Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 199

How my daughter’s interracial relationship opened my eyes

The author's daughter and her groom on their wedding day. (Credit: Ryan Merchant)

As an FOTB (fresh off the boat) cisgendered, heterosexual, female graduate student from Pakistan attending Tufts University in Boston almost 40 years ago, I was careful not to stray too far from the cultural codes of my desi Muslim roots. I was considered pretty “out there,” of course, by my peers back home in Lahore, and my parents had to bear the burden of family and friends thinking they had gone too far in their liberalism to let me fly the coop to the big bad West at such a tender age. (I was 21 years old.) The real tut-tutting was directed at the fact that I had been “allowed” to leave without a husband to look after me and keep me “pure.”

I was a rebel to be sure — and a budding feminist to boot — but did not want to stray off the expected path too far. And so, though I dated white men briefly, I knew I would marry a Pakistani Muslim man in the end.

The big rebellion was that I fell in love with and married a man from Karachi — an Urdu-speaking mohajir, whereas I was from the dominant Punjabi ethnic group of Pakistan, which comprises most of the Lahori elite from whence I hailed, and who routinely look down upon Urdu speakers. Ironically, his parents in turn were relieved that their son had not married a black woman — a habshi in common parlance — since they’d heard my father was from Nigeria. They had gotten this misconception because my dad at the time was posted on a UN mission in Kano, in northern Nigeria.

These ethnic and racist prejudices held by our parents’ generation are alive and well in our own, even amongst those of us who left our country of origin and settled in the multicultural United States, where we live in a “melting pot” and where interracial marriages are supposedly acceptable  in our day and age. Even in the era of Trump, none of the white people we know who voted for him would admit to being racist. None of our Pakistani or Indian friends voted for him — that we know of — and among these desi friends and acquaintances we hear only horror and anguish expressed at the rampant racism and xenophobia the Trump presidency has unleashed, not least against brown Muslims like ourselves.

However, what we fail to acknowledge is our own internalized racism against black people, a legacy of 200 years of British colonial rule over India, where to be fair of skin is the standard of beauty, where to date and perchance to marry a white person is acceptable to some degree, but not a black person.

When our daughter Faryal told my husband and me ten years ago during her sophomore year in college that she was dating an African American young man of Jamaican heritage from the Bronx, I remember thinking it was a bad idea, hoping this fascination would pass. Jaleni, her then-boyfriend, must have sensed my disapproval, for he told her after I’d met him briefly on a visit to their campus, “your mom doesn’t like me.” He was 22 years old, about the same age I was when I first arrived in this country.

I remain deeply ashamed of my feelings of fear and unease about my daughter and her now brand-new husband’s relationship back then. Perhaps it was that disapproving vibe he got from me that day, perhaps it was his own need to grapple with what a relationship with a woman outside of his own race would mean for him in the future, perhaps my own daughter had feelings of insecurity and a need to please me, to “belong” to the Pakistani side of her heritage. Perhaps it was all of the above that led to their splitting up soon after they both returned to New York after graduation. My daughter took the break-up hard.

In the intervening years — almost a decade — between that difficult heartbreak and the joyous reunion of two young people deeply, irrevocably in love, we’ve all had a lot of time to do some serious soul searching, most of all myself. My husband has always been someone who has walked the walk he talked. He is truly one of the most genuinely open-minded and non-tribal human beings I know. So the problem was never with him.

Despite a lifetime in academia speaking out against and teaching students to critique and resist a racist, heterosexist, patriarchal, imperialist class system, I realized how deeply ideology exerts its hold on us. I recognize how the fear of rejection from our communities and peers constrains our every move, how hard it is to rise above the madding crowd even for those of us who fancy we are rebels of a sort. How, I had found myself thinking, will I be able to protect my daughter and son-in-law from the hurt of their brown/black kids when a racist society judges them inferior or a threatening presence? How will I deal with my fear for their future safety and well-being, the fear that all black folk live with daily in this great country?

The acknowledgement of this fear has ironically been the greatest gift my daughter’s interracial relationship has bequeathed me, for it has made me more empathic, and made real my theoretical commitment to forging solidarity with other brethren of color. I can no longer retreat to any space of privilege, that space the “model minority” myth bequeaths brown immigrants in this country, keeping us people of color divided and separate. Now, I can truly start living up to the karma of brown folk — and reading a wonderful anti-racist book of the same title by Vijay Prashad helped concretize my personal connection to the political mission of solidarity outlined in the work of the late great African American thinker and activist W.E.B. Dubois, a mission I understand with increasing clarity as one of forging real, deep and lasting connections to the souls of black folk, so that we can all truly move beyond the debilitating cliché of guessing who our daughters and sons will bring home to dinner.

As my husband and I have gotten to know Jaleni better over the past couple of years since he and our daughter picked up their relationship again; as some of my upper-class Pakistani women friends have met his hard-working single mother, different in race and class from their own privileged selves, at the bridal shower I threw for my daughter a few months ago; as we now hear these same bougie desi friends  from Scarsdale and Briarcliff Manor starting to say “he’s a lovely man” and “your daughter looks so happy” and “her mother in law seems so loving and down to earth,” then I know my husband and I have contributed in some small way to lifting the burden of racism and classism from the still-colonized minds of our South Asian brethren, including ourselves.

The palpable feelings of joy and love that filled the upstate New York barn where we hosted our daughter’s dream wedding just a month ago, uniting brown, black and white friends and family who attended, brought home more viscerally than any sermon or speech or book could the multicultural and multiracial reality that is this country’s greatest strength and gift to humanity, beckoning a post-racial world that the Trump era’s backwards-facing racism is powerless to resist.

For making us better human beings all around, we have our wonderful daughter to thank. As for Jaleni — I see him simply as an intelligent, loving, kind and thoughtful man who I am proud and happy to call my Damaad.

The case for a “green death”

Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth by Suzanne Kelly (Credit: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers/Getty/Bill Chizek)

Grief can take hold of us in many ways. It can masquerade as depression or a sense of personal failure. It can bring us closer or farther away from those we love. It can leave us feeling deserted or saved, in service or in need. But where exactly grief will take us is anyone’s guess.

I was thirty, working on my PhD, and preparing for some future life of the mind when my father suffered a massive and fatal heart attack at sixty-two. For some time afterward, I felt wedged between the interests of life and death. But like so many others, the invisible rope tying me to the land of the dead would eventually begin to slacken, just as life’s grasp would begin to strengthen. When I finally journeyed back from that liminal place I realized that far from leaving me stranded, grief had actually anchored me back to life with fresh perspective. Indeed, Proust may have been right, that “ideas come to us as the substitutes of griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some power to injure our heart.”

Up until then, my scholarly life had been centered on philosophies that tried to make sense of the denigration of matter, of the body in particular, mostly taking form in cultural fantasies of women’s bodies and the planet as both playground and dump. Merged with the changing states of my own loss, those same questions began to shift to the dead body—what we think of it, what we do with it, and why. Death would retreat, and my grief, too, would eventually resolve. These questions, however, would remain unshakable by my side, leading me to grapple with the implications of our contemporary death practices at the same time that I become part of a growing movement to change them.

My father would have the same death rites as his father and his grandfather. Two days of wake followed by a Catholic mass and church burial. Over the course of a week his body would journey that well-trodden path from the funeral home, to the church, and then into the cemetery. We had seen my father off and provided the care to do it. And though, overall, the funeral and familial support helped me say goodbye, I still couldn’t get the body off my mind.

It’s no secret that over the course of the last century the corpse has become increasingly hidden from sight, that the distance between the dead and the living inner circle has grown cavernous. Where funerals once happened in the home, they now occur in a place meant to mirror the home. Funerary viewings are still customary, but their popularity is waning. Nearly 70 percent of Americans die in hospitals, long-term care facilities, or nursing homes. Dead bodies are kept in morgues and transported to funeral homes, and often buried or cremated out of sight of the bereaved. And what funeral directors call “direct cremation,” where the body travels en route from the morgue to the crematory, is on the rise.

Before my father’s body was seen through to the end, it would first be embalmed, then placed in a wood and metal casket, and, finally, encased in a reinforced concrete vault that had been inserted in the ground. At the same time that this walled-off city of contaminants prohibited his body immediate access to the elements (and, conversely, the elements access to his body), his body had also become contaminated, poisoned. His body had, in all practical ways, become a problem. It seemed the most sinister of reversals. What kept my mind on the body were these facts. What plagued me wasn’t simply the lack of cultural proximity to the dead, but, also, the dead body’s distance from the whole of nature.

It wouldn’t take long to find that what stirred in me was also being felt elsewhere. On the heels of a budding movement in the United Kingdom, the first green, or natural, burial ground in the United States—Ramsey Creek Pre- serve in Westminster, South Carolina—had opened just two years prior. And because discontent with the status quo is as individually felt as it is shared, the next decade and a half would bring the creation of more green burial grounds throughout the United States, all messaging a rejection of standard funerary forms and a desire to do death differently.

It would be many years after my father’s death that I would come to find out that, like me, Ramsey Creek founder Dr. Billy Campbell had his own first inklings of greening up funerary care with the death of his own father back in 1985—although it would take over a decade to cultivate his vision. In those early days I longed for even such small connections. But what I wanted most was to find others who were also waking up, and who wished to work together toward the greening of death.

What exactly is this greening?

Green burial—also referred to as natural burial—aims to care for the dead with minimal impact to the environment. Where conventional burial typically includes embalming and caskets, often sealed, and manufactured from finished hardwoods and metals and sometimes non-plant-based materials as well as the use of reinforced concrete vaults or liners, whole-body green interment steers clear of all of them. Green burial grounds are on the rise in the United States, hovering somewhere around one hundred at last count. In all of them, rain, wind, and sun are respected in the work of decomposition, as well as the pressure of earth, stone, and roots. Human decay is regarded as good and valuable, as microbes and insects descend to feed on the dead. As food and nourishment for other creatures, the corpse is of consequence to the land and to the species of mammals, birds, amphibians, plants, and insects that inhabit it. In essence, the corpse is of consequence to the planet.

In many ways, green burial is about a return to the past—to the way we buried our dead in the United States over 150 years ago. Simple methods. Dust to dust.

Except that times have changed.

Since Jessica Mitford’s best-selling The American Way of Death (1963), cremation has been on the rise. The effect of Mitford on cremation rates can- not be understated. Her criticism of the funerary industry hit a chord with Americans—our funerary ways were unnecessarily excessive and expensive, and the funeral industry needed to be reigned in. Over the last forty years, Americans have responded to that sensibility by increasingly making the choice to be cremated. A century and a half ago, that choice didn’t even exist. Pyre burning is an ancient tradition, but not one that has been practiced in the United States with any regularity. And the modern crematorium didn’t come into being until the turn of the twentieth century, although it would take several decades for it to make any headway. Today, however, nearly half of all deaths in the United States resolve in cremation annually, with some states even higher.

Next to whole-body green interment, cremation is the second most environmentally sound way of disposing of the dead. If it’s less than ideal that’s mostly because any time something is burned ecological health is at risk.

Still, only about 13 percent of those who choose cremation claim the environment as a reason. All of these years later, Mitford’s call to cost and simplicity remain the driving factors. Unfortunately, this call hasn’t much helped to curb our unsustainable death ways that pollute, dishonor decay, and sever humans from the earth. In many ways, in not more robustly taking up the charge of our ties to nature, the way cremation has been practiced over the last half a century has left us even more stranded from a meaning of death, and a dead body, that belongs to the planet. In the meantime, conventional death ways have continued in their work of reversals, where flesh, blood, and bone have been turned into contaminants, and pollutants masquerade as protectors.

The greening of death, however, doesn’t mean an admonishment of cremation. On the contrary, for cultural, personal, political, and economic reasons, the movement largely regards incineration as a greener option than conventional burial. I say “greener” because cremation does pose some environmental risks. Crematories emit mercury and furans and other by-products of burning while also using a good deal of energy. Still, most green burial grounds do accept interment and/or scattering of cremated remains. The environmental problems of cremation are taken up by green burial advocates by pushing for better crematory filters that would help limit the amount of contaminants transmitted into the air, while also calling for more renewable forms of energy to run them.

The world around us has changed in other ways, too. Environmental destruction has transformed the planet into a very different place than it was when dust to dust was last the norm. Behind us stretches a fifty-year history of environmental activism and, yet, the planet is still on fire. For those of us paying attention, we’re desperate for ways to put it out. This is all to say that the movement is interested in not only what goes into our cemeteries, or for that matter what doesn’t, but also, how much energy was expended to fulfill an interment? A cremation? Where did the energy come from? What about carbon emissions? Was worker health jeopardized somewhere along the way?

There is also, of course, waste in terms of that other green—money. Be- cause the cost of most conventional death care arrangements are wrapped up in expensive caskets and burial vaults that are eschewed in green death care all together, a whole-body green burial should generally cost less. However, depending on geographical location and whether or not the cemetery is using any of the monies for purposes beyond the burial itself, like the restoration of habitat, the price of plots may vary. Which brings me to another movement goal—landscape-level conservation—which fundamentally challenges the standard lawn-park design of cemeteries that requires gridded rows, machine- cut and polished stones, highly manicured turf, and, at least for the larger and more well-funded cemeteries, the use of pesticides.

Of course, the pollution of conventional burial is nothing in comparison to the really big problems facing us, like climate change, water scarcity, and threats to our food system. The green burial movement, however, is doing more than offering more sustainable death care choices that would contribute to a healthier and less wasteful planet. Like me, other folks are waking up to lost ways of knowing death, especially in terms of recovering older practices. Out of this recovery, renewed meanings are emerging—ones that are rekindling our bond with the earth.

And herein lies the greatest potential green burial has to offer—rectifying our severance from the natural world in both symbolic and literal ways. As green-friendly funeral director, Bob Fertig, said to me, “The focus on the environmental aspect [of the green burial movement] is wonderful, but I think what sometimes gets lost in that is the potential for closeness with death and the way that it makes people feel.” When green burial advocates, especially those who deal with grieving families, say that green burial provides great solace to experiences of loss, there’s no doubt that such comfort has been born by connection to not only each other, but also to the earth itself.

An electrical brain switch can shut off food cravings

(Credit: AP Photo/Matthew Mead)

The brain’s reward system learns the actions that produce positive outcomes, such as obtaining food or sex. It then reinforces the desire to initiate those behaviors by inducing pleasure in anticipation of the relevant action. But in some circumstances this system can become oversensitized to pleasurable but harmful behaviors, producing pathological impulses like drug addiction, binge eating and compulsive gambling.

But what if we could spot impulsive urges in the brain and intervene to prevent the act? This is the promise of a new study published December 18 in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” led by neurosurgeon Casey Halpern, of Stanford University. His team identified a “signature” of impulsive urges in part of the brain’s reward-learning circuitry, the nucleus accumbens. Delivering electrical pulses to this region on detecting this activity reduced binge-eating behavior in mice. They also observed the same signature in a human brain, suggesting the technique has potential for treating a range of conditions involving compulsive behaviors. “We’ve identified a brain biomarker of loss of control,” Halpern says. “If we can use that to prevent any of these potentially dangerous actions, we can help a lot of people.”

Researchers used a variation on deep-brain stimulation (DBS) in their experiments, a well-established treatment to diminish the shaking present in Parkinson’s disease that is also showing promise in other conditions including depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Exactly how DBS has beneficial effects is still being debated, but there can be side effects. When treating movement disorders, patients may experience tingling and muscle contraction, says neurosurgeon Tipu Aziz of the University of Oxford. The long-term consequences in other regions are unknown but could include seizures, or effects on cognition, he says.

Ordinarily, DBS stimulates a brain area with an uninterrupted current. But researchers are investigating ways to provide electrical pulses only when needed by monitoring telltale brain activity related to a particular condition or symptom. This technique, known as “responsive neurostimulation” (RNS), has proved effective for epilepsy and an existing system has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating partial onset seizures (which affect only part of the brain). There is also some evidence RNS may be better than continuous stimulation for treating Parkinson’s, Aziz says.

Halpern’s group had previously shown standard DBS reduces binge eating in mice by as much as 50 percent. To provide as-needed stimulation, they set out to find a brain “signature” for impulsive urges they could use to trigger stimulation. They gave six mice high-fat food pellets one hour a day for 10 days (after which all the mice were binge eating). They recorded activity from the animals’ nuclei accumbens before and after this “learning” period and when they ate their normal diets. They saw an increase in low-frequency (“delta band”) brain-wave activity in the nucleus accumbens, which peaked one second before a mouse indulged in a binge session. This activity did not appear at the start of the experiment or when the animals were eating standard chow that was not high fat. They also demonstrated this signature was specific to binge eating by showing it was not seen immediately before interacting with a young mouse, which mice also find pleasurable. “We don’t want to block natural rewards,” Halpern says. “We’re not going after anybody with an impulse — I like a glass of wine myself.”

Having identified a “moment of weakness” signature, the team next tested whether using it to trigger electrical simulation to disrupt the impulse reduced binge eating. They compared automatically triggered stimulation with continuous, random, and manual stimulation in which a researcher activated the electrode on seeing the mouse move to start eating. All except random stimulation reduced the amount consumed. But they also showed only continuous stimulation decreased the amount of time mice spent interacting with young mice, considered to be an undesirable side effect.

The team next turned to a human brain to see if the signature they had discovered in mice also applied to people. They were able to conduct their search in an obsessive-compulsive disorder patient who was unresponsive to other treatments and had opted to undergo surgery for DBS. They monitored an electrode implanted in the man’s nucleus accumbens while he performed a task in which he had to push a button when a visual target flashed on a screen to receive a cash reward. Once he was accustomed to the task—and the reward from receiving cash—they saw a similar increase in delta activity to the one observed in mice, brain waves that intensified immediately before he began a task.

The fact similar brain activity was seen in both species for behaviors aimed at different rewards suggests this signature may be common to many compulsive behaviors. Of course, nobody with a gambling habit would undergo neurosurgery nor would physicians consider it. “We’re going after people who are dying of their condition or are severely debilitated,” Halpern says. “People who are about to have gastric surgery or those that fail it because they can’t stop binge eating, or alcoholics.”

One potential problem is if the signature of a craving is too specific, it may not be relevant to multiple disorders or even be applicable outside the lab for routine clinical use. “It’s not entirely clear whether this signal is related to the [experiment/task] or the behavior, “says psychiatrist Damiaan Denys of the University of Amsterdam, who was not involved in the study. If it’s too general, you could imagine a situation where someone being treated for compulsive eating can no longer enjoy playing blackjack. “But it’s important because it shows it’s possible to detect a signal that may be used for psychiatric disorders,” Denys says.

This is preliminary research, involving only one human, without showing a human treatment effect. “It was a first-in-man case study to validate our mouse studies — now we have to do it in a larger sample,” Halpern says. “We have an application with the NIH [National Institutes of Health] to test this in obese patients that exhibit bingelike behavior.”

The 10 Best Oh-So-2017 Performances in TV

Aubrey Plaza as Lenny "Cornflakes" Busker in "Legion" (Credit: FX/Michelle Faye)

You don’t need another “best performances of 2017” list, do you? At this point readers can predict who would have a place in the ranks. Emmy rubber-stamped the notion that Sterling K. Brown had a tremendous year, as did Issa Rae, Elisabeth Moss and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Sure, a few of the usual suspects are on this list, including Carrie Coon and Aubrey Plaza.

What interests me more are the TV performances that say something about who we were in 2017 and where the year has brought us. That’s why this list includes scripted portrayals as well as a tip of the hat to TV performances in the realm of news and late night. In their own unique ways these individual efforts on the small screen spoke to us — and for many of us, helped us to make sense of a challenging year or, if not that, at least to make it through with some of our sanity and humor intact.

10. Anthony Atamanuik as Donald J. Trump in “The President Show.” Alec Baldwin bathes in praise for his inflated, ridiculous interpretation of Trump as a petty fool on “Saturday Night Live,” but Atamanuik’s impersonation is at times so close to the real thing that it’s unnerving. He also allows the viewer catharsis, owing to “The President Show” writers’ frequent emphasis on Trump’s similarities to a petulant toddler, positing that beneath the bluster and massive ego hides a scared child with cripplingly low self-esteem. By now we know there’s no way to shame this devil, but in his capacity as a living effigy, Atamanuik offers a kind of relief by highlighting just how small the leader of the free world actually is. And for the 30 minutes that his show is on we can feel a little less anxious about the way the world is going.

9. Jimmy Kimmel as the host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Before 2017 Kimmel wasn’t a frequent flyer in the headline-maker category among late night hosts. That honor tended to go to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the aughts, accompanied the odd David Letterman dig in his later years. That was before the president and a Republican Congress went after the Affordable Care Act, before Kimmel witnessed first-hand the anxiety that less-fortunate parents of children with health problems go through, and before Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy attached Kimmel’s name to the debate.

This was a mistake. Cassidy proclaimed that he’d only vote for a bill that passed “The Jimmy Kimmel Test” — that pre-existing conditions would be covered and life-saving provisions of the ACA would be maintained. When the bill did not pass said test and Cassidy backed it anyway, Kimmel declared open season on the political establishment’s naked hypocrisy.

In less uncertain times Kimmel has treated politics as something to be openly mocked and dismissed, and that has made his recent calls to action particularly potent. Because if that reasonable, regular-guy celebrity is fed up enough to use his late-night network platform to go after the crooks in Washington, then the situation must really be dire. But at least he’s speaking up where other hosts (ahem, Jimmy Fallon) have remained silent.

8. Jimmy Tatro as Dylan Maxwell in “American Vandal.” Entertainment has a habit of rewarding stupidity with reality shows. Witness the staying power of “Jersey Shore” and other MTV series or the 15 minutes of fame granted the likes of, say, the Octomom.

Less common is a sympathetic view of who that stupid person actually is as opposed to what the stupid person does. The adolescent documentarians in Netflix’s mockumentary don’t intentionally try to get us to empathize with Dylan, their school’s resident chucklehead. But as they dig into the case that led to Dylan’s suspension for drawing dicks on faculty cars in spite of his professed innocence, the audience comes to feel something for Tatro’s simple, slack-jawed Dylan despite the fact that he’s willfully irritating, provocative and disrespectful.

If Tatro weren’t so skilled in winning us over, we’d call him a troll. And if we weren’t so inundated with trolls perhaps we not be so readily accepting of the first-season denouement, an outcome that validates and vindicates in one sweep.

7. Betty Gilpin as Debbie Eagan in “GLOW.” Liberty Belle, Debbie’s wrestling persona, is Reagan-era jingoism made flesh, a comic-book character brought to life. Pitting her against Zoya the Destroya, the Cold War Russian villain portrayed by Debbie’s ex-best friend Ruth is an act of genius on the part of the wrestling outfit’s creator Sam Sylvia. The wrestling is fake, but the rivalry behind it is real and residual chemistry these women share, and together, those qualities make their performance in the ring unbeatable.

But there’s a tragedy in the way Gilpin can make her expression flush with rage, frustration and sorrow that goes straight to the heart of any woman and yanks at it. It’s there even when she’s at her brattiest, and it really shines through when she’s fighting. The partnership between Liberty and Zoya works because the collaboration between Gilpin and Alison Brie, who plays Ruth, looks fierce and strong — an alliance of opposites, in many ways reflecting recently revitalized awareness of the need for political unity among women in general. It also stands in contrast to the reality that widespread sisterhood is still a pipe dream, since most white women continue to vote against the political interests of their gender. Then again, if Debbie and Ruth can put their anger at each other aside to deliver the goods when it counts, why can’t the rest of us?



6. Rachel Brosnahan as Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” What would be possible if women didn’t have to contort ourselves to work with, around and in spite of sexism? Midge Maisel explores that question as she defies the expectations of her parents (her father in particular) and the selfishness of a cheating husband to go after a career that she truly loves and one virtually nonexistent for women in 1958: stand-up comedy.

Series showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino could not have known that her Amazon series would premiere weeks after #MeToo felled Louis C.K. and only shortly before another male comedian, T.J. Miller, would be made to answer allegations of sexual assault. Those stories opened the door to conversations about the rampant misogyny in the comedy world, closing doors of opportunity to women who refuse to put themselves in proximity to predators with zero oversight but who often hold the keys to the kingdom, or are offered copies.

Brosnahan’s Midge doesn’t face such blatant ugliness in the opening episodes of the series. Rather, the performer’s insistent spirit, lending her character a biting wit and optimism laced with sarcasm (often marinated in wine), recalls Joan Rivers in her heyday.

5. DeWanda Wise as Nola Darling in “She’s Gotta Have It.” Spike Lee’s 1986 breakthrough film is primarily remembered for what it did for his career, rather than Tracy Camilla Johns’ original rendition of Nola Darling. Johns’ Nola represented Lee’s interpretation of a sexually liberated woman of her time. Wise nails the  vivacious nature of Nola in the now. Her sensualist, a twenty-something Brooklyn artist, embodies the wonder and doubt of youthful adulthood in the modern age, appearing confident in one moment, flaky and self-involved in the next. In the turn of a street corner, her warmth and vulnerability toward a down-and-out neighbor washes away the sins of a prior moment that makes us question her. Through it all she remains aware of the changes in progress around her: the gentrification of her neighborhood, the waning patience with her free-spirited antics, and the rising tide of economic anxiety.

4. Carrie Coon as Nora Durst in “The Leftovers.” Okay, rhapsodizing about Coon in 2017 appears to be the thing to do right now, but if we’re talking about oh-so-2017 performances it would be criminal to omit the way she externalized Nora Durst’s spiritual journey in HBO’s underappreciated existential gem. Coon captured Nora’s frantic push-and-pull between hope and carelessness, acceptance and effort, blind trust and despair with an assured grace. But as we close out this impressively taxing year, the image emblazoned in my mind is the river of water flowing from Nora’s closed eyes — not from tears, but the sprinkler system in the Melbourne hotel room she and her soulmate Kevin set ablaze in anger and frustration. The character may have been actually crying but Coon’s feather-heavy performance left us with the sense that like many of us, by that point she was pretty much all cried out.



3. Jake Tapper as a CNN anchor and host of “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” Tapper’s presence on this list doesn’t mean we believe he’s an “actor” perpetuating so-called “fake news.” Rather, it’s a respectful acknowledgement of the stamina it takes to work in 24-hour cable news, a fast-paced medium accelerated with the nitro injection of Donald Trump’s ignorant unpredictability. And Tapper has met the nonsense and various disinformation campaigns head on, speaking truth to power in a post-truth world with unblinking commitment and an even-keeled confidence.

From his marathon sparring session with double-speak specialist Kellyanne Conway in February to his recent and epic silencing of one of Roy Moore’s more idiotic surrogates, Tapper’s swaggering fearlessness in the face of bullshit peddlers has been a bright spot in a gloomy, doom-filled year.

2. Aubrey Plaza as Lenny in “Legion.” Plaza crystallized a deadpan comedy style on “Parks & Recreation,” which made her performance as Lenny Busker a transfixing shock. Lenny begins the season as the best friend of “Legion” protagonist David Haller. By its close she’s evolved into something altogether different. Several things, truly. The nature of who or what Lenny is keeps changing through the season until an important reveal in the sixth episode, and by then Plaza has incorporated several distinctly terrifying moods and masks into a single role. From week to week the viewer could never be sure what they’d be getting with Lenny Busker, echoing the erratic, sharply surreal mood swings of day-to-day living in 2017.

1. Ted Danson as Michael in “The Good Place.” Danson’s trademark lovable, “aw shucksy” demeanor serves him well in the show’s grand reveal at the end of season 1. All it took was a smile for his character to transform from a bumbling, seemingly benevolent cosmic architect into a devious agent of evil whose entire raison d’etre is to make the afterlife as crappy as possible, in as many unexpected ways as possible, for all eternity.

Danson’s Michael might as well be 2017 in a suit. And he’s plainly having a blast playing an uncaring agent of malice cloaked in a summer-weight suit. But that’s not a bad thing, since the comedy’s current chapter involves Michael joining his charges in a quest to actually and legitimately become a better being. Maybe fate will follow his lead in 2018, because this stint in the Bad Place is wearing us out.

5 bad cell phone habits you should break

(Credit: AP)

Radiation from your cellphone could be bad for more than just your mental health, California state health officials warn.

 

The California Department of Public Health has just released the first-ever guidelines on avoiding too much exposure to the radiation cellphones emit. State officials said one of the reasons for releasing the guidelines is that statistics show cellphone use is at an all-time high, with 95 percent of Americans using cellphones each day, Pew Research Center notes.

Karen Smith, of the state health department, said there is widespread public concern over cellphone safety, according to a San Francisco CBS station.

Perhaps another reason the guidelines are coming out now is due to pressure from researchers and others.

Psychologist and UC Berkeley professor Joel Moskowitz sued the health department in 2009 for its refusal to release information on the risks of cellphone use to the public. He won the lawsuit this spring. “People are being injured and harmed by the delay in having this information accessible to them,” Moskowitz told San Francisco’s CBS News affiliate.

Potential Risks

Cellphone use may increase the risk of cancer, but the scientific evidence so far is inconclusive, mainly due to the relatively short period of time cellphones have been around.

Cellphone radiation could be harmful due to the type of radio waves the devices emit: non-ionizing radiation. Tissues close to phone antennas — which exist inside of every smartphone — can be heated by the radiation, as the FDA, American Cancer Society and National Cancer Institute all recognize. When you hold your phone up to your head, those nearby tissues include your ears and brain.

Some studies have linked cellphone radiation exposure with brain tumors and other brain cancers, as the American Cancer Society acknowledges, but most studies have not shown conclusive evidence one way or another. Because cellphone use has only been widespread for a few years, as ACA notes, it is impossible for any study to conclude what the long-term health effects of exposure could be.

Higher levels of exposure to non-ionizing radiation are known to impact the health of human cells and DNA, but whether cellphones can expose us to those higher levels is a question researchers are still working to answer.

AlterNet ran an article by Christopher Ketcham in 2011 exploring the widespread reports of cellphones and WiFi making people and animals sick. For the first time in human history, Ketcham noted, people are being exposed to electromagnetic frequencies from cellphones, WiFi and digital meters 24 hours a day. He quotes David O. Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the State University of New York, who said, “Radiofrequency radiation has a number of biological effects which can be reproducibly found in animals and cellular systems. We really cannot say for certain what the adverse effects are in humans. But the indications are that there may be — and I use the words ‘may be’ — very serious effects in humans.”

While the National Cancer Institute’s official stance is that cellphones likely do not emit high enough levels of radiation to affect human health, at least in the short term, its fact sheet on cellphone safety states: “Radiofrequency exposure from cellphone use does cause heating to the area of the body where a cellphone or other device is held (ear, head, etc.). However, it is not sufficient to measurably increase body temperature, and there are no other clearly established effects on the body from radiofrequency energy.”

Other research shows that cellular phones could potentially lower sperm count, cause headaches, and intefere with sleep, hearing and memory retention.

CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta warned in 2012 that the risks of cellphone radiation are largely unknown. See the video, below:

 

 

An Atlantic article from earlier this year notes that a study published in PLUS ONE concluded there is a “‘significant’ association between long-term mobile phone use and the risk of glioma,” a type of brain tumor.
“But the actual significance of the link is questionable,” the Atlantic piece states. “The data they used spanned 11 studies between 1980 and 2016, but the researchers themselves acknowledged the evidence is limited and much of the data is ‘poor quality.’ The biggest takeaway, then, may be their conclusion that more study is needed.”

As in the U.S., European health experts continue to argue over the potential risks of cellphone radiation amid lack of long-term studies. A large-scale cellphone health study, the COSMOS project, is currently working to track the phone usage and health of more than half a million people across Europe. The study began in 2007 and will continue for the next two to three decades.

The New Guidelines

Since the long-term risk of cellphone use is unknown, why not take some simple, commonsense steps to reduce radiation exposure just in case? This was the apparent thought process behind California’s new guidelines.

The risk of cellphone radiation exposure can increase or decrease exponentially based on some simple do’s and don’ts. It’s a matter of tweaking a few basic habits.

Here are five things not to do, according to the California guidelines for cellphone health, “How to Reduce Exposure to Radiofrequency Energy from Cellphones.”

1. Don’t hold your phone up to your ear.“Use the speakerphone or a headset instead,” because “wireless (Bluetooth) and wired headsets emit much less RF energy than cellphones.” The guidelines also suggest sending text messages rather than talking on the phone whenever possible.

2. Try not to use your phone if you’re in a fast-moving vehicle.“Your phone puts out more RF energy to maintain connections to avoid dropping calls as it switches connections from one cell tower to the next unless it is in airplane mode,” the guidelines state.

3. Avoid using your phone when you have one or two service bars showing.“Cellphones put out more RF energy to connect with cell towers when the signal is weak,” the guide notes.

4. Don’t carry your phone in your pocket, bra or holster close to your body.The guidelines suggest you carry it in a backpack, briefcase, purse or elsewhere, so that the device is kept several inches away from your body. A few inches can make a difference, it notes. Also, put phones on airplane mode when carrying them close as the devices don’t emit RF energy when in airplane mode.

5. Never sleep with your phone under your pillow or near your head. Karen Smith from the state health department suggests keeping your phone at least an arm’s length away from your body when sleeping. You should also turn your phone off or on airplane mode while you sleep, the guidelines note.

April M. Short is a national health, wellness  and social  justice journalist of more than a decade. She previously worked as AlterNet’s drugs section editor and health section editor. She currently edits part of the time for AlterNet, and freelances for a number of publications nationwide.

How can I encourage a reluctant reader?

(Credit: Getty/Steve Debenport)

Kids may express reluctance toward reading for a variety of reasons. Often, adult guidance; variation in style of writing, text length, and subject matter; and well-chosen books are just the ticket to attract reluctant readers.

As with anything kids would rather not do, forcing them, comparing them to other kids, and using other negative reinforcements backfire. There are many ways to encourage kids who are reluctant.

Here are some ideas:

Encourage reading for fun. “Wimpy Kid” author Jeff Kinney says that sometimes adults focus so much on getting kids to read they forget about the fun. But kids who are having fun will read.
Go graphic. There are many high-quality graphic novels that draw in readers through illustrations, short-form text, and engrossing story lines.
Seek out sports. For kids who’d rather be physically active than read a book, consider books about teams or by athletes, such as “You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!” by Jonah Winter about the famous lefty; “Hothead” by Cal Ripken Jr.; or other books about sports.
Think big print. The “Here’s Hank” series by Henry Winkler features a dyslexic hero and a large, easy-to-read typeface.
Let them follow their interests. You may not love “Captain Underpants,” but if that’s what your kid wants to read, put aside your judgment for the greater good.
Find characters who reflect your kid’s experience. Kids like to see themselves in the stories they read. Look for books with characters and situations that mirror their experience — for example, kids of color or with divorced parents or who live on a farm or who love dogs. Whatever helps kids identify with the story will keep them more engaged.
Look for different reading opportunities. Reading is valuable no matter what the format: Pokemon cards, product labels, game manuals, recipes. Mix in shorter-form material with longer stuff.
Get techy. Ebooks and storybook apps that offer some multimedia along with the narrative can be entertaining and educational and may draw in kids who are turned off by text alone. Use them alongside traditional reading.
Fact-check. With their amazing stats, incredible images, short-form text, and start-anywhere formats, books of facts such as “Guinness World Records” and “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” entice kids who’d rather not tackle longer stories.​
Take turns. With a book your kid has chosen, take turns reading a page (or two) to each other. Ask questions along the way.

This Florida stealth offensive against unions could preview GOP onslaught in 2018

(Credit: AP Photo/Erik Schelzig)

Florida Republicans are pushing a bill designed to deal the state’s unions a death blow. House Bill 25, which was introduced by Longwood state Rep. Scott Plakon, would decertify any union in which 50 percent of the workers don’t pay dues, thus preventing them from being able to collectively bargain. Despite the fact that unions negotiate for the benefit of all their workers, no employee is forced to pay dues in Florida, because it’s a “Right to Work” state.

Right to Work policies are purposely constructed to reduce the resources of organized labor, as many workers realize they can benefit from their union’s collective bargaining efforts without giving them any money. In practice, HB25 largely targets unions that lean left, exempting the few worker organizations that typically back the GOP: firefighter, police and corrections unions.

This same exact move was just attempted by state Republicans. HB11 was the effectively the same bill, but it died during the 2017 legislative session in May. “This is divide and conquer … It’s an outright attack on labor unions,” Democratic Rep. Wengay Newton said at the time. “The right to bargain should be upheld and shouldn’t be interfered with.”

Not only has the failed legislation been resurrected as HB25, but it’s been fast-tracked for a floor vote when the 2018 legislative session begins next month. Typically, bills need approval from multiple committees, but HB25 was assigned to just one panel: the Republican-controlled Government Accountability Committee. The bill easily passed 14-9, despite one Republican voting with the Democrats and activists protesting the action outside. Members of the committee received letters from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded conservative advocacy group, urging them to vote for the bill.

HB25 would disproportionately impact women employees, who make up the majority at the unions that would be targeted, while the previously mentioned male-dominated organizations would remain protected. This fact was brought up was brought up during the Government Accountability Committee by Democratic Rep. Kristen Jacobs. “I know you said that was not your intent,” Jacobs said to Plakon. “But when you look at the workers affected by this bill — over 80 percent are women. Now if you look at the unions exempted … they are largely made up of men.”

The legislation could end collective bargaining for most teachers in the state, and Florida’s conservative lawmakers haven’t exactly concealed their disdain for the organizations. “The teachers’ union is fixated on halting innovation and competition in education,” said House Speaker Richard Corcoran during his swearing-in ceremony in 2016. “They are literally trying to destroy the lives of a hundred thousand children.”

United Teachers of Dade, Miami’s public teachers union, has between 13,000 and 14,000 members. But if stripped of their collective bargaining rights, they’d be unable to fight for the 30,000 teachers who work in the district. “HB25 is an unnecessary and destructive bill that targets women-dominated industries by seeking to eradicate their labor rights,” UTD president Karla Hernandez-Mats told In These Times. “There is a blatant disparate treatment being applied by the legislature between majority male and female professions and their unions, and it is unfortunate to see that our state lawmakers are attempting to move our country backwards instead of forward.”

Florida’s unions are already up against the odds without HB25. Not only is Florida a Right to Work state, its constitution prohibits public employees from striking. Just how devastating could this bill be for labor? Its potential impact can be gleaned from Florida’s last Annual Workforce Report. Only 2.8 percent of AFSCME state employees and 7.9 percent of Florida Nurses Association members pay dues. Even the Police Benevolent Association, the strongest union in the state, would be decertified if the legislation applied to them. Only 45.7 percent of their members pay dues, just below the bill’s 50 percent threshold.

The Trump administration has successfully stacked the National Labor Relations Board with pro-business forces, intervened against public employee unions in a landmark Supreme Court case, and moved to overturn the few labor victories that occurred under Obama. But what’s happening at a national level is taking place at an accelerated rate within various states. HB25 is reminiscent of a sweeping anti-union bill that was passed in Iowa at the beginning of 2017. That legislation stripped more than 100,000 workers of their collective bargaining rights and, just like Florida, the bill was fast-tracked and police unions were exempt. Nearly all of these bills are similar to Scott Walker’s infamous Act 10, the vast attack on organized labor in Wisconsin in 2011.

If HB25 is successful, it could provide yet another blueprint for state lawmakers looking to crush organized labor in 2018.

Of mice and murder, and Ronald Reagan

(Credit: AP/Getty/Salon/Mireia Triguero Roura)

When I was 21 years old I murdered mice at the crossroads of the world and almost got away with it. Not that anyone cared much. Not there, not then. I’m guessing few tears have been shed at any point for the mice of Times Square, but by June of 1981 we were six months into the blindingly bright new reality of the Reagan Era, and New Yorkers seemed to be splitting into roughly two large camps in response: those fighting desperately to keep their eyes open, and those fighting to keep them shut.

If that sounds a little dramatic, a little much, well that’s how it felt to a young, self-serious assistant manager of a six-screen movie theater on 44th and 7th, through whose glass doors the assistant manager would watch in slack-jawed wonderment every evening as the known world went koo koo. As if everything had taken on the qualities of dramatization, grown swollen and shiny, engorged with laughing gas.

People were wearing costumes instead of clothes, spiffed-up regurgitations of 30-year-old styles.They were speaking out of the corners of their mouths, their words bracketed by quotation marks. Two old Broadway theaters across the street were being razed to make room for a 30-story hotel with “California King” sized beds, whatever they were; a decades-old diner in the neighborhood was being kitschified into a 1950s-style “diner.” Even Bond’s, the iconic men’s clothing store above the Criterion, had been similarly mummified and repurposed as a retro nightclub.

Anyone who was alive in 1981 knows that our present moment is less of a beginning than a fruition. It can be difficult to communicate to those who weren’t there just how quickly and radically the culture inverted itself in just a few years, how disorienting it was for so many of us. Reagan, who liked to tell stories about being present at the liberation of concentration camps he had never visited, whose White House operated under the guiding principle that, “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true,” was first called the “Great Communicator” in August of ’81, giving Orwellian punctuation to a summer when when economic supply and demand traded places, music became a visual medium, and Jeff Koons became famous.

The movies being shown at the Criterion were either bloated, winking facsimiles of the stories they’d displaced, or new stories that blithely inverted the moral valence of the old ones. When it premiered in 1983, it wasn’t until about 45 minutes into watching “Risky Business” that I realized the filmmakers weren’t kidding, that they actually expected me to root for Tom Cruise’s amoral frat-boy and not against him.

The other staff members at the Criterion did not share my alarm, not outwardly anyway. My immediate superior was a defiantly bearded holdout from The Before Time named David, who oversaw my attempts at money-counting and book-balancing with the half-lidded gaze of a man who spent his breaks chain-smoking his way through “The Portable Dorothy Parker.” He was 30, about five and a half feet tall with a pointed chin and floppy bangs, and seemed to be making the leap from elvish to wizened without stopping at untroubled. He wore enormous, square-framed glasses. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone more pregnant with unspoken observations than David was in 1981.

He had only been at the Criterion for three years, yet David was the senior member of our staff. As movie theaters went it was not a terrible place to work — it was even, on occasion, thrilling (like on News Year’s Eve when we would all head up to the roof with picnic dinners and watch the thrashing mobs below from the comfort of fold-out beach chairs, or on our late night explorations of the labyrinth of hidden passageways that connected the Criterion to its neighbors, or on the morning in early June when 2,000 kids in Doc Martens lined up in front of the theater at 10 a.m. to see a matinee show by The Clash during their two week run at Bond’s ) — but nobody ever wanted to stay for very long. Most of us were on our way to or from somewhere, recently hired or about to leave. We were students, immigrants, divorcees, refugees, rehabbers, and in my case, a dropout, since leaving a junior-year lecture on The Politics of the Soviet Union at NYU, and never returning to the class or the school again.

In thinking about the moment years later I would finally notice that my retreat from impending adulthood had coincided almost exactly with the violent end of my parents’ marriage, but at the time I was certain I was leaving school because, as I put it to my soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, “They simply have nothing to teach me here.”

There was a certain redundancy to being 21 in 1981. The country itself had glimpsed, in its post-Watergate disillusionment, the frightening and liberating truths of post-adolescence: that our fathers were human, that we were mortal, burdened with responsibility and capable of cruelty, that a meaningful future would require self-reflection — and with the election of an addled fantasist we had chosen, as young adults will, to run from reality and take uneasy refuge in delusion.

Every night after the last show had started at the Criterion I would stand at the ticket box with Aman, the eldest of three friends from Afghanistan who had arrived at the Criterion two years earlier, after the invading Soviet army had chased them from their homes. Strikingly elegant, with a swept-back mane of hair and the posture of a sentry, Aman would ask in halting sentences why I had given up on my education, and smile with patience at my lunging replies. I was a lost, thick-tongued mess, but thankfully not far gone enough to miss the dull thud produced by the complaints of a foggy-eyed American suburbanite on the ears of an exile, so I let my colleague do most of the talking, which, as you can imagine was of a distinctly guarded sort.

Aman allowed himself a suspiciously hearty laugh at my expense at least once, though, when I finally confessed, during one of our ticket-counter chats, to a recent spree of mouse murders.

I had murdered my first mouse about eight weeks after taking the job at the Criterion, or about six weeks since the mice had launched a series of midnight attacks on the store-front ice cream stand the theater’s owners had opened in a renovated former box office. Ice cream stands were popping up all over New York that summer, selling a product that, like so many other things — suits, chairs, baseball players and beds — had suddenly and without warning doubled in size.

The Criterion itself had recently undergone a metastatic growth, with the division of its ground-level movie house into two, and the addition of four new bunker-ish theaters in the basement. It wasn’t very long, of course, before all that digging and growing and ice cream-welcoming caught the attention of the building’s permanent residents, and, on a distractingly humid night in early June, inspired them to overcome their usual shyness to brazenly dine, buffet style, at the stand’s five-gallon tub of rum raisin.

An emergency meeting was called by Rich, one of the owners, a sputtering fire hydrant of a man who had recently taken to wearing blue shirts with white collars that only served to emphasize his myocardial complexion. Rich, along with his wife and sons, operated the Criterion in a manner that perfectly evoked the level of easy-going, drama-free problem-solving we all associate with the word “family,” and forever inoculated me against the cultural mythology of “mom and pop shops.”

Rich had a plan for dealing with the mice and it went like this: Kill the mice. Kill all the mice, however we have to, every day, for as long as necessary to keep them from getting between us and a single penny of that sweet, sweet Fuck-You-Jimmy-Carter-It’s-Morning-in America-Now Money.

The mice-killing would happen like this: The morning crew would set out some traps, glue traps, and every night at closing time the college dropout would dispose of the trapped and killed enemies of wealth in a manner to be determined later. OK?

OK. So, that was OK. No biggie, whatever. Except I probably didn’t say “no biggie, whatever” because people weren’t saying things like that yet. We were still in the first few months of The Reaganing, and there were still some things, a few stalwart, remaining things, like words, that hadn’t yet been fully holographed and italicized. Or so it seemed to me, self-serious me, as I helpfully explained to the Criterion’s cashiers, concessionaires and ushers in long, spit-flecked, nightly asides much like this one, often for precisely the same purpose: to avoid the uncomfortable subject of mice.

Like people and presidents, mice do their worst damage in secret: the poisoning of wells, the sharing of contagion, the spreading of fear. We are left to infer the trouble they’ve caused by the shit they leave behind. In 1981, Ronald Reagan was doing his best to murder the past and obscure the future. He occupied a constantly evolving, revisionist present, where he was able to make a virtue of his knack for amiable amnesia and blithely dismiss “misstatements” with a calculated twinkle in his eye — and the press cooperated by judging the administration on its own terms.

The good news is that, like people and presidents, mice also cannot resist the desire to force others to clean up their poop, a hubris they refuse to unlearn and which leads them, inevitably, to their doom.

They do not go peacefully, however. A mouse stuck in a glue trap will chew through flesh to free himself, and die trying. He will snap his own bones, break his own teeth, and die in agony.

Finding a mouse in a glue trap usually meant finding a dying mouse, rather than an already dead one. It meant witnessing his agony, sometimes three or four times a night, something that only got harder the more I did it.

The question of what to do about that had become an urgent one. Tossing writhing rodents into a trash can was unimaginable. David suggested I let him pet the mice. David had a sore on his arm, near his wrist, that wouldn’t heal. A round, purple lesion that he referred to as his “stigmata.” “I’m like a reverse Jesus,” he said. One touch from me and they’ll keel right over.”

So I walked into the office to ask Rich, the owner, why we didn’t just hire an exterminator. I found him sitting there in front of teetering stacks of one- and five-dollar bills — a not uncommon sight in the movie theater business, but always a fraught one, since the movie theater business is actually the popcorn business, or, more accurately, the popcorn cup business, since popcorn cannot be inventoried in units, while cups of course can, and so the opportunities for mischief are as plentiful as the number of cups that can be retrieved from the trash every night by concessionaires who then refill and resell them while pocketing, and sometimes sharing, the profits.

So maybe it was just-a-hazard-of-the-business jumpiness, or maybe not, but whatever the reason, when I entered Rich’s office and asked my exterminator question he cocked his head at me and said, “Do you like your job?” and before I could muster an answer he was chalking a diagram for me on the office blackboard. As he drew he said, “Do you know why you have a job?” and then something like, “You have a job because I. Make. Money. I created your job and everyone’s job in this place and I pay for your uniform, your Social Security, (there were lots of chalk dollar signs and arrows now, raining down from the top of the blackboard at a stick figure that I guess was supposed to be me. “. . . and I give you breaks and let you eat in the office and all this stuff I do not and should not have to do because I make enough money to do them. You wanna give me a hard time about being smart enough to not get ripped off by some schmuck with a tank full of Raid I can buy at the A&P? How about a little gratitude? How about maybe instead some gratitude?”

I took a breath and mumbled my thanks, and what I did later that night was this: I followed a telltale trail of droppings behind the ice cream counter, to find a mouse who had just then and just barely been trapped. One of his rear feet had firmly, permanently, dug its way into to the glue. I lifted him, or, not him but the trap, as he dangled from it, and I placed it in a white ice cream bag and crumpled the top closed. Then I walked out the front door of the theater toward a momentarily empty Seventh Avenue and I bent quickly to place the bag a foot or so from the curb, turned right around and headed back inside without waiting to see what happened. When I left work through the same door an hour later I avoided looking at scene head-on, but caught the flattened shape of the bag in my peripheral vision.

I repeated the procedure every night after that, at least once, sometimes more.

The top ten television shows of 1975 were, in order, “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son,” “Chico and the Man,” “The Jeffersons,” “M*A*S*H,” “Rhoda,” “The Waltons,” “Good Times,” “Maude” and “Hawaii Five-O.” Anyone too young to remember them should look up images of the people who starred in those series, people like Esther Rolle and Bill Macy. You might notice that almost all of them look suspiciously like actual people, human beings, with medical histories and memories and digestive systems. And if you look up 1985’s top shows you might notice that this was very much not the case for the stars of “Dynasty,” “Dallas,” “The Cosby Show,” “Family Ties,” “The A-Team,” “Simon & Simon,” “Knots Landing” and “Falcon Crest.” You’ll see a gallery of the kind of faces we’re now used to seeing on TV, the ones that look like they’re assembled in face factories and shipped to Hollywood in bubble-wrap. That was the face Reagan’s America loved, the kind that asked nothing of its audience, and it was the face his White House presented to the public. Despite all his time on horseback, Reagan was a man of affect, not action, and he was inspiring a culture of apathy and entitlement.

Sometime in June of ’81 a patron vomited in the entryway to one of the new basement bunkers. I had cleaned up my share of excretions from a wide variety of urban inhabitants over the two years that I’d been working in theaters, but my recent elevation to management meant that I would now be able to delegate that and other unpleasant tasks to the ushers.

So I pulled a mop and bucket out of the storeroom, started walking it toward Aman, who was the usher on duty and . . . and I kept walking, right past him, over to the puddle on the floor. I had never been a boss before, of any kind, and I was incapable of making the needed request of anyone, let alone Aman, who was at least 20 years older than I and a lifetime more dignified.

I got to work on the stinking mess myself, but as I went to wring out the mop Aman placed his hand on my wrist and silently implored me not to. The look in his eyes wasn’t a collegial, “please, let me,” it was pained. Admonishing. Of course. I had insulted him. I let go of the mop without a word and watched as he went to work. He mopped that floor, that dirty floor of a Times Square movie theater, quietly and quickly, with his back straight and his face at rest, without a trace of a grimace. He cleaned it in the manner I’d seen him write letters home, talk to children and take off his jacket, with aplomb, in the manner I’d seen him scold the bullies who were starting to show up at closing time to yell “towel head” and “Ayatollah”: with purpose and serenity.

When he was finished Aman put the mop and bucket away, washed his hands, and joined me at the ticket box. We watched the late-night parade of punks and tourists thin to a few tipsy stragglers, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know this man, this man with whom I’d been sharing this midnight ritual for months, at all. I said, “Aman, what did you do at home, in Kabul, for work?”

Aman reached into his breast pocket and handed me a coin inscribed with Arabic calligraphy. I asked, “were you . . . a businessman, did you buy or sell things?” Aman reached again into his pocket and took out a small stack of Polaroid pictures. He handed them to me, one by one, taking a small pause between each photo. The first was of a haunting, twisted abstract shape in bronze, a sort of torqued apple with a hole through it. The next showed an urban plaza, a beautiful, terraced green and concrete space embraced by a large, sloping and curving monument of some kind, a sculpture, clearly created by the same hand responsible for the apple and the coin.

Amanullah Haiderzad was, and is, Afghanistan’s most celebrated artist. He’s the founder of its first undergraduate arts program at the University of Kabul, and the designer of its minted currency.

I don’t remember what I said to Aman about the pictures of his work. I do remember that as I spoke I felt a little bit like what I imagined astronauts feel when they’re “pulling G’s,” like I was rushing with great velocity toward or away from something.

One night not long after that one I was lifting a glue trap with a mouse stuck to it from a corner of the ice cream store when David burst into the room and said, “They’re holding a door for us upstairs at Bond’s. If we take the back stairway we can get in for free.” We bolted up an old, unused stairway as an insistent murmur above us grew to a ferocious, ecstatic beat, through a door that had been left ajar, and right into a frenetic, sweaty crowd lifting itself up and down in unison to The Clash. We stood shoulder to shoulder, very still at first, stupefied, on the edge of a hurricane. The room was blazing hot but I slipped my hands into my jacket pockets to pull it closed, in an act of self-comfort in the face of all that raging energy. It took less than a second for the pain to shoot straight from my fingertip, straight up my arm to my neck, an electric hot spasm that opened my mouth before I could gather enough breath for a scream. I grabbed my bleeding finger with the other hand, turned to David, and finally forced a word out: “Mouse!” An unmurdered mouse, still in the trap, still in my pocket where I’d stuffed him.

Blue and amber lights were spinning and strobing now as the crowd swarmed and engulfed us. Joe Strummer stomped a black boot on the stage while the drummer beat the skins into a raging, anguished delirium. I lifted my hands above my head and let the blood stream down my arm. The drums grew louder still. They sounded like they were beating a procession, a tribute to a great and murdered world.

Dirty work in Colorado: Coal threatens to harm the wilderness

(Credit: AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

Two federal agencies that were scolded by a federal judge for failing to look at what impact an expanded coal mine in Colorado would have on climate change have once again greenlighted those plans.

Environmental groups are suing the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to try to stop roads from being built in undeveloped forest near Colorado’s Mount Gunnison so the mine can be expanded.

The lawsuit, filed by High Country Conservation Advocates and four other groups in federal court in Colorado, seeks an injunction to prevent Arch Coal from bulldozing roads in the Sunset Roadless Area.

“It’s senseless to sacrifice these public lands so more carbon pollution can be spewed into the atmosphere,” said Allison Melton, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.

A spokeswoman for Arch Coal did not respond Monday to an email from DCReport.org.

The push to expand the mine into the Sunset Roadless Area comes as U.S. utilities are shutting coal-fired power plants and shifting to cheap natural gas, wind and solar power. Coal production in 2018 is expected to decline. A Nov. 2 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said coal-fired power plants “may eventually become obsolete.”

Arch Coal, the nation’s second largest coal producer, has been Colorado’s largest industrial polluter of methane during the last six years.

The greenhouse gas has been linked to climate change. Average temperatures in Colorado have increased by 2 degrees over the past 30 years, and wildfire season is weeks longer.

 

ACTION BOX/What You Can Do About It

Tell Ryan Zinke, secretary of Interior, your thoughts on expanding a coal mine when the demand for coal is falling.

Zinke can be reached at 202-208-3100 or write him at U.S. Department of the Interior, 1849 C Street NW, Washington, DC 20240.

Zinke is also on Facebook and Twitter.

High Country Conservation Advocates can be reached at 866-349-7104.

The Sunset Roadless Area is 5,800 acres on the west side of Mount Gunnison in Gunnison County with aspen groves, beaver ponds and habitat for the threatened Canada lynx. Mountain lions, elk, mule deer and turkeys also live there.

Arch Coal has wanted to expand the West Elk coal mine beneath the Sunset Roadless Area since 2009. In 2012 and 2013, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management approved plans to explore the area for coal, but a federal judge blocked it.

Judge R. Brooke Jackson wrote that the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management removed estimates of costs associated with climate change that were in draft environmental impact statements. An email from an economist said those costs at West Elk could be up to $984 million a year.

Jackson found that the agencies had violated the National Environmental Policy Act which requires that agencies analyze environmental impacts and disclose those to the public. He ordered the coal company not to explore the area for coal.

Arch Coal’s renewed effort comes after more environmental reviews. The Forest Service agreed to modify two coal leases in December to allow Arch Coal to expand into the Sunset Roadless Area, and the Interior Department also approved the modifications.

The Forest Service has estimated that the 48 methane drainage wells and the roads needed to service them would be on 1,701 acres of the Sunset Roadless Area.

Terry Crews and the shifting image of survivors

Terry Crews (Credit: AP/Jordan Strauss)

Terry Crews said he decided to tell his own #MeToo story after he saw the mounting skepticism and disbelief levied against the women coming forward in Hollywood about their experiences of sexual harassment and abuse.

Through a brave and candid Twitter thread, Crews described a traumatic encounter where an unnamed, but powerful agent allegedly groped Crews at a party in front of his wife (it was later revealed the talent agent was Adam Venit, former head of the motion picture department at William Morris Endeavor).

During an interview with ABC, Crews said the assault happened not once, but twice that night, and Venit stuck his tongue out at him in what he says was an overtly sexual manner. His wife confirmed Crews’ accusations to the network.

Since Crews came forward with his allegations, he has been a tireless advocate and ally as the tidal wave of sexual misconduct allegations coming from Hollywood and elsewhere continues to roll in. He’s refused to back down or be silenced. Crews posted a screenshot of an email that he says was from music mogul Russell Simmons where he asks Crews to give Venit “a pass.” Crews also said that his family has been spied on by WME.

Message Russell Simmons sent to me regarding my sexual assault case against Adam Venit of @WME:

Dear @UncleRUSH——
NO ONE GETS A PASS pic.twitter.com/DmEvqWVxkc

— terrycrews (@terrycrews) November 19, 2017

But in Crews’ outspokenness, in his unwavering support for all of the survivors sharing their own stories, he has forced a new reckoning of what sexual misconduct victims look like in the mainstream.

“I think Terry Crews is brave,” Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, told Salon. He “continues to be brave because he continues to speak up.” She added that the #MeToo movement has never been about just women.

It’s not a novel clarification that men are sexually assaulted — one in six of them are reportedly victims of sexual assault. But with Crews being a former NFL defenseman and a visibly muscular, traditionally masculine, tall, black man, he has opened up space in #MeToo in a substantial way. In a society where black men are rarely seen as victims, Crews is also actively combating a long, ugly, traumatic history of the hyper-sexualization of African-American men in the U.S.

 

 

“It’s really difficult I think as a black man to come forward and be honest about the way in which they are looked at and dealt with,” Burke said, “like the fear of black men in sexual violence, but as survivors of it, not perpetrators.”

It’s a phenomenon Crews is distinctly aware of. “The way he [Venit] looked at me, the way he giggled, it was one of those things where he was like ‘hey man, no one’s ever going to believe you,'” Crews told ABC’s Michael Strahan. But Crews has remained steadfast, filing a police report about the incident, suing Venit and refusing to be shamed. “I did not deserve to get molested,” he told ABC, and further, people need to be held accountable every single time, Crews told Time.

Zeke Thomas, son of NBA hall of famer Isiah Thomas and renowned DJ and music producer, has been very vocal about his own experience of rape since well before the Harvey Weinstein allegations broke the floodgates. In April of this year, he became the first male ambassador for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. And still, Thomas says, Crews’ story had a profound impact on him. “A straight, big, masculine, black male was assaulted,” Thomas told me on “Salon Talks.” “This isn’t just a gay issue, this isn’t just a women’s issue, this is now a human issue. And we’re bringing that to the forefront.”

“The takeaways and lessons are simple: it can happen to anybody, at any time, anywhere,” he added. “It’s all around us and this monster has to be defeated.”

Moving the conversation about sexual assault forward has faced roadblocks at every turn. The public is generally comfortable with supporting famous white women, and much less inclined when the victims are of color, or trans, poor or not women at all.

This was made clear with the attacks by Lena Dunham against actor Aurora Perrineau when she alleged that she was raped by a writer for Dunham’s show “Girls.” “Things women don’t lie about: rape,” Dunham once tweeted. When confronted by a woman of color who lodged an accusation against one of her white co-workers, and having no proof of its falsehood outside of the assurances of her friend, however, Dunham said, “this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.” Funny how that happened.

As well, both Weinstein and members of the public saved their strongest doubts and indictments of the producer’s many accusers for actors Lupita Nyong’o and Salma Hayek, both women of color. Further a New York Times story about a culture of rampant sexual harassment in Ford plants that mostly targeted women of color has received significantly less coverage than any similar accounts coming from Hollywood.

Similarly, much of the entertainment industry has shown a certain disregard when it comes to Crews’ claims. Venit initially took a leave of absence after the allegations, but returned to his job one month later. Weinstein, and many others like him, will likely never work again.

But Terry Crews and countless others may have begun, ever so slightly, to convince the media that the status quo of privileging the plight of white women will not cut it any more when it comes to systemized sexual misconduct. Until the power dynamics behind the abuse of all people are upended, until victims are no longer questioned and doubted more than their alleged perpetrators, they will stand there as a reminder that the survivors can be anyone, from golden-haired Best Actress Academy Award winners, to Latina factory workers, to trans individuals, to boys of all colors, to 6’3″, 245-pound black men.

If we are going to make real strides in tackling sexual harassment and assault in the workplace and elsewhere, we must let go of any preconceived notions or visions we have about victims and survivors. The nature of abuse and predation is broad and ravenous enough that it doesn’t make such distinctions, that its targets are as varied as those who commit it.

By acknowledging only the white, only the feminine, only the famous survivors, we lose the opportunity to address the problem in whole rather than in part, to attack it at the roots rather than at the branches.

Luckily, we’ve got Terry Crews helping to lead the way there.