A.N

On the corner of Washington and Decatur streets in Montgomery, Alabama, a visitor can feel history pressing in from every side. Just down the street is the church where Martin Luther King Jr. and others planned the Montgomery bus boycott. Two blocks away sits the First White House of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis once lived. But although the city is crowded with historical markers—including, by one count, 59 Confederate memorials, and a similar number devoted to the civil-rights movement—you won’t find many markers of the racial violence following Reconstruction.

Soon, however, on a six-acre site overlooking Montgomery’s Cottage Hill neighborhood, just a stone’s throw from the Rosa Parks Museum, the Memorial to Peace and Justice [1] will serve as a national monument to the victims of lynchings. It will be the first such memorial in the U.S., and, its founders hope, it will show how lynchings of black people were essential to maintaining white power in the Jim Crow South.

The memorial is the brainchild of Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer who directs the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery-based legal-advocacy organization. Two years ago, EJI completed an ambitious tally of the black Americans hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, beaten, or otherwise murdered by white mobs from 1877 to 1950. EJI’s original report identified 4,075 victims, a sizable increase from previous estimates. Since then, the list of killings has continued to grow; it now stands at 4,384.

Stevenson felt that it was crucial to find a way to incorporate this history into what he describes as a landscape “littered with the iconography of the Confederacy.” Conceived by mass Design Group, a Boston architecture firm, the memorial’s design comprises 816 suspended columns, each representing a U.S. county in which EJI has documented lynchings, with the names of that county’s known victims inscribed [2]. The columns will be made of Corten steel, a material that oxidizes when exposed to weather; over time, rust may bleed onto nearby surfaces. (The metal was used to great effect in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.) Viewers walking through the pavilion will gradually descend. As they do, the rust-colored columns will hang above them [3], a frank suggestion of dangling corpses.

Bordering the memorial will be replicas of the columns; EJI is challenging counties to come and claim theirs—a takeaway memorial to erect at home. The hope is that one day, the perimeter of the monument will be empty, the replicas dispersed across 20 states ranging from the Deep South to Utah, Minnesota, and California.

Construction on the memorial is already under way, with an opening planned for next spring. EJI is also creating a museum called From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which seeks to connect the history of slavery with the racial violence of the 20th century. One exhibit will feature hundreds, perhaps eventually thousands, of jars of soil [4] [5] from the sites of documented lynchings, collected by community volunteers [6].

The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin are among the models for the new memorial and museum, Stevenson told me. America’s original sin predates the atrocities that prompted those memorials, but he believes it’s not too late for the country to come to terms with the violence that has supported white supremacy across centuries. “I think we do need truth and reconciliation in America,” he said. “But truth and reconciliation are sequential. You can’t get to reconciliation until you first tell the truth.”

At about 3 p.m. on Friday, February 3, Tim Piazza, a sophomore at Penn State University, arrived at Hershey Medical Center by helicopter. Eighteen hours earlier, he had been in the kind of raging good health that only teenagers enjoy. He was a handsome, redheaded kid with a shy smile, a hometown girlfriend, and a family who loved him very much. Now he had a lacerated spleen, an abdomen full of blood, and multiple traumatic brain injuries. He had fallen down a flight of stairs during a hazing event at his fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, but the members had waited nearly 12 hours before calling 911, relenting only when their pledge “looked fucking dead.” Tim underwent surgery shortly after arriving at Hershey, but it was too late. He died early the next morning.

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Every year or so brings another such death, another healthy young college man a victim of hazing at the hands of one of the nation’s storied social fraternities. And with each new death, the various stakeholders perform in ways that are so ritualized, it’s almost as though they are completing the second half of the same hazing rite that killed the boy.

The fraternity enters a “period of reflection”; it may appoint a “blue-ribbon panel.” It will announce reforms that look significant to anyone outside the system, but that are essentially cosmetic. Its most dramatic act will be to shut down the chapter, and the house will stand empty for a time, its legend growing ever more thrilling to students who walk past and talk of a fraternity so off the chain that it killed a guy. In short order it will “recolonize” on the campus, and in a few years the house will be back in business.

The president of the college or university where the tragedy occurred will make bold statements about ensuring there is never another fraternity death at his institution. But he knows—or will soon discover—that fraternity executives do not serve at the pleasure of college presidents. He will be forced into announcing his own set of limp reforms. He may “ban” the fraternity from campus, but since the fraternity will have probably closed the chapter already, he will be revealed as weak.

The media will feast on the story, which provides an excuse to pay an unwarranted amount of attention to something viewers are always interested in: the death of a relatively affluent white suburban kid. Because the culprits are also relatively affluent white suburban kids, there is no need to fear pandering to the racial bias that favors stories about this type of victim. The story is ultimately about the callousness and even cruelty of white men.

The grieving parents will appear on television. In their anger and sorrow, they will hope to press criminal charges. Usually they will also sue the fraternity, at which point they will discover how thoroughly these organizations have indemnified themselves against culpability in such deaths. The parents will try to turn their grief into meaningful purpose, but they will discover how intractable a system they are up against, and how draining the process of chipping away at it is. They will be worn down by the endless civil case that forces them to relive their son’s passing over and over. The ritual will begin to slow down, but then a brand-new pair of parents—filled with the energy and outrage of early grief—will emerge, and the cycle will begin again.

Tim Piazza’s case, however, has something we’ve never seen before. This time the dead student left a final testimony, a vivid, horrifying, and inescapable account of what happened to him and why. The house where he was so savagely treated had been outfitted with security cameras, which recorded his long ordeal. Put together with the texts and group chats of the fraternity brothers as they delayed seeking medical treatment and then cleaned up any traces of a wild party—and with the 65-page report released by a Centre County grand jury, which recommended 1,098 criminal charges against 18 former members and against the fraternity itself—the footage reveals a more complete picture of certain dark realities than we have previously had.

Once again, a student is dead and a family is shattered. And all of us are co-authors of these grim facts, as we grant both the fraternities and their host institutions tax-exempt status and allow them to carry on year after year with little change. Is it time we reconsidered what we’re doing?

In 2004, a Penn State alumnus from the class of 1970 named Donald Abbey visited his old fraternity house, Beta Theta Pi. He had been a star fullback in the early years of the Joe Paterno era, and gone on to become a billionaire real-estate investor and builder in California who remembered the Beta house as a central part of his college experience. But when he visited, he was shocked—it was, he recalled, “repulsive,” and he felt compelled to bring his experience in “repositioning properties” to bear on 220 North Burrowes Road. He would spend a total of $8.5 million on what would be the most extensive renovation of an American fraternity house in history.

Abbey’s taste does not run to the economic or the practical. One of the mansions he built for himself in California, in the San Gabriel Valley, has an underground firing range; a million-gallon, temperature-controlled trout pond; an oak-paneled elevator; and “Venetian plaster masterpieces throughout.” Similarly, his vision for the refurbished Beta house was like something out of a movie about college. (Exterior: the frat where the rich bastards live.) The bathrooms had heated floors, the two kitchens had copper ceilings, the tables were hand-carved mahogany imported from Colombia. At the entrances were biometric fingerprint scanners.

Abbey seems not to have considered why the house might have become so “repulsive” in the first place. A simple trip through the archives of The Daily Collegian might have revealed to him that the Alpha Upsilon chapter of Beta Theta Pi was hardly the Garrick Club. This was an outfit in which a warm day might bring the sight of a brother sitting, with his pants pulled down, on the edge of a balcony, while a pledge stood on the ground below, his hands raised as though to catch the other man’s feces. At the very least, this might not have been the crowd for anything requiring a fingerprint.

The renovations were largely complete by the winter of 2007, and almost immediately the members began to trash the house. Abbey was justly furious, and at some point he had at least 14 security cameras installed throughout the public rooms, an astonishing and perhaps unprecedented step. The cameras were in no way secret, and yet the brothers continued to engage in a variety of forbidden acts, including hazing, in clear view of them. In late January 2009, the national fraternity put the chapter on probation. But the young men continued to break the rules. A few weeks later, the chapter’s probation was converted to the more serious “interim suspension.” Incredibly, with the pressure on and the cameras still recording, the behavior continued. By the end of February, the chapter had been disbanded.

The public often interprets the “closing” of a fraternity as a decisive action. In fact, it is really more of a “reopening under new management” kind of process. The national organization grooms a new set of brothers—a “colony”—and trains them carefully so that the bad behavior of the previous group will not be replicated. The first few years typically go very well. Indeed, not two years after the Penn State chapter of Beta Theta Pi reopened in the fall of 2010, it won a Sisson Award, one of the highest honors the national fraternity can confer. But just as typically, the chapter reverts to its previous behavior. Alumni visit their old house and explain how things ought to be done; private Facebook groups and GroupMe chats are initiated among brothers of different chapters, and information about secret hazing rituals is exchanged. This time, when the brothers of the newly reconstituted Beta chapter reverted to type and started hazing, the national organization did not intervene.

I wanted to learn more about the cameras, and also about something called the “Shep Test,” so in June I called the North-American Interfraternity Conference, the trade association for social fraternities, which is located in Carmel, Indiana. I asked to schedule an interview with the CEO, Jud Horras, who was also a Beta, a former assistant secretary of the fraternity’s national organization, and someone who had been intimately involved in the disbanding and recolonization of the Penn State chapter.

In 1998, a year after Tim Piazza was born, Beta Theta Pi launched something it called Men of Principle, intended to be a “culture-reversing initiative.” What culture was it seeking to reverse? This was best answered in the four planks of the campaign. The first was administrative: create “a five-person trained and active advisory team.” The other three were the crux of the matter: commit “to a 100% hazing-free pledge program,” institute “alcohol-free recruitment,” and eliminate the “Shep Test,” which it described as “the rogue National Test.”

The last one caught my attention, so I Googled around to find out what it was. Most fraternity secrets—their handshakes and members’ manuals and rituals—have gone the way of everything else in the time of the internet, and even those customs that members want to hide aren’t too hard to track down. But there really wasn’t anything at all about the Shep Test—except for this, from the national Beta organization:

Some chapters conduct the “Shep Test.” If Francis W. Shepardson, Denison 1882, one of the greatest leaders in our great and good fraternity knew that this practice was named after him he would be disgraced. This act is in direct violation of our third principle and second and third obligations. It contradicts everything Beta Theta Pi stands for.

It seemed to me—based on the fact that I could find nothing else about it—that the Shep Test had truly been eliminated. Or so I thought, until I read the grand jury’s presentment of the Piazza case. Text messages from members’ cellphones had been entered into evidence, and included this exchange between two brothers at the time of the fall 2016 initiation:

casey: We were setting up
torrye: Setting what up?
casey: Like the shep test and the fake branding
torrye: Ohh
casey: I in charge of administering the shep test
torrye: What happens first
casey: Fake branding

And from the next night:

casey: It starting … We have them wait in the boiler room after the shep test until we set up paddling

As people have since explained it to me, the Shep Test itself is little more than a quiz about Beta Theta Pi history, but it’s one part of a night of mind games and physical punishments. A former Beta told me that pledges were held down on a table as a red-hot poker was brought close to their bare feet and they were told they were going to be branded. With pillowcases over their heads, they were paddled, leaving bruises and, on at least one occasion, breaking the skin. They were forced to eat and drink disgusting things, denied sleep, and terrorized in a variety of other ways.

Jud Horras called me back and proposed something surprising: He would fly to Los Angeles for a day to meet with me in the lobby of an airport hotel. I said it was a pity to come all that way and not see the beach, so I would pick him up and take him to breakfast at Hermosa Beach, where he couldn’t shake me if my questions got too difficult. He was coming out to show that he had nothing to hide, but I knew he was not prepared for the hardest question I had for him, which I would return to over and over again: Why hadn’t Beta Theta Pi taken the simple, obvious steps that would have saved Tim Piazza’s life?

Jud Horras is a young man with a wife and a small son and daughter, and if Tim Piazza were alive and well—if he’d gone home to his apartment that night plastered but with a story to tell—I would have fully enjoyed my time with him. He grew up in Ames, Iowa, and spent summers working on a farm—rare for fraternity members, who are more often suburban kids of relative affluence. His parents divorced, and he lived with his father and brother; by his own estimation, he “made mistakes” in high school. When he began at Iowa State, he was a lost young man, arrogant and insecure. But Beta Theta Pi turned his life around. He learned—via, of all things, a college fraternity—how to exert self-control. Mentors—among them Senator Richard Lugar, a fellow Beta, who brought him to Washington as an intern the summer before his senior year—took him under their wing, and Horras’s gratitude to these men is immense. He loves his fraternity the way some men love their church or their country.*

Horras was eager to walk me through a list of talking points that he had written on a yellow legal pad during his flight. He wanted me to understand that changes were coming to the fraternity industry, that the wild drinking could not go on indefinitely. In many regards, our conversation was like other such conversations I’ve had with fraternity executives over the years. He was willing to acknowledge problems in the fraternity, but not to connect certain of its customs to any particular death. At the national level, all fraternities vehemently prohibit hazing, and spend tremendous energy and money trying to combat it. But according to the most comprehensive study of college hazing, published in 2008 by a University of Maine professor named Elizabeth Allan, a full 80 percent of fraternity members report being hazed. It’s not an aberration; it’s the norm.

I asked Horras why no one at Beta Theta Pi had done anything about all the bad behavior those cameras must have recorded over the years since the reopening of the chapter. He said that no one could be expected to watch every single minute of film. He said that at some point, you have to trust young men to make the right decisions. What Beta Theta Pi had done for him as a young man, he suggested, was allow him to make some poor decisions until he started to turn around and become the man he wanted to be. Giving members the freedom to do that was part of what the fraternity was about. If they screwed up and got caught—well, that was on them. As for the death of Tim Piazza, while it constituted “a tragedy for him and his family,” it would provide the industry with the impetus needed to make some necessary reforms. In fact, his death was a “golden opportunity.”

Then I asked Horras about the Shep Test, and why it endured, despite the effort that had gone into eradicating it. He interrupted me: “Wait a minute. That test doesn’t happen anymore. We have testimonials instead, where pledges can—”

“But it’s in the presentment,” I said, and he looked at me, baffled. “One kid asks where the pledges were, and the other one says they’re waiting in the boiler room after the Shep Test.”

It was clear in that moment—and as he affirmed in a later email—that Horras hadn’t read the presentment very closely.

In my notebook, I wrote:

Long pause
Long pause—
Long pause

Finally he said, with consummate feeling, “I’m fucking mad that that stuff is going on.”

And then I realized why Horras was able to see the torture and death of a 19-year-old kid as a golden opportunity: He didn’t really know that much about it. I started to ask him another question, but for a few moments he seemed lost.

“Am I just fighting for a bunch of idiots?” he asked.

I visited Jim and Evelyn Piazza on a lush New Jersey evening in July, when a summer rain was falling on the wide lawns and large houses of their neighborhood in Hunterdon County, one of the wealthiest areas in the United States.

Jim and Evelyn, who are both accountants, had been at work. Jim is tall and balding and was still dressed for the office, in shirtsleeves and trousers. Evelyn, who is petite and has long, ringleted hair—a lighter shade of red than Tim’s—was in shorts and a T‑shirt. Their house, where Tim had grown up since the age of six months, was silent and immaculate. We sat around their kitchen table with bottles of cold water and talked.

A fraternity death is, in some ways, like any other traumatic death of a young person. There is the horrifying telephone call, the race to the hospital, the stunned inability to comprehend basic information. (During cellphone calls on the two-hour drive, the doctor kept telling Evelyn that her son was “a very sick boy.”) But a fraternity death also brings multiple other levels of shock: The young person was killed because of something his friends did to him; his own university quickly backs away from any responsibility for his death; his parents become pariahs to the other members’ parents as they seek justice for their lost son.

In an effort to learn more about fraternities, the Piazzas— who had not taken part in Greek life when they were college students—had attended an information session while at a Penn State parents’ weekend in the fall of 2014 for their older son, Mike, who was then a freshman. Evelyn recalled that a university official told the crowd of parents that there was no hazing at the university. An uncomfortable silence followed, until one by one, parents informed the man that their sons were currently being hazed.

When I tried to confirm this incident with Penn State, the university denied, in a series of baffling phone calls and emails, that it could have happened. “We don’t doubt the Piazzas’ sincerity,” one of the exchanges begins, before heaping doubt on their assertion. I brought up all of this at the Piazzas’ table.

“We got a letter from another parent who was there,” Jim said. “He remembered it just the way we did.” I now have a copy of that letter, and have spoken with the parent who wrote it; the account verifies everything the Piazzas remember and identifies the man who made the remarks as the university’s then-head of Greek life, Roy Baker.

This is what the past nine months have been like for the Piazzas as they try to get justice for their son: simple requests for information and action on their part, the strangled responses of a massive, inelegant, and transparently self-protecting bureaucracy in reply. When Jim Piazza met with Penn State President Eric Barron a week after Tim’s death, he slid the program from his son’s funeral across the desk: “Since no one had the time to come,” he said.

The Piazzas are still easily unraveled by memories of their son. When I asked whether a spare car in the driveway had been Tim’s, Jim said yes and then suddenly struggled for composure; he had driven it back to the house after Tim’s death. Evelyn told me about a time, not long before Tim died, when the two of them were alone in the house at dinnertime, and he suggested that they go to a restaurant. They did, and they had a typically fun time together; when the check came, Tim reached over and picked it up. “I thought he was kidding around,” Evelyn told me. “But he said, ‘I think I can afford to take my mother out to dinner.’ ”

The Piazzas and I talked for close to an hour. As they walked me out, I thought of the Catholic funeral that Evelyn had so carefully planned for her son, and the grace with which both had withstood this horror.

“You must have a very strong faith,” I said, and Jim winced a little and glanced at his wife.

“They stole my son,” she said. “And they stole my faith.”

Jim opened the front door for me. It was full night now, and the rain had stopped. The leaves and grass were wet, and soft lights illuminated the trees. I walked out onto the porch, and then Jim took a sudden step toward me. I thought he was going to ask me something, or tell me one last thing.

“Be careful on the street,” he said. At my puzzled look, he explained that there were deer in the area and that they were hard to see at night. And then I got in my car, armed with a father’s good counsel about avoiding the dangers that hid in an ordinary night.

When I talked with people about Tim Piazza’s death, many brought up an earlier Penn State crisis, the Jerry Sandusky scandal, in which the longtime assistant football coach was convicted for a decades-long practice of sexually abusing young boys, and the university’s head coach, Joe Paterno, was abruptly fired. Both cases gestured to a common theme: that of dark events that had taken place on or near the campus for years, with some kind of tacit knowledge on the part of the university. There is also the sense that at Penn State, both the fraternities and the football team operate as they please. To the extent that this is true, the person responsible is Joe Paterno.

It’s hard to think of a single person with a greater influence on a modern university than Paterno, who died in 2012. Because of his football team—which he coached for half a century—Penn State went from an institution best known as a regional agricultural school to a vast university with a national reputation. He was Catholic, old-school, elaborately respectful of players’ mothers—and eager to wrest their sons away and turn them into men, via the time-honored, noncoddling, masculine processes of football.

To say he was a beloved figure doesn’t begin to suggest the role he played on campus. He was Heaney at Harvard, Chomsky at MIT. That he was not a scholar but a football coach and yet was the final authority on almost every aspect of Penn State life says a great deal about the institution. He was also a proud Delta Kappa Epsilon man and a tremendous booster of the fraternity system, and—as was typical for men of his generation—he understood hazing to be an accepted part of Greek life.

In 2007, he gave the practice his implicit endorsement. Photographs had surfaced of some members of the wrestling team apparently being hazed: They were in their underwear with 40-ounce beer bottles duct-taped to their hands. “What’d they do?” he asked during an open football practice that week. “When I was in college, when you got in a fraternity house, they hazed you. They made you stay up all night and played records until you went nuts, and you woke in the morning and all of a sudden they got you before a tribunal and question you as to whether you have the credentials to be a fraternity brother. I didn’t even know where I was. That was hazing. I don’t know what hazing is today.” He wasn’t upset that the wrestlers had engaged in hazing; he was scornful of them for doing it wrong.

Looking back at the past two decades at Penn State, we see a university grappling with its fraternity problem in ways that pitted concerned administrators against a powerful system, and achieving little change. In 1997, five members of a fraternity showed up at University Health Services with what the physician there strongly suspected were hazing injuries; in the ominous phrase of the director of Health Services, the injuries had been caused by “something that someone else was doing to them.” The president of the university at the time, Graham Spanier (who is currently fighting a jail sentence resulting from his role in the Sandusky scandal), became involved. “We will not tolerate hazing at Penn State,” he said. Yet an investigation into the fraternity resulted in its complete exoneration, most likely because the pledges refused to report what the brothers had done to them, which is typical. The episode, which was covered in the student newspaper, reinforced a message that would have tragic consequences for Tim Piazza: that seeking medical help for an injured pledge invites scrutiny and perhaps serious trouble.

In 2004, the university initiated a program it called Greek Pride: A Return to Glory, which was intended “to eliminate negative behavior within Greek organizations.” Many meetings were held, but nothing much seems to have come of them. Then, in 2009, after a freshman named Joseph Dado got so drunk at a fraternity party that he fell down a set of concrete stairs and died, the university’s student-run Interfraternity Council made what seemed to be a game-changing decision. It contracted with an outside security firm called St. Moritz. The firm would send employees to fraternity parties for unscheduled checks to make sure that they were in compliance with various safety policies. It was a system that should have saved Tim Piazza’s life. Two checkers arrived minutes before he fell down the stairs, and inspected a house rife with policy violations, yet no alarm was raised, and the night raged on.

Who were these checkers, and how could they have missed the obvious violations that were taking place? The IFC claims that neither it nor St. Moritz retains any records from that night. Nor will it comment on a fact that The Daily Collegian reported: that the checkers were not full-time security guards, but Penn State kids who were working part-time for St. Moritz. (The company declined to comment.) In the words of Stacy Parks Miller, the district attorney who brought the charges against the Beta brothers, the whole system was an elaborate “sham,” one that was exposed only after Tim Piazza died.

In 2015, a former pledge of Kappa Delta Rho’s Penn State chapter, James Vivenzio, made national news. He told police that his fraternity had kept a secret Facebook page where members could post naked pictures of female students, some of whom were unconscious or being sexually assaulted. He also said that he had been severely hazed two years earlier, and had reported the hazing to the Office of Student Conduct. Danny Shaha, the head of that office, took the report seriously enough to visit Vivenzio in his Virginia home. Tellingly, his fraternity was the same one that had been investigated after the five injured students went to Health Services 18 years earlier. Yet Vivenzio claims that Student Conduct did not investigate his allegations until he went to the police.

Vivenzio is currently suing both the fraternity and the university. His suit describes the hazing he endured: cigarette burns; “late-night line-ups that featured force-feeding bucketfuls of liquor mixed with urine, vomit, hot sauce and other liquid and semi-solid ingredients”; being told to “guzzle hard liquor without stopping until vomiting was induced.” (Penn State claims that it could not address Vivenzio’s hazing because he declined to provide documentation or pursue a formal disciplinary process, an assertion Vivenzio’s attorney disputes. After he went to the police, the university suspended the fraternity for three years.)

Another piece of ongoing Penn State litigation involves a student at the Altoona campus named Marquise Braham, who pledged Phi Sigma Kappa as a freshman in 2013. His parents’ civil suit describes what he experienced:

Among other things, being forced to consume gross amounts of alcohol, chug bottles of Listerine, swallow live fish, fight fellow pledges; being burned with candle wax, deprived of sleep for 89 hours, locked in a room with other pledges, alcohol, and a trashcan to catch their vomit; having a gun held to his head; and being forced to kill, gut, and skin animals.

Braham had texted with his residence-hall adviser, a young woman, desperately seeking help in understanding what was happening to him, but she only endorsed the system. “Yes it will get worse,” she wrote. “I’m sorry to say hahaha but it will.”

He made it through the hazing, but the next semester he was expected to haze other pledges, which broke him. He went home to New York for spring break, saying that he needed to see a priest. At lunch with his mother the day before he was to return, he excused himself from the table, climbed to the top of a nearby building, and jumped to his death. A grand jury found no link between his death and the hazing he had endured. Penn State suspended Phi Sigma Kappa’s charter for six years.

After Tim Piazza fell, four fraternity brothers carried him, unconscious, to a couch. He was in obvious need of medical attention, yet the fraternity brothers treated him with a callousness bordering on the sadistic. They slapped and punched him, threw his shoes at him, poured beer on him, sat two abreast on his twitching legs. Precious minutes and hours passed by, the difference between Tim’s life and death.

Two hours into the nightmarish security footage, something extraordinary happens. A young man walks into the frame and approaches the couch where Tim is lying, still unconscious. This is Kordel Davis, a recently initiated freshman brother and the chapter’s only black member at the time. According to the presentment, he “leans over Timothy’s head. Davis then turns to the Beta brothers near Timothy and becomes very animated, again pointing at his head and then at Tim.”

The presentment states that when the brothers told Davis that Tim had fallen down the basement stairs, he became

even more concerned—now for Timothy’s life. He stressed to them that Timothy needed to go to the hospital since he could have a concussion. Davis told them that if Tim was sleeping they needed to wake him up and call 911 immediately. He screamed at them to get help. In response [Beta brother] Jonah Neuman rose from the couch and shoved Davis into the opposite wall. Neuman instructed Davis to leave and that they had it under control.

Davis then sought out Ed Gilmartin, the vice president of the chapter: “The camera captures Davis gesturing once more, referring repeatedly to his head and pointing at Timothy.” Davis testified that Gilmartin told him he was crazy and “claimed the other brothers were kinesiology and biology majors,” so Davis’s word “meant nothing to him when compared to theirs.”

I sat with Kordel Davis this summer in the cacophonous food court in Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market, and we talked about that moment. “They made you doubt yourself,” I said, and—in as pure an expression of teenage-male anguish as I’ve ever seen, tears welling in his eyes—he said, “Like I’ve doubted myself my whole life.”

Kordel was born to a 16-year-old single mother in Reading, Pennsylvania, and was removed from her care and placed in two successive foster homes. At age 3, he was adopted by a white couple who had already adopted 9-year-old white twins from foster care, and who would adopt a black infant the next year; they divorced soon after that, at which point family life was further complicated by frequent moves, and the eventual introduction of new stepparents and stepsiblings. Kordel attended a majority-white high school, where he made good friends and had many caring teachers, and where he found a mentor in the football coach. Yet he also says that he was hazed as a freshman on that team, including by an older white player who beat him in front of others, and that he was called a racist nickname by his teammates. When the nickname came to the attention of a teacher and his coach, the other players claimed that it was meant to be affectionate.

“After all that,” I asked him, “why would you join an all-white fraternity with these privileged kids?”

“Because I’ve been around kids like that all my life,” he said. “I know how to handle them.”

Or at least he thought he did.

The story of black members of historically white fraternities is a complex one. Although the clubs started opening their ranks to African Americans in the 1950s and ’60s, they have few black members; nationally, only 3 percent of Beta Theta Pi’s members are black, for example. There is reason to believe that official membership policy and actual practice diverge. In 2015, cellphone video of some Sigma Alpha Epsilon members from the University of Oklahoma singing a fraternity song became public:

There will never be a n— SAE
There will never be a n— SAE
You can hang him from a tree
But he’ll never sing with me
There will never be a n— SAE

Any hope that this was the local custom of one rogue chapter disappeared when authorities discovered where the brothers had learned the lyrics: on a 2011 “national leadership cruise” that brought together hundreds of active and alumni members.

When Kordel Davis was interviewed by a police detective after Tim Piazza’s death, he had a scar on his forehead, which was still there when I met with him over the summer. It was from an injury sustained during his own bid-acceptance night the previous semester, when he, too, had fallen after drinking heavily. “My shirt, my phone—they were covered in so much blood,” he told me. His fraternity brothers put him to bed, he survived the night, and the next morning they took him for medical care—at a privately owned urgent-care clinic instead of University Health Services, where hazing might have been suspected. Keeping that incident secret was one of the costs of membership. Yet after Kordel was initiated, he did not seem to have the full measure of brotherhood that the others enjoyed. Once, he brought some friends to a party—to which other brothers had also brought guests—but was told he was not allowed to have guests, and so he had to leave, embarrassed, with his friends.

Kordel seemed rootless when I talked with him over the summer. “I lost my future,” he told me. He was seized by remorse over what had happened to Tim, and he had decided not to return to Penn State, although he had loved it there and had been awarded a significant financial-aid package. He’d read enough on online message boards to know what fraternity members on campus thought of him: that he had ratted out his brothers by talking so openly to the police, and thereby ruined Greek life for everyone.

I thought about the summons he had received from the police department, about the day he had gone there, alone, a 19-year-old black kid in a county that is 90 percent white, to report on events surrounding the death of a white college student. Still, the police were kind to him. They had a nickname for him, based on his actions on the tape: the Good Samaritan.

When I dropped Kordel off at his father’s home, I wondered whether this experience would indeed cost him his future. But he is resilient, incredibly so. By summer’s end he had been accepted at Rutgers, and had taken out student loans to pay his tuition. Perhaps he won’t have to pay them back himself. I asked a lawyer with extensive knowledge of fraternity litigation whether Kordel might have his own civil claim against Beta Theta Pi, and he affirmed that—given the hazing he had experienced as well as the scarring—he could indeed have a “deep-six-figure claim.”

In late May, shortly after the grand jury’s harrowing presentment was released to the public, Jud Horras appeared on CBS This Morning. In a conversation with Gayle King, Charlie Rose, and Norah O’Donnell, he was measured, calm, and so ungraspable—always separating the thugs of one rogue chapter from the larger entity of the fraternity industry—that midway through the interview, O’Donnell lost her patience and interrupted him.

“There have been 60 deaths over eight years involving fraternity activities,” she said angrily. “There should be zero tolerance. There should be immediate action on this. It is unacceptable. This is murder.”

Her sentiment was one shared by many people when they learned about what had happened to Tim Piazza, but it revealed a common misunderstanding: Fraternities do have a zero-tolerance policy regarding hazing. And that’s probably one of the reasons Tim Piazza is dead.

For most of their long history, fraternities pretty much did as they pleased. But in the 1980s, parents of injured and dead children began to fight back: They sued the organizations and began to recover huge sums in damages. Insurance companies dropped fraternities en masse. Because of this crisis, the modern fraternity industry was born, one that is essentially self-insured, with fraternities pooling their money to create a fund from which damages are paid.

The executives realized that even if they couldn’t change members’ behavior, they had to indemnify themselves against it, which they did by creating an incredibly strict set of rules, named for a term of art in the insurance industry: risk-management policies. These policies forbid not just the egregious behaviors of hazing and sexual assault, but also a vast range of activities that comprise normal fraternity life in the majority of chapters. You can’t play beer pong in a fraternity house. You can’t have a sip of alcohol if you’re under the age of 21, or allow anyone else who’s underage to have a sip of alcohol. During a party, alcohol consumption must be tightly regulated. Either the chapter can hire a third-party vendor to sell drinks—and to assume all liability for what happens after guests consume them—or members and guests may each bring a small amount of alcohol for personal use and hand it over to a monitor who labels it, and then metes it back to the owner in a slow trickle.

In an emergency, when the police and an ambulance show up, the national organization will easily be able to prove that the members were in violation of its policies, and will therefore be able to cut them loose and deny them any of the benefits—including the payment of attorneys’ fees and damages—that come with the fraternity insurance the members themselves have paid for.

Fraternity members live under the shadow of giant sanctions and lawsuits that can result even from what seem like minor incidents. The strict policies promote a culture of secrecy, and when something really does go terribly wrong, the young men usually start scrambling to protect themselves. Doug Fierberg, a Washington, D.C., lawyer whose practice is built on representing plaintiffs in fraternity lawsuits, told me that “in virtually every hazing death, there is a critical three or four hours after the injury when the brothers try to figure out what to do. It is during those hours that many victims pass the point of no return.”

All of these dynamics came into play the night Tim Piazza was fatally injured. The chapter president, Brendan Young, was—get this—majoring in risk management. He fully understood that officers of the fraternity face greater liability than do regular members. He became the president in November 2016, and shortly before rush began, in January 2017, he texted Daniel Casey, the pledge master: “I know you know this. If anything goes wrong with the pledges this semester then both of us are fucked.” He wasn’t suggesting they scrap hazing; he was reminding his subordinate that they had better not get caught doing it. (Young’s lawyer declined to comment.)

Even a full day after Tim died, some members were, amazingly, still focused on the consequences that could befall them. “Between you and me,” a member texted Young, “what are the chances the house gets shut down?”

“I think very high,” Young replied. “I just hope none of us get into any lawsuits.”

“You think they are going to sue?” asked the brother, to which Young responded in a way that is chilling and that reveals a sophisticated knowledge of how such events play out: “It depends if they want to go through with it, or just distance themselves from us all together.”


In fact, Jim and Evelyn Piazza have not chosen to distance themselves from the men who hazed their late son and left him to a fate that Jim compares to a crucifixion. They attended every day of the pretrial hearings that determined which of the charges against the brothers would go to trial, a grueling process that—with its many continuances and breaks—lasted the entire summer.

It ended, finally, with what looked like a significant defeat: The most-serious charges—of involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault—were dropped. In the courtroom, the 16 fraternity brothers (two had waived their right to a preliminary hearing) backslapped one another and exchanged fist bumps. The Piazzas quietly left.

Still, 14 of the Beta brothers will face a total of 328 criminal charges—jury selection is scheduled to begin in December—and the Piazzas also plan to file a civil suit after the trial ends. (When asked for comment, the national Beta fraternity stated that members of the Penn State chapter had not met its “expectations of friendship and brotherhood” and that it had “moved to close the chapter in February and expel men charged in the case.” An attorney for the chapter did not respond to a request for comment.)

The university has responded to the crisis with some significant steps: It has wrested discipline of the fraternities from the IFC, a group run entirely by frat brothers, and put it firmly in the hands of the Office of Student Conduct; checks on fraternity parties will be conducted not by St. Moritz, but by university employees. It has also permanently banned Beta Theta Pi from campus. The motivation behind these changes may lie as much in an earnest desire for reform as in a panicked need to contain what could become an ever-widening scandal, one with the potential to be as newsworthy as the Sandusky scandal.

At the end of the Piazza presentment, the grand jury issues a stunning condemnation of Penn State’s fraternity culture:

The Penn State Greek community nurtured an environment so permissive of excessive drinking and hazing that it emboldened its members to repeatedly act with reckless disregard to human life … Timothy Piazza died as a direct result of the extremely reckless conduct of members of the Beta Fraternity who operated within the permissive atmosphere fostered by the Pennsylvania State University Interfraternity Council.

The grand jury is now investigating the broader issue of hazing at Penn State and may recommend criminal charges. It is also reviewing the James Vivenzio and Marquise Braham cases. The presentment that could emanate from those horrific cases will surely be the subject of intense media scrutiny.

As for the university’s permanent ban of Beta Theta Pi from campus, a week after the most-serious charges against the former brothers were dropped, Beta alumni received an email inviting them to stay at their beloved house during football weekends this fall.

The Greek system has powerful allies at Penn State. After Tim Piazza’s death, several prominent trustees of the university vouched for fraternities, which they felt should be reformed but not hobbled. Their logic was sometimes tortured. William Oldsey told The Philadelphia Inquirer in May that the story of Tim Piazza—whose parents he pitied mightily—offered not an indictment but an endorsement of Greek life: “This is a good-enough system that it attracted a kid of the high caliber and character of Tim Piazza.”

So let us now imagine all the forces arrayed against 19-year-old Tim Piazza as he gets dressed in his jacket and tie, preparing to go to his new chapter house and accept the bid the brothers have offered him.

He is up against a university that has allowed hazing to go on for decades; a fraternity chapter that has hazed pledge classes at least twice in the previous 12 months; a set of rules that so harshly punishes hazing that the brothers will think it better to take a chance with his life than to face the consequences of having made him get drunk; and a “checking system” provided by a security firm that is, in many regards, a sham. He thinks he is going to join a club that his college endorses, and that is true. But it is also true that he is setting off to get jumped by a gang, and he won’t survive.

So here is Tim, reaching for his good jacket—in a closet that his mother will soon visit to select the clothes he will wear in his coffin—a little bit excited and a little bit nervous.

“They’re going to get me fucked up,” he texts his girlfriend, and then he pulls closed the door of his college apartment for the last time.

He has been told to show up at exactly 9:07. Inside, the 14 pledges are lined up, each with his right hand on the right shoulder of the one in front of him, and taken into the living room, where they are welcomed into the fraternity with songs and skits. And then it is time for the first act of hazing in their pledge period: quickly drinking a massive amount of alcohol in an obstacle course, the “gauntlet.” Court documents and the security footage provide excruciating detail about what comes next.

About an hour after the gauntlet begins, the pledges return to the living room, all of them showing signs of drunkenness. At 10:40, Tim appears on one of the security cameras, assisted by one of the brothers. The forensic pathologist will later describe his level of intoxication at this point as “stuporous.” He is staggering, hunched over, and he sits down heavily on the couch and doesn’t want to get up. But the brother encourages him to stand and walks him through the dining room and kitchen and back to the living room, where he sits down again on the couch. And then Tim tries to do something that could have saved his life.

He stands up, uncertainly, and heads toward the front door. If he makes it through that door, he may get out to the street, may find a place to sit or lie down, may come to the attention of someone who can help him—at the very least by getting him back to his apartment and away from the fraternity. He reaches the front door, but the mechanism to open it proves too complicated in his drunken state, so he turns around and staggers toward another door. Perhaps he is hoping that this door will be easier to open; perhaps he is hoping that it also leads out of the fraternity house. But it is the door to the basement, and when he opens it—perhaps expecting his foot to land on level ground—he takes a catastrophic fall.

On the security footage, a fraternity brother named Luke Visser points toward the stairs in an agitated way. Greg Rizzo clearly hears the fall and goes to the top of the steps to see what’s happened. Later, he will tell the police that he saw Tim “facedown, at the bottom of the steps.” Jonah Neuman will tell the police that he saw Tim lying facedown with his legs on the stairs.

Rizzo sends a group text: “Tim Piazza might actually be a problem. He fell 15 feet down a flight of steps, hair-first, going to need help.” (Rizzo, who was not charged with any crimes, told the police that he later advocated for calling an ambulance.)

Four of the brothers carry Tim up the stairs. By now he has somehow lost his jacket and tie, and his white shirt has ridden up, revealing a strange, dark bruise on his torso. This is from his lacerated spleen, which has begun spilling blood into his abdomen. The brothers put him on a couch, and Rizzo performs a sternum rub—a test for consciousness used by EMTs—but Tim does not respond. Another brother throws beer in his face, but he does not respond. Someone throws his shoes at him, hard. Someone lifts his arm and it falls back, deadweight, to his chest.

At this point, the brothers have performed a series of tests to determine whether Tim is merely drunk or seriously injured. He has failed all their tests. The next day, Tim’s father will ask the surgeon who delivers the terrible news of Tim’s prognosis whether the outcome would have been different if Tim had gotten help earlier, and the surgeon will say—unequivocally—that yes, it would have been different. That “earlier” is right now, while Tim is lying here, unresponsive to the sternum rub, the beer poured on him, the dropped arm.

A brother named Ryan Foster rolls Tim on his side, but has to catch him because he almost rolls onto the floor. Jonah Neuman straps a backpack full of books to him to keep him from rolling over and aspirating vomit. Two brothers sit on Tim’s legs to keep him from moving.

This is the moment when Kordel Davis arrives and attempts to save Tim’s life, only to be thrown against the wall by Neuman. Davis disappears from the video, in search of an officer of the club. By now Tim is “thrashing and making weird movements,” according to the grand-jury presentment.

Daniel Casey comes into the room, looks at Tim, and slaps him in the face three times. Tim does not respond. Two other brothers wrestle near the couch and end up slamming on top of Tim, whose spleen is still pouring blood into his abdomen. Tim begins to twitch and vomit.

At this point, Joseph Ems appears “frustrated” by Tim, according to the grand jury. With an open hand, he strikes the unconscious boy hard, on the abdomen, where the bruise has bloomed. This blow may be one of the reasons the forensic pathologist will find that Tim’s spleen was not just lacerated, but “shattered.” (Ems was originally charged with recklessly endangering another person, but that charge—the only one brought against him—has been dropped.) Still, Tim does not wake up.

Forty-five minutes later, Tim rolls onto the floor. The heavy backpack is still strapped to him. He rolls around, his legs moving. He attempts to stand up, and manages to free himself from the backpack, which falls to the floor. But the effort is too much, and he falls backwards, banging his head on the hardwood floor. A fraternity member shakes him, gets no response, and walks away.

At 3:46 in the morning, Tim is on the floor, curled up in the fetal position. At home in New Jersey, his parents are sleeping. Across campus, his older brother, Mike, has no idea that Tim is not safely in his bed.

At 3:49 a.m., Tim wakes up and struggles to his knees, cradling his head in his hands; he falls again to the hardwood floor. An hour later, he manages to stand up, and staggers toward the front door, but within seconds he falls, headfirst, into an iron railing and then onto the floor. On some level he must know: I am dying. He stands once again and tries to get to the door. His only hope is to get out of this house, but he falls headfirst once again.

At 5:08 a.m., Tim is on his knees, his wounded head buried in his hands. Around campus, people are beginning to wake up. The cafeteria workers are brewing coffee; athletes are rising for early practices. It’s cold and still dark, but the day is beginning. Tim is dying inside the Beta house, steps away from the door he has been trying all night to open.

Around 7 o’clock, another pledge wanders into the living room, where Tim is now lying on the couch groaning, and the pledge watches as he rolls off the couch and onto the floor, and again lifts himself to his knees and cradles his head in his hands, “as if he had a really bad headache.” The pledge lifts his cellphone, records Tim’s anguish on Snapchat, and then—while Tim is rocking back and forth on the floor—leaves the house. A few minutes later, Tim stands and staggers toward the basement steps, and disappears from the cameras’ view.

The house begins to stir. Some fraternity members head off to class, and in the fullness of time they return. And then, at about 10 a.m., a brother named Kyle Pecci (who was not charged) arrives and asks a pledge, Daniel Erickson (who was also not charged), a question that seems to both of them a casual one: Whatever happened to that pledge who fell down the stairs at the party? They come across Tim’s shoes, and realize that Tim must still be somewhere in the house, so they look for him. The search reveals him collapsed behind one of the bars in the basement. He is lying on his back, with his arms tight at his sides and his hands gripped in fists. His face is bloody and his breathing is labored. His eyes are half open; his skin is cold to the touch; he is unnaturally pale. Three men carry him upstairs and put him on the couch, but no one calls 911.

Fraternity brothers with garbage bags appear in the footage and start cleaning up the evidence. Brothers try to prop Tim up on the couch and dress him, but his limbs are too stiff and they can’t do it. Someone wipes the blood off his face, and someone else tries, without luck, to pry open his clenched fingers. Clearly the brothers are trying to make this terrible situation appear a little bit better for when the authorities arrive. But they do not use their many cellphones to call 911. Instead one brother uses his phone to do a series of internet searches for terms such as cold extremities in drunk person and binge drinking, alcohol, bruising or discoloration, cold feet and cold hands.

Where is Tim right now, as his body lies on the couch? Are his soul and self still here, in the room, or have they already slipped away? He has put up a valiant, almost incredible fight for his life, but by now he has lost that fight. When he was a little boy, he used to make people laugh because he got so frustrated with board games; he didn’t like playing those games, with their rules and tricks. He loved sports, and running, and playing with his friends at the beach. But his body is cold now, his legs and arms unbending.

Finally, at 10:48 a.m., a brother calls 911—perhaps realizing that it would be best to do so while the pledge is still technically alive—and Tim is delivered from the charnel house. Soon his parents will race toward him, and so will his frantic brother, who has been searching for him. They will be reunited for the few hours they have left with this redheaded boy they have loved so well, and at least it can be said that Tim did not die alone, or in the company of the men who tortured him.

On February 7, the Facebook page of the Beta Theta Pi national organization will report that “Tim Piazza, a sophomore at Penn State who had recently accepted an invitation to join the Fraternity, has passed due to injuries sustained from an accidental fall in the chapter house.” Flags at the fraternity’s administrative offices in Oxford, Ohio, will fly at half-mast for eight days, “representative of the eight young men of Tim’s same age who founded the Fraternity.” The Facebook post will encourage collegiate members around the country to “conduct Beta’s official Burial Service” on Friday evening, from 4 to 8 o’clock. And with those final rituals of the fraternity, Tim Piazza’s 28-hour membership in Beta Theta Pi will come to an end. “Rest in peace, Tim Piazza,” ends the post. “Rest in peace.”

* The print version of this article incorrectly identified Senator Lugar as an Iowan. We regret the error.

(I always feel the need to hedge Posts Like This [mundane, complain-y, privileged AF] during Times Like These [seriously, how many national emergencies/tragedies/horrors do we have deal with right now?] and be like:  I know. I know! I'm really upset and distressed about it all too in real life. But here is where I come to try and be kind of funny on the Internet. So Imma do that. Hugs for everybody.)

Once upon a time, several blog posts ago, I revealed the secret shame of the demogorgon shower sludge, and our less-than-super-adult approach to doing anything about it. (At least anything that would cost us more than a tube of Denial Caulk.) But finally we had a plan and an contractor and things started happening:

Demolish-y things!

Gateway to the demonscape things!

We decided to bump the shower out to the edge of the wall and tile up to the ceiling, and replace the shower basin with a mosaic tile floor.

We had three and half boxes of tile leftover from our kitchen/foyer remodel, which wasn't going to be quite enough. Which at first was a big old ARGH because we'd bought discontinued tile (discounted to only $1.50 a square foot)...but then we walked into the tile store and there it still was, not discontinued at all. It was now full price at a whopping $3 a square foot, but...um. Fine? That's still really fine. 

The mosaic tile looked mossy green-ish in the store, but in our bathroom it is very decidedly more of a blue. That tile store was basically made of lies, but it looks nice and didn't cost much so I ain't mad at anybody. 

My pretty shelves that it physically pains me to clutter up with all my shower crap. 

Ta-da! All done! Except...

"Babe, we have some extra paint for the master bath around here somewhere, right?"

Goddammit. The remains of the demon sludge scored one final point, as no, we did NOT have any of the paint, nor did we have any idea was brand or color was used and hahahaha you assholes have to paint. 

And so painting has predictably spiraled this one bathroom project into like, seventeen, as we are completely incapable of simply picking out a single paint color and just like...painting a room. By the time we left the paint store our to-do list had grown to:

1) Paint the bathroom, lose battle with husband over making vague guesses at the existing color and agree on a more neutral palette or idk i'm bored let's gooooo

2) Also paint the walls around the tub which is technically a separate room but you know, it needs to flow

3) Also let's do an accent wall behind the tub, in blue, but like, a totally slightly different blue than the one we're getting rid of

4) OOH OOH let's paint the linen closet in the main bathroom that accent color too cuz we crazy

5) Also we really need to replace that ugly Hollywood lighting

6) And then we're gonna Pinterest the shit outta how to convert builder's grade mirrors and medicine cabinets into something less blah

7) NEW SINK FAUCETS

8) THE OUTLETS AND SWITCHPLATES  AND DOOR PULLS ARE ALL THE WRONG FINISH THIS CANNOT STAND

9) SHELVES SHELVES SHELVES

10) And while the previous owners actually did a really nice job painting the vanity cabinets and the color still kind of works, I'm on a full DIY bender and you just KNOW I'm gonna suggest re-painting that shit white. 

(At some point Jason also added "build a new custom marble tile countertop all by myself and get new sinks" but after what happened next he's decided to scale back for now and focus on the shelves.)

We are definitely not done with our list yet. Here's where things stand now:

 

Man, do I know how to stage aspirational lifestyle photos for my blog or WHAT.

(On the bright side, I just spent 10 minutes wandering around looking for my coffee mug before noticing it in this photo.)

(Shame I can't say the same about the toothpaste, which has been missing since yesterday.)

Exhibit A of the super tricky lighting in this area (walls are taupe and the blue from the closet door, and not really that shiny). This led to the previous paint color -- a rich chocolate brown, is what I assume they were going for -- taking on an unfortunate...greenish tone at certain times of day. Which then had the effect of turning the entire room into a visual representation of the one question every parent has asked of a young child: Is that chocolate or poop?

(So long, poop walls!)

On Sunday night I decided to tackle the cabinets. Now, if you've never repainted a painted cabinet before, here are the important steps you should follow:

1) Send your husband back out to the store for the white paint and mini rollers, which you of course forgot to buy.

2) Remove the doors, scrub everything down, sand off any rough edges or drips from the previous paint job.

3) Start painting.

4) Express mild surprise at how poorly the paint is covering, blame husband for buying Behr instead of yr boi Benjamin Moore. 

5) Keep painting.

6) Start cursing.

7) DRINK!

8) Three coats later, survey your handiwork: A blotchy, drippy, streaky mess that looks 1,000% worse that it did before.

9) Realize you just wasted hours of your life attempting to paint over an oil-based paint with latex without priming it first, hahaha you dumb shit you. 

10) DRINK!

So it looked like we might have to rip out the cabinets/counters/sinks and replace all that stuff after all, all because I couldn't resist the DIY siren call of PAINT IT WHITE!!1! Most of the paint peeled right off in sheets, and Jason attempted to sand the rest of it but quickly determined that was making it even worse. We stared, we sighed, we debated stealing cabinet doors from our children's bathroom, before finally I asked Jason to indulge me and try a coat or two of the Benjamin Moore white paint that I'd sent him out to procure for all the trim. 

It worked! I don't know exactly how or why (we probably ruined enough of the original finish with the peeling/sanding so the new paint could adhere), but it worked. The cabinet and doors are now properly, boringly white and I found a box of extra handles and pulls from the kitchen remodel that should properly distract the eye that yeah, it's a cheap damn builder's grade cabinet with like 400 coats of paint on it, you wanna fight or something?

(DRINK!)

 

Most people, when they remember the film Alien, remember the dinner scene. When it was filmed, the director Ridley Scott refused to tell the actors exactly what was going to happen; they knew that the character of Kane, played by John Hurt, had been impregnated by an alien, and that an alien would explode from his chest when, choking, he was laid out on the table—but they did not know it would happen with exploding bags of blood. It all happens very quickly. First red swells on his shirt, then there is a tearing of fabric. The actors scream, stepping back; blood spattering their faces and the room. Their looks of shock aren’t feigned. The alien sticking out of Hurt’s chest looks like an erect bloody penis; it has an exaggerated cranium and sharp little teeth, and looks very aware, even comically so. It turns, slowly and deliberately from side to side, surveying the room—then darts out of Hurt’s body and off the table as if it’s late for an appointment. Even if the scene mimics a birth, this baby is a prick in more ways than one.

When I was younger, and had the luxury of ambivalence about whether I would have child or not, my go-to analogy for pregnancy and birth was Alien. I’d remember the look of stunned shock on Hurt’s face, and the creature’s mewling cry of triumph, and think, Yup. Here is a creature that is not you, inside of you, growing. Its birth is a death—at least for the way you lived before. But I didn’t say any of this out loud. I knew I was wrong: society told me so. Giving birth was supposed to be magical. It was natural. My body would know what to do. If there was ever a time to tap into a wellspring of female instinct, this was it—and I certainly shouldn’t think that a horror film made by a bunch of men offered anything more than a reflection of their own anxiety about impregnation.

After all, there is considerable evidence of such “horrors” throughout the film. The alien that hatches (the Chestbuster) grows inside the human host after introduction via the esophagus by the Facehugger: a skeletal flesh-colored hand-cum-horseshoe-crab, with a long, whipping tail. It scuttles with terrifying speed and when turned over, looks like nothing more so than a vagina, with fluttering folds of whitish pinkish flesh and a touch of grey. But this vagina is not a soft, delicate flower. It is a tough monster looking to rape you by mouth. In two separate films, there are shots of men delicately probing dead Facehuggers’ undersides with surgical instruments, pulling the folds away like curtains. The innards glisten like oysters. The men are obviously both fascinated and grossed out.

Alien has some mixed signals to send about women. On the one hand, signs of the female dominate in the film: the operating system of the ship is called Mother and the men in the crew aren’t macho at all. Nor are the women particularly feminine. The sole survivor is a woman called Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, who is tall, striking and very capable. She’s often cited as one of the first female action heroes in twentieth century cinema. ((The proof? Even when she is struck still by the horror of the alien, she keeps on strategizing. Her dash for the ship at the end is panic-stricken, but also calculated.) Ripley’s gender is such an exception that that Alien is often understood as upending the casual misogyny and gender dynamics in many horror and action films. And yet Weaver’s casting was a last minute choice; writers, producers and Scott had all thought she would be male. The aliens’ physiology was also a decision after the fact; the Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger had been drawing their eroticized shapes for years before filming began, and Scott’s genius was in importing Giger’s creepy grace rather than creating it from scratch.

Rather than Scott deliberately undermining a rather narrow definition of hetero-normative gender function (which seems a tad too conscious), what seems more central to the film’s horror is how the alien contains and absorbs any sexuality at all. In Alien, sex isn’t a function of gender. Penetration is an alien thing; the fully mature grown creatures contain a head of teeth within a head of larger teeth, which, extending at the moment of imminent death, are both dick and dentata. They contain all the tumescence the film needs. All told, if Scott had any explicitly radical ideology of his own, it seems more accurately located in the class dynamics of the Nostromo’s crew. Space isn’t a place for knight errants; when the crew wake prematurely from hyper-sleep, they are mostly concerned by what it means for their paycheck. Their employer also considers them utterly expendable. There is more than one kind of alienation at work here.

In other words, it’s difficult to spin Alien as a feminist film, even if many (myself included) want to. And though there are a few women who have described their fetus as an alien in prose, they do so in passing. They do not linger on the analogy. It would appear they feel guilty for doing so.

****

Then I actually fell pregnant. Falling is not the right verb for it. I crawled, or climbed, or inched my way into pregnancy. And because I live in the United States and it is 2016, I googled every step of the way.

The online celebration of the mystery of life is very amiable. You don’t even have to mention the word “pregnancy” in the search bar for the algorithm to guess that when you write n weeks (13 weeks, 26 weeks), you are talking about growing a human being. There are seemingly hundreds of websites each giving you weekly updates on your fetus’s development. She is as big as a blueberry, cherry, apricot, melon. She has fingerprints. She is hiccuping. She is learning to swallow, to open her eyes, to clench and unclench her fingers. She is learning how to suck, to latch, to breathe. She can recognize your voice over the pounding of your heart and the rushing of your organs, which must sound like the incessant white noise of a plane’s cabin.

If you select “images” with the same search terms, you’ll see photos that hundreds of mothers have posted of their baby bump. This is what sixteen weeks looks like on another body. This is what thirty-two does. They pose side-on, excited and alarmed, in front of chalkboards and poster paper that list fun facts. They are generally white, and often dressed in yoga gear. They have to-do lists and can’t wait to meet their little one. I did not realize you could be this upbeat and organized about pregnancy until the internet taught me. The illustrations of fetuses I saw were inevitably done in soft shades of pink. The fetus always floated very calmly in space. It did not thrash or tumble, it was not squished or covered in goo, it was not fish-like or primate-like or alien-like. It did not remind me of anything other than a baby: cleaned and camera ready. It appeared my fetus was a fruit, and the only gestures it would make were neotenous ones.

Yet as she grew, I also grew less sure. When she was about twenty-four or twenty-five weeks old, I started to see her movements beneath my skin. My stomach would look visibly lopsided when she settled to the right or the left. Sometimes she moved in two different directions, stretching her legs and arms or head, arching her back—and everything on the surface twisted, like a cloth is being wrung out, or a wave deep in the ocean, far from shore. I couldn’t stop recalling the bulging movements in Alien. Other times, there were short, soft knocks. She moved as people do in bed, sleeping, strangely intent on a world even further in, inside of her. She was looking at her own big bang, and I was on the outskirts of her universe, moving further and further away. I went to work, meet friends, watched films, and waited for her to hatch.

I did not recognize this as cuteness.  She did not feel like “my” daughter. I knew from the sonogram that she had hair on her back, that she was covered with a thick layer of vernix and encased in a caul, squashed and held close by my body—crammed in the same way that Giger’s drawings are, body parts and organs penetrated and penetrating each other without end. I didn’t like it his images, but I couldn’t deny his obsessive skill. He was interested in an ecstatic agony I found embarrassing.

Her heartbeat was eerily regular at my weekly appointments at the hospital, and the nurse regularly had to poke my stomach to get her to move. She was in her own time zone. I drank cold water and listened to the amplified thwack of her heart in the room, the jostling noises as she turned left or right. It was not that I was scared of her or birth, but she was definitely other, and that was no small thing. She felt like an animal, which shouldn’t have been surprising. The beginning of John Ashbery’s poem “At North Farm” kept on coming to mind:

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Inside of me, there was a being I didn’t know that was traveling toward me, growing week by week. She was in hyperspace. She was going to change the civilization of my life, but this was all in the future. Despite the belly, pregnancy was, on some level, an abstraction. This baby was a long-awaited stranger, a relative I had never met. I kept on waiting for the cat-mother-gut-wisdom that so many women talked about to show up. It never really did. I did not feel more female. I felt mortal.

****

In each Alien film, there is always a moment when an unsuspecting human steps on a bit of alien goo, and, as they slowly lift their feet or hands away, the camera lingers on the slow stretch of mucus, the way it glistens in the light. It is both liquid and solid, a transitive property in the flesh. The person looks down in horror, but also with a kind of ignorance that makes you hit your forehead with your hand. This is the equivalent of hesitating at the top of the basement stairs in other horror films. The alien is near; it is so near, it has already been where you are. And it might choose to turn around.

In film in general, mucus is treated as a metonym for grossness. It is biological byproduct of the stage of being alive, a sign of the monster that you have yet to kill. It shows the creature is thriving. It is a symbol of desire, of excessive embodiment, because we are used to controlling and hiding our own mucus secretions. It’s no surprise that although a different director made each of the four Alien films—Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, each with a different idea of what the alien meant or wanted—none could resist this mucous money shot. The stuff is employed with wanton abandon throughout all the films; it drips from alien jaws and air vents, cocoons unfortunate human hosts, and festoons the parting lips of alien egg pods. On each of the Alien shoots, someone had to have become a mucus aficionado, had to have examined the feel and look of bulldog spittle, insect traps or novelty toys.

This mucus was often made of methocel, which is short for methylcellulose, a powder made from wood pulp to which you simply add water and coloring. It can mimic all kinds of liquids—slime, oil, blood, saliva and sweat—and can be ingested with no ill effect. It even turns up in foods like ice cream as an emulsifier. It is a beloved substance for special effects designers, because it is often far more effective to add methocel rather than rely on digital post-production; the patterns of light on the liquid are much more complex than what could be added digitally. Methocel is analogue otherness—except for the fact that it is also so privately human. Any pregnant woman, for example, knows that her vaginal discharge increases throughout pregnancy, and not in a pornographic welcoming wetness, but in an animal-kingdom binding protein kind-of way. Women might talk about it furtively online, but not necessarily with their friends or their partners.

Slightly better known—but still taboo—is the loss in pre-labor of what’s called the mucus plug. It is exactly what it sounds like, and it forms when you’re first pregnant to block the cervix from bacteria that might enter through the vagina. When the cervix starts dilating, slowly expanding to eventually accommodate the baby’s head, the plug is dislodged, and it can either come out in one piece or in multiple pieces, appearing on the toilet paper when you wipe in glue-like long trails, tinted pink with a little blood. My plug appeared five days before I gave birth, and when I wiped, I felt like one of those characters in Alien. The movement of mucus itself mimics the dawning realization, a slow Oh. The baby is near; it is so near that my body had started to shed parts of itself. But I did not report this in the way that I reported sonogram statistics or the fetus’s movements to others. It seemed unnecessary—though that was hardly the case in the Alien films.

****

In those last few weeks of pregnancy, I re-watched all four films. If Scott sets up the cosmology of the Alien films—Ripley’s tenaciousness, the alien’s physiological transformations, the alignment of science and state indifference to human suffering—it was Cameron, directing the second film, who turned Weaver’s casting into a more explicitly feminist mythology. Her compadres in his film are a group of comically hyper-masculine marines, who cradle their guns and spit and swear—and who are promptly decimated by the aliens. The only beings to survive are women, androids, and the single marine who listens to Ripley and spends the least time flexing his biceps.

It is also Cameron’s film that embroiders upon maternal authority. One of the first scenes in the film is of Ripley in a hospital bed, waking up from fifty-eight years of hyper sleep. Jones, her tabby cat, who she went to great lengths to rescue in the first film, has survived. When he starts hissing at her, we know she’s in trouble—and sure enough, as she bolts upright in bed, clutching at her chest, an alien bursts forth. She wakes up. Ripley isn’t dreaming of dismemberment or the other deaths of the crew that dominated the first film, but of her own alien pregnancy. Her fear directs ours, as does her desire.

When she returns to the alien planet, she quickly focuses with obsessive attention on the sole survivor of a human colony, a young girl called Newt. Weaver’s face softens. She tenderly washes the girl’s face, offers her hot chocolate, cuddles her. (Newt mothers her own doll (Charley) in turn.) The last twenty minutes of the film is a standoff between Ripley and an alien queen who is laying eggs by the dozen through a gigantic, tent-like abdomen. It’s this scene that cements, very clearly, the sense that Ripley is not an accidental survivor, partly because it’s the first time in the two films we have a POV shot from the alien. We see Ripley from the alien’s vast height, looking up, clutching Newt to her. The alien understands Ripley as a mother. She also understands that Ripley sees her as a mother; when male drones begin to advance, Ripley threatens the eggs with a flamethrower, and the alien queen has them back off.

This is the first exchange between the two species that isn’t about consumption, but the moment quickly passes. Ripley, for no rational reason, reneges on the deal, and goes to town with her machine gun/flame thrower/grenade launcher, destroying not only the field of eggs but the queen’s abdomen. When the queen pursues her through the colony complex, freed from her reproductive burden (it rips away, a little like a velcro ad-on), we know that things have suddenly gotten personal. This alien wants Ripley, very particularly, dead. She wants to kill Newt. She understands revenge. In the final face-off, she issues little grunts of rage. This is quite different from the alien’s motivation in Scott’s film, which is pure efficiency of procreation and death. The alien has become more emotional, and Ripley in turn becomes less human, strapping herself into a large mechanical moving suit for the final face-off.

I don’t remember these scenes as well as Hurt’s death, but they do more to recast the maternal impulse as violent and anti-human than most other films I’ve seen. When I was younger, and uneasy about giving birth, I was uneasy about how I would be destroyed. Cameron’s film proposes a view of motherhood that is both nurturing and enormously aggressive. Ripley and the alien queen are creators and destroyers of worlds. I didn’t see it as a child, but I saw it decades later, eight months pregnant, huge and sweating in the early New York summer. It was weirdly comforting that men made the Alien films because it spoke to a shared anxiety rather than one that only women could understand or recreate. Scott had set up a series of ideological mad libs, and the subsequent directors had found themselves confronting the question of progeny in ways they might never have directly addressed otherwise.

****

My due date came and went. One day, two days. Three days. This baby showed no sign of descending or arriving. It was only at 4am on the fifth day that I woke to feel my insides pulling in and twisting quite convulsively, but also quite bearably. The movement was reflexive in the same way an orgasm is; you cannot help but let go. I had breakfast with a friend, went for a walk, sat in a terrible café reading a good novel. But toward the evening and after a second walk, the contractions became closer together, and more painful. They developed peaks and valleys of intensity, and at their height, I began to moan involuntarily from the pain. By ten in the evening, as I lay on the sofa, it hurt enough that each time, I started to instinctively reach my arm up to the sky, as if grabbing for a rope that would pull me out of my body.  Three hours later, when we drove to the hospital, I was groaning constantly, hanging over the back seat, looking at the empty Manhattan Bridge receding behind me. My vision was slowly closing down; by the time we made it into the hot tub at the hospital’s birthing center, I opened my eyes only for brief moments, could not stand or sit, and had devolved to a crouch, slow rocking motions, and loud groaning. Now that I have a baby, I see how all of these movements and behaviors are those of an infant.

It was absurdly comforting to hold my partner and doula’s hands. I lost track of many things, but I knew instinctively whose hands they were, and that I was not alone. I don’t think I let go of more than one hand for hours. Every so often, the midwife would inspect my cervix to see how much it had dilated, and when they did, I could feel hands wiping liquids away from me. They spotted dark green meconium (her feces), which indicated she was in distress, and so they inserted an IV into my arm, and started a constant monitoring of her heartbeat

By five a.m., the terror was not in the pain of one convulsion, but in the knowledge that I would have to do this for an unspecified period of time; this could last one, two, even three hours, but as it became seven and eight, panic set in. I began to shake uncontrollably. My contractions were about a minute apart, and had been that way for hours. As each one arrived, I would moan and writhe, holding onto the bars of the bed with such force that my arms ached for two days afterward. Looking back, I cannot resurrect the actual sensation of the pain, but I can construct the image of my body on the bed in my mind, even though my eyes were closed. I remember thinking that this was the closest I was going to come to dying before death itself. I was skating close to the cessation of consciousness. I now think of John Hurt on the Nostromo’s dining table. When I was told to push, the pain increased to the point where I felt flesh tearing. It didn’t feel right or natural to hurt myself that way; the sensation was akin to trying to break one arm with the other. Yes, my body wanted to push, but not with an almost audible ripping sound.

Then I was fully dilated, and it was time to actually push. I had not reflected on what it would feel like to lie on your back, bend and open your legs as wide as they could go, and be asked to hold onto the back of your own thighs—in other words, to be primarily responsible for a humiliating vulnerability. (There is a very similar yoga pose called Happy Baby, which now seems like a very bad joke.) Multiple people hovered over me, chanting, cheering me on. Decades of bladder control and social training were pushed aside with one brusque shove. With each contraction, I squeezed with all my energy. “Harder!” they cried. “Harder!” I could not go harder.

And then it happened very quickly—a slithering feeling that could have been a noise or a sensation, a long string of something passing through me, and they called for me to open my eyes. “You have a baby,” they said. “You did it.” They took her away immediately to aspirate her, to remove the meconium from her mouth and nose, but she was yelling before they even reached the table. I saw her grey body being carried aloft, all head and a long torso like a tadpole, and I thought that is a baby. That is my baby.

****

They cleaned her up before giving her to me. I wished I had seen her as she was inside my body, covered in my liquids. She had a little hat on. She lay on my chest and fell asleep almost immediately, exhausted. I looked at her face. It was true that I did not recognize her, but I could not stop looking at her, trying to engrave her face in my neural cortex. While all of this was happening I birthed the placenta, which simply felt like a mass of material moving through me. Then the midwife began to stitch me up. I could feel pain from the needle passing through me, the tug of the thread against my skin, but it felt like nothing next to what had come before.

Of the four Alien films, the French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s take in Alien: Resurrection has been most roundly criticized. It’s probably because he is more interested in the conditions of Ripley’s resurrection than in creating an action film. Backstory predominates: it’s two hundred years later, and socially awkward scientists have cloned Ripley from blood taken during the third film.

The Ripley of the fourth film is not Ripley; her DNA, altered by her impregnation by an alien queen (in the third film), has been fundamentally changed. We watch the birth of the alien queen from her, as well as Ripley’s own birth—or at least, her growing awareness of what she is: she learns to speak, to reason, to tolerate her captors. Birth is figured as a horror, as a vacuum of meaning. The scientists see her as part meat-byproduct, part pet, a curiosity that should’ve died when her daughter was harvested. Weaver is not entirely human; she is incredibly strong, has acidic blood, and some kind of empathic ESP with the aliens (particularly her alien daughter queen). It’s not clear for some time whether Ripley will pledge loyalty to the humans when the aliens start running amok.

The action sequences, when they come, are inventive enough (underwater aliens!), but fans felt cheated by the last twenty minutes of the film, which seem baroquely fixated on a seemingly unnecessary plot point. We are told that Ripley’s alien queen, initially giving birth to 12 eggs (which, hosted by twelve humans, produced twelve aliens) is now giving birth like a mammal for her second cycle, growing an alien inside her that hatches from her giant abdomen fully-formed, a seven foot adolescent. This creature is called the Newborn. Just as Ripley is part alien, this alien is part human, a throwback to Ripley’s own DNA, made of gelatinous white bone, with rounded eyes-sockets and a snub nose. Its skull is recognizably hominoid. It is horrified by its own “purely” alien mother, and within seconds, rips her face off. But it loves Ripley, and pursues her, through the ship, imprinting like a duckling.

All of this makes no sense, even by the film’s internal logic. The Newborn is not scary in the way the aliens are. It is grotesque rather than terrifying; we are repelled by its need, rather than its aggression.  It is also barely alive for ten minutes before it is sucked, piece-by-piece, out of a hole in a window that Ripley has made with her own blood. It squeals piteously, clearly shocked by its (grand)mother’s betrayal. The gulf between human and alien in Scott’s first film has collapsed, inverted. The Newborn’s death is the negative of Ripley’s original nightmare; rather than death by addition through the chest, this is death by subtraction, the hole beginning at its back, then expanding outward. Its innards collapse with a terrible sucking sound, its body disappearing into space like a scarf pulled backwards until finally, it is just a face—and then with a whoompf, even its skull vanishes.

This reverse symmetry appears to have been an irritant to many rather than a pleasure. Jeunet has turned the basic horror of the franchise inside out, and now we see the lining of our own initial fascination, which was to be penetrated by something profoundly non-human. Our disappointment is revealing. The Newborn is too much like a newborn—or at least, like the newborns we have come to idealize. The horror it invokes is the excessive truth of an ideal stretched beyond our implicit expectation.

After I gave birth, I was wheeled to the recovery ward and my nurse, Gigi, explained how to assemble a pad to absorb all of the blood I was about to dispel from my body. It was the sanitary pad system to end all menstrual events, a battleship composed of disposable mesh panties, a liner sheet folded in half, three fat menstrual pads, and witch-hazel circles of cloth that soothe and cool. My body was so confused that I could not actually will myself to piss, and Gigi had to stand and watch me squirt water onto my labia with a squeeze bottle. In sympathetic response, I urinated—a little, then a little more. I was told to use a pain relief spray that settled like a white dusting of snow. I walked as if I’d been kicked more than once in the crotch. Climbing up onto the bed took effort. I felt beaten up.

Eating my first solid food since the labor began, more twenty-four hours ago, I started to realize I had passed through the eye of the needle. I had survived. Being fit and strong, I had not realized it would be such a debatable matter. Any euphoria came from pure relief. I did not feel like a hero, but a survivor. We both dozed, exhausted. I was still seeing double from tiredness.

Later, Gigi came and took my breast in hand and squeezed. Bright yellow drops oozed out of the nipple. “Good,” she said approvingly. This was colostrum, high protein power food for my baby, designed to hold her over until my milk arrived in a day or two. Gigi held my breast, molding it, showing me how to direct the nipple and areole into my baby’s mouth. When the baby began to suck, and the latch was good, it felt as if she was pulling on strings anchored deep in my breastbone.

I felt intensely grateful for Gigi, and asked her question after question. How do you burp? How do you hold the head up? How warm does she need to be? How does this car seat work? I may have been all instinct, but I was also no training. Gigi patiently answered everything. Every day bought another set of dazed women into her ward. Each one had just crested a peak and was now fast sliding down the other side into motherhood. Some must have known what they were doing—they were on their second or third child, or had younger siblings to look after when they were young. But this was also New York. There were a lot of women who had put off having children until they were well into their thirties. In the lactation class the next morning, we all sat in stunned silence, all first-time parents, our babies in Plexiglas basinets at our sides. The consultant squeezed a knitted woolen breast she had bought on Etsy. It was no longer cute. Our progeny lay beside us, caught fish, occasionally twitching, running nowhere.

Days later, we visited the pediatrician for the first time. When asked to undress her and put her on the scales, we discovered an almighty shit in her diaper. We cheered. This was evidence that her digestive system was working well; it was literally a shit for the record books. Shahzad went about wiping her ass, and as he methodically made his way frontward, he eventually reached the labial folds, and the tiny slit inside. A new wipe was needed—and what came out of her vagina was a long white string of viscous mucous, gel-white and unmistakably whole. If you had flung it like a piece of spaghetti against the fridge, it would have stuck fast.

“What is that,” Shahzad said, and we all watched it stretch, impossibly large for that tiny entrance. “It’s just discharge,” I said casually, amazed that he didn’t know. He had watched the whole birth, had seen her inch her way out of me—had seen more even than I would ever know—but I hadn’t talked to him about mucus. My hormones, via the colostrum, were entering her body. Our doula mentioned that she might even have a tiny period. We could see her nipples were inflamed. All of my living in her: all of my desire embodied in this excess. My own reproductive patterning was already showing up in her and she wasn’t even a week old. I felt ashamed. Up until now, I had felt her growing in me as an imposition. Now I could see the reverse was also true.

My internal organs had to migrate back to their pre-pregnancy dimensions and positions; my abdomen, which had felt as tight and as firm as a basketball, was now a squishy, obviously partially filled sac. As a friend put it, I had an Off Track Betting belly. It subsided almost visibly with each day. When I breastfed, I felt a dull cramping, which turned out to be my uterus shrinking; it needed to descend from my bellybutton into my pelvis, dropping in weight from 1kg to about 50g. This whole process was called autolysis and involution, which sounded like two characters in a sci-fi apocalyptic novel. As the uterus sank, it shed blood cells and tissue, and pinched off blood vessels at the site where the placenta had been, which was essentially a dinner-plate sized open wound. The blood changed hue according to which cells were self-digesting or shedding.

I was disintegrating, piece-by-piece, back towards my old body, the cells absorbing what they could, sending the rest out into space. When I walked to the corner store three days later, I marveled that no one seemed to notice. I was Jeunet’s Newborn, which appears to be decomposing even ten minutes after birth, its flesh not smooth or taut, but composed of chunks of gelatinous white bone. I could not stop the liquids seeping, could not hold myself back, or draw a distinction between myself and the world around me. I felt some panic. I was melting. My stomach jostled with each movement. I spent hours everyday trying to pour myself into another human being. Her little jaw worked furiously as she took in the milk.

No one had told me that my body odor would suddenly increase, all the better for my daughter to recognize me. In the weeks after, she learned to clutch at me, to hold on. I learned to hold her, to gauge the bobbing weight of her head against my hand as we walk. I clean her of fluids, give her new ones, learn to live with the nightmare of dissolving boundaries. We named her Anika. A& I. We are two characters spinning through space, living far beyond the civilization of my life before. When she sleeps, she sometimes shivers, trembles as if she is dreaming: her own internal big bang receding, receding, in her mind.

–Jenni Quilter teaches at NYU. Her most recent book is New York School Painters and Poets (Rizzoli)

This lightweight unicorn shaped pillow unzips and flips into a travel neck pillow. So fun!

Video description: The Bangles cover Big Star’s September Gurls in Pittsburgh in 1986.

It’s time for the monthly thing where we answer the things people typed into search engines as if they are actual questions. This feature is generously funded by Patreon supporters.

1 “How to stop a neighbour and hubby putting me down every time I walk past
.”

Ugh, your husband is being a giant asshole, and it’s time to tell him straight up to knock this behavior off. “Stop doing that. It’s rude, disrespectful, and it hurts my feelings.” If he won’t, you’ve got Husband-problems more than you have Neighbor-problems.

2 “What does it mean when a girl says focusing on school right now after you say your feelings
.” 

It means she did not enthusiastically say “Yes, I feel the same way, let’s definitely date each other!” It means she’d rather focus on school than go out with you. Interpret it as “No.”

3 “Anonymous STD notification letter.”

National treasure website Scarleteen recommends InSpot  for sending an anonymous e-card and has a good how-to guide on doing this kind of notification. Australia has a service called Better To Know that lets you notify partners of possible Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) anonymously via text or email. In both cases, you enter info, the person gets a message that lets them know that they may have been exposed to an STI (+ there’s a way for you to enter which ones) and should get tested. There’s a good roundup of similar services in this article.

If you’re feeling blue and alone in this, the Netflix show formerly known as “Scrotal Recall” (now renamed Lovesick) is a romantic comedy about a man who must notify past sexual partners about possible chlamydia exposure.

If you don’t want to go anonymous, a simple text or phone call that says “Hey [Sex Friend] I recently tested positive for ________. You should get checked out, too” is a very kind and ethical thing to send. The more we all remove stigma and shame around STIs, the better job everyone can do taking care of ourselves and each other.

4 “My boyfriend mom prophesied that we are not meant to be together.”

Translation: Your boyfriend’s mom does not want you to be together.

What do you and your boyfriend want?

5 “When some knocks on door and says the Lord compelled them to stop and talk to you.”

Translation: The someone wanted to stop and talk to you.

What do you want?

6 “How to decline a neighbor asking us over

.”

“How nice of you to think of us, but no thank you.”

7 “What to do when your friend sets you up on a blind date and the guy’s interested in her.”

Acknowledge the awkwardness, have a good laugh together, tell the guy “good luck, dude, tell her how you feel and maybe we can avoid this sitcom nonsense next time” and go home with your dignity. You didn’t do anything weird.

8 “Should you invite girls of interest to your party

.”

Throwing a party is a great reason to invite someone that you might be interested in romantically over. That person can meet your friends, see your place, everyone can see how everyone gets on together, you can get to know each other better without having it be a DATE date, etc. Why not?

Now, girl(s) plural is an advanced move, but again, why not?

9 “What do you do when your daughter owes you money and is not paying you back but takes vacations and spends a lot
.”

Ugh, this is a hard one. Here are some steps for dealing with friends and family members who are not good/prompt/conscientious about paying back loans,

a) Assume that you won’t ever be repaid. Take whatever steps you need to shore up your own financial well-being so that you’re not depending on that money. If you do manage to collect it it will be a happy thing.

b) Ask the person to repay you what they owe. If you bring up fancy vacations or their other spending they will get automatically defensive, so skip that part in your request (even if it is relevant to the issue). Why skip it? You don’t need the story about how she bought the tickets long ago or how they were really a gift from a friend and you don’t want to give her a reason to feel judged and aggrieved (even if judgment is warranted). The vacation money is spent. It’s not coming back. She knows that you know that she knows that she owes you money. Just be simple and direct and ask for what you need:

Script: “Daughter, you still owe me $______. When can we expect repayment?” or “Daughter, you still owe me $_______. Can you repay me by (date)?” Brace yourself for the wave of defensiveness and excuses that is coming. Do not, I repeat, do not get into the details of her spending or her excuses or reasons. Just repeat the question. “Okay, so, when can you get the money to me?“

c) Don’t lend this person any more money. You may or may not ever get the money back, but you can definitely control whether you lend them more. You now have a lot of information about how they’ll behave when you lend them money and you both have a hard, awkward lesson. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior here, and “I’m sorry, Daughter, I don’t feel comfortable lending you money since you didn’t pay me back” is a situation your daughter created, not you.

I hope you get a good result. Also, general thought, if you are going to lend money to friends or family, it’s a good idea to put something in writing: How much, what it’s for, when & how will it be paid back. Your script can be “Let’s just write it down so we all know what the agreement is and I never have to bug you about paying me back.”

10 “Etiquette of peeing when surfing.”

We are people of action and lies do not become us: In the unlikely comedy of errors that lands me on an actual surfboard in an actual body of water, there is no way on earth my enthusiastic and prolific middle-aged bladder is gonna be able to wait until I swim to shore, find a land-based bathroom, and peel off my wetsuit in time to pee decorously in a toilet. This seems like a “it’s a big ocean” and “that’s between you and your wetsuit” issue to me, but maybe an actual surfer has insight?

11 “How to make girlfriend move out to Colorado.”

You do not make. You ask, and then she either moves or she doesn’t.

12 “I have to leave the Midwest or I will die but my husband thinks it’s all in my head.”

Ok, this seems like a REALLY specific situation and we are DEFINITELY missing context here but what if I said “Even if it were in your head, is your need to go so great and so urgent and so necessary that it’s worth going alone, even if that’s a difficult & sad decision?”

13 “Dating female academic awful
.”

It certainly can be, since the prospect of relocation is always hanging over the whole deal.

14 “He said he wants to do his own thing and maybe see other people.”


Translation: “I am planning to see other people and have less energy/focus/time/interest for a relationship with you.”

It’s a prelude to a breakup, possibly one where “he” either wants you to be the bad guy and actually do the breaking up or where he’d like you to stick around in his life but in background/low-priority mode.

15 “My 23 year old son looks so unattractive, but he won’t shave or cut his hair
.”

[Bad Advisor] Well, it’s definitely 100% his job to make sure his face and body look attractive and acceptable to you, his parent, at all times so definitely be sure to bring this up as often as possible! Your concern, constantly expressed, will only bring you closer together as a fellow adult human strives to please you in all things, including and especially the hair that is growing on his personal face and body where he lives and you do not.

Also, to be on the safe side, hide all of your copies of the musical about this very question, lest he get ideas about fur vests, naked dancing or protesting the Vietnam War.

It is not only your business but your duty to set this young man straight. [/Bad Advisor]

16 “What does it mean if you ask for a guy’s phone number and his response is he is antisocial
.”

He did not want to give you his phone number, or, if he does/did, he is warning you that he doesn’t want to actually hang out. Try again, another dude, another day.

17 “Fucking past due invoices.”

Fucking the worst.

18 “Girlfriend of 11 years is leaving me
.”

Wallow. Fuck Around. Do The Thing.

Repeat the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear to yourself.

(Or not, as it suits you).

19 “Angry that my husband allows his parents to come whenever they want
.”

This would make me angry, too. His family may have a drop-in culture or agreement and expectations, but you do not, and therefore the family that you and your husband make together does not. There are several conversations/actions that need to happen if they haven’t already (and maybe they have and need to happen again):

a) “Husband, I want your folks to feel and be welcome in our house, but to make that happen I need some advance notice. Please ask them to call first and ask if we’re free, and please check with me before you say yes.” 

b) “In-Laws, I really want you to be and feel welcome in our house, but I need more advance notice than you’re accustomed to providing. Just dropping by, even when I’m happy to see you, really stresses me out. I know this is different from how you do things in your family, but I need you to call first and ask if I’m free or if now is a good time. Thanks!” 

c) “Husband, I know I’m somewhat ‘changing the rules’ on your family, but I really need some consideration here. Back me up.” 

d) When they just drop by anyway and your husband isn’t home try: “Oh, too bad this isn’t a good time, I’m just stepping out” + LEAVE (go to the library or run errands or something, just take a drive around the block on principle). Btw if they have keys and are in the habit of just letting themselves in, put the chain on when you’re home alone. Teach them that you won’t drop everything because they came over.

e) When they just drop by anyway and your husband is home, “Oh, too bad, this isn’t a good time, I was just about to take a nap” + HIDE (in your bedroom with the door shut  – keep books handy – and let him do whatever work of entertaining them). Risk seeming unwelcoming and unfriendly. You ARE unwelcoming…to people who invite themselves over.

This didn’t start overnight and won’t go away overnight but in my opinion it’s a battle worth picking.

20 “How to agree a girl for fucking if she dislikes doing it.”

Find someone else to fuck. Someone who likes doing it. Someone who enthusiastically likes doing it with you.

What the fuck, people.

21 “Got an apology from my ex after 15 years
.”

That had to feel weird.

Whether this was welcome or unwelcome contact, there’s one important thing you should know:

It doesn’t obligate you to do anything or feel anything or re-open any kind of contact with this person. If you want to talk to them, ok? You could say “Thanks for the apology, I forgive you and wish you well” if that is true of how you feel.

But if you’d rather let the past stay in the past, you can 100% delete the weird Facebook message or whatever and go on with your life.

22 “Did the date go good or bad?”

This is a great question. You can’t control whether another person will like you, so after a date ask yourself:

• Did I enjoy myself?
• Was I relaxed and comfortable with this person?
• Could I be myself around this person?
• Did the conversation flow?
• Did I feel like the other person was on my team, helping the date go smoothly and laughing gently at any awkward moments? Or did the awkward silences turn into awkward chasms on the edge of the awkward abyss?
• Did the other person seem at ease and comfortable with me?
• Was the actual time we spent together fun/enjoyable/comfortable/pleasurable?
• Was it as good as spending time alone doing something enjoyable or with a good friend or do I wish I’d just spent the evening at home?
• Was I bored? Checked out? Apprehensive?
• Was it easy to make plans?
• Do I feel like the person was listening/paying attention/engaged?
• (If kissing is a thing you’re interested in) Can I picture myself kissing them?
• Am I looking forward to hanging out again?
• Were there any red flags?*

If the date went well for you, where you enjoyed yourself and felt good, ask the person for another date. The rest is up to the other person.

If you can get in the habit of checking in with yourself about your own comfort and enjoyment levels during and after dates, even a “meh” date can be useful because you’ll know more about yourself and what you’re looking for.

*Bonus list of some of my personal First Date red flags from back in the day when I bravely put on clean shirts and lip gloss and met strangers from the Internet for drinks:

• Was the person I was meeting generally congruent with the person presented on the dating site and during any prior conversations? If you’re “single” on the dating site and suddenly “planning to get divorced btw we still live together and no one at work knows we’re separated so I’d appreciate your discretion” when we meet, if you’re 28 in all your dating site photos and 58 in person…it was not going to work.
• Did the person monologue the whole time?
• Did I feel like I was monologuing the whole time at someone who just shyly stared at me and nodded? (The Silent Type is a great type and it may be your type but experience tells me it was not mine).
• Did I feel like I was an unpaid nonconsensual therapist while someone shared everything about their life?
• Did the person constantly talk about their ex & exes?
• Was literally everything they said a complaint about someone or something?
• Were these complaints at least funny and entertaining?
• In these complaints was nothing ever their responsibility? Was it just a long list of Ways I Have Been Wronged By Others with a subtext of Surely You Have A Duty To Not Disappoint Me Like Everyone Else Has (Now That You Know My Tale of Woe)?
• Ugh, mansplaining, especially politics or philosophy, how movies get made, the “authenticity” of whatever food we were eating, the makeup & history of the neighborhood where I lived and they did not (for example when I failed to pick the “most authentic” taco place in Pilsen or Little Village), telling me why everything I liked was actually overrated.
• Talking during movies. No.
• Taking me to some sort of performance and then critiquing how much it sucks into my ear in real time. No.
• Overfamiliarity, over-investment. “I can’t wait to introduce you to my son, he’s going to love you!” Ok but u just met me I am still wearing my coat slow down friend.
• Overdoing innuendo & sex talk too soon, like, “I just got a new bed, it’s very comfortable, you’ll have to come test it out with me later heh heh.” Ok but u just met me I am still wearing my coat slow down friend.
• Overdoing it with the touching. If dinner and a movie remind me of how my cat likes to constantly crawl all over me and make annoying biscuits everywhere it’s too much touching!
• Negging of all sorts, especially “I don’t usually date ________, but you seem really cool.” (Bonus Nope!!!!! if the blank includes fat people, feminists, “women who seem really smart”)
• Constant contact, expecting constant texts/calls/emails before we’ve even met in person, all up in my social media biz, “liking” every single photo/comment going back through the archives. It feels good to be seen and not so good to be surveilled.
• Neediness  – We literally just met, so, surely there is someone else in your life who can drive you home from dental surgery or hold your hand while you put your dog to sleep or fly home with you to your father’s funeral or weigh in with you about whether you should accept this job offer? (All true stories of actual things actual men wanted me to do after a few emails and one hour-long bar or coffee date). I will move mountains to take care of people I love, when, you know, I have had a chance to figure out if love them.
• Casual, “ironic” sexist or racist comments, dropping code sentences like “I hate all the political correctness these days, I feel like I can’t say anything.“
• Bringing your feature screenplay to the date for me to read.

Your Mileage May Vary, as the great saying goes. My list doesn’t look like anyone else’s and I may have had stuff on there that is not necessarily a problem in itself or not a problem for you, or where there are exceptions to be made (I did drive the guy home from dental surgery as a human favor for a fellow human being, I just didn’t date him more) or that are just differences in styles and interest levels. It’s not meant to be universal and it’s about compatibility with you vs. any one thing being Good or Bad.

I’m including the list because I developed it over time by paying attention to what made me feel good, comfortable, safe, relaxed, happy, excited and what made me feel the opposite.I stopped asking people “Is this normal/cool/okay thing when you date?” and started asking “Am I good with this?” and “Am I delighted by this?” Those experiences (and the decision to be picky about second and third dates) helped me avoid some entanglements that would have been fleeting at best and draining at worst, and it helped me know “Just Right” when I saw it.

We focus so much on the auditioning aspect of dating – Am I good enough? Does the other person like me back? – that our own comfort and needs and pleasure can get lost right when we need them most. It was a good date if you enjoyed yourself and felt good and did your best to be kind and considerate. It was a bad date if you didn’t enjoy yourself. Whether a good date will lead to another one is up to more than just you.

 

Dear Polly,

I am staring into the void. A bit dramatic, right? I thought so, too. Yet, as I type the words, they feel so real. Let me be absolutely clear, I have never desired the advice of others, until you, Polly. Like a misguided, pathetic, helpless whelp of a...More »

The cover of the May 2000 issue of The Economist featured an Africa-shaped photo cutout with a young, armed man popping out of it. “The Hopeless Continent,” the magazine deemed it, asking, “Does Africa have some inherent character flaw that keeps it backward and incapable of development?”

Today, few would write off Africa—or developing nations on any continent—as hopeless. Instead, the health of the developing world has been very much a story of hope. Since 2000, new malaria infections have halved in sub-Saharan Africa. Child mortality and AIDS deaths have fallen precipitously. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, famines killed about a million people per year around the world. Since 1980, that number has gone down to an average of about 75,000 annually. (Indeed, in 2011 even The Economist took note, publishing a new cover story titled “Africa Rising.”)

In a new report from their foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates write that it’s this type of progress that could be reversed if funding for global health is cut—including by the U.S. government.

President Trump’s budget proposal, released in May, recommended slashing global health funding by 26 percent and humanitarian funding by 44 percent, or $4.2 billion. It eliminated global family planning. The proposal will likely be watered down by Congress this fall, but global-health advocates are nonetheless worried that even minor cuts could have massive, and tragic, effects.

If Congress agrees to the proposed cuts, they would mean “almost 800,000 people would face preventable death due to lost support for vaccination programs, 3 million people would be left without access to lifesaving HIV/AIDS treatment, and 3 million children would be at higher risk of malnutrition due to an inability to access nutrition services,” said Gawain Kripke, Oxfam America's policy director. He said the effects of the proposed cuts are already being felt, with projects canceled or delayed because of the uncertainty.

Amanda Glassman, a senior fellow with the Center for Global Development, is also concerned about proposed cuts to international financial institutions, such as the African Development Bank, whose proposed funding also shrank this year.

The Gateses began writing their report before the White House released its budget proposal, but it includes the U.S. budget as a potential threat to progress on global-health metrics.

“Seeing a zero in a line item on a spreadsheet for global health, I have never seen that before,” Melinda Gates told me recently in her Seattle office. “If a government starts defunding stuff, it means something doesn’t matter to them. And that is the signal I think you’re seeing from this administration.”

For the report, Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and a global-health professor at the University of Washington, projected what would happen if progress on various global-health issues stalled. He looked at trends in issues such as infant mortality or infectious disease between 1990 and 2016, and then examined what would happen if all countries performed as badly as poorly performing countries—those in the 85th percentile—on those metrics by 2030.

For example, he found that child deaths have fallen from 11.2 million to 5 million between 1990 and 2016, and they are on track to halve again by 2030. But under the “regress” scenario, there would be 3.3 million deaths, compared to 2.5 million if we stay the course. There are now 29 new cases of malaria per 1,000 people each year, but that could rise to 39, he found. Aid funding is part of what could send a country on a downward trajectory, but there’s also economic growth, the education of young girls, and vaccination rates.

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Gates said the foundation would not be able to fill the gap created by a reduction in aid spending by the U.S. government, the world’s largest donor. Oxfam’s Kripke concurred, saying, “the simple fact is that wealthy philanthropists don’t have enough money to fill the gap, even if they wanted to.”

To those who say the United States should focus its funds on domestic problems, rather than supporting health abroad, Gates brings up the 2014 outbreak of Ebola, which made its way to the United States. “If we don’t make these investments in global health, my argument to people is, you’re going to see a lot more things like Ebola in our own country, and we’ll be dealing with them in our own health clinics because borders are porous,” she said.

Beyond his budget proposal, President Trump has also reinstated the Mexico City policy, which bans U.S.-government global family-planning funds from going to any organization that performs or promotes abortion. He also broadened the policy’s scope so that it applies to all global-health assistance, or $8 billion, rather than just the $600 million in family-planning funding. We won’t see the effects of the policy for about six months, according to Gates, but she says it’s already causing turmoil among nongovernmental organizations. “The NGOs don’t know where their funding is coming from,” she said. “They don’t know whether they should pause on ordering supplies.”

The Mexico City policy has been in effect under past Republican administrations, but it was reversed by President Obama in 2009. Any Republican president would have been likely to reinstate it, but Gates said it was the extent of Trump’s version that prompted her to speak out against it, even though she has not been vocally pro-choice in the past. In 2014, Gates wrote that she struggles with abortion, “but I’ve decided not to engage on it publicly—and the Gates Foundation has decided not to fund abortion.”

Still, in January of this year, she wrote on Facebook that “I’m concerned about the impact that the expansion of the Mexico City policy could have on millions of women and girls around the world. I’ve spent the past 16 years talking to women in developing countries who’ve told me—again and again—that their futures depend on the ability to use contraceptives.”

In our interview, she added that “when you start applying [the Mexico City policy] broadly to other global-health areas, like HIV/AIDS, like malaria services—that to me is where we all have to speak out and say that is just not okay. And that’s why I chose to use my voice more strongly on it this time.”

Not everyone believes the future of foreign aid is quite so bleak. Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee rejected many of Trump’s proposed cuts to humanitarian and family-planning assistance—including the Mexico City policy.

The policy and some foreign-aid cuts could still survive the Congressional budgetary process, but the strong rebuke in the Senate bodes well for the foreign-aid budget, according to Andrew Natsios, a professor at Texas A&M University who served as USAID administrator under George W. Bush.

“We should be cautious, we should be vigilant, and we should watch what happens,” he said. A more significant threat to global development, according to Natsios, is a proposal to merge USAID into the State Department, as well as an uptick he’s noticed in retirements of experienced foreign-service officers.

In some ways, though, Congress’s reluctance to make the foreign-aid cuts is a testament to the power of the Gateses’ and others’ advocacy efforts. In March, Bill Gates reportedly met with several Congressional leaders to discuss foreign aid.

The United States is not the only crucial source of global-health dollars. Also important is making sure middle-income countries maintain their funding levels, Gates told me. “We are constantly going out to governments, whether it’s in Africa, whether it’s in India, whether it’s in the United States, or the United Kingdom, and saying, you have to keep up this funding,” Gates said. The “youth boom” in the global South—the number of Africans between the ages of 15 and 24 is set to double by 2045—heightens the risk that HIV infections could rise if funds run dry. According to the foundation’s report, a 10-percent cut in funding for HIV treatment could cause 5 million additional deaths by 2030.

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For Africa, it’s been a decade of hope, but the priorities laid out by the Trump administration make it less clear whether the continent can continue to put its hope in international donors.

Before I left, I asked Gates whether anything that the Trump administration has said or done since releasing its proposed budget has given her hope.

“No,” she replied.

I bought a pair of these handmade raffia shoes from Oscar and Shades on Etsy and they’re in heavy rotation. They were cheaper when I bought them, they’re $66 now, but I still think it’s worth it for a pair of handmade shoes. I’m sure they’re like $5 wherever they come from, so if you know, go ahead and send me back a pair on your next trip.

That said, they’re super comfy, pretty soft against your feet and don’t chafe anywhere. And because they’re like sandals, zero foot sweat, but still dapper AF. Recommend.

“Keep your eye on the donut, not on the hole.”
– David Lynch

(via)

If you use Instagram, you have seen an exhortation from a friend or colleague to check out some article or event. These calls to action inevitably end, “Link in Bio.”  

That’s shorthand, of course, for the single link that Instagram allows users to drop into their profiles. Because other links can’t be added to posts, that single link is an endorsement: It must be the one URL in the world that you are willing to attach to yourself at that moment.

For years, I’ve wondered why Instagram doesn’t allow links elsewhere. It would be so simple. (I reached out to Instagram for comment, but they didn’t respond.) The Ringer’s Alyssa Bereznak dressed down the company in a post titled, appropriately, “‘Link in Bio’ Is the Worst Thing About Instagram.”

“A network that hosts millions of people won’t let them do something that is second nature for digital natives. So its users have concocted their own clunky loophole to get around the problem,” Bereznak writes. “It’s as if there were a permanent snowstorm in a city, and the mayor refused to clear the sidewalks. Inevitably, pedestrians would just stomp out their own inelegant roundabout paths to navigate the dirty, urine-filled slush.”

Other writers have called Link in Bio “dreaded,” “clumsy,” and “clunky at best.”

And yet, Instagram crushes on, adding users by the hundred millions. The reason is simple: People, like myself, like Instagram. It is a plain like, uncomplicated. In 2015, when my colleague Rob Meyer wrote the definitive post about liking Instagram, “I Like Instagram,” he laid out its excellent lack of features:

It is a silly, idiosyncratic piece of software, but so simple. It says: Here is a picture. Here is a picture of a weird bird my friend saw. Here is a picture of my friend celebrating Eid with her brother. Here is a picture of an acquaintance flying over the city where I used to live.

With every photo, I have two options. I can scroll by, or I can say “I saw this and liked it.” Either way, then I scroll some more. It is a place to look at pictures and, maybe, video. It does not do much else. It doesn’t need to. It is so simple as to be almost serene.

It was true back then! The app’s simplicity seemed to be its heart. But many things have changed about Instagram in the intervening two years. There are now stories, daring you to step into their circles. The formerly chronological feed has been Facebooked. Even back then, Instagram had already added private messaging to its basic function of picture posting.

But the basic feeling people have about Instagram remains the same. They might be annoyed by certain aspects of the app, but they still like it, basically, and in the flat way that Meyer captured perfectly. “Oh, that was nice” is something one could imagine saying after looking at Instagram.

Not so for Facebook or Twitter. On those platforms, I feel like I’ve been snookered into emoting. The reason for this, I would argue, is simple: Instagram has never become a full participant in the web. By refusing to allow hyperlinks, it has maintained a distinct space on the internet. Twitter and Facebook expanded to become a messy, permeable front end for the whole of the web (even as they try to claw ever more video minutes/ads into their players).

And what is on the web right now is, more or less, politics. The Trump era has meant that Americans are talking about politics perpetually, endlessly, circuitously, directly, boringly, excitedly. Given the circumstances and stakes, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But as “the conversation” goes, so follows the content, bucketing arguments, relating to your feelings, connecting popular culture with political theater. I don’t know anyone who isn’t exhausted, at least some of the time.

Then there is Instagram, where the documentation that life goes on doesn’t feel out of place. Like a recipe book written in 1944, Instagram declares: Still gotta eat! Like sunset pics from 1968: Still the world turns!

You can trace this right back to Link in Bio. Mobile apps are supposed to let the users do what they want, what they demand. Their paths of desire must be seamless and easy. Friction is the enemy.

But what if friction is necessary for the long-term health of these social systems? What if the platforms sometimes need to do the thing that generates lower short-run “engagement”? What if social networks now need dampening, not amplification?

The outright denial of user desire is also a good reminder of what these spaces actually are. The New York Times’ John Herrman calls the big platforms a “commercial simulation” of freedom. Instagram does not pretend to be part of the public sphere. It is not the natural home of #theresistance. It’s a place for the Sunday’s-best version of your personal life to have space on the internet.

In recent months, Instagram has experimented with letting verified users link out to the web from inside their stories. It solves the Link-in-Bio problem like that. But once the web starts to creep in, will its exhausting dynamics follow?

I evicted a longtime resident of my To Cook list this week with this corn chowder. I have no argument with traditional corn chowder — it has cream, bacon, and potatoes and thus would be impossible not to love as soup or salad — but I adore to the point of boring everyone around me with my gushing, Mexican-style corn either elote-style (on the the cob rolled in butter, mayo, lime juice and coated with salty crumbled cotija cheese and chile powder or a chile-lime seasoning blend) or esquites-style (all of the above, but in a cup). This corn chowder attempts to celebrate the best of both.

Read more »

This year I’ve spent my working hours in a distant American past, reading contemporaneous accounts of abolitionism, civil war, and Reconstruction in the deepest reaches of our archives.

Over the last few months this position has sometimes felt disjointed from the constant stream of news coming out of Congress and the White House. But this week the two eras collided violently when efforts to take down Confederate monuments were met with protests by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Confederate generals became the subject of articles, protests, and presidential flim flam, and Frederick Douglass reemerged on our homepage as a powerful political voice.

So, though it was written more than 150 years ago, William Cullen Bryant’s “The Death of Slavery” feels relevant today. In the poem, published in our July 1866 issue, Bryant hails the abolitionist victory at the close of the Civil War by addressing his words to the institution of slavery itself—that “great Wrong,” that “scourge,” finally at the end of its “cruel reign.”

Like The Atlantic’s founders, Bryant was fiercely opposed to slavery. He repeatedly gave voice to his abolitionism in the editorials he penned as the longtime editor of the New York Evening Post, and was an emphatic supporter of the anti-slavery Free-Soil and Republican Parties and particularly of Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 presidential campaign. The grand moral language and triumphant tone of “The Death of Slavery” evince the fervent outrage with which he viewed America’s “peculiar institution,” and the equally fervent exultation he felt when it finally ended.

The last stanza of the poem, in which Bryant addresses the physical remnants of slavery, feels particularly resonant at the end of this long and difficult week. It reads:

I see the better years that hasten by
   Carry thee back into that shadowy past,
   Where, in the dusty spaces, void and vast,
The graves of those whom thou hast murdered lie.
          The slave-pen, through whose door
          Thy victims pass no more,
Is there, and there shall the grim block remain
   At which the slave was sold; while at thy feet
Scourges and engines of restraint and pain
   Moulder and rust by thine eternal seat.
There, ’mid the symbols that proclaim thy crimes,
Dwell thou, a warning to the coming times.

You can read the rest of the poem here, and find more verse about the Civil War in our archives.

Dear Polly,

Eight months ago my boyfriend/favorite human in the world was diagnosed with ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) at the age of 32. ALS affects all the voluntary muscles in the body — he will eventually lose the ability to use his hands and arms, the ability...More »

Slainte, Captain!

I have a weird family question that I couldn’t find an answer to, so I turn to you.

I’m 30 years old, raised by my mom and my stepdad. Hopefully brief context: my stepdad and I have never got along. There were many instances of emotional abuse – he’s the kind of guy who would excitedly volunteer to tell me when I was in trouble because he delighted in bringing me bad news, and was jealous enough of my relationship with my mom that he would come up with chores for me to do whenever he caught me sitting and talking or reading with her. There were also a few occasions of drunky physical abuse; I got slapped and thrown around a fair bit. He’s still incredibly rude to me a lot of the time, which is why we don’t really talk. They live in another state and that’s the way I like it.

By contrast, my relationship with my mother is… good, but problematic. She is the strongest, classiest, most brilliant and brave woman I’ve ever known, and I practically worship her, but I also know that I can’t be around her and retain my adulthood at all. She loves me ferociously but spent most of my childhood pushing me away. “Love me from afar!” was her favorite line. We can talk for years about books, movies, history, science, ideas… but I cannot tell her things that matter to me, because she will either ridicule them or simply tell me, “Oh, honey, you know I don’t care about that.” Yes, she actually says exactly that.

So! Here’s my issue:

Every time I talk to them on the phone (usually about twice a month for an hour or more – my mom and I LOVE to talk) one or the other of them will say something like, “Do you think we were good parents?” I never know how to answer that question. I don’t think they were great parents, but at this point, there’s nothing they can do about that, and they’re not likely to agree with a lot of my criticisms anyway. Answering that question honestly would ultimately involve me DEFENDING my memories of neglect and abuse. I’m happy with my life now; I have a family I love and I am finally discovering the person I want to be. Why make both them and me feel like crap when it doesn’t really matter now?

But it keeps coming up. They won’t stop asking, and I hate comforting them about it when I can’t feel genuine doing it. How can I make this question go away without opening up a whole can of emotional nonsense when my life is finally getting better?

Thank you for your time!
Loving From Afar (she/her pronouns)

Dear Loving From Afar (WUT? Ugh, your MOM),

A lot of people who were emotionally abused as kids walk in your same shoes. How to reconcile the demogorgons of our childhoods with the mellower, grayer, almost fragile-seeming fellow adults in front of us now?

This question that your parents keep asking you is deeply strange. If they are concerned about how they treated you and they wanted to have an actual honest conversation about it, your stepdad could say (for example): “I’m in the ‘make amends’ step of recovery and I’d like to apologize for [specific things] I did back when I was drinking.” They could tell you specifically what they want to talk about and why instead of making you play some weird guessing game. They could include, I dunno, an actual apology? None of this is an apology. Their question is a trap, so, good job for knowing that it’s a trap.

Possible answers:

• “You’ve been asking this question a lot. Is there something specific from the past that you want to talk about?” 
• “You’ve asked this a lot. What’s prompting this?”
• “Wow, what a question. What’s really on your mind?” 
• “Wow, what a question. Is there something specific that’s bothering you?” 
• “I could have done with 100% less being slapped around by [Stepdad] – is that what you want to talk about?”
• “If I said ‘not really’ what would you say?” 
• “Wait, are you asking me to reassure you about your parenting? I have no idea how to do that.”
• “This feels like a trap.“
• “I don’t know how to answer that, but I’m a pretty happy adult.” 
• “Do they make comment cards for family relationships now? Let’s talk about something else.”
• “What an awkward question. Why on earth would you ask me that?“
• “No, but we can’t change the past. Why do you want to talk about this now?“
• “Do you think you were good parents?” 
• “Wow. What brought this on?” 
• “I don’t know how to answer that.” 
• Edited to add: “Oh, Mom, you know I’m not interested in talking about any of that.” 

If a lot of the scripts above look like answering a question with a question, yes, correct! Think of this as “If you’re going to bring this up, then you’re going to be the ones to do the work of explaining why.” Your parents are almost certain to pass on answering your counter-question or give a “no reason” non-answer, which gives you an opening to ignore the question entirely, like, “Ok, I have no idea how to answer that, but if you think of something specific you want to talk about let me know.” Return awkwardness to sender!

This is such a fucked up question from fucked-up people that there’s no right answer. But (good news?), that means there’s also no wrong way to answer. Answering honestly and giving them an opportunity to have an honest conversation doesn’t mean you have now agreed to discuss or defend or rehash anything. Alternately, saying “If I say ‘sure,’ will you stop asking me?” doesn’t undo all the true things that happened.

My thinking is, no matter how you answer you’re gonna feel weird and bad for a little afterward while because these people are experts at making you feel weird and bad, so you might as well be genuine and honor the life and the self you’ve created. Maybe your script is: “Not really, but I like our relationship how it is now.”

 

 

“There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness.”

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

HBO’s prospective series Confederate will offer an alternative history of post-Civil War America. It will ask the question, according to co-creator David Benioff,  “What would the world have looked like … if the South had won?” A swirl of virtual protests and op-eds have greeted this proposed premise. In response, HBO has expressed “great respect” for its critics but also said it hopes that they will “reserve judgment until there is something to see.”

This request sounds sensible at first pass. Should one not “reserve judgment” of a thing until after it has been seen? But HBO does not actually want the public to reserve judgment so much as it wants the public to make a positive judgment. A major entertainment company does not announce a big new show in hopes of garnering dispassionate nods of acknowledgement. HBO executives themselves judged Confederate before they’d seen it—they had to, as no television script actually exists. HBO hoped to communicate that approval to its audience through the announcement. And had that communication been successful, had Confederate been greeted with rapturous anticipation, it is hard to imagine the network asking its audience to tamp down and wait.

HBO’s motives aside, the plea to wait supposes that a problem of conception can be fixed in execution. We do not need to wait to observe that this supposition is, at best, dicey. For over a century, Hollywood has churned out well-executed, slickly produced epics which advanced the Lost Cause myth of the Civil War. These are true “alternative histories,” built on “alternative facts,” assembled to depict the Confederacy as a wonderland of virtuous damsels and gallant knights, instead of the sprawling kleptocratic police state it actually was. From last century’s The Birth of a Nation to this century’s Gods and Generals, Hollywood has likely done more than any other American institution to obstruct a truthful apprehension of the Civil War, and thus modern America’s very origins. So one need not wait to observe that any foray by HBO into the Civil War must be met with a spirit of pointed inquiry and a withholding of all benefit of the doubt.

Skepticism must be the order of the day. So that when Benioff asks “what would the world have looked like … if the South had won,” we should not hesitate to ask what Benioff means by “the South.” He obviously does not mean the minority of  white Southern unionists, who did win. And he does not mean those four million enslaved blacks, whom the Civil War ultimately emancipated, yet whose victory was tainted. Comprising 40 percent of the Confederacy’s population, this was the South’s indispensable laboring class, its chief resource, its chief source of wealth, and the sole reason why a Confederacy existed in the first place. But they are not the subject of Benioff’s inquiry, because he is not so much asking about “the South” winning, so much as he is asking about “the white South” winning.

The distinction matters. For while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and Davis sought to erect, lives on. It had to. The terms of the white South’s defeat were gentle. Having inaugurated a war which killed more Americans than all other American wars combined, the Confederacy’s leaders were back in the country’s political leadership within a decade. Within two, they had effectively retaken control of the South.

Knowing this, we do not have to wait to point out that comparisons between Confederate and The Man in the High Castle are fatuous. Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.

The symbols point to something Confederate’s creators don’t seem to understand—the war is over for them, not for us. At this very hour, black people all across the South are still fighting the battle which they joined during Reconstruction—securing equal access to the ballot—and resisting a president whose resemblance to Andrew Johnson is uncanny. Confederate is the kind of provocative thought experiment that can be engaged in when someone else’s lived reality really is fantasy to you, when your grandmother is not in danger of losing her vote, when the terrorist attack on Charleston evokes honest sympathy, but inspires no direct fear. And so we need not wait to note that Confederate’s interest in Civil War history is biased, that it is premised on a simplistic view of white Southern defeat, instead of the more complicated morass we have all around us.

And one need not wait to ask if Benioff and D.B. Weiss are, at any rate, the candidates to help lead us out of that morass or deepen it. A body of work exists in the form of their hit show Game of Thrones. We do not have to wait to note the persistent criticism of that show is its depiction of rape. Rape—generational rape, mass rape—is central to the story of enslavement. For 250 years the bodies of enslaved black women were regarded as property, to be put to whatever use—carnal and otherwise—that their enslavers saw fit. Why HBO believes that this duo, given their past work, is the best team to revisit that experience is a question one should not wait to ask.

And all this must be added to a basic artistic critique—Confederate is a shockingly unoriginal idea, especially for the allegedly avant garde HBO. “What if the white South had won?” may well be the most trod-upon terrain in the field of American alternative history. There are novels about it, comic books about it, games about it, and a mockumentary about it. It’s been barely a year since Ben Winters published Underground Airlines.

Storytellers have the right to answer any question they choose. But we do not need to wait to examine all the questions that are not being chosen: What if John Brown had succeeded? What if the Haitian Revolution had spread to the rest of the Americas? What if black soldiers had been enlisted at the onset of the Civil War? What if Native Americans had halted the advance of whites at the Mississippi? And we need not wait to note that more interesting than asking what the world would be like if the white South had won is asking why so many white people are enthralled with a world where the dreams of Harriet Tubman were destroyed by the ambitions of Robert E. Lee.

The problem of Confederate can’t be redeemed by production values, crisp writing, or even complicated characters. That is not because its conceivers are personally racist, or seek to create a show that endorses slavery. Far from it, I suspect. Indeed, the creators have said that their hope is to use science fiction to “show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could.” And that really is the problem. African Americans do not need science-fiction, or really any fiction, to tell them that that “history is still with us.” It’s right outside our door. It’s in our politics. It’s on our networks. And Confederate is not immune. The show’s very operating premise, the fact that it roots itself in a long white tradition of imagining away emancipation, leaves one wondering how “lost” the Lost Cause really was.

It’s good that the show-runners have brought on two noted and talented black writers—Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman. But one wonders: If black writers, in general, were to have HBO’s resources and support to create an alternative world, would they choose the world dreamed up by the progenitors of the Ku Klux Klan? Or would they address themselves to other less trod areas of Civil War history in the desire to say something new, in the desire to not, yet again, produce a richly imagined and visually beguiling lie?

We have been living with the lie for so long. And we cannot fix the lie by asking “What if the white South won?” and waiting for an answer, because the lie is not in the answer, but in the question itself.

This article is a response to Olga Khazan’s Atlantic article “Why Do Women Bully Each Other at Work?”

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Olga Khazan’s recent article “Why Do Women Bully Each Other at Work?” examines women’s workplace relationships and includes several firsthand accounts from female professionals of being undermined or verbally assaulted by female superiors. As researchers who have studied these dynamics, we couldn’t help but notice that, save for one example of a young employee at a consulting firm who found herself begrudging a colleague her six-week maternity leave, all of Khazan’s interview subjects told their stories from the perspective of a junior staffer stung by a senior one.

Which led us to wonder: Is it possible that gender-based expectations make it difficult for more-senior women to provide constructive criticism to their female reports?

At least part of the “queen bee” label Khazan discusses (and critiques)—a label often assigned, fairly or not, to female bosses considered to be “catty” or “bitchy”—emerges from biased interpretations of women’s behavior. Consider Shannon, the lawyer interviewed by Khazan who in one breath describes a female partner as being passive-aggressive, and in the next recalls a time when the same partner told her, in a strikingly non-passive-aggressive way, to be more confident. Shannon uses these examples to illustrate a problematic relationship, but could it be that one woman’s criticism is another woman’s attempt at mentoring?

This reminded us of a story related by Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In: Sandberg once listened in shock as a junior woman, to whom she considered herself a mentor, claimed to never have had anyone looking out for her career. When Sandberg pressed the junior woman on how she defined mentorship, she concluded that the woman expected not a mentor but a therapist.

In a paper published in 2014 in the Journal of Management, we proposed that women’s workplace relationships with one another are subject to two stereotypes—one that describes how they’re believed to act and one that prescribes how they should act. The first suggests that women’s relationships with each other are fraught with tension and “cattiness.” The second dictates that they should be nurturing and supportive of each other. These stereotypes put women in a bind: If they mentor their junior counterparts, as Sandberg says she did, that guidance can go unnoticed because it’s what they’re expected to provide anyway. But the moment they make a firm demand or give critical feedback to a younger colleague, they risk being labeled a queen bee.

These stereotypes also shape women’s unrealistic expectations of other women: If one subscribes to the first stereotype, she enters the workplace expecting women to be her worst enemies, whereas if she subscribes to the second stereotype—as many feminists appear to—she expects consistent and unquestioning support from other women. The standards to which women in positions of power are then held are nearly impossible to meet while fulfilling the requirements of their jobs—among the most important of which is holding colleagues accountable for their performance regardless of their gender.

Supporting the theory we laid out in that 2014 piece, one of us (Leah) has a working paper demonstrating that, in a hypothetical scenario, a woman who criticizes the job performance of a junior woman is viewed by both male and female research subjects as jealous and threatened by her junior colleague—a finding that does not emerge when either employee is a man. In another study, women said they’d feel more let down by a hypothetical workplace scenario in which they imagined a woman acting toward them in an unsupportive way, compared to when they imagined a male coworker doing the same; men reacted similarly regardless of the critical colleague’s gender.

These results suggest that the same workplace behavior is judged differently when it involves two women, compared to two men or one man and one woman. This conclusion is bolstered anecdotally among Khazan’s interviewees. “Many women told me that men had undermined them as well,” she writes, “but it somehow felt different—worse—when it happened at the hands of a woman, a supposed ally.”

In any discussion of the queen-bee stereotype, it’s important to note the implications of believing that professional women undermine each other because their work environments are male-dominated, as some research cited in Khazan’s article suggests they do. From that belief follows the problematic conclusion that if only an organization could become more egalitarian, its female employees would revert to their supposedly natural feminine state of being warm and supportive—a stereotype that is just as constricting as any other.

Indeed, women shouldn’t be expected to nurture others more than men, and they’re no less entitled to criticizing and challenging their colleagues. In conversations about women’s relationships with one another at work, it’s important to keep this in mind before labeling anyone too harsh or competitive.

Our Little Racket by Angelica Baker

I read all 512 pages of Angelica Baker’s debut novel greedily, in one dizzying weekend, unable to put it down. Which is fitting, in a way: Our Little Racket follows the sudden downfall of a Lehman Brothers–esque CEO through the eyes of his wife, their teenage daughter, and the other women surrounding them, and as such it’s very much a story of greed and its out-of-control consequences. But the book gets beyond moneymaking hubris to a more basic kind of desire—the fretful, shapeless longing of those who are sidelined to be seen somehow as indispensable.

Binge-watchers of Big Little Lies will enjoy the elegantly cutthroat politics of suburban life in wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut, while fans of Elena Ferrante will like the sharp portrayal of the delicate power balances in women’s friendships. But any reader will appreciate the tightly woven drama of this book, which brings its five protagonists out of the margins of the crisis and into an explosive confrontation of their own.

Book I’m hoping to read: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

—Rosa Inocencio Smith, assistant editor

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The Idiot by Elif Batuman

For Selin, the Turkish-American protagonist and narrator of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, arriving at Harvard in the fall of 1995 is an occasion of great flourishing. Intellectual and experiential horizons are broadened. New technology, in the form of, yes, email—“a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn’t know … like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world”—makes apparent the complexities of our ever-evolving epistolary media. But it’s also a time of emotional confusion: Selin falls for a bland, apparently brilliant, Hungarian mathematician named Ivan. Several years her senior, he treats her as an odd curiosity, someone to be intrigued by but never quite taken with.

While Selin’s on-again, off-again pursuit of Ivan gives The Idiot its narrative spine, for me, the novel’s true pleasures are in the rapid maturation of her powers of observation. “Why was ‘plain’ a euphemism for ‘ugly,’ when the very hallmark of human beauty was its plainness, the symmetry and simplicity that always seemed so young and so innocent,” Selin muses. It’s a work of peculiar discovery, a portrait of the artist as a young Turkish-American woman obsessed with language and its powers. And Selin’s infatuation with Ivan, too, offers her a way to work out her nascent theories of love, life, and meaningful expression.

My anxious, sweaty, early college days were full of unrequited longings, both romantic and cerebral—I wanted my opinions about Bergman, Chekhov, and colonialism to be valued and important. The Idiot took me back to that awkward time, full of pain and strangeness, but also of promise and delight.

Book I’m hoping to read: Neuromancer by William Gibson

—Siddhartha Mahanta, associate editor

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Fear and Loathing in America by Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing in America is a collection of Hunter S. Thompson’s private and business letters between 1968 and 1976. There are other earlier and later collections, but in these years he’s in his prime. “The Battle of Aspen” (Rolling Stone, 1970) is one of my favorite pieces of his, and here you see how it came together, and how it shaped his understanding of journalism’s role in political power.

Thompson carbon-copied all of his letters and reportedly imagined they’d be published one day, which slightly ruins the idea that you’re looking inside his head when reading them. His letters have the same energy and humor of his columns. But to whatever degree his persona involved conscious performance, it’s one he kept up for thousands of pages of private correspondence. I come out believing the reason his work resonated with so many people was because it was authentic. It’s possible the crisis of faith in journalism today would be helped if there were more writers as relatable, unpretentious, and candid as he was.

There are, of course, parallels between his feelings about Richard Nixon then and many people’s feelings about Donald Trump today. It can be cathartic to wade through HST’s despair for democracy and the American idea, and to realize that it was not less intense than many people’s today, and to see how he coped and didn't, and to remember that he and the country made it through.

Book I’m hoping to read: Things That Happened Before the Earthquake by Chiara Barzini

—James Hamblin, senior editor

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Uncomfortably Happily by Yeon-Sik Hong

This hefty graphic novel by the Korean cartoonist Yeon-Sik Hong is one of the simplest stories I’ve read this year. It has no real suspense or plot, no grand reveal. Based on Hong’s own experience moving with his wife Sohmi from Seoul to the countryside, Uncomfortably Happily is a candid, engrossing tale of two comic artists looking for comfort in solitude and minimalist living, even as the twin shadows of poverty and stress loom.

While they are thrilled to leave the smog and noisy crowds behind, the couple relocate largely out of financial necessity; on page after page, the irritable Hong agonizes over his meager paychecks and unfulfilled creative dreams. Uncomfortably Happily, which is plainly but engagingly drawn, spends as much time, though, on the daily indignities and triumphs of living in the mountains. Divided into seasons, the book reflects the duo's newfound connection to the patterns and whims of nature: In the winter, the couple experiment with burning coal to save money. In the spring, they begin the tricky work of loosening the soil and planting sesame, lettuce, and mugwort. They fret over trespassers, chores, and commuting to the city. They adopt a dog, buy some chickens, and clean up the mess when the dog kills the chickens. Sometimes, they treat themselves to grilled meat for dinner or go for a swim.

I appreciated the book’s contemplative, and realist, mode, and its unromantic look at oft-romanticized lifestyles: that of the country-dweller and that of the artist. Beyond that, I just found it therapeutic to follow the quietly charming Hong and Sohmi week to week, not doing much more than making do.

Book I’m hoping to read: Nochita by Dia Felix

—Lenika Cruz, associate editor

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Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo

At 549 pages, Nobody’s Fool is not a short novel, but it could be easy to dismiss as slight. The setting is unremarkable, and the action, such as it is, unfolds slowly. But Richard Russo, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his 2001 book Empire Falls, creates compelling characters and writes with such humanity and humor that the book is pure delight. The story is built around Sully, a down-on-his-luck everyman who lives in a blue-collar town in upstate New York; his son Peter, a college professor whose career and marriage are failing; his aging landlady Miss Beryl; his dim-witted best friend Rub Squeers; his anxious ex-wife Vera; and a menagerie of other townspeople who bring a boisterous joy to the happenings. Russo’s mastery of dialogue, gift for observation, and penchant for amusing cul-de-sacs more than compensate for any lack of pyrotechnics in the plot.

Book I’m hoping to read: Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden

—Bob Cohn, president

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My Promised Land by Ari Shavit

Now is a time to be reading about Israel. Every day, it seems, some new controversy brings the little Middle Eastern country back into the American discourse; while U.S. politics are going through a period of chaotic scramble, the politics of U.S.-Israel-Palestine appear to be on the same steady path toward crisis. Ari Shavit’s book is not a political argument, exactly: It is about the history, and fraughtness, and hope of the land of Israel, and all the ugliness, ambition, joy, and sadness with which the country came to be. He tells the story of Israel's founding and evolution through original interviews and personal narrative, inviting readers along on a journey of historical reckoning that is profoundly ambivalent in its conclusions. That the author himself has become a troubled figure in recent months only adds to the long list of questions I'm wrestling with as I approach the end of the book.

Book I’m hoping to read: Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon

—Emma Green, staff writer

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Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

I spent a night in a seaside tent shortly after finishing Annihilation, and it transformed the familiar-to-campers morning symphony of bird songs, buzzing insects, and crashing waves into something new and not altogether comforting. In this hypnotic and deadpan hybrid of sci-fi, science non-fiction, psychological thriller, and horror, Jeff VanderMeer imagines a group of scientists venturing into a stretch of the American coastline that’s been taken over by a mysterious something rebuffing the influence of humankind. Our narrator, referred to only as “the biologist,” describes a vibrant wilderness that defies her understanding not only of science but also of her own perception. To say much more about her expedition’s mind-bending findings would spoil the book, the first of a trilogy. But trust me: Once you begin Annihilation, you’ll see the flora and fauna around you with more clarity—which is to say, with proper awe at its unknowability.  

Book I’m hoping to read: A Separation by Katie Kitamura

—Spencer Kornhaber, staff writer

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Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh

There’s a thin line between trashy summer reads and meaty, good summer reads. How many times can you flop on the beach with a thriller like The Girl on the Train and not feel like you are bingeing on candy and your brain is turning into a big cavity? I'm always on the lookout for a page-turner that isn’t too indulgent, and Jennifer Haigh’s Heat and Light fits the bill. It has a weighty topic—fracking in Pennsylvania—but deftly tackles the human dimensions of the subject and creates tension that keeps the reader occupied. Through the eyes of a farmer, a prison guard, an activist, a housewife, and a man employed by the drilling industry, the book looks at how a small town reacts to fracking among its farms. This would be easy to do in black and white—fracking bad, environmentalists good—but Haigh brings texture to her characters, making the reader really consider the pros and cons of outside business coming into small, dying towns. In short, you can take Haigh's book to the beach and leave the guilt behind; it’s well written, and will definitely make you think.

Book I’m hoping to read: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

—Alana Semuels, staff writer

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The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

There are certain books that occupy such a place in my consciousness that a simple glimpse of its spine fills me with joy and transports me to where I was when I first read it. The Shadow Lines is such a book. I picked it up recently after nearly two decades to see whether it held up; as before, I was quickly engrossed. The novel is funny, sad, wistful, and ultimately tragic: An unnamed narrator describes his hero worship of one cousin, his unrequited love for another, and the friendship between two families, one English and the other Indian, forged during the war. Amitav Ghosh’s writing luxuriates in what seem like the certainties of the past, but contain memories that are misremembered, half-remembered, and deliberately concealed—the shadow lines of the title. The book can be difficult to follow: It moves back and forth in time, between places, among multiple story arcs, often on the same page. But it’s precisely those qualities, and Ghosh’s incisive observations along the way, that make reading it an arresting experience, as I once again discovered.  

Book I’m hoping to read: July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin

—Krishnadev Calamur, senior editor

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Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker

Bianca Bosker was the executive technology editor at The Huffington Post when she abruptly quit her job and took a $10-an-hour gig as a “cellar rat,” hauling cases of wine for a Manhattan restaurant. Her endgame: to immerse herself in the world of “cork dorks,” master sommeliers and obsessives who devote their lives to studying, sampling, and selling wine. Cork Dork is an account of Bosker’s journey from a casual wine drinker to the sommelier at Terroir Tribeca. But it’s also an enlightening and wacky introduction to the wine industry itself, with its manifold highs (1989 Chateau d’Yquem) and lows (highly processed wines like Yellow Tail and Sledgehammer that contain additives like powdered egg whites or bentonite clay).

Bosker’s mission seems journalistic, at first—she wants to ascertain what actually makes a super-nosed oenophile, and whether such rarefied powers of perception are within the grasp of the average Cabernet drinker. This involves an alarming number of days where she’s hungover by 2 p.m. after attending tastings to bolster her limited education. But she ends up thoroughly absorbed in the weird world she documents, even as she maintains an outsider’s ability to skewer its more ridiculous elements. Cork Dork is, somehow, both an entry-level guide to the ever-growing business of wine and a masterclass in the strange, immensely skilled fanatics who make it their life’s work.

Book I’m hoping to read: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

—Sophie Gilbert, staff writer

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My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan

Years ago, an editor instructed me to read My Traitor’s Heart, Rian Malan’s 1990 reported memoir about Late Apartheid South Africa. I can’t recall what the context for that recommendation was, but I didn’t get around to picking up the book until this summer, when the timing felt fortuitous: What better moment to read about a society tearing itself apart, wracked with police violence against people of color, with a progressive bloc standing by, wringing its hands solemnly but unable or unwilling to formulate an effective response?

But it’s unfair to distill My Traitor’s Heart to, or read it as, merely a parable for the present era in American politics. For someone of my generation, who grew up with the Apartheid regime as a sort of cardboard bogeyman, Malan’s vivid reportage makes the horror of South Africa under P.W. Botha come alive in sickening ways. And Malan, the renegade son of a deeply connected Afrikaner family and a disenchanted former Marxist, is at his best when he is skewering the illusions and pieties of white South Africans who opposed the racist regime. He is especially unsparing in enumerating the faults of one young liberal: himself.

Book I’m hoping to read: Fly Me by Daniel Riley

—David A. Graham, staff writer

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The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

As much as I love discovering new books, I find myself coming back to Jeffrey Eugenides’s first novel, The Virgin Suicides, at least once a year. And more often than not, it happens to be during the summer: The June months that bookend the story feel even more poignant when I’m sitting in the same muggy, buzzing weather as the Lisbon sisters and the boys so enthralled by them.

The Virgin Suicides turns what could easily be a dark and depressing tale into an engrossing, lyrical story about youth, innocence, and that ever elusive idea of teenage girlhood. Told from the perspective of a group of middle-aged men looking back on their past, Eugenides’s novel attempts to explore what it is that brought the five Lisbon sisters to kill themselves. The narrators fail to reach a solid conclusion, but learn more about the sisters as people, concluding that “the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”

It’s easy to forget the particulars of what it means to be a teenager—“Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl,” says the youngest Lisbon sister, Cecilia, when chastised for not knowing how tough life can really be—but Eugenides’s writing has a way of making those isolating high-school years feel familiar, relatable, and not all that long ago.

Book I’m hoping to read: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

—Tori Latham, editorial fellow

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Salt Houses by Hala Alyan

In her debut novel, Salt Houses, Hala Alyan pulls readers into the daily ups and downs of displaced people, using themes of memory, inheritance, ongoing loss, and rebuilding. The Palestinian American author was inspired by her own family’s experiences being forced to relocate: As she notes of that past in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, “A lot of the times it’s something that's really not brought up, which then leaves it to the later generations to reimagine, reconceptualize, kind of recreate what it was that was lost.”

Alyan—who has published three books of poetry—moves the reader lyrically through multiple storylines, continents, and political contexts to depict how families carry their history, through major turning points as well as the everyday. Starting in Nablus, Palestine, in 1963, Salt Houses paints a detailed and emotional portrait of the struggles and triumphs of creating home and reconciling that which no longer exists. It poses difficult and personal questions about what displaced people can give to their children, what they want to be remembered and what—consciously or unconsciously—slips through the cracks.

Book I’m hoping to read: The Sobbing School by Joshua Bennett

—Taylor Hosking, editorial fellow

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Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

If there’s one thing watching a lot of HGTV has taught me—and there is, now that I think about it, pretty much only one thing that watching a lot of HGTV has taught me—it’s that the kitchen is the most important room in the home. Bedrooms are great, Joanna and Chip will enthuse; bathrooms are necessary, Property Brother One and Property Brother Two will concede; living rooms (pardon, Family Spaces that have been laid out, ideally, according to a whimsical Open Concept) are definitely, Tarek and Christina will tell you, a crucial component of the whole deal. But the kitchen: That’s the non-negotiable. It’s the place where everyone, finally, comes together—the warm and beating heart of the home, whatever kind of home it may be.

HGTV’s kitchen-centricism is a (sort of) new idea—remember when fancy dining rooms were the thing to aspire to?—that is also an extremely old one. Food, after all, has been for millennia a driver of community. Consuming it and preparing it, in particular, have long encouraged cooperation and, with it, culture. Our DIY relationship with our meals is in fact, Felipe Fernández-Armesto argues in his 2001 book Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food, part of what makes us human. “Cooking deserves its place as one of the great revolutionary innovations in history,” the Notre Dame history professor writes, "not because of the way it transforms food—there are plenty of other ways of doing that—but because of the way it transformed society.”

Fernández-Armesto makes his case with eloquence and, especially, with wit (“Lego cookery,” he calls the cuisine that calls itself “fusion”; “food-Fordism,” he dubs fast food, as a phenomenon). But Near a Thousand Tables isn’t (merely) another takedown of our current, highly industrialized food system. Fernández-Armesto instead considers food as a constant companion to human history; he examines it in relation to imperialism and to class. He sweeps across cultures and cuisines and eras with polymathic ease. The result, I should note, is definitely not traditional beach reading. But in another way, Near a Thousand Tables is a fitting book for summer, with the season's park picnics and family barbecues and time spent outdoors, among food both actual and potential. Its lessons have made me appreciate, even more fully, the things I cook and consume. Even if those things aren’t served, sadly, on a fashionable breakfast bar.

Book I’m hoping to read: The Mothers by Brit Bennett

—Megan Garber, staff writer

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Grace and the Fever by Zan Romanoff

Grace and the Fever is the story of a girl who meets a member of her favorite boy band, Fever Dream, and gets drawn into their world. But there’s a twist—she’s super-active in the online community of fans who believe two of the band’s members are in a hidden gay relationship. (The storyline is seemingly inspired by the real-life conspiracy theory that One Direction’s Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are secretly in love.)

A fun, escapist read, Zan Romanoff’s book also evokes that particular feeling of teenage summers—of a compressed period of change, of a self that’s blooming in the heat. It’s a story of how people find themselves through the things they love, but also of the dangers of giving too much weight to the mythologies they create around them. “You can see something very clearly without knowing what it is,” Romanoff writes. “You can know what something is without understanding what it means. Something can be real, and not at all true.”

When Grace discovers the truth about the band she adores, she has to reconcile it with the story she’s been telling herself. She also has to reconcile the many different stories she’s been telling about who she is—to her friends, to the band, to her online compatriots. Romanoff’s sensitive and thoughtful portrayal of fandom gives it a literary weight equal to the importance it has in fans' lives.

Book I’m hoping to read: Marlena by Julie Buntin

—Julie Beck, senior associate editor

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There’s a Mystery There by Jonathan Cott

Maurice Sendak’s illustrations are so fantastic that it’s easy to overlook the brilliance of his design choices. Such decisions are quite meaningful, in fact. A story is subtly shaped by a book’s physical contours; there are layered meanings in the interplay between text and art; there’s utility built into the very act of turning the page—a gap in time and space that must be closed by the reader.

“My heartbeat actually changed with the excitement of discovering the picture-book medium with all its complexities,” the art historian Jane Doonan tells Jonathan Cott in his new book, There’s a Mystery There. Cott’s ode to Sendak is an engrossing extension of the 1976 Rolling Stone cover story he wrote about the illustrator, who died in 2012. To make sense of Sendak’s legacy, Cott revisits their conversations from that time and also turns to a panel of scholars, including Doonan.

What emerges is a clearer picture of Sendak the man, and also a riveting excavation of his approach to art. Sendak often described his work as an exploration of how children understand their own feelings of fear, anger, frustration, and boredom. But Cott sees more nuance than that, comparing the emotional resonance of Sendak’s work to a sense of “being outside and inside … at the same time.” This is why it makes sense in Sendak’s universe for a whale to spout chicken soup with rice, and for a glass milk bottle to be a skyscraper, and for a child’s bedroom to be suddenly canopied by trees. In childhood, the smallest and most ordinary spaces are infinite. And when the potential for adventure is everywhere, the distance between a precarious journey and a reassuring homecoming collapses.

Reading Cott’s book, I was struck by the wish to have known Sendak as a boy. Through his beloved canon, I realized, we already do.

Book I’m hoping to read: Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 by Glenda Gilmore

—Adrienne LaFrance, editor

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The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch’s latest novel, a futuristic reimagination of the story of Joan of Arc, opens on a gruesomely detailed scene of burning flesh. In The Book of Joan, skin serves as canvas, screen, and page: Grafting artists are the Dickenses of their era, etching epic sagas and love tales onto their hairless clients’ scalps, necks, and thighs. The narrator, Christine, is one such artist, and she is methodically burning onto her own body a text, the titular “book”: the biography of a young environmental activist named Joan who has become a symbol of resistance as the world’s wealthy elites have their way with an ecologically devastated Earth. The “book” is a way for Christine to document the truth about Joan amid widespread propaganda that would cast her as a terrorist. It is also, as it were, a weapon of protest in a world taken over by sly, false narratives—ones that can move mass opinion, to toxic, even apocalyptic effect.

If this plotline sounds a bit self-serious, Yuknavitch smartly cuts it with mordant humor. She gives Christine, her wry narrator, the nickname “Christ.” She makes Joan crotchety, powerful but not particularly charismatic, and the horrid, dictatorial Jean de Men—a dangerously effective raconteur determined to squelch Joan—essentially, a popular romance novelist. Throughout, Yuknavitch is interested in examining what happens when language is torqued away from average people, and what results when they try to torque it back in their direction. With The Book of Joan, she proffers a thought-provoking meditation on the influence of story—on how it can manipulate and inspire, and how it can be used to resist.

Book I’m hoping to read: Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

—Jane Yong Kim, senior editor

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Canada by Richard Ford

What if your parents were bank robbers? That's essentially the premise of this 2012 novel by Richard Ford, the writer best known for his four Frank Bascombe books, including the Pulitzer-winning Independence Day. While those works more broadly explored the anxieties and pieties of late-20th-century America, in Canada, Ford examines a different set of questions—about criminality, marriage, and the lessons a child learns from his parents—with impressive range.

Where the Bascombe books star a middle-aged, middle-class Southern transplant to the Northeast, Canada is the story of a working-class family in mid-century Montana told from the perspective of an orphaned teenager, Dell Parsons, who is sent north of the border after his parents are arrested. How do you cope with a rupture that sudden? How do you start over? What lessons do you learn from your parents, and what do you discard? In the narrator Parsons, Ford has created a new voice, one that’s entirely distinct from the now-familiar Bascombe. He's more wistful than wry, but no less engaging. And though Canada is tighter in scope than Ford's earlier works, it moves quickly and grabs you from the start.

Book I’m hoping to read: Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

—Russell Berman, senior associate editor

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The Draw by Lee Siegel

Published earlier this year, The Draw, a memoir by the cultural critic Lee Siegel, is deeply unsettling. The first 20 pages reveals the heart of the trauma: Siegel’s father, unable to repay advances on his salary, has gone bankrupt, while his mother devolves into a screaming, slapping hurricane of disappointment. From then on, Siegel spends his adolescence shrinking from his mother’s increasingly erratic power trips and struggling to accept his father’s shrinking sense of self. With uncomfortable composure and clarity, Siegel dissects his parents—labeling faults, diagnosing neuroses—and himself.

This book upset me, but I couldn’t put it down. Siegel’s clinical judgements and fluid transitions, combined with his almost humdrum childhood experiences, make The Draw an engrossing read.

Book I’m hoping to read: Presence in the Modern World by Jacques Ellul

—Katie Martin, designer

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Invisible Planets edited by Ken Liu

I'm a lifelong sci-fi fan, and as any lifelong sci-fi fan can tell you, the repetition of themes and tropes sometimes cripples the genre. So when I was introduced to Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, the space-opera trilogy to which it belonged, and Chinese science fiction in general, it was like a window opened onto a new universe. Just the act of seeing fictional futures through an international lens added depth to my understanding of the genre. And it didn't hurt that the work was thrilling and fresh.

In between his own award-winning sci-fi and fantasy work, Ken Liu has been the chief promoter of the Chinese-American science fiction cultural exchange, so it's no wonder that he translated and edited Invisible Planets, a speculative fiction collection from new and classic Chinese authors. Included are a short story from Liu Cixin and a trippy time-bending Hugo-award-winning novella “Folding Beijing” from Hao Jingfang. Also of interest are the collection’s essays on Chinese sci-fi identity and the prominent role the genre has played in developing cultural identity.

Book I’m hoping to read: The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

—Vann R. Newkirk II, staff writer

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Moonglow by Michael Chabon

Moonglow is not a memoir and, despite what its cover would have you believe, it’s also not quite a novel. It falls somewhere in the nameless space between the two, recounting the story of a writer named Michael Chabon and his maternal grandparents in a way that feels true but that doesn’t always adhere to the facts.

The book centers on stories Chabon’s grandfather tells while lying on his deathbed, high on painkillers: stories about his childhood, his military service during World War II, his NASA career, his time in jail, his marriage. To the narration of these remembered episodes, Chabon brings the same vivid descriptive voice and engaging character development I loved in his earlier novels, crafting moving portraits of his grandparents as they grapple with the damage left by the war and navigate the fluctuations of their lives together. But Chabon abandons the more straightforward plot progressions he laid out in those books, instead jumping around in space and time and veering off on tangents in the distracted, non-linear style of real memory.

The resulting work is something new from Chabon, something beautiful, compelling, and sincere in the way of the very best family stories—and the best books.

Book I’m hoping to read: The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

—Annika Neklason, editorial fellow

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Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman’s latest book has a simple thesis: that the characterizing feature of the 21st century is the convergence of the planet’s three largest forces (technology, globalization, and climate change), and that these accelerations are transforming the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community. Friedman convincingly builds one big case for “being late”—for, essentially, pausing to reflect on and take stock of our current period of history. His methodical, explanatory approach, similar to the one he uses in his New York Times columns, will appeal to those who have a tendency to get caught up in the daily news cycle and don't take a moment to see broader patterns emerge.

Book I’m hoping to read: Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg

—Annabelle Timsit, editorial fellow

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The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir by Ariel Levy

At one point in her powerful memoir, the New Yorker writer Ariel Levy observes that she had “managed to solve the Jane Austen problems that women have been confronting for centuries … in an entirely unconventional way.” And for a blip, that’s true. But then comes a crueler set of rules: those of nature, including fertility. Levy explores her friends’ battles with conception—before losing her own child. The book tracks her overwhelming grief and her efforts to accept it. (In one poignant passage, she writes of finding companionship from her cats, who are “no more baffled by agony than they were by dishwashing.”)

If you’re looking for sugared-up platitudes about life and its meaning, maybe pass on this one. It left me with a sadness hangover. But Levy’s memoir offers comfort for the realist: "Death comes for us,” she reminds the reader. “You may get 10 minutes on this earth or you may get 80 years but nobody gets out alive.” That rule very much still applies.

Book I’m hoping to read: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

—Caroline Mimbs Nyce, assistant editor

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The Possessed by Elif Batuman

When I read it earlier this year, I fell hard for Elif Batuman's debut novel, The Idiot. So I was excited, this summer, to delve into her earlier book, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The nonfiction collection’s unusual subtitle gives some indication of its genre-defying contents: Published in 2010, it’s a first-person account of Batuman’s years as a graduate student in Russian literature that manages to be laugh-out-loud funny.

In The Possessed, as in The Idiot, Batuman punctuates the mundane with singular, sometimes self-deprecating, wit. “Air travel,” she writes, “is like death: Everything is taken from you.” Her ear for the absurd is matched by her ability to distill it into unflinchingly honest, delightfully readable prose replete with memorable characters. In Batuman’s capable hands, obsessive grad students appear as worthy of study as their dissertation subjects. Describing a private tour of the Hermitage Museum’s 18th-century wing, she contrasts her experience with that of a friend who, unlike Batuman, specializes in the period: “I soon felt the full weight of historical boredom on my soul. When I left the museum, she was gazing with a kind of rapt criticalness at the upholstery of an armchair embroidered in 1790 by pupils from the Smolny School for Aristocratic Young Ladies.” Happily, this book, as much about the accident-strewn path to adulthood as about history, is never boring.

Book I’m hoping to read: Fear City by Kim Phillips-Fein

—Amy Weiss-Meyer, associate editor

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Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West is many things: It’s a window into the daily lives, mundane and beautiful and horrifying, of Nadia and Saeed, two students living through their unnamed country’s civil war. The bombs, death, tragedy, and fear intersperse with work and a budding romance. It’s also a story of magical escape, which starts when Nadia and Saeed utilize mystical doors that instantly transport them away from one danger and often into another—first Greece, then the United Kingdom, and eventually the United States. Finally, it reflects on what it takes to make a new place home, and whether that is even possible.

While Hamid’s plot takes the reader along a geographic journey, it’s his protagonists’ emotional and psychological arcs that provide the story’s real narrative. Hamid weaves in acknowledgements of the physical and external hardships and dangers associated with refugee life, but his complicated portrayal of how two people, bound by extreme circumstance, must try to reinvent themselves in new places prove to be the most illuminating part of Exit West.

Through their meeting and subsequent flight, Hamid uses Nadia and Saeed to explore questions of religion, love, family, gender, and migration. It’s a tall task that the book delivers on gracefully and thoughtfully.  

Book I’m hoping to read: The Color of L​aw: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

—Gillian B. White, senior associate editor

Compared to whites, African Americans are more likely to suffer from a constellation of health problems referred to as “cardiovascular and metabolic diseases:” high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke. Things like diet, exercise, and smoking contribute to those conditions, but when researchers control for those behaviors, the disparity persists. Now scientists are examining an unexpected factor that could be driving these disparities in heart disease: sleep.

Think of sleep as a time when the body tidies up its hormonal systems. People who consistently don’t get enough sleep have increases in ghrelin, a hunger hormone, and decreases in leptin, a hormone that helps people feel sated. That might lead to increased eating during the day. Even if it doesn’t, sleep deprivation wreaks havoc on other key hormones and proteins, like insulin and the inflammatory markers C-reactive protein and interleukin-6—which are, in turn, linked to cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

David Curtis, a human development researcher at Auburn University, decided to try to determine whether differences in sleep could explain some of these racial disparities in cardiometabolic diseases. He and researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin recruited 426 white and African American men and women and equipped them with Fitbit-type devices that can monitor sleep. They took some biological measurements, such as blood pressure, waist circumference, and insulin resistance, and then measured how long they slept each night for seven nights. It wasn’t enough just to be in bed: The wrist-bands they wore also measured how often the participants woke up in the night.

In the resulting study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they found that African-Americans got about 40 minutes less sleep each night than the white participants did, and their sleep was about 10 percent less “efficient”—meaning they were more likely to wake up in the middle of the night or to have a hard time falling asleep. They also had higher biological risk factors for cardiovascular disease—things like higher blood pressure and a larger waist circumference. But the most surprising thing was how those two were related: According to their model, about half of the racial difference in cardiometabolic disease risk could be explained by the sleep deprivation among African Americans—and really, only explained by sleep deprivation among black women, not men. When they looked at the data by sex, the relationship was only significant for the women in the sample.

“The study and its conclusions are in line with previously published data showing similar patterns that African Americans have shorter habitual sleep duration and poorer habitual sleep quality,” said Garth Graham, the president of the Aetna Foundation and former director of minority health at the Department of Health and Human Services. A meta-analysis of 14 studies found that African-Americans sleep worse and for shorter periods of time than white people do.

Of course, cardiovascular disease can also cause sleep disorders, like sleep apnea, that can make people sleep fitfully. To control for that, Curtis and his co-authors excluded people with sleep disorders and those who already had heart disease and diabetes. Even in these, relatively healthy subjects, sleep deprivation still explained cardiometabolic disease risk.

So what’s causing these racial differences in sleep time and quality? This study doesn’t say, but based on past research, Curtis speculates that it could be neighborhood crime or economic stress. People don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods, or they feel too worried about money to sleep. In past studies, Curtis and his colleagues have found that people in disadvantaged neighborhoods are more likely to wake up in the night, and in many major cities black families are more likely than white families to live in concentrated poverty. Perceived racial discrimination is also associated with sleep disturbances.

It’s unclear why the relationship between sleep and health risks was stronger for women than for men. Pregnancy could have something to do with it. Or, it could be that “being a black female in the United States is inherently more stressful than being just a female or being just black,” Curtis said. “There are multiple identities that are disadvantaged in society, and that can lead to health risks.”

Curtis sees his findings as pointing to an important sleep gap between black and white Americans. Knowing it exists can help build the case for public-health interventions on sleep, just like those already in existence for food and exercise. For example, interventions like tai chi or cognitive behavioral therapy might help people sleep better in the short term, even if it doesn’t resolve the root cause of their worries.

“If our society is committed to reducing racial health disparities,” Curtis said, “our national health promotion efforts need to consider sleep seriously.”

Leaving aside everything else that is wrong and immoral about this proposed ban, at the moment there are something like 11,000 trans people currently serving openly in the US services and reserves. They are there legally, and it is currently their right to serve openly. Trump’s ban, at first glance, appears to take away their right to serve their country, and takes away their jobs, their incomes, their benefits for themselves and their families — for no other reason than something which yesterday was not illegal nor an impediment to serving their country with passion and distinction.

Make no mistake: Trump is affirmatively and explicitly taking away a right from American citizens, a right they already had and enjoyed. This is a big right: The right to serve in one’s military openly, without fear of punishment for who you are.

If Trump will take away one right from Americans, he’s not going to have a problem taking away other rights as well. Why would he? Trump is the living embodiment of “If you give a mouse a cookie” — if he gets away with one thing, he’ll go ahead and try to get away with something else. He’s already trying, of course.

I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone that I support the right of transgender people to serve openly in the military, a thing they already have done, any more than it will come as a surprise that I support the rights of transgender people generally. But as important as it is for me to explicitly say I support transgender rights, I think it’s also worth asking people who oppose these rights, or other rights enjoyed by people not exactly like them, whether they are comfortable taking away fundamental rights these American citizens already have — and if so, what leads them to believe that their own rights, rights they already enjoy, are not also placed in jeopardy by that precedent.

If the answer boils down to “well, that will never happen to me,” as it inevitably will, it’s worth examining why they think they will forever be immune. The answer will be instructive for everyone.

And also, they’re wrong. If you can take away an existing right of an American simply because of who they are, then you can take away a right of any American simply because of who they are — or what they are, or where their ancestors came from, or what they believe, and so on.

I said on Twitter this morning, “Today, as has almost every day in this administration, offers each us of a chance to understand the dimensions our own moral character.” And so it does. And so it will, every day, I expect, until it is done.

For teenagers aspiring to make it onto a high-school sports team, the summer-vacation days of sleeping in are drawing to a close. By mid-August, many hopeful athletes will be exerting themselves before a cadre of school coaches, striving to demonstrate their fitness or conceal their summer sloth. Younger kids, too, soon will be back on the playing fields—if they ever left—and will begin training for their miniature versions of  various varsity sports.  

Maggie Moriarty was one of those kids. Long before she began competing for the women’s lacrosse team at Holy Cross College, she shined on dozens of youth and school athletic squads. As a tiny, ponytailed 5-year-old, Moriarty played soccer on the town league, adding lacrosse and basketball the next year. Her athletic prowess followed her to high school, where every fall she played varsity soccer as the team’s scrappy midfielder, and every spring she excelled from the attack position as a four-year varsity lacrosse player. By the time she graduated in 2016, she held her high school’s record for assists.

As is true for many serious young athletes, sports have shaped Moriarty’s life and identity. She recalls vividly one soccer game during sophomore year, when her team tied a local rival in the county tournament and it was her turn to take the penalty kicks. Moriarty blew a shot, the team lost, and she crumbled, a puddle of sweat and tears. She also remembers the jubilation she felt as a high-school senior when her lacrosse team clawed its way back from a three-goal deficit and seized the state championship.   

Her coaches have been towering influences, providing guidance, leadership, and comfort when needed, as with that ill-fated penalty kick. (“My soccer coach gave me huge hugs after that game,” she said.) Her most influential coaches guided her for years, some through outside clubs as well as school. Her high-school lacrosse coach, she said, played an especially pivotal role in her life: “He had more of an impact on me than any of my teachers.”

Moriarty estimated that as many as 20 coaches guided her various sports teams before college. What united all her head coaches, across sports, was gender: All were male.

Much attention and worry has been devoted to the decline of female coaches at the collegiate level since Title IX was passed in 1972. This landmark legislation prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex in all educational programs that receive federal funds, and its passage compelled colleges to ramp up the number of athletic teams for girls to stay on par with what they offered boys. While nudging a record number of girls into athletics, Title IX also contributed to an unexpected and steady drop in the number of female collegiate coaches of women’s teams, from 90 percent in 1972 to 43 percent in 2014. In response to Title IX, many colleges combined male and female athletic departments, which in turn often meant that men now oversaw women’s teams; the law also meant pay parity for women’s-team coaches, the now-lucrative salaries attracting male coaches to female sports. These phenomena, among others, pushed women out of college coaching.

What’s gained scant notice is the even greater scarcity of women coaches in youth sports organizations and secondary schools. According to a 2015 survey conducted by the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, one of the few national organizations that carries out research on youth sports, only 27 percent of the more than 6.5 million adults who coach youth teams up to age 14 are women. Scarce data of any kind is collected on coaches, but a 2014 report on high-school coaches in Minnesota found a similar discrepancy: Across the state, just 21 percent of high-school head coaches, and 28 percent of assistant coaches, were women. The same study found that 42 percent of girls’ teams, 2 percent of boys’ teams, and 21 percent of co-ed teams were headed by a woman. As for assistant coaches, the numbers were similarly small, except the all-boys’ teams had no female assistant coaches at all. Enormous numbers of children experience this imbalance in athletic role models: The Aspen Institute’s Project Play surmises that up to 57 percent of kids ages 6 to 12 play team sports annually, even if it’s just one season a year.

These early—and for many prolonged—experiences with predominantly male leadership can leave lasting impressions on both boys and girls.

Given the historical context of youth sports, perhaps the lopsided numbers of male and female coaches makes sense. Early promoters of organized athletics for kids believed that team competitions would help boys develop the critical manly attributes they would need to contribute to an industrial society. Luther Halsey Gulick, a social reformer and leading figure at a Massachusetts YMCA who rose to prominence in the 19th century, added team sports to the Y’s slim menu of athletic options and introduced interscholastic sports to New York City’s public schools. He had an evangelical mindset: “The fundamental qualities to be cultivated in the boy are those of muscular strength, the despising of pain, driving straight to the mark, and the smashing down of obstacles,” he wrote in A Philosophy of Play, which was published in 1920, shortly after his death. “The world needs power and the barbaric virtues of manhood, together with the type of group loyalty which is based upon these savage virtues.”

Military leaders and heads of business also seized on the benefits of organized youth sports, said Tom Farrey, the head of the Sports & Society Program at the Aspen Institute and author of Game On, via email. Athletic teams would divert aimless city boys into healthy pursuits and shape them into reliable workers, solid soldiers, and fellow patriots. Sports would serve as an introduction into this respectable world, with the coach acting as a boy’s first boss or commanding officer.

Few youth coaches today would bluntly encourage the cultivation of savage virtues. Still, a century later, most boys playing sports see the same face of leadership in the people at the helm of their teams.

Why so relatively few women decide to coach for high-school or youth sports teams is unclear. After all, thousands of girls who grew up playing sports under Title IX are qualified to coach, and many are parents themselves. But the management of such teams, all of it volunteer, typically splits along gender lines. According to a 2009 study by the sociologists Michael Messner and Suzel Bozada-Deas, men typically coach, and women typically serve as “team moms,” organizing the snack schedule, managing logistics, and collecting money for coaches’ gifts, among other administrative work. In the researchers’ view, this imbalance stems from “institutional gender regimes” that divide the work between men and women based on traditional roles. The well-documented gender gap in confidence may also be part of the answer. And some mothers who might otherwise enjoy leading their child’s athletic team are vetoed by their offspring. “My kids didn’t even want me to cheer; I’m their mother!” said Kathleen Feeney, a mom whose two sons who played on ample youth sports and high school teams.

Yet the preponderance of male coaches, even kind and gentle ones, has consequences for boys. “Boys are denied the ability to see women operate in leadership roles that males most respect,” Farrey said. “This has deep implications for our society as boys grow into adulthood, work with, and decide whether to empower, women,” he added. Exposure to female coaches can pay dividends for boys.

Consider Leland Jones, a 20-year old junior at the University of California, Berkeley, who grew up in New Jersey and graduated from high school as one of the state’s top distance runners. Until the ninth grade, Jones had been coached only by men. But as a freshman, he and his teammates were trained by a small squad of coaches that included a nationally ranked woman runner who assisted both girls’ and boys’ cross-country teams. Jones never doubted her mettle. She sometimes came to practice with ice bags the size of grapefruits taped to her quads, the better to relieve the muscle pain from her own early-morning workout. Other times, she joined in the teams’ hardest runs—multiple half-miles at race pace, repeat sprints up extreme hills—before stretching with the group and offering training advice or racing strategies. It was her zeal for running as well as her kindheartedness that made her such an effective coach, Jones said. “She was definitely a role model,” he added.

Of course, for girls, the absence of women coaches means a dearth of female role models in powerful leadership positions. And same-sex role models matter, particularly for women. The University of Toronto social psychologist Penelope Lockwood, who has studied the impact of race and gender in role modeling, found that girls benefit from same-gender role models more acutely than boys. Female role models act as “inspirational examples of success” and “guides to the potential accomplishments for which other women can strive,” Lockwood concluded.  

Naturally, the lack of female coaches also signals to girls that coaching is not a career option that’s open to them. If the overwhelming majority of coaches they encounter are men, young women would logically conclude that sports and coaching are better left to the males. And the research bears that out: Girls who were coached by men were less likely to pursue coaching careers than those led by women. “When you only see men in positions of power, you conclude ‘sports are not for me’,” said Nicole LaVoi, the co-director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota.

More generally, girls who see just males in charge of teams may develop the distorted belief that leadership roles are reserved for men—and that aspiring to lead means adopting a masculine style of governance. To be sure, men don’t manage with punishment and threats any more than women lead with lollipops and cuddles. But research shows that men and women, in general, have different leadership styles: A 2013 symposium at Harvard Business School on women leaders that included a meta-analysis of the research on male and female managers found that women have a “more participative, androgynous, and transformational leadership style,” while men “adopt a top-down, ‘command and control’ style.” Also notable was that male and female leaders differed in their ideals and outlook, with women favoring “benevolence” and “universalism” more than their male counterparts. If female athletes have only male coaches, they’re apt to experience a kind of leadership that can controvert what feels natural to them and insinuate that they lack the faculties to lead.

And if female athletes have only male coaches, they could also be apt to disengage with sports altogether. Indeed, Risa Isard, the senior program associate at the Aspen Sports & Society Program, wonders if the scarcity of female coaches at younger levels helps explain why girls still trail the number of boys who start and continue playing—even though more girls play sports today than ever before. By age 14, girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys, just at the time when girls stop speaking up and asserting themselves. And non-participation has a health consequence: Compared to girls who play sports, inactive females have worse grades, graduate from high school at lower rates, and are more likely to become pregnant. “Girls respond well to female coaches, and good coaches keep kids in sports,” Isard said. Thus, the shortage of female coaches has a potential health consequence for those girls who connect better to fellow females, and who opt out or quit when women coaches are absent.

For the majority of sporty girls and boys who will rarely if ever answer to a female head coach, the absence of women leaders in this slice of their lives may feel inconsequential. It’s just sports, after all. With any luck, boys and girls have ample role models of both genders in other places—at home, in school, at work. But athletics are deeply important to many Americans, a reality that’s visible in the genuflecting before professional and college players, and in the robust participation rates for kids in club, town, and school teams. And sports are a window into society, revealing the larger culture’s values and hang-ups. In this regard, it would be strange to think of sports as any different from business or politics, where many more men than women similarly go on to lead.

Farrey of the Aspen Sports & Society Program wonders how the country would be different if young men who played sports were coached by qualified women. “Would we have more female CEOs and senators if every male in America had an effective female coach growing up? Would Hillary have been elected President? My guess is absolutely, yes.”

Atlantic Media Chairman David G. Bradley announced to The Atlantic staff today that Emerson Collective, the organization founded and run by Laurene Powell Jobs, has agreed to acquire majority ownership of The Atlantic.  

The acquisition includes its flagship magazine, digital properties, live events business, and consulting services. Emerson Collective will partner with Bradley, who through Atlantic Media will hold a minority stake and continue to run The Atlantic for at least the next three to five years.

The Atlantic leadership – President, Bob Cohn; Publisher, Hayley Romer; and Editor in Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg – will continue to run day-to-day operations of the company.

Michael Finnegan continues as president of Atlantic Media, working closely with Bradley in oversight of the privately held holding company, which also includes Quartz, National Journal Group, and Government Executive Media Group.

The decision to enter into this partnership is personal for Bradley, 64, who explains in a letter to The Atlantic staff today: " Against the odds, The Atlantic is prospering.  While I will stay at the helm some years, the most consequential decision of my career now is behind me: who next will take stewardship of this 160-year-old national treasure?  To me, the answer, in the form of Laurene, feels incomparably right.”

When Bradley began more than a year ago considering future owners of The Atlantic, he researched more than 600 possible investors. Powell Jobs and Emerson Collective were at the top of the list and the only prospect he approached.  

“What a privilege it is to partner with David Bradley and become a steward of The Atlantic, one of the country's most important and enduring journalistic institutions,” said Powell Jobs. “The Atlantic was co-founded 160 years ago by a group of abolitionists including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is a primary inspiration for our own work at Emerson Collective. Emerson and his partners, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, created a magazine whose mission was to bring about equality for all people; to illuminate and defend the American idea; to celebrate American culture and literature; and to cover our marvelous, and sometimes messy, democratic experiment.”

She added, “Emerson Collective is excited to work with David, with his first-rate leadership team, and with his enormously talented staff, to ensure that The Atlantic continues to fulfill its critical mission at this critical time."

Peter Lattman, managing director of media at Emerson Collective, will become vice chairman of The Atlantic. He will continue in his role at Emerson.

Emerson Collective is an organization dedicated to removing barriers to opportunity so people can live to their full potential. Established and led by Powell Jobs, 53, it centers its work on education, immigration reform, the environment and other social justice initiatives. Emerson Collective has a substantial portfolio of media investments and grants, ranging from film and television production companies to nonprofit journalism organizations.

The partnership between Atlantic Media and Emerson Collective – the terms of which will not be disclosed – comes at a time of significant growth and success for The Atlantic.  In the eighteen years since acquiring the flagship magazine from Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Bradley has led the company through a sustained surge in both its editorial and business operations. Digital readership has grown from two million in early 2009 to a monthly average of 33 million unique visitors for the first half of 2017. The company, which early in Bradley’s ownership recorded losses of more than $10 million a year, now, generates profits well above $10 million per year.

In recent years, The Atlantic has transformed its business in response to convulsions in the media world. A decade ago, 85 percent of the company's revenues came from print advertising and print circulation. Since then, revenues have quadrupled while the sources of those funds have flipped: 20 percent of revenue now comes from print, with 80 percent from digital advertising, the AtlanticLive events business, and the Atlantic Media Strategies consulting services.

The company's success has been fueled by a confluence of factors: commitment to editorial excellence across all its publishing platforms; remarkable audience growth; product and sales innovation, including development of a first-in-class branded content studio, Atlantic Re:think; and a multi-platform strategy that delivers Atlantic journalism wherever and however audiences want to consume it.

TheAtlantic.com audience increased 36 percent in the first half of 2017 over the same period last year, punctuated by a spike to a record 42.3 million monthly unique visitors in May. Video plays are up 120 percent year over year. Last week, The Atlantic introduced a podcast, Radio Atlantic, that shot to number one in the iTunes store. Meantime, even as the digital business grows and other platforms proliferate, the print magazine remains central to The Atlantic's rise and core to its future. Circulation has grown to 530,000 readers and, despite an industry decline of 12 percent at the newsstand last year, The Atlantic grew single-copy newsstand sales by 19 percent.

Evercore Partners and Ropes & Gray advised The Atlantic. Emerson Collective was advised by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

"You enjoy long walks from cars to helicopters, or from helicopters to shipyards" "The number of pages in my last prenuptial agreement were greater than my current bodyweight in imperial pounds"

Brighton Park is a predominantly Latino community on the southwest side of Chicago. It’s a neighborhood threatened by poverty, gang violence, ICE raids, and isolation—in a city where income, race, and zip code can determine access to jobs, schools, healthy food, and essential services. It is against this backdrop that the Chicago teacher Xian Franzinger Barrett arrived at the neighborhood’s elementary school in 2014.

Recognizing the vast economic and racial inequalities his students faced, he chose what some might consider a radical approach for his writing and social-studies classes, weaving in concepts such as racism, classism, oppression, and prejudice. Barrett said it was vital to reject the oft-perpetuated narrative that society is fair and equal to address students’ questions and concerns about their current conditions. And Brighton Elementary’s seventh- and eighth-graders quickly put the lessons to work—confronting the school board over inequitable funding, fighting to install a playground, and creating a classroom library focused on black and Latino authors.

“Students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them,” he said, “and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”

Barrett’s personal observation is validated by a newly published study in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development that finds traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years. The research is considered the first evidence linking preteens’ emotional and behavioral outcomes to their belief in meritocracy, the widely held assertion that individual merit is always rewarded.

“If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they just tried hard enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about how [you] made it,” said Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School. But for those marginalized by the system—economically, racially, and ethnically—believing the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences.

“If the system is fair, why am I seeing that everybody who has brown skin is in this kind of job? You’re having to think about that … like you’re not as good, or your social group isn’t as good,” Godfrey said. “That’s the piece … that I was trying to really get at [by studying] these kids.”

The findings build upon a body of literature on “system justification”—a social-psychology theory that believes humans tend to defend, bolster, or rationalize the status quo and see overarching social, economic, and political systems as good, fair, and legitimate. System justification is a distinctively American notion, Godfrey said, built on myths used to justify inequities, like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps … it’s just a matter of motivation and talent and grit.” Yet, as she and her colleagues discovered, these beliefs can be a liability for disadvantaged adolescents once their identity as a member of a marginalized group begins to gel—and once they become keenly aware of how institutional discrimination disadvantages them and their group.

Researchers measured system-justifying beliefs among 257 students from an urban, public middle school in Arizona. All of the students’ families were identified as low-income, as defined by their eligibility for free or reduced-price lunches. The vast majority of the sample—91 percent—were also students of color: Fifty-five percent Latino, 18 percent black, 11 percent Native American, and 7 percent other nonwhite youth. Additionally, the area, populated by many immigrant families and children, was experiencing social and political unrest due to Senate Bill 1070, a controversial Arizona law that in its original form criminalized undocumented people in the state.

Godfrey asked the sixth-graders to rate their endorsement of the “American Dream” and system-justifying ideas—namely, that America is the land of opportunity where everyone who works hard has an equal chance to succeed. Youth were then asked to rate themselves on various qualities, including their self-esteem, risky behaviors (“stayed out all night without your parent’s permission,” “cheated on school tests,” etc.), and perceived discrimination (for example: “How often have others suspected you of doing something wrong because of your ethnicity?” and “How often have the police hassled you because of your ethnicity?”).

At three points over the course of middle school, the youth rated their self-esteem, behavior, and experience with discrimination. The results revealed an alarming trajectory. In sixth grade, among students who believed the system is fair, self-esteem was high and risky behavior was rare; by the end of seventh grade, these same students reported lower self-esteem and more risky behaviors—with no significant differences based on race, ethnicity, gender, or immigration generation (youth from newly arrived immigrant families and native-born counterparts).

What’s more, for youth who perceived more discrimination from an early age, system-justifying beliefs were associated with less-risky behavior in sixth grade, but with a sharp rise in such behaviors by seventh grade. Godfrey attributes this spike to a “perfect storm” in which marginalized young people are experiencing more discrimination; beginning to understand the systemic and institutionalized nature of that discrimination; and starting to strongly identify as a member of a marginalized group, seeing that group as one that’s being discriminated against. As for why this leads to more risky behavior, Godfrey points to research that suggests people who really believe the system is fair internalize stereotypes—believing and acting out false and negative claims about their group—more readily than those who disavow these views.

And while it’s easy to attribute the increase in risky behavior to  developmental changes such as puberty, the fact that the students’ outcomes started high in the sixth grade and then deteriorated suggests that psychosocial phenomena are at play.

“I do think that there’s this element of people think of me this way anyway, so this must be who I am,” Godfrey said, adding that the behaviors—things like stealing and sneaking out—reflect stereotypes perpetuated about youth of color. “If you’re [inclined] to believe that things are the way they should be, and [that] the system is fair, then you’re maybe going to accept stereotypes about you more easily.”

While the sample was relatively small, Godfrey said the findings are informative and mirror prior research. Indeed, previous analyses have found that system-justifying beliefs are associated with lower self-esteem in black adults and lower grade-point averages for Latino college students—though the same beliefs predicted better grades and less distress for “high status” youth.

“I was really interested in trying to think of [early adolescents] as active agents in their world,” Godfrey said, “and as people who can understand and interpret their social world in a way that a lot of research doesn’t recognize.”

David Stovall, professor of educational-policy studies and African American studies at University of Illinois at Chicago, said the paper is a confirmation of decades of analysis on the education of marginalized and isolated youth. It’s a “good preliminary piece” that lays the foundation for more academic study of historically disenfranchised adolescents and their motivations, he said.  

“If young folks see themselves being discriminated against, they’ve been told that a system is fair, and they experience things that are unfair, they will begin to reject this particular system and engage in behaviors that will not be to their betterment,” he explained. Stovall said it’s critical to guide young people from “defiant resistance”—defying what they’ve learned to be untrue regarding a just and fair system for all—to “transformative resistance”—developing a critical understanding of the historical context of U.S. society. Educators, he said, play a crucial role in this work.

“We have to ask different questions around school,” he said. “Does [school] contribute further to our [students’] marginalization and oppression? Is it just about order, compliance, and white normative standards that marginalized young folks of color don’t measure up to because the structure never intended for them to measure up?” He also warned educators and youth of color to be prepared for pushback, highlighting the current legal battle over the ethnic-studies ban in Tucson public schools despite its proven academic benefits.

Mildred Boveda, an assistant education professor at Arizona State University, likewise said the findings hold important implications for both teachers and teacher education. “This is of great consequence to … teachers who may think they are protecting children by avoiding conversations about systems of oppressions,” she said, emphasizing that the onus is also on teacher-prep programs to ensure aspiring educators know how to address these controversial topics.

Given her recent experience teaching fifth-graders in Miami-Dade, Florida, Boveda disagrees with the researchers’ notion that sixth-graders lack a full understanding of social hierarchies. Her students on the brink of middle school, she noted, were hyper-aware of social inequalities. Still, she sees valuable insights in the data.

“Unlike the majority of the teaching workforce, I once fit the demographics of the students in this study,” she said, alluding to the fact that more than 80 percent of public-school teachers are white. “I will admit that it sometimes felt risky to tackle these difficult conversations, but this [research] underscores why we cannot equivocate when it comes to preparing our children to face injustices.”

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“It was more comfortable than I could have imagined,” is how The Unit begins, with Dorrit, a single, impoverished 50-year-old woman picked up from her home in a metallic red SUV and transported to a luxury facility constructed by the government for people just like her. Her new, two-room apartment is bright and spacious, “tastefully decorated,” inside a complex that includes a theater, art studios, a cinema, a library, and gourmet restaurants. For the first time, Dorrit is surrounded by likeminded people and included rather than ostracized. At the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material, she’s one among a community of people who couldn’t—or didn’t want to—have children.

The cost is that, for the remaining four or five years of her life, Dorrit will be subjected to medical testing and will donate her organs one by one until her final, fatal donation. The Unit’s author, the Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist, has imagined a society fixated on capital, but in human form. Those who have children or who work in fields like teaching and healthcare are seen as enabling growth; the childless and creative types like Dorrit, a writer, are deemed “dispensable,” removed, and forced to make their own biological contributions. The unit itself is a fantasy of government welfare for aging citizens (it offers delicious meals, culture, and companionship), but with a particularly sharp twist.

And yet one of the most jarring elements of the book is the extent to which all the residents not only accept but affirm their own status. “All this luxury! How much is all this costing the taxpayer?” Dorrit’s new friend Elsa remarks, aghast, when she sees the well-appointed exercise facilities. Dorrit reiterates over and over again that she lives in a democracy, where anyone has the right to express any opinion they want to. Though the idea for “biological reserve units” was first proposed by a fringe political party, she recalls, it soon “slipped into the manifestos of some of the bigger and more established parties,” and was ultimately passed by referendum. Holmqvist’s dystopia doesn’t emerge from autocracy but from widely held beliefs about the necessity of procreation, taken to an extreme.

Holmqvist wrote The Unit, she explains in an author’s note, after she turned 45, when it occurred to her that she was “completely dispensable,” and that her death would leave “no tangible empty space behind me that needed to be filled.” As a childless woman in a creative profession, she felt compelled to write about “how it felt to be regarded as a selfish, spoiled oddball who makes no contribution to any kind of growth.” The novel, first published in English in 2009, has been recently reissued, presumably to capitalize on the feverish interest in reproductive dystopias sparked by Hulu’s Emmy-nominated adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. But The Unit feels like an inversion of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, where fertile women are forcibly impregnated under biblical sanction. Here, the justification for horror—the extraction of human tissue from the childfree—is secular, a capitalist democracy demanding its toll.

Holmqvist has a particular gift for pacing, withholding full explanation from the reader for as long as possible but proffering unsettling details from the very first page. Dorrit’s clean, light apartment is monitored in its entirety by cameras. Before the SUV arrives, she explains, she considered killing herself, but didn’t have the courage. There are no windows anywhere in the unit, which appears to exist inside some kind of dome. Internet use is allowed only under supervision, and when a five-course Italian meal is served for dinner, with Parma ham, melon, and panna cotta, “only the wine was missing.”

On her first night in the facility, Dorrit meets Majken, an artist who’s lived there for four years, and who’s donated “eggs for stem-cell research, one kidney, and the auditory bone from her right ear.” Soon, Majken explains, she’ll go in to donate her pancreas “to a student nurse with four kids. So I guess this will be my last welcome party.” Majken’s matter-of-fact tone and the general strangeness of her new situation prompts Dorrit to have a panic attack, and her three new friends comfort her. And as the novel progresses, the pattern continues, with Dorrit acclimatizing to the unit and comforting new residents in turn, just as she was soothed on her first day.

* * *

The Unit contains elements that echo a number of different speculative and dystopian works. The domed environment and omnipresent cameras seem to predict Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy; the prospect of forcible organ donation brings to mind Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, published in 2005, the year before The Unit was released in Sweden. Never Let Me Go, which tells the story of three clones raised from birth to be organ donors, ponders the humanity of genetic engineering. Holmqvist’s book, more provocatively, deals with the humanity of an ever-growing segment of the population: the childless. In her fictional society, the government has mandated 18 months of shared parental leave and free childcare for all children up to the age of 6. “There is no longer any excuse not to have children,” Dorrit states. “Nor is there any longer an excuse not to work when you have children.” The question of not wanting to do either doesn’t enter the equation; Dorrit knows, as all citizens do, that increasing the gross national product is the ultimate reason for her existence.

In this way, Holmqvist’s book functions better as a metaphor than as a warning. Practically, it isn’t necessary: There are, for instance, far more childless, “dispensable” citizens over 55 living in Europe today (at least several million) than there are people on the organ donation list (63,000 in the entire European Union as of the end of 2013). A facility like the one Dorrit lives in would be prohibitively expensive to establish and maintain. But Holmqvist’s intention isn’t realism—it’s to unravel and critique assumptions about the meaning of life. Is it criminal, she wonders, to live a quiet life dedicated only to self-actualization? Do artists who never achieve greatness have value? Does every citizen have a responsibility to contribute to their society? In exploring such questions, Holmqvist takes liberal assumptions about Scandinavian paternalism versus American individualism and flips them upside down.

When Potter, an orderly, hints to Dorrit that he thinks the facility is morally wrong, she surprises him by stating that she enjoys her new life. “In here I can be myself, on every level, completely openly, without being rejected or mocked, and without the risk of not being taken seriously,” she explains. “I am not regarded as odd or as some kind of alien or some troublesome fifth wheel that people don’t know what to do with. Here I’m like everybody else. I fit in. I count. … I have a dignified life here. I am respected.” The unit has enticed her not with luxury, but with community—the sense that finally she’s not anomalous, but accepted. And as a narrator, she’s honest and intuitive enough to persuade readers that her appreciation of her new home is about much more than Stockholm syndrome.

In the last third of the novel an unexpected development comes out of the blue that offers a potential way out for Dorrit. The question is, does she want to leave? Holmqvist’s writing is spare in style, elegantly succinct, but the layers of the world she’s created are manifold. Other dystopian stories like The Handmaid’s Tale might seem particularly chilling in a moment when democracy feels like it’s under threat, but The Unit is haunting in its assertion that democracy itself isn’t enough. The tyranny of popular sentiment can be just as dangerous, Holmqvist argues, presenting scene after scene of intelligent, compassionate citizens indoctrinated into doubting their own worth.

“Life and existence have no value in themselves,” Dorrit’s friend Johannes tells her. “We mean nothing. ... The only thing of any real value is what we produce.” The question readers might ponder is whether he’s talking about art, children, or both.