YouTuber Josh Hawkins uploaded a new video called “The thug life chose me” in which he tosses a variety of objects into various containers and lands them perfectly every time.
Of course we don’t see all the practice attempts, but it still takes a lot of skill.
Watch him chuck CDs, toilet paper, garbage, plates and toothbrushes, and put everything in its place.
The above video was posted on Reddit Sunday with the uploader asking if anyone knew what it was, piquing everyone’s curiosity while at the same time turning their stomachs.
“I don’t know, but it shouldn’t be on your f-cking hand,” writes one commenter.
The caption is in Thai and describes the creature as a Nemertea, or a ribbon worm, which shoots a proboscis (elongated nose) out of a hole above its mouth to capture prey.
Presumably, that is what is going on here.
When not stretched out like an alien life form, the proboscis normally sits in “a fluid-filled chamber above the gut,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
And here’s a description of how it works from NCSU:
When the animal senses a prey organism nearby, a circular muscle layer around the proboscis sheath rapidly and vigorously contracts. This contraction forces the fluid from the proboscis sheath into the proboscis and, in the process, literally turns it inside out, blowing it out of the proboscis sheath. The proboscis will rapidly (within a second or so) wrap itself around the prey, which is then drawn to the mouth and eaten.
So that mystery is solved, but we may never understand why this man is gleefully holding one of them as it tries to eat him.
First of all, let me say that I feel really bad for everyone who is losing Dave Goldberg in their life. I feel bad that he will not get to see his two kids grow up. His death is very sad. I have not had a spouse die or a parent die and I’m sure the experience is more awful than I could even imagine.
Still. I can’t help but wonder how he died. It is completely standard in journalism to report the cause of death when the announcement is made. After the initial, cursory announcement of death, major publications frequently run an obituary when a famous person dies, yet the Wall St. Journal and the New York Times ran formal obituaries and still mention nothing of the cause of death.
If there were suspicion of murder, there would be a police report.
If there were some sort of complicated condition that Dave kept a secret, the death announcement could follow a time-honored tradition of being vague and uninformative, like saying “heart condition” or “muscular complication” or even “degenerative disease”.
Let’s say he has a terrible disease, like the one in Still Alice, where he will die early and so will his children. And let’s say his children do not know and the family has chosen not to tell them. Fine. The announcement could use that same, vague language.
If the family does not want to talk about the cause of death, it seems that the most logical thing to do would be to announce some sort of vague cause that would stop people from asking questions. But surely the family knows there will be questions if they say nothing. Dave and Sheryl are the most vocal couple on the planet about how to have a dual-career marriage, and one half of that marriage is gone. Of course people will ask questions. The best way to stop the questions is to give a vague, boring cause of death.
So the only explanation I can see for being totally quiet on this topic is that he killed himself.
Why is this important? Why do I get to ask the personally invasive question about his death?
Because Sheryl Sandberg, who was married to him, is not only Facebook’s COO, but she is also the author of the book Lean In. That book tells women that they should have a career like Sheryl’s. And, most significantly for this post, that women should pick a spouse like Dave.
Sheryl has said over and over again that it is because of her spouse that she is able to Lean In (which, loosely translated, means work insanely long hours and have kids and have a great marriage).
I want to know, how can someone Lean In as a single parent? I wonder how someone will Lean In when there is no other parent to comfort a sad child.
If this sounds spiteful and ugly it is. But I think it is also appropriate, and whoelsewouldsayitbesidesme?
Most people have something in their life that prevents them from leaning in. I don’t actually even think this is a gender thing. I coach hundreds of men whose earning power plateaus because they won’t relocate or they won’t work weekends, or they want to be home for spring break. It’s not that we are victims of life, it’s that at some point in most of our lives there comes a time when something else is more important than Leaning In.
I don’t have any evidence that it was a suicide. All I have is someone notable died and no one is saying how. And however Sheryl’s husband died is news, since she has been news for three years telling women their husband is instrumental into the process of Leaning In.
But really, I just want to know how Dave died. Because I think he killed himself. And if he did, this might tells us a lot about what happens when both people in marriage Lean In.
On Friday night, Jason and I were hanging out on the back deck after dinner. The boys were instructed to get pajamas on before picking out a movie to watch. Noah and Ezra were allowed to make a pit stop at the candy bowl for dessert; Ike had refused to eat any dinner so he was to go directly upstairs.
Suddenly, we heard some very, very distressed crying coming from the kitchen. Ike was sitting by the candy bowl and wailing.
"What's wrong, what happened?" I asked.
"IT'S HOT!" he cried.
"What's hot?"
"NOTHING!"
That was a damn dirty lie and we both knew it.
"Did you eat something you weren't supposed to, Ike?"
"NO," he sobbed. "YES."
Yes, indeed. Out of all the clandestine candy options he could have gone with, he'd chosen very, very poorly:
I purchased this chocolate at food & booze festival we attended a couple months ago, and I purchased it because the ghost peppers are like built-in portion control. It is physically impossible for me to shove all this chocolate in my mouth hole and that's a good thing. One or two small bites is about all I can manage.
I have no idea how much Ike ate, but I'm pretty sure he could see through space and time afterwards.
Take this milk, son. It's time for your vision quest.
Tl;dr: When Mom says you can't have any candy, don't try to sneak some candy. It'll bite ya back.
BETRAYAL BY EYE MAKEUP: THE AMY STORCH STORY
On Sunday morning, my very first thought upon waking up was that my arms were itchy. Very, very itchy. Also, I was pretty sure my eyes were open, but I couldn't really see out of them that well.
I got up and stumbled to the bathroom and squinted at my face, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with it. (I am not a morning person. My brain is not a morning brain, and often refuses to be very useful for awhile.)
Hives. Giant ones. All over my eyelids and scattered across my face.
"Huh," I thought, because I am a genius.
That when I realized the itchiness on my arms was also hives -- much smaller ones, but hundreds and hundreds of them, breaking out live and in real time as I watched, until they eventually overlapped and combined to cover my entire arms in unbearably red itchiness.
"Okay," I said, because I am a capable, articulate person with problem-solving skills.
A small sampling of my lovely skin, mid-break-out. If you think you're getting a photo of my busted-ass face from first thing in the morning you are wrong, because I have dignity and boundaries am vain as all hell.
I grabbed the Zyrtec and surveyed the bathroom counter for a few minutes before locking in on the culprit. An ancient pot of Bare Minerals eye shadow that I'd been using as a base color for the past couple days. I'd run out of my usual stuff and had dug it out of the bottom of the drawer.
I'd had one hive by my eye on Saturday morning, but oh fiddle dee dee, I'd thought, because I am a moron. A moron who put the Bare Minerals in the bottom of the drawer years before because SHE WAS ALLERGIC TO IT. And too much of a moron TO NOT JUST THROW OUT THE THING SHE WAS ALLERGIC TO.
Anyway, I am fine now. Antihistamines and cold compresses got the hives down after a couple of hours, and the Bare Minerals went in the trash, unable to lurk in my makeup drawer for like, another five years until I forget about it and decide that once again, it's such a lovely neutral color I wonder why I never wear it?
Each spring, groups of middle-school students sporting matching day-glo T-shirts journey from their hometowns across the U.S. and descend on the nation’s capital for some sightseeing. They may tour its famous memorials and visit some of the Smithsonian’s best museums. Perhaps they explore the National Archives and get to meet with their representatives in Congress. The purpose of these trips is to give the kids first-hand exposure to American history and civic affairs—and for many students, the experience is the highlight of the school year.
As a teacher, I both loved and loathed these trips. I hoped my students—who consist of relatively fortunate New York City seventh- and eighth-graders—would be gobsmacked by the majesty of the Lincoln Memorial, only to discover them snapping selfies with the Washington Monument sprouting out of their heads. I set up elaborate tours of the battlefield at Gettysburg, and the kids would ask to watch movies in the bus during the excursion.
The annual trips at Brooklyn Heights Montessori School, where I teach, improved when the educators turned the planning process over to the students. While teaching young teens the intricacies of trip planning is far more complex and time-intensive than simply printing out a well-worn itinerary, the educational payoff before and during the experience makes it worth it. Educators want adolescents to be empowered, not entitled—educated, not merely entertained. The students earned the trip money through a business they ran, and once they took responsibility over the budget and clear guidelines, abstract subjects like math and geography came to life.
Earlier this year, my students decided, after extensive deliberation, to travel to Baltimore. The eighth-graders reserved discounted train tickets, crafted an itinerary, and debated the merits of buying Chipotle versus making their own sandwiches. They had no idea their plans would soon undergo a drastic change.
On April 12, Baltimore resident Freddie Gray was arrested, suffering and later dying from a spinal injury after he was apprehended by police. As he lay in a coma, protests began. But for two weeks, the protests didn’t seem to enter my students’ consciousness. Even as Gray lay dying in a hospital, the kids were planning a speedboat ride in the Inner Harbor.
But on Monday, April 26, the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral, a flier circulated via social media on the cellphones of Baltimore students: “All HighSchools Monday @3 We Going To Purge From Mondawmin, To the Ave, Back To Downtown,” read the text, which was superimposed on a photo of two people standing on a police car, surrounded by an apparently lively crowd. This message mapped out a very different sort of teen-planned itinerary, a three-stop tour of destruction. The “Purge” references a film in which a futuristic government allows crime for 12 hours. By the time school got out that day, police in riot gear had assembled at the Mondawmin Mall and closed down a number of streets. That night, despite the efforts of many Baltimoreans to maintain order, shops were looted and buildings burned.
Earlier in the year, my students had studied the protests in Ferguson and Staten Island, after which they saw the film Selma. They learned that while the rule of law is the foundation of American democracy, violence sometimes interferes and changes history: the Boston Massacre, The American Revolution, and the Civil War are examples.
These history lessons were now unfolding in real time. So, on Monday afternoon—while Freddie Gray’s family was grieving, police were massing, and teenagers were throwing bricks—I started planning a research project on class, race, media, geography, and current events in Baltimore. The trip had not been canceled—at least not yet—but my students nevertheless had a lot to learn about the context behind these developments.
Students at Brooklyn Heights Montessori School discuss what they learned about Baltimore. (Eliso Rivera)
My students are racially and culturally diverse, yet relatively sheltered. They come from deeply supportive families, and either walk to school from Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, or come by car or subway from less-gentrified neighborhoods. #Blacklivesmatter protests have occurred regularly this academic year within walking distance from campus—my students even held one themselves in the fall—yet violence, bald racism, and the abuse of police power are not their everyday experience.
By first period on Tuesday morning, the forthcoming trip and the news had finally merged in my students’ minds. “Something happened in Baltimore,” one student, Tristan, said. “I heard there were riots.” When I pressed my students for facts and sources, they were vague. “[My parents and I] watch Fox News and The Today Show,” Sadé said. Reece added: “I hear bits on the radio on the way to school, but I never hear the full story.” They shared information and asked questions, confused and appalled but also engaged. What was the name of the man who died? What happened? Does Baltimore have a history of racism? Why the fires? Would the trip be canceled?
“Until we started talking about this in class, I had no idea [the protests were happening],” Lorelei said. “But now I really want to find out more. Because this is our history.”
* * *
While my students’ choice to visit Baltimore seemed a bit arbitrary at the time, the protests surrounding Freddie Gray’s death suddenly made it one of the most relevant places in the nation for them to study. The night the violence escalated, as reporters scrambled to follow the story in real time, I started gathering learning materials: news articles; links to interactive maps of Baltimore neighborhoods and the protests; relevant Twitter feeds; Countee Cullen’s poem about Baltimore, “Incident”; and historical terms for students to research. I organized them into a Google Doc that all the students could access and consult to prepare for a classroom conversation. (I've since made the document publicly accessible.) Each student would choose a big question to study, initially based on the resources I provided, and then find and evaluate new sources. Each student would share at the end of the day Wednesday what he or she had learned.
To understand the complexities of geography, history, race, class, power, and law in Baltimore, my students not only needed resources, they also needed guidance. Parents and teachers sometimes think teens know more than they actually do—about technology and about the world. And students struggle to develop effective research skills if left to their own devices. At one point during the research phase of the assignment, for example, I looked over the shoulders of a group of boys and saw them using Google maps to scan the area around the hotel where the class planned to stay, almost as if they expected to see rioting. I pointed out that Google maps aren’t real-time videos, and they laughed at their error. Then, as I was walking away, I heard one exclaim, “Hey! Our hotel has a waffle maker!”
Hotel amenities aside, it was clear my students wanted to know more about the city and its suffering. After class, when the kids were elsewhere on campus, icons showing that students had the Google doc open on their computers popped up on my screen, like Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map.
* * *
By Wednesday afternoon, the students were prepared to share and discuss what they had learned. I reviewed guidelines for the conversation, including: “Assume good will. Demonstrate curiosity.” I directed the 25 students (and six teachers who decided to join us) to sit in two concentric circles. Those in the inner circle would offer three contributions and then change places with someone in the outer circle; the outer circle would listen, take notes, and then join the inner circle when someone left.
Amouri began with a geography lesson prepared by her group: “Seven of us made a map of our trip and where riots or protests happened. Violence occurred just half a mile from our hotel.” The trip was in green, the school color; violence was in red. They even made a key:
They were fascinated by Freddie Gray’s arrest, too. “He was arrested for possessing a switchblade, then he ran away,” Ella said. “That’s why he got taken in.” Julia raised her hand to disagree: “According to CNN, the mayor said it’s not illegal to carry a switchblade.” Sadé added, “He was arrested multiple times. But not everything he was arrested for he was prosecuted for.”
From there, several students discussed the difference between peaceful and violent protests. Jaden offered what sounded like a 13-year-old’s version of Martin Luther King’s 1968 speech in Grosse Point: “One of the reasons this is so big is that the arrest happened in a black community. Some people feel these events are similar to events of the past. That’s why riots might happen. Some may call riots ridiculous, but other people understand why they happen.”
“The news is only covering the bad things—other sites show people doing good things,” Charlotte added. Tristan concurred, then called me out for a factual error I had made: “It’s hard to know just from the news what is true. Remember yesterday when Launa said she knew for sure that Freddie Gray was tasered? Then we discovered today that he wasn’t.” “There are conflicting messages on social media. In some, young kids are giving policemen water bottles,” Arlo continued. “In others, people are cleaning up. And in some others, people are being encouraged to riot. What’s true?”
Each student focused on an aspect that interested him or her the most. Caleb and Nick pointed out that the city’s curfew meant that the Baltimore Orioles baseball game scheduled for Wednesday night would be the first MLB game ever played without fans. Sadé, the daughter of a police officer, explained what she had learned at home about correct police procedure. Ixe said, “My dad was in Baltimore when this happened. On one of the days of the riots, there were sports fans drinking in the area of the protests. They used racist language and provoked people.” Bridgette went on to say, “When you read about it and get more involved, it makes you angrier and want to do something. And some people think the easiest way is to riot.”
Students were sharing their insights, disagreeing, correcting me and one another, and comparing sources. And they weren’t thinking about lost deposits and possible dangers—they were trying to understand complex events from multiple perspectives.
When teachers spoke during the conversation, they followed the same rules as the students. Among them was Martha Haakmat, the school’s head, who asked the students their thoughts on what, given how ingrained racism is in many parts of society, a school’s responsibility is to its students to help undo those legacies.
For Oliver, schools need to embrace and enhance diversity: “Learning in class with people different from yourself should just feel normal,” he said. For Chloe, ensuring opportunities for discussion should also be a school’s priority: “Kids learn from their parents,” she said, “but not all kids ask their parents these questions if they aren’t learning things in school.”
That night for homework, I asked students to reflect in writing on their research and the day’s conversation. “The most important lesson I learned is to think first before doing things,” Tristan wrote. At first I assumed he was talking about the students and rioters, but he later clarified that he was was referring to the police. “They should have known their reaction would make a huge impact everywhere around the country.”
Students also wrote about the trip, fearing for the safety of Baltimore residents, and for their own. But most still wanted to go. “The past few days have been especially sad with all the riots in Baltimore,” Arlo wrote, adding that he wanted protests to continue, as long as they did so peacefully. “I think it would be cool to see how the local community is helping damaged businesses to get back on their feet.”
With the scheduled date of the trip still two weeks away, my students and I continue to add to the shared Google Doc. Friday morning’s news brought “indictment” and “Marilyn Mosby” to the new-vocabulary list. The initial lesson is over, but the learning goes on.
Lessons in American history and literature should prepare students to be informed, contributing citizens. Democracies thrive when people wrestle with big questions; read, write, speak, and think well; and understand the differences between fantasy and fact, opinion and propaganda. But intellectual skills aren’t sufficient. Students also need opportunities to connect emotionally with people and places outside of their immediate surroundings—to feel empathy, outrage and compassion.
Students develop skills and independence much more readily when they are empowered to engage in meaningful work than when they are merely told information. In this case, students mapped an unfamiliar city, researched the past, grappled with the brutal realities of inequality, educated themselves about social phenomena, and navigated digital news sources. They spoke respectfully across differences of opinion, listened to each other, and reflected on what they learned. In short, they practiced what adults will need to do to better understand and solve the thorny questions facing today’s society—including those raised by Freddie Gray’s death.
The trip my students planned is still two weeks away, and it’s unclear whether it will actually take place. But regardless of whether the class stays or goes, this has already been by far the most educational middle-school American history trip I’ve ever experienced.
My heart races, my breathing faint and quick, when I read the naive, ignorant, vile, insensitive things I see on social media, posted by white people about black citizens' response to epidemic police violence against their unarmed brothers and sisters—the only reason I can think of which makes me thankful that my son Calvin can't, and will never be able to, read.
A friend and former Bowdoin College professor tweeted in response to white judgement of the riots in Baltimore, “We were property once too.” She got these tweets in return:
John Reiter @boopmeatsweats, “and you shouldve stayed that way you ugly ape whore”
and
David Kirk @SmokeyJihad777, “Bitch you weren’t shit smh still crying about shit that happened 150 fucking years ago that doesn’t affect you at all”
I sit and wonder why such hate and ugliness festers in the hearts of people who, statistics show, more than likely don’t even know any African Americans, though perhaps that is the problem. I wonder if they think of themselves as followers of God. Most whites in this country do. But maybe their hate first took root because of certain conservative media's racial stereotyping, fear mongering and twisting of the truth. Or is it latent white guilt which blinds these bigots to the facts, that though slavery is over, racial subjugation still exists, permeating society beginning with the unjust punishment of black and brown-skinned kindergartners, haunting them through their childhood years into adulthood, if indeed they make it that far?
It disturbs me seeing so many white people simplifying or deriding this complex, tragic and centuries' old problem of racism, others trying to wish it away by citing their colorblindness, denying that racism exists at all or putting all the blame back on black people. It seems clear to me they don’t understand the source of anger that the black community harbors toward this most unjust society of ours. The problem, I believe, is that these people choose not to see reality. They view life only from the white side, which is opaque at best and privileged galore, and doesn’t take responsibility for the ills that continue to be imposed on our black citizens—high unemployment rates, high rates of poverty, grossly disproportionate rates of arrest and conviction, stiff fines and sentences leading to mass incarceration, broken families, torn neighborhoods and the resulting sanctioned discrimination in subsequent searches for housing, employment, health care and the right to vote—all of which we have the capacity to amend, and should.
I grew up in a Seattle suburb knowing only a few black children my age. Racism didn’t seem like a thing to me, until I began befriending non-white men, then dated an African American for five years. From behind a different lens I learned—second hand because I am white—of society's ingrained suspicion of black people, of cops rampantly frisking black youths for doing nothing more than loitering, something my white friends could do with utter impunity.
Then I began to sense the insidious bigotry. I remember when my mom once saw a tall, well-dressed black man emerging from a luxury car.
"He must play professional basketball," she said. "Why not a doctor or a lawyer, Mom?" I asked. Her only response was to seethe at me.
Over the years I've witnessed blatant as well as subtle racism, like when white people marvel at how well a black person might express themselves on television, when really they are no more articulate than most folks I know, black or white. Or when someone says that President Obama isn't black because he had a white mother and has light skin, thereby denying the rife condemnation he faces because of his race. Or when the airline agent asks only one person in line to check luggage, and that person is black. Or when a pretty white teenage girl says, when reclaiming her cigar from her father's mouth, "Why'd you have to nigger-lip it?" Or when whites use the word thug to describe black children in hoodies wielding toy guns or handfuls of Skittles on their way to being shot to death. Or when white folks wonder what we owe them. Or when black folks are pulled over or chased by cops for no reason but that they are black. Or when an interracial family is heckled by a passerby or when a black woman is charged more in rent because of the color of her skin or turned down for a job interview because of her name, or when white folks think that the wrongful deaths of Michael Brown and Renisha McBride and Travon Martin and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Akai Gurleyand Oscar Grant and Freddy Gray are isolated incidents.
The root of racism is, and always will be, bitter, white and invasive. You don't have to dig down very deep dirtying your fingers to see for yourself. Our white ancestors slaughtered Native Americans by the droves, calling them savages, taking and raping their resources and forcing survivors onto reservations. White people are still taking their children. Our white ancestors led the slave trade and white plantation owners profited from the sweat and tears of men, women and children who were seized from their homeland, forced to give up their language, culture and religion, their freedom, their children, their lives. White men forced Japanese American families into internment camps. White politicians designed Jim Crow laws pitching poor whites against poor blacks at a time when the two groups had begun to galvanize a force against the rich. White men lynched black men for no other reason but the color of their skin. White shop owners barred black patrons. Black leaders were assassinated by white men. White heads of corporations shipped inner-city jobs overseas exacerbating poverty. White politicians devised the war on drugs, targeting black, inner-city boys and men while white cops enforced it, with skewed brutality and rigor. White men exploit Hispanic men and women to pick our fruit and sate our wasteful appetites. White witnesses, jurors and judges have condemned innocent black men and boys, putting many behind bars for years and sending others to their deaths. White politicians redistrict states to win the vote and champion voter ID laws which disenfranchise blacks, among others. I could go on. My eyes are open.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” If we want the rioting to stop, we, as whites, need to listen to our Black American brothers and sisters and validate their struggle against the heavy boot of white society. Then we need to right it, whatever it takes. We need to see the true injustices of our time. To do so we must humble ourselves, but most of all, and first, we need to open our eyes.
Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times, Baltimore riots, 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
An man walks past damage caused by an earthquake in Kathmandu, Nepal, Saturday, April 25, 2015. (Niranjan Shrestha / AP)
Four hours after learning about Saturday's devastating earthquake in Nepal, I received a Facebook notification I had never seen before: Sonia, a journalist friend based in northern India, was "marked safe." An hour later, the same notification about a different friend popped up. Then another. Soon, several of my friends wrote that they, too, had learned via this strange new notification that their friends in Nepal were okay.
A few hours later, the mystery was solved. On Saturday afternoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on his timeline that the notifications came from Safety Check, a service the company launched last fall. "When disasters happen, people need to know their loved ones are safe," he wrote, "It's moments like this that being able to connect really matters."
A screenshot of Safety Check
When activated, Safety Check locates Facebook users near a disaster site through the city they list on their profile, or from where they last used the Internet. Users then receive a notification asking to confirm that they're safe or to say that they weren't in the affected area. Those who choose "safe" generate a notification to their friends and followers, who can track how many of their friends were affected.
The idea for Safety Check emerged after a devastating tsunami struck Japan in 2011. "During that crisis we saw how people used technology and social media to stay connected with those they cared about," Facebook wrote when introducing the service.
Saturday's earthquake in Nepal, however, revealed some of the limits to Safety Check. Smartphone penetration in the country—one of Asia's poorest—is low, and six Nepalese out of seven are not registered on the social network. Electricity in the country is unreliable even during normal times, and there were reports of extensive power outages throughout Kathmandu in the hours after the quake.
But for those who can and do use Facebook, Safety Check's existence could offer an easy way for people to tell their friends and family that they're okay.
"At this time of desperation and disaster, just knowing your loved ones are safe is just like a beam of light in the dark," wrote Facebook user Dinesh Gurung in a comment posted beneath Zuckerberg's.
Three siblings have become viral stars after recording a video to their mother last week, in which one of them gets a little offended.
Ava and Logan are on camera, and their brother George is off to the side.
“George is meaning to say hello, but… here he is,” says Ava, panning over to him.
“I’m not mean!” he replies before running away.
Their father provided some background on George in the video’s caption, explaining why he tends to misunderstand things:
George was born with a cleft lip and palate and also totally deaf in his left ear. He’s had glue ear in his right and only been able to hear well in it for about a year and a half. He also wears a hearing aid in this ear to help. This means he has delayed speech and language as he finds it hard to hear parts of some words, hence the misunderstanding. He’s a good kid, a total trooper and amazingly funny.
Dear Captain Awkward,So, if I tell you that when I was in high school, a teacher of mine called off class for a session of “yoga in the dark where no one can see what the teacher is doing” that left me very upset, I probably don’t need to give you more details, right? And I see a therapist now (not just for that, but the therapist feels that part is important), but I am not serenely at peace with the past here, and I do really, really badly with yoga. I have problems with rage and tears just from being told to “focus on my breathing.” So I avoid going to yoga. (I also don’t do well with meditation, Alexander Technique, etc. — basically, being pressured to “relax” makes me panic.)
My problem is that many people, in both my personal and professional life, very strongly believe in the universal healing powers of yoga. They refuse to believe that I could find it anything other than relaxing and empowering. I try to explain that having someone dictate how I ought to move and breathe does not make me feel relaxed or empowered, but multiple staff retreats at multiple offices have left me in the superfun position of explaining that I really can’t do yoga, and being pushed about it until I cry, because they refuse to believe that anyone could have a good reason not to like yoga. I say I’ve had bad experiences, and they insist that this will be different, and I say, no, really kind of traumatic experiences, and they say, “But yoga helps traumatized people!” And there I’m back with the tears and rage. One year I tried to do it; I had to run out of the room and apparently the teacher said that some people aren’t brave enough to get in touch with their bodies. When my coworker told me that I think I literally bared my teeth like a dog and snarled.This does not make me look like a competent professional. And it makes me feel like shit. They’re my coworkers, my job has nothing to do with yoga, and I guess I don’t think I should have to bare my soul and expose my vulnerabilities because somebody else thinks their favorite form of exercise would make me a better worker/person.
I’ve just started a new job in a high-stress workplace. My boss is very excited about a yoga-focused health-and-centeredness retreat. I’m still in my probation period. How do I not look unstable, or like a bad team player?Please don’t tell me I just haven’t found the right yoga instructor yet. I hear that a lot.And, thank you.
Dear Letter Writer:
Not only am I going to not tell you that you just haven’t found the right yoga instructor, I am going to put a pre-emptive ban on yoga evangelism (which includes personal stories about how commenters personally stopped worrying and learned to eventually love yoga) in this comment thread.
A boss who thinks that it’s fun and normal for people to strenuously breathe in unison with their coworkers in their free time is unlikely to be dissuaded from having the upcoming retreat altogether. There’s no great approach here, but one possible way involves a) formally invoking Human Resources and b) a vague medical excuse for missing the retreat. Lay the groundwork by asking your therapist to agree to write a doctor’s note should it be necessary, and then speak to your HR person. “Hi (Nice HR Person), I can’t do yoga for medical reasons, and at my doctor’s recommendation I am going to have to miss the upcoming staff retreat. What’s the best way to let Boss and the rest of the team know that I can’t be there, without disclosing my private medical information?”
Key Elements:
1) Start with a verbal conversation rather than an email. I know (I know) you’re worried about betraying a lot of emotion and looking unprofessional, so practice the request with a friend and your therapist ahead of time if you need to. If you can make it come out smoothly and project a relaxed demeanor, you will feel more confident and less exposed. I know email is easier in some ways, but you want to be able to feel the situation out before making (& documenting) things more officially. You can always follow up with email if need be.
2) Go ahead and invoke the authority of absent medical professionals. You don’t have to mention how much you personally hate yoga at all – Corporate You is yoga-agnostic – “I agree it can really help many people deal with stress, sadly, I’m not one of them!” You just simply can’t do it.
3) Anxiety and PTSD are legit medical issues, by the way, so you’re not lying about why you can’t, but there’s also no reason to disclose those things specifically. The medical note itself should be very vague, “At my recommendation, my patient, Letter Writer, should be excused from company activities involving yoga or other group exercise. Signed, Medical Professional X,” and you should not volunteer it. It’s something to have in reserve if HR asks for it, and it’s something to put on file if you think there might be negative consequences.
4) Experiment with presenting the fact that you’ll miss the upcoming retreat as a fait accompli rather than as asking permission to skip it. “Medically, I’m going to have to miss it” > “Is it okay if I miss it.” If they want you to be there but just skip the yoga parts, let them be the ones to suggest that compromise, to which you can magnanimously agree. If you’re feeling really magnanimous, you could offer to lead some alternative thing during some of the yoga sessions (thereby planting the seed that the yoga parts should be optional…for everyone.)
5) Ask the HR person’s help in a specific way – “Can you notify the boss?”
6) If the HR person handles this gracefully and seems to be on your side about things, ask if future retreats could alternate yoga and other activities, because you very much want to participate in team-building that you can do.
7) Have the conversation at the end of the day if you can, or right before lunch, so you can leave right afterwards and do something nice for yourself.
8) You can’t be the only person in the office who is secretly dreading this shitshow, so pat yourself on the back for being a superhero in protecting your own safety and comfort and in making this easier for someone else in the future.
Since your corporate culture is “Yay for yoga!” and because most corporate cultures are profoundly ableist, this is going to mark you as an outlier and you probably will encounter *some* weirdness, but I think people will mostly (not perfectly, but mostly) take their cues from you on how big a deal this is. You’re no doubt making sure that your professional game is tight already, but pay attention to cosmetic issues like dress and grooming, keeping your workspace neat, getting to work a few minutes early each day, responding promptly to emails, saving old-to-do lists so you are visually documenting for yourself how much you are getting accomplished. If you have the energy, go to occasional happy hours or lunches with your coworkers, make an effort to get to know them as people, try to remember their kids’ names or hobbies. Don’t turtle away from them; be a team player in the ways that actually matter to the work. And have responses, or rather non responses, ready for when yoga evangelism* happens.
Since trying to explain or convince your coworkers of the reasons why you can’t do yoga has not served you well in the past, stop explaining or convincing or giving reasons. If this blog post serves no other purpose, I hope you take this away from it: Your reasons for not wanting to ever do yoga are perfectly sound, and you are not the one being weird if you don’t want to do it and if you don’t really want to discuss it. You don’t have to convince your coworkers that yoga sucks or that it isn’t right for you, you just have to change the patterns of the interactions enough so that they will leave you alone about it. For HR and Boss, that means a “confidential medical issue,” as in, if the HR person asks specifically “why can’t you” or “what’s wrong with you,” respond with “I’m happy to provide a doctor’s note” and don’t elaborate further.For coworkers, it’s “I’m sure you’re right about that! I hope the retreat is great, we’ll have to have lunch when you get back and you can fill me in.” See also: “So sad to miss it, but I’ve cleared it with boss and HR. Maybe next time we’ll do something non-yoga-based and I will be able to join you all.”
If people won’t let it drop, it’s okay to say “I’m sure you understand, this is a sensitive topic and I’d rather let it drop. So, how is [OBVIOUS SUBJECT CHANGE?]” If the person won’t let it drop and keeps going past a subject change, remember that there is power in the unvarnished truth, like when someone won’t stop harping on “So, when are you going to have kids?” and the non-parent finally snaps and says “When and if my uterus stops deleting all of them in horrible miscarriages I guess, thanks for ignoring all of my attempts at politely changing the subject btw.” Maybe it will give you power to imagine saying “To be clear, I should not have to and do not have to disclose this, but I was sexually assaulted by a teacher during a yoga session, and I’d prefer not to have screaming flashbacks in front of my coworkers in the name of ‘teambuilding.’ So, shall we go with ‘medical excuse’ rather than spreading deeply private and uncomfortable information to my colleagues? Here is my doctor’s note, I will not be at the retreat, thanks for all your help.” Then imagine yourself flipping over the table and leaving dramatically, like you’ve suddenly developed the ability to teleport or you are Angel or The Justice League and they are “doors.”
While you imagine all of that, practice a making a fake smile and holding it silently for a long, awkward silence. No need to bare your teeth and snarl (though I simultaneously love that you did that and hate that you were pushed to that point), just, pick a “WTF smile” and hold it until they change the subject or slink away. For example:
Bow before the queen of the “You really just said that out loud, didn’t you” face.
There can be more than one queen of “How amusing it is that you are still talking” face.
“I would dearly like to give you the home training that you so clearly missed out on, but who even has the time?”
In summary.
Your coworkers may spread tales like “I kept asking Letter Writer about yoga, but they just weirdly smiled at me…well…not a smile exactly, but they gave me this *look* for a long time and changed the subject, so, anyway, don’t bring up yoga with LW unless you want it to get weird” and that is okay. In fact, that is victory. *See also: diet evangelism, actual evangelism
This story made me tear up.. and to want to provide this type of support to a college student.
Gregory Reid
Mary Hamm was in pain, though it was hard to tell. She bustled around the Starbucks, pouring drinks, restocking pastries, and greeting customers with an unshakable gaze perfected during 25 years of working in hospitality. Her smile said, How can I help you? Her eyes said, I know you’re going to order a caramel Frappuccino, so let’s do this.
Occupying prime space in a Fredericksburg, Virginia, strip mall, beside a Dixie Bones BBQ Post, this Starbucks pulls in about $40,000 a week. Hamm, 49, had been managing Starbucks stores for 12 years. The problem was her feet. After two decades in the food-service business, they had started to wear out. She had two metal plates in the right one, installed over the course of five surgeries. Now her left foot needed surgery too. She doesn’t like to complain, but when I asked her how often she was in pain, she smiled and said quietly, “All the time.”
According to the Fitbit on her wrist, Hamm had walked six miles back and forth behind the espresso bar during the 13 hours she had been at work that day. For years, doctors had told her she needed to get off her feet, so she had applied for more than 15 corporate jobs, within and outside of Starbucks. Again and again, though, she had been passed over in favor of other candidates with more formal education. This was a woman who had raised three children largely on her own and had started a nonprofit to help homeless people in her area. She had experience, competence, and drive. What she didn’t have—like three-quarters of Starbucks employees, and an equal share of American adults—was a bachelor’s degree.
Thirty-one years ago, Hamm told her parents she wanted to be a nurse. They told her to get married—they had no money for college. By age 19, she was a wife and a mother. Then came more children, a divorce, and medical bills. In 2007, she took out a loan to attend the University of Phoenix, an online, for-profit school. But when the tuition went up, she quit. She is still paying off the loan.
When it comes to college, the central challenge for most Americans in the 21st century is not going; it’s finishing. Thirty-five million Americans now have some college experience but no degree. More Americans than live in Texas, in other words, have spent enough time at college to glimpse the promised land—but not enough to reap the financial bounty. Some are worse off than if they’d never enrolled at all, carrying tens of thousands of dollars in debt, not to mention the scar tissue of regret and self-doubt.
President Obama’s recent proposal to have the federal government and states pay for two years of community college is elegantly simple, and would surely prompt more students to enroll. But community college is already close to free for most low-income students, and still only 4 percent of all community-college students earn a two-year degree in two years. (Yes, 4 percent.) Money is just part of the problem.
We like to think of college as a meritocracy, a place where only the dedicated and smart survive. But it seems to be something else. Between 1970 and 2012, the proportion of American 24-year-olds who came from affluent families and had a bachelor’s degree rose from 40 percent to 73 percent—quite an enlightenment period for privileged kids. But over the same period, the proportion of American 24-year-olds who came from low-income families and had a bachelor’s degree rose from 6 percent to just 8 percent. The country’s uneven public-school systems cannot be blamed entirely for this state of affairs. Too many people come to college unprepared academically, it’s true. But even those low-income students who outperform their affluent peers on tests are less likely to graduate from college.
Our class-based higher-education divide explains more about America’s widening income gap than does any other single factor, according to Anthony P. Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Declining union membership, frayed social services, low minimum wages—none matters as much as the unequal distribution of college degrees and certificates. “Income inequality started increasing in 1983,” Carnevale told me, “and 70 percent of that inequality is derived from differences in access to higher education. It is both a fountain of opportunity and a bastion of privilege. The problem has gotten worse and worse and worse.”
Alicea Thomas, a Starbucks barista, describes working her way through college in the company’s initiative with Arizona State University.
Last summer, in an unusual attempt to reverse this trend in his own corner of the service economy, Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, announced that his company would team up with Arizona State University, one of the nation’s largest public universities, to help Starbucks employees finish college. As long as they worked 20 hours or more per week, any of the company’s 135,000 employees in the United States would be eligible for the program. Those who’d already racked up at least two years’ worth of credits would be fully reimbursed for the rest of their education. Those with fewer or no credits would receive a 22 percent tuition discount from Arizona State until they reached the full-reimbursement level. Without saying so, Schultz was acknowledging an awkward truth about working at Starbucks: no one wants to be a barista forever.
Schultz shared the news in a PR blitz that featured tear-jerker testimonials from grateful employees, a cameo by the U.S. secretary of education, and a visit to The Daily Show. He explained that employees could study any of the 40 majors offered online by Arizona State. They’d be held to the same standards as all of Arizona State’s on-campus students, and their degrees would look identical. Most surprising, employees would be under no obligation to stay with Starbucks after finishing. “To build a great, enduring company that is so people-based, as Starbucks is,” Schultz told me, “we have to bring our people along on this journey and demonstrate we are sharing the success.”
Almost immediately, reporters criticized Schultz for exaggerating his beneficence. After all, the program was going to be relatively cheap for Starbucks, given the discount provided by Arizona State. Plus, only students at the junior or senior level would be fully reimbursed—and only after they’d earned 21 new credits, proving their commitment to college and company. All students would be required to apply for federal financial aid, so taxpayers would be covering some of the cost, too.
But those objections missed the purpose of the program, which, admittedly, Schultz had glossed over in his soaring rhetoric about creating “access to the American dream.” The goal was not to print a pile of get-out-of-tuition-free coupons. It was something less expensive and possibly more important: to help more students finish what they’d started.
The most revolutionary part of the program had nothing to do with tuition and got far less media attention. In their announcement, Starbucks and Arizona State also committed themselves to providing all enrolled employees with individualized guidance—the kind of thing affluent American parents and elite universities provide for their students as a matter of course. Starbucks students would each be assigned an enrollment counselor, a financial-aid adviser, an academic adviser, and a “success coach”—a veritable pit crew of helpers. Like a growing number of innovative colleges around the country, Starbucks and Arizona State were promising to prioritize the needs of real-life students over the traditions of academia.
Starbucks and Arizona State granted The Atlantic exclusive access to the first semester’s students, advisers, and detailed results. Despite all the hype, no one at either institution knew how many employees would sign up—or how they would fare once enrolled. Working students attending college online drop out at notoriously high rates, but if the experiment succeeded, it might suggest that college, designed differently, could still become the equalizer it was meant to be. “We’re not trying to save the world,” Arizona State’s president, Michael Crow, told me. “We’re trying to show that the world can be saved.”
When the program was initially announced, on June 15, 2014, Mary Hamm read the details in a company e-mail. At first she thought about which of her young employees she could persuade to enroll. But then it dawned on her that this opportunity was meant for her, too—and that it might be her best and last chance to finish her degree. She signed up to talk to an Arizona State enrollment counselor the next day.
Mary Hamm, on duty at the Starbucks she manages in Fredricksburg, Virginia. (Charles Gallung)
In the weeks following the announcement, Starbucks shipped off posters and information packets to its 7,300 company-operated stores in the United States. District managers gave store managers suggested talking points and asked them to spend 15 minutes with each employee to discuss the new benefit.
From focus groups and internal surveys, Starbucks executives knew their employees made up a fairly representative sample of the national population, educationally speaking. They were disproportionately young and female, and the vast majority did not have a four-year degree. Most were either taking classes on the side or hoped to do so at some point. They were busy, cash-strapped, and yearning for more. (Full disclosure: I briefly worked at a Starbucks in Washington, D.C., after graduating from college in 1996, until I got a much easier job in journalism and quit.)
Most baristas already have a complicated history with college. Allison Hills, an athletic 23-year-old with long, straight black hair that drapes her head like a silk scarf, went to college straight out of high school, intending to become a physical therapist. She attended Arizona State on campus in Tempe, and racked up $26,000 in debt by the end of her sophomore year. This came as a shock. “I really didn’t have a grasp on the finances and how many loans I would need to take out,” she told me, sounding embarrassed. Trying to be practical, she decided to move back home, to Seattle, and attend college there. But when she couldn’t get into the classes she wanted, she figured she would work at Starbucks for a while. Before long, her loans came due, and she found herself sending $320 a month to banks, $270 of which went toward interest. “I’ve just been in a financial rut,” she said, “feeling so hopeless.”
Hills explained her failure to finish college as a result of her particular circumstances—as did every Starbucks worker I interviewed. But it’s hard to ignore the systemic problems that are also in play. According to an analysis released in December by the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, half of American college freshmen “seriously underestimate” the amount of student-loan debt they have, and about a quarter of students with federal loans do not even know they have such loans. Many just don’t know the loans are federal, but some don’t realize they have any loans at all, perhaps because their parents filled out the forms for them.
Hills’s mother had explained her loans to her, but all the paperwork had seemed very abstract. “I was just so excited to go to college that I didn’t really look at it,” Hills told me. Even if she had looked carefully, she would not have seen the whole picture. Students have to reapply for financial aid each year, which means they can’t tell how much they will have to pay from one year to the next. Hills, like many other students, had literally no way of knowing when she started college how much her whole education would cost. In theory, according to research by Robert Kelchen and Sara Goldrick-Rab of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, by the time students are in the eighth grade, the government has the ability to predict with high levels of accuracy which ones will be eligible for Pell grants—and it could easily inform them of this when it tells them that they qualify for free school lunches. But it doesn’t.
Instead, each year, students under age 24 must gather up their parents’ tax information and fill out a 105-question form known as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. (A bill that would shorten the application to two questions is awaiting action in Congress.) Those who file the form early in the year typically receive twice as much money as those who file later, but you of course have to know that bit of trivia to take advantage of it. Hills didn’t know it. She also didn’t know that after she turned 24, her parents’ income would no longer be a factor in decisions about financial aid. As it was, her parents earned too much for her to qualify for federal grants but too little to help her pay for college (a common story among young students I interviewed). “If I had known,” she told me, “I never would’ve gone to college right away.”
Several Starbucks employees I met had never previously applied for college financial aid, even though they probably were eligible. (Some 2 million low-income college students who would have qualified for federal grants didn’t complete the FAFSA in the 2007–08 school year, according to Mark Kantrowitz, a financial-aid analyst and a senior vice president at Edvisors.com.) They were too frightened of debt—a reasonable anxiety, but one that also kept some from receiving grants.
This past summer, Hills, like all Starbucks employees who applied to Arizona State, filled out the FAFSA form. But applying to college this time felt altogether different, because she had the help of an enrollment counselor and a financial-aid adviser. They walked her through the forms, the costs, and her options. “It’s a lot clearer than before,” she told me. “They really spelled it out. And they were really patient with all my questions.”
After the financial-aid application, the next odyssey for returning students is the transcript hunt. Many American adults now have transcripts scattered near and far, at the various colleges they have attended over the years. To get credit for their previous courses, students must get their transcripts sent to the new college. But getting those transcripts to a new college’s admissions office can be an epic process—akin to getting doctors’ offices to send medical records.
Allison Hills, a Starbucks barista in Seattle, doing homework in her apartment. (Charles Gallung)
Alicea Thomas, who works at a Starbucks in Perris, California, not far from Riverside, was the captain of her cheerleading squad in high school. This is not hard to visualize. “I like happy people, mad people, sad people,” she told me, smiling behind glasses with pink frames—“anyone who is willing to listen to me talk.” Her exuberance makes her an ideal barista, but she dreams of starting her own talk show one day. Failing that, she’d like to do PR in the music business.
By the time Thomas, who is now 23, applied to Arizona State through Starbucks, she’d attended California State University at Los Angeles and Riverside City College. She’d dropped out of Cal State after failing a remedial math class three times and feeling isolated on the commuter campus. “I had no real motivation for school,” she said. She eventually got an associate’s degree at Riverside, and always intended to go back for a bachelor’s degree. “I don’t want to have a career where I have to work on holidays,” she said. “I want to be able to go to my kids’ plays and see my family. At Starbucks, you can’t do that.”
Thomas had always assumed she’d go back to college on a campus, with sororities and football games. But she also knew a bargain when she saw one. Because she had already earned two years’ worth of credits, the Starbucks program would be free for her—a savings of about $30,000. So she went online and requested more information.
A few days later, she got a call from Nicki Nosbish, an enrollment counselor based at Arizona State in Phoenix. (Technically, Nosbish works for Xerox, which is under contract to provide enrollment counseling to people applying to Arizona State’s online undergraduate program. The university has chosen to outsource much of its advising, because that kind of support is unfortunately not a core competence of Arizona State, or many other schools.) Thomas had never encountered anyone like Nosbish in her previous college attempts. Nosbish listened. She assured Thomas that she could indeed walk across the stage on graduation day, even though her classes would be online. She talked her through the application process. “I felt like I was her only student,” Thomas told me. “Like she was only worried about me.” Nosbish told her she’d check in again in a few days. After they spoke, she left Thomas voicemails reminding her to send in her transcripts so she could get credit for previous classes.
Thomas was actually applying to other colleges that summer, but she had procrastinated and hadn’t yet sent in her transcripts, which meant her applications were unfinished. She knew she was sabotaging her own academic future, but she was terrified of being rejected. With Nosbish’s help, though, she felt stronger. She made the calls and sent in the forms. When Riverside’s transcript didn’t come through, she sent a second form. When Cal State notified her that she had to come in person to get her transcript in time for the Arizona State deadline, she got in her car and drove an hour to get it.
If a student owes money to a college—even a nominal amount from many years ago—the college can hold the transcript hostage until the debt is paid. Thankfully, Thomas did not have any outstanding payments to make, so she figured she had completed her application. Soon afterward, though, Nosbish called again. The transcripts had not arrived. Thomas felt her heart rate rising. But Nosbish did something truly radical for a college adviser—she set about searching for Thomas’s transcripts herself, and she found them. They’d been misplaced at Arizona State. Finally, Thomas’s application was fully submitted, something she insists never would have happened without her counselor.
We assume that people drop out of college because of the cost. But that’s only part of the explanation. Listen closely to former students, and you’ll hear them tell stories about bureaucracies losing their paperwork, classes running out of spots, nonsensical tuition bills, and transcript offices that don’t take credit cards. The customer service is atrocious.
Simply put, many Americans fail to finish college, because many colleges are not designed to be finished. They are designed to enroll students, yes. They are built to garner research funds and accrue status through rankings and the scholarly articles published by faculty. But those things have little to do with making sure students leave prepared to thrive in the modern economy.
Now, however, there is hope. Ever so slowly, it’s getting harder for colleges to neglect their students’ needs. That’s partly because fewer students are enrolling: the economy is improving, and Americans have other options. The dip in demand means recruiting new students can be more expensive for colleges than keeping the ones they already have. Meanwhile, more colleges are facing embarrassing government and media scrutiny over their students’ low graduation rates and high debt loads. For some schools, ensuring that more students stick around is becoming a matter of survival.
“People are starting to realize there is a direct correlation between your customers staying at your store and your bottom line,” Neal Raisman, a consultant who has advised colleges on student retention for the past 16 years, told me. Raisman instructs colleges to train their employees in basic customer service: say hello to students in the hallways, conduct exit interviews when they drop out, keep financial-aid offices open past 5 p.m. Most students are looking for a sense of community and are happy to stay put when they find it. The same holds true for people generally—as Starbucks and other service-oriented businesses well know.
John Tobin, a serious, compact 29-year-old with short brown hair and sideburns, likes to work the espresso bar at his Starbucks, just outside of Phoenix. He can get into a zone that way, and the time goes by faster. The other workers call him Blackjack, a nickname he earned more than a decade ago, when he wore No. 21 as a star on his high-school baseball team. He’s been a Starbucks employee for 10 years.
After high school, Tobin received a small scholarship to play baseball at Glendale Community College, a 40-minute drive from his hometown. Neither of his parents had a college degree. This was his chance to get an education without taking on a lot of debt. But during the first week of school, he tore his rotator cuff in practice. A few days later, he was cut from the team and lost his scholarship money.
Tobin’s entire life had been about sports. Now, for the first time in his memory, he had nowhere to go after class, no record to break, no opponent to beat. He transferred the next semester to a community college even closer to home. After one semester there, he told himself he needed time to figure out what to do with his life, and withdrew. No one from the college reached out to ask why he’d left.
This past summer, he spoke with an enrollment counselor at Arizona State about the Starbucks program and decided to apply. A couple of weeks after he was admitted, he got an e-mail from his counselor. “I see you haven’t enrolled in classes,” she wrote, reminding him that the deadline was two weeks away. Tobin read the message twice. “I was literally dumbfounded,” he told me. Every day at Starbucks, he gave customers the kind of high-touch service the company promises—emptying a dozen Splenda packets into a latte for one customer, crafting elaborate, off-menu drinks for others, all with a smile and a kind word for the regulars. Meanwhile, he’d had to put up with utterly indifferent treatment by colleges—to whom he was paying a lot more money for services vastly more important than anything offered to customers at Starbucks.
When Tobin got the counselor’s e-mail, he’d already been looking at the course catalog. But the message energized him in a way he hadn’t expected. “I felt like there was somebody who wanted me to succeed as much as I did,” he told me. He signed up for two health-sciences classes. His current plan is to finish his degree and return to sports, this time as a coach.
Howard Schultz, the Starbucks CEO, talks with an employee at his headquarters, in Seattle. In launching the Arizona State program, Schultz has acknowledged an awkward truth: no one wants to be a barista forever. (Charles Gallung)
Two summers ago, Howard Schultz, the Starbucks CEO, and Michael Crow, the head of Arizona State, went to Aspen, Colorado, along with about 50 other business leaders, politicians, and luminaries, among them former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Senator Cory Booker, of New Jersey. Officially, they were all serving on a Markle Foundation committee to discuss how to save the American dream in an age when globalization and technology had displaced jobs and stifled social mobility. Unofficially, Schultz and Crow, at least, were tired of waiting for Congress, colleges, and the other formal institutions of change to, well, change.
At the first meeting of the group, the two men broke away and began hatching a plan.
“Howard and I basically holed up in the corner,” Crow told me, “and we said, ‘Why don’t we do something other than just talk about this?’ ”
The two men had much in common. Both came from working-class homes. Crow’s mother died when he was 9, and after that he followed his Navy father around the country, attending 17 different schools before finishing high school. Some of his younger siblings never graduated. Schultz, meanwhile, grew up in public housing in Brooklyn. Neither of his parents graduated from high school, and he was the first in his family to get a college degree.
They both considered themselves anti-establishment pioneers. Schultz had built an empire that was as much about emotion as it was about coffee. It was important to his brand—and his identity—that he be leading something bigger than a caffeinated-beverage-dispensing platform. Crow was a college president who actively disdained the elitism and status consciousness of other college presidents. “We said, ‘God, let’s do something that hasn’t been done before,’ ” Schultz told me. They recognized their shared iconoclasm, and saw the potential for inspiring other partnerships nationwide. “Howard and I talked about ‘What if every company did this, and lots of universities too?,’ ” Crow told me. “We’d take care of this college-completion thing like that.” He snapped his fingers.
Over the next year, Starbucks executives vetted the idea. In November 2013, the company surveyed a representative sample of employees about what benefits they wanted. More than 80 percent expressed interest in a benefit that would help them finish college, a strong indication that a college program could help Starbucks attract and retain talent. Then the company held a “bake-off,” as Schultz puts it, inviting a small group of universities, including Arizona State, to pitch their services. Arizona State won the competition for two reasons, Starbucks executives say. First, the school was committed to providing an education to as many Americans as possible, not just the academic high achievers, which appealed to Schultz’s populism and to the company’s needs. Second, Arizona State’s leadership seemed to have embraced online learning as a central element of its entire mission, not just as a shiny accessory.
Arizona State still relies upon many standard college practices, and some faculty members remain more focused on winning grants and publishing than on teaching. But over the past decade, the university’s leadership has gotten unusually creative about circumventing these models and finding new ways to reach students. “We believe that the modern public university, rather than being focused around tradition, must be adaptive to the speed of technological advancements and the changing economics and demographics of the country,” Crow told me. Under his leadership, the school has deliberately become more diverse and less exclusive, and has more than doubled the percentage of low-income students enrolled. Nearly 40 percent of Arizona State students come from low-income families, twice the proportion found at many other large public universities, among them Penn State and Indiana University. Arizona State’s online program, which started in 2010, now has 13,000 students, and one of the highest retention rates in the country.
To help students find their way, the school has developed a tool called eAdvisor—a user-friendly system that provides guidance to all 66,000 undergraduates about which classes they must take to graduate on time, and then tracks their progress along the way. If a student falters by, for example, dropping a required class, eAdvisor automatically e-mails the student and his or her adviser. The system has had an immediate and impressive effect. In 2006, the year before the school began using eAdvisor, only 26 percent of on-campus students from families earning less than $50,000 a year graduated within four years. By 2009, that rate had gone up to 41 percent.
Across the country, dozens of colleges are starting to tap into their own data to find simple and sometimes inexpensive ways to keep their students. When officials at Georgia State University looked at their records, they found that a surprising number of students had quit because they’d owed the university small amounts of money for fees not covered by their loans. So the school started giving out micro-grants to help students who were on track to graduate but had run into minor cash-flow problems. During the past academic year, Georgia State gave out more than 2,000 of these grants, mostly to seniors. The average grant was just $900. Of the seniors who received money, 70 percent graduated successfully within two semesters. For seniors in similar financial straits whom the university did not have the budget to help, the graduation rate was less than 10 percent. So far, the initiative has more than paid for itself, since students who stay continue to pay tuition after getting the micro-grant.
But the most telling part of the story is how students reacted to this news. When the university’s vice provost, Timothy M. Renick, and his colleagues first began making phone calls to offer the micro-grants, they expected shouts of joy. Instead, a handful of students hung up on them. “They thought it was a scam,” Renick told me. It was a sobering glimpse of how students perceived the university and their place in it.
Renick and his team called the students back and convinced them that the grants were real. Over time, the most surprising benefit was the psychological one, Renick said. Many of Georgia State’s minority students from low-income families had concluded that they were on their own in college. When they got the micro-grants, students told him, they felt that sense of isolation lift. “We’ve heard from students,” Renick said, “that it makes them feel like someone is on their side, that we want them to succeed.”
The old model of seeking out help on your own—by tracking down tutors or spending hours in financial-aid offices—doesn’t work for students who have jobs and family obligations, not to mention creeping academic anxieties. “We have set up incredibly complex universities with rules that most of the faculty have trouble figuring out,” Renick said. “Then we hand students a course catalog and say ‘Find your way.’ ” Like Arizona State, Georgia State and other innovative schools are using data to determine which students need which services, and then pushing those services out to them.
When I met Nicki Nosbish, the enrollment counselor, this winter, she was wearing an Arizona State Sun Devils T‑shirt. But she had never actually finished college. She’d tried, years earlier, going from a tiny high school to a Nebraska state college, but she was overwhelmed. “I didn’t do so hot,” she told me. “I didn’t know how to read a course catalog. I didn’t know anyone.” Her adviser, who was also the college’s band director, was of little help. Looking back on it, she acknowledged that she could have used the kind of counseling she now provides. The irony has not escaped her. “If I would have had some support on my time management and what to expect,” she said, “I think I would have been a little more successful.” She recently started the enrollment process at a local community college in hopes of finishing her degree.
By mid-August, two months after the launch of the program, the Starbucks enrollment numbers were alarmingly low. Days before the deadline, only 1,500 people—about 1 percent of Starbucks’s American workforce—had completed the application. And not all of them would be accepted, of course; they had to meet the same GPA and test-score standards that regular Arizona State students did.
Thousands of employees, it turned out, had started applications but not finished them. Enrollment counselors were reporting that many students were still waiting for transcripts to arrive—or were simply nervous about the decision to return to college. So Arizona State and Starbucks decided to shift the deadline. Whom was it serving, exactly? If students needed more time, they could have until four weeks before the start of classes to apply. “We realized they didn’t need another stress point to make this major life change,” Laurel Harper, the manager of global corporate communications for Starbucks, told me.
By October, when classes began, 5,289 employees from all 50 states had started an application to Arizona State, and about half of them had submitted one. Of those, 2,121 had been admitted—an acceptance rate of 85 percent, close to the 90 percent rate for Arizona State’s online applicants overall—and 1,012 had enrolled for the fall semester. They majored in all kinds of subjects, but the most popular were psychology, organizational leadership, health sciences, and mass communications.
Back when Starbucks announced the program, the company put out a powerful video featuring a handful of its employees. It documented emotional phone calls in which the workers told their mothers that Starbucks was going to pay for college. By the time the fall semester started, though, only one of those featured employees had actually enrolled. Some were waiting for transcripts, and others had decided the timing wasn’t right.
Starbucks expects more people to apply as they learn that the benefit is real. “People have been looking for the catch,” Lacey All, the director of strategic talent initiatives at Starbucks, told me. The company has sent out thousands of inspirational e-mails, tweets, and other messages to reassure employees, but skepticism lingers. “We’ve had to do a lot of work,” All added, “to say ‘This is our investment in you. Whether you choose to stay [with the company] or go, you’re going to be better for it. And Starbucks is going to be better for it.’ ”
Understandably, many Starbucks employees wonder what’s in it for the company. Schultz has insisted the decision was largely driven by a sense of social justice. “We are employing over 100,000 young people in America, and the majority of them do not have a college degree,” he said when announcing the program. “We can’t be a bystander, and we can’t wait for Washington, and I strongly believe that businesses and business leaders must do more for their people and more for the communities they serve.” He readily acknowledges that the new benefit will help Starbucks’s bottom line. “You have to link long-term value for shareholders,” he told me, “with long-term value for employees.” Starbucks already has its pick of employees, hiring just 4 percent of applicants each year. Like many retail businesses, the company’s problem is turnover. In its first two decades under Schultz’s leadership, Starbucks attracted and retained talent partly by offering unusually generous health insurance and stock options to employees, including ones who worked part-time. But those benefits have become less revolutionary, Schultz said, noting that many Americans have now gained access to health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. The college plan, in combination with a January 2015 pay raise for all baristas and shift supervisors, was designed to keep the company attractive to young employees. Starbucks pays more than the minimum wage in each state, and the company recently revised its scheduling software to ensure that managers can give employees their schedules at least one week in advance and never ask them to work back-to-back closing and opening shifts (a practice baristas refer to as “clopening”).
Half of the Starbucks students received federal Pell grants, a good indicator that they came from families in the bottom 40 percent of the nation’s income distribution. And half took out loans—a similar proportion to Arizona State’s entire online student population. But largely because Arizona State was subsidizing their tuition, Starbucks students’ loans averaged only $4,216, an amount 40 percent lower than the average for the rest of the online student body. In any case, the loans were temporary for the 70 percent of Starbucks students who had at least two years’ worth of credits, because they would be fully reimbursed through their paychecks for every class they took at Arizona State. (If they left Starbucks before reimbursement kicked in, they would be responsible for repaying their loans.)
There is a tension between making college accessible and making graduation likely. Most colleges have seen no downside to erring on the side of accessibility and letting millions drop out without a degree. For Starbucks and Arizona State, however, a high dropout rate would be a PR fiasco. The right balance is elusive. “We’re learning as we’re going,” Schultz told me.
Alicea Thomas got two A's in her first semester attending Arizona State online. (Charles Gallung)
The week before classes began, Alicea Thomas, the barista in Southern California, had her laptop stolen. The keyboard had stopped working, so she’d given it to a friend who supposedly knew someone who knew how to fix things. Then her friend disappeared. “He changed his cellphone number and blocked me out on social media,” she told me. She was irate. How could she be an online student without a computer? The laptop, a MacBook Pro, would cost $1,500 to replace—money that Thomas didn’t have. She was earning $11.64 an hour as a Starbucks shift supervisor. “I don’t get paid well for what I do,” she said.
Many college students today have very little room for error. They don’t live on campus; they attend school online or at a community college. They work full-time and have limited cash. When things go wrong, even small things, a spiral of problems can ensue that ends up causing them to abandon school, the one part of their lives that feels optional. But with a little support—just one or two people in their corner—these same students can prove extremely resilient. “We know if you surround any student with love and attention and good coaching and mentorship, they will succeed,” Daniel Greenstein, who directs college-completion initiatives at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told me. Over time, Greenstein has become more and more convinced that data-driven, student-centered university cultures can reverse the college-dropout trends. “The research tells us that what really matters for low-income and first-generation students,” he said, “is that you put your arms around them.”
Besides the counseling support, Arizona State also created a special one-week, noncredit orientation class required for all Starbucks students. The course, which I took, involves time-management exercises and inspirational videos, and teaches students basic IT skills to help them cope with the technical glitches that invariably accompany online learning. Much of the content was taken from other places. Like a lot of college classes, it could have been faster-paced and more engaging, but courses like this have been shown to help students succeed in college, and most of the Starbucks students gave it positive reviews in the post-class survey.
After Thomas’s computer was stolen, she dropped out of her orientation class. But then she did something crucial. She reached out to her academic adviser at Arizona State, who got her signed up for another orientation class happening later that month and encouraged her to find a way to get online.
That’s when Thomas began taking her classes on her iPhone. She was amazed at how much she could do on the device. After work, she’d take it to Applebee’s, get a margarita, and start doing her reading and tapping out her discussion posts. Problems arose only when she needed a webcam to take the remotely proctored quizzes. In those cases, she usually borrowed a computer from a relative.
For Mary Hamm, in Virginia, the problems came later, perhaps because she was older and had more life experience, and they were harder to see. On her first quiz in Introduction to Organizational Leadership, Hamm got a 7 out of 10. She felt like she’d failed, even though she hadn’t. She told herself to work harder and not to dwell on it. But then she got a call from Daniel Adams, her success coach at Arizona State. From his office, in Portland, Oregon, where he works at InsideTrack, a company that provides coaching services to Arizona State, he could see on his screen that Hamm had transferred with a high GPA, and that she’d been participating in her classes regularly. He made a throwaway self-deprecating joke, something he does on purpose in all his introductory calls, and then asked her how things were going. He paid very close attention to how she responded. “I call it listening between the lines,” Adams, a former middle-school science teacher, told me. “I have to understand the need.”
Hamm’s answer was upbeat but revealing. “I’m going to have to overcome my own insecurities,” she told him. “The first quiz defeated me just a little bit.” Adams talked with her about her confidence level, and he asked her whether it would be okay if they checked back in on her confidence each time he called in the future. She said that would be fine. Then he asked how she was approaching her reading assignments. When she said she’d struggled to absorb the material, he suggested that she read the chapter summary and discussion questions first, so her brain would have some scaffolding in place to make sense of what was to come. They spoke for half an hour.
During another call, Adams asked about Hamm’s confidence level. She said it had risen. The reading strategies were helping. And she loved making connections between what she was reading in her business classes and what she was doing on the floor of Starbucks, managing her employees. “I have names for things now!” she told him.
In a subsequent conversation, Hamm mentioned that she wasn’t using her notes in the quizzes. Adams suggested she ask her professor whether notes were allowed. She did, and she learned that the quizzes had been open-book all along. She’d gotten a 7 out of 10 on the first one because she hadn’t used her notes—a realization she might never have made without Adams’s prodding.
When Adams had first started contacting Hamm, she’d been skeptical. “I was like, ‘Why is this guy calling me every week?’ ” she told me. But by the third call, he’d won her over. “Knowing that he’s watching out to make sure I do succeed has been very important,” she continued. “He kind of keeps me level. He’s almost a member of my family now.”
At the Gates Foundation, Greenstein calls this approach the “reintroduction of intimacy”—a return to what worked in the Middle Ages, when university meant not a physical place but a collection of dons and students unified by a collaborative sense of educational mission. Ironically, high-tech online programs like Arizona State are finding that they can get better results by creating very human connections via coaches like Adams. He spends most of his time building relationships with students when things are going fine—listening to their stories, making suggestions. That way, when things go wrong, as they almost always eventually do, the students will trust him enough to ask for help.
According to Dave Jarrat, InsideTrack’s vice president of marketing, trust is crucial for students, like Hamm, whose parents did not go to college. “They often have doubts about themselves being college-ready,” he told me. “That manifests itself when they get into college, take a quiz, and get a C and say ‘See? I’m not college material.’ Then they drop out.” To disrupt the pattern, InsideTrack trains its coaches to talk with students before things go wrong, and to warn them about what to expect. The warning, Jarrat said, goes something like this: “College is hard. You will struggle. I just want you to know, it’s not you. Everybody struggles. Even people whose parents and grandparents went to college.”
Unlike so many other education reforms, coaching has been shown to have significant, measurable effects on student results. In a 2011 study, two Stanford University researchers conducted a randomized, controlled study of the performance of 13,555 students in eight colleges of varying degrees of selectivity. One group of students received coaching from InsideTrack, and a second group did not. After six months, the students in the coached group were five percentage points more likely to still be enrolled. The effects lingered for at least a year after the coaching ended. Five percentage points might seem small, but compared with the results of other, more expensive efforts to increase retention, it is impressive. Other studies have found that every $1,000 increase in financial aid per student leads to about a three-percentage-point increase in retention; InsideTrack was charging schools $500 a semester and getting better results. When Arizona State started using the company to provide coaching for its online students, its semester-to-semester online retention rate rose seven percentage points, from 75 percent in the spring of 2011 to 82 percent in the spring of 2014.
“Everybody spends all their time talking about money and cost,” Michael Crow, Arizona State’s president, told me. “That’s a variable. That’s not the determining factor. The determining factor is creating the culture for success.” He’s delighted, of course, that Starbucks has teamed up with the university to help students pay for college. But that’s just the beginning of the story. He believes that Arizona State needs to do even more coaching and advising than it already does. “With the financial barrier eliminated, now we’re into the sociology, the psychology. Those are hard-slogging problems.”
Mary Hamm made the dean's list. (Charles Gallung)
By November, halfway through the first semester of the Starbucks program, the students who had developed a regular study routine were generally doing well. But plenty of others were struggling. Starbucks students dropped 53 classes in October, and another 172 before the semester ended, in December. About a dozen quit their jobs at Starbucks, meaning they will not be reimbursed for any tuition payments they made.
One student who dropped out, an older woman who works at an East Coast Starbucks and asked that her name not be printed, out of concern for her job, told me the experience had been painful. When she’d first heard about the benefit, she’d been thrilled. She’d enrolled in the program full of hope. She’d always wanted to earn a degree. But because she had no previous credits, she would have to take out $10,000 in loans to cover the first two years, and spend about $2,000 of her own money. As the semester progressed, she got more anxious every day. “At this point in my life,” she said, “I just really had a hard time taking on more debt. This was making me miserable. I couldn’t even focus.”
On the last day she could withdraw and still get a full refund, she clicked the “Drop” button on Arizona State’s Web site, fighting back tears. “I usually don’t give up on things,” she said. After that, she would try not to wince when customers would come in and say, “This is incredible! Starbucks is paying for college!” Her reaction: “Well, yes and no.”
At Starbucks headquarters, in Seattle, meanwhile, executives had been hearing similar stories. To get employees’ feedback, the company surveyed 1,000 workers who had begun the application process but not completed it. The top reasons workers cited for not moving forward were that Arizona State didn’t offer their desired major, or that the program was still too expensive. Even the steep discount was not enough to make the program manageable for them. Early this year, therefore, Starbucks renegotiated the contract with Arizona State. Since March, the company has offered full tuition reimbursement to all employees, regardless of how many credits they’ve accrued. Starbucks has also committed to reimbursing employees immediately after they complete a class, rather than waiting for them to rack up 21 credits. Finally, Starbucks students will get even more of the kind of coaching that they found so valuable in the first semester. “We needed to learn,” said Lacey All, of Starbucks, explaining the changes. “We’re deeply committed to understanding the experience. It’s not just about ‘Send me to college.’ It’s about providing support along the way, at every step. We’re listening.”
This concept of listening to students—and then making structural changes based on their feedback—remains unheard-of at most colleges. By moving quickly to improve, Starbucks and Arizona State are showing that it is possible for large, publicly traded companies and unwieldy public universities to provide better service for large numbers of nonelite students. Making those changes, All admitted, is not easy. “It requires a new way of doing business. It requires partnerships. It requires a lot of unsexy work.” But it isn’t impossible, and the changes will continue, she told me. “We’re not done yet.”
Even with the initial, more limited scheme, the mid-semester class-drop rate for Starbucks students was less than 9 percent, slightly lower than the drop rate for Arizona State online students overall. The Starbucks students who stuck it out for that first semester took 1,480 courses in all and passed 79 percent of them, a pass rate similar to that of all new online students at the school.
By the last day of classes in December, Alicea Thomas knew her final grades. “I got two A’s on my iPhone!” she reported to me, bursting with pride. Shortly before Christmas, she got a text from her academic adviser, reminding her to register for the next semester’s classes before they filled up. She mentioned this while I was interviewing her at her home, and before I left she picked up her phone and started selecting classes, right then and there. She seemed to be as interested in pleasing her adviser as she was in taking the classes.
As of early January, 87 percent of the first class of Starbucks students had registered for the spring semester at Arizona State, including every employee named in this story. In the turbulent world of online learning, that is considered a good success rate. (It’s three percentage points higher than Arizona State’s overall online retention rate during the same period.) In addition, another 585 Starbucks employees had enrolled, bringing the current class to 1,500.
Those numbers are still lower than Starbucks and Arizona State officials initially had projected. When they announced the program, they’d boasted that as many as 10,000 employees might enroll in the first year. These days, they’re predicting something more modest: 3,000 to 5,000 student employees in the first couple of years and 25,000 graduates over the next decade.
Eventually, Schultz expects the benefit to cost tens of millions of dollars a year. But the program remains cheap for Starbucks. By comparison, the company’s health benefits cost about $250 million a year. It’s hard to imagine the college benefit ever approaching that level.
Since Starbucks announced the program in June, 20,000 people who have applied online for jobs at the company have cited the college benefit as a reason for their interest. One barista I interviewed had quit her office job in Dallas and taken a $4-an-hour pay cut to attend college for free through Starbucks. The company does not have data yet on whether employee retention has increased, but so far, it has spent very little and received significant PR and HR returns.
The Starbucks experiment is unfinished. To help students find more support, the company and Arizona State are launching a new community platform, so students can connect with one another online. To make sure employees know their options, the company sent out 135,000 mailers about the college program to their homes this past fall, and it’s planning another big promotion effort this spring. “We’re trying to show that this is not as hard as you think,” All said.
Half a dozen other companies have reached out to Starbucks to learn more about the program. As the job market tightens, more companies may begin investing in a college education for their employees. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has vowed to rate colleges based on completion rates, cost, and graduates’ earnings, despite widespread objections from colleges. (The first ratings are due from the Department of Education this summer.) “We want people to vote with their feet,” Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, told me. “It’s not just about your kids going to college; it’s about going to the right colleges.” He praised Arizona State and other colleges that focus on student services and results but also continually revisit their efforts in order to do better. “These kinds of best practices, these kinds of cultures, need to be the norm,” he said. “It doesn’t take a billion dollars, but it does take an entrepreneurial spirit and a real commitment.”
In December, in hopes of getting off her feet, Mary Hamm applied for yet another corporate job, this time in the Starbucks recruitment division. The response came swiftly, in an e-mail, just before the holidays: a “more qualified” candidate had been chosen. Hamm read the note without surprise. A few days later, she got another e-mail: she’d made the dean’s list at Arizona State.
She has enrolled for the spring semester and plans to travel to Tempe next year to walk in the graduation ceremony.
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entriesfrom Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.
Doug Mclean
In 2011, Kate Bolick’s much-discussed Atlantic cover story “All the Single Ladies” made a case for the unattached life, decrying the lack of affirming cultural narratives for single women. In a new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, Bolick combines memoir, literary biography, and cultural history to continue her examination of what it means to remain alone. Spinster studies the lives of five groundbreaking, independent women—Neith Boyce, Maeve Brennan, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edith Wharton. As Bolick considers how these historical figures triumphed, faltered, and made tradeoffs, she explores the pleasures and consequences of long-term solitude, as well as her own competing desires for freedom and attachment.
When I spoke to Bolick for this series, she chose to discuss an overlooked short story by Gilman, one of the five “awakeners” depicted in the book. “If I Were A Man,” falls somewhere between Freaky Friday and Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”: the story’s female narrator, Mollie, wakes up one day to find herself inhabiting her husband’s body. We discussed different forms of projecting oneself into another person’s experience, and what’s revealed in our personal fantasies about freedom, relationships, and the future.
Kate Bolick is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. She lives in New York City, where she spoke to me by phone.
Kate Bolick: In my late 20s, I felt very lonely in my thinking about being single. As I wondered what I was going to do with my life—as well as whether I’d get married or not—I didn’t see the option of staying single being reflected in an appealing way within the contemporary situation. Back then, in the year 2000, our culture was representing single women as either Carrie Bradshaw from Sex in the City—fabulous and frivolous—or Bridget Jones—desperate and comical. The archetype was very limited.
Then I came across Neith Boyce, who wrote a column for Vogue in the year 1898 called “The Bachelor Girl” about her decision to never marry. Discovering Boyce was a revelation, and the beginning of a very long process that eventually became this book. It felt incredibly exciting and important to read a late-Victorian piece of writing about what it meant to be an unmarried woman. I hadn’t known such a conversation existed so long ago.
I had known that, during the second wave of the women’s movement, there was a lot of discussion about single women and a huge critique around marriage. But I hadn’t known that conversation also happened in the late 1800s (not to mention the early 1800s). To hear Boyce’s voice a century on—a voice that sounded so relevant and contemporary and modern—made me feel not alone. It was something I really needed at that moment in time. To think that history was supplying me with what I needed was consoling.
By the time I sat down to write Spinster, I’d acquired this habit of accumulating women from the past. After my mother died, it became a way of recreating the kinds of conversations I would have had with her. I couldn’t talk to her, but—oddly enough—I could talk to these other women instead. A lot of my questions were about finding a home in the world: Where did I come from? Where am I going? What kind of home am I making for myself? Once my mother died, my sense of home was lost, in a way, because I could never return to the life I’d shared with her. Going out into the world and accumulating these women was a way of creating my own home, whatever that would turn out to be.
I first read Charlotte Perkins Gilman in college, and at the time she was never one of my favorites. But I found myself thinking about her story “The Yellow Wallpaper” as I wrote this book—so I looked around on my shelf, found my copy, and reread it. Right away I was struck by what a strong piece of writing it is, and I became curious about her life and her work.
Gilman’s not a great writer. She’s not a stylist. She didn’t think of herself as being a literary type of person. But what I find so admirable about her—so refreshing and exciting—is the way she’s just bursting with ideas, hurrying to get them down on the page. You can see her imagination at work, for example, in her 1915 novella, Herland—a satirical work about a utopian, all-female society. Gilman designs the entire society from soup to nuts: the architecture, the dinnerware, the food supply system, the clothes. It’s such an inspired vision: Every detail about this world she engineers.
One of my favorite Gilman stories is the lesser-known “If I Were a Man,” which was published in 1914. (I assume she wrote it for her publication The Forerunner, which she ran from 1909 to 1916—she pretty much wrote and published the whole thing herself.) It’s a very short story about a character named Mollie, whom Gilman describes as typically female. One day, Mollie wakes up as a man: she’s become her husband, Gerald. She finds herself in his body, hurrying to the train to commute into the city for work—running late, "as usual, and, it must be confessed, in something of a temper." Which made me laugh out loud. Even now we say men “have tempers” and women are “moody.”
As Mollie experiences what it’s like to be a man, one of her very first revelations is that she has pockets. In the early 1900s, pockets were not a feature of women’s clothing. Unthinkingly, she/he reaches into one to get a nickel for the conductor, a penny for the newsboy, and is overcome with the novelty and power conferred by this tiny sartorial element:
These pockets came as a revelation. Of course she had known they were there, had counted them, made fun of them, mended them, even envied them; but she never had dreamed of how it felt to have pockets. Behind her newspaper she let her consciousness, that odd mingled consciousness, rove from pocket to pocket, realizing the armored assurance of having all those things at hand, instantly get-at-able, ready to meet emergencies ... The keys, pencils, letters, documents, notebook, checkbook, bill folder—all at once, with a deep rushing sense of power and pride, she felt what she had never felt before in all her life—the possession of money, of her own earned money—hers to give or to withhold, not to beg for, tease for, wheedle for.
It’s very typical of Gilman to imagine herself into the mind of a man to try to see what that would feel like, just as an exercise. Here, the pocket becomes a powerful gender distinction. Being able to stash all of the things that help her move around the world makes Mollie feel powerful.
Gilman taught me about material feminism, a movement within the long history of feminism I had not been aware of until I started reading her. She was committed to the idea that changing our physical, material world—our built environment, our architecture—could improve our lives. One of her biggest ideas, for instance, was the kitchen-less house: taking kitchens out of individual homes and making them communal [to] alleviate the chores and scutwork of housekeeping, and free women from toiling alone. She showed me ways to think about the home in relation to the world at large, and how to change society through changing the home. Up until then, I’d been thinking about it on an individual level—how the house shapes the person, how the house shapes the family—but Gilman politicized architecture and space for me in a way I found very compelling.
Mollie’s climbing into the male experience and feeling that physicality is similar to what I felt like I was doing as I climbed into the experience of women like Gilman in order to write this book. I find that I habitually turn to the past into order to make sense of the present. I’m very drawn to that imaginary time-traveling—projecting yourself into the past, and into a specific person’s experience of the past, though their physical environment and the actual clothes that they wore.
I think that, as I was thinking about wanting to be single, I was living that fantasy through the lives of the women I read about. Adam Phillips has written eloquently about the role of our longed-for selves, the lives we think we should be leading versus the lives we actually are leading. A sense of frustration is, surprisingly, necessary: The answer is not always to give up the life you have and then go lead the life that you want. The fact is that we’re all living in a tension between the life we live and the life we think we should be living or want to be living, constantly, and that our life is in that tension. In my own life, even at a moment where I would be in a committed relationship, I might still long for or wonder or dream about what it would mean to be a single woman. I could do that by reading about this woman or thinking about that woman. Reading allowed my fantasy to live inside of my reality.
There is a very universal longing to be alone, to be independent. It’s a real fantasy for a lot of people, whether or not they’re actually living it. At some point in my 30s, a woman my mother had been friendly with contacted me out of the blue. She said, “I’m Margaret, the woman your mother wrote a romance novel with.” I had no idea my mother had ever written a romance novel. It was a very un-her thing to do. She didn’t read romance novels, she was not a particularly romantic or sentimental kind of person, and she was very serious in her reading habits. So this friend sent me the novel—my mother had written the first half by herself and then had gotten bored with it, so she and this friend collaborated to finish it.
There I was, 10 years or so after my mother’s death, reading her romance novel—the story of a young, unmarried woman named Ivy Winter who works as an interior decorator and lives in New York City. It was so uncannily like my own life—at the time, I was living in New York and working as an editor at a glossy home-decor magazine—but had nothing at all to do with my mother’s experience—she never lived in New York, she was single for about two minutes before she married my father, and she knew nothing about interior decorators. But clearly, she had a fantasy about home decorating, about being the archetypal single, urban woman. To see that my mother had carried around that fantasy while living the life of a married woman and mother of two children was a thrill. Of course, we never fully know our parents—and we rarely get such evidence of their secret selves. It made me feel so much closer to her.
Though they allowed me to fantasize, and despite my admiration for them, I don’t think of the historical women I write about as “inspiring” figures. “Inspiring,” to me, suggests an aspirational stance—that you want to be that person. I didn’t ever want to be these people: They were completely distinct entities that I engaged and interacted with by bumping up against. Engaging with them allowed me to think about my own life from different perspectives the way great conversations do. I could like or not like their choices as I read, just as people who read my book will like or not like the decisions I’ve made.
I’m very suspicious of the role of the bad-ass, brave, rebel woman. That is a type of personality, of course, and there are people out there who are like that—they are necessary! But we can tend to reduce women to two archetypes: You’re the badass woman who breaks all the rules and gets to live a fulfilled life, or you’re a woman who follows convention and is fearful. There’s a whole range, obviously, in between. The most shocking and helpful thing, when I am reading the biographies and memoirs and letters of the women who I converse with most readily, is when I get to experience moments of self-doubt. To watch them go through that, and find their own confidence—that is useful. Just being presented with a strong badass woman who has it all figured out, that doesn’t help me. What helps me is watching somebody else go from doubt to certainty. Or to change their mind again. It’s a reminder that there is no fixed place to arrive at. We’re always works in progress.
Brittany Howard has given a name to each of the many dance moves she does onstage with her band Alabama Shakes. Those moves include, according to The Guardian's profile of Howard, “the Reverse Raindance, the Matador, the One-Legged Foxtrot, the Pre-Apocalyptic Strut (completely different, she insists, from the Post-Apocalyptic Strut), the Full Body Seizure.” You’ve got to wonder, listening to her band’s new album Sound & Color, whether she has a similar taxonomy for the kinds of sounds her voice can make. Might she refer to the wheeze at the start of “Don’t Want to Fight No More” as the Deflating Balloon? The quivering moan of the word “baby” on “Gimme All Your Love” as the Movie Villain Cackle?
Or maybe she doesn’t overthink her gift. During the young band’s already-legendary concerts, she taps into what she's called the “the spirit world”—“latching on to a feeling, riding it, trying not to come out of it. You stop thinking, you’re just performing—that’s the spirit world.” The ideal of a total-abandon performance, of being in the zone like an athlete, isn’t a new one for musicians. But it’s one that seems especially powerful in relation to Howard, a singer who rasps and booms in styles that recall icons from Robert Plant to Nina Simone. How many of her wild swings in pitch, her murmured asides, and her asymmetrical phrasings come out of careful, creative planning? How many result from pure improv?
There was little need to ask the same questions about the rest of the band's sound on Alabama Shakes' 2012 debut, Boys & Girls, which sold an impressive 500,000 copies in the U.S. It was retro rock in the Kings of Leon model, placing classic and Southern soul sounds into a tight, polished packaged that captured the attention of NPR playlist-makers and Jack White. There are lots of bands working in the same mode all over the country, writing songs as or nearly as catchy; for the most part, it was Howard who made this one stand out.
But on its sophomore album, Alabama Shakes sounds delightfully unglued. The title-track opener drifts by with vibraphones, Howard crying that "a new world hangs outside the window," and no traditional crescendo. The message: something freer, jazzier, and possibly more difficult is on offer. When creaking funk riffs and a disco beat snap into place for the follow-up track, “Don’t Wanna Fight,” it’s reassurance that the band hasn’t abandoned pop, but it's also a sign that where Boys & Girls prized consistency, Sound & Color prizes diversity. The songs to come include punk, psychedelia, and slew of more unplaceable moments.
The experimentalism pays off when it's executed with the same crazed passion as Howard's vocals. “Gimme All Your Love” is a two-parter: first comes stop-start thundering, alternating shouts and guitar stabs with lullaby-like interludes. In the second half, the tempo picks up and the band starts jamming over a bright organ line, and it feels like the satisfaction of some primal, universal hunger. Another highlight, “Miss You,” opens with a 50s-prom backing as Howard delivers some uncharacteristically specific lyrics—“I’m gonna miss you and your Mickey Mouse tattoo / and you’ll be leaving in your Honda Accord”—before she and the arrangement froth up in waves of noisy desire.
Other songs don't gel as well. The punk salvo “The Greatest” was apparently intended to be a ballad but, according to the band’s publicity material, it got a genre makeover because “it wasn’t clicking.” The conflation of interesting style with interesting songwriting is a problem throughout, especially on the Sun Ra-indebted "Gemini," which sounds neat in theory—Alabama Shakes: Space Voyagers—but at more than six and a half minutes long, just bores.
But for a band with an asset like Howard, some misfires in the name of ambition are no vice. Hearing her in new contexts is exciting; it makes you realize how cool it would be to have a Howard singing above house, or prog, or any number of styles. The most tantalizing piece of work is the closer, “Over My Head,” where Howard harmonizes in rounds with herself over a minimal soundscape of handclaps and keys. It’s gospel meets Kid A, but it doesn’t feel like arty affectation. It feels like a band realizing that with a voice as weird and powerful as Howard's, they can do anything at all.
Ryan Chatfield was out playing with his drone on Floreat Beach in Australia this week, when its batteries died.
The videographer then sprinted after the expensive toy (he said it cost him over $2000) and managed to catch it before it took a dive in the ocean.
“I thought, ‘That’s it, it’s gone’ but I knew I just had to have a crack at it,” he told The West Australian.
And fortunately he was successful in his rescue attempt and just got a little wet in the process. He also chose the perfect song to edit into the clip using Enya’s “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away).”
Can an Alzheimer’s patient with dementia so severe she can’t remember her daughters’ names or how to eat a hamburger consent to have sex with her husband?
Earlier this week, the New York Times reported on the case of Henry Rayhons, who has been charged with third-degree felony sexual abuse for having sex with his wife, who suffered from Alzheimer's so severe that her clinicians claim she was incapable of consenting to sex. Science of Us picked up the conversation too, and oh boy, I can't tell if this is complicated or not? On one hand, if Mrs. Rayhons was giving repeated verbal and non-verbal cues that this is what she wanted, we should be trusting her. On the other, we have lots of parameters for who has the capacity to consent, and understand that even if, say, a minor is giving lots of positive verbal cues, it'd still be rape. On a third hand, we tend to infantilize the elderly and infirm. On a fourth, there's a lot we still don't understand about Alzheimer's. I am not the person to solve this but maybe you are.
Imagine an original comedy about The First Woman President. Between media pressure (“Is she powerful enough?”) and network notes (“Is she relatable enough?”) and focus group testing (“She should be hotter, but not like, too hot?”) it would likely endure as much tweaking, flattening and deadening as the Clinton campaign put into Hillary’s announcement video (Clinton 2016!). Every scene would be plagued by questions like, “Do we really want to imply that this is how The First Female President would behave in the War Room?” or “But can we really let The First Woman President refuse to pardon both turkeys just because she’s on her period?” Every plot point would seem like an accusation or prediction, every casting choice would Say Something, every line would be ringed with stupid boring significance. For all this well-considered work, it could only hope to be as funny as the failed Geena Davis drama Commander-in-Chief, which is to say, sliding up and down a scale of “kind of funny by accident” to “maybe it was a bad idea to have women be a gender; we could all quit and become vestal virgins.”
“We’re making history, we’re the first woman president! Well, I am, Michael, you’re not!” Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) giddily tells a well-wisher at the joint chief’s assembly, but blessedly Veep hasn’t become a show about The First Woman President. It’s still about the Selina Meyer we already know and kind of love, or at least laugh at and properly fear as a political idea. She’s narcissistic and crazy foul-mouthed; competitive and short-sighted and mean. She’s still completely unrelatable (poor, poor First Daughter Catherine), but now terrifyingly powerful. She also remains really, really hot, but that can be written off as a by-product of being played by perfect human specimen Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
Selina came by the White House much the same way Francis Underwood did (and Geena Davis’s President Mackenzie Allen, just for the record) — unelected, ascending after a president’s resignation. There are valid fears about transitioning a comedic character from having minimal, laughable authority to being leader of the free world. Is it still hysterical that Mike McLintock (Matt Walsh) is always out of the loop, when the loop means the fate of our nation? Are Kent’s (Gary Cole) tautological aphorisms just as joyously meaningless when they’re said in the Oval Office? Is it entertaining that Gary (Tony Hale) lets his obsession with Selina override all other considerations when he has the White House purse strings in his hot little hands? Well, yeah. It’s great.
The change gives the characters a new, amped up energy. It even allows President Meyer a few glimmers of reassuring competence before putting her perfectly-heeled foot back in her mouth. Mike is a famous press secretary now and loving it, Amy (Anna Chlumsky) is left to deal with Selina’s tattered campaign, Gary lacks security clearance and is losing unfettered access to his beloved Selina, and Jonah (Timothy Simons) has a whole new Veep’s office to haunt with his hilariously ghoulish presence. Last season Selina was running for president — and she still is, in her minimal free time — but making her president dispenses with much of the concern about gender and optics and horse-race discussions. Campaigns are funny, but they are necessarily one-note. Gotta get that one note out, make sure the voters understand your one note. But dealing with missing hikers and Greek oil tank crashes and historic speeches about the future whatever puts the show back at a comfortable, breakneck speed. Veep has always run at a pace where any small mistake could become huge and any huge mistake can be quickly forgotten as the next giant blunder comes crashing down (remember the entire staff shit-talking a doofy reporter into his own microphone last season? No? Neither does anyone else). Now the stakes and mistakes are even bigger. There’s no time for quibbles about Selina’s folksiness when there’s world peace to not achieve.
And there’s definitely no time to wring hands about being The First Woman President. Having watched the first four episodes, I can (spoiler alert) assure you that there is no early episode belaboring the media’s obsession with The First Woman President, or soliloquy on the Unusual Pressures that First Woman President Meyers faces. There are fun additions, like a small army of faceless young women eager to work under President Meyers, whom the staff, including Reid Scott’s Dan Egan and Mike, cannot tell apart (“You big lady racist,” Zak Orth’s Communications Director tells Mike). There are some solid gender jokes (“I’m used to dealing with angry, aggressive, dysfunctional men,” Selina tells her chief of staff, Ben (Kevin Dunn), “i.e. men,” and Kent calls her negotiations “masterly, or mistressly, whichever’s not offensive”). And there is a looming sexual harassment scandal, thanks to the new Vice President’s handsy chief of staff, Teddy (Patton Oswalt), who can’t keep his hands of Jonad’s gonads. None of this bogs the show down or gets in the way of the epic, gender-neutral screw-ups the Veep team excels at. “Cause I’m the president, see? Everything’s my fault now.” Selina says happily, and everything is what she’s dealing with. Bring it all on.
There are a lot of great reasons to make your own soda syrup. You can use real sugar, rather than the HFCS devil that lurks in most bottles. You can make flavors that make you happy, from real seasonal ingredients with complexity and intensity, and you can use up excesses of things in your fridge like, say, the time you assumed strawberries being on sale meant that you were going to eat a few pounds of them before they went bad. You can use the syrup as a foundation for cocktails, because it’s Friday and baby, you’ve earned it, and you can package bottles up as gifts for friends, because you’re just that awesome of a person.
The biggest affront to gay equality in America today is the fact that same-sex couples in 13 states are still prevented from marrying. The laws of Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Ohio, and Tennessee are discriminatory, callous in their effects, and may violate the Constitution. Overturning those laws is the most urgent gay-rights cause. Once they fall, whether through a Supreme Court decision or legislation, the benefits that marriage confers on couples and society will increase.
And they will fall. More just marriage laws lay ahead!
But they haven't fallen yet. So it is strange to see Indiana, where same-sex couples can and do wed, emerge as the focus of national controversy on gay rights.
The cause is Governor Mike Pence's decision to sign legislation called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Critics of the law say that it is a thinly veiled response to anti-discrimination cases like one in Oregon, where state authorities want a bakery to pay a $150,000 fine for refusing to make a cake for a lesbian couple's wedding, or a similar case in New Mexico, where a photography studio lost a lawsuit filed when its proprietors refused to shoot the wedding of a same-sex couple. Supporters of the law, like religious liberty expert Douglas Laycock (a vocal gay-marriage supporter), argue that its actual affect will almost certainly be to afford greater protection to many religious minorities. And he thinks it is unlikely to stymie gay rights.
Critics of the law have seized the upper hand in the battle for public opinion. "The list of businesses, governments, and famous people boycotting the state of Indiana over Gov. Mike Pence's decision to sign the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is still growing," Robby Soave writes. "Now even Nick Offerman—the comedian and actor who played libertarian hero Ron Swanson on NBC's Parks and Recreation—has cancelled his upcoming Indiana comedy tour dates. Ashton Kutcher, Larry King, Charles Barkley, and a host of other celebrities have made similar declarations, as have several companies, cities, and Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy—even though Connecticut has had RFRA in place for the last 20 years."
This puzzles me.
When 13 states prohibit gay-marriage outright, what sense does it make for gay-rights supporters to boycott a different state where gay marriage is legal?
Being barred from marriage puts a significant burden on gay couples—a burden many orders of magnitude greater than the relatively small possibility of being refused by an atypically religious photographer or baker in the course of planning a same-sex wedding (the outcome the law's opponents assert to be its true purpose). And there is no reason to think this law would allow a hotel or a restaurant to exclude gay customers, or that any hotels or restaurants are interested in doing so.
So why is Indiana public enemy number one?
The talented band Wilco has cancelled its May 7 show in Indianapolis, commenting that the law "feels like a thinly disguised legal discrimination." But Wilco is playing two April shows in Texas, a state that doesn't yet issue marriage licenses to gays. That is, Texas engages in not-at-all-disguised discrimination. Wilco also has upcoming shows in Missouri, Ohio, and Kentucky, other states that don't grant marriage licenses to gays at all despite court rulings (which are presently stayed) declaring that its existing policy constitutes unconstitutional discrimination. Indianapolis, by contrast, actually has a municipal statute that bans anti-gay discrimination!
Then there's this:
NASCAR said in a statement Tuesday that it was "disappointed" by the legislation, and the NCAA, which has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1999, says it is concerned about the law's effect on future Indiana events.
NASCAR hosts events at tracks in the following states where gay marriage is illegal: Kentucky, Michigan, and Texas. Are future events in those states in doubt?
The reaction from politicians who oppose the law is confounding in its own way.
Most notable is Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic frontrunner. She published this short statement on Twitter: "Sad this new Indiana law can happen in America today. We shouldn't discriminate against ppl bc of who they love #LGBT." I wholeheartedly agree that no one should discriminate against anyone for being gay. But it isn't lost on me that I started championing that position more than a decade before the Democratic frontrunner, who opposed allowing gay couples to marry one another as recently as 2013! Now that she's changed public positions—a shift that perfectly tracked broader public sentiment —she declares Indiana out of step with the times for making gay weddings legal, because refusing to bake cakes for them may be legal, too. In other words, Indiana's "sad" position today is far more progressive than Clinton's own stance was just a few years ago.
"I know that many in our country still struggle to reconcile the teachings of their religion, the pull of their conscience, the personal experiences they have in their families and communities,” Clinton said in 2013 when she came out in favor of gay marriage. “And people of good will and good faith will continue to view this issue differently. So I hope as we discuss and debate, whether it’s around a kitchen table or in the public square, we do so in a spirit of respect and understanding.”
Two years ago, she thought people who wanted to deny gays the right to marry had "good will" and "good faith." She encouraged us to offer them understanding. Now, people who merely oppose state sanctions against a rare, far less burdensome form of discrimination make her "sad" about the state of America. At least her latest rhetoric is preferable to the stance she took as a Senate candidate, when she avowed that she would've supported the Defense of Marriage Act (just as her husband had) and declared that "marriage has got historic, religious, and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time and I think a marriage is as marriage has always been, between a man and a woman."
She would later explain her evolution:
Like so many others, my personal views have been shaped over time by people I have known and loved, by my experience representing our nation on the world stage, my devotion to law and human rights and the guiding principles of my faith.
Clinton's 2013 explanation may help many Democrats support her bid for the presidency enthusiastically, even as they presume that people who haven't yet evolved on the issue—many of whom haven't benefited from personally knowing as many gay people, been constantly surrounded by cosmopolitans, represented our nation on a world stage, seen the connection to global human rights, or been guided by the same progressive spiritual leaders—to be despicable bigots. The speed at which resisting change transitions from understandable to unthinkable just happens to track the speed at which the most prominent Democrats do it.
As best I can remember, I have never opposed gay marriage. It's a policy that never even occurred to me until I came across an Andrew Sullivan piece on the subject. His eloquence sold me from the start. I began arguing in favor of gay marriage with my grandparents at dinner. I've kept arguing in favor of it for the entirety of my career as a professional journalist, even early on when I had editors and bosses who vehemently opposed it. Over the years, I've watched a lot of people shift from opposing to supporting gay marriage, as have we all. Look at the trends:
Pew Research
Were all those converts to gay-marriage bigots before their conversions? Did they deserve to be punished? Consider that Bill Clinton signed, and Hillary Clinton supported, federal laws that blatantly discriminated against gays. As noted, Hillary didn't announce her support for gay marriage until March 18, 2013. She has, of course, paid no penalty for her influential acts against gay equality. (Far from boycotting her, Governor Malloy of Connecticut endorsed her for president in 2008.)
That's how it works for elites. As a point of contrast, that small-time Oregon baker refused to bake that cake for a gay wedding on January 13, 2013—weeks before Hillary would endorse a gay couple's right to even have a wedding. The penalty Oregon recommends for that baker: $150,000. I think Christian bakers should happily bake for gay weddings (I've written that Christian photographers should happily photograph them). I don't think doing so is prohibited by their faith. It's arguably in keeping with it. I nevertheless see something unjust in that juxtaposition.
In the thick of the fight, when speaking out on behalf of gay marriage could've make a significant difference in advancing equality, celebrities weren't willing to boycott populations on the wrong side of the issue, putting them crosswise of a majority of their fans and their wallets. Corporations weren't yet exercising their free speech rights as corporate persons to support gay equality while being cheered by progressives who showed no discomfort with such entities engaging in political speech.
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, John Edwards, and many other Democratic political elites echoed majority opposition to equal recognition for same-sex relationships (though their Republican opponents were generally much worse).
Now that public opinion has thankfully shifted, marriage traditionalists have thankfully been routed, gay marriage in all 50 states is thankfully inevitable, and its opponents are a waning minority incapable of imposing any cost on political opponents, elites who support gay marriage are suddenly very self-righteous and assertive. Now that those who would discriminate against gays are a powerless cultural minority that focuses its objectionable behavior in a tiny niche of the economy, elites have suddenly decided that using state power to punish them is a moral imperative. The timing suggests that this has as much to do with opportunism, tribalism, humanity's love of bandwagons, and political positioning as it does with advancing gay rights, which have advanced thanks to persuasion, not coercion.
Going forward, non-bigoted Americans are inevitably going to reach different conclusions regarding the tensions among non-discrimination law, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and freedom of conscience—thorny issues all (unless one just ignores the fact that there are multiple core rights at stake). So long as gay equality is the goal, a better focus for fury than religious-liberty exceptions are unjust marriage laws in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and Tennessee.
During a recent visit to the Frick Collection, my students were expressively irritated by the lack of wall text that could explain the works of art to them. However, when forced to consider William Turner’s Fishing Boats Entering Calais Harbor, they were able to understand the precarious situation of the boat and intuit the frustration of seeing the proximity of the harbor yet being on a boat unlikely to reach it. They noted the tiny figure on the boat pointing to the enormous swell of the sea and felt the ultimate powerlessness of man in the face of natural forces. Once engaged with the work, the students kept noticing details and elements in the painting, delighting in the tale told through paint. A particular student was later inspired to do some research on Turner and was excited to talk about the differences between the Frick image and Dutch Boats in a Gale currently in the National Gallery, London. She did not start with the historical context nor what others had written about the images, rather, she began with visual analysis.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Dutch Boats in a Gale 1801
While we are trained to read and consider the significance of the written word, we are often at a loss as to how to read a picture. Frequently, misunderstanding the tired trope of a picture being worth some large number of words, we glance at it, categorize it in relation to something verbal and move on. Of course, viewing images in a museum is not the same as, say, glancing at a photograph online. The lack of learned visual literacy, however, is at the foundation of misunderstanding both.
I often hear unexpected effects of studying art history on student lives: one of my Columbia University undergrads once noted that his relationship with his family had improved vastly once he learned to observe and respond to their body language in a manner he would interpret a painting, rather than in an emotionally charged way.
An unapologetic feminist, Maslany is frequently hailed as a purveyor of Strong Female Characters. Though appreciative, Maslany finds this a reductive formulation. “That’s so boring!” she said, and went on to condemn the way female strength gets shoehorned into the confines of male-dominated narratives. “What about the strength of this uncharted territory we’ve never explored on camera? We haven’t seen them yet, they’re not archetypes yet, because they’re all related to male expression.”
She cited Gena Rowlands, in her role as Mabel in John Cassavetes’s 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence, as a truly innovative model for a Strong Female Character. The film concerns Mabel, a housewife and misfit, and her husband, Nick, played by Peter Falk. Mabel is spectacularly eccentric but desperately wants not to be. Scenes in which she tries to be a good hostess or order a drink at a bar are spellbinding failures. She’s eventually sent away to an asylum to be “cured,” and she and her husband deal with the aftermath.
“Her performance is so strong to me, because it’s full of vulnerability, full of fragility, full of nuttiness,” Maslany said. “Like, she’s big in this movie. She does things I’ve never seen a woman—or a man or anybody—do on camera, like these little tics and things like that that are so funny and so bizarre. That’s what I want to see. Like, I don’t want to see a robotic woman in a cat suit who can kick ass. I don’t give a [expletive] about that. It’s just not real.”
Lili!!!! Her profile of Tatiana Maslany, the star of Orphan Black, is here, and I would like you to go read it right now and then come back so we can discuss our feelings.
If you’ve been here long enough you know I’ve been working on my second book for the last three years. I’ve carried it with me every day, adding a paragraph here, deleting another there, reworking a sentence for the eleventieth time because I want it to be perfect, always feeling like a loser because Stephen King and cocaine set unrealistic expectations about how easy it should be to write a book. If you know me in real life you’ve seen me lugging around a giant manuscript and scribbling furiously in it when inspiration strikes. You may have asked me why I don’t just use a laptop and then nodded in what you hoped passed for understanding when I explained that I was afraid I’d lose everything I’ve written when the robot revolution happens and computers become self-aware and refuse to humor me anymore because I wasted their potential watching videos of baby hedgehogs in bathtubs.
When I was deciding what to write about for book two my first thought was “SPARKLY MALE VAMPIRES WHO ARE PRETTIER THAN YOU versus ZOMBIE FAINTING GOATS, IN THE BATTLE FOR BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH’S HEART”. Then Victor was like, “What are you, crazy?” and I thought, Well, sort of. And that’d probably be easier to write about since I have slightly more experience dealing with mental illness than I have dealing with goats.
And so began a terrifying and incredibly daunting task of writing a very funny book about a very terrible thing.
This book was hard. I wanted to be honest about my struggles — and that means opening up about things I’ve never really discussed before. And it was hard. But luckily, I had help. From you.
When I came out so many years ago about my depression and anxiety disorder I was afraid you’d all run away screaming. But you didn’t. Instead, thousands of you said “Me too,” and “I thought I was the only one,” and “It’s not just me?” You gave me the strength to be honest about my flaws and the support to realize that I was more than the broken parts that make up me. And you did something else you might not even realize…
In the years since I started writing about mental illness I’ve received so many letters from people who were affected by this community, but there were special ones I kept in a folder that I named “The Folder of 24.” – It was called that because it contained 24 letters from people who were actively planning their suicide, but decided to get help instead. And not because of what I said…they did it because of you. Almost every single one explained that what convinced them that depression was lying to them was the amazing response to my posts. They could look at a single person like me and think it was still a rare illness or something to be ashamed about…but when thousands of strangers shout out into the darkness that they are there too, it makes ripples. And those anonymous strangers saved lives without even knowing it. If you ever left a comment or a kind word you may have been the cause of someone’s mother or daughter or son being alive. Being thankful to be alive.
When I was on tour with my last book I’d sometimes talk about the Folder of 24 and how that folder is the best reason I’ll ever have for writing. And then something strange happened. After a reading people would lean in close and whisper “I was 25.”
There were so many 25’s.
This was what I went back to whenever writing this new book got too hard. Because I knew that to truly write about what it’s like to struggle with mental illness I’d have to go deeper and talk about things I haven’t written about, for fear that everyone would back away if I talked about self-harm, or mania, or the personality disorder that pushes me from “normal” crazy to something a bit scarier.
I wrote and deleted and rewrote passages, and I’m still afraid of how people will react. I’m in the exact same place I was seven years ago…afraid to share but unable to tell my story without laying it all out. And so I’ll do the same thing I did before. Because I don’t have any other choice but to be myself, and hopefully you’ll still be here in the same wonderful way you have been.
I hope you’ll come with me on the next step of the journey. I hope you’ll see yourself, or someone you love, in these pages and learn to love them better. I hope it shows people that laughter and joy can come from chaotic bizarreness. I hope you know how much you’ve helped me to become my own 25.
This is a humor book and I’ve been told that it’s funnier than my last. Most of the people who’ve read it don’t have mental illness. Certainly none of them have my specific diagnosis, but they still loved it because I think everyone can relate to the ridiculousness we bring on ourselves, to the fact that laughing at a dangerous, terrifying monster is the only way to make it small and easier to hide in your pocket.
I think everyone can relate to the fact that a ton of bullshit happens every single day and the only way we can battle that bullshit is choose to be furiously happy whenever we have the opportunity. That means different things to different people, but to me it’s about making clothes out of live ferrets, making the best of it when you get kidnapped by an actual funeral, and occasionally balancing your taxidermy raccoon on the back of your cats to create a Midnight Raccoon Rodeo in your kitchen when you’re having one of those weeks where you’re afraid to leave your house.
It also means celebrating the fact that I HAVE FINISHED THE BOOK. AAAAAAHHHHHH! Sorry. Just happy.
Step two was choosing a book cover, but my last book cover had a dead mouse on it and that level of sophistication is pretty hard to top. How do you get a book cover that captures the celebration of being broken in just the right way? My suggestion was to use a model who literally went from being road kill to being the star rodeo rider during my recurring bouts of insomnia.
Any you know what? I think we nailed it.
(That’s Rory, by the way. He’s in the book.)
I hope to God you love it.
Rory and I love you.
PS. Want details on when it comes out and where to order it right now? CLICK HERE.
PPS. Thank you. Again. Seriously. You made this happen. (Which I guess sort of means it’s your fault if you hate it. Just saying.)
Rad American Women A-Z. Can I be proud without sounding like someone’s disgusting old paternalistic grandpa? Because I am. Twenty years ago, the outrageous Kate Schatz was a student of mine at UC Santa Cruz—in both my creative writing class, and in my section of Wendy Brown’s life-changing Feminist Theory class. And look! Look what she’s doing! Feminist writing! Right? This book is buoyant, brilliant, gorgeous, badass, heroic, and totally, unapologetically rad. Just the very fact of it, in my house, makes me happy every day—to say nothing of all the times I walk past Birdy intently reading about Temple Grandin or Dolores Huerta or Angela Davis.
Angela Davis, who was teaching at Santa Cruz when Kate and I were students there. Was it a constant thrill to glimpse her on the wooded walkways of that campus? Guess.
Yes, it is a (brilliantly) illustrated alphabet book—but make no mistake. This is a book for boys and girls of any age, including grown-ups. It is my new go-to baby gift, as well as my new go-to teenager gift. If you want to win a copy of this book, leave a comment here. I’m going to use some of our Amazon credit (generated from this blog’s holiday shopping) to send the book out to three happy readers. But please don’t let the give-away stop you from ordering a copy, either from Amazon or, preferably, directly from City Lights. (OMG: It is currently out of stock. HOW RAD IS THAT? Pre-order it, okay?)
Our friend Maya, modeling.
More bragging. Our dear friend Ava (known to long-time readers variously as “Ben’s best friend, Ava” or “Nicole’s daughter, Ava” or “Birdy’s idol, Ava”) has opened an Etsy shop. Currently on offer: t-shirts printed with two of her incredible designs. These are stunning. Plus, when she is crazy-famous one day, you can produce your thread-bare Ava original, and blow people away. Don't you want to support a young artist, and be wicked cool at the same time?
A few other things. These three books, all written, suspiciously enough, by middle-aged white mothers (?), are among the best I've read, despite my current lack of imagination.
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. When my friend Ali was dying, and I couldn't bear to read anything that wasn't perfectly crushing and hopeful, this book was perfectly crushing and hopeful. And also just so funny and kind-hearted and profoundly human (maybe because Toews is Canadian?). We love, we try hard, we are deeply flawed. It's a novel, but is almost exactly autobiographical, so brace yourself. And "All My Puny Sorrows" is taken from a Coleridge poem, of all perfect things. Oh, really. I only envy you for not having read it yet.
Man at the Helmby Nina Stibbe. Also perfection, in a different way: a crazily funny, irreverent find-Mom-a-husband story told by a completely delightful English 9-year-old. It sounds YA-ish (not that there's anything wrong with it!) but it is actually comically full of sex and drinking and darkness and depression, and in the Venn diagram of "pleasure" and "reading," the circles would overlap completely, and it would be this book. There was not a single page from which I didn't want to read aloud (and I only stopped myself because every time I said, "Oh my god, listen to this," Michael, putting down the paper, would sigh) If you haven't read Love, Ninayet, her nanny memoirs, read that too.
Single, Carefree, Mellowby Katherine Heiny. I just finished this last night, even though I tried and tried to make it last longer, but wolfed it down instead, and then lay around feeling full and kind of greedy and sad because it was all gone. Don't let "stories" throw you if you're not a story person: the voice is continuous, and it reads like a novel. A novel that is mostly about women having sex with men who are mostly not the men they should be having sex with. It is so funny and good-natured and true: there is passion and tedium, like in real life, and, in my favorite story, a child's birthday party that is so profoundly stressful and boring that I wondered if it wasn't, perhaps, the very best representation I'd ever read of parenting.
Now I need a new book. I welcome your thoughts below, even if you're not entering the give-away! Speaking of: enter by Monday April 6th at noon, winners announced soon after.
xo
p.s. One last recommendation: this documentary. It blew us all away, kids and grown-ups.
Imagine an original comedy about The First Woman President. Between media pressure (“Is she powerful enough?”) and network notes (“Is she relatable enough?”) and focus group testing (“She should be hotter, but not like, too hot?”) it would likely endure as much tweaking, flattening and deadening as the Clinton campaign put into Hillary’s announcement video (Clinton 2016!). Every scene would be plagued by questions like, “Do we really want to imply that this is how The First Female President would behave in the War Room?” or “But can we really let The First Woman President refuse to pardon both turkeys just because she’s on her period?” Every plot point would seem like an accusation or prediction, every casting choice would Say Something, every line would be ringed with stupid boring significance. For all this well-considered work, it could only hope to be as funny as the failed Geena Davis drama Commander-in-Chief, which is to say, sliding up and down a scale of “kind of funny by accident” to “maybe it was a bad idea to have women be a gender; we could all quit and become vestal virgins.”
