Noelle Singleton challenges any swim-cap maker who claims a swimmer’s hair won’t get wet with their caps to send her one. She’ll post a review on social media of her swimming a 100-meter individual medley in it.

Swim caps matter for Singleton, a 30-year-old black swim coach in Georgia with a thick, full-moon-shaped afro. Known on her AfroSwimmers Instagram account as Coach With the Fro, she has been offering swim lessons that target the black community for 16 years. The first question she always gets from female clients, she says, is: “What do I do with my hair?” She gives them tips, including which swim caps to buy. But, “I tell them up front: Please expect your hair to get wet,” Singleton says.

Historically, swimming pools have played a murky part in racial segregation and disparity in the United States. Despite a public-pool boom in the 1950s and ’60s, generations of black people have not learned how to swim. In 2017, a report from the USA Swimming Foundation found that 64.2 percent of black adults said they had no or low swimming abilities, versus 39.7 percent of white people. Among the black parents in that group, 78 percent said their children had no or low swimming abilities, too.

Numerous factors contribute to why blacks are less likely to swim: a lack of lap pools to learn in, a lack of representation in water sports, a fear of drowning, and a lack of affordable swim lessons. But one thing that’s often overlooked is that swim caps aren’t designed to protect common hairstyles among black women, adding yet another barrier to their participation in swimming, kayaking, water polo, diving, and other aquatic activities. “It’s an epidemic,” Singleton says of their exclusion.

For black women, hair is a long-standing point of pride, self-expression, status, and heritage. Some women will spend hundreds of dollars—and sit for hours—to get box braids or install a weave. That’s not including the hair products required for daily maintenance. All this makes swimming risky. Chlorine can damage the softness of an afro, the tightness of a box braid or sisterlock, or the clean scalp hidden under a sew-in weave. For some hairstyles, the prospect of starting over with washing, conditioning, sitting under a hair dryer, combing or picking out hair, and restyling in general is frustrating.

While doing research for an earlier version of the USA Swimming Foundation report, Carol Irwin, an associate professor at the University of Memphis School of Health Studies and one of the lead researchers on the study, remembers asking black women around campus if they swam. Most said they did not, because of their hair and chemicals that dried out their skin. So Irwin and her colleagues put the hair question on the 2010 survey, “thinking it might be significant.” Black respondents reported significantly greater concern about getting their hair wet, and about the negative impact of chemicals on children’s appearances, than white respondents did.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black children drown at 5.5 times the rate of other children. Drowning was the second-leading cause of unintentional deaths among black boys and girls under 18 in 2016. Still, as Irwin points out, the drowning rates are higher among the boys. “I truly believe [black women] avoid the water like the plague,” she says. “They might get into the shallow end and splash around, but it has to be limited because of their hair. Maybe their hair is saving them, I don’t know.”

Swim caps have conventionally been designed as one size fits all for straighter, less curly hairstyles. They help with resistance in the water, but are not meant to keep water fully out. Singleton tells her students that the most important factor in choosing a swim cap is size and type, not brand, but she says many students don’t know how to put on a swim cap properly in the first place. There’s little instruction on the internet on what to do if they have afros or dreadlocks. “I’ve had black girls that have had the entire backs of their hair broken off from breakage, or [from] not having the right moisturizers because of the chemicals and the rubbing of the caps,” she says.

But recently, the cultural push for products that accommodate diverse bodies and hair types has begun to permeate the aquatics world. Some swim caps now do exist that are designed for dreadlocks, braids, afros, and more. And swim caps are now made of silicon instead of latex, which helps keep the cap from rubbing off hairline edges.

In 2014, a client told Stella Walker, a hairstylist in North Carolina, that she was looking for swim caps to accommodate her sisterlocks. Walker, who specializes in the style, started looking online for options. She soon found herself reaching out to companies manufacturing swim caps to see if they could help her create larger sizes. She never heard back from them, she says, so she looked to China to make them. “People pay a lot of money to have those styles, so those folks definitely don’t jump at the opportunity to get in a pool without a cap,” Walker says.

Just like hairstylists who sell weave hair or shampoos as side revenue, Walker now sells her jumbo and extra-large Lock Journey caps in online stores including Etsy and Amazon. Her caps are designed for traditional, waist-length locks, but she says anyone with long hair can use them. She says the key for her caps is that they create a seal along the hairline and are worn below the ear for a tighter fit.

Walker has heard some clients say they would squeeze on two or three traditionally sized swim caps to protect their hair. She shudders when she comes across advice like not wearing a cap at all, or not applying moisturizing products when swimming without a cap. Chlorine can cause dryness, hair breakage, or color damage, Walker warns. And adding moisturizer before putting on a swim cap causes it to slide around, allowing water to get inside.

Singleton, the swim instructor, sees this rise in entrepreneurs as positive. But she worries when she hears companies say their larger caps keep all water out of women’s hair. “If you have the proper swim cap that has the correct fit, it is possible to help eliminate the amount of water your hair will absorb while swimming,” she says. “But to make something that says it keeps your hair dry, it’s false advertising and inaccurate.”

Despite the hair issue, Singleton says she’s starting to see a growing number of black parents putting their children in swim lessons, and even getting into the pool themselves. The statistics seem to back her up: Even though 64.2 percent of black people said they have no or low swimming abilities in the 2017 report, that number was still close to five percentage points less than in the 2010 report. (For white people, the number dropped about two percentage points over the same time period.)

“The parent can’t swim, so they don’t go to the pool or swim,” Singleton says. “I’m seeing a lot more people step off that train of thought and say ‘I don’t know how to swim, but I don’t want my child to not have opportunities.’”

I just went down a massive internet rabbit hole watching Mr. Rogers clips on YouTube. In this one, Mr. Rogers moved an entire room to tears when he got up to receive his Life Achievement Award at the Emmys in 1997. Instead of going on about his accomplishments and listing off a bunch of thank-yous, he asked everyone to take 10 seconds “to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life.” “I’ll count the time,” he said gently, looking at his watch.

What a remarkable man! A ball of love!

Last week, while buying new prescription glasses, the lovely person at the store was wearing this pin. It resulted in a wonderfully honest, open conversation around gender. It was a lovely moment. This pin made it happen. More of this.

100% of profits are donated to Camp Aranu’tiq, a nonprofit program serving transgender & gender-variant youth and their families.

I’ve been experimenting with tofu a lot lately because it’s an incredibly inexpensive, and now quite readily available source of protein (okay, and also because it also happens to be the #1 searched word on my website). The cool thing about tofu is that it has almost no flavor on its own, so you can pretty much add it to anything, so long as there is a delicious sauce to give it some life. So this time I decided to douse my tofu in some BBQ sauce, because SUMMER! These BBQ Tofu Sliders may seriously be my favorite tofu dish so far. It’s finger-licking good (yes, they do get a bit messy), and also seriously easy. This is going to become your new favorite!

Tofu Techniques

Through all of my experimenting with tofu, I have still only found one preparation method that I like, which is lightly coating the tofu with cornstarch and then pan frying it. BUT quite a few people have messaged me with another cool tip—freezing and thawing tofu to alter its texture. I don’t know the exact science behind this, but freezing and then thawing the tofu does in fact change the texture quite a bit, and for the better! The thawed tofu was MUCH easier to squeeze water out of and had a more firm, meat-like texture (less jiggly or egg-white-like). So, pop that container of tofu in your freezer when you get home from the store, then transfer it back to your refrigerator to thaw the next day. You won’t be sorry!

Another “extra” I added to my cornstarch process this time is to coat the tofu in a few spices before coating in it in cornstarch. Usually people marinate tofu to give it flavor, but with the cornstarch technique you want the tofu to be as dry as possible, so marinating in a liquid isn’t a good option. Instead, I mixed together a couple smoky spices to add some oomph to the BBQ sauce later.

You ready to see how easy this is??

BBQ Tofu Sliders

Leftovers

This recipe does make a strange number of servings (three large sliders), which is due to the size of a standard block of tofu, but you could stretch this to four smaller sliders, if needed. Because I was only making three sliders, I only used half of a bag of the shredded cabbage slaw mix. There are several options for the leftover cabbage. You can add it to a quick stir fry, like my Beef and Cabbage Stir Fry, toss it into a soup, or even make a small batch of Savory Cabbage Pancakes. Cabbage is incredibly versatile and makes a great low-carb filler for recipes! Here is the full list of cabbage recipes on Budget Bytes, in case you need more inspiration!

I also only used three buns out of a pack of eight, but don’t worry! Buns and other baked breads freeze great. So you can take a few buns out of the freezer as needed for your small batch recipes. They thaw really quickly at room temperature.

Step by Step Photos

It’s kind of hard to believe that this sad looking block of tofu can become the mouth-watering sandwiches in the photos above! 😅 Anyway, start with a 14 oz. block of firm or extra firm tofu. If you have the time or remember, freeze the block of tofu (I just did it right in its package) and then thaw it before beginning this recipe. It gives the tofu a slightly better texture. Whether frozen or not, you’ll wan to press the tofu to remove the excess moisture. I like to place it between to baking sheets (the rim catches the extra liquid) and then place something heavy on top, like a pot full of water or a heavy cast iron pot. Press the tofu for about 30 minutes if you did not freeze/thaw, or for about 15 minutes if it has been frozen and thawed. Once it’s pressed, it will look a little like the photo above.

Roughly chop the tofu into random shaped pieces, about 1/2-inch in size.

Place the chopped tofu in a bowl. In a separate bowl, stir together 1 tsp smoked paprika, 1/4 tsp garlic powder, 1/2 tsp salt, and some freshly cracked pepper. Sprinkle that over the tofu, then gently stir it until the tofu is coated in spices.

Next, add 1 tsp cornstarch to the tofu at a time, stirring to coat before adding more, until you’ve added 3 tsps (that is 1 Tbsp) cornstarch.

Add 2 Tbsp cooking oil to a large non-stick skillet (you can use cast iron or teflon, whichever type of non-stick you prefer). Heat the skillet over medium and once the oil is very hot, add the tofu. Allow the tofu to cook, stirring only occasionally, for about ten minutes or until the tofu feels slightly more firm and the edges have darkened. It won’t really be “crispy”, but the texture will be more firm.

Remove the tofu from the heat. Add 1/4 cup BBQ sauce to the tofu and stir to coat.

And now that BBQ tofu is finished and ready to go! I have a hard time not eating it out of the skillet at this point! You could also build some bowl meals out of this tofu if you don’t like sliders or buns.

Since the tofu doesn’t need much attention as it cooks, you can prepare the simple coleslaw while you wait. In a bowl, combine 1/3 cup mayonnaise, 1/2 Tbsp honey, 1 tsp Dijon mustard, 1 tsp apple cider vinegar, 1/4 tsp salt, and some freshly cracked pepper. Stir the dressing ingredients together until smooth.

Add 1/2 lb. (about 3 cups) packaged coleslaw mix and stir until it’s coated in dressing. This “coleslaw mix” is simply bagged shredded cabbage and carrots. You can find it near other bagged salad greens in the grocery store.

And now it’s time to assemble the BBQ Tofu Sliders! Just place 1/3 of the BBQ tofu mixture on each bun, drizzle another 1 Tbsp BBQ sauce over the tofu, then top with a heaping scoop of the coleslaw. Then DEVOUR. :)

The post BBQ Tofu Sliders appeared first on Budget Bytes.

Dear Polly,

I’m facing a dilemma. I’m a queer female software engineer in the Midwest. I make a good living — there’s room for my compensation to grow, sure, but I’m doing okay. I like my job for the most part. I work for a small company, but I’ve got...More »

When I was a kid, in the early 1980s, I programmed a little in a language called BASIC. Recalling that long-ago era, I see myself, bowl cut and braces, tapping at the keyboard of some ancient computer:

10 PRINT “[Whatever]”

20 GOTO 10

And when I hit “return,” up jumps a digital column of whatever I’d entered between the quotation marks to fill the screen:

[Whatever]

[Whatever]

[Whatever]

And so on. Later in my life, there were more advanced computing experiences—my parents eventually got me a TI-99/4A with Extended BASIC—but 20 GOTO 10 lingers. Those early days at the computer enabled me, for the first time, to issue commands. I was—suddenly, shockingly—a person to be obeyed. My commands didn’t carry any grand force, as do commands in, say, a military context, but issuing them did make me happy. The Nobel laureate Elias Canetti described the dynamic well some 60 years ago in Crowds and Power:

The power of those who give commands appears to grow all the time. Every command, however trivial, adds something to it, not only because in practice it generally benefits the person who gives it, but because, by the very nature of commands—their knife-edged precision and the recognition they exact in the whole sphere they traverse—it tends in every way to augment and secure his power.

Today, the power differential has changed. My own son, Ari, is 13. Ari’s a far more skilled computer user than I could ever hope to be—and he has access to extremely sophisticated  equipment.

Ari makes me think about the future of computers, as technology moves away from the keyboard-and-monitor model of computing. Consider the Amazon Echo, a specimen of which is playing the audio version of Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist in the other room as I type. For all its magical qualities, the Echo—or Alexa, to give the name the device responds to—is an imperfect interface. Alexa often has us repeating ourselves, but we forgive her because the very idea of conversing with a computer is still a wonderful novelty. Voice-activated computing is at an adolescent stage, which is fitting for my newly teenaged son.

“Alexa, play Jeopardy!,” he might say—and his word is her command.

And that gives me pause. My wife and I have expended much time and energy ensuring that when Ari speaks, he does so respectfully and intelligently. But he can speak to Alexa without any consideration at all. “Please” or “thank you” are never involved. In fact, polite words would just get in the way.

Of course, there was no “please” or “thank you” in my BASIC computations. But then, my programming was written—silently and solitarily. Alexa makes the command-based nature of computers audible. The device lives on the table where Ari, his mother, sister, and I eat every day. We talk at her all the time.

Kids who live with Alexa or other smart speakers have access to a digital genie. What might be the consequences of giving a child this voice-activated magic lamp, one with no limit to wishes and no consequences for exceeding the allotted amount?

Commands, as Canetti suggests, usually sting their recipients—it’s a sting that “sinks deeply into the person who has carried out the command and remains in him unchanged.” With Alexa, there’s no sting at all. I wonder if this crucial absence could, under certain circumstances, grow into an empathic blind spot.

Traditionally speaking, kids are too overwhelmed by commands to deliver any of their own. “Those most beset by commands are children,” writes Canetti. “It is a miracle that they ever survive the pressure and do not collapse under the burden of the commands laid on them by their parents and teachers.” For Ari, commanding Alexa is a regular part of life. I do it myself sometimes. Alexa is there, waiting for us to tell her what to do and to obey. He is—we all are—Alexa’s master.

Ari is 13, and mature enough to know the difference between a human and a computer interface programmed to sound like one. But as his dad, I want him to use his voice to create real human dialogue, of the sort the 20th-century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber proposed in his book I and Thou. Buber says that when people speak, they employ one of two essential dispositions (Buber calls them “basic words”): “I-It” and “I-You.” These are two different attitudes an “I” can take when speaking. The former is transactional; the latter is relational. As he writes in I and Thou: “When I confront a human being as my You and speak the basic word I-You to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things.” When people use I-You language, it’s about relating in the deepest sense, as opposed to using it as a means to some sort of end. This “I-You” relation is an area of meaningful connection, but throwing commands at Alexa habituates people to speaking “I-It” language out loud.

Now, I could be overreacting. Maybe speaking to Alexa is just programming by another means. It’s too soon to assess what, if anything, speech-driven interfaces will do to children (mine or anyone else’s). But to me, using one’s voice to get what one wants feels qualitatively different from silently inputting commands on a keyboard. Vocalizing one’s authority can be problematic, if done repeatedly and unreflectively—and today’s chatbots and digital assistants encourage a lot more repetition than reflection.

Setu is an inclusive yoga community that supports and promotes diversity. And now, the site has a section where you can follow classes. Setu is a labor of love started by Libby Nicholoau.

I have grandma tastes. I don’t have a pocketbook full of butterscotch candies or a plastic cover on the sofa or anything, but I’m sitting on it right now and think our elders are probably onto something, especially when you have two kids with an unnatural contempt for napkins. But I will stan [Grandma Deb has Googled this word, feels ready to give it a spin] for thick cardigans, tins of Danish butter cookies, Walkers shortbread, and Fig Newtons.

Read more »

In the 1970s, Shulamith Firestone wrote: “the end goal of feminist revolution must be […] not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself […] The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (or at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally.” This hopeful if unsettling vision of the artificial womb entices me, a 1970s harbinger of the “gender is over” rallying cry.

Firestone’s utopian manifesto, penned in a world where birth control and in vitro fertilisation were new to the reproductive conversation, was buoyed by its relative improbability. Maybe Firestone really believed that the new reproductive technologies of her era heralded the arrival of ectogenesis sometime after. More likely it was the stuff of fantasy, provocatively introduced to challenge readers to reconsider the status quo.

But what once felt like fantasy seems increasingly more real. A human pregnancy is 40 weeks of gestation, with any baby born before 37 weeks considered preterm. The point at which a human fetus can survive outside the mother’s womb (otherwise known as “fetal viability”) sat around 28 weeks of gestation when Roe v. Wade was handed down almost exactly forty-five years ago. Today, following progress in neonatal intensive care technologies, viability in most wealthy countries is somewhere between 22 and 26 weeks, depending on the resources available in a given area and hospital. The health of babies born before 28 weeks remains precarious. In April of 2016, however, a group of scientists in Philadelphia developed a partial artificial womb that may allow for fetuses born at the cusp of viability (22-23 weeks) to gestate to term outside the mother’s body. Trialed with lamb fetuses at the equivalent of 22-24 human weeks of gestation, the technology, dubbed the “Biobag”, mimics the conditions of a fetus in utero, surrounding it with artificial amniotic fluid. If the Biobag is successful, almost half of a fetus’s gestation might be able to occur outside the womb. In August, scientists in Australia replicated the experiment, with the unnerving addition of dubbing the technology “ex-vivo uterine environment,” or EVE.

Those involved in these experiments insist that artificial wombs are not their intention, that these technologies are simply to support the survival of preterm babies, and that full ectogenesis is the “stuff of science fiction.” But science has continually moved several paces ahead of law and ethics, and preparing for what is possible in the future is also a way of investing in the present. Women of color writers and activists have long identified how movements championing reproductive rights and technologies centralize the reproductive needs and circumstances of white, cis, moneyed women. Imagining the artificial womb as a reality, and putting those whom reproductive technologies have historically endangered (women of color, queer and trans men and women, immigrant women) at the center of our thinking, provides an opportunity to consider how existing legal frameworks can be altered to account for other reproductive changes to come.

****

The crux of Firestone’s utopia is the idea of gender becoming essentially irrelevant for building families.  Since the Supreme Court heard Obergefell and granted same-sex couples the right to marry, equal acknowledgement of gay and lesbian couples as legal paThe crux of Firestone’s utopia is the idea of gender as essentially irrelevant for building familiesents should follow. But a slew of cases have cropped up post-Obergefell in which states have refused to do exactly that. In just one example, a court made the claim that a lesbian non-biological mother whose partner conceived using IVF was not a legal mother, and in fact, that the anonymous sperm donor the couple had used should be considered an absentee father. Given that it is unheard of for a court to consider a sperm donor an “absentee father” over the male partner of a woman who conceives using IVF (a circumstance that is not uncommon), to deny lesbian partners the same right is explicit discrimination.

The existing legal framework around parenthood is one that still holds a cis, heterosexual, two-parent family model at its core. As long as this remains true, the law will continually refer back to one particular model of kinship, and while it may expand to include same-sex partners (or, as in several states, attempt to deny them), it inhibits the recognition of families that don’t look like this: families with three or more involved parents who may or may not be related to a child, families with single parents, families where children are parented across generations.

So where does Firestone’s artificial womb fit in? One way of thinking about parenthood in a legal sense is through the idea of intention. This doctrine holds that the individuals that should be recognized as parents are those who show sustained intent over time to have and to raise a child. In California, Senate Bill No. 272 allows families to be formed via “intention” before a child is born. The bill lets courts recognize more than two individuals as legal parents where this is an accurate representation of the intent of their family, and in circumstances where it would be “detrimental to the child” were the court to neglect to recognize this. Though far from perfect, the California bill is one example of a legal movement toward acknowledging difference in familial forms and decentralizing the two-parent, heterosexual, “normative” family.

Could the artificial womb, in interrupting gestational parenthood and further complicating biological parenthood, provide grounds for parental intention to take precedence as the base of family formation? The artificial womb, and the possible protections of parental intent, potentially opens a slew of possibilities including the elimination of the need for surrogates, the crumbling of the barrier of the “biological clock,” the irrelevance of sex to parenthood. I’m drawn to these visions of a future in which parenting roles are established not by gender, age, or biology, but intent.

****

In our current reality, parental rights flowing unproblematically from intention is an impossibility. In many states, assisted reproductive technologies are prohibitively expensive: IVF is available only to those who can pay for it, and given the current political landscape, were an artificial womb to be introduced, it would be accessible only to the wealthiest individuals. Tracing the historical arc of how reproductive technologies have been used and the climate around access to reproductive care in the United States, the availability of an artificial womb under existing circumstances might only be dangerous. In a society that criminalizes pregnant women for attempting to self-abort, where more value is placed on the potential life of the fetus than on the rights of the mother, and where babies are frequently taken from women deemed to be unsuitable mothers almost as soon as they are born, the artificial womb is plainly dystopic. Given that many women already struggle to access abortion, the artificial womb might be used to justify a total abortion ban in favor of fetal extraction and adoption. Pregnant people facing drug and alcohol addictions, already treated punitively (and already frequently denied rights to their own children), might experience the artificial womb as a mandatory alternative to incarceration. Ectogenesis might be made available to wealthy women as a solution to the difficulties incurred in pregnancy, in place of addressing the issues in our society that limit the possible pleasures of pregnancy for everyone.

Firestone’s artificial womb, though idealistic, was not something she suggested would land, fully equipped for utopian use, without any effort. It is the “end goal of [a] feminist revolution,” the thing waiting on the other side of insurrection, uprising, revolt.  Maybe, then, considering the path toward the artificial womb has less to do with the thing itself (especially given that it remains a technology which may never arrive), and more to do with the work on the way there.

It matters who you are when it comes to parenting rights already. It also matters when it comes to accessing reproductive health care, and to whether new reproductive technologies are accessible to you. For women of color in America, for queer and trans people, immigrant women, and disabled people, new reproductive technologies have most frequently meant new ways for their bodies to be subjugated and subjected to experimentation. For ectogenesis to shatter our existing, engrained social understandings of what constitutes gender, and how we build families in beneficial ways, the “feminist revolution” must do the work of putting those whom these technologies have historically made vulnerable at the center of the conversation.

–Claire Horn researches the legal and ethical implications of artificial wombs at Birkbeck Law. Editor at http://www.whatfreshwitch.com/ and writer on reproductive technologies, dead birds and butterflies, selkies, and more.

Updated on April 3 at 2:23 p.m. ET

In early March, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt approached the White House with a request: He wanted substantial pay raises for two of his closest aides.  

The aides, Sarah Greenwalt and Millan Hupp, were part of the small group of staffers who had traveled with Pruitt to Washington from Oklahoma, where he had served as attorney general. Greenwalt, a 30-year-old who had worked as Pruitt’s general counsel in Oklahoma, was now his senior counsel at the EPA. Hupp, 26, was working on his political team before she moved to D.C. to become the agency’s scheduling director.

Pruitt asked that Greenwalt’s salary be raised from $107,435 to $164,200; Hupp’s, from $86,460 to $114,590. Because both women were political appointees, he needed the White House to sign-off on their new pay.

According to a source with direct knowledge of the meeting, held in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, staffers from the Presidential Personnel Office dismissed Pruitt’s application. The White House, the source said, declined to approve the raises.

So Pruitt found another way.

A provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act allows the EPA administrator to hire up to 30 people into the agency, without White House or congressional approval. The provision, meant to help expedite the hiring of experts and allow for more flexible staffing, became law in 1996. In past administrations, it has been used to hire specialists into custom-made roles in especially stressed offices, according to Bob Perciasepe, a former acting EPA administrator.

After the White House rejected their request, Pruitt’s team studied the particulars of the Safe Drinking Water provision, according to the source with direct knowledge of these events. By reappointing Greenwalt and Hupp under this authority, they learned, Pruitt could exercise total control over their contracts and grant the raises on his own.

Pruitt ordered it done. Though Hupp and Greenwalt’s duties did not change, the agency began processing them for raises of $28,130 and $56,765, respectively, compared with their 2017 salaries. Less than two weeks after Pruitt had approached the White House, according to time-stamped Human Resources documents shared with The Atlantic, the paperwork was finished.

Word of the raises quickly began to circulate through the agency. The episode infuriated some staffers; to some political aides, it was evidence of Pruitt’s disregard for the White House’s warnings to cabinet officials that they avoid even the appearance of impropriety. It also underscored the administrator’s tendency to play favorites among his staff, according to two sources with direct knowledge of agency dynamics. Hupp, in particular, is making more than her Obama-era predecessor, a five-year veteran of the agency who did not break six figures until the final year of the administration, according to public records. (While Greenwalt has no obvious peer in the Obama administration, the EPA’s general counsel had an annual salary of $155,500 in 2016.)

Said one EPA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press: “This whole thing has completely gutted any morale I had left to put up with this place.”

“The Safe Drinking Water Act provides the EPA with broad authority to appoint scientific, engineering, professional, legal, and administrative positions within EPA without regard to the civil service laws.  This is clear authority that has been relied on by previous administrations,” EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said in a statement. “The Administrator was not aware that these personnel actions had not been submitted to the Presidential Personnel Office. So, the Administrator has directed that they be submitted to the Presidential Personnel Office for review.”

The White House did not return requests for comment.

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The unusual hiring scheme comes amid new questions about Pruitt’s ethics as administrator. The EPA chief rented a Capitol Hill apartment partly owned by the wife of a top energy lobbyist, paying just $50 per night for the space, according to an ABC News report last week. Pruitt also faces questions over his use of taxpayer money to make regular first- and business-class flights during his first year in office.

Now, in the wake of Greenwalt and Hupp’s salary boosts, government watchdogs are deepening their probe of Pruitt’s use of the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Last May, Senate Democrats pressed the agency for answers about Pruitt’s embrace of the provision. That month, for example, Pruitt used the law to hire Nancy Beck, a long-time lobbyist for the chemical industry, as the deputy head of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Historically, that role has been filled by a career civil servant or a political appointee.

Because she was hired administratively, and not appointed by the White House, Beck did not have to sign President Trump’s ethics pledge, which mandates that Trump officials cannot work on an issue on which they had lobbied in the previous two years. Senators Tom Carper and Sheldon Whitehouse, top Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee, sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office requesting a probe into Beck’s hiring. They were concerned, chiefly, that Pruitt was using the Safe Drinking Water hiring authority as a way for new employees to evade the ethics pledge.

“[The Safe Drinking Water Act] can be a legitimate way to bring on skilled experts the EPA needs to protect Americans’ health and safety, but Administrator Pruitt seems more interested in using it to skirt ethics requirements, like the president’s order banning hires from working on matters involving former employers or clients,” Whitehouse said in a statement provided to The Atlantic.

Last October, Senator Bob Menendez wrote to the EPA inspector general requesting an investigation of the agency’s use of the Safe Drinking Water hiring authority, among other matters. The IG agreed to take up the investigation two months later, but it wasn’t until March that they began seriously questioning the EPA’s top political appointees about potential abuse of the hiring authority.

Now, staffers are waiting to see how officials will address the raises.

“It’s a complete coincidence that Pruitt went behind the White House’s back and used this in the most unethical way possible, just as the [inspector general] starts asking questions,” said one EPA staffer. “Now they just have to connect the dots.”

It’s not as though Pruitt is the first EPA administrator to lean on the Safe Drinking Water Act hiring authority. EPA veterans of both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations said they were well-acquainted with the provision. But of the half-dozen former top EPA staffers interviewed for this article, not one could comprehend using it as a means of increasing salaries—especially following a rejection from the White House.

“I can’t imagine that being done in the regime in which I served,” said Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy administrator of the EPA in the Obama administration. “It would have been very controversial. The accusation that would have been pinned on the administrator was that they were trying to give a private benefit using public funds.”

Meiburg, who spent his career at the EPA after joining as career staff in 1977, said that “ADs”—the internal shorthand for “administratively determined” hires—were considered a precious commodity inside the agency.

“The number of ADs were monitored very closely by the chief of staff,” he said. “To get one was a big deal. To get one was not an easy task.”

Christine Todd Whitman, the first EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, said she couldn’t remember ever reclassifying a political appointee as an AD. “I don’t even remember it being brought up as a potential or something to think about,” she said.

As Meiburg noted, even appearing to convert a political appointee to an AD simply to give a salary raise could prove politically damaging. But other officials said the deeper effects would be felt inside the agency, where a transparent show of favoritism could inflame inter-office tensions and decrease morale. And in an office where staffers already jockey for favor among Pruitt’s “posse,” according to a source who works closely with the EPA, such a backlash is likely.

“It’s already such a toxic work environment,” the source said, requesting anonymity to speak candidly. “It’s hard to see how it could get any worse.”

Over the last several days, as press reports have zeroed in on Pruitt’s living arrangements, this is the scandal that has seized the agency from the inside. If Pruitt was on thin ice with the White House before, the acceleration of the inquiry into his payroll practices may shatter it.

“We were once the president’s favorite,” said the EPA official. “Now we’re the problem child.”

Over a single weekend in March, an unprecedented disaster hit fertility clinics—twice.

First came the news that the University Hospitals Fertility Center in Ohio, lost more than 4,000 eggs and embryos in a malfunctioning cryogenic tank. Then, in an unrelated incident, Pacific Fertility Center in California reported that liquid-nitrogen levels had fallen too low in a tank holding “several thousand” eggs and embryos, affecting an unconfirmed number.

In-vitro fertilization can be a draining process—financially, physically, emotionally. And for some families, these embryos had been their last chance to have biological children. Dozens of lawsuits have since been filed; parents and would-be parents spoke of the children they will never have, of the siblings their children will never know. At times, they spoke not just of “embryos” but of “babies.”

“How many babies are at risk right now while we sit, while we talk?” asked Wendy Penniman, who lost embryos in the malfunctioning Ohio tank, on the Today show.

On Friday, as first reported by Courthouse News, Penniman’s lawyer, Bruce Taubman, filed a complaint asking the court to consider an embryo a person. The filing—which comes in addition to a class-action lawsuit already filed March 12 on behalf of Penniman and her husband, Rick—asks for a declaratory judgment that “the life of a person begins at the moment of conception” and “the legal status of an embryo is that of a person.”

Taubman says that he filed the complaint to “unclog the logjam” of dozens of related fertility-clinic cases in Ohio. If embryos were declared people, he noted, then a wrongful-death claim could also come into play. “The damages are much more severe ... There is no cap on damages,” he says.

Encapsulated in this legal strategy is a lightning rod of a question. If—and that’s a big if—an embryo is deemed a person, then it could very well alter the practices of in-vitro fertilization clinics, which routinely create more embryos than are implanted into patients. And it will almost certainly alter the landscape of abortion politics.

The filing cites a 1985 Ohio Supreme Court case, Werling v. Sandy, that held a viable fetus is a person. But I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, says that case may not be the most relevant one here. A viable fetus is one that can survive outside of a womb. And in Egan v. Smith, an Ohio Court of Appeals court held in 1993 that wrongful death could not be brought for a nonviable fetus. This case is more likely to apply to embryos. “It’s a real stretch,” he says, “but lawyers are supposed to give every argument they can.”

Nevertheless, the rising popularity of IVF has opened real questions over how to treat embryos. This has come up in disputes, like when the actress Sofía Vergara was sued by two frozen embryos created with her ex, who wanted to implant them in a surrogate mother. That case was brought in Louisiana, which deems embryos neither property nor humans but “juridical persons,” an entity with legal rights. (The case was ultimately dismissed.)

This issue also comes up in more prosaic scenarios, like when a family is deciding what to do with extra embryos from IVF. Some donate them to research. Others dispose of them, sometimes through a ceremony. Often, they simply decide to keep the embryos in storage. “Couples don’t always agree about the moral and legal status of the embryo, where life begins, and how religion enters into it, and a lot of them end up kicking the can down the road,” a fertility doctor told The New York Times in 2015. There are no exact numbers, but as many as a million embryos may be in indefinite frozen storage.

Christian organizations have advocated “snowflake adoptions,” in which a family adopts another’s extra embryos. Last fall, one such adoption resulted in the birth of a baby girl from an embryo frozen for 24 years, nearly as long as her 26-year-old adoptive mother had been alive.

The Penniman’s lawsuit appears to be the only so far to have broached the subject of personhood. Another attorney, Tom Merriman, who says his firm is representing more than 100 clients against UH Fertility Center now, is not pursuing this legal strategy. “An embryo—whatever your personal moral or religious belief about the status of embryos—it’s something that’s created with tremendous personal sacrifice. It is unique, and it has value far greater than something like your car or your TV,” he says. But personhood adds a partisan dimension to the cases. “I hate to see these cases get politicized and transformed into some partisan debate on a hot-button issue,” he adds.

When the personhood filing came out, the pro-life, antiabortion website LifeNews.com jumped on the news by reprinting an article from the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, “Thousands of Unique Human Beings Die After Fertility Clinic Has Storage Tank Malfunction.”

Cohen, the Harvard law professor, added that deeming embryos people could have huge implications for the IVF industry. Clinics routinely create extra embryos because not every embryo that is implanted will result in a pregnancy. What will happen to those extra embryos if they are persons? And perhaps more importantly, did those embryos that did not result in a pregnancy die? It could have a huge chilling effect on the IVF industry.

I put this scenario to Taubman, the lawyer who wrote the personhood filing. “That’s a good question. I don’t have an answer to for that. We’ll leave the court to decide about that,” he replied, with a long pause. “That’s a good question.”

Well. My least-favorite month of the year is here. April, I hate you so much. It’s nothing personal.

The ninth anniversary of Madeline’s death is this Saturday. My friends are wonderful. They text me to check in, send jokes to make me smile, or little notes to let me know they’re thinking of us. I really cannot stress enough how much that means to me. I tell everyone who comes to me with “My friend lost a child, what can I do to support them,” that the ongoing messages YEARS LATER are so, so crucial for Mike and me. If you have a friend who’s lost someone important to them, make a note to remember that person every year.

But I digress. The last twelveish months have been really hard for me, from a grieving standpoint. Maddie’s tenth birthday weighed on me all year. The flashbacks, which I can usually manage, came far too often. I’d look out the window in the car and flashback to when Mike would drive me to my appointments, or I’d smell something that made me think of all the time Maddie and I spent in the hospital. I was very depressed and often struggled to complete simple things like doing laundry…writing on my blog…even getting off the couch.

On top of that, I wasn’t honest with myself. I think at first I honestly didn’t realize I was depressed. But when the word “depression” was brought up, I was in denial for a long time. I told myself that I was “too far” in the grieving process to be depressed. I would put on my happy face and attempt to go through the motions of life. My old standbys of staying busy to keep my mind off things started to backfire, and suddenly everything seemed incredibly overwhelming. And then on Maddie’s birthday, I just about came apart.

What this has made me realize is that I need to be kinder to myself. I don’t need to push through things. It’s okay to be overwhelmed and depressed and I just need to admit it to the people around me. I shouldn’t worry that they won’t understand. I need to let people in on what’s happening so they can help me. And I need to help myself.

So, with that in mind, Mike and I have decided not to physically participate in the March for Babies this year. The event is always an emotional minefield. I am relieving myself of the stress that comes along with trying to put together a team. I’m not going to send out a mass email asking for donations (thereby avoiding the dreaded “unsubscribe” responses). And, Mike, the kids, and I are not going to attend the March for Babies at the end of the month.

This was simultaneously the easiest and hardest decision. It means A LOT to us that so many give up their Saturday mornings to walk with and support us. We know how hard it is. But not going means Mike and I won’t be slammed with so many reminders that our daughter died. It’s really difficult to see the children who survived prematurity — we’re obviously so happy for them, but to see so many children running around, laughing and living…it’s really, really hard. The march makes us relive the worst moment of our life and this year, I just can’t do that to myself.

That being said, we still heavily support the March of Dimes, and we hope to continue to raise money and awareness for a cause and organization that means so much to us. I’m still registered for the Los Angeles march to support our local March of Dimes branch, and if anyone is kind enough to give to the cause, the link to donate in Madeline’s name is here.

Even though I know this is the right decision for this year, I’m still terrified that I’m going to be letting people down. My heart and my head are rarely on the same page when it comes to this stuff. I know Annabel is going to be disappointed, as she loves the march. But this year, I have to take care of myself and I know that someday she’ll understand.

I hope you all understand, too.

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© copyright Heather Spohr 2018 | All rights reserved.

This content may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, without the prior written permission of the author.

Every few decades, a new idea emerges about the “right” way to raise children. The 1990s saw the rise of the helicopter parent, those anxious middle- and upper-middle-class mothers and fathers who hover, imagining the worst-case scenario. Their fears led many states to pass laws aimed at keeping kids safe, including statutes that punish parents who leave their children at home alone or unattended in cars.

Today, new child-rearing norms are on the rise, with parents taking a more laissez-faire approach. “Free-range” parenting, a reaction to the overbearing style of the previous generation, has become fashionable, even expected, among many of today’s parents.

In a corresponding shift, state laws are starting to catch up. Utah recently became the first state to explicitly legalize free-range parenting, with a new law stipulating that parents cannot be charged with neglect for allowing “a child, whose basic needs are met and who is of sufficient age and maturity to avoid harm or unreasonable risk of harm, to engage in independent activities.” Essentially, parents can now legally let their children “walk, run or bike to and from school, travel to commercial or recreational facilities, play outside and remain at home unattended”—things that may previously have attracted the attention of child-welfare authorities.

As this relatively new child-rearing philosophy is codified into law, it’s a good time to reflect on the consequences of it. Free-range parenting is certainly a warranted corrective to the ever-anxious helicopter parents, but it also, in ways not often fully appreciated, benefits some families more than others. Utah’s new law, and the broader free-range parenting movement, are susceptible to a problem of interpretation: What counts as “free-range parenting” and what counts as “neglect” are in the eye of the beholder—and race and class often figure heavily into such distinctions.

For some parents—poor and working-class parents, and especially poor and working-class parents of color—free-range parenting has long been a necessity, even if it didn’t previously get the virtuous-sounding label it has today. In the ’90s, the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein studied single working mothers in Chicago, Boston, San Antonio, and Charleston, South Carolina. Those mothers often had no choice but to leave their kids at home, and they were certainly not the first to do so.

When children in poor and working-class families stay home or walk to school alone, their parents face considerable risks. In 2014, Debra Harrell, a 46-year-old black mother in South Carolina, was arrested for allowing her 9-year-old daughter to play at the park while she was working at a nearby McDonald’s. Harrell spent the night in jail, and her daughter was placed in foster care for 17 days.

Harrell’s punishment may have been egregious and anomalous, but it’s something many fear in a society in which poor parents are often assumed to be bad parents—indeed, a recent Brookings Institute study showed that the vast majority of families investigated by child-welfare authorities are poor families, and especially poor families of color. In my own research, I have interviewed poor and working-class parents who worry that a teacher or a neighbor or a well-meaning stranger will report them to child-welfare authorities, just for doing what they have to do to get by. One working-class single father regularly left his 9- and 11-year-old daughters home alone after school. He said he had no other choice, but he worried that others might not see it the same way. (As is standard in scholarly research, I agreed not to publish the father’s name.)

The middle- and upper-middle-class parents I interviewed never voiced those same concerns. For them, free-range parenting seems relatively risk-free. Consider Lenore Skenazy, the former columnist who coined the term. Skenazy received her share of extreme criticism for a column she wrote 10 years ago about her decision to let her 9-year-old son to ride the New York City subway alone. But no one called the police, and child-welfare authorities never threatened to take her son away. Instead, Skenazy was invited to host her own reality show about parenting.

Other examples point to a far-reaching double standard. A study published last month by the sociologists Sinikka Elliott and Sarah Bowen found that poor mothers, and especially poor black mothers, are judged harshly on their children’s health and well-being. Many of those mothers had been reported to child-welfare agencies by doctors or teachers, especially when their children were smaller than average or seemed hungry at school. And even when investigators’ questioning of a parent produced no evidence of abuse or neglect, it left poor mothers and children in a lingering state of fear.

As a relatively well-off white parent, I have personally benefited from the opposite dynamic. My 9-month-old son recently came down with a nasty case of dermatitis. His face, arms, legs, and torso were covered with red, itchy blotches. It took weeks of doctor visits and steroid creams to get the rash under control. In the intervening time, my son got plenty of sideways glances from neighbors, child-care providers, even strangers at the grocery store. But no one called child-welfare authorities. No one questioned my judgment or assumed I was doing something wrong.

And even if they had, I, like many well-off parents, probably would have been able to talk my way out of trouble. My own research finds that middle- and upper-middle-class parents are particularly good at exempting their children from many rules and punishments—partly because of savvy negotiating skills, but partly because their class or race affords them the benefit of the doubt. In the schools I observed, many well-off parents made unreasonable requests. They would ask teachers to excuse their children from having to do homework or to put their children in advanced classes, even if their children’s test scores were too low to qualify. In those cases, well-meaning teachers often wanted to say no. But the teachers were afraid of the parents, worrying that the parents would flood their inbox with emails, complain to the principal, or even threaten to get lawyers involved. So the teachers found it easier to say yes instead.

Utah’s new law—and the free-range-parenting movement more generally—doesn’t seem to account for all this. The law doesn’t specify when free-range parenting becomes neglectful parenting, and that gives authorities an uncomfortable amount of discretion. Utah’s law protects parents from having their children taken away, but only if those children are of “sufficient” age and if those children’s “basic needs are met.” But what counts as sufficient? Is a 9-year-old old enough to stay home alone? And what about children whose parents need to work more to put food on the table or keep a roof over their heads? Will those children be just as free to play at the park alone?

The better-educated, better-paid parents who embrace free-range parenting aren’t preoccupied with questions like these. A major shortcoming of their otherwise well-intentioned movement is that the people who have the most to gain from it—poor and working-class parents—will find themselves held to a different set of expectations.

These Tuna Stuffed Deviled Eggs are perfect to pack for lunch or serve as an appetizer!

Tuna Deviled Eggs

I combined two favorites, deviled eggs and tuna salad and made these bite sized snacks, lunch or appetizers you can easily make ahead and pop right into your mouth!

(more…)

Chaz is a free spirit. Iris is a good girl looking for love. Dylan is a foodie who isn’t sure how he feels about kids. Luke likes long walks—really long walks. All of them are ready for a long-term relationship. In fact, they’d like to move in right away. All of them are dogs.

Taking a cue from dating websites, a number of programs have begun using personality tests to pair pets with owners. For example, PawsLikeMe, a website described by a co-founder as “eHarmony for people and pets,” gives humans a questionnaire to gauge their lifestyle and expectations, then returns dating-site-style bios of rescue dogs. (For Karisma, a Chihuahua–pug mix: “If you are looking for big things in little packages, then look no farther!”)

Human–animal matchmaking may sound fanciful, but it mirrors a renewed scientific interest in animal personality. Having moved beyond the fear of anthropomorphism associated with researchers like Jane Goodall (who was ridiculed for “inventing” personality traits for chimps in the 1950s and ’60s), scientists are actively exploring animal personality’s implications for everything from daily care to evolution. As John Shivik, the author of Mousy Cats and Sheepish Coyotes, points out, a species’ survival depends on diversity, including of personality. “If you don’t have variation, you will go extinct,” he says, noting that traits that are advantageous in one situation may not be in another. Boldness, for example, might be beneficial when food is scarce and risk-taking essential, but less helpful at other times. In one study, scientists assessed how bold or shy captive foxes were, and then released them into the wild. After six months, only bold foxes had died, perhaps because they were more inclined to take risks that put them in harm’s way.

Much as psychologists do when studying humans, scientists can characterize consistent behavior in animals. To this end, researchers have taken questionnaires designed to measure human personality and refashioned them for animals (a person fills them out based on observations). One influential early review of animal personality by the psychologists Sam Gosling and Oliver John identified three personality factors in dogs analogous to three of the “Big Five” personality factors in people: extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. (A fourth factor for dogs combined the remaining two: openness to experience and conscientiousness.) Meanwhile, Marieke Cassia Gartner, a psychologist at the Philadelphia Zoo, led research that identified three feline personality factors—dominance, impulsiveness, and neuroticism—among certain species, including house cats.

Some of the new research is shedding light on how an animal’s personality—like a human’s—affects its life course. When Gartner and her co-authors examined the relationship between personality and subjective well-being in leopards and lions, they found that neuroticism correlated negatively with happiness, just as in humans. A 1999 study found that cheetahs in captivity who were rated as more “tense-fearful” than others were less likely to breed.

The better that pet owners and zookeepers understand an individual animal, the better they can tailor care to it. One study, for example, notes that highly neurotic cats can benefit from extra hiding places, while relatively extroverted cats may need more toys and more playtime with other animals.

Still other research supports the idea of matching pet and owner personalities. In 2011, an Oklahoma State University researcher surveyed the traits and preferences of dogs and their owners, then asked the owners to report how satisfied they were with their pet. Some factors that foretold a happy match were unsurprising—a mutual love of running outside, say. Others were a little more unusual. One particularly strong predictor of bliss was a shared “likeliness of being destructive.” That’s right: Owners who agreed with the statement “When I am feeling anxious, I am likely to tear up something” and the statement “My dog tears up pillows and other items” were among the most likely to have happy human–dog marriages.

With dogs as with people, there’s someone for everyone.

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This article appears in the April 2018 print edition with the headline “Which Kind of Dog Are You?”

This article is part of Parenting in an Uncertain Age, a series about the experience of raising children in a time of great change.

So much of raising children is unimaginable until it happens, an abstract future materialized awkwardly into an actual child covered in dirt. Amid constant unpredictability, one small unsung comfort for parents is the chance to revisit books from childhood, to share with your own children the stories you knew and loved.

Recently I came across my old copies of Betty MacDonald’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, a series about magic cures for children’s foibles that amazed me as a child. But when I read them to my own children, I was stunned to discover that these silly books are actually horror stories—though for reasons no child could ever comprehend.

The books, children’s best sellers from the 1950s that my mother passed to me in the 1980s, are seemingly anodyne stories about the improbably named Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, a childless woman who serves as an unlicensed psychopharmacologist to her suburban neighborhood’s Baby Boomer kids. You see, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle possesses a treasure chest of medicines to treat children’s bad habits—and unlike Ritalin, these cures involve bad trips.

When little Melody Foxglove’s mother complains that Melody cries too much, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle prescribes “Crybaby Tonic,” which makes Melody produce enough tears that she nearly drowns. Jody Jones, who skips school to build his tree house, is treated with “Ignorance Tonic,” which makes him forget how to count and read. Whenever Wendy Hamilton tattles, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s “Tattletale Pills” cause a dark-tailed cloud to emerge from her mouth.

Even more haunting are Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s therapeutic cures. When Hubert Prentiss refuses to pick up his toys, he is abandoned to this vice until his mess traps him in his room, forcing him to take his meals through a window off a garden rake. More unfortunate is Patsy Waters, whose refusal to take baths leads Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle to prescribe the “Radish Cure”: Poor Patsy goes unwashed for so long that her parents plant radish seeds in her dirt-encrusted face while she sleeps, so that plants sprout overnight. That story alone was curative enough to make me raise my parents’ water bill for months.

If this sounds like gothic horror, well, it is. But unlike the unalloyed sadism of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which children are tortured and maimed for sins like overeating or chewing gum (while touring a candy factory), Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s “cures” are meant to be admired, even emulated. “Isn’t it a shame that children can’t be evened up?” she asks one distraught parent rhetorically. “Some are show-offs and some are shy and some are quiet and some are noisy … But children are wonderful and I love them all.” Parents agree, especially since her rather aggressive “love” evens up their children perfectly. As one relieved mother swoons, “There goes the most wonderful person in the whole world.”

As a child I found these books fascinating, suggesting as they did a conspiracy of adults manipulating children’s every move. Now, as a mother of four, I find them even more fascinating, because it turns out that the conspiracy is real. Parents do constantly conspire with a bevy of licensed and unlicensed advisors—relatives, friends, doctors, teachers, social-media strangers, even representatives of the state. What all these people promise is what Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle provides: conformity. It’s something so unnatural that it can only happen through magic, and yet it’s what’s expected of children, then and now.

Much of this conformity is just common courtesy; no one wants to live in a world in which people don’t pick up their toys. But the conformity parents sometimes crave goes deeper than that, and the desperation of these books’ 1950s parents hasn’t gone away. My 21st-century children laugh at Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s picket-fenced planet, where Mrs. Brown does the mending while Mr. Brown smokes his pipe, and little Christopher Brown putting his elbows on the table incurs an intervention involving a trained pig (don’t ask). But the reality is that today, amid a middle-class panic about their families’ and their country’s future, there is intense demand for children’s conformity. It can be hard to see just how much conformity is required until you have a child—or two, or four—who simply won’t comply.

For large numbers of children, for instance, sitting in a cinderblock box for six hours a day is an awful way to learn. But it’s hard to appreciate just how awful it is until your child gets expelled from preschool for being unable to remain in the room. You don’t think about how many questions your children ask when you read together until they get kicked out of the library story hour; you don’t realize how eagerly they explore nature until the arboretum ejects them for failing to stay in line on the trail. When your children achieve good grades, you are delighted, until you sit through the presentations where every child recites an identical list of facts about the country they “researched” on Wikipedia, and you realize what success is. You wonder why their assignments are so uninspired, until your answer arrives in the form of paperwork about multiday standardized tests. You wonder why your child who reads five novels weekly has been flagged for poor reading skills, until you discover that said child spends all assessment time reading under the desk.

You appreciate the need for children to develop patience, mastery, tolerance for boredom. But demand piles upon demand until it becomes a kind of daily war, as if this structure were specifically designed to destroy the very things that it purports to nourish. Your children soon meet other repeat offenders who frequent the principals’ and psychologists’ offices, children who sit on exercise balls and wear weighted vests in class to better constrain them, like characters from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” dystopia. You observe as your children uncover, like video-game Easter eggs, your state’s various statutes that trigger ejection from class; soon even your kindergartner discovers that all he needs to do to leave the room is announce an urge to kill himself, a fact he then exploits at will. You don’t blame the schools for these essential interventions, but you can hardly blame your child either for wanting out, because clearly something is wrong. Your children love learning, reading, exploring, creating; at home they write books, invent board games, make up languages, build gadgets out of old coffee makers. They appear to have the makings of successful adults—they’re resourceful, independent, and interested in contributing something to the world. But the markers of success in children are in many ways the opposite of these markers of success in adulthood, and in the meantime—a long, decade-plus meantime—children are trapped in a kind of juvenile detention where success is defined by how well adults can manage them, the chief adult being you, the parent.

Through all this, the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggles proliferate. Some are relatives or trusted friends; others are professionals, teachers, therapists, doctors, all offering their chests of cures. Some of these cures actually work. But even when they work, you begin to wonder what it means for them to work, to wonder what you are not seeing when all the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggles see is a tattletale or a truant or a child covered in dirt, an aberration to be evened out, fixed, cured. This harrowing question brings you to the farthest edge of your own limitations as a parent, which is also the nearest edge of your child’s freedom. And then you understand that control is a delusion—that all you can do is what Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle never does, which is to love the people your children actually are, instead of the people you want them to be.

Parents’ desire for conformity in their children comes from something much deeper and more impossible than getting them to do their homework. We, parents, want our children to be us; at some unconscious level, we produced them to replace us. But thinking beyond ourselves requires an active imagination—and imagination, with all its frightening risks, is exactly what parents are unconsciously trying to suppress, in our children and in ourselves.

Today, when I read these books to my children, I try something I never could have done as a child: I imagine Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s uncured young Baby Boomers as adults, and appreciate how much we needed them. I imagine Melody Foxglove’s ready tears inspiring her to join the Freedom Riders or to protest the Vietnam War, while tree-house-building truant Jody Jones tunes in, drops out, reads Silent Spring, and designs new sustainable homes for the future. I see unwashed Patsy Waters digging wells in the Peace Corps, lifting people out of poverty; I picture toy-obsessed Hubert Prentiss inventing robots and cellphones; I imagine tattletale Wendy Hamilton as a fearless prosecutor, taking down child molesters and organized crime. Christopher Brown, after half a century of perfect table manners, lets his grandchildren put their feet up on his table, laughing with them about his parents’ limitations. And then I look around at my own children, hoping someday they will laugh at my limitations too.

When Kelli Kelley awoke from her C-section 17 years ago, having delivered her son after just 24 weeks of pregnancy, her husband gave her a Polaroid of their baby. He was tiny, underdeveloped, eyes still fused shut, with translucent skin covered in fine hair, and lying in a sea of medical equipment and lines. To Kelley, he looked like a baby bird. Cut to her first visit to the neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU) to meet him: a cacophony of beeping machines, harsh lighting, “space-age-looking equipment,” and hospital smells, with 40 “tiny, alien babies in boxes.” Her son had a whole team of doctors and nurses working to keep him alive, but Kelley felt frightened and alone. Kelley remembers just one support group for parents, with a chaplain. “Sitting with a man in a collar felt more like a memorial service,” she recalls.

Four months later Kelley and her husband brought their son home. He was on a heart monitor and still unable to breastfeed. They lived under a crush of medical bills, and in his first year, their baby underwent three surgeries. Kelley didn’t recognize the toll her son’s ordeal had taken on her until two years later when their daughter was born at 34 weeks with a blood disorder. The family returned to the NICU, and for Kelley, the trauma from both births collided. Kelley was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder; but her son was already five before Kelley finally received a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis.

“The experience of the neonatal intensive-care unit, the birth of a premature baby—it’s a very different kind of trauma from what we call single-incident trauma, like someone in a car accident or even a sexual assault,” explains Richard J. Shaw, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Stanford University’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. In the NICU, traumatic, stressful events are continuous: your baby’s fragile health, other babies coding, a flow of bad news about your baby’s current health and future prognosis. Mothers—themselves still recovering from childbirth—commonly describe guilt, feeling as though they’d somehow failed their children by giving birth early (even though, of course, they couldn’t help it), and a sense of uselessness in the shadow of a medical team of experts. Only in recent years have researchers begun recognizing that the fear, stress, and anxiety parents carry with them out of the NICU can manifest later as PTSD.

Shaw, who has researched PTSD in mothers of premature babies, notes that very few NICUs have dedicated psychiatrists on staff. While screening for postpartum depression has become common—and rates of PPD in mothers of premature infants can be as high as 40 percent—PTSD screenings for NICU parents are still rare. Even among fathers of preemies who did not meet the criteria for PTSD shortly after the birth, one study found that many did experience PTSD symptoms after about four months (once the baby was home).

When Kelley needed help and began searching for it, she found little. So she started a program to train people she calls “NICU graduate parents” to support other families with children in the NICU in her hometown of Austin, Texas. That program eventually became a stand-alone nonprofit, Hand to Hold, and has grown to comprise a network of up to 200 peer-support volunteers (dubbed Helping Hands) across the United States, England, South Africa, Canada, the Virgin Islands, Japan, and Puerto Rico. Those Helping Hands undergo intake screening to help ensure they are ready to reenter the NICU; are given a background check; must complete a four-part, online training on effective listening, bereavement, and trauma-informed care; have an interview with Hand to Hold’s peer-support team; and also receive ongoing support from Hand to Hold’s staff of social workers. Helping Hands are paired with current NICU parents based on the similarity of their babies’ conditions and their experiences in the NICU. (Parents of 23-weekers are matched with other parents of 23-weekers, for example.) This free program offers parents a person to call, text, and email who knows what it’s like to navigate life in the NICU. A separate Hand to Hold “ambassadors” program places peer volunteers in person in the NICU to go on rounds with medical teams and lead parent and sibling support groups at three Texas medical centers.

Peer support is a useful method for treating PTSD. “Speaking to a parent who’s been through something similar and learned how to cope with it is tremendously powerful,” Shaw says. Writing a trauma narrative is also common practice, which in a clinical setting might include writing out a full story of the traumatic event, and going through paragraph by paragraph to consider the feelings those memories arouse—perhaps two or three times. When such a therapeutic setting is unavailable, there’s evidence that writing for 20 minutes a day about one’s trauma can relieve distress, anger, and anxiety, and somewhat reduce PTSD symptoms.

A core element of Hand to Hold’s programming is the opportunity for parents to write for the organization’s blog—which can help the writer process, but is also beneficial as a resource for other NICU parents. Kayla Aimee delivered her daughter at 25 weeks and found Hand to Hold during a search for micro-preemie support groups. She started blogging and eventually published the book Anchored: Finding Hope in the Unexpected.

Andrea Mullenmeister was 23 weeks pregnant and on vacation in northern Minnesota when her contractions started. After a rush to the nearest hospital, Mullenmeister was so dilated that her baby’s foot was visible by vaginal exam. So Mullenmeister was airlifted by helicopter to the nearest hospital with a NICU. She could hardly breathe as lakes, cityscapes, and countryside flicked past the windows. Her husband followed in their car below. Mullenmeister’s son was born bruised, small, and battered, foot-first, not breathing. Once doctors got him breathing, “I heard this tiny mew,” she says. But his traumatic birth and the subsequent 93 days in the NICU left a firm impression, giving Mullenmeister a fear of heights and flashbacks for years when she heard helicopters. It was two years before Mullenmeister was diagnosed with late-onset postpartum depression and PTSD. Around that time she found Hand to Hold and started writing about her experience on the organization’s blog. In addition to therapy, she explained, that habit of writing remained crucial as her son, now six, grew up with a mix of chronic health concerns, ranging from autism to a brain tumor.

Mullenmeister’s experience of dealing with long-term trauma and navigating additional health concerns is common. Hand to Hold offers ongoing support to families as their kids age via forums and Facebook groups. Hand to Hold also recently launched a podcast series, NICU Now, that explores life in the NICU, with a new series to come (in English and Spanish) for bereaved parents whose babies passed away in the NICU. The organization is also soon releasing a continuing education podcast series for NICU nurses. The podcast has been downloaded more than 15,000 times internationally.

For all the refreshed trauma Kelley felt years ago upon returning to the NICU with her daughter, now she returns to the NICU on new terms, not grieving, but as an ambassador. She sees babies struggle, and it’s still painful to watch. But now Kelley turns her eyes to the parents—to anxious fathers, and to mothers, standing in shock in their hospital-issued gowns as the medical team encircles an impossibly small baby. “I don’t ever want another NICU parent to feel alone like I felt,” Kelley says, and so, she will walk over to them, and offer them her hand.

This article contains spoilers throughout the entire second season of Jessica Jones.

Early in the first new episode of Jessica Jones, Patricia “Trish” Walker (Rachael Taylor) is shown, without context, at a children’s birthday party, dressed in rainbow sequins and an auburn wig, halfheartedly singing the theme song from the children’s TV show she starred in (It’s Patsy!) a decade or so ago. At the end of the performance Trish rushes away without posing for photographs, prompting one of the gay dads who hired her to observe, semi-admiringly, that “Patsy’s kinda mean.”

It’s a throwaway moment and a punchline, but it also foreshadows much of what’s to follow in the second season of the Marvel Netflix show. Trish is different. During the superb first season of Melissa Rosenberg’s superhero series about an alcoholic private detective with a traumatic past (played ably by Krysten Ritter), Trish was Jessica’s foil and sidekick, as pulled together and bland as Jessica was snarly and compelling. But in the second, which comes almost two-and-a-half years later, Trish gets a more fleshed-out backstory, involving a TV director who preyed on her when she was 15, a mother who exploited Trish for her own gain, a Britney-esque meltdown of a pop career, and a sordid addiction to drugs and alcohol. She also (significant spoiler) becomes the bad guy.

Or one of the bad guys, at least. The 13 new episodes of Jessica Jones meander from action scene to chase sequence, with a whole lot of filler in between. What they’re most obviously missing is a Big Bad like Season 1’s Kilgrave (David Tennant), an antagonist who’s both disturbing and charismatic enough to shape a whole season of a television show around. They also suffer from Netflix bloat, the affliction of every other Marvel superhero series on the streaming service, all of which could could prune almost half their running time without sacrificing anything substantial. But Rosenberg made one specific change in the season that stands out: Each of the three potential villains is a woman.

It wasn’t entirely clear until the final episode which character was going to transform into Jessica’s main antagonist, but there were several potential candidates. Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss), newly diagnosed with ALS, seemed like she might be gunning for superpowered status, given the fragility of her own human body and her always outsized ambitions. I spent most of the early episodes wondering how long it would take Jeri to find the doctor at IGH who “made” Jessica and compel him to fix her. But in the end it was Trish, unwillingly detoxing off a government-issued inhaler, who did just that. Trish’s desperation to be powered had turned into the focal point of the series, pulling her toward vigilante stunts and drug-fueled obsession that put everyone in her orbit at risk. Trish became a monster just as Jessica—learning more about her past and discovering that her mother was still alive—became more human.

The third element in the triad was Alisa Jones (Janet McTeer), a mysterious woman with freakish strength and an estimable array of frizzy wigs who was revealed in the sixth episode to be Jessica’s mother. It was an astonishing reveal that made almost everything that came after it feel anticlimactic. The introduction of Alisa shed some light on Jessica’s origin story as a superhero: how she was revived—after the car crash that killed the rest of her family—by the rogue hippie Dr. Karl Malus (Callum Keith Rennie) and his experimental gene therapy. And how her mother was also brought back from death by Karl, who later became her caregiver, and her husband. But it also shed some light on Jessica as a person. It’s been tempting in previous episodes to attribute Jessica’s worst habits (her slovenliness, her temper) to her status as an orphan, but here was Alisa to point out that she was simply taking after her mother all this time.

As Season 2 proceeded, it pitted Jessica against Alisa, then Trish, and then repeated the cycle. The gamble, which didn’t quite pay off, meant a lack of both narrative momentum and tension, given that neither of the women Jessica was up against, her mother and her best friend, truly seemed to pose a threat to her. But it was a fascinating experiment by Rosenberg. In the first season, she used a superhero show to delve into the ramifications of trauma and the dynamics of abusive relationships, underpinned by superior performances from Ritter and Tennant and their obvious chemistry. In the second, her focus was family instead, and how women are just as likely as men to be distorted by greed, ambition, pride, and power. “You want ratings, power, and stardom,” Jessica tells Trish, scornfully. “Yes, yes, and yes,” Trish replies. “Because those things will help me help people.” But her professions of altruism aren’t remotely persuasive.

The second season’s biggest achievement is moral complexity, something remarkable for a superhero show. Jeri’s conclusion, in which she encourages the woman who conned her to become a murderer, feels satisfying, even though Jeri’s behavior is reprehensible. Alisa, who kills several innocent people, including a cop, remains a sympathetic character. Trish, who falls sway to her own jealousy of both the Jones women, doesn’t. It’s frustrating, because the series presents a patchwork of different scenes and threads (Jeri’s predatory behavior at work, Trish’s biography) that are tantalizing by themselves, but it never quite shapes them into a unifying worldview. What you long for as a viewer is a way to make sense of it all, but it’s messy, more like real life than a well-formed drama.

Still, it’s intriguing just to see female characters engage in behavior like this. Trish, with her rapacious drive and diminishing ethical boundaries, becomes progressively more like her mother, the narcissistic Dorothy Walker (Rebecca De Mornay). Jessica refuses to become like hers, but she can’t condemn her, either. And Jeri, who reveals in one scene that she grew up in a trailer, behaves more and more like someone abusing her power in the workplace (if she were a man, she’d be precisely the kind of character the #TimesUp movement is coming for). Accused of sleeping with her assistant, she replies, “Did you not see the way she dressed? She practically did a split on my desk.” She shamelessly ogles her yoga teacher and treats sex workers like dirt, throwing money at them and ordering them out of her apartment. But she also engages in a sexual liaison with Inez (Leah Gibson) that’s a masterclass in how to gracefully ask for consent.

The new season benefits from stellar performances, particularly Moss as Jeri and the British McTeer as Alisa. In one scene early on, before it’s entirely obvious who or what Alisa is, she’s seen playing the piano at home, as a neighbor with a baby drops by to say hello. It’s clear that Alisa is drawn to the infant, but wary about letting them hear her play. When the baby’s cries throw off her rhythm, Alisa has a terrifying outburst of rage in which she destroys the piano, with McTeer conveying all of her ferocious anger while also making her oddly sympathetic.

The cost of the focus being on Jessica’s family is that Ritter herself has less to do. She’s still luminous to watch, and enjoyably DGAF, but she’s left playing the straight woman to her increasingly off-the-wall mother and best friend. Taylor struggles more with selling Trish’s transformation, possibly because her evolution is too much of a leap to begin with. Even given all the information that’s revealed about her past, it’s hard to accept the ugly, violent person Trish becomes with the  kind, supportive woman she was before.

It’s unconfirmed as yet whether Jessica Jones will see a third season. The new episodes, which exclusively used women directors, seem to have suffered from the long gap between the show’s debut and its return. But what’s admirable is that Rosenberg is still thinking of stories that very few other people in television are telling at the moment. Compared with shows like Daredevil and Iron Fist, Jessica Jones is in a different category, using its superhero not for spectacle, but to convey something deeper about the world outside the show. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely worthwhile.

If “Homeward Bound meets The Walking Dead” sounds appealing to you, then Good Dog, Bad Zombie is probably right up your (likely dark and zombie-infested) alley. This is how board-game developers Make Big Things describe their new tabletop game, which is currently seeking funding for production through a Kickstarter campaign. In GDBZ (which is fun to say fast), players work cooperatively (read: everyone wins, or everyone loses) to save a post-apocalyptic city from a zombie attack. In the story-based game, game players are members of a heroic dog pack rescuing humans from a zombie apocalypse; using their special powers (such as snuggling, protecting, or being grumpy), the pup pack searches the city for human survivors and herds them to safety in Central Bark — all while occasionally pausing to, you know, lick themselves. Extra coolness factor: GDBZ is ethically produced by a worker-owned cooperative using environmentally friendly and sustainable production methods, AND the Kickstarter campaign will also help benefit One Tail at a Time, a no-kill rescue and adoption center. Sniff out more about Good Dog, Bad Zombie over at Kickstarter.

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Dear Captain,

My girlfriend and I are getting a dog (jeey!). We are both women and some people have commented this is like getting a baby for us. It hurts to think about us not being able to reproduce “just like” a man and woman would be. Do you have any tips about reacting to these statements?

With love,
Jeey we are getting a dog

Dear Yay for Dogs!

If you and your girlfriend decide to have kids someday, there are many routes you could try, and these people are neither the boss of you nor (clearly!) authorities on the subject.

Depending on the audience and your sense of humor, what if you replied with one of these?

• “What a very strange thing to say.”
• “Weird, why would you say that?” 
• “How is it the same?”…”But it’s a dog, not a baby!” (Be super sincere, ask them to explain until they get embarrassed and stop.)
• “Your understanding of human reproduction is missing a few pieces, I think.” 
• “I do not think that means what you think it means.” 
• “It is…not the same at all.”  
• “Nope, but it’s exactly like when straight people get a dog!”

Congratulations on the dog, sympathies on the people who are using it as an opportunity to be homophobic and weird.

P.S. Please feel free to send cute dog photos

Update (3/14): Idk what’s going on, but the overall vibe of comments is very contentious this week. Let’s take a break from discussions, eat some pie for Pi Day, and try again soon. Jeeeeeeeyyyyy on the new dog, Letter Writer!

 

 

 

“So, why were you crying through the entire film?”
— my daughter Athena, who was mildly concerned.

There are several answers to this, most of which boil down to the fact that I am a father who remembers being the ten-year-old boy who fell in love with Madeleine L’Engle’s book, and the movie engaged both of these states. I cried because the casting and performance of Meg (played by Storm Reid) is immensely good — such a stubborn, willful, doubt-filled girl — and because I could see both myself as a child and my daughter in her. I cried because I remember being a fatherless child and being a father who would never want to leave his daughter. I cried because the film has empathy not only for bright but difficult children but for all children, and because it wants so much for Meg to see herself, just as I would want to be seen and would want my own child to see her value. I cried because I remembered being lost like Meg was lost, and remembered everyone who helped me find myself, as everyone in this film does so for Meg, and as I hope I have helped my own daughter become who she is meant to be.

I cried because this film has an enormous amount of empathy, as the book did, and that essential core remains intact, even as the film takes liberties with the source material. It would have to, 56 years after the book’s initial publication, to speak to the audience it’s intended to speak to, which is not me, a 48-year-old white dude, although it clearly and so obviously did. I cried because this film gets the book right, because it sees the book, just as the book saw me when I came to it almost four decades ago, and has seen so many other children since. Director Ava DuVernay’s love of the material, and her willingness to put the work into it to make it speak today, is self-evident and appreciated.

It is not a perfect film, in itself or in its adaptation of the source material. Lots is truncated, changed and elided, some new stuff is put in to middling effect. The commercial needs of a $100 million film mean that some tropey elements get past the gate, and on more than one occasion the special effects become the tail wagging the dog. In the end I didn’t see much of this as a problem. The film is not perfect, and also, this is a film about faults, and how our own faults ultimately may give us power to save ourselves and others. While I’m not going to say this film’s faults ultimately give it power, I can say that none of the film’s faults are that important to me when the film’s core is solid, and intact, and so powerfully on point. It’s not perfect, nor does it have to be to work.

(And, you may ask, what do I think about the film’s multicultural and feminine viewpoint and aesthetic? I think it works very well, and it’s a reminder that things that are not designed specifically for one in mind may still speak significantly and specifically to one, if one is open to it. I would not have imagined A Wrinkle in Time the way DuVernay has — I seriously doubt I could have imagined it this way — and yet there I was crying my eyes out all the same. I do not need the world to be imagined as I would have imagined it. I want the world and the things in it to exceed my imagination, to show me things I cannot make for myself but can take into myself, hold precious, and make my imagination that much wider from that point forward. As I noted before, this movie was not, I think, made for me, and still here I am, loving it as much as I do.)

Should you see this film? Well, I think you should. I also think you should see it on a big screen, because it’s visually impressive enough to warrant it and because films still have their most potent power on a big screen, in front of an audience. Maybe it won’t have the same effect on you that it had on me — in fact, it probably won’t, because you are not me. But I’m willing to believe it will have some effect. Whatever that effect is, it’ll be worth getting yourself to a theater for, and maybe taking a kid or two along with you, too.

As for me, I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve been this affected by a film in years. Part of that is because I loved the book as a child, but I’ve loved other books before, and their adaptations, and yet didn’t spend their entire running time in tears. I think, in the end, it’s what Ava DuVernay, her team and her actors (especially Storm Reid) brought to it: Empathy, joy, optimism and their own point of view that brings A Wrinkle in Time into modern times. No one needs me to tell them that DuVernay is a major director; that much was evident with Selma and 13th. What I can say is that DuVernay, rare among directors, is now someone whose vision I trust — not to give me what I think I want, but to give me what I didn’t know I needed, until she showed it to me.

I knew I was probably going to like A Wrinkle in Time. I didn’t know I was going to love it this much. I certainly didn’t know I was going to find myself crying all the way through it. That’s on DuVernay and her team. And for that, I say: Ava DuVernay, thank you. I don’t think it’s possible for your film to have moved me more than it has.

The exam table with its stirrups. The cold, metal instruments lying in wait. The drape-sheet hiding the patient from herself. The invasive poking and prodding. A routine trip to the gynecologist can elicit anxiety and dread.

One study attributed “negative affective, behavioral, and cognitive processes” to the pelvic exam, “unlike most other preventative care procedures.” Each year, some 60 million pelvic exams are performed in the United States. Providers use a speculum—the hinged, two-bladed instrument that looks like a duck bill—to inspect the cervix, test for STDs, and obtain pap smears.

For all its beneficial uses, the speculum has a sordid past, one connected to patriarchal authority and institutionalized racism. In the hands of professionalized medicine, the speculum became a tool for (mostly male) doctors to make public decisions about women’s private, reproductive organs. But today, product designers in San Francisco are taking aim at gynecology’s hated device. They’re rethinking the speculum’s jingling screws, materials, and uncomfortable angles to make the pelvic exam less unnerving for patients and providers.

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In 1845, James Marion Sims, a 32-year-old surgeon in Montgomery, Alabama, was asked by a local slave owner to treat a young woman suffering from vesicovaginal fistula. This debilitating condition, a source of pain and incontinence, is usually caused by an obstructed labor: when the baby, stuck in the birth canal, crushes the soft tissues between the vagina and bladder. In the antebellum South, where black women had little health care or control over their bodies, rape and chronic infections were also often to blame. Sims, a plantation doctor, lacked relevant experience, but took an interest in finding a cure. Between 1845 and 1849, he performed dozens of surgeries, without anesthesia, on at least 12 enslaved women. In these experiments on human chattel, Sims developed a technique to repair fistula, the first of its kind. In the process, he invented the duckbill speculum so that he could better visualize the cervix.

Sims moved to New York, where he founded the first hospital for gynecological surgery in the country. It served the city’s white, affluent clientele. He moved to Europe in the 1860s, where his female patients included royalty; later, he served as president of the American Medical Association. His accomplishments made Sims a hero; he eventually was immortalized in New York’s Central Park, where a controversial statue of the “surgeon and philanthropist” still stands. Its inscription makes no mention of the enslaved women—Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey were the only names Sims recorded—on whose bodies he practiced his surgery.

These are the chilling origins of gynecology in America, but the shift had begun in Europe even earlier. Until the early 19th century, women’s health “was a craft for laywomen,” left to midwives who weren’t viewed as real medical providers, says Ornella Moscucci in her book The Science of Woman: Gynecology and Gender in England. But that changed when population concerns and the professionalization of medicine put men in charge of women’s reproductive health.

The speculum offered a solution to a problem that had plagued gynecology from the beginning: How could a man inspect a woman—“a serious sacrifice in delicacy,” as the French doctor Marc Colombat de L’Isère put it—without violating her modesty? The speculum allowed the male doctor to access the cervix while abiding by the strictly separate gender spheres of the day. “There was great anxiety about what it meant to examine a woman and about the propriety of that exam,” says Agnes Arnold-Forster, a historian at the University of Roehampton. “The speculum meant not touching with your hand, but with an object.”

Despite its utility, the device was immediately caught up in intrigue. For critics in the medical community, the speculum compromised a woman’s morality. They worried that it could even lead patients into illicit relationships with their doctors. In 1850, The Lancet reported on a raucous meeting of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, where an overflow crowd listened to opponents rail against the “filthy and indecent application” of the device.

Soon, hysteria, the upper-class affliction said to originate in the womb, entered these debates. British and American physicians warned that the speculum could trigger “furor uterinus” (mania of the uterus), the symptoms of which included nervousness, insomnia, loss of appetite and sex drive, irritability, and a “tendency to cause trouble.” As Terri Kapsalis, the author of Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum, writes on the matter, white women were diagnosed as hysterics “in a period when rebelliousness, shamelessness, ambition, and ‘overeducation’ were considered to be likely causes.” No wonder suffragettes (Elizabeth Cady Stanton), social reformers (Jane Addams), and other disruptors of the status quo all shared the condition.

Beyond the bedside, the speculum was an instrument of surveillance, deployed by police to detain prostitutes suspected of carrying venereal disease, according to Moscucci. Britain’s Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s introduced compulsory exams by speculum-wielding doctors. Similar laws targeted the separation of the “unclean” from the “clean” in France and Germany. This is how the speculum became a symbol of sexual deviancy, linked to syphilis and gonorrhea. Gynecology was a product of the social and political order—one that aimed to control women first. As Moscucci asks, why else would there be a medical science of women when no such equivalent exists for men?

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In San Francisco, four women at the design firm Frog hope to revisit the speculum Sims created 170 years ago. Their design, known as Yona, grew out of a conversation between women designers about the flaws of the pelvic exam. From a product standpoint, the exam’s audio cues only ratchet up discomfort and anxiety. The patient, lying with feet in stirrups and unable to see what’s happening, hears the jarring sounds of jingling metal and the tightening of the screw. “You actually have open screws on this instrument,” Hailey Stewart, one of Frog’s industrial designers, told me. “You hear them as they’re opening you up.”

Stewart’s team also explored materials, settling on surgical-grade silicone for a quieter device that doesn’t feel as unnatural in the body as plastic or as cold as metal. It bears no resemblance to a medieval torture device. Fran Wang, a mechanical engineer working on the project, focuses on questions about the speculum’s received shape: “Why is it shaped so flat? Why is it so wide? Why is it angled? Why does the screw pinch when not covered by the provider’s finger?” After addressing exposed screws and pinching, the designers wanted to modify how the mechanism operates, with the goal of allowing providers to carry out the insertion and opening process with one hand, freeing the other to grab swabs. The result, they hope, will be a shorter exam. Stewart noted that even small adjustments to the apparatus magnify improvements in comfort during the exam. By pulling back the handle angle, they say Yona creates more space between the provider’s hand and the table, so that the patient no longer has to “scooch down” until they’re practically hanging off the edge.

Together with the designers Rachel Hobart and Sahana Kumar, Stewart and Wang hypothesized that the older generation of ob-gyns—providers with decades of experience using the hulking, gray instrument—would be less open to change than others who are just starting out. Yet, according to Stewart, interviews with clinicians confirmed the opposite. She says that providers recounted “ hacks” they adopt with the speculum “to put patients at ease” because they “know it’s not the right instrument” for the job. Gynecologists may be as eager for an alternative to the speculum as their patients.

The Frog designers aren’t the first to set their sights on the pelvic exam. It’s impossible to imagine Yona without the women’s-health movement of the 1970s and ’80s, when feminists—mostly white, middle-class women—gathered at speculum parties to inspect their anatomy, equipped with the device, a flashlight, and a mirror. The idea was to reclaim knowledge about the body while challenging “the mystique of the speculum and the fear and anxiety surrounding its use,” as Kapsalis says in her book Public Privates. No longer would the male doctor peer inside the powerless patient who had never seen her own cervix.

When 19th-century doctors clashed over the speculum, Arnold-Foster says, they engaged in debates about a man’s authority over women, but they also made claims about how to gather information. Until the introduction of the microscope into the diagnostic process, even elite, highly trained doctors believed that seeing, which required uncomfortable poking and prodding, was unnecessary. The seasoned physician could simply ask questions and determine what ailed the patient. The speculum was the perfect tool for empiricists who put their faith in observation. It “signified the growing belief in clinical practice that to see was increasingly to know and that this kind of knowing was inextricably linked to power,” writes Margarete Sandelowski.

Women now account for about 85 percent of U.S. gynecologists, a profession once dominated by men. Even so, the speculum hasn’t changed much, even as ultrasounds and fetal monitors have transformed the practice of looking at patients in similar clinical contexts. That might finally be shifting, even if the practical future of a design like Yona is hardly guaranteed. At the very least, it represents a new approach to the design and use of a device that has seemed inevitable, even if not natural. To serve women better, the speculum has to face its history in American slavery and 19th-century gender relations, in order to move beyond it.

Reading someone else’s private letters feels almost as intrusive as spying on them through their living-room window. The personalized salutation, the handwriting quirks, and the inside jokes sprinkled throughout offer a glimpse at an interior world only the recipient is meant to see. There is no performance, no act put on for third-party observers. And while perusing just one letter between two people provides hints into their relationship, digging into a whole trove of letters sent over the course of several years can reveal intricacies that face-to-face interaction with the authors never would.

It is this sort of intimacy that Tayari Jones so searchingly explores in her new novel, An American Marriage, which follows the wrongful imprisonment of a young black man named Roy, and its impact on him and on his new wife Celestial. Jones shifts from the first-person narration provided by these two protagonists to letters they send each other while Roy is in prison. She then returns to their firsthand accounts, adding in a third narrator—Andre, a childhood friend of Celestial’s and a college friend of Roy’s. The variation in these perspectives serves an important purpose: It offers up myriad means of understanding the novel’s complicated central relationship, and lets every character speak for themselves, giving each an opportunity to capture the reader’s allegiance.

Roy and Celestial have been married for a little more than a year when they’re introduced, and they’re madly in love, with a fire “still burning blue hot.” The couple is about to travel from their home in Atlanta (also Jones’s hometown, and the city in which she has grounded her three previous novels) to visit Roy’s parents in the fictional town of Eloe, Louisiana. It’s clear from the outset, with Roy and Celestial’s narration carrying the benefit of hindsight, that this trip will be the start of the pair’s troubles. To Roy, reflecting on the day of their departure, Celestial’s attempt to get them to stay behind and cancel the trip is “like watching a horror flick … When a spectral voice says, GET OUT, you should do it.” But, of course, Roy and Celestial don’t do it. They drive to Eloe, where they’ve decided to stay in a hotel rather than with Roy’s family, and where, ultimately, Roy is falsely accused of rape, subsequently arrested, tried in court, and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

This moment and those both immediately preceding and following it are relayed, in separate chapters, by Roy and Celestial, who feel a raft of emotions: There’s the confusion Roy feels about how this could have happened in the first place; the utter fear Celestial feels as the police storm their room and drag them into the parking lot; and the complete sense of loss both of them experience in the aftermath. (“Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied,” Celestial writes to Roy in her first letter to him in prison.) But rather than dwell on the moral implications of this violent and false imprisonment of a black man, Jones almost speeds through it; specifics of the arrest and the trial are provided in a matter of paragraphs. The terseness doesn’t make these details any less affecting, but does suggest them as essential context for the dissolving marriage at the novel’s core. Jones’s exploration is a breathtaking look at who and what can be complicit in that breakdown.

Marriages, of course—and the anxieties that abound within them—have been fodder for fiction for years. As Adelle Waldman wrote in 2013 about Jeffrey Eugenides’s aptly named The Marriage Plot, “As long as marriage and love and relationships have high stakes for us emotionally, they have the potential to offer rich subject material for novelists.” In recent months, books that range from memoir to “adultery narratives” have taken on the idea of troubled partnerships and how to deal with them, making it one of the more abundant themes in literature at this moment. With An American Marriage, Jones joins this conversation in a quietly powerful way. Her writing illuminates the bits and pieces of a marriage: those almost imperceptible moments that make it, break it, and forcefully tear it apart. Touching on familiar marital aspects (infidelity, stasis, competition), Jones suggests that it is the amalgamation of these things, not any particular isolated instance, that can indelibly fracture a relationship.

Jones’s strongest work in An American Marriage is in the missives she crafts between Celestial and Roy while he’s imprisoned. Though they make up less than a quarter of the novel, the letters nonetheless serve as the spine of this crumbling partnership. Everything the reader could want to know about the couple is laid out in these accounts. The sheer volume of backstory provided here amounts to literary whiplash: Old family secrets and integral plot developments are presented in a single sentence and not even fully digested by the reader until several more pages have gone by. It becomes head-spinning how Jones upends all expectations, flipping the reader’s perceptions and offering unexpected moments of clarity.

These letters mark the swift progression of time and house details that nudge the story forward, but perhaps most importantly they offer a snapshot of Celestial and Roy’s changing feelings, expressed directly to each other. At the outset, both are hopeful about the future and are trying hard to keep things as they were. Roy refers to his writings as “love letters”; Celestial writes down, word for word, their last conversation before his arrest so that “we can pick up where we left off.” But these affectionate remarks dwindle over time, and their bond begins to fray. It becomes unclear where the relationship stands—“Your husband (I think),” Roy signs one of his later letters—as his time in prison drags on. Without the need to perform their relationship to others, the truth of their fading affection becomes evident in their words. There is no need to hold back, and the animosity they begin to feel toward one another (for not visiting, for not writing, for simply not being what the other person wants or needs) is palpable. Their troubles lodge themselves in the reader’s mind, but it’s impossible to choose sides.

By the end of the epistolary section, Roy is released from prison seven years short of his original 12-year sentence. “I am coming home,” he writes to Celestial, but he fails to realize that home is a malleable concept, not a fixed place. The home he knew five years ago is basically nonexistent, no matter how hard he may try to will it back into existence. For the past three years, Celestial has been “playing house” with Andre, their old friend, and the second half of the novel sees her navigating the different lives she has been living with these two men. This latter section is dynamic, with conflicts coming to a head and silent tensions finally boiling over. The present collides with the past, as Celestial, Roy, and Andre all attempt to find harmony between the two—a seemingly insurmountable task for all of them. They’re trying to move past the pain and to locate that earlier intimacy—of newlywed bliss, childhood friendship, and those first letters—but they all have different ideas of where to find it.

This made me laugh, but also extend a lot of empathy.

Smart. Ji Lee turned multiple Instagram accounts into a portfolio site.

(via Jocelyn)

Following a similar vein to our Instagram Love feature from last month (@dogs_infood), we present our newest muse: Muttsterpieces! Muttsterpieces’ goal is simple: show dogs as “the works of art they truly are”. From Vermeer to Dali, you’ll find various Instagram pups taking centerstage in well-known masterpieces. Our favorite so far? Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Tuna“.

For more dogs-as-art good times, check out @muttsterpieces!

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The ride-sharing company Uber is launching a new service that will allow hospitals and doctors to book rides for their patients.

The new Uber Health dashboard, which has been tested by a beta group of about 100 hospitals and doctors’ offices since July, will allow medical and administrative staff to either call an Uber to the office to drive a specific patient home, or to dispatch an Uber to the patient’s house, with the option to schedule it up to 30 days in advance. The patient need not have the Uber app or even a working smartphone: The dashboard comes with a printable sheet allowing a doctor to circle the incoming Uber’s car color and write down the license plate.

With the dashboard, the drivers would see the patient’s name and phone number. The patient would get a text when their car arrived; if they have the regular Uber app, it would not be billed.

The new tools are compliant with HIPAA, the medical-privacy law, the company says. Uber Health’s data is “cordoned off” from the rest of Uber’s data, and only a handful of employees are given access, says Jay Holley, the head of partnerships at Uber Health.

Citing studies, the company says missed doctors’ appointments cost the health-care system $150 billion each year, and that 3.6 million Americans miss or delay appointments due to a lack of reliable transportation.

Holley is not aware of any Medicaid or insurance plan that reimbursed for Uber rides. He says many hospitals are paying for the rides out of their own budgets, finding it cheaper than the cost of missed appointments. Uber Health’s prices are similar to those of Uber in the same city, but the company did not have an average price for the Uber Health rides.

Pro Staff Physical Therapy, which has seven locations in New Jersey, began using Uber Health last summer. Many of the practice’s patients must come in two or three times per week, and many can’t drive because they’ve been injured, says Carlos Ospina, the chief clinical officer at Pro Staff. The Ubers are cheaper than cabs, he says, and Pro Staff covers the cost for patients. The only hiccup came from some of the practice’s less tech-savvy, older patients. They weren’t sure about the service at first, but they warmed to it with time and explanations from staff, he said.

Arun Sundararajan, a business professor at New York University and the author of The Sharing Economy, says it’s a good move for Uber to enter health care, which makes up one-sixth of the economy. The only pitfall, he says, might be in working out liability. How much is the driver responsible if, say, the patient faints in the back seat? “The burden on the platform and the health-care provider to ensure against something going wrong with the patient is a lot higher than if the patient is calling the car themselves,” Sundararajan says. “The fact that they are only launching this service now and not in the past is because it’s likely taken a while to work out the details.”

Many doctors call cabs for their patients, but Uber is available in about 250 U.S. cities and is sometimes cheaper than a metered taxi. Holley says that it would be up to doctors to determine if a patient was well enough to take an Uber, rather than an ambulance, and that if something happened to the patient in transit, the Uber driver should just call 911.

Partnering with hospitals might also introduce Uber to new customers. As recently as 2015, just 15 percent of Americans had used ride-hailing apps, and a third had never heard of them. The apps are mainly popular among higher-income people and college graduates, a Pew survey found. Conceivably, some of these patients, safely delivered to their homes by Uber Health, will go on to download the regular app for themselves.

The announcement comes after a string of scandals involving Uber in recent years. Just since January 2017, Uber has settled a lawsuit alleging that it misled drivers about earnings, and it faced sexual-harassment claims. It’s also been reported that the company spied on drivers, city agencies, and certain users. In November, it admitted to paying hackers $100,000 to cover up a data breach that affected 57 million accounts, disclosing names, emails, and phone numbers. (“None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it,” said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in a statement regarding the breach and cover-up. “While I can’t erase the past, I can commit on behalf of every Uber employee that we will learn from our mistakes.”)

“Uber has developed a reputation for pushing the limits of the law in its pursuit of dominating the ride-hailing market,” is how The Wall Street Journal described the company last fall. In 2015, a survey found that Lyft had become a more trusted ride-hailing app than Uber.

It remains to be seen if allying with the more pure-seeming health world will repair Uber’s reputation—or how much its brand is even suffering. After all, according to a spokeswoman, the company still has 75 million riders and 3 million drivers globally.

“We have a short memory as consumers,” the Georgetown University business professor Marlene Towns told the AP last fall, regarding Uber. “We tend to be, if not forgiving, forgetful.”

We might be especially forgiving if we happen to be spared a hefty ambulance bill.

The above title is a pretty good caption for the past two years of my life. I mean that in the way you’d say looking at a car wreck and wondering how the heck that happened. I mean that in the way you’d look at a cliff overlooking a beautiful and turbulent ocean, wondering why not jump into that terrifying and exhilerating adventure.

I’m a human factors engineer currently working as a contractor for the VA. I work on interfaces, tools and workflows for patients and clinicians in healthcare environments. I’m also a graphic designer. I’ve worked on large websites (largely bio-tech), brands and logos, marketing campaigns, many a magazine, corporate publications and everything in between. And I’m a mom.

Two years ago my identical twins were born at 24 weeks and 2 days. For those of us that don’t look at the what-to-expect app every day that means “your fetus is the size of an ear of corn and their skin is gradually growing opaque.” Our sons, T—(hereafter known as “T”) and Gabe, were born at 1 lb. 6 oz and 1 lb. 12 oz respectively. They were given a 50 percent chance to survive at birth. People often look at the fact that only one of them survived in light of that statistic and think it makes sense. But, EACH of them had a 50% chance of surviving, not a 1 out of 2 total. Either way, our Gabe lost to those odds.

T is two now and thriving. He is also, like most micro-preemies, medically complex. We spend a lot of time in medical facilities, watching clinicians work, and being on the user side of healthcare UX. It’s an interesting life. During the workday, I watch clinicians and patients work with electronic health records (EHRs) and patient portals. I visit medical centers and decipher the intricacies of clinical workflows through interviews and observations of patient/clinician interactions in my professional life. And then my personal life is consumed with medical equipment, facilities, appointments and interfaces.

I am continually telling my team at work about the insights I learn through my personal life. T’s doctors are used to me watching over their shoulders as they input his information on the computer and asking how they communicate with their team. And continually, in both sides, I find myself asking: why was this set up this way, what would be a better user experience, and what the f*** is going on?