In the new print issue of Esses, a quarterly print magazine covering motorsports and the culture around it, Duncan Fyfe writes about the most bizarre Formula One video game ever made. Centered around Gerhard Berger, a former racing driver from Austria who competed in F1 from 1984 to 1997, Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz is a quirky video game from 1993 that raises more questions than it asks. Fyfe digs into the mystery, investigating the quiz’s grammatically awkward questions and the game’s developer, Austria Soft, whose existence is questionable. (Esses subscription may be required—consider becoming a member.)
THE REAL QUIZ, it soon becomes clear, is not a test of one’s F1 knowledge, but figuring out what the game expects to hear. This only becomes more difficult, and even sinister. Question nine: FROM WHAT COUNTRY IS JEAN ALESI REALLY? The answer is not France, where Alesi was born and grew up, and under whose flag Alesi competed for over a decade. To progress in the quiz, the game forces one to submit that Alesi was born to Italian parents, and thus is “really” from Italy.
The game’s questions all have correct answers that cannot be submitted, and yet they are less difficult to answer than these ones: Who made this game? Why? And what was Gerhard Berger thinking?
“Taste is a new core skill,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman declared earlier this year—one voice in a growing chorus of pronouncements about the centrality of judgment and preference in an economy built on artificial intelligence. And yet taste itself is largely undefined by many of its loudest proponents. Celine Nguyen considers the historic relationship between automation and taste; the “seemingly irrelevant, unimportant” inputs that shape our critical perceptions; and the perils of wielding taste like a cudgel. A striking, insightful blend of criticism and personal essay.
Today’s frontier models are trained on enormous quantities of data. One takeaway from Anthropic’s 2025 settlement with a group of authors, in which the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion (or an estimated $3,000 per book) for scraping copyrighted books from shadow libraries like LibGen, is that its models have “read” at least 482,460 books. But even Claude Opus 4.8 hasn’t written a short story that I enjoy more than those by Lydia Davis or Jessi Jezewska Stevens — both of whom, despite being prodigiously well-read, have almost certainly read fewer books.
Joël Kyaviro is a professional cyclist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who has risen above government instability, war, violence, poverty, and Ebola, overcoming every “tack in his path” to become the first rider from the DRC to win a Union Cycliste International race. What’s more, he’s used his success to get the next generation of kids interested in the sport by founding Tumaini Academy, “a cycling program aimed at transcending war by getting Goméen kids on bikes and in school.”
He rolled into the finish zone alone, a full ten seconds ahead, the cushion so big that he was able to victoriously throw his arms in the air. He coasted the last few meters no hands, grinning ear to ear, as his old club president, Charles Guy Makongo, leapt up and down on the sidelines.
Makongo’s sneakers got soaked in the puddles, but he did not care. In the entire 126-year run of the Union Cycliste International, no Congolese rider had ever won a UCI race. On Instagram that night, a picture of Joël ran with a banner header reading, “A historic moment in Congolese cycling.” Posting on an African cycling forum, Makongo proclaimed, “Today’s victory is much more than a sporting result.” It showed, he said, “that talent can flourish even in the most challenging environments.”
Running with Rachel Entrekin must be pretty wild—she encourages competitors and stops mid-race to pet dogs. But her personality is even bigger off the course. Tough and empathetic, her running success has come after 13 years of hard work and a battle to transform an addictive, perfectionist past into a healthier relationship with food, rest, and herself. And even as success came and ultramarathons were won, she watched opportunities go to her male competitors. Gloria Liu honors the incredible achievement of “smashing records while battling impostor syndrome and the fragility of your own self-worth in a world enamored with men, and their accomplishments.”
The key word, however, is average. As any female runner who’s ever passed a dude working himself into a froth to stay ahead of her on the trail knows, women beat men on an individual basis daily. And as athletes like Entrekin and Dauwalter have shown, they do so, occasionally and spectacularly, even at the elite level. We have an understandable reflex to point to categorical advantages that might explain why women can do this, Malcolm says: “It’s inherently feel good, the David and Goliath aspect of a woman winning outright.”
But in searching for the advantages we hope all women have, we may be missing a simpler truth: Most men are faster than most women, but some women still beat most men. The point is not that we have any advantage. The point is that they have almost every advantage—and we still win.
Apparently, African wild dogs enjoy knocking around balls of elephant dung like a football. It’s this playfulness that has endeared them to researchers—but, as Helen Sullivan points out, they have their work cut out for them trying to protect this persecuted big predator. Sullivan follows conservationists in southern Africa who are carefully managing tiny, isolated populations and attempting to introduce genetic diversity. The story of the three sisters who are flown over from Mozambique to be introduced to Waterberg—a South African municipality three hours from Johannesburg—is heart-wrenching. Yet in such a harsh environment, individual tragedies have to be endured while staying focused on the bigger picture: the fragile recovery of the species as a whole.
As we help Greyling and Hlako lift a crate off the pickup, a dusty paw flops out of one corner, and I think of something my uncle says: “You can smell the world in a dog’s paw.” Mooney and I back away, watching from inside a container as Hlako moves the car so that the overheating dog is in the shade. Though it is late afternoon, the temperature is still around 90 degrees.
Hlako and Greyling release the dogs one at a time, opening the crate and waiting until a dog walks, then trots, out. The first is less sure on her feet, the second seems almost normal, until Mooney points out that she would have run much faster from the crate and people had she not still been a bit dozy. The sisters stand together in a grassy area, point their noses in the air, move their satellite-dish ears and lie down under a thorn tree; it has been a long day.
America’s elders need more places to live, but even in liberal enclaves that recognize the problem, developers are facing fierce foes: America’s elders. Make it make sense! Charley Locke reports from her hometown of Oakland, California, where boomers are organizing against two proposals that would add 618 market-rate residential units to the city’s senior housing stock:
Many in the crowd had been marching against governmental and corporate overreach for half a century: against the Vietnam draft and the invasion of Iraq; against Wall Street; against police brutality. They’re part of a generational force that’s antiestablishment and suspicious of power. But in this fight, it wasn’t so clear who the establishment was or who had the power. Were these righteous middle-class activists fending off greedy developers who would charge high rents, or were they wealthy seniors prioritizing neighborhood character over ameliorating the housing crisis? Were they once again David, or had they become Goliath?
“Most people don’t get to buy their old homes back, or ever step foot in them again, and that’s okay. But we sure can spend a lifetime trying to re-create them.” In this poignant essay for Dwell, Emilia Petrarca celebrates the work of her late father, the New York City architect John Petrarca, and explores how his influence has shaped her own relationship to home and interior design. Petrarca reflects on the process of finding her own aesthetic while carrying her father’s with her, considering the ways belongings and spaces can hold our memories, legacies, and grief.
When I moved out of my mom’s house and into my first apartment with a roommate at 23, I brought with me a black rug my dad bought in Morocco. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, he joined the Peace Corps and spent time in Ouarzazate designing government buildings. In a room full of cheap Ikea furniture, it was the only thing that truly felt like a reflection of me. Well, that and a rigid, plastic, yellow outdoor chair I for some reason bought to go with my desk. Looking back at photos now, I see that the choice makes more sense: The chair my dad got me for my room in the Big House was almost the exact same hue.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
“Very, very whorish,” was how Annie Lennox described it to Melody Maker. “It was like she was fucking the music industry,” the Eurythmics lead singer said of Madonna’s performance at the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards (VMA) in September, 1984. With her bright orange crew cut and fondness for men’s tailored suits, Lennox’s androgynous appearance challenged sexualized, hyper-feminine images of women in music. For both artists, sweet dreams were made of shattering gender norms; Lennox just preferred her trailblazing with a little less dry humping.
Madonna had snagged a Best New Artist nomination for “Borderline,” the Top 10 single from her 1983 self-titled debut, but she was also opening the show. Rather than perform a track from the album, like MTV and her management wanted, Madonna insisted on the not-yet-released “Like a Virgin.” She had requested a Bengal tiger for the performance, but for safety reasons that idea was killed. (Protect Moonman nominees Herbie Hancock and Huey Lewis at all costs!)
Instead, Madonna appeared atop a 17-foot-tall, three-tier wedding cake, with a mannequin dressed as a groom. (Probably a better choice than future husband, Sean Penn.) Her wedding dress was a white lace bustier and tulle skirt. Her unconventional bridal attire also included fingerless, white lace gloves, chains, crosses, and her BOY TOY belt—a nod to Madonna’s graffiti tag that also happened to irk feminists like Lennox. As she strode down the cake, she kicked off her white pumps, removed her veil, and shook out her hair. Later, she dropped to her knees, gyrated and writhed on top of the veil, and suggestively crawled across the Radio City Music Hall stage. In the process, she exposed her garters, white silk panties, and Moonman to the audience.
For Madonna, the performance was a commentary on marriage and sexual double standards. Others saw a career-ending disaster. “This gal, Madonna—this is not going to happen,” Huey Lewis’s agent Dan Weiner said of the shocking opener.
Weiner wasn’t alone in thinking the singer’s image was as destroyed as the guitar Roger Daltrey had smashed onstage while presenting one of the night’s awards. Watching backstage, her manager Freddy DeMann also worried she’d gone too far, but Madonna wasn’t concerned. As a new artist, she felt she didn’t have a career to lose. She also maintained she didn’t know about the wardrobe malfunction. “Well, fuck it, I made a mistake,” was her unapologetic reaction.
The mistake paid off. Rather than kill her career, the performance defined it. By late December, “Like a Virgin” was the number one single in America, and remained atop the charts for six weeks. MTV put the video in heavy rotation and the album from which it came, also called Like a Virgin, reached the top spot on the Billboard 200. Being touched wasn’t the only thing Madonna was doing for the very first time. Like a Virgin was the first-ever album by a woman to sell more than five million copies.
I spent my allowance on one of those five million copies. I was 13 then, and Madonna was different than the female singers I heard in my house while growing up. The soft, soothing sounds of Anne Murray and the over-the-top, emotional ballads of Barbra Streisand had filled our living room and shaped my understanding of female singers. On album covers, they looked poised and polished. In television appearances they stood politely in front of microphones as they sang. Babs and Anne weren’t rolling around on an MTV stage or dancing on a gondola in a music video while wearing spandex pants. It never occurred to me that women could do that. When Madonna descended from that wedding cake and stunned the MTV audience, she also shattered my notions of what a female singer was, what she looked like, and what she could accomplish.
As a nerdy kid growing up in suburban Edmonton, I struggled to fit in. I wasn’t athletic like the other girls in my class: They made all the sports teams and racked up more Canada Fitness Test gold badges than Madonna had crucifixes. The girls on the volleyball team always got the boys, the party invites, and the coolest cabin on the school ski trip. I never felt fully comfortable in my Jordaches until Madonna and Cyndi Lauper burst into my life. (Lauper’s debut She’s So Unusual was released a year before Madonna’s MTV performance, but her nine VMA nominations had ignited my interest in the quirky singer, especially her feminist anthem “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”) I played their records non-stop and studied the covers, fascinated by Lauper’s bright orange hair and Madonna’s lace bustier. They defied conformity and represented a different version of femininity than the one I had been raised with. I didn’t know where Lauper shopped, but it was definitely cooler than the Fairweather at my local mall.
As a nerdy kid growing up in suburban Edmonton, I struggled to fit in. I wasn’t athletic like the other girls in my class: They made all the sports teams and racked up more Canada Fitness Test gold badges than Madonna had crucifixes.
They helped me understand that being different was more than just OK, it was cool. I didn’t have to look, dress, or act like the volleyball girls. Rather than join their ski cabin, I could build my own (metaphorically speaking, of course, since the Canada Fitness Test had shattered any confidence I had in my upper arm strength). If girls just wanted to have fun, Lauper and Madonna taught me that physical fitness badges weren’t the only way to do it.
I’d also grown up surrounded by a steady stream of male artists on Friday Night Videos, in Tiger Beat, and on the radio. The ladies of the ’80s showed me that girls could sing, play instruments, and make cool videos (and have fun doing so). They represented opportunities for women in music, roles that were something other than being David Lee Roth’s set dressing. They seized on the expectations about what women could accomplish and ripped them to shreds—a move previously reserved for Roth’s animal-print spandex pants.
A few days after the VMA aired, my friends and I sat in someone’s wood-paneled basement, rewinding and replaying a VHS tape of the awards. “Madonna is humping the floor,” we said, giggling as we rolled around on the shag carpet imitating her performance. We didn’t fully understand what we were watching, we just knew it was very cool and that our parents probably wouldn’t like it. The VMA appearance kickstarted our obsession with all things Madonna—as it did for the rest of the world. “That three minutes in 1984 was the point when Madonna became a superstar,” said MTV’s Jocelyn Vena of the performance, which Rolling Stone later called “as indelible as the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.”
With “Like a Virgin,” Madonna delivered an anthem of female sexuality that was empowering rather than exploitative. Media messages and awkward health classes in school had taught us that sex was bad, something to be avoided unless we wanted to end up pregnant. While my friends and I whispered about sex in the library at lunch, Madonna sang openly about it, promoting pleasure over passivity and encouraging us to embrace our sexuality. Thanks to Madonna, our voices got louder.
Madonna and Lauper weren’t the only ’80s ladies I idolized. The decade provided plenty of trailblazing female musicians for me to look up to. Women from Tina Turner and Pat Benatar to Chaka Khan and Whitney Houston influenced me with their catchy songs, compelling videos, and unique personal styles. Their success redefined what it meant to be a woman making music, and for me it redefined what it meant to be a woman making her way in the world.
With the help of my red Sony Walkman, I heard lyrics that promoted individuality, independence, and confidence. If Joan Jett didn’t care about her reputation, why should I care about mine? (Not that I had one, serious dork that I was, but the message was empowering nonetheless.) Women like Jett sang about something other than romantic love, the perennial subject matter for female singers up to that point. Instead of heartbreak and hunks, I heard songs that inspired me. Lauper’s “True Colors” promoted self-acceptance; “Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves,” Annie Lennox’s and Aretha Franklin’s 1985 hit, celebrated women supporting each other; Irene Cara’s “Flashdance… What a Feeling” encouraged young women like me to pursue our dreams (and was the perfect theme song for the sleepover-favorite movie it accompanies). While Deniece Williams sang “Let’s hear it for the boy,” these women made me want to hear it for the girl.
Music and videos that featured diverse women and addressed topics like race, class, and sexuality broadened my perspective. Donna Summer singing about the struggles of working women in “She Works Hard for the Money,” Annie Lennox challenging traditional gender roles in the video for Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” and Madonna’s support for the LGBTQ+ community exposed me to a world beyond my very white, very conservative, very middle-class suburb.
As my worldview evolved, so did my style. Growing up, pop culture’s representations of girlhood included a blonde Wakefield twin from Sweet Valley High, a post-makeover Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, and a big-breasted bombshell manufactured by some dorks with a Commodore 64. (We don’t talk nearly enough about how problematic Weird Science was.) At a time when I was discovering makeup, Sun In hair lightener, and clothing my mom didn’t buy for me, seeing women on MTV who were different taught me it was OK to develop my own look.
Video might have killed the radio star, but it ignited something in me. Depictions of women standing up for themselves, whether it was Madonna’s insistence on keeping her baby in “Papa Don’t Preach” or Pat Benatar confronting a creepy club owner in the “Love Is a Battlefield” video, made me want to do the same. I felt rebellious and wanted to raise a lace-glove-clad middle finger to anyone who told me I had to fit in—boys, teachers, mean girls, or my boss at Taco Time.
These women helped to shape music long after the ’80s ended, from Jett’s production work with ’90s riot grrrl band Bikini Kill to Grace Jones collaborating with Beyoncé. Pop princesses Debbie Gibson and Tiffany and later Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera would not have experienced success had Madonna and Lauper not paved the way.
So, as we remember the decade when Axl welcomed us to the jungle, Public Enemy brought the noise, and the Go-Go’s had the beat, it’s time to examine the impact these female musicians had. For a young girl like me, it was bigger than all that teased ’80s hair.
In a 1982 Melody Maker interview, Madonna said she wanted to make music for “the kind of people who might like Grace Jones.” It wasn’t just the Jamaican singer’s audience that inspired Madonna, it was also her subversive style and sound. A fixture in New York’s disco scene, Jones signed a deal with Island Records in 1977 and achieved chart success with hits like “I Need a Man” and “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect For You).” In the ’80s, as anti-disco sentiment spread, her music embraced a new wave, pop, funk, and reggae sound, as evidenced by 1980’s Warm Leatherette and 1981’s Nightclubbing, the latter of which introduced Jones to a wider audience, including MTV.
One of my earliest memories of Jones was seeing her present the Best Male Video award at the 1985 VMA. She was wearing a slinky, rust-colored silk evening gown that clung to her body and accentuated her statuesque height. Her signature flat-top hair peeked out from under a black headwrap and her blush highlighted razor-sharp cheekbones. The look was avant-garde and androgynous, a rejection of traditional gender roles and conventional beauty standards. The Best Female Video award nominees that year were Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Sheila E., and Sade. (Tina won for “What’s Love Got to Do with It.”) They all had distinct styles, but Jones seemed like she had been beamed in from another universe, one I desperately wanted to visit. “Her image celebrated blackness and subverted gender norms; she presented something we had never seen before in pop performance—a woman who was lithe, sexy, and hyperfeminine while also exuding a ribald, butch swagger,” Barry Walters wrote in a 2015 Pitchfork piece.
They all had distinct styles, but Jones seemed like she had been beamed in from another universe, one I desperately wanted to visit.
Jones has talked about the rejection she faced in her early modeling days, including regularly being told her skin was too dark and her face too angular. In her 2015 memoir, she recalled a modeling agent who told her that “selling a black model in Paris is like trying to sell them an old car nobody wants to buy.” Her response was, “I’m going to make you eat your words.” She did just that, walking the runways for designers like Yves Saint Laurent and appearing on the covers of Elle and Vogue. Jones made rejection her trademark, rebelling against conformity and embracing an image and music that pushed boundaries and refused labels. “I believe in individuality, that everybody is special, and it’s up to them to find that quality and let it live,” Jones famously said. She let her special quality live and encouraged me to do the same. At a time when I faced intense pressure to fit in, Jones showed me I didn’t have to. On that VMA stage, and in interviews and videos, she exuded confidence and strength, qualities that soon mattered to me more than which Duran Duran member I was going to marry.
I remember discovering Nightclubbing in a friend’s older brother’s record collection. (Older sibling vinyl was a powerful gateway drug in the ’80s.) On the cover, Jones wears an oversized men’s suit jacket with sharp shoulder pads. Her chest is bare under the jacket and a cigarette dangles from her lip. I didn’t see people like Jones in the hallway at school or in the mall food court, but thanks to MTV she was now regularly in my living room.
Jones’s videos often felt more like experimental art projects than slick productions. Everything she did was creative, an expression of her unique personal style. The idea of being able to express myself through clothing, makeup, or how I carried myself in the world hadn’t occurred to me before Jones and my ’80s ladies entered my life. I thought being creative meant playing the recorder or writing a book report on Judy Blume in school. Jones taught me I could embody creativity in every aspect of my life.
Like Madonna, Jones proudly expressed her sexuality and encouraged others to do the same. Nightclubbing’s hit single “Pull Up to the Bumper” featured the lyrics:
Pull up to my bumper baby In your long black limousine Pull up to my bumper baby Drive it in between Grease it Spray it Let me lubricate it.
She has insisted the song is not about what you think it is, but rather a post-disco ode to parking cars (as all great post-disco songs are). Whatever the subject matter, it reached number two on Billboard’sHot Dance Club Songs and was the singer’s first transatlantic hit. It was also some of my earliest exposure to suggestive lyrics; I didn’t entirely know what the song meant, but I knew it wasn’t about parallel parking (a skill I was still trying to master).
Jones released her last studio album in 2008, but her influence lives on in today’s female singers, and especially in their videos. I see it in the ’80s aesthetic of Rihanna’s “Rude Boy,” the avant-garde imagery of Nicki Minaj’s “Stupid Hoe” (Minaj even replicated Jones’s poses from the cover of Island Lifein the video), and the theatrical performance style of Lady Gaga. Jones has also made an impact beyond videos, having contributed vocals to Janelle Monáe’s The Age of Pleasure and Beyoncé’s Renaissance.
“Trends come along and people say, ‘Follow that trend.’ There’s a lot of that around at the moment,” Jones writes in her memoir. “‘Be like Sasha Fierce. Be like Miley Cyrus. Be like Rihanna. Be like Lady Gaga. Be like Rita Ora and Sia. Be like Madonna.’ I cannot be like them—except to the extent that they are already being like me.” I look forward to Miley’s innuendo-filled post-disco ode to car parking.
Growing up, I saw Jett as an artist who carved their own path in the ’80s. Jett projected a tough image, with her leather pants and jacket; rather than smile politely like female performers were supposed to, she snarled and stared. I studied her videos and played air guitar to “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” in the bathroom mirror after school. Growing up I had been taught that loving, and playing, rock and roll was strictly for the boys, but Jett changed that.
She represented rebellion—a very attractive thing when you’re a teenage girl. I was constantly reminded of all the things girls don’t do. Girls don’t skateboard, girls don’t play drums, girls don’t do math. Girls don’t take up space. Girls definitely don’t talk back. Then came Jett. She taught me that assertiveness and speaking your mind weren’t negative traits, they were necessary. When the world tells you that you can’t do something, you show them you can. (Who knew I was hiding a punk attitude under all that Maybelline and Esprit?)
In the 2018 documentary Bad Reputation, Jett recounts receiving a Sears electric guitar and amp from her parents as a Christmas gift when she was 13. While her first guitar teacher told her “girls don’t play rock and roll,” 16-year-old Jett thankfully ignored him to found all-girl band the Runaways with drummer Sandy West. While the band toured the world and released four albums, not everyone was a fan. “I thought everyone would love it. Once they realized it was serious and we planned to make an album and go on tour and do everything that male bands were doing the tables turned where it went from ‘cute, sweet’ to ‘slut, whore, cunt,’” Jett said about the sexist double standards the band faced. Misogynistic headlines followed them in the press from “Runaways—Teenaged, Wild & Braless” (Circus) to “The Runaways: Lissome Lolitas or Teenage Trash?” (Creem).
When the world tells you that you can’t do something, you show them you can. (Who knew I was hiding a punk attitude under all that Maybelline and Esprit?)
After various lineup changes, the Runaways broke up and Jett went solo. In May 1980, Ariola Records released Jett’s self-titled debut album in Europe, but she didn’t experience the same luck in the US. The album was rejected by 23 major labels. Jett and her producer Kenny Laguna decided to release it independently on their newly formed Blackheart Records, sometimes selling albums out of the trunk of Laguna’s car. Casablanca Records founder Neil Bogart eventually made a joint venture with Laguna. He signed Jett to his new label, Boardwalk Records, and Joan Jett was rereleased as Bad Reputation.
While record labels might have said no to Jett, fans were saying yes. Her second album, 1981’s I Love Rock ’n’ Roll, went platinum and its title track was Jett’s first number one hit, spending seven weeks in the top spot on the Billboard 100. She had two other Billboard Top 10 hits during the ’80s, “Crimson and Clover” and “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” and performed sold-out tours with the Police and Queen. In 1987, she starred in the movie drama Light of Day with Michael J. Fox as he tried to shed the conservative, Reaganomics-loving Alex P. Keaton role he played on the popular ’80s television series, Family Ties.
Jett’s influence also extended well beyond the ’80s, and beyond me. In the summer of 1992, she got her hands on a Bikini Kill demo tape at a Fugazi show in Washington, DC. She became a fan and produced the band’s 1994 vinyl seven-inch EP, New Radio. She also played on the record and sang backup vocals. Bikini Kill’s riot grrrl and DIY ethos were a perfect match with Jett. “She was the cement that kept a lot of things going for some of the feminist bands in the ’90s. Definitely for me. She changed my whole career path and taught me how to record an album,” Bikini Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna said in Bad Reputation. The Bikini Kill seven-inch was not Jett’s first work as a producer. She also produced the first, and only, studio album by Los Angeles punk band the Germs, 1979’s (GI), which is considered the first full-length hardcore punk record.
Her attitude was best summed up in a 2010 Rolling Stone interview: “Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. Make your own victories. Make your own mistakes.” While I never looked as cool as Jett in a leather jacket, her attitude was something I learned to pull off. All that bathroom mirror air guitar was worth it.
When “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” reached the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1982, Jett wasn’t the only woman there: Olivia Newton-John, Diana Ross, Debbie Harry (with Blondie), Sheena Easton, Dolly Parton, and Kim Carnes all had number-one hits the year before. But after August 1981, female artists’ visibility began to increase significantly. That, friends, is when MTV launched.
Pre-MTV, radio was how my friends and I discovered new bands. We made mixtapes of songs recorded off the radio and knowing the exact moment to hit “record” when “Mickey” by Toni Basil came on was a highly-respected skill in the ’80s. Now with music videos, we could not only hear Toni, we could also see her in our living room. A musician’s style and videos now mattered as much as their sound. We traded VHS tapes of Friday Night Videos and spent our babysitting money on records by our favorite video stars. We weren’t the only ones hitting the record store at our local mall. MTV boosted sales; record stores received requests for bands that weren’t on the radio but got MTV play. (Devo is one example.) Record companies and musicians initially skeptical of MTV soon saw the appeal. MTV also influenced concert demographics. Pat Benatar noticed more women at her concerts after MTV started playing her videos. “When we first began, most of our concerts were probably 80/20 male-oriented. There were very few women. Very few women used to go to concerts no matter who was playing, male or female. I saw that really change around 1982.”
Benatar was the first female artist aired on the channel—and in fact was the first solo artist overall, with her video for “You Better Run” running directly after the network’s debut (and perennial pub-trivia answer), the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Yet “Love Is a Battlefield” remains Benatar’s most iconic video, as well as my favorite. The song’s feminist lyrics promoted independence and addressed the emotional volatility of relationships, presenting love as something more than just happily ever after. Teen Beat may not have devoted much ink to the concept of female agency, but I felt it when Benatar sang the lyrics, “We are strong. No one can tell us we’re wrong.” In the video, Benatar escapes an abusive family situation, confronts a sexist club owner, and encourages a group of female dancers to fight back. The strength and resilience she projected taught young girls like me to stand up for ourselves. Also that killer choreography remains a surprisingly effective tool against creeps.
The strength and resilience she projected taught young girls like me to stand up for ourselves. Also that killer choreography remains a surprisingly effective tool against creeps.
Sadly, creeps were something she was used to. In her 2010 memoir Between a Heart and a Rock Place, Benatar talked about facing music industry sexism, from misogynistic marketing campaigns to DJs insisting she sit on their laps. “We’d be pushing to get airtime for our songs,” she wrote, “and radio programmers would say things like, ‘We’ll definitely put that single in heavy rotation at the end of the week, but we can’t right now. We’re already playing a single by a girl.’”
MTV helped change this “one girl at a time” policy. Now there were many girls at a time, and they were successful. “The 1985 winner of the top Grammy award, Tina Turner, had no record deal one year, but a top hit single the next. Her album, Private Dancer has sold 10 million copies around the world. Pat Benatar, Chaka Khan, and the Pointer Sisters all reached a million in sales with albums promoted by music video,” wrote Lisa Lewis in Jump Cut, a journal devoted to film, television and media. Turner was almost 45 when she released the 1984 single “What’s Love Got to Do with It.” After the video became an MTV hit, the song went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and ultimately won Record of the Year at the Grammys. (While Turner’s success helped challenge ageist notions of sexuality, beauty, and fame, Rolling Stone still put her on an October 1984 cover with a headline that read “She’s Got Legs!”)
I loved that when I watched MTV or video shows like Friday Night Videos I could go from Bananarama to Gloria Estefan to Bonnie Tyler to Sade inside 30 minutes. (I liked Tyler, but the glowing eyes in “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video still give me the creeps. Please don’t turn around, bright eyes.) Their videos presented female role models who were quirky, androgynous, powerful, fun, and sexual without being sex objects.
Had it not been for these women, female representation in music videos would have been limited to ZZ Top’s “Legs,” Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” and Tawny Kitaen cartwheeling on the hood of a car in a Whitesnake video. Instead, I experienced women of different ages, races, and body types, all with their own distinct styles. I also saw women playing instruments, singing songs, and commanding stages. I remember recording the video for “We Got the Beat” by the Go-Go’s and playing the VHS tape over and over because it was the first video I saw that showed women actually playing drums and guitars. As a teenager, I wouldn’t have had the courage to pick up a drumstick or a guitar if I hadn’t seen women playing them on MTV first.
While MTV helped increase representation for female artists, it was criticized in its early days for failing to play Black artists. During a 1983 interview with VJ Mark Goodman, David Bowie called out MTV for ignoring Black musicians, or only playing them during early morning hours. Donna Summer’s 1983 hit “She Works Hard for the Money” was the first video by an African American woman put in heavy rotation by MTV; its portrayal of the struggles of working women and single mothers helped contribute to broader pop culture portrayals of family dynamics during the decade. Single mothers were increasingly represented thanks to Summer’s song and ’80s sitcoms like Who’s the Boss? and Kate & Allie. I was one of the only kids in my class who lived in a single-parent household, and actually seeing this as the subject of songs and videos made me feel seen. (Thanks, Donna!) The majority of my classmates were from middle-class, two-parent households and I hoped hearing Summer’s lyrics (or Dolly Parton singing about working nine to five) might help them better understand my family dynamic.
Summers’s success helped break down racial barriers, but it was Whitney Houston who transformed MTV’s relationship with Black artists. Her early videos received heavy play on Black Entertainment Television and VH1, but her label struggled to get them on MTV. The network initially rejected the video for her debut single, “You Give Good Love,” because of its R&B sound, but when “Saving All My Love for You” became a huge hit, MTV had no choice but to play the video. “It was a major breakthrough for African American entertainers to be on MTV, because it was solely for rock artists,” Houston said in a 2001 interview. “I remember Michael Jackson making a very big breakthrough, and then Tina Turner, along with myself and Bobby Brown and a few others that were major breakthrough artists on MTV. I do remember the hassle of introducing Black artists to MTV, because, let’s face it, it was solely for white artists at that point.” The heavy rotation she received on MTV helped increase representation for other Black female artists on the station, including Janet Jackson, Jody Watley, and Tracy Chapman. Houston’s success opened MTV’s door for other Black female artists and helped them crossover from R&B stations to pop and Top 40 radio.
It was the video for “How Will I Know,” the third single from Houston’s self-titled debut, that made me a fan. She appeared in a shiny dress, with a giant sparkly hairbow, dancing through a maze of bright, paint-splattered walls. She was vibrant and energetic, with a girl next door image young girls could aspire to. I was 14 when the video was released and Houston, at 22, seemed closer to my age than some of the other women I saw on MTV. After “How Will I Know” played heavily on MTV, Houston became the first Black female artist to win a VMA, taking home the 1986 Best Female Video award.
Next came the frothy, fun pop energy of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me),” from her second album, Whitney. A VHS recording of the video enjoyed heavy rotation in my bedroom where I danced along with Houston. With her candy-colored clothing, bright dangly earrings, and crimped hair teased higher than her four-octave voice, her infectious smile brought me joy (not an emotion I associated with puberty).
Houston was more than just the soundtrack to my after-school dance parties; she was a feminist trailblazer who breached white, male-dominated music to become the first Black woman to achieve mainstream commercial success in the MTV era, setting records along the way. Whitney Houston is still the most successful debut album by a solo artist, with sales of more than 25 million copies, and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” made Houston the first female artist to debut at number one on the Billboard 200. It wasn’t just her musical success I found inspiring; she was one of the first Black women to appear on the cover of Seventeen magazine, the required reading at all my teenage sleepovers.
With her candy-colored clothing, bright dangly earrings, and crimped hair teased higher than her four-octave voice, her infectious smile brought me joy (not an emotion I associated with puberty).
I loved that Houston’s videos showed her performing, rehearsing, or working in the studio, contributing to the images of working women I saw in ’80s music videos. Throughout her career she lifted up other Black women, mentoring young singers like Brandy and Monica. The Benetton-clad mean girls at my school could have taken some boosterism tips from Houston. “She kicked down doors for every Black female artist, every Black artist and artists in general,” Brandy told ABC News in 2021. With multiple lead roles in movies, Houston also pioneered the triple threat (singing, acting, and dancing), inspiring other Black female artists like Queen Latifah and Beyoncé to achieve the same legacy. Icon status aside, Houston dancing in her purple dress in the “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” video still sparks joy for me, especially since it no longer has puberty to compete with.
Houston passed away in 2012, having sold more than 200 million records worldwide and boasting seven consecutive number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100—the only artist to do so. In 2023, she had the biggest posthumous earnings for a female artist, proving her crossover appeal isn’t limited to radio stations. And she’s not the only one of the ’80s ladies still in the spotlight. Cyndi Lauper, whose debut album was the first by a female artist to achieve four top-five Billboard Hot 100 hits, was finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025. Pat Benatar, Tina Turner, Chaka Khan, and Annie Lennox (as part of Eurythmics) have also been inducted in recent years. The Go-Go’s—another recent inductee and still the first and only all-girl band who wrote their own music and played their own instruments to have a Billboard number one album (1981’s Beauty and the Beat)—played last year’s Coachella Music Festival, bringing Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong onstage to help them with “Head Over Heels.”
Recent documentaries have also honored ’80s ladies, including 2023’s Love to Love You, Donna Summer and 2022’s I Wanna Dance with Somebody (an examination of Whitney Houston’s legacy). The 50th anniversary of hip-hop celebrations in 2023 included tributes to groundbreaking ’80s rap groups like Salt-N-Pepa. Music journalist Jessica Hopper’s 2022 Women Who Rock series, a history of female musicians, featured several ladies of the ’80s, including Sheila E. and Joan Jett. Recent memoirs and biographies have explored the decade’s female musicians and bands, from Stevie Nicks and Debbie Harry to Heart and the Bangles.
And while Madonna’s 1984 VMA performance was shocking at the time, the singer doesn’t see it that way. “The most controversial thing I have ever done is stick around,” she said in January 2024 during one of two Toronto stops on the Celebration Tour, which grossed over $225.4 million. The tour’s final stop in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, attracted over 1.6 million people—at the time, the largest all-time crowd for a female singer.
The Queen of Pop remains the best-selling female musician of all time, with sales of more than 300 million records worldwide. She has had 12 number one songs on the Billboard Top 100, 38 Top 10 hits, won seven Grammys and 20 VMAs. Confessions II, her 15th album, came out in July and was the singer’s 10th number one album on the Billboard 200. Madonna still deserves all the Moonmen, and to roll across any stage she wants.
Lisa Whittington-Hill is the publisher of This Magazine. She also coordinates and teaches in Centennial College’s Book and Magazine Publishing program. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Hazlitt, Catapult, and more. She is the author of Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture Is Failing Women and The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat. You Know What You Did: The Hills, her book about the MTV reality show The Hills and how it changed the conversation on fame and young women will be out in October from ECW Press. She is currently working on a collection of essays about Gen X and ’80s pop culture to be published by Vehicule Press in 2027.
Northwest Arkansas has been changing. Walmart, which has been rooted in Bentonville for more than 75 years, has reshaped the small town, and now that growth is spreading into the surrounding countryside. With that change, writes Jordan P. Hickey in this poignant essay, come wealthy newcomers looking for a country lifestyle and gravel cyclists riding thousands of unpaved rural roads. And then there are the dogs—who have been here longer than any of these transplants—caught in the midst of it all. Hickey calls them “yarddogs,” finding in them a metaphor for a region in the process of transformation. (Subscription required.)
Downtown Bentonville, so carefully planned, feels surreal today—”Disneyfied,” “Pleasantville,” “gentrification” are the apt words of the critics.And not that it needs to be said, but there are no yarddogs in Bentonville. Not anymore. Here, there are only good dogs. Dogs on leashes, dogs that have been to school, dogs that listen, obey, behave, and will not lunge at every passing jogger.
But, of course, this is not really about dogs at all.
Scientists are growing miniature human brains in labs around the world. (Yep, you read that right.) For Wired, Claire L. Evans reports on the latest research in the field of organoid intelligence, or OI, where scientists are artificially growing brain organoids from tiny human samples, whether skin, blood, teeth, or even hair. As these seed-sized globs mature, they are able to send and receive electrical signals, and even learn to remember and anticipate them. In other words, this living matter is programmable. “And this is where things get truly weird,” writes Evans.
For now, these neural computers are mostly of interest to researchers who want to work with neurons without taking on the tedious wet-lab husbandry themselves. Eventually, however, the company hopes that neurons will prove themselves to be an energy-efficient, resilient substrate for more general computing applications—including some tasks currently handled by AI, like image recognition and classification.
“When you think about what you want from AI, it’s biology,” said Brett Kagan, Cortical Labs’ chief operating officer, when I reached him over Zoom. “You want it to be self-repairing as much as possible. You want it to be adaptable. You want it to be long-lived. You want it to be energy-efficient. These are all features you get for free in biology.”
What defines success when it comes to music? For Hrishikesh Hirway, who wrote four albums under the name The One AM Radio, it meant commercial attention. His interest in making music cooled after sales and airplay failed to materialize; he went 15 years without releasing an album. In this essay for The Bitter Southerner, Hirway looks at how he overcame perfectionism to write and record In the Last Hour of Light, an album heavy on collaboration.
“But Phil was echoing something I’d heard in the interviews I’d conducted and read about in books on writing: separate your creative, generative side from your editing, critical side. They push in opposite directions, and as soon as you start to edit, you’re no longer as free to play.”
“It was two days after my 47th birthday, which had left me feeling melancholy about reaching middle age and still feeling so far from my goals. I sat on my couch, put my headphones on, and played the album. Something had shifted for me. Somewhere around the third song, I felt something for the first time: I loved what I was hearing.
The music brought back memories with perfect clarity: what it felt like to write each song, to record them, the long journey to transform a part of myself into this music. It was no longer a question of the music’s worth. I can say to myself: this album is a document. And in it —listen!—you’re alive.”
As Eliran Arazi spends time with the Andoque, an Indigenous people in southern Colombia along the Caquetá River, he finds himself increasingly drawn into their tales that interweave sexuality with the creatures of the jungle. Gradually, those stories begin to shape his own way of thinking about seduction in modern life, as his mind spins off its own fantasies. A fascinating piece that blurs the lines between writer and subject, leaving the reader in a dreamlike state.
A few days later, jaguar footprints appeared along the long path leading to a small harbour on the Caquetá River. For the next week, Dufi’s family expressed concerns about venturing down that path, especially alone, for fear of a jaguar attack. When I mentioned my plan to go there for a phone call, hoping for better reception by the river, one of Dufi’s sons again cautioned me about the jaguar. Dufi, however, quickly reassured me. I had nothing to fear because jaguars dislike the soapy, perfumed scent of white people, which, he added, is precisely the smell that attracts dolphins.
As I reached the Caquetá in the late afternoon, I sensed the dolphin smell again. Odours and attraction, I thought – at least it works both ways.
For Nautilus, Charles Digges recounts a massive undertaking begun in 1970 by the Soviet Union: As part of its science program, they decided to dig into Earth. Known as the Kola Superdeep Borehole, at 40,230 feet, it was—and is—the deepest human-made hole on the planet. While the hole didn’t go as deep as they planned, the project gave geologists a new understanding of the subterranean world and the earth’s deep continental crust—a place more alive and dynamic than they ever thought possible.
Other discoveries proved just as momentous. Nearly 22,000 feet beneath the surface, drill cores contained microscopic fossils from two dozen species of plankton that had drifted through an ancient sea more than 2 billion years ago. This showed that even after billions of years of burial deep within the continental crust, unmistakable evidence of some of Earth’s earliest life had survived. Between 16,000 and 23,000 feet, the borehole encountered saline water circulating through fractures in crystalline rocks that geologists had long considered essentially dry. Rather than groundwater that had somehow seeped miles underground, the fluids appear to have originated within the crust itself. As ancient minerals were transformed by heat and pressure, they released chemically bound water, while reactions between water and iron-rich rocks generated hydrogen gas, showing that the supposedly inert continental crust was still chemically active billions of years after it had formed.
In this essay at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, writer and professor Samuel Autman reflects on tourism and privilege, especially in a time of xenophobia; traveling as a Black queer American; and the idea of not fully belonging wherever he goes. The sections in Autman’s piece are organized as terms and conditions in a legal agreement, reminding us that when we cross borders, we navigate different cultural and social scenarios, written and unwritten rules, and people who view us as foreign—no matter how at home we might feel.
I found myself asking harder questions about the young men around him, about the relationships, the patronage and the blurred line between generosity and dependency. Mark had paid for many of them to study law, medicine or business. He had even helped one man living in the United States without legal status by paying for him to attend a Spanish-language school.
None of it suggested scandal or anything obviously illegal. But parts of it no longer sat comfortably with me.
I found it easy to resist the early dispatches from “UFC Freedom 250,” the Ultimate Fighting Championship event held in June on the White House South Lawn. But Jon Ronson is the sort of writer I can’t help following into battle. Fresh off a new book about masculinity, Ronson brings a delightfully skewed perspective to the fights and the days that surrounded them. The result is a portrait of a planned media spectacle that can’t quite make sense of itself. The best battle here may be Ronson’s tussle with his own photographer, 79-year-old Bruce Gilden, who is a bit of a hugger.
“I’m pretty certain you hugged Stephen Miller first,” I say. “I don’t see Stephen Miller as initiating a hug.”
“You may be right,” he says. “I don’t remember. Look, I do things maybe other people aren’t comfortable doing, but I felt comfortable and I trust my instincts.”
He acknowledges that “nobody is immune to misreading a situation” and that because of him we were all forced back indoors, but he blames Miller’s entourage for not checking with their boss on whether he minded being hugged.
In Wilbert L. Cooper’s new memoir, The Black Shield, he tells two intertwining stories: the history of the city’s Black Shield Police Association, one of the country’s oldest Black policing organizations, and the multigenerational narrative of his own family, embedded in the police force. Both of his parents and sister are retired Black Cleveland cops, and on his mother’s side, there’s been a Cleveland cop in the family since 1950. In this book about race, policing, and power, Cooper examines the complex duality of the Black cop, what it was like for his parents to navigate an institution that was hostile to their own community, and, ultimately, what this all has meant for him.
This excerptcombines the prologue and a chapter focused on his mother’s beginnings in Cleveland’s police department. Two individuals mentioned spearheaded legal efforts in the 1970s to diversify the department: Fred Johnson, the association’s president who led a lawsuit over the department’s discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, and Jean Clayton, a policewoman and the organization’s secretary whose parallel lawsuit disbanded the segregated Women’s Bureau and integrated women into the department. Below, Cooper recounts how his mother, Gayle, walked through the door that they opened. But it was not without a struggle.
—Cheri Lucas Rowlands
The gun was always there. I used to see it in flashes as Dad would get ready to leave the house. After he doused himself in spicy cologne and sliced a plastic comb through the waves of his jet-black Jheri curl, I would catch that 9-millimeter sliding between the small of his back and the belted waistband of his blue jeans.
Mom had her own. She kept it in her purse. One of those big leather bags, the kind they show behind the counter at Dillard’s, with shiny metal clasps and countless compartments. Her gun would be in there with red lipstick, a double-sided compact mirror, and her bulky pager. I knew the gun was there because I sensed its heft whenever I’d have to move the bag off the kitchen table to do my homework. It felt like a bowling ball in a pillowcase.
Dad used to store his 9-millimeter above the fine china, on top of the large, baby-pink Victorian-style cabinet in our dining room. One time while he was sleeping, I climbed on top of the pink-velvet-upholstered chairs to get a good look at it through the scrollwork. When I came face-to-face with the gun, I was too intimidated to actually pick it up and play with it.
It took a few moments for me to work up the gumption to run my little fingers across the raised bumps of its grip. Then I touched the ridges of the slide and the smooth, cold, hard barrel from where bullets burst. And just that alone felt crazy to me. Even in the dusty, mundane space of the cabinet, the stock-still object pulsated with wild energy. It was like petting a tiger.
Even now, it’s overwhelming for me to imagine that all that calamitous potential to take life, to inflict pain, to inspire fear, to demand subservience, to have your way with the world, to finally be the actor instead of the one who is acted upon—was right there and it was theirs.
I was 7 or 8 when I saw Dad shoot that gun. It must have been the summer, because I still remember the heavy outside air kissing my arms and legs, the suburban sunlight beaming on me. I see that light reverberating off the concrete, making vivid every blade of green grass in the yard and every goose-egg stone in the gravel strips. But I cannot hear the gunshot. I cannot tune in to the boom. All I sense is the fear, because it is so foreign. I’m still there. Standing in the driveway. Stuck and dumbfounded. Until Dad’s shouts break through, begging me to run inside before those crackers come back, commanding me to have Mom call the cops.
Have you heard of Pastor Leon McCray? The man of faith who saw two White people dumping a refrigerator on his property. When McCray tried to stop them, the duo threatened him. One of the Whites ran off to grab three more racists. McCray says that’s when they all ganged up on him. That’s when they told him that his “Black life didn’t matter.” The beating didn’t stop until McCray pulled out his gun. When the police showed up at the scene, they handcuffed McCray and put him in the back of the cruiser. His assailants laughed and waved at him as he was taken off.
But at least McCray survived. You know that many of us aren’t so lucky: The police shot and killed the father Philando Castile during a traffic stop after he told them he had a firearm. The police shot and killed the father John Crawford while he was carrying a pellet rifle inside the Walmart that retailed the damn pellet rifle. Police shot Emantic F. Bradford Jr. at a shopping mall while they were responding to a call about gunshots at the mall. Witnesses say they killed Bradford as he was trying to direct shoppers to safety.
These killings now give shape and sharpness to that immense and totalizing fear I felt in the driveway as a child. That American malice is always there anytime we try to commandeer a power that wasn’t intended for us. Black people are killed or incarcerated every day for much less than what Dad did. Simply owning a gun can put a bullseye on your back. Pulling one on a White man can turn you into a hashtag.
So why did Dad want to call 911? I know that he’d tell you it was because his gun was different from Pastor Leon’s. Dad didn’t buy it at Walmart or Bass Pro alongside camouflage galoshes and fly-fishing rods. He didn’t pick it up at a gun shop with a shooting range full of targets depicting men in turbans and hip-hop gear. He didn’t procure it across state lines at a gun show with bundles of cash and no identification or background check. And he didn’t get it off the street, with scratched-out serial numbers and bodies on it.
Dad got his gun from the City of Cleveland. That’s where Mom got hers, too. Both are tools of policing, the Cooper family business. They hold up those guns and their power to use them as symbols of our freedom in a country that will not stop killing or incarcerating Black folks. When I was a child, I never questioned that contradiction. But to become my own man in the America I inherited, I realized I’d have to try to solve the paradox of my parents.
By the time the Black Shield had forced the hand of the Cleveland Police Department in 1977, Gayle had given birth to another child—a little boy named Geoffrey. Now with three kids, she was even more entrenched in a wrathful marriage and farther away from the working world. And losing her uncle Lloyd, which felt a lot like losing a father, only made her feel that much more alone. When he died, the dream of becoming a cop and the freedom the job promised died with him.
It was at the moment that she’d almost completely resigned herself that it all came raging back. She opened up an issue of the Plain Dealer to find that people who’d taken the test with her and were lower than her on the eligibility list were being appointed to the police academy. And quickly, her despondency turned to confusion. And then her confusion turned to anger. She said to herself, “I know my number is higher than this and they’ve gone eighty past me and I’m not getting called?!” As she started to look into the issue, she found out that the city had expunged her from the eligibility list. “They were trying to lose Black folks’ stuff,” she told me. The city claimed it was because her addresses had changed and she hadn’t notified the civil service. To get back on the list, she had to go to court. “They claimed I had moved, but I owned my own home!” she said. “I told them, ‘I bought this house, I haven’t gone anywhere.’” As soon as she prevailed in her hearing, a White officer walked up to her in court. He simply said, “I’m from the academy.” He took her information. And then he said, “You will start the police academy on Monday.”
Later that same night, Fred Johnson called Gayle’s phone. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to the man. Lloyd was never big on the Shield Club, and Curtis was much closer with her younger brother, his namesake, who would join the police department five years later. Gayle didn’t have a complete idea of what the Shield Club had been up to at that point, or of how much it had shaped the situation she was walking into. Because of all the lawsuits, more than 40 percent of her classmates would be people of color and women. But the department they were entering was only 9 percent Black or Hispanic, and 2 percent women. For his part, Johnson stressed the struggle happening in the city to resist the change that Black women like Gayle represented. The academy was framed as a contentious environment controlled by people who were intent on destroying Gayle’s professional prospects and her spirit.
Despite the reforms that resulted from the Shield Club and the Women’s Law Fund cases, Gayle was still put through a series of tests, during which she could still be expunged. She had to meet with a psychiatrist, who asked her questions about her affiliations. Although this test had been revised thanks to the efforts of Fred Johnson and the Shield Club, it remained biased. As many of us conclude from a life living in this country run by White people, Gayle figured the best way to stick around was to hide herself. Her strategy was to answer every question like a White man of modest intellect.
In the 1970s, Gayle had spent a few years in the Nation of Islam. Although she never really let go of Jesus, she converted aesthetically and culturally to satisfy the whims of her second husband. She traded her hot pants for conservative flowing dresses. And instead of sweet potato pie, she started baking bean pies. When she did make a Polish Boy, she did it with beef sausage. She even traveled to Chicago once for Saviours’ Day to see the honorable Elijah Muhammad with her own eyes. But she put all that behind her when she found out that her proud Muslim husband was sleeping with a fellow “sister.” By the time she took the psych test to become a police officer, she’d gone back to straightening her hair and listening to gospel music. But some of the political knowledge she gained from the Nation, especially its perspective on America, stuck with her. She understood things differently than most—like the “riots” that happened in Hough and Glenville. She saw them as a natural reaction to the way her people had been done in this city and done in America. To her, the people who stormed the streets weren’t criminal. The crimes being committed were by the landlords renting rat-infested apartments and the Board of Education shoving kids into overcrowded schools and businesses charging a premium for rancid meat. She had a lot of ideas about these sorts of things, but none of them could feed her kids or free her from her marriage. And so she kept them to herself during her psych test.
The new hires were also required to do a complete physical examination. This was especially humiliating for Gayle. The whole ordeal was a perverse take on the idea that if women want to be in the academy, if women want to do what the men do, then they have to go through the exact same processes. For the physical exam, this meant standing around nearly nude to be ogled by their peers. “They made us stand up there in paper gowns and these guys were trying to catch glimpses at us. And they make you do stuff in the gowns so the gowns get all torn up. My breasts and everything were just hanging out,” Gayle recalled. She was so thoroughly humiliated that a fellow female in the academy came to her with some Scotch tape to try to cover her up. “They did that kind of thing because they wanted us to quit. The guys didn’t want us, their wives didn’t want us, it was terrible. They treated us like new meat, picking out which one they were going to take.”
Fred Johnson made himself available to all the Blacks in the academy because he was prepared for the city to try to find excuses to fail them. Gayle didn’t think she’d have a problem. She was voted the vice president of the academy class and consistently scored high on all of the interstitial tests. Those high scores were attained by studying alongside her new girlfriend. But when they both got good grades on a test with similar answers, they were accused of cheating and threatened with expulsion from the academy. Fred Johnson had to step in and help them prove that they’d arrived at the same answers because they’d been preparing together.
After passing the academy, but before they could be sworn in as officers, they were also required to take a qualification test administered by the State of Ohio that evaluated their skills. Cadets could fly through the academy with high marks and still get disqualified to be a police officer. Although policewomen in Cleveland had been in the academy before the 1970s, they weren’t required to take the qualification test because officers in the women’s bureau didn’t carry guns. Anticipating that they would do whatever they could to disqualify her, Gayle prepared for the test with the desperate intensity of a woman fighting for her life. “To prepare for the running test, I used to run up and down the steps whenever I’d put the kids down for nap,” she told me. To make her qualifying time, she outran some Vietnam veterans, who threw up before they crossed the finish line. The state also required people to do a series of chin-ups and push-ups and dips that demanded upper body strength that seemed to favor the male physique, but Gayle fought her way through those. When she finally had to take her shooting test, the last phase, it was 19 degrees below zero. In 1977, Cleveland was in the midst of one of its coldest winters ever. But one of the essential rules of the academy was that it never canceled or postponed qualification tests for any reason, in an effort to help simulate what it’s like to be a police officer and have to work when everyone else gets the day off. And so Gayle stood at the outdoor range with the soft skin of her red-nailed fingers sticking to the ice-cold metal of her gun, her body involuntarily shivering, hoping the icy air didn’t tank her shot.
The first night Patrolwoman Gayle Smith reported to the Fifth District of the Cleveland Division of Police in the winter of 1977, her supervisor showed her two things: the coffee machine and the broom. It was expected that she would be the shift’s glorified janitor. But she bucked back. “I did not go through all that training to do no housekeeping. I came here to be a police officer,” she remembers saying to him, surprised by her own candor. Ridiculous as it seems now, perhaps this kind of insult by her male colleagues should have been expected. After all of the efforts by the Women’s Law Fund and Jean Clayton to break down the formal barriers in the CDP, women still constituted only 2.3 percent of the police force when Gayle started. The assholes she was working with had almost no experience working alongside women as equals and little incentive to see them as such. Gayle was basically a guinea pig. Ironically, it was because of Jean Clayton, Gayle’s initial inspiration to become a lady cop, that the women’s bureau was dissolved and lady cops ceased to exist. Although Gayle had been intent on following Clayton’s path, she found herself involved in something entirely new.
While most of the male cops were unhappy with the gender integration of the department, a lot of the women officers were displeased, too. They were especially pissed at Jean Clayton and her damn lawsuit. These were women who had no interest in being partnered with men and participating in a form of policing that oriented itself around violence and punishment. There were certainly fair criticisms of the women’s bureau, from its troubling focus on purity to the fact that its diversion efforts and empathy weren’t as equally distributed to Black suspects as they were to Whites. But I wonder if the department would be less lethal and repressive today if the men on the Cleveland Police Department had become more like the women and their women’s bureau. Instead, the women became more like the men. After the women’s bureau closed, some of its important work, such as sex crimes, was shamefully ignored or mishandled. Gayle would see this firsthand. But first she needed to get out of coffee duty.
It took some convincing, but eventually Gayle got her first assignment outside the district. After roll call, she would be taken to White City Beach, a former park on Lake Erie that in the 1940s was home to attractions like Bonavita the lion trainer, along with fishing and a yacht club. After natural disasters hurt the park and desegregation saw the City of Cleveland give up on supporting community spaces shared by both Blacks and Whites, White City Beach went the way of Euclid Beach. By the 1970s, it became a dumping ground for garbage and a place where the city parked vehicles that were towed to clear the streets for snowplows or as the result of car wrecks. That year, it was overflowing with gnarled automobiles. It had been the coldest Cleveland winter of the century, complete with “superbomb” blizzards and scores of days that were more than 20 degrees below zero. There were more than one thousand cars down there at White City Beach, but not another soul in sight.
“They dropped me off at White City Beach every night and stuck me in a shell of a car that was up on bricks and cinder blocks, with a wire heater inside of it. There was no bathroom. They’d leave me there all night and they’d come back and get me in the morning. I was just down there by myself in pitch blackness and cold. Even if I had wanted to get out, I couldn’t go nowhere. If someone had tried to steal the cars down there, there is nothing I could have done about it. It was demoralizing.”
Mom told me this in the kitchen, where I’d often heard her talk about the bad early days on the job. I’m not sure whether this was the first time I was really listening, or if she was telling it differently. Usually, her stories were never this detailed and specific. It was just “racism” and “men being nasty.” Perhaps because I was taking a real interest, she started accessing parts of the story she had often left untouched in her recounting.
There is a feeling of humiliation that stings long after an event has passed. It doesn’t just hurt because of what was done, it hurts because you feel as though you had some agency in the matter. That you let it happen. When she started telling me what it was like, I could feel her own surprise at the disregard she had endured. In the zone car with White partners, she was beneath speaking to. These were men who would greet a dog if they saw it on the street, but wouldn’t say one word to her. In this sense, despite the lawsuit and the consent decree, not much had changed on the job since the late 1950s, when White officers would “throw a shoe” to avoid being paired up with Curtis and Fred Johnson.
“When they finally had two guys take me out, they put me in the back seat where a prisoner would sit. And they didn’t let me touch the radio. They were supposed to show me some things. But instead, they got out of the car and went to eat. They just left me locked in the back of that car without saying anything. I’m just beating on the door and everything.”
It wasn’t until an old, White, Catholic officer who looked like Santa Claus decided to take Gayle under his wing that she finally got to learn a bit about real policing. The rotund veteran with snow-white hair explained to Gayle the first time she got in the car with him exactly why he was willing to teach her. It wasn’t that he was pleased about working with Blacks or with women. He simply realized the futility of resistance: “If we get rid of her, they will just send another one of them down here.”
“It was crazy to have me on the job that length of time and nobody taught me nothing except what I learned in the academy,” she remembered of her time wasted on frivolous assignments. “When he took me out, the first thing he ever told me was this: He said, ‘Okay, kid, what time is it?’ I looked for my watch. He said, ‘That is the first rule. Don’t you ever take your eye off anybody. If they ask what time it is, say you don’t know or your watch is broke. But you don’t look down.’”
It was with Santa Claus that she got to see how the men handled sex crimes now that the women’s bureau was closed. The first rape call that they ever responded to together involved a White woman. The lady had walked three doors over from where she lived to bum a cigarette from her neighbor. Before she could get back home, three men had grabbed her off the street, dragged her into a car, and took turns raping her. While Gayle was wrenched by the story, calling back to her own experiences of sexual abuse, the veteran was incredulous. “He talked to that girl so bad, I felt sorry for her,” she remembered. “He asked her, ‘What were you wearing?’ ‘Why were you out at that time of night?’ ‘What did you expect was going to happen?’ It was horrible . . . I will never forget it. That girl ended up not even filing.”
It was also alongside Santa Claus that she finally proved she could be real police, like the men. The call was a robbery at a drugstore that drew several cars to the scene. The suspect was a young Black man who managed to run out the back door. To show her tenacity, Gayle took off after him ahead of the rest of the cops, moving just as she had when she was training for the department’s entrance exam, going up and down those steps. Santa, who was heavy and plodding with bad knees, couldn’t keep up as Gayle tailed this man through an alleyway. And then from behind her, a shot rang out.
When a police shooting happens, officers come together to get their story straight. Although this was an era when it was still legal for officers in Cleveland to shoot fleeing felons, all the patrolmen made sure they agreed on what took place. After they were finished, they looked over at Gayle to see if she saw it the same way they did. Forget the police academy. The offensive rape call was a pop quiz, and this shooting was the final exam of real police shit. And Gayle passed with flying colors. “After that, I started having people to work with,” she told me. “It didn’t feel good, but I had a demon behind me.”
This excerpt is protected under copyright laws and reproduction of the text in any form for distribution is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer this work via any medium must be secured with the copyright owner.
Wilbert L. Cooper grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. He studied journalism at Ohio University and earned a master’s degree in publishing at New York University. He has written for outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Marshall Project, and The Wall Street Journal. His Vice documentary The Cleveland Strangler was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In 2024, he was the recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award. The Black Shield is his first book.
When Sabrina Imbler’s cat, Melon, becomes seriously ill with what is later confirmed as feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), Imbler feels she doesn’t have time to wait for a formal diagnosis and turns to a Facebook group that connects desperate cat owners with a black‑market treatment: GS‑441524. Injecting Melon twice a day at home, they enter a frantic stretch in which the acidic drug causes a wound to open on Melon’s back, and she is sentenced to weeks in a hated recovery suit called a Suitical: “Melon was so upset that she lay on her side like a tipped cow for hours, her chin glumly fixed to the carpet.” With Melon finally fully recovered, Imbler has the space to look back on the desperate measures it took to save her.
The FIP Warriors contact met me in the lobby of their building, wearing a knit cap with cat ears. They proceeded to demonstrate how to deliver the medicine on their stuffed cat, Edward. I watched as they manipulated the stuffed toy, lifting up pockets in Edward’s “skin” into which I was to drive a 22-gauge needle at an angle into subcutaneous tissue. I paid $50 for two vials of injectable GS-441524, which was acidic to keep it shelf-stable. This acidity, the contact warned me, meant the injections burned. “It’s really best if you have help,” they told me. “Will you have help?” No, I told them. My ex was out of town and it was just me and Melon. “Well, you’ll figure something out,” they said. I would have to.
More than a decade ago, a group of snipers shot up an electrical substation in Silicon Valley, striking power transformers and disabling the substation for nearly a month. The shooters were never identified; similar substation shootings, some by neo-Nazis, have taken place since. The longer Christopher Cox studies the American power grid—looking at aging infrastructure and ongoing transformer shortages, specialized manufacturing and rising demand, the massive energy consumption of data centers and whiplash usage of large language models—the more vulnerable it seems. “Somehow, we’ve made the industrial equivalent of a Fabergé egg the linchpin of our civilization,” Cox writes. “What would happen if someone started breaking them?”
The hope of restoring the grid would fade as fossil fuel supplies were exhausted, because so many utilities rely on them to “black-start” their generating units. A 2010 report called “High-Impact, Low-Frequency Event Risk to the North American Bulk Power System,” prepared by the Energy Department and NERC, condensed the entire disaster movie that would follow into a single paragraph: “The supply of food, water and fuel would degrade within days. The facile communication of information to the general population would be greatly complicated by the loss of cellphones, internet access and television. The economy would virtually shut down as electronic transactions could no longer be processed. After several days, widespread social unrest and confusion would ensue.” Thirsty, starved, dirty and surrounded by the useless machines we once depended on, we would be lucky if our misery ended at “confusion.”
Login
