The Classroom Origins of Toxic Masculinity

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 8 minutes (1,974 words)

Covington Catholic High School, St. Michael’s College School, Georgetown Preparatory School. All three are Catholic, mostly white, mostly rich, all-boys, and all three have recently made the news. At Covington, student Nick Sandmann went viral after a video emerged showing him, surrounded by a bunch of white classmates in the same glaring MAGA hats fresh off the same anti-abortion rally, mocking Native American Indigenous Peoples March attendee Nathan Phillips. At St. Mike’s school — Canadian, suggesting we may be less nice than we are similar — several students were charged after a video appeared on social media in which their fellow classmates were assaulted, one with a broomstick. Eight boys were eventually expelled after several incidents were investigated, all, according to reports, involving football and basketball players. Georgetown Prep, meanwhile, made the news when Christine Blasey Ford accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when they were teenagers while fellow Georgetown student Mark Judge watched. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. The quote reverberated across social media once again after the Covington video went viral.

“I’d think it important to consider the presence of the peer group, since for boys and young men that’s often the crucial public in shaping the enactment of masculinities,” says University of Sydney Professor Emerita Raewyn Connell, an Australian sociologist and one of the first to carve out men’s studies as discipline in the 1970s. She is referring to the Covington video but could just as well be talking about any of the other schools, or any other all-boys school in America, really. She says that “collective bullying behaviour” can target anything from gender to sexuality to race. Same-sex environments can be particularly noxious, Connell explained in a 2003 report: “Some institutions designed for boys, such as sporting clubs and boys’ schools, define a strongly-marked, even exaggerated, masculinity in their organizational culture.” These days we would call that toxic masculinity, but back in the ‘80s, Connell, who wrote the seminal 1995 book Masculinities, called it something else.

“Hegemonic masculinity” was first coined in 1982 by Connell and co-authors Dean Ashenden, Sandra Kessler, and Gary Dowsett in Making the Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division. The Australian government had released a report in 1975 — “Girls, School and Society” — which prompted the 1982 study, in which students, teachers, and parents in local schools were interviewed in order to explore social inequality. They did their field work in the late ‘70s, an era in which questions of sex were in vogue following the women’s liberation movement and subsequent feminist critiques of the patriarchy. “It wasn’t that gender hierarchies had become more pronounced,” Connell tells me, “but that debate about them had become more intense.”

Though certain elements of “hegemonic masculinity” were later heavily critiqued, the fundamental concept persists, which is that of a dominant masculinity in any given situation that supersedes all other masculinities around it. “Because the concept of hegemonic masculinity is based on practice that permits men’s collective dominance over women, it is not surprising that in some contexts, hegemonic masculinity actually does refer to men’s engaging in toxic practices — including physical violence — that stabilize gender dominance in a particular setting,” Connell and James W. Messerschmidt wrote in their 2005 reevaluation of the original theory. That same year, these “toxic practices” were dubbed elsewhere by another academic as “toxic masculinity,” marking the term that 14 years later has become so pervasive its origins have been almost entirely lost.

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One of the first appearances of toxic masculinity in the mainstream press was in a 1990 New Republic article by Daniel Gross. “The Gender Rap: ‘Toxic Masculinity’ and Other Male Troubles” focused on a new-age movement that appeared to resonate with a healthy number of American men (the first annual Men’s Studies Conference had launched the year before). Gross credited Shepherd Bliss — who preferred the term “mythopoetic” to “new age” — with coining toxic masculinity as a phrase “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.” Bliss comes from a military family and says his authoritarian father embodied the term he defines to me as “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men.” He still has a men’s group, which he separates from “negative” men’s rights groups, and he emphasizes that the expression he invented is “not meant to condemn all males.”

The California-based retiree is surprised his ‘80s neologism has gotten so much attention lately, considering no one really seemed to notice it before. Bliss couldn’t recall exactly when or where he first uttered “toxic masculinity,” but claims it was around the time he named his men’s group. That would have been in 1986, when he was a contributing editor of Yoga Journal and wrote about how the mythopoetic movement “seeks to learn from ancestors and retrieve wisdom from the past that can be applied to the lives of men today.” The man he proposed was the opposite of the urban industrial model; he lived more primally, with stronger father-son connections, male bonding, and a close relationship with the land. Bliss held $200 healing retreats that were attended by about 50,000 men looking to get back to literal nature, but also the figurative nature of man. “I use[d] a medical term because I believe that like every sickness, toxic masculinity has an antidote,” he told TNR. (In practice, this antidote, according to one attendee, involved “farting, crawling around on all fours, wrestling, crafting animal masks, and butting heads.”)

So, yes, technically toxic masculinity was coined in the mid-’80’s, but Connell had already recognized the concept. And there are reasons Bliss’ version didn’t really take off outside of that side-eyeing TNR article. This was the era of the feminist backlash, so there wasn’t much room for a backlash against men outside the minutiae of academia. And Yoga Journal hadn’t exactly cracked the mainstream — the ‘80’s were, ironically, not a very radical time — and even if it had, toxic masculinity would have still been bathed in a vague fanciful hippie-ish light. Not to mention that Bliss’ definition of his own term was itself a little airy-fairy. No, masculinity was too impervious for yoga — we needed science.

Scholars point to psychiatrist Dr. Terry A. Kupers as the source of “toxic masculinity” as we now know it, particularly his definition in a 2005 prison study: “Toxic masculinity is the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence.” Kupers has been studying incarcerated masculinity for most of his career (his most recent book is Solitary), but in the ‘80’s he was involved in the pro-feminist men’s movement and realized he could integrate his knowledge of gender with his knowledge of prisons. Kupers found that Connell’s hegemonic masculinity, when applied to prisons, was in fact toxic masculinity — which is to say prison is toxic masculinity in its “pure form.” He points specifically to black men who are disproportionately (along with Hispanic men) incarcerated by America’s “justice” system. These are men for whom institutionalized racism has shut them off from “positive ways” of expressing masculinity — excelling at school or at work, for instance — causing them to resort to “negative ways” like crime. In prison the lack of authority is complete, so the toxicity is equally complete. “I don’t think it’s a matter of them being inclined to fight with each other and gain dominance; they’re not,” Kupers says. “Rather they’ve been deprived of all the more positive avenues to get ahead so they choose to maintain their manhood in the prison yard.”

What does this have to do with a bunch of white upper crust school boys? “My sense was that what we see in prison, the sort of tough guy on the yard kind of thing, where prisoners buff up and fight each other for dominance and where sexual assault is the ultimate humiliation,” Kupers explains, “my sense was that that’s not that different from what men do out in the world.”

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“[Y]oung men use crime as a means of constructing the kind of stereotypic masculinity that helps them traverse their adolescence and win the acceptance of peers, as well as fathers, coaches, and other hypermasculine role models,” writes Kupers. This is where stealing a car, joining a gang, bragging about rape — or confronting a Native American, groping a girl, assaulting a boy — becomes a way of being a man. This is also where privileged white boys are divided from other boys. While the kids at Covington and St. Mike’s and Georgetown Prep are acting out in their adolescence, they have the opportunity to graduate to a more socially acceptable adulthood of building a career (a Supreme Court position, maybe?) and a family. Without the same opportunity, the boys who are not white, who are not privileged, sidestep from the school yard to the prison yard.

Without his friends around him, sitting in front of NBC interviewer Savannah Guthrie, Nick Sandmann, the Covington teen from the viral video, looks like he’s soiling himself. Unblinking, speaking in a slow monotone, he is the opposite of how he looked in the video — smug, shameless, full of power. He is emasculated, as ineffectual as Brett Kavanaugh’s red-faced temper tantrum as he testified after Christine Blasey Ford. Yet both have arrived: Sandmann’s voice in the media has drowned out that of Nathan Phillips, and Kavanaugh is comfortably installed in the Supreme Court. And St. Mike’s, though none of its students have spoken publicly, has reinstated a Varsity team in which police say members participated in the assaults. These young men have successfully used crime as a means of constructing the kind of stereotypic masculinity that helps them traverse their adolescence and win the acceptance of peers, as well as fathers, coaches, and other hypermasculine role models.

This is the reason Gillette’s latest ad shows, among other aggressive male behaviors, a group of boys chasing another, and asks, “Is this the best a man can get?” Men who thought the ad was portraying them — yikes — believed they were being made to feel toxic just for existing. They responded with the hashtag #gilletteboycott and dumped Gillette’s products en masse. A week after the ad went up, Toronto writer Audra Williams posted a vintage image of Kris Kristofferson comforting Sinead O’Connor on stage at Madison Square Garden in 1992. It was two weeks after she had ripped up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live to protest abuse in the Catholic Church, and the audience would not quiet down. Kristofferson had been tasked with removing the 25-year-old singer from the stage, but instead he held her until she was ready to perform. “The recent Gillette ad has started/furthered a lot of conversations about what alternatives to toxic masculinity look like,” Williams tweeted. “This is it.”

The recent Gillette ad has started/furthered a lot of conversations about what alternatives to toxic masculinity look like. This is it. pic.twitter.com/xATL9KUr9K

— Audra Williams (@audrawilliams) January 20, 2019

“There’s a very strong confrontation between the two ends of the spectrum right now and in it I think there’s the potential to form a new idea about masculinity,” says Kupers. On the right side there is the President and his hatred of the other, whether it be a woman or literally anyone else who is not like him. That is to say, the loudest voice in America “is giving permission to the most reactionary, the most racist, the most homophobic tendencies in people to be expressed.” On the left side, however, there are a growing number of others — women, women of color, LGBTQ people — in politics, there are campaigns like Gillette’s, there are fourth-wave feminists calling out oppression. So even though hatred may be freely expressed, it will no longer go without being challenged, and therein lies the option to change. “Masculinity is not a fixed entity embedded in the body or personality traits of individuals,” writes Connell. “Masculinities are configurations of practice that are accomplished in social action…” To paraphrase Kupers, they’re not bad kids, but it’s up to their parents, their role models, society as a whole, to ensure that they don’t grow up to be worse.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

‘What If We Just Got Out of Nature’s Way?’

For many, climate change is still a future problem to address, but it’s already affecting certain beachside communities. When water flooded Imperial Beach, California, in March 2014, it made a symbolic meeting with the city’s surfer statue — as if to tell residents, “What is now dry will soon be shoreline.”

For High Country News, Ruxandra Guidi details how this small beach community is directly confronting climate change by talking the impossible: managed retreat. As other coastal towns consider raising the land, building seawalls and levees, or using sand replenishment, Imperial Beach asks instead: “What if we just got out of nature’s way?”

Dedina does not see a future in sand. His city, he believes, will have to do what was once unthinkable: It will have to retreat. Managed retreat represents a planned move away from the coast, allowing the beach to erode for the forces of nature to take over. This, of course, is a gargantuan task. How does a city take all the homes and businesses along its coast and relocate them inland? It has never been done in the Western U.S. before, certainly not on the scale that would be needed — even for a city as small as Imperial Beach.

“This is all new to us,” Dedina said, as we chatted one day in his office. He showed me what a retreat looked like on a map: a ribbon of color, one to three city blocks deep, that covered Imperial Beach’s entire coast. “Cities are inherently very conservative places, but we decided that it would be unwise to be conservative in this situation,” he said. “Our only future lies in being innovative and taking risks, because the risk of not taking a risk is very great.”

Read the story

The Family Is Political

American Andrew met his future husband, Elad, in Israel. They married in Canada, and had twin boys — Aidan, and Ethan, one fathered by each man — with a surrogate. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Obergefell v. Hodges, they decided to move to California to be closer to Andrew’s family. It did not go as planned.

A few months after Ethan’s citizenship had been denied, the Dvash-Banks family landed in Los Angeles. Andrew and Aiden carried their US passports; Elad carried his Israeli passport and a green card. Ethan passed through US customs at LAX with a Canadian passport and a six-month tourist visa. What they would do next was anyone’s guess, but at the very least they were determined to live the life they had planned as an American family for as long as they could.

“Of all the hundreds and hundreds of things I worried about, this one never crossed my mind,” Andrew said of the ordeal. “How could it? They’re both my children. I’m on both birth certificates, Elad is on both birth certificates—exclusively. No one else appears on the birth certificates. I am the legal father. I am the father of both children. It never would have crossed my mind in a million years.”

Now, LGBTQ immigration rights organization Immigration Equality is bringing a lawsuit on their behalf, hoping to highlight the ways in which immigration law is not keeping up with reproductive technologies and changing definitions of family. Raj Telhan‘s story at VQR is a comprehensive, accessible dive into the history and future of U.S. immigration law, what makes a citizen, and what makes a family.

Immigration Equality also argues that the sections of the INA concerned with citizenship (as opposed to immigration), do not include specific definitions of the terms “parent,” “person,” “mother,” “father,” and “out of wedlock” that are being used by the State Department to impose a genetic threshold for parentage on married same-sex couples like Andrew and Elad. This last intriguing argument essentially amounts to a critique of the State Department’s reading of the statutory language of the INA. Tacitly, the complaint asks what we really mean by parent or mother or father. And more profoundly: What, precisely, is family? And this is where the precedent-setting power of the Dvash-Banks case stems from. Until recently, these definitions were taken for granted, their interpretations rooted in age-old understandings of hereditary bonds. With advances in assisted-reproductive technology, however, the supposedly reliable assumptions don’t always hold. The outcome of the Dvash-Banks family’s case will hinge, in part, on whether the courts acknowledge the biotechnological and social forces that have transfigured traditional definitions of family.

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True Crime and the Trash Balance

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 9 minutes (2,514 words)

In his satirical 1827 essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” Thomas de Quincey called himself a connoisseur of murder before ensuring us he hadn’t actually committed one himself. In her new book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, late author Michelle McNamara also reassures us that her interest is personal, not prurient (it originated with an unsolved crime in her childhood neighborhood). Most of us have excuses for our interest in true crime, as though enjoying it offered real insight into our own predilections. The quasi-religious impulse to consider this a perversion of society’s innate morality has led to a flurry of theories about the source of our fascination, with four main hypotheses recurring: true crime can be a cathartic conduit for our primal urges, a source of schadenfreude, a controlled environment to experience the thrill of fear, and way to arm us (women particularly) with the knowledge to keep ourselves safe. A psychologist, speaking to NPR in 2009, provided the perfect précis: “our fascination with crime is equaled by our fear of crime. It’s two sides of the same story.”

True crime is less embarrassing, like so many things, when it’s scrubbed clean. On my shelf, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s News of a Kidnapping and Dave Cullen’s Columbine stick out for how unobtrusive they are amidst the loudly stylized spines of Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, among others. With their unadorned print (no drips) and minimalist art (no claret), these tasteful soft covers pass for literature. They are comparable to “prestige” podcasts like Serial and S-Town and series like Making a Murderer and The Keepers, Netflix shows in which the classic hallmarks of true crime programs — overly explicit, overly emotive — are massaged into character-driven narratives for the graduate set. In the midst of this influx of classy crime content, watching throwbacks like Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly, in which survivors are tasked with reliving their abuse and tear-stained grief is the closeup du jour, starts to feel like an ignominious act.

In 2016, at the beginning of the true crime renaissance, The New Yorker asked Popular Crime author Bill James whether, regardless of the highbrow livery, it was fundamentally “distasteful” (New Yorker for “trashy”) to transform tragedy into entertainment. “Well, certainly there is something distasteful about it,” James said, but, “When there is a car wreck, we ask what happened to cause the car wreck.” That is to say: The crime itself is distasteful (or trashy), therefore it’s necessarily distasteful (or trashy) when we address it. So, either we can refuse to interrogate crime, full stop, or we can ensure that the grief we cause is for a greater good. It is a sort of trash balance — less exploitation, more justice — with only one bad ending instead of two.

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True crime was lurid straight out of the birth canal. Born in the mid-sixteenth century, it was the offspring of two relatively new developments: criminal justice and the printing press. Historic crime reports’ graphic nature is typically associated with a depravity believed to appeal to the unrefined, uneducated, and unmoneyed, but that was not the case with these early publications. Though they were often branded with explicit woodcuts that would have been understandable to even the illiterate, they also boasted rhyming text and only went to those who could afford them, predominantly the upper echelons. In “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism,” published in The American Historical Review, Joy Wiltenburg writes that “emotive language, direct dialogue, building of suspense through circumstantial detail, and graphic description of bloody violence were common in the genre.”

Favored cases were in-family and usually involved multiple deaths. The focus was on the victims, while the moral of the story was that sin begat punishment. “The combination of truth with appeals to the heart underlined the religious focus of these works,” writes Wiltenburg. “Virtually all crime accounts published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries connected their stories with an edifying Christian message.” This message associated brutality with the devil and positioned public order as the path to virtue. “[Sensationalism] has had religious, political, and cultural impact,” Wilternburg sums up, “promoting the ready acceptance of punitive government actions, the advancement of religious agendas, the internalization of mainstream emotional expectations, the habit of vicarious emotional experience, and the focus on distinctive individual identity.”

With a reputation for being insensitive to and financially exploiting both criminals and their victims, true crime is often accused of sensationalism, but that term wasn’t coined until the 19th century, a time that favored rational thought over the emotive prose of journalists. “While sexual scandals and other shocking events have become staples of modern sensationalism,” writes Wiltenburg, “its chief focus has always been crime, especially the most bloody and horrifying of murders.” The 1800s also gave us our first detectives, who inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the latter not only centering crime fiction as a genre, but granting it a modicum of respectability. The gutter was still within spitting distance, though. Penny dreadfuls arrived — demon barber Sweeney Todd in tow — as early versions of popular culture in the form cheap mass-produced serials for young, increasingly literate working-class men, featuring salacious gore; like the true crime paperbacks of today, they supplied affordable, digestible scandal to entertain tired people with no time. The last gasp of the penny dreadful coincided with the precursor to O.J. Simpson’s so-called trial of the century: The Lizzie Borden case. The 32-year-old Massachusetts woman’s trial for the axe murder of her parents spawned a media phenomenon and firmly established the mass appeal of true crime. The next century saw the trash-fired genre shooting off in various directions, from tabloids like The National Enquirer to paperbacks like Lacey Fosburgh’s Closing Time to shows like America’s Most Wanted.

Then there was In Cold Blood.

“Until one morning in mid-November 1959, few Americans — in fact, few Kansans — had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.” Before In Cold Blood, this is not how real crime stories read. What Arthur Conan Doyle did for crime fiction, Truman Capote did for true crime. His 1965 experiment was released as a four-part serial in The New Yorker and became the reference point for every other high-brow true crime work in every other medium. “The motivating factor in my choice of material — that is, choosing to write a true account of an actual murder case — was altogether literary,” Capote told The New York Times. “It seemed to me that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘nonfiction novel,’ as I thought of it.” He believed only those with the “fictional technical equipment” — novelists, not journalists — like him could do it. The factual inaccuracies that have since emerged suggest that Capote’s belief in his own skills — he neither taped nor took notes during interviews — were as sensational as the genre he was hoping to reinvent. His book is still, however, considered the pinnacle of crime lit.

It was Capote’s book that the Times referred to when designating Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line a “nonfiction feature film,” per its distributors, in 1988. This exercise in lyrical fact was groundbreaking in its own right: an elegant piece of true crime as an advocacy tool. The subject of a false conviction, Randall Dale Adams had his case thrown out with the help of evidence Morris uncovered. It’s a straight shot from The Thin Blue Line to Serial, which blew up true crime podcasting in 2014. But while an appeal followed this program’s highly subjective long-form reexamination of Adnan Syed’s conviction for killing Baltimore teen Hae Min Lee in 1999, it was Capote — “a leap in narrative innovation on the scale of In Cold Blood” — who was once again cited, this time in The New Yorker. Serial’s executive producer has said they were trying to avoid an exploitative “Nancy Grace type of a titillating thing,” but the program was serialized with its own version of a cliffhanger each week, and provided its own hero, the avatar in our ears, reporter Sarah Koenig. Yet Koenig bristled at the suggestion by the Times’ Magazine that this was entertainment. “I don’t think that’s fair,” she said. “I’m still reporting.”

As though the two were mutually exclusive. As though true crime could only be trash if it were entertainment, and could only be entertainment if it weren’t journalism. Of course, this negates the nature of media. To entertain — to entertain a thought, for instance — is merely to take it into consideration, to allow it to hold one’s attention. Journalism is made to entertain; if it weren’t, reports would not be called “stories” and there would be no need for inverted triangles or kickers or pull quotes or anything else to catch our attention, to hold it. Because to deliver the news there has to be someone to deliver it to, and that necessitates their entertainment. Otherwise the news is nothing but fact; there is no story.

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“Many of the differences between trash culture and high culture show only that storytelling adapts to changing economic, social and political conditions,” Richard Keller Simon writes in Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition. It’s something to consider when watching Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly. The series was produced by a network for women branded by its schlocky aesthetic and penchant for frothy romance. An exec at Lifetime has admitted it has “erred on the tabloid side” and Surviving R. Kelly, which has a number of black women recounting the decades of abuse they say the singer has inflicted on them, exhibits the familiar tropes: the inflated score, the voyeuristic set pieces, the abused women on display. In an interview with Complex earlier this month, showrunner dream hampton revealed that she received a number of notes from Lifetime and that she was pushed to find more victims. “I didn’t like the salaciousness of stacking up all of these people who survived him,” she said, “but I got the corroboration part.” The result is a series that orchestrates rescue attempts and highlights the explicitness of Kelly’s brutality, while only gesturing vaguely at the cottage industry he has fostered over the past three decades in order to victimize black women and at our collective failure to see these women as victims at all.

When I watched it, I couldn’t shake a feeling of ickiness, particularly when one of the victims was asked to describe her abuse and dissolved into tears. We didn’t need to see that scene from the pee tape so many times, we didn’t need a tour by one victim of the room where she was allegedly tortured, we didn’t need to watch as one mother reunited with her daughter. (I’m not even including the questionable stylistic choices). The whole endeavor read trashy, old-school Lifetime. “I saw someone kind of try to drag me about why isn’t this on something more premium like Netflix. But this to me is the perfect place for it,” hampton told Complex. “I know that women watch Lifetime, and that black women make up the majority of those viewers.” Reading this made me doubly uncomfortable. It suggested that to get black women’s attention you had to feed them trash. And, okay, maybe black women weren’t trying to mute R. Kelly over The Chicago Sun-Times’ original reporting, but none of us were! The world has changed since 2002, and all of us — including black women — have become more sophisticated about predation.

“The average American today has greater familiarity with the legal process, thanks in part to procedural dramas and the round-the-clock media coverage of splashy crimes that began with the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s,” writes Lenika Cruz in The Atlantic. “And people are more aware than ever of flaws in the criminal-justice system, including police brutality and wrongful convictions.” This means that true crime has had to hustle to keep up with its audience, reframing from the crime itself to seeking its closure. NPR noticed the new true crime formula in 2015, with programs like Serial and HBO’s The Jinx (and later Netflix’s Making a Murderer and APM’s In the Dark) concentrating on ongoing cases that could be affected by new reporting. Andrew Jarecki, director of The Jinx, called this subject matter “live ball,” and so here we are in the live-ball era of true crime in which Robert Durst literally burps up a confession on camera before he is charged with murder. “Can the genre sustain this? Can they really sustain true crime as an advocacy medium?” Michael Arntfield, founder of the Cold Case Society, asked The Pacific Standard. “The success and the legitimacy of the medium hinges on being able to stay within this framework of advocacy ahead of strictly sensationalism or profitability.”

But even advocacy has its limits. Netflix’s runaway success Making a Murder eschewed Serial-like narration and Jinx-like reenactments, but contorted almost 700 hours of footage into supporting a theory that the filmmakers had already formulated, that convicted murderer Steven Avery was innocent despite everything pointing to the contrary. Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos told the Times they secured interviews where others didn’t because of their “tempered approach.” Like those books on my shelf, this refined series passed for high culture.

The most balanced true crime isn’t actually true crime. Last year, American Public Media launched the second season of their hit podcast In the Dark, hosted by Madeleine Baran. Over 11 episodes, it examined the six trials of Curtis Flowers for the same murders. Even though the precipitating incident was the crime, the attention was on everything else; the reporting team embedded itself in Flowers’ Mississippi hometown for a year, ultimately producing not only a strong — dare I say entertaining? — sense of place, but a rigorous analysis of the systemic failures of the investigation. “For us as reporters, we’re here to look at the people in power and look at the systems in place that raise questions about whether or not the criminal justice system is fair, whether it is just using facts,” Baran told NPR. “So what that results in is not our place to say. But certainly, in this case, what we’ve shown is that the evidence against Curtis Flowers is weak. So this becomes a question now for the courts.” While other podcasts rely on their relatability, this one doesn’t have to — the story is enough. In the aftermath of Baran’s team’s exhaustive reporting, the Supreme Court has agreed to reconsider Flowers’ conviction. It is a rare case in which the balance seems to be moot. It’s all justice.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Theatre of Wokeness

Will Amazon Finally Kill New York?

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | Month 2018 | 10 minutes (2,519 words)

In May of 2017, Mayor de Blasio unveiled Jimmy Breslin Way, a street sign dedicating the stretch of 42nd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue to the late reporter. It was a strange press conference — half eulogy, half lecture — a chance for the mayor to laud Breslin and scold members of today’s media by whom he often feels unfairly maligned. “Think about what Jimmy Breslin did. Think about how he saw the world,” said de Blasio. He left without taking questions. What was he talking about? Did he imagine he and Jimmy Breslin would get along? In 1969 Breslin wrote a cover story about Mayor Lindsay for New York Magazine, “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” was the title. Lindsay was an inch shorter than de Blasio.

In 2010, Heike Geissler took a temporary position at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig. Geissler was a freelance writer and a translator but, more pressingly, she was the mother of two children and money was not coming in. Seasonal Associate, which was translated by Katy Derbyshire and released by Semiotext(e) this month, is the product of that job. (Read an excerpt on Longreads.) It’s an oppressive, unsettling book, mainly because the work is too familiar. The book is written almost entirely in the second person, a style that might’ve come off as an irritating affectation with a lesser writer or a different subject. Here, it’s terrifying — you feel yourself slipping along with Geissler, thoughts of your own unpaid bills and the cold at the back of your throat weaving their way through the narrative. It’s not just that this unnamed protagonist could be you, it’s the certainty that someday she will be you. “You’ll soon know something about life that you didn’t know before, and it won’t just have to do with work,” Geissler writes. “But also with the fact that you’re getting older, that two children cry after you every morning, that you don’t want to go to work, and that something about this job and many other kinds of jobs is essentially rotten.”

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The question of who killed New York used to be up for debate. Was it John Lindsay, who couldn’t face reality, who covered the city’s debts with short-term, high interest loans he knew were impossible to repay? His successor, Abe Beame, who bent to the demands of the bankers and gutted the social safety net during the fiscal crisis of the 70’s? Ed Koch, who embraced Beame’s cuts wholeheartedly and mocked past mayors as men who wanted New York “to be the No. 1 welfare city in America”? Giuliani, who launched the deregulation of rent controlled apartments and the quality of life campaign that gave us Broken Windows and COMPSTAT? (I’m not mentioning David Dinkins, because I really don’t think David Dinkins brought us here.) Was it Hipsters and their attendant paraphernalia? Was it the McKibbin Lofts? Union Pool? Was it Shred Stuy?

Inventory work provides Geissler with a granular view of consumerism. Stripped of the marketing and storefronts that make it palatable it quickly begins to look like a form of mental illness. Who is buying these mugs, stamped with George Clooney’s face?

All New York City mayors are venal, but some are more venal than others. A few months ago, I would have told you Bloomberg was to blame, our bloodless, billionaire mayor, who rezoned the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods and openly courted real estate investment from foreign billionaires. Rents rose at neat clip alongside the homeless population. To his credit, Bloomberg — a very short man — was always transparent about where his priorities lay. The city, he said, was a “luxury product” and it should behave that way.

De Blasio was supposed to be the antidote to the Bloomberg years, a progressive underdog who ran on universal pre-k and affordable housing. But that affordable housing has largely failed to materialize — where it’s been built, it’s often still pretty unaffordable — and his administration has been marked by disappointing half-measures and an ill-conceived plan for a ridiculous four billion dollar streetcar no one wants.

On Black Friday, Amazon workers staged mass walkouts across Europe. On Cyber Monday, led by community groups Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change (NYCC), protestors stormed Amazon’s Midtown bookstore to protest the planned headquarters in Long Island City and later gathered in front of the LIC Civil Courthouse chanting “I stand in the rain, I stand in the snow, Amazon has got to go!” City Council members Jimmy Van Bremer, Jumanne Williams, and Melissa Mark-Vitero were all in attendance — Williams and Mark-Vitero, it should be noted, are both running for Public Advocate. All of them decried the incentives offered to Amazon, which total about 3 billion. Williams claimed they were steamrolled by the Mayor and Governor Cuomo and that while Cuomo’s betrayal was no surprise, the de Blasio administration was “the biggest waste of progressive capital [Williams had] ever seen.”

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It might’ve been a good show of force, had not all of the aforementioned politicians signed the letter urging Amazon to build its headquarters in New York. What did they think was going to happen? A New York Times investigation released earlier this year showed that the city had lost 152,000 rent-regulated apartments since 1993. The subway system is crumbling, the state leads the nation in income inequality, and the homeless population is at an all time high. No reasonable human being could look around and conclude that the answer to all these problems is to give the most avaricious company in the world the keys to the city. Amazon swallows everything it touches, it isn’t interested in civic health. Only half of the jobs being brought in are in tech and many of the low level positions will likely be replaced by robots fairly soon, but for now, these are the jobs for which the Mayor sold the city. “At any rate,” Geissler writes, early on in Seasonal Associate, “it’s almost impossible not to be forced to your knees and into defiance by this job you’re about to have.”

*

Geissler was hired in the warehouse to handle the Christmas rush, hence the title, and the cold is so omnipresent it seems to be a feature of the company rather than simply the reality of winter. A gate that will not latch properly becomes a major antagonist and everyone is either ill or on the verge of falling ill, although they have been warned specifically against this. “Sick days hurt Amazon,” Geissler is told at her orientation. Precarity manifests as a constant, low-grade fever. You’re the protagonist but her voice leads you through the job, a tired Virgil navigating a new circle of hell. The work is inventory — entering items into the system so they can be purchased online and performing at least a cursory check to make sure they’re undamaged. “Everything exists, in case you were going to ask,” says Geissler. “Absolutely everything exists, and people can buy it all.” Despite the scale of the warehouse, inventory work provides Geissler with a granular view of consumerism. Stripped of the marketing and storefronts that make it palatable it quickly begins to look like a form of mental illness. Who is buying these mugs, stamped with George Clooney’s face? Who needs these pre-distressed Iron Maiden hats, already rags at point of purchase? Amazon customers, which is to say, all of us.

Geissler tried to sell the book as straightforward journalism initially and was turned down by five publishers, likely because book is largely boring. It’s a propulsive, weaponized banality though — something unnatural is going on here and it’s hard to see a way out.

Geissler isn’t the typical warehouse employee and as a temporary contractor she’s something of a tourist at Amazon. She’s well-educated, she’s white, she lives with the father of her children, and she’s normally able to make a living — however precarious — as a writer. There’s significant privilege there. Many people spend their entire lives working shitty, unforgiving jobs with arbitrary, infantilizing rules and part of the reason Geissler is so attuned to the myriad indignities of Amazon is because she’s unused to them. She’s aware of this position though. “It has to be said right away,” she writes, “that no one is suited for unhappiness, yet this fact doesn’t get enough recognition.” Seasonal Associate is a book about slippage and a sudden fall into the working class, but it’s a document of anxiety and futility rather than stunt journalism. The central rallying point in the warehouse is a desk made out of a door — a replica of Jeff Bezos’ desk when he founded Amazon; an absurd symbol of frugality and the company’s dedication to customer satisfaction over employees’ personal comfort. As if every warehouse worker has the potential to become the richest man in the world, if only they would stop buying such expensive desks. The idea that if you work hard enough you will inevitably rise out of poverty has always been a sham and Amazon has taken it to it’s logical endpoint. You work hard and nothing happens. You will never be good enough at your job, because you’re a human being, not a machine. As long as you’re alive you’re a potential problem for the company.

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In order to maintain some sense of agency Geissler stages tiny acts of rebellion — refusing to hold a handrail despite the signs instructing her to hold the handrail, keeping her safety vest in her pocket until she absolutely has to put it on. The gestures are adolescent and effectively meaningless, but every time she’s snide it’s a relief — a sign of life. Much later, after her contract is finished, she recognizes a man in a parking lot who she described as Amazon’s “only hipster.” The last time she’d seen him he was docking people’s pay for what’s commonly known as time theft. They had lined up a few minutes early to leave work, rather than waiting, unpaid, to go through security. “Unable to think of anything better,” says Geissler. “Or because it seemed like the most appropriate idea, I called out the name of a book I’d just read, by Mark Greif and others. I yelled at him: What Was the Hipster! I called it twice and I thought then he might know he was over.”

Geissler tried to sell the book as straightforward journalism initially and was turned down by five publishers, likely because book is largely boring. It’s a propulsive, weaponized banality though — something unnatural is going on here and it’s hard to see a way out. “You’ve completely forgotten that you have a profession and are only here to alleviate momentary poverty,” Geissler writes, just after her interview at Amazon. “Something inside you is essentially unsettled and will never calm down again, even though you do get the job. From this point on, you are beside yourself with worry.”

My own mother raised two kids by herself as a high school English teacher and she took a number of side jobs to supplement her income. Tutoring, working at a bakery, working at a strange, luxury gardening store that sold copper birdhouses and rocks that said things like “LOVE” and “CREATE” for people who couldn’t. None of them were bad jobs, none as oppressive as warehouse work, but they did not pay very well. Her desk (worse than Jeff Bezos’) was just a slab of wood, perched atop two filing cabinets. She never made a big deal out of that though, because she is not an asshole. She’d wake up at four or five in the morning to grade the lousy papers of teenage Republicans and shovel the walkway, but she still tried to read to me and my brother before putting us to bed. Oftentimes she’d fall asleep mid-sentence and start mumbling about the electricity bill or replacing the boiler. Eventually, a doctor told her she had to relax — her blood pressure was dangerously high, her muscles so tense that when she breathed, her ribs barely moved.

If you think you’re immune to this — if you went to college, if you believe you’re upwardly mobile, if you imagine you will comfortably survive the inevitable spike in rent once Amazon’s headquarters settles into Queens — unless you have vast familial wealth to draw on, I’m sorry but you’re wrong.

My mom was thrown into financial uncertainty (and my dad wasn’t even a deadbeat) by an early divorce and the responsibility for two small children, but at this point that choking feeling is basically just the lived experience of the average American. In a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2003 J.G. Ballard said that “the totalitarian systems of the future will be subservient and ingratiating, the false smile of the bored waiter rather than the jackboot.” This is it, the future is here now. It’s because Geissler doesn’t fit the typical profile of an Amazon warehouse worker that her book is such a well-timed warning shot. If you think you’re immune to this — if you went to college, if you believe you’re upwardly mobile, if you imagine you will comfortably survive the inevitable spike in rent once Amazon’s headquarters settles into Queens — unless you have vast familial wealth to draw on, I’m sorry but you’re wrong. Without immediate collective action, this is coming for all of us.

*

“Too tall,” Breslin clarified, about Mayor Lindsay, “means too Manhattanish, too removed from the problems of the street corners.” He wrote “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” shortly after his own failed mayoral bid with Norman Mailer, a campaign that left him “nervous and depressed.”

“I saw a sprawling, disjointed place which did not understand itself and was decaying physically and spiritually, decaying with these terrible little fires of rage flickering in the decay…On top of the city was an almost unworkable form of government and a set of casually unknowing, unfeeling, uncaring men and institutions. The absence of communications in a city which is the communications center of the world is so bad that you are almost forced to believe the condition of the city is terminal.”

 

If that doesn’t sound familiar, it will soon. On December 12, the New York City Council held the first of a series of hearings on the new Amazon headquarters. Protestors covered the balcony and unfurled a No HQ2 Banner. “It’s all smoke and mirrors!” a man yelled. “Don’t let them monopolize the city! Don’t let them near the subways, don’t let them near the schools — these guys are lying creeps!” He was escorted out.

Amazon has become so large that it can have the same pacifying effect as the threat of climate change, but despair isn’t helpful right now. As Hamilton Nolan and Dave Colon have already pointed out over at Splinter, Amazon’s New York headquarters represents the best chance at effectively unionizing the company and the resistance to HQ2 is broad and growing. Still, it was difficult to watch the City Council hearing without a paralyzing sense of dread. Amazon is a contractor with ICE, they have a horrific labor record, and they’re accountable to no one. That guy was right, these people are lying creeps, as are many of the people we’ve elected. There’s such a long and rich tradition of grift in this city that it’s rare to be able to definitively level blame, but here we are. De Blasio was too tall to be mayor and we didn’t see it. “Is this all a matter of life and death?” Geissler writes, at the very beginning of Seasonal Associate. “I’ll say no for the moment and come back to the question later. At that point, I’ll say: Not directly, but in a way yes. It’s a matter of how far death is allowed into our lives.”

* * *

Rebecca McCarthy is a freelance writer and a bookseller.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Earth to Congress

Livia Gershon | Longreads | December 2018 | 9 minutes (2,149 words)

In recent weeks, protesters have swept across France, burning cars, evading tear gas-wielding riot police, and spraying graffiti across the Arc de Triomphe. Called the “yellow vest” protesters for the safety gear that French law requires drivers to carry, they have drawn much of their support from the countryside. They first mobilized in mid-November, in response to a gas tax hike equivalent to 25-cents-per gallon, which was scheduled to go into effect in January to combat climate change. After not very long, they succeeded in cancelling the tax increase. Since that victory, they have continued to stage rallies, taking on President Emmanuel Macron’s overall economic program, which includes shrinking social programs and rolling back labor protections.

In the United States, conservatives were quick to describe the protests as a repudiation of any and all efforts to address climate change. “The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris,” President Trump tweeted on December 8. “Protests and riots all over France. People do not want to pay large sums of money, much to third world countries (that are questionably run), in order to maybe protect the environment. Chanting ‘We Want Trump!’ Love France.”

There is, in reality, no reason to believe that anyone in France has chanted Trump’s name as part of the yellow vest movement. And protesters have not expressed opposition to the Paris Agreement as a whole—their official demands include adopting substantive ecological policy rather than “a few piecemeal fiscal measures,” as they wrote in a November 23 communiqué. Still, the protests point to a real danger for the most common approaches to environmental policy, which tend to involve tweaking private economic activity through taxes or regulations. Carbon taxes can be devastating to working-class people, especially outside big cities, if there’s no affordable alternative to gas-fueled cars. Rules limiting coal mining and oil drilling can wreak havoc on communities built on those industries if there are no other local sources of good jobs.

In the U.S., however, there is a chance to drastically cut carbon emissions and help the world transition to an ecologically stable path that accounts for labor interests: the Green New Deal, championed by incoming Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the young climate activists of the Sunrise Movement. The official proposal—really a plan to make a plan, by creating a select committee—won the support of 40 House members. Democratic leadership has watered down the committee’s mandate and rules, but high-profile support from senators like Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders suggest that the Green New Deal is likely to remain politically relevant in 2019 and beyond. The idea represents a rare bid to take on climate change with urgency and determination, reminiscent of the U.S. mobilization for World War II. Already, it has taken comprehensive climate policy—one that factors in working class people—out of the realm of fantasy (or street protest) and into the halls of Congress.

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The Green New Deal is, at this theoretical stage, full of promises: to completely replace power production with renewable energy; to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation; and to retrofit every residential and industrial building in the country for energy efficiency—all within ten years. Ocasio-Cortez’s outline proposed the virtual elimination of poverty by creating good jobs for all Americans, with a particular focus on workers left behind in the shift away from fossil fuels and people who have been harmed by racial, regional, and gender-based inequality. For good measure, it suggested that the committee might “include additional measures such as basic income programs, universal health care programs and any others.”

That’s an awful lot. The idea of a Green New Deal has been around for a more than a decade, taking different forms to suit various political agendas, many of them far less radical than Ocasio-Cortez’s. Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, first popularized the phrase “Green New Deal” in 2007. He used it to describe a package of research, loan guarantees, carbon taxes, incentives, and regulations that he hoped would spur environmentally friendly entrepreneurship. President Obama adopted the idea as part of his electoral platform and the 2009 stimulus package, which expanded environmentally friendly infrastructure and entrepreneurship. Ultimately, though, the policy fell far short of putting the country on the road to zero emissions.

Since then, conversations about fighting global warming have typically focused on market-driven solutions, including incentives, subsidies, and, most common of all, some kind of carbon tax. The Democratic Party officially supported such a tax in its 2016 platform, and so do the minority of Republicans who are willing to acknowledge climate change as a threat. Some fossil fuel companies, like ExxonMobil, now say that they support one, too. “To me it’s a kind of smoke screen,” Matt Huber, a geography scholar at Syracuse University who has written about the potential for a Green New Deal, said. “It sort of suggests that this problem can be solved through market pricing, and I’m just not convinced that that’s the case.”

Ocasio-Cortez took up the cause as part of her primary campaign to defeat Joe Crowley, a moderate, from the left. The ambition of her Green New Deal proposal came in line with a report on global warming released in October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of the United Nations. The report states that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade—the level necessary to reduce the risk of droughts, floods, and other disasters that would affect hundreds of millions of people—“would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

To reach that goal through a carbon tax, the IPCC suggests, the tax would need to be between $135 and $5,500 per ton by 2035. By comparison, the proposed hike that triggered the yellow vest protests would have brought the total carbon tax, at maximum, to the equivalent of about $100 per ton. It’s hard to imagine a tax even at the low end of the IPCC’s range proving politically palatable in most countries.

The idea of a Green New Deal has been around for a more than a decade, taking different forms to suit various political agendas.

Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who helped craft the green energy investment portion of Obama’s stimulus plan and has created green jobs plans for a number of states and countries, told me that a Green New Deal for the U.S. that aims to reduce the country’s emissions 50 percent by 2035 would probably cost 1.5 to two percent of GDP per year (though delaying investment could increase that cost). His approach would create 4.2 million jobs, he said, doing everything from building solar and wind installations to retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency. It would also shrink the fossil fuel industry with a carbon tax and regulation, but workers in those fields would be able to find new, well-paid positions that are carbon neutral. “We need to incorporate the transition side, and it has to be serious,” he said. “We have to take care of the people who are going to be harmed.”

The Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal proposal promised to go further, including a job guarantee that would pay workers a living wage. It also made an overture to “deeply involve” labor unions in training and deploying workers. When Data for Progress, a left-wing think tank, modeled a plan with a similar scope, it projected the creation of ten million jobs over ten years.

***

Given the scale of a progressive vision for a Green New Deal, it’s worth looking at one of the most ambitious U.S. government projects ever: the mobilization for World War II. Federal spending jumped from under ten percent of GDP in 1939 to more than 40 percent in 1944. That’s a much bigger shift than any Green New Deal would bring, but active U.S. involvement in the war lasted only four years. Imagine the 2020s and 2030s as a less intense, more protracted battle against an existential climate threat.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that the U.S. would take up arms against the Nazis. But in 1939, that wasn’t at all clear. After Germany invaded Poland that year, prompting Great Britain and France to declare war, nearly half of Americans said the U.S. shouldn’t get involved, even if the Allied Powers were losing. Even after France fell, 79 percent wanted to stay out of the war.

Like climate change deniers today, many opponents of World War II doubted the scope of the problem. Charles Lindbergh, celebrity pilot and spokesman for the isolationist America First Committee, argued that a German victory was inevitable and that the Nazis really weren’t so bad anyway. (A 1938 survey found that 65 percent of Americans believed that the Nazi persecution of Jews was at least partly the fault of the Jews themselves.)

And, like the yellow vest protesters in France and the residents of U.S. towns facing the threat of economic disaster if coal and oil industries suddenly disappear, many Americans in 1939 worried about the economic cost of entering, at an unprecedented scale, a foreign fight. In July 1941, most Americans believed that the war would be followed by another great depression. Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara has written that, when President Franklin Roosevelt ramped up military production to aid the Allies, the heads of large manufacturing corporations were hesitant to take on the contracts, as they worried about the increased taxes and federal power that would come with military programs. Some were also sympathetic to America First, or at least hesitant to pick a fight with the isolationists; many were reluctant to bet on the unstable demand from the war effort. “I don’t believe that manufacturers are anxious for war business,” Harvey Campbell, of the Detroit Board of Commerce, said in 1940. “They would rather see a steady line of production and employment.”

Labor is a key force behind the drive for a Green New Deal.

 

Labor leaders like Walter Reuther, of the United Auto Workers, seized the moment to push for curbs on laissez faire capitalism, helping yoke private industry to a centralized economic plan. Most unions tied their fate to Roosevelt’s agenda, agreeing to no-strike pledges and putting their backs into the war effort. They were rewarded with perhaps the most labor-friendly economy in U.S. history. Unions went from representing fifteen percent of U.S. workers in 1937 to twenty-seven percent in 1945. The government capped corporate profits. Full employment, combined with government and union anti-discrimination programs, brought new opportunities for black and female workers. Employers eager to retain workers in the face of wartime wage freezes began offering pensions and health insurance.

We can’t go back to 1947, and most of us wouldn’t want to. The era brought segregated suburbs, anti-communist witch hunts against labor and civil rights organizers, and an environmentally disastrous dependence on cars. But the war, in combination with the New Deal that preceded it, established a stable economic order and, crucially, widespread faith in the federal government.

***

Today, labor is a key force behind the drive for a Green New Deal. Much of Pollin’s research, for example, has been commissioned by unions and their supporters. But the unions of 2018 are much smaller and less powerful than their counterparts of 1939, and no Democratic leader has anything like FDR’s popularity. Enacting a comprehensive plan to fight climate change, poverty, and inequality will require strong alliances. Such an effort must bring together environmental activists, communities that have long depended on fossil fuel industries, and economic justice campaigns like the Fight for $15 and the teachers who mobilized across red states in 2017. It will also take collective action, like the sit-ins, which the Sunrise Movement has been holding at Democratic leadership offices.

It will also require more people to vote, in order to persuade the Democratic Party that this level of investment in economically responsible climate policy is a winning strategy. A minority of Americans voted in the 2018 midterms; working-class people and the young are particularly likely to sit out elections. But, Huber said, an agenda with the ambition of a Green New Deal might help bring more of the to the polls. “I’m a big believer that Democrats could do better just by turning out more working-class and poor people,” he told me. “As the Republicans know, the more people vote, the more they lose.”

The good news is, despite decades of anti-green rhetoric from fossil fuel companies and conservative politicians, environmental action is far more popular now than military action was in 1939. Nearly 70 percent of Americans—including 64 percent of Republicans—say that the U.S. should work with other nations to curb climate change, and 55 percent support the idea of a green jobs guarantee.

A Green New Deal—something on the scale of the Ocasio-Cortez outline, with systemic economic changes beyond subsidies and incentives—could utterly transform what comes after it, much as World War II did. It remains to be see what kind of change Congress can usher in.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other places.

Editor: Betsy Morais

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel