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kamreadsandrecs · 3 months

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So for anyone wondering why he's considered controversial: this New Yorker story has the whole story - and boy is it a DOOZY! Looks like either Dan Mallory/A.J. Finn and/or his publishing house were counting on the internet's short memory span to squeeze this new book out in the hopes that no one would remember what happened six years ago and buy it.

Dan Mallory, a book editor turned novelist, is tall, good-looking, and clever. His novel, “The Woman in the Window,” which was published under a lightly worn pseudonym, A. J. Finn, was the hit psychological thriller of the past year. Like “Gone Girl,” by Gillian Flynn (2012), and “The Girl on the Train,” by Paula Hawkins (2015), each of which has sold millions of copies, Mallory’s novel, published in January, 2018, features an unreliable first-person female narrator, an apparent murder, and a possible psychopath.

Mallory sold the novel in a two-book, two-million-dollar deal. He dedicated it to a man he has described as an ex-boyfriend, and secured a blurb from Stephen King: “One of those rare books that really is unputdownable.” Mallory was profiled in the Times, and the novel was reviewed in this magazine. A Washington Post critic contended that Mallory’s prose “caresses us.” The novel entered the Times best-seller list at No. 1—the first time in twelve years that a début novel had done so. A film adaptation, starring Amy Adams and Gary Oldman, was shot in New York last year. Mallory has said that his second novel is likely to appear in early 2020—coinciding, he hopes, with the Oscar ceremony at which the film of “The Woman in the Window” will be honored. Translation rights have been acquired in more than forty foreign markets.

Mallory can be delightful company. Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, recently recalled that Mallory, as a junior colleague in the New York book world, had been “charming, brilliant,” and a “terrific writer of e-mail.” Tess Gerritsen, the crime writer, met Mallory more than a decade ago, when he was an editorial assistant; she remembers him as “a charming young man” who wrote deft jacket copy. Craig Raine, the British poet and academic, told me that Mallory had been a “charming and talented” graduate student at Oxford; there, Mallory had focussed his studies on Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels, which are about a charming, brilliant impostor.

Now thirty-nine, Mallory lives in New York, in Chelsea. He spent much of the past year travelling—Spain, Bulgaria, Estonia—for interviews and panel discussions. He repeated entertaining, upbeat remarks about his love of Alfred Hitchcock and French bulldogs. When he made an unscheduled appearance at a gathering of bloggers in São Paulo, he was greeted with pop-star screams.

One evening in September, in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mallory sat down in the bar of the hotel where he and other guests of a literary festival were staying. Tom Scott, an editorial cartoonist and a screenwriter, was struck by Mallory’s self-assurance, which reminded him of Sam Shepard’s representation of Chuck Yeager, the test pilot, in the film “The Right Stuff.” “He came in wearing the same kind of bomber jacket,” Scott said recently, in a fondly teasing tone. “An incredibly good-looking guy. He sat down and plonked one leg over the arm of his chair, and swung that leg casually, and within two minutes he’d mentioned that he had the best-selling novel in the world this year.” Mallory also noted that he’d been paid a million dollars for the movie rights to “The Woman in the Window.” Scott said, “He was enjoying his success so much. It was almost like an outsider looking in on his own success.”

Mallory and Scott later appeared at a festival event that took the form of a lighthearted debate between two teams. The audience was rowdy; Scott recalled that, when it was Mallory’s turn to speak, he flipped the room’s mood. He announced that he was going “off script” to share something personal—for what Scott understood to be the first time. Mallory said that once, in order to alleviate depression, he had undergone electroconvulsive therapy, three times a week, for one or two months. It had “worked,” Mallory noted, adding, “I’m very grateful.” He said that he still had ECT treatments once a year. “You knew he was telling us something that was really true,” Scott recalled. In the room, there was “a huge surge of sympathy.”

Mallory had frequently referred to electroconvulsive therapy before. But, in those instances, he had included it in a list of therapies that he had considered unsatisfactory in the years between 2001, when he graduated from Duke University, and 2015, when he was given a diagnosis of bipolar II disorder, and found relief through medication. In a talk that Mallory gave at a library in Centennial, Colorado, soon after his book’s publication, he said, “I resorted to hypnotherapy, to electroconvulsive therapy, to ketamine therapy, to retail therapy.”

In that talk, as in dozens of appearances, Mallory adopted a tone of witty self-deprecation. (An audience member asked him if he’d considered a career in standup comedy.) But Mallory’s central theme was that, although depression may have caused him to think poorly of himself, he was in fact a tremendous success. “I’ve thrived on both sides of the Atlantic,” he said. “I’m like Adele!” He’d reached a mass readership with a first novel that, he said, had honored E. M. Forster’s exhortation in “Howards End”: “Only connect.” Mallory described himself as a man “of discipline and compassion.”

Mallory also explained that he had come to accept that he was attractive—or “semi-fit to be viewed by the semi-naked eye.” On a trip to China, he had been told so by his “host family.” At a talk two weeks later, he repeated the anecdote but identified the host family as Japanese.

Such storytelling is hardly scandalous. Mallory was taking his first steps as a public figure. Most people have jazzed up an anecdote, and it is a novelist’s job to manipulate an audience.

But in Colorado Mallory went further. He said that, while he was working at an imprint of the publisher Little, Brown, in London, between 2009 and 2012, “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” a thriller submitted pseudonymously by J. K. Rowling, had been published on his recommendation. He said that he had taught at Oxford University, where he had received a doctorate. “You got a problem with that?” he added, to laughter.

Mallory doesn’t have a doctorate from Oxford. Although he may have read Rowling’s manuscript, it was not published on his recommendation. (And he never “worked with” Tina Fey at Little, Brown, as an official biography of Mallory claimed; a representative for Fey recently said that “he was not an editor in any capacity on Tina’s book.”)

Moreover, according to many people who know him, Mallory has a history of imposture, and of duping people with false stories about disease and death. Long before he wrote fiction professionally, Mallory was experimenting with gothic personal fictions, apparently designed to get attention, bring him advancement, or to explain away failings. “Money and power were important to him,” a former publishing colleague told me. “But so was drama, and securing people’s sympathies.”

In 2001, Jeffrey Archer, the British novelist, began a two-year prison sentence for perjury and perverting the course of justice. Nobody has accused Dan Mallory of breaking the law, or of lying under oath, but his behavior has struck many as calculated and extreme. The former colleague said that Mallory was “clever and careful” in his “ruthless” deceptions: “If there was something that he wanted and there was a way he could position himself to get it, he would. If there was a story to tell that would help him, he would tell it.” This doesn’t look like poetic license, ordinary cockiness, or Nabokovian game-playing; nor is it behavior associated with bipolar II disorder.

In 2016, midway through the auction for “The Woman in the Window,” the author’s real name was revealed to bidders. At that point, most publishing houses dropped out. This move reflected an industry-wide unease with Mallory that never became public, and that did not stand in the way of his enrichment: William Morrow, Mallory’s employer at the time, kept bidding, and bought his book.

Mallory had by then spent a decade in publishing, in London and New York, and many people in the profession had heard rumors about him, including the suggestion that he had left jobs under peculiar circumstances. Several former colleagues of Mallory’s who were interviewed for this article recalled feeling deeply unnerved by him. One, in London, said, “He exploited people who were sweet-natured.” A colleague at William Morrow told friends, “There’s this guy in my office who’s got a ‘Talented Mr. Ripley’ thing going on.” In 2013, Sophie Hannah, the esteemed British crime-fiction writer, whose work includes the sanctioned continuation of Agatha Christie’s series of detective novels, was one of Mallory’s authors; she came to distrust accounts that he had given about being gravely ill.

I recently called a senior editor at a New York publishing company to discuss the experience of working with Mallory. “My God,” the editor said, with a laugh. “I knew I’d get this call. I didn’t know if it would be you or the F.B.I.”

Craig Raine taught English literature at New College, Oxford, for twenty years, until his retirement, in 2010. Every spring, he read applications from students who, having been accepted by Oxford to pursue a doctorate in English, hoped to be attached to New College during their studies. A decade or so ago, Raine read an application from Dan Mallory, which described a proposed thesis on homoeroticism in Patricia Highsmith’s fiction. Unusually, the application included an extended personal statement.

Raine, telling me about the essay during a phone conversation a few months ago, called it an astonishing piece of writing that described almost unbearable family suffering. The essay sought to explain why Mallory’s performance as a master’s student at Oxford, a few years earlier, had been good but not brilliant. Mallory said that his studies had been disrupted by visits to America, to nurse his mother, who had breast cancer. Raine recalled, “He had a brother, who was mentally disadvantaged, and also had cystic fibrosis. The brother died while being nursed by him. And Dan was supporting the family as well. And the mother gradually died.” According to Raine, Mallory had described how his mother rejected the idea of suffering without complaint. Mallory often read aloud to her the passage in “Little Women” in which Beth dies, with meek, tidy stoicism, so that his mother “could sneer at it, basically.”

Raine went on, “At some point, when Dan was nursing her, he got a brain tumor, which he didn’t tell her about, because he thought it would be upsetting to her. And, evidently, that sort of cleared up. And then she died. The brother had already died.”

Raine admired the essay because it “knew it was moving but didn’t exaggerate—it was written calmly.” Raine is the longtime editor of Areté, a literary magazine, and he not only helped Mallory secure a place at New College; he invited him to expand the essay for publication. “He worked at it for a couple of months,” Raine said. “Then he said that, after all, he didn’t think he could do it.” Mallory explained that his mother, a private person, might have preferred that he not publish. Instead, he reviewed a collection of essays by the poet Geoffrey Hill.

Pamela Mallory, Dan’s mother, does seem to be a private person: her Instagram account is locked. When I briefly met her, some weeks after I’d spoken to Raine, she declined to be interviewed. She lives for at least part of the year in a large house in Amagansett, near the Devon Yacht Club, where a celebratory lunch was held for Mallory last year. (On Instagram, he once posted a video clip of the club’s exterior, captioned, “The first rule of yacht club is: you do not talk about yacht club.”) In 2013, at a country club in Charlotte, North Carolina, Pamela Mallory attended the wedding reception of her younger son, John, who goes by Jake, and who was then working at Wells Fargo. At the wedding, she and Dan danced. This year, Pamela and other family members were photographed at a talk that Dan gave at Queens University of Charlotte. Dan has described travelling with his mother on a publicity trip to New Zealand. “Only one of us will make it back alive,” he joked to a reporter. “She’s quite spirited.”

I told Raine that Mallory’s mother was not dead. There was a pause, and then he said, “If she’s alive, he lied.” Raine underscored that he had taken Mallory’s essay to be factual. He asked me, “Is the father alive? In the account I read, I’m almost a hundred per cent certain that the father is dead.” The senior John Mallory, once an executive at the Bank of America in Charlotte, also attended the event at Queens University. He and Pamela have been married for more than forty years.

Dan Mallory, who turned down requests to be interviewed for this article, was born in 1979, into a family that he has called “very, very Waspy,” even though his parents both had a Catholic education and he has described himself as having been a “precocious Catholic” in childhood. His maternal grandfather, John Barton Poor, was the chairman and chief executive of R.K.O. General, which owned TV and radio stations. Mallory was perhaps referring to Poor when, as an undergraduate at Duke, he wrote in a student paper that, at the age of nine, he had “slammed the keyboard cover of my grandfather’s Steinway onto my exposed penis.” The article continued, “As I beheld the flushed member pinned against the ivories like the snakeling in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, I immediately feared my urinating days were over.”

Dan and Jake Mallory have two sisters, Hope and Elizabeth. When Dan was nine or so, the family moved from Garden City, on Long Island, to Virginia, and then to Charlotte, where he attended Charlotte Latin, a private school. The family spent summers in Amagansett. In interviews, Mallory has sometimes joked that he was unpopular as a teen-ager, but Matt Cloud, a Charlotte Latin classmate, recently told me, by e-mail, that “Dan’s the best,” and was “a stellar performer” in a school production of “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

In 1999, at the end of Mallory’s sophomore year in college, he published an article in the Duke Chronicle which purported to describe events that had occurred a few years earlier, when he was seventeen; he wrote that he was then living in a single-parent household. The piece, titled “Take Full Advantage of Suffering,” began:

From a dim corner of her hospital room I surveyed the patient, who appeared, tucked primly under the crisp sheets, not so much recouping from surgery as steeped in a late-evening reverie. Her blank face registered none of the pristine grimness which so often pervades medical environs; hopeful hints of rose could be discerned in her pale skin; and with each gentle inhalation, her chest lifted slowly but reassuringly heavenward. Mine, by contrast, palpitated so furiously that I braced myself for cardiac arrest. I do not know whether she spied me as I gazed downward, contemplating the unjustly colloquial sound of “lumpectomy,” or if some primally maternal instinct alerted her to my presence, but in a coarse, ragged voice, she breathed my name: “Dan.”

His mother, he wrote, urged him “to write to your colleges and tell them your mother has cancer.” Mallory said that he complied, adding, “I hardly feel I capitalized on tragedy—rather, I merely squeezed lemonade from the proverbial lemons.” In college applications, he noted, “I lamented, in the sweeping, tragic prose of a Brontë sister, the unsettling darkness of the master bedroom, where my mother, reeling from bombardments of chemotherapy, lay for days huddled in a fetal position.”

This strategy apparently failed with Princeton. In the article, Mallory recalled writing to Fred Hargadon, then Princeton’s dean of admissions. “You heartless bastard,” the letter supposedly began. “What kind of latter-day Stalin refuses admission to someone in my plight? Not that I ever seriously considered gracing your godforsaken institution with my presence—you should be so lucky—but I’m nonetheless relieved to know that I won’t be attending a university whose administrators opt to ignore oncological afflictions; perhaps if I’d followed the example of your prized student Lyle Menendez and killed my mother, things would have turned out differently.”

Mallory ended his article with an exhortation to his readers: “Make suffering worth it. When the silver lining proves elusive, when the situation cannot be helped, nothing empowers so much as working for one’s own advantage.”

At some point in Mallory’s teen years, I learned, his mother did have cancer. But the essay feels like a blueprint for the manipulations later exerted on Craig Raine and others: inspiring pity and furthering ambition while holding a pose of insouciance.

In the summer of 1999, Mallory interned at New Line Cinema, in New York. He later claimed, in the Duke Chronicle, that he “whiled away” the summer “polishing” the horror film “Final Destination,” directed by James Wong. “We need a young person like you to sex it up,” Mallory recalled being told. Wong told me that Mallory did not work on the script.

Mallory spent his junior year abroad, at Oxford, and the experience “changed my attitude toward life,” he told Duke Today in 2001. “I discovered British youth culture, went out clubbing. . . . I learned it was O.K. to have fun.” While there, he published a dispatch, in the Duke student publication TowerView, describing an encounter with a would-be mugger, who asked him, “Want me to shoot your motherfucking mouth off?” Mallory responded with witty aplomb, and the mugger, cowed, scuttled “down some anonymous alley to reflect on why it is Bad To Threaten Other People, especially pushy Americans who doubt he has a gun.”

Before Oxford, Mallory had been self-contained—Jeffery West, who taught Mallory in a Duke acting class, and cast him in a production of Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” said that he was then a “gawky, lanky kind of boy, an Other.” After Oxford, Mallory was bolder. Mary Carmichael, a Duke classmate and his editor at TowerView, told me that Mallory was now likely to sweep into a room. An article in the Chronicle proposed that “being center stage is a joy for Mallory.” He directed plays, which were well received, and he became a film critic for the Chronicle. He ruled that Matt Damon had been “miserably graceless” as the star of “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

In 2001, Mallory was the student speaker at Duke’s commencement. As in his cancer article, he made a debater’s case for temerity, in part by deploying temerity. He called himself a “novelist,” and said that he had missed out on a Rhodes Scholarship only because he’d been too cutely candid in an interview: when asked what made him laugh, he’d said, “My dog,” rather than something rarefied. He described talking his way into the thesis program of Duke’s English Department, despite not having done the qualifying work. He compared his stubborn “attitude” on this matter to struggles over civil rights. In college, he said, “I had honed my personality to a fine lance, and could deploy my character as I did my intellect.”

“The Woman in the Window” is narrated by Anna Fox, an agoraphobic middle-aged woman, living alone in a Harlem brownstone, who believes that she has witnessed a violent act occurring in a neighbor’s living room. Early in 2018, when Mallory began promoting the novel, he sometimes said that he, too, had “suffered from” agoraphobia. He later said that he had never had the condition.

In an interview last January, on “Thrill Seekers,” an online radio show, the writer Alex Dolan asked Mallory about the novel’s Harlem setting. Mallory said that, when describing Anna’s house, he had kept in mind the uptown home of a family friend, with whom he had stayed when he interned in New York. After a rare hesitation, Mallory shared an anecdote: he said that he’d once accidentally locked himself in the house’s ground-floor bathroom. When he was eventually rescued, by his host, he had been trapped “for twenty-two hours and ten minutes.”

“Wow!” Dolan said.

Mallory said, “So perhaps that contributed to my fascination with agoraphobia.”

Dolan asked, “You had the discipline to, say, not kick the door down?”

Mallory, committed to twenty-two hours and ten minutes, said that he had torn a brass towel ring off the wall, straightened it into a pipe, “and sort of hacked away at the area right above the doorknob.” He continued, “I did eventually bore my way through it, but by that point my fingers were bloody, I was screaming obscenities. This is the point—of course—at which the father of the house walked in!” After Dolan asked him if he’d resorted to eating toothpaste, Mallory steered the conversation to Hitchcock.

In subsequent interviews, Mallory does not seem to have brought up this bathroom again. But the exchange gives a glimpse of the temptations and risks of hyperbole: how, under even slight pressure, an exaggeration can become further exaggerated. For a speaker more invested in advantage than in accuracy, such fabulation could be exhilarating—and might even lead to the dispatch, by disease, of a family member. I was recently told about two former publishing colleagues of Mallory’s who called him after he didn’t show up for a meeting. Mallory said that he was at home, taking care of someone’s dog. The meeting continued, as a conference call. Mallory now and then shouted, “No! Get down!” After hanging up, the two colleagues looked at each other. “There’s no dog, right?” “No.”

Between 2002 and 2004, Mallory studied for a master’s degree at Oxford. He took courses on twentieth-century literature and wrote a thesis on detective fiction. Professor John Kelly, a Yeats scholar who taught him, told me, “He wrote very challenging and creative essays. I said to him once, ‘It can be a little florid.’ I always think that’s a wonderful fault, if it is a fault—constantly looking for not just the mot juste, as it were, but to give a spin on the mot juste. And his e-mails to me were like that, too; they were always very amusing.” Chris Parris-Lamb, a New York literary agent, similarly impressed by Mallory’s e-mails, once suggested that he write a collection of humorous essays, in the mode of David Sedaris.

As Kelly recalled, by the end of the two-year course Mallory was making frequent trips to America, apparently to address serious medical issues. Kelly didn’t know the details of Mallory’s illness. “We talked in general terms,” Kelly said. “I didn’t ever press him.” Kelly also understood that Mallory’s mother had a life-threatening illness. “Alas, she did die,” Kelly told me, adding that he respected Mallory’s “forbearance.”

Mallory received his master’s in 2004 and moved to New York. He applied to be an assistant to Linda Marrow, the editorial director of Ballantine, an imprint of Random House known for commercial fiction. At his interview, he said that he had a love of popular women’s fiction, which derived from his having read it with his mother when she was gravely ill with cancer. He later said that he had once had brain cancer himself.

Mallory was given the job. He impressed Tess Gerritsen and others with his writing; he contributed a smart afterword to a reprint of “From Doon with Death,” Ruth Rendell’s first novel. Adam Korn, then a Random House assistant, who saw a lot of Mallory socially, told me that Mallory was “a good guy, lovely to talk to, very informed,” and already “serious about being a writer.” Another colleague recalled that Mallory immediately “gave off a vibe of ‘I’m too good for this.’ ” Ballantine’s books were too down-market; Mallory’s role was too administrative.

As if impatient for advancement, Mallory often used his boss’s office late at night, and worked on her computer. On a few occasions in 2007, after Mallory had announced that he would soon be leaving the company to take up doctoral studies at Oxford, people found plastic cups, filled with urine, in and near Linda Marrow’s office. These registered as messages of disdain, or as territorial marking. Mallory was suspected of responsibility but was not challenged. No similar cups were found after he quit. (Mallory, through a spokesperson, said, “I was not responsible for this.”)

A few months later, after Mallory had moved to Oxford, his former employers noticed unexplained spending, at Amazon.co.uk, on a corporate American Express card. When confronted, Mallory acknowledged that he had used the card, but insisted that it was in error. He added that he was experiencing a recurrence of cancer.

In an interview with the Duke alumni magazine last spring, Mallory said that, as someone who was “very rules-conscious,” he found Patricia Highsmith’s representation of Tom Ripley, across five novels, to be “thrilling and disturbing in equal measure.” He went on, “When you read a Sherlock Holmes story, you know that, by the end, the innocent will be redeemed or rewarded, the guilty will be punished, and justice will be upheld or restored. Highsmith subverts all that. Through some alchemy, she persuades us to root for sociopaths.”

When, in a scene partway through “The Woman in the Window,” Anna Fox thinks about another character, “He could kiss me. He could kill me,” Mallory is alluding to a pivotal moment in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” On the Italian Riviera, Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf, a dazzling friend who is tiring of Ripley’s company, hire a motorboat and head out to sea. In the boat, Ripley considers that he “could have hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard, and nobody could have seen him.” He then beats him to death with an oar.

Back at Oxford, Mallory has said, he “anointed” Highsmith as the primary subject of his dissertation. But he doesn’t seem to have published any scholarly articles on Highsmith, and it’s not clear how much of a thesis he wrote. An Oxford arts doctorate generally takes at least three or four years; in 2009, midway through his second year, Mallory was signing e-mails, untruthfully, “Dr. Daniel Mallory.” Oxford recently confirmed to me that Mallory never completed the degree.

At Oxford, Mallory became a student-welfare officer. In a guide for New College students, he introduced himself with brio, and invited students to approach him with any issues, “even if it’s on Eurovision night.” According to Tess Gerritsen, who had drinks with him and others in Oxford one night, Mallory mentioned that he was “working on a mystery novel,” which “might have been set in Oxford, the world of the dons.”

Mallory sometimes saw John Kelly, his former professor, for drinks or dinner. “They were very, very merry occasions,” Kelly told me. He recalled that Mallory once declined an invitation to a party, saying that he would be tied up in London, supporting a cancer-related organization. Kelly was struck by Mallory’s public-spiritedness, and by his modesty. “I would have never found out about it, except he wrote to me to say, ‘I’d love to be there, but it’s going to be a long day in London.’ ” (When Kelly learned that I had some doubts about Mallory’s accounts of cancer, he said that he was “astonished.”)

At one point, Kelly noticed that Mallory no longer responded to notes sent to him through Oxford’s internal mail system: he had left the university. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, his doctoral supervisor, recently said of Mallory, “I’m very sorry that illness interrupted his studies.” Mallory had begun looking for work in London publishing, describing himself as a former editor at Ballantine, not as an assistant. He claimed that he had two Ph.D.s: his Highsmith-related dissertation, from Oxford, and one from the psychology department of an American university, for research into Munchausen syndrome. There’s no evidence that Mallory ever undertook such research. A former colleague recalls Mallory referring to himself as a “double-doctor.”

Toward the end of 2009, he was hired as a mid-level editor at Sphere, a commercial imprint of Little, Brown. In New York, news of this event caused puzzlement: an editor then at Ballantine recalled feeling that Mallory “hadn’t done enough” to earn such a position.

One of Mallory’s London colleagues to whom I spoke at length described publishing as “a soft industry—and much more so in London than in New York.” Hiring standards in London have improved in the past decade, this colleague said, but at the time of Mallory’s hiring “it was much more a case of ‘I like the cut of your jib, you can have a job,’ rather than ‘Have you actually got a Ph.D. from Oxford, and were you an editor at Ballantine?’ ”

Mallory was amusing, well read, and ebullient, and could make a memorable first impression, over lunch, on literary agents and authors. He tended to speak almost without pause. He’d begin with rapturous flattery—he told Louise Penny, the Canadian mystery writer, that he’d read her manuscript three times, once “just for fun”—and then shift to self-regard. He wittily skewered acquaintances and seemed always conscious of his physical allure. He’d say, in passing, that he’d modelled for Guess jeans—“runway only”—or that he’d appeared on the cover of Russian Vogue. He mentioned a friendship with Ricky Martin.

This display was at times professionally effective. In a blog post written after signing with Little, Brown, Penny excitedly described Mallory as a former “Oxford professor of literature.” Referring to the bond between author and editor, she added, “It is such an intimate relationship, there needs to be trust.”

Others found his behavior off-putting; it seemed unsuited to building long-term professional relationships. The London colleague said, “He was so full-on. I thought, My God, what’s going on? It was performative and calculating.” A Little, Brown colleague, who was initially impressed by Mallory, said, “He was not modest, ever.” The colleague noted that many editors got into trouble by disregarding sales and focussing only on books that they loved, adding, “That certainly never happened with him.” Little, Brown authors were often “seduced by Dan” at first but then “became disenchanted” when he was “late with his edits or got someone else to do them.”

Mallory, who had just turned thirty, told colleagues that he was impatient to rise. He found friends in the company’s higher ranks. Having acquired a princeling status, he used it to denigrate colleagues. The London colleague said that Mallory would tell his superiors, “This is a bunch of dullards working for you.” Another colleague said of Mallory, “When he likes you, it’s like the sun shining on you.” But Mallory’s contempt for perceived enemies was disconcertingly sharp. “You don’t want to get on the wrong side of that,” the colleague recalled thinking.

Mallory moved into an apartment in Shoreditch, in East London. He wasn’t seen at publishing parties, and one colleague wondered if his extroversion at lunch meetings served “to disguise crippling shyness” and habits of solitude. On his book tour, Mallory has said that depression “blighted, blotted, and blackened” his adult life. A former colleague of his told me that Mallory seemed to be driven by fears of no longer being seen as a “golden boy.”

In the summer of 2010, Mallory told Little, Brown about a job offer from a London competitor. He was promised a raise and a promotion. A press release announcing Mallory’s elevation described him as “entrepreneurial and a true team player.”

By then, Mallory had made it widely known to co-workers that he had an inoperable brain tumor. He’d survived earlier bouts with cancer, but now a doctor had told him that a tumor would kill him by the age of forty. He seemed to be saying that cancer—already identified and unequivocally fatal—would allow him to live for almost another decade. The claim sounds more like a goblin’s curse than like a prognosis, but Mallory was persuasive; the colleague who was initially supportive of him recently said, with a shake of the head, “Yes, I believed that.”

Some co-workers wept after hearing the news. Mallory told people that he was seeking experimental treatments. He took time off. In Little, Brown’s open-plan office, helium-filled “Get Well” balloons swayed over Mallory’s desk. For a while, he wore a baseball cap, even indoors, which was thought to hide hair loss from chemotherapy. He explained that he hadn’t yet told his parents about his diagnosis, as they were aloof and unaffectionate. Before the office closed for Christmas in 2011, Mallory said that, as his parents had no interest in seeing him, he would instead make an exploratory visit to the facilities of Dignitas, the assisted-death nonprofit based in Switzerland. A Dignitas death occurs in a small house next to a machine-parts factory; there’s no tradition of showing this space to possible future patients. Mallory said that he had found his visit peaceful.

Sources told me that, a few months later, Ursula Mackenzie, then Little, Brown’s C.E.O., attended a dinner where she sat next to the C.E.O. of the publishing house whose job offer had led to Mallory’s promotion. The rival C.E.O. told Mackenzie that there had been no such offer. (Mackenzie declined to comment. The rival C.E.O. did not reply to requests for comment.) When challenged at Little, Brown, Mallory claimed that the rival C.E.O. was lying, in reprisal for Mallory’s having once rejected a sexual proposition.

In August, 2012, Mallory left Little, Brown. The terms of his departure are covered by a nondisclosure agreement. But it’s clear that Little, Brown did not find Mallory’s response about the job offer convincing. “And, once that fell away, then you obviously think, Is he really ill?” the once supportive colleague said. Everything now looked doubtful, “even to the extent of ‘Does his family exist?’ and ‘Is he even called Dan Mallory?’ ”

Mallory was not fired. This fact points to the strength of employee protections in the U.K.—it’s hard to prove the absence of a job offer—but also, perhaps, to a sense of embarrassment and dread. The prospect of Mallory’s public antagonism was evidently alarming: Little, Brown was conscious of the risks of “a fantasist walking around telling lies,” an employee at the company told me. Another source made a joking reference to “The Talented Mr. Ripley”: “He could come at me with an axe. Or an oar.”

In protecting his career, Mallory held the advantage of his own failings: Little, Brown’s reputation would have been harmed by the knowledge that it had hired, and then promoted, a habitual liar. When Mallory left, many of his colleagues were unaware of any unpleasantness. There was even a small, awkward dinner in his honor.

Two weeks before Mallory left Little, Brown, it was announced that he had accepted a job in New York, as an executive editor at William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. Publishing professionals estimate that his starting salary was at least two hundred thousand dollars a year. That fall, he moved into an apartment in a sixty-floor tower, with a pool, in midtown, and into an office at Morrow, on Fifty-third Street.

He had been hired by Liate Stehlik, Morrow’s widely admired publisher. It’s not clear if Stehlik heard rumors about Mallory’s unreliability—or, to use the words of a former Morrow colleague, the fact that “London had ended in some sort of ball of flame.” Stehlik did not reply to requests for comment for this article.

Whereas in London Mallory had sometimes seemed like a British satire of American bluster, in New York he came off as British. He spoke with an English accent and said “brilliant,” “bloody,” and “Where’s the loo?”—as one colleague put it, he was “a grown man walking around with a fake accent that everyone knows is fake.” The habit lasted for years, and one can find a postman, not a mailman, in “The Woman in the Window.”

Some book editors immerse themselves in text; others focus on making deals. Mallory was firmly of the latter type, and specialized in acquiring established authors who had an international reach. Before the end of 2012, he had signed Wilbur Smith—once a giant in popular historical fiction (and now, as Mallory put it in an e-mail to friends, “approximately four centuries old”).

At some point that winter, Mallory stopped coming into the office. This mystified colleagues, who were given no explanation.

On February 12, 2013, some people in London who knew Mallory professionally received a group e-mail from Jake Mallory, Dan’s brother, whom they’d never met. Writing from a Gmail address, Jake said that Dan would be going to the hospital the next day, for the removal of a tumor. He’d be having “complicated surgery with several high risk factors, including the possibility of paralysis and/or the loss of function below the waist.” But, Jake went on, “Dan has been through worse and has pointed out that if he could make it through Love Actually alive, this surgery holds no terrors.” Dan would eat “an early dinner of sashimi and will then read a book about dogs until bedtime,” Jake wrote, adding, “Dan was treated terribly by people throughout his childhood and teenage years and into his twenties, which left him a very deeply lonely person, so he does not like/trust many people. Please keep him in your thoughts.”

That e-mail appears to have been addressed exclusively to contacts in the U.K. The next day, Jake sent an e-mail to acquaintances of Dan’s in the New York publishing world. It noted that Dan would soon be undergoing surgery to address “a tumor in his spine,” adding, “This isn’t the first (or even second) time that Dan has had to undergo this sort of treatment, so he knows the drill, although it’s still an unpleasant and frightening proposition. He says that he is looking forward to being fitted with a spinal-fluid drain and that this will render him half-man, half-machine.”

Recipients wrote back in distress. An editor at a rival publishing house told me, “I totally fell for it. After all, who would fabricate such a story? I sent books and sympathies.” In time, Jake’s exchanges with this editor became “quippy and upbeat.” Another correspondent told Jake that his writing was as droll as Dan’s.

Jake’s styling of “e.mail” was unusual. The next week, Dan wrote to Chris Parris-Lamb, the agent. He began, “Wanted to thank you for your very lovely e.mail to my brother.”

Given the idiosyncrasy of “e.mail”—and given Dan’s taste for crafted zingers, and his history of fabrication—it’s now easy to suppose, as one recipient put it, that “something crazy was going on,” and that “Jake” was Dan. Like Tom Ripley writing letters that were taken as the work of the murdered Dickie Greenleaf, Dan was apparently communicating with friends in a fictional voice. (Online impersonations also figure in the plot of “The Woman in the Window.”)

Jake Mallory is thirty-five. He’s a little shorter than Dan, and doesn’t have the same lacrosse-player combination of strong chin and floppy hair. The week of Dan’s alleged surgery, while Jake was supposedly by his side in New York, Jake’s fiancée posted on Facebook a professional “pre-wedding” photograph of the couple. In it, she and Jake, who got married that summer, look happy and hopeful. Jake Mallory did not respond to requests for comment. Dan Mallory, through the spokesperson, said that he was “not the author of the e-mails” sent by “Jake.”

On February 14, 2013, a “Jake” message to New York contacts described overnight surgery—uncommon timing for a scheduled procedure—in an unspecified hospital. “My brother’s 7-hour surgery ended early this morning,” the e-mail began. “He experienced significant blood loss—more so than is common during spinal surgeries, so it required two transfusions. However, the tumor appears to have been completely removed. His very first words upon waking up were ‘I need vodka.’ ” I was told that a recipient sent vodka to Dan’s apartment, and was thanked by “Jake,” who reported that his brother roused himself just long enough to say that the sender was a goddess.

The ventriloquism is halfhearted. Dan’s own voice keeps intruding, and the hurried sequence of events suggests anxiety about getting the patient home, and returning him to a sparer, mythic narrative of endurance and wit. While in a New York hospital, Dan was a dot on the map, exposed to visitors. Reports from the ward would require the clutter of realist fiction: medical devices, doctors with names.

“Jake” continued, “He has been fitted with a ‘lumbar drain’ in his back to drain his spinal fluid. The pain is apparently quite severe, but he is on medicine.” (A Britishism.) “He is not in great shape but did manage to ask if he could keep the tumor as a pet. He will most likely be going home today.”

On February 15th, “Jake” wrote an e-mail to Parris-Lamb: “We’re anticipating a week or so of concentrated rest, the only trick will be finding enough reading material to keep his brain occupied.” A week later, Dan Mallory, writing from his own e-mail address, sent Parris-Lamb the note thanking him for the “very lovely e.mail”—which, he said, had “warmed my black heart.” Mallory went on, “Today I start weaning myself—I’ll just let that clause stand on its own for a minute; are you gagging yet?—off my sweet sweet Vicodin, so am at last fit to correspond. Feeling quite spry; the wound is healing nicely, and I’m no longer wobbly on my feet. Not when sober, at any rate.”

Mallory suggested meeting the agent for drinks, or dinner, a week or two later. Writing to another contact, he described an impending trip to London, for which he was packing little more than “a motheaten jumper.” On February 26th, twelve days after seven-hour spinal surgery, Mallory wrote to Parris-Lamb to say that he was in Nashville, for work.

Three days later, “Jake” wrote another group e-mail, saying that “an allergic reaction to a new pain killer” had caused Dan “to go into shock and cardiac arrest.” He went on, “He was taken to the hospital on time and treated immediately and is out of intensive care (still on a respirator and under sedation). While this setback is not welcome it is not permanent either, and at least Dan can now say he has had two lucky escapes in the space of two months.” “Jake” went on, “The worst is past and we are hoping he can go back to his apartment this weekend and then pick up where he left off. This would daunt a mere mortal but not my brother.”

At the end of March, late at night, “Jake” wrote again to London contacts. Dan was “in decent physical shape,” but was upset about the “painful upheaval” of the previous year—and about an e-mail, written by an unnamed Little, Brown executive, that seemed to “poke fun at him.” Dan felt “utterly let down” and was “withdrawing into himself like a turtle.”

“Jake” noted that Dan had been “working with abused children and infants at the hospital where he was treated.” The previous week, “Jake” had seen Dan “talking to a little girl whose arm had been broken for her,” he wrote, adding, “My brother’s arm was broken for him when he was a baby.” This phrasing seems to stop just short of alleging parental abuse. (The theme of childhood victimization, sometimes an element of “Jake” e-mails sent to London associates, did not appear in the New York e-mails.) “Jake” went on, “He wrote the little girl a story about a hedgehog in his nicest handwriting to show her how she could rebound from a bad experience. I want for him to do the same, although I understand that he is tired of having to rebound from things.”

The same night the “Jake” e-mail was sent, an ex-colleague of Mallory’s at Little, Brown received an anonymous e-mail calling her one of the “nastiest c*nts in publishing.” Mallory was asked about the e-mail, and was told that Little, Brown would contact law enforcement if anything similar happened again. It didn’t. (Through the spokesperson, Mallory said that he did not write the message and “does not recall being warned” about it.) In “The Woman in the Window,” Anna Fox seeks advice about a threatening anonymous e-mail, and is told that “there’s no way to trace a Gmail account.”

A week later, in an apparent attempt at a reset, Dan Mallory wrote a breezy group e-mail under his own name. The cancer surgery, he said, had been “a total success.” A metal contraption was attached to his spine, so he was now “half-man, half-machine.” He noted that he’d just seen “Matilda” with his parents.

When Mallory returned to work that spring, after several weeks, nothing was said. A former co-worker at Morrow, who admires him and still has only the vaguest sense of a health issue, told me that Mallory “seemed the same as before.” He hadn’t lost any weight or hair.

After his return, Mallory came to work on a highly irregular schedule. Unlike other editors, he rarely attended Wednesday-afternoon editorial meetings. At one point, another co-worker began keeping a log of Mallory’s absences.

Mallory bought a one-bedroom apartment in Chelsea, for six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. He decorated it with images and models of dogs, a framed sign reading “Amagansett,” and a reproduction of a seventeenth-century engraving of New College, Oxford.

Morrow executives either believed that Mallory’s cancer story was real or decided to live with the fact that it was not. Explaining Morrow’s accommodation of its employee, a former colleague said that Mallory’s focus on international deals protected him, adding, “Nothing’s more important than global authors.” The co-worker went on, “There’s a horror movie where all the teachers in a school have been infected by an alien parasite. The kids realize it, and of course nobody believes them. That’s what it felt like.” The co-worker described Mallory’s “gaslighting, lying, and manipulation” in the workplace as cruel, but noted, “People don’t care, if it’s not sexual harassment.” A Morrow spokesperson released a statement: “We don’t comment on the personal lives of our employees or authors. Professionally, Dan was a highly valued editor, and the publication of ‘The Woman in the Window’—a #1 New York Times bestseller out of the gate, and the bestselling debut novel of 2018—speaks for itself.”

An acquaintance of Mallory’s recently said that “there’s not a lot of confrontation” in publishing. “It’s a business based on hope. You never know what’s going to work.” In the industry, rumors about the “Jake” e-mails were contained—perhaps by discretion or out of people’s embarrassment about having been taken in.

I recently spoke with Victoria Sanders, an agent who represents Karin Slaughter, the thriller writer. In 2015, Slaughter signed a three-book deal, for more than ten million dollars, involving Mallory and a British counterpart. Sanders viewed Mallory as Slaughter’s “quarterback,” adding, “His level of engagement made him really quite extraordinary.”

The editor at a rival publishing house who’d had “quippy” exchanges with the Jake persona said of the episode, “Even now it seems a bizarre, eccentric game, but not threatening.” “Jake” hadn’t asked for cash, so it wasn’t an “injurious scam.” The editor said, “This seemed almost performance art.” Chris Parris-Lamb, however, was affronted, in part because someone close to him had recently died from cancer.

The acquaintance who described an industry “based on hope” didn’t see Mallory for a few years, then made plans to meet him for a work-related drink, in Manhattan. Mallory said that he was now well, except for an eye problem. His eye began to twitch. Mallory’s companion asked after Jake. “Oh, he’s dead,” Mallory said. “Yes, he committed suicide.” The acquaintance recalled to me that, at that moment, “I just knew I was never going to correspond or deal with him again.”

In 2013, Sophie Hannah met Mallory for the first time, over lunch in New York. They discussed plans, already set in motion in London, for Hannah to write the first official Agatha Christie continuation novel. William Morrow would publish it in the U.S. They also discussed Hannah’s non-Christie fiction, which later also came to Morrow. Hannah, who lives in Cambridge, recently said by phone that they quickly became friends. Mallory “renewed my creative energy,” she said. He had a knack for “giving feedback in the form of praise for exactly the things I’m proud of.”

Hannah seems to have found, in Mallory, a remarkable source of material. In 2015, she completed her second Hercule Poirot novel, “Closed Casket.” Poirot is a guest at an Irish country house, and meets Joseph Scotcher, a character whose role can’t be described without spoilers. Scotcher is a charming young flatterer who has told everyone that he is terminally ill, with kidney disease. During Poirot’s visit, Scotcher is murdered, and an autopsy reveals that his kidneys were healthy.

After the murder, Randall Kimpton, an American doctor who is also staying in the house, tells Poirot that he’d become friendly with Scotcher years earlier, at Oxford; he had begun to doubt Scotcher’s dire prognosis, while thinking that “surely no one would tell a lie of such enormity.” Kimpton tells Poirot that he was once approached by someone claiming to be Scotcher’s brother. This brother, who looked identical to Scotcher except for darker skin and a wild beard, had confirmed the kidney disease, and Kimpton had decided “no man of honor would agree to tell a stranger that his brother was dying if it were not so.” But the supposed brother had then accidentally revealed himself to be Scotcher, wearing a beard glued to his face.

A seductive man lies about a fatal disease, then defends the lie by pretending to be his brother. The brother’s name is Blake. When I asked Hannah if the plot was inspired by real events, she was evasive, and more than once she said, “I really like Dan, and he’s only ever been good to me.” She also noted that, before starting to write “Closed Casket,” she described its plot to Mallory: “He said, ‘Yes, that sounds amazing!’ ” Hannah, then, can’t be accused of discourtesy.

But she acknowledged that there were “obvious parallels” between “Closed Casket” and “rumors that circulated” about Mallory. She also admitted that the character of Kimpton, the American doctor, owes something to her former editor. I had noticed that Kimpton speaks with an affected English accent and—in what works as a fine portrait of Mallory, mid-flow—has eyes that “seemed to flare and subside as his lips moved.” The passage continues, “These wide-eyed flares were only seconds apart, and appeared to want to convey enthusiastic emphasis. One was left with the impression that every third or fourth word he uttered was a source of delight to him.” (Chris Parris-Lamb, shown these sentences, said, “My God! That’s so good.”) While Hannah was writing “Closed Casket,” her private working title for the novel was “You’re So Vain, You Probably Think This Poirot’s About You.”

A publishing employee in New York told me that, in 2013, Hannah had become suspicious that Mallory wasn’t telling the truth when he spoke of making a trip to the U.K. for cancer treatment, and had hired a detective to investigate. This suggestion seemed to be supported by an account, on Hannah’s blog, of hiring a private detective that summer. Hannah wrote that she had called him to describe a “weird conundrum.” Later, during a vacation with her husband in Agatha Christie’s country house, in Devon, she called to check on the detective’s progress; he told her that “there was a rumor going round that X is the case.”

“You’re supposed to be finding out if X is true,” Hannah told the detective.

“I’m not sure how we could really do that,” he replied. “Not without hacking e-mail accounts and things like that—and that’s illegal.”

Asked about the blog post, Hannah told me that she had thought of hiring a detective to check on Mallory, and had discussed the idea with friends, but hadn’t followed through. She had, however, hired a detective to investigate a graffiti problem in Cambridge. I said that I found this hard to believe. She went on to say that she had forgotten the detective’s name, she had deleted all her old e-mails, and she didn’t want to bother her husband and ask him to confirm the graffiti story. All this encouraged the thought that the novelist now writing as Agatha Christie had hired a detective to investigate her editor, whom she suspected of lying about a fatal disease.

Hannah—who, according to several people who know her, has a great appetite for discussing Mallory at parties—also seems to have made fictional use of him in her non-Poirot writing. “The Warning,” a short story about psychopathic manipulations, includes an extraordinarily charming man, Tom Rigbey, who loves bull terriers. Hannah recently co-wrote a musical mystery, “The Generalist”; its plot features a successful romance novelist who feels that her publisher has become neglectful, after writing a best-seller of his own.

An American woman in mid-career, a psychologist with a Ph.D. and professional experience of psychopathy, is trapped in her large home by agoraphobia. She has been there for about a year, after a personal trauma. If she tries to go outside, the world spins. She drinks too much, and recklessly combines alcohol and anti-anxiety medication. Police officers distrust her judgment. Online, she plays chess and contributes to a forum for stress-sufferers, a place where danger lies.

This is the setup for “Copycat,” a spirited 1995 thriller, set in San Francisco, starring Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter. It also describes “The Woman in the Window.” In “Copycat,” the psychologist’s forum log-in is She Doc. In “Window,” it’s THEDOCTORISIN.

“The Woman in the Window” acknowledges a debt to the film “Rear Window,” by making Anna Fox a fan of noir movies and Hitchcock. And Mallory has publicly referred a few times to “The Girl on the Train,” a well-told story about a boozily unreliable witness, a woman much like Mallory’s boozily unreliable witness. But he hasn’t acknowledged “Copycat”—unless one decides that when, in “The Woman in the Window,” a photograph with a time stamp in its corner downloads from the Internet at a suspenseful, dial-up speed, it is an homage to the same scene in “Copycat,” rather than an indictment of Internet service providers in Manhattan.

When I e-mailed Jon Amiel, the director of “Copycat,” about parallels between the two narratives, he replied, “Wow.” Later, on the phone, he proposed that the debt was probably “not actionable, but certainly worth noting, and one would have hoped that the author might have noted it himself.”

The official origin myth of “The Woman in the Window” feels underwritten. In the summer of 2015, Mallory has said, he was at home for some weeks, adjusting to a new medication. He rewatched “Rear Window,” and noticed a neighbor in the apartment across the street. “How funny,” he said to himself. “Voyeurism dies hard!” A story suggested itself. Mallory is more cogent when reflecting on his shrewdness regarding the marketplace—when he talks about his novel in the voice of a startup C.E.O. pitching for funds. “I bring to ‘The Woman in the Window’ more than thirty years of experience in the genre,” he told a crime-fiction blogger last winter. He explained to a podcast host that, before “Gone Girl,” there had been “no branding” for psychological suspense; afterward, there was vast commercial opportunity. Mallory has said that he favored the pseudonym A. J. Finn in part for its legibility on a small screen, “at reduced pixelation.” He came up with the name Anna Fox after looking for something that was easy to pronounce in many languages.

Mallory has described writing a seventy-five-hundred-word outline and showing it to Jennifer Joel, a literary agent at I.C.M., who is a friend of his; she encouraged him to continue. He has said that he then worked for a year, sustained by Adderall, Coca-Cola, and electronic music. Mallory told the Times that he wrote at night and on the weekends. Former colleagues who had taken note of his office absences were skeptical of this claim.

Paula Hawkins’s “The Girl on the Train” was published in January, 2015. By the summer of 2016, it had sold 4.25 million copies in the U.S. Early that September, just before the release of the film adaptation, it was No. 1 on the Times paperback best-seller list. On September 22nd and 23rd, a PDF of “The Woman in the Window,” by A. J. Finn, was e-mailed to editors in New York and London. Mallory has said that he adopted a pseudonym because he wanted publishers to assess the manuscript without “taking into account my standing in the industry.” This isn’t true, as Mallory has himself acknowledged in some interviews: Jennifer Joel told editors that the author worked at a senior level in publishing.

The editors started reading: “Her husband’s almost home. He’ll catch her this time. There isn’t a scrap of curtain, not a blade of blind, in number 212—the rust-red townhome that once housed the newlywed Motts, until recently, until they un-wed.”

The story feels transposed to New York from a more tranquil place, like North Oxford. The nights are dark; the sound of a cello, or a scream, carries. At the center of the plot are two neighboring houses, on the same side of a street, with side windows that face each other across a garden. This arrangement is easy to find in most parts of the world that aren’t Manhattan.

Mallory cannily set himself the task of popularizing the already wildly popular plot of “The Girl on the Train.” His book consists of a hundred very short chapters, and reads like a film script that has been novelized, on a deadline, under severe vocabulary restrictions: sunshine “bolts in” through a door; eyebrows “bolt into each other”; eyes “bolt open”; one character is “bolted to the sofa”; another has “strong teeth bolting from strong gums.” He then gilded his text with references to Tennyson, Nabokov, and the Pitt Rivers Museum, in Oxford. The over-all effect is a little like reading the e-mails sent by “Jake”: Anna, the narrator, feels subordinate to Mallory’s struttingly insistent voice. It’s much more a Tom Ripley novel than a Patricia Highsmith novel. Instead of Highsmith’s disorienting, erotic discovery of character, “Window” is an enactment of Ripleyan manipulation. It’s a thriller excited about getting away with writing a thriller. In a recent e-mail, Joan Schenkar, the author of “The Talented Miss Highsmith,” an acclaimed biography, described “Window” as a “novel of strategies, not psychologies.” It was, she said, “the most self-conscious thriller I’ve ever opened.”

The selling of “The Woman in the Window” was a perfectly calibrated maneuver, and caused the kind of hoopla that happens only once or twice a year in American publishing. One publisher offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to preëmpt an auction. This was rejected, and at least eight publishing imprints, including Morrow, began to bid for the North American rights. Meanwhile, offers were being made for European editions, and Fox 2000 bought the film rights.

When the bidding reached seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Mallory revealed his name. A former Morrow employee recalled, “I’d wondered why this person in publishing wants to be anonymous. Then: Oh, that’s why!” Mallory has said that “nobody dropped out” at that point; but many, including Little, Brown, did. When it was announced that Mallory’s employer had won the auction, one joke in New York was “The call was coming from inside the house!”

Morrow sent out a press release saying that Mallory had been “profiled in USA Today”—he hadn’t—and quoting Jennifer Brehl, the Morrow editor who had won the auction. “A. J. Finn’s voice and story were like nothing I’d ever heard before,” she said. “So creepy, sad, twisty-turny, and cunning.” She said that she had not recognized this voice as Mallory’s, and added, “He’s already known as an esteemed editor; I predict a long career as a brilliant novelist, too.” Liate Stehlik, the Morrow publisher, later wrote to booksellers, “I love it, and the only thing I thought when I was reading it was that Morrow must publish this book.”

Mallory stayed on as an editor at Morrow for another year. He set up a corporation, A. J. Finn, Inc., using an Amagansett P.O. box. A photograph of him smiling and unshaven, taken by Hope Brooks, the older of his sisters, began appearing in stories about his success.

The Mallory house in Amagansett is set back from a quiet road; trees line the driveway, joining overhead to form a tunnel. On an overcast morning just before Thanksgiving, I walked up to the house, and reached a garage whose doors were open. An S.U.V. was parked in front; two dogs leaped, barking, from its back seat. (I recalled that, according to Dan Mallory, his mother had, on separate occasions, killed two dogs by backing up over them.)

John Mallory, Dan’s father, came out of the garage, wearing a denim shirt. He is in his mid-sixties, and has a handsome, squarish face. He apologized for the pandemonium, and joked, “I’m just the lawn guy.”

I explained why I was there. “Dan does not want me commenting,” he said. “He’s my son, so I have to respect his privacy.” But his manner was friendly, and the dogs calmed down, and we stood talking for a few minutes. “He’s a wonderful young man, he truly is,” John said.

I said that I’d become interested in Dan’s accounts of cancer—the claim that he’d had a malignant tumor, and that his mother had died of cancer.

“No, no,” he said. He didn’t sound surprised or annoyed—rather, he was obliged to correct a misapprehension. When Dan was a teen-ager, he said, “his mother did have cancer. Stage V, so she was next to death. But, no, Dan didn’t have it. He’s just been an absolutely perfect son. He has his faults, like we all do, he’s just a tremendous young man.”

Did Dan have cancer later? “No, no,” John said, adding that Dan had told him that “he’d been misquoted several times, and it really bothers him when things come out that are negative about him.”

I began to describe the “Jake” e-mails. “Dan and his brother, Jake, are very close,” John said, adding that “Jake would never, ever say” Dan had fallen ill with cancer, because it wasn’t true. I wondered if John had been told that such e-mails existed, and could be explained as the work of a scurrilous third party. They can’t—Dan saw replies written to the “Jake” e-mail address, and responded to them.

When Dan wrote about living in a single-parent family when he was seventeen, was that true?

“No,” John said. “Well, in a way I guess it was, because my wife and I were separated.” They were apart for two and a half years, he said. “She made me come back,” he went on, laughing. “We had our differences. We didn’t file for divorce or anything like that.” He added, “Pam was saying, ‘I think you made a mistake. But it’s up to you.’ And then I realized I’m being an idiot.”

I asked if the separation was difficult for Dan. “Very difficult,” he said. “The family’s very closely knit and to see the dad not there on Thanksgiving or Christmas—Ian, it’s my fault. I hate to this day to think they had a Thanksgiving dinner without me.”

He continued, “Dan went through a tough time, in his teen-age years, but he’s really pulled together.” In the past, “a lot of times, he hid from us.” Now “every morning I get a FaceTime from Dan. He just bought a little French bulldog. Oh, my God, Ian—he bought one three weeks ago, the dog has, like, four thousand toys, a little blanket. He’s just an avid dog-lover, as we all are—as you see. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body.” He said that, as far as he knew, Dan had finished his Ph.D.

The dogs started barking again. A car came up the driveway. “Here comes his mother,” John said. “Oh, Lord.”

Pamela Mallory got out of an S.U.V. with a shopping bag. I introduced myself. “We’re not doing that,” she said, walking toward the house. “Thank you.”

In “The Woman in the Window,” much of whose plot this article is about to give away, Anna Fox watches a family move in next door. Ethan, the family’s sorrowful and lonely only child, aged about fifteen, visits Anna. She is filled with pity when he describes a controlling, violent father, and she is struck by his earnestness: he’s prone to tears, and teaches swimming to developmentally disabled children.

Then Ethan murders his mother, and—in the novel’s climax—appears one night in Anna’s bedroom, with a letter opener as a weapon, and a crazed look, saying, “Older women interest me.” In passages that seem more fluent than those which have come before, Ethan acknowledges the matricide, and describes it as “exhilarating.” Sitting on Anna’s bed, playing with the letter opener, he acknowledges other transgressions. By impersonating a friendly grandmother on Anna’s agoraphobia forum, he has tricked her into giving up her passwords. He has copied her house key, allowing him to go in and out of her house. “I come here almost every night,” he says. He forces her to agree that she is “very fucking stupid.” He mocks her—a child psychologist—for not recognizing him for what he is.

“I know what I am,” Ethan tells her. “Does that help?”

Anna says to herself, “Psychopath. The superficial charm, the labile personality, the flat affect.” She then tells him, “You enjoy manipulating others.”

He replies, “It’s fun. And easy. You’re really easy.” He strokes the blade against his thigh. “I didn’t want you to think I was a threat. That’s why I said I missed my friends. And I pretended I might be gay. And I cried all those fucking times.”

Both Ethan’s depression and his account of a vicious father were part of a performance—one effective enough to dupe a psychologist and draw the eye away from personality pathology.

In a Morrow sales brochure, Mallory said that he’d “struggled for more than fifteen years with severe depression,” and that, in 2015, he had finally been given a diagnosis of bipolar II disorder. This announcement surprised the acquaintances of Mallory’s who spoke to me. Over the years, he had been willing to talk of cancer, near-death, and a brother’s suicide, but he hadn’t mentioned mental illness so severe that he’d sought relief in electric shocks and ketamine.

Speaking in Colorado last January, Mallory quoted a passage from Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir, “An Unquiet Mind,” in which she describes repeatedly confronting the social wreckage caused by her bipolar episodes—knowing that she had “apologies to make.” Nobody I spoke to remembered a Mallory reckoning or an apology. In more recent public appearances, Mallory seems to have dropped this reference to wreckage. Instead, he has accepted credit for his courage in bringing up his mental suffering, and he has foregrounded his virtues. Asked, on an Australian podcast, to define himself in three adjectives, Mallory said, “Inquisitive. Kind—I do think I’m a kind person.” He clicked his tongue. “And I love French bulldogs. I don’t know if there’s an adjective that sums that up.”

Mallory clearly has experienced mental distress. At Mallory’s request, his psychiatrist confirmed to me that Mallory was given a diagnosis of bipolar II. The psychiatrist said that Mallory, because of his mother’s illness, sometimes had “somatic complaints, fears, and preoccupations,” including about cancer. But a bipolar II diagnosis does not easily explain organized untruths, maintained over time. Nigel Blackwood, a forensic psychiatrist at King’s College London, told me that patients with the condition may experience “periods of inflated self-esteem,” but he emphasized that hypomanic episodes “cannot account for sustained arrogant and deceptive interpersonal behaviors.”

Chris Parris-Lamb, the agent, who has a very close family member who is bipolar, said, “I’ve seen the ravages, the suffering that the disease can cause.” He went on, “If Mallory’s deceit is the product of bipolar episodes, then they have been singularly advantageous to his career, and that is unlike any bipolar person I’ve ever encountered. And if he is one of the lucky ones who has managed to get his disease under control and produce a best-selling novel—if he is stable and lucid enough to do that—then he is stable and lucid enough to apologize to the people he lied to and the people he hurt.”

Carrie Bearden, a professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A., who has not met Mallory, said that a patient with bipolar II disorder cannot attribute to that diagnosis delusions, amnesia, or “chronic lying for secondary gain, or to get attention.” To do so is “very irresponsible,” she said, and could add to the “already huge stigma associated with these disorders.”

On January 30th, a public-relations firm working on Mallory’s behalf provided The New Yorker with a statement from him: “For the past two years, I’ve spoken publicly about mental illness: the defining experience of my life—particularly during the brutal years bookending my late twenties and mid-thirties—and the central theme of my novel. Throughout those dark times, and like many afflicted with severe bipolar II disorder, I experienced crushing depressions, delusional thoughts, morbid obsessions, and memory problems. It’s been horrific, not least because, in my distress, I did or said or believed things I would never ordinarily say, or do, or believe—things of which, in many instances, I have absolutely no recollection.”

He went on, “It is the case that on numerous occasions in the past, I have stated, implied, or allowed others to believe that I was afflicted with a physical malady instead of a psychological one: cancer, specifically. My mother battled aggressive breast cancer starting when I was a teenager; it was the formative experience of my adolescent life, synonymous with pain and panic. I felt intensely ashamed of my psychological struggles—they were my scariest, most sensitive secret. And for fifteen years, even as I worked with psychotherapists, I was utterly terrified of what people would think of me if they knew—that they’d conclude I was defective in a way that I should be able to correct, or, worse still, that they wouldn’t believe me. Dissembling seemed the easier path.”

He continued, “With the benefit of hindsight, I’m sorry to have taken, or be seen to have taken, advantage of anyone else’s goodwill, however desperate the circumstances; that was never the goal.”

A paperback edition of “The Woman in the Window” was published in the U.K. in December, and the novel immediately returned to the best-seller list; the U.S. paperback will appear next month, with a first print run of three hundred and fifty-five thousand copies. The movie adaptation, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, is scheduled to be released on October 4th.

Mallory has said that his second novel will be set in San Francisco. It will have the flavor of an Agatha Christie story, and will be partly set in a Victorian mansion. It’s a story of revenge, he has said, involving a female thriller writer and an interviewer who learns of a dark past. He hopes to turn it into a television series.

#dan mallory #a.j. finn #publishing #books #scam #hoax #full article text under the cut because fuck paywalls

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redgoldsparks · 8 months

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My very last comic for The Nib! End of an era! Transcription below the cut. instagram / patreon / portfolio / etsy / my book / redbubble

The first event I went to with GENDER QUEER was in NYC in 2019 at the Javits Center.

So many of the people who came to my signing were librarians, and so many of them said the same thing: "I know exactly who I want to give this to!" Maia: "Thank you for helping readers find my book!" While working on the book, I was genuinely unsure if anyone outside of my family and close friends would read it. But the early support of librarians and two American Library Association awards helped sell two print runs in first year.

Since then, GENDER QUEER been published in 8 languages, with more on the way: Spanish, Czech, Polish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portugese and Dutch.

It has also been the most banned book in the United States for the past two years. The American Library Association has tracked an astronomical increase in book challenges over the past few years. Most of these challenges are to books with diverse characters and LGBTQ themes. These challenges are coming unevenly across the US, in a pattern that mirrors the legislative attacks on LGBTQ people. The Brooklyn Public Library offered free eCards to anyone in the US aged 13-21, in an effort to make banned books more available to young readers. A teacher in Norman, Oklahoma gave her students the QR code for the free eCard and lost her job. Summer Boismeir is now working for the Brooklyn Public Library. Hoopla and Libby/Overdrive, apps used to access digital library books, are now banned in Mississippi to anyone under 18. Some libraries won’t allow anyone under 18 to get any kind of library card without parental permission. When librarians in Jamestown, Michigan refused to remove GENDER QUEER and several other books, the citizens of the town voted down the library’s funding in the fall 2022 election. Without funding, the library is due to close in mid-2024. My first event since covid hit was the American Library Association conference in June 2022 in Washington, DC. Once again, the librarians in my signing line all had similar stories for me: “Your book was challenged in our district" "It was returned to the shelf!" "It was removed from the shelf..." "It was moved to the adult section."

Over and over I said: "Thank you. Thank you for working so hard to keep my book in your library. I’m sorry you had to defend it, but thank you for trying, even if it didn't work." We are at a crossroads of freedom of speech and censorship. The future of libraries, both publicly funded and in schools, are at stake. This is massively impacting the daily lives of librarians, teachers, students, booksellers, and authors around the country. In May 2023, I read an article from the Washington Post analyzing nearly 1000 of the book challenges from the 2021-2022 school year. I was literally on route to a festival to talk about book bans when I read a startling statistic. 60% of the 1000 book challenges were submitted by just 11 people. One man alone was responsible for 92 challenges. These 11 people seem to have made submitting copy-cat book challenges their full-time hobby and their opinions are having an outsized ripple effect across the nation. WE NEED TO MAKE THE VOICES SUPPORTING DIVERSE BOOKS AND OPPOSING BOOK BANS EVEN LOUDER. If you are able too, show up for your library and school board meetings when book challenges are debated. Send supportive comments and emails about the Pride book display and Drag Queen story hours. If you see a display you like– for Banned Book Week, AAPI Month, Black History Month, Disability Awareness Month, Jewish holidays, Trans Day of Remembrance– compliment a librarian! Make sure they feel the love stronger than the hate <3

Maia Kobabe, 2023

The Nib

#maia kobabe #banned books #library funding #comics #book challenges

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hellyeahsickaf · 4 months

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I found an extremely dope disability survival guide for those who are homebound, bedbound, in need of disability accommodations, or would otherwise like resources for how to manage your life as a disabled person. (Link is safe)

It has some great articles and resources and while written by people with ME/CFS, it keeps all disabilities in mind. A lot of it is specific to the USA but even if you're from somewhere else, there are many guides that can still help you. Some really good ones are:

How to live a great disabled life- A guide full of resources to make your life easier and probably the best place to start (including links to some of the below resources). Everything from applying for good quality affordable housing to getting free transportation, affordable medication, how to get enough food stamps, how to get a free phone that doesn't suck, how to find housemates and caregivers, how to be homebound, support groups and Facebook pages (including for specific illnesses), how to help with social change from home, and so many more.

Turning a "no" into a "yes"- A guide on what to say when denied for disability aid/accommodations of many types, particularly over the phone. "Never take no for an answer over the phone. If you have not been turned down in writing, you have not been turned down. Period."

How to be poor in America- A very expansive and helpful guide including things from a directory to find your nearest food bank to resources for getting free home modifications, how to get cheap or free eye and dental care, extremely cheap internet, and financial assistance with vet bills

How to be homebound- This is pretty helpful even if you're not homebound. It includes guides on how to save spoons, getting free and low cost transportation, disability resources in your area, home meals, how to have fun/keep busy while in bed, and a severe bedbound activity master list which includes a link to an audio version of the list on Soundcloud

Master List of Disability Accommodation Letters For Housing- Guides on how to request accommodations and housing as well as your rights, laws, and prewritten sample letters to help you get whatever you need. Includes information on how to request additional bedrooms, stop evictions, request meetings via phone, mail, and email if you can't in person, what you can do if a request is denied, and many other helpful guides

Special Laws to Help Domestic Violence Survivors (Vouchers & Low Income Housing)- Protections, laws, and housing rights for survivors of DV (any gender), and how to get support and protection under the VAWA laws to help you and/or loved ones receive housing and assistance

Dealing With Debt & Disability- Information to assist with debt including student loans, medical debt, how to deal with debt collectors as well as an article with a step by step guide that helped the author cut her overwhelming medical bills by 80%!

There are so many more articles, guides, and tools here that have helped a lot of people. And there are a lot of rights, resources, and protections that people don't know they have and guides that can help you manage your life as a disabled person regardless of income, energy levels, and other factors.

Please boost!

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burtlancster · 6 months

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Outside Washington, D.C., studio, before Youth Wants to Know got underway, a few students cornered Burt to ask, "Do you think certain of our movies encourage juvenile delinquency?" Burt paused, thoughtfully lit a cigarette, and said, "I'd like a moment to think about that."

Please Tell Us, Mr. Burt Lancaster. . . — PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE DECEMBER, 1957

Twenty high school students were lucky enough, recently, to interview Burt Lancaster, who is currently breaking box office records as the star of his own film, Sweet Smell of Success. And the teens broke a record of their own. "It was one of the toughest interviews I've been put through," Burt admitted at the end. The questions ran through everything from sex and censorship to the high price of the neighborhood movie and Marilyn Monroe. There wasn't a dull moment.

STUDENT: Sir, does the average American moviegoer's preference for films dealing with crimes, sex and violence indicate that he cannot appreciate more refined acting and drama? I've wondered about this.

MR. LANCASTER: No, I don't think that is necessarily true. I think you will find most people go to movies for purposes of relaxation, and they like to see things on the screen that cause visual excitement but that don't particularly disturb or distress them too much or make them think too hard.

STUDENT: In other words, intellectual movies would not appeal to the average American moviegoer?

MR. LANCASTER: To the average American moviegoer, no, I would say.

STUDENT: In this light, do you feel that you are debasing yourself when you are acting, just to satisfy American moviegoers' cravings and likes?

MR. LANCASTER: No, I think you have responsibilities to the likes and dislikes of people. What we as a group have to try to do in the making of movies is to make those that will appeal to a large, mass audience. We must also try to make movies that will appeal to, shall we say, a smaller and minority group. And as long as we maintain our own standards of what we like, we will find we can make pictures that can appeal to all peoples. Not all the time, though.

STUDENT: Mr. Lancaster, as a producer, would you tell me this: When you choose a picture, do you choose one that is popular with the American public even though you personally feel that story is not too good?

MR. LANCASTER: Not always. Well, no, we would never choose a picture if we felt the story is not too good; that is, if it doesn't have the basic ingredients of what would represent drama and entertainment to people.

STUDENT: Mr. Lancaster, do you feel that movies such as "The Man with the Golden Arm" gives Europeans the wrong impression of America?

MR. LANCASTER: I don't think any picture gives European people a wrong impression of America if it is well made and made with honesty and integrity as to the subject matter.

STUDENT: Well, do you think such movies encourage juvenile delinquency here in the United States?

MR. LANCASTER: I think juvenile delinquency is not encouraged by movies, specifically. I think juvenile delinquency is encouraged by unfortunate economic conditions and conditions in homes where children don't have a proper upbringing because, very often, of those conditions.

STUDENT: Sir, we know now there are a lot of foreign actors and actresses over the United States. Do you think the American public seems to like these people much better than their own people, those they see all the time?

MR. LANCASTER: No. This brings up the question of what makes really a star performer. American people and, of course, European people and people all over the world, for that matter, like the performer who has that unique personality and quality which appeals to them personally. It has nothing to do with the fact that they are, shall we say, of foreign extraction, I don't think.

STUDENT: Do you feel foreign films are going to make any great inroads into the habits of the American movie-going public?

MR. LANCASTER: I think time has proven at least that foreign films as such do appeal only to a limited group of Americans. Again, it goes back to the original question that was asked earlier. One of the reasons is that American people as such are more comfortable with a subject matter that pertains to things that they particularly understand. Foreign people talk with accents that are very hard to understand. Very often, they have a very grim and brutal kind of realism which a great many American people do not like to see, since they do not have any identification with the problems. These are some of the reasons foreign films are not especially successful in a broad sense in the American cinematic world.

Moderator Steve McCormick nodded to a boy in the front row, who demanded, Mr. Lancaster, how do actors and producers react to censorship groups?" The girl next to him wanted to know, "Do Americans like foreign films and stars more than our own?"

STUDENT: I am interested in knowing why you think western films should be done necessarily with fun and action.

MR. LANCASTER: It isn't that they necessarily should; and a peculiar thing happens in movies. You see, there have been pictures like "High Noon," for instance, which have been highly successful. On the other hand, there have been pictures like the one I made with Gary Cooper called "Veracruz," which by critical standards does not measure up to a "High Noon," but which is a much more satisfying picture from the point of view of entertainment. There is also another problem: When you make a film of a special nature that will appeal to limited groups of people, you have to face the fact that these films are not in the broad sense of the word, popular. Therefore, when you do them, you must be careful that you do them for a certain price, because you have a limited income on such films, and the first cardinal rule of making pictures or writing a play or any form of entertainment is to make something that is financially successful. If they are not successful, you don't continue in business, and you have no opportunity to present the ideas that you think are unique or even artistic.

STUDENT: How does Hollywood face competition between TV and movies?

MR. LANCASTER: What Hollywood has attempted to do about it is this: Actually, it is my personal opinion that the advent of TV, as far as Hollywood is concerned, has been a very, very healthy thing. There was a time, about ten short years ago, when almost anything that came out of Hollywood could be assured of reasonable financial success. Naturally, this sort of lulled people into a sense of false security, and there was not a great deal of attempt on the part of the studios to try to do anything worthwhile and different and challenging. Now that great inroads have been made in the whole financial structure of Hollywood, they have realized they have to do better things, things that are more exciting, more challenging so that people will leave their television receivers and come out to look at them.

STUDENT: Sir, I have read you do not attend many Hollywood social functions. Don't you like the type of people at these functions?

MR. LANCASTER: Oh, yes. It has nothing to do with the functions. It is just that I have a group of friends that I would prefer to be with. For example, my wife and I like to play bridge. I have never been particularly comfortable or at ease in large social functions, cocktail parties, and so forth.

STUDENT: Would you ever encourage your own children to go into acting if they wanted to?

MR. LANCASTER: I would certainly do it. I feel a child should have an opportunity to do anything he has an inclination toward.

STUDENT: Do yours watch you when you are performing in movies?

MR. LANCASTER: Yes, and they're among my toughest critics. They have traveled with me all over the world while I was making movies. They have lived in the Fiji Islands for four months and attended school there, they attended school in Mexico City, they have lived in France for the summer and they have lived in Italy for six months when I was there making a picture. But now they have reached the age where it is very difficult for them to go with me because they go to school. They have certain ties there, so I try to arrange my program so if I am shooting on location, it occurs in the summertime so I can take them with me.

STUDENT: Mr. Lancaster, you mentioned a few minutes ago about the entertainment of movies, and that is why people go to movies, to be entertained. But it seems to me a juvenile delinquency film or a film on corruption in life, the baseness in life, would be rather not too entertaining.

MR. LANCASTER: Let me make clear what I mean by entertaining. Every movie that is made has a point of view, whether it is a good one, a bad one, a useful one or what. By entertainment, I mean that regardless of what the subject matter may be, it should have an entertainment quality to it. That does not mean that the subject should not be treated with great seriousness, and great depth and great definition.

STUDENT: I was wondering if the type of film such as "On the Waterfront," where you can come out fighting mad and want to clean up the waterfront, has the purpose of reforming. Or "Baby Doll."

MR. LANCASTER: Well, about "Baby Doll," I would quarrel with you. But certainly on "On the Waterfront" I agree with you.

STUDENT: Most of your films are hard-bitten, often violent, dramas. Do you object to your children seeing them?

MR. LANCASTER: Here is what I try to do. I let my children see the films that I am in. Some of them—for instance, "Come Back Little Sheba," which I think is a worthwhile picture in addition to being an entertaining one are difficult for their immature minds to understand completely. But rather than have them not see it, if they ask to see it, I let them, but I make sure to see it with them so I can try to answer all the questions they might raise. Therefore, I hope I can give them some sense of security about it, even those matters they might not particularly understand.

I would like to cite an example of just that. My little boy asked yesterday to see "Sweet Smell of Success," which is also a very hard-bitten picture and not what you would normally call children's fare. I said, "Well, Jimmie, that is fine; you can see the picture. But I don't think you will like it. Why do you want to see it?"

"Well," he said, "I'd like to see it, Daddy, because you're in it."

"That is fair enough," I said, "but I don't think you will understand it." And he answered, "I may not understand it, but that doesn't mean I won't like it."

STUDENT: Mr. Lancaster, what is the reaction of producers to censorship groups?

MR. LANCASTER: As you probably know, there is no official censorship problem in the movies in the United States or any official censorship at all. This is not so in England, where they do have an official government censorship, and can refuse you a license to show a picture. In short, they have a police force that can stop you from showing the picture. There is the Johnson office which has its headquarters here in Washington, and is a self-imposed censorship by the industry.

It is known as the MPPA—Motion Picture Producers Association. Their attitude is this: They say to the producers, "In order to protect the morality of the nation as it might be affected by motion pictures, if you will let us see the scripts you are going to make, we will attempt, not to censor, mind you, what you are trying to say, but attempt to guide you in matters of how to handle these problems as best you can."

Now, of course, it always comes to the question of who are the people who are going to decide this, how knowledgeable are they, do they know better than the actual creators of the motion picture?

What has happened is that in recent years (and I think this a very healthy thing) the MPPA has been forced to recognize—perhaps not forced but has willingly recognized—the fact that enormous advances have been made in the general education of the American public and, therefore, the subjects which were considered taboo before are now permitted.

So what has happened is this: The old code has been enormously changed. The whole attitude of the so-called censor board has improved a great deal. We do now show pictures in which words like "abortion" and "prostitution" are mentioned, and in which we discuss divorce problems, and then, of course, there is the matter of narcotics, which was recently brought up in several pictures. The picture "Hatful of Rain" now has been approved by the board, where before the "Man with the Golden Arm" was not approved. It looks like things are looking up in the censorship problem.

STUDENT: I would like to know, would you agree with some critics who say that Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe have acting talents equal to their more obvious appeals?

MR. LANCASTER: Well, I don't know what the critics feel about it. That is their opinion. One of the things I would like to be made clear about movies again it goes back to the business of being a star: The most unique thing a motion picture actor or actress can have is an outstanding or peculiar personality of some kind. And these girls certainly have some outstanding qualities that appeal to people visually, at least. Those are the elements most important in the making of a motion picture star. Not necessarily the acting ability as such. On the other hand, to be a good actor, to be an exciting personality on the screen, of course, is that much better.

STUDENT: Who is the most beautiful woman you have ever acted with?

MR. LANCASTER: They were all beautiful. I am just quoting my lines from "The Rainmaker." "They are all beautiful in a different way."

STUDENT: I want to know what your wife thinks about your performing in movies and having these torrid love scenes with Hollywood leading ladies.

MR. LANCASTER: The torrid love scene you have with a Hollywood leading lady is, from our point of view while we are in the process of making it, "work." You have a job. You are creating an illusion for an audience to see, and the only assurance I think that my wife has is that she knows I love her, and that is about all I can say on that subject.

STUDENT: I am interested in knowing why you didn't change your name when you started acting. Most actors and actresses do.

MR. LANCASTER: As a matter of fact, I did want to change my name. They were going to give me the name of an economist, Stewart Chase. They decided this by numerology. Then a gentleman by the name of Mark Hellinger, who is now dead, and who produced the first picture I was in, "The Killers," said to me, "Is Burt Lancaster your real name?"

I said, "Yes."

He said, "What's wrong with that?" I said, "Nothing." He said, "Let's use it." I said, "O.K."

STUDENT: Sir, because of television, do you think that the pictures now coming out might break down some of the prices that these theatres have? In other words, producing prices and everything?

MR. LANCASTER: You think the prices are too high?

STUDENT: Well, yes.

MR. LANCASTER: I know this has been a subject of great discussion among distributors, because I have also been in that end of the business since my pictures are distributed and exhibited. The feeling is they try to keep the economic level of prices and pictures as low as possible since it is, first of all, a traditional thing and the people who generally support the pictures are not those who have a great deal of money, normally speaking.

I will gladly say this: The distribution groups would gladly put a picture up for a nickel tomorrow if the cost of production would permit them.

There is no desire on their part to try to cheat the public. Sometimes pictures are so expensive they have to charge certain prices in order to get any kind of income from them.

"This has been one of the most provocative questioning sessions I've ever gone through. Our young people are really serious about motion pictures," said Burt as time ran out and the interview came to a close. "Anyone who says American teenagers are delinquents is all wet. I am grateful to the National Broadcasting Company's 'Youth Wants to Know,' and the National Education Association for bringing us together today."

THE END

#full interview under the cut or read it at the source :^)#his perspective as an indie producer during this period of filmmaking is super interesting #youth wants to know #photoplay magazine #<- transcript was published there but this was on tv #interview #article #1957 #television

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kindnessoverperfection · 9 months

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Please, if you can, take a moment to read and share this because I feel like I'm screaming underwater.

NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) stigma is rampant right now, and seems to be getting progressively worse. Everyone is using it as a buzzword in the worst ways possible, spreading misinformation and hatred against a real disorder.

I could go on a long time about how this happened, why it's factually incorrect (and what the disorder actually IS), why it's harmful, and the changes I'd like to see. But to keep this concise, I'll simply link to a few posts under the cut for further reading.

The point of this post is a plea. Please help stop the spread of stigma. Even in mental health communities, even around others with personality disorders, in neurodivergent "safe" spaces, other communities I thought people would be supportive in (e.g. trans support groups, progressive spaces in general), it keeps coming up. So I'm willing to bet that a lot of people on this site need to see this.

Because it's so hard to exist in this world.

My disorder already makes me feel as if I'm worthless and unlovable, like there's something inherently wrong and damaged about me. And it's so much harder to fight that and heal when my daily life consists of:

Laughing and spending time with my friends, doing my utmost best to connect and stay present and focused on them, trying to let my guards down and be real and believe I'm lovable- when suddenly they throw out the word "narcissist" to describe horrible people or someone they hate, or the conversation turns to how evil "people with narcissistic personality disorder" are. (Seriously, you don't know which of your friends might have NPD and feels like shit when you say those things & now knows that you'd hate them if you knew.)

Trying to look up "mental health positivity for people with npd", "mental health positivity cluster bs", only to find a) none of that, and b) more of the same old vile shit that makes me feel terrible about myself.

Having a hard time (which is constant at this point) and trying to look up resources for myself, only to again, find the same stigma. And no resources.

Not having any clue how to help myself, because even the mental health field is spitting so much vitriol at people with DISORDERS (who they're supposed to be helping!) that there's no solid research or therapy programs for people like me.

Losing close friends when they find out, despite us having had a good relationship before, and them KNOWING me and knowing that I'm not like the trending image of pwNPD. Because now they only see me through the lens of stigma and misinformation.

Hearing the same stigma come up literally wherever I go. Clubs. Meetings. Any online space. At the bus stop. At the mall. At a restaurant. At work. Buzzword of the year that everyone loooves loudly throwing around with their friends or over the phone. Feels awesome for me, makes my day so much better/s

I could go on for a long time, but I'm scared no one will read/rb this if it gets too much longer.

So please. Stop using the word "narcissist" as a synonym for "abusive".

Stop bringing up people you hate who you believe to have NPD because of a stigmatizing article full of misinformation whenever someone with actual NPD opens their mouth. (Imagine if people did that with any other disorder! "Hey, I'm autistic." "Oh... my old roommate screamed at me whenever I made noise around him, and didn't understand my needs, which seems like sensory overload and difficulty with social cues. He was definitely autistic. But as long as you're self-aware and always restraining your innate desire to be an abusive asshole, you're okay I guess, maybe." ...See how offensive and ignorant that is?)

Stop preventing healthcare for people with a disorder just because it's trendy to use us as a scapegoat.

If you got this far, thank you for reading, and please share this if you can. Further reading is under the cut.

NPD Criteria, re-written by someone who actually has NPD

Stigma in the DSM

Common perception of the DSM criteria vs how someone may actually experience them (Keep in mind that this is the way I personally experience these symptoms, and that presentation can vary a lot between individuals)

"Idk, the stigma is right though, because I've known a lot of people with NPD who are jerks, so I'm going to continue to support the blockage of treatment for this condition."

(All of these were written by me, because I didn't want to link to other folks' posts without permission, but if you want to add your own links in reblogs or replies please feel free <3)

#actuallynpd #signal boost #actuallyautistic #mental health awareness #narcissistic personality disorder #people also need to realize that mental health professionals aren't immune from bias #(it really shouldn't come as a shock that the mental health field has a longstanding pattern of misunderstanding and mistreating ppl who ar #mentally ill or otherwise ND)#the first therapist i brought up NPD to like. literally pulled out the DSM bc she could barely remember the criteria. then said that there'#no way I have it because I have low self-esteem lmaoooooo #anyway throwback to being at work and chatting with a co-worker. and the conversation turning to mental health. and him saying that #he tries to stay informed and be aware and supportive of mental health conditions & that he doesn't want to be ignorant or spread harmful #misinformation. and then i mentioned that i do a lot of research into mental health stuff and i listed a bunch of things. which included #several personality disorders. one of which was NPD.#and after listening to my whole ass list he zeroed in on the NPD and immediately started talking about how narcissists are abusive and #he knew someone who had NPD and how the person who had it had an addiction and died from the addiction in a horrible way and he #was glad he did #fun times #or when i decided to be vulnerable and talk abt my self-criticism/self-hatred bc i knew my friends also struggled w that and i wanted to #support them by sharing my own coping methods. and they both(separately!) started picking and prodding at my npd through the lens of stigma #bc i'd recently opened up to them abt having it. they recognized self-hatred as a symptom and still jumped on me for it. despite me #trying to share hurt vulnerable parts of myself to help them and connect with them.#again..... fun times

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underwhelmingalchemist · 1 month

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So apparently the version of the "Isn't It Bromantic" interview that gets passed around isn't the full thing

So after seeing a tumblr post I can't find, about two and half hours of intensive internet digging, and one purchase from a sketchy second-hand site later (full story under the cut, I promise it's interesting, but also long), I got the physical magazine and scanned it

So here you go: the full "Isn't It Bromantic?" TV guide interview with Robert Sean Leonard and Hugh Laurie

Feel free to repost wherever you want- I want people to be able to find the full thing

SO, as for how I found it:

I saw this tumblr post forever ago that I can't find anymore because tumblr is just Like That with a cropped screenshot of an interview with Hugh Laurie and Robert Sean Leonard. In the interview, they're asked about the "bromance" between their two characters. Leonard makes an annoyed comment about how "everyone [is] obsessed with homosexuality", followed by the interview apologizing and Laurie immediately jumping in with, "No, no, let's talk about it. Wilson and House have an unusual relationship so you have to explore…" and the screenshot cuts off there. Cue funny comment from the OP about the interaction, roll credits.

Except, as these things tend to do, it ended up becoming a bit of a brain worm, and I wanted to find it again. But I couldn't find the tumblr post. I looked absolutely everywhere, and in the process of looking everywhere, I found what I thought was the original interview- a blog post with the full quote from the actor. I didn't think too much about it, I figured it was just a short quote given to a popular blog in 2008. There's a magazine cover above it, but I don't think too much about it, because I'm focusing on the quotes in the article instead of the rest of it.

So I send screenshots to a couple friends to make jokes, and it probably should have died there.

However, late at night I end up thinking about that interview again, because of course I did. I start to think about how it's weirdly formatted for, what I assumed at first reading, was just an entertainment news blog reaching out for comment and getting a response. So I pull up the screenshots of the article (because weirdly enough, the old-ass blog only loads on mobile) and look at it again.

This is when I realize that this isn't an original piece from a blog interviewing these two after reaching out for comment. This is a blog post quoting and commenting on a full interview from a magazine, which I had originally thought had just been the inspiration for the piece.

So naturally, I go looking for the magazine.

Luckily, the name of the magazine is displayed on the cover, and so is the title of its main piece. This should be easy to find, right?

Wrong.

This is an interview in a physical magazine. From 2008. October 13th, 2008, to be exact.

I know this exact date because searching the article title and magazine name leads me to an archive on the TV Guide website.

Of covers.

And nothing but covers.

I spend like forty-five minutes searching everywhere I can think of on the web. Internet Archive, the TV Guide website, any search result that comes up when I search any combination of the words "House" "Interview" "Bromantic" "Bromance" "TV Guide" "Archive" etc. Over and over, all that's coming up are that original blog post and the cover from the official gallery.

The only things I could find online were:

The cover and date of the issue on the TV Guide website

The original blog post that was screenshotted in the original tumblr post

Another blog post that had a much shorter version of the quote, references something Leonard says from later in the article, and makes a comment on the nature of his reaction to the term "bromance"

An entry on Leonard's IMDB page's "interview" list mentioning it in title only

And:

5. A single listing for the issue on what seemed to be a second-hand site that looked like it hadn't had its UI updated since the mid 2000's, with a listing with no date or additional information besides what issue it is.

This is the only listing anywhere. I checked every other second-hand site I could think of, and then some that only came up through google searches. There's not a single listing for that issue on any of them. There were plenty of listings of TV guide magazines, including one that seemed promising because it included issues from that year, but it was missing all of October.

It seemed like the only listing for this issue on the entire internet was this one copy on this one obscure website. For all I know, this was listed in 2008 and abandoned, and just never got marked inactive. It could also be a complete scam.

A few quick google searches show that that website seemed to be legit, albeit a bit loose on quality control (which makes sense, this website seemed like the kind of thing you'd have to use the Way Back Machine to access). It also had an option to pay via PayPal, which meant I could file a chargeback if need be.

It was $11.50 when you include shipping.

So at about half past midnight, I bought the listing.

Naturally, about an hour later, I manage to actually find a scan of the interview. I had to follow a link in the comments of a post on FanPop, taking me to an old wordpress blog, and I'm sitting in front of the damn interview at last.

But something doesn't make sense. Why would their cover story only be two pages of text that aren't even full pages, and why would it cut off so strangely? There was no concluding sentence or paragraph, even though it started with a fairly long lead-in. It also led right up to the edge of the page, which felt like there should be more to it. There were more images in the interview than text, and the fact that there are so many of them and they clearly did a whole photoshoot indicated that they had them on hand for a while. The silly string one, for instance, I imagine probably had to require a couple takes, which means cleaning off Wilson's hair and face, adjusting makeup, etc. for it. Meanwhile, the conversation itself seems like it could have taken ten minutes total. I could have been totally wrong and that was where the article ended, but I couldn't shake the feeling that there might be more.

So I hold tight. A couple days pass with no update, and then the PayPal purchase gets updated with a tracking number. Promising, but it could still be a scam. Whether or not I get the actual magazine becomes a source of anxiety for the next week.

Until today, when I get told it was delivered. And when I opened the envelope it was sent in: there it was.

When I tell you I was happy stimming in my bedroom just holding the damn issue in my own hands... And then opening it and finding out that I was right, there was a missing page... I was elated. I still am, just typing this.

So I spent half an hour getting my scanner to work, and I give you the above issues.

Like I said above, feel free to repost however and wherever you want. I want all this to mean something.

In the meantime, I have two more House-themed TV Guide magazines coming to try and get articles from.

#i am so psyched to have found this you have no idea #house #house md #hatecrimes md #malpractice md #gregory house #james wilson #hugh laurie #robert sean leonard #tv guide #magazine #interview #house interview #isn't it bromantic #hilson

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humandisastersquad · 1 year

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hey UK followers, go get your covid boosters ASAP before these bastards take away yet another covid protection. jfc

EDIT: ffs can y'all read the tweet and the actual article, not just the headline, it says how it's 'healthy under-50s' that they're cutting access to boosters for and eventually first and second doses. Yeah, most people who would have gotten them would have by now but there's many reasons that some people haven't and these options should still be open regardless.

This bullshit approach of taking away even the vax part of "vax and relax" is going to kill and disable people. It even quotes the fuckign health minister saying "as the transition continues away from a pandemic emergency response towards pandemic recovery". THERE IS NO RECOVERY WHEN SAID PANDEMIC IS STILL GOING!!!

and YES i know the sun is a murdoch rag that's lower quality than used toilet paper but i shared this particular tweet as a) the tweeter is a reliable and staunch anti-covid advocate and b) for once this piece of shit news source is telling the truth

finally, for those saying that this isn't a big deal as "most people are fully vaccinated", think again. Most vaccine immunity wanes after several months so defining "full vaccination" as having had a primary course nearly 2 years ago is outdated and lulling people into a false sense of security. In an ideal, science-informed, non-covid-minimiser world, we'd be having boosters every 4-6 months so that antibodies don't fall below effective levels.

Basically, this post should be a wake up call to those who haven't gotten their booster if they're eligible for it and for everyone to realise how much more fucked the approach to the pandemic is becoming. not only in the UK but everywhere else tbh

#uk politics #needles cw #ukpol #covid 19 #absolutely insane

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fernreads · 1 year

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America’s Biggest Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains

by Logan Jaffe, Mary Hudetz and Ash Ngu, ProPublica, and Graham Lee Brewer, NBC News

Series: The Repatriation Project

As the United States pushed Native Americans from their lands to make way for westward expansion throughout the 1800s, museums and the federal government encouraged the looting of Indigenous remains, funerary objects and cultural items. Many of the institutions continue to hold these today — and in some cases resist their return despite the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

“We never ceded or relinquished our dead. They were stolen,” James Riding In, then an Arizona State University professor who is Pawnee, said of the unreturned remains.

ProPublica this year is investigating the failure of NAGPRA to bring about the expeditious return of human remains by federally funded universities and museums. Our reporting, in partnership with NBC News, has found that a small group of institutions and government bodies has played an outsized role in the law’s failure.

Ten institutions hold about half of the Native American remains that have not been returned to tribes. These include old and prestigious museums with collections taken from ancestral lands not long after the U.S. government forcibly removed Native Americans from them, as well as state-run institutions that amassed their collections from earthen burial mounds that had protected the dead for hundreds of years. Two are arms of the U.S. government: the Interior Department, which administers the law, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest federally owned utility.

An Interior Department spokesperson said it complies with its legal obligations and that its bureaus (such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Land Management) are not required to begin the repatriation of “culturally unidentifiable human remains” unless a tribe or Native Hawaiian organization makes a formal request.

Tennessee Valley Authority Archaeologist and Tribal Liaison Marianne Shuler said the agency is committed to “partnering with federally recognized tribes as we work through the NAGPRA process.”

The law required institutions to publicly report their holdings and to consult with federally recognized tribes to determine which tribes human remains and objects should be repatriated to. Institutions were meant to consider cultural connections, including oral traditions as well as geographical, biological and archaeological links.

Yet many institutions have interpreted the definition of “cultural affiliation” so narrowly that they’ve been able to dismiss tribes’ connections to ancestors and keep remains and funerary objects. Throughout the 1990s, institutions including the Ohio History Connection and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville thwarted the repatriation process by categorizing everything in their collections that might be subject to the law as “culturally unidentifiable.”

Ohio History Connection’s director of American Indian relations, Alex Wesaw, who is also a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, said that the institution’s original designation of so many collections as culturally unidentifiable may have “been used as a means to keep people on shelves for research and for other things that our institution just doesn’t allow anymore.”

In a statement provided to ProPublica, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville spokesperson said that the university is “actively building relationships with and consulting with Tribal communities.”

ProPublica found that the American Museum of Natural History has not returned some human remains taken from the Southwest, arguing that they are too old to determine which tribes — among dozens in the region — would be the correct ones to repatriate to. In the Midwest, the Illinois State Museum for decades refused to establish a cultural affiliation for Native American human remains that predated the arrival of Europeans in the region in 1673, citing no reliable written records during what archaeologists called the “pre-contact” or “prehistoric” period.

The American Museum of Natural History declined to comment for this story.

In a statement, Illinois State Museum Curator of Anthropology Brooke Morgan said that “archaeological and historical lines of evidence were privileged in determining cultural affiliation” in the mid-1990s, and that “a theoretical line was drawn in 1673.” Morgan attributed the museum’s past approach to a weakness of the law that she said did not encourage multiple tribes to collectively claim cultural affiliation, a practice she said is common today.

As of last month, about 200 institutions — including the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology and the nonprofit Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, Illinois — had repatriated none of the remains of more than 14,000 Native Americans in their collections. Some institutions with no recorded repatriations possess the remains of a single individual; others have as many as a couple thousand.

A University of Kentucky spokesperson told ProPublica the William S. Webb Museum “is committed to repatriating all Native American ancestral remains and funerary belongings, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony to Native nations” and that the institution has recently committed $800,000 toward future efforts.

Jason L. King, the executive director of the Center for American Archeology, said that the institution has complied with the law: “To date, no tribes have requested repatriation of remains or objects from the CAA.”

When the federal repatriation law passed in 1990, the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would take 10 years to repatriate all covered objects and remains to Native American tribes. Today, many tribal historic preservation officers and NAGPRA professionals characterize that estimate as laughable, given that Congress has never fully funded the federal office tasked with overseeing the law and administering consultation and repatriation grants. Author Chip Colwell, a former curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, estimates repatriation will take at least another 70 years to complete. But the Interior Department, now led by the first Native American to serve in a cabinet position, is seeking changes to regulations that would push institutions to complete repatriation within three years. Some who work on repatriation for institutions and tribes have raised concerns about the feasibility of this timeline.

Our investigation included an analysis of records from more than 600 institutions; interviews with more than 100 tribal leaders, museum professionals and others; and the review of nearly 30 years of transcripts from the federal committee that hears disputes related to the law.

D. Rae Gould, executive director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University and a member of the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmucs of Massachusetts, said institutions that don’t want to repatriate often claim there’s inadequate evidence to link ancestral human remains to any living people.

Gould said “one of the faults with the law” is that institutions, and not tribes, have the final say on whether their collections are considered culturally related to the tribes seeking repatriation. “Institutions take advantage of it,” she said.

Some of the nation’s most prestigious museums continue to hold vast collections of remains and funerary objects that could be returned under NAGPRA.

Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, University of California, Berkeley and the Field Museum in Chicago each hold the remains of more than 1,000 Native Americans. Their earliest collections date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, when their curators sought to amass encyclopedic collections of human remains.

Many anthropologists from that time justified large-scale collecting as a way to preserve evidence of what they wrongly believed was an extinct race of “Moundbuilders” — one that predated and was unrelated to Native Americans. Later, after that theory proved to be false, archaeologists still excavated gravesites under a different racist justification: Many scientists who embraced the U.S. eugenics movement used plundered craniums for studies that argued Native Americans were inferior to white people based on their skull sizes.

These colonialist myths were also used to justify the U.S. government’s brutality toward Native Americans and fuel much of the racism that they continue to face today.

“Native Americans have always been the object of study instead of real people,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, chief executive of the Association on American Indian Affairs and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

As the new field of archaeology gained momentum in the 1870s, the Smithsonian Institution struck a deal with U.S. Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to pay each of his soldiers up to $500 — or roughly $14,000 in 2022 dollars — for items such as clothing, weapons and everyday tools sent back to Washington.

“We are desirous of procuring large numbers of complete equipments in the way of dress, ornament, weapons of war” and “in fact everything bearing upon the life and character of the Indians,” Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian, wrote to Sherman on May 22, 1873.

The Smithsonian Institution today holds in storage the remains of roughly 10,000 people, more than any other U.S. museum. However, it reports its repatriation progress under a different law, the National Museum of the American Indian Act. And it does not publicly share information about what it has yet to repatriate with the same detail that NAGPRA requires of institutions it covers. Instead, the Smithsonian shares its inventory lists with tribes, two spokespeople told ProPublica.

Frederic Ward Putnam, who was appointed curator of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology in 1875, commissioned and funded excavations that would become some of the earliest collections at Harvard, the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum. He also helped establish the anthropology department and museum at UC Berkeley — which holds more human remains taken from Native American gravesites than any other U.S. institution that must comply with NAGPRA.

For the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Putnam commissioned the self-taught archaeologist Warren K. Moorehead to lead excavations in southern Ohio to take human remains and “relics” for display. Much of what Moorehead unearthed from Ohio’s Ross and Warren counties became founding collections of the Field Museum.

A few years after Moorehead’s excavations, the American Museum of Natural History co-sponsored rival expeditions to the Southwest; items were looted from New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon and shipped by train to New York. They remain premiere collections of the institution.

As of last month the Field Museum has returned to tribes legal control of 28% of the remains of 1,830 Native Americans it has reported to the National Park Service, which administers the law and keeps inventory data. It still holds at least 1,300 Native American remains.

In a statement, the Field Museum said that data from the park service is out of date. (The museum publishes separate data on its repatriation website that it says is frequently updated and more accurate.) A spokesperson told ProPublica that “all Native American human remains under NAGPRA are available for return.”

The museum has acknowledged that Moorehead’s excavations would not meet today’s standards. But the museum continues to benefit from those collections. Between 2003 and 2005, it accepted $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve its North American Ethnographic and Archaeological collection — including the material excavated by Moorehead — for future use by anthropologists and other researchers. That’s nearly four times more than it received in grants from the National Park Service during the same period to support its repatriation efforts under NAGPRA.

In a statement, the museum said it has the responsibility to care for its collections and that the $400,000 grant was “used for improved stewardship of objects in our care as well as organizing information to better understand provenance and to make records more publicly accessible.”

Records show the Field Museum has categorized all of its collections excavated by Moorehead as culturally unidentifiable. The museum said that in 1995, it notified tribes with historical ties to southern Ohio about those collections but did not receive any requests for repatriation or disposition. Helen Robbins, the museum’s director of repatriation, said that formally linking specific tribes with those sites is challenging, but that it may be possible after consultations with tribes.

The museum’s president and CEO, Julian Siggers, has criticized proposals intended to speed up repatriation. In March 2022, Siggers wrote to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland that if new regulations empowered tribes to request repatriations on the basis of geographical ties to collections rather than cultural ties, museums such as the Field would need more time and money to comply. ProPublica found that the Field Museum has received more federal money to comply with NAGPRA than any other institution in the country.

Robbins said that among the institution’s challenges to repatriation is a lack of funding and staff. “That being said,” added Robbins, “we recognize that much of this work has taken too long.”

From the 1890s through the 1930s, archaeologists carried out large-scale excavations of burial mounds throughout the Midwest and Southeast, regions where federal policy had forcibly pushed tribes from their land. Of the 10 institutions that hold the most human remains in the country, seven are in regions that were inhabited by Indigenous people with mound building cultures, ProPublica found.

Among them are the Ohio History Connection, the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the Illinois State Museum.

Archaeological research suggests that the oldest burial mounds were built roughly 11,000 years ago and that the practice lasted through the 1400s. The oral histories of many present-day tribes link their ancestors to earthen mounds. Their structures and purposes vary, but many include spaces for communal gatherings and platforms for homes and for burying the dead. But some institutions have argued these histories aren’t adequate proof that today’s tribes are the rightful stewards of the human remains and funerary objects removed from the mounds, which therefore should stay in museums.

Like national institutions, local museums likewise make liberal use of the “culturally unidentifiable” designation to resist returning remains. For example, in 1998 the Ohio Historical Society (now Ohio History Connection) categorized its entire collection, which today includes more than 7,100 human remains, as “culturally unidentifiable.” It has made available for return the remains of 17 Native Americans, representing 0.2% of the human remains in its collections.

“It’s tough for folks who worked in the field their entire career and who are coming at it more from a colonial perspective — that what you would find in the ground is yours,” said Wesaw of previous generations’ practices. “That’s not the case anymore. That’s not how we operate.”

For decades, Indigenous people in Ohio have protested the museum’s decisions, claiming in public meetings of the federal committee that oversees how the law is implemented that their oral histories trace back to mound-building cultures. As one commenter, Jean McCoard of the Native American Alliance of Ohio, pointed out in 1997, there are no federally recognized tribes in Ohio because they were forcibly removed. As a result, McCoard argued, archaeologists in the state have been allowed to disassociate ancestral human remains from living people without much opposition. Since the early 1990s, the Native American Alliance of Ohio has advocated for the reburial of all human remains held by Ohio History Connection. It has yet to happen.

Wesaw said that the museum is starting to engage more with tribes to return their ancestors and belongings. Every other month, the museum’s NAGPRA specialist— a newly created position that is fully dedicated to its repatriation work — convenes virtual meetings with leaders from many of the roughly 45 tribes with ancestral ties to Ohio.

But, Wesaw said, the challenges run deep.

“It’s an old museum,” said Wesaw. “Since 1885, there have been a number of archaeologists that have made their careers on the backs of our ancestors pulled out of the ground or mounds. It’s really, truly heartbreaking when you think about that.”

Moreover, ProPublica’s investigation found that some collections were amassed with the help of federal funding. The vast majority of NAGPRA collections held by the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology are from excavations funded by the federal government under the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration from the late 1930s into the 1940s. Kentucky’s rural and impoverished counties held burial mounds, and Washington funded excavations of 48 sites in at least 12 counties to create jobs for the unemployed.

More than 80% of the Webb Museum’s holdings that are subject to return under federal law originated from WPA excavations. The museum, which in 1996 designated every one of its collections as “culturally unidentifiable,” has yet to repatriate any of the roughly 4,500 human remains it has reported to the federal government. However, the museum has recently hired its first NAGPRA coordinator and renewed consultations with tribal nations after decades of avoiding repatriation. A spokesperson told ProPublica that one ongoing repatriation project at the museum will lead to the return of about 15% of the human remains in its collections.

In a statement, a museum spokesperson said that “we recognize the pain caused by past practices” and that the institution plans to commit more resources toward repatriation.

The University of Kentucky recently told ProPublica that it plans to spend more than $800,000 between 2023 and 2025 on repatriation, including the hiring of three more museum staff positions.

In 2010, the Interior Department implemented a new rule that provided a way for institutions to return remains and items without establishing a cultural affiliation between present-day tribes and their ancestors. But, ProPublica found, some institutions have resisted doing so.

Experts say a lack of funding from Congress to the National NAGPRA Program has hampered enforcement of the law. The National Park Service was only recently able to fund one full-time staff position dedicated to investigating claims that institutions are not complying with the law; allegations can range from withholding information from tribes about collections, to not responding to consultation requests, to refusing to repatriate. Previously, the program relied on a part-time investigator.

Moreover, institutions that have violated the law have faced only minuscule fines, and some are not fined at all even after the Interior Department has found wrongdoing. Since 1990, the Interior Department has collected only $59,111.34 from 20 institutions for which it had substantiated allegations. That leaves tribal nations to shoulder the financial and emotional burden of the repatriation work.

The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, a tribe in California, pressured UC Berkeley for years to repatriate more than a thousand ancestral remains, according to the tribe’s attorney. It finally happened in 2018 following a decade-long campaign that involved costly legal wrangling and travel back and forth to Berkeley by the tribes’ leaders.

“To me, there’s no money, there’s no dollar amount, on the work to be done. But the fact is, not every tribe has the same infrastructure and funding that others have,” said Nakia Zavalla, the cultural director for the tribe. “I really feel for those tribes that don’t have the funding, and they’re relying just on federal funds.”

A UC Berkeley spokesperson declined to comment on its interactions with the Santa Ynez Chumash, saying the school wants to prioritize communication with the tribe.

The University of Alabama Museums is among the institutions that have forced tribes into lengthy disputes over repatriation.

In June 2021, seven tribal nations indigenous to what is now the southeastern United States collectively asked the university to return the remains of nearly 6,000 of their ancestors. Their ancestors had been among more than 10,000 whose remains were unearthed by anthropologists and archaeologists between the 1930s and the 1980s from the second-largest mound site in the country. The site, colonially known as Moundville, was an important cultural and trade hub for Muskogean-speaking people between about 1050 and 1650.

Tribes had tried for more than a decade to repatriate Moundville ancestors, but the university had claimed they were all “culturally unidentifiable.” Emails between university and tribal leaders in 2018 show that when the university finally agreed to begin repatriation, it insisted that before it could return the human remains it needed to re-inventory its entire Moundville collection — a process it said would take five years. The “re-inventory” would entail photographing and CT scanning human remains to collect data for future studies, which the tribes opposed.

In October 2021, leaders from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Chickasaw Nation, Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, and Seminole Tribe of Florida brought the issue to the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, which can recommend a finding of cultural affiliation that is not legally binding. (Disputes over these findings are relatively rare.) The tribal leaders submitted a 117-page document detailing how Muskogean-speaking tribes are related and how their shared history can be traced back to the Moundville area long before the arrival of Europeans.

“Our elders tell us that the Muskogean-speaking tribes are related to each other. We have a shared history of colonization and a shared history of rebuilding from it,” Ian Thompson, a tribal historic preservation officer with the Choctaw Nation, told the NAGPRA review committee in 2021.

The tribes eventually forced the largest repatriation in NAGPRA’s history. Last year, the university agreed to return the remains of 10,245 ancestors.

In a statement, a University of Alabama Museums spokesperson said, “To honor and preserve historical and cultural heritage, the proper care of artifacts and ancestral remains of Muskogean-speaking peoples has been and will continue to be imperative to UA.” The university declined to comment further “out of respect for the tribes,” but added that “we look forward to continuing our productive work” with them.

The University of Alabama Museums still holds the remains of more than 2,900 Native Americans.

Many tribal and museum leaders say they are optimistic that a new generation of archaeologists, as well as museum and institutional leaders, want to better comply with the law.

At the University of Oklahoma, for instance, new archaeology department hires were shocked to learn about their predecessors’ failures. Marc Levine, associate curator of archaeology at the university’s Sam Noble Museum, said that when he arrived in 2013, there was more than enough evidence to begin repatriation, but his predecessors hadn’t prioritized the work. Through collaboration with tribal nations, Levine has compiled evidence that would allow thousands of human remains to be repatriated — and NAGPRA work isn’t technically part of his job description. The university has no full-time NAGPRA coordinator. Still, Levine estimates that at the current pace, repatriating the university’s holdings could take another decade.

Prominent institutions such as Harvard have issued public apologies in recent years for past collection practices, even as criticism continues over their failure to complete the work of repatriation. (Harvard did not respond to multiple requests for comment).

Other institutions under fire, such as UC Berkeley, have publicly pledged to prioritize repatriation. And the Society for American Archaeology, a professional organization that argued in a 1986 policy statement that “all human remains should receive appropriate scientific study,” now recommends archaeologists obtain consent from descendant communities before conducting studies.

In October, the Biden administration proposed regulations that would eliminate “culturally unidentifiable” as a designation for human remains, among other changes. Perhaps most significantly, the regulations would direct institutions to defer to tribal nations’ knowledge of their customs, traditions and histories when making repatriation decisions.

But for people who have been doing the work since its passage, NAGPRA was never complicated.

“You either want to do the right thing or you don’t,” said Brown University’s Gould.

She added: “It’s an issue of dignity at this point.”

#article #NAGPRA #native american #indigenous #repatriation #museum repatriation #racism #colonialism #eugenics #anti indigenous violence #anti indigenous racism #death #graves #burials #ask to tag #full article under the cut #bolding mostly mine

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yourfavoritehouseplant · 5 months

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I watched James Somerton's final video, and all I got was this 6 page document

As soon as I learned his final unreleased video was on Revolutionary Girl Utena, I knew I had to hate watch it. I didn't know that I'd spend the following 4 hours making a comprehensive doc on everything I hated about it. But here we are.

The TLDR (is this too long to be a TLDR?)

The intro section, as well as Part 2, are directly plagiarized from wikipedia. The rest is unclear.

He makes a “haha this show is so weird right guys” joke 10 different times

He reads Anthy as so emotionally stunted she literally has to be taught how to think for herself, and believes that being the rose bride makes her feel good

He says that his reading is ‘vastly different” from the rest of the community, before boldly stating that this is because he sees it as a “deeply allegorical and symbolic story”

He sees the sexual abuse as “not to be taken literally”

Insists that the show be separated into parts that are strictly literal and strictly allegorical for the entirety of parts 3 and 4, before making the contradictory move of analyzing characters as allegories during part 5

The only characters that get dedicated sections are Akio and Dios, who he doesn’t believe are the same person.

He says Dios gets his powers by “deflowering women”

He calls Akio, known child predator, a chaotic bisexual

Uses 14 year old SA survivor Anthy’s passive personality to make a joke about her being a bottom

His final point is that Utena was the real prince all along

There are no citations

Anyway, full version for people who hate themselves under the cut. With time codes, because I cite my sources.

Part 1: Intro

This entire section is almost exclusively quoted from the Wikipedia article for Revolutionary Girl Utena. Words have been changed, but the order at which certain topics come up is not. Highlights include:

0:56 In his introduction of Be-Papas, lists the founding members in literally the exact same order as Wikipedia.

1:40-2:00 His list of Be-Papas previous works is lifted entirely from wikipedia, only with the words changed. This leads to a strange moment at 1:52 where he claims Be-papas ‘lent their talents to’ Neon Genesis Evangelion, a show which started production at least a year before Be-papas was founded. On the wikipedia article for Utena, this is instead referring to the previous work of Shinya Hasegawa and Yōji Enokido

4:23 he uses a quote by Yūichirō Oguro describing the production as a “tug of war”. He seems to have lifted this in its entirety from Wikipedia, as he does not cite the actual source it is from (the box set companion book, btw)

As for James Somerton originals, at 0:44 he claims that out of all magical girl series,”none to my knowledge have been more discussed and dissected than the 1997 series Revolutionary Girl Utena” He will go back on this at 5:05, where he states that “Sailor Moon takes the lion’s share of discussion” in regard to influential magical girl anime

Part 2: Part 1

(At least I know I’m not funny, unlike James Somerton)

Speaking of which. Here is every single time he makes a “wow this show is sooooo weird you guys” joke: 6:00, 8:50, 10:40, 10:58, 13:46, 17:07, 24:16, 30:34, 41:19, 48:01

Here’s every time the punchline to the joke is the existence of Nanami, a character who he otherwise completely disregards: 10:56, 12:05, 16:22, 42:40

6:16 Claims that the “Apocalypse saga” and “Akio Ohtori saga’ are two names for the same several episodes, depending on the release. This is untrue. Instead, different releases either only have the Apocalypse saga, or split the episodes into an Akio Ohtori saga and then the Apocalypse saga.

7:58 Claims Utena intervening on Anthy’s behalf begins the first duel. While this happens in the movie, Touga intervenes in the scene he uses clips from (like literally right after the shot he uses in the video). Utena only gets drawn into the duels when Wakaba’s love note to Saionji is posted. Youtuber Noralities’ Utena video also gets this wrong, which makes me wonder if this was copied.

9:09 Claims Akio’s “End of the World” moniker is actually more closely translated to “Apocalypse”. In reality, the translation moves away from a more apocalyptic reading, with 世界の果て (Sekai no hate) apparently translating closer to “the furthest reach of a known world” or “edge of the world”. (Love the implications of this translation, but I digress)

9:10 As can be assumed from the previous point, this means I can’t find any sources that point to them not using the title “apocalypse” for religious reasons

10:10 Uses Anthy’s extreme passivity under her Rose bride persona to make a top/bottom joke. I’m gonna repeat this in case you’re just skimming. He uses a trait that likely stems from years of abuse, (possibly exaggerated by the persona Anthy uses to manipulate people), and uses it to call her a bottom.

He also just doesn’t seem to understand how the whole point of Utena constantly telling Anthy that she's just a normal girl who should make more friends is framed as Utena imposing her will on Anthy, just as much as the previous Engaged have done.

11:54 Apologies in advance for my most “um, actually!” point yet, but technically his statement that Anthy stops being host to the Sword of Dios is wrong. Akio literally pulls a sword out of her chest in the final duel. It's a more evil-looking sword of Dios, granted.

13:02 !!! CANTARELLA SCENE ALERT !!! He interprets it as them fighting over Akio?? Which like. I will allow people to have their own interpretations of vague and symbolic scenes. I will. I swear. This is not technically incorrect. It just makes me want to eat my own intestines.

14:44 Bad Anthy take #1: He states Anthy “is emotionally stunted to the point where she needs people to make decisions for her because she does not know how to think for herself” This ignores several moments of Anthy clearly making her own choices throughout the show, including the suicide attempt Somerton mentions about a minute prior. This also strips Anthy of what little agency she has throughout the story, usually exerted through messing with Utena or Nanami. (The fact that she repeatedly makes choices that contribute to her own abuse is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting parts of her character, and it's a shame that Summerton’s ‘reading’ of the story completely disregards that)

Additionally, he once again reads Utena ‘urging Anthy to think for herself” in the first arc as an unambiguously good move, and not as something critiqued in the show.

14:52 Summerton reads the Swords of hatred as symbolizing men’s hatred specifically. Again, I’m trying not to completely disregard differing interpretations to a show like Utena, but this feels very simplistic, especially considering the harm we see aimed towards Anthy by other women

16:42 Here he claims that his reading of the story seems to be “vastly different” from the bulk of Utena discourse. What is this reading? That the show shouldn’t be read literally. Or, in his words, “[we can interpret] Revolutionary Girl Utena as a deeply allegorical and symbolic story about the struggles of coming of age amidst widespread institutional corruption in a high school and which describes a passive culture of inaction in regard to brazen instances of domestic exploitation in which there is not only a question about the caporeality of the events transpiring but also which events can be taken for granted and which events are meant to signify abstract sociological institutions.” The idea that he believes this is in any way a new reading of the material honestly baffles me.

Part 3: Part 2

17:48 through 18:50 differently quotes the Wikipedia article for postmodernism. He even makes a joke at 17:55 about Wikipedia. Please kill me.

The first three themes he lists at 19:11 are just the three main themes listed on the Revolutionary Girl Utena Wikipedia page. What was that about a “vastly different” reading, James?

You’re gonna have to take my word for it, but this section is so short because it's just him talking about the various ways the story can’t be taken literally. He does, ironically, call this a hot take.

Part 4: Part 3

Here’s where the reading falls apart folks

At 23:15, he states that some things in Utena are allegorically coded, while others are to be taken literally. This is true. However, he seems to take this to mean that some parts of the show are Strictly Literal, while others are Strictly Allegorical for things going on in the Literal World.

This is apparently why he prefers the Anime to the Movie, where there basically is no separation between the Literal and Allegorical

This take is bizarre to me for several reasons, but here is my favorite. At several points, he mentions how Revolutionary Girl Utena is a work of Magical Realism. Magical Realism is literally defined by its blending of the “literal” and “allegorical”, the mix of fantastical elements in a mundane, realistic setting. This idea of the impossibility of a blurred line, that Utena must either have lore where the magic is all real and means nothing, or dedicated allegory segments quarantined from the rest of the story, is contrary to the very idea of Magical Realism.

I can’t help but wonder if Somerton took his mentions of Magical realism from a previous work, due to how little it is consistent with his final argument. Either way, this section suggests a great lack of creativity in his analysis, a shame for such a creative work.

24:36: Shiori slander, for those who care

After this he gets really worked up about people assuming symbolism in everything, even when the author ‘doesn’t make it clear something is symbolic’. He shuts down a reading of a shot in the Lord of the Rings. Miley Cyrus is there? Very The Curtains Were Blue of him.

28:22 Claims that Wakaba is the key to telling where the Strictly Literal segments end and the Strictly Allegorical segments begin. He states that, under this lens, deeply personal moments of character suffering such as all of the sexual abuse and Anthy’s suicide attempt (which he literally cites) should be read as symbolic and be “approached with uncertainty rather than confusion”. (28:24-29:13)

This also somewhat falls apart when you consider Wakaba is the jeep in the movie's car chase

And then he rants about people not liking his Attack on Titan video for a bit. Since its potential symbolism also doesn't follow hard enough rules to be symbolism. Once again, the separation of “fact vs allegory” I haven’t watched AOT, so that's all I’ll say.

Part 5: Part 4

Thank god this part is short. Much like Dios’ on-screen presence.

32:55 Makes the extremely bold claim that Dios is not Akio. As in, never even became Akio. because Dios is Strictly Allegorical.

Just to be a pedant, this is pretty explicitly disproven in the show

Confusingly, both earlier and later he will address these two as the same character.

33:04 he also explains the root of Akio’s name in a tone that suggests this is supplemental information and not like. Literally something he explains out loud in the show?

Part 6: Part 5

This section is nearly entirely about Akio Ohtori. I would like to note that him and Dios are the only characters with dedicated segments.

38:30 The part where he states that Dios gets his powers from deflowering women.

38:46 Claims, once again, that Akio’s abuse of Anthy “may not be literal”.

38:59 “the instance of exploitation here is used because assault has deep roots as indicating that akio's gender is the source of his imbalance” THE ASSAULT IS ABOUT AKIO NOW???

39:45 Bad Anthy take #2: “Anthy’s conformity to the Rose bride is based around the fact that she feels good being subservient because this is the only thing in her life that has ever brought her any kind of positive reward”. This is a direct quote. Anyway, I can’t think of any instances in the show where Anthy’s subservience gives her a positive reward, except maybe when she’s intentionally using it to manipulate others. As for her feeling good being the rose bride. She tries to commit suicide. Dude.

Side tangent, but isn’t this exactly what Akio says during the final 2 episodes? That Anthy enjoys being a witch? Is the main villain, who consistently says things during that very episode that are blatantly false, our source of information for this take? I guess so, since this is the dedicated Akio section.

At 40:20 he decides to introduce the concept of Anthy, Akio, and Utena as stand-ins for wider concepts, which is antithetical to his approach in analysis beforehand

Part 7: Part 6

42:40 he finally acknowledges that he’s been spending too much time talking about Akio, and literally no time on characters like Nanami

46:10 states that Utena’s exclusive motivation “is to protect Anthy from the predatorial intentions of the other dualists”, which disregards the fact, which she states herself, that she was largely participating in the duels and protecting Anthy to feel like a prince

48:04 The part where he says that Akio has ‘chaotic Bi vibes’ in regards to him sleeping with Touga, who is 17 and implied to be a long-term victim

Part 8: Part 7

54:01: His concluding point is that Utena was the real prince all along.

In true Somerton fashion, the video then ends over a scrolling wall of patrons, with not a single citation in sight.

#the autism won again you guys #revolutionary girl utena #james somerton #shoujo kakumei utena #utena #anthy #hbomberguy

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incorrectbatfam · 7 months

Note

If the batfam had tiktok what would they post? What would go the most viral?

Dick does duets where he remixes people who have bad takes. His most viewed one is turning Lex Luthor's corporate monologue into a dubstep track with beat drops every time Superman is mentioned. Equally popular is his mashup of Bruce's yawning with a Sam Smith song.

Jason makes cooking videos. The recipes are normal, but the voiceovers like, "today I'm making a realistic animal-themed vegan bento box 'cause I wanna torment my brother." His most popular video is of him shit-talking Batman while making a pot roast, but it gets deleted because he didn't say "unalive."

Tim does behind-the-scenes videos of his photoshoots where he makes it seem like a complex process with dimmed lights and glitter falling from a ceiling fan, then it cuts to a blurry iPhone pic of a pissed-off Jason with sparkly hair chasing him down a dark hallway.

Damian's is a mix of animal videos, art tutorials, Cheese Viking speedruns, and classical covers of anime intros. But his most popular one is recording his family's reaction to him saying the fuck-word for the first time. He also has a series where he asks people how babies are made to see whose response TikTok takes down first.

Duke posts subtle and wholesome pranks, like leaving Tooth Fairy money under the older batkids' pillows or gradually filling Kate's purse with Jolly Ranchers. His most popular series is when he slowly replaced Damian's furniture with increasingly smaller replicas until the 8th day when Damian finally notices.

Steph does a little bit of everything and often takes suggestions (re: dumb dares) from the comments. Her account started with her just sharing her favorite memes, but her most popular video is when she slept in a bathtub full of Mardi Gras necklaces after an audience poll.

Cass normally posts a mix of dance covers and sign language lessons, but occasionally there will be moments from her daily life that she captures at the right time. Her most viral video is at the grocery store when someone accidentally knocks a coconut onto the ground and she follows it as it rolls to the other end of the store.

Harper and Cullen do a lot of backyard science experiments where they take hypotheses from comments and test them out, like if they can cook steak with firecrackers or make a trampoline out of rubber bands. Their biggest project was turning an abandoned pool into a frog sanctuary.

Barbara keeps most of her daily videos private and her public ones are mainly book hauls, song recs, and computer tips. Her most popular video, even making news articles, is a video where she breaks down how planned obsolesce works and calling out big tech companies.

Bruce has a secret account that no one knows about. He doesn't post anything. He just lurks because he wants to be the first like and comment whenever his kids post.

2K notes · View notes

btsvt-bar · 2 months

Text

FEVER

pairing ꩜ journalist!mingyu x afab!reader x journalist!wonwoo

synopsis ꩜ a promotion at work, the new political reporter and a few bottles of wine. writing for a prestigious newspaper can be much more exciting than it seems. it all depends on who your co-workers are.

content/genre ꩜ frenemies with benefits, threesome, smut (18+ mdni)

author's note ꩜ not proofread . comments are apreciated! lmk if you wanna be tagged on part 2 ♡

warnings under the cut!

part one | part two

warnings ꩜ smut, threesome, anal sex, oral (m. receiving), masturbation (f. and m. receiving), cum swallowing, double penetration, alcohol consumption, tipsy sex, sex in the workplace, voyeurism, tit sucking, jacuzzi sex, protected sex. lmk if i forgot something important.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.・。.・゜✭・

chapter one

The newsroom of the largest newspaper in the city of Chicago and the Great Lakes region was exactly what one could expect: true chaos. Phones ringing all the time, people talking loudly, papers scattered in the corners, journalists typing at full speed to deliver their articles in time… the place was a huge mess, but you wouldn't trade it for the world.

You walk quickly among the dozens of tables scattered irregularly across the 6th floor of the building. Being the responsible for the entertainment and arts column, you needed to submit an unfinished article in less than two hours.

The click of your white scarpins were practically inaudible over the cacophony of the room. A little out of breath, you arrive at your table and drop your red bag on the dark wooden tabletop with an audible thump, drawing Kim Mingyu's attention.

The black-haired man looks away from the screen in front of him and starts analyzing your outfit. From the pants tight enough to outline your ass perfectly, the refined silk blouse showing just enough cleavage and the small crucifix that rested near your throat. Mingyu lets out a sigh, he hadn't been with you in bed for three hours and he already wanted to drag you back.

"Did you lose something here on my desk, Kim?" you question in a mocking tone when you notice him staring. Of course you wouldn't miss the opportunity to tease him.

"Not really" he responds by getting up and slowly approaching you. A roguish smile tugs at his mouth. "You, on the other hand, lost a pair of lace panties at my place."

"Mingyu!" you shriek and slap the man's strong chest.

"Relax, darling. No one listened." he informs with a wink. "Would you like a coffee? You look tired, didn't you sleep well?"

The worst part of spending the night with him was his inflated ego the next day.

"You are ridiculous."

In a completely childish act, you throw him a middle finger. Mingyu laughs and leaves to grab a coffee for the two of you.

If one asked any Chicago Tribune employee who y/n y/l/n and Kim Mingyu are, they would, undoubtedly, say "the biggest rivals who have ever worked here".

The two of you had been on the newspaper's journalistic team since the beginning of college. You started together as interns, and since then fought like cat and dog. You weren’t sure, but you thought your enmity started with an argument in the archives room. You just knew that "hating" Kim Mingyu in front of everyone was as natural as breathing.

What most people didn't know was that you don’t replicate Tom & Jerry's behavior when you are alone. Protected from curious eyes, you enjoyed your time in a much more pleasurable way.

Literally.

You hated the term "friends with benefits" to describe what you had with Mingyu. Yes, you were friends outside of work. And yes, you had sex occasionally. But you hated people's need to label things, so you preferred to think of Mingyu as just a friend. The "frenemies" dynamic worked well, both sides were comfortable with it.

And that was enough for now.

"I already added sugar. Two small spoons, right? "Mingyu declares as he approaches to hand over the mug filled with steaming coffee.

"Yes, thank you." you offer a grateful smile and take a small sip of the dark liquid.

You weren’t even surprised that he knew how you had your coffee, you’ve had many breakfasts together.

"Good morning!" Yunjin, your best friend, greets you with a beaming smile. "Have you seen Dino?" the youngest questions as she approaches you. "I need to get a file from his computer."

You look back at your friend's table and notice his backpack on the sideboard, but the man himself was nowhere to be found.

"Lipinski asked him to go to her office about twenty minutes ago." Mingyu responds without looking away from the computer screen. "I have no idea why."

You frown at the information.

"Weird." Yunjin comments when turning on her own computer.

"He’ll be back" you state with a shrug.

"Is he being fired?" Yunjin freaks out.

"He wasn't fired. "Mingyu laughs, amused by the situation.

"And how are you so sure?"

Mingyu points something behind you. You turn your head in sync with Yunjin, and see Dino walking towards the three of you. And he wasn't alone.

The man accompanying Dino wore a black suit, white t-shirt and a dark blue tie with white stripes. He was taller than Dino by a good few inches and, even in a suit, it was noticeable that he took care of his physique and probably went to the gym regularly. However, what left you and Yunjin flustered was his beauty.

"Guys, meet our new political journalist." Dino introduces the man.

"Jeon Wonwoo." says as he extends his hand to Yunjin, who was closer to him.

"Yunjin, fashion and lifestyle." the woman introduces herself by taking his hand.

Wonwoo addresses you with expectation in his eyes. His eyes, you notice, are striking and intense. The kind that seems to be able to read your soul with just one look.

"y/n, entertainment and arts."

Suddenly, you feel like the room is too hot.

Maybe it was because of the man in front of you, who was undeniably handsome and seemed too good to be true. Or maybe it was his baritone voice. You hadn't expected the deep, husky tone that came out of his full, heart-shaped lips.

You bite her lower lip to contain a sigh and shake his hand eagerly.

"Mingyu, sports." His face contorts a little, as if he’d already decided that he didn't like Wonwoo.

"Nice to meet you all" Wonwoo says with a friendly smile and adjusts his glasses over his elegant nose.

"Your table should arrive tomorrow." Dino says, drawing everyone’s attention. "You can use mine for today, I'm going to do some field work and I'll be out all day." the youngest explains as he gathers his belongings and puts them inside his backpack. "Now, I need to take you to HR. Let 's go".

Wonwoo agrees and leaves his backpack on the table. The two head to the elevator hall with Dino explaining more about how the newsroom works.

"I call dibs!" you exclaim as soon as you’re sure Wonwoo can’t hear you.

"Hey, not fair!" Yunjin whimpers.

"You already have Dino"

"And you already have Mingyu."

"Dibs… on what?" Mingyu raises his eyebrow when asking. He wasn't even sure if he even wanted to know what the two of you were talking about.

"To fuck him." Yunjin responds as if it was obvious, gesturing with her hand at the same time. "The new guy is pretty hot, if you ask me."

"Your bad taste scares me."

Mingyu's handsome features contort into a frown. He knew he had no right to be jealous of you, but he couldn't help it. It was difficult, even more so when it directly affected his ego. The thought that he might no longer be the only one to have your attention made him slightly irritated.

"Are you jealous?" you tease as you give the man a knowing look.

"He's dying of jealousy." Yunjin says in disbelief. "I never thought I would see Kim Mingyu like this."

"In your dreams, darlings." he says with a mocking tone and goes back to work. "I need to finish my article".

You exchange a glance with Yunjin and you two let out an amused laugh. You take a sip of your almost cold coffee and risk one last look in Mingyu's direction.

The man was frowning and pouting like a toddler being denied something for the first time.

"Don’t be like that. I promise you’ll always be my favorite." you smile flirtatiously.

Totally out of character, Mingyu offers a shy smile.

"You make it sound so sweet when you lie to me" he snorts and you laugh at the comment, finding the whole situation funny as hell.

Everyone returns to their tasks, but the slight irrational jealousy remains in Mingyu’s thoughts. He lets out an unhappy sigh, feeling extremely stupid.

The brunette takes a few deep breaths in an attempt to refocus on finishing the basketball game schedule he needed to deliver. For now, that’s all he could do.

chapter two

It was Wednesday and the Chicago Tribune newsroom was practically empty. You, Mingyu, Wonwoo and two other journalists were the only ones there.

You feel like you’re being watched and look around, finding Mingyu staring from his desk, his bottom lip casually caught between his teeth. You could practically hear his mind engines turning.

You were very angry at him the night before. Out of jealousy, Mingyu was a total dick to you and to Wonwoo at the company dinner. However, after you shouted at him for around 20 minutes and he fingered you in the backseat of his car, you calmed down a bit. You still pretended to be mad, but you weren’t one to really hold on to grudges.

"I need your help in the archives room. "Mingyu says, shaking you out of your own thoughts.

"Is it difficult for you to find a file on your own?" you tease, tilting your head mockingly.

Mingyu smirks.

"It would be easier if the person who organized it had a decent system, my dear." he teases, remembering why you supposedly hated each other. The man gets up and says: "Let's go, I don't have all day".

You roll your eyes at him, but stand up anyways. He leads the way, and the two of you leave an unaware Wonwoo behind.

Mingyu opens the heavy wooden door and lets you get in first. The lights flickered a few times before stabilizing. Several silver shelves filled with white folders were scattered around the place, as well as some wooden tables and chairs. In the right corner, they had a copy machine and other stationery items that could help journalists' research.

You walk a few inches to the first shelf and only then realize that Mingyu didn't say what he was looking for. "What do you want to find?"

"Archives about the 1958 World Cup."

"Hm... I don't know if we'll have much on the subject" you state as you walk towards the shelves at the end of one of the aisles. "This is the stupidest thing to find around here, why would you even… " you’re cut off when Mingyu turns you around to face him.

He presses you against the low sideboard against the back wall of the room. Your eyes widened, not understanding what was happening. Mingyu runs his large hand across your cheek. He wets his lips, staring at yours eagerly.

"Is it okay if I say ‘shut up and kiss me’?"

You roll your eyes, but grab the man by his tie and pull him in for a kiss. Mingyu lets out a sound of approval, satisfied with your attitude. He lifts you and places you on the sideboard, positioning himself between your legs.

Mingyu raises his hands to your ass and squeezes hard, bringing you even closer. You tangle a hand in his hair, while the other one lightly scratches his nape just the way you knew he liked. Your tongues caress each other with dexterity, having already done this hundreds of times.

The kiss wasn't at a desperate pace with a hint of anger, like it was the last time you hooked up. It seemed like Mingyu wanted to prove a point. He kissed you as if he wanted to mark you as his. And you loved it. The world seemed to disappear when you kissed like that. An earthquake could happen, none of you would notice.

The man separates your lips and starts distributing wet kisses across your jaw and neck. You let your head fall back, giving him more space to explore. Mingyu opens the buttons on the black blouse you wear and notices you weren’t wearing a bra. He lets out a grunt as he raises his strong hands calmly; touching you gently. Too gently. You start to get impatient, knowing you didn't have much time before someone else showed up.

Mingyu wraps his lips around your right nipple, making you let out a soft moan. He gives it a few seconds of attention before moving on to the other and repeating the same process of giving small licks and pulling away with a gentle brush of his teeth. He kisses up from your boobs to your neck, his hands stripping you out of your black skirt in the same rhythm.

"You can stop there." you pull the man by his dark locks when he tries to give you a hickey near your collarbone. You hated being marked in visible places.

"Sorry…" the look he gives you is warm and without the slightest trace of regret. His swollen lips pull back into a sly smile and you roll your eyes out of habit. With no more time to waste, the journalist opens the button on his own pants while you take care of removing your panties.

And that's when you see him. If Mingyu turned his face a little, he would see him too.

Precariously leaning on a file box, two hallways away, was Jeon Wonwoo. His eyes widen when he realizes that you discovered him there. You bite your lower lip and wink at him, making it clear that everything was fine.

Wonwoo lets out a breath, which he hadn't even realized he was holding until then. The man didn't intend to be there. He had gone to the files room after you, at Lipinski's request. He didn't expect to find his coworkers about to have sex.

And he didn't expect to want to stay there to watch.

Suddenly feeling bewildered, Wonwoo backs up until his back rests against the white cabinets that were adjacent to the bookshelf that hid him. He brings his right hand to his forehead and presses the space between his eyebrows with his fingertips.

The room was too hot, the black tie suffocated him, the tailored trousers felt like a prison. A little desperate, he runs his hand through his hair, removing it from his sweaty forehead. Your low moans pull him back to the reality of where he was and what was happening just a feet away from him. He straightens his body, ready to get out of there.

However, he can't leave without taking one last look.

Mingyu hid his face in your neck as he fucked you in a controlled tempo. You hugged him tightly, with your lower lip trapped between your teeth in an attempt to contain your moans.

As if they were magnets, your eyes soon meet Wonwoo's again. You smirk, amused to know he was still there.

With his hands shaking, the man lets out a tortured sigh and walks away, leaving the room as quickly and silently as possible.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.・。.・゜✭・

"I need to say something." you declare as you try to adjust the black blouse on your body. It was completely crumpled, but whatever.

"Go ahead” Mingyu turns to look at you.

You open and close your mouth several times, unsure of how to start the sentence. As someone whose job was the use of words, you were definitely failing to communicate.

"I didn't want to talk when we were... " you interrupted the sentence, implying what they were doing. "Wonwoo saw us."

Mingyu stops trying to straighten his messy hair and looks at you suspiciously, as if you had just told him that you knew which numbers would be drawn in the lottery.

"And that’s a problem because…?"

"Why aren't you nervous about this? "you question, finding the man’s reaction weird.

You tilt your head, analyzing the man in front of you. He was strangely calm for someone who had just heard that the new nemesis had seen naked the woman he had been jealous of a few days ago.

"What do you think he's going to do? Go out and tell everyone he saw us here?" he rolls his eyes and tucks the hem of his white blouse into his pants. "As if."

"Of course not, you moron. I thought you would freak out for another reason."

"And what reason could that be?" Mingyu asks, holding your chin with his long fingers, forcing you to look at him.

"Nevermind."

Mingyu shrugs, it was in his best interest to leave that subject aside. You try to adjust your black skirt, unzipping at the back to make the process easier.

"How much did he see?" Mingyu asks himself as he leans against the sideboard, waiting for you.

"I don't know when he arrived, but I saw him before you... oh, you know."

"Before I fucked you?" Mingyu laughs loudly and you slap his chest, suddenly feeling ashamed. "Who knows, maybe he learned a thing or two…"

"You are annoying, Kim Mingyu." you let an amused smile escape your lips.

You turn around in a silent request for help from the man, who zips up your skirt.

"And you love it, my dear" Mingyu kisses your neck as he carefully pulls the zipper up. "Now, move that beautiful ass of yours. We have deadlines." he gives you a playful slap on the butt before heading to the exit.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.・。.・゜✭・

read part two!

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