The 2022 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant

The Whiting Foundation recognizes that works of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction are essential to our culture but come into being at great cost to writers in time and resources. The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant of $40,000 is awarded to writers in the process of completing a work of nonfiction to the highest aesthetic and intellectual level to be published in the United States, Canada, or the United Kingdom. It is intended to encourage original and ambitious projects by giving grantees the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition.

of the 2022

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian The Hidden Globe

Forthcoming from Riverhead (US) Narrative Nonfiction

Judges’ citation:

In this deeply researched and incisive work, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian pulls the curtain back on concepts most of us understand vaguely, if at all: the uncomfortable intersections of capital and national sovereignty, where money exerts more control than government. Abrahamian renders the complexities of global trade and wealth inequality in sharp, lucid, and humane prose, offering a rigorous analysis of the policies and practices that conjure an economic shadow world designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

The project:

The Hidden Globe investigates the extraterritorial jurisdictions that lie above, between, and beneath nations. Combining reporting, criticism, economic history, and legal theory, it leads readers through the special economic zones that prop up world trade, the polar archipelagos that challenge the definition of national sovereignty, the ships criss-crossing the world flying flags of convenience, and the micro-states rewriting the laws of outer space. Profiling the consultants, lawyers, and thinkers who conceived and built this parallel world, the book argues that, far from challenging the nation-state system, liminal jurisdictions help sustain it.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is the author of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen, a book about the international market for citizenship. A former editor at The Nation and Al Jazeera America, her reporting and criticism have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Intercept, and many other publications. She is currently a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

On a drizzly afternoon in April 2017, Prince Guillaume, the hereditary grand duke of Luxembourg, and his wife, Princess Stéphanie, sailed through the front doors of an office building on the outskirts of Seattle and into the headquarters of an asteroid-min ing startup called Planetary Resources. The company’s engineers greeted the royals with hors d’oeuvres, craft beer, and bottles upon bottles of Columbia Valley rieslings and syrahs. In the corner of the lounge stood a vintage Asteroids arcade game; on the wall hung an American flag alongside the grand duchy’s own red, white, and blue stripes.

Planetary Resources had been building the tools to “expand the economy into space,” and in addition to more predictable Silicon Valley investors, the nation of Luxembourg was one of its first and most vocal benefactors, having pledged about $25 million in direct funding and state support for research and development. The country’s unlikely investment was one element of a wildly ambitious national campaign to become a terrestrial hub for the busi ness of mining minerals, metals, and other resources on celestial bodies. Much like its close cousin, Switzerland, the tiny country has enriched itself significantly over the past century by greasing the wheels of global finance. Now, as billionaires, startups, and even larger aero space companies prepare for a cosmic land grab, Luxembourg is using its place on earth to help send capitalism into deep space.

Space exploration has historically been an arena for grand, nationalistic operations that were too costly and dangerous for civilians to take up without state backing. But spacefaring technology has advanced to the point of making it accessible for private actors to take part, and the fledgling “NewSpace” industry—an umbrella term for commercial spaceflight, aster oid mining, and other private ventures—has found eager supporters in the investor class. Twenty-first century space entrepreneurs speak of a new “gold rush” and compare their mis sion to that of the frontiersmen or the early industrialists. Rocket startups are banking on finding water on the moon to supply refueling stations on journeys to the cosmos’s outer depths. And as natural resources on Earth are rapidly being depleted, asteroid miners see a solution in the vast quantities of untapped water, minerals, and metals in outer space. In 2017, Goldman Sachs sent a note to clients claiming that asteroid mining “could be more real istic than perceived,” thanks to the falling cost of launching rockets and the vast quantities of platinum sitting on space rocks, just waiting to be exploited. Venture capitalists and other investors fairly poured cash into the space industry in 2021, making it a $46 billion business.

This surge of interest is turning theoretical questions that were once the domain of sci-fi novels and dorm-room thought experiments into pressing legal, regulatory, and commercial concerns. Who can lay claim to an asteroid and all of its extractive wealth? Should space be colonized, privatized, and commercialized? What kind of power do individual states have so far away from their own land and their own borders? Do trickle-down economics apply in zero-gravity conditions?

Much like past frontiers, from the high seas to colonial conquests, space is the latest testing ground for these thorny ethical and legal questions. It could also wind up being a very lucrative goldrush indeed. So while major powers such as China and India plow increasing sums of money into developing space programs to rival NASA’s, and the US and Russia mili tarize the stars to prepare for future warfare, more wily states like Luxembourg—which has all the square footage of an asteroid—are making a different bet: that they can become home to a multinational cast of entrepreneurs who want to go into space not for just the sake of scientific progress or to strengthen their nation’s geopolitical hand, but also to get rich.

Emily Dufton

Addiction, Inc.: MedicationAssisted Treatment and the War on Drugs

History

Judges’ citation:

In Addiction, Inc., Emily Dufton takes a deep dive into the history of opioid addiction and treatment, writing with clarity, rigor, and a contagious sense of urgency. Dufton offers a comprehensive view of the governmental failures and corporate greed that have led to the privatization of a treatment that has failed to live up to its promise of moving patients closer to recovery. Her book masterfully weaves together science, policy, and individual stories to illuminate a crucial facet of America’s opioid epidemic.

The project:

Medication-assisted treatment for heroin addiction, or MAT, was conceived in the 1970s as a liberal initiative to provide a medicalized “off-ramp” from the burgeoning war on drugs. Addiction, Inc. will show how, over the past fifty years, MAT has degraded from an idealized dream of socialized healthcare that treated addiction as a disease to a largely private, predatory system that emphasizes profit over rehabilitation—even as the opioid epidemic continues unchecked and more than 100,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2021 alone.

Emily Dufton is a writer and drug historian and the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America. She received her PhD in American Studies from George Washington University. Addiction, Inc. was also awarded a J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award in 2021 and a Robert B. Silvers Foundation Grant for Work in Progress in 2022. She lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with her family.

Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press (US)

Methadone had always been controversial. The synthetic opioid, three times stronger than morphine, was developed in Germany in 1938 by the Nazi-aligned pharmaceutical company I.G. Farben Industrie, which had also developed the gas chamber drug Zyklon B. In 1946, methadone was brought to America as a spoil of war, along with Volkswagens and the aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, via federal programs designed to transfer German technologies to American industry. First tested at the Addiction Research Center (ARC) at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, methadone’s potency impressed scientists, but they were skeptical it was any less addictive than tradi tional opiates. In a 1947 report, Research Director Dr. Harris Isbell warned that methadone was an “addiction-causing drug” and that “narcotic drug addicts would abuse and would become habituated to it if it were freely available.”

Methadone then languished for nearly twenty years. A few pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, manufactured it for pain treatment under the name Dolophine, but it was never a big seller, either legally or underground. Herbert Hunke, the writer and poet best known for introducing heroin to the Beats, argued that “dollies” were useful during a panic, when a sudden shortage of heroin made it unavailable in the streets. But methadone was never a proper way to maintain an addiction. The pills were usually a last resort, Hunke said, “merely a way to get straight” so users wouldn’t get sick.

But in 1965, methadone began making headlines again. That summer, in a lengthy twopart article in The New Yorker, Nat Hentoff profiled Dr. Marie Nyswander, who, along with her partner Dr. Vincent Dole, was using methadone to treat heroin addicts at the Rockefeller Institute’s clinical hospital in New York. Nyswander and Dole were doing something new. They weren’t using methadone to detoxify patients as at ARC, or periodically, like Hunke, to get through a scare. Instead, they were giving large doses of methadone to known her oin addicts every day and then watching as the drug transformed their lives. “From two slugabeds,” Nyswander reported, her patient volunteers were now “dynamos of activity”: “One began to paint, and to paint industriously and well. The other started urging us to let him get his high school-equivalency diploma.”

For Hentoff, the concept of “methadone maintenance”—Nyswander and Dole’s new practice of keeping addict-patients on high supplies of legal methadone indefinitely— seemed nothing short of a miracle.

Wes Enzinna

Impossible Paradise: Life, Death, and Home in a California Tent City

Judges’ citation:

This eye-opening book will stand shoulder to shoulder with Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London It is a deeply reported, emotionally suspenseful account of trying to make a home in the 21st-century economy, where the author’s experience of housing precarity is braided into an exploration of the lives of others—disproportionately Black, Brown, and LGBTQ—living in the tent cities of the Bay Area. Wes Enzinna’s evocative, intelligent storytelling shatters indifference, refusing to let his reader walk heedlessly past the increasingly urgent issue of homelessness in America. His reason for writing it cuts one to the core: “Without honest and accurate stories, there can be no solutions.”

The project:

Impossible Paradise investigates the causes and effects of American homelessness through the story of a single tent city in Oakland—one of the first to crop up in the wake of the 2008 recession, and one of approximately 140 that currently exist in the city. Despite the attention Bay Area homelessness has received in recent years, no one has written a detailed account of what life is like at the crisis’s epicenter: the encampments, where as many as 74 percent of the region’s unhoused population lives. The book focuses on the lives of five camp residents, exploring how they ended up homeless and narrating the challenges they face as they try to get back into housing. To research the book, the author spent more than a year visiting the encampment and at times living alongside the residents.

Wes Enzinna is a contributing editor at Harper’s and a visiting professor in Columbia University’s Nonfiction MFA Program. He has written cover stories for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Mother Jones, and New York Magazine, and he is a contributor to The London Review of Books and GQ. He’s won awards from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism, the Richard J. Margolis Foundation, and the 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship at UC Berkeley, where he earned a Master’s in 2010. He lives in upstate New York.

Forthcoming from Penguin Press (US) Cultural and Political Reportage

Taking responsibility for the camp on 77th Avenue had become, after Derrick Soo’s first, desperate, suicidal years, his new reason to live, his new identity, and it had probably saved his life. Yet it was this same pride that seemingly prevented him from asking others for help, which was likely what he needed if he was ever going to get off the streets. Stormy, who had lived at the camp nearly as long as Soo, sometimes worried he had become so attached to his role of keeping order and being “mayor” that he forgot his goal was actually to leave the camp himself. The city of Oakland had deemed him “service resistant,” the term for somebody who supposedly doesn’t want housing.

Yet, while I was taken slightly aback by harsh remarks Soo sometimes made about Candy or camp residents, he was the only reason she and others had anything to eat many days, because he made sure there were always provisions, filling a gap that the city or social service agencies didn’t even come close to satisfying. He used his own money to keep the communal refrigerator running. He harangued the city to bring in the shower and laundry truck, and to explain what the hell was going on when it didn’t show up for months at a time. He had built a solar-powered communal shower one year after the city stopped answering his emails. He went out of his way to protect camp inhabitants. Once, when one of his neighbors was stran gling his girlfriend unconscious, Soo charged into the couple’s tent and clubbed the man over the head with a fire extinguisher, saving the woman’s life, by her own account, and risking his own in the process.

Soo did want to leave 77th Avenue, but he didn’t want to leave to go just anywhere. He once spent four months on a friend’s couch until the friend’s roommate insisted Soo leave. He’d spent 91 days in a shelter and said he’d rather die than go back there, and besides, Mama needed him, and he needed her, and you couldn’t bring a dog to a shelter. In the construction of his dwelling you could see some of these contradictory feelings embodied—the war within him between his desire to escape and his desire to make the most of his present circum stances manifested itself aesthetically, in much the way that all of the tents on 77th Avenue embodied the paradox of capitalism’s wastefulness and the poor’s resourcefulness.

The exterior was a mix of tarp and plywood and nylon, sewn and utility-taped at the seams. A plywood atrium extended from the tent walls. A sliding twin-paned window had been installed in the plywood, and a beach towel with an illustrated map of the French West Indies island of Saint Martin hung as a curtain. Guests entered through a white wooden front door that faced the street, hung from a rudimentary door jamb framed out with 1x3s. There was a handle and lock, though the lock was broken, unlike the white electric doorbell, which was connected to a small solar-powered speaker inside and produced a digital ding-dong.

Inside, the space was about the size of an igloo, dark and warm in the same way, and lit by a lattice of dim LED lights strung from the ceiling. A white bookshelf in the kitchen held eight reusable three-liter water bottles, which Soo filled twice weekly at a gas station two miles away. He spent about two hundred dollars on water each month and pushed the jugs to and fro in a handcart. “Being homeless is a lot of work,” he said, “and it’s expensive.”

Ekow Eshun The Strangers

Forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton (UK) Biography/Memoir

Judges’ citation:

Ekow Eshun has charged himself with answering Toni Morrison’s observation that Black people are often “spoken of and written about as objects of history, not subjects within it,” and his project has the power to take readers to a new understanding. Eshun links his fine-grained explorations of these fascinating but too-little-known figures and their social worlds to his own, and to ours. He has the quick, light sentences of a journalist combined with the imaginative reach of a novelist; this is a rich and beguiling way of writing biography and memoir. The book will offer astonishing discoveries.

The project:

Structured around the stories of several remarkable Black men from the 19th to the 21st century and across the global diaspora, The Strangers sets out a radical exploration of identity and experience. From Victorian actor Ira Aldridge to philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon to hip hop star Tupac Shakur, the subject of each chapter stands at a crossroads, the society around him in flux. Drawing on historical sources to imagine their interiority, Ekow Eshun examines the forces that have shaped, constrained, and transformed our understanding of Black masculinity—and considers how we can think beyond them. From toxic masculinity to male fragility, mental health to queerness and the performance of gender, The Strangers offers a powerfully intersectional investigation of what it has meant and could mean to be a Black man.

Ekow Eshun is a writer and curator and the former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. He is the author of books including In the Black Fantastic and Black Gold of the Sun, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Described by The Guardian as a “cultural polymath,” he is the writer and presenter of TV and radio documentaries including the BBC film Dark Matter: A History of the Afrofuture. He has contributed to books on artists such as Chris Ofili, Mark Bradford, and Kehinde Wiley, and his writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Financial Times, Granta, and Aperture.

New York, 1823

Ira Aldridge: It is 9 o’clock and Ira is backstage when the commotion starts. He hears men shouting and the tumble of furniture. The screams of ladies. He is not performing tonight and he rushes front of house to see a mob of white men, about fifteen of them, charging through the theater. Black patrons are scrambling out of their way. A woman in a peach-colored dress is shoved to the floor. The men break up the benches, making them into clubs and breaking the lamps. Some of them scramble into the boxes. They cut the cord holding up a circular frame of candles and send it crashing to the floor. A group of them climb onto the stage. They slash the scenery and rip down the curtain. They tear the costumes off the struggling bodies of the actors.

And even as Ira watches, horrified, he’s punched in the side of the face and falls to the floor. An overweight man with ginger hair stands over him. From the floorboards, he, Ira, considers briefly the flapping sole of the man’s boot as he launches a kick at his head. He shuts his eyes and all he can hear is the man exhaling with the effort of more kicks, and fur ther away, running feet, screams, a burst of guttural laughter.

Later, as they sit amid the wreckage of the theater, Brown, his face bruised and swollen, his white shirt torn, is adamant that he recognises some of the thugs as Price’s men. He insists that Ira go with him to the Watch House to bring action against the men he knows. But it is a forlorn endeavor and they both know it. The men are charged with assault and battery, but the case is dismissed before ever arriving in court. Patrons are scared to come back. Which way do you go, wonders Ira, leaving the American Theatre. Which way do you go?

London, 1825

George Davidge: The boy, Ira, turned up at my door knowing no one in London and barely able to look me in the eye. Even before he spoke I’d decided to put him on the stage. You just had to look at him. His movements languid like he was swimming. Eyes blinking so slowly he might have been dreaming. And the color of him. That skin that caught the light and held it. Actors, they come to you hungry to please like panting dogs. He gave you nothing and you couldn’t get enough of it.

Our theater, the Royal Coburg, is a handsome one, with gilt cherubs watching from the ceiling and a thirty-six-foot-high curtain. But it is in Lambeth, on the wrong side of the Thames, and the better class of patron is reluctant to pay the toll on Waterloo Bridge for the privilege of being robbed by the pickpockets of the Marshes. Hazlitt was unjust in comparing us to a “brothel filled with Jew-boys, prostitutes and mountebanks.”

As manager this past year I’ve tried to raise our sights. Dr. Preston and his exhibition of nitrous oxide—audience members line up on stage to inhale from a canister of laughing gas— will not be booked for this season. Instead, there is King Lear and Hamlet, albeit abridged and with musical interludes.

And now, The Revolt of Surinam or A Slave’s Revenge, “a most faithful Portrait of the horrors that arise out of the dreadful traffic of slavery, as depicted in its principal role by A Man of Colour.”

Patricia Evangelista

Some People Need Killing

Judges’ citation:

There are people who seem born to tell the story of their country—its history and also its present moment. A third-generation journalist, Patricia Evangelista writes with brio and poetic sensitivity on the hope and despair of the Philippines, from its colonial past to its troubled present. Evangelista’s greatest strength is her voice: its sharp, ironic playfulness, its ferocious bravery, its compassion. In recording her subjects’ experiences living through horror, she bears witness to the lives of people that society treats as disposable.

The project:

Some People Need Killing is a cautionary tale of a modern democracy under the leadership of a populist autocrat. The title comes from one vigilante’s answer to the question of why he murdered suspected drug dealers and addicts. This book, told through the stories of killers and survivors, combines literary journalism and investigative reportage into a first-person account that documents President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent campaign against illegal drugs. It is a book about memory, complicity, and language, at a time when a country has decided that some lives are less grievable than others.

Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist and former investigative reporter for Philippine news company Rappler. She is a recipient of the Agence France-Presse Kate Webb Prize and a fellow of the Dart Center, the Logan Nonfiction Program, the Marshall McLuhan Fellowship, and the New America Fellows Program. Her work investigating President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war was awarded the Human Rights Press Award, the Society of Publishers in Asia Award, and the Global Investigative Journalism Network’s Shining Light Award, and was a finalist for the Osborn Elliott Prize for Journalism. She is based in Manila.

It began with the mayor. Not the killing, because there had always been killing. It was the mayor who made the killing a matter of national pride.

There were many things he said that politicians had never said before. He promised to kill a hundred thousand criminals if he won. He said he would end corruption and crime and drugs inside of his first year. He said he cheated on his wife. He cursed at the Pope. He called the American president a son of a bitch. People thought he was brave and bold and exactly what they needed.

“Take me for what I am,” said the mayor from the south, and the people did.

It was just after the mayor became the president that he promised his people he was going to kill them. Not all of them, of course. The president was very clear about which of his citizens he would kill.

“I am asking you, do not go [into drugs] because I will kill you,” the president said. “It may not be tonight, it may not be tomorrow, but in six years, there will be one day that you will make a mistake and I will go after you.”

It did not take six years, or even six days. It took roughly six hours. The dead man was young. He wore blue shoes. He was killed one short walk away from where the president just spoke. There was a sign beside his body that said “Drug Lord.” […]

The people who had been living beside drug addicts all their lives were confounded by the discovery they weren’t living with people at all. It was helpful to be told that proper behavior included murdering neighbors and burning houses. Mothers and fathers were exempted from killing their sons and daughters, as the president understood it would be a painful enterprise. That the president announced he was willing to kill his own children if they used drugs was not a surprise. The president, after all, was made of sterner stuff.

Many people died.

Sometimes there were ten, and sometimes twenty bodies a night. They were crack users, small-time dealers, solvent sniffers. Their bodies were rolled into garbage bags. Their heads were wrapped in tape. They were bound, knifed, shot, suffocated, and tossed out of tricycles in the dead of the night. Their corpses were displayed on highways and alleyways. The men who killed them left signs behind: addict, dealer, occasionally thief. Some of the killers took the trouble to dash off jokes and smiley faces.

There were many more ways to die, and not all of them in the hands of masked gunmen. The police were very hardworking. They racked up numbers in the thousands. Here is Juan, opening the door. Here is Juan, dead on the floor.

“If they pull out a gun, kill them,” the president told his troops. “If they don’t, kill them, son of a whore, so it’s over, lest you lose the gun. I’ll take care of you.”

The families were frightened. The fathers wept. The mothers screamed. The wives fainted. The daughters clawed at coffins. There was a glut of new orphans. Corpses piled up naked in funeral parlors, so many that mass burials were held two bodies to a grave, a fit so tight the men with the shovels had to kick in the skulls.

The police said the dead addicts were violent. They were all killed in self-defense. Almost every crime scene listed a gun as evidence the dead man had fought back. If, for example, the corpse lay sprawled on the sidewalk with a .45 upside-down in his hand, or in the wrong hand, or if the wrists were cuffed, or if the revolver appeared after the body hit the ground, there was no need to explain.

“Fought back,” said the police reports. “He surrendered,” said their mothers. […]

Foreign governments complained. The United Nations interfered. Human rights organi zations said the president could be tried for crimes against humanity. None of them under stood that the victims were not victims. They were bad people—barely people. “In the first place,” said the president, “I’d like to be frank with you: are they humans? What is your defini tion of a human being?”

From Patricia Evangelista’s previous reportage for Rappler, “The Butcher in the Palace, and Other Fabrications,” July 3, 2017

Brooke Jarvis Invisible Apocalypse

Forthcoming from Crown (US) Natural Science

Judges’ citation:

Brooke Jarvis is writing a Silent Spring for the insect world, and the impact of their plummeting population for life on earth is an urgent question for us all. Working in the tradition of the great E.O. Wilson as well as Elizabeth Kolbert and David Wallace-Wells, Jarvis takes us into the field to meet the obsessive and dedicated people doing bootson-the-ground fieldwork. Jarvis is supremely good at making complex science easy to grasp, writing with style and surprising poetry; even the footnotes are compelling. This book should be required reading for policy makers, activists, NGOs, and corporate leaders, but will grip anyone who feels curiosity and concern about the natural world and our effect on it.

The project:

The disappearance of insects has captured the world’s attention and set off a search among scientists to discover what’s happening, why, and what it all means for the future of life on Earth. This book takes us on a narrative journey inside the “insect apocalypse,” where readers will gain a new understanding of the losses that define our era.

Brooke Jarvis is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine who also writes regularly for The New Yorker and Wired. Her work has won recognition from the Livingston Awards, the National Academies of Sciences, the International Labour Organization, and the Society of Environmental Journalists, among others, and been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best American Travel Writing, Love and Ruin, 50 Essays, and New Stories We Tell: True Tales by America’s Next Generation of Great Women Journalists. She lives in Seattle.

“He was just laughed at,” Dan Janzen, the scientist who set up the paratax onomist program in Costa Rica, and who had worked with the entomologist Terry Erwin on many occasions, told me, decades later, as we fishtailed through mud on our way down the mountain from the research station. “Nobody believed him.”

Janzen was eighty, with a fluff of white hair, a thick white beard and wild curly eye brows, and a style of discourse that he labeled, apologetically but not inaccurately, as over bearing. He had been living in Costa Rica for more than fifty years, most of them with Winnie Hallwachs, his long-haired, soft-spoken research partner and wife, who now sat in the back seat as Janzen drove, the better to shout directions and suggestions into his good left ear. When she did, she called him “friend of mine,” as in, “friend of mine, don’t you think you’re driving a little too fast for this mud?” or “hey, friend of mine, I think you’re answering a different question than the one Brooke asked you.” Janzen called her “lady” and liked to say that while he was the talker of the pair, Hallwachs was the thinker. Janzen’s name is the more famous one—the winner of prestigious global prizes from the MacArthur to the Kyoto, and author of scientific articles so seminal that their fifty-year anniversaries are marked by ret rospectives from new generations of scientists—but that fact frustrated him. Their work was all about the study of interactions, the way different species’ lives intertwined and supported each other, and any understanding of that work that ignored their own irreplaceable mutualism was fundamentally incorrect.

We’d just passed an eight-foot-wide mud dome that marked a colony of leaf-cutter ants (“there’ll be two million individuals down there, and hundreds of cantaloupe-sized chambers where they farm fungus to eat,” said Janzen) and a broadwing hawk (“for food, it depends entirely on the small things that eat insects”). Discoursing on these visible lives brought Janzen to the topic of how little we still know about the less visible ones, and from there to the subject of Erwin’s famous number. To Erwin, he said, the estimate of thirty million insect species was always meant to be the beginning of a debate and not a definite statement. How could it be anything else? “He was sticking a spoon into the unknown.” But while other scien tists had revised Erwin’s estimate downwards, Janzen, Hallwachs, and the parataxonomists kept discovering new reasons to push it back up. When I asked Janzen how many species of insect he now believed the Earth to hold, he replied twenty-five or thirty million—right about at the laughable number Erwin had proposed forty years before. (In fact, though, according to Garcia-Robledo, one of Erwin’s former students, by the time he died Erwin had settled on a different reply to the numbers question. “Gazillions,” he would answer, smiling sweetly.)

The general public tends to believe that the discovery of a new species is a momentous and rare occasion. Entomologists know otherwise. I’ve lost track of how many told me they could discover a new species in my backyard if given time and help from taxonomists, and many scientists have personal backlogs of species that they haven’t bothered to name. The historical backlog is even larger; one entomologist described opening a large drawer full of different as-yet-unnamed beetles at a museum, only to be told that the forest where they’d been collected had vanished. (It can be a painful job, a group of taxonomists wrote, “docu menting this monumental historical loss of biodiversity and, in some cases, grimly identify ing and naming new species already extinct or destined thusly.”) The more entomologists learn about the genetics and life histories of even supposedly well-known insects, the more diversity they discover. That’s how great is the gap between what exists and what we know, the vastness into which Erwin dipped his spoon.

The Life: Sex, Work, and Love in America

Judges’ citation:

May Jeong’s examination of the everyday lives of sex workers, including the victims of the Gem Spa murders, exudes compassion but rests on immersive reporting and incisive analysis. Her narrative approach is both delicate and kaleidoscopic, combining her interrogation of the societal and legislative underpinnings of sex trafficking with individual stories that reveal the human cost of criminalizing its victims. Jeong’s book is poised to draw much-needed attention to an overlooked civil rights issue and has the potential to become a classic of investigative reporting.

The project:

The Life: Sex, Work, and Love in America examines the forces shaping sex work and the lives of its workers, and how these forces interact with race, gender, and class. Jeong explores the limitations of our justice system when it deals with sex work and sex trafficking, often criminalizing those who are victims as much as they are breakers of unjust laws. Investigating the various paths taken to sex work, Jeong shows how those in “the life” are often trapped in a cycle that punishes them for the crime of poverty or other diversions from social norms. Based on deeply reported life stories, The Life probes the injustices, indignities, and redemptions these workers experience and lays bare the intersections of immigration, sexuality, power, and labor.

May Jeong is a reporter at Vanity Fair. Her reporting from Afghanistan has been awarded the South Asian Journalist Association’s Daniel Pearl Award and the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for war correspondents. Her work has also been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Livingston Awards. She lives on land ceded by the Lenape people in the Treaty of Shackamaxon in 1682, in an area currently called Brooklyn, New York.

Forthcoming from Atria Books (US) Investigative Reporting

Being a bottom was not unlike being a house mom in a strip club. Ty had connected the 1-800 number of his escort service to Sugar’s phone so she could book sessions for the girls. It was the bottom’s job to make sure nobody was doing calls behind Ty. Even if they suc ceeded in circumventing Sugar, the money would cycle back to Ty anyway, as the girls bought all their drugs from him. Whenever Ty recruited a new girl, which was often, say every other week, it was up to Sugar to take her out shopping, get her hair done, her nails done, and ready her for a date. This, Sugar was certain, was yet another sign of her special status in Ty’s universe.

Later Sugar came to see her bottom status with greater ambivalence. It had nothing to do with any special amorous feelings, it occurred to her, but that she was among the few still sufficiently sober to keep Ty apprised of events. Sugar continued to live in Ty’s thrall.

In the beginning, Sugar refrained from using hard drugs, which was frowned upon even among other workers. Sugar began, haltingly, on half an opiate taken the special Cry Baby way; Cry Baby had shown Sugar how to pack a pill inside a McDonald’s straw and bite down on the plastic before emptying the crushed pill down alternating nostrils.

By the end of the week, Sugar was taking two or three pills a day like this. The following week, another escort, Nuba, taught Sugar how to do a speed ball, mixing cocaine with crushed opiates diluted in water, injected intravenously. By the month’s end, Sugar had become what she called a trashcan junkie.

Soon Sugar was beginning the day with half a joint, then alternating between oxycodones, which the girls called blues, or cocaine, called whites. Between the whites and the blues was a vast un governable stretch of unconscious expanse, punctuated by moments of fleeting awareness. During those brief sober moments, Sugar spoke to Sierra about what she might do if she could just get out of the life. They wanted to set up in Gainesville, where Sierra would work as a medical assistant, her old job, and Sugar would start college. But they couldn’t seem to save any money. Once, Sugar made eight hundred dollars in one night and woke up to fifty the next morning. She had spent it all in a black-out. On another occasion, she found a pill underneath a hotel bed. Sugar suspected it was MDMA, though she wasn’t sure. She took the anonymous pill anyway, and woke up the next morn ing in an entirely different room of an entirely different hotel, not knowing how she had gotten there.

At first Sugar went in sixty-forty with Ty just like the other girls. If a regular call was a hun dred and fifty dollars, Sugar kept nearly a hundred. Out of the hundred, if it was an out call, Sugar paid the driver a twenty, leaving her with seventy-six dollars. She split the room with another girl, usually at thirty-five dollars per night. With the remaining forty-one dollars, she purchased pills, which went for twenty each. Even if Ty cut you a deal at fifteen dollars a pill, if you were doing four to five pills a day—most days Sugar was doing ten and some girls did twenty—you were left with little or no money at all. Even in her loopy, very high state, Sugar surmised it would be a better deal to give Ty all her money in exchange for access to an unlimited amount of drugs.

It was a godsend when a hotel had a washing machine, but otherwise, garments were hand-washed in the basin. Mostly, the girls did runs to the mall, as it was easier to buy than to wash or mend. Such challenges of the hotel life never got to Sugar, as she existed in a kind of fugue state and could only be shaken out by drugs. The monomania that hard drugs demand of its users manifested itself in a kind of clarity of purpose in Sugar, the kind found in those who practice deep meditation, or the singularly devout.

When we think of trafficking, we think of global conspiracies spanning international borders, but actual, everyday domestic trafficking is much less organized. It is often a func tion of poverty or neglect, or coordinated by those you love.

The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive

Judges’ citation:

Mathelinda Nabugodi dazzles with her originality of approach in this exhilarating tour de force, opening new ways of seeing and reading. A scholar of the highest caliber, she uses archival treasures—a teacup, a baby’s rattle, a necklace made of human hair—to reframe the dusty portraits of the Romantic poets in relation to what has been termed the “racial capitalism” of chattel slavery, the engine of their eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Her own story provides sparkling grace notes as she delves into the influence of the slave trade on a literary tradition associated with personal and political freedom, and among this project’s most moving moments is Nabugodi’s reckoning with the limits and possibilities of writing herself into this lineage.

The project:

Romanticism is best known as a movement celebrating political and imaginative liberty— the human mind freeing itself from the shackles of tradition. But Romanticism also coincided with the apex of the transatlantic slave trade. This book recovers some of the links between the poetry of freedom and the practices of slavery in the Romantic period. It presents an at once radical and intimate group portrait of the major Romantic poets that recasts their lives and works in the light of the Black Atlantic while at the same time describing the author’s own journey through this space with passion, curiosity, disquiet.

Mathelinda Nabugodi is a Research Associate in the Literary and Artistic Archive at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. She was the first to be awarded a PhD in Creative Critical Writing from University College London, for a thesis on Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walter Benjamin. She has edited Shelley’s translations from Aeschylus, Calderón, and Goethe for The Poems of Shelley as well as the essay collection Thinking Through Relation: Encounters in Creative Critical Writing. She has secured fellowships at the University of Cambridge, Newcastle University, the Bodleian Libraries, and the Huntington Library.

Forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton (UK) and Alfred A. Knopf (US) Literary Criticism/Memoir

Mathelinda Nabugodi

In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, William Blake uses folksy and almost childlike ballad forms to deliver scathing critiques of social injustice, often drawing on Christian iconography to create redemptive visions of a future where no one has to suffer. His poem “The Chimney Sweeper” attacks child labor by likening the exploited boys to lambs, echoing the Christian notion that Jesus is the Lamb of God. But it introduces a hint of racial ambiguity: “my father sold me,” says the poem’s narrator before telling us of his friend “little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head / That curl’d like a lambs back was shav’d.” These two chimney sweepers could be read as stand-ins for the thousands of “woolly-haired” Africans who were likewise sold and had their hair shaved prior to being forced down into the holds of slave ships—yet the analogy between the London underclass and enslaved Africans breaks down when the narrator comforts Tom with the words “Hush, Tom! Never mind it, for, when your head’s bare / You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.” As the poem goes on, the blackness of soot becomes legible as the visible expression of evil: “that very night” Tom has a dream in which an Angel comes and releases him and “thousands of sweepers” from the “coffins of black” where they have been locked up. Now the little chimney sweepers can “run / And wash in a river and shine in the Sun,” ensuring that they are all “naked & white” before ascending to Heaven. Blackness must be purged to gain access to Paradise.

While slavers may have shaved the heads of enslaved people for reasons of hygiene, the ritual anticipated the social and cultural death that awaited Africans at the far end of their passage across the Atlantic. In Hair Story (2001), a cultural history of African-American hair, Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps suggest that the “shaved head was the first step the Europeans took to erase the slave’s culture,” and that this was an important part of the process that transformed a human being—embedded in a culture and social community—into a piece of property. “Arriving without their signature hairstyles, Mandingos, Fulanis, Ibos, and Ashantis entered the New World, just as the Europeans intended, like anonymous chattel.” The casting off of black hair can be read symbolically as a ritual that expunges Africans from the body of history.

This is of course not the end of the story. It would typically take a slave ship six to nine weeks to cross the Atlantic, so that, on arrival, the captives’ hair would have begun to grow out again, albeit now matted, uncombed, entwined. When hair is neglected for extended periods of time, the outer layer begins to break down, exposing the inner cortex, which is slightly sticky. Hair begins to meld into a mass that can no longer be disentangled: in Europe this condition was called plica Polonica (Polish plait), but in the Caribbean it became known as dreadlocks—allegedly named for the dreadful appearance of Africans coming off the slave ships. The present-day international popularity of dreds or locs is indebted to Rastafarians who embraced the hairstyle in honor of enslaved ancestors. This is a cultural practice of not cutting one’s hair that commemorates both the moment of arrival in the Caribbean and styles worn by legendary African warriors. In this regard, one can read dreadlocks as a liv ing cultural heritage, in vivid contrast to the cut-off locks of their own hair that Europeans exchanged with one another in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, locks which now molder in museums and archives.

Alejandra Oliva

Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration

Judges’ citation:

Subtle, personal, and deeply informative, this is one of those books that catapult you to a place you have never been. Translation is the author’s vocation as well as a metaphor for the in-between spaces that her personal and professional identities compel her to traverse. Alejandra Oliva stands at a literal border and contemplates the metaphorical borderlines language creates, in terms of both the immigrant crisis and her own identity as a bilingual Mexican-American. Driven by a fierce sense of social justice, she is also an exquisitely controlled journalist. Her candid, intimate voice is irresistible.

The project:

Rivermouth is an urgent reckoning and reexamination of the humanitarian crisis we call the American immigration system, told through the lens of the author’s work as a translator for asylum seekers. Each of the book’s three parts orbits around a space that becomes a unifying metaphor: the river as the waterway that separates the United States and Mexico, as well as the river of meaning that translators must navigate; the table where Oliva helps asylum seekers fill out applications, and scrutinizes how utopian aid so often falls short of helping those who need it most; and the wall as the behemoth imposition that runs along America’s southernmost border, as well as the confines of the migrant detention centers where our carceral and immigration systems intersect.

Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, embroiderer, and translator whose writing has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020, nominated for a Pushcart prize, and honored with an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. She is the Yale Whitney Humanities Center Franke Visiting Fellow in Spring 2022. She lives in Chicago with her husband and dog.

Forthcoming from Astra House (US) Memoir/Political Reportage

Couples get married in this line, kiss each other goodbye in this line, cry, recite over and over again to themselves the answers they have prepared for their Credible Fear Interview like litanies. Mothers sharpie phone numbers onto their children’s bellies— the family separations have allegedly stopped at this point, but nobody wants to take any chances. Sometimes there is a white-collared priest or a pastor among the volunteers, and they ask if anyone wants prayers. Sometimes I translate, a huddle of us holding hands, the electric current of intention running from the pastor’s hand through mine and to those receiving the blessing. There are little moments of comfort: a woman passes a huge jar of Vaseline to a single man waiting in line next to her so he can use it to cover over scrapes and bumps on his legs, a woman re-braids the hair of someone else’s daughter eye-wateringly tight to prevent the lice that is said to run rampant at the detention centers and the hopeless tangle that results from not being able to brush or bathe adequately for days. “Hay que estar bien arregladita,” the woman says, snapping an elastic onto the end of a wispy little braid.

And then, just as the last baby hair has been brushed into submission, as clothes are straightened out and crumbs and dirt are dusted off, the guy with the mustache from Grupos Beta starts calling out names again, checking things off on a clipboard, sending people around the concrete bars that make up the fence and into waiting vans with metal grates across the windows. Up until this point, everything has felt ad-hoc, somewhat informal and loose, or at least negotiable, but with that clipboard, and that line, there’s an order put in place, the knowledge of some kind of an authority standing over it all, a knowledge that disobedience comes with consequences.

Two times each day, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, we watch this familiar procession. Those who’d heard their number called that morning load whatever lug gage they have into the back of the van, pass children into the cabin and then climb up its steep step themselves, disappearing behind windows with bars over them, like a prison van. The man with the mustache shuts the door and the grates close over.

Then, as the vans slowly pull out of the lot, we stand there yelling: “Vayan con Dios! Adios! Adios! Buena suerte!” You can barely see their hands waving back out of the windows, their faces peering back out of the glass as the vans hurtle down the street, turning a corner and falling off the face of the earth. This happens every day, twice a day. It is still happening now.

Throughout those long days, as we prepared people to cross over, we listened to them talk about “el otro lado” with burning intensity, even as they could only give vague answers about what it would look like and feel like, what they would do when they got there, and what would happen next. We prayed over people, blessing their journeys. I helped translate the prayers of clergy from English to Spanish: “Que Dios les bendiga, que les vaya bien, que Dios los cuide.” We offered a few small comforts before they left—but all with the forced cheerful ness of a wake that’s trying to be a party.

Our language was that of crossing a border, but it was also the language of death.

Permissions

Excerpt from The Hidden Globe (working title) by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. Copyright © 2022 by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. Forthcoming from Riverhead. All rights reserved. A version of the excerpt was first published as part of the author’s article “How a tax haven is leading the race to privatise space” in The Guardian on September 15, 2017.

Excerpt from Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and the War on Drugs (working title) by Emily Dufton. Copyright © 2022 by Emily Dufton. Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Impossible Paradise: Life, Death, and Home in a California Tent City (working title) by Wes Enzinna. Copyright © 2022 by Wes Enzinna. Forthcoming from Penguin Press. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from The Strangers (working title) by Ekow Eshun. Copyright © 2022 by Ekow Eshun. Forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “The Butcher in the Palace, and Other Fabrications” by Patricia Evangelista. Copyright © 2022 by Patricia Evangelista. Used by permission of and first published by Rappler on July 3, 2017. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Invisible Apocalypse (working title) by Brooke Jarvis. Copyright © 2022 by Brooke Jarvis. Forthcoming from Crown. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from The Life: Sex, Work, and Love in America (working title) by May Jeong. Copyright © 2022 by May Jeong. Forthcoming from Atria Books. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive (working title) by Mathelinda Nabugodi. Copyright © 2022 by Mathelinda Nabugodi. Forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton (UK) and Alfred A. Knopf (US). All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration (working title) by Alejandra Oliva. Copyright © 2022 by Alejandra Oliva. Forthcoming from Astra House. All rights reserved.

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