A.N

Because, like I suspect a great many people, I couldn’t get to sleep tonight.

1. Well, I certainly missed that turn of events, didn’t I? To be fair to myself, pretty much everyone missed it — apparently even Trump’s pollsters thought he was going down in defeat last night — but I’m not responsible for other people, I’m responsible for me, and, well: Missed that one totally. I never thought Trump would win the election. I was wrong. He won it. My being wrong is on me.

Would he have won it with a different opponent? Would he have won it if the Supreme Court hadn’t gutted the Voters Right Act? Would he have won it if a significant number of people hadn’t voted for third party candidates? Or if James Comey hasn’t done his little email stunt in the last couple of weeks? These are interesting questions that don’t change the fact that in this reality, Donald Trump is the president-elect. The woulda, shoulda, coulda of things is irrelevant to that.

2. With that said, it is of note that the polling for this election cycle was essentially disastrously wrong, and — again to be fair — it was pretty much only Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight who warned people that if it was wrong, that the predictions for the race would fail in basically the manner that they did. Silver and his site predicted the outcome incorrectly just like everyone else, but he gets credit for saying “if I’m wrong, this is how that’s going to work” and as far as I can see pretty much nailing that. So, yay, Nate Silver? I would have rather it gone the other way and we all had a post-election laugh at his over-cautiousness. But it didn’t, and once again Silver is the smartest dude in the room, for what it’s worth.

Be that as it may, there is clearly something systematically wrong with how polling is being done. If poll after poll had Clinton leading in states she went on to lose, and often leading by more than a margin of error, then something’s going on. I don’t mean in a conspiratorial, “the polls are being manipulated, man!” sort of way. Again, it’s something systematic in how the polls are conducted and who they are reaching (and probably also something to do with this particular election cycle in itself). How does that get fixed? I’m sure someone will tell us. Maybe Nate Silver.

Much of my confidence about this year’s election was rooted in the polling, which had been reasonably accurate for the last few election cycles (both presidential and congressional), and like I said, while I own my own mis-estimation and being wrong, it’s also a fact that I was wrong along with a whole lot of people, including people for whom polling is their actual job. It’s a discomfiting place to be.

3. It will be no surprise to anyone I’m unhappy with the result of this election. Donald Trump was manifestly the worst presidential candidate in living memory, an ignorant, sex-assaulting vindictive bigot, enamored of strongmen and contemptuous of the law, consorting with white nationalists and hucksters — and now he’s president-elect, which is appalling and very sad for the nation. I don’t see much good coming out of this, either in the immediate or long-term, not in the least because if he does any of the things he promises to do, his impact will be ruinous to the nation. Add to the fact that he’s the GOP candidate, and the GOP now will have the White House, Congress and will appoint the next Supreme Court justice, and, well. There aren’t any grownups in the GOP anymore, and we’re going to find out what that means for all of us.

Here are some of the things it could mean: A conservative Supreme Court for decades, backtracking on climate change, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, curtailment of free speech, loss of medical insurance to millions, tax policy that advantages the wealthy and adds trillions to the national debt, punitive racial policies, the return of torture as a part of the military toolbox, and a president who uses the apparatus of the US to go after his personal enemies. And these are only the things Trump has said he’s ready to do — we don’t know what else he will do when he’s literally the most powerful man on the planet, with a compliant legislature and judiciary.

The GOP conceit is that somehow they will be able to control Trump, which is a theory that’s worked so well up to now. More realistically, I think the best that can be hoped for is that Trump simply becomes apathetic and bored and leaves actual governance to others, i.e., the Dubya maneuver. This didn’t work particularly well then, but it might be marginally better than the alternative. But no matter what, I don’t have much optimism for the next four years.

4. I’m a well-off straight white man, which means of all the segments of the population, the Trump years will likely punish me the least — I may have to adjust my investments so I don’t lose tons of money when the stock market tumbles (or just be willing to ride it out, just like in 2008), but otherwise, in the short-term at least, I’m likely to be fine. I can’t say the same for my friends and loved ones who are women or minorities or LGTBQ or who struggle financially to make ends meet, or some combination of all of those. I wish I could say to them that it’ll be fine and that they’ll be able to ride out the next four (or, God forbid, eight) years, but I can’t. Trump, himself racist and sexist, brought a bunch of racists and sexists and homophobes to the dance, and now he’s obliged to dance with them. Things could get pretty ugly for everyone who isn’t a well-off straight white man. Things are likely to get ugly.

A lot of my friends are scared of Trump’s America, in other words, and they should be. As Maya Angelou once said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Donald Trump has shown us over and over again who he is; the worst of his supporters — the ones who will now feel like they have free rein to indulge their various bigotries — have shown us who they are, too. And while not every Trump voter is among the worst of people, they share the responsibility of having made anyone who isn’t straight, and white, and male, and well-off, less secure, less safe, and more frightened. That’s what they bought for us when they pulled the lever for Trump.

5. And we have to face up to fact that it was white people who brought Trump to us — Trump got the majority of white men and white women who voted. We can parse out why that was (and we can talk about how the minority vote was suppressed), but at the end of the day, the fact remains: Trump will be in power because white people wanted him there.

If Trump’s administration indulges in the racism, sexism and religious and other bigotries that Trump and his people have already promised to engage in, we can assume it’s because his voters are just fine with that racism, sexism and religious and other bigotries — even if they claim to have voted for him for other reasons entirely. After all, Trump didn’t hide these things about himself, or try to sneak these plans in by a side door. They were in full view this entire time. If you vote for a bigot who has bigoted plans, you need to be aware of what that says about you, and your complicity in those plans.

I voted against Trump — voted against him twice, in fact, since I also voted against him in the primary — and I voted against him in no small part because I found his bigotry shameful, and still do. I am proud that he did not get my vote; I’m as proud of that vote as any I’ve offered up. And as an American, I have no plans to take his bigotry lying down. I hope you won’t, either.

6. That said, it might be a little much to ask people to stand and fight today. It was a long night, and a depressing night, for a lot of us. Take a day. Or two. Or a week. Or however much the time you need for yourself to get your head around this thing.

But at the end of that time, I hope you come back to us. Looking at the numbers as they stand right now, Trump won by just about 300,000 votes Clinton got at least 100,000 more votes than Trump out of about 120 million individual votes cast. There’s a lot of us who will stand with you, when you’re ready to stand again with us. There’s work to be done over the next four years and beyond. We need to get to it.

November is Prematurity Awareness Month, and it’s also Madeline’s birthday month. I am missing my oldest girl so much. We should be preparing for a ninth birthday party and a house full of third graders. When November rolls around, I have a lot of flashbacks to our time in the NICU with Maddie. I’m reposting a piece I wrote two years ago about what it’s like to be a Preemie Parent. If you know a Preemie Parent, reach out to them today. Let them know you’re thinking about them, and their child. No matter how old their preemie may be, they’ll never lose that lingering fear, never forget the smell of the NICU soap, never forget how small or sick their baby once was.

Madeline, four days after she was born. She’d just had her forehead IV removed, and was on a ventilator, IVs, umbilical cath, pulse ox, chest tubes, and was extremely swollen from the fluids being pumped into her body.

The first time I was told my child was going to die, I was about seven weeks pregnant. There was no way of knowing it then, but those words started me on my path to becoming a Preemie Parent.

The next time I was told my child was going to die, I was nineteen weeks pregnant. My water had just broken, and my doctor gave my baby almost no chance for survival. A few weeks later, that doctor reminded me that termination was an option. Mike and I told her no.

When I was admitted to the hospital on bed rest, the doctors didn’t say my baby was going to die, but they never said she was going to live. The statistics were against her, you see. Babies who PPROM at 19 weeks rarely survive, and those who do have a host of problems. But I’d beaten the odds by not immediately going into labor, and I was certain my baby would beat the odds, too. The doctors told us they’d likely take the baby at 30 weeks gestation, so that was our goal.

I read everything I could about NICUs and premature babies. Being the parent of a premature baby is something no one expects. Your typical expectant parent doesn’t stock up on preemie clothes and diapers, or research medical terms and nutritional techniques. Even though I had some time to educate myself, I was completely unprepared for NICU life – especially Madeline’s introduction to it.

The doctors decided to give me an emergency c-section in my 28th week of pregnancy because I was passing blood clots. They feared I was having a placental abruption, and delivered Madeline over eleven weeks early. Because my water had broken ten weeks before that, Madeline’s lungs were developmentally on par with a 24-25 week baby. It was dire. They transferred her to another hospital with a better NICU. They told me she was going to die.

She made it through the night, but every time my phone rang the next day it was someone telling me she was going to die. Again. For her first two weeks in the NICU, she almost died every day. She was the sickest baby in the unit by far, with two nurses constantly dedicated to her care.

We lived minute to minute. I planned her funeral. I learned metric measurements. I scrubbed my hands under scalding water every time I wanted to see her. I filled a notebook with numbers and abbreviations (SAT, VENT, TEMP). I wondered what color her eyes were. I was afraid she’d die before I could hold her. I memorized every single medication and dosage schedule.  I watched her eyelashes grow in. I asked questions, so many questions. I learned when to use my voice and how to be an advocate for my child.

This is the typical life of a preemie parent in the NICU. You make sure you’re there for rounds. You ask when tests are going to be run, and you learn how to read a head scan or lung x-ray. You ask about diuretics. You love the nurses so much. You pump and hope the tiny bit of milk you eek out can help you baby. You live for the moments you get to do normal things like change a diaper or give a bath. You know the NICU is a roller coaster so you’re constantly waiting for something to go wrong. Holding your child is a luxury. You often feel like you need permission to interact with your baby.

Madeline was in the NICU for ten weeks, and we saw a lot. Babies came through with conditions I’d only seen on the Discovery Channel. Babies had medical emergencies and everyone would be kicked out of the unit. Sometimes it was my baby with the emergency.

Sometimes babies died, and I was reminded how close we’d come, and how far we’d come.

Prematurity doesn’t go away after NICU discharge. It follows you to pediatrician appointments and clinic visits. It’s on your insurance forms, and sometimes on school paperwork. It impacts your child’s life for the rest of their life, even indirectly. It also impacts your other children; they might have been full-term but you realize how fragile life is. You’ll never look at anything the same after you’ve held your tiny baby in your hand.

Next week is the eight year anniversary of the day I became a Preemie Parent. Even though my Madeline is gone, her premature birth is still a driving force in my life. She was born during Prematurity Awareness Month, eleven weeks too soon. We got seventeen wonderful months with her, but in the end, prematurity was a cause of her death. In the United States, over half a million babies are born too soon – that’s one in every nine births. Way too many. This has to be stopped.

Every year on Madeline’s birthday I hope there will be a medical breakthrough that helps end prematurity. It’s too late for my Maddie, but it isn’t too late for Annabel and James. I never want them to know what it’s like to be a Preemie Parent. I never want them to hear the words, “Your child is going to die.”

Madeline, four days before she got sick.

---

© copyright Heather Spohr 2016 | All rights reserved.

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

These delicious breaded cauliflower florets are baked in the oven with a parmesan-crumb crust, they remind me of my Moms fried cauliflower I used to love as a kid – without all the frying!

Great for kids or adults. I would serve them as a side dish, or double the portion for a meatless main with a big salad on the side.

(more…)

This isn’t your regular meatball, it’s HUGE, baked in the oven similar to how you would make a meatloaf, then topped with marinara and melted cheese – I’m OBSESSED!

This creation is a result of asking my husband what he wants for dinner. Tommy doesn’t care about eating light, so naturally he comes up with some decadent ideas, and because I love a challenge I had to make it work – the results, he LOVED it!

(more…)

I saw this on Buzzfeed recently, and I quickly filed it away with other stuff that cheers me up: a Japanese dog owner named Semba (@myouonnin) makes hilarious cardboard-cutout costumes for her cute (and very patient) pup, Chihuahua-mametaro and posts pictures (and videos) on her Twitter feed. I am a) happy this exists and b) happy I’ve saved all those Amazon Prime boxes. Check out more at Buzzfeed and on Semba’s Twitter.

 

---

Share This: Twitter | Facebook | Don't forget that you can follow Dog Milk on Twitter and Facebook.

---

© 2016 Dog Milk | Posted by Katherine in Other | Permalink | 1 comment

A reader writes:

I have uterus didelphys—a.k.a. having two uteri, two cervixes, and two vaginas. (On top of that I have a hormonal imbalance, which one doctor said was PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome]—I had a trans-vaginal ultrasound done and my ovaries are riddled with cysts—but a second doctor said it’s not PCOS.) Each of my uteri is smaller than a normal-sized one. But my menstrual cycle is like clockwork, and there are no other downsides besides high-risk pregnancy.

The doctor told me that the organs of the female reproductive system are duplicated at one point during development, but eventually the organs merge and become one. For mine to have not merged is like a mutation! I’ve thought of it like the X-Men. It’s pretty cool, IMO, because I can break the ice by telling people I have two vaginas.

Read On »

Cat lovers, this is for you:

“Ever find yourself driving behind someone with one of those “Baby On Board” stickers on their car, thinking how nice it would be if you had a way to communicate a something equally impertinent back to them? Well, now you can! No baby in the car, but you do have a cat back at home.”

Kodak has unveiled Ektra, a smart phone aimed at photographers. It runs on Android and features a 21 megapixel fast focus camera with a f2.0 aperture. The camera also boasts DSLR functionality and can capture video in 4K.

Drool.

The debate made me feel panicky and furious. And so we registered I’m With Nasty.

We made Nasty Woman T-shirts,

and Nasty Hats,

and Such a Nasty Woman pins,

and Make America Nasty pins (Michelle’s idea, because she’s a genius).

50% of profits go to the Hillary for America campaign. We’re paying rush fees to get them to you as soon as we can. Let’s fight this man who thinks no one respects women… more than him.

America, I’m with Nasty.

The post Nasty Woman T-Shirts appeared first on Mighty Girl.

SNL’s ongoing “Black Jeopardy” series has been, in part, about divisions. In each edition, black American contestants answer Kenan Thompson’s clues with in-jokes, slang, and their shared opinions while an outsider—say, Elizabeth Banks as the living incarnation of Becky, Louis C.K. as a BYU African American Studies professor, or Drake as a black Canadian—just show their cluelessness.

When Tom Hanks showed up in a “Make America Great Again” hat and bald-eagle shirt to play the contestant “Doug” this weekend, it seemed like the set-up for the ugliest culture clash yet. The 2016 election has been a reminder of the country’s profound racial fault lines, and SNL hasn’t exactly been forgiving toward the Republican nominee on that front: Its version of Trump hasn’t been able to tell black people apart, and it aired a mock ad painting his supporters as white supremacists—which, inarguably, some of them really are.

But this time the Black Jeopardy contestants came to be pleasantly surprised as Doug answered the questions correctly. SNL’s viewers might have felt a similar sense of amazement as they realized that this particular sketch didn’t quite come at the expense of Trump’s supporters. Smartly and hilariously, it suggested an idea that’s novel in 2016: Maybe America isn’t as helplessly divided as it seems.

Part of the common ground is economics—many white Trump supporters are as familiar with financial desperation as many black Americans are. Thompson’s host Darnell Hayes asks Doug whether he’s sure he wants to play black Jeopardy; Doug says he’s just hoping to win some money, so “get ’er done.” When lottery scratcher tickets get mentioned, Doug chimes in, “I play that every week.” On a question of what to do when your brakes are busted, Doug correctly answers, “You better go to that dude in my neighborhood who’ll fix anything for 40 dollars” (Hayes: “You know Cecil?!” “Yeah, but my Cecil’s name is Jimmy”).

But the sketch goes further, pointing out that social conditions shape worldview and culture. Everyone on stage distrusts the idea of giving their thumbprint to an iPhone. Everyone on stage agrees that elections are decided by the elite (the Illumanti?) before the votes are cast. Doug’s lifestyle even means he’s come to love Tyler Perry movies: “I bought a box set at Walmart. And if I can laugh and pray in 90 minutes, that’s money well spent.”

Hanks and Thompson’s performances help nail the sketch’s humor and strange poignance. The gravelly Doug seems matter-of-fact as he battles his nervousness, stumbling into the occasional questionable remark about “you people.” The host Hayes, meanwhile, goes from dismissal to total delight. At one point, he comes over to shake Doug’s hand; Doug recoils, scared Hayes has been offended, but then they awkwardly embrace.

A vision of healing? Not quite. The final Jeopardy question category is “Lives That Matter.” Everyone freezes, knowing that Doug’s answer—which we don’t see—might not be so agreeable as his previous ones. “Well it was good while it lasted, Doug,” Hayes says. One implication is race isn’t just an illusory divide. Another is both hopeful and a bit depressing: People casting opposing ballots in November might not realize just how much they have in common.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m having fun exploring the new Trader Joe’s in New Orleans. I asked everyone on Instagram to share their favorite products with me so I could sample the best the store had to offer and one item that was suggested multiple times was their frozen seafood paella. While the paella wasn’t bad, I was a little underwhelmed, and after glancing at the ingredient list I knew I could make something similar at home. And that’s how this super easy Seafood Rice Skillet was born.

Why is mine a “skillet” and not a paella? Well, for multiple reasons, but the main reasons being that A) I did not use saffron ($$$), B) I used long grain rice, and C) I made it in a skillet and not a paella pan. I like to change recipes to work for me and these changes were made to fit my budget, ingredient availability, and cooking style. But guess what? This Seafood Rice Skillet is still amaze-balls. Not a term I normally use, but totally fitting here.

I did end up using the frozen seafood mix from Trader Joe’s (shrimp, scallops, and calamari), but if you can’t find something similar near you, you can totally use just shrimp alone. If you can find a seafood broth, or maybe a little clam juice, you can sub some of that in for part of the chicken broth and have this be even more seafood-y. And of course, if you have short grain rice, you can use that in place of the long grain, but make sure to adjust the broth to rice ratio to match the directions on the package.

Alright, ready to see this super easy and impressive skillet meal??

Seafood Rice Skillet

Step by Step Photos

Begin by dicing one onion and mincing two cloves of garlic. Add the onion and garlic to a large deep skillet along with 2 Tbsp olive oil. Sauté the onion and garlic until the onion are soft and transparent.

While the onion and garlic are sautéing, dice a red bell pepper. Add the bell pepper to the skillet and continue to sauté for 1-2 minutes more.

Add 2 cups uncooked long grain white rice, 1/2 Tbsp turmeric, 1 tsp smoked paprika, and 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper.

Stir until everything is well coated in spices.

Add 3 cups chicken broth to the skillet, place a lid on top, and turn the heat up to high. Let the skillet come to a boil. Once it reaches a boil, turn the heat down to low and let simmer on low for 15 minutes.

This is the seafood blend that I used. It’s a mix of shrimp, scallops, and calamari. I used half of this bag, or 1/2 lb. If you can’t find something similar to this, you can use just shrimp.

After simmering on low for 15 minutes, most of the broth should be absorbed by the rice. Add 1/2 lb. of the frozen seafood mix and 1 cup frozen peas. Seafood cooks very quickly, even from frozen, so you don’t want to add it before the rice is cooked.  Over cooking seafood makes it very tough.

Fold the seafood and peas into the cooked rice, place the lid back on top of the skillet, and let it cook over low heat for another 5-10 minutes, or until the shrimp have turned pink and opaque. You may need to stir once half way through to check the doneness of the shrimp buried in the rice. 

One the seafood is cooked through, top the Seafood Rice Skillet with chopped parsley and lemon wedges.

Squeezing fresh lemon over the top of your bowl really gives this dish a nice fresh POP, so don’t skip it! :)

The post Seafood Rice Skillet appeared first on Budget Bytes.

Today I didn’t accomplish much because tv exists and I felt shitty about it but then I thought that maybe today I managed to forget something horribly scarring  forever.  I don’t know what it was but I don’t want to … Continue reading →

Yuni Kim Lang‘s hair piece made me look. Beautifully absurd.

Big thanks to Postable for sponsoring my blog and RSS feed this week.

Postable prints, addresses and mails all of your holiday cards for you. You can type your messages on the website and they take care of the rest. The card collection is truly stellar with amazing designers like Rifle Paper Co. and it’s all 100% recycled.

It’s especially great for company holiday cards and they even have a free address book that collects all of the addresses for you. Full end-to-end snail mail service.

Go to postable.com and receive 15% off your cards with code SWISSMISS until 12/31

(Interested in sponsoring a week of my RSS feed, learn more here.)

I love when someone tries to redesign an object in an unconventional way, in this case, tweezers. The unique circular shape of these tweezers by Clemens Auer is beautiful.

Photo by Rebecca Woolf.

Fable asked for rainbow hair for her birthday, and Rebecca made it go. Gorgeous.

The post Tot of Gold appeared first on Mighty Girl.

At this point there is no doubt that Donald Trump is the single worst major party presidential candidate in living memory, almost certainly the worst since the Civil War, and arguably the worst in the history of this nation. He is boastful and ignorant and petty, disdainful of the Constitution, a racist and a sexist, the enabler of the worst elements of society, either the willing tool of, or the useful idiot for, Vladimir Putin, an admirer of despots, an insecure braggart, a sexual assaulter, a man who refuses to honor contracts, and a bore.

He is, in sum, just about the biggest asshole in all of the United States of America. He’s lucky that Syrian dictator Bashar Hafez al-Assad is out there keeping him from taking the global title, not that he wouldn’t try for that, too, should he become president. It’s appalling that he is the standard bearer for one of the two major political parties in the United States. It’s appalling that he is a candidate for the presidency at all.

But note well: Donald Trump is not a black swan, an unforeseen event erupting upon an unsuspecting Republican Party. He is the end result of conscious and deliberate choices by the GOP, going back decades, to demonize its opponents, to polarize and obstruct, to pursue policies that enfeeble the political weal and to yoke the bigot and the ignorant to their wagon and to drive them by dangling carrots that they only ever intended to feed to the rich. Trump’s road to the candidacy was laid down and paved by the Southern Strategy, by Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove, by Fox News and the Tea Party, and by the smirking cynicism of three generations of GOP operatives, who have been fracking the white middle and working classes for years, crushing their fortunes with their social and economic policies, never imagining it would cause an earthquake.

Well, surprise! Here’s Donald Trump. He is the actual and physical embodiment of every single thing the GOP has trained its base to want and to be over the last forty years — ignorant, bigoted and money-grubbing, disdainful of facts and frightened of everything because of it, an angry drunk buzzed off of wood-grain patriotism, threatening brown people and leering at women. He was planned. He was intended. He was expected. He was wanted.

But not, I think, in the exact form of Donald Trump. The GOP were busily genetically engineering the perfect host for their message, someone smooth and telegenic and possibly just ethnic enough to make people hesitant to point out the latent but real racism inherent in its social policies, while making the GOP’s white base feel like they were making a progressive choice, and with that person installed, further pursuing its agenda of slouching toward oligarchy, with just enough anti-abortion and pro-gun glitter tossed into the sky to distract the religious and the paranoid. Someone the GOP made. Someone they could control.

But they don’t control Trump, which they are currently learning to their great misery. And the reason the GOP doesn’t control Trump is that they no longer control their base. The GOP trained their base election cycle after election cycle to be disdainful of government and to mistrust authority, which ultimately is an odd thing for a political party whose very rationale for existence is rooted in the concept of governmental authority to do. The GOP created a monster, but the monster isn’t Trump. The monster is the GOP’s base. Trump is the guy who stole their monster from them, for his own purposes.

And this is why the GOP deserves the chaos that’s happening to it now, with its appalling and parasitic standard bearer, who will never be president, driving his GOP host body toward the cliff. If it accepts the parasite, it will be driven off the cliff. If it resists, the parasite Trump will rip himself from it, leaving bloody marks as it does so, and then shove the dazed and wounded GOP from the precipice. That there is a fall in the GOP’s future is inevitable; all that is left is which plunge to take.

I feel sorry for many of my individual friends who are Republicans and/or conservatives, who have to deal with the damage Trump is doing to their party and to their movement, even if I belong to neither. But I don’t feel sorry for the GOP at all. It deserves Trump. It fostered an environment of ignorance and fear and bigotry, assumed it could control the mob those elements created, and was utterly stunned when a huckster from outside claimed the mob as his own and forced the party along for the ride. It was hubris, plain and simple, and Trump is the GOP’s vulgar, orange nemesis.

Trump will do the GOP long and lasting damage, and moreover, Trump doesn’t care that he will do the GOP long and lasting damage. Trump was never about being a Republican; he was just looking to expand his brand. As it turns out, like apparently so many things Trump does, he’s done an awful job of it — the name Trump, formerly merely associated with garish ostentation and bankruptcy, is now synonymous with white nationalism, sexual battery and failure — but the point is on November 9th Trump is going to move on and leave the wreckage of the GOP in his wake, off to his next thing (everyone assumes “Trump TV,” in which Trump combines with Breitbart to make white pride propaganda for the kind of millennial racist who thinks a Pepe the Frog Twitter icon is the height of wit — and I hope he does, because the Trump touch will drive that enterprise into the ground, and little would warm my heart more than a bankrupt Breitbart).

Trump is the party guest who sets fire to your house, gropes your spouse and drives over your neighbor’s cat when he leaves; the GOP is left to deal with the police and the angry neighbors. It’s almost piteous, except when you scrub back to five hours earlier to hear the GOP say “What, Trump wants to come to the party? Well, he’s an asshole who drove Fred Jones’ car into the pool the other weekend, but he’s always good for a laugh, isn’t he? Surely it will be fine,” and then tells him to bring his bad boy self right on over.

There is no good way for the GOP or its members to extricate itself from this mess. Trump has doomed them for this election cycle. But there is a moral way, and they should take it. When a grifter and a con man has suckered you into a shitshow, you have two options: bail out early and admit you got shit all over yourself, or stick with the con and affirmatively choose to drown in the shit. No GOP politician should ever have endorsed him; the moral hazard he presented was obvious and clear and became clearer the further he went along. But if they were foolish enough to have endorsed him, it’s not too late to bail out. He’s going to lose either way and drag the GOP down with him; these politicians might as well come out of it with their souls, besmirched but still their own.

And obviously to me, no one with sense should cast a vote for Trump. He’s not just a candidate, he is an active repudiation of what we should expect from the United States and those who lead it. A candidate who can’t open his mouth without a lie falling out — a lie that everyone including him knows is a lie — doesn’t deserve to be president. A candidate who threatens millions because of their religion does not deserve to be president. A candidate who promises to extralegally throw his political opponent into jail does not deserve to be president. A candidate who fosters white nationalism, racism and anti-semitism does not deserve to be president. A candidate who brags about sexual assault and then tries to dismiss it as mere talk does not deserve to be president.

These are not merely Democratic or Republican issues. These are American issues, human issues and moral issues. You can’t vote for Donald Trump and say you don’t know what you’re voting for. You’re voting for hate, and chaos, and the deluge. Anything else that you think you get from voting for him will be washed away in the flood.

Trump is the single worst major party presidential candidate in living memory, but he’s there because the GOP spent decades making him possible, and its base, trained for decades to look for someone like him, made him its standard bearer. He needs to lose and the GOP needs to be punished for him. Conservatism and classical Republican ideas won’t go away, nor should they. But if the GOP can’t break itself from its addiction to the bigoted and the ignorant, then it certainly deserves to die. It’s brought the country to the edge. Shame is only the beginning of what it should feel for it.

Update, 3:00pm 10/12/16: I’ve made my official presidential endorsement. It’s, uh, not for Donald Trump.

This video demonstrates how to use an elastic string anchored at the horizon of a canvas to sketch a drawing with two point perspective. Brilliant!

Get out of here.

Did you see this? Apparently it “blew up Twitter,” but I didn’t see it on there so I’m gonna share it with you here, too. In a recent interview with Bustle about how it’s fucked up that Tim Burton’s new movie is all white except for the bad guy who is black, Tim Burton said this:

“Nowadays, people are talking about it more,” he says regarding film diversity. But “things either call for things, or they don’t. I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct. Like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black. I used to get more offended by that than just… I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies.”

Huh. Fuck this guy, seems like he sucks.

---

Tim Burton Seems Bad was originally published in The Hairpin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

 

Read the responses to this story on Medium.

The candidate: Donald Trump

The gaffe: Speaking about veterans’ issues Monday morning, Trump was discussing suicides among ex-servicemembers. “When people come back from war and combat and they see maybe what a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over, and you’re strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can’t handle it,” he said, implying that PTSD victims were weak.

The defense: Trump, who likes to project strength in all circumstances, looks to have been trying to flatter his audience. It didn’t appear Trump was trying to ridicule victims; it was just a thoughtless comment.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): Let us count the ways this remark is bad. First, it blames those suffering for PTSD, suggesting they are not strong. Second, it’s scientifically bankrupt: No doctor would agree that PTSD is a sign of weakness. Third, it spotlights the fact that Trump avoided facing combat to test his own “strength,” obtaining draft deferments. Fourth, it fits in a string of comments ridiculing veterans, starting with saying he didn’t like John McCain because he was captured. Fourth, it’s another example of Trump’s insensitivity about mental illness. (“If I looked like Rosie [O’Donnell], I’d struggle with depression too,” he once said.)

The lesson: A politician who didn’t fight in battle should not question the mental strength of those who won their Purple Hearts the hard way.

If you’re going apple picking and need a fun, healthy treat – this is it! I’m in love with these apple treats, great for the kids or even adults. Drizzled with anything that strikes your fancy, here I did a variation with PB and chocolate as well as some with just chocolate. Caramel would also be great to give you a caramel apple combination!

(more…)

The AC is finally off and you discover that sadly, moths have been feasting on your sweaters all summer. Trees are starting to show off their golden hues and moms are covering up their little ones before they go out to play.

In this week’s illustration, fall hits Fort Reno, the highest point in Washington DC. Originally built in 1861, this Tenleytown monument was once the city’s largest and strongest defense. Later, it harbored freed slaves and eventually became a water reservoir. In more recent years it has served as a backdrop for summer concerts, and features one of the city’s greatest urban legends: back in 2000, Fugazi performed there amid an imminent thunderstorm – then, right at the climactic point, drums paused, lightning lit the sky and roared close behind them. To the public’s delight, nature repeated this exact performance the following year.

Buy this print.

—

*Postcards from Washington DC is a personal challenge to produce a weekly illustration that highlights life in the capital.

I often feel like I have Oscar the Truth Toad sitting on my head. Painting by Travis Louie.

Hi! Hi hi hi.

How are you? I am fine. Everything is fine. Very very busy with non-blog work and then we had to travel to New York for a family wedding on Saturday and oh, absolutely, the whole thing started out as a planned day trip and ended up being a complete and utter clusterfuck as per my usual travel exploits, and while I suppose it would make for a classic Idiots Doing Idiot things story, the real reason things unraveled on us as badly as they did obviously kills the potential/appropriateness of humor. Long story short: Getting out of Manhattan and onto the very last NJ Transit train of the night was no easy feat on Saturday, and involved several unnecessary and/or aborted Uber rides, a lost credit card, a frantic sprint on and off the subway and a lot of REALLY oblivious, slow-moving Mets fans. 

None of it was very fun, but we made it home and the wedding was just lovely.

(We also finally took some pictures of us together!)

Another reason for the relative silence here on the blog is that FINALLY, in the year of our Lord 2016, I am redesigning the fucking thing. I promise to keep the overall change fairly minimal, but it's obviously time to make the site responsive/mobile friendly and freshen up the layout and fonts. My four-year-old self will still be here to scream at you, just from the top of the site so I can stop wasting

so much

damn space

over

there.

<--------------

Currently working on some ad zone kinks and settling on final fonts (VOTE NOW SERIF OR SANS SERIF IN COMMENTS THIS IS MIGHTILY IMPORTANT), but other than that, you can go ahead and Expect That Shit at some point very soon.

In the meantime, please to enjoy some photos about the True Cost of a Forever Home from a very patient rescue cat's perspective: 

HALP

These books shelves hide a secret room.

Kids who are sentenced by college-football-loving judges who are disappointed after unexpected team losses are finding themselves behind bars for longer than kids who are sentenced after wins or predicted losses.

That’s the gist of a new working paper by a pair of economists at Louisiana State University. It sounds almost comical, like an Onion headline, at first glance: “Judge Sentences Teen to Two Years After Louisiana Tigers Fall to Wisconsin Badgers.” But, insists Naci Mocan, an economics professor at LSU and a co-author (with a fellow professor, Ozkan Eren) of “Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles,” it’s not far off.

In looking at decisions handed down by judges in Louisiana’s juvenile courts between 1996 and 2012, the pair found that when LSU lost football games it was expected to win, judges—specifically those who had earned their bachelor’s degrees from the school—issued harsher sentences in the week following the loss. When the team was ranked in the top 10 before the losing game, kids wound up behind bars for about two months longer, on average. When the team was not as highly ranked, it was a little more than a month. The pair found that the harsher sentences disproportionately affected black defendants.

Judges are supposed to operate without bias and without letting their emotions influence how they make decisions. They are also human. And the idea that emotions in one realm shape decisions in another is not new. The stock market does better when the sun is shining, for instance. But the stakes, particularly for young people of color, are high.

The authors looked specifically at first-time offenders between the ages of 10 and 17 who were convicted of a single statute offense, like drug use or robbery, to “circumvent any potential confounding effects.” They excluded first- and second-degree murder and aggravated rape because those cases require mandatory sentences in Louisiana, and ultimately looked at about 8,200 records involving 207 judges.

Mocan and Eren found that the behavior of the children in court wasn’t a factor in sentencing. Economic background didn’t seem to play a role either. Cases are randomly assigned by a computer in Louisiana juvenile court, so judge selection wasn’t an issue. And a placebo test showed that non-LSU games didn’t have an impact.

The research is obviously limited in scope, and the authors looked at a state where football culture runs deep. It’s unclear whether judges in, say, California, would hand down longer sentences after a University of Southern California loss. Jeffrey Butts, the director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the study seemed like “academic clickbait.” What are judges supposed to do, he asked rhetorically, not handle cases in the week following each unexpected loss?

Butts is open to good data analysis, he said, and appreciates transparency, but he has concerns about what he sees as a movement toward using large data sets for things like predictive policing, where police use math and data analysis to pinpoint potential criminal activity. That may be acceptable as long as it’s one tool in many, he said, but data shouldn’t drive the entire justice system.

Where some might argue relying on data would eliminate human bias, Butts worries it would reinforce and hide bias. Consider, he said, a 16-year-old drug user who lives in a neighborhood where everyone has a car and a rec room or a basement where neighborhood kids gather to smoke or shoot up or whatever. Those kids are going from private space to private space, so the chances of being seen by a cop and arrested are low. Now consider a 16-year-old drug user who lives in a two-room apartment where no one has cars. He and his friends wind up taking a bus or walking to a local park or alleyway, where the chances of being arrested are high. That second kid might get picked up more often, which might mean increasingly tough sentences. A human might be more aware of the context in which the kids are committing the crimes, Butts said, where an algorithm might fail.

But Mocan hopes the research will strengthen what he says is a growing body of evidence that suggests emotions influence unrelated decisions. He hopes, too, that the more judges know about the impact of emotional shocks (in this case, football losses), the more aware they’ll be of their own decisionmaking.  “Maybe they will be careful,” he said.

Mocan and his colleague started looking at the impact of football scores after studying how judges react to news coverage and local crimes. As they were contemplating how judicial decisions are affected by judges’ exposure to different communities, they wondered whether football might also be a factor. “Frankly, in the beginning, we thought we wouldn’t find anything and that it was probably a waste of time,” Mocan said. “But, in fact, we found robust and significant relationships.”

Marc Schindler, the executive director of the Justice Policy Institute and a former public defender in Baltimore, said he found the study fascinating. While he’s not convinced judges will take it to heart, he said defenders might see the study as a tool. If he was defending a kid in Louisiana in the week after a big LSU upset and knew the judge had attended the school, he might say something like, “Now, Your Honor, I know we all had a rough day on Saturday, but we all know we’re not going to let that impact our decision making…” Maybe it would backfire, but maybe it wouldn’t.

Schindler wants to know how unique the results are, but, broadly, he thinks the paper could bring renewed attention to the fact that adult behavior or emotion, such as anger at a kid’s attitude in court, can drive decisions in juvenile court where kids’ actions are what should matter most. “We shouldn’t lock kids up because they make us mad,” he said. In an ideal world, he added, everyone dealing with children in the juvenile-justice system should be trained in adolescent development and also be aware of their own biases, racial and otherwise.

While the paper is relatively small in scale, perhaps it will spark a broader conversation and more research. “This is not a little lab experiment,” Mocan said. “These are consequential decisions made by uniformly highly educated people.”

It’s always been one of the most annoying parts of Instagram: If you really liked a friend’s photo, and wanted to get up close to inspect it… you could’t. There was no way to zoom in on a photo.

Instagram has now relieved us of that error. Starting Wednesday, iOS users will be able to pinch to zoom in on Instagram photos and videos. Android users will be able to zoom in a few weeks, says the company.

“As things change, we’re still focused on improving the core parts of Instagram,” says a release from the company.

Instagram has put its app through a number of changes in the past year, most significantly adding a rolling “Stories” feature earlier this month. Many of these changes were undertaken to fend off its biggest rival, Snapchat, which has become increasingly popular among teenagers. Wednesday’s update seems to demonstrate that the app is looking for any way to improve its core services without undermining the simplicity that made it famous.

As an eleven-year old-girl growing up in the 1980s, I was sure I was some variety of previously unclassified monster. I had a million words at my command, but still couldn’t make adults understand me. I stared in the mirror wondering if I was pretty and good, and also wondering why I cared. I felt, in other words, like a “weirdo”—but I wasn’t. This was the completely average experience of an eleven-year-old girl in the Reagan-era suburbs. But it was an experience I rarely saw reflected back to me in the movies I watched — despite the fact that the 1980s were supposedly a golden era of movies for young people.

Into this gap moves Netflix’s Stranger Things. As countless commentators have noted, the show offers a very smart brand of nostalgia: the kind that, instead of mocking or aping an earlier era, makes you long for a time you didn’t realize you were missing. Some of this feeling, of course, is screen memories: Stranger Things feels like the 80s because it mimics so accurately the movies we watched in our youth—all of those Spielberg, Carpenter, and Hughes films, not to mention myriad adaptations of Stephen King. But at the same time, in a way that few if any critics have pointed out, it repairs a gaping hole at the center of those movies: their inability, in films all about the wonders of childhood, to imagine the inner lives of girls.

Take The Goonies, for instance, a movie lovingly invoked by Stranger Things, not only in its detailed portrayal of pre-adolescent friendships but in its deft attention to class. There are exactly two girls in The Goonies: Andy, a cheerleader so intent on making out with a particular boy that she ends up accidentally snogging his younger brother, and Stef, a tomboy who spends most of the movie rolling her eyes and audibly scoffing. Andy and Stef are girls defined through and against boys: Andy is boy-crazy, and Stef desperately wants to be a boy.

As portrayals of 80s kidhood went, E.T. was a bit better; there was so little that was aggressively boylike about Elliot. But while his sensitive outsiderhood invited girlish empathy, his disgust at E.T. in Gertie’s dress-up clothes was a slap. John Hughes’s movies, those cherished staples of 80s adolescence, also offered little; neither Sixteen Candles’s Samantha nor Pretty in Pink’s Andie was particularly complex. (And the fact that two of the most iconic 80s teen girls are named Andy should tell you something about how 80s movies felt about girlhood.) Though Molly Ringwald’s soulful stares and barely-concealed disgust made her a model of seething teenage angst, even those films still defined their female characters primarily in terms of their relationships with men.

Stranger Things, to my relief and delight, tweaks these sources and others to create female characters who aren’t just props in boys’ stories. When Nancy and Barb first appear in Stranger Things, they look like Andy and Stef: Nancy is all aflutter about her budding relationship with school jock Steve; Barb, in her choking flowered top and mom jeans, seems to be actively warding off male sexual interest. A lesser show—an 80s show—would have made Nancy’s arc all about her encounter with Steve; an 80s horror movie would have killed her for it. But for Stranger Things, Nancy’s choice to sleep with Steve is a minor aspect of her character, defined primarily by her development into a “badass.” Barb’s mental inventory of Nancy’s underwear, meanwhile, hints at a possible attraction without turning Barb’s sexuality into an object of ridicule. If she’s a lesbian, she’s neither monstrous nor man-hating, nor is she trying, like Stef, to shed her loathsome girlness.

Even more than Nancy and Barb, Eleven redeems, retroactively, all of the disappointment of being a girl in the 1980s watching beautifully rendered portrayals of (pre-)adolescent life that cared only for boys or, at most, boys as seen through the eyes of girls. She embodies how terrible and wonderful and frightening and overwhelming and fun and sad it was to be an eleven-year-old girl during the waning years of the Cold War. I, unlike Eleven, had more vocabulary than “yes” and “no” and was well versed in the roller coaster joys of the La-Z-Boy. But her alienation is completely familiar.

The most compelling aspect of Eleven’s character is how terrified she is by her own feelings. Raise your hand if you would have flipped a van for your sixth-grade crush. Mine was Eric Berg, and I would have done it in a heartbeat. And then I would have been horrified by my own strength. “What is WRONG with you?” Mike demands to know when Eleven hurls Lucas against a wall to stop him punching Mike. What’s wrong is how much she feels: so much she can tear through water with her screams, so much she can open a gate to another dimension.

Adolescent girls have long been taught that our feelings—particularly our new and confusing feelings about boys (or girls, as the case may be)—are the most dangerous thing on earth. To put it in terms that Avidly readers understand: Jo gets mad, so Amy drowns. Emotions kill. Stranger Things doesn’t deny this; it literalizes it, then reminds us that emotions also save and heal. To my pre-adolescent self, Eleven would have been a revelation: a strange girl whose friends (even, eventually, Lucas) accept her as just another kind of weirdo, whose worthiness doesn’t depend on her performance of femininity, whose power is protective and not just destructive.

Fortunately, those of us who grew up in the 80s also experienced the 90s, where Dana Scully and Buffy Summers awaited us. But with its flawlessly staged setting and piled-up homages to 80s movies, Stranger Things has performed a kind of time travel: it has reached back into my memories, Total Recall-like, and inserted characters who now seem as though they were there all along. Nancy, the nerd-turned-monster killer who can like more than one boy at once. Barb, the buttoned-up babygay whose best friend won’t let her be disposable. Eleven, the terrifying, funny, scared, brave, smart weirdo whose feelings could save the world.

 

Ashley Reed: Timeless 80s icon.

Cameras rolling, Manhattan gastroenterologist Harold Bornstein was confronted last week with a letter that carried his signature. In that letter, the writer “state[d] unequivocally” that Donald Trump “will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

Donald Trump would be the oldest individual ever elected to the presidency. He sleeps little and holds angry grudges. He purports to eat KFC and girthy slabs of red meat, and his physique doesn’t suggest any inconsistency in this. His health might be fine, but a claim to anything superlative feels off.

Bornstein might have jumped on that opportunity to get out of this mess—to say that Trump had dictated the letter, and Bornstein only signed it. Or that Trump had at least suggested phrases. Because it’s not just the facts of Trump’s life that don’t add up, but the linguistics of the letter.

To readers with a keen eye, the hand of Trump might seem evident, particularly the descriptors: “his strength and physical stamina are extraordinary” and his “laboratory test results are astonishingly excellent.” There is even an instance of the Trumpian habit of beginning a sentence with “actually,” for purposes of  building on (as opposed to contradicting) the prior sentence: “Mr. Trump has had a complete medical examination that showed only positive results. Actually, his blood pressure and lab results were astonishingly excellent.”

EXCLUSIVE: Trump doctor says he wrote health letter in just 5 minutes as limo waited https://t.co/hy9CLowPJt pic.twitter.com/CyoqDpVhIl

— NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) August 26, 2016

But Bornstein only stuck to his guns. Not only did he double down on the letter, he said he rather liked the line about Trump being the healthiest person ever elected president. So I’d like to go through this letter a little more closely.

The adjectives are the most obvious clue. Doctors describe lab results as “normal” or “within normal limits.” If in some rare case these results warranted qualitative assessment, “reassuring” or “encouraging” would be more likely than “excellent.” Were it ever warranted to choose “excellent” as  the qualifier, the effect would never need heightening with an adverb like “astonishingly.”

Especially to describe normal lab tests. Many doctors do experience astonishment, but we are trained to keep medical documentation within a regimented, almost militant set of rhetorical boundaries. That serves a couple purposes, primarily to limit subjectivity. During my medical internship, I had a patient who was taking blood thinners, and she came to the hospital after she had accidentally taken too much. Our plan was to keep a close eye on her until the medication wore off. I wrote in the patient’s chart, in one hurried stroke, that the action plan was to discharge her from the hospital as soon as her blood coagulation rates were “cool.”

I received an irate page from my attending physician as soon as he read that. “WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR A TEST TO BE COOL?”

Point taken, I was supposed to write “when the INR [international normalized ratio] is between 2 and 3.” This way there would be no ambiguity for anyone who reads that chart. He knew what I meant, but his point was that every nurse and social worker and phlebotomist (and lawyer) who picked up that chart needed to be on the same page. So always write this way.

One key place where he does use the right language—“positive results”—he’s using it a way that would be nonsense in clinical parlance. We would say that a test had a positive result, for example, if an HIV assay detected the presence of a virus. Negative results would mean no HIV. Bornstein writes that Trump’s “medical examination showed only positive results.”

Again, in everyday conversation, people would know what that means. Over years of medical training and practice—decades in the case of Bornstein—the instinct to write in a colloquial way is washed out of you. Whether qualitative hyperbole and superlatives would often be of any use in a doctor’s assessment is moot, because they are simply not part of the lexicon. If a physician were going to break from that lexicon, it would not be in a career-defining document when the task is predicated on conveying credibility and authority.

So for linguistic reasons alone, it would shock me if Bornstein wrote this letter. Add to that the other bizarre elements, and  it was jarring to hear him stand by it last week, laughing in the process. In video footage that appears to have been taken covertly, Bernstein also admitted that he “wrote the letter in five minutes” while a car was idling outside waiting for him. This is a critical fact: It means that he cowed to the demands of his patient. (Trump had tweeted two days prior, “I have instructed my long-time doctor to issue, within two weeks, a full medical report—it will show perfection.”)

Patients don’t instruct doctors. Bernstein didn’t admit to taking instruction or dictation from Trump, or to signing a prewritten letter, but he did admit last week to throwing together a haphazard letter under unreasonable time constraints so as not to keep the idling car waiting. The letter is dated December 4, and Trump tweeted his promise on December 3. The two-week deadline was nowhere near. The writing could’ve waited another hour. If the car was in such a hurry, Bornstien could’ve emailed it later that afternoon.

And Bornstein does use email, as we know from the letterhead, which includes “E-mail: hornist@gmail.com.” That is another oddity. Gmail isn’t a secure platform, so it’s not meant for patients to communicate medical information. And that is why you’d be communicating with a doctor in the professional sense. This isn’t just for fear of google being hacked; it’s the law (HIPAA).

(A quibble from an editor: Is writing “E-mail:” necessary? If you saw simply “hbornst1@gmail.com,” would you think, “What is that?”)

Another physician, Jennifer Gunter, an obstetrician-gynecologist and “sexologist,” made similar observations recently in an article for The Huffington Post titled "I’m A Doctor. Here’s What I Find Most Concerning About Trump’s Medical Letter.” (That made me want to start every headline with “I’m a Doctor.”)

What she found most concerning was ... many things. Among them, Bornstein’s signature line says that he is part of the “section of gastroenterology” at Lennox Hill hospital. He is not. And only partly because there is no section of gastroenterology at Lennox Hill hospital. There is a gastroenterology division. And he is not part of that, either.

It may just be that the footer is outdated. And also the header, as it includes two names: Harold Bornstein and Jacob Bornstein. The latter is deceased. He died not recently, but in 2010. That leaves plenty of time to remove his name from the letterhead.

The letterhead also includes a web address, haroldbornsteinmd.com. I visited immediately when I first read the letter. It was a nonfunctioning site. (And now I see that the URL redirects to a site that sells prank teddy bears, of the sort that sing “Happy Birthday” when squeezed, for three solid hours.)

These are all small things in isolation, but together the evidence suggests that this letter was written at a time distinct from the dating of the letterhead and signature, which are seriously outdated. The letter also does not appear to be written by a physician. It does appear to have been written by someone who speaks like Donald Trump.

If Bornstein is the author of these words, and they were written under the circumstances he described on Friday (in five minutes while the limo idled outside), then not only is Bernstein not a meticulous physician, but he has shown that he will compromise professional standards in order to do what Trump asks of him.

So, is Trump in good health? There is no legal requirement mandating transparency in that regard. With the bizarre letter before us, he has not been transparent. That may be the best that can be said. I’m less concerned with his health than his character.

Last week Bornstein laughed when he mentioned Trump’s mental health: “His mental health is excellent. He thinks he’s the best.”

I caught some criticism recently for suggesting that Trump is—as the man’s own ghost-autobiographer described him— “a sociopath.” I was careful not to give him an actual medical diagnosis. Sociopath is a colloquial term for something in the venn diagram between antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders. I thought it was a worthwhile exercise to go through the diagnostic criteria and think about them. The dean of Harvard Medical School, for one, agreed. He said that, at least in this circumstance, more physicians should be speaking out.

Normally it’s inappropriate for physicians to weigh in on patients they haven’t seen personally. Out of respect for the process of diagnosis, some physicians are deferring to Bornstein. What would it take for more in the medical community to break the code and say that this man’s appraisal is inadequate?

Even the reserved CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta spoke out last week: “I don’t even know what to make of this letter.” That is the Gupta equivalent of spitting fire. “It's just a strange letter that's absurd.”

Bornstein has not replied to request for comment. (I wrote to him at the email address on the letterhead, which might be his actual email address.)