What Our Cells Teach Us About a ‘Natural’ Death

[ed. Yes. Imagine if there were more research devoted to promoting a good, natural death (free of invasive technologies) that makes succumbing to the inevitable a more gentle, pain-free process. I don't fear death as much as I fear dying (... insert Woody Allen joke here).]

Every Thursday morning on the heart transplant service, our medical team would get a front-row seat to witness an epic battle raging under a microscope. Tiny pieces of heart tissue taken from patients with newly transplanted hearts would be broadcast onto a gigantic screen, showing static images of pink heart cells being attacked by varying amounts of blue immune cells. The more blue cells there were, the more voraciously they were chomping away the pink cells, the more evidence that the patient’s inherently xenophobic immune system was rejecting the foreign, transplanted heart.

There was so much beauty to be found in the infinitesimal push and pull between life and death those slides depicted that I would fantasize about having them framed and put up in my house. Yet the more I studied those cells, the more I realized that they might have the answers to one of the most difficult subjects of our time.

Throughout our history, particularly recently, the human race has looked far and wide to answer a complex question — what is a good death? With so many life-sustaining technologies now able to keep us alive almost indefinitely, many believe that a “natural” death is a good one. With technology now invading almost every aspect of our lives, the desire for a natural death experience mirrors trends noted in how we wish to experience birth, travel and food these days.

When we picture a natural death, we conjure a man or woman lying in bed at home surrounded by loved ones. Taking one’s last breath in one’s own bed, a sight ubiquitous in literature, was the modus operandi for death in ancient times. In the book “Western Attitudes Toward Death,” Philippe Ariès wrote that the deathbed scene was “organized by the dying person himself, who presided over it and knew its protocol” and that it was a public ceremony at which “it was essential that parents, friends and neighbors be present.” While such resplendent representations of death continue to be pervasive in both modern literature and pop culture, they are mostly fiction at best.

This vision of a natural death, however, is limited since it represents how we used to die before the development of modern resuscitative technologies and is merely a reflection of the social and scientific context of the time that death took place in. The desire for “natural” in almost every aspect of modern life represents a revolt against technology — when people say they want a natural death, they are alluding to the end’s being as technology-free as possible. Physicians too use this vocabulary, and frequently when they want to intimate to a family that more medical treatment may be futile, they encourage families to “let nature take its course.”

Yet, defining death by how medically involved it is might be shortsighted. The reason there are no life-sustaining devices in our romantic musings of death is that there just weren’t any available. Furthermore, our narratives of medical technology are derived largely from the outcomes they achieve. When death is unexpectedly averted through the use of drugs, devices or procedures, technology is considered miraculous; when death occurs regardless, its application is considered undignified. Therefore, defining a natural death is important because it forms the basis of what most people will thus consider a good death.

Perhaps we need to observe something even more elemental to understand what death is like when it is stripped bare of social context. Perhaps the answer to what can be considered a truly natural death can be found in the very cells that form the building blocks of all living things, humans included.

by Haider Javed Warraich, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Corbis, via Getty Images

Millennials Are Giving the Finger to Diamond Rings

[ed. 'Silent rings'?! : )]

It may not be as glittery or romantic, but saving for a house together or putting money aside to cover future parental-leave shortfall does signify a deeper level of commitment than the traditional diamond ring. That’s a possible explanation as to why among millennials – the generation in full marital swing – cheaper gemstones seem to be an increasingly attractive choice.

They’re also more fashionable, particularly in art-deco-style jewellery. “About five years ago, there was a massive reappraisal of coloured stones; a recognition they could be just as beautiful,” says John Benjamin, an expert in antique jewellery. For years, coloured stones were under-appreciated and undervalued. “The prices have absolutely skyrocketed in recent years. In auction, we’re seeing prices that we never saw before, it is a very different sort of marketplace from the old days when coloured stones could be bought, frankly, very cheaply in auction.”

That isn’t to say diamonds, particularly among younger people, are over – a 2016 report into the market by De Beers found that millennials spent $26bn on new diamond jewellery in its four key markets – more than any other generation. But jewellers are reporting that younger customers are starting to look for something less traditional than the white sparkler. An article in style journal the Gentlewoman this month even suggested that some women are opting for “silent” rings – fingers left naked as a mark of independence.

The internet – and specifically Pinterest and Instagram – has opened up options, says Nikolay Piriankov, founder of Taylor & Hart, which specialises in custom-made rings. “Before, it was very much driven by what jewellers could stock, and, if it wasn’t in your local shop, you wouldn’t know it was possible.

by Emine Saner, The Guardian | Read more:

Image:ProArtWork/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Ng Han Guan
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How We Finally Know We're Old: Grunge Tours Are a Thing in Seattle

It's 10 a.m. on a Thursday, and I'm standing in front of the (recently rebranded) MoPOP Museum waiting for my ride. I'm here to go on Stalking Seattle, a driving tour billed as "A Rock & Roll Sightseeing Tour."

And it's certainly not hard to feel stalker-esque when climbing into an unmarked black Dodge minivan with tinted windows. Two couples, visiting from the Netherlands and the Dominican Republic, sit in the back. It's not what I had pictured—which, to be fair, was some kind of double-decker bus, or maybe a Ride the Ducks "I'm embarrassed for everybody here" type of situation.

"Oh, it's not a real tour," owner and operator Charity Drewery insists, "just a van full of fans." Drewery, who grew up in Seattle, spent her musically formative years "going to shows and chasing boys" in the early 1990s grunge and rock scene.

She starts the tour in a parking lot in front of the Queen Anne apartment where Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone overdosed in 1990, just before the band's debut album was released.

"If Andy hadn't died, Mother Love Bone would have made it. And then of course, after Andy died, Chris Cornell wrote the best album of his life, Temple of the Dog," she explains to us as we head to the next location. Drewery says she wants to bring up more Seattle grunge-era bands in her tour than "just the big four" who made it, playing bands like Gruntruck, Mudhoney, Green River, Screaming Trees, and Skin Yard on her iPod as she drives.

The highlight of the tour is easily Black Dog Forge. After almost kicking the door in because the key was stuck, Drewery leads the tour inside the blacksmith shop and down some rickety steps to the basement space where both Pearl Jam and Soundgarden used to rehearse.

It's still a practice space for the Briefs, a punk band formed in 2000 that includes Lance "Romance" Mercer, Pearl Jam's former photographer, Drewery points out. Maybe because it's still used, the rehearsal space manages to almost preserve the very smell of the—dare I say it—teen spirit that catalyzed a movement.

Guitars are stacked haphazardly in the corner, piles of PBR cans and ashtrays threaten to fall over. Like the Moore and the Paramount, both spots on her tour, it has life—it is still fulfilling its intended purpose. But, as became obvious from driving past all the new construction sites downtown, few other places still are.

Drewery, for her part, is keenly aware that the Seattle she is stalking on her tours is by now almost a ghost town: RKCNDY, Tower Records, and the Off Ramp are all long gone. As is a cheap bite at the Hurricane, all the record stores, and the bowling alleys.

"This used to be a working man's town," she laments as she pulls into the parking lot of a Madison Park Starbucks after visiting the house where Kurt Cobain killed himself. "Everybody worked at Boeing, or they were loggers and fishermen. You know, that's what your dad did. That's why people wore flannel, because their dad had flannels!"

The Crocodile—since remodeled—is still there, as is Re-bar, where Nirvana started a food fight and got kicked out of their own record-release party for Nevermind. But the parking lot she used has been replaced by construction, so she doesn't even bother stopping there anymore, just points it out from the van. Sometimes, though, tourists will ask her to take their picture in front of the legendary venue.

"If you just look at the building you're standing right in front of, and you don't look to the side at all the new construction, maybe you can feel like you were back there."

by Amber Cortes, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Amber Cortes

The Murakami Effect

For the past decade or so I’ve been working on what is essentially an ethnography of the publishing industry, primarily in Tokyo and New York, and the way the intersection—and often the collision—of aesthetic and economic considerations influences what gets translated, how it is translated, and how it is marketed and consumed in another literary context. That is, ultimately, how the traffic of translation is subject to the larger economic concerns of the publishing industry, and how these concerns shape a canon of literature in translation that may bear little resemblance to that in the source literature and culture, but that comes to play an important role in the way that culture or nation is perceived in the national imagination of the target culture.

So, for example, reducing the argument to its simplest terms, in the 1950s and 60s, Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata were translated, marketed, and read in the US as representatives of a newly docile, aestheticized, Zen-like Japanese culture that was explicitly meant (by translators and publishers and perhaps policy experts as well) to replace the bellicose wartime image of Japan, as Edward Fowler has argued. This was one piece of a general rehabilitation strategy for the country in concert with promoting its new role as a reliable ally in the US Cold War calculus. At the same time, however, this image bore little resemblance to the positions Kawabata and Mishima often occupied in the domestic Japanese literary canon or marketplace.

In more recent years, Haruki Murakami has been similarly—though quite distinctly—marketed as the foremost literary representative of what Douglas McGray has called Japan’s emergent “Gross National Cool.” That is, at some point after the bursting of its economic bubble at the end of the 1980s, Japan began a transition from being a producer and exporter of industrial and technological products (Honda Civics and Sony Walkmen) to being a producer and exporter of cultural capital. As its hold on industrial domination receded, it succeeded, more or less, in reinventing itself as a possessor and wielder of soft power and cultural capital that could rival US global hegemony in the popular culture imagination. In effect, Hondas and Sonys were replaced by Pokémon and anime and sushi. At that point Haruki Murakami was, I would argue, more or less consciously identified as the most likely literary equivalent of this phenomenon. His slacker narrators and magical-realist plots were key to his selection for translation and export as another form of Japanese cultural “cool,” at a moment when the world was increasingly receptive to the notion that Japanese film, fashion, and food carried with them a kind of global cultural cachet. In other words, Murakami’s fiction, apart from its literary value, became a kind of cultural product representing a certain view of Japan as futuristic pop phenomenon. To cite just one example of this, when the translation of his bestselling novel 1Q84 was published in 2011, I remember walking out of the Harvard Coop in Cambridge, where a wall of the heavy volumes had been stacked in the lobby, and into the Urban Outfitters store where there were equally impressive stacks of the book, but this time they were clearly intended as fashion accessories to match the rest of the disposable books that chain tends to sell.

Murakami is no doubt known to many, even perhaps most, readers of literature in English—or he should be (a fact in itself worth noting when it comes to writers read largely in translation). Another significant writer of contemporary Japanese fiction, who is I’m sure known to far fewer readers in English, is Minae Mizumura. This writer has staked out a fascinating position, both in her fiction and in her critical work, that stands in stark contrast to Murakami’s fiction, the reputation it has engendered, and the position he occupies in the global literary market and imagination. These two authors could be said, in fact, to embody two completely opposite positions when it comes to the question of literary traffic. Furthermore, it seems to me that some fundamental contradictions inherent in the work of translators—work that serves, ostensibly, to build cultural bridges—can be inferred even more clearly from two specific texts by these authors. The two fictions in question are Murakami’s short story “Samsa in Love,” first published in Japanese as part of a 2013 collection entitled Koishikute [Ten Selected Love Stories] and in English in the New Yorker magazine in 2013 in Ted Goossen’s excellent translation, and Minae Mizumura’s very long 2002 fiction, entitled Honkaku Shōsetsu in Japanese and A True Novel in English, published in 2013 in Juliet Winters Carpenter’s equally good translation.

But first it’s helpful to take a close look at the example of Murakami, in order to see some of the ways literary traffic is affected by and, in some cases, radically altered by the economic considerations that accompany the movement of literary products through global markets. Translation, in this context, is no longer the activity of a single individual—the one traditionally known as the “translator”—but is altered and inflected by numerous other actors. I think of all this as “translation discourse”—that is, the tacit conversations between and negotiations among translators and, in no particular order, literary agents, editors, publishers, copy editors, jacket designers, marketing managers, sales representatives, book reviewers, and others who, in one way or another, have a say in what gets chosen for translation, who is chosen to translate it, how it gets translated, how it gets edited, how it gets marketed, and who, ultimately, will be likely to read it—and even how they are likely to react to it.

Murakami’s international success has helped make the outlines of the translation discourse remarkably clear. I’ve analyzed elsewhere, and in more detail, the development of his global reputation in a variety of registers, all of which have contributed to the way he was translated and marketed abroad. Some of these factors include the origin of Murakami’s career in an act of auto back-translation (that is, he wrote the opening passages of his first novel, Kaze no uta o kike, in English and translated them himself back into Japanese); Murakami’s own experience as a highly prolific translator of American fiction and the knowledge that lent him of how books fare in translation and what needs to happen to make them intelligible and attractive to a wide readership in a target culture; his conscious management of his global career—switching translators, for instance, from a talented but “interventionist” freelancer to a Harvard professor, switching his representation from a small Japanese foreign rights agency to Amanda Urban at ICM, switching publishers from Kodansha International, the English-language arm of a large Japanese house that brought out his first three titles in English, to the prestige imprint Knopf, and the accompanying switch from little-known, Tokyo-based editors to Gary Fisketjon, one of the most influential literary editors of his generation; and perhaps most importantly, what I see as Murakami’s fairly self-conscious assault on the fortress of America’s most important literary reputation-maker, the New Yorker magazine, where he was acquired and edited by another literary titan of the 1990s, Robert Gottlieb. Murakami himself studied the work of New Yorker writer Raymond Carver—and ultimately translated every word Carver ever wrote into Japanese—in part with an eye to creating a version of the New Yorker house style in Japanese, which allowed him, when his work was translated back into English, to embody a naturalized Japanese New Yorker writer more New Yorker in many ways than any other and, not incidentally, made him among the writers who have appeared most often in that magazine in the past 25 years.

I worry that this account of Murakami’s career is too cynical and that it fails to take into consideration the role his literary talent played in his success. There is no doubt some truth to that criticism, but I have also felt that it is important to understand these largely economic and political mechanisms in order to see the effects they have on the aesthetic process. Of course, it’s also worth pointing out that my fascination with the mechanisms of Murakami’s literary celebrity was also fueled by the fact that his career has had a direct influence on my own work as a translator, much of which would have been unimaginable were it not for his success and his shaping of Western and particularly American expectations for what Japanese contemporary fiction looks like, and the role that success has played in encouraging American publishers to go on a decades-long hunt for what is invariably called “the next Murakami.” I have taken to calling this the “Are there any more like you at home?” factor, in reference to the almost constant questioning by agents and editors about the next Murakami and my own experience in translating half a dozen writers, such as Natsuo Kirino and Yōko Ogawa, who have been identified, often explicitly on jacket copy, as Murakami-like in one way or another—and often in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I have also been able to observe and participate in an analogous (if less successful) process of commodification of these writers and of my translations that has involved, in some cases, the same players and moves I had previously noted in the Murakami narrative: Kirino, for example, after the success of her novel Out in English translation, made an identical change of representation from the same Japanese agency to Amanda Urban at ICM, and an analogous change of publishers; and just as Robert Gottlieb “discovered” Murakami when he was literary editor for the New Yorker, his successor, Deborah Treisman, I suspect, acquired Yōko Ogawa’s stories, in a sense, to develop her own global Japanese New Yorker writer.

So, again, there are many non-literary, largely extra-textual, and mainly economic factors that influence the nature and volume of literary “traffic” flowing between Japan and the English-speaking world, and these factors have an influence on the practice of translation itself.

by Stephen Snyder, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Jerry Jeff Walker

Lyrics

[ed. See also: My Old Man]

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Employees Who Decline Genetic Testing Could Face Penalties Under Proposed Bill

[ed. Republican representatives, hard at work for you! This bill probably won't go very far (for now, anyway) but at least it gives a good idea of what some people (and insurance companies) are thinking. Remember when drug testing was considered an invasion of privacy because what you did on your own time was your own time, and of no consequence to your employer (as long as you showed up sober)? Now that's all been normalized. This is the next step. I wonder how many people will sign up for their company wellness programs after this?] 

Employers could impose hefty penalties on employees who decline to participate in genetic testing as part of workplace wellness programs if a bill approved by a U.S. House committee this week becomes law.

In general, employers don't have that power under existing federal laws, which protect genetic privacy and nondiscrimination. But a bill passed Wednesday by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce would allow employers to get around those obstacles if the information is collected as part of a workplace wellness program.

Such programs — which offer workers a variety of carrots and sticks to monitor and improve their health, such as lowering cholesterol — have become increasingly popular with companies. Some offer discounts on health insurance to employees who complete health-risk assessments. Others might charge people more for smoking. Under the Affordable Care Act, employers are allowed to discount health insurance premiums by up to 30 percent — and in some cases 50 percent — for employees who voluntarily participate in a wellness program.

The bill is under review by other House committees and still must be considered by the Senate. But it has already faced strong criticism from a broad array of groups, as well as House Democrats. In a letter sent to the committee earlier this week, nearly 70 organizations — representing consumer, health and medical advocacy groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, AARP, March of Dimes and the National Women's Law Center — said the legislation, if enacted, would undermine basic privacy provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act and the 2008 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA).

Congress passed GINA to prohibit discrimination by health insurers and employers based on the information that people carry in their genes. There is an exception that allows for employees to provide that information as part of voluntary wellness programs. But the law states that employee participation must be entirely voluntary, with no incentives for providing the data or penalties for not providing it.

But the House legislation would allow employers to impose penalties of up to 30 percent of the total cost of the employee's health insurance on those who choose to keep such information private. (...)

The average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health coverage in 2016 was $18,142, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Under the plan proposed in the bill, a wellness program could charge employees an extra $5,443 in annual premiums if they choose not to share their genetic and health information.

The bill, Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act, HR 1313, was introduced by Rep. Virginia Foxx, (R-N.C.), who chairs the Committee on Education and the Workforce. A committee statement said the bill provides employers “the legal certainty they need to offer employee wellness plans, helping to promote a healthy workforce and lower health care costs.”

by Lena H. Sun, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: (luchschen/iStock)

The Rules Do Not Apply

I first met Ariel Levy in 2009, soon after moving from London to New York, but I had been a fan for more than a decade. Her frank articles about pop culture and sex, which she wrote in her first job at New York magazine from the late 1990s, provided the template of what I wanted to write one day. Her 2005 book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, a blistering look at how young women were being sold the lie that emulating pole dancers and Paris Hilton was empowering, became one of the defining feminist statements of that decade. At the New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 2008, she breaks up the magazine’s occasional aridity with vivid articles about sexuality and gender. (She got her job when she told editor David Remnick that, “If aliens had only the New Yorker to go by, they would conclude that human beings didn’t care that much about sex, which they actually do.”)

Heroes rarely live up to your fantasies, but Levy exceeded them. Usually we’d go out for drinks – cocktails that knocked me sideways, but barely seemed to touch her sides – and from the start she struck me as being just like her writing: laid-back, wise, curious, kind. Sometimes Levy’s wife, Lucy, would join us. “Isn’t she hilarious?” Levy would say after Lucy had said something that wasn’t, actually, all that funny, but I envied them their mutual devotion after almost a decade together. I, by contrast, was lonely and, like generations of single women in their mid-30s before me, starting to panic. But like a lot of women of my particular generation, I felt ashamed of this. Panicking about not having a baby? How retrograde. So I never admitted any of it to Levy, who seemed more likely to eat her own hair than indulge in such uncool, unfeminist thoughts.

I left New York in 2012 and, despite my doomy fears, had twins when I was 37. Levy and I stayed in touch by email, and although her messages became shorter and more distant, I assumed everything was fine, because she was Ari. But in 2013, I opened the New Yorker and learned that it was not. (...)

In 2012, Levy conceived a baby with sperm from a friend, having overcome the reservations she’d long had about parenthood. She was about to turn 38: “It felt like making it on to a plane the moment before the gate closes – you can’t help but thrill,” she wrote in her 2013 New Yorker article, Thanksgiving In Mongolia.

When she was five months pregnant, she flew to Ulaanbaatar for work. Her friends were concerned but, she wrote, “I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi desert pregnant.” After two days of abdominal discomfort, she ran into the hotel bathroom, crouched on the floor and blacked out from the pain. When she came to, her baby was on the floor next to her. “I heard myself say out loud, ‘This can’t be good.’ But it looked good. My baby was as pretty as a seashell,” she wrote. She stared in awe at his mouth, “opening and closing, opening and closing, swallowing the new world”.

She had suffered a severe placental abruption, a rare complication in which the placenta detaches from the uterus. In shock, Levy held the 19-week foetus while blood spread across the tiles. She eventually called for help, taking a photograph of her son before the ambulance turned up. She was taken to a clinic where a kind South African doctor tended to her while she bled and sobbed. “And I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted a child, that this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of vanity and selfishness, and the dark Mongolian sky had punished me,” she wrote.

Levy flew back to New York and, within two weeks, her relationship with Lucy came to an end. For months afterwards, Levy continued to bleed and lactate: “It seemed to me grief was leaking out of me through every orifice.” She looked obsessively at the photograph of her baby, and tried to make others look, too, so they could see what she saw and they did not: that she was a mother who had lost her child.

Her article, which won a National Magazine Award in 2014, ends at that point, and I assumed that the end of Lucy and Levy’s marriage was tied to the loss of their child. In fact, that was “a whole other shitshow”, Levy says now. When she returned from Mongolia, she realised through her fog of grief that Lucy, who had struggled with alcoholism before, needed to go to rehab, badly. The women, still in love but too broken to support one another, separated. Today, they are in touch, but, Levy says, “There are times when one of us says, ‘I gotta stop talking to you for a while because this is too painful.’ Just because you get divorced, you don’t magically stop caring about each other.”

The breakup is one of only several shitshows recounted in Levy’s memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, which looks, in self-lacerating detail, at events in her life before she went to Mongolia, and hints at some that came after. It is not the book that many expected would follow Female Chauvinist Pigs, not least because it could be spun as a warning to women about the perils of waiting too long to have a baby. Placental abruption, Levy writes, “usually befalls women who are heavy cocaine users or who have high blood pressure. But sometimes it just happens because you’re old.” She doesn’t go into this in the book, but Levy, who is now 42, has not been able to conceive again, despite having undergone “a ridiculous amount of IVF” over the past four years.

The alternative way of looking at Levy’s memoir is that she is dealing with a subject that feminism has never been able to resolve: the immovable rock of fertility, butting up against female progress. Levy says she had always wanted to be a writer, “so I built my life with that as my priority”; by the time she realised she also wanted to be a mother, she was in her late 30s. She writes that she and her generation “were given the lavish gift of agency by feminism”, coupled with a middle-class, western sense of entitlement that led them to believe that “anything seemed possible if you had ingenuity, money and tenacity. But the body doesn’t play by those rules.”

“Of course, this is partly about class,” she says now. “I don’t hear women who are less privileged thinking they’re entitled to everything, whenever they want it. That’s a privilege phenomenon, but it is a phenomenon. It makes me laugh when people say, ‘Why don’t you “just” do surrogacy, or “just” adopt?’ Believe me, there is no ‘just’ about them.” Surrogacy costs $100,000-$150,000 in the US, while adoption costs are on average between $20,000 and $45,000 (costs in the UK are much lower). After the money Levy spent on IVF (“A lot. A lot, a lot, a lot”), those options are less possible than ever.

Doomy warnings that women need to stop shillyshallying and sprog up are published in the Daily Mail every day. They are far less common from prominent feminist writers, and Levy agrees there is no point in lecturing young women, “because it doesn’t do anything, and they know it already. They’re like, ‘Eff you: I’m busy trying to earn money and figure myself out.’ It’s just a design flaw that, at the exact moment so many of us finally feel mature enough to take care of someone beside ourselves, the body’s like: ‘I’m out.’”

by Hadley Freeman, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Annabel Clark

South Korea Stunned By Leader's Rapid Ouster

This was not supposed to happen in South Korea. It was too divided, too corrupt, too much in thrall to the rich and powerful who'd always had their way.

Four months ago, the idea that the country's leader, along with the cream of South Korean business and politics, would be knocked from command after sustained, massive, peaceful protests would have been ludicrous.

Now Park Geun-hye, thanks to a court ruling Friday, is no longer president and may very well face criminal extortion and other charges. The head of the country's biggest company, Samsung, sits in jail, when he's not in a courtroom facing trial for bribery and embezzlement linked to the corruption scandal that felled Park. And a Who's Who of once untouchables languishes behind bars waiting for their day in court.

This swift upending of the status quo has so shaken the country's foundations that it has left people here a bit stunned.

Now comes the hard part.

South Koreans will look to take their peaceful revolution - and the genuine sense of empowerment that many of the average citizens who took to the streets in protest, week after week, now feel at their accomplishment - and turn it into lasting progress.

Among the first of the many big, uneasy questions that linger over this enterprise: What happens next?

In the short term, at least, the answer is more politics, and of the lightning-quick variety. Half a dozen or so candidates will now scramble, over the next two months, for a shot at becoming the next president of South Korea. Elections will likely come May 9.

The current smart money is on a liberal - Moon Jae-in, who lost to Park in 2012 and who now leads in early polls - but conservatives, though in disarray and currently viewed as toxic by many South Koreans of all political stripes, still have strong bastions of support in the country's south, if a charismatic candidate arises.

The qualities of the next leader will help answer another fundamental question: Will the confidence that many won from South Korea's version of "people power" last?

South Korea is no stranger to rapid, intense change. The country whiplashed from Japan's colonization to total war in the 1950s, to an economic "miracle" of rebuilding supported by a brutal dictatorship, to one of the world's most successful democracies.

Just below the surface have always lurked deep social and political divisions - between conservative and liberal, rich and poor, men and women. The entrenched elite often seemed to just chug along, untouched. If they did topple from power or privilege, it was because of violent change, when the streets filled with tear gas and riots, not, as in past months, singing, smiling families of all social classes and political backgrounds.

Park's fall may have shattered that pattern.

Among the changes: an energized citizenry who can now point to concrete proof that they can make a real difference when they're united, and an eagerness among civic groups to build on their ability to turn popular anger into peaceful protests that actually worked.

There's no guarantee that any of this will last.

"Now is a critical transition moment," said John Delury, an Asia expert at Yonsei University in Seoul. "Starting tomorrow, the question is, where does all this energy go? The unifying factor was a focus on getting rid of a problem. Now, they have to figure out, how do you turn that energy into something more constructive than destructive?"

by Foster Klug, AP |  Read more:

Image: Lee Jin-man

The Album Doesn’t Count

[ed. See also: Ed Sheeran has 16 songs in the Top 20 – and it's a sign of how sick the charts are.]

It’s about the event.

For how long have we heard it’s about the new record, the hit, that they are the engine of all that follows.

Maybe with Top Forty, but in the rest of the music sphere…

Lady Gaga had one of the stiffest follow-up albums of all time, even rivaling Peter Frampton’s “I’m In You,” but now she’s gonna sell out stadiums, how can this be?

She can’t seem to write a hit to save her life. But she was on the Super Bowl and the Grammys, never mind two years with Tony Bennett, and she’s seen as a star and is doing business accordingly.

Now if you’re playing the hit game, if you occupy the Spotify Top 50, it’s a different world. So many of the popsters live and die by the hit. Without it, they’re nothing. Especially if their tracks are part of the combine, made by the producers du jour. But if you’re more self-contained, if you’re doing something a bit different, the music is still important, it’s what seals the deal, gives you your audience, but to sustain it’s less about having hits and satiating those who haven’t cared previously as opposed to staying in the public eye. The old days of disappearing between album cycles, of being mysterious, those are done. Today you humanize yourself and stay in the game. As for recordings, they should be dripped and dribbled out, to keep fans satiated, but to get them coming to your show…

You’ve got to be on TV and online and…

Kinda like John Mayer. He’s on Snapchat, masquerading as Hank Knutley on Kimmel, you see him around, you think of him as a friend, like someone on a sitcom, as opposed to the distant musical titans of yore.

So you go where the eyeballs are. Unless your credibility is at stake. You take chances, mistakes are forgotten overnight, you play with whomever asks, you make YouTube videos, you weigh in on popular culture and more, and when it comes time to monetize…

You’re top of mind.

For far too long the industry has been playing a radio game. Wherein the charts are all that matter. Getting on the airwaves, reaching mass. But the dirty little secret is music is now all niche. Think about satiating your niche, not those distantly interested. Every act today is a big niche, from Taylor Swift to Beyonce to Metallica. All that press about Ed Sheeran? Most people have not listened to his new album and will not, they don’t care, in today’s overloaded society you have a hard time keeping up on what you do care about.

Forget the radio, forget the charts, forget sitting at home afraid you’re not gonna get it right. Get into the swim. Sure, hire a PR agent to spread the story if it’s worth telling, but really you’re looking for your fans to talk about what you do, and it all happens online, and online becomes so two-dimensional that people yearn to interact live.

We’re wiping the classic acts off the map. As well as their handlers and the record company people who sustained them and were inured to the old ways. Younger people are infiltrating the business who are willing to take chances, to start with a blank slate.

Your act can get started on NPR, like Alabama Shakes, a press story if there ever was one.

Or “CBS Sunday Morning”…

The former gets other scribes paying attention and the latter is a victory lap for those who care.

But both are event-like.

Think about what you can do that’s new and different that will generate a story, that will live on YouTube, that will endear yourself to your fans. It’s much more important than working with indie promo and slaving over adds and chart position, neither of which resonate with the public. Come on, if you’re listening to terrestrial radio you’re the most out of it person extant, you probably can’t afford a concert ticket. Better for an act to appear on Howard Stern or a hit podcast or some place online with traction.

Once again, the old metrics do not apply.

by Bob Lefsetz, The Lefsetz Letter |  Read more:
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Elliott Smith, My First Celebrity Death

[ed. See also: Needle in the hay: Elliott Smith's incomparable brilliance lives on.]

Sunset Boulevard is a long road. It goes on – and on – for 22 miles, following a path stamped out by cattle in the 18th century that now cuts between Downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood, reaching the ocean at what was once the ranch of the silent film producer Thomas Ince. Ince was known as “the Father of the Western”, and by the time he died in 1924, he had made more than 800 pictures (150 two-reelers in 1913 alone). A photograph from around this time shows him in a cap and thick, checked jacket, his eyes looking to his right with a glare as quiet and fearsome as Vito Corleone’s.

Ince had just turned 44 when he boarded a yacht owned by William Randolph Hearst, where the newspaper magnate, his mistress Marion Davies and film celebrities including Charlie Chaplin had gathered for his birthday party. Within 24 hours, Ince was dead. According to Hollywood lore, the LA Times ran the headline “Movie producer shot on Hearst yacht!” in its morning edition, but dropped it come the evening. The official cause of death was heart failure, but rumours about the “true” circumstances of Ince’s demise still circulate – a recent example being the Peter Bogdanovich film The Cat’s Meow, in which Cary Elwes plays the doomed film-maker, shot by Hearst in a jealous rage.

When public figures die, it becomes everybody’s business. Death is ordinarily a private matter, but for the famous – who live as characters in some collective fantasy – it can be another excuse for public speculation, for public myth-making. After David Bowie’s death last year, fans and journalists interpreted the video for his single “Lazarus” as a cryptic message about the illness that killed him. It was a reasonable supposition, since the song begins with the lines “Look up here, I’m in heaven”, and the video shows the singer in a hospital bed. According to a BBC documentary that aired in January, however, Bowie came up with the video’s concept before receiving his final diagnosis. It was all just a weird coincidence. But listening to the song and Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, today, I find it hard to escape the sense that here is a transmission from beyond the grave.

The myths surrounding the lives and deaths of stars can overpower the often mundane reality. Bobby Kennedy probably had nothing to do with Marilyn Monroe’s barbiturates overdose on 5 August 1962 – but faced with a choice between glamorous tragedy and sad fact, many choose to believe the former, however fantastical.

The singer-songwriter Elliott Smith was a very different kind of star to Bowie, or Monroe, or even his peer Kurt Cobain. Both Cobain and Smith killed themselves mid-career after long periods of drug dependency (Smith was “clean” at the time of his death in 2003), and both were significant figures on the Beatles-ish pop end of 1990s alternative rock.

But where Nirvana transfigured misery into an exhilarating, cathartic squall, Smith turned it inward. Even as a grungy rocker in his early band Heatmiser, he sang as if every word were some shameful secret, as if his whispery voice were the voice in our heads when we are most alone. Smith was signed to the major label DreamWorks Records in 1997 and was nominated for an Oscar for his song “Miss Misery” the following year (it was used in the Gus Van Sant movie Good Will Hunting), but somehow the usual glamour of fame and success never stuck to him. He always came across as an underdog. And to his fans, myself included, his music felt like personal property. It didn’t belong to pop culture at large. It belonged to us.

All music is, of course, performance, and I’m pretty wary of those claims of “authenticity” that still pass for so much music criticism. (How many reviews of the Sharon van Etten album Tramp obsessed over how “she was essentially without a home over its recording process”?) That Smith recorded most of his early albums, from 1994’s Roman Candle to 1997’s Either/Or, on rudimentary tape equipment gives his music a self-consciously uncommercial sound, which translates upon listening as more “genuine” than that of slick, studio-made work. But it’s an aesthetic effect – a lo-fi style that is no more or less valid than Nile Rodgers’s sparkly productions for Madonna, or Steve Albini’s keeping-it-real recordings for, say, Nina Nastasia.

Nonetheless, Smith traded on this image of emotional honesty and privacy that seemed always at odds with his status as a relatively well-known public figure. He appeared on MTV, on late-night chat shows such as Conan O’Brien, on magazine covers and on several major movie soundtracks, the most notable being Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums and Sam Mendes’s American Beauty. Perhaps his deliberate rejection of the myths of stardom was a myth in itself – sort of like the barroom pick-up line about having no pick-up line.

All of this complicated our ability to deal with Smith’s death back in 2003. At least, it complicated it for me. When I first heard that he had stabbed himself in the chest and died, something in me shut down. I’d been bemused by those who had mourned Princess Diana so lavishly in August 1997 – “How could anyone cry about the death of a stranger?” I’d thought. But Elliott Smith felt personal. He was a personal public figure, if that makes sense. It was as if I’d lost a part of myself.

by Yo Zushi, New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Justin Hampton via: Amazon

Erotic Exposure

[ed: See also: Glenn Greenwald interview on privacy.]

The difference between gossip and surveillance is hard to articulate, just as it is sometimes hard to tell where a neighbourhood ends and the country begins. In Miranda Lambert’s song “White Liar,” the husband goes out cheating on a Friday, and by Monday his wife has news for him: “My cousin saw you on the street with a redhead named Bernice.” With this version of the adultery story, the cousin brings the news because she cares about the wife, and maybe also about the husband. It is not none of her business.

Now here is another version. Last summer in Blackpool, the down-at-heel resort town of which the Kinks sang in “Autumn Almanac,” a woman and her lover were waiting in line for coffee at a gas station. The conversation turned to the mechanics of the liaison itself – my man thinks I’m at work. Do I pick up if he calls? A young man, Stevie Wilcock, overheard them. He opened Facebook and typed:

David. If your Girlfriend/wife is mid 40’s, went to work this morning wearing a black skirt, black tights and a light blue shirt... She told you she was in a meeting all day with work. She isn’t, she’s currently stood in front of me at the costa Coffee machine in Chester Shell garage, telling another man this whole story whist they’re laughing about it. Oh she also drives a black Ford Fiesta with the Reg ******. Pack your stuff and get yourself gone Dave.

We have no idea whether David read this, nor do we know, or care, who David is. Likewise, despite what seems to be Wilcock’s intention, namely to expose and punish a woman who has humiliated a man, we have no clue as to the identity of the “Girlfriend/wife”. The registration number is an amusing bit of sleuthing, but what if the car were the man’s? What if it were rented? Tens of thousands of people saw this post on Facebook, yet most of them saw it as a curiosity, rather than something to be genuinely curious about, and there is no certainty that Wilcock achieved the objective he gleefully envisioned (“get yourself gone Dave”). Many relationships survive affairs. Maybe this Facebook post is now the story David and his wife tell their friends, “laughing about it”.

Wilcock did expose someone with his post. He exposed Stevie Wilcock. If we Google the name “David”, we get Bible verses, a Michelangelo. If we Google the registration number, we get a jumble of unrelated articles. But Google “Stevie Wilcock” and we immediately come to the news of an anonymous British woman’s sexual life, accompanied by a picture of scruffy, austere Wilcock, sitting in what I think is the back of a van, staring out at us with his bland, grey-blue eyes. Unless he does something outstandingly noteworthy or criminal, the post will define him for the rest of his life. “Stevie Wilcock, isn’t he that guy who…?”

We might think of Wilcock and “White Liar” as belonging to two separate spheres of knowledge: the written and the oral. One sphere contains surveillance, where records are generated and maintained for a far-removed observer, and the other has usually contained gossip, the kind of knowledge that flows around us changeably, valuable only to those who inhabit a relevant space – a group of friends, or a school cafeteria, or a small town.

In her 1965 essay “On Morality”, Joan Didion claimed that in the California desert “stories travel at night”. She explained, a bit fantastically: “Someone gets in his pickup and drives a couple of hundred miles for a beer, and he carries news of what is happening, back wherever he came from.” Hundreds of miles is a lot for a beer, but when I think of the use of gossip, it is this sort of scene that I think of: the pleasure of news from the nearby afar, the way you hurt someone who I care about, the warning that the stranger arriving late tonight at the motel is known to be bad with his debts and once several towns over pulled a knife when he got drunk. That you were spotted on the street with a redhead named Bernice, and your wife’s cousin tipped her off.

Most major religions disapprove of gossip. (From the Koran: “And do not spy or backbite each other. Would one of you like to eat the flesh of his brother when dead?”) In the legal system, too, a court will prevent witnesses from recounting remarks made by people who have not testified, so-called hearsay evidence. Because you cannot expect God or a judge to condone gossip, it sits just outside the realm of official record, where it does us a necessary service by carrying information back and forth that might not otherwise appear in a newspaper or a trial transcript.

The less access that you have to traditional channels, the more important gossip becomes. Gavin Butt in his study of queer artists in post-war New York, writes that gossip has “historical importance in disseminating knowledge about same-sex sexuality”. (Warhol’s diaries, full of married men with “a problem”, i.e. gay desire, are the case in point.) So where society makes full expression of the self impossible, gossip can give it the mercy of a double life.

Then, more mercifully still, gossip vanishes. It must be new or it is not worth repeating. Only the most embarrassing moments turn into memes, and if you grew up before Google Image search, you may remember that memes were in-jokes and folded notes, not images, and that these could be forgotten in a way that they cannot be forgotten now. An incident from my childhood makes this obvious. As a boy from a liberal suburb in Massachusetts, I liked having sex with my male friends. I also had a tendency to take a good thing too far. Once, at a birthday party, I fellated a boy in front of a large group, in a bedroom in broad daylight. (This was a stupid thing to do, but if you think that it is hard to get a blowjob as a teenage boy, try giving one.) The next day I received a phone call from a member of the bedroom’s audience, Pete, who told me he and his friend Willy were blackmailing me for $160, payable, quite reasonably, in $40 installments. If I failed to pay the first installment by Friday, he would start telling everyone what I had done. I told him I would come up with the cash, then went upstairs and sat trembling in my bedroom, flooded with shame and terror.

The next day was Thursday. In school, I found Nick, a sly and elfin boy who could always be counted on to spread a rumour. He would not believe what I had seen, I told him. What? he said. I can’t, I said. Please? Nick said. OK, I said, fine. But you cannot tell anyone. Pete blew Willy at a party. This being unusual news, the rest of the school took an interest, and by the end of the day it was accepted fact. I left at 2pm to find Pete standing on the sidewalk, surrounded by a hostile crowd. “They suck dicks,” he wailed, pointing at my friends and me. “They do.” Like two missiles colliding in mid-air, the stories disintegrated into the cool water of confusion. I never paid the $160. (...)

In ads for its new video-streaming service, Facebook advises me to “go live” when I see something arresting. When a person walks an animal that is not a dog, for instance, or when a scene unfolds at the airport baggage claim. Things that I once might have related to a friend, I am now supposed to film. It is one of the odd realities of our era that although we live under a sprawling surveillance apparatus, we eagerly volunteer to do surveillance of our own. We already know that Facebook shares data with the NSA. When coupled with facial-recognition software, Facebook Live will become a geolocation tool of unstoppable reach and depth.

For a person who finds himself the subject of unwanted attention on Facebook or Google, the options for recourse are quickly depleted. There are really only a handful. Facebook will accept takedown requests in cases of abuse. Where search engines are concerned, citizens of the European Union can invoke the “right to oblivion” law, which allows them to petition Google to remove compromising information. One may as well petition a leopard to donate to the Vegan Society. If Google declines to grant your request, you can appeal to a court, but by that time the page has been indexed and mirrored, now accessible from anywhere. Because the internet is moving toward a single-identity system – Google and Facebook, who know who you are, lie beneath most of your interactions online – the double life becomes endangered.

It is a strange phrase, “the right to oblivion”, and the strangeness is revealing. It does not mean what it thinks it does. Strictly speaking, the right to oblivion would be the right to a state equivalent of never having existed. Not even a puff of smoke but the absence of anything ever having burned in the first place. The right to be completely forgotten, to have an unmarked death. What the EU wishes to intend by it, however, is the right to keep a certain part of life out of print: a bankruptcy, a nude photograph sent to a former lover. The spectre of a beautiful Latin word – oblivion from oblivisci, to forget – conscripted into sentences beside the American neologism“Google”, metaphorises the horror of our predicament, adults standing helplessly before the blinking and childlike incomprehension of the Valley. Oblivion, meet Google.

by Jesse Barron, The Tank |  Read more:

Image: Shizuka Yokomizo, Stranger No.1, 1998. Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo

The 100 Websites That Rule the Internet

100 Websites That Rule the Internet
by Jeff Desjardin, Visual Capitalist |  Read more (click here for larger graphic):
Image: Visual Capitalist

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Going Underground: Inside the World of the Mole-Catchers

[ed. I think I'd hate moles less if they weren't so wily. Do a Google search of mole traps and look at all the various contraptions. There are millions of them because NONE OF THEM WORK! One hardware store even recommended a hose attachment for the exhaust pipe on my truck, which did absolutely nothing except make my lawn start to smoke (but maybe got the moles a little high). Now  I use cinch mole traps, which the local golf course uses, but have to purchase them by mail order (because Washington state considers them inhumane). It's pretty much hit or miss. Mostly miss. Drives me nuts, like Bill Murray in Caddyshack.] 

Roger Page purchased his home in East Bilney, a Norfolk farming community, about 25 years ago. For the better part of those 25 years, he bore no ill will toward the moles. He was fond of wildlife, or at least what little of it remained in the country. A family of deer foraged in the backyard. Foxes lolled in the road at dusk. Moles were a rarity.

Page worked as a commercial pilot and when the occasional molehill erupted on his lawn, he would pat it down before departing again to New York or Hong Kong. They seemed to have an understanding, he and the moles. They mostly kept to the woods, while Page mostly kept to the garden.

But after he retired five years ago, Page expanded his back lawn and the moles became more persistent. As more and more molehills sprung up, Page came to feel as if their labours were engineered to produce in him the maximum anguish. He purchased traps at the garden centre, but they would often remain unsprung or – worse – sprung and empty.

He decided to escalate his counter-assault. During a stopover in Amsterdam, he bought a pungent bag of flower bulbs advertised as a natural mole deterrent. (The moles didn’t mind.) Next, he installed a solar-powered mole repeller, a torpedo-shaped device that emits vibrations that are supposed to keep the moles away. (The moles carried on.) He tried flooding them out with a water hose. (Moles are strong swimmers.) Finally, he tried suffocating them with the exhaust of his lawnmower. (Moles can survive in low‑oxygen environments.)

Page knew it wasn’t healthy to go on like this. Last September, he found the phone number of a woman named Louise Chapman, also known as the Lady Mole Catcher of Norwich. Traditional mole catching in Britain has experienced a resurgence following a 2006 European Union ban on strychnine, and Chapman is one of many trying to profit from the boom. A former drama teacher, she has been profiled in national newspapers and travelled to Australia in 2016 to be featured in the first season of a reality television show called Deadliest Pests Down Under, where she applied pink lipstick before hunting a funnel web spider. With the help of a business coach, she has also tried marketing Country Mole Catcher™ franchises across the country, offering newcomers to the business everything they need to get started for £7,500, plus a cut of their proceeds.

Chapman is a compact blonde woman, and – when she’s on the job – clad in Wellington boots. When we arrived at Page’s home, she popped open the back of her white Audi estate car and retrieved a bucket containing plastic flags, a garden spade and a long metal rod with a bulb on the end – a mole probe.

We followed Page to the side of his house. There, a ragged strip of lawn about the size of a tennis court lay dotted with patches of overturned earth, each patch spaced every two feet or so. The lawn looked as though it had been strafed by artillery. Chapman walked the length of it, taking note of small details: a crack in the soil, a dead patch of grass, a pile of fresh dirt. She saw herself as an archaeologist who could reconstruct the workings of an underground metropolis based on the scantest traces on the surface.

“I reckon there are three,” Chapman said at last. She gave Page a quote for the work: £80 for the first mole with the price dropping to £60 a mole for two or more. She couldn’t promise to dispatch them on the first visit or even the second one. It could take weeks, but he didn’t have to pay a penny if she wasn’t successful. “No mole, no fee,” they call it in the business. “You’ve already tried to catch them, and they might have got wily,” she warned.

Clients are sometimes taken aback by Chapman’s prices, which she makes a point of delivering in person. Page, however, readily agreed that it was worth it for his sanity, and Chapman got to work. She began by cutting a cube of turf from the roof of the mole run and carefully set it on the ground. Then, she inserted a trap shaped like a fizzy drink can into the hole and covered it with a few clumps of grass. This trap, known as the Duffus half-barrel and first patented in 1920, is based on traditional designs made of a clay or wooden barrel and a horsehair snare powered by a bent stick. In the modern metal trap, a spring-loaded wire loop functions as the snare. When the mole enters the device, it makes it halfway through this loop before brushing against the trigger. The wire loop then accelerates upward, crushing the mole against the trap’s curved roof.

Page was clearly torn between his desire to have an attractive lawn and the violent death he was about to sanction. “I don’t like killing animals,” he said. Chapman, on her hands and knees, looked up from her work. “You were driven to it,” she told him. When she had finished setting traps, she said that either she or her colleague Carole would return “in a few days”.

Chapman tossed off those last words casually, but they represented one of the most divisive issues in mole catching today. Unlike mousetraps, mole traps do not kill instantly and do not always kill cleanly. The world of mole catching is bitterly divided between those who believe that traps should be checked every 24 hours – to ensure that any injured moles are dispatched quickly, rather than being left to die a slow and agonising death – and those who don’t.

Because of the expense of driving out to check an empty trap day after day, opponents of such regulations argue that it would hasten the extinction of mole catching as it has been practised for centuries. “It will criminalise all the mole-catchers,” Chapman says. Britain would be overrun by molehills, which are not only unsightly, but can also potentially spread disease to livestock, trip up horses on race-courses, and ruin golf courses and football pitches. To professionals such as Chapman, such threats appear to outweigh the possibility that a maimed mole or an unfortunate weasel could be squirming in pain beneath someone’s lawn for days.

by Brendan Borrell, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Tony Evans /Timelaps/Getty Images

A Town Under Trial

In the early 1990s, New Life Fitness & Massage kept its lights on twenty hours a day, closing at five every morning and reopening at nine. Everyone in Oak Grove knew it was a brothel. Fort Campbell, one of the nation’s largest Army posts, sits on top of the Kentucky-Tennessee border, and New Life stood right outside its northern gates next to Interstate 24. Many of its clients were Screaming Eagles: paratroopers from the famous 101st Airborne Division. Most of the others were truckers off the highway and locals of all stripes; some say judges and other dignitaries would come up from Nashville, an hour down the highway, to be ushered in and out covertly.

At twenty-six, the owner, Tammy Papler, was shrewd beyond her years. She had picked the location for the ready-made customer base in Fort Campbell, and for the pool of potential workers: soldiers’ wives, ex-wives, and girlfriends, as well as women who had recently been discharged, most of them far from their families and without safety nets. She wore her hair in a fluffy blond permanent and took the pseudonym Mercedes. Some of her employees feared her temper.

Oak Grove, Kentucky, wasn’t a city in any meaningful sense, but rather just a commercial strip hedged by trailer parks and clapboard housing. Its population was around three thousand, though this number fluctuated depending on deployments. While Fort Campbell’s officers could afford the more elegant digs on the other side of the post in Clarksville, Tennessee, Oak Grove was a haven for young enlistees, and it drew seedy businesses like mosquitos to a bog. The main stretch of highway was lined with liquor stores, pawnshops, and adult businesses: Fantasee Lingerie, Donna’s Den, Mona’s Go-Go, Classic Touch, and Cherry Video, the last of which Papler also owned. The brothel operated in the back of a small brick building that it shared with a Chinese restaurant.

The business cycle at New Life, as with Oak Grove’s small economy, rose and fell with military paydays. During the slow periods, the women would order takeout and watch the O.J. trial. There were moments of levity, and escapades. Once, two strangers came in off the interstate and plied a couple of workers with mounds of cocaine and hundred-dollar bills for an all-night party, but the men made such a mess in the Jacuzzi room that the workers had to spend their tips to have the carpet cleaned before Papler arrived in the morning.

For Ed Carter, a burly twenty-four-year-old police officer, the city was something of a playground. Carter grew up near Hopkinsville, the county seat, on a farm, where his father worked for an influential white family (the Carters were black) and his mother cleaned houses and churches for extra money. After dropping out of community college, Carter was recruited into the Police Explorers, an apprenticeship program for youths who want to work in law enforcement. He graduated into the midnight shift, responding to domestic fights of young military couples and scuffles at Oak Grove’s strip club.

With minimal training, he spent his first months on the job scrambling to learn the local geography and police procedures. But he didn’t need any instruction to push people around. (Once, Carter responded on a call about a fighting couple and he flung the husband out of their trailer.) He began to walk with a swagger. One of the badge’s perks, he found, was that wearing a uniform made it easy to pick up women—especially with so many men away on deployments. In 1992, he married a woman he’d met on the job, but this didn’t get in the way of his tomcatting.

As a bad cop, Carter was largely a product of his environment. The Oak Grove Police Department had only six officers and was known throughout Christian County for its corruption. Buddy Elliott, the police chief, was the older brother of the mayor, Jack, and together the Elliott brothers owned a major share of the local real estate. They used the police force as an arm of their business enterprises and sometimes as a revenue generator. For instance, in 1993, after some of the New Life massage parlor’s workers were charged with prostitution, Buddy Elliott came to Papler and asked whether she’d “get with the program.” She gave him $600 cash, and when the case reached a grand jury, the charges were dropped.

Over the year that followed, the cops got increasingly cozy at New Life, and some even hung out in the lobby when they were off duty. “They felt like they owned the place, they really did,” one of the workers remembers. “You never knew if they were just stopping by to say hi, or if they were wanting something.” Papler says she came up with a special procedure when an officer wanted sex: he didn’t pay, but his name was recorded at the bottom of the client register, so she could compensate the worker later herself. The Oak Grove government didn’t have much tax revenue, so when the patrol cars needed new lights, the cops imposed on Papler to foot the bill.

Carter spent more time at the brothel than any of his colleagues. He began a steady affair with the manager, and since his police salary was so meager, he compelled Papler to put him on the payroll as a “janitor.” She later said in court proceedings that the payments were really for “protection” or “hush money”—not for mopping the floors. And she was afraid that if she stopped, he’d get the place shut down. For all her friendliness with cops, Papler faced regular threats of closure. For backup, she had an emergency dispatcher keeping guard; whenever there was talk of another prostitution raid, the brothel would get a call—“a storm is coming” or “time to get the umbrellas out”—so her workers could get dressed.

Then, in the summer of 1994, Papler says, she cut Carter off. His payments cost her too much and they had a falling-out. She remembers telling him not to come back, but short of changing the locks, she couldn’t keep him out; he had a key. A few weeks later, in the early hours of September 20, two of her workers were alone at New Life. At 3:35 A.M., two colleagues found them in a back room of the brothel, naked, lying in puddles of blood, both shot through the head and stabbed in the neck. The investigators suspected Carter right away, but they didn’t have enough evidence to convict him. To many, it appeared that the Oak Grove Police Department had a hand in covering up the double murder. Within months, the New Life massage parlor shut down. Carter fled town and many of the locals close to the event eventually left, too, including Papler. The sheriff’s office handed over the investigation to the state, but for more than fifteen years no one was arrested. By the time I moved to the area, the case had almost evaporated into a grisly local legend.

In the fall of 2009, I arrived in Christian County. I’d landed a job at the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville—a newspaper founded in 1869 by two ex-Confederates—as a police and government reporter. On my first drive down for the job interview (from Michigan, where I’d recently finished college) the landscape surprised me. It was flat, dominated by soybean and tobacco fields; western Kentucky is more like the plains of southern Illinois than the wooded hills of Appalachia. I met the paper’s editor, Jennifer Brown, at the city’s only Starbucks. Forty-seven, with short dark hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and a light drawl, Brown grew up in Hopkinsville, raised two kids there, and had worked at the New Era for twenty-five years, mostly reporting. We talked about our favorite writers, and she gave me a rundown of local industry: it was largely agricultural, but in recent decades some auto-parts manufacturing plants had sprung up, because land was cheap and property taxes were nil.

And she told me about Fort Campbell. Comprising more than one hundred sixty square miles, it is five times the physical size of Hopkinsville, seven times that of Manhattan. Some thirty thousand soldiers were stationed there at the time, most living off-post, and it has its own golf course, bowling alley, and Starbucks franchise. In other words, a small city. The base is home to three major combat units: the 5th Special Forces Group, which was among the first deployed to Vietnam in 1961 and one of the last to leave; the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known for its involvement in the conflict in Somalia depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down; and the 101st Airborne, famous for its deployments to Europe during World War II and to Arkansas during the Little Rock desegregation crisis of 1957. Oak Grove, Brown told me, was the incorporated city outside the military gates and was permeated by Army culture.

by Nick Tabor, Oxford American |  Read more:

Image: Tamara Reynolds

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Appreciative Audience

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