DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: July 27, 2025

Volkswagen’s Slave Ranch In Brazil.  I’d never heard this story before:

When Ricardo Rezende Figueira saw the headline, he felt a chill run through him. It was about Volkswagen. The company said it was finally ready to atone for its past. After admitting that its staff had cooperated with Brazil’s military dictatorship to target workers for political persecution, the automaker had begun to negotiate reparations.

Rezende read to the bottom of the article, then sat for a moment, quiet.

The story didn’t say anything about the Volkswagen cattle ranch. Nor a word about the Amazon rainforest, where the company’s leadership had once presided over a property nearly twice the size of New York City. It sometimes seemed to Rezende as if no one still remembered what had happened there — the forced labor and privation, torture and violence, deception and horror. But Rezende did. He’d recorded it all.

It was early 2019. Rezende left his small apartment and walked across the street to Rio de Janeiro’s federal university, where he taught human rights and coordinates a commission to study modern slave labor. At 73, gray-haired and bespectacled, he no longer resembled the shaggy Catholic priest who had led an investigation into alleged atrocities at the Vale do Rio Cristalino Ranch, owned by an eponymous subsidiary of Volkswagen Brazil. But the documentary evidence he’d gathered during that time was still with him, inside a filing cabinet. It had sat there for years.

Rezende called Rafael Garcia, who prosecutes slave labor cases for Brazil’s Labor Ministry. “Did you see that Volks is recognizing what it did?” Rezende recalled asking him. Maybe, he continued, it was time to investigate the Volkswagen cattle ranch, as well.

Garcia didn’t know what he was talking about. He had no idea Volkswagen had participated in one of the world’s first grand experiments in globalization half a century ago, when multinational corporations partnered with Brazil’s authoritarian regime to develop the Amazon — pressing poor, unwitting workers into service in the distant rainforest. But Garcia trusted the aging priest and admired his work. He asked Rezende for his files. They ran to more than 1,000 pages; it took Rezende days to photocopy them. But by late February 2019, Garcia was paging through the dossier.

Thereby hangs the tale.  Read it.  Remember that Clintonian word:  globalization.  This story, among many others, illustrates what it hath wrought.

Route 66 Ghost Town Reborn?:

The tiny desert cafe, caught in a desolate middle between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, had only been open for five minutes when the first customers of the day ambled in from the already blistering heat.

It was a Friday morning in June, sand swirling outside across the cracked street and towards the Bagdad Cafe’s front door. In the same parking lot, a 1950s-era sign advertised a motel that no longer exists. In the distance, only a few surviving businesses remained: a small community center, a veterans organization and a longstanding roadhouse bar popular with locals. A few miles to the north, an entire neighborhood was abandoned in the 1990s after mounds of blowing sand swallowed it whole; today, only rooftops and chimneys peek out from the towering sand dunes.

Despite the general ghost town-like atmosphere, the cafe’s early-morning visitors were giddy.

Neilson Lopes, a tourist from Brazil, happily perused a rack of neon T-shirts and snapped photos of the dimly lit cafe. He and his wife had flown and driven, on the back of a motorcycle, thousands of miles to be there, in the middle of nowhere.

“I’ve planned this trip for 10 years,” he said. “For decades, maybe.”

Because while this Mojave Desert outpost – a tiny settlement of 2,000-some people called Newberry Springs– may look deserted to the uninitiated, it’s positioned on one of the most famous roads in the world: Route 66. The roughly 2,400-mile (3,900km) route stretches from the California coast to Chicago, connecting both small towns and sprawling metropolises across the country. For many, the road embodies a sense of quintessential Americana, from its quirky roadside kitsch to its historic roots.

And next year, Route 66 is turning 100 years old. Nationwide preparations for the big anniversary have been under way for years: caravans of people are planning to drive the entirety of the route, and Congress even created a Route 66 Centennial Commission in 2020 to commemorate the milestone.

Like, I’m Supposed To Resist This–Sondheim’s Manuscripts, Notebooks, And Recordings Acquired By The Library Of Congress.  What comes through is the sheer amount of labor that went into his creative process:

Horowitz flicks through a thick folder containing 40 pages of lyric sketches for A Little Priest, a duet where Sweeney, the demon barber of Fleet Street, and Mrs Lovett gleefully plan to dispose of his murder victims by baking their flesh into pies to sell at Mrs Lovett’s failing pie shop. It uses clever wordplay and puns about professions and social classes, imagining how 31 different flavours would suit various pies.

Here is a master wordsmith at work. “One of the things he writes in the margins is lists of people who might be baked into the pies: cook, butler, page, sailor, tailor, actor, barber, driver, crier, gigolo. I went through the pages and counted them and I came up with 158 different professions that he considered as types of people.”

Horowitz points to an abandoned idea: “Somewhere on this page is rabbi and the thing I get a kick out of is that then, a few pages later, he actually turns it into a couplet: ‘Everybody shaves except rabbis and riff-raff.’”

His most famous song?:

Horowitz reaches into a box and produces lyric sketches for Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music, along with a one-page inner monologue written as subtext for the character Desirée when she sings it. The most popular song that Sondheim ever wrote was also one of the quickest to turn around.

Horowitz explains: “Basically in 24 hours he wrote his hit song whereas for most of his songs it took about two weeks, certainly for the longer numbers. There are 40 pages of sketches for Priest; I think there are nine pages here for Send in the Clowns.

“One of the reasons was they’d already been in rehearsal so he knew almost everything about the show and particularly about Glynis Johns and her voice. He always described it as a light, silvery voice, which was very pleasant but she couldn’t sustain notes.

“He wrote it specifically for her voice. It’s very short phrases, which is why they’re questions. ‘Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair?’ They cut off quickly. It was written for this character, for this place in the show, for this actress, for this voice, and knowing all that made it much easier than it would be otherwise.”

Sondheim preferred actresses/actors who can sing as opposed to singers who can act.  We’ll let Glynis and Len Cariou sing us out: