A.N

I know Brian Williams slightly; have always liked his on-air presence; am glad he has participated in Atlantic events, like the one shown above; and am sorry for his current "our helicopter was hit" difficulties.

I don't mean to compound them, but I want to explain why I find the episode mystifying when it comes to human nature, and revealing about our current politics.

Mystifying: Memory is tricky. So is presentation-of-self—as David Graham explains in an item just now.

But with all such allowances, I still find it just about incomprehensible that someone: (a) whose professional background involves observing and reporting events, (b) who holds one of the handful of jobs in the world most reliant on trustworthiness, and (c) who knew he was talking to an audience of millions of people that would (d) include others with first-hand knowledge of the incident, would nonetheless (e) "misremember" what must have been one of the most dramatic and traumatic moments of his life, after (f) accurately reporting the event for the first few years after it took place, and (g) when the whole thing is only a dozen years in the past, not somewhere in the fog of distant childhood memory.

Again, narrative and recollection are strange. I think I clearly recall vivid or traumatic episodes in my life, starting with the time a pickup truck rammed the car in which I was riding with my mom as a pre-schooler in Jackson, Mississippi. I believe I'm sure that I was sitting in the front seat, in that era before seat belts or child safety-seats, and just missed hitting the windshield, being stopped by the padded dash. But maybe, this many years later, I'm fooling myself. There is no one else around who was there. Three or four times in the past 20 years, I've been in uncomfortable situations while flying an airplane. I think I could recount those episodes in second-by-second slo-mo detail. But I can't be absolutely sure.

What I find hard to imagine is telling a story I wasn't 100 percent sure of, in public, with the detail, drama, and certainty Williams used in his famous session with David Letterman less than two years ago. The relevant part starts at around time 3:40. It is worth watching the few minutes that follow, knowing what we do now. (This video has the bonus of Italian subtitles.)

I try to put myself in this situation, and I can't. Like every person I have misremembered things, and like many people I often exaggerate them. But in circumstances like this? Where you know that other witnesses could be listening in? (To spell it out: Everything that appears in our magazine is super-fact-checked, and any residual errors are despite our best efforts. Things I put on this web site are not checked the same way, but I know that anything I write is subject to someone writing in and reporting, "Hey, I also know about that episode, and it didn't happen the way you say.")

* * *

Revealing. Of the various commentaries on this issue I particularly recommend today's note by Andrew Tyndall, at his Tyndall Report. He says, as I would, that the misremembering is strange but not of huge consequence in itself, especially after Williams's apology. Then he makes the political point. He mentions my Chickenhawk article, but I would agree with him even if he hadn't. I've added the emphasis:

This particular fib that Williams chose to tell—to identify himself all the more closely with the perils soldiers face in battle—derives from his underlying editorial judgment to offer instinctive support to the members of the uniformed armed forces ... And it is not only journalists that exhibit such "instinctive support," which is in truth a mere euphemism for "kneejerk adulation." Anyone who attends a major league baseball game observes the same unquestioning endorsement of the uniform and those who wear it.

Jim Fallows of The Atlantic recently observed that such "reverent" solidarity with our troops acts as a ring-fence that protects the entire military-industrial complex from the scrutiny it deserves. So the editorial importance of the fib Williams told is not only that it displays a reflexive desire toward identification with the military; it also represents his own newscast's self-disqualification as a dispassionate journalistic observer of the Pentagon's role in the domestic body politic and the nation's foreign policy.

I don't know what more Brian Williams can or will say about his own re-rendering of history. I do think, with Tyndall, that the particular way he re-presented himself says something about our times.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/the-brian-williams-story-in-the-chickenhawk-era/385218/

Hello Captain!

Something has been bothering me for a long time – I have been accused of “leading guys on.” When this happened in college and grad school, I shrugged it off because the guys who would accuse me of this were always ones that took any female attention as romantic interest in them or they had a crush on me, but I had told them, usually several times, that I was not interested in them romantically, only as friends.

I am a friendly, smiley person who is easy to talk to/confide in (which is good since I am a healthcare provider now), so I am guessing that helps lend to their idea that I am romantically interested in them. But if they paid attention, they would see that I am like that with everyone! However, I do make a point of not flirting at all, not touching them in any way, and only meeting with them in groups to avoid any accidental messages going through to guys that I suspect have interest in me. 

But I feel like it keeps happening! And it is really starting to make me angry because I am trying to make professional connections (and hopefully friends!) and I am so tired of guys coming onto me out of nowhere or when it is clearly inappropriate.

For example, I went to a business lunch with two professionals. The second person never showed up, so we had some drinks and chatted. We talked about our relationships a bit (me = my boyfriend is awesome, him = having a child completely changed his life and marriage). We went back to his office to talk more (business, I thought), when he said, “if I was younger, I would have thought that you coming back to my office meant you wanted to sleep with me.” I was shocked. I wrapped up the conversation and ran.

Something similar happened with another healthcare provider. We were exchanging treatments, and because he was so easy to talk to, I ended up confiding much more in him than I usually would with someone. He ended up confiding his marriage problems to me and a few sessions later, he stated that he “could not be alone with me” because he was “afraid something he would regret would happen.” I assured him that I would never cheat on my boyfriend, so he had nothing to worry about from me, but I respected his wish to stop our exchanges. I was upset about this for a few weeks because I thought I had finally found a new friend to talk about our practices and daydreamed about double dates with him and his wife.

There is a third guy with the same basic thing of us hanging out, him coming onto me when I thought we were just friends, me having to leave ASAP, and then never talking to him again AND actively avoiding seeing him (which means I have to skip professional events I would like to attend but not enough to risk seeing him).

Both times, these guys were married AND we had talked about my wonderful boyfriend. I know they are unhappy with their marriages, but I am clearly happy with my relationship, and even if I wasn’t, I would never cheat and I really resent the implied accusation that I would do so. With the unmarried third guy, the same still stands because he knew about my boyfriend.

My boyfriend only knows about what happened with the third guy because I was so distraught over it (it was actually the first event). He said that I am too nice and naive. I know I can be pretty oblivious when reading signals that are related to me (it’s so much easier to observe what’s happening with other people!), but I am actively doing everything I can think of to avoid sending misleading signals and avoiding “compromising” situations.

What am I doing wrong? I can’t possibly be leading every guy on, can I?

Thank you for reading (and thank you for all of your previous posts!),
Not Leading Them On (On Purpose Anyway)

Dear Not Leading Them:

“You just like to lead guys on” is something pushy assholes say when their boners of wishful thinking meet the fact that you are an actual person who is separate from them, a person with choices and boundaries. They want to transfer their embarrassment and disappointment at being rejected to you and make you think that everything is your fault somehow.

That’s it. That’s what it means. If someone says that to you (or anyone reading this), I want you to stop and think, “What is this person trying to get from me? Why is this person trying to manipulate me?” and tread very carefully, like, check where you are for exits, get out of the same room as them as quickly as possible, and start psyching yourself up to possibly have to make a scene. Get in touch with your anger, let the Dark Side of the Force fill you. I am not saying anything bad will happen, necessarily, or that you should be afraid of all men. But this phrase and the concept of women leading men on (by ignoring and/or rejecting them? How? What?) is SUCH a Shibboleth for me for identifying a sexist and manipulative person that you don’t want in your life.

You have a “series of pushy assholes” problem and not a “anything you are doing wrong” problem. You are friendly, and young, and probably very likely nice to look at, and above all female, and they are choosing to take that to mean something that it does not.

Your “wonderful, awesome” boyfriend is being a douche about this also, by making it a “you are too nice and naive” problem rather than a “gross dudes be creepin'” problem. It is not your fault, and by implying that it is, he is tacitly endorsing how these men see and treat you.

It sucks, I am so sorry. Next time someone says “If I was younger, I would have thought that you coming back to my office meant you wanted to sleep with me,” you are cleared to say “Ew. Why would you think that, and why would you say that out loud?” And next time your boyfriend says the thing about being naive, say “Wow, that is insulting, and not helpful at all.”

See also: “That’s inappropriate.” “Your wishful thinking does not make it so.” “I have no interest in that.” “That makes me very uncomfortable.”

You are not responsible for these dudes or their feelings. You did not cause these interactions and you are handling them just fine by shutting it down getting out of there.

Unfortunately, solving the “Too Nice” problem just replaces it with the old “Women Who Don’t Love Being Objects Are Mean Bitches” double-bind, because assertiveness from women is punished – you become “abrasive,” “touchy,” “no sense of humor,” etc. Sexist men will put friction and social costs around you not playing the role they wanted you to play to try to get you to stay in that role. Sometimes they put violent costs around it (harrowing stuff at that link, so dive in only if you are in the right headspace).

Story:

When I was 22 I worked at a very crunchy non-profit organization for a while. We brought on a new 45+ year old finance manager who had a dorky, Ned Flanders-y aspect. I noticed that whenever I made copies in the copy room he would stare at me from his office or make a reason to come chitchat with me. I mentioned to my coworkers that he was sorta creepy. He hadn’t done anything I could put my finger on, but something was off about our interactions. They laughed and told me I was imagining it, that the dude was nice and just trying to fit in and be friendly. He would often buy everyone lunch, or bring in baked goods from home – he definitely went out of his way to be liked by everyone.

When he started to offer me rides home after work, and I said “No thanks, I like to walk” and he said “I know, I’ve seen you. You’re right on my way, though, are you sure I can’t give you a ride?” I told my other coworkers about it, like wasn’t it kind of weird that he knew where I lived? They made fun of me for being so suspicious of a nice guy and for having a big ego to think that he would be into me. “He processes your paychecks, right? They have your address on it. Stop reading into everything.”

When I started seeing his car following me as I walked home, I told them about it, and they laughed and told me I was imagining it. Plus, didn’t he have a wife? They were pretty sure he had a wife. When I started to have dreams where he was literally Satan, that was also a funny joke, like, hahaha, the nicest person in the world, and Jennifer thinks he’s the Devil!

When he started pulling up alongside me on rainy days, asking me to get into the car, I walked faster. I took weird routes through alleys and yards so he could not follow. One day I screamed at him to leave me the fuck alone and took off running. When I got home his car was parked across the way, watching, waiting, wanting me to know that he knew where I lived. When I looked out the window to see if he was still there, he smiled and gave me a jaunty wave. My coworkers found this all very hard to believe. Surely he was just trying to be nice? It was raining! He wanted to make sure I got home okay!

I avoided him at work and started changing the times I arrived and left to make them not match up with his patterns.

Then my direct deposits started failing, due to some “bank error,” so, surprise!, I would have to come pick up my checks from him, personally, which always meant a bout of leering or him asking me what he’d done to make me not like him, but with authority behind it, like, “Jennifer, don’t you think it’s unprofessional to treat me so rudely, sit down, let’s talk through this like reasonable people.” He’d force me, in the office, into the position of looking cold and rude when he would try to make a bunch of small talk and  I would say “Can I have my check please? Can I have it now, thanks? My check, give it to me.” Poor dude, he’s so professional and nice, and that crazy bitch we hired is so rude to him! I guess they never taught her professional behavior at Georgetown, what do you want, hiring kids right out of college, etc. etc.

Some coworkers made fun of me for my “crush” on this dude. After all, wasn’t I always in his office chatting? He was always so smooth and unruffled, and yet whenever I had to interact with him I was hostile and “crazy.” In a romantic comedy isn’t “violent hate” always a sign of “secret lust”? Hilarious, right? He would join right in on this, “Aw, everyone knows Jennifer has a little crush on me, but let’s not embarrass her, she’s so young.”

Then I got another job and left, THANKFULLY. After I left, he embezzled a ton of money from the organization and disappeared. That was a problem that they could wrap their minds around. But months of leering and following me? All in my head, I was leading him on, I was the one with the crush, etc. He was so good at keeping everything he did at work on just this side of the line of plausible deniability, and the following, and weird stuff he did was carefully orchestrated to make me sound unreasonable and crazy. I don’t know if he would have assaulted me, but I do know that he got off on making me uncomfortable and getting away with it and making it seem like it was all in my head.

I’m friends with one person from that job to this day, the one person who, after things escalated to the point where he was following me in his car, believed me. Fuck the rest of them, and fuck that entire place forever.

Letter Writer, find some other women where you work, and hang out with them, and find a place (a journal, trusted friends, etc.) where you can get really angry about the way these dudes are treating you. Look out for opportunities to professionally network with women in your field, and if you can, find a fellow woman to go to those professional events with – it’s not fair that you should have to give those up just because your rejected suitor is sulking. It’s great to be a kind, friendly person, but you do not have to be nice to people who disrespect you at work and then try to make it your fault for being female. If a networking bridge gets burned by someone expressing attraction to you and you saying “No thank you!,” it’s not you who burned it.

If I could offer you one slightly more concrete piece of advice, it seems that some of these recent stories have one element in common, in that the dudes start discussing their marriage with you as a prelude to hitting on you. If you started treating “older dude at work starts telling me his marital stuff,” as a red flag, and change the subject back to work stuff as soon as possible, it *might* unfairly cut you off from deepening a good friendship, but also you *might* be able to derail some of the hitting on stuff a bit sooner. To be clear, you didn’t cause anything that happened by not doing this in the past, you weren’t leading them on by not shutting this down, and it’s not a guarantee of anything. But when I hear an older man open up about his marital problems to a younger woman that he knows from work, my suspicious & humorless bitch-senses start tingling because in my experience he is spinning a justification for himself and for you about why it won’t be wrong when he propositions you later. You think you’re getting to know each other as friends, he thinks he’s laying the groundwork. See what happens if you NOPE-out of these conversations, like, interrupt him with “Well, that’s sad to hear, so, about WORK TOPIC OF WORK-WORK-WORK-Y-NESS” and DON’T share anything about your own relationship in return. The man who goes with the work-y subject change with the least amount of resistance is the person who in the long run is most likely to be good friend and colleague material, because he understands boundaries.

TL;dr Sexism: It sucks.

Comments closed on Feb. 8.

America needs more people like James Robertson. Every place needs more people like James Robertson. But that doesn't mean his story isn't disturbing.

The 56-year-old Detroiter was the subject of a profile in the Free Press over the weekend. He walks 21 miles every day, part of a 23-mile commute from his home in the city to his factory job in Rochester Hills, a suburb. He's been doing it five days every week, ever since his old Honda bit the dust. His route takes him through rough neighborhoods and he leaves work well in the middle of the night. This being Detroit, he also reckons with snow drifts and sub-freezing temperatures regularly during the winter.

But Robertson is impressively upbeat about it:

"I sleep a lot on the weekend, yes I do," he says, sounding a little amazed at his schedule. He also catches zzz's on his bus rides. Whatever it takes to get to his job, Robertson does it.

"I can't imagine not working," he says.

There are some fringe benefits. Robertson's boss' wife feeds him delicious home-cooked Southern meals. Still: pretty grueling.

The reaction has been appropriately positive. Robertson was already something of a role model for his co-workers, and readers responded to the story generously, donating $70,000 and counting to help him get a new car. That's great for Robertson. But this isn't a feel-good story—it's a story about policy failures, structural economic obstacles, and about what it takes to keep working despite those challenges. Robertson is no doubt deserving, but it'll take larger changes to help other people who face similar struggles.

Transportation

Let's start with the obvious problem here: lack of mass-transit options. Robertson used to drive to his job, but his 1988 Accord gave out 10 years ago. In car-obsessed Motor City, that's bad news. Robertson's $10.55 per hour pay is more than a buck-fifty higher than the living wage in Wayne County, but it's still not enough for him to get a new car and insure and maintain it. The Freep's Bill Laitner reports:

Robertson's 23-mile commute from home takes four hours. It's so time-consuming because he must traverse the no-bus land of rolling Rochester Hills. It's one of scores of tri-county communities (nearly 40 in Oakland County alone) where voters opted not to pay the SMART transit millage. So it has no fixed-route bus service.

Once he gets to Troy and Detroit, Robertson is back in bus country. But even there, the bus schedules are thin in a region that is relentlessly auto-centric.

Detroit has never been big on mass transit—car companies helped hasten the demise of streetcars—but it's gotten worse over the last five years. Even as the city shrinks and people struggle, there are fewer options for transportation. But with unemployment rates inside the city at nearly 25 percent, workers have to leave the city limits for work. The Detroit area overall has a much rosier 7 percent unemployment rate. (A transportation official told the paper that Robertson might qualify for a special service for low-income workers.)

Mobility

That, in turn, points to one of the big problems in the economic recovery: While there were often jobs available in the United States, they weren't where workers needed them. It's all well and good to say that people should move, but of course it's not that easy. People are tethered by underwater mortgages, family ties, and the high costs of relocations. The Detroit metropolitan area is a microcosm of geographic inequality. Even as the city suffers a shrinking population, limited services, water shutoffs, and high crime, adjoining Oakland County, where Robertson works, is booming.

The county has been run for more than two decades by L. Brooks Patterson, a flamboyant and effective executive. As The New Yorker chronicled, Patterson has gone out of his way to cut the county off from Detroit, stopping regional infrastructure projects and generally bashing the city. Oakland County is pricey to live in, but it's where the jobs are, so workers like Robertson have to go through heroic measures to get to them. The alternative is essentially not working.

Crime

And what of the dangers Robertson encounters? "I have to go through Highland Park, and you never know what you're going to run into," he said. "It's pretty dangerous. Really, it is (dangerous) from 8 Mile on down. They're not the type of people you want to run into. But I've never had any trouble." That's not actually true—the stoic Robertson didn't want to discuss it, but his boss told the reporter he'd been mugged. It's especially dodgy since Robertson gets there after 1 a.m. Detroit has the highest murder and violent-crime rates of any major city.

Health

Robertson's trek is saintly, but like many saints who practiced bodily mortification, it can't be good for him. "He comes in here looking real tired—his legs, his knees," a coworker said. He also doesn't get enough sleep, for which he compensates by drinking 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew or cans of Coca-Cola, filled with unhealthy sugar—although given his walk, the calories maybe aren't a big factor. What happens if Robertson's knees or some other part of his body give out prematurely? Presumably he'd end up relying on disability benefits.

* * *

Detroit's citizens have fallen victim to an impressive nexus of forces, and no single agenda can fix all of the problems they face. But Robertson's travails offer a good window into the sorts of pressures someone faces if they want to maintain employment doing an honest day's work. Workforce participation in the United States has seen a steep, consistent downward drop over the last few years.

Workforce Participation, Ages 16 and Older

This chart isn't as simple as it looks—people aging out of the workforce are a major factor. Still, one of the things that makes Robertson's story so stunning is the context of fewer Americans going to work.

This isn't just a threat to poor Americans or poor Detroiters. It's a threat to the American economy. The more workers there are, the better off the nation is. But not everyone can do what James Robertson does every day; he's clearly a rare breed. The problem isn't just that people who don't work aren't contributing to that; it's that there's also the cost of more and more people drawing federal disability benefits. Some are skeptical that the ballooning number of recipients are really disabled. Setting that question aside, however, it's a drag on the nation to have a huge number of Americans who might be able to work but are unable to find employment nearby, drawing assistance instead.

It's no surprise that James Robertson has become a viral story. But the amount of effort required to punch a clock shouldn't be so unbelievable it earns national headlines.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/james-robertson-detroit-daily-commute/385098/

I am not even a cat person but yet I am getting excited over this smartly designed cat bowl by Hepper. The tray forms a moat around the bowls that catches whatever falls to the side.

A few months ago, for some reason, an old Atlantic story called "I Married a Jew" resurfaced and went viral, prompting much laughter and chagrin (so much so that we had to append an editors’ note calling attention to the year it was published: 1939). So much has changed since this was written that it’s now basically an after-midnight SNL sketch in magazine-article form, from the bizarre headline on down. Why would anyone not want to marry a Jew? (Say I, a half-Jew.) Seventy-five years later, the “nice Jewish boy” is already a stale joke about marriage.

The woman, who is blessedly “Anonymous,” writes that she is an American of German descent who frequently finds herself “trying to see things from the Nazis' point of view,” much to the “confusion of my husband.” Kind of understandable, since he’s Jewish.

Lest we forget, though, this was a time when Jews in America couldn’t join certain fraternities or buy houses in specific zip codes.

What’s astonishing about this piece is how the author manages to be wrong about almost every single thing she mentions. Einstein had his “windy theories”; Picasso is “not great.” The writer, possibly the world’s first-ever Shiksplainer, as Jonathan Chait calls her, is also shockingly prejudiced, her “progressive” life-choice notwithstanding. She calls hers an “interracial marriage” and accuses her husband of “lapsing into his Jewish ways” (??) around his family. Her mother thinks “the Jews are essentially an Oriental race” ... to which a Reddit user quipped “this does explain the stereotype about us loving Chinese food.”

Let’s just say it was a bad year to cast sunny predictions about the future of Jewish-Christian relations. The author tries to convince her husband, Ben, that “a hundred years hence the world will no more call Hitler a swine for expelling the Jews than it does Edward I of England,” but Ben refuses “to take the long view.” The long view would turn out to be much more horrific than either of them imagined.

For all its cringeworthiness, this story accomplishes a lot: It’s a good cautionary tale about sensitivity and judgment calls for modern journalists, a powerful remembrance of how much more hateful our world was just a few generations ago, and yet it still contains a plus ça change element.

It’s striking, for example, the way this section echoes current conversations about European Muslim identity in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy: “The Jews must come off the fence and make up their minds whether they want to be primarily citizens of, say, France or England or primarily citizens of Jewry. They cannot be Jewish in their homes and French or English outside. They cannot pledge their pride and loyalty to Israel and expect Frenchmen and Englishmen to treat them exactly like other Frenchmen and Englishmen.”

Few in the U.S. would bat an eye at the kind of marriage described in this article today, but both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia continue to be strong forces in Europe. It will be interesting if, “a hundred years hence,” we will wonder why France ever debated whether Muslim women should be allowed to wear burqas or why people the world over found photos of Jews and Arabs kissing to be unusual.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/who-wouldnt-want-to-marry-a-jew/385097/

You have probably heard, by this point, the news that Harper Lee is finally releasing a companion novel for To Kill A Mockingbird after over 50 years. Pretty exciting news, right? Her publisher has probably had a lot of time to figure out their publicity rollout and has also definitely made sure that she wants them to publish said companion novel, yes? Especially since Harper Lee has always made it very clear that she would not release another book, and since Harper Lee is currently in a nursing home, and since her sister and lawyer died last year, and several third parties have begun suing one another for the right to use Harper Lee's name...you would definitely think they would be sure to have all their ducks appropriately rowed before making such a significant announcement, right?

At the very least, they would have talked to Harper Lee about it, right? To get her, you know, permission?

Who knows! Yesterday Vulture ran one of the most confusing interviews I've ever seen from Harper Lee's editor, Hugh Van Dusen, who doesn't seem to know what room he's in at the moment:

Why is this book finally showing up now, after all these years?
The version I was told was that the book was in either a safe deposit box or a bank vault, and it was wrapped in a manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird and nobody noticed it for all these years. I don’t know this for a fact, but one must imagine that Harper Lee — we call her Nelle — just never told anybody about the book and then forgot it existed.

Read more Questions I Have About The Harper Lee Editor Interview at The Toast.

A few years ago, frustrated by my inability to meet a normal, non-psychopathic man with whom to have regular sex, I decided to turn my love life into a sociological experiment. Every month, I followed a different dating guide and recorded the effect it had on my test subjects (i.e., guys I was dating). The experiment, which started as a blog and became the basis for my first novel, was enlightening and distressing in equal measures. Here’s what I learned during my time as a low-rent Margaret Meade:

1. Following The Rules is basically like getting into a time machine and traveling back to the 1950s, but without the easy access to Valium. No eye contact, phone calls, loud voices, or strong opinions allowed for ladies, thanks. It works on exactly the kind of guy you’d expect: douchebags.

2. A diet of canned pineapple and cottage cheese is not conducive to an active sex life. Or even a dormant one. Most of the other advice in Sex and the Single Girl, a 1960s guide for swinging gals-about-town, was surprisingly sound, but it was nutritionally suspect.

3. If you’re looking to get laid, look no further than The Flappers. The bestselling guide of the 1920s encouraged women to have several lovers at once and to flirt with everyone, always. The best piece of advice? “Let your relations with men leave memories of seething fury and hatred rather than embarrassment.” YES.​

Fox’s MasterChef Junior stands out even among the hundreds of cooking competition shows currently on air, not to mention the dozen or so other versions of the storied MasterChef franchise. For one, all the contestants are between the ages of eight and 13; for another, these children create dishes just as complex as any made by their adult counterparts. Some can barely lift the kitchen equipment, but that doesn’t stop them from sous vide-ing like they’ve been cooking for at least twice as long as they’ve been alive. It’s stunning to watch as tiny children execute perfect homemade pasta, macarons made from scratch, and salt-crusted branzinos, all under the somewhat terrifying watch of Gordon Ramsey.

Still, the mere novelty of watching kids cooking isn’t why MasterChef Junior has continued to garner solid ratings in its third season (with a fourth already on the way). There’s something genuinely touching about the way these children approach the kitchen. Where else can you see reality contestants literally squeal with excitement at a team challenge, or say, “I’m here to win, but also to make friends” without even a trace of irony? These kids are not only thrilled to be there, but they also clearly respect each other, cheering their friends on in a challenge or praising a fellow competitor’s plating technique. This unfettered love of cooking and lack of the usual sour scheming can make MasterChef Junior one of the more heartwarming, inspiring, and downright fascinating reality competitions on television—but it isn't immune from some of the usual pitfalls.

In its second season, the show started getting predictable, as could be expected; reality competitions tend to settle into a repetitive groove when they find a format that works. The problem with MasterChef Junior, though, was that the same kinds of kids kept getting the same kinds of comments. As a dedicated viewer, I felt uneasy about this in a way I couldn’t explain—at least not until the end of the second season, when the show had the closest thing it’s had to a scandal. Judges Ramsay, Graham Elliot, and Joe Bastianich had to cut two children from a losing team after they had struggled with a pop-up restaurant challenge. There was Oona, a fierce 9-year old girl who had a meltdown while manning the deep fryer, and Sean, a 12-year-old Asian-American boy whose steak blew the other team’s out of the water. Their team leader was Samuel, a 12-year-old white boy who'd been pegged as the gourmand frontrunner, and yet had both botched his fish and failed to bring his team together. Elliot sighed, took a pause big enough to hold a commercial break, and finally announced that the one to stay would be … Samuel. “Crucially,” Elliot said to a visibly surprised Samuel, “you were the one that looked the most comfortable in that environment.” Emphasis his.

My jaw dropped. First of all, since when should the veneer of confidence matter for a cooking challenge? You can’t eat confidence. Second of all, and most devastating: Of course Samuel looked the most at home in that environment. Unlike the others on his team, Samuel was a self-assured white boy. In other words, he was what most people visualize when they imagine a head chef.

The discomfort I’d been feeling snapped into place: MasterChef Junior bills itself as an inclusive show that encourages creativity and hard work, but it can still be a microcosm of the same old exhausting gender and race biases ingrained in daily life. That these biases can be less overt doesn’t make them less dangerous. If anything, coded sexism, racism, and favoritism is far more damaging than if it's blatant, because it becomes so much harder to change—or even to call out at all. The feeling that something’s fallen prey to bias is uniquely frustrating; without concrete proof, it’s easy to dismiss unease as over-sensitivity. The evidence that MasterChef had more sympathy for its white male contestants came in the form of Elliot saying outright that Samuel “looks” the part. With the implicit made explicit, it was easier to look at MasterChef Junior's two-and-a-half season run through a sharper and much less flattering light.

Ramsay, Elliott, and Bastianich are all very successful chefs, restaurateurs, and white men. And on screen, they have a history of favoring children who look like them, whether they mean to or not. Throughout the series, these judges encourage all the children, but reserve more heartfelt sentiments like “I see a lot of myself in you” for the boys who do indeed look like they do. It was clear season two champion and adorable blond Tennessee native Logan was marked for success once he was pulled aside for several one-on-one talks with an unusually earnest Ramsay. Logan seemed startled, but I wasn’t; Ramsay had said only a couple episodes earlier that Logan reminded him of his own son. There’s comfort in the familiar.

In the pilot episode, Bastianich asks the boys about their future restaurants like it’s a given, but his compliment when he tastes Sofia’s almond-crusted sea bass is to ask, “Could you do that again, or is this luck?” (In season two, he asks the same of Oona, when she bakes a spectacular blood orange passionfruit cream pie: “Is this a fluke?”) Later, Ramsay jokes to 12-year-old Jewels that she should take on one of the boy contestants as her boyfriend, “on the side, like mustard,” and he playfully asks Oona if she’d want to marry his son Jack, to which she scrunches up her nose and shakes her head. Sofia, Jewels, and Oona remain serious about their food despite the judges’ best efforts, but these jokes undercut their legitimacy as young cooks. The boys, on the other hand, don't have to deal with this kind of teasing. It'll be interesting to see what happens next season when Momofuku pastry chef Christina Tosi replaces Bastianich on the judging panel.

The girls of MasterChef Junior were the ones who drew me into the show in the first place. During the first season, my Twitter timeline was consistently beside itself about Sarah, the nine-year old girl who blew Ramsay’s mind with a perfect molten lava cake and shrieked at her friend to win a whipped cream challenge by whipping it “like a man!” We shared our outrage when older competitor Troy dismissed her prowess by reducing her to her gender, and nursed our heartbreak after her final week on the show. Other favorites included first season runner-up Dara—the only girl and/or minority to make it to the finals—who always cooked with a calm confidence way beyond her 12 years. In season two, there was the blunt and ruthless Oona, and the consistently poised Adaiah. This season, excitable 12-year-old Jenna has had more screentime as a determined frontrunner, raising speculation that she might be MasterChef Junior’s first female winner. These girls are all great cooks, but for many viewers there's also something undeniably special about seeing young girls push for what they want without equivocation or apology, assuming they have a place in the room even though they don’t “look” the traditional part.

* * *

When Time released its “Gods of Food” cover in late 2013, it was greeted with a hailstorm of criticism. For one, it was overwhelmingly male; only four women were included, none of them chefs. The feature also included a “family tree” of the culinary community that almost seemed to go out of its way not to include women, since there were many—like chefs Suzanne Goin, Barbara Lynch, or Dianne Foley—whose professional connections would have easily fit. In defending the piece to Eater, Time editor Howard Chua-Eoan insisted that “it’s all men because men take care of themselves. The women really need someone—if not men, themselves actually—to sort of take care of each other.” It’s an unsettling sentiment, but the worst part is, he isn't entirely wrong. A 2004 Tulane study on gender and race in finance revealed that white men not only gravitate towards other white men, but that they help each other in more significant ways than they would women.

New York City chef and restaurant owner Amanda Cohen told The New York Times that Time’s feature “simply did not reflect the reality that we see in the industry every day.” Like many female chefs, Cohen was bored of having the sexism conversation. She also wrote a scathing op-ed for Eater in which she insisted that women are a prominent and growing force in professional kitchens, but that Chua-Eoan may have been too busy going to events with the same people (read: men) to notice. This not only speaks to the importance of diversity, but of visibility. Being able to see diversity in an industry is the first step in changing the idea that one kind of person can look like they should be there.

Meanwhile, black children have rarely advanced far on MasterChef Junior. If they do stick around—like last season’s Adaiah—we hardly hear from them at all. This current season, nine year-old Cory’s hyperactive demeanor has gotten more screentime than any of the series’ other African-American boys combined. Black contestant Ayla didn’t have a single one of her dishes critiqued on camera for three episodes, and when she co-won the challenge on the fourth, her white partner Jimmy received every triumphant testimonial. Yes, there are fewer black children on the show than white, just as there are fewer black professional chefs than white. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 9 percent of chefs or head cooks in America are black. Even as black enrollment in culinary programs grows steadily, it still accounts for just a tiny percentage of the overall student population, as with the Culinary Institute of America (2 percent black). When PBS did a recent in-depth look on why there aren't more black chefs in the U.S., it found an “overwhelming” consensus that there need to be more black culinary role models to look up to, or at the very least, increased media exposure. Like MasterChef Junior.

This isn't about cherry picking petty grievances from an otherwise largely encouraging show. After all, these kids are across-the-board talented, and MasterChef Junior has made a clear effort to include fairly diverse casts. Still, the mere inclusion of diversity, while certainly a step forward, doesn't magically erase existing biases. There’s also the fact that watching a cooking show means not having any idea whose food is better or worse—which further means we have to trust the judges far more to tell us who does or doesn’t belong there. The sad fact is that girls and young minorities absolutely do absorb implications that they don’t quite fit the larger perception of what success in America looks like (i.e. white and male). A 2012 Indiana University study tracked children's’ self-esteem after watching hours of television and found that girls and black children consistently felt worse about themselves. White boys, on the other hand, consistently felt better.

This study, combined with Elliot's reason for allowing Samuel to stay, offers further proof that white boys more consistently get the message that they can succeed. They can embrace their ambition and run with it, while girls and minorities have to navigate their ambition through existing roadblocks of subconscious bias. This is especially devastating for a show like MasterChef Junior, which not only caters to a family-friendly audience, but purports to celebrate and inspire children who are especially susceptible to the message that they don’t fit in. For every successful white man who tells a white boy he looks like he belongs, there’s a girl or a minority who hears she doesn't.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/02/masterchef-junior/385079/

Nelle Harper Lee, born in Monroeville, Alabama in the spring of 1926, was named, in a roundabout way, after her grandmother: “Nelle” is “Ellen” spelled backward. The writer's father, A.C. Lee—the inspiration for Atticus Finch—called her “Nelle.” So did her friend from childhood, Truman Capote. So do the small group of people, past and present, who move in her intimate orbit.

To the rest of us, however, she is Harper. That's because, when Nelle Lee published her first and (as yet) only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird—leading to, in short order, a Pulitzer, an Oscar-winning film, and a fame she didn’t ask for—the young writer didn’t trust the media not to mispronounce the name she’d spent her life with, the one she’d gotten from her grandmother, as “Nellie.”

So Harper Lee it was. And Harper, for most of us, it remains.

Lee, today, finds herself in a place she traditionally has not enjoyed occupying: the news. That's because of the surprise announcement that To Kill a Mockingbird will have its long-awaited sequel: Go Set a Watchman, about the adventures of a grown-up Scout as she returns to Maycomb, Alabama to visit Atticus. That a novel more than 60 years in the making would finally be published was the result, Lee said in a statement delivered through her publisher, HarperCollins, of some crazy serendipity: The book’s long-lost manuscript was discovered by her lawyer, the statement says, “in a secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird.”*

Which is all, almost needless to say, a very big deal. (When the new novel was announced earlier today, apparently, “a series of screams” could be heard in the offices of Penguin Random House, Lee's U.K. publisher.) To Kill a Mockingbird is beloved in ways few of its fellow curricular staples are. More than half a century after its original publication, it continues to sell more than a million copies a year; it's been translated into more than 40 languages. Not only has it proven itself, repeatedly, to be on the right side of history; it also captures, in a way few books are able to, that particular feeling, smallness straining against bigness, that comes with being a kid. For many American children—myself, and possibly you, very much included—Mockingbird offered an early, easy exposure to justice and the lack of it. It eased us, through the charming person of Scout, into a truth we were alternately warned about and protected from: that life can be, without at all meaning to be, cruelly unfair.

* * *

Mockingbird’s author is now 88 years old. She spent much of her adult life in New York City, living with the kind of strategic privacy that tends to get one labelled as “reclusive.” Recently forced to sell her Upper East Side apartment, she now lives in an assisted-living facility back in Monroeville—a 2007 stroke, a friend says, having left her “95 percent blind, profoundly deaf,” and bound to a wheelchair. "Her short-term memory," he says, "is completely shot, and poor in general."

Perhaps he is overstating Lee's condition. Perhaps not. But it’s worth considering, either way, something that is both inconvenient and also indicative of the expectations we place on the small cadre of people we have elevated to the status of Author: that Harper Lee, née and known to those close to her as Nelle, spent the majority of her life not wanting Go Set a Watchman to be published. Or, at least, she has spent the majority of her life telling the media that she didn't want Go Set a Watchman to be published. (She has had many opportunities to do so: In 2006, The New York Times wrote a piece about her specifying “the three most frequently asked questions” associated with her name: “Is she dead? Is she gay? What ever happened to Book No. 2?”)

Here’s an exchange from a press conference Lee gave in 1962 to promote the film version of her novel:

"Will success spoil Harper Lee?" a reporter asked.

"She's too old," Harper Lee replied.

"How do you feel about your second novel?" another asked.

"I'm scared,” Harper Lee replied.

At one point, Lee's sister (and companion and caretaker and sometime legal adviser), known publicly as Miss Alice, claimed that a burglar had stolen the manuscript of Mockingbird’s spectral sequel. But Lee had many other explanations for why the anticipated novel failed to materialize. To a cousin: “When you're at the top, there's only one way to go.” To a bookseller: "I said what I had to say." To a friend: “I wouldn't go through the pressure and publicity I went through with To Kill A Mockingbird for any amount of money.”

All that, human nature and media systems being what they are, only served to stoke the curiosity that swirled around a Second Novel From Harper Lee. As did Lee’s own reluctance to situate herself within fame's familiar infrastructures. As The New York Times summed it up: “Unmanageable success made her determined to vanish.” Lee's repeated response to the interview requests of Charles Shields, who published an (unauthorized) biography of her in 2006, was "not just no, but hell no." Lee once told Oprah Winfrey, over a (private) lunch, why she’d never appear on her show: While people tended to compare her to Scout, she explained, “I’m really Boo.” Lee did not, in the manner of some other literary “recluses,” fully withdraw from public view—she occasionally accepts awards and honorary degrees and the like—but she has insisted that her participation in her own publicity be mostly of a silent nature. In 2007, at a ceremony inducting four new members into the Alabama Academy of Honor, Lee declined a request to address the audience, explaining, “Well, it's better to be silent than to be a fool.”

* * *

Given all that, you have to wonder: Why end the silence? And why do it now?

Perhaps it really was as simple as a manuscript lost and recovered, serendipitously for all involved. Perhaps all those doubts Lee had previously expressed about the publication of a second novel were merely the results of the natural, but not invincible, anxiety that comes with that infamously fraught project. Perhaps Lee regretted having signed over her copyright of Mockingbird, and wanted something else she could call, in the fullest sense, truly hers. Perhaps Lee, approaching her 90s, figured that age will afford her what her attempts at a sheltered life could not: the easy relief of silence.

Perhaps she decided that she has not, after all, said all she has to say.

Or perhaps, having witnessed the rise of what Boris Kachka calls the “Mockingbird industrial complex” from afar, the writer wanted to bring a renewed kind of intimacy to her work. "I think it very undignified for any serious artist to allow themselves to be exploited in this fashion," Truman Capote, in full frenemy mode, once sniffed of Lee’s work to promote the film version of her novel. Lee's silence, after the initial heat of her fame dissipated, might indicate that she agrees.

Or perhaps Lee, alive but ill, is being treated the way so many deceased authors are: as ideas rather than people, as brands and businesses rather than messy collections of doubts and desires.

We won’t know. We can’t know. All we will have, in the end, is a book, a thing that will raise as many questions as it answers. And, for better or for worse, that is probably just how Harper Lee—Nelle to the small collection of people who really know her—would prefer things.

* This post originally misstated the U.S. publisher of Harper Lee's new book, Go Set a Watchman. It is HarperCollins, not Penguin Random House, which will publish the books in the U.K. and Commonwealth. We regret the error.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/02/the-tragedy-of-harper-lee/385132/

Previously in this series.

Before there was #thestruggle, there was The Struggle, or more accurately “I’m struggling.” #thestruggle was sleeping through an alarm, a bathroom with every stall taken when you had a narrow sliver of time to use it. “I’m struggling” was crying every time I heard my alarm, or in that bathroom stall typing that message, or in my car as Christmas music played through my speakers. My favorite season, my birthday, and my beloved winter holidays were sacrificed to my brain and its chemical failures.

After years of questioning whether Seasonal Affective Disorder was a real condition, I realized that it was indifferent to my skepticism. SAD doesn’t need you to believe it exists, it makes itself known. Still, I was no stranger to the psychiatrist’s office, which somehow made me even more reluctant to say “I’m depressed.” I thought of the poem “Not waving but drowning” and felt it keenly, but still wanted to choose something less dramatic than “drowning.” So I chose “struggling,” and I certainly was.

Read more Struggling with Seasonal Affective Disorder at The Toast.

In September 1862, the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was one of 22,717 men who fell during the Battle of Antietam. His father, Oliver Sr., set out on an epic journey to find him and, a couple of months later, wrote about it for The Atlantic.

“My Hunt After the Captain” is an incredible firsthand account of what Maryland looked and felt like just after the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. Holmes describes what he saw on the streets of Frederick: “Delicate boys, with more spirit than strength, flushed with fever or pale with exhaustion or haggard with suffering, dragged their weary limbs along as if each step would exhaust their slender store of strength.” He notes what the ground looked like after the battle, with “dark red patches where a pool of blood had curdled and caked, as some poor fellow poured his life out on the sod.”

But there’s one especially memorable sentence that has nothing to do with the war. It comes near the beginning, as Holmes is recalling his train ride down from New England:

Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni's famous experiment,—fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer's wagon,—all this without volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the thoughts in motion, as the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound up,—many times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum with this delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend, cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed the flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of my thought dry during the hour when they should have been filling themselves full of fresh juices.

This sentence (and it is one single sentence!) is amazing for all kinds of reasons. First, there’s the sheer length—it’s 198 words long. Then there are the metaphors. Holmes’s thoughts are “magnetized,” then “shaken up by vibrations.” He casually alludes to “Chladni’s famous experiment” (you can read about it on Wikipedia if you don’t own a copy of the 1787 classic Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges). Then he compares his thoughts to kernels of corn, cogs in a self-winding watch, and carriages being pulled by flying horses. By the end, his thoughts are breasts, which his chatty friend has milked dry.

It’s not just Holmes’s writing that’s remarkable. It’s also the actual experience he’s describing. In this age of smartphones, it’s hard to remember a time when people actively sought out opportunities to daydream. But you can see it in just about every Atlantic article from the 19th century—our writers were in no hurry. They were enjoying the process of thinking on paper, letting their associations carry them along without worrying about where they might end up (or when they might need to use a period). Emerson wrote that way: James Russell Lowell once described the Concord sage’s prose as “a chaos full of shooting-stars, a jumble of creative forces.” But I never really understood the mindset behind this kind of writing until I read that sentence by Oliver Wendell Holmes.

To find out more, I called up David S. Reynolds, a distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center who specializes in 19th century literature and history. As someone who studies that era, Reynolds chuckled affectionately at Holmes’s sentence. He said it reminded him of Herman Melville: All throughout Moby Dick and Bartleby, the Scrivener, “there are a lot of these longer sentences that go on and on, and yet they hang together and are filled with metaphors that are just wonderful.”

Reynolds pointed out that the 19th century was the Romantic age, a time when writers wanted to “luxuriate in language” and explore their inner worlds. A classic example, he said, was Walt Whitman’s 1855 “Song of Myself.” Reynolds’s students often have trouble understanding what Whitman meant when he wrote, “I lean and loafe at my ease ... observing a spear of summer grass.” “Some of them say, ‘What is this guy, a space cadet or something?’ But that’s the way Whitman was. He was able to really slow down and enjoy his environment.”

What made writers stop loafing in the grass? Mark Twain, another Atlantic contributor, had a lot to do with it. According to Reynolds, Ernest Hemingway was right when he observed, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

“I mean, the Holmes sentence was really designed for an educated reading public,” Reynolds said. “It doesn’t pretend to be at all vernacular. What Mark Twain did was to try and register the voices of people who weren’t necessarily educated, barely literate kids.” And Twain didn’t hide his disdain for those who wrote 200-word sentences. According to Reynolds, “He once stood up before a literary crowd at a formal banquet and went on and on about the windy, excessive language of writers like James Fenimore Cooper.”

American literature didn’t change all at once; Reynolds points out that Henry James went right on doing his thing even as Twain was writing his down-to-earth dialogue. But history was on Twain’s side. The spread of mass media, the rise of motion pictures, and the popularity of Strunk and White all helped shape the sensibilities we have now. Today’s Atlantic editors would never let some of the metaphors Holmes used into a finished story, let alone all of them in one endless sentence.

But that’s part of what makes Holmes’s writing so mischievously appealing. It breaks all our modern rules, but somehow, it works. He manages to capture the motion of the mind, the almost physical ways it floats and vibrates and whirs. Writers may write differently now, but our words and ideas still come from somewhere, and the process of bringing them to the surface is as wonderful and mysterious as it ever was. Sometimes it takes a 198-word sentence by a masterful writer to remind us of that.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/02/the-best-sentence-in-atlantic-history/384741/

Riane Konc's previous work for The Toast can be found here.

My students will learn to lose and then find themselves again through the existential questions of great literature. Even the most reluctant readers will discover that their closest confidantes and most intimate lovers have been waiting for them in the pages of a book. After a class discussion about Romeo and Juliet versus West Side Story, students from different socioeconomic classes will look each other in the eyes and give a brief nod of understanding. The Kid Who Everyone Thought Was Bad News will perform Sonnet 116 over a sample of “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” to a standing ovation on the last day of school, and when he’s done, the whole class will leap upon their desks and address me as O Captain, My Captain, and also none of them will ever type u instead of you in a text message again.

Okay, well, I don’t expect every student to be Harold Bloom. I mean, how many ADULTS do you know who can fully parse "The Waste Land"? I’m not looking for a full textual analysis here. Maybe one student will follow the way that World War I haunts the narrator; maybe one will pick up on the theme of existential decay; maybe another will follow the parallels between Eliot’s poem and Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. I actually like it better that way, each of them poring over bits of the poem and teasing out individual meanings, then bringing what they’ve mined back to class to share. The important thing is that they figure it out on their own. 

It’s best to work through dense poems like this in class. Although several of my students did point out that April, in the poem, was symbolic of spring, which I thought was a good start. Also I think they really connected with the cruelty of the spring, because did you know the school makes them take the SAT the same month as prom AND the senior class trip, which is totally oppression? -- as Chloe mentioned.

Read more The Gradual Devolution of My Goals as an English Teacher at The Toast.

I don't really have much big picture analysis in the wake of Andrew Sullivan's departure from blogging. My reaction is strictly personal. I've spent the majority of my career as a print journalist. In 2008, when I first started blogging, I had two models in mind--Matthew Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan, and I only knew about Matt because of Andrew. I started reading Andrew during the run-up to the Iraq War and thus bore witness to one of the most amazing real-time about-faces in recent memory. But it was a sincere about-face and it taught me something about writing, and particularly writing on the internet, which guides me even today--namely, that error is an essential part  of any real intellectual pursuit.

Back when I started blogging, there was an annoying premium on "public smartness" and "being right" among pundits, journalists and writers. Likely, there is still one today. The need to be publicly smart and constantly right originates both in the writer's ego and in the expectation of incurious readers. The writer gets the psychic reward of praise--"Such and such is really smart" or "Such and such was 'right' on Libya."  And the incurious reader gets to believe that there is some order in the world, that there is a stable of learned (mostly) men who will decipher the words of God for them. The incurious readers is not so much looking for writers, as prophets.

And Andrew has never been a prophet, so much as a joyous heretic. Andrew taught me that you do not have to pretend to be smarter than you are. And when you have made the error of pretending to be smarter, or when you simply have been wrong, you can say so and you can say it straight--without self-apology, without self-justifying garnish, without "if I have offended." And there is a large body of deeply curious readers who accept this, who want this, who do not so much expect you to be right, as they expect you to be honest. When I read Andrew, I generally thought he was dedicated to the work of being honest. I did not think he was always honest. I don't think anyone can be. But I thought he held "honesty" as a standard--something can't be said of the large number of charlatans in this business.

Honesty demands not just that you accept your errors, but that your errors are integral to developing a rigorous sense of study. I have found this to be true in, well, just about everything in life. But it was from Andrew that I learned to apply it in this particular form of writing. I am indebted to him. And I will miss him--no matter how much I think he's wrong, no matter the future of blogging.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/andrew-sullivan-and-the-importance-of-error/385071/

Zuppa Toscana… it’s one of those recipes that EVERY food blogger has made. I see it on Pinterest at least once per day. At least. I try to avoid over-hyped recipes like this but…

I had a friend staying at my house last week and he so graciously offered to cook dinner one night. He chose Zuppa Toscana. “Sure, why not?” I thought, “Let’s see what all the hubbub is about.” He is a former Olive Garden employee and if he could eat it every day for months on end and still want to cook it by choice, then there’s gotta be something to it, right? Well, to my surprise, the soup actually lived up to its enormous hype. We each ate two bowls for dinner, then ate it again for breakfast and lunch the next two days. Yep. It’s that good.

If you’ve never been to Olive Garden or had Zuppa Toscana anywhere else, I’d describe it like a creamy potato soup loaded with flavorful Italian sausage, kale, and bacon. The original version uses heavy cream, bacon, and a whole pound of sausage, but I decided to try to lighten it up a bit. I used half and half instead of heavy cream (according to thekitchn.com it has one third the fat), subbed half the sausage for white beans, used smoked paprika for smokiness instead of bacon, and then loaded up on potatoes and kale. The result? Still totally creamy and chock full flavor, plus a hefty dose of vegetables. I’m probably going to eat nothing but this soup for the next four days straight (it has kale, so it’s okay, right?).

Are you ready for this?

Step by Step Photos

I use Italian sausage a lot to flavor dishes, so I took advantage of a sale on this value pack. I only used 1/2 lb. for this soup, but packaged the rest up for the freezer (in two link portions, since that’s usually how much I use per recipe). 

Squeeze two links (1/2 lb.) of Italian sausage out of its casing and into a large pot. Sauté the sausage over medium heat, breaking it into chunks as it cooks. I didn’t use any extra oil because sausage tends to be pretty fatty. It’s okay if a little sticks to the bottom of the pot because it will dissolve off in the next step. If you’re having a lot of trouble with it sticking to the bottom of the pot, add a splash of olive oil.

While the sausage is browning, dice one onion and mince two cloves of garlic. Add them to the pot and continue to sauté until the onions are soft. The moisture from the onion should help dissolve any browned bits off the bottom of the pot.

Drain and rinse one 15oz. can of Great Northern beans, then add them to the pot with 1/2 tsp of smoked paprika. The smoked paprika will give that smoky hint that the bacon would have supplied. Tricky, right?

Next add 3 cups of chicken broth, 1 cup water, and 2 cups (one pint) of half and half. If you’re not from the U.S., “half and half” is like a lighter version of light cream. Read about it here. Put a lid on the pot and let it come to a simmer over medium heat.

While the pot is heating up, wash and slice three red potatoes (about 1.5 to 1.75 lbs.). I first cut the potatoes into quarters lengthwise, then sliced them thinly across. Slicing them thinly helps them cook faster, plus makes a great texture in the soup. Add the potatoes to the pot.

Instead of buying a regular bunch of kale, I bought this bag of pre-chopped kale (it’s actually less expensive than regular bunches at my local store). This one pound bag is roughly equivalent to two bunches and I used half of it (or about one bunch). If you buy a regular bunch of kale, you’ll need to wash it, remove the stems, and chop the leaves.

Add the kale to the pot and it will likely fill it up to the top. Let the heat from the liquid begin to wilt the kale. Give it a stir occasionally to help it contact the hot soup and wilt.

After a few minutes it will have wilted down into the soup nicely. Let the soup simmer over medium heat for about 15 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender.

I like my soup spicy (and had used mild Italian sausage), so I seasoned with a pinch of red pepper flakes. A little freshly cracked black pepper is also nice. Depending on what type of broth you use, you may need to add a little salt (I did not add any).

The potatoes and beans help thicken the broth up nicely, without having to use heavy cream.

Absolutely deserving of all the internet hype. SO. GOOD.

Big thanks to Brandon for opening my eyes to the Zuppa! YUM!

The post Zuppa Toscana appeared first on Budget Bytes.

“War is easy. Art directing is hard.”

College Humor

IT'S THE WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER PREQUEL TRAILER

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A reader recently sent me a link to the Tumblr analyzing this painting:

Susanna and the Elders, Restored (Left)
Susanna and the Elders, Restored with X-ray (Right)
Kathleen Gilje, 1998

For those who don’t know about this painting, the artist was the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi.

Gentileschi was a female painter in a time when it was very largely unheard of for a woman to be an artist. She managed to get the opportunity for training and eventual employment because her father, Orazio, was already a well established master painter who was very adamant that she get artistic training. He apparently saw a high degree of skill in some artwork she did as a hobby in childhood. He was very supportive of her and encouraged her to resist the “traditional attitude and psychological submission to brainwashing and the jealousy of her obvious talents.”

Gentileschi became extremely well known in her time for painting female figures from the Bible and their suffering.

Read more Link Roundup at The Toast.

Writes Taylor in Ontario: “My parents are divorced, and I live with my mom. My dad’s parents can definitely afford to buy more appropriate cards, but they went with this one.”

related: The Happiest Place on Earth

What huh no I don't know these aren't tears there are absolutely no fluids exiting my eyeballs at this moment I mean how do I know that you're not crying oh God I gotta go.

UPDATE: ajsdhfjasdhfjsdnf

One of the most important things the Affordable Care Act was supposed to do was put an end to a practice called pre-existing condition exclusion. Before the law passed, health insurers could refuse to cover any medical services for a health condition a person already had when they joined that insurance plan, or they could prevent the person from joining the plan entirely. So, for example, if you had psoriasis, the company might say that you could be on their plan, but you'd have to pay for all your psoriasis medications out-of-pocket.

For many people with big, expensive health problems, like asthma or diabetes, this part of the law greatly brought down the cost of their treatment. However, a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that some insurers are still finding ways to keep sick people off their plans, particularly when it comes to people with HIV.

For the study, Doug Jacobs and Benjamin D. Sommers of Harvard analyzed the co-pays for HIV drugs within 48  "Silver" (mid-range cost) health-insurance exchange plans in 12 states. The drugs they examined were nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitors, or NRTIs, which are one of the most commonly prescribed HIV medications.

Annual Cost of HIV Treatments

They found that in a quarter of the plans, insurers had listed the NRTIs in the highest co-pay tier, meaning that the customers would have to pay 30 percent of the cost or more. About half of these so-called "adverse tiering" plans also had a deductible specific to that drug. People enrolled in these plans would have to pay more than $3,000 more per year for their treatments, even if they used generics.

"If plans place all HIV drugs in the highest cost-sharing tier, enrollees with HIV will incur high costs regardless of which drugs they take," the authors write. "This effect suggests that the goal of this approach—which we call 'adverse tiering'—is not to influence enrollees’ drug utilization but rather to deter certain people from enrolling in the first place."

The authors point out that these adversely-tiered HIV patients will at some point realize they're overpaying and switch plans. However, that creates its own problem. Health insurance markets require a delicate balance to function. Just enough sick people and healthy people need to be enrolled in each plan for the insurer to be able to make a small—yet reliable—profit while still paying for everything they promised to cover.

Once all the HIV patients start clustering in the more generous plans, it may lead to a "race to the bottom in drug-plan design," the authors write. No insurer wants to be saddled with all the most-expensive customers, so they may all rejigger their drug co-pays to be similarly harsh.

"The [Affordable Care Act] has already made major inroads in designing a more equitable healthcare system for people with chronic conditions," Jacobs and Sommers conclude, "but the struggle is far from over."

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/how-insurance-companies-still-discriminate-against-the-sick/384908/

Christian Brown's previous work for The Toast can be found here.

Yesterday, residents of Glenwood were surprised to find Bill Murray, star of Stripes, sitting on a park bench overlooking the East River and slowly weeping. He turned away all who would comfort him for the entire day. As soon as the sun sank below the skyline at his back, he stood without a word and left. Local residents report that the bench he sat on has since disappeared.

Gene writes in to say: “I always read stories like this and assumed they were fake, but this actually happened to me! I was sitting in a strip club, minding my own business, when I felt hands reach up to cover my eyes and a beard tickle my neck as someone leaned in real close and a voice whispered ‘Guess who.’ I thought maybe this was the worst bouncer ever, but nope - it was Bill goddamn Murray! From Charlie’s Angels! He signed a twenty and tipped the dancer before he left saying, ‘No one will ever believe you.’”

Read more Bills, Bills, Bills: Melancholy Murray Surprises Fans Across the Nation at The Toast.

Well, this is a nice thing to discover: The Texas Library Association has put Lock In on the TLA Lariat List for Recommended Adult Fiction, with 24 other eminently worthy entries across several fiction genres. Other science fiction-y entries on the list this year include The Martian from Andy Weir and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel among others. Congratulations to everyone on the list, which I’ve included below from the TLA press release (arranged alphabetically by title):

• After I’m Gone ~ Lippman, Laura; William Morrow/ HarperCollins Publishers.
• All the Light We Cannot See ~ Doerr, Anthony; Scribner.
• Archetype ~ Waters, M.D.; Dutton.
• The Book of Unknown Americans ~ Henriquez, Cristina; Knopf.
• The Enchanted ~ Denfeld, Rene; Harper/ HarperCollins Publishers.
• Everything I Never Told You ~ Ng, Celeste; The Penguin Press/ Penguin.
• The Girl with All the Gifts ~ Carey, M.R; Hachette Book Group/ Orbit.
• A Guide for the Perplexed ~ Horn, Dara; W. W. Norton & Company.
• The Husband’s Secret ~ Moriarty, Liane; Putnam/ Penguin.
• I Am Pilgrim ~ Hayes, Terry; Atria/Emily Bestler Books.
• The Invention of Wings ~ Kidd, Sue Monk; Viking Adult/ Penguin.
• Life After Life ~ Atkinson, Kate, Reagan; Hachette Book Group/ Reagan Arthur Books.
• Lock In ~ Scalzi, John; Tor Books/ Macmillan.
• The Martian ~ Weir, Andy; Random House.
• Neverhome ~ Hunt, Laird; Hachette Book Group/ Little, Brown & Company.
• Night Film ~ Pessl, Marisha; Random House.
• The Pearl that Broke Its Shell ~ Hashimi, Nadia; William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers.
• The Queen of the Tearling ~ Johansen, Erika; Harper/ HarperCollins Publishers.
• The Sea of Tranquility ~ Millay, Katja; Simon and Schuster.
• The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing ~ Jacob, Mira; Random House.
• Stars Go Blue ~ Pritchett, Laura; Counterpoint/ Perseus.
• Station Eleven ~ St. John Mandel, Emily; Knopf.
• The Steady Running of the Hour ~ Go, Justin; Simon & Schuster.
• Terms & Conditions ~ Glancy, Robert; Bloomsbury USA./ Macmillan.
• To Rise Again at a Decent Hour ~ Ferris, Joshua; Hachette Book Group/ Little Brown & Company.

Many thanks to the TLA folks who sat on this year’s task force committee. You’ve put my book in some excellent company, and I am deeply appreciative.

“That had better be one charming pig.” – Jules, Pulp Fiction

Dear Captain Awkward,

I have a problem. I am a feminist. Why is that a problem? Because my boyfriend, as generous and thoughtful and funny and sweet as he is, doesn’t get it. At all. We’ve been dating for over a year and I love him, which is what makes this so hard. About three months into our relationship, I noticed that when I’d bring up some women-centric issue (i.e, the Steubenville rape case), his argument was “Well, she shouldn’t have been drinking so much.” Which, of course, is awful and, yes, I may have gone to bed angry that night.

I chalked it up to him just “being a guy” and being influenced by the world’s habit of blaming the victim, etc. But then, as our relationship progressed, these things just kept. popping. up. To the point where he told me that he believes in Men’s Rights and he thinks feminists are crazy and damaging. I’ve told him my feelings on this and how hurtful and scary I think these opinions are. He’s told me that he may be influenced this way because of a (really bad) past relationship, a relationship which I knew all about when we started dating.

If I knew he had these opinions and this hate back when we first started dating, I would have walked away in a heartbeat. But I’ve been sucked in. I love him. But every time this comes up, like if there’s a news story that’s big (Gamergate and the Ugly Shirt Comet Guy were big topics) where he feels “feminists” are getting out of line, I feel sick inside.

I’m embarrassed when we go to parties and my level headed friends (both men and women) don’t share his opinions, I feel my stomach tighten when I’m browsing online and see a story about feminist issues – not because the story makes me upset, but because I’m worried about what HE will think about it. I’ve honestly told him ALL of this and he doesn’t want me to change my opinions for him. He says that my opinions and views don’t change the way he feels about me. But do they change the way I feel about him? I think so. 

I know all of this sounds like a laundry list of reasons to break up. But he has so many fantastic qualities and there’s a reason I’ve stuck around this long. Do you have any suggestions for how to… I don’t know… fix this?

First, I guess I should congratulate you on finding possibly the world’s hottest and most charismatic man, the apocryphal Brad Pitt in all MRA arguments about how women are unfair when they have preferences about which men they interact with and how, i.e. “You’d put up with vile and creepy stuff from an alpha like Brad Pitt, just not meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

Digging into this more, you’re both “allowed” your opinions, but you’re the one whose stomach is in knots when you see a news story that he might have a different opinion on? You’re constantly embarrassed when he’s around your friends? And one bad relationship with a woman turned him against all women (except for you)?*

Looking more ‘sheveled than usual. Def. has time to follow women into elevators and stand too close to them on public transit.

It does in fact sound like a laundry list of reasons to break up (or re-read The Lysistrata), but you do you. Your decisions about your life and your heart are your own. Some people really get off on the whole Opposites Attract/I Have Found The One Good One vibe, or think that systematically destroying each other”s arguments is a form of foreplay, and you two might be those people. The thing you have to know going forward, though, is that you cannot “fix” another adult to make them be more how you want them to be. You can decide to love what’s there, you can disengage, but there’s no fixing them, and as soon as you see the other person as a collection of things that needs fixing, the relationship has a hole in the bucket, Dear Liza.

I guess the most optimistic thing I could say is that many of us go through a period in our lives where we try out extreme views of one sort or another that don’t hold up over time or with more experience and self-awareness. True story: I was a vocal libertarian** for two semesters of college, and I apologize for anyone who was in any kind of discussion-based class with me back then as I tried on the the position of The One Person Who Could Clearly See The Flaws In The System That No One Had Ever Seen Or Pointed Out Before. I do think that some of the young dudes who are very, very concerned about ethics in game journalism right now are going to feel super-sheepish about the whole thing before long, with the caveat that having ridiculous views is one thing, harassing behavior is another, and that no one is required to hang out and be someone’s Humanity Tutor. You do NOT have to be the shining example of womanhood who melts his steely heart and shows him the way. “He might grow out of it” isn’t a ringing endorsement, and if you are both, say, 52 instead of 22, your Nope Rocket awaits you.

Destination: Nopetune

• We Hunted The Mammoth (or, DON’T read this if you want to keep looking at his face across your breakfast table)
• Bad Feminist
• Meninist Valentines (hee)

*This is the fishiest logic, to me. After millenia of oppression, violence against women, centuries of being legal property, straight women will still find something to love about and root for in straight men. But one bad relationship is an excuse to hate women and think they deserve fewer rights than men? Oh wait. Except for you. You the shining exception to all other women. Until you mess up in some way, of course.

**Apologies to actual libertarians out there in the crowd. 18-year-old me was definitely one of the obnoxious ones who ruins it for the rest of y’all.

January 25: Well, the MRAs have found us, judging from the amount of sexist drivel and “shut up you fat cunt” comments now circling the drain of my moderation queue. FYI, my banhammer is a ball peen hammer, the most hilarious of hammers.  I’ve harvested enough male tears for my morning tea, and I’ve got things to do today besides systematically oppress men and censor their free speech, so comments are closed. Have a good Sunday, y’all.

I know, I’m about a month late on this post, but so many good things happened in 2014 that I wanted to make this roundup, even if a bit late! 2014 was a busy year, with the launch of my first book, the purchase of my first home, and the adoption of my first dog (yay!). Despite all these firsts, I had time to crank out a few delicious recipes in between. I couldn’t narrow it down to just ten, so here are 15 of my favorite recipes from 2014!

Best of Budget Bytes 2014

Chunky Lentil and Vegetable Soup – The year started off strong with this amazing soup on New Years Day. It’s packed full of delicious and colorful vegetables, black beans, and lentils. This soup is every bit as tasty as it is healthy, which is why it is one of my all-time favorite Budget Bytes recipes!

Easy White Spinach Pizza – I didn’t even mess around with making a separate sauce for this pizza, I just mixed the cheese, spinach, and spices together into one creamy topping. You can make your own dough or simplify it one step further by topping a store bought crust with this amazingly easy spinach and cheese topping.

Oven Roasted Ratatouille - A medly of thinly sliced vegetables get the “pizza” treatment with a few dollops of red sauce and a generous sprinkle of mozzarella cheese. If you’re looking for a delicious way to get more vegetables, THIS is the way to do it.

Southwest Chicken Skillet – 2014 was the year that I got really into “one pot” and “skillet” meals. These easy dinners contain your meat, vegetables, and starch all in one dish, so you never have to sit around trying to decide what sides to make. And, because it all cooks in just one pot or pan, there’s a lot less cleanup!

Falafel Salad - This salad! This is what it’s all about. I love falafel, but didn’t want to mess with making patties and frying them up, so I just made a salad out of the ingredients. BINGO. I never looked back.

Chorizo and Sweet Potato Skillet – Another fantastic skillet meal, this time utilizing that glorious combination of spicy Mexican chorizo and the subtle sweetness of sweet potatoes. YUM. I need to make this again soon.

Slow Cooker Black Bean Soup – Rich, velvety, and packed with vegetables that you can’t even see (a good way to trick those vegetable haters!). This soup cooks itself in the slow cooker while you’re busy doing more important things and delivers a hearty and delicious soup to your table at the end of the day.

Spicy Tuna Guacamole Bowls – This is the perfect hot weather food. Lots of texture, flavor, and color in one delightful and good-for-you bowl. When it’s too hot outside to be weighed down by food, this will fill you up and keep you feelin’ light.

No Knead Pan Pizza – I’m pretty obsessed with pizza, so when I finally tried cooking pizza in a cast iron skillet, I was in love. The heavy duty cast iron gives the crust a gloriously crisp outer edge, while keeping the inside soft and fluffy. Deep dish WIN.

Penne Pasta with Sausage and Greens – I took part in the SNAP Challenge last September and many good things came of the incredibly difficult experiment, including this Penne Pasta with Sausage and Greens. Tossing any frozen vegetable I can find into a pot of pasta with red sauce has always been my go-to easy weeknight meal, but this combo of spinach, broccoli, and Italian sausage takes the cake.

One Pot Chili Pasta – This is another winner born of the SNAP challenge. Chili is always awesome, but you can stretch the flavor and your dollars even further by cooking some pasta right in the flavorful chili goodness. Melting a little cheese into the sauce at the end adds a little creaminess for good measure.

Slow Cooker Rosemary and Garlic Beef Stew – At the first cold snap of the year I was craving a warm and filling pot of beef stew. I utilized my slow cooker to make sure the beef was extra tender and all the amazing flavor of rosemary and garlic infused into every bite!

Moroccan Lentil and Vegetable Stew – This one is so good that I’m seriously hoarding my last two servings away in the freezer for a special occasion. It’s going to be a sad day when they’re finally gone. Aaaaand, make that one last serving. I just gave in and reheated one for lunch after drooling over this photo.

Crunchy Kale and Chicken Salad – Hooray for salads that are so filling they can be a meal! This one has more texture than you can shake a stick at, thanks to crunchy almonds, crisp celery, sweet golden raisins, and kale. It’s topped with a sweet honey mustard-esque dressing that makes every bite lip-smacking good.

African Peanut Stew – Vegan never tasted so good. This is one of those recipes that no one would ever guess is vegan unless you told them. It’s rich, filling, and just bursting with flavor. Serve it over rice for a full out meal.

What were your favorite new recipes from 2014? Be it from Budget Bytes or any other website, share your favorites in the comments below!

The post Best of Budget Bytes 2014 appeared first on Budget Bytes.

Generally, friends are good for you. Decades of research link loneliness not just to depression, but to physical health problems as well. A seminal 1979 study reported that risk of death over nine years was more than doubled for adults with the fewest social ties, compared to those with the most. Since then, scientists have continued to connect social isolation with mortality, as well as specific conditions like cancer. And a recent study published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine underscores one thing in particular: how relationships help protect the heart. Physically. But I suppose if you want, you can see it as a metaphor, too.

Researchers at Concordia University in Montreal, and Rush University Medical Center in Chicago recruited 60 international students at Concordia shortly after they arrived in Canada, making sure they’d be equally lonely to start out with—none of them had friends or family in the area, nor were they in romantic relationships. Participants had their heart rates measured on the first visit to the lab, and then at follow-up appointments two and five months afterward. They also answered questionnaires about their social lives during these visits, reporting how many people they saw and talked to at least once a week.

The study found that how well students integrated socially in their new environment was associated with changes in their heart-rate variability (differences in the length of time between heartbeats).

“Other research has shown that individuals with a lower heart-rate variability are at increased risk for the development of poor health, including greater risk for cardiac diseases,” lead study author Jean-Philippe Gouin said in a press release. “Therefore, decreases in heart-rate variability are bad for you.”

The students with less social integration had lower heart-rate variability, while those who made more friends over the five months saw their heart rate variability increase, even after controlling for individual differences in extraversion. This was a relatively short time period, of course, but low heart rate variability over years could put lonely people’s hearts at risk.

Plenty of other studies have linked a lack of social interaction to heart problems. The Swedish Survey of Living Conditions, which surveyed more than 17,000 people, found that those with the fewest social contacts were at a 50 percent higher risk for dying of cardiovascular disease. And once someone has a heart problem, friends improve her chances of survival. In one study, women with suspected coronary artery disease were more than twice as likely to be alive after two years if they had a wider social circle, and also had lower rates of hypertension and diabetes. And in an American Heart Association study, after a heart attack, patients with low social support were more likely to have depressive symptoms and report low quality of life.

As Gouin’s study suggests, lower heart-rate variability could be one thing that accounts for the connection between social isolation and poor heart health. Another possibility is stress—stress is linked to heart disease, as well as many other conditions. Social support might help mitigate stress, and protect the body somewhat from its negative effects. In one small study, when children hung out with their best friends during a stressful situation, they had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol (which, in high levels over time, increases the risk for heart disease). The participants in Gouin’s study didn’t have their best friends in their city, but they still saw results with the presumably more casual connections they were able to make in five months.

The factors that go into heart-disease risk create a tangled web, but life’s web is tangled too. The health of the heart is inextricable from the health of the rest of the body, and a person is inextricable from his environment. And for your heart, it seems, it’s better to have people in that environment than not to.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/friendship-for-a-healthy-heart/384746/

"I just bought all the placenta items they had," read a text from Jaya yesterday afternoon, and it is easily a contender for text of the year.

For weeks, Jaya and I have been obsessed with the thought of putting placenta in our hair—partially because of the allure of putting something weird in our hair, partially because placenta is supposed to have moisturizing and conditioning properties, and partially because Jaya just happens to live next to a beauty supply store with an abundance of placenta-based products.

Here are the products we used:

Hask Henna 'n' Placenta with Olive Oil conditioning treatment
Lafier Colageno & Placenta Shampoo
Hask Placenta Leave-In Instant Conditioning Treatment spray
Hask Placenta Leave-In Instant Conditioning Treatment… shot glass?
Queen Helene Placenta Hot Oil Treatment
a special gift from our moms

No, that's a joke (though Jaya's mom DID come over and watch Purple Rain with us and it was AWESOME)! It's important to note that the above products were just animal placenta, which makes things super chill and totally normal. But then Jaya found Formula 707 B, which came in a glass vial that had to BREAK TO OPEN that CONTAINED HUMAN PLACENTA EXTRACT. We do not know whose placenta, or how they get the placenta, or anything except that Googling “Formula 707B placenta” gets you a lot of links to Alibaba.

(Hey did you know that—in a super chill and totally normal way—while America OKs human placenta use in beauty products, other countries don't? Jaya did some research: "Human-derived ingredients are prohibited from use under the provisions of the European Union cosmetics directive based on concerns about transmission of human spongiform encephalopathies and viral diseases, for example, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)." We sacrificed our bodies and ourselves for science, but you probably shouldn't. Don't use human placenta in your hair unless it belongs to you or a trusted friend who is totally willing to let you play around with their vascular tissue, which, like, should be all your friends.)

Here's how it went.

Jaya’s Treatment:
Washed hair with Lafier Colageno & Placenta Shampoo
Conditioned left side of head with Hask Placenta Leave-In Conditioning Treatment Spray
Conditioned right side of head with Queen Helene Hot Oil Treatment, then Formula 707 B

The first thing I noticed was the shampoo felt like slightly unset Jello, or that weird gel stuff they put in the Wonder World Aquarium (just me?). It also smelled slightly of sandalwood, which was comforting for me because that’s the incense my grandma favors. It lathered up really quickly and almost immediately felt like it was adding a lot of volume to my hair, and when I brushed through it with a wide comb there were not many knots, which was strange for me, as a person who really needs to condition every time I get my hair wet.

Onto the conditioning products. Almost immediately I could tell that the left side of my hair would need to be re-conditioned soon. The leave-in conditioning spray is really watery, so while it may be infusing my strands with vitamins and hormones (??), it didn’t make it feel particularly silky or smooth. Given that I have pretty thick, curly hair that frizzes easily, I need that silky feeling, so I would not use that particular product again. However, the hot oil treatment was a revelation. After I washed it out my curls started to bounce up, not weighed down by any heavy creams, and they kept their shape without getting frizzy. I also added the Formula 707 B on that side, which was also slightly watery and pearlescent, but given that I didn’t test it independently, we can’t know for sure if human placenta gives your hair a little extra oomph.

Before going to bed my husband commented “You look really pretty, that placenta must be working.” And, funny story, according to at least one maybe-believable website, placental protein gives your body “a hit of hormones,” so maybe that gets men thinking of sex idk. The next morning the right side of my hair is feeling noticeably softer than the left side, and a little shinier too. I think hot oil treatment is the way to go from now on, though maybe I’ll switch to a brand with fewer possible side-effects.

Jazmine's Treatment:
Washed hair with Lafier Colageno and Placenta Shampoo
Conditioned left side of head with Hask Placenta Leave-In Instant Conditioning Treatment
Conditioned right side of head with Formula 707 B

Jaya and I both started with the placenta shampoo, which smelled what world traveler Jaya Saxena deemed "sandalwood" and what green-thumbed hillbilly J.S. Hughes thought to be "corn chips." But we were both right!!! Because we're geniuses.

So here's the deal with my hair: you can't see it!! I currently have a bunch of synthetic hair (think Solange but with a blog) braided into my natural hair, which I have recently stopped chemically straightening. My hair, when out of braids, looks like this. Anyway, when my hair is in braids, all I do is rinse and deep condition my scalp once every 7-10 days, and shampoo it whenever I think to do it (so maybe every 2-3 weeks? I'm gross). All this to say: I didn't have a ton of actual hair for the products to interact with, so I might have to do this again when I take my braids out.

Wetting your braids in the shower is messy and heavy and way too much effort, so I generally just take a spray bottle and mist my scalp, then rub shampoo in. The placenta shampoo, which looked like slightly solidified jizz, went in fine, but too SO LONG to take out. It got clumped up where the synthetic hair meets my hair and was a pain to get out — I had to go home and wash my hair out in the shower.

I didn't feel like rinsing anything out again, so I tried the two leave-in conditioners: the human one, which was essentially stinky water, and the conditioning treatment shot glass, on either side of my head. Neither of them made too much of a difference, and my hair takes a while to air dry, but the nape of my neck, where there's more loose hair and where I used the conditioning shot, was noticeably softer than usual this morning.

I took home the Hask conditioning spray. Braids LOVE sprays– my hair craves moisture all the time, but especially when locked up for 2 months — so I put that on my scalp the next morning after washing the placenta smell off and it seemed to do me well.

Matt's Treatment:
Forced to try beauty products by two pushy broads

"I will put placenta in my beard if Jazmine Hughes actually ever comes to Queens," a man once said, a man who underestimated me and a man who ended up with placenta in his beard. Matt Lubchansky, professional good sport, used the Hask Henna 'n' Placenta with Olive Oil conditioning treatment on his beard.

This is how the scene went:

JAYA: You put a bunch of it through your beard….
MATT: This smells bad!!!
JAZMINE: It smells… ok.
JAYA: …and then you leave it on for ten minutes and rinse it out.
MATT: TEN MINUTES?!? Goddamnit. * beardy pout *

There was a lot of pouting, but he got the conditioner on, and bolted to the bathroom as soon as we told him his ten minutes were up. But there was a difference! Matt says he often conditions his beard in the shower, but the deep conditioning treatment left his beard much softer and much less puffy. The morning after, he says “it feels really soft but much less so after sleeping, like than it did yesterday. I guess I’d want to put this on before a big night out of strangers touching my beard, but its efficacy is fading by the minute.”

FINAL PLACENTA VERDICT: Would you use again?

Jaya: I will probably use the hot oil treatment again, just because I have extra and it really helped! The shampoo didn't seem all that different from other shampoos, but it was $4.50 and a bottle of shampoo so I will use it until it's out.
Jazmine: I'd probably use the Henna 'n' Placenta mask; I started using a mask with olive oil about two months ago, and it almost instantly made my hair so much softer, even in the braids. I touched Chansk's beard and I have to agree: it was smooth as fuck. The spray hasn't impressed me, but it hasn't not impressed me, so I'll keep that around for a little while as well.
Matt: If I was trying to impress someone with the softness of my beard, I would use it again. But in general I don't like leave-in stuff and will likely just go back to conditioning in the shower.

NEXT: Placenta face masks. No, really, Jazmine got super excited and bought them already.

Jaya and Jazmine and Matt are friends that met in a Masterchef Junior betting pool.

I had braces for seven years of my life—a clumsy mix of palate expanders, headgear, and invasive lip-bumpers that bulked my skinny face at a time when I was already awkward enough without them. I was one of those middle-schoolers whose parents forced orthodontics on them when they were too young to realize what a great investment it was in their future. Instead, I adopted a coping mechanism of smiling with my mouth closed, a practice subsumed by a general feeling that I would forever be ashamed of my smile. What I didn’t realize then was that my teeth were about to look amazing. Like really amazing.

By ninth grade, the timely convergence of puberty and my braces removal made me feel like Pippi Longstocking blossoming into Jessica Chastain. Diligent toothbrushing through the awkward years paid off! Everywhere I went, people told me I had beautiful teeth: strangers, teachers, friends, parents of friends. People I didn’t know asked me everything from what toothpaste I used to whether or not I had my teeth professionally filed (the answer: never). A TSA agent once told me, as she scanned my luggage, “You have a perfect smile”.

When people compliment a feature of yours repeatedly, vanity leads you to maintain it, and over time I realized that a lot of what we think is good for our mouths are myths propagated by popular culture—or by companies trying to sell us something, like whitening strips, punishingly strong mouthwash, or air-flossers that imply through their advertising that they are sufficient to give us the Perfect White Smile we’ve always wanted. Don’t believe the hype, y’all. I’ve spoken with several dentists about proper oral hygiene and technique (I’m a nerd like that) and the reality is much more humble. Our mouths are pretty complicated, and there isn’t one miracle product that solves all the problems (and this make sense, because that’s also true for hair, diet, and skin). The good news is it’s easy to maintain a fresh breath, white teeth, and other forms of smile-related world domination—but you have to know the rules.

Here are the best “healthy smile” tips I’ve picked up over the years. I haven’t had a cavity yet.

1.) You Shouldn't Brush Your Teeth in The Shower

A lot of people talk about brushing their teeth in the shower in order to “kill two birds with one stone”, but leaving your toothbrush in the shower allows unhealthy bacteria (read: mold!) to grow on the toothbrush as it festers in a damp, muggy environment. When you brush with that toothbrush the next day, you introduce all that buildup into your mouth (gross). Brushing your teeth in the shower can also be counterproductive because the fluoride in toothpaste needs to sit on your teeth for ~30 minutes after you brush (this is why you're not supposed to rinse after you brush). When you are in the shower, you're more likely to leave your mouth ajar and rinse all the lingering, beneficial fluoride off your teeth.

2.) You Shouldn’t Use Mouthwash Unless You Have To

Most people have heard a common criticism of hand sanitizer: using it too often makes you more vulnerable to sickness because it kills off even the beneficial germs that fight viruses like the cold and flu. The same is true for the bacteria in your mouth: mouthwash is so antiseptic that most dentists recommend you only use it if you are impaired or have an injury that prevents you from brushing. Otherwise, you risk killing off even the beneficial flora (yes, our mouths are disgusting wastelands of bacteria, but a lot of them are good guys) that help fight plaque and odor-causing bacteria.

3.) Even People Without Sensitive Teeth Should Use a Sensitive-Bristle Toothbrush

It's easier to erode the enamel on your teeth than you think, which ultimately leads to the dullness and LACK of luminescence that is the OPPOSITE of a bright white smile. Since most of us brush really aggressively (we push really hard on the toothbrush and walk around our apartment while brushing without thinking about it, and we also brush for way too long,) then having a sensitive (read: soft) bristle toothbrush makes it harder for us to erode enamel even during aggressive, mindless brushing.

4.) Floss More, Brush Less

A dentist in Virginia once told me about this experiment: go 4-5 days without flossing, then floss. After you floss, ball the string up in your hand and smell it. You will never go without flossing again.

The moral of the story is this: the worst bacteria that causes bad breath and cavities lingers near our gum line and flossing is the only way to get them out. Luckily, its actually a lot easier to knock plaque off our teeth than we think, so flossing followed by a light brush is sufficient to keep your mouth squeaky clean. In fact, some dentists suggest that if you had a choice between flossing or brushing you'd be better off just flossing. It's that important. As my best friend's father—a dentist—once told me: “floss more, brush less”.

5.) Sucking On A Clove Fights Bad Breath

Gum, mouthwash, and mints can't address odor that ultimately comes from the stomach, but cloves (yes, the little sticks that you often put inside of potpourri and Jack-O-Lanterns) have been proven to kill odor-causing bacteria in the mouth—they don't just mask it like gum or mouthwash or mints do. My family have all known about this and practiced it for years (my parents and I all carry around little tins filled with cloves instead of mints, and I think its because we love garlic-y hummus but we hate bad breath). I suck on one before important meetings and hot dates.

For chronic conditions like halitosis, however, you should see your doctor; bad breath originates from bacteria/food in the stomach, not the mouth. The good news about bad breath originating from the stomach, too, is that there are certain foods that mask persistent scents like garlic (which stays in your system for two days, usually). Breath-boosting foods include: leafy greens, apples, lemon juice, and turmeric. Eat these things before going on a date and you're golden!

6.) Replace Your Toothbrush Every 3-4 Months

Dentist’s agree that you should replace your toothbrush every 3-4 months, and admittedly I didn’t know this until late in the game and now I feel disgusting for ever having kept a toothbrush for (gulp) a year. Intuitively this make sense, but sometimes we forget to articulate the disgustingness of an old toothbrush to ourselves on a regular basis. Take a moment to think about how disgusting this is: research shows that thousands of germs lurk in your toothbrush. Unless you are cleaning your toothbrush regularly, bacteria just sit there and fester all day. Even WebMD, who are typically conservative about any sort of “holistic wellness” recommendation, have suggested that you should throw out toothbrushes that you or anyone in your home uses while sick, because there are so many germs inside those bristles that just sit there and fester, all day, all night, right now. Frayed bristles will also not clean teeth and gums adequately, and usually they get worn down in about 3 months.

If you’re sitting here thinking “wow, I can’t even remember how old my toothbrush but it’s certainly been around for longer than 3 months OH MY GOD I feel disgusting and never want to put that thing in my mouth ever again!” then feel free to REPLACE THAT BRUSH IMMEDIATELY.

7.) Rinse Your Mouth After Drinking Acidic Beverages—Don’t Brush

If we really cared about not staining our teeth we would probably drink all citrus-based juice, coffee, wine, soda, tea, and seltzer through a straw. All of these drinks have low pH values (they are very acidic, which demineralizes tooth surface on contact) as well as enamel-staining properties (think of the awful red-wine mouth that you sometimes got in college). But let’s get real: drinking hot coffee through a straw isn’t always possible, and you’d probably look ridiculous sipping wine like it’s a juice box. The best solution I’ve found is to rinse your mouth promptly after consuming any of these beverages. Dentists recommend rinsing your mouth with tap water and to avoid brushing your teeth for at least 30 minutes after consuming coffee and orange juice—two likely morning culprits of erosion and tooth sensitivity. The same is true for every other beverage I listed. This is because acidic beverages soften the enamel on your teeth, and taking a brush to them in this vulnerable stage is like taking a brillo pad to hand-painted china.

8.) But Actually: You Need To Floss Every Day

A few years ago the BBC ran a story about how gum disease and poor oral hygiene actually lowers fertility, and even though I for one am NOT TRYING TO HAVE KIDS ANYTIME SOON, the takeaway message was surprising: what goes down in your mouth has implications for the rest of the body.

Experts think the issue is underlying inflammation that can set off a chain of reactions capable of damaging the body's normal functioning—which isn’t good even if you’re NOT trying to be a parent. (Bacteria that flourish in an unhealthy mouth can lead to heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and respiratory illness, research suggests.) A toothbrush's bristles can't adequately clean between the teeth or under the gums—but you already know that. What you probably don’t know is the correct way to floss (and you need to be doing it every day).

To floss properly, you need about 18 inches of floss so that you can wrap it around your fingertips for better control. This is a TON of floss! You’re also supposed to curve the floss around each tooth in a c-shape, rubbing it up and down (NOT left-to-right) in order to scrape away plaque. To repeat: you’re NOT supposed to make a sawing motion—that can hurt your gums and lead to the twin-headed bitch known as “bleeding and receding”. You also need to floss before you brush so that you can clean away all the plaque you just scraped up. Otherwise, it just sits there.

9.) Try Oil Pulling, But Only If It Doesn’t Gross You Out

Oil pulling is an Ayurvedic technique for mouth cleansing that involves swishing a teaspoon of oil—usually coconut or sesame—around your mouth for approximately 15 minutes each day. New-age health acolytes (and Shailene Woodley) suggest that doing so can have a full range of health benefits—from whitening your teeth improving your skin condition. People rave about it. They believe in it like some people “believe” in SoulCycle (no shade). To date, there’s very little information about oil pulling, but coconut does make a good non-chemical mouthwash because it’s high in Vitamin E, Lauric Acid, and Monolaurin, which have anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties.

Some studies also suggest that oil pulling can help prevent gingivitis and bad breath, because most odor-causing bacteria are covered with a lipid membrane that naturally adheres to oil—thus the term “pulling”. The evidence isn’t conclusive, but stay tuned on this: often, western science lags behind eastern traditions that have persisted for centuries, so we might eventually learn that there is something to the practice. In the meantime, don’t feel bad if you’re not cool with swishing coconut oil around your mouth for 15 minutes like it’s mouthwash: it’s not always fun. The good news is that oil pulling cannot harm you, so if you’re a devout oil-puller and you think it works some kind of magic for you, then party on, pretty baby.

Molly Beauchemin is a writer, photographer, and health nerd based in Brooklyn, New York. Check her out on Twitter or at MollyBeauchemin.org.

Brianne Burnell is a digital illustrator working out of Toronto, Canada. See more of her work at brianneburnell.com.

Doomsday has always been at least seven minutes away. That's according to the "Doomsday Clock," a symbolic timepiece that ticks off humanity's proximity to, well, doom. (Doom!)

The clock, introduced by members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947, was designed to warn people about the implications of global nuclear armament. It has since expanded its doomscale to track other potential disasters for humanity—most recently, climate change.

The way the clock works: The closer to midnight it is set, the worse off we are.

Today the Bulletin announced doomtime is now three minutes to midnight, whereas at last check, in 2012, we were five minutes away from doom. Here's the latest explanation:

Unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity, and world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe.

It was already 11:53 p.m. when the clock was introduced, which is a pretty grim place to start—and, of course, just the right amount of dramatic tension to get people's attention.

Over the years, the minute hand has crept forward and back. (And our net movement has been forward—that is, closer to calamity—over the years.)

Humanity was farthest from doom in 1991, after the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was closest to doom in 1953, when the Bulletin announced it was 11:58 on the doom clock. (The reason: The ongoing development of thermonuclear bombs in the United States and hydrogen bomb tests in the Soviet Union.)

We've been as close to doom o'clock as we are now on three occasions, including today:

• 1949: When the Soviet Union tested the atomic bomb and the arms race began
• 1984: When the arms race intensified during the Cold War and relations between the United States and the Soviet Union reached "their iciest point," according to the Bulletin
• 2015: Climate change and the threat of nuclear-weapons use

Creeping forward two minutes in a period of three years may seem slow by regular timekeeping standards. But the clock has only ever spanned 14 total minutes—in either direction—over the past 66 years. The biggest time jump was between 1990 and 1991, when there was a seven-minute shift away from doom.

Back in the halcyon days of 1991, just after the end of the Cold War, the Bulletin declared humanity to be 17 glorious minutes away from doom—practically an eternity compared with previous and subsequent Doomsday Clock readings.

The device is an effective way to highlight some of the biggest challenges the planet faces, but it's also a pretty clunky one, technologically speaking.

Clocks have always been a way of looking ahead (or, around and around). People wear watches with the assumption that time will continue to march forward and that we will continue to have a need to keep track of it. What time is it? is mostly a way of asking, What time is it about to be? We set alarms with the expectation that the sun will, in fact, rise again tomorrow.

A metaphorically appropriate alternative—Doomsday Seesaw, anyone?—may not carry the same sense of urgency as a tick-tocking clock. But the idea that we're so close to doom now, as bad as things may be, also seems at least a little unimaginative. What might the world even look like at 11:01 p.m. on the Doomsday Clock? Or, better yet, around dinnertime? And what if we've already gone so far past doom that it's really 5 a.m., an idea a letter writer to The New York Times floated in 1995.

Assuming that everything comes crashing down at midnight, the most desirable time on the clock would have to be noon, farthest from doom in either direction.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/three-minutes-until-doom/384758/

On a recent sleepless night around 3 a.m., I bought a bunch of mint-condition LIFE magazines from the spring on 1948 on Ebay. Reading about stuff that was going on in 1948 is good for my 2014-era anxieties, which are currently off the charts. When I consume a news magazine from 1948, I already know what’s going to happen in 1949 and 1950, and beyond; being a detached, omniscient observer feels weirdly reassuring. Also reassuring is the evidence that the world has always been a huge mess, and that maybe some things are improving (very, very slowly). Reading these old LIFE magazines feels so poignant because the writers and subjects within have no idea what lies ahead—they’re all struggling to make some sense of their time and place.

Enter Gwyned Filling. She is the intelligent and ambitious star of my very favorite issue of 1948, the May 3 "Career Girl" issue. The cover article/photo essay caused a big stir at the time: LIFE magazine plucked a random 23-year-old copywriter and NYC transplant out of obscurity and followed her around Manhattan for three weeks. They photographed Gwyned everywhere: at the office, going on dates with various men, fighting with her roommate, and in the bath. The issue sold out almost instantly and was reprinted within the week; LIFE did six different follow-ups with Gwyned.

The essay opener tells us Gwyned was pretty cool, and the kind of girl who today might read The Billfold: Gwyned Filling came to New York last June to begin a career. Because she wanted to feel independent, she borrowed $250 from a local bank rather than from her father.

With the $250 loan (nearly $2,500 today after adjusting for inflation) and a bachelor’s degree, Gwyned moved from St. Louis, Missouri to Manhattan and started knocking on doors. After five weeks, she landed an entry-level position at Newell-Emmett Co., an advertising agency. Her starting salary was $35 a week (about $350 in today’s dollars). She shared an 11 by 15-foot furnished bedroom with a roommate in Chelsea for $75 a month ($750 today). Like many New Yorkers, myself included, Gwyned’s rent was a little more than half her income. Not much has changed, except a room of that size in Chelsea can cost more than $1,400.

While parts of the LIFE article feel dated, there is a sexist tone that's unfortunately still pervasive in most media coverage of career women today. LIFE asked of Gwyned, "When should she marry, and will she jeopardize her chance by trying to close her eyes to everthing but her career?" Ugh, she’s 23, LEAVE HER ALONE. But some of LIFE’s questions are universal and timeless: "How much of her time and nerves must she sacrifice for success?"

Most of the people I know are still figuring that last part out. Below, some of the beautiful photographs.

Gwyned’s landlady wakes her up every morning—this is definitely different than my living situation. My landlord and I have incredibly awkward encounters in the hall about once every two months. Once he invited me to a performance of his noise band.

I feel like this bathtub picture could be a screengrab from an episode of Girls, minus the newspaper.

I have this exact exchange every morning, except instead of baby, my pal at the bodega calls me "mamacita" and hands me an egg and cheese sandwich for $2.50. My coffee is a dollar.

Gwyned at work at Newell-Emmett. Here she is at one of "an endless series of major and minor conferences, at which advertising layouts are discussed, changed, accepted and rejected." LIFE claims Gwyned is "overawed and nervous" because the managing partner is present.

Here’s something that hasn’t changed one bit since 1948, at least in my social circle.

Gwyned’s colleague Margery Paddock makes an obnoxious remark that Gwyned’s promotion to copywriter and a $17 a week raise is due to her dating around. I can’t believe LIFE actually printed the comment, but I’m obsessed with the smoking lady’s reaction to Margery’s lame, sexist joke!

Margery Paddock is an idiot. Gwyned got promoted because she’s a go-getter who takes work home. (Hilariously, LIFE says that her roommate Marilyn never brings work home, so "sits on the bed nearby making…acid comments").

Gwyned on a date with the cute copywriter she would marry only six months later, Charles Straus.

I feel so conflicted about that last photograph. According to an online obituary from 2005, Gwyned and Charles Straus had a long and happy marriage. That’s wonderful and all, but in the LIFE photo essay, Gwyned says she wants to concentrate on her career and put off marriage for at least five years. She didn’t even make it six months. Apparently, she had to leave her job after the wedding, because Charles also worked at the Newell-Emmett Co., and the firm didn’t allow married couples (pretty common for the time). LIFE also makes multiple references to Gwyned’s ambition and work ethic, so it’s upsetting she didn’t get to continue on in advertising.

I also wonder if Gwyned was affected by the backlash to the piece—all the sexist, critical Letters to the Editor, which LIFE printed in their May 23, 1948 issue under the headline "CONTROVERSIAL CAREER GIRL."

Most of these readers were the horrible internet trolls of their day:

(DID ANYONE EVER IRON A DIAPER? WHY?) And here’s another:

I love this Detroit woman’s hyperbolic letter, especially the insanely dramatic last paragraph. I feel like both these responses get to the crux of why people are so obsessed with career girls: Independent women have always seemed a threat to the social order, as have big cities themselves. The letter-writer is disguising her fear for and of Gwyned as a judgment, but she's really just afraid of change.

Today in the city it's rainy, windy and cold, and my landlord just raised my rent. I do feel a little like a battered moth flinging myself against the lamp of New York. I can move further out in Brooklyn to Bensonhurst or Coney Island. I could just work more side gigs, or rent my living room couch out to a Albanian exchange student. I could move into an old school hippie commune in Ridgewood, Queens. This city is full of possibilities! Many of them are horrible or bizarre, but they're always interesting. Looking at Gwyned’s face on my coffee table makes me want to stick it to everyone, and stick around.

AC Bern is an artist who lives in New York.

I helped created a new card game and it's called Exploding Kittens.