Alyssagk

When I was 17, I won $20,000 from the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans. Named after the prolific 19th-century novelist whose rags-to-riches tales have come to represent the idea of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” the scholarship honors youth who have overcome adversity, which, for me, included my parents’ mental illnesses, time in foster care, and stints of homelessness.

In April 2010, the Distinguished Americans flew me and the other 103 winners to Washington, D.C., for a mandatory convention. We stayed at a nice hotel and spent an entire day learning table manners. We met Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who I remember shook hands with the boys and hugged the girls. Before the event’s big gala, we posed in rented finery, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the center of our group photo. The political commentator Lou Dobbs praised the awardees’ perseverance in his opening speech. In the words of the Horatio Alger Association, we were “deserving scholars” who illustrated “the limitless possibilities available through the American free-enterprise system.” We were proof that anyone could make it.

The Horatio Alger Association is one of the institutions that Alissa Quart, a journalist and the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, critiques in her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream. In a wide-ranging 230 pages, Quart challenges our nation’s obsession with self-reliance. According to Quart, the fiction that anyone who works hard can have a better life increases inequality and promotes policies that hurt us. Meanwhile, blaming people for their supposedly bad choices is “a kind of nationwide bullying” that the poor internalize. Bootstrapped puts words to beliefs that I struggled to articulate as a teen and that haunted me into adulthood: Both success and failure were up to me alone, I was valuable only when I triumphed, and if I couldn’t overcome, I’d be better off dead.

[Read: The perils of meritocracy]

Quart opens by investigating the origins of the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” and how our culture began to idolize the so-called self-made man. In 1834, the magazine Working Man’s Advocate mocked a local inventor by suggesting that a contraption he’d fashioned would allow him to “hand himself over the Cumberland river … by the straps of his boots”—a laughable impossibility, of course, because you can’t lift your whole body by your shoes. But the term stuck, and over time became synonymous with self-reliance. Quart then points out a number of cracks in our collective myth of self-sufficiency. While Henry David Thoreau stayed at Walden Pond—for many, the mecca of American individualism—his mother did his laundry. Ayn Rand, patron saint of libertarians, collected Social Security near the end of her life. Even Horatio Alger’s novels aren’t tales of genuine independence: In most, a wealthy benefactor steps in to sponsor a handsome teenage protagonist. (These stories also take on a darker meaning when you consider Alger’s own past: A Harvard Divinity School–trained pastor, he was forced to resign after being accused of molesting two boys.)

The belief that underprivileged teens can study hard, prove their worth, and access higher education thanks to charitable largesse also seems more and more like a fable. Donors disproportionately give to elite schools with massive endowments. Only 1.5 percent of the total sum contributed goes to two-year colleges—despite the fact that state and community colleges have some of the highest upward-mobility rates. Not only do the same universities benefit again and again, often the same students do too. A recent Horatio Alger winner observed to me that a small pool of high-achieving, low-income students seemed to win multiple big awards each year. I had noticed this as a teenager too. A handful of my peers were plucked out by various nonprofit organizations and feted repeatedly. Many of them got into prestigious universities that offered full financial aid, rendering the prizes moot.

I was one of those students: I received a full ride to Harvard. At the Horatio Alger conference, a Distinguished American’s wife offered me another grant that meant I didn’t need to get a term-time job; I hardly touched the Horatio Alger money. I sat uncomfortably with all the advantages I’d had. Yes, I’d rotated among friends’ sofas and slept in my car the previous summer. But I also had a grandmother who’d taken an interest in me, insisting I get straight A’s and paying for a parochial elementary school. I’d left foster care because of boarding-school financial aid. For me, as for most of my multi-scholarshipped peers, lucky breaks compounded. Our ascensions were the opposite of self-sufficiency; if anyone had paid attention, they might have studied us to understand what interventions worked—and what held others back.

But for many people who insist that modern America is a meritocracy, the onus is on those who need help to prove that they need it. One of Quart’s sharpest points is that administrative burdens force disadvantaged people to repeatedly prove their worthiness. For example, Medicaid requires participants to frequently recertify themselves (a practice that was paused during the pandemic) to receive benefits. In recent years, more than 220,000 children in Tennessee alone lost coverage because of clerical errors. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has said that the unemployment-insurance system was designed to “put as many kind-of-pointless roadblocks along the way” as possible, so that the jobless gave up. Some of these hurdles—such as some states’ Medicaid work requirements, which have been shown to insignificantly affect employment rates—are simply punishment for poverty.

Although Quart primarily criticizes such policy failures, she also shows how widespread the tendency is to overemphasize individual responsibility. For example, she condemns the “dystopian social safety net” that stretches under the abyss of unmet need. Epitomized by GoFundMe fundraising (where people solicit donations from friends, family, and strangers to help cover the cost of necessities like housing, car repairs, and expensive medical procedures), getting help often means “commodifying our suffering”—not dissimilar to students brandishing their trauma for a single semester’s tuition at a private college.  

Glorifying mettle is common across our culture—the fantasy of self-sufficiency is so pervasive because it feels good, both to witness and to experience. Quart calls out the “hygge” of Little House on the Prairie, which features a pioneer family surviving alone on the frontier, salt pork crackling over their self-started fire. I swelled with pride when my application essay for the scholarship, in which I compared my life to that of the Horatio Alger Award recipient Buzz Aldrin, delivered me into a State Department dining room. Growing up in a society that idolized individual achievement, I never failed to notice, and cling to, moments of seemingly single-handed success.

[Read: The myth of independent American families]

And when things went wrong, I blamed myself—when I was raped a few months after the conference, when I didn’t have a place to stay during school breaks, when I went nearly broke from a mouthful of root canals and fillings after years of sporadic dental care. I’d bought into the intoxicating fiction that I was the master of my fate. When it turned out I wasn’t, the failure felt personal.

By the time I graduated from college, my shame that I wasn’t a smiling overcomer became unbearable. The only way I could let it go was to recognize the dark side of our fixation with independence—a message Quart arrives at far more directly than I could. She proposes commonsense changes to improve the social safety net, most of which are extensions of COVID-era policies: expanding the child tax credit, making recertification for Medicaid less onerous, and reducing administrative hurdles to seeking help.

Just as important, Bootstrapped urges readers to rethink their narratives of accomplishment. Quart encourages us to stop shaming others, and ourselves, for needing assistance and to acknowledge the ways we are all interdependent. When I was a teenager, no amount of praise for my tenacity could have replaced the help I received: encouragement from teachers who believed in me, rides from friends’ parents, a few nights in a shelter, and, yes, the financial aid that let me graduate without debt—a modern miracle. There’s a clear irony to a charity that rewards “self-sufficiency,” even as it attests to our deep impulse to help others.

At the Horatio Alger gala, a falconer released a bald eagle, which soared through the auditorium to the sound of the national anthem. The audience lit up in rapturous applause. Watching the bird, I assumed that it represented the individual triumphs of each of the scholarship’s winners. But maybe I should have been looking at the crowd, drawn together in our wonder, none of us so solitary after all.

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Kaitlyn: What is life but a series of meals, some of which are given dramatic titles to imbue them with random significance?

I once received an email from the comms team at Reddit promoting the company’s end-of-year data that made the claim that the top post of the preceding 12 months had been a recipe for something called “Divorce Carrot Cake.” Of course you’ve heard of Engagement Chicken, the roast chicken that reportedly brought about the betrothal of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, as well as that of Howard Stern and his second wife, Beth.

There’s also something called “Breakup Chili,” invented by our friend Tamar, that is based on the Texas-Style Chili recipe by The New York Times’ Julia Moskin and further inspired by a seminal blog post that Tamar and I have texted back and forth, and to whoever else needs to see it, for the past several years called “February is Breakup Season in Cape Town.” The post, by the writer Rosa Lyster, is about a cluster of early-winter breakups she’d observed, generally of “relationships about a year and a half or less, where breaking up doesn’t involve too much paperwork.” The reason we return to this post so much is because it features a great email from Lyster’s mom, offered as comfort to devastated winter-breakup victims, in which she talks about rereading her own diaries from when she’d just turned 30 and concludes: “The level of introspection and self-analysis and vacillation is truly alarming. I had no idea that my life as I know it now had not even begun and that I would be fine. Isn’t that strange.”

This is the fifth year of the Breakup Chili. Tamar makes it for us all once per winter. The third year was outside; it was 20 degrees and we ate out of our own jars brought from home. Some of the other years I don’t specifically remember. Of course, the first year is a private story. Traditions become most real when you obscure their origins and rewrite their lore!

Lizzie: This was the Breakup Chili’s fifth year, but it was my first year attending the party. Sometimes you gotta work for that invite! Anyway, great name. I understood the gist of it right off the bat: We’d be eating chili. There would be a meat one and a vegetarian one. Maybe someone would break up.

I don’t really have any meaningful foods in my own life. Certainly nothing that has ever gotten me engaged or divorced. That’s not to say that I’m a “food is fuel” person either. It’s just that, unfortunately, the most memorable foods in my personal history are the ones that have given me food poisoning. Hard to forget a turkey sandwich that ruined your life for a week.

I brought Matt along to the party because he’s from Texas and has strong opinions about chili (mostly re: beans). We got to Tamar’s at about 4:30, rang the bell three times, and sat on the stoop for a while before giving up and calling Kaitlyn for help.

Kaitlyn: I hate that this happened. One of my least favorite feelings is waiting on a stoop thinking, If the buzzer doesn’t work, and my text isn’t being answered, what technologies are even left to me? What if I’m not found for another 30 minutes and by then I’m crying? But she made it.

Nathan and I had taken the S to Prospect Park at about 4:00 p.m.—just before dark on a school night. We were carrying some queso-flavored Tostitos, some Topo Chico, and a loaf of sourdough Nathan had made at 1 a.m. while I was on the couch reading the Associated Press’s introduction to its original edition of the Warren Report (“Will history be fully content with the answers?” Guess!!!).

When you enter Tamar’s apartment, you have to go down a long hall that curves in such a way as to conceal the entire living area from view. You get to call out, “Helloooooo,” as if you were in the foyer of a mansion. When Tamar hustled around the corner to greet us, she was wearing a perfect linen apron that went down to her shins—a Christmas present from Alex who’d asked, “Do you think you’ll wear it on Breakup Chili day?” It had dark blue ties on either side and a scooped back. She could leave the house in it!

The apartment was in a state of stunning beauty and warmth. The living room was lined with cream taper candles and espresso cups of Swedish Fish, spicy pistachios, and cornichons. On the bar, Tamar had set up a row of glasses of premixed “ranch water,” which is what Kourtney Kardashian (among others) calls lime seltzer with tequila. She’d had another adventure at Best Meats on Flatbush, she told us. The boys there had cubed the chuck steak for her, and at first she wasn’t sure it was “cube-y” enough. Over FaceTime, her dad had said that the cubes were alright.

Lizzie: Tamar showed us a photo of the raw cubed meat. Looked good to me! Nicely marbled, red, etc.

Really, you have to try and be a deserving guest at a dinner party these days, because hosting one comes with so many pitfalls that only a few brave souls attempt to do it, and even fewer invite more than 10 people. Do you know how expensive it is to buy meat for 20 people? We showed up with some nonalcoholic beer and a bag of Fritos. A bag of Fritos ran me back almost $6! I applaud Tamar for providing us with beef at a time like this, instead of telling us to just go home and chew some cardboard.

Kaitlyn: Though I hoped that the theme of the party would inspire juicy disclosure of romantic failures past, approximately 80 percent of the guests, including myself, were participating in Dry January. So the first 30 minutes were spent gossiping about how “they really have made advances” in nonalcoholic aperitifs and imaginary gin.

This reminded Sonia that her dad had recently learned that there are calories in alcohol, a life-changing revelation that prompted him to begin a somewhat extreme diet. From there, we got on the topic of the OMAD—“one meal a day”—lifestyle, which my dad is currently messing with, God knows why. Nathan said he wouldn’t be impressed until dads started doing GOMAD, which stands for “gallon of milk a day.” I thought he had just come up with that on the spot and was riffing, but I guess he knew someone in college who did it. They actually drank a gallon of milk every day.

Lizzie: He did mention that the GOMAD guy got sick pretty immediately. That’s like, what? 16 cups of milk? You probably shouldn’t be drinking 16 cups of any one thing in a day, except maybe water if you’re obsessed with peeing. (This isn’t medical advice, by the way; maybe you shouldn’t be drinking 16 cups of water a day.)

Kait’s razzing her dad for his recently acquired OMAD lifestyle, but she failed to mention that she herself is in the throes of some kind of 12-week juice-and-salad-eating commitment designed by Kate Upton, or maybe just approved of by Kate Upton. I was like, “Oh, is that enough food for a human adult?” and Kaitlyn was like, “Well, the morning juice is actually a shake.”

This will be relevant soon, as the sun sets and Kaitlyn gets hungrier by the minute. For now, she’s still holding it together in our ever-expanding conversation circle …

Kaitlyn: Amy was going to a date at a nearby bar called Fiona’s after the party, which prompted a discussion of Fiona the Hippo. Annie, a Cincinnati celebrity, explained that Fiona is currently “mating” with her mother’s boyfriend, who is the father of her tiny half-brother, Fritz. Lizzie was trying to understand and recited it back to her: “Her brother’s dad is also the man she’s having sex with?” When she heard herself, she didn’t like that she’d said “man.” She frowned and paused. “I mean hippo,” she said, very quietly.

Lizzie: Yes, a hippo! That’s what I meant. I don’t really know that much about famous zoo inhabitants in general, or about hippos specifically, but this sexual proclivity was news to me. An interesting conversation topic for a first date, perhaps.

Meanwhile, probably totally unrelated to the fact that she’d only eaten beet juice and romaine for the past two weeks, Kaitlyn started craning her head around every few minutes to glare toward the kitchen, where the chili was sitting on the stove. The chili was available for consumption, but inaccessible to us due to the crowd of people lingering in front of it. Kaitlyn watched enviously as they ate, blocking her path to non-juice dinner. It’s as if they were completely unaware that there were people in the next room positively starving!

Kaitlyn: “If it were me, I would go into the kitchen and get some chili and then leave the kitchen,” I said. “I would probably not stand in front of the chili for more than a minute or so.” I was joking but …  

Once I was finally in there I had to eat my words because I did not want to leave. It smelled so good—spicy, smoky, etc.—and Tamar has a Tiffany lamp on the butcher’s block and a big bundle of Santa Fe chilis on the wall. It’s the most wonderful kitchen in New York. The chili was amazing and there were no leaves or E3Live in it, which was absolutely thrilling for me given my current commitment to the lifestyle of the new First Lady of the New York Mets. Plus, Milena was standing off to one side telling one amazing story after another—about her brother staying at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment (near Hudson Yards?) in an “amethyst bed,” then about a “celebrity encounter” she’d had with a Brooklyn 8-year-old who is the namesake of a coffee shop that seriously everyone hates.

Lizzie: The same person who has the amethyst bed (it “looks like a regular bed,” if you were wondering) believes that one should have as many children as possible, apparently because with each additional child you have, the likelihood that one of them will solve climate change increases exponentially. Or something like that.

Milena also told us that a man in London once said to her, upon learning that she’s from New York, “Rice to Riches is the best restaurant in the entire world.” Anyone who knows what Rice to Riches is will recognize the charming absurdity of this statement. For those who don’t know, Rice to Riches is a counter-service restaurant that serves nothing but different flavors of rice pudding out of big plastic saucers. The place looks like it was designed by someone obsessed with the Jetsons, and features a veritable solar system of baffling signs that say things like “No Skinny Bitches!!!,” “Kiss My Fat Free Ass!!!” and “Man Discovered Farming … Invented Food. Woman Discovered Food … Invented Diet.” It’s been open since 2003, which is impressive for a restaurant in Soho that sells a single type of (apparently fat-free) dessert. The owner was arrested in 2005 for running a gambling ring, which adds to the establishment’s rice-y and dicey mythology. To call Rice to Riches the “best restaurant in the world,” apparently sincerely, is both inspiring and confounding.

Eventually, we got tired of standing in the kitchen, realized we were the new wave of chili-loiterers, and sat down at the table in the main room, waiting for other people to join us, like newlyweds situated in the middle of a banquet hall, anticipating visitors and gifts.

Kaitlyn: Tamar came to us with a pile of “freezer cookies”—oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies she’d baked on impulse for a mid-party dessert after remembering that she keeps cookie dough in her freezer just in case. She also keeps a glass bottle of premade Manhattans in her fridge. I’m sure you’d like to marry her!

When Neil stopped by the table for a mandarin and a bit of sourdough, I told him I’d seen him in our backyard setting up his new exercise equipment and asked what his workout regimen was. He didn’t want to get into specifics but he did have a point to make: He’d spent 15 years of his life going to the gym and doing stuff for hours, and it had all been a waste of time. “You don’t have to be that strong,” he said. “It’s so stupid.” He now does 30 minutes in the yard at 4 p.m. Squats and whatever he thinks of.

Lizzie: “Working out is for idiots,” he said.

We also talked about “buffet rules,” and how Nathan’s friend once got kicked out of a CiCi’s Pizza because he ate something off another friend’s plate without paying the required fee. I honestly didn’t know that buffet rules prohibited sharing, but I guess it makes sense, because otherwise you could buy one plate for 12 people. It was agreed that in this instance—a single, sneaky bite off a friend’s plate—Nathan’s rule-breaking friend should have been given a warning first, instead of being forced to stand out in the parking lot while the rest of his friends finished eating.

From there it was on to the topic of the Jimmy Fallon ride at Universal, which I thought was a joke that Nathan made up but is apparently real. We talked about how it’d be funny if Jimmy Fallon were the main guy in Taxi Driver instead of the 2004 flop Taxi. And what if it were Jimmy Carter who hosted a late-night show?

Kaitlyn: We were also suspicious of Nathan’s claim that Adam Driver is going to be in a new movie in which his spaceship crash-lands on “prehistoric Earth” and he has to fight dinosaurs with guns. Nathan pulled up a poster to prove it to us, but it honestly looked like something he could have made himself. (Having since watched the trailer for the real movie, 65, I’m still foggy on the premise. Is Adam Driver from Earth? And he stumbles across another planet similar to Earth, which happens to be in the same ecological state that Earth was in 65 million years ago? Or is Adam Driver from an Earth-like planet that is 65 million years ahead of Earth-Earth, and he stumbles across Earth?)

Anyway, there’s no knowing how these things happen, but more than once the topic of conversation turned to Jimmy Carter and how he is still alive despite the odds. (“He’s had many fatal diseases,” Katie said cheerfully, just as if she were saying something like, “He’s from Georgia.”) I bring this up because I think it’s a nice way to take things full circle …

If I understand correctly, when Jimmy Carter was a younger man and was president, many people considered him to be pretty ineffectual, and his own staff gaslighted him when he reported being menaced by a swimming “swamp rabbit.” But now he’s old and people remember that ineffectiveness fondly, believing it indicated that he was always too good for the disgusting task of wielding power. They now love him.

This is not to say that he has been “vindicated” or to encourage attitudes of waiting years or decades to say, “Look at me now” (toxic). I just bet that Jimmy Carter would enjoy a Breakup Chili and an annual reminder that life does go on and on and on until you can barely remember what it used to be like.

Lizzie: Honestly, sometimes life goes on so quickly that I forget everything that happens to us at these parties we go to!

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On the afternoon of the 2016 election, I took a cab directly from my polling place in South Brooklyn to JFK, where I boarded a full flight to San Francisco. In the evening, when the plane took off, the consensus seemed to be that by the time we landed, the country would have elected its first female president. I wasn’t sure, so when the miniature television that had been allotted to me came alive as we climbed to 10,000 feet, I turned it to the news.

As the sunset outpaced the plane and the dark rose outside our windows, I saw that everyone else had their television turned to the news, too. Pennsylvania and Ohio, Iowa and Nebraska, passed silently beneath us as the returns came in.

The flight from JFK to SFO is about six and a half hours, depending on the wind, so between the hours of 7 p.m. and midnight eastern on November 8, 2016, 180 televisions shone their bluish light on 180 faces arranged in rows of three, facing forward. No one spoke. Strapped in shoulder to shoulder in a metal tube hurtling 35,000 feet over the breadth of America, everyone watched the country’s electorate reveal itself on our own screens. By the time we landed, the decision had been made.

I mentioned this the next day to my mother when we spoke on the phone: the silent, dark plane; all the people quietly watching, hour after hour.

“That’s just like White Noise,” she said.

This is something my mother has been saying to me for about 15 years. White Noise is one of her seminal texts. She read it for a class after going back to graduate school to study literature when I was in my late teens, got excited about the book, and later taught it to her own students. “This is just like White Noise !” she would say, listening to the radio or sitting at the dinner table. She still does this a few times a year, but for a while she was finding White Noise echoes at least once a week.

I seem to be the only college-educated person left in America who hasn’t read Don DeLillo. Sometimes my mother will read something I’ve written and say, a little balefully, “You should really be reading White Noise,” suggesting that this gap in my education, specifically, is egregious and foolish. She’s probably right. Any writer with an interest in probing “American magic and dread”—to borrow a phrase from the novel—is probably in conversation with DeLillo, whether or not she knows it.

[Read: The author of White Noise reviews Taylor Swift’s white noise]

I have no good reason for how or why I evaded this book for so long. It never showed up on a high-school or college reading list, for one thing, but more pertinently I have an embarrassing and completely unproductive resistance to reading what people tell me I should read. I have still never cracked The Little Prince, or On the Road, or Slaughterhouse-Five. I know. The only person this is hurting is myself. And yet I avoided White Noise with special stubbornness. I had the vague sense that the book was a reflection on how alienating modern American life can be—a theme you hardly need to seek out in fiction. People kept referring to it as a masterpiece of postmodernism, which—after years of being assigned so many other books of that genre—didn’t light my fire. Really, I had no idea what it was about. When I asked my mother, she was cryptic. “You’ll just have to read it.” That’s just like my mother.

Sometimes my partner and I look up at each other while we’re doing chores or reading, or maybe when we articulate some minor thought at the same time, and smile and say, “Love.” It’s shorthand. We mean: This is what love is, how strange and funny and good.

Most of the time, my brain chimes a silent little chime after “Love.” It’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru.

This is just like White Noise. In fact, it’s a clear echo of a scene in White Noise. Jack Gladney, our protagonist—a professor at the College-on-the-Hill, a midsize liberal-arts college in Blacksmith, a midsize town somewhere in the midsection of the U.S.—is watching his daughter sleep and feeling the immanent swell, the “desperate piety,” that parents sometimes feel. The girl turns in her sleep and mutters something, propelling him to lean forward to catch her “language not quite of this world.”

I struggled to understand. I was convinced she was saying something, fitting together units of stable meaning. I watched her face, waited. Ten minutes passed. She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant. Toyota Celica … She was only repeating some TV voice.

Nevertheless, Jack thrills at his 9-year-old’s incantation of brand names, which, he notes, is “part of every child’s brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe. Whatever its source, the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence.”

[Read: Writers should examine everything, even the supermarket]

Prodded by an editor at this publication, I finally read White Noise, a fact that vindicated and exasperated my mother in equal measure. The novel has been adapted by Noah Baumbach into a feature film starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, despite a reputation for being unadaptable because of its density of detail and its fractured, occasionally absurdist plot. For the first time, nearly 40 years after the novel’s publication, Americans will consider White Noise on-screen, which is either the best or worst—but definitely the most ironic—medium for it.

The television is always on in the house that Jack shares with his wife, Babette, a “fairly ample” woman with a blondish mop, and four of their children from various prior marriages. Fragments of programming intrude into every aspect of daily life. (“Now we will put the little feelers on the butterfly,” says the voice on the television, or “And other trends that could dramatically impact your portfolio.”) Every Friday, the family sits and watches together, sometimes a sitcom, sometimes a documentary—though far and away the biggest hits are the disasters, human and natural: car accidents, earthquakes, villages swallowed by a lava flow. “Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping,” Jack notes. Vaguely disconcerted by this family-bonding exercise, he mentions it to a colleague, the chair of the “department of American environments,” who assures him that their behavior is totally normal. It’s practically a neurological imperative, he insists: “We’re suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.”

The way that technology—and particularly the television screen—seeps into our consciousness is a primary subject in White Noise. “You have to open yourself to the data,” a visiting lecturer in American environments named Murray Jay Siskind tells Jack.

Look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. “Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.” The medium practically overflows with sacred formulas.

No part of the American mind remains untouched by branding. Nothing is sacred, and so eventually the branding itself comes to acquire an air of the sacrosanct. The grocery store becomes a temple. Reality is determined by the language and images that represent it on television, rather than the other way around.

Jack is renowned as the founder of an academic field, Hitler studies, though by his own admission he is not so much brilliant or pioneering as canny. He saw a niche and exploited it. Hitler studies is less concerned with history, politics, and the Second World War than with the dictator’s success at corralling and manipulating group fascination, his genius for turning himself into a figurehead. Jack is interested in the surface details of Hitler, his theatrics, his optics. He, too, adopts a uniform, never removing his sunglasses or his academic robes when on campus. He teaches “Advanced Nazism” and carries around a copy of Mein Kampf. He barely speaks any German, but this hasn’t really been a problem. Though he can’t read Mein Kampf in its original language, he likes the way German sounds, the way it seems to carry “an authority” that he can’t put his finger on. “Look at it this way,” he explains to his stepdaughter, Denise. “Some people carry a gun. Some people put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer. It’s in this area that my obsessions dwell.”

[From the May 2016 issue: Death and Don DeLillo]

I was caught off guard by this: Although the book takes American alienation, decadence, and moral decay as its subject, it’s profoundly funny. Baumbach has preserved the humor in his adaptation, along with the foreboding backdrop. The rhythm of his dialogue—everyone talking over and past one another in rapid-fire torrents of impressive but usually counterfactual or irrational language—is so perfectly chaotic, nearly slapstick, that the audience at the press screening of White Noise the morning of its premiere at the New York Film Festival erupted in laughter. Baumbach’s Jack is equally hilarious and pathetic thanks to Driver’s exquisite deadpan, his commitment to the bit (though he’s too young to play Jack by about a decade, and Gerwig is too young for her role as well).

The production design is funny in its own way: The grocery store gleams, almost menacingly gorgeous. Everything is very ’80s—the jogging suits, the Hula-Hoops; Gerwig’s wig is a kind of joke all by itself. This hyper-saturated, highly stylized theatrical approach accents the story’s humor and presages the moments when the film’s mood and color palette switch to something more like noir. In the dark, Jack has nightmares; we learn that placid Babette is secretly tortured by the fear of death even when life seems like the suburban middle-class dream, a “condition” for which she takes mysterious pills. Every register contains a deft, satisfying touch of the hysterical.

I wonder if laughing at White Noise feels different than it used to. The novel skewers Americans’ dependence on technology and screens, a phenomenon that is incalculably more intense than it was in 1985. The protagonist may have seemed like a more absurdist construction back then: the paunchy white American male of middling intelligence who idolizes dictators and never turns off the television—who studies and exploits the shortcut to power found in putting on a good show, regardless of whether you have any idea what you’re talking about. Jack is funny because he’s a relatively harmless fool—a product of his circumstances rather than their author; an American patsy. Terrified to die, he idolizes Hitler because Hitler seems “larger than death.” Jack has no meaningful power, really, so he’s a tragicomic figure. Or he was.

I texted my mom to ask whether she found White Noise funny when she first read it, during the early years of the Iraq War. “Not very,” she replied.

Critics have been calling DeLillo’s work prophetic nearly his whole career. When the novelist Jayne Anne Phillips reviewed White Noise in 1985 in The New York Times, she noted that the plotline was “timely and frightening.” The reason Phillips gave was that the middle section of the novel revolves around an “airborne toxic event.” (This is what the authorities on the radio agree to call it, having tried and discarded “feathery plume” and “black billowing cloud.”) Something lethal has been released into the air. Without warning, Jack and his family are living through a public-health disaster. A month before the book appeared, an industrial accident in India had killed thousands of people; it seemed DeLillo had almost foretold the disaster.

Obviously, this plotline remains eerily prescient. Like our own recent airborne toxic event, the poison in White Noise is ambient, diffuse, unpredictable. It upends everyone’s lives, even those who think themselves economically immune to “disasters.” (Disasters happen elsewhere, Jack is sure. “Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods?”) The symptoms it supposedly causes change by the hour—the authorities can’t really get a handle on it, and mass hypochondria shifts every time there’s an update. Jack reassures Babette that something is doubtless available to deal with such a thing, probably a squad of “custom-made organisms” ready to eat the toxic cloud. Babette feels awe—“There is just no end of surprise”—but also fear at this prospect. “Every advance is worse than the one before because it makes me more scared,” she says.

“Scared of what?”

“The sky, the earth, I don’t know.”

Jack agrees. “The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”

[Read: The world’s worst industrial disaster is still unfolding]

Even aside from the airborne toxic event, calamity is ambient. Children are evacuated from school with no clear reason given, only the suspicion that the environment is somehow dangerous. Children participate in emergency evacuation drills where they lie in the street, playing victim. Lev Grossman, writing about the book for Time in 2010, suggested that it was “pitched at a level of absurdity slightly above that of real life,” a statement that more than a decade later no longer feels quite true.

We are always running from a disaster we ourselves have caused, it would seem. We are always alienated. Americans are perpetually spiritually blotted by consumerism and afraid to die. Fitbits. #Sponcon. “Likes.” “Alternative facts.” Infinite scroll. Amazon same-day delivery. When my grandmother was dying, I watched on my cellphone as a priest performed her last rites; I was sitting on the floor of an empty apartment 2,000 miles away. Not knowing what else to do, I took screenshots of her face, impassive. When the call ended, I didn’t see her again, except now my phone occasionally delivers me the screenshots in the middle of the day as “Memories.”

I put out a call before I began reading White Noise, blank slate that I was, for general impressions, and the majority of people who wrote back said that they had read the book in college. Some liked it, a few objected to the characterization of Babette—who, through Jack’s eyes, is more of an instrument than an interiority—but most remembered it favorably, if vaguely. I started to understand why this book appears so often in classrooms, why teachers choose to teach it. It’s a masterpiece of postmodernism, sure. But what White Noise does well—and what literature teachers are often in the position of training students to do—is render visible (or audible, if we want to follow DeLillo’s metaphor) aspects of social and political life that have been normalized into near invisibility.

One’s culture is largely composed of what can no longer be explicitly sensed—we often fail to notice what’s endemic in our social world, believing it to be the given state of things. Intrusions of the uncanny signal that culture is changing faster than our ability to absorb the results into our conception of what’s normal. We live in an uncanny time—though there has been no moment in my life, at least, that has not seemed to be an uneasy, unnatural moment in American life. White Noise was originally published against the backdrop of the Cold War; nuclear anxieties; the reelection of Ronald Reagan, an entertainment personality, to the office of the president. It turned 10 as the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. began to wane, as personal computers began appearing in American homes, nudged into daily life by the advent of the internet. It turned 20 as the War on Terror was truly getting under way. It is turning 38 as it becomes a movie that will be available for streaming, via Netflix, into tens of millions of American homes through televisions, tablets, and phones that also track how many minutes of the night you dream.

Things still seem to be just like White Noise because of DeLillo’s gift for observing the world as if he had just been dropped into it. Instead of simply opening some gum, Babette pulls “the little cellophane ribbon on a bonus pack of sixteen individually wrapped units of chewing gum.” This gaze is evident in his many subsequent novels, most recently The Silence in 2020, a pandemic-related novel that he happened to finish just before COVID-19 made itself known. He credits this vantage to having been raised by Italian immigrants in the Bronx, and to having “roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside.”

In a recent interview with DeLillo in The New York Times Magazine, David Marchese cited the cultural theorist Raymond Williams, who posited that every era has “a structure of feeling, which is basically the way that people experience the times in which they live.” DeLillo had not read Williams, but Marchese’s reference still felt correct. In White Noise, DeLillo nailed a structure of feeling that shapes our present consciousness. Writing shortly after September 11 for Harper’s Magazine, DeLillo articulated it this way: “We don’t have to depend on God or the prophets or other astonishments. We are the astonishment. The miracle is what we ourselves produce, the systems and networks that change the way we live and think.”

When I called my mother to tell her I’d finally read the book and wanted to talk about it, we agreed to do a sort of book club on Zoom. She logged on from home, but I couldn’t see the room behind her: She had programmed a branded image from an organization she works for as her “background.” When she tried to show me her copy of White Noise (a repurchase; she lost her original, dog-eared copy crammed with notes many years ago, and still resents this now-decade-old replacement), it flashed visible and invisible, interfering with the Zoom setting.

“Turn off your weird background,” I said. “I can’t see anything.”

She smiled and cocked an eyebrow. “Are you sure? How about this one?” The beach I grew up playing on appeared behind her. “How about this one?” She was in the mountains. “How about this one?” The desert. “This one?”

She was excited to have looked over the book again for the first time in a few years. “I can’t believe how funny it is! I took it so seriously when I first read it.” Then again, she’d always been receptive to skepticism about technology and mass media. “Remember I didn’t let you and your brother watch TV?”

“I remember. The book really was funny. He’s a Hitler professor who can’t even speak German?”

“Hilarious.”

We chatted for an hour or so. She pointed to the echoes between Jack and Donald Trump. I wanted to know what reading it for the first time had felt like. She called me a few weeks later, after I’d been texting her about White Noise again. “I’ve been thinking more about that question you asked me, about whether I found the book funny when I read it the first time,” she said.

“Tell me,” I said.

“I think when the book first came out, and even when I first read it, we weren’t so used to seeing the posture of dry, overweening wit, or of irony, as comedy.” It was always clear that the book was humorous, she suggested, but the gesture of laughing out loud at jokes told about the sinking ship as it goes down is more recent. We are primed to laugh at black humor now, she said, and black humor becomes funnier, somehow, the blacker—or bleaker—things get. She mentioned rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

[From the October 1997 issue: Don DeLillo’s Underworld, an underhistory of mid-century America]

It so happened that when she called, I was reading a new book by the choreographer Annie-B Parson, The Choreography of Everyday Life. She observes, “I think it was Kundera who wrote that the definition of irony is one eye crying and the other eye watching that tear fall.” This ability to hold our tears at a distance—whether they’re tears of laughter or not—is something Americans have gotten very good at.

My mother will like the movie, I think. Especially the credits, which involve an elaborate dance sequence, zany and extravagant, set to the sounds of the first new LCD Soundsystem track in years. Baumbach loves credits at the end of movies. He likes to watch them all the way through, and he wants his audiences to as well. The dancing is his way of helping us over the finish line: He knows that Americans love a vacuous but well-executed spectacle.

---

This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline “White Noise Used to Be Satire.”

New research documents a major migration into Britain during the Late Bronze Age that would displace half the genetic makeup of England and Wales.

The massive scale of the study challenges previous notions of the origins of Celtic languages and culture in Britain, says Douglas J. Kennett, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and one of the 223 coauthors of the paper in Nature.

“It now appears that these migrations played out over centuries and involved the peaceful mixing of populations,” he says. “It shows that the movement of smaller populations over centuries can result in major changes in ancestry. In this case, half the ancestry of all later British populations.”

In analyzing the DNA from the remains of 793 individuals from the Middle to Late Bronze Age, the researchers discovered large-scale migration into southern Britain from around 1300 to 800 BCE. These newcomers so thoroughly mixed with the native population that by 1000 BCE they accounted for roughly half the genetic makeup of southern Britain by the Iron Age, which began about 750 BC.

The researchers can’t yet say where the migrants came from, but they suspect present-day France.

Kennett’s group directly radiocarbon dated 123 individuals with genome-wide data to between 1300-800 BCE.

“These chronological data were a critical component of the study because previous work suggested that large-scale movements of people into Britain occurred hundreds of years later in the Iron Age,” he says. “These data also indicate that population movements from continental Europe were not abrupt, but persisted through the Middle to Late Bronze Age and were largely complete by 1000-875 BC.”

Language spread

There’s a good chance the migrants into Britain contributed more than their genes. As the study notes, big population movements often drive cultural changes, including the languages people speak. Did the Bronze Age migrants bring Celtic languages with them? The answer: maybe.

Some researchers have said other studies provide evidence of Celtic being brought to Britain from present-day France at the end of the Bronze Age or in the early Iron Age. (Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic are all Celtic languages.) Given the coinciding migrations into Britain, the coauthors write, their “identification of substantial migration into Britain from sources that best fit populations in France provides an independent line of evidence in support of this, and points to the [Middle to Late Bronze Age] as a prime candidate for the period of this language spread.”

Lactose tolerance

What’s more, those ancient migrants are likely responsible for Britons’ love of dairy products. The researchers found lactase persistence in about 50% of the population compared to around 7% in Central Europe, which didn’t see a rapid rise of it until 1,000 years later.

Kennett, who has studied the expansion of populations in Eurasia during the Bronze Age, notes that it was fueled, in part, from the use of secondary animal products such as milk, cheese, and yogurt. But those earlier continental populations didn’t have the allele for lactase persistence, suggesting milk products were most likely fermented or consumed by younger lactose tolerant individuals.

“The allele for lactase persistence does not develop in continental Europe for another millennium,” he says, “but our study indicates that it developed in Britain earlier, during the Late Bronze age, in concert with the transition in ancestry. This suggests that cultural changes in the consumption of milk products during this transition resulted in genetic changes in the British population favoring milk consumption.”

While dairy products may have played a key role in humanity’s expansion in Europe, science and technology are the drivers of new research and discoveries in our understanding of ancient populations.

“Ancient DNA and paleogenomics research are radically changing our views of mobility and migration in the ancient past,” Kennett says. “Our study, the largest of its kind conducted thus far, indicates that the movement and mixing of ancient populations was much more common than previously thought and that half the ancestry of later British peoples came from continental Europe.”

The University of York, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Vienna led the study.

Source: UC Santa Barbara

The post DNA says migration reshaped Bronze Age Britain appeared first on Futurity.

This post, updates: the toxic positivity, the boss neighbor, and more , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

1. Manager’s toxic positivity is getting us down

I wish I could say that we had an open discussion with the principal, and that she took our concerns to heart, but it didn’t seem worth it since we all knew she would be leaving in two months. Plus, I think most of us felt so bombarded with keeping up with the bare minimum of our daily tasks that the prospect of facing yet another situation where we’d be told how we’re not resilient enough was just too much to bear. Our new principal is much more understanding and open to hearing our concerns, then working with us to find solutions. However, it took a few months for us to trust that.

The major benefit I got from writing to you originally was reading the comments. It was a relief to hear from others who agreed how frustrating this would be. After finally having a real conversation with my partner about the daily nightmares I had been having for six months, as well as several other disturbing mental health symptoms that I’ve never experienced before, I realised that it wasn’t possible for me to keep trying to the extent that I was. The constant feelings of rage and powerlessness over the terrible decisions being made by our politicians all the way down through the entire education system were just too overwhelming. It was an extremely difficult decision to make, because a lot of my sense of identity comes from being reliable and able to “suck it up”, but I finally admitted that I needed to reduce my work schedule. I’ve been struggling with intense feelings of guilt for not being able to just carry on, but I’m slowly working through them. I’ve been having therapy, exercising, sleeping better, not having nearly as many panic attacks, and I feel like I’m doing a much better job with my reduced teaching load. I don’t know yet how long I’ll need to do this, but I’m really trying to allow myself the time I need. This is hard because I still feel the need to tough everything out and it feels a little like giving up to not push myself to do it all.

So I guess, in the end, I followed my principal’s advice and practised some self-care. Probably not in the way she was advising though. *shrug* I have learned that many employers will take advantage to the extent that they can get away with it. It was up to me to make myself less available and take care of myself. Your readers’ comments truly made me feel like I was not alone during a very vulnerable time, and I appreciate that more than I can express.

2. I had to fire someone and I feel like a failure

I absolutely took your advice and the advice of lots of the commenters. I was able to find a great new hire for the role and he’s fitting in with the team fantastically and has taken to the work like a fish in water. The team and I talk openly and freely about our workloads and how we’re working with or getting along with other members of our team.

About 2-weeks after Bob’s dismissal from the company, we found out that he’d been working for all of 2020 with one of our competitors and working on their deliverables at the same time he was working on ours.

Thank you so much for providing a sounding board for us when we need a third party perspective.

3. My new boss lives a few doors down from me (#2 at the link)

The restructuring did happen. My job was moved to the department where I thought it would be. But the would be boss of mine who lives in my neighborhood, got let go by the company during the restructure. So I never reported to him. Now I have a boss who I love and does not live in my neighborhood.

I never reached out or asked around to find out what happened with my former would be boss. I haven’t seen him since, but he does still live in our neighborhood (something you were right about in your reply, that we would probably not see each other much). His getting let go could have possibly been due to the restructure and not performance based. I do expect to see him out on Halloween, since he has kids and our neighborhood has a huge trick or treating crowd every year.

4. My coworker made a rude comment about my grandmother’s death

My boss did speak to my coworker privately, and pointed out that she had really upset me when I was grieving for a family member, and to think how she would have felt in my place. I never got an apology, but she was (frighteningly) nice to me for a while afterwards. I don’t think I will ever fully trust or like her again (she wasn’t high on my ‘favourite co-worker list anyway, so not too much difference) but I can put it out of my mind for the most part.

We managed to get my nan’s house sale through though, with a few bumps in the road, and at my parents request I have organised a family trip to near where we scattered my grandad’s ashes, so that we can have a tribute trip and scatter her there as well.

The number of people living with dementia globally more than doubled between 1990 and 2016 from 20.2 million to 43.8 million, report researchers.

The researchers also found that 22.3 percent of healthy years lost due to dementia in 2016 were due to modifiable risk factors. Their study looks at the global, regional, and national burden of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias from 1990-2016.

The systematic analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016 found dementia was more common at older ages, with the prevalence doubling every five years over age 50. There was also significant potential for prevention.

“In our study, 22.3 percent (11.8-35.1 percent) of the total global disability-adjusted life years lost due to dementia in 2016 could be attributed to the four modifiable risk factors—being overweight, high blood sugar, consuming a lot of sugar-sweetened beverages, and smoking,” the authors say.

Lead author Cassandra Szoeke, a professor at the University of Melbourne and director of the Women’s Healthy Ageing Project, says even more risk factors would be explored in the new data collection.

By 2050 the number of people living with dementia could be around 100 million.

“But already the importance of these risks in allowing us to prevent or delay dementia is clear,” she says. “The paper noted that changes in risk factor exposure over time as we become healthier might account for several cohort studies documenting a reduction in age-specific incidence rates in their study populations.”

Because dementia develops over at least 20 to 30 years before patients get a diagnosis, Szoeke says studies needed to investigate cognition over 20 to 30 years to determine when and for how long intervention is necessary to prevent disease.

She says most randomized controlled trials lasted one to five years and the necessary 30-year longitudinal studies were rare.

“In addition, when you look over decades there are so many exposures that impact on our health, you need to account for all these things or you could miss a factor that is crucial in the development of disease,” she says.

Szoeke says by 2050 the number of people living with dementia could be around 100 million.

“The paper states that to support our community, we will need a larger workforce of trained health professionals as well as planning and building facilities and community-based services which support improved quality of life and function,” she says.

“We need to enhance the quality of life and function of people living with cognitive impairment and focus on preventing further cognitive decline. This will need a codeveloped community wide approach with well-developed services and an even greater network of trained health professionals.

“Chronic diseases are becoming the leading causes of death and disability worldwide, and whilst we continue to work daily on new therapies to target disease, at home we really need to focus more on the health choices that we know extend both disease-free and disability-free survival.”

The research appears in the Lancet Neurology. Researchers from the University of Washington also led the research.

Source: University of Melbourne

The post Number of people with dementia doubled in just 26 years appeared first on Futurity.

The Vatican treasurer and most senior Australian Catholic faces charges relating to alleged incidents decades apart

Cardinal George Pell will likely face two separate trials over historical sexual offence allegations, with his defence barrister Robert Richter telling a Melbourne court this was necessary because the nature of the two sets of charges were “completely different” and occurred two decades apart.

Judge Sue Pullen presided over the brief directions hearing on Wednesday morning and prosecutors did not object to the separate trials for the treasurer of the Vatican in Rome.

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I was stunned just now to read the disgusting, racist, indefensible thing that Pat Buchanan has written in his syndicated column in response to the Confederate statue controversy:

Looking back over the history of a Western Civilization, which we call great, were not the explorers who came out of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England all white supremacists?

They conquered in the name of the mother countries all the lands they discovered, imposed their rule upon the indigenous peoples, and vanquished and eradicated the native-born who stood in their way.

Who, during the centuries-long discovery and conquest of the New World, really believed that the lives of the indigenous peoples were of equal worth with those of the colonizers?

More:

“All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?

With that, Buchanan repudiates not only the founding principle of our Constitutional order, but also a core teaching of the Christian faith, which holds that all men are created in the image of God. It is fine to disbelieve in egalitarianism as an ideology and as a basis for policy. Most conservatives do, and most conservatives rightly reject the idea that all cultures are equally good. And it is reasonable to argue against the puritan iconoclasts who would destroy monuments and historical memory in the name of a mindless, ideological dogmatism.

But that’s not what this is. Buchanan is not meditating on the tragic nature of history, as any conservative worth the name must do. No, in this column, Buchanan is defending white supremacy, straight up.

It is abhorrent, and must be rejected in the strongest terms by conservatives. If this is where the Right is going, it can go right off that racist cliff without me. This is what white supremacists did to black people in the American South.  And this is the terrorism white supremacists inflicted on black citizens in my own town a few years before I was born. This was really inflicted by white people on black people made, like them, in the image of God. It is a blood-red stain on this country, and in particular on my ancestors.

It grieves me to see a conservative writer and thinker I have long admired, even if I did not always agree with him, descend to the gutter like this. But it has happened, and it is shameful. It is intolerable. He has crossed a bright red line. No, no, no! Conservatives, this is not us. It cannot be us. We cannot put up with this.

UPDATE: Link to Buchanan column fixed.

UPDATE.2: Mona Charen says of the column:

Jefferson’s words were not a statement of human sameness. Obviously some people are smarter, handsomer, taller, and more athletic than others. It was a philosophical and ethical commitment to the idea that all human beings are morally and politically equal — that they are entitled to respect and to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” just because they are members of the human family. Buchanan asks for evidence, as if this were an empirical question. It’s not. It’s a moral one. A belief in human equality arose out of the Enlightenment and before that from the Judeo-Christian tradition. That tradition teaches that each human is made in the image and likeness of God. This is the foundation of equality. Jefferson, for all his personal shortcomings, understood that, which is why his words have inspired people around the world and particularly in our land for centuries. Buchanan dissents. Just underline this: He is rejecting the American idea.

I’m more radical about this stuff than Mona Charen is. If Buchanan wanted to reject the American idea of a polity based on universal moral and political equality, I wouldn’t necessarily condemn him for that. It would depend on his reasons. Because whites deserve to rule over others by nature of their racial superiority is not a good reason, to put it mildly. I, too, hate the radical egalitarianism of the contemporary Left, but by no means because I believe in racial superiority.

Rapper and singer leaves lengthy Facebook post in which he explains, ‘I am not at peace. I haven’t been since you’ve known me’

Kid Cudi has posted a statement in which he describes his ongoing battle with anxiety and depression, describing himself as “a damaged human swimming in a pool of emotions everyday of my life.”

In a Facebook post on Tuesday, the Ohio musician said that he has checked himself into rehab “for depression and suicidal urges.”

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The To Do List may look and feel like an R-rated teen sex comedy in the modern tradition, a la American Pie or Superbad or The Girl Next Door -- and, true to form, it offers gross-out gags and F-bombs aplenty.

But at the center of writer/director Maggie Carey's brave, funny debut film, there's an un-panicked, radically reassuring portrayal of teenage sex.

Set in the summer of 1993, The To Do List follows late-blooming valedictorian Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza) as she attempts to master a full repertoire of sexual proficiencies with interchangeable male classmates. The end game to this plan: losing her virginity to chick-magnet lifeguard Rusty Waters (a delightfully '90s-tastic Scott Porter) before starting her freshman year at Georgetown. Her more experienced best friends (Alia Shawkat and Sarah Steele) counsel her along the way, while her dorky but endearing friend Cameron (Johnny Simmons) quietly pines for her.

What's unusual about The To Do List isn't that Brandy sets her sights on losing her virginity to a gorgeous, kinda-brain-dead older boy; pop culture boasts plenty of young women who initially just want to get the whole awkward rite of passage over with. Instead, what's unusual about Carey's film is that (spoiler alert) Brandy succeeds -- and then moves on. She loses her virginity to a guy who doesn't really know her and definitely doesn't love her, and then she checks off the "Intercourse" box on her eponymous to-do list, packs up her things, and goes to college, un-traumatized and un-stricken by tragic regret.

When it comes to teenage girls losing their virginity on TV and in the movies, a few old storylines tend to get recycled. Most of them have to do with the fear of what could happen if the girl doesn't "save it" for the right moment or the right guy. These fictional teenagers with plans to have sex for the first time often "come to their senses" at the last minute, or get effectively dissuaded by someone older and wiser who advocates waiting for the "right" guy to come along -- the good guy, the One, who's trustworthy and kind and loves her for the right reasons.

My So-Called Life's Angela Chase, for instance, backs out of losing her virginity to her longtime crush, the dopey but sexy Jordan Catalano, because she's simply not ready. Rachel Berry saves herself for Finn on Glee after thinking better of her promise to let bad-boy rival glee-club singer Jesse be her first. On Friday Night Lights, a determined Julie Taylor makes a curfew-conscious appointment to have sex for the first time with her new boyfriend Matt Saracen -- only to get nervous and realize that, like her mother warned her, she's not ready. (Julie and Matt do have sex later -- after it's been firmly established over the course of a season or so that Matt is, indeed, the "right" guy.)

On How I Met Your Mother, Robin Scherbatsky realizes her younger sister Katie has plans to have sex with her obnoxious boyfriend when they visit New York together; she enlists her friends to help talk her out of it, and they succeed. American Beauty and What Women Want feature father figures persuading teenage girls away from having sex for the first time with men who don't love them. In 2002's Crossroads, Britney Spears's valedictorian Lucy reneges at the last minute on a pact to lose her virginity with her high-school lab partner, and instead has sex for the first time with Ben, a sensitive musician who once rescued his sister from their abusive dad.

And what happens to the fictional teenage girl who actually goes through with it, who loses her virginity without waiting for a boy or man who loves her truly, madly, deeply, and honestly?

Very bad things, frequently. Sometimes it's immediate karmic retribution: Marissa Cooper from The O.C. "finally" gives in to her jerky boyfriend of several years only to find out soon afterward that he's been habitually cheating. The Virgin Suicides' Lux Lisbon has sex with the school heartthrob on a football field only to fall asleep afterward, get abandoned, break curfew, and subsequently get put under parent-inflicted house arrest for what's effectively the rest of her life. Sometimes it's pregnancy: Juno of Juno, Mary Cummings of Saved!, and Becky Sproles of Friday Night Lights all find themselves pregnant after their first time. And still other times it's paralyzing regret, like Felicity on Felicity. As a 1999 Entertainment Weekly review put it when describing her post-sex antics: "You could read the guilt-stricken reaction all over Russell's face ... she looked ashen throughout the episode."

The To Do List, though, presents a less common kind of story about a girl having sex for the first time. Brandy loses her virginity to Rusty -- who's clearly not the guy she's "meant to be with" -- then has a moment of thoughtfulness before meeting up with her best friends right in time to announce her recent banging of Rusty Waters and then catch the rest of Beaches. When Brandy's dad (a hilariously anal-retentive Clark Gregg) discovers what's happened and races to her rescue, a calm Brandy reassures him, "I'm fine, Dad. I'm OK."

By sidestepping the "emotional-trauma-after-virginity-loss" construct, 'The To Do List' provides a positive alternative outlook on what happens to girls who "give away their flower" or don't "guard their carnal treasure": Sometimes, they're pretty much fine.

By sidestepping the "emotional-trauma-after-virginity-loss" construct and replacing it with giddy detail-spilling among friends, The To Do List sends up both a female onscreen teen-virginity trope and a male one: The "late-blooming virgin loses it to generically hot rando, comes away with high-five-worthy story to tell buddies" theme crops up more often in stories about teenage boys. (See: American Pie, Sixteen Candles, Almost Famous, Porky's, Road Trip, Losin' It -- and Superbad, kinda.) And perhaps more importantly, it provides a positive alternative outlook on what happens to girls who "give away their flower" or don't "guard their carnal treasure": Sometimes, they're pretty much fine.

It's not that waiting for the "right" sexual partner is a bad idea to promote among teenage audiences. Waiting for the right sexual partner is a really, really good idea. That's both for health and safety reasons, and because we can probably all agree that sex is most magical, the first time and every time, when it's between two people who are mutually trusting and nuts about each other.

And, to its credit, The To Do List seems to recognize this. Near the end of the film, Brandy finds herself face-to-face with both Rusty (with whom Brandy's just had a mildly disappointing first sexual encounter) and Cameron (who's hurt and angry that Brandy has broken his heart, used him and his friends as hookup practice partners, and slept with Rusty). Finally, she realizes Cameron is sweet, reliable, thoughtful, and the kind of guy she should have been with all along, and she tells him so.

But then: "I don't regret it," she tells him. "I'm a teenager. I'll have regrets when I'm... 30.

"And you," she says to Rusty, "are -- really hot." Does she wish she hadn't lost her virginity to him? "No. Because you are going to make an awesome story to tell my friends."

At the end of the film, Brandy is pictured a few months into her freshman year at Georgetown -- where she's well-adjusted, involved on campus, making friends, and having great sex with a guy who likes her.

Advertising to teens that they'll be perfectly fine after doing what Brandy does is, of course, a slippery slope at best. Care and caution are always a wise choice in real life. But the "hold-out-and-then-have-consensual-safe-sex-with-the-right-guy-or­-else" narrative often omits the fact that if a teenage girl happens to hold out and then have consensual, safe sex with the wrong guy, it's OK for her to simply accept it and move forward, sans the seemingly obligatory emotional baggage.

Taken as a whole, The To Do List functions as a sort of Everybody Poops for the world of sex. Everybody does it: young people, old people (like Brandy's wonderfully warm, kooky parents, played by Gregg and Connie Britton), pretty people (like Brandy's older sister Amber, played by Rachel Bilson), icky people (like Brandy's pool-manager boss, played by Carey's husband Bill Hader). And it takes care to show that there's a diverse range of ways to experience sex. Sometimes it's a sacred pledge of deep emotional investment and mutual trust, as it seems to be between Brandy's parents. But sometimes it's a transaction, sometimes it's a pastime, and other times it's simply a haphazard, non-committal muddle of fluids and sweaty limbs. The memorable message of The To Do List is that, as Brandy muses in the final scene, "Sometimes sex is just sex" -- and whether or not you've had it doesn't have to change who you are.

Last year when American Paradigm Schools took over Philadelphia's infamous, failing John Paul Jones Middle School, they did something a lot of people would find inconceivable. The school was known as "Jones Jail" for its reputation of violence and disorder, and because the building physically resembled a youth correctional facility. Situated in the Kensington section of the city, it drew students from the heart of a desperately poor hub of injection drug users and street level prostitution where gun violence rates are off the charts. But rather than beef up the already heavy security to ensure safety and restore order, American Paradigm stripped it away. During renovations, they removed the metal detectors and barred windows.

The police predicted chaos. But instead, new numbers seem to show that in a single year, the number of serious incidents fell by 90%.

The school says it wasn't just the humanizing physical makeover of the facility that helped. Memphis Street Academy also credits the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), a noncoercive, nonviolent conflict resolution regimen originally used in prison settings that was later adapted to violent schools. AVP, when tailored to school settings, emphasizes student empowerment, relationship building and anger management over institutional control and surveillance. There are no aggressive security guards in schools using the AVP model; instead they have engagement coaches, who provide support, encouragement, and a sense of safety.

The size and immediacy of the drop will strike some as suspect, but Memphis Street Academy stands by accuracy of their numbers, saying that they are required by law to report the same types of incidents any other school must report. Nothing about the reporting process or the kinds of incidents that must be reported was changed. And while many charter schools are criticized for "creaming," i.e. taking only the best students and transferring those with behavior problems or disabilities to other struggling public schools, the Memphis Street Academy and the Alternatives to Violence Project insist that wasn't the case, here. The conditions of their charter required them to pick up exactly where John Paul Jones left off.

Carolyn Schodt, a registered nurse at Alternatives to Violence who also runs AVP inside Graterford State Prison, says, "We did this with the same students, same parents, same poverty. In one school year serious incidents - drug sales, weapons, assaults, rapes - went from 138 to 15.

~

"The police department told us flat out, 'You're foolish, and you'll regret it.'"

Fifth grade certainly isn't too early for school-based violence intervention programming in North Philadelphia. Memphis Street Academy kids grow up quick. Many students have parents struggling with addiction and older siblings in the drug game who are already either dead or in jail. The reality of life in their community can be harsh; teachers say students coming to school in the morning witness prostitutes on Kensington Avenue tricking to get their wake-up dope shots. On the way home in the afternoon, after the extensive network of drug corners operating in the neighborhood are up and humming, they might have to dodge bullets. Students have brought dirty syringes and discarded guns they found on the street to class. By middle school many of them have witnessed more violence than most Americans who didn't serve in a war ever will.

Previously listed as one of Pennsylvania's persistently dangerous schools, John Paul Jones was known as an unruly place where fights were the norm and street violence from the surrounding neighborhood occasionally spilled onto school property. This despite the fact that security measures at the time--the ones the school got rid of while rebranding to Memphis Street Academy--were extreme.

"Every day ," says CEO of American Paradigm Schools Stacey Cruise, "they would set up a perimeter of police officers on the blocks around the school, and those police were there to protect neighbors from the children, not to protect the children from the neighborhood." Before school let out the block would clear, neighbors coming in off their porches and fearfully shutting their doors. Nearby bodegas would temporarily close shop. When the bell rung, 800 rambunctious children would stream out the building's front doors, climbing over vehicles parked in front of the school in the rush to get away.

School police officers patrolled the building at John Paul Jones, and children were routinely submitted to scans with metal detecting wands. All the windows were covered in metal grating and one room that held computers even had thick iron prison bars on its exterior.

In taking the hugely risky leap to a noncoercive, nonviolence based safety system at Memphis Street Academy, American Paradigm says convincing community stakeholders that these prison-like implements of the security state needed to be discarded wasn't easy.

"The police department told us flat out, 'You're foolish, and you'll regret it,'" says Jerry Santilli, American Paradigm's co-founder. He says that the police department lobbied so hard the school was ultimately convinced not to remove all the window gratings, leaving the rear of the school still enmeshed in metal because the officers informed them of a network of drug houses operating directly across the street.

The school took the grates down from the building façade in an elaborate ceremony, inviting news crews to film a cherry picker crane lifting them off the building. Police brass showed up wearing Kevlar vests outside their white dress shirts to make their feelings about the neighborhood clear.

Later that night 12 of the windows got shot out by drug crews.

It didn't change anyone's mind; in fact, it proved an opportunity for Memphis Street Academy CEO Dr Christine Borelli, herself a neighborhood native who spent part of her childhood living with her grandmother at Kensington & Somerset, one of the most notorious drug corners in the world, to begin the process of reaching out to the community and building relationships with families. Her willingness to come on the block and get cooperation from distrustful neighbors proved crucial.

"I don't just fit in here, I'm from here. I'm proud to be from here. When I go out to look for a student who's not coming to school I run into people I know. Parents appreciate that you're not fearful of the community."

Many educators have come to question the value of the oppressive security measures that predominate in big urban public schools like Philadelphia's: metal detectors, barred windows, windows that open only a crack ostensibly to keep objects or people from being thrown out of them, and militaristic security staff that roam the hallways demanding documentation from students not in the classroom,

Assaults on students by other students and on teachers and administrators have persisted despite these measures. It raises the question of whether the marginal benefits of the district's security apparatus are worth the psychological impact of creating an environment for children that so closely resembles a correctional facility. The kids at John Paul Jones, who nicknamed their own school the "Jones Jail," were clearly aware that it was the school-to-prison pipeline entrance.

Shaun Harper is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education where he heads the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education. His forthcoming book Exceeding Expectations explores the subject of black and Latino male academic achievement, which he feels is shaped by environmental factors like the physical condition and culture at a particular school.

"Environment matters," says Harper, who interviewed hundreds of low-income New York City public school students for his research on the subject. "If a school promotes academic rigor and going to college, that shapes student behavior. If a school's environment feels unsafe and looks like a prison, then that does, also." None of the kids Harper has ever interviewed who went from a high-security school to a low-security school ever said they felt unsafe without all the bars and metal detectors. Like many educators, he's dubious about the protection these measures actually provide. He cites the story of a hard-working, college-bound student in New York City who accidentally brought to school a box cutter he used on a summer job and forgot to remove from his backpack. For months this student unwittingly carried the box cutter in and out of the school undetected before a security officer finally discovered it. Once the box cutter was discovered, the student was suspended. Did this make the school any safer?

AVP pitched a new way forward on the safety question to American Paradigm when they were brought on board as the school's partner. Rather than aggressive security guards patrolling the hallways, they suggested a network of "engagement coaches" whose job is to be continually interacting with children in a supportive instead of punitive role. Engagement coaches were recruited from Troops to Teachers, a program that trains veterans as educators. The vets provide a strong role model presence that makes children feel secure, but they're also trained in nonviolent conflict resolution, so their job is to help mediate disputes rather than dole out punishment. Since the children trust their engagement coaches, the school is able to get ahead of potential conflicts: coaches often get advance word, for example, when something's about to go down in the hallways.

Professor Shaun Harper believes even kids who have grown up in violent environments can adapt to a school environment that is more gentle and humane. He explains that in better-performing public schools in New York City, academic achievement can be established as the community norm through small acts like announcing each student's college acceptance over the PA system. "You do this for the 9^th graders," Harper explains, "not for the seniors who are getting admitted to college. When I interview 9^th graders at better-performing low-income schools about why they want to go to college, they say because that's the expectation the school has for them."

Memphis Street Academy says their own internal student polling reflects Mr Harper's research findings. Allowed to respond anonymously to questionnaires, 73% of students said they now felt safe at school, 100% said they feel there's an adult at school who cares about them and 95% said they hope to graduate from college one day. These are the same Jones Jail kids who 12 months ago were climbing over cars to get away from school (Memphis Street Academy has since staggered dismissals and is using AVP techniques on the grounds as kids leave--nearby bodegas have stopped locking their doors when school lets out).

When asked about the security changes at Memphis Street Academy a ten-year-old fifth-grader sums up her experience: "There are no more fights. There are no more police. That's better for the community."

Well this is both embarrassing and deeply telling.

In what appears to have been a gesture of goodwill gone haywire, McDonald's recently teamed up with Visa to create a financial planning site for its low-pay workforce. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the thing seems to have been literally incapable of imagining of how a fast food employee could survive on a minimum wage income. As ThinkProgress and other outlets have reported, the site includes a sample budget that, among other laughable assumptions, presumes that workers will have a second job. 

As Jim Cook at Irregular Times notes, the $1,105 figure up top is roughly what the average McDonald's cashier earning $7.72 an hour would take home each month after payroll taxes, if they worked 40 hours a week. So this budget applies to someone just about working two full-time jobs at normal fast-food pay. (The federal minimum wage is just $7.25 an hour, by the way, but 19 states and DC set theirs higher). 

A few of the other ridiculous conceits here: This hypothetical worker doesn't pay a heating bill. I guess some utilities are included in their $600 a month rent? (At the end of 2012, average rent in the U.S. was $1,048). Gas and groceries are bundled into $27 a day spending money. And this individual apparently has access to $20 a month healthcare. McDonald's, for its part, charges employees $12.58 a week for the company's most basic health plan. Well, that's if they've been with the company for a year. Otherwise, it's $14. 

Now, it's possible that McDonald's and Visa meant this sample budget to reflect a two-person household. That would be a tad more realistic, after all. Unfortunately, the brochure doesn't give any indication that's the case. Nor does it change the fact that most of these expenses would apply to a single person. 

Of course, minimum wage workers aren't really entirely on their own, especially if they have children. There are programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit to help them along. But that's sort of the point. When large companies make profits by paying their workers unlivable wages, we end up subsidizing their bottom lines. 

Jean-Luc Godard famously said that the best way to criticize a movie was to make another movie. That bit of wisdom feels like the guiding principle for Noah Baumbach's lovely new film Frances Ha. It looks like a romantic comedy and sounds like a romantic comedy, but it's so smart, keenly observed, and unbeholden to Hollywood formula that it feels a rebuke to the entirety of female-centric mainstream film. This portrait of New York post-graduate ennui is sometimes warm, sometimes funny, and sometimes acidic, but it's also surprisingly daring—because it makes the rather unorthodox suggestion that finding a nice fella is not the all-purpose solution to a young woman's problems.

The look of the film channels Manhattan; director Baumbach shoots New York in that same black-and-white love-letter fashion, though he's capturing shabbier apartments and louder parties. Frances (Gerwig) starts the film with a boyfriend, but the real love of her life is her best friend and roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner)—to the extent that when Frances's boyfriend proposes they move in together, she turns him down on account of Sophie. That, of course, isn't the only reason she rejects the offer, and the scene turns from a proposal to a break-up.

Frances is kind of a mess, and she knows it as well as anyone. "I'm so embarrassed," she says at one point, as part of an apology, "I'm not a real person yet." She should be—she's 27 years old. But she can't disengage from her romantic notions of what her life should be. She works as an apprentice for a modern dance company, where she hangs on to the slimmest thread of hope that she'll work her way in. As long as she's clinging to that dream, the idea of getting a "real" (read: day) job is anathema. But you need a real job to make money, and when Sophie bails, Frances finds herself descending through a series of less-than-perfect living situations. (Baumbach and Gerwig, who co-wrote, dramatize her movements with on-screen text of her changing addresses.)

That sense of life in flux should feel familiar to any young New Yorker, and though many have branded Frances Ha as a late arrival (or, some have posed, indirect critique) of the "mumblecore" movement, it seems a lot closer to the work of Lena Dunham. (Her perpetually shirtless Girls co-star Adam Driver is even on hand to help connect those dots.) Those who disdain such influences will find plenty to dislike here: the chit-chatty dialogue, the frequent navel gazing, the lack of color.

Those criticisms are legitimate, but the film itself is so engaging and approachable that they come to mind only after the fact. Baumbach has always had a way with a good one-liner; there's an everyday, casual wit to his dialogue, which is filled with lines like "This apartment is very... aware of itself" and, of a home where one can smoke indoors, "This makes me feel like a bad mother in 1987." The picture also has a right-on sense of tempo, adroitly pivoting between blackout-sketch montages and natural conversations that play out mostly in medium-wides with minimal cuts and crisp, lovingly desaturated photography. Gerwig is, as ever, a delight; she finds the goodness underneath this messy young woman. She may be spectacularly bad at dinner parties, and she may treat the man who's stealing her best friend with barely concealed derision, but she's got a good heart and wants the best for everyone. She's trying, you've got to give her that. The question is if and when she's going to try hard enough.

Gerwig is, as ever, a delight; she finds the goodness underneath this messy young woman. She's trying, you've got to give her that. The question is if and when she's going to try hard enough.

I hope it is not a spoiler to reveal that not only does Frances Ha not hinge on its protagonist's love life, it is barely concerned with or even interested in it. That's a commendable, even admirable quality in a storytelling medium that continues to maintain the fiction that a woman can only find true happiness in the arms and bed of a dynamite dude. Even a supposedly forward-thinking, trope-busting effort like Bridesmaids had to bend itself into pretzels to give audiences the happily-ever-after that they supposedly crave, and it was worse for it. With its classical style and prototypical New York twentysomething heroine, Frances Ha seems far from subversive. But in suggesting that its title character look inward rather than outward to solve the puzzle of herself, the film is quietly, slyly revolutionary.

During a talk at Oxford University back in February, scientist Richard Dawkins was asked to justify his belief in the scientific method. In his brief but pointed response, Dawkins explained that he believes in science because it works, or as he put it: “It works, bitches.” His quote appears to be a reference to a classic 2006 web comic by xkcd:

via John Adams

For almost every day last month Malaysian artist/architect Hong Yi (who often goes by the nickname Red) created a fun illustration made with common (and occasionally not so common) food. Her parameters were simple: the image had to be comprised entirely of food and the only backdrop could be a white plate. With that in mind Yi set out to create landscapes, animals, homages to pop culture, and even a multi-frame telling of the three little pigs. The project, which still appears to be ongoing, has been documented heavily around the web, but if you haven’t seen it all head over to her Facebook and read an interview on designboom. Photos will also be appearing on her Instagram at @redhongyi.

maddieonthings:

Austin, TX #sxsw

teamfortress2blog:

vanehwasreal:

i mean what

what the fuck

gustav no

stop it

gustav please

He has an amazing taste in hats

“Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. ‘Faith’ is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman: ‘I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love/ If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.’”

- I cannot claim to not fear death, but this philosophy is sound

Submitted by: Unknown

Tagged: easter , chandeliers , peeps , g rated , there I fixed it Share on Facebook

Reuters

The average American cashier makes $20,230 a year, a salary that in a single-earner household would leave a family of four living under the poverty line. But if he works the cash registers at QuikTrip, it's an entirely different story. The convenience-store and gas-station chain offers entry-level employees an annual salary of around $40,000, plus benefits. Those high wages didn't stop QuikTrip from prospering in a hostile economic climate. While other low-cost retailers spent the recession laying off staff and shuttering stores, QuikTrip expanded to its current 645 locations across 11 states.

Many employers believe that one of the best ways to raise their profit margin is to cut labor costs. But companies like QuikTrip, the grocery-store chain Trader Joe's, and Costco Wholesale are proving that the decision to offer low wages is a choice, not an economic necessity. All three are low-cost retailers, a sector that is traditionally known for relying on part-time, low-paid employees. Yet these companies have all found that the act of valuing workers can pay off in the form of increased sales and productivity.

"Retailers start with this philosophy of seeing employees as a cost to be minimized," says Zeynep Ton of MIT's Sloan School of Management. That can lead businesses into a vicious cycle. Underinvestment in workers can result in operational problems in stores, which decrease sales. And low sales often lead companies to slash labor costs even further. Middle-income jobs have declined recently as a share of total employment, as many employers have turned full-time jobs into part-time positions with no benefits and unpredictable schedules. 

QuikTrip, Trader Joe's, and Costco operate on a different model, Ton says. "They start with the mentality of seeing employees as assets to be maximized," she says. As a result, their stores boast better operational efficiency and customer service, and those result in better sales. QuikTrip sales per labor hour are two-thirds higher than the average convenience-store chain, Ton found, and sales per square foot are over 50 percent higher. 

Entry-level hires at QuikTrip are trained for two full weeks before they start work, and they learn everything from how to order merchandise to how to clean the bathroom. Most store managers are promoted from within, giving employees a reason to do well. "They can see that if you work hard, if you're smart, the opportunity to grow within the company is very, very good," says company spokesman Mike Thornbrugh.

The approach seems like common sense. Keeping shelves stocked and helping customers find merchandise are key to maximizing sales, and it takes human judgment and people skills to execute those tasks effectively. To see what happens when workers are devalued, look no further than Borders or Circuit City. Both big-box retailers saw sales plummet after staff cutbacks, and both ultimately went bankrupt.

As global competition increases and cheap, convenient commerce finds a natural home online, the most successful companies may be those that focus on delivering a better customer experience. Ton's research on QuikTrip and other low-cost retailers--now a Harvard Business School case--is applicable across a variety of industries, she says. Toyota's production system, for example, gives all employees--including workers on the assembly lines--a voice in improving products.

But for a publicly traded company under pressure to show quarterly earnings, it's tempting to show quick profits by cutting labor costs. The bad economy has also made workers willing to take lower-paid positions rather than join the ranks of the unemployed. New employer-sponsored health insurance requirements under the Affordable Care Act are only going to give employers an additional incentive to shift workers to a part-time schedule. 

There are also trade-offs to investing in employees. Businesses that spend more on their workers have to cut costs elsewhere. Trader Joe's streamlines operations by offering a limited number of products and very few sale promotions. Costco stocks products on pallets, as a warehouse would. And the QuikTrip model requires investors to have the fortitude to accept possible short-term drops in profits. "You have to take a loss for a little bit," says Maureen Conway, executive director of the Economic Opportunities Program at the Aspen Institute. "You have to pay above market. You have to change how you do business."

At the upper echelons of the American workforce, salaries have soared. Companies are accustomed to thinking of their highest-level employees as "talent," and fighting to hire and reward people who will help grow the company. Now Trader Joe's and QuikTrip are proving that lower-level employees can be assets whose skills improve the bottom-line as well.

Reuters/Associated Press

This one couldn't be going better if it was scripted for a Comedy Central show.

There's a pretty good chance that a philandering former governor will face off against the sister of a television comedian for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. During a primary for South Carolina's first congressional district special election Tuesday, Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch won the Democratic nod. Meanwhile, Mark Sanford won the most votes in the GOP field, sending him to a runoff for the Republican nomination.

This is the seat, you may recall, that opened up when Governor Nikki Haley appointed Tim Scott to a Senate seat vacated by Jim DeMint. The field was full of names in the "Is that the same ....?" category -- not just Sanford and Colbert Busch, sister of Stephen (though she pronounces the 't,' as in COAL-burt), but also Sanford's ex-wife Jenny and Teddy Turner, the conservative son of the CNN mogul. A profile in the Charleston Post and Courier several years ago aptly pointed out how her brother didn't define her:

Elizabeth Colbert-Busch is Stephen Colbert's sister, and that's probably the least interesting thing about her.

Her father and two of her brothers were killed in a plane crash when she was 19. She was married to a man who ended up on "America's Most Wanted." And in 2001, while at a business conference in New York City, she was sitting in a building directly across the street from the World Trade Center when two jetliners slammed into its twin towers, forever changing the landscape of America.

And then there's Sanford, of Appalachian Trail and Argentine lover fame, who apparently by unwritten rule must be described by reporters as "disgraced former governor Mark Sanford." Perhaps we're reaching a point where it would be more appropriate to call him "formerly disgraced governor Mark Sanford," though. He took a solid 37 percent of the vote, exceeding the closest comer by 24 points. It's not clear who he'll face in the April 2 runoff. Curtis Bostic and Larry Grooms are close enough that there's likely to be a recount, which Bostic, a former county counselor, currently holding the edge over Grooms, a state senator. That race won't be a gimme for Sanford, and his greatest asset -- his name recognition -- is also his greatest weakness, and nearly two-thirds of GOP primary voters cast ballots against him

Sanford's return is proving eerily like his fall: weird to watch, because it feels guiltily like rubbernecking, but also a refreshingly honest performance the likes of which seldom occurs in politics.

Assuming Sanford wins the runoff, he's probably headed for victory in the May 7 election, which would cap an extremely unlikely comeback with a return to the seat he held from 1995 to 2001. For some reason, National Review's John Fund is warning darkly that Colbert Busch could win, but that's a long shot. If you really want it, Phillip Bump has an extensive run-down on the demographics, but what all you need to know is that Republicans outnumber Democrats 60-40 in the district; it went for Mitt Romney by 18 points; Sanford won more total votes than Colbert Busch Tuesday, even though she got 96 percent of the Democratic vote; and no Democrat has represented the seat since the fairly conservative Mendel Davis lost in 1980.

Sanford's return is proving eerily like his fall: weird to watch, because it feels guiltily like rubbernecking, but also a refreshingly honest performance the likes of which seldom occurs in politics. Back in 2009, once Sanford admitted he hadn't been hiking and 'fessed up to his extramarital affair, the world was treated to one of the oddest, most frank press conferences ever, in which he explained his love for Maria Belen Chapur in surprising, squirm-inducing detail. And he showed his resilience then: Despite predictions from almost every quarter that he'd have to step down, Sanford finished out his term as governor before entering the figurative (rather than literal, Appalachian) wilderness, briefly.

During his comeback, sensing the futility of trying to cover it up, he's maintained a similar stance, as Jason Zengerle showed in a great profile in New York. Sanford insists he's learned from his mistakes, but is extremely self-effacing: "I'm anybody but the guy to take marriage lessons from, but you want to treat that marriage as something special and unique and guard it and protect it in a way that I did not." And yet he still does things like ask his ex-wife to run his campaign, just as she did his prior ones. ("I could pay you this time," he offered.)

You couldn't write a TV show this weird.

The Republican Party on Monday released a 100-page autopsy of how its 2012 presidential campaign was conducted. I've picked out the key sections you need to read from the analytic recommendations and critiques made by the party in this "Growth and Opportunity Project" report. The project report also has a long section of recommendations for GOP friends and allies -- read, PACs and Super PACS -- which I've not excerpted from below. It's an astonishingly frank document that calls for major changes in how the party addresses minorities, women, and its own campaign processes. *** The GOP today is a tale of two parties. One of them, the gubernatorial wing, is growing and successful. The other, the federal wing, is increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.

Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. States in which our presidential candidates used to win, such as New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Florida, are increasingly voting Democratic. We are losing in too many places.

It has reached the point where in the past six presidential elections, four have gone to the Democratic nominee, at an average yield of 327 electoral votes to 211 for the Republican. During the preceding two decades, from 1968 to 1988, Republicans won five out of six elections, averaging 417 electoral votes to Democrats' 113.

Public perception of the Party is at record lows. Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us.

At the federal level, much of what Republicans are doing is not working beyond the core constituencies that make up the Party. On the state level, however, it is a different story. Republicans hold governorships in 30 states with 315 electoral votes, the most governors either party has had in 12 years, and four short of the all-time GOP high of 34 governors who served in the 1920s.

Republican governors are America's reformers in chief. They continue to deliver on conservative promises of reducing the size of government while making people's lives better. They routinely win a much larger share of the minority vote than GOP presidential candidates, demonstrating an appeal that goes beyond the base of the Party.

It is time for Republicans on the federal level to learn from successful Republicans on the state level. It is time to smartly change course, modernize the Party, and learn once again how to appeal to more people, including those who share some but not all of our conservative principles.

At our core, Republicans have comfortably remained the Party of Reagan without figuring out what comes next. Ronald Reagan is a Republican hero and role model who was first elected 33 years ago -- meaning no one under the age of 51 today was old enough to vote for Reagan when he first ran for President. Our Party knows how to appeal to older voters, but we have lost our way with younger ones. We sound increasingly out of touch.

***

The perception, revealed in polling, that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the Party and its candidates on the federal level, especially in presidential years. It is a major deficiency that must be addressed.

One of the contributors to this problem is that while Democrats tend to talk about people, Republicans tend to talk about policy. Our ideas can sound distant and removed from people's lives. Instead of connecting with voters' concerns, we too often sound like bookkeepers. We need to do a better job connecting people to our policies.

***

If we believe our policies are the best ones to improve the lives of the American people, all the American people, our candidates and office holders need to do a better job talking in normal, people-oriented terms and we need to go to communities where Republicans do not normally go to listen and make our case. We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too. We must recruit more candidates who come from minority communities.

***

We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.

***

If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies. In the last election, Governor Romney received just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. Other minority communities, including Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, also view the Party as unwelcoming. President Bush got 44 percent of the Asian vote in 2004; our presidential nominee received only 26 percent in 2012.

As one conservative, Tea-Party leader, Dick Armey, told us, "You can't call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you. We've chased the Hispanic voter out of his natural home."

We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party's appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only. We also believe that comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.

***

When it comes to social issues, the Party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming.

If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues.

***

The pervasive mentality of writing off blocks of states or demographic votes for the Republican Party must be completely forgotten. The Republican Party must compete on every playing field.

***

If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn't want them in the United States, they won't pay attention to our next sentence. It doesn't matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think that we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies. In essence, Hispanic voters tell us our Party's position on immigration has become a litmus test, measuring whether we are meeting them with a welcome mat or a closed door.

Throughout our discussions with various Hispanic groups, they told us this: Message matters.

Too often Republican elected officials spoke about issues important to the Hispanic community using a tone that undermined the GOP brand within Hispanic communities. Repairing that relationship will require both a tone that "welcomes in" as well as substantial time spent in the community demonstrating a commitment to addressing its unique concerns. As one participant in a regional listening session noted, "The key problem is that the Republican Party's message offends too many people unnecessarily. We win the economic message, which is the most important to voters, but we then lose them when we discuss other issues."

***

It is also a fair criticism that Republicans do not do enough to elevate Hispanic leaders within the Party infrastructure. This includes not just candidates running for office, but also senior decision-makers in the RNC's infrastructure. These personnel should not be pigeonholed into demographic outreach, but should be promoted to positions to develop political strategy and provide input on all budgeting decisions. The RNC must rebuild a nationwide database of Hispanic leaders and donors that can be a resource to the Republican community at large.

***

The RNC must invest financial resources in Hispanic media. In a $1 billion campaign, much less than 1 percent of the total budget was spent on Hispanic or other demographic group oriented media. At one point during the 2012 campaign, OFA was outspending us 8 to 1 in these media markets. If we are going to attract these groups to our Party and candidates, our budgets, and expenses need to reflect this importance.

***

The RNC must improve its efforts to include female voters and promote women to leadership ranks within the committee. Additionally, when developing our Party's message, women need to be part of this process to represent some of the unique concerns that female voters may have. There is growing unrest within the community of Republican women frustrated by the Party's negative image among women, and the women who participated in our listening sessions contributed many constructive ideas of ways to improve our brand with women throughout the country and grow the ranks of influential female voices in the Republican Party.

***

The Republican Party committees need to understand that women need to be asked to run. Women are less likely to run for office on their own, and we should be encouraging and championing their desire to seek elective office. Additionally, the Republican Party must recognize the unique challenges that female candidates face when running for office, as well as the unique opportunities female candidates provide in winning elections. The Party should provide training programs for potential female candidates that includes fundraising guidance, digital strategy, etc.

***

Another consistent theme that emerged from our conversations related to mechanics is the immediate need for the RNC and Republicans to foster what has been referred to as an "environment of intellectual curiosity" and a "culture of data and learning," and the RNC must lead this effort. We need to be much more purposeful and expansive in our use of research and more sophisticated in how we employ data across all campaign and Party functions. No longer can campaign activities be compartmentalized or "siloed" in a way that makes sharing resources and knowledge less efficient.

***

...we must develop a deeper talent pool that understands and can deploy data and technology/digital campaigning in decision-making processes and targeting efforts. More active recruiting on college campuses, providing internships and scholarships, and recruiting from commercial firms that may harbor talent with relevant skills sets is critical in providing the talent for future campaigns. The RNC should strive to establish working relationships and open lines of communication with thought leaders in Silicon Valley to ensure the Party is at the forefront of new developments and trends in digital technology. The Party can and should play an important role in building bridges between its digital operatives and the best minds in the Valley and elsewhere. And we must make an earlier commitment to field operations and ground game than we have made in the past to ensure a year-round, election-cycle-to-election-cycle presence that can improve the quality of our voter contact.

All of these areas of focus will require a reprioritization of resources through not only the RNC budget but also the budgets of the other national party committees, state parties, campaigns, allied groups, and Super PACs. But this is critical in order for us to move forward.

***

Identify a team of strategists and funders to build a data analytics institute that can capture and distill best practices for communication to and targeting of specific voters. Using the GOP's data, the data analytics institute would work to develop a specific set of tests for 2013 and 2014 -- tests on voter registration, persuasion, GOTV, and voter mobilization -- that will then be adopted into future programs to ensure that our voter contact and targeting dollars are spent on proven performance. These tests should be the first order of business of the analytics team and should incorporate pollsters, data managers, and messaging professionals at the table developing a variety of approaches that would be subject to measurement.

***

The number of early and absentee voters continued to increase this cycle, and Election Day voting continued to fall. In 2004, 76 percent of the electorate voted on Election Day; in 2012, 65 percent voted on Election Day, a decrease of 12 percent in eight years. The Democrats successfully front-loaded many of their votes this cycle, expanding their early vote and absentee reach and giving them a much better picture going into Election Day of who had already voted and who remained a target for their efforts. They continued to expand their advantage in early voting, and this cycle they ran a much more focused effort on absentee voting, which helped them close their margins.

This trend in early, absentee, and online voting is here to stay. Republicans must alter their strategy and acknowledge the trend as future reality, utilizing new tactics to gain victory on Election Day; it is imperative to note that this will be a critical cultural shift within the Party. Additionally, early voting should be factored into all aspects of political strategy, messaging and budgeting so that we understand that we are no longer working in an environment where 72-hour GOTV efforts will determine an election outcome. And again, we must test and retest what will work best with respect to contacts and persuasion of early and absentee voters.

The Democrats' effort on maintaining a year-round presence with field operations, and investing in infrastructure to support early and absentee vote programs, had a significant impact on the outcome of the election.

***

Our survey asked political professionals in what areas they would like to receive more training and education, and digital and social media were the second most popular items listed. In an open-ended question, 29 percent of all respondents mentioned one or both of these items in their comments.

Our challenge is less of a technology problem and more of a culture problem. As referenced earlier, we need to strive for an environment of intellectual curiosity, data, research, and testing to ensure that our programs are working.

***

The RNC should recruit and hire a chief technology and digital officer for the RNC by May 1, 2013, whose experience and background sends a strong and immediate signal that we are serious about growing our digital and tech operations and data integration. The chief technology and digital officer should identify, recruit and hire a working group of data scientists, tech and digital advocates to build a structure that can eventually be deployed during the 2014 midterm elections and the 2016 presidential race to provide a 21st century digital, data and tech operation for our candidates.

The RNC should begin the search for expanded technology and digital teams that can be deployed across every division of the RNC -- fundraising, political, communications, and so on to integrate the work of those divisions and increase the potential to use technology and digital in an efficient and effective manner. (These employees are separate and distinct from those described in the data section earlier.) Technology and digital should be treated as two separate but related functions in this process. The search for members of these teams should be expanded beyond the traditional political sphere and include individuals with significant professional experience in web development and marketing programs. Integration across all areas/offices/divisions is critical for success.

***

Programs such as the Republican State Leadership Committee's "Future Majority Project" (www.futuremajority.com) to recruit minority candidates and women candidates for the 2012 cycle have been highly effective and should be encouraged, and the RNC and state parties should expand their efforts in this area. In the 2012 cycle, the RSLC committed to spend $3 million to identify and support new GOP candidates of Hispanic descent and women for state office. Ultimately the RSLC identified 125 new Republican Hispanic candidates and 185 new women candidates. More than $5 million was used to successfully elect 84 new women and grow the state-level Republican Hispanic caucus. The RSLC has now established a Future Majority Caucus led by new Mexico Governor Susana Martinez and Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval along with a board of 10 rising stars from state legislatures across the country. Together, these leaders will help identify new candidates and develop even more ambitious goals for electing the new generation of GOP leaders.

***

There is a strong consensus that we have not invested the financial resources in a labor pool that can actively conduct and run "in-person" contact at the ground level. The Obama campaign budgeted its spending to ensure the most personal forms of voter contact were a priority. But they went beyond this. They gave volunteers and field staff flexibility in implementation and creativity in decision-making to get the most out of their field teams. And they acted based on information they received from volunteers through their voter contact operation. We need to write campaign plans that reflect an increased presence of field staff in states starting much earlier than we have done in the past.

***

By June 15, 2013, make an investment in field staff beyond traditional battleground states and make an earlier commitment to building the field team in all state operations. It is essential for the Party to grow the playing field. There are too few existing paths to 270 electoral votes for our presidential nominee under current trend lines. We need to aggressively work to put more states in play where we have infrastructure advantages over the Democrats based on our foothold in the governorships. And this requires an early commitment to building the team.

***

There is no consensus on the top problem facing pollsters, according to our survey, though it's clear that public pollsters and private pollsters of both parties faced several challenges during the 2012 election cycle. When asked to choose the single most important issue or problem facing pollsters when it comes to telephone polling accuracy, four problems (cell phones, demographics, refusals, and turnout) bubbled to the top in a close grouping, each mentioned by 18 to 21 percent as most important.

Concerns expressed by pollsters include the increasing use of cell phones, making contact on land-lines more difficult and accurate polling more expensive and expansive. Another issue of concern is the need to include more young voters and Hispanics in polling samples given the growth in the electorate in these groups. An additional challenge facing pollsters was a nonresponse bias that occurred as various groups reached different levels of fatigue in the elections process. 24 percent describe higher refusal and no-answer rates as a "very important" factor. For example, following Governor Romney's first debate performance, both public and private polling firms reported a drop-off in the number of Obama supporters who would agree to participate in surveys. Understanding this bias and correcting for it is a major challenge facing pollsters in the future. And finally, 36 percent of pollsters believe that "flawed turnout models" are a "very important" factor in poll inaccuracy. The concerns expressed in our survey mirror the concerns raised in specific conversations with pollsters during the course of our task force work.

Responses to open-ended questions in the pollsters' survey suggest that many pollsters would welcome regular meetings with other researchers to share best practices and pitfalls. It is important that GOP pollsters share information on a regular basis about sampling and weighting of samples, as well as assumptions made in interpretation of survey research, to ensure more accurate data that can be used in allocating campaign and Party resources.

The significant challenge of reaching the right mix of people on the phone may sometimes require that we dedicate more resources to ensuring that our samples accurately reflect the electorate that will actually vote. This could mean enlisting bilingual interviewers in districts and states with large Hispanic populations. As mentioned earlier, it also means that a significant portion of polling samples must be dedicated to cell phones (while recognizing that auto-dialed calls cannot legally be made to cell phones). And it could mean that polls need to be fielded over longer periods and with larger samples. In addition, more spending may be required for research into special populations (e.g., youth, Hispanics) by Party organizations for private learning that could be shared with campaigns and other Party committees when appropriate.

***

Recent election cycles have seen a troubling diminishment of the role of political parties and even candidates themselves in our democracy. The national and state political parties are well on their way to the intensive care unit. McCain-Feingold now makes it impossible for the national parties to use funds raised under a state's own laws to support state and local candidates and parties in that state, and it forces them to use federal money for what are truly state and local activities. ...

Outside groups now play an expanded role affecting federal races and, in some ways, overshadow state parties in primary and general elections. As a result, this environment has caused a splintered Congress with little party cohesion so that gridlock and polarization grow as the political parties lose their ability to rally their elected officeholders around a set of coherent governing policies.

Fixing the inability of the political parties to be true national parties must be a top priority. Unless Congress acts, the country will continue to suffer under the current misguided statutory scheme that over regulates campaign finance, limits free speech and empowers the very so-called special interests this law was meant to diminish.

***

Federal campaign finance laws need to be revised to loosen the restrictive burdens that have stifled the voices of candidates and parties.

***

Debates must remain a central element of the GOP nominating process, but in recent years there have been too many debates, and they took place too early. The first debate of the 2012 cycle took place on May 5, 2011, eight months before the first votes were cast in the Iowa caucuses. In contrast, the first Republican primary debate of the 1980 election took place on January 5, 16 days prior to the Iowa caucuses. On January 7 and 8 last year, two debates took place within 12-hours of each other. The number of debates has become ridiculous, and they're taking candidates away from other important campaign activities....The number of debates should be reduced by roughly half....

***

The Republican Convention should be held earlier in the summer. It should be moved to late June or sometime in July, allowing our nominee more time to begin the general election phase. (Note: The 2016 Olympics will be held August 5-21.)

Because the nominee will still need an estimated 60-90 days to prepare for the Convention, changes will need to be made to the primary calendar. If the Convention were to be held in July, the last primary would need to be held no later than May 15. If the Convention were to be held in late June, the final primary would need to be held no later than April 30. Moving primaries up will require states and state parties to cooperate.

***

We also recommend broadening the base of the Party and inviting as many voters as possible into the Republican Party by discouraging conventions and caucuses for the purpose of allocating delegates to the national convention. Our party needs to grow its membership, and primaries seem to be a more effective way to do so.

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"Hop Mr. Bunny, Skip Mr. Bear If you don't dig this party you ain't no where!"


The place was Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s. Rents were high and wages were low for many African Americans and one way they came together to fight the injustice and to raise the rent money was to hold rent parties.
Refreshments and music were provided and they printed up these neat cards to promote the evenings.
When Langston Hughes moved to Harlem he was already familiar with the rent party scene from his days writing for the Chicago Defender. He would eventually put together "quite a collection" of the cards. Hughes said “When I first came to Harlem, as a poet I was intrigued by the little rhymes at the top of most House Rent Party cards, so I saved them. Now I have quite a collection.”


Hughes' collection of rent party cards resides at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the above images are from.

Thanks to The Vault, a new blog from Slate for the lead.

Okay, maybe it's the camera angle, but there is some resemblance between Arrested Development's George Bluth Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor) and the new Pope Francis I, no?

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