Lily Salter's Blog, page 997

Is marijuana a single species?: While you’re searching for the perfect high, scientists go deeper

Is all marijuana from a singles species, cannabis sativa? Or are there three distinct species: cannabis sativa, cannabis indica, and cannabis ruderalis? Weed connoisseurs have long grappled with the issue as, intent on their pursuit of a more perfect buzz, they have now built up a couple of generations' worth of experience with plant breeding, hybridization and cross-pollination. That was pretty much all in the pursuit of getting high, but in the past couple of decades, interest has also turned to cannabinoids other than THC, such as cannabidiol (CBD), with all its apparent medicinal properties, not to mention increased interest in industrial hemp. Now, as marijuana increasingly moves out from the shadows and into a regulatory—as opposed to prohibitionist—environment, the question becomes ever more pressing, and not just for stoners. With the commercialization of cannabis already well underway in California, Colorado, Washington and other states, and its medicalization advancing worldwide, governments and the scientific research community are facing rising demands for taxonomic clarity. Canadian government botanist Ernest Small's research on the natural range of THC concentrations helped the Canadian set standards that allowed the classification of plants with less than 0.3 percent THC as hemp, not marijuana, creating groups of plants with stable characteristics, and registering them as formal hemp cultivars. Now farmers in those countries can grow hemp without fear of running afoul of drug laws. Creating that chemical threshold was a pragmatic and useful response, but a settled taxonomy would allow researchers, regulators, growers and consumers to use a clear and common language to describe the plant. Talking about cannabis taxonomy "is really talking about the ability of countries to rationally regulate important drugs and products," Small explained to Nature. But his research allowed governments to skirt the taxonomy question, and that could be a good thing. "It's complicated taxonomically because of its intimate relationship with humans over a long period of time," explained University of British Columbia botanist Jonathan Page. And that's not the only reason. First, pot is old. Cannabis diverged from the hops plant, humulus, around 28 million years ago, according to a genetic analysis by researchers at London-based GW Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturers of Sativex, a whole plant cannabis medicine. That means it's had millions of years to evolve, with geographical and environmental diversity playing an as yet unclear role in the development of distinct lineages (or are they species?). Second, Mary Jane has loose morals. She sleeps around, or, in more scientific terms, cannabis is promiscuous. Most marijuana lineages are able to produce viable offspring by crossing with other lineages. Third, and then there is human intervention. We've been messing with marijuana for at least 10,000 years—hemp ropes that old have been found in Taiwanese tombs—and that further muddles the taxonomic waters. And we've been cultivating it for different purposes, including food and fiber, as well as for its medicinal and psychoactive effects, creating divergent lineages as we went. From its origins in South and Central Asia, the plant is now cultivated on every continent except Antarctica, and humans carried it around the world. Mexican marijuana, for example, didn't occur because a pot seed floated across the ocean, but because Spanish colonists in the 1530s brought seeds with them in a failed effort to establish a fiber hemp industry there.  (The hemp experiment may have faltered, but feral marijuana got loose in Mexico nearly five centuries ago, and the rest is history.) And not only have humans been cultivating and breeding marijuana for millennia, but because marijuana is so promiscuous, the genetic diversity created by human meddling is further increased by human-bred pot's ability to cross-breed with wild or feral strains. Give us a few years of commercial marijuana production in the Midwest, and that feral hemp ("ditch weed") left over from World War II may actually start to get people high. The Taxonomic Debate The standard taxonomy, dating back to Linnaeus, is that marijuana and hemp are a single species, C. sativa, with a number of variants. But in the 19th century, French naturalist Jen-Baptiste Lamarck argued that differences in morphology and chemistry demanded a second species, C. indica, that was shorter, less fibrous and more psychoactive. In the 20th century, U.S. botanist Richard Evans Schultes posited the existence of a third species, C. afghanica. The standard taxonomy—cannabis is a single species—is favored, but the debate is still alive and grows more heated each time another scientist or researcher makes the argument for multiple species. Small wishes it would go away. "The issue is exaggerated and tends to mislead people," he said. "I almost feel that it's better not to talk about it anymore." Yet neither the demands for more clarity nor the interest of researchers is going away. And scientists are shifting their quests from examinations of plant morphology to looking into molecular structure and genetics. A decade ago, researchers at Indiana University examined the enzyme-encoding genotypes of 157 marijuana samples and, based on the proportions of CBD and THC levels, argued for two species, C. sativa and C. indica, with six subspecies. One of the researchers, Karl Hillig, later published a broader study suggesting a third species, C. ruderalis. In 2013, that position got support from botanist Mark Merlin at the University of Hawaii and cannabis researcher Robert Clarke of the International Hemp Association in Amsterdam. In their magisterial work, " Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany ," they argued for the three-species position, but concluded there were not six, but seven, subspecies. Still, the matter remains unresolved. At the same time Hillig and his team at Indiana were advancing the three-species thesis, other researchers were also looking at CBD/THC ratios, and they developed a single species position, but with five different lineages. And the work goes on. Canadian botanist Page and his colleagues have published a draft set of the DNA and RNA of a marijuana plant and compared that to the RNA of a hemp plant, finding "tantalizing differences" in the way cannabinoid-controlled genes are expressed. Another botanist, Nolan Kane of the University of Colorado, is working on a "genetic map" that will include complete gene sequencing of some 500 plants. That work could provide "unprecedented" insight into the relationships between the major cannabis lineages, Kane said. It's not just a matter of semantics. Identifying and defining lineages is important because researchers need to know what they're working with. Most commercially available marijuana is not of a pure lineage, but is hybrid, and while that can make for fast-growing, super-stony smoke, it isn't that useful for scientists. "Many taxonomic studies and genetic studies work with Cannabis hybrids, and generate inconclusive results," GW Pharma botanist John McPartland explained. "In the marijuana world, we don't have varieties or registered cultivars—we have these things called strains," Page said, noting that these are informal classifications not associated with genotypes in the same way formal varieties or cultivars are. "You need to put a name on something to research it." C. sativa or c. sativa, c. indica, and c. ruderalis?  Don't feel bad if you're not sure. Nobody else really is either. Phillip Smith is editor of the AlterNet Drug Reporter and author of the Drug War Chronicle. Is all marijuana from a singles species, cannabis sativa? Or are there three distinct species: cannabis sativa, cannabis indica, and cannabis ruderalis? Weed connoisseurs have long grappled with the issue as, intent on their pursuit of a more perfect buzz, they have now built up a couple of generations' worth of experience with plant breeding, hybridization and cross-pollination. That was pretty much all in the pursuit of getting high, but in the past couple of decades, interest has also turned to cannabinoids other than THC, such as cannabidiol (CBD), with all its apparent medicinal properties, not to mention increased interest in industrial hemp. Now, as marijuana increasingly moves out from the shadows and into a regulatory—as opposed to prohibitionist—environment, the question becomes ever more pressing, and not just for stoners. With the commercialization of cannabis already well underway in California, Colorado, Washington and other states, and its medicalization advancing worldwide, governments and the scientific research community are facing rising demands for taxonomic clarity. Canadian government botanist Ernest Small's research on the natural range of THC concentrations helped the Canadian set standards that allowed the classification of plants with less than 0.3 percent THC as hemp, not marijuana, creating groups of plants with stable characteristics, and registering them as formal hemp cultivars. Now farmers in those countries can grow hemp without fear of running afoul of drug laws. Creating that chemical threshold was a pragmatic and useful response, but a settled taxonomy would allow researchers, regulators, growers and consumers to use a clear and common language to describe the plant. Talking about cannabis taxonomy "is really talking about the ability of countries to rationally regulate important drugs and products," Small explained to Nature. But his research allowed governments to skirt the taxonomy question, and that could be a good thing. "It's complicated taxonomically because of its intimate relationship with humans over a long period of time," explained University of British Columbia botanist Jonathan Page. And that's not the only reason. First, pot is old. Cannabis diverged from the hops plant, humulus, around 28 million years ago, according to a genetic analysis by researchers at London-based GW Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturers of Sativex, a whole plant cannabis medicine. That means it's had millions of years to evolve, with geographical and environmental diversity playing an as yet unclear role in the development of distinct lineages (or are they species?). Second, Mary Jane has loose morals. She sleeps around, or, in more scientific terms, cannabis is promiscuous. Most marijuana lineages are able to produce viable offspring by crossing with other lineages. Third, and then there is human intervention. We've been messing with marijuana for at least 10,000 years—hemp ropes that old have been found in Taiwanese tombs—and that further muddles the taxonomic waters. And we've been cultivating it for different purposes, including food and fiber, as well as for its medicinal and psychoactive effects, creating divergent lineages as we went. From its origins in South and Central Asia, the plant is now cultivated on every continent except Antarctica, and humans carried it around the world. Mexican marijuana, for example, didn't occur because a pot seed floated across the ocean, but because Spanish colonists in the 1530s brought seeds with them in a failed effort to establish a fiber hemp industry there.  (The hemp experiment may have faltered, but feral marijuana got loose in Mexico nearly five centuries ago, and the rest is history.) And not only have humans been cultivating and breeding marijuana for millennia, but because marijuana is so promiscuous, the genetic diversity created by human meddling is further increased by human-bred pot's ability to cross-breed with wild or feral strains. Give us a few years of commercial marijuana production in the Midwest, and that feral hemp ("ditch weed") left over from World War II may actually start to get people high. The Taxonomic Debate The standard taxonomy, dating back to Linnaeus, is that marijuana and hemp are a single species, C. sativa, with a number of variants. But in the 19th century, French naturalist Jen-Baptiste Lamarck argued that differences in morphology and chemistry demanded a second species, C. indica, that was shorter, less fibrous and more psychoactive. In the 20th century, U.S. botanist Richard Evans Schultes posited the existence of a third species, C. afghanica. The standard taxonomy—cannabis is a single species—is favored, but the debate is still alive and grows more heated each time another scientist or researcher makes the argument for multiple species. Small wishes it would go away. "The issue is exaggerated and tends to mislead people," he said. "I almost feel that it's better not to talk about it anymore." Yet neither the demands for more clarity nor the interest of researchers is going away. And scientists are shifting their quests from examinations of plant morphology to looking into molecular structure and genetics. A decade ago, researchers at Indiana University examined the enzyme-encoding genotypes of 157 marijuana samples and, based on the proportions of CBD and THC levels, argued for two species, C. sativa and C. indica, with six subspecies. One of the researchers, Karl Hillig, later published a broader study suggesting a third species, C. ruderalis. In 2013, that position got support from botanist Mark Merlin at the University of Hawaii and cannabis researcher Robert Clarke of the International Hemp Association in Amsterdam. In their magisterial work, " Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany ," they argued for the three-species position, but concluded there were not six, but seven, subspecies. Still, the matter remains unresolved. At the same time Hillig and his team at Indiana were advancing the three-species thesis, other researchers were also looking at CBD/THC ratios, and they developed a single species position, but with five different lineages. And the work goes on. Canadian botanist Page and his colleagues have published a draft set of the DNA and RNA of a marijuana plant and compared that to the RNA of a hemp plant, finding "tantalizing differences" in the way cannabinoid-controlled genes are expressed. Another botanist, Nolan Kane of the University of Colorado, is working on a "genetic map" that will include complete gene sequencing of some 500 plants. That work could provide "unprecedented" insight into the relationships between the major cannabis lineages, Kane said. It's not just a matter of semantics. Identifying and defining lineages is important because researchers need to know what they're working with. Most commercially available marijuana is not of a pure lineage, but is hybrid, and while that can make for fast-growing, super-stony smoke, it isn't that useful for scientists. "Many taxonomic studies and genetic studies work with Cannabis hybrids, and generate inconclusive results," GW Pharma botanist John McPartland explained. "In the marijuana world, we don't have varieties or registered cultivars—we have these things called strains," Page said, noting that these are informal classifications not associated with genotypes in the same way formal varieties or cultivars are. "You need to put a name on something to research it." C. sativa or c. sativa, c. indica, and c. ruderalis?  Don't feel bad if you're not sure. Nobody else really is either. Phillip Smith is editor of the AlterNet Drug Reporter and author of the Drug War Chronicle.

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Good luck, Trevor Noah: Stephen Colbert just raised the bar very, very high

Ever since CBS announced in April 2014 that Stephen Colbert would be replacing David Letterman, many of his fans wondered if he would lose his edge after he moved from "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central to "The Late Show" on CBS. Now we know. In his first three weeks as "Late Night" host, Colbert has had more serious guests (and more serious conversation) than Jimmy Fallon has had in the 19 months he's hosted NBC's "The Tonight Show" and the 12 years that Jimmy Kimmel has had his ABC nightly talk show. But, in Colbert's case, "serious" doesn't mean dull. When he moved from Comedy Central, he didn't leave his provocative political bite behind. Rather than play a character who parodies bombastic right-wing buffoon Bill O'Reilly (his previous incarnation), Colbert is now himself -- a thoughtful, well-informed, religious, nice and clearly progressive individual with a sharp sense of humor. He can be sarcastic without being snarky, because his concern about the state of the world is a passion, not a pose. It's his mix of talents, and the combination of entertainment and education, that allows the show to appeal to a broad audience and makes it more than a late-night version of "Meet the Press." Colbert has done little to change the standard talk show format – the desk, the guests, the band – except that Colbert does his opening monologue sitting down. In addition to some great musical guests (including Paul Simon and Pearl Jam), and a mix of interesting (Stephen Curry, Amy Schumer) and dull (George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson) interviews with sports and showbiz folks, he's asked telling, insightful questions to a variety of public figures that give the show an air of gravitas (Colbert likes to display his knowledge of Latin) that other talk shows lack. Although Hillary Clinton apparently turned town an offer to appear on the show, Colbert has already interviewed presidential candidates Jeb Bush, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Colbert's conversation with Vice President Joe Biden -- which focused on their shared experience of losing family members to early and unexpected death -- was a remarkably heartfelt and intense moment. As with his interview with an upbeat Sen. Elizabeth Warren ("the game is rigged"), you could sense Colbert's not-too-subtle effort to convince Biden to run for president. On Thursday night, with Pope Francis garnering headlines for his visit to the United States, Colbert invited journalist Andrew Sullivan, Maria Shriver, comic Jim Gaffigan and Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Detroit to discuss the current condition of American Catholicism and the impact of the pope's visit. Rather than invite a celebrity artist as his musical guest that night, he recruited the interfaith (Christian, Muslim and Jewish) YMCA Jerusalem Youth Chorus as well as New York's St. Jean Baptiste Choir. They performed a mesmerizing version of "Joy to the World." His interview Friday night with 18-year old Nobel Prize-winning activist and author Malala Yousafzai was amazing. Although she was on the show in part to plug the new documentary "He Named Me Malala," she captivated the audience with her discussion of her efforts to get the U.N. and world leaders to invest in education for young girls, her confrontation with the Taliban, and her willingness to forgive her attackers. Her radiant sense of humor and her ability to perform a clever card trick were unexpected bonuses. Colbert also interviewed Global Poverty Project founder Hugh Evans and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon about the world's income inequality. This is clearly an issue close to Colbert's heart. He co-hosted the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park on Saturday. Unlike most talk show hosts, Colbert did haven't to rely entirely on his notes to ask Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk about his plans to make outer space a tourist destination. Musk told Colbert that Mars is a "fixer-upper of a planet." Colbert is still getting into his groove. When Donald Trump refused to say whether he thought Obama was born in the United States, Colbert let him off the hook too easily. The interviews with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, novelist Stephen King, and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick lacked the drama and spirit of his other exchanges. Some of Colbert's jokes, gags and routines (especially his riffs on public figures like gay marriage opponents Kim Davis and Rep. Steve King) have been hilarious, while a few others went bust. But his quick wit, and his obvious knowledge of current events and issues, shines through every night. He clearly intends to make "Late Night" the kind of intelligent entertainment show that we haven't seen since Jack Paar, Dick Cavett and David Susskind were on the air.Ever since CBS announced in April 2014 that Stephen Colbert would be replacing David Letterman, many of his fans wondered if he would lose his edge after he moved from "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central to "The Late Show" on CBS. Now we know. In his first three weeks as "Late Night" host, Colbert has had more serious guests (and more serious conversation) than Jimmy Fallon has had in the 19 months he's hosted NBC's "The Tonight Show" and the 12 years that Jimmy Kimmel has had his ABC nightly talk show. But, in Colbert's case, "serious" doesn't mean dull. When he moved from Comedy Central, he didn't leave his provocative political bite behind. Rather than play a character who parodies bombastic right-wing buffoon Bill O'Reilly (his previous incarnation), Colbert is now himself -- a thoughtful, well-informed, religious, nice and clearly progressive individual with a sharp sense of humor. He can be sarcastic without being snarky, because his concern about the state of the world is a passion, not a pose. It's his mix of talents, and the combination of entertainment and education, that allows the show to appeal to a broad audience and makes it more than a late-night version of "Meet the Press." Colbert has done little to change the standard talk show format – the desk, the guests, the band – except that Colbert does his opening monologue sitting down. In addition to some great musical guests (including Paul Simon and Pearl Jam), and a mix of interesting (Stephen Curry, Amy Schumer) and dull (George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson) interviews with sports and showbiz folks, he's asked telling, insightful questions to a variety of public figures that give the show an air of gravitas (Colbert likes to display his knowledge of Latin) that other talk shows lack. Although Hillary Clinton apparently turned town an offer to appear on the show, Colbert has already interviewed presidential candidates Jeb Bush, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Colbert's conversation with Vice President Joe Biden -- which focused on their shared experience of losing family members to early and unexpected death -- was a remarkably heartfelt and intense moment. As with his interview with an upbeat Sen. Elizabeth Warren ("the game is rigged"), you could sense Colbert's not-too-subtle effort to convince Biden to run for president. On Thursday night, with Pope Francis garnering headlines for his visit to the United States, Colbert invited journalist Andrew Sullivan, Maria Shriver, comic Jim Gaffigan and Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Detroit to discuss the current condition of American Catholicism and the impact of the pope's visit. Rather than invite a celebrity artist as his musical guest that night, he recruited the interfaith (Christian, Muslim and Jewish) YMCA Jerusalem Youth Chorus as well as New York's St. Jean Baptiste Choir. They performed a mesmerizing version of "Joy to the World." His interview Friday night with 18-year old Nobel Prize-winning activist and author Malala Yousafzai was amazing. Although she was on the show in part to plug the new documentary "He Named Me Malala," she captivated the audience with her discussion of her efforts to get the U.N. and world leaders to invest in education for young girls, her confrontation with the Taliban, and her willingness to forgive her attackers. Her radiant sense of humor and her ability to perform a clever card trick were unexpected bonuses. Colbert also interviewed Global Poverty Project founder Hugh Evans and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon about the world's income inequality. This is clearly an issue close to Colbert's heart. He co-hosted the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park on Saturday. Unlike most talk show hosts, Colbert did haven't to rely entirely on his notes to ask Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk about his plans to make outer space a tourist destination. Musk told Colbert that Mars is a "fixer-upper of a planet." Colbert is still getting into his groove. When Donald Trump refused to say whether he thought Obama was born in the United States, Colbert let him off the hook too easily. The interviews with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, novelist Stephen King, and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick lacked the drama and spirit of his other exchanges. Some of Colbert's jokes, gags and routines (especially his riffs on public figures like gay marriage opponents Kim Davis and Rep. Steve King) have been hilarious, while a few others went bust. But his quick wit, and his obvious knowledge of current events and issues, shines through every night. He clearly intends to make "Late Night" the kind of intelligent entertainment show that we haven't seen since Jack Paar, Dick Cavett and David Susskind were on the air.

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Priyanka Chopra’s “Quantico”: Cool, charismatic, complex Alex Parrish — the Indian-American heroine I’ve been waiting for

Representation in pop culture, as it matters in principle, has become a cornerstone of contemporary cultural critique. The lack of it is still staggering, but conversation about diversity and inclusion is more mainstream than ever: It was the driving momentum of this year’s Emmys and continues to be a pillar of network strategy at both ABC and Fox. Indeed, as you might have noticed, I write about representation all the time. As a woman of color myself, I know that it is valuable. But as I discovered yesterday while watching the premiere of “Quantico,” there is quite a difference between knowing that representation matters and feeling that it matters by seeing yourself represented on-screen. It’s an opportunity I get quite rarely: I’m a first-generation Indian-American, meaning that I exist in a very small minority between two much larger cultures. Though fast-growing, “Asian Indians,” as the U.S. Census Bureau calls us, don’t even make up 1 percent of the American population — we tot up to just under 3 million, based on 2010 numbers. Back in the subcontinent, the population of India alone is over 1 billion, and combining the racially similar populations of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka adds up to something like 1.5 billion people. In America, it’s difficult to find characters that look like me. In India, which has a huge film industry, it’s hard to find characters that I can relate to culturally. (Very few Indian women on-screen have had a goth phase, after all. Even fewer are queer, sexually active or just plain rebellious.) Still, compared to other ethnic minorities, I have very little to complain about. What Indian-Americans do have going for them, in the game of representation, is affluence; doctor shows have been showcasing desi talent for decades now, because so many Americans actually do see their first (and maybe only) Indian-Americans at a clinic or hospital. And as Indian-Americans enter American politics and the creative classes—largely because of that affluence—characters like Aziz Ansari's bureaucrat Tom Haverford in “Parks and Recreation” or Hannah Simone's model Cece Parekh in “New Girl” have become known quantities. American audiences have a fascination for Indian culture that is at times very frustrating, but it does mean that yoga, bindis, saris and henna are somewhat understood by domestic audiences. Similarly, Indian audiences have a fascination for Western culture and Westernized desis — protagonists for Bollywood films are often expats from the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, if only to justify filming in far-flung and exotic locales. I happen to live in the era of Mindy Kaling and Aishwarya Rai, of Padma Lakshmi and Freida Pinto. And yet. It appears I was hungrier than I thought. As Rohin Guha writes in the Aerogram, when you’ve been content with scraps for your whole life, you never expect to be thrown a bone. Even “The Mindy Project’s" Mindy Lahiri is, true to type, a doctor. “Quantico’s" lead, Priyanka Chopra, is a certified A-lister in India—an actress on the level of Jennifer Lawrence here in the states, with that similar combination of critical approval, youth, beauty and mainstream appeal. Her decision to tackle the American market via television is strikingly forward-thinking—while film shut out the promising debuts of Sarita Choudary and Parminder Nagra (who both went on to have careers on television), TV is more eager than ever to promote artists from different ethnicities. ABC bent over backward to give Chopra what she wanted with “Quantico”; the actress secured the lead role in her own drama but will still be free to act in Indian films. Guha continues, “In our consumption of American pop culture, we are frequently asked to be content nibbling on scraps — and Chopra, in the most diplomatic way possible, has indicated that if she comes to the U.S., she won’t settle for scraps herself. No bit roles, no cameos, no typecasting.” As Chopra herself said earlier today, in an interview with Vulture: “I don’t look at Hollywood as a big break. Indian film stands on its own.” In just the first episode of “Quantico,” Chopra has hooked up in a car, admitted to murder, and been arrested under suspicion of terrorism. The plot of “Quantico” takes no prisoners—it doesn’t even stop to draw breath. The pilot, “Run,” has at least four discernible major twists, and two of the introduced characters are already dead. Without being a Shonda Rhimes show, it has clearly been coaxed into being as close of a copy to one as possible—the classroom looks like an exact copy of the one in “How to Get Away With Murder”; there’s a glass hallway on the training compound that looks identical to one in Grey Sloan Memorial; and those pictures taped on glass in the investigation are eerily reminiscent of Olivia Pope & Associates’ project wall. Still, the show has its own non-Rhimes flavor, and a lot of that comes from Chopra, who carries the pilot through the force of sheer charisma (and an absolutely stellar blowout). An interesting detail, at present, is that while Chopra is not mixed-race, her character is—an Indian mother and a white American father. Showrunner Joshua Safran has said that this parentage has a plot significance that will unfold further down the line. I hope the significance is not merely to make her more relatable (read: less “foreign”) for American audiences. As a result, though, her name (“Alex Parrish”) and identity aren’t exactly Indian-American, even if her accent and appearance are both noticeably Indian. Maybe that means I cannot quite claim her as Indian-American; or maybe that means that in her cobbled-together heritage that is part American, part Indian and significantly influenced by the mainstream, she is even more like me than I first thought. Regardless, Chopra portrays Alex as sympathetic, but pretty mysterious; she’s innocent, but not that innocent. The audience is drawn into admiring her incredible coolness, instead of indulging her naiveté (or laughing at her klutziness, as is often the case with lead heroines). But she’s still a warm character, able to trade barbs with her romantic interest and befriend her roommate. That’s the type of thing that requires some skill. It’s not easy to be engaging when your character is keeping as many secrets as is humanly possible—Viola Davis just won an Emmy for it, after all. The most common criticism of “Quantico” is that it is a silly show. This is true. But it is silly in the same way that “Scandal” and “How to Get Away With Murder” are silly; silly in the same way that “Empire” and “Game of Thrones” and “Outlander” are silly. Television is quite silly, to be honest. A lot of people in costumes running around on a set, pretending to kill each other and crying all the while. But the silliness has a subtext, and with “Quantico,” the subtext is that an Indian-American woman can be an American hero—or an American villain—just as much as the next person. We don’t have to be doctors or in arranged-marriage plots in order to see ourselves on television. “Quantico” is little more than a fantastical sandbox full of gadgets and car crashes, sure; but for once, I feel actually invited to play.

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Elizabeth Warren just delivered the realest talk on race by any American politician

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren just further burnished her progressive credentials with a thorough and explicit telling of racial injustice in America, focusing on what she called three tools of oppression historically and currently used against African-Americans and concluding with a full-throated endorsement of the Black Lives Matter movement. "Violence, voting, economic justice," Warren told the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate on Sunday, were and are state-sanctioned "tools of oppression" used against African-Americans. Warren detailed what she described as the "dark underbelly" of "how America built a great middle class":

Entire legal structures were created to prevent African Americans from building economic security through home ownership. Legally-enforced segregation. Restrictive deeds. Redlining. Land contracts. Coming out of the Great Depression, America built a middle class, but systematic discrimination kept most African-American families from being part of it. State-sanctioned discrimination wasn't limited to homeownership. The government enforced discrimination in public accommodations, discrimination in schools, discrimination in credit-it was a long and spiteful list.

Turning to today's racial struggle, Warren credited the civil rights legislation of the 1960s with widely establishing the founding principle of the current protest movement. "The first civil rights battles were hard fought. But they established that Black Lives Matter," Warren said. “These laws made three powerful declarations: Black lives matter. Black citizens matter. Black families matter,” she argued, crediting her predecessor, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, with helping to shepherd the landmark legislation through Congress. Still, housing discrimination, Warren reminded the audience, is "alive and well in 2015," noting recent multi-million dollar settlements by banks who illegal charged a so-called "racial surtax" for home mortgages. Warren squarely laid blame for the economic failures of the civil rights movement at the feet of Republican economic theory:

Research shows that the legal changes in the civil rights era created new employment and housing opportunities. In the 1960s and the 1970s, African-American men and women began to close the wage gap with white workers, giving millions of black families hope that they might build real wealth. But then, Republicans' trickle-down economic theory arrived. Just as this country was taking the first steps toward economic justice, the Republicans pushed a theory that meant helping the richest people and the most powerful corporations get richer and more powerful. I'll just do one statistic on this: From 1980 to 2012, GDP continued to rise, but how much of the income growth went to the 90% of America - everyone outside the top 10% - black, white, Latino? None. Zero. Nothing. 100% of all the new income produced in this country over the past 30 years has gone to the top ten percent. Today, 90% of Americans see no real wage growth. For African-Americans, who were so far behind earlier in the 20th Century, this means that since the 1980s they have been hit particularly hard. In January of this year, African-American unemployment was 10.3% - more than twice the rate of white unemployment. And, after beginning to make progress during the civil rights era to close the wealth gap between black and white families, in the 1980s the wealth gap exploded, so that from 1984 to 2009, the wealth gap between black and white families tripled

Warren also called out the "five conservative justices on the Supreme Court" whom she argued "gutted the Voting Rights Act, opening the floodgates ever wider for measures designed to suppress minority voting":

Today, the specific tools of oppression have changed-voter ID laws, racial gerrymandering, and mass disfranchisement through a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates black citizens. The tools have changed, but black voters are still deliberately cut out of the political process.

But, Warren argued, "economic justice is not - and has never been - sufficient to ensure racial justice," admitting to the fallibility of her populist rhetoric if it lacks equally weighty measures to combat racial inequality:

Owning a home won't stop someone from burning a cross on the front lawn. Admission to a school won't prevent a beating on the sidewalk outside. But when Dr. King led hundreds of thousands of people to march on Washington, he talked about an end to violence, access to voting AND economic opportunity. As Dr. King once wrote, "the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice."

Warren then implored White America to listen to the concerns of African-Americans on the issue of police brutality and over-criminalization, arguing that their "pervasive and persistent distrust isn't based on myths. It is grounded in the reality of unjustified violence":

Listen to the brave, powerful voices of today's new generation of civil rights leaders. Incredible voices. Listen to them say: "If I die in police custody, know that I did not commit suicide." Watch them march through the streets, "hands up don't shoot" - not to incite a riot, but to fight for their lives. To fight for their lives. This is the reality all of us must confront, as uncomfortable and ugly as that reality may be. It comes to us to once again affirm that black lives matter, that black citizens matter, that black families matter.

The reaction to Warren's speech by Black Lives Matter activists has been positive. Prominent activist DeRay McKesson praised Warren as better than any other politician on her understanding "that the American dream has been sustained by an intentional violence and that the uprisings have been the result of years of lived trauma." "Senator Warren's speech clearly and powerfully calls into question America's commitment to black lives by highlighting the role that structural racism has played and continues to play with regard to housing discrimination and voting rights," Mckesson told the Washington Post. Watch Warren's full address to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate and read her full text here: (H/T: Huffington Post)

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The Uber-ization of everything: These guys make $1,000 a week standing in line

Robert Samuel, founder of Same Ole Line Dudes, makes up to $1,000 a week to stand in line. He waits in line for Broadway shows, sample sales, tech releases and even brunch waitlists. Samuel recently spent 48 hours outside the Apple store in the Meatpacking District waiting for the iPhone 6s. He was the first in line, slept in a fold-up cot for two nights, had pizza delivered to his spot and snagged $1000 for the gig. Samuel's business joins dozens of "Ubers" like Lugg: Uber for Movers, Doughbies On-Demand: Uber for chocolate chip cookies, Minibar: Uber for alcohol and Breather: Uber for peace and quiet — all of which essentially allow customers to buy their way to the front.

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Christian school kicks out kindergartener because she has two moms

Sadly, nationwide marriage equality simply isn't enough to inoculate all children of same-sex couples from the cruelty and indignity that is anti-gay discrimination. The latest example comes from San Diego, California, where a five year-old girl was recently barred from starting the first day of kindergarten after her school changed its nondiscrimination policy following the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, reports the local ABC News affiliate KGTV. Mt. Erie Christian Academy, a private institution that does not appear to take any public funds, updated its handbook this summer to reserve the right to discontinue the enrollment of any student it finds "in opposition to the biblical lifestyle," citing at least one Bible passage that calls for homosexuals to be murdered:

Mt. Erie Christian Academy is a religious, Bible-believing institution providing education in a distinct Christian environment, and it believes that its biblical role is to work in conjunction with the home to mold students to be Christ like. On those occasions in which the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home is counter to or in opposition to the biblical lifestyle that the school teaches, the school reserves the right, within its sole discretion, to refuse admission of an applicant or to discontinue enrollment of a student. This includes, but is not necessarily limited to, living in, condoning or supporting sexual immorality; practicing homosexual lifestyle or alternative gender identity; promoting such practices; or otherwise having the inability to support the moral principles of the school (Leviticus 20:13a; Romans 1:21-27; Matthew 19:4-6; I Corinthians 6:9-20).

The new policy effectively barred one of the school's pre-school students from entering kindergarten this school year. The five-year old's mother, Shenna (she asked that her last name be withheld) called the policy change "heartbreaking." The stay at-home mother said the she was unaware of the school's extreme anti-gay attitude and insisted that she wouldn't not have subjected her daughter to such humiliation had she known of their discriminatory policy before enrolling at the academy. "If we knew from the beginning that this was unacceptable, they didn't condone or believe in this, if it was such a big deal, we would have never started her off there," Sheena said. "I would never put my child's emotional wellbeing in an unstable setting like that." Shenna said that although both her and her wife, whose is currently deployed with the Navy, are Christian, they never considered their sexuality to be in conflict with the faith or the school's mission. "What does our family life have to do with anyone else? Like no one's gonna be in danger." She continued: "I want my baby to be safe when she grows up. I don't want her to ever have to be discriminated against because of her lifestyle. That's not fair." Shenna told KGTV that she is looking for legal recourse but that her daughter continues to be out of the classroom as they search for an alternative. "I miss my friends. I miss my teachers," the child told the news station. (H/T: The Root)

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Trevor Noah is changing “The Daily Show”: Here are the biggest adjustments fans will have to make

After months of speculation, Trevor Noah's tenure as “Daily Show” host finally begins tonight. While it remains to be seen exactly how things will change under a Noah regime, we have some pretty good guesses based on things that Noah and his team have said over the past few months. Here's a look at some of the biggest changes we foresee coming down the pipeline: New targets  While much of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” involved eviscerating/demolishing/[pick dramatic verb of your choice] Fox News, Noah told journalists that he doesn’t have any particular axe to grind… yet. “I don’t have targets yet," he told journalists at a press preview last week. “I get to discover the person I will grow to loathe, to hate, and they may not be on Fox News.” Still, when it comes to lampooning the media, it’s likely that we’ll see Noah move away from the cable news cycle that Stewart so loved to target. At a recent TCA panel, Noah explained that, while “The Daily Show” was in part a response to the “emerging 24 hour news cycle,” the media landscape is very different now. “Half of it is online now,” he explained. "Now you’ve got the Gawkers, the BuzzFeeds. The way people are drawing their news is soundbites and headlines and click-bait links has changed everything. The biggest challenge is going to be an exciting one I’m sure is how are we going to bring all of that together looking at it from a bigger lens as opposed to just going after one source—which was historically Fox News.” A digital-friendly approach Not only will online media outlets serve as fodder, but they will also be intrinsic to the show's growth. Recently we learned that Noah had hired a separate online team, headed by comic Baratunde Thurston, to lead production of original online content that will run in tandem with the show. And as late night shows increasingly compete for clicks and YouTube views as much as they do for Nielsen ratings, and given Noah’s remarks about wanting to pivot more to focus on online media, its safe to say that Noah’s “Daily Show” will be a much more digital-friendly, multi-platform experience than its predecessor. As Thurston tells the New York Times, his job is to help the show work with “all this media that has become highly fragmented and swipe-able and annoying in ways that Edward R. Murrow could never have imagined” and to "make things that land on Instagram and Snapchat and FlipFlamf.” Or, as Comedy Central president Michele Ganeless put it last week, Thurston will help add "a multi-platform layer for the show that hasn't existed before" that "will enable us to have a conversation with viewers." A finely-honed racial sensibility Noah was born in Apartheid South Africa to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, and much of his stand-up derives from his unique history of growing up mixed in a segregated state, as well as his more recent experiences coming to terms with the complex racial dynamics in his adopted country. If Noah’s stand-up routines are any indication, we can expect race to be one of the primary lenses he looks through in order to help make sense of the world around him. "America is the one place in the world where I just innately understood what was happening because South Africa and the United States of America have a very similar history,” Noah told journalists on Friday, when asked about coming to terms with racial politics in the U.S. "It's different timelines, but the directions we've taken and the consequences — dealing with the aftermath of what we consider to be democracy, and realizing that freedom is just the beginning of the conversation, that's something I've learned. I'm not now trying to understand what segregation or institutionalized racism is.” That multicultural perspective also extends to his staff, with Noah telling Rolling Stone that "the racial diversity of the correspondents has gone up dramatically,” and introducing three new correspondents with diverse backgrounds: The Malaysian-born Ronny Chieg, African American stand-up Roy Wood Jr., and “Awkward” star Desi Lydic, who joins Jessica Williams as one of the show's few female voices. An outsider’s perspective At Friday’s press preview, Noah repeatedly made reference to his outsider’s point of view, suggesting that his fresh perspective on U.S. politics and culture would be contrasted with the writing staff’s more seasoned views. “For the writers, they’ve got a history with all of these people,” Noah explained of watching the Republican debates with his staff. “I’m watching the debate and someone says something about something one of the politicians did 10, 15 years ago, and they’re like ‘that’s like the time that happened.’ And I’m the person going ‘why is that funny? Who is that person? What is important about that?’” Much like John Oliver does on "Last Week Tonight," we can expect Noah to use his outsider’s perspective to poke fun at some of the more absurd aspects of American society, particularly those things that a native audience may take for granted. “The fun part is the learning,” he continued. “And I think sometimes transferring that learning into a TV show and giving that to the audience is fantastic, like when you have a child, they learn new things and then you get to relearn it with them.” The network brass certainly seems keen to capitalize on Noah's unique cultural vantage point. “He is a student of our culture,” Ganeless told GQ a few months ago. “But he looks at it from a very different perspective.”After months of speculation, Trevor Noah's tenure as “Daily Show” host finally begins tonight. While it remains to be seen exactly how things will change under a Noah regime, we have some pretty good guesses based on things that Noah and his team have said over the past few months. Here's a look at some of the biggest changes we foresee coming down the pipeline: New targets  While much of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” involved eviscerating/demolishing/[pick dramatic verb of your choice] Fox News, Noah told journalists that he doesn’t have any particular axe to grind… yet. “I don’t have targets yet," he told journalists at a press preview last week. “I get to discover the person I will grow to loathe, to hate, and they may not be on Fox News.” Still, when it comes to lampooning the media, it’s likely that we’ll see Noah move away from the cable news cycle that Stewart so loved to target. At a recent TCA panel, Noah explained that, while “The Daily Show” was in part a response to the “emerging 24 hour news cycle,” the media landscape is very different now. “Half of it is online now,” he explained. "Now you’ve got the Gawkers, the BuzzFeeds. The way people are drawing their news is soundbites and headlines and click-bait links has changed everything. The biggest challenge is going to be an exciting one I’m sure is how are we going to bring all of that together looking at it from a bigger lens as opposed to just going after one source—which was historically Fox News.” A digital-friendly approach Not only will online media outlets serve as fodder, but they will also be intrinsic to the show's growth. Recently we learned that Noah had hired a separate online team, headed by comic Baratunde Thurston, to lead production of original online content that will run in tandem with the show. And as late night shows increasingly compete for clicks and YouTube views as much as they do for Nielsen ratings, and given Noah’s remarks about wanting to pivot more to focus on online media, its safe to say that Noah’s “Daily Show” will be a much more digital-friendly, multi-platform experience than its predecessor. As Thurston tells the New York Times, his job is to help the show work with “all this media that has become highly fragmented and swipe-able and annoying in ways that Edward R. Murrow could never have imagined” and to "make things that land on Instagram and Snapchat and FlipFlamf.” Or, as Comedy Central president Michele Ganeless put it last week, Thurston will help add "a multi-platform layer for the show that hasn't existed before" that "will enable us to have a conversation with viewers." A finely-honed racial sensibility Noah was born in Apartheid South Africa to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, and much of his stand-up derives from his unique history of growing up mixed in a segregated state, as well as his more recent experiences coming to terms with the complex racial dynamics in his adopted country. If Noah’s stand-up routines are any indication, we can expect race to be one of the primary lenses he looks through in order to help make sense of the world around him. "America is the one place in the world where I just innately understood what was happening because South Africa and the United States of America have a very similar history,” Noah told journalists on Friday, when asked about coming to terms with racial politics in the U.S. "It's different timelines, but the directions we've taken and the consequences — dealing with the aftermath of what we consider to be democracy, and realizing that freedom is just the beginning of the conversation, that's something I've learned. I'm not now trying to understand what segregation or institutionalized racism is.” That multicultural perspective also extends to his staff, with Noah telling Rolling Stone that "the racial diversity of the correspondents has gone up dramatically,” and introducing three new correspondents with diverse backgrounds: The Malaysian-born Ronny Chieg, African American stand-up Roy Wood Jr., and “Awkward” star Desi Lydic, who joins Jessica Williams as one of the show's few female voices. An outsider’s perspective At Friday’s press preview, Noah repeatedly made reference to his outsider’s point of view, suggesting that his fresh perspective on U.S. politics and culture would be contrasted with the writing staff’s more seasoned views. “For the writers, they’ve got a history with all of these people,” Noah explained of watching the Republican debates with his staff. “I’m watching the debate and someone says something about something one of the politicians did 10, 15 years ago, and they’re like ‘that’s like the time that happened.’ And I’m the person going ‘why is that funny? Who is that person? What is important about that?’” Much like John Oliver does on "Last Week Tonight," we can expect Noah to use his outsider’s perspective to poke fun at some of the more absurd aspects of American society, particularly those things that a native audience may take for granted. “The fun part is the learning,” he continued. “And I think sometimes transferring that learning into a TV show and giving that to the audience is fantastic, like when you have a child, they learn new things and then you get to relearn it with them.” The network brass certainly seems keen to capitalize on Noah's unique cultural vantage point. “He is a student of our culture,” Ganeless told GQ a few months ago. “But he looks at it from a very different perspective.”After months of speculation, Trevor Noah's tenure as “Daily Show” host finally begins tonight. While it remains to be seen exactly how things will change under a Noah regime, we have some pretty good guesses based on things that Noah and his team have said over the past few months. Here's a look at some of the biggest changes we foresee coming down the pipeline: New targets  While much of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” involved eviscerating/demolishing/[pick dramatic verb of your choice] Fox News, Noah told journalists that he doesn’t have any particular axe to grind… yet. “I don’t have targets yet," he told journalists at a press preview last week. “I get to discover the person I will grow to loathe, to hate, and they may not be on Fox News.” Still, when it comes to lampooning the media, it’s likely that we’ll see Noah move away from the cable news cycle that Stewart so loved to target. At a recent TCA panel, Noah explained that, while “The Daily Show” was in part a response to the “emerging 24 hour news cycle,” the media landscape is very different now. “Half of it is online now,” he explained. "Now you’ve got the Gawkers, the BuzzFeeds. The way people are drawing their news is soundbites and headlines and click-bait links has changed everything. The biggest challenge is going to be an exciting one I’m sure is how are we going to bring all of that together looking at it from a bigger lens as opposed to just going after one source—which was historically Fox News.” A digital-friendly approach Not only will online media outlets serve as fodder, but they will also be intrinsic to the show's growth. Recently we learned that Noah had hired a separate online team, headed by comic Baratunde Thurston, to lead production of original online content that will run in tandem with the show. And as late night shows increasingly compete for clicks and YouTube views as much as they do for Nielsen ratings, and given Noah’s remarks about wanting to pivot more to focus on online media, its safe to say that Noah’s “Daily Show” will be a much more digital-friendly, multi-platform experience than its predecessor. As Thurston tells the New York Times, his job is to help the show work with “all this media that has become highly fragmented and swipe-able and annoying in ways that Edward R. Murrow could never have imagined” and to "make things that land on Instagram and Snapchat and FlipFlamf.” Or, as Comedy Central president Michele Ganeless put it last week, Thurston will help add "a multi-platform layer for the show that hasn't existed before" that "will enable us to have a conversation with viewers." A finely-honed racial sensibility Noah was born in Apartheid South Africa to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, and much of his stand-up derives from his unique history of growing up mixed in a segregated state, as well as his more recent experiences coming to terms with the complex racial dynamics in his adopted country. If Noah’s stand-up routines are any indication, we can expect race to be one of the primary lenses he looks through in order to help make sense of the world around him. "America is the one place in the world where I just innately understood what was happening because South Africa and the United States of America have a very similar history,” Noah told journalists on Friday, when asked about coming to terms with racial politics in the U.S. "It's different timelines, but the directions we've taken and the consequences — dealing with the aftermath of what we consider to be democracy, and realizing that freedom is just the beginning of the conversation, that's something I've learned. I'm not now trying to understand what segregation or institutionalized racism is.” That multicultural perspective also extends to his staff, with Noah telling Rolling Stone that "the racial diversity of the correspondents has gone up dramatically,” and introducing three new correspondents with diverse backgrounds: The Malaysian-born Ronny Chieg, African American stand-up Roy Wood Jr., and “Awkward” star Desi Lydic, who joins Jessica Williams as one of the show's few female voices. An outsider’s perspective At Friday’s press preview, Noah repeatedly made reference to his outsider’s point of view, suggesting that his fresh perspective on U.S. politics and culture would be contrasted with the writing staff’s more seasoned views. “For the writers, they’ve got a history with all of these people,” Noah explained of watching the Republican debates with his staff. “I’m watching the debate and someone says something about something one of the politicians did 10, 15 years ago, and they’re like ‘that’s like the time that happened.’ And I’m the person going ‘why is that funny? Who is that person? What is important about that?’” Much like John Oliver does on "Last Week Tonight," we can expect Noah to use his outsider’s perspective to poke fun at some of the more absurd aspects of American society, particularly those things that a native audience may take for granted. “The fun part is the learning,” he continued. “And I think sometimes transferring that learning into a TV show and giving that to the audience is fantastic, like when you have a child, they learn new things and then you get to relearn it with them.” The network brass certainly seems keen to capitalize on Noah's unique cultural vantage point. “He is a student of our culture,” Ganeless told GQ a few months ago. “But he looks at it from a very different perspective.”After months of speculation, Trevor Noah's tenure as “Daily Show” host finally begins tonight. While it remains to be seen exactly how things will change under a Noah regime, we have some pretty good guesses based on things that Noah and his team have said over the past few months. Here's a look at some of the biggest changes we foresee coming down the pipeline: New targets  While much of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” involved eviscerating/demolishing/[pick dramatic verb of your choice] Fox News, Noah told journalists that he doesn’t have any particular axe to grind… yet. “I don’t have targets yet," he told journalists at a press preview last week. “I get to discover the person I will grow to loathe, to hate, and they may not be on Fox News.” Still, when it comes to lampooning the media, it’s likely that we’ll see Noah move away from the cable news cycle that Stewart so loved to target. At a recent TCA panel, Noah explained that, while “The Daily Show” was in part a response to the “emerging 24 hour news cycle,” the media landscape is very different now. “Half of it is online now,” he explained. "Now you’ve got the Gawkers, the BuzzFeeds. The way people are drawing their news is soundbites and headlines and click-bait links has changed everything. The biggest challenge is going to be an exciting one I’m sure is how are we going to bring all of that together looking at it from a bigger lens as opposed to just going after one source—which was historically Fox News.” A digital-friendly approach Not only will online media outlets serve as fodder, but they will also be intrinsic to the show's growth. Recently we learned that Noah had hired a separate online team, headed by comic Baratunde Thurston, to lead production of original online content that will run in tandem with the show. And as late night shows increasingly compete for clicks and YouTube views as much as they do for Nielsen ratings, and given Noah’s remarks about wanting to pivot more to focus on online media, its safe to say that Noah’s “Daily Show” will be a much more digital-friendly, multi-platform experience than its predecessor. As Thurston tells the New York Times, his job is to help the show work with “all this media that has become highly fragmented and swipe-able and annoying in ways that Edward R. Murrow could never have imagined” and to "make things that land on Instagram and Snapchat and FlipFlamf.” Or, as Comedy Central president Michele Ganeless put it last week, Thurston will help add "a multi-platform layer for the show that hasn't existed before" that "will enable us to have a conversation with viewers." A finely-honed racial sensibility Noah was born in Apartheid South Africa to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, and much of his stand-up derives from his unique history of growing up mixed in a segregated state, as well as his more recent experiences coming to terms with the complex racial dynamics in his adopted country. If Noah’s stand-up routines are any indication, we can expect race to be one of the primary lenses he looks through in order to help make sense of the world around him. "America is the one place in the world where I just innately understood what was happening because South Africa and the United States of America have a very similar history,” Noah told journalists on Friday, when asked about coming to terms with racial politics in the U.S. "It's different timelines, but the directions we've taken and the consequences — dealing with the aftermath of what we consider to be democracy, and realizing that freedom is just the beginning of the conversation, that's something I've learned. I'm not now trying to understand what segregation or institutionalized racism is.” That multicultural perspective also extends to his staff, with Noah telling Rolling Stone that "the racial diversity of the correspondents has gone up dramatically,” and introducing three new correspondents with diverse backgrounds: The Malaysian-born Ronny Chieg, African American stand-up Roy Wood Jr., and “Awkward” star Desi Lydic, who joins Jessica Williams as one of the show's few female voices. An outsider’s perspective At Friday’s press preview, Noah repeatedly made reference to his outsider’s point of view, suggesting that his fresh perspective on U.S. politics and culture would be contrasted with the writing staff’s more seasoned views. “For the writers, they’ve got a history with all of these people,” Noah explained of watching the Republican debates with his staff. “I’m watching the debate and someone says something about something one of the politicians did 10, 15 years ago, and they’re like ‘that’s like the time that happened.’ And I’m the person going ‘why is that funny? Who is that person? What is important about that?’” Much like John Oliver does on "Last Week Tonight," we can expect Noah to use his outsider’s perspective to poke fun at some of the more absurd aspects of American society, particularly those things that a native audience may take for granted. “The fun part is the learning,” he continued. “And I think sometimes transferring that learning into a TV show and giving that to the audience is fantastic, like when you have a child, they learn new things and then you get to relearn it with them.” The network brass certainly seems keen to capitalize on Noah's unique cultural vantage point. “He is a student of our culture,” Ganeless told GQ a few months ago. “But he looks at it from a very different perspective.”

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Stop asking working moms about “having it all” — and women, stop answering

Sometimes, all you need for a little Monday validation is Shonda Rhimes tweeting, "THIS!" THIS, as in a rousing hell, yes to Facebook executive Margaret Gould Stewart's recent USA Today op-ed, in which she quite reasonably suggests, "Let's talk about my brain, not babies." THIS. Stewart writes, "My uterus doesn’t have much to say on the matter of technology and how it can improve people’s lives," adding, "though my brain has quite a bit to offer." She recounts attending the Fortune Brainstorm conference earlier this year and watching YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki introduced by an interviewer who credited her for "truly extraordinary" feat of raising five children. And of course, he asked her the inevitable, "How do you do it all?" Please. The working mothers of the world beg you. Stop. Asking. This. Stupid. Question. Stewart aptly explains, "When the venue is a tech conference, let's talk about tech, for goodness sake. Making motherhood a required topic for women leaders minimizes their contributions to the industry…. It minimizes my expertise and accomplishments and those of my fellow women tech leaders." She helpfully offers advice on how to do better, including a simple tip: "As I see it, you have two choices: you can either ask everyone these questions about their private lives and their role as a parent, or you should ask no one." And she encourages female professionals, "Please don’t engage in these discussions when the focus is supposed to be on your professional accomplishments." Again I say, THIS. The "having it all" legend, much like a demonic serial killer from an '80s horror franchise, refuses to die — it seems instead to just keep getting stronger and scarier. It's been more three years since Anne-Marie Slaughter's self-explanatorily titled "Why Women Still Can’t Have It All" became a sensation in The Atlantic, soon followed by Sheryl Sandberg's command to "Lean In," though it came with an acknowledgment of "The Myth of Doing it All." In Slaughter's new book, "Unfinished Business," she posits, "Perhaps the problem is not with women, but with work." Or maybe it's how it's framed. When NPR this weekend ran a feature on the book, it came with the headline, "When Working Families Can't Do It All." I know I keep asking this but… seriously, who out there is Having It All? And what's with this specific expectation that women are supposed to? The trick is, they're not. Not really. They're supposed to come up short and serve as cautionary tales of what happens when women want things, especially things in addition to babies — or even, oh Lord, no — instead of them. How's that "having it all" going for you, ladies? What? You say you're just here to talk about economic growth or a new drug you developed or social media outreach? Yeah, first we need to know where your children are right now. Who fed them dinner? How do you feel about that? Is your husband at home right now "babysitting" his own children? Does he "help out" with stuff like cooking and scheduling family activities? Did you take any time off when you had your last baby? Do you feel it got you off the career track? Do you want to have more children and if so, when? Please put your hand on a bible and solemnly swear that your first and best "job" is being a mom. We'll be here looking for any cracks in your facade that might suggest compromise, trade-offs, flexibility, or, most of all, imperfection. Then we can point at you and say "A-HA! You call THAT having it all?" I think the reason that women are so often so challenged on the "having it all" trope is because there's something implicitly threatening in the message. After all, if women start having it, and all of it, then there's nothing left for men, right? They'll have the jobs and the kids and the world will be a cold and masculinity-free place. What's your game, women? Better keep asking them about their kids — maybe they'll get scared off from this whole "careers and ambitions" thing. Of course, the work-life tightrope is a very challenging one to walk, and the burden of navigating it falls disproportionately to mothers. We can have conversations about that. We can conversations about that all damn day long, if you'd like, because I have plenty to say. But when women come to talk about work and get asked about their babies, it sends a message to everybody reading, listening and watching that babies are the top story and work is a hobby. So just remember that women — yes, even women who've had children — are capable of talking about things other than children. And that there is no magical all to had, for anybody.

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My mother, the drug war and me: Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates and forgiving my own black family in the age of mass incarceration

If you think you feel pressured to watch all of the good TV out there, imagine having to watch for a living. It’s impossible to keep up — and here I will confess to having skipped the ratings juggernaut “The Walking Dead.” I can’t stomach zombies; I made it through about four episodes before I gave up. It wasn’t until I saw the movie “Requiem for a Dream” that I realized why. Now I know there are two types of characters on-screen I can’t watch—zombies and drug addicts. The terrifying, dark eyes, the sagging limbs—to me, they look precisely the same. They look like my mother. Or, I should say, they look like how I imagine my birth mother looked. Unlike my older siblings, I don’t have a strong recollection of our mother before she turned us over to the state of Massachusetts. And up until this point, I’ve never understood her, or the very large Houston family who looked on silently while she gave up six children, all under the age of 10. The only reason I can even begin to understand what happened to us now is because of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent article for the Atlantic, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Before that, an article about a possible end to the war on drugs and “The Wire’s" David Simon’s concerns about decriminalization already had me rethinking my biological family. My adoption at the age of 7 had, among other things, granted me the privilege of not having to consider certain things about the world I came from — I’d dodged that bullet. But today, the hypothetical question of whether my life and the lives of my five siblings would have been different in a society that treated drug users differently seems relevant. Coates argues that imagining such a world demands that we go far beyond the question of decriminalization. Legalizing marijuana is fine and good, but in no way does it acknowledge the centuries of work that went into the mass incarceration of black families and the systematic destruction of families like mine. One of the biggest takeaways from “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” is that it is no accident that the black family has, in many respects, been destroyed. Slavery may have been abolished in 1865, but various forms of unfreedom—the most successful version being mass incarceration—exist and operate today. Coates uses the narratives of individuals like Tonya (a woman who became an addict after years of abuse from her biological family and foster parents), and families like Patricia Lowe’s to show how mass incarceration is both a political and personal attack against the black family—a direct descendant of slavery and Patrick Moynihan’s 1950 report “The Negro Family.” What that means for many people like me is that there is now a piece of writing that functions as the beginning of an answer to a question all kids who have been in the system have asked: “Why did my family abandon me?” Coates offers up some statistics that help illuminate things: “From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000.” These numbers refer to people like my biological mother’s father, who was in and out of prison countless times during this time. “From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again,” he writes. During these years, at least one of her older brothers was incarcerated, too. My mother would go on to serve her own time as well. For me, these statistics offer up a helpful framing for the world that was in place in 1988 when Crystal Houston called the Department of Social Services in Boston and asked them to come pick up her six children.

***

If you ask my mother why she turned her six children over to the State, she will never speak of her struggles with drugs, and she will certainly make no mention of her being a victim of a system meant to criminalize black women like her and black men like those in her family, and those with whom she chose to create families. She will tell you one true story, and she will tell it over and over again, with the occasional variation in detail. When she was 23 and pregnant with her twins, her mother went missing for a couple of days. My grandmother had recently divorced her husband, my mother’s stepfather, and remarried. My mother grew worried and, along with her siblings, went looking for her mother. She visited the shoe store owned by her stepfather and mother. Upon finding him there, she asked if he knew where her mother was. She’ll tell you she saw something in his eyes, and in a panic, began searching through the store, and went into the back where she stumbled upon her mother’s corpse. The woman who’d always been there for her, the woman who never made her feel judged or like less of a person, the one who was helping her raise her children, had been stabbed to death in what a judge would later rule was a crime of passion. This is why she couldn’t raise her kids, she’ll tell you. She won’t tell you that she’d already developed a drug habit. She won’t tell you that her oldest daughter (still well under the age of 10) had already grown accustomed to being left alone for long stretches of time—sometimes days—with her younger brothers and her baby sister. She’ll just tell you that finding her mother’s body, while pregnant with the twins, was too much for her to bear. “I knew I was going someplace dark after that, and I couldn’t take you all there with me,” she once told me—the only allusion to her addiction I’ve ever been able to decipher in our conversations, which are few and far between. The words of Margaret Garner, the enslaved woman who became the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” are the first words Coates uses to begin his historical narrative: “Never marry again in slavery.” Garner was a mother who also had no desire to take her children where she was going. And while the connection between these two women might seem loose, I can’t help but marvel at how their boldest and most terrifying personal choices were rooted in political doctrine against the survival of the black family. My mother may not have been fully aware of it, but in the ‘80s, she was living in an era of unfreedom as well. That she was going to further shackle her wrists and ankles together with crack cocaine and heroin was, for her, all the more reason to find a different space for her children. Like Garner, she wanted a better life for those innocent bodies she’d brought into circumstances that would surely hinder them. Unlike Garner, she didn’t attempt to kill us. She probably thought that she was saving us — and in some way, I know she did. But the system, as Coates explains, isn’t designed to save individual members of the black family, no matter how well-meaning one’s parents might be. My two oldest brothers were separated from my sister and me, and put into a foster home. The twins went to live with their father and his family. My sister and I were separated after just one year together, when our foster parents believed she was showing signs of difficulty. Neither of us remember it this way (I have memories of her pinching the hell out of me, like big sisters have been doing to little sisters the world over, since the beginning of time), but if she showed any signs of anger or difficulty, it was certainly easier to move her into an institution than to get her help, so that’s what they did. When my brothers became too old or too difficult (or too much like preteens, or too black—whatever they were guilty of), they were also separated and sent to various group homes. It is a well-known fact that these places are, for many young black boys, a fast-track to jail and prison. After turning 18, the boys and my sister were all released from the State. All of them, including the twins, at some point or another, found their way back to our birth mother. Both of my older brothers and at least one of the younger   have served time, a fact that comes to mind when I read sociologist Devah Pager’s quote in Coates’ piece: “Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s most marginalized groups... Rather it has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood.” My oldest brother is inside right now. He’s been selling drugs for many years, and was recently caught with a large amount of heroin. My sister told me a story I still cannot believe—that he once sold to our mother. It’s probably true. If it is, Coates tells us, then this is also proof that the system is working just fine. Indeed, it may be an indictment of my brother’s character, but it’s also proof that some black men might become so destroyed by a system that set out to do just that, that they’d sell drugs to their own mothers. But this knowledge of a political system at work — at work when the men are in prison, and still at work when they are released — does not take away from the fact that this is personal. This is my family, my blood.

***

What’s strange about having been adopted by a historian is that even the intelligent, politically and socially aware mother who raised me would get angry with my biological family. Before she passed away when I was 15, every once in a while she’d go on a mini-rant about how she couldn’t comprehend an entire family letting four kids get swallowed up by the system. When I was 13, I met my biological father at my sister’s birthday party in Boston. My mother was furious that this had happened without her permission. How dare these people try to come back into your life after all these years (and, subtext: after all her hard work earning my trust and love). She was the smartest woman I knew, but looking back it seemed that even she couldn’t see how my blood family was not really flawed, but was instead a shining example that the American system was working. How could a whole group of children be lost to a system? Easily. Throw in a handful of incarcerated black men, a birth mother with better access to drugs than grief counseling, and a father who hadn’t even been made aware of my existence until I was already adopted (and who had his own struggles with drug abuse), and you have the Houston family—the product of a finely tuned environment. There are personal explanations for how my birth mother became a 23-year-old living in Brockton’s Southfield Gardens housing projects with four young children and a set of twins on the way, but there are political explanations as well. As the child of an impoverished black family in the ‘80s, according to the political forces outlined by Coates, that is precisely what she was meant to become. In the same way, she was also meant to become an addict, one who would go on to prostitute herself for money to support her addiction, and would then be arrested on such charges. She was born into—then brought lives into—a system designed to foster this. In taking on the prison system, Coates’ work shows us a world where laws, since the drafting of the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Clause, were literally made to break us; drug wars were declared and funded by government administrations who, either openly or behind closed doors, declared their hope for the end of the black family or, as President Nixon did, an end to those “criminal elements which increasingly threaten our cities, our homes, and our lives.” My mother may have grown up in the projects and may have become accustomed to her loved ones—those so-called “criminal elements”—going in and out of jail and prison, but she also grew up in a two-parent home, headed by her mother and stepfather. The parents who raised her were, to my knowledge, loving and fairly stable business owners. Although my mother was young and clearly troubled, she had a lot of help from my grandmother, a devout Catholic who did not believe in abortion, and would not permit my mother to have any, while raising her children during those first few years. My mother was loved, but because she still existed in an environment geared more toward her failure than her success, that love wasn’t enough. Perhaps she sought to fill those holes created by her biological father’s constant incarceration with the father of my oldest sister, and then again in the father of my oldest two brothers. And did the same, again, with my father, and again with the father of my younger brothers. For years I saw her as ignorant, disgusting, irresponsible and weak for deciding to have so many lovers and so many children—decisions I saw as the beginning of the end of a chance for my siblings and me to have a “normal” family life. But Coates tells me, as no one else ever has, that these choices were not merely in the hands of my mother. These decisions were part of a greater design.

***

Twenty-seven years since we lost our first family, my two older brothers, my sister and I have all gone on to create our own families in this age of mass incarceration. It’s telling that not one of us has created a nuclear family consisting of a father (husband), mother (wife) and child(ren). While some of my siblings have attended college, I’m the only one to have graduated. We’ve all been on public assistance at one point in time, and I believe we — unsurprisingly — all suffer emotionally from the abandonment of our birth mother. Speaking for myself I can say that, because of my experiences, the word “family” has an effect on me similar to those “Walking Dead” zombies: My stomach turns and I try to tell myself, sometimes, that it isn’t a real thing. Family isn’t real. That even as a mother myself, I don’t always see the value of the family unit because of my overwhelming disappointment in my first black family, is proof that a system designed to dismantle the concept of the Black Family—which has been deemed, in many ways, worthless—has been highly effective. That I had to fact-check many of the details in this piece with my older sister, the only blood relative with whom I have had fairly consistent contact, is also proof that this system has been highly effective—but isn’t infallible. In spite of it all, we laugh as much as we cry about what happened to us, partly because there are some pretty hilarious memories too (like how my foster parents let me wallpaper my room with NKOTB posters, or how—true story—this one prostitute who knew our mother got her nipple bitten off in a fight). But our relationship also highlights the fact that, even when I’ve had access, I’ve cowered from contact with my biological family. On one hand, it’s a defense mechanism and survival tool. But this personal fear is also political—a symptom of the rhetoric of white supremacists like Hinton Rowan Helper, who helped create the myth that gets its very own chapter in Coates’ work: I too came to believe that there was a “crime-stained blackness” inherent in my family. Whether I wrote them off as “ghetto,” or “hood” or “ignorant,” I did so with the faulty assumption that they chose their quality of life—they chose, in some way, to remain in poverty, addicted to drugs and/or incarcerated. That I held on to these beliefs tightly, and that it took the work of a scholar to loosen that grip, is further proof that white supremacy is a hell of a drug, and not one of us is immune. When I think about what the State did with us, I think of that quote from Belgian King Leopold II at the 1876 Geographical Conference on Central Africa: “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.” We, my siblings and I, were our own little continent, divvied up for the taking, though not worth near as much as that magnificent African cake proved to be. It reminds me that even when there is public, historical record of a body of land or a body of people being sliced into pieces, the world can go on as if it never happened, and those in power—those Clintons, those Bushes—can continue to reign as if they never played a hand in the damage done. Coates’ piece ends with a return to his call for reparations—repair for the damages done. Like him, I can’t help but ask who will pay for the damages done to the families highlighted in his piece? The Tonyas, the Lowes, the Newtons? And who will pay for what happened to the Houstons, the Davises, the Wrights—the four of us who went through DSS? The youngest two may have evaded one system by going to live with their paternal family, but how much better was it, in the end? Unfortunately, I wouldn’t really know — I haven’t met my younger brothers yet. Most likely no one, much less the American government, will ever pay. But the political acknowledgement of this failed system is not enough. An admission that the war on drugs and the war on crime failed is not enough. And yet, I fear that it’s the most I’ll see in this lifetime. While the American government may never do its part, I will do mine. I’ll no longer place the entire blame of the early childhoods my siblings and I lost, and the ongoing, unfolding results of that loss, on the family that never came to save us. That they were addicts, or grief-stricken, or incarcerated, or traumatized by the loss of their own family members to incarceration or drugs, or depressed and distracted by the realities of their own surroundings means that they were, like countless others, too busy trying to save themselves. And although they are not absolved of all wrongdoing and all mistakes, my broken black family deserves my understanding — and forgiveness, too, though I haven’t completely reached that, yet. In addition to providing us with a sharp historical, social and political perspective on the era of mass incarceration, Ta-Nehisi Coates gave me a necessary insight to the judgments I cast against a family that America had decided was never meant to survive or thrive. And even as I am eternally grateful for a second family and for second chances, and for the family I’ve started myself, the untold stories of my first family continue to haunt me. It’s not just my blood, but the potential of a people who might have flourished in a system designed for them to do so, that I will not stop mourning.If you think you feel pressured to watch all of the good TV out there, imagine having to watch for a living. It’s impossible to keep up — and here I will confess to having skipped the ratings juggernaut “The Walking Dead.” I can’t stomach zombies; I made it through about four episodes before I gave up. It wasn’t until I saw the movie “Requiem for a Dream” that I realized why. Now I know there are two types of characters on-screen I can’t watch—zombies and drug addicts. The terrifying, dark eyes, the sagging limbs—to me, they look precisely the same. They look like my mother. Or, I should say, they look like how I imagine my birth mother looked. Unlike my older siblings, I don’t have a strong recollection of our mother before she turned us over to the state of Massachusetts. And up until this point, I’ve never understood her, or the very large Houston family who looked on silently while she gave up six children, all under the age of 10. The only reason I can even begin to understand what happened to us now is because of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent article for the Atlantic, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Before that, an article about a possible end to the war on drugs and “The Wire’s" David Simon’s concerns about decriminalization already had me rethinking my biological family. My adoption at the age of 7 had, among other things, granted me the privilege of not having to consider certain things about the world I came from — I’d dodged that bullet. But today, the hypothetical question of whether my life and the lives of my five siblings would have been different in a society that treated drug users differently seems relevant. Coates argues that imagining such a world demands that we go far beyond the question of decriminalization. Legalizing marijuana is fine and good, but in no way does it acknowledge the centuries of work that went into the mass incarceration of black families and the systematic destruction of families like mine. One of the biggest takeaways from “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” is that it is no accident that the black family has, in many respects, been destroyed. Slavery may have been abolished in 1865, but various forms of unfreedom—the most successful version being mass incarceration—exist and operate today. Coates uses the narratives of individuals like Tonya (a woman who became an addict after years of abuse from her biological family and foster parents), and families like Patricia Lowe’s to show how mass incarceration is both a political and personal attack against the black family—a direct descendant of slavery and Patrick Moynihan’s 1950 report “The Negro Family.” What that means for many people like me is that there is now a piece of writing that functions as the beginning of an answer to a question all kids who have been in the system have asked: “Why did my family abandon me?” Coates offers up some statistics that help illuminate things: “From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000.” These numbers refer to people like my biological mother’s father, who was in and out of prison countless times during this time. “From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again,” he writes. During these years, at least one of her older brothers was incarcerated, too. My mother would go on to serve her own time as well. For me, these statistics offer up a helpful framing for the world that was in place in 1988 when Crystal Houston called the Department of Social Services in Boston and asked them to come pick up her six children.

***

If you ask my mother why she turned her six children over to the State, she will never speak of her struggles with drugs, and she will certainly make no mention of her being a victim of a system meant to criminalize black women like her and black men like those in her family, and those with whom she chose to create families. She will tell you one true story, and she will tell it over and over again, with the occasional variation in detail. When she was 23 and pregnant with her twins, her mother went missing for a couple of days. My grandmother had recently divorced her husband, my mother’s stepfather, and remarried. My mother grew worried and, along with her siblings, went looking for her mother. She visited the shoe store owned by her stepfather and mother. Upon finding him there, she asked if he knew where her mother was. She’ll tell you she saw something in his eyes, and in a panic, began searching through the store, and went into the back where she stumbled upon her mother’s corpse. The woman who’d always been there for her, the woman who never made her feel judged or like less of a person, the one who was helping her raise her children, had been stabbed to death in what a judge would later rule was a crime of passion. This is why she couldn’t raise her kids, she’ll tell you. She won’t tell you that she’d already developed a drug habit. She won’t tell you that her oldest daughter (still well under the age of 10) had already grown accustomed to being left alone for long stretches of time—sometimes days—with her younger brothers and her baby sister. She’ll just tell you that finding her mother’s body, while pregnant with the twins, was too much for her to bear. “I knew I was going someplace dark after that, and I couldn’t take you all there with me,” she once told me—the only allusion to her addiction I’ve ever been able to decipher in our conversations, which are few and far between. The words of Margaret Garner, the enslaved woman who became the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” are the first words Coates uses to begin his historical narrative: “Never marry again in slavery.” Garner was a mother who also had no desire to take her children where she was going. And while the connection between these two women might seem loose, I can’t help but marvel at how their boldest and most terrifying personal choices were rooted in political doctrine against the survival of the black family. My mother may not have been fully aware of it, but in the ‘80s, she was living in an era of unfreedom as well. That she was going to further shackle her wrists and ankles together with crack cocaine and heroin was, for her, all the more reason to find a different space for her children. Like Garner, she wanted a better life for those innocent bodies she’d brought into circumstances that would surely hinder them. Unlike Garner, she didn’t attempt to kill us. She probably thought that she was saving us — and in some way, I know she did. But the system, as Coates explains, isn’t designed to save individual members of the black family, no matter how well-meaning one’s parents might be. My two oldest brothers were separated from my sister and me, and put into a foster home. The twins went to live with their father and his family. My sister and I were separated after just one year together, when our foster parents believed she was showing signs of difficulty. Neither of us remember it this way (I have memories of her pinching the hell out of me, like big sisters have been doing to little sisters the world over, since the beginning of time), but if she showed any signs of anger or difficulty, it was certainly easier to move her into an institution than to get her help, so that’s what they did. When my brothers became too old or too difficult (or too much like preteens, or too black—whatever they were guilty of), they were also separated and sent to various group homes. It is a well-known fact that these places are, for many young black boys, a fast-track to jail and prison. After turning 18, the boys and my sister were all released from the State. All of them, including the twins, at some point or another, found their way back to our birth mother. Both of my older brothers and at least one of the younger   have served time, a fact that comes to mind when I read sociologist Devah Pager’s quote in Coates’ piece: “Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s most marginalized groups... Rather it has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood.” My oldest brother is inside right now. He’s been selling drugs for many years, and was recently caught with a large amount of heroin. My sister told me a story I still cannot believe—that he once sold to our mother. It’s probably true. If it is, Coates tells us, then this is also proof that the system is working just fine. Indeed, it may be an indictment of my brother’s character, but it’s also proof that some black men might become so destroyed by a system that set out to do just that, that they’d sell drugs to their own mothers. But this knowledge of a political system at work — at work when the men are in prison, and still at work when they are released — does not take away from the fact that this is personal. This is my family, my blood.

***

What’s strange about having been adopted by a historian is that even the intelligent, politically and socially aware mother who raised me would get angry with my biological family. Before she passed away when I was 15, every once in a while she’d go on a mini-rant about how she couldn’t comprehend an entire family letting four kids get swallowed up by the system. When I was 13, I met my biological father at my sister’s birthday party in Boston. My mother was furious that this had happened without her permission. How dare these people try to come back into your life after all these years (and, subtext: after all her hard work earning my trust and love). She was the smartest woman I knew, but looking back it seemed that even she couldn’t see how my blood family was not really flawed, but was instead a shining example that the American system was working. How could a whole group of children be lost to a system? Easily. Throw in a handful of incarcerated black men, a birth mother with better access to drugs than grief counseling, and a father who hadn’t even been made aware of my existence until I was already adopted (and who had his own struggles with drug abuse), and you have the Houston family—the product of a finely tuned environment. There are personal explanations for how my birth mother became a 23-year-old living in Brockton’s Southfield Gardens housing projects with four young children and a set of twins on the way, but there are political explanations as well. As the child of an impoverished black family in the ‘80s, according to the political forces outlined by Coates, that is precisely what she was meant to become. In the same way, she was also meant to become an addict, one who would go on to prostitute herself for money to support her addiction, and would then be arrested on such charges. She was born into—then brought lives into—a system designed to foster this. In taking on the prison system, Coates’ work shows us a world where laws, since the drafting of the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Clause, were literally made to break us; drug wars were declared and funded by government administrations who, either openly or behind closed doors, declared their hope for the end of the black family or, as President Nixon did, an end to those “criminal elements which increasingly threaten our cities, our homes, and our lives.” My mother may have grown up in the projects and may have become accustomed to her loved ones—those so-called “criminal elements”—going in and out of jail and prison, but she also grew up in a two-parent home, headed by her mother and stepfather. The parents who raised her were, to my knowledge, loving and fairly stable business owners. Although my mother was young and clearly troubled, she had a lot of help from my grandmother, a devout Catholic who did not believe in abortion, and would not permit my mother to have any, while raising her children during those first few years. My mother was loved, but because she still existed in an environment geared more toward her failure than her success, that love wasn’t enough. Perhaps she sought to fill those holes created by her biological father’s constant incarceration with the father of my oldest sister, and then again in the father of my oldest two brothers. And did the same, again, with my father, and again with the father of my younger brothers. For years I saw her as ignorant, disgusting, irresponsible and weak for deciding to have so many lovers and so many children—decisions I saw as the beginning of the end of a chance for my siblings and me to have a “normal” family life. But Coates tells me, as no one else ever has, that these choices were not merely in the hands of my mother. These decisions were part of a greater design.

***

Twenty-seven years since we lost our first family, my two older brothers, my sister and I have all gone on to create our own families in this age of mass incarceration. It’s telling that not one of us has created a nuclear family consisting of a father (husband), mother (wife) and child(ren). While some of my siblings have attended college, I’m the only one to have graduated. We’ve all been on public assistance at one point in time, and I believe we — unsurprisingly — all suffer emotionally from the abandonment of our birth mother. Speaking for myself I can say that, because of my experiences, the word “family” has an effect on me similar to those “Walking Dead” zombies: My stomach turns and I try to tell myself, sometimes, that it isn’t a real thing. Family isn’t real. That even as a mother myself, I don’t always see the value of the family unit because of my overwhelming disappointment in my first black family, is proof that a system designed to dismantle the concept of the Black Family—which has been deemed, in many ways, worthless—has been highly effective. That I had to fact-check many of the details in this piece with my older sister, the only blood relative with whom I have had fairly consistent contact, is also proof that this system has been highly effective—but isn’t infallible. In spite of it all, we laugh as much as we cry about what happened to us, partly because there are some pretty hilarious memories too (like how my foster parents let me wallpaper my room with NKOTB posters, or how—true story—this one prostitute who knew our mother got her nipple bitten off in a fight). But our relationship also highlights the fact that, even when I’ve had access, I’ve cowered from contact with my biological family. On one hand, it’s a defense mechanism and survival tool. But this personal fear is also political—a symptom of the rhetoric of white supremacists like Hinton Rowan Helper, who helped create the myth that gets its very own chapter in Coates’ work: I too came to believe that there was a “crime-stained blackness” inherent in my family. Whether I wrote them off as “ghetto,” or “hood” or “ignorant,” I did so with the faulty assumption that they chose their quality of life—they chose, in some way, to remain in poverty, addicted to drugs and/or incarcerated. That I held on to these beliefs tightly, and that it took the work of a scholar to loosen that grip, is further proof that white supremacy is a hell of a drug, and not one of us is immune. When I think about what the State did with us, I think of that quote from Belgian King Leopold II at the 1876 Geographical Conference on Central Africa: “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.” We, my siblings and I, were our own little continent, divvied up for the taking, though not worth near as much as that magnificent African cake proved to be. It reminds me that even when there is public, historical record of a body of land or a body of people being sliced into pieces, the world can go on as if it never happened, and those in power—those Clintons, those Bushes—can continue to reign as if they never played a hand in the damage done. Coates’ piece ends with a return to his call for reparations—repair for the damages done. Like him, I can’t help but ask who will pay for the damages done to the families highlighted in his piece? The Tonyas, the Lowes, the Newtons? And who will pay for what happened to the Houstons, the Davises, the Wrights—the four of us who went through DSS? The youngest two may have evaded one system by going to live with their paternal family, but how much better was it, in the end? Unfortunately, I wouldn’t really know — I haven’t met my younger brothers yet. Most likely no one, much less the American government, will ever pay. But the political acknowledgement of this failed system is not enough. An admission that the war on drugs and the war on crime failed is not enough. And yet, I fear that it’s the most I’ll see in this lifetime. While the American government may never do its part, I will do mine. I’ll no longer place the entire blame of the early childhoods my siblings and I lost, and the ongoing, unfolding results of that loss, on the family that never came to save us. That they were addicts, or grief-stricken, or incarcerated, or traumatized by the loss of their own family members to incarceration or drugs, or depressed and distracted by the realities of their own surroundings means that they were, like countless others, too busy trying to save themselves. And although they are not absolved of all wrongdoing and all mistakes, my broken black family deserves my understanding — and forgiveness, too, though I haven’t completely reached that, yet. In addition to providing us with a sharp historical, social and political perspective on the era of mass incarceration, Ta-Nehisi Coates gave me a necessary insight to the judgments I cast against a family that America had decided was never meant to survive or thrive. And even as I am eternally grateful for a second family and for second chances, and for the family I’ve started myself, the untold stories of my first family continue to haunt me. It’s not just my blood, but the potential of a people who might have flourished in a system designed for them to do so, that I will not stop mourning.

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Mary Karr on the “loser, outsider weirdos” of memoir and skipping the David Foster Wallace movie: “The whole St. David thing … it’s a little hard to take”

Twenty years ago, Mary Karr helped kick off the memoir boom with her book “The Liar’s Club,” which described growing up in a small East Texas town with a charming, mendacious father and deeply pious, hard-drinking family. (“They're Liars, and That's Just the Least of Their Problems” ran the headline of the New York Times review.) She’s written about her early years, her drinking, a divorce, and her recovery and Catholicism in two other memoirs, “Cherry” and “Lit.” A professor at Syracuse University’s prestigious writing program, Karr has just released “The Art of Memoir,” which is somewhere between a writing instruction book and a defense of the popular but sometimes controversial genre. Cheryl Strayed, whom Karr knew during the “Wild” author’s time at Syracuse, calls the book “astonishingly perceptive, wildly entertaining, and profoundly honest.” (Karr did teach Koren Zailckas, author of "Smashed: Story of Drunken Girlhood.") At the very least, Karr has managed to make a tome about a prose form as ornery as her books about sex, drink and sorrow. We spoke with Karr in San Francisco, where she was touring behind the book. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Do you think there’s still a bias against the memoir, for being not as serious or substantial as the novel? I do! Absolutely! When I was in grad school, I think I mentioned Geoffrey Wolff described it as like engraving the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice: It’s just a province of loser, outsider weirdos. As though novels aren’t. But yeah… There’s no danger of the American Academy calling me up to induct me. I’m seen as this low, trashy kind of creature, which is probably not that far from wrong. But certainly the readership for it has ratcheted up, which is a great thing. Why do you think it’s considered a less serious form? I don’t think there are any more bad memoirs than there are bad novels: Most novels are bad and most memoirs are bad and most poems are bad and most movies are bad… I just think genres rise and fall: When the novel began, [authors] were seen as morally reprehensible because it was made up. And [because they didn’t have] any interest in truth. Obviously you can tell great truths in a novel or you can lie in a novel. It’s like photography, which was seen as not an art until the latter half of the last century. That began to change. But [memoir] is filling a need of dealing with the real. As novels have gotten less real, our readership has grown. These days, we associate the memoir with pain or trauma or difficult childhood -- Isn’t that what all art is about? Isn’t all art about drama? I think there’s something about it being personal… A novel is seen as grander… Or that you could write a novel and your character and your values would not be on display, as they are in a memoir. Or that reality doesn’t inform a novel. As I’ve said, the best parts of David Foster Wallace’s fiction are nonfiction. Is a memoir a substitute for therapy? Does writing one help or help with the wound that sometime motivates it? I had a therapist ask me last night… I think therapy should be a requisite for everybody anyway. I had such a difficult childhood, I don’t know what a normal person, occupying a normal body, would feel like. For me, I had to be in therapy for 15 years before I could even start trying to write the story. In therapy, you pay them; in a memoir, hopefully, they pay you. I think it is true that writing a memoir is cathartic. But unless it’s cathartic for the reader, don’t publish it… It’s a bomb that doesn’t go off until the reader starts reading it. The other debate around the memoir is the role of reality and truth – how far is too far for embellishing details. How do you come down on this? You and other writers have been criticized for how you call it. I actually haven’t been criticized -- I’m talking about the Janet Maslin review. She made a mistake. I wrote her an email and said, You misread this. There’s a big difference between accidentally misremembering a small detail, and making up an event that didn’t happen. And if you’re doing something to trick or deceive people, you know when you’re doing that: It isn’t hard to figure out. Greg Mortenson [author of “Three Cups of Tea” and “Stones Into Schools”] didn’t misremember and think he’d been kidnapped by the Taliban: That wasn’t a mistake of memory. The truth is, the minute you begin to shape a narrative – to tell one story instead of another story – you’re shaping people’s opinions. That’s why I say memoir is not about external fact; it’s internal, psychological, flawed-by-your-experience. And that’s why I think voice is so important. One reason I stopped using quotes in “Cherry” and “Lit” is I didn’t want it to read like journalism. I didn’t want it to read like objective reportage. The mistakes that I make are mistakes of interpretation… Elie Wiesel in “Night” – there’s a terrible scene. His father is horribly sick and dying, and he’s calling out his name. And the SS guy comes in and essentially beats the old man to death for making noise. And Wiesel never responded to it. He said, “His last words had been my name, and I never answered.” But when I looked in subsequent versions of the book, I couldn’t find it, because he had cut it out. He said it was quote-unquote too personal. But he didn’t cut it out because it was too personal, he cut it out because he was ashamed. So I think the bigger problems we face as memoirist is being scrupulous with our own conscience. It’s one reason I say, unless you’re a worrier and a nail-biter, you just shouldn’t be writing one of these. It’s too easy to deceive yourself. So Maslin’s not wrong… But there’s a difference between inadvertent mistakes and making things up. I don’t advocate making things up! If you make things up, you deny yourself the truths that come from being really uncomfortable. Here’s a great writer who never wrote a memoir: David Foster Wallace. He’s become a hero or a martyr or something since his death. You knew him: Have you been surprised how he’s become a pop-culture figure? He’s a great genius and people love the work and it’s a terrible tragedy to lose a writer of that caliber. The whole St. David thing, to people who knew him (laughs)… it’s a little hard to take. David was a very troubled guy for most of his life, obviously. He flatlined before he was 21 years old. He was trying to kill himself; I had suicidal ideation, or I was depressed, I never had what he had. I think it’s a horrible, tragic story. Do people misremember him now? People who didn’t know him misremember him. People talk about how obsequiously polite he was. Like when I met him he called me “Miss Karr.” But it [was] kind of mocking almost, if you knew him. It was so insincere and Eddie Haskell. It was kind of a really… That’s not what he was like. He was snarky and snappish and difficult, you know… He was not that damn careful. The whole St. David thing, I don’t know. I loved him, it was a great tragedy, but the people who knew him well… He was not long-suffering; he was a pretty angry guy. At least, when I knew him. I believed he had gotten better. I believed his rap, what he told me. Obviously that was not true. Did you see the movie? No. As I understand it – I haven’t seen it – the family is dimly horrified. I don’t want to see it. Why don’t we close with you picking a memoir you admire, from any historical period, and describing what makes you like it so much? I think Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”… “Native Son” is a great novel, but for me as a reader, I think “Black Boy” is an even more artful book. And in some ways, he was the first semi-civilian to have this massive bestseller in the genre. It’s very hard to write with both tenderness and bitterness, and his ability to combine both those things… and to do it in a beautiful literary style, at times lyrical and poetic… And it’s never really mentioned. But I think it’s a great book.Twenty years ago, Mary Karr helped kick off the memoir boom with her book “The Liar’s Club,” which described growing up in a small East Texas town with a charming, mendacious father and deeply pious, hard-drinking family. (“They're Liars, and That's Just the Least of Their Problems” ran the headline of the New York Times review.) She’s written about her early years, her drinking, a divorce, and her recovery and Catholicism in two other memoirs, “Cherry” and “Lit.” A professor at Syracuse University’s prestigious writing program, Karr has just released “The Art of Memoir,” which is somewhere between a writing instruction book and a defense of the popular but sometimes controversial genre. Cheryl Strayed, whom Karr knew during the “Wild” author’s time at Syracuse, calls the book “astonishingly perceptive, wildly entertaining, and profoundly honest.” (Karr did teach Koren Zailckas, author of "Smashed: Story of Drunken Girlhood.") At the very least, Karr has managed to make a tome about a prose form as ornery as her books about sex, drink and sorrow. We spoke with Karr in San Francisco, where she was touring behind the book. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Do you think there’s still a bias against the memoir, for being not as serious or substantial as the novel? I do! Absolutely! When I was in grad school, I think I mentioned Geoffrey Wolff described it as like engraving the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice: It’s just a province of loser, outsider weirdos. As though novels aren’t. But yeah… There’s no danger of the American Academy calling me up to induct me. I’m seen as this low, trashy kind of creature, which is probably not that far from wrong. But certainly the readership for it has ratcheted up, which is a great thing. Why do you think it’s considered a less serious form? I don’t think there are any more bad memoirs than there are bad novels: Most novels are bad and most memoirs are bad and most poems are bad and most movies are bad… I just think genres rise and fall: When the novel began, [authors] were seen as morally reprehensible because it was made up. And [because they didn’t have] any interest in truth. Obviously you can tell great truths in a novel or you can lie in a novel. It’s like photography, which was seen as not an art until the latter half of the last century. That began to change. But [memoir] is filling a need of dealing with the real. As novels have gotten less real, our readership has grown. These days, we associate the memoir with pain or trauma or difficult childhood -- Isn’t that what all art is about? Isn’t all art about drama? I think there’s something about it being personal… A novel is seen as grander… Or that you could write a novel and your character and your values would not be on display, as they are in a memoir. Or that reality doesn’t inform a novel. As I’ve said, the best parts of David Foster Wallace’s fiction are nonfiction. Is a memoir a substitute for therapy? Does writing one help or help with the wound that sometime motivates it? I had a therapist ask me last night… I think therapy should be a requisite for everybody anyway. I had such a difficult childhood, I don’t know what a normal person, occupying a normal body, would feel like. For me, I had to be in therapy for 15 years before I could even start trying to write the story. In therapy, you pay them; in a memoir, hopefully, they pay you. I think it is true that writing a memoir is cathartic. But unless it’s cathartic for the reader, don’t publish it… It’s a bomb that doesn’t go off until the reader starts reading it. The other debate around the memoir is the role of reality and truth – how far is too far for embellishing details. How do you come down on this? You and other writers have been criticized for how you call it. I actually haven’t been criticized -- I’m talking about the Janet Maslin review. She made a mistake. I wrote her an email and said, You misread this. There’s a big difference between accidentally misremembering a small detail, and making up an event that didn’t happen. And if you’re doing something to trick or deceive people, you know when you’re doing that: It isn’t hard to figure out. Greg Mortenson [author of “Three Cups of Tea” and “Stones Into Schools”] didn’t misremember and think he’d been kidnapped by the Taliban: That wasn’t a mistake of memory. The truth is, the minute you begin to shape a narrative – to tell one story instead of another story – you’re shaping people’s opinions. That’s why I say memoir is not about external fact; it’s internal, psychological, flawed-by-your-experience. And that’s why I think voice is so important. One reason I stopped using quotes in “Cherry” and “Lit” is I didn’t want it to read like journalism. I didn’t want it to read like objective reportage. The mistakes that I make are mistakes of interpretation… Elie Wiesel in “Night” – there’s a terrible scene. His father is horribly sick and dying, and he’s calling out his name. And the SS guy comes in and essentially beats the old man to death for making noise. And Wiesel never responded to it. He said, “His last words had been my name, and I never answered.” But when I looked in subsequent versions of the book, I couldn’t find it, because he had cut it out. He said it was quote-unquote too personal. But he didn’t cut it out because it was too personal, he cut it out because he was ashamed. So I think the bigger problems we face as memoirist is being scrupulous with our own conscience. It’s one reason I say, unless you’re a worrier and a nail-biter, you just shouldn’t be writing one of these. It’s too easy to deceive yourself. So Maslin’s not wrong… But there’s a difference between inadvertent mistakes and making things up. I don’t advocate making things up! If you make things up, you deny yourself the truths that come from being really uncomfortable. Here’s a great writer who never wrote a memoir: David Foster Wallace. He’s become a hero or a martyr or something since his death. You knew him: Have you been surprised how he’s become a pop-culture figure? He’s a great genius and people love the work and it’s a terrible tragedy to lose a writer of that caliber. The whole St. David thing, to people who knew him (laughs)… it’s a little hard to take. David was a very troubled guy for most of his life, obviously. He flatlined before he was 21 years old. He was trying to kill himself; I had suicidal ideation, or I was depressed, I never had what he had. I think it’s a horrible, tragic story. Do people misremember him now? People who didn’t know him misremember him. People talk about how obsequiously polite he was. Like when I met him he called me “Miss Karr.” But it [was] kind of mocking almost, if you knew him. It was so insincere and Eddie Haskell. It was kind of a really… That’s not what he was like. He was snarky and snappish and difficult, you know… He was not that damn careful. The whole St. David thing, I don’t know. I loved him, it was a great tragedy, but the people who knew him well… He was not long-suffering; he was a pretty angry guy. At least, when I knew him. I believed he had gotten better. I believed his rap, what he told me. Obviously that was not true. Did you see the movie? No. As I understand it – I haven’t seen it – the family is dimly horrified. I don’t want to see it. Why don’t we close with you picking a memoir you admire, from any historical period, and describing what makes you like it so much? I think Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”… “Native Son” is a great novel, but for me as a reader, I think “Black Boy” is an even more artful book. And in some ways, he was the first semi-civilian to have this massive bestseller in the genre. It’s very hard to write with both tenderness and bitterness, and his ability to combine both those things… and to do it in a beautiful literary style, at times lyrical and poetic… And it’s never really mentioned. But I think it’s a great book.

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