April 29, 2019 Objects of Despair Objects of Despair: Drones By Meghan O’Gieblyn Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column Objects of Despair examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them. A drone (Photo: Pexels) There was a big magazine story several years ago—I don’t remember where—about drone pilots who worked at an air force base in Nevada’s desert. The pilots spent their days in a windowless control room at this complex, which was some distance outside of Las Vegas, operating drones in Iraq—or maybe it was Afghanistan. I can’t seem to remember any of the details precisely. At the time, drones were still novel, and the central thrust of the article seemed to be the ethically troublesome fact that a strike could be enacted from a distance of 7,500 miles. One detail I remember clearly was that the base was deliberately remote, so that the pilots, after their shifts were over, were forced to drive several hours back to civilization. Whoever was in charge decided that humans who had been at war should not be allowed to simply zip home and eat dinner with their families, or grab drinks with friends. They needed time alone in their cars to decompress and segue back into ordinary life, to transform from soldiers into civilians. After reading this article, I tried to write a short story about a drone pilot who worked at this base. The story took place entirely during his drive home, and was largely interior, unfolding in the character’s mind. It was the kind of premise that interested me at the time. I envisioned a claustrophobic moral drama unfolding against the desert landscape as the car hummed across the interminable highway and the sun went down, turning the mountains the color of blood. But in the end, I couldn’t finish the piece. I could not imagine myself into the pilot’s head. Had he truly been at war? Or had he spent the afternoon in a Naugahyde recliner, pressing buttons? This is the enduring question of foreign policy in the age of the drone: Are we at war? A strike kills six civilians in Yemen. The headline scrolls across the ticker on an airport flatscreen, appears on a news app amid the noonday quiet in a corporate office park. There is little or no context, little or no commentary. Outside, the sky is a clear and endless blue. The drone embodies the remoteness of modern warfare, but more than that, its thoughtlessness. It is the symbol of wars that are without leaders, of conflicts so diffuse and underreported they seem to have no face, no soul. Drone is a type of bee that is believed to be entirely mindless. It also describes the monotonous hum that machines make—or humans, when they are speaking like machines. Both meanings reflect our era of perpetual war, which is so unvaried and automatic that it can transition seamlessly from one presidential administration to the next, radically different one. (As the bumper sticker on my neighbor’s car puts it: AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY DRONES ON.) At the time, I thought my failure to write the story was due to an epistemological problem—that I, a civilian, could not understand the psychological demands of war. But the problem was actually ontological. I was looking for consciousness in the byways of bureaucracy, searching for thought and conviction where there was none. Read More
April 26, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Chili’s, Chapbooks, and Childcare By The Paris Review Mary Miller. I’m inclined to call Mary Miller’s new novel, Biloxi, a lonely book. The narrator, sixty-three-year-old Louis McDonald Jr., is perhaps how one might cynically imagine the average late-middle-age man. He’s recently divorced, distant from his daughter, anticipating an inheritance from his father’s death, and living a quiet, burger-and-beer-fueled existence in front of TV marathons of Naked and Afraid. On a detour to avoid his ex-wife, he impulsively adopts a dog named Layla, and his solitude becomes a strange, blundering parenthood. Louis oscillates between embitterment and naivete, cloaking his anxieties in a devotion to Layla that verges on delusion. But even as he falls prey to shortsighted impulses—which include neglecting his medications, burning through his bank account, and impersonating a Baptist missionary to meet a woman—Louis retains a genuine desire for connection, despite his insistence otherwise. The narrative remains intimate throughout, swinging between neuroses and hilarity to create an empathetic depiction of masculinity. Biloxi is everything I want in a story: a man with an affinity for leftover Chili’s, an antisocial dog with digestive challenges, and a bunch of truly dislikable people I love regardless. —Nikki Shaner-Bradford Read More
April 26, 2019 Arts & Culture Reframing Agnes By RL Goldberg A 1958 case study is widely believed to be “the first sociological case study of a transitioning person.” A new documentary short, premiering at Tribeca, finally allows Agnes to speak in her own words. Kristen Schilt. Photo: Dan Dry. In October 1958, a nineteen-year-old woman called Agnes approached the psychiatry department at UCLA, having been referred there by a physician in her hometown. “She was tall, slim, with a very female shape,” the sociologist Harold Garfinkel noted. “Her measurements were 38-25-28. She had long, fine dark-blonde hair, a young face with pretty features, a peaches-and-cream complexion, no facial hair, subtly plucked eyebrows, and no makeup except for lipstick.” Agnes arrived at UCLA seeking genital surgery for her self-described intersex condition. According to Agnes’s self-reporting, though she had apparently been born a boy, female secondary sex characteristics began to spontaneously develop during puberty. Extensive physical and endocrinological testing revealed her to have no obvious intersex condition; all the same, Agnes’s physical appearance assured doctors that she was, in fact, female. So Agnes became a patient—and subject—of Dr. Robert Stoller and Harold Garfinkel. At the time, Garfinkel was writing an ethnomethodology of how individuals make accountable aspects of daily life and interactions—that is, how individuals might give an account of their interactions. While doctors determined whether Agnes was an acceptable candidate for surgery, conversations between Agnes and Garfinkel were recorded and formed the basis of Garfinkel’s chapter “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an ‘Intersexed’ Person Part 1*.” This article is widely believed to be, in sociologist Kristen Schilt’s words, “the first sociological case study of a transitioning person.” Read More
April 26, 2019 Arts & Culture Clarissa Dalloway Is a Virgo By Alex Dimitrov and Dorothea Lasky Cover design by Oliver Hibert. In late November 2016, the poets Alex Dimitrov and Dorothea Lasky decided to bring their shared love of astrology and poetry to the world, and Astro Poets was born. They’ve since amassed hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers for their sharp, snappy takes on the signs, and this November, they’ll release their first book together, Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac. To celebrate the reveal of the book’s cover, Dimitrov and Lasky read the charts of some of literature’s most beloved (and reviled) characters. Aries: Janie Crawford (Their Eyes Were Watching God) Janie Crawford is the quintessential Aries: resilient, determined, and ready to take control of her own destiny. Taurus: Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice) Elizabeth Bennet will marry for love, and she doesn’t care if that goes against convention, and she doesn’t care whom she’ll disappoint. She is the epitome of a Taurus: strong-minded and endlessly passionate. Read More
April 25, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: An IV Dripping into Something Already Dead By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © Ellis Rosen. Dear Poets, I’m a young artist and writer—twenty-two, just graduated, and starting out on a professional career. I’m having some success: a few group shows, a couple publications, and a few readings in small spaces. For this, I am incredibly grateful. I try to celebrate these accomplishments and not continue to fall into the trap of berating myself for “not doing enough.” That being said, last night, a close friend and I read at an event to which four people showed up, the host of the series included. I got a lot of apology texts, and I understand. I, too, have had hard days and not been able to show up for other people. But the number of these excuses, and the silence, from a great number of other close friends has been a little disappointing. I’ve got a few solid friends that are forever supportive, but they’re spread across continents now. I am grateful for all of these people, too, but how do I celebrate my accomplishments when the people around me don’t seem interested in celebrating with me? Sincerely, Forced to Toot My Own Horn Read More
April 25, 2019 Arts & Culture What the Scientists Who Photographed the Black Hole Like to Read By Rebekah Frumkin On April 10, 2019, an international team of scientists working on a project called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) released an image of a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). Several years in the making, the image was created from data compiled by a number of telescopes spaced across the planet. The EHT team is a large and diverse group, including many early-career Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers from the U.S. and abroad. Rebekah Frumkin spoke to nine of those scientists, all in their twenties or early thirties, about what they like to read, how the black hole is like a work of art, and their advice for writers depicting black holes in their work. (Image: © EHT Collaboration) What kind of fiction or poetry do you like to read, and how has it influenced your research? Sara Issaoun: I like science fiction, the kind that either drifts toward realism or toward whimsy. I’m a big fan of Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is probably a classic for most astronomers. Daniel Palumbo: It is difficult for me to choose a particular genre of fiction, so I’ll just pick a recent favorite: Blood Meridian. I find insurmountably evil villains incredibly compelling, though the horror of this book is at times physically painful to read. In science, the situation is the opposite—astronomy is difficult not because of some malicious actor, but due to a cold, uncaring complexity with which humanity contends, largely for the joy of discovery. Michael Janssen: I like to read science fiction novels, for example Isaac Asimov. I want to really understand how our world and the universe work, and what mankind is capable of through technological advancements. Andrew Chael: I pretty consciously try to take Shevek, the main character of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, as my model for how to act as a physicist. While his physics are a little iffy—or maybe just beyond our current understanding—his approach to research, teaching, and discovery is fundamentally generous while still being influenced by his personal ambition to go further than others have gone. The Dispossessed also points out that all science, even physics, is shaped by its social and political context. Read More