Quando me perguntam sobre minhas lembranças de Natal da minha infância, tenho a resposta bem clara: cheiro de bala, som de buzinas e sapatos na janela do quintal. Isso porque eu cresci em Holambra, colônia holandesa no interior de São Paulo, e por lá as tradições são um pouco diferentes daquelas que vemos no resto do Brasil.
Meu primeiro Natal na cidade, em 1998, aos 4 anos, foi marcado por um verdadeiro susto. O que aconteceu foi o seguinte: a partir de novembro, os Zwarte Piet – Pedros Negros em tradução livre – começaram a aparecer nas ruas de Holambra. Eram adultos, normalmente brancos, que se pintavam de preto, usavam peruca afro, fantasias, penduravam brincos de argola nas orelhas, passavam batom vermelho nos lábios e saíam distribuindo doces para as crianças boazinhas e punindo as levadas. Varas e correntes amarradas na cintura também faziam parte da fantasia. Eu saí de lá em 2007, aos 13 anos, mas a tradição segue intacta até hoje.
Naquela época, a imagem sempre me pareceu “normal”, apesar de eu sentir bastante medo deles. Essa cultura surgiu na Holanda e foi trazida para o Brasil com os imigrantes que chegaram em 1948 em Holambra – nome que se deu pela junção de Holanda, América e Brasil. A história que nos contavam (e que ainda segue sendo repetida por aqui) é a de que os Pedros Negros são os ajudantes do São Nicolau, figura que deu origem ao Papai Noel.
Eles vêm da Espanha para acompanhar o bom velhinho e ajudam na distribuição de presentes. No período das festas, os Zwarte Piet passam pelas ruas, casas, restaurantes e escolas distribuindo balas. A chegada deles é anunciada pelo som de buzina dos carros.
“Zwarte Piet” na festa de São Nicolau, em 2013, na cidade de Amsterdam.
Foto: 24 Oranges
As crianças “mal comportadas”, no entanto, não têm essa sorte. Os Pedros Negros andam também com uma vara, usada para dar palmadas naqueles que não foram bonzinhos durante o ano. Os mais rebeldes teriam um destino ainda pior: seriam levados dentro de um saco para trabalhar em colheitas de laranja na Espanha.
Eu não era das melhores alunas da sala, conversava muito e sempre aprontava alguma. De alguma forma, eles sabiam disso e sempre corriam atrás de mim pelo pátio da escola dando varadas. A possibilidade de ser levada para trabalhar na colheita me apavorou durante boa parte da minha infância.
Tenho uma lembrança muito clara, quando tinha por volta de 8 anos, de estar sentada na sala de aula em uma rodinha com todos os alunos da classe e alguns dos Pedros Negros. Eu estava bem nervosa e me recordo que só senti alívio quando vi a tinta preta escorrendo da orelha de um deles. Foi naquele momento que eu entendi que eles não eram de verdade? – eu já morava na cidade havia três anos.
Por mais que eu participasse das festas, nunca senti a empolgação que meus colegas de classe pareciam sentir. Eu ficava apavorada, na verdade. Para piorar, por conta do meu tom de pele mais escuro e do meu cabelo cacheado, também era comum fazerem piadas me comparando a imagem do Zwarte Piet. Eu respondia de volta como um mecanismo de defesa, mas ainda não entendia a gravidade desse tipo de brincadeira.
A grande questão é que eu só percebi como essa tradição é problemática anos depois, quando já havia me mudado para São Paulo e cortado boa parte das minhas relações com a cidade onde passei minha infância. Um pouco antes disso, inclusive, tive amigos que se fantasiaram de Zwaerte Piet, e eu simplesmente não via nada de errado. No entanto, no momento em que eu comecei a estudar mais sobre raça e me deparei com o termo blackface, foi que eu entendi que aquilo tudo era bem racista. E, então, passei a me lembrar da sensação de medo que eu tinha em relação aos Pedros Negros. Eu, uma menina que era lida como parda ou negra, em uma cidade de maioria holandesa e branca, tinha receio de pessoas pintadas de preto.
Mas, naquela época, a imagem do Pedro Negro era incontestável. Nunca houve um debate. Na Holanda, de acordo com Patricia Schor, pesquisadora da Universidade de Utrecht e especialista em pós-colonialismo e racismo, a problematização só começou a surgir há cerca de seis anos. Com essas discussões, muito se foi falado sobre a origem do Zwarte Piet, que é bem problemática: apesar do São Nicolau fazer parte das festas de final de ano desde a Idade Média na Holanda, o Pedro Negro só surgiu no século 19, quando a escravidão ainda era presente nas colônias do país.
Sua primeira aparição foi em um livro chamado “São Nicolau e seu servo”, escrito por Jan Schenkman. A história conta que o bom velhinho visitava várias cidades dando presentes para as crianças, ao lado do seu ajudante, o Zwarte Piet. Nas ilustrações, percebe-se que o personagem fazia todo o trabalho duro. Além de carregar todo o peso, ele também era o responsável por punir as crianças com palmadas, ou levá-las para a Espanha em um saco.
Ilustração do livro “Sint Nikolaas en zijn knecht” de Jan Schenkman, publicado em Amsterdã no ano de 1850.
Foto: Reprodução/ J. Vlieger
Nesta mesma época, era bem comum colocar os negros na posição de escravizado como se fosse algo natural e não imposto, uma identidade – foi a forma que os colonos encontraram de justificar a escravidão e o racismo. O termo blackface caracteriza exatamente isso: pessoas brancas que resolvem “se fantasiar” com estereótipos negros. A boca grande, o rosto pintado de preto, a peruca afro e os brincos de argolas – exatamente como vemos no Zwarte Piet – fazem parte da “fantasia”.
Com essa constatação, a luta de ativistas pelo fim da tradição na Holanda tem se acentuado cada vez mais porque ela é uma alusão óbvia à escravidão em antigas colônias holandesas. Os centros urbanos da Holanda já têm feito alterações na figura tradicional do Pedro Negro. Uma saída foi afirmar que o Zwarte Piet tem essa cor porque ele caiu pela chaminé e, por conta da fumaça, ficou com a pele escurecida.
Mas a pesquisadora Patricia Schor explica que existe uma dificuldade em aderir a essa história e mudar um padrão tão antigo porque, quem contesta, acaba quebrando um vínculo com a maioria que segue acreditando na tradição. Ao criticá-la, a pessoa deixa de fazer parte daquele grupo, o que pode trazer uma sensação de exclusão e de não pertencimento.Como quem se manifesta contra normalmente é imigrante, os holandeses insistem em defender a sua própria cultura – afinal já está presente no país há séculos e que até então não era contestado por ninguém. Ao mesmo tempo, existe um sentimento de negação em afirmar que a tradição é racista, porque isso implicaria em dizer que eles são racistas também, e ninguém quer ser tachado como preconceituoso.
Em Holambra, a discussão começou a surgir também depois que eu me mudei da cidade, principalmente nas redes sociais. Alguns poucos moradores – não descendentes de holandeses – têm usado suas páginas pessoais para mostrarem suas opiniões contrárias ao Zwarte Piet, mas nada que tenha ido adiante. Gabriela Wagemake, integrante da organização Losango, responsável por manter essa tradição na cidade, a reação pública não foi o suficiente para abalar a figura. “As crianças entendem a cor negra no Piet como fuligem. Eles não têm olhos de adulto que enxergam que esses personagens foram na antiguidade escravos. Eu acredito que o preconceito e a maldade estão nos olhos do adulto e não das crianças”, afirma.
Essa mesma história era contada durante a minha infância, mas o rosto dos Pedros Negros era – e ainda é – completamente coberto pela tinta preta. Eles ainda usam a peruca com cabelo afro e pintam a boca de vermelho.
Cartaz usado em Holambra para eventos de São Nicolau, em 2017.
Foto: Arquivo Pessoal
No final das contas, tanto na Holanda quanto na colônia do interior de São Paulo, a maior parte dos moradores não holandesa acaba aderindo as festividades – como era o caso da minha família –, mas hoje já existe um grupo que não quer participar e faz comentários contrários à tradição. A discussão acaba virando uma disputa entre quem pode fazer parte da cultura holandesa, quem pode criar ou mudar as tradições, atiçando um sentimento xenófobo.
Com a Europa se mostrando cada vez mais relutante a aceitar a presença de estrangeiros no continente, insistir nesse tipo de comportamento é uma forma de mostrar quem realmente manda ali, e o mesmo se repete no interior de São Paulo. A chegada de moradores brasileiros vindos de outros estados fez com que os nativos holandeses lutassem para manter suas tradições – algumas delas plausíveis, e outras, nem tanto. O discurso de que tudo isso é “mimimi” e que essas pessoas estão apenas contestando algo “puro e ingênuo” se mantém nos dois países.
Ao comentar toda a questão com meus pais, eles comprovaram exatamente essa análise: os dois achavam a tradição bem estranha, mas deixavam que eu e minha irmã participássemos para que não nos sentíssemos excluídas ou diferentes. Hoje em dia, no entanto, não consigo achar correto insistir em perpetuar a figura deste personagem que, mesmo sem intenções, fere e segrega. Muitas dessas imagens são passadas para crianças, que ficam com essa visão do negro como uma pessoa inferior, caricata e malvada. É claro que nem todas elas vão sair por aí reproduzindo preconceitos e diminuindo pessoas de outras raças ou etnias, mas algumas delas vão, e isso é um problema grave.
Em um momento de ascensão da extrema-direita e da relativização de atitudes claramente racistas, é necessário, sim, entender em que contextos nossas tradições surgiram. Também não dá para lidar com isso de forma maniqueísta, afirmando que quem mantém essa cultura é racista e ponto final. As coisas são complexas e exigem interpretações menos rasas. Mas uma coisa é certa: justificativa de manter uma tradição racista só porque ela perdura há muito tempo não faz sentido algum.
The post Pedros Negros: a tradição natalina racista que sobrevive no interior de São Paulo appeared first on The Intercept.
The Senate vote this month to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen marked a historic break from a bipartisan embrace of a pro-war foreign policy, yet it was accomplished without strong backing from Washington’s liberal foreign policy infrastructure.
The resolution, co-sponsored by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., invokes the rights laid out in the War Powers Act of 1973 that assert Congress’s authority over war, and it was the result of many months of work by a coalition of progressive activists and anti-war lawmakers. The war is Saudi-led, but the U.S. has provided critical support, and an end to that support effectively means an end to the war.
Backers of the effort approached the Center for American Progress, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the American Civil Liberties Union, and all declined to specifically endorse the resolution or become members of the activist coalition. And when a procedural vote on the resolution came to the House floor, it got the same kind of half-hearted support from Democratic leadership, falling just three votes short.
The politics of war and peace in Washington are being reoriented.As the momentum built toward the Senate victory, the lack of support from established groups in Washington became increasingly conspicuous. In the wake of the successful vote, the politics of war and peace in Washington are being reoriented, opening the possibility for a generational change that could have implications far beyond the Trump administration, potentially restraining the militaristic impulses of a future Democratic administration.
“This is an unprecedented assertion of Congress’s authority over declaring war that is an affirmation of structural checks on the presidency,” David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress, a progressive group that mobilized grassroots activists in support of the resolutions, told The Intercept. “It will probably constrain future presidents’ decisions about whether or not to engage in military activities all across the globe.”
Before December 13, the Senate had never used its authority under the War Powers Resolution to force a president to end an ongoing war. (It did pass a resolution to end hostilities in Somalia in the 1990s, but U.S. troops had already left.) A previous Senate vote on the resolution was defeated back in March.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates directly intervened in Yemen in 2015 when Houthi rebels took control of the country’s capital, Sana’a, in the midst of a political dispute. The Gulf allies wrongly blamed their regional foe Iran for the takeover, and they assembled a coalition and went to war to oust the Houthis — with Iran, in turn, happy to arm and supply the rebels in order to drain resources and political capital from Saudi and the UAE. The Obama and Trump administrations both supported the war effort. The Senate’s move comes as negotiations between the warring parties in Yemen have progressed, and puts pressure on Saudi Arabia and the UAE to bring the war to an end.
The Senate’s passage of the resolution bestowed on it the kind of luster that allows liberal groups to support it without feeling as if they’re moving in too radical a direction. And, indeed, some insist that they’ve been strong supporters all along.
Before the Senate vote, CAP, Amnesty International, and HRW put out statements condemning the war in Yemen and signaling broad backing of congressional action to end U.S military support in the country. There is no question that, to varying degrees, they’ve all been critical of Saudi Arabia. Yet none of them specifically endorsed the two parallel resolutions on the Yemen war making their way through Congress — when it came to using the War Powers Resolution as a vehicle to end the war, reluctance set in.
The issue is especially sensitive to the Center for American Progress, the most prominent Democratic think tank in Washington, because it has been criticized for accepting significant funding from the embassy of the UAE, one of the Gulf countries leading the war on Yemen. The UAE gave CAP between $500,000 to $999,000 in 2017, according to the organization’s website.
The nation’s ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, played a key role in elevating Mohammed bin Salman to the role of crown prince in Saudi Arabia. The UAE, according to the Associated Press, has operated torture chambers in Yemen “in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire.”
Sam Hananel, a CAP spokesperson, told The Intercept, after the resolution passed, that they “fully support” the invocation of the War Powers Act that would end U.S. support for the war in Yemen, and believe that it applies legally to the hostilities there. But so far, there appears to be no specific mention of invoking war powers in any of CAP’s official statements. (There is an article on the site by CAP fellow Kate Martin, originally published by Just Security, that references the resolution.)
For years in Washington, the dominant foreign policy narrative held that conflicts like the one in Yemen are the province of the executive branch, not subject to the War Powers Act. CAP’s embrace of the opposite line of argument is in and of itself a significant victory for the left.
“It’s good that they are finally coming around. It shows that we are moving the conversation forward.”Hassan El-Tayyab, co-director of Just Foreign Policy, a progressive advocacy group that helped coordinate lobbying for the resolutions in Congress, told The Intercept he was pleased CAP had publicly affirmed its support. “It’s good that they are finally coming around,” he said. “It shows that we are moving the conversation forward and making the use of the WPR and ending U.S. involvement in the Saudi war on Yemen a mainstream position.”
Hananel said that the think tank worked hard behind the scenes with congressional staff to push for the resolution and referred The Intercept to Murphy, the Democratic co-sponsor, for confirmation.
But when asked by The Intercept to assess CAP’s involvement with the resolution, Murphy praised CAP in general terms, but stopped short of commenting on its role in pushing for the resolution. “This landmark resolution passed because a coalition of unlikely partners, inside in the Senate and out in the streets, came together to do the right thing,” Murphy said in a statement. “I was proud of the humanitarian and progressive organizations who rallied their members to put pressure on their Senators. CAP is an important part of the movement toward a more progressive foreign policy, and they’ve done good work on evaluating the U.S.-Saudi relationship over these past few months.”
When reached for comment by The Intercept, congressional aides associated with the resolution said they had been in productive discussions with CAP on the issue, but their exploration of CAP’s possible endorsement of the measure did not pan out.
When asked for clarification on the organization’s posture toward the resolution, Hananel said that “the notion that CAP has been silent on Yemen is categorically wrong and disproved by facts.” He pointed to a panel discussion the organization hosted after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi officials, and the fact that Murphy delivered opening remarks during a presentation of a foreign policy report by CAP’s national security team. Hananel also directed The Intercept to two statements on the Yemen war, neither of which references the War Powers resolution.
Statements put out by Human Rights Watch, a leading humanitarian nongovernmental organization in D.C., also reflect a broad willingness to criticize Saudi Arabia — to condemn atrocities in the war in general terms, but to decline to specifically endorse the resolution that would end it. “US Senate vote signals that, unlike Trump, it won’t sell out the most basic human values (voiding complicity in Saudi-led bombing and starving of Yemeni civilians) for a few arms-sales jobs,” Kenneth Roth, the group’s executive director, wrote on Twitter.
US Senate vote signals that, unlike Trump, it won't sell out the most basic human values (voiding complicity in Saudi-led bombing and starving of Yemeni civilians) for a few arms-sales jobs. https://t.co/bvtFEDtUd7 pic.twitter.com/AvT2CWk8VI
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) December 14, 2018
HRW Washington Director Sarah Morgan similarly celebrated that the “Senate just took a big step towards greater transparency & oversight of the US role in Yemen. At 63-37 the vote is solidly bipartisan and sends a clear message to the White House: we aren’t buying what you have to offer. The status quo is no longer acceptable.”
Those statements obscure the whole truth: The resolution wouldn’t just bring “greater transparency and oversight” to the war, it would end the U.S. role in it — a notion whose radical nature has been difficult to absorb in Washington, even as it gathers steam in Congress.
The resolution wouldn’t just bring “greater transparency and oversight” to the war, it would end the U.S. role in it.In an article for Just Security, Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW’s executive director of Middle East and North Africa division, touted a bill introduced by Sens. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and Todd Young, R-Ind., to impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia as “the strongest effort to date for taking serious action.” She did not mention the War Powers Resolution, though she did praise it on Twitter.
When a coalition — led by the progressive group Win Without War and conservative FreedomWorks, and including 53 other groups like Demand Progress, Indivisible, and Our Revolution — sent a letter to senators ahead of the first Senate vote in March urging them to vote for the resolution, CAP, HRW, Amnesty International, and the ACLU did not sign on.
Ahead of the March vote, a spokesperson for HRW explained its absence in backing the resolution to the magazine In These Times, stating that the organization does not “take a position on the legality of armed conflicts.” An Amnesty International USA spokesperson similarly told In These Times that it did not take stances on whether countries “should go to war.”
Amnesty International USA reiterated this view when asked by The Intercept last week if it had changed its stance on Congress invoking war powers since March, especially in light of the recent Senate vote. “Our position is dictated by Amnesty’s global policy on armed intervention, and by our core values of impartiality and independence, which is that we do not take a position on armed intervention, but instead call on all parties in any conflict to respect their obligations under international law,” said Robyn Shepherd, Amnesty’s interim director of media relations. HRW declined to comment.
The ACLU, meanwhile, had objections to the approach taken by backers of the resolution. In order to win majority support, they specified in the resolution that it would not impact the U.S. war on terror in Yemen, which has included drone strikes and cruise missile attacks against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (a group that is now, ironically, on the same side as the U.S. in the war against the Houthis).
The ACLU is in the middle of a lawsuit against the administration, arguing that the war on terror in Yemen is illegal. The resolution, the group worried, would moot the lawsuit by legalizing the drone war. Moreover, lawyers at the ACLU were concerned that by explicitly condemning the war in Yemen, the resolution could be implicitly read to be an approval of other extralegal hostile actions around the globe. Backers of the resolution put the question to the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan resource at Congress’s disposal, which concluded that the resolution would not in fact explicitly legalize other conflicts and did not legalize the drone war. “The language in both resolutions serves to indicate that the removal directive is limited to the subject of the two resolutions, that is to say, ending the U.S. involvement in the KSA-led counter-Houthi campaign in Yemen,” CRS concluded. “Neither resolution’s language contains any indication of legislative judgment as to whether such U.S. use of military force for counterterrorism purposes in Yemen is congressionally authorized,” the CRS report, which was obtained by The Intercept, continues.
The historic Senate vote did not come out of nowhere — supporters of the resolution have been working over the past year to build consensus around the issue. And it’s clear that their efforts are paying off: The resolution passed with the support of every Democrat in the caucus, joined by seven Republicans.
The resolution has rapidly become one of the few issues that the entire Democratic Party — center, left, and liberal — is uniting behind.Improbably, and despite the lack of support from the foreign policy establishment, the resolution has rapidly become one of the few issues that the entire Democratic Party — center, left, and liberal — is uniting behind. When the measure was brought up last March, the Senate blocked it by a 55-44 vote, with 10 Democrats joining with the Republican majority against it. By the end of November, when the Senate took a procedural vote on the resolution invoking war powers, the ground had shifted. Spurred in part by Trump’s hand-waving of bin Salman’s involvement in Khashoggi’s murder (the CIA concluded that bin Salman ordered his assassination), the bill then had the support of every single Democratic senator, who were joined by 13 Republicans.
The day before the resolution’s ultimate passage in the Senate, victory barely eluded opponents of the war in the House. The vote on a rule that would block a resolution brought forward by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., passed 206-203 — another indication that the effort to end the war is moving forward thanks to a groundswell of energy outside Washington, with only the reluctant, half-hearted support of leaders in Congress. The No. 2 House Democrat, Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, had co-sponsored Khanna’s effort to end the war, but in his statement, he made clear that he didn’t believe the U.S. was actually “engaged in hostilities in Yemen”; rather, he said the purpose of the resolution was to push the U.S. to work toward a political solution in Yemen. He also took an opportunity to bash Iran and praise Saudi and the UAE for “humanitarian efforts.”
Hoyer is the Democratic whip, and his job is just that: to whip recalcitrant party members into line. The coalition of groups backing the effort sent Hoyer a letter pleading with him to leverage his power to make sure that Democrats voted unanimously against the war. He did not do so. “We weren’t whipping. We always urge a no vote on the Rule,” said his spokesperson, who also denied receiving a letter from the coalition. That prompted the groups to reiterate that yes, in fact, they had sent such a letter to both Hoyer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
When the resolution finally came up for a vote, it happened in a manner that was bizarre even by congressional standards. The House managed to cram a vote on the war in Yemen in with the farm bill, an unrelated agriculture and social policy spending bill. The move, by House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, was even blasted by some Republicans.
Despicable. @SpeakerRyan is shirking responsibility for debating our involvement in the Yemen war by hiding the war resolution in a procedural vote on the farm bill. SAD! https://t.co/W2sw7K1nMY
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 12, 2018
The Yemen resolution was tacked onto the farm bill in the form of a rule that would strip the War Powers Resolution of its privileged status, meaning that Democrats could not bring it to the floor until January.
But if war opponents were to vote the rule down, the farm bill would have had to come back to the floor again for a separate vote. That was highly likely to happen — the farm bill is a bipartisan priority — but it was too big a risk for some Democrats who had spent years negotiating the bill, which contains funding for food stamps, known as SNAP.
Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, the top-ranking Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, wanted to seize the opportunity to pass the farm bill, rather than risk it by voting down the Yemen rule, but he needed help to do it.
Toward the end of the vote, when it seemed like the doves might succeed in voting down the rule, he approached Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger on the floor, another Maryland Democrat who is part of the whip team. Peterson told Ruppersberger that he needed five Democratic votes to make sure the rule passed. Ruppersberger, a co-sponsor of Khanna’s resolution, agreed to be one of them. “We were asked to vote for the farm bill rule by the ranking member of the Agriculture Committee to advance the farm bill,” Jaimee Lennon, a spokesperson for Ruppersberger, told The Intercept.
Reps. Jim Costa of California, Al Lawson of Florida, and David Scott of Georgia joined Peterson and Ruppersberger as the five Democrats who broke with Democrats and pushed the Yemen rule on the farm bill through on a 206-203 vote. “Without a rule, the vote would not have taken place. Many Americans could have gone hungry. And the war in Yemen could have still continued,” Ruppersberger, getting hammered at home for his vote, later wrote in a Baltimore Sun column, titled “Farm bill vote broke my heart.”
The bill’s sponsors vowed to take the measure up once the new Congress is sworn in and power shifts to Democrats in January.
That the liberal foreign policy elite might be starting to come around on supporting the resolution will only help bolster the measure in the coming year. But as House leadership has showed, half-hearted approval will only get the bills so far. And in the meantime, the war has left Yemen on the brink of a famine. In September, the United Nations’s World Food Programme warned reporters at a U.N. General Assembly briefing that 18 million of the Yemen’s 29 million people are food insecure. The country tops the U.N.’s list of countries as the biggest humanitarian crisis in 2019, with 70 percent of the country in need of humanitarian assistance.
“Yemen can’t wait,” El-Tayyab said. “The suffering is on an unprecedented, biblical scale.”
The post Major Liberal Groups Sat on Sidelines as Senate Passed Historic Resolution on Yemen War appeared first on The Intercept.
Billie Winner-Davis, mother of Reality Winner, carries a sign in support of her daughter outside the Lincoln County Law Enforcement Center in Lincolnton, Ga., on June 3, 2018.
Photo: Michael Holahan/The Augusta Chronicle/AP
Let me introduce myself. I am the mother of Reality Leigh Winner, a 27-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran who is in prison for leaking a document with proof of Russian election hacking efforts. I am writing now because I am outraged: While my daughter languishes in prison, those actually responsible for threatening our election continue to get off easy.
My daughter was sentenced to five years in prison for releasing a single document from the National Security Agency with proof of a threat to our voting system, when no one else would give the public the truth. She was widely reported to be the source for a June 2016 article in The Intercept on an NSA report detailing phishing attacks by Russian military intelligence on local U.S. election officials. (The Intercept has said it received the document anonymously.)
Her conviction wrongly portrayed her as a traitor and spy. To give the public proof of a threat to our nation, Reality violated her contract and nondisclosure agreement (she worked for a company that performed work for the NSA), and may have violated the law. She did so at a time when Russian interference in our 2016 presidential election was being hidden and downplayed.
Those who actually played roles in the malfeasance surrounding the Trump campaign and transition do not appear to be paying near the price that Reality Winner is.She certainly should be held accountable for her actions, and she is. But other figures in the news today — those who actually played roles in the malfeasance surrounding the Trump campaign and transition — do not appear to be paying near the price that she and our family are paying.
Reality was just 25 years old when she was charged with the unlawful disclosure of national defense information, a charge under the Espionage Act of 1917. She was denied bond by the judge, as her distinguished military experience, service to her community, and intelligence was used against her. The government painted her as a Taliban sympathizer and a threat to the U.S., even though her service and medal of commendation directly contradicted this. The government, arguing that she was a flight risk, used her savings of $30,000 against her. They used her one and only trip out of the country, a trip to Belize to honor her deceased father, against her. They used her language skills — taught to her during and used for her military service — against her. They used her social media posts and a single doodled joke, in one of her many journals, against her.
Even though the prosecution made false statements to keep her jailed — saying that she had multiple classified documents in her possession — the judge accepted their apologies and still kept her locked away in deplorable conditions. She was deprived of contact with her family and friends, she was deprived of an adequate diet and nutrition, her mental health needs were ignored by the system, she was assaulted and injured, and deprived of fresh air and sunlight and basic needs. The government knew what to do to break her and they did.
In June 2018, Reality pleaded guilty to the one charge against her, in a deal that resulted in the longest-ever sentence imposed for a crime along these lines. Although Reality’s legal team did their best to build a defense for her, the court ruled against them at every turn, and the threat of 10 years in prison and hefty fines if she didn’t prevail at trial became too much to battle against.
Despite having a spotless record, distinguished military service, documented volunteerism, and service to her community, the government’s sentencing memo again portrayed Reality as an enemy of the country. On August 23, 2018, the court sentenced Reality to 63 months in prison and three years of supervised release. In a press release, U.S. Attorney Bobby Christine stated that resolving the case with this plea agreement was the best resolution, as a trial may risk the further disclosure of classified information. He said that the sentence imposed on Reality “promotes respect for the law and affords deterrence to similar criminal conduct in the future” — using Reality as the example. He referred to her as a “quintessential example of an insider threat.”
Billie Winner-Davis with her daughter, Reality Winner.
Photo: Courtesy of Billie Winner-Davis
Reality’s case, treatment, and sentence are more than enough to stoke my outrage, but every day, I become angrier and more frustrated with the news. The facts of the entire investigation into Russian election interference — a saga of greed — are heartbreaking. It is maddening to watch my daughter in prison as the so-called justice system interacts in such drastically different ways with Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, and Michael Cohen.
First, Manafort and Gates. In February 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller handed down 32 indictments on these two men, to include conspiracy and numerous tax evasion crimes. Gates’s fate is not yet known, but we do know that he has not spent time languishing in a jail or prison after he was charged, unlike Reality, who is now on day 568 behind bars.
Then Manafort. Despite having the financial means, connections, multiple passports, and experience traveling to other countries — at levels that far exceeded Reality’s — Manafort was allowed to remain out of jail on bond. Manafort’s bond was revoked only when he was accused of tampering with witnesses, and even then he seemed to be getting preferential treatment — until a judge transferred him to a “real” jail. Manafort was convicted of eight crimes and then entered into a plea agreement in another case. That plea was later revoked, after he was accused of lying to prosecutors.
Last year, on December 18, 2017, as the court allowed Manafort to travel to the Hamptons to celebrate Christmas, our family celebrated that Reality had been given fresh fruit, a gift from a local church, and the very first fresh anything since her arrest on June 3, 2017.
Next comes Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI concerning his contacts, during the presidential campaign, with people he believed had connections to the Russian government. He was sentenced to a total of 14 days in prison — and even then tried to get this sentence postponed before spending a mere 12 days incarcerated. What I wouldn’t give to even have Reality released after 12 months.
On to Flynn’s case. A retired Army general, revered and entrusted due to his experience and rank, and put in charge of our national security, Flynn lied about work he did on behalf of the Turkish government, as well as his backchannel communications with the Russian government prior to Donald Trump’s inauguration. He worked for Turkey to try to send a legal U.S. resident, a dissident Turkish preacher, back to Turkey, knowing that this would place the preacher in danger. And Flynn communicated with the Russian government about sanctions placed on them for interfering in the U.S. elections. This Army general should have been facing some very serious charges and consequences, but what is he charged with? Not conspiracy, not espionage — but lying to FBI agents. And, if that does not cause one to gasp, the government is not seeking any prison time! Just this week, Flynn was dressed down by a judge who expressed his “disgust” for the former general’s conduct — but there’s little indication that he’ll receive a hefty sentence.
While I realize that the crime of lying to the FBI may not automatically qualify one for a prison sentence, my outrage on Flynn’s case centers more on what he was not charged with. I would have thought that someone of his rank and position within our government, someone who lied about the lucrative work he had done for one foreign government and contacts with another, would be held to a much higher standard than a 25-year-old veteran airman. Reality is described as an “insider threat” — one who “plainly abused her position of trust” — yet Flynn’s sentencing memos and recommendations paint him in a much better light, resulting in requests for extreme leniency that the judge found so hard to swallow.
Reality Winner, charged with leaking U.S. secrets to a news outlet, walks into the Federal Courthouse in Augusta, Ga., on June 26, 2018.
Photo: Michael Holahan/The Augusta Chronicle/AP
Michael Cohen is next. Cohen acted on behalf of Trump’s presidential campaign and also as his personal lawyer. He arranged what prosecutors said were illegal payments to two women alleged to have had affairs and sexual encounters with Trump. This was done during the campaign to hush the women as their stories were sure to bring negative attention to then-candidate Trump — which also made the payment a violation of federal laws relating to campaign finance.
Cohen was also charged with other crimes — nine total — to include tax evasion and lying to Congress. He pleaded guilty to all those charges and was sentenced to a total of three years in prison with three years’ supervised released. He will not have to surrender himself to begin his prison term until March. It’s difficult to conclude anything other than that Cohen lined his pockets and betrayed our democracy for selfish reasons.
Last, but perhaps not least, in this unfolding tale is Maria Butina, a Russian operative who was arrested for conspiracy to commit crimes against the United States. Though she was not charged as part of the Trump-Russia probe, Butina inserted herself into the National Rifle Association and ran in the top circles of power in U.S. politics. She was said to be facilitating backchannel communications between our leaders and Russia. Butina, at this time, was actively working against the United States.
Last week, she pleaded guilty to a crime of working as a foreign agent in the U.S. She was not charged with and will not be convicted of espionage. Let that sink in. My daughter Reality, who blew the whistle on Russian efforts to attack our election, is the traitor, the one guilty of espionage — but not a Russian agent and those working with her.
I totally understand the need for prosecutors to work with defendants to secure cooperation; incentives are certainly necessary. However, when you consider what this means for those without power or position, like Reality, it is also unjust. Treating Reality as an insider threat and using her and her sentence as a deterrent for others, yet allowing the likes of Cohen, Flynn, Gates, and Butina off easy for much more serious offenses undermines our entire system. It sends the clear message that if you are poor and powerless in this system, you will be abused.
I am outraged. I hope you are too.
The Intercept’s parent company First Look Media Works has contributed to Reality Winner’s legal defense.
The post My Daughter Reality Winner Faced Severe Punishment, but Key Figures in the Trump-Russia Scandal Are Getting Off Easy appeared first on The Intercept.
In the fall of 2017, Glenn Greenwald reported on a nationwide FBI manhunt for two pigs named Lily and Lizzie. The pigs had been removed from a factory farm in Utah by animal rights activists from a group called Direct Action Everywhere. From the perspective of the activists, the pigs were rescued. From the perspective of Smithfield Farms, the Chinese-owned multinational corporation that owns the factory farm, they were stolen.
Direct Action Everywhere, also known as DxE, engages in a practice called “open rescue.” Open rescue involves entering, without authorization, the facilities of animal-based industries, such as farms, slaughterhouses, and puppy mills, documenting the conditions within them, and removing as many animals as possible, usually from among the sick and injured. The activists don’t wear masks and make no effort to conceal their identities; they post the videos on social media for the world to see. By practically inviting prosecution, the activists aim to make a point: that the laws that regard these animals as mere property are wrong and that violating those laws is a moral imperative.
Since Greenwald’s story was published, prosecutors in Utah have charged six DxE activists with multiple felonies, both for the Smithfield action and for a separate open rescue of turkeys at a Utah factory farm owned by Norbest. In Utah, stealing property worth less than $1,500 is generally a misdemeanor. But lawmakers have carved out an exception specifically for the benefit of the animal agriculture industry. If the property in question is an animal “raised for commercial purposes,” then no matter how little economic value that animal may have, the crime is a felony. Because of this exception, DxE activists are potentially facing decades in prison.
Our new documentary tells the rest of the story to date. It’s an alarming example of the power of the animal agriculture industry, the confluence of interests between industry and law enforcement, and the appalling treatment of animals in industrial agricultural production.
The post They Rescued Pigs and Turkeys From Factory Farms — and Now Face Decades in Prison appeared first on The Intercept.
O interminável silêncio do motorista Queiroz não deixa dúvidas de que ele não tem como explicar as mutretas no gabinete de Flávio Bolsonaro, que envolvem o presidente eleito da República e sua esposa.
Há mais de duas semanas, a família Bolsonaro vem tentando se esquivar do assunto, limitando-se a dizer que é Queiroz quem deve ser questionado. Mas o amigo íntimo de quase 40 anos do presidente sumiu do mapa. Na última sexta-feira, ele faltou pela segunda vez a uma convocação para prestar depoimento no Ministério Público do Rio alegando doença. Essa dificuldade em explicar os desvios nos leva a supor que os envolvidos no caso ainda não combinaram uma boa desculpa.
O motorista mora numa casa simples e leva uma vida incompatível com a de um criminoso que liderava um esquema que desviava quantia milionária dos cofres públicos.
Já a família Bolsonaro, que multiplicou seu patrimônio na política, hoje conta com pelo menos R$ 15 milhões só em imóveis.
“Tudo funciona dentro do meu gabinete. Vocês estão criando uma história no imaginário das pessoas que não é verdade. Nós sempre trabalhamos super direitinho, super bem”, mentiu Flávio Bolsonaro. A sua família está longe de trabalhar “super direitinho” quando se trata da administração dos seus gabinetes.
Pouco se tem lembrado que o clã Bolsonaro tem larga tradição na distribuição de tetas públicas para amigos e parentes e no funcionalismo fantasma. É um costume de família. Com atuações parlamentares tímidas, para não dizer irrelevantes, a promiscuidade entre o público e o privado sempre foi uma das grandes marcas dos gabinetes dos Bolsonaro. Não foram poucas as vezes em que se descobriu que gente próxima da família recebia um salário público sem aparecer para trabalhar.
O caso Queiroz é só mais um entre tantos. Resolvi relembrar alguns casos antigos que mostram como o clã mais poderoso do país tem utilizado seus mandatos para abrigar amigo e parentes no serviço público. Nem todos os casos são ilegais, mas demonstram que o zelo pelo dinheiro público nunca foi um princípio caro dentro dos seus gabinetes.
Todos os casos citados abaixo já foram publicados na mídia. Portanto, não há novidades. O intuito é colocar o caso Queiroz sob perspectiva e registrar o uso do dinheiro público para favorecimento particular como uma tradição familiar.
Ana Cristina Valle – é aquela ex-mulher que negou ter sido ameaçada de morte por Jair Bolsonaro durante a campanha mesmo depois de aparecer um documento oficial do Itamaraty em que ela relatou a ameaça. Antes de virar candidata à deputada federal usando o sobrenome do ex-marido, e não se eleger, Ana Cristina conseguiu emprego nos gabinetes da família Bolsonaro não apenas para ela, mas também para seus parentes.
No fim de 1998, quando seu filho com Jair Bolsonaro ainda não tinha completado um ano, Ana Cristina foi trabalhar no gabinete da liderança do PPB, a sigla pela qual Bolsonaro acabara de ser eleito.
Em 2000, se mudou para o Rio de Janeiro para trabalhar no gabinete do vereador Carlos Bolsonaro, onde ficou por seis anos. Em 2018, foi ser chefe de gabinete do vereador Renan Marassi que, vejam só que coincidência, é de Resende — base eleitoral dos Bolsonaro — e um grande aliado político. No mês seguinte à contratação, mais uma nova coincidência: o vereador foi com o prefeito de Resende até Brasília para agradecer Bolsonaro pelas emendas que destinaram verbas para o município.
Andrea Valle – a ex-cunhada de Bolsonaro estreou no serviço público ganhando uma tetinha no gabinete de Jair Bolsonaro em 1998, mesmo ano em que sua irmã deu a luz ao filho de Bolsonaro. Ela foi nomeada assessora na Câmara, onde ficou até 2006.
Dois anos depois, uma semana após o STF proibir a contratação de parentes de até terceiro grau para cargos de confiança, o então deputado estadual Flávio Bolsonaro nomeou a ex-cunhada do pai para trabalhar em seu gabinete.
Durante 10 anos, Andrea recebeu R$ 7,3 mil entre salário e gratificações, além de mais R$ 1,1 mil em auxílio escolar. Há um ano, reportagem do O Globo foi procurá-la no gabinete por duas vezes, mas os funcionários nunca haviam ouvido falar dela. Flávio garante que ela não era funcionária-fantasma. Segundo ele, ela não aparecia no gabinete porque ficava em Resende organizando reuniões e fazendo divulgação e panfletagem das atividades parlamentares.
José Cândido Procópio Valle – é pai de Ana Cristina e Andrea. O ex-sogro de Jair foi nomeado como assessor do seu gabinete também no mesmo ano em que Renan Bolsonaro nasceu. Mas não foi para Brasília, ficou no Rio de Janeiro prestando assessoramento parlamentar. Em 2003, foi trabalhar no gabinete de Flávio Bolsonaro, onde ficou durante cinco anos. Foi exonerado no mesmo dia em que sua filha Andrea foi contratada para o mesmo cargo.
Renato Antônio Bolsonaro – o irmão de Jair Bolsonaro mora em Miracatu, interior de São Paulo. Já foi candidato a prefeito da cidade, é dono de quatro lojas de móveis na região e trabalhou como assessor especial no gabinete do deputado estadual André do Prado (PR). Reportagem do SBT acompanhou a rotina do irmão de Bolsonaro e constatou que ele não só não aparecia no gabinete do deputado como também não exercia nenhuma atividade ligada ao parlamentar em sua cidade. O irmão de Jair Bolsonaro sugava cerca R$ 17 mil dos cofres públicos por mês, totalizando aproximadamente R$ 230 mil por ano. Foram três anos nessa mamata. Após a revelação do caso, Renato foi exonerado.
Assim como a filha do Queiroz, que ganhava salário como funcionária do gabinete de Jair Bolsonaro, mas atuava como personal trainer de celebridades no Rio, Renato se dedicava exclusivamente à administração das suas lojas.
Waldirene dos Santos Conceição – conhecida como Wal do Açaí, ela constava como funcionária do gabinete de Jair Bolsonaro desde 2003, mas jamais exerceu o cargo público. Wal trabalhava vendendo açaí em Angra dos Reis, na mesma rua em que Bolsonaro tem uma casa de veraneio. Segundo moradores da cidade, Wal prestava serviços na casa de Jair, onde seu marido trabalhava como caseiro. Ou seja, durante mais de uma década, Bolsonaro usou dinheiro público para pagar uma funcionária particular.
Depois que a Folha revelou o caso, Jair exonerou a funcionária, assinando o atestado de culpa. Preocupado com a campanha eleitoral, entrou com pedido no TSE para que as reportagens a respeito fossem retiradas do ar.
Enquanto baixo clero, a família Bolsonaro tratou a coisa pública como se fosse um puxadinho da sua casa. Distribuiu cargos para amigos, parentes e fantasmas. Mesmo assim, uma das palavras de ordem que impulsionou o bolsonarismo foi: “a mamata vai acabar!” Nada indica que essa família muito unida e ouriçada vá se emendar quando papai subir a rampa do Planalto. O Brasil anda numa fase tão surrealista, que é capaz de Jair Bolsonaro desfilar no Rolls Royce presidencial no dia da posse tendo Queiroz como motorista.
The post Caso do motorista que movimentou milhões é apenas mais uma das suspeitas de mutreta do clã Bolsonaro appeared first on The Intercept.
At least 222 people have reportedly been killed along the Sunda Strait in Indonesia, and another 800 injured late Saturday night by a tsunami, likely triggered by an eruption of the Anak Krakatau volcano. Water swept along the shoreline with no warning, crashing into homes, hotels, and beach side holiday events. Electricity and water services, as well as roads, have been badly damaged; remote areas have been the hardest hit.
Everything is formed by habit. The crow’s feet that come from squinting or laughter, the crease in a treasured and oft-opened letter, the ruts worn in a path frequently traveled—all are created by repeatedly performing the same action.
Even neurons are formed by habit. When continuously exposed to a fixed stimulus, neurons become steadily less sensitive to that stimulus—until they eventually stop responding to it altogether.
Anything that’s habitually encountered—the landscape of a daily commute, storefronts passed on a walk to the bus stop, photographs arranged on a mantelpiece—tends toward invisibility. The more we see a thing, the less we see it. Familiarity breeds neglect.
Once perception settles into a comfortable pattern, we fall asleep to it. Only when the pattern is broken do we notice there is a pattern at all. The chains of mental habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson.
[Read: What ‘food porn’ does to the brain]
Wit, whether visual or verbal, can make the commonplace uncommon again by breaking the habits that render perception routine. We tend to define the quality of wit as merely being deft with a clever comeback. But true wit is richer, cannier, more riddling. And the best of it is often based on a biological phenomenon called supernormal stimuli.
The story of supernormal stimuli begins with the Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. As a boy growing up in The Hague in the 1910s, Tinbergen was fascinated by the fish and fowl inhabiting the little pond in his backyard. These early encounters with the wildlife of the Netherlands informed his later work, and as an adult, he kept an aquarium in his home.
One day he noticed that the male three-spined sticklebacks—which have “gorgeous nuptial colors,” Tinbergen observed, “red on the throat and breast, greenish-blue on the back”—went into attack mode every time a red postal van parked outside. They dropped their heads and raised their dorsal fins, a posture normally assumed only in the presence of a rival male.
Wondering whether the fish were reacting to the postal van, Tinbergen introduced variously colored objects into the tank. He discovered that the males became aggressive in response to anything red—the unmistakable sign of another male’s presence—regardless of whether it resembled a fish. The observation sparked Tinbergen’s discovery of color’s influence on animal behavior, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973.
When he wasn’t observing three-spined sticklebacks, Tinbergen spent a lot of time with adult herring-gull hens, which have pronounced orange spots on their lower mandibles. For the first few weeks of a chick’s life, its mother’s beak is its sole food source. That orange spot is a good target for chicks to aim at when they peck at their mother to prompt her to regurgitate food.
Tinbergen noticed that the chicks in his lab, like the male sticklebacks in his aquarium, aggressively pecked not just at their mother’s beak but at anything with an orange spot on it. It occurred to him that it might be possible to one-up nature, to “make a dummy that would stimulate the chick still more than the natural object,” he wrote.
So Tinbergen started making “super-gulls”: cobbled-together constructions that amplified the orange spot to which the chicks so enthusiastically responded. He painted orange spots on everything from old pieces of wood to kitchen utensils. He made the orange spots bigger and surrounded them with white rings to enhance the contrast. The chicks pecked at absolutely everything that had an orange spot on it. The bigger the spot, the more aggressively the chicks pecked.
Tinbergen called his exaggerated orange spots “supernormal stimuli,” which, he concluded, “offer stimulus situations that are even more effective than the natural situation.” This response to supernormal stimuli is not limited to herring gulls. Chicks from all species will beg for food from a fake bill if it has more dramatic markings than its parents have, and parents will ignore their own eggs and attempt to incubate much larger objects—including volleyballs—if those objects are decorated to resemble eggs.
Tinbergen theorized that human beings are susceptible to supernormal stimuli, too. The oversized eyes of stuffed animals, dolls, and cartoon characters are supernormal, he reasoned, kick-starting our instinctive response to nurture anything with infantile facial features. Sugar-saturated soft drinks, works of art, clothing, perfume, even lipstick—anything that intensifies or exaggerates an instinctive biological, physical, or psychological response—can be considered supernormal stimuli.
Supernormal stimuli are key to certain kinds of wit, too, deliberately skewing or exaggerating our usual patterns of perception. The great silent comic Buster Keaton is a case in point.
In The High Sign (1921), as Keaton settles down on a bench to read his local daily, he unfolds the paper to standard broadsheet format. He soon notices, though, that the newspaper is bigger than he expected, so he continues unfolding it—first to roughly the surface area of an ample picnic blanket, then easily to the proportions of a king-size bedsheet, until he’s finally engulfed by a single gigantic swath of newsprint.
In Seven Chances (1925), Keaton, a stockbroker on the verge of financial ruin, learns that he will inherit handsomely from his grandfather—if he weds by 7 p.m. When his sweetheart rebuffs him (she will marry for love, not for money), he places an open offer of marriage, with details of the pecuniary benefits, in the newspaper. Hundreds of women turn up at the church for the ceremony, only to become enraged at Keaton’s tactics. The bevy of would-be brides chases him out of town and onto a nearby hill, where he dislodges a single rock, which sets in motion an avalanche of boulders, which rain down on our hapless groom’s head.
Keaton’s gags start innocuously enough, with some ordinary object, then snowball into supernormal stimuli. But stimuli can also be made supernormal by visual or verbal tricks that disrupt the ordinary ways we see and understand the world.
Marcel Mariën’s work is rife with such tricks. Mariën started out as a photographer’s apprentice while still in his teens. But in 1935, after seeing the work of René Magritte for the first time, he decided on a career as an artist, soon becoming a close friend of Magritte and one of the most prominent of the Belgian surrealists. He worked in a variety of media—photography; film; collage; and “ready-mades,” works of art assembled from discarded materials, common household items, or unused parts of other objects.
In Star Dancer (1991), Mariën attached a doll’s high-heel shoe to one of the arms of a dead starfish, transforming it into a wispy, Matisse-esque ballerina. The strange juxtaposition makes the viewer do a double take. How can such a clearly alien creature have such distinctly human expressiveness? Like the volleyball/egg that birds try to incubate, the cobbled-together starfish/doll becomes a supernormal stimulus that alters viewers’ perceptions.
The same principle is at work in verbal wit. The English film director Anthony Asquith, for example, once introduced Jean Harlow, the platinum-blond 1930s Hollywood star, to his mother, Lady Margot Asquith, the author and wife of the longtime British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith. Harlow mispronounced Lady Margot’s first name, sounding the final t, as in forgot. “The t is silent, my dear,” Asquith snipped, “as in Harlow.” Lady Margot isolated and exaggerated the significance of the simple t, just as Tinbergen isolated and exaggerated the herring gull’s orange spot, thereby dramatically enhancing its impact.
What is a punch line but a supernormal stimulus?
We respond to witty words and images more intensely than to “normal” objects, just as Tinbergen’s theory of supernormal stimuli suggests. “Humor at its best is a kind of heightened truth—a super-truth,” E. B. White wrote. This is also true of wit, which takes routine seeing and heightens it by shearing ordinary things and meanings of their habitual context, revealing them as suddenly strange and unfamiliar.
This piece was adapted from James Geary’s new book, Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It.
After Maryanne Pope’s husband, John, died in September 2000, the first Christmas without him, just a few months later, was a struggle. She used to cherish decorating a Christmas tree in her Calgary, Canada, home, but that year, there was no joy to be found.
“Putting up a tree didn’t feel right to me. There was absolutely nothing to celebrate,” says Pope, the author of A Widow’s Awakening. “Plus, I may have had the intuitive wisdom to know that unpacking all the familiar decorations would be a disaster.” She tried again the next year, but “every ornament was like unpacking a land mine,” she says. “The memories were extremely painful.”
Instead, she tried something new.
“I put up a string of white lights on the hearth of our fireplace, where there were some photographs of John,” she says. “I did Christmas very differently.”
As the years went by, Christmas got a little easier to bear, and she began to love the season again, especially the lights she would always put up in honor of her husband. “I finally began to realize that I was going to have to toss the traditions that were causing me even more anguish,” she says. “I had to learn how to set boundaries so that I could celebrate the Christmas season the way I wanted to.”
Behind all the presents and the abundance of food and drinks, the holidays are fundamentally about spending time with family and friends. But after the death of a loved one, a season of indulgent celebration can feel perverse to the bereaved. While the logistics of holiday travel, meals, and gifts can be tricky for just about anyone to navigate, grieving people may also grapple with an array of unfamiliar emotions and unenviable practical considerations, whether it’s the anxiety of gathering in a different place, whether to decorate the home as in previous years, or, simply, how to get through it all without their loved one around. The holidays are never an easy time for those who are in mourning, but they can also provide a clarifying opportunity to create a new host of routines, rituals, and behaviors for a new stage in life.
[Read: In grief, try personal rituals]
For those who are facing the first holiday season without a loved one, one of the biggest challenges is just wading through the deluge of raw grief.
Catherine, a 45-year-old woman in the Kansas City area who asked to be identified by only her first name to speak openly about her grief, told me she lost her mother two years ago, four days after Christmas. In the past, Christmas in her household had been a festive time of decorating, baking, and soaking up the atmosphere of her mother’s favorite holiday.
“Last year, I didn't do any of those things. I asked not to exchange gifts and just did the best I could to get through Christmas,” she says. “I was so lost in the first year that I couldn’t conceive of following family traditions. I was struggling to merely make it to work.”
That sense of holiday-season malaise is echoed by Rachel Gebler Greenberg of Hermosa Beach, California, who lost her husband, Glenn, in March 2013. She remembers lying low during the first few holidays. With family scattered all over the country, the prospect of traveling became especially difficult—one time, she arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and broke down at baggage claim, realizing that Glenn wouldn’t be there to greet her.
To avoid spending every waking moment thinking about their loss, some people I spoke with mentioned trying to stay busy in the weeks and months leading up to the holidays. Corina Saucedo, a 32-year-old nurse from Evergreen Park, Illinois, lost her mother in February. Saucedo says she’s scheduled herself to work overtime because that’s the only way for her to stay distracted. “My family knows I love my job, but they do worry I am overworked,” she told me. “I have not given myself time to grieve.”
Julie Hazelwanter, 54, from Airdrie, Canada, lost her son, William, in October. She’s preoccupying herself by putting all her energy into preparing for two separate Christmas gatherings that she had planned before her son’s death. “It’s definitely a bigger workload this year,” she says. “It keeps my mind off of everything, I guess.”
Still, in the face of all that pain in a season when seemingly everyone else is holly jolly, experts told me that some proven strategies can help people move forward from the sadness, irrespective of how fresh the feelings are. The impulse to clam up about the deceased at a family dinner isn’t necessarily the best move; the Grief Recovery Institute has found that the biggest need for people in mourning is to “talk about what happened and my relationship with the person who died.”
Mari Itzkowitz, a clinical therapist at the Center for Loss and Renewal in Alexandria, Virginia, says that talking about loved ones is key. “Light a candle, say the names, bring the people into the room,” Itzkowitz told me. “You’re the one to bring it in, you’re the one to bring it up, which then gives people permission to celebrate the joy.” In other words, “you’re allowed to feel really bad.”
Another key to working through grief, Itzkowitz says, is figuring out new rituals and traditions. Say Grandma always hosted a holiday meal at her house—how should a family handle planning the first year without her?
“It’s about everybody having a conversation together and saying, ‘Okay, this sucks. We can’t do it this way. What is the new tradition we would like to create for our family moving forward?” Itzkowitz says.
Indeed, many of the grieving people I talked with mentioned recalibrating the holiday season with new routines and traditions, whether it’s minor tweaks or major changes.
Hazelwanter told me that she plans to place an ornament with William’s name on it on her Christmas tree. “I know we’ll talk about Willie and have memories of him,” she says. “As long as everybody’s comfortable talking about him, I think that’s pretty much all we would do—include him in conversation.”
Gebler Greenberg told me that because her husband was Jewish, she has started to incorporate some of his rituals into the holidays, like teaching her grandchildren about Hanukkah and bringing them gelt. Honoring him with new traditions, she says, “makes it better.”
Saucedo told me that during the holidays, her mother would help manage her father, who struggles with alcohol abuse. Now that she’s gone, Saucedo has taken on that responsibility herself. “She loved and respected my dad despite his drinking, drug use, and lack of parental support,” Saucedo says. “We try not to upset each other—that’s what my mom would have wanted.”
Of course, new routines and traditions aren’t some elixir for the pain of a loved one’s death. And some people aren’t quite ready to lose their cherished traditions. As Catherine tells me, “I can see a possibility of new ways to celebrate in the future, but I’m not there yet.” Still, as Itzkowitz says, breaking the “normal” habits of the holidays can be an illuminating experience for those in mourning.
Maryanne Pope says she knows her late husband would be glad she continues their tradition of kicking off the holiday season by watching their all-time favorite movie, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
“The first time I watched it after his death was pretty difficult. But I still laughed at the funny scenes,” she says. “And now, after all these years, every time I watch it, I always take away something different. And I always laugh.”
Starting around Thanksgiving, one can hardly run an errand or ride an elevator without being serenaded by Christmas music. The songs cover familiar seasonal territory—silver bells, open sleighs, roasting chestnuts—as well as a timeless emotion: desire. Just think of Eartha Kitt flirting with “Santa Baby,” Mariah Carey donning a Santa hat to sing “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” or George Michael pining for a lost love in “Last Christmas,” by Wham! But all of those romantic lyrics about wanting and wishing also happen to tap into a different, but no less powerful desire: the urge to shop.
Which is one reason there’s a holiday classic that those racing to finish their gift shopping won’t hear this year: “Green Christmas,” by Stan Freberg. When it was released by Capitol Records 60 years ago, the song caused a huge backlash from major advertisers, many of whom threatened to pull radio ads in protest. A young DJ at the time—one George Carlin—was almost fired for playing it on the air. “Green Christmas” (originally styled “Green Chri$tma$”) can best be described as a holiday choral jazz parody inspired by the narrative of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Updated from 1840s England to 1950s America, the 1958 track is set in an advertising agency where the company chairman is named Mr. Scrooge, and a client named Bob Cratchit wants to devise a purely humanitarian holiday message for his small spice company.
In Freberg’s recording—which is part song, part extended skit—the color green refers not to environmental concerns but to cold, hard cash. At a meeting where clients have been invited to propose Christmas advertising gambits, one describes a plan to put up billboards of Santa Claus smoking his brand’s cigarettes and flexing a pair of toned biceps—one with a tattoo that says “Merry Christmas,” the other sporting ink that says “Less Tar.” When Bob Cratchit says he plans to send his customers cards featuring the three wise men following the star of Bethlehem, Scrooge at first thinks he understands the ploy: “I get it! And they’re bearing your spices. Now, that’s perfect.” When Cratchit says the card will just say “Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men,” a fellow executive at the table mutters, “Well, that’s a peculiar slogan.”
As in a Broadway musical, the dialogue in “Green Christmas” is frequently interrupted by people bursting into song. When the chorus sings “Deck the Halls With Advertising,” an announcer promoting the fictional Tiny Tim Chestnuts intones, “Tiny Tim’s roast hot like a chestnut ought!” echoing the famous slogan “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” Mr. Scrooge laments that Christmas comes but once a year, adding that it’s incumbent upon businesses to seize the shopping season. Cratchit tells Scrooge that “people keep hoping you’ll remember” whose birthday Christmas celebrates, but no one listens. The song closes with a chorus of “Jingle Bells” highlighted with the sound of a ringing cash register. Cratchit’s disappointment echoes that of his namesake in A Christmas Carol, but instead of worrying for his own family, this Cratchit is concerned about the disdain with which Scrooge and his company seem to treat the buying public—which is to say, everyone. And unlike Dickens’s Scrooge, this one experiences no Christmas awakening.
Freberg, who was born in 1926 and died only a few years ago, knew whereof he wrote. In addition to being a successful voice artist, comedian, and writer, he was also a creative director who was widely credited with helping introduce satire to the previously irony-free world of advertising. He won 21 Clio Awards over the course of his career, during which he created successful ads for Heinz, Sunsweet Prunes, Jeno’s Pizza Rolls, Encyclopedia Britannica, and scores of others. One product you won’t find on Freberg’s credit list is tobacco: He was steadfast in his objection to advertising cigarettes. And there was, in fact, a Stan Freberg Show, which premiered on CBS Radio in 1957 as a replacement for Jack Benny’s program. Freberg’s stance on tobacco resulted in the show’s failing to attract a sponsor; it lasted only 15 episodes. In other words, the fact that you might not be familiar with Freberg’s work underscores the message of “Green Christmas.”
When the song was first released, Freberg was told by a Capitol executive that he’d never work in advertising again. The record was lambasted in advertising trade magazines, and caused advertisers to demand that their segments be played with a buffer of at least 15 minutes from the song. A station manager at KCBS-TV in Los Angeles described “Green Christmas”—apparently without irony—as “sacrilegious.” But Freberg wrote in his 1988 autobiography, It Only Hurts When I Laugh, that despite the attempts to limit the exposure of “Green Christmas,” he got loads of fan mail about the record, much of which came from members of the clergy who admired its message. About six months after the song’s release, Coca-Cola and Marlboro both approached Freberg to work on satirical ads, and though he rejected Marlboro, he ended up worked with Coca-Cola on a successful campaign. Despite (or perhaps because) of the controversy, Freberg’s career as an adman spanned decades.
The ruthlessly commodified landscape that Freberg warned about hasn’t gone away. If anything, it has only grown more insidious: Social media, smart devices, and native-ad content have made Christmas commerce impossible to avoid. The low-key, conversational tone of much contemporary advertising allows it to fade seamlessly into the background noise of daily life. The Mr. Scrooge of “Green Christmas” would be positively giddy at the idea of digital beacons that track your movements via your smartphone, then creepily show you online ads for the very thing you just shopped for in real life. And the fact that you tend to hear cheery Christmas songs while shopping is not an accident: Retail “soundtracks” have been a fixture of the holiday season in America since Muzak went mainstream in the 1950s. But retailers also understand that there’s a fine line between setting a festive tone in stores and driving shoppers crazy. Over and above sheer auditory annoyance, the tension between loving and loathing holiday tunes is just one facet of a long-standing ambivalence about Christmas and consumerism.
[Read: The joy of no-gift Christmas]
One vein of Christmas commentary holds that the holiday has become much more businesslike than it used to be. However one might feel about the ways in which the holiday today differs from that of a fondly remembered childhood, modern Christmas itself is as old as Americans’ anxieties about its alleged commercialization.
The way Christmas is now celebrated, with its twin focus on retail and childhood, is a cultural tradition that dates back less than 200 years. Even the way one imagines Santa’s workshop, which is superficially rustic but conceptually modern, contains a subtle critique of 19th-century capitalism. One classic depiction comes from an 1866 Harper’s Weekly illustration by Thomas Nast called Santa Claus and His Works, which shows Saint Nick sewing clothing for dolls, finishing wooden toys by hand, and consulting a hefty Record of Behavior—presumably to prepare for the big December 24 toy run. Santa’s portrayal here is like the Christmas equivalent of a Craftsman-style bungalow, or a 19th-century Gothic Revival building: It employs the imagery of a romanticized medieval past to disguise the guts of a rapidly industrializing consumer culture.
As soon as Christmas was transformed from a feast day—with festivities more akin to the carousing that now happens on New Year’s Eve—into a cozy domestic holiday geared toward children, adults became concerned that the focus on gift-giving would spoil children. Stephen Nissenbaum, the author of The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday, notes that the publisher Horace Greeley took to the pages of the New-York Tribune (the paper he founded) in the 1840s, right around the time that Americans were reading A Christmas Carol, to admonish readers about consumerism defiling Christmas. The historically thrifty culture of the U.S. was being steered toward a new kind of consumerism, and direct connections between the figure of Santa Claus and a patriotic duty to shop during economic lean times were being made in print ads regularly by the middle of the 19th century. Promoted as a wholesome, preindustrial figure who makes toys by hand, Santa was the ideal figure to divert attention away from mass production; in some ways, he helped comfort a public uneasy about industrialization.
This kind of anti-commercial critique was all over the place during the economic boom time of the 1950s and ’60s—when “Green Christmas” came out. In Dr. Seuss’s 1957 How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Whos of Whoville proved that the Grinch couldn’t steal their Christmas spirit, because it’s not a commodity that can be given or taken away. And in A Charlie Brown Christmas, which premiered in 1965, Charlie and Linus turned their backs on Lucy’s gaudy forest of pink aluminum Christmas trees, and celebrated the message of “peace and goodwill towards men” with a forlorn, nearly bare pine tree that sagged under the weight of a single ornament. This idea—that we need only one another, standing firm inside the eye of a powerful retail hurricane—is presented anew in some form each December, revealing something about a given era’s particular relationship with consumerism.
“Green Christmas” would have been a kind of thinking person’s Christmas classic had it been widely shared when it first debuted. Perhaps because Charlie Brown and the Grinch delivered their versions of the “Green Christmas” message in a softer voice—aimed (like the holiday itself) at children, and without taking such direct aim at business and advertising—adults were more receptive to it. After all, kids are usually not the ones making purchasing decisions, which leaves grown-ups to wrestle with the question of whether to indulge in a festive retail splurge or to adopt a more austere, buy-nothing ethos and suffer the consequences on Christmas morning. No store would dare play anything as gauche as “Deck the Halls With Advertising,” but Freberg’s holiday masterpiece is a timely reminder this season, not necessarily to abstain from shopping altogether, but maybe to at least think before we buy.
One went to Congress, served on the House Rules and the Ways and Means Committees—and now toils as a county commissioner. Another was a scion of a powerful business and political family, became lieutenant governor, narrowly missed being elected to Congress—and now gives speeches about depression and is working on a novel. A third hoped to be on the Federal Reserve board—and is now pursuing Japanese flower arranging. Two went to jail, one of them twice. One has been chair of the Democratic National Committee twice.
These are some of the political stars of the future I profiled in the pages of The Wall Street Journal 31 years ago—a long-ago time when Michael Douglas declared greed to be good, when Ronald Reagan urged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, when Jim Bakker resigned from his PTL Club pulpit, and when I was a young political writer given a prized assignment: Look across the country—dig into state legislatures, examine grassroots political organizations, roam the halls of Congress—and identify the 10 people who would dominate American politics in the 21st century.
Sadly, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump did not make the Journal Ten. No one on Earth envisioned any of them living in the White House. Nor did Paul Ryan, Elizabeth Warren, or Kamala Harris make the cut. They were living in true obscurity. Mike Pence was about to lose a House race. Hardly anyone even in his Indiana district paid him any mind. Sonia Sotomayor was on the State of New York Mortgage Agency board. No one thought that was a launching pad to the Supreme Court.
But as I reconnected in recent months with all 10 of those who were on the list—the two who hoped they might be chosen vice president but weren’t, the one who thought she would help elect her presidential candidate but didn’t, and the one who, after getting in a bad bicycle accident, abandoned thoughts of running for office and is now running to stay healthy—it became clear that, in the lives of the politically gifted as in the lives of the rest of us, the state of the family is more important than the state of the nation. And as I evaluated what happened to these men and women of great potential, it was evident that nearly all of them regarded their political lives as peripheral to their personal lives.
“I had great success early,” said John Rowland, who served in Congress and won three terms in the governor’s chair in Connecticut before serving two terms in prison. “Sometimes success in the early years makes it hard to get wisdom. But there’s a lesson: Hold on to what is important in life—faith, family, and friends.”
Indeed, reuniting with these men and women who had great futures in their past provides a fascinating testimony to what matters in their lives and in life itself, which in many of these cases was good works far outside politics. And the astonishing ties among the members of the Journal Ten—none of whom knew one another when the original piece was published in 1987—provide evidence that partisanship and ambition are not necessarily barriers to human impulses. Mari Maseng Will, who prepares Republican candidates for televised debates, and Donna Brazile, the two-time Democratic chair, have become close friends. Pat Nolan, a former Republican leader of the California State Assembly, counseled Rowland on what to expect in prison.
For some of the Journal Ten, the national exposure that the piece provided was but a preface to greater attention in ever greater roles. For others, it was their single heady moment in the spotlight. Scott McInnis, a Republican state representative in Colorado at the time of his selection, framed the piece, the only newspaper clipping he ever placed behind glass. “It was,” he said, “a big, big deal to me.”
Here are the 10 people the Journal identified three decades ago as the great stars of our time, and what happened to them in the period between the Ronald Reagan presidency and the Donald Trump administration:
CHET EDWARDS (1987: Democratic state senator from Texas)
The onetime youngest member of the Texas Senate and the protégé of longtime Representative Olin Teague of College Station, Texas, Edwards emerged as one of the most innovative lawmakers in Austin, co-authoring a state deregulation statute, writing a plan to encourage agricultural diversification in the state, and sculpting a legislative package that restructured universities’ research programs, encouraged women and minorities to enter engineering fields, and clarified university intellectual-property policies.
Edwards served in the Texas Senate for eight years and then moved to Congress, where his district included George W. Bush’s Crawford presidential retreat and where he eventually became chair of the Appropriations subcommittee on military construction and veterans’ affairs—and was one of the figures Senator Barack Obama vetted to be his running mate. He was swept out of office in the anti-Democratic wave of 2010 and now holds the W. R. Poage Distinguished Chair of Public Service at Baylor University, is a partner in a Dallas accounting firm, and is co-chair of the Arlington National Cemetery advisory committee.
“Life turned out far better for me than I expected in 1987,” he said. “I went from being a 35-year-old bachelor to a very happy husband and father of two sons. The biggest change in my life in these 31 years is that new dimension of family that made life more meaningful.”
PATRICK J. NOLAN (1987: Republican state-assembly leader in California)
He volunteered for Ronald Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign, was a leader of the Young Americans for Freedom, created one of the most effective political operations in California history, and had his eye on the speakership of the state assembly, then perhaps on becoming attorney general and eventually governor.
“Life didn’t turn out for me the way I expected,” he said. “I seemed on the fast track. From the beginning, I felt God’s hand on me and an assurance he was with me and would guide me.” There was a pause, and Nolan teared up and apologized, explaining that he eventually served 29 months in prison for racketeering. “It wasn’t a path I would have chosen, but God used that experience,” he said.
Nolan eventually worked for 18 years with Charles Colson, who went to prison on obstruction-of-justice charges in the Watergate scandal and founded the Prison Fellowship. Like Colson, Nolan—once at the forefront of the drive to retain capital punishment in California—grew committed to prison reform. He and fellow WSJ future star Brazile, among others, sponsored a Washington conference on criminal-justice reform, and he has emerged as one of the most prominent conservatives rallying to the cry of overhauling the prison system.
“When Pat was in the legislature, he was a standard law-and-order conservative without any understanding of the consequences of our prison system,” said David Keene, former chairman of the American Conservative Union. “He came out with a far different perspective, and he understood that it didn’t work at all.”
Today, Nolan, who recalls the television cameras that were at the prison gates “to record my debasement,” argues that the sense of redemption at the heart of the American character is absent in U.S. prisons. “Prisons are for people we are afraid of,” he said. “What we do is stupid—but also wrong morally. No sentence for a crime should do more damage than the underlying crime itself.”
ROBERT KERR III (1987: Democratic lieutenant governor of Oklahoma)
The grandson of the late Senator Robert Kerr—who in his trademark hopsack blue shirt and red suspenders was a fabled orator, the Capitol Hill spokesman for Big Oil, and the architect of massive water projects that brought life to much of dry Oklahoma—Kerr was marked early for success. He served a single term in the state House before becoming lieutenant governor, and his emphasis was on economic development at a time when the collapse of agriculture and oil transformed the state from prosperity to distress.
His route to bigger things ended when he lost a Democratic primary to Bill Brewster, whose two children were killed in an airplane crash the day he announced his candidacy to succeed longtime Representative Wes Watkins in 1990. That made it impossible for Kerr to prevail over a rival draped in tragedy. “He would have been elected to Congress,” said Robert Henry, a former state attorney general, “and who knows how high he could have gone.”
Instead, he was laid low by repeated bouts of depression, was divorced, sought treatment, went into public finance and investment banking, and now is a petroleum landman, identifying real-estate ownership and operating as a lease agent for drilling. But his greatest impact may be in speeches in which he seeks to explain the effects of depression.
“That old public-service inclination has kicked in, so I can be a voice in fighting the stigma of depression and advocating for better mental health in our state,” he said. “So many people don’t have to be handicapped by this if we would just take care of people.”
MARI MASENG WILL (1987: press secretary for Robert Dole’s presidential campaign)
She once covered the crime beat for the Charleston, South Carolina, Evening Post; was an aide to Nancy Reagan; was a speechwriter for President Reagan; worked for both Robert and Elizabeth Dole; was director of the White House Office of Public Liaison; served as a vice president of Beatrice Companies; helped Cindy McCain with her 2008 Republican National Convention speech; and, four years after the original Journal piece was published, married the columnist George F. Will.
[Read: Should George Will have to disclose his wife’s clients?]
Today, Mari Maseng Will specializes in debate prep for Republican candidates, working on the campaigns of such figures as Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Governor Rick Perry of Texas, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, and Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska.
“I help people get their message out, and I love it because it requires me to be constantly up for all the issues and working for people who believe in what I believe in,” she said. “Every candidate is different; all have different gifts. There’s no template, but there is a method: You understand the strategy of their race, and you get them to refine what they want to say through discipline.”
TERESA VILMAIN (1987: chief Iowa organizer for Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign)
As one of eight children, Vilmain realized early the importance of organization, a lesson she took from her family and applied to politics. She worked for Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign and then moved to Dukakis’s, providing the Massachusetts governor with a statewide organization and an army of volunteers. In doing so, she was described by former Representative Bob Edgar of Pennsylvania as “visionary in terms of organization.” Phil Roeder, then an Iowa Democratic Party official, credited her with “infectious energy and commitment.”
Vilmain, who now lives outside Madison, Wisconsin, was for a time the most sought-after Democratic political organizer in the country. “I didn’t have a cult following,” she said. “I just worked for people who did.”
Today, Vilmain is undertaking projects to register people to vote—especially the young, the unmarried, and people of color—and to encourage women to be more engaged in ballot measures, candidates, and issues. She is also involved in the Rockefeller Family Fund, specializing in economic justice for women.
After a bike accident, she decided to train for triathlons. “I’m just trying to stay healthy,” she told me. “I never did that back when you first interviewed me. I’m living more healthily than I did back then.”
JOHN ROWLAND (1987: Republican congressman from Connecticut)
The first Republican state representative from Waterbury in a century, Rowland moved fast, becoming minority whip in the House chamber in Hartford after only two terms, defeating three-term Representative William Ratchford to become the youngest member of the U.S. House, then becoming governor, the first in two centuries to win three terms. Among other things, he implemented a plan to provide health insurance to children and fostered economic development in the state’s cities.
Then things fell apart. He resigned the governorship and went to jail for mail and tax fraud in 2005, was released, and rebuffed an invitation from Colson to join the Prison Fellowship. “I said, ‘No, I had bigger fish to fry,’” he recalled. But Rowland returned to jail a decade later, this time for election fraud. He was released in May, worked for a time booking weddings at the Chippanee Country Club in Bristol, Connecticut—and finally joined the Prison Fellowship, where today he handles the Northeast as development director.
“I learned the wrong lessons in politics,” he said. “Politics is not the real world. Everyone in Washington is so self-important, thinking they are changing the world when they are really running in place.”
He said he would dissuade any young person from running for Congress. “If you want to be in politics,” he said, “be a selectman in your town.”
DONNA BRAZILE (1987: national field director, Richard A. Gephardt’s presidential campaign)
The daughter of a janitor and a maid, a Louisiana State University activist, and a Carter-Mondale organizer at age 16, a young Brazile wrote in her diary that she wanted to manage a presidential campaign someday. In 2000, she became the first black woman to reach that position, directing the Al Gore campaign.
[Read: What Donna Brazile’s new book really reveals]
In the years since that diary entry, she has become one of the most prominent Democrats of her era. She emerged on the national scene in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, was a prominent figure in the effort to win a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and was a center of controversy for sharing debate questions with the Hillary Clinton campaign. Along the way, she has taught college and lectured at 215 universities.
She also served on the board of directors at the Louisiana Recovery Authority after Hurricane Katrina wreaked its devastation. “I’ve had several stumbling blocks in my career,” she said, “but I never anticipated that a major hurricane would destroy my hometown of New Orleans and set my family back a decade.”
Brazile has often said she wants to be a university president by age 60. She turned 59 this month.
SCOTT McINNIS (1987: Republican state representative in Colorado)
McInnis’s star shone bright from the start. A former police officer and fourth-generation Coloradan who won his state House seat by 13 votes, the closest legislative race in Colorado history, he became chair of the state House Agriculture, Livestock, Natural Resources and Wildlife Committee and—in large measure because of his skill in appealing to environmentalists, hunters, and energy interests—was being groomed for a seat in Congress when the original Journal story appeared.
He won that seat, kept it for six terms, served on both the Rules and the Ways and Means Committees, and returned to Colorado, in part to care for his aging parents. He fought off a messy claim of plagiarism and narrowly lost a gubernatorial race. Then he went into business but had what he described as “heavy withdrawal pains of missing politics.” So he ran for, and won, a seat as a Mesa County commissioner.
“I’m thoroughly enjoying it,” he said. “I don’t have to travel. I think I bring some value to this job. I had a great run in Congress, but I got what I wanted. I spent some time with my folks, and they’re gone now. And I am really enjoying this. Here, we’re not only the legislative branch—we are the executive, too.”
ALAN WHEAT (1987: Democratic congressman from Missouri)
A black man who won his congressional seat in a white district, Wheat became the youngest person ever to be appointed to the powerful House Rules Committee, and emerged as one of the brightest stars in the Democratic firmament—a potential speaker of the House, perhaps more. He was, according to the late Representative Richard Bolling, a onetime legendary Rules Committee chairman and the man Wheat replaced in Congress, “above all things, a learner.”
After six terms in the House, he sought to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of the iconic Republican Senator John Danforth in 1994. “You’ve heard of John Ashcroft?” Wheat asked in a reference to the former senator whom George W. Bush selected to be attorney general. “I’m the reason why.” Ashcroft, at the time a former governor of Missouri, defeated Wheat by 24 percentage points to go to the Senate.
Wheat went to work for CARE, the hunger-relief organization, and then served as a top executive in Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. Clinton offered him several positions in his second administration, but Wheat was content to remain a Washington government-relations specialist. Today he says he is proud of his time on Capitol Hill but is prouder still of his children.
“I grew up in a cause-oriented family, and the years in public office honed my skills and whetted my appetite for service,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade this life for anything. I’ve had a very happy and rewarding time.”
ELISE PAYLAN SCHOUX (1987: executive assistant to a member of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board)
Schoux was at the center of an angry confrontation that at age 26 she helped stage between Dole, then the powerful chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Senator Robert Kasten of Wisconsin; for weeks it paralyzed the Senate in an arcane dispute over whether taxes should be withheld from personal savings accounts. She later was the staff director for economics for the 1984 Republican platform, helped shape the tax-overhaul plan that led to the landmark 1986 tax bill, and harbored dreams of being appointed to the Federal Reserve, perhaps as chair.
She left Washington two years after appearing on the Journal Ten list, moving to New York to pursue what she now regards as “the fantasy of working on Wall Street.” She hated every minute there. Eventually she married a man who was a retired USAID official, and started a mom-and-pop consulting operation, working in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor, among other places. She cared for her husband during his seven-year Alzheimer’s-disease ordeal, got her master’s degree in accounting, and is now pursuing Japanese flower arranging.
“I never did become chair of the Fed,” she said, “but I had a better life than I thought I would have, even with the ups and downs.”
And now one more: DAVID SHRIBMAN (1987: political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Wall Street Journal)
I’m now the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, having left the capital 16 years ago. I learned much in this reporting exercise—about values and what is valued, about life and how it should be lived. I learned that early achievement does not necessarily portend lasting impact, and—this from those many who did not make the Journal Ten and who occupy important posts in the White House and across the capital and the country—that the race sometimes is to the runner who starts late, or who has great imagination, or great determination, or great courage and perseverance.
I learned, too, the truth in what Rowland said in one of our interviews about life after two trips to prison: that each person’s passage is a plan, “and you have to figure it out and jump on the bandwagon.”
Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2018” coverage here.
The word podcast has by now become completely untethered from its namesake—the iPod. Analytics that were once uncapturable have become fairly comprehensive (downloads from Apple Podcasts surpassed 50 billion this year) and specific (Chicago streams more podcasts on Spotify than any other U.S. city does), which has brought new money and possibility to the form. Recipes for how to create a decent series were invented through trial and error, and thousands of producers now understand what makes our ears stand up: cults, cold cases, politics, feminism, and relationships, but most of all: stories.
Last year, S-Town blew our minds by taking a novelistic approach to its fascinating characters, plot, and setting. This year, playwrights and journalists came out from behind the page in droves. Podcasts are now regularly adapted for television (Homecoming, 2 Dope Queens, Pod Save America, and Dirty John, to name a few). They became more niche and even self-referential: The Onion’s A Very Fatal Murder satirizes true-crime podcasts. There’s even a podcast (Before It Had a Theme) about a radio show that is now also a podcast (This American Life). Podcasts, it seems, are the new black hole (a concept that’s explained very well on HumaNature), because they feed and feed on whatever is around them.
The shows on this year’s top-50 list highlight innovation where it collides with craft and entertainment. They are the ones that answer the call “Make it new!” They made space for new voices, ideas, and methods of connecting with and harnessing audiences, the internet, and the material world. They are the ones that don’t require advanced preparation, the ones you’d recommend to your friends. Here’s to the best podcasts of 2018, and to what they’ve made resoundingly clear about digital audio: So much more is yet to come. (As usual, we’ve recused The Atlantic’s shows from the list.)
50. The Truth: The Off SeasonThe Truth’s Jonathan Mitchell has been doing experimental, fictional art audio since what feels like the beginning of time (for more than 20 years, actually). The Off Season begins with Bruce Alvarez, a fictional TV host, interviewing a prominent female journalist. They start taking callers, and the first one accuses Alvarez of sexual harassment. As his network investigates the allegations, Alvarez heads to Montauk, New York, where he has an unlikely encounter with an aspiring journalist named Erica Hernandez. The plot becomes implausible—but the conversations that take place between the two allow listeners to process some of the major news events of 2018 without reliving the falls of Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein, both of which seem to have inspired the show. The Off Season is, in part, an exploration of the mind of a man who feels helplessly, inexcusably trapped by ingrained sexism. The show’s writers, Marina Tempelsman and Niccolo Aeed, manage to offer poignant social criticism without reducing Alvarez to a caricature of evil. The Off Season may hold up a mirror to life, but it also reflects back some light—some optimism—at listeners, too.
Gateway Episode: “Banished to the Hamptons”
49. Death, Sex & Money: Hot DatesDemystifying romantic relationships, especially complicated topics such as consent and online dating, is a wellspring with seemingly endless mass appeal. The Death, Sex & Money host Anna Sale kicked off a summer series by introducing listeners to a group of people at different stages in their lives, with wildly different goals and dispositions, as they attempted to find love. Most of the episodes are short, serving listeners with a quick shot of dating gossip without veering into anything too indulgent. The vignettes are meaningful, but they likely won’t trigger a sensation of emotional vertigo. Listeners take in the hope and hesitation that one man describes as he attempts to turn a close friendship into something more. One woman discusses the reasons why, even as a virgin, nonmonogamy made the most sense for her. Another man wonders aloud, in light of the #MeToo movement, “Am I losing my masculinity by asking too many questions?” as he tries to suss out when, if ever, it’s okay for him to make a move. Sale puts participants at ease and dignifies them without shying away from asking pointed questions. Hot Dates is intellectually stimulating but not taxing, and in the podcast space, this level of sophisticated simplicity hits a refreshing sweet spot.
Gateway Episode: “Hot Dates: Romance Right Now”
48. This Is LovePhoebe Judge has been making audio narrative in her popular podcast Criminal since 2014. Here, she turns her gaze to love, which her show argues isn’t just a feeling—it’s also something you do. Even if the stories in this series don’t frame love as one-dimensional or predictable, they sometimes still evoke movie magic. “The Run,” for instance, starts off as a meet-cute at a park, but when a man’s wife dies, his affections morph into a goofy, even sloppier, form when redirected at his children. “Nothing Compares to You” highlights the passion for one’s profession and for those who make that work possible (this one features Prince and resurrects him through stories from his sound engineer). The episode is about what we project onto other people and their expressions of care, and about how we need love in all its forms. Even if we don’t feel it or when we forget about it, Judge’s series is there to help us remember that love is as much an action as a frame of mind.
Gateway Episode: “Something Large and Wild”
47. What’s Good With Stretch and BobbitoStretch and Bobbito have the cachet to interview guests such as Dave Chappelle, Eddie Huang, Regina King, and Jonah Hill. After all, in the ’90s, the duo introduced a New York audience (and so, the world) to Eminem, Jay-Z, Biggie, and Nas, among other hip-hop veterans, on their radio show. Netflix even made a documentary about the duo. Despite all this, Stretch and Bobbito maintain a regular-man vibe on their show. The two-on-one technique they have creates an advanced conversational style—not chaotic or rambling—that makes you feel invited to a party you have no business being at. Listeners experience nostalgia through mood and ambience rather than via the reminiscences of back-in-the-day stories. Radio shows have a different calling from podcasts—they tend to be more rooted in a specific time and place—but What’s Good With Stretch and Bobbito proves that the democratization of audio can make room for those projects, too.
Gateway Episode: “Erykah Badu”
46. BodiesYou might remember Allison Behringer from her new–in–New York podcast series The Intern. Now she’s exploring women’s bodies in a show that addresses topics often discouraged in art or dismissed as “oversharing”: sexual encounters, menstruation, breastfeeding. Each episode starts out by examining a particular bodily issue, then zooms out to examine the greater context. The podcast kicks off with “Sex Hurts,” in which Behringer asks herself why she’s always put her own body’s pleasure second and why women so often think “pain is just part of the deal.” “Bleeding” examines the fact that uterine fibroids are especially prevalent among black women, a phenomenon that could be linked to structural racism. These are the extended conversations women often have in private—with friends, in ladies’ rooms, online, and especially when doctors can’t or don’t help. Behringer sheds light on the underground network of information-sharing that many women depend on, forcing attention onto subjects her listeners may be socialized to ignore.
Gateway Episode: “Sex Hurts”
45. ErrthangAl Letson and his longtime friend Willie Evans Jr. teamed up to create Errthang, a podcast that is simultaneously a comedic memoir, an action-packed comic book, and a meditation on race in America. Leston’s creative outlet doesn’t follow a traditional structure. Take “What the Hell Is Wrong With Al?,” in which the co-host describes how he came to protect a right-wing protester from a violent beatdown. The episode includes interviews with Richard Spencer, a white nationalist, and Letson’s recollections of growing up in Jacksonville, Florida (including fending off an angry group of white boys who came after him and his brother). While this sounds weighty—and it is—Letson never lets us stray far from his arms-wide-open approach. In “No Ordinary Love,” he shares the experience of taking his white son—Letson is black, and his wife had a child before they were married—to a grocery story and suffering the judgment of other families. What makes the podcast special is no secret: It’s Letson. He’s a poet, a singer, and a committed romantic who knows what he’s doing in this medium.
Gateway Episode: “No Ordinary Love”
44. BubbleNot long ago, fiction in the audio landscape seemed mostly to follow stodgy noir tropes first popularized by Orson Welles in the ’30s. Bubble pays homage to those strictures but updates the package with modern characters in a closer-to-reality sci-fi world. The rules of the show are this: You either live a protected life somewhere like Fairhaven—a so-called deliberate community reminiscent of Portland, Oregon, that is encased in a literal bubble—or in the monster-infested brush beyond. The story follows mismatched roommates living in a dodgy part of town. Morgan kills monsters; Annie then sells the creatures’ blood on the black market to get people high. The authorities give the pair a choice: go on a secret mission, or go to jail for their drug trade. Along the way, the series winks at listeners by poking fun at lovable stereotypes of Millennial culture. The sound engineering is appropriately cartoonish, and the action is not at all lost without a visual. Tavi Gevinson of Rookie fame voices the show’s exposition, which invites listeners to coexist in the safe space that is Bubble, where we can all escape from what real life has become by laughing at it.
Gateway Episode: “Episode 1: Huntrs”
43. Edge of FameA partnership between The Washington Post and WBUR, Edge of Fame is not your ordinary interview-style podcast, if it can be called that at all. The show subverts the notion of the big interview by inserting its host, Geoff Edgers, into the real world—this isn’t a traditional sit-down in which the studio serves as his home base. Front and center is the discussion of fame, in all its complexity (what it affords, the cost it exacts), with guests such as Issa Rae, Weird Al Yankovic, and Billy Joe Shaver. In one episode, Edgers is in a hotel with the comedian Norm Macdonald, who’s vying for a comeback, while another episode finds the host hanging out on set with the filmmaker Ava DuVernay, talking about the pressures that black female directors face. The process isn’t perfect—celebrities can be cagey—but at its best, Edge of Fame is a welcome step away from the podcast studio system.
Gateway Episode: “Hanson Beat the System”
42. Last SeenLast Seen will captivate you with its promises of clearing up the world’s largest unsolved art heist. It will also take you down some paths to frustrating dead ends. Created by the WBUR producer Kelly Horan and the reporter Jack Rodolico, as well as the former Boston Globe journalist Stephen Kurkjian, the show puts a Murder on the Orient Express spin on the affair at hand. Listeners learn that in 1990, thieves dressed as police officers walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, duped the security guards, locked them up in the basement, and walked out with the motherlode: 13 artworks now valued at $500 million. You’ll get hooked immediately, and perhaps feel relieved that you can obsess over every suspect without the guilt that comes with poring over violent crimes. The hosts here are so dogged in their pursuit of the missing works, in the possibility of finding these paintings, that they’re willing to follow any lead, right down to the bottom of a hole.
Gateway Episode: “81 Minutes”
41. Happy FaceMelissa Moore grew up with a father unlike any other. A truck driver and a serial killer, Keith Jesperson confessed to the murders of multiple women in the 1990s, tagging his written confessions with cartoonish smiley faces. People called him the Happy Face Killer. In this nine-part series, Moore takes on the hybrid role of host and subject as she reckons with the lasting trauma of her father’s brutality. (A letter Jesperson wrote to his teenage daughter from prison says: “You’re a killer just like me.”) A conversation Moore has with a once-combative ex-boyfriend demonstrates the near-inevitability of the cycle of violence. While the show errs on the wrong side of overproduction—the music is flat-out distracting—it pulls you back with the raw testimony of victims and abusers. The bravest interview of the many interviews in this series has Moore talking to the son of one of her father’s victims. The power of that exchange is in hearing Moore, who carries the legacy of her father in her blood, seek forgiveness from a man she never wronged.
Gateway Episode: “Childhood”
40. Benjamen Walker’s Theory of EverythingBenjamen Walker uses Theory of Everything to explore his resistance to a society controlled by Facebook, gig economies, blind consumerism, and misinformation. This year’s exceptional 15-part series about fake news launches with a bit of soul-searching: Because TOE mixes nonfiction with fiction, and especially because it has a meta slant, Walker decided it was time to carefully reflect on whether he himself may have spread any lies through his show. He then sets his sights on the subject of “deepfakes” in “Fake Nudes,” and on the manipulation of Civil War history in “Heavenly Truths.” Ten years from now, people will likely still be grappling with the internet hoaxes, cryptocurrency, and post-truth realities that Walker is warning about today. When he’s not crafting stories about where creativity intersects with the evil machinery that foils it (such as in the episode “This Is Not a Drill” ), he’s the most charming guy you’ve ever heard announcing the end times while wearing a (metaphorical) sandwich board.
Gateway Episode: “This Is Not a Drill (False Alarm! Part I)”
39. Wild ThingIn 2006, the host and producer Laura Krantz read a Washington Post article about the late Grover Krantz, a tenured anthropology professor who spent his spare time searching for Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest. After Krantz figured out that she’s Grover’s distant cousin, she began researching both him and his beloved Bigfoot. In Wild Thing, she walks listeners through how she inherited the hunt and how sharing Grover Krantz’s last name gives her and her audience access to different communities of Bigfoot believers and researchers (alien theories get a nod, but biologists get the mic). She’s open-minded but skeptical: There have been new large-mammal discoveries in our lifetime, but she acknowledges it’s pretty suspicious that only blurry pictures of Bigfoot ever surface. Krantz interviews a variety of scientists, all of whom speak with such authority on both sides of the Sasquatch question that they help create the wonderful and rare experience of being able to believe in two contradictory ideas at once. Wild Thing gives listeners a break from reality while staying in the realm of possibility.
Gateway Episode: “Grover”
38. BundyvilleA partnership between Longreads and Oregon Public Broadcasting, Bundyville looks at the bizarre circumstances of two armed standoffs against the federal government led by the Bundy family: a rebellion in Bunkerville, Nevada, in 2014, and the takeover and occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, near Burns, Oregon, in 2016. The host and writer Leah Sottile interrogates the motives behind the insurrections, even interviewing the Bundy patriarch, Cliven. Much has been made of the disconnect between coastal and heartland Americans, and that tension drives Bundyville. Sottile tells listeners, “The story of the Bundys is about belief and truth and figuring out which one of those things has more power.” This division rings true. Sottile is the truth: fact-checking the Bundys’ claims of constitutional rights to graze on government lands. The ranchers are the belief: in their old-fashioned living, in God, and in the Constitution. Listeners are almost forced to pick sides. While the podcast succeeds as an indispensable document on the clashes between ranchers and the feds, the conversation crackles when Sottile stares directly into the abyss between conviction and fact.
Gateway Episode: “The Battle”
37. We Came to WinSometime in the past 30 years, many Americans went from nearly ignoring soccer to waking up early on Saturdays to watch the English Premier League. The sport is rising in popularity—it could become America’s third-favorite game in the near future—and that means there are newcomers, and even diehards, who don’t know about decades of past champions and iconic matches. We Came to Win’s host, Nando Vila, catches these listeners up on soccer’s gargantuan global importance and history. “How the 1990 World Cup Saved English Soccer” tackles the sport’s cultural dimensions by unpacking stereotypes of hooligan English fans and what it means when a player and a song embody the ethos of a country. “Zaire ’74: The Most Misunderstood Team in History” delves into the colonialist history of Zaire, today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo, and how one set piece that was thought to be folly may have been a jab at a cruel dictator. Many audio documentaries fail to live up to their filmed counterpart, but We Came to Win—with its polished sound design, narratives, and production values—is completely immersive. This is a series of tremendous sports movies without the moving pictures.
Gateway Episode: “The Rise and Fall of Diego Maradona”
36. Radiolab: In the NoFor 15 years, Radiolab has succeeded by allowing its producers to simply follow their own interests, and this year, it seems, they had gender studies on their mind. In the No followed the Radiolab co-host Jad Abumrad into the gray area of consent. After listening to a series on sexual consent titled “No,” within Kaitlin Prest’s show, The Heart, Abumrad invited Prest to further explore the subject. Abumrad also brings in an educational consultant named Hanna Stotland, who at first blush seems dismissive of victims. Stotland and Prest discuss situations where consent is given but then retracted; they also debate exactly how many seconds are allowed to pass or how many nonverbal cues have to be ignored before something qualifies as assault. The conversation is impressive because most people find it hard to talk about rape with someone who disagrees with them—and yet here are two women who can. The show pivots to discuss the BDSM world, where practitioners have a teachable working language to ensure that no one gets hurt. But the series acknowledges that even this community hasn’t figured out how to make it safe to say that you don’t feel safe, at least not in public. In the No doesn’t have all the answers, but it does suggest that finding common ground on consent is achievable, if only people can manage to stay in the conversation.
Gateway Episode: “In the No Part 1”
35. Where Should We Begin? The Arc of LoveAudible’s shining jewel of a podcast is back again with the therapist and author Esther Perel talking with various couples at unstable moments in their relationships. Perel has made it her life’s mission to study couples, instead of individuals, and despite none of the series’s participants’ being her actual clients, she immediately picks up on their respective patterns. The host’s third season, a collection of sessions called The Arc of Love, outlines the maturation of coupledom. Perel considers not only how a duo’s problems might grow more complex but also how the solutions can become more exciting. Even though the show isn’t about ogling other people’s problems, Perel has picked compelling subjects. With one on-again-off-again couple, she figures out, by asking only two questions, how the man became a compulsive liar. At one point, Perel says that “we’ve never invested more in our intimate relationships than we do today, and we’ve never crumbled more under the expectations.” With Perel dropping nuggets of wisdom like that so often, even though we aren’t seated in her office, Where Should We Begin will make many listeners feel fully seen at last.
Gateway Episode: “The Arc of Love”
34. Embedded: Coal StoriesIn 2016, Donald Trump promised to reinvigorate the coal industry and won the central-Appalachian coal counties overwhelmingly. For more than a year, Embedded and its host, Kelly McEvers, tracked the stories of various people reliant on the fossil fuel, shining a light on what happens when the jobs run out, as they will for more than just the coal industry. This reported series is a reminder that while shifting toward a new trade may seem like a clear long-term solution to many, holding tight to a sunset industry can also make sense, if it’s the only way you have of feeding yourself.
Gateway Episode: “Coal Stories Episode 1”
33. Rough TranslationIn Rough Translation, the host, Gregory Warner, treats culture like a language—as something that must be learned over years and practiced with people who’ve grown up with it. In the case of Pakistan, for example, the show discusses the intricacies of courtship—with a little help from English literature—and the hard decisions many women in the country have to make about marriage. “Intruders” finds a galvanizing feminist movement sprouting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in a surprising place: on a sleazy daytime talk show. The most vital episode expands listeners’ vocabulary in the lost art of forgiveness, as seen through a vast hierarchy of apologies in Japan. Consider Rough Translation your first-class ticket out of whatever bubble you might be calling home these days.
Gateway Episode: “The Apology Broker”
32. ESPN 30 for 30: BikramBikram Choudhury emigrated to the United States from India and launched a hot-yoga empire—named after himself—with little more than poses from the old country and sheer ambition. The 30 for 30 producer Julia Lowrie Henderson used to practice Bikram yoga, and in this podcast she guides listeners through the practice’s rocky history. Once a groundbreaking space for weight loss and self-reflection, Choudhury’s studio—and the franchises the teacher launched—fell under a dark cloud when he self-appointed guru was accused of rape and harassment (he denies the allegations). 30 for 30 had been a series of stand-alone episodes on sports for years, but it ventures into a serialized format here. Henderson’s and others’ experiences make it clear that many students and instructors loved Choudhury—they felt their lives had changed under his tutelage and in his 105-degree studios. The ambivalence that the yogis interviewed for the podcast share with Henderson about the years they devoted to him makes for a riveting listen. Whether because of quasi-Stockholm syndrome or straightforward commitment to the practice, the people who inhabit this series have a lot to say about how to cope when something you love turns rotten.
Gateway Episode: “Part 1: Arrival”
31. Thunder BayThunder Bay, named for the Canadian city in which it takes place, depicts the harshness that is specific to the area’s history and geography. The host, Ryan McMahon, is an Anishinaabe writer and comedian who grew up close to Thunder Bay, and his proximity to the story assures listeners that they’re being piloted by the right voice. Over the past two decades, several young indigenous people have been found dead in the nearby Kaministiquia and McIntyre Rivers. Most of the deaths have been deemed accidental, or the causes could not be determined. Thunder Bay is not just a dangerous and racist place; the area has also been seemingly minting corrupt government officials, including one who was disbarred and arrested for soliciting sex from underage girls. Many podcasts exploring a particular community feature a well-meaning host who is usually white and/or from the outside. This dynamic can create an uncomfortable parachuting-in-for-the-story effect. No such dissonance exists here. Thunder Bay also says up front that it isn’t out to solve the cases. In lesser hands, the show would have gone the true-crime route and dragged the rivers for clues. Instead, McMahon sets his sight on the whole city, its institutions, and its apologists, arguing for revolutionary change in a town that needs to answer for when its children die alone in the elements.
Gateway Episode: “There Is a Town in North Ontario”
30. Slow RadioGiven how many podcasts exist, it’s surprising that there aren’t more like Slow Radio. Isolating sounds—of cities, of nature, of machines—is a concept that programs dance around and occasionally dip into but rarely do right. Often, they interrupt the serenity when all you want is to listen to the sounds of the hibernating tadpoles (as you can properly do in Slow Radio’s “A Visit to a Snowy Forest Near Oslo”). The work here is not of the causal press-record-whenever variety. One man collected the sounds in an episode about Japan over the course of 20 years. Another plays his bamboo flute on a farm, prompting the nightingales to sing, and they’re responsive to him in the most darling way. Other episodes are less meditative: “Forgotten Sounds” includes typewriters and steam engines, among other no-longer-modern noises. “Walking Through Time” features clocks ticking, chiming, and winding. There are sounds of war and even of dementia. These audio spaces remain usefully, poignantly nebulous. Everything Slow Radio creates allows listeners to inhabit other worlds without leaving their own.
Gateway Episode: “Nightingales”
29. Bag ManIn 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew was under investigation for accepting bribes; he pushed to get the charges dropped, claiming that the Justice Department was trying to frame him. Bag Man, a fantastic new series hosted by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, confronts the obvious parallels between Agnew’s plight and President Donald Trump’s attempts to scuttle the Russia investigation. The series should be a touchstone for how to pace a narrative that’s dense with history. Maddow is an excellent host: In addition to being a pro behind the mic, she doesn’t editorialize, and she keeps the story accessible. Most listeners probably already knew that Agnew resigned once he fell out of favor with Nixon, but because the vice president’s criminal legacy was quickly and thoroughly overshadowed by the Watergate scandal, some of the information presented here might be a revelation. Maddow’s producer even digs up audio of Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman—who was later arrested for lying under oath, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice for his role in Watergate—pushing the administration to bail Agnew out of trouble. The lead prosecutor on the Agnew case, Barney Skolnik, after hearing the tape, tells Maddow: “I mean, that’s, you know, that’s the swamp, you know, in operation.” Bag Man reminds listeners that investigations of high-level political corruption stick to a familiar script: Prosecutors follow the dirty money, and the accused leaders start casting aspersions when the Justice Department comes knocking on their door.
Gateway Episode: “An Unsettling Secret”
28. The United States of Anxiety: Gender and PowerUSA’s host, Kai Wright, and his team read history like meteorologists read the weather: The layperson knows the patterns are bound to repeat themselves, but the USA team has a superior sense of when and where. Their third season focuses on gender and power in light of the midterm elections—and even though the results are in, the series contextualizes American culture and shows listeners how to approach politics beyond opinions. USA was already drawing connections between 2018 and 1992 (a.k.a. the Year of the Woman a lá Anita Hill) when, as if by fate, America found itself grappling with the testimonies of Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. The show analyzes women in power, dissecting their names and voices, their cleavage and haircuts. It profiles Ida B. Wells (from the birth of “respectability” politics to what she called her “besetting sin”: anger) and Jeannette Rankin (the first and only female member of Congress from Montana). One of USA’s greatest strengths is going where the action is—Texas, for example, for the tight Ted Cruz–Beto O’Rourke race, during which secret women’s groups formed to talk about liberal issues in conservative counties. The show has always been able to swiftly explain current events through the lens of the past, but this season, it began to apply that lens to the future.
Gateway Episode: “Episode 1: The Dream Was Not Mine”
27. UnErased: The History of Conversion Therapy in AmericaJad Abumrad of Radiolab hosts a four-part series as a supplement to the film Boy Erased, itself an adaptation of a memoir by Garrard Conley. Like the film and the book, the podcast focuses on the practice of trying to “convert” gay people into heterosexuals—a practice sometimes forced on minors that’s still legal in most states. UnErased kicks off with a truncated account of Conley’s experience of escaping a conversion camp, before pivoting to other subjects: the stories of conservative women who’ve taken in children who were disowned for coming out, and an exploration of how Playboy magazine played a crucial role in dismantling the notion of the “gay cure.” The series concludes with a profile of the former leader of a so-called ex-gay organization who is now out of the closet and married to a man. UnErased provides context that stretches beyond the world of Boy Erased, diving deeper into the issues at hand and justifying itself as a stand-alone work.
Gateway Episode: “Garrard and the Story of Job”
26. The Teacher’s PetSet some time aside and prepare yourself for The Teacher’s Pet, an immersive, comprehensive, true-crime run of 16 episodes about the disappearance and suspected murder of Lyn Dawson in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, in 1982. The alleged villain in the story is Dawson’s ex-husband, Chris, who told police that Lyn may have run off with a cult. Around the same time she went missing, a teenage student of Chris’s with whom he was having an affair moved into his house; they ended up getting married. Treating the missing-person case as if all the evidence is fresh, and all rumors are worth reporting on, the host, Hedley Thomas, has created something gargantuan in scope, even if the whole affair is salacious at times. (The Teacher’s Pet is set in the suburbs and definitely captures the flavor of how gossip spreads there.) The podcast has garnered considerable attention, and not just from fans, who’ve downloaded it 28 million times. The police in New South Wales have been sniffing around Chris Dawson for a while; they even dug up his backyard back in the 1980s looking for his wife’s body, but didn’t find anything. This month, Dawson was arrested and charged with the murder of his ex-wife, with the help of corroborating evidence from The Teacher’s Pet.
Gateway Episode: “Bayview”
25. In the Dark: Season 2Curtis Flowers, the subject of In the Dark’s superb second season, is in prison and has been tried six times for the same crime—the shooting of four people at Tardy Furniture in 1996. The host, Madeleine Baran, and her team spent almost a year in Winona, Mississippi, re-interviewing witnesses, finding new ones, and reexamining evidence. Some of the facts are inescapable and familiar: how the initial arrest brings into question the tenets of policing; the blackness of Flowers’s skin; the inequities of the criminal-justice system. With each conversation and confounding piece of evidence—police matched a bullet from the crime scene to a gun that was never found and never belonged to Flowers in the first place—In the Dark aims to complicate listeners’ understanding of the case. This is a podcast you should listen to for the sheer depth of its investigation, which just might teach law enforcement how to set a man free, step by step.
Gateway Episode: “July 16, 1996”
24. Song ExploderFor the uninitiated to this now old-school podcast, the host, Hrishikesh Hirway, asks musicians to dissect the isolated vocal or instrumental tracks of one of their songs. Beyond the intro and credits, you rarely hear Hirway’s voice; the show is all about the artist and the music, giving diehard fans precious insight into their favorite songs and making fans out of skeptics. Listeners won’t be able to unhear the craps tables in Arcade Fire’s “Put Your Money on Me” after learning that Win Butler’s mom was into gambling. Janelle Monáe’s striking cadence in “So Afraid” transforms from a catchy repetition into a feminist mantra. And Lindsey Buckingham’s lonely vocals and vulnerable storytelling of Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way,” inspired by his breakup with Stevie Nicks, makes the classic suddenly new again. Song Exploder started in 2014 and has never changed its tune, but the series manages to stay both evergreen and current by relying on the real core of its inquisition: showing exactly where creativity comes from. It’s a mission that, like Song Exploder, cannot possibly get old.
Gateway Episode: “Arcade Fire—‘Put Your Money On Me’”
23. Longform PodcastLongform Podcast launched in 2012 as a series of hour-long interviews with nonfiction writers the hosts admired. Though the show quickly established itself as a promising project, it was made by writers for writers, meaning it was too niche for a general audience. But the co-hosts, Aaron Lammer, Max Linsky, and Evan Ratliff, have expanded their remit over time, deemphasizing craft and making the machinations of journalism the focal point of an exciting conversation (even spotlighting podcasters—Chana Joffe-Walt of This American Life—and the occasional fiction writer, such as Sheila Heti). The series leans into the drama that creates great stories and functions as a foil to the distrust of the press that’s reached fever pitch as of late: Take the New Yorker writer Paige Williams talking about the dedication necessary to be a reporter (it’s a 365-day-a-year job), or the New York Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman typing notes on a breaking-news story during the interview. If, at its heart, the show is about the doctrine of reporting—pitching ideas, collaborating with sources, hunting for the right narrative—it’s also about the long tail of such work: appreciating a really good story, even when everyone else has moved on.
Gateway Episode: “Tom Bissell”
22. Terrible, Thanks for AskingTTFA, as friends of this pod call it, has created a community through listener support—and not just the financial kind. If you donate, you’re automatically invited into the Terrible Club, a forum in which people can connect both online and in real life. Non-joiner types may turn up their noses at this kind of togetherness, but it appears to have helped the show do what it aims to do: examine the tension between the terrible parts of life and the fact that people don’t know how to talk about them. Truly impressive was a two-part episode about suicide. Instead of speaking from a place of authority or telling one person’s story, the host, Nora McInerny, gave the reins over to her audience; more than 100 people spoke up, about both their personal experiences and what it’s like to lose a loved one this way. It’s a method that, when applied to this subject, accentuates the superpower of the podcast form: Listeners get to step into someone else’s life and return to their own with words that might actually help another person. The show continuously, unapologetically, ferociously plows into subjects most people are too uncomfortable to touch.
Gateway Episode: “What Do You Say About Suicide Parts One and Two”
21. Ear HustleThe media landscape this year has seen plenty of stories—including podcasts—focused on the ills of the U.S. criminal-justice system, such as racial bias and unfair sentencing. But Ear Hustle adds another dimension to that conversation: It takes place inside San Quentin State Prison. The co-hosts, Earlonne Woods (himself an inmate) and Nigel Poor (an artist who’s worked at San Quentin for seven years), examine the realities of serving time. When the show premiered last year, the pair covered many of the obvious bases—solitary confinement, cell mates, conjugal visits—to orient its audience, but this year it went everywhere else. “The Big No No” is a forbidden-love story that will leave you wanting more. “Birdbaths and a Lockbox” details what happens when access to outside food stops and your stash runs out. The big news of Season 3 is that Woods’s sentence was commuted after he spent 21 years behind bars. When he calls to tell his mother, we get to listen in. Ear Hustle encourages its audience to stop thinking of inmates as either an abstraction or a problem to solve, and places outsiders on the inside.
Gateway Episode: “Firsts”
20. The RealnessThe Realness lures listeners in with a trip down hip-hop’s memory lane. It tells the genesis story of the duo Mobb Deep, but the show is much more than a nostalgia piece; it also weaves in Prodigy’s battle with sickle-cell anemia, including an exploration of discrimination in health care. The show comes through a present-day lens, because Mobb Deep’s sound continues to influence artists, and because biases still shape the kind of service patients receive in a hospital. The Realness is irresistible for listeners looking to recall—or deepen their understanding of—hip-hop history, and the show features deep cuts, like when A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad discusses the day a gun accidentally went off and wounded someone at Def Jam Records. Most compelling is when the show addresses Prodigy’s unusual death in 2017—he choked on an egg, at age 42—through interviews that explore how the nature of the rapper’s passing doesn’t reflect the power people attribute to him. The entire series is a love letter to hip-hop and an elegy that draws a crystal-clear connection between race and health.
Gateway Episode: “Episode 1: This Sunny Day Right Here”
19. Empire on BloodThe host and journalist Steve Fishman throws open the decades-old case file on the onetime Bronx crack dealer Calvin Buari—a smooth, mink-coat-wearing, first-generation American who was convicted of a double homicide in 1992. Fishman is white and privileged; Buari is a black inmate and self-made businessman, and maybe the cops who arrested him aren’t telling the whole truth. After befriending Buari, Fishman talks on the phone with him regularly. They strategize about legal work, discuss the murders, and settle into what could be called a mutually beneficial relationship, all while Fishman’s recorder runs. If you think the journalist-as-detective formula has played itself out, look to Panoply’s Empire on Blood for a reminder of how a popular genre stays fresh. This isn’t just a reporter inserting himself into the narrative; Fishman is a co-lead in the Calvin Buari story, which itself poses a credibility issue. The tension of the show lies in all the contradictions and conflicts of interest, many of which are explored by Fishman. Everyone’s working an angle.
Gateway Episode: “Calvin’s Last Shot”
18. Death in Ice ValleyThe insistent rain and ethereal singing that punctuate every episode of Death in Ice Valley help establish the eerie setting for the international sensation created by the Norwegian journalist Marit Higraff and the BBC documentary filmmaker Neil McCarthy. In 1970, an unidentified woman was found dead in Norway’s Isdalen Valley. After a thorough police investigation, almost nothing made sense about the Isdal Woman, as she came to be called. “When people go missing, they are usually missed,” Higraff says in the first episode. Yet for the past nearly 50 years, no one has come forward with details about who the woman might be. Listeners travel to each hotel room and store where witnesses say they saw her all those years ago. The audience even finds out how she smelled. The show wants to uncover the truth, but the hosts also entertain speculation; even theories from Facebook are addressed. Death in Ice Valley is an accidental history lesson about World War II, the Cold War, and even the symbology of an engraved spoon. Once the final episode’s closing music begins to play, it practically begs you to start the series all over again, searching for clues that you—and everyone else—might have missed.
Gateway Episode: “The Isdal Woman”
17. Sold in AmericaThroughout Sold in America, the host, Noor Tagouri, hovers over the unsolvable puzzle of human trafficking as if it were a Rubik’s Cube. She asks listeners to leave their preconceived notions behind and stick with her as she explains how, despite her reporting on the sex trade for many years, what she thought she would understand by making this podcast changed again and again along the way. Tagouri hands over the mic to people who believe that sex work in America can never be consensual, to people pushed to the edges of society when they started transitioning genders, to sex workers who love their jobs. There’s an interview with Dennis Hof, the now-deceased owner of a brothel called Moonlite Bunny Ranch, and tense sound bites of one of his female employees sexually harassing Tagouri. The host travels to Kentucky to explore how and why people use sex work to pay for expensive opioid addictions. And she tags along with activists who are fighting pending legislation on Capitol Hill. Sold in America doesn’t conclude with answers. But sometimes, the best way to get people talking about something as stigmatized as the sex trade is to simply get it all on the table. Sold in America does just that.
Gateway Episode: “Sold in America”
16. Still ProcessingThe co-hosts of Still Processing, Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, are the kids who come to class in the fall having completed the summer reading and, yes, they have some things to say about it. This pop-culture talk show, which blends discussions of art, race, sex, gender, and queerness, pulls off something incredibly difficult, given its format: making a conversation between two people spontaneous and tightly structured. A rigorous defense of Janet Jackson’s involvement in Nipplegate is deeply sourced and never veers off topic. The writer Wells Tower’s reading of “heinous, misogynistic” dialogue from a piece of his nonfiction gets a thoughtful critique. One episode devotes an hour to analyzing Black Panther, exploring how it isn’t just one of the year’s best films—it’s also an exorcism of more than 100 years of white filmmakers’ casting malpractice. Come to Still Processing to be moved and challenged and loved; to listen to a movie review and feel like you’re attending a big-ticket event.
Gateway Episode: “We Heard Lauryn Hill, but Did We Listen?”
15. Dr. DeathIn Dr. Death, the host and award-winning medical journalist Laura Beil leads listeners through the rise and fall of Christopher Duntsch, a neurosurgeon who left 33 patients in Dallas dead, paralyzed, or injured. He’s now serving a life sentence. The show teases out a number of angles—that Duntsch was fueled by hubris, hate, hope, or drugs and alcohol—and in doing so, it illuminates major blind spots in how hospitals report infractions, allowing a physician with an unclear training record and several botched surgeries to keep practicing. The facts of Dr. Death are so sensational that, as you listen, you may have difficulty accepting them as true (the show reaches peak gross-out with detailed descriptions of, say, hardware free-floating in a body). Beil eases some of the helplessness her reporting might provoke by giving patients cum listeners tips (talk to the nurses!) and context (this case really is unprecedented). Unsurprisingly, Dr. Death is one of the many podcasts now set for a television adaptation.
Gateway Episode: “Three Days in Dallas”
14. Making ObamaMaking Obama isn’t about public policy; it’s a gripping narrative about the incredible sacrifices and dogged commitment that comprise a run for the presidency. The WBEZ host Jenn White takes listeners back to the salad days when Obama was a mixed-race man from Hawaii living in Chicago trying to make a run for the state Senate. The show explores how even though many people respected him, they were also used to the system—the one that told them Obama was too young, not local enough, not black enough to succeed in politics. Making Obama is a remarkable look at what goes on behind the scenes in politics: The third episode is a jaw-dropping look inside party primaries and broken promises, which makes you begin to realize that Obama wasn’t destined for the presidency, as so many people remember; he was opportunistic, he had a streak of good luck, and he was married to the right person. After you finish Making Obama, you might revisit footage of Obama’s big speech at the Democratic Convention Convention in 2004 and realize that it wasn’t the beginning of a president—it was the middle act.
Gateway Episode: “The Man in the Background”
13. StartUp: Church PlantingStartUp continued to venture into unexpected places this year with its series on church planting, led by the reporter and host Eric Mennel. Founding a church isn’t dissimilar to the trials of starting any new company, except that church planters are trying to sell the word of God. Whether and how a church accepts gay members, for instance, can determine whether a parish ever gets off the ground. And while most businesses don’t require its CEOs to directly reveal their deep-seated personal beliefs, that openness matters here. Mennel, a Christian who hasn’t been to church in decades, asks planters uncomfortable questions about gender roles, homosexuality, and whether they practice what they preach when the lights go off and everyone goes home. Church Planting is beautifully written, and with Mennel examining his own relationship to churchgoing throughout the series, its vulnerability and tenderness make it worthy of high praise.
Gateway Episode: “Church Planting 1: The Movement”
12. This American LifeUnlike so many shows that have been churning out episodes with the same methodology, This American Life and its three-acts-based-on-one-theme construct have moved steadily toward the boldly political. The host, Ira Glass, has steered the show away from the hyper-personal, hyper-local flavor of the past, when segments covered summer camp, used-car lots, and abandoned houses (and wonderfully so). Glass threw the door open to the political game in 2016, when he called his Fox News–loving uncle to talk about Barack Obama. This year, on an episode about Senator Jeff Flake, TAL’s commitment to political reporting and on-the-ground tape-gathering paid off when the show’s producer Zoe Chace found herself standing behind the protester who famously shouted Flake down in an elevator. Some installments are set before 2018. There are episodes like “Random Acts of History,” which recalls a complicated history of oppressors (slave owners, Nazis, European colonizers), and the perfectly constructed caper “The Feather Heist,” about a man who steals exotic birds from a museum. Perhaps no one in narrative audio has the stable of talent that This American Life has, and whether the show is setting its sights on politics or plumage, it is creating awe-inspiring work.
Gateway Episode: “Random Acts of History”
11. HeavyweightDuring a year when show hosts entered their stories in ways that used to be considered off-limits, Heavyweight’s Jonathan Goldstein went a step further. He’s telling other people’s stories, mostly, but he’s also made himself into a character, or perhaps a caricature of himself, and that persona is what much of the show’s success hinges upon. Goldstein is funny and self-conscious, but also self-aware. For instance, every episode kicks off with a call to his best friend, Jackie Cohen, (whom Goldstein’s been talking about on-air since at least 2003), that listeners know will likely lead to her hanging up on him. He paints obvious exaggerations of his relationship with his boss and frames himself as the hero in almost every installment. Even the commercials keep listeners in Goldstein’s specific brand of humor. These devices delightfully pop up in the stories he tells, which focus on the things people hide from or don’t want to admit—like telling the father of your 10-year-old that he has a kid, or asking your roommates why they kicked you out, or finishing that massive amount of work you neglected when you went into a depressive hole. The show claims to be about “going back to the moment that everything changed,” but that’s not entirely true—Goldstein actually pushes people to create that moment of change for themselves in real time, and listeners get to hear it unfold.
Gateway Episode: “Rob”
10. Uncover: Escaping NXIVMWhen the seasoned producer Josh Bloch happened to run into an old acquaintance, Sarah Edmondson, whom he hadn’t seen in years, she quickly informed him that she’d just left a cult. And so, a podcast was born. In Uncover, Bloch follows Edmondson as she untangles herself from a world she’d been part of for more than a decade. Depending on whom you ask, NXIVM is a lifestyle company, a self-improvement pyramid scheme, a “sex cult,” or itnone of these; an ongoing federal investigation might help work that out. The group’s high-profile members include the actress Allison Mack, the Seagrams heiress Clare Bronfman, and its founder, Keith Raniere, all of whom are facing criminal charges. Bloch argues that, unlike what so many cults or gangs do to attract members—exploit a person’s isolation and lack of self-esteem—NXIVM grew primarily by tapping into people’s egos and their desire for betterment and access to a vast network. Listeners get to hear Edmondson reflect on becoming a national news story, too, because Bloch’s reporting started before Edmondson spoke to The New York Times for a piece about NXIVM. During a year that saw a flood of stories about cults, Uncover does a great deal to help audiences understand what it means to be part of such a world.
Gateway Episode: “The Branding”
9. Serial: Season 3For its third year, Serial heads to multiple courtrooms in Cleveland, Ohio, far from the suburbs of Baltimore and the battlefields of Afghanistan—the settings, respectively, of its first two seasons. The change isn’t just geographic; the interrogation is different, too. While the first two seasons focused on specific crimes—the murder of Hae Min Lee; the desertion of U.S. Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl—Season 3 follows producers Sarah Koenig and Emmanuel Dzotsi as they tackle multiple cases in Cleveland and “the whole criminal-justice system.” Serial recorded everywhere inside Cleveland’s Justice Center, including courtrooms, hallways, and judges’ chambers. The first installment, “A Bar Fight Walks Into the Justice Center,” is an apt prelude for the backroom brokering and paralysis of an overburdened government that color every story Koenig tells. But the young woman’s bar fight featured in that first episode is chump change compared with what comes later. Serial’s dour thesis statement about the system devouring the individual sticks with you. By the time the series gets to “You in the Red Shirt,” with its horrific depiction of an undercover cop beating an innocent man and wrongfully arresting him, a glass-half-full listener might believe recompense is finally coming. Serial, through its incredible reporting, admonishes anyone who has such optimism.
Gateway Episode: “A Bar Fight Walks Into the Justice Center”
8. The Horror of Dolores RoachDuring the first scenes of The Horror of Dolores Roach, a few things become clear: More playwrights like Aaron Mark should write podcasts; Daphne Rubin-Vega, who portrays Dolores, kills in the audiosphere; and this show is like nothing you’ve ever heard before. Dolores has just finished serving a 16-year prison sentence, and when she returns to her Washington Heights neighborhood in New York City, she finds that everything has changed. The only thing that hasn’t is Empanada Loca, the restaurant that her buddy Luis, played by Bobby Cannavale, still runs. In fact, the show revolves around this restaurant and a specialty empanada and the gentrifiers who can’t stop eating it. It’s unclear whether this podcast fits into the horror genre until the third episode—but it does. And the horror (oh, the horror) has a lasting, personal effect, because your specific imagination will dictate how you cope with the gory notion of say, two people having sex in a freezer next to a dismembered body. If you listen at the wrong time, you might just lose your lunch. And yet, the show shouldn’t be missed. It’s created a new type of immersive theater: Because Dolores is also the show’s narrator, the listener, in part, becomes her—and that is by far the most horrifying part of all.
Gateway Episode: “All the Gory Details”
7. The DailyThe Daily reshaped how major media outlets think about daily-news podcasts when it debuted in January 2017. Nearly two years later, the host, Michael Barbaro, is still using the long reporting arm of The New York Times to enlighten his listeners. Some episodes are built around urgent field notes from a reporter, such as Kirk Johnson’s dispatches from the front line of the California wildfires. Others explore politics or technology, like when the Times writer Kevin Roose joins Barbaro to explain why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can’t stop tripping over his own feet. The show’s general structure remained untouched this year, though it tapped into something extraordinary as storms bore down on the East Coast in September. In a two-part series, The Daily flashed back to August 2017 to recall the devastation that Hurricane Harvey wrought on Houston, pulling liberally from the work done by the writer Sheri Fink. “Lost in the Storm” proved exactly why history matters, and why one couple’s struggle to survive remains potent even after the flood waters have subsided. Above all else, it’s arguably The Daily’s focus on humanity that keeps racking up the downloads.
Gateway Episode: The Latest Release
6. The DreamWhile multilevel marketing, or MLM, is a murky business, The Dream makes it a joy to learn about. An exhaustive look into the opaque marketplace of direct selling, this 11-part series uncovers the fascinating origin story of the business practiced by numerous companies with household names, such as Herbalife and Amway. When The Dream looks further into the past, it discovers that the model sprang up at a time when gender roles blocked many women from entering the workforce. For some of these women, selling cosmetics wasn’t just about beauty; it was also about autonomy. The host, Jane Marie, pulls out all the stops investigating MLM: She goes home to Michigan to talk with women in her family who sold Tupperware; enlists her colleague MacKenzie Kassab, a writer and producer, to sell makeup; and investigates what kind of a living commission-only employees are making selling products for MLM firms. Enough can’t be said about how entertaining Marie is—she wisely puts her NPR voice in a drawer and instead frames the show around funny, lively conversations she has with people. The Dream might transform your idea of what a Tupperware party is—from a necessary evil to a time-honored example of a century-old business practice. Whether or not you believe direct selling is ethical, there’s no denying it’s rich with history.
Gateway Episode: “Wanna Swim in Cash?”
5. Slow BurnSeason 2 of Slow Burn might as well be the first time listeners have heard the full truth about the Starr Report and the headline-stealing relationship between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Using interviews and footage of Starr, Linda Tripp, Lewinsky, and others, the host, Leon Neyfakh, unravels the events that led to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. In this excellent follow-up to 2017’s Watergate postmortem, the story of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal plays out differently, almost as though the American public wasn’t ready to grasp the plot the first time around. The eight-part series is about history being recast in real time as the culture’s vocabulary improves: about the shift from talking about false statements and infidelity to talking about abuses of power. If most reporting at the time wrote out Lewinsky’s agency (the former White House intern was portrayed as naive at best), Slow Burn makes ample room for Lewinsky, who is undeniably its most compelling character.
Gateway Episode: “Deal or No Deal”
4. The ShadowsThe creator Kaitlin Prest—best known for her acclaimed series The Heart—has returned from a brief podcast hiatus with a remarkable artistic achievement: The Shadows, a story about a girl, Kaitlin, who meets a boy, Charlie. It’s a work of fiction, set in the made-up town of MontYuron, that includes actual events from Prest’s life. “I always cry when I fall in love,” Kaitlin’s character says after the two admit their feelings for each other. “I cry because it’s the moment I realize I won’t be getting out of this unscarred.” The Heart, which ended in 2017, was a dissonant, high-culture, sex-positive reckoning with the jaggedness of intimacy. The Shadows is precise and devastating without losing any of the subversiveness of its predecessor. The way that relationships ebb and flow should be familiar to anyone who’s ever risked heartbreak. From a craft perspective, the writing, multiple points of view, and sound design make the romance tactile. The Shadows is a love letter to anyone who falls too hard for beautiful strangers, or can’t seem to stay faithful, or find anyone who can.
Gateway Episode: “Romantic”
3. No Feeling Is FinalHonor Eastly, an Australian podcaster, has achieved something extraordinary in her six-part memoir, No Feeling Is Final. She documents her struggles with suicidal thoughts and behaviors, while listeners follow along as she tries to improve her quality of life and her thinking—or even just how she thinks about her own thinking. Eastly uses various sound-engineering techniques as well as recordings she’s made of herself over the years to render the feelings of anxiety and fear. Sometimes she even enlists friends to reenact conversations. She says she hopes to foster a more human way of viewing mental-health struggles, and here Eastly triumphs—thanks in part to her sense of humor and her musical stylings (her sweet scores help with the emotional comedown at the end of most episodes). As Eastly says, “Getting to the other side of things is as much common sense as it is complete mystery.” Such is the case for the success of No Feeling Is Final, which is both straightforward, excellent work and total magic.
Gateway Episode: “Hi, My Name Is Honor”
2. Headlong: Surviving Y2KYou may think Headlong is an entirely new show given its title—and it is—but it’s also the successor to last year’s Missing Richard Simmons, whose host, Dan Taberski, is back at the helm. For those who tagged along on his journey to find the fitness legend, it was hard not to be impressed with Taberski’s numerous charms, even if Simmons didn’t want to be found. Headlong: Surviving Y2K is the perfect vehicle for Taberski’s emotional intelligence and humor. Set in the late ’90s, the show centers on the drama of the Y2K bug that people feared would be catastrophic enough to shut down power grids and fry computer processors. Taberski interviews programmers, early internet philosophers, and doomsday preppers, but then the narrative grows into something transcendent as the clock ticks toward midnight on January 1, 2000. The podcast delves into a series of life-altering dramas set just before the stroke of the new millennium, and with these stories, Y2K blossoms into a full-fledged classic.
Gateway Episode: “Millennium Approaches”
1. CaliphateRukmini Callimachi, the New York Times journalist known for her authoritative reporting on the Islamic State, leaves listeners weak in the knees at times with Caliphate. The 10-part series follows her as she travels to Canada to meet a young man known as Abu Huzaifa, who claims to be an ISIS defector. Each installment not only illuminates the tactics ISIS uses to lure in and train mujahideen, but also reveals Callimachi’s tedious methodology for vetting everything Huzaifa says. Whether or not he’s a reliable source is a key part of the plot: Huzaifa unquestionably has insider knowledge about ISIS, and yet his timelines don’t quite check out. Callimachi struggles to reconcile the apparent veracity of his story with his possible motivations for lying; she labors over why he would confess to murder or describe the way blood splatters against the ground when you whip someone, and yet not be honest about when he was in Syria. Caliphate forces listeners to wrap their minds around the notion of evil and also somehow amplifies reasons listeners can and should have faith in the world.
Gateway Episode: “Chapter One: The Reporter”
Feminist history is typically described in three waves: The struggle to secure voting rights, then workplace rights, and third—roughly—to upend stereotypes. The battle against racism and its effects is often described in a similar three-part timeline, with movements against slavery and segregation, and then—vaguely—the post-civil-rights era.
The ambiguity of that last term masks that third-wave antiracism, as one might call it, and reflects a profound change in methods and attitudes. Just as the first and second waves of both feminism and antiracism transformed social structures, third-wave antiracism may seem parallel to third-wave feminism in moving on to a different form of abuse, psychological rather than institutional. But this focus on the psychological has morphed, of late, from a pragmatic mission to change minds into a witch hunt driven by the personal benefits of virtue signaling, obsessed with unconscious and subconscious bias. As noble as this culture of shaming genuinely seems to many, it’s a dead end.
In their new book, The Coddling of the American Mind Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt discuss modern antiracism as it exists within the collegiate social-justice culture. (The book is expanded from the eponymous 2015 article in The Atlantic.) On American college campuses, it is typical to depict unwelcome opinions as injurious to one’s sense of safety. In a version of self-defense, it’s voguish to “de-platform” controversial speakers. Occasional unsavory incidents are said to render a university a thoroughly racist establishment. And questions interpretable as exotifying— such as “Where are you from?” to someone born in the United States—are considered as hurtful as bullying.
Crucially, this phenomenon of hypersensitivity extends far beyond campus. The virally popular Stuff White People Like blog of 2010 was a wry self-parody of the cultural mores that had settled in by roughly the late 1990s amidst a certain stripe of educated white people. “Being Offended” was one of the cleverest entries, describing a kind of almost recreational quest to take umbrage on behalf of people other than whites. Already, the satirical tone of this entry dates awkwardly: Many of the people it describes would read it today as disrespectful to the urgency of attesting to one’s white privilege. As the writer Meghan Daum has argued, it’s now customary for many educated whites to take on a strident, uncompromising, radical tone in the guise of justice and truth. Middle-class adult playdates are as central to this mise-en-scène as dorm lounges.
[Read: White people vs. white privilege]
Taking the longer, academic view, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, in their 2015 monograph Inventing the Future, identify the rise since the 1960s of what they term “folk politics,” which reduces the complexity of politics down to human-level grievance, elevating protest over planning and wedge issues over platforms.
To roll the eyes and dismiss this cultural movement as “crazy” is unhelpful and incurious—as is decreeing it “complex” while hoping the subject changes soon. Although I ultimately find it counterproductive, I think this movement actually does, in the formal meaning, make sense; as I noted, the modern social-justice paradigm can be seen as a legitimate third phase in a continuing struggle.
The abolition of slavery was the first major victory in black progress in America. A reading of David Blight’s recent biography of Frederick Douglass vividly underscores what a titanic struggle abolition was for people white and black, given not only the violent hostility that it regularly elicited, but the bafflement. Many intelligent people found it counterintuitive and even ridiculous that black people could ever be treated as whites’ equals. Yet the battle was worth it: Slavery ended.
Perhaps more familiar is the violence, skepticism, and indifference that civil-rights leaders of the mid-20th century encountered in fighting legalized segregation. Even many educated, temperate-minded people—some of them black—thought Martin Luther King Jr. was a hasty rabble-rouser “stirring that stuff up,” at least until his murder led to his more respectful evaluation in martyrdom. Yet the bloodiness of Selma and Birmingham served a purpose: Segregation was outlawed, and black lives changed profoundly.
Crucial, also, is that religion played a key role in making the case for both of these phases of the struggle. Blight stresses how much Douglass relied in his speeches on the prophetic teachings of Jeremiah and Isaiah, and the stories of Exodus, Job, Lot’s wife, and others, identifying the hypocrisy of a nation calling itself Christian while nakedly oppressing so many of its people.
Racism, quite obviously, has not been vanquished in American life. Might the logical next task be a transformation of psychology rather than sociology, as argued on college campuses and elsewhere? The contemporary left’s concern is with the underlying biases that bolster the racism that remains. It seeks, as a way forward, a society not only without racist structures, but without racist thought, which, for one, can foster race-based disparities that eerily parallel those conditioned in the past by overt segregation.
[Read: How well-intentioned white families can perpetuate racism]
The new quest, then, will focus to a new degree on how people think. Blight notes that even in Douglass’s time, his “message to whites, therefore, was morally change yourselves. The new order was as much for whites to give as it was for blacks to take.” That facet of the quest has taken center stage since. The historian Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn has noted that after the 1960s, in civil rights “the desired goal was no longer civic equality and participation, but individual psychic well-being.” This would include that of black people as well as nonblack ones, with their racist bias qualifying as a kind of mental imbalance in itself, as thinkers from Douglass through James Baldwin have taught.
The secularism of this new therapeutic approach to racial progress may seem fundamentally dissimilar to the previous two phases. In fact, however, third-wave antiracism is a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology. The idea that whites are permanently stained by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally attesting to it, is the third wave’s version of original sin. The idea of a someday when America will “come to terms with race” is as vaguely specified a guidepost as Judgment Day. Explorations as to whether an opinion is “problematic” are equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous. The social mauling of the person with “problematic” thoughts parallels the excommunication of the heretic. What is called “virtue signaling,” then, channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of her faith in Jesus. There is even a certain Church Lady air to much of the patrolling on race these days, an almost performative joy in dog-piling on the transgressor, which under a religious analysis is perfectly predictable.
Add in the tendency to let pass certain wrinkles in the fabric as “complex”—the new religion, as a matter of faith, entails that one suspends disbelief at certain points out of respect to the larger narrative. Beyond a certain point, one must not press too hard when asking a priest why God allows bad things to happen to good people. In the same way, one must not ask, “If black people are strong survivors, then why do they disallow the utterance of the N-word even in referring to it rather than using it?” And if one does dare to ask, the answer is inevitably heavier on rhetoric than reasoning. Antiracism requires one to treat the word as taboo—blasphemous—in all its manifestations and go in peace, as it were.
When someone attests to his white privilege with his hand up in the air, palm outward—which I have observed more than once—the resemblance to testifying in church need not surprise. Here, the agnostic or atheist American who sees fundamentalists and Mormons as quaint reveals himself as, of all things, a parishioner.
The people espousing this third-wave ideology are not unintelligent, mentally imbalanced, or working from some nefarious agenda. They want to be on the right side of history. However, upon reflection, and aware of the risk of how an essay like this might read in the future, I suggest it is going nowhere fast.
More specifically, it is a mission creep from the second wave—or “concept creep,” as Lukianoff and Haidt put it, citing the psychologist Nick Haslam. They have defined trauma downward, as it were. Where antiracist progressives once looked to bondage, disenfranchisement, and torture, today they classify as equally traumatic the remark, the implication, the unwelcome question.
[Read: The coddling of the American mind]
There are three main reasons that third-wave antiracism is a less convincing project than the first and second waves.
First, to what extent is it possible to alter human sentiment as opposed to actions and behavior? Can a whole society’s inner biases and naïvetés about black people be expunged through preaching? Bias and ignorance remain “under the surface,” from films like Crash to the election of Donald Trump. Is there any evidence that today’s religious crusade is making any significant changes in Americans’ deepest thoughts, or ever could?
Second, and more important, is it even necessary to force a revolution in thought? Certainly a people cannot succeed as slaves, or under a system that condemns them to officially segregated and second-class status. However, human history hardly shows that an oppressed group needs the wholehearted love and acceptance of its overlords. Are black hands truly tied because whites are more likely to associate black faces with negative concepts in implicit-association tests, especially when evidence suggests that the results do not correlate meaningfully with behavior? Or because whites aren’t deeply informed about the injustices blacks have suffered throughout history? Precisely why must whites transform themselves to so extreme a degree for racial disparities to close?
Many will answer with what can be summed up with the grand old mantra, “If you’re white, you’re all right, if you’re brown, stick around, but if you’re black, get back.” The idea is that animus against black Americans—as opposed to Latinos or Asians—is so profound as to stanch striving. But that line is a tad elderly now, and the success since the 1970s of so many Caribbean and African immigrants—richly familiar with racism—has shown its obsolescence. In Ivy League institutions, typically almost half of black students come from immigrant families, despite such students representing less than 15 percent of the general black population of people their age.
Okay, first-generation Americans have, as it’s often phrased, a “pluck” one can’t expect native-born blacks to have as often. But to insist that native-born blacks require whites’ love in a way that Nigerian newcomers do not would seem to claim weakness as a birthright. And upon what basis do modern antiracists preach that a people embrace impotence? In my experience, it is not unusual for a black American person, if free to show his best and live a full life, to not really care whether whites see him as their true equal deep in their hearts.
Some will feel the previous two observations as accommodationist, insufficiently imaginative. However, that objection is less effective regarding a final problem with third-wave antiracism: its immaturity. Third-wave antiracism is a call to enshrine defeatism, hypersensitivity, oversimplification, and even a degree of performance. Lukianoff and Haidt are useful here, in noting the three guiding tenets of the new antiracist culture:
1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
2. Always trust your feelings.
3. Life is a battle between good people and bad people.
It may be difficult to see the relationship between these tenets, baldly stated, and the commitments of well-intentioned social-justice warriors, as they’re sometimes called. Notably, however, the approved methodology of persuasion is based on the impulses of the child.
The call for “safe spaces” from any failure to be fully understood. The microaggression treated as slashing slander. A black student shouting obscenities at a professor because an email urged reflection before condemning Halloween costumes as culturally appropriative. Or beyond the campus, how readily many usually measured people call views dissenting from the new orthodoxy on race “white supremacist,” a term generally associated with poll taxes and lynching. Consider also the reductive notion of black people engaged in endless battle against a monolith of “white people,” often benevolent but endlessly racist despite themselves, blissfully unaware of their inherent privilege, incapable of genuine empathy, and tarred as clumsy phonies for any attempt to show themselves as anything but the just-described. The lack of fit between this cartoon and reality is supposed to be fine because black people are punching up, but then King was arguably punching upper and let’s face it, this kind of professional hatred of the Other is exactly what he preached against.
[Read: The rise of victimhood culture]
The new normal is, “If you don’t like it, cry loudly and then louder, because you’re always right and they’re just bad.” Contrast this approach with that of people lionized today who worked within a racism none could disagree was more implacably overt and hostile than today. The black lawyer and activist Pauli Murray insisted in 1963 that none other than Alabama Governor George “Segregation Forever” Wallace be allowed to speak at Yale. She believed that the speech rights blacks had fought for so hard must be extended to people she found noxious, including on issues as personal to her as race. James Weldon Johnson, the NAACP head and author, insisted in 1934, “I will not allow prejudice or any of its attendant humiliations and injustices bear me down to spiritual defeat. My inner life is mine, and I will maintain and defend its integrity against the forces of hell.”
Under the new regime, people like Murray and Johnson had it wrong and apparently now qualify as antique figures; fostering social justice requires fashioning oneself as vulnerable, injured, and/or broken by things thoroughly “woke” people in the past would have treated as things to be brushed off their shoe.
The contrast here is not simply “complex.” It suggests that the struggle has gone off the rails. The new zeitgeist is under-considered and even condescending, seductive but fruitless, a fashion statement in the guise of a program, and finally, a distraction for a people who have already been through so very much.
Social concern and activism must not cease, but proceed minus the religious aspect they have taken on. One can be fervently dedicated to improving the lot of black Americans without a purse-lipped, prosecutorial culture dedicated more to virtue signaling than to changing other people’s lives.
Progressives can battle a War on Drugs that creates a black market that tempts too many poor black men into lives of crime. They can fight for free access to long-acting, reversible contraceptives for poor women and phonics-based reading instruction for kids from bookless homes. They can stand against Republican attempts to discourage the black vote via a sham concern for all-but-nonexistent voter fraud. The struggle must, and will, continue.
But the black person essentially barred from the polls gains nothing from someone sagely attesting to their white privilege on Twitter and decrying that “no one wants to talk about race in this country” when America is nothing less than obsessed with race week in and week out. One may consider President Trump a repulsive, bigoted excrescence without morally equating anyone who didn’t prioritize his racism enough to deny him their vote in 2016 with those who cheered a lynching 100 years before.
All of the above hinges on feigning claims of injury, on magnifying indignation in a trip-wire fashion, and on fostering a Manichaean, us-versus-the-pigs perspective on humanity out of Lord of the Flies. Racial uplift in modern America does require dealing with matters more abstract than what a Douglass or a King faced. This is a challenge. Progressives shirk that challenge, however, in fashioning a new kind of activism based on performance and display. They should not do less; they should do better.
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