Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 983
October 12, 2015
October 11, 2015
The Rolling Stones of Gen X: “David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen are our Jagger and Richards”
So you thought you knew Van Halen? I did. But I had no clue they’ve been around in some form since 1971, or that the brothers basically hated David Lee Roth but let him in because it was cheaper than renting his P.A. week after week, or that even after Dave joined they were the house band at Gazzarri’s for over two years before they got a break. Greg Renoff devotes his entire book, "Van Halen Rising: How a Southern California Backyard Party Band Saved Heavy Metal," to their formative years and nearly every page is a revelation. Reading it is like finding some lost demo tape every bit as awesome as "Fair Warning," or stumbling on a bitchen Camaro time machine kegger where Jeff Spicoli shows up with his hand in the back pocket of Kim Kelly’s bell bottom jeans. We have so much to discuss with author Greg Renoff. But before we get to the book, we must, must, must discuss Van Halen 2015. What do you think about this recent reunion? It’s hard for me to see Diamond Dave this way. I just had a conversation with a musician who worked with Dave for a number of years during his solo career. He said that Roth is a guy with very wide ranging interests, from origami to cattle herding with dogs, and as a result, one thing that suffers is his vocal performances because Dave doesn’t give singing as a technical matter the attention it deserves. In other words, because David Lee Roth isn’t a boring simple-minded guy who only likes to do one thing, he doesn’t always perform as well as he could as a vocalist. I thought that provided good food for thought, especially since DLR’s early live performances during this album cycle weren’t great out of the gate and he has improved as the band has played more shows. I wrote a grad school paper about the personality dynamics of Van Halen and how I thought Michael Anthony was the secret key to the band’s appeal. That solid blue-collar working man who holds the foundation down so the other guys can all be flamboyant. I don’t know if the band works without Mike for me. I think VH fans, at least those who came of age as fans from the 70s-90s, understand Anthony’s contributions to the band’s success were substantial, to say the least. He didn’t write the songs or end up on the cover of the magazines, but he was the guy, for instance, who was always spot-on with his background vocals in a live setting while Roth was jumping around and swigging JD. That made a big difference when it came to making Van Halen sound good back in the day. And Templeman also doubled Anthony’s background vocals in the studio because clearly he understood that he had a certain sound that made a difference on their records. So for me, yes, I do miss Anthony, even though I am glad VH is a going concern these days. You think Mike’ll ever be back? I think Wolf is a talented musician who is in an impossible position because of the messy situation with Anthony. Regardless, he’s handled everything with maturity and class and for however long his Dad wants him in VH, Wolf will be in VH, regardless of former members or what anyone else thinks. Why did you decide to focus "Van Halen Rising" on the early years? I’m a fanatical Van Halen fan who happens to be a historian by training. So I think I was pretty attuned to what was known and not known about the band’s past. I’d read just about every book about the band, and it always seemed that while the band’s post-1978 history had been detailed fairly well, VH’s origins and years in L.A. got short shrift. In the meantime, I’d read little mentions in Dave and Eddie’s interviews about these wet-T-shirt contests the band was involved in, the insanely big backyard parties, and about how Ed and Al had a power trio called Genesis way back in 1971 or so. As fans we knew almost nothing about VH’s history prior to 1978. I wanted to know a lot more, and that’s what inspired me. But it all came down to one key question — how did VH develop into a band powerful enough to blow Black Sabbath off the stage in 1978? That could only be answered by looking at their pre-fame years. Eddie and Alex had Mammoth and Dave had Red Ball Jet. And they really didn’t like each other at all. So how did Van Halen the band ever come together? I have a whole chapter in the book about “How David Lee Roth joined VH.” But the short answer is two-fold. EVH was not much of a singer, and he was an introvert at heart. He didn’t like fronting Mammoth (which was the band name before it was changed to Van Halen). Roth was confident and talked a good game, so even though his voice wasn’t great, he surely knew how to attract attention and draw a crowd while onstage. In addition, Dave had a PA system that he’d been renting to the brothers, which helped them think it would be cheaper to get him in the band. But when people read the book, they will see that David Lee Roth was very strategic about how he approached trying to join Mammoth. It’s a great untold story. Van Halen gigged for years before getting any sort of breakthrough. What role did Gene Simmons play in getting them signed? Gene Simmons will tell you he discovered Van Halen. I’m not sure that’s true, but Simmons did take the entire band to NYC and into Electric Ladyland, where a demo was recorded. In the long run, I’d say that even though KISS’s management passed on VH, the band got a boost from the demo because it was played on KROQ in LA by Rodney Bingenheimer. How about Ted Templeman? In late 1977, Van Halen’s media guide offered up a story that implied that Templeman just wandered into the Starwood club one evening earlier that year, was wowed by Van Halen, and signed them. That’s only true in the outlines. The truth is that Marshall Berle, who was booking bands at the Whisky in late 1976, got a tip about Van Halen. He then saw them perform in Pasadena and was blown away. A few months later, Berle, who’d promised to help VH get a record deal, called up his old friend Ted Templeman and said, come check out this band. Templeman told me that before Berle’s call he had no idea there was a band called Van Halen playing regularly in Hollywood. Templeman also said that he knew Berle had good instincts when it came to bands, so he thought it would be worth his time to go to the Starwood. So the truth is that without Berle making that call, Templeman doesn’t show up at the Starwood that night. In your opinion, what made Van Halen so magic? It’s hard to boil that down, but let me try. Like many of the great rock bands of the '70s, the creative push and pull between the frontman and the guitarist made the big difference. When he first joined the band in 1973, Roth had a vision for the group to have more of a pop sound. EVH, of course, was a brilliant technician and songwriter. Between those two things, we get the classic Van Halen sound. For kids like me who were born during the Nixon administration, Roth and EVH are our Page and Plant, our Tyler and Perry, our Jagger and Richards. What’s your favorite / most curious tidbit you discovered about the band? Early on in my research, I learned that Van Halen, soon after Roth joined in the summer of 1973, was performing “Cold Sweat” by James Brown. This really seemed like something out of left field for a hard rock band like Van Halen, but after I learned more about Roth’s background (he was bussed to a majority-black high school in Pasadena starting in 1970) and musical tastes, it all made perfect sense. Explain “Backyard Party Band” — how did that work in Southern California in the '70s? The backyard party phenomenon ran hot in LA in the early 1970s. I think it was part of the Woodstock effect – the early 70s were the golden age of festivals: Isle of Wight, Watkins Glen, Altamont, and so on. I think rock music had really set kids afire and so the obvious thing to do was to try to imitate that on a local level. Parents would leave town, kids would hire a band like Van Halen, make flyers, get some kegs, and things would be off and running. You mention that Al called the shots because he could hands down whip anybody in the band but that was early on, before Mike Anthony joined. Just for fun – who do you think was tougher in ’75? Alex was bigger and more physically imposing than his brother. He was also an intimidating guy when he was drunk and not in a good mood. A number of people mentioned that to me. And Michael Anthony told me that when Alex and Ed would get in fistfights, Alex was very careful not to hurt Ed’s hands. Mike Anthony looked like a brawler, but from all accounts, was very nice and easygoing, so I don’t think he was kicking anyone’s ass back then. From "Van Halen Rising," one gets the notion there is a huge trove of unreleased tracks. What are your five favorite rare VH songs? Good question. “Believe Me” showed off VH’s prog-rock side. Would have been a great song maybe for the second side of Fair Warning. I love “Young and Wild” – that was the Kim Fowley, Steven Tetsch penned song, recorded on VH’s Warner Bros demo at the behest of Fowley, who’d told Marshall Berle, Van Halen’s then manager, about VH. I love the original “House of Pain” from the Simmons demo, complete with the horror movie lyrics. Also a big fan of “Voodoo Queen” from the WB demo, mostly because of the killer ending that has Anthony and Roth trading screams. And then “Angel Eyes,” which is Roth’s take on 70s soft rock, like the Eagles. The band recorded in in 1974 on a demo they did at Cherokee Studios. Supposedly it was worked up for Van Halen II too. Is there more coming? "Women & Children First" to "1984"? Van Hagar? In theory, I’d be interested in writing another book, but I think that comes down to how well this one sells, and if the other three band members — the Van Halen brothers and Roth -- would be willing to speak to me about their recollections. I think it would be more challenging to do a book about say, 1978-1985, without their participation. But nothing’s set in stone and my mind is open about all of this.
So you thought you knew Van Halen? I did. But I had no clue they’ve been around in some form since 1971, or that the brothers basically hated David Lee Roth but let him in because it was cheaper than renting his P.A. week after week, or that even after Dave joined they were the house band at Gazzarri’s for over two years before they got a break. Greg Renoff devotes his entire book, "Van Halen Rising: How a Southern California Backyard Party Band Saved Heavy Metal," to their formative years and nearly every page is a revelation. Reading it is like finding some lost demo tape every bit as awesome as "Fair Warning," or stumbling on a bitchen Camaro time machine kegger where Jeff Spicoli shows up with his hand in the back pocket of Kim Kelly’s bell bottom jeans. We have so much to discuss with author Greg Renoff. But before we get to the book, we must, must, must discuss Van Halen 2015. What do you think about this recent reunion? It’s hard for me to see Diamond Dave this way. I just had a conversation with a musician who worked with Dave for a number of years during his solo career. He said that Roth is a guy with very wide ranging interests, from origami to cattle herding with dogs, and as a result, one thing that suffers is his vocal performances because Dave doesn’t give singing as a technical matter the attention it deserves. In other words, because David Lee Roth isn’t a boring simple-minded guy who only likes to do one thing, he doesn’t always perform as well as he could as a vocalist. I thought that provided good food for thought, especially since DLR’s early live performances during this album cycle weren’t great out of the gate and he has improved as the band has played more shows. I wrote a grad school paper about the personality dynamics of Van Halen and how I thought Michael Anthony was the secret key to the band’s appeal. That solid blue-collar working man who holds the foundation down so the other guys can all be flamboyant. I don’t know if the band works without Mike for me. I think VH fans, at least those who came of age as fans from the 70s-90s, understand Anthony’s contributions to the band’s success were substantial, to say the least. He didn’t write the songs or end up on the cover of the magazines, but he was the guy, for instance, who was always spot-on with his background vocals in a live setting while Roth was jumping around and swigging JD. That made a big difference when it came to making Van Halen sound good back in the day. And Templeman also doubled Anthony’s background vocals in the studio because clearly he understood that he had a certain sound that made a difference on their records. So for me, yes, I do miss Anthony, even though I am glad VH is a going concern these days. You think Mike’ll ever be back? I think Wolf is a talented musician who is in an impossible position because of the messy situation with Anthony. Regardless, he’s handled everything with maturity and class and for however long his Dad wants him in VH, Wolf will be in VH, regardless of former members or what anyone else thinks. Why did you decide to focus "Van Halen Rising" on the early years? I’m a fanatical Van Halen fan who happens to be a historian by training. So I think I was pretty attuned to what was known and not known about the band’s past. I’d read just about every book about the band, and it always seemed that while the band’s post-1978 history had been detailed fairly well, VH’s origins and years in L.A. got short shrift. In the meantime, I’d read little mentions in Dave and Eddie’s interviews about these wet-T-shirt contests the band was involved in, the insanely big backyard parties, and about how Ed and Al had a power trio called Genesis way back in 1971 or so. As fans we knew almost nothing about VH’s history prior to 1978. I wanted to know a lot more, and that’s what inspired me. But it all came down to one key question — how did VH develop into a band powerful enough to blow Black Sabbath off the stage in 1978? That could only be answered by looking at their pre-fame years. Eddie and Alex had Mammoth and Dave had Red Ball Jet. And they really didn’t like each other at all. So how did Van Halen the band ever come together? I have a whole chapter in the book about “How David Lee Roth joined VH.” But the short answer is two-fold. EVH was not much of a singer, and he was an introvert at heart. He didn’t like fronting Mammoth (which was the band name before it was changed to Van Halen). Roth was confident and talked a good game, so even though his voice wasn’t great, he surely knew how to attract attention and draw a crowd while onstage. In addition, Dave had a PA system that he’d been renting to the brothers, which helped them think it would be cheaper to get him in the band. But when people read the book, they will see that David Lee Roth was very strategic about how he approached trying to join Mammoth. It’s a great untold story. Van Halen gigged for years before getting any sort of breakthrough. What role did Gene Simmons play in getting them signed? Gene Simmons will tell you he discovered Van Halen. I’m not sure that’s true, but Simmons did take the entire band to NYC and into Electric Ladyland, where a demo was recorded. In the long run, I’d say that even though KISS’s management passed on VH, the band got a boost from the demo because it was played on KROQ in LA by Rodney Bingenheimer. How about Ted Templeman? In late 1977, Van Halen’s media guide offered up a story that implied that Templeman just wandered into the Starwood club one evening earlier that year, was wowed by Van Halen, and signed them. That’s only true in the outlines. The truth is that Marshall Berle, who was booking bands at the Whisky in late 1976, got a tip about Van Halen. He then saw them perform in Pasadena and was blown away. A few months later, Berle, who’d promised to help VH get a record deal, called up his old friend Ted Templeman and said, come check out this band. Templeman told me that before Berle’s call he had no idea there was a band called Van Halen playing regularly in Hollywood. Templeman also said that he knew Berle had good instincts when it came to bands, so he thought it would be worth his time to go to the Starwood. So the truth is that without Berle making that call, Templeman doesn’t show up at the Starwood that night. In your opinion, what made Van Halen so magic? It’s hard to boil that down, but let me try. Like many of the great rock bands of the '70s, the creative push and pull between the frontman and the guitarist made the big difference. When he first joined the band in 1973, Roth had a vision for the group to have more of a pop sound. EVH, of course, was a brilliant technician and songwriter. Between those two things, we get the classic Van Halen sound. For kids like me who were born during the Nixon administration, Roth and EVH are our Page and Plant, our Tyler and Perry, our Jagger and Richards. What’s your favorite / most curious tidbit you discovered about the band? Early on in my research, I learned that Van Halen, soon after Roth joined in the summer of 1973, was performing “Cold Sweat” by James Brown. This really seemed like something out of left field for a hard rock band like Van Halen, but after I learned more about Roth’s background (he was bussed to a majority-black high school in Pasadena starting in 1970) and musical tastes, it all made perfect sense. Explain “Backyard Party Band” — how did that work in Southern California in the '70s? The backyard party phenomenon ran hot in LA in the early 1970s. I think it was part of the Woodstock effect – the early 70s were the golden age of festivals: Isle of Wight, Watkins Glen, Altamont, and so on. I think rock music had really set kids afire and so the obvious thing to do was to try to imitate that on a local level. Parents would leave town, kids would hire a band like Van Halen, make flyers, get some kegs, and things would be off and running. You mention that Al called the shots because he could hands down whip anybody in the band but that was early on, before Mike Anthony joined. Just for fun – who do you think was tougher in ’75? Alex was bigger and more physically imposing than his brother. He was also an intimidating guy when he was drunk and not in a good mood. A number of people mentioned that to me. And Michael Anthony told me that when Alex and Ed would get in fistfights, Alex was very careful not to hurt Ed’s hands. Mike Anthony looked like a brawler, but from all accounts, was very nice and easygoing, so I don’t think he was kicking anyone’s ass back then. From "Van Halen Rising," one gets the notion there is a huge trove of unreleased tracks. What are your five favorite rare VH songs? Good question. “Believe Me” showed off VH’s prog-rock side. Would have been a great song maybe for the second side of Fair Warning. I love “Young and Wild” – that was the Kim Fowley, Steven Tetsch penned song, recorded on VH’s Warner Bros demo at the behest of Fowley, who’d told Marshall Berle, Van Halen’s then manager, about VH. I love the original “House of Pain” from the Simmons demo, complete with the horror movie lyrics. Also a big fan of “Voodoo Queen” from the WB demo, mostly because of the killer ending that has Anthony and Roth trading screams. And then “Angel Eyes,” which is Roth’s take on 70s soft rock, like the Eagles. The band recorded in in 1974 on a demo they did at Cherokee Studios. Supposedly it was worked up for Van Halen II too. Is there more coming? "Women & Children First" to "1984"? Van Hagar? In theory, I’d be interested in writing another book, but I think that comes down to how well this one sells, and if the other three band members — the Van Halen brothers and Roth -- would be willing to speak to me about their recollections. I think it would be more challenging to do a book about say, 1978-1985, without their participation. But nothing’s set in stone and my mind is open about all of this. 
We get it, you love the ’80s! John Hughes nostalgia trap catches “Red Oaks”
The maddening thing about “Red Oaks” is that it’s not all bad. If it were, it would be easier to dismiss it. But the Amazon Studios comedy, which debuted today, is executed with a lot of flair and sophistication--a nearly deceptive amount of sophistication, really. One of the biggest tells of prestige television is just how much money has been spent on the production, and “Red Oaks” has the recognizable names and high production values to prove its pedigree. Richard Kind, Jennifer Grey, and Paul Reiser are in the main cast; attached producers and directors include Steven Soderbergh and Amy Heckerling. And the setting—Red Oaks, a Jewish country club in suburban New Jersey in 1985—is meticulously rendered, with the kind of attention to detail that only the familiar view of hindsight can deliver. Walkmen, VHS tapes, big hair, blue eyeshadow, aerobics and a thorough misunderstanding of the dangers of date rape: “Red Oaks” offers the whole nine yards of ’80s minutiae, in an appealing and approachable format. The problem is that “Red Oaks” is only minutiae, really. It’s a love letter to the ’80s, with all the aimless sentimentality and wishful thinking that the medium implies. Because the Amazon Studios model is to drop every episode at once, the 10 episodes of “Red Oaks” are less like a traditional sitcom and more like a long, meandering movie, split into bite-sized chunks. This feeds into “Red Oaks'” backwards glances, too; “Red Oaks” feels like mash-up of “Dirty Dancing,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Say Anything” and “Pretty in Pink.” Just to seal the deal, Jennifer Grey—a star of two of those films—is a series regular for “Red Oaks,” and Alexandra Socha, another regular, is a dead ringer for Ally Sheedy in “The Breakfast Club”(albeit playing a role that is essentially Molly Ringwald's character in “The Breakfast Club”). Music rights for the era appear to have been too expensive to purchase, but otherwise “Red Oaks” is pitched and lobbed directly to whatever algorithm suggests John Hughes movies, in rapid succession, as you comb through streaming options. The series follows David Myers (Craig Roberts), an awkward-but-not-too-awkward NYU sophomore who has taken a summer job teaching tennis at Red Oaks. His girlfriend Karen (Gage Golightly) leads the aerobics classes; his stoner friend Wheeler (Oliver Cooper) works valet. It being a country club—and David still being quite young—“Red Oaks” is populated with weirdos of every stripe. Such as: the “artist” who takes an interest in “photographing” Karen; David’s out-of-touch mom and dad; the filthy-rich club president; and, of course, the club president’s untouchable, damaged and alluring daughter, Skye. [This is Socha—who in addition to behaving like Claire from "The Breakfast Club," and looking like Sheedy, has a name that sounds awfully familiar to fans of “Say Anything.”] Roberts as David is a serviceable hero, in that he’s mostly a blank slate; the only characteristic he seems to have, besides being good at tennis, is being interested in filmmaking. (I wonder if any of the show’s producers identify with David.) The narrative, such as it is, follows the arc of the summer, as David fools around with Karen, falls for Skye, wins the respect of Skye’s father (Paul Reiser) and comes to terms with his parents’ loveless marriage (played with typical dramedy by Richard Kind and Grey). There are times where the sophistication of the show creates sublime little juxtapositions—for example, there’s an episode where two different sets of people go on dates, and the half-hour offers us two parallel nights on the town without making much of a fuss about the device. And especially with some of the minor characters, like Wheeler, Karen, and Nash (Ennis Esmer), “Red Oaks” offers a rich sympathy that neither apologizes for nor judges them as they go on adventures David barely knows about. But mostly, the story is scattered and unfulfilling—a portrait of youth that doesn’t quite go anywhere, a collection of disjointed vignettes that follow nearly every predictable story beat in cinema. It has a lived-in quality that draws in the viewer—but once there, the furniture turns out to be covered in plastic, shrink-wrapped against the encroaching forces of time. “Red Oaks” is mired in nostalgia, both carefully rendered and just as carefully unconsidered. It’s comfort food for a certain class of individuals—the individuals, probably, that Amazon hopes to reach with “Red Oaks.” But the show offers merely an airless hall full of mirrors; there is no vision or thematic content to this show aside from scene-setting. “Red Oaks” is just reflected memories and the vague outlines of coming-of-age movies. This is most apparent in the way the show treats its female characters. It seems quaint to drag the term “male gaze” out of the film theory classroom, but I cannot think of a more perfect example than “Red Oaks”—whose all-male writing and producing team looks back on the hot girls of their youth with pure objectivity. “Red Oaks”’ female characters are interesting, but the show struggles to give them interiority; they are all just about licking their lips while running around in their swimsuits and leotards, and it’s all the camera can do to listen while they talk. Each one of the female characters is tangled in a relationship with a man or men who are not as chivalrous or heroic as the main characters—pretty lifeguard Misty (Alexandra Turshen) is with a jock who doesn’t pay attention to her; Skye has several toxic flirtations with older men; Karen is too credulous of the advances of lecherous photographer Barry (Josh Meyers), who is after her to “pose” for him. The camera watches, with barely concealed indignation, as these women are ensnared by these men; the camera waits, with barely concealed impatience, until they see the error of their ways and embrace the nice guys. (David is the nice guy for both Karen and Skye; Wheeler is the nice guy for Misty.) Even David’s mom—Judy, played by Grey—is stuck in a weird, sad relationship. The pilot introduces the Myers family in the midst of father Sam’s heart attack. It’s minor, but it forces everyone to reevaluate. As he’s collapsing, Sam tells David that he’s always believed Judy to be bisexual, or a lesbian. This is then left to percolate, uncomfortably, for the next several episodes, until barely becoming a C-plot late in the season. Judy’s appreciably repressed and kooky, but there’s still something so painful and strange about the plot point—as if it is supposed to be funny, when it feels anything but. Indeed—to bring out another dusty term from the film theory classroom—I don’t think “Red Oaks” passes the Bechdel test. If it does, it’s mere seconds against what is a five-hour series. There is a glass wall past which the show does not even attempt to pass; I got the impression it would be too much of a distraction from the main purpose of “Red Oaks,” which is to manufacture nostalgia. It’s not that I don’t understand it. Our happy memories of the past are a security blanket; even some sadder ones can be looked back on fondly as difficulties now surmounted. When you’re 20, the world looks quite different than it does at 40, or 50, or 60. It’s not for nothing that David’s most formative conversations happen with his father or Skye’s father; “Red Oaks” is at least partly about being the same age as your parents once were, and remembering what they tried to teach you. But nostalgia is not just an emotional refuge. In the scope of a story, it is—like everything else!—a political act. There is so much casual exclusion and marginalization in “Red Oaks”—so many dropped threads that could have challenged the characters and the audience with a little more courage. The way we tell the stories of our past is fundamental to the way we think about our present and our future; that is at the root of America’s divide between red and blue. “Red Oaks” paints a past that is just a closed-ended cocoon for some man’s injured feelings. I have come to expect more complexity from television.
Your fake Fendi has a human cost: Indentured servants fuel Italy’s knockoff luxury goods market
I could tell that Sam wasn’t lying, but the bags he had laid out on a white bedsheet were. Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Hermès, Fendi. They were good, but not quite good enough. Sam [not his real name] came from Western Africa to Italy as an indentured servant. I didn’t get the details of his story when I offered to buy him a bottle of juice this summer while I was, as chance would have it, teaching a course on forgery, but what he did tell me meshed with what I had been told by a member of the Italian Carabinieri military police (a force with which I’ve collaborated over the years in my role as a specialist in art crime). He was selling fake luxury goods, but a very high level of fake that takes an educated eye to spot the difference. He isn’t quite aware of the distinction, but has been told not to accept less than 50 Euro per bag, which makes his wares fairly high-end, when it comes to fakes, when the originals sell in the hundreds. Sam is part of what is a subsection of human trafficking, not quite a modern-day slave, but not far from it. He volunteered to be smuggled out of his home in Africa to a new life in Italy. He is housed and fed, and bused into the city center, where he sells alongside a team of fellow refugees, catering mostly to tourists. He is paid, but barely, and is expected to repay those who organized his transfer from Africa to the promise of Italy, and who keep him fed and housed, in a system designed for him never to quite buy his independence. My Carabinieri colleague had pointed out, with a smile that I found out of place, a sort of game between these sellers of fake luxury goods and the local Italian police. You can spot it if you watch them long enough. The sellers are unlicensed and have no legal status in Italy, but are tolerated by the government because refugees like them are willing to do the sort of work that Italians don’t want to (factories, mining, messy manual labor), and are therefore a key, but nearly invisible, cog in the Italian economy. In exchange, their sale of counterfeit goods is accepted, as long as they superficially demonstrate respect for the police. I’ve seen it many times in Rome and Florence and Venice: Police saunter over, and the illegal immigrants are expected to quickly pull up their white sheets and run off with their counterfeit goods, around a corner and out of sight. If they do this, the police do not pursue or arrest them, and when the police pass, they return to their trade. If, however, they fail to kowtow and flee, the police are very unhappy, their authority visibly questioned, and things can get ugly. Sam was offering a mid-range quality of forged luxury good—one that holds up to closer inspection and requires a keen eye to spot the difference between this counterfeit handbag, available for 100 Euro (if he can haggle you successfully), and the original that might sell for 800 at the real shop on Rome’s posh Via Condotti. A lot of us buy luxury goods, which cost us hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of dollars. It’s always safest to go to the Louis Vuitton or Fendi store, but there is a ravenous appetite for “designer impostor” luxury goods. We spend hundreds of billions per year on fake versions of what we think we’re buying, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. Products labeled as “designer imposters,” or some equivalent are usually safe, because they are overt imitations (though the conditions of the workers who produce them may be objectionable). But when we buy imitation luxury goods, there’s always a chance that we are donating our cash to the continuation of a form of human trafficking. Want a Hermès handbag, but it’s being offered by someone like Sam, at a suspiciously accessible price? The problem is hardly limited to Europe. A 2004 report stated that the counterfeit goods industry in the United States alone brings in around $287 billion, which would make it one of the highest-grossing criminal trades worldwide. An estimated $1 billion per year is lost in tax revenue for New York City alone, where some 8 percent of all U.S. counterfeit goods are traded. In December 2007, federal officials seized over $200 million in smuggled goods in just one raid at the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal in New Jersey. Most of what was seized consisted of luxury counterfeits from China, including fake Nike sneakers, which had been labeled as “refrigerated noodles” on the manifests of the ship that had imported them. There are several categories of counterfeit luxury goods. At the top level are those created at the original factories, by the original craftsmen, but which are made after hours, smuggled out and sold privately. The quality and materials are identical to the originals, and these sell for the same price as originals, just not from licensed retailers. The mid-level (Sam’s fare) features handmade, quality imitations that are made off-site, often using stolen components, materials and molds or forged versions of them. But these are expensive and require skill to produce, so can still be costly. The most common, and cheapest, knockoffs are made elsewhere (often in China), using no original molds or materials, are meant to look only superficially like the real thing, and are of questionable quality. These are the easiest to spot, because there is little to no effort made to reproduce key details, like tooling or hand-stitching or lined interiors (if the interior of a bag feels like thin synthetic cloth, you’re certainly dealing with a fake). Leather should feel dry and substantial: if it feels greasy or sticky or too light, it’s probably fake. These cheaper knock-offs also employ versions of logos that are not exact copies, but are meant to look like the logo in question only at a glance, and may even include misspellings. Check for quality and quantity of stitches—the fewer the stitches, the less likely it is to be of high quality, and therefore authentic, and stitches should be perfectly aligned, with no loose strands. If there are seams to the product, like those joining sections of fabric inside bags, they should match perfectly, with logos lined up from one section to the next. Check images of the real deal online and compare them directly to the product on offer. And don’t underestimate the abstract “feel” of the product. Does it feel well-made, luxurious? Do the details, like zippers, feel good in the hand? If not, buyer beware. Buying online is particularly risky because there’s no guarantee that the seller’s photographs of the product are real, or that the product you’ll be sent matches the one advertised. It’s best to invest in products that are overt imitations, if you’re not going to purchase an original. But above all this, keep in mind that there are real people who suffer from the trade in fake luxury goods, and that your purchase may encourage practices like the one Sam has been caught in to continue. It’s easy to forget that there are complex human costs involved in bringing a product, particularly an illicit one, to the consumer. Just like buying an antiquity that seems to come from Syria or Iraq these days might place cash into the hands of terrorists, the desire for a discount knockoff handbag may encourage a practice that is little removed from indentured servitude, and not a far cry from slavery.
“Transition makes things easier, but it doesn’t fix everything”: “Trans” author Juliet Jacques
Juliet Jacques has written a memoir, "Trans" (available now from Verso), based around her transition but encompassing a wide sweep of her life, from disaffected teendom in rural England to politically angry but established adulthood in London. Jacques’ transition was chronicled in the Orwell Prize-nominated column she wrote for the Guardian, "My Transgender Journey," which began in 2010 and lasted three years. However, "Trans" is a broader take on what it was like coming of age in the transphobic '90s, navigating an identity via music, film, literature, football, gender theory and a slowly expanding circle of role models. Jacques writes in a detached way, and descriptions of her attempted suicide and the unrelenting stigma she faced – tempered though they are with accounts of warm friendships – will strike you with their matter-of-factness. It’s an honest book, without being gratuitous. Hard to write, for sure; Jacques says she spent six months unable to type another word after she submitted the manuscript. Salon caught up with Jacques for a conversation about writing, censorship, politics and parents. You’ve already been in the public eye, but still, writing this book must have been terrifying. Absolutely. Writing this memoir was much more public, more permanent than anything I’ve done before. I had to have a quite stressful conversation with my parents, saying "This is what’s going in about you." The same thing with friends. I had lots of anxieties about the wider public. Arguments about how trans people are represented in the media, and how we represent ourselves, are very heated at the moment, so publishing this book in that context was terrifying. To what extent did you feel you had to censor yourself because of that? Some issues that would have been really controversial don’t concern me or didn’t fit the narrative. But I think we live in a climate that’s becoming increasingly censorious. There’s so much pressure on trans people to be good role models and, yes, maybe I could have said more about my sex life and my relationship with my body if there weren’t all these competing pressures from conservatives, certain feminists and the trans community. Some scenes are heartbreaking to read and must have been painful to write. How did you look after yourself through that? It was really difficult to reinhabit some moments in the book, and to do so thoroughly enough to create something interesting, poetic, or politically worthwhile. The hardest part was in chapter five, where I decided to kill myself. I knew that bit was coming for a long time and was building up to writing it. The way I dealt with that was to make sure I wrote the next episode – where I decide not to and, the following day, I’m still alive and I play football, well, feeling that nothing else mattered – at same time. After I’d written that, nothing else seemed quite so daunting. You say explicitly in your book that you see who you are as inherently political. How have you been aware of your politics shaping your identity? I became very conscious of my mindset changing around 2005, when I discovered that line of (mainly North American) transgender theory: Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, Pat Califia and others, leading to Julia Serano and Paul Preciado. This theory wasn’t so much about making a smooth move from male to female or vice versa, more about creating areas between them or around them, and creating a better language to discuss our experiences. As a child I had the terms "transvestite" or "transsexual" and neither really suited me. "Transvestite" had all these sexual connotations and the stereotype was of a high-powered male lawyer wearing his wife’s underwear. "Transsexual" described someone who’d gone through a medical process, which I hadn’t and, at the time, wasn’t sure I wanted to. "Transgender" gave me this grey area; it gave me some intellectual space to move in. Trans memoirs like Jan Morris’s and Lili Elbe’s seem very "of their time" now and make you realize how dialogue has changed. Do you imagine yourself looking back at your book in the same way one day? Absolutely. Really, this book aims to make itself irrelevant. It’s reflexive about the way memoirs have been used and the obligation on trans people to write autobiographically. I do use that form but I critique it heavily and try to infuse it with politics, theory and history. I’m trying to move the conversation on to those things. You say in the book that inclusion in feminist spaces isn’t the most pressing issues for trans people but that, once those debates begin to influence health and social care policy, they become a bigger deal. Given that, how much attention do you give these days to feminist battles over trans issues? Like you say, I don’t feel that this argument around feminism is necessarily the most important thing in and of itself. Where it becomes a problem is when anti-trans feminists end up being involved in policy decisions that affect trans people. Lots of my writing on trans issues to date has been an effort to make sure that trans perspectives on trans lives are the ones that reach policy-makers. Really, the whole point of putting a lot of material in this book was just the feeling that, OK, I’ve done all I can. It would have been irresponsible not to get involved in this conflict at all, but I’m not going to let it define my entire writing career. It’s clear from your book that the abuse you’ve received has differed: Men have gone from shouting "Are you a bloke?" to shouting "Get your tits out," whereas women have tended to attack from a distance and from a more theoretical place. Yes, I don’t think I got any face-to-face abuse from women, or even particularly intrusive questioning. Towards the end of book I talk about two big scandals around trans media coverage. One was Julie Burchill in the Observer, the other was Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. It’s telling that the Burchill attack was on trans people as a group – quite abstract and relying on a set of crude, outdated stereotypes – whereas Littlejohn’s piece singles out an individual, which is even crueler. That reflected the gendered way that I experienced hostility from people. There’s a point in your book where you have an epiphany about why so many trans women end up doing sex work. Your whole book reinforced for me why there’s such an alliance between trans and sex work activism; there are huge similarities in the way these groups are talked over and basically held responsible for propping up patriarchy. The alliance completely makes sense to me. In a feminist context we get attacked by the same people, so there’s a need to unite against that. Also, particularly in the U.S., the workings of the healthcare system mean that a lot of trans people do survival sex work to pay for medical treatment. Employment discrimination and the way that heterosexual male attraction to trans women is treated socially adds to this. I think these alliances are incredibly important. Minority politics that unites over shared experience rather than splits over differences is what we should be aiming for. I love the line in the book where, a few weeks after surgery, you have this realization that, after all you’ve been through, "David Cameron is still prime minister." I wonder if you’re feeling similar now that your book is out? Yes. A lot of the book is a reaction against this preconception that transition is going to be a panacea, and the transphobic argument that if you transition and you’re not the happiest person ever, then transition was wrong for you and, by extension, is wrong for everybody. Transition makes things easier but it doesn’t fix everything. At the end of the process, there’s a psychological toll, let alone the other things we all have to be depressed about: the Tories are still here and we literally have a prime minister who can get away with, as Lord Ashcroft recently alleged, fucking a dead pig! You talk a lot about your parents in the book. Are they proud now that it’s out? I think they are. I called my dad when he was halfway through reading the draft. My dad being my dad, he told me about his allotment for 10 minutes and I was really anxious and had to say "What do you think?" and then all he said was ‘There’s a typo on one page!" And my mum’s told me that Shirley down the road, whose son I used to walk to school with 20 years ago, wants to read it. So what next? You’ve said you want to move away from being a "professional trans person?" I certainly don’t want to be on the front line anymore. I’ve been there for five years and the burnout has been really difficult to deal with. I want to do more arts criticism, which is what I was doing 10 years ago, and also I’m doing a PhD in creative and critical writing. I think academia will suit me better; it allows me to work in a slower, quieter, more thoughtful way. At some point there will be a volume of short stories with a trans theme. I think that’s the final trans-related project I want to do. @frankiemullin Juliet Jacques has written a memoir, "Trans" (available now from Verso), based around her transition but encompassing a wide sweep of her life, from disaffected teendom in rural England to politically angry but established adulthood in London. Jacques’ transition was chronicled in the Orwell Prize-nominated column she wrote for the Guardian, "My Transgender Journey," which began in 2010 and lasted three years. However, "Trans" is a broader take on what it was like coming of age in the transphobic '90s, navigating an identity via music, film, literature, football, gender theory and a slowly expanding circle of role models. Jacques writes in a detached way, and descriptions of her attempted suicide and the unrelenting stigma she faced – tempered though they are with accounts of warm friendships – will strike you with their matter-of-factness. It’s an honest book, without being gratuitous. Hard to write, for sure; Jacques says she spent six months unable to type another word after she submitted the manuscript. Salon caught up with Jacques for a conversation about writing, censorship, politics and parents. You’ve already been in the public eye, but still, writing this book must have been terrifying. Absolutely. Writing this memoir was much more public, more permanent than anything I’ve done before. I had to have a quite stressful conversation with my parents, saying "This is what’s going in about you." The same thing with friends. I had lots of anxieties about the wider public. Arguments about how trans people are represented in the media, and how we represent ourselves, are very heated at the moment, so publishing this book in that context was terrifying. To what extent did you feel you had to censor yourself because of that? Some issues that would have been really controversial don’t concern me or didn’t fit the narrative. But I think we live in a climate that’s becoming increasingly censorious. There’s so much pressure on trans people to be good role models and, yes, maybe I could have said more about my sex life and my relationship with my body if there weren’t all these competing pressures from conservatives, certain feminists and the trans community. Some scenes are heartbreaking to read and must have been painful to write. How did you look after yourself through that? It was really difficult to reinhabit some moments in the book, and to do so thoroughly enough to create something interesting, poetic, or politically worthwhile. The hardest part was in chapter five, where I decided to kill myself. I knew that bit was coming for a long time and was building up to writing it. The way I dealt with that was to make sure I wrote the next episode – where I decide not to and, the following day, I’m still alive and I play football, well, feeling that nothing else mattered – at same time. After I’d written that, nothing else seemed quite so daunting. You say explicitly in your book that you see who you are as inherently political. How have you been aware of your politics shaping your identity? I became very conscious of my mindset changing around 2005, when I discovered that line of (mainly North American) transgender theory: Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, Pat Califia and others, leading to Julia Serano and Paul Preciado. This theory wasn’t so much about making a smooth move from male to female or vice versa, more about creating areas between them or around them, and creating a better language to discuss our experiences. As a child I had the terms "transvestite" or "transsexual" and neither really suited me. "Transvestite" had all these sexual connotations and the stereotype was of a high-powered male lawyer wearing his wife’s underwear. "Transsexual" described someone who’d gone through a medical process, which I hadn’t and, at the time, wasn’t sure I wanted to. "Transgender" gave me this grey area; it gave me some intellectual space to move in. Trans memoirs like Jan Morris’s and Lili Elbe’s seem very "of their time" now and make you realize how dialogue has changed. Do you imagine yourself looking back at your book in the same way one day? Absolutely. Really, this book aims to make itself irrelevant. It’s reflexive about the way memoirs have been used and the obligation on trans people to write autobiographically. I do use that form but I critique it heavily and try to infuse it with politics, theory and history. I’m trying to move the conversation on to those things. You say in the book that inclusion in feminist spaces isn’t the most pressing issues for trans people but that, once those debates begin to influence health and social care policy, they become a bigger deal. Given that, how much attention do you give these days to feminist battles over trans issues? Like you say, I don’t feel that this argument around feminism is necessarily the most important thing in and of itself. Where it becomes a problem is when anti-trans feminists end up being involved in policy decisions that affect trans people. Lots of my writing on trans issues to date has been an effort to make sure that trans perspectives on trans lives are the ones that reach policy-makers. Really, the whole point of putting a lot of material in this book was just the feeling that, OK, I’ve done all I can. It would have been irresponsible not to get involved in this conflict at all, but I’m not going to let it define my entire writing career. It’s clear from your book that the abuse you’ve received has differed: Men have gone from shouting "Are you a bloke?" to shouting "Get your tits out," whereas women have tended to attack from a distance and from a more theoretical place. Yes, I don’t think I got any face-to-face abuse from women, or even particularly intrusive questioning. Towards the end of book I talk about two big scandals around trans media coverage. One was Julie Burchill in the Observer, the other was Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. It’s telling that the Burchill attack was on trans people as a group – quite abstract and relying on a set of crude, outdated stereotypes – whereas Littlejohn’s piece singles out an individual, which is even crueler. That reflected the gendered way that I experienced hostility from people. There’s a point in your book where you have an epiphany about why so many trans women end up doing sex work. Your whole book reinforced for me why there’s such an alliance between trans and sex work activism; there are huge similarities in the way these groups are talked over and basically held responsible for propping up patriarchy. The alliance completely makes sense to me. In a feminist context we get attacked by the same people, so there’s a need to unite against that. Also, particularly in the U.S., the workings of the healthcare system mean that a lot of trans people do survival sex work to pay for medical treatment. Employment discrimination and the way that heterosexual male attraction to trans women is treated socially adds to this. I think these alliances are incredibly important. Minority politics that unites over shared experience rather than splits over differences is what we should be aiming for. I love the line in the book where, a few weeks after surgery, you have this realization that, after all you’ve been through, "David Cameron is still prime minister." I wonder if you’re feeling similar now that your book is out? Yes. A lot of the book is a reaction against this preconception that transition is going to be a panacea, and the transphobic argument that if you transition and you’re not the happiest person ever, then transition was wrong for you and, by extension, is wrong for everybody. Transition makes things easier but it doesn’t fix everything. At the end of the process, there’s a psychological toll, let alone the other things we all have to be depressed about: the Tories are still here and we literally have a prime minister who can get away with, as Lord Ashcroft recently alleged, fucking a dead pig! You talk a lot about your parents in the book. Are they proud now that it’s out? I think they are. I called my dad when he was halfway through reading the draft. My dad being my dad, he told me about his allotment for 10 minutes and I was really anxious and had to say "What do you think?" and then all he said was ‘There’s a typo on one page!" And my mum’s told me that Shirley down the road, whose son I used to walk to school with 20 years ago, wants to read it. So what next? You’ve said you want to move away from being a "professional trans person?" I certainly don’t want to be on the front line anymore. I’ve been there for five years and the burnout has been really difficult to deal with. I want to do more arts criticism, which is what I was doing 10 years ago, and also I’m doing a PhD in creative and critical writing. I think academia will suit me better; it allows me to work in a slower, quieter, more thoughtful way. At some point there will be a volume of short stories with a trans theme. I think that’s the final trans-related project I want to do. @frankiemullin
Being black can be bad for your health: Race, medicine and the cruelest unfairness of all
On a spring morning in 1997, Jim Harper, a young man from Durham, North Carolina, woke up in his two-bedroom apartment with no clue that he would soon become gravely ill. The first signs of trouble seemed innocent enough: some numbness on the right side of his face and in his right arm and hand, easily chalked up to having slept on that side of his body. He stumbled as he got out of bed, but figured he was simply tired from the previous day’s shift managing angry teens at a group home. His fiancée, Regina, asked if he needed to see a doctor; he smiled and told her that she worried too much. Her anxiety ebbed as she went off to her job at Kmart, only to resurface when he didn’t answer the phone during her lunch break. When Regina rushed home a few hours later at the end of her shift, she found Jim sprawled across their bathroom tile. His eyes were wide open and he clearly recognized her, but his words were garbled. He couldn’t tell her what was wrong or how long he’d been that way. She frantically dialed 911. Within a half-hour of his arrival at the emergency department, after a neurological exam and rapid CT scan of his brain, it was clear what had transpired: Jim, just a few weeks shy of forty, had suffered a massive stroke. The doctors learned that Jim had high blood pressure that had been poorly treated, but found nothing else to account for his tragic fate. He had no heart problems. No clotting disorders. No aneurysms. No diabetes or high cholesterol. He didn’t smoke, rarely drank, and avoided street drugs. Ultimately, as best they could tell, Jim mostly had a lot of bad luck. * About two weeks later, I stood at the foot of Jim’s bed at Duke Hospital. Along with another first-year medical student, I was shadowing Dr. Wilson, a faculty neurologist, as part of a weekly seminar that introduced us to clinical medicine. This class was the highlight of our week, as it gave us a brief break from the lecture hall and laboratory, where we memorized biochemical pathways and micro-organism names, and provided a peek at our future lives on the hospital wards. We wore perfectly knotted ties and crisp white coats for the occasion, trying hard to look like the doctors we would one day become. Jim’s future seemed far less promising than ours did. A big man, he had once been a football player. Now he could not move the right side of his body. His face drooped as saliva dribbled out of the corner of his mouth. His words came out choppy, like those of a toddler; when frustrated, he cried like a child in the midst of his “terrible twos.” Given his lack of improvement, the doctors had begun to doubt that he could make any significant recovery. They were preparing to send him to a rehabilitation facility. This place also had a long-term care unit, where, if he made no real progress, Jim might spend the rest of his life. According to the nurses, Regina’s visits were already becoming shorter and less frequent. “It’s a very sad case,” Dr. Wilson said, as we left the room and walked to a nearby conference area to discuss our patient and his illness. He started by telling us that stroke was consistently one of the top five causes of disability and death in America. Then he drilled us about the major risk factors, going back and forth between us in a competition of sorts. In eager medical student fashion, we rattled off the usual suspects: diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, advanced age, smoking, and high cholesterol. When it was my turn again, Dr. Wilson indicated that there was one important risk factor we had yet to mention. He looked at me with a worried frown. Come on, his look said, for you of all people, this should be easy. I sighed. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but, as I was quickly learning, it always did. “Race,” I said, looking down at my dark hand against my pristine white coat. “Our patient is black.” “Exactly,” Dr. Wilson responded, as if I’d now earned a top score on my exam. “Some would say that this is the most important variable of all.” He rattled off damning statistics about race and stroke: “The risk is twice as high for blacks compared to whites for those over sixty-five. And in younger groups, such as with our patient here, the ratio is more like three-to-one or even four-to-one.” I’d seen the impact of stroke on both sides of my family. When I was fourteen, my dad’s brother—who would often drive five hours each way on a Saturday to visit us for a few hours—died within days of collapsing at his home, putting an abrupt end to his unexpected and always enthusiastic visits that I so enjoyed. A few years later, my maternal grandmother—Grandma Flossie—developed dementia from a series of minor strokes that slowly stole her mind and, eventually, her body. Like Jim, both had high blood pressure. “Our patient’s other major risk factor is hypertension,” Dr. Wilson continued. “This also is much more prevalent in blacks—nearly twice as common. No matter how you slice it, race is a very big deal when it comes to stroke.” Dr. Wilson had hammered home something I would learn time and again, both at Duke and beyond: Being black can be bad for your health. * “Of all the forms of inequality,” Martin Luther King Jr. told a gathering of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in 1966, “injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.” At the time of his remarks, the United States had begun to take several formal steps to end its century-long practice of state-sponsored segregation that had followed the end of slavery. In medicine, this meant that black people could begin to receive treatment side by side with whites rather than being relegated to separate and unequal facilities or sectioned off in run-down areas of white hospitals. Such practices had undoubtedly contributed to their poorer health, especially in the Deep South of Dr. King’s time, where black people on average had a life expectancy nearly nine years less than whites. While the civil rights movement ultimately stirred remarkable racial progress in various areas of American life, many of King’s concerns about health and health care remain valid to this day. From cradle to grave, these health differences, often called health disparities, are found virtually anywhere one might choose to look. Whether it is premature birth, infant mortality, homicide, childhood obesity, or HIV infection, black children and young adults disproportionately bear the brunt of these medical and social ills. By middle age, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, kidney failure, and cancer have a suffocating grip on the health of black people and maintain this stranglehold on them well into their senior years. Thus, it is no surprise that the life expectancy among black people, despite real progress over the last twenty-five years, still significantly lags behind whites. In suffering a crippling stroke at age thirty-nine, Jim had become another casualty of inequality, a fresh case that Dr. Wilson could use to illustrate the health burden of being black. * Three decades after Dr. King’s 1966 remarks, I entered Duke University School of Medicine as one of a half-dozen black students on scholarship. With the scholarships, Duke sought to cast aside its history of racial exclusion and become a national leader in producing a new generation of black physicians who could change the face of medicine. My goal as I headed for Durham was much less ambitious and civic-minded. I simply wanted to make my parents proud of me and set myself up to earn a good living. Race-based concerns ranked low on my list of priorities. But my professors couldn’t stop talking about race. During my early months, as they taught us about diseases both common and rare, they inevitably cited the demographics, explaining which disorders were more common in the young or old, women or men, and one racial group or another. When they spoke about race, they would sometimes mention Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Yet invariably, as it always seems to in America, their analysis came down to comparing blacks and whites. It seemed that no matter the body part or organ system affected, the lecturers would sound a familiar refrain: “It’s more common in blacks than in whites.” Each time the demographics of a new disease came up in a lecture, my stomach twisted. I knew where this was heading. Seated in a sea of mostly white and Asian faces, I wondered how this information affected their views of black people, whether they already had biases against us, and whether any of this impacted the way they saw me. This racial health data intensified my already uneasy feelings about my place at Duke. My classmates largely hailed from well-to-do suburbs and had attended prestigious, brand-name schools; I came from a working-class neighborhood and had attended a state university with little name recognition. Their parents all seemed to be doctors, lawyers, or professors. My dad didn’t finish high school and worked as a meatcutter in a grocery store; my mom attended segregated inner-city public schools before embarking on a forty-year career in the federal government. From the moment I walked along Duke’s manicured lawns and inside its Gothic buildings, I worried that I was at a stark disadvantage, both socially and academically. Constantly hearing about the medical frailties of black people picked at the scab of my insecurity. Over time, I came to dread this racial aspect of the lectures so much that I felt intense, perverse relief whenever a professor mentioned that a disease was more common among white people. But this list was short and the refrain that accompanied it proved equally painful. For example, while breast cancer got diagnosed more often in white women, “black women who get this disease do much worse,” the professors would say. While I was learning about the health woes of my race, my own body began to betray me. The first sign occurred not long after I’d met Jim, the young stroke victim. As part of that same introductory course, my classmates and I learned basic medical skills by practicing on each other. One day, we measured blood pressures. My classmate frowned as she took mine. The reading was 150/95. Our supervisor, a family physician, rechecked and confirmed the reading. The doctor I saw soon afterward gave even worse news: My kidneys were showing early signs of failure. To a twenty-three-year-old first-year medical student, high blood pressure and kidney disease sounded like a death sentence. Worst-case scenarios flashed through my mind: Dialysis. Kidney transplant. Transplant rejection. More dialysis. Infection. Death. Was I destined for a similar fate as my uncle and grandmother? Or something worse? Would I even reach fifty? The image of Jim flashed through my mind. A few weeks after leaving the hospital and moving into the rehab facility, he died from a massive blood clot that lodged in his lungs. He had just turned forty. I drove home from the clinic picturing Jim in an open casket. But instead of a stirring eulogy and traditional funeral hymnals, I heard Dr. Wilson’s voice reciting statistics on race and stroke. * As I struggled to make sense of the prospect of facing chronic illness in my twenties, I became consumed by the broader health problems of my race. Along with the many patients I saw who gave life to my professors’ statistics came reports of prominent black men who had met similar fates. Harvard Law graduate and billionaire CEO Reginald Lewis died at age fifty from cancer, while football legends Walter Payton and Reggie White died in their mid-forties from rare disorders, just a few years before 60 Minutes mainstay Ed Bradley succumbed in his mid-sixties to cancer. Journalist Ron Howell chronicled the premature deaths of his black classmates from Yale in a 2011 article for the university’s alumni magazine that generated national interest. A large bank account, Ivy League schooling, Hall of Fame busts, and a quarter-century run on America’s most-watched program stood no match against early death for these black men. Why do black people suffer more health problems than other groups? What do these challenges mean in their everyday lives? How do their struggles play out before a largely white medical community? How can we begin to solve these seemingly intractable problems? Do I have a special role to play as a black physician? Confronting these questions has led me on an intellectual and emotional journey, one that I’ve tried to capture in the pages that follow. I’ve divided the book into three sections, corresponding to the different phases of my medical life. Part I surveys my medical school years. Part II explores my grueling twelve months of medical internship as a newly minted doctor. Part III examines my subsequent years in psychiatry training and in early clinical practice. Throughout each stage, race played a recurrent role, at turns predictable and unexpected, often annoying, sometimes disheartening, and occasionally uplifting. By sharing my story, as well as the stories of some of the patients I’ve met over the past fifteen years, I hope to humanize the dire statistics and bitter racial debates and paint a fuller picture of the experiences of black patients, as well as that of the black doctors who navigate between the black community and the predominately white medical world. In tracing my journey along the intersection of race and medicine at the end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first, I make no claim to speak for all black physicians or black patients, yet I am confident that much of what I have written will ring true to their varied experiences. By putting human faces on these serious dilemmas, I hope to contribute to a much-needed public dialogue on improving the health of black people. Jim’s fate—a young black person robbed of his future—is one that far too many of us suffer. Excerpted from "Black Man in a White Coat" by Damon Tweedy. "Black Man in a White Coat" copyright © 2015 by Damon Tweedy. First hardcover edition published Sept. 8, 2015, by Picador. All rights reserved.On a spring morning in 1997, Jim Harper, a young man from Durham, North Carolina, woke up in his two-bedroom apartment with no clue that he would soon become gravely ill. The first signs of trouble seemed innocent enough: some numbness on the right side of his face and in his right arm and hand, easily chalked up to having slept on that side of his body. He stumbled as he got out of bed, but figured he was simply tired from the previous day’s shift managing angry teens at a group home. His fiancée, Regina, asked if he needed to see a doctor; he smiled and told her that she worried too much. Her anxiety ebbed as she went off to her job at Kmart, only to resurface when he didn’t answer the phone during her lunch break. When Regina rushed home a few hours later at the end of her shift, she found Jim sprawled across their bathroom tile. His eyes were wide open and he clearly recognized her, but his words were garbled. He couldn’t tell her what was wrong or how long he’d been that way. She frantically dialed 911. Within a half-hour of his arrival at the emergency department, after a neurological exam and rapid CT scan of his brain, it was clear what had transpired: Jim, just a few weeks shy of forty, had suffered a massive stroke. The doctors learned that Jim had high blood pressure that had been poorly treated, but found nothing else to account for his tragic fate. He had no heart problems. No clotting disorders. No aneurysms. No diabetes or high cholesterol. He didn’t smoke, rarely drank, and avoided street drugs. Ultimately, as best they could tell, Jim mostly had a lot of bad luck. * About two weeks later, I stood at the foot of Jim’s bed at Duke Hospital. Along with another first-year medical student, I was shadowing Dr. Wilson, a faculty neurologist, as part of a weekly seminar that introduced us to clinical medicine. This class was the highlight of our week, as it gave us a brief break from the lecture hall and laboratory, where we memorized biochemical pathways and micro-organism names, and provided a peek at our future lives on the hospital wards. We wore perfectly knotted ties and crisp white coats for the occasion, trying hard to look like the doctors we would one day become. Jim’s future seemed far less promising than ours did. A big man, he had once been a football player. Now he could not move the right side of his body. His face drooped as saliva dribbled out of the corner of his mouth. His words came out choppy, like those of a toddler; when frustrated, he cried like a child in the midst of his “terrible twos.” Given his lack of improvement, the doctors had begun to doubt that he could make any significant recovery. They were preparing to send him to a rehabilitation facility. This place also had a long-term care unit, where, if he made no real progress, Jim might spend the rest of his life. According to the nurses, Regina’s visits were already becoming shorter and less frequent. “It’s a very sad case,” Dr. Wilson said, as we left the room and walked to a nearby conference area to discuss our patient and his illness. He started by telling us that stroke was consistently one of the top five causes of disability and death in America. Then he drilled us about the major risk factors, going back and forth between us in a competition of sorts. In eager medical student fashion, we rattled off the usual suspects: diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, advanced age, smoking, and high cholesterol. When it was my turn again, Dr. Wilson indicated that there was one important risk factor we had yet to mention. He looked at me with a worried frown. Come on, his look said, for you of all people, this should be easy. I sighed. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but, as I was quickly learning, it always did. “Race,” I said, looking down at my dark hand against my pristine white coat. “Our patient is black.” “Exactly,” Dr. Wilson responded, as if I’d now earned a top score on my exam. “Some would say that this is the most important variable of all.” He rattled off damning statistics about race and stroke: “The risk is twice as high for blacks compared to whites for those over sixty-five. And in younger groups, such as with our patient here, the ratio is more like three-to-one or even four-to-one.” I’d seen the impact of stroke on both sides of my family. When I was fourteen, my dad’s brother—who would often drive five hours each way on a Saturday to visit us for a few hours—died within days of collapsing at his home, putting an abrupt end to his unexpected and always enthusiastic visits that I so enjoyed. A few years later, my maternal grandmother—Grandma Flossie—developed dementia from a series of minor strokes that slowly stole her mind and, eventually, her body. Like Jim, both had high blood pressure. “Our patient’s other major risk factor is hypertension,” Dr. Wilson continued. “This also is much more prevalent in blacks—nearly twice as common. No matter how you slice it, race is a very big deal when it comes to stroke.” Dr. Wilson had hammered home something I would learn time and again, both at Duke and beyond: Being black can be bad for your health. * “Of all the forms of inequality,” Martin Luther King Jr. told a gathering of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in 1966, “injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.” At the time of his remarks, the United States had begun to take several formal steps to end its century-long practice of state-sponsored segregation that had followed the end of slavery. In medicine, this meant that black people could begin to receive treatment side by side with whites rather than being relegated to separate and unequal facilities or sectioned off in run-down areas of white hospitals. Such practices had undoubtedly contributed to their poorer health, especially in the Deep South of Dr. King’s time, where black people on average had a life expectancy nearly nine years less than whites. While the civil rights movement ultimately stirred remarkable racial progress in various areas of American life, many of King’s concerns about health and health care remain valid to this day. From cradle to grave, these health differences, often called health disparities, are found virtually anywhere one might choose to look. Whether it is premature birth, infant mortality, homicide, childhood obesity, or HIV infection, black children and young adults disproportionately bear the brunt of these medical and social ills. By middle age, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, kidney failure, and cancer have a suffocating grip on the health of black people and maintain this stranglehold on them well into their senior years. Thus, it is no surprise that the life expectancy among black people, despite real progress over the last twenty-five years, still significantly lags behind whites. In suffering a crippling stroke at age thirty-nine, Jim had become another casualty of inequality, a fresh case that Dr. Wilson could use to illustrate the health burden of being black. * Three decades after Dr. King’s 1966 remarks, I entered Duke University School of Medicine as one of a half-dozen black students on scholarship. With the scholarships, Duke sought to cast aside its history of racial exclusion and become a national leader in producing a new generation of black physicians who could change the face of medicine. My goal as I headed for Durham was much less ambitious and civic-minded. I simply wanted to make my parents proud of me and set myself up to earn a good living. Race-based concerns ranked low on my list of priorities. But my professors couldn’t stop talking about race. During my early months, as they taught us about diseases both common and rare, they inevitably cited the demographics, explaining which disorders were more common in the young or old, women or men, and one racial group or another. When they spoke about race, they would sometimes mention Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Yet invariably, as it always seems to in America, their analysis came down to comparing blacks and whites. It seemed that no matter the body part or organ system affected, the lecturers would sound a familiar refrain: “It’s more common in blacks than in whites.” Each time the demographics of a new disease came up in a lecture, my stomach twisted. I knew where this was heading. Seated in a sea of mostly white and Asian faces, I wondered how this information affected their views of black people, whether they already had biases against us, and whether any of this impacted the way they saw me. This racial health data intensified my already uneasy feelings about my place at Duke. My classmates largely hailed from well-to-do suburbs and had attended prestigious, brand-name schools; I came from a working-class neighborhood and had attended a state university with little name recognition. Their parents all seemed to be doctors, lawyers, or professors. My dad didn’t finish high school and worked as a meatcutter in a grocery store; my mom attended segregated inner-city public schools before embarking on a forty-year career in the federal government. From the moment I walked along Duke’s manicured lawns and inside its Gothic buildings, I worried that I was at a stark disadvantage, both socially and academically. Constantly hearing about the medical frailties of black people picked at the scab of my insecurity. Over time, I came to dread this racial aspect of the lectures so much that I felt intense, perverse relief whenever a professor mentioned that a disease was more common among white people. But this list was short and the refrain that accompanied it proved equally painful. For example, while breast cancer got diagnosed more often in white women, “black women who get this disease do much worse,” the professors would say. While I was learning about the health woes of my race, my own body began to betray me. The first sign occurred not long after I’d met Jim, the young stroke victim. As part of that same introductory course, my classmates and I learned basic medical skills by practicing on each other. One day, we measured blood pressures. My classmate frowned as she took mine. The reading was 150/95. Our supervisor, a family physician, rechecked and confirmed the reading. The doctor I saw soon afterward gave even worse news: My kidneys were showing early signs of failure. To a twenty-three-year-old first-year medical student, high blood pressure and kidney disease sounded like a death sentence. Worst-case scenarios flashed through my mind: Dialysis. Kidney transplant. Transplant rejection. More dialysis. Infection. Death. Was I destined for a similar fate as my uncle and grandmother? Or something worse? Would I even reach fifty? The image of Jim flashed through my mind. A few weeks after leaving the hospital and moving into the rehab facility, he died from a massive blood clot that lodged in his lungs. He had just turned forty. I drove home from the clinic picturing Jim in an open casket. But instead of a stirring eulogy and traditional funeral hymnals, I heard Dr. Wilson’s voice reciting statistics on race and stroke. * As I struggled to make sense of the prospect of facing chronic illness in my twenties, I became consumed by the broader health problems of my race. Along with the many patients I saw who gave life to my professors’ statistics came reports of prominent black men who had met similar fates. Harvard Law graduate and billionaire CEO Reginald Lewis died at age fifty from cancer, while football legends Walter Payton and Reggie White died in their mid-forties from rare disorders, just a few years before 60 Minutes mainstay Ed Bradley succumbed in his mid-sixties to cancer. Journalist Ron Howell chronicled the premature deaths of his black classmates from Yale in a 2011 article for the university’s alumni magazine that generated national interest. A large bank account, Ivy League schooling, Hall of Fame busts, and a quarter-century run on America’s most-watched program stood no match against early death for these black men. Why do black people suffer more health problems than other groups? What do these challenges mean in their everyday lives? How do their struggles play out before a largely white medical community? How can we begin to solve these seemingly intractable problems? Do I have a special role to play as a black physician? Confronting these questions has led me on an intellectual and emotional journey, one that I’ve tried to capture in the pages that follow. I’ve divided the book into three sections, corresponding to the different phases of my medical life. Part I surveys my medical school years. Part II explores my grueling twelve months of medical internship as a newly minted doctor. Part III examines my subsequent years in psychiatry training and in early clinical practice. Throughout each stage, race played a recurrent role, at turns predictable and unexpected, often annoying, sometimes disheartening, and occasionally uplifting. By sharing my story, as well as the stories of some of the patients I’ve met over the past fifteen years, I hope to humanize the dire statistics and bitter racial debates and paint a fuller picture of the experiences of black patients, as well as that of the black doctors who navigate between the black community and the predominately white medical world. In tracing my journey along the intersection of race and medicine at the end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first, I make no claim to speak for all black physicians or black patients, yet I am confident that much of what I have written will ring true to their varied experiences. By putting human faces on these serious dilemmas, I hope to contribute to a much-needed public dialogue on improving the health of black people. Jim’s fate—a young black person robbed of his future—is one that far too many of us suffer. Excerpted from "Black Man in a White Coat" by Damon Tweedy. "Black Man in a White Coat" copyright © 2015 by Damon Tweedy. First hardcover edition published Sept. 8, 2015, by Picador. All rights reserved.
7 wildly successful CEOs who have no reservations about smoking pot
Even though marijuana is now legal in four states and the nation's capital, and medical marijuana is legal in 23 states, being a pot smoker is still enough to get a worker fired in lots of places. It's different if the big boss is a pot smoker. No one is going to fire him or her except the board of directors, and these days, it really doesn't seem like pot-smoking CEOs have that much to worry about. Some business leaders have long advocated for marijuana law reform, including Microsoft mogul Bill Gates and Whole Foods founder John Mackey, both of whom have called for outright legalization. The Virgin Group's Sir Richard Branson is so enthused that he says “would invest” in the marijuana industry if he could do so legally. Some don't just talk the talk about marijuana legalization, they walk the walk. The recently departed John Sperling of the for-profit University of Phoenix, backed California's groundbreaking 1996 Prop 215 medical marijuana initiative to the tune of $200,000, and he was back four years later along with financier George Soros and others to kick in $3.7 million to support Prop 36, which helped to reverse California's prison overcrowding by diverting non-violent drug offenders to treatment. Also recently departed, Peter Lewis, long-time CEO of Progressive Insurance, was the single biggest individual donor to marijuana and drug reform efforts, kicking in an estimated $40 million since the 1980s, including $3 million to support legalization efforts in places like Washington state in 2012. Lewis has left us, but a new generation of businessmen are stepping up. Facebook cofounders Sean Parker and Dustin Moskovitz contributed $170,000 between them to the barely failed 2010 California Prop 19 legalization initiative, and Weedmaps founder Justin Hartfield has already put $2 million into a fund to legalize weed in California next year. Advocating marijuana legalization or backing it with financial support is one thing—it is advocacy of a political position on a pressing social issue—but being an actual out-and-out pot smoker is another. But it really doesn't seem to matter. Here are seven pot smoking CEOs that nobody has gotten around to firing: Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg is the founder, CEO, and owner of Bloomberg L.P., the financial software, data, and media giant. As three-term mayor of New York City, he presided over tens of thousands of small-time pot busts, despite having famously answered a question about smoking pot with: "You bet I did, and I enjoyed it." NORML used those remarks as the basis for a full-page ad in the New York Times and ads on city buses, prompting Bloomberg to say he regretted those remarks, and that he was "a believer that we should enforce the laws, and I do not think that decriminalizing marijuana is a good idea." Richard Branson. The afore-mentioned Branson not only wants to invest in marijuana, he says he smokes it with his adult son. In a 2007 interview with GQ, he told Piers Morgan as much, saying father and son had lit up during an Australian beach vacation. In that same interview, Branson revealed that he had learned the art of joint-rolling from none other than Rolling Stone Keith Richards, who should know how it's done. Hugh Hefner. The Playboy magazine founder and octogenarian serial monogamist deserves kudos for being the first businessman to get behind pot legalization, donating $5,000 to help found NORML in 1970. Hef is still sticking to that position: “I don’t think there’s any question that marijuana should be legalized because to not legalize it, we’re paying the same price we paid for prohibition,” he said in 2010. But it wasn't just politics; Hefner liked what pot did for him: “Smoking helped put me in touch with the realm of the senses,” he told Patrick Anderson, author of "High in America." “I discovered a whole other dimension to sex.” Mark Johnson. Johnson may not be as well-known as some other names on this list, but he is the CEO and founder of Descartes Labs, a New Mexico-based tech company, and before that, he was CEO of Zite, a Silicon Valley personalized news streaming company. Back in his Zite days, he told Bloomberg News he was a full-on stoner, toking up day in and day out, and that so many other tech workers were, too, that it was not an issue. “People just don’t care,” Johnson said. "If you do, you don’t need to hide it; and if you don’t, you accept that there are people around you that do.” He also defended marijuana users' productivity: “Pot is an extremely functional drug,” he said. “Coders can code on it, writers can write on it.” Peter Lewis. Lewis was CEO of Progressive Insurance from the 1960s to his retirement in 2000, and served as chairman until his death in 2013. He was also "a functioning pot head" who used weed for both fun and relief from chronic pain from a leg amputation in 1998. John Sperling. The University of Phoenix CEO died last year at age 93, but not before publicly acknowledging that he smoked marijuana manage the side effects of the treatment he received for prostate cancer. He, Lewis, and George Soros were the original troika of deep-pocketed marijuana reform businessmen; now only Soros is left, although Lewis's estate continues to invest in legalization efforts. Oprah Winfrey. The iconic Oprah isn't on TV anymore, but she' worth $3 billion and she's still the chairwoman and CEO of both Harpo Productions and the Oprah Winfrey Network, where she's also CCO. She has never staked out a position on marijuana legalization, but she has twice said she smoked it, although not for a long time. She told "Watch What Happens: Live" in 2013 that she had last smoked in 1982, and she told "The Late Show With David Letterman" earlier this year that she hadn't "smoked weed in 30 years." George Zimmer. The founder and recently ousted CEO of Men's Wearhouse is an unabashed pot smoker, as well as a financial backer of legalization efforts. Just a couple of weeks ago he told CNBC that he’s “been smoking marijuana on a regular basis for about 50 years.” And he's not take it easy after his 2013 firing, either: He has since gone on to create online tuxedo rental and tailoring companies. 
Turn off your f**king phone and talk to me! Sherry Turkle on why “I’m not the Darth Vader of social media”
Few observers have gotten closer than Sherry Turkle to what digital technology has done to our souls. She’s followed up her chilling 2011 book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” with a look at the way digital devices and the online world make it harder for us to engage in meaningful ways. “Reclaiming Conversation” is subtitled “The Power of Talk in a Digital Age,” but it looks not just at the corrosion of conversation but of solitude and society as well. A psychologist and professor at MIT – where she directs the university’s Initiative on Technology and Self – starts with the work of Henry David Thoreau and contrasts his vision with the lives of millennials and contemporary parents who pay more attention to their iPhones than their kids. “This is a persuasive and intimate book,” Carlos Lozada wrote in the Washington Post, “one that explores the minutiae of human relationships. Turkle uses our experiences to shame us, showing how, phones in hand, we turn away from our children, friends and co-workers, even from ourselves.” We spoke to Turkle from New York City. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. So let’s start with the issue of conversation. The digital world has changed us in all kinds of ways, as individuals, as a society. Why is conversation the right lens to contemplate on, to get at the seismic shifts? First of all, we have to start at the fact that I’m a psychologist. I think you want to write about what you know and you should write about it with confidence. So, I finished a book that describes people’s experience with isolation, even in the middle of being connected. I’m very interested in that kind of paradox. They’ve called it "alone together," but I’m sure there are other better ways to describe that new kind of feeling that I experience myself. I’m alone but I have 500 unopened emails. I would interview people and find that that wasn’t an isolated experience, it was happening to so many people. As I was finishing that book – which I had begun way before social media was a big thing; it was a 15-year project – I began to hear more and more something that I did not have a chance to explore. I just had a chance to hear it, which was “I would rather text than talk.” I mean, it was almost like a joke. It was one more person, it wasn’t just kids, it wasn’t just grown-ups. It was my students; they didn’t want to come to office hours, they would rather text than talk. And I just began to think at the end of this “Alone Together” project, as a psychologist, what does conversation do for us? Where do we develop the kind of give-and-take, of sensing other people’s bodies and response to us? Putting ourselves in place of others? For children that’s like the bedrock, the bedrock of development.... In business you need it; there was this great research on conversation and productivity and conversation being good for the bottom line. And I thought, what about if I take seriously what these people are saying to me, and I just pursue the question of conversation in many areas of life, the best I can for five years. I wasn’t going to do another 15-year project. I’m going to give myself five years and be the Energizer Bunny. For five years, I’m going to study conversation, and I decided on Thoreau. I was very interested in Thoreau at the time and this essay where he talked about the three chairs in his house – one for solitude, one for friendship and one for society – and how they kind of worked together. You need solitude for friendship, you need friendship and solitude for society and… you read the book so you understand. And I said, I’m just gonna pursue this story, kind of like a journalist. I just became compelled. Then, as I began to pursue this story, I realized that I was far from alone. All of these researchers were doing absolutely magnificent studies, the kind of studies I don’t do, which were very interesting quantitative studies of the putting the phone on the table and the conversation becomes trivial and people don’t empathize with each other.... The putting of people in solitude and people giving themselves electroshocks every six minutes because they can’t tolerate minutes of solitude as they feel the need to administrate self-induced electroshocks. That’s the reason it happened and I felt, more and more, that conversation was a thing that we were interrupting. The thing that bothers me about this technology, because I’m so pro-technology, is the fact that it interrupts us from giving our attention. Like right now, I’m really into this conversation and I love Salon… but my phone is blipping! It’s telling me that you’re not the only one. I think there’s a setting that I can turn that off. It’s not blipping for another call, it’s blipping for an email and I don’t know how to turn of that setting; it’s annoying. We live life that way. In a traditional kind of conversation, a face-to-face encounter between two people, what is happening? It’s not just two people talking. There’s a kind of deep interaction, ideally, right? Yes. I don’t need to call it deep. I really want to de-romanticize what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the basics. I’m not talking about “And now, Let’s do Heidegger" talk. When a parent talks to a child over breakfast and says, “What’s happening at school today?” You’re getting eye contact, you’re getting attention to body language, you’re getting vocalization, you’re putting yourself in the place of the other, you’re getting a back-and-forth of turn-taking. You’re getting respect for someone finishing their thoughts. You’re getting the feeling that someone else is listening to you. You’re getting the feeling that someone else is going to be there to hear you finish your idea. You’re getting the bare bones of a relationship. You’re learning empathy and continuity. You’re learning things that you’re going to take to every aspect of your life, of relationship and community and friendship and romance. You’re learning how to think about yourself. It’s in conversation with other people, in that respectful back-and-forth of ideas that you learn how to do it to yourself for yourself. You learn self-reflection. It’s not like people kind of jump out of the womb, knowing what to do about their problems. They have conversations with other people and it kind of models how you think about your own stuff. So, so much is going on in that. In my book I talk about, instead, a parent is doing their email at breakfast and the child is being ignored. They’re not getting that. So my basic point of view is very simple. We just have to hold on to our phones and just use them with intention. Now that we’ve had some experience with them, we can see the ways they can be tremendous disruptors. And in some ways, younger people are better at it than older ones… You’ve written – especially in your new book, and in “Alone Together” – about teenagers, students, young people. You’re a college professor and spend a lot of time with them. We think generally about young people as being mostly comfortable with the digital world and its distractions. But you’ve found that many of them aren’t, even if sometimes they can’t articulate it. Some of them suspect something is wrong – that these devices have taken over their lives. Definitely, definitely. Well, I would say there’s a conflict here. On the one hand, I just spoke with a young woman who read my book and said, “Listen, I really want to defend the kind of talk I have (and I talk a lot about these people in my book). I’m with my friends and I’m also on the phone, and actually the people who I’m with were also on the phone together. We’re also on social media together even though we’re in the room together, and there are other people in the conversation who are just on social media. And I really want to defend that as a very rich way of interacting, and I don’t want to hear from you that that’s not great.” And to all of those people who love that, I want to say that sounds like a really rich interaction. And just as long as you know how to do other things, I am very fine that you know how to do that, and enjoy that. Because I’m not the Darth Vader of social media, here to take away the pleasure and the fun of being able to enjoy that. Right. I know those conversations. I’ve watched them; I’ve seen the transcripts of them. I’m very familiar with their wit and the sexiness and the eroticism, and the pleasures of those interactions. And I’m just here to say that as long as they’re fluid enough and flexible enough that they can also have conversations one-to-one, and do the kind of thing that that sort of conversation can accomplish – all the more power that we’ve expanded our range. I celebrate that, that we’ve expanded our horizons. The fact that I can do email with you – I love that. I mean, this is great. So I’m not going to say I’m not going to use email because I can only use the voice, you can hear my modulation… that’s stupid. And I love texting with everybody. But then, I also know a lot of young people who are very aware that they’re often in conversations where they’re with their friends but they’re also on their phones, and the conversation is really trivial because they’re constantly being interrupted. And like that one guy says, “Our texting is fine. It’s what texting does to the conversation that’s basically is the problem.” And a lot of people are really concerned about that. So I found a lot of young people who really, I would say, were very aware of that, and wanted to talk to me about that at length, and the sort of role their parents had played in really sensitizing themselves to the importance of putting their phones away, and how important it was for them to learn that. I think that you found that even a phone that wasn’t being used changed the tone of the conversation. If two or three people are sitting around, say, a dinner table, and a phone is out and visible, it changes the way everybody connects or doesn’t connect. It doesn’t even need to be ringing. What does it do to that small encounter? It makes everybody aware that the conversation could be interrupted. And you see that in experimental results – so there are experiments that have been done that show that. And then you see that ethnographically when you watch people interacting, but also when people talk about what it’s like to go to dinner in those situations. So you see that it’s a reminder that we’re interruptible. It’s a reminder that we’re not just there for each other right now. And that’s the gratification of feeling that “You are mine for now. I can make a mistake.” I love the girl who talks about the seven-minute rule. People take at least seven minutes to figure out if the conversation is going to be interesting. And she says, “I’m usually not willing to put in my seven minutes.” But she knows what she’s losing. She says, “I’m not willing to put in my seven minutes. Because that’s what’s wrong with me, that’s what’s wrong with my generation. I go to my phone – I don’t like to be bored.” You make a powerful and frightening argument in your book that something’s wrong with the way we’re interacting these days. For those of us who recognize that there really is a problem – whether we’re teachers or parents, or just citizens of the 21st century – what can we do to, as you say, reclaim conversation, restore human connection? It’s funny. I wrote an op-ed for the [New York] Times… They made me add a line that says, This all may sound simple, and not a big deal, but if taken together, they really make a big, big difference. So first of all, act with intention. I tell the story of the guy who’s giving his 2-year-old daughter a bath, and he’s doing his email when he’s giving her a bath. And he remembers his 11-year-old daughter, and how he used to talk to her when she was in the bathtub. He feels so terrible, but he does it anyway. That guy, he knows that he’s not letting conversation do its work. So that guy needs to put down his phone and not bring it into the bathroom. So I talk about designing for vulnerability, which is one of my big, big things now; that when you go on a diet, your first step is not to stock up your refrigerator with Häagen-Dazs. This guy has no business bringing the phone into the bathroom if he knows that the conversation with his daughter is very important. So I talk about sacred spaces – the kitchen, the dining room, the car – as places you just don’t bring your device. And those are places that are places for conversation. So conversations will happen if you make spaces that are for conversation. And a wonderful study about our resilience – that after only five days in a summer camp with no devices, the empathy numbers rebound. It’s very inspirational. So that’s my first thing: Design for vulnerability, make sacred spaces for conversation. When you find yourself in situations where you know you’re doing something that is acting against the best interest of you and your family, your lover or your friend – stop. Take a minute. Take a breath, and think. And then I really believe in taking time for solitude, because conversation begins in solitude. And I really believe in this virtuous circle, this whole notion that you need solitude in order to come to conversation with the ability to listen to other people, and form a relationship of… well, you can really hear what they have to say and not just project on them what you need them to say. Well, we end up back where your last book, "Alone Together," began. Thanks again for taking some time to speak. Few observers have gotten closer than Sherry Turkle to what digital technology has done to our souls. She’s followed up her chilling 2011 book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” with a look at the way digital devices and the online world make it harder for us to engage in meaningful ways. “Reclaiming Conversation” is subtitled “The Power of Talk in a Digital Age,” but it looks not just at the corrosion of conversation but of solitude and society as well. A psychologist and professor at MIT – where she directs the university’s Initiative on Technology and Self – starts with the work of Henry David Thoreau and contrasts his vision with the lives of millennials and contemporary parents who pay more attention to their iPhones than their kids. “This is a persuasive and intimate book,” Carlos Lozada wrote in the Washington Post, “one that explores the minutiae of human relationships. Turkle uses our experiences to shame us, showing how, phones in hand, we turn away from our children, friends and co-workers, even from ourselves.” We spoke to Turkle from New York City. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. So let’s start with the issue of conversation. The digital world has changed us in all kinds of ways, as individuals, as a society. Why is conversation the right lens to contemplate on, to get at the seismic shifts? First of all, we have to start at the fact that I’m a psychologist. I think you want to write about what you know and you should write about it with confidence. So, I finished a book that describes people’s experience with isolation, even in the middle of being connected. I’m very interested in that kind of paradox. They’ve called it "alone together," but I’m sure there are other better ways to describe that new kind of feeling that I experience myself. I’m alone but I have 500 unopened emails. I would interview people and find that that wasn’t an isolated experience, it was happening to so many people. As I was finishing that book – which I had begun way before social media was a big thing; it was a 15-year project – I began to hear more and more something that I did not have a chance to explore. I just had a chance to hear it, which was “I would rather text than talk.” I mean, it was almost like a joke. It was one more person, it wasn’t just kids, it wasn’t just grown-ups. It was my students; they didn’t want to come to office hours, they would rather text than talk. And I just began to think at the end of this “Alone Together” project, as a psychologist, what does conversation do for us? Where do we develop the kind of give-and-take, of sensing other people’s bodies and response to us? Putting ourselves in place of others? For children that’s like the bedrock, the bedrock of development.... In business you need it; there was this great research on conversation and productivity and conversation being good for the bottom line. And I thought, what about if I take seriously what these people are saying to me, and I just pursue the question of conversation in many areas of life, the best I can for five years. I wasn’t going to do another 15-year project. I’m going to give myself five years and be the Energizer Bunny. For five years, I’m going to study conversation, and I decided on Thoreau. I was very interested in Thoreau at the time and this essay where he talked about the three chairs in his house – one for solitude, one for friendship and one for society – and how they kind of worked together. You need solitude for friendship, you need friendship and solitude for society and… you read the book so you understand. And I said, I’m just gonna pursue this story, kind of like a journalist. I just became compelled. Then, as I began to pursue this story, I realized that I was far from alone. All of these researchers were doing absolutely magnificent studies, the kind of studies I don’t do, which were very interesting quantitative studies of the putting the phone on the table and the conversation becomes trivial and people don’t empathize with each other.... The putting of people in solitude and people giving themselves electroshocks every six minutes because they can’t tolerate minutes of solitude as they feel the need to administrate self-induced electroshocks. That’s the reason it happened and I felt, more and more, that conversation was a thing that we were interrupting. The thing that bothers me about this technology, because I’m so pro-technology, is the fact that it interrupts us from giving our attention. Like right now, I’m really into this conversation and I love Salon… but my phone is blipping! It’s telling me that you’re not the only one. I think there’s a setting that I can turn that off. It’s not blipping for another call, it’s blipping for an email and I don’t know how to turn of that setting; it’s annoying. We live life that way. In a traditional kind of conversation, a face-to-face encounter between two people, what is happening? It’s not just two people talking. There’s a kind of deep interaction, ideally, right? Yes. I don’t need to call it deep. I really want to de-romanticize what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the basics. I’m not talking about “And now, Let’s do Heidegger" talk. When a parent talks to a child over breakfast and says, “What’s happening at school today?” You’re getting eye contact, you’re getting attention to body language, you’re getting vocalization, you’re putting yourself in the place of the other, you’re getting a back-and-forth of turn-taking. You’re getting respect for someone finishing their thoughts. You’re getting the feeling that someone else is listening to you. You’re getting the feeling that someone else is going to be there to hear you finish your idea. You’re getting the bare bones of a relationship. You’re learning empathy and continuity. You’re learning things that you’re going to take to every aspect of your life, of relationship and community and friendship and romance. You’re learning how to think about yourself. It’s in conversation with other people, in that respectful back-and-forth of ideas that you learn how to do it to yourself for yourself. You learn self-reflection. It’s not like people kind of jump out of the womb, knowing what to do about their problems. They have conversations with other people and it kind of models how you think about your own stuff. So, so much is going on in that. In my book I talk about, instead, a parent is doing their email at breakfast and the child is being ignored. They’re not getting that. So my basic point of view is very simple. We just have to hold on to our phones and just use them with intention. Now that we’ve had some experience with them, we can see the ways they can be tremendous disruptors. And in some ways, younger people are better at it than older ones… You’ve written – especially in your new book, and in “Alone Together” – about teenagers, students, young people. You’re a college professor and spend a lot of time with them. We think generally about young people as being mostly comfortable with the digital world and its distractions. But you’ve found that many of them aren’t, even if sometimes they can’t articulate it. Some of them suspect something is wrong – that these devices have taken over their lives. Definitely, definitely. Well, I would say there’s a conflict here. On the one hand, I just spoke with a young woman who read my book and said, “Listen, I really want to defend the kind of talk I have (and I talk a lot about these people in my book). I’m with my friends and I’m also on the phone, and actually the people who I’m with were also on the phone together. We’re also on social media together even though we’re in the room together, and there are other people in the conversation who are just on social media. And I really want to defend that as a very rich way of interacting, and I don’t want to hear from you that that’s not great.” And to all of those people who love that, I want to say that sounds like a really rich interaction. And just as long as you know how to do other things, I am very fine that you know how to do that, and enjoy that. Because I’m not the Darth Vader of social media, here to take away the pleasure and the fun of being able to enjoy that. Right. I know those conversations. I’ve watched them; I’ve seen the transcripts of them. I’m very familiar with their wit and the sexiness and the eroticism, and the pleasures of those interactions. And I’m just here to say that as long as they’re fluid enough and flexible enough that they can also have conversations one-to-one, and do the kind of thing that that sort of conversation can accomplish – all the more power that we’ve expanded our range. I celebrate that, that we’ve expanded our horizons. The fact that I can do email with you – I love that. I mean, this is great. So I’m not going to say I’m not going to use email because I can only use the voice, you can hear my modulation… that’s stupid. And I love texting with everybody. But then, I also know a lot of young people who are very aware that they’re often in conversations where they’re with their friends but they’re also on their phones, and the conversation is really trivial because they’re constantly being interrupted. And like that one guy says, “Our texting is fine. It’s what texting does to the conversation that’s basically is the problem.” And a lot of people are really concerned about that. So I found a lot of young people who really, I would say, were very aware of that, and wanted to talk to me about that at length, and the sort of role their parents had played in really sensitizing themselves to the importance of putting their phones away, and how important it was for them to learn that. I think that you found that even a phone that wasn’t being used changed the tone of the conversation. If two or three people are sitting around, say, a dinner table, and a phone is out and visible, it changes the way everybody connects or doesn’t connect. It doesn’t even need to be ringing. What does it do to that small encounter? It makes everybody aware that the conversation could be interrupted. And you see that in experimental results – so there are experiments that have been done that show that. And then you see that ethnographically when you watch people interacting, but also when people talk about what it’s like to go to dinner in those situations. So you see that it’s a reminder that we’re interruptible. It’s a reminder that we’re not just there for each other right now. And that’s the gratification of feeling that “You are mine for now. I can make a mistake.” I love the girl who talks about the seven-minute rule. People take at least seven minutes to figure out if the conversation is going to be interesting. And she says, “I’m usually not willing to put in my seven minutes.” But she knows what she’s losing. She says, “I’m not willing to put in my seven minutes. Because that’s what’s wrong with me, that’s what’s wrong with my generation. I go to my phone – I don’t like to be bored.” You make a powerful and frightening argument in your book that something’s wrong with the way we’re interacting these days. For those of us who recognize that there really is a problem – whether we’re teachers or parents, or just citizens of the 21st century – what can we do to, as you say, reclaim conversation, restore human connection? It’s funny. I wrote an op-ed for the [New York] Times… They made me add a line that says, This all may sound simple, and not a big deal, but if taken together, they really make a big, big difference. So first of all, act with intention. I tell the story of the guy who’s giving his 2-year-old daughter a bath, and he’s doing his email when he’s giving her a bath. And he remembers his 11-year-old daughter, and how he used to talk to her when she was in the bathtub. He feels so terrible, but he does it anyway. That guy, he knows that he’s not letting conversation do its work. So that guy needs to put down his phone and not bring it into the bathroom. So I talk about designing for vulnerability, which is one of my big, big things now; that when you go on a diet, your first step is not to stock up your refrigerator with Häagen-Dazs. This guy has no business bringing the phone into the bathroom if he knows that the conversation with his daughter is very important. So I talk about sacred spaces – the kitchen, the dining room, the car – as places you just don’t bring your device. And those are places that are places for conversation. So conversations will happen if you make spaces that are for conversation. And a wonderful study about our resilience – that after only five days in a summer camp with no devices, the empathy numbers rebound. It’s very inspirational. So that’s my first thing: Design for vulnerability, make sacred spaces for conversation. When you find yourself in situations where you know you’re doing something that is acting against the best interest of you and your family, your lover or your friend – stop. Take a minute. Take a breath, and think. And then I really believe in taking time for solitude, because conversation begins in solitude. And I really believe in this virtuous circle, this whole notion that you need solitude in order to come to conversation with the ability to listen to other people, and form a relationship of… well, you can really hear what they have to say and not just project on them what you need them to say. Well, we end up back where your last book, "Alone Together," began. Thanks again for taking some time to speak. Few observers have gotten closer than Sherry Turkle to what digital technology has done to our souls. She’s followed up her chilling 2011 book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” with a look at the way digital devices and the online world make it harder for us to engage in meaningful ways. “Reclaiming Conversation” is subtitled “The Power of Talk in a Digital Age,” but it looks not just at the corrosion of conversation but of solitude and society as well. A psychologist and professor at MIT – where she directs the university’s Initiative on Technology and Self – starts with the work of Henry David Thoreau and contrasts his vision with the lives of millennials and contemporary parents who pay more attention to their iPhones than their kids. “This is a persuasive and intimate book,” Carlos Lozada wrote in the Washington Post, “one that explores the minutiae of human relationships. Turkle uses our experiences to shame us, showing how, phones in hand, we turn away from our children, friends and co-workers, even from ourselves.” We spoke to Turkle from New York City. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. So let’s start with the issue of conversation. The digital world has changed us in all kinds of ways, as individuals, as a society. Why is conversation the right lens to contemplate on, to get at the seismic shifts? First of all, we have to start at the fact that I’m a psychologist. I think you want to write about what you know and you should write about it with confidence. So, I finished a book that describes people’s experience with isolation, even in the middle of being connected. I’m very interested in that kind of paradox. They’ve called it "alone together," but I’m sure there are other better ways to describe that new kind of feeling that I experience myself. I’m alone but I have 500 unopened emails. I would interview people and find that that wasn’t an isolated experience, it was happening to so many people. As I was finishing that book – which I had begun way before social media was a big thing; it was a 15-year project – I began to hear more and more something that I did not have a chance to explore. I just had a chance to hear it, which was “I would rather text than talk.” I mean, it was almost like a joke. It was one more person, it wasn’t just kids, it wasn’t just grown-ups. It was my students; they didn’t want to come to office hours, they would rather text than talk. And I just began to think at the end of this “Alone Together” project, as a psychologist, what does conversation do for us? Where do we develop the kind of give-and-take, of sensing other people’s bodies and response to us? Putting ourselves in place of others? For children that’s like the bedrock, the bedrock of development.... In business you need it; there was this great research on conversation and productivity and conversation being good for the bottom line. And I thought, what about if I take seriously what these people are saying to me, and I just pursue the question of conversation in many areas of life, the best I can for five years. I wasn’t going to do another 15-year project. I’m going to give myself five years and be the Energizer Bunny. For five years, I’m going to study conversation, and I decided on Thoreau. I was very interested in Thoreau at the time and this essay where he talked about the three chairs in his house – one for solitude, one for friendship and one for society – and how they kind of worked together. You need solitude for friendship, you need friendship and solitude for society and… you read the book so you understand. And I said, I’m just gonna pursue this story, kind of like a journalist. I just became compelled. Then, as I began to pursue this story, I realized that I was far from alone. All of these researchers were doing absolutely magnificent studies, the kind of studies I don’t do, which were very interesting quantitative studies of the putting the phone on the table and the conversation becomes trivial and people don’t empathize with each other.... The putting of people in solitude and people giving themselves electroshocks every six minutes because they can’t tolerate minutes of solitude as they feel the need to administrate self-induced electroshocks. That’s the reason it happened and I felt, more and more, that conversation was a thing that we were interrupting. The thing that bothers me about this technology, because I’m so pro-technology, is the fact that it interrupts us from giving our attention. Like right now, I’m really into this conversation and I love Salon… but my phone is blipping! It’s telling me that you’re not the only one. I think there’s a setting that I can turn that off. It’s not blipping for another call, it’s blipping for an email and I don’t know how to turn of that setting; it’s annoying. We live life that way. In a traditional kind of conversation, a face-to-face encounter between two people, what is happening? It’s not just two people talking. There’s a kind of deep interaction, ideally, right? Yes. I don’t need to call it deep. I really want to de-romanticize what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the basics. I’m not talking about “And now, Let’s do Heidegger" talk. When a parent talks to a child over breakfast and says, “What’s happening at school today?” You’re getting eye contact, you’re getting attention to body language, you’re getting vocalization, you’re putting yourself in the place of the other, you’re getting a back-and-forth of turn-taking. You’re getting respect for someone finishing their thoughts. You’re getting the feeling that someone else is listening to you. You’re getting the feeling that someone else is going to be there to hear you finish your idea. You’re getting the bare bones of a relationship. You’re learning empathy and continuity. You’re learning things that you’re going to take to every aspect of your life, of relationship and community and friendship and romance. You’re learning how to think about yourself. It’s in conversation with other people, in that respectful back-and-forth of ideas that you learn how to do it to yourself for yourself. You learn self-reflection. It’s not like people kind of jump out of the womb, knowing what to do about their problems. They have conversations with other people and it kind of models how you think about your own stuff. So, so much is going on in that. In my book I talk about, instead, a parent is doing their email at breakfast and the child is being ignored. They’re not getting that. So my basic point of view is very simple. We just have to hold on to our phones and just use them with intention. Now that we’ve had some experience with them, we can see the ways they can be tremendous disruptors. And in some ways, younger people are better at it than older ones… You’ve written – especially in your new book, and in “Alone Together” – about teenagers, students, young people. You’re a college professor and spend a lot of time with them. We think generally about young people as being mostly comfortable with the digital world and its distractions. But you’ve found that many of them aren’t, even if sometimes they can’t articulate it. Some of them suspect something is wrong – that these devices have taken over their lives. Definitely, definitely. Well, I would say there’s a conflict here. On the one hand, I just spoke with a young woman who read my book and said, “Listen, I really want to defend the kind of talk I have (and I talk a lot about these people in my book). I’m with my friends and I’m also on the phone, and actually the people who I’m with were also on the phone together. We’re also on social media together even though we’re in the room together, and there are other people in the conversation who are just on social media. And I really want to defend that as a very rich way of interacting, and I don’t want to hear from you that that’s not great.” And to all of those people who love that, I want to say that sounds like a really rich interaction. And just as long as you know how to do other things, I am very fine that you know how to do that, and enjoy that. Because I’m not the Darth Vader of social media, here to take away the pleasure and the fun of being able to enjoy that. Right. I know those conversations. I’ve watched them; I’ve seen the transcripts of them. I’m very familiar with their wit and the sexiness and the eroticism, and the pleasures of those interactions. And I’m just here to say that as long as they’re fluid enough and flexible enough that they can also have conversations one-to-one, and do the kind of thing that that sort of conversation can accomplish – all the more power that we’ve expanded our range. I celebrate that, that we’ve expanded our horizons. The fact that I can do email with you – I love that. I mean, this is great. So I’m not going to say I’m not going to use email because I can only use the voice, you can hear my modulation… that’s stupid. And I love texting with everybody. But then, I also know a lot of young people who are very aware that they’re often in conversations where they’re with their friends but they’re also on their phones, and the conversation is really trivial because they’re constantly being interrupted. And like that one guy says, “Our texting is fine. It’s what texting does to the conversation that’s basically is the problem.” And a lot of people are really concerned about that. So I found a lot of young people who really, I would say, were very aware of that, and wanted to talk to me about that at length, and the sort of role their parents had played in really sensitizing themselves to the importance of putting their phones away, and how important it was for them to learn that. I think that you found that even a phone that wasn’t being used changed the tone of the conversation. If two or three people are sitting around, say, a dinner table, and a phone is out and visible, it changes the way everybody connects or doesn’t connect. It doesn’t even need to be ringing. What does it do to that small encounter? It makes everybody aware that the conversation could be interrupted. And you see that in experimental results – so there are experiments that have been done that show that. And then you see that ethnographically when you watch people interacting, but also when people talk about what it’s like to go to dinner in those situations. So you see that it’s a reminder that we’re interruptible. It’s a reminder that we’re not just there for each other right now. And that’s the gratification of feeling that “You are mine for now. I can make a mistake.” I love the girl who talks about the seven-minute rule. People take at least seven minutes to figure out if the conversation is going to be interesting. And she says, “I’m usually not willing to put in my seven minutes.” But she knows what she’s losing. She says, “I’m not willing to put in my seven minutes. Because that’s what’s wrong with me, that’s what’s wrong with my generation. I go to my phone – I don’t like to be bored.” You make a powerful and frightening argument in your book that something’s wrong with the way we’re interacting these days. For those of us who recognize that there really is a problem – whether we’re teachers or parents, or just citizens of the 21st century – what can we do to, as you say, reclaim conversation, restore human connection? It’s funny. I wrote an op-ed for the [New York] Times… They made me add a line that says, This all may sound simple, and not a big deal, but if taken together, they really make a big, big difference. So first of all, act with intention. I tell the story of the guy who’s giving his 2-year-old daughter a bath, and he’s doing his email when he’s giving her a bath. And he remembers his 11-year-old daughter, and how he used to talk to her when she was in the bathtub. He feels so terrible, but he does it anyway. That guy, he knows that he’s not letting conversation do its work. So that guy needs to put down his phone and not bring it into the bathroom. So I talk about designing for vulnerability, which is one of my big, big things now; that when you go on a diet, your first step is not to stock up your refrigerator with Häagen-Dazs. This guy has no business bringing the phone into the bathroom if he knows that the conversation with his daughter is very important. So I talk about sacred spaces – the kitchen, the dining room, the car – as places you just don’t bring your device. And those are places that are places for conversation. So conversations will happen if you make spaces that are for conversation. And a wonderful study about our resilience – that after only five days in a summer camp with no devices, the empathy numbers rebound. It’s very inspirational. So that’s my first thing: Design for vulnerability, make sacred spaces for conversation. When you find yourself in situations where you know you’re doing something that is acting against the best interest of you and your family, your lover or your friend – stop. Take a minute. Take a breath, and think. And then I really believe in taking time for solitude, because conversation begins in solitude. And I really believe in this virtuous circle, this whole notion that you need solitude in order to come to conversation with the ability to listen to other people, and form a relationship of… well, you can really hear what they have to say and not just project on them what you need them to say. Well, we end up back where your last book, "Alone Together," began. Thanks again for taking some time to speak.
October 10, 2015
My breast cancer was not a gift, and my experience of it was anything but pink.
1.
I am sitting in my doctor’s office, wondering why this woman who is generally so straightforward won’t say the word that is booming inside my head. The word that is “cancer,” and is the thing that has taken root inside my left breast. The word I’ve been afraid of since my mother died of it, when she was three years older than I am in this moment.
Instead, my doctor keeps saying the phrase “irregular cells.” Repeating it as she draws uneven circles on her prescription pad, filling them in with a black pen. She is saying other things as well, but I am too distracted to hear them. Distracted by that booming word, and the cold, panicky feeling that my skin is peeling away from my body, and a great desire that in the next few seconds I will wake and this will have been a very bad dream.
But what happens in the next few seconds is that my doctor asks if I have any questions, and though I don’t believe I do, I hear myself asking if she can give me something. Which I realize is a vague request. But it appears I am not the first to ask this, because she has already torn off the page with the blackened circles, and is writing me a prescription for thirty Xanax.
2.
I go home and tell the man I am in a relationship with about my irregular cells. I force myself to say the word my doctor would not, but it leaves a taste in my mouth I will later try to erase by brushing my teeth.
It’s a Friday afternoon, and I cannot bear to spend the weekend in the fog-shrouded city. I convince the man I am in a relationship with to take me away. North, to the Napa Valley. And though this man has spent the past hour assuring me that my cancer is different from my mother’s, that in three years, I will still be alive, I understand how worried he is for me when he agrees to this weekend, because he doesn’t like to drink wine and would never willingly spend the money on the overpriced bed and breakfast I have booked for us.
We are in the car, driving through a landscape of vineyards, when a woman from the overpriced bed and breakfast phones to say they are oversold and that they’ve moved us to another property, one they are certain we will enjoy just as much. I really liked the overpriced bed and breakfast I booked for us — and I have cancer — and so I do something I have never done before. I tell the woman on the phone to google my name, knowing that when she does, she will find it linked to more than a dozen travel stories. Ten minutes later, the woman calls back to say she has made a mistake and our original reservation will be waiting. When we arrive, we are shown to a much nicer room than the one I booked, and I do not feel at all guilty.
I spend the weekend in a haze of Xanax and alcohol. Every time I feel it lifting, I swallow another peach-colored pill. In the nice room at the overpriced bed and breakfast, I do not let the man I am in a relationship with touch my left breast. I won’t even touch it. I am pretending it is not part of my body, pretending it belongs to someone else. That other person who has cancer.
3.
In the time between the surgery to remove the lump in my left breast and learning what kind of cancer I have — the good kind, which means only radiation, or the bad kind, which means both radiation and chemotherapy — I travel to the East Coast for my father’s 80th birthday. The news that his daughter has breast cancer cannot be the 80th birthday present my father is hoping for, and for two days, I tell him nothing. Then, I tell him everything. Because if what I have is the bad kind of cancer, it will be much harder to explain on the phone.
My father asks questions about the diagnosis, the news I am waiting to hear. And it’s this — the two of us talking in the humidity of his screened-in porch, so like every other visit — that makes me believe I have not brought him such a terrible birthday present after all.
Some days later though, as we’re coming home from dinner, as my father pulls the car into his driveway, my surgeon calls from San Francisco. Your cancer, she tells me. It’s the good kind. When I can breathe, I relay this information to my father, and step out into the night. I am nearly to the door of my father’s house when I realize he isn’t behind me. He is still sitting in the dark car, his hands on the steering wheel.
4.
There is a disagreement between the surgeon who removed the cancer from my breast and the doctor who tested it. The surgeon is certain she has gotten all of the cancer out of my body. The doctor believes that beneath the already fading scar near my breastbone are more of the irregular cells I now imagine as the blackened circles the first doctor drew on her prescription pad. Since I cannot live with this uncertainty, I undergo a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
I am ten days out from this procedure and the man I am in a relationship with has driven me to Walgreens to pick up a tube of Aquaphor ointment. I could have sent him on this errand, but I have been confined to the house for most of those ten days, and even a trip to Walgreens feels like an outing. I am about to pay, when the little screen under the electronic pen informs me with a cheerful pin ribbon that it is Breast Cancer Awareness month.
I have four, thin tubes running under the skin of my chest, each attached to a plastic grenade-shaped bulb. Three times a day, I must detach these bulbs and drain them of a yellowish fluid. Twice a day, I have to remove the bandages from my nipples — which are so scabbed over, I can barely stand to look at them — so that I can dab them with the ointment I have come here to buy. I am not allowed to sleep on my side, lift my arms above my head, or carry anything heavier than five pounds. And though most of this will be over in a month, once you are diagnosed with breast cancer, you can never be entirely certain you’ve beaten it until you die of something else.
My pen hovers over the screen with the pink ribbon — pink, a color reserved for little girls — and I have the urge to turn to the line of people waiting behind me to pay for their toilet paper, and their Advil, and their melatonin, and unzip my sweatshirt to show them the half-filled bulbs pinned to its fleece lining, pull down the elasticized bandeau squeezing my chest and force these strangers to look at the smile-shaped scars that cup my reconstructed breasts. Smiles that spit thick, black threads of stitches. Because it is after all, Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Instead, I sign my name next to the pink ribbon, pressing harder than is necessary on the electronic screen and leave with my tube of Aquaphor ointment. I barely leave my house until it is November.
5.
I am three years out from my diagnosis — the age my mother was when she died. Every time I get a headache, a pain somewhere I don’t expect, I believe it is my cancer coming back to claim me. I am no longer in a relationship with the man I was when I was diagnosed, and in the two years since it has been over, I have not been with anyone new. Reconstructed breasts look very much like real breasts, but not exactly like them. And telling someone about your cancer, showing them a part of your body that has been taken apart and put back together requires an entirely different level of intimacy.
My new breasts are strange even to me. They are three cup sizes larger than the breasts I had before cancer. One cup size larger than what I asked the plastic surgeon to give me. Everyone — even doctors — believe women want bigger breasts. These new breasts are entirely without feeling. Touching them is like the dead finger game I played at childhood slumber parties, pressing my hand against that of a friend and running my thumb and forefinger along the matched-up digits for the shivering sensation of the numbness of another’s flesh. Except in this instance, there is no equivalent of taking my own hand back. No matter how many times I run my fingers over my new breasts, it’s as if they belong to another person.
There are people who say having cancer is a gift. I would not be one of them. I would say having cancer broke apart something in me. Or perhaps, broke it open. Since my cancer, I feel everything more. Love, sadness, fear, joy. Because once time no longer felt endless, maintaining the barrier that kept me from being vulnerable began to seem like a waste of time.
I spend some part of each day being afraid. But I also spend some part being grateful. It’s both a terrifying and a gratifying way to live, and not one that can be neatly tied with a pink ribbon.
1.
I am sitting in my doctor’s office, wondering why this woman who is generally so straightforward won’t say the word that is booming inside my head. The word that is “cancer,” and is the thing that has taken root inside my left breast. The word I’ve been afraid of since my mother died of it, when she was three years older than I am in this moment.
Instead, my doctor keeps saying the phrase “irregular cells.” Repeating it as she draws uneven circles on her prescription pad, filling them in with a black pen. She is saying other things as well, but I am too distracted to hear them. Distracted by that booming word, and the cold, panicky feeling that my skin is peeling away from my body, and a great desire that in the next few seconds I will wake and this will have been a very bad dream.
But what happens in the next few seconds is that my doctor asks if I have any questions, and though I don’t believe I do, I hear myself asking if she can give me something. Which I realize is a vague request. But it appears I am not the first to ask this, because she has already torn off the page with the blackened circles, and is writing me a prescription for thirty Xanax.
2.
I go home and tell the man I am in a relationship with about my irregular cells. I force myself to say the word my doctor would not, but it leaves a taste in my mouth I will later try to erase by brushing my teeth.
It’s a Friday afternoon, and I cannot bear to spend the weekend in the fog-shrouded city. I convince the man I am in a relationship with to take me away. North, to the Napa Valley. And though this man has spent the past hour assuring me that my cancer is different from my mother’s, that in three years, I will still be alive, I understand how worried he is for me when he agrees to this weekend, because he doesn’t like to drink wine and would never willingly spend the money on the overpriced bed and breakfast I have booked for us.
We are in the car, driving through a landscape of vineyards, when a woman from the overpriced bed and breakfast phones to say they are oversold and that they’ve moved us to another property, one they are certain we will enjoy just as much. I really liked the overpriced bed and breakfast I booked for us — and I have cancer — and so I do something I have never done before. I tell the woman on the phone to google my name, knowing that when she does, she will find it linked to more than a dozen travel stories. Ten minutes later, the woman calls back to say she has made a mistake and our original reservation will be waiting. When we arrive, we are shown to a much nicer room than the one I booked, and I do not feel at all guilty.
I spend the weekend in a haze of Xanax and alcohol. Every time I feel it lifting, I swallow another peach-colored pill. In the nice room at the overpriced bed and breakfast, I do not let the man I am in a relationship with touch my left breast. I won’t even touch it. I am pretending it is not part of my body, pretending it belongs to someone else. That other person who has cancer.
3.
In the time between the surgery to remove the lump in my left breast and learning what kind of cancer I have — the good kind, which means only radiation, or the bad kind, which means both radiation and chemotherapy — I travel to the East Coast for my father’s 80th birthday. The news that his daughter has breast cancer cannot be the 80th birthday present my father is hoping for, and for two days, I tell him nothing. Then, I tell him everything. Because if what I have is the bad kind of cancer, it will be much harder to explain on the phone.
My father asks questions about the diagnosis, the news I am waiting to hear. And it’s this — the two of us talking in the humidity of his screened-in porch, so like every other visit — that makes me believe I have not brought him such a terrible birthday present after all.
Some days later though, as we’re coming home from dinner, as my father pulls the car into his driveway, my surgeon calls from San Francisco. Your cancer, she tells me. It’s the good kind. When I can breathe, I relay this information to my father, and step out into the night. I am nearly to the door of my father’s house when I realize he isn’t behind me. He is still sitting in the dark car, his hands on the steering wheel.
4.
There is a disagreement between the surgeon who removed the cancer from my breast and the doctor who tested it. The surgeon is certain she has gotten all of the cancer out of my body. The doctor believes that beneath the already fading scar near my breastbone are more of the irregular cells I now imagine as the blackened circles the first doctor drew on her prescription pad. Since I cannot live with this uncertainty, I undergo a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
I am ten days out from this procedure and the man I am in a relationship with has driven me to Walgreens to pick up a tube of Aquaphor ointment. I could have sent him on this errand, but I have been confined to the house for most of those ten days, and even a trip to Walgreens feels like an outing. I am about to pay, when the little screen under the electronic pen informs me with a cheerful pin ribbon that it is Breast Cancer Awareness month.
I have four, thin tubes running under the skin of my chest, each attached to a plastic grenade-shaped bulb. Three times a day, I must detach these bulbs and drain them of a yellowish fluid. Twice a day, I have to remove the bandages from my nipples — which are so scabbed over, I can barely stand to look at them — so that I can dab them with the ointment I have come here to buy. I am not allowed to sleep on my side, lift my arms above my head, or carry anything heavier than five pounds. And though most of this will be over in a month, once you are diagnosed with breast cancer, you can never be entirely certain you’ve beaten it until you die of something else.
My pen hovers over the screen with the pink ribbon — pink, a color reserved for little girls — and I have the urge to turn to the line of people waiting behind me to pay for their toilet paper, and their Advil, and their melatonin, and unzip my sweatshirt to show them the half-filled bulbs pinned to its fleece lining, pull down the elasticized bandeau squeezing my chest and force these strangers to look at the smile-shaped scars that cup my reconstructed breasts. Smiles that spit thick, black threads of stitches. Because it is after all, Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Instead, I sign my name next to the pink ribbon, pressing harder than is necessary on the electronic screen and leave with my tube of Aquaphor ointment. I barely leave my house until it is November.
5.
I am three years out from my diagnosis — the age my mother was when she died. Every time I get a headache, a pain somewhere I don’t expect, I believe it is my cancer coming back to claim me. I am no longer in a relationship with the man I was when I was diagnosed, and in the two years since it has been over, I have not been with anyone new. Reconstructed breasts look very much like real breasts, but not exactly like them. And telling someone about your cancer, showing them a part of your body that has been taken apart and put back together requires an entirely different level of intimacy.
My new breasts are strange even to me. They are three cup sizes larger than the breasts I had before cancer. One cup size larger than what I asked the plastic surgeon to give me. Everyone — even doctors — believe women want bigger breasts. These new breasts are entirely without feeling. Touching them is like the dead finger game I played at childhood slumber parties, pressing my hand against that of a friend and running my thumb and forefinger along the matched-up digits for the shivering sensation of the numbness of another’s flesh. Except in this instance, there is no equivalent of taking my own hand back. No matter how many times I run my fingers over my new breasts, it’s as if they belong to another person.
There are people who say having cancer is a gift. I would not be one of them. I would say having cancer broke apart something in me. Or perhaps, broke it open. Since my cancer, I feel everything more. Love, sadness, fear, joy. Because once time no longer felt endless, maintaining the barrier that kept me from being vulnerable began to seem like a waste of time.
I spend some part of each day being afraid. But I also spend some part being grateful. It’s both a terrifying and a gratifying way to live, and not one that can be neatly tied with a pink ribbon.
1.
I am sitting in my doctor’s office, wondering why this woman who is generally so straightforward won’t say the word that is booming inside my head. The word that is “cancer,” and is the thing that has taken root inside my left breast. The word I’ve been afraid of since my mother died of it, when she was three years older than I am in this moment.
Instead, my doctor keeps saying the phrase “irregular cells.” Repeating it as she draws uneven circles on her prescription pad, filling them in with a black pen. She is saying other things as well, but I am too distracted to hear them. Distracted by that booming word, and the cold, panicky feeling that my skin is peeling away from my body, and a great desire that in the next few seconds I will wake and this will have been a very bad dream.
But what happens in the next few seconds is that my doctor asks if I have any questions, and though I don’t believe I do, I hear myself asking if she can give me something. Which I realize is a vague request. But it appears I am not the first to ask this, because she has already torn off the page with the blackened circles, and is writing me a prescription for thirty Xanax.
2.
I go home and tell the man I am in a relationship with about my irregular cells. I force myself to say the word my doctor would not, but it leaves a taste in my mouth I will later try to erase by brushing my teeth.
It’s a Friday afternoon, and I cannot bear to spend the weekend in the fog-shrouded city. I convince the man I am in a relationship with to take me away. North, to the Napa Valley. And though this man has spent the past hour assuring me that my cancer is different from my mother’s, that in three years, I will still be alive, I understand how worried he is for me when he agrees to this weekend, because he doesn’t like to drink wine and would never willingly spend the money on the overpriced bed and breakfast I have booked for us.
We are in the car, driving through a landscape of vineyards, when a woman from the overpriced bed and breakfast phones to say they are oversold and that they’ve moved us to another property, one they are certain we will enjoy just as much. I really liked the overpriced bed and breakfast I booked for us — and I have cancer — and so I do something I have never done before. I tell the woman on the phone to google my name, knowing that when she does, she will find it linked to more than a dozen travel stories. Ten minutes later, the woman calls back to say she has made a mistake and our original reservation will be waiting. When we arrive, we are shown to a much nicer room than the one I booked, and I do not feel at all guilty.
I spend the weekend in a haze of Xanax and alcohol. Every time I feel it lifting, I swallow another peach-colored pill. In the nice room at the overpriced bed and breakfast, I do not let the man I am in a relationship with touch my left breast. I won’t even touch it. I am pretending it is not part of my body, pretending it belongs to someone else. That other person who has cancer.
3.
In the time between the surgery to remove the lump in my left breast and learning what kind of cancer I have — the good kind, which means only radiation, or the bad kind, which means both radiation and chemotherapy — I travel to the East Coast for my father’s 80th birthday. The news that his daughter has breast cancer cannot be the 80th birthday present my father is hoping for, and for two days, I tell him nothing. Then, I tell him everything. Because if what I have is the bad kind of cancer, it will be much harder to explain on the phone.
My father asks questions about the diagnosis, the news I am waiting to hear. And it’s this — the two of us talking in the humidity of his screened-in porch, so like every other visit — that makes me believe I have not brought him such a terrible birthday present after all.
Some days later though, as we’re coming home from dinner, as my father pulls the car into his driveway, my surgeon calls from San Francisco. Your cancer, she tells me. It’s the good kind. When I can breathe, I relay this information to my father, and step out into the night. I am nearly to the door of my father’s house when I realize he isn’t behind me. He is still sitting in the dark car, his hands on the steering wheel.
4.
There is a disagreement between the surgeon who removed the cancer from my breast and the doctor who tested it. The surgeon is certain she has gotten all of the cancer out of my body. The doctor believes that beneath the already fading scar near my breastbone are more of the irregular cells I now imagine as the blackened circles the first doctor drew on her prescription pad. Since I cannot live with this uncertainty, I undergo a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
I am ten days out from this procedure and the man I am in a relationship with has driven me to Walgreens to pick up a tube of Aquaphor ointment. I could have sent him on this errand, but I have been confined to the house for most of those ten days, and even a trip to Walgreens feels like an outing. I am about to pay, when the little screen under the electronic pen informs me with a cheerful pin ribbon that it is Breast Cancer Awareness month.
I have four, thin tubes running under the skin of my chest, each attached to a plastic grenade-shaped bulb. Three times a day, I must detach these bulbs and drain them of a yellowish fluid. Twice a day, I have to remove the bandages from my nipples — which are so scabbed over, I can barely stand to look at them — so that I can dab them with the ointment I have come here to buy. I am not allowed to sleep on my side, lift my arms above my head, or carry anything heavier than five pounds. And though most of this will be over in a month, once you are diagnosed with breast cancer, you can never be entirely certain you’ve beaten it until you die of something else.
My pen hovers over the screen with the pink ribbon — pink, a color reserved for little girls — and I have the urge to turn to the line of people waiting behind me to pay for their toilet paper, and their Advil, and their melatonin, and unzip my sweatshirt to show them the half-filled bulbs pinned to its fleece lining, pull down the elasticized bandeau squeezing my chest and force these strangers to look at the smile-shaped scars that cup my reconstructed breasts. Smiles that spit thick, black threads of stitches. Because it is after all, Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Instead, I sign my name next to the pink ribbon, pressing harder than is necessary on the electronic screen and leave with my tube of Aquaphor ointment. I barely leave my house until it is November.
5.
I am three years out from my diagnosis — the age my mother was when she died. Every time I get a headache, a pain somewhere I don’t expect, I believe it is my cancer coming back to claim me. I am no longer in a relationship with the man I was when I was diagnosed, and in the two years since it has been over, I have not been with anyone new. Reconstructed breasts look very much like real breasts, but not exactly like them. And telling someone about your cancer, showing them a part of your body that has been taken apart and put back together requires an entirely different level of intimacy.
My new breasts are strange even to me. They are three cup sizes larger than the breasts I had before cancer. One cup size larger than what I asked the plastic surgeon to give me. Everyone — even doctors — believe women want bigger breasts. These new breasts are entirely without feeling. Touching them is like the dead finger game I played at childhood slumber parties, pressing my hand against that of a friend and running my thumb and forefinger along the matched-up digits for the shivering sensation of the numbness of another’s flesh. Except in this instance, there is no equivalent of taking my own hand back. No matter how many times I run my fingers over my new breasts, it’s as if they belong to another person.
There are people who say having cancer is a gift. I would not be one of them. I would say having cancer broke apart something in me. Or perhaps, broke it open. Since my cancer, I feel everything more. Love, sadness, fear, joy. Because once time no longer felt endless, maintaining the barrier that kept me from being vulnerable began to seem like a waste of time.
I spend some part of each day being afraid. But I also spend some part being grateful. It’s both a terrifying and a gratifying way to live, and not one that can be neatly tied with a pink ribbon.
