On September 9, a parade of men marched across the stage at Flint Center in Cupertino, California, outlining a variety of new products in the Apple lineage. After the iPhone, Apple Pay, and, the doll of the party, the Apple Watch, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage to give some more details about Apple Health, an app that had been announced back in June and will eventually integrate with the Apple Watch. In that June announcement, Apple’s senior vice president of software Craig Federighi bragged that the app would let users “monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in.”
As promised, Health is a powerful app. It allows users to track everything from calories to electrodermal activity to heart rate to blood alcohol content to respiratory rate to daily intake of chromium. But there’s a notable exception. Apple Health doesn’t track menstruation, an omission that was quickly seized upon by many tech writers as, well, ridiculous. The Verge asked “is it really too much to ask to that Apple treat women, and their health, with as much care as they've treated humanity’s sodium intake?” How could Apple release a health tracking app without the ability to monitor what is likely one of the earliest types of quantified-self tracking?
Women have tracked their cycles for thousands of years. St. Augustine spoke against timing sexual activity to coincide with periods of infertility (a method that would require period tracking) as far back as 388. “Is it not you who used to counsel us to observe as much as possible the time when a woman, after her purification, is most likely to conceive, and to abstain from cohabitation at that time, lest the soul should be entangled in flesh?” He said, according to one translation, before going on to condemn the method. Despite there being little written documentation of these records, women have long kept notes on their own cycles. Before apps, they used spreadsheets and online calendars. And before that, they used plain old paper. Today, there are hundreds of period tracking apps available in the iTunes store. And yet, in a health app Apple describes as “comprehensive,” there is no way to simply tick on the calendar that your period has started, and when it has stopped.
This, of course, isn’t the first time a tech product has prioritized men over women. The vast majority of tech companies are staffed by men, especially on the development side. Phones are too big for many women’s hands. The newest artificial hearts are designed to fit 80 percent of men but only 20 percent of women. Dropdown menus show “male” over “female” even when the rest of the menus are alphabetical. But when it comes to data tracking, there’s a perceived element of democratization. How could an app or tool that simply lets you track things be biased? Let us count the ways.
* * *
When Amelia Greenhall moved to San Francisco from Seattle, she looked for a Quantified Self meet-up. She had been active in the Seattle QS community, and quickly found the corresponding group in San Francisco. Soon, she was organizing the Bay Area meetings herself. But while she enjoyed the community there, something was missing.
“After each one, women would come up to me and say, ‘I wish we could talk about periods or fertility or dating or anything that wasn’t getting talked about.’ It just felt like there was a lot getting left out,” she said. And the meetings, set in the belly of the Silicon Valley beast, felt like tech meetings. “It was just kind of like a microcosm of the tech world where dudes are willing to speak about the most boring trivial stuff as if it’s the best invention ever, and these women would have these really cool things and they’re like, ‘Oh I don’t know if anybody would be interested.’” So Greenhall started the first ever QSXX meet up—a space for women to showcase their QS projects, talk about what worked for them, and find a smaller community within the larger group.
Soon, QSXX groups popped up in Boston and New York City. “The conversations seemed more real and more interesting and we were talking about the problems with devices and apps and it turned out much as I was hoping,” said Greenhall. Maggie Delano started one in Boston, after having a conversation with another woman about the differences in what some women want to track. “We were talking about how the kinds of things that women need to track are really different, and things can change a lot more throughout the month than they might for other people” she said. The women who attend these meetups discuss what they want to track, present their projects, and form bonds within the smaller community that some say they couldn’t quite forge at the bigger meet-ups.
Whitney Erin Boesel, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and active QS member, said it took her a few years of being involved in the QS community before she realized that there was little to no emphasis on women’s issues. Which is weird, she pointed out, because outside the QS world one might think women would be more likely to track personal data than men are, whether that’s calories or menstruation. “So many regular facets of being a woman in a western culture are highly likely to make one track,” Boesel said, “and yet those were things I wasn’t seeing in the QS context.”
I spoke with Boesel, Greenhall, Delano and others about what it’s like to be women interested in the quantified-self movement. Their experiences were similar: They really enjoyed the work, the problem solving, the personalization. But they also echoed that when it comes to forward facing technology—apps and devices marketed for the masses—there was a clear bias towards men’s interests. Even apps developed for women are often designed by men, and it’s not hard to tell. Apple Health, they said, and its mysterious omission of parameters relevant to women, isn’t the exception, it’s the rule.
Before we go on, a definitional point that many I spoke with asked me to make clear. There is a difference between the quantified self community and movement, and what Boesel calls the “tracking industrial complex,” by which she means the suite of apps and gadgets available in the commercial world. Quantified Self or QS, capitalized, is a collective of people interested in tracking elements of their lives in some way. They have a loose organization, and organize conferences in Europe and the United States each year. Some of them use apps and devices, but some of them don’t. “Lots of people within QS don’t use apps or anything digital,” Boesel said. So QS is the community, and tracking products are the apps and hardware designed for commercial use. Great, let’s continue.
* * *
There’s no better place to look for evidence of quantified self apps designed by men for men than the sex tracking apps on the market. On principle, sex is something that one might guess an equal number of men and women are interested in. And yet looking at the apps out there for tracking bedroom activity is like looking at a caricature of bad porn. Many of them base quality of sex on things like the amount of thrusting that goes on and how loud the partner is. Apps with names like iThrust and Sex Stamina Tester and Sex Counter Tease ask users to place their phones on the bed so that the built in accelerometer can measure “strokes” and offer men a ranking among other users. One app encourages people to share their stamina and determine whether the user is “good enough to compete with the Don Juans in the Top 10.”
None of this is malicious, said Deborah Lupton, a researcher at the University of Canberra, who recently wrote a paper documenting many of these sex tracking apps titled “Quantified Sex.” Sara Watson, another fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, points out that many of these strange measurements come from what the phone is capable of measuring: movement and sound. “That just has to do with the reductive nature of tracking something with an accelerometer,” she said. But the apps do reflect a certain kind of bias. “I think the designers, who are mostly men are, they’re just taking up norms and assumptions that are embedded in our society about women’s fertility and sexuality, and reproducing them,” Lupton said. So sex is judged by thrusting, success is judged by endurance, and pleasure is measured in moans. “Regardless of the type of app, we should view it as a cultural product rather than something that’s just popped up out of the blue.”
If sex tracking apps are a caricature of what straight white men think sex is, then fertility tracking apps are a caricature of what straight white men think about periods. These apps are still designed largely by men, but now instead of sexual prowess and a Don Juan ranking the goal is pregnancy.
Many of these invite women to give their partners access to the information. The app Glow sends a little note when a user’s partner is entering her fertile period, along with helpful seduction advice like bring her a bouquet. The vast majority of these period tracking apps are pink. Many of them are covered in flowers. The fact that menstrual tracking and fertility tracking are almost always lumped together is, in itself, indicative of how developers think about women, said Lupton. “When you look at those types of apps they’re completely about the surveillance of pregnant women and making them evermore responsible and vigilant about their bodies for the sake of their fetus,” Lupton said.
Yet the appetite for period trackers is huge. And it has been huge for a long time. Seven years ago, long before apps like Clue or Glow hit the market, Heather Rivers was in college and was tracking her period using an excel spreadsheet. She thought there must be a better way, but when she Googled for period trackers she couldn’t find one. “When I didn’t find anything I decided to just make a simple weekend project version,” she told me. “Thus was born Monthly Info.” The site was simple—users record the start and end to their period and the system extrapolates from their history to guess when their next cycle will start. Trackers could set up customizable reminders, so when it was almost that time they’d get a little email with whatever message they chose.
Monthly Info was really designed for Rivers, but she added a user signup system mostly because it was easy. And people signed up. A lot of people. “It kind of took off on its own from there and grew to over 100,000 users,” she said. “There was apparently a need for something like this, because it didn’t take much energy to make or grow.” Now, there are hundreds of period tracking apps on the market. Considering the gender imbalance in tech, it’s fair to guess most of them are made by men. Rivers joked that it’s not hard to spot a fertility tracking app designed by a man. They focus on moods (men want to know when their girlfriends are going to be grouchy) and treat getting pregnant like a level in a video game. “It feels like the product is mansplaining your own body to you,” said Rivers, who is now an engineer working on other projects. “‘We men don’t like to be blindsided by your hormonal impulses so we need to track you, like you’re a parking meter.’”
Not all these apps are made by men, of course. In fact, one of the most popular version, called Clue, was developed by Ida Tin, fueled by a similar problem that Rivers faced. “I was using condoms for contraceptives and I was starting to wonder why there were no better options for me to keep track of my cycle,” Tin said. Much of the design of Clue, which is decidedly non-floral, was natural to Tin. “I just took it totally for granted,” she said, “like of course its as not going to be pink. That seemed very natural. I didn’t want it to be your secret diary… I wanted it to be a very straight natural part of life.”
It took two years for Tin and her team to build the app into something they were ready to release. By the time they finished, they had competition. Glow, a Clue competitor headed by Max Levchin, the founder of PayPal and a chairman at Yelp, launched just a month before Clue. “We were very lucky because about a month before we launched Max announced he was launching Glow,” Tin said. “That was lucky for us because he kind of validated this category of apps, and he could do that because he’s a celebrity and he’s a nerdy guy who knows about data. I think that was a great help for us.”
Had Tin launched the app herself, without Levchin’s male validation, would people have taken her seriously? She’s not sure. “I’ve had investors, really, very good experienced high profile investors who will say, ‘I’m not a woman I don’t understand your product,’” she said. Tin said she’ll sometimes hear investors say thing like “I don’t invest in products I can’t try myself,” which rules out any female health tracking products for male investors. “I’ve never been treated badly,” she said, “but I think it just takes more to have them write the check for a female entrepreneur tackling a female health problem.”
* * *
The promise of Quantified Self, the community, is “self knowledge through numbers.” It’s a broad aim, and one that, in theory, overlaps with the apps and devices in the market. Collecting data can help people better understand themselves, their lives, their needs. But who are those people?
Boesel points to one example of how many even within the QS community assume their users are men: passive tracking apps. These apps run in the background of your phone, and using your movement, theoretically determine things like whether you’re depressed or active or inside too much. This works based on the assumption that your phone is always in your pocket. “Inevitably some dude gets up at a conference and said something how your phone is always on you,” Boesel said. “And every time I’ll stand up, and I’ll be like ‘hi, about this phone that is always on you. This is my phone. And there are my pants.’” Passive tracking apps would think that I stay at my desk from morning to night without once getting up to go to the bathroom. Many apps operate under the assumption that your phone is always connected to you, in pockets that women don’t really have.
Let’s go back to Apple’s Health tracker. They don’t quite say it, but Apple’s premise seems to be that Health will one day be the place for everything. “The Health app lets you keep all your health and fitness information in one place on your device and under your control.” All your information. This is one of the streams that quantified self apps are traveling down—the road to universal data collection. The idea that there is a list of variables that everyone can, and should track.
The thing is, there isn't such a list. How could there be?
There is no universal set of variables that would be meaningful or even possible for everyone to track. The idea that some comprehensive self tracking app could at some point boil down the universal essentials neglects the fact that humans are different—not just in biology, but in needs and habits and interests. Right now, as these apps are developed largely by men for men, the data they collect might seem to men to be pretty comprehensive.
“There is no universal,” Boesel said. “QS is such a radical individual culture overall that you are the ultimate expert.”
The Atlantic's editors and writers pick their favorite moments from Game of Thrones, The Good Wife, Looking, and more from 2014. (Spoilers abound; consider this the first and only warning.)
The seventh season of Cartoon Network’s trippy wonder Adventure Time has continued to plumb stranger and stranger narrative depths, with a host of great episodes shifting focus from heroes Finn and Jake to the show’s deep ensemble. But Adventure Time’s most satisfying 11 minutes were this time-bending wonder, where interdimensional dream god Pismo (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani) engineered his resurrection through dream pickles, time loops, and causality. Yes, if you don’t watch the show, the plot of any Adventure Time episode sounds like utter lunacy. But “Is That You” was the cartoon at its very best—quietly emotional, brazenly hallucinatory, and whimsical without ever seeming cheesy. It’d likely come off as nonsense to a newcomer, but the thriving, complicated universe Adventure Time has created in its seven seasons means it can deliver emotional payoffs like this one.
It’s unfair how good the premiere of The Affair is, not just in comparison to the otherwise generic pilots of the fall 2014 season but also in comparison to the show itself, which hasn’t been able to match its opener for edge-of-your-seat captivation since. When it was released online in October, much was made of the Rashomon-like structure and zeitgeisty take on the sobering state of the modern marriage, which followed Gone Girl and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. The show’s two-points-of-view narration highlights how everything is open to interpretation: Was that a meet-cute or a meet-creepy? A sexual assault—or post-argument coitus? Did Noah initiate or Alison? The conceit could easily be annoying, but instead the ambiguity fosters a constant state of sexy suspense, a climactic tension way more effective than when the pesky murder investigation gets developed later on.
The Affair isn’t dead yet (it’s returning for a second season), and while its pulse has weakened in recent weeks, the pilot remains premium-content television at its best: Sixty minutes of nothing happening, compellingly. I’ll keep watching, hoping the next season will reach the magnificent, baffling heights of its abstract opener.
The Biggest Loser is, like many reality shows, based on a premise that is inherently grotesque, even as it touts its credentials when it comes to “transforming” lives and confronting the obesity epidemic. The ultimate goal isn’t a healthy weight; it’s a $250,000 cash prize. It was only a matter of time until one contestant took it too far.
In February, that contestant was Rachel Frederickson, a 24-year-old former athlete who walked into the finale as a gaunt, grinning specter of her former self, visibly shocking a number of the show’s professional trainers in the process. On the scale, she became the first competitor to finish the show underweight at 105 pounds, simultaneously clinching the prize and illuminating the murky morality of mining weight loss for mass entertainment.
It's sometimes hard to believe our collective good fortune that we're on five seasons and counting of Bob's Burgers, the best family sitcom on TV and very often the funniest show in a given week. In "The Kids Rob a Train," the Belchers take a weekend wine-train excursion, where kids are "allowed but not welcome." Obviously, Linda's the enthusiastic one while Bob just wants to relax. But with their parents slurping and swishing wine in the front, Tina, Gene, and Louise are thrown in the "juice caboose" along with occasional chum Regular-Sized Rudy. The best Bob's episodes see the kids engaging in oversized adventures involving what's essentially kids' stuff, and so it is here.
The prospect of four hours locked away in a no-fun train car is utterly unendurable, particularly with a chocolate fountain so tantalizingly close in the dining car. So the kids plot to defy their smug jailer, Ethan, and score them some chocolate. Where many comedies succeed by going big, Bob's kills it when it goes small, and that's never truer than when the affable, asthmatic Rudy is involved. Contrasting his sweet calm with Louise's agent-of-chaos hollering is nothing short of delightful. Meanwhile, Bob and Linda's sommelier nemesis proves to be a perfectly pompous foil, one who's subject to a nicely disgusting comeuppance.
The greatest trick Broad City pulls every week is coming off as shaggy while simultaneously executing a complex comedy caper that dovetails to a satisfying, messy conclusion. It’s having its pot cookie and eating it too, and we should be all the more delighted for it. “Stolen Phone” tracks Abbi around New York as she tries to recover her lost cell before a cute guy texts her back, while Illana has a one-night stand with a beautiful, airheaded boy (and Lincoln hangs out with a lot of puppies, which gives Hannibal Buress the opportunity to show us he can even have electrifying chemistry with random dogs).
Everything I love about Broad City, probably the best new comedy of 2014, is best encapsulated in “Stolen Phone.” Its perspective on New York felt fresh and grounded without losing the satire (like Illana and Abbi’s bafflement upon visiting the Upper East Side). Its female leads are rollicking, flawed, lovable three-dimensional women, of whom there are still not enough on television. And Hannibal Buress talks to a lot of dogs. Hannibal Buress should probably have a whole talk show where the only guests are dogs.
It's been almost a year since The Carrie Diaries left forever, and there's still a short, big-haired hole in the TV landscape because of it. Somewhat improbably, Carrie hitched a ride on Sex and the City nostalgia and created TV's best teen drama. The show was always a bit more than it needed to be: more fun than its competition; smarter; sweeter than expected; far less forced than its predecessor series in its attempts to be shocking or to create a cultural statement.
"This Is the Time," the second-last episode of the series, sees Carrie and her best friends attending prom at the Waldorf. Like all the greatest prom episodes, it sees its characters at various crossroads in their young lives, but it also makes time for the kinds of character moments that separate really good shows from the pack. Mouse and Donna's unlikely friendship gets a nice spotlight, for example. Walt takes a brave step back to Bennet and out of the closet. Carrie takes her own brave step down the road to the kind of self-sufficient city gal that we know she's going to become. One of the tragedies of not continuing with the series is we'll never get to solve the mystery of how this Carrie, surrounded by great friends and close family, ended up losing all these people en route to that big advice column. We get a taste of that here, as her dad cuts her off when she chooses a job over college, but we're only left to imagine the rest.
Cristela is a family sitcom. That both refers to its format—a highly traditional multicam half hour starring a brassy, fun comedienne—and its specific sense of humor, delightfully biting in all its oxymoronic glory. The pilot shows off the best parts of both Cristela and star Cristela Alonzo: good jokes with great delivery by a compelling, lovable lead.
Cristela isn’t afraid to laugh along with its audience—and to make viewers feel like part of the family. The first episodes have been uniformly good, but it’s the premiere that stands out largely because it’s so assured of itself. This is Cristela, staid format and all. It doesn’t care if you like it—but for your sake, it hopes you do.
It feels self-aggrandizing to say that the TV shows that you love and that get cancelled never really had a chance, too pure and good and brilliant were they for such an awful, unappreciative world. But that's how it feels for fans of Enlisted, the one-and-done season of heartfelt, army-barracks comedy from Kevin Biegel. It never managed to get off the ground, despite appealing leads (take a look at Geoff Stults, Chris Lowell, and Parker Young as three brothers assigned to rear-detachment duty and try not to swoon even a little) and a heartland-friendly concept. Alas, all we can do now is remember the good times ... like "Pete's Airstream," which deploys a plot about Pete trying to find some solitude away from the doofuses he lives with in service of poking into Pete's PTSD from active duty. It's a story that nails the funny/sweet/poignant/funny again vibe that made the show so great. Even better, the episode gets a boost from a subplot about "lone wolf" Perez learning to loosen up and have fun with the girls.
Even as someone who digested the first three seasons of Game of Thrones the three days before the fourth season premiered, I was ill-prepared for the level of mercilessness that concluded the Oberyn-Mountain trial by combat (it was a cruelty only rivaled by the slew of brain-explosion puns and Princess Bride allusions that followed). And because I had unfortunately heard about the tragedy that would come at the end of “Rains of Castamere,” Oberyn’s death was, essentially, my Red Wedding.
Yes, other things happened in this episode: Sansa finally wised up and proved a worthy (if newly vampy) rival and ally to Little Finger. Reek transformed into Theon to help Ramsay Sn—I mean Bolton capture Moat Cailin. Danaerys uncovered Ser Jorah’s betrayal and banished the heartbroken knight. But because this show is consistently filled with strong moments and plot development such as these, it doesn’t feel cheap to turn to this episode for its most memorable storyline—the jail-cell chat, the battle, the fall of the Red Viper, the chillingly delivered death sentence.
It’s a wound fans (or at least I) will never fully recover from; the best I can do is imagine Oberyn spinning his spear in the land of eternal summer, where the Dornish wine flows as fast as free as blood in Westeros.
There were more truly great episodes of The Good Wife this year than can be counted on one hand. Much has been said about installments like “The Last Call” (a worthy wake for a main character) and “Oppo Research” (an hour of thorny personal dynamics, with a brilliant centerpiece performance from Julianna Margulies). But season-five episode "A Few Words" stands out for its ambition—it was easily the best-directed hour of The Good Wife in 2014. It has a playful relationship with time—flashing back and forth as Alicia Florrick prepares a speech about the days of her life just before the first season began.
“A Few Words” changes viewpoints of past events to reveal more; not just events, but feelings and emotions. Director Rosemary Rodriguez did ace work—the resulting episode is an entertaining, thought-provoking, stellar piece of television.
There is no show like Hannibal on television. Or on streaming services. Or in your worst nightmares. But it's not the violence and gore that sets it apart. ... Okay, it's not just the violence and gore that sets it apart. True, Hannibal gets away with more artfully arranged revulsion than you'd ever expect on network TV, even tucked away as it is on Friday nights at 10 p.m. where no one is watching. But that kind of brazen grand-guignol quality is merely one quality of a show that's been fearless in all aspects, from plotting to characterization and beyond. The second season sent ostensible protagonist Will Graham past the edge of outright villainy, put Hannibal Lecter in genuine peril, and tied up its characters in psychological knots and let them wrangle their own ways out. The audience was put through the wringer repeatedly, whether they were losing beloved characters or having to watch a guest star claw his way out of the belly of a horse.
"Mizumono" is the best episode of the season because it brought all that horror to a head ... and then took it further. As a possible series finale (as all season finales of low-rated network shows must double as) it offered a bold crescendo to Will, Jack, and Hannibal's inevitable three-way collision. As a possible season finale, after which the show is expected to pick up the pieces and resume, it was downright insane.
It’s hard to think of a show whose pendulum swing between sublime and ridiculous is as dramatic as Homeland’s. The first seven episodes of the fourth season encapsulated everything that has historically irked me the most about Carrie and co., from the manipulation of mental illness for dramatic effect (finger guns, anyone?) to the prioritizing of personal storylines over professional ones.
But then everyone started doing their jobs again and the show remembered it was about counterterrorism and everything culminated in this Benghazi-inspired episode in which the Taliban stormed the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan, killed 36 people, and escaped with the names of all the covert CIA agents in the field. Yes, it was preposterous, and yes, it felt like Die Hard in the best way, but I’m starting to think that this is what Homeland should have been all along: a batshit crazy, well-crafted action drama rather than a subtle analysis of the personal stakes of the war on terror. When you do something so well, why fight it?
No one saw it coming. We could have, because Frank Underwood is nothing if not despicable, but it was viscerally shocking nonetheless when, in the first episode of season two, he pushed his former lover, Zoe Barnes, right into the path of an oncoming Metro train, killing a major character and giving me countless commuting nightmares in the process.
“Chapter 14” embraced brutality wholeheartedly, from Freddie lasciviously describing how his pigs are slow-bled for extra flavor to Claire’s threatening the life of Gillian’s unborn child by withholding her health insurance and outing Gillian to her baby daddy’s wife. Never has the Underwoods’ credo been more visible than in the episode’s closing focus on Frank’s new cufflinks: appropriately engraved with the letters F and U.
It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that Jane the Virgin has restored my faith in shows with traditional values. In an era of world-weary vigilantes, detectives, and zombie killers, the character Jane arose angelically, bafflingly, from The CW (bless them) with a devotion to honesty, the Catholic Church, keeping her artificially-inseminated child, and sticking to a vow of chastity until marriage. The virgin-birth conceit is preposterous, yes, and that’s the show’s point and pleasure as it repurposes the plot twists, tongue-in-cheek narration, and pop-art sets of a telenovela while proffering some wholesome moral lessons along the way. Jane the Virgin succeeds by balancing grounded family drama with the murder, romance, and pulp, and no episode did that better this season than Chapter 4.
The episode’s a reversal of affairs: Straight-laced Jane’s having pregnant sex fantasies about the father of her child (not her boyfriend) while her flirty mom is struggling to own up to the identity of her father. Which really means we get the best of everything: Jane seeing Rafael with a perpetual halo, Andrea Navedo getting serious, and lots and lots of Rogelio, her self-absorbed telenovela star dad. The way it treats the Catholic Church’s hilarious attempts to stay hip isn’t bad, either. I laughed, I welled up, I literally said “bravo” to my computer at the end of the episode. Get thee to Jane the Virgin, there’s no better, or less guilty, a pleasure.
Despite the dress fittings (in which Kanye West tried to make his mother-in-law’s neckline more revealing) and the scenery (gorgeous shots of Paris at night) and the family drama (in which Rob Kardashian ditched the wedding and flew back to Los Angeles in a huff), for me, the highlight of the KUWTK Kimye wedding episode was seeing a brutally hungover Khloe sitting on the edge of the runway next to a private plane, trying not to throw up. It was an oasis of unglamorous truth in a desert of micromanaged, perfectly made-up Kardashian-West fantasy.
This episode was ostensibly filmed by “friends and family” of Kim and Kanye to get around the latter’s objection to TV cameras invading his private life (to be with the one you love, sometimes you have to love the ones they come with, whether that’s Kris Jenner or an entire E! production team). Although an inordinate amount of time was spent discussing hair (Kylie’s was blue and Bruce couldn’t decide if his should be up or down), ultimately the episode ended with a wedding, which is all any post-modern, paparazzi-infested fairytale can ask for.
Strangely naïve and a bit self-obsessed, Looking’s protagonist Patrick is the kind of charmed rookie who brandishes the “boyfriend” label before thinking to Define The Relationship. Looking itself, however, is not so oblivious. What initially came off as a low-key tale of San Francisco gay men mumbling turned out to be a pretty daring and hilarious interrogation of sexuality, society, and peri peri chicken.
The sixth episode exposed characters’ dumber, yet typical, assumptions about the world, and the results were both cringeworthy and moving. Dom despairs of turning 40—that’s when Grindr sends you a death certificate, he says—but his older business partner just scoffs knowingly and talks about doing mushrooms. Later at the birthday picnic, Patrick indulges a host of very-2014 prejudices: squealing in mockery of effeminate voices, insisting that his working-class boyfriend harbors greater career aspirations, and tacitly endorsing the idea that he’s dating a Mexican hairdresser to prove something to himself.
That Mexican hairdresser, by the way, is the best thing about Looking so far. As played by Raúl Castillo, Richie wears his various identity markers proudly, rejects every attempt to belittle him, and just seems like a really cool guy. His self-assurance contrasts with Patrick’s friend Agustin, who, while trashing Richie, mentions his own Cuban heritage for the first time all season. When confronted about his racist nonsense, Agustin finally breaks out some Spanish to try and defuse the situation. “Now I'm your hermano?” Richie replies, awesomely. “Man, fuck you.”
People griped about its messy structure and its Lindelof weirdness, but I loved The Leftovers, in spite (because?) of its bleak, relentless nihilism. Never was it darker or more enigmatic than in this Nora-centric episode, in which Mapleton’s most bereaved woman bought groceries no one would eat, paid a prostitute to shoot her in her (Kevlar-protected) chest, and took a quick trip to New York for a conference of businesspeople who’d somehow forged careers out of the Departure.
Carrie Coon was perhaps the show’s strongest performer, giving Nora layers upon layers of barely suppressed emotions, from grief to rage to desire. At the conference, which also served as a neat reminder that even the most pointless of human activities will survive the apocalypse, Nora lost her identity (her nametag, and her status as a survivor) then clawed it back again via booze, pills, and a hug from Holy Wayne, for better or for worse.
Every time you think you know Mad Men, Matt Weiner shoots off Ken Cosgrove’s eye or unleashes a lawnmower as a not-so-gentle reminder that sexy, sophisticated New York advertising in the ‘60s wasn’t nearly as put-together as Joan’s tailored suit dresses are. That’s the case with the latest season’s fifth episode, which contains a horrifying moment that Weiner’s been building up to. He delivers it in one bold, broad, and terrifying stroke that viewers perhaps should have seen coming.
But far from being an episode about a single twist, “The Runaways” is at its best revealing how its characters are transitioning into new, more mature roles. Sally doles out some of her best sass yet to Betty, while Betty airs a controversial political opinion at an otherwise paradisiacal suburban party. Megan asserts herself and her new California-fabulous lifestyle in yet another glorious, freewheeling addition to the annals of Weird Stuff that Happens When Don Goes West. All in all it’s an episode of well-placed moments showing characters coming into their own in the new era, a dynamic that is just so iconically Mad Men. And throughout, the office’s massive new computer hums ominously, which gives Weiner ample opportunity to make jokes about early tech anxiety, but also to hint that people were right to fear the coming of the machine.
Hilarity ensues, as do many double entendres, as tends to happen on a primetime network sitcom. "My office only has one entrance, and I don’t think that’s enough for you anymore," Mindy tells Danny, indignantly.
Let's dispense with the euphemisms. Danny offers his two-worded explanation while he and Mindy are in bed; the "I Slipped" episode of The Mindy Project is about anal sex, a subject that remains mostly taboo on primetime sitcoms. What makes the episode great, though, is that in the end its story has very little to do with the taboo in question. "I Slipped" is mainly concerned not with sex itself, but with sex as a frontier in a relationship. What happens to romance when novelty—all those little firsts—gives way to familiarity? The episode opens with Mindy and Danny settling into the easy domesticities of coupledom; he delivers a nose hair trimmer to her in the bathroom. "I’ll be out in 20,” she informs him.
This is the other side of intimacy, the stuff of comfort and companionship and nose hair, and Mindy and Danny are both eager and terrified to embrace it. And that’s where “I slipped” comes in. Neither one wants to become boring; neither one want to admit this; both go to absurd lengths to avoid the thing they obviously both need: a conversation.
The episode was controversial; many objected to the lack of consent implied by "I slipped." For Mindy Kaling, though, the criticisms miss the point. "There was no sexual peril in there, and it was not a situation where she felt unsafe or was treated as objectified," The Mindy Project’s creator, writer, and star pointed out. The Mindy of the show, rather, “was startled in a common place.” Kaling added: “And that’s where comedy lives, in these uncomfortable places."
There’s something about the use of farce in television comedy that can be very stressful (usually when it’s Frasier Crane-related). But the joy of Modern Family is that you can almost always bank on nothing bad happening, which is what made the fifth season’s adults-only excursion to Vegas such a gift.
The episode featured guest appearances by Fred Armisen, Patton Oswalt, and Stephen Merchant (the latter’s turn as a “bath butler” was one of the weirdest, funniest cameos in recent memory), as well as a climactic final sequence involving endless entrances and exits, mistaken identity, accidental loss of clothing, and the “Kilty Pleasures,” an all-male troupe of Scottish-themed strippers. In other words, all of the fun of the farce with no unnecessary angst.
Every once in a while, a show that has hit its stride will step out with an experimental episode that exists not to drive the plot but to be, simply, fun. For New Girl, “Landline” is that episode. The main story goes like this: It turns out that the only area of the loft that gets cell reception is a corner of Nick’s bedroom (the corner, as comedy requires, that is occupied by his bed). Jess decides to solve the problem—and further her ongoing cause of roommate unity—by purchasing a phone the roommates can share. Jess being Jess, the phone ends up being a land line: a bulky, perky specimen of analog uncool.
The landline, perched on a table in the middle of the loft’s massive living room, takes on a mystical quality—a crystal ball of plastic blue—and begins to reveal wacky truths about each character. Nick, at home all day while everyone else is at work, ends up taking messages for the other roommates, and relishing his self-imposed secretarial duties. Winston turns out to have a preternaturally smooth Phone Presence—a fact he uses to give an interview, posing as Schmidt, to the perfectly named magazine Business, Man!. Schmidt, under the phone’s influence, becomes even more Schmidty. (“I'm just excited to have a new number—home, work, and cell. Damn, I'm reachable!”)
Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, the phone’s magic is practical: Having to share the thing—the loft’s connection to the outside world, with all its seductions and confusions and inconveniences—forces the roommates to come together as the pseudo-family they are. Though, per the logic of the Weird Episode, the landline is scuttled come the next episode, and no one ever speaks of it again.
“Some people collect buttons or Taco Bell Chihuahuas; I collect orgasms.” The words of an Apatow comedy bro? Barney Stinson? No, it’s Nicky Nichols of Litchfield women’s prison, kicking off a competition with Big Boo over who can sleep with more of their fellow inmates. Obsessing over one’s “number” is an old pop-culture trope, but it’s normally the domain of pick-up artists, teenagers, or man-eaters—not bored queer women behind bars.
The sex-off is just one of the raunchy, refreshing throughlines in the fourth episode of the Netflix show’s second season. Another: Some of the less privileged among the inmates apparently missed the sex-ed class that would have taught them where their “pee hole” is, which necessitates a lecture on genital anatomy. The fact that said lecture comes from the transgender woman Sophia isn’t just a clever writer’s room choice—it’s plausible storytelling. “I designed one myself,” she explains.
B-plots like those are amusing reminders of why Orange Is the New Black is so radical. We just haven’t seen these stories told on TV, ever. Same goes for the wrenching centerpiece of the episode, when viewers learn of gum-smacking sweetheart Lorna Morello’s backstory, involving stalking, mental illness, and wild deceptions. At the start of the hour, you root for her because of who she seems to be; by the end, you're sympathetic because of who she actually is; once again, Orange Is the New Black has shown you something new.
After having made six episodes' worth of wonderful, underappreciated comedy for NBC with Best Friends Forever in 2012, Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair made it back to TV this year with Playing House. Once again, the pair played best friends (Maggie and Emma) helping each other through some life changes. This one looked like it might end in disaster as well, but USA just renewed it for an eight-episode second season. Which is great news, because how frustrating would it have been to lose another comedy blessed with Parham and St. Clair's easy, unforced chemistry, especially in an episode like "Bird Bones."
Maggie and Emma get invited to brunch with Tina, the titular "Bird Bones," wife to Emma's ex and object of Maggie and Emma's high-school mockery. It's a classic awkward sitcom setup made daring by the way it explores an ugly side to Maggie and Emma's close friendship, particularly that they can get mean when cloistered together. Poor high-strung Tina makes herself an easy target, with her surface-perfect life and meek demeanor, and obviously Emma has another agenda in trying to figure out how this simpering thing scored her ex. As happens, however, a series of comedic mishaps brings the women closer together—then farther apart—then closer together at the end. Maggie and Emma's friendship is a force of nature, and those forces can be destructive sometimes. Other times, those forces can be well-versed enough in Oprah's hoarding-themed episodes to help a friend out.
Please Like Me, the Australian comedy from young creator Josh Thomas, tried to do a lot at once in its second season. This proved frustrating at times: There was an entire section of the show—basically, any plotline involving the mental hospital and its patients—that felt disconnected, as if it belonged in a different series entirely. Yet creator and star Josh Thomas brought it all together in the second season finale. It was Please Like Me at its best: hilariously sad and sadly hilarious.
Nowhere was that more apparent than in its climax sequence: Josh and current love interest Joel taking care of a very inebriated Patrick—Josh’s previous love interest. In just one scene, Thomas captured two real difficulties: the simple frustrations of dating, and the very serious frustrations of mental illness. “Margherita” is great on its own, but even better in terms of the rest of the season; it was the episode where Thomas finally said what he wanted to say all along.
Reality TV shows tend to run far beyond their primes, and Project Runway is certainly no exception. Season 13 was a total snooze, filled with bizarre judging decisions that rewarded mediocre talent, all while spinning nonsensical “narratives” for the season. And yet for once, with six designers remaining in the game, all the bells and whistles didn’t drown one another out. Instead, “The Highest Bidder” paired an oddball challenge—bid on storage units in teams to create a mini-collection of three looks—with pure personal drama to great effect.
Korina, the season’s designated villain, wound up in a last-minute sew-off against Char, who had been virtually saved from elimination by series mentor Tim Gunn twice. Korina’s hate for the situation manifested itself in an ugly garment and delicious personal drama. It was uncomfortable, challenging, and painful for all involved. But it was impossible to look away.
There’s comedy that makes you cringe, and then there’s Andy Daly’s Review, which every week made me gasp in horror and cover my eyes in fear at Forrest MacNeil’s latest endeavor in the name of art. Asked to “review” life experiences by online fans, Forrest begins the episode eating 15 pancakes at a diner—a fairly sickening, pointless experience—then goes back to the studio and gets his next challenge: “What’s it like to get divorced?”
The conceit of Review—Forrest puts himself into embarrassing situations to try and understand what it’s like to, say, be a racist or rob a bank—was funny to begin with. But this episode, the third in the season, raised the stakes in a fascinating way. Review was pitched almost as a sketch series, with Forrest doing three or so “reviews” per week. But when he approached his wife in the kitchen and out of the blue told her he wanted a divorce, it became clear that we were watching a show about a demented man set out to ruin his life for reasons too arbitrary to understand. The episode’s ending gag is too tragically hilarious to spoil, and you might not believe that you could laugh so much at one person’s anguish. But you’d be wrong.
Like the final product or no, there’s no denying Scandal sped off the rails in its third season. To continue at that velocity would have been a show-killer—so a reboot in the fourth season was necessary. Yet Shonda Rhimes and her team pulled off something far more remarkable: a successful relaunch that didn’t forget what came before it.
Olivia Pope and her team are left nursing battle scars in the season opener—and despite how they all feel about one another, they still come together to bury their fallen friend. After an episode dedicated to making them likable again, Olivia, Abby, Huck, and Quinn stand together for a brief, beautiful moment at Harrison’s funeral. Then, they part. Healing takes time when so much blood has been spilled. This is just the first step—but what a beautiful first step it is.
Watching Shameless and liking Shameless (not nearly the same thing) requires a delicate balancing act on the part of the viewer. It's so much of a heterogenous mixture that even when it's at its very best, there are entire characters and subplots (usually the Frank stuff) that are pretty terrible. The show's dedication to its own ugliness can feel forced, but the sludge in which this show wallows makes the moments of greatness shine brighter.
"Emily," the season's penultimate episode, saw Fiona sent to prison after a season's worth of downward-spiraling, Lip made into a bad-boyfriend scare tactic for his girlfriend's parents. Frank's storyline isn't even its usual braying, horrid self; in a post-surgery delirium, he mistakes a sick little girl for his own daughter, Fiona, and apologizes for being a rotten dad. But it's Ian and Mickey's defiant coming out in a bar full of drunk old cretins (Mickey's family, particularly his awful dad) that makes the episode special. In the context of all of Shameless’s gloom, the smallest of victories, even those that present as a barroom brawl, can seem downright beautiful. The sight of a bloody-mouthed Mickey, handcuffed on a police-car hood, screaming defiantly to his dad about taking it up the ass was better than any televised gay wedding.
January's Winter Olympics in Sochi made for the perfect timing, and ESPN's 30 for 30 the perfect platform, for what now stands as the definitive take on the 1994 Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding scandal, a story that remains every bit as riveting today as it was then. While NBC would go on to air its own doc during the course of the Olympics, that one with Kerrigan's participation (and thus her tacit approval), "The Price of Gold" was superior, both as a document and as a piece of entertainment.
What director Nanette Burstein understood was exactly what she had in Harding, an endlessly fascinating subject who maybe still doesn't understand how she comes across. With footage from as far back as Harding's early teen years, the portrait of her is tragic, defiant, off-putting ... and yet strangely endearing. She's positively delusional, thinking if she'd only landed a triple-axel at the Olympics, that's what she'd be remembered for, but her anger at a figure-skating establishment that had always treated her as white trash is palpable and relatable. It's an eye-of-the-beholder thing, but it's also a testament to Burstein finding every bit of humanity, good and bad, beneath the tabloid legend.
The Internet regularly offers up weird, subversive quirks of art that gain rapid followings and just as quickly suffer a heady backlashes. Too Many Cooks somehow transcended that dynamic. Yes, once admiration for this Adult Swim one-off created by Casper Kelly reached fever pitch (it's past four million views on YouTube), there was some mild grumbling that it might be overrated. But by and large, Too Many Cooks felt like an inspiring success story. Airing at four in the morning during the channel's "Infomercials" block, Too Many Cooks is a deceptively simple mockery of overlong '80s TV theme songs that builds up a horrifying throughline before spinning off in all kinds of wacky directions. Also, Snarf the magic cat is there.
If you haven't watched Too Many Cooks yet and you're still reading this description, stop. It's really best experienced with as little information as possible. Don't even look at the runtime on YouTube. Just soak in its charming weirdness. Then show it to someone else, sight unseen. If Too Many Cooks is the future of television, then we have much to look forward to.
“I’m just here to make you happy.” It’s maybe the single most beautiful line uttered in Transparent, a tender, funny, and smart show about a family of pathologically selfish people trying to be a little less pathologically selfish. Often their individual journeys don’t align: When one Pfefferman experiences a rare moment of clarity, another may be too deeply self-involved to care. And yet each family member, in his or her own way, struggles to care and be cared about. When they succeed, it’s often in painful and small ways.
In this penultimate episode, Shelly’s “done” with taking care of a bedridden, dying Ed, who seems to be an inconvenience for all. The family handles the uncomfortable question of morality awkwardly, with self-righteousness and, sometimes, bizarre tone-deafness.
And so it’s perhaps fitting that the real gut-punch moment of the episode is preceded by an irony-free, wordless dream sequence: Ed rises, wobbling, from his bed, and stumbles out the front door completely unnoticed; a hazy, gorgeous POV shot follows him ambling out into the soft lights of the early evening, filled with the sound of crickets and splashing of ducks. And then there's a flashback to his earlier days with Shelly, when he tells a goofy joke and says “I’m just here to make you happy.” The utter selflessness of the line feels devastating—and it’s this deft handling of humor and sadness, delusion and self-awareness, regression and growth that makes Transparent the best show to debut in 2014.
“Easy, easy … 30 seconds in and out, 30 seconds in and out.”
In the way that the episode title “Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency” means nothing to a lot of Mad Men viewers until you say “The one with the lawnmower,” this True Detective episode title means nothing until you say “Six-minute tracking shot.” It may feel unfair to spill more digital ink on an episode with most-hyped scene of the most-hyped show of 2014.
True Detective earned praise and scorn for its grandiose cinematography, bouts of self-serious fatalistic cerebro-babble, a bayou-intrigue plot, and an often-grim but ultimately profound cop-buddy duo at the center of it all. But push this all aside and you get something “Who Goes There” crystallized and negotiated so well, particularly in its final moments: atmosphere. One minute, you’re lulled by the gloomily beautiful palette of colors and Rust Coehle’s throaty drawl; the next, the show’s spun you up in a ring of dread, mystery, and sheer awe that made the series’ debut season so hypnotizing for many.
Vanderpump Rules plays like the heedless twentysomething child of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—louder, nastier, but also more aware about things like creating your own narrative on reality TV. At this point, it'd be rather naive to tut-tut about what's real and what's not in shows like these. When you're living your life as if it's a primetime soap opera, where does "real" even enter the discussion? There was a point in the second season when the cast—waitstaff at Lisa Vanderpump's Sur restaurant in L.A.—peered out from the kitchen at Lisa and her Real Housewives pals staging a contentious lunch at the restaurant and commented on what they were doing wrong/right.
Do we need a Bravo-lebrity 2.0, where the participants are even savvier about their own drama? Maybe not. But sometimes the net result is Stassi finding out that Kristen and Jax had sex (twice!) while Tom was asleep in the other room, and Kristen engineered a Haldeman-worthy cover-up before Stassi finally figured it out, staged an ambush, and then backhanded her frenemy with more precise fight choreography than we got in half this summer's blockbusters. In that case, it's worth it.
Watching Selina Meyer go through the tedious, often humiliating business of serving as the nation's second in command was already pretty hilarious, but Veep went and topped itself in its third season by taking Selina out on the campaign trail. "Clovis" sees Team Meyer (sans a few members, particularly Dan Egan, who is nearing the end of his angry little rope back in D.C.) make a stop at the titular tech company, an incredibly thin gloss on Google. The brilliance of the episode lies in how it manages to mix the obvious with the surprising. Having earned its reputation as TV's preeminent spewer of hateful barbs, there were high expectations for Veep to skewer tech culture, and from the first Lego station, they don't disappoint.
But rather than rest on cheap gags about hoodies and ping-pong, Veep also pokes at some darker corners of the conflicts of interest between tech, business, and government. "We consider ourselves post-tax," says the Clovis CFO, as her boss lobbies Selina, plying her with free iPads for her education initiatives. That such pointed social criticism sits side by side with porn jokes and the usual Jonah slams ("Jonah with money. It's like if Hitler could fly.") is what makes Veep as special as it is.
The fifth season of The Walking Dead was a surprise from start to finish for its narrative restraint and emphasis on developing character so as to build up satisfying stories. There was no better example than “Consumed,” which spent its entire time with two of the show’s most compelling characters (Carol and Daryl) as they rove through Atlanta trying to find their kidnapped compatriot. It was almost a bottle episode, but set in an entire city, flashing back to critical moments in Carol’s life that informed the haunted, lonesome warrior she had become.
In an earlier season of The Walking Dead, a quiet hour like “Consumed” might have felt like the result of a show stalling for time, but here it came off like a necessary breather in an action-packed arc. It played to all of the show’s strengths, using the empty, apocalyptic Atlanta landscape to generate tension, being as spare with dialogue as possible, and balancing on a knife-edge every moral decision the pair have to make. Pretty much every episode of The Walking Dead was good this season, but “Consumed” was artful in a way the show couldn’t have pulled off even a year before.
It’s tough to pick one episode from You’re the Worst’s splendid first season, so it makes the most sense to take the finale, which demonstrated all the surprising strengths of this under-the-radar anti-romcom. Acidly thumbing its nose at the traditions of the genre, You’re the Worst charted the halting romance of two emotionally crippled narcissists in Los Angeles who slowly realize that their lives have progressed to the point where they might actually want to settle down. Kinda. “Fists and Feet and Stuff” was the final episode in a loose three-parter to wrap up the first season that saw our heroes Gretchen and Jimmy break up (hardly a surprise, given their poor communication skills) and get back together (much more of an accomplishment).
You’re the Worst is not without its swooning romance, it just comes in a different package. In the finale, Gretchen tells Jimmy that they’re like angry pitbulls who can somehow only interact with each other. It’s a harsh line, but delivered by the toxically charming Aya Cash, it makes the heart beat quicker all the same. There’s room for many kinds of love in the world after all—and the best kind of optimism always comes from the most pessimistic sources.
Growth and progress could be this nation's reward for facing the challenge of our times with courage and a demand for equal justice. The American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the civil-rights movement of the 1960s were moments when the United States could have been torn from its very foundation, but a creative response to this turmoil helped move the nation forward.
At its best, non-violent protest is a strategically engineered crisis designed to wake up a sleeping nation, to educate and sensitize those who become awakened, and to ignite a sense of righteous indignation in people of goodwill to press for transformation. That's what the protests galvanized by the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and others are trying to accomplish.
Many Americans find themselves at a loss to understand the depth of the anger and frustration of the protestors galvanized by the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and others. It might be worthwhile for them to read a speech Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on April 14, 1967, at Stanford University. A colleague of mine in Congress reminded me of his words, and I find they ring as true today as they did almost 50 years ago.
In the speech, King describes what he calls the "other America," one of two starkly different American experiences that exist side-by-side. One people "experience the opportunity of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all its dimensions," and the other a "daily ugliness" that spoils the purest hopes of the young and old, leaving only "the fatigue of despair." The Brown and Garner cases themselves are not the only focus of the protestors' grievances, but they represent a glimpse of a different America most Americans have found it inconvenient to confront.
One group of people in this country can expect the institutions of government to bend in their favor, no matter that they are supposedly regulated by impartial law. In the other, children, fathers, mothers, uncles, grandfathers, whole families, and many generations are swept up like rubbish by the hard, unforgiving hand of the law.
They are offered no lenience, even for petty offenses, in a system that seems hell-bent on warehousing them by the millions of people, while others escape the consequences of pervasive malfeasance scot-free. Some people rationalize that it was unfortunate, but not altogether disturbing, that Michael Brown was put to death without due process because, after all, he allegedly took some cigarillos from a corner store. But who went to jail for the mortgage fraud that robbed his community and other black communities around the country of 50 percent of their wealth?
Should people accused of stealing be held accountable? Definitely. But the justice system entangles the most vulnerable so effectively that even the innocent often find it easier to just plead guilty. Meanwhile the capable, and sometimes the stealthiest and most damaging, are slapped on the wrist and given a pass.
If Americans are to be honest with themselves, they must admit we may never know what actually happened to Michael Brown because of the unusual way the grand-jury process was conducted by a local prosecutor whose independence was in doubt. They must admit that publishing a selective collection of details online corrupts the integrity of grand-jury deliberations and proceedings meant to be held in confidence. It subverts a judicial process designed to air the arguments of both sides—the victim and the perpetrator—exposing them both to challenge and cross-examination.
Denying any victim of homicide the right to a public trial is a painful outcome, but to distort the process and use it to achieve that goal compounds the tragedy of homicide with robbery. It's no wonder then that even videotaped evidence showing Eric Garner pleading to breathe 11 times would lead to no indictment. It proves the protestors' point—in some courts even the worst offenders can go free as long as they wear a badge.
Don't get me wrong—I work with police everyday. Whenever I see them, I let them know I appreciate their service. The job is difficult, and there are many responsible officers, but does that mean they should avoid scrutiny when they take a human life, especially under questionable circumstances? Isn't that the law they are supposed to defend?
Thousands of people—young and old, black, white, and brown—are speaking to the nation. They are "dying in" to shake it out of denial. They are saying that American society is blind to hundreds, even thousands of murders perpetrated in its name by agents of governments. They are saying that blood is on the hands of the nation and its people. (Black-on-black crime, or white-on-white crime for that matter, is an important but different discussion, and it does not justify what is done by agents with the presumed consent of society.)
Today's protestors demand that Americans confront several questions as a national community:
Is it all right with them that police kill hundreds of unarmed teens and young men every year without having to account for their actions? Do they mind that a retired veteran who accidentally pressed his medical-alert button is now dead at the hands of police? Or that a 12-year-old boy playing with a toy gun in a park near his home, a 22-year-old man talking on a cell phone in a Walmart, a 17-year-old walking home from the corner store, an unarmed 23-year-old man attending his own bachelor party shot 50 times, or a 7-year-old girl at home asleep in her bed were all killed by their representatives? One recent study reports that one black man is killed by police or vigilantes in our country every 28 hours, almost one a day.
Doesn't that bother you?
Ever since black men first came to these shores we have been targets of wanton aggression. We have been maimed, drugged, lynched, burned, jailed, enslaved, chained, disfigured, dismembered, drowned, shot, and killed. As a black man, I have to ask why. What is it that drives this carnage? Is it fear? Fear of what? Why is this nation still so willing to suspend the compassion it gives freely to others when the victims are men who are black or brown?
Soon the nation will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day unarmed, nonviolent protestors were brutalized by deputized citizens and Alabama state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. As a leader of that march, I wonder, if the same attack took place in Ferguson today, would Americans be shocked enough to do anything about it? What has happened to the soul of America that makes citizens more interested in justifying these murders than stopping them?
Dr. King declared in his 1967 speech, "Racism is evil because its ultimate logic leads to genocide .... It is an affirmation," he said, "that the very being of a people is inferior," and therefore unworthy of the same regard as other human life. Do Americans accept the deaths of hundreds and thousands of young men and boys simply because they are black? Ignorance of their day-to-day lives is no excuse for what is done in society’s name.
In the presence of injustice, no one has the right to be silent. Members of government and the business, faith, and even law-enforcement communities must stand up and say enough is enough. Let the young lives of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sean Bell, John Crawford, and Trayvon Martin serve a higher purpose to shine the light of truth on our democracy and challenge us to meet the demand for equal justice in America.
There is a growing discontent in this country. And if the fires of frustration and discontent continue to grow without redress, I fear for the future of this country. There will not be peace in America. I do not condone violence under any circumstance. It does not lead to lasting change. I do not condone either public rioting or state-sponsored terrorism. "True peace," King would tell us, "is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."
I'm sure by now you've read Zach Baron's profile of Tilda Swinton, unless you spent all day yesterday with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears, which, listen, it's your life and your business, but I'd strongly recommend that you stop that and read this instead:
"I spent a lot of time thinking that I was some kind of foundling," Tilda Swinton says, answering a better question than the one I asked. "That I had been a changeling, that I had been found under a bush somewhere, and that I couldn't possibly be kin—but the more I live, the more I feel absolutely like I come out of my family. I'm a sort of strange natural progression."
Yes she is. God. Tilda Swinton was a professional gambler before she was an actress. Tilda Swinton made Zach Baron eat haggis. Tilda Swinton has played every kind of part but struggled the most when playing a corporate lawyer. Tilda Swinton's email auto-reply kindly reminds the sender that she is "away until 01/01/2070." Tilda Swinton is a universal treasure. Tilda Swinton makes the world a better place. Can I properly communicate just how strongly I feel about Tilda Swinton? This seems like a good start.
I realize this might not look like much. It probably looks suspiciously like a salad, which means it’s probably going to be the last kid picked for your holiday cooking olympics. It doesn’t taste like ginger, linzer or crushed candy canes. It smacks of January Food, the stuff of resolutions and repentance, and there’s no time for that now. But I need to tell you about it anyway, urgently, because the preoccupation with this salad has hit me so intensely, so wholly, it’s basically the only thing I want to eat, and since I’m ostensibly the grownup here, this is exactly what I’m going to do.
I had this for the first time two weekends ago, when I got to spring a surprise Miami Beach getaway on my husband as a belated birthday present. We had dinner the first night at José Andrés’ Bazaar, the kind of prolonged, indulgent meal that, I’m sure purely coincidentally, usually only occurs when we’re not simultaneously parenting. I don’t think we had a bite of food that was less than pristine. I’ve been a little obsessed with Andrés’ cooking since I lived in DC, right around the time Jaleo opened. I remember piling in there one night in 1999 with friends in town from New York and one told us that he really wanted to study in Paris the next year, but he needed someone to stay in his rent-controlled East Village apartment and also take care of his cat while he was gone. My roommate and I have never volunteered ourselves so quickly, not that anyone asked me my “welcome to new york” story. Even without such life-changing memories, the food was perfect, and no matter how many pork and scallop products were on the menu, there were always vegetables too, treated as carefully and respectfully as the finest jamón serrano. Our Miami meal was no different, which is why I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that of everything we ate, it was this seemingly random composition of goat cheese, almonds, oranges, chives, sea salt, endive, sherry vinegar and olive oil that I haven’t stopped pining over since.
Earlier this week, Shonda Rhimes received The Hollywood Reporter Sherry Lansing Award, given to her for "in recognition of my breaking through the industry’s glass ceiling as a woman and an African-American." Here's part of her speech, published on Medium:
How many women had to hit that glass before the first crack appeared? How many cuts did they get, how many bruises? How hard did they have to hit the ceiling? How many women had to hit that glass to ripple it, to send out a thousand hairline fractures? How many women had to hit that glass before the pressure of their effort caused it to evolve from a thick pane of glass into just a thin sheet of splintered ice?
So that when it was my turn to run, it didn’t even look like a ceiling anymore. I mean, the wind was already whistling through — I could always feel it on my face. And there were all these holes giving me a perfect view to other side. I didn’t even notice the gravity, I think it had worn itself away. So I didn’t have to fight as hard, I had time to study the cracks. I had time to decide where the air felt the rarest, where the wind was the coolest, where the view was the most soaring. I picked my spot in the glass and called it my target. And I ran. And when I hit finally that ceiling, it just exploded into dust.
Like that.
My sisters who went before me had already handled it.
A couple of weeks ago, I was working a red carpet event for a freelance job and one of the questions I had to ask was "What's your favorite Shonda Rhimes moment?" The answer, from now on, is this one.
Let's just get this out of the way: Moses was not a badass, at least not in the traditional sense of badassery. In the Bible, he spoke with a stammer, constantly doubted himself, and had a penchant for petulance. It is absurd for Christian Bale, with his perfect pectorals and haughty swagger and gentile face, to play the lead in Ridley Scott's new feature film, Exodus: God and Kings, a retelling of the Jews' liberation from slavery in Egypt.
The movie has many absurdities, as my colleague Chris Orr described in his review. Some characters speak with a British lilt, while others use vaguely Central European/Middle Eastern/stock Orientalist accents, seemingly at random. As many critics have pointed out, almost all of the movie's protagonists are white, even though the story takes place in the Middle East and North Africa (Scott attributes this to the financial pressure to cast big-name actors).
But in spite of itself, perhaps even unintentionally, Exodus manages to be provocative. Every year, Jews revisit the story of the exodus at Passover, remembering how the Hebrews were freed from slavery in Egypt. Throughout history, this narrative has been a foundational part of Jewish identity. But ever so slightly, Scott—who is an atheist—reframes this narrative, highlighting the morally troubling quality of any people being a "chosen people."
The first half of the movie follows the formula of a typical Hollywood blockbuster, with an impressive and basically pointless battle scene that sets up the main plot line. The year Moses was born, Egypt's pharaoh ordered the death of all Jewish baby boys, reacting to a seer's prediction that a new leader of the Hebrews would be born. Fearing for his life, Moses's parents stuck him in a basket and sent him down the Nile, where he was discovered by Bithia, one of the pharaoh's daughters. She raised him as a prince of Egypt alongside Ramses, the pharaoh's son and heir.
A couple decades later, the pharaoh's seer makes another prediction, that a new, great leader will be saved in battle. Shortly thereafter, Moses saves Ramses from death. Even though this bodes well for Ramses, he is suspicious of Moses's motives.
Soon, the pharaoh dies and Ramses takes the throne; Moses becomes his adviser. On a routine visit to one of Egypt's quarries—which are run on the labor of Jewish slaves—he meets the elders of the Hebrews, who eventually reveal his Jewish heritage. A pair of spies overhear this exchange and reveal it to one of the pharaoh's bureaucrats, who reveals it to Ramses. In what appears to be a rage, he banishes Moses to the desert. (This is not how this all went down in the Bible. In the book of Exodus, Moses killed an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew slave and buried the body. When his actions were discovered, "Moses became frightened and ... fled from before Pharaoh." See? Not a badass.)
This is a revealing moment in the movie's plot: Although he feels he has to punish Moses, Ramses hides a sword in Moses's pack before he's sent out into the desert so that he can defend himself. Throughout the movie, Ramses proves himself a less-than-perfect ruler for a number of reasons: He's incompetent, he's vain, he makes abominable chewing noises. But cruel, he is not. Evil, he is not. He's a petty failure, one who has the misfortune of helming an empire at the exact moment in history when God decides to issue a smackdown on the Egyptian people.
Ah, yes, God. In another of the movie's absurdities, God is played by an exceptionally creepy small child, one whose skin tone is disturbingly gray and who dresses like a Buddhist monk. He appears occasionally to encourage and taunt Moses, and, eventually, to bring down a series of plagues on the ancient city of Memphis. As the God of the Bible says in the book of Exodus, "I heard the moans of the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians are holding in bondage, and I remembered my covenant."
Despite his slightly bizarre casting choice, Scott deserves credit for making God a serious character in his retelling of the book of Exodus. God is all-powerful, and vengeful, just as he is in the Bible. "For now, you can watch," child-God says to Moses in Exodus before the plagues begin. "Now, you will see what I will do to Pharaoh," God says to Moses in the Bible.
And what a thing to behold. In terms of cinematography, most of Exodus is generically impressive: panoramas of ancient Egypt, fast-paced scenes of battle violence, shots of the pharaoh standing regally on the steps of his giant palace. But the plagues—they are visually distinctive, and striking, and unsettling. We see terrifying crocodile-like creatures, devouring men in two or three bites; the water of the Nile, turning burgundy with blood; and thousands of locusts, swarming people's faces and hands and food and homes. Frogs jump into people's beds and boils cover their faces; cattle die en masse and hail rains down with fury. Darkness falls, and shortly after, the final plague arrives: the death of every Egyptian's firstborn son.
This is affecting. Whenever children are shown dying in movies, it's meant to be sad; when several dozen children are shown dying, it's devastating. The Egyptians were theoretically culpable for the lives they led at the cost of Hebrew slave labor, yes. But to slaughter innocents because of the actions of their leaders—and because their race was not chosen to be part of an ancient covenant—seems appallingly cruel.
Then again, this idea, that whole peoples should be punished for their sins, comes up repeatedly in the Bible. Examples include Sodom and Gomorrah, cities that were destroyed by God, and Nineveh, which ultimately was not. The consequences of sin in ancient times were total and intense; God wiped out quite a few civilizations in the course of crafting early humanity.
It is this side of God—his cruelty, his capriciousness—that Scott emphasizes with his cinematographic choices. What's interesting about Scott’s portrayal of the exodus is the grief he chooses to focus on. Toward the beginning of the film, there are a few shots of Jews toiling in slavery, building statues in honor of the pharaoh and getting beaten by their masters. But there aren't many. Compared to the grief of the Egyptians—who are shown desperately trying to revive their dead livestock and weeping with the bodies of their sons in their hands—the hardship of the Hebrews seems generic, perfunctory, a necessary plot point without much poignance.
This sets up a difficult moral question: Is the freedom of the Hebrews worth more than the lives of Egyptians? God, after all, did not merely liberate the Jews in the spirit of freeing the oppressed; he wiped out Egyptians, per the Bible and per Exodus, because the nation they’d enslaved happened to be his anointed one. Is one people, even the people God has chosen, worth more than another?
This is an impossible question to answer. It depends upon a theory of justice that assigns blame for the system to the individuals that inhabit it. It depends upon the idea that, by designation of God, certain humans can be more holy, or historically worthy, than others; that the accident of birth is enough to determine which side of God's wrath you deserve to be on. This, perhaps, is why "chosenness" is debated, even within the Jewish community; Reconstructionist Jews, for example, reject this idea.
What's interesting about Scott's portrayal of the exodus is the grief he chooses to focus on.
The story of the exodus happened in a different period of human history, when God supposedly walked the earth and vast seas parted and plagues swept the land upon divine command. Even in this context, God's genocidal favoritism is disturbing, which the movie highlights
Today, it seems inexcusable. Not everyone in the world believes all individuals are equal, that all peoples deserve basic human rights, but to a certain extent, the global community has claimed these as its fundamental values. It's no coincidence that the United Nations wrote its Universal Declaration of Human Rights directly following the Holocaust, history's greatest massacre of Jews and other ethnic groups who were deemed genetically inferior by the Nazis.
And yet, most Jews remember the exodus, this story of being championed as God's chosen people, as an essential part of their identity. We were slaves in Egypt, and now we are free. This narrative structure has been reinforced over and over again throughout the history of Judaism, from the Inquisition to Europe's pogroms to the founding of Israel. The exodus is part of how we Jews make sense of our tragic history. At Passover, we dip our pinky fingers into a glass of wine to symbolize each of the 10 plagues, a brief moment in the seder which symbolizes the price of freedom; the rest is mostly focused on the generosity of God, and celebration. We eat matzo to remember how quickly our people fled from their homes. We sing "Dayenu," meaning "enough"—a song full of lines like: It would have been enough "if God had brought us out from Egypt, and had not carried out judgments against our oppressors."
We go through the motions of these rituals, sometimes with boredom, sometimes in earnest, but always in gratitude to a just God. We do not usually mourn the dead sons of ancient Egyptians, because they do not fit cleanly into a narrative of justice.
This is where Exodus succeeds as a piece of art: Although God's chosen people are saved, viewers are forced to confront the loss left behind them. It's a subtle reworking of the narrative, a shift in emphasis that challenges a deep part of Jewish identity. It would be wrong to call this anti-Semitic; Scott clearly has empathy for the Jews, and for Moses. But as Mel Gibson made choices in The Passion of the Christ that challenged the framing of the death of Jesus, so Scott takes up a central aspect of Jewish identity—one that undoubtedly shapes the community's politics and religious practice today. When one people are chosen, others must suffer.
For some Jews, this may just be part of the truth they embrace as believers—that the world we live in is unfair, and unjust, and unequal, but by birthright, the Jewish people have a covenant with God. For me, at least, it’s unsettling—and an undeniably relevant moral challenge. Must the freedom of the Jews come at the price of others’ lives?
At the end of the movie, Moses sits with his brother, Aaron, on the shores of the Red Sea. He looks out at the many thousands of slaves who just escaped from Egypt, who are about to begin 40 years of wandering in the desert.
"What happens when we start running?" Moses asks Aaron. It's a confusing line, one that seems to imply meaning more than communicate it. But given the history of the Jews, a people pursued, cursed, oppressed, and set apart from others everywhere they've gone, it's a heady implication. Even in ancient Egypt, Scott seems to say, Moses understood that the Jews would be a people who flee—and that this pursuit of freedom sometimes comes with moral complications.
When a child sees a parent die, experiences severe poverty, or witnesses neighborhood violence, it can leave a permanent mark on her brain. This type of unmitigated, long-term "toxic stress" can affect a person's cardiovascular health, immune system, and mental health into adulthood.
“If you have a whole bunch of bad experiences growing up, you set up your brain in such a way that it’s your expectation that that’s what life is about,” James Perrin, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me recently.
A new study in the journal Health Affairs finds that nearly half of all children in the U.S. have experienced one such social or family-related trauma.
Here's how the report authors found that number, according to the release:
For the study, [Johns Hopkins University family-health professor Christina] Bethell and her colleagues analyzed data from the 2011-12 National Survey of Children's Health, a survey of parents of 95,677 children under 17 from throughout the United States. The survey included questions about nine adverse childhood experiences as reported by parents: extreme economic hardship, parental divorce/separation, lived with someone with a drug or alcohol problem, witness or victim of neighborhood violence, lived with someone who was mentally ill or suicidal, witnessed domestic violence, parent served time in jail, treated or judged unfairly due to race/ethnicity, and the death of a parent. The survey includes myriad data on family and neighborhood environments and parental well-being in addition to children's schooling and medical care, and contains some data about child resilience.
The study found that 48 percent of children have experienced one of these childhood traumas, and 23 percent experienced two or more. But kids in some states fared worse than others. New Jersey had the lowest percentage of children with two or more traumas, at 16 percent, while Oklahoma had the highest, at 33 percent. Here's a map showing the general ranking of the states:
Percentage of Children Who Have Experienced at Least Two Traumas, Compared to the National Average
Prevalence of kids who experienced at least two traumas, compared to the U.S. average (Health Affairs)
Children exposed to at least two traumas were 2.5 times more likely to repeat a grade or to be disengaged with their classwork, compared to those who had no such experiences. They were also much more likely than the others to suffer from chronic health problems, such as asthma, ADHD, autism, and obesity.
This was true even after adjusting for race, income, and health status. Put another way, this means that even if a child is born into the best of circumstances, just two hyper-stressful events can send him on a downward development spiral.
Doctors and teachers can mitigate the negative effects of these experiences by providing kids with emotional support, the study authors note, as well as with "neurological repair methods, such as mindfulness training." The authors also recommend "trauma-informed" medical care for these children—a type of treatment that takes their turbulent home lives into account. For example, for a traumatized child between six and 17 years of age, it might be helpful to learn techniques such as "staying calm and in control when faced with a challenge."
That's good advice for any of us, but for nearly half of American children, it might be an essential, life-saving strategy.
Friedersdorf: In television, the penultimate episode of a season often packs in lots of plot advances while building to the climax of a story arc. But the second-to-last episode of Serial, "Rumors," is tangential to the story of Adnan Syed and the murder that he did or did not commit.
Has this podcast run out of steam?
Sarah Koenig makes much of a rumor that, as an eighth grader, Adnan stole money from the collection boxes at his mosque. Adnan subsequently admits he did steal, though he is frustrated that she's bringing up a shameful memory. What, he wonders, does that have to do with his case?
If there's a good answer, I don't know it.
Later in the episode, there's speculation with an expert witness who has interviewed a lot of killers about whether Adnan could be a psychopath, or could have convinced himself that he never committed a murder even after doing it, or could have done it without even realizing his crime.
None of the analysis that's offered goes very far toward providing solid answers. So why this particular aside?
Adnan's appearance at the end of the episode is the only part I found interesting. He writes Koenig a letter explaining that from the outset he’s endeavored to try to prove his case to her based on the facts. This is ostensibly a defense mechanism against people believing him to be untrustworthy. If he's being candid, there is a certain irony to his attempted approach. As a Redditor put it, "Charming guy charms reporter, later writes letter explaining he was trying to not be charming lest he be accused of trying to charm reporter."
It now seems overwhelmingly likely that Serial will end in ambiguity, though Adnan's story may well outlive it depending on whether or not the Innocence Project finds any useful evidence. I still have hopes that the last episode will be better than this week's effort–my least favorite, by far.
Are there redeeming qualities that I am missing?
Basu: My immediate reaction to this week's episode? A yawn, I kid you not.
Perhaps the yawn was because of early-morning working hours. But probably it was also because of how boring this installment turned out to be. For an episode previewed last week with the provocative drop of the word “psychopath” and titled "Rumors," I had high expectations for something that was as riveting as last week's deft handling of white-reporter-privilege allegations and vivid profile of Cristina Gutierrez.
This week, Koenig focused on following up on rumors that hinted at a potential duplicitousness in Adnan's character. One rumor she mentions is unnamed besides hinting at something about Adnan that, if it were true, would implode the entire case and Koenig’s efforts. Koenig tracks down a guest of a long-ago party who allegedly started this rumor, drives several hours expecting the worst, and gets a blank stare in return.
The second rumor has more evidence behind it: Adnan and a small posse of young congregants stole money from Friday prayer donations at the local mosque frequently. The total amount ranges from being some chump change to thousands of dollars, but there are eyewitness accounts and verification from Adnan himself. However, Koenig asks, does being a thief a murderer make? Not necessarily, and Koenig spends the rest of the episode talking to a particularly bland criminal psychologist who verifies what we all sort of know: Murders of passion are often done in a blind rage. Those that commit such murders might not remember what they've done in the moment, and when confronted with evidence that they have, hurriedly try to cover it up. It takes an extreme emotional manipulator—and only here is the word psychopath correctly, clinically used—to murder and maintain innocence.
In terms of knowledge gleaned and narrative intrigue, this episode was a flat line of meh-ness.
As I pondered this episode, I realized something unsettling about myself, and perhaps every other Serial listener: I expected something sensational. As a journalist, I was a bit ashamed to come to this realization. The foundation of journalism, after all, is facts. As they say at J-school, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Koenig, in this respect, followed the proper protocol. She did the grunt work of following up on leads, she talked to experts, she explored every possible avenue of every lead, no matter how incredulous she was or how bombastic the accusation. She has been a relatively unbiased investigative journalist doing what she's supposed to, and here we get a glimpse of how unsexy and tedious research and fact-checking can be.
In a week that has resurfaced the Rolling Stone UVA story and condemnations of reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely who appeared to fudge her handling of sexual-assault allegations, Koenig shows us that she’s a journalist, first and foremost. A story can be sensational by nature, and can be a source of intrigue, but in the end, there are real costs. There are humans involved, with emotions and livelihoods and reputations. It's a journalist's frighteningly awesome job to collect these stories and tell them without bias, insofar as that’s possible. We're reminded that this sometimes means a story entails just plain, dry facts.
What has made Serial essential water-cooler fodder has been its unpredictably meandering turns, its morally gray characters and compelling plot, its capability to appeal to what ultimately defines a good story: emotional investment. But what we have to remember is that facts, in the end, are a reporter’s priority even if they’re often tearfully boring.
Kilkenny: In keeping with her recent habit of studying characters rather than the evidence involved in Hae's murder, this week Sarah turned her microscope on us. The listeners, or alternatively, the world—anyone who has ever perpetuated rumors and lent them credence. Sarah tries not to partake in that habit, instead using this episode to expose the errors in the rumors circulating about Adnan, even if the results aren’t exciting.
In the midst of it all we learn any one character trait is interpreted a thousand different ways by his acquaintances. Adnan tends to put people at ease, which one old friend remembers fondly: Adnan always made sure his less athletic buddy got picked for teams in gym class. Another interprets this same character trait to mean he was always deceptively looking for ways to defuse the “heat.” This is not a particularly thrilling revelation, but it also shows Serial at its best. For the time she’s tracking down rumors, Sarah Koenig is a dispassionate journalist superhero who substantiates and unsubstantiates all claims, no matter how ridiculous or seemingly inconsequential (a.k.a. stealing money at the mosque).
For that portion of the episode she is, as Adnan puts it so well, either his savior or his executioner.
But towards the end, Sarah becomes a sentimental storyteller. After he writes her a letter saying he wished the Serial scrutiny would stop, she expresses some misgivings about having exposed Adnan’s story, noting that she has been “stirring up the most painful possible questions about whether he’s a monster.” Sorry, Sarah, but that’s a journalistic cop-out. She’s backtracking, reverting to the fact that Rabia initially handed her the story, that she’s re-opening a case that makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable, most of all Adnan. We already know this stuff. As Conor noted, too, the letter contains some bullshit: Adnan hasn’t restrained himself from turning on the charm with her. Honestly, if that’s his 1% charm level, I shudder to think what maniacal villainous beneficence he could unleash at 100%.
Serial has become so important because it’s captivating viewers just as it severely complicates how we usually take our storytelling, even when it comes to true crime. So when Sarah pulls on the heartstrings for Adnan and implicates herself, I get angry. Sarah’s a reporter, she’s not beholden to the wishes of her source, who is a potential murderer who is talking to her willingly and is getting a lot of listeners, even fans, for it. We're not beholden to have the story end just because he wants it to. (Maybe, probably, I just don't want it to end.)
So here's my message for Sarah: Keep your backbone. As you go into the final episode, give us more of the savior-executioner. She's the one who's making Serial so great.
Cruz: Let’s see if I can’t channel Adnan here and diffuse some of the heat in this conversation. So you all essentially agree that this episode was boring; you make a lot of reference to journalistic this and reporter that. Katie and Tanya were expecting something more sensational. Conor and Katie think Adnan was full of it when he said he didn’t want to manipulate Sarah, only to give her the facts.
OK. So, the facts. Yes, journalists are beholden to telling the truth as best they can, verifying leads here, checking out sources there. And yes, Sarah’s a journalist, and journalists tell stories. In some ways, it’s very kind of you to blame the alleged boring-ness of this latest episode on Sarah doing her duty to serve impartiality by any means. But journalists don’t just tell stories, because they’re true. Journalists do not traffic in fact-relaying or data distribution.
Journalists try to tell interesting stories! Often, journalists spend hours and hours of interviewing different sources to figure out if the story they want to tell is worth the time the audience puts in to paying attention. Every journalist, or writer for that matter, should try to answer the question: Why should anyone care? Why does this matter? Sarah told us in the first episode why she’s telling this story, and it’s not because there’s a point to telling Adnan’s story specifically: She picked this story because it came to her, almost literally landed on her desk. That’s it. That, and people started to listen.
If this were a truly journalistic endeavor, she would have checked out all the leads, gathered all her information ahead of time, and created a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. She would have come to a conclusion; by now, no one is exactly expecting a real conclusion when next week’s final episode rolls around. In other words, if Serial were a purely journalistic effort, Adnan’s case probably wouldn’t have made for a good story. That’s not to say that what happened to him doesn’t matter, or that his case doesn’t have incredibly compelling elements, or that his situation doesn’t throw into sharp relief problems with the U.S. criminal justice system. But a major part of the appeal of Serial is the ability to follow along, to play detective alongside a journalist who is also playing detective (and savior, and executioner, and entertainer, and confidante, and so many other things).
If we strip away the snowballing, communal fascination, Serial is just Sarah telling a story without doing all the legwork ahead of time to figure out if there will a satisfying ending, a payoff in the traditional sense. If it fluctuates from exhilarating or boring from week to week, that's just the nature of this particular podcast. Exploiting Adnan and all the curious, ugly parts of his case was inevitable. Serial was destined to have to publicly work out the weird, ambiguous, unanswerable questions of the nature of knowledge, something that journalists rarely do. The nonlinear, jolting from subject to subject every week—also unavoidable.
I understand the urge to treat Serial like a TV show or a piece of pure reportage and arrange our expectations accordingly. But to do so is also unfair and misunderstands the limitations of the weird cross-genre space in which Serial lies. So if the season feels like it’s limping to the finish line, it’s doing so for the same reasons that made Serial so appealing in the first place.
It wasn't until her death, in 1886, that the true scale of Emily Dickinson's profound poetry was both discovered and appreciated by family and friends, many of whom had only glimpsed her talents in the numerous poem-filled letters that she wrote. She found an even wider audience in 1890 with the posthumous publication of a volume of her work; a collection of her letters followed in 1894. Her most frequent correspondent, and a person now thought to have been the inspiration for much of her passionate material, was close friend (and, from 1856 onwards, sister-in-law) Susan Huntington Gilbert, a lady who provoked some undeniably intimate and romantic letters from the poet, the intensity of which to this day generate speculation about their relationship.
I have but one thought, Susie, this afternoon of June, and that of you, and I have one prayer, only; dear Susie, that is for you. That you and I in hand as we e'en do in heart, might ramble away as children, among the woods and fields, and forget these many years, and these sorrowing cares, and each become a child again — I would it were so, Susie, and when I look around me and find myself alone, I sigh for you again; little sigh, and vain sigh, which will not bring you home.
I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider, and dear ones fewer and fewer, every day that you stay away — I miss my biggest heart; my own goes wandering round, and calls for Susie — Friends are too dear to sunder, Oh they are far too few, and how soon they will go away where you and I cannot find them, dont let us forget these things, for their remembrance now will save us many an anguish when it is too late to love them! Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say — my heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here — and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language — I try to bring you nearer, I chase the weeks away till they are quite departed, and fancy you have come, and I am on my way through the green lane to meet you, and my heart goes scampering so, that I have much ado to bring it back again, and learn it to be patient, till that dear Susie comes. Three weeks — they cant last always, for surely they must go with their little brothers and sisters to their long home in the west!
I shall grow more and more impatient until that dear day comes, for till now, I have only mourned for you; now I begin to hope for you.
Dear Susie, I have tried hard to think what you would love, of something I might send you — I at last saw my little Violets, they begged me to let them go, so here they are — and with them as Instructor, a bit of knightly grass, who also begged the favor to accompany them — they are but small, Susie, and I fear not fragrant now, but they will speak to you of warm hearts at home, and of the something faithful which “never slumbers nor sleeps” — Keep them 'neath your pillow, Susie, they will make you dream of blue-skies, and home, and the “blessed contrie”! You and I will have an hour with “Edward” and “Ellen Middleton”, sometime when you get home — we must find out if some things contained therein are true, and if they are, what you and me are coming to!
Now, farewell, Susie, and Vinnie sends her love, and mother her's, and I add a kiss, shyly, lest there is somebody there! Dont let them see, will you Susie?
Emilie —
Why cant I be the delegate to the great Whig Convention? — dont I know all about Daniel Webster, and the Tariff, and the Law? Then, Susie I could see you, during a pause in the session — but I dont like this country at all, and I shant stay here any longer! “Delenda est” America, Massachusetts and all!
open me carefully
RSS Feed proudly sponsored by TinyLetter, a simple newsletter service for people with something to say.
It's difficult to overstate my love for this wonderful letter of thanks, written in 1982 by the late Jack Lemmon. It was sent to friend and fellow actor, Burt Reynolds, in response to a donation made to the Jack Lemmon Burn Center—one can only hope that Lemmon thanked all donors in a similarly amusing manner.
This precious letter is currently being sold at auction.
It has come to my attention that you sent a contribution of $10,000 to the Jack Lemmon Burn Center in the Children's Hospital of Buffalo.
I just wanted to say that I'm sorry that you couldn't come up with a sizable contribution, but God knows after all these years I, as much as anyone, understand the ups and downs of this crazy business. Some years are good, some years are bad, and even though you're obviously on the shit list, I certainly appreciate the fact that you made some kind of effort no matter how meager.
I do think it is important for me to clarify an area of possible confusion on your part. Burn Centre has nothing to do with critical reaction to your work. However, it's too fucking late so we're going to keep the money and help a hell of a lot of kids.
One of these days I'm going to work with you even if it kills me (and it probably will).
Many thanks, and love,
(Signed)
JL:bk
cc: Lee B. Winkler
RSS Feed proudly sponsored by TinyLetter, a simple newsletter service for people with something to say.
After the Senate released its torture report, Michael Hayden, who formerly led both the CIA and the NSA, granted an interview to NBC News. Under questioning by Brian Williams, he provided no persuasive rebuttal to the report's findings. But he did offer a defense of America's intelligence community that doubles as an unwitting indictment of the country's leadership in the post-9/11 era. Here's what Hayden said as if it reflects well on the people who were in charge:
I was in government for ten years after 9/11, and let me tell ya, a phrase I never heard from anybody in any position of authority: 'Whatever you guys do about this terrorism threat, please, please don't overreact.' Never heard it, Brian.
Like so much of what Hayden says, this is factually false. Members of Congress were in a position of Constitutional authority, and some pleaded with the Bush Administration to avoid overreacting to 9/11, as Russ Feingold and Barbara Lee can attest. But let's suppose Hayden was speaking of executive branch authority figures, in accordance with the dangerous but common view that the executive is all powerful in emergencies. It's believable that neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney nor Don Rumsfeld warned bureaucrats beneath them against overreacting to the terror threat.
What's staggering is that Hayden still hasn't figured out what a catastrophic misstep that was. Overreacting to the terrorist threat caused the U.S. to launch a war of choice against Iraq that killed thousands more Americans than Osama Bin Laden did at a cost expected to reach $6 trillion, plus thousands of lost limbs and PTSD cases. Overreacting to terrorism caused intrusive ethnic profiling of New York City Muslims that led to zero terrorism leads and intrusive surveillance on the phone calls of American citizens that stopped zero terror plots.
One needn't be a particularly sophisticated student of terrorist-group tactics to understand that a superpower can harm itself more by overreacting than by doing too little. As David Kilcullen told Jim Fallows, "It’s al-Qaeda plus our response that creates the existential danger.” But if Hayden is to be believed, no one in a position of authority ever warned him to be wary of going too far, and he apparently lacked the prudence and foresight to guard against such excesses for himself.
Many American officials performed no better. Thus the world we live in today.
With one successful plot that killed 3,000 people, Osama Bin Laden baited America's ruling class into multiple foreign invasions, significant abrogations of civil liberties, and a loss of moral high ground as the world gazed in horror at our descent into torture. Yet an experienced intel official still finds it absurd to think he should've taken more care not to overreact. His heuristics are a poor guide to reality.
"If it's in a word, or it's in a look, you can't get rid of the Babadook."
So begins a mysterious children's pop-up book filled with eerie white charcoal drawings of an overcoated, Slenderman-like figure. The book and the spooky creature inside are ostensibly the big marketing hooks for the independent Australian psychohorror-meets-monster-story The Babadook, which debuted at Sundance earlier this year, months before a quiet Nov. 28 release in select U.S. theaters and VOD.
Promotional materials for horror films often try to tell audiences what kind of scary movie to expect. Is it a creepy doll movie? A haunted object movie? Freaky body horror? Possession movie? Another Paranormal Activity sequel? And so The Babadook got billed according to its most salient horror element: the monster.
Those lucky enough to have already seen the movie, which the director of The Exorcist called the most terrifying film he'd ever seen, quickly realized it wasn't quite about the titular boogeyman itself, nor was it about his evil book-vessel that haunts Amelia and her son Sam, whose father was killed in a car crash while driving his pregnant wife to the hospital to deliver him. Many reviews noted how the film gave form and voice to the unspoken horrors and pains of parenting, specifically motherhood, through the metaphor of an insanity-inducing demon.
First-time feature director Jennifer Kent admitted as much to Rolling Stone, saying "It really was connecting to that woman and her journey towards staring something nightmarish in the face. As the film progresses, you start to realize: Oh my God, the kid was right—and that's where the fear is for me."
But motherhood is inextricably tied in with childhood—there's the one doing the mothering and the one being mothered. And yet it's easier to focus on Essie Davis's increasingly wild-eyed, unhinged widow as the protagonist and the monster as a manifestation of her own unspoken grief than it is to focus on the trauma of her son, played with measured brilliance by Noah Wiseman.
Perhaps that's because Sam's behavior early in the film is the kind that could make for an effective birth-control ad campaign. Sam brings homemade weapons to school, obliviously tells uncomfortable strangers about the sad tale of his birth, throws poltergeist-like tantrums, pushes little girls out of tree houses, and worst of all, won't let his poor mother sleep. As the Boston Globe notes, "It’s tough at times to decide who’s the worse nightmare, 6-year-old Sam or...the Babadook. "
Part of this is just Sam being a kid. But it also turns out that his more maddening and arguably disturbing traits—the anger, anxiety-induced seizures, screaming, and risk-taking—fit the behavioral profile of a traumatized boy, according to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. Look past the horror trope of the Satanic or disturbed little boy seen in The Omen, The Ring, and The Sixth Sense, and you'll find a child struggling to deal with the loss of a father he never knew, and Amelia's subsequent, deeply buried resentment toward him—in a completely normal way.
As Amelia succumbs to her madness—a harrowing blend of insomnia and cabin fever—Sam seems to grow more innocent. He's hungry. He's tired. He's scared. And even as Amelia withdraws, turning more violent, Sam is keen enough to understand that the woman who's screaming slurs at him and neglecting him isn't really his mother. She ignored his pleas ("Don't let it in! Don't let it in! Don't let it in!"), but it's still clear that when he told his mother "I promise to protect you if you promise to protect me," he meant it. He saved her, ultimately, with a soft touch on the cheek as she attempted to strangle him. In other words, with his intuitive, stubborn love. (Indeed, personal growth is a frequent result of loss for children).
The film is reminiscent of the 30-minute short film The Grandmother by David Lynch, whom Kent has cited as an influence (the auteur's has a singularapproach to horror). Like The Babadook, the title of Lynch's 1970 film is just misdirection; the story isn't about the "grandmother," but the young boy who yearns for her as a source of affection. Lynch's mostly dialogue-free film delves into the twisted psyche of a disturbed, but ultimately sympathetic child who retreats into fantasy as a way to survive (even if his ending isn't quite as hopeful as Kent's).
The Babadook isn’t a tool to help children cope with grief (there are plenty of other films better up to the task), but the film does a sensitive job of portraying the special and confusing way children handle bereavement, and the way exasperated adults often misinterpret and obstruct that process.
The film has a solid grasp on the mutable, but ever-present pain of loss. The Babadook is particularly special for allowing its monster to live, even if it's locked in the basement, acknowledging that Sam and Amelia's shared darkness isn't a parasite to be eradicated. Amelia eventually learns that she can't fully insulate her son from her sadness; but she slowly allows him to recover in his own way, by having a birthday party, by collecting a can of worms to feed the new family member trapped downstairs. Turns out the book was right all along: You can't get rid of the Babadook, but you can at least learn to live with him.
When it comes to buying gifts for children, everything is color-coded: Rigid boundaries segregate brawny blue action figures from pretty pink princesses, and most assume that this is how it’s always been. But in fact, the princess role that’s ubiquitous in girls’ toys today was exceedingly rare prior to the 1990s—and the marketing of toys is more gendered now than even 50 years ago, when gender discrimination and sexism were the norm.
In my research on toy advertisements, I found that even when gendered marketing was most pronounced in the 20th century, roughly half of toys were still being advertised in a gender-neutral manner. This is a stark difference from what we see today, as businesses categorize toys in a way that more narrowly forces kids into boxes. For example, a recent study by sociologists Carol Auster and Claire Mansbach found that all toys sold on the Disney Store’s website were explicitly categorized as being “for boys” or “for girls”—there was no “for boys and girls” option, even though a handful of toys could be found on both lists.
That is not to say that toys of the past weren’t deeply infused with gender stereotypes. Toys for girls from the 1920s to the 1960s focused heavily on domesticity and nurturing. For example, a 1925 Sears ad for a toy broom-and-mop set proclaimed: “Mothers! Here is a real practical toy for little girls. Every little girl likes to play house, to sweep, and to do mother’s work for her":
An ad from a 1925 Sears catalog (Sears)
Such toys were clearly designed to prepare young girls to a life of homemaking, and domestic tasks were portrayed as innately enjoyable for women. Ads like this were still common, though less prevalent, into the 1960s—a budding housewife would have felt right at home with the toys to “delight the little homemaker” in the 1965 Sears Wishbook:
An ad from the 1965 Sears Wishbook (Sears)
While girls’ toys focused on domesticity, toys for boys from the '20s through the '60s emphasized preparation for working in the industrial economy. For example, a 1925 Sears ad for an Erector Set stated, “Every boy likes to tinker around and try to build things. With an Erector Set he can satisfy this inclination and gain mental development without apparent effort. … He will learn the fundamentals of engineering”:
An ad from a 1925 Sears catalog (Sears)
However, gender-coded toy advertisements like these declined markedly in the early 1970s. By then, there were many more women in the labor force and, after the Baby Boom, marriage and fertility rates had dropped. In the wake of those demographic shifts and at the height of feminism's second-wave, playing upon gender stereotypes to sell toys had become a risky strategy. In the Sears catalog ads from 1975, less than 2 percent of toys were explicitly marketed to either boys or girls. More importantly, there were many ads in the ‘70s that actively challenged gender stereotypes—boys were shown playing with domestic toys and girls were shown building and enacting stereotypically masculine roles such as doctor, carpenter, and scientist:
In the 1970s, Sears catalogues had a higher proportion of gender-neutral advertisements. (Sears)
Although gender inequality in the adult world continued to diminish between the 1970s and 1990s, the de-gendering trend in toys was short-lived. In 1984, the deregulation of children’s television programming suddenly freed toy companies to create program-length advertisements for their products, and gender became an increasingly important differentiator of these shows and the toys advertised alongside them. During the 1980s, gender-neutral advertising receded, and by 1995, gendered toys made up roughly half of the Sears catalog’s offerings—the same proportion as during the interwar years.
However, late-century marketing relied less on explicit sexism and more on implicit gender cues, such as color, and new fantasy-based gender roles like the beautiful princess or the muscle-bound action hero. These roles were still built upon regressive gender stereotypes—they portrayed a powerful, skill-oriented masculinity and a passive, relational femininity—that were obscured with bright new packaging. In essence, the "little homemaker" of the 1950s had become the "little princess" we see today.
It doesn’t have to be this way. While gender is what’s traditionally used to sort target markets, the toy industry (which is largely run by men) could categorize its customers in a number of other ways—in terms of age and interest, for example. (This could arguably broaden the consumer base.) However, the reliance on gender categorization comes from the top: I found no evidence that the trends of the past 40 years are the result of consumer demand. That said, the late-20th-century increase in the percentage of Americans who believe in gender differences suggests that the public wasn’t exactly rejecting gendered toys, either.
While the second-wave feminist movement challenged the tenets of gender difference, the social policies to create a level playing field were never realized and a cultural backlash towards feminism began to gain momentum in the 1980s. In this context, the model outlined in Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus—which implied that women gravitated toward certain roles not because of oppression but because of some innate preference—took hold. This new tale of gender difference, which emphasizes freedom and choice, has been woven deeply into the fabric of contemporary childhood. The reformulated story does not fundamentally challenge gender stereotypes; it merely repackages them to make them more palatable in a “post-feminist” era. Girls can be anything—as long as it’s passive and beauty-focused.
Many who embrace the new status quo in toys claim that gender-neutrality would be synonymous with taking away choice, in essence forcing children to become androgynous automatons who can only play with boring tan objects. However, as the bright palette and diverse themes found among toys from the ‘70s demonstrates, decoupling them from gender actually widens the range of options available. It opens up the possibility that children can explore and develop their diverse interests and skills, unconstrained by the dictates of gender stereotypes. And ultimately, isn’t that what we want for them?
Facebook has released its annual Year in Review lists for 2014, and they are pretty grim.
In case you needed a reminder of how terrible things were this year, here are the top 10 topics in the United States:
1.Ebola Virus Outbreak
2. Ice Bucket Challenge
3. Robin Williams
4. Super Bowl
5. Michael Brown & Ferguson
6. World Cup
7. Conflict in Gaza
8. Midterm Elections
9. Malaysia Airlines
10. ISIS
Basically lots of horrible deaths and tragedies, but… Ice Bucket Challenge! Yay!
World-wide, the World Cup was the number 1 topic, with Ebola and the Brazil elections in spots 2 and 3.
Other notable winners: Beyonce topped the entertainers category, LeBron James was the most discussed athlete, "Game of Thrones" was the top TV show, "Frozen' the top movie, and Pharrell's "Happy" was the top song.
Facebook even made a top ten list just for the best Ice Bucket Challenge videos - a phenomenon that the company considers a milestone in terms of social sharing - topped by George W. Bush and Will Smith.
"I think the Ice Bucket Challenge was the first time a lot of people realized you could shoot a video and share it," said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer.
You can check out all the lists in depth here.
Paul Gilmartin can spot his listeners well before they introduce themselves to him. They look like they want to cry, and their first words are usually something along the lines of "I just want to say ..." Gilmartin immediately hugs them, and the conversation that follows is far from anything two people who just met would ordinarily hold.
Gilmartin, 51, is the creator and host of The Mental-Illness Happy Hour, a weekly two-hour trudge to the darkest—and most joyful—corners of the human condition. He records the podcast in his hometown of Los Angeles, and the show is built around interviews with celebrities, artists, therapists, and podcast listeners; anonymous surveys; and Gilmartin's narration of his own struggles with depression, addiction, and overcoming sexual abuse. Thirty-five thousand people download the podcast each week, and some episodes—interviews he's held with Marc Maron, Maria Bamford, and Adam Carolla, for example—have been downloaded more than 80,000 times. The Mental-Illness Happy Hour website is home to an active listener forum, and the show's 200th episode aired on November 21.
The podcast serves as a place of community and affirmation for those who struggle with mental illness, including Gilmartin, who has been undergoing treatment for clinical depression since 1999 and has gained clarity on his own issues through talking with his guests and corresponding with his listeners. It was while interviewing comedian Danielle Koenig during episode 16 of the podcast that Gilmartin realized on-air that he had been molested by a neighbor as a young boy, and the revelation that he was a survivor of incest began its slow simmer while talking with radio personality Phil Hendrie on episode 59.
"We kind of compared notes and had the same creepy mom that had no boundaries," Gilmartin said in a Skype interview from the Dubuque Food and Wine Festival in Iowa in early November, where he was emceeing the event and serving as grand marshal of the festival's parade from a horse and buggy.
Ironically enough, Gilmartin has been sober since 2003, but prior to that, he read about wine all the time and kept his bottles in a temperature-controlled locker. “I drank wine every single night,” he said. “I didn't think I was an alcoholic. I just thought I was classy.”
Though his career has shifted almost entirely towards the world of mental health, Gilmartin remains well-known for his successes in the world of stand-up comedy and entertainment. He began performing stand-up in 1987, hosted TBS' Dinner and a Movie from 1995 to 2011, and has done the rounds at the Montreal and Aspen Comedy Festivals. You can still find his performances on YouTube and The Adam Carolla Show as the faux Congressman Richard Martin, a Republican from Ohio who believes religious extremism can be "crushed with God's help." Levity and humor also keep the podcast from being overwhelmingly heavy, and listeners can expect a dick joke every now and again, in between tales of binge eating, drug dealing and coping mechanisms.
Paul Gilmartin, host of The Mental-Illness Happy Hour (Paul Armstrong)
"[Dr. Zucker] started pulling things out of me and walking me through it, and it was just like a dam broke," Gilmartin said. "By the time I posted the episode it was clear, and I cut contact with my mom." During episode 58 (recorded after the interview with Hendrie but aired beforehand), Gilmartin confronted the truth about his relationship with his mother for the first time: He had been a victim of incest. He was speaking with Dr. Jessica Zucker, a clinical psychologist who specializes in women's health, and about halfway through their conversation, Gilmartin's mother came up, along with her habit of grabbing his butt until he was in his mid-20s.
Gilmartin is all about getting into the grit, and this is why so many people listen to his podcast, take his surveys, pour their hearts out to him in emails, and walk up to him to say thank you, eyes full of mist. All psychiatric disorders are discussed and treated with empathy on The Mental-Illness Happy Hour, simply because Gilmartin feels that the more people can talk about their issues, the less others will be hurt by them. And perhaps people are genuinely curious about the inner workings of the unwell mind—Gilmartin's interview with Dr. David Hirohama, a counselor who worked with rapists and child molesters at Coalinga State Hospital in California, was the third most-listened to episode of 2013.
"We're all so related in so many ways," Gilmartin said. "Everybody has a dark side and a light side. And I'd like to think that the podcast is a really safe place to talk about their dark side, because there aren't many places that we can do that."
Gilmartin has put feelers out for interviews with serial killers, pedophiles, and rapists in efforts to push the limits of our understanding of one another, no matter our thoughts or actions. However, he says he won't interview someone who is planning on hurting someone, nor will he interview someone if he feels it's the wrong time—if they're in the midst of a breakdown or a relapse, for example. This, Gilmartin says, would be exploitative.
Between the hundreds of interviews he's conducted, the thousands of listener surveys he reads, and the extensive email correspondence he maintains with his listeners, Gilmartin finds that depression and anxiety are the most common ailments suffered. In fact, it was Gilmartin's own depression—or rather his emergence from it—that inspired him to create The Mental-Illness Happy Hour podcast in the first place. It was the holiday season of 2010, five months after he had stopped taking Wellbutrin, Celexa, and BuSpar for depression and anxiety, and darkness had descended over his life in a seemingly permanent way.
"When I realized, 'Oh my god, this is the depression!' I went back on my meds and within three, four days was feeling fine," he said. "I was like, 'I have to talk about this. I have to get the word out there.' Because I've been in therapy for years; I've been [going] to support groups for years; I've been seeing a psychiatrist for years, and I was [still] fooled by it. I thought about all the people who have never had any of those things, and what they're up against—thinking that [depression] is reality."
The first episode of The Mental-Illness Happy Hour aired in March of 2011, and it featured an interview with Janet Varney, Gilmartin's former co-host on Dinner and a Movie. She, too, suffered from depression and anxiety, as well as panic attacks and a habit for soothing herself with sugar.
The Mental-Illness Happy Hour now serves as Gilmartin's full-time job, though not one that pays very well. Between listener donations, podcast advertisers, and speaking gigs, he makes the equivalent of what would be a minimum-wage job—but according to Gilmartin, it's the greatest minimum-wage job you could ever imagine having. His wife works as a sitcom writer and takes care of most of the bills, allowing him to keep the podcast free for whoever needs it. Gilmartin says he also gets more fulfillment from producing the show than he ever did while making a name and money for himself in the world of entertainment.
"I don't come to this out of a sense of altruism," he said. "Maybe I started it because I thought I'd be good at it and it would help people. But I wouldn't be doing it three years later if I wasn't comforted by it. And I love that people say it helps them. I love it, love it, love it."
The Mental-Illness Happy Hour is not all healing tears and recovery breakthroughs. Gilmartin wades through people's gnarliest thoughts, compulsions, and confessions day in and day out, and he sometimes gets triggered and overwhelmed by the volume and intensity of it all. He can only get through between 10 and 20 responses to his abuse-focused "Shame and Secrets" survey in a sitting due to their heaviness, and he currently has a backlog of about 100 responses to sort through before he reads them on the air.
"Sometimes the best I can do is to say, 'I'm so sorry you're feeling that way, I'm so sorry this happened to you," Gilmartin said, describing how he handles the heaviest emails. "'That must be really hard. I want to encourage you to go talk to someone who's qualified because this is too much. This is over my head.'"
As Gilmartin nears his fourth year of producing The Mental-Illness Happy Hour, he's looking to get another idea off the ground, one that could provide instant solace to those in need: an app, similar to Twitter or Tinder, that would allow people who are experiencing an intense emotion to connect to other people and get support.
Gilmartin thinks such an app could play a small part in preventing child abuse, financial collapse, and even war. When you boil down addiction, murder, and greed to its base parts, he says, you'll find a hurt person at the bottom of the pot, a person expressing themselves in the only way they can. Destigmatize that person's condition, give them affordable healthcare and a safe place to process, and you're on your way to nipping 90 percent of society's problems in the bud, he believes.
"Our only other problem would be the weather," he said.
I still remember the first time someone spoke to me about grit. It wasn’t when I lost my dad and saw my mother fall apart.
It wasn’t when my mother died, and I felt like I was falling apart.
It wasn’t when people who I believed would invest in my business didn’t. It wasn’t when the great recession hit our advertisers and my business had to stop publishing a magazine.
It was when I was thinking of pulling my 3-year-old out of a preschool in which she clearly wasn’t thriving. She was anxious, frozen, a shadow of the child she used to be before she started there.
But it was a co-op preschool, meaning I couldn’t just turn around and leave. When you sign up to join a co-op, you also sign up to work various jobs around the school and to commit to being an active part of a larger community. In other words, I had to talk to the other parents at the co-op about my decision. One of them cautioned me: "What about grit?" she said. For a minute, I was taken aback. Was she talking about me or my 3-year-old?
She wasn’t talking about me.
It shouldn’t have shocked my system. I’ve often felt like a misfit around parents when they talk about how kids have it too easy these days or how important it is to inculcate a sense of independence in them as early as possible.
This is the story of my struggle to allow myself to be the kind of parent I want to be. I grew up in India, but moved to the U.S. in my 20s and became a mother here in my 30s. I had never felt like an outsider, ever—until I had a child.
I read a lot of books so that I would be the best mom I could be. And I suddenly found myself wondering, did the Indian parents I saw in my parents’ generation—and many in mine—get it wrong? My father was a big believer in the importance of a child’s first five years. I often heard him tell people how he couldn’t scold me until I was five. He reprimanded his younger brother for raising his voice at his kids before they turned five. Raised voices or not, we didn’t have any concept of time-outs anywhere around us. I can’t recall a time when I cried and a grown up didn’t come to console or hold me. They always did. I slept with my mother until I was five. My father would tease me and say I was my mother’s tail, but neither of them did anything to get me to sleep alone or in a different room with my siblings.
My parents weren’t the only ones with this kind of approach. The phrase I would hear in almost every home we visited during my childhood was some version of 'Let the kids enjoy themselves.' They have the rest of their lives to be grown up. And the social fabric of our world supported them. We would go to the fanciest of restaurants with our parents and run around and play tag. No one would stop us—not the managers, not the other diners. It was normal. Soon enough, the servers would join in. It was lovely.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that my parents and their friends necessarily had it right. Some of them produced kids who were happy, some of them didn’t; some of them raised CEOs, some of them raised stay-at-home moms. I’m just saying that it’s okay to be an elephant mom, an elephant dad—an elephant parent.
If you’re wondering what 'elephant parent' means, it’s the kind of parent who does the exact opposite of what the tiger mom, the ultra-strict disciplinarian, does. Here’s a short video clip that shows how real elephants parent. And that’s what I’m writing about here—parents who believe that they need to nurture, protect, and encourage their children, especially when they’re still impressionable and very, very young.
My elephant mom was a doctor with infinite patience. I failed a Hindi test when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I remember going to her, teary-eyed, with my results—and hearing her tell me that it didn’t matter. There were many more tests ahead. As I sobbed in her lap, she stroked my hair, hugged me, and told me there would be another test, and I could pass that one. (I did get the annual proficiency prize for Hindi a year later at the same school.)
My grandparents were doting parents, too. On both sides, the families lost everything in the partition of India. They had to flee to India from what is now Pakistan. My naana (mother’s father), originally a doctor from a wealthy family, began saving every rupee to educate his girls. He stopped going to the movies, his favorite past time. Both he and his wife stopped buying new clothes and began stitching them at home instead.
My father knew grit. He came to Punjab in India on a train with bullets flying around him—and people dying in front of his eyes. (Riots accompanied the 1947 partition that divided India and Pakistan.)
After his father died suddenly, he looked after his mother and brought up his four siblings in India. He and my mother paid for them to study in school and college and funded their weddings. Yet, my father never talked to me about grit. If anything, my parents protected me from pain; perhaps they knew that life would eventually have some pain in store for me, sooner or later. They learned how to raise their kids from their parents. And I learned how to raise my kid from them.
But my husband, who is also Indian, and I are raising our daughter thousands of miles away from where we were grew up. There aren’t any families of Indian origin at my daughter’s preschool or even in our immediate neighborhood. "Our way" isn’t a way that everyone around us understands. As a baby, we wouldn’t let her cry to sleep. It wasn’t a judgment on those who followed the sleep expert Marc Weissbluth’s advice. It was and is a cultural belief. Even now, our four-year-old will often ask us to put her shoes on, and feed her, much to the consternation of many fellow parents. But we do it because it connects us to our uncles and aunts who would have said she has the rest of her life to do it herself.
To make sense of the world where I was raising my child, I went to meet Angela Jernigan, who runs Parent Connect East Bay in Berkeley. She helps people find and build a support structure in their parenting journey. "We don’t have the village anymore," she said. "It’s very hard for parents to be connected (to their kids), to give their kids the experience of being felt and heard." For that to happen, parents need to feel connected and supported themselves, which in our fragmented world can be hard to do, she explained.
Jernigan has heard words like grit and resilience thrown around in her own child’s elementary school. "I explain that us having adult-like standards for children is the wrong way to build resilience. Parents have to be nurturing to build a core of strength with children," she said.
Nurturing. Vulnerable. Empathetic. That’s how parents need to be, she suggests, when kids are having a "big feeling" (in other words, a meltdown).
I heard something similar in a TED talk by Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work, who studies the human connection. "You can’t selectively numb those hard feelings," Brown said. She was referring to emotions like guilt, vulnerability, and shame—emotions kids and adults feel. In an uncertain world, Brown said, we like to make things certain. "We perfect, most dangerously, our children."
And why we do that probably warrants an entirely different discussion about our cultural fears and insecurities. Have we failed as parents if our kids aren’t the most well-behaved, toughest, and smartest kids in the neighborhood? Jernigan’s clients are more often than not people who are trying to be the perfect parents, raising perfect kids.
Literature, discussions and forums about parenting abound. As we look for the best ways to raise our kids, we gravitate toward what makes sense to us. After meeting Jernigan, I couldn’t help but think that if there were so many parents flocking to her group to learn how to better connect with their kids, maybe many of the differences I’d noticed weren’t as fundamental and deep-rooted as I’d believed. Perhaps parents, regardless of where they’re from, have more in common than not. The mom who spoke to me about grit also, on a separate occasion, spoke to me about wanting a slow separation from her child.
Studies and facts indicate that, regardless of what parents might say about being tough with their kids, they are spending more time and money on them than previous generations have done. A 2012 study by sociologists Sabino Kornrich and Frank Furstenberg that was published in Demography found that parents spent more on their children’s education and care than on consumer goods from 1972 to 2007. Studies out of the University of California at San Diego show that college-educated parents in the U.S. have dramatically increased the time they spend with their kids over the past twenty years.
So what does any of this mean? I suspect that, even though it’s the tiger mom who makes the bestseller list, and everyone’s petrified of looking too soft, maybe everyone around me is a little softer than they think they need to be. I’ve realized that the best parent you can be is the one that you want to be; and there is no perfect parent, just as there is no perfect kid.
The journey that started at my child’s first preschool ended well. I knew I had found the right preschool when a matter-of-fact educator named Janet Bronson, who helps run a small preschool in Berkeley, said to me during a school tour: "What I want to do is make sure that a kid feels emotionally safe here, not just physically safe." And then a teacher named Nyisha Galvez said, "Teach me some words in Hindi so that I can make her feel comfortable and at-home."
My daughter had found her habitat. And perhaps I had, too.
There’s this new thing going around where you’re supposed to google your first name and the word “meme” and post the images that come up. And I thought, we should totally do this. I’ll go first…
Aw. That’s sweet.
Fair enough.
Well, that took a turn.
Okay. Feeling a little uncomfortable now.
What…what is happening?
No. Do not like.
Am I supposed to feel like I’m being stalked? Is that how this is supposed to work?
How did you even get in here?
My name is not even on there.
I get the joke but it still feels weirdly threatening at this point.
Yeah. I don’t like this anymore.
I want to go home now.
PS. I also looked up “bloggess meme” and it was much less threatening and took me to thousands of pictures you guys made of Juanita, my taxidermied weasel. Some of the very best are collected here. I highly recommend it as a palate cleanser.
Jon Stewart is just as disturbed as you are about the Eric Garner decision.
Following the announcement that a grand jury would not indict the police officer who put unarmed Garner in a chokehold resulting in his death, people across the country expressed shock and disbelief. Many taking to Twitter with the hashtag #ICantBreathe
In New York, swarms of protesters blocked major roads and intersections, tried to shut down the Rockefeller tree lighting, and held "die ins" at various parts of the city including Grand Central Station.
And since the news broke before the taping of "The Daily Show" on Wednesday, Jon Stewart had an opportunity to chime in. But don't expect much humor from him here.
"I don't know," said Stewart. "I honestly don't know what to say."
Recently, educators and policymakers have shifted more attention and funding to students’ education in science, technology, engineering, and math, known as STEM. Last month, for example, President Obama announced that his Educate to Innovate initiative raised $28 million to train 100,000 STEM teachers by 2021, augmenting the budget of $53 million already awarded for teacher recruitment.
Even people who have haven’t had STEM on their radar have probably seenheadlines that reflect the challenges and discrimination faced by some people interested in pursuing these fields. Women in science have gotten a fair amount of attention, and it’s warranted; even though women made up about 45 percent of the overall workforce in 2010, they only accounted for 28 percent of scientists, according to the National Academy of Sciences.
Although there are more women in the workforce now than ever before, women who aim high professionally know that they will likely encounter a tough road. Many encounter discrimination or dissuasion (in STEM and otherwise) and almost all are forced to make hard choices between their jobs and other aspects of life. Since women entered the workforce, they have been subjected to an impossibly high standard of of “having it all”—professional success, well-behaved children, sated spouse, spotless oven. And living up to that expectation can be daunting. Trailblazers like Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, have offered tips for how women can better navigate a male-dominated professional world, yet somehow true equality in the workplace seems to seem only incremental.
This past June, 41-year-old Ana Luz Porzecanski became the director for the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Originally from Uruguay, she has been working at the center for over a decade, having earned her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Columbia University in 2003. In late October, she gave a presentation at a conference called STEMinism: Inspiring Women Scientists for current and future women in STEM. I caught up with her shortly after in her corner office to learn about her career and get a few tips on finding balance as a woman in science. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited.
Alexandra Ossola: When did you know that you wanted to go into science?
Ana Luz Porzecanski: It wasn’t an easy decision for me because I had a lot of interests. My father is a scientist—he’s an agronomist—and my mother is an architect, but also an amateur paleontologist. So we spent a lot of time outside in nature; my parents were very curious and eager to show me the natural world. I had a lot of concerns about society and societal issues so for a while I thought I might go into sociology rather than biology. But I decided to try biology. And it was very rewarding so I stuck with it. I would say there was a tipping point and a tipping person, as happens many times. I started college in Uruguay and took an evolution course with a researcher professor there named Enrique Lessa. He led the evolution lab at the school of sciences and he was incredibly inspiring and dynamic and fun. He invited me to a field trip with his lab and—I’ll never forget this—I arrived late on a freezing night and all they had available to eat was cold rice. The field conditions were tough, but the next day the work was so interesting, the team was so much fun to work with, and they had so many interesting thoughts and questions that I got hooked.
Ossola: So you’ve been working in this field for 23 years. If you could go back in time and tell your early career self one thing, what would you tell yourself?
Porzecanski: I would have wanted to be more aware early on that there are a broad diversity of career paths related to science. In the beginning I thought that there was really just research, but now I know that there are a lot of different paths, and I think it’s important for people to know that. Not that I would have done anything different; I think a Ph.D. served me well on many levels.
Ossola: What has been the hardest part of getting here to this point?
Porzecanski: I always say the two hardest things I’ve done in life are: getting my Ph.D. and giving birth to my first daughter—in that order, because the latter was shorter. I think getting a Ph.D. is challenging because you’re really trying to figure out who you are intellectually, what you can do, where your limits are, how not to be too ambitious with what you’re trying to do. And you also have to negotiate a lot of relationships—with your committee members and their expectations, and with your advisors. It’s just a challenging time for everybody who’s in that process because you are consumed by your project, you think about it all the time. It’s not a job—it’s your mission. It’s all consuming.
Ossola: Is there a point at which you were almost dissuaded from completing your Ph.D.?
Porzecanski: Yes, I think that happens for many people. The Ph.D. is a journey and almost all of it rests on you, so it’s a lot of responsibility. Halfway through my Ph.D. I spent a month and a half in the field with a team of researchers from the American Museum of Natural History in the Central African Republic. We were doing demanding fieldwork, and even though it wasn’t completely related to my Ph.D., it was a great opportunity. I remember one day riding in the back of a van with the wind in my face, thinking, ‘Here I am, halfway through it; this is really challenging for a number of reasons. I’m either going to stick with it or maybe I should stop.’ And I remember thinking I will stick with it. That’s how you do it. I also had a very supportive partner; we got married while I was doing my Ph.D.. They say that’s very helpful and I really do think it is, to have someone there who can support you. And my family was supportive—it makes a big difference when you have a supportive network.
Ossola: Let’s talk about a recent presentation you gave on “STEMinism” in which you spoke about women building successful and enjoyable careers in the sciences. Where did your inspiration for the presentation come from?
Porzecanski: It came from me seeing all this negativepress out there [about women in STEM] and saying, gosh, this is really an important conversation but I wonder if it’s going to dissuade women from going into science. If they see all this literature out there about bias, about sexual harassment, about discrimination, they’re going to say, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t even try,’ or, ‘This isn’t going to be pleasant.’ And yet I’ve had such a pleasant career so far. I’m surrounded by many people, especially women, who love what they do and are having a great time. At the American Museum of Natural History, I am surrounded by very successful women in science, in all kinds of roles from administration to research. People aren’t writing articles about that fun part, so let’s talk about that. That was the impetus for the presentation. And basically the whole point was to highlight that your career can be successful and enjoyable. You don’t have to be this martyr to be successful, you can have a great life and enjoy it, too. Not that it’s not highly demanding and not that there won’t be sacrifices, but here’s what I’ve learned and here’s how information can help. So I wanted to give the participants some practical tips.
Ossola: Do you think there has to be a tradeoff in order to have a successful career?
Porzecanski: You have to make choices in life. This is how I see it: You can have it all, just not in the same day—you can have it all over time. You’re not going to leave work every day and say, ‘Today was a perfectly balanced day.’ Sometimes that does happen. But when you look back at your life, the past month, the past three months, the past year, if you feel like you have a good balance of things going, then that’s balance. That’s what it looks like. It’s not at every given moment of your life.
Ossola: So how do you maintain this balance?
Porzecanski: I think you have to make some hard choices sometimes. You have to make some decisions about when you need to miss dinner with the family because you need to spend more time working, and when you need to decide ‘I’m not going to make this deadline because I want to go trick-or-treating with my kids.’ But you get better at making those choices. And I do have to say that like any other experience in life, parenting and motherhood teach you how to make those choices because you have to make choices all the time about other people’s needs, your own needs and priorities. And you get better all the time.
Ossola: At the presentation, there were 33 young girls in the audience. You first told them the bad news, about discrimination and bias, but spent most of your time on the good news, that they are good enough to make it. But of course, not everyone is good enough. When do you know it’s time to quit?
Porzecanski: You have to listen to yourself as you go through life and see where are you humming. When are you buzzing when you’re working, when are you happiest, what are you really good at. And follow that. And then you’ll be great at that; everybody has that thing. It’s not a question of saying you’re not good enough at this. I know I probably wouldn’t be good enough for research on theoretical physics, but I’m not going to try it because I don’t think I would be happy doing that. So learn from your experiences and let them tell you about your strengths. And then you will find the area where you are really good at it.
Ossola: What makes the difference between a woman who goes into STEM and a woman who is dissuaded from pursuing a career in a STEM field?
Porzecanski: One big piece is finding those really inspiring, positive mentors. If you have bad luck at the beginning that may dissuade you, and I think that happens for both men and women. The more aware you are of the challenges you may encounter and the more prepared you are to deal with them, the better.
Ossola: What is the biggest hurdle for women in STEM right now?
Porzecanski: I really think there’s no simple answer to that. Any of these things can happen: an unhelpful (in the best case scenario) mentor, a traumatic experience with a mentor or a colleague, an unsupportive environment, the wrong kind of fit in an endeavor you’ve tried to tackle that then becomes really discouraging because you didn’t do well, discrimination and bias. And then there’s family; if you don’t have a supportive partner, it can become a real issue. Any of those things can add up. But you also have other options. Some women leave STEM finding something they like more, and that’s legitimate. Surround yourself with good supporters, both personally and professionally, and have frank discussions with your life partners about the life you want.
Ossola: How can teachers and parents help prepare girls to make these decisions and preparing themselves?
Porzecanski: Try to make it the expectation that women belong in science. One little thing I’ve done with my two daughters is I picked all female physicians, from the orthodontist to the dentist to the pediatrician. And we don’t talk about it, they just are. So I have a feeling that in the future they might be less prone to assuming a doctor is a male than other people. They also have a scientist mother, so there’s that. But we all have that schema in our head; it happens to everybody. An important piece of information that came up recently is this idea that smarts is something you do and not something you are. Not promoting intelligence as a fixed thing but promoting resourcefulness and love of intellectual challenges as the manifestation of intelligence. Put the emphasis on trying hard; if someone is struggling with a particular math unit it doesn’t mean they’re not cut for math.
Above all, don’t let the bad news dissuade you or others; in my experience, for every bad news case, there’s many more women out there having a blast in science.
Edward Lucas has a habit of popping up at pivotal moments in European history.
In March 1990, shortly after Lithuania declared independence from the Soviet Union, the Economist editor caught a flight to Vilnius and received the first Lithuanian visa: number 0001, a stamp-sized chink in the Iron Curtain that got him arrested and deported by Soviet authorities.
On Monday, Lucas helped chip away at borders once again. In a ceremony in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a friend of Lucas's from Ilves's previous career as a journalist, made Lucas Estonia's first e-resident. And just like that, the word "resident" took on new meaning, distilled in the smart card below:
To be clear: E-residency is not a path to citizenship; it's not legal residency. It cannot be used as a travel document or a picture ID. Instead, it's a form of supranational digital identity issued, for the first time, by a country. It's the online self, now with a government imprimatur. And it's the latest innovation from a tech-savvy nation that brought you Skype, the world's first digitally signed international agreement, and an intricate national ID system that allows citizens to speedily elect politicians and file taxes online. The Baltic republic is so wired that officials are even contemplating uploading the government's digital infrastructure to the cloud so that it can continue operating if Russia invades Estonia.
Lucas is British and lives in London. He speaks "very basic spoken Estonian" and in the 1990s worked as a journalist in Tallinn, where his oldest son was born. Beyond that, his Estonian identity now consists of an ID card with a microchip for authentication and digital signatures, plus a card reader to help generate those signatures. The card will allow him to do things like sign documents, register a company in Estonia, conduct transactions with an Estonian bank account, and order prescriptions in Estonian pharmacies—all online, and from anywhere in the world. E-residents, in other words, will have access to many digital services that Estonians already enjoy, rather than having to go about these tasks through a more ponderous, paper-based process.
Edward Lucas (Saeima/Flickr)
As Lucas sees it, the biggest benefit of Estonian e-residency is "having a digital signature valid anywhere in the EU, or in any other country which uses electronic authentication" (Estonia is an EU member). He can, for example, use his new digital ID to a buy a ticket on a German train. And he can send authenticated emails, including encrypted messages to other cardholders.
"I can identify myself and other people online," he explained by email. "This is one of the biggest weaknesses of the internet. I do not know whether the people who send me e-mails are really those people, or just impersonating them (perhaps even cybercriminals who have broken into an e-mail account). Similarly it is hard for me to prove that I am me. Having a state-issued digital signature means that I can sign an e-mail (and if I wish encrypt it)."
In its embryonic form, at least, the program is a cross between techno-utopian ambition and bureaucratic reality—a theoretically seamless, borderless digital system grafted onto a messy physical world. E-residents will, for example, be able to use their Estonian bank accounts from anywhere they can get Internet, but they'll need to visit those banks in person to open the accounts. Anyone in the world over age 18 can apply for Estonian e-residency, but applicants need to first visit a Police and Border Guard office in Estonia, where they'll submit paperwork, pay a €5o ($62) fee, and provide biometric data (a facial image and fingerprints) for a background check—an attempt to keep criminals and hackers out of the system. Accepted e-residents will be able to pick up their ID cards within two weeks at the same office where they applied.
The point being: If you're interested in becoming an e-resident but don't live in the country or nearby, you might want to start planning that extended Estonian vacation you've always dreamed of. (If I were to leave D.C. for Tallinn tomorrow, and return two weeks later, a round-trip plane ticket would cost me at least $1,300, making that $62 fee seem just a touch steeper.) Siim Sikkut, an information and communications technology advisor in the Estonian government, told me by email that Estonia hopes to move the application process partially online and offer e-residencies at its embassies overseas by the end of 2015.
The population of Estonian e-residents is likely to be small, at least at first. Sikkut said that almost 13,300 people have signed up so far for an email listserv with updates on e-residency, and that Estonia will initially target roughly 40,000-50,000 foreigners who are already involved in the country as, say, students, investors, and businesspeople. Estonian officials have set ambitious goals of eventually attracting millions of e-residents and tens of thousands of companies, drawn to the ease of doing business in Estonia and the European Union. (According to Estonian officials, e-residents will have a similar legal status to foreigners in Estonia, though Estonian law will govern access to the data on ID cards.)
"Many people live in countries where the state does not issue digital IDs, or find their country's system cumbersome or untrustworthy," explained Lucas. "Now they have an alternative. Imagine a world where governments issued credit cards, and you were stuck with whatever your own country's government provided. Estonia is issuing the digital equivalent of the Amex card—you can use it anywhere."
E-residency "is not meant to be a meaningful innovation in the sense of revolutionizing citizenship," he noted. "We are solving a practical problem for people, allowing them to conduct business and carry out their lives more efficiently (meaning: digitally)."
"I personally think that citizenship will be tied to older territorial constructs for quite some time," Sikkut added. "However, I also think that citizenship is not the most defining feature of us anymore—rather a community feeling is, and each of us can belong to quite a few communities." In the long term, he wrote, the government is interested in exploring how it can make Estonia, a tiny nation of 1.3 million people, "larger in the world than we otherwise would be, as a community of e-Estonians."
In a way, Estonia's e-residency program is making the nation-state more relevant, not less. Lucas, for instance, acknowledged that private companies already sell digital IDs, but expressed concern about "severe shortcomings" in those services. "Estonia's card has the authority of a nation-state behind it," he wrote.
And how will Lucas respond if he's asked tomorrow about his nationality, or where he lives?
"I will still be a proud and loyal British subject," he responded. "But in my life online, where I am not constrained by national boundaries, I will be identifying myself with an Estonian-issued digital ID."
This video brings a whole new meaning to the word "freeze."
A Michigan man named Brandon McKean went out for a stroll on Thanksgiving, when a police officer approached him for "making people nervous."
So what exactly was he doing that was so suspicious? According to McKean's Facebook post:
"Just got stopped Walking BECAUSE MY HANDS WERE IN MY POCKETS....... POLICE STATE"
McKean, who says he was just cold, is pretty upset about about the whole incident considering the situation in Ferguson, and both he and the cop captured the moment on video.
The cop tells him there's been a string of robberies in the area lately, and when he and asks McKean what he's up to, he responds: "Walking, with my hands in my pockets."
Sometimes, I wish Instagram was a real person so I could shake its hand and give it a huge hug for the endless amounts of inspiration it provides. From discovering great new home tours, photographers and florists to talented DIYers, I am constantly screengrabbing things and sending them to myself to follow up on later. This week’s final DIY project before the holiday is one I’ve been excited to post for weeks. I follow a number of crafters online, but few inspire me as much as Susan Beech. Susan’s Instagram account, A Petal Unfolds, is full of beautiful paper flowers. Most of the time I can’t believe they’re not real, but especially in the case of her rich purple and red ranunculi. They looked so much like the real thing that I wrote to her to ask if we could do a how-to together. Thankfully she was game and today I’m thrilled to share her project, just in time for holiday centerpieces. xo, grace
About Susan: Susan Beech is a paper flower maker living in Brighton, UK. She graduated in Fine Art Printmaking from the University of Brighton in 2002. She focused mainly on digital work and landscape photography, producing emotional pieces on her keen affiliation with nature. In 2013 Susan decided she wanted to go back to making things with her hands again. She took a class in making paper flowers and was instantly drawn to the beauty that could be created from paper. She opened her online shop A Petal Unfolds in April 2014 and is excited to develop her work further.
10 Ways You Can Help the People of Ferguson from the Huffington Post:
• Support efforts requiring all state, county and local police to wear [dashboard and] body cameras.
• Advocate for the removal of the Pentagon’s “1033 Program” by signing the petition here
• Send condolences to Michael Brown’s family here.
A protestor retreats after being treated for tear gas. Photo Credit: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images
President Obama’s Press Conference
“We need to recognize the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges we still face as a nation. The fact is in too many parts of this country distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color.”
“We have made enormous progress in race relations over the course of the past several decades. I have witnessed that in my own life, and to deny that progress is to deny America’s capacity for change.”
2 Timothy 1:7 – For the spirit of God does not make us timid, but gives us power, love, and self-discipline. Photo by: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images
Brown Family’s Statement
“Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera. We respectfully ask that you please keep your protests peaceful.”
Dasha Jones, 19, is arrested for unlawful assembly during a protest outside the Ferguson Police Department in Ferguson, Mo. on the evening of Nov. 20, 2014 from Time Magazine
“I’m frustrated with myself for expecting, if only for a moment, that people who have historically not valued black life, would actually value black life. More than anything, I’m sad. I’m just sad. This is no way to live.” – Dr. Yaba Blay, director or Africana Studies, Drexel University
“Even as I expected the decision to be what it was, it still hurts deeply. Who can be shown their babies’ lives don’t matter and expect to feel anything but pain and rage? And fear? The decision leaves me in fear for the safety of the children I love so deeply.” – Asha Bandele, Author
Satire and Social Commentary
Young man wears a shirt mimicking popular shirts with names of television show characters, but supplanted by names of black children and young men killed through abuse of power. Photo by Time. (If you’d like one, it’s part of the And Counting collection sold here.)
Everything that could've been said has been said; everything that could've been done was avoided. Last night, Michael Brown was put on trial for his own murder. You will hear me repeat this a lot: what age is a black boy when he learns he's scary? Millions learned last night.
Let's focus on the good. Mike Brown was 18 years old, freshly graduated from high school. He was funny, silly, quiet and respectful, a gentle giant. He liked to take selfies. He liked to rap, and there is not a goddamned thing wrong with that. He is gone, but we cannot forget him.
If you are angry, like me, here are some things you can do. First and foremost, always and forever, register to vote. There is no excuse. You can contact your local representatives to implore them to require body cameras on every cop. You can sign petitions like the ACLU's against racial profiling, or Change.org's to protect communities from police violence. You can donate: organizations like Black Lives Matter and Operation Help or Hush are on using social media to garner change, the National Lawyer's Guild is providing legal support to protestors, and the Ferguson library will remain open today even though schools are closed, to provide solace and shelter.
Keep thinking about Michael Brown. Keep thinking about Trayvon Martin, about Oscar Grant and Tamir Rice and Sean Bell, about so many others. Keep thinking about all those little black boys who never made it home, about all the little boys who are afraid to leave. But do more than think: do. "Let's not just make noise," as Brown's family has implored us. "Let's make a difference."
