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One morning a couple of years ago, during the awkward hour between my eldest daughter’s school drop-off and her sister’s swim lesson, I stopped at a coffee shop. There, I ran into the father of a boy in my daughter’s class. He was also schlepping a younger child around, and as we got to talking, I learned that we had a lot in common.

Like me, he had followed his spouse to the United Kingdom for work; she was a physician, learning some new procedure to take back to Australia. He couldn’t wait to move home to his big house down the road from the beach. “Do you think you’ll ever move back to the U.S.?” he asked. Sure, eventually, I said. Or at least that was the plan.

What he said next threw me: His wife had recently been offered a job in America. “It would have been great for her career,” he said, “but we figured it would be too dangerous for the kids.”

I can’t remember what I said in response—probably something about things not being quite as bad as they seem on the news. But his comment, and the matter-of-fact way he said it, stuck with me.

For most of my life, I have never felt anything but extreme, what-are-the-odds gratitude to have been born and raised in America. We have so much: a high median income and larger-than-average houses and some of the world’s most prestigious colleges and universities. When I tell people in the U.K. that I’ve moved there from the U.S., many respond with something to the effect of “Why on Earth would you do that?”

But their tone changes a little when I mention having kids. American parents have something of a reputation in Europe. We’re known for being intense, neurotic, overprotective, obsessed with academic achievement—“the opposite of relaxed,” Matthias Doepke, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, told me. Some Europeans worry that American child-rearing norms will take hold there. Yet many of the parents I’ve spoken with also express some sympathy, or even pity, for American parents. They seem bewildered by how little support new parents receive in the U.S., and horrified by the prevalence of gun violence in American life.

Of course, people in many other parts of the world experience levels of poverty, violence, and instability that are far worse. By that measure, many Americans are indeed very lucky. But the United States is a rich country, and it could afford to alleviate some of the challenges its parents face. Instead, the U.S. mostly regards children, and the vital task of raising them, as a personal matter.

[Read: Parental leave is American exceptionalism at its bleakest]

If you have children in America, it is up to you to keep them safe, healthy, and well cared for. This philosophy shapes government policy in some obvious ways: The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world without guaranteed paid maternity leave. Compared with the rest of the OECD, an international coalition of 38 nations—most of them wealthy—it spends far less on direct cash benefits for families (which the U.S. briefly experimented with more broadly during the early pandemic but then abandoned), as well as on early education and child care. Statutory paid vacation, sick leave, caregiving leave, and pension credits for caregivers are all common in OECD countries but absent in America.

I’ve come to understand that Australian dad’s logic: America is a land of incredible opportunity, but it’s not a great place to raise kids.

The job of raising children is simply different in the U.S. It comes with fewer assurances and requires navigating a level of precarity that is unique in the developed world.

It is, in a word, harder.

To me, the American ideal of “having it all”—that is, working a full-time job while raising children—always seemed like way too much. So when I finished graduate school with a baby in tow, I sought out part-time work that I hoped to scale up when my kids got older.

But the sort of work you can do part-time in America is generally not the sort that offers any leave or that can cover the cost of child care for two kids. When I gave birth to my second daughter, in 2018, I left my job entirely. This was by no means a disaster—my husband has a great job with excellent health insurance—but it was daunting to entirely lose my foothold in the labor market. I spent my first year at home trying to start a freelance writing career but didn’t get very far. Then, at the end of 2019, we moved to the United Kingdom.

Among the wealthy, postindustrial nations that make up America’s peers, England is hardly the most supportive for parents. Brits sometimes describe their country as a kind of halfway point between Europe and America, and that’s certainly true for family policy. But with a full year of job-protected leave, up to 39 weeks of which is paid; cash stipends for parents; tax-free child-care funds; paid vacation and sick leave; universal health care; and a right to request flexible working arrangements, there is far more support for parents in the U.K. than in the U.S. I don’t qualify for some of these benefits due to my visa status, but all kids, including mine, are entitled to at least 570 hours of early-childhood education or child care per year from age 3 to 4, and most children start full-time school a year earlier than American kindergarten.

With this help, I was able to give freelancing another go. I’m now living my dream of having a career that allows me to pick my daughters up from school every day, and I owe it in no small part to the subsidized child care in England. I would not be writing this article without it.

I still find parenting overwhelming and difficult at times, even though I know I’ve got it better than most people. But there’s a different feel to parenting over here—more sure-footed and secure—and it took me a while to figure out why. It’s the sense that my children’s welfare is not all on me and my husband. That is, after all, what a policy like paid parental leave represents: the conviction that parents deserve support, that the work of raising a country’s next generation of citizens should be a collective enterprise. When the government instead leaves parents to look for employers willing to tolerate their care responsibilities, it sends a clear message: your kids, your problem.

Take the example of Dina, who was born in Africa and works in higher education. When she found out she was pregnant, everyone in her and her husband’s extended families abroad assumed that she would have paid maternity leave. (Dina asked to be identified by her first name only so that she could speak openly about her leave experience.) But her academic job at the time offered no paid leave, and because she hadn’t been there for a full year when she gave birth, she didn’t even qualify for unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). This is something I encountered repeatedly in speaking with women for this article—the fact that they had switched jobs during their pregnancy or worked part-time rendered them ineligible for any job-protected leave, which isn’t how it works in many other countries.

[Read: The U.S. leaves parents on their own for a reason]

By the time Dina gave birth, she had accumulated just three days of paid time off. She scheduled her C-section for the Friday before the last week of the 2020 fall term so that she would have the weekend to recover before diving back into grading and research for the rest of her school’s winter break.

When the spring term started, she went back to teaching—virtually, due to the pandemic—at five weeks postpartum, still in pain from her C-section, pumping and nursing through six hours of class. Even so, Dina told me, in some ways she felt “lucky.” That her due date came so close to winter break was a stroke of good fortune; COVID-19 “saved” her, she said, because it allowed her to teach from home.

Another mother I spoke with, Patricia Green, was working as a home-health aide for a company serving people with disabilities when she found out she was pregnant. One of her clients would sometimes get violent and hit her belly, so Green sought out a new job at another agency. Like Dina, the fact that she started working there midpregnancy meant that she didn’t qualify for the FMLA. And even if she had been eligible, she needed the money, which meant that she had to go back to work two weeks postpartum, even though she didn’t have anyone she trusted to watch her child. “I feel like I was just kind of forced to go back to work, and I was not ready,” Green told me. “I would constantly be thinking about the safety of my child.”

Work-family conflicts continue throughout a child’s life—and, unsurprisingly, put the most strain on financially vulnerable mothers. Amanda Freeman, a sociologist at the University of Hartford who conducted a yearslong study of low-income mothers in America, told me that all of the women she surveyed were working, often multiple part-time jobs that not only paid poorly but also offered few benefits and none of the flexibility necessary to coordinate employment and parenting. Just-in-time scheduling, in which employers post employees’ schedules with very little notice and can change it at the last minute, made it difficult to arrange child care or, for that matter, any other aspect of their child’s life. “Sometimes they’ll pay for child care, which they can’t afford anyway, and then not have a shift,” Freeman said. The mothers Freeman interviewed worried about their kids getting sick—or about falling ill themselves—because few of them had any sick leave, which meant that if they called out of work, they lost money and potentially their job.

One mother I spoke with, Mendy Hughes, has worked at Walmart for more than 13 years. For many years, her employer only allowed her to work night shifts, sometimes until midnight, so she would bring her 10-year-old son to work when she couldn’t find someone to watch him. “I can’t call in,” she told me. “He had to get up and go to school the next day.”

On top of all this, many of the women Freeman interviewed depended on various forms of means-tested social assistance that are issued for brief and varied intervals and subject to stringent income limits and work requirements. Hanging on to them requires, among other things, regularly reporting detailed information about their earnings or work-related activities, creating an additional axis of work-family conflict. This triple load of work, parenting, and navigating public benefits is a direct by-product of America’s view of public support for parents as something you are not supposed to need, Freeman told me. It’s not something that happens when programs are universal.

To lose work in America is to lose not only your income and the child care it pays for but also practically everything else: your health insurance, your company’s retirement-savings plan, and, potentially, Social Security benefits. Even much of the social safety net—the earned-income tax credit, the refundable portion of the child tax credit, and often Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, what we usually think of as “welfare”—is tied to work. What help is left for those with little or no income is sparse, patchy, and difficult to access (and retain). If American families can’t find a way to juggle work and parenting in spite of all the obstacles, they have a lot to lose and very far to fall.

And people do fall. At least one in 10 Americans has medical debt; one study found that postpartum women, more than one in 10 of whom are uninsured, are significantly overrepresented among them. Nearly 5 percent of children in America have no health insurance, and, by one estimate, a third of children are underinsured. Even though the health system in the U.K. has problems, parents there and in other countries with universal health care don’t have to hesitate to seek care for their kids for fear they won’t be able to afford it.

American families are also more likely to live in poverty than those in most other OECD countries. And as Jane Waldfogel, a professor of social work at Columbia University, told me, “It’s not just that we have more poor kids, but that the penalty to being poor is stronger.” For one thing, kids who grow up in poverty in the U.S. are four times more likely to be poor as adults than those in Denmark or Germany, and twice as likely as those in the U.K. or Australia.

And then there’s the threat American parents have to worry about that pretty much doesn’t exist in many of the United States’s peer countries: guns. According to one analysis, from birth to 18, kids in the U.S. are nearly twice as likely to die as kids in a set of other wealthy countries—and the No. 1 cause of death is gun violence. Firearms are responsible for 20 percent of all U.S. child and teen deaths; the average among other comparably large and wealthy countries is less than 2 percent. Yet even that shocking statistic understates the degree to which guns distort childhood and complicate parenthood.

[Read: No parent should have to live like this]

The prevalence of gun violence is the reason Kayla Perry, who moved from the U.S. to Singapore in 2019, plans never to move back home. Born and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, Perry’s first brush with gun violence occurred when snipers spent three weeks in 2002 shooting people across the greater Washington, D.C., area. Their first victim was the father of one of her classmates. Perry heard the news when a fellow student passed her a note in French class, minutes before the school went into lockdown. Everything about school life was strange that month, she remembers—they weren’t allowed to go out for recess, and no one stood outside at the bus stop. Perry was never a direct victim or survivor of firearm violence, yet it shaped her worldview. She recalled a time when, while walking home from school, she and her friends heard what they thought was a gunshot. “We all ran in zigzags all the way home, because it’s the best way to avoid a shooter,” she told me. “Looking back, like, how sad is it that a kid that age has that fear?”  

American childhood today is indelibly shaped by that fear. School shootings have been rising in the past few decades; according to one count, in 2022, 40 people were killed and 100 more injured in 51 shootings. And even though most students will never encounter a school shooter, the pervasive threat and all of the countermeasures—the drills and metal detectors and bulletproof backpacks—produce a sense of unsafety at school. For parents, the unrelenting fear that your child could fall victim to a shooter is a source of anxiety, always there in the back of your mind.

But school shootings, and the defensive apparatus that has built up around them, are only the most visible way that firearm violence has warped American childhood. They represent a tiny fraction of gun deaths. Once, while Perry was home for winter break during her freshman year of college, her neighbor was shot in his driveway during an armed robbery. No one died, and Perry mostly accepted the swirling threat of gun violence as an ordinary part of life. “You could get in a car crash; you could get in a plane crash; you could be shot … That’s just normal life,” she said.

Only when she moved away did she fully appreciate how unusual widespread gun violence is in other parts of the world, or start to wonder what it would be like to grow up without it. Perry doesn’t have children yet, but she wants them—and that’s why she’s decided she will not move back to the United States. She wants her future kids to live in a country where they don’t need to worry about firearms.

For a year during the pandemic, I found myself in the somewhat strange position of writing a weekly roundup of parenting advice for an American audience from my perch overseas. I remember reading an article published after the Uvalde massacre, meant to give American parents data-driven advice on how to protect their kids. The author accurately noted that the overwhelming majority of children who die by gun violence aren’t killed at school. Nearly a third of deaths from firearms among minors are suicides. Among kids under 13, nearly half of gun deaths and injuries are accidental.

Nothing epitomizes U.S. individualism quite like widespread gun ownership—and nothing more clearly illustrates the impossible burdens that individualism inevitably places on parents. No amount of tragedy has yet convinced Americans to set aside their guns, so instead we saddle parents with the absurd task of protecting their children from other gun owners while also ensuring that the child never stumbles across a gun.

All of this might help explain why American parents act the way they do.

In many parts of the world, parenting has gotten more intense, and childhood has become less free. But the all-consuming nature of American child-rearing is extreme compared with many other countries, Doepke, the economics professor, told me. In the U.S., for example, preschool is much more academic. (While searching for summer camps last year, I stumbled on a “USA-style” camp where kids can learn to code.) In the Nordic region and elsewhere, early care settings are more focused on playing in nature. “If you live in Stockholm and do the American thing of teaching numbers and letters to your kids and signing them up for violin at age 4, then your Swedish friends will tell you that is almost child abuse,” Doepke said.

This meddling style of parenting may have started out as an idiosyncrasy of the upper classes, but it has become the norm—or at least the aspiration—for many American parents. We see it not only in that early academic pressure but also in the way moms and dads devour parenting advice, and the high degree of surveillance kids are subjected to. But, of course, not everyone has the time and resources to meet these standards. Amanda Freeman told me that every parent in her survey of low-income mothers was aware of intensive-parenting norms; most were desperate to replicate them and ashamed when they couldn’t.

[Read: The gravitational pull of supervising kids all the time]

Hannes Schwandt, an economist at Northwestern University, told me that in many communities in Switzerland, where he used to teach, accompanying children on their walk to school was generally frowned upon. By comparison, American children seem to be raised as if they were in a “combat zone,” Schwandt said. Perry noted something similar in Singapore—kids there are extremely focused on academics (many go to after-school school), but they also have a tremendous amount of freedom from a young age, riding the metro or going to the mall on their own.

It’s ironic that in a country so committed to freedom, children have so little of it; that in a society so committed to personal responsibility and self-reliance, children can do so little for themselves. But perhaps that’s not a coincidence. In their book, Love, Money, and Parenting, Doepke and his co-author, Fabrizio Zilibotti, argue that much of the variation among wealthy nations in parenting styles has economic roots. The emphasis that parents across the world put on hard work (relative to values such as independence and imagination) lines up remarkably well with their country’s economic inequality. About 9 in 10 Chinese parents and two-thirds of American parents place hard work among the most important values to pass along to children. In Sweden, it’s 11 percent. This makes a lot of sense: Parents everywhere want to set their kids up for success, but “the economic environment really shapes what that means,” Doepke said.

Pushing your kids to do well in school and filling out their free time with extracurriculars that will help their college applications might be tough on children, but if you live in the U.S., it is still likely the rational thing to do. The risks, both physical and financial, of taking a hands-off approach to parenting are simply higher in America than in pretty much any other comparably wealthy country.

This, I think, is the quandary I find myself in when weighing whether to return to the United States: I don’t know that I can move back to America without becoming an American parent. The task of raising a child is always uncertain and daunting, even under the best of circumstances. But when you sign up to be a parent in the U.S., you are signing up to navigate threats to your kids’ safety and your family’s financial stability that you would not have to consider if you lived in any comparable country. There’s no opting out of these stressors; they’re part of the job.

My husband and I still plan to move back to the U.S. at some point. We want to be near our families—and will need to be, eventually, in order to help care for our parents as they age. We always assumed that moving closer to family members who can help out with our kids would make parenting easier. But I don’t know if my relatives’ support would be enough to offset the feeling that my country doesn’t have my family’s back. It’s a tragic thought: that moving home is not what’s best for my family. But it’s one I cannot shake.

Whether its your own self review or a review of someone else, its always a challenge not to write something that feels like its falling flat. Make your accomplishments sound like the hard work they are with some of these words.

One small tip: use these carefully, they can be a little much if you stuff too many into a review at once.

Leadership words:

1. Chaired
2. Modeled
3. Principal
4. Coached
5. Mentored
6. Drove
7. Guided
8. Persuaded
9. Instructed

Creation words:

1. Composed
2. Produced
3. Executed
4. Devised
5. Conceived
6. Defined
7. Derived
8. Invented

Management words:

1. Coordinated
2. Headed
3. Organized
4. Oversaw
5. Planned
6. Presided
7. Arranged
8. Orchestrated

This is not by any means an exhaustive list. Please feel free to share more and save these for future use.

Example transformation of some of my year end review from 2019 (pre awesome words list, obviously)

Before:

• Release of chat 2.0 and web messaging (prior to joining architecture FT)
• Improving performance testing requests intake process & roll out to teams
• PCF Scaling Guidelines released
• Continued work with teams on performance testing
• Continued work with other architects on planning for performance success
• Grew technological understanding of AWS and Mulesoft

After:

• Coordinated and managed the release of chat 2.0 and the web messaging to production
• Devised an improved intake process for performance testing requests & instructed the appdev teams on the new process
• Defined PCF Scaling Guidelines and coached teams on why they were important
• Worked with appdev teams on performance testing
• Collaborated with other architects on planning for performance success
• Grew technological understanding of AWS and Mulesoft

Just a reminder that all the food you panic-bought at the beginning of the pandemic has expired. PS. If this is relatable content go move the stuff from the wash into the dryer (or rewash them if you can’t remember when you washed them), call to get your meds refilled, drink some water and plugContinue reading "If you don’t need this reminder you are a better person than I am."

No virtue resists cultivation like forgiveness; it grows in the wild. For Sarah Gregory, a middle-aged mom working for a substance-abuse treatment center in Frederick, Maryland, it arose from a blaze of old pain. Gregory, having been through years of addiction and recovery, has learned all about the cathartic power of letting go. But early in the fall of 2020, she still so vehemently hated the man who had murdered her grandmother Dorothy Epps in Alabama nearly 20 years prior that she couldn’t so much as say his name, even in prayer. She had been furious at him for so long, she told me, “I was having trouble remembering the good things about my grandmother.” All of the memories were stained by anger.

There was no question of guilt in Epps’s case. By the time Gregory was nearing her breaking point in 2020, the killer had already given an account of his crime. James “Jimi” Barber, a contractor and erstwhile boyfriend of Gregory’s maternal aunt, had been working on Epps’s house in the spring of 2001. He was also, at that time, nursing a fierce addiction. By his own dim recollection, Barber said in a 2012 court hearing, he had smoked “hundreds of dollars’ worth” of crack cocaine, drunk at least a case of beer, and taken a handful of prescription pain pills before he arrived at Epps’s home on the night of the murder. What he remembered from that point was, he said, hazy; he could clearly recall being inside the house, and picking up a hammer. Barber narrated his immediate horror at what he had done, how he had recoiled from his own image in a mirror moments after the crime. He said he didn’t know why he had struck Epps. It had just happened.

And then, one day in the autumn of 2020, Gregory was driving, and a Bruce Springsteen song—“Letter to You”—came on the radio, and she knew what she had to do. She wrote a letter to Barber, who was by then on Alabama’s death row. Her letter began haltingly, but with purpose. She led with her loss.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Dead to rights]

“Before May 2001, you were part of our family,” she wrote. “You saw firsthand how close we all were and how we were held together by one woman … She was strong, graceful, filled with compassion and love, she forgave and saw the best in everyone.” When Barber killed her grandmother, she said, he murdered “our matriarch, my best friend, my confidant, the woman who loved me (and everyone) unconditionally. I lost my hero that night and I lost her in the most horrible way imaginable.” After the crime, she said, she had abused drugs to avoid facing her grief. In the process of getting clean, she had devoted herself to “helping the next person, being there when anyone needs me, and loving unconditionally,” like her grandmother had. And she had come a long way in practicing forgiveness, she said, but Barber had been the exception.

That was changing, even as the letter unfolded. “The internal struggle that has eaten me alive all these years has to end … now,” Gregory went on. “I am tired Jimmy. I am tired. I am tired of carrying this pain, hate, and rage in my heart. I can’t do it anymore. I have to do this and truly forgive you.” She hoped that Barber had already asked God and her grandmother for forgiveness, and that the entreaties had yielded some comfort for him. “I pray that when you answer to God you have peace and acceptance in your soul. I pray that when you see Grandmamma again, she embraces you and tells you it is OK … I forgive you Jimmy. I forgive you for everything you did.” She wished him well, and encouraged him to try to help others. And if he didn’t write back, she said, she would understand. She had no expectations about how her letter would find Barber, or how he might respond.

She put her letter in the mail.

---

Barber is from Winstead, Connecticut, and sounds like it, a gravel-voiced but amiable Yankee calling from a place where most guys sound real southern: Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama. The state plans to kill Barber next month despite the fact that Alabama botched the last three executions it attempted. Still, the main thing Barber wanted to tell me about when we spoke on the phone one spring afternoon was the day he received Gregory’s letter.

“I broke down and started crying,” Barber said. “I thought it was bad. I thought they’d gloat and say, ‘You’re gonna get what’s coming to ya.’ I thought it was gonna be bad and the letter started out like that.” But as he kept reading, Barber said, “it brought me to my knees.”

He wrote Gregory back. “Dear Sarah, Receiving your letter was the single most edifying, uplifting moment that I have experienced, short of October 6th, 2001, when I forced the county jail to be baptized for the remission of my sins into the death & resurrection of Jesus Christ.” It had been a pivotal moment for Barber, as he went on to explain. “I did not pick up the bible to seek out God or get out of jail, or anything of the sort,” he said; rather “it was, and I’m ashamed by this, boredom.” With the jailhouse TV on the fritz and only one book a month passing through his hands, Barber decided to read the good book to pass the time. He would read for hours, he said, and once he had read it the first time, he read it again and again and again. “I’m not going to tell you I saw doves ascending or anything of that kind,” he told Gregory, “but there was a definite change before I finished.” The Bible, he wrote, had saved what was then his “worthless life.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Not that innocent]

“I know you didn’t write the letter to hear me say ‘I’m sorry,’” he wrote, turning to the miracle of Gregory’s forgiveness, which he did his best to witness: “Sarah, sorry could never come close to what is in my heart & soul. The self loathing, shame, shock and utter disbelief at what took place at my hand almost overcame me. If not for God’s grace I would be gone.” The only thing that had kept him from suicide, he said, was that he had no clear recollection of committing Dorothy’s murder. “I don’t think I could tell you anything that would explain or enlighten. There is no explanation. I loved Dottie. Loved her with all my heart. Still do.”

Barber told Gregory he had decided early on not to become “a convict,” that no matter how he left prison, “either on my feet or in a body bag, I was going to be a better man than when I arrived.” His record on the inside, he said, was spotless. He had spent nearly two decades under a death sentence, trying to bring men to Christ.

How did it feel to be forgiven? Barber strained to describe it. “Receiving your letter caused me to break down and sob for several long minutes. You sweet wonderful person! I can’t tell you how much that means to me that you have that kind of spirit in you … I’m so glad you found the grace and strength to write.” He wished her well and placed himself forever in her debt, with only a hope spared at the end of his long letter that Gregory might write back.

When Gregory opened his letter, she told me, she “could feel those feelings of anger and resentment coming off of me.” She set to work on a return letter. “You have freed me,” she wrote back in September 2020. “Receiving your letter was the final piece of freedom. The weight was lifted when I forgave you in my heart, but your response back brought me indescribable freedom and release. I have no anger … zero. I feel as if a thousand pounds were lifted from my soul. I cannot thank you enough. I am sorry that it took me so long.”

Reading their correspondence put me in mind of how dull and ordinary my daily exchanges are, the ticktock of friendly banter and household chatter. These people had experienced something profoundly, transcendently emotional; there, where the most justified anger and hatred had been, was something growing that looked like love. “It was all for nothing,” Gregory wrote of her formerly hard feelings, “but now, we move forward. I hope forward will be continued communication for us.”

[Read: A prison lifer comes home]

They began to talk on the phone. “It’s a pretty cool relationship,” Gregory told me. They talk about Gregory’s life, her son, the Lord. Gregory told me that they sometimes talk weekly, sometimes monthly. Barber looks forward to their conversations with happy anticipation. “I love that girl more than I love anybody else in this world,” he told me. “I love her more than anyone else on this planet.” Gregory had possessed something he needed—her forgiveness—which she had given to him freely, and this act of charity had forged a bond between them. The way Gregory remembers her grandmother now, she told me, is how she chooses to remember her.

They haven’t discussed his execution. Barber tells me he isn’t afraid, and I don’t detect any bravado. He’s been in pain for a long time—for the past 12 years, he’s needed a hip replacement. But more than that, he’s at peace. Most Christians who await the afterlife only hope for forgiveness, but Barber has experienced it here on earth. “They can’t threaten me with heaven,” he likes to say.

But if anyone knows anything about the bracing joy of forgiveness, it’s Gregory, and what she feels at the prospect of Barber’s execution is only despair. “I don’t want it to happen,” she told me. “I don’t … I don’t want to see it done.” She will likely attend with her family, “but it will be hard. I spent so long believing in ‘an eye for an eye’—I’ve changed,” she said, but some relatives of hers feel differently, which she understands. “It’s a really hard one.”

The proceeds of vengeance are typically greater in the criminal-justice system than the proceeds of forgiveness. In its communications with the media concerning last year’s string of botched executions, Alabama has repeatedly insisted that it is acting on behalf of victims’ families. Yet the state executed Joe Nathan James in July 2022 over the vocal protest of his victim’s family. It is in the nature of American justice that anger can end a life, yet forgiveness cannot necessarily save one. But then again, maybe it already has.

In one very specific and mostly benign way, it’s starting to feel a lot like the spring of 2020: Disinfection is back.

“Bleach is my friend right now,” says Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, who spent the first half of this week spraying and sloshing the potent chemical all over her home. It’s one of the few tools she has to combat norovirus, the nasty gut pathogen that her 15-year-old son was recently shedding in gobs.

Right now, hordes of people in the Northern Hemisphere are in a similarly crummy situation. In recent weeks, norovirus has seeded outbreaks in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Last week, the U.K. Health Security Agency announced that laboratory reports of the virus had risen to levels 66 percent higher than what’s typical this time of year. Especially hard-hit are Brits 65 and older, who are falling ill at rates that “haven’t been seen in over a decade.”

Americans could be heading into a rough stretch themselves, Caitlin Rivers, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me, given how closely the U.S.’s epidemiological patterns tend to follow those of the U.K. “It does seem like there’s a burst of activity right now,” says Nihal Altan-Bonnet, a norovirus researcher at the National Institutes of Health. At her own practice, Cameron has been seeing the number of vomiting and diarrhea cases among her patients steadily tick up. (Other pathogens can cause gastrointestinal symptoms as well, but norovirus is the most common cause of foodborne illness in the United States.)

To be clear, this is more a nauseating nuisance than a public-health crisis. In most people, norovirus triggers, at most, a few miserable days of GI distress that can include vomiting, diarrhea, and fevers, then resolves on its own; the keys are to stay hydrated and avoid spreading it to anyone vulnerable—little kids, older adults, the immunocompromised. The U.S. logs fewer than 1,000 annual deaths out of millions of documented cases. In other high-income countries, too, severe outcomes are very rare, though the virus is far more deadly in parts of the world with limited access to sanitation and potable water.

Still, fighting norovirus isn’t easy, as plenty of parents can attest. The pathogen, which prompts the body to expel infectious material from both ends of the digestive tract, is seriously gross and frustratingly hardy. Even the old COVID standby, a spritz of hand sanitizer, doesn’t work against it—the virus is encased in a tough protein shell that makes it insensitive to alcohol. Some have estimated that ingesting as few as 18 infectious units of virus can be enough to sicken someone, “and normally, what’s getting shed is in the billions,” says Megan Baldridge, a virologist and immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis. At an extreme, a single gram of feces—roughly the heft of a jelly bean—could contain as many as 5.5 billion infectious doses, enough to send the entire population of Eurasia sprinting for the toilet.

Unlike flu and RSV, two other pathogens that have bounced back to prominence in recent months, norovirus mainly targets the gut, and spreads especially well when people swallow viral particles that have been released in someone else’s vomit or stool. (Despite its “stomach flu” nickname, norovirus is not a flu virus.) But direct contact with those substances, or the food or water they contaminate, may not even be necessary: Sometimes people vomit with such force that the virus gets aerosolized; toilets, especially lidless ones, can send out plumes of infection like an Air Wick from hell. And Altan-Bonnet’s team has found that saliva may be an unappreciated reservoir for norovirus, at least in laboratory animals. If the spittle finding holds for humans, then talking, singing, and laughing in close proximity could be risky too.

[Read: Whatever happened to toilet plumes?]

Once emitted into the environment, norovirus particles can persist on surfaces for days—making frequent hand-washing and surface disinfection key measures to prevent spread, says Ibukun Kalu, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at Duke University. Handshakes and shared meals tend to get dicey during outbreaks, along with frequently touched items such as utensils, door handles, and phones. One 2012 study pointed to a woven plastic grocery bag as the source of a small outbreak among a group of teenage soccer players; the bag had just been sitting in a bathroom used by one of the girls when she fell sick the night before.

Once a norovirus transmission chain begins, it can be very difficult to break. The virus can spread before symptoms start, and then for more than a week after they resolve. To make matters worse, immunity to the virus tends to be short-lived, lasting just a few months even against a genetically identical strain, Baldridge told me.

Day cares, cruise ships, schools, restaurants, military training camps, prisons, and long-term-care facilities can be common venues for norovirus spread. “I did research with the Navy, and it just goes through like wildfire,” often sickening more than half the people on tightly packed ships, says Robert Frenck, the director of the Vaccine Research Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Households, too, are highly susceptible to spread: Once the virus arrives, the entire family is almost sure to be infected. Baldridge, who has two young children, told me that her household has weathered at least four bouts of norovirus in the past several years.

(A pause for some irony: In spite of norovirus’s infectiousness, scientists did not succeed in culturing it in labs until just a few years ago, after nearly half a century of research. When researchers design challenge trials to, say, test new vaccines, they still need to dose volunteers with norovirus that’s been extracted from patient stool, a gnarly practice that’s been around for more than 50 years.)

Norovirus spread doesn’t have to be a foregone conclusion. Some people do get lucky: Roughly 20 percent of European populations, for instance, are genetically resistant to common norovirus strains. “So you can hope,” Frenck told me. For the rest of us, it comes down to hygiene. Altan-Bonnet recommends diligent hand-washing, plus masking to ward off droplet-borne virus. Sick people should isolate themselves if they can. “And keep your saliva to yourself,” she told me.

[Read: The stomach-flu mystery]

Rivers and Cameron have both managed to halt the virus in their homes in the past; Cameron may have pulled it off again this week. The family fastidiously scrubbed their hands with hot water and soap, donned disposable gloves when touching shared surfaces, and took advantage of the virus’s susceptibility to harsh chemicals and heat. When her son threw up on the floor, Cameron sprayed it down with bleach; when he vomited on his quilt, she blasted it twice in the washing machine on the sanitizing setting, then put it through the dryer at a super high temp. Now a couple of days out from the end of their son’s sickness, Cameron and her husband appear to have escaped unscathed.

Norovirus isn’t new, and this won’t be the last time it hits. In a lot of ways, “this is back to basics,” says Samina Bhumbra, the medical director of infection prevention at Riley Children’s Hospital. After three years of COVID, the world has gotten used to thinking about infections in terms of airways. “We need to recalibrate,” Bhumbra told me, “and remember that other things exist.”

In second grade, I stopped being able to do math. One night I went to do my long-division homework and I couldn’t figure it out. My mom demanded that I sit with my math teacher because my sudden inability made no sense. Two weeks later, I was sent home with a disciplinary note for turning in only empty or incorrect homework and was accused of not paying attention in class.

Up until then I had been a “good” student, a “smart” girl. I remember the secret bliss I felt when I knew before my peers how to count fractions without the help of manipulatives, and how to subtract negatives. This can be only partially explained by the teaching I got in school. My mom, who was then studying computer science and psychology in her master’s program, was determined to instill a love of learning in my life. Over the course of a year, she built me a computer out of parts and installed all kinds of educational games on it. When I arrived home every day, I attended my mother’s academy, where I spent most of my afternoons watching the sun fall on the walls of my bedroom as I finger-punched my way through the programs.

I loved Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and You Can Be a Woman Engineer, but Math Blaster was my favorite. I remember the illustration of the game as vividly as any beloved book: an astronaut, tethered to a spaceship, floating their way through the starry landscape of space with simple mathematical expressions on their chest, and on each planet, a foreign landscape with different levels of math problems to solve. That image in my head of the astronaut working diligently in the vast expanse of space, the stars an infinite backdrop to a mathematical cosmos, is exactly how I see math in my head now—fantastical, endless, and enchanting. But I had to lose that relationship with math to be able to find math again.

My mom would later connect the dots between the rapid deterioration of my learning abilities and another, correlative timeline. After getting in trouble one day for saying something so inappropriate in class that it boggled even me, I went home and told my mom what my older cousin had been doing to me while she was at work and my grandma wasn’t home. Immediately, the evidence began to click: the inexplicable spotting in my underwear, the change in my emotional regularity, my 68 score on a math test I’d have more than passed two summers before.

Learning of the violent trauma I’d been experiencing caused a radical 180 in both our lives. Lawyers, doctors, judges—I watched my mom attempt to be strong every day as she worked to manage the worst crisis she could ever have imagined happening to her. Math classes were getting harder as my brain attempted to process the initial trauma and what followed the trauma’s reveal. I went to school, and most mornings, the board seemed too far away. Greater-than and less-than symbols were like commas to me, nearly indistinguishable in function and in form. I was tested for vision impairments twice that month, though the eye doctor recorded 20/20 vision. Division amplified the inadequacy I felt. I would come home, blank, my mom imploring me to think: “You must have remembered something, Camonghne.” But I didn’t remember anything.

Some part of my brain stopped working the way it was supposed to once the assaults started happening. But I was the only one who could see the size of the injury and just how it was affecting me physically. I was tired, uninspired, easily triggered, and quick to fire, always ready to fight. I knew I needed extra help, maybe to go to school somewhere else where they’d rehabilitate me. I spent countless school nights researching boarding schools for troubled kids. But when my mom asked me if she should tell my teachers the full story about what was going on, I refused. I didn’t want eight hours of sympathy; I just wanted to be able to get through my math homework. She told them anyway. It was worthless, as their incapacity to understand how living in my head felt at that time only highlighted the significance of my needs.

Years later, while researching bipolar disorder and executive-function disorders, I found one scientific explanation for all of my mathematical confusion. In 2018, psychologists published a study on the association between adverse childhood experiences and traumatic brain injury in adulthood. Both can affect developmental skills, mood, regulation, the ability to process and synthesize new information. Both affect some of the same parts of the brain. I began to think of the experience of childhood trauma, especially related to abandonment, neglect, and sexual abuse, as similar to a concussion. Imagine a child’s ability to cope with that, particularly when the injury remains invisible to the people she spends eight hours a day with.

Doctors and scientists have only just begun to develop a more complete understanding of how trauma works and how it affects individuals psychologically throughout their lifetime. But what we’re starting to understand confirms much of what people who’ve struggled with trauma and PTSD have long been trying to articulate: Emotional trauma is an injury. Trauma hits you, and your brain absorbs the shock.

In high school, my inability to point to where the wound was earned me the label of underperformer, troublemaker, someone who didn’t want to learn. I wished I could project myself onto the whiteboard and, with a bright-red cursor, point to the front lobe of my brain, and then to my heart, to show the teachers how badly it all ached. But that hungry and inquisitive child who devoured mathematical challenges was so afraid that those labels were true that she decided it was less disappointing to just give up—on math, on school, on life.

High school continued to go on despite the fact that I felt incapable of going on with it. I spent more time locked up in mental-health facilities than I did in classes. I shuttled from one high school to the next, kicked out, failed out, behind. I knew that I wanted to go to college; I knew that I wanted to study literature and language. I couldn’t focus in most classes, but I hid novels in my textbooks and wrote fan fiction in the evenings, losing myself in imaginary lands and complex world building, skills that would later revolutionize what I thought I was capable of. By junior year, when my transcript indicated a 1.4 GPA (NYC schools evaluate on a 0.0–4.0 scale), the high-school counselor responsible for helping me get into college told me it was too late, that I would have had to have at least gotten an A in one of my math classes to be anywhere near qualified for admission to any of the schools I was interested in. I was confronted with a series of closed doors as I watched my adolescence spiral out of my control.  

I was eventually transferred to an alternative high school (also known as a last-chance school), where a Cornell-educated and Bronx-raised scientist who’d returned home to teach saw something in me and promised she wouldn’t let me fall through the cracks. She spent every lunch period tutoring me, showing me how to calculate momentum, teaching me that nutrition started with an understanding of how the body quantifies energy, offering me tangible, material ways to understand math. Another math teacher across the hall attempted to teach me calculus. I still couldn’t do the arithmetic I’d need to be able to grasp it at its most complex form, but there was something about calculus as a study in continuous change that made sense to me.

Noticing my curiosity, my lunchtime tutor gave me a copy of Einstein’s Dreams, a novel that reintroduced me to the magical qualities of mathematics, reminding me of the sense of wonder that the illustrations in Math Blaster had made me feel as a kid. It turned numbers back into metaphors and images and poetry instead of scores on the exams I’d failed. I graduated from high school a year later than I should have, but with an A in calculus. For the first time since I was 9 years old, I no longer felt inadequate in the face of something my body knew it had once loved.

But it would be almost a decade before math and I would begin to have a conversation about what had happened to us, and why it had left me behind.

After graduating from high school, I managed to build a career, to become a writer and poet and to put the trauma of my childhood in a corner of my mind where it couldn’t disturb me. But years later, after a destabilizing breakup and a subsequent suicide attempt forced me back into psychiatric treatment, I decided that someone had to be in charge of figuring out where this wound was, and what the hell was still wrong with me. In almost no time, I was diagnosed with severe ADHD, and then later with bipolar 2 disorder.

Bipolar disorder, characterized by periods of depression and mania or hypomania, works kind of like a blowtorch. When an individual is having an episode, it causes stress to the brain, which can affect cognitive skills and executive function. It can be degenerative, meaning that as one gets older, and with each episode, the brain’s ability to do what it needs to do deteriorates.

After my diagnosis, I spent months researching a connection between math and bipolar disorder. I learned about dyscalculia, a kind of math dyslexia, and called the doctor who’d tested me for ADHD. “Do I have this?” I asked him. He told me, “I’d say it’s extremely likely based on the severity of your results.”

Immediately, I let out a sigh I’d been holding for decades. All at once, I felt betrayed, grateful, and relieved. After some months of treatment for my bipolar diagnosis, I couldn’t believe the clarity with which I began to see and feel. As my treatment adjusted (I tried a couple of mood stabilizers before ending up on lithium last year), I felt my ability to compute improve too.

I’m still no mathematician; I probably couldn’t even pass a sophomore-level college course. But I don’t have to be able to solve every equation for math to mean something to me. Math, after all, is infinite; no human can best it. I try to challenge myself to approach mathematics from a place of wonder and admiration instead of anxiety. And as I study basic techniques such as estimation, and continue to refamiliarize myself with division, I feel the slow death of that earlier block that kept these basics away from me. I feel the excitement I felt when I played Math Blaster, or when I first read Einstein’s Dreams. Losing my ability to learn and understand math represented the frailty of the human mind, but my ability to relearn it represents the mind’s innate resiliency.

Recently, I was out at dinner when, over steaming bowls of rice and half-eaten platters of bulgogi, my friend slid the bill across the table, a gesture with only one meaning. “Why me?” I asked her. “You’re the one who went to Johns Hopkins!” She waved me off. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but you do mental math better than I do.” For a moment, I stared down at the check and I swore it was staring back at me.

This scene with my friend has become pretty typical. She hands me the bill and I calculate the tip. And every time feels like the first time. I hover over that bill with the focus of worship, willing my brain to do what the numbers ask of it, nothing less and nothing more. My respect for math is born from a deep desire to understand it. I’m always nervous when it’s my turn to split the bill, but I don’t wish for those nerves to go away. The chance to correct the narrative of the past feels transcendent.

This essay was adapted from the memoir Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation.

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New Year’s resolutions had barely been resolved before parents across the nation started thinking ahead to summer. The scramble to sign kids up for summer camp begins in January, because limited slots and huge demand have led to a highly competitive environment that verges on absurd. Case in point: Rachael Deane, a mother in Richmond, Virginia, has a summer-camp spreadsheet. She joked to me that it is “more sophisticated than a bill tracker” she uses to follow legislation in her work at a children’s-advocacy nonprofit; the spreadsheet is color-coded, and registration dates are cross-posted onto her work calendar so she can jump into action as soon as slots open.

Deane’s intense approach reflects the state of modern parenthood. The lack of universal child care is a pain point for parents throughout the year, but the summer is a unique headache. As with after-school care, parents have to navigate a confusing patchwork of options, but in the summer, they need a plan for all day, every day, for three months. And society leaves them largely on their own to figure it out: A 2019 survey from the Center for American Progress found that for three-quarters of parents, securing summer care was at least a little bit difficult. The system is essentially a competition that has winners and losers, and rests upon a willful ignorance of the reality of most American families—only one-fifth of all parents are stay-at-home. Change is long overdue.

I believe part of the problem is that in the U.S., education is a right for kids, and a responsibility for the state, while care outside schools, despite being just as vital for child development, is seen as solely the parents’ responsibility. So when the academic calendar ends, the government bows out. As Amanda Lenhart, a researcher who has studied summer care, told me, “We’ve made a decision culturally to push the burden of caring for kids during the summer fully onto parents, and forcing them to manage. It’s in some ways a throwback to an idealized family setup and work setup that never existed for most people anyway.” Indeed, the system’s assumption that one parent (read: the mother) should be available to watch the kids is a prime example of what the historian Stephanie Coontz calls “the way we never were.”

[Read: America’s child-care equilibrium has shattered]

Although some people wax nostalgic about lightly supervised summers spent mainly by themselves or with friends, the landscape has shifted since the 1980s, and this is no longer a viable option for many families. The sociologist Jessica Calarco explained in an interview with the writer Anne Helen Petersen that several factors led to the change. These included new laws about the minimum age at which children can be home alone, and a desire among certain parents for specialty camps to give their kids a leg up in college admissions. In parallel, the economic challenges of running camps drove a decline in options and an increase in prices.

The lack of affordable summer care leads to very different choice sets for parents in different income brackets. The mid-winter dash for summer-camp spots occurs mostly, though not exclusively, among wealthier, more educated parents. Lenhart’s research found that about one-third of parents in 2018 were sending their kids to camp; another study concluded that the kids of college graduates had an attendance rate seven times higher than that of kids whose parents had only a high-school diploma or less.

Parents who go this route face a logistical puzzle: Few summer programs run for multiple weeks, cover the hours when parents are working, and are reasonably affordable. Although many municipal parks-and-recreation departments valiantly try to provide inclusive low-cost options, there simply aren’t enough slots to go around. Making matters worse, camp sign-ups tend to be first come, first served, provoking a page-refreshing scrum more appropriate to acquiring Taylor Swift tickets than securing care for one’s children. I was discussing this topic with my literary agent, Laura Usselman, and she told me that in her small Georgia city, camp registration opens at 9 a.m. on one day in January, and “many of the camps are full by 9:03.”

Lower-income parents, for whom camps are often entirely out of reach, sometimes have to shape their entire work lives around the need for summer care. The Center for American Progress survey found that, to accommodate summer-care needs, more than half of families had “at least one parent [plan] to make a job change that will result in reduced income.” Calarco explained that in her research interviews with mothers, “quite a few have talked about how they made their own career decisions around the fact that their kids would be home in the summers and after school”—choosing a lower-paying job because it was closer to family who could help, for example, or taking part-time gig jobs.

The most obvious solution to this problem—year-round school—has never really gained traction in the United States. A mere 4 percent of U.S. schools have year-round schedules, and these still have substantial breaks. Summer vacation’s place in the American cultural mindset is deeply entrenched; there is also a fair case that children need opportunities for open play and creativity through an extended summer break to complement academic study.

Other countries have different approaches that preserve summer vacation without leaving parents scrambling every year. Municipalities in Sweden, for instance, are required by law to offer parents slots in programs known as fritidshem, or “leisure-time centers,” until their children turn 13. These centers provide both before- and after-school supervision and care during school breaks. In Germany, children have a legal right to day care; although there isn’t a corresponding policy for school breaks, some towns and cities organize comprehensive holiday programming, often in partnership with local schools. It’s not free, but the costs are moderate and financial aid is generally available.

Approaches like these in the U.S. would, of course, require funding, and maybe even legislation. Sadly, this country has shown time and again that it is unwilling to commit major resources to child care, laying the problem at parents’ feet instead. A cultural shift is needed to smooth the path for potential policy shifts. The summer scramble seems unlikely to end unless U.S. society moves its philosophy away from “every family for itself” and toward an understanding that school, work, and child care are all interconnected.

[Read: Why child care is so ridiculously expensive]

There have been recent glimmers of possibility. Although it was interrupted by the pandemic, two New York City council members introduced legislation in early 2020 to offer free summer camp for all youths in the city. Last year, several school districts across the country used pandemic-relief funding to temporarily provide free summer programming. Yet the fact that such policies are new and notable underlines the absurdity of America’s inconsistent ideas about when and where families deserve support. As Lenhart told me, “We’ve decided culturally and politically that the care of very young children, and the care of children in one season [of the year], is a burden to be borne by the family as opposed to spread across the community.”

Child care shouldn’t be a luxury good that the wealthy fight over, the middle class squeezes to acquire, and low-income folks do without. But that’s what it becomes every summer when parents’ options are shelling out for expensive camps, fighting for limited slots in affordable programs, or nothing. Until action is taken, forcing parents to sprint to sign up for summer camp in the dead of winter is a not-so-subtle message about how the nation really feels about them.

Roughly a century ago, a new fad diet began to sweep the United States. Hollywood starlets such as Ethel Barrymore supposedly swore by it; the citrus industry hopped on board. All a figure-conscious girl had to do was eat a lot of grapefruit for a week, or two, or three.

The Grapefruit Diet, like pretty much all other fad diets, is mostly bunk. If people were losing weight with the regimen, that’s because the citrus was being recommended as part of a portion-controlled, low-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet—not because it had exceptional flab-blasting powers. And yet, the diet has survived through the decades, spawning a revival in the 1970s and ’80s, a dangerous juice-exclusive spin-off called the grapefruit fast, and even a shout-out from Weird Al; its hype still plagues nutritionists today.

[Read: Why science can be so indecisive about nutrition]

But for every grapefruit evangelist, there is a critic warning of its dangers—probably one with a background in pharmacology. The fruit, for all its tastiness and dietetic appeal, has another, more sinister trait: It raises the level of dozens of FDA-approved medications in the body, and for a select few drugs, the amplification can be potent enough to trigger a life-threatening overdose. For most people, chowing down on grapefruit is completely safe; it would take “a perfect storm” of factors—say, a vulnerable person taking an especially grapefruit-sensitive medication within a certain window of drinking a particular amount of grapefruit juice—for disaster to unfurl, says Emily Heil, an infectious-disease pharmacist at the University of Maryland. But that leaves grapefruit in a bit of a weird position. No one can agree on exactly how much the world should worry about this bittersweet treat whose chemical properties scientists still don’t fully understand.

Grapefruit’s medication-concentrating powers were discovered only because of a culinary accident. Some three decades ago, the clinical pharmacologist David Bailey (who died earlier this year) was running a trial testing the effects of alcohol consumption on a blood-pressure medication called felodipine. Hoping to mask the distinctive taste of booze for his volunteers, Bailey mixed it with grapefruit juice, and was shocked to discover that blood levels of felodipine were suddenly skyrocketing in everyone—even those in the control group, who were drinking virgin grapefruit juice.

After running experiments on himself, Bailey confirmed that the juice was to blame. Some chemical in grapefruit was messing with the body’s natural ability to break down felodipine in the hours after it was taken, causing the drug to accumulate in the blood. It’s the rough physiological equivalent of jamming a garbage disposal: Waste that normally gets flushed just builds, and builds, and builds. In this case, the garbage disposal is an enzyme called cytochrome P450 3A4—CYP3A4 for short—capable of breaking down a whole slate of potentially harmful chemicals found in foods and meds. And the jamming culprit is a compound found in the pulp and peel of grapefruit and related citrus, including pomelos and Seville oranges. It doesn’t take much: Even half a grapefruit can be enough to trigger a noticeable interaction, says George Dresser, a pharmacologist at Western University, in Ontario.

The possible consequences of these molecular clogs can sometimes get intense. “On the list of concerning food-drug interactions,” Dresser told me, “arguably, this is the most important one.” When paired with certain heart medications, grapefruit could potentially cause arrhythmias; with some antidepressants, it might induce nausea, vomiting, and an elevated heart rate. Grapefruit can also raise blood levels of the cholesterol drugs atorvastatin and simvastatin, prompting muscle pain and, eventually, muscle breakdown. One of the fruit’s most worrying interactions occurs with an immunosuppressive drug called tacrolimus, frequently prescribed to organ-transplant patients, that may, when amped up by grapefruit, spark headaches, tremors, hypoglycemia, and kidney problems. The citrus even has the ability to lift blood levels of drugs of abuse, including fentanyl, oxycodone, and ketamine.

The full list of potential interactions is long. “More than 50 percent of drugs on the market are metabolized by CYP3A4,” which inhabits both the liver and the gut, says Mary Paine, a pharmacologist at Washington State University. That said, grapefruit can really affect only intestinal CYP3A4, and will cause only a small fraction of those medications to reach notably higher concentrations in the blood (and sometimes only when fairly large quantities of juice are consumed—a quart or more). And only a small fraction of those medications will, when amassed, threaten true toxicity. Our bodies are always making more CYP3A4; stop eating grapefruit and, within a day or two, levels of the protein should more or less reset.

Professionals disagree on how to characterize grapefruit’s risks. To Shirley Tsunoda, a pharmacist at UC San Diego, “it’s definitely a big deal,” especially for the organ-transplant patients to whom she prescribes tacrolimus. Her advice to them is to indulge in grapefruit exactly never—and ideally, tacrolimus-takers should skip related citrus too. Tsunoda even advises people to check the labels of mixed-fruit juices, just in case the makers sneaked some grapefruit in, and she thinks twice when considering noshing on it herself. Paul Watkins, a pharmacologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is much less worried; his bigger concern, he told me, is that the fruit’s reputation as a nemesis of oral medications has been way overblown. He used to study grapefruit-drug interaction but abandoned it years ago, after “I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t very important,” he told me. Some concern is absolutely warranted for certain people on certain meds, he noted. But “I think the actual incidence of patients who have gotten into any kind of trouble or had serious adverse reactions due to taking their drugs with grapefruit juice is very, very small.”

Even the FDA seems a bit unsure of how it feels about the fruit. The agency has stamped the documentation of several grapefruit-sensitive medications with official warnings. But fact sheets for other drugs merely mention that they can interact with grapefruit, say to consult a health-care professional, or just counsel people to avoid drinking the juice in “large amounts.” And as Dan Nosowitz has reported for Atlas Obscura, several interacting drugs that bear warnings in Canada—among them, Viagra, oxycodone, the HIV antiviral Edurant, and the blood pressure medication verapamil—don’t mention any issues with grapefruit in the United States. (When I asked the agency about these discrepancies, a spokesperson wrote, “The FDA is continuously reviewing new information about approved drugs, including studies and reports of adverse events. If the FDA determines there is a safety concern, the agency will take appropriate action.”)

Very little solid data can precisely quantify grapefruit’s perils. Over the years, researchers have documented a number of isolated cases of citrus-drug interactions that prompted urgent medical care. But some of them involved truly exceptional amounts of juice. And citrus stans aren’t constantly dropping dead in clinical trials or nursing homes. Even when Bailey first presented his findings to the greater medical community, “people asked, ‘Where are all the bodies?’” Dresser, who was mentored by Bailey, told me. The paucity of data, Dresser contends, stems in part from health-care workers neglecting to check their patients for a history of juice-chugging.

For now, the conversation has mostly stalled, while grapefruit has served up even more mysteries. In the years since Bailey’s discovery, researchers have found that the fruit might lower the concentration of certain drugs, such as the allergy med fexofenadine, perhaps by keeping the lining of the intestines from absorbing certain compounds. New drugs are a particularly murky area, especially because grapefruit interactions aren’t a typical first priority when a new medication hits the market. The popular COVID antiviral pill Paxlovid, for instance, contains the CYP3A4-susceptible ingredient ritonavir. A Pfizer representative told me that the company is not concerned about toxicity. But Heil wonders whether grapefruit could mildly aggravate some of Paxlovid’s irksome side effects: diarrhea, for instance, or maybe the sour, metallic taste that reminds many people of … well, grapefruit.

[Read: Paxlovid mouth is real—and gross]

That said, most grapefruit lovers need not despair. The fruit is still healthy—chock-full of vitamins and flavor—and yet is often overlooked, says Heidi Silver, a nutrition scientist at Vanderbilt University. Silver and researchers have shown that consuming grapefruit flesh or juice might be able to slightly lower levels of triglycerides and cholesterol. Technically, it can even play a role in weight loss: Snacking on a small portion before a meal can help people feel full faster. Then again, a glass of water will too. Just as grapefruit is not a miraculous vanquisher of fat, it isn’t a ubiquitous killer.

Even people on certain medications may be able to enjoy it if they consult an expert first. Heil’s own father absolutely adores grapefruit, and also happens to take an oral medication that can interact. Swallow them too close together, and he risks dizziness and fatigue. But he and Heil have found a compromise: He can have small portions of grapefruit or its juice in the morning, spaced about 12 hours out from when he takes his meds at bedtime. A few weeks ago, Heil (who thinks grapefruit is disgusting) even gave her dad the green light to enjoy a dinnertime cocktail that contained a small splash of the juice. Maybe the smidge of fruit affected his meds that day. But “it wasn’t going to be the end of the world,” Heil told me. To say that, after all, would have been an exaggeration.

YES!

There was a moment a few years ago when I couldn’t help but cringe a little every time I heard the word story, so wantonly was it being bandied about. This was during the Trump administration, when lots of people still sweetly believed that culture could counter raw political power, that protest art could engender a sense of shame among the shameless, even that satire might have the capacity to save the republic. It was no longer enough for novels or TV shows or musicals to be engaging, transporting, even transcendent. They also had to have a kind of radical, inherently noble energy. Things seemed to come to a head in early 2019, when Apple announced its new streaming service with a spiel so solemn and devout that it was as though Jesus Christ himself had signed on as a creator. (Or as, I suppose, a Creator.) Stories, a fleet of onstage executives said oh-so-earnestly, can “change the world,” connecting us to one another and new ideas.

Here’s the thing: None of this was wrong. But we—and I did my part—presumed that the winning stories of the era would naturally have some kind of moral valence, or at least intentions no more nefarious than making money. In truth, though, that just hasn’t been the case. Stories are everywhere today, and they’re more contagious and virulent and influential than ever. They can indeed connect us, show us new ideas and worlds. One of the dominant storytelling genres of our time is conspiracy, which claims to clarify chaotic reality through a kind of multiplayer shared experience. QAnon is a choose-your-own-adventure tale. “The story of a ‘stolen election,’” the literary theorist Peter Brooks writes in his new book, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, “led to the violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol a few months later.” The “good” stories, you could argue, might have succeeded in enhancing our conception of the world. But for a dizzying number of people, the “bad” stories have subsumed reality altogether.

[Read: Beware the ‘storification’ of the internet]

As humans, we crave stories. We instinctively divide the world into heroes and villains; we apply the logic and structure of storytelling to the disorder of life and express frustration when they don’t fit. “We don’t simply arrange random facts into narratives,” Brooks writes. “Our sense of the way stories go together, how life is made meaningful as narrative, presides at our choice of facts as well.” That can mean that, sometimes, the way a story is told can be almost as leading as the elements within it. The HBO series The Vow—which recently returned for a second clutch of episodes about the cult that grew around the convicted con man Keith Raniere—is a primer on how our fundamental desire for narrative can be manipulated. That the series can seem just as susceptible as the alleged villains and victims it’s profiling only makes it more fascinating, and more troubling.

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If the first season of The Vow was an attempt to sweep viewers into the experience of apostates fleeing what was apparently a cult, the second is fixated on the manipulative potential of narrative. All cults exploit language. But NXIVM, the Albany-based corporation founded by Raniere and Nancy Salzman in 1998, seems to have been truly adept at weaponizing the human desire to storify our lives. Part multilevel marketing scheme selling quackish personal-development “technology,” part personality cult in which Raniere groomed women to sleep with him and other men to perpetuate his mythology, NXIVM told its followers that reality is fungible, and that we all have the power to change our lives simply by changing the stories we tell about them. Over six new episodes, The Vow reveals how the group’s remaining defenders cling to imprinted versions of its teachings, and how NXIVM’s accusers try to make sense of their own identities after leaving.

[Read: How to tell the story of a cult]

Raniere and Salzman seem to have cobbled together their founding modules out of Ayn Rand books (she, like Raniere, fostered a sexualized cult of personality that punished dissent), conversational hypnosis, and narrative therapy, a school of psychotherapy that encourages patients to “rewrite” their identity. Through seminars, NXIVM coaches told people that victimhood was a choice—that anyone could choose not to be hurt by things that had happened to them. In the beginning of the third episode, Salzman explains that people impose their own meaning on certain experiences. This is a particularly ingenious form of gaslighting: If someone’s behavior makes you feel enraged or heartbroken, it’s your fault for feeling that way when you could choose to react with a different emotion.

That The Vow Part Two takes place against the backdrop of Raniere’s criminal trial for offenses that include sex trafficking, racketeering, and fraud (and Salzman’s sentencing for racketeering) is particularly apt—its director, Jehane Noujaim, spends significant time with both Raniere’s lead defense attorney, Marc Agnifilo, and the prosecutor on his case, Moira Penza, witnessing how both parties try to use storytelling toward very different ends. In Seduced by Story, Brooks dedicates a chapter to the role of storytelling in legal proceedings: “In pleadings and arguments and judgments,” he writes, “law makes use of narrative constantly—yet rarely with any recognition that its narrative commitments need analytic attention.” Penza’s job is to gather evidence (often in the form of narrative testimony from witnesses) to convince a jury that Raniere was a manipulative cult leader who sexually, emotionally, and psychologically abused many of his followers, and persuaded them to commit crimes in turn. Agnifilo’s job is to reshape that raw testimony into an entirely different, but equally compelling form.

In its most intriguing moments, The Vow follows the defense lawyer as he tries to figure out which kind of story might save his client. After one woman testifies that Raniere imprisoned her in a bedroom for two years after she expressed interest in another man, Agnifilo is filmed outside the courtroom as he processes what she said. “Certainly, her story … was a very dramatic story of her being locked in a room against her will, and being put upon in all these different ways, and [being] the recipient of attention she didn’t want, and the question is whether that’s the whole story, whether that story’s even valid,” he says. He wonders whether it’s relevant that her father, “who seems to be a very capable, intelligent, successful man, was on board with this.” You can almost hear his mind whirring as he tries to compute the substance of her statement, to spin it into different material.

Telling their own story, no matter how much of a recalibration it is, or how it might clash with others’ versions, seems to be the major preoccupation of virtually everyone interviewed for The Vow Part Two. Speaking about the last group of hard-core Raniere defenders, the former member turned outspoken apostate Anthony “Nippy” Ames says, “They’re just lying, and in order to maintain their narrative, they have to make so many people’s truth, abuse, and stories fiction.” One of those women, the actor Nicki Clyne, talks on camera about the ways in which she feels her personal experiences—including having a sexual relationship with Raniere, and having her body permanently marked while part of a secret women’s group within NXIVM—are being taken out of context. “You could say, ‘This was a cult where women were branded,’ right? And that sounds horrible. And I would never want to be part of that. Or you can say, ‘There was a group of women who, in an act of solidarity, chose to get a brand.’” She shrugs.

[Read: We choose our cults every day]

Another Raniere supporter who is interviewed engages in an act of creative redirection that’s striking to behold. Being a member of DOS, the “sorority” Clyne was a part of, in which some women were branded and specifically groomed for sex with Raniere, “is not what has brought hardship to my life,” she says. Rather, it was people finding out about her involvement in something investigated as a “sex-trafficking operation,” and judging her accordingly. It’s hard not to wonder if the reason NXIVM recruited so many actors, directors, and creative professionals was because they have a predisposition toward making someone else’s fanciful ideas feel entirely real.

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Stories are never neutral. “The vehicles of truth and untruth are the same,” Brooks writes. Being skeptical in the face of a self-interested narrative is key, and this is where The Vow seems to falter. It’s too openhearted, too credulous. In Season 1, Salzman was something of a void—openly discussed but never deeply addressed as a subject. In Season 2, Salzman agreed to substantial interviews with Noujaim, but her version of events is given so much space that it threatens to engulf the last few episodes. Salzman tells us she was “terrified of Keith” and “purposely disempowered” by him. In her words, her desire was simply to make the world better with what she thought was groundbreaking “technology” to empower people in their own lives. Here, the show’s lack of external context means it leaves out crucial information in much the same way as Season 1 did, namely the money that Salzman made during her two decades in NXIVM. (When police raided her house in 2018, they found more than half a million dollars in cash on the premises.)

The Vow also omits victim-impact statements against Salzman from the former NXIVM member Ivy Nevares and others. In a letter to the judge presiding over Salzman’s sentencing, Nevares described Salzman as “not only instrumental, but essential” to the company and to Raniere’s abuses. Nevares also accused Salzman of forcing her to work extremely long hours for little pay because of her immigration status, entrapping her with debts to the company, and punishing her for “an ethical breach” against Raniere when she failed to meet his desired weight for her of 95 pounds. Salzman, Nevares says, “was in it for herself from day one in an unrepentant pursuit of power—she wanted the money, the clout, the prestige, the connections.” Nevares also alleges that Salzman used an intermediary to threaten her against speaking in court. (At her sentencing hearing, Salzman apologized “to everyone I hurt, intentionally and not.” In footage shot immediately after she was sentenced, she sobs while refuting the judge’s assertion that she was to blame for her own daughter being victimized by Raniere.)

Why would The Vow leave so many accusations against Salzman out? Why would it allow Salzman to portray herself on the show predominantly as a carer for her elderly parents, an altruistic and insecure former nurse bruised by her mother’s harsh critiques? I’ve been grappling with these omissions for a few weeks, and with whether the show might have given similarly open-minded treatment to Raniere had he agreed to a sit-down interview. Noujaim doesn’t demand accountability from her subjects, at least on camera; we don’t hear any questions designed to poke holes in their belief systems, or even their version of events. “We’re living in this time of takedowns and one-sided storytelling, and not a lot of discourse,” Noujaim told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview about the show. “People are not listening to each other, and I don’t think that’s helping. So my hope, as a filmmaker and as a human, is to take the time to listen to viewpoints that are very different than my own sometimes. And I think if you disagree with somebody, it becomes very important to try to understand how that perspective formed.”

This attitude is well-intended reasoning. It’s also strikingly naive, because it assumes that everybody is speaking honestly all the time. “Story is powerful,” Brooks writes, “and for that reason it demands a powerful critical response.” Still, it’s easy to see why Salzman was a fascinating enough subject to merit so much unchallenged airtime. Not because of who she is, but because of what she represents: a person who for decades told herself a particular story about NXIVM but is now being confronted with a very different one. “It’s not very interesting to film somebody who is set in their ways,” Noujaim said. It makes for a far more compelling story arc, for sure, to feature someone who may be grappling with repentance and the weight of their sins. It might even be compelling enough that it doesn’t quite matter whether that repentance is sincere or expertly crafted. The final moments of The Vow Part Two are given to Salzman, arguing that what happened to her could have happened to virtually anyone—that, despite everything, “it’s not as strange a story as one might think.”

“Our family, Black and white.” For the slaveholding class of the old South, it was a familiar trope, one intended to convey both mastery and benevolence, to hide the reality of raw power and exploitation behind an ideology of paternalistic concern and natural racial hierarchy. There was profound irony in the white South’s choice of this image, for the words were far from simply figurative: They revealed the very truths they were designed to hide. One can see in the slave schedules of the 1850 and 1860 censuses the many entries marked “mulatto,” individuals the census taker regarded as mixed race, rather than Black. This was the literal family produced by the slave system before the Civil War—children conceived from the sexual dominance of free white men over enslaved Black women in liaisons that ranged from a single encounter of rape to extended relationships, such as the decades-long connection between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

Few of these ties were ever acknowledged; white fathers held their own children in bondage, in most cases treating them little differently from their other human possessions. Of the many excruciating and all-but-unfathomable dimensions of American slavery, its manifold assaults on kinship seem among the most inhumane. What was the nature of “slavery in the family,” a designation that today seems both twisted and oxymoronic? How did individuals and families survive its emotional distortions and its insertion of racial subjugation into the most intimate—and precious—aspects of life?

The Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut, born on a South Carolina plantation, once famously remarked of this widespread denial:

The mulattos one sees in every family … resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.

Yet that denial had its limits and its exceptions, and the historical record offers occasional glimpses into the tortured dynamics of families “Black and white.” Annette Gordon-Reed’s acclaimed work on Jefferson ranks as one of the most notable of these explorations. But the history of another southern lineage, which Kerri K. Greenidge examines in her new book, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, is perhaps even more revealing of the way human bondage shaped and deformed families, as well as the lives of those within them.

The Grimkes of South Carolina were in no sense representative of the South’s slaveholding class. The decision of Sarah and Angelina, two daughters of the wealthy planter John Grimke and his wife, Mary, to confront the horror of slavery and move north in the 1820s to become abolitionists and feminists illustrates in its singularity the difficulties of escaping the grip of a system that compromised every white person connected to it. Two of their mixed-race nephews, Archibald and Francis, sons of their brother Henry and the enslaved Nancy Weston, emerged as major figures in Black political and social life after the Civil War. They were embraced and supported by their activist aunts, who had not known of their existence during their early years of bondage, which included brutal beatings and abuse from their white half brother, another of Sarah and Angelina’s nephews. But the exceptional nature of the story—and of the individuals within it—casts into dramatic relief how the slave system could mold lives across generations.

John Grimke, the patriarch, sired 14 white children and held more than 300 enslaved workers on his extensive properties in the South Carolina Low Country and in Charleston. Sarah, his sixth child, born in 1792, displayed remarkable intellectual gifts from an early age, but such talents were not welcomed in a girl. While her father permitted her to teach herself using the books in his library, he denied her the education provided to her brothers. Sarah described taking a “malicious satisfaction” in defying both her parents and South Carolina law by teaching her “little waiting maid” and numbers of other enslaved workers to read and write. When Sarah’s mother gave birth to her last child, in 1805, Sarah insisted on being named the baby’s godmother. Angelina would be her surrogate daughter.

[From the April 2016 issue: The truth about abolition]

Thirteen years apart, the two sisters came to share an abhorrence of the slave system on which their family’s wealth and position depended. Angelina was particularly repelled by the institution’s violence—the sound of painful cries from men, women, and even children being whipped; the lingering scars evident on the bodies of those who served her every day; the tales of the dread Charleston workhouse that, for a fee, would administer beatings and various forms of torture out of sight of one’s own household. Both Sarah and Angelina became deeply religious, rejecting the self-satisfied pieties of their inherited Episcopalian faith, but finding in Christian doctrine a foundation for their growing certainty about the “moral degradation” of southern society. In 1821, Sarah moved to Philadelphia and joined the Society of Friends; by the end of the decade, Angelina had joined her.

Philadelphia was a focal point of the growing antislavery movement, and the sisters were swept up in the ferment. Soon defying Quaker moderation on slavery just as they had defied their southern heritage, the Grimke sisters embraced William Lloyd Garrison and what was seen as the radicalism of abolition. In essays appearing in 1837 and 1838, Angelina and Sarah each set out the case for the liberation of women and enslaved people. They joined the Garrisonian lecture circuit, and Angelina developed a reputation as a sterling orator at a time when women were all but prohibited from the public stage. In 1838, Angelina married the abolitionist leader Theodore Dwight Weld in a racially integrated celebration that adhered to the free-produce movement, including no clothing or refreshments produced by enslaved labor. Weld and the sisters shared a household for most of the rest of their lives, and Sarah became a devoted caretaker of Angelina and Theodore’s three children. Their opposition not just to slavery but to racial inequality and segregation, as well as their support for women’s rights, placed them in the vanguard of reform and at odds with many other white abolitionists. With emancipation, they took up the cause of the freedpeople, which they pursued until they died, Sarah in 1873, Angelina in 1879.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the sisters’ understanding of their family changed. Angelina came across a notice in an 1868 issue of the National Anti-Slavery Standard referring to a meeting at Lincoln University where a Black student named Grimke had delivered an admirable address. She wrote to the young man to ask if he might be the former slave of one of her brothers. Archibald replied that he was in fact her brother’s son, offered details of his early life, and told her about his siblings, Francis, known as Frank, and John. Angelina responded that she was not surprised but found his letter “deeply … touching.” She could not change the past, she observed, but “our work is in the present.” She was glad they had taken the name of Grimke; she hoped they might redeem the family’s honor. “Grimke,” she wrote,

was once one of the noblest names of Carolina … You, my young friends, now bear this once honored name—I charge you most solemnly by your upright conduct, and your life-long devotion to the eternal principles of justice and humanity and religion to lift this name out of the dust, where it now lies, and set it once more among the princes of our land.

Thus began a relationship in which the Weld-Grimkes provided financial assistance to Archibald at Harvard Law School and Francis at Princeton Theological Seminary and delivered unrelenting exhortations to prove their excellence and worth, both as Grimkes and as representatives of their race. John, seen by his aunts as less talented and less deserving than his brothers, became estranged from his family. Francis and Archibald achieved notable success—Archibald as a founder and vice president of the NAACP and later the American consul to Santo Domingo, Frank as a prominent member of the clergy and the Black elite of Washington, D.C. Relationships among the white and Black Grimke families were not always easy; Frank in particular found his white relatives oppressively demanding and “unaccustomed to the ways of colored people,” and after a time he declined to accept their support. But it seems telling that Frank nevertheless called his only child Theodora, and Archibald chose to name his daughter Angelina.

The remarkable story of the Grimkes was long neglected by historians, and the way it has come to be told reveals a great deal about how we have chosen to understand the past. Until the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s prompted scholars to look anew at the narrative of Black freedom, abolitionists were regarded as dangerous radicals, to be deplored rather than acclaimed. The likes of Weld and Garrison, not to mention the women who moved outside their assigned sphere to join them in opposition to slavery, were cast as reckless fanatics, endangering the peace of the nation. But amid appreciation for mid-20th-century activists, perspectives shifted on those who had come before.

Abolitionists turned from demons into heroes, and their lives and struggles aroused widespread and sympathetic scholarly inquiry. Similarly, Black-freedom and women’s-liberation movements spawned new fields of Black and women’s history, making the Grimke sisters and their nephews a focus of exploration. The fate of the first modern scholarly treatment of the Grimkes is illuminating. Gerda Lerner, who was a founder of the National Organization for Women and became a superstar in the nascent field of women’s history, wrote her Columbia doctoral dissertation on the Grimke sisters. She published the study as a book in 1967, a moment when the civil-rights movement was well under way but the women’s movement was just emerging. She titled it The Grimké Sisters From South Carolina, with the subtitle, at her publisher’s insistence, Rebels Against Slavery instead of her preferred Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition. “ ‘Women’s rights,’ ” her editor told her, “was not a concept that would sell books.” By 1971, when a paperback edition appeared, the growth of feminism permitted the subtitle she had originally intended, along with a blurb from Gloria Steinem hailing the sisters as “pioneers of Women’s Liberation.”

Drawing on a flush of historical work that included scholarly biographies of the two nephews, Mark Perry in 2001 published a study that considered Black and white Grimkes together. His book explored the lives of “four extraordinary individuals”—Archibald and Frank as well as the sisters. Lift Up Thy Voice: The Sarah and Angelina Grimké Family’s Journey From Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders was unabashedly celebratory—designed to inspire a general audience by underscoring the possibility for racial enlightenment and for connections across the color line. “We see in their troubles our own,” he wrote of the family; “in their triumphs our hope; and in their history, the history of our nation.”

The Grimkes proved fodder for drama and fiction as well. In 2014, the novelist Sue Monk Kidd released The Invention of Wings, a tale that imagined the intertwined lives of Sarah Grimke and an enslaved girl presented to her on her 11th birthday. Oprah designated it a Book Club selection, declaring that it “heightened my sense of what it meant to be a woman—slave or free,” and it debuted at the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

The Grimkes’ story has served as a kind of cultural Rorschach test. We have projected onto it questions that have troubled us about ourselves and our racial past and found in it the promise of transcending the forces that seem to trap humans in the circumstances of their era. We have, as Perry wrote, seen in it our own anxieties, hopes, and history: The sisters have represented the possibility of moral redemption and social transformation; their nephews have embodied the myth and reality of personal uplift as well as social conscience and commitment. All four defied the expectations and limitations of their origins. For more than half a century, as the rights of Black people and women have advanced, we have rediscovered and then lionized the Grimkes.

The latest addition to the Grimke literature marks a new departure. Greenidge’s The Grimkes is not a story about heroes. Instead, it is intended as an exploration of trauma and tragedy. Like the studies of the Grimkes that have preceded it, the book reflects the challenges of our own time, but Greenidge, who is an assistant professor at Tufts, regards these not with optimism about possibilities for racial progress but with something closer to despair. She set out, she declares in her introduction, to write “a family biography that resonates in the lives of those who struggle with the personal and political consequences of raising children and families in the aftermath of the twenty-first-century betrayal of the radical human rights promise of the 1960s.”

Although earlier treatments hailed the sisters’ successes, Greenidge finds these vitiated by Sarah and Angelina’s unacknowledged “complicity in the slave system they so eloquently spoke against.” Sarah’s “dissatisfaction was possible only because of the very privileges denied to the numerous Black people who cultivated her family’s cotton and maintained their household.” The “feel-good stories” of Archibald’s and Francis’s achievements have ignored “the superficialities of the colored elite” of which they became proud members, and have failed to call the nephews to account for their obsessions with skin color and class hierarchies in the Black community.

As the pastor of Washington’s Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, Frank served a Black “professional, political, and business elite” that “shielded their congregation from the Black masses” by means of a rigorous admission process. Reverend Grimke “cultivated a conservative culture of racial respectability” that resulted, Greenidge finds, in the purge of “less well-heeled (and darker-skinned) members from Fifteenth Street’s rolls.” Archibald was unable to transcend his experience as a “fetishized Black wunderkind” during years spent in “neo-abolitionist New England”—at Harvard and as a young lawyer in Boston. His service as the consul to Santo Domingo, often cited as a badge of remarkable accomplishment for one born in slavery, came “at the expense of the African-descended subjects living under American empire.” Greenidge mentions only briefly Archibald’s role in leading the NAACP’s Washington efforts to combat President Woodrow Wilson’s segregation of the federal government. But she notes disapprovingly that despite “his genuine belief in racial equality,” he “neither argued for racial revolution nor criticized the color consciousness, materialism, and social conservatism of his fellow colored elite.” Even as Archibald witnessed the steady escalation of Jim Crow, she contends, he remained too close to white society and white power to effectively resist it.

Greenidge is the author of an earlier, prizewinning study of another leader of the postbellum Black community, William Monroe Trotter, who had an often close but fraught relationship with Archibald Grimke. The two ultimately broke sharply over Trotter’s more radical, less accommodationist stance, disseminated through his paper, the Boston Guardian. Trotter, Greenidge writes, “provided a voice for thousands of disenchanted, politically marginalized black working people” for whom Grimke’s efforts in the “politically moderate camp of colored elite” had little significance. In Greenidge’s portrayal of this conflict, and in her broader interpretation, her allegiances seem clear.

Greenidge leaves the stature of Sarah, Angelina, Archie, and Frank diminished, but she offers an enriched view of the extended Black Grimke family. Foregrounding the nephews’ enslaved mother with a chapter of her own, she provides a valuable treatment of the free Black Forten family—the prosperous Philadelphia clan to which Frank’s wife, Charlotte, belonged—and highlights the crucial role of Black women in the abolitionist struggle. A third-generation antislavery activist, Charlotte served as a teacher of the freedpeople in the Sea Islands, and her two 1864 articles on her experiences there made her the first Black writer to be published in The Atlantic.

[From the May 1864 issue: Charlotte Forten Grimké’s “Life on the Sea Islands”]

The Grimkes begins and ends with a portrait of Angelina Weld-Grimke, the only child of Archibald and his white wife and an often-overlooked figure in the Grimke lineage. Here she serves as an embodiment of the troubled legacy Greenidge seeks to portray. Abandoned by her mother when she was 7, Angelina, who lived until 1958, became a writer, struggling as a mixed-race woman, a Grimke, and a lesbian to confront the realities and tragedies of race in her own and the nation’s heritage. Her best-known work is a play titled Rachel, centered on a brutal lynching that leads the victim’s daughter to decide she will never bring children into such a cruelly racist world. Rachel became a “vehicle for civil rights activism,” but Greenidge emphasizes that the play also “reveals an artist who was as concerned with intergenerational trauma as she was with political protest.” Angelina’s life and work, Greenidge argues, gave expression to the failures—and the “existential rage”—of a Black elite whose narrative of “Black Excellence and racial exceptionalism” had rendered them politically “impotent” and “irrelevant” in the face of the violence of lynching and the imposition of Jim Crow.

At a time when we are confronted once again by an assault on rights long presumed to have been obtained and guaranteed—including voting and affirmative action—Greenidge has found in the Grimkes’ experiences a world chillingly like our own. Just as the promise of emancipation and Radical Reconstruction evaporated into Jim Crow, so we live, she writes, in an era when the heralded accomplishments of the civil-rights movement are being overturned and its promise abandoned. Upbeat stories of Black achievements cannot, she insists, counterbalance the wider reality of enduring oppression and inequality.

In recent years, considerable attention has been directed by scholars of history and literature to the question of slavery’s “afterlife,” to the assessment of its impact long after its legal demise. Greenidge embraces this perspective as she connects the injustices of the present with their roots. She finds their origins embedded not just in the strictures of society and law, but in the human psychology formed in the families that racism has so profoundly shaped. Our nation’s racial trauma lives on. The arc of history bends slowly—or perhaps, Greenidge seems to suggest, hardly at all.

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This article appears in the December 2022 print edition with the headline “Slavery in the Family.”

When I became pregnant, my partner and I, like many expectant individuals, opted not to tell our friends until after the first trimester. But I had an additional goal: for my friends to learn of my pregnancy before advertisers did. I’m a health-privacy scholar, so I know that pregnant individuals are of particular interest to retailers because their purchasing habits change during pregnancy and after birth. Companies are eager to send targeted ads and capture a new customer base. In an attempt to avoid this spamming and, frankly, to see if it was possible, I endeavored to hide my private health status from the advertising ecosystem.

My first step was to not directly tell any companies that I was pregnant. I didn’t download “femtech” products that track ovulation, provide cat videos while confirming a pregnancy result, or give updates on a fetus’s growth. With many of these apps, users must agree that their data can be sold. And user agreements are not always foolproof. In one case, the Federal Trade Commission alleged that a femtech company shared consumers’ health details with companies such as Facebook and Google in ways at odds with the user agreement. (The company entered into a settlement agreement without admitting wrongdoing.) I missed out on knowing when my child would be the size of a grape, but I knew my data would be kept private.

I also needed to be wary of ways that companies could piece together my health status. In a famous example reported in The New York Times Magazine, Target identified pregnant shoppers based on purchases for products such as unscented lotion, vitamins, and cotton balls. Data from internet searches, social-media posts, and GPS locations could theoretically tip off a company to a pregnancy. Armed with this knowledge, I took annoying and time-consuming steps to bolster my privacy. I bought prenatal vitamins and pregnancy tests in person with cash, without using rewards or loyalty programs. On the internet, I tried tactics such as using a VPN and non-tracking search engines. I was cautious when going to medical appointments. Knowing the link between location and health status, I turned off my phone’s GPS or left it at home during appointments.

Yet, because of the lack of data privacy in the U.S., the day finally came when I lost my battle to keep my reproductive information private. I was sitting on my couch scrolling through social media when I saw it: an advertisement for diapers. It appeared the same week that we lost the pregnancy.

Like so many individuals and couples who experience miscarriage, stillbirth, or a devastating fetal diagnosis, we had to face tragedy and grief. The very real risk of pregnancy loss is why many choose not to announce their pregnancies until after the first trimester. I, too, chose not to tell others about my pregnancy so that I didn’t have to risk people accidentally asking about children’s names or sending congratulatory cards if—and, it turned out, when—we experienced loss.

Although I could insulate myself from the inadvertent, painful faux pas of a friend or acquaintance, I was not afforded the same ability when it came to advertisers. Seeing advertisements of smiling babies and happy families throughout social media in the days and weeks after the loss made an already unbearable grieving process that much harder—a compounded harm all too familiar for those in similar situations.

Who knows how it happened. Did I forget the VPN one time when searching online? Did that time I used my credit card to buy ginger chews and tea tip them off? I’ll never know. What I do know is that our country’s abysmal privacy framework is failing to protect private reproductive-health information. Instead, the choice to protect one’s privacy in the U.S. is, theoretically, up to the individual. However, given the complexities of user agreements, many individuals are unaware of how their data are being shared. For others, a loss of privacy doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Their data are the price they are willing to pay for free services, cool apps, or lower-cost goods. Individuals who don’t want to make that trade are told to just not use the product.

But such a simple solution doesn’t address the realities of navigating a health issue in the 21st century. The U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) only protects information within the health-care system. Nowadays, however, we constantly obtain and share medical information outside the clinic. Risking privacy loss may be the sole way to seek answers to important questions, find a community of support, or even make a doctor appointment. And you can’t avoid purchasing medicine and food. Even the slightest bit of protection is available only to those with the means to pay for privacy. Buying a VPN, avoiding free apps, and having cash on hand for purchases are not options accessible to everyone.

Privacy violations are not always benign. Mine came with emotional harm. For others, unwanted disclosure of private medical information comes with risks of discrimination or stigma. Now, because of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, some experts worry that the lack of privacy can create a risk of criminal exposure if companies share amassed reproductive-health information with law enforcement.

Greater protection is sorely needed. Several pieces of legislation have been introduced in Congress that could go a long way toward fully safeguarding reproductive-health information—including data about pregnancy status, pregnancy loss, and abortion. Under HIPAA, we’ve recognized that medical information is worthy of privacy protection. But, in an era of big data, this lofty goal fails.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

Several weeks ago, I asked readers to tell me what people don’t get about their jobs. I thought we might receive several dozen replies. Instead, we received several hundred. We heard from teachers and professors; from opera singers and orchestra musicians; from corporate executives and tech workers; from screenwriters, playwrights, and book editors; and from sailors and summer-camp directors.

Last week, I read all of your emails. Today, I’m presenting more than two dozen replies in alphabetical order—from A(id workers) to T(impanists for metropolitan orchestras). I’ve provided a one-line summary of each respondent’s answer to the prompt followed by an edited and often condensed quote.

I hope you have as much fun reading these answers as I did. You’ll learn that humanitarians aren’t as nice as you dreamed; that some pastors prefer funerals to weddings; that chief executives still have bosses they’re afraid of; that many pharmacists are anti-medication; and that for screenwriters, talking is a more important skill than writing.

Aid Worker

It isn’t about charity. It’s about politics and stability.

International aid is almost never handing out bags of food or clothes to people. It is about working with national partners and hosting governments to build systems that deliver better for people. It is a lot more complicated than giving stuff away.

International aid is not charity. It is an investment in geopolitical stability. And it is less than 1 percent of the federal budget in the US. And many other countries devote higher percentages of their GDP than the U.S. Think about that in relation to military spending when things fall apart, and you see it’s really a bargain.

Book Editor

It’s a sales job.

A book editor spends 90 percent of their time working on selling a book, that is, publishing, and only 10 percent of their time working with its author to make that book the best it can be, that is, actually editing.

Chef

It’s not like being a visual artist with food. It’s more like being a middle manager (with food).

As a chef, most people assume that I spend my day eating food and making up new dishes. The reality is that I am a middle manager who spends most of my time managing my employees, writing schedules, completing checklists, and placing orders. So much less glamorous than most expect.

Corporate Communications Executive

People think the job is just writing. Nope.

I work in corporate communications for a Fortune 500 company, and people often think they can do my job. They think it’s just writing and they can do it themselves. Uh, no. Yes, strong writing is required as part of the job, but corporate communications is more than that.

As communication professionals, we communicate company strategy and purpose to our employees, protect its reputation among the public, and connect employees to company culture through our work. Great communicators are thought leaders to senior leadership who intimately understand the business to develop and deliver communication strategies that result in increased employee awareness, adoption, or engagement.

We can work long hours, sometimes under tight deadlines with colorful personalities or in stressful situations. It’s not for everyone, but hey, I love my job.

Data scientist No. 1

STEM jobs are creative too.

I’m writing as a data scientist and wanted to give the common misconceptions about AI/machine learning more broadly:

It’s just math, not magic. A lot of people talk about machine learning in a very sci-fi manner. People worry if AI is becoming “sentient” or “too smart.” People tend to anthropomorphize the word learning in machine learning. ML is effectively math. All of these algorithms—even the complex deep-learning neural nets—are a mix of linear algebra and nonlinear equations. In middle school/high school, we learn to fit lines given data with the equation y=mx+b. This is what is called a parametric equation—we have to solve for two parameters: m and b. It’s a relatively simple equation, one that we can often do by hand or with minimal calculations. AI fits equations like this, but instead of simple equations with two parameters, these can be insanely complex and have millions or billions of parameters. The emphasis on machine in machine learning is the fact that these equations are just too complex for people to do by hand, so we rely on computers to do all of these calculations at speeds that no person could ever dream of doing on their own. So to summarize: When people refer to machines “learning,” they are referring to a computer filling in the appropriate parameters to a complex mathematical function; these parameters are determined from the data used to train this function.

STEM people are creative! There seems to be this stereotype that people in STEM—especially engineers—are super robotic. We think about them as just about as far away as possible from those in the arts in terms of creativity, but I think this is wrong! The best engineers are incredibly creative. Building good programs and writing good code is not just about knowing a coding language. You are constantly hitting roadblocks that require creative solutions. There are always tons of ways to make a script run, but it’s on you as the coder to design a solution that is efficient, scalable, easy to follow, and won’t cause future tech debt. This is not something a single-note thinker would be able to do well.

Data Scientist No. 2

Coding is a smaller part of tech jobs than the average person thinks.

The most common misconception about data science is the amount of time we actually spend coding. Coding is probably only 10 percent of our time and is often done in chunks of time (i.e., three days of lots of coding and then not much for a while). The vast majority of our time is Googling how to troubleshoot a bug, brainstorming how to code or solve a specific problem, learning new technologies/softwares, designing technical diagrams, using low-/no-code tools, and communicating with stakeholders. Coding is likely a smaller component of most tech jobs than the average person believes.

Debate Coach for High School

In this field, facts are less important than the presentation of logic.

There are lots of things people don’t understand about competitive debate. For one, people tend to overestimate the importance of rhetoric and formality. Using pretty words in a presidential debate might help score you some polling points. But nine times out of 10, competitive-debate rounds are won on logic, not polish.

For another, people tend to overestimate the importance of facts. I know that sounds bad. What I really mean is that citing individual studies and statistics is unlikely to score you points with judges. It makes sense if you think about it: There is so much data out there that no individual number can capture the full scope of reality. Who cares if a poll shows that 60 percent of workers hate their jobs? Your opponents can point to another study claiming that only 15 percent of workers hate their jobs, and unless judges want to spend hours scouring the internet to fact-check every single cited source, no one will get anywhere. Logic is much more convincing.

Personally, I think everyone could benefit from a year or so of debate coaching. Debating helps you gain confidence, think critically, and BS your way through job interviews and presentations. But competitive debate is not an accurate re-creation of any kind of real-life argument: There are strict and sometimes unintuitive standards that define what constitutes a persuasive case, and anything else is noise. Is it better for discussions about gun control and health care to take place in a simulated, unrealistic environment? Well, that’s up for debate.

ER Doctor

Yes, the job is incredibly stressful. That’s why you have to be incredibly prepared.

I am retired now, but the most common reaction when I tell people that I was an ER doctor for 40 years was “OMG, how stressful that must have been!”

The truth is, unless you are a rookie, you have experienced many, many heart-wrenching situations where very bad things happen to people. Similarly, you encounter innumerable situations in which you must make critical decisions without much information when the well-being of a fellow human depends on that decision. But, like the Boy Scouts, we are prepared. We are trained; we have necessary equipment; and we have a team to work with. We don’t feel helpless; we feel we are doing what we are there for. Having said that, I experienced anxiety almost routinely in situations where I was behind and people were waiting hours to be taken care of. That was stressful!

Financial Analyst

The job is about numbers. But everyone thinks in stories.

I am an analyst by profession. I read a lot; I write a fair amount; I build a lot of presentations and speak to lots of CEOs, boards of directors, ministers, and the like. Here is what people don't get about my job: Everyone thinks in stories. Perhaps data drives that story (or data IS the story), or maybe compounding anecdotes drive the story. Whatever it is, it’s a story. We are narrative creatures, and we want to be told stories, whether it is about scientific progress or human frailty or what the world will look like a year, a decade, a century from now. And not only that—most of the people that consider themselves the most rational/objective are the most prone to storytelling-path dependence, particularly as they become very successful. Story becomes mythos.

Humanitarian

“The biggest misconception I’ve found is that people think I must be a lovely person.”

I’m a humanitarian, currently in a war zone. My friends often assume I am standing on the back of a truck handing out supplies. But in fact I am currently sitting on a bench balancing my computer on my knee while I try to get enough internet to request more supplies from my logistics team and an updated budget from the finance team, and more time to finalize a report that was due a week ago to a donor.

The biggest misconception I’ve found is that people, especially on dating sites, think I must be a lovely person. Not saying I’m not nice. But I wouldn’t have gotten very far in this job if I weren’t ambitious, determined, and downright stubborn at times. The assumption seems to be that I do this out of the goodness of my heart. But actually I’m highly qualified (I don’t think I know anyone in the job without a master’s) and reasonably well paid (not compared to the private sector but you can’t spend much in a lockdown, so my finances are okay). I do it because I love it, not because I think I should. I’m also not naive, and even on my best days I don’t think I can save the world, or even the very small part of it I’m hoping to help. I’m just trying to stave off the worst until people and communities can start to get back on their feet.

Government Consultant

Government employees have become glorified project managers.

I work for a private-consulting engineering firm, but I’m among the hundreds of thousands of consultants that functionally operate the government. Since the ’90s the federal budget has quadrupled, but the workforce has remained the same. Rather than paying for federal employees, that money has gone to private consultants that do all the research, write all the reports, and recommend all the policy. Government employees have become glorified project managers. This is the model of small-government efficiency we’ve settled on as a nation.

Grape Grower

“The best fertilizer is the farmer’s boots on the ground.”

Our farming uses immigrant labor, provided by a farm labor contractor. We don’t ask if they are legal because the contractor is responsible for payroll. But if farmers didn’t use immigrants, we wouldn’t have the variety of food and the price would be far, far higher. Do Americans really want higher-priced food with less variety?

Farming requires patience, perseverance, flexibility, and ingenuity to fix things when they break. I never realized how clever my husband was until he fixed every piece of equipment we use.

The best fertilizer is the farmer’s boots on the ground. Walking your property tells you where water runoff occurs, where animals pose a threat, which micro-area needs a little more compost. Big commercial operations treat everything the same and do it mechanically, albeit at a lower cost but without the expression of the unique terroir inherent to your property.

IT Project Manager

“I have a B.A. in geography and do just fine.”

Most people assume I was a developer or have a computer-science or engineering degree and that I couldn’t possibly be a good IT project manager without this background. Actually, I have a B.A. in geography and do just fine in the IT world. Sure, I have limitations when the techies get into the weeds but I can also use my lack of formal technical skills to my advantage. For one, I’m not too proud to ask the dumb or obvious questions that my tech colleagues avoid for fear of looking less, well, tech savvy. No one expects me to know better.

Lobbyist No. 1

“Most people assume lobbying is legal money laundering. Most people are quite correct.”

I have worked as a lobbyist at the Texas Capitol for more than 20 years. Most people assume lobbying is legal money laundering, and most people are quite correct. However, not all lobbyists are money changers in the temple. In fact, many of us do not make campaign contributions, wine and dine legislators, or even work for big corporations or special interests. Many lobbyists also represent low-income families, nonprofit organizations, and, well, the not-so-horrible stuff.

Lobbyist No. 2

The industry isn’t just a bunch of unethical fat cats. (However, it includes unethical fat cats.)

First, I don’t buy elected officials. The money is used to build a relationship and keep them in office. I NEVER buy votes or access.

There are bad apples; we see them all the time. Most of us are ethically bound to never blend the line of an “ask” (for a vote or favor) and handing over a check.

Second, I’m not a fat cat. While there are some exceptions, a reception grip and grin is basically it. Sure, I can eat and drink well, but we spend 90 percent of our day walking from office to office.

Third, the American process isn’t broken, it’s just super, super slow and complicated. Hundreds of bills are signed into law each year. Getting those done is a considerable lift because only small groups care about them versus, say, the big transportation bill, clean-energy investments, or the CHIPS and Science Act. The small laws change people’s lives a lot more than anyone knows.

Partisanship is real and a myth at the same time. The GOP hated Trump! The Dems don’t all like Biden! The question is do they have the muster to admit it publicly? There are good people on both sides, but more often than not, the names you hear a lot of—a few southern and New England senators—are totally in it for the headline. The rest want to get stuff done.

Neurologist

They don’t all make “boatloads of money.”

If I were a procedural neurologist in private practice, I could make boatloads of money. I am an academic neurologist with a low-paying procedure and make a little over $200,000 a year. That is after 13 years of education and training and 25 years post-internship residency and training. The most we are able to receive in raises is 3 percent per year. I got one as well as a $7,500 productivity bonus this year. In the private sector you lose or gain money based on how much income you generate, or relative value units (RVUs). In academics we get an email each month telling us where we are on the expected RVUs. I am way over expected as I am classified as mostly clinical. The research and teaching I do is barely considered in calculating my salary. So, I just work harder, see more patients, and don’t make more money. I came to academics from the private sector for a variety of reasons and took a 50 percent pay cut.

I hate when I try to engage a patient in their care only to hear, “I’ve done my research.” So, your Dr. Google or Fox News is equal to my training and years of practice? Wow, you must be super smart. This was very evident when discussing COVID vaccinations with patients who were immunocompromised and at greatest risk.

Neuroscientist

“Drugs are weird. Brains are weird. Put them together, and it gets ineffable.”

Right now I'm running a study in which I give people psychedelics (think LSD, magic mushrooms, etc.) and then measure what happens to their brain activity. When I tell people what I do, the first thing people don’t get is that this is, in fact, a real job. It’s all legal and happening at a real university. I’ve had people just simply not believe me!

The second question I tend to get is: “How do you make sure no one gets addicted?” The answer is that we don’t really have to. Psychedelics carry very little addiction risk. They are about as addictive as meditation, or travel. I often forget how few people know this.

I also have to make sure no one has a so-called bad trip. This is certainly a complex task, but one thing I wish more people understood was that bad trips are not completely random. Though psychedelics are always a little bit unpredictable, it’s not like you take LSD and have a 50 percent chance of hell. The risk of anxious reactions can be greatly minimized if you know what you’re doing, and we don’t see bad trips in our lab very often. A lot of people I meet are surprised at how safe working with these drugs can be, mentally as well as physically.

But it’s also hard for people to get what I do because the effects of psychedelics in general are really tough to explain. Psychedelics cause an intensely altered state of consciousness in which normal, everyday existence can seem unrecognizable. They affect everyone very differently, and they can cause both absurd hallucinations and sensible personal insights. Many people simply find it hard to fathom that a drug could cause insightful, meaningful experiences for some people—“trips” that they cherish for a very long time. But this is routine. Even though it’s [prompted by] “just” a drug, most of my study participants say afterwards that the experience was one of the most meaningful in their entire lives (it usually makes the top five, or at least the top 10).

I don't really blame people for not getting my job, though. Drugs are weird. Brains are weird. Put them together, and it gets ineffable. If I didn’t love that, I wouldn’t be studying it.

Managing Director

Even when you run a company, you still have a boss.

The things most people don’t get about running a company are:

1) You still have a boss. You may have the ultimate power in terms of making decisions around the future of the company, but if you are not the majority shareholder, then you need to have those decisions approved at board meetings. Even if you do own the company, you may have a bank loan, so you have to do what they want (e.g., covenants), or you may have a significant client or supplier, which means you have to do what they want.

2) It’s all about people. To be honest, I didn’t get this before I moved up from CFO. However you want to phrase it—I prefer “right people in the right seats”—that’s pretty much all I think about. Why is that team failing? Is it the management, or the workload, or the dynamics within that team? Stuff fails and succeeds because of people, not tech.

Nurse

The air-traffic controller of the health-care system

Patients in the hospital have no idea how much bullshit, danger, and negative experiences we keep from reaching them. Even when we’re not physically with you, we are advocating for you and coordinating your care. We collaborate with pharmacy, respiratory, doctors, consulting teams, case management, social work, dietary/nutrition, imaging, physical therapy, occupational therapy, lab, phlebotomy, central supply, environmental services, transportation, even the chaplain. We are the middleman for all of those for every single patient. There’s so much going on in the background in addition to what patients see.

Opera Singer

More like a professional athlete than you’d think

One thing I’d say people don’t understand about this job is that it’s not all about "talent.” It's more about actual hard work. Working as an opera singer is more like being a professional athlete, rather than being a delicate “artiste.” You start out with some natural talent, then spend years of your life and a lot of money developing and honing and perfecting that talent to be viable and appealing to opera companies and other performing-arts organizations. The amount of success you may achieve (and whether that success allows you to make a living as a performer) is very much a crapshoot, dependent on luck and a whole host of factors over which the singer has little to no control.

Pastor

The funerals are more interesting than the weddings.

I have served as pastor of a few churches over the past 20 years. In addition to the weekly preaching, Bible study, and pastoral-care calls, I also have the blessing of officiating at funerals and weddings.

The experience of preparing for and officiating a funeral is infinitely more interesting and more important than the same work for weddings. The whole of the community is much more honest and real around funerals than weddings. It is on the occasion of death that we get down to the truly important things in our common life together.

Pharmacist

“I think most people would be shocked to learn how anti-medication some of us are.”

Most people have no concept of how their health insurance works or that we as pharmacists have no say in what insurance charges them for medications. Patients would be well served to review the details of their policies and compare coverage for the medications they need.

Additionally, many patients are unaware that we are charged a fee every time we submit a claim for insurance or a discount card. Lastly, as a pharmacist I think most people would be shocked to learn how anti-medication some of us are. Medications are seldom the sole factor when it comes to addressing health issues, and polypharmacy leads to countless adverse reactions, increases the risk of medication errors, and ultimately enriches drug companies who want you to remain unwell.

Postal Worker

Online orders have a hidden cost: “back-breaking” labor and unusual work hours.

What I want people to know about my job is that people are doing grueling, back-breaking work at all hours around the U.S.A. to get your Amazon and UPS packages to you. COVID might be starting to go away, but ever since people got used to ordering things from their couch, Amazon is bigger than ever. It never stops. I work at a local post office. Amazon now brings its first truck at 1 a.m., so that’s the time I have to go to work. It used to be 5 a.m.

Your package arrives in a shipment of large cardboard boxes and shrink-wrapped pallets. We break those down, scanning the barcode of each package and placing them in separate bins for the different carrier routes. It is grueling, almost soul-killing work—very physical. Another truck arrives anywhere between 3 and 5:30 a.m. Sometimes there’s a third truck. (Full-time workers are required to take a one-hour lunch on weekdays; part-timers are not. In an eight-hour day, we are allowed two 15-minute breaks. If it turns into a 10-hour day, we are allowed one more break.)

Sunday is no different, except that only two of us are there, and the carriers come in earlier. Holidays are the same as Sundays. I would like to ask people if they really need to have their packages delivered on Sundays and holidays. Workers are giving up much-needed physical rest and much-needed family time to process and deliver on those days. (Luckily there is a local union rule that management has to give us eight hours between the end of one day’s shift and the beginning of another shift. It’s nowhere near enough time to rest. But if it were up to management, there would be far fewer hours in between, that’s for sure.) For the first one and a half hours of the 1 a.m. shift, the building’s air-conditioning is not on.

Real-Estate Broker

They do more than just sit around and check Zillow. And most don’t work on a salary.

As a residential real-estate broker, I often encounter the perception that everything is on Zillow or Redfin and that all I’m needed for is my access to these listings. Your Realtor does so much more! Sure, you can find the listings, but we know of homes being sold off-market (pocket listings, they're called). More than that, we are your advocate for buying or selling a home. We have your back and will work so hard to help you earn or save the most money while buying or selling the right house.

Other broad misconceptions are around how we get clients and how we get paid. Every real-estate agent is out there marketing themselves, working by referral for the most part and not being fed leads (unless they buy them, and those are expensive and rarely pan out). Very few brokers work on a salary; we work on commission, period.

And while real estate is widely understood as a sales profession, we are truly here to help! We want to be a resource for our clients. I get so much satisfaction from having just the right contractor for a client at just the right time. The relationships built during these very emotional transactions ([a house] is probably your biggest asset!) are deep and lasting and make this a very rewarding line of work.

Sailor

“If something goes very very wrong, who are we going to call for help? Buzz Fucking Lightyear?”

I am a sailor by profession. A delivery skipper, to be exact. My husband and I deliver brand new sailboats all over the planet. Before anyone gets their panties all in a wad, let me just inform you that, yes, swearing like a sailor is a real thing. Because, well, we all fucking swear like sailors. Here are some big myths about my job and the actual reality that it is.

"You guys are living the dream!" If one more person says that to me I am going to fucking throat-punch them. Of course we are not. Whose fucking dream is it to have a goddamn hurricane form overhead while they are working? We have had it happen, and it sucks. There is nowhere to run or hide.

“You must have a great time out there, watching the sunset, kicking back, having a beer. What a life!” Fuck you. We don’t drink while sailing. You would be an idiot to drink while sailing, even on your own boat. When things go wrong at sea, things go wrong very very fast, and it’s usually a cascading series of events. If you are hanging around out here being a drunk fucking slob, chances are you are going to get hurt, hurt someone else, die, or all of the above.

“It takes that long to get to Tahiti? Don’t you stop?” What are you a fucking moron? There’s nothing out there. Look at a goddamn map. At one point, in the middle of the Pacific, we are in what is called the Null Zone. We are actually closer to the people on the International Space Station than we are to actual land and people. It’s a very cool fact, but also intimidating. If something goes very very wrong, who are we going to call for help? Buzz Fucking Lightyear? When I am sailing the boat, my husband sleeps and vice versa. We see each other at watch change and our one big meal a day, dinner. Unless something goes wrong and then it’s all hands on deck until it’s not wrong anymore. That could be anywhere from four hours to four days. Or more.”

Screenwriter

Most of the job involves talking, not writing.

I went to film school with the intent of becoming a writer/director like Paul Thomas Anderson or Spike Lee but ended up focusing on screenwriting because I was bad at making friends and raising money, both of which you needed to be able to do to progress through the directing program by making short films at the college I attended. Productions cost money and need crews, who knew?

I like writing. I like the battle that goes on between my brain and the blank page. I’m up against it on my own, and it suits me. But here’s the thing nobody tells you when you decide you want to be a screenwriter and especially a TV writer: Most of your job involves talking, not writing. You have to sell producers on your ideas, then you have to discuss their notes, then you have to do it all over again with the studios and networks, and then you have to do it even more as your script veers quixotically toward production as more and more collaborators get involved. You have to talk to directors and actors. It’s endless.

The business of writing in Hollywood then is really the business of talking. And those who are good at talking can be very successful—while also being not that great at writing. Contrarily, if you can’t talk to other people but can write beautifully, you are likely screwed, because the process of making film and TV is so collaborative you have to be able to communicate your ideas verbally. If you only want to write, don’t come to Hollywood.

Software Engineer

“It’s amazing that any of this shit works at all.”

I work in the field of site reliability engineering, a niche within the tech industry at the intersection of software engineering and operations. Site reliability engineers are the folks tasked with making sure the largest websites, apps, and networks in the world are up and running. All. The. Time. They are often the first ones on the job when one of those things goes down.

There are two things the world should know about the work we do:

1. It's amazing that any of this shit works at all. The simple act of performing a search for Best Burger in Minneapolis from your phone requires not only hundreds of software systems to execute code in less than one second, but also communication via radio waves, copper cables, and fiber-optic lines. It’s mind-boggling that it even works, let alone that it works almost all the time.

2. Everything is broken all the time. The internet is incredibly resilient. The network, and the software systems that run on it, are designed to expect failures and minimize disruption from them. Which is a good thing, because failures happen constantly. Could be a bug in the new code, a ship drops an anchor on a fiber-optic line, or—and this my favorite—some of these systems grow to be so big that they take on emergent properties that no one intended or predicted, resulting in unexpected failures.

So next time you can’t post a snarky tweet because Twitter is down, or you can’t buy an organic cheesecloth because of an esoteric error message, just remember how crazy it is that any of this works at all.

Stenographer

“I am certified to capture the spoken word, up to 260 words per minute, and instantly create a written record of what was spoken. I do so with 99.5 percent accuracy.”

I work as a freelance deposition reporter. The transcripts that I produce are often used in court to impeach a witness, to support a party’s claims, to provide information in a trial when a witness is not available to appear live, or for any other reason deemed appropriate by the court.

The keyboard is the part of my job most people find fascinating. With just 21 letter keys (plus an asterisk key, a number bar, and eight number keys), I can write any word in the English language with just a few keystrokes. (There are specialized keyboards for many different languages; each one is configured to best suit that language.)

The stenographic keyboard is a marvel and I could go on for days about its beauty. Here’s a basic explanation [from the Made in Chicago Museum]: “The left side keys represent initial consonant sounds, the right side represents ending consonant sounds, and four bottom keys (operated by the thumbs) create your vowels. ‘The genius of the Ireland keyboard—the simplicity of it is fantastic,’ Robert Wright later said. ‘Every sound is in the position it is on the keyboard because of the frequency with which it occurs in the language, and, secondly, the sequence in which it occurs. You have two total phonetic systems under each hand.’”

Stenography is a phonetic, syllabic language. To write a word, I may depress one or, usually, multiple keys at one time, and many words require more than one keystroke. These keystrokes are represented in letters, but the letters often do not mean what they look like. For example, to write the word background, I would tap the keyboard twice, first for the sound “back” and second for the sound “ground.” The stenographic output would be: /PWABG/TKPWROUPBD. When I write, I also have to be mindful of homonyms, regional accents, proper names, punctuation, certain nonverbal actions, prefixes and suffixes, identifying who is speaking, and probably a hundred other things that by now I don’t even think about, I just do. All while folks are speaking up to 300 words per minute.

Summer-Camp Director

Folks, it’s a desk job.

I am a summer-camp director, and people don’t seem to realize that it’s not all fun and games. Imagine you rent a boat with all of your friends. Everyone gets to hang out, waterski, and have a beer. But someone has to drive the boat. They’re still out on the boat, but they don’t get to waterski or have a beer. Honestly half of the time in this analogy the camp director isn’t even the boat driver; they’re the rental manager stuck inside behind the desk making sure all the boats are insured, properly repaired, and getting rented to the right people.

Timpanist

“Most of my non-percussion colleagues don’t understand my job … Many of our conductors don’t either!”

I’m a principal timpanist for [a prominent big-city orchestra]. The timpani are the big copper drums in the back—think 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unlike a snare drum or a bass drum, timpani produce specific pitches. Now, we play a lot of operas by Italian composers, like Verdi, Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini. But the thing is, back when they were composing in the early 1800s, the quality of timpani in their pit orchestras was really poor; most of their timpani didn’t generate a recognizable pitch. So those composers basically wrote for “high boom” and “low boom.” Fast-forward 200 years, and the expectation today is to perform these operas on modern instruments. Therefore, whereas the rest of my colleagues receive their part from the music library in “basically ready to play” condition, my part is often woefully incomplete: I have to rewrite it, in many cases from scratch, in order to meaningfully integrate with and support the harmony. It’s a lot of homework! Funny thing? Most of my non-percussion colleagues don’t understand this is part of my job. Funnier still? Many of our conductors don’t either!

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There is a beautiful lightness to Rebecca Clark’s illustration work. Love!

On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of their messages. In hindsight, that was the first sign that she had COVID-19. It was also her first experience with the phenomenon known as “brain fog,” and the moment when her old life contracted into her current one. She once worked in artificial intelligence and analyzed complex systems without hesitation, but now “runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities—buying food, making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult. Her inner world—what she calls “the extras of thinking, like daydreaming, making plans, imagining”—is gone. The fog “is so encompassing,” she told me, “it affects every area of my life.” For more than 900 days, while other long-COVID symptoms have waxed and waned, her brain fog has never really lifted.

Of long COVID’s many possible symptoms, brain fog “is by far one of the most disabling and destructive,” Emma Ladds, a primary-care specialist from the University of Oxford, told me. It’s also among the most misunderstood. It wasn’t even included in the list of possible COVID symptoms when the coronavirus pandemic first began. But 20 to 30 percent of patients report brain fog three months after their initial infection, as do 65 to 85 percent of the long-haulers who stay sick for much longer. It can afflict people who were never ill enough to need a ventilator—or any hospital care. And it can affect young people in the prime of their mental lives.  

Long-haulers with brain fog say that it’s like none of the things that people—including many medical professionals—jeeringly compare it to. It is more profound than the clouded thinking that accompanies hangovers, stress, or fatigue. For Davis, it has been distinct from and worse than her experience with ADHD. It is not psychosomatic, and involves real changes to the structure and chemistry of the brain. It is not a mood disorder: “If anyone is saying that this is due to depression and anxiety, they have no basis for that, and data suggest it might be the other direction,” Joanna Hellmuth, a neurologist at UC San Francisco, told me.

And despite its nebulous name, brain fog is not an umbrella term for every possible mental problem. At its core, Hellmuth said, it is almost always a disorder of “executive function”—the set of mental abilities that includes focusing attention, holding information in mind, and blocking out distractions. These skills are so foundational that when they crumble, much of a person’s cognitive edifice collapses. Anything involving concentration, multitasking, and planning—that is, almost everything important—becomes absurdly arduous. “It raises what are unconscious processes for healthy people to the level of conscious decision making,” Fiona Robertson, a writer based in Aberdeen, Scotland, told me.

For example, Robertson’s brain often loses focus mid-sentence, leading to what she jokingly calls “so-yeah syndrome”: “I forget what I’m saying, tail off, and go, ‘So, yeah …’” she said. Brain fog stopped Kristen Tjaden from driving, because she’d forget her destination en route. For more than a year, she couldn’t read, either, because making sense of a series of words had become too difficult. Angela Meriquez Vázquez told me it once took her two hours to schedule a meeting over email: She’d check her calendar, but the information would slip in the second it took to bring up her inbox. At her worst, she couldn’t unload a dishwasher, because identifying an object, remembering where it should go, and putting it there was too complicated.

Memory suffers, too, but in a different way from degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s. The memories are there, but with executive function malfunctioning, the brain neither chooses the important things to store nor retrieves that information efficiently. Davis, who is part of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, can remember facts from scientific papers, but not events. When she thinks of her loved ones, or her old life, they feel distant. “Moments that affected me don’t feel like they’re part of me anymore,” she said. “It feels like I am a void and I’m living in a void.”

Most people with brain fog are not so severely affected, and gradually improve with time. But even when people recover enough to work, they can struggle with minds that are less nimble than before. “We’re used to driving a sports car, and now we are left with a jalopy,” Vázquez said. In some professions, a jalopy won’t cut it. “I’ve had surgeons who can’t go back to surgery, because they need their executive function,” Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, a rehabilitation specialist at UT Health San Antonio, told me.

Robertson, meanwhile, was studying theoretical physics in college when she first got sick, and her fog occluded a career path that was once brightly lit. “I used to sparkle, like I could pull these things together and start to see how the universe works,” she told me. “I’ve never been able to access that sensation again, and I miss it, every day, like an ache.” That loss of identity was as disruptive as the physical aspects of the disease, which “I always thought I could deal with … if I could just think properly,” Robertson said. “This is the thing that’s destabilized me most.”

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Robertson predicted that the pandemic would trigger a wave of cognitive impairment in March 2020. Her brain fog began two decades earlier, likely with a different viral illness, but she developed the same executive-function impairments that long-haulers experience, which then worsened when she got COVID last year. That specific constellation of problems also befalls many people living with HIV, epileptics after seizures, cancer patients experiencing so-called chemo brain, and people with several complex chronic illnesses such as fibromyalgia. It’s part of the diagnostic criteria for myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS—a condition that Davis and many other long-haulers now have. Brain fog existed well before COVID, affecting many people whose conditions were stigmatized, dismissed, or neglected. “For all of those years, people just treated it like it’s not worth researching,” Robertson told me. “So many of us were told, Oh, it’s just a bit of a depression.”

Several clinicians I spoke with argued that the term brain fog makes the condition sound like a temporary inconvenience and deprives patients of the legitimacy that more medicalized language like cognitive impairment would bestow. But Aparna Nair, a historian of disability at the University of Oklahoma, noted that disability communities have used the term for decades, and there are many other reasons behind brain fog’s dismissal beyond terminology. (A surfeit of syllables didn’t stop fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis from being trivialized.)

For example, Hellmuth noted that in her field of cognitive neurology, “virtually all the infrastructure and teaching” centers on degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, in which rogue proteins afflict elderly brains. Few researchers know that viruses can cause cognitive disorders in younger people, so few study their effects. “As a result, no one learns about it in medical school,” Hellmuth said. And because “there’s not a lot of humility in medicine, people end up blaming patients instead of looking for answers,” she said.

People with brain fog also excel at hiding it: None of the long-haulers I’ve interviewed sounded cognitively impaired. But at times when her speech is obviously sluggish, “nobody except my husband and mother see me,” Robertson said. The stigma that long-haulers experience also motivates them to present as normal in social situations or doctor appointments, which compounds the mistaken sense that they’re less impaired than they claim—and can be debilitatingly draining. “They’ll do what is asked of them when you’re testing them, and your results will say they were normal,” David Putrino, who leads a long-COVID rehabilitation clinic at Mount Sinai, told me. “It’s only if you check in on them two days later that you’ll see you’ve wrecked them for a week.”

“We also don’t have the right tools for measuring brain fog,” Putrino said. Doctors often use the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which was designed to uncover extreme mental problems in elderly people with dementia, and “isn’t validated for anyone under age 55,” Hellmuth told me. Even a person with severe brain fog can ace it. More sophisticated tests exist, but they still compare people with the population average rather than their previous baseline. “A high-functioning person with a decline in their abilities who falls within the normal range is told they don’t have a problem,” Hellmuth said.

This pattern exists for many long-COVID symptoms: Doctors order inappropriate or overly simplistic tests, whose negative results are used to discredit patients’ genuine symptoms. It doesn’t help that brain fog (and long COVID more generally) disproportionately affects women, who have a long history of being labeled as emotional or hysterical by the medical establishment. But every patient with brain fog “tells me the exact same story of executive-function symptoms,” Hellmuth said. “If people were making this up, the clinical narrative wouldn’t be the same.”

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Earlier this year, a team of British researchers rendered the invisible nature of brain fog in the stark black-and-white imagery of MRI scans. Gwenaëlle Douaud at the University of Oxford and her colleagues analyzed data from the UK Biobank study, which had regularly scanned the brains of hundreds of volunteers for years prior to the pandemic. When some of those volunteers caught COVID, the team could compare their after scans to the before ones. They found that even mild infections can slightly shrink the brain and reduce the thickness of its neuron-rich gray matter. At their worst, these changes were comparable to a decade of aging. They were especially pronounced in areas such as the parahippocampal gyrus, which is important for encoding and retrieving memories, and the orbitofrontal cortex, which is important for executive function. They were still apparent in people who hadn’t been hospitalized. And they were accompanied by cognitive problems.

Although SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID, can enter and infect the central nervous system, it doesn’t do so efficiently, persistently, or frequently, Michelle Monje, a neuro-oncologist at Stanford, told me. Instead, she thinks that in most cases the virus harms the brain without directly infecting it. She and her colleagues recently showed that when mice experience mild bouts of COVID, inflammatory chemicals can travel from the lungs to the brain, where they disrupt cells called microglia. Normally, microglia act as groundskeepers, supporting neurons by pruning unnecessary connections and cleaning unwanted debris. When inflamed, their efforts become overenthusiastic and destructive. In their presence, the hippocampus—a region crucial for memory—produces fewer fresh neurons, while many existing neurons lose their insulating coats, so electric signals now course along these cells more slowly. These are the same changes that Monje sees in cancer patients with “chemo fog.” And although she and her team did their COVID experiments in mice, they found high levels of the same inflammatory chemicals in long-haulers with brain fog.

Monje suspects that neuro-inflammation is “probably the most common way” that COVID results in brain fog, but that there are likely many such routes. COVID could possibly trigger autoimmune problems in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the nervous system, or reactivate dormant viruses such as Epstein-Barr virus, which has been linked to conditions including ME/CFS and multiple sclerosis. By damaging blood vessels and filling them with small clots, COVID also throttles the brain’s blood supply, depriving this most energetically demanding of organs of oxygen and fuel. This oxygen shortfall isn’t stark enough to kill neurons or send people to an ICU, but “the brain isn’t getting what it needs to fire on all cylinders,” Putrino told me. (The severe oxygen deprivation that forces some people with COVID into critical care causes different cognitive problems than what most long-haulers experience.)

None of these explanations is set in stone, but they can collectively make sense of brain fog’s features. A lack of oxygen would affect sophisticated and energy-dependent cognitive tasks first, which explains why executive function and language “are the first ones to go,” Putrino said. Without insulating coats, neurons work more slowly, which explains why many long-haulers feel that their processing speed is shot: “You’re losing the thing that facilitates fast neural connection between brain regions,” Monje said. These problems can be exacerbated or mitigated by factors such as sleep and rest, which explains why many people with brain fog have good days and bad days. And although other respiratory viruses can wreak inflammatory havoc on the brain, SARS-CoV-2 does so more potently than, say, influenza, which explains both why people such as Robertson developed brain fog long before the current pandemic and why the symptom is especially prominent among COVID long-haulers.

Perhaps the most important implication of this emerging science is that brain fog is “potentially reversible,” Monje said. If the symptom was the work of a persistent brain infection, or the mass death of neurons following severe oxygen starvation, it would be hard to undo. But neuroinflammation isn’t destiny. Cancer researchers, for example, have developed drugs that can calm berserk microglia in mice and restore their cognitive abilities; some are being tested in early clinical trials. “I’m hopeful that we’ll find the same to be true in COVID,” she said.

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Biomedical advances might take years to arrive, but long-haulers need help with brain fog now. Absent cures, most approaches to treatment are about helping people manage their symptoms. Sounder sleep, healthy eating, and other generic lifestyle changes can make the condition more tolerable. Breathing and relaxation techniques can help people through bad flare-ups; speech therapy can help those with problems finding words. Some over-the-counter medications such as antihistamines can ease inflammatory symptoms, while stimulants can boost lagging concentration.

“Some people spontaneously recover back to baseline,” Hellmuth told me, “but two and a half years on, a lot of patients I see are no better.” And between these extremes lies perhaps the largest group of long-haulers—those whose brain fog has improved but not vanished, and who can “maintain a relatively normal life, but only after making serious accommodations,” Putrino said. Long recovery periods and a slew of lifehacks make regular living possible, but more slowly and at higher cost.

Kristen Tjaden can read again, albeit for short bursts followed by long rests, but hasn’t returned to work. Angela Meriquez Vázquez can work but can’t multitask or process meetings in real time. Julia Moore Vogel, who helps lead a large biomedical research program, can muster enough executive function for her job, but “almost everything else in my life I’ve cut out to make room for that,” she told me. “I only leave the house or socialize once a week.” And she rarely talks about these problems openly because “in my field, your brain is your currency,” she said. “I know my value in many people’s eyes will be diminished by knowing that I have these cognitive challenges.”

Patients struggle to make peace with how much they’ve changed and the stigma associated with it, regardless of where they end up. Their desperation to return to normal can be dangerous, especially when combined with cultural norms around pressing on through challenges and post-exertional malaise—severe crashes in which all symptoms worsen after even minor physical or mental exertion. Many long-haulers try to push themselves back to work and instead “push themselves into a crash,” Robertson told me. When she tried to force her way to normalcy, she became mostly housebound for a year, needing full-time care. Even now, if she tries to concentrate in the middle of a bad day, “I end up with a physical reaction of exhaustion and pain, like I’ve run a marathon,” she said.

Post-exertional malaise is so common among long-haulers that “exercise as a treatment is inappropriate for people with long COVID,” Putrino said. Even brain-training games—which have questionable value but are often mentioned as potential treatments for brain fog—must be very carefully rationed because mental exertion is physical exertion. People with ME/CFS learned this lesson the hard way, and fought hard to get exercise therapy, once commonly prescribed for the condition, to be removed from official guidance in the U.S. and U.K. They’ve also learned the value of pacing—carefully sensing and managing their energy levels to avoid crashes.

Vogel does this with a wearable that tracks her heart rate, sleep, activity, and stress as a proxy for her energy levels; if they feel low, she forces herself to rest—cognitively as well as physically. Checking social media or responding to emails do not count. In those moments, “you have to accept that you have this medical crisis and the best thing you can do is literally nothing,” she said. When stuck in a fog, sometimes the only option is to stand still.

In the introduction to her book Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, Angela Garbes describes these times as “strange and difficult years of instability, loss, and grief—both general and intimate.” That’s it, I thought. Sometimes it feels as though decades of tragedy and erasure have been smashed into the past 30 months. During the upheaval of the summer of 2020, for example, my son also had his third unexplained seizure, and I faced the disorienting truth that I couldn’t promise to keep him safe, even within my own house.

It can be hard to find space to live and grow and breathe in the U.S., let alone mother. (Here I borrow from Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who defines mothering expansively as “the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life.”) How does one cultivate and pass along anything more than rage and despair?

For me, reading and writing can be restorative acts, even when they require me to face dark or uncertain realities. The right book can whisk you away; others draw you in without your permission. When I wrote my memoir, This Boy We Made, about my son’s medical and developmental challenges, re-creating scenes of hospital visits and emergencies drained me, and yet I knew that if I didn’t convey the intensity of those moments, my words wouldn’t connect with the readers I wanted them to reach. And, to find solace after dwelling in painful memories, I read widely. Books did not offer me an escape; instead, they inspired the hope that I can love deeply and create something beautiful in the world. The five titles below helped me reimagine how to mother in an inhospitable time and place.

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We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood, by Dani McClain

In McClain’s reported guide to parenting Black children, her prescience stands out. “I wonder … whether US institutions and our confidence in them will continue to collapse,” she wrote in 2019, ahead of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the January 6 insurrection, and a devastating pandemic. “I also wonder just how bad things can get and how soon.” McClain’s work is notable for its vulnerability. She weaves together research, conversations with activists, and her personal experience of raising a Black daughter. McClain doesn’t provide us with pat answers, but she offers a wealth of perspectives that broaden our definitions of motherhood and family before returning her focus to what we can control. Community-based institutions can seed freedom and joy, she reminds us. “In these pages I have mentioned my desire to find a place where I could flee with my daughter, a place that will allow her to flourish into her full potential as a black girl,” she writes. “I know that no such perfect place exists. It’s not something to find but something to create.”

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The Breaks: An Essay, by Julietta Singh

Singh opens this intimate and breathtaking letter to her 6-year-old by describing a common yet gutting event: Her daughter has come home from school with a picture book telling a whitewashed version of the Thanksgiving story. An initial feeling of pride that her daughter “colored all four children Brown like you” gives way to the need to explain how the holiday connects to a legacy of genocide. “My job as your mother is to tell you these stories differently,” she writes. Throughout the book, Singh fights to teach her daughter about her origins in a queer, mixed-raced family, and to consistently connect their lives to the global realities of climate change, racism, and colonialism. What pulls me to Singh is the way you can almost hear her voice breaking on the page, even as she gathers herself to press on: “No, I do not want to leave this planet,” she tells her daughter. “What I want is another world. And when I say another world, I mean this one, toppled and reborn.” This is a mother working to complicate simplified and harmful narratives—a mother I could stand and dream alongside.

[Read: Where to turn when you feel “at odds with being human”]

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The Trayvon Generation, by Elizabeth Alexander

In her new book, Alexander expands on an essay published in The New Yorker in June 2020, about the generation whose lives have been shaped, for the past 25 years, by stories of Black people being killed by police officers or neighborhood vigilantes. This group includes her two sons, and she writes with a mother’s and poet’s touch. Every word cuts just so, like when she describes how “the specter of violence hangs as constantly as the moon over Black people.” Alongside visual artwork and poems by others, this writing dares to ask if art can really change us. It might seem an outrageous question, when, as Alexander puts it, Black mothers know “that we cannot fully protect our children.” Why, when the country casually marches on despite mass shootings, lynchings, and high Black maternal mortality rates, should we look to art? Because “artists make radical solutions all day long, soup from a stone, beauty from thin air,” Alexander answers. She ends her book with a powerful declaration that Black people have the distinct ability to articulate both the problems with and the possibilities of America, the kind of vision that has continually produced life and wonder even amid darkness and danger.

[Read: The civil-rights movement’s generation gap]

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Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, by Imani Perry

The scholar and Atlantic contributing writer Perry constructed an unsparing, lyrical guide to motherhood in this dispatch to her Black sons. Similar to Singh, she’s honest with her children about the hostility they’ll face, but her warnings can be more urgent: “There are fingers itching to have a reason to cage or even slaughter you,” she writes, recalling a night when she feared that cops responding to a false alarm would mistakenly shoot one of her children. “My God, what hate for beauty this world breeds.” But Perry emphasizes that her boys are not the issue—“Mothering you is not a problem. It is a gift,” she writes tenderly. She also critiques the notion that more knowledge, more videos, more images can save America. “Awareness is not a virtue in and of itself, not without a moral imperative,” she notes, explaining her decision to stop watching videos of police shootings. “I knew the imperative wasn’t there.” The greatness Perry wants for her sons is not tied to money or prestige, but to imagination and connection. And the way she encourages her children to cherish small pleasures, like smooth sheets or a hug, makes existing and parenting when bad news never stops seem more bearable.

[Read: How we must raise our children now]

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Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca Solnit

I was initially nervous about reading a book with hope in the title. How would the author speak to my experiences of despair and anxiety as a Black mother? But Solnit is a writer who can tear down the walls of your brain with a single acute observation, and she earned my attention early, in the 2016 reissue’s new foreword. “It’s important to say what hope is not,” she declares. “It is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.” What she writes about is instead “an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.” It’s a hope that makes space for grief and asks us to remember times when the world did, indeed, change for the better. Progress often happens incrementally, and Solnit comes with detailed receipts. Crucially, she points to the merits of not knowing what will happen next: As long as there’s ambiguity, we have to leave room for the chance that we could build a future that will blow our minds again—in a good way.

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The story of America’s rabid raccoons begins in Florida. Rabies was once rarely found in raccoons, but in the ’50s, an outbreak began spreading from the Sunshine State. It diffused first to neighboring states and then made a great leap north into the mid-Atlantic, possibly via the shipment of over 3,500 Florida raccoons to hunting preserves in Virginia. From there, rabid raccoons ambled their way as far north as Canada and as far west as Ohio. The East Coast became “one solid belt of raccoon rabies,” says Charles Rupprecht, the former chief of the CDC’s rabies program.

In the early days of the outbreak, officials quickly realized that mass killings of raccoons would not be popular with the public. Residents on one Florida island with a rabies outbreak were so attached to their raccoons that a restaurant owner was feeding them 400 pounds of dog food a month.

For the past 30 years, the U.S. government has embarked on a far more unusual and elaborate campaign: mass immunization of raccoons. Every summer and fall, the USDA, in collaboration with local agencies, drops millions of packets of oral rabies vaccines over the U.S. by air and by hand. The vaccines come in two flavors: fish meal and vanilla. When a hungry raccoon bites into the packet, the liquid vaccine coats its mouth, immunizing it against the rabies virus. We’re now trying to save raccoons from the rabies outbreak we once unwittingly helped unleash. As far as management strategies for dangerous wildlife go, mass immunization is a pretty gentle one.

A similar vaccine campaign has already eliminated strains of rabies from coyotes and foxes in the Southwest. It has also slowly pushed back the northern front of rabid raccoons from Canada into Maine. The immediate objective is to prevent rabies from spreading any farther north or west, but eventually, says Richard Chipman, the national rabies-management coordinator at USDA, “our goal is to push back rabies to the ocean. We want raccoons rabies-free by 2063.”

This mass immunization effort in raccoons is ultimately a roundabout way of protecting humans. Rabid animals notoriously like to bite—the virus hijacks the central nervous system and makes animals unusually aggressive. So when rabies takes hold in a raccoon population, the virus tends to spread to other animals: feral cats, foxes, unvaccinated dogs, even humans. And rabies is virtually always fatal in humans, unless we get a timely dose of antibodies plus the vaccine, which together are known as rabies postexposure prophylaxis. When the outbreak reached New Jersey in 1989, the need for rabies postexposure prophylaxis “started going through the roof,” Rupprecht says. (The treatment costs thousands of dollars per person.) Eliminating rabies in raccoons wouldn’t eliminate rabies in the U.S. entirely, as bats are another important reservoir, but “it’s getting the biggest bang for the buck,” Chipman says. Human rabies exposures are 600 percent higher in areas where both raccoon and bat rabies circulate, compared with areas where there is only bat rabies.

Two types of vaccines are now used in raccoons. The first was jointly developed by the Wistar Institute in Pennsylvania and the French biotech company Transgene in the 1980s; scientists inserted a gene for a rabies protein into another live virus called vaccinia. This vaccine worked well in lab animals, but then came the problem of how to actually inoculate raccoons in the wild. Rupprecht, who was at Wistar at the time, remembers batting around ideas to grow the virus in eggs or put it inside Slim Jims or sausages. The breakthrough came when people trying to prevent raccoons from breaking in and eating their fish baits called the scientists for help. Rupprecht and his team weren’t in the raccoon-deterring business, but they were in the raccoon-attracting business—so they thought, Why not fish? They tried encasing vaccines in fish-meal-bait polymer, which worked brilliantly. The manufacturer now also makes plastic packets of the vaccine coated in fish oil and fish meal. “We typically sort of equate it to a small ketchup packet,” says Jordona Kirby, rabies field coordinator at the USDA.

The second vaccine is also made of the same rabies gene inserted into a different virus called adenovirus. This vaccine is loaded into a blister pack, which is in turn coated in edible vanilla wax. Technically, it’s still experimental; the USDA team has been field-testing it since 2011 and expects FDA approval soon. Their preliminary results, Chipman says, suggest that it stimulates much higher antibody levels in raccoons than the older vaccine does.

Distributing the vaccine is a three-pronged process. Small airplanes equipped with a conveyer belt—“a little bait treadmill,” Kirby says—drop the vaccines over large, empty rural expanses. Helicopters that can fly lower drop them over suburbs. Dense urban areas are the hardest to reach: The team actually walks around setting up bait stations or J-shaped tubes filled with the fish-meal polymer cubes. The idea is to make sure that raccoons, specifically, try to eat these; they can reach into the pipes with their dexterous hands, whereas possums, skunks, and feral cats cannot. The program is aiming to vaccinate at least 60 percent of raccoons in an area to stop the spread.

The team—and those who come after—still have a lot of work ahead in eliminating rabies in raccoons by 2063. “I’ll be, in fact, 103 then, but I hope to still be standing and smiling and cheering these guys on,” Chipman told me over the phone from West Virginia, where he had just finished supervising the distribution of rabies vaccines. In October, he’ll be out in the field again for the second leg of the campaign, this time starting in Virginia and going south until the ocean.

This delicious Grilled Chicken Panini with Zucchini, Tomato, and Mozzarella highlights end-of-summer vegetables on sour dough bread.

Chicken Panini with Zucchini, Tomato Mozzarella

There’s something about a hot sandwich that just feels more satisfying sometimes especially when you add protein like I did in this Grilled Chicken Panini. With the grilled chicken, this sandwich has 26 grams of protein! I usually use sour dough bread because it contains higher levels of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants than many other breads. I served this for dinner with some tomato soup, which was so delicious. Some other panini recipes you might want to try are this Eggplant Panini with Pesto, Asparagus Prosciutto Panini with Garlic Mayo, and Chicken Arugula Provolone Panini with Chipotle.

(more…)

The post Grilled Chicken Panini with Zucchini, Tomato, and Mozzarella appeared first on Skinnytaste.

Author Jody Keisner comes to us today with some classic advice: face your fears. Or at least, don’t ignore them. Open up about them! Explore them. That’s exactly what she does in her memoir, Under My Bed.

JODY KEISNER:

My Big Idea started as My Big Humiliation.

“What is your greatest fear?” I asked the room of college students on the first day of a creative writing class. The question was from the Proust Questionnaire, named after the French essayist and novelist Marcel Proust. I used the questionnaire to break-the-ice and create a sense of intimacy, which was crucial since we’d be reading about each other’s personal lives for most of the semester. Composed of questions ranging from “What is your idea of perfect happiness?” to “What is the trait you most deplore in others?”, it was thought to uncover someone’s true self. 

Though I’d been answering the questions along with my students for as many years as I’d been teaching, I’d never revealed my true self, at least concerning fear. My greatest fear was also what I then perceived as my greatest humiliation. And so, I kept this part of myself hidden: I was a thirty-something woman living in the quiet, middle-class suburbs, who was afraid of being alone in her home at night. In other areas of my life, I felt daring, tough, and a little wild, just not in my own house. Only my husband and sister knew my secret.

One year, without forethought, instead of my usual vague answer, I blurted the truth:

My fear arrives out of nowhere. I’m reading a book or drinking a glass of wine, supposedly enjoying “me time,” when I’m startled by the creak of a floorboard or a doorknob rattling. The normal sounds of a normal house settling—or unsettling. The feeling that I’m not alone overwhelms me. There’s only one way to be sure. I have to check.

I saw my absurdity through my students’ eyes as I stood before them in my Ann Taylor skirt and coordinating blouse and told them how I opened closets, tugged back shower curtains, looked behind the couches and chairs, checked every latch on every window and door, and finally got down on my hands and knees and peered under my bed. I was looking for a prowler, a man waiting to rape or murder me. I felt childish and exposed. Why did I tell them? 

After a moment of silence that felt like years, the unexpected happened. Well, first the expected happened and they laughed. But then a handful of young women admitted experiencing a similar anxiety on occasion. Most of my students didn’t think I was absurd—though, as one student said, perhaps I was a touch obsessive-compulsive—and one student approached me after class to discuss her own under-the-bed checking. The male students in the room were more apt to confess humorous fears, like being frightened of boogers or death-by-zombies, though one acknowledged being “spooked” after watching horror movies. My students and I talked about how although girls and woman are assaulted—and murdered—every day in this country, I was greatly overestimating the probability of it happening to me. 

Still, my being vulnerable and open with them about my odd behavior invited them to be more vulnerable in their writing, flaws and all, which made their work more compelling. Which, of course, was exactly what I needed to do with the memoir I was writing, too.

Under My Bed and Other Essays was born out of a need to understand this anxious, hidden part of myself and the origin stories of all my greatest fears. From there it grew into an exploration of how fear carried on in my life and, more broadly and universally, the lives of all of us and especially women and mothers. Through my research and writing, I came to understand that my fears weren’t entirely illogical and didn’t really “arrive out of nowhere.” They came—as many fears and anxieties do—from a whole host of interconnected places, such as:

• media and film portrayals of horror and tragedy (“the chest chomp” scene in John Carpenter’s The Thing makes a cameo appearance in my memoir)
• proximity to danger (John Joubert, aka the Nebraska Boy Snatcher, lived within ten minutes of my childhood home)
• brain changes during pregnancy (scientists say that when a woman is pregnant, the part of the brain responsible for anxiety and fear increases in activity)
• family trauma (I grew up with a father who had an explosive temper, though he has mellowed over the years)
• mothering young girls (what do we teach our daughters about living in a society that teaches them to ignore their anger and rebellion and instead to always be accommodating and polite?)
• the cultural objectification and sexualization of the female body (the nationally covered murder of solo runner Mollie Tibbetts, as but one example of thousands)

I was, for once, revealing my authentic self, searching out the darkest corridors of my mind, and in doing so, I uncovered an opportunity to connect with readers as they, too, struggled to keep their greatest fears from getting close to them. 

In a recent post on this blog, Patrick O’Leary writes: “As the shrink says in my Door Number Three, ‘The only terror that heals. The terror of being yourself.’” The act of writing this book and being myself helped me to overcome fear. I will, however, never live completely without it. Does anyone? Should we even want to? Fear compels us to act and make change.

Naming my fears was ultimately empowering for me, as I hope it will be for readers. I didn’t neglect the flip side of the coin in my memoir-in-essays: stories of hope, triumph, and love. Ultimately, it wasn’t only fear that propelled my writing—it was also fear’s antidote: curiosity. My beloved grandmother used to say, “Don’t be afraid. Try everything once.”

In memoir writing, the courage to be vulnerable is everything.

—-

Under My Bed and Other Essays: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s|University of Nebraska Press|The Bookworm

Visit the author’s site. Follow her on Twitter. 

On August 21, 1831, enslaved American Nat Turner led about 70 of his enslaved and free Black neighbors in a rebellion to awaken his white neighbors to the inherent brutality of slaveholding and the dangers it presented to their own safety. Turner and his friends traveled from house to house in their neighborhood in Southampton County, Virginia, freeing enslaved people and murdering about 60 of the white men, women, and children they encountered. Their goal, Turner later told an interviewer, was “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.”

State militia put down the rebellion in a couple of days, and both the legal system and white vigilantes killed at least 200 Black Virginians, many of whom were not involved in Turner’s bid to end enslavement. Turner himself was captured in October, tried in November, sentenced to death, and hanged.

But white Virginians, and white folks in neighboring southern states, remained frightened. Turner had been, in their minds, a well-treated, educated enslaved man, who knew his Bible well and seemed the very last sort of person they would have expected to revolt. And so they responded to the rebellion in two ways. They turned against the idea that enslavement was a bad thing and instead began to argue that human enslavement was a positive good.

And states across the South passed laws making it a crime to teach enslaved Americans to read and write.

Denying enslaved Black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation. The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled propaganda and religion to defend their dominance.

In 1858, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond explained that society needed “a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill.”

But when they organized in the 1850s to push back against the efforts of elite enslavers like Hammond to take over the national government, members of the fledgling Republican Party recognized the importance of education. In 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln explained that those who adhered to the “mud-sill” theory “assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible…. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous.”

Lincoln argued that workers were not simply drudges but rather were the heart of the economy. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” He tied the political vision of the Framers to this economic vision. In order to prosper, he argued, men needed “book-learning,” and he called for universal education. An educated community, he said, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.”

When they were in control of the federal government in the 1860s, Republicans passed the Land Grant College Act, funding public universities so that men without wealthy fathers might have access to higher education. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans also tried to use the federal government to fund public schools for poor Black and white Americans, dividing money up according to illiteracy rates. 

But President Andrew Johnson vetoed that bill on the grounds that the federal government had no business protecting Black education; that process, he said, belonged to the states—which for the next century denied Black and Brown people equal access to schools, excluding them from full participation in American society and condemning them to menial labor.

Then, in 1954, after decades of pressure from Black and Brown Americans for equal access to public schools, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California, unanimously agreed that separate schools were inherently unequal, and thus unconstitutional. The federal government stepped in to make sure the states could not deny education to the children who lived within their boundaries. 

And now, in 2022, we are in a new educational moment. Between January 2021 and January 2022, the legislatures of 35 states introduced 137 bills to keep students from learning about issues of race, LBGTQ+ issues, politics, and American history. More recently, the Republican-dominated legislature of Florida passed the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act, tightly controlling how schools and employee training can talk about race or gender discrimination. 

Republican-dominated legislatures and school districts are also purging books from school libraries and notifying parents each time a child checks out a book. Most of the books removed are by or about Black people, people of color, or LGBTQ+ individuals.

Both sets of laws are likely to result in teachers censoring themselves or leaving the profession out of concern they will inadvertently run afoul of the new laws, a disastrous outcome when the nation’s teaching profession is already in crisis. School districts facing catastrophic teacher shortages are trying to keep classrooms open by doubling up classes, cutting the school week down to four days, and permitting veterans without educational training to teach—all of which will likely hurt students trying to regain their educational footing after the worst of the pandemic.   

This, in turn, adds weight to the move to divert public money from the public schools into private schools that are not overseen by state authorities. In Florida, the Republican-controlled legislature has dramatically expanded the state’s use of vouchers recently, arguing that tying money to students rather than schools expands parents’ choices while leaving unspoken that defunded public schools will be less and less attractive. In June, in Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court expanded the voucher system to include religious schools, ruling that Maine, which provides vouchers in towns that don’t have public high schools, must allow those vouchers to go to religious schools as well as secular ones. Thus tax dollars will support religious schools. 

In 2022, it seems worth remembering that in 1831, lawmakers afraid that Black Americans exposed to the ideas in books and schools would claim the equality that was their birthright under the Declaration of Independence made sure their Black neighbors could not get an education.

—

Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/21/politics/supreme-court-religious-schools/index.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-blocks-floridas-stop-woke-act-pushed-gov-desantis-rcna43908

https://www.flsenate.gov/Committees/BillSummaries/2022/html/2809

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/17/book-ban-restriction-access-lgbtq/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/03/school-teacher-shortage/

https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/education/2022/08/12/sarasota-schools-library-book-purchases-donations-frozen/10307632002/

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The last time I tried to wait out the pandemic, I drove south. My dog and I traveled nine hours from San Francisco to the Anza-Borrego Desert, which sprawls over more than half a million acres near the Mexican border. Most of that territory is untouched wilderness, rocky washes home to deer, pumas, and golden eagles.

The place felt solitary. That’s why I chose it. I work as a doctor in an emergency room, a hospital, and an HIV clinic. I also take powerful immunosuppressants for autoimmune disease, one of which rendered the coronavirus vaccines far less effective in my body. My co-workers had tried to see all of the COVID patients to protect me, but as Omicron exploded in January, that became impossible. The woman who’d broken her ankle tested positive. The grandfather who’d lacerated his scalp did too, just like the middle-aged man who wanted to detox. Treatments for COVID were in short supply, and I wanted to get through the surge alive. So for several weeks, I canceled work, a privilege most can’t afford. Forced into isolation, I decided to spend a week where solitude felt deliberate.

Back then I would have described my trip to the desert, and pandemic life broadly, as an intermission. The moment caseloads tumbled and hospitals stocked treatments, I would go hiking in Japan. I would brave the dating scene after a two-year hiatus. I would deploy with Doctors Without Borders. Meanwhile, I reassured myself that I just had to hold out a few months longer, even though the deadline kept retreating. Mine was an outlook equally comforting and wrong.

[Read: The millions of people stuck in pandemic limbo]

Kurt Vonnegut famously taught about six archetypes that underpin stories. In a video of one of his lectures, he draws on a chalkboard an x-axis for time and a y-axis for degree of good fortune, then traces a sine wave that plummets before rising again. “We call this story ‘Man in Hole,’ but it needn’t be about a man, and it needn’t be about somebody getting into a hole,” Vonnegut says. It’s a tale—of fall and salvation, of mettle forged through trials, of ultimate catharsis and victory—that humans tell naturally. And it needn’t be about a man and a hole. It could be about a world and a virus.

People in the U.S. have heard this story repeatedly over the past two and a half years, the media and government casting the downturn of each surge or advent of each therapeutic as the ladder that would soon carry us from the hole of the pandemic. Until that deliverance, we could cultivate rooftop gardens and sourdough starters to stave off our impatience. It’s less scary to rewrite reality into a reassuring plot arc—one with a familiar contour and clean resolution—than to envision a story that doesn’t end, or one whose ending permanently reconfigures our world.

But nearly eight months after my return from Anza-Borrego, the bridge of my nose is raw from my N95 mask. Yet another Omicron subvariant is spreading, as one strain supersedes another. Despite stunning progress in vaccines and drugs, COVID still threatens to hospitalize or disable me, and I don’t foresee that reality changing imminently. While the mirage of normalcy recedes, glittering and unattainable, I remain marooned in another desert, staring down the truth that a sense of closure won’t arrive anytime soon.

[Read: The BA.5 wave is what COVID normal looks like]

SARS-CoV-2 is only the latest pathogen to upend people’s lives. Working as a doctor who specializes in HIV—a virus that profoundly affects my patients yet is ignored by most Americans—has taught me some truths about pandemics. The first time someone asked me whether HIV was “still a problem,” at a Christmas party years ago, I almost choked on my drink. But the question made twisted sense in a country where the notion that a pandemic is over depends little on science and more on which communities are affected.

The people I treat who gasp from pneumonia or seize from meningitis because they can’t access or adhere to HIV medications are invariably poor, and many are Black or Latino. My acquaintance at the party was a straight, white, wealthy man in his 60s. He could exist in a story where the man had climbed out of the hole. Tale concluded, the credits rolled. That conversation is the reason why, whenever someone says the coronavirus pandemic is over, my first question is always, “Over for whom?”

Though I‘ve endured a sliver of the adversity my patients have, I’m learning what it’s like to embody a less comfortable story than the one others are telling. I walk by packed bars. I scroll through photos of maskless crowds at concerts. I hear people use the phrase “during the pandemic,” as if it’s ended. After multiple false starts, the man in the dominant version of the story escaped the hole after the Omicron surge once and for all.

That narrative has real consequences, including lax precautions, risky workplace policies, and woefully inadequate funds for global COVID efforts. It sidelines millions of Americans: not only people like me dealing with high-risk medical conditions, but also survivors confronting long COVID, frontline workers depleted by burnout, and loved ones grieving those who have died, disproportionately people of color. I don’t want my fellow San Franciscans to stop eating out or traveling; their lives will be freer than mine, a situation I accept as unavoidable even if it saddens me. I do wish, though, that the government would value my life by investing in preventing COVID transmission rather than issuing ever more anemic guidelines. And amid such policy failures, I wish people with less to fear from the virus would shift the burden off the shoulders of the more vulnerable, by wearing masks on public transit, staying home when they’re sick until a rapid test turns negative, and keeping up to date on boosters.

[Read: The pandemic’s soft closing]

After far too long, I have stopped clutching the myth of Man in Hole, in which I must either pretend the pandemic is over—a self-deception that could land me in the hospital—or else wait indefinitely for a ladder, watching clouds scud over desert lowlands as I forfeit plans and dreams. I need a story to replace it, and for that, I’ve turned to my patients.

A few years ago, I treated a young man who had contracted HIV just out of college. A pandemic that had never touched him suddenly shaded his life, and for months, that paralyzed him. He didn’t look for work; he played video games all day and nearly lost his housing. Then, six months after his diagnosis, he started bringing a notebook to our visits. In it, he fashioned a plan. Nothing sweeping: Stop by two restaurants to ask about jobs. Get glasses. Post a dating profile. A year into our time together, he was working in a café, had an adoring boyfriend who knew his status, had undergone a long-overdue surgery, and had started graduate school.

I started carrying a notebook recently. The plans I scribble down differ from those I might have conceived before the pandemic but share one feature: They are possible despite my constraints. I rode my bike from Seattle to Vancouver for an outdoor vacation. I attended a wedding in an N95 mask. I made enchiladas with friends after we all took rapid tests. I spoke on the radio about the injustices of pandemic policy, because adapting to my new reality doesn’t mean abdicating the battle for a better one. That, too, I learned from people with HIV, who formed committees to pressure the FDA and the NIH, demanded inclusion in policy decisions, and were jailed for protesting for effective antiretrovirals, including one used in COVID treatment.

[Read: COVID long-haulers are fighting for their future]

I still seethe whenever I show up to an event that’s too overcrowded and underventilated for me to stay, or board a plane where the overturned mask rule reminds me of the nation’s disregard for my health. But action is nonetheless a relief after spending so long stymied. If I were to chart my life on Vonnegut’s chalkboard now, I’d draw a steep plunge followed by a slow and bumpy incline that hasn’t yet neared the original precipice. It’s a tale less tantalizing than Man in Hole, and galling in its incrementalism, but it does have one advantage: It’s true.

Some people visit Anza-Borrego only after the rains, in perfect conditions, when a riot of wildflowers suffuses the land with color. I never have. People tend to assume that this is when the desert is most alive, but in truth, even in the most arid conditions, bobcats prowl, coyotes slink, and foxes rear their kits. When the wild sheep can’t find water, they ram barrel cacti and devour the wet pulp. These animals know well that the rains don’t always come. During the dry spells, life carries on.

I had the Midjourney AI art generator give me a few pictures of a cat in a library, in the style of Gustav Klimt. This was my favorite, both for the absolutely unimpressed expression but also because in the cat’s “fur” you can see hints of books and bookshelves, which is actually quite clever for an artist without actual sentience. It was worth sharing on this slow summer weekend, so here it is. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Maybe read a book.

— JS

The neglected or endangered child—the orphan, the vagrant, the waif—is a character with deep roots in the Western canon. Beginning perhaps with the binding of Isaac in the Bible, this figure appears everywhere: in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, in Charles Dickens’s oeuvre and, more recently, in Toni Morrison’s. These stories captivate young and old readers, provoking thrill and worry. Children who are lost fill us with grief; kids who wish to rise above their tough circumstances or go on an epic adventure bring us the highest joy, and we seek these narratives out in books as disparate as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy. Why? Because each of us knows, in some measure, what they’re feeling.

We all understand what it means to feel abandoned, ignored, or underestimated. Some of us may have experienced it for just a moment, or a day; others may have felt it for a decade, or a lifetime. Regardless, we carry those memories for the rest of our lives, and we have been trying to express those feelings for as long as we, as a species, have known how to express anything.

In the sea of great literature that tells these tales, here are some of the titles that helped me write about my own complex childhood in my new memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts. Their circumstances are varied, but their depictions of the unique ways kids feel delight and pain will resonate with any reader.

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Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn

To not mention this book—and to not mention it first—would be a crime. Flynn’s memoir is about his family’s struggles with alcoholism and with one another; it’s set in Boston and centers on a homeless shelter where Flynn himself worked. When I first read it, I was surprised by the number of places, emotions, and even experiences that overlapped between the author’s life and my own: addiction, mental illness, generational trauma. I was spellbound by how Flynn structured the narrative, which was inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. In that novel, the reader is aware of the titular white whale for most of the story through hearsay, with the giant beast appearing only in the final pages. In the same way, Flynn’s father casts a shadow over his own family history and life, without being present during his childhood. Only after meeting his father does Flynn begin to work on himself. When I finished it in my early, early 20s, I remember thinking, That’s the type of book I want to write—vulnerable, poetic, kind.

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The Yellow House, by Sarah M. Broom

What I love about this memoir, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2019, is its incredible sense of place. Broom’s story is submerged in one of the most lionized—and complex—cities in America: New Orleans. More specifically, she focuses on New Orleans East and the yellow shotgun house that the author’s steadfast mother, Ivory Mae, bought in 1961, and where Broom grew up as the youngest of 12 siblings. The Yellow House takes on history and structural racism while also telling small, intimate stories that show how families, like neighborhoods and cities, are evolving, living things that shift and affect their members in an endless dance. Broom’s brilliant book demonstrates that context and setting are crucial to telling a story, and will ring true for anyone who also grew up in a house that loomed large over everything that happened to their family.

[Read: How to write the book no one wants you to write]

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Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle

In this novel, the wounds of youth are carried for a lifetime. Its author is the man behind The Mountain Goats, a band I’ve adored for more than two decades. Wolf in White Van tells the story of Sean Phillips, who suffered a disfiguring injury when he was 17 and became a recluse. When we meet him, he has invented an intricate, mail-based role-playing game to allow for a modicum of human connection. But when something terrible happens to a couple of teenage players of the game, he is forced to enter the real world again. Wolf in White Van is a master class in restraint. Darnielle paints a picture of isolation and loneliness, but by not giving away the whole truth of what happened to Sean until the very end, he dares the reader to figure out the complexities of the novel in almost the same way they untangle the complexities of the game. It encouraged me to not turn away from the anger in my younger years—and to keep some of its causes unseen until the last pages of my own book.

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Heavy, by Kiese Laymon

This memoir is incredible. The writing talent on display is undeniable, and every sentence sings. “My body knew things my mouth and my mind couldn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, express,” Laymon writes early in the book. That sentence hit my heart; it was something I knew to be true, but had never been able to articulate. At the book’s center are Laymon’s relationships with his mother and with his own body. Who among us has not had difficulty with our body? With our mother? (If you haven’t, I’d love to hear your secret.) What truly inspires is not the book’s universal themes, but instead Laymon’s incredible striving. Here is a man trying to find the truth, to communicate something to his parent and find common ground or, if not that, an understanding of what their relationship has become and why. To do so, Laymon examines sex, gambling, racism in America, and himself. Digging into how he grew up becomes a way to finally say aloud what he’s always carried with him—and to hope for a better future.

[Read: The personal cost of Black success]

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Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray

In the opening pages of this raucous novel filled with unforgettable characters, Skippy, a hapless 14-year-old pupil at a fancy boys’ school, writes a mysterious message in jelly filling on the floor of a doughnut shop and drops dead. But this mystery wasn’t what drew me to the book, nor the fact that it focuses on adolescents who attend a boarding school, as I did. The core of Murray’s writing is its humor: Skippy’s experience at his school, Seabrook, is raunchy, searching, and complex, but always deeply funny. Told from numerous different perspectives, stretching across a wide variety of subjects—string theory, organized religion, folklore, poetry—Skippy Dies is a tutorial in the ability to find laughter in the bleakness of growing up.

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The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead

This 2020 Pulitzer Prize–winner is tragic and unrelenting. A report released in 2016 documented more than 50 skeletons buried on the grounds of the Dozier School for Boys, in Florida, which operated from 1900 to 2011 housing orphans, wards of the state, and children convicted of crimes. Whitehead uses that real-life horror to weave an incredibly powerful novel about the cruel, racist abuse suffered in the name of rehabilitation at the titular Nickel Academy. At the center of the story are two young boys, Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, who both end up there in the 1960s. The Nickel Boys is about how the smallest bit of bad luck can have a rippling effect throughout one’s entire life—but it’s also about how the people we love can change us in ways we might not ever be able to imagine.

[Read: What is crime in a country built on it?]

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The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

One of the biggest titles of the past decade, The Goldfinch, a kaleidoscopic achievement, covers so much ground. It’s the story of Theo Decker, whose mother is killed during a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Young Theo slips away from the explosion with a painting by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius, the titular Goldfinch. The whole book is masterful and has indelible moments in both New York City and Amsterdam, but the section that I absolutely love is set in the sandy outskirts of Las Vegas, in the novel’s middle. Here, Theo and Boris Pavlikovsky, two friends without much parental supervision, forge the bonds of young rascals; they drink, take drugs, and try to figure out what to do with Theo’s stolen, priceless painting. As someone who grew up playing violent games in the woods with real BB guns and turning old hair-spray cans into flamethrowers with my friend, I can attest that The Goldfinch artfully displays the reckless abandon that comes from a feral, unsupervised youth.

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The Collected Breece D’J Pancake: Stories, Fragments, Letters, by Breece D’J Pancake

This assemblage of Pancake’s work—especially its 12 bleak, beautiful stories about trilobites and coal country and truckers and also tenderness, in their way—is a fundamental stepping-stone in my evolution as a reader. Pancake writes about Virginia and West Virginia, places that I had never been when my father gave me my first copy. But here was writing that reflected my own experiences growing up in a low-income area in North-Central Massachusetts: people in trailers. Hunting. Rural isolation. The joys and hardships that come from living in the woods. The prose is unpolished, yet Pancake’s lyricism somehow manages to shine, whether it’s describing a pregnant farm wife or a snowplow driver with a secret. The mythos of the collection is also part of its pull. Pancake died by suicide at 26; I have grappled with suicidal ideation, and this galvanizing book convinced me that my account might also have some value.

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This month’s Fantastic Strangeling Book Club choice is so, so good. It’s The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean. I devoured this atmospherically creepy and gorgeous novel.  Well, not literally.  But after reading the book I kind of wanted to.   In fact, I loved it so much I made my own book house inspired by the cover and onlyContinue reading "It’s a good month for reading"

These days, middle-class families run ragged by their kids’ competitive-sports schedules are achingly common across America: Weekends are devoured by tournaments and practice, family dinners replaced by mandatory strength-training sessions, and vacations forever postponed. During my five years of researching and writing about youth sports for my book Take Back the Game, I heard so many variations of these stories, and the burden on burned-out teenagers is clear. Less obvious is the effect of relentless overtraining on the rest of the household. In the ever-earlier scramble to develop their kids’ athletic skills, mothers and fathers frequently find themselves giving up the integrity of the family as a whole.

In my observation, this is most common among competitive club sports, which for many kids begin during elementary school and extend through high school. For all the evidence that shows how exercise and sports benefit children, comparatively little research exists on the costs of competitive youth sports participation to the unpaid support network that enables it—specifically, the young athletes’ families. What of the marriages, siblings, and extended relatives who are pulled in or dragged along or left out when one child takes up soccer or tennis with gusto, and the parents go all in? Besides so much else that’s wrong with contemporary elite youth sports—the prohibitive cost, erosion of fun, epidemic of injuries—disrupted families should be added to the list.

[Read: The downsides of America’s hyper-competitive youth-soccer industry]

For parents, the financial costs alone are steep—even when their kids aren’t high-level athletes. According to a 2019 study conducted by the Aspen Institute think tank and Utah State University of 1,032 adults with kids who played sports at the recreational, high-school, or club level, families spend an average of $693 annually for each sport a child plays. Though the high price squeezes many low-income kids out entirely, in households earning less than $50,000, parents still pay an average of $475 annually per child per sport. And raising a highly promising child athlete can require major financial trade-offs. A Harris Poll survey on behalf of TD Ameritrade queried 1,001 adults who had at least one child playing for a club or an “elite competitive” nonschool team and found that 19 percent had taken a second job or worked overtime, or would be willing to, in order to fund their kid’s sports. In this survey, parents also reported spending an average of 12 hours each week on their child’s athletic activities. In my research, I’ve found that the biggest drain on parents’ time comes from attending sports events. One mother told me that she and her husband had eliminated what she called “meaningful family vacations” to afford her three daughters’ soccer and lacrosse expenses.

One of the few academic studies exploring how youth sports affect marriages discovered a significant impact on quality partner communication. Of the seven couples interviewed, all of whom had been married for at least 10 years, some reported that their child’s participation on an elite team had turned family life into an endless discussion about logistics. “Our conversations go something like, ‘What are you doing? Where are you going? When are you going to be here?’ You know, typical kind of coordination-type stuff,” one mother explained. “Sometimes we don’t talk. He’s at the field picking them up at 10:00 p.m. There are some weeks it feels they have practice after school five days a week, and he is either in the car or at the field,” another said about her husband.

The sports psychologist Jim Taylor, who has been counseling athletes and their families for more than 35 years, told me that pressure on parents comes up constantly in his practice. Parents clash over spending and worry about the lack of attention they devote to each other and to their other children. Family bonds can become even more frayed when a parent relocates with one child to advance their athletic prospects, leaving the rest of the family behind. This happens most in solo sports such as ski racing, figure skating, and gymnastics, Taylor said, where some parents believe that the child needs to leave home to get top coaching and elite competition.

Then there are brothers and sisters, who often suffer from what Taylor calls “neglected-sibling syndrome,” when all the family’s attention is focused on the athletic child. For most families, the cultivation of sports means less resources for other activities or children. Jordan Blazo, a sports-psychology professor at Louisiana Tech University, has studied the younger siblings of serious athletes—in his research, Division I collegiate players who had earned an athletic scholarship. Some younger children delighted in their sibling’s success and found the family focus on athletics “an agent of cohesion”; the older sibling’s distant games allowed the family to travel together to new places. Others resented having to traipse around in their elder’s shadow, bristled at being compared frequently with the family star, and felt overlooked by the parents, all of which damaged their relationship with the older sibling. “It kind of ate me up because of all the attention that she would get,” one younger sibling in the study said.

In her landmark study of 12 families with varied socioeconomic backgrounds, Annette Lareau, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, found that middle-class children who were ferried from activity to activity—including but not limited to sports—had uneasier relationships with their brothers and sisters than the kids living less structured lives. Children on the receiving end of “concerted cultivation,” as Lareau dubbed this frenzied approach to child-rearing, seemed to be more aggressive with their siblings, sometimes making casual references to “hating” a brother or sister. She speculated that this stemmed from siblings spending so much time in activities and having limited interactions with family.

[Read: How to quit intensive parenting]

Blazo—himself a former high-school soccer player and the second son in a family of five boys—reminded me that sibling relationships move through cycles, and that conflict in adolescence doesn’t lock in a lifetime of estrangement. In some households, an athletic brother or sister might be an encouraging role model, a steady playmate, a reliable confidant. But Blazo cautions mothers and fathers to consider how the child who doesn’t play sports will perceive the value their parents attach to athletics. Even the most conscientious parent will be up against a culture that exalts athletic achievement. When professional players are rewarded with riches and attention, about half a million young adults compete in college, and children are frequently nudged into sports as soon as they can walk, convincing kids that it’s okay to bail on soccer or skip the baseball tryout can be a tough sell.

In my reporting, I’ve often asked parents caught up in competitive youth sports if they’d ever considered withdrawing their kids from the circuit. Some told me they feel like they have no choice: Their child loves it, or it will help them get into a better college. Families might be strung out and split up, they seemed to be saying, but no matter. In elite sports families, individual athletic triumphs still seem to justify every household sacrifice.

At 36, I am just old enough to remember when sunscreen wasn’t a big deal. My mom, despite being among the palest people alive, does not remember bringing it on our earliest vacations, or hearing any mention of sun protection by our pediatrician. The first memories I have of sunscreen are from the day camp that my brother and I attended in the 1990s, where we spent every day on a playground in the direct Georgia sun but were prompted to slather it on only once every two weeks, when we were bused to a community pool. On those days, mom dropped an ancient bottle of Coppertone, expiration date unknown, into my backpack, where I usually left it. In 2000, I started high school, just in time for the golden age of the tanning bed.

The preponderance of babies in rashguards and bucket hats that you now see at the beach shows how much has changed, and how quickly. Skyrocketing skin-cancer rates, specifically for fair-skinned people, among whom the disease is more prevalent, have scared plenty of people into rethinking their tans, as has the realization that sun exposure causes—horror of horrors—wrinkles and other visible signs of aging. Now SPF is ubiquitous. You can find it in lotions, sprays, gels, oils, powders, and implements that look like grade-school glue sticks, as well as infused into skin-care products, lip balms, makeup, and clothing. Sun care has its own aisle at big-box stores, and beauty companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been built from the ground up by offering only products that block ultraviolet rays.

Yet if sun protection, and specifically sunscreen, has become a very big deal in a relatively short amount of time, the UV blockers Americans are slathering on have barely evolved at all. While some of the more expensive U.S. products are better than they used to be in terms of texture and how they look on skin, their active ingredients remain stubbornly unchanged. To make matters worse, we’ve brought this situation on ourselves. Consumers in Europe and Asia are not locked in, as we are, to a small and outmoded set of active ingredients. Simply put: They have better sunscreen than we do. We should have it too.

[Read: How SPF ratings can do more harm than good]

Forgive me, but in order to understand what’s going on with the sun-protection market, we must briefly discuss chemistry. Sunscreen works by preventing two of the sun’s three types of ultraviolet rays—UVA and UVB—from penetrating your skin and doing cancer-causing damage. The ingredients that counteract those rays are called filters, and for the general public, they’re divided into two categories: physical and chemical. (Don’t be fooled by “natural” marketing—the active ingredients in both groups are synthetic chemicals.) Physical—a.k.a. mineral—sunscreens block both UVA and UVB rays, and tend to leave a residue that makes even pale people look like they’re doing some additional Casper the Friendly Ghost cosplay. Chemical filters, which absorb either UVA or UVB rays, are mixed together to create sunscreens that provide full-spectrum protection; they usually feel a bit oily or greasy.

In the U.S., sunscreen is regulated as an over-the-counter drug, which means that the FDA considers all filters, physical or chemical, to be active ingredients that must be evaluated and approved individually before they can be marketed. In general, this type of regulatory regime works out pretty well for the American public: cheap, off-brand anti-inflammatories, allergy medications, or cough syrups contain active ingredients that have been tested for efficacy and safety in just this way. The same is true for sunscreens. Whether you buy yours at Dollar General or Sephora, it will contain at least one FDA-approved UV filter in a clearly marked concentration.

The government currently allows 17 filters in American sunscreens, nine of which are rarely used, because they have undesirable side effects or because cosmetic chemists find them difficult to blend into the kinds of products that people like. The eight that you will find in the products at your local drugstore still leave something to be desired. “The ingredients that we have to work with can cause some challenges in creating a really elegant formula,” Kelly Dobos, a cosmetic chemist who teaches at the University of Toledo, told me. That’s especially true when filters are used in the concentrations necessary for high SPFs, she said. Maximum protection can sometimes mean maximum chalkiness or oiliness, although a skilled formulator will try to counteract these effects with tweaks to the formula or manufacturing process.

A sunscreen that has an unpleasant texture or turns your skin a strange color might be tolerable for a one-off excursion to the beach or an afternoon in the cheap seats at a baseball game, but it wouldn’t exactly encourage thorough and repeated applications of a sunscreen, which is necessary no matter which product you use. For everyday use, which is widely recommended by dermatologists, the obstacles are even harder to clear, from a formulation standpoint: Oily products don’t play nice with makeup, while chalky products look wild on pretty much everyone, especially people with darker skin tones. Adam Friedman, a dermatologist at George Washington University, told me such concerns are a huge obstacle for his patients. “You can have the best filter in the world,” he said. “If the vehicle in which that ingredient resides is visibly unacceptable or physically unacceptable in terms of application, it doesn’t matter.”

For many people, frustration with sunscreen means they don’t wear it as much as they should. For others, it means looking beyond the country’s shores for better products. In Europe, Australia, and much of Asia, sunscreens are regulated as cosmetics or health-bolstering goods, with simpler efficacy and safety standards than those in the U.S. In those markets, several dozen active ingredients are available for use in sunscreens, including some developed in the past decade that have intriguing properties. The allure of these new technologies has drawn Americans to scour the internet for supply lines that skirt FDA notice, which often means buying sunscreen through third-party sellers on Amazon. (The booming popularity of Korean beauty products in the U.S. has only added to this fervor.) A few international sunscreen products have recently become cult favorites among U.S. beauty fiends, including one that feels like a skin-care product and is marketed as a “watery essence” by Bioré, a Japanese company known to Americans mostly for producing the little paper strips that rip the gunk out of your pores.

Bioré markets some of its products in the U.S., but its ultra-popular facial sunscreen contains bemotrizinol, a chemical filter that’s popular overseas but has not yet been approved in the U.S. The substance is on a short list of those that Dobos told me have the strongest case for FDA approval—it’s widely used around the world and very effective at absorbing UV rays. Another ingredient at the top of her list is bisoctrizole, a favorite in Europe, which she said degrades more slowly in sunlight, is less readily absorbed by the wearer’s skin, and helps stabilize other UV filters when mixed with them, potentially improving their efficacy. Wearers don’t need to reapply it as often in order to remain protected, and they may not worry as much about the putative risks of carrying chemical filters in their bloodstream. (None of the experts I spoke with said there is any demonstrated danger from using standard products as directed. You probably shouldn’t eat your sunscreen, though.)

Dobos emphasized to me that she thinks the FDA’s strict regulation of sunscreen products is generally beneficial to the American public, but that the agency’s slow progress on new ingredients doesn’t match the urgency of skin cancer’s threat to public health. In formal statements and position papers, doctors and cancer-prevention advocates express considerable interest in bringing new sunscreen ingredients to the American market, but not a lot of optimism that any will be available soon. The FDA hasn’t added a new active ingredient to its sunscreen monograph—the document that details what is legally allowed in products marketed in the U.S.—in decades. The process for doing this is so onerous that L’Oreal, a French company, chose to go through a separate authorization process to get one of its sunscreen ingredients onto the consumer market in 2006—which meant that only a few specific beauty products containing that ingredient could be marketed legally.

In 2014, Congress passed a law attempting to speed access to sunscreen ingredients that have been in wide use in other countries for years, but it hasn’t really worked. “The FDA was supposed to be fast-tracking these ingredients for approval, because we have the safety data and safe history of usage from the European Union,” Dobos said. “But it seems to continually be stalled.” According to Courtney Rhodes, a spokesperson for the FDA, manufacturers have submitted eight new active ingredients for consideration. The agency has asked them to provide additional data in support of those applications, but none of them has yet satisfied the agency’s requirements.

“In the medical community, there is a significant frustration about the lack of availability of some of the sunscreen active ingredients,” Henry Lim, a dermatologist at Henry Ford Health, in Michigan, told me. The more filters are available to formulators, the more they can be mixed and matched in new ways, which stands to improve not just the efficacy of the final product, but how it feels and looks on your skin, and how easy it is to apply. On a very real level, making sunscreen less onerous to use can make it more effective. “The best sunscreen is going to be the one you’re going to use often and according to the directions,” Dobos said. Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in the United States, and by one estimate, one in five Americans will develop it in their lifetime.

For many dermatologists, these lengthy regulatory battles and widespread issues with regular usage also underline a common recommendation that tends to go unheard by patients: Sunscreen is great, and sunscreen from Europe, Australia, and Asia may be better, but even the best, most cutting-edge SPF lotion is just one part of keeping your skin healthy. Floppy hats, big beach umbrellas, or loose, high-coverage clothing might not be your ideal beach look while you’re young, but if you can mostly cover up and stick to the shade, your elderly self will thank you.