Kristin Idaszak | Longreads | October 22, 2026 | 3,741 words (13 minutes)

The city of the dead is the obverse of the society of the living, or rather than the obverse, it is its image, its intemporal image. For the dead have gone through the moment of change, and their monuments are the visible sign of the permanence of their city.

—Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death

Shortly after I graduated from college, my best friend sent me a postcard from the Sedlec Ossuary, a Catholic chapel formally named the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Kutná Hora, a town about an hour east of Prague. The postcard depicted the chapel’s interior: a chandelier of bones flanked by two towers of skulls. On the back she wrote, “The chandelier alone contains all the bones in the human body. Thanks to the plague, we have this work of totally weird art!” 

Immediately I started planning my own trip to Kutná Hora—a place made prosperous by silver mining but famous for its bone church—and arrived with the zeal of a pilgrim. Today the town has 20,000 residents, but in its 14th-century heyday it boasted almost four times as many souls. The late Middle Ages was a tough time to be alive, between the Black Death, various crusades and holy wars, and famine—not to mention the labor conditions of silver mining. Kutná Hora was also a popular place to die, and all the villagers wanted to spend eternity at the medieval Sedlec Abbey. After one of the crusades, an abbot had brought back a handful of soil, supposedly from Golgotha, and strewn it on the abbey grounds. Burial in that soil was believed to grant quicker access to heaven, which led to an overcrowded cemetery. The solution? Build a subterranean chapel to house the remains. And then a half-blind monk, in the wake of a terrible plague, exhumed the victims and used them to redecorate. 

An ossuary is any repository for human remains, but it’s also the term for a holy site that serves this function. Another name for this kind of church is charnel house, which to me evokes the image of an abattoir. Death historian Philippe Ariès connects the term to the French idiom une vieille carne, translated as an old nag or a tough piece of meat. It’s apropos: These buildings enshrine human remains as décor in macabre, otherworldly, electrifying memento mori. 

Forty-thousand bodies’ worth of bones. Probably more. My brain buckled at the magnitude.

Four months later, I found myself in the Czech Republic. A coat of arms made out of bones greeted me when I arrived at the bone church. Upon closer inspection, the heraldry included a skeletal bird, its slender beak playfully pecking out a long-disintegrated eye from an empty socket. As I descended the stygian steps from the ticket kiosk, I took in the pyramid of bones that guarded the four corners of the room. 

The chapel seemed to exist in a perpetual gloaming, the air hushed and cool. The sheer presence of so many human remains disoriented me; they surrounded me on every side. Forty-thousand bodies’ worth of bones. Probably more. My brain buckled at the magnitude. The remains took on an animated quality—not in a Halloween-y, top hat–wearing, dancing skeleton sense; nor in an eerie, horror movie sense; but in the sense that each one radiated a life force.

I loved it. I loved being surrounded by skeletons and weird art and death.

Death and the afterlife fascinated me. I devoured stories of women who visited the underworld and returned—Alcestis, Eurydice, Persephone—and philosophers and poets who broached the subject—Nietzsche, Camus, Dante. Thanatos, my favorite philosophy professor called it. The death drive. But I had no sense of the fragility of my own body. My knees did not yet make those alarming soft pops; the permanent ache had not settled into my shoulder; my heart wouldn’t sputter erratically in my chest for another decade. The allure was intellectual and emotional, certainly not embodied. Like climate change or menopause, I understood mortality conceptually, but it didn’t feel real.

I’d like to tell you that my visit to the Sedlec Ossuary changed everything, that after my trip I appreciated life’s transitory nature. Or that it gave me a premonition of what lay in store for me, my own brushes with death that were to come.

It did not.

While I was underground, I felt temporarily transported and transformed—or at least, I had a flicker of understanding: I sauntered into the chapel with the hubristic notion of a young artist that my words would become immortal. The bones confronted me with the truth. My legacy would be deposits of calcium and protein and collagen. My art wouldn’t endure, but these nameless victims of plague and famine and war—they did. It humbled me.

But I left the ossuary’s insights with the dead. In my early 20s, I didn’t need the bone church to convince me to suck the marrow out of each day. I went to grad school, became a playwright, got married, traveled to all seven continents. Somewhere in there, I relegated the bone chapel to memory.

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In the summer of 2020, I got sick with a life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia called ventricular tachycardia. I had so many episodes of VT I lost count, and any one of them could have ended in cardiac arrest. These events were indescribably painful and frightening. They enervated me, sapping me of my strength, vitality—eventually my will to persevere. My life became very small.

Mortality was no longer an abstraction: I was scared of what would happen to me when I died. Of how much it hurt. Of the nothingness of bones.

In the years that followed my initial descent into illness, I rarely left home. At the time I lived in a two-bedroom apartment, a third-floor walk-up. Climbing the stairs could, unpredictably, trigger a cardiac event, and so unless I had to leave for work, I spent most of the time in my living room. I can close my eyes now and return to that place. I’d painted the walls a shade of cornflower blue I grew to loathe. The television tottered precariously on an ancient table. Cherry-stained bookcases lined the wall. The top of the bookcase displayed a golden Japanese fan with a cloud tree painted on it. Next to it stood a penguin pitcher I bought on my honeymoon in Tierra del Fuego. Three vintage-style travel posters advertised Antarctic destinations: Beagle Channel, Lemaire Channel, Paradise Harbor.

That room was the real ossuary. 

One of my favorite Greek tragedies is Euripides’ Alcestis, in which the eponymous heroine journeys to Hades in her dying husband’s stead. The god Apollo tricks the Fates so that her husband, the king, can live if he can find someone to take his place in the underworld. There’s an exchange I think about a lot: “Possible to say she is both alive and dead,” her servant reports, and the chorus leader, understandably confused, asks, “How could someone die and keep on living?” This is how I felt—alive but dead. Already in Hades. I’d escaped my fate, like the king, but my true self, the intrepid, curious, wonderstruck version of me? She was in the underworld with Alcestis.

The play takes a strange turn when Heracles arrives amid his twelve labors. During a supremely awkward evening of drunken revelry at the palace, he figures out what’s going on and hustles to the graveyard to wrestle death and bring Alcestis back. 

I didn’t have a demigod to save me. But I didn’t want to be lost and gone. 

The allure was intellectual and emotional, certainly not embodied. Like climate change or menopause, I understood mortality conceptually, but it didn’t feel real.

Sitting in my apartment day after day, surrounded by artifacts from the world I used to inhabit, was slowly killing me. I was afraid of things that had caused my VT, which meant I was afraid to go to the grocery store. I was afraid of taking a yoga class. I was afraid to simply be outside if it was really hot out. Finally I reached a breaking point. I could drop dead in the peanut butter aisle, or I could drop dead seeing the world. Staying at home wouldn’t save me. The threat resided inside my own chest.

I formulated a drastic plan to return to the land of the living. I took time off teaching and planned a sabbatical to travel and write. I couldn’t hide in my house if I rented it to someone else, if I jetted to the other side of the world. Instead of crossing the River Styx I ferried myself across the Pacific Ocean, and then the Atlantic. The final stop on my sabbatical was leading a study abroad in the Czech Republic, to attend an international scenography and performance festival. The ossuary didn’t really fit into the rest of the itinerary, but I wanted to give my students the experience I’d had all those years ago. 

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Though contemporary visitors can experience ossuaries as disturbing or revolting, they didn’t start out that way. In The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses, Paul Koudounaris traces their proliferation in Europe during the 13th century as a storage solution to the medieval Christian problem of where to keep the dead safe for their resurrection. There were more bodies than places to put them. Death preoccupied the medieval imagination. After the Bubonic plague, medieval artists began portraying its grotesque physicality: images of rotting corpses, poetic descriptions of worm fodder. You get the sense they would’ve painted the stench if they could. Is it any wonder that these decomposed cadavers eventually became the artistic medium itself? 

Dozens of bone chapels sprang up across Europe by the 17th century, in a confluence of theology and aesthetics that seems morbidly inevitable. During the Counter-Reformation, Catholicism leaned into opulent and lavish Baroque art. It also leaned into corporal mortification, the kind that now shows up in mass-market thrillers as a fetishization of pain and suffering. 

The appetite for gaudy-verging-on-gauche bone art swelled when the Romantics arrived on the scene in the 19th century. Gothic literature supplanted the medieval Ars Moriendi; a secular touchstone of this cultural moment is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Today, the Sedlec Ossuary has benefitted—or suffered from—the kitschification of gothic art, popping up in surprising places like The Young and the Restless and the “uninvolving and cliché-ridden” vampire B movie Blood and Chocolate.

Romanticism also marked the rise of a phenomenon now known as “dark tourism,” which refers to the practice of visiting sites associated with disaster, war, atrocity. Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon coined the term in 1996, in reference to tourism spawned by John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Scholars often point to concentration camps and Chernobyl as the field’s quintessential sites. Yet it’s a concept as old as tourism itself, dating back to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which a group of pilgrims travel to the site of Thomas Becket’s murder. During the Grand Tours of the Romantic era, visits to places like the Paris catacombs (an underground labyrinth containing the bones of some six million people) and Pompeii (mass grave by way of volcano) came into vogue as a way to cultivate the Sublime. 

It can’t be an accident that this coincided with the proliferation of ossuaries. I have to believe not everyone went to charnel houses for the sake of holy contemplation. Prurience is not an invention of the digital age, even if we have elevated it to new heights (or denigrated it to new social media-inflected nadirs). I imagine gentlewomen in whalebone corsets and dilettantish young men titillating their companions with stories of the macabre.

The contemporary case for dark tourism—sometimes called thanatourism—is that it refutes any attempt to forget or whitewash history. It’s one of the few ways we can meaningfully encounter death and atrocity. Before I got sick, I went to Auschwitz as well as Hiroshima. The power of these sites is undeniable. They serve as monuments to some of modern history’s darkest moments and have been carefully transformed into vehicles for education, reflection, and solemn commemoration. I went because it felt important to bear witness to the horrific crimes against humanity that occurred there. But I’ve also participated in dark tourism less consciously, and perhaps you have, too. I’ve seen an Ai Weiwei art installation at Alcatraz, toured the Colosseum where murder was a matinée, peeked into the bakeries and brothels of Pompeii, strolled through Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. I skipped Hell’s Museum, which a friend recommended in Singapore, and wish I’d skipped a ghost tour of Savannah, Georgia—what made it haunting was the way the city’s bloody history of enslavement and oppression was repurposed as entertainment for partiers carrying to-go cups of watered-down vodka.

The counterargument is self-evident: It leaves these sensitive sites vulnerable to exploitation. The suffering of one group commodified as a cocktail party anecdote for another. The exit through the gift shop. 

This is how I felt—alive but dead. Already in Hades. I’d escaped my fate, like the king, but my true self, the intrepid, curious, wonderstruck version of me? She was in the underworld with Alcestis.

It would be a neat narrative if the newest wave of dark tourism had gained traction after the pandemic, when there was a momentary reintegration of death in our day-to-day. In actuality, it flourished before COVID spread, before ambulances drove through empty city streets and bodies piled up in overcrowded mortuaries, before corpses were stashed in refrigerated trucks in New York City because the morgues were beyond capacity. And now, when those months and years have receded like a bad dream and no lessons were learned, it’s hard to attribute a newfound reverence for mortality to this renewed appetite for dark tourism. 

I never thought about what I was doing as morbid. I gravitated to many of these attractions unconsciously, often because I wanted to understand history—and history is littered with corpses. But I think back uneasily to the casual way these sites were slotted into my itineraries. I remember the okonomiyaki place I went to after the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the hole-in-the-wall with the cheerfully ursine line cook, but not how I possibly could’ve been hungry.

The impetus for this flavor of tourism isn’t monolithic. Some dark tourists are processing their personal or ancestral experiences, some are genuinely curious, some don’t even realize they’re doing it, and some are rubberneckers. Regardless of motivation, one effect of present-day dark tourism under global capitalism is the Disneyfication of death.

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The first months of my sabbatical were rocky. Fear dogged me through the streets of Sydney, Mumbai, Athens. A few weeks before I went back to the Czech Republic to lead my study abroad, I went to another bone chapel, in a small town east of Lisbon called Évora. Visitors flock to Évora for its prehistoric megaliths and Roman temple to Diana, but I’d driven across Portugal to see the charnel house. My GPS misled me through the hot, dusty town, and I circled around the temple and its remaining Corinthian columns—which seemed dropped into the town square like an abandoned film set—until I found the Capela dos Ossos.

The 17th-century Capela has more bling than Sedlec, from azulejo tiles to ceiling frescoes, with skulls where cherubs might usually repose. (Other charnel houses put the Capela to shame in their ostentation, such as the skeletons at the German Basilica of Waldsassen wearing jewel-encrusted gold costumes, which were originally posed with chalices with dried blood at their feet.) The chapel is crammed, floor to illustrious ceiling, with​ bones stacked horizontally, so only the knobs show. Lined with osteological columns, the architecture echoes the ruined temple to the pagan goddess in the town beyond. Before you even enter there’s a Dantean inscription: Nos ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos. 

We bones that are here await yours. 

I found the inscription strangely comforting as I entered the inner chamber. The first interpretive sign explained the function of a bone chapel as a memento mori: “It is expected to serve as a consolation to some and news to others.” 

Lucky them, I thought.

I appreciated the aesthetics of the Capela dos Ossos, but it lacked the Hadean quality that engendered my near-mystic experience at the Sedlec Ossuary. Afterward, I continued on my sabbatical still mistrustful of my body, still afraid to move through the world. 

Finally I reached a breaking point. I could drop dead in the peanut butter aisle, or I could drop dead seeing the world. Staying at home wouldn’t save me. The threat resided inside my own chest.

But when I got to Prague, something shifted. It didn’t happen all at once. I didn’t walk into the bone chapel and have an epiphany. A logjam loosened in my psyche. Shepherding a group of young adults in a foreign country, I couldn’t hide in the hotel or confine myself to strictly prescribed routes and routines. For many of them it was their first trip overseas, and overwhelmed, they looked to me for guidance. 

At 7 a.m. one morning, 20 students piled onto a bus to Kutná Hora. On the drive, I strove to impart my love of bone churches: Ossuaries aren’t morbid (okay, well, they are, but they’re not only morbid); they highlight the brevity of our lives to help us live more intentionally. But in a kind of punk rock way. Carpe fucking diem. The students were curious but respectful. Some found it moving, others creepy. 

When we arrived, the bone chapel was different than I remembered. Tentatively, I descended into the brightly lit space below. In the open area of the chapel, monitors now played a video of renovators handling the bones. The video explained a restoration project to shore up the building’s structural integrity and preserve the skeletons. The foundation is unstable and has started sinking since it was built sometime in the 14th century. In the Baroque period the Czech-Italian architect Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel redesigned the ossuary as it exists today, and it wasn’t until the 1860s that a carpenter named František Rint created the bone art, including the famous chandelier and the Schwarzenberg coat of arms that reproduced the heraldry of the local aristocrats. 

That wasn’t the origin story I’d learned years ago, about the monk and the plague—was the monk even real? The crepuscular lighting and gloom were gone. Where was the ambience? How could you commune with the dead like this?

Behind me, another busload of tourists arrived, and another, and another. Tourists overran the chapel, their guides speaking into little microphones in various languages while they snapped photo after photo. At the entrance, the lone employee said in English, no photos allowed. Everybody ignored her. 

Snap. 

Desensitized, they gawked without seeing. 

Snap. 

No photos, repeated the ticket taker. 

Snap.

The scores of tour groups weren’t part of my memory. 

The contemporary case for dark tourism—sometimes called thanatourism—is that it refutes any attempt to forget or whitewash history. It’s one of the few ways we can meaningfully encounter death and atrocity.

Through a side door I climbed the stairs into an outdoor cemetery. The videos of the restorers kept replaying in my mind. It’s one thing to envision an apocryphal monk constructing pyramids of bones, it’s another to watch footage of archaeologists cleaning them and then putting them back in the pile. One of my students was minoring in archaeology and, as we strolled through the cemetery, she told me that ethical and legal restrictions governed archaeologists’ handling of human remains. It was obvious once she said it, but I hadn’t thought about it. The videos had close-ups of hands in nitrile gloves cleaning the dirt off the bones. Afterward, the bones were soaked in lime solution, which is also how Rint first prepared them in the 1860s. His chlorinated lime solution is the reason the Sedlec Ossuary’s decorations have remained relatively white over the years, while bones in other ossuaries have browned with age. The archaeologists also have the benefit of video mapping to help them rebuild the pyramids once the bones are cleaned and restored. 

It must take incredible dedication for these archaeologists to put themselves in this proximity with death. To sustain that intimacy day after day—I know the cost. 

I resented the crowd of tourists I’d left thronging the chapel. More than that, I felt a sense of superiority. Now that I was ready for the ossuary to transform me, I’d found an atmosphere that was more carnivalesque than sacred. 

But as I meandered among the headstones in the fresh air, it occurred to me: Did I really think that none of those tourists had ever lost a parent or child or partner, ever grieved, ever had a near-death experience of their own? Did I really think my proximity to death, my awareness of its phalanges drumming on my shoulder, had given me some privileged access to the charnel house’s true meaning? To the contrary, after I got sick, I guarded my life like a dragon hoarding a treasure pile in a dark cave, and it moldered away, unspent. Those bones had more vivacity than I did. 

For the medieval peasants whose skeletons limned the walls, death was a prolonged nap until everyone woke up during the rapture. There was a fluidity between death and the afterlife. These days it seems so much more final. (Per Ariès, once it was tame and now it is wild.) Much has been made of the deathbed’s move in modern society from the home to the hospital: out of sight, out of mind. Ossuaries thrust mortality squarely in your line of vision. They ask that you regard death as a transition, not a terminus. Not something to guard against hyper-vigilantly, but a natural part of a cosmic continuum. 

It was time to live again.

Going back to the Sedlec Ossuary was not some purifying rite. It was an ordinary day. The tourists streamed past me, discussing where they were going for lunch. The ​students had moved on, browsing for trinkets at the shop across the street. I recoiled at the kitschy skull mugs and shot glasses, but when I got home, I wished I had a memento mori to put next to the penguin.  

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After Heracles brings Alcestis back from the underworld, she’s silent for the remainder of the play. Still sacred to the god of the dead, she cannot speak until three days have gone by, Heracles explains. I think there might be other reasons she stays silent. Maybe she preferred it down there. Maybe she left some irretrievable part of herself behind. Maybe she found the light above a little too harsh, the music too loud, the colors too saturated; found herself attracted to dusk, to intertidal zones, lintels, liminal spaces. Or maybe she has nothing left to say.

When I got home, I went through my old photos. I couldn’t figure out if my memories of Sedlec were real until I found a photo of myself, painfully young, standing in the semi-dark underneath the chandelier, its bones glowing white—either from the camera flash or an out-of-frame light source. I look half-happy, half-haunted, like I’m about to say something, but I can’t remember what.

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Kristin Idaszak is an internationally produced and award-winning playwright and essayist whose recent work explores the intersection of ecology and chronic illness. She is a 3Arts Awardee, two-time Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow, and the former Shank Playwriting Fellow at the Goodman Theatre. She received the Kennedy Center ACTF Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award. Her essays appear in The American Scholar, Fourth Genre, HowlRound, and elsewhere.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

As part of their homework, students are given specific tasks that require picking up the phone and talking to people they have never met before.

• After Robert and John F. Kennedy were assassinated, a rumor formed that the family could be cursed.
• Their history has been marred with tragedy, from four plane crashes to a deadly skiing accident.
• In 1969, Ted Kennedy publicly referenced the curse when apologizing for fleeing a fatal car crash.

Members of the Kennedy family have reached the highest positions in public office, becoming senators, congressmen, and even the president. Now, the next generation of Kennedys is carrying that legacy forward.

Still, the family has also endured profound losses across generations. Most recently, Kyle Kennedy, the granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, died at 42 in September.

The family has also dealt with numerous tragedies, from illness and assassinations to fatal accidents and addiction. The family’s history of loss has fueled the long-running notion of a “Kennedy curse.”

Here are the many tragedies that have affected the Kennedy family.

Native to dense rainforests of Australia, cassowaries are massive, flightless birds often called some of the closest living relatives to dinosaurs.

In May, William Tharien, a 19-year-old student, made his second attempt at passing NEET, India’s national entrance exam for would-be medical students. Passing the test was the only way William would be eligible to study to be a doctor, surgeon, dentist or vet and he was competing with about 2.2 million other students for one of about 130,000 places in medical schools around the country. What makes the test even more nerve-wracking is that only half of these places are available at heavily subsidized state-run colleges, rather than expensive private institutions.

It can take students up to two years to prepare for these exams, with parents going into debt to pay fees at tuition centers entirely devoted to cracking the test. Days after William, and millions of others, took the test on May 3, authorities discovered that the paper had likely been leaked and circulated on social media platforms like Telegram. The results were voided.

Around the same time, the Chief Justice of India’s Supreme Court compared young people “who don’t get any employment and don’t have any place in a profession” to cockroaches and parasites. In a country with the largest population of 15- to 29-year-olds in the world (nearly 370 million people) and high levels of youth unemployment, particularly amongst the educated, the judge’s remarks struck a raw nerve.

It led to the formation of the Cockroach Janta Party — a mocking reference to India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, led by prime minister Narendra Modi — initially as a satirical meme. But the cancellation of NEET gave the Cockroach Janta Party real-life relevance and made it an outlet to channel the extensive frustration and anger of India’s youth. 

In neighboring Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, so-called Gen Z protests between 2022 and 2025 had toppled governments. 

In June, William joined tens of thousands of students in Jantar Mantar, an iconic venue for public protest in the Indian capital Delhi, to call for the resignation of Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan over the NEET debacle. The demonstrations lasted for weeks, even as the Delhi Police resorted to tear gas, pellet guns, electric shock devices, and lathis (nearly six-foot-long bamboo sticks) to disperse the crowds. William was a regular.

“I always felt watched,” he told us. At metro stations, on his way to the protests, he said he repeatedly encountered the police. “They made sure that we saw them and that we should feel intimidated by their presence and their numbers.”

As journalists, we covered the June-July protests, including on July 20 when the police brutality reached an ugly peak as protesters marched towards the Indian parliament. Artificial intelligence-enabled CCTV cameras installed under Delhi’s “Safe City” project lined the streets in and around Jantar Mantar. A permanent surveillance tower stood at the center of the protest site, recording around the clock. Multiple drones circled overhead. Photographers hired by the police moved through the crowd. Some officers carried body cameras, and at least one police officer was seen wearing Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

Two police surveillance vehicles were parked just outside the entrance to Jantar Mantar. One was Ikshana (the Sanskrit for, literally, the act of seeing), an AI-powered police van with eight cameras that used facial recognition technology to match faces to police databases in real time. The other was a mobile command center. 

According to William, the surveillance was not limited to the protest site. “I saw police detaining students at the metro station,” he said. “They were recognizing students from footage, identifying them by their bags, or style of mask or sunglasses.”

Even after the protests stopped, with the July 25 resignation of Pradhan, the education minister, William said the police paid visits to students in their neighborhoods. They were tracking down protesters. On August 3, he said, two police officers showed up at his lodgings. He was alone. “We have photos of you,” the police told him, “in colour. You’ve been seen going to the protest site on multiple days and also seen at the metro station.” Insisting that attending protests was a democratic right, William refused to let the police into his room without a warrant.

According to the Indian Express, the Delhi Police used surveillance footage accrued during the NEET protests in the summer to identify at least “2,800 people with a criminal background” who would be be prevented from protesting against Gyanesh Kumar. 

Aishe Ghosh, a prominent student activist and national office holder at the left-wing Students’ Federation of India, has challenged the Indian government and the Delhi Police in court over the indiscriminate use of surveillance technology. Not only were the authorities documenting the protests, she alleges, they were using the footage to threaten protesters with public exposure.

Long an object of surveillance, Ghosh, who was a leader of the NEET protests, said the police entered the Communist Party of India (Marxist) headquarters in Delhi to arrest her in August on the basis of protests she had attended five years earlier in 2021. Describing the attempt to arrest Ghosh as a “continuing witch hunt against student protesters,” the CPI(M) added that it was evidence of “the Modi government’s escalating assault on democratic rights.”

Modi’s surveillance state   

Hearing Ghosh’s litigation, the Delhi High Court appeared to suggest that the urgency to examine her specific allegations had dissipated since the NEET protests had concluded. The judges suggested that she file a more general petition.

The NEET protests proved only to be the start of the Cockroach Janta Party’s precipitous rise as serious, youth-led opposition to the Modi government, in power since 2014 and seemingly determined to use every arrow in its quiver, from opaque sources of funds to the takeover of independent institutions to the use of surveillance technology, to stifle dissent. In October, the “cockroaches” poured into Delhi’s streets again. 

This time, they wanted the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, India’s Chief Election Commissioner, a constitutional role meant to be entirely independent, apolitical and focused on maintaining the integrity of the Indian electoral process. An investigation by the Indian Express newspaper revealed that despite 14 objections in the last 10 months from the two other members of the election commission, Kumar had allegedly illegally taken unilateral decisions that resulted in voters being left off electoral rolls. India is currently undertaking an extensive revision of its voter lists that has controversially already disenfranchised 130 million people and potentially swayed state elections in favour of the governing BJP.

Kumar has not directly addressed the Indian Express’s findings. And while Modi too has remained typically silent — in his 12 years as prime minister, he has yet to call a single press conference — the Delhi Police has once again used violence and arbitrary arrests to crack down on still ongoing protests. Jantar Mantar, the de facto site of protests in Delhi since 1993, has been officially shut down. Prominent protesters, including Aishe Ghosh and the founders of the Cockroach Janta Party, have been detained. The opposition led by Congress Party scion Rahul Gandhi — the son, grandson and great-grandson of former Indian prime ministers — has been galvanized. 

But India’s next general election is not until 2029 and the next major state legislative election is not until February 2027 at the earliest. Maintaining momentum is a task Gandhi has yet to show he can manage. 

Meanwhile, the BJP continues to use friendly mainstream television media, alongside its heavy-handed policing, to argue that the protests are marginal, paid for by foreign sources and disliked by the large majority of Indians.

Fallible facial recognition tech

Technology researcher Srinivas Kodali told Coda that India’s efforts to modernise its policing system were stepped up after terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008. Police stations across the country were connected, with access to criminal records and a tracking database. If someone attends a protest somewhere in India, Kodali explained, and has a police report filed against them, that information will be available to every police department in the country. He described the approach as “360-degree profiling,” pulling data together from facial recognition technology, surveillance towers, phone records, social media activity, and government databases including electoral records.

Delhi Police has said its use of technology and AI is meant to maintain law and order and identify people who already have a criminal record and not to randomly profile protesters. However, privacy researchers and lawyers warn that sophisticated surveillance systems can make participation in protests traceable long after the crowds have dispersed. 

Much of the technology for this work is supplied by a growing group of private companies. Ikshana, the AI-powered police van used to monitor protesters in Jantar Mantar back in July, is one example. Rahul Bhardwaj, the Chief Growth Officer at analytics firm Intozi based in Gurugram, a tech hub on the outskirts of Delhi, said the company provides the software layer behind Ikshana’s system. Intozi processes video feeds through AI applications designed for tasks including crowd monitoring, detecting weapons and identifying people against police databases.

Intozi has previously deployed its facial-recognition technology for government security operations at high profile international summits in Delhi. Asked specifically whether its technology was used at Jantar Mantar this summer, though, Bhardwaj cited confidentiality obligations.

The company said that its role ends after its system is installed on police infrastructure, and that it does not retain the database or continue to access the system once it has been handed over to the police. “Images of people who are not in the police database,” Bhardwaj said, “are automatically blurred within seconds, while records associated with people already registered in police databases are retained by the police.”

That places responsibility for the technology and its subsequent use with the police. 

Innefu Labs, whose AI Vision facial-recognition software has been used by Delhi Police in criminal investigations, declined to answer questions about data retention, legal safeguards or its operational relationship with police.

Another company, AjnaLens, confirmed its direct role in live policing. Kuldeep Pathak, Associate Director at AjnaLens said the company had supplied AI-enabled smart glasses to Delhi Police, first used in January 2026 in security operations during India’s Republic Day celebrations. The company confirmed that its glasses were used again during the NEET protests in Jantar Mantar. According to Pathak, their system was given access to a police database containing around 65,000 people with criminal records. He said 14 people were arrested after being recognized through the glasses.

Experts we spoke to questioned what authorises private vendors to access and process police databases, or whether an independent authority audits the system.

Surveillance without accountability

“What statutory regime operates in this context?” asked Menaka Guruswamy, a senior lawyer who is involved in litigation in the Supreme Court over the use of facial recognition technology at Jantar Mantar. “Where is this information hosted? Is it hosted by the private vendor, the state or the police? We know nothing.”

Guruswamy said tenders and contracts between the state and private companies should make it possible to establish what data each party is permitted to access and retain.

Disha Verma, AI researcher at Tech Global Institute and Ashoka University, claims these private vendors get access to police datasets that help them train their AI systems. “They (vendors) did not need to buy training datasets from anywhere,” she says. “They didn’t need to test their product anywhere else. They ended up with a curated, very accurate facial-recognition system.” The data provided by the police, she added, would help vendors sell their product for profit to other companies that want to make use of surveillance technology.

“What I am most concerned about is how much impunity and data and power this gives the private vendors,” Verma said, calling it a “parallel police state.” 

And then there’s the accuracy of the technology, little of which has been subject to question or scrutiny.

In response to Right to Information requests made by the digital rights group Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) in 2022, the police said it considered facial-recognition results with an accuracy score of 80 percent or above as a positive match. Only results below the 80 percent threshold were “subject to further verification using corroborative evidence.”

But the distinction between technical facial recognition matches and actual verified identifications became harder to ignore after the NEET protests in Jantar Mantar in the summer. Delhi Police said its facial recognition system identified 2,873 people with previous criminal records at the protest between July 20 and 26. But at least 25 of those people were actually in jail at the time they were supposed to be protesting.

Intozi’s own description shows why that distinction is not always straightforward. Bhardwaj told us that the company’s recognition threshold is “generally kept above 70 to 80%” and once that threshold is crossed, “it is a 100 percent match for us.” This is why, argues Guruswamy, the Supreme Court lawyer, a statutory framework is necessary. “There is no foolproof system,” she said. “That is why you need accountability, a legal regime, data protection and safeguards governing how these interactions take place.”

Nearly six years ago, Ahmed* (name changed on request) experienced the pitfalls of the Delhi Police’s then fledgling facial recognition technology and surveillance system. He was identified by AI-assisted video analysis as being present during deadly communal violence in northeast Delhi in 2020. Ahmed spent around 18 months in jail, accused of killing a police official during the riots. He insisted that the man seen in the footage used as clinching evidence was someone else.

“My hair was cropped short, and I had different shoes. Only the white shirt and dark trousers matched. But that does not make anyone wearing those clothes me,” Ahmed told us. He said he had shut his shop around noon on the day of the violence and gone home. Footage from one security camera showed him near the lane where he lived. But police later said it had used Amped FIVE, a video and image analysis tool, and AI Vision, facial recognition software made by Indian company Innefu Labs, to place Ahmed at the scene of the crime.

In September 2021, Ahmed was released on bail. The court noted that several people in the area wore similar clothes to those shown in the footage and that the video analysis identifying Ahmed across different recordings would have to be tested at trial.

By then, though, the damage to Ahmed’s life had already been done. Before his arrest, Ahmed ran a garments shop and employed a couple of workers. The shop did not survive his incarceration and, while on bail, he now works at a street stall, barely surviving on his meagre income.

Facial recognition systems turn facial features into numerical data and compare them with stored images, producing a similarity score or a list of possible matches. In a one-to-many search, a single face from a protest can be compared against an entire database.

“It's able to recognize a face the way an iPhone camera might,” Disha Verma, the Ashoka University researcher said. An iPhone's front camera works because everyone looks at it from roughly the same angle in consistent light, she added; but a police station is often dimly lit, angles vary, and the camera used to take the photo might be old and pixelated. "The system the police are using usually has a very large error rate, just inherently," Verma said.

Katie Kinsey, Chief of Staff and Tech Policy Counsel at the New York University School of Law’s Policing Project, told us that broad accuracy claims tell little about how a facial recognition system might work once it leaves controlled testing conditions. “A model tested on one dataset may behave differently when the cameras, lighting, image quality and population change,” she said. 

Live video presents an additional difficulty because the images are less controlled and officers may be acting on alerts as events unfold. Kinsey said systems should be tested under the actual conditions in which police intend to use them.

Verma also raised concerns about biases affecting facial recognition systems. “If the police think a criminal looks like a dark-skinned bearded young man,” Verma said, “that is the data they will collect and that is what will train the AI.” It would, she added, create a feedback loop in which technology does not remove police prejudice but reproduce and legitimise it instead. 

India has constitutional privacy protections and general data protection legislation, but no dedicated law for the use of facial recognition technology. Basically, “you won’t know you are on a watch list,” researcher Srinivas Kodali told us.

We reached out to the Delhi Police Cyber Cell with questions about the use of live facial recognition technology and other surveillance systems during protests, but did not receive a response. 

Some jurisdictions have tried to place clearer limits on this type of power. For example, under the European Union’s AI Act, real-time remote biometric identification by law enforcement in public spaces is generally prohibited, with narrow exceptions. Even then, its exceptional use is subject to necessity and proportionality requirements and generally requires prior judicial or independent authorization.

Police in India have long maintained categories of people they consider suspects or potential troublemakers. For instance, in the south Indian state of Telangana, police have a category called “rowdy sheets” for people considered habitual offenders or threats to public order.  With facial recognition technology, these categories have only widened.  

Lawyer Menaka Guruswamy wondered what might happen when someone photographed at one protest is then seen at another protest. “Are we being criminalized simply for attending protests?” 

Verma said that one of the significant shifts that she has witnessed over the years is how the technologies once associated with borders and the military have moved to civilian policing. The militarization of the Delhi Police has been evident as paramilitary personnel dressed in camouflage have been assaulting and detaining protesters.

Still, the protesters come. 

William Tharien told us that despite being a known face to the Delhi police, despite his fears and struggles with his mental health, despite the monitoring of his social media, he is not going to stop protesting. 

And with Delhi’s cockroaches still calling for the resignation of India’s chief election commissioner, still warning of the danger posed to Indian democracy by the Modi government’s authoritarian tendencies, how, William said, could he give up the fight now?

The post In Modi’s India, somebody is always watching appeared first on Coda Story.

Zohran Mamdani has places to be.

At 35, the mayor of New York City knows how to catch — and keep — people's attention. It's tempting to think the key to Mamdani's success is Instagram, but the secret sauce of his leadership isn't just a social media machine. It's a man criss-crossing the five boroughs with a portable podium and the occasional sugar-free Red Bull.

To better understand how his in-person ubiquity shapes public perception, Business Insider spent the summer tracking the mayor's daily schedule. From May 1 to August 31, Mamdani had 249 listed appointments, 170 of which were held in public. Eighty-one of these were in community spaces such as classrooms, libraries, parks, apartment buildings, tennis courts, places of worship, and restaurants.

Another 50 were government events at emergency preparedness centers and police precincts. With the exception of Staten Island — which Mamdani visited three times — his appearances dotted the city. He spent the most time in Manhattan with 85 events, followed by Brooklyn (35), the Bronx (26), and Queens (21). He made few appearances in City Council chambers and other traditional political arenas. At the mayor's home, Gracie Mansion, there were no press conferences. Instead, Mamdani hosted 10 cultural receptions, pickup soccer games, and religious celebrations.

At a time when C-suite bigwigs are delivering bad news via canned memo, and politicians are mediating their message through glossy election mailers, dozens of political analysts, media strategists, historians, and people in the mayor's orbit say that Mamdani's man-about-town style stands out.

What makes Mamdani a lesson in charisma is his ability to combine four important factors: physical presence, personal authenticity, political messaging, and active participation, a review of his nearly first year shows.

He's able to be in on the joke — poking fun at his omnipresent suit by jumping into a pool, tie and all — while still getting his message across. They're a regular part of his schedule, rather than a surprise one-off that feels like it was cooked up by a communications staffer. It's not an easy balance to strike, but the mayor's in-person events lay out a road map for other leaders.

Showing up doesn't solve all problems, and nine months into his tenure, the mayor has met his fair share of critics. Glad-handing with a few CEOs and small business owners doesn't replace the need to attract investment from blue-chip companies and buzzy startups. Despite his push for affordability, he has yet to substantially lower residents' household bills.

But his supporters and critics agree that the mayor has a natural talent for connection, turning mundane events into meaningful moments with constituents. He fuses human connection and mass media to turn heads in the cutthroat attention economy. Whether it's cheering on the Knicks in the nosebleeds of Madison Square Garden or ordering an egg and cheese with jalapeño at a Queens bodega, Mamdani knows how to see and be seen.

Between a crammed row of treadmills and elliptical machines, Mamdani straightened his blazer and stepped up to the microphone. The East Village recreation center smelled like sweat, dust, and takeout coffee. Events like this one in early July, which touted new rules to make it easier for people to cancel subscriptions, are a signature way to promote his agenda. As the images circulated online, New Yorkers could imagine Mamdani on the rowing machine next to them, complaining about how hard it was to get out of a pesky membership.

All mayors go to ribbon-cutting ceremonies and attend parades. Mamdani's retail politics events also include everyday New Yorkers in everyday settings. He gave only a few keynote speeches this summer, but he found time to visit three senior centers, seven schools, and a soccer watch party at Rikers Island. A sentiment expressed by dozens of residents is that, regardless of their personal politics, they respect Mamdani for coming to their neighborhoods. One Central Park halal vendor says he feels like the mayor understands how pricey food can be these days. A Staten Islander who has met Mamdani — and filmed a video with him — was shocked that he could rattle off deep-cut Sri Lankan cricket trivia.

Debbie Saslaw runs the video production company Melted Solids alongside Anthony DiMieri. The pair are the brains — and lenses — behind some of Mamdani's viral videos. While much has been said about the mayor's knack for social media, Saslaw says his penchant for physical presence is crucial to making his short-form videos effective. Saslaw recalls a day early in the mayoral campaign when they visited a park to chat with picnickers. She figured no one would want to speak with an underdog candidate on what turned out to be a very rainy afternoon.

"People were honking out from their cars, and one guy waved from his apartment window," she tells me. "People were stopping their bikes — there was a bike pileup."

Moments like that become social media content: More than 80 in-person events this summer earned posts on the NYCMayor Instagram — largely photos and videos of Mamdani with regular people. Only a handful of posts were policy announcement graphics or highly produced mini-documentaries.

Some critics say the energy the mayor puts into engagement is a distracting gimmick that diverts attention from controversial policies or a lack of meaningful accomplishments. With hundreds of events over the summer, Mamdani's time to negotiate and pass policies within City Hall is limited. At least on the books, his schedule shows he met with local political leaders a handful of times between May and August. On the other hand, for all but 25 of 122 days, he attended at least one public event.

The city's business leaders, in particular, say Mamdani hasn't spent enough time learning from corporate advisors, economists, or local shop owners. Of Mamdani's 249 listed events, six were with CEOs or Wall Street execs, and only a few were with small business owners. By comparison, he met childcare and day care workers more than a dozen times. While former communications leaders for Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams say past mayors have also limited their time in boardrooms and offices ("their job is to be out there," one tells me), some small-business owners feel they're getting short shrift from Mamdani as well. A vendor near one of his planned city-owned grocery stores says she feels left out of the conversation, "You're going to spend all this money on building this new infrastructure, and the basic things that we have been asking for don't get done."

Those less convinced by Mamdani's tactics say the resources the Mayor's Office pours into communications are a smokescreen. Mark Jaffe, a founder of NYC's Multicultural Business Coalition who is suing the administration over its city-run grocery store initiative, says that while Mamdani "gets people's attention," the substance is coming up short.

"He knows the issues," Jaffe says. "He just doesn't come up with good plans that can actually solve them through jobs and capitalism."

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Mamdani's propensity for kissing babies and waltzing into bars has both practical and historical grounding. As people spend more of their lives conversing with AI customer service bots, half-engaged with corporate Zoom meetings, and watching political attack ads between TV episodes, they're starving for more intimate, authentic connections. When C-suite leaders and politicians try to connect with people, it can yield limited success. Whether it's a fast-food CEO taking tiny bites out of a burger and calling it a "product," tech execs looking unconvincing as they sip beer, or politicians filming stilted selfie videos, attempts to add a personal touch through a mediated platform can leave people cold.

"We are, at our core, social creatures who need to connect, and we did not evolve to connect only digitally," Amy Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, tells me.

Mamdani is trying to resurrect a bygone era for New York City politicians — with his own new-school sheen. Mayoral calendars aren't publicly posted, and changes in record keeping, news coverage, and technology make comparisons imperfect. But historians and communications directors under previous administrations say that recent mayors struggled with the perception of being distant from their constituents.

A longtime New Jersey homeowner, Eric Adams drew criticism for his international travel and trips to exclusive nightclubs. Michael Bloomberg's billionaire status made him less relatable to regular people, NYC historian Kevin Draper tells me, even when he made an effort to meet residents around town. Bill de Blasio had a Mamdani-esque focus on affordability but, based on his dismal approval ratings throughout his mayoralty, failed to connect on a personal level. Former communications directors for de Blasio and Adams say they both had their go-to outer-borough neighborhoods, but neither had Mamdani's widespread reach.

Timing was a factor: Those two leaders tended to work later into the night, whereas the current mayor makes stops around the city much earlier. Draper says youth is also a leg up that Mamdani has over his predecessors. My analysis shows that Mamdani attended at least one event on 97 of his 122 days this summer, averaging more than two per day, and a third of these were out in the community. On busy days, he made up to seven stops.

"He has had a longer honeymoon than any other mayor," José Bayona, who worked under the Adams and de Blasio administrations, says with a laugh. "I can tell you that."

Mamdani has said he emulates Depression-era Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who launched an early version of city-owned stores and primarily focused messaging toward the working class with his "Talk with the People" radio program. He also evokes Ed Koch, the relatively moderate mayor who dominated the 1980s, who was known for strolling the streets and riding the train, asking residents, "How'm I doin'?" The style's lineage stretches back to the 19th century, when candidates and elected officials would drum up support by giving speeches and meeting the public in their saloons and town squares. Members of Tammany Hall, a highly corrupt but popular New York City political machine, focused on in-person interactions with the working class.

There are, of course, challenges to the mayor's attempts at everyman charisma. On a practical level, it's much harder for Mamdani to show up at a sports bar these days without serious planning and a security detail. And even with sharp messaging and the reputation for popping up in unexpected places, the complexities of policy rollout and city politics have slowed his attempts to transform New York.

Mamdani is early enough in his term that he can get away with having big plans that haven't been realized, riding high on a banner sports summer and pothole politics. But as he approaches his second year in office, his constant presence outside City Hall and prolific digital footprint could become more of a liability than an asset. As Edmondson puts it: "There's always a risk of disappointment when people believe that, in your back pocket, you have a magic wand."

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Interactive graphic by Randy Yeip.

In Pakistan’s rapidly growing urban centres, daily life is accelerating. As cities expand, demanding work schedules and household management have made time one of our most precious commodities. Yet, while traditional conversations around food often focus on heritage recipes or shifting culinary trends, a quieter, structural revolution is unfolding. This transformation centres on reliable, daily access to fresh food and essential groceries – a fundamental human necessity.

For millions of households, putting nutritious meals and essential groceries on the kitchen table every day is a daily logistical challenge. In this evolving landscape, digital delivery platforms have moved beyond convenience and become essential infrastructure for modern urban living. The true breakthrough in Pakistan’s delivery landscape is the innovation that’s driving convenience and accessibility. Historically, securing fresh produce or a warm meal meant navigating dense traffic, dealing with localised supply shortages, or settling for whatever was available at the nearest market.

Today, data-driven quick-commerce models have fundamentally altered how Pakistanis access food. Through foodpanda’s hyper-local dark store network, pandamart, and intelligent routing algorithms, technology is shrinking the distance between supply and demand. By optimising rider routes and establishing localised fulfilment hubs, tech platforms drastically cut the time, cost, and friction of moving essentials from source to customers’ doorstep. Whether it is an early-morning delivery of fresh milk and eggs or an affordable dinner after a long workday, digital micrologistics have made food access consistent, predictable, and inclusive.

This structural shift speaks directly to World Food Day’s core message and its global guiding theme, “Innovate today, nourish tomorrow.” True innovation in modern food systems extends far beyond agricultural yields; it requires building smarter, resilient supply chains that eliminate waste, reduce friction, and bridge distribution gaps.

By digitising neighbourhood kiryana stores, empowering home-based food entrepreneurs through initiatives like HomeChefs, helping established (as well as new) restaurants expand their offerings to wider customer cohorts and optimising rapid last-mile delivery, foodpanda is helping construct an agile, modern food and grocery network across Pakistan. In a developing economy, this technological resilience cushions local food systems against urban sprawl, rising fuel costs, and supply chain bottlenecks. At its core, technology fulfils its highest purpose when it directly serves human needs.

In Pakistan’s evolving gig ecosystem, foodpanda anchors its platform around a central mission: to put a meal on every table. This motto reflects an operational commitment to give every consumer seamless, affordable access to fresh groceries and quality food with just a few taps on a smartphone screen. It means equipping micro-entrepreneurs and local merchants with digital tools to expand their reach and protect their livelihoods. It also means building a connected ecosystem where farmers, local sellers, delivery riders, and families thrive together.

As Pakistan accelerates its transition toward a fully digitised economy, online platforms play a role that extends well beyond delivering food. By turning technological innovation into reliable, daily nourishment, foodpanda is laying the foundation for a more connected, efficient, and inclusive food future for all Pakistanis – one delivery and one meal at a time.

The post How digital delivery is innovating Pakistan’s food ecosystem appeared first on Daily Pakistan English News.

Daniel Barnum | Longreads | October 15, 2026 | 4,116 words (15 minutes)

The Hyrtl Skull Collection is the first exhibit you notice when you walk into the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. This is by curatorial design: The skulls face the main entrance, staring steadily at each person who crosses the threshold. All 139 are evenly spaced in long lines behind the glass doors of a towering cherrywood cabinet. Each one rests in a wire frame on top of a thin balsa box with a tag at its center. I recall tracking them with glances as I shuffled nearby with two friends, as part of a large crowd. Small bright lights illuminated them from inside the cases, making them glow dully from my angle. Seeing them for the first time, I was both mesmerized by this effect and intimidated by the skulls’ great number. I tried not to look for too long, but the density of people on the narrow walkway made that impossible: I was soon stuck in the dead center of the exhibit. Almost in spite of myself, I scanned the wall text and learned how they had been brought together to disprove a piece of 19th-century race science, which seemed like one of the better reasons to collect skulls. 

Most of the exhibits in the Mütter Museum have similarly odd origins. Tucked into a corner of the College of Physicians’ stately New Beaux-Arts building, the Mütter is a 19th-century medical teaching collection/cabinet museum with an annual visitorship of almost 150,000 people. Its staff goes on late-night talk shows with specimens in tow, hosts YouTube series. The gift shop sells soaps and keychains in the shapes of its artifacts. Coming out of a death-obsessed past into an incongruous living present, the exhibits are caught somewhere between scientific exemplar and exploitative spectacle. The museum acknowledges its reputation as a freak show and, in response, doubles down on the meanings of curiosity. Signs we saw at the main gate declared the place’s ethos: disturbingly informative. 

The text beside the skulls explained itself: Brought together is a euphemistic way of saying, assembled by grave robbing. Dr. Hyrtl dug up a lot of his collection, or had assistants do it for him. Or paid other collectors, other doctors. The graves were attached to hospitals, madhouses, prisons. Some of the people these skulls belonged to surely had surviving relatives, though none could afford or cared to pay for burials and upkeep, and no one has made any claims on them since Dr. Hyrtl sold his collection to the College of Physicians in 1873. The College has the distinction of being the oldest professional medical organization in the United States, and was thus a trusted member of the international buyers’ network for bodies, whole and in parts. 

I barely recall that history when I’m called in for a job interview. I quickly look up the museum online, which is why I have something to say about the Hyrtl Skulls during the interview. But I can’t keep up the pretense. I begin to ramble about the real reason I went that first day. There was a special exhibit of tsantsa (shrunken heads) on view, reported to be the most extensive group ever brought together, most on loan from private collectors. The Hyrtl Skulls were on the upper level, set opposite the entrance. We looked lost—so a security guard pointed us toward the stairway’s descending brass banister and red carpet. Across from the melting skeleton, she told us. 

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Downstairs, we watched a middle-aged white woman wearing a fanny pack and soft baseball cap peer around curtains and squeal before turning away. We entered where she wouldn’t into a columned salon crowded with the museum’s teratology collection and displays of sundry wet specimens. Fetal variations. Rows of organs jellied into translucence, bound by webs of blood vessels dyed blue and red. At the far wall, the tsantsa were tiered on stands in a wide, purpose-built wood case. There were dozens: small, leathery heads still recognizably human though passed out of identity. The shrinking process had exaggerated some features, vanished others, and blackened the flesh. Many had long, black hair braided with beads and strung with bright parrot feathers. They were beautiful and horrible, familiar and strange. I could not stop staring. Their eyelids had been sewn shut. 

The poet Mary Ruefle writes about shrunken heads in her essay “My Private Property.” She reflects on growing up in Brussels and regularly skipping school to commune with a particular shrunken head in the collection of the Congo Museum, “that horrific monument of smashed lies and beautiful things.” The ruminations lead her to realize she “wanted to die.” My own day with the tsantsas felt like the opposite: It was initial, not iterative; it was a whole bunch of heads, not a singular one; I was happy, adult, new in town, not alone, truant, or passively suicidal. That first time in the museum, I by no means “wanted to die.” The life I was starting in the city was meant to be the cure for a bad ending, a bad boyfriend. For being a bad boyfriend. For Boston. When I got to Philly, I could believe that the last years of my life just hadn’t happened and here I would begin a real life in a real city. And even though, when I sit for the interview at the Mütter and have cause to answer the question Have you ever been here before?, I do indeed want to die, I am not, despite all my wanting, dead yet, so I need the job. 

They were beautiful and horrible, familiar and strange. I could not stop staring. Their eyelids had been sewn shut.

Needing the job came from wanting to die. A month earlier, I quit the copy shop where I worked since coming to Philly. There, weeks earlier again, an unknown number with an area code I recognize—Tucson, Arizona’s—comes over my phone while I’m at the counter sending a fax. The call I’m expecting from my aunt. It’s been 15 years or more since we last spoke, and longer since we saw each other. She found me online and emailed late at night, while I was sleeping. I arrive for my shift, log onto a work computer—it’s a little before noon—and her note is waiting: Danny, I have to talk to you about something. Please send me your number. I type it into the message bar, then work keeps me distracted for the next few hours. The fax goes through. I charge the guy $4.27 and he calls me a criminal. I tell my boss, I’m gonna take off for a sec, then cross the counterline, snake between the customers, and open the door. 

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Outside, I walk the block, not ready for the call. My mom’s family has been estranged my whole life and generations back before that. Growing up, hearing stories, it felt odd that any of my people should have found each other to begin with. They were from all over the map. Most were fleeing unimaginable things. They never stayed together, barely knew each other to begin with. Brothers, husbands, mothers, children, grandparents—all were lost again and again in life, and then in death. Was grief resounding? Some stories my mother told me about her childhood made her very sad (an angry father gone, her spine turning in on itself, the inheritable tragedy of her psyche), but many were happy. Her sister fit somewhere in the middle. I met her only a few times I could ever remember, and knew her best by her semi-regular phone calls with my mom, though I heard only my mother’s end of those conversations and was young when the two were still on speaking terms. What I knew of her was mostly my mom’s eye rolls, the gesture of her fingers forming a gun against her forehead and her deadpan expression as she cocked her thumb and pulled the trigger. This would make me laugh so loudly my aunt would ask, What’s so funny?—or so I supposed, hearing my mom’s response: Nothing. He’s watching a movie. 

I thumb the buttons on the side of my phone crossing the street to the main quad of campus. A spot appears on the open lawn, half under a plane tree’s shade and a bit beyond the arcs of a frisbee thrown between three people. I sit down. I know what this call will be, what she has to tell me. Though I feel certain, I hope for the best, or at least that she’ll deliver a line I’ve heard before: My mom is in the hospital, she’s in a psych ward, she’s in jail. No. I call my aunt, and after quick, strained How are yous, she confirms my worst thoughts in swift, worsening terms. Your mom is dead. She was murdered, and soon, Threw her body in a dumpster. After all the other details she knows: A month ago. She has waited a month to find me, to tell me. She cannot explain why. We don’t have much more to talk about. I make a plan to check in over the next few days about coming out for the memorial they’re holding where my grandma lives in New Mexico. We already had two here in Tucson, she tells me. I say, Okay, gotta go, and lie down in the grass. 

For three days I lie in bed, alternating between barely being able to move and being violently wracked with sobs. I toss back and forth between the numbness of certainty—of believing I knew before I heard—and supernatural disbelief. I wail like the wounded animal I am. On the third day, it’s my birthday. I ask for a new world. My boyfriend and my housemate take me to the trails through the forest above the little cliffs along the Wissahickon. The bright August light comes through the trees on the top of a rise, and my boyfriend takes my picture, but I have no awareness of this until the film comes back. I spend the hike trying to smile whenever I realize someone is looking at me, or, short of that, trying very hard not to cry. In my sunglasses, slumped into my boyfriend’s shoulder in the backseat on the way home, I feel like Bernie in Weekend at Bernie’s. Like the actor playing Bernie. 

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I’m lying down in the grass again, in the front yard of my childhood home, visiting with my oldest friend, when she says something about how truly wretched the world is, and I laugh. Not at what she says, but how she says it. It’s the first time I’ve laughed since I talked to my aunt. Which is a euphemistic way of saying since I heard my mom was murdered. When it happens, my laugh feels like a betrayal. I do not know how I am going to live in this world. You get it! I tell my oldest friend. My boyfriend holds my hand on the flight from Philadelphia to Albuquerque, and on the bus down to Las Cruces. He holds my hand in the church hall at my mom’s third memorial service, except when I have to stand up in front of the room full of strangers to give a eulogy. On the ride from the service, sitting next to me in the back-backseat of an SUV so cavernous it swallows my aunt’s soft voice in the front, he pulls his hand back when he gets a text meant for me from our housemate back in Philly. Bad timing/great gig, it reads, with a link to a Mütter Museum job listing that closes the following day. 

In a few days, I’ll be in the Pima County Courthouse in Tucson, sitting across from the murderer, and, that evening, my aunt will hand me the small black plastic box containing my mother’s ashes. My mother as ashes. My mother in the form of ash.

There’s no grass to lie down in at my aunt’s hotel, where she’s having our family gather for a post-memorial pool party, so I update my CV in the computer lab. More betrayal. When I finally get in the water, I race my youngest cousin, whom I have never met before. I stay under as long as my breath holds. In a few days, I’ll be in the Pima County Courthouse in Tucson, sitting across from the murderer, and, that evening, my aunt will hand me the small black plastic box containing my mother’s ashes. My mother as ashes. My mother in the form of ash. Time and places are spiraling, have been since I heard. I’m still hearing, still seeing. The next week, in Philadelphia, the copy shop welcomes me back, but I can’t last more than 40 minutes of my shift. I do not know how I am going to live in this world. The world going on: the worst betrayal. 

I don’t say all that in my interview. Nobody is prepared to hear Devastating tragedy made life as I knew it incomprehensible in answer to Why did you leave your last position? A month has passed since I quit, two months since I heard about my mom (a euphemistic way of saying since I heard my mom was murdered), three months since her murder. As with her ashes, putting the murder into her possession feels off to me. Did she own it? Was it part of her? It wasn’t something she could claim, like a package or a piece of luggage. She didn’t have too much to do with it; she was the one with too much done to her. Too much: a euphemism my brain conjures to replace images of actual violence, conjured from police reports and testimony from eyewitnesses and the man I sat across from in the courtroom. This pattern—unbidden images, then banishing language—I can’t seem to control. 

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In the interview, it’s just me and my broken brain and a copy of my CV I ran off on 24-pound cloudy-gray stock that last day at the shop. Bullet points about things someone with my name did, all the stuff I’m supposed to know how to do. I thought those shrunken heads were really cool, I tell the woman, and she says she thought so too. Gasps, Wasn’t that incredible?, when I mention the green and blue iridescent beetle wings braided into their hair. I understand her as someone who loves her job, which is something I have always thought questionable, if not impossible, but she is an adult goth on payroll with full benefits at a 19th-century wunderkammer of death, mourning, and human oddities, and that constellation of person and circumstance has never before formed in my mind. Although it should have, as I am, in my way, an adult goth, and all the more lately with mourning and death so readily in my thoughts. I would soon come to learn that most of the staff of the Mütter Museum and its parent organization, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, were, each in their way, adult goths. Where else would we go? 

They were really controversial. Holly, my new boss after the interview, tells me that the museum got a lot of heat for the tsantsa exhibit’s perceived disregard of ethical practices. It wasn’t always clear where the heads came from or how people got ahold of them in the first place. Plus they just really freaked people out. I laugh, then stop laughing, because I don’t want to seem like I’m laughing at ethics violations or shrunken heads. I’m laughing at people being freaked out by shrunken heads, although I understand. Really I was laughing in response to the tone in her voice which indicated humor in the phrase freaked people out. My focus was on cues: Smile when someone smiles at you. People like to complain, Holly says. 

You’ll be dealing with a lot of people, hundreds on the weekends. They’ll either love it or hate it, and they’ll let you know. If anyone asks for a refund, if they’ve been in the museum longer than 15 minutes, tell them no. Holly points to the red refund button on the museum’s ticketing screen, then clucks her tongue as she clicks and the amount on the screen turns negative. She touches a big gray button and a receipt prints on a scroll of paper as the cash drawer jolts out. Make sense? she asks, and I nod, mmmhmming in unison with the two other hires. It’s my turn. She has me pull closer to the screen and the chair’s wheels twirl beneath me. Gray button, red button, gray button, drawer. See? So easy. 

---

It’s a little after 3:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, one of the slowest times of the week, perfect for training. This is our first shift. We’ve been walking and talking since 11 a.m., and have been at the register for over an hour now with Holly explaining shortcuts and the various branchings of ticket types. Erin, Christina, and I take turns selling to dwindling bursts of visitors. Erin and Christina are nice, but nervous, and I assume I must be assumed as such too. I am smiling on cue and exhibiting a genius for point-of-sale software, but not making a big deal about it. I am trying hard not to cry, and I will somehow succeed at this during work hours for years. That morning I told myself in the mirror, NO CRYING!—which made me feel foolish, which made me start to cry. And then laugh. Early on in the shift, Holly mentions the possibility of this gig going full-time, and I take this as a reason to live. My survivor benefits end in a year; I’ll need the insurance to pay for the therapy I’m about to start after the predetermined date when the state of Arizona says grief should stop, or at least that their obligation to pay for it is over. I’ll need the therapy because it’s where my brain gets good at going to work, at living in the world. Once a week, I’ll feel normal, allowed to be wholly in grief. After each session, I’ll walk the mile home, and pass the same patch of grass I lay down in when I first heard. Everything I don’t want to think about will rise up from the ground all around me. Too much. 

My survivor benefits end in a year; I’ll need the insurance to pay for the therapy I’m about to start after the predetermined date when the state of Arizona says grief should stop, or at least that their obligation to pay for it is over.

Training overloads us with information. There are dozens of people on staff with names to memorize and departmental relations to understand, hidden wings of the building to explore, intricate calendars to master. Novelty begins to balance out my psychic deadweight. I touch the grid of buttons on-screen, and even that slight activity pushes the unwanted sights to the edge of my mind, even out of it. I’ve barely thought of my mom (mom becoming a euphemism for her murder) since I started this shift, but how long can that last? The number of minutes between visitors is increasing. When the museum closes at five, we’re to refill the brochure stand and empty the plexiglass cube people drop their guest badges into as they leave, but for the next hour, there’s not much to do. Why don’t you guys take a break and check out the collection? You’ll get a real tour next shift, but for now, just spend some time in there. Holly lists some of the exhibits she loves—The Soap Lady, Harry Eastlack—and tells us to go wild. 

We walk a diagonal across the College’s marble entry hall, where a classical statue that I’ll learn is Asclepius, the Greek god of the healing arts, carries a big club with a snake wrapped around it. There are thick curtains to duck under, and suddenly we’re in a deep red chamber faceted in brass, glass, and wood. Bodies and parts are everywhere we look. The shelves are covered with objects and specimens in a curatorial vision bordering on horror vacui. Whoa! It feels totally different, Christina says. She’s never been here when the museum was empty like this, and neither have I. With no living bodies standing between us and the other bodies, there’s a lot to look at all at once. I turn to follow the balcony’s open ring around the stairs, my eyes passing over a bezoar, some bloodstained lengths of gauze . . . but I can’t fix on anything. Then: skulls. 

---

One hundred thirty-nine. I do not try to count them. They range in size, in general and specific shape. The color of each varies: gray, amber, yellow, ivory, gleaming white. There are different bumps and divots in the bone to take in, small details differentiating each one from the next. Many are missing teeth, a few have cracks or slashes or holes left from when something outside forced its way in. Knives and sabres and bullets. The trace of bone plates’ fusion remains in jagged lines like black lightning. Labels below each head form a piecemeal map of Europe, the Levant, Western Asia, and North Africa. Places people I come from came from. I stand for a long time in front of the case, thinking about how they all ended up here, together, these people who would likely never have met in life. The 19th century is long gone; phrenology is and was always bunk—so what lesson can the specimens teach me? My vision relaxes the longer I stare, and the skulls begin to blur into one another. When I catch myself and sharpen my sight, I see my face reflected in the glass, eye-level with the center row. My ghost between two skulls in a long line. 

Despite the claims of collectors, a skull can only belong to its own person, not a museum or any other buyer on the market.

For the next few years, I see these sights almost every day. Not like the images I try to block out: The skulls are real, not a secondhand reality become trauma, making life feel over while it’s still going on. My grandma tells me she has bad dreams. My aunt has religion. I have a diagnosis and a steady job at the goth factory. I see the skulls every day I work—five days a week when full-time comes through. Whenever security calls me into the museum over the walkie talkie, whenever I’m just strolling on shift, or passing through to use the secret door on my lunch break. Sometimes, I linger at their case and read what I can make out of the lettering on a few of the frontal bones. Some skulls were engraved with the names of their former owner, if known, along with ethnicity, occupation, age, and cause of death, as these were the pertinent details Dr. Josef Hyrtl needed for making his case against phrenology. Despite the claims of collectors, a skull can only belong to its own person, not a museum or any other buyer on the market. 

I appreciate the attention to detail. I’m close enough to read the incised black letters on one of the skulls. Despite wanting Philly to overwrite Boston, the German that I learned at an old job in Massachusetts is still good enough to let me make out most of the inscription. The tag on the base fills in the rest: Geza Urmenyi, 80. Romania. Protestant, shepherd. At age 70, attempted suicide by cutting his throat. Wound not fatal because of calcified larynx; laryngeal fistula remained. Lived until 80 without melancholy. There are no teeth in his jaws, and the sockets have smoothed over. I take a step back from the case, focused on the blank space where his mouth would have been. I can see him in the story engraved in his forehead. Clear hazel eyes set into two deep bruises. His nose’s sunburnt flesh. The lips, folded in to cover where his teeth should be. Very thin but leanly muscled; his body grown solid from a lifetime walking the herds up and down the mountains. Face sliced with wrinkles. He is exhausted. He doesn’t know how to live in the world. He draws his best knife across his neck as fast as he can, but something in his own body stops it. Won’t let it cut deep enough to do more than hurt and make a mess. 

Ten years without melancholy. It will take me just as long to become something like myself again. A decade on, releasing my mom’s ashes at last, I’ll know it’s over. No more dreams. If I hadn’t declared an end date, it could have gone on forever. Sometimes, I wanted it to. I didn’t know how else to live in the world. I only knew how I wanted to die: to draw my best knife across my brow and pluck my skull from my head. To hold it in my lap and sand down the spot where my story was engraved. To blow away the dust and polish the bone with a fine cloth. To set it gently back within the flesh of my head. To be born whole again into the world, a new world—a world without melancholy. To live there, beyond the glass. My skull looking out from behind my face, smiling, like all skulls.

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Daniel Barnum’s poems and essays appear in Prairie Schooner, Guernica, Seneca Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, The Offing, and elsewhere. Their writing has received support from the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Hambidge Center. They live in Athens, GA, where they are at work on a novel.

Contact Longreads senior editor Cheri Lucas Rowlands for co-publishing opportunities.

James Whorton Jr. | Longreads | October 13, 2026 | 5,932 words (25 minutes)

I live in Edgewood, a subdivision of quarter-acre lots in the town of Brighton, New York. Before the house was here, Edgewood was a farm, and before the farm, there was a forest. On a July day in 1788, a 55-year-old man named Hugh Maxwell set out to cross the forest in straight lines.

Not kind of straight. Maxwell’s job was to walk 1,100 miles on ruler-straight lines through this vast, obstacle-filled forest, to divide it into a grid of parcels that could eventually be sold as property. To shrink it down to the scale of human imagination. To look at the forest and see something else in its place.

I first learned about Maxwell from Mary Jo Lanphear, Brighton’s town historian. I had gone to Lanphear to research the racially restrictive housing covenants that made home ownership in Brighton exclusive to white people for decades. Whose fault was this? I wanted to know. Some racist real-estate developer? Something to do with the Federal Housing Administration? Lanphear printed out a copy of an old deed linking the Edgewood land to the Phelps and Gorham Company, a group of New England speculators. For a bargain price, Phelps and Gorham had acquired the title to 2.6 million acres of forested country along the Genesee River, in what is now western New York. The company then hired Maxwell—a Revolutionary War veteran, father of seven, and the first recorded white person to pass within shouting distance of the place where I now live—as surveyor. 

As Maxwell crossed the forest, he imagined the nation he believed would one day replace it. “The land in this country is exceedingly good, but it wants good inhabitants,” Maxwell wrote to his wife, Bridget, imagining “many worshipping assemblies of Christians where now the wild beasts howl.” In place of the forest, he envisioned schools, churches, cash crops, and county clerks. However, he wrote, “these things are in the womb of futurity, and will be brought about in the proper way and time, as also by the proper means.” 

Maxwell’s walk—through leechy ponds and tick-infested brush, down and up creek banks, over the rocky exposures that rattlesnakes prefer, in those remarkably straight lines—was like the act his fellow new citizens were performing daily, striving and pretending a nation into being. At the time he set out, the United States were only loosely joined, under the Articles of Confederation. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the first essay of The Federalist Papers, had recently asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” Neither the new government nor the grid of lots for sale were to be discovered on the ground. They were ideas in people’s heads, notes on paper. In the “womb of futurity,” maybe. 

The forest, however, was real. 

Have you ever retraced your steps looking for some lost thing you had no hope of ever finding again? More than two centuries after he walked the forest into the future, Maxwell’s path persists, as lines on a map and on the ground in my neighborhood. I wanted to find the forest he walked through. 

So I set out to follow Hugh Maxwell—through books and archives, on maps and over the ground, across the state of New York and, finally, across my neighborhood, looking for traces of the forest in what is here now.

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On July 25, 1788, Maxwell set off from the southeastern corner of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, on the Pennsylvania line, headed due north. He led a small crew, whose job it was to drag a Gunter’s chain, a surveyor’s tool used to measure distance. The chain was 66 feet long; 80 chains made a mile. Every six miles he marked a township corner, hacking Roman numerals into the sides of a convenient tree, Vs and Xs being easier to cut in bark than 5s and 10s. 

While his helpers dragged the chain, Maxwell carried the grid in his head. The job was to lay this imaginary grid over the forest itself, to parcelize the land into numbered squares—to cut it up and shrink it. In a notebook that first day, he wrote:

From the 82 mile Stone

120 Rods the groth is Beech

Maple birch ash Basswood

and Hemlock mixt

Throughout Maxwell’s young life, the forest had been a chaotic place, subject to accident and force, to the wars that would determine its fate. During the French and Indian War, Maxwell, in his early 20s and part of a Massachusetts militia, barely escaped a violent death at Lake George. Following a surrender, Indians pulled militia men from the retreating lines, killing some on the spot and taking others prisoner, to be ransomed in Montreal. Maxwell was pulled aside, too, and had his boots, coat, and shirt stripped from his body. But he got loose somehow and escaped into the forest, running at least 14 miles to Fort Edward, barefoot in his pantaloons. Later, during the Revolutionary War, Maxwell was shot at the Battle of Bunker Hill. A musket ball entered his body just beneath the right collar bone, breaking Maxwell’s shoulder blade and exiting through his back. He survived field surgery and gangrene, and wrote home to Bridget with his left hand, fretting that his nurses fussed too much over him.

Now, as Maxwell walked off the eastern line of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, the forest wars were coming to an end. Still, the forest itself resisted him in its way. It did not lend itself to being crossed in straight lines, as though it were a blank page awaiting the pen’s touch. Branches snagged his clothes. “I am of the opinion,” he wrote to Bridget from his walk, “that if I live to return, I shall stand in need of some winter shirts for I think my old ones will be pretty much worn out.”

What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?

To reach Maxwell’s starting place—his “82 mile stone,” a roadside block of granite 82 miles west of the Delaware River—I drove a hundred miles south to Caton, New York. A welcome to caton sign marked the town line, which was also the state line. I took my phone out, opened a map on the screen. The phone is able to locate itself using pings from four satellite systems: GPS (“a global public service brought to you by the US government”), GLONASS (same, but brought to you by Russia), Galileo (European Union), and BeiDou (China). The screen suggested there should be a marker right in front of me.

Crouched inside a brushy spot, I shoved skinny branches out of my face and slapped at my hair. I found a tangle of rusted barbed wire. I found a deer skeleton. But no mile marker. Feeling things crawling on me, I climbed out into the sunlight and slapped down my shirt and pants. 

The growth I saw around me now was not so mixed as what Maxwell described in his notebook. I was standing on a stone chip road, looking across a hay field. My phone screen showed a satellite image with a red pin to the west of the road, in the brush I’d climbed out of, and a blue dot in the road, which was me. This had to be the spot, though. I walked to my car, felt my head for ticks again. Then I walked back up the road, to check under the welcome to caton sign. There, I found a block of pink and gray granite with an “82” cut into the side and several loops of orange surveyor’s tape tied around it. It wasn’t hidden—I’d simply been looking on the wrong side of the road. Looking for what was in my head instead of seeing what was there.

It was a slow march from here for Maxwell and his crew, dragging their chain in a straight line through the thickness of mixed trees and across creek cuts. It took them two weeks to cover the first 54 miles. For me it was an easy drive, a straight shot north between fields of sweet corn. I stopped to examine an occasional historical marker, and again at a roadside farm stand, hoping to say hello to someone who lived on this line. The little stall was well stocked with honey and dried garlic, but there was nobody to say hi to: Sales were on the honor system, with a Mason jar on the counter to leave your cash in. I had only brought a credit card.

Maxwell’s notebook was a memento of a different world. He passed massive chestnut trees such as I could only read about. One spot he judged “moist and good and springy,” another “good for grass.” He noted with approval where a stream was big enough to support a sawmill. And yet the gaps in his notes are astonishing. A few weeks into his survey, he crossed “some old clear land” and “through the old castle.” Castle was the colonial way of referring to an Indian town. Here was proof on the ground of what Maxwell already knew: People had been living in this forest for a very long time, cultivating this land in a different way than European settlers did. And yet Maxwell found little to note about the old castle. He carried on instead with his catalog of trees—”white ash, basswood, elm, &c.”

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What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?

The Latin precursor of the word “forest” meant something like an unenclosed outdoor space. In early English law, the silva forestis was a place for lords to chase game and for ordinary people to gather wood. In the 13th century, as the Magna Carta encoded the rights of English barons, the Carta de Foresta laid out the rights of commoners to pasture cattle in the open places among the English forests. Similarly, the forest Maxwell entered in the summer of 1788 was more than just mixed trees. Its openings included the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation. The Senecas had long used fire to manage areas of the forest, clearing thick undergrowth to attract deer, and they moved their farming fields from time to time to prevent exhausting the soil.

A forest is too big to see all at once, and maybe too big to describe. Writing about it, one is moved to grand language and weird leaps of perspective. The historian Francis Parkman devoted his career to what he called “a history of the American forest,” which is really a history of empires. Writing in the 1880s, with no satellite photos at hand, Parkman borrowed the point of view of a flock of Canada geese flying north from Albany. “As the aërial travellers winged their way, the seat of war lay spread beneath them like a map. First the blue Hudson, slumbering among its forests, with the forts along its banks. . . .” Parkman’s geese paid special attention to military architecture, noticing Fort William Henry by the “glistening breast of Lake George” and the white flag of the French at Ticonderoga. Onward they flapped: 

“Lake Champlain now spread before them, widening as they flew: on the left, the mountain wilderness of the Adirondacks, like a stormy sea congealed; on the right, the long procession of the Green Mountains; and, far beyond, on the dim verge of the eastern sky, the White Mountains throned in savage solitude.” 

This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head. 

At the heart of Parkman’s seven-volume France and England in North America was a question about property. “To whom belonged this world of prairies and forests?” he asked. Parkman wrote that France had “claimed it by right of discovery and occupation,” adding that the French had an “excellent system” for distributing land: “Whoever received a grant from the Crown was required to improve it, and this within reasonable time. If he did not, the land ceased to be his, and was given to another more able or industrious.” The English eventually outdid the French in this regard, Parkman wrote: “New England was pre-eminently the land of material progress . . . nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in the pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty.” The quickest way to gain from the forest was to sell or burn the timber and put a cash crop in the ground. 

Sir Albert Howard, an English botanist, saw the forest as a model for sustainable farming. In what he called “Nature’s agriculture,” variety is the first rule: “Many species of plants and of animals all live together,” he wrote in the early pages of An Agricultural Testament, published in 1940. Economy is another rule: “Nothing is wasted” and “nothing is lost.” Somehow, life and decomposition continue across millennia with no one in charge. 

Wendell Berry, referencing Howard in The Unsettling of America, writes that the forest is a place where “the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance.” I like this way of putting it very much. A forest tree dies in place, and its slow decay swells with life—mosses, fungi, beetles, and things that eat beetles. A living hardwood tree throws its leaves away every year. In The Great American Forest, Rutherford Platt calls this “the deciduous idea”—a funny way to imagine it, as though the founding fathers of the forest had written this leaf-shedding principle into their charter. But it is a brilliant idea, a world-changer. In balance, growth and decay work in cycles. The mat of discarded leaves becomes the food of millipedes and the habitat of worms. In spring, the snow sinks into it. A thick, black soil builds.

This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head.

I had already traveled to Maxwell’s starting place; now, it occurred to me that I had never followed Hugh Maxwell’s route where he passed nearest to my house, along the eastern township line, which is not a road at all and which happens to be covered over with trees. From my front door, I followed the sidewalk along Edgewood Avenue, where the utility poles shrink away into the distance like an exercise in single-point perspective. 

The place where I live has gone through a lot of changes in the 20,000 years since the most recent ice age, from deglaciation to migration and cultivation. At the time Maxwell began his walk, the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation were openings in a vast forest that still covered half of North America, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. The houses in my part of Brighton were built beginning in the 1930s, but the older eras of this place are visible on any road map. The early roads go from some important place to some other important place. Monroe Avenue, a very old road, follows a route from the north end of Canandaigua Lake to a shallow, fordable spot in the Genesee River. It is not straight, but bends sensibly between Cobbs Hill and Pinnacle Hill. People have been walking that way for a long time, since long before Maxwell arrived. 

After Maxwell, there came an era when all new roads were cut parallel to his township lines. The logic of the Brighton-Henrietta Town Line Road, for instance, has nothing to do with terrain, and the things one passes when driving it—an auto body shop, a small church with three steeples, an Asian market, a sex shop, Dunkin’—have little to do with each other. It’s as though Maxwell set the place to auto-arrange, so that every major surface road for the next two hundred years would snap to grid. 

I stopped at the former site of the old Rowland farm. My friend Roger lived next door to the farm as a boy. Mr. Rowland had a stand of virgin timber on his place, Roger recalls, and the soil in his fields was so fertile that a person had to take care not to get knocked over by his produce. “Dig a hole, drop a seed in, and stand back,” Mr. Rowland warned. 

As late as the 1950s, there still were some farms along Edgewood Avenue. But it wasn’t long before they were subdivided into residential lots.The timber now is mostly whatever people have chosen to set out in their yards. Norway maples are common—tough street trees, not from around here, indifferent to road salt and car exhaust. Rows of arborvitae make living privacy fences. Shading the Briar Manor apartments are seven big sycamores, handsome monsters with paint-by-number bark of yellow, gray, and lilac brown.

Past the row of sycamores, I turned onto a paved bicycle path that follows a chain-link fence. A little further, a sign marked the town line. I found a low place in the fence and stepped over, into the trees, following Maxwell again.

It was dark under the high canopy, and the underbrush was sparse. Maxwell had once described this section of his route as “very good beech and maple land with a mixture of ash, elm, oak, basswood, etc.” I found a beech tree, its pale sides smooth, its trunk a good two feet across. Beneath the beech tree was a shattered porcelain toilet. There was no plumbing attached; somebody had brought this toilet out here, set it on the ground, and taken a hammer to it.

I checked the map on my phone. In the satellite photo, the woods were more or less featureless except for the town line, superimposed in yellow over the treetops, and a blue dot, me, on top of that yellow line. I was still on Maxwell’s course. There was no trail on the ground for me to follow, though. The only trails were the soft, narrow animal trails that passed under blown-down branches or veered away into low cover.

The growth was mixed: saplings, mature trees, dead standing, and dead fallen. I found a red maple with circular fractures erupting like a target in its bark. I found an ash tree, its bark split open and buckling, the meandering tracks of an emerald ash borer scoring the bare wood. A lean musclewood with ten trunks, one with its bark chewed at the height of my knee. A basswood with a stripe of red spray paint on it and rings of woodpecker holes.

If this was a forest, it was a half-wrecked one. Much of the soil was exposed and cracked from flooding. Variety was here, though, and life among the decay. Deer tracks crossed a muddy trench. Bright moss blanketed the softening fallen trunks, and ferns grew. I heard chattering overhead and a rainlike sound in the leaves. Somebody was up there taking nuts apart. Chunks of green and yellow hull hit the ground around me, cycling back to the soil. 

---

In September of 1788, Hugh Maxwell took a fall in the woods and hurt his shin. He made things worse, he wrote, “by wading in the swamp and through wet brush.” For three weeks, he was laid up in the Seneca town of Kanadesaga, where he had nothing to do but think and write home.

He missed Bridget. “I feel anxious for your welfare,” he wrote to her. “I long to hear from you and love to hear from you.” He reminded Bridget to have their son get the haying done, get some long shingles to fix the roof, cart the dung to the field, plow the field on time, and do the sowing.

He also missed church. Shortly after his near-death experience at Lake George as a young man, Maxwell had joined a church and, judging from his letters, devoted himself to a stern code under which he must strive constantly for an approval that he would never earn. For Maxwell, life on earth became a moral exercise, an attempt to deserve immortality. God, he wrote, “is Daily Loading us with his Benefits, though we are evil and unthankfull.” Now, once more wounded far from home, Maxwell wrote to his wife of “unprincipled fellows and drunken savages,” adding, “Religious society is quite out of the question here.” 

It had been only nine years since the Continental Army’s expedition across Seneca country. After Senecas joined with Tories to raid White settlements along the Mohawk, the young United States had set aside European conventions of war in an attempt to drive Seneca communities from their land. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible,” George Washington wrote in his orders. “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” At Kanadesaga, the Continental Army had burned at least 50 Seneca houses, tore ripe corn and beans from the fields, and bayoneted pumpkins. A whole orchard of apple trees was girdled, a circle of bark stripped from around each trunk, creating an unhealable, fatal wound. The Continental Army took few hostages: The Senecas moved west just ahead of the approaching troops and then returned again when the troops went home, rebuilding their houses and replanting their fields. 

Nine years later, laid up in Kanadesaga while his shin healed, Maxwell now found himself surrounded by Indians. “I am in hopes their time with us here is short,” Maxwell wrote to Bridget. “I do think that the Great Governor of the universe is about to plant a glorious gospel in this wilderness,” he predicted—with the help of his own survey, of course. “May it be so and soon spread over this land.” Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.

After more than a month’s recovery, Maxwell resumed his survey. “First mile through excellent land,” he wrote from the woods, on the line of a future township along the east bank of the Genesee River, noting nearly a half-dozen different trees in the area. The next mile: “Same sort of excellent land and growth but considerable mixed with chestnut.” The third mile was less good: “80 rods over a wet low land.” Then more very good land again. He crossed a brook that ran one way, then the other. Both Maxwell and the brook were headed to the same place, north to Lake Ontario. The brook took the easy way, downhill. Maxwell took the straight way, leading his team and their chain through swamp and timber, mile after mile.

At the end of the 18th mile, he chopped a “XIII” into the side of a small basswood tree, marking a corner of the 13th township—“with trees marked for witness about it,” he wrote, for the benefit of some future settler searching for the corners of his lot. 

Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.

When the blue dot on my phone told me I had reached the southeast corner of the town of Brighton, I spent some time looking for the basswood tree with the XIII in its bark. But I was kidding myself, of course. Maxwell’s hatchet marks were meant to last years, not centuries. I slapped at mosquitoes, scanning for some connection between the forest Maxwell had walked through and the place I was in. A scrap of fluorescent pink tape caught my eye. I’ve been seeing this stuff in the woods for my entire life, weatherproof trash that will outlive me and, I suppose, every other individual living thing in the woods as well. I looked past it, because I can’t pick up every piece of garbage in the woods and carry it out. Then I looked again and my understanding of the place shifted. 

The pink plastic was a piece of surveyor’s tape, tied to a branch. Near the branch was a short, square concrete pillar. This was the marker—a “monument,” in surveyor-speak—that had taken the place of the basswood with the XIII in its side. It was a more durable monument than a tree, and though it was short and unobtrusive, the little non-decaying flag of pink plastic made it hard to miss, even for me. 

Maxwell wrote of this site:

The line of this town is very

good land covered with a thick

growth of Beech Maple Elm Basswood

Ash Butternut &c. Not very uneven.

No elms now, but I had seen the others he mentioned. This wasn’t “virgin timber”: The nearest big tree was a two-trunked silver maple, second growth, sprouted back from a stump. This was the place, though. 

I stayed there awhile doing nothing, a little dazzled, a little jarred by the impression of two forests coming together—the one Maxwell crossed and the one I was in. The forest wasn’t gone, but it had changed, and so had the way we live with it. In imagining the forest as a wild place, it seemed to me, we had imagined ourselves right out of it. It’s become a place to visit, a resource or a park, not our home. 

Or something like that. Half-stumped, I managed to stand there motionless long enough that a red fox, not noticing me, stopped nearby with its nose in the air and its tail extended. I watched it for a while as it watched something else. Then a leaf blower whined, and the fox and I went our separate ways.

---

In a healthy forest, the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance. But those same forces are the conditions of life everywhere—balanced or not.

Reaching Lake Ontario, Maxwell cut his initials into a tree, then went home to Heath, Massachusetts. In years to come he served as a deacon and justice of the peace in that town. He applied for an invalid officer’s pension, but was denied. At 67 years old, in debt, he bought some horses and embarked with them for the West Indies, where the animals, along with enslaved humans, were in demand on sugar plantations. It was a nightmare world where both humans and horses were routinely worked to death in brutal heat. I wonder how he justified that new venture to himself. Maxwell took a profit from the sale, but died of yellow fever on the voyage home, and his body was buried at sea.

I couldn’t visit Maxwell’s final resting place. Instead, I drove to western Massachusetts, to his house. On Route 2 I locked on to an excellent Albany radio station whose signal held through the Taconic Mountains as far as Williamston, Massachusetts. The road had been graded and guard-railed in the 1920s, on top of an older road that people had been walking since the last ice age, for all one can know. The road sided a stream tumbling over rocks. And what was so important about that? Why did I love it? I loved this road because it was no one’s idea. A glacier put this road here, and people followed. 

The house that once belonged to Maxwell was surprisingly modern-looking, with its solar panels and a Prius in the driveway. I knocked and a woman came to the door. Sue, the owner, invited me in. In the kitchen, one wall was almost all fireplace, paneled above with a single blond board 20 inches wide—spruce, Sue thought. In the next room, there was more of that broad paneling, and a row of cupboards over a smaller fireplace with a grow-light installed inside it over a collection of potted cacti. Sue showed me a copy of Maxwell’s only portrait, a silhouette on horseback that was made during the Revolutionary War. She also had a copy of The Christian Patriot, a biography written by Maxwell’s daughter, Priscilla, who recalled her father’s strong singing voice and a gory song about the courage of the Bunker Hill heroes that he liked to sing for the children. Near the house was a cemetery with a marker for Maxwell, a tall obelisk with worn stories in its sides.

I also drove to Lake George to see the place where 22-year-old Maxwell had first spied death coming for him through the forest. I followed US Route 9 past a sprawling outlet mall and Bloody Pond, where the bodies of slain men had been thrown at the end of that chaotic day early in the French and Indian War. Then I emerged from under clustered trees to what Thomas Jefferson once called “without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw.” Lake George was “ limpid as crystal,” he wrote, the mountains on either side “covered with rich groves of thuja, silver fir, white pine, aspen, and paper birch.” Today the groves of thuja are interrupted with summer mansions and the sandy parking lot by the beach is jammed with cars, but the mountains are still mountains and the long lake still stretches far away between them. When I arrived, the beach was crowded with boogie boarders, volleyballers, and people just splashing. A man threw a tennis ball into the lake, and a dog took a fierce running leap to retrieve it. 

I’d booked a camp site nearby at the Lake George Battleground Campground. A few pines were all that separated my site from Route 9, its four lanes roaring with traffic. I set up my folding camp stool by the sidewalk, across from an Exxon. 

I tried to picture a young Maxwell loping through here shirtless in his bare feet, enveloped by the forest and afraid for his life. Among the English-speaking settlers, the events at Lake George would be remembered as a massacre, and the Indigenous people whose home this was, whose conventions of war did not match those of the European empires, were called savages. It was powerful storytelling, indispensable to the colonial project. 

Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame.

Maxwell trained himself on a version of that story: He had outrun death, sought God, and sought profit while declaring himself unthankful. He hardened himself into a professional fighter, banking on the next life while he improved an ancient forest by drawing a checkerboard on it. He wrote home about the “womb of futurity,” a bizarre metaphor I still do not understand. Whom did he think made futurity pregnant? Was it God, or the Phelps and Gorham Company? I didn’t understand the guy. On the other hand, I didn’t go to war when I was 22. I was working in a restaurant and writing stories. 

Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame. Blame has to be assigned—Indigenous communities did not displace themselves, nor did the forest wreck itself—but it is also necessary to keep looking and to try to keep noticing how much one does not understand. Among the Native allies who joined the French at Lake George all those years ago was a band of ten Iowas who had traveled a thousand miles, from beyond the Great Lakes, to fight the English. What were they thinking, and what had their journey been like? They had only themselves to tell their story to, because no one at Lake George spoke their language. 

As I tried to conjure the experiences of these men nearly 270 years ago, it occurred to me that I ought to be more concerned for the daring pedestrians trying to cross Route 9 from the campground to the MiniMart attached to the Exxon. There was a crosswalk, but the traffic was coming in fast. 

There was too much here for me to make sense of. The seat of war was now a vacation spot. War is violent and so are four-lane highways. Lake George is beautiful, and it puzzled me to notice that the MiniMart was pretty, too, with its high-wattage red-and-white Exxon sign and its glass front glowing softly yellow.

I walked over. Inside, the MiniMart was lit up like a minor carnival, aggressively air-conditioned, and it had a sweet, grimy, convenience-store smell of burnt coffee and potato logs. People were getting chips, jerky, gasoline, and party ice. The forces of growth and the forces of decay were jostling. I liked being there. I selected two cold singles, thanked the cashier, and followed the crosswalk safely back to my campsite and my folding camp stool, from which I watched the people coming and going late into the night.

---

When Hugh Maxwell wrote home to Bridget with his story about the womb of futurity, he got a couple things wrong. 

He was right that the country was changing. While he was in the forest tramping out lines, trying to get his head around this thing that was too big to fit inside anyone’s head, the United States ratified their second constitution. The document was a little over 4,000 words long, and it relied heavily on the word “shall,” a modal verb used to indicate a future action, which was used 191 times. The official copy covered four big sheets of parchment in ink made from oak galls. 

He was wrong about the Senecas’ time being short. They are still here. On the Tonawanda Territory, an hour’s drive west from my house, Senecas still govern themselves according to the Great Law of Peace—a constitution established by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and recorded in white wampum before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. The Tonawanda Seneca Nation is currently fighting a plan to build a data center next to their woods.

He was right about the coming of new inhabitants. The grid he’d laid over the forest became a map in a land office, and his employers were soon marking squares SOLD in small cursive. Settlers arrived slowly, then in booms, cutting trees, burning stumps, shooting wolves, and plowing the black ground with teams of oxen, raising vegetables for their families and wheat to sell over the Erie Canal.

The land in Township 13, my township, turned out to be mixed. The ground was clay in some parts. Brighton became known for brickyards. That industry is gone now, but the high school had an ugly surprise this year when it tried to replace a grass playing field with plastic turf. Chunks of brick, glass, and metal were buried a few inches down; tests showed high levels of arsenic, lead, and semi-volatile organic compounds. The field where my daughter played soccer is now sheeted in plastic while the state decides what to do next.

In Edgewood, the earth is as rich as Maxwell said it was, but he might have been surprised to learn how briefly that would matter. Soil fertility is mostly beside the point, and even an inconvenience, since lawns have to be mowed, leaves blown into piles, and pollen hosed off windshields in the spring. 

No description, no story, is big enough to capture the forest Maxwell walked through. The best I can think to do is to keep looking for better questions about it. Here’s one: If a forest had a constitution, what would it say? Its coequal branches might be soil, air, water, and sun. It certainly would have no president. Its bill of rights might hold that differences exist, that living things may strive, that life includes an accumulation of wealth, and that death includes the release of that wealth. Nothing is wasted, nothing is lost, but eventually everything has to be let go of. When you die, you simply spread out your wealth on the ground.

---

James Whorton Jr. grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.  He is the author of three novels, and his writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Washington Square Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Washington Post.  He teaches at SUNY Brockport.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

This feature report was co-produced and is being co-published in partnership with How Things Work by Hamilton Nolan and The Valley Labor Report.

On a plain, blue-lit stage in a plain event space at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, a gruff man with white hair and a thin goatee is complaining about Las Vegas. How it is too hot. How it is too expensive. And how the hotel’s convention-management bureaucracy is driving him nuts.

“You can’t even move a box from left to right without contacting someone to do that!” he barks into the microphone.

Far from all the political bluster about the police being defunded, six years after the earth-shaking George Floyd protests swept the US and public approval for law enforcement plunged to a generational low, these guys have never been more politically and monetarily supported than they are now.

This will become a communal ritual by the end of the week. Without fail, like some sort of morning prayer, the convention begins every day with opening grumblings about the convention itself.

We can see why. After all, the organization convening here is supposed to be a strong union representing nearly 20,000 members around the country. Far from all the political bluster about the police being defunded, six years after the earth-shaking George Floyd protests swept the US and public approval for law enforcement plunged to a generational low, these guys have never been more politically and monetarily supported than they are now.

But there are only about 50 people in the room here with us (28 delegates, 10 alternates, and some wives and family members mixed in). The proceedings are pretty boring and energyless, the attendees are grumpy, and the air is thick with middle-age resentment.

Clearly, the convention organizers and speakers were expecting something much different than this. To be honest, so were we. Because it’s 2026, Donald Trump is president again, and this is the 23rd Quadrennial Convention of the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA), which represents tens of thousands of cops in departments from coast to coast.

The convention was billed as “The premier gathering for law enforcement leadership… An event you don’t want to miss!”

But it’s absolutely dead here. Even the speakers and attendees don’t want to be here. In fact, they won’t shut up about it.

THE BLUE SHEEP OF THE FAMILY

It is by no means the largest police union in America, but IUPA has the distinction of being the only police union that is a member of the AFL-CIO. It joined the labor federation in 1979, making it a formal but uncomfortable partner to every progressive labor union and every rank-and-file union member in the AFL-CIO who has ever had to question why they should be affiliated with a union representing the same kind of cops who beat and arrest them, their union siblings, and their neighbors at protests and on picket lines.

The plainspoken man on stage right now grumbling about the convention, the one with white hair and the thin goatee—that’s Sam Cabral. He’s been IUPA’s president for more than 30 years.

Cabral certainly sets the right wing edge of the AFL-CIO’s unions and union leaders. In 2014, when grassroots racial justice protests rocked Ferguson, Missouri following the killing of Michael Brown by police, the AFL-CIO’s then-President Richard Trumka, who was by no means a hard-left figure, joined calls for police reform and an end to police militarization.

That really pissed off Cabral. In a Strongly Worded Letter to Trumka, he proved what citizens have long known about how law enforcement “workers” wielding the might and prejudice of state violence see the rest of us: “[Police] are not the cause of the problems facing the black communities in America. They are not responsible for the single parent families, the unemployment, the school dropout rate or its attendant unacceptable literacy rate among black youth. They are not responsible for the gangs, black on black crime or the infant mortality rate.”

It is by no means the largest police union in America, but IUPA has the distinction of being the only police union that is a member of the AFL-CIO.

In true “nothing-to-see-here” fashion, Cabral also noted that, when it comes to police department staffing, “we have not ever seen racism or systematic exclusion of minorities.”

In 2020, as populist fury and protests swept the nation (and beyond) following the filmed police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, parts of the labor movement (including Hamilton’s own union, the Writers Guild—East) renewed their push for the AFL-CIO to disaffiliate from IUPA, on the grounds that police unions have clear, unique, existential interests that are irreconcilable with the shared interests of the rest of their alleged union siblings. AFL-CIO leadership disagreed, and they decided instead to speak out in defense of IUPA and its membership: “We believe the best way to use our influence on the issue of police brutality is to engage our police affiliates rather than isolate them.”

Yet the federation’s nominal support for some general accountability and police reform was still too much for Cabral. Stepping back into the political fray to hold the Thin Blue Line, he fired off another furious letter to Trumka, saying that the AFL-CIO President criticizing police over what happened to Floyd was “reprehensible” and an act of “profiling.”

“[Police] are not the cause of the problems facing the black communities in America. They are not responsible for the single parent families, the unemployment, the school dropout rate or its attendant unacceptable literacy rate among black youth. They are not responsible for the gangs, black on black crime or the infant mortality rate.”

Sam Cabral, President of the International Union of Police Associations

“Your recent statement where you speak of ​‘America’s long history of racism and violence against black people’ is inflammatory and patently false,” Cabral wrote. “Further, your call to end racial profiling and ‘demilitarize’ police forces makes assumptions that are, again, ridiculous.”

Shocking no one, IUPA endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential reelection bid in 2020, and Cabral full-throatedly joined the MAGA chorus. “Every top Democrat currently running for this office has vilified the police and made criminals out to be victims. They seem to take any union’s support for granted,” he wrote in an official statement in September of 2019. “Many of them still refer to the tragedy in Ferguson as a murder, despite the conclusions of every investigative inquiry to the contrary.”

“THEY OBSTRUCTED EVERYTHING”

The mood-deadness and industrially chilled air here in the half-empty Concord Ballroom at the Paris Hotel contrasts so starkly with the grassroots intensity fueling the 2020 George Floyd protests—and with the heat and fury of the longstanding, ongoing debates about what the proper relationship between the labor movement and the police should be.

“Police unions are a conservative force in every institution they find themselves in,” Bill Fletcher Jr.—a lifelong unionist and racial justice activist—tells us over the phone. Fletcher recounts dealing with the police sections of his union during his time as Director of Field Services for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal employees union (and Jacob’s own union), which represents many members who are employed as law enforcement.

“It was like having a ship trying to leave the harbor with an anchor still out,” Fletcher says. “They obstructed everything.”

They could even openly flout the rules of their own union and face no consequences, Fletcher tells us. AFGE’s ICE Council did exactly that when they de-facto endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, against AFGE’s endorsement of Clinton. Guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

In order to secure member support for an agenda that is more challenging to the police state—an issue that is becoming more urgent by the day in Trump’s America—the labor movement needs “serious education” and an “open discussion that begins with the fact that the politics of the IUPA” and other cop unions “run counter to the rest of the labor movement.”

At one point during his time as an AFL-CIO staffer, Fletcher remembers trying to get the labor federation to encourage then-President Bill Clinton to issue a pardon or clemency for political prisoner Leonard Peltier. His proposal was not enthusiastically received. No one asked if taking such a step was worthwhile. No one debated whether it was the right thing to do. Instead, they just asked, “What does IUPA think?”

“They blasted the idea,” Fletcher says, “and that settled it.”

Therein lies the problem, and it’s not a new problem. As Fletcher puts it over the phone, in order to secure member support for an agenda that is more challenging to the police state—an issue that is becoming more urgent by the day in Trump’s America—the labor movement needs “serious education” and an “open discussion that begins with the fact that the politics of the IUPA” and other cop unions “run counter to the rest of the labor movement.”

But Fletcher has his issues with the “Defund the Police” camp, too, and he’s certainly not the only one. While agreeing with many of the goals of police accountability activists—in particular, the need to demilitarize the police and to delink police unions from the rest of the labor movement—Fletcher argues that many in the movement for police accountability have marginalized themselves.

“People have a right to safety,” Fletcher tells us, recalling a terrifying incident when his daughter was held up at gunpoint. “If a cop had killed the guy who did that, I wouldn’t have cared. The way I see it, when you point a gun at someone, those are the chances you’re taking. And I’m a Marxist.”

Fletcher makes the point stick by telling us about a 2020 forum he attended organized by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA). The union had also put out a statement in response to the police murder of George Floyd, which Fletcher commended as “a good statement.” That pissed off a lot of NYSNA members at the forum. Many of those members were married to cops, he says, and they felt like the statement attacked their partners.

Fletcher wonders aloud if certain segments of the left today—those who say they support unions but have no patience or tolerance for law enforcement of any kind—have any patience or tolerance for working people like those NYSNA members and their families. They should, he says.

A THIN BLUE WHINE

Over the course of the convention, IUPA’s relationship with the AFL-CIO is the target of more than one sarcastic barb. Cabral refers to IUPA’s “friends” in the House of Labor with all the contempt of Denethor II in his voice.

Far from eschewing the negative popular stereotypes about cops in America—and far from heeding or caring about assertions from organized labor that the interests of police unions run directly counter to the shared goals of the rest of the labor movement—most of the cops here seem to revel in not caring at all (and not having to care) about those things.

Many at this convention make it clear to us that police unions and their members feel no need or duty to consider, accept, or align themselves with the goals of the broader labor movement. According to them, it is the rest of the labor movement whose politics and priorities are out of whack.

Presenters frequently point to a Gallup poll from last year that shows 74% of Americans having confidence in their local police, and 76% being satisfied with the relationship between the police and the public. Gallup’s long-running “Confidence in Institutions” poll also shows that 45% of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in police. Another 32% have at least “some” confidence.

In the six years since Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis—and the furious eruption of demands for racial justice and police accountability that followed—law enforcement unions (at least at the national level) have done absolutely nothing to try to meet the rest of the labor movement—or the rest of the country—on this issue. It’s also true and fair to say that neither unions in general nor the AFL-CIO specifically have made any attempt to seriously “engage” police unions on this issue.

In the six years since Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis… law enforcement unions (at least at the national level) have done absolutely nothing to try to meet the rest of the labor movement—or the rest of the country—on this issue

During the convention, when we speak to delegates about their relationships with other unions back home, they don’t have much to say.

One IUPA local president tells us his union is affiliated with the local labor council, but they don’t participate in council activities anymore, due in large part to rifts caused by political differences.

In Florida—the state where the IUPA international headquarters resides and where some of its largest locals are—labor reporter McKenna Schueler says the union is more or less a nonentity. IUPA members and leaders don’t really work with other labor leaders and unions down there. And the other police unions, which are much bigger in size and have much more political influence, don’t really need IUPA to see their priorities supported in Ron Desantis’s Florida.

“Police get what they want here in the state of Florida,” Joey Davis, a Florida firefighter and member of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), sums it up to us. As a member of the IAFF, Davis says he’s worked with the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) and the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) on shared policy priorities. But, echoing Schueler’s assessment, he says that IUPA has never been all that relevant.

Police unions and their members feel no need or duty to consider, accept, or align themselves with the goals of the broader labor movement. According to them, it is the rest of the labor movement whose politics and priorities are out of whack

Here at the convention, there’s certainly no love lost for the Fraternal Order of Police. To Cabral, FOP is less of a union and more of an advocacy organization with a bad insurance plan, which he contrasts with his own union, boasting about IUPA’s huge resources for members’ legal defense costs.

A FEW GOOD APPLES DON’T UN-SPOIL THE BUNCH

To put it bluntly, Cabral pretty much looks and talks exactly like you’d expect a cop union leader in America to look and talk like. But it would be dishonest not to mention that there are other attendees and speakers here who either buck the stereotype or at least complicate it. John Covington, Vice President of the Memphis Police Association (MPA)—an IUPA affiliate—is one of those people.

We speak with Covington on a Zoom call after the convention is over. He freely admits that he is “very active” in Republican politics in the state of Tennessee, but says he doesn’t see a contradiction between that and his commitment to labor.

“Supporting workers—advocating for the backbone of the city, the working class—doesn’t have to fall on any political spectrum ” he tells us.

There’s a disconnect sometimes between national politics and locally what’s most effective. When it comes to police unions, what we run across is the left is very suspicious of us because we’re police, and the right is suspicious of us because we’re in unions. We get it from both sides. [But] we use whatever influence we have to let it be known that we don’t stand alone and if you’re gonna support us… you have to support these others.

My advice for a lot of local [unions] in cities, especially Republican cities that naturally the right is going to gravitate to: be supportive of first responders. Those other unions may want to find ways to find that common ground and work together and… look out for each other, and get that mentality of “Look, we may not agree on every single thing, but when it comes down to the voice of the workers, of making conditions better, we’re all on the same page—and if one of us falls under attack, we all fall under attack.”

And then, for police that have more Republican support [my advice would be] to garner more Democratic support, to create coalitions together, because the biggest thing you could ever lose is that voice and right to collectively bargain… We understand the responsibility we have being one of the bigger [unions]; we’re not going to let any of our brothers and sisters fall by the wayside.

Of course, we bring up the fact that many police unions don’t see things the way Covington does. Hamilton recounts how collective bargaining rights for public sector workers are frequently attacked by austerity-horny politicians while police and fire departments get special carveouts. Covington doesn’t dispute the point, but tells us, “We’ve recognized that if you let one fall, you’ve started the domino effect to let all fall, and we take that very seriously. We’ve been under attack for 30 years—all of us. Sometimes the powers-that-be come after us, and the other unions stand with us. Other times it’s them that are the focus, and we stand with them. The bottom line is: advocating and giving a voice to all these folks that make the city run—that’s really unifying. We’re stronger together. ”

To put it bluntly, Cabral pretty much looks and talks exactly like you’d expect a cop union leader in America to look and talk like. But it would be dishonest not to mention that there are other attendees and speakers here who either buck the stereotype or at least complicate it.

Covington isn’t just a one-off figure. According to Memphis Labor Council President Kevin Bradshaw, Covington’s whole MPA local—one of IUPA’s largest—bucks the long-established trend of how cop unions operate.

Bradshaw is a leader in the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers (BCTGM) union representing Kellogg’s factory workers in Memphis, and he has led the labor council since 2022. He says the Memphis Police Association has been active in his labor council since Bradshaw started coming around well over a decade ago—and they continue to be a valued partner.

With 2,000 members, the MPA attends Labor Day parades, supports candidates endorsed by the labor council, and walks picket lines with other union members. Bradshaw also recalls multiple instances of the MPA helping to connect members of other unions to needed resources; particularly, women fleeing domestic abuse. Then he shares an important memory with us.

During the 2021 Kellogg’s strike—a strike that lasted 77 days and involved workers at Kellogg’s plants in Battle Creek Michigan; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Omaha, Nebraska; and Memphis—Bradshaw recalls the company trying to weaponize the cops and the courts against BCTGM strikers by claiming they were breaking the law, trespassing, and blocking the entrances. But Memphis police officers stood up for the BCTGM members and set the record straight. No one was arrested.

“We got calls from anti-union folks and from the company about the picket line,” Matthew Cunningham, MPA President and IUPA Region 15 Vice President, tells us after the convention. “We have to go when there is a call. But the BCTGM members were always following the law, so when we got there and investigated, we just told them they were doing a great job and went back to the station.”

When it comes to police unions, what we run across is the left is very suspicious of us because we’re police, and the right is suspicious of us because we’re in unions. We get it from both sides.

John Covington, Vice President of the Memphis Police Association

Cunningham also recounts an incident last year with Memphis Mayor Paul Young—a “Democrat in name only” who, according to him, is backed by “business owners and old money.” Mayor Young and the Memphis City Council sparked a furious uproar when they tried to revoke collective bargaining rights for city employees last October. What we hear from Cunningham—and what other labor leaders in Memphis have corroborated—is that MPA worked with the other municipal unions to fight back and save union rights, not just for cops and MPA members, but for all city unions. Rather than carve out a side deal for his members—as many police union leaders have repeatedly done in cities and states across the country—Cunningham led that fight to protect bargaining rights for all.

To be honest, Cunningham seems like a genuinely solid guy who is trying to do the most good he can. And of course there always are, always have been, and always will be genuinely good-hearted people who choose to make a living wearing a badge on their chest.

But the reality that there are decent people who work as law enforcers doesn’t negate the reality of what law enforcers do to poor and working people across the country (and what the police exist to do in our society). Two things can be true at the same time. Many things are true at the same time, in fact.

The reality that there are decent people who work as law enforcers doesn’t negate the reality of what law enforcers do to poor and working people across the country (and what the police exist to do in our society). Two things can be true at the same time.

Everything Memphis Labor Council President Kevin Bradshaw recounted about what happened (and, more importantly, what didn’t happen) between the Kellogg’s strikers and the MPA cops is true. So are all the documented and completely unwarranted murders of people by police. So are all the verified, horrifying images of police brutalizing and crushing student demonstrations, strikes, and countless forms of protest or righteous civil disobedience. So are all the other abuses of power people have experienced firsthand, witnessed with their own eyes, and recorded with their phones. So are all the things that the Fraternal Order of Police and its president Patrick Yoes have said in public and written down. So are all the things IUPA president Sam Cabral has said in public and written down.

When we’re talking to Bradshaw, we show him IUPA’s 2020 statements about George Floyd, racism in policing, etc. He is shocked.

As a contrast, he points to the way the MPA reacted to the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed black man who was beaten to death. While the association didn’t explicitly condemn the officers in press statements, they also offered no public defense of them. They did, however, provide a legal defense to the tune of $4.2M and counting.

Regarding the Nichols case, Covington stresses that the legal defense fund is a distinct entity that they pay into, and that it is ultimately that entity that makes decisions about which cases to take. (Here at the convention, funding the Tyre Nichols defense is something that the administrator of the fund openly brags about.) The Memphis Police Association never took a vote on whether or not to expend funds defending Nichols’ killers. But Covington reiterates what the union said at that time: that everyone deserves due process.

Defending “bad workers” is something that all unions have to deal with. When required to defend workers who actually have sub-par performance records or who have committed some other form of misconduct, most unions will generally defend this practice by arguing that protecting the contract is their paramount duty, that everyone deserves due process and a good defense, and that it is management’s job, not the union’s, to discipline.

But does that entitle the officers who killed Tyre Nichols to a $4.2 million Cadillac legal defense when they are so clearly in the wrong, should clearly never be entrusted with law enforcement duties ever again, and should (under the logic of our carceral system) be serving serious time for their crimes? Doesn’t it stand to reason that such defenses just embolden cops to use more force than they otherwise might? Is it the responsibility of the union to consider social ramifications like that, even if discipline and performance are supposedly the sole responsibility of management?

These questions are neither brought up nor wrestled with at the IUPA convention. Instead, a resolution is passed supporting qualified immunity for cops—unanimously, as far as we can tell.

IS THIS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE?

In hindsight, the cops won the fight over police reform.

Police departments were not defunded; their budgets are bigger than ever. As IUPA members are quick to point out, confidence in police is still quite high—significantly higher than in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Even Zohran Mamdani, New York’s socialist mayor and erstwhile supporter of defunding the police, went on an apology tour to placate the police.

The AFL-CIO’s momentary enthusiasm for police reform collapsed into a symbolic committee that released a report rejecting calls to “Defund the Police.” Richard Trumka died suddenly in 2021. Now Donald Trump is in charge again. IUPA is still an AFL-CIO affiliate. And under the gaudy, chandeliered ceiling of the Paris casino, Sam Cabral has just been reelected as IUPA’s International President.

No doubt the record drops in crime the US is experiencing have something to do with the decrease in grassroots movements that are more antagonistic towards police. Ironically, current drops in crime can be attributed, at least in part, to policies advocated for by these very movements, from investing in non-carceral solutions to societal ills like poverty, homelessness, and drug abuse, to pushing local governments to hire and employ more people as social workers, teachers, counselors, clinicians, etc.

Eric Blanc, a prominent socialist writer and member of NYC-DSA, argues that an approach of emphasizing the addition of social services rather than subtraction of policing is a better agenda to pursue anyways. “Fight for a massive redistribution of wealth,” which could be used to fund programs like these, ultimately “taking jobs away from cops,” he says, instead of fighting them head on. With respect to the demand to kick police unions out of the AFL-CIO, Blanc cautions that, to many working people, it is “not so obvious how kicking out cops makes the world better.”

The slogan itself definitely needed some work, but it’s important to remember that “Defund” was as much about diverting public money away from police as it was about putting more money into social services. It was about questioning whether armed police officers should be asked to be the primary first responders when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis. Cops are being asked to do too much, with deadly consequences, and the Defund movement sought to take some of those responsibilities off their plate.

When we ask Covington about this, he enthusiastically endorses the call for increased spending on social services, acknowledging that they help a lot. “[The system] we have now is you take them in and in two days they’re back on the street, and we have no control over that. We want to see more support, more programs for people… We don’t like having to do all these roles that fall on us.” However, when it comes to “defunding” or replacing police with social workers on distress calls, or even adding them to a team of police, Covington is still very wary. “Situations can get out of hand quickly, violence can happen very quickly… For us, to bring a social worker on a scene—that’s one more person you have to protect. It’s that much more dangerous.”

Earlier this summer, the AFL-CIO’s quadrennial convention was held in Minneapolis. The federation made it a point to uplift and honor the role that Minnesota’s unions had played in the hard and grinding grassroots opposition to ICE that traumatized the city this year. A few months later, one of the AFL-CIO’s member unions has its own convention and goes out of its way to feature speakers who talk approvingly about union members working hand in hand with ICE to sweep up their immigrant neighbors.

A union like IUPA, and a convention like this, helps to illuminate the boundaries of solidarity. You see here how that admirable quality can be turned backward on itself and become meaningless, nonsensical, even harmful. How much solidarity are we expected to have—how much solidarity is it possible to have—with the people who arresting, deporting, and killing us? Will that solidarity be recognized and reciprocated by law enforcers when it counts? If the past is any precedent, and if this convention is any indication, our advice is: Don’t hold your breath.

Thomas Sankara had a signature look: a natty red beret, worn with military fatigues. A striking figure, Sankara was a military officer and the radical, anti-imperialist prime minister of the Republic of Upper Volta. His arrest in 1983 led to demonstrations, followed by a coup, after which Sankara was released and installed as president. By the following year Sankara had given the country he now led its new name — Burkina Faso. He fashioned a Burkinabè identity in his own anti-imperialist image, eschewing French for local languages, promoting economic self-reliance and national pride. 

In 1986, he famously took the then French president François Mitterrand to task in a fiery speech broadcast both in Burkina Faso and France. Sankara’s dashing uniform played an outsized role in how his words were interpreted. Here was Africa’s own Che Guevara. But by October 1987, Sankara was dead, killed during a military coup led by his former friend and ally Blaise Compaoré.

France, the old colonial power, backed Compaoré. Soon after the coup, French officials once again flocked to Ouagadougou, helping to prop up Compaoré for decades. 

This potted history is important to understanding the phenomenon of Ibrahim Traoré, Burkina Faso’s current president, an authoritarian head of state who in his charisma and self-presentation so deliberately echoes Sankara.

On September 30, thousands of Burkinabè gathered in Ouagadougou’s Place de la Révolution to hail Traoré on the fourth anniversary of the coup that brought him to power. As the second coming of Sankara, Traoré — whatever their entirely different political ideologies – is arguably the face of contemporary African anti-imperialism. It is a meticulously cultivated image that has almost nothing to do with Traoré’s actual record, or his achievements in Burkina Faso. 

Traoré is a pan-African leader for a digital age, an autocrat who has suspended his country’s constitution, dismantled its admittedly fledgling democratic institutions and been accused of crimes against humanity, but who has used artificial intelligence, particularly deepfakes, to bury that record beneath a highly effective cyber cult of personality.

How do Burkinabè reconcile the man with the persona? And is Traoré a triumph of the algorithm, the kind of politician increasingly familiar from Ouagadougou to Delhi, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and of course Washington, DC?

The man, the myth, the algorithm 

Ibrahim Traoré came to power in September 2022. In his own telling, while Sankara was installed as president, Traoré led the putsch himself. By January 2023, Burkina Faso terminated its military accord with France, giving French special forces one month to leave the country. In June this year, Burkina Faso ended all diplomatic relations with France. 

As Traoré turned away from France, he strengthened relations with Moscow. It’s in keeping with the pattern across the countries of the Sahel — Burkina Faso and its neighbours Mali and Niger — as the region’s colonial history with France has been swept clean by a broom held first by the mercenaries of the Wagner Group and latterly the Russian state itself, represented by the Africa Corps. 

But in April and May 2026, Africa Corps forces were dealt a humiliating defeat in northern Mali by a combination of Tuareg separatists and allegedly Al-Qaeda linked Islamists. The Malian defence minister was assassinated in a suicide bombing at his home near the capital Bamako. With Russia so involved militarily in the Sahel countries, Ukraine has admitted to assisting rebel forces. Both Mali and Niger have cut diplomatic ties with Kyiv. And Burkina Faso has described Kyiv as a destabilising force in the region, making the Sahel effectively a front in Russia’s war with Ukraine. As recently as September, Traoré named Ukraine as a part of Burkina Faso’s “map of enemies” for which, he added menacingly, “we need to prepare.”

Russia, as Coda Story has reported for years, has used everything from weapons sales to mercenaries to paying African influencers to both spread Russian narratives and hold Moscow up as the alternative to continuing to rely on exploitative economic relationships with the West, particularly erstwhile European colonialists.

Despite the extent of Russian attempts to influence the Sahel, it’s not Moscow that is signing the most consequential deals with the military juntas it helps prop up. It’s Beijing. And the deals being signed with China to mine the region’s extensive mineral wealth — the lithium, gold, copper, zinc, bauxite and uranium — have served as a reminder to the United States that it too should resume stalled relationships in the Sahel. Early in 2026, Burkina Faso signed a near $150 million healthcare deal with the U.S. in exchange, it appeared, for favourable access to minerals. Both Zambia and Zimbabwe backed away from similar deals, expressing concern about U.S. demands for data and minerals that amounted to an infringement of sovereignty. 

The deals with China and the United States are being negotiated alongside a drive to reduce reliance on foreign loans and grants and ramp up domestic production, particularly of gold. Traoré claims his economic policies emphasise nationalisation and self-reliance. His government has taken over major mining operations and increased state stakes in other industries. In early 2024, his administration suspended export permits for small-scale gold production to crack down on smuggling and keep mineral wealth inside the country. Last month, he inaugurated Burkina Faso’s first gold refinery. 

Some of this has had positive economic effects. The World Bank, in a June 2026 update, said the country had an estimated 5.3% growth in 2025, up from 4.8% in 2024, and its fiscal deficit narrowed from 5.8% of GDP to 1.8%. Inflation was also negative, 0.5%, compared to 4.2% in 2024. Reports by the World Bank and IMF have ascribed these growth to external factors such as the gold rally, climate-driven increase in agricultural outputs, and reduction in energy prices. 

Economic growth, though, is part of a larger story that includes a crackdown on the press, particularly critical coverage of alleged human rights violations. Human Rights Watch documented 1,840 civilian deaths between January 2023 and April 2025, over 1,200 of which were directly attributed to government forces. Even as the report acknowledged widespread violations by Islamist groups, the actions of the Burkina Faso military, it said, “amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” At the same time, Traoré has clamped down on Burkinabè civil society, banning over 100 human rights organizations and dissolving all political parties.

None of it appears to have affected his carefully-honed image in certain online spaces.

A pan-African hero 

Traoré is everywhere. In Accra, the capital of Ghana, his image is pasted onto buses and in parks. In January 2025, at the swearing-in of the Ghanaian president John Mahama, it was Traoré who the crowd responded to, cheering for a rockstar rather than a head of state. Even Mahama joked that Traoré had stolen the show. Artwork celebrating Traoré is frequently posted online. The commentary that accompanies the art is gushing. “Through this artwork,” reads one Facebook tribute, “I celebrate the spirit of a man who stands for sovereignty, truth, and the rise of a self-determined Africa.”

Meanwhile, the Ivory Coast government has granted refugee status to at least 69,000 Burkinabè fleeing Burkina Faso.

In May, when I travelled to Ghana and Ivory Coast to talk to people displaced from Burkina Faso, at least five sources decided they no longer wanted to speak. Guaranteeing anonymity didn’t seem to matter. A Burkinabè journalist who was helping me find people to speak to, stopped responding to my messages the day after I arrived in Accra. Those who did speak to me refused to be quoted for fear that harm would come to family and friends left behind in Burkina Faso.

Reporters have been intimidated into silence. “Today, any journalist living in the country is forced to practice self-censorship to avoid being arrested,” says Harouna Simbo Drabo, disinformation analyst and Director of Programs & Partnerships of Faso Check. “Burkinabé journalists have two options,” he told me, “either practice self-censorship or go into exile.” After threats to his life, Drabo has left Burkina Faso.

He’s one of the luckier journalists. Since 2022, at least seven Burkinabè reporters have been forcibly conscripted into the army after criticizing the Traoré junta's crackdown on the press. Guezouma Sanogo, Boukari Ouoba, and Luc Pagbelguem were abducted days after their union denounced state media as "instruments of propaganda." Atiana Serge Oulon, editor-in-chief of L'Événement, is among the disappeared. Many, like Drabo, have either left Burkina Faso or quit their jobs. 

As conditions deteriorate, what information is becoming available is government propaganda amplified by social media linked to Russian misinformation. In the absence of accurate, verified information, there is inevitably only disinformation. For instance, one of the most persistent pieces of disinformation is the story that Traoré — a supposedly avowed anti-imperialist despite his kowtowing to Moscow, Beijing and Washington — rejected billions of dollars in International Monetary Fund handouts because he believes, à la Thomas Sankara, in economic self-reliance. It is a story that has been debunked but was repeatedly told to me by Traoré supporters, including at least one journalist.

The claim was cited more than 700 times in a single three-day window in January 2025 alone, racking up millions of views across Facebook, X, and TikTok. Dubawa fact-checked the story and found that rather than rejecting money from the IMF, the Burkina Faso government had negotiated a 48-month IMF loan program in September 2023 and drew on World Bank financing in 2024. 

By mid-2025. Code for Africa's analysis found social media in sub-Saharan Africa flooded with AI-generated videos casting Traoré alongside Beyoncé, Rihanna, and, in one particularly unhinged iteration, Pope Leo XIV, all of whom supposedly endorsed him as a Pan-African hero holding the line against the West. After US AFRICOM commander Michael Langley criticized Traoré's handling of Burkina Faso’s gold reserves in a Senate hearing, a network of 165 Facebook accounts began posting identical language claiming Putin had deployed special forces to protect Traoré from an American assasination plot. In ten days it pulled 10.9 million views. 

In Accra, I caught a bus with a picture of Traoré emblazoned on the side. The driver, who only identified himself as Kofi, insisted that before we spoke I should tell him what I thought of Traoré. I say I am not Burkinabè, that I have not visited Burkina Faso but that I have spoken to many people whose lives have been upended by Traoré’s strongman politics. I told him about Burkinabè journalists in exile, forced to join the army, or even disappeared. I told him that when asked about a transition to democracy, Traoré said it was important for Burkinabè to “forget” about democracy. “We have to tell the truth,” Traoré said, “democracy isn’t for us.” I told him about the Burkinabè refugees I met in Treichville, a district in Abidjan, the Ivory Coast capital.

Kofi listened and then told me that “good things take sacrifice,” including the death of a free press. When I asked what he meant by good things, he showed me AI-generated videos of a smart city Traoré had supposedly built.

African identity is tightly wound around the belief that the continent has more potential than it has achieved. The deficit can be attributed to a lot of issues, but chiefly to Western exploitation and the complicity of African leaders. “African countries have also fallen into autocratic democracy,” Sanusi Sanusi, Research Analyst at the Digital Tech, AI & Information Disorder Analysis Centre, DAIDAC, tells me. “There is an election every couple of years but it isn't free or fair.”

Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, writes that “disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information — misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information — information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”

Many Traoré supporters I spoke with, most of whom were men, were convinced they knew things I did not. They told me to educate myself more on Western hypocrisy in Africa. They said they did not have faith in those who appointed themselves arbiters of what was fact and what was disinformation. In Lagos I met Lemi Ghariokwu, who designed album covers for the iconic Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, a revolutionary figure. Ghariokwu, who has a portrait of Ibrahim Traoré hanging in his studio, told me that “Western education and propaganda has made our elite class toothless bulldogs.” Listening to them, it seemed as if a successful Africa needed strongmen, needed autocrats.

In Abidjan, the last person I spoke to about Traoré was Oumar, a Burkinabè taxi driver who had moved to the Ivorian capital in 2021. He told me he “supports Traoré with all my heart.” But as we talked, he admitted he had not been back home because “things are only getting worse.” Three Burkinabè refugees I spoke to told me they thought I might be a government agent planted among them to find out what they really thought about Traoré and that I would then report those thoughts back to Ouagadougou.

Many of the Traoré supporters I spoke with thought I was brainwashed by Western media or, worse, too docile to participate in an African revolution. For my part, I thought they were ill-informed and unable or, worse, unwilling to see through propaganda.

The fundamental curse of the age of information and connection is that we rarely confront how the mediums meant to unite us have fractured us. An unprecedented flood of data has shattered shared reality into millions of customized, mutually hostile subcultures.

With the help of AI and social media, Traoré has managed to decouple national and anti-imperial pride from government performance. By the middle of next year, Burkina Faso will no longer be part of the International Criminal Court, denounced by Traoré as an “instrument of neocolonial oppression”, and thus no longer accountable in any international forum. His government has said it is “decolonizing” the school curriculum. Cheered on by social media, Traoré has used anti-imperial grievances and resentments to argue that authoritarian military rule is the only safeguard for sovereignty.

As some Burkinabè exiles told me ironically, they thought both I, so sceptical of Traoré, and the Traoré die-hards in the African diaspora could use a few months living in Burkina Faso. We should, they said, experience the country Traoré has made IRL. See past the carefully curated myth of the man himself, the largely online fantasy of the pan-African, anti-imperial revolutionary who needs to break a few eggs to make the omelet, and assess the country he runs unchallenged.

The post The cyber-fueled cult of Ibrahim Traoré appeared first on Coda Story.

David Alm | Longreads | October 1, 2026 | 5,726 words (24 minutes)

I got off Interstate 81 to give my soul a break. The back roads of southwest Virginia wind, crest, and plunge through lush valleys of oak, poplar, birch, and maple trees. It’s easy to lose track of time and distance there. People drive slower. Cows graze in pastures. And there are no placards festooned with Motel 6 and Starbucks logos, flattening the American landscape into a homogeneous blur. Any signs you might see are low to the ground and handmade, protesting a data center, for instance, or thanking Jesus.

I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.

The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.

There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs. 

One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. 

In the 1980s and ’90s, cars lined up days before the gates to Felts Park opened. The fairgrounds got so full back then that people slept in the horse stables that used to line one end of them. Once, Elizabeth Taylor made a surprise appearance with her then-husband, Virginia Senator John Warner. Rumor has it that members of Old Crow Medicine Show and Leftover Salmon have shown up at Galax, under the radar, just to jam. 

And yet, despite appearing well attended to my virgin eyes, the Old Fiddler’s Convention’s numbers are down from the pre-pandemic years, and way down from peak Galax. Folks say it’s not like it was. Maybe, as one long-time attendee speculated, it’s that more kids are choosing devices and passive consumption over face-to-face activity with other humans, or that more and more young adults are fleeing southwest Virginia due to the gutted coal, tobacco, and manufacturing industries. Or maybe it’s just that people around there are dying faster than they’re being born. Glen Alexander, a 55-year-old fiddler who’s been going to Galax since he was a child, put it bluntly: “We’re all scared to death this is gonna go away.” 

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Tara Linhardt, a professional mandolin player from Leesburg, Virginia, with thick, curly hair and a determined gaze, has been going to Galax since she was in high school, and was happy to advise me on how to survive my first time. Buy what you need locally, she told me; it was cheaper than New York. It will probably rain, so bring mud boots. Find a high patch of ground, because rainwater pools in the low spots. Afternoon jams were open to anyone, but unless I was dead good, I should just observe the nighttime ones, where the “thoroughbreds” play so fast that a newbie like me would only drag it down. 

Tara and her husband, Ian, pulled into Galax late Saturday afternoon, just in time to get a bite before parking their Four Winds RV by the dumpsters behind the Applebee’s at the edge of town. She told me to sleep in my car there, since the church parking lot was already full, and Applebee’s, unlike Hardee’s, doesn’t mind. We’d need to queue up by the gates to Felts Park before seven o’clock Sunday morning to ensure we’d get decent campsites. First-come, first-served. 

I’d arrived earlier that afternoon, hours later than Google Maps had predicted, because I forsook the interstate. The day before, I’d left my home in Brooklyn only to spend two hours driving five miles to reach the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey. I was spat out onto I-78, which at some point blended into I-81, hauling me across Pennsylvania to Staunton, Virginia, where I slept in a former sanatorium. I had recently been laid off from a job I’d held for 13 years, editing reports for a geopolitical risk advisory firm, and needed reprieve. I sought my escape on Route 11. 

In the trunk were a guitar and two banjos, instruments I was determined to spend the week playing in the Blue Ridge Mountains in lieu of applying for jobs and fretting about AI in my Brooklyn apartment. It was the first long road trip I’d taken alone in a quarter-century, and I’d hoped for a reset. Call it a midlife crisis if you want, but I drove cross-country a lot before I moved to New York, always on back roads. America is best seen up close.

After chatting awhile with Tara, Ian, and a luthier named John Hamlett, who’d also parked his RV behind the Applebee’s, I folded myself into the backseat of my Chevy Trax rental and more or less slept. I awoke at 6 a.m. to a downpour, rain pelting the roof of my car like fingertips on a conga drum. 

The four of us caravaned into town, where we waited until almost 9 a.m. to enter the park. We figured it was due to the rain. In fact, it was because of an issue with the gate itself. My source for this intel was none other than the Galax chief of police, DeWitt Cooper, who was directing traffic into Felts Park that day and hails from the Bronx. I’d see Chief Cooper again a couple days later, at Willie’s Food Truck inside the fairgrounds, where we chatted over catfish and collard greens about his philosophy of policing. “Don’t judge based on appearances and treat people with love,” he told me. 

I chose a plot on the far side of the fairgrounds, near a fence and a row of portable toilets, with Tara, Ian, and John all nearby. Our little commune wouldn’t last; the next day, Four Winds got stuck in the mud and Tara had to summon a Moose—one of the men of Moose Lodge No. 733, a fraternal organization that’s managed the Old Fiddler’s Convention since the beginning—to drag it out with a tractor. They found higher ground by the tennis courts and I stayed put. That night it rained again, and I awoke at 5 a.m. in a half-inch of water that had pooled in my tent overnight, soaking my sleeping bag, pillow, and clothes.

It’s no fun to wake up in a puddle, but when it rains in your tent, or the fairgrounds get so muddy that you watch a young woman lose a Birkenstock forever to the muck, or you start to stink because there’s only one public shower in Felts Park, it all feels incidental to what matters more: There’s pickin’ to do. You hear it all around, all the time. A lone fiddle at dawn, guitars easing into the afternoon, jams that grow in size and volume throughout the day, until night falls and Felts Park erupts in a surround-sound jamboree of syncopated banjos, arpeggiated fiddles, and bass notes so low and driving that they cut through it all at ground level. When it’s not raining, those jam sessions continue through the night, practically until the early morning’s still air is broken anew by someone’s fiddle.

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My first jam came on Day 0, after the rain abated and I’d set up camp. The Old Fiddler’s Convention wouldn’t officially start until Monday night, with the astoundingly good kids’ competitions—the reigning bluegrass fiddle champion herself, Hollace Oakes, was 14 when she won the adult contest last year—but everyone in Felts Park was eager to pick.

Tara wanted to introduce me to Bill and Nancy Sluys, a couple in their early 70s who’ve been going to Galax every summer for some 50 years. We walked to their site, where Bill, a towering figure with a steady voice and a long, white, braided ponytail, emerged from their Airstream to invite anyone who might “wish to partake” to join Nancy and a few others inside. I told Bill I’d thought of bringing edibles to Galax, but the convention website said state laws concerning drugs and alcohol are “strictly enforced,” and Google’s AI bot, Gemini, warned that law enforcement would be crawling Felts Park with K-9 units, even though recreational cannabis is legal in Virginia for adults over 21.

Bill laughed and said that hasn’t been true in more than 40 years, though it used to be, on account of a music festival that happened once, half a century ago, about 15 miles up the road. Stompin 76 featured Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, and other big names from the time. The festival attracted a huge crowd, including a motorcycle gang that allegedly wanted to keep the party going after the festival wrapped, so they rolled into Galax on their hogs, stocked with methamphetamine, moonshine, and guns. Mayhem ensued. The authorities cracked down after that, ostensibly to maintain law and order in fiddleland. By the mid-’80s, they realized that the Old Fiddler’s Convention really was a family affair and let the fiddlers be. 

A group of six or seven people had gathered outside the Airstream by this point, all brandishing instruments. Bill, who grew up on Long Island, assumed his position behind an aluminum upright bass from the 1930s, while Nancy, a fiddler and banjo player roughly half Bill’s height who grew up in Connecticut, emerged from the Airstream with her fiddle. She sat down on a folding chair, called “Soldier’s Joy” in the key of D, and kicked it off at breakneck speed. This was an old-time jam, and “soldier’s joy” was a Civil War-era euphemism for morphine. Galax had begun.

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An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church. 

The tradition dates to the mid-1700s, when Scots-Irish immigrants first settled in Appalachia. Even then, coastal property was for the elite, forcing poorer immigrants inland and south, through the Shenandoah Valley to southwest Virginia, where land was plentiful and cheap. Their music quickly took root. “The Scots brought fiddles and liquor,” Ted McAllister, one of my neighbors in Felts Park, told me. “The Germans brought church music and beer.” 

Over time, Scottish fiddle tunes evolved, as oral traditions do, and began to mix with the musical traditions of enslaved Africans, who had brought with them gourd instruments that would evolve into the American banjo, along with rhythms the Scots had never heard before. Old-time music, in other words, is the music of diasporas, fed into a blender and then worked into a froth. A lot of traditional folk songs came out of this period, too. One that I learned at Galax, “Going to the West,” tells the story of a young man who leaves the mountains of his birth, “where labor is in vain,” to seek the fertile plains out west. It’s the story of my own Scottish forebears, who settled in South Dakota before moving to what is now suburban Chicago, and later, Florida. 

Bluegrass, by contrast, was born in the 1940s, when Bill Monroe and The Blue Grass Boys took those mountain sounds, combined them with Southern church music and blues, and tightened it all into something you might call an uncle of rock ’n’ roll. There’s a reason that Billy Strings plays to sold-out arenas and pickers from around the world can play classics like “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” at the drop of a one-chord. 

Where bluegrass is punchy and clean, designed for the stage, old-time is ecstatic, designed for participation. Bluegrass jams attract spectators who marvel at the players’ pyrotechnics; old-time jams get people on their feet. At Galax, some folks drag big pieces of plywood around the fairgrounds looking for old-time jams, where they’ll lay the board down at the edge of the circle and dance. Flatfooters they’re called: the percussion section. 

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The New York bluegrass community has a Signal thread, and through it I met Harrison Corthell, a banjo player from Queens who was camping in what he called the “gayborhood” of Felts Park: two tents and a rainbow flag. Corthell offered to introduce me to Tyler Hughes, who was also camping in the gayborhood. Hughes serves as the executive director of the Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail, a nonprofit founded by the Virginia Assembly in 2004 to boost tourism through music. Alsace has the Route des Vins, and Kentucky the Bourbon Trail. Southwest Virginia has the Crooked Road.

I found Hughes Thursday afternoon as he was setting up the Crooked Road’s information booth. Musicians were streaming by for the clawhammer banjo competition, which was set to begin any minute. As we sat on a park bench, I told Hughes that I’d begun to think of its music as the region’s chief international export of the past 100 years. “I think that’s a fair assessment,” he said, but stressed that he resists thinking of Appalachia’s musical traditions like a natural resource such as iron or coal. “We really try to stray away from an over-commodified, over-commercialized vision of southwest Virginia,” Hughes said. 

Musical traditions can be packaged and sold, after all. Last winter, an Appalachian folk musician named Murphy Campbell discovered that her videos on YouTube had been used to create AI clones of her voice and banjo playing. Someone then used Vydia, a music distribution platform, to share those clones via streaming services and to make copyright claims on Campbell’s own videos. Campbell described her ordeal on Instagram, including trying to address the matter with “agents” at those streaming services: “I’m telling robots to take down music robots made,” she said. Her posts went viral, causing Vydia to ultimately withdraw the copyright claims and ban the user responsible, according to reports. “It’s the wild west,” Campbell said in one of her posts. “And it can happen to anyone.”

I asked Hughes what percentage of the people in southern Appalachia play an instrument of some kind. He guessed around 70 percent. I’d heard the same number from Daniel, a 32-year-old banjo player I’d met earlier in the week, who works at a sawmill in Grayson County. “It’s kinda the only thing goin’ on around here,” Daniel said. He explained that when the cotton mill in Grayson County closed in the late 1980s, “everyone” started using meth. Then opioids. Within the next 20 years, drug overdoses had become a leading cause of death in southwest Virginia. Getting together to pick, Daniel said, “helps you through real hard stuff.”

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The guitar I took to Galax is a 1989 Takamine I’ve had since I was 14, when my parents indulged my desire to learn Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix songs on the condition that I take classical guitar lessons. I spent my first day or two in Felts Park carrying it around like a security blanket, but I was there to play the banjo. Upon arrival, I realized that I might have been the worst banjo player in Galax. 

I picked up the instrument in 2024, at age 48, in part because my maternal grandfather played one and I was always curious about it. More than that, I wanted to build a mountain banjo, the rustic kind people in Appalachia made from whatever wood they had nearby, animal skins for heads, and guts for strings. I liked their warm, thuddy sound, totally unlike the piercing banjos of bluegrass with their steel strings and resonator backs. So I learned everything I could about how to build one and called my dad to ask if he’d help. I knew the banjo; he knew wood. 

That summer, we spent a week together in his shop in Illinois, building a fretless eastern Kentucky-style mountain banjo out of walnut and ash. Most people in New York ask what it is; everyone at Galax identified it instantly. I’ve since built seven banjos and acquired three more, all different styles. This spring, I carved a neck from a piece of walnut entirely by hand, no power tools, for a 19th-century-style tackhead, the kind played by enslaved Africans on plantations and by Civil War soldiers around the campfire. It’s not just that I’m fascinated by the instrument. As my actual trades—crafting sentences and teaching others to do the same—are increasingly devalued by technology and a society that no longer reads, building banjos gives me one thing that I can hold onto. 

Shortly after my banjo obsession began, I started going to old-time jams in New York City, and later, bluegrass jams. I didn’t—and still don’t—actually listen to old-time or bluegrass music; my tastes trend melancholic. But I missed playing music with other people, something I hadn’t done since college and had begun to crave during the endless, isolated days of the pandemic. In early 2025, I started going to a regular jam session at a bar in Brooklyn called Sunny’s, whose owner has turned it into an institution of roots, bluegrass, and folk music. Some of the best pickers in the tri-state area turn up there each week, along with people like me, there to learn. It took me months to lead a song without blacking out. They call it “jamnesia,” and it’s humiliating. 

After one week among the pickers of southern Appalachia, I got tighter, faster, as if the place itself does some of the teaching. A fiddler friend from New York, who’d been to Galax in the 2010s, was more succinct: “It seeps from the earth.”

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Galax is hardly the first fiddlers’ convention; it’s just the oldest one still left. In the days before the railroad and automobile, let alone the World Wide Web, fiddlers’ conventions brought the people of Appalachia together, allowing songs and picking styles to spread like gossip over those hills. They could get pretty wild, and early-days Galax was no exception. Women and children did not go to Galax back then. It was a place where men gathered to let loose—“outside of the eyes of their preacher and their wives,” Rex McGee, a multi-instrumentalist from North Carolina, told me.

I’d heard of the McGee jams already, where “things get weird,” according to a woman I met Monday morning while I waited in line for the shower. Their camp sits right inside Felts Park, steps from the food trucks, identifiable by a 1974 Ford school bus painted an ominous matte grey. They call it the Muddy Creek Bus, for the band that Glen Alexander’s dad formed in the 1970s and soon became the back-up band for Rex and his brother Ralph’s grandfather, Ralph McGee the First, aka the Old-Timer. The Muddy Creek Boys could party as hard as the Old-Timer; it didn’t hurt that they could pick too. By the 1980s, the real show came after hours. Dozens of people would gather outside the bus to watch the Old-Timer, then in his 80s, fiddle with just about anything he could find: a toothpick, a comb, a “coon dick”—literally a bone from a raccoon’s penis. And it was loud. (For any curious fiddlers out there, you can buy four of these on eBay for $39.95.)

Felts Park is a galaxy of legacy camps like the Muddy Creek Bus. Almost everyone I met told me they’d been going to Galax for 40, 50, even 60 years. Their stories are legion, and they love to tell them: The year it rained so hard that one group holed up in an RV for six days with eight people, an upright bass, and “a little bit of cocaine.” The year a couple of young women got into a fight over a guy, went to fisticuffs in the mud, and ripped each other’s shirts off in front of scores of onlookers—“no one wanted it to stop,” one man recalled with a chuckle. The year several people went mudsliding on the tire tracks, which, for reasons unclear, were composed of raw sewage. 

Jimmy Kidd, an 86-year-old Dobro player who’s been going to Galax since he was 29, regaled me with the time he won the guitar competition, in 1969, by playing the Dobro because there was no Dobro competition then. His daughter, Vicky, told me she met Elizabeth Taylor when she came through Galax, in 1977, when Vicky was 12. Taylor was in a wheelchair, Vicky said, and she wasn’t very nice.

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Leo Lindblom sat on a low stool cradling a mandolin, his sister Lucy beside him. They’d taken the stage in the kids’ mandolin competition on Monday night, and Leo was focused. With flawless timing and dexterity, the 12-year-old picker dazzled the audience, Lucy accompanying him on guitar, for roughly two minutes. Then he rose from the stool, took a bow, and, with Lucy, exited the stage. 

On Thursday, I met Leo, Lucy, and the rest of the Lindbloms—Marina, Jon, and their nine kids, all but one of whose names begins with an L—at their bus in a gravel parking lot just across the road from Felts Park, where it was a little quieter than Galax Central. The Lindbloms first went to Galax in 2021, after discovering bluegrass at a gift shop in North Carolina while on a family vacation five years prior. All nine of the kids responded instantly to the “happy, upbeat” music coming out of the speakers, and mom and dad bought the CD on the spot. 

The kids, who range in age from 12 to 28 and were all homeschooled, each chose an instrument and formed their two bands, Headin’ Home and The Brothers Five. Now, when they’re not home in Bloomingdale, Georgia, they’re on the road playing festivals and gigs across the country. I asked what makes Galax special. Libby said it gives them a rare chance to slow down, to not have to be “on” all the time, and just spend time together. 

As we sat outside their bus, all 11 of them and me, I asked: Why bluegrass? After all, Marina and Jon met at the Eastman School of Music and played in the Savannah Philharmonic for 10 years. They know Tchaikovsky and Brahms just as well as Bill Monroe and the Carter Family. They could teach their kids classical music, or any other kind. “Our goal, in everything we do, is to glorify the Lord,” Marina explained. And with bluegrass, she said, they are able to give people a bit of happiness, a chance to tap their feet and forget about their troubles for a little while. It’s an act of service. 

Then I turned to Leo, the youngest, who was perched on Lucy’s lap, and asked what he likes about playing music that, surely, most kids his age don’t know anything about. “Everything,” he said, before checking my presumption: All the kids he knows play bluegrass or old-time, he said. He’s met them all through places like Galax. 

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I’d registered for the clawhammer banjo competition a month before Galax opened its gates, but by the evening of the contest, I was so worn out from five semi-sleepless nights, as many days packed with conversation and playing, and a dubious diet of beer, bananas, and cheese sandwiches that I decided to sit it out and trekked up the hill to Main Street for some Chinese food. Besides, I don’t even play clawhammer banjo. I’ve developed a hybrid style: I use finger picks, like bluegrass, but keep rhythm by striking the strings with the back of my middle finger, like clawhammer. After five days of watching virtuosos of both styles create magic on their instruments, I wasn’t about to do my mishmash in front of a panel of judges.

As I sat in my air-conditioned booth, hovering over a plate of garlic chicken, I got a call from Tara. Was I going to compete? I told her I’d spent the whole day interviewing people and was exhausted. “You have to participate!” she countered. “I triple-dog dare ya.” I was just delirious enough to bend. Thirty minutes later I was backstage rehearsing my song with John Garrison, who has gone to Galax each of the past 46 years. After a few runs through an instrumental version of “White Freightliner Blues” by Townes Van Zandt, I checked in, slapped a number on my chest, and took the stage. Tara squatted right in front to take video, smiling wide. Our pickin’ was clean, but we landed way outside the money: I bastardized the form and played a copyrighted song. We still got a big round of applause. 

My style served me better in the jams, where more than once people assured me that if it sounds good, ain’t no reason to change it. Some of the best sessions I went to were inside an A-frame tent adjacent to the gayborhood and maybe 100 yards from my campsite. On Monday night, I played fiddle tunes and shared a jar of moonshine in that tent with three young guys who lived just down the road, near the town of Fries, in Grayson County. One of them built a fiddle from scratch; it took him years. I did my version of “White Freightliner Blues” with them, and when we finished, one yipped, “That’s how it’s done!”  

Thanks to the moonshine, I forgot about Tara’s advice to sit out the nighttime jams and hopped over to a bluegrass jam that was really crackin’. At least 10 musicians stood in a circle, and the tempo was hot. I asked a guitar player if I could join. “You’ll have to ask him,” he replied, motioning to the only banjo player in the group. They did not expand the circle to let me in, and I hung awkwardly on the periphery for a song or two before going back to my tent. 

It was one of only two times I felt unwelcome at Galax. The other came after the guys from Fries learned I was a journalist from New York City. I’d gone back to their tent Tuesday afternoon to jam but ended up talking with Daniel, the sawmill worker, instead. He was without his banjo, so while the other guys picked fiddle tunes, I told Daniel I was there to write about Galax and asked if I could record our conversation. He cheerfully agreed, but after that—and I could very well be wrong about this—I sensed that the other guys looked at me sideways. 

Daniel, on the other hand, remained inviting and warm. One afternoon late in the week, I was sitting by my tent when he wandered over to say hello. He wanted to give me a leaf of galax, the rubbery, low-lying evergreen from which the town takes its name. “I thought you’d like this for your story,” he said, and stayed to visit awhile.

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I broke camp Saturday afternoon and packed up my car. Before I left Galax, however, I dashed over to catch the “43rd Yearly International Kazoo Championship” a few campsites down from Bill and Nancy’s Airstream, as Tara had assured me it was “not to be missed.” Reporters don’t spend much time at the Old Fiddler’s Convention, and Tara was concerned that I might focus too much on the negatives in my writing—the mud, the gastronomic limitations, the attrition. Like everyone I met in Felts Park, she wanted me to return to New York with a real sense of why they keep coming back, year after year, and of what could be lost if they stopped.

Several dozen people were gathered at the “soup kitchen,” a community tent where, two nights prior, Chief Cooper had served hundreds of Styrofoam cups filled with venison stew, made by Nancy herself, from deer she and Bill had hunted on their property. Now, the ground was muddy and more rain was imminent. The contestants were undeterred, ready to blow their hearts out on plastic kazoos. 

I soon understood Tara’s insistence. The International Kazoo Championship pokes a little fun at the rigidity of the main stage. One by one, each contestant was disqualified for breaking at least one of the competition’s 12 rules, which included “No Fun Not Allowed” and “All Participants Must Be Present In Order To Attend.” They were then each invited to perform again, and one by one, each was named the winner. Then all the contestants and judges second-lined through Felts Park in the rain, led by a trumpet and trailed by a banjo, blowing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on their kazoos.

After a quick walkabout to say my goodbyes, I drove north on Route 221, past the Applebee’s and the Walmart where, at Tara’s urging, I did most of my shopping for the week. That night I met up with a friend from New York, who’d invited me to a 40th birthday party at a 19th-century cabin deep in the woods north of Roanoke. We stayed up late, drinking bourbon and talking about music. I’d rather have been playing it. 

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On Sunday morning, I got in my car and continued north on Route 11. As I wound through the mountains, catching the occasional glimpse of semis and cars streaming by on I-81, I played a recording I made of “Going to the West” through the car’s stereo. Brian Muller, who placed third in this year’s mandolin contest, led us in the jam, his plaintive baritone providing the perfect soundtrack to my drive: I leave you here, in this land that you love, ’mid scenes so bright and fair, where fragrant flowers are blooming and music fills the air. I imagined bringing the song to New York jams, and wondered if it would fly.

Passing through the town of Buchanan, a few hours from Galax, I saw a familiar face. Ted McAllister and his wife, Debbie, were getting out of their car just outside the Buchanan Baptist Church. I pulled alongside them, rolled down my window, and said, “Fancy seeing you here.” Ted, guitar case in hand, told me to come inside.

A few dozen people were gathered in the Fellowship Hall for a potluck lunch to celebrate the Buchanan Baptist Church’s 190th anniversary. A preacher named Bill Hartsfield welcomed me at the door. (“Like a field of hearts,” he said with a firm handshake.) Then he walked with me to the serving counter, where I fixed a plate of fried chicken, cheese casserole, and ambrosia salad. We sat down with the McAllisters and two other local musicians, Alan Berry and Mike Lee. “Galax is a subculture of a subculture,” Ted explained as we ate. Music is woven into everything from Sunday morning church services to holiday parties and family picnics. 

We finished our plates and went into the chapel, where, for the next 90 minutes or so, Ted, Alan, Mike, and a banjo player named Kim Wood played bluegrass versions of church hymns for around 20 people. Two little girls danced in the aisle, swept up by the music. Halfway through their set, as I sat in my pew, Ted walked to the pulpit and introduced me. He explained that we’d spent the week as neighbors in Galax, talking, telling stories, picking songs, and he was delighted to show me a little more of “how we do things ’round here.”

I hadn’t been to church in decades, and a couple hours of Southern hospitality won’t make a believer out of me. But hearing Ted and the others play, watching children dance, and meeting people who looked me in the eye and didn’t rush the conversation felt deeply familiar. I may have spent almost my entire adult life in New York City, but I grew up on the Illinois-Iowa border, on the banks of the Mississippi. Church backrooms, potlucks, and ambrosia salad were all part of my childhood. 

By 2:30, I really had to get going. For the second time in two days, I said goodbye to Ted, got in my car, and was on my way. 

A week later, I was back at Sunny’s Bar in Brooklyn, playing songs with a dozen or so people in the bar’s backroom. I called “Going to the West,” and after a quick run through the chords on my latest banjo build, a resonator back with a dragon fretboard inlay that I’d played on stage in Galax, I started singing. It was a little shaky at first, but by the second verse everyone was locked in. 

When we finished, one of the musicians remarked that it was a beautiful song. I agreed and asked if he knew it already. “No,” he said. “But I’m going to learn it now.”

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David Alm is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. His work has frequently been included in Longreads‘ Weekly Top Five and annual Best Features lists. He also teaches journalism at Hunter College-CUNY, where he focuses on feature writing and creative nonfiction.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Earl Swift was a reporter for The Virginia Pilot and has contributed to Outside. He’s been nominated for a Pulitzer eight times. Among other books, he wrote Chesapeake Requiem, a New York Times bestseller that chronicles a year in the life of Tangier Island, located 12 miles out in the middle of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. There, a dozen miles from shore, residents live a life with “one foot in the twenty-first century and another in times long passed,” he writes.

Swift spoke with Brendan O’Meara, host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, about reporting and writing his new book, Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail. Swift hiked the 2,000-mile trail twice, 30 years apart, in order to write the book. He talks with O’Meara about story structure, getting close to the truth, and why it’s important to remove the speedbumps that might cause a reader to abandon your story before the end. 

This conversation has been edited for pacing and flow. 

—Krista Stevens

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Brendan: Much has been written about the Appalachian Trail, and you’ve brought a different kind of sensibility to it. How do you make your book fresh and immediate and yet able to sit alongside all the other titles about the trail?

Earl: I’m lucky, in the sense that probably the two best books about trail hikes were written by people who didn’t finish them. Bill Bryson was one and Cheryl Strayed was the other. Most trail accounts are self-published and unedited, written by folks with relatively little writing experience. Not to sound highfalutin, but it shows. I also knew I had a story to tell with Molly and Jeff and what had happened there. [Ed: to say more about Molly and Jeff here would spoil the plot of Swift’s book.] I felt I was pretty well-suited to tell that story. The opportunity was to be that one rare book about a trail journey that stands apart, and I figured it was worth the risk to try to write that book.

Brendan: As you hiked south, getting into Georgia, you started to experience congestion, more people. You noticed a generational divide at Low Gap and other campsites. Younger hikers seem predisposed to tenting, no matter what. Even in the middle of a downpour, they’ll choose their individual shelter over the communal. You also noticed isolation and phones, something you wouldn’t see 30 years ago.

Earl: You didn’t see it 30 years ago because there were no phones. We forget that the smartphone didn’t come along until 2007, a full 17 years after I did that first hike. It was a very different environment back then. This was eight years before Bill Bryson wrote A Walk in the Woods. The trail did not occupy a spot in the collective consciousness. It was not part of American culture the way it has become since, and so you were dealing with people who were drawn from a much narrower band of society. There were people who were already outdoorsy, and that’s not necessarily the case now. All walks [of life] attempt a thru hike these days, but back then it tended to be people who were already part of the fraternity. If you wanted to make a call, you hitchhiked to the nearest town and went to a payphone. There was no other option. If you wanted a pizza, you had to hitch into town. Now you have people who will get on their phones when they’re two miles from the nearest road crossing, and they’ll arrange for a pizza joint to deliver a pie at the road crossing when they arrive, which would have been science fiction. 

Brendan: There’s a balance in what to include, so that it doesn’t feel repetitive. You need to pick high intensity moments, be it the physical experience of a gnarly section of trail, or the three siblings from Kentucky who are assholes with no etiquette. You pick these moments so it’s not front-loaded or middle-loaded or back-loaded. There is a delicacy in how you deploy various elements throughout.

Earl: For any storyteller, proportionality is the key ingredient. You must figure out how much of each piece you share with the reader. If there’s one fatal flaw in most trail chronicles, it’s that writers don’t make enough of a distinction between telling moments and untelling moments. They just throw everything at you, and it gets boring. 

There are relatively few classic books about the Appalachian Trail, but one of them came in the late ’70s. It’s this two-volume, 1,000-page book called Hiking the Appalachian Trail. It gives you first-person accounts of the first 50 or so thru hikes. By 100 pages into the first volume, you’ve gone numb because every story is exactly the same. Part of the problem is that the whole tenor of the story is This happened, and then this happened. There’s never a moment’s pause to reflect on what it means and why I should care as a reader. Everything’s treated as equally important, and therefore nothing is important.

Job one, for anybody writing a book—for anybody writing a story of any kind, of any length—is to get the reader to that last word. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter which pretty words you drop in the middle of the story.

Brendan: You’re the tour guide and you’re going to point to what matters. That degree of authorial authority is integral to any narrative, especially something like this, because otherwise it would just be so rote and boring. You have to imbue it with a pulse.

Earl: Job one, for anybody writing a book—for anybody writing a story of any kind, of any length—is to get the reader to that last word. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter which pretty words you drop in the middle of the story. It doesn’t matter how brilliantly conceived it is. The story has failed because you have failed to get the reader to the end, to the finish line. 

The whole process of structuring a story, and strategizing about a story comes down to, How do I remove all the speed bumps that will encourage the reader to set this aside? If you can do that effectively, then you win, you get the reader to finish the story. The reader can badmouth the story after the fact. If the reader’s reached the end, you as the writer have achieved what you set out to do. All you can ask is for them to finish the story. You can’t ask them to like it. That’s up to them. But you can get them to finish it if you do it right.

We make decisions about what we include and what we leave out. We decide where we start a story, which is not always at the beginning. We decide where we’re going to end it, which is not always at the ending. You hope that in making those decisions, you get the reader to the truth, or pretty damn close to it, as close as you can, given the facts that you’re working with. But it is a construct, and it is your responsibility. Structure your story in such a way that the story will achieve what it sets out to do. That it will succeed in terms of incorporating enough propulsion to get the reader to the end. 

I probably spent three months doing nothing but cutting. Most of the writing of this book was cutting. I wrote a journal while I was hiking, and then I did nothing but cut when it came to writing the book. 

Brendan: In what ways did the hike change you?

Earl: In 1990, the big takeaway for me was that I could do anything. It boosted my confidence to the point where I’m sure I was pretty obnoxious in the months immediately after. God knows I must have been difficult to deal with. I could do anything! It made me Superman. Part of that was seeing something demonstrated daily that my dad had been saying to me for years. He was always big on saying, “How do you eat the elephant? One bite at a time.” It had just been “dad talk” to me until this hike, when I realized part of being able to do anything is knowing how to bust it up into its components, and then bust those components up into their individual ingredients. How to take each little bite-sized fragment in sequence, and pretty soon you’ve accomplished the whole thing. 

That dictated my approach to big assignments at the paper and in magazines, and certainly it has informed every book effort. It’s a stupid amount of work to write a book. I wouldn’t recommend this line of work to anybody. It’s a ridiculous way to try to make a living. So uncertain, so filled with terror, and so potentially without reward of any kind. But breaking the 2,200 miles into daily doses of 14 to 17 miles describes perfectly how I go about writing a book now. You don’t sit down to write 105,000 words. You sit down to write 1,200 words a day. That’s my daily quota. Do that over enough days, and pretty soon you have the 105,000 words.

Brendan: How did you settle on 1,200?

Earl: Early on, with my first couple of books, it was 2,000, and I just whacked it down. My first hike, I had no trouble banging out 17 to 20 miles a day. Now, 14 miles feels like a pretty tough day at the office, a long day. 

It’s the same with writing. Twelve hundred words takes as much out of me now as 2,000 used to. I’ll probably drop it down to 1,100, maybe even 1,000 with the next book. I’d like to think that the words are better than they used to be. I still find that I spend the first hour or two every morning, in the middle of a book project, going back through what I thought were perfect words laid down the day before. Invariably, when I wake up, I find that they weren’t so perfect after all. In fact, they need a lot of fixing and so I do repair for the first couple of hours, and then try to make something out of the rest of the day with new stuff. 

Listen to the full conversation below.

Mark and Betsy Blondin | Longreads | September 22, 2026 | 2,702 words (10 minutes)

We left Boyne City, Michigan, in the fall of 1996 in a 34-foot Coachmen motorhome towing a minivan, with three children, a golden retriever not originally part of the plan, and a desktop computer on a stand bolted to the floor where a chair used to be. We stopped in Flint to say goodbye to family and retrofit the motorhome for the road. Mark’s father had died that June. His mother was devastated, and for a while the question wasn’t which route to choose but whether to go at all. We left Flint on October 4. Five miles later, the motorhome shut down.

A loose fuel line.

A few miles after the fuel line was fixed, we were surprised by a flat tire on the van’s tow dolly, and then, unbelievably, we bent a bumper while putting the van back on the dolly. It was past seven in the evening. We were finally on our way to Cleveland, Ohio.

That was day one. What we built over the following nine months—25,000 miles through 40 states—would go on to earn a Yahoo! Cool Site designation, a presentation at a US Department of Education national conference, and a place in the federal Education Resources Information Center archive. On the road, we filed over 1,500 emails and website dispatches from museum lobbies, hotel reception desks, libraries, and wherever we could find a phone jack and someone willing to let us run a telephone cord to their wall.

Google would not exist for another two years. The word “blog” had not yet been coined. We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.

Blondins’ Assignment America was both the name of our trip and the website we built in real time as we traveled. We had a partnership with Northwest Academy, a science and technology charter school in northern Michigan in its first year of operation, that made it possible. We had prepared to make the case for why our children—Donald, 14, and twins Kelly and Stacy, 11—would not attend the 1996–97 school year in a conventional sense. The school board didn’t just accommodate us; they encouraged us. Northwest Academy loaned us a laptop and a 1.2 MP digital camera, and we took their curriculum on the road.

The idea had been circulating for some time. For over a year, we had been looking at our future and considering ideas for our next step. Watching The Bridges of Madison County and the questions it raises about the road not taken confirmed for us that we could do something unconventional and educational. Our adventure was also, after Mark’s 12-year career run at Coca-Cola, exactly what we needed.

Red flags of risk waved. In Betsy’s 1996 site bio before the trip began, she wrote her own reasons for going: “I hope [the children] learn that although it is not always easy, unconventional choices in life can be made. Quitting my part-time job as a writer for The Citizen in Boyne City for this adventure was not easy for me. Neither is the financial risk, but I believe it will be worth it.”

What emerged was a family travel journal published to the web, which we updated continuously with photographs and written dispatches. On the site we invited visitors to submit their own travel stories and organically grew a readership we couldn’t really see or measure. Blondins’ Assignment America, our family’s online home, resided at blondins.com, running on Microsoft FrontPage 97.

It is still there. We have not updated the code. The link list on the homepage points to AltaVista, HotBot, and WebCrawler. Many of the links are broken. It is an archive, broken links and all—a well-preserved time capsule.

We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.

This archive holds more than our travel dispatches. Each family member had their own web page. Donald created Donald.com on GeoCities, a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free. He dated his site-building career to November 27, 1996—54 days into the trip. One section with links to tutorials existed to teach strangers how to build websites of their own. The note for November 18, 1997, reads: “I have photoshop! Major site changes are coming.” 

The photographs were 640 by 480 pixels, because anything larger would take a reader minutes to load; we could feel our audience’s patience through the phone line. We uploaded our dispatches whenever we could find a connection—this fundamental part of our publishing process was not on a schedule, nor was it guaranteed. Seven weeks in, parked in Sarasota, Florida, Mark wrote in his journal that he hoped to get something on the site before we left. The week before, in Jacksonville, three days had passed with no update.

When we were lucky, we were able to upload our accounts of adventures on the day they happened.

Stacy posted on October 15, 1996: “Dear Journal: Today was not my favorite day, but it was okay. We spent half the day looking for a place to check our e-mail and were successful. Then we went to the Portland Museum of Art where we saw some neat artwork by Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, etc. Later that night we went swimming while Dad and Donald went to Maine Internet Connections. Kelly and I had lots of fun playing at the pool. We slept once again at the college police parking lot.”

Kelly wrote about our hike on the Lost Mine Trail in the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park in Texas on January 9, 1997. “The trail was supposedly five and a half miles, but straight uphill. We made it back down in about 45 minutes. When we got back, we did some laundry. For dinner, we had barbecue chicken in tortilla shells. There was still snow on the Chisos. There is a legend that there is gold in the mountain.”

Our stories traveled unfiltered into the world for anyone anywhere to read. 

In our 34-foot home, the dinette was the flat surface where we spread out school work and projects and wrote in our journals. It also converted to a bed for Donald. When he wanted to sleep before the rest of us, the cry went out to clear the dinette—a plea or a command, depending on the night. Years later we could still hear echoes of “clear the dinette!”

The web of 1996 was not yet monetized in the way it is today. The internet then wasn’t flooded with platforms competing for your attention and harvesting and selling your data, or algorithms constantly tuned to optimize for engagement. At the time, Yahoo! had editors—actual people employed to look at websites and decide which ones were worth surfacing to other people. That web lasted about a decade before it was dismantled, piece by piece, in favor of one that extracts profits from similar interactions. 

We were the beneficiaries of that architecture and didn’t know it was temporary.

Logistics in the physical world were more challenging than in the world online. Six weeks in, we were low on propane, parked in a friend’s driveway in Maplewood, New Jersey, taking the van into New York City on day trips. The only place that filled RV tanks was in Jersey City. We left the van behind and drove the motorhome onto streets built for nothing that long. Following sketchy directions, we stopped several times to ask for help. The horns behind us did not let up. We found the place, got the propane, and worked our way back through the traffic.

It was one of the worst days of our trip. 

Some of our best days resulted from meeting people while finding ways to get online. Back on day one at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, we told our story, and after a momentary pause, the receptionist at the information desk gave us her chair. We sat at her desk in that major museum and filed our dispatches while visitors walked up to ask for directions to the dinosaurs. We did our best to help. 

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, also in Cleveland, gave us free admission, a press kit, and a phone line. The Great Lakes Science Center nearby, and new that year, gave us free admission and a tour by their PR director. We got better at telling the story, and three charming children helped.

A man named Pierre at a Portland, Maine, YMCA spent an hour trying every phone line in the building to help us connect.

In New York City, our communication efforts found us, just a bit embarrassed, walking down the aisle in our travel clothes to seats five rows from the stage at The King and I. Mark had called the box office that afternoon and told a woman named Sandy our story. Our tickets were waiting at will call for a magical theater night.

A 7-Eleven outside Washington, DC, became a nightly ritual: We’d run a 50-foot cord to the backroom, upload the day’s pages, check and send email, and play a trivia game about the museums we’d visited. Correct answers were worth a Slurpee. That is what the technology was for.

Somewhere past the Four Corners Monument on the Navajo Nation, we ran out of gas less than a mile short of a station that had no can to sell us. A man drove past, saw our motorhome stopped on the shoulder, and turned around. He went home for a gas can and brought back enough gas for us to reach the pump. We never learned his name. This is what human kindness did.

We were the beneficiaries of that architecture and didn’t know it was temporary.

Betsy filed a few freelance columns for The Citizen from the road. Her parents mailed printed issues of the newspaper to whatever general-delivery post office or friend’s or relative’s address we could predict two weeks ahead.

The yeses got bigger as the trip went on. At the JFK Presidential Library outside of Boston, which also gave us free admission, Mark asked if we could park the motorhome in the lot overnight. The staff said yes, and after our visit they showed us where to park and locked the gate behind us. One family, one motorhome, one golden retriever, inside the locked grounds of a federal presidential library, with a view of Boston in the dark. Nobody had a policy for that. Someone had a key and decided yes.

When we needed someone to take Buddy for the month we spent in Hawaii, we found him a home through a golden retriever email list. It connected us to a breeder in Morton, Washington, who knew a young man near Seattle raising his own golden for a 4-H project. He needed the money; Buddy needed a yard. The family also had room for the motorhome. Nobody took a percentage. Nobody optimized the match.

No matter where we were, the realities of our past intruded on our adventure. The family parked the motorhome in Pacifica, California, and waited while Mark flew back to Michigan. He had been fired by Coca-Cola Enterprises in March 1995, and his age-discrimination suit had reached the deposition stage. It ran from nine in the morning to 5:30 p.m. His mother waited at the house our family still owned but no longer lived in. With the retirement savings spent down, much was dependent on the court case going well.

One family, one motorhome, one golden retriever, inside the locked grounds of a federal presidential library, with a view of Boston in the dark. Nobody had a policy for that. Someone had a key and decided yes.

We returned home in June 1997, rich in experience and financially broke. A brief exchange at a campground became an unforgettable memory. Betsy had told an elderly man she was worried the children wouldn’t understand or appreciate what the trip had been. He thought about it. “Maybe it’s not a matter of appreciating it as something unique or separate,” he told her. “It will simply become part of who they are.”  

We spent the summer running an ice cream and yogurt business, and planning the future. While researching, we discovered a request for abstracts from the organizers of a US Department of Education conference called “Families, Technology, and Education.” We were accepted as featured speakers and off to Chicago that October.

A PowerPoint to help tell our story and a video our children had made in Big Bend National Park on its plant and animal life fit the conference title in every way. On a stage in front of 400 educators from around the country, we made our presentation. During the Q&A period, Donald fielded several questions like a pro. Our paper, People Make Dreams Come True, and Technology Expands the Possibilities: An Educational Journey across the United States, seemed close to becoming a template for the future of education—and we had played a role.

In June 1998, an email arrived from a stranger in New York.

His name was Ted Sammons, and he worked in the editorial department of Broadway Books. He had seen Blondins’ Assignment America on Yahoo!’s “Cool Site” listing and had been impressed—and, he admitted, a bit jealous. He believed the story of our trip would make a good book, and he wanted to know if we’d thought about writing one. Of course we had.

We made our pitch, but ultimately, the editorial board passed. Their stated reason was not enough tragedy. 

In 1998, our story was: family leaves, family travels, family lands well. We both began new careers. It’s an adventure with an enviable ending. Eventually, Donald went to Berkeley, and Kelly and Stacy went to Harvard.

In December 1997, we put the Boyne City house on the market, loaded the motorhome for its last trip, and landed in Carlsbad, California, one of our favorite cities discovered on our journey. It was there that Betsy began work as a managing editor and Mark went into the technology industry. Our children thrived. 

The household that once ran a 50-foot cord into a 7-Eleven backroom to send the day’s mail now talks on platforms that eavesdrop on what we say.

A decade passed, and the publisher Betsy worked for went under. Cloud computing came for the company Mark worked for, and then for the storage business he started. In 2009, we lost our Carlsbad house.

Getting from Carlsbad to a city on the Portuguese coast took 10 more years and three continents worth of seeking. But that isn’t this story.

Today, the children are grown and our family is scattered across four countries. The household that once ran a 50-foot cord into a 7-Eleven backroom to send the day’s mail now talks on platforms that eavesdrop on what we say.

Our children’s dispatches still live where they filed them, and how they perceive the trip is not a question we have to ask in 2026. We see it in them. In their curiosity, courage, and adaptability that can partly be traced back to Cleveland. The older, wise man at the campground had predicted correctly. It has indeed become a part of each of us.

Recently, we went looking for who still visits the site. The statistics page is a dead link; it has outlived the instrument that measured it.

We both still write, and Betsy still edits, from a town on the Portuguese coast—a domain renewed annually, hosting billed monthly, a newsletter on a platform that takes its percentage. Every function we had for free in 1996, now itemized. The North Central Michigan College server had hosted our website and asked for nothing.  

While the early web afforded us online advantages, the real-world experiences and connections we enjoyed would not have been possible without the human kindness and generosity we found along the way. Both human and online access made our adventure possible.

Our story is a record of an internet that no longer exists: the one with human editors, not algorithms, discovering and surfacing content worth seeing. The one that offered real access and possibility, resulting in a federal agency highlighting our work and an editor at a major publishing house discovering our project. The one that connected us to a host family for our dog and motorhome in rural Washington, no strings attached. That internet—serendipitous, kind, free, and open—is gone.

Nine months, 25,000 miles, 40 states. Three kids who were there for all of it. A golden retriever who died years later in Carlsbad. A motorhome that is long gone. 

And a website that is, in the most literal sense, still on its way to Cleveland.

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Mark and Betsy Blondin are living and writing in Vila do Conde, Portugal, currently at work on a memoir of the thirty years that followed Assignment America. Betsy is a longtime writer and editor at WordMetro.com who compiled and published Migraine Expressions: A Creative Journey Through Life with Migraine. Together, they published At Home Abroad: Today’s Expats Tell Their Stories. Mark’s work has appeared in The Humanist, and he writes at markblondin.com and Material Witness.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

Gabe Bullard | Longreads | September 15, 2026 | 3,401 words (12 minutes)

Watching The Jetsons as a kid in the ’80s, I was obsessed with the food machine, and how it dispensed a full meal at the touch of a button. The show was set in 2062, exactly a hundred years on from its original broadcast. We’ve made it to 2026, but life today resembles nothing like that slick space-age future. We have gadgets, but they’ve arrived as phones, apps, and smart home devices—and I’m not sure they’ve made my life better.

“Accepting modern conveniences too often means accepting lower standards,” writes Gabe Bullard in Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease. Lower standards for material goods, for labor conditions, for socializing, for art and entertainment. “Experiences become transactions.” Bullard isn’t anti-technology. His argument, he writes, “is an argument against how we use and are pushed to use technology.” In his new book, he examines the conveniences that have crept into his life—and likely yours—and offers ideas for living with them more sustainably and equitably.

In this excerpt from chapter seven, Bullard sets this scene: a physical world, the one we’ve moved through for centuries, slowly reshaped by the virtual one we increasingly live in. Cars drive from one dot on a map to another, ferrying takeout to people at home on sofas. Food deliverers make some extra money. Businesses take orders both online and off. It appears easier, efficient. But Bullard examines the costs—to the customer, to the driver, and to the restaurant owner, who still has to make sure the fries are crispy once they reach your door.

—Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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The artist Jake Longstreth paints landscapes of America, often the West and Southwest, with their distinctive vegetation, deserts, and mountains. In the foreground of many of his paintings are features that evoke a time more than a single place—CubeSmart self-storage, Taco Bell, a sun-bleached facade with shadows where the words Toys ‘R’ Us once hung.

In one series, each painting is a different view from the parking lot of a Walmart in Scottsdale, Arizona. Ferns, trees, and desert grasses obscure the sharp edges of the boxy store. Semitrailers and loading docks peek from behind the brush. In a painting from a different series, a Home Depot abuts a Civil War battlefield. 

The work has a loneliness that’s reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s paintings. But unlike Hopper, Longstreth rarely paints people (one exception is a group of soldiers in uniform at the grand opening of a Chili’s). The only signs of humanity are occasional cars and the chains that “make up, basically, an American commons,” as Longstreth described them in an interview promoting an exhibition of his work in 2024. “Most people don’t really have a super-deliberate relationship with these places,” he added.

There’s a certain democracy to the scenes: Anyone, anywhere can eat the same value meal as anyone else. There’s also an intrusion: The chains’ architecture imposes a sameness on once-unique landscapes. The stores and restaurants are dropped into spaces that weren’t made for them. Flat, square plots are pressed into hills, ample parking provided.

The encroachment of a drive-thru on a lush California valley is a good representation of many modern conveniences. The services that claim to make something faster, easier, or cheaper are built on top of physical landscapes, legal frameworks, or social orders that were not made to accommodate them. The systems absorb the change, but they do it awkwardly and end up forever altered. Starbucks becomes a place to pick up app orders; appliances become accessories to connect to your phone; QR codes sit on restaurant tables; analysis replaces news; art becomes Content; machines replace people. 

Uncomfortable intrusions and uneven responses are everywhere.

Examples abound: Grocery delivery apps bring an old idea to a new reality. Grocers offered delivery over a century ago, but the stores were set up and staffed for this. Modern grocery stores are built for customers to come in and do their own shopping. Delivery apps now let customers pay someone to do the same physical task the user would do if they went to the store themselves. What seems like a simple process can quickly become inconvenient. Grocery stores evolved to let customers pick out their own fruit, check dates on packages, and otherwise get things for themselves based on what looked good (or what the store suggested they buy). Virtual shoppers do this picking for customers, sometimes in a hurry so they can fulfill more orders. Mistakes can happen even under the best circumstances. Better deals go ignored. There’s confusion when an item is out of stock and the customer hasn’t chosen an alternative. It can lead to a customer essentially steering a shopper through the store on their behalf.

Rentable electric scooters have become a fixture of urban sidewalks in the past decade. The scooters speed up trips that are too far to walk, too short for a car ride, and not covered by public transit. But these are more of a tacked-on convenience than a real solution. City streets aren’t often built to accommodate smaller vehicles, leaving scooter riders to either use car lanes (putting the rider at risk) or sidewalks (putting pedestrians at risk). Poorly parked scooters clutter neighborhoods. And the environmental benefits are questionable, if at times nonexistent: Broken scooters need to be replaced and vans typically pick up scooters for charging. These problems could be solved through a more active response from cities—more adequate public transit, sustainability requirements for the rental companies, limits on where scooters can be ridden and parked. Cities could build better infrastructure, too, to favor bikes, scooters, and pedestrians over cars.

The postal system and most homes were built to accommodate the delivery of mail and packages. But the scale of e-commerce deliveries has forced inconvenient adjustments to physical and social spaces. In the years I lived in a large apartment building, package drop-off was a constant frustration. Every afternoon, the lobby filled with Amazon and Chewy boxes. They sometimes sat there for days (rush delivery wasn’t essential after all). What was built as a place for neighbors to mingle became a warehouse for boxes of dog food where people occasionally waited for rideshares.

For private homes, the doorbell camera offers convenient, instant notification that a package has arrived and security footage if the package is stolen. It’s an inelegant, antisocial solution. The old-style doorbell was already a notification a package had arrived. The new gadget moved the chime and the peephole to the pocket (and gave users another reason to stay glued to their phones). Package theft is a crime of convenience created by constant online shopping and delivery, and it’s not clear the cameras are stopping it. In my old neighborhood, people often posted grainy images of package thieves to local message boards. Sometimes the person said they were giving the information to the police, as if the police would bother tracking down whoever took a box that had most likely already been replaced. Perhaps the footage will go into a database to be scanned by facial recognition software instead. Doorbell cameras might be meant to catch crimes, but more often, they create Content like the videos of accidents I scroll past online. Everyone is eager to share their personal view of the panopticon.

Is the convenience worth the cost of constant surveillance and suspicion of every person who steps on your stoop (not to mention a subscription to the software that runs the camera)? Even if the cameras prevent a package theft, it’s unlikely the increased surveillance is a deterrent for violent crimes, or that it has an effect on overall neighborhood safety. That would take a collective solution. The camera lets the homeowner feel optimized to take on (or hide from) the world’s troubles alone.

The services that claim to make something faster, easier, or cheaper are built on top of physical landscapes, legal frameworks, or social orders that were not made to accommodate them.

Ridesharing’s “disruption” is perhaps the most prominent example of convenience overloading existing systems, and those systems bending to accommodate it. In this case, the systems were municipal regulations, employment standards, and users’ expectations for how to get around a city. In his book Blood in the Machine, tech journalist Brian Merchant notes that the arguments against regulation echo one the mill owners made in the fight against the Luddites in the early 1800s. Existing laws regulated mills and set standards for worker training and for the quality of cloth. As businessmen automated manufacturing, they argued that “the regulations on the books are out of date, should not apply to new technologies, and are stifling innovation; they’re really not that important, and no one plans on violating them anyway,” Merchant writes.

The argument that our existing laws are inadequate in the face of progress is so pervasive in the tech industry, breaking rules is basically a strategy. OpenAI’s CEO has said it’s impossible to create their products without access to copyrighted material, and as I write this, the debate continues over how AI firms should license—or should have licensed—the material they use to train their software.

We are still adjusting to new technology—legally, morally, socially. The adjustment will go deeper than making room for a new way of shopping, computing, or getting around. How we react in these (still) early stages—how we comport ourselves and what we demand of the apps and our governments—will have ramifications for generations to come.

It’s not looking good.

The spread of generative AI is the most worrying sign at the moment, but I hear about new, supposedly convenient, yet ultimately unnecessary, technologies every day. Not long ago, it was facial recognition for buying concessions at sporting events. It’s mind-blowing computing power put to mundane use, and it raises big questions about privacy and security. I wonder if the food tastes any better.

To get a sense of the stakes of all-encompassing adaptation to new technology, go outside: massive parking garages in downtown real estate (somehow still necessary even with rideshares); four-lane streets in residential neighborhoods; houses with no stoop and a garage door as the most prominent feature on the facade; interstates along riverfronts; drive-thru-only restaurants; restaurants with double-wide drive-thrus. Cities and landscapes have been remade to accommodate privately owned personal cars. Shared cars or scooters might offer some relief, but the infrastructure has already been changed—these solutions are technology to solve the problems of technology, built not just on top of a system that wasn’t made for them, but on top of a system that wasn’t made for people at all.

This is the world I see in Longstreth’s paintings. The buildings are in places that are hostile to anyone traveling without their own car—shopping centers between batches of suburbs and man-made deserts of pavement. The paintings remind me of the long drives I’ve taken across the US—every exit has the same few fast-food restaurants and gas stations. The public commons is a place people stop at on their way somewhere else. Everyone eats the same value meal because there’s nothing else to eat.

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The encroachments of high-tech convenience create a second reality—one that’s virtual and smooth. To someone using a grocery app, the store looks like a list of products on a screen, not the physical supermarket where a worker will go to pick out an order. To a person in a rideshare or driving by GPS, the world between two destinations looks like a line on a map. It’s a little like the augmented reality game Pokémon Go, which dropped monsters and training gyms onto the grids of city streets. Physical reality is a support structure for a world that exists on an individual’s screen. The virtual world imposes its demands on the physical world, often with results that aren’t better for the user or the real world.

Delivery food, for a long time and in many places, meant pizza or Chinese. This wasn’t by accident. Restaurateurs (and in the case of pizza, chains) refined the business model for delivery and developed containers that kept dishes in the best condition possible for the trip to a customer’s house. Modern food delivery promises to make any food into something you can eat at home. But not every dish, and not every restaurant, is built for this.

Traditionally, restaurant dining was a two-party affair. A customer went to a restaurant to dine in or carry out, or they ordered food over the phone that was delivered by an employee of that restaurant. Modern delivery adds two more parties: a food deliverer who is typically classified as an independent contractor and the app that mediates the relationship between everyone involved. The customer orders in the app. The app dispatches the driver. The customer tips the driver through the app. To the user, all of this is virtual—even the handoff of the food can happen through a smart doorbell.

Delivery apps offer something to each party they work with. To customers, the offer is any meal delivered to their door. To restaurants, the offer is new customers, more orders, e-commerce tools, and delivery without the staff (though some apps offer to let restaurants use their own couriers). To deliverers, the offer is the flexibility of the gig economy—be your own boss, work when you want. (I’m going to use the words “driver” and “deliverer” interchangeably, though in many cities, delivery is done on bike.) Each of these parties makes trade-offs if they accept the offer. Drivers take on the usual hazards of gig work. Claude Bahati lives in the UK and signed up to drive for Deliveroo because he liked the autonomy. But the money has been inconsistent. He sometimes works eighteen hours a day, five to seven days a week. Early on, he cleared about a thousand British pounds per week. He earned occasional bonuses by logging on when orders were heavier, too. Now he’s not seeing as many boosts and the orders have dropped. “You’d be lucky if you hit £700 a week,” he says. In response to questions, Deliveroo said this may be related to a change in which deliverers are paid based on distance traveled. (Bahati and many of his fellow drivers have organized with the GMB labor union in the UK to push for changes to pay and to how the apps treat drivers—and these have led to agreements on minimum pay for time and transportation.)

Paying drivers more would mean either reducing profits, upping the fee on the restaurants, or raising prices for customers. “It is always the drivers who get pinched,” Bahati says. The actual cost of a service is unclear to customers in the virtual world. “As a customer, you’re thinking, ‘which one’s the cheapest?’ ” Bahati says. “I don’t think you think about a driver and how much they’re being paid. I think you’re thinking, ‘How quickly can the driver get here?’”

Restaurants can choose whether to be on the apps, but this wasn’t always the case. When DoorDash, GrubHub, Postmates (since purchased by Uber Eats), and Seamless (it’s odd they’re all compounds of short words) launched, restaurants sometimes found themselves listed on the apps without agreeing to participate. Some restaurants sued. California banned the practice. Most apps changed their policies in response.

Modern food delivery promises to make any food into something you can eat at home. But not every dish, and not every restaurant, is built for this.

Given the thin margins of running a restaurant, opting out isn’t an easy decision, especially as customers come to expect delivery. Liz and Jesse Huot own two hamburger restaurants and a bakery in Louisville, Kentucky. They were hesitant to offer delivery at first. “You don’t have control over your food once it leaves,” Jesse says. “Kind of like handing your kid off to a babysitter you’ve never met,” Liz adds. Besides the loss of control, trade-offs for restaurants include fees from the apps and a potential decline in dine-in customers.

The Huots signed up to have their food delivered by DoorDash in 2023. They realized customers seemed okay with a dip in quality in exchange for the ease of delivery. “It’s normal for you to know that your fries suck when you get them delivered,” Liz says. Customers also didn’t mind paying a 30% extra charge for the food—a price the Huots settled on to cover the 15% app commission, the additional packaging, and to offset the drop in tips for servers.

Delivery orders are strong, and the Huots say they feel pressure to make the menu more accommodating. “Our two sides are fries that get soggy and Brussels sprouts that, ten minutes after they’re made, they get a little funky,” Jesse says. “So I’ve considered changing the sides. But people in-house love them, and if I change that, I think it would hurt us.” The solution to soggy fries is a starchy coating that some restaurants have adopted. It keeps them crispier, but it can cause indigestion. To add these, the Huots would need a larger kitchen with room for another frier.

With orders coming in online, the Huots are essentially running additional restaurants out of the same space they had before (they took their bakery off the app due to the challenge of managing inventory between physical and virtual lines). They favor their in-house customers, who provide the bulk of business and who the Huots have a direct relationship with. Online, their restaurants are among the businesses that pop up if someone searches for burgers. In person, the restaurants are a destination and an experience. That experience is why the Huots started their business in the first place. “I’m not passionate about food that lasts a long time in a car,” Jesse says. “That’s not what I got in this for. And if that’s what it became, I would question if I still want to do this.” 

Sometimes the Huots turn off online orders to tend to a packed house, which leads to emails from customers asking why they can’t order. This isn’t the only entitled behavior the pair has encountered since the rise of delivery apps and the isolation of the pandemic. Liz has noticed an impatience and a demanding attitude from in-person patrons that wasn’t as prevalent a few years ago. Customers get angry when something is out of stock. At the bakery, they complain if they can’t get an ornately made cake without ordering ahead. “That kind of convenience, people expect it when they walk in the building, too,” Liz says.

This is the discomfort that comes from the virtual and real worlds overlapping. Most of us exist in both places. Yet the rules of the real world don’t always apply virtually, and the behavior of the virtual world, in real life, is typically weird and antisocial. Online, we shop without assistance, lurk on conversations without taking part, and pay to have whatever we want brought to us. The world is shaped around the user, with targeted ads and algorithmic feeds. Spending so much time in the virtual world shifts expectations for the physical world.

This is the discomfort that comes from the virtual and real worlds overlapping.

Participation in the virtual world is the cost of doing business in the physical one. Besides adopting to delivery, many restaurants have changed their lighting, decor, and menus to be visually friendlier for diners who post to Instagram or TikTok. One trend saw posters raving about dishes with melted cheese that stretched as far as possible. Like viral Starbucks drinks, the taste was secondary—what mattered was documenting the consumption.

The virtual world of platforms and apps has given rise to the ghost kitchen—a restaurant that, for the user, exists only on apps. Some ghost kitchens operate out of shared facilities with no storefront, and can give aspiring chefs a way to test out ideas. Other times, a restaurant owner sets up a second, online-only brand in their kitchen to boost sales. The concept is an outgrowth not only of delivery apps, but of the rise in commercial rents. The crisis of the pandemic made moonlighting via ghost kitchens essential for some restaurants to survive.

Not every virtual eatery is a passion project. Some are chains managed by a corporate parent and are often branded with celebrity endorsements or gimmicky names that appeal to novelty on the apps—examples include Egg the F* Out, OMG BBQ LOL, and B*tch Don’t Grill My Cheese. Virtual chains compete against the small restaurateurs who the concept of ghost kitchens was supposed to save—and sometimes restaurateurs are competing against themselves, if they add a virtual brand to their business. People pursuing their passion are made to pursue it in the same kitchen that turns out pancakes for a virtual chain called Granny Pannies (a real ghost kitchen). The customers may not know the difference between the businesses, since every restaurant looks the same on the app.

As of May 2025, a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich from Egg the F* Out in New York City is $19.09, more than three times what it would be at one of the city’s many bodegas. Food delivery was never about being cheaper, though. It’s not guaranteed to be faster. It’s rarely better. Delivery via app offers users control over their participation in a once-public activity—a virtual alternative to reality. It lets diners get whatever they want and eat it alone, away from the friction of the physical world and away from reminders of what it takes to make and serve food, and the people who do this work. If diners want to be social, they can get a viral dish that looks good on camera.

A few years ago, I went to my hometown in rural Illinois for Christmas. On a walk, I saw a sign advertising MrBeast Burger sticking out of the snow-covered grass at the edge of a park. I wondered who had put it there over the holiday—out in the cold, surrounded by cornfields, hoping someone might pick up their phone and order a burger. I thought about the person who might place the order—curious, looking for novelty, unaware of what it would take to get a meal themed around their favorite YouTube star. I wondered where the food would come from and how far someone would need to drive to drop it off. But these were concerns of the physical world. More and more, that’s not where we live.

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Gabe Bullard is a journalist, critic, and broadcaster. He has written for NPR, The New York Times Magazine, Nieman Reports, 99% Invisible, Bright Wall/Dark Room, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian Magazine, among other outlets. He was a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard University and is co-founder of Together, Alone, an online magazine of television criticism. He’s from the Midwest and now lives in Switzerland.

For more than four months, Brian, a commercial fisherman in his late 40s, had been waiting for the weather conditions to be right for us to go fishing outside Bagenkop, a small harbor town on the southern tip of the Danish island of Langeland. 

“One more problem has come up,”  Brian told me over the phone in early May. “I have lost my fishing license." He was no longer allowed to sell fish for a living. Instead of preparing his boat to go out to sea and to show me how fishing in Denmark had changed over his lifetime, Brian was now removing the registration number from its hull. 

Across Denmark, coastal fishing communities are shrinking as catches decline. At the same time, warming seas, overfishing and pollution are putting increasing pressure on marine ecosystems. 

“Plenty of fish in the sea”? Not anymore, say UN experts, with 35% of the world’s marine fish stocks being fished faster than they can be biologically replaced. Today, more than half of the fish we consume worldwide comes from fish farms. 

This summer, sea temperatures along Denmark’s beaches reached 28 degrees Celsius, a record high. On September 2, the UN Environment Program warned that the world is likely to cross 1.5 C of warming above pre-industrial levels within the next few years. As the climate warms, the pressure on marine ecosystems grows.

In August, Iceland voted not to restart accession talks with the European Union, in part because of concern that it would lose sovereign control of its fishing industry. While fishing is not as major a part of Denmark’s GDP as it is Iceland’s, the EU’s impact has meant independent Danish fishermen have struggled to survive in the face of corporate competition.

For Brian, though, it’s about more than regulations. It is about watching the ocean he grew up with slowly disappear.

Nets covered in black slime

His story reflects a larger shift happening along the Danish coastline. Coastal fishermen, once a central part of the country’s history, are a vanishing breed.

For Brian, it was never about the money. Even when he was a teenager and he told his father he wanted to be a fisherman, his father said it was a bad idea. But the pull of the sea was irresistible. His life as a fisherman began as a hobby, accumulating experience and knowledge just by spending as much time as possible on water. He learned how to read the currents, the weather, and fish movements through experience rather than education. In 2019, despite the uncertainty surrounding the industry, he bought a commercial fishing boat. “When I started as a teenager, there were fish everywhere,” he said. But over the years, the numbers have dwindled starkly. Every few years, another Danish harbor became economically unsustainable. First Bogense, then Kerteminde, later Nyborg and Spodsbjerg. Each one of them followed the same pattern: fewer fish, declining landings, and growing questions about whether it was possible for small fisheries to continue their operations. 

While working on this story, I spoke to ten small-scale Danish fisheries across the country. Half of them said they do not expect to still be fishing five years from now. In 2019, they said, ten nets could bring in between 150-200 kilos of plaice on a single trip. Two years later, the same nets would return with only two kilos. As the catches became smaller, so did the possibility of keeping a commercial license. Brian no longer caught and sold enough fish to keep his permit.

One day still stands out to him as perhaps the single worst he has experienced at sea. He had three nets in the water. The first one he hauled in looked normal. The second held fewer fish than expected. Then he started pulling in the third — the net was completely empty and covered in thick, black slime. 

Marine biologist Stiig Markager told me that what Brian saw was a tell-tale sign of oxygen depletion. In 2025, around 40% of Danish marine areas were affected by low oxygen levels. Oxygen depletion happens when too many nutrients, mainly nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture and wastewater, enter the sea. These nutrients fuel large algae blooms. 

When the algae die and sink to the seabed, bacteria begin decomposing them, consuming enormous amounts of oxygen in the process. Climate change exacerbates the problem. “Warmer water contains less oxygen. At the same time, biological processes speed up when temperatures rise.” In practice that means algae grow faster, oxygen is consumed more quickly, and deep waters struggle to recover. Together, these processes reinforce each other. “When oxygen disappears, it damages the seabed ecosystem,” Markager said.

A new global study argues that aquatic deoxygenation is approaching an “unsafe space” and should be considered a potential tenth planetary boundary. The global ocean has lost around 2% of its oxygen over the past 50 years. The consequences for marine life are catastrophic, forcing either flight or suffocation.

Marine biologists have studied oxygen depletion in the Danish seas for decades. But, Brian says, “fishers are often the first people to see the effects of that depletion, directly in their nets.” It is a first-hand experience, fishers say, that is often discounted or ignored. Many independent coastal fishers say they feel increasingly excluded from political conversations about the ocean, despite spending their working lives at sea. 

“It feels like we’re not really welcome anymore,” Brian said. He believes small-scale fisheries like his are being pushed out while decisions about the seas are increasingly made by those on land. “I think they don’t want so many people out there seeing what’s actually happening.”

For years, debates about oxygen depletion in Denmark have become deeply political. Marine scientist Stiig Markager says that the results of environmental research have repeatedly clashed with agricultural and political interests. “There is complete opposition from agriculture and from Venstre (a major center-right political party) to making research publicly available,” he said. “There is a clear political strategy from Venstre that there must be no interference with agriculture.” 

According to Markager, tensions between environmental researchers and agricultural interests intensified during the early 2000s, as scientists linked nitrogen runoff from farming to oxygen depletion in Danish waters. Despite decades of plans and political promises, Markager says, the recovery many researchers hoped for never fully arrived.

For this story, I also contacted both the Minister of Environment and the Minister for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries to ask for an interview about the state of Danish waters and the future of small-scale fishing. Neither had time to answer questions.

What remains is behind glass

One harbor that has felt the impact of the changing nature of Danish waters is Bønnerup Strand, which has transformed from a fishing town into a tourist destination. The harbor now features an ice cream shop, a hot dog kiosk, a seafood restaurant, and  a mini golf course. The iconic blue Danish fishing boats are conspicuous only by their absence. Instead, boats built for leisure, not commercial fishing, are docked at the harbor. 

Along the quay, an outdoor exhibition has been installed behind glass panels. It started last year, created by a local group of volunteers trying to preserve what Bønnerup Strand used to be. The pictures show fishing nets piled high, men in blue overalls, boats unloading their catch, and fish laid out in crates.

Movement. Noise. Purpose. It was a harbor bustling with life. Hans, in his 60s now, was once a fisherman in Bønnerup Strand. He walks past the diorama and tells me that twenty years ago “there were 60 or 70 fishing boats here, now there are two.” Some of the independent fishers chose to leave, their lives no longer making economic sense. Others lost their licenses. The rest have disappeared, not all at once, but gradually. Some left before it was too late, others had their boats seized by the bank when their revenue became too low. “Quite a lot of my colleagues had their boats taken by them," says Hans, referring to banks who repossessed boats because independent fishermen no longer made enough money to pay for them.

You could say that the gradual suffocation of the Danish seas began in 1909 with the invention of the artificial nitrogen fertilizer that transformed global agriculture. Artificial fertilizer rapidly became central to modern-day farming. By 1959, nearly 75% of farms were using fertilizer to increase crop production. At first, the growing amounts of nitrogen entering the sea did not appear harmful. During the 1960s and 70s, the extra nutrients actually increased algae and plankton growth, creating more food for some fish species. “There were actually more fish,” says Markager, the marine scientist, “but by the mid-1980s, the consequences had become impossible to ignore.”

On October 8, 1986, on Danish television fishermen in Gilleleje were seen pulling dead lobsters from the sea. The images became the subject of alarmed national conversation. For the first time, the public saw what oxygen depletion meant for life beneath the surface of the sea. 

Hans, the fisherman from Bønnerup Strand, told me he was part of the television coverage himself. “Fishers had talked about pollution long before the dead lobsters,” he said. “But suddenly people started paying attention.” The public outrage pushed Denmark to act. In 1987, the country introduced its first Water Environment Plan, aiming to reduce phosphorus emissions from wastewater by 80% and nitrogen emissions by 50% within five years. For many fishers and marine scientists, it became the first real sign that the environmental crisis in Danish waters was finally being taken seriously. During the 1990s, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution declined significantly. Water in several fjords and coastal areas became clearer, and conditions slowly began improving. For a moment, it appeared the damage could still be reversed.

But by the early 2000s, many coastal fisheries were once again experiencing declining catches and, with it, a growing uncertainty about the future. Hans was one of those affected. Coming from a family that had fished for five generations, the harbor was never a tourist destination for Hans. It was a way of life. But on a sunny Friday in April back 2005, he sailed out to Kattegat for plaice. He knew it was over. “I said to my employee: “this is the last trip. I start working on land from Monday.”” He had made the decision months earlier, as the numbers of fish dwindled and regulations tightened. 

It wasn’t an easy choice, but he had four children to think of. Climate change had taken away his livelihood. “You can’t do anything about it,” he said. “If you think too much about it, you go crazy.” Researchers describe this kind of environmental grief as solastalgia, the distress caused by watching a familiar environment change beyond recognition. Unlike homesickness, solastalgia happens while still remaining in the same place. For coastal fishers, the sea remains physically present, but the ecosystem they once knew and depended on, is disappearing.

Adapting has always been part of the job, says Hans. “There has always been a species that disappeared and then another one came.” But eventually, nothing was replacing what was lost anymore. 

In 2002, marine scientists Stiig Markager and Peter Bondo Christensen from DMU, the Danish Environmental Research Institute, published research showing that around 75% of Denmark’s nitrogen emissions originated from agriculture through waterways and atmospheric pollution. The findings intensified tensions between marine scientists, politicians, and agricultural organizations about who was responsible for the declining marine environment. 

In response to the worsening marine crisis, Denmark established DMU in 1989 to monitor oxygen depletion, nutrient pollution, and ecological changes beneath the surface. But their findings were inconvenient. By 2007, after nearly two decades as an independent institution, DMU was folded into Aarhus University as part of a wider restructuring of Denmark’s research sector. The decision sparked criticism from several environmental researchers and organizations, who feared the changes could weaken the independence of Danish environmental monitoring. 

“Agriculture succeeded in closing DMU,” former researcher Bo Normander told the media. “Nature has lost.” In 2015, the Danish government introduced the controversial Landbrugspakke, easing environmental regulations on fertilizer use in an effort to increase agricultural production. 

Critics warned that the policy could worsen nitrogen pollution in Danish waters at a time when oxygen depletion remained a recurring problem. In the years that followed, researchers from Aarhus University reported rising nitrogen emissions instead of the reductions politicians had promised. Markager argues that despite decades of environmental warnings, nitrogen pollution reductions largely stalled. While nitrogen pollution in Danish waters declined significantly after the first Danish Water Environment Plans in the 1980s and 1990s, researchers say the reductions have largely stagnated over the last 20-25 years. 

Now, Denmark is trying to reverse that trend. In the first week of September, the country passed a historic new law changing how agricultural nitrogen is regulated. The law will take effect in 2027 and represents a significant tightening of the rules introduced in 2015. 

Under the system introduced in 2015, farmers were allowed to fertilize closer to what was considered the agronomic optimum for their crops, while still operating within nationally defined nitrogen quotas and other rules. The new system moves in the opposite direction. Instead of relying primarily on broad national rules, nitrogen regulation will increasingly take the environmental sensitivity of individual areas into account. 

Where a farm is located will thus matter much more. The requirements will vary depending on factors such as whether fields drain towards vulnerable rivers or coastal waters, and whether they lie above areas important for groundwater and drinking-water protection. For farmers, this means that the amount of nitrogen they can use will become more restricted in areas where the surrounding environment is particularly vulnerable. 

For fishermen like Brian and Hans, the law represents a change they have long been asking for: an attempt to redress the damage done to Danish seas. 

But understanding how the water became polluted is more complicated than it first appears. Much of the pollution data commonly referred to in public debates focuses on point-source pollution, which emanates from identifiable sources like wastewater treatment plants, industrial discharge, and fish farms, and is generally easier to measure. But most nitrogen pollution in Danish waters actually comes from diffuse sources, mainly agricultural runoff carried from fields through rainwater, rivers, groundwater, and the atmosphere. Unlike point sources, diffuse pollution is far harder to measure directly and comes with greater uncertainty in the data. As a result, wastewater pollution can often appear to be the biggest issue, even though agriculture remains the dominant source of nitrogen input into Danish waters.

For Hans, the consequences appear almost irreversible. These days, the fish often do not return. “There are still plaice here, but they’re too thin. They don’t gain weight.” Scientists point to several overlapping causes, and the suggested solutions are just as diverse. Activists call for stricter rules, fishers say there are already too many. Farmers reject blame, and governments insist wastewater is already being purified. Plenty of fingers are being pointed, but the problem remains.

Hans doesn’t expect it to change. “I don’t think we’ll have fish out here ever again.” These days, he’s on the other side of the industry, buying catch from fisheries and selling it to customers. “People have to get used to the fact that we don’t always have everything available on demand. With a changing climate, fish shops may no longer offer cod, salmon, or plaice like we’ve been used to.” Instead, he says, squid is becoming the new normal. 

Still, while independent fisheries disappear, the demand for fish continues to grow. Instead of restoring the ocean, parts of the fishing industry are increasingly moving onto land. 

In northern Denmark, companies like Skagen Salmon are now raising fish entirely inside closed artificial systems, where the water, oxygen, and temperature are carefully controlled. Outside, Skagen Salmon looks like a factory. No windows, just a large grey box near the coastline. 

If the building had windows, the fish inside could look out at the sea. But these fish will never see, taste, or feel those waters. Instead, they are raised in artificial tanks until they reach market size. They are then slaughtered and sold to supermarkets and fish shops across the country.

https://youtu.be/XKDIe7PXMCw

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When I was little I had a ritual with my parents where, as they tucked me into bed, they’d tell me a few reasons why they loved me (yes, I know how lucky I am to have been raised in an environment like this). As part of their list, I always asked them to say I was careful, and dutifully they’d repeat, “Yes, of course, we love you because you’re so careful.” I needed my parents’ words to ward against a recurring-day-mare-type vision I had in those years, in which I climbed onto our roof and then, while recklessly peering over the edge, toppled off the eave and cracked open my skull. I would never have put myself in that situation in waking life; I was so cautious that even an imagined scenario in which I endangered myself was enough to terrify me. But being reassured of my carefulness night after night made me feel safer.

My prudent youth did involve a handful of responsibly chaperoned birthday parties at Northern California climbing gyms, and a handful of climbing excursions in the Sierras with my grandfather, but ironically the flatland of Minnesota is where I got serious about the sport. During those unrelentingly brutal winters I seized upon climbing for exercise and entertainment—in the gym, since it was colder than the dark side of Mars outside—as a way to stave off cabin fever in the long months of permafrost. On a recent visit back to the Twin Cities at the close of one such winter, right after a session at the gym where I first cut my teeth, I posted up on the patio of an organic café to bask in the abrupt warmth of springtime. A guy sitting at the table next to me asked if I was a climber—our veiny forearms signal us to one another like Harley-Davidson jackets do for bikers—and I said yes. We started chatting.

This guy had just moved to town to save his own life. He was a paraglider, parachutist, kite-surfer, and wingsuiter, and he said that in the last year a dozen members of his inner circle “went in,” including his best friend and his brother, all in accidents related to their gravity-skirting pursuits. At first I couldn’t figure out what he meant by “went in,” but as I listened to him enumerate their various methods of “going in,” I eventually realized he was telling me they had all died. I could hardly comprehend the reality he described: being at the heart of a community where loved ones blink out in droves, like candles in a gale. He knew if he stayed in the game as a professional extreme athlete, pressured by peers and sponsors alike to remain at the cutting edge, he himself wouldn’t be around much longer. So, sight-unseen, he moved to the flattest and boringest place he’d ever heard of: Minnesota. He came specifically because there weren’t any cliffs for him to throw himself off. Only a few months into his new life as a Minnesotan, he was still in the jittery, cold turkey phase of his thrill detox.

“You done much free soloing?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. A truer answer would have been HELL NO I’M A WIMP, MY PARENTS LOVE ME BECAUSE I’M CAREFUL.

“Amazing feeling,” he said. “Being certain if you fuck up you’ll die, and being equally certain you won’t fuck up.”

We listened to the birds, sipped our coffees. I picked at the remains of my huevos rancheros. The juncos twittering around us sounded gladder than usual to be alive. I asked, “Is it really that much less fun to have a rope on? Like, clip a few draws? Place some cams along the way?”

He shook his head. “Once you been hucking yourself off the high dive, it’s no fun jumping off the edge of the pool.”

This at least rang true. Even I find it boring to jump off the edge of the pool.

“Glad you got out when you did,” I said.

He nodded grimly, seeming less glad than I was. Then I asked what he was getting up to instead. Of course, it was the most extreme thing you can do on flat ground.

“Ultramarathons,” he said.

He didn’t seem interested in probing his own psychology or rationales. He unapologetically liked the feeling of being adrenalized, and he wanted to feel that feeling as much as possible without killing himself. Why turn it into some elaborate trolley problem? For those living on the outer edges of risk, I suspect confidence is the key to survival: the confidence in one’s ability to assess a risk and then the confidence to execute the necessary action once a risk is deemed acceptable. Extreme athletes don’t seem to think too hard, at least on an abstract philosophical level, about the dangers they face. Their engagement is logistical, methodical. Far more productive to test the snowpack, visualize the beta, read the weather report, double-check the way the parachute is folded, determine what direction the wind blows down the talus field.

Rather than focusing on what we stand to lose, what riches does risk put us in position to gain?

But risk has been on my mind of late, because, much to my own surprise, my relationship to it has been changing. Recently I was on a very tall boulder called the Kraken, and it felt like I spent a hundred years with the sand in its penultimate pocket rolling grittily under my fingertips while I searched the rounded top of the block for a hold I could trust. A part of me is there still, suspended in that epoch of hold hunting, gearing up for the final move. This is one of risk’s most obvious gifts, the chance to experience that rare, thin-slicing acuity where each separate millisecond stands out like an image etched in stone. The present dilates to activate the past and future, too, as though we’re living our whole life all at once. With a cognitive rapacity available only during a fight-or-flight response, we cast our gaze forward, asking what grim future will bloom if we fall. And simultaneously cast it back, asking what errors in our past have brought us to this crossroads. Have I survived a situation like this before? Will I get lucky and survive again?

In a film, that’s where the music would come up, dissonant strings, ringing ears, the drums increasing tempo. It’s odd that the times of our deepest dumbstruck not-knowingness should be called “moments of truth.” I found a shallow, sandy divot for my right hand, threw my left heel high over the lip, and rolled onto the top of the boulder. A friend took photos, but it makes me uncomfortable to look at them.

---

From the back seat of a lifted pickup, deep house oozing out of a handmade portable stereo that Owen built into an antique suitcase, I look over the truck bed at the contrail of dust we send into the Eastern Sierra evening. Our pilot expertly navigates a kaleidoscope of dirt roads to deliver us at the Crab Cooker. Tumbling out of the truck we grab towels, water bottles, and puffy jackets, and walk a raised wooden path to the area’s hottest hot spring. An eggy, algal cloud envelops us before the spring itself comes into view. Then we see the rock-rimmed pool, a steam plume ascending from a dark crater. The water here, when it first comes to the surface, hovers around 150 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to cook crabs, no exaggeration in the name—so people cut it with cold water from a surface stream until it comes down to around 110. The pool is still hotter than any man-made tub I’ve ever sunk myself into, and its scalding sting feels spectacular on the aches we’ve accrued from several consecutive climbing days at the Buttermilks and in Owens River Gorge. We keep our hands lifted above the surface of the water so our hard-earned calluses don’t melt off.

Parallel to us climbers, there runs an entire subculture of hot springs enthusiasts who travel the country to find the loveliest, toastiest, unlikeliest geothermal pools that tectonics has to offer. Connecting with this odd population of wanderers is one of the surprise pleasures of our annual Bishop trip. The Crab Cooker must rank high on their list. Wild sage and scrubby junipers riddle the sand, boulders punctuate the foothills and draws, and the impressive ridgelines of the Sierra Eastside tower over it all, seemingly close enough to splash with the flick of a finger. At sunset the land gets saturated with glory and import and impeccable desert light, and we in our good fortune get to gaze at this panorama while the guts of the planet warm us to temperatures well in excess of our own hearts’ heat.

When, to our surprise, two bodies coalesce out of the steam, we apologize for our loudness and promptly shut down the stereo. The strangers don’t mind, they say, they’ve been enjoying the ruckus. The new arrivals are a pair of Germans, a father and his grown son, who have been touring America together. Before long our separate conversations become enmeshed in the small pool. We learn that the younger soaker, the son, used to be an accomplished extreme athlete. He somberly explains that he found himself a lonelier and lonelier survivor as his BASE-jumping and wingsuiting friends went in. Hearing the phrase now for the second time, I’m struck by the gentleness of the euphemism, far softer than the verb to crater, as in “their parachute didn’t deploy and they cratered,” which I’d heard in gruffer conversations with BASE jumpers. I picture these lost friends “going in” to a collective reserve of matter and spirit, the heavenly welter where all unmade is remade. Although, with the image of a crater in mind, I suppose “going in” could refer not to the eternally cyclical return to one’s mysterious origin but rather to a body “going in” to the ground at terminal velocity. Needless to say, I don’t ask the German.

He explains to a rapt audience that last year, upon successfully landing a jump, his still-open parachute caught a fierce gust of wind that slammed him into a cliff and dragged him across a talus field. Multiple impacts against the rocks shattered innumerable bones, including several in his back. By coincidence, the guy’s best friend was flying the emergency helicopter that came to collect his ragdoll body. To those on board it looked like a hopeless case, a certain fatality, but in the end the guy survived. Hearing the story, I look to my own best friend soaking by my side. We make eye contact and discreetly drop our jaws a fraction of a centimeter, a silent exchange of Jesus fucking Christ.

“Jesus Christ,” I say aloud to the German.

“It’s no problem,” the guy says, gesturing grandly at the mountain-rimmed basin that surrounds us. “Happy I am living.”

He’s still in the middle of a years-long rehabilitation process, he explains. He points to a neck brace he’d removed before his soak, whose plastic struts I now see glowing in the moonlight, a safe distance back from the water where it won’t get splashed. “It’s no problem to wear that sometimes.”

“Just like when he was a baby,” the dad says cheerfully. “I help him eat, then I help him shit!”

---

We typically view risk in relation to death—inviting its possibility, skirting its tentacles—but I’ve lately been exploring a philosophy that views risk, instead, in relation to life. Rather than focusing on what we stand to lose, what riches does risk put us in position to gain? This question came by way of a book called Éloge du risque by French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle. It hadn’t yet been translated into English, but with undergrad French memories and a Larousse dictionary in hand, I bought a copy and dove in. I worked on my translations of Éloge du risque while riding the Flatiron Flyer bus between Boulder and Denver. During this commute the Flatirons themselves rise to the west like a fleet of ships tacking in formation, their huge reddish triangular faces making a tidy row of sails afloat on a choppy sea of pine.

A route called Freeway ascends the Second Flatiron (they’re numbered sequentially from north to south), and locals tell me it’s a fun, dead-easy romp for the entire thousand feet of the eastern face. Nobody bothers to use the melodramatic phrase free solo; they just call it a scramble. The route has seen barefoot ascents, no-hands ascents, and, the clearest indicator of its difficulty, an ascent by a climber wearing roller skates. For some reason I never wonder whether I’m going to climb it, I just know, innately, that I’m going to. It’s an indicator that my relationship to risk is changing. Even still, as I prepare to solo—sorry, scramble—the Second, I approach it with a solemnity bordering on gloom. I warm up at home, stretch, fuel and hydrate, tidy the basement so that if I die I won’t leave an unsightly mess for my landlady to deal with. Ridiculous. The short drive across town feels haunted, with the Flatirons leering in the windshield as I pilot my way westward. I park and take a deep breath before exiting the vehicle. Walk up the trail, a well-beaten one that sees countless tourists and toddlers safely along the base of the range, taking every rock-hopping step with exaggerated care, testing the infallibility of my balance. And then I sit at the base of the Second for ages, meditative and serious, while a string of a half-dozen stoned teenagers fire the route, unroped, not even pausing their giggling conversation as they step off the trail and onto the rock.

Supposedly there’s a crux around fifty feet off the ground, but for me it turned out the crux was just deciding to do it. When I finally put on my climbing shoes, tuck my sneakers into my backpack, and lay my hands on the crystalline stone, hard moves are absolutely nowhere to be found. The climbing feels easier than walking, in fact, since I get to use my hands in addition to my feet. From a hundred feet up, and again at three hundred and again at five hundred, I glance down at the sandstone ramp the foot of the mountain makes, observe how the trail gets thinner and the trees get smaller as I rise, and experience a wave of giddiness. I sip that sensation like champagne, peering, bubbling, then I turn my face to the wall and continue the scramble. At the summit I sit a long time and look east at a flat expanse of town and plain that appears to extend all the way to the Atlantic. I’ve wagered my life, and have been repaid tenfold.

A week later, I take an incremental step up in difficulty and try the Third Flatiron. Locals, I notice, do tend to refer to this one as a solo, not a scramble. I’m exiting the kiddie pool. Again I follow the trail through Chautauqua Park with a measure of unease in my gut, hiking through grassy open fields up into the pine sea, and then across a stretch of loose talus to the base of the route. A thousand angling, rippling feet of sandstone thrust westward, the summit hidden from view. I bring my chalk bag this time and coat my palms with a layer of white dust to keep them from slickening with sweat. Unlike the Second, the Third is a legitimate, if moderate, climb. I make careful progress, never moving more than one limb at a time, testing each handhold for soundness, testing each surface for slipperiness, before entrusting my weight to it. Focus, rather than rhapsody, rules the experience. The crux comes at the top. Until that point I’d been hanging on bucket-like holds, generous craters, but the rock comprising the last twenty feet below the peak has been worn smooth by the elements. Though the terrain is low angle, it’s holdless as an asphalt road. This section, I knew from my research beforehand, would require a few moves of open-hand slab climbing. In the absence of tangible features on the cliff, you just paste your hands and feet onto the surface and rely on friction to hold you in place.

Slab is an unnerving, faith-based style of climbing, and those few moves—a thousand feet off the ground, knowing a fall would be fatal—demand a degree of meticulousness I’ve never before needed to summon. To summon it that afternoon is like flexing a new muscle for the very first time. I feel each grain of the gritty matrix as it deforms the skin of my fingertips, fitting the ridges of my fingerprint to match the ridges of the Flatiron’s surface. I attune to the gumminess of my shoe, the pressure of the ball of my foot compressing its rubber sole, filling completely the negative space of the rock’s surface. Death isn’t on my mind. It’s a million miles away. I know I will be perfect, and this perfection will make me invincible. If I fall, my last thought will be I never saw this coming. But I wager; I scurry. I summit. From the top I stare down at the backs of raptors, at the pine and the prairie, and again my spirit prospers.

The next morning from the bus I cast a lingering glance over the Flatirons. I look at the granulated ripples of the cliffs and superimpose my antlike image onto them, watching memories of myself crawl up the faces as if in footage captured by a drone. I’m still up there, forever taking those calm breaths, forever palming those grainy domes. Fellow commuters catch me wearing a moony smile. Now, pen gripped in my teeth, Éloge du risque open in my lap, my gaze drifts a click northward. My newfound muscle twitches. In the notebook for my scraps and outlines I write FOR RISK ESSAY: SOLO THE FIRST? After spending the day on campus I get back on the bus for my evening commute, and that scribbled notion digs into me uncomfortably. The wobble on the highway made my script look manic. It is manic. The idea stands squarely outside of what I consider to be an acceptable level of climbing risk. From the bus window the First dominates the ridgeline as the Flatirons fall into shadow. Morning and evening light seem to fashion two different ranges out of the same rock space. When I try on the idea of soloing the First, it feels like a too-small sweater pulled over my head, grabbing my skull. I know I should rip it off and discard it. But I could also push my way inside. I recall a strong, confident climber-friend whose trip report after soloing the First was simply, “I’m never going to do that again.” I wondered what had happened to turn his face so ashen, but he didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t pry.

These accident reports save lives more directly, more demonstrably, than poetry or scripture.

Climbing culture has a storytelling idiom I call “Close Calls.” They’re an inversion of just-so stories; instead of tales of creation like “How the Zebra Got Its Stripes” or “How the Giraffe’s Neck Got So Long,” Close Calls focus on tales of destruction like “How Rebecca Lost Her Leg” or “How Johnny Lost His Partner.” Years ago at the base of the Incredible Hulk, a gorgeous granite outcrop in the Sierras, Owen and I were preparing to climb the classic Red Dihedral. We’d undertaken the steep approach hike in the evening, stove heated some expired and deeply disappointing beef stew, and established our bivvy beside a picturesque rivulet riffling through a boulder field. Two young women camped at another minimeadow a few hundred feet downstream, and when the stars came up, they invited us down for a sip of whiskey. We splashed a bit of warmish bourbon into our unwashed bowls, resulting in a cocktail like a hot Sazerac with a beef-grease rinse instead of an absinthe one. During that night’s edition of Close Calls, we hear of a time an inexperienced leader led a pitch and built an anchor, and one of the women (now sipping her whiskey between plot points) followed him up, arriving at a worthless nest of protection that, had she fallen, would have sputtered from the wall and killed them both. Next my buddy describes watching a climber follow an outdoor route on top-rope, unclipping each draw along the way, and then, at the top, unclipping the two draws that held the rope, and then, the height of outrageousness, untying his rope and dropping it to the ground, meaning he was now clinging to holds a hundred feet off the deck with nothing else to hold him in place. By some miracle a professional climber was on a route next door and, seeing the disaster unfold, climbed to the stranded kid in minutes with a spare rope to reattach him to the world.

As with any public storytelling genre, there’s a ritual to it. One teller shares the scariest climbing story they’ve heard or experienced, a story of someone’s closest call. The fireside audience takes in the punchline—a survival unscathed, a rescue, an injury, a fatality—in solemn contemplation. After a respectful interval and perhaps another sip of whiskey, the next teller narrates an even closer call. For listeners familiar enough with safety systems to fully appreciate the danger, miscommunication, unpreparedness or negligence in these stories, the tales provide riveting entertainment, in their own grim way. But they serve a deeper purpose, too, in that they circulate these scenarios as a risk-prevention measure. The same could be said of the more formal narratives published by the American Alpine Club. Their style is unadorned, a blow-by-blow sequence of errors that led up to an injury or death on the wall, but safety-oriented climbers read these annual accident reports with biblical devotion. Instead of re-living old traumas, these prudent folks pre-live them, learning to deal with such catastrophes should they arise or, better yet, learning to avoid such catastrophes altogether. These accident reports save lives more directly, more demonstrably, than poetry or scripture.

We could easily swap Close Calls all night, but both teams are planning to start our ascents of the Hulk at dawn, so we force ourselves to break up the party before it gets too late. I brush my teeth, taking a gamble on unfiltered river water, and tuck myself into bed. In the sleeping bag, staring up at the densest panorama of stars I’ve seen in months, I wonder what moment, in my life so far, was the moment I was nearest to death. My own closest call, in a statistical sense, when my odds of survival were lowest. At first I think it would land among the instances when I was most afraid. There was a hike to a ghost town called Lundy when I was dead certain I was being stalked by a mountain lion. Or a time at an outdoor concert in Denver when gunshots broke out and the whole crowd stampeded in panic away from the brutal sound. Then I wonder if my closest call fell among the times I sustained an injury: a spinout on the highway from a blown tire, a fainting spell in the Rockies brought on by dehydration and exhaustion, a split forehead from an ice cave collapse that let me see my own skull through the hole in my skin. But in all likelihood, I bet the moment passed by me altogether unnoticed. One of my countless midnights on a two-lane country road, maybe, when the approaching headlights belonged to a drunk driver, or a trucker on the cusp of sleep, or a heartsick teenager composing a text to an ex. So long as they keep their car on the proper side of the yellow line, I never know the peril I’m in.

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This evening in Boulder the sky is not its usual bluebird. From the egress window of my cheap-ass basement rental I see bulbous clouds gathering overhead. A handful of months have passed and by now the Second Flatiron scramble has become my go-to after-work workout. I lap it a couple times a week, not bothering with climbing shoes anymore, just using the same busted sneakers I wear for the approach hike. But when it rains, the rock slickens, the lichen sucks up moisture and magically transforms from a crust to a lubricant. Given the inclement weather, it’s shaping up to be a work night. So instead of soloing—sorry, scrambling—at sunset, I’m at my desk with a mug of mint tea, bringing Dufourmantelle into English word by word. Risk, she writes and I translate, “inaugurates an other time, as though traumatic. But a positive trauma.”

“An other time” makes me think, to my discredit, of the movie Donnie Darko. The premise of that film, as I interpret it, is that one night in a freak accident an airplane engine fell through the roof of the protagonist Donnie’s house, and should have crushed him, except that he was somnambulantly chasing a giant nightmare rabbit onto a golf course at the time, and thereby avoided his fate. This sets in motion an alternate universe—the one where Donnie lives—that runs alongside the one in which he rightfully dies. I think this is what Dufourmantelle means: When we take a risk, knowing we’ll either experience a near-miss like the Donnie who lives or a direct hit like the Donnie who dies, we create a narrative fork in the road. I’ve long wondered what wingsuiters, free soloists, and skydivers gain through their constant navigation of risk, and tonight I start to sense it. When carefully and responsibly considered, these dangerous activities let adventurers inhabit innumerable parallel universes. We get to live infinite lives and die infinite deaths as, in preparation, we imagine the outcomes and contingencies of each climb, each jump, each flight. The potential plotlines proliferate and the density of our life experience increases. Time dilates to accommodate not only the life we’ve lived and the life we will lead, but also all the lives we might have lived, and might yet lead.

I turn my attention to trauma positif. It’s an uncomfortable phrase. The language carries a reminder that many people experience risk and precarity only under duress. As far as I’m concerned, the privilege inherent in elective risk is alpinism’s original sin, and a key reason that, despite the vast increase in diversity and gender parity in climbing in the last decade, the sport has been slow to shake its aura of patriarchy and whiteness. But Dufourmantelle’s claims sound right to me. Just as negative trauma has the power to reshape the stories that people tell themselves about themselves and about the worlds they inhabit, so too can a trauma positif rewrite a person’s history, even as it rewrites their future. As a result of the risks I’ve taken, and the trauma positif of surviving them, I’m phasing out the story that I’m a meek person. Now, with demonstrable evidence, I must tell myself I’m capable of being brave. Maybe every time you risk your life, you lose it: You lose the life you had before taking the risk, and supplant that life with a new one. A solo of the First Flatiron feels this way for me. Ever since moving to town I’ve told myself I couldn’t solo it. So if I solo it, the version of me too frightened to try it will die.

Days later I see the headline in the local paper: “17-Year-Old Falls to His Death While Climbing Boulder’s First Flatiron.” There’s a photograph of the formation I’ve spent my daily commute mulling over, and the article below:

Equipped with camping and outdoor survival gear—but no climbing-specific equipment—a 17-year-old died after climbing alone and falling up to 100 feet or more from Boulder’s First Flatiron on Sunday evening.

Climber rescues, and non-fatal falls, are common every summer across the iconic rock formations above Chautauqua Park. But this appears to be the first accidental climbing death on the Flatirons in nine years.

The teenager—whose identity has not yet been released, and who officials initially said was 18—was found by a hiker near the base of the First Flatiron, above the Blue Bell Shelter in Chautauqua Park, according to Boulder County sheriff’s officials.

Sheriff’s Cmdr. Mike Wagner said the teen was free-soloing—climbing alone, without the use of ropes or gear—on the First Flatiron when he fell possibly more than 100 feet and suffered “massive traumatic injuries.”

Sources report that the climber took a selfie and posted it to Instagram shortly before the fall. There follow, in the next few days, admonishments from the climbing community, the oft-repeated self-assurances that this kid was unprepared but we know better, and more than a few references to a phenomenon known as “Kodak Courage,” where the possibility of taking an impressive photograph pushes a climber past their typical margin of safety. The next time I walk up to the foot of the First Flatiron, a sober memorial sits at the base of a pine tree. Cards, flowers, offerings. A printout of the photo the climber snapped and posted minutes before his death.

Toward the tail end of the same season the paper runs another headline: “Climber Dies After Falling from Boulder’s First Flatiron.” This time there’s a different stock photo of the mountain, now caked with snow. The article reads:

A man climbing on the First Flatiron on Thursday afternoon fell to his death, the second person to die following an accidental plummet off of the iconic Boulder landmark since August but only the second in nearly a decade.

Boulder County Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. Kevin Parker said that the man—who has not been publicly identified—did not appear to be using any kind of climbing gear, but rescuers were searching the area for any signs of a backpack or gear on Thursday afternoon.

By the time a Denver Post article comes out about the incident later that night, investigators have located and interviewed an eyewitness, so the article is able to provide a bit of additional detail: “The witness believed the climber fell about 1,000 feet from the top of the First Flatiron.”

With that, this essay gets shelved for a spell. It’s not just because the weather has shifted, although the snow on the Front Range makes the Flatirons unclimbable through the winter, intermittent warm days sending rivers of melt down the faces, cold storms stacking new layers of powder over the slush. But more acutely, I realize I’ve been lulled into thinking a solo of the First Flatiron would be a casual endeavor, one that wouldn’t really bring me into proximity of any grave risk. The two deaths, in rapid succession, on the route I’ve planned to climb in the same style abruptly extinguish this confidence, leave me not only shaken but also self-admonishing for having been so cocksure in the first place. I take winter walks through Chautauqua. The snow crunches under my feet, sifts from trailside pine boughs. The Flatirons stand above, their features outlined in icy white. Below, the town of Boulder enjoys its bubble of dreamy calm, a hush of distant traffic in the air, interrupted by an occasional siren belting down Baseline or Table Mesa. During these walking meditations my notebook starts to feel suspiciously similar to the luckless young climber’s selfie camera. Moleskine Courage.

What do we stand to win when our ante is ourselves? The chance to make our finite time feel infinite? The chance to make our finite self feel infinite?

The crux of the First comes in its first hundred feet, where the climbing is particularly thin, slabby and insecure. I stand in the snow at the base—where a second memorial is now tucked in the pines—and visualize the climb. My counterfactual imagination invents a worst-case scenario: I’m not far up the route, approaching the gnarled tree that marks the top of the first pitch where a roped party would typically belay. Immediately below this point there’s a delicate section of friction-dependent slab; the first time I climbed the pitch on rope, this stretch clarified for me that I’d never, ever attempt the route as a solo. There aren’t proper holds, just shallow dishes for the hands and feet. I imagine extending my left foot and placing it in one such divot. I reach farther left with my left hand, where a small diagonal rail supports my left fingertips, stacked in a row. My right hand is similarly stacked in a higher-up dish, and as I go to move my right foot toward my body’s centerline, the left foot slips off. My knees strike the rock first, my elbows a moment after. The angle is low, so I don’t go into full vertical freefall. I bounce down the face. After twenty feet a heel catches and I invert, delivering a rolling blow to my shoulder and an impact to the back of my skull. In my chest a depth charge, a low moan as I land in the talus beside the twin shrines. After my death, my writer-friends will wonder what I was working on in my last days. I’ve kept my preparations for the solo secret, but now they will look in my notebook and see I’ve been planning it for months, getting ready to sacrifice myself for no greater purpose than a literal thought exercise.

I shift my weight in the snow, shake the spectacle out of my head. I return to the trail, the car, the comforts of home.

The winter months pass, long nights, a bomb cyclone that buries my basement windows in snow and leaves me to lurk in the dark like a slumbering bear, and then spring arrives abrupt and clanging and golden. Overnight the Flatirons slough off their snowy coats. Still ambivalent about soloing the First, I go to Chautauqua with two friends, planning to rope up and climb with them as a party of three. This will give me a chance, I figure, to scope the route once more and make a final call. Reassess those dishes and divots, determine whether I can trust my life to them. We spend a long time at the base, not rushing, just racking up and rearranging our packs, sipping water and snacking, enjoying the gorgeous day. The sun dips behind the ridge and the temperature gets perfect, just on the cooler edge of pleasant. The rock won’t be greasy, there’ll be plenty of friction, but it won’t be so cold I’ll get chilly and misinterpret my shivers as fear. Plenty of daylight, light spirits, and for once in my life, I don’t overthink. I know deep in my soul that I don’t need the rope today. So I don’t tie in. I just climb alongside my friends. It’s easier than walking because I get to use my hands, and everything goes perfectly, which means in the end there’s no story at all.

I won’t solo the First again, but not because I hated it. I won’t solo it again because I loved it too much. Since then, I haven’t exactly become a soloist, but I’ve heard the bell-clear siren song from routes a number of times, Johnny Vegas in Red Rocks, the Capstan on Flagstaff Mountain, a few choice cracks in the Sierra, a handful of highballs like Airwolf and High Plains Drifter in various deserts of the West. I am measured and studious, with my books and dictionaries and writing routine and mint tea. I also, when called, enjoy something categorically deadly. Soloing puts me in touch with the multitudes I contain. On insomniac nights I relive the memories of these ropeless ascents, with every detail of every hold seared in my mind in everlasting high resolution, and the perfection of my movements lulls me to sleep. It must sound counterintuitive, but nothing in this world makes me calmer.

The phrase “to risk one’s life” conjures in my mind’s eye a kind of scale, like the one Anubis uses to weigh a heart against a feather. On one of its golden dishes sits your wager, your life; on the other there must be something of equal or greater value in order for the risk to seem worthwhile. What do we stand to win when our ante is ourselves? The chance to make our finite time feel infinite? The chance to make our finite self feel infinite? The satisfaction of saving our own life? Is that payoff enough?

I discovered Anne Dufourmantelle’s work on the university library search engine, under keywords “philosophy” and “risk.” At the time I didn’t look into her biography, just went straight to the primary text. But I’m curious to see what she’s working on now, so I check the regular internet instead of the university database. The first hit is an article from the New York Times, headlined “Philosopher Who Praised Risk Died Trying to Save Children from Drowning.” It reads:

PARIS—A French philosopher and psychoanalyst, known for her work that praised living a life that embraced risk, died last week as a result of following her own bold philosophy.

The philosopher, Anne Dufourmantelle, 53, drowned on Friday as she tried to save two children who were struggling to swim off the coast of Pampelonne beach, near St.-Tropez, France, according to a report from French public television.

Ms. Dufourmantelle was on the beach when the weather began to change and the previously safe swimming area became treacherous. She saw two children who were in danger and leapt into the sea to help, according to France 3, before being caught in the rough surf.

She was pulled unresponsive from the water by two other swimmers, and attempts to resuscitate her failed.

Both children survived.

I’m stunned by how recent the news is: Dufourmantelle died days before the first soloist fell from the First Flatiron. Another search result, an obituary, quotes an English-language lecture she’d once given: “Being completely alive is a task, it’s not at all a given thing. It’s not just about being present to the world, it’s being present to yourself, reaching an intensity that is in itself a way of being reborn.” Having only experienced her work, up until this point, through the veil of translation, there’s something uncannily intimate about reading her words in my own language for the first time. The clarity of it is painful, the poetry self-evident, breaking out of human time and into the mythic. She saw the children, the danger. She saw the swift water. She went in.

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Brian Laidlaw is an author of the two collections of poetry, The Mirrormaker and The Stuntman. A songwriter and musician, he has released several albums, most recently This Aster. He writes for outdoor magazines including Outside, Climbing, Alpinist, and Orion. Based out of Moab, Utah, he moonlights—often by literal moonlight—as a rock climber.

This story first appeared as the cover story in Issue 4 of The Atlas, a new global publication by Coda Story and The Continent. Sign up to the newspaper here.

In late July, at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia, the mathematician Jacob Tsimerman was awarded one of four Fields Medals – the highest honour in mathematics.

A few hours later, Tsimerman announced that he was joining OpenAI.

Tsimerman’s departure from theoretical mathematics, while at the absolute peak of his powers, highlights the fault line in a debate that is upending the normally quiet world of higher mathematics. “What a dick move,” said one mathematics professor, speaking to The Atlas off the record.

Tsimerman, who has written extensively about his fear of “omnicidal futures involving artificial intelligence” – a fear that AI could wipe out humanity, closely associated with the AI “doomer” community – has said he will work on OpenAI’s safety team.

Tsimerman and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

In recent months, OpenAI has announced proofs of various longstanding mathematical problems, solved with one of the company’s latest large language models. Other companies have also made advancements: RedNote, a Chinese AI model, obtained a perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Shanghai in July.

Human mathematicians, at all levels of the profession, are reeling from the implications. Tim Gowers, a professor at the University of Cambridge who helped to verify one of OpenAI’s proofs, has written that even if AI models fail to progress further, “we have still probably entered an era where it will become very difficult for humans to compete with AI at solving mathematical problems”.

This is a startling assessment – and a marketing coup for the likes of OpenAI.

“Mathematicians actually have a special role in this,” said Joshua Grochow, an associate professor in Computer Science and (by courtesy)Mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “The AI companies’ PR pitch is essentially to say, ‘Look, we have solved math. the intellectually hardest thing ever, therefore we can solve everything.’ ”

LLMs have not solved math – far from it. Nonetheless, Grochow added, recently some capabilities have improved. “They are legitimately able to produce real math, new math that they had not produced before. So you can’t deny that utility. You can deny the extent of that utility, but you can’t say it’s all BS.”

Miek Messerschmidt, a senior lecturer in mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, recently used Anthropic’s Claude to take a crack at a problem that had stumped him. Claude solved it within 30 minutes. “How did I feel? You mean emotionally? I was relieved, because I didn’t have to go down this dead end any more. But I was also disconcerted by what this entity could do in such a short amount of time.”

NEW VARIABLES

Mathematics has been disrupted by technological leaps before. The abacus. The mechanical calculator. The blackboard, even, which played an instrumental role in standardising training and mathematical notation (“It’s hard to research, because most of what’s written on blackboards doesn’t stay there very long,” said mathematics historian Michael Barany).

But AI is a different kind of disruption. Where previous advances helped mathematicians expand the frontiers of their knowledge, large language models threaten the livelihoods, and purpose, of mathematicians themselves.

“Our place in society at developing new ideas has been quite unthreatened for quite some time,” said Tim Chartier, a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Davidson College. “For a long time, the frontier of mathematics could only be expired by the mathematicians themselves. There were no tools that could push into that boundary, except the research mathematician…At this current time, it’s not like we don’t need research mathematicians – but the landscape has changed so quickly, it’s hard to know what that will look like a year from now, two years from now.”

This matters for everyone: for thousands of years, mathematics has been considered to be the foundation of scientific knowledge. There is no physics without mathematics. No astronomy without mathematics. And there is no computer science – or AI – without mathematics. What happens if there are cracks in the foundation?

“I think that LLMs pose an existential threat to the mathematical community,” wrote Tasmin Chu, a PhD student at the California Institute of Technology, in an essay published on 2 August – the day after OpenAI released a set of ten new mathematical results, resolving or making progress on various problems.

“This is a polemic, not a press release,” Chu continued. “I know that others feel the same way; I have spent today crashing out and learning that top mathematicians I know are crashing out.”

Some of what mathematicians are worried about is the same as what everyone else is worried about: that AI will take their jobs; that AI companies have absorbed everyone’s work, and are reproducing it without attribution or compensation; that students aren’t learning properly any more; and that there won’t be jobs for them when they graduate.

But some worries are more specific to the field. Like the fear that, if mathematics becomes too reliant on particular AI models, then AI companies will have the power to restrict access to a select few – or make it prohibitively expensive. That promising young mathematicians, instead of turning to research, will use their talents instead to refine proprietary algorithms, which may or may not be used for the common good. That there will be no one left to understand, let alone vouch for, the mathematics produced by the machines. That objective truth, or anything close to it, is going to be much harder to prove – a fear shared with journalists, incidentally, who find it increasingly difficult to verify whether a photograph is real or fake.

MATHEMATICIAN IN THE LOOP

After speaking with more than a dozen leading mathematicians from around the world, The Atlas can confirm that Chu is not alone with her fears: it’s all anyone is talking about. The crisis is existential – and mathematicians are looking to one man in particular to guide them through it.

There are no working mathematicians who are truly famous. The closest anyone gets is Terence Tao, a professor at UCLA, who is often referred to as the world’s greatest living mathematician. A prodigy, Tao skipped five grades of school, receiving his masters degree at age 16. By 21, he had earned a PhD from Princeton, and was awarded the Fields Medal just ten years later, in 2006, for his pioneering work with Ben Green on prime number theory.

But what sets Tao apart, in a field infamously incomprehensible to outsiders, is his ability to communicate to both mathematicians and laypeople alike. This has made him a de facto spokesperson for the mathematics community – and extremely influential in setting its norms. “From all accounts he’s a lovely man,” said one researcher, speaking anonymously.

“But the social pressure to agree with Terry Tao is really strong.”

On July 24, the day after Jacob Tsimerman joined OpenAI, Tao gave a public lecture at the ICM titled “Mathematics in the Age of AI”. In it, he presents his “working hypothesis”: that AI tools for mathematics, which he already uses in his own research, will keep getting better. This will allow for collaboration on a vastly greater scale than has ever been possible before, Tao argues, and speed up the pace of research – revealing new, previously unimagined frontiers.

But it will also change, fundamentally, the role of human mathematicians. There will be little point in problem-solving – the computers will handle that. But the humans will still have to do the really hard work: understanding why AI-generated proofs are correct, and explaining this to others. The sooner they embrace this and plan accordingly, Tao concludes, the better.

The Atlas reached out to Terence Tao to request an interview. His human assistant, UCLA media relations officer Holly Ober, declined the request, making a referral instead to a “living document” which is maintained by Tao’s Claude AI assistant, on his website. This document synthesises Tao’s current thinking on AI, based on his public writings and talks, even “interviewing” Tao with follow-up questions.

As per his AI assistant, Tao believes that the topic of AI in mathematics is too important to be left to just a small number of spokespeople – and that his own “influence on this discussion should diminish as the rest of the community steps up.”

AN UNSOLVED EQUATION

Not everyone believes in the inevitability of AI defining the future of mathematics. According to several sources, both organisers and funders were disappointed with the turnout at the ICM in Philadelphia. Despite the gravity of the occasion, the congress was not at capacity.

Ila Varma and Tarik Aougab, associate professors at the University of Toronto and Haverford College respectively, may have had something to do with that. In March, they launched a petition to boycott the ICM due to the ongoing war in Iran, increasing authoritarianism in the United States and the risks faced by visiting academics – if they were even allowed in. “AI companies were invited, but most African mathematicians who tried to attend couldn’t get visas,” Varma said.

More than 2,600 people signed the petition. For Varma, this is evidence that mathematicians may yet use their status to resist the influence – and the cash – of the big AI companies.

“There’s an idea that the positionality of mathematics in society is to decide who’s smart, who’s worthy of the most lucrative career opportunities and the privileges that go along with it. And now we are being asked to take this technology that is likely to be extremely unhealthy for users, that’s bad for the environment, this thing built on unethical labour, and our discipline is being used against many of our wishes to tell society that this thing is intelligent, and that you should let it do your thinking for you.”

Michael Harris, a professor at the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris, was at the ICM in Philadelphia. “The talks I attended on AI, starting with Tao’s public lecture, took pains to insist on the need for human mathematicians to make sense of anything produced in the name of the discipline, by machines or by humans,” he said. “There is a growing resistance to any use of AI whatsoever in mathematics, especially among young people, and this will become evident over the next few months.”

One of the clearest voices of dissent belongs to Max Weinreich, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the City University of New York.

In an essay published earlier this month, Weinreich makes the case against what he describes as “artificial mathematics”: “Mathematicians do not need to use AI, nor should we use AI; soon, I argue, you will not want to have your name associated with AI. Instead, we should use our intellectual authority to oppose its development.”

His opposition is about more than mathematics, he told The Atlas. In his view, the environmental and financial implications of the AI boom pose major societal risks – and mathematicians, given their privileged position, are one of the few groups of people who can do anything about it.

As John Fletcher, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, observed: “There is a lot of power in being perceived as the smartest people in the world.”

Po-Shen Loh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and former coach of the US International Mathematical Olympiad team, backs mathematicians to figure it out – by treating it like a maths problem. “AI is making mathematicians engage with the real world. They are smart enough to realise they have an existential crisis. They’re quickly racing down to discover all the dead ends, to see what works and what doesn’t.”

And when they figure it out, maybe they’ll let the rest of us know. 

A version of this story, edited for length, first appeared in The Atlas newspaper.  Additional reporting by: Shougat Dasgupta, Masho Lomashvilli, Irina Matchavariani.

The post As mathematicians grapple with AI, divisions are multiplying appeared first on Coda Story.

Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | August 27, 2026 | 5,568 words (20 minutes)

“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.

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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’s Hot 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 Life in 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.  

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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.

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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.

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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.  

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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.

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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.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

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 excerpt combines 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

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.