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THREAD: My @nybooks piece (!) on @Laurence_Ralph's THE TORTURE LETTERS––and, by extension, the thorny questions of how and why to write about brutality––is now available online. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/07/02/legacy-police-torture-chicago/
Ralph uses open letters to plumb Chicago's legacy of police torture. This is a subject I've written about before, centrally in this reported essay about the city's police torture reparations initiative for @the_point_mag / @Longreads https://thepointmag.com/politics/this-too-was-history-battle-police-torture-reparations-chicago-schools/
If you don't know the story, it's a harrowing one. But Ralph's major accomplishment, on my reading, lies less with the story he tells and more with how he goes about telling it.
The open letters help him circumvent the pitfalls of "brutality writing"––and make something new.
The open letters help him circumvent the pitfalls of "brutality writing"––and make something new.
Not all reviewers have seen it this way. The review in @thenation faulted the open letters for muddying the storyline. A piece in @SouthSideWeekly argued that the device makes Ralph's voice too central to a story fundamentally about others...
I don't want to just wave off these critiques. All writing is fraught with dangers. Dodge one and you hit another. But: Having read a great deal about torture in general, and Chicago police torture specifically, I feel Ralph is making a valuable intervention.
I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to think and write about it. Thanks to editor @janaprikryl and everyone else who helped at @nybooks. Back to work.
