Football can be a force for good. The University of Missouri’s football team proved it earlier this month when student athletes took a facet of campus life that’s often decried—the cultural and economic dominance of college football—and turned it into a powerful leverage point in the pursuit of social justice. Football can build a sense of community for players and fans alike, and serve as a welcome escape from the pressures of ordinary life. The sport cuts across distinctions of race, class, geography, and religion in a way few other U.S. institutions do, and everyone who participates reaps the benefits.
But not everyone—particularly at the amateur level—takes on an equal share of the risk. College football in particular seems headed toward a future in which it’s consumed by people born into privilege while the sport consumes people born without it. In a 2010 piece in The Awl, Cord Jefferson wrote, “Where some see the Super Bowl, I see young black men risking their bodies, minds, and futures for the joy and wealth of old white men.” This vision sounds dystopian but is quickly becoming an undeniable reality, given new statistics about how education affects awareness about brain-injury risk, as well as the racial makeup of Division I rosters and coaching staffs. The future of college football indeed looks a lot like what Jefferson called “glorified servitude,” and even as information comes to light about the dangers and injustices of football, nothing is currently being done to steer the sport away from that path.
The football-consuming public has only recently started to grapple with the magnitude of the dangers inherent in playing football—traumatic brain injury and painkiller addiction chief among them—and to understand that you don’t need to play 10 years in the NFL to suffer permanent physical, psychological, or neurological damage. Though football’s dangers compound over time, they manifest right away, even at the lowest levels. Therefore, as more information comes out, more and more parents are hesitating to let their sons play organized football. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll from January found that 37 percent of respondents would prefer that their children play any other sport, which seems understandable—what parent wouldn’t protect his or her children from unnecessary risk?
Unfortunately, the degree to which children are protected from the risks of playing football is very much related to the level of privilege—racial, economic, and social—the child experiences while growing up. That same NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that while 50 percent of respondents with postgraduate degrees would prefer their children not play football, only 31 percent of people with a high-school education or less would say the same.
There’s a good reason for that disparity—better-educated and wealthier people have more access to information about football’s concussion crisis. A 2013 poll conducted by HBO and Marist found that 63 percent of college graduates and 66 percent of people making more than $50,000 per year said they’d heard “a good amount” about football causing concussions, compared to 47 percent of those who made less than $50,000 per year and half of those without a college degree.
In other words, children are being put in danger not because of their own carelessness, or a difference in parenting style, or even because poorer, less privileged kids have fewer ways to climb the class ladder. It’s because many of their parents—especially those who earn less or who haven’t attained as much education—aren’t getting the information they need to make the best decisions for their families.
College football players participate in America’s longest and most brutal unpaid internship.
Of course, any discussion of privilege in the power dynamics of football has to contend with racial privilege as well. In college football, where coaches and administrators are paid six- or seven-figure salaries while players are paid nothing, who has the power? Who bears the risk? A handy tool from the NCAA called the Sport Sponsorship, Participation, and Demographics Search offers some illuminating data. In the 1999-2000 school year, 51.3 percent of Division I football players were white, and 39.5 percent were black. By 2007-2008, those numbers had evened out (46.6 percent white, 46.4 percent black), and in 2014-15, 40.2 percent of DI football players are white, and 47.1 percent are black.
Compare that to the university employees who profit most directly from football: coaches and administrators. In 2014-15, 81.6 percent of Division I athletic directors were white—87.4 percent if you don’t count HBCUs. The numbers skew even farther if you include all three divisions. The NCAA reports 1,081 member schools that aren’t HBCUs, and among those a little over 90 percent have a white athletic director. The numbers are about the same for coaches: 82.8 percent of Division I head coaches and 81.5 percent of coordinators are white, while 15.2 percent of head coaches and 15.6 percent of coordinators are black.
While the head coach and coordinator numbers more or less represent the population of the U.S. as a whole, there are two bits of context worth noting. First, the population of college-football participants gets whiter the farther up the chain of power you go: from players, to graduate assistants and position coaches, to coordinators and head coaches, to administrators. Second, the racial dynamics of the head-coaching ranks don’t come close to matching the makeup of the body of players from which coaches are almost universally drawn.
In short: In the world of college football, the more privileged a person’s background, the more power he (sometimes she, but usually he) has, and the less risk he assumes. And if those survey numbers about parents holding their kids out of football wind up reflecting the future, that imbalance is not only going to increase, but it’s going to be reflected significantly along class lines as well as racial lines.
Not that any of this comes as a particular shock. But unless something changes, college football is going to reach a point where the distribution of risk and profit in college football is so grotesquely unfair, and the ethical ramifications (ideally) or the optics (probably) of unpaid poor and/or black men destroying themselves for the profit and amusement of white men will make the sport, as it exists now, unsustainable.
So what, if anything, can be done?
There’s a growing belief that football is so dangerous it’s unethical to contribute to its hegemony in American culture by consuming it, publicizing it, or contributing to it financially. Every minute passed discussing the sport adds to its cultural importance; every dollar spent on tickets or apparel feeds the machine that turns healthy boys into broken men, and along the way produces toxic levels of sexism, militarism, retrograde masculinity, and corporate greed. The only way to stop the dangerous chokehold football has on American culture, then, is to deprive it of the attention and money that make it work.
But while the urge to boycott is understandable, it’s so far been ineffective as a tactic for enacting change. The most direct impact of football’s brain-injury crisis has been the proliferation of thinkpieces calling for concerned consumers to boycott the NFL, a movement that’s gained steam as the league bungled domestic-abuse investigations against Ray Rice and Greg Hardy. But the league posted $7.2 billion in revenue in 2014—more than double what it pulled in in 2010. Last May, Keith Olbermann called for viewers to boycott the NFL draft and the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight, in response to inaction by the governing bodies of both football and boxing to confront their athletes’ high-profile predilection for intimate-partner violence. The draft’s ratings dropped significantly from 2014 (though it’s unclear how much of that is due to the influence of Olbermann and others like him), but it was still the third-highest-rated draft ever. The Pacquiao-Mayweather fight took in $400 million from 4.4 million pay-per-view buys in the U.S. alone. If a boycott of football could bring about real change, it hasn’t happened yet.
Football is supposed to build a sense of community, and true communities look out for everyone’s kids.
It’s possible that football is such big business it almost can’t be starved, even as universities spend self-destructively in pursuit of on-field success. So until and unless such a mass defection can be organized, the best avenue for reform runs through the existing fan and media structure, not by opting out. A football community only composed of people unconcerned about player safety and workers’ rights would never pursue reform on its own. But by remaining part of the conversation and within the community, empathetic fans and media members can exert pressure on the power structure to diversify its own ranks and ensure better treatment for players.
The NFL has made small steps toward improving player safety and minority hiring, but concussion protocols and the Rooney Rule, which mandates that NFL teams interview minority candidates for head coaching jobs, didn’t come about under threat of boycott. They were the result of an internal push from players, fans, and media who remained involved with the game. The next step is to pursue some evolution in the rules or technological breakthrough that could reduce the risk of playing tackle football. If that’s not feasible, then it’s worth fighting to ensure that players are compensated according to the risk they’re undertaking.
Refusing to participate in college football—or to let your kids participate—because you're horrified by its nature won't compel the people with power over how the game operates to make it safer, or its economic structure less exploitative. Ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away, and it doesn’t cease to be a problem just because it doesn’t affect your kids anymore. Seven high-schoolers have died playing football this year, and tens of thousands of college players have performed for millions of fans, for free and at great personal risk. Football is supposed to build a sense of community, and true communities look out for everyone’s kids—not out of self-interest, but because it’s the right thing to do.
My friend Laura has a son a little younger than Hank and a gift for choosing children’s books with sweet messages and lovely illustrations. So with this new baby in the mix, I asked for her list of books for our home library. Every one I’ve bought has been amazing, so I asked her to share her list with you here. Thanks, Laura!
I’ve been meaning to put this list together for way too long. Here is the abridged version. I left out the more obvious choices – like Richard Scarry, Dr. Seuss, and all the mythology/fairy tale books. Those are all necessary and lovely, but those just show up.
I think I have a kid’s book addiction, I love them so much.
They come every year around this time, as reliably as the chilling of the air and the preponderance of red coffee cups: the public-relations pitches, bedecked in exclamation points and cheer, offering expert tips on how to fight the holiday weight, or win the battle of the bulge, or stay svelte through New Year’s. If I had a nickel for every email in my inbox right now exhorting me to put down the pie, I’d have enough money to buy myself several more pies. Not the grocery-store brand, either. The fancy bakery kind.
‘Tis the season, in other words, to make some strangers feel bad about their bodies. Over the weekend, some people in London, purportedly from a group called Overweight Haters Ltd., took that to heart:
Kara Florish, an employee of the U.K.’s National Health Service, tweeted on Saturday that someone had handed her the card while she was riding the London Underground.
According to the BBC, London Transport is encouraging any riders who see the cards being distributed to notify the police.
There are many, many reasons why this is gross. An easier and more productive exercise than engaging with those reasons may be to point out why it’s also misguided. Research has shown that fat-shaming doesn’t actually work—as far as strategies to curb obesity go, it’s ineffective at best, and downright counterproductive at worst.
Last year, a survey tracking 3,000 people in the U.K. found that those who reported weight discrimination gained an average of two pounds over the study’s four-year window; those who hadn’t experienced weight discrimination lost an average of a pound and a half over the same time period. A similar study out of the Florida College of Medicine, published in 2013, also tracked people over four years, and found that people who reported weight discrimination at the beginning of the study were 2.5 times more likely to be obese by the end of it. And in 2012, researchers from Yale University found that people rated anti-obesity campaigns with negative or accusatory messages as less motivating than ones with more neutral slogans, like “Let’s Move.”
“The most positively rated were campaigns that focused on encouraging specific health behaviors or actions, like eating fruits and vegetables every day or engaging in physical activity,” the Yale study’s lead author, Rebecca Puhl, told The Atlantic at the time. “And the most motivating were the ones that made no mention of obesity or weight at all.”
Nevertheless, the idea of social ostracism as an effective weight-loss tool remains a pervasive one, even among some health researchers. In 2013, the bioethicist Daniel Callahan published an editorial in the journal The Hastings Center Report calling for “stigmatization lite,” a sort of mild shaming campaign to pressure overweight people into slimming down.
Anecdotal evidence suggests this is true in a wide variety of contexts. After all, if shaming worked, there'd be no jerks handing out those cards on the subway, either.
Last month, almost 200 people gathered on a street in Bakersfield, California, to protest the police killing of James De La Rosa, who was not carrying a weapon when tased and shot by four police officers. Cops shooting a man dead didn’t surprise locals. Several months ago, I reported that law enforcement in Kern County, where Bakersfield is located, kill more people per capita than anywhere else in California, citing an ACLU analysis of data collected over six years ending in 2014.
But it turns out that there is much more to this story.
While attempting to track every police killing in the United States during 2015, journalists at The Guardian discovered that cops in Kern County aren’t just the deadliest force in the state relative to the population, they are the deadliest in the nation. “In all, 13 people have been killed so far this year by law enforcement officers in Kern County, which has a population of just under 875,000,” the newspaper has just reported. “During the same period, nine people were killed by the NYPD across the five counties of New York City, where almost 10 times as many people live and about 23 times as many sworn law-enforcement officers patrol.”
This is due in part to the fact that Bakersfield and other spots in Kern County are extremely high-crime areas, afflicted by gang violence, epidemic poverty, and drug addiction: “The city’s murder rate is 75% higher than the national average and its robbery rate is 79% higher. Bakersfield’s burglary rate is more than twice that of the US average and its rate of motor vehicle theft is more than three times as high. In 2014 an assault or robbery involving a firearm occurred at a rate of just under once a day.”
Even so, The Guardian unearthed many alarming facts about local law enforcement in a place where all 54 fatal shootings over the last decade appear to have been ruled justified by police organizations that essentially oversee themselves. Some findings are jaw-dropping, and they suggest a little remarked upon failure.
Let’s start with some of what Guardian journalists Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland, and Mae Ryan found.
After police killed the unarmed De La Rosa, a couple who witnessed the shooting as bystanders said that he had his hands up and was not reaching for his waistband. Later, while his corpse was under a sheet on a hospital gurney, a police officer lifted the sheet, began playing with his toes, and made a joke about rigor mortis.
The police officer then said, “I love playing with dead bodies.”
A different Bakersfield police officer, Rick Wimbish, “has been involved in at least four fatal shootings in two years, including that of De La Rosa, during which Wimbish deployed his taser. None of the four men killed in these confrontations were armed with a deadly firearm themselves. One, a violent criminal, had a BB gun; another was holding a tire iron.” Shooting the guy with the BB gun struck me as clearly justified after I read the description of the incident. But during one of his other killings, Wimbish and other officers opened fire on an unarmed confidential informant of their own department during a planned operation after the guy he was with––the criminal he was helping cops to catch that very moment––pulled out a gun.
And the “tire-iron” case involving Wimbish could hardly be more suspicious:
Jason Alderman’s family refuse to believe it, but police say he was trying to rob a closed Subway restaurant one Saturday evening in August. He was confronted abruptly by Bakersfield officers Wimbish and Garrett ... The pair was responding to an unrelated call-out when they spotted Alderman, according to police records.
Garrett, who was the passenger in the patrol car, is said to have got out and shot Alderman dead, firing “several rounds.” After days of vague and confusing statements the department eventually said Alderman, 29, had been carrying a black tire-iron and held it towards Garrett as if it were a gun. A photograph of the iron, helpfully laid out in the approximate shape of a rifle, was released. But unfortunately, police said, only one person apart from Alderman had seen what happened: Garrett himself. No surveillance footage existed; the sandwich restaurant’s cameras had stopped filming earlier in the night.
“To our knowledge there is no video,” a police spokesman said at the time, “has never been video, and we certainly don’t have any video in evidence.”
Five days after the shooting, however, investigators working for Alderman’s family made a discovery. There was, in fact, some surveillance footage of the incident. The police had quietly seized it from the Subway manager, who had been asked not to disclose what it showed. Police refuse to release the recording. Sergeant Joe Grubbs, then the Bakersfield PD spokesman, said the shooting would be “highly scrutinised” and said: “We want to be scrutinised.” But within a month, Garrett and Wimbish had been cleared of wrongdoing by the department itself...
Remarkably, another Bakersfield police officer, Timothy Berchtold, “shot and killed three people in the span of less than two months in 2010,” The Guardian added. “Two of those he shot were unarmed and accused of a strikingly similar offence—reversing a car they were driving towards Berchtold. One of them, Traveon Avila, was a 15-year-old boy.”
Perhaps these two police officers are just unlucky, and it is an unfortunate coincidence, not incompetence or worse, that explains why they’re so frequently involved in deadly encounters in one of America’s most deadly police departments. But surely the facts that The Guardian has reported about the shootings they’ve participated in and other goings on in Bakersfield warrant an investigation by state or federal overseers, who are responsible for safeguarding the rights of citizens. Surely there are enough red flags to warrant at least taking a closer look.
And that brings us to the little remarked upon failure.
Lots of jurisdictions in America started collecting data on police killings only recently. But the data about Kern County as a place where the cops shoot and kill such an aberrant number of people has been collected by the State of California for more than a decade. It has been a public record, and thus available to the federal government, too, for all that time. So why is it that only The Guardian, after gathering its own data, thought, “Hey, Kern County cops kill wildly more people per capita than other jurisdictions––let’s send some investigators to look more closely”?
Part of the story of the police protests roiling American cities is the abject failure of state and federal officials to fulfill their most basic oversight duties. Thus far, Kern County hasn’t been an object of national attention. Perhaps that’s partly because the Black Lives Matter narrative has dominated press coverage of police misconduct—in Kern County, most of the victims are Latino. But the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement affect a variety of communities, even if that’s not always acknowledged in the media.
Guided by data, The Guardian has done important work in Bakersfield to correct that oversight. Now state or federal overseers should launch an overdue investigation. There can be no question that something is very wrong in Kern County. What exactly that is remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the entire Guardianstory, only parts of which I’ve touched on, is worth the time of anyone interested in policing.
Last year, I made Hank this fancy box with ten chocolate coins inside, and told him he could trade each one for a new iPad game (under $5, but he only ended up choosing free ones). When he traded it in, he also got to eat the chocolate. The gift lasted for six months, because he kept forgetting he had the coins and then remembering in a fit of ecstatic glory.
This year, I got one of these Super Mario Bros. chocolate coin tins, because hilarious, and I’ll adjust the coins inside. If you have a tablet-obsessed kid, try it.
Thank goodness I'm not sentimental, or these little faces would really kill me!
My loves. I want to say the obvious, before launching into the catalogue of things to buy, buy BUY! and it's this: touch a match to some candles, set out a bowl of nuts and a nutcracker, put on some croonery Christmas carols, write a check to Planned Parenthood and Partners in Health, and participate as little as you like in the consumer end of things. We have actually stopped giving the kids birthday things (we give them experiences instead, like concert tickets or ziplining), but we still wrap up material gifts at the holidays. But I am all for not doing that. Or for makingeverythingyourself. Or for whatever tradition you can come up with that distills the spirit of the season back to light in the darkness rather than a black hole where your wallet used to be.
But. For buying things, here's a little culled list of ideas for games and books and other happy-making things that will ideally either have remarkable longevity or get nice and used up (rather than languishing unloved in your life and home).
Our coffee table continues to be covered in white paper, and this continues to be a great thing.
You are going to think this is a German little-kid game that's been awkwardly translated, and you are going to be right. But oh, it is so strangely wonderful. I first laid eyes on it in a Facebook post by Jessica Lahey (who also wrote a fantastic piece about games for the Atlantic), and it has been a favorite ever since: a simple, maddening, tiny, aesthetically divine, fabulous stacking game. There are other versions of this game, including the original big one, and we've never played any of them because this one is so perfect. I keep it in a little mint tin in my bag, and it is our go-to restaurant game for that awkward stretch of time when the chicken wings still haven't come out.
A brand-new favorite is Rolling America, which is like a slightly more complex version of the always-terrific Qwixx, but with similar game play and materials. You roll dice and fill in numbers (the whole country/state thing is kind of a red herring, in terms of strategy), and you need to put certain numbers next to others, and no two whatevers can be next to something else, and men with knitted woolen ties can't sit next to women drinking tea, so how would you arrange the luncheon buffet? No, it's not like the GREs. It's just dice and numbers. And it's an excellent game.
If you play on a dirty carpet in bad light, it will look more like this.
Plus, relatively simple, inexpensive, quick to play, and portable. LOVE it.
I lifted this photo from BoardGameGeek.
Splendor was our new big game of 2015. We played it a lot. It's kind of a classic accumulate-resources-to-get-more-resources game, as many strategy games are, but it's a lot faster, easier, and quicker to learn than, say, my beloved Agricola or Catan. Plus, there's a jewel theme, which is appealing, and the jewel chips are weighted in a lovely way that makes the game feel well-crafted. I have to paste this, though, from their own description, because what? "As a wealthy Renaissance merchant, acquire mines and transportation, hire artisans and woo the nobility. Create the most fantastic jewelry to become the best-known merchant of them all! Acquire precious stones to trade them for development cards. Use development cards to acquire more gem stones. Use your gems and gold to create the most fantastic jewelry, and appeal to the nobles to gain the prestige you need to win." Who knew!
Next up, a pair of games that we got last Christmas, and that we play regularly. We are learning about ourselves, as a game-playing family, that the more attractive a game is, the more we want to play it. Call us shallow design snobs, but there it is.
Machi Koro is an awesome city-building card game that I'm pretty sure one of *you* recommended to us! (Thank you.) I'm linking to the deluxe edition here because it includes both the Harbor and Millionaire's Row expansions, which we have and love, but you could also give the original, which is smaller and less expensive, and then you can save the expansions to give separately when birthdays come around! Right?
It also happens to have really great graphics and colors. It's your kind of classic--say it with me--get-resources-so-you-can-get-more-resources game, and, as with most good games, every time we play, the wheel in my brain turns another notch, and I think: Aha! That's how you play!
Takenoko is a full-on game, with awesome panda graphics, Catan-style tiles, a cool die, and colorful wooden pieces.
You are growing bamboo to feed a giant panda, and it's got a little of the Catan juggling-goals flavor, but definitely refracted through, like, the cheerful feeling of Totoro. That is, it is appealing to younger players, and while there are a number of rules, it is not hideously impossible to learn. Plus: totally adorable.
I have gotten in the habit of getting our family a White Mountain puzzle every year, and this time it's the junk-food one. As far as I'm concerned, White Mountain makes the perfect puzzle: fun themes, interlocking pieces, and plenty of individual areas for people to work on in the kind of parallel-play puzzle-doing apart togetherness that I love. I won't put this under the tree. My mom and I will open it (and some other things, like bottles of wine) on Christmas eve.
I mentioned them over the summer, I know, but these watercolors would make a perfect holiday gift. They're compact and of very high quality: the hues are as vivid or washed as you want them to be, and the colors themselves are simply thrilling. We use them all the time. The pad you see in the picture above is the fabulous Poppin Jumbo Writing Pad that used to be called "The Analog Tablet," which made me laugh. I have given this pad as a gift to at least a dozen kids, including my own, and everybody loves it. The paper is thick and white and square, and edged attractively in green and blue. Plus, the pad is just so appealingly thick and chunky.
I am also rementioning this wonderful coloring book. The whole series is great (we got this one too), and the pages are sturdy enough to handle the paints. This would be fun to get, no matter who you were, except if you were my dad, so I won't be getting it for him.
I also got my kids some ridiculously expensive pencils this year.
They're Blackwings, and our friend Corn, who I trust in all things, made me feel like we had to have to them. Putting pencils in the kids' stockings reminds me of Ben's fourth birthday, when our friend Daniel asked him if anything special had happened yet and Ben said, with his excited little eyes glittering, "Well, Daniel. Yes. I got juice without any water in it!" "Juice without any water in it!" Daniel said. "You are living the dream."
Okay, are you ready for the slightly more random portion of the gift guide? It's these four things, and then after that, some not-random books.
This weird plastic stuff: Fix That Thing Mouldable Glue. I confess to having an ulterior motive in putting it in the kids' stockings this year: there are some broken things I'm hoping they'll repair, including a shower handle, a pair of kitchen scissors, and a window latch. Merry Christmas! (But it really looks cool--like Silly Putty, only purposeful.)
This Swedish Fireknife, but sign the waiver first, okay? Because this is not for the faint of heart. We gave it to a friend for his eleventh birthday (after clearing it with his parents, I swear), and he did manage to give himself a small(ish) cut. So. There's that. But he loves it, and I love it as a gift for older kids because it is so real and useful, and the fire starting--which involves striking a steel with the knife--requires practice but is so incredibly cool. We are giving it to Birdy for Christmas, along with this book. (Read the reviews and it will become clear that, in the Venn diagram, this is where I overlap with conservative survivalists.)
This bubble bath, which I mentioned last week too. It's something we actually had when I was a child, so it's true that the aromatic nostalgia factor is high for me. Still, it is gorgeous. Not at all car-freshenery. Just clean, real, pure foresty heaven, and a little goes a long way. I got a few bottles to give as adult gifts (why does that sound like porn?), and I can't think of anyone who wouldn't want it.
And a couple of books, below, but for other books that would make great gifts (or to read yourself while you're hiding out from the holidays), including the fabulous new children's classic, Rad American Women A to Z, please see this post. Note: I am starting to think that All My Puny Sorrows may be the best novel I have ever read. Oh, and The Green Road--get it for yourself and/or anybody who is lucky enough not to have read it yet. Oh, oh, and The Last September. Okay. I'm moving onto the giftier books now, I swear.
Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York, which, coincidentally, our cider-making friends gave us last year. The book is a lot like the blog: photographs of vibrant, wacky, beautiful, struggling people, with provocative, funny, life-affirming captions that make you think and laugh and--listen closely!--that creak open your heart a few notches. Plus, it is lovely to sit with your children and a real book, rather than calling everyone to gather round a device. This is also a great book to give teenagers, who can find themselves in a strange vortex of difficulty, with respect to gifts: halfway between LEGO and scotch. It is edgily wholesome in all the right ways.
Okay, this which I'm pasting from an earlier post: the latest Unbored book: Unbored Adventure, which I had the deep honor of contributing to, and which Birdy has named "The best Unbored book yet!" (Huge praise.) This is a chock-a-block book, filled with crazy, thoughtful, well-tested ideas that range from the immediately doable to the profoundly inspirational and aspirational. Birdy read the book cover to cover, then promptly spent the day sewing something called a "Ditty Bag," which thrilled her no end. "What are you going to do next from it?" I asked her, and she looked thoughtful, then said, "Purify drinking water using nesting bowls and evaporation." We have already given many copies of this as gifts, sometimes accompanied by an adventurous accessory, like a headlamp or a Swiss Army Knife or the Swedish Fireknife above.
We (i.e. I) got Ben 101 Things I Learned in Engineering School and 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School. These are crazily attractive little hardback books that are simply full of interesting stuff. Plus, again, for the halfway-between-LEGO-and-scotch crowd, just perfect. Or, I'm hoping. Because I haven't given them yet. But we saw them for sale at the MIT gift shop, so I have a good feeling about them. There are more in the series, too, depending on the interests of your person: cooking, business, law. Oh my god, are they all written by men? I think they are. Sigh. Sexist gift alert. #bastards
Last year, I gave Birdy Just Between Us: A No-Stress No-Rules Journal for Girls and Their Moms, not sure if it mightn't be too gimmicky to be her exact cuppa--and she has absolutely loved it. We both did. Do still. Basically, you each answer the same questions or set of prompts, and it's a way to communicate and share that's totally low-key and free-form. Sometimes we sit together and fill it out; sometimes we leave it on the other person's pillow to find and respond to--from the basic "Favorite Word," "Favorite Book," kinds of questions, to the meatier, "Something I'd do if I knew I'd never fail" or "I believe in." I think it would be a good gift for kids 8 and up. I'm not sure why it's gendered like this, but there it is.
[Video: A French bulldog puppy rolls around on its back trying to flip over]
If you’re not feeling this time of year, this is your place to commiserate with others. I am not sure I’m getting to any more “holiday” questions this month, so you may want to post the short version here instead for others’ feedback.
Last year my mom got me the coolest Crock Pot. It is wifi enabled! I connected it to our home wifi and then downloaded the wemo app which allows me to communicate with the Crock Pot remotely. I can schedule the cooking, check in on it, change the settings and get notifications.
Crock Pot season is here and Aaron was hungry for pot roast so I used a combination of a recipe from my Betty Crocker cookbook and the Crock Pot booklet. You can see how I was able to check in on the pot roast during the day. Aaron kept texting me - "How is the pot roast?!"
The pot roast was perfect when I got home. What you see here is the topping of spices and horseradish on top.
I am hooked! There are lots of recipes on the Crock Pot website that I can't wait to try.
Seriously, I don’t think the bedwetting about Muslims has been this bad in a very long time, which is saying something, and the panic on Syrian refugees is particularly ridiculous. Here’s a nice, juicy quote from a just released essay on the subject:
Of the 859,629 refugees admitted from 2001 onwards, only three have been convicted of planning terrorist attacks on targets outside of the United States and none was successfully carried out. That is one terrorism-planning conviction for a refugee for every 286,543 of them who have been admitted. To put that in perspective, about 1 in every 22,541 Americans committed murder in 2014. The terrorist threat from Syrian refugees in the United States is hyperbolically over-exaggerated and we have very little to fear from them because the refugee vetting system is so thorough…
The security threat posed by refugees in the United States is insignificant. Halting America’s processing of refugees due to a terrorist attack in another country that may have had one asylum-seeker as a co-plotter would be an extremely expensive overreaction to very minor threat.
What horrifyingly liberal commie soviet came up with this load of codswallop? The Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch, i.e., the fellow who with his brother is currently trying to buy the entire right side of the political spectrum for his own personal ends. When the Cato Institute is telling you to maybe take down the pearl-clutching over the Syrian refugees a notch or two, it’s an indication that you’ve lost all perspective.
It’s been particularly embarrassing how the mostly-but-not-exclusively (and thankfully not all-encompassing) GOP/conservative politician freakout about the Syrian refugees points out that, why, hello, bigotry really is a thing, still. From small-town mayors declaring that FDR had it right when he put all those US citizens of Japanese descent into camps to presidential candidates alluding that might not actually be a bad idea to make special IDs exclusively for Muslims here in the US, to the House of Representatives passing a bill to piss on the Syrian refugees, it’s been a banner week for bigotry here in the US, enough so that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum took the extraordinary step of issuing a statement of concern with reference to the Syrian refugees. And as many have noted, there is irony in the freakout about Syrian refugees coming into a season which celebrates a notable middle eastern family who famously were refugees at one point in their history, according to some tales.
But as this asshole politician said this week, “Mary and Jesus didn’t have suicide bomb vests strapped on them, and these folks do.” Well, no, they don’t. Leaving aside that the perpetrators on the attacks in Paris all appeared to live in Europe to begin with, the actual process for placing refugees in new countries is so long and arduous and so selective, with just 1% of applicants being placed, that (as the Cato Institute astutely notes) there’s a vanishingly small chance that someone with ill intent will make it through the process at all — and an even smaller chance that they would be assigned to the US when all the vetting is done. To worry about terrorists in the refugee pool is, flatly, stupid — no terrorist organization is going to pour resources into an avenue with such a small chance of success, especially when it’s easier to apply for a friggin’ visa and get on a plane (they can buy their guns when they get here, don’t you know). The reasons why so many people are voiding their bowels about it are simple: Ignorance, racism, xenophobia and bigotry.
“But people are scared!” Okay, and? Being scared may be the excuse for abandoning all sense and reason in the moment one is actively under attack; it’s not even close to a reasonable excuse for, thousands of miles away from an attack and with no immediate threat on the horizon, vilifying innocent co-religionists of the attackers and plotting to slam the door on refugees running from the very people who claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks. Taking the Paris attacks out on Syrian refugees is security theater — it doesn’t make us safer, it’ll just make the most ignorant among us feel safer. It’s the TSA of solutions to the Daesh/ISIS problem.
This has been a bad week for the United States, folks. France was directly attacked by terrorists and its response was to promise to house 30,000 Syrian refugees; we weren’t and one branch of our government fell over itself to put the brakes on accepting a third of that number. France is defying the very organization that attacked it while we, on the other hand, are doing exactly what that organization hoped we would do. We’re being the cowardly bigots they hoped we would be, and as loudly as possible.
So congratulations, America. We’ve successfully wrested the title of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” from France. Enjoy it.
On Thursday, presidential candidate Donald Trump provided the clearest evidence yet of his disregard for religious liberty, tellingYahoo News that if elected he would target Muslims with a previously unthinkable degree of intrusion. “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,” he said. “Certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
Asked if he would consider “registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form of special identification that noted their religion,” a tactic reminiscent of the treatment of Jews in 1930s Europe, he would not rule it out. He put it this way to Yahoo: “We’re going to have to—we’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely.”
Over the last several years, Christians in the United States have become increasingly alarmed about threats to religious liberty. Among other things, they don’t want their nonprofits forced to provide contraception to their employees or their believers forced to provide services like photography or baking for same-sex unions. Even the people most invested in those fights should see that positions held by Trump would pose a far greater threat to their religious liberty were he elected.
The forced registration of any faith group is so abhorrent that it can only be described by words we generally avoid to preserve their integrity for moments like this: Trump’s position is nakedly prejudiced, proto-fascist, and un-American. It would be troubling even if he expressed his views off-the-cuff, without having thought them through. It is more worrisome in the context of a previous interview where he declared that “we’re going to have no choice” but to shut down some mosques in the United States, and a town hall in which he failed to challenge––and arguably encouraged––a voter who asked him about getting rid of Muslims in the United States.
This record ought to make Trump anathema to anyone who has concerns about religious liberty in America. Had he aimed his remarks at any Christian denomination, his candidacy would effectively be over because of the backlash. The fact that his positions pose a stark threat to the religious liberty of Muslim Americans ought to be enough to provoke a backlash. Insofar as it leaves some Christians unmoved, they might reflect on how much damage would be done to their religious liberty if a president of the United States successfully set a precedent for a religious registry or empowered the government to shut down places of worship.
...getting the federal government involved in tracking and labeling citizens’ religious affiliations is abhorrent on the merits and a huge invitation to profound mischief down the road. Creating databases on all members of any religion is a terrible idea as well. I don’t mind “monitoring mosques,” if there is intelligence suggesting that a specific one needs to be monitored. But a blanket policy of monitoring all mosques strikes me as a major assault on religious liberty — and a spectacular waste of resources. Trump is right — or at least may be right — when he says that some mosques may need to be shut down when “some bad things happen” — if those bad things were plotted or advanced by those mosques. I’m all for cutting through the PC platitudes about how Islamic extremism isn’t Islamic. But I have little interest in going so far the other way that we actually resemble the straw men the Left has been screaming about all along.
The current leader in the Republican Party’s presidential primary is now unambiguously on record with positions incompatible with religious freedom in America. How many voters will cast ballots for a man like that? The answer will go some way toward telling us if claims about pervasive anti-Muslim prejudice are a straw man or not, and how willing religious groups are to stand up for the rights of other denominations. Once again, Trump has failed one of the most basic tests of leadership.
Last year, when Twisty the Clown was terrorizing the town on Jupiter on American Horror Story: Freak Show, I wrote about how clowns went from lovable children’s entertainers to horrifying monsters toward the end of the 20th century. There are a number of reasons why this happened—Poltergeist, Ronald McDonald, the fact that the notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy regularly dressed up as a clown on weekends—but for me, the thing that ruined clowns forever was the 1990 TV adaptation of Stephen King’s IT.
The two-part miniseries debuted 20 years ago today on ABC, and starred Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown, a shapeshifting presence that emerges every 30 years in the town of Derry to feast on small children. Curry is one of the most efficiently creepy actors of the last 50 years, imbuing even his more ridiculous roles (Rooster in Annie springs to mind) with equal parts menace and smarm, but his Pennywise is something different altogether. He speaks in a kind of singsongy, guttural growl, his teeth are sharp fangs, and the contrast between his comical yellow dungarees and his penchant for ripping off children’s limbs is fairly stark.
The scariest thing about Pennywise, though, is how he preys on children’s deepest fears, manifesting the monsters they’re most petrified by (something J.K. Rowling would later emulate with boggarts). He appears to one child as a werewolf, to another as a mummy, and to Bill, the hero of the piece, as Georgie, the brother Pennywise murdered a few years ago. In that sense, Pennywise isn’t so far removed from regular clowns, who’ve made a living for decades by mimicking the thing that almost everyone fears—being seen as ridiculous.
IT is currently being remade, although not by Cary Fukunaga, who dropped out of the project earlier this year after writing a two-part script. He explained why to The Hollywood Reporter:
In the first movie, what I was trying to do was an elevated horror film with actual characters. They didn’t want any characters. They wanted archetypes and scares. I wrote the script. They wanted me to make a much more inoffensive, conventional script. But I don’t think you can do proper Stephen King and make it inoffensive.
Until the project finds a new director, here’s a supercut of Pennywise from 1990, reminding children that laundry, paper boats, and old photo albums will never not be scary again.
Clathrus archeri, also known as devil's fingers, has a gelatinous egg stage from which the fruitbody arises, its four to eight reddish arms each coated with dark, foul-smelling tissue. [...] Clathrus archeri is one of the phalloid fungi (Phallales) and is related to the common stinkhorn (Phallus impudicus), a well-known woodland fungus in Britain. It similarly produces a sticky spore-bearing tissue designed to attract flies which are the agents of spore dispersal. Like other phalloids, C. archeri accumulates manganese in the egg-stage, apparently important chemically in producing the sugars and odorous substances found in the fertile tissue.
A time-lapse to haunt your dreams:
Here’s a guide to get rid of them (without having to resort to a flamethrower).
Rob had a really great post this morning asking why American college students don’t strike the way students at universities around the world sometimes do. There are a variety of theories—you should read the piece—but I was struck by this quote from Angus Johnston, a professor at the City University of New York who researches student activism:
“Students in the United States today are living in conditions of economic precarity that didn’t exist in the 1960s,” he said. “As students have gotten poorer on average, tuition has gone up. And so they’re getting squeezed on both sides. They have a lot less ability to withstand the effects of … losing a semester, because if that happens, they’re gonna be screwed.”
That rings true, but I think it undersells the effects of rising tuition on campus, and what that might do to student activism. It’s not just that students have to pay more, which makes them more nervous about losing money. As tuition rates have risen—and particularly as state governments have drawn down funding for public universities—public and private universities have both increasingly come to look at students as sources of revenue. (For-profit universities just take this idea to its logical conclusion.)
That means that students come to be seen as “customers” by college administrators, and in turn they start to see themselves that way too. That has radical effects for how they interact with the university. Instead of being part of a bigger community, composed of scholars, teachers, learners, and others—a sort of “academical village,” to borrow Thomas Jefferson’s phrase—students show up, get the service for which they’ve paid, and leave with a diploma. Doing that leads to inevitable economic decisions: prioritizing fancy dorms, high-quality facilities, and popular eating options over faculty hiring, for example. Professors complain that students feel entitled and comfortable asking for better grades.
But it also makes it harder to see why you’d go on strike. Striking only makes sense if you see yourself as part of the integrated community, where the university’s direction is determined by a negotiation between adminstrators, faculty, students, and staff. If you’re a customer, though? Even leaving aside what you can afford, paying tuition, and then going on strike seems less sensible if you think classes are a product that you’ve purchased. It’s like going to Chipotle, paying for your burrito, then refusing to eat it.
One company has decided on a more direct approach: just pay women more.
In a panel at a conference organized by Fortune last week, Marc Benioff, the CEO of the cloud-based software company Salesforce, said that he recently ordered a review of all 17,000 employees’ salaries to see if female employees’ pay was in line with those of male employees doing similar jobs. According to Fortune, Benioff said that the company is spending about $3 million extra this year on its payroll to make these adjustments. “We can say we pay women the same that we pay men,” he said the conference. “We looked at every single salary.”
What prompted this review was the allegation, made earlier this summer by Salesforce employees Cindy Robbins and Leyla Seka, that women at the company likely weren’t being paid as much as men. Benioff said he was initially skeptical, but commissioned an internal review anyway. Data on the compensation of employees in all departments at all levels of tenure apparently revealed Robbins and Seka’s suspicions to be warranted.
Salesforce has declined to clarify the $3 million figure or provide further details—the size of the average adjustment, how many employees saw their salaries changed, and how they reacted—but is going to put out a report with more information next year.
One aspect of gender parity at Salesforce, though, needs no further data collection: Overall, the company is 70 percent men and 30 percent women. Among leadership positions, it’s 81 percent male. The preliminary details of Salesforce’s salary revisions sound promising, but the shortage of women throughout the company, and particularly at the top, indicates the scale of the work remaining.
Further, while pay equality is being instituted at Salesforce, it’s just one company. “Salesforce has set a strong precedent, but we can’t rely on the good graces of every single employer in America to conduct this same kind of review and adjustment,” said Vivien Labaton from Make It Work, a campaign that pushes for equal pay. “We need a national standard.”
I need to learn how to list my allergies like this, so it's funny instead of making people back away slowly.
Ah, November. The leaves are dropping, the weather's all over the place (40 degrees! No, 60 ! Sun! Rain! More rain! Here's some wind! Now get those shorts back out cuz it's going up to 80 for some reason!)...and of course, everybody's sick.
We're passing around a mostly symptom-less fever thing right now, most likely the flu because I lost the consent forms for them to get vaccinated at school and then the Target flu clinic was out of the mist when we went and then the next day Ezra complained of a headache and went to bed for three days. Then he was fine and Noah suddenly wasn't.
(Go get ur flu shots ppl it's real and it's happening and it's COMING FOR YOU.)
I feel fine so far, unless you count the fact that I am horribly, violently allergic to the ENTIRE WORLD UP HERE. Since we moved, my previously mild seasonal allergies are now like, major and not very seasonal, since I was allergic to everything in the summer and now it's fall and I'm still sneezing my head off.
If I keep a constant, steady dose of allergy meds in my body I'm okay. Not great, but okay. If I miss a dose or take it even a few hours late, I go from one sneeze to a full-on stay-in-bed-worthy hay fever, with a headache and watery eyes and sneezing/coughing/sinuses from hell. It's really sexy, OBVIOUSLY.
So if you're keeping track, my current list of allergies has expanded to include:
1) Antibiotics, almost all the life-saving ones and definitely the best ones for treating UTIs
4) Raw onions, like my eyes don't just water, they leak copiously, turn bright red and burn-y, and then my sinuses freak out and my nose runs and my eyelids and lips swell and one time my throat started to close up and I had trouble breathing and THAT, my friends, was the last time I ever chopped a raw onion.
5) Mosquitoes, who specifically target me (and Ezra) because we swell up so comically and itch for days afterwards.
Honorable mentions of suspicion include the carpet and curtains in my bedroom, maybe my pillow, or my hair, or something else but dear God if I wake up at 3 am one more time thinking "huh I feel sniffly shit did I take my medicine oh no get up get up go take it aw fuck too late here comes the onslaught" I'm going to burn it all down.
Or probably just vacuum and dust everything. AGAIN.
In other news, please enjoy trying to wrap your head around the proportions in the following photos:
The standard first-trimester screen for Down syndrome, called the combined test, uses three numbers in an algorithm to assess the chance that the fetus has the genetic disorder: markers from the mother’s blood; ultrasound measurements of the fetus’s nuchal fold, an area of tissue at the back of the neck; and the mother’s age.
This last one is perhaps the most well-known risk factor among parents and parents-to-be—it’s common knowledge that as a woman’s age increases, so does her chance of having a baby with a genetic abnormality. Down syndrome occurs when the egg contains an extra copy of chromosome 21. This kind of error is more likely to happen in older eggs, due in part to the decay of proteins within the egg over time.
Here’s what the algorithm doesn’t account for: Extra genetic material can also attach itself to chromosome 21 in the sperm. Scientists agree that Down syndrome can be attributed to the father in 5 to 10 percent of cases, and some believe that number may be as high as 20 percent. As men age, their risk of fathering a child with Down syndrome may increase—the older the man, the more likely that the process of spermatogenesis, or sperm production will go awry, leading to sperm that contain errors like an extra chromosome. In 2003, a study examining New York State health records found that for parents over 40, paternal contribution to Down syndrome could be as high as 50 percent.
“For genetic abnormalities, it’s not just a woman’s problem anymore,” says Harry Fisch, a professor of urology at Weill Cornell Medical College and the study’s lead author. “The fact that couples are waiting longer to have children makes this very significant.”
But the combined test takes only maternal age into consideration, in part because paternal age hasn’t yet been studied enough for it to be accurately used as a risk factor. A father’s age has long been recognized as a factor in relatively rare genetic conditions like Klinefelter syndrome and achondroplasia, or dwarfism—but it’s only in the last 15 years or so that it’s started to receive more research attention, as studies have shown that it may also play a role in better-known conditions like autism and schizophrenia.
“The question is, why aren’t more people looking into this? There’s still much more interest in maternal issues than paternal issues. It takes a long time for a paradigm shift in the way we think,” Fisch says.
“It’s not a maternal issue, it’s not a paternal issue. It’s a parental issue.”
While women who have children at age 35 or older are considered to be of “advanced maternal age,” the medical community has yet to define “advanced paternal age,” according to the geneticists Helga Toriello and Jeanne Meck, who co-authored a guideline for genetic counseling for older fathers. “Some studies look at [men] over 40, some over 50, some over 35,” Toriello says. Though research suggests that the paternal-age effect is most significant for fathers over 40, younger fathers may also face an increased risk, possibly because spermatogenesis in very young fathers is more likely to result in the same mutations seen in older fathers. A recent study suggests that a 20-year-old father doubles the chance of Down syndrome as compared to one who’s 40.
But until more is known about the effect of paternal age, it’s difficult to know the true accuracy of the current combined test for Down syndrome. A woman who’s 49 has a one-in-nine chance of having a baby with Down syndrome—but the test doesn’t account for fluctuations in that number based on whether her partner is 24 or 64. And because women often partner with men older than they are, it’s also not clear now much paternal age may have already silently influenced the risk that the combined test assigns to each additional year of a mother’s life.
“You would need to take those 49-year-old women and those that have a 20-something-year-old partner and those that have a 30-year-old partner [and so on] and see what the differences might be,” Toriello says. Fisch’s study comes the closest, but no one has replicated that study with a bigger sample size.
The most accurate risk assessment would take both the maternal and paternal contribution into account, adjusted for the combined age of the mother and the father. “It’s not a maternal issue, it’s not a paternal issue. It’s a parental issue,” Fisch says. “It’s no longer one or the other.”
“The bottom line is that we don’t have a good direction for how to counsel for the effect of paternal age on the mother’s risk,” says Toriello. And the medical professionals who conduct screening tests and interpret the results for patients may not understand the role of paternal age, either. “I think there’s a lot of ignorance in the field,” says Meck. “A lot of OBGYNs don’t understand a lot about prenatal screening. The physicians don’t have the time and they don’t have the full range of knowledge. Those offices that do the best are the ones that have genetic counselors in them.”
But in recent years, some doctors have begun to abandon the combined test and other invasive screening techniques in favor of a newer, noninvasive prenatal test, which uses placental cells floating in the mother’s blood to check for chromosomal abnormalities in the fetus. As this type of testing becomes more widely available, age-based risk assessments may become outmoded. Noninvasive prenatal testing is more accurate than the combined test—with a 93 percent detection rate, as opposed to 82 to 87 percent—and can be performed as early as 10 weeks into pregnancy. Most importantly, noninvasive prenatal testing, which doesn’t rely on any algorithm to assess risk, takes both maternal and paternal age out of the picture. (In the U.S., noninvasive prenatal testing may be offered as an alternative to the combined test, though it may not be covered by insurance.)
Still, outdated beliefs about the egg and the sperm persist in standard clinical practices like the combined test for Down syndrome. When a screening test takes only maternal age into account, it creates the false impression that only maternal age matters for genetic abnormalities—that a woman’s eggs go bad over time, as if they were sitting on a supermarket shelf, while a man continues to produce fresh, robust sperm into old age.
Research has contradicted that idea, showing that while men do produce sperm into old age, their sperm carries more mutations and there’s less of it. “There are a lot of changes that compromise spermatogenesis,” says Patricia Hunt, a reproductive biologist at Washington State University. “It’s like a machine that gets rusty with age.”
In the meantime, scientists are only beginning to understand the effect of paternal age on sperm. “I think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg,” Fisch says. “We have no idea what other paternal-age effects there are.”
A reader revives the thread of women telling personal stories of how their painful health condition went undetected or misunderstood by medical officials:
I read Joe Fassler’s piece last month, and just heard his interview on NPR. My circumstances 11 years ago were slightly different and I nearly died, and I say that with absolutely no exaggeration. It infuriates me to hear this is all too common.
In 2004, I recently moved back to my hometown (Kansas City) and started a new job. On a Saturday night I was getting ready to go out and meet friends for drinks. Shortly before I left my apartment, I doubled over in indescribable pain.
Initially, I laid down on my bed hoping for it to subside enough before I could drive myself to a hospital. The pain only got worse, so I knew that I needed to call an ambulance. It took me to a hospital where they seemed to question my claims that I had insurance because I could not provide them with a card or name or policy number. I had just started my new job that week and had not received that information. I am fairly sure that my lack of insurance information, coupled with my dress (more appropriate for a mid-20s young woman joining friends for a Saturday night out drinking than a hospital) influenced the level of care, or more accurately lack of care that I received at that hospital. I arrived at the hospital around 10 PM.
In an ER exam room, the male nurse went through standard health related questions. Was I pregnant? Not that I knew. Had I ever been pregnant? Yes, once and it was an ectopic pregnancy and I had surgery before my fallopian tube ruptured.
Alone, I did my best to answer questions even though I was in excruciating pain and was becoming disoriented. The nurse wanted to do a pregnancy test (seemed smart), but I was completely incapable of urinating, something that annoyed the male nurse greatly. Meanwhile, I was asking for something—anything—for the pain, which they refused until they could confirm that I was not pregnant.
I was showing signs that I recognized as signs of internal bleeding (shoulder pain, etc), which I also told the ER nurse. Finally, after making me attempt to urinate three times, they decided to insert a catheter. Up until the pregnancy test came back positive, I was sure that I had appendicitis; it seemed like the only thing that made sense.
With a positive pregnancy test, I was certain that I had another ectopic pregnancy, but it became clear that neither the doctor nor the nurse shared my concern. At this point, I had been at the hospital for a few hours and it was past midnight. Any slight movement was painful. The ER physician came in to talk to me, and made it clear they would not give me any drugs that would harm the “baby.”
I quickly got the impression that I was being treated like a “drug-seeker.” I told the doctor, again, that I had an ectopic pregnancy before. I knew the symptoms of a ruptured ectopic pregnancy because of my first one about six years before. I pointed out to the ER physician that my shoulder pain was a sign of internal bleeding because of blood pooling in my abdomen. The ER physician disagreed and was pretty sure that I just had an ovarian cyst rupture, but that it was not serious.
I made it clear that if the pregnancy was viable (although I was certain that it was not) that I had no intentions of remaining pregnant. I begged for some sort of pain relief, which they gave me sometime between 1:00 and 6:00 AM. I asked for an ultrasound, but I was told that they did not have anyone on staff at that time at night on Saturday.
Sometime before 6:00 AM, the nurse informed me that I needed to leave since they were not going to admit me. I either needed to have someone pick me up or they would call me a cab. At this point I was incapable of arguing or doing much of anything. I called my older brother, who came to pick me up. The doctor explained that I likely had a cyst rupture. He wrote a prescription for pain medication and told my brother that I should probably eat something. When I left, the jeans that I came in would no longer button or zip up because my abdomen had swollen so much during the eight hours I was at the hospital.
My older brother dropped me off at home. Although he did not think I looked well, he trusted that the doctors knew what they were talking about. In my apartment, alone, I laid in my bed and drifted in and out of consciousness, only to wake enough occasionally to vomit. My mother, who lived out of state, called about every hour, but she became worried as I became less coherent. At some point my mother called my younger brother and asked that he take me to a different hospital.
Around 3:00 PM that Sunday, my younger brother rushed me to a different hospital. As soon as the people working in admitting saw my condition, I was quickly rushed into a room and I tried to give them details about my condition starting from the night before. Within a matter of 15 minutes, I was getting an ultrasound, and they immediately began prepping me for surgery while wheeling me to the operating room. The last words I heard right before the anesthesia took effect was the anesthesiologist telling me “honey, you are going to feel so much better when you wake up.”
I required multiple blood transfusions during surgery and I was about as close to dead as you can be and still recover. In fact, with as much blood as I lost, I really should not have survived. As painful as surgery is, the anesthesiologist was right; I woke up just over 24 hours after my fallopian tube ruptured feeling so relieved that I was not in pain like I was before.
An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants outside of the uterus, most commonly in the fallopian tube. The fertilized egg will continue to develop, eventually threatening the structure that it is attached to, particularly the fallopian tube. A ruptured ectopic pregnancy is a medical emergency. It is also one of the most common pregnancy complications. A woman who has had one ectopic pregnancy is much more likely to have another ectopic pregnancy.
You do not have to be an MD to know that if a pregnant woman presents at the ER with a sudden onset of extreme pain, with abdominal swelling and shoulder pain, you do not send her home without at least doing an ultrasound.
My employer was amazing, and my insurance covered my medical costs. Once I was home and recovering, I became increasingly furious. I decided to file a complaint with the Missouri Board of Healing Arts. I wrote a letter, very similar to what I described here, and I mailed it to BHA. I also sent a copy to the CEO of the first hospital. I included a cover letter saying that if I was a CEO of a company that is about to be the subject of a complaint to a regulating agency of my business, that I would want to know and I would want to find out what happened as soon as possible.
I received a carefully worded letter from the CEO’s office apologizing that my condition changed after I left their hospital (which is not true—my tube ruptured before I arrived there by ambulance). Eventually, the complaint proceeded and I met with an investigator for Board of Health Arts. The investigator followed up with me later and told me that although she could not give me the specifics, considerable changes were made at the hospital and those directives came from the top of the organization as the result of my letter to the CEO.
I have never really been satisfied with the conclusion. At the time I did speak with attorneys and I received exactly the same response that I just heard Joe discuss on NPR. I was told that unless I could prove irreparable harm, there was not much that could be done. Apparently, almost dying is not enough, but if I had died, my family would have had one heck of a case.
Everything about this whole shit-show pisses me off
TV screenshot sent in by a reader, November 8, 2015.
In the context of this past week’s “Paid Patriotism” report by Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, about the way the Pentagon has been paying pro sports teams for patriotic on-field displays, a reader sends a screenshot from one of today’s games:
Sorry for the interruption, but I had to send this from the game on now. All of the coaches are dressed in camouflage!
Yes it's Veterans Day Wednesday, but during the years when I lived in England, where people really know about the horrors of war, no one would even think of dressing up like that. If you wanted to honor vets you wore a red poppy.
And of course red poppies on the lapel are very widespread Remembrance Day tributes in the U.K., Canada, Australia, etc. It’s worth noting that the camo theme in today’s U.S. football games applies not simply to the caps but even to the Bose headsets, as you see here.
The significant point, I think, is that the American public has seen things like this so often that we barely notice any more. The re-themed Bose headsets are another detail that Ben Fountain might have worked into Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, though perhaps he was worried about making the satire a little too broad.
***
Update Thanks to a reader for pointing out that in a special salute to the troops, the NFL’s online shop is offering a full 15% off list price to veterans and service members.
Then twitter came to my rescue and throughout the night thousands of you shared your own cringey moments, which were so awesome that hotel security had to do a welfare check on me because I was laughing so hard the people next door thought I was dying. I tried to convince them I was fine but I had tears running down my face and they were like, “Are you sure you don’t need help? Is someone hurting you?” and I was like, “No, this is what I look like when I’m happy” and they left, as confused as most people who deal with me are. I tried to storify the tweets to share them with you but there were too many and it kept crashing so instead I just decided to do a bunch of screenshots and share them here. I waited until after 5 because you cannot read these at work. You will hurt yourself. In a good way.
Thank you, amazing people for reminding us all how stupid and adorable and ridiculous mankind is, especially as the rest of the world screams “ME TOO” at your mortifying confessions. Also, if you don’t laugh in recognition of doing at least a quarter of these yourself you are probably in the wrong place or just haven’t lived long enough. Just saying.
UPDATED: This is not the end because mortification is the gift that never ends. Links to more here.
In 1987, multi-award winning author Ursula K. Le Guin was asked to supply a blurb for Synergy: New Science Fiction, Volume 1, the first in a new four-part series of anthologies edited by George Zebrowski which intended to showcase science fiction stories from authors both established and up-and-coming. For Ursula K. Le Guin, however, the book was notable not for its stories but for its complete absence of women’s voices. She reacted by way of this brief letter.
John Radziewicz Senior Editor Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 111 5th Ave New York NY 10003
Dear Mr Radziewicz,
I can imagine myself blurbing a book in which Brian Aldiss, predictably, sneers at my work, because then I could preen myself on my magnanimity. But I cannot imagine myself blurbing a book, the first of the series, which not only contains no writing by women, but the tone of which is so self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club, or a locker room. That would not be magnanimity, but foolishness. Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here.
… is this big takedown by Kurt Eichenwald, in Newsweek, about the phony nature of the whole inquiry. (For my previous installment on the fraudulence of this committee, and how the press has allowed itself to be used, please check here.)
Two bits of factual-comparison data from the story. First, on the proportionality of the numerous Congressional hearings on the Benghazi case:
Congress convened 22 hearings about the 9/11 attack that killed almost 3,000 citizens working in the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan; this week, Congress will be holding its 21st hearing about an attack that killed four people working in Libya, with many more sessions left to come…
In fact, no previous assault on a diplomatic outpost has received this kind of relentless expression of congressional outrage. There weren’t investigations that were anything on this scale about the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 (63 killed), on the U.S. Embassy annex northeast of Beirut in 1984 (24 killed) or on the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, in 2008 (18 killed)….
Benghazi was just one of 21 major assaults on an American diplomatic facility in the last 20 years; the personnel murdered there were among about 90 other Americans hired by the government to work in diplomatic outposts who were killed in terrorist attacks from 1998 through 2012, according to a State Department report.
Then, on the signs of the committee’s real interest:
Since March, the committee has issued almost 30 press releases related to Clinton; only five have been put out on every other topic combined. Then there is the committee’s interim report from this past May. The word Obama—who cannot run for commander-in-chief again [JF note: and who, after all, was president during this episode]—is not mentioned. Neither is the word president. Or Ansar al-Sharia, the group suspected of engineering the attack. White House makes only 13 appearances. Imagine an investigation on 9/11 that did not mention Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or President Bush; that is what has been done with the Benghazi committee’s first public report….
The name Ahmed Abu Khatalla, the man arrested as the mastermind of the attack, shows up once. The word terrorist appears only 10 times. As for references to Clinton, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination? Those show up 36 times in just 13 pages, an astonishing number given that the word Benghazi appears only 38 times. But the winner for the most mentions is the 39 references to emails from Clinton and the State Department.
This summing-up of the piece might sound intemperate, taken on its own. But in context of the evidence Eichenwald offers, it seems fair enough:
It is impossible to review what the Benghazi committee has done as anything other than taxpayer-funded political research of the opposing party’s leading candidate for president…. But the modern McCarthys of the Benghazi committee cannot perform this political theater on their own—they depend on reporters to aid in the attempts to use government for the purpose of destroying others with bogus “scoops” ladled out by members of Congress and their staffs.
Worth reading before Hillary Clinton and Rep. Gowdy’s committee face off a few hours from now. Or for that matter, after her appearance.
"I think you know that your parents are unlikely to give you an apology for how they’ve treated you and you are unlikely to have any kind of real accountability or reconciliation. It is very difficult to call people who have abused you to account, because their narcissism (or whatever the hell is going on) prevents them from seeing themselves as the bad guy in any situation and their highly selective memories will remember everything you did wrong with complete clarity while deleting their own bad behavior entirely from the record. You come ready to finally hash out all The Stuff and they act like The Stuff literally never happened and that you are crazy/too sensitive/vindictive/evil/petty/unreliable for thinking that it did. Gaslighting like this can make you feel even worse than a visit where they pretend not to be assholes, and if you are already feeling vulnerable it can be devastating. A fake pretend Fun Family Getaway might be a slightly preferable first step toward Family Glasnost than using this trip to sort out all The Stuff."
Plus all of the responses the friend could give.
Hi Captain
My best friend, “Toby” has been living in my city for about a year now and over that time he’s gone from being homeless and alcoholic to having a sweet flat and ten months of sobriety under his belt. I’m trying to be as engaged in his recovery and support as possible because he doesn’t really have much of a support network around him – the mental health system in this country is a joke and he hasn’t ever received the help he really needs for his STPD, anxiety disorders, alcoholism and BPD, he has only a few other friends in town none of which he knows as well as me and his other closest friend and sister live across the country and overseas, respectively.
He and his sister “Jackie” were raised in a horribly abusive household – less violent than psychological, verbal and financial – rich parents who had children for appearances and ignored them to the point of neglect when they weren’t belittling them or loudly expressing their anger at both children being gay, as well as things such as encouraging the eating disorder that has been dominating his life for a long time and having family pets put down once they began to bond with the kids. Jackie bore the brunt of the abuse and has not talked to them for years and has been written out of their will etc, but Toby was the preferred kid and despite being loudly and aggressively disowned by them last year still says he hasn’t made up his mind about them and brings up things like “well, they bought me a car, so they must love me”.
He’s currently in a psych ward on a short stay and got a call from his parents out of the blue. They want him to come up to his hometown to stay with them for a week next month (with the potential to stay longer) and seem to think that they can play happy families and ignore both a lifetime of abuse and a year of no contact despite hearing second hand about his homelessness (during which time the mother volunteered for the Salvation Army and refused to contact him), alcoholism and a near-death experience at the beginning of the year. During that time they were telling the rest of the family to never mention the fact that they had children and had changed all their phone numbers so Toby and Jackie could not contact them. Now they say that they have changed their names and have distanced themselves from the rest of the family and want to make amends – though their phone call contained no outright apologies and skimmed over the major problems in their relationship with Toby and Jackie.
Recently I was with Toby when he ran into his uncle (his mother’s brother) in a store so we think they may have heard about that from him. He is considering going up to visit but I’m not sure what their motivations are and I’m very worried. These people have shown themselves to have only his worst interests at heart and I’m not sure anyone else other than me is in a good position to give him advice or keep an eye on what happens. He recently got out of a very physically and mentally abusive relationship as well and I’m worried that he will transfer his dependence back to his parents which will undermine his recovery and – generally – stable mental health.
I’d like to give him some scripts to take to his parents once he is up there because we both at least agree that they shouldn’t be allowed to to treat the visit as a Fun Family Getaway if he takes their offer of a plane ticket.
– Worried and suspicious
Dear Worried and Suspicious:
This is for Toby:
Dear Toby,
If you want to visit your family, then you are the only one who can make that decision. Your friend the LW and I can be all “BAD IDEA JEANS!” and throw ourselves in front of you in slow motion saying “nooooooooooooooooo this is not the tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime,” but don’t beat yourself up for having an open heart and wanting love and a place in your family, even if it seems impossible, even if it is impossible. If being back in touch with them is a mistake, you’ll figure it out quickly enough. You have all the information that you need to make a good decision about how to handle your family. You’ve survived everything they’ve ever thrown at you or withheld from you, and you will survive them again if you need to.
EDITED TO ADD: Planes, roads, and phones work both ways and your parents could come visit YOU instead of summoning you home to their turf on their terms. Think about it. [/edit]
From what your friend tells me, I think you know that your parents are unlikely to give you an apology for how they’ve treated you and you are unlikely to have any kind of real accountability or reconciliation. It is very difficult to call people who have abused you to account, because their narcissism (or whatever the hell is going on) prevents them from seeing themselves as the bad guy in any situation and their highly selective memories will remember everything you did wrong with complete clarity while deleting their own bad behavior entirely from the record. You come ready to finally hash out all The Stuff and they act like The Stuff literally never happened and that you are crazy/too sensitive/vindictive/evil/petty/unreliable for thinking that it did. Gaslighting like this can make you feel even worse than a visit where they pretend not to be assholes, and if you are already feeling vulnerable it can be devastating. A fake pretend Fun Family Getaway might be a slightly preferable first step toward Family Glasnost than using this trip to sort out all The Stuff.
My hope is that you’ll your expectations low and not take your cue from movies where dysfunctional families work it all out in some big dramatic scene with hugging and crying and speechifying. Look at the Peanuts comics where Lucy yanks the football away from Charlie Brown if you need a visual “keep your expectations low” reminder. Above all, remember, you are not the one who needs to be forgiven right now. You are not the one who needs to make amends for homophobia, for abuse, for neglect, or for cutting off contact and expressing public shame about you and your life. If your parents behave badly, it is not about you, and you didn’t cause it. Maybe your mantra can be “I am responsible for me and what I do, and I know that I am living with as much integrity and grace as I can in a difficult situation. I am not responsible for them and what they do.” Sometimes being able to know that you tried your very best and gave people every chance to rise to the occasion is a powerful tool in finding peace and closure with a difficult situation.
If you do visit, stay in a hotel/AirBnB or with nice, trusted friends or relatives or friends to give yourself a little distance and privacy. See your parents in smaller doses. Consider driving instead of flying, or consider renting a car when you are there if that is possible so that you always, always have your own escape route and can’t be stranded. Also, if you do a 12-step program for addiction, I think it’s important to find a meeting nearby and to go every day (and even more often than that, if you need to) so that you can be among people who aren’t your folks and to get frequent support and reality checks. Always keep your cell phone charged and with you, plan breaks where you get out of the house for solo time (running errands, taking walks) and some privacy to check in with your sister/friends/sponsor/counselor. I’m told the forums at friendsofcaptainawkward.com sometimes have threads for peer support and recovering addicts and abuse survivors, so check in there from time to time if you need a sanity check or some kindness from strangers.
There is a non-zero risk that your parents will try to use the visit to have some weird intervention and/or forcibly check you back into a hospital or rehab facility or otherwise try to control your life. If your parents tell you that they want to “help”, it more than okay to ask for the kind of help you actually want and need and to reject “help” that doesn’t meet your needs. It’s also okay to say, “I don’t want help from you, I just want to spend a little time with you.” Struggling in some areas of your life doesn’t mean you have to automatically accept the role of lost sheep who needs help.
For example, if your folks offer you any ‘help’ that carries a condition of coming back under their roof and their control or if they try to persuade you to sign anything or do anything or agree to anything, be very, very skeptical, ask for time to think, and NOPE THE HELL OUT of there if you start to feel unsafe. Scripts could be “Thank you, I’ll think about what you said” or “Thank you, can I think about it and let you know?” or “Thank you, let me have my lawyer look at it/let me talk it over with my counselor/friend” or “Thanks, let me go back home and think it over. When do I need to let you know?” If they challenge you on this, like, Why would you need time to think? or What is there to think about? or Don’t you trust us? or Come on, no need for that, we’re family, that is bad. If your request for time and outside review unleashes a recitation of your perceived failings and wrongs or threats of consequences, be afraid. You have a right to think about big decisions at your own pace. Someone with your best interests at heart would want you to take your time and to have whatever advice and support you need.
Try to remember that your parents had the opportunity to be a kind and positive part of your life and that they *often,* *repeatedly,* made different choices. Please don’t ever assume that their money and age and fancy house or status as parents means that they know what’s best for you or that they can tell you anything about your current life. You are the boss of your own life, and you deserve credit for the way you’ve taken care of yourself and turned your life around. You’ve been able to be sober for an incredible 10 months (congratulations!), you’ve escaped from a bad relationship recently (that is so hard to do, and you did it!), you’ve found a good place to live (how fortunate!), and you have a caring friend in the LW and in others who love and support and value you. You are healing, so above all be very kind and gentle with yourself and do things at your own pace.
Letter Writer, this is for you.
You can’t save Toby or fix this for him. You can love him, you can be his friend, but you can’t save him. Your love can’t prevent a relapse in his sobriety, it can’t prevent unhealthy family and relationship dynamics, it can’t save him from abusive people. If visiting his parents is a mistake, then it will be his mistake. If he is going to relapse, then it is his relapse, and there is nothing you can do or could have done to prevent it.
I say this because when I read sentences like “I’m trying to be as engaged in his recovery and support as possible…” and “I’m not sure anyone else other than me is in a good position to give him advice or keep an eye on what happens,” that may be true, but it’s revealing of how much of your well-being and identity has been invested in helping Toby. In addition, hearing that you’re “the only one who understands” or “the one totally indispensable person who gets it and always comes through” can feel good when it’s someone you love and even provide an ego boost, like, “I have my shit together enough that I can help my friends out and I am being a good friend, go me!” It can also be a red flag for dependency or codependency if it’s a self-designation or a role that you become attached to because if you are always the helper than something must always be wrong for you to feel/be important and that can get really fucked up over time. If Toby were to say “I don’t know what I’d do without you” or “You’re the only one I can count on” that’s a heartfelt and wonderful thing to express in terms of gratitude, but on another level, it’s not *really* a compliment as much as it is a statement of need. In my opinion, some healthy answers to “You’re the only one” or “I super-need you above all others” or “What would I do without you?” statements from Toby are:
“Well, I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re a great friend!”
“I’m so glad you moved closer to me and that I get to see you all the time now.”
“Fortunately you live here now so we don’t have to find out! You would figure it out, though. I believe in you.”
“I am rich in friends, and so are you. We’re lucky to have each other.”
“Plus I’m freaking delightful and gorgeous, as are you. Let’s take a walk outside so that other people can envy us.”
In other words, affirm your affection for him vs. the role of #1 helper.
Please also make sure that you are taking care of yourself and that you are giving and receiving love and support and attention and time from other friends. Please make sure that you are caring for your own housing situation, your own job/career/education situation, your own family relationships, your own romantic life (if that’s a thing you care about), and your own health. Crisis/Caregiver Fatigue is a thing, it’s especially a thing with addiction and recovery, it’s still a thing even if the person you are helping is lovely and wonderful and doing the very best they can. If this whole thing with Toby’s family turns into the shitshow that you fear, I don’t want your life to go sideways if the wheels come out from under his for a while.
You probably deserve a ton of credit for how well Toby is doing right now, and Toby probably legit needs a shitload of all kinds of help and has benefited greatly from your support all this time as he goes through truly hard stuff. As you transition out of crisis management mode (hopefully) and into friend maintenance mode (hopefully!), it’s important that your conversations with Toby don’t immediately become “You poor thing! How can I help?” conversations and also that you don’t cast yourself as an authority on his life…even if you think you know better…even if he is fragile and not making great decisions or is too close to the situation and you actually do (objectively speaking) know better…even if it his expectation that you will immediately offer help and that is the established habit of your dynamic together.
Furthermore, if he makes a decision about his life that you think is unwise or unsafe, it’s going to be essential to your well-being and to your friendship that you NOT take it personally. For an empath like yourself that is going to be the hardest thing in the world and it’s why helping professionals a) go through years of training b) are available for small, scheduled sessions with set beginning and end times and c) have mentoring and peer support so that they can offload their own feelings somewhere that’s safe to the patient. Toby is your friend, not your patient or your child or your ward, and even if you have the proper training you would be ethically prohibited from being his [insert chosen variation of social worker/helping professional]. You can be totally right, he can make the wrong decision, and it’s still not your job to prevent it or fix it or your responsibility to convince him otherwise or put his pieces back together. Some other scripts for you in speaking with Toby might be:
“Your parents, really? What do you think you’ll do?”
“That sounds like a terrible idea to me based on what you’ve told me, but you can handle it.”
“How do you want to handle it?”
“It sounds like you are handling this beautifully.”
“I hope the visit is everything you want it to be. If you need me, I’m a text or a phone call away.”
“What do you think/how do you feel about [their offer][that plan you are thinking about][your next steps]?”
“Wanna run through the Escape Plan again? Does Shaking The Dust Of This Godforsaken Town From Your Feet come before or after hiring the skywriter to scrawl ‘EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT SHITTY PARENTS YOU ARE, FIRSTNAMES LASTNAMES” across the sky above their house?”
“That was unexpected. Do you think it’s sincere?”
“That escalated quickly. What do you want to do?”
“That could have gone better, but it could have gone worse. How are you holding up?”
“That sucks. Are you able to go to a meeting today?”
“That sucks. What does your counselor/doctor/therapist/sponsor say?”
“That sucks. What do you think you’ll do?”
“Do you want my opinion/advice, or do you just need to vent?”
“Now is not a good time for me to talk. Can I text you tomorrow/later?”
“I’m in the middle of something. What’s a good time to call you back?”
“Wow, stressful. My day was also a doozy, let me tell you about it!”
Yep, you read those last couple of scripts right. The comfort in-dump out principle applies, especially just now when your friend is in hospital, but a stable, reciprocal friendship sometimes means that you sometimes ask Toby for things that you need, within reason. “I’m happy to make those phone calls for you about your [thing you need]. Can we Skype on Saturday and you can help me choose a Halloween costume?” When friends are down, we sometimes worry about over-burdening them, but being asked to contribute can feel really good and remind your friends how much they are valued. I know that when my boyfriend got out of the psych hospital, he needed support and love, and he also needed to not be treated like a patient.
All love to you and to Toby. May his family take a break from sucking so very hard, may his recovery continue, and may your friendship transition beautifully.
My self-care today involves saying “no” to involved comment moderation, so, no comments this time.
Machi Koro is an awesome city-building card game that I'm pretty sure one of *you* recommended to us! (Thank you.) I'm linking to the deluxe edition here because it includes both the Harbor and Millionaire's Row expansions, which we have and love, but you could also give the original, which is smaller and less expensive, and then you can save the expansions to give separately when birthdays come around! Right? 
