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That New-Fangled Technology
Inside Their World is the photo series that follows the lives of some of the returned families at the Yearning for Zion ranch.
On July 17 and 18, the photographer Stephanie Sinclair was allowed to visit the Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado, Tex., and given rare access to the members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or F.L.D.S., who live there.
One of the photos is better than all the rest combined.
“Harold Black Jr., 22, Levi Steed, 15, Guy Jessop, 48, and Jacob Johnson, 30 (left to right), check their cellphones in front of Jacob’s house.”
Since when does a group of three or more men come together in a circle to “check their cellphones”? Perhaps, instead they were erasing vital information, like, I don’t know, the birth dates of their youngest wives.
Or maybe I’m too cynical. This could merely be a “what exactly do these things do again?” meeting.
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“I don’t even like the tea set.”
Now this is how you do guilt. Of her dead mother’s furniture, Bonnie Barrett Stretch says,
“I felt responsible for them — my mother had taken such good care of them, so naturally I had to, or I wouldn’t be a good daughter,” she says. “I guess my relationship with the furniture was something like my relationship with her; I was never sure that I was good enough.”
And this is how you do creepy.
Courtney Monroe, 42, a homemaker in Clayton, Del., has a massive mahogany sideboard in her dining room. On top of it are a silver tea set and silver candlesticks, set up in exactly the same way they were when they belonged to her grandmother and later her father, now both dead.
“I don’t even like the tea set,” Mrs. Monroe says, “but it goes with the sideboard, because that’s where it was when I grew up.”
This makes me mostly glad that there aren’t any pieces I really want to inherit. All the stuff from my childhood is gone, dispersed to Salvation Army, relatives’ houses, or the garbage.
None of it would go with my aesthetic, anyway, but if it were here, you can be sure that my great big sense of obligation would want to keep it in the apartment.
And even if it came with a four-story townhouse (which it wouldn’t), living intimately with other people’s history is just not for me.
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Polygamist Sect Returns Home
And the reunited families are happy but still upheaved, as the courts lose another murky battle to protect the children in these groups.
My question is only marginally related, though. Why is it always the women who bear the physical manifestation of being “different”?
Erich Schlegel/The Dallas Morning News, via Associated Press
See more here.
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Poop Patrol
Have you ever thought twice about how they enforce the “pooper scooper” law? I always imagined it was like flagrant jaywalking; if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the wrong cop sees you, you might be looking at a ticket. Apparently, I was wrong.
It was just after dawn when Theo Otibu began prowling Ditmas Park in Brooklyn in his unmarked Sanitation Department car. He scanned the sidewalk for an elusive prey, one known only by the droppings of its best friend: the dog owner who does not scoop.
A former police officer in Ghana and UN monitor in Bosnia, Mr. Otibu now devotes his attention to the intricacies of negligent dog owner behavior.
He could see all the telltale signs of negligent intent: the irritated expression, the hurried pace, the absence of a plastic bag in the pocket. “People who pick up have time,” he said earlier. “You can look at some people right away and say, ‘This person is not going to pick up after their dog.’ ”
Jacob Silberberg for The New York Times
There are fourteen similar officers in the Sanitation Department fleet. They patrol the five boroughs looking for violators, and make every effort to hand each of them a ticket, to which is attached a $100 fine. However, it’s not always so easy.
Without identification, agents cannot write summonses, and a number of dog owners sometimes refuse to show ID or claim to have left it at home. Leaving dog waste is a health code violation, not an arrestable offense, so in those cases, agents have to let the matter drop.
I’m not a fan of the gleeful way law enforcement (of any kind) often goes after its prey:
“I have him for the off-leash, but now I’m going to wait to see if he picks up.”
But I also hope this knowledge doesn’t encourage dog owners to go walking, confident in their immunity, without baggies or ID.
