Leah Libresco's Blog, page 6

Covid, Vulnerability, and a Miasma Mindset

The New Atlantis convened a slate of writers for a symposium on lessons to learn from covid. My contribution to the “Beyond the State of Exception” symposium is “Bad Air,” a mediation on aerosols, ventilation, and vulnerability.

We’re used to starting with a premise of safety and sterility. The goal of our policy and our private precautions is to return us to that baseline of nothingness.

The artist Anicka Yi uses scents as her medium, and, as she told the New York Times in an interview, she thought about how to replicate the crisp nothing that people expect as the marker of both safety and luxury. “I talk a lot about how power has no odor,” Yi explained. “This is why you should not be smelling any odors when you walk into a gallery in Chelsea, or when you walk into a bank. These are places of power and sterility.”

[…]

We are all vulnerable, open systems. Our lungs are not, at least topologically speaking, interior organs. They are part of our surface — more like the nakedness of our faces than the tucked-away security of a liver. Our public health must start from the premise that we are present to the world, and total retreat is not an option. Then we will have the freedom and clarity to decide how best to face a lively, dangerous, and beautiful world.

R ead the whole thing at The New Atlantis

The Green Knight and the Elderly Gunman

First Things asked contributors for the best film they saw in 2021, and my husband and I both picked films by David Lowery. My choice was The Green Knight, and (once I had dibsed it) Alexi chose The Old Man and the Gun. Here’s an excerpt from my reflection:

To call it an adaptation of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight would be inaccurate. It’s a wrestling match with the tale, and with the ideal of chivalry itself. I can’t recommend it for teen viewers, as this is a decidedly unchaste Gawain. But it’s a good movie to see with friends, provided you watch it early enough in the evening that you have time for at least an hour of argument afterward. Lowery’s Camelot is a fading kingdom. His protagonist is himself green, not yet knighted, and not ready to live up to the demands of knighthood, marriage, or any vocation of sustained faithfulness and sacrifice. When he answers the Green Knight’s Christmas challenge, the film’s Gawain is hoping this fight will change something in him. In his subsequent quest, he’s still seeking a great act, worthy of song and story, big enough to swallow up his life of persistent sin and broken promises. He hopes, like one of Flannery O’Connor’s characters, that if he can’t be a saint, “[he] could be a martyr if they killed [him] quick.” Not everything in the film was satisfying, but it took serious questions seriously. 

Alexi’s choice was the based-on-a-true-story tale of elderly bank robber Forrest Tucker.

Unlike the hapless not-quite-a-knight Gawain, Tucker knows exactly what he wants to be doing and relishes the life he’s chosen. He follows a chivalric code of sorts, living as the last cowboy outlaw or gentleman thief. Does that mean he’s found the honor Gawain is seeking? The film offers occasional glimpses of the damage Tucker does to those who stay in his life longer than his bemusedly charmed victims. Elisabeth Moss appears in a single, crucial scene as a daughter Tucker doesn’t even know he has. Lowery lets us enjoy a venerable rogue reflecting on his picaresque life, while leaving open the question of what it would take for such a man to be part of a family or a society

Read the whole thing at First Things

Books I Hope to Read in 2022

I wrapped up 2021 with 10/11 of the books on my reading list finished. (I had ambitions of at least starting to read Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy on December 31st, but instead I took a third trimester nap). I can live with that.

Past my official list, I read 117 books in total (34.5k pages) and the numbers will probably go down again this year, with my second daughter due in February. And, more to the point, my toddler is very insistent that when we read together, I read a book from her shelf, not mine.

I still like making these lists, because they give me permission to prioritize these books over other things. By default, my reading plans are set by the schedule of library holds coming in, so being reminded that I wanted to make time for these books, and that I’ve set them an artificial deadline, helps me choose them.

This year’s list is definitely shaped by books I’ve found through my Other Feminisms substack project. I’m looking forward to the Kittay in particular. So, without further ado:

Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency by Eva Feder Kittay Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America by Evelyn Nakano Glenn Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births by Michelle Millar Fisher Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by Claudia Goldin The Virtues of Limits by David McPherson The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture: The Cadaver, the Memorial Body, and the Recovery of Lived Experience by Brent Dean Robbins The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World by Ran Abramitzky Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church by Michael Philip Penn The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics by Andrew Willard Jones Sun Slower, Sun Faster by Meriol Trevor Brisbane by by Eugene Vodolazkin

And I got a lovely gift over Christmas of Malcolm Guite’s Word in the Wilderness.

It’s a collection of poems, one per day for the seasons of Lent and Easter. I’m grateful to have a small daily practice of prayer and of beauty, especially as many traditional Lenten penances don’t work with a newborn.

(Arguably a list of planned reading for the year also doesn’t work with a newborn + toddler, but time will tell! I know the list will help me get to some of them I’d otherwise miss. The question is: Which ones?)

My Favorite Books of 2021

I read in two homes, across a move. I read mostly library books, across three different states where I have borrowing privileges. I read very very little on planes, between covid and a toddler who spent most of a flight trying to steal my mask off my face. I read aloud, and I do a very good voice for The Bear Snores On.

These books, in roughly chronological order, were my favorites.

The Friendship of Christ by Robert Hugh Benson

My husband and I pick out a readaloud book for our Sunday spirtual reading, and we began the book with this new edition from Oak and Linden Press. The book was simply written and moving—we incorporated it into our chaplaincy work with Catholic students. And there is something refreshing about reading a spiritual book from over 100 years ago and seeing how un-novel your questions are.

Perfectly Human: Nine Months with Cerian by Sarah C. Williams

Williams tells the story of her daughter Cerian’s short life. Early on in her pregnancy, they learn that Cerian has a congenital condition that means she will be stillborn. Williams and her husband and their children have to figure out what different shape their love for their daughter will take. This meant a lot to me as a mother who has lost children before birth.

Here is an excerpt from an essay Williams wrote for Plough on prenatal screening:

As a practice, prenatal scanning both teaches and reinforces particular ways of thinking about the human person. It teaches the pregnant couple to ask: Is this child physically normal? This question is asked as if it were of primary importance. Whether or not the scan results reveal fetal abnormality, irrespective of whether a parent chooses to act in certain ways as a result of the information given, the practice makes everyone ask this question at a relatively early stage in the pregnancy.

What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics by O. Carter Snead

This was my favorite book of the year, especially if you’re judging by how many of my own pieces I tried to sneak citations of Snead into. Like Williams’s memoir, Snead’s book is about our culture of “expressive individualism” and how an emphasis on choice diminishes the humanity of those who aren’t able to choose. I shared an interview I did with Snead on my substack, Other Feminisms. And here’s one of the quotes that I kept coming back to:

Law and policy, animated by an anthropology of embodiment would view the mother as a vulnerable, dependent member of society, who is entitled to the protections and support of the network of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving that must exist for any human being to survive and flourish.

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

And now we’re into the “ripping good yarn” section of the list. This early history of SpaceX was thrilling to read. (There’s one scene in particular, when an engineer has to crawl into an imploding rocket body being transported by cargo plane, that is clearly awaiting film adaptation). The book is a real mix of joyful and stomach-turning moments. People get to do things right instead of “the way we’ve always done them.” But then you start hitting the list of SpaceX divorces and feeling sick about what a culture of total commitment means for families. It’s a fascinating story, well told.

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman

Also a ripping good yarn (no no, hear me out). Here, one of the most thrilling scenes is when an inspector realizes that the Statue of Liberty is rusting through and is in danger of total structural collapse. Engineering and chemistry to the rescue! Almost everything we rely on is build with rust in mind (or else, we can’t rely on it for long). I loved learning about the design choices and work of maintenance that keeps buildings standing and pipes running.

Chosen Country by James Pogue

Pogue found a space for himself at the Bundy standoff and has a sharply observed, thoughtful book. There’s nothing pat about his portraits of the militiamen he meets or their politics. It’s not a book you can wave as an answer to what is dividing the country. I liked it because it reminded me how dense the lives behind any news story are.

The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought by Mara H. Benjamin

This is a book I plan to return to for Other Feminisms, and one that fits nicely into conversation with Snead. Benjamin is offering an understanding of what it means to be human that doesn’t start with negative freedom, but positive duties. While Jewish men have their days and their bodies shaped by their halachic obligations, women’s work carries a different weight. Instead of binding their arms with tefillin, women jut out a hip to carry a child. But in both cases, Benjamin sees who we are defined by whom and what we are burdened by. It was a moving book and very alien to mainstream individualism.

The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope

I always close the year with less fiction on the list than I would wish. Vespertine and The Mirror Season also stood out to me (though the latter has a sexual assault that is handled well but is tough to read, so I feel like it needs a note when I recommend it).

But Perilous Gard is the one I’m most excited to share with others. I am a tremendous fan of 1) Tam Lin retellings with 2) genuinely inhumane fey and 3) a world that rewards both gentleness and stubbornness. I loved it and I believed it. (I also enjoyed Pope’s The Sherwood Ring).

Finally, I want to mention three books I got to cover in more detail through book reviews. I reviewed The Deep Places, Ross Douthat’s Lyme memoir, for National Review (“Becoming Literate in Suffering”) and I reviewed two books on disability and design (What Can a Body Do? and Making Disability Modern) for Plough (“Spaces for Every Body”). All three books were excellent.

And if you’re interested, my favorite books from last year are listed here.

Lyme and Literacy in Suffering

I got to read and review Ross Douthat’s memoir of Lyme disease, The Deep Places for National Review. The book is thought-provoking and unsettling. It is as much about how to endure suffering as how to address medical mysteries.

In some ways, Douthat’s striving for a cure is a transposition of the same meritocratic story that he was living out before he fell ill. His wife, Abigail Tucker, is a New York Times–best-selling author; he was a wunderkind pundit — when he was hired as a New York Times columnist, he was the youngest person to fill that role. When his descent begins, he and his wife are preparing to “graduate” from a cramped home in Washington, D.C., to a spacious home in the Connecticut suburbs. On the morning that Douthat first notices a possible tick bite, it is overshadowed by his wife’s positive pregnancy test.

Douthat has been a public skeptic of the meritocratic mindset, suspicious of the way our modern elites’ confidence in their own striving erased any sense of noblesse oblige. But he admits the idea is too deeply rooted not to mark him, too.

The meritocratic American dream is one of transcending need or vulnerability. Money cushions scarcity and shocks, social status eases you past the lines or red tape, education and accomplishments quiet any sense that these gains might be fragile. The gig economy makes it easier to fill in any gaps, to the point where the elite might look askance at Christ’s proclamation that His Father “sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” Surely we are just one disruption away from resolving that bug in Creation.

Read the whole thing at National Review

Black Widow, Gymnasts, and How We Use Girls

I saw Black Widow just before the beginning of the Tokyo Olympics, and, as I wrote at The Bulwark, the juxtaposition was an uncomfortable one.

The story of the girls reshaped and thrown away by the Red Room trainers isn’t so different from the story of USA Gymnastics over the last decade. With the Summer Olympics now underway, I don’t know how to balance celebrating the fortitude of the members of Team USA and rejecting the abusive system that chose and trained them. Natasha may end the movie standing amid the smoking wreckage of the Red Room, but American gymnasts are still fighting to dismantle the system of abuse that they grew up within.

I know now that some of the moments I saw as unalloyed triumph when I was a little girl watching the Olympics were in fact shadowed by abuse. In 1996, when I watched Kerri Strug land her second vault on an injured ankle, clinching the gold and collapsing in pain, I was moved by her strength and stubbornness. I didn’t realize that one of the people rushing to her aid was the team trainer, Larry Nassar, who would go on to take advantage of his position to sexually abuse gymnasts for decades. For years, I’ve been watching young women’s strength be celebrated—and marketed—by forces that have no real respect for the women as people.

You can read the whole thing at The Bulwark.

The movie was the second one my husband and I saw in theaters post-vaccination, and Alexi wrote a reflection, too. You can check out his review at First Things. Here’s a preview.

For bastions of the progressive capitalist entertainment industry no less than for Soviet supervillains, the age-old process of childbirth and family formation presents a threat to be managed rather than an opportunity to be embraced. Black Widow takes this theme in an unexpectedly heartwarming direction: Perhaps even the bonds of a fake family might be enough to topple a regime that hates family life.

Penance and Public Shaming

I was glad to get the chance to make my Bulwark debut with an essay on a question I’ve been wrestling with for some time: “What do we do with people who have committed a wrong that they themselves cannot put right?”

Cycles of public shaming ebb and flow through our public discourse. Some implicate public figures in scandals or crimes, while others entangle formerly private individuals whose errors are placed before a national audience. We need a way to find an answer to the following questions: What do we do with people who have committed a wrong that they themselves cannot put right? And is it possible for me to make full amends for the wrongs that I’ve done, whatever their size?

As a Christian watching these cycles of shaming, I see half of the Gospel story. Secular culture agrees with the apostle Paul that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That truth is proclaimed not just in the controversies, but in more nuanced discussions of such subjects as racial reparations and structural sexism. The trouble is that secular discussions of justice and reconciliation necessarily stop before the next verse in Paul’s letter to the Romans: “and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

By secular lights, we are sinners without a savior—an untenable situation. To avoid facing the full ramifications of this form of the Bad News, people often fudge the truth, making some combination of these three errors: We deny the universality of sin; we deny the seriousness of sin; or we admit both, but deny the possibility of full reconciliation.

Read the whole thing at The Bulwark

Government Should Fail More

At The Week, I have a reflection on watching SpaceX crash rockets with my daughter and the price we pay for expecting perfection in public policy.

Musk’s riches allow him to comfortably risk his money. But these more adventurous investments should be made by the government, too. I want to see more failures of government policy, as we experiment with more ambitious programs. There should be more iteration and revision of legislation, as politicians listen to citizens and rework their theory to take account of lived experience and the last-mile implementation of policy.

Unfortunately, our political institutions are sclerotic and fearful. While SpaceX attempts to learn from every launch, politicians rarely point to a failed or flawed policy as an opportunity to learn and improve. Even at the state level, the supposed laboratories of democracy, there are few governors attempting policy that is truly experimental — which they admit at the outset may not work and they are willing to roll back if it fails.

Read the whole thing at The Week

Paid Family Leave Should Cover Miscarriage

New Zealand unanimously passed a law requiring three days of bereavement leave for parents who lose a child through miscarriage. I wrote a piece for the Institute for Family Studies on why I think this kind of leave is sorely needed.

Parents who lose a child through miscarriage can have their grief dismissed. When my husband and I lost children in the first trimester, our doctors were brusque with us, telling us to move on and work on getting pregnant again. In contrast, the New Zealand law treats a miscarried child with dignity.

Offering bereavement leave communicates something different than offering sick days. Some miscarriages involve medical complexities that make women eligible for sick leave, but when a child dies, the parents shouldn’t need to use up sick leave to grieve. A mother shouldn’t need to question whether her bodily suffering is enough to interfere with her work and qualify for medical leave. Bereavement leave is more unconditional. Bereavement leave also makes it clear that fathers also deserve time off after a death.

Read the whole thing at IFS.

Making Mothers Count in Medicine

At Capita, I’ve written an appreciation of doulas. My daughter was born with the help and support of a close friend who was training as a doula. That experience left me grateful for Bria… and furious her work was considered “extra” to medicine. A medical system that ignores the value of doulas leaves a lot of care out of what counts.

To talk to a doctor, you have to be a translator. A patient has to make his or her experience accessible to the doctor, but the resulting translation can be clumsy. Think of those pain scales, with the laminated little faces, shading gradually from serenity to sorrow to screams. The doctor needs some kind of standard in order to apply diagnoses and to conglomerate individual patients into statistics. But the gap between the patient’s experience and how it’s measured is often, itself, painful. […]

Doulas help to bridge the gap between patient and provider—a gap that exists for more than just laboring mothers. Recognizing the worth of doulas’ work should spur us to ask where else patients are missing out on care that is undervalued because it isn’t easily quantified, or because it is too tender, slow, and personalized to look like what we expect of medicine.

Read the rest at Capita