Lifestyle
My Practice: Retelling Rituals
Occasions Insider explains who we’re and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes collectively.
“The large heart crop is called makua,” Miki’ala Pua’a-Freitas, the proprietor of a taro farm in Hawaii, informed me. Makua is a time period for “guardian” in Hawaiian tradition. “All of the offshoots, these are referred to as keikis, and, you realize, we’re all offshoots of our dad and mom,” she mentioned.
I knew taro was a candy, earthy root vegetable common in boba drinks and desserts. However I needed to hear intently to maintain up with Ms. Freitas, who was describing its sacred worth to Hawaiians.
It was mid September, and talking with Ms. Freitas was considered one of my first in-depth interviews as a reporter on the Types desk. As a part of The New York Occasions embed program, I had left my function as a Occasions information assistant for a short while to dive into Types and its world of vogue critiques, celeb profiles, taboo matters and engaging sides of society. The purpose of the embed program was to discover ways to be an important reporter by sharpening my interview abilities, storytelling methods and Occasions model and information over the subsequent three months.
So when Ethan Hauser, a senior employees editor on the desk and my mentor in this system, requested me if I’d like to assist with a collection on completely different rituals in America and the individuals who observe them, I used to be delighted to contribute.
The digital challenge, which was printed on-line final month, offers readers a take a look at practices equivalent to Ms. Freitas’s taro harvest in Hawaii, ocher mining in Utah and a church service at a monastery in New Mexico. Ethan described the challenge as a option to doc rituals throughout a rustic that had developed unusual new ones, like masks and social distancing, in the course of the pandemic: Photojournalists for The Occasions photographed 12 of them, and reporters performed interviews, then wrote brief vignettes to accompany the photographs.
I used to be assigned to interview and write about a number of folks together with Christian McGee, who proudly takes half in a Cajun Mardi Gras run in Louisiana that dates to the nineteenth century; Adonia Lee, a woodworker in Washington who infuses conventional components of her Makah heritage with trendy supplies and methods; and Alice Liu, the second-generation proprietor of a store in Manhattan’s Chinatown that sells conventional altars used for ancestral and god worship.
Earlier than becoming a member of The Occasions as a information assistant, I had labored as an area reporter in San Diego, my hometown. I’d written a number of articles for The Occasions whereas working as an assistant, so I knew I wanted to attach with my topics, despite the fact that it wasn’t my full-time job. I wanted to unlock the feelings they felt whereas participating of their rituals, and to understand the deeper that means the ritual holds for his or her households or cultures. The task additionally meant asking in regards to the small particulars, just like the names of pets or youngsters, and being sincere about when elements of a ritual have been past my understanding.
A frightening job awaited as soon as the interview was over, and I needed to sit at my pc and determine a option to condense an hour of dialog into a number of hundred phrases.
The primary two drafts I wrote have been practically 1,000 phrases, properly over the recommended phrase depend of 300, as I attempted to squeeze in each element. I felt like leaving something out can be an injustice to these I’d interviewed.
However over the course of the challenge, I developed a sharper sense of what mattered most for my topics and for readers. Sure particulars matter: To work with ocher, an earth pigment, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis, a professor of design in Utah, mixes it with a binder earlier than grinding, swatching and cataloging. I additionally marked the moments throughout interviews that produced a flutter in my abdomen — a sense of pleasure when a supply’s ardour for what they do radiated by the telephone. These moments, whether or not they ended up as direct quotes or small descriptive particulars, have been what introduced the article to life.
Since this reporting challenge, I’ve began to see rituals because the small ways in which all of us attempt to produce work or design practices that can go away a mark on this world after we go away it. I started to suppose that the observe of documenting peoples’ tales could be a ritual, too.
Lifestyle
Hold on to your wishes — there's a 'Spider in the Well'
Illustrations © 2024 Jess Hannigan
Once upon a time, in the folkloric town of Bad Göodsburg, which is probably in Germany, there was an overworked newsboy.
Not only did he bring the people their daily news, he also swept their chimneys, shined their shoes, and brought them their milk.
He was overworked, and underappreciated.
So, when the townspeople discover that their wishing well is broken, the newsboy sets off to fix it — and get some revenge. Thus begins this children’s tale of extortion, labor rights, and justice.
Author and illustrator Jess Hannigan spoke about her debut picture book, Spider in the Well, with NPR’s Tamara Keith. Here are excerpts from that conversation, edited in parts for clarity and length.
Illustrations © 2024 Jess Hannigan
Interview highlights
Tamara Keith: How did you come to write a book about a spider, when I understand that you are afraid of spiders?
Jess Hannigan: I am. I don’t care for them. But do I love the webs they spin? Yes. Do I love the spooky aesthetic? Of course. Basically, the whole story came about because I really just had the image of looking down a well with the web, with the spider in it, and I thought that would look cool. And then I kind of asked myself, like, ‘Is there a story here? Why is he in there? What’s he catching in the web?’ And it kind of just wrote itself from there.
Keith: Is everyone in Bad Göodsburg a little bit bad and a little bit good? Or are all people a little bit bad and a little bit good?
Hannigan: Well it’s supposed to be, you know, real life. I really like when a character is in a gray area with some good and some bad because it’s realistic and relatable. And we have heroes and we have “villains,” but they’re just like us. And that way they’re humanized. And you just get to kind of discuss who you side with, who you agree with.
Keith: How would you describe what this book looks like?
Hannigan: I did the whole thing completely digitally. I kind of was going for a sort of imperfect printmaking effect because I love the look of block printing, but I don’t have the patience. So this was kind of a happy medium of me achieving that kind of folkloric, old-timey printing look without any of the labor.
Illustrations © 2024 Jess Hannigan
Keith: Where did you draw your inspiration for the art? The colors are not colors that you traditionally see in a children’s book. It’s like black and hot orange and purple.
Hannigan: A lot of my inspiration for the kind of shapes that I use comes from like, Polish posters. They’re from the 1960s and ’70s — Polish poster design was crazy and they had the wackiest shapes and colors, and I was introduced to those back in college.
These were just the colors that I had been obsessed with at the time that I happened to be making the book. They are like these kind of sickly, weird tones. And I used all those purples and greens for the “bad guys” because I guess it suited their vibe. But I’m actually colorblind, very slightly. So everyone’s been telling me this book is such a lovely shade of orange and I’ve been telling everyone it’s red.
Keith: What lesson do you want the kids who are reading this book — or who are reading it with their parents — what do you want them to take away from it?
Hannigan: I didn’t go into making this story with a lesson in mind. I know books with morals are important and they have a place for sure. But really I just wanted to make people laugh. And to go back and read it again and think, ‘What the heck was this guy even doing? Where did they learn how to do blackmail? Who taught them about extortion and labor rights and things?’
I love stories like that, that just make you wonder more about them.
Illustrations é 2024 Jess Hannigan
Lifestyle
Diddy Posts Apology Video for Cassie Beating
Diddy‘s uttering his first words about the videotaped beating of Cassie … saying he “takes full responsibility for his actions,” and claims he’s already gone to rehab.
He posted a video Sunday morning, looking directly into camera, he said, “It’s so difficult to reflect on the darkest times in your life, but sometimes you gotta do that. I was f***ed up. I mean, I hit rock bottom.”
A 2016 video shows Sean “Diddy” Combs assaulting then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura in an altercation that matches some allegations in now-settled lawsuit https://t.co/fYUQ2z2MYN
— CNN (@CNN) May 17, 2024
@CNN
He says he’s not making any excuses for his behavior — the brutal March 2016 assault on his then-girlfriend Cassie while they were staying at the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles. The surveillance video — obtained by CNN — showed Diddy chase her down a hallway, grab her by the back of the neck and hurl her to the ground .. where he kicked her and dragged her.
Diddy claims he “sought out professional help” after the incident. He says, I had to go into therapy. Go into rehab. I had to ask God for his mercy and grace.”
He didn’t offer any detail about how long he was in treatment.
TMZ Studios
He ended the video with an apology, of sorts … “I’m so sorry, but I’m committed to be a better man each and everyday. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m truly sorry.”
What’s interesting is he did not directly apologize to Cassie — and, so, it comes off more as an apology to the public than the victim.
Remember, Cassie described the attack in the sexual assault lawsuit she filed in November against Diddy — a lawsuit they settled just one day later.
At the time, Diddy’s attorney emphasized the settlement was in no way an admission of guilt, and Diddy himself would later deny all the allegations made against him in several lawsuits.
Lifestyle
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