A Florida woman has revealed that she spent nearly a year eating free rotisserie chickens from area Publix grocery stores by taking advantage of a store policy promising all sales be priced as advertised or taken off the bill.
Janet Feldman, a 57-year-old who designs stripper costumes, first demanded the so-called 'Publix promise' after realizing many of the stores birds didn't meet the listed 2-pound minimum weight.
A year and 300 free chickens later, the Davie woman portrays herself as a sort of Robin Hood of poultry.
Having presumably built up a level of chicken tolerance that one can only develop after housing approximately one bird every 24 hours for a year—or maybe she's lying; maybe she never ate them, maybe they're dressed up in small, custom stripper outfits and just hanging out around the dinner table at her apartment trying to agree on something to Netflix—Feldman recently obtained 47 free chickens in a single day and took her hard, greasy evidence to a local newspaper, exposing Publix's underweight chickens and, in the process, her own unquenchable desire for them.
"You can’t ever stay silent," she's quoted as saying. "Everybody’s got to speak up, even if it’s about chickens." [Daily Mail]
Train derailments. Bus crashes. Plane crashes. And one hell of a twist ending to the incredible true story of this Croatian man who is both blessed and cursed.
In the field of pain studies, urban legend had it that the presence of experimenters decreased pain behavior in mice and rats, and that more pain would be recorded if experimenters left the room.
"It was sort of lab lore. A thing that people whispered about sometimes in meetings," says Dr. Jeffrey Mogil, chair of the Pain Genetics Lab at McGill University. "After hearing this story on and off for 15 years I finally said, 'Listen, if you think this is true, let's do it properly and see if it is.'"
Stress is known to have an analgesic, or pain-inhibiting, effect. So for the first experiment, Mogil and his team injected lab mice with an inflammatory agent and recorded the pain responses with an experimenter present in the room, and the mice's responses when the experimenter was absent. In subsequent experiments, the experimenter was replaced with t-shirts worn by human males and females, as well as bedding material from the mice's own cages and from different animals including other mice, guinea pigs, rats, cats, and dogs—both castrated and "gonadally intact."
The results were a "huge shock," says Mogil. The researchers' suspicions were confirmed, but only halfway: Experimenters did decrease pain in mice—but only male experimenters.
As noted in their findings, which were published in Nature Methods this week, male experimenters and olfactory stimuli produced no effect and neutralized the effect of male stimuli when presented together. On average, the pain response in the mice decreased a significant 36 percent after the introduction of stimuli from male experimenters and un-castrated male animals, and the effect proved to be "exactly as stressful" as two comparison conditions—a three-minute swim in cold water and 15 minutes of restraint in a tube.
"We weren't surprised that those [comparison conditions] would produce stress because we knew they would, but we were surprised that the simple presence of male olfactory stimuli could produce stresses of an equivalent level," Mogil says. "It's quite impressive. This is a very robust amount of stress to not know about until 2014."
He speculates that since bedding from stranger mice produces the effect, what causes the stress is the thought of imminent territorial aggression from males in general, rather than the threat of predation from human males specifically. "What they're afraid of is strange male mice," he explains. "It's just that other male mammals, including us, smell like male mice."
Mogil's theory might also explain why the presence of female researchers and olfactory stimuli defuse the effect of stress-induced analgesia: If the mice smell a mixed-sexed group, the "strange" male mouse is likely to be within a group or with its family, and much less likely to be aggressive or defending territory. The scientist has received a grant to observe whether the same effect is true for people. He believes that it will be, however, since the stress disappears once the animal convinces itself there's no actual danger, "humans would be able to do that fairly quickly"—and any observable stress response would likely be much smaller and shorter-lived.
"A lot of people may interpret this study as bad news that animal testing doesn't work or can fatally confound [research], but I don't look at it that way," says Mogil. "I think a stronger case can be made that, actually, this is good news for animal research."
Growingconcernsabout the ability to replicate the results of animal testing and the occurrence of false positives may be assuaged by the premise of this new explanation: That it isn't about one lab being right and another wrong, but that both labs are right given their particular environmental context.
"The biological phenomena under study are interacting with these laboratory environmental factors that we don't know about. That means that the results are true, but are just more complicated than we currently understand," says Mogil. "I've seen how much inertia there is in science, but if we started to pay attention to this sort of thing, then we would understand what factors actually matter, and that would make research going forward stronger."
In this case, while the sex effect on mice does go away after extended exposure to male olfactory stimuli, Mogil understands that it is unreasonable to mandate that a female researcher always be present in the room, or even to ask male researchers to sit in a room with mice or rats for 30 to 45 minutes before testing. Instead, he suggests the simple solution of including information about the researchers' sex in their methods section.
"Now that people know this, they can go back and look over their old data and hopefully be able to explain why, for example, they had an effect when with one student, but when a new student took over the project, the effect went away; or why they weren't able to replicate the lab in their field in another city," Mogil says. "I'm hoping that this will solve some existing mysteries."
Group of researchers ran this interesting field experiment. They emailed more than 6,500 professors at the top 250 schools pretending to be the students. And they wrote letters saying, I really admire your work. Would you have some time to meet? The letters to the faculty were all identical, but the names of the students were all different. [...] Brad Anderson. Meredith Roberts. Lamar Washington. LaToya Brown. Juanita Martinez. Deepak Patel, Sonali Desai, Chang Wong, Mei Chen. [...]
All they were measuring was how often professors wrote back agreeing to meet with the students. And what they found was there were very large disparities. Women and minorities [were] systematically less likely to get responses from the professors and also less likely to get positive responses from the professors. Now remember, these are top faculty at the top schools in the United States and the letters were all impeccably written.
Two more kickers: "There's absolutely no benefit seen when women reach out to female faculty, nor do we see benefits from black students reaching out to black faculty or Hispanic students reaching out to Hispanic faculty," and, "In business academia, we see a 25 percentage point gap in the response rate to Caucasian males vs. women and minorities." Word, this sounds great, we're doing great. [NPR]
Slate's posted a letter that Rose Wilder Lane wrote to her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder after reading the first draft of By the Shores of Silver Lake, and although I was vaguely aware that Rose Wilder was a hardass whose outlook on civil society I will never ever share (she may be credited with the current use of "libertarian"), this note is really a marvel:
You have the brief scene in which Laura threatens to kill Charley with a knife, but that has to be cut out. A 12-year-old girl whose cousin wants to kiss her does not normally threaten him with a nice; she laughs and kisses him, he’s her cousin. Or if she’s shy and doesn’t like him she just escapes, and the incident is not important enough to mention. […] You cannot have [your character] acting like a slum child who has protected her virginity from street gangs since she was seven or eight. Maybe you did it, but you can not do it in fiction; you can not make it credible in under ten or twelve thousand words, and if you do make it credible it’s not a child’s book.
She follows that up with this:
I remember when I was five years old or so, and Mrs. Boast let those hoodlums take me home, I ran away from a hulking big brute who tried to kiss me, and his motive was pure sex sadism which I recognized well enough without knowing at all what it was. I suppose something of that kind was in this incident. But it is not child’s book stuff.
Whether she edited the Little House series or ghostwrote them completely, Rose knew what she was doing in terms of this "child's book stuff," but damnnnn. [Slate]
I’m not a dog person. I prefer cats. Cats make you work to have a relationship with them, and I like that. But I have adopted several dogs, caving in to pressure from my kids. The first was Teddy, a rottweiler-chow mix whose bushy hair was cut into a lion mane. Kids loved him, and he grew on me, too. Teddy was probably ten years when we adopted him. Five years later he had multiple organs failing and it was time to put him to sleep.
When I arrived at the vet, he said I could drop him off. I was aghast. No. I needed to stay with Teddy. As the vet prepped the syringe to put him to sleep, I started sobbing. The vet gave me a couple minutes to collect myself and say goodbye. I held Teddy's paw until he died. Honestly, I didn't think I was that attached.
This experience led me to undertake experiments on animal-human relations to try to understand how animals make us care so much about them. Biologically, I wanted to know if pets cause the people to release oxytocin, known as the neurochemical of love, and traditionally associated with the nurturing of one's offspring.
My lab at Claremont Graduate University in California pioneered the study of the chemical basis for human goodness. In the past decade, we have done dozens of studies showing that the brain produces the chemical oxytocin when someone treats us with kindness.
I call oxytocin the "moral molecule" because it motivates us to treat others with care and compassion. Oxytocin was classically associated with uterine contractions in humans, and in rodents caring for offspring. Our studies showed that a large number of agreeable human interactions—from trusting a stranger to hold money for you, to dancing, to meditating in a group—causes the release of oxytocin and, at least temporarily, makes us tangibly care about others, even complete strangers.
In our animal experiment, 100 participants came into my lab and we obtained blood samples from them to establish their baseline physiologic states. Then they went into a private room and played with a dog or cat for 15 minutes. We did a second blood draw after this, and then had participants interact with each other to see how they behaved toward humans, too. If animals caused oxytocin release in humans, it would explain my surprise attachment to my dog Teddy, and perhaps why people spend thousands of dollars to treat a pet medically rather than euthanize it and simply get a new animal.
Our previous studies showed that when humans engage in social activities with each other, oxytocin levels typically increase between 10 percent and 50 percent. The change in oxytocin, measured in blood, indexes the strength of the relationship between people. When your little daughter runs to hug you, your oxytocin could increase 100 percent. When a stranger shakes your hand, it might be 5 or 10 percent. If the stranger shaking your hand is attractive, oxytocin might increase 50 percent. Oxytocin is considered a reproductive hormone. It increases powerfully during sexual climax, establishing long-term bonds between romantic partners. Our experiments focus on what causes the brain to make oxytocin and its behavioral effects.
The dog and cat study showed that neither species consistently increased oxytocin in humans. Only 30 percent of participants had an increase in oxytocin after playing with an animal. We found that one factor predicted whether playing with a dog would increase oxytocin: the lifetime number of pets of any type one had owned.
The opposite was true for those who interacted with cats. Greater lifetime pet ownership caused oxytocin to fall linearly. Dogs are simply more "people-oriented" than cats, and previous pet ownership seems to have trained our brains to bond with them.
We also found that dogs reduced stress hormones better than cats (no surprise there!). When stress hormones were lower, people in the experiment trusted strangers with more of their own money. This may tell us why people who own dogs are judged as more trustworthy than those who don't. The human-canine bond appears to be powerful and important to both species.
Many dogs, and sometimes other mammals, exhibit another human-like behavior: play. I was curious if animals can form friendships with other animals and was invited to take part in a small-scale experiment for BBC television that would give me a chance to test this.
As in our laboratory experiment, I wanted to see if cross-species animal play causes oxytocin synthesis. This would be biological evidence for animal friendships. That's how I ended up in Arkansas with a goat in my lap.
At an animal refuge in Arkansas, where a large variety of animals interact with one another, I obtained blood samples from a domestic mixed-breed terrier and a goat that regularly played with each other. Their play involved chasing each other, jumping towards each other, and engaging in simulated fighting (baring teeth and snarling). Both animals were young males. We then placed the dog and goat into an enclosure together and let them play. A second blood sample was done after 15 minutes.
We found that the dog had a 48 percent increase in oxytocin. This shows that the dog was quite attached to the goat. The moderate change in oxytocin suggests the dog viewed the goat as a "friend."
More striking was the goat's reaction to the dog: It had a 210 percent increase in oxytocin. At that level of increase, within the framework of oxytocin as the "love hormone," we essentially found that the goat might have been in love with the dog. The only time I have seen such a surge in oxytocin in humans is when someone sees their loved one, is romantically attracted to someone, or is shown an enormous kindness.
Charles Darwin, in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals argued that emotions are conserved across species, including dogs, goats, and humans. That animals of different species induce oxytocin release in each other suggests that they, like us, may be capable of love. It is quite possible that Fido and Boots may feel the same way about you as you do about them. You can even call it love.
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Claire Messud, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.
Doug McLean
After Marcus Burke, author of Team Seven, learned he’d been accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he got no Girls-style celebration. His basketball coaches and teammates at Susquehanna University were mostly baffled, even angered, by his literary hopes. They couldn’t understand why Burke, a gifted athlete having a standout season, would throw away a lifetime’s training trying to write fiction. They wanted him to keep playing in Europe, not cast his bet with the writing desk and art’s uncertain lot.
I first met Burke, who later became a classmate of mine at Iowa, when he visited the program as a prospective graduate student. When he joined us at the Foxhead, a writers’ bar in town, he seemed nervous but giddy, like someone who knows he’s about to a burn a bridge—and wants to. “People don’t get the writing thing, not at all,” I remember him saying, but I could tell he was ready to trade in his old mentors for a set of new ones.
In his interview for this series, he discussed how a line from Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro helped him build the confidence to turn from sports to literature. We discussed the ways that context, relationships, and race can come to define us, the hard work of unlearning who you’re told to be, and the ways stories can break down barriers.
Team Seven takes place south of Boston, in Milton and Mattapan, where suntanned ladies bake out along Lothrop Avenue, reggae and rap battles mix with blunt-smoke in Kelley Park, and street gangs scuffle on the streets. It’s the story of Andre Battel, a gifted athlete who lets his basketball dreams slide as he gets in deep with Team Seven, a squad of local dealers. With multiple narrators and voices that range from freestyle rap to Jamaican patois, the novel depicts a West Indian community as its young people struggle against darkness.
Marcus Burke spoke to me from his home in Iowa City.
Marcus Burke: I still remember the first sentence I ever wrote. I was a junior in high school, and we had just moved to another city from my hometown—Milton, Massachusetts. It was a rough time. I can be a person who clams up—I didn’t want to talk, but then I had a lot on my mind. One day I went to the computer, and a blank Word screen was there, waiting. I don’t know why, but I started to write:
“The holiday season reminds me of how fucked up families can be sometimes.”
That’s how it began. From there I kept going. It was a deeply personal urge to just start writing. Why did I do that? I still don’t know. Sometimes I think the law of attraction keeps the world together—you eventually come to what you’re going to do.
I kept it very quiet. My sisters knew that I would write sometimes, but I didn’t have much confidence in it. I didn’t want to show it to anybody. Senior year, while I was I playing basketball at the private school Brimmer and May, I would get rides into school from the registrar—the school was far away from where we lived, and she lived nearby. I’d read to her from my stories sometimes. She didn’t mind me cursing and cutting up in the car. Instead, she’d laugh—and say, you’re good. You should do something with this.
Writing was the highlight of my academic life, which wasn’t saying much. In public school, at least the school I’d been going to, I could squeeze by doing very little. In class, you could put your hoodie on and keep your head down on the desk, and nobody would really bother you. I had to get good enough grades to get into private school, but there I didn’t really push myself there, either. The great faculty there did their best to start molding me into a student, but I was having success on the court, and I knew what I could get away with. For me the term, “student-athlete” was something of an oxymoron. I wasn’t an NBA prospect or anything, but you couldn’t really convince me that there was going to be consequences to my lack of action.
When you get recruited it puts you in a funny mind-space—coaches and colleges all calling, and they want you. But it’s really just setting you up for a fall. Because once the ball stops bouncing, the world wants to know what else you can do.
I was recruited to play Division III basketball at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. By the end of my freshman year in college, I was in trouble. I was failing out of the business school. I’d gotten three Fs, and was on academic and financial aid probation. Not only that, I didn’t mesh with my coach’s system initially. So basketball hadn’t been rewarding the way I’d hoped, and chronic patellar tendinitis—jumper’s knee—kept me from being the player I’d wanted to be, too. The only thing I felt like I had any confidence in was that I liked telling stories. I didn’t know that you could even major in such a thing. I didn’t know it existed!—until I saw a little video on my school’s website about the university’s undergraduate offerings. I was like, wait—on this campus here I can major in creative writing?
I went and saw the chair of the department. I told him I wanted to change my major, and asked about what writing students do when they get out of Susquehanna. He hemmed and hawed a little, and then he told me a story about a guy who graduated and was a manager at a Chili’s. I signed up anyway.
My sophomore year, I showed up for “Intro to Fiction.” The professor was Tom Bailey, who was an alum of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was publishing novels. The other kids were talking about all these books that they’d read, and all their favorite writers, and what their “process” was. I had no idea what they were talking about. I felt so out of place, so overwhelmed, that I skipped the second class.
But I did do the homework assignment. I wrote a story called “The Big One-Two”—it’s part of my novel now—and gave that to the class. It wasn’t very polished. It needed lots of fine-tuning. But my professor responded with praise and encouragement. It was confusing for me. I didn’t understand what he was reacting to, or what constituted good literature. I couldn’t see what they saw. But I’d been in so much academic trouble the year before, and I was struggling athletically, and I was glad at least one thing was seeming to go well.
If you guys like it, I thought, well—I do, too.
From there, I think I could feel my loyalties switching. It was a baffling paradigm shift from being a basketball player to becoming a writer, and it required a lot of soul searching. At the same time, I was out in the middle of central PA—which wasn’t the most hospitable place. I had fallen out of grace with a lot of the big basketball people, and the coach responsible for linking me into to Susquehanna wasn’t jazzed about the writing thing, and he didn’t have good things to say about it. It’s hard not to listen to what a coach you once trusted says is best. This was the guy who believed in me enough to pull me out of a bad situation in high school, and paid for me to come. It was a complicated split and it rattles your confidence to pursue another endeavor with no backing.
I’d burned a lot of my bridges at Susquehanna, by sophomore year, and the coach that put us at Susquehanna wanted us to leave. He said he saw a way forward for me. He wanted me to forget about the writing thing and go to Robert Morris, where he knew the head coach, who he thought could get me into shape. That world is all a big fraternity—he could get me a spot, he said. He’d even buy me a computer to write on if I’d behave.
The coach at Robert Morris at the time was Mike Rice—who was later fired from Rutgers for abusing his players. I was in the game early enough that I knew Coach Rice back in Boston. And I knew he was crazy—he was throwing balls at me, he was screaming at people. I left that workout feeling like I took part of something completely not OK. That man? Is a lunatic.
So, when my coach said, you go play for Mike Rice at Robert Morris, I was like: Have you lost your mind? I’ll pass on that one. And he snapped.
He said, You’re going to be an alcoholic. You’ll be suicidal. You’re not going to make any money. He said, What the hell is a writer going to do? You going to wait tables? He held his authority over my head. The message was: You’re coming out of my graces, so you better not run too far from the money pot. I knew our relationship couldn’t be the same after that.
But I had to figure something out. At a basketball camp one time I had a coach who said, “Listen guys, use the game but don’t let it use you.” In other words: don’t be 24 years old, still trying to reclassify yourself to get into a Division I school. You’re delaying the process of your life. Go to school, man! If it hasn’t happened, it hasn’t happened. The longer you skirt that truth—thinking it applies to everybody but you—the harder you fall on your face. But me, my teammates in college, nobody really prepared us for what would happen if it didn’t work out. I don’t think anyone really thought past that point. It was too hard to think, “Oh, so it’s just over now?”
So I decided to stay in Pennsylvania and keep writing, try to turn it into a viable Plan B. That summer, instead of working on my game, I stayed on campus to work in the library. I put myself in a well of books. It was total immersion. My “Intro to Fiction” teacher gave me reading suggestions—but I mostly blew them off. He broke it down for me in basketball terms: “You think your jump shot’s going to get better if you don’t work on it?” But I wasn’t a huge reader growing up. It had never been my thing. He’d kept telling me to read Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, and though I’d tried and hadn’t cared for it, that summer I opened it again and just fell in. I had to ask myself: What the hell have I been doing? Why have I not been reading this?
I took his suggestions more seriously after that.
I remember reading “Sonny’s Blues,” “Nilda” by Junot Diaz, ZZ Packer’s stuff, Edward P. Jones, and James Alan McPherson. Jim McPherson's stuff made an impact on me especially: I’d never seen fireworks like that on the page. That’s when I started to realize, now this is the stuff I like.
As I read, my confidence in my ability to learn and comprehend grew too. And in Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro, I found a quote that I returned to countless times as I wrote Team Seven:
Philosophers have long conceded … that every man has two educations: that which is given to him, and the other that which he gives himself. Of the two kinds the latter is by far the more desirable. Indeed all that is most worthy in man he must work out and conquer for himself. It is that which constitutes our real and best nourishment. What we are merely taught seldom nourishes the mind like that which we teach ourselves.
I feel like I could have those words tattooed on my heart. I couldn’t only teach myself. I needed Tom Bailey to point out certain writers he knew I’d like, people I’d never find out about on my own. That’s the education you are given. But it’s another thing entirely to actually read these authors, see what they’re about, and decide how much they matter. Nobody can do that for you. That’s the kind of education you can only give yourself.
And it’s applicable in a broader sense, too: People are always going to be telling you who you are. But you’ve got to learn to make your own decisions about who you can and can’t be.
That fall, two things happened. I applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. And I started playing the best basketball of my life.
As a senior in college, it was the first time I’d ever been healthy. At the same time, I could see my athletic life coming to a close. In my senior year bio, the first line was “Marcus Burke is healthy through preseason for the first time in his whole career.” I understood; how much longer could I do this to my body?
I would pray before every game that I didn’t get hurt. I got nervous every game. We’re all out here, and we’re all really strong. If someone hits you in the wrong way, that could be bad.
But it didn’t even necessarily take that. I saw guys get career-ending injuries just turning around on the court. Nothing drastic. I had a teammate—we were just laughing in the tunnel, and suddenly his ACL is done. Nothing dramatic had to happen. Your number can get pulled any day.
But I played. I played so well that eventually that coach reached out through my head coach on campus, and said he wanted to get back in touch. Basically, by the end of that season, me and that coach were back in touch. He said, “I can’t guarantee that you’re going to be playing the First Premier League overseas, but with these numbers you can get a roster spot somewhere. I can say you’ll be able to live, make some money, and figure out your life.”
When [Iowa Writers’ Workshop director] Sam Chang called, it was towards the end of the season. I was at team lunch, and I almost didn’t answer the call because I didn’t know the number. I answered it and Sam came through the phone—“This is the Workshop!”—I made such a fool of myself. I asked her name probably four times. I felt so vindicated. I kept yelling, “I’m going to come! I know already!” She kept saying, “slow down, slow down—I need to tell you: you have a fellowship!”
The world had taught me I could be a pretty decent basketball player. I’m grateful for that; it taught me a lot. But I taught myself, with the help of some great teachers, that I needed to write. So I went.
It’s very easy to be defined by your circumstances. We’re all dealt such drastically different hands of cards. Think about it: Some kids’ parents are 100 percent ready for their arrival. They have a dope room, great clothes, and a whole bunch of people ready to love them. Doesn’t that teach you certain things about yourself? But other kids, they pop up at a very inconvenient time for everybody. And that teaches you certain lessons, too.
Nonetheless, there comes a time when you start to just feel responsible for yourself. Yes, you’re at the mercy of whatever life grants you—but that second education is taking the power back. Developing the ability to say, well, certain things happened, but now I would like to do this or that, and I don’t see why I can’t. We’re always being told who we can be or we can’t be, we’re always having labels slapped on. This is what black guys do, exclusively. Or if you do that, you’re maybe not such a black guy. Of if you’re an athlete, you can’t write—and so on. The second education means broadening your horizons—taking risks to definite yourself against all odds. History is written every day, and nothing is certain. Maybe you’re writing towards a thought of school or tradition that you’re not really aware of yet—and maybe it doesn’t yet exist. But you can come to define it.
This is part of what’s at stake for me in literature. I refuse to be put in a box. I think I wrote a novel that’s not just “street lit.” And yes, while I’m an African-American writer—if you even want to say that, because it’s just a P.C. term for “black”—I’m not African-American in the way most people consider it, because my family comes from Jamaica, and not so long ago. (Jim McPherson would always joke—“The reason you get so charged up is because your family hasn’t been here that long. Your people are still trying to learn to be a minority. Your people in their recent past where in the land of majority, where they are. Don’t be a moral dandy, kid.”)
There aren’t many white characters in this novel, but I never thought about it. I wasn’t really trying to write “black” characters either. I’m blessed to say that everybody that I’ve worked with doesn’t really subscribe to that nonsense. One of the things that charmed me about my editor when we spoke—something that really moved me was, he said, “This isn’t just a ‘black’ story or a ‘white’ story. This is an international story. I wouldn’t want to ghettoize this story.”
Just because I’m a black guy doesn’t mean that every action that I make defines who I am in relation to my blackness. Of course, I know that people are tribal. Mankind doesn’t like what it doesn’t understand—if people can’t drop a couple boxes around something, we have a hard time saying what it is. We rely on those kinds of categories. It’s human nature. I don’t even look at it as a bad thing, necessarily. Every time you look at somebody, a whole bunch of boxes get checked. A certain amount of this is unavoidable.
And still, I think, we can transcend these labels, too. That is another one of my stakes in literature. When I came out to visit Iowa City, I went out to a bar to watch the Red Sox play. And there was a guy sitting there in a Pawtucket Red Sox hat. I thought, what is this guy doing out here, in the middle of Iowa, wearing a hat for the Red Sox minor league team? We started talking, and it turned out it was the writer Paul Harding—he was teaching at the Workshop that semester, and a few weeks later won the Pulitzer Prize. We had so much more in common than I could have known, sitting there: Boston guys, sports fans, writers. And that night, he told me something I’ll always remember.
“One of the only requirements for literature,” he said, “is that the reader can feel a heart pulsing back from them on the other side of the page.”
That feeling is indiscriminate. It’s not black or white; it’s classless, sexless. It doesn’t matter where you fall on any kind of spectrum: emotional truth is emotional truth. And this is the standard I’m trying to reach for. People are different and aesthetics are different—there’s so much variety in literature. But the universal needs the singular, and the singular must contain the universal. If you can put yourself in it, the labels fall away and it becomes art.
When Sandra Hassan created the I Am Alive app, her intention was mostly dark humor. A 26-year-old graduate student in Paris, Hassan had gotten sick of worrying about family and friends whenever she heard news of a suicide bombing in her hometown of Beirut. A detonation on January 21, in the same neighborhood where a car bomb had exploded just three weeks earlier, spurred her to action. In what she describes as an “expression of discontent,” Hassan developed an app that allows users, with one touch, to tweet a reassuring message to their followers: “I am still alive! #Lebanon #LatestBombing.”
The app quickly caught on: within a month, it was downloaded more than 5,000 times. In addition to cultural commentary, it has provided a much-needed service to people who live in areas targeted by terrorists—and to those who care about them. The moments following a suicide bombing are, after all, among the worst times to make a phone call. Networks jam. Getting sent to voice mail induces dread. “It’s the same cycle each time,” Hassan says. “You have to rush to your phone or Facebook or Twitter to try to make sure that everyone you know is okay. It’s a horrible feeling.” On the ground, the trilling of victims’ phones becomes an eerie score to the aftermath.
Hassan now offers hashtags for other countries and allows users to post their statuses to Facebook. She also realized that the app might help in all kinds of crises. To that end, she is working with the nonprofit International Crisis Group to develop a version for use in situations from natural disasters to mass-transit accidents.
In the meantime, Hassan says she’s gotten e-mails from many people who are using the app “in much more peaceful ways.” Members of one jet-setting family told her that they use it to let one another know when their planes have safely touched the ground.
There was no transition at all, no sense of approaching danger. It was as if I had suddenly gone blind and deaf. I was aware that my legs were surrounded by water, but my top half was almost dry. I seemed to be trapped in something slimy. There was a terrible, sulphurous smell, like rotten eggs, and a tremendous pressure against my chest. My arms were trapped but I managed to free one hand and felt around – my palm passed through the wiry bristles of the hippo's snout. It was only then that I realised I was underwater, trapped up to my waist in his mouth.
-There is no way I would have survived this hippo attack, but this man did, and wrote about it at the Guardian.
RECIFE, Brazil — When Ivana Borges learned she was pregnant, she told her obstetrician that she wanted a natural birth. Her mother had delivered five children without surgery or medication, and Borges wanted to follow her example.
But when she returned the hospital after her water broke, the same doctor began persuading her that she should instead deliver by caesarean section.
“He told me I wasn’t getting dilated enough,” Borges told me the other day in Recife. “I said, ‘I can wait!’ Then he started joking that I couldn’t handle the pain.”
He pestered her while she labored for six hours, and gradually the then-24-year-old Borges began feeling powerless and overwhelmed. She caved. The C-section commenced, but that wasn’t the end of the doctor’s heckling.
“He was saying, ‘I was at a birthday party, and I want this done fast because I want to go back and finish my whiskey,’” she said.
Borges said the experience was so traumatic that she sought psychiatric help for depression after the birth.
Doctors and activists here say Borges's experience is fairly common among women who give birth in the country’s private hospitals, where 82 percent of all babies are born by C-section. Brazil has a free, public healthcare system, but many of its wealthier residents–about a quarter of the population–use a private insurance scheme that functions much like the U.S. medical system.
With the higher price of the private system comes better amenities and shorter wait times, but also all of the trappings of fee-for-service medical care. C-sections can be easily scheduled and quickly executed, so doctors schedule and bill as many as eight procedures a day rather than wait around for one or two natural births to wrap up.
“It’s a money machine,” Borges said.
The economics of private insurance certainly play a role, but culture is a big part of what drives the C-section epidemic here.
“Childbirth is something that is primitive, ugly, nasty, inconvenient,” Simone Diniz, associate professor in the department of maternal and child health at the University of São Paulo, said. “It takes long, and the idea is we have to make it fast. It’s impolite for doctors to leave cases for the doctors on the next shift–there’s a sense that you need to either accelerate it or do a C-section.”
Even in public hospitals, the C-section rate is roughly half. Because so many patients are booked in advance for C-section procedures, women who want natural births find themselves on zero-hour sojourns to find free beds. One Sao Paulo doctor told me that some physicians ask for bribes in exchange for allowing mothers to deliver naturally. And in an extreme example from earlier this month, a woman named Adelir Carmen Lemos de Goés was forced by police to deliver by C-section in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.
Campaign slogan for the Brazilian protests against coerced C-sections
"There is no doubt that, even if it contains unnecessary or even greater risk to the mother or the newborn, ceasarean section has a much lower risk for the obstetrician,” wrote a 2005 editorial in the Brazilian Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Granted, many women ask for the procedure of their own accord, seeing the convenience and sterility of it all as a marker of liberation rather than oppression. Rio and Sao Paulo are dotted with upscale C-section resort clinics where women get post-op manicures and room service.
But a 2001 study of Brazilian women published in the British Medical Journal concluded that the country’s rise in C-sections was driven primarily by unwanted procedures rather than personal preference. And some women elect to go under the knife only after hearing about the rough treatment of mothers who choose the alternative.
"Here, when a woman is going to give birth, even natural birth, the first thing many hospitals do is tie her to the bed by putting an IV in her arm, so she can't walk, can't take a bath, can't hug her husband. The use of drugs to accelerate contractions is very common, as are episiotomies," Maria do Carmo Leal, a researcher at the National Public Health School at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, told the AP. "What you get is a lot of pain, and a horror of childbirth. This makes a cesarean a dream for many women."
Many physicians’ attitudes toward childbirth weave together Brazil’s macho culture with traditional sexual mores.
“There’s the idea that the experience of childbirth should be humiliating,” Diniz said. “When women are in labor, some doctors say, ‘When you were doing it, you didn't complain, but now that you're here, you cry.’”
This brashness manifests itself in other types of interventions during labor. Though Brazilian law mandates that all women be allowed doulas or birthing companions, few moms are actually accompanied by such helpers. In past years, some Brazilian cities tried to bar companions from hospitals entirely.
Diniz said many doctors unnecessarily overuse fundal pressure – pushing on the pregnant woman’s stomach – to speed things along, and that they administer the labor hormone oxytocin more frequently than needed. The vast majority of women who give birth vaginally also have episiotomies, or surgical cuts to the vagina that are intended to make delivery easier.
“We have a really serious problem in Brazil that the doctors over-cite evidence [of fetal distress],” said Paula Viana, head of a women’s rights nonprofit in Recife. “They think they can interfere as they would like."
***
Mariana Bahia holds a sign at a protest against obstetric violence in Recife. (Olga Khazan)
There’s nothing wrong with C-sections, of course – they can be life-saving for women with distressed babies or difficult deliveries. And most of the activists who are concerned about rising C-section rates think women should be able to opt for the procedure if they really want one.
But it’s still a major abdominal surgery that brings with it a chance of complications, infection, and neonatal challenges, not to mention placental problems that might impact future births. Women who have C-sections that are not medically necessary are at a greater risk of death, blood transfusions, and hysterectomies, a 2010 World Health Organization study found. The WHO has, until recently, recommended that C-sections be limited to only 15 percent of all births.
But the rate in many other countries, including Brazil, is much higher. In China, nearly half of all babies are delivered this way, with some women finding it a simple way to choose a “lucky” birthday. In the U.S., the rate has reached 30 percent after rising for decades. Experts say that among American doctors, fear of litigation is what prompts them to reach for the scalpel.
The increase is “really based on protecting the institution and ourselves,” obstetrician Peter Doelger told WNPR. “And, you can’t blame them. Getting sued is a horrible thing for the physician, a horrible thing for the nurse, and a horrible thing for the institution."
Jesusa Ricoy-Olariaga, a Spanish doula and mothers’ rights activist, helped organize a series of rallies in multiple countries on Friday that called for the improved treatment of women in labor worldwide. The protesters used the social media hashtag #SomasTodasAdelir – we are all Adelir.
“Brazil has highlighted this issue, but it's shouting a secret,” Ricoy-Olariaga told me by phone. “The issue is the same in other countries, but in a different manner. There are countries where birth is industrialized and dominated by men, and there's very little input from women.”
For its part, Brazil is working to reverse course and promote natural births. The federal government is spending $4 billion on a program – dubbed “the Stork Network” – that plans to educate both mothers and doctors about the benefits of giving birth the old-fashioned way.
But women at the small #SomasTodasAdelir rally in Recife on Friday said it will take a major cultural shift, as well. Mariana Bahia told me that when she miscarried a few months ago, her obstetrician treated her brusquely because she suspected Bahia had attempted to abort her fetus, which is illegal here.
Bahia said she wants to see women wield greater autonomy in the maternity ward – and to see doctors’ bullying behavior punished.
“There’s no horizontality between patients and doctors,” Bahia said. “Doctors are always above us.”
You guys have likely read the BBC story about the 13-year-old Kazakh girl who hunts with eagles in western Mongolia; if you haven't, you must; the Ashol-Pan Lifetime Admiration Society starts now and ends never. ("I will endeavor to make myself worthy of you for the rest of my life, you eagle-wielding teen who strides the narrow world," wrote Mallory Ortberg yesterday.) It's a tough fucking life being a young girl in Central Asia, let alone one who is challenging gender norms, let alone one who is doing so by hunting with eagles: after a year of being harassed out of my skull in Kyrgyzstan I'd still barely seen things my female students already counted unremarkable. In a couple of those beautiful photos Ashol-Pan (off-duty) wears the same space-maid schoolgirl aprons they did, sits in one of those meticulous unheated schoolrooms with the blue-green walls and the white mountain light filtering in from the side. She looks, actually, a lot like an eighth-grade girl I taught once:
She's hidden in there among all the other Ashol-Pans. Bless the teenagers of Central Asia. These kids weren't eagle hunting but they were certainly better than me in almost every way: kinder, more generous, more spontaneous, more loving, more brave. Yesterday I was reading that Salon piece about how young girls often view assault as normal male behavior; two years ago I was listening to my 12-year-old host sister, who spoke four languages and halfway ran the household, tell me matter-of-factly that I shouldn't wear a skirt on the bus because men, as she knew from experience, would try to get under it. I guess what I'm trying to say about Ashol-Pan is that there is only one of her, as there should be with all perfect beings, but there are also a million of her, girls who are used to having to build the fires that keep them warm at night, and I hope they ride the sea change that's happening in their generation to enormous ahistorical things.
One day, some drug dealer bought a particular digital scale—the AWS-100— on the retail site, Amazon.com. And then another drug dealer bought the same scale. Then another. Then another.
Amazon's data-tracking software watched what else these people purchased, and now, if you buy the AWS-100 scale, Amazon serves up a quickstart kit for selling drugs.
Along with various scale-related paraphernalia, we find:
This is classic data mining at work. Even if each scale purchaser only made one other drug-related purchase, when you look at the clusters, the pattern becomes obvious.
Amazon clearly did not set out to create such a field-tested kit for starting an illicit business. But looking at the list of items, it sure seems like they've created a group of products by looking at the purchasing habits of people who may not be recording all of their incomes on W-2s and 1099s. Not everyone who buys one of these scales is a drug dealer, but... it sure seems popular among a demographic in need of baggies.
So, how long until police departments find an AWS-100 scale and request account information from Amazon?
The digital-rights advocacy group, EFF, has dinged Amazon's terms of service for its lack of transparency around how they cooperate with law enforcement: "The service is not making clear to their users what standards and rules law enforcement must follow when they seek access to sensitive user data."
Privacy, such as it is on the web, is collective. Beware who you share purchases or click-patterns with.
2014 will be the first time any married gay couple has ever filed federal taxes together in the United States. It’s been a decade since Massachusetts became the first state to start granting marriage licenses, and some states have previously accepted joint returns for state taxes. But until the Supreme Court struck down the federal prohibition against gay marriage in The United States v. Windsor last summer, the Internal Revenue Service didn’t recognize joint returns for married same-sex couples.
For some, this April’s tax season will be a time to celebrate the progress of the gay-rights movement. But for most couples, it will be also be a huge headache.
In gay-marriage recognition states, “thanks to the Windsor decision, doing tax returns for same-sex married couples is much easier now,” said Joan Zawaski, an accountant in California who is also in a same-sex marriage. “Married is married, we just file joint returns just like other folks. But in non-recognition states, it’s back like the battle days.”
This is because many states are refusing to accept joint returns from married gay couples, even if they were legally married in another state. Usually, states piggyback off of the IRS on tax returns—people fill out their federal returns and then use that information to fill out state returns. But since many non-recognition states aren’t following the IRS’s decision to accept joint returns from same-sex couples, their revenue departments have had to devise new ways to figure out how to collect the right amount of money from married same-sex couples. In some places, this means gay men and women have to fill out multiple forms, sometimes saying they’re married, sometimes saying they’re single. Other states have created brand new forms, just for gay couples.
But many have simply issued tax bulletins describing the ways same-sex couples will have to divide their incomes, benefits, and even claims on their children for state-tax purposes. Virginia’s five-page memo mentions that the Commonwealth does not recognize same-sex marriage or agree with the federal government’s decision to accept joint filings at least seven times.
“There were no statutory provisions in the Virginia tax code for doing that,” said Marc Purintun, a tax attorney who lives in the state. He and his husband got married in California in 2008. “On the receiving end in Virginia of the memo from the tax department, it felt pretty hostile.”
A few non-recognition states have made a very different choice: Colorado, Missouri, Oregon, and Utah will all accept married same-sex couples’ joint tax returns, even though all four have constitutional amendments against gay marriage. This is particularly interesting in Utah, where same-sex marriage was legal for 17 days in 2013 and 2014. After a federal judge ruled the state’s ban on gay marriage unconstitutional, the Supreme Court put a hold on same-sex marriage licenses until the justices decide whether they want to review the ruling. That left the 1,300 gay couples who got married during that time in something of a legal limbo, since Utah’s governor said the state would not recognize their unions. Now, at least one issue has been resolved: For tax purposes, the state considers these couples to be married.
All of this has created an interesting mix of tax policies among the states. Here’s a basic map of what married gay couples have to do to file their taxes in different states:
State requirements for married same-sex couples filing taxes in 2014, based on information provided by the Human Rights Campaign (The Atlantic)
But of course, it’s not quite that simple. “The fun part is where you have one of the same-sex spouses inheriting some oil royalties from Oklahoma,” for example, said Zawaski. Oklahoma is a non-recognition state, so even if a California couple filed their taxes jointly at the federal and state levels, they would have to file separately to pay taxes on any investment income they owe to Oklahoma.
Employers have also had to figure out how to deal with their gay employees' tax status. Some benefits, like health insurance, tuition breaks, and transportation subsidies, are not taxable income under federal law. Many companies had previously extended these kinds of benefits to same-sex couples and families if employees could prove they were part of a domestic partnership or marriage, but those couples had to pay taxes on this money. Now that federal guidelines have changed and states are issuing their own tax policies, companies have had to adjust how they handle benefits for same-sex couples. “National corporations that have employees all over the country are having a hard time keeping up,” said Purintun, who has worked with clients who have received inaccurate W-2s from their employers.
Kate Fletcher, a private-practice attorney and full-time pilot at American Airlines, said it took four months of persistent pestering to get the company to adjust her W-2. “They get to keep my money—American Airlines has given the state of Virginia money that belongs to me,” she said. Eventually, that money will be refunded, because she isn’t legally required to pay federal taxes on her benefits, but in the meantime, she could have been investing the money or using it to buy groceries or pay her mortgage.
Even though the IRS issued guidelines for same-sex couples following the Windsor case, some think the agency may be partly at fault for the confusion. For example, the agency has said that married gay couples can re-file past returns in the hopes of getting a refund, but that hasn’t been made clear to tax preparers across the country. “The IRS is telling them things like, sorry, the Windsor case is not retroactive. There’s been lots of miscommunication between taxpayers and IRS agents in the field,” said Pat Cain, a tax-law professor at Santa Clara University, who is also in a same-sex marriage.
“I would not say the IRS writ large has been trying to reach out to community organizations and make sure people are informed as possible,” said Brian Moulton, the legal director at the Human Rights Campaign. “They put out guidance, put out publications; that’s their approach.”
All of this means one thing: Even for married gay couples who live in states that recognize same-sex marriages, this filing season may involve unexpected complications. “I do think this is going to be a surprise to some people,” said Cain.
Couples in civil unions may also have issues. Even in recognition states, they have to file individually at the federal level and jointly at the state level, because the IRS does not recognize joint returns from people who aren't technically married. This creates an interesting situation for couples living in Hawaii, for example, which just started recognizing gay marriages in December: Even though they have the option to get married, they might get better benefits and pay less tax money if they don’t.
But for many people, taxes are symbolic of the broader question of equality. While gay-rights advocates have cheered the Windsor decision and the IRS’s tax ruling, this filing season shows that gay marriages still aren’t equal to heterosexual marriages in America, no matter where you live.
"My husband says not one damned dime to them: If they’re not going to recognize our marriage, we’re going to file in the cheapest way possible."
“There’s certainly anger that the state wants to disregard my family and our value,” said Purintun. “The form asks are you married, and … you sign under penalties of law that what you put on the form is true.” If Purintun and his husband follow Virginia’s guidelines, they will have to file their state taxes as single, “unmarried” individuals. “I wonder how many members of the legislature or general citizens of Virginia would be willing to sign that that’s true because a tax bulletin says this is true,” he said.
Purintun and his husband haven’t decided what they’re going to do about their taxes yet; they’re hoping that Virginia may revise its guidelines before the state's filing deadline at the end of April. “My husband says not one damned dime to them: If they’re not going to recognize our marriage, we’re going to file in the cheapest way possible,” he said. “But as a tax attorney, I think you should follow the law.”
Gay couples who live in non-recognition states have a few other options, he said, including filing their taxes with an attached letter of protest. Or, they could cross their fingers and try to file jointly—since the IRS and state revenue agencies don’t ask people to indicate their gender on filing forms, he thinks couples would probably get away with it.
“There are penalties that apply if you falsify your tax return, but would it be false if you say that you’re married in Virginia even though Virginia didn’t recognize it?” he asked. “If you’re married and likely to pay more by filing married, where’s the foul?”
It is true that most married couples who will now file jointly at the federal level will likely owe more money to the government—with a higher combined income, more of their money will be taxed at a higher bracket. But for many, this seems to be worth it.
“I’m going to pay a huge marriage tax penalty myself and I hate that, but I’m probably not going to curse as much when I’m preparing my form as I have in past years,” said Cain.
“What we’ve said as we try to convince ourselves that we have to pay more taxes is that equality is the benefit that we wanted,” Purintun said. “Equality is not necessarily free, but it is what we want.”
I've been with my current boyfriend for three years. We're really great together—similar interests, senses of humor, great sex. I love him so much—the only issue is that of our respective backgrounds. He grew up in a tony suburb, went to prep school, then to a very prestigious college, and finally the very prestigious graduate school where we met. I went to public school in a bad neighborhood, put myself through a not-so-prestigious college, made a name for myself in my field, then got into that same prestigious grad school. Our families could not be more different. I didn't think it would matter so much, but something happened recently that I can't shake.
My little brother, who has been a fuck up his entire life, has finally gotten it together and joined the Air Force. I'm not super pro-military or anything, but he was on a bad, bad path and now he has a job and structure and it's been really good for him. When he finished basic training, we (me, my mom, and my boyfriend—our father has long been out of the picture) went to his graduation. I'd never been to one of these things before but it's a really big deal for the airmen. A lot of them, my brother included, had never really accomplished anything worth celebrating before. My mom basically cried the entire time.
Unfortunately, throughout the day-long graduation, whenever we were alone, my boyfriend would bring the subject back to him. He looked around anxiously when we got there because most of the young men were in uniform. He kept asking me if he thought people knew that he hadn't served. Then he would go on these weird defensive rants about why he hadn't served, one of which included some pretty fucked-up ideas about people who don't go to college. I got pretty annoyed at him for being so self-involved on a day that should have been about celebrating my brother. I didn't say anything, though, because it was so out of character for him to behave like that.
In the couple of months since this incident, I get so angry whenever I think about it. I brought it up with him once, but he sort of dismissed me, saying that he wasn't trying to draw attention from my brother. I actually totally believe him about that. I guess the thing that drives me nuts is that this person who has been given every opportunity and celebrated at every turn can't stand one day when others are being honored and he isn't. I'm probably being too harsh, but this is the narrative in my head.
This whole incident is bringing up some stuff from earlier in our relationship that I think I'd just brushed aside. When we first met, I honestly resented how easy his life had been compared to mine. I used to tease him for being a prep school kid and eventually he told me that hurt his feelings so I stopped. Since I stopped, we basically never talk about class-related stuff, so I think it appeared that we'd resolved that conflict. In reality, we just stopped talking about anything that would trigger any tension related to class. We also spend way more time with his family. It's partially because we live closer to them, but also because I'm comfortable in his family's world of affluent professionals while my boyfriend is just not comfortable spending a lot of time with my family in my old neighborhood. We do have pretty decent communication about other issues—this one just seems to be off limits for some reason.
I do love this man, and we're starting to talk marriage (we're both around 30). Can I be with someone long-term who I resent in this one way? Is it possible to love someone without wholly respecting them? Or am I being too hard on him? Ultimately it's not really his fault that his parents have been able to give him so much. I just really can't tell if this is something that will blow over in time or an indicator that this relationship isn't built to last.
Help me Polly!
Confused About Class
Dear CAC,
Honestly, I think you misread your boyfriend's reaction to your brother's graduation. I don't think he was envious of the attention. I think he felt unexpectedly droopy and emasculated in the company of all of those guys in uniform, looking sharp, accompanied by a lot of pomp and circumstance and talk about the incomparable honor of giving your life for your country. No matter how you might feel about the military or our country or the whole notion of having to give up your life at the whim of a potentially misguided leader, as a young man this experience would probably be unexpectedly intense. Your boyfriend is roughly the same age as all of these perceived heroes proudly proclaiming their willingness to die. It was understandably unsettling for him. He didn't want you to see him as less heroic than those dudes. He didn't want to see himself that way. He wanted to explain why he thinks those guys aren't necessarily doing something that's so honorable. He did this away from the rest of your family. He was trying to get you on his side, looking for your support and understanding. He probably said some dumb things along the way.
Not that I don't understand why you weren't aware of the particular folds of his emotional experience. You had your own concerns. This was your brother's big day. And if your boyfriend blathered on and on about himself the whole time, in front of your family, that would be concerning. But I don't get that sense. I get the sense that he made a series of discombobulated, defensive comments when you two were alone, and they stuck in your craw and made you wonder if he has any idea at all how totally pampered he's been, how easy he's had it, how hard other people have to work just to fucking exist.
I do understand your anger about that. Personally, I would want to explain the big gap between rich and poor, between sailing along and struggling tooth and nail, between floating through college and working really fucking hard in school while holding down two jobs, between sailing into grad school and working a real job first. And I think you should explain those things to him.
But I also think that you have to empathize with him, not only about his feelings around this military graduation but also about his life in general. He was standing there feeling a little bit useless, in spite of his faith in himself and his beliefs about the world. He was feeling like a wilty little grad student among macho men. Men are really fucking sensitive to this kind of thing. Even the kinds of smart, sensitive late-bloomers that most of us favor have these moments of self-doubt where they wonder, "Christ, should I feel embarrassed that I'm not uniformed and heroic like these macho guys? Am I supposed to feel like they're making good choices and I'm the wimpy dude back home they're out there protecting?" It's easy for women to forget how often men compare themselves to each other, and how sensitive they are to feeling somehow less studly in the company of overt machismo.
I know saying that makes me sound like a deluded Camille Paglia type. Throw in a little Greek mythology here and there and voila, six figure book deal. But I do think you're not opening yourself up to your boyfriend's experience enough, and you're not going to have a healthy relationship with him if you can't stop seeing the first 30 years of his life as a relaxing and leisurely stroll down Easy Street.
Imagine for a second going to your boyfriend's little sister's debutante ball. It's her big night! She struggled with eating disorders in the past, but now she's doing fine and she just got into a very expensive private college, and she looks just beautiful! Her dad is so proud of her, and her mom is crying big salty tears! What you're thinking, though, is that these fucks would never ask YOU to wear a white dress, thanks to your zip code of origin. And in spite of the token people of color here and there, these people are obviously racists. Imagine that you stayed up late grading papers the night before, and your tuition fees are overdue, and there you are, surrounded by gorgeous little rich girls who never do anything more taxing than sitting still to get their nails done? And everyone can't stop talking about how impressive and gorgeous and special they all are?
I know it's not the same thing. And I know you would keep your mouth shut. But imagine the feelings you might feel. Imagine the things you'd like to say to your boyfriend, in private, after watching him admire the pretty spoiled girls from afar.
Listen to me: Your boyfriend was feeling feelings about that graduation ceremony. That's all that was about. If you start discounting his feelings routinely just because he's been a little pampered, your relationship will suffer. Your guy had his own hardships, trust me. You can say to yourself, "What a spoiled little fucker, and he doesn't even realize it!" But that's not fair to him. You love this guy. You need to find out more about the things that did challenge him, the situations that did unnerve him and make him feel bad about himself.
I grew up in a perfectly comfortable home in a perfectly nice middle-class urban neighborhood, first as a professor's kid and then with a divorced working mom. We were usually in debt and I was always expected to scrub toilets, trim bushes, rake leaves, paint doors, empty gutters, pull weeds, whatever. I always had a summer job, starting at age 15. I never had a car. I was definitely jealous of my friends, with their fucking Clinique cosmetics and Esprit sweatshirts and Polo shorts, with their dermatologists and their expensive ballet lessons and their pretty redecorated bedrooms with walls and ceilings they didn't paint themselves. I loved my friends but I was a real asshole about how spoiled they were. I used my resentment of their wealth as an excuse not to empathize with them. I discounted any suffering they told me they were going through. And some of them had real problems—deeply dysfunctional families, eating disorders, financial support that kept them semi-infantilized until their early 30s. I thought my own problems were somehow more real than theirs, just because they had a lot more money and didn't have to work as hard as I did.
The truth is, we were ALL privileged. And I was particularly privileged, because I learned the satisfaction of hard work early on in life. I do mean satisfaction. I can't count the times that setting my feelings aside and doing some really fucking hard work has pulled me out of a funk. Most of what's good in my life found its way to me because I knew how to work hard without giving up, to work hard at something until I was better and better at it. I'm not a workaholic, not by a long shot. I am a lazy motherfucker. But I do understand and appreciate a concerted, strenuous effort. I don't mind looking at my work and saying, "That could be better." It doesn't scare me that it'll take MORE HARD WORK to take something from mediocre to great.
People who don't understand hard work, who don't appreciate and enjoy it, end up suffering a lot. That is a fact. Your boyfriend has nothing to do with this point I'm making; he's in grad school, he knows how to work hard. I'm just telling you that there are many, many aspects of struggling that are a real privilege, that put you at an advantage, once you realize your full potential.
I want to challenge you to take more pride in your background. Not angry fuck-you resentment, but real pride. I know you think you have real pride, and you also think I am a fucking pampered piece of shit who doesn't get it. You're probably right about that. I still want you to listen to me: Real pride can be angry, sure. But real pride can also allow for difference. Real pride invites the privileged in, warmly, to witness with clear eyes, to share some of the many gorgeous aspects of growing up with nothing. There is ugliness there, but there's beauty there, too. There are things about your family that might make you feel ashamed, but that should make you feel proud. My grandparents chainsmoked hand-rolled cigarettes and watched "The Family Feud" every fucking night on a couch covered in plastic. At the end of the show, my Carpatho-Rusyn grandfather would shout to my Carpatho-Rusyn grandmother cleaning up in the kitchen, "Dem Greeks, dey won, Ma!"
When I brought my boyfriend to visit my grandparents, was it uncomfortable for him? Of course. He couldn't mask his emotions, as he spotted the plastic grapes in the little urn on the wall. People who grow up with lots of money often don't have access to working class people, don't have access to immigrants. But everyone is provincial in their own way. People who grow up in Manhattan can be hopelessly provincial, hopelessly unaware of the rest of the country, the rest of the world. If your boyfriend isn't that comfortable around your family, that's not necessarily snobbery, and if you cast it in that light, you're being unfair to him and yourself. Some people out there watch "Judge Judy" and speak in double negatives. Shocker. Some people live in neighborhoods that seem scrappy and dangerous to outsiders. He just needs some time to get used to it. You need to insist that he get used to it. If you protect him from it while resenting him for that, if you avoid taking him home, you'll injure your relationship. Give him the benefit of the doubt. I hate the phrase "It is what it is," but when it comes to showing people where you came from, it comes in handy. This is how I grew up. It is what it fucking is. Did I choose this? Would I choose it again? Do I hate this? Do I love this? All of the above. It is what it is.
Also? Being a guy is not a walk in the park. The separation from your own feelings you have to achieve just to get by is crazy. Prep school, while it sounds absolutely luxurious to a poor kid, can be an insanely cut-throat, unfriendly place. Kids I know who went away to prep school often came back with completely different personalities, personalities that, quite frankly seemed a little defensive and overly cool, like they'd been traumatized by their exposure to a whole new level of uber cool, pushy rich kids and had emerged far worse for the wear.
That's my casual observation, nothing more. But you really do need to open your mind and allow that your guy has had a very different experience than you, and not all of it boiled down to him getting his ass wiped by servants armed with extra-soft toilet tissue.
I don't think you'd feel as angry at him if you'd chosen a time when you WEREN'T mad and explained the very particular folds of your background to him. I think this needs to happen, and you need to do it in a way that doesn't make him feel defensive about the way he grew up. After you feel like you've been heard—and look, you've got to warn him, "I need for you to listen very closely to this. I need you to understand all the shit I had to do to get here"—then you've got to hear HIM out. You've got to ask him all about his upbringing, and you've got to be nice about it, really fucking nice, not dismissive and eye-rolly. You've got to appreciate the little bits and pieces of his past that feel crumpled or messy, that don't fit together well, that made him feel sad as a kid.
He sounds like a sensitive person, just like you. Sensitive people don't have an easy ride, no matter where they are. We will make mountains out of molehills wherever you plant us. And even though it's easy to be unsympathetic and skeptical of that—and believe me, I can be—it's still important, if you love him dearly, that you empathize with the challenges he faced and still faces, no matter how small they might seem to you.
It's probably time to have some tough conversations. Don't wait until you're mad. Sit him down when you're feeling good and look him in the eye and tell him you need to talk about your differences. Be gentle. There is no moral high ground in this conversation. You are simply two different people, with two different stories. He needs to understand that your family is important to you. Remember that it's never easy to accept and embrace someone's family, no matter what they're like. Be respectful of that, but make it clear you feel sensitive about them and protective of them and you don't really want him making negative comments to you about them moving forward. Just as he didn't want to be teased about prep school, you don't want to be teased about your background, and you don't want him casting aspersions on your family's choices. You should ask him to rethink the way he talks about people's life choices when he talks to you and to them, with some acceptance that he may not have all the information he needs to draw conclusions about people from completely different circumstances from his. You should tell him that you're going to try to do the same thing for him: Not assume that someone is lazy or spoiled, for example, or doesn't know the meaning of hardship. There are all kinds of hardship out there.
It's a big challenge, for two people from totally different classes to come together and smoothly navigate the world. It's also really romantic and interesting and if you approach it with care and sensitivity, you'll both grow into richer, wiser, more mature people together. You both have a great opportunity to learn a lot. Try to embrace it rather than avoiding it. Try to open your heart and be vulnerable and allow him the same safe space that you need.
It will be a challenge. Lean into the challenge and talk about it a lot, with a generous, accepting spirit, and your love for each other and trust in each other will grow in leaps and bounds.
This isn't about your boyfriend wanting to be the center of attention. He's grappling with something bigger than that. He has prejudices, sure, and also fears and insecurities. Let him show you the full scope of who he really is, flaws and all, and dare to show yourself to him. We are not ONLY safe among our own kind, in our own comfort zones. When we believe that, we make our worlds smaller and smaller. Take pride in your path here, and let him have his pride in his path, too. Dare to do this without anger and preemptive, self-protective resentment. Dare to do this with an open heart.
Polly
Are you ashamed of your money? Do you suspect that buying a million copies of Polly's book might make you feel better? Because you're right about that. Also? Write to Polly and cry her a river.
Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photograph by Teruyoshi Hayashida, from, of course, the incomparable Take Ivy.
A lot of folks probably would say Pauline Kael or David Bordwell or Manny Farber; some might argue for more academic writers like Linda Williams, Stanley Cavell, or Carol Clover. For me, though, it's an easy question. The greatest film critic ever is James Baldwin.
Baldwin is generally celebrated for his novels and (as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote recently) his personal essays. But he wrote criticism as well. Mostly this was in the form of short reviews. There is, though, a major exception: his book-length essay, The Devil Finds Work, one of the most powerful examples ever of how writing about art can, itself, be art.
Published in 1976, the piece can’t be categorized. It's a memoir of Baldwin's life watching, or influenced by, or next to cinema. It's a critique of the racial politics of American (and European) film. And it's a work of film theory, with Baldwin illuminating issues of gaze and identification in brief, lucid bursts. The dangerous appeal of cinema, he writes, can be to escape—"surrendering to the corroboration of one's fantasies as they are thrown back from the screen" And "no one,” he acidly adds, “makes his escape personality black."
The themes of race, film, and truth circle around one another throughout the essay's hundred pages, as Baldwin attempts to reconcile the cinema he loves, which represents the country he loves, with its duplicity and faithlessness. In one memorable description of the McCarthy era midway through the essay, he marvels at "the slimy depths to which the bulk of white Americans allowed themselves to sink: noisily, gracelessly, flatulent and foul with patriotism." It's clear Baldwin believes that description can often be applied to American cinema as well—whether it's the false self-congratulatory liberal Hollywood pap of The Heat of the Night or Guess Who's Coming to Dinner or the travesty made of Billie Holiday's life in Lady Sings the Blues, the script of which, Baldwin says, "Is as empty as a banana peel, and as treacherous."
Yet, for all its pessimism, The Devil Finds Work doesn't feel despairing or bleak. On the contrary, it's one of the most inspirational pieces of writing I've read. In part, that's because of the moments of value or meaning that Baldwin finds amid the dross—an image of Sidney Poitier's face in the Defiant Ones, which in its dignity and beauty shatters the rest of the film, or "Joan Crawford's straight, narrow, and lonely back," in the first film Baldwin remembers, and how he is "fascinated by the movement on, and of, the screen, that movement which is something like the heaving and the swelling of the sea … and which is also something like the light which moves on, and especially beneath, the water."
But more even than such isolated images, what makes the essay sing, and not sadly or in bitterness, is its sheer power of description, and its audacity in treating self, society, and art as a whole, to be argued with and lived with and loved all at once. You can see that perhaps most vividly in the concluding discussion, in which Baldwin talks about the racial subtext of The Exorcist.
For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself. The devil has no need of any dogma—though he can use them all—nor does he need any historical justification, history being so largely his invention. He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do.
The mindless and hysterical banality of evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks—many, many others, including white children— can call them on this lie, he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet.
I like The Exorcist considerably more than Baldwin does, but even so, I think it's indisputable that he transforms the film. A pulp horror shocker becomes a meditation on how evil is displaced and denied—and on how denial of sin, personal and social, is central to evil. Baldwin's scorn doesn't destroy the movie, but turns it into something wiser, more moving, and more beautiful. As the blues that Baldwin loves changes sorrow into art, Baldwin takes American cinema and makes it look in the mirror to see, not the devil, but the face it could have if it were able to acknowledge its own history and violence. It's a face that would be, yes, blacker, but also more honest and more free.
In her first post at her blog at The Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg explained that she writes about pop culture because "art and culture are deeply engaged with big, important ideas about the way we live our lives, the conditions we’re willing to let others live in and our most important priorities." I don't disagree with that, and I doubt Baldwin would either. But I think The Devil Finds Work also makes a different case for writing about pop culture. That case is the case that Shakespeare makes for writing drama, or that Jane Austen makes for writing novels, or that Wallace Stevens makes for writing poetry, or Tarkovsky for making films. Baldwin shows that criticism is art, which means that it doesn't need a purpose or a rationale other than truth, or beauty, or keeping faith, or doing whatever it is we think art is trying to do. When I write about pop culture, I'm trying, and failing, to make art as great as The Devil Finds Work. That seems like reason enough.
Yesterday morning at the office we all got an email in our inbox that our co-worker Chuck had brought in a special dessert to share. Not one to miss out on a treat I skittered out of my cubicle to check it out. This pan of "kitty litter" is what I found.
Isn't is GRRRROOOSSSS?! Ha ha we dug into anyhow! What craftsmanship with the kitty poo! It was very tasty! We all got a big kick out of Chuck's April Fool's Kitty Litter Dessert. It's made from cake crumbles, pudding and vanilla cookies. I found the recipe online for anyone that wants to yuck out their friends and family too.
“Their mouths, which mere minutes before had been employed in the process of demolishing and ingesting various foodstuffs, were now jammed up damply against one another while still being used for breathing, which must have been more than a little uncomfortable.”
“Bits of one jammed into bits of the other, dangerously close to some of the weakest and most important internal organs.”
“With absolutely no regard for personal space, the two of them created an unnecessary amount of friction, generating sweat in the process.”
“Some sort of gel emerged.”
“One sat upon the other, like furniture that sneaks inside of your body.”
A Florida woman has revealed that she spent nearly a year eating free rotisserie chickens from area Publix grocery stores by taking advantage of a store policy promising all sales be priced as advertised or taken off the bill.
From NPR's transcript of a Morning Edition story:
Slate's posted a letter that Rose Wilder Lane wrote to her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder after reading the first draft of By the Shores of Silver Lake, and although I was vaguely aware that Rose Wilder was a hardass whose outlook on civil society I will never ever share (she may be credited with the current use of "libertarian"), this note is really a marvel:
So there's a glass. With liquid in it. And it's filled halfway to the top. I can do this.
Hi Polly.
Here's a nice use of science fiction's trick of describing cherished human behaviors and institutions through the ironic distance of an alien observer: Mallory Ortberg's short story Erotica Written By An Alien Pretending Not To Be Horrified By The Human Body: 