Oxford University Press's Blog, page 156

The story of “adz”

Part 2

I am picking up where I left off last week. The word adz(e) was coined long ago and surfaced more than once in Old English texts. It had several local variants, and its gender fluctuated: adesa was masculine, while adese was feminine. Also, eadesa and adusa have come down to us. Apparently, the tool had wide currency. As will be shown below, adusa may be the form that provides the best clue to the etymology of adz(e). The consonant s in all those forms should have been voiced, but until the seventeenth century the standard spelling was addice, and Samuel Johnson, the author of the famous 1755 dictionary, considered the spelling and the pronunciation adze to be a reprehensible corruption of addice. We do not know why s in adesa and its likes remained voiceless in Old and Middle English, instead of becoming z. The pronunciation with z became the norm only after i in addice was lost (syncopated, to use a technical term); hence the modern spelling. The form atch turned up in the seventeenth century, and some people who said an adz occasionally made the by now familiar mistake of misdivision and turned an adz into a nadz (see the examples of such metananlysis in the post on awl for March 11, 2020). A few other dialectal forms of adz are also known. They are more or less predictable and shed no light on the origin of our word.

Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds. Via Wikimedia Commons.

As mentioned at the end of the previous post (March 18, 2020), adz has no established cognates, even though it is an old word. Most likely, it was coined “locally” and had no currency outside England. If the speakers of Old English had brought it to their new home from the continent, some related forms would probably have turned up in Frisian, Dutch, or German. The texts in which adesa appears owe nothing to the language of the Vikings, and indeed no similar word exists in Scandinavian.

A cagey man. Image by Eren Emre Kanal. CC by 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The process of formation must have been simple, even transparent, for people are not expected to create words out of nothing. Yet numerous well-known modern (!) adjectives, verbs, and nouns, summarily dismissed in dictionaries without explanation as slang, have no ascertained etymology. You call your new acquaintance cagey. Look up cagey in a respectable reference book! “Origin unknown.” Does a cagey person live in a mental cage of his or her own construction and refuses to leave it? A trite piece of folk etymology? But an adz was a well-known tool, and it is reasonable to suggest that its name, a technical term, was coined by those who dealt with it.

Although adz seems to have been a neologism, quite a few of its possible cognates (or rather, look-alikes) have been offered: some by over-imaginative authors, others by reliable ones. The search was for the words denoting either something sharp or related to manual skills: German Ader “vein,” German ätsen ~ Engl. etch, Engl. thixle ~ German Dechsel “adz” (pay special attention to this pair!), Latin astutus “sharp; astute,” Latin ador “spelt” (a cereal plant) and asser “stake,” Lithuanian vedegà “adz; icepick” (related to Sanskrit vádhar– “some deadly weapon”), and a few others.

One lookalike has attracted special attention. In Hittite, a dead language of ancient Anatolia, the word ateš occurred. Its meaning has been a matter of debate, but the noun is now glossed as “ax.” This is indeed a remarkable coincidence. Our readers interested in all kinds of details pertaining to the Hittite word will find them in the entry adz in my etymological dictionary. Here I’ll only say that, according to the opinion of the most reliable modern specialist, the Hittite word is not related to adz. This conclusion is intuitively correct, because, if adz were a migratory word (a common case with the names of tools and instruments of all kinds), it would have, almost certainly, turned up somewhere between Anatolia and Anglo-Saxon England. Even if the two forms were related as items of the ancient Indo-European stock, the occurrence of a carpentry term only in Hittite and Old English would have been a minor miracle. A Basque cognate or etymon of adz has also been proposed; again, perhaps there is no need to go so far.

An adze. Image by Pearson Scott Foresman. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Last week, while looking for the etymology of the word ax, I mentioned, among many other words, Old Saxon akus. Old Engl. æces seems to have developed from some such form. Walter W. Skeat, in the first edition of his etymological dictionary of English (1882), “suspected” that adesa was a “corruption” of aces or acwesa (acwesa was of course inspired by Gothic aqizi—all those words were mentioned in the previous post); he should have added acusa as a possibility. We now wince at the once widely current term corruption (see its use by Samuel Johnson, above!) and indeed, linguistic change is always an act of “corruption”! If we substitute alteration for Skeat’s corruption, his idea will look reasonable. Yet we are not told why the original form was “corrupted,” altered, modified, or simply changed. That may be the reason Skeat gave up his early suggestion (it does not appear in the fourth, latest edition), and adz joined a long list of “words of unknown origin,” where it stays to the present day, its cutting edge notwithstanding.

Yet, if we begin with Old Engl. adusa (rather than adesa; adusa “ax,” as noted above, has been recorded), Skeat’s idea may perhaps be rescued. There is no doubt that adusa resembles somewhat Old Engl. æx and especially Old Saxon akus. In Old English, this similarity was, quite naturally, noticed, with the result that æx and adesa sometimes formed an alliterative pair. And here comes my timid tentative etymology. I believe (“suspect”) that Old Engl. adusa is the continental acusa “ax”, with d substituted for c (k) under the influence of some form like Middle Low German dessele “adz” (see thixle ~ Dechsel, above), that is, I suggest that adusa was a blend meaning originally “a kind of ax.” The blending happened, because the names of the two tools were frequently mentioned in single breath, like our modern alliterating pots and pans, sticks and stones, and the like.

The process of blending can be established only when it is occurring under our eyes. Thus, sitcom, Eurasia, and workaholic are certainly blends. This fact can be “proved” by reference to the memory of the native speakers still living and the dictionaries that recorded the act. A historical blend is doomed to remain a hypothesis. The same holds for my reconstructed blend, but as the starting point for a perhaps better informed research into the etymology of this intractable word it will probably do.

Feature image credit: book on table by Alex Brown. CC by 2.0, via Flickr.

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Seven classics for comfort reading [reading list]

The impact of the COVID-19 can be felt in all areas of our lives, with many staying at home for the next few weeks. Perhaps this is an opportunity to finally start your copy of War & Peace that’s been on the to-be-read pile for years or you find yourself revisiting old friends in Jane Austen’s world. Classics can provide comfort and escape in these uncertain times and we’ve compiled a short list of some of our favourites.

Middlemarch George Eliot
George Eliot follows the fortunes of the town’s central characters as they find, lose, and rediscover ideals and vocations in the world. Through its psychologically rich portraits, the novel contains some of the great characters of literature, including the idealistic but naïve Dorothea Brooke, beautiful and egotistical Rosamund Vincy, the dry scholar Edward Casaubon, the wise and grounded Mary Garth, and the brilliant but proud Dr Lydgate. In its whole view of a society, Middlemarch offers enduring insight into the pains and pleasures of life with others, and explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, and, above all, human relationships. Little Women  Louisa May Alcott
Little Women has remained enduringly popular since its publication in 1868, becoming the inspiration for a whole genre of family stories. Set in a small New England community, it tells of the March family: Marmee looks after daughters in the absence of her husband, who is serving as an army chaplain in the Civil War, and Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy experience domestic trials and triumphs as they attempt to supplement the family’s small income. In the second part of the novel (sometimes known as Good Wives) the girls grow up and fall in love. David Copperfield  Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens wrote the book after the completion of a fragment of autobiography recalling his employment as a child in a London warehouse, and in the first-person narrative, a new departure for him, realized marvellously the workings of memory. The embodiment of his boyhood experience in the novel involved a “complicated interweaving of truth and fiction,” at its most subtle in the portrait of his father as Mr. Micawber, one of Dickens’s greatest comic creations. Enjoying a humour that never becomes caricature, the reader shares David’s affection for the eccentric Betsey Trotwood and her protégé Mr. Dick, and smiles with the narrator at the trials he endures in his love for the delightfully silly Dora. Orlando Virginia Woolf
Orlando tells the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through centuries of English history, first as a man, then as a woman; of his/her encounters with queens, kings, novelists, playwrights, and poets, and of his/her struggle to find fame and immortality not through actions, but through the written word. At its heart are the life and works of Virginia Woolf’s friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Knole, the historic country house of the Sackvilles. But as well as being a love letter to Vita, Orlando mocks the conventions of biography and history, teases the pretensions of contemporary men of letters, and wryly examines sexual double standards. Sherlock Holmes (Selected Stories)  Arthur Conan Doyle 
For more than a century the Sherlock Holmes stories have held a strange, almost inexplicable grip on the popular imagination. They are intimately associated with late Victorian and Edwardian society, yet curiously timeless in their appeal. The characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, together with their housekeeper Mrs. Hudson and their address at 221B Baker Street are as familiar today as when they made their first appearance in the late 1880s. The stories have been endlessly interpreted, adapted, and modernized, but still it is to Arthur Conan Doyle’s originals that we return. Treasure Island   Robert Louis Stevenson
When a mysterious seafarer puts up at the Admiral Benbow, young Jim Hawkins is haunted by his frightening tales; the sailor’s sudden death is the beginning of one of the most exciting adventure stories in literature. The discovery of a treasure map sets Jim and his companions in search of buried gold, and they are soon on board the Hispaniola with a crew of buccaneers recruited by the one-legged sea cook known as Long John Silver. As they near their destination, and the lure of Captain Flint’s treasure grows ever stronger, Jim’s courage and wits are tested to the full. Collected Ghost Stories  M. R. James
Considered by many to be the most terrifying writer in English, M. R. James was an eminent scholar who spent his entire adult life in the academic surroundings of Eton and Cambridge. His classic supernatural tales draw on the terrors of the everyday, in which documents and objects unleash terrible forces, often in closed rooms and night-time settings where imagination runs riot. Lonely country houses, remote inns, ancient churches or the manuscript collections of great libraries provide settings for unbearable menace, from creatures seeking retribution and harm. These stories have lost none of their power to unsettle and disturb.

These books showcase some of our favourite classic titles that we will be reading over the next few weeks. Do you have a favourite classic tale that you want to reread?

Featured Image Credit: Bookshelf Old Library by Free-Photos, public domain via Pixabay.

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Why an Irish Buddhist resisted empire in Burma

On 2 March 1901, during the full moon festival at Rangoon’s Shwedagon pagoda, the Buddhist monk U Dhammaloka confronted an off-duty colonial policeman and ordered him to take off his shoes. Burmese pagodas are stupas, containing relics of the Buddha, so wearing shoes on them (as white colonials did) was a serious mark of disrespect. Choosing his target well, Dhammaloka engaged in an act of non-violent resistance that provoked a local political crisis but also launched shoes as an issue that would become central to later Burmese nationalism until 1919. The shoe controversy made respect for Buddhism a challenge to racial hierarchies and colonial power.

Religion and race also came together in the monk’s bare feet. Born Laurence Carroll in Ireland, he had crossed America as a hobo and sailed two oceans before converting to Buddhism and ordaining in Rangoon in 1900.  Yet Europeans still expected him to wear shoes, a key marker of racial difference intended to buttress colonial power. Going native—including abandoning European dress—was not only part of his required clothing as a bhikkhu but marked his defection from this symbolic racial order. So too, of course, did his ritual subordination to an Asian hierarchy and a non-Christian religion – in a world where empire increasingly justified itself at home by its capacity to bring the Christian gospel to the heathen masses.

Echoing traditionalist Burmese views, which saw the British defeat of the Burmese monarchy as a sign of the decline of Buddhism, Dhammaloka would build his career as an anti-colonial celebrity activist around opposition to what he called “the Bible, the whiskey bottle and the Gatling gun” – missionary Christianity, cultural destruction (given Buddhism’s opposition to alcohol) and military conquest. If his bare white feet undermined the racial hierarchies of empire, his monk’s tonsure challenged the military and the missionary.

Dhammaloka brought together the persona of the Irish rebel with the developing figure of the activist Buddhist monk, in a life that continually challenged power. We know of five different aliases – but little of the 25-year gap in his biography before 1900, during which he learned the skills of effective activism in one or another of the radical movements of late nineteenth-century America: freethought (atheism), labour organising, Irish republicanism, socialism, or anarchism. We find him under police and intelligence surveillance and put on trial for sedition. He seemingly dies at least twice.

Dhammaloka brought a distinctive Irish sensibility to his anti-colonialism. As the movement for Catholic emancipation had shown, if empire’s support for its own religion overstepped the mark—as on the Shwedagon in 1901—rebels could use local religion as a force for resistance, which the colonial power could not be seen to tread too heavily upon. Dhammaloka pioneered this form of symbolic confrontation in Burma, for Buddhism rather than for Catholicism; but the arguments he used against missionary Christianity were not traditional Buddhist ones but those of western freethinkers, published in huge numbers by his Buddhist Tract Society. Convicted for sedition for a version of his slogan about “the Bible, the bottle and the Gatling gun,” Dhammaloka danced out of reach and continued his provocative challenge to power.

Dhammaloka’s dramatic life helps us understand how people used religion to engage with vast processes of change. Within a generation of his disappearance, popular movements had swept the British empire out of Asia, in many cases replacing it with nation-states founded on an ethno-religious basis. Yet before Irish independence, the pan-Asian Buddhist revival contained many imagined futures, and many different actors. Burmese peasants and Sri Lankan villagers flocked to Dhammaloka’s sermons, but his Buddhist projects also involved a Singapore Chinese businessman and a Shan chieftain. We find him based in monasteries of the Dawei ethnic minority in three countries and part of Japanese elite projects for international Buddhist networking. He ran Buddhist schools in Singapore and Thailand and was also active in India, Bangladesh, China, Australia, and present-day Malaysia.

All of this reflected the deeper ethnic complexity and transnationalism of a world of port cities, migrant labourers, trading diasporas, and poor whites. It was a sort of plebeian cosmopolitanism in which the Chinese, Indian, and Burmese bazaars of Rangoon closed down in support of an Irish ex-sailor gone native, who drew on the radical literature of American and British atheism to challenge imperial Christianity on behalf of Burmese Buddhists. If this story was lost for a century because it did not fit with mono-ethnic accounts of nationhood (and sanitised accounts of western Buddhism), it now offers us a window onto these wider currents that would help to bring about the end of empire – and the rise of today’s global Buddhism.

Featured Image Credit: Shwedagon Pagoda via Wikimedia Commons

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How African presidents rig elections to stay in office

There are at least 19 African countries where the heads-of-state have overstayed beyond their term limits via (un)constitutional revisions: Algeria, Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo , Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea (which is trying once more in 2020), Rwanda, Senegal, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. But there are also 11 notable European countries that have no term limits at all on how long the Prime Minister or Chancellor could stay in office, which is probably why the Africans do not pay heed to lectures from the Europeans, because the latter do not believe in term limits themselves!

In all European cases (Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom) the prime minister could remain in office for as long as their parliamentary majority is retained and the majority party wants them there, which is exactly what is currently practised in Angola, except that the Angolan constitution allows two maximum terms.

The presidential system concentrates power in that office, hence presidents do their utmost or damndest to exercise all the power at their disposal to the disadvantage of their opponents, and when besotted with that power, would do everything possible to keep it by extending term limits and enforcing the extension with winning elections. Hence elections have become the battlefield where both incumbents and aspirants fight accession to the throne, and as the saying goes, “might is right.” But the art of electioneering is now so fraught with tactics (boundary revisions, campaigning, vigilance on the manual ballot processes, vote buying, and even rigging), that the smartest and not necessarily the best candidate can win by sleight of hand. So the saying now, is “sleight is right.”

Stakeholders, including incumbents, opposition parties, electoral commission officials, civil society, and international monitors have now mastered the art of policing the manual ballot processes, hence the state of the art in elections cheating has shifted towards the cyber arena where government sponsors or opposition agents seek to avoid detection or apprehension via the application of various modus operandi ranging from, directly influencing electoral commission officials, to hacking and counter-hacking, in order to manipulate the electronic data aggregation of election results. Therefore, exercising control over the electronic aggregation process has become the new battleground and decider for who wins an election. It’s clear that, at least in Gabon, Ghana, Gambia in 2016, and Kenya in 2017, the incumbent wins the elections when he has control over the electronic vote aggregation exercise, and loses when not in control.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s December 2018 elections whereby the incumbent-controlled electoral commission cancelled voting in the opposition strongholds of Beni, Butembo and Yumbi, and subsequently announced results which were counter-intuitive to real time figures collated by some 40,000 observers of the Catholic Episcopal Commission, further demonstrates that whoever is in control of the data aggregation wins the election, and highlights the sleight is right milieu we are currently in. Even the colossal joint intervention of the African Union, the Southern African Development community and the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region was unsuccessful. Contrarily, recent irregularities highlighted by a Constitutional Court ruling over the May 2019 elections in Malawi, now known as the Tipp-Ex elections, included the use of the correction fluid on tallying forms, and posits a glaring example of an unsophisticated effort which proved unsuccessful, compared with the Congo’s more brazen commandeering of the election boundaries and results aggregation in the gizmo age.

We await Guinea-Bissau’s Supreme Court investigation over the disputed November 2019 presidential elections, to see what further challenges that might bring. In the meantime, African politics provides serious lessons to ponder. It may help to adopt an electronic or cyber solution which should forensically address all data entry errors in order to prevent rigging in the first place, or which could resolve such errors in the case of a dispute. However, countries must be willing to comply with the system once it is designed and mainstreamed.

Featured Image Credit: ‘Black and white image’ by Element5 Digital. CCO public domain via Unsplash.

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The story of COVID-19, by the numbers

The COVID-19 pandemic was announced on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organization, marking a turning point for the public health systems serving the health of constituent populations across the globe. This declaration moment is important for narrative on COVID-19 because it is the point at which it is accepted that the virus is not only travelling to different countries, but is now circulating in those countries. Governments are now required to take action to moderate the impact of the infection, reducing harm for the polity until the virus – through the mutation of its biological properties, human immunity, vaccines or some combination of these – takes its place, we hope, among the many other microbes with which human life has found co-existence.

The WHO declaration is also an important moment for the COVID-19 story because it reveals how data about notifications of diagnosed infection and deaths are used to make decisions and therefore reveals how, in the circumstances of a pandemic, it is keenly apparent that numerical and narrative futures constitute each other.

Pandemics are narrated into meaningful existence and COVID-19 is no exception. In Australia, for instance, news stories on the novel coronavirus have escalated since January 2020 to become headlined on many broadcast and digital news platforms. This pattern of media interest conforms to what has been seen in previous outbreaks. Swine flu in 2009 was a significant media event that did not go unremarked in the interviews and focus groups I and colleagues conducted with members of the general population variously impacted by the pandemic threat. Ebola, too, was a prominent news story in 2014 as was Zika in the run up to the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro  in 2016.

COVID-19 resembles these other outbreaks and pandemics, but the news stories about it seem to have a distinctively numerical quality. The number of known infections in a particular place over a period of time gives an index of the transmissibility of an infection. Mortality rates – a measure of the proportion of people that die with an infection – are also woven into pandemic stories, in general. But COVID-19’s numbers seem to be its story. News feeds continually update the counts of diagnoses and deaths, and have numerically tracked the contagion from a supposed source in China to other countries, notably South Korea, Iran and Italy, and then to most other parts of the world. This pandemic by numbers approach charts the particular transmissibility and severity of this virus, but also lends itself to our increasingly complex small-screen media diet, where numbers and graphs alongside images and videos more easily convey the COVID-19 story than do long form narrative texts.

COVID-19 also comes into a context where public health systems have increasingly turned to mathematical models to make decisions about how to manage various infections, notably HIV and influenza. Models are used to decide how to apply resources and strategies to best effect. For example, modelling has shown how HIV can be prevented by HIV treatments, because they reduce the likelihood of the transmission of the virus. For influenza, models are used to calculate what proportion of the population needs to be vaccinated to protect the whole population from an emerging infection. These models can be adjusted to fit what is known about the biosocial properties of a particular infection, the efficacy of treatments and vaccines, and cost. In the case of COVID-19, for example, models may be indicating that containment will reduce the speed and scope of transmission and therefore reduce mortality, the burden on the health system, and ultimately the cost for governments. COVID-19 may be a fully-fledged algorithmic pandemic in the sense that its storyline is transparently about its numbers and because it is managed in terms of the models that combine numerical indices of transmission, mortality, burden, and cost.

Mathematical models and narratives also have a point of contact in relation to futures and pasts: they both offer means of trying to shape what might happen through action in the present guided by understandings of what has happened. Decision-makers want to know how to act now to reduce the future impact of a pandemic and models support these decisions by analysing pre-existing data about transmission, mortality, the benefits and costs of treatments, vaccines and containment, for example. Modelling, then, looks to what the future might be by assessing a pandemic’s past numbers. This is strictly true even during the course of a particular pandemic. Narratives on pandemic futures also recall the past, for example, through reference to the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, swine flu in 2009, and other outbreaks, and on that basis orient the narrator and their interlocutors to possible futures. Public policy statements about containment requirements and news media vision of empty supermarket shelves both reflect action in the present that is predicated on pasts and aims to shape futures.

For all its life threatening, anxiety-making potential, though, the numerical narrative on COVID-19 is surprisingly impersonal. Stories of the many lives affected by the pandemic and the full tenor of its corporeal horrors are crowded out by governmental advice and updating of the numbers. One reason for this separation of pandemic knowing and lived experience is their incommensurability. Pandemics are constituted in the sheer scale and spread of their numbers, so much so that no one person can experience a pandemic without recourse to some signification of this calculated, collective plight. Infections, in contrast, are visceral and personal, including for those who devote themselves to providing care. Moreover, narrative arguably meets its limits in the experience of an infection because, like traumatic experience, living through a debilitating one is not an easy story to tell. Some accounts of how people experienced the 1918-1919 pandemic remark on the lack of affect, giving the impression that emotion was bracketed aside as irresponsible, impossible or even a luxury.

Numerical narrative, then, may not only be one of the ways we can know a pandemic is happening; it may provide the means of living with emerging threat. As they say, time – and numbers – will tell how things turn out for COVID-19.

Featured Image Credit: “people walking on train station” by Liliya Lisa. CCO via Unsplash.

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Harvey Weinstein and the decriminalization of prostitution

The New York trial of Harvey Weinstein, which ended last month with a guilty verdict on charges of rape and sexual assault and an acquittal on more serious charges of predatory sexual assault, has already elicited extensive commentary from pundits of all stripes. Everyone wants to know what it will mean, for example, for the success of rape prosecutions going forward, for other victims of sexual assault who wish to file charges and testify, and for the future of the #MeToo movement generally.

One aspect of the case that has elicited almost no attention, however, is a curious aspect of Weinstein’s defense. Weinstein’s lawyers contended that his victims were never subjected to nonconsensual sex. Rather, it was claimed, they were willing partners in a “transactional” exchange of sex for professional advancement in the highly competitive movie industry. In short, Weinstein argued, what the government alleged to be rape was really just an instance of Hollywood’s notorious “casting couch.”

Obviously, the jury did not buy this story. Still, for purposes of discussion, it is worth thinking about the implications of such a defense — of the notion that that these women willingly exchanged sex for a hope of professional advantage — since it is likely to come up again.

Note something quite peculiar about this defense. Even if it had let Weinstein off the hook for the serious crime of rape, it could still have potentially exposed him to liability for a lesser offense. After all, agreeing to give someone something of value in exchange for sex satisfies the legal definition of prostitution (though, admittedly, these kinds of transactions hardly ever get prosecuted in the real world).

And this recognition, in turn, leads to a question: why is it a crime to engage in such transactional sex in the first place? It is quite striking that the U.S., practically alone among Western industrialized nations, criminalizes both the buying and selling of sex. Most other Western legal systems either: (1) criminalize only its purchase (this is the approach in most of Scandinavia, Canada, and France); (2) criminalize some prostitution-related activities such as streetwalking, but do not criminalize the buying or selling of sex as such (the approach in the U.K.); (3) criminalize pimping, but not the purchase or sale of sex itself (the policy in Denmark and Israel); or (4) do not criminalize any prostitution-related activities other than trafficking and forced prostitution, but instead license, impose age limitations and regulate matters of health and safety (the policy in Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and several counties in Nevada).

Although U.S. law to date has maintained its markedly punitive approach to prostitution, that may be about to change. In just the last year or so, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. have all begun to give serious consideration to the possibility of decriminalizing at least some aspects of the sex trade.

It is worth asking why this should be happening now.

Consider the ways in which our law and culture have changed in recent years with respect to the regulation of sex. On the one hand, we have seen an increased punitiveness with respect to nonconsensual sex, including an expansion in the definition of what constitutes rape and sexual assault, and the introduction of new offenses such as human sex trafficking, child grooming, female genital mutilation, and revenge porn. On the other hand, we have seen a general liberalization of laws involving various forms of previously disfavored forms of consensual sexual activity, including the decriminalization of fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and adult pornography, as well as other “vices” such as gambling and marijuana use.

And where exactly does prostitution fit into this picture? It all depends on how one understands the underlying factual dynamics of that practice. If one believes that competent adults should be free to decide to engage in whatever consensual private sexual behavior they wish to engage in – in short, that prostitution is akin to fornication and adultery — then one will want to decriminalize prostitution except where there is proof of actual human trafficking or coercion. But if one believes that most prostitution is inherently coercive — that few people willingly decide to earn a living in such a degrading manner, that many sex workers sell sex, say, in order to feed a drug addiction — then one will be inclined to want to keep prostitution criminal, at least on the buyer’s side.

So, what to make of Harvey Weinstein’s casting couch defense? The parallels to prostitution should be clear: Some might view movie producers and those who wish to work in the industry as competent adults who should be free to reach whatever private arrangements they wish, so long as no actual force or coercion is involved. Others might believe that the relationship between powerful movie moguls (and other similarly situated business and political figures) and their subordinates is so intrinsically unequal, and so likely to be coercive, that sex between them should be uniformly prohibited.

And the problem posed by sex within unequal hierarchical relationships is hardly limited to movie producers. Most jurisdictions have long criminalized sex between prison guards and inmates, police officers and persons in their custody, and health care professionals and patients. More controversial are newer laws criminalizing sex between clergy persons and congregants and educators and (adult) students as well. And even where sex within a hierarchical relationship is not a crime – say, if it involves a high-ranking political official and a staffer – it is much more likely today to lead to censure and firing than in the past.

We live in an age of deep conflict concerning the proper regulation of sex. Most liberals agree, at least in principle, that the law should protect people in their right not to be subjected to sexual contact against their will, while also safeguarding their right to engage in (private consensual) sexual conduct in which they do wish to participate. But how that balance should be achieved in practice is much harder to say, in part because there is so much disagreement about the underlying facts that inform such public policy choices.

If nothing else, we should seek to make our law internally consistent. If it should not be a crime to offer someone a part in a movie in return for sex, it is hard to see why it should be a crime to exchange sex for money “in the street.” Conversely, if it should be a crime to buy sex in the conventional way, then why should it not also be a crime to do so via the casting couch?

As states begin to contemplate the decriminalization of prostitution while simultaneously looking for new ways to prevent coercive sexual encounters, these are the kinds of hard questions with which the law will have to contend.

Featured Image Credit: by iSAW Company via Pexels

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How Title IX changed American ballet

It has been nearly 50 years since Title IX of the Education Amendments was passed in 1972, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex by federally funded entities. Title IX proved critical in opening many fields of endeavor to girls and women and is perhaps most famous for its impact on sports. According to Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, before Title IX, women made up only 2% of college varsity athletes, and the scant women’s teams received less than 10% of most campus athletic budgets. There were no athletic scholarships for women at all. Title IX ushered in a new era of girls’ and women’s participation in athletics. Whereas in 1971 32,000 girls participated in intercollegiate sports, that number had risen to 203,600 by 2012. At high schools the shift was even more dramatic, from fewer than 300,000 girls participating in 1971 to more than three million by 2009. These expanded opportunities are certainly positive outcomes. But there were unanticipated consequences as well, and the feminist victory of Title IX affected a surprising corner of American culture: ballet class.

Title IX had two major effects on ballet class. The most immediate was a significant drop in enrollment among girls who now had a wider range of extracurricular options. As John Kalina of the Marie Shaw School of Dance explained in Dance Teacher several decades after Title IX passed, “Over time, with girls getting involved with sports, the competition has been really tough. A much smaller percentage of girls take dancing because of soccer and all the activities that school provides.” Girls never stopped taking ballet class altogether, but ballet became just one of many choices, as it always had been for their male peers.

Image credit: Ballet dancer in white and gold tutu. Photo by David Hofmann. CC0 via Unsplash.

The second effect of Title IX on ballet class followed the first. If girls wanted more competitive activities, then perhaps dance should respond accordingly. Adding trophies and prizes might renew the interest of dance students who had come to expect competition in all their activities. If, as dance teacher Tom Karaty told a Dance Magazine writer in 1996, “The tenor of America today, and of the kids, is very competitive, very competition-minded,” then perhaps organized competitions would increase dance class’s viability. Consequently, although enrollment lagged throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, recreational ballet restored the balance to some extent during the 1990s by establishing a new competitive ecosystem.

As a result of these changes, one of the fundamental decisions any parent makes when enrolling a child in dance class in the United States today is whether to choose a competition studio. Few industry figures exist, but a 2000 Dance Teacher survey found that 59% of dance teachers sent their students to competitions. The 2009 edition of The Dancer’s Survival Manual: Everything You Need to Know from the First Class to Career Change estimated as many as 16,000 American studios large and small participated in competitions. As these numbers suggest, today more dance studios than not are competition studios. Not all the students compete, but those who do require extra lessons, rehearsal time, and financial support. Greater parental commitment is also necessary to facilitate travel, just as for travel soccer and softball teams. Young dancers on the circuit spend hours every day learning choreography and rehearsing. The competitions motivate hard work and provide performance experience but can also be exhausting and stressful.

The most influential ballet competition for recreational dancers is the Youth America Grand Prix, established in the United States in 1999 by former Bolshoi Ballet dancers who believed that a competitive structure would elevate the status of ballet class. The competition was so successful that it now operates worldwide and has reached more than 100,000 ballet students through auditions, competitions, and workshops. Few other competitions in the United States focus solely on ballet as Youth America Grand Prix does, but virtually all competition studios insist that their students take ballet as critical training for all forms of dance.

While appreciating the role competitions have played in keeping ballet class relevant, many in the dance world express ambivalence about the whole idea of competition. Some ballet teachers think that artistic expression cannot—and should not—be scored, while teachers and parents alike object to the sexualization of young students who compete in flashy costumes. Others involved in dance competitions, as in all youth sports, dislike the heavy focus on self-esteem that leads to an insistence on all children winning something at every competition. Still, the children themselves often value competitive experience. As one twelve-year-old girl informed Dance Magazine in 1996, “I like performing, I like getting awards, and I like the achievement I feel.” Competitions allowed her to have those experiences through the traditional girls’ activity of ballet, not only through the new athletic activities opened up by Title IX.

Competitions have changed the experience of ballet class for millions of young American dancers. They are a good example of the unintended consequences of shifting ideas about gender for every corner of American society. Although competitions raise lingering questions about art and sport, there is no doubt that they have exerted an enormous influence on the long history of ballet class, a history that intersects in so many ways with broader social and cultural developments in America.

Featured image credit: Girls dancing on stage. Photo by Francesco Tommasini. CC0 via  Unsplash .

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How New York City became a technology hub

Recently in New York, as in other cities, the coronavirus pandemic has spurred an urgent shift from working in offices to working at home and given a massive boost to digital platforms for telecommuting, teleconferencing, and online teaching. Yet the tech industry has also generated some of the most significant spaces for face-to-face interaction of recent years. These are the hackathons, meetups, startup accelerators, and innovation districts that make up a globally hegemonic innovation complex.

As the second-largest startup ecosystem in the world and a superstar city of jobs using digital technology, New York hosts many of these spaces. Numbers vary according to who is counting, but both city government officials and organizations that represent the tech “community” claim the city has more than 9,000 startups and between 150,000 and 300,000 tech workers, half of whom work in non-tech companies. There are 70 tech accelerators, some specializing in fields like health or finance, 44 coding schools, and more than 500 programs for tech training and education. While Big Tech titans like Amazon, Google and Facebook are expanding their footprint in Manhattan, each by one million square feet, a recent study showed the Brooklyn waterfront to be the second fastest-growing “innovation economy” in the United States.

I immersed myself in these spaces. But I was shocked to see how few friends or colleagues knew where they were, how they worked—or, indeed, anything about them. So, with documentary filmmakers Alice Arnold and Gary Griffin, I set out to create a visual journey around New York’s tech ecosystem. We wanted to show how broadly tech production has spread in New York and how it is changing the character of many neighborhoods. his is not the same tech-led gentrification that has roiled San Francisco or the corporate power that has been exercised against taxes in Seattle, but it is a new landscape of power.

 

Despite risk from floods and rising water levels, a significant portion of this landscape is on the waterfront. Small-scale computer hardware startups, media platforms, branding agencies and production studios for film and TV production are on the East River in North Brooklyn from Greenpoint to Sunset Park, with an epicenter at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Google has a big beachhead near the Hudson River in Manhattan’s Chelsea and is building another in the old printing house district called Hudson Square. To the north, Facebook has leased space near top financial firms in the newly built, high-status district called Hudson Yards. Meanwhile, companies like Conde Nast and Spotify are in the newly reconstructed office towers of the World Trade Center near the Hudson River in lower Manhattan. From river to river, the historic financial district at the tip of lower Manhattan has been transformed into a tech and media hub.

Featured Image Credits: by Leonhard Niederwimmer via Pixabay

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How olive oil promotes brain health

Diets and superfoods are all the rage. From acai berries to the Zone diet, many a dietary trend has come along promising a range of benefits, such as weight loss, heart health, and improved cognition. But the science behind these claims is often sketchy at best. One dietary regime that has stood the test of time – and importantly, scientific scrutiny – is the Mediterranean diet. Earlier this year, U.S. News and World Report named the Mediterranean diet as the best diet of 2020 for the third year in a row. The diets were scored by a panel of nationally recognized experts in diet and nutrition. In second place was another consistent high performer in the rankings, the DASH diet (DASH stands for dietary approaches to stop hypertension) which focuses on lowering blood pressure.

If you are on a DASH diet or the Mediterranean diet you are probably eating fruits, vegetables, and low-fat dairy foods, as well as whole-grain foods, fish, poultry, and nuts.  You are also probably consuming olive oil as a substitute for unhealthy vegetable or coconut oils.  Olive Oil, particularly the extra virgin preparation, contains lots of antioxidants (just look at that rich color; it screams anti-oxidants) and also has significant anti-Inflammatory properties. Everyone knows that these are the two most important properties of healthy foods.

Your body clearly benefits from eating olive oil. Does your brain care?

Answering this question is not easy. First of all, olive oil is a complex blend of various chemicals. It would be nice to know which of these is most advantageous and whether they influence brain health directly or indirectly. A recent study attempted to find answers using an animal model that mimics conditions of multiple sclerosis in the human brain. Multiple sclerosis is characterized by brain inflammation leading to numerous degenerative changes.

The brain inflammation present in multiple sclerosis patients is thought to be driven by changes in the gut microbiome. Scientists now understand that the gut microbiome plays a significant role in both the progression and severity of the disease. This is the likely scenario: an imbalance in the gut bacteria leads to inflammation, chemical debris released from the bacteria migrate out of the gut into the blood and then into the brain. The most harmful of these bacterial debris is called lipopolysaccharide and it can induce a powerful inflammatory response inside the brain. People with multiple sclerosis have elevated levels of lipopolysaccharide in their brains, spinal cords, and blood.

Olive oil modifies how your gut microbiome communicates with your brain. Olive oil’s beneficial effects on the human brain and body are likely related to the presence of the polyphenols hydroxytyrosol and oleic acid. Hydroxytyrosol protects cells that are under oxidative stress. Oleic acid has beneficial effects on blood cholesterol levels.

One recent study of olive oil demonstrated potent anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. Administering olive oil animals significantly reduced the number of harmful chemicals that can cause tissue injury and aging, particularly within the brain. Olive oil administration also increased levels of the enzymes that provide protection against oxidative damage in the brain and also reduces the negative actions the lipopolysaccharide released by bacteria in the gut. Olive oil also reduced the level of inflammation in the brain.

So, yes, your brain benefits a lot from adding olive oil to your diet and these benefits originate in response to the changes that olive oil makes to your gut microbiome. Olive oil should become a big part of the diet for anyone with an aging brain.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

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How work conditions shape healthcare

A few hours before he died, my patient, a 21-year-old man (a boy, really) who was undergoing treatment for a blood cancer came to my ward from the emergency department where he had presented with fever. His parents came with him. The emergency clinicians had begun the right protocol to address his fever. My duties, as his ward nurse, were to follow that protocol. He was doing well. He even tried to crack a joke. I laughed, though I was too old to get the reference. His joy, with his smiling parents by his side, was enough to make me happy. But then he started breathing heavily. His blood pressure dropped. I knew these as the signs of life-threatening infection. While running between his room and the rooms of my three other patients, I got the resident, whom some call the junior doctor, on the phone. After what seemed too long, she came, but shortly after she got there, my patient had grown unconscious. I grabbed a colleague on the floor and asked her to cover hanging the chemotherapy for my patient in another room so that I could sit with my unconscious, now dying patient and his parents. I knew this would burden my colleague. She had four very sick patients of her own; now she’d have five. My patient died about a half hour later. I sat with his sobbing parents for another half hour, but then my friend came to say that she had a patient in crisis. If I didn’t take back my patient who needed the chemotherapy, she was afraid she was going to be too busy and she might make a mistake. “I don’t want to kill someone. There’s enough mourning on the ward tonight already,” she said. She needed me to pick up my full load.

Another night, I had a patient in the intensive care unit who had come to the hospital with a stroke. A neurologist had placed her on a mechanical ventilator by which to oxygenate her body as soon as she had arrived at the hospital. But the stroke, an electroencephalogram had shown, had shut down her brain altogether. There was no electrical activity; she had no reflexes; and without the ventilator, she could not breathe. The clinical signs were clear: Her brain essentially was dead. The neurologist who had placed her on the ventilator met with her family and said he needed them to consent to “take her off and let her die.” Her family was confused. Why would they “let her die”? The neurologist insisted on calling an ethics consult to force a withdrawal of the ventilator—without the family’s consent. As I was in the ICU that night, I only had one other patient. But this other patient needed dialysis, which demanded a lot of my time. I didn’t have time to help the family process why the neurologist had placed their wife, mother, and sister on the ventilator without their consent and now was forcing their hand in disconnecting it. They sat in the room dazed and angry.

On both nights, I wanted to quit. And truth be told, I would have had I not needed my salary. I didn’t want to stop being a nurse. But I couldn’t deal with the emotions I felt. I felt trodden upon. Beat up, burned out. My body ached. I oozed stress hormones.

Some call what I felt “moral distress,” the emotions that arise from not being able to do what one thinks of as the right thing to do. It is right for nurses to care for bereaved parents and help a confused and angry family understand the clinical situation. I knew my nursing department had a “moral resilience” program to help with the feelings some call “moral distress.” But I didn’t want to deepen, sustain, or restore my integrity. My integrity was just fine.

The twin concepts of moral distress and moral resilience put a lot of burden on nurses – and other healthcare providers. But healthcare providers aren’t the problem. And both concepts, in one way or another, put the problem on our backs. It’s our problem to butt heads against institutional constraints so we can do our jobs or our problem to readjust our integrity amid these constraints. No; the problem is the constraints.

Healthcare systems, of whatever stripe, control the conditions of our work. The push to treat patients in the cheapest way possible, the hierarchy that lets one type of provider decide what to do and then makes families undo those decisions and undercuts other providers’ ability to help – whatever the situation, when nurses and other healthcare providers go home at the end of the shift beaten and broken, it’s because the moral conditions of work are off.

We can no longer use moral distress and moral resilience to mask the moral conditions of work. Safe work environments in which one can perform one’s core professional duties while being treated fairly and respectfully and in which all providers are valued as important members of the care team; environments in which one can take time to be human, time to eat, put one’s feet up for a few minutes, and to process one’s own grief at the loss of a patient – these, among others, are the moral conditions of work. Let us reframe the discussion to focus on the moral conditions of work, not on concepts that make these conditions healthcare providers’ problem.

Featured Image Credit: “Stress Programmer” by andreas160578 via Pixabay.

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