Monkey Business
An anthropological look at a strange kind of human
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Reader, can I interest you in a guided tour of a bizarre little island I recently stumbled upon? I can promise you monkeys, and gossip.
I’m working on an essay about nature. Well, it’s about wolves. Kind of. I started this sort-of-wolf essay over a year ago. I started it on an island, actually—Fire Island (not the island I’m taking us to, so worry not, homophobes in the audience). I even forewent the much anticipated weekly underwear party and a dalliance with a varicose Australian because I felt I was on such a roll with this 6,000-something-word essay, though I’d end up not looking at the document again for another full calendar year. I’m single, by the way, though that’s neither hither nor yon.
Hither: I’ve been trying this new approach to producing literature wherein I “read books.” It’s going pretty well so far, and I have to wonder why the idea never occurred to me before. I guess it didn’t feel intuitive. But I’m optimistic about the results. While dusting off this wolfish essay from over a year ago, I went looking for inspiration and picked up the essay collection Ill Nature by Joy Williams, a writer whose work I’m enjoying, and photos of whom I find rather intimidating. Williams is usually shown wearing sunglasses. She says she forgot her prescription glasses on her way to a reading once many years ago, wore sunglasses instead, and then never took them off. Looking at pictures, I get the impression that, were she to remove these sunglasses in front of me, I’d be met with an instant and fatal blast of energy.
Our actual destination today is Lois Key. “Key Lois” (its name is reversed in the title, it’s interchangeable) is an essay in Ill Nature. After seeing in the table of contents that it was only two pages long, it was the one I decided to start with so that I might begin my day with a feeling of accomplishment (I’m hanging on by a fucking thread).
The thing about Lois Key is that it’s evil. The island, formerly called Loggerhead Key, was once owned by Charles River Laboratories. CRL, at the time of relevant events, was owned by the Bausch and Lomb Company, famed producers of Biotrue® Hydration Plus Multi-Purpose Solution, semi-opaque bottles of which may well be sitting in your medicine cabinet as we speak.1 But before their acquisition by B&L, in the 70s, CRL populated Lois Key with rhesus monkeys (macaca mulatta) for the purpose of breeding them to sell them for around $5k a pop for medical experimentation. I promised monkeys. I didn’t promise they’d bring you joy.
“There is no natural food for them on the island and no fresh water,” Williams writes of the monkeys and their depressing home, “so someone arrives daily by boat with water and hundreds of pounds of Purina Monkey Chow. At other times a boat will arrive, collect some of the monkeys to fill an order from a laboratory, and take them away.” With this, I’ve quoted a very decent chunk of the entire chapter.
Williams’ essay damns by stating bare facts. It’s maybe not even an essay. It’s in keeping with her style. Reading Williams reminds me of looking at a Georgia O’Keeffe painting: soft, austere, haunted, see her short story Chaunt, which I recommend. Like the subject, “Key Lois” is small and disturbing. Williams infuses the text with a pointed detachment (her sunglasses come to mind) that gives the impression of an always concealed but definitely present revulsion. “Key Lois” is sort of like a literary, high-brow Wikipedia entry, and I mean that positively.
On the opposite end of the “literature about the unconscionable monkey island off the coast of Florida” spectrum is Jay Forman’s essay, published in Slate in June 2001, titled “Monkeyfishing.” Forman, in contrast to Williams’ “spooky Google Earth” approach, is anything but detached. He’s an active participant.
The essay, which does open with “Once upon a time,” recounts an excursion to Lois Key in which Forman witnessed his guide engage in a macabre local sport. The guide hooks an apple on a fishing pole (your scrupulous tour guide questions the physics of this) and tosses it out from his skiff to a terminally bored primate population that’s been “eating [their] own feces all day” and which immediately swarm the delicacy.
“I knew he had hooked one by the shriek it made,” Forman writes, “a primal yowl that set my hair on end. The monkey came flying from the trees, a juicy apple stapled to its palm.” Having been party to animal abuse, Forman contends with his conscience. What follows is a kind of rote exercise in “but then again, doesn’t China eat dogs?” stuff. “Yes, my crimes are small compared to the Chinese,” he writes in an insane sentence2 before going into equally trite but less racially fraught “would it have been better if I ate the monkey?” stuff before landing in “at least I’m trying to work through these quandaries by writing about them” territory.
“And after all,” Forman concludes, “I’m the one who has to sleep with myself.” That much is true.
I don’t much like Jay Forman’s style and prefer to believe that, were I an avid Slate reader in 2001, I’d have been like, “Bah! More dreck from that old rag!” I would have probably said stuff like that all the time as a Slate reader in 2001, sitting on my chaise in a Manhattan apartment reminiscent of Friends and drinking, I don’t know, Scotch on the rocks, velvet smoking jacket wrapped about me and a twink with fewer civil rights than he’d have today cooking my breakfast of gruel in the kitchen.
Forman has that kind of prose I describe as “up to something.” I’m uncertain who he’s ripping off, only certain that that’s what he’s doing. But I’m no literary critic (I started reading books last month), and I probably only feel this way thanks to hindsight: Forman completely fabricated the “Monkeyfishing” story. There’s not a single true thing in “Monkeyfishing” by Jay Forman, and a big tent of Forman detractors united shortly after its publication to say so.
We have to wade into the weeds a bit here. Lucky you, you’ve a dedicated guide whacking the way forward with a machete. The timeline looks like this:
1996: An email correspondence occurs between two media professionals. I refuse to spoil this, so we’ll come back to it later. Just know it’s important.
June 8, 2001: Forman, a freelance writer hired by Slate in 2001 to pen columns on the subject of human vice, sends a draft of “The Shame of Fishing for Monkeys” to founding editor of Slate, Michael Kinsley. Slate’s then editor at large is Jack Shafer, who also edits and fact-checks Forman. The piece is published. In what’s characterized as a matter of hours, outlets begin poking holes in the story, including James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal. One Gray Lady also takes an interest.
June 25, 2001: The New York Times publishes “Tortured Tale Of Journalism And Monkeys,” the journalistic equivalent of affixing a dunce cap on Slate’s head. “While the column began with the sing-song language of a fairy tale, the account itself appears to be a fairy tale,” writes then New York Times reporter Alex Kuczynski, with warranted giddiness. She also got in touch with the fisherman who allegedly took Forman on this trip, and the man confessed to being the source of several hoaxes, such as the time he plastered fake labels over Vienna sausages that read “Manatee Pâté: Enjoy an Endangered Species While You Still Can.”
Also June 25, 2001: CRL, refusing to take any of this lying down, releases a statement to the Times. “It is not factually possible to hook a monkey on a fishing pole,'' the statement reads. ''They are much too smart, and too strong, and would not eat in that fashion.” A touching tribute to their captive population of intelligent creatures being bred for scientific experimentation.
Still June 25, 2001: I don’t know where else to put this, but let’s appreciate Kuczynski rubbing salt in Shafer’s wound, because I think it says a lot about how Shafer, himself a media critic, was perceived at the time. Per other articles I’ve read, many in the media landscape feared him as a kind of apex predator. “Last year he wrote an article critical of New Yorker editors for not being able to smoke out a hoax story about an Internet company published in the magazine,” Kuczynski writes, delivering a swift editorial kick to Shafer’s ribs.
June 25, 2001, the day that never ends: Slate apologizes for some falsehoods in “Monkeyfishing,” but maintains that the excursion did happen. “In fact the Times story, by Alex Kuczynski, quotes the fisherman who took Forman and his friend on the trip,” Slate argues, citing the Manatee Pâté guy. June 25 finally gives way to June 26, and our epic takes an intermission of six years.
February 2007: The New York Times exhumes Jay Forman’s writing career to beat Slate about the head with it anew. They publish the work of Columbia journalism students Gretchen Cuda and Leonardo Blair, who blow the story out of the water with a single phone call to Forman, who confesses to making the whole thing up. Shafer, in turn, publishes an apology to readers, thus completing the veritable zoo of articles related to “Monkeyfishing.”
While Forman didn’t come clean to Shafer until 2007, it’s clear Slate’s faith in him was rattled back in 2001. “Monkeyfishing” was the last thing he ever wrote for the outlet. He had two earlier stories there to his name, also published in 2001. One, titled “The Booty Business,” impressively manages to make the sit-com trappings of “working for a pornography company in an office adjacent to the consulate of Madagascar in New York” kinda boring. It’s unclear if he also pulled this story out of his ass, and thus making it, sorry for saying so, “booty business” indeed.
Anyway, one might imagine this is where the “Monkeyfishing” saga ends. One would be wrong. In a piece published just last year in the Washington Examiner, Mark Judge, who has a dedicated Media Matters page warning about his various misdeeds, brought up “Monkeyfishing” as an artifact of the long, slow decline of legacy media. His article does not take the detached Joy Williams approach, but the immediate “I was there” Jay Forman approach, and reads less as a measured treatise about the decay of journalism than it does as one man’s bizarre and cathartic outburst in a sparsely populated supermarket.
“Here’s the thing,” Judge writes (again, it’s worth emphasizing, in 2024), “I could have prevented ‘Monkeyfishing.’” This sentence reverberated through the mostly vacant halls of my brain, and I’ve no doubt that echoes of “I could have prevented ‘Monkeyfishing’” will follow me for years to come.
Judge goes on to recount how, when Slate launched in 1996, he emailed Shafer about possibly contributing. “Shafer rejected my offer, using profanity to describe my writing,” he writes. “Like other media liberals, he could not or would not comprehend that hiring a conservative could provide balance, drive traffic, and offer a safety valve against stories that were crazy. He would have been helping himself.”
Aside from being an interesting “I could have stopped it” fantasy to have in the context of the summer of 2001, it’s worth putting personal politics aside to appreciate the impressive depths of Mr. Judge’s contempt for Mr. Shafer, the latter of whom Mr. Judge was critiquing for his statements about the state of journalism at the time (I’ve no macaca mulatta in their fight). I need you to actually go on this journey with me and imagine it. Imagine nursing this grudge for 24 years.
1996: Ted Kaczynski AKA the Unabomber is arrested and Twister is released to commercial success (the highest-grossing film for Warner Bros. at the time) and the Republicans nominate Bob Dole for president (and is defeated by Bill Clinton) and Animal Planet makes its debut (those Warner Bros. at it again) as does Arthur (PBS) and, it’s very sad, the whole JonBenét Ramsey thing, and the U.S. makes one of its recurring violent cameos in the Middle East and an email is sent to Mr. Jack Shafer (editor at large for a nascent Slate) by one Mr. Mark Judge asking if he might contribute to the outlet, and is told to go fuck himself.
This is in other words a grudge from the 1900s that predates Shark Week and survived multiple, dramatic shifts in the media landscape as well as multiple national and global calamities to make it to an article in 2024. While available data indicates that Mr. Judge is not an individual whose views I condone, in at least this respect, one does feel compelled to say, “Holy shit, man.”
Given infinite time, I’m sure a Hims®-owned island of rhesus monkeys typing on MacBook Airs would eventually produce a game-changing essay on wolves. But, as for me, I’m stuck, and today I’m feeling more inclined to open up yet another browser tab to look into these monkeys with typewriters and infinite time on their hands (I’m kind of jealous) than I am to finish off this piece I started a year ago on Fire Island.
Writers are strange creatures.
It is in mine; my contact lens prescription is -6.5, more than qualifying me as legally blind.
I do believe this is the first time these words have appeared in a legacy media outfit.
I want a t shirt that says “I could have prevented Monkeyfishing”
God I love this newsletter