“Tampax Compak has a smooth plastic applicator that is half the length of a usual Tampax Cardboard applicator, making it twice as discreet to carry.”
“New! Neat! Discreet!” proclaims an 80s-tastic ad for Playtex Portables.
“The original o.b. tampon … was revolutionary in the world of tampons and played to women's need for discreet yet reliable protection.”
Tampax Compak is apparently so discreet, according to one old commercial, that a teacher mistakes it for a piece of candy, and asks his student to bring it to the front of the class when he catches her passing it to a friend.
You would think once he held it and felt the hard plastic applicator within the wrapper he would figure it out—tampons and candy bars don’t really have similar tactile sensations. But no. “I hope you brought enough for everyone,” he says, sternly.
“Enough for the girls,” the girl replies, laughing. All the boys in the class look around, confused. This is beyond their simple understanding.
In some sense, they can be forgiven. It’s entirely possible these wide-eyed naïfs have never seen a tampon in the wild, given the sometimes painstaking efforts women make to conceal them (the same efforts that products like Tampax Compak are created to facilitate). You can just palm it, or there’s the ole tampon-up-the-sleeve trick. In sleeveless weather, one can tuck it under the bra strap, or in the waistband. Anywhere tuckable, really. Or just bring your whole purse to the bathroom.
My friend Mallory, a project manager for a digital agency in Nashville, used some creative strategies to carry tampons at her old job. Her office was situated at the end of a long hallway, meaning she had to walk past everyone else to get to the bathroom.
“I would make sure I took care of things in the morning and then always have to remember to take my purse with me to lunch,” she says. “And then one day I was in a bind, I had already gotten up to get coffee and then get water and then I came back to my desk and I realized I hadn’t changed my tampon. It feels too awkward to get up from my desk in the middle of the day and walk out with my purse and then walk back in five minutes later. Then I look at my coffee mug, it was empty. So I stuck a tampon in an empty travel coffee mug and walked to the bathroom. And that was my plan.”
Nadine Ajaka / The Atlantic
Mallory also mentioned a friend of hers with an even sneakier approach—this person apparently hides tampons in the bathroom stalls at her office in the morning, and just hopes they’re still there when she returns.
Why go to all that trouble?
Secrecy is a key element of the modern period—the existence of tampons and pads in the first place allows women to “pass as non-bleeders,” as Sharra Vostral puts it in her book Under Wraps: A History of Menstrual Hygiene Technology. Barring any mishaps, the blood is only visible behind closed doors. Women’s public bathrooms have special trashcans in the stalls so feminine products can be disposed of neatly and privately.
Some of this, surely, comes from the disgust associated with all bodily fluids, and a preference to keep dirty-but-necessary animalistic activities (like excretion) cordoned off by bathroom walls, out of the public eye. But if excretion is a great equalizer (Everybody Poops, as the children’s book says), menstruation divides. Only half the population is biologically predisposed to do it, and the other half would largely prefer not to know about it, thank you very much. Many religions have historically dubbed menstruating women “unclean” and secular shame abounds as well, with jokes aplenty about “that time of the month” and teen magazine “Most Embarrassing Moments” columns filled with period-related anecdotes.
“Menstrual etiquette requires that women hide the fact of their periods…from others, especially from men. Accordingly, they take great pains to keep hygiene products out of sight,” writes Rebecca Ginsburg in her 1996 study “‘Don’t Tell, Dear’: The Material Culture of Tampons and Napkins.”
Pads and tampons themselves often seem designed to be hidden—for one, there’s the plethora of smaller, more “discreet” designs like Tampax Compak and U by Kotex Click, and a couple years ago Tampax introduced its “Radiant” tampons, which boasted a “softer, quieter wrapper.”
But companies wouldn’t make these products if people didn’t want them. “Incorporating discretion into our products is important because it’s important to our consumers,” Melissa Dennis, the senior brand manager for U by Kotex, told me in an email. “Based on an internal study conducted by Kimberly-Clark [Kotex’s parent company], 95 percent of tampon users reported that tampons are discreet to wear. However, the same study showed fewer tampon users reported tampons were discreet to carry.”
“It’s just one more thing that dudes don’t even realize that we as women have to think about and plan,” Mallory puts it.
In her study, Ginsburg, now director of the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, looked at 150 different packages of feminine hygiene products, and found them generally to be “relatively plain” and to avoid “any reference to the physicality of the objects inside or to their use.” White, pink, and light blue were the most common colors (“Significantly, there was no red on any of the boxes or bags”) and “very few packages contained clear plastic that would allow the consumer to see into the box.” Ginsburg describes this as “the distancing of these products from any suggestion of actual use.”
This was almost 20 years ago, of course. Things are a bit more vibrant than that today in the feminine hygiene aisle, with bright purples, pinks, and yellows (you’d still be hard-pressed to find a red, though) and floral or starburst patterns alongside simpler packages. Still, a more colorful packaging palette doesn’t mean people are eager to put their tampons on display—according to Dennis, in 2014 the compact section of the tampon market grew four times faster than tampons overall.
It’s at least understandable why people are motivated to keep used feminine products concealed—social stigma aside, it’s messy, it’s private—but what’s embarrassing about a clean, unopened tampon? Is it gross by association, like carrying a magazine into the bathroom—everybody knows what you’re going in there to do? Maybe hiding hygiene products is just another way of keeping the poised, public self separate from the animal functions of the body.
Or maybe it’s just savvy self-protection. In one study, people had worse impressions of a woman who dropped a tampon out of her bag than if she dropped something innocuous like a hair clip, and even avoided sitting near her.
Even people who are completely comfortable with their periods might choose to conceal them to avoid that kind of reaction. Efforts to destigmatize menstruation are becoming more mainstream, with even brands getting in on the action with commercials that subvert tampon-ad tropes (like women wearing white spandex and dancing through their periods) or show a girl’s first period as something to be celebrated. “U by Kotex believes that women should not feel like they have to keep the fact that they are menstruating hidden or to have to conceal their products in public if they don’t want to,” Dennis says.
But taboos don’t change that quickly. If there’s a chance open-carrying a tampon in public will only get someone disrespect, maybe she’ll think it’s better to keep it up her sleeve—literally.
Have you read this piece in the New York Times about the Russian Troll Factory where hundreds of highly paid employees are paid to spread disinformation and leave pro-Kremlin comments in regular news outlets?
They’re believed to be behind a chemical explosion hoax in Louisiana that partially played out on Twitter:
Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @AnnRussela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.
Nature can be prettyterrifying sometimes (we’re looking at you Australia), but it can also be pretty magical as shown in this new video from a snorkeler in Palau.
It was shot in a body of water called Jellyfish Lake, which is home to millions of the alien-like animals.
The species seen here is the golden jellyfish, which are always on the move as the sun rises and sets to expose the light to their symbiotic algae.
Before sunrise, the jellies cluster along the saltwater lake’s western shore. Each morning around 6, when dawn brightens the eastern sky, they begin to swim toward the light. Pumping water through their bells, these jellyfish use a type of jet propulsion to follow the sunlight until they nearly reach the eastern shore—stopping just short of the shadows caused by lakeside trees.
They also are pretty harmless, so swimmers don’t have to worry about getting stung by the numerous creatures. Because they’ve been isolated to this one spot, their sting has gradually gotten weaker to the point where you would hardly feel anything, according to The Nature Conservacy.
Anyone is allowed to snorkel around in the lake, you just can’t go scuba diving.
“Swimming with literally millions of jellyfish was absolutely surreal,” the uploader writes in the caption. “A reminder that there will always be surprises out there!”
When I consider my friends I’m overcome with pride. They are accomplished, interesting women who are also funny, empathetic, and inspiring. And yet among those who gravitate towards men, few have partners.
This is both by choice—we’re all reaching an age at which we’re unwilling to compromise—and by circumstantial compulsion. Why aren’t there more men who are willing and able to match them in professional success, ambition, intelligence, kindness? If not romantically, then platonically?
This poem by Louise Gluck slices to the lonely heart of female excellence with such a sharp blade, I hesitated to share it with the woman it most reminds me of. “She’s used to playing by herself”— did my friend need someone else to articulate that? I’d witnessed firsthand how relentless her energy is, her persistence in hitting the metaphorical softballs. I know she knows she has no rivals. I’m almost loath to praise my friends to their faces sometimes—the genius single mother who works harder than I can fathom, the trailblazer whose brilliant writing barely pays—because they are very familiar with the ways in which they’re strong, yet their assets have become their thorns. What does it mean to become great in the face of circumstances you resent? How do you celebrate your power when it’s come out of a painful reality beyond your control?
After some deliberation, I did send it, because the greatest support we can offer each other now may not be cheerleading or praise. The refrains of “girl power” and “empowered women” are part of our blood, too natural to need acknowledging, and almost insulting to articulate given our obvious strengths. What I want to provide my friends with now is recognition. If we must be alone, let us not be unseen.
Charlotte Shane (@CharoShane) is a writer whose work can found at charlotteshane.com. Her TinyLetter is so much more than cool links.
Just to clarify before we begin, San Andreas is not the kind of movie one should see if one requires such elements as “realism” or “dialogue” or “originality” or “plot.” It cares not at all for scientific accuracy, or logic, or narrative cogency, and its most pressing structural concern seems to be the maximum amount of tension its characters’ physical attributes can impose on Lycra without their clothes giving up the good fight.
All this acknowledged, it’s enormously entertaining, thanks to the undeniable charisma of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and the wanton CGI destruction of all of the West Coast’s greatest landmarks (in 3-D, no less). Johnson plays Ray Gaines, a burly Afghanistan veteran who spends his days as a rescue-helicopter pilot for the Los Angeles Fire Department. His soon-to-be-ex-wife (Carla Gugino) has found new love with a gazillionaire architect (Ioan Gruffudd), his daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) is heading off to college, and the now-separated spouses are trying to move on from the death of another daughter, Mallory. All is calm, until an earthquake of unprecedented proportions forces Ray to go AWOL with a helicopter and rescue his family.
Ray’s plot is juxtaposed with that of Lawrence (Paul Giamatti), a seismologist at Caltech who coincidentally happens upon a new method of predicting earthquakes approximately five seconds before one comes along that happens to be 50 times more intense than any mankind has ever experienced. As far as timing goes, it’s pretty rough. Still, Lawrence joins forces with a local-news reporter (Archie Panjabi) to try and find ways to warn the state of California that the ground is about to fall out from underneath it, presumably under the impression that way too late is better than never. If nothing else, it adds him to a lengthy list of scientists in disaster movies who predict that Very Bad Things are about to happen (The Day After Tomorrow, Dante’s Peak, 2012, Deep Impact, etc).
San Andreas, for all its lumbering attempts at understanding and explaining something as complex as seismology, is nevertheless breathtaking in its simplicity. Ray, when told that his ex-wife is currently atop a skyscraper in the middle of an earthquake, turns the helicopter around and tells her that he’ll be right there to save her (if not the thousands of other doomed people in the building, one of whom, bizarrely, is the Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue). Blake is somehow guileless, sweet-natured, innocent, and yet enormously practical in an emergency, looting an electrical store, a fire truck, and a number of empty buildings while trying to get to high ground—with the bizarrely confident knowledge that her father will find her. The obvious bad guy, who pretends to be a good guy quite convincingly for his first few scenes, turns out to be a real heel after all. And when Ray needs a helicopter (or a truck, or a plane, or a boat, or a parachute), lo and behold, he finds one.
The screenplay by Carlton Cuse (Lost, The Bates Motel) is perhaps the biggest disappointment, only because it seems like such a clunker coming from an accomplished writer. The film’s extreme succinctness when it comes to dialogue is remarkable, even for a dumb action flick: “Let’s go get our daughter.” “I’m gonna get you out.” “People need to know that the shaking is not over.” And yet, somehow, the whole thing is kind of a blast. The movie takes a sanitized approach to the theoretical greatest mass disaster in American history—there are no shots of bodies floating in the water, or even so much as a lone kitten stranded in a tree. There’s no ethical complexity, or nuanced storytelling, and very few surprises. When Ray finds out Blake is stranded in San Francisco, he deprives earthquake-leveled Los Angeles of one of its few rescue helicopters with nary a moment’s thought. He’s a man on a mission to save his daughter, and God help the walls or steel gables or 100-feet tsunamis that get in his way.
As Ray, Johnson is intensely committed to his hero’s journey while making the case that he’s as stolid and dependable a national treasure as Mount Rushmore. Gugino and Daddario are consistent, if unexceptional, but San Andreas finds more charm in two brothers with plummy British accents: Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt), a wannabe architect and a love interest for Blake, and Ollie (Art Parkinson), his younger sibling, who provides much-needed comic relief. But the primary thrill of the movie, indubitably, is watching various terrifying acts of nature pit themselves against a 6 foot 5, 260-lb leviathan of a human being and then promptly wither in their unworthiness.
The secondary thrills are in director Brad Peyton’s gorgeous sequences of live-action ruin porn. Spoiler: It all falls down. But in 3-D, seeing the Hoover Dam crumble into obsolescence, the Golden Gate Bridge shatter, and downtown Los Angeles topple to the ground like a particularly unwieldy Jenga tower is eminently satisfying. Knowing that The Rock is going to do his best to add to the ongoing mayhem and destruction—when was the last time you wrenched a car door off to free a girl while dangling from a helicopter in a narrow precipice, after all?—is just the icing on the cake.
“But I was reading.” Photo by Ash Hernandez, via Cathy De La Cruz (@SadDiego)
Hello Captain!
I have an situation that I don’t think has been discussed: how do you deal with Stranger Mansplainers when you are a lady doing things normally associated with manliness & they can’t fathom how a lady could figure out how to do such things?
For me: I am a lady & I participate in an activity that involves pulling trailers behind trucks. Backing the trailer into a parking space so you can go participate in the actual event is a frequent occurrence. I’m usually at these events by myself & can back up my own trailer, thank you very much. But I frequently encounter dudes who refuse to believe this is the case. I have had them bang on the windows of my truck, yell at me to stop, & block me from backing up my rig, all when I have a completely clear path & am not in danger of hitting anything. I’ve tried the “thank you, but I’m fine” approach but they refuse to move until I follow their directions. Sometimes they tell me to do exactly what I was already doing, other times they want me to follow a completely convoluted path that makes no sense. Even better, they usually follow it up with something along the lines of “if you don’t get hysterical, it’s easy!”
Other than going to the event management, how can I deal with this? It makes even more fun when the Mansplainers have their own rig that they parked like a Picasso painting, but it still sours the event for me. I don’t have any history with these dudes, they’re just total strangers who see a lady driving a truck & trailer and assume incompetence. Please help.
I’ve Been Backing My Own Trailers For A Long Time, Eff Off.
Dear Eff Off,
I think it’s worth reaching out to the organizers with this to see if they can’t send out some kind of safety reminder, like, “Hey, if you offer to help someone back up, and they say they’ve got it, it means they’ve got it. Get out of the way!” Treating it like a safety issue (which it is), rather than a sexism issue (which it also is) is going to have the cleanest chance of getting through.
You could also try a not-moving standoff. Dude won’t move until you take his directions? You won’t move until he gets out of the way.
But the truth of it is: You’re doing everything right already and there is no way to preemptively get these guys to stop acting like jackasses. You can’t control their behavior at all by phrasing things differently. So what remains is to deliver the message very clearly in a way that (hopefully) amuses you.
To do this, first, decline the offers verbally just as you have been. “Thank you, I got this!”
If the interrupter persists in standing behind your truck and waving his arms at you, beckon him over, roll down your window, and hand him this flyer from the stack you keep in your glove box.
Prepare for lots of sadface and “I was just TRYING to HELP YOU you are SO RUDE, JEEZ” pouting. Feel no need to smooth it over. No condescending insistence on “helping” complete with condescending “don’t get hysterical” comments? No condescending flyer!
We could all use more “Florida Man” with his crazy antics in our lives, and fortunately we have two of them running for president.
Marco Rubio has officially declared his candidacy, and Jeb Bush is expected to officially throw his hat in the ring soon, even though he sort of already let it slip a few weeks ago.
And so the Independent Journal Review took the next logical step and developed a new Chrome extension which replaces any instance of their names with “Florida Man.”
More importantly, it will also randomly swap all references to “Florida Man” with one of the two candidates, creating some amazing headlines like this one:
No that didn’t actually happen to Rubio. but it certainly makes reading about the already crowded Republican race much more entertaining.
Once you download and enable the program, head on over to Florida Man’s Twitter account for endless fun.
Summer in Switzerland means people jumping into rivers, in the middle of major cities (!), their clothes tucked away in waterproof bags, and then peacefully drifting for long distances. Eventually they hop out and get their dry clothes out of their bags. These design-y waterproof seabags from Büro Destruct & Kitchener are perfect for this. Also, wish our NYC water was as clean as the rivers and lakes in Switzerland. (le sigh)
When the Border Patrol stopped Jessica A. Cooke at a checkpoint, the 21-year-old was about to earn her degree in law-enforcement leadership from New York’s public-university system. Due to her course work, she knew her rights as an American. She chose to complain when her rights were violated. And, as a result of that decision, the unarmed woman was pushed, thrown against her car, and tased.
The Watertown Daily Timestells her story, but there’s no substitute for watching the altercation that left her on the ground screaming in pain and incomprehension:
Cooke is an American citizen. The Border Patrol stopped her inside the United States. Although she was close to the Canadian border, she had not crossed into that country. And she produced a New York state driver’s license to confirm her identity. Even if one believes that the Border Patrol ought to operate internal checkpoints within the United States—which I do not—showing a valid I.D. ought to be enough to allow motorists to proceed.
This video suggests that there was no probable cause to search this woman’s trunk, which was later shown to contain nothing illegal when it was opened without her permission. She should have been permitted to drive away unmolested, not forcibly detained while a canine unit was called, apparently from an hour away. And the male Border Patrol agent clearly and needlessly escalated the situation.
“If you want to know how Cooke ended up on her back, screaming in pain as the barbs from a stun gun delivered incapacitating electricity into her body, there are several possible answers,” Reason’s Jacob Sullum writes. “You could say this indignity was caused by her own stubbornness, her refusal to comply with the seemingly arbitrary dictates of a Border Patrol agent who was detaining her ... Or you could blame the agent's insistence on obeisance to his authority, which led him to assault an unarmed 21-year-old woman who posed no threat to anyone. But the ultimate responsibility lies with the Supreme Court, which has invited this sort of confrontation by carving out a disturbing and dangerous exception to the Fourth Amendment.”
His article adeptly runs through the relevant case law.
What’s additionally galling is that even with video evidence showing Border Patrol agents misapplying the case law and then meting out wholly unnecessary violence, Cooke is more likely to be charged with assaulting an officer than the officers themselves are to be disciplined. Her video will presumably be an asset if she goes forward with a lawsuit. “If I can take it to Supreme Court, I will take it to Supreme Court. I should never have been detained,” she told her hometown newspaper. She added that she is still in the early stages of applying to U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement to become a federal law-enforcement officer herself. “Of course I second-guess it,” she said, “but it takes something like this and someone like me to change it.”
The 2-year-old cat has been stealing various items from nearby homes in Portland since he was 6-months-old, and he doesn’t appear to be giving it up anytime soon.
He’s taken toys, frisbees, gloves, towels and garbage, but he is particularly fond of shoes and flip flops.
The furry little thief has accumulated about half a dozen pairs according a recent report from to Fox 12 News. And the number keeps growing.
“I don’t know what’s more impressive, getting them both at once or going back for the second one,” said his owner, Gabbie Hendel.
Hendel has been posting pictures of the stolen goods on Instagram as well as her neighborhood’s Facebook page with the hopes of tracking down the owners.
Here are a few photos of Snorri’s haul, including some fresh items from the last few days.
“Guess the news segment didn’t help,” writes Hendel.
Last December, another cat burglar in Russia became famous around the world for sneaking into a shop and stealing some expensive seafood.
His life of crime ultimately landed him a new home and a position as as the mascot of a local hockey team.
Now Snorri has become a bit of a feline celebrity as well, so apparently crime does pay… if you’re a cat.
You can also follow him and keep track of his thievery via his own Instagram account @snorrithecat.
For the person who wants to cook Indian food but doesn’t have the patience, time, or wherewithal to learn all the spices and wait for the pot to boil, from an expert in lazy cooking.
In 2002, four Danish scientists began examining grocery receipts. This may sound like a waste of taxpayer dollars, but in fact it was the kind of experiment other scientists describe as “elegant.” For years, science had been grappling with the unexplained health benefits of wine—wine drinkers seemed more resistant to coronary heart disease and certain cancers, but no one knew why. Predictably, there was a large-scale effort to rip wine apart in search of whatever compound was working its peculiar magic on the human body and turn it into a pill. (Resveratrol was one.) The Danish group came at it from a different angle. They didn’t need a gas chromatograph. They needed receipts. They wanted to know what else all those healthy wine drinkers were buying when they visited the supermarket.
Altogether, they examined 3.5 million transactions from 98 supermarkets. They found that wine drinkers didn’t shop the same way as beer drinkers. Wine drinkers were more likely to place olives, low-fat cheese, fruits and vegetables, low-fat meat, spices, and tea in their carts. Beer drinkers, on the other hand, were more likely to reach for the chips, ketchup, margarine, sugar, ready-cooked meals, and soft drinks.
Perhaps the health of wine drinkers isn’t caused by wine so much as by the fact that wine drinkers like wine in the first place. The greatest predictor of health, these results suggest, doesn’t come down to this or that nutrient. It comes down to what a person finds delicious.
— Adapted from The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor, by Mark Schatzker (published by Simon & Schuster in May)
Female operators at Midvale Company payroll machine in Time Office, April 29, 1949 (Kheel Center / Flickr)
Austin has a new City Council. Seven of its members are women; four of them are men. This—a majority-female governing body—is a nice milestone, but the city manager’s office saw it as something else, too: a potential challenge when it comes to communication and getting things done. That office recently offered a training for city staff who regularly interact with the City Council members: a crash course, it seems, on how best to interact with ladies in a professional—and political—context.
The talk, given by two speakers from Florida (and recorded by Austin-American Statesman reporter Lilly Rockwell) was dripping with condescension and bursting with benevolent sexism: It included helpful insights into women’s relationship with numbers (they don’t like them!) and questions (they love asking them!) and briefing documents (they won’t read them!).* At one point a presenter—his qualifications for giving such a talk being that he had been a city manager in a Florida town with an all-female city commission—confided that he’d received some of his revelations about how women in politics go about their business by way of his 11-year-old daughter. (“In a matter of 15 seconds, I got 10 questions that I had to patiently respond to,” he recalled—an experience that “taught me the importance of being patient” when it comes to communicating with the lady folk.) The other presenter, Miya Burt-Stewart, shared such gems as, “Men have egos, women have wish lists.”
This kind of thing—women, seen and thus portrayed as mere girls in high heels—is, sadly, not unusual. Look through the Internet, which, in its Internet-y way, is full of advice on interacting with both women and children … and it can be hard to tell the difference between the two.
With that in mind, here’s a quiz: Based on these tips collected from the Wall Street Journal, the Statesman, the Business Analyst Times, Jezebel, Wikihow, and other advice-givers, can you tell whether the advice in question is being offered for interacting with women in the workplace, or for interacting with children? And thank you, of course, for being patient with my questions.
* This article originally stated that both presenters were male. We regret the error.
Could this be Airhead High? (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, via YouTube)
Recently I mentioned that during service on the jury in a Washington D.C. criminal trial, I had been alarmed to hear a police officer nonchalantly talk about catching a fleeing suspect from behind and then whacking him with an “ass baton.”
When the trial was over, the judge explained what had really been going on.*
This is the category of language mix-ups known as Mondegreens. A reader adds:
I once sat through an honors ceremony in college in which people kept referring to Airhead High School. I was very upset; did any school deserve such a derogatory term?
After a while, I saw a program, and came to understand that it was Arrowhead High School. That's what a Wisconsin accent can do to the language.
* Explanation of the “ass baton”: It’s actually an “ASP baton,” as explained in the earlier post. But no one says it the way it’s spelled. As one friend pointed out: “The P is silent. Like the pee in pneumonia. Or in swimming pool.”
It’s been a rough week but if you’re reading this it means you’re still alive. Or that you have very good internet reception in the afterlife. Either way, this calls for a small celebration:
It’s the small things, y’all.
*******
And now, our weekly wrap-up. Buckle-up, Buttercup.
Shit I made in my shop (Named “EIGHT POUNDS OF UNCUT COCAINE” so that your credit card bill will be more interesting.):
I think we’ve all been this drunk. (Victor says this sloth isn’t drunk but I’m pretty sure all sloths are drunk/and or high. That’s why they’re so slow and adorable and why they aren’t allowed to operate heavy machinery.)
This week’s wrap-up is brought to you by a book you should check out: Surviving Mental Illness Through Humor by Alyson Herzig & Jessica Azar. One in four people suffer from mental illness and this book aims to break that stigma with tales of hope, despair and hilarity by writers walking their own mental health journey as they discuss their experiences with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, anorexia, agoraphobia, panic disorder and more. I ordered several copies because it’s right up my alley and probably yours. Bonus: They lowered the price this month in honor of May being Mental Health Awareness month. Buy it here.
Ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi is seen behind bars during his trial at a court in Cairo May 8, 2014. (Reuters)
Just under three years ago, Mohammed Morsi assumed office as Egypt’s first freely elected head of state, a milestone in the “Arab Spring” struggle for democracy. On Saturday, the same Egyptian state condemned him to die. A court in Cairo has sentenced the former president to death for conspiring with foreign militants during a prison escape in 2011. The ruling comes one month after Morsi received a separate 20-year sentence for inciting violence against protesters while in office. Egyptian authorities have detained Morsi since his overthrow in July 2013.
The sentencing triggered international outrage. Amnesty International called the verdict a “charade based on null and void procedures” and demanded Morsi’s release or retrial. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president and an erstwhile supporter of Morsi, also condemned the decision.
“The popularly elected president of Egypt, chosen with 52 percent of the vote, has unfortunately been sentenced to death," he said at a rally in Istanbul.
“Egypt is turning back into ancient Egypt,” he added.
The country’s sudden and complete reversion to authoritarian rule, however, is a distinctly modern phenomenon. General Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, Egypt’s ruler since overthrowing Morsi in July 2013, has overseen a sustained crackdown of political opposition, recriminalizing membership in the Muslim Brotherhood and imprisoning thousands of Morsi supporters. In recent months, the al-Sisi regime has sentenced hundreds of people to death, including 100 others condemned alongside Morsi on Saturday.
Meanwhile, Morsi’s predecessor—the 87-year-old Hosni Mubarak—may soon win back his freedom. On May 8, an Egyptian court upheld a three-year sentence against the former dictator, who governed Egypt from 1981 to 2011, but said that prosecutors were considering releasing him due to time served. Mubarak’s sons Alaa and Gamal, arrested alongside their father in 2011, were released in January and have recently reappeared in public.
Mubarak gets 3 years in prison. Morsi gets referred to the Mufti for potential execution. Let this sink in for a minute.
The United States, once a full-throated supporter of Egypt’s fledgling democracy, has quietly acquiesced to the country’s authoritarian revival. In March, President Obama lifted an arms freeze against Egypt and told Al-Sisi that the White House would support resuming $1.3 billion in annual military aid “in the interest of U.S. national security.”
Morsi’s eventual execution is by no means assured, and his case will likely undergo a lengthy, uncertain appeals process. The next step in the process, though, has been announced. On June 2, Egypt’s Grand Mufti, the country’s maximum Sunni Muslim authority, must decide whether Morsi will be executed. In a Shakespearean twist so familiar to Egyptian politics, the Grand Mufti was originally appointed by Morsi himself.
Either this ape thinks he’s a tiger, or these tigers think they’re tiny apes.
An orangutan at Myrtle Beach Safari in South Carolina started looking after some tiger cubs after watching employees at the park tend to the little cats.
Because monkey see, monkey do.
In the video above he feeds them with a bottle, hugs them and cuddles with them… and watching it might make your heart explode.
The clip is from Discovery Family Channel’s new series “My Dog’s Crazy Animal Friends” which highlights various interspecies friendships.
It was originally posted last week on their Facebook page, and it now has over 55 million views.
Back in February, Google released a new ad for Android that featured a bunch of the odd couples as well.
Mostly for this: So we wanted to return to this question, "Why do people feel so distant from people in poverty?" When we were planning our coverage, we just kept coming back to that "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" phrase.
We tracked down a linguist, and she said that it was originally this term that was used to describe how absurd somebody's ideas were. It was used in this time when inventions were taking off and industrialization was beginning, so people were coming up with a lot of harebrained schemes, and that phrase was used to describe them. And then, I think James Joyce was one of the first people to use it to connote upward mobility, and now it is universally used as shorthand for the American Dream, but we've completely lost sight of how absurd that idea is. I always thought about it as absurd in the assumptions it makes about how people move out of poverty, but I didn't think about it as absurd in its very construction. I think even those of us who are really familiar with the phrase kind of lost sight of where it came from.
Eric Thayer / Reuters
Who is the news made for? In answering that question, the free market tends to sniff out potential readers with a good amount of spending money, because they’re more attractive to advertisers. But that can exclude entire communities—tens of millions of people—with relatively low incomes and levels of wealth.
How might the media start to serve the informational needs of these overlooked swaths of the population? That’s the question that Sarah Alvarez is interested in answering. Alvarez currently works in public radio in Michigan, where she is a senior producer for State of Opportunity, a grant-funded reporting project that focuses on how poverty shapes the lives of local families.
She’s heavily influenced by the work of James Hamilton, a Stanford professor who studies the market dynamics of information. With Hamilton’s work in mind, Alvarez started Infowire, a pilot project that caters to low-income news consumers with stories about education, food, and healthcare, among other topics. (She’ll be thinking about how to expand this project during her upcoming John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford.) I spoke to Alvarez about what it would look like if the media started delivering information that was relevant to people of all financial backgrounds. The interview that follows has been edited and condensed for the sake of clarity.
Joe Pinsker: You recently reported a story about the origins of the phrase "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps." Can you say a little bit about where that phrase came from and how it shapes the way people think about breaking cycles of poverty?
Sarah Alvarez: I had just started producing specials in the way that I really wanted to, to take them away from call-in shows, which I hate, and have better production value. So we wanted to return to this question, "Why do people feel so distant from people in poverty?" When we were planning our coverage, we just kept coming back to that "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" phrase.
We tracked down a linguist, and she said that it was originally this term that was used to describe how absurd somebody's ideas were. It was used in this time when inventions were taking off and industrialization was beginning, so people were coming up with a lot of harebrained schemes, and that phrase was used to describe them. And then, I think James Joyce was one of the first people to use it to connote upward mobility, and now it is universally used as shorthand for the American Dream, but we've completely lost sight of how absurd that idea is. I always thought about it as absurd in the assumptions it makes about how people move out of poverty, but I didn't think about it as absurd in its very construction. I think even those of us who are really familiar with the phrase kind of lost sight of where it came from.
Pinsker: Yeah, I thought that story was well done. So, can you talk about the nature of the information gap that affects many low-income communities, and what it is about the media industry that perpetuates it?
Alvarez:Yeah, and of course, all of this goes back to James Hamilton [a professor of communication at Stanford University]. He gets tremendous props for caring about this. His story of how he came to study this is really interesting. I heard him describe it as, he was in a convenience store, and he saw a newspaper that was basically just made up of people's mug shots—super weird. And it was one of the only newspapers in this convenience store, and he's like, "What the hell is this? How is there a market for this and not a market for news? If people are willing to buy this, what are they not being served by traditional media?"
The research that he does is really interesting because he notes that even when low-income news consumers are taking in media at very similar rates to people who have more money, they're not being served by the media because the media is obsessed with their target audience. I know that to be true. I'm sure you know that to be true. In public radio, there's this person we consider, called "Mary." Sometimes, when people are pitching stories, somebody will say, "Well, why would Mary care about that?" And Mary is in her 50s, she's well-educated, she's white, she's affluent. And Mary is not Maria, you know?
It's not that low-income news consumers are not interested in being served by media, but there are these huge information gaps that result from targeting higher-income consumers. So the stories aimed at them, especially issues in low-income communities, those stories are more like, "Look at what's happening on the other side of town." And there's this very behind-the-museum-glass mentality. If you're in a low-income community and you see that story, that might be validating if it's done well. But it's not informative. It's not helpful.
Pinsker: So how do the needs and, more importantly, wants, of low-income news consumers differ from those of people who are more well-off?
Alvarez:I wish I knew more. There's just not enough people working on this, so most of what I know, I'm looking at proxy studies that are close but not exactly right. We know that people want more information about local news. They want better information on how they can make decisions. I also know from my reporting that people need more information on how to navigate certain systems because that information is put out by groups or government offices that are bad at filling information gaps.
Pinsker: When you say "systems," what do you mean?
Alvarez:Healthcare, education, benefits—but it's not only stuff like that. It's just that systems are involved. Low-income people have a lot more interactions with systems, and there is not a lot of reporting on where those systems truly break down. There are a lot of stories like, "Oh! We're cutting off benefits for these people." But there's not a lot of information on how to navigate those systems. The thing that totally got me interested in this was what James Hamilton said about how when information gaps exist, accountability is what suffers. And that's when I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is what I want to do." There's also not a lot of stories about, "Who do you hold accountable?" There are a lot of stories about, "Business is totally messed up," but there are not stories that say, "And this is whose doorstep that lies at."
Pinsker: I know that some of your thinking requires setting up low-income news consumers as very different from people who are not low-income news consumers. But how do you think they're similar? Is there something lost when you try to draw a dividing line between those demographics?
Alvarez: Definitely. I think they're much more similar than they are different. I think that we've gotten into trouble as media organizations by thinking these populations are so different, because all they want is high-quality news, high-quality information. Coverage of parenting is a really interesting place to look at this because you'll see this examination of parenting ad nauseam in publications that are aimed at me, basically—moms who are in their thirties or forties. There's so much information on parenting, but it's aimed at people with a ton of economic resources. If that would just be written not for rich people, then it would be useful to everybody. It's not that low-income news consumers need a different article. It's just that rich people don't need their own article, necessarily.
Pinsker: So it's clear to me that there's a moral or democratic case for filling the information gap. Do you think there's a good argument for doing that, from a business perspective?
Alvarez: I think there's more of a business case for doing it. Again, I wish I knew more. I feel like somebody has to know this, some for-profit. In public media, we'd be the last to know. [Laughs] I feel like for-profit news organizations must know that they're missing a giant slice. You see commercial endeavors really targeting lower-income individuals—yes, sometimes in ways that are predatory—but a lot of people have changed their business models. But news is so far behind. We haven't figured out how to bring those folks in, and I'm not sure why. I don't think it's because there's not a good business case. I think it's because news organizations are under siege, and they're just freaking out and not thinking clearly.
Pinsker: You talked a little bit before about how reporting on systems and where systems break down can be really useful to a low-income audience. In general, do you think the information gap that you're talking about should be filled more with service journalism and stuff that's intended to deliver actionable information? Or do you have more narrative-based reporting in mind? Or maybe both of those things?
Alvarez: I think the information gap is just so big that it needs to start with more information, with a little narrative tint. And then I hope that other people who are really skilled at narrative will do that. But I think that already exists, storytelling projects that are more focused on narrative.
Pinsker: From what I understand, the biggest single project of yours that's trying to put Hamilton's ideas into practice is Infowire.
Alvarez:Right. And by biggest, that's like incredibly small. [Laughs]
Pinsker: What is its distribution strategy? Do you think about that differently than how most media companies might think about delivering stuff to a middle-class or upper-middle-class audience?
Alvarez:I think what we know about how people access information is it's increasingly more mobile, and it's increasingly online. So I definitely make Infowire to be web-first, and sometimes the stories have radio pieces attached to them. Infowire has a text component where you can get an alert sent to your phone. I think that I have to have a real distribution strategy, but first I really want to know where the information gaps are before I figure out a strategy of how to get information to people. There's more information on how people are consuming news than on what it is they want from that news. Pew has done a ton of work on how people get news, so I think distribution is the least of my problems. That's better understood than anything else.
Pinsker: Have you seen any other publications or media outlets try to cater to low-income news consumers? Are there any models out there for you to pattern any of your work on?
Alvarez: Yeah, there are. I think ethnic press and local—super, super local. Because they're more inclusive, right? Their target consumer is already kind of a small universe. If you look at how the Spanish-language press handles immigration, it's super information-driven. It's helpful. It's written in a way that's accessible for everybody.
The most information-heavy pieces that I see are generally in the local press or ethnic press. After Ferguson, it was the same thing: There was a lot of information-driven coverage that was very, very local. Nobody else was picking that up, but nobody else really needed it. It was made for people in that community.
Pinsker: Now I have a thought experiment for you. Let's say you somehow gain control of a small but significant part of The New York Times's newsroom. You get it for a month. What sorts of stories are you going to send people to report on? How are you going to tell editors to start thinking differently about the stories that they assign?
Alvarez: I have not thought about that. I should. I think The New York Times is doing a good job on some of their desks already. I bet the city desk is doing a good job with that. So I think I would send people on the exact same stories, but I would say, "OK, how much more information do we need to know who's accountable for this?" Or, "How much more information do we need to know not just that this situation sucks, but how somebody is going to make it better?"
If there's a story just about how broken something is, or how something sucks, or how great something is, I would want fewer of those, because they're not informative. I'd want fewer of those, or I'd just want them to be shorter. It's not that this coverage needs to be wildly different—just tweaked in a way that it's accessible to everybody, where it's not just one type of person who's supposed to benefit from this information. That slightly different angle is not going to alienate people in your "target audience." And I think that that's just what I want to do, to make these things more inclusive.
In a classroom at the University of Pennsylvania, more than a dozen black girls and women gather on a recent Saturday afternoon. A simple game begins as an icebreaker for the workshop. “Stand up if your racial identity ever made anyone doubt your abilities,” the session’s leader says. Everyone stands. “Stand up if you’ve ever been told to act like a lady.” Everyone stands again. “Stand up if you’ve ever been called aggressive or bossy.” Universal affirmation. “Stand up if you’ve ever taken AP classes.” Less than five rise.
Across generations—from high-school students to professionals with salt-and-pepper hair—a common reality appears. “Day-to-day things—you’re bossy, you’re aggressive, you’re not ladylike—all of us share that experience,” explained Melanie Horton, a 17-year-old senior from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. Horton helped lead the session, which focused on gender, race, and class expectations and was part of a recent “Penn Summit,” a symposium sponsored by the school’s Center for the Study of Race & Equity focused on exploring the educational lives of black girls and women.
With a tone of resignation, Horton recalled a counselor who she said doubted her aptitude for an honors biology course. She also spoke of a teacher who belittled her in front of an entire class after she questioned the cost of an Advanced Placement exam. “Constantly being treated as if I don’t belong” led the teen to transfer out of her district’s only public high school to a cyber school—a move that Horton described as “the best of a bad situation.”
A mounting body of evidence suggests that black students across the country face daunting odds in their quest for an equitable education. Federal statistics show that black students in the U.S. are suspended and expelled three times as often than white students. Research on racial discrepancies in discipline underscores that the higher rates of punishment among black students don’t correlate with a greater tendency to violate school policies—rather, the data suggests they’re disciplined more harshly than whites and other students for identical infractions. A number of studies also suggest that racial stereotyping by teachers is a key reason black students are often stigmatized as both troublemakers prone to misbehavior and underachievers incapable of academic excellence.
Given the growing recognition that race and poverty hinder educational opportunity and outcomes, leaders ranging from policymakers to businesspeople have committed to tackling this crisis. Yet their interventions and solutions are centered on boys of color. This often renders black girls all but invisible.
“The gender-exclusive focus on boys (of color) as ground zero … continues to undermine the well-being of our entire community,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia who cofounded the African American Policy Forum, a gender and racial-justice think tank based in New York City. “We have to accept that there are wrongs that are happening to black girls.”
Much of the current discourse revolving around boys of color is driven by President Obama’s signature initiative,
My Brother’s Keeper, which is aimed at removing barriers to education and employment—closing the “persistent opportunity gaps” faced by this demographic. Launched last February, the program has since expanded to include 60 of the nation’s largest school districts, pledging to improve access to preschool and gifted courses, reduce suspensions and expulsions, and boost graduation rates. And in a nod to this initiative, just last week Obama announced a nonprofit spinoff—My Brother’s Keeper Alliance—which comes with more than $80 million from major corporations, among other backers, for programs earmarked for young black and Latino men.
The president’s crusade is spreading across the country. In Washington, D.C., for example, the public-schools chancellor and mayor earlier this year promoted their own version of My Brother’s Keeper: An initiative titled “
The emphasis on boys is also gaining traction in Boston. There, Nikki Delk Barnes, the principal fellow at KIPP Academy Boston, which is part of the national KIPP charter network, has designed programs to change the trajectory of boys’ lives. “Our school is 100 percent black and Latino, so everything is targeted to that group,” Barnes said. When school staff looked at trends for the 2013-14 year, however, a troubling pattern surfaced: The boys were suspended twice as often as the girls were. “While our suspensions are lower than the average [rate] in Boston Public Schools, we were not excited about this,” she said. “It was my job to change our culture and build up our male students’ ability to manage their emotions.”
Barnes in part credits gender-exclusive advisory groups that meet daily with empowering the school’s boys—giving them the agency and voice of which they’re so often deprived. “It’s the place where we learn that their parents broke up, dad just got out of jail, or a brother was shot,” she said. “It’s where they have a chance to argue and fix it before they jump into work for the day. It’s absolutely crucial to our desire to have students’ voices heard.” Moreover, to build rapport and trust with the school’s families, Barnes started after-school “Mother to Son Meetings,” in which mothers, grandmothers, and aunts get together to discuss raising males. Based on the Langston Hughes poem, Barnes said, the meetings offer a “very organic space to cry, laugh and be open with their challenges.” Genuine student-teacher relationships, paired with high expectations for all students, are the school’s core ingredients, Barnes continued, but these factors are especially important for black boys because “low expectations have been their enemy.”
But for Crenshaw, a scholar in race and gender theory, the widespread targeting at boys only is a shell game. “Even though we might experience racism in different ways,” she said, “at the end of the day, it’s a group experience—and at the end of the day, the solutions should be a group experience.” She points to D.C., where
Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration is touting its initiative as a testament to its commitment to “advancing achievement and opportunity … for boys and young men of color.”
Yet the challenges faced by their female counterparts don’t seem to get as much attention—even though one in four black girls in the nation’s capital will become teen mothers. That significantly lowers their prospects for high-school completion.
In D.C., black girls stack up poorly with black boys on measures ranging from school satisfaction and attendance to reading at grade level. In some areas, they fare far behind their peers. Nationally, the same holds true. Black girls are six times more likely to be suspended from school than white girls are, compared to black boys, who are suspended three times more often than their white peers are. In interviews, black girls report feeling marginalized in learning environments that they often describe as unsafe and unwelcoming and subjected to sexual harassment and violence. And family responsibilities, like caring for siblings, disproportionately fall on black girls. Societal biases and gender-based obligations often combine to derail their education.
Black girls are mostly ignored in policy discussions. This in turn results in scarce research-based interventions designed to improve the outcomes for this demographic, often leaving the false impression that girls are fine and don’t have a problem. To position the needs of black girls more prominently in policy talks, a new school of thought and action led mainly by women of color is emerging. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Women’s Law Center, and the African American Policy Forum are changing the status quo with reports, studies, and the #WhyWeCantWait movement—which is urging Obama to include women in his initiative—that challenge single-gender racial agendas and the erasure of females of color.
The responsibility that schools and educators have to better support black girls is also gaining attention. Sherell McArthur, an educational researcher at Georgia State University who studies black girls, says understanding among teachers and administrators about how race, gender, and class affect students differently is fundamental.
Research has found that educators focus more on the behavior and attitudes of black girls than on their academic development, dismissing them as “loud,” “ghetto,” or “sassy,” McArthur said. This is an obstacle to the academic success of black girls if educators judge them based on their presentation instead of their intellectual abilities, she said.
“When we examine … the unique racialized-gender position of black girls, we have to focus on the intersections of race, gender and class,” she said, emphasizing the need to create more opportunities that allow their voices to be heard. “Black girls are judged according to a meter of white girlhood as the standard.”
Horton, the high-school senior, found the power to push boundaries and speak up through a girls-rights organization in Philadelphia. The group sponsors activism trainings on gender justice designed and facilitated by girls of color and works to bring these issues to the forefront. “I think it’s interesting that the labels that we’re all given are so unified among all of us,” said Horton, who plans to study psychology and sociology at Tufts University in the fall.
“It brings up the scope, so it no longer feels like a personal issue,” she said. “It’s a societal issue.”
A Washington DC man noticed his backyard security light flash on in the middle of the night this week, and when he went over to investigate he saw this.
Two baby foxes had discovered one of his pet dog’s tennis balls and were playing with it like a couple of puppies.
He captured the whole thing on video through the window so you can watch and squee to your heart’s content.
The new season of their show may not start until July, but Key & Peele released a new sketch online this week that couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time.
“Had to release this one early,” wrote Jordan Peele on Twitter.
Just one week after the riots and protests in Baltimore, the comedy duo addressed the multitude of cases that have emerged recently in the United States involving police misconduct.
In the bit, Keegan-Michael Key is being arrested for no reason by a white cop when a mysterious man intervenes showing him a magical world where black people can live freely without fear of being racially profiled.
“You won’t get followed when you try to shop,” they sing. “You can wear your hoodie and not get shot!”
But is it too good to be true?
A new installment of "these are sometimes dreams I have" Uncensored – Key & Peele – Negrotown http://t.co/8m7QesAsIp
Psst. I know what everyone is really hoping you’ll cook this weekend, and I’m sorry, it is not that kale salad. Okay, maybe not if these people are gluten-free, or opposed to butter, burnt sugar and stretchy yeasted breakfast treats. You probably shouldn’t make this for anyone on a juice cleanse or auditioning a paleo lifestyle. And now that I’ve ruled most of the people on this earth out, maybe I should stop talking about “everyone” when what I really mean is me.
Jet lag from my vacation has been hitting me hard, but I found the time in between naps yesterday to make it to the grocery and cook up a good meal to last me through the end of the week. I’ve had this idea for Curried Potatoes with Poached Eggs kicking around in the back of my head for a couple months now, so I decided it was the perfect no-brainer thing to make while I try to shake my brain out of vacation mode.
I love making quick tomato curry sauces because they’re super fast and provide tremendous flavor to anything (see Quick Curried Chickpeas). This time around I used potatoes as my inexpensive bulk ingredient and added eggs to provide protein and keep me full. A little fresh cilantro on top gives the dish a fresh note and balances the spicy curry (you can use mild curry powder if preferred). I poached my eggs in the sauce just to make things easier, but if you want a prettier presentation or more control over how the yolks are cooked, you can always fry up your eggs in a separate skillet and just lay them on top of the curried potatoes. Either way, the creamy yolk is awesome with that spicy curry sauce. YUM! :D
Wash the potatoes well, then cut into ¾-inch cubes. Place the cubed potatoes in a large pot and cover with water. Cover the pot with a lid and bring it up to a boil over high heat. Boil the potatoes for 5-6 minutes, or until they're tender when pierced with a fork. Drain the cooked potatoes in a colander.
While the potatoes are boiling, begin the sauce. Peel the ginger with a vegetable peeler or scrape the skin off with the side of a spoon. Use a small holed cheese grater to grate about one inch of ginger (less if you prefer a more subtle ginger flavor). Mince the garlic.
Add the ginger, garlic, and olive oil to a large, deep skillet (or a wide based pot). Sauté the ginger and garlic over medium low heat for 1-2 minutes, or just until soft and fragrant. Add the curry powder to the skillet and sauté for about a minute more to toast the spices.
Add the tomato sauce to the skillet and stir to combine. Turn the heat up to medium and heat the sauce through. Taste the sauce and add salt, if needed. Add the cooked and drained potatoes to the skillet and stir to coat in the sauce. Add a couple tablespoons of water if the mixture seems dry or pasty.
Create four small wells or dips in the potato mixture and crack an egg into each. Place a lid on the skillet and let it come up to a simmer. Simmer the eggs in the sauce for 6-10 minutes, or until cooked through (less time if runny yolks are desired). Top with chopped fresh cilantro.
Notes
If you don't have a large deep skillet like mine, a wide pot will do the trick. Make sure your skillet or pot has a lid and is big enough to hold the potatoes.
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Step by Step Photos
Start by scrubbing two russet potatoes (about 2 lbs. total) to remove any dirt. Dice the potatoes into 3/4-inch cubes. (Mine were closer to one inch, but smaller is definitely better.)
Place the diced potatoes in a large pot and cover with water. Put a lid on the pot and bring it up to a boil over high heat. Boil the potatoes for 5-6 minutes, or until they’re tender when pierced with a fork (the total cooking time will depend on the size of your cubes, so check them by poking with a fork. When the fork slides in easily, they’re done.) When they’re finished cooking, drain in a colander.
While the potatoes are cooking, you can begin the sauce. The sauce starts with my favorite duo: ginger and garlic! Mince two cloves of garlic and peel about one inch of ginger. You can use a vegetable peeler or the side of a spoon to scrape the skin from the ginger. Once peeled, use a small holed cheese grater to grate the ginger. I like ginger a lot, so I used about one inch, but it’s flexible.
Add the ginger and garlic to a deep skillet with one tablespoon of olive oil. Sauté over medium-low heat for 1-2 minutes, or until the ginger and garlic are a little softened and smell fragrant. If you don’t have a deep skillet like this, you can use a pot. Just remember, it needs to be big enough to hold all those potatoes later.
Next, add 2 Tbsp curry powder. This is the curry powder that I use and I like it quite a bit. You can use hot or mild. If you only have mild curry powder but want to make it hot, you can add a little cayenne pepper.
Add the curry powder to the skillet and continue to sauteé it with the ginger, garlic, and oil for another minute or so. This toasts the spices and amplifies their flavor.
Next add one 15oz. can of tomato sauce. If you live in a country that doesn’t have “tomato sauce”, you can use any puréed tomato product, although you may have to add salt to the sauce later.
Add the tomato sauce to the skillet, turn the heat up to medium, and let it heat through. Taste the sauce and add salt if needed (I didn’t add any, but it will depend on the tomato sauce you use).
Add the boiled and drained potatoes, then stir to coat them in the sauce. If it seems really thick and pasty at this point, add a couple tablespoons of water.
Make four little dips or wells in the mixture, then crack a large egg into each one. Place a lid on the skillet and let it come to a simmer. Simmer the eggs for 6-10 minutes, or until cooked through (if you prefer a runny egg, let it simmer for less time). Alternately, you can fry the eggs in a separate skillet and just place them on top of the potatoes before serving.
Lastly, roughly chop some fresh cilantro and sprinkle over top. Perfection!
Tons of flavor, very filling, simple, and cheap. Just my style. (Homemade naan is awesome for dipping in the sauce.)
I was in a prenatal class the first time I realized I was a fraudulent mother. “Dads,” said our instructor, a lithe doula with a faint British accent and an aura of calm reassurance similar to Pigpen’s dust-cloud corona, “It’s up to you to be a support while the moms begin to actively labour.” I froze and tried to focus on the wood grain of the expensive white-oak floor.
We held fistfuls of rapidly melting ice (a pain-management exercise) and we visualized palm-fronded beaches (another pain-management exercise). Between those activities, we talked at length about the miracle of birth—or, more specifically, the logistics of how the tiny, alien beings curled up inside the various uteri in the room might emerge into the great wide world.
“And sometimes,” the instructor continued her thought, “the best way to get the baby out is the same way you got the baby in there in the first place.” She shot an impish grin at the anxious faces sitting around her, a ring of bleary-eyed proto-parents wedged on bolsters and worn batik pillows on the floor of a yoga studio in downtown Toronto.
Around me, people giggled. I didn’t get it. And then, just as the feeling started to return to my soggy, ice-numbed palms, I did. As the doula recommended positions to accommodate third-trimester bellies and reassured the earnest dads with their hands on their pregnant partners’ lower backs that, no, it was highly unlikely that their emphatic thrusting would hurt their kid-to-be, even during pre-labour, a clammy discomfort set in. I wondered, briefly, if I should ask for clarification: Would siphoning a syringe of freshly-thawed semen and passing it to my pregnant partner, lying on a bed, help us shake out our baby?
Friends have described this phenomenon as “lesbian dad syndrome”—the condition of feeling like an impostor, a fake, experienced by the non-gestational half of a two-mom couple. Some of the feelings that overwhelmed me on the floor of that yoga studio were rooted in the deep anxiety that I’d have no real place as a parent; that in the absence of a biological connection, I wouldn’t know how to love my kid; that without that innate tie, our bond would be brittle and fraught.
But above and beyond that prenatal panic, my uneasiness was more basic: I felt profoundly, alarmingly alienated from everyone else in the room. I wasn’t just an apple in a room of oranges. I was a hedgehog in a room of bowling balls. Queer motherhood felt like an unwitting conscription into a freak show.
There’s a deep irony in that statement, I know. At least as long as I’ve been alive, the LGBTQ community has been fragmented by debates over which issues to prioritize, which fights should commandeer the most attention and energy. The ones that win out—the ones that inspire the loudest ruckus and capture the public attention—are the ones that most closely align with mainstream (read: middle of the road) mores; same-sex marriage and the rights of gay and lesbian folks to become parents are chief among those causes. For years I’ve sided with dissenters who argue that these issues are not just assimilationist (read: pandering to family-values diehards), but only relevant to a privileged few. When trans women of colour are being killed in the streets, when disproportionate numbers of LGBTQ youth are homeless, how can we justify yelling about gay weddings?
It’s easy to take that stance when I live in Canada, where I’ve had the right to marry my girlfriend for a decade now, where daycares that refuse to take in the children of a lesbian couple can be held in violation of the human-rights code (sorry, Indiana). And yet, and yet: I can imagine few things that fall further from the radical roots of queer culture than getting hitched. Or having babies.
In theory, I still subscribe to those beliefs. I've always felt itchy about the idea of marriage in general; I've bristled at the prospect of aspiring to create the kind of gay poster family that will sell a Subaru. Yet becoming a parent has made me feel more queer—not just gay, or lesbian, but defiantly, non-normatively queer—than I've ever felt in my life. More than anything else I've experienced, motherhood has made me feel profoundly alienated from straight people and straight culture.
I tried hard not to feel like a fraud in that prenatal class—I was so good at holding ice, for so long!—but there was something so jarring about the realization that even in the most progressive enclave, a New Age-ey course in a sandalwood-scented multipurpose wellness centre, with vegan snacks and herbal tea that tasted like bark, in a wholly gentrified pocket of downtown Toronto, taught by a smart, politically informed doula, would revert to a default mode of heterocentrism in the context of parenting. I wanted that moment to be the exception; I’ve been forced to confront the depressing reality that, when babies and mommy culture are involved, it’s almost always the rule.
It feels shitty to make that kind of blanket statement, and I’ve never predicated my friendships on the basis of sexuality. Most of my best friends are straight! Nearly all of my favourite parents are straight! But outside of my cozy, queer-conscious niche, it seems, there’s no space for the kind of mother I am. I read parenting books with a kind of abject horror, half-convinced that Dr. Sears, paragon of attachment theory, is secretly some kind of throwback stand-up comedian. In his world, mothers are primal, selfless nursing machines, saintly hosts for the mewling beings they’ve birthed and which remain basically fused to their bodies for close to a year.
Fathers appear for wacky cameos, to anxiously bounce their infants just long enough to let their wives grab a 15-minute shower. (New moms let themselves get filthy, apparently.) Mothers, I’ve learned, have an uncanny sense of their newborns’ every need; they physically ache before a cry is audible; they’re so attuned to their children’s auras that they would never accidentally roll over on top of one while co-sleeping. Dads, those doltish galoots, have breast pockets on their button-down shirts in which they can keep pens (babies love them, apparently?), and can hum in low voices. Sometimes, husbands—always husbands, always—become jealous of the new additions monopolizing their wives’ bodies and breasts, and they want sex. (New moms need to understand that new dads need attention too, apparently.)
The realm of parenting is alarmingly gendered, alarmingly binary. More and more, the openness I used to feel in unfamiliar circles is dissipating. I’m on guard, anticipating that I'm stepping into a morass of presumed heterosexuality—because I am. Not long before my kid catapulted into the world, a full six weeks early (but healthy!), I joined two different Facebook groups: one specifically tailored to LGBTQ parents, and another general forum for local moms, though a brave dad or two might comment on a thread from time to time.
The disparity between the two is startling. I’m grossed out by the idea of only sticking to “safe spaces” with people like me, but it’s tricky to navigate a zone where a mom is not only assumed to come as part of a matched set with a dad, but is, without fail, the person who carried and birthed her kid. I wince at the periodic “Ladies, don’t you hate how lazy your husbands have been since the baby arrived?” posts; I feel heartsick when gleeful moms share threads full of photos and marvel to each other about how much their infant resembles them/their husband/”a perfect combination of us both.” I lurk, morose, knowing how often I’ve scanned my kid’s face in the hopes that, through some strange magic, he might’ve absorbed elements of me through osmosis. I fret, not only about myself and other queer moms (who, by and large, seem to be completely absent from this community), but also about whether any of the other parents have adopted, or struggled with fertility issues.
Gender, more than anything, is a hellish quagmire in parenting culture. Our kid has a bike helmet with flowers; I brace myself for critical comments from people who’ve decided we’re using him to make a political statement. (It’s just an adorable helmet!) My own relationship with gender is complex—I’m a girl, I’ve always been a girl; I yearn, often, for androgyny; I’m constantly at war with bras and breasts and anything else bound up in performing femininity; I wear makeup and feel like I’m in drag—but I anticipate, already, the complicated territory I might encounter if I decide to get pregnant. And then I think about trans folks I’ve known who’ve conceived and carried their own kids, and how fucked it must be to come up, again and again, against the notion that pregnancy is some acme of femininity. (I’m grateful in these moments for the advent of Butchbaby, for the concept of “alternity” wear.)
I didn’t grow up assuming I’d someday become a mom. Around a decade ago, my own mother told me I was the “least maternal” person she knew—an assessment based largely on the fact that, as a kid, I eschewed dolls in favour of stuffed animals and My Little Ponies. But even when I idly considered the concept, this particular challenge never crossed my mind. I didn't anticipate how much I'd be on constant alert, that I'd find myself changing the words in Dr. Seuss books (not everyone has a dad).
More than anything, I didn't anticipate how much parenthood would reanimate my investment in queer politics, in being out, in fighting not just for the causes that affect me but for everyone on the radical fringes. Becoming a mom, so far, is amazing. It’s weird and fascinating and hilarious and exhausting. And it’s the farthest I've ever felt from the norm.
Start by scrubbing two russet potatoes (about 2 lbs. total) to remove any dirt. Dice the potatoes into 3/4-inch cubes. (Mine were closer to one inch, but smaller is definitely better.)
Place the diced potatoes in a large pot and cover with water. Put a lid on the pot and bring it up to a boil over high heat. Boil the potatoes for 5-6 minutes, or until they’re tender when pierced with a fork (the total cooking time will depend on the size of your cubes, so check them by poking with a fork. When the fork slides in easily, they’re done.) When they’re finished cooking, drain in a colander.
While the potatoes are cooking, you can begin the sauce. The sauce starts with my favorite duo: ginger and garlic! Mince two cloves of garlic and peel about one inch of ginger. You can use a vegetable peeler or the side of a spoon to scrape the skin from the ginger. Once peeled, use a small holed cheese grater to grate the ginger. I like ginger a lot, so I used about one inch, but it’s flexible. 
Add the ginger and garlic to a deep skillet with one tablespoon of olive oil. Sauté over medium-low heat for 1-2 minutes, or until the ginger and garlic are a little softened and smell fragrant. If you don’t have a deep skillet like this, you can use a pot. Just remember, it needs to be big enough to hold all those potatoes later.
Next, add 2 Tbsp curry powder. This is the curry powder that I use and I like it quite a bit. You can use hot or mild. If you only have mild curry powder but want to make it hot, you can add a little cayenne pepper.
Add the curry powder to the skillet and continue to sauteé it with the ginger, garlic, and oil for another minute or so. This toasts the spices and amplifies their flavor.
Next add one 15oz. can of tomato sauce. If you live in a country that doesn’t have “tomato sauce”, you can use any puréed tomato product, although you may have to add salt to the sauce later.
Add the tomato sauce to the skillet, turn the heat up to medium, and let it heat through. Taste the sauce and add salt if needed (I didn’t add any, but it will depend on the tomato sauce you use). 
Add the boiled and drained potatoes, then stir to coat them in the sauce. If it seems really thick and pasty at this point, add a couple tablespoons of water.
Make four little dips or wells in the mixture, then crack a large egg into each one. Place a lid on the skillet and let it come to a simmer. Simmer the eggs for 6-10 minutes, or until cooked through (if you prefer a runny egg, let it simmer for less time). Alternately, you can fry the eggs in a separate skillet and just place them on top of the potatoes before serving.
Lastly, roughly chop some fresh cilantro and sprinkle over top. Perfection!
Tons of flavor, very filling, simple, and cheap. Just my style. (Homemade naan is awesome for dipping in the sauce.)
