Yesterday, I told you guys the latest in Hughes family trolling: my dumb sister sent me a dumb Valentine's Day card that's just a dumb picture of her dumb face. Rude, but also NOTHING compared to the stories you guys told me. Check the comments on yesterday's article for some gold, but here are a few of my faves from Twitter. Feel free to send me more stories!!!!!!! Or pictures of dogs. Or tacos???? I'm pretty much open to anything.
@thehairpin once my mom woke me up at dawn, told me the rapture was happening, & took me to church in my pjs. It was a youth group retreat.
These are some damn good muffins. As an avid second breakfast eater, I’ve made/eaten a lot of tasty muffins in my day. And, for almost a year now, I’ve been honing/hoarding this recipe. I’m thrilled to finally share it. No, really!!
Inspired by incredible muffins from the Culinary Institute of America, these suckers are sweet but not cupcake-sweet, healthy-ish but not dry or boring. And hello, chickpeas! In the muffins! And nuts, and grain! Basically they are a complete meal unto themselves. (Also, they require just one mixer instead of multiple mixing bowls, and who isn’t a fan of less clean-up?)
All three of these are moist and nutty and cake-like. The blueberry ones are gorgeous and end-of-summer-y, the zucchini-apple ones smell like fall, and the chocolate-beet, ohhhh my god, they’re like gorgeous, delicious valentines. The color is reminiscent of red velvet cupcakes—it gets me every time. I hope you try one!
Just kidding. Obviously try them all.
Ingredients
1 ½ cup chickpeas (or one 15 oz can/container), drained and rinsed
½ cup ground almonds
½ cup flour (I used whole wheat flour in the blueberry and brown rice flour in the other two, which is why those have a smooshed top/less of a rise. I’ve also tried millet flour and spelt, as well as just adding more almond meal because I didn’t want to bother measuring another half cup of flour. Also, that would be a great gluten free option. Really, you can’t go wrong!)
½ cup sugar (I usually use light brown sugar or turbinado, or coconut sugar if I’m feeling fancy.)
2 eggs
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons baking powder
For the Sour-Cream-Blueberry muffins:
½ cup sour cream
1 cup blueberries (fresh or frozen)
For the Zucchini-Apple-Spice muffins:
¾ cup shredded zucchini
½ cup apple puree
½ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ teaspoon cloves
¼ teaspoon ginger
Extra tablespoon of sugar mixed with ½ teaspoon cinnamon for topping
For the Dark-Chocolate-Beet muffins:
½ cup beet puree
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 cup dark chocolate chips
Directions
Preheat oven to 325.
Olive-oil spray or butter up your muffin tin.
In a food processor, puree your chickpeas til smooth.
Add in the rest of the ingredients and puree.
Add in the additional ingredients, depending on which muffins you’re making, and mix just until combined.
Scoop batter into the prepared muffin tins.
Cook for ~45 minutes, and let me know what you think!
Natalie Eve Garrett is an artist and writer, and the editor of The Artists' and Writers' Cookbook. Prints of her paintings are for sale here.
If you hear any of the following words or phrases used to describe a female character in a movie made before 1970, odds are good that they're trying to tell you about a lesbian, a real shadows girl, someone who prefers the hour just after dusk, a gal with her own library card.
I’ve been married to a wonderful man for almost 5 years now. He and I have worked hard to have a marriage based on openness and honesty.
We decided fairly early on we weren’t in a hurry to have kids, if ever. We wanted to have time to be just us. Then I had some medical issues which required a snip of the tubes, so it hasn’t even been an issue for many years.
The second question my MIL ever asked me was if I was going to give her grandchildren. To the point she stopped talking to us for a year after the marriage when we told her it wasn’t happening.
My husband has always, always handled her and stood up to her on our (and my) behalf. He’s never tried to make me do what she wants even superficially for “family harmony”.
Adding to the tension is the fact that for ten years her ex husband brutally abused my husband. When my husband finally talked to her about it and asked why she didn’t allow him to live elsewhere, her reply was “I didn’t want to admit I was wrong. I would rather you be abused and hurt than hear ‘I told you so’ from my mother”. She has also Whitewashed the abuse and makes it like they had a Rockwell childhood.
There has been therapy for all of this, don’t worry. And continues to be.
Husband and I are now talking about having kids in the next couple years, especially now that we have found out My body has reversed that surgery all on it’s own (super mutant Fallopian tubes for the win).
We will need to set boundaries, probably All over again. Going into it this is what We would want:
1. She would never be left alone with any of our kids. Ever. She has a history of poor decision making and drug use.
2. We would need to restrict how much time she is visiting for our own sanity, and to be honest, mainly mine.
3. That she will not argue every aspect of our parenting choices.
So when is the best time to establish these? What’s a good script that doesn’t involve my overprotective tendencies an easy out? Can I just hide being pregnant until the kid is like 13?
We are not telling anyone I am fertile again, but we are discussing all of this potential madness.
Thanks for your advice
Not yet a momma but already dreading grandmomma drama
Dear Not Yet A Momma,
All of your planned boundaries for your mother-in-law sound reasonable to me based on the history. She will fight them all, especially #3, to which the answer is a robot-like “Well, thanks for telling us but we’re going to do it our way since the baby is fine.”
The time to set boundaries like these is in the moment. She won’t understand the general principles of what you’re doing and why and she won’t understand them or agree to them ahead of time. She won’t accept the logical case for why things have to be the way they are, especially if it means acknowledging past bad behavior on her part. So you could buy yourself tons of conflict when there isn’t even an actual baby yet, or you could hang out, completely ignore her for a while, and then set boundaries on a case by case basis where you don’t have to convince her of anything, you just have to exercise your power as parents. For example:
Her: “Can I come visit you and the baby?”
Your husband: “It’s not a good time, Ma.”
Her:“Now that I’m coming to see you all, good news, I’m going to stay for three weeks!”
Your husband: “We were thinking more like three days/three hours.”
Her:“I’m going to come anyway! You can’t keep me away from my grandchild!”
Your husband: :shrug: “That’s not our intention, but three weeks is too long for us, so why not come for a short visit and enjoy yourself?” See also: Husband takes grandchild to visit Grandmomma for a day or two, you get house to yourself.
Her: “Why don’t I watch grandchild while you take some time for yourselves?”
Your husband: “No thanks!”
Her: “Jeez, it’s like you don’t want to leave me alone with grandchild or something. Don’t you trust me?”
Your husband: “Well, since you bring it up, no, we’re not comfortable leaving you alone with them.”/”Thanks for the offer, but we’ll get a sitter.”
Her:Why are you doing (parenting thing) like that? You should do it like this!”
Your husband: “Huh, thanks for telling us.” :keeps doing whatever he was doing before:
She may start planning and butting into things as soon as she knows you are expecting, with tons of advice and speculation about how things will be. I suggest that for your own sanity, you let your husband be the one who communicates with her, and that he develops a lot of scripts that go “Hey thanks for telling us” or “Huh, that’s one thought” or “Let’s wait and see!” She can have all the unsolicited advice and wishful thinking she wants. Y’all “win” by being noncommittal and brief so as to not get drawn into lengthy discussions with her. If she pushes to the point where a big discussion needs to happen, he has the option to say “Since you let Ex-husband abuse me, you’ll understand if my trust in you about parenting matters is very low. I’m not the one who needs to earn your regard here.”
It’s good for you to be vigilant about safety issues, like drug use and leaving children alone with someone who is so cavalier about abuse (I 100% understand your sense of YIKES where she is concerned). As you go forward, remember three things:
If your child grows up knowing Grandmomma in some fashion, there are times they will be delighted by her, and times when they realize what a fucking pain in the ass she is (and possibly love her anyway). Their relationship most likely won’t mimic your husband’s relationship with her, either because she will genuinely try to do better or because she’s mellowed with time, and because your child won’t ever be in a situation where she has power over them. It’s one of those maddening and beautiful truths that tremendously difficult parents can sometimes be okay grandparents.
That said, you don’t have to do anything you think is unsafe just to let her have her redemption narrative. “Nope!” is always a possible answer to anything she suggests.
You and your husband are the bosses of what happens to your child. You will get tons of practice in saying no between now and Actual Baby (from what I hear, life as a pregnant person really lets you practice saying “Kind Sir or Madam, Kindly Fuck Off” to people who want to shove their opinions into your life). Your husband has already survived growing up with this lady. He can handle anything she throws at him, and so can you.
As you plan your family, please don’t let the specter of this lady ruin this time for you. She has no rights or power here except what you grant her.
Yes Neil Patrick Harris got naked (sort of), Oprah was handed Legos and Benedict Cumberbatch found comfort in a flask, but one of the buzziest moments from the Academy Awards on Sunday night was a speech about women’s rights and wage equality.
Patricia Arquette won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “Boyhood,” a movie that took 12 years to film.
Towards the end of her speech, she spoke up about a topic that had everyone in the room cheering her on in support.
“To every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation: we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights,” she said. “It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America,” she said.
Meryl and JLo loved it, resulting in the GIF of the night.
The Santa Claus emoji, now in five possible skin tones (and one Simpsons-esque yellow) (Apple)
There are emoji for pears, koalas, and jack-o’-lanterns; for a pine tree, a pizza slice, and a dragon’s head on a plate.
But there are no emoji for black people. That seems likely to change soon: Diverse emoji are coming.
The next system update for Apple Mac and iOS devices will let users type emoji with a variety of skin tones, a beta software release revealed Monday. Each human-like emoji, from the smiley face to the thumbs-up, will be available in one of five skin tones. And emoji that do not have a racial modifier will no longer appear as white—they’ll instead appear a Simpsons-esque yellow.
A Simpsons-colored “neutral” emoji, with the five new skin tone options (MacRumors)
This new update will let Apple smartphone users send each other diverse emoji. But as the emoji standard is jointly implemented by Apple and Google, it signals that the Unicode Consortium has chosen a method of typing emoji with different skin tones. (It's unlikely Apple would implement these changes if they weren't going to be the standard.)
All this has been a long time coming. Emoji are part of Unicode, the vast and important standard used across nearly all modern computing systems. Unicode is what ensures that an “a” on my screen looks like an “a” on yours, and that ★ stays a star everywhere. Emoji—small pictographs that can be typed among paragraphs of text, somewhat like this ☺—actually predate modern smartphones, as they emerged first from Japan’s chaotic phone ecosystem. But it was not until 2010, with support from Apple and Google, the two most-prominent American smartphone manufacturers, that Unicode standardized emoji.
But with new edition, emoji commentators (myself included) asked: Where are the emoji for people of color? For while there were hundreds of emoji, and more than 100 different representations of human bodies or faces, nearly all were white or a “neutral” yellow. Only two—an apparent East Asian boy, and an apparent South Asian man—seemed to be people of color. There were no non-white women whatsoever, and no black people.
Then, in November of last year, the Unicode Consortium made a quiet announcement in its draft of the new Unicode standard. Different skin tones would be introduced to the emoji standard through a toggle board: A user could click and hold on an emoji while typing it and a menu would coming up, letting them type it in one of five skin tones. (The tones correspond to the Fitzpatrick scale, a numerical method of categorizing human skin pigmentation.)
“People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone,” said the draft.
Still, the draft was just that: a draft. The document itself warned that “these sets may change before this document is final.” It was unclear how long it would take for diverse emoji to become a real option for users.
It now appears that Apple has now adopted a similar implementation in the next version of its iOS and Mac operating systems. MacRumors first reported that developer betas of both systems, distributed to developers today, allowed for the new emoji. What’s more, the feature will be in the next periodic upgrade for both systems, meaning it could debut in a matter of weeks or months. Users likely won’t have to wait for the next major operating systems—iOS 9 or Mac OS 10.11—neither of which yet have an official release date.
It is unclear when Android users will receive a similar update. As of publication, The Atlantic has asked Google for more information.
MacRumors also reports that the update “brings 32 new country flags, including flags for Canada, Australia, and India.” As I’ve previously detailed, emoji flags are implemented in a more peculiar way, because the Unicode standard is designed to outlive any individual nation-state.
Emoji have long been one of the most accessible parts of the Unicode standard, a piece of technological infrastructure which makes the Internet possible. They’re also just fun. (I mean, a taco pictogram! Who doesn’t want that?) Today’s update makes them even more so, and fixes one of their most glaring—and embarrassing—errors.
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It was fitting that J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists who helped design the atomic bomb, chose to quote from the Bhagavad Gita in response to the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon in the remote sands of New Mexico.
The Gita, one of the most venerated Hindu religious texts, chronicles the conversations between Prince Arjuna and the God Krishna—and only the words of a God could appropriately convey the incomprehensible scale on which the United States government had acted. On July 16, 1945, the first nuclear blast in Earth’s history erupted with the force of 20 kilotons of TNT. The desert sand within the blast radius was superheated into a radioactive green glass, named trinitite, and a mushroom cloud blossomed over seven miles into the sky.
As impressive as the explosion itself was, the most powerful aspect of the bomb was the invisible force of radiation. On a very limited scale, radiation is something that occurs naturally on Earth. Particles decay, atoms lose energy, and that energy is emitted in the form of radioactive waves. Every time you take a cross-country flight for instance, you expose yourself to a bath of low-level radiation simply by being closer to space. It isn’t anything to worry about. But the radiation emitted by a nuclear explosion is of another magnitude altogether. After the Trinity test, that first successful detonation in New Mexico, contamination at the blast site was measured at 15 roentgen. Exposure to normal levels of background radiation for most humans is measured at around 200 milliroentgens a year, the equivalent of 0.2 roentgen, as a point of comparison.
Even now, 60 years after the test, levels of radiation at Trinity are about 10 times higher than normal background radiation. The site is open to the public only one weekend a year in April, and visitors are prohibited from touching the still radioactive trinitite. The most stunning feature of the Trinity test turned out not to be the massiveness of the original blast, but the lingering effects that have survived generations into the future, warping the energy of a specific place and challenging our conceptions of how time is experienced.
Harnessing the power of the atom has forced us to think in new ways about time and energy, specifically when it comes to the safekeeping of nuclear waste. Radioactivity works on a literally inhuman scale. The waste that’s created when building nuclear weapons or running nuclear power plants has a half-life of tens of thousands of years. And we’ve come up with a surprisingly inelegant way of dealing with it: burying it in the ground. Of course there are sophisticated safety measures in these storage facilities, but there the toxic sludge sits, and should remain there far, far into the distant future. So far into the future, in fact, that the generations of people it will continue to affect stretch so deep into projected time we struggle to imagine what things we might share in common with them. And so a problem arises: How do we tell our distant descendants where nuclear waste is buried and that it’s dangerous for humans to be around?
* * *
Radioactive waste could remain dangerous to humans for tens of thousands of years. In the age of the Internet, it’s hard to conceive of the difficulties inherent in trying to communicate over such vast amounts of time. We tend to live in a sort of temporal bubble, an eternal present, with communication being made intentionally disposable. We don’t tweet for next week, much less for generations yet to be born. And that counter-intuitively makes it easy to lose perspective on what the French Annales School of historians termed longue durée, literally the “long term,” the deep and almost imperceptible changes over vast stretches of time. It’s in these broad historical terms that we should consider communicating messages over something like 300 generations.
For starters, written language is out. In the longue durée it’s a relatively new technology anyway, and not necessarily efficient at communicating through deep time. Sumerian, one of the first coherent written languages, was only developed as recently as 3000 BCE. Old, to be sure, but only last week in terms of deep time. Humans have been on Earth for something like a couple hundred thousand years, after all.
Our ability to understand ancient written languages is problematic as well. As Rachel Kaufman wrote for Mental Floss, “Only a few of today’s scholars can understand the original Beowulf without a translation, and that text is only 1,000 years old.” There are at least a handful of ancient languages, such as Isthmian and Olmec, which we still don’t quite understand. And there have been instances of civilizations losing the ability to understand written systems as well. According to the 18th-century Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler, the average lifespan of a civilization is about 250 years. Sometimes civilizations decline slowly, like the Western Roman Empire. Or they can collapse almost instantaneously, as in the case of the Mayan. The knowledge accumulated by those societies can be lost over long stretches of time. So any warning to the future about nuclear waste will have to outlast these certainly inevitable collapses, and written language just won’t do the trick. We’re going to have to be more creative than just posting a sign outside of nuclear waste storage sites.
Fortunately for our distant progeny, people are working on it. And they’re coming up with some fascinating propositions. TheConstructing Memory Conference (or Construire la mémoire) is really a hybrid between a conference and a debate. The most recent took place in Verdun, France, last September and featured contributions from artists, semioticians, philosophers, writers, and archaeologists, offering diverse suggestions of how to communicate warnings through deep time. The artist Cécil Massart, who works with nuclear agencies in France, presented ideas on how each generation can work with and update the ways it explains nuclear dangers to itself, in the hopes of avoiding the sclerotic decay of communication over generations. The British curator Ele Carpenter presented work in creating a “Temporary Index,” which would consist of countdown clocks being placed at specific nuclear waste facilities, presented in galleries, and featured online.
It makes sense that visual artists would be at the forefront of exploring ways to articulate messages without using written text, and the most ambitious idea featured at the conference was the creation of an Atomic Priesthood. The work of the artists Bryan McGovern Wilson and Robert Williams explores the relationship between the Cumbrian region of England’s nuclear industry and it’s landscape and folklore, specifically using megalithic monuments to move information in the future. The idea is rather complex, but in a nutshell, it would mean using what they call “atomic folk objects” to create an oral tradition of myths associated with nuclear sites. Imagine stories, objects, costumes, and rituals, all being used to convey the danger and power of nuclear sites and the taboo of digging up the radioactive material buried there. David Barrowclough describes their work as, “[m]eticulous illustrations of a fantastical world juxtaposing industrial mine shafts, nuclear power stations with a prone mummified body and dangerous wolf, all illuminated by an eerie yellow glow; a series of photographs featuring a smartly dressed, yet masked, man in unexpected situations next to a prehistoric standing stone, within a Neolithic stone circle and seated in an armchair in an underground cavern…” It’s wonderfully ironic that in order to imagine the far future we have to drudge up the images and implementations of the past. This is exactly what the Atomic Priesthood idea is all about—using our collective human memory to speculate on our shared future.
The phrase “Atomic Priesthood” was coined by the linguist Thomas Sebok in 1981 while Sebok served on an eclectic team of thinkers assembled by the U.S. Department of Energy and Bechtel Corporation. The team’s task was the same as the Construction of Memory Conference—to consider novel ways to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste at least 10,000 years into the future. It was the first of its kind and ushered in what’s now known as “nuclear semiotics,” human communication along nuclear time.
Sebok’s solution of the creation of an Atomic Priesthood has a few obvious benefits: It doesn’t rely solely on written communication, oral traditions and ceremonies can last huge spans of time, and it’s modeled on the leadership structure of the Roman Catholic Church, an institution which has already survived two millennia. The Priesthood could dictate which areas are off limits and help set norms of behavior for dealing with nuclear waste sites. It’s a novel idea, but it’s not without its flaws. Susan Garfield points out how it might be problematic to artificially create an elite caste (which is what a Priestly caste is by definition) and endow it with so much power. There’s also the issue of the priestly caste abdicating its duties in some way. It’s a lot of responsibility to put on a very small number of people. What if, instead of limiting themselves to spiritual and nuclear leadership, they got greedy and starting amassing worldly influence like land ownership and political power?
Sebok wasn’t the only original thinker to offer up creative ideas to the Department of Energy in 1981. The Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem proposed the creation of artificial satellites that would beam warnings back to Earth. He also proposed the creation of "information plants," vegetation that would somehow convey the danger of nuclear areas to future humans. But these suggestions bring us back to the original problem—who’s to say that generations to come would understand the messages that satellites and “information plants” are conveying? The less observer-dependent the messages, the better.
My favorite idea to come out of the 1981 conference was put forth by two French authors, Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri. They suggested the creation of “radiation cats” or “ray cats” whose fur color would change when exposed to high levels of radiation. Cats and humans have cohabitated for thousands of years already and there’s no reason why our tight relationship with felines might end anytime soon. All we would need to do would be to genetically engineer the cats and then create a series of myths or songs about cats’ colors changing when they’re in dangerous places.
These proposals are playful, but there’s also a sense of seriousness, of necessity. The most down to Earth suggestion came from the Swiss physicist Emil Kowalski, who suggested sealing up the nuclear waste so that it’s impossible to reach without a level of technology commensurate with what we currently have. It’s safe to assume that if people in the future are able to create tools sophisticated enough to reach the waste they would also have tools that could measure the high levels of radiation and would understand the inherent dangers.
In New Mexico, not too far from where the original Trinity test was held, is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Almost 2 million cubic feet of radioactive waste is buried half a mile deep in the 250-million year old salt deposit. The plant will continue to receive nuclear sludge from around the country until 2070, when it will be sealed up for good. The government half-heartedly anticipated the dangers to future humans and settled on surrounding the plant with obelisks containing messages in Spanish, Navajo, Chinese, Latin, Hebrew, and English. Literal warning signs aren’t as inventive as “ray cats,” and the drawbacks of using text to communicate through deep time should be obvious by now. But the only thing we should have confidence in when making predictions on this scale is our uncertainty. Maybe, hopefully, the warning signs will be enough.
While shuffling through a Washington, D.C.-area metro station recently, I noticed a large ad for the technology company Brocade plastered on the wall:
Obsessive Compulsive Reorder (n.): The need to buy expensive IP networking gear again and again.
This is, of course, an attempt at a cheeky play on obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which sufferers have compulsions to do the same things over and over. Companies and people alike frequently evoke the mental disorder with lighthearted puns or references just like that one. Misuse of the term “OCD” has become popular, leading to misunderstandings revolving around the disorder itself.
“When people have this common usage or knowledge of the term; it creates what we call a 'cultural script,' a commonly used way that identifies what something is, what kind of steps are involved, or if it is harmful or not,” says Yulia Chentsova-Dutton, a cultural psychologist and a professor at Georgetown University.
For many, “OCD” has become synonymous with words like “clean” or “organized”—qualities most would say are good. When OCD is seen as something “good” rather than as a devastating illness, it’s stripped of its reality.
“Whenever it’s kind of a ‘positive’ thing, like with OCD, it means we are encouraging these symptoms, overlooking them, or encouraging people and their family members to overlook them, potentially,” Chentsova-Dutton continued.
People may just be trying to relate. When someone first comes into contact with the term, maybe she focuses on a perceived commonality. The “obsessive” part sticks in her memory and the “compulsive” part and the “disorder” part lose their meaning. So anything that she can remotely obsess over becomes equated with OCD.
“‘Obsessive’ is a personality trait. It doesn’t get in the way of your functioning, it’s something you prefer. What people are meaning to say is, ‘I am obsessive rather than OCD,’ ” says Jeff Szymanski, executive director of the International OCD Foundation. “You’re now mixing a distressing psychological disorder with a personality preference, and when you mix them, you lose the severity of the disorder.”
Nearly one in 100 people suffer from OCD in the United States. Approximately 51 percent of those cases are severe.
"Your life becomes consumed with a fear and your preoccupation with getting rid of the fear … it becomes a vicious cycle," Alison Dotson, author of Being Me With OCD, told me in an email. “It’s scary to feel like you can’t even control your own thoughts.”
Alison’s experience with OCD is also one that stresses the effects of misguided portrayals of the disorder: “I started obsessing when I was a child, and I wasn't diagnosed with OCD until I was two months shy of my 27th birthday. I suffered in silence for years and years because all I knew about OCD was that people wash their hands too much and always check to make sure the stove is off.”
With OCD, there are obsessions (unwanted thoughts, impulses, or images that repeat in a person’s mind) and compulsions (acts that a person repeats in order to “get rid” of these obsessions). These compulsions are often done in a desperate attempt to protect oneself from the wave of anxiety the obsessions bring, not because the person actually wants engage in the compulsion. The cleaning and checking that Alison mentioned are just two examples of the many kinds of OCD compulsions people can have.
In my teen years, I had a close friend who suffered from OCD. She told me about a time when she sat on the floor of her kitchen crying, deranged with anxiety as she tried for an hour to correctly pronounce the word “now.” Once she said the word “now” correctly, it kickstarted a stream of mental compulsions which she then could end by pronouncing the word “now” again. Once she said “now” the second time, she was able to allow herself to get off of the floor, as long as she was applying more pressure on her right foot than her left. By doing these things, she thought she would prevent her parents from dying. They weren’t in any danger, but the thought was inescapable, and she felt the only way to keep it at bay was by performing her compulsions.
“I would think, ‘What type of person thinks things like this?’” Alison asks. “Even though I knew—or thought I knew—deep down that I was a good person, it certainly didn't feel that way when I couldn't stop obsessing about religion and offending God and illegal or immoral sexual acts.”
The International OCD Foundation lists approximately 10 different types of obsessions and compulsions, the majority of which, including religious obsessions and mental compulsions (mentally reviewing events to prevent harm, for example) rarely appear in public interpretations of OCD. Using the term “OCD” correctly, only in reference to the disorder itself, and understanding the diversity of the disorder, would help people begin to acknowledge its seriousness and complexity. After all, casual use of other mental-illness terms has become increasingly frowned upon, Alison points out.
“I don't often hear people say, ‘I'm so schizo!’ or, ‘I'm so psycho!' On some level people seem to know that's wrong and offensive,” she says. “OCD isn’t cute.”
Having supportive, honest people in your life can make a huge difference in your overall happiness (and theirs). But fostering friendships that go beyond the surface can be a challenge—they take a lot of time and energy, and it can feel awkward at first. If you want to build deeper connections with your friends, here's how to get started.
Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, SE1 8XX near Waterloo station, 21st February, 11am onwards.
Time for another colouring in meetup. Please bring stuff to colour in, or colouring pens and pencils, if you can. Or come anyway, we’re not fussy!
This venue is working out really well.
They sell food in a cafe (standard sandwiches etc.), but they also don’t mind people bringing food in from outside. There are several other local places where you can buy stuff as well. The excellent food market outside has loads of different food options, which can fit most food requirements, or you can also bring a packed lunch.
Meet on the fourth floor, outside the Blue Bar (go up in the JCB lift, lift 7, which is bright yellow and quite musical).
I will have my Cthulhu with me, which looks like this: http://forbiddenplanet.com/3950-cthulhu-baby-plush/ One time I forgot it but I will do my best this time, however if I forget again I will put up a sign. I have long brown hair and glasses.
The venue is accessible via a lift, and has accessible toilets.
When Wendy Sue Swanson started out as a pediatrician eight years ago, it never crossed her mind to bring up the option of intrauterine devices—an insertable form of long-acting contraception—when she had her regular birth-control discussions with teenage patients who were sexually active.
“The patch had been the thing,” she said, referring to a small, band-aid-like plastic patch that transmits hormones through the skin to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
But Swanson’s approach changed after a casual conversation with her sister-in-law. This relative wasn’t a doctor, but she worked at the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, and she told Swanson that the devices could be used as a first choice of contraception for teenagers. Now Swanson regularly discusses IUDs, which are more than 99 percent effective, in her Seattle practice.
“I thought, ‘I can’t believe I don’t know this and no one else in my office knew’” that IUDs could be a good choice for some patients, she said.
Yet some pediatricians and other doctors worry they aren’t properly prepared to make this form of birth control available, because their training did not cover insertion of the devices. Experts say this has to change, starting during medical residencies, especially among pediatricians who will treat teenagers.
Serious medical problems reported with the use of the Dalkon Shield in the 1970s frightened many women away from IUDs, and the extra cost associated with their insertion often stopped women from using them. But the devices have become increasingly popular. IUDs, which use copper or hormones to block sperm from fertilizing eggs, are considered safe in part because they do not use the problematic strings that were part of the Dalkon Shield, and a number of physician groups recommend them. And under the 2010 health law, women with insurance are eligible for IUDs without paying out-of-pocket costs.
Almost 12 percent of women who used birth control between 2011 and 2013 chose IUDs, a rate surpassed only by contraceptive pills and condoms, according to a recent analysis by the Guttmacher Institute.
Last fall, the American Academy of Pediatrics for the first time recommended IUDs as a first-line form of contraception for adolescents who have sex, though condoms and the pill are also accepted options. This recommendation builds on support from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which in 2011 termed it the most effective form of birth control and noted that it posed minimal risks. A year later, the group recommended it specifically for teens. Rare problems reported include disruption of menstrual cycles and, in rarer instances, perforation of the uterus. The IUD also can occasionally be expelled by a woman’s body, meaning it no longer prevents pregnancy.
Once inserted, IUDs—which last for years before they need to be removed or replaced—don’t require daily attention. This makes them easier to manage than options such as condoms or daily birth-control pills, which teenagers must remember to use or, in the pill’s case, take on a daily basis. Unlike condoms but like the pill, the IUD doesn’t prevent sexually transmitted diseases. Though the patch is about as effective as an IUD, it requires weekly maintenance and has attracted scrutiny in recent years for potential side effects such as strokes and blood clots.
“So many kids never pick up the pills, or pick up the pills and don’t take them right,” said Melanie Gold, the medical director of Columbia University’s School-Based Health Centers. “Clearly, an IUD is a better choice.”
But even with this relatively recent buzz, a December editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics asserted that pediatricians often aren’t trained in the procedure—making it, experts said, harder for teenage girls to access this form of birth control, unlike adult women, who are more likely to see a gynecologist.
Pediatric residents typically spend only a month studying “adolescent medicine,” which includes contraception.
Julia Potter, a doctor based in New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s pediatric department and a co-author of the editorial, said the instructors who teach the adolescent medicine often aren’t themselves trained in IUD-insertion procedure. Medical residents then may not pick up the skills they would need to provide this birth-control option once they start practicing.
If residents are exposed to the procedure—something that depends heavily on the patients they happen to see during that month-long rotation—that time frame is “certainly not enough time to learn how to put in an IUD,” said Jane McGrath, the chief of adolescent medicine at the University of New Mexico.
Doctors offered different thoughts on how many times would be enough to become competent in inserting IUDs, but Gold suggested it might take 10 insertions before a physician would feel comfortable administering it.
Pediatricians also may be less comfortable offering IUDs to patients than are other doctors, suggests a 2013 survey published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. The study found that 26 percent of doctors practicing pediatrics or internal medicine provided IUDs or other long-acting contraception—compared with 88 percent of those identified as OB/GYNs or family-medicine providers.
Those who do bring it up often refer patients interested in IUDs to other providers, such as gynecologists, said Annie Hoopes, a pediatrician and adolescent-medicine fellow at Seattle’s Children’s Hospital. But for teens, such referrals can get complicated.
Privacy can be an issue, said Swanson, who doesn’t do the insertion procedure in her office. A teenager may not want her parents to know she’s receiving the birth control, but “if she goes in and sees a gynecologist and the visit is billed,” it’s impossible for the pediatrician to guarantee that won’t appear on an insurance statement.
In those situations, Swanson said, she will send patients to Planned Parenthood or a similar provider, where the visit doesn’t get billed to a parent’s insurance plan.
Teens also don’t always act on the referral, said Marissa Raymond-Flesch, a fellow of adolescent and young-adult medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.
“They may have limited control over their time—particularly if they’re trying to come to receive services confidentially,” she said. That fear of attrition, she added, is a reason her practice has moved to offer IUD insertions in-house. Otherwise, “adolescents could be lost to follow-up.”
And in places where a provider is harder to reach, geography could pose another barrier to teens who don’t get the IUD from their regular doctor.
Meanwhile, conversations with patients and their parents have changed “dramatically” since she began discussing IUDs, Swanson said. Initially, parents would be nervous about IUDs—suggesting, for instance, that they might cause infertility for their daughters. Now, by contrast, both teens and parents seem “very open to” long-acting contraception, she said, and teenage girls are more likely to ask about IUDs without prompting.
Swanson added that, though parents sometimes bring up birth-control issues, she personally waits to raise the subject until the one-on-one portion of a teenager’s visit, when parents are required to leave the room.
It’s still unclear whether and how residency curricula might change to incorporate IUDs and similar forms of contraception. If they become more popular, residents—especially those with an emphasis on adolescent medicine—might come to demand such training in medical school.
But it’s hard to know when or how this might happen, said Mandy Coles, another co-author of the JAMA editorial and an adolescent-medicine physician and assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine.
“The bottom line is this is going to take more time and advocacy and research to improve training,” she said.
What? Just because she looks like a person more likely to forge a pole axe and come after you with it than make a little peg doll? #watchyourback
I am participating in a Blog Tour! I know! And it's because I am just in love with this book, and when Margaret Bloom asked me to write about it here, I couldn't resist.
This is the first book.
Making Peg Dolls & More is her follow-up to the lovely Making Peg Dolls, and it's so deliciously gorgeous and inspiring that it is currently in rotation here as a coffee table book. [cough *Waldorf coffee table* cough *drink your Sereni-Tea*] Birdy and I pretty much compulsively leaf through it, all the time, and every page shows something we want to make: dreamy-perfect little dolls and toys and ornaments, everything so appealingly wool and wood, so pretty and gentle. Plus, the instructions are super-clear.
We got the book a little before the holidays, and Birdy immediately decided on the project she wanted to make for gifts: these little Herbal Comfort Friends, which are sewn from felt, completed with wooden beads, and filled with sweet-smelling herbs. She designed her own medallions: a sprig of lavender for her grandmother's lavender-filled friend, a little campfire for her friend Harry's that's filled with mint, and a little wind storm for her test doll, that she kept for herself. She loved making them. They are just the sweetest things and, I'm imagining, double nicely as drawer-scenting sachets.
I wish I had a scan of Harry's thank-you note. I think it says, "Thank you for that mint thingy." True, he might not have been the ideal recipient of this particular gift, but it's the thought that etc.
Birdy was making a diorama for her Underground Railroad report, and she painted this little figure for it. Not a Making Peg Dolls project exactly, but certainly inspired by it. I love the way Margaret paints all the dolls with watercolors so the wood shows through.
If there were 40 doll bodies in your house, then you could make a few yourself, and your kids wouldn't even miss them!
Making Peg Dolls & More, plus this set of 40 wooden doll bodies (pictured above), would make the world's most perfect gift for a crafty kid. It only gives me a little pang because I feel like my days of giving that kind of gift are truly numbered. Sigh. And then what? Mani-Pedi gift certificates? A Meth-Lab Kit?
I lifted this photo from the Wee Folk Studio post, because this is my very favorite project in the book.
Anyways, thanks to Margaret's generosity, as well as that of Hawthorn Press, I am lucky enough to be hosting a give-away here. Just leave your name in the comments here if you'd like to be entered (!), and I will announce a winner a week hence. February 18th, 11:00 am EST. Or thereabouts. And for more chances to read about it and win, feel free to visit the other blogs that are hosting reviews and give-aways of this tender, optimistic world-view-as-book:
“In a typical experiment, Dr. Dweck takes young children into a room and asks them to solve a simple puzzle. Most do so with little difficulty. But then Dr. Dweck tells some, but not all, of the kids how very bright and capable they are. As it turns out, the children who are not told they’re smart are more motivated to tackle increasingly difficult puzzles. They also exhibit higher levels of confidence and show greater overall progress in puzzle-solving.”
“…children thrive best in an environment that is reliable, available, consistent, and noninterfering.”
So let your kid walk to the Dairy Queen by themselves, just follow at a discreet stalking distance so you can be at hand when the police intervene.
Previous installments can be found here. There will be spoilers. “An historian” is a perfectly acceptable Commonwealth convention, haters to the left [side of the road].
My heart constricts whenever Thomas Barrow comes onscreen. He’s manipulative, scheming, and consistently creepy, but he’s the only recurring gay character. I wouldn’t like him if I knew him in person, but I have to root for him; that’s what limited representation means. And I hate the show a little bit more each time he’s made to enact homophobic tropes even while he ostensibly shores up Downton’s tolerant, liberal reputation.
In the last few episodes, we’ve seen Thomas growing ever sicker, while injecting a mysterious substance in his room on the sly. He answered an advertisement and went to London, under the pretense of an ill father. This week, we learned that he went to receive electrotherapy to make him attracted to women instead of men; the injection and pills, apparently placebos, were supposed to further the "treatment." His illness is the result of non-sterile equipment causing infection. After breaking down and asking Baxter for help, he’s treated compassionately by Dr. Clarkson, who reveals that he’s been the victim of quackery and urges him to bear his burden bravely rather than seek, hopelessly, to change his nature.
Demonstrators celebrate in Seattle in May 2012, one day after President Obama announced he supported same-sex marriage. (Kevin P. Casey/AP)
Even in 2008, Barack Obama sharply divided Democrats and Republicans. It wasn't just a matter of policy disputes; it was a question of whether he was acting in good faith. (Prominent conservatives remain convinced that he hates America.) On one point, though, both liberals and conservatives agreed. Both sides were pretty sure Obama was lying when he said he opposed gay marriage.
Now there's evidence they were right. In his new book, former Obama strategist David Axelrod says candidate Obama took that position in 2008 at the behest of his political advisers. “Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union,’” Axelrod wrote, as Time reports.
“I’m just not very good at bullshitting,” Obama told Axelrod after announcing the stand.
There were good reasons to believe Obama was bullshitting, to use his term. In 1996, while running for Illinois state senate, he answered a question from a gay newspaper, saying, "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.” (In a classic political we're-stupid-not-dishonest maneuver, Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer tried to claim Obama hadn't actually filled out the survey.) While running for reelection two years later, he said he was undecided. By 2006, he was citing his Christian beliefs as a reason for opposing gay marriage but adding that he was willing to consider the idea that his stance was "misguided."
That made political, if not moral, sense in the 2008 Democratic primary, where only fringe candidates Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel clearly supported gay marriage. Gallup polling showed that only 40 percent of Americans supported gay marriage. It's tempting to imagine what might have happened if Obama had announced his support earlier, but it still seems likely that he would have been penalized for it politically, perhaps dooming his chances.
So by 2008, Obama's supposed opposition was a fiction, but it was a politically effective one. The press could and did report that Obama had previously felt otherwise, but no one could prove he was lying. Liberals remained convinced that in his heart of hearts, he was lying and would eventually publicly back marriage equality. Conservatives remained convinced that in his heart of hearts, he was lying and was just waiting to announce his backing for marriage equality. (The one group that was unwilling to abide this situation, understandably, was gay activists, who insisted that rights couldn't be a matter of patience and pressured Obama to speak out at every turn.)
Meanwhile, Obama claimed he was "evolving," a rather pernicious torturing of language: Can one evolve back to a position that one held already? (Darwin spins in his grave.) So as president, he announced he opposed the Defense of Marriage Act; then said all Americans deserved to be treated equally; and finally, in May 2012, called Robin Roberts of ABC to the White House for an interview in which he announced that—as everyone had feared or hoped—he backed gay marriage.
That dissembling arguably laid the groundwork for the huge transformation in public opinion on gay marriage over the last seven years. Today, a small but solid majority of the country favors gay marriage. Most citizens live in jurisdictions that allow gay marriage. It's even legal in Alabama, despite the best efforts of some conservative jurists and officials. Public opinion—which can be said to evolve in the way Obama's personal opinion clearly did not—gradually moved toward gay rights. By cloaking his own views, the president didn't polarize the issue, as he has shown he can do quite effectively, until the die was cast. Once he did announce his stand, it seems to have helped bring new supporters with him, particularly black Americans. By fall of 2012, what might have been a fatal liability in the 2008 campaign was one of Obama's top talking points during the 2012 campaign—which successfully won him another four years. It's unthinkable that any future Democratic nominee would oppose gay marriage, and even Republicans are said to be "evolving" on it, realizing the utility of that slick term.
The Supreme Court will hear cases on gay marriage this term. (The Court expanded gay rights in 2013 with United States v. Windsor, but declined to make a more sweeping ruling.) Predicting what the justices will do is dangerous, but it's widely expected that they will rule that gay marriage is a constitutional right. Even Justice Clarence Thomas, a staunch opponent, seems to agree. On Monday, dissenting from the decision not to block marriages in Alabama, Thomas objected that the Court had effectively made its decision. "This acquiescence may well be seen as a signal of the Court’s intended resolution of that question," he wrote. "This is not the proper way to discharge our Article III responsibilities. And, it is indecorous for this Court to pretend that it is." Justice Antonin Scalia, meanwhile, raged in his dissent in Windsorthat the Court was effectively paving the way for gay marriage.
Thomas and Scalia seem to have a point: Will the justices really offer a decision that invalidates hundreds or thousands of legally valid marriages? The other justices seem to have learned a lesson from Obama. By holding their cards close to their robes and delaying the imperative to follow their logic to its conclusion, they can let politics catch up. Sometimes, lying does pay.
You won't miss the meat in this flavorful, hearty veggie burger, loaded with healthy sweet potato, black beans and sharp cheddar cheese.
In your efforts to eat healthier, have you embraced more meatless meals?
We try to, but it's hard when you love bacon and sausage -- and only half-jokingly refer to yourself as The Meatasaurus.
One way we've successfully enjoyed more meatless dinners is with veggie burgers. If your only experience with veggie burgers are those frozen, cardboard-like discs that come four-to-a-box in your grocer's freezer, it's time to put down the processed food and make your own.
A good, homemade veggie burger can truly be a delicious substitute for a traditional grilled burger (not all the time, mind you -- clearly I'm not that cray cray). I love to make big batches of them to keep on hand in the freezer for times when I need a quick lunch or I'm at a loss as to what to make for dinner. They can go from freezer to table in less than 15 minutes.
To keep the freezer back-up meals interesting, I've added this new black bean and sweet potato burger to the stash. It was inspired by a recipe from the brand-new Cabot Creamery Cookbook, which is officially available online or at your favorite bookstore as of today! If you're a fan of cheese (lordy, I do not want to meet the person who isn't a fan of cheese), do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of this cookbook. The recipes -- for everything from entrees to desserts -- are delish, the photos are gorgeous: it's a real treat.
When people talk about technologies that might offset climate change, they often evoke not-yet-invented marvels, like planes spraying chemicals into the atmosphere or enormous skyscrapers gulping carbon dioxide from the clouds.
But in a new report, Oxford University researchers say that our best hopes might not be so complex.
In fact, they are two things we already know how to do: plant trees and improve the soil.
Both techniques, said the report, are “no regrets.” They’ll help the atmosphere no matter what, they’re comparatively low-cost, and they carry little additional risk. Specifically, the two techniques it recommends are afforestation—planting trees where there were none before—and biochar—improving the soil by burying a layer of dense charcoal.
Between now and 2050, trees and charcoal are the “most promising” technologies out there, it said.
It also cautioned, however, that these so-called “Negative Emissions Technologies” or NETs should only be seen as a way to stave off the worst of climate change.
“NETs should not be seen as a deus ex machina that will ‘save the day,’” its authors wrote. NETs should instead be seen as one of several tools to meet the international goal of avoiding climate change greater than 2 degrees Celsius. Another crucial tool is reducing emissions.
It’s a solution that makes sense, as forest management is one of the oldest ways that humans have shaped their environment. Before the arrival of Europeans, Native communities in the Americas had been burning forest fires for millennia to support the growth of desirable plants like blueberries and to manage ecosystems. British communities have long practiced coppicing, a tree-cutting technique that keeps forests full of younger trees.
In other words, humanity has been “geoengineering” with trees for a very long time. The authors of the Oxford report add that afforestation will need global support in order to be successful.
“It is clear that attaining negative emissions is in no sense an easier option than reducing current emissions,” it says (emphasis mine). “To remove CO2 on a comparable scale to the rate it is being emitted inevitably requires effort and infrastructure on a comparable scale to global energy or agricultural systems.”
Last night, Kanye West gave us one of the best awards-show moments of all time. Of all time! Right as Beck was about to accept his award over Beyoncé and Sam Smith for Album of the Year, West walked on stage, extended his hand towards the microphone—and then smiled and returned to his seat. It was a cheeky remix of the time when West interrupted Taylor Swift’s VMAs acceptance speech to plug Beyoncé six years ago; it also came off like an older, wiser West speaking for all awards-show viewers by getting momentarily enraged about a baffling upset and then shrugging to say “who cares?”
After the ceremony, though, West made it clear that he actually cares a lot. “The Grammys, if they want real artists to come back, they need to stop playing with us,” West told E! News. “... Beck needs to respect artistry, and he should have given his award to Beyoncé. And at this point, we tired of it because what happens is, when you keep on diminishing art, and not respecting the craft, and smacking people in the face after they deliver monumental feats of music, you're disrespectful to inspiration.”
Setting aside the unlikely notion of one artist giving his award to another one (though, interestingly, Sam Smith had said he'd do just that if he beat Beyoncé), the most fascinating thing about West’s statement is the use of the word “respect.” Because the Grammys are, in fact, obsessed with respect—a certain kind of respect, at least. It’s the respect one pays at a funeral: solemn, formal, a performance of sacred awe. It’s also the respect that one affords an athlete, or a child prodigy: amazed at raw technical talent, rather than at, yes, “inspiration.”
Unfortunately for viewers, in the Grammy universe, the quickest way to shore up one’s respectability is to perform a ballad. And so in addition to hushed sets from modern hymn singers like Hozier and Smith (who won four awards), artists known for upbeat radio hits enlisted string sections and elder crooners (Tom Jones, Tony Bennett, Paul McCartney) to show that they could slowly emote as well as anyone. It’s occasionally refreshing to see an act like Rihanna sing for a dinner party rather than a dance floor; at the point when you have Ariana Grande, Maroon 5, Gwen Stefani, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Jessie J, and even West attempting the same thing, though, you begin to suspect that there’s a gas leak in the building.
The evening's snooziness did make Beck’s upset fitting, at least. For his 12th album, Morning Phase, he ditched the strange wit, hip-hop flourishes, and sonic adventuring that made him famous in favor of a series of achingly pretty acoustic songs. It's a nice record, but as the journalist Chris Molanphy pointed out on Twitter, it probably won Album of the Year in large part because it was the only rock album nominated.
Folks, when calling AotY, *always look if "rock" album has that lane to itself*. Beck win=vote-splitting in other genres. #GRAMMYs
For anyone who, like West, thinks that Beyoncé's boundary-pushing self-titled album—a diverse set of songs that shocked the music industry and became ubiquitous while sounding like little else on the radio—deserved the win over an indie guitarist’s midlife chill-out record, the idea of vote-splitting and a bias towards rock might be comforting. Beyoncé probably never really had a chance; the system was rigged.
But then you think about the overwhelming sameness, and whiteness, of the general-field Grammy winners historically. You think about the fact that a hip-hop release hasn’t won Album of the Year in more than a decade; the closest thing to an R&B victory recently was for Adele’s 21. The Grammys invite Beyoncé, West, and co. every year, but voters clearly think the music that makes those stars successful is an inferior sort. That's probably unfair, and it definitely leads to a pretty boring ceremony. It's enough to make you wish Kanye had gone all the way this year and grabbed the mic, to make the night's one moment of great TV even better, and to pay the Grammys the disrespect it deserves.
Prison artwork created by Adnan Syed sits near family photos in his mother's home in Baltimore. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Serial, the true-crime podcast that became a major pop-culture phenomenon last year, was that the show had no practical effect on the murder case it covered. But that might be about to change. A Maryland court has granted Adnan Syed, whose conviction for murdering Hae Min Lee in 2000 served as the centerpiece of the show, the right to file for an appeal to be heard by a panel of three judges in June. The odds that the appeal will work are by no means high. But a successful appeal raises the possibility that Maryland will retry Syed in a court of law—and that the fame of Serial may have something to do with it.
The basis for the appeal is Syed's contention that his defense attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, provided ineffective counsel by neglecting to use a witness who served as a possible alibi. The witness, Asia McClain, wrote to Syed in the aftermath of the crime saying that she saw him in the school library at the moment Hae died, and was willing to testify in his defense. But Gutierrez did not contact her.
During the appeal, the state will likely argue that Gutierrez's decision to ignore McClain was strategic rather than neglectful—for instance, the attorney may have determined for some reason that McClain could not provide credible testimony. The state usually wins these arguments. University of South Carolina law professor Colin Miller, who has written extensively about Serial, told Voxthat between one and eight percent of claims of ineffective counsel are successful.
Nevertheless, there is a chance that, following the appeal procedure, Syed's murder conviction will be overturned. Should that happen, the state may decide to throw the case out—or it might re-prosecute. And that's where the fame of Serial—which has been downloaded 68 million times—may come into play.
Asia McClain, whose 1999 letters to Syed appeared to give him an alibi, filed an affidavit last month in which she said Serial renewed her desire to participate in the case.
After I learned about the podcast, I learned more about [Serial producer and host Sarah] Koenig’s reporting, and more about the Syed case. I was shocked by the testimony of [lead prosecutor] Kevin Urick and the podcast itself; however I came to understand my importance to the case. I realized I needed to step forward and make my story known to the court system.
Then there's Jay Wilds, the prosecution's star witness, who refused to participate in Serial. But after his address and photographs of his house were published on Reddit, Wilds granted a wide-ranging interview to the Intercept, which was published in three parts in December. Wilds again maintained that he saw Lee's body and assisted Syed in burying her in Baltimore's Leakin Park. But in recounting the story, Wilds changed enough details from his original testimony that Rabia Chaudry, an attorney and family friend of Syed's, believes he is no longer credible.
"If what he’s reporting is the truth right now," she toldVox's Ezra Klein, "then what he’s saying is that when he took the stand under oath at trial one, he lied, and when he took the stand under oath at trial two, he lied … If there was a third trial, that could be used to impeach his credibility."
Syed and his attorney, C. Justin Brown, will not be able to mention Jay's testimony during their appeal process this June. And should Syed's appeal be denied, McClain's affidavit and Wilds's comments will be mere historical footnotes. But in the event that Syed is tried again in the court of law, evidence surfaced by Serial's celebrity may yet have influence, according to Miller.
"The judiciary should make the decision objectively—but it’d be pretty hard for the judges and the clerks to avoid the publicity going on, and that potentially could have some impact on the decision-making."
David Smith has just 124 days to live when he meets Mira Bhatti, his competition, an emerging sculptor from Queens. Mira is still trying to make it in the art world: She’s 36, a mother to a 7-year-old, finally pursuing her degree, and looking to land a big show. She has time; David doesn’t. David thinks she’s the better sculptor. But the reality is that he's more likely to get everything he wants as an artist. And not just because he’s made a deal with Death.
The Sculptor, a new graphic novel by the cartoonist Scott McCloud, follows this artist, David Smith—no, not that David Smith, but a young artist living in New York today who very much aspires to his namesake's success. So much so, in fact, that in a moment of despair, drunk and broke, totally out of options, he makes a deal with the Grim Reaper, who here takes the form of his Great Uncle Harry. Would David give his life for his artwork? Yes, the sculptor says, unmoved by the alternative vision that Death outlines for his life: a house upstate, a wife (and maybe a second wife), kids and grandkids, a modest career at the community college.
Such a humdrum destiny is a fate worse than death, in David’s estimation. Maybe it isn't so far from the path followed by middle-aged Mira, the superior sculptor whose work he winds up stealing, albeit unconsciously—but no matter. David wants to live forever, and on his 26th birthday, he accepts Death's deal: He gets unlimited power to make artwork with his literal bare hands, but just 200 days to do what he will with it. Given control over matter itself, the brash young artist sets out to solve life’s big riddle: Is greatness worth the ultimate price?
The Sculptor is McCloud’s first major graphic novel since Zot!, the 36-issue, mostly black-and-white superhero series that served as a lighthearted alternative to the dark-and-gritty world of comics during its six-year run in the '80s. McCloud has been celebrated for many other graphic and comic-related efforts since then, most notably his three meta-graphic nonfiction books: Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006). Yet, the world of graphic storytelling is much changed today. Some of the difference shows up as strain in The Sculptor—a sprawling, sweet, superb achievement that nevertheless suffers from some severe blindspots.
Central to the story is David’s counterpart and romantic interest, Meg, a bike messenger and sometime-actress. Meg appears to David as an angel when they first meet; he falls in love with her instantly, and after things fall apart with another man, she quickly reciprocates. While he's supposed to be using the precious time he has left to secure his place in eternity—or at least in some Saudi oil baron’s loft along Billionaire’s Row—the artist instead devotes much of his time to wooing Meg, despite himself.
A name for a stock character like Meg didn’t exist back when McCloud set out to explain the mechanics of comics. But she is a manic pixie dream girl, a force every bit as supernatural as Death. She rides hard and fast on her bike, she takes in homeless people off the street (David included) despite the risks, she talks about her boobs a lot. Carefully she poaches his virginity. “I might try to push you away,” Meg tells David at one point, as she sets the message from a fortune cookie alight over a candle. “Don’t let me, okay?”
When Meg turns from manic pixie to manic depressive, David finds the strength to stay by her side through a dark spell. (It’s cast as a revelation for him, a moment of development.) At least her character grows a little fuller through her ordeal; and the scenes from a big gathering of friends and family she hosts for Hanukkah smack of real, remembered details. Still, The Sculptor wouldn’t pass the famous feminist litmus test for fiction set out by Alison Bechdel, another great comics gatekeeper. The only woman Meg ever interacts with is her roommate; the only thing we know about their relationship is that one time they fooled around. (For balance, Meg schools David whenever the conversation turns to art, cutting through the name dropping to something more insightful.)
But it would go too far to say that The Sculptor fails as a feminist text. The story boils down to a magical dilemma about weighing the urge for a family down the road against the desire for professional validation today. Only this time—thanks to a deal with Death—it’s a man whose clock is ticking. I might’ve just as soon read the story about how Mira Bhatti balanced life and death and fate and art. She explains her formal innovation as a sculptor, only for David to echo her creation in a major overture to Meg. (And to her credit, Meg isn’t all that impressed.)
If there’s more than a story about family in The Sculptor, it’s undercooked. It’s no coincidence that Great Uncle Harry bears a striking resemblance to former Marvel Comics impresario Stan Lee. Or that Death-as-Harry(-as-Stan-Lee) shows up to seal the deal with the young artist just after he plunges his hands into a block of granite, realizing for the first time his scope and potential. At over 400 pages, the book illuminates the scope of what a graphic novel can do; in dwelling on subjects like creative stagnation and familial obligation, McCloud reveals the potential for what comics can be.
These days, though, McCloud isn’t alone. Even as Marvel sends a workhorse like Wolverine off to the glue factory (and conscripts the rest of its heroes to endless sequels)—and even as DC Comics prepares us for a cinematic universe anchored by Batfleck—the creators who actually write many of these print titles all do their best work outside the Big Two. Books like Southern Bastards, East of West, Sex Criminals, Pretty Deadly, and above all, The Walking Dead are paving the way for independent creators working in a superhero-ish format. Which is to say nothing of the indie stuff that doesn't involve capes, such as Richard McGuire's astonishing Here.
What’s most compelling about The Sculptor is the artist’s hand. Panel by panel, McCloud conducts a clinic: His decisions about pacing and line are unimpeachable. The simplest choices about when to let a panel fall off the page, when to tighten the camera, when to go for a big splash—these are as instructive as anything he wrote in Making Comics. None of the sculptures he depicts work; but the elegant way he captures an early brush with death? The light falling from a doorway into an unlit room where Meg crouches deep in depression? Every moment when McCloud drops the inks, letting pencils stand alone, is perfectly tuned. Clearly it’s McCloud who is the Sculptor here. Forgive the master if his politics have grown rusty; his artistry is still as sharp as the scythe.
There are diagnoses for some people who can’t or won’t take pills. There’s dysphagia, or difficulty swallowing. There’s emetophobia, the fear of gagging or vomiting. There’s pharmacophobia, the fear of taking any medicine at all.
And then there are people who have none of these conditions, but really, really hate to do it anyway. Hate it so much, in fact, that when a recent survey asked people if they’d prefer to risk immediate death or swallow a daily pill for the rest of their lives, more than a third chose the former.
In a study published earlier this week in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, a journal of the American Heart Association, researchers from the University of North Carolina and the University of California, San Francisco, surveyed 1,000 people on what they would be willing to give up to avoid taking a daily pill—one without any cost or side effects—to protect heart health.
Here’s what people were willing to trade:
More than 20 percent said they would pay $1,000 or more; around 3 percent said they’d pay up to $25,000.
Around 38 percent of respondents said they’d be willing to gamble some risk of immediate death; around 29 percent of the people surveyed said they’d accept a small (lower than 1 percent) risk, while 9 percent of them said they’d accept a one-in-10 chance of immediate death.
When the question changed from risk of death to certain death, around 30 percent said they would trade at least a week off their lives, and 8 percent were willing to give up a full two years.
The researchers aren’t sure why the survey respondents were so averse to the idea of taking a pill each day, but they have some educated guesses. Beyond the simple hassle of remembering a daily chore, “We think that part of the opposition is the stigma of ‘being sick’ or needing to be treated,” Robert Hutchins, a physician at UCSF and the study’s lead author, said in an email.
Because the study asked about specifically about a pill as prevention rather than treatment, there’s also the possibility that people simply didn’t see much benefit to taking it, or much risk to skipping it. “The problem with many of the pills that people take for their whole life is that they don’t necessarily make them feel better—they are medications like aspirin and statins that prevent an adverse outcome,” Hutchins said. “If that outcome is prevented, the person doesn’t know how bad the alternative to taking the pill actually is. If someone is taking a pill for back pain, they should get relief from that pill and don’t mind taking it, because the alternative, pain, is worse.”
The American Heart Association recommends a daily aspirin as heart-attack prevention in people at higher risk, though the Food and Drug Administration is less sure: In May, the agency revised its guidelines on the subject, declaring that while aspirin should be taken as a preventive measure by people with a history of heart attacks or strokes, the risks outweigh the benefits for everyone else.
Either way, the Circulation study adds a little more nuance to what’s already been identified as a major problem: Not only do people dislike taking pills, but they’re also pretty bad at it. A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2012 found that patients’ failure to follow their prescriptions—either by not taking medication correctly or by not taking it at all—causes around 125,000 deaths and 10 percent of all hospital visits each year, and costs the U.S. somewhere between $100 billion and $289 billion annually.
Hutchins added that among the respondents in his study, the three-quarters who who said they already took daily pills were even more vehemently opposed to the hypothetical one the survey described. “Maybe those people know what it's like to take pills and know how much of a hassle it is,” he said. In a follow-up study, he and his colleagues are examining which physical qualities of a pill—taste, size, texture—make the most difference in a person’s attitude towards taking it.
But much of people’s resistance, the researchers believe, stems less from the properties of the pill that’s being swallowed and more from the act itself. Even when side effects are discounted, “The act of having to take a daily pill can have a large effect on an individual's quality of life,” Hutchins said in a statement. “That effect multiplied across millions of people can have very large effects on the cost-effectiveness of that drug for a population.”
Simply combining both high schools would result in a student body that’s about 30 percent white, which would push the racial balance past a tipping point of comfort for many white families who "don’t want to be in a small minority," says Jim Tims, a former school board member.
Cleveland High School was founded in 1906 exclusively for whites. Today, it has an almost even mix of black and white students. (Sharon Lerner)
CLEVELAND, Miss.—The wheels of justice have been said to turn slowly. And few things move quickly here in Cleveland, Mississippi, a town of 12,000 people with no movie theater and a quaint commercial district that’s shuttered on Sunday. But when a deadline on a school desegregation suit—originally filed in 1965—came and went last month with opposing sides still unable to agree on a resolution, some locals admitted frustration.
"If you fight for something for 50-some-odd years and it don’t work out? Good gravy, that’s a long time," said Leroy Byars, 67, who is known around town simply as "Coach." Coach led East Side High School’s football team, the Trojans, from 1972 to 1987 and served as the school’s principal from 1988 to 1997. Back then, East Side High was all black—as it had been back when it was called Cleveland Colored Consolidated High and officially served only black students.
The problem, as the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice sees it, is that East Side High is still virtually all black: 359 of 360 students are African American. The racial mix is pretty much the same at D. M. Smith Junior High School, one of the two middle schools in this Delta town. In June, a federal judge asked the school district and the justice department to try to come up with a joint plan to desegregate the district’s schools. But the two sides were unable to agree by the January deadline and, late last month, unveiled separate visions for Cleveland. This spring, a federal judge will likely decide how the district should move forward—more than 40 years after most of the country desegregated public schools.
Cleveland is one of 179 school districts in the country involved in active desegregation cases. Mississippi has 44 of these cases—more than any other state. But Cleveland’s case is unusual. Nationally, there’s been a trend of "resegregation" in recent years, as school districts released from court oversight revert to the racial divisions common before school desegregation was mandated by the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
But, in Cleveland, full desegregation never happened in the first place.
"You’re starting from scratch," says Wendy Scott, dean of Mississippi College School of Law and an expert in school desegregation. "There are only a handful of cases like that."
Though extreme, the still-unresolved Cleveland case highlights the remarkable persistence of school segregation, despite decades of efforts to address it. As Scott notes, this isn’t just a problem of the Deep South or small towns. "The very same issues can be found in any school district in America."
Cleveland’s epic legal case began in 1965, when a group of black parents sued to stop the district from maintaining segregated schools. In the summer of 1969, the court ordered Cleveland to cease discriminating on the basis of race and eliminate the effects of the "dual school system." Though the plaintiffs won the legal victory—and black students were allowed to enroll in the all-white Cleveland High for the first time that September—roughly 1,000 white locals gathered in the streets to show their opposition to integration, and local leaders vowed to fight it.
Cleveland Mississippi, population 12,000, has no movie theater, but two high schools, and two middle schools. (Sharon Lerner)
Fight they have: For the past half-century Cleveland has carried on with two sets of schools with wildly different demographics. While East Side and D.M. Smith are almost uniformly black, Cleveland High and Margaret Green Junior High, the historically white high school and middle school, have nearly even black-white splits. As a result, Cleveland has some of the most integrated —and some of the most segregated—public schools in the region.
Over the years, the district has, for the most part, waged its end of the legal battle with half-hearted tweaks designed to encourage white enrollment. In 1990, Cleveland created a magnet program that used enriched math and science instruction to entice white students to attend classes at a mostly black elementary school.A few years later, after that didn’t work, the district added more magnet programs, this time at East Side High. But that effort wasn't successful—at least when it came to getting whites to enroll in black schools.
Then there was the "freedom of choice" plan, which allowed students from either side of the old railroad tracks that divide the mostly black side of town from the white side to enroll in any of the town’s high schools or middle schools. More than 200 black students enrolled at Cleveland through the program, but white students uniformly passed on enrolling at East Side. And, in 2012, Cleveland introduced popular International Baccalaureate programs based on well-respected curricula at two of its all-black schools, including East Side High. These were meant to draw white students into the schools. By one measure, the program succeeded: 49 white Cleveland High students now come over to East Side to take the classes. But, still, none have enrolled at the school.
The justice department is hoping to finally bring an end to this 50-year-long string of incremental reforms. "The children and families of Cleveland have waited far too long for desegregated schools that provide equal educational opportunities for all students," Vanita Gupta, the acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.
The federal agency’s desegregation plan calls for combining Cleveland’s two middle schools and high schools starting in the 2016-17 school year. At the same time, the school district submitted two plans. Although one calls for merging the two middle schools in the 2017-18 school year, the proposals mostly rely on the unsuccessful, decades-old approach to the problem: using magnet programs to draw white students to black schools.
Supporters of merging the schools maintain that it’s the only way to ensure equality in education, noting that Cleveland’s overwhelmingly black schools still get the short end of the stick.
"Some of our teachers, I don’t call what they’re doing teaching," says Muave Sanders, a black senior at East Side High, who is a plaintiff in the case against the district.
Sanders didn’t receive preparation for the ACT test. No one at East Side does. Nor do East Side students have science textbooks to bring home at night; there aren’t enough to go around. They don’t have lockers, either. Sanders and his classmates carry their books around in their backpacks all day. Though he is a strong and athletic, "it gets heavy," says Sanders.
A mile away, students at the racially mixed Cleveland High have these basics, even though the school receives more than $3,000 less per student each year than East Side does, according to the school district. And Cleveland has some amenities East Side does not, including a softball field and a weight-room "that makes ours look like a baby weight room," as Sanders puts it. An investigator hired by the Justice Department in 2009 found that the quality of Cleveland’s all black—or mostly black—schools was "not comparable to [the quality at] those with majority white enrollments," noting lighting that failed to meet minimum standards and buildings that were of "substantially poorer quality."
* * *
Despite the glaring inequities, members of both the town’s black and white communities remain divided over the prospect of change.
Part of the resistance stems from a fondness for the current incarnation of Cleveland High. "It’s a big eclectic mix where everyone has a spot," parent Margaret Swartzfager says of the school. Swartzfager, who is white, has four children in Cleveland public schools, including a 15-year-old daughter who goes to Cleveland High. While Swartzfager says her children would likely remain in public schools if the district has to merge them, other families would likely leave the public system.
Simply combining both high schools would result in a student body that’s about 30 percent white, which would push the racial balance past a tipping point of comfort for many white families who "don’t want to be in a small minority," says Jim Tims, a former school board member.
"If they feel threatened or for some reason race bothers them, then they have an option and they’re going to leave the schools," says Tims. There are mostly-white private schools nearby, such as the local Presbyterian Day School, which was founded in 1965, and Bayou Academy, founded the year before. As Tims sees it, "The question is: Do you want to have ‘integration’? Or do you want to have white flight?"
For the African American families who feel East Side has been stigmatized and under-resourced, that’s an easy question. "To integrate these schools is the law," says Claude Boddie, 76, whose five children went to Cleveland public schools. "My thing is the law part of it."
Though the district has used concern about white flight to argue against consolidating the schools in court, Jamie Jacks, a lawyer for the school district, also cited greater opportunity for participation in extracurricular activities—like band and student government—as an advantage of maintaining two high schools. With fewer schools, fewer spots would be available in these programs.
Some black families do indeed choose East Side because they think their children will have a greater shot of making a club or a team there. Tonya Short, whose son is a ninth grader at East Side, says she sent him there because of his love for baseball; she feared that, as a black student, he wouldn’t be allowed to play or excel in the sport at the racially mixed school. "In the history of that program, they only have one or two blacks on the senior team," says Short. "He’s a good student but we didn’t want to take the sports away from him."
Nevertheless, Short supports the idea of consolidating the schools. "I’d like to see each child have an equal opportunity to participate instead of being selected based on color or who their parents may be," she says. "I think that could happen if the schools were combined."
The Sanders Family (Sharon Lerner)
But Tims, the former school board member, said he wished those urging school consolidation would "just leave us alone. Maybe that’s because I’m a sentimental fool, but I love Cleveland High School and I don’t want it to go away." And Maurice Lucas, president of the Cleveland School Board, who is black, testified that he thought a majority of black East Side alums would also object to consolidation out of loyalty to their alma mater.
Sanders’ parents, Mack and Lenden, who both graduated from East Side, don’t agree with that interpretation. They sent their children to East Side not because they feel it’s a better school—they don’t—but because they fear their children won’t be treated fairly at Cleveland High. Lenden Sanders believes that Muave, who was voted "Mr. East Side High" at the last homecoming and is likely to be East Side’s valedictorian this year, wouldn’t have a shot at that distinction at Cleveland High "no matter how good his grades are." Cleveland High has never had a black valedictorian.
Still, Lenden Sanders is dubious anything will change soon and was not at all surprised by the inability of the school district and the feds to agree on a desegregation plan. "The people over there, they’re not ready for a change," she says.
Maybe it’s because of his youth, but Muave Sanders is still optimistic, despite the lack of progress. "I thought it would happen before I got to high school," said the senior, who is planning to attend the University of Southern Mississippi. Despite this latest delay, Sanders is confident that one day all students will be together in a single high school in Cleveland. And when that true integration happens, he believes it will help students, whatever their color.
"Cooperating with other races is something you have to do when you get in the real world and go to work, he reasons. "So why not do that in high school?" This story was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report.
My boyfriend Danny and I were dancing at a bar in downtown Boston on a recent Saturday night — my hands on his waist, his draped over my shoulders — when I noticed a woman, a 20-something brunette, approaching us. Judging by the giddy look on her face, I knew what was coming.
“I just wanted to say that you guys are so cute,” she shouted over the loud music, out of breath after pushing her way through a sea of straight couples to reach us.
She placed her hand on Danny’s shoulder and grinned. I wasn’t sure if this was part of the act, or if she actually needed to steady herself. She was tipsy and struggling to walk in her black stilettos. We thanked her for the compliment and smiled awkwardly until she scurried back to her friends, looking pleased with herself, as if she had fulfilled her good deed for the month. Her group of seven was a rowdy bachelorette party, decked out in cocktail dresses, feather boas, and tiaras.
I had just finished telling a friend beside me about our newest fan when I noticed she had already returned and was leaning in to Danny’s ear. He looked wildly uncomfortable. “My friend is getting married and we’re having a bachelorette party,” she said, pointing across the dance floor. “Would you guys sandwich the bride?”
