A.N

On Monday, October 13th, you’ll be able to sit down in front of your TV and enjoy a John Carpenter cult classic, a remake of a John Carpenter cult classic, an urban anthology, a zombie comedy, an animated family movie, a staple of the slasher genre, a clash of the two giants of the slasher genre, an Oscar nominee for Best Picture from the 1970s, and a cheap descendant of that movie from the 2010s.

And they’ll all be the same kind of film: horror.

October is the most wonderful time of the year for horror fans. TV networks pack their schedules with scares, allowing viewers to create their own  horror marathon out of hundreds of different combinations. Below, I’ve put together a calendar of all 300+ horror films set to air on cable for the month—and looking at the list, it’s clear how incredibly versatile the definition of “horror” can be.

Consider the very first entry, airing on AMC just as the calendar flips over to October: Jurassic Park III. Is it a horror movie? A lot of people would say no. It’s a monster movie with horror elements—enough to tip the balance over into straight-up horror?

Figuring out what ties together the disparate versions of horror can be tricky. “Scary” seems like an easy enough definition, but revisit the old Bela Lugosi Dracula movies and you probably won’t find much occasion to jump or scream. There’s a darkness to the subject matter, of course. A willingness to look the worst of existence. Be it murder or monsters, the cruel depths of human weakness or the pitilessness of the supernatural, in every case you’re staring into the abyss. That abyss can stare back in any of a dozen ways, from the violent to the suspenseful to the comedic.

Over the course of October, I’m going to look across the horror genre and examine its subcategories, writing posts that delve into the classics and the cults, the slashers and the shlock. As the calendar below shows, there’s a lot to talk about.    

On the methodology of the calendar: All times are Eastern. Double-check your local listings. We (David Sims, Kevin O'Keeffe, Shirley Li, Arit John, and I) pulled from the October schedules for the most prominent cable channels running horror programming: AMC, TCM, Syfy, Chiller, Sundance, IFC, Showtime, and all HBO channels.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/every-horror-movie-on-tv-this-october/380973/

And then a month or so ago I started following Frank Prisinzano, a restaurateur in my neighborhood on Instagram, a man that is unwaveringly obsessed with both eating and writing about crispy eggs. “The eggs should almost explode in the hot oil, the white should soufflé around the yolk” he writes, “the bottom should form a crispy crust hard enough that you can remove the egg from a normal pan with just a little scraping and shimmying.” You should eat it immediately, “like a steak,” showered with sea salt, pepper flakes, herbs or spices of your choosing.

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I wanted to make something creepy and festive for our front door this Halloween, and found these papier-maché masks at Paper Source for $4. So many possibilities!

If you’d like to make one like the above you’ll need:

Paper Skull Mask
Glitter in various shades
Glitter Glue
Modge Podge Glue
Paint Brush
Craft Wire or pipe cleaners
Tissue Paper cut into squares about the size of your palm
Bit of Ribbon
Glue gun

First choose the glitter you’ll use to coat your mask and mix it with Modge Podge at about a 1:1 ratio. You’ll need less than you think, and Modge Podge is the secret to using glitter without finding it on all future generations of children born to your family.

Paint the mask with a base layer of glitter. Once it’s dry, you can go back for touch ups. In person, the pink looks less Dawn of the Dead.

Your work environment should be pristine.

While you’re waiting for the first coat of glitter to dry, you can make the tissue paper flowers. I used the technique outlined in more detail here. Just stack five or six squares of tissue paper, accordion fold them like a fan, and secure the center with wire or pipe cleaner.

Then fluff the layers. The glitter dries pretty fast, so by now you should be ready to decorate.

I used a mixture of glue-with-glitter, glitter glue pens, and beads I had left over from a caviar manicure set. The latter looked kind of cool (you can see around the eyes), but they were a huge pain.

If I had it to do over, I’d go all pre-mixed glitter glue pens, which is what I used for the green dots over the eyes and temples. It goes on 3-D, but dries flat, and is super easy to direct. I did my decoration freehand, but here are a bunch of skull designs you can use for ideas.

If you’d like to hang it up, use the glue gun to glue a little loop of ribbon to the back at the top.

Now just hot glue your flowers on the crown and voila! Darth Maul meets Day of the Dead. Jedi! I have been waiting for you.

The post Glitter Skull Decoration for Halloween appeared first on Mighty Girl.

Forget Colorado, stoners. The real frontier of narcotic edibles is in Shaanxi province, China. A restaurant owner there just confessed to police that to keep customers coming back, he had infused his noodles with 4.4 pounds of pulverized poppy buds—which can contain narcotics like morphine and codeine—that he bought in August for $98.

Apparently, it worked; the restaurant boss said customer numbers leapt after he started using his “special” seasoning. Chinese authorities say doses were enough to addict frequent diners, reports the South China Morning Post. Police launched an investigation only after one of the restaurant’s repeat customers tested positive for opiates in a routine urine screen.

But Zhang, the shop owner, wasn’t the first Chinese restaurateur to strike upon this idea—not by a long shot. An investigative report in 2011 found that illegal poppy products are available in Shaanxi markets—with restaurant owners being the prime customers.

In the opiate dining market, however, Shanghai gives Shaanxi a run for its money. Just last May, a Shanghai restaurant owner was sentenced to 10 months in jail for zesting up soups with morphine. In March 2014, police jailed Shanghai restaurant owners for using Narceine, another poppy-shell opiate, to dope up a famous crayfish dish called xiaolongxia. In 2010, three Shanghai hotpot restaurants were shuttered for adding opiates.

Restaurant owners all over China have long embraced this customer retention trick. Last year, two restaurants in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou were caught adding pulverized poppies to their food. The prior year, seven restaurants in Ningxia were found to be dousing their hotpot soups with morphine. A Sichuan restaurant has repeatedly been found to feature "codeine as a secret ingredient." In Guizhou province in 2004, police busted 215 restaurants for morphine-laced hotspots.

These are only the ones that have been caught, amid a broader spate of food-safety scandals dogging the Chinese government and inspiring public outrage. The source of the opium supply isn’t clear, but western China abuts the Golden Triangle—the prime poppy-cultivation areas of Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. The drug's first noted use in China was as a surgical anesthetic as early as 220 AD, and the commodity played a major role in China’s struggle against the British Empire in the 1800s (its double defeats in the Opium Wars are still a national sore spot).

Note that while all parts of the poppy plant contain some level of opiates, the seeds common on bagels and muffins aren’t typically used in large enough quantities to be psychoactive (or, as popularized on Seinfeld, to cause drug test failures).

Not everyone is as lucky as a Seinfeld character. The 26-year-old diner whose urine test exposed the noodle shop’s secret is still in prison for drug use—even though further police testing suggested he tested positive as a result of the poppy-laced noodles. “Whether it’s through self-inflicted drug use or unwitting food consumption, it’s still drug use,” says local police chief Ma Yubintold the Xi’an Evening News. “The law doesn’t draw a sharp distinction between the two."

This article was originally published at http://qz.com/271411/to-keep-customers-coming-back-chinese-restaurants-are-lacing-noodles-with-opiates/

What could be more delicious than tater tot waffles? Nothing, nope, nada. But it lost me when it called for a bag of frozen tots smashed onto a waffle iron, not because it wouldn’t be delicious or because I have any opposition to frozen tater tots, but because if I ever crossed a bag of them in a dark galley kitchen, the last thing I’d want to do is mash them into something no longer recognizably tot. Essentially, it’s all about the wee cylinder shape for me.

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At the close of a hackathon held at the Massachusetts institute of Technology this weekend, tables were littered with the standard fare: empty coffee cups, LEDs, joysticks, and transistor parts. There were also scraps of fabric decorated with elephants, foam models of women’s breasts and flanges. Lots of flanges.

For the uninitiated, the flange is a crucial part of a breast pump, a device that help nursing moms extract milk from their breasts. Shaped like a broad funnel, the flange (or “shield”) forms a seal around the breast during pumping, helping maintain a vacuum. The flange is also the subject of numerous complaints by pumping women, which were printed and taped to a wall at the event: “Too rigid;” “Hard to adjust;” “Doesn’t work with gravity;” “Weird-shaped cones which don't look anything like a baby's mouth.”  Improving the flange was just one part of the hackathon’s broader goal of making the breast pump suck a little less.

The World Health Organization recommends breastfeeding for the first two years of a child’s life; the American Academy of Family Physicians recommends it for at least the first year. While breastfeeding rates are on the rise—79 percent of newborns start on breast milk, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2014 Breastfeeding Report Card—less than half of those babies are still breastfeeding at six months.

Sticking with breastfeeding is difficult for a lot of reasons. The shape of the baby’s palate can make latching on difficult if it doesn’t match up well with the shape of the mother’s breast, notes Boston-based nurse and lactation consultant Nancy Holtzman. Relatively minor issues, like jaundice, can disrupt breastfeeding and jump-start a formula-focused diet. But babies are born with several breast-feeding friendly reflexes, Holtzman says, such as suckling, which develops while still in the womb, and the unfortunately-named “rooting reflex,” which helps the baby seek out the nipple. Given the innate qualities in babies that are pro breast-feeding, and the innate physiological trait of female mammals to lactate after pregnancy, designing a smarter breast pump should be a tractable problem.

“The breast pump is a key technology in extending the nursing relationship and providing babies with breast milk for longer. But most women will tell you that the experience of using the breast pump sucks, literally and figuratively,” notes Catherine D'Ignazio, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab with a background in data visualization, arts, and software development.

Granted, consumer breast pumps are relatively new; the first pump that wasn’t intended for hospital use was introduced in 1991. But plenty of technologies that were born later than the breast pump have had much speedier evolutionary trajectories. In May, after reading a post on the New York Times parenting blog that called out this lag in innovation, D'Ignazio helped organize a small group of engineers, public health professionals, designers, lactation consultants, entrepreneurs, and parents to hack the pump. It quickly became clear that there was room for improvement. The working group then organized a second hackathon and upped the ante: A first place prize of $3000 and a trip for two to Silicon Valley to pitch the winning idea to venture capitalists.

In an online repository created before this weekend’s event, cumbersome flanges were one of many complaints lodged by breast pump users. Frustration with pumps’ numerous parts came up repeatedly, as did the fact that pumped milk is collected in bottles situated close to the breast, making it impossible to throw on a shirt and go about one’s business while pumping. There were calls for basic self-diagnostics, such as the pump equivalent of a “check engine” light so the pumper doesn’t mistakenly assume she’s no longer making milk when the pump isn’t working. References to feeling like a cow were ubiquitous. And many posts pointed to the “wheezy pumping noise” (also described as embarrassing, indiscrete, mechanical, not soothing, and like “an industrial dairy pump”).

These complaints were echoed by hackathon participants during the introductory stage of the event. “The noise, the noise, the noise, I still have dreams about that sound,” says Mar Hershenson, cofounder of the venture capitalist firm Pejman Mar Ventures, and sponsor of the Silicon Valley pitch trip prize. Pumps should be more like the Fitbit and other wearable devices by tracking personal data, such as milk volume and pump settings and offering encouragement to the user, said one participant. For many, convenience loomed large. “I want to be able to take the whole kit and throw it in the dishwasher” said mom Liz Slavkovsky. Another asked, why not a basket that holds breast-pump parts in the dishwasher so they don’t come out filled with bits of food and rinse water?

The 150-odd participants, which included breast-pump users, fluid dynamic engineers, software developers, health care providers, and experts in “wearable tech,” then dispersed to form teams. According to the firm Transparency Market Research, the global breast-pump market is expected to reach an estimated value of more than $1 billion in 2018. Why isn’t there a user-friendly breast pump and a clever basket for the dishwasher?

“I think a lot of it is because the people who do provide investment are men and they get very uncomfortable with discussions of [breast shape] and liquid coming out of breasts,” says Joy Kosak, who cofounded the pumping bra company SimpleWishes, a sponsor of the hackathon (along with several breast pump companies that supplied the event with parts and foam breasts). “As a society we are uncomfortable. People have issues, it’s something we are still trying to overcome.”

Those issues, which include America’s sexualization of breasts, have led to the sterile, goal-focused breast pumps on the market today, says San Francisco-based lactation consultant Charity Pitcher-Cooper.

“A lot of what we see with pump companies is, ‘Oh, this doesn’t have to do with sex.’ So it’s going to be very clinical, and we are going to end up with a medical device that looks like something that is used in a hospital,” Pitcher-Cooper says.

Nursing can be pleasurable, but it’s not sexual, she notes. And pumping appears to be neither. When Sunday afternoon rolled around and hackathon teams had to pitch to the judges, it became clear that while pleasure might be a pie-in-the-sky goal, convenience, dignity, and a good breast pump app are not.

The $1000 third prize went to PumpIO, an app to reduce the stress of pumping by measuring the volume of milk pumped in real time, alerting the pumper to pressure changes, time-stamping milk, and connecting the user with a lactation consultant with the press of a button. Compress Express won the popular vote with an entry inspired by blood-pressure cuffs that focuses on massaging the breast, which can improve milk delivery and keep painful blocked ducts at bay. The first place award went to “Team Batman,” for a prototype that combined real-time data collection with a discreet utility belt to hold the collection apparatus, enabling mobile pumping. Several of the team members were not on hand at the award ceremony; they’d gone home to be with their kids. All of the winners can be seen here.

Team Batman addressed a prominent concern, says Holtzman, one of the hackathon’s judges—“Women not having to walk around with giant bottles attached to their breasts would really improve the user experience.” But there’s still a larger hack on the horizon. “In no way is a better pump going to solve the social and cultural stigma associated with breast-feeding and breast pumping,” she says. Until women have better support for breast-feeding, whether that manifests as paid maternity leave, safe and convenient places for pumping, or  better access to lactation specialists, breast pumps aren’t likely to go the way of the Fitbit.

Ironically, the Affordable Care Act, which requires coverage of breast pumps, might push the technology into an even worse space, Holtzman notes. The client is no longer the mom that uses the technology, but the insurance company that’s paying for it, and the insurance companies’ main concern is cost, not functionality.

“What happened this weekend was fantastic,” she says. “But it was just the tip of the iceberg.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/building-a-better-breast-pump/380734/

A Pinterest rabbit hole led me to the flickr portfolio of illustrator Jared Chapman, and I’m awfully glad, because it’s full of fantastic dogs.

Chapman lives in Texas, and his client list includes Hallmark, Nick Jr., Nike, and McSweeney’s. Check out more of his stuff here and here.

This week, the social-networking site Ello exploded onto the scene. The site is slowly letting new users in, and in declarations that sound eerily familiar, some are calling it “the Facebook killer.” Whether people will truly flock to Ello from Facebook, or whether it will go the route of Google+ and other Facebook killers before it, remains to be seen. But it’s worth looking at the way Ello launched, and in particular its central claim.

Ello went for the manifesto launch—the kind that proclaims a certain world view, and literally asks its prospective users to Agree or Disagree with that world view. In Ello’s case, their claim is simple: “You are not a product,” they say. Here’s the full manifesto:

Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.

We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.

We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate—but a place to connect, create and celebrate life.

It’s pretty clear that Ello is firing shots at Facebook—the social site that makes its money by treating its users as the product. The idea that us users are the product for a site like Facebook isn’t new. Media analysts declared last year that Graph Seach confirmed it, but all the way back in 2010 Bruce Schneier said “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not—you’re the product. Its customers are the advertisers.”

Ello claims that on its site, that’s no longer the case. They’re tapping into not just a general feeling of vague discomfort surrounding Facebook as a place, but also the long-bubbling resentment about Facebook’s revenue generating practices. A site that can be Facebook without being Facebook is something people are clearly hungry for.

But here’s the thing about Ello’s manifesto—something that Ian Aleksander Adams, the director of information architecture and UI/UX at Hedvig Inc. an infrastructure startup, pointed out to me (on Facebook, of course): Ello doesn’t have to be storing and selling your information for you to be the product.

Adams, who also volunteers as community architect at the non-profit Internet Archive, said that we tend to think of “being a product” as being something that somebody can sell. In Facebook terms, that means being a human with interests and desires that companies can use to better understand how to sell you things. But there are lots of ways you can be the product of a website without them selling your data to advertisers, Adams notes.

The fact that you, the user, even exist and use their site makes you a product. Ello already has some amount of seed funding from VCs, which means it will need to return to them with something in hand if it wants more. And when it does, or when it is eventually bought by a larger company, you are part of that transaction—a key line in the sales pitch. Your existence on that site is a unit of currency, and it’s a unit that Ello is selling to whoever will give them money for it.

And even if Ello fails to make money, if it isn’t able to successfully execute on the freemium model it has talked about (and many sites don’t), you are still currency in the form of promotion for Ello’s founders. You’re a line on their resume that gets them that next job, or that next seed money for that next startup: Founder, Ello, 200,000 users (hey look, that’s you!).

“If Ello was serious about their 'manifesto' they'd be non-profit,” Adams told me. But Ello’s founders have to sell something, whether it’s to VCs or companies. And that something is always going to be you.

You might decide that being that kind of currency—the kind that promotes investment, hiring and promotion of this companies and these people—is fine with you. It might be preferable to the Facebook model of tracking your every move and selling that information to advertisers. But you are still the product.

Being the product isn't inherently a bad thing, either. In many cases, users are willing to be the product in exchange for some service they want, and that's totally fine. The premise that turning your users into a product as inherently evil (which is what Ello's manifesto is arguing) ignores the reality of what people are comfortable with. Ello's manifesto seems to miss what the true issues with Facebook are. Building the anti-Facebook social network doesn't necessarily have to mean building a social network that claims to do the opposite of everything Facebook does.

Relatedly, Ello has already heard some criticism for things that, some feel, are already violating their own ethos in spirit at least. In their manifesto, they declare that it would not be selling ads of any kind. "We also think ads are tacky, that they insult our intelligence and that we're better without them," the site says.

So ads are forbidden—but brand pages aren’t, apparently. Ello founder Paul Budnitz has a brand page for his bicycle company on Ello, as Ben Breier pointed out in this post on Medium. The prestige-speaker makers Sonos have one, too.

Ello promises no ads, and that it won’t treat you like a product. We’ll see about ads. But as long as it remains for-profit, it will almost certainly treat you something like a product—just in a way you're not used to.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/ello-says-youre-not-a-product-but-you-are/380809/

In the era before cheap video technology, this would be a story about a police officer who reported that he shot a man during a traffic stop when the man dove into his car to grab a weapon. Absent images, many people would give the police officer the benefit of the doubt, even when the motorist turned out to be unarmed, on the theory that cops have no reason to shoot men who comply with their orders. The motorist's behavior would be described as erratic and aggressive. People would believe that the cop reasonably feared for his life before shooting his gun.

But this is the era of the dash cam. So this is a story about South Carolina Highway Patrol officer Sean Groubert being charged with armed aggravated assault.

On September 4, he pulled over Levar Jones, who is black. He asked Jones, who was standing beside his vehicle, for his driver's license. Jones turned and reached into his car to retrieve it. And that's when the police officer panicked and started firing. All three shots are egregious, but take a particularly close look at shots two and three:

What can one feel watching that display of reckless ineptitude save for anger, shock, and confusion? The incredulity of the victim is itself a powerful rebuke to the shooter. About the only thing one can say for the highway patrolman is that he doesn't seem as though he was trying to murder the motorist. He seems to have felt genuine fear, though it doesn't come close to being "reasonable." As video footage proliferates, people will continue to see more cases where police officers behave badly to a degree that many wouldn't have believed sans images. One hopes this will eventually lead to better training and fewer incidents.

For now, it is leading to increased accountability that's long overdue, and serving as a hint to police brass that dashboard cameras are cheap enough now to be a moral imperative.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/cop-asks-for-mans-license-shoots-him-when-he-reaches-for-it/380775/

Key & Peele is back this Wednesday night, thank god, and the show has been dropping some sneak peeks at sketches from the new season to build up the anticipation. Last week it was one about an alien invasion. This week it’s something arguably even trickier than fighting off a space invader attack: explaining a gay wedding to family members who want to be supportive but have … questions. Lots of questions. Lots of strange, off-base questions that say as much about the person asking them as they do about the ceremony. Questions about “gay hymns” and couscous, for example. I won’t spoil it for you beyond that, other than to say it’s really, really good, and that Key & Peele remain the greatest.

In a related matter, more of the guest list for the new season has been revealed. In addition to the appearances by Lance Reddick, Romany Malco, and Will’s mom from The Fresh Prince in this clip, the show will also roll out Ty Burrell, Anna Camp, Rashida Jones, Chelsea Peretti, and Retta. Hell yes, Retta on Key & Peele. Hell yes, gay weddings. Hell yes, everything.

Source: Out

Two weeks after I returned from maternity leave to my job in Boston as a television-news producer, I found myself facing a demotion. My bosses were kind, even apologetic. The move did not affect my pay and did not reduce my hours. Simply put: The man they had placed in my position during my leave was a better fit than I had been. Not being one to deal well with demotions, I left almost immediately, and eventually found a job in management.

I didn’t fault my employer. I had worked at the company during the most stressful time of my life: twins on the way, an unemployed husband who had been laid off in the economic crisis of 2008, and a newly-bought home suddenly worth nothing. With everything going on, my work had suffered. I accepted that and decided to move on.

But, looking back, I wonder whether my work was judged fairly. According to sociologist Shelley Correll, mothers are more heavily scrutinized than both women without children and men with or without children. Her research shows that motherhood results in biased evaluations of both competence and commitment to a job, that women with children can do the exact same quality work as those without children, and it will be perceived as less well done.

One woman I talked to saw her job go to a childless woman as soon as she left on maternity leave. She was working in television in Connecticut, but when she returned from having a baby, she remembers feeling that the environment had turned so hostile toward her that she took a job at another station at a significant pay cut just to get away from it.

Studies from 2004 and 2010 have shown that mothers start at a lower pay than their coworkers, make less money over time, and they receive raises and promotions less often than their colleagues—that is, when they’re kept around.

Another woman I interviewed, who had been a therapist in Maryland, said everything seemed fine when she took her maternity leave. Two weeks before her scheduled return to work, she received a phone call telling her that her services would no longer be needed.

“There’s a common misperception out there that women try to use their pregnant condition to bilk extra money from their employers, when in reality, it’s the opposite,” said Diane King, an employment attorney in Colorado. “There are many more women discriminated against in the workplace due to pregnancy, family, and gender than will ever come forward to file a claim.”

These testimonials might be similar to stories you've heard before. Though anonymous, they present a picture of women being pushed aside when they have families. In the world of workplace discrimination, particularly for pregnancy, workers fear retribution from an employer or ex-employer so much that many women—including most of the ones I talked to for this story—are afraid to come forward about it.

“Bad references can kill your career, especially if you are specialized,” King explained. “In some businesses, a simple wink and nod can ruin your chances of getting the next job.”

While few women file lawsuits, there are more discrimination claims submitted now than there used to be. In 2006, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received nearly 5,000 complaints of pregnancy-based discrimination—a 30 percent increase from the previous decade. In 2010, there were more than 6,000 complaints filed.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act has been in place since 1978, branching out from Title VII, which states employers cannot discriminate due to gender. In 1986, those laws were upheld in Meritor Savings Bank vs. Vinson, which found that the civil rights law applied to pregnancy-based discrimination.

Under the law, companies of 15 or more employees are required to treat pregnancy equal to all other short-term disabilities in terms of medical coverage and leave. Pregnant employees must be allowed to work, as long as they can perform their jobs. Employers must hold the employee’s position for her for as long as they would for any other employee on any type of disability leave. This was emphasized in 1993 under FMLA, which allows employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for childbirth, family illness, or emergencies—provided the business has more than 50 employees, and the worker has been there full-time for more than a year, or racked up at least 1,250 hours.

However, a recent ruling allowed for employers to let employees go while on maternity leave if the business undergoes a structural shift and eliminates the position during downsizing. And if an employer is able to prove that letting the pregnant employee go had to do with those reasons, it is likely the woman is out of luck.

A big challenge for women who want to take their claims to court is that discrimination can be very hard to prove, Colorado attorney Brian Stutheit says. In many states, videotaping inappropriate workplace behavior for evidence goes against privacy laws. And unless there's a paper trail clearly indicating harassment or discrimination, the evidence is considered circumstantial. In Stutheit's experience, eyewitnesses are hard to come by because they also work for the company and don’t want to jeopardize their own employment.

“The law clearly states the employer can’t retaliate against a woman speaking up for her rights, but many employers do it anyway. They just find another reason down the road,” Stutheit said. “As a lawyer, you can’t glibly tell a client [to] go ahead and air their complaint, if it could cost them their job. And that’s the real world.”

Stutheit calls it the "halo effect”: After a complaint, the employee who filed is treated like an angel for six months or so, then fired for something unrelated. “Employers consider them troublemakers,” he said.

“These are hard cases,” employment-attorney King said of her work. “The law is hard and the judges can be hard.”

King advises that women who feel they have been discriminated against on the grounds of pregnancy or childbirth keep a detailed log of all events and comments, including the date and who was present. She also recommends creating a paper trail by putting all correspondence in email form. Most importantly, they should file a claim with the EEOC. While current employers will be notified of such complaints, they are kept from future employers. Filing an EEOC complaint is a requirement before filing for a lawsuit. The fact that there are few pregnancy-discrimination suits could mean that many people may be satisfied with the way EEOC handles these cases.

“People have to bring claims or this is only going to continue and get worse,” King said. “If we don’t stand up about it, discrimination will be allowed to run rampant in our businesses.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/when-bosses-discriminate-against-pregnant-women/380623/

To hear critics tell it, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is the most celebrated film of 2014 in large part because everyone can relate to it.

“The profuse pleasures of Boyhood spring not from amazement but from recognition—from saying, Yes, that’s true, and that feels right, or that’s how it was for me, too,” Anthony Lane writes in the The New Yorker. Richard Roeper, of the Chicago Sun-Times, describes Boyhood as “a pinpoint-specific and yet universal story,” and Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers calls it, “a four-star game-changer that earns its place in the cultural time capsule.”

Which raises a question: What is the culture it captures? Whose culture is it?

Filmed over the course of 12 years, with the same primary cast, Boyhood tracks the life of a boy in Texas, from childhood through adolescence. Mason makes and loses friends, survives his parents’ divorce and is transformed by his first serious romantic relationship—all as he naturally ages on screen.

Linklater includes cultural landmarks from the last decade to help note the passing of time, from Coldplay’s first hit to the evolution of video games to the Harry Potter phenomenon. And with a directorial style that suggests documentary, he further encourages viewers to apply their own meaning to Mason’s journey.

There’s no denying that, as so many have pointed out, it takes a visionary artist to conceptualize and execute a project on this scale, this well. Indeed, the experience of watching a human being age in this way, in the span of one movie, is unforgettable. Yet there are also clear limits to Linklater’s vision. Because in this otherwise sprawling exploration of a boy’s life in America, there is an essential aspect of the present-day human experience that goes unexplored: race.

It’s not surprising that the protagonist and his entire family are white; most movies today, still, are about white people. What’s surprising is that, as portrayed in the movie, Mason lives 12 years in America without ever having or overhearing a significant conversation about race. Not on TV, not at school, not with his parents, nor with any of his friends.

Every movie can’t be about boys or girls of color (though it would be nice to have a few more). No film is obligated to talk about race (though it would be nice if a few more did). And it’s plausible enough that a kid growing up in Texas, where the population is 70 percent white, would not be confronted with racism very often.

It’s certainly true as well that many viewers who don’t look like Mason, including women and people of color, have found and will continue to find Boyhood’s narrative illuminating and relatable.

But the fact that this particular film omits the topic of race almost entirely, underscores something insidious about our movies and the society they reflect.

* * *

Boyhood is not, in general, oblivious to the real world. Linklater does choose to openly point out social inequities that Mason encounters on his path.

Mason’s family is not wealthy, and their struggles with money clearly play a major factor in the narrative. His friends make gay jokes and participate in macho posturing, but Mason openly rejects the aggressive masculinity of his mom’s partners (even as he is chastised by one for wearing nail polish). At one point the kids giggle at a disabled person, and the camera lingers on the exchange—asking Mason to consider it further.

He observes women being demeaned, objectified, and—in one brief moment—even physically abused. We’re also shown his working single mother, Olivia, doing her best to get by (brilliantly given life by Patricia Arquette). And Mason’s sister Samantha, played by Linklater’s own daughter, is used throughout to reference just how much girlhood in America might differ from boyhood.

These are intentional decisions on the part of the director. They draw attention to the ways in which kids see the world, how they talk to one another, and how they learn about the society around them. Mason is constantly observing people, and through these observations he is changing.

Most of these scenes make us, as the audience, wince at the things we inadvertently teach our kids. And they make us reflect on a time when we were blissfully unaware of the pain around us. But they also force us to consider some of the cruelties, subtle and not, that mark our society: classism, homophobia, sexism, ableism...

Yet, as a few others have noted (largely drowned out by the mass of praise), the list of humanity's roadblocks in Boyhood does not include racism.

The closest Mason comes to witnessing the long history of racial discrimination in this country is when he, his sister, and father are shown canvassing for Barack Obama, and they meet an older white man who stands in front of a Confederate flag and says he won’t be voting for “Barack Hussein Obama.” But the scene isn’t about that man’s feelings—it’s about electoral politics seeping into culture. There aren’t any actual people of color in sight. The scene, which is played for laughs, quickly transitions into his father asking Mason to steal a nearby John McCain sign.

Similarly, in an earlier scene where Mason and his friends are being bullied by some high schoolers, there is one boy of color present in their group. He gets bullied like the rest of them, but there is no suggestion of racism. And the character disappears from the story as quickly as he arrives.

In fact, there is only one truly significant interaction with a person of color in the entire plot. In the second half of the film, a Spanish-speaking worker—who is fixing a pipe outside the family’s house—is given words of encouragement by Mason’s mom (the teenage Mason, who is waiting for her in the van, doesn’t observe this). We learn a few years later, as Mason is having breakfast with his mother and sister, that her words inspired that man (played by Roland Ruiz) to pursue a college education and that he is now a restaurant manager. The interaction is a reiteration of the film's “carpe diem” theme, and we can infer that by watching this exchange, Mason might have newfound respect for his mother.

In this tale of a white family living in a state that borders Mexico, isn't it strange that the only time they’re shown truly interacting with a Spanish-speaking non-white individual is when they are saving them from a life of manual labor? Perhaps we’re meant to gather from this that Mason is aware of the barriers that those with brown skin must overcome to make it in a place like Texas, but unlike the film’s references to other forms of discrimination, it’s not made obvious. Instead, it actually seems easier to interpret this scene as saying something closer to “any boy can make it in America if they just seize their opportunities.”

Meanwhile, no girls of color and only two women of color speak throughout the three-hour film: Samantha’s college roommate (played by Andrea Chen) and Olivia’s colleague, a black professor (played by Angela Rawna) whose most memorable action is making a pass at the teenage Mason.

* * *

The Seattle Times says Boyhood is “the most engrossing coming-of-age movie in the history of the genre.” That assertion may be true, but it’s also true that the popular history of the genre has been largely limited to imagining the lives of white kids. In Flavorwire’s 2014 list of the best coming-of-age films ever, all of the top 10 are about white childhood. A similar list posted on the Sundance blog this year is even more specific, including only films about white boys. Boyhood may be revolutionary in many ways, but it’s frustratingly familiar in others.

Compare Linklater’s vision to 1991’s Boyz n the Hood, John Singleton’s Oscar-nominated coming-of-age drama depicting life in South Central Los Angeles. It’s an entirely different setting and cinematic style (and has its own severe limitations when it comes to depicting black women), but it’s hard to even imagine that Mason and Tré Styles are boys living in the same country. Singleton’s film tracks Tré, and his best friends Ricky and Doughboy, over the course of seven years, from elementary through high school. They deal with a lot of the same issues as Mason—single-parent homes, drugs, sex, peer pressure, violence—but they also deal with race. One of the earliest scenes in the film is a young Tré challenging his white teacher during a history lesson on the origins of Thanksgiving. The 10-year-old gets up in front of the class and shares that “everybody’s really from Africa”—because his father has taught him that the body of the first man was found there—and the assertion eventually leads to a fight between Tré and another black classmate. It foreshadows much of the rest of his story.

You might point out that Singleton’s film takes place decades before Linklater’s, but it’s equally difficult to imagine Mason living in the same country as Oscar Grant, the subject of one of last year’s best reviewed films, Fruitvale Station. That film, which also premiered at Sundance, is based on the true story of an unarmed young black man who was shot and killed by a white Bay Area Rapid Transit officer in 2009. First-time director Ryan Coogler depicts the last day of Grant's life, the events leading up to that fatal event, but like Singleton, uses the opportunity to tell a larger story about life in America for black boys and men.

For Oscar and Tré, every day features a confrontation with race. For Mason, 12 years can pass without confronting it at all.

Of course there are far more worrisome films than Boyhood, and it’s a more thoughtful work than all of the blockbuster movies playing at American cinemas right now—none of which overtly deal with race either. But those films aren’t being said “to channel the flow of real life” by The Wall Street Journal. Those films don’t have all-encompassing titles like “boyhood.”

This isn’t the first time Linklater’s forgotten race in his otherwise expansive philosophical explorations. The seminal Before Sunrise series’ Jesse and Celine, over the course of three films where they do nothing but talk to each other, spend hours arguing about faith, feminism, war, the economy, love, and even the very meaning of life. And yet, they do not mention, even in passing, how skin color intersects with all those issues.

These films, like Boyhood, like the most beloved coming-of-age films, are lauded for celebrating moments and conversations that imply a more meaningful whole. But when you look closely at the moments and conversations that are depicted, there seems to be a pattern in what’s being left out.

* * *

What’s most troubling about all of this is not the idea of a fictional 18 year-old who has never had to think about race. It’s the thought of living white men in America mistakenly thinking that race has played no significant role in their own lives. In fact, cinema like Boyhood suggests that it’s the norm for these boys and men not to think about race. Which makes it seem like it’s okay.

While Linklater and the character of Mason can choose not to see it, dialogue about race is happening all around them and affecting their lives and experiences. That’s never been clearer than this year, when the events in Ferguson have people nationwide asking—as they did after the death of Trayvon Martin, and so many times before—a painful question: In America, are the lives of black boys worth less than those of white boys? (And where does that then leave girls of color—especially black girls?)

Race and racism shapes the life of everybody, no matter where they live or who they are. This includes white boys. We all grow up in a society that gives us opportunities, or limits opportunities, based on the color of our skin. Mason—who has high-school teachers who believe in him, does drugs without fear of the police, is encouraged to compete in art competitions, and eventually goes to college—is surely the beneficiary of privileges historically bestowed upon white men.

Richard Linklater may have set out to tell one, small story; not the entire story of America. But as long as society continues to present lives like Mason’s as what's normal, the childhood of people of color, like Michael Brown, will be seen as variant—as other. To be centered is not merely normalizing—it’s elevating. And to be othered is not only to be seen always as potentially dangerous, but also to feel always in danger.

This has been a big year for gay rights in America. In state after state, either judges or voters have affirmed the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, and public support for gay unions reached an all-time high.

But there's still a tension between the acknowledgement of gay rights and the acceptance of gayness itself. A new Pew poll on religion in public life found that exactly half of respondents said they consider "homosexual behavior" sinful, a five-percentage-point increase since May 2013. This view is most prominent among white evangelicals and black protestants; more than three-quarters of each group said they see gay sex as a sin.

This bump is accompanied by a slight dip in the portion of respondents who said they support same-sex marriage—49 percent said they were in favor, which is a five-point drop since February. This is roughly the same level of support seen among Americans in 2013.

Another gay-rights issue—whether businesses should be forced to provide services, like catering or cake-baking, at same-sex weddings—split Americans in roughly the same way. Forty-nine percent said vendors should be required to serve at gay ceremonies, while 47 percent said they should be allowed to refuse.

These three data points represent a significant divide in how Americans see the gay community. Half of the country sees homosexuality as sinful, opposes gay marriage, and believes businesses should be able to refuse to serve gay couples' wedding ceremonies—maybe not quite the same half, but there's probably a significant overlap. A 2013 Pew poll suggested that there's a small group of Americans who see homosexuality as a sin but think gay marriage should be legal anyway, although that wasn't as evident in this latest poll. Either way, this is a big change from a decade ago, when only a third of people supported legalization but 55 percent saw homosexuality as sinful.

And that's what's so striking about this data: In 10 years of steadily increasing support for gay marriage, attitudes toward gay sex don't seem to have changed much at all. In a 2013 poll, people generally had a more "favorable opinion" of gay men and women than they did in 2003, and significantly more people said "homosexuality should be accepted by society." But when it comes to the most fundamental part of being gay—sex—opinions seem to be less malleable.  

Pluralism relies on a tense kind of tolerance. Everyone has to live with and possibly listen to people who see the world differently—and, for that matter, have sex in different ways. This seems most important in the sphere of politics, in which pluralism is mostly about rights and peaceful coexistence. But there's a deeper kind of tolerance that seems like it may still be long in coming for gay Americans, one in which sexuality isn't framed in terms of sin—just as another way of being.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/half-of-americans-believe-gay-sex-is-a-sin/380567/

At 11 o’clock on a Tuesday night, Amanda, a senior at Princeton University, got her first text message from Stephen, a 60-something Wall Street banker. He wanted her at his New York City apartment. Immediately.

“I told him it was too late—the trains just stopped running,” Amanda said. “He said he’d send a limo.”

Amanda agreed, on the condition that she’d be back on campus for her 10 o’clock class the next morning. After dinner at a fancy restaurant, sex, and some post-sex apartment decorating, Amanda was back in the limo. When she got back to Princeton, she had just enough time to change her clothes, grab her books, and run to class.

Stephen is just one of the many men Amanda has met on Seeking Arrangement, a website that connects “sugar babies”—young, pretty women—with “sugar daddies”—usually rich, older men. On Seeking Arrangement, the most important part of the profile is the number at the top of the page: net worth. Men with annual incomes of over $5 or $10 million get the most attention. The site advertises “mutually beneficial relationships,” in which young women shower men with attention in exchange for “the finer things in life”—fancy dinners, extravagant vacations, or monthly allowances. What the site doesn’t talk about is sex. But sex, I was told by multiple sugar babies, is what everybody’s thinking about.

“’Sugar babies are escorts,” said Tammy Castle, a professor at James Madison University whose research includes analyzing the content of escort websites. “[The administrators of the Seeking Arrangement] are trying to avoid the negative stigma of prostitution by advertising this as just another dating website, but money is exchanged for arrangements that may include sex.”

In 2013, Seeking Arrangement announced that approximately 44 percent of its 2.3 million “babies” are in college. This is a trend that the website encourages—if babies register with a .edu email account, they receive a free premium membership (something the guys have to shell out as much as $1,200 for). Seeking Arrangement creates the illusion that the sexual element of these relationships isn’t forced, but organic. No one associated with the website wants to admit that what it’s doing is facilitating sex-for-money exchanges. The large number of college women on the site helps preserve this illusion, for both the daddies and the babies.

“Dating a college woman fulfills these guys’ wildest dreams. They want someone highly educated who is eager to learn,” said Parinda Wanitwat, director of the documentary Daddies Date Babies, which profiles several college sugar babies living in New York City.

In almost every message Amanda receives on Seeking Arrangement, sugar daddies comment on how intelligent she sounds in her profile. Amanda has met more than 50 men through the site. All of them are well-educated, the majority are business executives.

When she first signed up for Seeking Arrangement, Sarah, another sugar baby who recently graduated from college, was surprised by how many men sent her messages. Sarah has a curvy figure and is originally from Southeast Asia.  She expected the men to be interested in girls who were skinny, blonde, and white—“sorority Barbies.” “That’s just not me,” she said.

And yet, Sarah got a lot of attention on Seeking Arrangement. So did Sophie, a 27-year-old graduate student in New York City. She describes herself as an intellectual with pretentious glasses and curly brown hair.

“I look like what I am, and the men like that,” Sophie said. “They want someone who doesn’t look like a bimbo.”

On Seeking Arrangement, intellect is important—maybe even more important than looks. If the sugar baby can understand what the “daddy” does at work and engage in topics he finds interesting, he is more likely to feel he’s in a real relationship. “The guys eventually want to feel like, ‘That girl likes me for me,’” Amanda said.

While some men on the site use it exclusively for sex, the majority want sex and something else. They want someone to come along on business trips, go to company events, and meet their friends—someone who understands and appears interested in what they have to say. Most importantly, they want someone who will help them pretend that the relationship is not a transaction. Only one sugar baby I interviewed said she discussed her fee upfront, on the first date. The rest said they preferred to let the issue of compensation “come up naturally.”

The women I talked to found that avoiding a conversation about money actually led to more of it. When she first signed up on the site, Rebecca, a sophomore at NYU, asked potential sugar daddies about money right away—sometimes even before the first date. After a few months of making far less than her friends on the site, she decided to stop asking. She started waiting for the daddy to bring up the money issue and was immediately more successful.

Like Rebecca, Amanda never directly asks for money. Instead, she waits until the sugar daddy is comfortable enough to give her a credit card in his name.

“I get to a point in these relationships when the guy starts to naturally want to pay for things for me. They prefer giving me a credit card because it feels more informal. There is no direct exchange of money,” Amanda said.

In this way, it’s easier for the men—and, to a certain extent, the women—to pretend the transaction never actually happened.

“I found that some, if not most, of the guys don’t want to talk about money. I suspect that’s because it kills the fantasy,” said Wanitwat. “They’re trying to pretend that these smart, beautiful women actually want to hang out with them.”

The illusion works the other way, as well. When a friend of mine started to think about joining Seeking Arrangement in our senior year, she told me the site was extremely popular among college students. She said tons of girls at Columbia and NYU had profiles to help pay tuition bills. This made the website seem safer, and less like prostitution. If half the women on the site really were college students—and the guys had a particular interest in meeting college students—maybe the work wasn’t just purely physical. Maybe it really was about the conversation and companionship, not just the sex.

When we consider what it means to be a high-end prostitute, we generally think about Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman—a desperate young person willing to trade some of her dignity for the chance to avoid working on curbs at two in the morning. A college education seems fundamentally at odds with that image. By actively seeking out college students, and publicizing the high numbers already in its ranks, Seeking Arrangement makes it easier for smart, young women with bright futures to rationalize the decision to join Seeking Arrangement: If so many college women are signing up for the site, it must be something different. It must be more socially acceptable somehow. It can’t really be prostitution.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/how-sugar-daddies-are-financing-college-education/379533/

One of my favorite things about fall is the new crop of books out from publishers. And today, I thought I’d share some of my favorite recently (or soon to be) released illustrated books. These are all books that you’ll keep on your coffee table and keep coming back to – from the stories behind tattoos to the real story of Moby Dick, to a chronicle of untranslatable words, there’s a little something for everyone. So pour yourself a cup of tea, get cozy with a sweater and get reading.  -Amy

In Lost in Translation, Ella Frances Sanders illustrated more than fifty words that don’t have direct English translations. For example, did you know that the Japanese language has a word for gazing vacantly into the distance without thinking about anything specific? Or that Tulu (spoken in parts of Southwestern India) has a word for the mark left on the skin by wearing something tight? Or that there’s a Finnish word for the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to rest? This book is as sweet as it sounds. *Our own Anne Ditmeyer keeps a section of her blog, Prêt à Voyager , devoted to funny translations and untranslatable words/phrases in the French language.

See more book recommendations after the jump!

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Labor experts and industry analysts have written at length about the explosion of telecommuting in the last decade. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban workers from telecommuting earlier this year attracted the ire of working moms and other critics who call the work-from-home trend the “inevitable wave of the future.” A growing body of evidence shows that full-time employees who work from home tend to be more productive than their cubicled counterparts, but some say telecommuting promotes disconnection among colleagues.

Just over 3 million Americans qualify as telecommuters, or those who work full-time at home for someone other than themselves. Coincidentally, the same number of Americans also suffer from agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder and the most common type of phobia. Not exactly the fear of open spaces, as the popular definition would have it, agoraphobia is, simply put, the fear of being trapped in a place or situation where you think you can’t escape or get help.

A term first used in 1871, agoraphobia has also been known as “locomotor anxiety” and “street fear.” These names make sense, considering that modern wide boulevards first emerged in Paris in the 1870s and, around the same time, technological breakthroughs such as extended railroad networks and long-distance commercial steamships had just begun to allow for the possibility of higher-speed, long-distance travel.

In Western cultures, agoraphobia can be particularly “debilitating because social and interpersonal skills are the primary traits that allow the acquisition of resources,” according to the first volume of Cultural Sociology of Mental Illness. In other words, making a living has historically been difficult for agoraphobes, although that could be changing.

To the severely agoraphobic, the housebound, telecommuting life may sound like a dream. While some sufferers unable to work outside the home may be eligible to receive disability benefits, full-time telecommuting remains an attractive option: It opens the door to something much more closely resembling a normal life.

But it’s less intuitive to think that someone might become a full-blown agoraphobe after he or she starts working from home.

After graduating from college two years ago, I landed a job as an editor for a mobile news startup, which meant I could work from anywhere with nothing but a laptop and Internet connection. “You’re so lucky,” everyone said when they learned I worked from home, and I agreed. I didn’t need to pack a lunch every day, or worry about commuting costs. Pajamas and no makeup made for an easy uniform in the mornings. My desk was often just a couch.

Just before getting hired, I suffered my first-ever panic attack while on a plane flying back home to Los Angeles from Boston. Twenty minutes after takeoff, I hovered outside the bathroom, weak and dizzy, having thrown up from sheer terror. 

Panic attacks are fairly common and do not necessarily lead to agoraphobia. With the release of the DSM-5, agoraphobia was unlinked from panic disorder, in which sufferers experience sudden and unexpected attacks. Anxiety researchers now view agoraphobia as a separate disorder.

Working from home was wonderful, convenient, and money-saving, but as time went on, my small anxieties devolved into something more destructive. I’d obsess over uncomfortable yet fleeting bodily sensations, growing convinced that every twinge of my gut or gnawing headache signaled something ominous. I later learned that this is what’s called “anxiety sensitivity,” and is experienced by those who are particularly attuned to the subtlest of changes in their body. Soon, my self-talk often went something like this: What if I go to the store and faint in front of everyone? What if I get food poisoning at the restaurant? What if I can’t escape? What if I go insane and die? In my purse, I always carried ibuprofen, Pepto Bismol chews, Xanax, acidophilus pills, and water, just in case.

The symptoms were always the same: guts churning, icicles for fingers, my skin at once numb and on fire, head disoriented. Once, while I was having a panic attack on a road trip, I begged my friend to let me roll down the window, even as we whipped down the freeway, our ears shuddering from the wind. Later that night I caught sight of my reflection in the bathroom mirror—the blood vessels in my eyes had burst from hyperventilation.

With time, things worsened. Soon, I couldn’t think about getting into a car or on a bus without panicking. I made excuses to avoid going to dinner or on trips to visit family. When I worked from home, I could easily ignore my growing impulse to withdraw, to stow myself away in my house where I was always within reach of a bottle of medication, a bathroom, a bed. These were talismans more than remedies, but life crept on, and every two weeks I received my paycheck direct-deposited into my bank account.

To be clear: Working from home didn’t cause my agoraphobia, it just enabled it. As someone who already had latent anxiety issues, I lacked incentive to prove myself wrong about all the imagined catastrophes that could occur if I were “trapped” somewhere. Telecommuting offered me the retreat I craved, but it helped to reinforce my avoidance patterns. And so the agoraphobia blossomed.

“Avoiding anxiety-provoking stimuli tends to both perpetuate our anxiety and erode our self-confidence, thereby worsening our anxiety—this is true for all anxiety, not just agoraphobia,” said Dr. Kilianne Kimball, the Sacramento clinical psychologist who eventually helped treat me.

It was true. My world grew smaller every week, but working from home meant my world didn’t need to be that big in the first place.

*  *  *

From 2005 to 2012, the number of people who worked from home multiple times a week grew by nearly 80 percent; not even the recession could interrupt the ascent of telecommuters. And its rise isn’t over yet—the number of professional workers in the U.S. who telecommute at least once a week has been forecasted by the Telework Research Network to rise 60 percent by the end of the decade.

Currently, the scientific literature has nothing to say, specifically, about the connection between agoraphobia and telecommuting, though there are several possible reasons for this, according to Dr. Anu Asnaani, a clinical psychologist at University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety. Psychology researchers may be unaware of new employment trends such as telecommuting, meaning they won’t study potential mental health problems linked to them. And it takes time to conduct and publish a study, even if someone was interested in doing the research.  And without a body of research to build on, psychologists are less inclined to come up with options for intervention or outreach.

Plus, agencies that award funding for psychology research currently tend to support studies examining the neurobiology behind behavior and mental disorders, as opposed to the psychosocial factors of anxiety disorders, such as shifts in work environments, Asnaani says.

“I think the topic itself is very interesting to anxiety researchers as we continue to integrate technology and newer lifestyle information into making our treatments more widespread and better,” Asnaani told me in an email. When we spoke earlier, she said she believed the issue of mental health and telecommuting simply needs greater visibility in the scientific community in order to be studied rigorously.

“I could see where [agoraphobia] would really perpetuate if people developed the ability to ... make a career from home,” said Dr. Dennis Greenberger of the Anxiety and Depression Center in Newport Beach, California. Even now, Greenberger says, people can get groceries delivered to their homes by Amazon, maintain a sense of social connection through Facebook and Skype, and use the Internet to support themselves with relative ease.

Of course, agoraphobia—like all mental disorders—isn’t a “just add water” phenomenon. No one, even if they have underlying anxiety issues, will necessarily become agoraphobic simply by working at home. And fortunately, panic disorders and agoraphobia tend to have the best prognosis of all mental disorders, according to Greenberger—but that’s only if individuals seek help, like I did.

I still work from home today, but after months of self-guided therapy exercises and taking SSRIs, I can say that I’m “recovering.” I read books and did exposure therapy and no longer need to carry a bottle of Xanax around everywhere for comfort. This year, I got on the train to attend my younger sister’s college graduation and flew more than 6,000 miles to visit my grandparents in Guam. But I still feel most proud when I do something pitifully normal, like buying bread at the store without worrying about falling apart.

My world is getting bigger again.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/agoraphobia-and-the-telecommuter/379483/