Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 262

“Maybe this is all in your head”: When doctors don’t believe women

Jennifer Brea appears in Unrest by Jennifer Brea, an official selection of the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute . (Credit: Photo by Sam Heesen)

What happens when you know something is terribly wrong but nobody believes you?

Not too long ago, if Jennifer Brea had gone to a doctor with the debilitating symptoms that left her bedridden, she would have been diagnosed with “hysteria” — a catch-all for pretty much any unexplainable symptom experienced by a woman and attributed to things like an uncooperative uterus, or sexual repression, or sexual promiscuity . . . or just women’s “frailty.”

Today, Jennifer is diagnosed with a condition generically described as chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME for short). There is no test and there is no cure. In fact, it wasn’t until a decade ago that medical professionals recognized it as a true condition, even though millions of people in the U.S. — mostly women — meet the criteria for it.

As Jennifer sought treatment for her symptoms, “they would run a wide range of tests and do investigations. And then when they couldn’t find anything, it always turned back to, ‘Well, maybe you’re just really stressed. Maybe you are depressed. Maybe there’s nothing wrong at all. Maybe this is all in your head.’”

It took Jennifer over a year of seeing doctors and getting second, third and fourth opinions to even land on her diagnosis. Was this reluctance to diagnose Jennifer due to the lack of knowledge about this fairly prevalent disease? Or was there another unstated prejudice standing in the way of Jennifer getting treatment?

“I started to suspect as I was trying to get a diagnosis that I was being taken less seriously because I was young and female there was a strong expectation that because of my youth I was supposed to be well and nothing could be wrong,” Jennifer told me in our interview for “Inflection Point.” “But that also because of my youth and my gender that I was just more prone to be kind of anxious and worry about my body and what I was feeling. . . . And I think there’s just this sort of unspoken expectation that women are more fragile and more achy, more whatever.”

Jennifer and millions of other people diagnosed with ME — mostly women — have quietly disappeared from the radar of the medical establishment while they suffer alone in their beds for days, weeks, even months, sometimes unable to turn on a light or even listen to music because of their unbearable pain.

To show the world that this is a real disease with a truly debilitating impact on her life — not just in her head — and to inspire the medical community to take the lead on finding answers, Jennifer created a film, mostly from her bed, out of the videos she captured of herself, others like her and the few experts there are. Her film is called “Unrest.”

Listen to our conversation:

Subscribe to Inflection Point.

As Jennifer told me, “there are literally thousands of people out there who you don’t know yet, but we’re here and we will embrace you and we will do everything we can to support you and we will believe you.”

It’s time for women to be taken seriously when it comes to our health, our bodies and our ability to speak out.

Laura Benanti: “I don’t live in a lighthouse, ladies!”

Laura Benanti

Despite what you may have seen in the conspiracy-verse lately, there is only one true Fake Melania, and her name is Laura Benanti. The 38-year-old actress and singer was already a name as a Tony-winning Broadway star and regular on shows like “Nashville” and “Supergirl,” when her turn as America’s leading member of the Third Wives’ Club on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” introduced her to a whole new fan base. Recently, Salon caught up with the busy actress in between shooting for her new season of “The Detour,” rehearsals for Amy Schumer’s Broadway debut “Meteor Shower” and co-raising baby daughter Ella Rose with husband Patrick Brown to talk about sexism, motherhood and not living in a lighthouse.

How are you today? Having it all, right?

Yeah, it’s a lot. Motherhood looks so easy in commercials. And, oh my God, don’t even get me started about Instagram. That’s why my Instagram is just chock full of me being like, “This shit is hard.”

It makes me insane when I see a beautiful woman with a blowout and a white flowy dress standing at the ocean lifting her perfectly dressed baby up in the air, and they’re both beaming. I’m like, that’s not life, or it’s not mine.

I look like a garbage monster right now. Literally, my doorman said to me the other day, “You know what I like about you? You don’t care about what you look like.” You know what? I used to but I don’t anymore. Your priorities totally change.

You post these photos where you say, “This is me; I’m exhausted; my baby is teething; I’ve had no sleep; I’m a mess.” Why is it important to do that?

Because for me it is the antidote to the sancti-momommies who are making it seem like motherhood is this daily Thomas Kinkade painting. I don’t live in a lighthouse, ladies.

It’s the same reason that I wrote about my miscarriage. I just feel like part of uprooting this deep seated misogyny in our culture is talking about women’s issues and naming them. For me, women’s reproductive health, women’s reproductive rights, miscarriage, all of these sort of taboo subjects, I want to talk about them, to show other women that they’re not alone and just to make it less of a big deal. The more we talk about something, the more that it lives in the sunlight. For me, with my daughter and being honest too about having postpartum depression and anxiety — it’s so incredibly common.

Having a baby after a miscarriage, one would think that every day I’d be skipping through some flower field. But it’s hard. My daughter has had some issues — she didn’t sleep; she was waking up every hour. I wasn’t getting any rest. I just want other moms who might be going through a similar experience to know that they are not alone. They’re not crazy. You don’t have to love every second of it. You can love this little human more than anything on this earth, and I do, but it can also be challenging and that’s okay. That doesn’t make you a bad person.

I also think women who’ve gone through infertility go through the same situation, where it’s, “Oh now I’m supposed to just be happy all the time and my kid can never annoy me.”

And those are the ambivalent, counterintuitive feelings can exist at the same time. Women are not allowed to be more than one thing at a time. Men are allowed to, especially on TV and in the way that we see them depicted in the media. Men are allowed to be complicated, and women are — in my humble opinion, and I think it’s getting way better — expected to be one thing at a time. [But] we can hold multiple feelings in our bodies at the same time.

You’ve got, like, a bazillion things going on right now. You’ve got “The Detour,” you’ve got “Meteor Shower,” you’re on PBS “Great Performances,” where we can watch “She Loves Me.” How are you doing with all of this? And are you going to be back doing Melania?

Yes, well they asked me actually to come back, but I was in the hospital with my daughter, so I was unable to do that. It was so disappointing because they wrote probably the funniest sketch we would have done. I was so bummed, but obviously family comes first.

“The Detour” was amazing. My husband [was] so incredibly supportive. He works for a startup organization, so he works from home, and he was able to come to Calgary with me and Ella while I did the show. That was the most fun I had ever had on a job ever. It was just so fun, the writing is so good.

You are a regular now this season.

I am. I felt so honored. When they brought me on last year as basically a guest star, while I was pregnant, and then they asked me to come back as a regular this year, and I was just so excited. I’m such a fan of the show. Jason Jones and [writer/director] Brennan Shroff, they are so talented. Super mommy Natalie Zea, she’s just incredible. That was really, really fun.

Of course, there were forest fires happening. That was really stressful. My daughter started to have an asthmatic response to the forest fires, so I was holding her up at night, just so she could sleep, and then going to work. That was bizarre and insane. Then she ended up having to go home about ten days earlier than me. That was so hard and weird and complicated to be away from her for those ten days, but also like, oh my God, I’m going to sleep 14 hours a day because I haven’t slept in seven months.

And now I’m in rehearsals for “Meteor Shower” with Amy Schumer, who’s the coolest chick you’ll ever meet, and Keegan-Michael Key and Jeremy Shamos. Jerry Zaks, I did my second show on Broadway with him, “Swing!” And of course Steve Martin is a legend and a genius. That is such a fun room to be in. And I’m doing concerts with my mom at 54 Below.

I heard you are very up on Amy Schumer. I know you have been interviewed, and people have been asking, “What’s she like on stage?” 

I’m obsessed with her. She is exactly like you want her to be. She is completely untouched by fame. She’s super appreciative; she’s just normal; she’s just a regular person. She’s hilarious. I’ve never met a quicker mind. She will microwave a joke for you. Like, “That took two or less seconds. How did that come out of your mouth?” That would have taken me 25 minutes to think about, or I never would have.

It’s really interesting because I’m such a people pleaser and she’s not. I just try to be near her, hoping that by osmosis I get some of it, because she is just brave. She’s not doing anything for anyone else. She just is herself, and I’m so inspired by that, and I’m trying at the ripe old age of 38 to take a little bit of that into my life. Yeah, I think she is pretty much the bee’s knees.

The past couple of weeks there’s been so much conversation about the industry. I was really moved by Emma Thompson’s interview where she said that this is the tip of the iceberg. I’m wondering, what do you think about that? Is it the tip of the iceberg?

Yes, and it’s not just our industry. I think what this election has unearthed, for me, is just a deep seated misogyny in our culture. I don’t understand how anyone can look at the most qualified candidate we’ve probably ever had, and then the least qualified candidate we’ve ever had, and see the outcome of the election and not go, “There’s little bit to do with the fact that she was a woman.” I think it’s primal. I think it’s since the beginning of time. I don’t think women have been treated like gold throughout history.

This is probably the best we’ve ever been treated. However, we are now saying it’s still not good enough. We don’t want to be judged, abused or used for our bodies. We want to have control over our bodies and our lives. For a man in any position, you are not allowed to make us physically uncomfortable, or even worse, assault us or terrify us or harass us. I am grateful that these issues are out in the open, because Anne Boleyn got her head chopped off.

Every woman I know, we’ve been having really intense conversations. Has it been that way with you and your friends?

Yeah. We have been talking about it like crazy. So many women that I admire have been talking about their stories, and almost every single woman I know has a story where I’m like, “Wait, what? How are you so amazing? How are you so resilient? How are you walking around just being a human after you have gone through that?”

I think women are resilient. We give birth to babies, and then we don’t go on vacation for two weeks. We then start feeding our babies from our bodies and then we go back to work. Women go through horrendous abuse cases. We should also say there are men who are sexually harassed. There are men who are abused. I think it’s more common with women, certainly, but I know plenty of men who have gone through very scary similar situations, and certainly young boys are no strangers to predatory people. I don’t think it is solely a women’s issue, but of course that’s what we are talking about right now. We’ve been having super intense conversations with all my girlfriends. And everybody has a story and that makes me really sad. But I’m glad we’re talking about it.

Laura Benanti can be seen on Broadway in the new comedy “Meteor Shower” and performing around the country with her mother Linda in “The Story Goes On.“

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Social media may not be hurting the minds of our youth

(Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

It was 1:30 a.m., and Anna was trying to keep her mind off her ex-boyfriend, with whom she had ended a painful relationship hours earlier. It was too late to call the therapist she was seeing to cope with low self-esteem and homesickness, and too late to stop by a friend’s house.

So, she turned to social media. “I’m having a really hard time right now,” Anna — who asked to be identified by a pseudonym — posted on Facebook. “Is there anyone I can call and talk to until I feel better?”

Almost immediately, three people responded with offers to talk. They were friends she had met playing Quidditch, a sport based on the Harry Potter fantasy books, and she kept in touch with them online. Anna talked to two of them until she was able to fall sleep.

“I used to be very shy about posting personal stuff on Facebook because I didn’t want people judging me,” said Anna, 26. “But that night, I was in such a bad place; I was desperate, and I thought anything would help.”

The negative effects of social media on young people’s mental health are well-documented by researchers and the press. Social media can drive envy and depression, enable cyberbullying and spread thoughts of suicide.

But some academics and therapists are proposing a counterintuitive view: They have found that social media may also help improve mental health by boosting self-esteem and providing a source of emotional support. These benefits have attracted too little attention from journalists and parents, they say.

“Yes, social media is contributing to a new era of adolescent (and adult) social stress, but when we accept that it is here to stay, we can also see it as a new opportunity for connection and mindfulness,” according to an online advice column published by the University of California-Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.

“We need to think about social media as not being absolutely good or bad,” said Amy Gonzales, an assistant professor who studies social media and health at Indiana University’s Media School. “We need to think about how to come up with appropriate uses of this stuff.”

Social media have become integral to the lives of young adults and teens: 45 percent of teenagers say they use apps such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram every day.

In research published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, Gonzales found that college students who viewed their own Facebook profiles enjoyed a boost in self-esteem afterward.

By curating their online personas to reflect their best traits — choosing flattering pictures and sharing exciting experiences — users remember what they like best about themselves.

“It’s like the way you might feel good about yourself when you check yourself out in the mirror before a date,” Gonzales explained.

Other studies reveal that people feel more social support when they present themselves honestly on social media, and tend to feel less stressed after they do so.

“You get much broader affirmation by posting on social media than from calling a relative,” Anna said. “It’s one thing if you text a friend; it’s another thing if you have a bunch of people trying to help you out.”

Matthew Oransky, an assistant professor of adolescent psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and a practicing therapist, said many of his patients find social connections online they could not find elsewhere. This is particularly true of marginalized teens, such as kids in foster homes and LGBT adolescents.

“I’ve seen some of the really big positives, which is that kids who are isolated can find a community,” Oransky said. “They’re often first able to come out to online friends.” In a 2013 survey, 50 percent of LGBT youth reported having at least one close friend they knew only from online interactions.

Young adults with serious mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can also find social support via social media, according to a study published in 2016. “These people are openly discussing their illness online,” said John Naslund, a research fellow at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

Social media postings can help foster greater acceptance of mental health problems. “It’s definitely real that there’s hostility online,” Naslund said. “But we’ve found that comments related to mental health are overwhelmingly positive. People can learn how to cope with symptoms and how to find the right support.”

But parents can and should help their children use social media wisely, experts say. Oransky suggests, for instance, that parents talk with kids about the privacy consequences of posting compromising material, such as revealing pictures or personal details that might affect their job prospects. Naslund recommends that people start cautiously on social media by using pseudonyms.

Anna uses filters to keep co-workers from seeing her mental health posts. But she views social media as a way to act on her therapist’s recommendation to reach out for support when she needs it. “If you trust your friends,” she said, “I don’t see why you shouldn’t embrace the social media option.”

World hunger is increasing thanks to wars and climate change

(Credit: AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Around the globe, about 815 million people — 11 percent of the world’s population — went hungry in 2016, according to the latest data from the United Nations. This was the first increase in more than 15 years.

Between 1990 and 2015, due largely to a set of sweeping initiatives by the global community, the proportion of undernourished people in the world was cut in half. In 2015, U.N. member countries adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which doubled down on this success by setting out to end hunger entirely by 2030. But a recent U.N. report shows that, after years of decline, hunger is on the rise again.

As evidenced by nonstop news coverage of floods, fires, refugees and violence, our planet has become a more unstable and less predictable place over the past few years. As these disasters compete for our attention, they make it harder for people in poor, marginalized and war-torn regions to access adequate food.

I study decisions that smallholder farmers and pastoralists, or livestock herders, make about their crops, animals and land. These choices are limited by lack of access to services, markets or credit; by poor governance or inappropriate policies; and by ethnic, gender and educational barriers. As a result, there is often little they can do to maintain secure or sustainable food production in the face of crises.

The new U.N. report shows that to reduce and ultimately eliminate hunger, simply making agriculture more productive will not be enough. It also is essential to increase the options available to rural populations in an uncertain world.

Conflict and climate change threaten rural livelihoods

Around the world, social and political instability are on the rise. Since 2010, state-based conflict has increased by 60 percent and armed conflict within countries has increased by 125 percent. More than half of the food-insecure people identified in the U.N. report (489 million out of 815 million) live in countries with ongoing violence. More than three-quarters of the world’s chronically malnourished children (122 million of 155 million) live in conflict-affected regions.

At the same time, these regions are experiencing increasingly powerful storms, more frequent and persistent drought and more variable rainfall associated with global climate change. These trends are not unrelated. Conflict-torn communities are more vulnerable to climate-related disasters, and crop or livestock failure due to climate can contribute to social unrest.

War hits farmers especially hard. Conflict can evict them from their land, destroy crops and livestock, prevent them from acquiring seed and fertilizer or selling their produce, restrict their access to water and forage, and disrupt planting or harvest cycles. Many conflicts play out in rural areas characterized by smallholder agriculture or pastoralism. These small-scale farmers are some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. Supporting them is one of the U.N.‘s key strategies for reaching its food security targets.

Disrupted and displaced

Without other options to feed themselves, farmers and pastoralists in crisis may be forced to leave their land and communities. Migration is one of the most visible coping mechanisms for rural populations who face conflict or climate-related disasters.

Globally, the number of refugees and internally displaced persons doubled between 2007 and 2016. Of the estimated 64 million people who are currently displaced, more than 15 million are linked to one of the world’s most severe conflict-related food crises in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia.

While migrating is uncertain and difficult, those with the fewest resources may not even have that option. New research by my colleagues at the University of Minnesota shows that the most vulnerable populations may be “trapped” in place, without the resources to migrate.

Displacement due to climate disasters also feeds conflict. Drought-induced migration in Syria, for example, has been linked to the conflict there, and many militants in Nigeria have been identified as farmers displaced by drought.

Supporting rural communities

To reduce world hunger in the long term, rural populations need sustainable ways to support themselves in the face of crisis. This means investing in strategies to support rural livelihoods that are resilient, diverse and interconnected.

Many large-scale food security initiatives supply farmers with improved crop and livestock varieties, plus fertilizer and other necessary inputs. This approach is crucial, but can lead farmers to focus most or all of their resources on growing more productive maize, wheat or rice. Specializing in this way increases risk. If farmers cannot plant seed on time or obtain fertilizers, or if rains fail, they have little to fall back on.

Increasingly, agricultural research and development agencies, NGOs and aid programs are working to help farmers maintain traditionally diverse farms by providing financial, agronomic and policy support for production and marketing of native crop and livestock species. Growing many different locally adapted crops provides for a range of nutritional needs and reduces farmers’ risk from variability in weather, inputs or timing.

While investing in agriculture is viewed as the way forward in many developing regions, equally important is the ability of farmers to diversify their livelihood strategies beyond the farm. Income from off-farm employment can buffer farmers against crop failure or livestock loss, and is a key component of food security for many agricultural households.

Training, education, and literacy programs allow rural people to access a greater range of income and information sources. This is especially true for women, who are often more vulnerable to food insecurity than men.

Conflict also tears apart rural communities, breaking down traditional social structures. These networks and relationships facilitate exchanges of information, goods and services, help protect natural resources, and provide insurance and buffering mechanisms.

In many places, one of the best ways to bolster food security is by helping farmers connect to both traditional and innovative social networks, through which they can pool resources, store food, seed and inputs and make investments. Mobile phones enable farmers to get information on weather and market prices, work cooperatively with other producers and buyers and obtain aid, agricultural extension or veterinary services. Leveraging multiple forms of connectivity is a central strategy for supporting resilient livelihoods.

In the past two decades the world has come together to fight hunger. This effort has produced innovations in agriculture, technology and knowledge transfer. Now, however, the compounding crises of violent conflict and a changing climate show that this approach is not enough. In the planet’s most vulnerable places, food security depends not just on making agriculture more productive, but also on making rural livelihoods diverse, interconnected and adaptable.

Leah Samberg, Research Associate, Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota

In the Trump age, an emboldened attack on intellectuals

Back in the 1930s a scholarly intramural feud to choose the inscription for the new library at my future alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, ended in a draw. From many nominations the competition came down to two finalists. Both said the same thing in different tongues: “Ye Shall Know The Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free,” from the biblical Gospel of John, and its Latin counterpart: “Cognoscetis Ventatem et veritas liberabit vos.”

Fortunately — at least for me — the selection committee chose English. As I crossed that plaza as a student in the 1950s, and twice later when I spoke at commencement, I would look up (mainly to check the time on the huge clock high on the iconic tower rising above the library), catch a glimpse of the inscription, and be grateful that so many of my professors had fought hard to prevent the politically appointed Board of Regents from dictating exactly what truth could be taught. Some paid a dear price for defending academic freedom, among them survivors of a ferocious campaign waged the previous decade by the state legislature to fire the university president, a political assault bravely resisted by many faculty and students alike.

Attacks on the Academy at large occur frequently in America, and none more intensely than now. Just consider these items from the news:

A Republican legislator in Arizona introduced a bill that would prohibit state colleges from offering any class that promotes “division, resentment or social justice” without defining what he means by those words – Arizona earlier banned the teaching of ethnic studies in grades K-12.
A Republican state senator in Iowa introduced a bill to use political party affiliation as a test for faculty appointments to colleges and universities.
A Republican legislator in Arkansas filed a bill to ban any writing by or about the progressive historian Howard Zinn, author of the popular  A People’s History of the United States .
In Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker tried to remove all references to the university’s commitment to the “search for truth.”
Wisconsin’s Republican Legislature has stripped state workers and professors of their collective bargaining rights for professors.
Donald Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, has called on conservative college students to join the fight against the education establishment.
A leader of the College Republicans at the University of Tennessee wants to protect students in the classroom from intimidation by “the academic elite.” He announced that “Tennessee is a conservative state. We will not allow out-of-touch professors with no real-world experience to intimidate 18-year-olds.”
The right-wing organization Turning Point USA created a “professor watch list” and has been publishing online the names of professors “that advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.”

No one I know has followed this trail with keener interest or deeper concern than Joan Wallach Scott, one of the most respected and influential scholars of our time. Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, she has been praised for groundbreaking work in feminist and gender theory, celebrated as a mentor, and honored as the author of several books; her latest, Sex and Secularism, will be published this fall. Earlier this year the American Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded her the Talcott Parsons Prize for distinguished contributions to the social sciences; previous recipients included Clifford Geertz in anthropology; C. Vann Woodward in history; Albert Hirschman in economics and Daniel Kahneman in psychology.

 

 

Bill Moyers Professor Scott, connect these dots for us. What’s the pattern?

Joan Scott: The pattern is an attack on the university as a place where critical thinking occurs, where free thought is encouraged. This is not new, it’s been going on for a number of years. It can be seen in the defunding of state universities. It can been seen in attacks on free speech at the university, particularly on the supposed tenured “radicals” who are teaching in universities. The Trump election brought it the fore and made it possible for a number of different groups whose aim is to stop the teaching of critical thinking to to launch direct attacks.

Moyers: You’ve said there’s a kind of bloodlust evident at work. What do you mean by that?

Scott: Richard Hofstadter, in his famous book which was written in the time of the McCarthy period in the 1950 and 1960s, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, talks about the deep hatred that some Americans had for what they consider to be elitist intellectual activity. I think that’s what’s happening now — the vicious unleashing of attacks on professors and students, the clear decision by the right to make free speech their campaign and to demonstrate that universities and particularly students are dangerous leftists who would deny to others the right of free speech. The right as the victim of the intolerant left. It is a concerted plan to depict the university itself as a place of dogmatic ideological thinking — an institution somehow out of step with the way most Americans think. What I mean by bloodlust is a kind of vicious vindictive description of the universities and their faculties.

For example, you read that quote from Betsy DeVos. She was warning students that they don’t have to be indoctrinated by professors at their universities. But the reason you go to university is to be taught, is to learn how to think more clearly, to call into question the ideas that you came with and think about whether or not they are the ideas you will always want to hold. A university education at its best is a time of confusion and questioning, a time to learn how to think clearly about the values and principles that guide one’s life. Of course, it’s also a time to acquire the skills needed for jobs in the “real world,” but the part about becoming an adult with ideals and integrity is also important.

Moyers: Richard Hofstadter referred in particular to what he called “the national disrespect for mind” that he said characterized the country in the 1950s. Is that true of what’s happening today or is this more a deliberate political strategy to try to put the opposition off balance? Do they disrespect the mind or are they in need of a political tool to weaponize the culture wars?

Scott: I think it’s both. I think there is a disrespect for the mind that Trump, for example, exemplifies. His is a kind of strategic thinking that’s more about shrewdness than about intellect. His attack on “elites” is meant to rally his base to rebel against the powers that be — in Washington especially. I don’t think he cares much about higher education per se; he just wants to demonstrate that learning isn’t necessary for business or government. He wants to elevate mediocrity to a heroic virtue. But I also think there’s a concerted effort on the part of groups of the Bradley Foundation and the Koch brothers, of people like Betsy DeVos, to call into question the very function of public education in general and of the university in particular.

Moyers: Back in the 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) railed against universities, artists, writers and journalists, his followers howled along with him in trying to persecute their perceived enemies. As you listen to what’s happening today, do you ever hear McCarthy’s voice resonating in your head?

Scott: I do. In some ways it’s even worse today. The internet has made possible a frightening practice of threats and intimidation — threats of unspeakable violence and death. McCarthy was scary, but not like that. There’s been a lot of talk about left student groups violating the free speech of the right. And certainly there are examples of students shouting down speakers whose political views they don’t want to hear, views they think don’t belong on a university campus. I certainly don’t support that kind of behavior. But what’s not been covered to the same extent is the attack by the right on people with whom they disagree. A large number of university teachers have been targeted for speeches that they’ve made, they’ve been harassed and threatened. Take the case of Princeton’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. She gave a commencement speech at Hampshire College in which she called Trump a racist and a white supremacist. Fox News carried it, and she received hateful emails, among them death threats — she’s African American — so there we threats to lynch her too. She canceled all of her speaking engagements because the threats were so violent. They make McCarthy look tame in comparison. McCarthy’s were violent threats at a more abstract level. These are specific threats: “I have a gun pointed at your head.” So there’s something now about the unleashing of violent hateful speech that is more prevalent than it was even in the days of Joseph McCarthy.

Moyers: If I may raise your personal story: Your father was suspended back then from his job as a high school social studies teacher and two years later he was fired because he refused to collaborate with an investigation into a purported communist infiltration in the New York public schools. How old were you at the time?

Scott: I was 10.

Moyers: Were you afraid?

Scott: Yep. Although we weren’t supposed to be afraid; we were supposed to be proud. And I certainly was proud of the principled stand he had taken. But yes, I was also afraid. FBI agents routinely came knocking at the door. The phone was certainly tapped. Years later I got a copy of my father’s FBI file, most of which was redacted. There were all sorts of amazing things in it; things that I thought at the time were maybe paranoid worries on the part of my parents turned out to be even more true than I thought they were. A couple of times I gave the wrong birthdate to get a summer job before I was 18. They had my name in my father’s FBI file with three different birthdays listed under it.

Moyers: Father and daughter!

Scott: They were doing even that? I was 16, 17 years old. So we were certainly afraid. We were worried. I had friends whose fathers were in jail. But the personal danger was the fear of going to jail or losing one’s job. The visceral expressions of hatred, the death threats, that are coming out now in social media. These are more frightening than my experiences as a kid.

Moyers: How long was your father out of work?

Scott: He never taught again. He had different kinds of jobs doing educational projects or working in various other places. But he defined himself as a teacher and he lost that permanently.

Moyers: What was your father’s name?

Scott: Samuel Wallach.

Moyers: His defense was both brave and eloquent. Let me read it to you:

I’ve been a teacher for 15 years, a proud American teacher. I have tried all these years to inspire my youngsters with a deep devotion for the American way of life, our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Hundreds of my youngsters fought in World War II and I know their understanding of the need to fight for their country was inspired by my teaching and the Bill of Rights… From that teaching, our youngsters got the feeling that we are living in a country where nobody as a right to ask what are your beliefs, how do you worship God, what you read.

“As a teacher and a believer in those fundamental principles, it seems to me,” your father said, “that it would be a betrayal of everything I have been teaching to cooperate with the committee in an investigation of a man’s opinions, political beliefs and private views.” If I may say, that’s one for the ages.

Scott: Yes it is.

Moyers: Did he live long enough to see your career as a scholar unfold?

Scott: Yes. He lived until he was 91 and he was proud of me. He would be even prouder now, I think, of the kinds of things I’ve been saying lately about academic freedom. All of my work in some way or another speaks to political issues according to the upbringing that I had, which was deeply rooted in exactly those principles that you just read.

Moyers: Ariel Dorfman has an essay in the current edition of The New York Review of Books. He says, “Never has an occupant of the White House exhibited such a toxic mix of ignorance and mendacity, such lack of intellectual curiosity and disregard for rigorous analysis.” He describes what’s happening as “an assault on national discourse, scientific knowledge and objective truth.” Where is this taking us?

Scott: Oh God, where is this taking us? I hope not down the road of the kind of fascist thinking that was going on in Italy and Germany in the ’20s and ’30s, but it certainly feels we could move in that direction, toward an extremely dangerous authoritarian populism. Because the thing about education — and why I’m so passionate about the position and status of the university — is that it’s supposed to teach citizens how to think better, how to think critically, how to tell truth from falsehood, how to make a judgment about when they’re being lied to and duped and when they’re not, how to evaluate scientific teaching. Losing that training of citizens is an extremely dangerous road to go down because it does open people to the kind of toxic influences that Dorfman describes.

Moyers: Here’s the challenge: Two-thirds of Americans today don’t have college degrees. As politics last year and this year reveal, many of them have a deep resentment toward those who do, and toward the colleges and institutions that produce many of today’s so-called elite. How do you persuade those people that academic freedom is relevant to their lives?

Scott: One way is that even before college and university, teaching in public schools K–12 has to deal with what it means to learn the truth; it has to teach respect for science, for the authority and lessons of history. It also has to teach kids to question things — how to question them. I think if you start this at a lower level than at university, people who didn’t go to university would have some sense of how to make a judgment about the honesty or not of politicians. I think the anger that is being directed to universities and so-called elites at universities is actually an anger that’s displaced from politicians (who promise to make things better and never do), from employers, it’s an anger at the economic system that has put so many of these people out of the kind of work that once was so satisfying to them. Did you read in The New York Times that long article about the closing of the plant that made ball bearings in Indiana?

Moyers: It was four pages long and I thought at first, well, who’s going to read this? And I couldn’t stop reading it.

Scott: I couldn’t stop, either. Partly I was trained first as a labor historian, so this was my kind of story. But it also gives an example of the misdirected anger I was talking about. This woman — whose anger, and the anger and resentment of her colleagues — had been directed at Mexicans and in favor of the wall that Trump wants to build, when in fact the anger should be directed at the employers who are increasing the profits they were already making by employing cheap labor in Mexico. It’s capitalism, not elites and university teachers, that is the problem for vulnerable Americans, indeed for all Americans. The growing gap between rich and poor, the seeming lack of concern for the health and well-being of ordinary people, the obscene salaries made by CEOs who are increasing profits by moving their plants to places where labor is cheap — that’s where the problem is, not in schools, colleges and universities.

Moyers: She is an everyday American — the woman who was in that story — and she and her co-workers were doing a very good job in the factory, making a decent living, and boom! Their jobs were gone.

Scott: And the humiliating part of it [is], they were asked to train the people who were going to be their replacements! I think this is humiliation beyond belief.

Moyers: You’ve put your finger on something very important. There’s a cruelty in politics and capitalism in America today that is often called to account by professors doing splendid research about exactly what has been happening to our workers. The real ruling elites would prefer to hide that research or stop it altogether.

Scott: Exactly, and blame it on others — on immigrants, on Mexicans, on so-called elites.

Moyers: In your lectures and essays you use a term that we don’t hear very often today. You say the pursuit of knowledge is not an elitist activity but a practice vital to democracy and to the promotion of the common good. What do you mean by the common good and how does academic freedom contribute to it?

Scott: What I mean by the common good is that we understand we’re all part of something bigger than ourselves, that we live in societies together and must help take care of one another because you never know when you’re going to need to be taken care of by others. And it’s not enough to say that your family or your church is going to take care of you. Societies are collective entities, we’re meant to be connected to one another; the function of government is to administer that connection. We’ve increasingly lost that sense of community, of the notion that there is something we contribute to and benefit from that is called the common good. I think I would date the beginnings of that loss to the Reagan administration and to the notion that somehow we were all separate individuals who only ought to be interested in ourselves. There were a number of court cases in the early ’80s when class-action suits were brought, only to be thrown out by Reagan judges on the grounds that individual injury had to be proven, that you couldn’t use statistics about discrimination in the labor force. You had to have individual cases and each one had to be remedied as an individual matter. There was the tax reform movement that treated progressive income taxes as assaults on individual autonomy rather than what they are — a shared responsibility for ourselves and others in the society that we all live in. People began to say they didn’t want to pay property taxes any longer because they had no children in schools (and most property taxes were used to support the public schools). As if the education of society’s children didn’t have an impact even on childless people! The common good is the notion of shared collective responsibility and reciprocity. It’s that that we’ve lost.

Moyers: I grew up in a small town in East Texas in the ’30s and ’40s; I was the son of one of the poorest men in town but I was friends with the daughter of the richest man in town. Both of us went to good public elementary schools, shared the same good public library, played in the same good public park, drove down good public roads, attended the same good public high school, and eventually went on to good public colleges — all made possible by people who came before us, whom we would never know: Taxpayers!

Scott: They were people who were taking their responsibility for you in the sense that you were the next generation of a society that had benefited them and that they needed to benefit by continuing to support it.

Moyers: You mentioned Ronald Reagan. His kindred spirit Margaret Thatcher (prime minister of the United Kingdom) declared there is no such thing as society.

Scott: Yes. The late ’80s and ’80s — that’s the beginning of the turn away from collective responsibility to a kind of selfish individualism that we now associate with or call neo-liberalism.

Moyers: So colleges and universities contribute to understanding the need for a social contract — pursuing knowledge and understanding is important to responsibility and reciprocity. You’ve said that there is an important distinction between the First Amendment right of free speech that we all enjoy in some circumstances and the principle of academic freedom that refers to teachers and the knowledge they produce and convey. What exactly is that distinction?

Scott: Well, free speech is what we all have and is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Academic freedom refers to what happens in the university, particularly in the classroom, and to the importance of the teacher having the right to teach and share  what he or she has learned, has proven her competence to teach, having gone through a series of tests and certifications including research and writing to demonstrate her abilities and knowledge. I don’t think students have academic freedom in that sense but they do have the right of free speech; they can express themselves, but their ideas are not subject to the tests of the judgment of their peers or to scientific affirmation as  teachers are.  A biology teacher does not have to accept a student’s essay that insists creationism rather than evolution is the explanation of how we got to be where we are. That student is not being denied his right of free speech when he’s given a low grade for not having learned the biology. So the university is the place where the pursuit of truth is taught, the rules for learning how to pursue it are explained, and students begin to understand how to evaluate the seriousness of truth. Those are incredibly important lessons, and only the teachers’ academic freedom can protect them because there will always be  people who disagree with or disapprove of the ideas they are trying to convey. There are students whose religious upbringing is going to make them feel really uncomfortable in a class where certain kinds of secular ideas are being presented. There are students whose ideas about history or sexuality are going to be similarly challenged to question, to affirm or to change those ideas. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be exposed to them; that’s why they’re at school. That’s why they come to school and to university: to be taught how to think well and critically about material that they’re being presented with. But it’s the teacher who is certified to teach them how to do that.

Moyers: You write that free speech makes no distinction about quality; academic freedom does.

Scott: Yes, and there’s actually a wonderful quote from Stanley Fish, who is sometimes very polemical and with whom I don’t always agree. He writes, “Freedom of speech is not an academic value. Accuracy of speech is an academic value; completeness of speech is an academic value; relevance of speech is an academic value. Each of these is directly related to the goal of academic inquiry: getting a matter of fact right.” Freedom of speech is not about that. Freedom of speech is about expressing your opinion, however bad or good, however right or wrong, and being able to defend it and argue it and be argued with about it in public forums. But that’s not what academic freedom is about. That’s not what the classroom is about. I would have a hard time banning even Richard Spencer [founder of the white nationalist movement] from speaking on a university campus, however hateful and dangerous I find his ideas.

Moyers: You quote Robert Post, the former dean of Yale Law School, who seems to suggest that professors do not have an unfettered right of free speech in the classroom, that they’re constrained by the need to teach their subject matter so that their job as educators limits their rights of free speech. Is he splitting hairs there?

Scott: Yes and no. I think he’s right that the criticism of too much political advocacy in a physics class for example is something that one could reasonably object to, that students who come to learn math or physics and who have to hear a speech about the war in Iraq for example, probably are right that they shouldn’t have to, that that’s not what they’re there in that class for. It doesn’t mean that that professor can’t speak outside of the classroom on those issues. But where it gets tricky is in classes where, say, history classes and a professor is teaching material that some students find objectionable because they think it’s too critical of the story that they want to be told.

Moyers: In one of your lectures you asked some questions that were rhetorical in nature—

Scott: I asked, but didn’t answer them — yes. Am I going to have to answer them now?

Moyers: Yes, the reckoning is here. So — should a professor be able to teach that human activity does not contribute to global warming?

Scott: I think it’s questionable. I’m with the climate scientists; I find it very hard to think that that would be a credible scientific position. How much human activity has contributed, OK, what other sorts of influences there have been, OK, but I think somebody getting up and saying that there is no proof whatsoever of human influence on climate change, I would have a hard time accepting the seriousness of a professor who taught that.

Moyers: What’s the difference between a climate denier and a Holocaust denier?

Scott: I think not much these days. I think not much at all because the climate denier tries to prove, as the Holocaust denier does, that the facts that demonstrate that there was a Holocaust and that there is climate change are wrong and don’t exist — against all evidence that they exist.

Moyers: Should a professor be able to teach creationism in the biology curriculum if half the students believe it?

Scott: No. Absolutely not.

Moyers: Why?

Scott: Because, again, we’re talking about what counts as science. If the students don’t want to learn about evolution, they shouldn’t be in the course. A biology course that teaches creationism is not a science course, it’s a religion course. So the students demanding that creationism be given credence in that course are out of line and are denying the academic freedom of the professor. They are calling into question the scientific basis of the material that’s being presented. And students are not in a position to do that.

Moyers: So you’re saying that both sides of that argument don’t carry equal weight in the training of future scientists, right?

Scott: Yes, exactly.

Moyers: Are professors being “ideological,” to put your quotes around it, when they refuse to accept biblical accounts as scientific evidence?

Scott: No, I think they’re being true to their callings as professors of biology. And I think in fact to do anything else would disqualify them in the scientific communities in which they operate.

Moyers: Is there really no difference between the structures of discrimination experienced by African-Americans and criticism of those structures leveled against whites?

Scott: I think there is a huge difference between those things because I think what is being pointed out by African-Americans is that from slavery forward they have been living in a supposed democracy which treats them as less than other citizens, less than whites in the society. And I think that pointing out that there are structures of discrimination in the society, deeply rooted racist structures, that segregate housing, that send black children to ill-equipped schools, that discriminate in the workplace — these  are truths about our society that must be faced. I don’t know if you’ve seen Ta-Nehisi Coates article in The Atlantic?

Moyers: Yes I have.

Scott: Your question, or my own question, made me think about it. He makes a very passionate argument about the structures of racism that go deep in American society and that if we’re going to correct them, must be addressed and pointed out, which is not to say that every white is a racist but that the way things are organized and the often unconscious biases that people bring to relations with African-Americans, need to be put on the table and examined for what they are.

Moyers: It makes a difference in lineage whether your great-grandfather owned slaves or was owned as a slave. Whether your grandfather was lynched or wore a white robe and did the lynching. Your circumstances can sometimes be traced back to those differences.

Scott: Yes — although probably not directly. But the structures that created those differences and those affiliations continue to organize life in our society.

Moyers: Do you think that the strategy on the right is to provoke situations that can be used to demonstrate that it’s the left that is shutting down freedom of speech today?

Scott: I do, yes. I think that’s what people like Milo Yiannopoulos, the conservative provocateur, are all about. He comes to a campus, he insults people, he engages in the worst forms of racist and sexist speech. And the point is to provoke leftist reaction to him that can then be used to discredit the left. And my sense is that what the left needs to do is find strategies that will defuse the situation rather than play into their hands.

Moyers: After the outbursts that greeted Yiannopoulos at the University of California at Berkeley, a city councilwoman there said, “I don’t appreciate that these are racists coming to UC Berkeley to spew hate.” Would you argue that racists should be silenced?

Scott: I don’t think we can argue that. I think what we need to do is expose them for what they are and fight back. I think we need to let them speak. They have free speech rights. At the same time we have to argue that other groups must not be shut down, either — say, students standing up for Palestinian rights. They have the right to speak just as often and just as much as racists like Yiannopoulos or Richard Spencer. There has to be equal treatment of these groups even though the right wing groups are, because of their publicity stunts, gathering all of the attention while quietly left wing groups such as the Palestinian students are being shut down or—

Moyers: You’re not at peace with some of the behavior on the other side, either.

Scott: No.

Moyers: You’ve warned about the moralism that’s appeared in some college courses. And I know you have expressed some concern about so-called trigger warnings.

Scott: Well I think trigger warnings assume that students are fragile and need to be protected from difficult ideas. I don’t think students need to be protected from difficult ideas. And I think the problem of trigger warnings is that they have been used to police what’s taught in classes, to avoid subjects such as rape, violence, race — these need to be discussed.

Moyers: What about minority students who have experienced considerable hostility growing up in an inhospitable culture, who have been silenced or marginalized by that hostility, and want colleges to be safe spaces against the hostile culture?

Scott: I don’t think colleges are safe spaces. It’s one thing to have a fraternity house or a community center where students can go and talk about their shared experiences. But it’s another thing to have safe spaces in the sense that the university’s providing them with protection from what they have to experience and find ways of protesting and resisting.

Moyers: Let’s talk about what happened at Middlebury College back in March. Charles Murray, the controversial author of The Bell Curve, a book some critics denounced as racist, was invited to speak at this small liberal arts college. Much of the audience turned their backs on him and a couple of hundred students chanted, “Black lives matter! Black lives matter!” and, “Your message is hatred, we will not tolerate it.” Murray finally had to deliver his talk via a video feed from a locked room. Ironically, perhaps, later reports suggested that the audience was driven less by Murray’s work and by free speech rights than by the larger political forces of partisanship and polarization and anger throughout the country. Murray himself said that he and his audience probably had something in common: They all hated Trump. As you know, the Harvard scholar Danielle Allen took a position that angered some of her liberal friends. She compared Charles Murray’s experience at Middlebury with that of the black high school students who integrated Central High School in Arkansas 50 years ago,. They had to be protected by the National Guard from a violent white racist mob. Danielle Allen said that Charles Murray and his sponsors were like those students who were trying simply “to go to school.” They were also “trying, simply, to keep school open. And in this moment they, too, were heroes.” Were they?

Scott: I think the comparison is a bad one. Because in the one case, Little Rock, these kids were not just trying to keep school open, they were trying to integrate the school. An all-white school. They were trying to go to school in a school that had historically kept them out. So this was a protest against a longstanding form of discrimination that required enormous courage and resulted in fact in the integration of the school. To compare that to students protesting a speech by an invited outside speaker who has had no experience of that kind of discrimination, a white man, an academic who has always held a university position and despite the criticism of some of his work has never been removed from the tenured position that he enjoys — with all the privileges of an academic life — to compare that momentary experience of being shouted down or treated unfairly as he was (because I don’t think they should have shouted him down) — it’s just a comparison that makes no sense to me. It raises the incident with Charles Murray to a level that is not at all comparable or in the same register as the experience of the Little Rock Nine.

Moyers: Earlier we both seemed to agree that there was a political motive to the right’s current attacks on the academy — and that what’s involved is Trump’s crusade to discredit his critics and opponents — as well as the right’s appetite for alternative facts to challenge knowledge-based and evidence-driven reality, which get in the way of their drive for power.

So there’s a politically conservative outfit named the National Association of Scholars that wants to “evaluate the academic elite.” They would eliminate peer review — that is, scholars charged to judge competence of professors and replace them with ‘experts’ who are “of genuinely independent minds.” They don’t want you scholars assessing each other’s work, they want someone on the their side doing that. How does this play into the right’s attack on the academy and Trump’s crusade against knowledge?

Scott: I think the National Association of Scholars is the inside group that’s looking to transform the academy in conjunction with the outside group. I don’t think they are probably coordinating with one another or maybe they are, but I think the effect is the same. Bringing in so-called “neutral outside experts” to judge the quality of academic work seems to be impossible because it’s precisely within disciplines that the judgment and evaluation and regulation of academic work happens. If you’re not in the discipline, you have no way of knowing what the standards are, what the history of changing modes of interpretation have been, whether the work is following acceptable patterns of proof and evidence. It just doesn’t make any sense at all. Who are these neutral outside experts?” What is the standard of neutrality that they’re offering? Somebody who doesn’t know anything about history and therefore can decide that our book about slavery is well-done or not? Somebody who isn’t a scientist or who is a scientist but is not trained to understand how physics operate and whether string theory is a good thing or a bad thing. What constitutes neutrality on the part of these so-called experts which is better than the expert judgment of peers — people within the discipline who understand how and why scholars do the research that they do?

Moyers: So sum up the state of academic freedom in late 2017 as we approach the end of Trump’s first full year in power.

Scott: It’s under grave threat. And it’s under grave threat from many different directions. And it’s up to those of us in the academy who care about the universities and who love the teaching that we do, to somehow keep open that space of critical thinking and the pursuit of knowledge and the search for truth — to keep that space open and protected from the forces that would destroy it.

Moyers: Thank you, Joan Scott.

House Democrats push for tougher oversight of regulators’ conflicts of interest

(Credit: Getty/kali9)

A group of House Democrats introduced a bill on Wednesday that would require federal officials to disclose any potential conflicts of interest before they implement significant changes in U.S. regulations.

The lawmakers said the legislation is intended to alert the public if those involved in the decisions, including the president and his top advisers, would personally profit from revising or replacing the rules.

“President Trump ran and campaigned on this idea of draining the swamp,” said the bill’s author, Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I. “We see, in fact, he has filled the swamp with people who have deep business interests and may be using their positions in the government to advance their financial interests.”

Among those who would have to project how much they would personally benefit from any particular regulatory changes are members of the new deregulation teams Trump has installed at federal agencies. The groups are tasked with weakening or eliminating government rules found to be overly burdensome for businesses.

The Congress members cited a recent investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times revealing that members of these deregulation teams have deep industry ties and are reviewing regulations their previous employers sought to weaken or kill. Appointees include lawyers who represented businesses in cases against government regulators, staff members of political groups raising so-called dark money and employees of industry-funded organizations opposed to environmental rules. At least four were registered to lobby the agencies they now work for and at least two may be positioned to profit if certain regulations are undone.

Federal agencies have defended their deregulation teams, saying appointees are adhering to strict ethics rules and generally avoiding topics that would narrowly affect recent former employers. The Trump administration has said its deregulatory push is necessary because similar reviews of existing rules by past administrations were not rigorous enough.

Cicilline’s bill, co-sponsored by Reps. John Conyers, Raul Grijalva, Lloyd Doggett, Gerry Connolly and Peter DeFazio — all Democrats — would require “an assessment and quantification” of the conflicts of interest for any major regulatory action. The report would disclose any possible personal benefit for the president, his senior advisers and members of the deregulation teams, along with the heads of the agency issuing the rule, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Though ProPublica and the Times have identified nearly three dozen deregulation team members with potential conflicts, a full vetting of industry connections has been difficult because some agencies have declined to provide information about the appointees — in many cases, not even their names.

Cicilline was among a group of Congress members who wrote a letter to the White House in August calling on the administration to release the names of all deregulation team members as well as documents relating to their potential conflicts of interest.

He said they have received no response. “This sadly has become the practice of this administration to routinely ignore members of Congress. That’s very disturbing to me and other members,” Cicilline said.

The congressman does not yet have any Republican support for his legislation, which would be needed for it to pass. “One would hope that shining light on this would be a bipartisan issue,” Cicilline said. Members of the House Republican leadership didn’t immediately return requests for comment.

The deregulation teams are part of Trump’s push to cut red tape across government, and have created a new avenue of influence for industries trying to kill rules they say hurt profits, depress job creation and raise prices. Environmental, consumer and other liberal groups have argued such regulations protect the public, keeping drinking water clean and roads safe, for example.

Among the appointees are Byron Brown, who is a member of the deregulation task force at the Environmental Protection Agency. He is married to a senior government affairs manager for the Hess Corporation, an oil and gas company regulated by the EPA.

The agency has declined to say whether Brown or his wife own shares in Hess, though an agency ethics official said Brown had recused himself from evaluating regulations affecting the company. The agency declined to say whether Brown would also recuse himself from issues affecting the American Petroleum Institute, where his wife’s company is a member. The association has lobbied to ease Obama-era natural gas rules, complaining in a recent letter to Brown’s team about an “unprecedented level of federal regulatory actions targeting our industry.”

Before she led the deregulation team at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Maren Kasper was a director at Roofstock, an online marketplace for investors in single-family rental properties. Financial disclosure records show that Kasper owned a stake in the company worth up to $50,000.

Changes at HUD could increase investor interest in rental homes, affecting a company like Roofstock. The agency, for example, oversees the federal government’s Section 8 subsidies program for low-income renters. Ethics officials allowed Kasper to keep her stake during her short tenure on the task force, but she pledged not to take actions that would affect the company.

 

Why the US men’s soccer team is destined to fail

U.S. men's soccer team goalkeeper Tim Howard scrimmages during a public training session at EverBank Field in Jacksonville, Fla., Friday, June 6, 2014 before Saturday's friendly match against Nigeria ahead of the World Cup Championship. (Credit: (AP Photo/The Florida Times-Union, Gary McCullough))

David beating Goliath is very exciting – unless you’re a fan of Goliath.

The United States has 330 million people and a massive youth soccer system, yet its men’s national soccer team just got bushwhacked by a team from Trinidad and Tobago, a country with 1.3 million residents.

How could this happen?

It’s not just about cultural norms. (Even if 90 percent of the U.S. population didn’t care about soccer, 33 million still would.) It’s not just about high school football teams siphoning off potential soccer talent. (There’s talent enough to go around when you have all those people.) It’s not just about U.S. soccer’s leadership and disorganization. (There are ineffective bureaucracies everywhere.) It’s not just about the unimaginative style of soccer played by U.S. teams. (Nobody criticizes the German team for its methodical style of play.)

Instead the problem is the American system of identifying and cultivating soccer talent – or, more accurately, not identifying this talent.

For the past six years I have been researching and writing about the commercialized youth sports industry, including a youth soccer system that excludes low-income and nonsuburban families from participating at the same rate as higher-income families.

U.S. kids don’t play soccer with bare feet on hardscrabble barrio fields where creativity dominates the action and with few grownups in sight.

Instead, too many American kids play soccer in high-tech cleats on manicured suburban fields, where they stand around quietly until an adult (often paid) runs them through repetitive drills – all to prepare for an expensive tournament three states away.

Commercial components permeate every aspect of the youth game. Research presented in my recent book on college and youth sports shows that family income is highly correlated with youth soccer participation. About 25 percent of American families have incomes over US$100,000 annually, yet they produce 35 percent of youth soccer players.

Conversely, the 25 percent of families with incomes below $25,000 account for only 13 percent of youth soccer players. Forty percent of youth soccer players will leave the sport between ages 13 and 18.

Many leave for financial reasons. Kids interested in playing soccer must increasingly pay for apparel, equipment, team fees, coaches, trainers, tournament travel and field space. It’s not unusual for families to spend over $10,000 per child per year to play organized youth soccer. `

The result is a system more attuned to identifying the best payers than the best players.

Those remaining in what I call the pay-to-play soccer system increasingly sign up for high-cost tournaments like the annual Disney Boys’ Soccer Showcase, with the idea that it’ll increase their chances of being identified by the national team or college recruiters who frequent the expensive tournaments.

What would have become of Cristiano Renaldo or Marta had they grown up in the U.S. pay-to-play system?

Talent isn’t being found in overgrown weed patches stuffed between urban row houses and rural farms. Nor is it being found among the 630,000 kids playing in the American Youth Soccer Organization programs, which adhere to the philosophy that youth sports should be fun in and of itself, not an expensive pathway to some “next level.”

U.S. international dominance in men’s basketball provides a good contrast to soccer. Sure, there’s a significant commercial element to youth basketball, most notably reflected in the Amateur Athletic Union circuit.

But this isn’t the only place where talent is identified. There’s a robust network of recruiters who still go to cramped high school gyms and neighborhood playgrounds teeming with skilled players. Low-income boys are 50 percent more likely to participate in basketball than in soccer, with participation rates identical between blacks and Latinos (despite cultural stereotypes that assume Latinos are more likely to play soccer).

There might be a reason for this: There are low-cost options for playing basketball (and being noticed), unlike in soccer. The U.S. men’s national basketball team does not systematically exclude an enormous swath of the population merely because it is poor. A bigger talent pool equals better teams.

Men’s soccer will never be able to compete internationally as long as it is enmeshed in a class-restrictive youth sports system. As for the U.S. women’s comparative international success in soccer, that’s a different dilemma. Many other countries don’t fund and cultivate women’s soccer players as well as the U.S., which gives the Americans an advantage.

My prediction, though, is that these same economic restrictions will soon kick U.S. women’s soccer in the collective shin guards as other countries eventually compensate for the Title IX-based advantages afforded to American girls and women for the past 44 years.

Rick Eckstein, Professor of Sociology, Villanova University

 

California wildfires torch the legalization hopes of pot growers

(Credit: AP Photo/Seth Perlman, File)

The wildfires that swept across Mendocino, Sonoma, and Napa counties in Northern California last week devastated many of the region’s legal cannabis growers, torching their crops and facilities at peak harvest time and leaving smaller farmers at risk of collapse.

The fires, which continue to smolder, are the deadliest and most destructive in the state’s history — killing at least 41 people and claiming 220,000 acres and 5,700 homes. The blazes incinerated untold amounts of pot, just as legal sales are set to begin in the state in January.

“The opportunity of legal cannabis is in ashes for many longtime California growers and their communities,” wrote Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association, in a message to the trade group’s 1,200 members. “Over the course of the last 18 months, these growers have spent their life savings getting permits and preparing for state licenses.”

Allen said the fires had destroyed at least 21 farms and damaged two others. Even for farms that didn’t burn, the crops may die for lack of water, as many are in areas that are now off-limits. Unlike grape farmers who lost vines in the fires, cannabis growers don’t qualify for crop insurance and can’t apply for federal assistance grants.

Allen was working with state officials to create an insurance program for growers, but it wasn’t in place yet. The farms were already under pressure from growing competition from much bigger operations. “It was just really bad timing,” he told me.

The cause of the fires is unknown. Some are pointing fingers at sparking Pacific Gas & Electric power lines on ridge tops. But the real culprit looks like climate change, which will put cannabis growers — and the state at large — at risk in the future, as reported by Sonoma County’s weekly newspaper, The Bohemian.

“That’s the way it is with a warming climate, dry weather and reduced moisture,” California Governor Jerry Brown said in a press conference last week. “These kinds of catastrophes have happened, and they are going to continue to happen.”

All the conditions in place before the fire — hot, dry weather, massive fuel loads, and hurricane-force east winds — are hallmarks of a changed climate. “Climate sets the stage, and we have strong evidence that the global warming that’s already happened has increased wildfire risk in the western United States, through the effects of temperature drying the landscape,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford University climate scientist.

Terry Garrett, who serves on the Sonoma County Economic Development Board and its Cannabis Task Force, says damage reports are still coming in, but the losses could be substantial. A typical 10,000-square-foot operation would lose about $1 million in pot, plus infrastructure, he said.

Garrett estimates that Sonoma County produces about $2.5 billion in cannabis revenue per year. That includes indoor and mixed-light production, which is harvested three to five times a year. Outdoor production, the kind most likely to be damaged by the fire, represents the most potential for loss since that crop hadn’t been harvested and dried.

For the cottage-scale growers whose farms were destroyed in the blazes, the disaster intensifies financial pressure that was already pushing them to the brink. The first two weeks of October are generally peak harvest for cannabis growers. Flames got the crop before they could.

To help farmers who suffered losses, the growers association launched a recovery fund. But even that good-faith effort hit a snag. YouCaring, the platform receiving wildfire relief funds for the association, sent the $9,000 raised so far back to the group because of a policy against cannabis campaigns. So the association has moved its fundraising to a new platform.

Most of the losses were in Sonoma County, where the fires were largest. The Emerald Triangle, the traditional heart of Northern California’s cannabis country, begins just north of Sonoma County in Mendocino County; but with an estimated 5,000 cannabis farms, Sonoma County is as much cannabis country as it is wine country.

Just as the fire did not discriminate, incinerating homes in upscale ridge-top areas as well as a vast swath of more than 1,000 working-class homes in hard-hit Santa Rosa, the fire took out pot farms big and small, too.

CannaCraft is Sonoma County’s largest cannabis producer and distributor. The company lost 15 greenhouses in the fires, which represents about 5,000 plants. As a larger company, it will be able to absorb the losses, but smaller operations already struggling to afford often costly state and county permits and fees will have a harder time rebounding. CannaCraft has opened its offices to smaller competitors to help them get back on their feet.

“Getting hit at this time is going to be pretty devastating for some of these people, as they were just coming above board trying to create legitimate businesses,” said Dennis Hunter, CannaCraft’s founder.

A bit of good news: In Sonoma County, growers who had applied for permits are eligible for tax relief if their crops were destroyed or damaged. And although the losses may be extensive, dispensary owners say that because of the record amount of cannabis grown in California this year, they will backfill their supply from other sources. That will benefit small growers who made it through the fires and are struggling to adjust to the new, legal market.

Produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit, investigative news organization.

Find the best movies for your sensitive kid

(Credit: Enrique Ramos via Shutterstock)

Every parent knows that one kid’s worst fear is another kid’s “no big deal.” That makes choosing movies for young kids tricky. In most cases, kids younger than 3 likely aren’t ready for feature-length movies at all. Better bets for a movie-like experience for them are special episodes of favorite TV shows or shorter-form features like Scholastic’s great book adaptations.

But as kids get a little older, their attention span grows, their interests expand, and parents are often looking for an hour and half of uninterrupted time. You can experiment with movies from our Best First Movies List or search for movies in your kid’s age range. After a little experimenting, you can usually get a pretty good idea of the kind of things that your kids can handle – and what they can’t. Depending on your kid’s particular sensitivity, the movies below can be great choices (or big no-nos!). And in the end, parents know best, so use our suggestions as a guide, and take it from there.

No Loud Noises or Fast Action

Watch:​

Winnie the Pooh, 3+

The Snowman, 3+

Cinderella, 5+

Frogs and Toads: Max’s Magical Journey, 5+

No Dead Parents or Lost Pets

Watch:

Curious George, 4+

Tinker Bell, 4+

Robin Hood, 5+

Wallace and Gromit in Three Amazing Adventures, 7+

No Princesses or Pink-splosions

Watch:

The Jungle Book, 4+

Lilo and Stitch, 5+

The Rescuers, 6+

The Incredibles, 7+

No Strong Emotions or Conflicts

Watch:

Puppy Party 2+

Angelina Ballerina: Dreams Do Come True 4+

Ruby’s Studio: The Friendship Show 4+

Wings of Life, 6+

No Kissing (Ewww!)

Watch:

VeggieTales: Lord of the Beans, 4+

My Neighbor Totoro, 5+

The Wizard of Oz 6+

Oceans, 8+

Blood boundaries: Should transfusions be matched by sex?

Blood donated in Indianapolis. (Credit: AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

Each time health care workers grab a pint of blood for an emergency transfusion, they make sure the donor and recipient have compatible blood types. But they do not pay attention to the donor’s sex. A new study raises questions as to whether that should change.

In the first large study to look at how blood transfusions from previously pregnant women affect recipients’ health, researchers discovered men under 50 were 1.5 times more likely to die in the three years following a transfusion if they received a red blood cell transfusion from a woman donor who had ever been pregnant. This amounts to a 2 percent increase in overall mortality each year. Female recipients, however, did not appear to face an elevated risk. The study of more than 42,000 transfusion patients in the Netherlands was published Tuesday in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association.

The American Red Cross and the researchers themselves were quick to say the study is not definitive enough to change the current practice of matching red blood cell donors to recipients. But if this explosive finding is confirmed with future studies, it could transform the way blood is matched—and it would suggest millions of transfusion patients worldwide have died prematurely. “If this turns out to be the truth, it’s both biologically interesting and extremely clinically relevant,” says Gustaf Edgren, an expert who was not involved in the study but co-wrote an editorial about it. “We certainly need to find out what’s going on.” Edgren, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute and a hematologist at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, says his own research suggests the donor’s sex makes no difference to the transfused patient. “Our data is really not compatible with this finding,” he says.

But the new study is the fourth work—including a pilot study by the same authors—to find differences in the survival rates of blood transfusion recipients associated with sex mismatches. And the findings hint that potential problems extend beyond the question of whether female donors have ever been pregnant. One of the studies suggested women were at a disadvantage when they received male blood, and that the opposite was true as well.

Moreover, the three teams were from different countries, used different data sets and all had slightly different findings. The direction of each of their results, however, was the same: biological sex matters, says Henrik Bjursten, a professor in the department of cardiothoracic surgery, anesthesia and intensive care at Lund University/Skane University Hospital in Stockholm. Bjursten, who helped lead the study that found male-to-female transfusions were also problematic, was not an author on the latest JAMA work.

To definitively prove there is a problem, Bjursten says scientists would have to find a plausible biological mechanism to explain these differences—and then run two randomized controlled trials designed to look at whether the donor’s sex and pregnancy history affect the recipient. Still, the Dutch study raises enough red flags that he would like to see transfused red blood cells matched male-male and female-female now, even before a connection can be confirmed. “My personal opinion is yes…I would want to have it sex-matched,” Bjursten says, adding it would not be difficult to implement such a change. “There are millions of lives at risk here. Do we want to take the risk or do we want to go the safe route and try to avoid the harm?”

Bjursten’s own research found risk to both male and female cardiac surgery patients who received blood from someone of the opposite sex. It suggests gender-mixed transfusions may, on average, take about a year off a patient’s life. With 100 million transfusions per year worldwide, if 10 million to 40 million of those cause harm, he says, “the numbers start adding up.”

It may be difficult to arrive at a solid conclusion about whether sex matters in red blood cell donations. The ethics of running a randomized trial, in which some patients receive sex-mismatched blood products, may also be questionable now that so many doubts have been raised, Bjursten notes. But finding definitive answers without such trials will be tough. Existing data sets, like the one used by the Dutch group, often have holes. “It’s not clear that currently available databases will ever be able to answer this,” says Ritchard Cable, a scientific director with the American Red Cross, who co-wrote the editorial with Edgren and is hoping to compile a reliable database. Researchers in France are also planning a follow-up study, says Maxime Desmarets, a public health physician and epidemiologist at the University of Franche-Comt in France, whose own research suggests no gender difference in blood transfusions.

Desmarets and Cable, along with the American Red Cross, say current research does not justify a change in the way red blood cell donors are matched with patients. The study “needs confirmation as conflicting studies also exist,” Mary O’Neill, interim chief medical officer of the American Red Cross, said in a prepared statement. “As further research is required, we do not anticipate a change to the standard blood donation criteria or current conservative transfusion practices at this time. The Red Cross will closely examine subsequent studies on this subject to ensure the ongoing safety and availability of the blood supply.”

Scientists speculate women who have been pregnant could have some immune factor in their red blood cells that causes more rejection among younger male recipients. The main theory is that perhaps women who had sons developed antibodies to proteins in the Y chromosome of male DNA, as an immune reaction to their pregnancies. But that is a hypothesis the new study could not test, because the researchers did not have information about the sex of the women’s offspring. It is also possible the male and female immune systems are fundamentally different in some way or the men are reacting to sex differences in RNA found in the women’s blood, Bjursten says.

Until a smaller study on sex mismatches by the same Dutch team six years ago, no one had thought to look at the pregnancy history of red blood cell donors, says Rutger Middelburg, an epidemiologist with Sanquin Research in the Netherlands, who helped lead that pilot work and the study published Tuesday. The differences in mortality are difficult to detect unless researchers know what to look for, Middelburg wrote via e-mail. “Even now, we find that in our data set simply looking at all patients can dilute the effect to the level where it becomes undetectable,” he added. “We had to specifically look at the right patient group.” He does not know why the team saw a survival difference only in younger men.

It is conceivable, he says, that younger men might have different diseases triggering their need for a transfusion than older men, which might make them more vulnerable to problems incorporating women’s red blood cells.

The data was not perfect, Middelburg says. The team examined records of patients who had received transfusions years earlier, and the researchers did not know the pregnancy status of all the women donors. The researchers disqualified data from patients who received blood from both men and women—and because men can donate blood more often than women, the pool was already skewed male, he notes. Women who had been pregnant at any point accounted for just 6 percent of the donors the team studied, although the association was still statistically valid. “We are very confident of our results,” Middelburg says.

He is continuing his research, and now hopes to get additional funding. “My priorities would be [to] look into more detailed pregnancy histories and causes of death,” he says, “but much other relevant research could still be done with sufficient resources.”