a potent shaper of the economy—that’s why rich people and corporations fight so hard for cuts.

 

Since then, tax policy has been riding a seesaw with whichever party has been in power. Under Bill Clinton, the top tax rate went up—and raised lots of money—then, under George W. Bush, it fell again. Through the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama effectively raised rates by creating new taxes on high incomes.

But as long as tax codes have existed, rich people and corporations have been finding ways to dodge them—and the rest of America knows it. That remains a problem: Many people distrust the government and resent their tax bills not only because they hate to turn over a slice of their paychecks, but also because they’re well aware that wealthy people can manipulate loopholes or simply break tax laws with impunity.

***

Chuck Marr, the director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, told me that there’s no need to despair at the seeming impossibility of imposing higher tax rates on the rich. Tax evasion isn’t just a matter of wealthy people being clever crooks, he said—it’s largely about the government being an unenthusiastic cop when it comes to this crime. If politicians took fighting fight tax evasion seriously, they could strengthen the Internal Revenue Service’s enforcement division, which has been hobbled in recent decades by funding cuts. They could also push for strong international agreements to fight the use of tax havens. Besides, even with the all the methods of evasion, tax policy remains a potent shaper of the economy—that’s why rich people and corporations fought so hard for last year’s tax package.

Going forward, beyond repealing the 2017 tax cuts, both Marr and Baker believe that Democrats should push for more comprehensive and better enforced estate taxes and higher taxes on the rich. “The idea that we suffer any harm—we meaning non-rich people—from higher taxes on the wealthy, I think, just doesn’t hold any water,” Baker said. Depending on how they’re structured, tax hikes can sometimes cause problems, like encouraging rich people to find new dodges or discouraging them from making worthwhile investments, he noted, but many types of taxes have benefits for everyone. For example, a tiny tax on financial transactions could limit short-term speculation that enriches the financial sector at the expense of other parts of the economy.

Like the populists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Baker sees higher taxes as a crucial part of a broad agenda designed to curb the wealth and power of private interests. Just as land grants to railroads supported barons of the Gilded Age, the enforcement of intellectual property laws puts enormous government resources at the service of pharmaceutical companies. There’s nothing “free market” about how this system delivers gains to large companies and their owners, Baker said.

If we want to defend taxes on the rich, or other government policies that shift power away from the wealthy, we need to face down everyday libertarianism—and its bogus theories. That means recognizing that markets don’t precede government policy—they’re created by it.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other places.

Editor: Betsy Morais

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

This week, we’re sharing stories from Christine Kenneally, Desiree Stennett and Lisa Rowan, Andrea Long Chu, Victoria Blanco, and David Kushner.

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

* * *

1. We Saw Nuns Kill Children: The Ghosts of St. Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage

Christine Kenneally | BuzzFeed News | August 27, 2018 | 108 minutes (27,057 words)

A wide-ranging piece of investigative journalism — the result of four years of research — on widespread abuse and in some cases, the killing of children at St. Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage in Vermont and other orphanages, in the 20th century.

2. The American Nightmare: 10 Years After the Housing Collapse

Desiree Stennett and Lisa Rowan | The Penny Hoarder | August 27, 2018 | 44 minutes (11,000 words)

For The Penny Hoarder‘s first longform project, Desiree Stennett and Lisa Rowan share the stories of lives forever changed after losing homes to foreclosure at the height of the financial crisis. So many families haven’t woken up from what still feels like their own personal nightmare, even though more than 9 million Americans are having the same dream.

3. I Worked With Avital Ronell. I Believe Her Accuser.

Andrea Long Chu | Chronicle of Higher Education | August 30, 2018 | 7 minutes (1,907 words)

“When scholars defend Avital — or ‘complicate the narrative,’ as we like to say — in part this is because we cannot stand believing what most people believe. The need to feel smarter is deep. Intelligence is a hungry god.”

4. Why We Cross the Border in El Paso

Victoria Blanco | Catapult | August 30, 2018 | 11 minutes (2,856 words)

A personal essay in which Mexican-American writer Victoria Blanco reflects on change over the years at the border between El Paso, Texas, and Cuidad, Juárez, as immigration patrolling has become increasingly restrictive, and how the Rio Grande, which lies between the two towns, has begun drying up as a result of climate change.

5. How Viagra Went From A Medical Mistake To A $3-Billion-Dollar-A-Year Industry

David Kushner | Esquire | August 21, 2018 | 17 minutes (4,298 words)

How a happy accident has gone on to make men happy the world over.

“Friendships don’t just happen,” says William Rawlins, a professor of interpersonal communication at Ohio University. “They don’t drop from the sky.”

Like any relationship, friendships take effort and work. But they’re often the last to receive that effort after people expend their energy on work, family, and romance. And as I’ve written before, as time goes on, friendships often face more hurdles to intimacy than other close relationships. As people hurtle toward the peak busyness of middle age, friends—who are usually a lower priority than partners, parents, and children—tend to fall by the wayside.

Our increasingly mobile world also strains friendship. In one study that longitudinally followed best-friend pairs, people moved 5.8 times on average, over 19 years. But it’s not just that people move frequently in the modern era—they also cover more ground than they ever have, historically. The epidemiologist David Bradley once looked at the “lifetime track” of four generations of his family. “Lifetime track” is a term zoologists use to describe the entire sum of an animal’s movements from birth to death. Bradley found that his great-grandfather’s entire life took place “in a square of only 40 kilometers.” His grandfather’s lifetime track was about 400 square kilometers; his father’s was about 4000 square kilometers, and his own extended all over the world, for a 40,000-kilometer square.

“Thus in four generations the range of linear traveling has increased by a factor of 1000 and the area within which movement takes place has increased by a factor of 1 million,” Bradley wrote. “The experienced described here is not atypical.” This was in 1989—one imagines that between then and 2017 the average roaming range of humans has only grown.

This matters because when people move, their families may come with them, but they leave their friends behind. And even though extended, remote social networks are more accessible than ever for anyone with an internet connection, proximity still makes a difference. Moving is associated with shallower relationships, and people who move frequently are more willing to dispose of their friends, perhaps because they get used to losing them.

At the same time, there’s been a growing interest in exploring the complex dynamics of friendship. As people get married later, and the ranks of single women rise, more and more books and television shows have been exploring friendship dynamics.

But even if someone wants to make friends a high priority in their life, unlike with romantic relationships, for friendships there are fewer cultural scripts to follow to do the work of befriending someone, or making a friendship closer.

“The opportunities for friendship come with how people’s lives are organized,” Rawlins says. “When I talk to students, I say ‘Pay close attention to the habits you’re forming, because before you know it, you have organized your life in a way that doesn’t allow for the kind of friends that you would like to have.’”

Ryan Hubbard, who lives in Adelaide, Australia and works in “design for social innovation,” started a research project called Kitestring to try to figure out how people organize their lives to prioritize friendship, and some of the more specific ways that friendships get deeper. Later, they hope to use what they learn to fuel some sort of business or nonprofit venture aimed at better facilitating friendships. Kitestring recently put out a report of its findings from around 20 in-depth interviews, and 50 smaller interviews. While it’s not an academic study by any means—their methodology was closer to what companies do for market research—they came up with several interesting insights.

The first was that the more points of connection you have with someone, the stronger the friendship will be. “We think of friendship as a singular connection, but it’s a structure,” Hubbard says. A friend who you see in only one context—the office, for example—is likely to be a less close friend than someone who you see in many contexts, and connect with over many different things, rather than a single shared interest.

The second takeaway was actually borrowed from existing research on romantic relationships. The psychologist John Gottman came up with the concept of “bids” in the 1990s. “Bids” are small requests for connection—anything from a smile, to attempting to start a conversation, to inviting your partner on a trip with your family. As Emily Esfahani Smith previously reported in The Atlantic, the more partners respond to each others’ bids by “turning toward” them—engaging and offering the requested connection—the stronger their relationship. The more they “turned away” from the bids, the more likely they were to get divorced, Gottman found.

In the interviews Kitestring did, Hubbard found that bids also deepened friendships, and could set off “a cycle of increasing vulnerability and trust.”

Kelci Harris, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto who studies friendship, says that bids seem “probably equally viable for friendship” as they do for romance and marriage. She thinks that’s a promising avenue for research—taking concepts from romantic relationships and seeing if they work for friendship as well.

But as far as getting that cycle going, “it does take some push from someone,” she says. “I think a lot of people, myself included, can sometimes get stuck. Like ‘They haven’t called me, so I’m not going to call them.’ If you want to talk to your friend just call them. You don’t have to play chicken about who’s going to take the first step.”

Rawlins, however, doesn’t care for the bid concept. “I don’t think of friendships in economic terms,” he says. “I don’t think about ‘investing’ in friends. I see friendship as an ongoing conversation. A way of literally coauthoring the story of our relationship.”

Another metaphor Rawlins doesn’t like is Kitestring’s third takeaway—the idea of putting friendships in “containers,” where friendships are easier to maintain if you create some kind of regular practice in which to hold them—a weekly dinner, or a monthly book club.

“I think friendships are more dynamic than to be placed in a container,” Rawlins says. “But I like the notion of rituals.”

One interesting way Hubbard uses the container metaphor is this concept of “repotting” friendships to make them closer, as you might repot a succulent that has outgrown its terra-cotta cup. “Sometimes you’ve got a friend at work, and you see them every day, but the pot that plant is in at work is quite small,” Hubbard says. “It’s going to reach the size of the pot, and that’s it. If you want it to be a bigger, deeper friendship, you need to repot it to a bigger context. You might need to bring them to your house. Or invite them to meet your family—that’s an even bigger pot.”

Regardless of the chosen metaphor, Rawlins has some similar advice. He recommends “taking the risk to express to someone that you’d like to do something with them outside of situations where you’re required to spend time together.”

Obviously you have to build up to it; it probably wouldn’t be advisable to try to start a strict weekly dinner date with a brand-new friend. Hubbard uses the terms “intention” and “air”—“intention” being earnest efforts to connect with someone, and “air” being the breathing room you give the relationship. “If you have a lot of trust in a relationship, it can bear more intention, and if you don’t have as much trust, you need more air,” he says.

A lot of things about modern life make it easy for the air in a friendship to overtake the intention. “I think the times we live in are really an obstruction to friendship, and it needs to be said out loud,” Rawlins says. “We are living in very very divisive times where the tenor of discourse in public places sets the tone for conversation and it works its way down very quickly to dyadic relationships.”

He also expressed concern about the “proliferating technological illusion of connection.”

“We live in a very sped-up time where people are getting messages to multitask, to be doing several things at once, to in many ways not actually be where they are,” he says.

Harris disagrees, noting that social media can allow for a “constant chain of communication, wherever you are in the world,” with your closest friends. They both have a point: Technology can make friendships shallower, but it can also make them stronger, depending on how ... intentionally ... you use it.

I honestly lost track of the number of times I heard the word “intentionality” while reporting this piece. All it really means, Harris says, is putting effort into a relationship. And the fact of that effort is probably more important than the exact form it takes.

In a study that Harris did, the quality of the time friends spent together—specifically their self-reported depth of conversation, and the amount of self-disclosure—was linked to higher friendship satisfaction.

And you have to be realistic about your friends’ other responsibilities. Sometimes life is so busy that people may not be able to keep friendship from falling to the bottom of their priority list, much as they may desire otherwise.

“Part of the genius of friendship is that people respect and encourage each other to make their life the best it can be,” Rawlins says. “How do you do that in a way that respects the contingencies of each other’s lives while also trying to build in, if not a regular practice, the expectation that we’re going to see each other? It can be a challenging needle to thread.”

The skull came from the Wando River, which today runs past Charleston, South Carolina to the ocean.

Thirty million years ago, it was all under the sea. Ancient dolphins and whales swam over what would become Charleston's cobblestone streets. For millions of years, megalodons also swam in this sea, leaving behind shark teeth bigger than your hand. And it was divers looking for megalodon teeth who initially found the fossilized skull, loose on the bottom of the Wando River.

The skull—unusually wide and unusually squat—made its way to a collector who gave it to the College of Charleston’s Mace Brown Museum of Natural History. By the time the paleontologist Robert Boessenecker came to it, he says “It was already known as something new and very strange.” It was definitely a cetacean, but like none they had ever seen before. Its snout was too short. Its body was likely only a few feet long. And it had no teeth, no tooth sockets even.

It’s hard to overstate just how weird cetaceans are as mammals. Modern whales, dolphins, and porpoises all descended from a wolf-sized creature that returned to the sea, losing its hind legs and most of its fur in the process. Their dental evolution is odd, too. Unlike most mammals, cetaceans do not chew. The ones with teeth grasp and tear like reptiles and then swallow the chunks whole. The ones with baleen filters feed on giant amounts of krill. And about 30 million years ago, there were apparently cetaceans like the one found in South Carolina, that had lost their teeth and ate by suction.

As Boessenecker and his colleagues measured the partial skull, they realized it is related to modern odontocetes, also known as toothed whales—a name that’s obviously a bit misleading. “It’s definitely a weird, weird toothed whale.” says John Gatesy, who studies cetaceans at the American Museum of Natural History and was not involved in the study. The team studying the South Carolina skull named it Inermorostrum xenops.

There actually are modern odontocetes that don’t really use their teeth either. Male beaked whales, for example, usually have one pair of teeth that is only used to fight for females, whose teeth stay completely hidden in their gums. Beaked whales, along with pilot whales and sperm whales, also catch squid by sucking them into their mouths. But all of these whales evolved recently. Inermorostrum xenops seems to have evolved its toothless suction-feeding independently and much, much earlier than modern suction-feeding whales. “It’s a highly specialized species but it’s essentially a dead end,” says Boessenecker. Evolution, far from being some linear progression, often works this way, hitting dead ends and retrying failed experiments from millions of years earlier.

Inermorostrum xenops’ short snout and toothless suction-feeding is also just one extreme amidst a sudden explosion of whale diversity in this time—at least based on the limited fossil record. Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution, says that suction feeding as a strategy is not that surprising, since all mammals have the ability to suck for milk. “Every mammal on the planet was a suction feeder since the origin of mammals,” he says. “It’s the basic way a mammal feeds as a baby.” Since all baby mammals must suck, it limits how much their jaws and snouts can change in adulthood to adapt to other feeding strategies. So perhaps more surprising, says Pyenson, is the emergence of other, later cetaceans with long, crocodile-like snouts that they can use to snap while sweeping left and right. Fossils of the ancient cetacean Xiphiacetus, for example, show a snout three feet long with hundreds of teeth.

Boessenecker and his team hypothesize—and it’s only a hypothesis—that the diversity of feeding strategies before and around this period may have to do with changes to the global climate. Antarctica finally broke off as its own separate continent, which allowed the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to swirl around the landmass, bringing nutrients up from the deep sea. Its effects may have rippled out through the world’s oceans, all the way up to to what would one day become the Wando River.

I don’t remember when Joss Whedon went from being a garden-variety household name to being someone I refer to on a first-name basis. I quote Joss, I verb Joss, I adjective Joss. As a woman who was once a teenage girl who grew up with Buffy, I’ve internalized more than my fair share of lessons from Our Lady of Buffdom. For the better part of twenty years, I’ve known Joss Whedon as the creator of a feminist hero.

For the better part of the same twenty years, Kai Cole knew Joss Whedon as her partner and husband. He was just Joss to her, too — far more intimately Joss than to any of his first-name-basis-ing fans.

This weekend, Cole wrote about her divorce with Joss in a post on The Wrap. She writes about how, on their honeymoon in England in 1995, she encouraged him to turn his script for Buffy the Vampire Slayer — which had just been misinterpreted as a film — into a television show. Joss apparently hadn’t wanted to work in television anymore. I repeat: As of 1995, Joss Whedon “didn’t want to work in television anymore.”

Yet on March 10, 1997 — two years after their honeymoon — Buffy aired on The WB.

According to Cole’s post, Joss had his first affair on the set of Buffy, and continued to have affairs in secret for fifteen years. I believe Cole. I believe that when she quotes Joss in her post, she is quoting him verbatim. I’ve quoted him verbatim, too.

(Or have I? I wonder, knowing more now than I did then about writers rooms, whether every line I attribute to episodes credited as “Written by Joss Whedon” were, in fact, written by Joss Whedon. Every time Jane Espenson tweets credit for specific lines to specific writers on Once Upon a Time — or retroactively to Buffy quotes — I wonder. Every time I watch UnREAL, a show co-created by Sarah Gertrude Shapiro and Marti Noxon that sends up how often women are discredited in television, I wonder. I don’t doubt that Joss was responsible for the vast majority of what I’d call classic Joss dialogue. I’ll just never know which lines weren’t actually his.)

After I saw Joss Whedon trending and read Cole’s post, I scrolled through other longtime fans’ and non-fans’ reactions on Twitter. Many were not surprised. I texted friends about my own lack of surprise, punctuated with single-tear emojis: “I almost can’t even call it disappointed. As though it would be actually inhuman to expect something else.”

Cole quotes a letter Joss wrote to her when their marriage was falling apart, when he was “done with” lying to her about the truth of his affairs. He invokes the inhuman in his confession, too — or, as is so often the case with Joss, the superhuman: “When I was running ‘Buffy,’ I was surrounded by beautiful, needy, aggressive women. It felt like I had a disease, like something from a Greek myth. Suddenly I am a powerful producer and the world is laid out at my feet and I can’t touch it.”

Was it superhuman for Cole to expect her husband to resist that kind of power? Would Joss have been running Buffy, if he hadn’t married Cole? “I was a powerful influence on the career choices Joss made during the 20 years we were together,” Cole writes. “I kept him grounded, and helped him find the quickest way to the success he so deeply craved. I loved him. And in return, he lied to me.”

As Marianne Eloise notes below in Dazed, it remains to be seen whether Cole’s letter will impact Joss’s career, most notably as director of the upcoming Batgirl. In the meantime, his fans are left to resolve tense, charged questions, none of which have easy answers: How do we come to personal decisions about whether or not we can separate the art from the artist? Will consequences come in the form of a public fall from feminist grace, or cost Joss professional opportunities he’s been enjoying for decades as a self-proclaimed feminist artist? Do feminists, male or female, need to be perfect to count?

In “Lie to Me” — Season 2 Episode 7, “Written by Joss Whedon” — Angel asks Buffy if she loves him. Buffy answers, “I love you. I don’t know if I trust you.” For fans and collaborators who are working through hard questions about love and the loss of trust this week, here is some guided reading on feminism, fandom, and fidelity for Whedonverse enthusiasts:

1. “Why I Am A Bad Feminist” (Roxane Gay, BuzzFeed, August 2014)

I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying — trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself: a woman who loves pink and likes to get freaky and sometimes dances her ass off to music she knows, she knows, is terrible for women and who sometimes plays dumb with repairmen because it’s just easier to let them feel macho than it is to stand on the moral high ground.

I am a bad feminist because I never want to be placed on a Feminist Pedestal. People who are placed on pedestals are expected to pose, perfectly. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. I regularly fuck it up. Consider me already knocked off.

2. “I Believe Dylan Farrow” (Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com, May 2016)

I feel what I feel. You can’t just decide not to feel the way you feel. The human personality doesn’t work that way.

More importantly, trying to suppress that reaction would be tantamount to denying that Allen molested Dylan.

I can’t do that.

As a witness to, and survivor of, domestic abuse in childhood, I just can’t do that.

It’s not worth it to me, going through that. Not even for a couple of hours, or a few minutes.

I’ve gotten a lot of pleasure from Allen’s films over the decades, but they are not so important to me that I’m willing to deny what my gut tells me is almost certainly true, and deny my own experience, which affects how I treat people in real life, not just how I react to particular films and filmmakers.

So, Woody Allen has gone, in my mind, from “One of the great American filmmakers” to “One of the great American filmmakers, and probably a child molester.”

It’s a different lens through which to view a director’s work, that’s for sure.

But I didn’t do that to Woody Allen. He did it to himself.

3. “The Legend of Vera Nabokov: Why Writers Pine for a Do-It-All Spouse” (Koa Beck, The Atlantic, April 2014)

Twenty-three years after her death, Vera Nabokov remains a revered figure in capital “L” Literature—not necessarily for her own work, but for devoting herself fully to that of her husband, the great Vladimir Nabokov. Vera not only performed all the duties expected of a wife of her era—that is, being a free live-in cook, babysitter, laundress, and maid (albeit, she considered herself a “terrible housewife”)—but also acted as her husband’s round-the-clock editor, assistant, and secretary. In addition to teaching his classes on occasion (in which Nabokov openly referred to her as “my assistant”), Vera also famously saved Lolita, the work that would define her husband’s career, several times from incineration, according to Stacy Schiff ‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2000 biography, Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). With Vera by his side, Nabokov published 18 novels between 1926 and 1974 (both in Russian and English). Through 1976, the year before his death, he also published 10 short story collections and nine poetry collections along with criticism, plays, uncollected short stories, and translations.

4. “What’s Wrong With Infidelity?” (Emily Bobrow, 1843 Magazine, December/January 2017)

Reliable statistics on infidelity are hard to come by as there are few incentives for candour and definitions vary. Numbers of those in Western countries admitting to some sort of infidelity range from 30% to 75% of men and 20% to 68% of women. Now that more women enjoy financial independence and jobs outside the home, the gap between philandering men and women is narrowing swiftly. “There is not a single other taboo that is universally condemned and universally practised,” says Perel. Basically, cheating is something we don’t want and don’t like, but it is something we do and do often.

“It’s because fidelity is the last thing left that defines a marriage,” she says. “You don’t need to wait to have sex, you don’t need kids. You don’t even need marriage anymore. The only thing that distinguishes it is that, after years of sexual nomadism, you suddenly say ‘I have finally found the one. You are so extraordinary that I am no longer looking for anything else. For you I promise to be suddenly exclusively monogamous’.” The only hitch, says Perel, is that sexual nomadism doesn’t prepare you for exclusivity. “It’s not as though you got it out of your system. Love and desire aren’t the same thing.”

5. “A Chat With Mimi Pond on the Service Industry, Cocaine, and Writing the First Episode of The Simpsons” (Anna Fitzpatrick, The Muse, August 2017)

MIMI POND: I was never invited to be on staff, and I never knew why for the longest time. No one ever called me or explained to me or apologized or anything. And it wasn’t until years later that I found out that Sam Simon, who was the showrunner, didn’t want any women around because he was going through a divorce. It had remained a boys’ club for a good long time. I feel like I was just as qualified as anyone else who came along and got hired on the show, and it was just because I was a woman that I was, you know, not allowed entry into that club. I always wind up being the turd in the punchbowl because the show is so beloved and everything, and I’m sorry to burst bubbles but [laughs]. It wasn’t a pleasant experience for me.

JEZEBEL: I know you said the ordering of the episode was arbitrary but you were still largely responsible for bringing that family to the masses.

POND: Like every TV script ever, every script is rewritten in the writer’s room. So I can’t claim that responsibility. It’s always a group effort. Just in terms of being denied the opportunity to participate in something that became that big is kind of a drag. And then having to explain this over and over is the biggest drag of all.

6. “10 Things I’ve Learned About Gaslighting As An Abuse Tactic” (Shea Emma Fett, Everyday Feminism, August 2015)

“Maybe a better way to put this is that gaslighting is a type of manipulation, but not the only type. Manipulation usually centers around a direct or indirect threat that is made in order to influence another person’s behavior. Gaslighting uses threats as well, but has the goal of actually changing who someone is, not just their behavior. It’s important to recognize that gaslighting and garden variety manipulation are not the same. Both will degrade your self esteem, but gaslighting, when effective, will actually damage your trust in yourself and your experience of reality.”

7. “Joss Whedon and the problem with ‘male feminists’” (Marianne Eloise, Dazed, August 2017)

Joss Whedon has built his empire off the back of claiming to be a feminist and a Good Man. His work is good in its own right, but his glowing public profile is based on pretending to be a feminist, and it was only a matter of time until the cracks that were always showing completely burst open. Whether or not these accusations will actually impact Whedon’s career remains to be seen. There is every chance that he will get off scot free; that, as is so often the case, the people who hire and idolise him will brush this off as a domestic issue. But there is a lesson in Cole’s essay for all of us: never, ever trust a self-titled male feminist who is comfortable with how ‘good’ for women he is.

The Olympics have a problem. Countries that have bid and won the “honor” of hosting the games are finding it increasingly difficult to manage the after effects — from rampant growth to financial demands — that accompany inviting the world for a late summer visit every four years.

The last host city that substantially profited from hosting the Olympics was Los Angeles, which “earned” $93 million some thirty-plus years ago when it hosted the 1984 games. The southern California event set the template for Barcelona and Atlanta, two cities that re-envisioned their respective downtowns and central hubs thanks to the Olympics, but in the years since, it has been increasingly more difficult for host countries to justify pursuing the games, leaving too many empty and unusable stadiums in the wake.

Take Brazil. A thriving economy and a commitment to athletic excellence led Brazil to target landing the 2016 games, but the subsequent combination of a recession and various scandals have left the South American country — the first ever to land the Olympics — in tatters. Wayne Drehs and Mariana Lajolo of Doubletruck, ESPN.com’s longform vertical, explored what has happened to Brazil just one year after the Olympics left Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and its other cities:

The opening ceremony in Brazil’s famed Maracanã was the most watched in Olympic history. More than 2.5 billion people from around the globe tuned in as 11,000 athletes marched on the stadium floor holding a cartridge of soil and a seed from a native Brazilian tree. The athletes placed the cartridges into mirrored towers. Olympic organizers called the procession “Seeds of Hope,” explaining the containers would be planted as part of an Athlete’s Forest in the Deodoro neighborhood of Rio.

But now, just over a year later, there is perhaps no greater example of the Rio Games’ complicated legacy. The seedlings sit in planting pots under a sheer black canopy on a farm 100 kilometers from Rio. Prior to last week, Marcelo de Carvalho Silva, the director of Biovert, the company responsible for the seeds, hadn’t heard from Olympic organizers in months. He had no idea what the plans were for the seeds, but he painstakingly watched over them for free, knowing what it would mean for his company — and the country — if something happened to them.

Read the story

Cody Delistraty | Longreads | June 2017 | 11 minutes (2787 words)

 

Holly Maniatty is moving faster than anyone in the Wu-Tang Clan. She bounces up and down, her whole body undulates, her hands fly as she signs, her eyes flare precisely, her mouth articulates the lyrics. She is in the front row at the Bonnaroo music festival in Manchester, Tennessee, where she’s interpreting the concert for Deaf fans. The other American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter at the show looks at her in awe. Maniatty doesn’t pause.

Maniatty, who grew up in rural Vermont and holds degrees in interpreting and ASL linguistics, is a sensation in the Deaf community and among hip-hop fans. When she interpreted a Killer Mike concert, also at Bonnaroo, the rapper was so impressed with her rapid movements and visible passion that he jumped off the stage and began dancing with her. With a smile, he rapped a series of nasty words and phrases. Maniatty kept up; the crowd went wild.

Maniatty is an in-demand ASL concert interpreter and has grown in fame, appearing on late night shows from Jimmy Kimmel to Jimmy Fallon. Her skill is hard-won; for a single concert, she often prepares for up to 40 hours, to understand every aspect of the musical group she’ll sign for. She wants to provide near-perfect information to her Deaf patrons, so she learns everything: the group’s entire backlist, where they grew up, what charities they give to. By knowing the group she’s interpreting, she can more precisely — and more quickly — interpret their performance.

Maniatty wants to use her profile to bring greater equality to Deaf people. “There’s this whole population of culture in America that sometimes is easily overlooked and not served,” she tells me. Likewise, she wants attention turned not toward her but toward the Deaf performers who are breaking stereotypes of what it means to be a performing artist and what it means to be Deaf. She mentions her great respect for Deaf performers like Sean Forbes, Dack Virnig, and Peter Cook.

Maniatty and I discussed the boundaries of language, the complexities of interpreting, and raising awareness for the Deaf community. Throughout it all, she was upbeat and energetic, stressing how grateful she is to get to do what she does. Deaf or hearing, it’s hard not to look forward to her next concert.

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How did you become interested in ASL?

I had ideas about going to art school and I really felt like I wanted to be an interpreter and I went for it wholeheartedly. I was very fortunate to be accepted to RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology). The National Technical Institute for the Deaf is there so they have a large population of Deaf students. I lived in a dorm with Deaf people and interacted with Deaf people, and most of my friends were Deaf, so I was really lucky to have that immersive experience, and because of that, I gained the language quickly. Since then, it’s really been one of the fulfilling things I could ever think of in life, really.

I worked for a short time as a staff interpreter at RIT and as a freelance interpreter, and just randomly was asked to do a concert. They were having a hard time finding an interpreter for it. I jumped in and found that I really loved the work because of the preparatory process: going through the music and analyzing the lyrics, and doing what an interpreter would call “text analysis” of the intent of the speaker and, hopefully, the received message of the person you’re interpreting for. I fell in love with that process.

That was in between my two degrees, and I went back to school to get a degree in ASL Linguistics because I felt like there was so much more that I needed to know about the language before I could really do this at the highest level. The University of Rochester has a fabulous program that includes linguistics classes, brain, and science classes, but also a lot of Deaf history, and Deaf folklore, and Deaf poetry. I was able to take those classes, and it really helped build my skill. From there, I just started doing shows and patrons liked the interpreting that I was able to offer, and they requested me to do shows.

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Was that your big break?

After I moved to Portland, ME, I got involved in Bonnaroo and interpreted there, and, again, that was patron-driven: someone that I had interpreted for before asked if I was able to go to Bonnaroo, and I contacted the accessibility department there.

Starting at Bonnaroo was a big step for me because it wasn’t just one show a night. Over the course of a weekend, an interpreter at a festival can do fifteen to twenty shows in just three to four days. That was a big step for me and brought me to another level of being able to do a variety of music throughout one day. You could go from something that was more lyrical and folk all the way to something that someone would refer to as a hardcore rap show. It definitely stretched my skills, and I think built me up to be a better interpreter every single year that I did it. I just really enjoyed that.

There’s a fabulous team of interpreters that come from all over the country to do Bonnaroo so it was a great opportunity to learn from other professionals, and we had this great, little brain trust going on — learning from each other and working together and supporting each other through that process. It was one of the pivotal interpreting opportunities I had.

Where does your particular skill set lie?

That’s such an astute question. No one has ever asked me that. I think the things that most prepares me for this work is my ability to look at communication as a whole entity — almost this global package. I try to use as many different possible ways to communicate a message as possible. Obviously the sign language, but then there’s the poetic aspect of music that you’re always trying to relay and put that experience out there for a person that’s at a show.

I always go back to what I would term as “the old Deaf masters,” like Clayton Valli and Patrick Graybill and The National Theater for the Deaf and all those old things we watched on VHS tapes when I was in college — that’s how old I am. Going back to them and seeing how they creatively used their language and then incorporated that into the way you communicate as a human being. So accessing people’s visual representations of things — like if they’re talking about a political movement, what was the picture that went along with that political movement? Or what was the striking Pulitzer image that goes along with that, and trying to access that through the interpretation. I research how the performer moves, and I think that speaks a lot to how they feel about one particular song or album. You see the way they shift their body posture and even the way they’re projecting their voice can be different based on the album, which goes back to a time in their life.

The more you look at communication as a global thing — a global delivery as opposed to just looking at the language itself — you’re able to communicate things a lot more efficiently and a lot more effectively than if you were just kind of thinking, How can I translate this instrument to sign language? Music is about so many more things than that, and if you’re going from very rich and lush movement to ASL, which is also a very rich and lush medium, you want to take advantage of everything you have.

…the most important thing is that they’re experiencing the same thing as somebody else is. They’re dropping with the beat at the same time; they’re having that emotional moment. I’ve interpreted shows before and almost everyone in the crowd is tearing up, and you want that for the patron that you’re interpreting for.

Is there something we can learn about translation from how you interpret ASL?

I do think that there are implications with any language — cultural implications. In Taiwan, February 14th is not Valentine’s Day; it was their February 14 Massacre so you couldn’t go from English to Taiwanese or whatever dialect you were using there and not understand the implication when somebody mentions February 14th. I think that in any language, you have to understand the cultural implications, and ASL is so deeply tied with American cultural experience.

I’ve learned, obviously, from my Deaf professors that you have to understand that cultural implication. I grew up near Canada in Northern Vermont, and on Quebec license plates, it says, “I will remember.” I never really understood that, and then I had a professor who was from France who explained to me the whole cultural implication of “I will remember,” as in Quebec will always remember their relationship as being kind of separate from Canada. So it’s interesting. If you delve into the culture of the language, you’ll have a more complete translation and one that moves people in the appropriate way.

What’s the most important part of interpreting music for Deaf patrons?

I think the most important thing is that they’re experiencing the same thing as somebody else is. They’re dropping with the beat at the same time; they’re having that emotional moment. I’ve interpreted shows before and almost everyone in the crowd is tearing up, and you want that for the patron that you’re interpreting for. Ultimately the goal is that they’re feeling the exact same thing as everybody else. When you hit that interpreting sweet spot, there’s nothing else like it. You’re just like, “Yes! Mission accomplished!”

Tell us about the connection you make with Deaf patrons.

I did a Beastie Boys concert, and the patrons were really excited about it, and I worked really hard to make sure the cultural references in Beastie Boys songs and the funny puns were tangible. There are moments when everyone’s like, “Oh no. He just didn’t say that” all at the same time, including the Deaf patrons. That’s what you go for. Those are the moments when the twenty to forty hours of preparation for the ninety-minute show are absolutely worth it.

I don’t know about you, but I definitely had experiences where I’m at a concert and I think a song means one thing, and then I’m in a crowd of people and we’re all kind of feeling the same thing, and then I see the performer and I’m like, “Oh, that’s what they meant?” I think people have those a-ha moments, and you want to provide an opportunity for someone to have that a-ha moment. They will never forget the moment they really understood what that song meant, or what it meant to the person that wrote it. That’s really the challenge. You’re just setting an opportunity before somebody, and they grasp it just like everybody else.

I think people have those a-ha moments, and you want to provide an opportunity for someone to have that a-ha moment. They will never forget the moment they really understood what that song meant, or what it meant to the person that wrote it.

Why hip-hop?

It just became my thing over the last ten years of interpreting. The Beastie Boys concert was a huge education for me because I was like, “Yeah, I can do that.” And then I was like, “Wait a minute. What is this song about? Wait, who and what are they referencing?” I didn’t grow up in metro New York City so I didn’t know about the Pelham train so I had to look that up and I read all of that. And I mean that whole song has like seventeen different historical references about Manhattan in it and for someone who didn’t grow up there, that’s huge.

I ended up falling in love with the simplicity of hip-hop. It’s this really lush and diverse use of language. Everyone’s really excited about Hamilton because it’s telling a story in a more modern way, but hip-hop’s been doing that for a long time. They broke barriers. They broke social barriers, racial barriers standing for a long time. I think the masterful way that people use language in hip-hop songs is just amazing. It just fascinates me. I read everything I can about hip-hop culture. Every single time, in the same way that I feel like I learned something new about American Sign Language on a weekly basis, I’m learning something new about hip-hop on a weekly basis.

Hip-hop is often the place where the vernacular of American English is first stretched. Are you likewise trying to expand the possibilities of ASL?

I’m a second-language learner, so I will never use ASL to one hundred percent of its potential like a native user. I understand and respect that. ASL is so complex and has so many beautiful nuances. It really is a perfect medium to translate any kind of hip-hop, just the way in which you can communicate so many concepts very, very quickly. Many of the aspects of ASL are spatial. We use first-person perspective and storytelling mode. It’s literally the perfect medium to make this accessible in a different language.

To what extent is the body a vital interpreting tool?

I think it’s super important. In preparation for a show, you have to think about the lyrical story and the story of the person who wrote it, but you have to think about the musical story too. Jay Z, in 99 Problems, uses this really awesome technique where there’s this weird static noise behind the lyrics where he’s “becoming” the cop that pulls him over. The way in which people are mixing and DJs are mixing their songs with these acoustic effects is really relayed in your body and the way you’re positioning your body in interpreting, and I think that — as much as the words — is important. The context is important, and the beat is just as important. There are some songs you know in just the first three seconds, like It’s Tricky from Run DMC. And that’s really important. If you can make your body movements equally as iconic as the music that’s written, it just enhances the access to the concert and to the musician.

What’s the most creative you’ve ever had to be when signing a lyric?

I think one challenge was when we were doing a back-to-back concert with Eminem and Jay Z. They’re very different performers, with very different approaches to the way they deliver the same genre of music. You have to be able to show that. Eminem had done a lot of sampling of other R&B like Rihanna, so that was a big challenge — to be really visceral like him and then kind of emotional like her in the same song and just kind of switch back and forth between that based on the lyrics and the hook.

I think, too, ideally as an interpreter, you’re making yourself vulnerable to whatever emotion the music is about. So there are some songs that are emotional and you have to go there, and it’s a risk. You really go the whole way and try to make the interpretation as accessible as possible even if it’s emotionally risky for you and other people there.

What do you see as your contribution to the Deaf community at large?

I hope my contribution to the Deaf community is bringing a greater spotlight to their need for access to interpreting. Not just concert interpreting — any kind of interpreting. The Americans with Disabilities Act just had its birthday; it’s twenty years old and people still struggle on a daily basis to get interpreting services for basic things like doctor’s appointments and surgeries.

I hope that somebody hears about this crazy person doing whatever concert and then looks at my page and sees maybe something about a Deaf performer like Sean Forbes or Dack Virnig and then they check out Deaf performers and then they go to their page and say, “Oh wow, this Deaf person is posting that the EDHI law is up for renewal in the United States House and that’s for early detection of hearing loss in children so that there can be ASL services and early intervention services.” There’s this whole population in America that sometimes is easily overlooked and not served.

Interpreters have an inside look on people’s lives. It’s a huge privilege being in a partnership with the Deaf community and Deaf culture. I will continue interpreting. and I will continue trying to be an advocate for access for Deaf people.
 

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cody Delistraty is a writer based in Paris. Follow him on Twitter: @delistraty.

In the early days, when motion pictures were still new, filming the ocean was a radical idea.

A surface-level shot of the waves was certainly feasible, but capturing footage of swaying undersea fauna, swimming fish, and marbled sunlight dancing on the seafloor? The consensus was: It couldn’t be done.

In fact, it could be. A century ago, the brothers John Ernest and George Williamson, the sons of a sea captain and inventor, would prove it. To do so, the Williamsons turned to a piece of technology their father had designed for divers in undersea repair and salvage jobs. The device was a series of flexible concentric tubes, “interlocking iron rings that stretched like an accordion,” as the Library of Congress puts it, made to suspend from a specially outfitted ship so that a diver could descend into a watertight chamber below. At one end of the tube was the boat on the surface of the water; at the other, the submersible room.

John Ernest and George were enchanted by their father’s machine. From the glass portals along the tube, they observed red snappers, yellowtails, fat groupers, and other shimmery creatures weaving through the coral reef of the Bahamas. And they had the idea of bringing a camera with them next time. Later, when they shared their still photos with newspapers—images included a blurry oblong shark and shadowy seaweed—it created a sensation.

Eventually, the Williamsons’ tubes—outfitted with a new, specialized spherical observation chamber that had a large funnel-shaped window—would be used to film the underwater scenes in the 1916 film, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. “I call this my magic window,” one of the silent film’s intertitle cards reads, before revealing a gray, clouded ocean view. “We gaze on scenes which you might think God never intended us to see.”

At the time, the footage was extraordinary. The film was a smashing success.

Filmmakers have been using technology to push the limits of how the ocean is portrayed ever since—and not just in live-action films. Most recently, Disney dazzled audiences with the animated film, Moana, which tells the story of a girl from the Pacific Islands who sets out on a voyage to rediscover her ancestors’ wayfinding heritage.

Moana’s directors, Ron Clements and John Musker, have been obsessed with stories about the ocean for decades. They made The Little Mermaid in 1989. The 1940 film Pinocchio, with its famous whale sequence, is what first inspired Clements to pursue a career in animation. But depictions of the ocean in those stories are nothing like what audiences see in Moana, which is as groundbreaking for its portrayal of water in 2017 as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was in 1916.

“Water is always hard,” said Marlon West, the co-head of effects animation for Moana. “Usually, in animation, we have a dozen water shots. They’re hard to do.” In Moana, however, the majority of the movie involves water. And the ocean isn’t just a presence; the action takes place on the water, introducing yet another layer of complexity. On top of that, Moana’s Pacific ocean is occasionally anthropomorphic, like a distant cousin to the water in James Cameron’s The Abyss.

Disney’s software team came up with a program it calls Splash—a companion to Matterhorn, which was used to create the snow in Frozen—to help automate the way the water would behave in various shots. Splash is a “fluid solver” that plugs into Houdini, third-party 3-D animation software. To use the solver, effects specialists would define the area they wanted to simulate—say, a section of water around an animated boat—then use a setting to determine what the ocean condition should be like to begin with. From there, they’d run the simulation on the pre-determined ocean surface, to animate how that area of water responds to the boat. The output from that simulation—“millions of particles,” essentially millions of new points of animation data—would then be smoothed into the final rendering of the film.

Splash also involved on a series of algorithms that could simulate splashes, eddies, and wakes. The program’s buoyancy algorithm made it so the huge navigating canoes in the film bounced in and out of waves realistically. (In several shots, many of these canoes appeared in the water together, in close proximity, creating an additional animation challenge.)

“As effects artists, working with fluids, you can’t always predict what you’re going to get from your water simulation,” said Erin Ramos, the film’s effects lead. “And the hard thing with water is, if it doesn’t look right, you can really tell. Even if it’s in the background.”

Disney effects specialists told me they were able to successfully automate key ocean-movement details about 80 percent of the time—meaning you could have a production assistant simply run a script to generate the animated boat’s wake. “Running these scripts to generate these animations leaves room for the artists to focus on the artistry of the shot,” Ramos told me, “so they have time to create these sweeping shots, and the ability to have the ocean acting as a character.”

The ocean in Moana is an anthropomorphic force that occasionally nudges Moana along the way. Except the ocean character doesn’t have a face. And it doesn’t talk. (In this way, it was a bit like the animated magic carpet in Disney’s Aladdin, Osnat Shurer, the Moana producer told me.) So Disney’s effects specialists and animators were constantly navigating the tension between wanting the water to look and act like actual water—but to be magical at the same time.

“That was a big challenge,” West said. “They would animate the ocean as almost a sock puppet, and we would take that and fill it full of bubbles and liquid or we’d do a simulation over it and make it full of water to make it look more watery.”

There were many debates among animators and effects specialists over how to convert the ocean from its ordinary state into a character with agency and back again. “What made the ocean character look like water to one person, looked too agitated and aggressive to another,” West said. “You have the ocean often as a chartacter looming over toddler Moana and looming over Moana’s grandmother, and at no point do you ever want to be afraid for them. You want to be in awe.”

In the end, calibrating between those two expectations—a realistic-looking ocean that could also convey subtle warmth and encouragement as a character—meant keeping a portion of the water unnaturally smooth and rounded when it surfaced as a character. Also, there were moments when obeying the laws of physics were discarded in favor of keeping the audience focused on the characters. “Because it’s storytelling,” West told me. “It’s a stylized world. And we’re trying to create water that exists in your heart and your mind’s eye.”

Then there was the question of representing the ocean in an authentic way—not physically realistic, but culturally true. To do so, Disney formed an Oceanic Story Trust, a group of cultural practitioners from around the Pacific who acted as consultants on the film. Members of the trust weighed in on everything from haka chants to tattoo design to the demigod Maui’s hair. (He was drawn as bald at first. He shouldn’t have been, members of the trust said. Disney gave him luxurious hair.)

On one of the film’s first research trip, to Fiji, the Disney team met with Jiujiua “Angel” Bera, a skilled wayfinder. “He spoke about the ocean in such a personal way,” Osnat Shurer, the Moana producer told me. “He would stroke it really gently, and told us you had to speak gently to the ocean. ‘The ocean knows,’ he said. He goes out to greet the ocean in the morning like he greets his family. This left a very deep impression on us.”

Shurer and her colleagues were also struck by a larger theme of connectedness from the Pacific Islanders they met—and the way many island cultures see the land and sea as indistinct. (In ancient Hawaii, for instance, this idea was encapsulated in the concept of ahupuaʻa, divisions of land that run from the mountain down to the ocean.) And also the extent to which some cultures view the ocean itself as a connective force. “In the Pacific, we don’t consider the water a barrier to each other,” Dionne Fonoti, an anthropologist and a member of the Oceanic Story Trust said in an interview with Disney that’s in the Moana bonus features. “It’s not just the cultures of the people and the islands that connect us, it’s also the ocean that connects us.”

When the film project began, however, the Disney team had no idea how they could portray all this complexity—even just from a technological standpoint. Not to mention the separate but related challenge of animating an anthropomorphic volcanic island.

“I’m pretty pumped up about what we did,” West told me. “There’s nothing, when I look at the final film, that I cringe at. And there usually is.”

The project also changed the way that animators and effects specialists think about the actual ocean. Ramos, the effects lead, told me she spent more than a year and a half working on getting the shoreline animation just right. Even now, she says, she can’t go to the beach without noticing things she’d never considered before her work on Moana.

“You know it’s hard for me to go to the beach nowadays,” she said. “When I’m there, I’m looking at how foam dissipates, at how the water recedes back into the ocean, the cadence and the rhythm of the little breaks. I’m looking at how the beach itself is modeled to create the reef breaks, how the light affects the water, the clarity of the water itself, the colors. There’s just a million things going through my head.”

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” she added. “I think it’s gorgeous.”

Dwayne Johnson smashed through the great wall of news this week, rushing over and lifting us up in a powerful but tender overhead press, carrying us toward the dreamland he lives in where everyone is hardworking, great-looking, and nice as hell.

Bless GQ for sending Caity Weaver on the enviable mission to profile Dwayne Johnson, and for their art department for thinking what we’re all thinking: If a celebrity had to be president, wooing the electorate with charm and charisma, why not elect Johnson, who appears to excel in every area our current president lacks?

Evan Osnos recently reported that “other than golf, [Trump] considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy.” A finite amount of energy? Dwayne Johnson is a solar-powered, clean running beast of infinite energy and charisma.

If you are a child, good luck getting past Dwayne Johnson without a high five or some simulated roughhousing; if you’re in a wheelchair, prepare for a Beowulf-style epic poem about your deeds and bravery, composed extemporaneously, delivered to Johnson’s Instagram audience of 85 million people; if you’re dead, having shuffled off your mortal coil before you even got the chance to meet Dwayne Johnson, that sucks—rest in peace knowing that Dwayne Johnson genuinely misses you. For Johnson, there are no strangers; there are simply best friends, and best friends he hasn’t met yet.

He’s always concerned about you. Are you drinking enough water?

“I just want to make sure you’re hydrated,” he says, picking up a cool, clear cylinder of Voss. He twists open the seal fast and hard, like he’s wringing the neck of a punk who disrespected the troops (he loves the troops—we love the troops—proud to be an American, troops, troops, troops), and hands me the bottle.

Pundits and pollsters, get ready. Dwayne Johnson is going to crush your likability scores.

How does an untrained actor jump from a cameo to a starring role in the span of a year, while never even quitting his day job? Then, as now, Johnson tested well in what the film industry refers to as “all four quadrants”: old men, young men, old women, and young women. “[He] is as close to guaranteeing you butts in the seat as anybody can be,” NBCUniversal vice chairman Ron Meyer told me.

Broadly, the quadrants thing means that everyone likes him. Specifically, it suggests that if Johnson’s personal magnetism were any stronger, birds in his vicinity might plummet from the sky, their internal navigation mechanisms thrown off by the force of his personality.

But hey, he’s still a unique guy! There’s even a box on the census form just for Dwayne Johnson.

His own racial blend (black and Samoan) means he is blessed with skin the color of graham crackers, a perfectly roasted marshmallow, and Abraham Lincoln on the penny. It’s a rare combination. In the last census, the number of Americans identifying as “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander” (a blanket term that includes people who trace their lineage to Samoa, Fiji, Tahiti, and lots of other small, warm islands) plus “Black or African American” was just 50,308. A figure so low it rounds out to 0.0 percent of the total U.S. population, though a more gracious person might say “less than 0.1 percent.” In other words, if you meet a 45-year-old half-black, half-Samoan man living in the United States, the odds are shockingly high he will be Dwayne Johnson

He’s also one of the people. He’s got that song in his head! No, not that song, the other one!

Johnson’s song from the Moana soundtrack, “You’re Welcome,” was not nominated for any awards, but he sings it under his breath all day anyway, just because he really loves that song.

And like any good politician, he loves the troops. Like, a lot. Like, really really a lot.

Johnson frequently takes to social media to thank members of the armed forces, specifically and in aggregate, for their service. In his patriotic hands, anything can—and will—become a tribute to the armed forces. In March, he was “grateful” to share the “big news” on Instagram that he would be portraying “a disabled US War Vet and former FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader” in an upcoming movie about “the world’s largest skyscraper—that’s on fire.” Johnson wrote that his character in this demented summer blockbuster was “inspired by the thousands of disabled US veterans and war heroes I’ve had the honor of shaking hands with over the years.”

He’s got the inside track on world events like the death of Osama Bin Laden, beating Obama’s announcement by an hour. (His cousin is a Navy SEAL.)

To this day, Johnson refuses to disclose how he got wind of this ultra-classified mission. “The tweet was actually supposed to come out at the same time the president was making his speech,” he says, “but the moment I sent that out, I got word that now we’ve delayed the speech a little bit. I was like, ‘Ooooh. Okay.’ ”

No really, he has what it takes to be president. If our current president is a goldfish who can’t remember the castle in his own bowl, Dwayne Johnson is the elephant who never forgets.

Barring the adoption of policy points that are completely unhinged (like spending $8 billion to build a colony in the earth’s core—though, if anyone could do that, it would be Dwayne Johnson), there’s much to suggest Johnson could chart a fast and furious ride to the White House. He’s a quick study with boundless attention to detail. Beyond his popularity—and the fact that his head often looks like a big, round smiley face—he’s got a politician’s warm, deep voice, which projects authority, capability, and strength. And he possesses a startling steel-trap memory. Johnson simply remembers everything about people: biographical details, offhand anecdotes, entire conversations. It’s the quality that allows him to treat everyone like a close friend, the silent secret to his supercharged charm.

And while our current president sleeps only four to five hours a night, Dwayne Johnson is very concerned about your sleep schedule. Are you getting enough? Is it quality sleep?

Weeks after I first met Johnson, I wake up to a direct message on Twitter. @TheRock is on the road and just wanted to alert me to the fact that his hotel carries GQ. The message is decorated with fist-bump and hang-loose emojis.

“Hope you’re great and sleeping soundly!!” he writes.

The wild thing is, I believe he means it literally. If anyone hopes his fellow man is great and sleeping soundly!! it’s Dwayne Johnson. And if he can convince a few million more people of that, everyone’s best friend is going to be president.

In conclusion, Johnson 2020. And Caity Weaver for Veep.

Read the story

In The Stranger, Ijeoma Oluo traveled to Spokane, Washington to sit at the kitchen table with Rachel Dolezal, who is jobless and living in a month-to-month rental, hoping her new book will start something, anything, to get money coming in.

Oluo thinks the meeting may have been a bad idea, (“I was half sure that this interview was my worst career decision to date”) but the result is a master class in confrontation, in which the hard questions are asked, answers are pushed, and frustrations laid bare.

There was a moment before meeting Dolezal and reading her book that I thought that she genuinely loves black people but took it a little too far. But now I can see this is not the case. This is not a love gone mad. Something else, something even sinister is at work in her relationship and understanding of blackness.

There is a chapter where she compares herself to black slaves. Dolezal describes selling crafts to buy new clothes, and she compares her quest to craft her way into new clothes with chattel slavery. When I ask what she has to say to people who might be offended by her comparing herself to slaves, Dolezal is indignant almost to exasperation…

“I’m not comparing the struggles, okay? Because I never said that my life was the same. I never said that it was the equivalent of slavery, of chattel slavery. I did work and bought all my own clothes and shoes since I was 9 years old. That’s not a typical American childhood life,” she says. “I worked very hard, but I didn’t resonate with white women who were born with a silver spoon. I didn’t find a sentence of connection in those stories, or connection with the story of the princess who was looking for a knight in shining armor.”

I am beginning to wonder if it isn’t blackness that Dolezal doesn’t understand, but whiteness.

Read the interview

Max Adams | In the Land of Giants: A Journey Through the Dark Ages | Pegasus | October 2016 | 15 minutes (4,012 words) 

Below is an excerpt from In the Land of the Giants, by Max Adams. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

I am surprised when I come suddenly upon the Wall.

Just after dawn on a late November day the North Pennines air is rigid with cold. A thick hoar of frost blankets pasture and hedge, reflecting white-blue light back at an empty sky. The last russet leaves clinging to a copse of beech trees set snug in the fold of a river valley filter lazy, hanging drifts of smoke from a wood fire. The sunlight is a dreamy veil of cream silk.

I am surprised when I come suddenly upon the Wall. I have not followed the neat, fenced, waymarked route from the little village of Gilsland which straddles the high border between Northumberland and Cumbria, but struck directly across country and, with the sun in my eyes, I do not see Hadrian’s big idea until I am almost in its shadow. Sure, it stops you in your tracks. It is too big to climb over (that being the point), so I walk beside it for a couple of hundred yards. The imperfect regularity of the sandstone blocks is mesmerizing, passing before one’s eyes like the holes on a reel of celluloid. This film is an epic: eighty Roman miles, a strip cartoon story that tells of military might, squaddy boredom, quirky native gods, barbarian onslaught, farmers, archaeologists, ardent modern walkers and oblivious livestock. I am somewhere between Mile 49 and Mile 50, counting west from Wallsend near the mouth of the River Tyne. The gap in the Wall, when I find it, is made by the entrance to Birdoswald fort. Birdoswald: where the Dark ages begin.

There is no one here but me on this shining day. The farm that has stood here in various guises for around fifteen hundred years is now a heritage center. On a winter weekday I have Birdoswald to myself. Just me and the shimmering light and the odd chough cawing away in a skeletal tree. In places the stone walls of this once indomitable military outpost still stand five or six feet high. Visible, in its heyday, from all horizons, the Roman fort layout was built on a well-tested model: from above, it is the shape of a playing card, with the short sides facing north and south. Originally designed so that three of the six gates (two in each long side, one at either end in the center) protruded beyond the line of the Wall, the fort was not so much part of a defensive frontier, more a launching pad for expeditions, patrols and forays in the lands to the north. Rome did not hide behind its walls; the legions did not cower. Any soldier from any part of the Empire would have known which way to turn on entering the gate; where the barrack rooms would be; where to find the latrines and bread ovens; how to avoid the scrutiny of the garrison commander after a late-night binge or an overnight stay in the house of the one of the locals. Uniformity was part of the Roman project.

Any native on any frontier would get to know the layout too. The British warrior might, in those first years of the Wall’s existence during the 120s, try to attack it; when that failed he would herd his livestock through its gates to his summer pastures and pay a tax on his sheep or cattle. British women would barter their homespun goods for ironwares or posh crockery; one day their sons might be recruited into its garrison. The Brittunculi or Little Britons, as a Vindolanda tablet suggests they were called by their imperial betters, might grow to like the idea of the Empire.

Outside Birdoswald fort, to the east, the frosted surface of a smooth, grassy field conceals the magnetic traces from geophysical mapping of a small village, or vicus, which grew up alongside. These vici were native British settlements, clinging like limpets to their military protectors, supplying them with goods and services and probably with children, wanted or unwanted. Much the same thing happens in frontier provinces today. You see it on documentaries filmed in the dodgier parts of Afghanistan—only there the Taliban regards such integration or fraternization as a capital crime. When the Western troops leave, and they are leaving as I write, one fears for the safety of the inhabitants. When Rome came to this frontier, she came to stay.

To the south, the line of the Wall, and this fort, are protected by the deep, sinuous gorge of the River Irthing, the western of two rivers which between them create the Tyne–Solway gap linking east and west coasts. This gap has been a lowland route through the Pennines for many thousands of years. Two generations before Hadrian the Romans built a road along this line, known in later times as the Stanegate, so that they could rapidly deploy troops along its length. Much of that road is still in use, or at least passable. And long after Hadrian, General Wade had his redcoats build a road following much the same route to keep Jacobites at bay. The gap between the headwaters of the Rivers Irthing and South Tyne is narrow: no more than four miles. Near Greenhead, just to the south-east of Gilsland, is the watershed boundary, the pass, a choke-point through which modern road and railway, ancient Wall and eighteenth-century military road must squeeze.

To the north, Birdoswald—Banna to the Romans—looks onto a landscape of boggy mires, dispersed sheep farms and conifer plantations, with another twenty odd miles before the modern border is reached. It is an odd thought: this land, so often fought over, has been at peace for two hundred and fifty years. The old border garrisons of Carlisle and Newcastle have almost lost their walls; standing on either coast halfway up the island of Britain, they are just like other modern cities. Had Scotland voted for independence in September 2014, that defunct border could have been revived; we might have had customs posts, and police on either side might have spent their time chasing smugglers once again. It may still happen. It would amuse the legionary builders of this place to think of their imperial customs booths being reopened after nearly two millennia; it would not surprise them. Sometimes borders are self-defining.

* * *

These things don’t just happen.

During the middle of the fourth century, long before the traditional date of ad 410, when the Roman administration dissolved the province of Britannia, the roof of one of the granaries (horrea) at Birdoswald collapsed. These things don’t just happen. The Roman auxiliary cohorts who had been stationed here for two hundred years relied on periodic resupply from the coast ports and on storing the fruits of each year’s harvest. Leaky roofs and military efficiency don’t go together; so either slackness was creeping in or the fort had been abandoned. That’s how it seems at first sight. But the subtle text of stratified deposits read by archaeologists tells a more complex story. The fort was not abandoned; and when, in the 360s, a huge barbarian onslaught threatened to overwhelm the province, Rome and her generals responded. After the north granary at Birdoswald lost its roof, its stones and tiles were used elsewhere. The floor of a second granary, immediately to the south, was reflagged, its under-floor heating flues blocked—to keep out draughts, or rats? The centurions’ quarters were remodeled to allow for the construction of a building with a small apse—a by then fashionable Christian church, perhaps. The abandoned north granary was used as a rubbish dump, but part of the main street frontage was refaced with dressed stone and a new barrack block was built. Neither slackness nor abandonment explains the halving of the fort’s storage facilities. More likely, the realities of the frontier zone changed.

Rome was not a static force any more than the British Empire was in its day. Three hundred years is a long time. As the empire stretched, then overstretched, as emperors’ fortunes waxed and waned, as troops and political interests migrated from one distant land to another, local commanders became increasingly autonomous. Centrally organized lines of supply, overly bureaucratic and too bloated to adapt to local realities, were superseded or bypassed. Pay wagons turned up with hard cash less often. Commanders took an active role in supplying garrisons from their immediate hinterland; probably they got more involved in the administration of local politics. The relationship between occupying force and native elite became more intimate, the integration more complete. By the middle of the fourth century Wall garrisons consisted mostly of troops called Limitanei, that is, frontiersmen. Many of the men had probably been born within a few miles of Birdoswald; their fathers had been soldiers before them. They spoke the native language known as Brythonic—an early form of Welsh—and were embedded in the native communities of the Wall zone. They revered a suite of local divinities and the odd imperial god, especially Jupiter. After Constantine, who was declared emperor in York in 306, they may have felt inclined, or obliged, to rationalize their pantheon and worship the one true God Jehovah and his charismatic, earthbound son.

The garrison commanders were an elite cadre. They could afford to modify their official quarters with bespoke trappings like Christian chapels or bath houses. Their dress and social class set them apart culturally and politically. In many places they brought with them in their deployments personal retinues from far-flung provinces of the geriatric, obese empire, now disintegrating and under threat of being overrun. The rigid formal structure of the old imperial army, mirrored in the fixed, square-shaped identikit forts of the first and second centuries, became flexible, individualized. The emergence of a vernacular tradition, blending native and foreign with a distinct local cultural flavor, meant that each fort and town was recognizable by its own regional idiosyncrasies. Many of the late imperial commanders had been recruited from the northern boundaries of the Empire from whose ongoing conflicts and edginess fine warriors were raised. Many of them must have spoken Germanic tongues.

* * *

We are talking barn conversions.

No one noticed the beginning of the Dark Age in Britain. It started in different ways and at different times in different places. Rome never lost interest in these islands; they bore valuable minerals, their soils were fertile and their conquest had been a prestigious triumph of the imperial project of the first century ad. But distance stretches and thins one’s interest; as the Empire reformed in the East and as Western emperors focused their attentions on Gaul, Hispania and Germania, it became harder to keep up with what was happening in Britannia: the distant relative was slowly lost to the family. In the towns of Roman Britain decline may have begun as early as the third century, as local elites increasingly favored the country life and became bored with Rome’s urban experiment, its high-maintenance sewage and water supplies, tedious civic snobbery and the tendency of the urban proletariat to riot on almost any pretext. On the coasts, vulnerable to a Continental penchant for piratical raiding, life from the early fourth century onwards could be uncomfortable even with the presence of the imperial navy to watch Britain’s shores facing Ireland and Saxony, Frisia and Pictland. In the cultured, decadent luxury of the Cotswolds, where superb country villas sat in an ordered, fertile and bucolic landscape, reality might not have dawned until the middle of the fifth century when effete toga-wearing Romano-British aristos woke up to find revolting peasants stealing their prize heifers and touting the heresy of a suspiciously liberal British-born cleric called Pelagius.

At Birdoswald the moment can, in its way, be quite precisely identified, with fifteen hundred years of hindsight to draw on. At the very end of the fourth century the south granary, renovated some decades before, had a succession of hearths built into its west end. When excavated, their ashes were found to contain some rather nobby personal items: a green glass ring, a gold and glass earring. More importantly for the excavator, Tony Wilmott, there was a worn coin of the Emperor Theodosius (reigned 388–85), which gives some idea of the date after which these fires were in use. Archaeologists, when finds and structures tell them they are excavating deposits of the fifth century, get a shiver down their spine: these moments are desperately rare.

Hearths seem odd things to have in a granary: fire and grain are a dangerous combination. Was the garrison now so compact, were the other buildings in such a state of disrepair, that the garrison commander had moved himself and his family into the grain store and fitted it out as domestic quarters because it was the only building left that would keep out the winter weather? Were these people cowering among ruins?

There is another way of looking at it. We are talking barn conversions. Not so much retreating to the corner of a bar because it’s the only building with a roof; more likely, the commander liked to have the company of his men for good cheer and fireside stories in those long nights of winter when they talked of the old days, of battles and life on campaign. The barn still had a good solid roof, maintained because it was where all the local produce came in and had to be stored for the year ahead. This produce was no longer paid for in cash (these late coins of Theodosius were about the last to make it to Britain from the imperial mints); the natives were required to give a few days’ labor and to donate a proportion of their harvest and other agricultural produce—say, a tenth. The commander still had his own quarters, nice bath suite, private chapel—wife from a local well-to-do family or perhaps an exotic Dacian bride who played a quasi-diplomatic role in the local community and kept a small but tasteful salon, as British army wives sometimes did in colonial India. Often, and especially when there had been a good harvest or on the quarter days of the native festive calendar when communal gatherings were de rigueur, it seemed right to have a feast in the barn, to share the land’s bounty, dispense a little justice and a few trinkets from the bazaars of Alexandria and reinforce old and prospective loyalties. The man who sat at the center of the long feasting benches was more of a local worthy and judge than a garrison commander. One is tempted to use the word ‘squire’. Gifts were exchanged; promises made; eligible young men and women affianced. Poems were composed and sung, wine and local mead consumed: drinking horns for the men, Rhineland glass beakers for the commander and his wife. Understanding the rules of patronage was becoming just as important as running a tight ship or ruthlessly enforcing the imperial law.

This cozy scenario takes us well into the fifth century, when there is virtually no narrative history for the British Isles, just rumors of civil war and raiding Saxons, plague and famine. Traders from the Continent came to these parts less frequently. We know that Gaulish bishops visited, retaining their solidarity with the British church long after secular link shad been severed. But no emperor came after the departure of Constantine III in 407. Rarely does archaeology have anything meaningful to say about the two centuries after 400: there are no new coins to date the layers; almost no inscriptions, and those few that do exist are difficult to date. The pottery found in native settlements might just well be that of the Iron Age. Even radiocarbon dating is unreliable for these centuries and, unless you are in the peaty bogs of Ireland, wood rarely survives to be dated by its tree rings. The fifth century existed all right—we just can’t see it. It is like the Dark Matter which fills our universe but can’t be seen or measured. The record falls silent, even if echoes and rumors of echoes are heard across the Channel in the courts of Byzantium, Arles and Ravenna.

Almost the earliest indigenous written account of events in Britain after the end of Rome is a note in an Easter calendar called the Annales Cambriae, its only surviving copy belonging to hundreds of years after the event. Under Anno I, which historians believe equates to the year ad 447, is a simple, bleak Latin entry: Dies tenebrosa sicut nox: ‘days as dark as night’. That just about says it all, even if it is an obscure reference to some distant volcano or a really terrible winter.

* * *

The works of giants.

At Birdoswald life went on, perhaps until the first years of the sixth century. On top of the defunct north granary a timber replacement was erected using the old stone foundations to give it solidity and a floor. Years passed. Finally, a similar structure was erected in more or less the same place, only it was designed to line up with a remodeled gate on the west side of the fort. The new building, imposing in its dimensions and constructed using great hewn crucks, looks for all the world like one of the timber halls of poetic legend: the Heorot of Beowulf. And if, at times, the walls were hung with spears and shields and the air rang to the sound of drunken song and poetry, with boasts of victories and laments for fallen comrades, it was, after all, still a barn. Were its carousing warriors and petty chiefs, its quartermasters and poets Romans, Britons or Anglo-Saxons? Who can say? Did they themselves know or care? And was the successor to the commander in whose name this grand design was built a rival, an imposed replacement, or a son?

Even the casual visitor to Birdoswald can’t fail to be impressed by the solidity of the foundations where the north granary has been excavated, its footings and buttresses consolidated. Where the post pads for the new timber hall of the fifth century were sited English Heritage has installed great round logs, like oversized telegraph poles, standing a few feet high to give an idea of the size and layout. It is a crude reconstruction, and yet viscerally effective in demonstrating the moment and mindset that changed Roman into Early Medieval. What is particularly striking is that the new timber hall was much wider than the old granary. If the south-granary-cum-barn-cum-feasting-hall was mere adaptation, with a hearth at one end and perhaps a partition in the middle, then the new hall built over the ruins of the north granary was a more ambitious vision, designed for the commander of the fort (be he a dux of his cohort, a war-band leader or petty tribal chief) to sit in the center of one of the long sides with his companions ranged on benches on either side, a glowing fire before him in the center and, perhaps, with doors at either end. This is truly a building in which the mythical Beowulf would have felt at home. And we must suspect that this was not an isolated structure: the Birdoswald of ad 450–500 was a busy place.

The fort at Banna, high in the Pennines, may just have an even more potent role to play in our history. St. Patrick claimed, in his Confessio, that he had been born and brought up in a place called Bannavem Taberniae, son of a local landowner called Calpurnius whose father, Potitus, had been a priest. His vita is difficult to date, but some time in the middle and later decades of the fifth century is plausible. Several modern scholars believe that this place name should read Banna Venta Berniae: the ‘settlement at Banna in the land of the high passes’. Berniae shares its root with the name Bernicia, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of north Northumbria. That Patrick, taken by slaves to Ireland, should have unwillingly launched his epic career as an Irish patron saint at this remote, beautiful spot, is quite a thought.

And then there is Arthur. Historical references to the legendary Romano-British warlord are very few: a list of twelve battles; a great victory recorded at a place called Badon (perhaps Bath in Somserset); a death notice; a possible mention in a battle poem. Arthur may be, as many historians have argued, an irrelevance, a distraction. There are ‘southern’ Arthurs and ‘northern’ Arthurs, never mind the medieval romantic hero of Camelot. Those who favor the northern version argue that the notice of his death in 537 during the ‘Strife of Camlann’ places him on the Roman Wall; for Camlann seems to be derived from Camboglanna. It used to be thought, erroneously, that this Roman fort, mentioned in the very late Roman list of imperial postings called the Notitia Dignitatum, must be Birdoswald. Now it is accepted that it should be Castlesteads, some seven miles to the west. Either way, there are those who would place both Patrick and Arthur on this stretch of the Wall between the fifth and sixth centuries.

Narrative histories do not get us very far towards an understanding of these islands in the centuries after Roman rule. An early sixth-century British monk called Gildas wrote of civil wars, of invasion, fire, sword and famine (and mentioned a victory at Badon without naming the victor), but nothing of the everyday comings and goings which sustained life. The Kentish Chronicle, fascinating in its melodrama but of doubtful veracity, tells of the foolish British tyrant Vortigern who made a fatal drunken deal with two Saxon pirates (a pretty girl was involved) and sold Britain’s soul and future. Even Bede, the greatest of our early historians, writing nearly three centuries later, covers the nearly one hundred and fifty years after 450 with a single paragraph. The odd memorial stone offers us the name of a Christian priest living in a far-flung community; but no suggestion of when, or why. Occasionally a Continental source records or speculates on the visit of a Gaulish saint or bishop to these islands or on their encounters with pagans and heresies, but not of how people moved around their landscape, how they grew old, tended their sick or brought up their children. Archaeology sometimes tells us where people lived and what they ate, show they constructed their houses; but it says frustratingly little about their relations or their identity. We must piece together these fragmentary sources and animate them. But if we cannot construct a narrative history, what can we say about the journey of the peoples of Britain between the last days of Rome and those of Bede or the Vikings?

This was an age when people believed that the material ruins of lost cultures—the walls and fountains, megalithic tombs and great earthworks, the aqueducts, henges and stone circles that populated their landscape and poetry and framed their psyches—had been built in a lost time by a race of giants. An Anglo-Saxon elegy called ‘the Ruin’, first written down, perhaps, in the eighth century, marvels at nature’s conquest of these great works. The poet writes:

Wondrous is this stone wall, wrecked by fate;
The city buildings crumble, the works of giants decay.
Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed,
Barren gates are broken, hoar frost clings to mortar,
Houses are gaping, tottering and fallen,
Undermined by age. The earth’s embrace,
Its fierce grip, holds the mighty craftsmen;
They are perished and gone. A hundred generations
have passed away since then. This wall, grey with lichen
and red of hue, outlives kingdom after kingdom,
Withstands tempests; its tall gate succumbed.

* * *

Excerpted with permission from In the Land of Giants: A Journey Through the Dark Ages, by Max Adams. Reprinted by arrangement with Pegasus Books. All rights reserved.

Poem quoted at the end of the excerpt is: “The Ruin”, translated by K. Crossley-Holland, The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology, Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.

At The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead profiles Margaret Atwood, Canada’s prolific queen of literature. Mead and Atwood cover the resonance of The Handmaid’s Tale in Donald Trump’s America, Atwood’s approach to feminism, and the purpose of fiction today. Beloved for her incisive mind along with her works, Atwood uses unlimited curiosity as her approach to a life well-lived—whether that’s tenting while birding in Panama, engaging with her 1.5 million Twitter followers, or writing as a septuagenarian. “I don’t think she judges anything in advance as being beneath her, or beyond her, or outside her realm of interest,” says her friend and collaborator, Naomi Alderman.

Atwood has long been Canada’s most famous writer, and current events have polished the oracular sheen of her reputation. With the election of an American President whose campaign trafficked openly in the deprecation of women—and who, on his first working day in office, signed an executive order withdrawing federal funds from overseas women’s-health organizations that offer abortion services—the novel that Atwood dedicated to Mary Webster has reappeared on best-seller lists. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is also about to be serialized on television, in an adaptation, starring Elisabeth Moss, that will stream on Hulu. The timing could not be more fortuitous, though many people may wish that it were less so. In a photograph taken the day after the Inauguration, at the Women’s March on Washington, a protester held a sign bearing a slogan that spoke to the moment: “MAKE MARGARET ATWOOD FICTION AGAIN.”

Given that her works are a mainstay of women’s-studies curricula, and that she is clearly committed to women’s rights, Atwood’s resistance to a straightforward association with feminism can come as a surprise. But this wariness reflects her bent toward precision, and a scientific sensibility that was ingrained from childhood: Atwood wants the terms defined before she will state her position. Her feminism assumes women’s rights to be human rights, and is born of having been raised with a presumption of absolute equality between the sexes. “My problem was not that people wanted me to wear frilly pink dresses—it was that I wanted to wear frilly pink dresses, and my mother, being as she was, didn’t see any reason for that,” she said. Atwood’s early years in the forest endowed her with a sense of self-determination, and with a critical distance on codes of femininity—an ability to see those codes as cultural practices worthy of investigation, not as necessary conditions to be accepted unthinkingly. This capacity for quizzical scrutiny underlies much of her fiction: not accepting the world as it is permits Atwood to imagine the world as it might be.

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Elena Passarello / Animals Strike Curious Poses / Sarabande Books / March 2017 / 12 minutes (3,100 words)

Illustrations from “The Last Menagerie” by Nicole Antebi.

The last Woolly Mammoth died on an island now called Wrangel, which broke from the mainland twelve thousand years ago. They inhabited it for at least eight millennia, slowly inbreeding themselves into extinction. Even as humans developed their civilizations, the mammoths remained, isolated but relatively safe. While the Akkadian king conquered Mesopotamia and the first settlements began at Troy, the final mammoth was still here on Earth, wandering an Arctic island alone.

The last female aurochs died of old age in the Jaktorów Forest in 1627. When the male perished the year before, its horn was hollowed, capped in gold, and used as a hunting bugle by the king of Poland.

The last pair of great auks had hidden themselves on a huge rock in the northern Atlantic. In 1844, a trio of Icelandic bounty hunters found them in a crag, incubating an egg. Two of the hunters strangled the adults to get to the egg, and the third accidentally crushed its shell under his boot.

Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, was pushing thirty when she died. She’d suffered a stroke a few years earlier, and visitors to her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo complained the bird never moved. It must have been strange for the older patrons to see her there on display like some exotic, since fifty years before, there were enough of her kind to eclipse the Ohio sun when they migrated past.

Incas, the final Carolina parakeet, died in the same Cincinnati cage that Martha did, four years after her. Because his long-term mate, Lady Jane, had died the year before, it was said the species fell extinct thanks to Incas’s broken heart.

When Booming Ben, the last heath hen, died on Martha’s Vineyard, they said he’d spent his last days crying out for a female that never came to him. The Vineyard Gazette dedicated an entire issue to his memory: “There is no survivor, there is no future, there is no life to be recreated in this form again. We are looking upon the uttermost finality which can be written, glimpsing the darkness which will not know another ray of light.”

Benjamin, the last thylacine—or Tasmanian tiger—perished in a cold snap in 1936. His handlers at the Beaumaris Zoo had forgotten to let him inside for the night and the striped marsupial froze to death.

The gastric brooding frog—which incubates eggs in its belly and then vomits its o spring into existence—was both discovered and declared extinct within the twelve years that actor Roger Moore played James Bond.

Turgi, the last Polynesian tree snail, died in a London zoo in 1996. According to the Los Angeles Times, “It moved at a rate of less than two feet a year, so it took a while for curators…to be sure it had stopped moving forever.”

The same year, two administrators of a Georgia convalescent center wrote the editor of the journal Nature, soliciting a name for an organism that marks the last of its kind. Among the suggestions were “terminarch,” “ender,” “relict,” “yatim,” and “lastline,” but the new word that stuck was “endling.” Of all the proposed names, it is the most diminutive (like “duckling” or “ ngerling”) and perhaps the most storied (like “End Times”). The little sound of it jingles like a newborn rattle, which makes it doubly sad.

While Nature’s readers were debating vocabulary, a research team in Spain was counting bucardos. A huge mountain ibex, the bucardo was once abundant in the Pyrenees. The eleventh Count of Foix wrote that more of his peasants wore bucardo hides than they did woven cloth; one winter, the count saw five hundred bucardos running down the frozen outcrops near his castle. The bucardo grew shyer over the centuries—which made trophy hunters adore it—and soon disappeared into the treacherous slopes for which it was so well designed.

Though a naturalist declared it hunted from existence at the turn of the twentieth century, a few dozen were spotted deep in the Ordesa Valley in the 1980s. Scientists set cage traps, which caught hundreds of smaller, nonendangered chamois. It was frustrating work, and bucardo numbers dwindled further as the humans searched on. By 1989, they’d trapped only one male and three females. In 1991, the male died and eight years later, the taxon’s endling, Celia, walked right into the researchers’ trap.

She was twelve when they shot her with a blow dart and tied white rags over her eyes to keep her calm. They fit her with a tracking collar and a pulse monitor and biopsied two sections of skin: at the left ear and the ank. Then Celia was released back into the wild to live out the rest of her days. Of the next ten months we know nothing; science cannot report what life was like for Earth’s final bucardo. But the Capra pyrenaica before her had, probably since the late Pleistocene, moved through the seasons in sex-sorted packs. In the female groups, a bucarda of Celia’s age would serve as leader. When they grazed in vulnerable spaces, she’d herd her sisters up the tricky mountain shelves at the rst sign of danger, up and up until the group stood on cli s that were practically vertical. Celia, however, climbed to protect only herself that final winter—and for at least three winters before that, if not for most winters in her rocky life.

It is dangerous to assume that an endling is conscious of its singular status. Wondering if she felt guilty, or felt the universe owed her something—that isn’t just silly; it’s harmful. As is imagining a bucardo standing alone on a vertical cliff , suppressing thoughts of suicide. As is assuming her thoughts turned to whatever the mountain ungulate’s version of prayer might be. Or hoping that, in her life, she felt a fearlessness impossible for those of us that must care for others.

The safe thought is that Celia lived the life she’d been given without any sense of finality. She climbed high up Monte Perdido to graze alone each summer, and hobbled down into the valley by herself before the winters grew too frigid. She ate and groomed and slept, walked deep into the woods, and endured her useless estrus just as she was programmed to do—nothing further.

But then again, a worker ant forever isolated from its colony will walk ceaselessly, refusing to digest food, and a starling will suffer cell death when it has no fellow creature to keep it company. A dying cross spider builds a nest for her o spring even though she’ll never meet them, and a pea aphid will explode itself in the face of a predator, saving its kin. An English-speaking gray parrot once considered his life enough to ask what color he was, and a gorilla used his hands to tell humans the story of how he became an orphan. Not to mention the countless jellyfish that, while floating in the warm seas, have looked to the heavens for guidance.

Though problematic, it’s still easy to call these things representative of what unites our kingdom: we are all hardwired to live for the future. Breeding, dancing, nesting, the night watch—it’s all in service to what comes later. On a cellular level, we seem programmed to work for a future which doesn’t concern us exactly, but that rather involves something that resembles us. We all walk through the woods, our bodies rushing at the atomic level toward the idea that something is next. But is there space in a creature’s DNA to consider the prospect of no next? That one day, nothing that’s us—beyond ourselves—will exist, despite the world that still spins all around us?

Six days into the new millennium, Celia’s collar transmitted the “mortality” beep. A natural death—crushed by a falling tree limb, her neck broken and one horn snapped like a twig. In a photo taken by the humans that fetched her, she seems to have been nestled on her haunches, asleep. They sent Celia to a local taxidermist and then turned to the cells they’d biopsied. After a year spent swimming in liquid nitrogen at 321 degrees below zero, the cells were primed to divide. The Los Angeles Times ran a long article about what might happen next, quoting an environmentalist who warned, “We don’t have the necessary humility in science.”

At the lab, technicians matched a skin cell from Celia with a domestic goat’s egg cell. The goat-egg’s nucleus was removed, and Celia’s nucleus put in its place. Nearly all the DNA of any cell lives inside its nucleus, so this transfer was like putting a perfect Celia curio into the frame of a barnyard goat.

After a mammal’s egg cell is enucleated, it is common for nothing to happen. But sometimes, the reconstructed cell reprograms itself. Thanks to a magic humans don’t totally grasp, the nucleus decides it is now an egg nucleus and then replicates not as skin, but as pluripotent, able to split into skin cells, blood cells, bone cells, muscle cells, nerve cells, cells of the lung.

While this DNA technology evolved, the Celia team cultivated an odd harem of hybrid surrogates—domestic goats mated with the last female bucardos. They had hybrid wombs that the scientists prayed would accept the reconstructed and dividing eggs. In 2003, they placed 154 cloned embryos—Celia in a goat eggshell—into 44 hybrids. Seven of the hybrids were successfully impregnated, and of those seven, just one animal carried a zygote to term. The kid was born July 30, 2003, to a trio of mothers: hybrid womb, goat egg, and magical bucardo nucleus. Genetically speaking, however, the creature was entirely Capra pyrenaica. And so, thirteen hundred days after the tree fell on Celia, her taxon was no longer extinct—for about seven minutes.

The necropsy photos of the bucardo kid are strangely similar to those of Yuka, the juvenile mammoth found frozen in permafrost with wool still clinging to her body. Wet, strangely cute, and lying stretched out on her side, the newborn looks somehow time- less. Her legs seem strong and kinetic, as if she were ready to jump up and run. All of her systems were apparently functional, save her tiny lungs.

In her hybrid mother’s womb, the clone’s lung cells mistakenly built an awful extra lobe, which lodged in her brand-new throat. The kid was born struggling for air and soon died of self-strangulation. Lungs seem the trickiest parts to clone from a mammal; they’re what killed Dolly the sheep as well. How fitting that the most difficult nature to re-create in a lab is the breath of life.

***

The term we now use for the procedure of un-ending an endling has been around for decades, though it was rarely used. “De-extinction” first appeared in a 1979 fantasy novel, after a future-world magician conjures domestic cats back from obscurity. But when the Celia team reported their findings to the journal Theriogenology, they didn’t use the word. A few scientifc papers in fields ranging from cosmology to paleobiology check the name, but it was left almost entirely to science fiction until a dozen years postbucardo. A MacArthur Fellow chided the term’s clunkiness, calling it “painful to write down, much less to say out loud.” But eventually, the buzzword stuck.

“De-extinction” made its popular debut in 2013, in a National Geographic article. To celebrate the coming-out of the term—and the new ways it would allow humans to mark animal lives—the magazine held a conference at their headquarters with lectures organized into four categories: Who, How, Why/Why Not, and Wild Again. Among the How speakers was Ordesa National Wild- life Park’s wildlife director, who recounted the Celia saga. The four-syllable term tangled with the director’s Castilian accent, but people still applauded when he called Celia’s kid “the first ez-tinc-de-tion.” As the audience clapped, the director bowed his head, obviously nervous. Behind him was a projected image of the cloned baby, fresh from her hybrid mother and gagging in the director’s latexed hands. The clone’s tongue lolled out the side of her mouth.

Earlier that morning, an Australian paleontologist confessed his lifelong obsession with thylacines, despite being born nine years after the Tasmanian tiger’s demise. “We killed these things,” he said to the audience. “We shot every one that we saw. We slaughtered them. I think we have a moral obligation to see what we can do about it.” He then explained how he’d detected DNA fragments in the teeth of museum specimens. He vowed to first find the technology to extract the genetic code from the thylacine tooth-scraps, then to rebuild the fragments to make an intact nucleus, and finally to find a viable host womb where a Tasmanian tiger’s egg could incubate—in a Tasmanian devil, perhaps.

The man’s research group, called the Lazarus Project, had just announced their successful cloning of gastric brooding frog cells. The fact that the cells only divided for a few days and then died would not deter his enthusiasm. “Watch this space,” he said. “I think we’re gonna have this frog hopping glad to be alive in the world again.”

Later in the conference, a young researcher from Santa Cruz outlined a plan that allowed humans to “get to witness the passenger pigeon rediscover itself.” But after de-extinction, he said, the birds would still need flying lessons. So why not train homing pigeons to fly passenger routes? To convince the passenger babies they were following their own kind, the young scientist suggested coating the homers with blue and scarlet cosmetic dyes.

That afternoon, the chair of the Megafauna Foundation mentioned how medieval tales and even the thirty-thousand-year-old paintings in Chauvet Cave would help prepare Europe for the herds of aurochs he hoped to resurrect. The head of the conference’s steering committee sounded almost wistful when he concluded at the end of his speech, “Some species that we killed off totally, we could consider bringing back to a world that misses them.” And a Harvard geneticist hinted that mouse DNA could be jiggered to keep the incisors growing from the jawline until they protruded, tusk-like, from the mouth. This DNA patchworking could help fill a gap in our spotty rebuild of the mammoth genome, he said.

Shortly after that talk, a rare naysayer—a conservation biologist from Rutgers—addressed the group: “At this very moment, brave conservationists are risking their lives to protect dwindling groups of existing African elephants from heavily armed poachers, and here we are in this safe auditorium, talking about bringing back the woolly mammoth; think about it.”

But what exactly is there to think about? What can thinking do for us, really, at a moment like this one? We’re knee-deep in the Holocene die-off, slogging through neologisms that remind us what is left. These speeches—of extravagant plans, of Herculean pipe dreams, and of missing—are more than thought; they admit to a spot on our own genome. Perhaps we’ve always held, with submicroscopic scruples, the fact of this as our next. The first time a forged tool sliced a beast up the back was the core of this lonely cell, and then that cell set to split, and now each scientist—onstage and dreaming—is a solitary cry of this atomic, thoughtless fate.

To dispatch animals, then to miss them. To forget their power and use our own cockeyed brawn to rebuild something unreal from the scraps. Each speech, at this very moment, is a little aria of human understanding, but it’s the kind of knowledge that rests on its haunches in places far beyond thought.

And at that very moment, the last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog was dodging his keepers at a biosecure lab in Atlanta. Nicknamed Toughie, the endling hadn’t made a noise in over seven years.

And at that very moment, old Nola and Angalifu, two of the six remaining northern white rhinos, stood in the dirt of the Safari Park at the San Diego Zoo with less than twenty-four months to live. Their keepers had already taken Angalifu’s sperm and would do the same for Nola’s eggs, housing the samples in a lab that had already cataloged cells from ten thousand species. It was a growing trend—this new kind of ark, menagerie, or book of beasts—and it carried a new term for itself: the “frozen zoo.”

The planet’s other northern whites, horns shaved down for their own protection, roamed Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy under constant armed watch. And Celia’s famous cells were buzzing in their cryogenic state, far from Monte Perdido, still waiting for whatever might come next.

And at that very moment, way up in northwest Siberia, a forward-thinking Russian was clearing a space to save the world. As the permafrost melted, he said, it would eventually release catastrophic amounts of surface carbon into the atmosphere. To keep the harmful gases in the rock-hard earth, the Russian and his team wanted to turn the tundra back into the mammoth steppe: restoring grassland and reintroducing ancient megafauna that would stomp the dirt, tend the grass, and let the winter snows seep lower to cool the deep land. The reintroduced beasts, he swore, would send the tundra back in time.

He proposed that for every square kilometer of land there be “five bison, eight horses, and fifteen reindeer,” all of which had already been transported to his “Pleistocene Park.” Here was a space where earlier versions of all these beasts had lived in the tens of thousands of years prior. Eventually, once the science caught up, he would bring one elephant-mammoth hybrid per square kilometer, too.

And so here is a picture of next: some model of gargantuan truck following the Kolyma River—rolling over the open land where mammoths once ran for hundreds of miles. Like a growing many of us, the Russian sees the moment in which that truck’s cargo door opens and a creature—not quite Yuka but certainly not elephant—lumbers out into the grass. Her first steps would be less than five hundred miles as the crow fiies, out and out over the Arctic, from the island where the last living mammoth fell into the earth 3,600 years ago.

The Russian’s process—making new beasts to tread on the bones of what are not quite their ancestors—has a fresh label for itself, as everything about this world is new. The sound of this just-coined word, when thrown by a human voice into a safe auditorium, carries with it the hope of a do-over, and the thrust of natural danger.

That new word is re-wilding.

***

Excerpted from Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello. Copyright Elena Passarello, published with permission of Sarabande Books, Inc., 2017.

Walk into the offices of Memac Ogilvy Advize, an advertising firm on the third floor of a car rental building in a business district of West Amman, Jordan, and you’ll be greeted with an immense black-and-white photo of Donald Trump’s face. The red cursive text printed across it reads: “We Trumped the awards.”

The sign sits behind a reception counter boasting a large trophy won at the Dubai Lynx 2017, an annual advertising competition where Memac Ogilvy won the Grand Prix for PR (a first for any Jordanian agency) along with four other silver and gold prizes, for trolling Trump in their ads on behalf of Royal Jordanian Airlines.

🍊 ⛔️✈️️ #USElections pic.twitter.com/yBDVO2w3gb

— Royal Jordanian (@RoyalJordanian) November 8, 2016

Royal Jordanian, the once-obscure national carrier of the small desert kingdom of Jordan, has been making a name for itself as the Middle Eastern airline that dared to mock Trump. Its first ad—the one that won Memac Ogilvy all those awards—was a simple image published on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram on November 8, 2016, just before the U.S. election results were announced. The ad showed economy and business class prices for RJ flights to Chicago, Detroit, and New York, with a few snarky lines above: “Just in case he wins… Travel to the U.S. while you’re still allowed to!”

That ad went viral, with an organic reach of 450 million, an 80.3 percent positive response, and press coverage on 26 official news sites and blogs, according to Memac Ogilvy.

The campaign summary that the agency later submitted for the advertising competition was simple. Objective? “Sell more plane tickets to the U.S.” Method? “Use Donald Trump’s ban of Muslims to our advantage.” Campaign budget? “Zero USD.”

According to a video of the award acceptance on the ad agency’s Facebook page, RJ bookings to the U.S. increased by 50 percent after the campaign. “We tweeted more than Trump himself,” the voiceover narration noted.

✈ 🇺🇸 ✅ #DonaldTrump #MuslimBan pic.twitter.com/rptY3dS3Xh

— Royal Jordanian (@RoyalJordanian) February 5, 2017

In early February, when American judges blocked Trump’s ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, RJ stepped into the conversation once again, releasing an ad with the word “Ban” scratched out and changed to “Bon Voyage!” Flights to New York, Chicago, and Detroit were on sale, the image announced, urging customers, “Fly to the U.S. with RJ now that you’re allowed to.” The sentiment was especially pertinent for Jordan, which hosts millions of refugees and displaced people from countries like Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen—all of which had been included in Trump’s executive order.

On March 22, when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that electronics “larger than a smartphone” would be banned as carry-on items for flights departing from 10 Middle Eastern and North African airports, including Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport, RJ spoke up again. The airline responded to the #electronicsban, first with a poem beginning with “Every week a new ban,” then with a list of “12 things to do on a 12-hour flight with no laptop or tablet,” and finally with a recommendation to “Do what we Jordanians do best… Stare at each other!” The posts have already garnered tens of thousands of shares as well as international media coverage lauding RJ’s response to the laptop ban as “snarky,” “cheeky” and “perfect.”

#electronicsban 🚫 pic.twitter.com/U3S7sdkipy

— Royal Jordanian (@RoyalJordanian) March 23, 2017

The mastermind behind all these campaigns is Hadi Alaeddin, a 31-year-old Palestinian-Jordanian art director at Memac Ogilvy who also designs posters and T-shirts on the side. He co-runs a branding service called Warsheh and does some work with Jo Bedu, a popular Jordanian brand known for its tongue-in-cheek T-shirts and arabizi (Arabic/English) puns.

When I met Alaeddin, together with Khalil Atieh and Aya Nasif, two Jordanian millennials who handle client services for the Royal Jordanian campaign, they told me that the Trump ads were a spontaneous idea.

“It was real-time, on the spot. We didn’t have a strategy,” Nasif said. “Hadi just thought of it.”

Eight months ago, Royal Jordanian approached Memac Ogilvy seeking help with an image refresh. Founded by the late Jordanian King Hussein bin Talal in 1963, the national carrier had been faithfully flying from the Levant across the region for decades, but developed a somewhat stuffy, overly institutional feel in the process. “RJ wanted to be a ‘fun brand,’” Nasif explained, especially as it struggled to compete with lavishly funded Gulf airlines like Emirates and Qatar Airways. While oil-rich competitors can afford to produce Jennifer Aniston commercials and to paint planes with roses for Valentine’s Day, Jordan’s airline has a far smaller budget. So, it decided to play to its strength: humor—specifically, Jordanian humor, with just the right touch of sarcasm.

“Jordan can definitely compete with the Gulf,” Alaeddin said, noting that his country has a local way of being, a shared mentality rooted in Levantine culture, which an international metropolis like Dubai may lack. “We have our own humor, culture, and way of talking. We have our personality. That’s our edge.”

👨🏻‍💻⛔👩🏻‍💻🇯🇴 #electronicsban pic.twitter.com/3csTSEePg7

— Royal Jordanian (@RoyalJordanian) March 23, 2017

The point of RJ’s Trump ads is not to be political, Alaeddin told me, but to personalize the brand, so that people can relate to the airline as they would to a Jordanian uncle, not to some cold, inaccessible business.

“It’s never about politics. The whole world was following the election. People don’t follow the election for politics. It’s just what everyone is talking about,” Alaeddin said. So when everyone was discussing Trump’s comments about banning Muslims, the ad agency joined in, the way a Jordanian uncle would. “We just made a silly joke. And people responded to it.”

Within an hour of the first Trump ad, Alaeddin’s phone battery had died from all the notifications that kept popping up. People across the world were responding, even those with no ties to the region or plans to fly Royal Jordanian. “Even non-Muslims globally saw that the sweeping statement was ridiculous for a president-to-be,” Atieh said. “They said things like, ‘Thank you for making fun of this,’ especially since the joke was coming from the people who are most affected.”

I watched from inside the Memac Ogilvy office as the team released their most popular recent ad—the “12 things to do on a 12-hour flight” ad—including the pointed number 12: “Think of reasons why you don’t have a laptop or tablet with you.” I wondered: Was that supposed to imply that the ban is nonsensical? (DHS appeared to be concerned about potential explosives hidden in electronics following intelligence reports, and the similar British ban seems to be based on this intelligence as well.) Why didn’t the ad directly name Trump, or contain an explicit message about security threats?

“We’re kind of passive-aggressive,” Alaeddin laughed, adding that RJ did publish an official release about the details of the ban, but that talking about terror is a poor marketing strategy. “Our job is not to tell people there’s a ban. People already know. Our job is to communicate in a lighthearted way that, yeah, this is happening, but here’s our point of view.”

Royal Jordanian doesn’t want to lose business, but they also can’t force American policy to change. So they’ll do the next best thing, which is to affirm the overwhelming response from their customers and from residents of Jordan writ large: “It’s annoying!” Nasif said. “All of us travel. I can only imagine how it would have been when I was in university, having to worry about this whenever I flew home from the States.”

“We know it’s annoying and we’re trying our best to accommodate,” Alaeddin said, adding that they’d given RJ some ideas about ways to enhance on-board entertainment without laptops. The comments on RJ’s Facebook ads are filled with requests for free inflight Wi-Fi, for example. If Jordanians can’t impact the American president’s decisions, at least they can feel that their airline cares what they think, and then support RJ in return.

After all, that’s what made the first Trump ad so successful. “It was a lighthearted response to a somewhat hateful claim,” Alaeddin said. “More importantly, it sold.”

Twenty years ago, when Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on The WB, it’s hard to imagine anyone conceiving of what a phenomenon the show would become—a hit TV series, yes, but also a platform through which pop-culture theorists and sociologists alike could consider the dynamics of American teenaged life around the turn of the millennium. “Buffy Studies” have become a thriving faction within academia, while streaming services have kept the show on the contemporary cultural radar. In a media landscape where people continue to be surprised that teenaged girls engage with political issues, the idea of a perky blonde cheerleader being tasked with saving the world is still strikingly subversive.

One of the most revolutionary things Buffy did, though, was take teenagers—and their pain—seriously. The show’s central conceit of having Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) be a “chosen one” destined to protect the earth from vampires and monsters offered a fairly typical setup for a supernatural drama, but the twist was that many of Buffy’s boogeymen were based on real sources of teenage angst. Here were metaphorical demons made literal: a controlling mother who lives vicariously through her daughter, a friend whose behavior becomes unrecognizable when he joins a pack of popular kids, a classmate so lonely and isolated she becomes literally invisible. By having intangible issues manifest themselves as physical monsters, Buffy made them accessible, and manageable.

As the show progressed, its creator, Joss Whedon, experimented more with the boundaries of what Buffy could do. In season four, concerned that the show’s great strength—its dialogue— was overriding its other qualities, he wrote an episode, “Hush,” in which every single character lost their voice. In season six, he conceived a musical episode in which the characters found themselves spontaneously bursting into song. And in season five, he wrote what many critics and fans consider to be Buffy’s superlative moment: an episode in which a central character died from natural causes, and which showed everyone else experiencing the shock, anger, and grief of her death in real time.

“The Body,” which aired on February 27, 2001, opened by repeating a scene that had concluded the previous episode. Buffy returns home, walking through her front door, commenting on some flowers sitting on the hall table, and calling out to her mother, who’s lying on the couch. When Buffy sees that her mother is motionless, she pauses, and her expression shifts. “Mom?” she says. She repeats the word, more urgently. Then, quieter: “Mommy?”

For Whedon, the episode was born out of a desire to explore and expose the real emotional responses to losing a loved one. On television, death is usually cheap: a device that precipitates a narrative arc, or writes out an actor who wants to leave, or functions as a ploy for ratings. Although some of these factors were involved in “The Body”—the death of Buffy’s mother, Joyce (Kristine Sutherland) marked a turning point for Buffy’s maturity into adulthood—Whedon wanted to focus not on the pain and catharsis of grief, but on how surreal and physically strange it can be. “What I really wanted to capture,” he later explained in the DVD commentary, “was the extreme physicality, the extreme—the almost boredom of the very first few hours.”

The first 13 minutes of the episode are set entirely in Buffy’s home. There’s a flashback to Thanksgiving, and then a swift and jarring cut to the present, where Buffy notices her mother’s body, calls 911, attempts to administer CPR, and responds to the paramedics. Joyce’s body—clearly and noticeably dead from an audience perspective—is visibly jarring, shown in close-up to have a grey pallor and an expression of shock. The title of the episode captures the impact of the physical presence in the living room, and the strangeness of Joyce’s sudden metamorphosis from a living entity into a dead one. Buffy, noticing that Joyce’s skirt has hiked up around her waist during her attempts to administer CPR, pulls it down before the paramedics arrive, conveying how wrong and obscene her mother’s death seems.

The sheer weirdness of this transmogrification from Joyce to “the body” is a theme throughout the episode. “She’s cold,” Buffy tells the dispatcher on the phone. “The body is cold?” the woman asks. “My mom is cold,” Buffy responds. Later, when Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) arrives and attempts to revive Joyce, not knowing the paramedics have already declared her dead, Buffy shouts, “We’re not supposed to move the body!” before clamping a hand to her mouth in shock, horrified at the consequences of what she’s just said. Stylistically, too, Whedon employs directorial devices to convey the disorientation Buffy feels. When a paramedic talks to her, the camera focuses on his chest below his head, and when Buffy picks up the phone, the buttons seem huge and distorted in perspective. There’s no music throughout the episode, with the few sounds that can be heard (children playing, wind chimes) marking the contrast between Buffy’s absurd reality and the world outside.

The peculiarity of the rest of Sunnydale carrying on as usual while the world of Buffy and her friends has upended is echoed later, when Xander (Nicholas Brendon) double parks his car going to pick up Willow (Alyson Hannigan), and duly receives a parking ticket at the end of the scene. Buffy’s friends, meanwhile, represent different responses to grief. Xander is angry, raging at the doctors and punching a hole in the wall. Willow is panicky and indecisive, obsessing over small details like her outfit rather than confronting the real source of her pain. Tara (Amber Benson) is supportive and accepting, with it emerging later that she’s experienced this before. And Anya (Emma Caulfield), a former demon who only recently became human, communicates a childlike response to Joyce’s death, asking irritating questions repeatedly and mimicking the behavior she observes from others. (When she clasps Giles in an awkward bear hug, it’s one of the few elements of humor in the episode.) Her monologue, after being told it’s not OK to ask such blunt questions, is one of the most moving moments in “The Body”:

But I don’t understand! I don’t understand how all this happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her and then she’s—there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead anymore. It’s stupid. It’s mortal and stupid. And Xander’s crying and not talking, and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch, ever, and she’ll never have eggs, or yawn, or brush her hair, and no one will explain to me why!

But it’s the scenes with Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), Buffy’s younger sister, that put the episode in context with everything Buffy has done over the past four seasons. When Dawn first appears in the episode, she’s crying in a bathroom at school because a classmate has spread rumors that she self-harms, and everyone thinks she’s a freak. This moment of pain—real for Dawn, but also surmountable, since she soon wipes her eyes and walks out of the bathroom head held high—is  juxtaposed with Dawn’s reaction when Buffy tells her that their mother is dead. The scene is observed externally by the audience, through a glass wall, and most of the words are imperceptible. But Dawn’s reaction, as she breaks into sobs and physically crumples to the ground, is unmistakable. Buffy, who’s spent the first half of the episode in vivid close-up, is seen from a distance, too, shifting roles from suffering impossibly to comforting her sister.

In this scene, Buffy draws an intriguing line. Throughout previous episodes, the show has told viewers that their experiences and their heartbreaks growing up have been real and powerful, from being bullied to being dumped. “The Body” manages to communicate, though, that there are a few certain life moments that change you irrevocably, and it does so without undermining the significance of other things that feel life-shattering in the moment. It presents a realistic experience of grief, reaching out to viewers who’ve endured it, and making it more comprehensible for those who haven’t. In tackling the less familiar aspects of death—boredom, shock, awkwardness—it offers a more truthful depiction of bereavement.

“The Body” is one of the most sophisticated analyses of the impact of death ever produced on television, and it remains a testament to why Buffy was so unique. “There’s things,” Tara tells Buffy about her own mother dying when she was 17. “Thoughts and reactions I had that I couldn’t understand. Or even try to explain to anybody else.” The power of Buffy is that it understands those thoughts, and does try to explain them, all in the guise of being a teen drama about vampires.

I’ve never read a scientific paper that so thoroughly gripped me in the first paragraph, so I will let the authors of a new paper from the journal Scientific Reports speak for themselves.

Readers of “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn might remember how the book starts: “In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream - and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old” (p. ix). That very same news item in Nature (‘Priroda’) continued by reporting what Solzhenitsyn did not: that in May 1946 unnamed prisoners of GULAG recovered a nest with three complete mummified carcasses of arctic ground squirrels at a depth of 12.5 meters of the permafrost sediments of the El’ga river (the upper Indigirka river basin, Yakutia). The carcasses were extremely well preserved and “smelled of dampness immediately upon their recovery but lost the smell after having air-dried and remained in a stable condition resembling that of the mummies” (p. 76). It was suggested that they had lain in the permafrost for at least 10–12 thousand years.

It turned out to be even longer, 30,000 years, according to new radiocarbon dating.

The paper goes on to describe how the team, led by Nikolai Formozov at Lomonosov Moscow State University, sequenced DNA from one of the mummified carcasses, along with DNA from four fossils found recently in Siberian permafrost and modern day Arctic ground squirrels. It was all a long time coming. Formozov first suggested studying the squirrels 25 years ago—a small blip of time when you’re talking about creatures that have laid in the ground for millennia but still, a long time in the span of a single scientist’s career.

* * *

The hard part was not, actually, getting access to the famous specimens, whose modern provenance is well documented. The unknown prisoners had turned the squirrels over to the Gulag camp’s geologist, Yuriy Popov, who gave two of them to the Zoological Museum in what is now St. Petersburg. The third, preserved in alcohol, is at the Magadan Regional Museum of Local Lore, closer to the camp where it was originally found.

Years ago, Formozov and his colleagues took some mummified squirrel tissue and extracted their DNA. They did it three or four times, only to end up with three or four different results. The problem, it turned out, was their lab, which was contaminated with DNA from modern day ground squirrels they also studied. The results always matched whatever modern squirrel species happened to be in the lab recently.

Ancient DNA is tricky like this. Over time, long coiled strands of DNA fragment into shorter pieces. The older, the more fragmented, leaving few intact strands for the scientists to sequence. Meanwhile, the cells of present-day ground squirrels are bursting with fresh DNA that can easily drown out the bits of intact ancient DNA. “It is impossible to study ancient and modern DNA of the same group at the same time in a lab,” Formozov wrote to me in an email. “So we stopped.”

Then, a reunion with an old university classmate, Marina Faerman, set things back on course. At a mutual friend’s apartment in 2010, Formozov remet Faerman, who like many Russians of Jewish descent, had moved to Israel in the 1980s. She now had a lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studying ancient human DNA, which meant 1) she was an expert in handling ancient DNA and 2) her lab was uncontaminated by modern squirrels. “It took about a minute to convince her to take part in this project,” said Formozov.

Around this time, Formozov remembered the preface to The Gulag Archipelago, which he, like many in the then Soviet Union, vividly recalls reading. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book was the first historical account of what happened in the Gulag camps, and it circulated in samizdat in the Soviet Union. Formozov’s family owned the first volume, he says, smuggled in from the west. The second volume was passed among friends, who had it for a few days at a time. The third volume was “extremely rare,” and he recalls having only three hours to read it in a friend’s home. If he could find the scientific paper referenced by Solzhenitsyn, Formozov thought, perhaps he could learn more about the origin of these mummified squirrels. In half an hour of scanning old copies of the journal Priroda, he found the original note by Yuriy Popov, the Gulag camp geologist.*

For Formozov, this wasn’t just an interesting bit of trivia, but the meeting of two long-time interests. About twenty-five years earlier, he learned that two of his teachers had taken part in the bloody uprising at Kengir, another Soviet labor camp, that is described in detail in The Gulag Archipelago. He became interested in the Kengir uprising and helped organize international conferences about Gulag uprisings in the early 1990s. It is with the weight of all this history in mind that he took to studying the squirrels originally found by Gulag prisoners.

* * *

The team ultimately sequenced one of the mummified squirrels found near the camp as long with four mummified squirrels more recently pulled out of the ground in Siberia. Because ancient DNA is so degraded, they sequenced only one gene. Yet that was enough to sketch out the relationships between these ancient Arctic ground squirrels and present day ones. The Ice Age was not a period of constant cold, but a period of fluctuations, when it warmed and cooled. Where the squirrels could live changed, too. So the squirrels that once lived in eastern Russia had actually gone extinct, the DNA analysis suggested. The squirrels that live in Siberia today are descendants of a later group that crossed the Bering land bridge from Alaska to colonize the area. The only known exception are squirrels on the Kamchatka peninsula that juts out of Russia’s east coast, which appear to be descended from the Ice Age squirrels. (Formozov also wrote me a magnificent email about how they collected the Kamchatka squirrels. It involves a fox.)

“I love this paper. It’s really cool,” said Tim Rabanus-Wallace, who works with ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide. “The science behind it is very solid.” At least as solid as any ancient DNA work can be, as Rabanus-Wallace knows, because he has done preliminary work sequencing ancient Arctic ground squirrels in the Yukon in Canada.

Here might be a good place to dwell on the fact that these ancient squirrels nests are also found in North America—often, in fact. The region comprising Siberia and western North America is known as Beringia, and it was of course once a contiguous region when the Bering land bridge existed.  In the Yukon today, gold miners shoot water cannons to melt permafrost, which occasionally exposes the nests that ancient Arctic ground squirrels made to hibernate through winter.** And even more occasionally, some of those squirrels never made it out of hibernation. Bad for the squirrel, but very good for Arctic ground squirrel researchers because underground lockers are the safest place to store a fossil. “They make the perfect kind of fossils,” said Grant Zazula, a paleontologist with the government of Yukon.

Ancient Arctic ground squirrels are also interesting, scientifically, because these little creatures build nests. In other words, they go out and do the work of collecting Ice Age flora and saving it in an underground deep freeze for you. “They’re quite a neat little record,” said Zazula. He went on, “Most paleontologists who study the Ice Age, especially men, study these big wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. When I’m at the conferences, I get up and say I study ground squirrels. But that’s okay.”

Sequencing ancient Arctic ground squirrels in North America would help confirm the findings in this study. Zazula and Formozov both say they’re open to collaboration, and they’ve corresponded with each other in the past. It’s gotten harder to collaborate with scientists in Russia recently, says Zazula, given the political winds. But as the shared lineage of Arctic ground squirrels reminds us, it’s really just a short hop across the Bering Sea.

---

* The opening of The Gulag Archipelago goes on to describe what Popov reported, that the prisoners who found the prehistoric fauna in ice “immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.” In an article in the Russian literary journal Novy Mir, Formozov wrote that this was unlikely, given that animals encased in permafrost lose moisture over time and become hard like wood. It’s likely those creatures were just fish stuck in a frozen river. But did he consider, I asked, even briefly when first reading the account that specimens might have been eaten? “Who knows what truly hungry people are capable of eating or trying to eat,” he replied, “The year 1946 was a very hungry one in Kolyma [the Gulag camp]. So we should be very thankful to those unnamed prisoners who saved those carcasses because they found the time and strength to do it in those terrible conditions.”

** You might be wondering how these little creatures dug nests in the permafrost, and the answer is they didn’t. The Ice Age was colder, which also meant there was less moisture around. With less moisture, there wasn’t enough liquid water in the ground to freeze into permafrost. These areas only later became permafrost, which had the effect of preserving the nests.

You could be forgiven for forgetting the National Day of Patriotic Devotion—technically, it happened before it was ever declared. Donald Trump established it with a stroke of a pen sometime after his inauguration; the official proclamation appeared Monday in the Federal Register.

That bit isn’t all that unusual. Presidents christen National Days Of Things all the time. President Barack Obama, for example, proclaimed the day of his own inauguration in 2009 a “National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation,” calling “upon all of our citizens to serve one another and the common purpose of remaking this Nation for our new century.” He annually declared September 11 to be “Patriot Day.” But “Patriotic Devotion” strikes a different note—flowery, vaguely compulsory.

Here’s the proclamation:

A new national pride stirs the American soul and inspires the American heart. We are one people, united by a common destiny and a shared purpose.

Freedom is the birthright of all Americans, and to preserve that freedom we must maintain faith in our sacred values and heritage.

Our Constitution is written on parchment, but it lives in the hearts of the American people. There is no freedom where the people do not believe in it; no law where the people do not follow it; and no peace where the people do not pray for it.

There are no greater people than the American citizenry, and as long as we believe in ourselves, and our country, there is nothing we cannot accomplish.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim January 20, 2017, as National Day of Patriotic Devotion, in order to strengthen our bonds to each other and to our country -- and to renew the duties of Government to the people.

It’s hard to imagine Trump tweeting: “A new national pride stirs the American soul” in one of his tweets. It sounds more like the language of his inaugural address, which the administration has insisted Trump wrote himself, but which was reportedly actually written by former Breitbart News head Steve Bannon and senior adviser Stephen Miller.

The proclamation speaks of the need to “strengthen our bonds to each other and to our country.” That parallels this section from his speech on Friday:

At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other. When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.

Presidential proclamations can go over the top. Those who felt a shiver of discomfort reading Trump’s florid prose should remember that Bill Clinton sounded similarly grandiose when declaring, say, Irish-American Heritage Month. (Barack Obama, on the other hand, kept his proclamations relatively conversational.)

But it’s not the words that are jarring. It’s the sentiment, which seems out of step with what the president himself usually says. Trump is an individualist; his books and speeches largely center on the ability of one person—often him—to do stuff. When he talks about America as a whole, it’s usually in the frame of his “movement,” which of course reflects back on him.

The proclamation instead focuses on America as a national community —and sounds much more like Bannon. He’s said that America is more than an economy, it’s a “civic society”—implying that the number of successful immigrants in Silicon Valley poses a threat to that. When the proclamation declares that Americans must “maintain faith in our sacred values and heritage,” it’s hard to tell whether it’s a banal sentiment, or an echo of the more troubling rumbles of white-identity politics.

And like his inaugural speech, Trump’s proclamation is devoid of history. He does offer a mention of the Constitution. But while Obama often tried to broaden what it means to be an American by weaving the traditional veneration of the Founding Fathers together with other moments of American triumph, such as the civil-rights movement, Trump leaves what “patriotism” means up to interpretation. That, and the fact that the proclamation was timed to his own inauguration, led critics to suggest it means devotion to Trump himself, the defender of those “sacred values and heritage,” the rightful successor to a president whose legitimacy he never really stopped questioning.

“Patriotic Devotion” is itself a phrase with a decidedly martial ring. The last president to declare a Day of Patriotic Devotion was Woodrow Wilson, marking the enactment of a draft for World War One. In 1943, when Congress attempted to establish December 7 as a day to recognize the “patriotic devotion” of members of the armed forces, FDR vetoed the bill. “I think that a more suitable date can be selected for this purpose,” he wrote.

The president’s critics felt much the same about his decision to declare his own inauguration a holiday. If, as the proclamation declared, its intent was “ to strengthen our bonds to each other,” it ended up having the opposite effect—serving as one more point of division.

If there is no doubting the good that humanitarian groups have done in the last half century, there is also no doubting that they could have done much more. Effectiveness has rarely been their lodestar, and one reason why is that the sector has lacked a stable reference point against which to judge interventions, other than the status quo. That is, in order to be considered worthwhile, a humanitarian act only had to bear the burden of making a marginal improvement in the condition of those it sought to help.

In the U.S., the lack of a more ambitious threshold made a certain kind of sense. For one, the nation’s charitable tradition has long celebrated voluntary acts of giving as expressions of individual preferences and passions, and has historically resisted any constraints, regulatory or conceptual, on donors’ choices. And the country’s deeply ingrained sense of pluralism has favored a multiplicity of approaches to addressing poverty over singling out one in particular as a standard.

But that logic may no longer hold: A new trend within the humanitarian sector—the increasing popularity of simply transferring cash to people in need—now allows for the establishment of a charitable benchmark. In other words, before a donor gives a gift—say, to support an agricultural training program in sub-Saharan Africa, or to provide food in the aftermath of an earthquake in Pakistan—they would first ask themselves if their money would be better spent if given directly to the same aid recipients and letting them decide what to do with the money. A no-strings-attached transfer of funds may sound indiscriminate, but as a panel of development researchers from the Center for Global Development (CGD) and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) pronounced last year, “Cash transfers are among the most well-researched and rigorously-evaluated humanitarian tools of the last decade,” and should be thought of “as the ‘first best’ response to crises.” Given that the evidence has shown cash transfers to be an inexpensive and “highly effective way to reduce suffering,” the panel’s report went on, “The question that should be asked is ‘Why not cash?’”

Those three words are together an interrogation that breaks with the foundations of modern charitable giving, placing the onus on donors, big and small, to defend the priority of their own humanitarian prerogatives against those of the people they seek to help. For some, this will be a heavy load. “The aid sector in general is bad at trusting people and reluctant to hand over power and control,” Paul Harvey, a researcher at ODI, has written. “It’s fundamentally premised on the idea of the external experts deciding what is needed and providing it. Cash challenges that.”

Researchers’ excitement about transferring money directly may make it sound like a novel strategy, but in truth its popularity marks the rehabilitation of cash relief as an accepted form of charity. For centuries, giving money directly to those in need was considered one of the quintessential acts of kindness. In Catholic tradition, almsgiving was honored not as a means of eliminating poverty but for the intimacy it established between giver and receiver. Little consideration was given to how alms were ultimately spent—it was beside the salvific point.

Yet that began to change as poverty became increasingly understood less as a providentially determined state than as a reflection of individual moral failing. From the 15th century onward, breakdowns in the social order, produced by epidemics and war, by the erosion of the feudal system, and later, by the stirrings of industrialization, led many of those with resources to regard people in need as a suspect class that threatened their own status. For authorities who sought to organize and formalize the labor market, idleness became a primary preoccupation, and throughout Europe, begging by the able-bodied was routinely criminalized, punishable by whipping or branding.

These efforts were focused on the recipients of charity, but by the 19th century, an equal amount of energy was devoted to disciplining the donors as well. In an 1889 article that came to be known as the “Gospel of Wealth,” for instance, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie went so far as to declare “indiscriminate” almsgiving to the poor “one of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race.” He called out the folly of a “well-known writer of philosophic books [who had] admitted the other day that he had given a quarter of a dollar to a man who approached him as he was coming to visit the house of his friend.” The writer knew nothing of the habits of the beggar or of the uses that he would make of the money; most likely, Carnegie suggested, the beggar would spend it “improperly,” on drink or some other excess. “It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea than so spent as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy,” he wrote.

It was Carnegie’s belief that the wealthy should apply the same attributes that led to the accumulation of a fortune toward its philanthropic redistribution. That’s one of the reasons why he argued that any capitalist who raised wages was effectively frittering away an enterprise’s earnings, since workers would only squander the gains, which could have been directed toward ambitious philanthropic ends. In other words, Carnegie’s “Gospel” insisted that those furthest removed from poverty were best equipped to combat it. Over the following century, a technocratic mode of analysis echoed this version of stewardship to make a related argument: Those endowed with advanced professional training and research expertise—as in, the men and women who began to populate the humanitarian sector—should make the decisions about how charitable resources could be best used to address global poverty.

It was against this institutional backdrop that cash transfers started gaining in popularity. As early as 1981, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen made a moral and philosophical case for cash transfers as a response to humanitarian crises. Beginning in the late 1990s, in an effort to reduce poverty, governments in Latin America designed conditional cash transfers, contingent on recipients’ complying with some predetermined requirement, such as regular school attendance or health check-ups for their children; by 2011, 18 countries in the region had instituted such programs, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa developed versions as well. Then, in 2004, the tsunami that ravaged nations on the Indian Ocean prompted a number of large aid agencies to experiment with cash transfers as an alternative to in-kind assistance.

Since then, an impressive base of evidence has developed around the success of cash transfers. The humanitarian sector has become more open to rigorous self-examination, with some organizations using randomized controlled trials to measure their programs’ effectiveness. The findings of some of those evaluations have put to rest one of the governing assumptions behind the centuries-long suspicion of cash transfers: that, if given additional funds, the poor would waste them on drugs, alcohol, or some other antisocial frivolity.

Instead, the research suggests, poor recipients tend to spend money responsibly, on what they think they need most. Researchers have found that a lot of in-kind aid is wasted when it doesn’t match what recipients think they need—they just sell it or give it away. In fact, a recent four-country study that compared cash transfers to food aid found that nearly 20 percent more people could be helped at no additional cost if everyone received cash. And beyond their cost-effectiveness, unconditional cash transfers promote autonomy as a good in its own right, re-prioritizing the discretion of the beneficiary, as opposed to that of the benefactor.

The popularity of cash transfers has gotten a further boost from technological advances. Ten years ago, even if a donor had a preference for cash, many countries lacked the infrastructure to deliver it expeditiously. But the rise of digital payment systems, widespread cell-phone ownership, and increased access to financial services—more than 60 percent of all adults globally have an account at a financial institution or through a mobile device—has made cash transfers a much more viable option.

This convergence of evaluative rigor and technological advances helps explain the rise of GiveDirectly, the charity that has most aggressively implemented charitable unconditional cash transfers. GiveDirectly has developed programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, pooling donations and then electronically transferring $1,000 to each of the households it has identified as the poorest in the region. The organization then monitors the recipients and conducts randomized controlled trials to evaluate its programs. It’s a relatively simple concept, though it took a while for GiveDirectly to convince potential funders of its merits: One fundraising pitch in Silicon Valley was reportedly met with the response, “You must be smoking crack.” But investors couldn’t ignore the organization’s data, and soon GiveDirectly had attracted funds from Google and from several of Facebook’s co-founders.

Given their effectiveness, it is surprising that cash transfers still represent a “niche form of aid,” as the CGD-ODI panel’s report phrased it. The panel estimated that it now represents only 6 percent of global humanitarian relief, though this figure includes conditional and unconditional cash transfers, as well as vouchers that can only be applied to specific types of goods or services. But there is a strong push now to boost these figures. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s recently called for cash-based programs to become “the preferred and default method of support” for humanitarian aid. And last year, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) announced it will “systemically default to a preference of cash over material assistance,” and committed to delivering a quarter of its humanitarian aid in the form of cash relief by 2020 (up from around 6 percent in 2015). For its part, the CGD-ODI panel did not recommend a particular percentage of cash to aim for, but argued that it should be an “ambitious” scale-up, one “an order of magnitude greater than that seen to date.”

It’s important to note that even cash transfers’ more enthusiastic boosters do not claim it as a cure-all, and insist that its appropriateness as a humanitarian or development response can still hinge on the particularities of recipients and the regions in which they live. There are still also significant implementation challenges in increasing the use of unconditional cash transfers in impoverished places throughout the world. Many areas still lack the necessary financial and technological infrastructure and have difficulty attracting the private and public investments to develop it. Even in places with the right systems, transfers are still not always possible: In 2013, after a typhoon in the Philippines damaged cell-phone towers and wiped out service in large parts of the nation, aid agencies had to deliver cash to the various islands by helicopter.

And further, there are plenty of situations in which alternative interventions prove more cost-effective than cash transfers. For example, GiveWell, a charity evaluator that has been a major supporter of GiveDirectly (and, full disclosure, to which I have served as a consultant on projects unrelated to cash transfers), has determined that distributing insecticide-treated mosquito nets—which evidence suggests people do not seem inclined to buy, even if they are offered at cheap prices—is roughly five to 10 times more cost-effective in saving lives than direct unconditional cash transfers.

More generally, though, cash might hold as great a promise for the humanitarian sector as an evaluative tool as it does a means of aid. GiveWell has begun to use cash relief as a baseline against which to compare other charities. And Jeremy Shapiro, a co-founder of GiveDirectly, likens the potential of cash benchmarking to the success of index funds, which are investments that track the performance of major market indexes such as the S&P 500. Originating in the 1970s, index funds don’t require as much active oversight and thus often boast lower operating costs and advisory fees; their supporters suspected that they would outperform most actively managed funds—and they were right.

Cash transfers, Shapiro points out, are similar to index funds in that both have been proven to achieve relatively impressive “returns” with extremely low overhead. Just as the existence of an investment instrument with low fees forced actively managed funds to justify their costs, the emergence of cash transfers might function as a galvanizing counter-factual, requiring aid organizations to demonstrate that their favored approaches are doing more good than would simply giving the money to the poor directly. Cash “keeps us honest,” says Radha Rajkotia, the senior director of economic recovery and development at the IRC, adding, “It helps really home in on how we might design our programs differently so that we might reduce time and cost and be just as effective.”

Index funds are not a perfect analogy: Earnings provide a uniform standard by which to compare a diverse range of investment funds, whereas in the humanitarian arena, there is a range of outcomes that can be targeted—health, economic security, individual empowerment, to name just a few. But it’s possible to account for this variety of goals, and GiveDirectly has begun working with institutional donors to help them run randomized controlled trials to compare the impacts of cash to other development interventions. This research will allow donors to better understand how various amounts of cash can help the people they seek to assist—to ascertain, for instance, how much a child’s nutritional intake improves when his family is given $500, versus $1,000, in cash. The goal of this research is to create a sort of measuring stick by which aid agencies can determine which interventions make the most of donors’ money.

But cash can serve as a sort of moral benchmark as well. As Elie Hassenfeld, one of the founders of GiveWell, explains, weighing programs against cash transfers prompts a powerful thought experiment for charities: Would they be willing to take money from someone they’re trying to help, just so they can provide what they insist is needed? Would they, in a sense, be willing to impose a tax on poor families to fund their favored intervention? The same logic can guide individual donors as well. Asking that powerful three-word question—“Why not cash?”—can keep any potential giver honest, forcing them to think more critically, and perhaps even more humbly, about how they seek to do good in the world.