Lily Salter's Blog, page 1017

Watch Donald Trump address immigration, abortion and what it means to be “conservative” in “Meet the Press” exclusive

Donald Trump doubled down in an NBC "Meet the Press" exclusive, which aired Sunday morning, telling host Chuck Todd that he would reverse President Obama's orders on immigration and call for the deportation of all undocumented immigrants. "We're going to keep the families together, but they have to go," he told Todd. Asked where the immigrants would "go" if they didn't have a home to return to, Trump reiterated "They have to go!" Adding, "We will work with them. They have to go. Chuck, we either have a country, or we don't have a country." Later, Trump was asked to define "conservatism." Here was his response:

"Well, for me, conservatism as it pertains to our country is fiscal.  We have to be strong and secure and get rid of our debt.  The military has to be powerful and not necessarily used but very powerful.  I am on the sort of a little bit social side of conservative when it comes-- I want people to be taken care of from a health care standpoint.  But to do that, we have to be strong.  I want to save Social Security without cuts.  I want a strong country.  And to me, conservative means a strong country with very little debt."

The conversation then pivoted to the issue of abortion, as Trump noted that he's "always hated the concept" and considered himself "pro-life." "Should it be legal?  Should some form of abortion be legal?" Todd asked him point-blank. Off-mic, Trump responded to Todd, telling him that he'd make some exceptions: "Rape, incest, if the mother is going to die.  And Ronald Reagan had those same exceptions.  And many Republicans have those same exceptions." Watch the full interview courtesy of NBC below: Donald Trump doubled down in an NBC "Meet the Press" exclusive, which aired Sunday morning, telling host Chuck Todd that he would reverse President Obama's orders on immigration and call for the deportation of all undocumented immigrants. "We're going to keep the families together, but they have to go," he told Todd. Asked where the immigrants would "go" if they didn't have a home to return to, Trump reiterated "They have to go!" Adding, "We will work with them. They have to go. Chuck, we either have a country, or we don't have a country." Later, Trump was asked to define "conservatism." Here was his response:

"Well, for me, conservatism as it pertains to our country is fiscal.  We have to be strong and secure and get rid of our debt.  The military has to be powerful and not necessarily used but very powerful.  I am on the sort of a little bit social side of conservative when it comes-- I want people to be taken care of from a health care standpoint.  But to do that, we have to be strong.  I want to save Social Security without cuts.  I want a strong country.  And to me, conservative means a strong country with very little debt."

The conversation then pivoted to the issue of abortion, as Trump noted that he's "always hated the concept" and considered himself "pro-life." "Should it be legal?  Should some form of abortion be legal?" Todd asked him point-blank. Off-mic, Trump responded to Todd, telling him that he'd make some exceptions: "Rape, incest, if the mother is going to die.  And Ronald Reagan had those same exceptions.  And many Republicans have those same exceptions." Watch the full interview courtesy of NBC below:

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“If we did not protest, no one would punish those men”: A brutal murder, a sham trial, and justice denied in Kabul

On March 19, 2015, 27-year-old female Islamic studies student Farkhunda argued with a mullah selling amulets in front of the Shah-Do Shamshera shrine in Kabul. As she questioned the ethics of selling “charms” for financial gain, the man reportedly accused her of burning the Quran. She immediately protested that she was a Muslim and had not burned the Quran. The growing mob of men either did not hear or did not care to acknowledge her defense. While a number of police officers failed to intervene, the mob beat her with sticks and stones. Within a short time, she was dropped from a roof, run over with a car and finally set on fire. When 22-year-old Zahra Ibrahimi, an artist and computer literacy teacher of girls in Kabul, heard about the murder, she knew she could not stay silent. She contacted her friends and on March 23 they painted their cheeks red to match the circulating photos and videos of Farkhunda’s bloody face. They made signs denouncing Farkhunda’s murder, and they joined hundreds to march from the shrine where Farkhunda was attacked to the banks of the river where she was burned. On March 24 Zahra joined thousands of men and women holding banners and shouting for justice in front of the Afghan Supreme Court in Kabul. The tragedy had transported her from the front of the classroom to the forefront of the national news as photographs of her barred teeth, painted cheeks and raised fist appeared in the Washington Post, the Huffington Post and news outlets around the world.  Zahra says of the incident: “We felt if we did not protest, then no one would punish those men.” A month earlier, in February of 2015, shortly after the United States announced an end to combat operations in Afghanistan, Zahra met us at the Serena Hotel in Kabul to talk about her job teaching in the computer literacy program at the Amena E Fedawi girls’ school in Kabul. The program, part of the Digital Citizen Fund started by Afghan social entrepreneur and Time 100 person of the year Roya Mahboob, seeks to expand digital literacy for women and girls throughout Afghanistan. Zahra brought her sister, Asima, the goalie of the women’s Afghan national soccer team. We sat in the luxurious but deserted hotel cafe, far from the dust clouds, smog and chaotic traffic of central Kabul. In response to our smiles, they looked at us with what can only be described as wariness and cautious optimism. They wanted us to see the women’s soccer team practice; they wanted us to visit the classroom where Zahra taught. They wanted the world to know they were fighting every day for the importance of girls' education and empowerment in Afghanistan. “I think I am too lucky because I have the best students in the world, and they really love me and I love them too. This century is the Computer Century,” Zahra said to us. “Knowledge is power.” Zahra, who had been always at the top of her class throughout her education, had never planned to become a teacher. Roya Mahboob, who calls Zahra “relentlessly creative and positive with her students,” inspired Zahra to consider a path of sharing what she had learned with other women and girls. “Education is not only important for Afghan women, it is important for all men and women, but for women it is more important,” Zahra said. “If a mother is educated, she can train her child and help her child ... Afghan society is made up of men and women. If all of them are educated, we can have the best society because two is more powerful than one.”  The computer is particularly important for women and girls, Zahra said, because in Afghan society women and girls are often not allowed to work outside the home. With computers and cellphones, women can learn and work from home or from one of numerous women’s centers established by UNICEF and other groups around Afghanistan. The next morning when we rose early and crossed Kabul to visit Zahra’s computer education class, the students stood up with their arms straight at their sides, their eyes wide and steady, and one by one they bolted out their answers. “I want to be a doctor,” one girl said; “I want to be a pilot”; “I want to be a computer scientist”; “I want to be a politician”; “I want the world to know that we do not want the Taliban to come back and close the schools.” Zahra, their teacher and translator, stood at the head of the classroom, and now for the first time she smiled. If Farkhunda’s savage murder reveals a virulent strain of misogyny in Afghan society, then the swift and passionate protests of women like Zahra testify to a growing counterforce that some attribute to the expansion of women’s education over the last decade. Under Taliban rule, women’s education had effectively ceased, but after the Taliban’s defeat by coalition forces in 2003, the Afghan government and the international community invested heavily in education. Though statistics in Afghanistan are notoriously difficult to verify, according to the World Bank, by 2012 more than 2.9 million girls had enrolled in school. Lauryn Oates, project director for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, who worked with UNICEF to gather statistics on women in Afghanistan and later wrote of her findings for the Guardian, echoes Zahra when she says, “The single greatest predictor for nearly every single indicator was the mother's education level.” Children of educated mothers are more likely to attend school, become literate, marry later and have better access to sanitation, food and water. They are more likely to demand a better life for themselves and their daughters. Amid the rhetoric over what constitutes original or authentic Afghan or Muslim culture and what the Taliban considers “foreign” or corrupting influence, many erroneously conclude that misogynist conservatism has dominated Afghan and Muslim culture from the beginning and that modern European and American influence single-handedly precipitated the recent expansion of women’s education. Many in the Taliban speak, as some conservative Christians do in America, of returning to the mythical origins of a restrictive theocracy where students only learn narrow interpretations of religious texts. Women like Zahra, who harbor no more love of foreign control than members of the Taliban, also crave a return.  Zahra’s view of history, which not surprisingly differs considerably from the Taliban’s, supports the narrative that recent changes in women’s education in Afghanistan result not so much from progress as a return to some of the great traditions in Islamic culture: “As Allah said, knowledge is necessary for both men and women. Allah paid attention to education, and I think through education we can have a good society because we can make good decisions.” According to Zahra, education is not only power, it provides access to a true understanding of Islam.   A brief examination of Islamic and Afghan history substantiates Zahra’s instincts. In 2004, Aisha Abdurrahman published "Muslim Women: a Biographical Dictionary," which profiles influential Islamic women from the first century AH to the 13th century AH. Profiles range from literary figures like Wallada bint al-Mustakfi (1001 to 1091), who wrote poetry, shunned the hijab and walked around Bagdad in a transparent tunic, to Islamic scholars like Fatima bint al-Mundhir (d.763 CE), to scientists like Al-ljliyah bint al-‘ljli al-Asturlabi (living in the mid-900s AD), and polymath scholars such as Sutayta al-Mahamali (d. 987), specialist in hadith, jurisprudence and mathematics. Many people now understand that while Europe languished in the superstitious Dark Ages, Islamic scholars equipped with paper from China studied spherical trigonometry and physics, using astrolabes to calculate the altitude of the stars, and made great achievements in medicine, literacy and many other fields. Islamic scholars of the Golden Age can be credited with, among other innovations, the invention of algebra. Between the ninth and 13th centuries, the libraries in Baghdad (Bait al-Hikma), Damascus (al-Zahiriyah), Timbuktu (Sankoré), Cordoba (Royal Mosque) and Cairo (Dar al-Hikmah) contained more books, manuscripts and literature than in the entire Greek world. As the evolution of power led to the extinguishing of scholarly pursuits in Islamic nations, Europe, building on the work of Islamic and Chinese scholars, flowered into the Renaissance. Passion for scholarship, science and the arts belong less to any one culture than to different historical periods of the world’s great civilizations. At any period, in America, Europe or in nations of the Muslim world, one can find the opposing forces of conservative control locked in struggle with forces of the human spirit that crave knowledge, expression and justice. The 19th and 20th centuries in Afghanistan witnessed an ongoing struggle between, on the one hand, those in support of education and women’s rights and on the other hand tribal elements seeking to consolidate power and limit women’s agency. Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, Emir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901, abolished the tribal custom of forcing a woman to marry her deceased husband’s brother, raised the age of marriage, gave women the right to divorce, and allowed women to inherit property. In the early 20th century, Amanullah Khan and his reformer wife, Soraya Tarzi, one of the most influential women in the Muslim world at the beginning of the 20th century, created modern schools for boys and girls, abolished the strict dress codes for women, and pushed for equal rights while increasing trade with Europe and Asia. At this time, women began to enter the workforce. Amanullah’s sister, Kobra, created the Organization for Women’s Protection. Eventually, conservative elements from tribal areas grew agitated with the reforms and in 1929 supported a bandit-turned-revolutionary named Habibullah Kalanani in a successful coup. Nine months later Mohammed Nadi Shah seized power and completed the process of abolishing Amanullah’s reforms.   Throughout the 20th century the conflict between conservative and reformist impulses continued: In 1959 women were allowed to unveil again, but as a result 60 people were killed during a revolt in Kandahar. In 1964 the constitution gave women the right to vote, and in 1965 the Democratic Organization of Women formed to work against illiteracy and forced marriages. In 1977 an Afghan woman activist named Meena Keshwar Kamal worked to establish RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. The ongoing struggle between restrictive impulses seeking to limit women’s freedom and impulses toward gender equity, rights and social freedom have always interwoven with outside elements from Europe, America, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, who have all sought influence in Afghanistan. It is certainly not the case, however, that reformist movements have always grown out of Europe and America. While trying to enforce reforms, including women’s rights, on tribal areas in the 1970s, the Russians often resorted to violence and terror while demonstrating a complete disregard for religious and tribal customs. During the same period, the United States began to provide military support for the Mujahedin, many of whom, after the defeat of the Russians, formed the Taliban forces who in the 1990s established extremely oppressive codes for women. The defeat of the Taliban at the hands of Coalition forces in 2001 led to the establishment of a democratic government, which continues to struggle with the Taliban for control of the nation and the role women will play in its future. By all measures, the last decade has been dangerous for women seeking a voice in Afghanistan. In 2009 the Taliban killed female activist Sitar Achakzai in Kandahar a month before she planned to leave Afghanistan for the sake of her own safety. In 2011 Hamida Marmaki, a renowned female Afghan law professor and human rights activist, was killed in a suicide attack. In 2012 outspoken student Malala Yousafzai was gunned down on her school bus. Also in 2012, gunmen killed activist Nadia Seddiqi. Recently Pakistani rights activist Sabeen Mahmud was gunned down in Karachi, and the list goes on. Many girls’ schools have been attacked and burned in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2009, President Karzai signed into law by executive order the Elimination of Violence Against Women Act (EVAW), but the constitution requires that parliament approve the law, and so far it has failed to do so because of conservative politicians and their constituents in the tribal territories. Many women activists and reformers, like Roya and her sister Elaha Mahboob, who set up the Digital Citizen Fund where Zahra teaches, received night letters from the Taliban and finally left the country for their own safety. The murder and forced exile of many other female activists, teachers, scholars, entrepreneurs and professionals can only demoralize those women who remain to fight for their rights. Though the expansion of women’s education and education in general since 2003 has been a major achievement, 38 percent of children (most of them girls) still do not have access to education. According to UNESCO, of the 5,000 schools built or rehabilitated since 2003, 50 percent are unusable because they have deteriorated, been destroyed or, in some cases, constructed too far from communities. UNICEF, which places the literacy rate for women and girls at 22 percent, hopes that expansion of technology and connectivity throughout the region will grow literacy and seed economic development. In 2014 there were only 210,000 fixed Internet subscribers, but mobile services cover  90 percent of the country. Currently, 20 million Afghans (48 percent of them women) subscribe to mobile services (out of a population of about 30 million). More important, USAID estimates that eight out of 10 women have access to a mobile phone. Among those women who own a cellphone, 67 percent obtained them in the last several years, and 25 percent of them use their phones for commercial and social activity. These statistics have encouraged UNICEF Innovation Labs to develop various technologies that allow women to operate simple educational programs, perform banking transactions, and even work on their cellphones. Among those who can access the Internet through phones or computers, 74 percent use social media. One of the first things the girls learn in Zahra’s computer class is how to set up their own social media accounts so they can begin to communicate with the outside world and feel connected to a wider community. Technology and social media now serve criminals, governments, terrorists and protesters alike. Many witnesses to and participants in Farkhunda’s murder unintentionally ignited a backlash of protest by posting videos of the crime on social media. Hasmat Stanekzai, spokesman with the Kabul police, reportedly wrote on Facebook about Farkhunda: "This (person) thought, like several other unbelievers, that this kind of action and insult will get them U.S. or European citizenship. But before reaching their target, lost their life.” The comment not only caused an eruption on social media, it helped spur many women to protest on the streets. After the murder, the reaction, protest and national and international debate over what it meant and what the government should do in response largely took place in the digital sphere before it spilled onto the streets. Many women, especially in Kabul where the murder happened, saw videos of the crime and immediately expressed their outrage via cellphone and social media. They communicated with each other to organize protests. For current President Ashraf Ghani, the Farkhunda murder represented one of the first challenges to his pledge to push for women’s rights and social reform. The protests elicited an immediate reaction from the government. Hashmat Stanekzai of the Kabul police was fired for his outburst on social media, and Ashraf Ghani set up a commission to investigate the crime. At first Zahra and her friends had hope that Farkhunda’s killers and the police who stood by watching her murder would receive justice. It seemed to many that the verdict, in this case, would extend beyond those involved in the murder, even beyond the murder itself, to all those men across the nation who cheered Farkhunda’s death and sought to silence women. Though Ashraf Ghani would not directly involve himself in the case, the trial could not help but feel like a litmus test of his government’s stance on women’s rights and social justice. After three days of court hearings, four people were found guilty (including the amulet seller who claimed Farkhunda had burned the Quran), and sentenced to death, charges against 18 men were dropped for lack of evidence, and eight others were sentenced to 16 years in prison. Of 19 policemen charged with dereliction of duty because they did not act to save Farkhunda, eight were acquitted due to lack of evidence, and 11 were sentenced to one year in prison. Few people felt satisfied with the result, which, in a few short hours, seemed to both exonerate many of the guilty while condemning others without due process. Then in June the Appeals Court overturned the death sentences of all four men found guilty (giving three 20-year sentences and the other a one-year sentence), and released most of those convicted of Farkhunda's murder ahead of their appeals. When we asked Zahra why the police had failed to arrest some key assailants who were clearly identifiable from video footage of the attack, while they arrested others without any evidence that they had been involved, she said, “If you have money, you get away with everything. If not, you may be punished.” She and her fellow activists felt discouraged by the judicial outcome both for the sake of Farkhunda, a woman who, like themselves, sought a public voice, and for what the judgment might portend for their own lives. “Kabul is becoming more dangerous,” Zahra said. “After Farkhunda’s murder and seeing that the murderers were not punished, men in Kabul became fearless and bold. Now many women who work for social change are depressed because they do not feel secure. They are afraid to make plans for the future. When we go to our jobs or to school, men harass us wherever we go because of what we do and how we dress. They say, ‘Don’t dress and act that way. Otherwise, we will do to you what we did to Farkhunda.’ We only feel secure in our homes.” Zahra says it is still too soon to tell what will happen in the long run. “Sometimes my mother tells me not to go to my job and tells my sister not to go to school. I come home early at the end of the day and do not go places if I do not have to. I am afraid for my sister. She is on the national soccer team, and sometimes she comes home late. But I cannot stop my life. We will see what happens. If more of the men involved in the Farkhunda murder were punished, and if those who were convicted had more severe sentences, then we would feel safer because men would stop what they are doing.” The habit of summoning courage has laid the foundation of a stubborn if not optimistic determination among a growing number of women in Afghanistan. For those who protest in the face of grave injustices and who continue to work for reform on a daily basis, even when their efforts endanger their own lives, returning to life under the Taliban is no more possible than escaping to another country. In the “computer century,” as Zahra described it, personal and political agency is predicated on connectivity and access to digital literacy. With so few female teachers in the country in general, and even fewer who can teach digital literacy, women like Zahra (and the Digital Citizen Fund in which she teaches) have become indispensable to the future of the nation.   When we asked Zahra what she would like to be known for, she expressed doubt that she would be known at all. She has been inspired, though, by the many Afghan women who have fought for social justice in recent years. Some of them are dead, some have emigrated, some remain to continue their work. Those Zahra has admired most have been defenders of women’s rights, the true spirit of their religion and the inherent greatness of their nation. Perhaps what the world thinks of Zahra matters less than what the girls in her classroom, who sit upright with their fingers hovering over keyboards, see when they turn to their teacher. They see a woman leading the way.

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“I knew I could never go home again”: The high cost of cooking (gumbo) on reality television

Before I begin, a simple fact: Louisiana cuisine is superior to every other American cuisine, and the competition isn't remotely close. Corollary to this fact is that anyone who promotes Louisiana cuisine beyond state lines is doing the rest of the country a favor, even if that person punctuates every sentences with "Bam!" -- he's only doing so, after all, because he knows that when he hits that dish with a finishing salt, whatever meal he's just prepared is better than any you ever will. So when Slate's Ashlie Stevens complained that "Next Food Network Star" finalist Jay Ducote belonged to Californian Guy Fieri's school of "shouting at slabs of meat," and that his presence in the competition is indicative of the network's "obsession with cranking out imitations" of Fieri, she only missed the point completely. Fieri's enthusiastic about everything -- every episode of "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" is an exercise in escalating superlatives, a veritable Cold War between the "best" and "greatest" things he can "hunch" into his mouth-hole. Ducote's enthusiasm is specific, grounded in the confidence that the tradition from which he comes will allow him to interrogate -- not shout at -- a tenderloin far better than any challengers. Which isn't to say he's professionally trained. Like another Louisiana State University graduate, Jesse Romero, who appeared on the Gordon Ramsay vehicle "MasterChef" this season, Ducote's Pembleton-deep knowledge of how to break a slab down and make it sing isn't the product of formal training, but of another tradition at which Louisiana outstrips the rest of the nation -- tailgating. It would be difficult to argue that the highly contingent nature of cooking outside in Louisiana during the wettest of its four rainy seasons necessarily gave the pair an advantage in their respective competitions since Romero was -- to the surprise of everyone, including himself -- eliminated very early in the "MasterChef" run by Gordon Ramsay, who accused him of behaving "like a petulant child."* *Romero didn't appear to be in the episode itself, nor in the previous ones. Reality shows are typically edited in the service of the production team's preferred narrative, such that someone eliminated in a later episode for petulance is shown behaving petulantly in previous ones. In Romero's case, the "MasterChef" editors did nothing of the sort. When I asked Romero if he was as surprised by both the fact of and explanation for his elimination, all he'd say was that the way he was portrayed on the show was "dead on accurate." Romero's early exit notwithstanding, it's clear that the tailgating experience provided Ducote with a distinct advantage over competitors who work in more traditional settings. Shooting days on "Next Food Network Star" often run twelve or thirteen hours long, and contain stretches of post-cooking, pre-judging downtime in which the contestants aren't allowed to interact. ("They want cameras on us for all our interactions, just in case," Ducote told me. "When you see us meet each other in the first episode, that's not staged. When you see us sizing each other up, and it looks like we're sizing each other up, that's because we're sizing each other up.") That kind of routine comes more naturally to a tailgater than fellow finalists like professional chef Dominick Tesoriero, who constantly interacts with his team during shifts, or former NFL cornerback and current food truck owner Eddie Jackson, who holds court with his customers all day. Cooking and waiting is the rhythm of tailgating, and few of the challenges Food Network producers could throw at the finalists could match those regularly posed by darkening Louisiana skies. Not that Ducote cooked flawlessly, mind you. He became what he called "a state embarrassment" after attempting to make a "quick gumbo," two words that should never a share sentence, much less be adjacent to each other in one. Not only did he make a cardinal error in Creole cuisine by creating a roux far thicker than any gumbo warrants, he had been tasked in this particular judge's challenge to use a "slimy" ingredient and chose okra -- which in addition to being slimy is also a natural thickening agent. As he prepared a single bowl for its glamour shot, the gumbo was already so thick that "I knew I could never go home again." He also knew that the rest of the gumbo would be sitting for hours while the judges evaluated his competitors' dishes, and that every passing minute increased the likelihood that he'd be offering their distinguished palates a concoction that would fall on the culinary spectrum somewhere between "a spicy congealed okra pudding" and "Cajun-infused baby food." When he returned to the lonely hotel room in which all the contestants spent their nights -- a room bereft of access to the outside world, as cell phones, televisions, and Internet access were forbidden -- all he could think about was that no matter how far "I advanced in this competition, or in this life either, there's no way I'm ever living down that gumbo. I could devote my life to gumbo, base my entire career on it, write cookbooks, go on tour, and people in New Orleans will shake their heads when they see me and say, 'How could you fuck up the gumbo?'" I first interviewed Ducote over two months ago, the week after his nationally televised gumbo disaster, so I didn't get a chance to ask him whether he's been approached and upbraided by disappointed strangers. We talked instead about the strange nature of Internet celebrity -- as proprietor of the popular website and radio show "Bite and Booze," he often arrives home to find promotional bottles of wine and whisky stacked high on his porch, and if you're reading this, you no doubt know my story -- and while I found him engaging almost to a fault, I admit that I've been secretly waiting for him to be eliminated so that I could write this article secure in the knowledge that he didn't win the competition. Not because I want to see him lose, but because a life spent rooting for the New York Mets has taught me that, the rare appearance of the miraculous notwithstanding, being invested in who wins and who loses a competition inevitably leads to disappointment. But as Ducote remained on the series episode after episode, I began to feel what every Mets fan fears most -- hope. Hope for Ducote personally, and for the state he seemed to represent more forcefully with each passing episode. Even the commercials sandwiching the final segments of the show seemed to be conspiring against his competitors. In the penultimate episode, as Jay, Dom, and Eddie each filmed a pilot episode for Food Network, the scenes of his dry-run were followed by an ad for a company that offered "free panties, because he puts you in the mood." His competitors? Cialis and Metamucil. As much as I know I should remain objective, part of me can't help but hope that Sunday night's finale will be Ducote's 1986.Before I begin, a simple fact: Louisiana cuisine is superior to every other American cuisine, and the competition isn't remotely close. Corollary to this fact is that anyone who promotes Louisiana cuisine beyond state lines is doing the rest of the country a favor, even if that person punctuates every sentences with "Bam!" -- he's only doing so, after all, because he knows that when he hits that dish with a finishing salt, whatever meal he's just prepared is better than any you ever will. So when Slate's Ashlie Stevens complained that "Next Food Network Star" finalist Jay Ducote belonged to Californian Guy Fieri's school of "shouting at slabs of meat," and that his presence in the competition is indicative of the network's "obsession with cranking out imitations" of Fieri, she only missed the point completely. Fieri's enthusiastic about everything -- every episode of "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" is an exercise in escalating superlatives, a veritable Cold War between the "best" and "greatest" things he can "hunch" into his mouth-hole. Ducote's enthusiasm is specific, grounded in the confidence that the tradition from which he comes will allow him to interrogate -- not shout at -- a tenderloin far better than any challengers. Which isn't to say he's professionally trained. Like another Louisiana State University graduate, Jesse Romero, who appeared on the Gordon Ramsay vehicle "MasterChef" this season, Ducote's Pembleton-deep knowledge of how to break a slab down and make it sing isn't the product of formal training, but of another tradition at which Louisiana outstrips the rest of the nation -- tailgating. It would be difficult to argue that the highly contingent nature of cooking outside in Louisiana during the wettest of its four rainy seasons necessarily gave the pair an advantage in their respective competitions since Romero was -- to the surprise of everyone, including himself -- eliminated very early in the "MasterChef" run by Gordon Ramsay, who accused him of behaving "like a petulant child."* *Romero didn't appear to be in the episode itself, nor in the previous ones. Reality shows are typically edited in the service of the production team's preferred narrative, such that someone eliminated in a later episode for petulance is shown behaving petulantly in previous ones. In Romero's case, the "MasterChef" editors did nothing of the sort. When I asked Romero if he was as surprised by both the fact of and explanation for his elimination, all he'd say was that the way he was portrayed on the show was "dead on accurate." Romero's early exit notwithstanding, it's clear that the tailgating experience provided Ducote with a distinct advantage over competitors who work in more traditional settings. Shooting days on "Next Food Network Star" often run twelve or thirteen hours long, and contain stretches of post-cooking, pre-judging downtime in which the contestants aren't allowed to interact. ("They want cameras on us for all our interactions, just in case," Ducote told me. "When you see us meet each other in the first episode, that's not staged. When you see us sizing each other up, and it looks like we're sizing each other up, that's because we're sizing each other up.") That kind of routine comes more naturally to a tailgater than fellow finalists like professional chef Dominick Tesoriero, who constantly interacts with his team during shifts, or former NFL cornerback and current food truck owner Eddie Jackson, who holds court with his customers all day. Cooking and waiting is the rhythm of tailgating, and few of the challenges Food Network producers could throw at the finalists could match those regularly posed by darkening Louisiana skies. Not that Ducote cooked flawlessly, mind you. He became what he called "a state embarrassment" after attempting to make a "quick gumbo," two words that should never a share sentence, much less be adjacent to each other in one. Not only did he make a cardinal error in Creole cuisine by creating a roux far thicker than any gumbo warrants, he had been tasked in this particular judge's challenge to use a "slimy" ingredient and chose okra -- which in addition to being slimy is also a natural thickening agent. As he prepared a single bowl for its glamour shot, the gumbo was already so thick that "I knew I could never go home again." He also knew that the rest of the gumbo would be sitting for hours while the judges evaluated his competitors' dishes, and that every passing minute increased the likelihood that he'd be offering their distinguished palates a concoction that would fall on the culinary spectrum somewhere between "a spicy congealed okra pudding" and "Cajun-infused baby food." When he returned to the lonely hotel room in which all the contestants spent their nights -- a room bereft of access to the outside world, as cell phones, televisions, and Internet access were forbidden -- all he could think about was that no matter how far "I advanced in this competition, or in this life either, there's no way I'm ever living down that gumbo. I could devote my life to gumbo, base my entire career on it, write cookbooks, go on tour, and people in New Orleans will shake their heads when they see me and say, 'How could you fuck up the gumbo?'" I first interviewed Ducote over two months ago, the week after his nationally televised gumbo disaster, so I didn't get a chance to ask him whether he's been approached and upbraided by disappointed strangers. We talked instead about the strange nature of Internet celebrity -- as proprietor of the popular website and radio show "Bite and Booze," he often arrives home to find promotional bottles of wine and whisky stacked high on his porch, and if you're reading this, you no doubt know my story -- and while I found him engaging almost to a fault, I admit that I've been secretly waiting for him to be eliminated so that I could write this article secure in the knowledge that he didn't win the competition. Not because I want to see him lose, but because a life spent rooting for the New York Mets has taught me that, the rare appearance of the miraculous notwithstanding, being invested in who wins and who loses a competition inevitably leads to disappointment. But as Ducote remained on the series episode after episode, I began to feel what every Mets fan fears most -- hope. Hope for Ducote personally, and for the state he seemed to represent more forcefully with each passing episode. Even the commercials sandwiching the final segments of the show seemed to be conspiring against his competitors. In the penultimate episode, as Jay, Dom, and Eddie each filmed a pilot episode for Food Network, the scenes of his dry-run were followed by an ad for a company that offered "free panties, because he puts you in the mood." His competitors? Cialis and Metamucil. As much as I know I should remain objective, part of me can't help but hope that Sunday night's finale will be Ducote's 1986.

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Charles Koch scolds the 1 percent: The plutocrat’s surprising moment of clarity

Earlier this month, billionaire Charles Koch had a surprising message: In a speech to his fellow conservatives, he said politicians must end taxpayer-funded subsidies and preferential treatment for corporations. Why is this surprising? Because the demand came from an industrialist whose company and corporate subsidiaries have raked in tens of millions of dollars' worth of such subsidies. The Koch-organized conference at a luxury resort in Southern California reportedly attracted roughly 450 conservative donors who have committed to spending nearly $900 million on the 2016 presidential election. The event included appearances by Republican presidential candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. "Where I believe we need to start in reforming welfare is eliminating welfare for the wealthy," said Koch, who, along with his brother David, is among the biggest financiers of conservative political causes. "This means stopping the subsidies, mandates and preferences for business that enrich the haves at the expense of the have nots." Yet, in the last 15 years, Koch's firm Koch Industries and its subsidiaries have secured government subsidies worth more than $166 million, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Good Jobs First. The group says since 1990, Koch-owned properties have received 191 separate subsidies worth a total of $195 million. Koch Industries and its subsidiaries, which are a privately held, are involved in everything from oil refining to manufacturing to high finance. In 2012, Charles Koch issued a similar jeremiad against government-sponsored subsidies for corporations. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he said, "We are on dangerous terrain when government picks winners and losers in the economy by subsidizing favored products and industries." In his essay, he specifically derided tax credits -- yet even after the op-ed, Koch-owned properties accepted more than $77 million worth of such taxpayer-funded preferences from governments, according to Good Jobs First. Among the biggest subsidies received by Koch-owned companies was a $62 million Louisiana property tax abatement for Georgia Pacific -- a paper and chemical conglomerate that was acquired by Koch Industries in 2005. Georgia Pacific also received a separate $11 million tax credit from Louisiana in 2014 to upgrade its facilities. Since 2007, Good Jobs First says Koch Industries itself has received more than $20 million in subsidies through an Oklahoma program designed to incentivize investment and job creation. Oklahoma's government website lists more than $28 million in such tax credits to the firm and its subsidiaries. Koch, it should be noted, is not like other top executives of major corporations. His company is not publicly traded -- it is privately held, with most of the company owned by him and his brother, David. That means the Kochs could reject subsidies and not have to justify the move to hordes of shareholders. Instead, though, they have accepted the government support, even as they fund conservative campaigns that deride the influence of government on the economy. Of course, Koch's speech certainly did identify a growing trend in America. As Big Business has used campaign cash to secure more control over politics, elected officials have been approving more and more taxpayer subsidies for corporations. Conservative opposition to those expenditures will no doubt be key to reining them in. However, it is difficult to believe that the head of a company that has benefited from so much taxpayer support is really going to use his political power to end the largesse. In other words: The message may be compelling, but the messenger is not particularly credible.Earlier this month, billionaire Charles Koch had a surprising message: In a speech to his fellow conservatives, he said politicians must end taxpayer-funded subsidies and preferential treatment for corporations. Why is this surprising? Because the demand came from an industrialist whose company and corporate subsidiaries have raked in tens of millions of dollars' worth of such subsidies. The Koch-organized conference at a luxury resort in Southern California reportedly attracted roughly 450 conservative donors who have committed to spending nearly $900 million on the 2016 presidential election. The event included appearances by Republican presidential candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. "Where I believe we need to start in reforming welfare is eliminating welfare for the wealthy," said Koch, who, along with his brother David, is among the biggest financiers of conservative political causes. "This means stopping the subsidies, mandates and preferences for business that enrich the haves at the expense of the have nots." Yet, in the last 15 years, Koch's firm Koch Industries and its subsidiaries have secured government subsidies worth more than $166 million, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Good Jobs First. The group says since 1990, Koch-owned properties have received 191 separate subsidies worth a total of $195 million. Koch Industries and its subsidiaries, which are a privately held, are involved in everything from oil refining to manufacturing to high finance. In 2012, Charles Koch issued a similar jeremiad against government-sponsored subsidies for corporations. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he said, "We are on dangerous terrain when government picks winners and losers in the economy by subsidizing favored products and industries." In his essay, he specifically derided tax credits -- yet even after the op-ed, Koch-owned properties accepted more than $77 million worth of such taxpayer-funded preferences from governments, according to Good Jobs First. Among the biggest subsidies received by Koch-owned companies was a $62 million Louisiana property tax abatement for Georgia Pacific -- a paper and chemical conglomerate that was acquired by Koch Industries in 2005. Georgia Pacific also received a separate $11 million tax credit from Louisiana in 2014 to upgrade its facilities. Since 2007, Good Jobs First says Koch Industries itself has received more than $20 million in subsidies through an Oklahoma program designed to incentivize investment and job creation. Oklahoma's government website lists more than $28 million in such tax credits to the firm and its subsidiaries. Koch, it should be noted, is not like other top executives of major corporations. His company is not publicly traded -- it is privately held, with most of the company owned by him and his brother, David. That means the Kochs could reject subsidies and not have to justify the move to hordes of shareholders. Instead, though, they have accepted the government support, even as they fund conservative campaigns that deride the influence of government on the economy. Of course, Koch's speech certainly did identify a growing trend in America. As Big Business has used campaign cash to secure more control over politics, elected officials have been approving more and more taxpayer subsidies for corporations. Conservative opposition to those expenditures will no doubt be key to reining them in. However, it is difficult to believe that the head of a company that has benefited from so much taxpayer support is really going to use his political power to end the largesse. In other words: The message may be compelling, but the messenger is not particularly credible.Earlier this month, billionaire Charles Koch had a surprising message: In a speech to his fellow conservatives, he said politicians must end taxpayer-funded subsidies and preferential treatment for corporations. Why is this surprising? Because the demand came from an industrialist whose company and corporate subsidiaries have raked in tens of millions of dollars' worth of such subsidies. The Koch-organized conference at a luxury resort in Southern California reportedly attracted roughly 450 conservative donors who have committed to spending nearly $900 million on the 2016 presidential election. The event included appearances by Republican presidential candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. "Where I believe we need to start in reforming welfare is eliminating welfare for the wealthy," said Koch, who, along with his brother David, is among the biggest financiers of conservative political causes. "This means stopping the subsidies, mandates and preferences for business that enrich the haves at the expense of the have nots." Yet, in the last 15 years, Koch's firm Koch Industries and its subsidiaries have secured government subsidies worth more than $166 million, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Good Jobs First. The group says since 1990, Koch-owned properties have received 191 separate subsidies worth a total of $195 million. Koch Industries and its subsidiaries, which are a privately held, are involved in everything from oil refining to manufacturing to high finance. In 2012, Charles Koch issued a similar jeremiad against government-sponsored subsidies for corporations. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he said, "We are on dangerous terrain when government picks winners and losers in the economy by subsidizing favored products and industries." In his essay, he specifically derided tax credits -- yet even after the op-ed, Koch-owned properties accepted more than $77 million worth of such taxpayer-funded preferences from governments, according to Good Jobs First. Among the biggest subsidies received by Koch-owned companies was a $62 million Louisiana property tax abatement for Georgia Pacific -- a paper and chemical conglomerate that was acquired by Koch Industries in 2005. Georgia Pacific also received a separate $11 million tax credit from Louisiana in 2014 to upgrade its facilities. Since 2007, Good Jobs First says Koch Industries itself has received more than $20 million in subsidies through an Oklahoma program designed to incentivize investment and job creation. Oklahoma's government website lists more than $28 million in such tax credits to the firm and its subsidiaries. Koch, it should be noted, is not like other top executives of major corporations. His company is not publicly traded -- it is privately held, with most of the company owned by him and his brother, David. That means the Kochs could reject subsidies and not have to justify the move to hordes of shareholders. Instead, though, they have accepted the government support, even as they fund conservative campaigns that deride the influence of government on the economy. Of course, Koch's speech certainly did identify a growing trend in America. As Big Business has used campaign cash to secure more control over politics, elected officials have been approving more and more taxpayer subsidies for corporations. Conservative opposition to those expenditures will no doubt be key to reining them in. However, it is difficult to believe that the head of a company that has benefited from so much taxpayer support is really going to use his political power to end the largesse. In other words: The message may be compelling, but the messenger is not particularly credible.Earlier this month, billionaire Charles Koch had a surprising message: In a speech to his fellow conservatives, he said politicians must end taxpayer-funded subsidies and preferential treatment for corporations. Why is this surprising? Because the demand came from an industrialist whose company and corporate subsidiaries have raked in tens of millions of dollars' worth of such subsidies. The Koch-organized conference at a luxury resort in Southern California reportedly attracted roughly 450 conservative donors who have committed to spending nearly $900 million on the 2016 presidential election. The event included appearances by Republican presidential candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. "Where I believe we need to start in reforming welfare is eliminating welfare for the wealthy," said Koch, who, along with his brother David, is among the biggest financiers of conservative political causes. "This means stopping the subsidies, mandates and preferences for business that enrich the haves at the expense of the have nots." Yet, in the last 15 years, Koch's firm Koch Industries and its subsidiaries have secured government subsidies worth more than $166 million, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Good Jobs First. The group says since 1990, Koch-owned properties have received 191 separate subsidies worth a total of $195 million. Koch Industries and its subsidiaries, which are a privately held, are involved in everything from oil refining to manufacturing to high finance. In 2012, Charles Koch issued a similar jeremiad against government-sponsored subsidies for corporations. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he said, "We are on dangerous terrain when government picks winners and losers in the economy by subsidizing favored products and industries." In his essay, he specifically derided tax credits -- yet even after the op-ed, Koch-owned properties accepted more than $77 million worth of such taxpayer-funded preferences from governments, according to Good Jobs First. Among the biggest subsidies received by Koch-owned companies was a $62 million Louisiana property tax abatement for Georgia Pacific -- a paper and chemical conglomerate that was acquired by Koch Industries in 2005. Georgia Pacific also received a separate $11 million tax credit from Louisiana in 2014 to upgrade its facilities. Since 2007, Good Jobs First says Koch Industries itself has received more than $20 million in subsidies through an Oklahoma program designed to incentivize investment and job creation. Oklahoma's government website lists more than $28 million in such tax credits to the firm and its subsidiaries. Koch, it should be noted, is not like other top executives of major corporations. His company is not publicly traded -- it is privately held, with most of the company owned by him and his brother, David. That means the Kochs could reject subsidies and not have to justify the move to hordes of shareholders. Instead, though, they have accepted the government support, even as they fund conservative campaigns that deride the influence of government on the economy. Of course, Koch's speech certainly did identify a growing trend in America. As Big Business has used campaign cash to secure more control over politics, elected officials have been approving more and more taxpayer subsidies for corporations. Conservative opposition to those expenditures will no doubt be key to reining them in. However, it is difficult to believe that the head of a company that has benefited from so much taxpayer support is really going to use his political power to end the largesse. In other words: The message may be compelling, but the messenger is not particularly credible.

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These religious clowns should scare you: GOP candidates’ gullible, lunatic faith is a massive character flaw

One of the most serious problems with religious faith is that it can afflict an otherwise intelligent person and incite her to utter arrant inanities with the gravitas of an old-time, Walter-Cronkite-style television newscaster. This problem is doubly striking when that intelligent person is herself a newscaster (of sorts). And triply striking when that newscaster (of sorts) is Megyn Kelly, the Fox News star who looks sane amid a roster of crazies headed by the faith-addled duo of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Kelly is purportedly a Roman Catholic, but judging by her racy photos, divorce, and remarriage outside the church, the Pope and his bull(s) don’t play much of a role in her life. All of which is good, in my view. Nonetheless, as the recent Fox News Republican presidential debates were coming to an end, Kelly decided to extract a (patently ridiculous) religion-related question from her channel’s Facebook feed and give it air time. Prefacing it by calling it “interesting,” she put the query to the politicians assembled on stage directly and in all seriousness: “Chase Norton on Facebook . . . wants to know this of the candidates: ‘I want to know if any of them have received a word from God on what they should do and take care of first.’” She paused. With just a hint of insouciance, and in one of the most understated segues I’ve ever witnessed, she then asked, “Senator Cruz, start from you. Any word from God?” Now let’s pause and consider the situation. Kelly is a political science graduate from a major Northeastern university, an attorney by trade with some 10 years of practice behind her, and a citizen of one the planet’s most developed countries. Speaking on satellite television (a technological wonder, whether we still recognize it or not, and no matter what we think of Fox News) in the twenty-first century, this sharp, degree-bearing professional American has just asked, with a straight face, a senator (who happens himself to be a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law) if he is receiving messages from a supernatural being. Yet no one in the audience broke into guffaws or even chuckled. And, of course, no one cried out with irate incredulity at the ludicrousness of the supposition implicit in the question (that an imaginary heavenly ogre could possibly be beaming instructions down to one of his earthling subjects). But since the supernatural being in question goes by the name of “God,” in the clown show that was the Republican debate, everyone – audience, MC, and the clowns themselves – simultaneously took leave of their senses and judged the matter at hand legit. In any event, the question gave Cruz the chance to display his bona fides as a faith-deranged poseur. He told us, to waves of applause, that he was “blessed to receive a word from God every day in receiving the scriptures and reading the scriptures. And God speaks through the Bible.” He reminded us that his truant, once-alcoholic father had found Jesus and returned to the family; that he supports the sickening array of Religious Freedom Restoration Acts now pullulating pestilentially across the land; and that he’s against Planned Parenthood. Nothing new or even interesting here. Referring to conservatives, he noted that “the scripture tells us, ‘you shall know them by their fruit.’" Well, we know Cruz’s fruit, and it is poison to the cause of Enlightenment. Kelly then turned to John Kasich, who, punctuating his speech with a strange mix of karate chops, head wobbles, and thumb-wags, brought up his family’s immigrant background and implied his election as Ohio’s governor was a miracle, but, oddly, did so without really implicating the Lord in it. He rambled on (godlessly) about the need for unity and respect, giving us reason to think – and this is a good thing – that he considered the issue of religion too divisive to dilate upon. He finally, though, did answer Kelly’s question: “In terms of the things that I’ve read in my lifetime, the Lord is not picking us. But because of how we respect human rights, because that we are a good force in the world, He wants America to be strong. He wants America to succeed.” This bland verbiage prefaced his closing non sequitur: “Nothing is more important to me than my family, my faith, and my friends.” Given that he is a biblical literalist and believes he is destined for heaven, and that why Kasich chose to pass up the chance to spout piety is a mystery.  However, he (grudgingly) recognized the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage; quite possibly, he is content with leaving faith out of public affairs.  Just as the Constitution would have it. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker spoke next. He admitted to being an "imperfect man" and straightaway proved it by claiming to have been redeemed of his sins “only by the blood of Jesus Christ.” Walker’s father is a Baptist preacher, and he himself took to the pulpit as a teen, so such language should hardly surprise us. But before you dismiss it as boilerplate Jesus jabberwocky, consider that it does serve to highlight the bizarre conceit of the Christian cult: that the good Lord could think of no other way to give us a boost a couple of millennia ago except by orchestrating a cruel, ghastly act of human sacrifice involving His own kid. (Some dad.) If nothing else, ghoulish talk of this sort should prompt Fox News post-factum to rate the entire debate NOT SUITABLE FOR MINORS, or, at the very least, VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED. (And where are all those annoying trigger-warning zealots when you need them? Why don’t they campaign to have the Bible stamped with “TRIGGER WARNING: contains multiple accounts of genocide, warfare, murder, enslavement, sexual abuse of women and underage girls, and ritual human and animal sacrifice”?) In any case, Walker returned to reality, if only for a brief sojourn, and said the Lord hasn’t vouchsafed him a plan of action, and “hasn’t given me a list, a Ten Commandments, if you will, of things to act on the first day.” He closed saying he planned to live his “life in a way that would be a testimony to [God] and our faith.” On this latter point journalists may wish to ask Walker to be more specific. Since he had just mentioned a bloody, barbaric, public act of execution and its lasting salvific effect on him, we are well within our rights to demand what sort of form his “testimony” will take. He has two sons. Might he consider offering at least one of them as a participant in one of the Philippines’ horrific real-life reenactments of the crucifixion that occur on Good Friday? Perhaps he would like to take part himself? Will he, if elected president, opt to introduce crucifixion as an approved means of execution? According to the Bible, God visited genocide, warfare, exile, slavery, and rape on humanity, and has drawn up plans to destroy the vast majority of us. Which of these banes would a President Walker chose, as part of his personal faith journey, to impose on his fellow Americans? Or would he limit himself to making merely cosmetic changes, such as replacing the White House’s annual National Security Strategy with the Book of Revelation? Without responding to the Facebook user’s question about God’s to-do list, Senator Marco Rubio sputtered out permutations of bless (noun, verb, and adjective) in pitchman’s prattle too dull to merit space here, and spoke about the need for reform in the Veterans Administration (which Kelly had asked him to address, from the Lord’s perspective, of course). One might have concluded that he hardly believed in the supernatural at all, yet one would, of course, be erring grievously: he attends the extremist Christ Fellowship in Miami, a hotbed of exorcism, creationism and homophobia. Kelly last turned to Dr. Ben Carson. Perhaps the most disturbing example of how high intelligence and belief in balderdash myths can jointly inhabit a single mind, Carson, so faith-deranged that he denies evolution and has had himself baptized twice, dodged God entirely and offered a reasonable look into how a neurosurgeon sees the issue of race relations. We can only surmise he felt he had elsewhere spoken enough about God. He gained nothing with his audience by leaving the Lord out, but by doing so he at least offered rationalists a tiny respite from the evening’s madness. Presidential candidates have the constitutionally protected right to profess the religion of their choice and speak freely about it, just as atheists have the right – and, I would say, the obligation – to hold religion up to the ridicule and derision it so richly deserves. In that regard, nonbelieving journalists in particular should give openly devout candidates no passes on their faith. Religion directly influences public policy and politics itself, befouls the atmosphere of comity needed to hold reasoned discussions and arrive at consensus-based solutions, sows confusion about the origins of mankind and the cosmos, and may yet spark a nuclear war that could bring on a nuclear winter and end life as we know it. I could go on (and on), but the point is, we need to talk more about religion, and far more frankly, and now, before it’s too late. Discussing religion freely and critically will desacralize it, with the result that the public professions of faith of which our politicians are so enamored will eventually occasion only pity, disgust and cries of shame! or, at best, serve as fodder for comedians. Faith should, in fact, become a “character issue.”   The advances of science have rendered all vestigial belief in the supernatural more than just obsolete. They have shown it to indicate grave character flaws (among them, gullibility, a penchant for wish-thinking and an inability to process information), or, at the very least, an intellectual recklessness we should eschew, especially in men and women being vetted for public office. One who will believe outlandish propositions about reality on the basis of no evidence will believe anything, and is, simply put, not to be trusted. Come on, rationalist journos, be brave and do your job. Even if Megyn Kelly won’t do hers.

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The education fad that’s hurting our kids: What you need to know about “Growth Mindset” theory — and the harmful lessons it imparts

One of the most popular ideas in education these days can be summarized in a single sentence (a fact that may help to account for its popularity). Here's the sentence: Kids tend to fare better when they regard intelligence and other abilities not as fixed traits that they either have or lack, but as attributes that can be improved through effort. In a series of monographs over many years and in a book published in 2000, psychologist Carol Dweck used the label "incremental theory" to describe the self-fulfilling belief that one can become smarter. Rebranding it more catchily as the "growth mindset" allowed her to recycle the idea a few years later in a best-selling book for general readers. By now, the growth mindset has approached the status of a cultural meme. The premise is repeated with uncritical enthusiasm by educators and a growing number of parents, managers, and journalists -- to the point that one half expects supporters to start referring to their smartphones as “effortphones.” But, like the buzz over the related concept known as "grit" (a form of self-discipline involving long-term persistence), there's something disconcerting about how the idea has been used -- and about the broader assumption that what students most need is a "mindset" adjustment. Unlike grit -- which, as I've argued elsewhere, is driven more by conservative ideology than by solid research -- Dweck's basic thesis is supported by decades' worth of good data. It's not just the habit of attributing your failure to being stupid that holds you back, but also the habit of attributing your success to being smart. Regardless of their track record, kids tend to do better in the future if they believe that how well they did in the past was primarily a result of effort. But "how well they did" at what? The problem with sweeping, generic claims about the power of attitudes or beliefs isn't just a risk of overstating the benefits but also a tendency to divert attention from the nature of the tasks themselves: How valuable are they, and who gets to decide whether they must be done? Dweck is a research psychologist, not an educator, so her inattention to the particulars of classroom assignments is understandable. Unfortunately, even some people who are educators would rather convince students they need to adopt a more positive attitude than address the quality of the curriculum (what the students are being taught) or the pedagogy (how they're being taught it). An awful lot of schooling still consists of making kids cram forgettable facts into short-term memory. And the kids themselves are seldom consulted about what they're doing, even though genuine excitement about (and proficiency at) learning rises when they're brought into the process, invited to search for answers to their own questions and to engage in extended projects. Outstanding classrooms and schools -- with a rich documentary record of their successes -- show that the quality of education itself can be improved. But books, articles, TED talks, and teacher-training sessions devoted to the wonders of adopting a growth mindset rarely bother to ask whether the curriculum is meaningful, whether the pedagogy is thoughtful, or whether the assessment of students' learning is authentic (as opposed to defining success merely as higher scores on dreadful standardized tests). Small wonder that this idea goes down so easily. All we have to do is get kids to adopt the right attitude, to think optimistically about their ability to handle whatever they've been given to do. Even if, quite frankly, it's not worth doing.

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The most common bit of concrete advice offered by Dweck and others enamored of the growth mindset is to praise kids for their effort ("You tried really hard") rather than for their ability ("You're really smart") in order to get them to persevere. (Google the words "praise" and "effort" together: more than 70 million hits.) But the first problem with this seductively simple script change is that praising children for their effort carries problems of its own, as several studies have confirmed: It can communicate that they’re really not very capable and therefore unlikely to succeed at future tasks. ("If you’re complimenting me just for trying hard, I must really be a loser.") The more serious concern, however, is that what's really problematic is praise itself. It's a verbal reward, an extrinsic inducement, and, like other rewards, is often construed by the recipient as manipulation. A substantial research literature has shown that the kids typically end up less interested in whatever they were rewarded or praised for doing, because now their goal is just to get the reward or praise. As I've explained in books and articles, the most salient feature of a positive judgment is not that it’s positive but that it’s a judgment; it's more about controlling than encouraging. Moreover, praise communicates that our acceptance of a child comes with strings attached: Our approval is conditional on the child’s continuing to impress us or do what we say. What kids actually need from us, along with nonjudgmental feedback and guidance, is unconditional support -- the antithesis of a patronizing pat on the head for having jumped through our hoops. The solution, therefore, goes well beyond a focus on what's being praised -- that is, merely switching from commending ability to commending effort. Praise for the latter is likely to be experienced as every bit as controlling and conditional as praise for the former. Tellingly, the series of Dweck's studies on which she still relies to support the idea of praising effort, which she conducted with Claudia Mueller in the 1990s, included no condition in which students received nonevaluative feedback. Other researchers have found that just such a response -- information about how they've done without a judgment attached -- is preferable to any sort of praise. Thus, the challenge for a teacher, parent, or manager is to consider a moratorium on offering verbal doggie biscuits, period. We need to attend to deeper differences: between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and between "doing to" and "working with" strategies. Unfortunately, we're discouraged from thinking about these more meaningful distinctions -- and from questioning the whole carrot-and-stick model (of which praise is an example) -- when we're assured that it's sufficient just to offer a different kind of carrot.

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Here's another part of the bigger picture that's eclipsed when we get too caught up in the "growth vs. fixed" (or "incremental vs. entity") dichotomy: If students are preoccupied with how well they're doing in school, then their interest in what they're doing may suffer. A 2010 study found that when students whose self-worth hinges on their performance face the prospect of failure, it doesn't help for them to adopt a growth mindset. In fact, those who did so were even more likely to give themselves an excuse for screwing up -- a strategy known as "self-handicapping" -- as compared to those with the dreaded fixed mindset. Even when a growth mindset doesn't make things worse, it can help only so much if students have been led -- by things like grades, tests, and, worst of all, competition -- to become more focused on achievement than on the learning itself. Training them to think about effort more than ability does nothing to address the fact, confirmed by several educational psychologists, that too much emphasis on performance undermines intellectual engagement. Just as with praise, betting everything on a shift from ability to effort may miss what matters most. And this brings us to the biggest blind spot of all -- the whole idea of focusing on the mindsets of individuals. Dweck's work nestles comfortably in a long self-help tradition, the American can-do, just-adopt-a-positive-attitude spirit.("I think I can, I think I can...") The message of that tradition has always been to adjust yourself to conditions as you find them because those conditions are immutable; all you can do is decide on the spirit in which to approach them. Ironically, the more we occupy ourselves with getting kids to attribute outcomes to their own effort, the more we communicate that the conditions they face are, well, fixed. Social psychologists use the term "fundamental attribution error" to mean paying so much attention to personality and attitudes that we overlook how profoundly the social environment affects what we do and who we are.  Their point is that it's simply inaccurate to make too much of a fuss about things like mindsets, but there are also political implications to doing so. Why, for example, do relatively few young women choose to study or work in the fields of math and science? Is it because of entrenched sexism and "the way the science career structure works"?  Well, to someone sold on Dweck's formula, the answer is no: It's "all a matter of mindset." We need only "shift widespread perceptions over to the 'growth mindset'” -- that is, to the perceptions of girls and women who are just trapped by their own faulty thinking. This is similar to the perspective that encourages us to blame a "culture of poverty" in the inner city rather than examine economic and political barriers -- a very appealing explanation to those who benefit from those barriers and would rather fault their victims for failing to pull themselves up by their mindset.

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Having spent a few decades watching one idea after another light up the night sky and then flame out -- in the field of education and in the culture at large -- I realize this pattern often has less to do with the original (promising) idea than with the way it has been oversimplified and poorly implemented. Thus, I initially thought it was unfair to blame Dweck for wince-worthy attempts to sell her growth mindset as a panacea and to give it a conservative spin. Perhaps her message had been distorted by the sort of people who love to complain about grade inflation, trophies for showing up, and the inflated self-esteem of "these kids today." In the late 1990s, for example, right-wing media personality John Stossel snapped up a paper of Dweck's about praise, portraying it as an overdue endorsement of the value of old-fashioned toil -- just what was needed in an era of "protecting kids from failure." Their scores stink but they feel good about themselves anyway -- and here's a study that proves "excellence comes from effort"! This sort of attack on spoiled kids and permissive (or excessive) parenting is nothing new -- and most of its claims dissolve on close inspection. Alas, Dweck not only has failed to speak out against, or distance herself from, this tendentious use of her ideas but has put a similar spin on them herself. She has allied herself with gritmeister Angela Duckworth and made Stossel-like pronouncements about the underappreciated value of hard work and the perils of making things too easy for kids, pronouncements that wouldn't be out of place at the Republican National Convention or in a small-town Sunday sermon. Indeed, Dweck has endorsed a larger conservative narrative, claiming that "the self-esteem movement led parents to think they could hand their children self-esteem on a silver platter by telling them how smart and talented they are." (Of course, most purveyors of that narrative would be just as contemptuous of praising kids for how hard they'd tried, which is what Dweck recommends.) Moreover, as far as I can tell, she has never criticized a fix-the-kid, ignore-the-structure mentality or raised concerns about the "bunch o' facts" traditionalism in schools. Along with many other education critics, I'd argue that the appropriate student response to much of what's assigned isn't "By golly, with enough effort, I can do this!" but "Why the hell should anyone have to do this?" Dweck, like Duckworth, is conspicuously absent from the ranks of those critics. It isn't entirely coincidental that someone who is basically telling us that attitudes matter more than structures, or that persistence is a good in itself, has also bought into a conservative social critique. But why have so many educators who don't share that sensibility endorsed a focus on mindset (or grit) whose premises and implications they'd likely find troubling on reflection? I'm not suggesting we go back to promoting an innate, fixed, "entity" theory of intelligence and talent, which, as Dweck points out, can leave people feeling helpless and inclined to give up. But the real alternative to that isn't a different attitude about oneself; it's a willingness to go beyond individual attitudes, to realize that no mindset is a magic elixir that can dissolve the toxicity of structural arrangements. Until those arrangements have been changed, mindset will get you only so far. And too much focus on mindset discourages us from making such changes. Alfie Kohn is the author of 14 books on education, parenting, and human behavior, including, most recently, "The Myth of the Spoiled Child" (Da Capo Press) and "Schooling Beyond Measure" (Heinemann). He can be reached at www.alfiekohn.org and followed on Twitter at @alfiekohn.

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3 surprisingly sane books on abortion: When absolutely no women’s lives are ruined by one procedure

In July, "Strange Animals" author Chad Kultgen made headlines when he used a website he created, prolifeantiwoman.com, as a way to promote his novel by pretending to be his protagonist: a woman demanding $100 million in donations, who will have the child if she receives the money, and have an abortion if she doesn’t. On the site, as in the book, the woman was pulling this stunt as part of her dissertation. Needless to say, her take on abortion is extreme, calculated and highly unrealistic. There’s a glibness to Kultgen’s treatment of abortion that doesn’t abate even when the character in question starts to reconsider her adamant stance. While I don’t expect fiction to hold up an exact mirror to real life, this treatment of abortion felt hollow to me as a reader, and made me want to find more nuanced, relatable outlooks. This is especially relevant in light of the recent attacks on Planned Parenthood, which are intent on making it seem like an amoral abortion mill rather than a women’s health service provider. Just as "Obvious Child" was an important representation on film of a woman having an abortion and not having it ruin her life, we need similar stories in our fiction and nonfiction, and we are starting to get them. So where can readers turn for protagonists who face unintended pregnancies, have abortions, and go on to live productive, happy, healthy lives? Three books from the last few years -- romance "The Girlfriend" by Abigail Barnette, "’89 Walls" by Katie Pierson and new graphic novel "Not Funny Ha-Ha: A Handbook for Something Hard" by Leah Hayes -- all offer important takes on the procedure. The women aren’t caricatures hell-bent on having an abortion because they “want” to, but women who are clear on why they need to, who ask for help with the process and who allow themselves a range of emotions, even though they never waver in what their choice will be. None of these authors talk down to their heroines, infantilize them or put someone else in control of their decision. The first two are fiction, while the latter, billed as nonfiction, uses the story of two characters having different types of abortions to offer practical advice for women about how to handle the process safely and know what to expect. What impressed me about all three is that none of these author flinches from describing the procedure itself, walking readers through the clinic experience alongside these characters. In the case of "The Girlfriend" and "’89 Walls," their partners join them, and we get to see how going through an abortion impacts their relationship, as well as their relationship with others close to them. While their abortions do change the heroines’ lives, we don’t see them spending the rest of the book lamenting or agonizing over their choice, though it does come up several times in the course of each plot. Both are novels where abortions happen, but neither could truly be called “abortion novels,” although abortion laws being discussed in the news are used in "’89 Walls" as a plot point. "Not Funny Ha-Ha" has more of a serious message, and while we don’t get to know as much about the emotional lives of its characters, its tone is upfront, conversational and helpful, breaking down medical terminology into easy to absorb language; the graphic novel format lends itself to the comforting tone of the book. These aren’t, of course, the only books to deal with the subject, but they are worthy additions to the bookshelves of readers who want to see abortion portrayed as a normal act that’s not overdramatized. Rather than abortion as a political issue, abortion is simply a fact of life, worthy of examination as part of a larger story. No, they aren’t a substitute for honest, first-person accounts, but rather, a useful supplement to them. While I can’t do justice to the full complexity of these stories with a single scene alone, here I wanted to highlight how each book handles the actual description of abortion, because it’s something we don’t see as often on the page as we should. But the true value in each of these books is that abortion is treated as something that does not hinder these women’s and girls’ lives, but advances them. They have feelings about it, both before and afterward, and those feelings are treated as valid and worthy. They decide who they want to tell, and who they don’t. None of these authors treat abortion lightly or facetiously; instead, all present it as the right option for these characters at this time in their lives, sans judgment. "The Girlfriend" by Abigail Barnette Barnette is the pen name for author and blogger Jenny Trout. This is the second in "The Boss" series, which finds 24-year-old protagonist Sophie Scaife pregnant and estranged from her billionaire boyfriend, Neil, who’s twice her age (yes, he’s a billionaire; no, he’s not as robotic as Christian Grey). At the end of the previous novel, "The Boss," Sophie makes it clear that she doesn’t want to be pregnant, and adoption isn’t right for her. "The Girlfriend" opens with Sophie having already scheduled her abortion appointment on her own. When she does tell Neil, even though he isn’t as resolute in wanting to end the pregnancy, he is fully supportive, joining her at her appointment and supporting her every step of the way. This is how Sophie’s abortion is described:

I stared up at the ceiling, my eyes drifting closed under the effect of the sedative. Every minute seemed drawn out, but the initial confusion and panic had given way to an odd feeling of blankness. I was my own calm little center of the universe. “Okay, you’re going to feel a pinch,” the doctor warned. My fingers crushed Neil’s, and I practically jumped off the table. Little pinch my ass! After that, I couldn’t feel anything. I gripped Neil’s hand super hard, and heard myself saying things like, “ow,” but if anything hurt, it was news to me. I heard comforting words from Neil, and Julie and Dr. Jacobson telling me I was doing a good job and it was nearly finished, but mostly I just drifted in a weird pink sedative haze. Everything was happening over there, and everyone was making far too big a deal about it. But it did seem to take a long time. “All right,” I heard Dr. Jacobson say cheerfully. “You’re all finished, Sophie. Julie is going to help you to recovery.”

Though Sophie has come across as incredibly strong in her conviction that she’s done the right thing for herself, we see that she’s been harboring a fear that catches up with her. Moments later, she asks Neil, “Do you hate me?” He replies, “No, no. Never. I don’t want you to ever think that.” Since this happens very early on in the book, we get to see Sophie and Neil deal with the immediate physical aftermath, discuss what birth control methods they will use, find out how the abortion affects their sex life, and, later, see Sophie deciding whether to share this news. The abortion is a catalyst to bring them closer together, but, while not forgotten, does not remain the focal point of the entire novel. "’89 Walls" by Katie Pierson Set in 1989, this teen romance finds protagonist Quinn discovering she’s pregnant about halfway through the book, despite having used condoms with her ex-boyfriend, Jason. She’s also already started dating a new guy, Seth, whom she does tell, along with her best friend and her mother, who’s disappointed but firmly supportive; she opts to not tell her father. Her mother drives her to the clinic, where Seth helps them navigate the protesters trying to block their way. Quinn meets with an abortion counselor who prescribes her the pill, even though having sex again is the last thing on Quinn’s mind. Here’s how Quinn’s abortion is described:

It took four minutes. It hurt, but no worse than her monthly cramps. The friendly nurse told Quinn to breathe with her. She did, and it helped. The worst part was the horrible slurping sound, like a straw on the bottom of a milk shake. Then it was over. The doctor, a beefy guy with a gray beard, patted her trembling knee as he rose from his rolling stool. “You take care,” he said. “You too,” Quinn whispered.

Pierson gives us a heroine who doesn’t berate herself for having gotten pregnant, comes to terms with having judged other girls for doing so, and lets the burgeoning sexual tension between Quinn and Seth unfold at a slower pace than it would have otherwise, since Quinn is understandably hesitant about having sex again. While her abortion certainly affects her, especially her political views, which contrast with her father’s around the issue, aside from her holding off on sex with Seth, she quickly becomes swept up in other dramas that are far more pressing. Pierson has said that her depiction of abortion as an everyday event that impacts, but does not in any way derail, Quinn’s life, was quite deliberate. She told Cosmopolitan:

I just wanted to be one of the voices out there that shows that this is actually quite normal…. I took care to detail what an abortion clinic is like, what a boring doctor's office it really is. It's not this clandestine, creepy place. I tried to be detailed about what the procedure itself is like. I think maybe an older audience doesn't need to have that explained. I tried to put in as much detail as I could and try to normalize it to make it what it is: a very safe, standard procedure that is safer than carrying a baby to term, especially when you are a teenager.

"Not Funny Ha-Ha" by Leah Hayes  "Not Funny Ha-Ha" uses the graphic novel format to share the stories of two fictional characters, Lisa and Mary, each facing an unwanted pregnancy, and opting for, respectively, surgical and medical abortions, terms that are detailed in the book. Billed as nonfiction, "Not Funny" offers the two women’s stories, interspersed with advice from Hayes about how and when to go about getting an abortion and what factors to consider when doing so. Unlike the novels above, she does not get into how or why the women got pregnant, only that they have made the decision to have an abortion. After going over the two abortion options and why some women prefer one or the other, we see each women choose one of them. In Lisa’s case, she decides on a surgical abortion. We see her lying down, her eyes closed, with this description:

Lisa felt like she was at a visit to the gynecologist at first. Everything happened pretty fast. But things seemed different when the nurse gave her the local anesthesia. Suddenly she could not feel anything between her legs. She looked at the ceiling and waited for the procedure to start. There was a lot of cramping...kind of like getting a pap smear, but at times, more intense. She tried to be very brave every time it hurt. The procedure takes a very short amount of time. She could hear the humming of the instruments.

After about 15 minutes, the doctor told her she was “all set,” and helped Lisa sit up. The nurse walked her to another waiting room-like placed called the “recovery room.” In Mary’s case, she gets the necessarily pills for a medical abortion at the clinic, takes one there, and the rest at home. She has bad cramps, throws up, sleeps and then:

At one point, the bleeding got very heavy all at once. She knew that this meant that the abortion had happened. It was intense and made her a little sad. She didn’t know why.

Hayes then lets the reader know that larger blood clots are perfectly normal at this point. While we don’t get to know Lisa and Mary’s interior lives very well, as "Not Funny Ha-Ha" is not a character-heavy book, but an information-rich one, the tone of her text and drawings is straightforward and comforting, with repeated reminders to consult a medical professional, not friends or Hayes, if you actually are in need of an abortion. Hayes told Salon about her reasons for creating the book: “I wanted to write about abortion because I felt like I had something that I could add to the conversation, expression-wise. I've always been influenced by graphic novels that try to tackle complicated issues, and I noticed that there was a bit of a void of visual 'commentary' on this topic. It's an experience that so many girls, women (and their families and partners) go through all around us, all the time, yet it can feel scary and lonely at times. I wanted to offer my interpretation of the procedures and the feelings that surround them. I wanted to make it feel like an open, warm conversation about something potentially hard and scary.”

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My body will never be “beach-ready”

AS PRETEENS on family holidays in Cyprus, my cousin and I used to stage photo shoots on the beach. These weren’t professional photo shoots, but we acted as though they were, pulling poses we borrowed from magazines and music videos. We stuck our hands on our hips, flared our arms out, jutted our legs back, held our chests forward, and stuck our heads up in the air, proud. Sometimes, we’d try more ambitious poses, balancing on slippery rocks or playfully running along the shore, dipping our feet in the Mediterranean with our sarongs flying in the breeze behind us, as the camera shutter blinked. This was around the time Destiny’s Child was still a girl group, Beyoncé and Jay-Z did “Bonnie and Clyde,” and Jay-Z still used a hyphen in his name. This was also around the time I last felt good in a bikini. Looking back at old photos of my cousin and I, everything about our shoots was ridiculous, from the exaggerated poses to the wide-eyed, pouty-lipped facial expressions we thought made us look cool, but neither of us cared how we looked then – even if our little bellies stuck out above our bikini bottoms, or our thighs rubbed together; we were having fun. And then we grew up. I started looking at my body differently when I was 14. It seemed to have suddenly changed; I’d started my period and with it came larger breasts and wider hips. I began weighing myself regularly, and paid closer attention to the clothes I wore, and how I carried myself. I heard women who I admired and, I thought, looked gorgeous call themselves “fat,” and noticed how men paid more attention to thinner women. I saw that the women who appeared wearing few clothes on the covers of magazines and had the leading roles in films were all pretty and thin. I began getting undressed behind a towel in the PE changing rooms at school so the other girls wouldn’t see me naked, and pulled in my stomach as best I could during swimming classes. At 16, I played Adelaide in a youth theatre production of “Guys and Dolls.” In one scene, I had to strip down to a leotard, suspenders, and stockings under the glare of a spotlight. Each night, I worried about what the audience thought about my body, and compared my shapely figure to those of the other girls on stage. The adrenaline of performing helped take some of that fear away, but that scene still made me more nervous than any other. Throughout my teens, and now into my 20s, I’ve become increasingly obsessed with body image, concerned with certain “problem areas” I hadn’t really looked at before. By “problem areas” – a silly term I picked up from a glossy magazine to describe body parts that ought to be whittled down until they’re no longer visible – I mean my upper arms, lower stomach, wide hips, and thighs. In an effort to get rid of these, over the last few years, I have: paid for expensive gym memberships; applied overpriced firming and anti-cellulite lotions; joined a slimming club; committed to a demanding diet that made me feel faint, and once almost pass out at work; and cut carbs from dinners. I’ve spent a lot of money and time – more than I’d care to admit – on my appearance. Recently, my friend and I spent a day on the beach in Connecticut. We didn’t stage a fake photo shoot (that seemed like a better idea in the early 2000s), but we sunbathed, talked for hours, and sipped cold beer in the sea. Still, I wasn’t comfortable in my body, or in my bikini – a red, white, and blue print ensemble that I bought last summer when I was a few pounds heavier. Next to my friend’s lithe, tanned body, I felt frumpy and unattractive. Moving around on the beach, I was acutely aware of all the areas on my body I’ve come to think of as problems, worried about the slightest jiggle or wobble of flesh, and how the pouch of fat on my stomach and the patterns of cellulite on my inner thighs looked. I know it’s vain, and I was annoyed with myself for fretting about these things that don’t really matter, but I couldn’t stop thinking about them – despite the fact that it was just me, my friend and her husband, and one of their neighbours’ dogs on our stretch of the beach. But I swear that dog was judging me. * * * Of course, I’m not alone in feeling insecure about my body. A 2004 study, commissioned by the beauty brand Dove, asked 3,200 women between the ages of 18 and 64 and across 10 countries to choose a word to describe their appearance. Just 2% of the respondents considered themselves “beautiful.” It’s worth mentioning that more women chose the words “attractive” (9%), “feminine” (8%), “good-looking” (7%), and “cute” (7%), but these still constituted a mere 33% of the results. The fact remains: most women aren’t confident in their appearance. It doesn’t help, then, that there are advertisements like the recent one for Protein World’s Weight Loss Collection – which consists of Slender Blend (a “low calorie, high protein meal replacement shake”), Slender Blend Capsules, and Multi Vitamin Capsules – designed to make women feel ashamed of their bodies. You’ve probably seen the poster, of a very slim blonde woman (model Renee Somerfield) wearing a very tiny yellow bikini next to the words: “Are you beach body ready?” Notice that she is not smiling. Probably because all she’s been eating are protein tablets. (As I write this, I would like to point out that I’m eating a very delicious chocolate chip cookie.) In April, two brilliant women in London, Fiona Longmuir and Tara Costello, responded to the advert by tweeting a photo of themselves standing in their bikinis in front of the poster on the platform of a London Underground station. “You’re goddamn right we’re beach body ready. Exactly as we are.” See! These women have bodies, and here they are in bikinis, ready for the beach. Voila: beach bodies. The photo went viral, and following its success a “beach party” was held in Hyde Park, where Londoners came together to show off their beach bodies – which we all have, simply by virtue of having bodies – in British weather. Some plus-size fashion retailers got in on the cause, too, launching campaigns with a similar aesthetic to the Protein World ad, but encouraging a healthier attitude toward and acceptance of women’s bodies. Swimwear brand Swimsuitsforall reacted with a poster of plus-size model Ashley Graham in a black bikini against a yellow background, and put forth the question, “Are you ready for this beach body?” (It reminds me a bit of the line, “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly,” in Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious”; the world was ready for big booties then, so why not fuller-figured women now?) Then Simply Be released its #SimplyBeKini campaign, starring plus model Jocelyn Corona posing in another black bikini on another yellow background next to the slogan: “Every body is beach ready.” Around this time, yet another image surfaced online of three average-sized women wearing bikinis, marked with the Dove logo in the bottom right-hand corner. “Yes. We are beach body ready,” it reads. While Dove has said publicly that it wasn’t responsible for the image (and though it agrees with the message that all bodies are beach-ready), the image’s anonymous designer clearly wanted Dove’s name on it. Perhaps the beauty brand’s name is appropriated here as an act of admiration, or maybe it was intended to highlight the importance of responsible advertising in the beauty industry; where Protein World’s message is lose weight to be desirable, Dove’s advertisements celebrate the beauty and diversity of women’s bodies regardless of their shape and size. Whatever the designer’s motive, the image ties together ideas about body image, the beauty industry, and standards of advertising that are worth thinking about. Simply Be’s creative director Ed Watson talked about some of these issues in a statement. “We have a responsibility as retailers to be representative in our advertising and that means using an array of body ideals that are achievable,” Watson said. “While the Protein World model, Renee, is undeniably beautiful and I’m sure very healthy, it is irresponsible to project something that is largely unachievable as the ideal.” As big-name brands wrangled with the Protein World ad, commuters on the London Underground took to posting stickers over the ad with empowering words like, “FUCK YOUR SEXIST SHIT;” over 70,000 people signed a change.org petition to remove the poster; and 378 people formally complained to the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency, calling out the advert for being “socially irresponsible” and promoting a culture of body-shaming. The ASA investigated the matter and, for a time, mandated that “the ad could not appear again in its current form.” Yet, as of a ruling dated July 1, the agency decided not to uphold the issue. From its ruling: “Although we understood the claim ‘Are you beach body ready?’ invited readers to think about their figures, we did not consider the image of the model would shame women who had different body shapes into believing they needed to take a slimming supplement to feel confident wearing swimwear in public. For that reason, we concluded the ad was not irresponsible.” * * * I had seen the Protein World poster online and read about the growing campaign against it in the UK, but given the backlash there, I didn’t expect to see it on billboards and in subway cars in New York City. When I did see it on the subway, I felt betrayed – by Renee Somerfield, the bikini-clad model who had been paid to make women feel bad about their bodies; by Protein World, whose products exist to make women smaller; and by the MTA for putting up the ad in the first place. And then, admittedly, I felt jealous. For the duration of the ride, I thought about my own problem areas, how I’ll never look like the Protein World model, and how I’d kill for abs like that. I’m aware that Protein World wants me to feel this way so that I’ll buy its products (I won’t), that this of kind of thinking is incredibly shallow – I know there’s more to life than a flat stomach and toned arms – and that this entire campaign is designed to make women doubt their bodies. And yet, here I am doubting mine. The reaction to the Protein World advert hasn’t been as loud here as it was in the UK. Though some feminist groups like National Women’s Liberation and Redstockings have been putting stickers printed with “This Oppresses Women” on the poster, along with other body-shaming ads to make a public statement about how certain companies are grossly shaming women into buying their products to “correct” their bodies. Other New Yorkers have scrawled body-positive responses like “ALL BODIES ARE BEACH BODIES!” over the ad. Such doodles and stickers effectively rewrite the campaign’s message by using its eyeball-drawing power to go against the very idea it peddles: that women’s bodies need to look a certain way in order to be “ready” for the beach, and perhaps for the world. * * * Unfortunately, Protein World’s isn’t the only asinine advertisement that exists to make women feel inadequate. Also on the subway, you might see a breast enhancement ad with a woman holding fruit to her chest to show her transformation from sad oranges to happy melons. There’s an ad for butt enlargement surgery with a tiny-waisted woman wearing tight jeans and nothing else, arching her back to flaunt a Kardashian-sized rear – the ad doesn’t bother showing the rest of her. And earlier this year, there was another breast surgery ad that zoomed in on a gigantic pair of breasts in a bikini top, strands of peroxide blonde hair framing the cleavage, while the rest of the woman was inexplicably cut out of the picture. The message in these last two advertisements is clear: the rest of her isn’t important. Ad campaigns like these sometimes amuse me because they’re so ridiculous, but most of the time, I find them seriously disturbing and degrading – especially the images of women’s isolated body parts. These ads are the most problematic, because they not only make it look as though a woman’s breasts or butt or whatever isn’t attached to her (and this, weirdly, is meant to maximize a body part’s appeal); they also physically take women’s bodies away from them. By isolating one body part, these bodies are no longer the property of the women pictured, but rather become ours to look at and judge as we please. While I don’t think that people absorb images like sponges, but rather filter them and choose what to pay attention to, I do think there’s power in repetition: seeing the same kinds of images over and over again can make the culture they promote seem acceptable. In their multitude, ads targeting women’s bodies in a negative way pose an unhealthy way of thinking about physical appearance – instead of embracing a variety of body types, these advertisements portray women’s figures as commodities made up of different parts that can be customized and tweaked to create a sexually desirable, impossible whole. Tina Fey perfectly exemplifies this dilemma in her manifesto of badassery, Bossypants, where she writes: “Now every girl is expected to have: Caucasian blue eyes full Spanish lips a classic button nose hairless Asian skin with a California tan a Jamaican dance hall ass long Swedish legs small Japanese feet the abs of a lesbian gym owner the hips of a nine-year-old boy the arms of Michelle Obama and doll tits.” Debora L. Spar expounds upon this idea in her book, Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection. “Again and again, women are being told – promised, really – that their bodies are mutable, that they can be bent and molded into different, better, shapes,” she writes. “Like accessories, bodies are things we tinker with, things we buy according to fashion and discard when they no longer please us.” Advertisements for plastic surgery procedures and dietary supplements often make similar promises to women; they tell them they can be beautiful if they make a change, a sacrifice. Amy Schumer parodied this reality perfectly in her “Swanks” skit, a commercial for a kind of butt enhancement surgery that squashes women’s breasts down and around into their bottoms, “causing minor internal bleeding and major external hotness.” Schumer’s bloody butt-boosting method demonstrates how shifting beauty standards dictate the ways in which many women nip and tuck their bodies, even when the cost of such surgery is potentially fatal. Women will literally kill for a hot body. To be clear, I’m not arguing that plastic surgery or going on a diet is wrong, or that any person who chooses to change their body should feel guilty or ashamed for doing so. However, body-altering measures – whether it’s going under the knife or on the latest juice cleanse – are increasingly beginning to feel less like personal choices and more like requirements to feel accepted and attractive. “If we could only lose five pounds, women tend to think, or have larger eyes / rounder breasts / silkier hair, life itself would change,” Spar writes. “Better body, we repeat and pray, better me.” It’s this kind of thinking the Protein World advert elicits and perpetuates, that makes some women not want to wear a bikini in public, and sells protein tablets. While I’m guilty of sometimes buying into this kind of thinking, I’m also aware that it’s complete bullshit. And I think most people are smart enough to realize that ads like Protein World’s promote an unrealistic body type and lifestyle. But I do think the fashion and beauty industries need to take more responsibility for the messages they’re sending to women about their bodies, and that they should be more honest in the ways they depict them. * * * Everyone seems to have an opinion about women’s bodies, and they’re often not afraid to share them. The first time someone commented on my weight I was 10 years old. I was in Cyprus again, this time at the home of a distant relative, where a distant relative told me cheerfully that I was getting “a big belly.” I was outraged and embarrassed, totally shocked that she had said this to me at all, let alone in front of so many people. On the drive back, and later in front of a mirror, I examined my stomach and wondered if maybe she was right. My mother assured me that I wasn’t getting a big belly and explained that unfortunately this is what Greek relatives do, and I shouldn’t take it personally. As angry as I was, this seemed like a reasonable explanation at the time, plus I was young and had more pressing things to worry about, like which member of the Backstreet Boys would I marry, and so I got over it. But a similar situation now, in my 20s, wouldn’t be so easy to overcome. Recently, a drunk man stumbled into the laundromat where I was waiting for some clothes to dry. He was clutching greasy takeout food, and began talking to another guy there about the baseball on the TV screen, and then, after noticing me sitting nearby, about my “thick thighs” and “big tits.” He came up to me and started talking to me, took my hand without my permission and wouldn’t let me have it back as he tried to sweet-talk me. “Why are you being like that? I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said, when I continued doing my best to ignore him. He asked if I was married, and I lied and said yes so he wouldn’t bother me. I hate that he seemed to think, if I wasn’t married, that I should be interested in him, that my body’s there for him to talk about in public, loudly, and for him to look at and touch as he pleases. I hate that I couldn’t just sit there and do my laundry, that not one of the other three people – all men – in the laundromat did anything, and that I had to call my boyfriend and ask him to meet me and sit with me so I didn’t feel afraid. * * * Am I beach body ready? By Protein World’s standards, definitely not. Of course, by real life standards, I am beach body ready whenever I take my body to the beach. I still question my figure whenever I look at myself naked in the mirror, or step on the scales, or wear a bikini in public. But I’m slowly beginning to feel more comfortable in my skin. I try to remember how I felt when I was younger, when I didn’t think of my body as a collection of problem areas and instead thought about all the things I could do with it – like run around on the beach with my cousin, and climb rocks to make silly poses on them, and dance to Destiny’s Child songs. Our photos were never perfect, but in them we were always happy.

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I am a souvenir hoarder: I’m the guy who can’t throw café napkins and hotel stationery away

One of the features of summer vacations used to involve bearing back mementoes and knickknacks to sentimentally clutter up shelf space at home. But in Istanbul, where my girlfriend and I keep an apartment, mustached vendors now hawk selfie sticks where roving souvenir sellers once plied their trade. My heart twinges every time I come across the sight. These Instagram days, does any sunburned visitor to Barcelona or Capri or Cape Cod still browse a postcard rack or a newsstand? Well, I do, and then some. As the boyfriend and plus-one of a globe-trotting food writer, I live a nomadic life for a good part of the year. And I come home with souvenir booty: color-saturated postcards from Marrakech, Paris, Granada, Sorrento; and touristic calendars from Rome (the pope, the Trevi Fountain), Venice (gondoliers under the Rialto Bridge), and Moscow (the monumental Stalinist metro stations). I come home too with café napkins, such as from Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires where Borges liked to loll; and hotel stationery from the rambling homey Richard Löwenherz in the Wachau, Austria, or the sleek Island Shangri-La in Hong Kong. The counters and shelves of my small apartment in Queens are awash in all this handleable non-digital ephemera — not to mention the museum brochures and pamphlets, the foldable city maps (mobile apps hold no magic for me). “You’re the only man I know who brings back hotel shopping bags!” exclaims my girlfriend, who doesn’t share my affection for such objects of memory. In response I quote to her Susan Pearce, an eminent English academic theorist on collecting who characterized souvenirs as “intimate and bittersweet, with roots in nostalgic longing for a past which is seen as better and fuller than the difficult present.” Doubly so when the mode of souvenir is becoming nostalgic itself. What the cultural critic (and postcard collector) Walter Benjamin famously wrote in 1936 about the diminished aura of a “mechanical reproduction” (e.g., a postcard), compared to the unique authenticity of a work of art, requires a rewrite, I think, for the post-analog age. Postcards and their calendar cousins possess a certain authentic glow now as tangible, discrete, physical things, compared to the never-ending streams of disembodied cyber images on social networks. These small, sunny, printed mementos that used to represent the commoditization of travel have turned artisanal and “slow.” Poignant in their anachronism. But I’m not a serious postcard collector. I’m no deltiologist, as such folk are formally called (postcards apparently still remain the third most popular collectible overall, after stamps and coins, despite the calamitous drop in their vacation mailings). I don’t aspire to be Benjamin or Walker Evans, the great photographer whose postcard collecting, begun in boyhood, ran to some 9,000 pieces, sorted into categories. I don’t do categories or keep count. I don’t troll flea markets or shops for hidden gems. I pick up my postcards and souvenirs — carefully — as I go along, as suggestive agents and operatives of what I call “colorized” memory. Call me a sentimentalist, a nostalgiaist — call me a tat-based daydreamer. Call me selfish. I don’t send postcards from abroad (I use email and now Instagram too). I’m not interested in any found poetry of what people wrote on the back. I avoid used cards. Walker Evans prized a “documentary” quality in his mainly black-and-white postcards, of street scenes particularly. I go for fanciful Ektachrome of faraway places. For me, these bits and pieces I bring home, no matter how humble — nothing over $25 — are emblems and trophies I can use to intimately imagine life — happily, wistfully, deludedly — as a never-ending Grand Tour. The sight of one of my souvenirs as it lies in the clutter of my dim apartment in Queens will rouse a bright exotic recollection, set off a selective Proustian flare. Would I lose the precious cheering fragments of memories if I lost the actual physical object? Well, I’d lose the mnemonic pushbutton, the madeleine. Because whenever my eye happens to fall on, say, that blue business card I magpied from “Sombreros Antonio Garcia,” with its brown silhouette of a flat-hatted horseman, then the shop and the street in Seville where I took it blooms in my mind, and then a walk in an Andalusian garden thick with purple flowers, and the three comidas (lunches) in one afternoon we endured on one of my girlfriend’s assignments — all of  which may or may not have been the same day, but blend into a fumy evocation of my times in Seville. A smartphone photo doesn’t work that way. Pixeled images lack the suggestive power of physical relics. Of lots of physical relics. The writer Dominique Browning recently wrote a defense of clutter, of the pleasures of owning many objects. But she felt compelled to note, triumphantly — she’s a former editor of House and Garden — that a “stained and rickety table” of  hers was actually “a Chinese altarpiece from the Ming dynasty with rolled bamboo marble top.” But I don’t claim “value.” My clutter is, again, papery slush mostly — gatherings of ephemera, and old at that; see my calendars. But I bet Hemingway could relate. That great he-man of adventure turns out to have been a paper packrat, a sentimentalist who hung onto old Christmas cards, receipts and hunting licenses. No doubt Marie Kondo, the princess of tidiness, would set her decluttering juggernaut against us both. She particularly doesn’t care for paper. But then again, her organizing credo is that possessions should “spark joy.” And don’t my souvenirs and knickknacks bring me that? But I embrace a very non-Kondo disarray. I do not organize what I have; I like to leave things dotted around in a larger, general sprawl, with occasional clusters. So I can wander my apartment like a daytripper — like a flâneur, that poetic stroller of 19th-century Paris streets dear to Benjamin’s heart. So I can be happily surprised by serendipity as I suddenly notice again a souvenir while I’m perhaps trying to locate something else more mundane, like a utility bill. In his essay on clutter, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observed how “if you lose something [in the clutter] you may find something else in the process of looking for it.” I admit that having all these travel souvenirs around can produce overstimulation, a memory overload. So I keep many of my postcards inside their purchase packets, to be dipped into occasionally like boxed chocolates for a nibble. I admit further that my cluttered, keepsake ways became for a while part of the “more difficult present” that Susan Pearce cited. Particularly when I started hanging onto large amounts of non-travel items like liquor-store cardboard boxes and plastic grocery bags. I had to undertake a major decluttering project, which proved a struggle; but it turned out well, I’m happy to say. I wrote a book about the whole business. I retained all my souvenirs, though, of course, still dotted about. But over at my girlfriend’s place, where I spend my nights, she keeps a tight rein on my sprawling inclinations. Her own travel mementos are shipshape and of a highish order: a display plate, say, from the Stalin museum in his Georgia hometown of Gori. Showing how Russia’s and Georgia’s collective nostalgia for a terrible past finds an uneasy expression in gift-shop knickknacks. Finally, I admit that Susan Pearce does assert, somewhat harshly, that “no one is interested in other people’s souvenirs.” Meaning, I suppose, the intimate wonderfulness of the memories and visions evoked are solely in the eye of the beholder. The same for the souvenir itself. Which really is fine by me — the more to savor all for myself, here in my private memory-and-mood theater. Where I can switch gears from my cards and calendars (if I care to) and  browse some of the pics on my new smartphone. From just this summer’s travels, I seem to have some 4,000 of them.  

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This is the laziest rhyme in all of songwriting history — and great artists use it all the time

I should probably start this by saying that I am not and have never been a songwriter. Or a singer. Or talented. Years ago, I wrote a few records for my then gal’s punk rock band but they were of the variety of: “Let’s go down to St. Marks place/punch somebody in the face.” For 17 years, since the winter of 1997, I have been surrounded by actual musicians. I’ve been in studios and on buses and in dressing rooms, and I’ve watched them struggle to create great songs. I’ve also seen them take the path of least resistance and settle for merely finished songs. Since I’m more of a profiler and an essayist when it comes to my place in the ecosystem of rock journalists, I have never really had cause to criticize, but I happened to be watching an old episode of “The West Wing” late one night. “The West Wing” has become a form of meditation for me. It’s always on — a soothing loop — and I don’t like to unplug from it, especially after a day of writing.  It was the “King Corn” episode, if you’re familiar with the show, and in it, the long unfolding romance between Josh and his assistant Donna finally seems to be coming into flower once she left the Wing and went on the road campaigning for the vice president, “Bingo Bob.” The music they chose to underscore the tension in a key scene in "King Corn" just happens to be an old Ryan Adams song from his 2002 “Demolition” album. Now, let me say that I think Ryan Adams, whom I used to know in my professional capacity as a rock writer and whom I have not seen in over a decade, is a true artist. Some of his songs are among my favorites (“Cold Roses,” most of “Heartbreaker,” less of “Gold” but still quite a bit of it, you get the idea). Anyway, Josh, weary from trying to elevate Matt Santos, is going to bed alone even though he wants Donna there in those clean hotel sheets, and Donna is likely thinking the same and over it all, and the sad hum of the generic hotel by night, one of hundreds they’ve checked into, we must hear Ryan sing these lines: “What is this fire? Burning slowly. My one and only. Desire.” Well, it took me right out of my great Sorkin “om” and back into the cold, oppressive city and a long, lonely night of my own. Of course, to Adams “fire” and “desire” may be the perfect rhyme. Most musicians, I’ve learned, write the lyrics last, and he might have just been feeling the music early and felt like “desire” was meant to be exactly where it was. Yes, maybe he liked the way fire and desire sounded in his mouth and looked on a page or a studio chalkboard, the way they generally fit like a pair of lovebirds on a perch. Fire and desire. Especially when punctuated by a mournful harmonica, which is definitely not a cliché in a Ryan Adams song (definitely). Or maybe he wanted to get wasted or laid and did not give a shit. I can’t really tell. I’m split. My cynical side, well you know what it says, but the mystery, the voodoo, the alchemy of the art of songwriting prevents me from determining one way or another. You’d have to ask him and hope he’d be honest. Which he probably wouldn’t. The next day I reached out to a mentor of mine, a slightly older rock critic (and one of my old bosses). I asked him what was up with the whole “fire and desire thing,” and let him know that I would be writing about it. Fire. Desire. When did they first do their dance? Was it in classical poetry? Did it crawl up into a blues song from a Delta murk? I even emailed the great Greil Marcus — the great Greil never replied, but my ex-EIC and mentor seized on the question. It seemed to trigger something in him as well. We agreed that there are some songs where “fire” could only ever be the key rhyme. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Fire,” for example. Jimi seems to sell it by sheer style points alone and it’s hard to deny his “itchin’ desire” and its need to be scratched fast.  Maybe Jimi is singing to a man, but most likely it’s a woman in crushed velvet flares who smells like musk or hash or cloves. But what is a woman’s "fire"? Don’t we all come with the same internal temperature? Hey, 98.6 — it’s good to have you back again. Is it the fire in the belly? The reproductive organs? Is it the body temperature that rises up during sex and makes us sweat?   If so, don’t men have internal fires as well? Doesn’t everyone? And therefore how can singing of this be special? Or even interesting? It’s like singing about having a pee. Malign the Doors all you want — and for some reason people who were never teenage boys often do — but the fuckers wrote a seven minute and six second song about “fire” that never once used the word “desire.” Bob Marley and the Wailers did the same, also with a song with “fire” in the title off an album with "fire" in the title. My mentor and I tried to determine without the help of the Internet whether the Beatles ever resorted to what we can call the “easy rhyme” — the “moon, June, spoon” of sex lyrics — a notch above “maybe” and “baby.” We couldn’t find any Beatles lyrics of the kind, but did turn up several Bob Dylan lyrics where the great man went there — "Caribbean Wind,” “Lord Protect My Child,” “I Feel a Change Comin’ On” — and again, I wondered if Bob examined all the possible words at his disposal, many thousands in various languages, as well as nonsense words or scat, and chose “fire” or “desire” because it fit (he even named an album "Desire," so perhaps so). Brian Wilson was convinced his “fire” song could start actual fires like Drew Barrymore. My point is that better men than myself and even Ryan Adams went there and emerged with their careers and legacies unsullied. The great Rick James created one of the best slow jams ever with a song that didn’t even try to bury the linguistic marriage. The actual title, a duet with Teena Marie, his insanely gifted protégé, is actually called “Fire and Desire.” Bruce Springsteen too is like the fucking poet laureate of the fire and its best friend desire. In song, The Boss can sell it like nobody else. “'I'm On Fire' by Springsteen?” recalls Gideon Yago fondly. “I was 7, a denizen of the NY tri-state area, meaning it was all over the radio that summer.  And also terrifying when you're 7 and don't understand metaphors of sexual tension.  You think ... jesus ... this guy is *on fire?’  Holy shit!" And that was after "Rosalita" (his “stone desire”) and the ballad “Fire,” which fell back on “desire” after soaring with “Sampson and Delilah.” It was a sexy soul jam for the Pointer Sisters but is probably best known for inspiring the late, great Robin Williams to sing it in the voice of Elmer Fudd. (RIP, man. Still.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUGxY... “Bruce’s ‘Fire’ is enormous,” says singer songwriter Lloyd Cole via email (we were also discussing the Pointer Sisters' perfect cover at the time). Cole is no slouch as a lyricist. The dude once rhymed “Norman Mailer” with “get a new tailor.” Normally, according to Cole, “You avoid it if I weren’t writing a song addressing fire and desire if you were a proper writer.” Cole is also partial to the old Shocking Blue song “Venus” (“Terrible and irresistible”). They go there, and so does Bananarama decades later. “English as a second language is always an advantage,” Cole adds and it’s true, the Shocking Blue version is much more charming than the Hi NRG "ramas." I was hooked now, and reached out to other singer/songwriters, wondering if my displeasure (and the thorough ruining of “King Corn”) was justified, or if I was overreacting. Most people, after all, barely notice lyrics, as I’ve heard so many rock stars lament to me over the years. “I don’t think I’ve ever rhymed anything with fire, alas,” wrote Moby, “but I like Billy Joel’s rhyming ‘fire’ with ‘turning’.” I don’t know what meditation Mobes was deep into at the time, but I reminded him that Saint Billy rhymed “burning” with “turning,” not “fire.” “A lot of people think that songwriters start with something to say and then look for the right words to say it,” writes Adam Schlesinger, backing up my earlier theory. “It's usually the opposite. They just start singing stuff that sounds cool and then they start rhyming to it, and then they try to make sense of it all afterwards. Fire is one of the greatest words to sing when you're just vocalizing gibberish. Morrison obviously hit upon the phrase light my fire first, then tried to rhyme fire with a bunch of different stuff, like mire and pyre and liar, but in the chorus he just said fuck it and rhymed light my fire with try to set the night on fire because fire sounded so awesome he wanted to sing it again. Maybe he didn't even notice it was the same word because he was high(er).” Oddly, I don’t mind rhyming “fire” with “fire,” if that even qualifies as a rhyme. But fire and desire will always, always  take me out of a song and and nix any chance of me making it one of my favorites, even if it comes from one of my favorite bands (say, U2’s “Desire”). Why couldn’t Bono make the extra effort? Johnny Cash did. He fell into a burning ring of fire and went down down down but he found no “desire” in his abyss, did he? The place where the quality control might be most stringent is in the world of hip-hop lyrics. You simply can’t get away with something that rote. Take this quote from a furious and young Eminem, talking to London’s N.M.E. about 15 years ago, on the cusp of the release of his now classic "Marshall Mathers LP." Boy bands and Britney ruled and fires and desire were all about, as if an asteroid of slack had just hit. “You can only rhyme fuckin’ ‘fire’ and ‘desire’ and ‘heart’ and ‘fall apart’ so many times, and I’m sick of hearin’ it. And if I lose my fans ‘cause they find out Eminem doesn’t like ‘N Sync, I don’t give a fuck, fuck ‘N Sync, fuck Backstreet Boys, fuck Britney Spears, fuck Christina Aquilera, fuck all that bullshit.” A decade and a half before that, a pair of MCs from Queens declared, “I’m the kind of rock, there is none higher, Sucker MCs should call me sire.   To burn my kingdom, you must use fire. I won’t stop rocking till I retire.” They didn’t need it to take over literally everything and announce a permanent shift in popular culture, did they? Maybe it’s time for us to finally retire it? But then again, I’m not a songwriter. "I'm absolutely guilty of this rhyme crime,” admits Catherine Pierce, another singer songwriter pal of mine and one-half of the great country rock duo the Pierces. “But I stand by it wholeheartedly. Desire burns, for god's sake, so of course you are going to partner it with fire. It's a rhyme that's just too satisfying to ignore. I'm more offended by the pairing of ‘love and above,’ but sometimes that can pass too.”

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