david sedaris personal essays

7 essays that every David Sedaris fan should read

The latest book from writer David Sedaris, Calypso , hits shelves on Tuesday, adding yet another tome to the writer's stellar collection. The book is his 12th overall , which means that after you're done, there's still a whole body of work to continue to explore.

And, yet, with so many books, essays, and stories circulating from his 25 year career, it can be daunting for both newcomers and long-time fans alike to figure out where to jump in to Sedaris' stack of writing.

The good new is: No matter where you start, in everything he does, Sedaris' acerbic humor crackles but it's not without heart. He has a way of telling stories that can come right up to the line of being mean and then deftly flipping the narrative, revealing a warm core at the center of it all. And, sometimes, his stories even move us to tears.

Whether it's his early collections, like Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day , or his more recent reflections in Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls , Sedaris particular brand of emotional gymnastics is a theme that stretches through all of his work and still remains fresh 12 books later.

But, just in case you need some advice of where to start reading, we've collected a few of our favorite essays to help guide you through the wonderful world of David Sedaris.

1. "Santaland Diaries" from various books

The piece that started it all. "Santaland Diaries" tells the tale of Sedaris' absurdity-filled time as an elf at Macy's Santa display. And true to form, Sedaris' recounting is filled with his trademark brand of curmudgeonly humor. The story was first read on NPR in 1992, and an extended version was also read on This American Life and appeared in his books Barrel Fever and Holidays On Ice . "Santaland Diaries" didn't just give Sedaris his big break (it was adapted into a pretty popular one-man play), it also has become a holiday tradition at NPR .

-Marcus Gilmer

2. "Repeat After Me" from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Perhaps the pitch-perfect Sedaris essay. "Repeat After Me" is full of laughs as Sedaris explores his sister Lisa's life — including her parrot Henry — in his typical deadpan style. But the essay gets a bit meta, addressing the way the family feels about Sedaris' use of their lives and foibles in his writing. While Sedaris churns chuckles out of Lisa, he doesn't spare himself, either, especially as the story takes a turn for the serious. By the end, the essay has been flipped on its head, closing on a moment of self-awareness and emotional catharsis that lands a hefty — and totally earned — emotional punch.

- Marcus Gilmer

3. "You Can't Kill The Rooster" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

Like "Repeat After Me," "You Can't Kill The Rooster" explores Sedaris' relationship with one of his siblings. But unlike "Repeat," "Rooster" keeps things much lighter due in large part to the personalities involved. The Rooster of the title is actually Sedaris' youngest sibling, little brother Paul, who was born in North Carolina (unlike the rest of the kids) and grew to possess some unique Southern eccentricities, both sweet and profane, that Sedaris revels in sharing. Ultimately, "Rooster" doesn't take the serious turn that "Repeat After Me" does, but it certainly doesn't lack for warmth, charm, and a resounding sense of familial love.

4. "Six to Eight Black Men" from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

One of the fun parts of reading a David Sedaris essay is that you never know what twist or turn will come next as he documents his adventures. In his essay, “6 to 8 Black Men,” Sedaris deconstructs the Santa myth in the Netherlands, which is an already absurd story in and of itself. (For instance, in the Netherlands, Santa travels via boat and white horse, and is accompanied by six to eight black men who used to slaves until slavery was abolished, and now they’re just referred to as “friends.”)

But it’s not just that myth that makes the story so great, it’s Sedaris’ snarky reactions that makes this essay so unforgettable. “I think history has proven that something usually comes between slavery and friendship, a period of time marked not by cookies and quiet times beside the fire but by bloodshed and mutual hostility,” he writes. Ultimately, “6 to 8 Black Men” is the perfect showcase of the signature wit that made David Sedaris a household name.

-MJ Franklin

5. "Now We Are Five" from The New Yorker

In his essay “Now We Are Five,” Sedaris writes about the death of his youngest sister Tiffany, who died by suicide in 2013. The essay starts off with a typical David Sedaris observation about an awkward situation: “Now, though, there weren’t six, only five. ‘And you can’t really say, ‘There used to be six,’’ I told my sister Lisa. ‘It just makes people uncomfortable,’” he writes.

But what follows is a moving eulogy about the beautiful, complicated, unforgettable life that his sister Tiffany lived. The moving tribute reiterates that humor isn’t what makes Sedaris’ writing great; it’s his heart.

Listen to the essay here .

6. "The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes" recorded for This American Life .

The joy of reading David Sedaris is way you experience a wave of epiphanies as you pour through each his humorous stories, and "The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes" is no exception. "Red Shoes" is a short essay about Sedaris trying to explain the insane traditions of our culture — like the Easter bunny — to a beginners French class. In just a few short pages, Sedaris will have you cracking up profusely and leave you with a smile on your face as his limited French language skills create confusion when he shares the tradition with classmates who are unfamiliar with the character.

You can hear him read the story here for the City Arts and Lectures audience in San Fransisco.

- Martha Tesema

7. " Letting Go" from The New Yorker

In "Letting Go," Sedaris explores his relationship with his mother through the lens of their shared smoking habit. It's a short story regarding his views on the act, but in his usual hilarious way, Sedaris breaks down the minute process of cigarette selection, what runs through his mind during smoking sessions, his uncle's death from lung cancer, and the specter of his mother's hauntingly similar cough. It's electric writing about something that might seem so mundane if it was penned by anyone other than the brilliant Sedaris.

You can read "Letting Go" here .

-Martha Tesema

These essays are just a start, just a few examples of Sedaris' deep — and growing — pile of work so there's much more to dig through if you like what you've read here.

Happy reading.

Topics Books

Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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25 great essays and short stories by david sedaris, you can't kill the rooster, us and them, go carolina, it's catching, our perfect summer, old lady down the hall, the man who mistook his hat for a meal, now we are five, laugh, kookaburra, journey into night, the santaland diaries, when you are engulfed in flames, company man, the shadow of your smile, my finances, in brief, why aren’t you laughing by david sedaris, see also..., 150 great articles and essays.

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Happy-Go-Lucky

Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask—or not—was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As  Happy-Go-Lucky  opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes.

But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine.

As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger’s teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone’s son. And back on the road, he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary, storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs, walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Trump 2024. Black Lives Matter.

In  Happy-Go-Lucky,  David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.

Buy "Happy-Go-Lucky"

About david sedaris.

David Sedaris is the bestselling author of the books Calypso, Theft By Finding , Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Naked, and Barrel Fever . He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and BBC Radio 4.

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5 of David Sedaris' Funniest Essays

Happy 57th birthday to David Sedaris: writer; humorist; former shopping mall elf; nudist colony visitor; smoking-quitter; frequent flyer; boyfriend to Hugh; brother to Amy, Tiffany, Paul, Lisa, Gretchen. In eight collections of essays including the most recent, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, Sedaris delivers wry observations of his family, friends, self, and the weird people with whom he finds himself.

To celebrate another year of Sedaris, let's take a look at five of his funniest essays.

"SantaLand Diaries"

This classic Sedaris essay is even better post-Christmas. He describes his experience working as an elf at Macy's in New York City. He first read the story on NPR in 1992, and it never gets old.

"Interpreters for the deaf came and taught us to sign, 'Merry Christmas! I am Santa's helper.' Thy told us to speak as we sign and use bold, clear voices and bright facial expressions. They taught us to say,'You are a very pretty boy/girl! I love you! Do you want a surprise?'

My sister Amy lives above a deaf girl and has learned quite a bit of sign language. She taught some to me and so now I am able to say, 'Santa has a tumor in his head the size of an olive. Maybe it will go away tomorrow but I don't think so.'"

"Long Way Home"

Sedaris recounts how he was burgled while vacationing in Oahu, Hawaii. The thief took his laptop and passport, which had his ever-important visa. Calamity ensues.

"There are only two places to get robbed: TV and the real world. In the real world, if you're lucky, the policeman who answers your call will wonder what kind of computer it was. Don't let this get your hopes up. Chances are he's asking only because he has a software question."

"Standing By"

As a frequent traveler, Sedaris has more than his fair share of airport horror stories. His observations are very timely, and guarantee a laugh while you're waiting for a delayed flight.

"Fly enough, and you learn to go braindead when you have to. One minute you're bending to unlace your shoes, and the next thing you know you're paying fourteen dollars for a fruit cup, wondering, How did I get here?"

"Letting Go"

Sedaris details his history as a smoker, including his cigarette selection process and how his habit allowed him to bond with his mother.

"I may have been a Boy Scout for only two years, but the motto stuck with me forever: 'Be Prepared.' This does not mean 'Be Prepared to Ask People for Shit'; it means 'Think Ahead and Plan Accordingly, Especially in Regard to Your Vices.'"

"Author, Author?"

Sedaris recalls how his book tours are bookended by humorous trips to Costco. In the first visit to Costco, he bought a pound of condoms as a gift.

"I'd later wonder what the TSA inspectors must have thought. My tour began, and every few days, upon arriving in some new city, I'd find a slip of paper in my suitcase, the kind they throw in after going through all your stuff. Five dress shirts, three pairs of pants, underwear, a cop kit full of Band-Aids and safety pins, two neckties, and several hundred rubbers — what sort of person does the mind cobble together from these ingredients?"

Bon anniversaire, David! Thank goodness for Sedaris.

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'Let's Explore': David Sedaris On His Public Private Life

The best-selling author and humorist has kept journals for 36 years. Those diaries have been the jumping-off point for the personal essays that appear in his collections, including Me Talk Pretty One Day and Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls. (Originally broadcast on April 24, 2013.)

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David Sedaris Breaks Down His Writing Process: Keep a Diary, Carry a Notebook, Read Out Loud, Abandon Hope

in Writing | June 27th, 2017 Leave a Comment

When did you first hear David Sedaris? Nor­mal­ly in the case of a writer, let alone one of the most famous and suc­cess­ful writ­ers alive, the ques­tion would be when you first read him, but Sedaris’ writ­ing voice has nev­er real­ly exist­ed apart from his actu­al voice. He first became famous in 1992 when Nation­al Pub­lic Radio aired his read­ing of the  “San­ta­land Diaries,”  a piece lit­er­al­ly con­struct­ed from diaries kept while he worked in San­ta­land, the Christ­mas vil­lage at Macy’s, as an elf. Though that break illus­trates the impor­tance of what we might call two pil­lars of Sedaris’ writ­ing process, nobody in his enor­mous fan­base-to-be gave it much thought at the time — they just want­ed to hear more of his hilar­i­ous sto­ry­telling.

A quar­ter-cen­tu­ry lat­er, Sedaris has released more diaries — many more diaries — to his ador­ing pub­lic in the form of  Theft by Find­ing , a hefty vol­ume of select­ed entries writ­ten between 1977 and 2002. They give addi­tion­al insight into not just the events and char­ac­ters involved in the per­son­al essays com­piled in best­selling books like  Naked ,  Me Talk Pret­ty One Day , and  Dress Your Fam­i­ly in Cor­duroy and Den­im , but also into his writ­ing process itself. “A woman on  All Things Con­sid­ered wrote a book of advice called  If You Want to Write and men­tioned the impor­tance of keep­ing a diary ,” a 26-year-old Sedaris writes in an entry from 1983. “After a while you’d stop being forced and pre­ten­tious and become hon­est and unafraid of your thoughts.”

Obvi­ous­ly he did­n’t need that advice at the time, since even then keep­ing a diary had already become the first pil­lar of the David Sedaris writ­ing process. “I start­ed writ­ing one after­noon when I was twen­ty, and ever since then I have writ­ten every day,” he once told the  New York­er , also a pub­lish­er of his sto­ries . “At first I had to force myself. Then it became part of my iden­ti­ty, and I did it with­out think­ing.” Most of what he writes in his diary each and every morn­ing he describes as “just whin­ing,” but “every so often there’ll be some­thing I can use lat­er: a joke, a descrip­tion, a quote.”

The entries lat­er cohere, along with oth­er ideas and expe­ri­ences, into his wide­ly read sto­ries. One such piece began, Sedaris told  Fast Com­pa­ny ’s Kristin Hohenadel , as “a diary entry from a trip to Ams­ter­dam. He met a col­lege kid who told him he’d learned that the first per­son to reach the age of 200 had already been born.” Then, Sedaris said, “I spec­u­lat­ed that the first per­son to reach the age of 200 would be my father. And then I attached it to some­thing else that had been in my diary, that all my dad talks about is me get­ting a colonoscopy. So I con­nect­ed the 200-year-old man to my father want­i­ng me to get a colonoscopy, and that became the sto­ry.”

Only con­nect, as E.M. Forster said, but you do need mate­r­i­al to con­nect in the first place. Hence the sec­ond pil­lar of the process:  car­ry­ing a note­book . To the  Mis­souri Review Sedaris described him­self as less fun­ny than obser­vant, adding that “everybody’s got an eye for some­thing. The only dif­fer­ence is that I car­ry around a note­book in my front pock­et. I write every­thing down, and it helps me recall things,” espe­cial­ly for lat­er inclu­sion in his diary. When he pub­licly opened his note­book at the request of a red­di­tor while doing an AMA a few years ago, he found the words, “Ille­gal met­al sharks… white skin classy… dri­ver’s name is free Time… rats eat coconuts… beau­ti­ful place city, not beau­ti­ful…”

These cryp­tic lines, he explained, were “notes I wrote in the Mekong delta a few weeks ago. A Viet­namese woman was giv­ing me a lit­tle tour, and this is what I jot­ted down in my note­book.” For instance, “I was ask­ing about all the women whom I saw on motor scoot­ers wear­ing opera gloves, and masks that cov­ered every­thing but their eyes. And the dri­ver told me they were try­ing to keep their skin white, because it’s just classier. Tan skin means you’re a farmer. So that’s some­thing I remem­bered from our con­ver­sa­tion, so when I tran­scribe my note­book into my diary, I added all of that.” And one day his read­ers may well see this frag­ment of life that caught his atten­tion appear again, but as part of a coher­ent, pol­ished nar­ra­tive whole.

The bet­ter part of that pol­ish­ing hap­pens through the prac­tice of read­ing, and revis­ing, in front of an audi­ence . “Dur­ing his bian­nu­al mul­ti­c­i­ty lec­ture tours, Sedaris says he rou­tine­ly notices imper­fec­tions in the text sim­ply through the act of read­ing aloud to oth­er peo­ple,” writes Hohenadel. “He cir­cles acci­den­tal rhymes or close­ly repeat­ed words, or words that sound alike — like night and nightlife — in the same sen­tence, rewrit­ing after each read­ing and try­ing out revi­sions dur­ing the next stop on his tour.” When a pas­sage gets laughs from the audi­ence, he pen­cils in a check mark beside it; when one gets coughs (which he likens to “a ham­mer dri­ving a nail into your cof­fin”), he draws a skull. “On the page it seems like I’m try­ing too hard, and that’s one of the things I can usu­al­ly catch when I’m read­ing out loud,” he says, whether his writ­ing “sounds a lit­tle too obvi­ous” or “like some­body who’s just strain­ing for a laugh.”

And the pres­ence of live human beings can’t but improve your sto­ry­telling skills. It helps to be able to fill Carnegie Hall like Sedaris can, but all of us can find, and learn from, some kind of audi­ence some­where, no mat­ter how mod­est. He  told Jun­kee that he began read­ing out loud back in his art-school days: “I was in a paint­ing class and we had a cri­tique, and you put your work up and talk about it, and most peo­ple would talk as if they were alone with a psy­chi­a­trist.” He real­ized that “they don’t have any sense of an audi­ence. For some rea­son, maybe it’s because I have so many broth­ers and sis­ters, I was always very acute­ly aware of an audi­ence,” and so for his cri­tiques he pre­pared in-char­ac­ter mono­logues from the point of view of invent­ed artists. “Peo­ple laughed, and it felt amaz­ing to me,” which brought about an even big­ger real­iza­tion: “This is what I’m sup­posed to do. Write my own stuff and read it out loud.”

What­ev­er fears so many of us have about speak­ing in pub­lic, the fourth pil­lar of the Sedaris process may prove the most dif­fi­cult to incor­po­rate into your own work meth­ods:  aban­don­ing hope . “If I sit at my com­put­er, deter­mined to write a New York­er sto­ry I won’t get beyond the first sen­tence,” he told the New York­er. “It’s bet­ter to put no pres­sure on it. What would hap­pen if I fol­lowed the pre­vi­ous sen­tence with this one, I’ll think. If the eighth draft is tor­ture, the first should be fun.” And any­body who gets stuck can use the writer’s-block-break­ing strat­e­gy he revealed on Red­dit: “There are a lot of col­lege writ­ing text­books that will include essays and short sto­ries, and after read­ing the sto­ry or essay, there will be ques­tions such as ‘Have YOU Had any expe­ri­ence with a pedophile in YOUR fam­i­ly?’ or ‘When was the last time you saw YOUR moth­er drunk?’ and they’re just real­ly good at prompt­ing sto­ries.”

And though it might seem obvi­ous, the activ­i­ty that con­sti­tutes Sedaris’ fifth pil­lar gets all too much neglect from aspir­ing writ­ers: con­stant read­ing , the active pur­suit of which he con­sid­ers “one of those things that changes your life.” At the same time he began writ­ing his diary, he told the  Mis­souri Review , “I start­ed read­ing vora­cious­ly. They go hand in hand, espe­cial­ly for a young per­son who’s try­ing to write.” Today, when peo­ple ask him to have a look at what they’ve writ­ten, “I often want to say to them, ‘This doesn’t look like how things in books look.’ Read­ing is impor­tant when you’re try­ing to write because then you can look at what’s in a book and remind your­self, ‘Hey, I’m young; I just start­ed, and it’s gonna take me a long time, but boy, look at the dif­fer­ence between this and that.’ ”

He should know, giv­en the vicious­ness with which he crit­i­cizes his own work. Even now his sto­ries require more than twen­ty drafts to get right, as he men­tions in the PBS New­sHour clip at the top of the post , but when he re-read his first diaries, “it was real­ly painful. Real­ly painful.” These ear­ly entries revealed that “no one was a worse writer than me. No one was more false. No one was more pre­ten­tious. It was just absolute garbage.” But some of them hint at things to come. “I stayed up all night and worked on my new sto­ry,” a 28-year-old Sedaris writes in 1985. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I write like I paint: one cor­ner at a time. I can nev­er step back and see the full pic­ture. Instead, I con­cen­trate on a lit­tle square and real­ize lat­er that it looks noth­ing like the real live object. Maybe it’s my strength, and I’m the only one who can’t see it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Sedaris: A Sam­pling of His Inim­itable Humor

Be His Guest: David Sedaris at Home in Rur­al West Sus­sex, Eng­land

Ray Brad­bury on Zen and the Art of Writ­ing (1973)

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

John Updike’s Advice to Young Writ­ers: ‘Reserve an Hour a Day’

The Dai­ly Habits of Famous Writ­ers: Franz Kaf­ka, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Stephen King & More

Based in Seoul,  Col­in Mar­shall  writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les , the video series  The City in Cin­e­ma , the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project  Where Is the City of the Future? , and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’  Korea Blog . Fol­low him on Twit­ter at  @colinmarshall  or on  Face­boo k .

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ANTI-SEMITIC ATTITUDES OF THE MASS PUBLIC: ESTIMATES AND EXPLANATIONS BASED ON A SURVEY OF THE MOSCOW OBLAST

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JAMES L. GIBSON, RAYMOND M. DUCH, ANTI-SEMITIC ATTITUDES OF THE MASS PUBLIC: ESTIMATES AND EXPLANATIONS BASED ON A SURVEY OF THE MOSCOW OBLAST, Public Opinion Quarterly , Volume 56, Issue 1, SPRING 1992, Pages 1–28, https://doi.org/10.1086/269293

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In this article we examine anti-Semitism as expressed by a sample of residents of the Moscow Oblast (Soviet Union). Based on a survey conducted in 1920, we begin by describing anti-Jewish prejudice and support for official discrimination against Jews. We discover a surprisingly low level of expressed anti-Semitism among these Soviet respondents and virtually no support for state policies that discriminate against Jews. At the same time, many of the conventional hypotheses predicting anti-Semitism are supported in the Soviet case. Anti-Semitism is concentrated among those with lower levels of education, those whose personal financial condition is deteriorating, and those who oppose further democratization of the Soviet Union. We do not take these findings as evidence that anti-Semitism is a trivial problem in the Soviet Union but, rather, suggest that efforts to combat anti-Jewish movements would likely receive considerable support from ordinary Soviet people.

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Land use changes in the environs of Moscow

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Eurasian Geography and Economics

Grigory Ioffe

komal choudhary

This study illustrates the spatio-temporal dynamics of urban growth and land use changes in Samara city, Russia from 1975 to 2015. Landsat satellite imageries of five different time periods from 1975 to 2015 were acquired and quantify the changes with the help of ArcGIS 10.1 Software. By applying classification methods to the satellite images four main types of land use were extracted: water, built-up, forest and grassland. Then, the area coverage for all the land use types at different points in time were measured and coupled with population data. The results demonstrate that, over the entire study period, population was increased from 1146 thousand people to 1244 thousand from 1975 to 1990 but later on first reduce and then increase again, now 1173 thousand population. Builtup area is also change according to population. The present study revealed an increase in built-up by 37.01% from 1975 to 1995, than reduce -88.83% till 2005 and an increase by 39.16% from 2005 to 2015, along w...

Elena Milanova

Land use/Cover Change in Russia within the context of global challenges. The paper presents the results of a research project on Land Use/Cover Change (LUCC) in Russia in relations with global problems (climate change, environment and biodiversity degradation). The research was carried out at the Faculty of Geography, Moscow State University on the basis of the combination of remote sensing and in-field data of different spatial and temporal resolution. The original methodology of present-day landscape interpretation for land cover change study has been used. In Russia the major driver of land use/land cover change is agriculture. About twenty years ago the reforms of Russian agriculture were started. Agricultural lands in many regions were dramatically impacted by changed management practices, resulted in accelerated erosion and reduced biodiversity. Between the natural factors that shape agriculture in Russia, climate is the most important one. The study of long-term and short-ter...

Annals of The Association of American Geographers

Land use and land cover change is a complex process, driven by both natural and anthropogenic transformations (Fig. 1). In Russia, the major driver of land use / land cover change is agriculture. It has taken centuries of farming to create the existing spatial distribution of agricultural lands. Modernization of Russian agriculture started fifteen years ago. It has brought little change in land cover, except in the regions with marginal agriculture, where many fields were abandoned. However, in some regions, agricultural lands were dramatically impacted by changed management practices, resulting in accelerating erosion and reduced biodiversity. In other regions, federal support and private investments in the agricultural sector, especially those made by major oil and financial companies, has resulted in a certain land recovery. Between the natural factors that shape the agriculture in Russia, climate is the most important one. In the North European and most of the Asian part of the ...

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In recent decades, Russia has experienced substantial transformations in agricultural land tenure. Post-Soviet reforms have shaped land distribution patterns but the impacts of these on agricultural use of land remain under-investigated. On a regional scale, there is still a knowledge gap in terms of knowing to what extent the variations in the compositions of agricultural land funds may be explained by changes in the acreage of other land categories. Using a case analysis of 82 of Russia’s territories from 2010 to 2018, the authors attempted to study the structural variations by picturing the compositions of regional land funds and mapping agricultural land distributions based on ranking “land activity”. Correlation analysis of centered log-ratio transformed compositional data revealed that in agriculture-oriented regions, the proportion of cropland was depressed by agriculture-to-urban and agriculture-to-industry land loss. In urbanized territories, the compositions of agricultura...

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Despite harsh climate, agriculture on the northern margins of Russia still remains the backbone of food security. Historically, in both regions studied in this article – the Republic of Karelia and the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) – agricultural activities as dairy farming and even cropping were well adapted to local conditions including traditional activities such as horse breeding typical for Yakutia. Using three different sources of information – official statistics, expert interviews, and field observations – allowed us to draw a conclusion that there are both similarities and differences in agricultural development and land use of these two studied regions. The differences arise from agro-climate conditions, settlement history, specialization, and spatial pattern of economy. In both regions, farming is concentrated within the areas with most suitable natural conditions. Yet, even there, agricultural land use is shrinking, especially in Karelia. Both regions are prone to being af...

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Featured Article

Some Black startup founders feel betrayed by Ben Horowitz’s support for Trump

“it appears personal interest and profit supersedes people,” one founder lamented..

Some of the richest, most influential investors in Silicon Valley are publicly supporting Donald Trump’s campaign. They run powerful firms that every founder wants as backers. But because of their financial support for Trump, some Black founders are rethinking if they should have them on their cap table, according to seven Black founders and investors who spoke to TechCrunch. 

Some of the VCs who show support for Trump are not shocking, as they have historically leaned politically right, like Sequoia’s Doug Leone and Shaun Maguire, Keith Rabois from Khosla Ventures and David Sacks of Craft Ventures. But earlier this week Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders of Andreessen Horowitz, publicly threw their support behind Trump , stunning some in the Valley. 

“They are supporting candidates that don’t want people like me to have a fair shot or level playing field. How can one be optimistic with that in the back of their mind, as well as knowing you have a less than 2% shot of raising as it stands today?” one Nigerian American founder, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of career repercussions, told TechCrunch.

Of course, there are Black founders and investors who are unconcerned about an investors’ political views and will sign a term sheet with someone who supports Trump. But others feel betrayed, particularly by a16z’s Horowitz, who was known as an ally to the Black community. 

“His reputation will definitely take a hit among well-thinking Black people because it shows that he doesn’t actually understand our lived experiences,” David Mullings, founder of Blue Mahoe Holdings, told TechCrunch.

These founders feel this way because Trump is an advocate for a number of policies that could be harmful to people of color. Trump has spoken about, for instance, using force to deport 15 million to 20 million people — a fierce anti-immigrant policy for the tech sector, which relies on a lot of immigrant talent . During Trump’s last presidency, he banned DEI at the federal level . He’s threatened to remove federal funding from schools that offer curricula on topics of race and racism. The Republican platform under Trump also has no interest in addressing climate change (which disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities). 

Then there’s Project 2025, which was drafted by former Trump administration officials and calls for policies such as dismantling the Department of Education, banning abortion pills and increasing the power of the president. Trump has sought to distance himself from the proposal, but that hasn’t stopped far-right supporters from mixing that message in with what they believe Trump will give them.

Horowitz’s support of Trump is particularly painful because he’s always been seen as an advocate for the Black community. He and his wife, Felicia Wiley Horowitz, who is Black, have spoken before about how much they have done for the Black community and have held events and spaces for Black techies to gather and network. He wrote a book with a foreword from famed African American historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. and has spoken of his love for hip-hop and what he learned from the Haitian revolution. He has also touted his relationship with activist and former prison gang leader Shaka Senghor. 

Horowitz once gave an interview to The New York Times about how he was different from his father, an outspoken Trump supporter who told the outlet that Ben was “practically Black.” 

To hear this week that Horowitz will donate to Trump’s campaign because he likes Trump’s policies on crypto regulation and taxes stung many.

“It appears personal interest and profit supersedes people,” the Nigerian American founder said. “The ‘hard things about hard things’ sometimes mean standing against oppression.” 

Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment and Horowitz did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

A not-so-shocking admission 

In terms of funding and opportunities, 2020 and 2021 were historic years for the Black tech community and many began to be hopeful that more long-term opportunities would open. Even a16z launched an accelerator program , managed by a charity, to help support marginalized founders. 

But now the community is reexamining what they thought they knew.

“Ben and Marc have consistently been quiet on social justice issues and moving further to the far right. Ben embracing celebrities and quoting rap lyrics does not mean Ben is committed to equal rights,” one Black investor, who asked to remain anonymous and who has attended events Horowitz has hosted, told TechCrunch. 

“The proximity to Black figures has never equaled allyship,” Khadijah Robinson, who founded the e-commerce cite The Nile List, told TechCrunch. “Those same investors are starting to show their true colors in public.” 

Even Arlan Hamilton, founder of Backstage Capital, which counted Marc Andreessen as an early investor, is taken aback that the firm’s founders want to broadcast their support for Trump. “I’m more surprised that they said it out loud instead of just funding anonymously,” she told TechCrunch. 

Andreessen’s support for Trump has perhaps come as less of a surprise since his viewpoints have long been seen as being in the right-leaning libertarian bucket. His Techno-Optimist Manifesto published last year, for instance, called “regulatory capture” and socialism “the enemy.” (It also called “authoritarianism” the enemy.) He painted a world where tech and tech startups solve all the world’s ills.

Black founders see a more harrowing possibility: increased divisive rhetoric and a society where tech billionaires barter democracy for capital gains. 

“I’m not shocked to see people putting their self-interest first,” another Black founder said. “Deep down I think this is how most of them felt the entire time but were scared of the blowback.” 

Tobi Ajala, founder of the SaaS startup TechTee, said she also isn’t surprised to see big investors supporting Trump. “It has caused more Black founders to consider what the options are other than obvious choices,” she said.

Now Black founders say they must balance being even more conscious of who they network with, while also not alienating influential and potential inventors. Many of them are also trying to not take the wave of Trump support too personally. “Politics, like investing, is unemotional,” one Black fintech founder said about the VCs backing Trump. “The market will move in the direction of who it thinks will do the best for them.”

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Guest Essay

‘J.D. Vance’s Speech Was Masterly’: Best and Worst Moments From Night 3

By New York Times Opinion

Did the night help Trump?

Welcome to Opinion’s commentary for Night 3 of the Republican National Convention. In this special feature, Times Opinion writers rate the evening on a scale of 0 to 10: 0 means the night was a disaster for Donald Trump; 10 means it could lead to a big polling bump. Here’s what our columnists and contributors thought of the event, which included speeches from Peter Navarro, Kimberly Guilfoyle and J.D. Vance.

Best Moment

Kristen Soltis Anderson, contributing Opinion writer How can you not feel the heartbreak of the Gold Star families? A powerful reminder of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, as well as President Biden’s incorrect assertion during the debate that no service members died overseas on his watch. Most important, a powerful reminder of the price of freedom.

Charles M. Blow, Times columnist Usha Vance, talking about her husband, J.D. Vance, and the veterans and families of soldiers killed or taken captive — they were the most effective and affecting speakers. Personal stories delivered with deep emotions, whether love or loss, break through the noise.

David Brooks, Times columnist The Gold Star families. The core Republican argument is that Biden has left regular Americans behind. These parents told that story with raw emotion. It was a moment when passion met the theme.

Michelle Cottle, political writer for Opinion J.D. Vance brought what Team Trump needed: a fresh face who can deliver even tough hits smoothly, with a charming smile and a sprinkling of humor. The political parts of his speech were nothing special. But the biographical bits were kinda glorious. The story from his youth about how his mamaw threatened to run over a local drug dealer was pure gold. And when Vance introduced his mother, who was in the crowd, “10 years clean and sober”? Chef’s kiss.

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Happy-Go-Lucky

Something about a car running over a policeman and a second officer being injured. This is my assessment of a news story broadcast on the television in my father’s room at Springmoor, the retirement community where he’s spent the past three years in the assisted-living section. It is early April, three days before his ninety-eighth birthday, and Amy, Hugh, and I have just flown to Raleigh from New York. The plan is to hang out for a while, and then drive to the Sea Section, our house on Emerald Isle.

Dad is in his wheelchair, dressed and groomed for our visit. Hair combed. Real shoes on his feet. A red bandanna tied around his neck “Well, hey!” he calls as we walk in, an old turtle raising his head toward the sun. “Gosh, it’s good to see you kids!”

As Amy and I move in to embrace him, Hugh wonders if we could possibly turn off the TV. “Well, sure,” my father, still smothered in grown children, says. “I don’t even know why it’s on, to tell you the truth.”

Hugh takes the remote off the bedside table, and, after he’s killed the television, Amy asks if he can figure out the radio. As a non-blood relative, that seems to be his role during our visits to Springmoor—the servant.

“Find us a jazz station,” I tell him.

“There we go!” my father says. “That would be fantastic!”

Neither Amy nor I care about the news anymore, at least the political news. I am vaguely aware that Andrew Cuomo has fallen out of favor, and that people who aren’t me will be receiving government checks for some reason or other, but that’s about it. When Trump was President, I started every morning by reading the New York Times , followed by the Washington Post , and would track both papers’ Web sites regularly throughout the day. To be less than vigilant was to fall behind, and was there anything worse than not knowing what Stephen Miller just said about Wisconsin? My friend Mike likened this constant monitoring to having a second job. It was exhausting, and the moment that Joe Biden was sworn into office I let it all go. When the new President speaks, I feel the way I do on a plane when the pilot announces that after reaching our cruising altitude he will head due north, or take a left at Lake Erie. You don’t need to tell me about your job, I always think. Just, you know, do it.

It’s so freeing, no longer listening to political podcasts—no longer being enraged. I still browse the dailies, skipping over the stories about Covid , as I am finished with all that as well. The moment I got my first vaccine shot, I started thinking of the coronavirus the way I think of scurvy—something from a long-ago time that can no longer hurt me, something that mainly pirates get. “Yes,” the papers would say. “But what if there’s a powerful surge this summer? This Christmas? A year from now? What if our next pandemic is worse than this one? What if it kills all the fish and cattle and poultry and affects our skin’s reaction to sunlight? What if it forces everyone to live underground and subsist on earthworms?”

My father tested positive for the coronavirus shortly before Christmas, at around the time he started wheeling himself to the front desk at Springmoor and asking if anyone there had seen his mother. He hasn’t got Alzheimer’s, nothing that severe. Rather, he’s what used to be called “soft in the head.” Gaga. It’s a relatively new development—aside from the time he was discovered on the floor in his house, dehydrated and suffering from a bladder infection, he’s always been not just lucid but commanding.

“If it happens several times in one day, someone on the staff will contact me,” Lisa told us over the phone. “Then I’ll call and say, ‘Dad, your mother died in 1976 and is buried beside your father at the Rural Cemetery in Cortland, New York. You bought the plot next to theirs, so that’s where you’ll be going.”

There had to be a gentler way to say this, but I’m not sure the news really registered, especially after his diagnosis, when he was at his weakest. Every time the phone rang, I expected to hear that he had died. But my father recovered. “ Without being hospitalized,” I told my cousin Nancy. “ Plus he lost ten pounds!” Not that he needed to.

When I ask him what it was like to have covid , he offers a false-sounding laugh. He does that a lot now—“Ha-ha!” I suspect it’s a cover for his failed hearing, that rather than saying “Could you repeat that?” he figures it’s a safe bet that you are delivering a joke of some sort. “Hugh and I just went to Louisville to see his mother,” I’d said to my dad the last time we were at Springmoor. “Joan is ninety now, and has blood cancer.”

That was on Halloween. Socially distanced visits were allowed in the outdoor courtyard of my father’s building, and after our allotted thirty minutes were up an aide disguised as a witch wheeled him back to his room.

“The costumes must do a real number on some of the residents,” Amy said as we walked with Hugh to our rental car. “ ‘And then a vampire came to take my blood pressure!’ ‘Sure he did, Grandpa.’ ”

A few days after we saw him, Springmoor was locked down. No one allowed in or out except staff, and all the residents confined to their rooms. The policy wasn’t reversed until six months later. That’s when we flew down from New York.

“You look great, Dad,” Amy says in a voice that is almost but not quite a shout. Hugh has finally found a jazz station, and managed to tune out the static.

“Well, I’m a hundred years old!” my father tells us in his whisper of a voice. “Can you beat that?”

“Ninety-eight,” Amy corrects him. “And not quite yet. Your birthday is on Monday and today is only Friday.”

“A hundred years old!”

This isn’t softheadedness but a lifelong tendency to exaggerate. “What the hell are you still doing up?” he’d demand of my brother, my sisters, and me every school night of our lives. “It’s one o’clock in the morning!”

We’d point to the nearest clock. “Actually, it’s nine-forty-five.”

“It’s one o’clock, dammit!”

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“Then how come ‘Barnaby Jones’ is still on?”

“Go to bed!”

Amy has brought my father some chocolate turtles, and as he watches she opens the box, then hands him one.“Your room looks good, too. It’s clean, and your stuff fits in real well.”

“It’s not bad, is it?” my father says. “You might not believe it, but this is the exact same square footage as the house, the basement of it, anyway.”

This is simply not true, but we let it go.

“There are a few things I’d like to get rid of, but as a whole it’s not too cluttered,” he observes, turning a jerky semicircle in his wheelchair. “That was a real problem for me once upon a time. I used to be the king of clutter.”

Were I his decorator, I’d definitely lose the Christmas tree that stands collecting dust on the console beneath his TV. It is a foot and a half tall, and made of plastic. Naked it might be O.K., but its baubles—which are the size of juniper berries, and gaudy—depress me. Beside it is a stack of cards sent by people I don’t know, or whose names I only vaguely recognize from the Greek Orthodox church. “Has the priest been by?” I ask.

My father nods. “A few times. He doesn’t much like me, though.”

Amy takes a seat on the bed. “Why not?”

He laughs. “Let’s just say I’m not as generous as I could be!”

My father is thinner than the last time I saw him, but somehow his face is fuller. Something else is different as well, but I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like when celebrities get face-lifts. I can see they’ve undergone a change, but I can never tell exactly what it is. Examining a photo on some gossip site, I’ll wonder, What is it? The eyes? The mouth? “You don’t look the same, for some reason,” I say to my father.

He turns from me to Hugh, and then to Amy. “Well, you do. All of you do. The only one who’s changed is me. I’m a hundred years old!”

“Ninety-eight on Monday,” Amy says.

“Have you had your Covid shots?” I ask, knowing that he has.

“I’m not sure,” he says. “Maybe.”

I pick up a salmon carved out of something hard and porous, an antler maybe. It used to be in his basement office at the house. This was before he turned every room into an office, and buried himself in envelopes. “Hugh and I and Amy, we’ve each had one shot.”

My father laughs. “Well, good for you. I haven’t had a drink since I got here.”

At first, I take this as a non sequitur. Then I realize that by “shot” he thinks we mean a shot of alcohol.

“They don’t let you drink?” I ask.

“Oh, you can have a little, I guess, but it’s not easy. You have to order it in advance, like medicine, and you only get a thimbleful,” he says.

“What do you think would happen if you had a screwdriver?” Amy asks.

He thinks for a moment. “I’d probably get an erection!”

I really like this new version of my father. He’s charming and positive and full of surprises. “One of the things I like about us as a family is that we laugh,” he says. “Always! As far back as I can remember. It’s what we’re known for!”

Most of that laughter had been directed at him, and erupted the moment he left whichever room the rest of us were occupying. A Merriment Club member he definitely was not. But I like that he remembers things differently. “My offbeat sense of humor has won me a lot of friends,” he tells us. “A hell of a lot.”

“Friends here ?” Amy asks.

“All over the damn place! Even the kids I used to roller-skate with, they come by sometimes.”

He opens his hand and we see that the chocolate turtle he’s been holding has melted. Amy fetches some toilet paper from the bathroom, and he sits passively as she cleans him off. “What is it you’re wearing?” he asks.

She takes a step back so that he can see her black-and-white polka-dot shift. Over it is a Japanese denim shirt with coaster-size smiley-face patches running up and down the sleeves. Her friend Paul recently told her that she dresses like a fat person, the defiant sort who thinks, You want to laugh, I’ll give you something to laugh at.

“Interesting,” my father says.

Whenever the conversation stalls, he turns it back to one of several subjects, the first being the inexpensive guitar he bought me when I was a child and insisted on bringing with him to Springmoor, this after it had sat neglected in a closet for more than half a century. “I’m trying to teach myself to play, but I just can’t find the time to practice.”

It seems to me that all he has is time. What else is there to do here, shut up in his room? “I’ve got to make some music!” he says. As he shakes his fist in frustration, I notice that he still has some chocolate beneath his thumbnail.

“You’re too hard on yourself, Dad,” Amy tells him. “You don’t have to do everything, you know. Maybe it’s O.K. to just relax for a change.”

His second go-to topic is the art work hanging on his walls, most of it bought by him and my mother in the seventies and early eighties. “Now, this,” he says, pointing to a framed serigraph over his bed, “this I could look at every minute of the day.” It is a sentimental, naïf-style street scene of Paris in the early twentieth century—a veritable checklist of tropes and clichés by Michel Delacroix, who defines himself as a “painter of dreams and of the poetic past.” On the two occasions when my father visited me in the actual Paris, he couldn’t leave fast enough. It’s only in pictures that he can stand the place. “I’ve got to write this guy a letter and tell him what his work means to me,” he says. “The trick is finding the damn time!”

Two of the paintings in the room are by my father, done in the late sixties. His art phase came from nowhere, and, during its brief, six-month span, he was prolific, churning out twenty or so canvases, most done with a palette knife rather than a brush. All of them are copies—of van Gogh, of Zurbarán and Picasso. They wouldn’t fool anyone, but as children we were awed by his talent. The problem was what to paint, or, in his case, to copy. Some of his choices were questionable—a stagecoach silhouetted against a tangerine-colored sunset comes to mind—but in retrospect they fit right in with the rest of the house. Back in the seventies, we thought of our color scheme as permanently modern. What could replace all that orange and brown and avocado? By the early eighties, it was laughable, but now it’s back and we’re able to think fondly of our milk-chocolate walls, and the stout wicker burro that used to pout atop the piano, one of our father’s acrylic bullfighters seemingly afire on the wall behind it.

When Dad retired from I.B.M., the art work became a greater part of his identity. He had been an engineer, but he was an art lover. This didn’t extend to museums—who needed them when he had his living room! “I’m an actual collector, while David, he’s more of an investor,” he sniffed to my friend Lee after I bought a Picasso that was painted by Picasso and did not look—dare I say it—like cake frosting.

Then, there’s my father’s collection of masks, some of which are hanging high on the wall over his bed. The best of them were made by tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, bought on fly-fishing trips. A few others are African or Mexican. They used to leer down from the panelled wall above the staircase in our house, and it is odd but not unpleasant to see them in this new setting. When walking along the hall at Springmoor, I always peek into the other rooms, none of which resemble my father’s. There are the neighbors, and then there is Dad—Dad who is listening to Eric Dolphy and holding the guitar he has never in his life played. “You know, four of the strings on this thing came off my old violin, the one I had in grade school!”

No, they didn’t, but who cares. Before his mind started failing, my father consumed a steady diet of Fox News and conservative talk radio that kept him at a constant boiling point. “Who’s that Black guy?” he demanded in 2014. The family was together at the Sea Section, and we were talking about Michael Brown, who’d been shot and killed three months earlier, in Ferguson, Missouri.

“What Black guy?” I asked.

“Oh, you know the one.”

“Bill Cosby?” Amy offered.

“Gil Scott-Heron?” I asked.

“Stevie Wonder?” Gretchen called from the living room.

Lisa said, “Denzel Washington?”

“You know who I mean,” Dad said. “He’s got that son.”

“Jesse Jackson?”

“He’s the one. Always stirring up trouble.”

Now, though, our father has taken a few steps back, and, like me, seems all the better for it. “How did you feel when Biden was elected?” I ask. The question is a violation of the pact Amy and I made before arriving: Don’t stir him up, don’t confuse him.

“Actually,” he says, “I was for that other one.”

Hugh says, “Trump.”

My father nods. “That’s right. I believed what he was telling us. And, well, it seems that I was wrong. That guy was bad news.”

Never did I expect to hear this: Trump was “bad” and “I was wrong”—practically in the same breath. “Who are you?” I want to ask the gentle gnome in front of me. “And what have you done with Lou Sedaris?”

“So Biden . . . I guess he’s O.K.,” my father says, looking, with his red bandanna, like the leftist he never was.

Amy, Hugh, and I are just recovering when an aide walks in and announces that it is five o’clock, time for dinner. “I’ll wheel Mr. Sedaris down . . . ”

“Oh, we’ll take him,” Amy says.

“Take what?” my father asks, confused by the sudden activity.

I push him out the door and past a TV that’s showing the news. Again the incident at the Capitol. Some people hit by a car, someone shot.

“This is like that old joke,” I say to my father as we near the dining room. “A man bitches to his wife, ‘You’re always pushing me around and talking behind my back.’ And she says, ‘What do you expect—you’re in a wheelchair!’ ”

My father roars, “Ha!”

The dining room, which fits maybe six tables, is full when we arrive. Women greatly outnumber men, and no one except for us and the staff is ambulatory. The air should smell like food, but instead it smells like Amy, her perfume. She wears so much that it manages to both precede her and trail behind her, lingering long after she’s moved on. That said, I like it. A combination of five different scents, none of which is flowery or particularly sweet, it leaves her smelling like a strange cookie, maybe one with pencil shavings in it.

“Eat, why don’t you,” my father says.

I am conscious of everyone watching. Visitors! Lou has visitors!

While Amy and Hugh talk to an aide, my father looks up and pats the space beside him at the table. “Stay for dinner. They can make you anything you want.”

I can’t remember my mother’s last words to me. They were delivered over the phone at the end of a casual conversation. “See you,” she might have said, or “I’ll call back in a few days.” And in the thoughtless way you respond when you think you have forever with the person on the other end of the line, I likely said, “O.K.”

My father’s last words to me, spoken in the too-hot, too-bright dining room at his assisted-living facility three days before his ninety-eighth birthday, are “Don’t go yet. Don’t leave.”

My last words to him—and I think they are as telling as his, given all we’ve been through—are “We need to get to the beach before the grocery stores close.” They look cold on paper, and when he dies, a few weeks later, and I realize they were the last words I said to him, I will think, Maybe I can warm them up onstage when I read this part out loud. For, rather than thinking of his death, I will be thinking of the story of his death, so much so that after his funeral Amy will ask, “Did I see you taking notes during the service?”

There’ll be no surprise in her voice. Rather, it will be the way you might playfully scold a squirrel: “Did you just jump up from the deck and completely empty that bird feeder?”

The squirrel and me—it’s in our nature, though maybe not forever. For our natures, I have just recently learned from my father, can change. Or maybe they’re simply revealed, and the dear, cheerful man I saw that afternoon at Springmoor was there all along, smothered in layers of rage and impatience that burned away as he blazed into the homestretch.

For the moment, though, leaving the dining room in the company of Hugh and Amy, I am thinking that we’ll have to do this again, and soon. Fly to Raleigh. See Dad. Maybe have a picnic in his room. I’ll talk Gretchen into coming. Lisa will be there, too, and our brother, Paul. All of us together and laughing so loudly we’ll be asked by some aide to close the door. Because, really, isn’t that what we’re known for? ♦

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