I think you guys all know by now that I am a semi-ridiculous person who doesn’t take much seriously. I mean, I have a one-sided rivalry with an 80-year-old college football analyst. Ridiculous. What’s that old quote, “I gotta laugh to keep from crying?” It pretty much sums me up.
I spent most of Saturday out of the house, so on Saturday night I sat down with the intention of getting caught up on the day’s news. After scanning the top stories on BuzzFeed and NPR, I looked at what was trending on Twitter. Donald Trump was the #1 trending topic, so I clicked on his name to see what the latest was with him. And that’s when I saw it:
Donald Trump had blocked me on Twitter.
I mainly use Twitter for three things these days: to see what’s trending, to spam out links to my blog posts, and to interact with people during live events. Twitter during live events is my favorite – it becomes a hilarious community during ridiculous events like awards shows, sports playoffs, and Sharknados. I realized that the last time I’d actively tweeted was during the televised Republican Presidential Debate.
I wasn’t really on my game the night of the debate. Frankly, I’m already sick of this stupid election and it’s still fifteen months away. Seeing the candidates (on both sides) act like idiots is embarrassing. I knew the debate would be a bit of a mess, because with ten candidates vying for attention, how could it not be? But I watched it anyway because I knew that, at the very least, Twitter would be entertaining.
As the debate progressed, I found myself getting irritated by Donald Trump. To be fair, he was already at the bottom of my list after his gross remarks about Mexicans and John McCain, but I was really pushed over the edge by the way he sneered at Megyn Kelly.
Not a tweet I am particularly proud of…if I’d thought about it for a moment, I’m certain I could have come up with a better word than repulsive. Loathsome…pugnacious…wretched. All excellent alternatives.
I’m no Nancy Drew, but I have to think this is probably why he blocked me from seeing his super-important tweets (or maybe he found out I have him on a secret Twitter list called, “LOL.”).
This is…really absurd. I didn’t even tag Trump in that tweet, which means someone in his camp actually took the time to search through tweets about him. But it’s also a little alarming. If Trump can’t handle a random woman in California tweeting that he’s repulsive, what’s he going to do when Vladimir Putin makes him mad?
9:09 AM: Two bears, at the far end of the falls. (Update: Just one bear at the end of the falls. There was a rock that looked like a bear’s butt.) I like watching the falls without bears, though. It’s very soothing. One of the bears comes toward the camera, fighting through the rougher part of the river to get to shore. It succeeds, then wanders off.
I think this would be a fun group to hear thoughts about this on.
manzanitakids.com
If feminism is about having the right to make choices, then it’s also about the obligation to make a choice. You cannot choose to have a spouse who’s a breadwinner and who shares everything 50/50. You cannot choose to have everything in life but only do it half the time. Having something—anything—is about commitment. And you cannot choose to have everything up to your standards but also allow other peoples’ standards to prevail.
Being a real feminist means you cannot have everything. So women who are feminists are self-assured enough to make choices to give stuff up. And men who are feminists are brave enough to say that they, too, will be giving up some things.
Here are things men should give up:
1. Give up the idea of 50/50. It doesn’t work. Most Gen Y dads think men should be breadwinners. But many don’t think this way until they have kids. It’s so much easier to live in a fantasy world about kids before there are kids.
The genesis for this post is a video from Jonathan Mann about how he and his wife are dealing with their new baby.
Jonathan basically feels bad that his wife is better at working and taking care of the household than he is. He thinks that he should be doing 50% of the household and baby chores because he is bringing in 50% of the income. He thinks that since he has his wife taking care of 50% of the income, then he should not leave her with more than 50% of the childcare or household chores.
Their baby is very young and therefore it’s unlikely that this will work. Because moms don’t share. Unless there is a full-time stay-at-home dad, and a full-time working-out-of-the-home mom, the mom rules determine the parenting style of a family. Because it’s impossible to have 50/50 breakdown of who sets the rules for parenting, and it’s impossible to parent when you are negotiating every decision, one parent’s style will prevail. It’s not fair to ask the non-prevailing parent to contribute 50% of the work when they don’t get 50% of the input.
It’s like cleaning the bathroom. Most men think the bathroom is clean enough, and most women don’t. There is research to back this up. Which means that you can’t hold a man responsible for meeting standards that are not his own. If the woman wants the bathroom cleaned the way she wants it cleaned then she has to clean it. (Or hire someone.) But the guy can’t do it.
Just as men and women are not equal when it comes to cleaning, men and women are not equal when it comes to career. If you take a male and a female math genius, the women is more likely to choose being a housewife. Please do not tell me there is societal pressure for math Ph.D.’s to become homemakers. There is the opposite, in fact. There is pressure to “live up to your potential.” Yet more women math geniuses choose to take care of kids. Because men and women are different, which is why 50/50 doesn’t work. (Another reason: It’s a financial suicide pact.)
It might seem, for example, that both spouses have equal earning potential, but when kids enter the picture, ambitions change. And most women do not want to advance as far as most men do. But it’s hard to see this proclivity crystalize until the kids have grown out of toddler-hood. And by then it might be too late. So there’s no point in assuming you are the exception to the rule when the stakes are very high and the statistics make it very unlikely.
Additionally, while 1 in 4 women are breadwinners for their homes, this is largely a poor person trend. That is, rich, educated women are driving the trend to stay at home with kids, and poor, uneducated women are driving the trend for women to be breadwinners.
3. Give up housework. Choose some other contribution. Men who do more housework get less sex. There is commentary all over the internet about this research. But the bottom line is that this research goes in tandem with the research that says that no matter how much money women earn, they want to marry a guy who earns more than they do.
Some women will say this is not true. It will be women who do not have school-aged kids. Some women, mostly ENTJs, decide that they have fallen in love with a guy who will not earn as much money as they do, but they love the guy, so it’s fine for them, they decide.
4. Give up being a stay-at-home dad.
There aren’t any. You might think there are, but men who are supposedly stay-at-home dads give up on the idea of “not working” and they start saying they do have a job.
So, for example, a huge number of stay-at-home dads will say they are writers or they are in construction. Because those are jobs you can say you are doing at home and no one needs to give you permission to do them—there’s no need to fake a job hunt.
This is not mean-spirited. I am reporting reality when I tell you that if a dad is a stay-at-home dad with no other job, the world thinks he’s unemployable.
5. Give up trying to something you’re not. Just being you will be a good enough dad. Women are more uptight about kids. I’m not even going to include links for that. If you can’t accept that as truth you probably stopped reading long before now.
Study after study shows that men do not force housework and childcare on women. Men just naturally do not do it. Men don’t mind kids in daycare as much as women do. Men don’t mind a dirty house as much as women do.
If you accept that, then you can accept that your role as a man is to be a man. And the role of a woman is to be a woman. That’s why you chose each other. You decide what that role looks like for you, but no marriage was ever 50/50 and it won’t start now.
Tonight we made a batch of Grape Nut ice cream. I know it sounds strange but it's so good. I grew up with the Igloo which specialized in Grape Nut ice cream (well, frozen custard). It's just vanilla ice cream with Grape Nuts mixed in. Really simple. It adds crunchiness and nuttiness.
Ooh, they just found a new pentagon that tiles—only the 15th so far. What does that mean? It means you can “cover a flat surface using only identical copies of the same shape.”
That was a team, with supercomputers. But what if a person could do that on her own?
She was then a woman in her 50s who had never been to college. (Usually described as a “homemaker.”) She is now in her 90s, and lives in California with her (very Christian!) daughter.
I’ve always loved the sound of the words Fertile Delta. The liquidic sound of the vowels coupled with the l, the hard D of delta, Greek for change, speaks to the power of a seasonal, shape-shifting body. Fertile Crescent makes another lovely pair. Crescent, so soothing, this half-moon, this womanly way to describe the cradle of civilization. Fertile, crescent, cradle, delta.
The opposite of these words: barren.
* * *
When you give birth, you do it with others. When you miscarry, you do it alone. Even if doctors and nurses are present, numbing you, holding your hand, giving gentle instructions, they’re not with you, because what’s happening is both too awful, and too common, to be shared. Nobody wants co-ownership of the failed human. Many don’t even consider it human.
On July 19, 2015, a 43-year-old Cincinnati man named Samuel DuBose was pulled over by a University of Cincinnati police officer, Ray Tensing. Tensing was white. Dubose was black. His car was stopped for missing its front license plate.
Minutes later, Tensing shot DuBose in the head, killing him.
What happened between getting pulled over and DuBose’s death?
After the two men briefly exchange words, DuBose's vehicle is seen to roll forward. Tensing then shoots him in the head. Tensing was indicted Wednesday on charges of murder and voluntary manslaughter.
“This is without question a murder,” said Joe Deters, the prosecutor for Hamilton County, Ohio, at a news conference Wednesday. “He didn’t do anything violent toward the officer. He wasn’t dragging him. And [Tensing] pulled out his gun and shot him in the head.”
“He purposely killed him. He should never have been a police officer,” said Deters.
During the 10 days between the killing and the announcement of the indictment, Cincinnati had seen protests calling for the release of Tensing’s body-camera video. City officials said they planned to release the video once the investigation was complete; the city’s chief of police would say only that he had seen the video and “the video is not good.” The video was released Wednesday.
“This is the most asinine act I’ve ever seen a police officer make,” Deters said. “It was unwarranted. It’s an absolute tragedy that, in the year 2015, anyone would behave in this manner.”
“He wasn’t dealing with someone who was wanted for murder. He was dealing with someone who was wanted for not having a front license plate,” he added. Even if DuBose had fled the scene, it was a minor traffic stop, said Deters, and Tensing should have let him roll away.
“It was so unnecessary for this to have occurred. This situation would never have escalated like this.”
Over the past 12 months, experts and activists have called for the nationwide adoption of body cameras by police forces. They have acquired wide support, including from Hillary Clinton and the family of Michael Brown, the 18-year old man who was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last year. But the adoption of body cameras is rife with complexities and privacy concerns, including who gets to view a video and whether they are a matter of public record. The case of DuBose provides a hint at the roles they will play in the American justice system, both as records that activists will fight to obtain, and as documents that will set the record straight.
On Wednesday, Deters said he probably would have believed Tensing’s version of the story had the body-cam footage not existed. But after watching it, there could be no doubt.
A friend of mine tweeted a comment last night that said “power corrupts” and I tweeted back something snarky about that; turns out she was tweeting about Bill Cosby and I missed the context, so I apologized and deleted my tweet. Turns out I am just as susceptible to the failure mode of clever as anyone else.
But I had additional thoughts on her comment. I think it’s true that power corrupts, or that it can. I also think it’s true that power reveals — which is to say, that with some men and women, it’s not that having power weakens their will or leads them into temptation, but rather that power allows them to indulge in the things that they’ve always wanted to do. They didn’t need to be corrupted. They needed only the means to do what they willed, which power provided.
Ultimately, however, it doesn’t matter if power corrupted or revealed Bill Cosby’s nature. I don’t imagine it matters to the women who were sexually assaulted whether Cosby gave into temptation or indulged in his will, or both. At the end of the day they were still raped by him. And at the end of the day, for decades, they were told there was no point in telling anyone about it because no one would believe them. Corrupted or revealed, Bill Cosby’s power protected him, until it didn’t. I am absolutely sure that the irony of what kicked the Fall of Cosby into high gear was Hannibal Buress, another man, calling Bill Cosby out on stage was not lost on these women, or women in general. The information was out there; women had been saying these things for years. They still needed a man to say it in order to have the world pay attention.
I’m not sad for Bill Cosby. He raped women, he did it for decades, and now everyone knows he did it. He deserves condemnation for it, and he deserves to see his reputation destroyed (he also deserves jail time, which at this point he is unlikely to receive. But I think for a person like Bill Cosby, the destruction of his reputation is probably no less painful than time in a cell). The man was and is a genius, and his comedy mattered to me; I remember being a kid listening to his comedy albums at the West Covina public library and trying (and failing) not to laugh out loud in a place where you weren’t supposed to make a lot of noise. Bill Cosby: Himself was one of my favorite comedy concert films. And by the time Himself was released, Cosby had assaulted 22 of the 35 women featured on that New York cover. Bill Cosby is a genius; Bill Cosby is a rapist of women. The former does not excuse the latter and never should have.
I am sad we are still in a place where women aren’t believed when they come forward about sexual assault, and that it’s such a matter of fact of our culture that The Onion can satirize it. I’m sad and sorry for the women who had to wait until a man came forward to call out Cosby in order for the cultural tiller to shift in their direction. Anita Sarkeesian — who knows something about the bullshit women have to put up with in order to speak — and others have said that one the most radical things you can do is believe women when they talk about their experiences. It seems like a dramatic statement until you take a hard look at that New York magazine cover, and the thirty five women there, bearing witness to sexual assaults over four decades, finally being believed in some cases fifty years later. You realize it’s not dramatic at all.
A large group of school children in New Zealand have honoured their beloved teacher by performing the traditional dance, the haka, as his hearse rolled into the school for the funeral
At least 1,700 boys at Palmerston North Boys' High School on New Zealand's North Island participated in the epic performance for their physical education and maths teacher, Dawson Tamatea.
Tamatea, 55, died in his sleep on July 20, according to TVNZ. He had been a teacher at the school for almost 30 years.
"This was a very emotional and powerful performance," the school wrote on its YouTube channel. "We are extremely proud of our boys' performance and we know that Mr Tamatea would be too." Read more...
In 1882 an American surgeon named William Steward Halsted popularized what’s now called the radical mastectomy. He didn’t think of the idea—one of the first written proposals for a mastectomy was published by a German surgeon in 1719. But it was Halsted who made invasive removal of breast tissue a mainstream part of cancer treatment, and his version of the surgery involved removing the entire breast, along with the nearby lymph nodes and both pectoral muscles. Removing that much tissue at that period of time, before many of the surgical techniques doctors are now familiar with were developed, often left women severely disfigured.
And with the removal of breasts, or pieces of them, came the demand for cosmetic replacements. In 1874 the U.S. Patent Office issued its first patent for a breast prosthetic, to a man named Frederick Cox. The prosthetic was made up of a cotton casing filled with an inflatable breast pad.
In the following years, women would come to dominate the world of breast replacement patents. In 1904, a woman named Laura Wolfe filed a patent for an “artificial breast pad.” Her version was solid, rather than inflatable, and in her patent she described the three things a woman wanted out of a replacement breast: comfort, appearance, and product quality.
Those three things are, largely, still what women want today, though many opt for surgical replacements rather than padded bras. Breast reconstruction is a highly technical and evolving field that employs techniques and technologies from beyond the typical boundaries of surgery—from stem cells to 3D-printed nipples.
It’s hard to pin down exactly how many people get mastectomies in the United States. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, about 35 percent of women with early-stage breast cancer will undergo mastectomies. The rate of women with a genetic predisposition for cancer getting preventive mastectomies is hard to determine too, but according to several studies and institutions, that rate is increasing.
Not everyone opts to rebuild afterward. According to one study about 42 percent of women choose reconstruction, and the rest decide to skip it, citing things like not wanting another surgery and a fear of breast implants. And there are still no breast replacements that restore function—so the decision is purely a cosmetic one.
But for those who do want to reconstruct their breasts, options can be grouped into two categories: implant reconstruction and tissue reconstruction, which relocates tissue from elsewhere in the patient’s body. The two procedures can be combined—using a small implant and surrounding it with tissue, for example—and both have advanced a great deal in the past 10 years.
On the implant side, researchers are working to develop new materials that will last longer and feel more natural. Many surgeons are moving away from gel-like implants to so-called “form-stable” ones. These are often called “gummy bear” breast implants, because they’re more solid than their predecessors. “If you cut the standard silicone gel it will flow out very slowly like molasses,” explains Oscar Ochoa, a plastic surgeon at the PRMA Center for Advanced Breast Reconstruction in San Antonio, Texas, “but [with] these new ones, if you cut the implant down the middle, everything just stays where it is.” Gummy bear implants are still made of silicone, but doctors say they feel more realistic, and will keep their shape longer than other implants.
When it comes to tissue-based reconstruction, doctors have gotten better and better at grafting a person’s own tissue onto their breast. This tissue normally comes from the belly, thigh, or butt, and along with it the doctors harvest the skin, fat, and blood vessels, while leaving muscle behind. “So the technology has been focused on leaving everything that is nonessential for the breast in place, and only taking the stuff that’s needed for the tissue reconstruction,” explains Ochoa.
Different surgeons prefer different techniques. Ochoa is a fan of tissue reconstruction. “I’m biased towards it, I firmly believe it’s the best, most high quality reconstruction there is for the long term,” he told me. There are downsides—taking tissue from another part of the body means more incisions for the patient, a longer recovery period, a steep learning curve on the part of the doctor and the need for a larger team of trained medical professionals on hand. But Ochoa points to the downsides to implants too—the long term satisfaction with implants isn’t always high. They can lose their shape and firmness, and even rupture if the implant gets old. When using the patient's own tissue, Ochoa says the results are often better. “If you see a patient five to 10 years along the line it’s hard to see the scars. And if another physician were to see the patient they’d be hard pressed to tell a surgery had even taken place.”
If tissue is best, why don’t doctors do breast transplants? Ochoa says that putting breast tissue back into an area that previously housed breast cancer is a tricky proposition. Not only are transplants risky, and require the patient to take immunosuppressant drugs, there’s the potential that the new breast tissue could simply develop cancer again and have to be removed once more.
When it comes to tissue reconstruction, Ochoa says that the next big step will involve stem cells—immature cells that can, in theory, grow into whatever kind of cells they are guided to. Ochoa says that some researchers are experimenting with using stem cells along with small injections of fat, to try and promote the growth of fatty tissue in the breast area.
Some have suggested using a patient’s stem cells to regrow an entire healthy breast. Not only are researchers far from having that capability, Ochoa points out that there are some reservations about using stem cells that way too. For the same reason doctors are wary of putting new breast tissue back into a body that once fought breast cancer, they worry that stem cells might promote the development of new cancers. Preliminary studies so far suggest that the implanted stem cells don’t usually promote cancer, but researchers want to do more work to be sure.
But rebuilding a breast isn’t just about creating a soft globe of tissue. Most women that Ochoa sees who opt for breast reconstruction, also opt for nipple reconstruction. Just like with breasts, there are a few different nipple-rebuilding methods. Some women go for a small silicone implant beneath the skin. Others have the surgeon use their own tissue, picking up the skin and wrapping it around itself to make a little standing column. Once the faux nipple is healed, a medical tattoo artist (often a nurse) colors it and the areola. (This may or may not be painful—some women develop feeling in their new breasts, while others never do.)
The problem with nipple reconstructions, however, is that they often don’t hold their shape. “Sometimes as soon as a year [after], it’s all completely gone. Other times it lasts for two to three years,” says Laura Bosworth-Bucher, the co-founder and CEO of a company called TeVido, which is trying to develop a way to 3D-print nipples using a patient’s own skin and fat cells. Bosworth-Bucher says that women she talked to didn’t want to go back in for more surgeries every few years, and that surgeons expressed frustration with their inability to predict which patients’ nipples would last, and which wouldn’t.
Bosworth-Bucher admits that printing nipples was not the first thing she thought of when she encountered 3D-printing technology. They spent the first year hoping to apply 3D-printed tissue technology to wounds and burns. But after she realized there was a lot of competition, and that the clinical trials were long and complicated, she started meeting with surgeons to try and think of another way to use the technology. “It was through a brainstorming session with a couple of plastic surgeons, he says, ‘We’re talking about skin, could you work with fat cells?’ And kind of a classic ‘Aha!’ moment, where he says that and we’re like, ‘Well sure, why not?’”
Now, TeVido is focused on developing a 3D-printed nipple, that can be printed not only to size, but with the exact color a woman wants. The technology works a bit like an old inkjet printer—layering cells one on top of another at the micron level to build up frameworks of blood vessels and tissues. Right now, a nipple reconstruction costs somewhere between $3,500 and $4,000, which is the price range they’re hoping their nipples will come in at. The team hopes to get started on clinical trials in two to three years—and because they’re working on something that doesn’t involve an open wound, with an outcome that’s easy to measure (is the nipple there, yes or no?) they hope the trials will move quickly.
Of course, not all women opt for reconstruction, or nipples, or anything of the sort. But when they do, what they want, still, just like Wolfe said back in 1904, is something that provides comfort, appearance, and product quality. And with advances in technology, they’re getting it, and their options are getting safer, longer lasting, and more realistic.
The new documentary White People opens with the journalist Jose Antonio Vargas approaching white people on the street and telling them he’s “doing a film for MTV on what it means to be young and white.” Each person giggles a bit. To them, the premise, on its face, seems funny.
But it was groans, not giggles, that greeted the news in November that MTV had put out a casting call that asked questions like “Are you being made to feel guilty because you’re white?” and “Are you having a problem with race on social media?” It sounded like a Breitbart.com reporter fishing for a follow-up to the Shirley Sherrod story—an attempt to make it seem as though white people were victims of an increasingly diverse nation, even as headlines keep reminding Americans that race divisions still harm the same people that they have always harmed in this country.
In the days before White People aired, though, professional critics started airing a different kind of disapproval of the project. The consensus seems largely to be that, in the words of Willa Paskin at Slate, the film’s “a little too remedial with and gentle on, well, white people.” The headline for Ken Tucker’s Yahoo review read, sarcastically, “Race Privilege Exists, MTV Discovers.”
Still yet another reaction unfolded when the documentary’s title started trending on Twitter and Facebook last night, with some users accusing MTV of “race baiting” and “whiteshaming.” “Wow,” wrote Ryan Wesley Smith, a 17-year-old Christian speechmaker with 120,000 followers. “Just watched @MTV's #WhitePeople docu. The most racially dividing thing I've ever seen. Really disheartening.”
The spectrum of responses speaks to the difficult but admirable task that Vargas and MTV’s Look Different campaign have undertaken. In some parts of America, “white privilege” and “race is a construct” are catechisms; in other parts, they’re seen as huckersterish buzzwords; in most, perhaps, they’re totally unfamiliar concepts. Popular works of art and entertainment directly addressing racial issues have rightfully focused on minority struggles, which means the notion that whiteness itself can and should be held up for scrutiny is usually only implied. White People makes that idea explicit, telling white people that to understand inequality they need to understand the ways that they’ve unwittingly benefited from it. Aired alongside the likes of Teen Mom and Teen Wolf , it should hit a broad swath of young people who really might stand to learn something.
As one of the folks interviewed in the film says, whiteness is too often seen as “the default”—how can a 40-minute documentary even begin to start deconstructing something so big? White People attempts the challenge with a creative hodgepodge of approaches, all rendered in MTV’s tried-and-true—and, to me and I expect most adults, extremely grating—style of transparently manipulative editing and more manipulative music. Running throughout the program are scenes of town-hall discussions in places like Rapid City, South Dakota; Bellingham, Washington; and Phoenix. Vargas lobs gentle but provocative questions at the largely white attendees, many of whom, it turns out, do possess some racial consciousness. One of the participant offers a particularly brutal assessment of what white privilege means: “You don’t have to show people that you’re one of the”—airquotes now—“‘good ones.’”
But the best parts of the program try to debunk common, defiant responses white people have when told that they’re privileged. A segment revolves around the notion—certainly front of mind for the MTV demographic—that white people are missing out on scholarships because of affirmative action in financial aid. Vargas zeroes in on a white teenage girl named Katie in Scottsdale, Arizona who can’t afford the college of her choice, and for a moment you worry that the documentary is going to validate claims of “reverse racism.” But then Vargas brings in statistics saying that white people receive scholarships at a disproportionately higher rate compared to people of color. During a group discussion, a multiracial teenager points out that he, like Katie, wasn’t awarded any scholarships. “I’m starting to feel like a victim,” Katie says, echoing the sentiments of many white people when made to talk about race—but what the documentary’s actually showing is that she isn’t one.
At one point, Vargas visits the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst, a formerly Italian enclave that has seen an influx of Chinese immigrants. A young white man canvasses the neighborhood to collect signatures to hold a block party, but is turned away by folks who don’t speak English. At dinner, that man’s father says it upsets him that the Asian newcomers in town aren’t very friendly. But Vargas, as well as some locals interviewed on screen, point out that the language barrier is a natural part of the immigrant experience. The Italian Americans acknowledge this; the dinner-table dad himself, it turns out, moved to America at age 5 and had a hard time adjusting. Racial healing? Not quite. But it’s a dose of perspective that perhaps not everyone watching might have come to on their own.
The most moving segment comes early on, when a white gay man from the South who’s attending a historically black college sits down for dinner with a racially mixed group of friends. He starts talking about how he can act “ghetto” just like black girls, and you can see that what he thought was a harmless comment—the exact same kind of comment you often hear from white people who consider themselves enlightened, especially white gay men—is actually hurtful. One of the girls bursts into tears, saying that “ghetto” has often been used to make fun of her. The soundtrack goes tender; hugs are had.
The special’s insistence on making sure that each example of racial misunderstanding is resolved into a moment of reconciliation probably dilutes the message—conversation doesn’t, in fact, heal all wounds in the real world. And the documentary conspicuously relegates the vast history of violence associated with white dominance to a very quick primer during a visit to an Indian reservation. Vargas and his producers likely chose to pull their punches in hopes of keeping the audience as broad as possible, and to placate skeptics who might accuse the show of attacking white people. Judging from some of the reaction that’s unfolded on social media, a lot of those skeptics were never going to be converted anyways. But with its combination of basic fact-giving and straightforward emotional appeal on a subject that white people are usually allowed to be oblivious about, there’s reason to hope that at least some viewers got the message.
Infants use about 240 diapers per month. A year’s supply of diapers costs $936. That means a single mother mother working full time at the minimum wage can expect to spend 6 percent of her annual pay on Pampers alone.
Meanwhile, the two biggest programs that assist low-income mothers, SNAP (food stamps) and WIC, don’t cover diapers or baby wipes.
That might be why, in a study of 877 pregnant and parenting women published in Pediatrics in 2013, a team of researchers found that needing diapers and not being able to buy them was a leading cause of mental health problems among new moms.
For the study, Megan Smith, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, approached women in New Haven, Connecticut, and asked them one simple question:
“If you have children in diapers, do you ever feel that you do not have enough diapers to change them as often as you would like?”
Almost 30 percent of the women responded “yes”—they often lacked sufficient diapers. Their explanations of what they did to “stretch” the diapers reflect the harrowing reasons why so many new moms feel depressed and anxious.
Mothers would take the diapers off, dump out the poop, and put the diapers back on. They would air-dry the diapers. They’d let their kids sit in wet diapers for longer than they should—a practice that can lead to UTIs and other infections. Other moms have reported potty training infants who are less than a year old—at least six months earlier than is recommended—in order to save money.
I learned more about this study during a week-long training with the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, where I am a grantee this year. Smith presented her work to the fellows and described what she’s done to help these mothers. The women told Smith things like, “My self-esteem plummets. I can’t soothe my baby because I can’t put a clean diaper on my baby,” she recalled.
The diaper deficit hurts more than moms’ self-worth: Many daycare centers require a week’s supply of diapers before mothers can enroll their children. Without the required diaper stash, women can’t drop their kids off and look for work.
“An adequate supply of diapers may prove to be a tangible way of reducing parenting stress and increasing parenting sense of competency, enabling parents to be more sensitive with their children, and thereby improving parenting quality and overall child outcomes,” Smith wrote in the study.
Smith now works with the New Haven MOMS Partnership, a support network for new mothers and their children. The Partnership operates several resource centers that offer stress-management classes and job-search help at locations across the city—including in places where moms are already likely to be, like Stop & Shop grocery stores.
The first thing the moms receive when they arrive for counseling? A bundle of fresh diapers.
The release of a video of Sandra Bland’s arrest doesn’t explain how the 28-year-old ended up dead in a Texas jail cell, but it makes a convincing case that she never should have been jailed in the first place.
The traffic stop, in which she was pulled over for failing to use a blinker (after an officer got into the lane behind her, no less) is a good case study in everything a stop shouldn’t be. Did Trooper Brian Encinia really need to pull her over? Once he had, did he need to escalate the encounter? During the exchange, Bland is curt, but not initially combative—and in any case, failing to be polite to a police officer, while perhaps unwise, is not a crime.
There are some questions about apparent edits in the video, which the Texas Department of Public Safety says are technical glitches. DPS also says it will release a new, fixed version soon. But there’s plenty that’s clear from the original version.
Encinia pulls Bland over, asks her for her license and registration, asks how long she’s been in Texas, and then heads back to his car. It’s when he returns that the trouble starts.
“Okay, ma’am. You okay?” he asks. She replies, testily: “I’m waiting on you. This is your job. I’m waiting on, whatever you ...” Encinia says, “I don’t know. You seem very, very irritated.”
Bland explains that she’s upset because she felt like he was tailing her so she got over to get out of his way, and now she’s been pulled over for not signaling. Like many African Americans, she may have seen the stop as a result of “driving while black”—being racially profiled, and then pulled over on some minor pretext. (Friends have noted that she was upset about police brutality in recent months.) As a graduate of Prairie View A&M, she was also probably familiar with the history of tension between African Americans and law enforcement in the area.
Encinia, just as testily, says: “Are you done?”
“You asked me what was wrong, and I told you, so now I’m done, yeah,” Bland replies. He then asks her, politely, to put out her cigarette. She says she doesn’t want to, and she’s in her own car.
That’s where things really go deeply wrong. Encinia says, “You can step on out of the car,” and she declines. He then orders her to step out of the car. He clarifies a few moments later that this is a “lawful order,” a legal term for a demand with which she is required to comply. But why did he issue the order? She seems understandably baffled, and asks him to explain. Encinia never offers a good reason for why he’s ordering her out of the car, and it’s tough to see anything in the order except spite and anger at being questioned by a citizen acting within her rights.
Encinia threatens to tase Bland—“I will light you up!”—and drags her out of the car. He also calls for back up. He tells her he was only going to give her a warning, but now she’s going to to be arrested. She demands, as is her right, to know why she’s being arrested. He doesn’t answer immediately, though later he says she’s “not compliant.” He accuses her of resisting arrest, and she says he’s jerking her around. This is a common pattern in disputed arrests: Police charge suspects for resisting arrest in cases where advocates say the people are not resisting, or in which they are being physically moved by officers who cite the movement as evidence of resistance. The video doesn’t offer any compelling evidence that she is resisting arrest, despite her obvious anger at the officer and a growing string of obscenities. (At one point, she says, “South Carolina has y’all’s bitch asses scared.”)
Later, after another officer arrives, she’s tackled to the ground and protests, “I have epilepsy!” Encinia answers: “Good.” Encinia also tells a bystander—whose clip of part of the encounter was previously released—to stop filming, though he appears to be within his rights in recording the encounter. (Bland shouts, “Thank you for recording!”)
One of the most painful moments in the video is when Bland tells Encinia, “I cannot wait until we go to court.” In hindsight, every viewer knows her day in court will never come. But it’s also possible that everything Encinia did would have passed muster in court, especially since juries, prosecutors, and judges tend to defer to police in close cases. The video does, however, make Encinia’s response to Bland seem outrageous, disproportionate, and inappropriate.
Bland’s arrest fits into the category of police overreacting to perceived challenges to their authority, even provocations as minor as an individual asking why he or she is being arrested. A prosecutor charges that Freddie Gray was given a “rough ride” in a police van as punishment for running away from police and making a scene when he was arrested (an arrest that the prosecutor further charges was unlawful). If Bland had not died—authorities called it a suicide, though they’re now also investigating it as a murder—it’s unlikely that the video would have seen the light of day. It certainly would not have received widespread-media attention.
As my colleague Rebecca Rosen notes, one of the biggest revelations in the Justice Department’s report on policing in Ferguson after Michael Brown’s death was how many egregious examples of police misconduct went essentially unremarked upon and unpunished, simply because they didn’t end with anyone dead. Yet each of those incidents did have a cost: a loss of dignity, dehumanization, a gulf between police and citizens, and often a violation of civil rights. How many cases like Sandra Bland’s are there? It shouldn’t take a tragedy for police to be called to account for abusing their authority.
The biggest change that motherhood has wrought on me is this: whether or not I’m happy is no longer the central question of my life. This disposition is often mischaracterized as selflessness. But if it is in fact selflessness, it isn’t a willed state. I feel the need to care for my son as an itch, an urge. This is what people mean when they describe the rearing of young as a biological necessity. Lest you accuse me of wanting only to usher my own DNA into the future, I’ll tell you a little story.
When my son was almost three, one of my friends sent me a photograph of her newborn daughter. My phone twitched and I pressed the little button and saw the face of a baby in profile, milk-drunk. My breasts tingled with an unmistakable feeling. They were filling with milk. I hadn’t nursed my son in nearly two years. No milk had come in all that time, but now I squeezed my nipples, and milk came out. If there were an earthquake, a bombing, I could nurse the orphans.
For Harper’s, Sarah Manguso writes about her decision to have children after a lifetime of saying she wouldn’t. I liked this piece very much for a lot of different reasons, but I especially liked the way she writes about changing her mind. Lately I’ve found myself expressing an opinion or an emotion and then immediately following it with “but I reserve the right to change my mind,” maybe as an attempt to ward off some kind of moral reckoning; like literally everyone, I hate hearing “I told you so,” and never more than when it comes to really big, life-changing decisions. Like: having kids is a big fucking deal!! Maybe it’s ok to be not ready, or to express ambivalence, or to feel a certain way at one point in your life and a different way at another.
In The Argonauts, Nelson describes debating with Dodge about what language gives us: “Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, murdered.”
“The cause of tragedy,” the philosopher Stanley Cavell writes in an essay on King Lear called “The Avoidance of Love,” “is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.”
Donald Trump's presidential campaign announcement last month was widely mocked, not only for the rambling diatribe he used to launch the campaign but for the actors he paid $50 apiece to cheer for it. Journalists responded with a predictable amount of schadenfreude when it was revealed that the Trump campaign hired actors to attend his rally, lighting up Twitter with jokes at Trump’s expense and “You’re Hired!” headlines. The incident was even memorialized with its own coy shout-out by The Simpsons.
Such claims of “astroturfing,” the practice of using money and outside support to create the illusion of grassroots enthusiasm, are not unheard of in the political sphere. The Tea Party movement faced astroturfing accusations from left-leaning opponents during its early years, as did George W. Bush for letters of support sent to a newspaper editor via his website.
The idea of paying for the appearance of excitement offends the belief that a political campaign’s fortunes should be somewhat rooted in genuine support for a candidate. The kind of grassroots fervor generated by Barack Obama in 2008, Ron Paul in 2012, or Bernie Sanders today is aspirational for campaign organizers. But, for politicians with a dearth of excitement, the reason for faking it is obvious: Phony support can generate buzz and media coverage of their campaign—which in turn could theoretically morph into real support, as voters start to hear more about the candidate.
This tactic hasn’t been limited to bids for higher office. Political protests have also used such services to fortify its crowds: The New York Timesreported that, during this year’s NYC Pride Parade, a group of anti-gay marriage “protesters” were actually several hired day laborers. Local carpenters unions—notably the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters—have been using such tactics for years, paying temporary workers (and often the homeless) to walk picket lines during a strike.
These days, if a candidate or protest organizer is short on numbers, he or she can simply pick up the phone and call a company like Crowds on Demand, a Los Angeles-based company that provides rental crowds for campaign rallies and protests. The company was founded in late 2012 by Adam Swart, a UCLA grad who majored in political science. It is among a very small number of U.S. companies that offers rental crowd services in the U.S. (including Crowds for Rent and the Trump-hired Extra Mile Casting), and perhaps the only one that does so openly.
While Crowds on Demand was initially geared toward corporate events and PR stunts, Swart says that soon after the company’s founding, would-be elected officials began reaching out for his services in order to give their campaigns a boost. Some have used his services to protest opposing candidates; others have used them to create the appearance of larger turnouts at their own events.
“Our business is about cultivating perception. It’s basic marketing,” Swart said.
Outside of the realm of politics, Crowds on Demand offers an array of crowd-providing services, ranging from a “celebrity shopping experience”—the client mobbed by fake paparazzi outside a posh L.A. boutique—to big PR stunts, such as a 100-person flash mob at a corporate trade show. Swart says his gigs have ranged from two people to hundreds, and that with enough notice (and money) Crowds on Demand can offer more than 1,000 people. But whether the setting is a campaign rally or a convention hall, Crowds on Demand’s goal is always the same: getting people’s attention.
Crowds on Demand offers its services in San Francisco, New York City, and Washington D.C. Thousands of people have applied to be extras with Crowds on Demand. Swart says that he has the most “crowd actors” in cities where real actors tend to try to make it—New York and L.A.—but he has actors available in political hotspots such as Iowa and New Hampshire as well. And while his company generally works in more populous areas, it isn’t limited by geography—or ideology for that matter.
“We’re not a Republican or Democratic group, so we’ll work with both. And third parties,” Swart said, adding that Crowds on Demand’s one major prohibition is against working with hate groups.
While Swart declined to discuss which candidates Crowds on Demand has worked for, the company’s fingerprints have occasionally been spotted. Campaign-finance filings in California show that Crowds on Demand was paid more than $50,000 by the “Six Californias” campaign, a failed ballot initiative funded by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper to split the Golden State into six independent states. The New York Post also found that scandalized former congressman Anthony Weiner paid Crowds on Demand actors $15 per hour to turn out for events during his bid for mayor of New York City in 2013.
Similar “crowds-for-hire” companies have also sprung up internationally to create fake support for politicians, including a British company named Envisage Promotions and an Ukranian outfit named “Easy Work,” which paid student protestors $4 an hour to support (and oppose) various politicians. To political experts, these developments are another symptom of a decades-long trend of political professionalization, with campaigns farming out work formerly done by volunteers to a class of paid consultants and specialists. In the case of crowd hiring, it’s actors.
Costas Panagopoulos, director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy at Fordham University, said that he first heard rumblings of the crowds-for-hire idea around the 2010 midterm elections, and is unsurprised that businesses like Swart’s have come to exist. Campaigns already pay for signature gatherers, canvassers, pollsters, direct-mailing services, and extras in feel-good political ads—why wouldn’t they pay to fill a hotel ballroom?
“It’s really another example of just how orchestrated political campaigns are these days, and the degree of attention that’s paid to every dimension. Especially visual elements, like crowd size,” Panagopoulos said.
Though highly-organized and paid-for synthetic support for a candidate may be a fairly new development in American politics, offering a little quid-pro-quo to boost turnout at a political rally is really far from new. “In the 19th century, campaigns did all kinds of things to get people to show up,” said Joe Cummins, the author of Anything for a Vote, which documents seedy campaign tactics used by U.S. presidential candidates throughout history. “If you were an immigrant in those days, the only social safety net was the local precinct of a political organization. Showing up to a rally might mean getting a job, or a meal, or even some money.”
Offering to feed campaign volunteers is generally accepted in American politics; paying them to show up and cheer is up for debate. There might be some gray area between offering a small token of appreciation to otherwise voluntary supporters and full-blown astroturfing, but spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars to prop up a struggling cause seems to fit more squarely in the latter category.
For his part, Mr. Swart is adamant that what Crowds on Demand and companies like it do is ethical—and says it’s more ethical than many other modern campaign tactics. “I say it’s far less misleading than negative TV ads that are often proven to be half-truths or complete fabrications,” Swart said. “I’m engaging with the political process and making people think.”
Still, even Swart admits that a revelation that a campaign is paying for supporters is deeply embarrassing, and he takes great pains to keep his clients’ identities a secret. And for his purposes, probably rightly so. The Trump episode illustrates that the public—and certainly the media—still prefers that crowds be assembled the old fashioned way: flyers, emails, Facebook invitations, and perhaps a harmless slice of campaign-expensed pizza after the party.
I’m a little obsessed with foreign artists’ depictions of America, mostly because the depiction of fashion and architecture is so detailed and careful in a way that Americans would often gloss over. This is Utagawa Yoshitora’s “America,” from 1857 (it’s in the Met). There’s a nice series here, collected by the amazing fashion enthusiast Mademoiselle Iona, which also includes Yoshitora’s portrait of Washington, also from the Met.
Yoshitora actually never came to America, or Europe for that matter, and depended upon prints making their way to Japan. That’s why his version of London seems a little wacky.
July 17, 2014 seems to have started as a normal day for Eric Garner. By the middle of the afternoon, Garner, who was out on bail for several minor offenses, including selling single cigarettes, was on the sidewalk in Tompkinsville, on Staten Island. He had reportedly just broken up a fight when police approached him about selling loosies. Police arrested him, and placed him in a banned chokehold as he protested—over and over—that he couldn’t breathe. Within an hour, the 43-year-old was dead at a hospital.
Friday marks the one-year anniversary of Garner’s early death, and with that it marks the one-year anniversary of the United States’ focus on police violence against black Americans. The story didn’t achieve full national attention until a month later, with Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, but Garner’s death provides a starting point for a litany: Garner, Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray—and many others whose names are unknown or less known. Garner’s last words, the repeated plea “I can’t breathe,” have become a slogan for protestors against police violence across the United States.
Garner’s death was not, of course, the beginning of a pattern; it was only the beginning of a new awareness and attention within the media to something many African Americans have endured and discussed for decades. My colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates has connected police violence against African Americans with a national identity based on the plunder of people of color stretching back to before the nation’s foundation. But the year has been important and potentially pivotal. These stories aren’t going away—this week, there’s a new mystery with the death of Sandra Bland. Here are three important lessons for Americans since July 17, 2014.
First, deaths like this are far more common than many Americans understood. Garner and Brown’s deaths raised two closely related questions: How many people are killed by police every year, and how many people are shot by police each year? People who wanted to know—from reporters to FBI Director James Comey—seemed surprised to learn that there are no reliable statistics to answer that question. Two heroic projects from The Guardian and The Washington Post have gone a long way toward answering the deaths and shooting-death questions, respectively. This isn’t a role that should fall to journalistic organizations, though—the government needs to reliably track the statistics.
Second, building awareness about police violence has proved much easier than doing something about it. Officer Darren Wilson, who killed Michael Brown, was not indicted by a grand jury in St. Louis County. Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who choked Garner, was not indicted by a grand jury on Staten Island. Six Baltimore police officers have been charged with crimes in Freddie Gray’s death, but it remains to be seen whether prosecutor Marilyn Mosby will be able to convict them on the most serious offenses. Baltimore is a particularly disheartening case—although Mosby’s action has been praised as a major step forward—because prosecutors are often wary of charging police, with whom they work every day. It’s been clear for many years that Baltimore’s police department has serious issues with brutality, and the city has had to pay out millions in settlements. Yet Baltimore’s reformist police commissioner, detested by the police rank and file, was just fired amid a spike in crime, which some people think was caused by a work slowdown by those same officers.
Even as traditional methods of cracking down on such abuses have come up short, activists, officials, and victims’ families have found alternative means of holding police to account. Foremost among those is forcing legal settlements and bringing civil cases where criminal cases fail. With the anniversary of his death approaching, Eric Garner’s family reached a $5.9 million wrongful-death settlement with the city of New York, though some people worry that the agreement doesn’t change anything since it has no material effect on police practices. At some point, though, it seems inevitable that the cost of compensation for police brutality will force cities to change practices. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that the 10 cities with the biggest police departments paid out almost $250 million in settlements last year and more than $1 billion over the last five.
Activists have also found a willing and powerful partner in the Department of Justice, which has used civil-rights investigations and consent decrees to force cities around the nation to reform their practices, including in Cleveland and Ferguson. There are other unconventional tactics in use, too—like the civil-rights leaders in Cleveland who discovered an obscure law that could be used to force a magistrate judge to consider arresting an officer in Rice’s death. The effort failed to obtain a warrant, but it renewed attention and spotlighted the local prosecutor’s slow pace in deciding whether to charge officers over the 12-year-old’s shooting.
Third, there’s still so much that the public doesn’t know and much that is left to police discretion. This already-bleak anniversary is made darker by the mysterious death of Sandra Bland. The 28-year-old black woman from Chicago was on driving to Texas for a new job when she was stopped by police near Houston for failing to use a blinker. During the traffic stop, she was eventually arrested in Waller County by a state trooper for assaulting a public officer, arraigned, and sent to jail on $5,000 bail. On Monday, she was found dead in her cell of what the sheriff says is self-inflicted asphyxiation.
Bland’s family rejects that—they don’t believe that she would have hurt herself, noting that she seemed in high spirits even after her arrest on Friday, and saying it’s generally out of character for her. The FBI has now joined the investigation, and a video has surfaced that reportedly shows part of the arrest. But by the time the clip begins, an officer is already physically subduing Bland. There’s still a great deal that is unknown about her arrest and death. Are stops for failing to use blinkers routine in Waller County, or used as pretexts for pulling over certain kinds of drivers? What happened between the driver and the officer? Was Bland the aggressor, as police have it, or was the officer at fault? Are there other recordings of the stop? Did the police act appropriately? What happened between Friday afternoon and Monday morning as Bland waited in her cell?
Many of these things may be unknowable, and others will emerge over the coming days and weeks. What’s clear from the start is that a traffic stop for failing to signal a lane change, involving an African-American woman with no apparent criminal record, somehow escalated to a physical altercation between the officer and the driver and ended with a young woman dead in a county jail cell. Eric Garner’s death one year ago may have been the beginning of Americans paying attention to police violence against people of color, but Bland’s death shows why the anniversary doesn’t offer any closure.
Sarah Hepola is a friend, one of the early writers over at The Morning News, where they just did an interview with her. I haven’t seen her in years, but I always hoped she would write a book one day. Here it is! And it just made the New York Times Bestseller List. Fucking-a-right it did. Huge Congrats, Sepola. You moved all those bricks into a very pretty pile.
…if you’re like me, you know the thunderbolt of waking up to discover a blank space where pivotal scenes should be. My evenings come with trapdoors.
“I’m not angry,” I told her.
“Then what are you?” she asked.
I thought maybe I was bad.
Even my food co-op mother bought a book listing calorie counts, and I memorized those entries like Bible passages. I couldn’t tell you much about John 3:16, but I knew Blueberry Muffin: 426.
I’m not going to say I faked orgasms. That sounds intentional. As if I knew what an orgasm felt like, and I purposefully pretended to be having one. It was more like: Orgasms happen when you’re with men. You’re with a man now. Are you having an orgasm? Probably so! I learned in to these swells of pleasure with loud gasps and moans as if, by moving my arms and legs frantically enough, I might somehow learn to surf.
I knew online dating would come for me someday. It was the fate of all single women in their late 30s to stare down a personal profile, and as far as punishments go, this was fairly benign. Once, my type faced spinsterhood and destitution. Now I had to walk into the gallows of OK Cupid and drum up a good attitude about emoticons.
“You’re a contrarian,” I told him, licking grease off my fingers.
“Is that good?” he asked. “I want to be the thing that you like.”
And it was the first time someone had said this to me, but I recognized it as my driving motto for the past 25 years. It was nice to be on the other side for a change.
I liked talking about writing much more than actually writing, which is an unspeakably boring and laborious activity, like moving a pile of bricks fro one side of the room to the other.
…a glass of champagne, throwing its confetti in the air…
What mattered was that I was doing something I wanted to do instead of merely talking about it.
I wish belief didn’t feel like a choice between blind faith and blanket disavowal. I’m a little freaked out by the certainty on either side.
Ooh, they just found a new pentagon that tiles—only the 15th so far. What does that mean? It means you can “cover a flat surface using only identical copies of the same shape.” 
I’m a little obsessed with foreign artists’ depictions of America, mostly because the depiction of fashion and architecture is so detailed and careful in a way that Americans would often gloss over. This is Utagawa Yoshitora’s “America,” from 1857 (it’s in the Met). There’s a nice series here, collected by the amazing fashion enthusiast Mademoiselle Iona, which also includes Yoshitora’s portrait of Washington, also from the Met.
