Leah Libresco's Blog, page 6

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

Why Pro-Life Catholics Should Get Vaccinated

In The New York Times, I made the case for pro-life Catholics to get covid vaccines, despite their dependence on cell lines derived from aborted children. Even people who are comfortable with the vaccines need to grapple with the question of how we make amends for our material cooperation with evil.

I’ve gotten both my shots and I strongly believe other Catholics should get vaccinated, too. But I don’t think those qualms are entirely misguided, and they’re not limited to vaccinations. When we reap the benefit of what we see as a past injustice, we are implicated in the original wrongdoing. We have to decide if our actions compound the original abuse and what kinds of reparations we must make.

The Jesuits of Georgetown University have been wrestling with a similar question of moral contamination. The order funded the school partly through the exploitation and sale of slaves. To make amends, the university has begun a fund-raising campaign to pay reparations to the descendants of those slaves. But a Georgetown professor still has to ask the same question as a someone rolling up his sleeve for the vaccine: Can I accept a benefit premised on someone else’s suffering?

Read the whole thing at The New York Times

The Cautionary Tale of WandaVision

WandaVision is an ambitious offering from the Marvel Industrial Complex, but it falls short of its potential. I reviewed the show for Mere Orthodoxy (in a way I hope was comprehensible even to non-watchers!). The show is ultimately about the consequences of the stories we tell about our lives.

The show uses the heightened style of a superhero story — as well as the genre conventions of sitcoms — to tell a big story about the quiet, internal work of mourning. Fantasy stories let us blow up our lives to heroic scale, to give small moments gravity.

Wanda plunges herself into American sitcom structures as a way of keeping grief at bay. In a sitcom, the world is safe— no trouble is allowed to be big enough to disrupt the show’s premise.

As the show unfolds, she must fend off internal and external attempts to take down the walls she’s built. Outside the town, a squadron of military types are preparing to engage her as a threat. Other bit players from the Marvel Cinematic Universe show up, and, in their attempts to dismantle Wanda’s enchantments, they’re also making a claim about what kind of story she belongs to — one full of gadgets, weapons, and standoffs.

Read the whole thing at Mere Orthodoxy

Game Design with Questing Beast

My husband Alexi and I were guests on Questing Beast for a discussion of game design and storytelling. I really enjoyed the conversation, particularly when we talked about how social conflict in incorporated into a game’s mechanics.

A more freeform game can turn on the player’s quick-thinking, rather than the character’s. We talked a bit about what kinds of design give you freedom to improvise while still giving structure to the story.

You can check out Alexi’s games at Cloven Pine Games, and I’ve tried my hand at a few myself! I’ve written about Back Again from the Broken Land, the game we wrote together, for the Gauntlet and for Mere Orthodoxy.

How The Government Wasted Our Pandemic Sacrifices

In my first piece for The Week, I’m discussing why the lack of high-quality masks is our pandemic failures in miniature.

Throughout the pandemic, Americans have made extraordinary sacrifices to slow the spread of the virus. We haven’t been unequal to the disaster, but our leaders’ lapses have left people filling in the gaps of the lackluster federal and state responses. Yet with each surge comes scolding about individual choices, while first former President Donald Trump and then President Biden have minimized the centralized work only the government can do.

This sleight of hand is part of a pattern. Our leaders love to valorize individual effort, especially when it suggests policy reform is unnecessary. When a child saves up his allowance to pay back his classmates’ lunch debt, it’s not a feel good story, much less a universal way to ensure every student has enough to eat. After graduating into a recession, millennials can’t catch up by avoiding avocado toast and lattes. The environment won’t be saved by banning plastic straws, rather than seriously considering nuclear power.

In each case, these stories shift the blame to individuals — if they really cared about getting out of debt or cleaning up the environment, shouldn’t they be visibly suffering in pursuit of the goal? If not, what right do they have to demand that anyone else take action?

Read the whole thing at The Week