A.N

In a recent debate with a CNN contributor, the conservative radio talk-show host Larry Elder declared that “if black America were a country, it would be the 15th-wealthiest country in the world.” His math proved incorrect, and his invocation of “black America” was followed by a refutation of the concept by a fellow black conservative. Shortly after Elder’s remarks, the Republican strategist Ron Christie argued that there is no such thing as ‘black America’ and, further, that the very notion of it is antithetical “to our national motto of E Pluribus Unum.”

Whether these men know it or not, they are continuing a debate that W.E.B. Du Bois gave voice to 80 years ago in his resignation speech from the NAACP. In a farewell address titled, “A Negro Nation Within a Nation,” Du Bois asserted:

The peculiar position of Negroes in America offers an opportunity. … With the use of their political power, their power as consumers, and their brainpower … Negroes can develop in the United States an economic nation within a nation ...

Though Du Bois eventually took an extreme turn toward communism and emigrated to Ghana, the goal of “fellowship and equality in the United States” remained his burning desire. As for the belief that black America is an immense, multifaceted asset to the United States, his instincts were right: Black Americans boast enormous capital that has been exploited over the course of the nation’s history and has yet to be fairly and fully employed to increase prosperity for all Americans.

This decades-old conversation invites a thought experiment: If black America were a nation-state, how would it stack up against other countries? How would it fare on standard measures of national power and weakness?

Naturally, this exercise presumes a monolithic black America, but this is a standard hazard when comparing large entities using statistical medians and per-capita rates. Another obvious concern is that a sub-national, racial demographic is not equivalent to a sovereign nation. Nearly all the sources of black America’s attributes are grounded in America’s history, economy, geography, and government structures. Still, it is this truism that gives weight to the insight revealed by the following charts: Black America is a fragile state embedded in the greatest superpower the world has ever known.

In the infographics below, two pictures emerge. The first is of a strong nation with considerable manpower and purchasing power. The second is of a troubled, fragile state suffering from socioeconomic disparities and structural subjugation in ways that degrade life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (on some measures, black America resembles countries like Brazil, China, and Russia—emerging powers that are struggling with stark economic inequality). Essentially, what we're witnessing is a nation that is comparable in certain ways to a regional power existing in the state of Disparistan (or, perhaps, Despairistan). This is more than an inconvenient truth; it fundamentally undermines the United States’ greatest contribution to humanity: the American idea.

The statistics tell the story.

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This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/what-if-black-america-were-a-country/380953/

I was born in 1971, and came of age watching soap operas. This was pre-Internet, before gay marriage was even a thought, when homosexuality was still a mental disorder in the DSM. When I remember back, the only images I can recall of LGBT people on TV involved people who were white and showed up only to hang themselves, or be runaway hustlers, or die slowly of AIDS, with their mothers crying at their bedside and their fathers brooding silently in hospital hallways.

I’ve been writing and publishing for over 25 years and long ago I bitterly “accepted” I’d never make a living solely as a writer. I hadn’t even made one-hundredth of my living as a writer, yet I trudged on with my little stories, all but sewing them into booklets in my bedroom à la Emily Dickinson.

When I did get the rare opportunity to be paid well for my writing, I had to completely edit out my life as a butch dyke to make it palatable/publishable to the outside world—or so was the expectation of nervous editors. And after so many years of just doing my own thing, I just trudged on, writing my novels and hosting an annual writers’ retreat in Mexico with RADAR Productions, a San Francisco literary non-profit. I met Transparent creator Jill Soloway when she attended one year.

I’d seen Jill a few times at readings after that but I had no idea she was even familiar with my work. So I was surprised and excited when she wrote to me and said, “Have you ever thought of writing for TV?”

Why, no I hadn’t. I was entering my seventh year as a cashier at a grocery co-op because after many different jobs and life configurations the co-op best suited my life as a writer. It gave my girlfriend and me health insurance and allowed me the most freedom to travel when I needed to.

“There’s like four shows coming out with trans content this year,” Jill said, when she first contacted me. One of those shows was her creation, Transparent, a dramedy that centers around an affluent Los Angeles family and their lives following the discovery that their father, whom they’d known as Mort, is a transgender woman named Maura.

I wanted to get it right, and recognized the dangers of a bad representation. I’ve lived a good part of my life in a gender-nonconforming body. As a butch who is constantly misgendered and regendered throughout the day by strangers, I have some crossover with a trans experience—especially when it comes to using public restrooms, navigating airports, getting wanded by security detail on entering a sporting event. So I felt like I could use my experience to add to the conversation. 

I’d never counted how many of my friends were trans, because why would I, they were just my friends. And my friends’ histories were as diverse as the breadth of genderqueer and trans’ characters on the show: trans men, trans women. On hormones. Not on hormones. Electing surgeries or not. Early, middle, and late transitioners. Concerned with passing or not passing. And while Jill is not trans herself, I knew she was personally invested in trans visibility, as her parent had recently come out to her as transgender. Plus, the time was right: Laverne Cox’s character, Sophia Burset, on Orange Is the New Black had set a new precedent for respectable depictions of transgender characters on TV.

As I sat in the writers’ room, it was apparent right away that Jill was committed to telling a trans story with integrity. Trans artists Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker acted as consultants for the show. We also had other trans folks visit the room to help us get it right; including Ian Harvie, Jenny Boylan, and Van Barnes.

Jill Soloway told the writers to think about what we’d never seen on TV before but wanted to.

I’d lived long enough to see the never-seen gays and lesbians on TV, now peppering every show, but these “gay” characters often felt dispersed as a kind of diabolical diversity seasoning salt. I have never seen anyone who looked like me represented on TV, but thanks to Jill allowing the writers to have some cameos, I will appear as a butch security guard named Tiffany. Take that!

Jill Soloway said during the last week of shooting that the world probably needs a trans 101 show and that Transparent is more like trans 507. It isn’t a show that spoon feeds the definition of trans to the audience. Instead, we present a spectrum of trans characters to choose from: a butch, a transman, two transwomen, and Maura, a transwoman at the beginning of her transition who may or may not “medically” transition. I knew besides Sophia Burcet, the trans community had only seen themselves portrayed as victims or villains.

We were committed to doing so much more.

Can a TV show save lives? Can cisgender actor Jeffrey Tambor be enough of a first stepping stone for transwomen who’ve waited forever for any kind of representation? Could a transphobe somewhere see this show and feel something shift? With four new shows with trans content, will cisgender people pepper their scripts with trans characters to sell scripts? The thought of that makes me want to crawl back in bed.

From day one, I realized I had a unique responsibility as a queer, gender-nonconforming writer working on a big television show. I owe it to my community. I hope that this show can not only give trans people positive visibility that will therefore make them safer in the bigger world, and more employable, and able to walk through the streets without the terror of violence. I want for trans people what I want for everyone: a fair living wage, health care, the absence of loneliness, freedom from addiction, a lemon tree in the front yard, and a TV show that they really love to watch.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/tv-shows-save-lives/380855/

Yearbook

chapmangamo:

Translated TV Shows

"You know, Dave," Chicago children's entertainer Pogo reportedly said over dinner with two cops who'd been tailing him, "clowns can get away with murder." Pogo would know, because outside of his clown identity he was John Wayne Gacy, the notorious 1970s serial killer and maybe one of the worst things to happen to clowns since the 1892 opera Pagliacci.

Clowns, it's fair to say, are not currently having the best time of it, PR-wise. The fourth season of American Horror Story, which debuted Wednesday, features Twisty the Clown as the primary antagonist: a terrifying perversion of the profession with a mask of grinning, oversized teeth and distorted black lips. In the opening episode, Twisty bounds up to a young couple in broad daylight, knocks them both out with juggling clubs, stabs the young man over and over again, kidnaps the woman and locks her up with a young boy in a decrepit old school bus, and forces them both to watch him craft balloon animals (there being clearly no limits to his malevolence).

In addition to this new incarnation of the monstrous, murdering clown trope, rogue scary clowns have been spotted recently stalking the streets of Wasco, California. In July, a "creepy" clown wearing a red wig and clutching a handful of pink balloons was sighted walking through Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. The professional clown industry, for once, isn't smiling. Membership of the World Clown Association, a U.S.-based trade group for performers, has fallen from 3,500 to 2,500 over the last 10 years. In the UK, a similar group, Clown International, has lost almost 90 percent of its members from its peak in the 1980s. Earlier this year, Butlin's holiday camp, in the popular destination of Bognor Regis, withdrew its annual offer to sponsor the group's annual gathering thanks to a decline in overall clown approval ratings.

How, exactly, did clowns go from lovable children's entertainers to the bewigged, bone-chilling incarnation of evil? The answer is complicated, and spans a period of almost 200 years, even if the current trend of coulrophobia seems to have peaked with the ascent of online media.

Traditionally clowns are anarchic figures who defy the boundaries of normal social conduct, even before Heath Ledger's Joker just wanted to watch the world burn. In Edgar Allan Poe's 1849 story Hop-Frog, a physically deformed court jester who's consistently the butt of practical jokes encourages the king and his court of noblemen to dress as orangutans covered in tar, at which point he sets them all on fire. The unpredictable nature of a clown's behavior, and his or her tendency to transgress acceptable standards of behavior (by, for example, throwing pies in each others' faces, or squirting water on an innocent bystander with a trick buttonhole flower), probably makes us wary of what other lines they might cross.

The makeup, too, is a factor. Traditional clown face paint—a white base, with exaggerated red lips and cheeks—was pioneered by Joseph Grimaldi, a popular entertainer in the early 19th century, and can be manipulated to create a face that is either grinning in an absurd rictus or tragicomically sad. "At its roots, clownaphobia springs from the duplicity implied by the frozen grins and false gaiety of clowns," writes cultural critic Mark Dery in his 1999 book The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: America on the Brink. "The clown persona protests too much; its transparent artificiality constantly directs our attention to what's behind the mask." The frozen smile of a clown makes his or her true expression impossible to read—yet another factor that leads us to ponder whether or not they can be trusted.

Despite all this, clowns were typically viewed in a positive light for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, even though Leoncavallo's aforementioned 1892 opera, Pagliacci, told the story of a clown who murders his unfaithful wife and her lover with a knife. (Se il viso è pallido, è di vergogna, the clown sings, or, If my face is white, it is for shame.) The turning point, culture-wise, appears to have been the arrest of Gacy, dubbed "the Killer Clown" by the media, whose grisly string of sexual assaults and murders contrasted so vividly with his alternate clown persona. As Pogo, Gacy performed at parades, parties, and charitable events, even meeting First Lady Rosalynn Carter in 1978 thanks to his role as director of Chicago's Polish Constitution Day Parade. While on death row, he painted a number of portraits of clowns, many depicting himself as Pogo, claiming that he wanted to use the paintings "to bring joy into people's lives."

The national shockwave following the exposure of one of the most prolific serial killers in American history may have forever traumatized the country as far as clowns were concerned. In 1980, Gacy was sentenced to death. Two years later, Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg released Poltergeist, a movie in which evil forces terrorize a household, in part by bringing young Robbie's Clown Doll to life and having it pull him under his bed and attempt to throttle him to death. In 1986, Stephen King published IT, a horror novel about the murderous Pennywise the Clown, who stalks children, terrifying them and occasionally ripping off their limbs. In 2009, King talked about the idea for Pennywise with Conan O'Brien. "As a kid, going to the circus, it'd be like 12 full-grown people piling out of a little car, their faces were dead-white, their mouths were red, as though they were full of blood," he said. "They were all screaming, their eyes were huge: What's not to like?"

Pennywise, as played so memorably by Tim Curry in the 1990 television movie of IT, emerged shortly after Jack Nicholson's Joker in Tim Burton's 1989 movie, Batman. The Joker, at least in comic books, has always seemed to occupy an odd space between jester, clown, and harlequin, but Nicholson's depiction felt deliberately clown-like, both in his pockets full of tricks (the flower filled with acid instead of water), and the way he used poison gas to give his victims pallid white skin and distorted scarlet smirks. Ledger's Joker, coming almost two decades later in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, was more explicitly wearing surreal makeup to enhance his scarred Chelsea grin: less Bozo, and more Insane Clown Posse.

Can clowns be saved? At this point, given their popularity as fright masks, the rise of coulrophobia, and the decline of the wholesome, apple-pie birthday party, it’s hard to see a future for clown acts outside of the circus (which itself is suffering thanks to the impossible dominance of the global juggernaut that is Cirque du Soleil). There is some hope: Even though studies in the past have typically shown that children fear clowns, research conducted at Tel Aviv University this year found that children undergoing allergy testing were less anxious when a clown was present in the room. Maybe the future for clowns is less about Ronald McDonald (nothing’s scarier than diabetes, after all) and more about distracting nervous patients from the giant needles injecting allergens into their skin.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/10/how-clowns-became-terrifying/381306/

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.

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

There is no political topic that makes the Clinton administration seem like ancient history more than gay rights.

Friday's release of a trove of White House papers from the Clinton library, coming at the conclusion of a week in which a pair of court decisions cleared the way for legal same-sex marriage in another dozen states, depicts the last Democratic presidency as even more of a relic.

The big debate at the start of Bill Clinton's first term was whether the new president would order the military to end its long-standing policy banning gays, and amid a bipartisan backlash, Clinton struck a compromise resulting in the policy–now infamous in some quarters–of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Among some 10,000 pages of documents that were posted online were hundreds of pages of legal memos on the proposed policy, as senior officials in the Justice Department weighed whether the new protocol would withstand legal challenges.

The documents also include 34 eye-opening pages of handwritten notes from a White House meeting during the first days of the administration in which Vice President Al Gore and Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, debated along with other Pentagon officials changing the ban.

Powell, as the president's chief military adviser, argued for keeping the ban in place. "Homo[sexuality] is a problem for us," he said, according to the handwritten notes. He pointed out that "sodomy" was banned by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. An "absolute right to privacy" for soldiers in such close quarters, Powell said, "simply does not exist."

He also listed AIDS as a concern in the military's policy toward gays, and he said officers would have to decide whether they could force straight soldiers to live with gay soldiers if the policy was changed. He noted that after desegregation of the military, white soldiers could not object to rooming with black soldiers but that male and female soldiers could not live together.

The parents of young soldiers, Powell said, were also "concerned about forced association and immaturity of 18-year-old" service members.

Most notably, Powell rejected the suggestion that the debate over gays in the military was a civil rights issue. The "comparison with blacks," he said, "is off-base" because race is a "benign characteristic."

A starred section of the notes indicates Powell's possible contribution to history: A "possible solution," he said, was that "we stop asking."

After much debate and dissent, that would be the policy of the United States for the next 18 years. Ultimately, it was a Democratic president that the Republican Powell endorsed who succeeded in persuading Congress to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and allow gays to serve openly in the military for the first time.

Powell told Politico in an email on Friday that he wanted Clinton to hear the views of the military in the meeting and noted that "the real issue was congressional opposition" at the time.

On the question of whether the debate was a civil rights issue, Powell wrote:

“I did not think they were equivalent; although both were discriminatory. The armed force[s] to do their job have to do things that are discriminatory, e.g. capital punishment for walking off the job.”

Powell now supports the policy of allowing gays to serve openly, and he said in 2012 that he no objections to same-sex marriage.

In the meeting, other military leaders voiced opposition to changing the clear-cut ban, while Gore spoke up for a view that would become largely undisputed over the next 20 years: Being gay was not a choice, but according to science, it was a "predisposition" for most.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/the-awkward-clinton-era-debate-over-dont-ask-dont-tell/381374/

mockeryd:

I AM SORRY BABY HUMAN! DO NOT CRY ANYMORE! i SHALL BRING YOU MORE TOYS

[video]

by Jazmine Hughes

I've already told you how nosy I am, so projects that answer "how X does Y" fascinate me. Also, I really like pictures of kids. Accordingly, probably just for me and no one else, the New York Times published a feature on what kids around the world eat for breakfast, launching a minor investigation into the nature/nurture dyad of how we categorize foods into "appropriate" meals. Breakfast-for-dinner, or brenner, according to my friend Brenner, always feels like an indulgence, though it's just a delay of food "normally" consumed ten hours prior, whereas dinner-for-breakfast feels backward and disruptive. Why have we set up these arbitrary food barriers for ourselves? Who's to say that fermented soybeans (or natto, a breakfast dish in Tokyo) aren't a delicious meal for any time of the day?

The article opens with a hot take: "Americans tend to lack imagination when it comes to breakfast"— which, ok, is totally true— but moves on to assert that a widespread change in taste preferences can happen ridiculously early, if we try:

Parents who want their kids to accept more adventurous breakfasts would be wise to choose such morning fare for themselves. Children begin to acquire a taste for pickled egg or fermented lentils early — in the womb, even. Compounds from the foods a pregnant woman eats travel through the amniotic fluid to her baby. After birth, babies prefer the foods they were exposed to in utero, a phenomenon scientists call “prenatal flavor learning.” Even so, just because children are primed to like something doesn’t mean the first experience of it on their tongues will be pleasant. For many Korean kids, breakfast includes kimchi, cabbage leaves or other vegetables fermented with red chile peppers and garlic. A child’s first taste of kimchi is something of a rite of passage, one captured in dozens of YouTube videos featuring chubby-faced toddlers grabbing at their tongues and occasionally weeping.

I texted my mom to ask what she ate when she was pregnant with me; she was a 25-year-old nurse, and it was her first pregnancy, so I figured she consumed only a healthy cocktail of fruits, veggies, and fairy dust. Wrong: "I ate Ruffles potato chips, Lincoln apple juice IN THE BOTTLE, pizza with mushrooms and extra cheese, and vanilla shakes from Alpha Delta Pizza. And lots of gum." Imagine me scratching at my tongue and crying.

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New tensions erupted in St. Louis on Wednesday evening after an off-duty police officer shot and killed Vonderrit Myers Jr, an 18-year-old African American man. The officer, who has not been named, was working at his second job as a security guard but was still wearing his police uniform when the incident occurred.

Teyonna Myers, the victim's cousin, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "He was unarmed. He had a sandwich in his hand, and they thought it was a gun. It’s like Michael Brown all over again."

St. Louis Police offered a different series of events. Chief Sam Dotson told the Associated Press the officer was spotted by three men while patrolling his designated security guard area in his car, and after one of the men ran away, the officer made a U-turn. This prompted all three to run away, with the officer tailing them in his car. The chase escalated as the officer got out of his vehicle and pursued one man on foot. Chief Dotson noted that because the teen was grabbing his waistband as he ran, the officer believed he was carrying a weapon.

"An investigation will decide if the officer's behavior was appropriate," said Chief Dotson, who did not offer an explanation for the seemingly excessive 17 shots. Police officers are generally trained to shoot to kill in situations where they feel their lives are threatened. As Jens David Ohlin, a professor of law at Cornell Law School, explained to me, there are two kinds of defensive force: "non-lethal measures and lethal measures. Once it is appropriate for the police officer to fire their weapon, you are in the territory of lethal measures and it is justified to kill the individual."

Many local residents drew parallels to the police shooting of Michael Brown, which took place in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, and the shooting of Kajieme Powell just a few days later. Protests of Myers death carried deep into the night and Thursday morning. The protests were predominantly peaceful, as no arrests were made or businesses looted, though some police car windows were broken in. (Dotson noted that police "showed great restraint" throughout the night.)

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/officer-shoots-and-kills-teen-in-st-louis/381274/

For years the biologist Gregory Goodwin Pincus had been searching for a project that might establish his greatness, only to watch ideas come and go like love affairs, beginning with promise and ending in hurt feelings.

His whole career had been a recovery process, one attempt after another to start over. He’d been unceremoniously dumped by Harvard and forced to start his own laboratory in a converted garage. When Pincus met the feminist crusader Margaret Sanger in 1950 and she implored him to go to work on the development of a birth-control pill, he knew the project carried enormous risk. Such a pill would never work, other scientists had told Sanger. And even if it did work, how would one test such a thing? Who would dare manufacture it? Who would prescribe it? Thirty states and the federal government still had anti-birth control laws on the books.

Yet in many ways, the pill project was perfect for Pincus. It concerned the area of science he knew best: mammalian reproduction. And it required not only scientific knowledge but also an entrepreneurial spirit. But the best reason the project suited Pincus was that he had nothing to lose. As one of his colleagues put it: “He wasn’t afraid to go out on a limb because he didn’t have any limb.”

Years of disappointment had taught Pincus that it wasn’t always the science that determined an experiment’s success; it was often the forces surrounding the science, including public sentiment. Now that Pincus had settled roughly on the hormone progesterone as the key to his pill, he needed to build the team to do the scientific work, forge alliances with manufacturers, conduct his trials, and, if all went well, spread the news of the coming invention so that it might have a chance at acceptance.

He knew that his progestins (synthetic forms of progesterone) stopped ovulation in rabbits and rats. The next step was to test them on women. And to do that, he would have to add a player to his team—a doctor who could reassure patients they were safe and would convey to the drug companies supplying the drugs that no one would be harmed. There had never been a medicine made for healthy people before—and certainly not one that would be taken every day. The risks were enormous. Pincus settled on a physician named John Rock, a gynecologist respected by his peers and adored by his patients. Rock looked like a family physician from central casting in Hollywood: tall, slender, and silver-haired, with a gentle smile and a calm, deliberate manner. Even his name connoted strength, solidity, and reliability.

Rock had one more thing going for him: He was Catholic.

There is no mention of contraception in the Bible, Old Testament or New, nor did the term enter the vocabulary of Catholic moral theology until the second half of the twentieth century. Before then, the most relevant term used by theologians was onanisma, from the biblical story of Onan (Genesis 38:4–10), which was described as masturbation or sexual intercourse performed without the intention of reproduction. Sex was only for procreation, the Christian church declared, which made onanisma a sin.

The human reproductive system was poorly understood even in the early years of the twentieth century. Many people thought women were merely the vessels, and that the man’s seed sprung on its own into a baby. That’s why spilling seed, or losing semen, whether in sex or masturbation, was labeled a sin.

Still, the Catholic Church had no official position on birth control until 1930, when Pope Pius XI issued a papal encyclical called “Casti Connubii” (Latin for “Of Chaste Wedlock”). The pope acknowledged that birth control was widely used “even amongst the faithful,” although he wasn’t happy about it, and called this trend “a new and utterly perverse morality.” He added that it amounted to a “shameful and intrinsically vicious” attempt to get around the natural “power and purpose” of the conjugal act. The pope did, however, offer the faithful an important loophole: A married couple would not be sinning, he said, if the husband and wife knew that natural reasons prevented them from having children.

For decades doctors had been instructing women who did not wish to become pregnant to have sex only during their “safe periods.” Unfortunately for many women, until the 1930s most doctors believed the safe period came in the middle of the menstrual cycle; in fact, that’s the time when women are most likely to conceive. After scientists finally got it right, a Chicago family doctor named Leo J. Latz, a devout Roman Catholic, figured out how this information, combined with the pope’s recent declaration, offered men and women a shot at having guilt-free and baby-free sex at certain times of the month. Latz wrote an instruction manual that sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

There was more than pleasure on the line. Women all over the world were desperate to control family size or better time the arrival of children—for the sake of their health and the welfare of their other children.

In the 1930s, birth rates for all American families fell to a low of 2.1 children per mother, in large part because of the Great Depression and in part because women—including Catholic women—became increasingly comfortable with the rhythm method and other forms of birth control. Priests, alarmed by the trend, took to their pulpits to attack birth control, but their sermons did little good. For the first time, many Catholics began compartmentalizing their beliefs. Sex became something private and apart from religion. It was the rumbling before a seismic shift.

John Rock had already gained a small measure of fame as the Catholic doctor who dared defy his church: He wanted young couples to talk about sex and babies before they married. He wanted them to understand that sex was neither shameful nor obscene. He wanted society to provide safe and effective means of birth control, and he wanted married couples to have the right to use them.

For all of this, Monsignor Francis W. Carney of Cleveland called the doctor a “moral rapist.” But Rock would not budge. It was no wonder Pincus liked him.

When Rock treated women for infertility, he would begin by taking a medical history and providing a complete physical exam. If the woman wasn’t menstruating, or if she wasn’t menstruating regularly, Rock might order an endometrial biopsy. Rock was unusual among fertility specialists at the time because he also asked husbands to have their semen tested. He was also unusual—if not unique—in that he operated a rhythm clinic down the hall from his infertility clinic to teach women how to better time their sexual activity to avoid unwanted pregnancies.

Between the women seeking birth control and those patients who were trying to overcome infertility, Rock came to understand not only human reproduction but also a good deal about human relations. In the same day, he would see some women who were straining to raise more children than they could handle and others deeply wounded by their inability to get pregnant. Among the women with children, many came asking for the only thing they’d ever heard of that would guarantee an end to their baby-making days: a hysterectomy, or the removal of the uterus.

One such patient, known as Mrs. L. A., was 32 years old. She had married when she was 18, borne 11 children, and had one miscarriage. Her last five deliveries had been by Cesarean section, and her very last had been twins. She told Rock she and her husband had sex twice a month and never used birth control. The twins were only six months old when Mrs. L. A. visited Rock. She reported that her husband was trying to be “careful,” meaning that he was withdrawing before he ejaculated, to avoid getting her pregnant again. She told the doctor she was exhausted, in pain, and suffering occasional blackouts. Her periods were unusually profuse and painful. Rock suggested an immediate hysterectomy.

Meeting these women emboldened Rock. In the 1950s, every young adult woman seemed to be having children, or wanting to. Raising big families was an act of patriotism in postwar America. Men and women who couldn’t reproduce were pitied. Year after year in the 1950s, the nation became more fertile. By 1957, the average American woman would have 3.7 children in her lifetime.

Demand for fertility treatments exploded in the 1950s, but doctors offered little meaningful help. Beginning around 1950, Rock conducted a series of experiments on women struggling with what he called “unexplained infertility.” He suspected that some of the women were not conceiving because their reproductive systems were not fully developed. When a woman with such a condition did somehow become pregnant, the ensuing pregnancy helped her reproductive system mature. To test his theory, he recruited 80 “frustrated, but valiantly adventuresome” women for an experiment in which he would use hormones—progesterone and estrogen, the same hormones Pincus had been studying—to create “pseudo pregnancies.” He confessed to the women that he had no idea if it would work, but the women trusted him and went along.

He started the women on 50 milligrams of progesterone and five milligrams of estrogen and escalated gradually to 300 milligrams of progesterone and 30milligrams of estrogen. When the first round of treatments ended, no one was dead and no one had become seriously ill. That was good news. Within months, the news got better. Thirteen of the 80 women in Rock’s care became pregnant when they’d stopped taking the hormones. Rock told colleagues that the hormone-induced pseudo pregnancies seemed to have given their bodies a lift and helped them become fertile. Soon, his fellow gynecologists were calling it “The Rock Rebound.”

Only one serious problem had developed: The women taking the hormones were often convinced that they were pregnant because the hormones produced many of the same symptoms as pregnancy: the women became nauseated; their breasts grew larger and more tender; and they stopped menstruating. The women were heartbroken when Rock told them, no, they weren’t pregnant; the hormones were merely tricking their bodies and mimicking pregnancy.

When Pincus learned of Rock’s work, he was pleased but not surprised that the progesterone and estrogen were having a contraceptive effect. The important thing to Pincus was the plain fact that Rock’s patients were not dying. Here was proof that it was safe to give large doses of progestins to women.

Still, Rock told Pincus that his infertile patients were crushed to learn that their symptoms of pregnancy were mere mirages. Pincus offered an elegant solution—and one that would have enormous consequences for his own work and for the future of women around the world. He told Rock to have his patients stop taking the pills for five days each month. Their hormone levels would return to normal, their symptoms would ease, and they would have their periods.

Rock liked the idea. It would make the pill seem more natural, like a scientific version of the rhythm method.

Once that was settled, Pincus presented Rock with a proposal: Would Rock permit some of his patients to be the first human recipients of an oral birth-control pill? The women would take Pincus’s form of the pill, not Rock’s, and they would be studied carefully to make absolutely certain they were not ovulating during their pseudo pregnancies. If they still benefitted from Rock’s rebound, great. But that wasn’t the point. The point was proving Pincus’s pill would work as an effective contraceptive.

Rock agreed. Together, the men would go on to conduct tests in insane asylums and in the slums of Puerto Rico and Haiti. They would even try giving the pill to men. They knew the Catholic Church would object to their work, and they had no idea if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would approve an oral contraceptive, or if a manufacturer would agree to sell one.

But those were problems for another day.

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This article has been excerpted from Jonathan Eig's The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-team-that-invented-the-birth-control-pill/380684/

29-Year-Old Brittany Maynard was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer and told she has 6 months to live. Rather than waiting for the cancer to give her a painful death, she decided to take her life, and death, into her own hands. She explains in an article she wrote for CNN:

Because the rest of my body is young and healthy, I am likely to physically hang on for a long time even though cancer is eating my mind. I probably would have suffered in hospice care for weeks or even months. And my family would have had to watch that.

I did not want this nightmare scenario for my family, so I started researching death with dignity. It is an end-of-life option for mentally competent, terminally ill patients with a prognosis of six months or less to live. It would enable me to use the medical practice of aid in dying: I could request and receive a prescription from a physician for medication that I could self-ingest to end my dying process if it becomes unbearable.

I quickly decided that death with dignity was the best option for me and my family.

More about Brittany and her choice can be found at the fund set up in her honor.

Alfonso Ribeiro finally pulls the “Carlton/Courteney Cox Dance” card.

“… The real trick to producing great work isn’t to find ways to eliminate the edgy, nervous feeling that you might be swimming out of your depth. Instead, it’s to remember that everyone else is feeling it, too. We’re all in deep water. Which is fine: it’s by far the most exciting place to be.”

Nobody Knows What The Hell They Are Doing, by Oliver Burkeman

I just read an article that isn’t related specifically to logos, but it’s one of the better collections of words in favour of saying no when for-profit companies ask for free work.

“This isn’t just about unpaid labor. One reason people, especially young people with creative aspirations, work for free is to form valuable relationships that will push their careers forward. But you can’t form a valuable relationship with a rich person who can afford to but won’t pay you a reasonable wage, because your entire relationship with that rich person is based on their failure to acknowledge the value of the work you’re doing for them.”

Exactly.

Don’t work for free — or even cheap — for rich people.

A good read, via Steve Douglas.

There are over 900 recipes in this site’s archives, [which is completely nuts, but also conveniently gives me an answer to the ever-present "what do you do all day?" question besides my usual, "mess around on Instagram?"] and while I’m overwhelmingly quite fond of all of them, there are ones that nag at me not necessarily because they don’t work but because they’re not, in hindsight, the “best in category” I once found them to be. Among these are the chicken pot pies I made from Ina Garten’s beloved recipe six years ago, and somewhere, my friend Ang is gasping because these are, to date, her favorite thing I’ve ever made for dinner. But I always thought they could have been better for several persnickety reasons.

First, instead of braising the chicken in that delicious veloué sauce you’re making, Ina has us roast chicken breast until they’re fully cooked, cool them, dice them and then add them to the sauce. But why? I asked Ina, but my book didn’t answer. That’s not the only extra step. Vegetables such as carrots, peas and those persnickety pearl onions are each blanched for two minutes in water before being added to the pot pie base, which baffled me even then. Why not just cook them in that finger-licking stew, too, and let them drink up all that awesomeness? My third quibble with the recipe is that for four servings of pot pie, the soup part alone uses 12 tablespoons (that’s 3/4 cup or 170 grams; it does not include the additional cup of butter used for the four pastry lids) of butter, and guys, I think it’s been fairly well established, perhaps even 900 times, my fondness for butter, but this is just … I cannot. When I created my own anything-but-abstemious pot pie recipe a few years ago for my cookbook, my filling only need 3 1/2 tablespoons butter for four portions to give you a nice rich sauce. Finally, I’d found that the sauce didn’t thicken well but assumed I’d done something wrong. A scroll through the comments that have arrived since indicates that it’s not just me.

... Read the rest of better chicken pot pies on smittenkitchen.com

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© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to better chicken pot pies | 181 comments to date | see more: Fall, Photo, Poultry, Stew, Winter

by Robert Balkovich

There are few people working in standup that are more divisive than Kathy Griffin. It doesn’t stem from controversial remarks, like many other comedians in her peer group, so much as taste. People who love her think that she is tremendous. People who don’t like her think that she's a talentless hack. There is very little middle ground, and even though she recently become only the third woman ever to win the Grammy for Best Comedy Album, she typically does not get respect from the mainstream.

Griffin’s career has often been compared to that of the late-great Joan Rivers, however their styles of comedy are actually like fire and water. Rivers was an old-school comic, rattling off joke after joke, firing punch lines into the audience with the speed of a gatling gun. Griffin’s sets are usually devoid of punchlines, or setups, or anything that serves as a comfortable guidepost when watching comedy. She tells stories, often about celebrities and pop culture, and you're either in it with her or you're totally lost. The one thing their careers have had in common is the ebb and flow. They have both been down before, under the radar for years before popping up on a TV show or news story that catches the eye of the public again.

Griffin has been in a moderate upswing for the last few years, in the spotlight thanks to her near-constant release of specials and CDs (like Rivers she also never turns down a job as long as it meets her fee), and highly publicized TV specials, such as New Years Eve with Anderson Cooper. She's been in the news most recently when she went on record as saying she was told by a CBS executive that they were “not considering females at this time” when she inquired about putting her name in the running to take over when Craig Ferguson left the Late Late Show. According to her she responded to those allegations by telling the executive that the lack of females in late night was “embarrassing,” and that “women who represent half the population should hold half of such jobs.” The executive responded by telling her that women already had their own show: The Talk. CBS, of course, dismissed her claims as false.

These allegations, and Griffin’s public reporting of them, are nothing new. Late night TV has always been a man’s game, and Kathy Griffin has always been a whistle blower of sorts for the entertainment industry. She does this humorously in her standup act; often when she is given a list of words or topics she is not allowed to discuss by the venue or client, she responds by reading said list on stage. In the case of the CBS executive she’s clearly taking a more serious stand, even though she is more well known for making crude off-the-cuff remarks. Many of her detractors point to this as a reason that they can’t abide: she has something to say about everything, it’s not always “ha-ha” funny, and she doesn’t know when to shut up. What gets lost in this critique is that her inability to shut up also provides us an important glimpse about what goes on behind the scenes, and how censorship and misogyny influence the way we engage with media.

I listened to Griffin on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast recently and was floored, as I always am, at her intelligence, honesty, and bravery. On WTF she talked candidly about her conservative upbringing. She grew up outside of Chicago, raised by two “total Irish alcoholic” parents to whom Catholicism was not just a religion, but an infallible social structure. Griffin explains that she “grew up in that Catholic family of ‘don’t say anything, and even if you see proof of something you better deny it, because that’s how we roll.’” She glibly mentioned to Maron that her uncle was a priest who got “moved from parish to parish” before eventually dying of AIDS. She talked candidly about her oldest brother who was a pedophile, who had been abused himself by a coach, and who was friends with the man who had sexually abused Griffin when she was a child. “My theory is that because this guy was my brother’s bestie, I have often had a lot of fear and guilt about, is this something they were doing together for fun? Because my guess is, dudes like this find each other,” she said bluntly of their friendship. When Maron asked if her parents knew, she said yes, but then stipulated that they were in denial:

GRIFFIN: And when my father finally said to him later in life, ‘Kathleen is estranged from you because she believes you’re a pedophile, is that true?’ And my brother Ken said to my father, ‘I do what I do.’

MARON: That’s what he said…

GRIFFIN: OK, so to this day my beloved mother is like, ‘Well, that’s not an admission.’ Let me tell you something – do you have sex with kids?

MARON: No.

GRIFFIN: OK, so your answer isn’t, ‘I do what I do.’ OK? If you asked me, I would not say, ‘I do what I do,’ I would say, ‘Nope, I sure don’t.’

When Griffin first rose to prominence in the ‘90s as an actress and comedian she was, in some ways, the pinnacle of the “un-cool” girl. In her act she talked rapid fire about vapid subjects: friends, dating, celebrities, etc, but she didn’t have the edge of Janeane Garofalo, or the sexual brazenness of Margaret Cho. The only shtick she had was that she was willing to talk about anything with her audience. Her career lulled at the turn of the century, and mostly lay dormant until 2005, when her reality TV show Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List premiered. Nine years later the show is remembered as a prototype for the avalanche of celebrity “candid” reality shows we’ve been inundated with, but unlike the Kardashians or Lindsay Lohan, My Life on the D-List had a near-perfect balance of reality and show. Griffin used every episode to create a character of herself, a hardworking comedian who valued success because it meant security, and fame because it meant success. Usually the episodes featured her contriving a publicity stunt of some sort with her eye-rolling assistants, and then executing it to mixed results. There was a lot on the show that was obviously staged, but the show as a whole was strangely authentic, even in its most put-on moments.

Her comical hunger for fame and wealth came from her middle-class upbringing, where nothing was taken for granted and every penny was put to good use. If you watched the show long enough it became clear that Griffin was not just a social climber, but an smart and successful businesswoman with an incredible work ethic. When she bemoaned her lack of respect as an actress and a comedian, she was both making fun of herself and projecting the unfair public image people have of her that she isn’t someone who deserves the mid-level career that she’s had. Those that watch carefully can see the self-awareness and intelligence behind the show, which won two well-deserved Emmy awards for “Outstanding Reality Program” during its run.

In the midst of the showbiz comedy there was also an intense personal and emotional current that ran through the show. Griffin did not just let viewers into a controlled version of her real life; she was often totally exposed on camera. In early seasons she experienced both a very painful divorce and the death of her father. Where other shows of its ilk would present these subjects in a dramatic and ultimately sympathetic manner, Griffin just told the truth. She sat in front of the cameras and cried, ugly, painful tears. She talked about being embarrassed to have realized that her husband probably never loved her, she revealed the immense pain she felt watching her mother, Maggie “Tip It” Griffin, the frequent butt of her jokes, trying to cope with the loss of her father. These moments peppered the show’s whole run. In an episode in a later season she is thrilled to get an acting gig on Law and Order, and then embarrassed to the point of tears when she gets on set and realizes that her usual funny shtick isn’t going to be enough to cut it. To this day I remember these moments, and I look back on My Life on the D-List as one of the very scant few reality TV shows that portrayed its subject honestly.

There is no vanity in those moments, and they certainly do nothing to help Griffin win over those who think she is immature and lacking in talent. Really, there is no glamour to anything she does, and even though it clearly pains her at times, she has never tried to change that. In her interview with Maron she tells him how she felt ostracized from his group of male comedian friends who all performed together at the time — Louis C.K., Nick DiPaolo, Dave Attell. She laughed about bombing nearly every show for five years straight, and Maron posits that Griffin was never really trying to be a standup in the way that he and the boys tried to be, she was doing something else. I think it is more complicated than that, but Maron is right. Griffin’s whole persona, from the standup, to relentlessly mocking celebrities, to My Life on the D-List, to coming out of meeting with executives and telling the public exactly what was said, is not about pleasing people by making them laugh, it’s Griffin’s form of rebellion.

In her interview with Maron she offhandedly calls herself a militant feminist. It seemed to me to be another one of her self-deprecating jokes at first, given that I know plenty of people who would trip over themselves coming up with things she has said to contradict that ascertain. But when we take a step back and really look at her work as a whole, it's all about rejecting the status quo, rejecting our accepted notions of what high or polite society is, raising our voices in dissent when something seems not right, no matter how unpopular it makes you. When we strip away our misogynist view of her career as a loud mouth bitch, and choose to see her instead as the Catholic girl who decided to not look the other way when she witnessed abuse, who grew up to be the woman who decided she wasn’t going to stay quiet in the face of the absurdity and hypocrisy of the entertainment industry no matter how many times the patriarchy has told her to shut up, militant feminist is actually a fitting description.

Robert Balkovich is an Oregonian-cum-New Yorker whose writing has appeared in/on The Airship Daily, 7 Stops Magazine, The Park Slope Reader, and TravelSquire.com. He is not from Portland. His other missives can be found @robertbalkovich.

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I have spent most of my egg-eating life doing everything in my culinary power to avoid getting texture of any kind on my eggs. Even the smallest amount of a wire-like edge to a firm-cooked white made me want to run, so when I’d cook eggs, I’d opt for any method that didn’t involve a frying pan. Hard-boiled? Good. Scrambled? Better. Soft-boiled, peeled and smashed? Oh yes. Poached? Yeah we can.

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.

... Read the rest of the crispy egg on smittenkitchen.com

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© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to the crispy egg | 259 comments to date | see more: Breakfast, Budget, Eggs, Photo, Quick, Vegetarian

This soup tastes like Fall in a bowl! Apples and caramelized onions are simmered with cider and broth, and blended with a touch of cream. The flavor is the perfect balance of savory and sweet. One bowl filled me up and made my tummy very happy!


Last Fall while visiting Harry and David in Oregon, I had lunch at a quaint bistro called Deja Vu Bistro that had this incredible soup.

I was dying to make this at home and I emailed the chef for the recipe. He was kind enough to send it to me and I've made it several times with slight adaptions to his original to lighten it up. In place of 1 cup of heavy cream I used 1/2 cup light cream. I also cut back on the butter and used slightly less cider since I was using less cream. Although it takes some time for the onions to caramelize, I think it's worth it. It also happens to be vegetarian and gluten-free. Enjoy!


Click Here To See The Full Recipe...

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/