Leah Libresco's Blog, page 3
October 2, 2023
Piecing Together Our Broken Medical System
I loved reading Ilana Yurkiewicz’s Fragmented: A Doctor’s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care, and I’m glad to have gotten to write about it for National Review.
The range of treatments that doctors can offer has gotten more and more advanced. Robotic suturing tools allow surgeons to conduct delicate surgery through minimally invasive laparoscopic procedures. CAR T-cell immunotherapy can be precisely tuned for individual cancers, teaching patients’ immune systems to kill their tumors. But when it comes to medical record-keeping and continuity of care, many doctors like Yurkiewicz find they’re operating in an era of oral history or as archaeologists.
In her practice, Yurkiewicz reconstructs a patient’s medical history as though she were piecing together potsherds at a dig site. She asks other doctors to mail her CD-ROMs of medical images (and then borrows a disc drive to be able to view them). She pores over pages of blurry, out-of-order faxed records. And often, she turns to the patient as her co-investigator, asking questions such as, “What did the testing show? Was it a loud machine where you lie flat, or did someone use a probe coated with cold gel?”
September 22, 2023
“Father” Is Not a Part-Time Job
Can you unbundle fatherhood from marriage? That’s the topic that Richard Reeves and I are (politely) skirmishing over at Fairer Disputations. Reeves would like to see more support for and ideals of fatherhood where fathers live apart from their children and are not married to their mothers.
Men need to know what they can uniquely contribute to their family. The abiding presence of a father isn’t replaceable by their paycheck, their banked sperm, or their weekend visits. Men and women both are impeded in knowing themselves and the full potential of their relationship when fathers are treated as trivial.
Read the rest at Fairer Disputations
Reeves got to offer a rejoinder, which turns on this point:
Two out of five children are now born outside of marriage, and there’s little sign of that number dropping. Whether we like it or not, we have to find a way to reboot fatherhood for the world as it is, rather than the world as it was.
Read Reeves at Fairer Disputations
I hosted a follow-up discussion, bringing in Melissa Kearney’s Two Parent Privilege at Other Feminisms.
August 20, 2023
Why Government Can’t Talk to Citizens
Whose to blame when government services don’t work? I got to review an excellent book on the last mile of policy for Deseret.
Social studies students learn how a bill becomes a law, but Jennifer Pahlka would argue that you can’t stop the story at the president’s signature. The administrative infrastructure and vendor contracts that determine how a federal, state or local law is put into practice often act as an inadvertent, unconstitutional veto. Often, as the first people who tried to register for Obamacare discovered, the web developer has as much power as the congressional committee in determining what government does.
Pahlka is the founder of Code for America and the author of “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.” […] Her new book is a chronicle of the secret gridlock that can cripple even the most enthusiastically bipartisan policy. The government, culturally and legally, has a preference for contracting out the software that underpins our public policy. As Pahlka shows, this means our government often winds up serving its vendors, not its citizens.
July 29, 2023
The Narrowness of Barbie Feminism
I was rooting for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, but I was ultimately disappointed by the movie. I got to review it for The Dispatch.
Gloria comes off as the Betty Friedan of the film, giving voice to the problem without a name. She offers her lecture on the impossibility of being a woman to each brainwashed Barbie in turn, like an ideological inoculation, and her frustration and exhaustion call them all back to themselves.
The message resonated with Hari Nef, a transgender actress who plays Doctor Barbie. In an Instagram post promoting the film, Nef said that the experience of being a woman badly is the most universal experience of womanhood. Nef and a group of transgender friends call themselves “the dolls” because, as Nef explained, “underneath the word ‘doll’ is the shape of a woman who is not quite a woman—recognizable as such, but still a fake.”
I think the movie was muddled rather than just bad, so I made sure to highlight a more positive take on the film from Helen Andrews in a post for Other Feminisms.
June 22, 2023
Hiding from Need at the Border and in the Womb
When we face a need that asks a lot of us, it’s tempting to try to make the needy person invisible. At Deseret, I’m talking about how both parties try to avoid acknowledging the humanity and reality of the one in need—Democrats averting their eyes from the child in the womb, Republicans from the refugee at the border.
The man walking through the water and the baby he holds are more alike than different. Whether a refugee is walking through Mexico or a baby is cradled in a suitcase — or, before then, in her mother’s womb — someone is on the way. Someone whose name we may not yet know, someone whose particular personality is yet to be revealed to us. Someone we know primarily through their need — they cannot survive unless we open the door to them and make them welcome.
Within our own borders, politicians hide from another kind of abject need — not the baby in the suitcase, but the baby in the womb. On abortion, the parties’ rhetoric reverses. It’s the abortion-rights activists within the Democratic Party who describe a baby in the womb as a kind of parasite, a foreign invader with no just claim to shelter. It’s abortion opponents within the GOP who speak movingly about the dignity of the weak, but whose party fails to deliver substantial material support for refugees.
April 6, 2023
The Colleges Cheated First
At First Things, I’m writing about Chat-GPT and cheating in college. The core problem—students only have a reason to cheat if they think they have no need to learn.
The cheating began with university administrators, when they started to substitute a credentialing process for an actual commitment to the formation of a particular kind of student. It’s no surprise that college administrators have already been caught using ChatGPT themselves—after all, many university mission statements are bland enough to be algorithmically generated from a few bullet points and buzzwords. They don’t exist to animate the mission of the university but to fill up enough column inches on a website.
At Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, administrators were even caught turning to ChatGPT to write a condolence note to the student body in the wake of a mass shooting at another school. The administrators apologized, but upon examining the note, it’s easy to see why they turned to AI. The bland corporatese of “we must reflect on the impact of such an event and take steps to ensure that we are doing our best to create a safe and inclusive environment for all” is the work of a human trying to erase any trace of humanity.
March 7, 2023
Cramming Child Care into CHIPS
At Deseret, I make the case against the child care benefit in the fine print of CHIPS, which would make child care a work-administered benefit at some semiconductor plants.
Making child care a work-linked benefit means repeating all the problems of the employer-linked insurance and retirement plans, and adding a more serious problem. Child care and early education are a flashpoint for political conflict. How we educate our children is an expression of our values and our world view. When an employer designs an on-site child care program or contracts with an existing provider, it means the HR department has to make a ruling about how children should be cared for. Choosing an educational philosophy requires more trust than an employee can reasonably place in their employer.
The employer child care mandate isn’t in the bill because Congress was confident that your boss should weigh in on who takes care of your children. It’s a quiet acknowledgment, in the middle of the ostensibly ambitious CHIPS Act, that legislators do not believe America can build real support for parents.
January 20, 2023
Embracing Amateurism in the Face of AI
As Chat-GPT and other machine learning models make it easier to generate text and art, I wrote in praise of doing something yourself, even if you do it badly, in Deseret.
When you choose to be bad at something, you get to experience the joy of being an amateur in the classical sense.
Today, “amateur” tends to mean “someone who isn’t good enough at something to be paid for it,” but its root is in the Latin amare, which means “to love.” An amateur works on a skill because she loves something about how grappling with the problem changes her.
An amateur birdwatcher has a new sense of who his neighbors are, even if he still scares off most of the birds with his footfalls. An amateur artist scrutinizes the planes of a face until the familiar seems strange, even if the resulting drawing is likewise strange. An amateur martial artist can’t win a fight yet, but she’s discovered new ways her body can move.
January 5, 2023
Books I Hope to Read in 2023
2022 had the most babies and the fewest books read, both in total, and off of my “to read” list for the year. This was predictable.
I read 7/11 of my “to read” books, and 85 books/26k pages across the year. Nothing earlier than 1950, either, I think (though Goodreads gets this wrong if I read a recent translation of an ancient text sometimes).
I like to read outside my time, and happily, this year I’m guaranteed to, because I’ve signed up for a reading group through the Catherine Project where we’ll be discussing Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams (1904) and The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga (1919).
So, why keep assembling this list, if I expect I won’t get to all the books this year? Or at least, why not make the list shorter?
I like making this list because it’s always limited to books I already own, and putting them on the list gives me permission to prioritizing them. I don’t know how many I’ll read this year, but I know it will be more than if they weren’t officially on the list, and I look forward to what I’ll discover.
I’ve grouped the books for 2023 with the books that are most linked to Other Feminisms at the top, and then no particular order to follow.
Motherhood, A Confession by Natalie Carnes The Autonomy Myth: A Theory Of Dependency by Martha Albertson Fineman Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace by Sara Ruddick Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It by Richard V. Reeves Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion by Caroline Walker Bynum Saga of Saints by Sigrid Undset The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography by Carlos Eire Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri The Falcon Thief by Joshua Hammer Silas Marner by George ElliotAs the list suggests, I tend to have more non-fiction than fiction coming into my house, and I’d love to know how you pick your fiction reading. I tend to long more for another reader, since I want to talk about the book. I considered signing up for Whale Weekly (a substack of Moby Dick readers) but this didn’t seem like my year!
December 21, 2022
The Best and Worst of Rings of Power
I wrote about Rings of Power for both First Things and Mere Orthodoxy. There’s potential in the show, but the first season fell far short of good storytelling. At First Things, I wrote about the moral muddle of its structure:
Tolkien’s stories aren’t mystery boxes. His characters have a very clear idea of what is asked of them, even if they have no idea how to accomplish it. At the Council of Elrond, Frodo says, “I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.” Tolkien’s heroes can take on what seem like hopeless duties—Frodo cannot guarantee that his quest will succeed, but, day by day, he chooses not to fail it. Instead of building the drama around Frodo’s long-term plans and stratagems, Tolkien treats each moment of temptation and choosing as epic in itself. In contrast, the veiled plots and many mysteries of Rings of Power mean the characters don’t know enough about their situation to know what to choose rightly, let alone how.
At Mere Orthodoxy, I got to talk more about one of the best parts of the story—the immortality of the elves.
Across the waters in Númenor, Galadriel’s visit to the island is as disorienting as the return of King Arthur might be for modern-day Britons. The people of Númenor have never seen an elf in the flesh, and their fluency with the language of the elves has become atrophied—a matter of scholarship or religion, not conversation. But, for Galadriel, the halls are familiar and the Númenoreans’ choice to break off friendship was recent and still rankles.
If the past is another country, Elves are its living ambassadors. For Men and Dwarves, their history speaks from living, foreign tongues. The Elves are, in essence, hyperobjects—“massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” in the coinage of Timothy Morton. Morton needed the term to describe ecological phenomena like climate change that are too large for humans to grapple with directly. We need statistics and other tools to image what we can see only as thin, MRI-like slices of the whole.
