Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 996

Elizabeth Warren just delivered the realest talk on race by any American politician

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren just further burnished her progressive credentials with a thorough and explicit telling of racial injustice in America, focusing on what she called three tools of oppression historically and currently used against African-Americans and concluding with a full-throated endorsement of the Black Lives Matter movement. "Violence, voting, economic justice," Warren told the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate on Sunday, were and are state-sanctioned "tools of oppression" used against African-Americans. Warren detailed what she described as the "dark underbelly" of "how America built a great middle class":

Entire legal structures were created to prevent African Americans from building economic security through home ownership. Legally-enforced segregation. Restrictive deeds. Redlining. Land contracts. Coming out of the Great Depression, America built a middle class, but systematic discrimination kept most African-American families from being part of it. State-sanctioned discrimination wasn't limited to homeownership. The government enforced discrimination in public accommodations, discrimination in schools, discrimination in credit-it was a long and spiteful list.

Turning to today's racial struggle, Warren credited the civil rights legislation of the 1960s with widely establishing the founding principle of the current protest movement. "The first civil rights battles were hard fought. But they established that Black Lives Matter," Warren said. “These laws made three powerful declarations: Black lives matter. Black citizens matter. Black families matter,” she argued, crediting her predecessor, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, with helping to shepherd the landmark legislation through Congress. Still, housing discrimination, Warren reminded the audience, is "alive and well in 2015," noting recent multi-million dollar settlements by banks who illegal charged a so-called "racial surtax" for home mortgages. Warren squarely laid blame for the economic failures of the civil rights movement at the feet of Republican economic theory:

Research shows that the legal changes in the civil rights era created new employment and housing opportunities. In the 1960s and the 1970s, African-American men and women began to close the wage gap with white workers, giving millions of black families hope that they might build real wealth. But then, Republicans' trickle-down economic theory arrived. Just as this country was taking the first steps toward economic justice, the Republicans pushed a theory that meant helping the richest people and the most powerful corporations get richer and more powerful. I'll just do one statistic on this: From 1980 to 2012, GDP continued to rise, but how much of the income growth went to the 90% of America - everyone outside the top 10% - black, white, Latino? None. Zero. Nothing. 100% of all the new income produced in this country over the past 30 years has gone to the top ten percent. Today, 90% of Americans see no real wage growth. For African-Americans, who were so far behind earlier in the 20th Century, this means that since the 1980s they have been hit particularly hard. In January of this year, African-American unemployment was 10.3% - more than twice the rate of white unemployment. And, after beginning to make progress during the civil rights era to close the wealth gap between black and white families, in the 1980s the wealth gap exploded, so that from 1984 to 2009, the wealth gap between black and white families tripled

Warren also called out the "five conservative justices on the Supreme Court" whom she argued "gutted the Voting Rights Act, opening the floodgates ever wider for measures designed to suppress minority voting":

Today, the specific tools of oppression have changed-voter ID laws, racial gerrymandering, and mass disfranchisement through a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates black citizens. The tools have changed, but black voters are still deliberately cut out of the political process.

But, Warren argued, "economic justice is not - and has never been - sufficient to ensure racial justice," admitting to the fallibility of her populist rhetoric if it lacks equally weighty measures to combat racial inequality:

Owning a home won't stop someone from burning a cross on the front lawn. Admission to a school won't prevent a beating on the sidewalk outside. But when Dr. King led hundreds of thousands of people to march on Washington, he talked about an end to violence, access to voting AND economic opportunity. As Dr. King once wrote, "the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice."

Warren then implored White America to listen to the concerns of African-Americans on the issue of police brutality and over-criminalization, arguing that their "pervasive and persistent distrust isn't based on myths. It is grounded in the reality of unjustified violence":

Listen to the brave, powerful voices of today's new generation of civil rights leaders. Incredible voices. Listen to them say: "If I die in police custody, know that I did not commit suicide." Watch them march through the streets, "hands up don't shoot" - not to incite a riot, but to fight for their lives. To fight for their lives. This is the reality all of us must confront, as uncomfortable and ugly as that reality may be. It comes to us to once again affirm that black lives matter, that black citizens matter, that black families matter.

The reaction to Warren's speech by Black Lives Matter activists has been positive. Prominent activist DeRay McKesson praised Warren as better than any other politician on her understanding "that the American dream has been sustained by an intentional violence and that the uprisings have been the result of years of lived trauma." "Senator Warren's speech clearly and powerfully calls into question America's commitment to black lives by highlighting the role that structural racism has played and continues to play with regard to housing discrimination and voting rights," Mckesson told the Washington Post. Watch Warren's full address to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate and read her full text here: (H/T: Huffington Post)

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The Uber-ization of everything: These guys make $1,000 a week standing in line

Robert Samuel, founder of Same Ole Line Dudes, makes up to $1,000 a week to stand in line. He waits in line for Broadway shows, sample sales, tech releases and even brunch waitlists. Samuel recently spent 48 hours outside the Apple store in the Meatpacking District waiting for the iPhone 6s. He was the first in line, slept in a fold-up cot for two nights, had pizza delivered to his spot and snagged $1000 for the gig. Samuel's business joins dozens of "Ubers" like Lugg: Uber for Movers, Doughbies On-Demand: Uber for chocolate chip cookies, Minibar: Uber for alcohol and Breather: Uber for peace and quiet — all of which essentially allow customers to buy their way to the front.

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Christian school kicks out kindergartener because she has two moms

Sadly, nationwide marriage equality simply isn't enough to inoculate all children of same-sex couples from the cruelty and indignity that is anti-gay discrimination. The latest example comes from San Diego, California, where a five year-old girl was recently barred from starting the first day of kindergarten after her school changed its nondiscrimination policy following the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, reports the local ABC News affiliate KGTV. Mt. Erie Christian Academy, a private institution that does not appear to take any public funds, updated its handbook this summer to reserve the right to discontinue the enrollment of any student it finds "in opposition to the biblical lifestyle," citing at least one Bible passage that calls for homosexuals to be murdered:

Mt. Erie Christian Academy is a religious, Bible-believing institution providing education in a distinct Christian environment, and it believes that its biblical role is to work in conjunction with the home to mold students to be Christ like. On those occasions in which the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home is counter to or in opposition to the biblical lifestyle that the school teaches, the school reserves the right, within its sole discretion, to refuse admission of an applicant or to discontinue enrollment of a student. This includes, but is not necessarily limited to, living in, condoning or supporting sexual immorality; practicing homosexual lifestyle or alternative gender identity; promoting such practices; or otherwise having the inability to support the moral principles of the school (Leviticus 20:13a; Romans 1:21-27; Matthew 19:4-6; I Corinthians 6:9-20).

The new policy effectively barred one of the school's pre-school students from entering kindergarten this school year. The five-year old's mother, Shenna (she asked that her last name be withheld) called the policy change "heartbreaking." The stay at-home mother said the she was unaware of the school's extreme anti-gay attitude and insisted that she wouldn't not have subjected her daughter to such humiliation had she known of their discriminatory policy before enrolling at the academy. "If we knew from the beginning that this was unacceptable, they didn't condone or believe in this, if it was such a big deal, we would have never started her off there," Sheena said. "I would never put my child's emotional wellbeing in an unstable setting like that." Shenna said that although both her and her wife, whose is currently deployed with the Navy, are Christian, they never considered their sexuality to be in conflict with the faith or the school's mission. "What does our family life have to do with anyone else? Like no one's gonna be in danger." She continued: "I want my baby to be safe when she grows up. I don't want her to ever have to be discriminated against because of her lifestyle. That's not fair." Shenna told KGTV that she is looking for legal recourse but that her daughter continues to be out of the classroom as they search for an alternative. "I miss my friends. I miss my teachers," the child told the news station. (H/T: The Root)

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Trevor Noah is changing “The Daily Show”: Here are the biggest adjustments fans will have to make

After months of speculation, Trevor Noah's tenure as “Daily Show” host finally begins tonight. While it remains to be seen exactly how things will change under a Noah regime, we have some pretty good guesses based on things that Noah and his team have said over the past few months. Here's a look at some of the biggest changes we foresee coming down the pipeline: New targets  While much of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” involved eviscerating/demolishing/[pick dramatic verb of your choice] Fox News, Noah told journalists that he doesn’t have any particular axe to grind… yet. “I don’t have targets yet," he told journalists at a press preview last week. “I get to discover the person I will grow to loathe, to hate, and they may not be on Fox News.” Still, when it comes to lampooning the media, it’s likely that we’ll see Noah move away from the cable news cycle that Stewart so loved to target. At a recent TCA panel, Noah explained that, while “The Daily Show” was in part a response to the “emerging 24 hour news cycle,” the media landscape is very different now. “Half of it is online now,” he explained. "Now you’ve got the Gawkers, the BuzzFeeds. The way people are drawing their news is soundbites and headlines and click-bait links has changed everything. The biggest challenge is going to be an exciting one I’m sure is how are we going to bring all of that together looking at it from a bigger lens as opposed to just going after one source—which was historically Fox News.” A digital-friendly approach Not only will online media outlets serve as fodder, but they will also be intrinsic to the show's growth. Recently we learned that Noah had hired a separate online team, headed by comic Baratunde Thurston, to lead production of original online content that will run in tandem with the show. And as late night shows increasingly compete for clicks and YouTube views as much as they do for Nielsen ratings, and given Noah’s remarks about wanting to pivot more to focus on online media, its safe to say that Noah’s “Daily Show” will be a much more digital-friendly, multi-platform experience than its predecessor. As Thurston tells the New York Times, his job is to help the show work with “all this media that has become highly fragmented and swipe-able and annoying in ways that Edward R. Murrow could never have imagined” and to "make things that land on Instagram and Snapchat and FlipFlamf.” Or, as Comedy Central president Michele Ganeless put it last week, Thurston will help add "a multi-platform layer for the show that hasn't existed before" that "will enable us to have a conversation with viewers." A finely-honed racial sensibility Noah was born in Apartheid South Africa to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, and much of his stand-up derives from his unique history of growing up mixed in a segregated state, as well as his more recent experiences coming to terms with the complex racial dynamics in his adopted country. If Noah’s stand-up routines are any indication, we can expect race to be one of the primary lenses he looks through in order to help make sense of the world around him. "America is the one place in the world where I just innately understood what was happening because South Africa and the United States of America have a very similar history,” Noah told journalists on Friday, when asked about coming to terms with racial politics in the U.S. "It's different timelines, but the directions we've taken and the consequences — dealing with the aftermath of what we consider to be democracy, and realizing that freedom is just the beginning of the conversation, that's something I've learned. I'm not now trying to understand what segregation or institutionalized racism is.” That multicultural perspective also extends to his staff, with Noah telling Rolling Stone that "the racial diversity of the correspondents has gone up dramatically,” and introducing three new correspondents with diverse backgrounds: The Malaysian-born Ronny Chieg, African American stand-up Roy Wood Jr., and “Awkward” star Desi Lydic, who joins Jessica Williams as one of the show's few female voices. An outsider’s perspective At Friday’s press preview, Noah repeatedly made reference to his outsider’s point of view, suggesting that his fresh perspective on U.S. politics and culture would be contrasted with the writing staff’s more seasoned views. “For the writers, they’ve got a history with all of these people,” Noah explained of watching the Republican debates with his staff. “I’m watching the debate and someone says something about something one of the politicians did 10, 15 years ago, and they’re like ‘that’s like the time that happened.’ And I’m the person going ‘why is that funny? Who is that person? What is important about that?’” Much like John Oliver does on "Last Week Tonight," we can expect Noah to use his outsider’s perspective to poke fun at some of the more absurd aspects of American society, particularly those things that a native audience may take for granted. “The fun part is the learning,” he continued. “And I think sometimes transferring that learning into a TV show and giving that to the audience is fantastic, like when you have a child, they learn new things and then you get to relearn it with them.” The network brass certainly seems keen to capitalize on Noah's unique cultural vantage point. “He is a student of our culture,” Ganeless told GQ a few months ago. “But he looks at it from a very different perspective.”After months of speculation, Trevor Noah's tenure as “Daily Show” host finally begins tonight. While it remains to be seen exactly how things will change under a Noah regime, we have some pretty good guesses based on things that Noah and his team have said over the past few months. Here's a look at some of the biggest changes we foresee coming down the pipeline: New targets  While much of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” involved eviscerating/demolishing/[pick dramatic verb of your choice] Fox News, Noah told journalists that he doesn’t have any particular axe to grind… yet. “I don’t have targets yet," he told journalists at a press preview last week. “I get to discover the person I will grow to loathe, to hate, and they may not be on Fox News.” Still, when it comes to lampooning the media, it’s likely that we’ll see Noah move away from the cable news cycle that Stewart so loved to target. At a recent TCA panel, Noah explained that, while “The Daily Show” was in part a response to the “emerging 24 hour news cycle,” the media landscape is very different now. “Half of it is online now,” he explained. "Now you’ve got the Gawkers, the BuzzFeeds. The way people are drawing their news is soundbites and headlines and click-bait links has changed everything. The biggest challenge is going to be an exciting one I’m sure is how are we going to bring all of that together looking at it from a bigger lens as opposed to just going after one source—which was historically Fox News.” A digital-friendly approach Not only will online media outlets serve as fodder, but they will also be intrinsic to the show's growth. Recently we learned that Noah had hired a separate online team, headed by comic Baratunde Thurston, to lead production of original online content that will run in tandem with the show. And as late night shows increasingly compete for clicks and YouTube views as much as they do for Nielsen ratings, and given Noah’s remarks about wanting to pivot more to focus on online media, its safe to say that Noah’s “Daily Show” will be a much more digital-friendly, multi-platform experience than its predecessor. As Thurston tells the New York Times, his job is to help the show work with “all this media that has become highly fragmented and swipe-able and annoying in ways that Edward R. Murrow could never have imagined” and to "make things that land on Instagram and Snapchat and FlipFlamf.” Or, as Comedy Central president Michele Ganeless put it last week, Thurston will help add "a multi-platform layer for the show that hasn't existed before" that "will enable us to have a conversation with viewers." A finely-honed racial sensibility Noah was born in Apartheid South Africa to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, and much of his stand-up derives from his unique history of growing up mixed in a segregated state, as well as his more recent experiences coming to terms with the complex racial dynamics in his adopted country. If Noah’s stand-up routines are any indication, we can expect race to be one of the primary lenses he looks through in order to help make sense of the world around him. "America is the one place in the world where I just innately understood what was happening because South Africa and the United States of America have a very similar history,” Noah told journalists on Friday, when asked about coming to terms with racial politics in the U.S. "It's different timelines, but the directions we've taken and the consequences — dealing with the aftermath of what we consider to be democracy, and realizing that freedom is just the beginning of the conversation, that's something I've learned. I'm not now trying to understand what segregation or institutionalized racism is.” That multicultural perspective also extends to his staff, with Noah telling Rolling Stone that "the racial diversity of the correspondents has gone up dramatically,” and introducing three new correspondents with diverse backgrounds: The Malaysian-born Ronny Chieg, African American stand-up Roy Wood Jr., and “Awkward” star Desi Lydic, who joins Jessica Williams as one of the show's few female voices. An outsider’s perspective At Friday’s press preview, Noah repeatedly made reference to his outsider’s point of view, suggesting that his fresh perspective on U.S. politics and culture would be contrasted with the writing staff’s more seasoned views. “For the writers, they’ve got a history with all of these people,” Noah explained of watching the Republican debates with his staff. “I’m watching the debate and someone says something about something one of the politicians did 10, 15 years ago, and they’re like ‘that’s like the time that happened.’ And I’m the person going ‘why is that funny? Who is that person? What is important about that?’” Much like John Oliver does on "Last Week Tonight," we can expect Noah to use his outsider’s perspective to poke fun at some of the more absurd aspects of American society, particularly those things that a native audience may take for granted. “The fun part is the learning,” he continued. “And I think sometimes transferring that learning into a TV show and giving that to the audience is fantastic, like when you have a child, they learn new things and then you get to relearn it with them.” The network brass certainly seems keen to capitalize on Noah's unique cultural vantage point. “He is a student of our culture,” Ganeless told GQ a few months ago. “But he looks at it from a very different perspective.”After months of speculation, Trevor Noah's tenure as “Daily Show” host finally begins tonight. While it remains to be seen exactly how things will change under a Noah regime, we have some pretty good guesses based on things that Noah and his team have said over the past few months. Here's a look at some of the biggest changes we foresee coming down the pipeline: New targets  While much of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” involved eviscerating/demolishing/[pick dramatic verb of your choice] Fox News, Noah told journalists that he doesn’t have any particular axe to grind… yet. “I don’t have targets yet," he told journalists at a press preview last week. “I get to discover the person I will grow to loathe, to hate, and they may not be on Fox News.” Still, when it comes to lampooning the media, it’s likely that we’ll see Noah move away from the cable news cycle that Stewart so loved to target. At a recent TCA panel, Noah explained that, while “The Daily Show” was in part a response to the “emerging 24 hour news cycle,” the media landscape is very different now. “Half of it is online now,” he explained. "Now you’ve got the Gawkers, the BuzzFeeds. The way people are drawing their news is soundbites and headlines and click-bait links has changed everything. The biggest challenge is going to be an exciting one I’m sure is how are we going to bring all of that together looking at it from a bigger lens as opposed to just going after one source—which was historically Fox News.” A digital-friendly approach Not only will online media outlets serve as fodder, but they will also be intrinsic to the show's growth. Recently we learned that Noah had hired a separate online team, headed by comic Baratunde Thurston, to lead production of original online content that will run in tandem with the show. And as late night shows increasingly compete for clicks and YouTube views as much as they do for Nielsen ratings, and given Noah’s remarks about wanting to pivot more to focus on online media, its safe to say that Noah’s “Daily Show” will be a much more digital-friendly, multi-platform experience than its predecessor. As Thurston tells the New York Times, his job is to help the show work with “all this media that has become highly fragmented and swipe-able and annoying in ways that Edward R. Murrow could never have imagined” and to "make things that land on Instagram and Snapchat and FlipFlamf.” Or, as Comedy Central president Michele Ganeless put it last week, Thurston will help add "a multi-platform layer for the show that hasn't existed before" that "will enable us to have a conversation with viewers." A finely-honed racial sensibility Noah was born in Apartheid South Africa to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, and much of his stand-up derives from his unique history of growing up mixed in a segregated state, as well as his more recent experiences coming to terms with the complex racial dynamics in his adopted country. If Noah’s stand-up routines are any indication, we can expect race to be one of the primary lenses he looks through in order to help make sense of the world around him. "America is the one place in the world where I just innately understood what was happening because South Africa and the United States of America have a very similar history,” Noah told journalists on Friday, when asked about coming to terms with racial politics in the U.S. "It's different timelines, but the directions we've taken and the consequences — dealing with the aftermath of what we consider to be democracy, and realizing that freedom is just the beginning of the conversation, that's something I've learned. I'm not now trying to understand what segregation or institutionalized racism is.” That multicultural perspective also extends to his staff, with Noah telling Rolling Stone that "the racial diversity of the correspondents has gone up dramatically,” and introducing three new correspondents with diverse backgrounds: The Malaysian-born Ronny Chieg, African American stand-up Roy Wood Jr., and “Awkward” star Desi Lydic, who joins Jessica Williams as one of the show's few female voices. An outsider’s perspective At Friday’s press preview, Noah repeatedly made reference to his outsider’s point of view, suggesting that his fresh perspective on U.S. politics and culture would be contrasted with the writing staff’s more seasoned views. “For the writers, they’ve got a history with all of these people,” Noah explained of watching the Republican debates with his staff. “I’m watching the debate and someone says something about something one of the politicians did 10, 15 years ago, and they’re like ‘that’s like the time that happened.’ And I’m the person going ‘why is that funny? Who is that person? What is important about that?’” Much like John Oliver does on "Last Week Tonight," we can expect Noah to use his outsider’s perspective to poke fun at some of the more absurd aspects of American society, particularly those things that a native audience may take for granted. “The fun part is the learning,” he continued. “And I think sometimes transferring that learning into a TV show and giving that to the audience is fantastic, like when you have a child, they learn new things and then you get to relearn it with them.” The network brass certainly seems keen to capitalize on Noah's unique cultural vantage point. “He is a student of our culture,” Ganeless told GQ a few months ago. “But he looks at it from a very different perspective.”After months of speculation, Trevor Noah's tenure as “Daily Show” host finally begins tonight. While it remains to be seen exactly how things will change under a Noah regime, we have some pretty good guesses based on things that Noah and his team have said over the past few months. Here's a look at some of the biggest changes we foresee coming down the pipeline: New targets  While much of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” involved eviscerating/demolishing/[pick dramatic verb of your choice] Fox News, Noah told journalists that he doesn’t have any particular axe to grind… yet. “I don’t have targets yet," he told journalists at a press preview last week. “I get to discover the person I will grow to loathe, to hate, and they may not be on Fox News.” Still, when it comes to lampooning the media, it’s likely that we’ll see Noah move away from the cable news cycle that Stewart so loved to target. At a recent TCA panel, Noah explained that, while “The Daily Show” was in part a response to the “emerging 24 hour news cycle,” the media landscape is very different now. “Half of it is online now,” he explained. "Now you’ve got the Gawkers, the BuzzFeeds. The way people are drawing their news is soundbites and headlines and click-bait links has changed everything. The biggest challenge is going to be an exciting one I’m sure is how are we going to bring all of that together looking at it from a bigger lens as opposed to just going after one source—which was historically Fox News.” A digital-friendly approach Not only will online media outlets serve as fodder, but they will also be intrinsic to the show's growth. Recently we learned that Noah had hired a separate online team, headed by comic Baratunde Thurston, to lead production of original online content that will run in tandem with the show. And as late night shows increasingly compete for clicks and YouTube views as much as they do for Nielsen ratings, and given Noah’s remarks about wanting to pivot more to focus on online media, its safe to say that Noah’s “Daily Show” will be a much more digital-friendly, multi-platform experience than its predecessor. As Thurston tells the New York Times, his job is to help the show work with “all this media that has become highly fragmented and swipe-able and annoying in ways that Edward R. Murrow could never have imagined” and to "make things that land on Instagram and Snapchat and FlipFlamf.” Or, as Comedy Central president Michele Ganeless put it last week, Thurston will help add "a multi-platform layer for the show that hasn't existed before" that "will enable us to have a conversation with viewers." A finely-honed racial sensibility Noah was born in Apartheid South Africa to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, and much of his stand-up derives from his unique history of growing up mixed in a segregated state, as well as his more recent experiences coming to terms with the complex racial dynamics in his adopted country. If Noah’s stand-up routines are any indication, we can expect race to be one of the primary lenses he looks through in order to help make sense of the world around him. "America is the one place in the world where I just innately understood what was happening because South Africa and the United States of America have a very similar history,” Noah told journalists on Friday, when asked about coming to terms with racial politics in the U.S. "It's different timelines, but the directions we've taken and the consequences — dealing with the aftermath of what we consider to be democracy, and realizing that freedom is just the beginning of the conversation, that's something I've learned. I'm not now trying to understand what segregation or institutionalized racism is.” That multicultural perspective also extends to his staff, with Noah telling Rolling Stone that "the racial diversity of the correspondents has gone up dramatically,” and introducing three new correspondents with diverse backgrounds: The Malaysian-born Ronny Chieg, African American stand-up Roy Wood Jr., and “Awkward” star Desi Lydic, who joins Jessica Williams as one of the show's few female voices. An outsider’s perspective At Friday’s press preview, Noah repeatedly made reference to his outsider’s point of view, suggesting that his fresh perspective on U.S. politics and culture would be contrasted with the writing staff’s more seasoned views. “For the writers, they’ve got a history with all of these people,” Noah explained of watching the Republican debates with his staff. “I’m watching the debate and someone says something about something one of the politicians did 10, 15 years ago, and they’re like ‘that’s like the time that happened.’ And I’m the person going ‘why is that funny? Who is that person? What is important about that?’” Much like John Oliver does on "Last Week Tonight," we can expect Noah to use his outsider’s perspective to poke fun at some of the more absurd aspects of American society, particularly those things that a native audience may take for granted. “The fun part is the learning,” he continued. “And I think sometimes transferring that learning into a TV show and giving that to the audience is fantastic, like when you have a child, they learn new things and then you get to relearn it with them.” The network brass certainly seems keen to capitalize on Noah's unique cultural vantage point. “He is a student of our culture,” Ganeless told GQ a few months ago. “But he looks at it from a very different perspective.”

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Stop asking working moms about “having it all” — and women, stop answering

Sometimes, all you need for a little Monday validation is Shonda Rhimes tweeting, "THIS!" THIS, as in a rousing hell, yes to Facebook executive Margaret Gould Stewart's recent USA Today op-ed, in which she quite reasonably suggests, "Let's talk about my brain, not babies." THIS. Stewart writes, "My uterus doesn’t have much to say on the matter of technology and how it can improve people’s lives," adding, "though my brain has quite a bit to offer." She recounts attending the Fortune Brainstorm conference earlier this year and watching YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki introduced by an interviewer who credited her for "truly extraordinary" feat of raising five children. And of course, he asked her the inevitable, "How do you do it all?" Please. The working mothers of the world beg you. Stop. Asking. This. Stupid. Question. Stewart aptly explains, "When the venue is a tech conference, let's talk about tech, for goodness sake. Making motherhood a required topic for women leaders minimizes their contributions to the industry…. It minimizes my expertise and accomplishments and those of my fellow women tech leaders." She helpfully offers advice on how to do better, including a simple tip: "As I see it, you have two choices: you can either ask everyone these questions about their private lives and their role as a parent, or you should ask no one." And she encourages female professionals, "Please don’t engage in these discussions when the focus is supposed to be on your professional accomplishments." Again I say, THIS. The "having it all" legend, much like a demonic serial killer from an '80s horror franchise, refuses to die — it seems instead to just keep getting stronger and scarier. It's been more three years since Anne-Marie Slaughter's self-explanatorily titled "Why Women Still Can’t Have It All" became a sensation in The Atlantic, soon followed by Sheryl Sandberg's command to "Lean In," though it came with an acknowledgment of "The Myth of Doing it All." In Slaughter's new book, "Unfinished Business," she posits, "Perhaps the problem is not with women, but with work." Or maybe it's how it's framed. When NPR this weekend ran a feature on the book, it came with the headline, "When Working Families Can't Do It All." I know I keep asking this but… seriously, who out there is Having It All? And what's with this specific expectation that women are supposed to? The trick is, they're not. Not really. They're supposed to come up short and serve as cautionary tales of what happens when women want things, especially things in addition to babies — or even, oh Lord, no — instead of them. How's that "having it all" going for you, ladies? What? You say you're just here to talk about economic growth or a new drug you developed or social media outreach? Yeah, first we need to know where your children are right now. Who fed them dinner? How do you feel about that? Is your husband at home right now "babysitting" his own children? Does he "help out" with stuff like cooking and scheduling family activities? Did you take any time off when you had your last baby? Do you feel it got you off the career track? Do you want to have more children and if so, when? Please put your hand on a bible and solemnly swear that your first and best "job" is being a mom. We'll be here looking for any cracks in your facade that might suggest compromise, trade-offs, flexibility, or, most of all, imperfection. Then we can point at you and say "A-HA! You call THAT having it all?" I think the reason that women are so often so challenged on the "having it all" trope is because there's something implicitly threatening in the message. After all, if women start having it, and all of it, then there's nothing left for men, right? They'll have the jobs and the kids and the world will be a cold and masculinity-free place. What's your game, women? Better keep asking them about their kids — maybe they'll get scared off from this whole "careers and ambitions" thing. Of course, the work-life tightrope is a very challenging one to walk, and the burden of navigating it falls disproportionately to mothers. We can have conversations about that. We can conversations about that all damn day long, if you'd like, because I have plenty to say. But when women come to talk about work and get asked about their babies, it sends a message to everybody reading, listening and watching that babies are the top story and work is a hobby. So just remember that women — yes, even women who've had children — are capable of talking about things other than children. And that there is no magical all to had, for anybody.

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My mother, the drug war and me: Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates and forgiving my own black family in the age of mass incarceration

If you think you feel pressured to watch all of the good TV out there, imagine having to watch for a living. It’s impossible to keep up — and here I will confess to having skipped the ratings juggernaut “The Walking Dead.” I can’t stomach zombies; I made it through about four episodes before I gave up. It wasn’t until I saw the movie “Requiem for a Dream” that I realized why. Now I know there are two types of characters on-screen I can’t watch—zombies and drug addicts. The terrifying, dark eyes, the sagging limbs—to me, they look precisely the same. They look like my mother. Or, I should say, they look like how I imagine my birth mother looked. Unlike my older siblings, I don’t have a strong recollection of our mother before she turned us over to the state of Massachusetts. And up until this point, I’ve never understood her, or the very large Houston family who looked on silently while she gave up six children, all under the age of 10. The only reason I can even begin to understand what happened to us now is because of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent article for the Atlantic, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Before that, an article about a possible end to the war on drugs and “The Wire’s" David Simon’s concerns about decriminalization already had me rethinking my biological family. My adoption at the age of 7 had, among other things, granted me the privilege of not having to consider certain things about the world I came from — I’d dodged that bullet. But today, the hypothetical question of whether my life and the lives of my five siblings would have been different in a society that treated drug users differently seems relevant. Coates argues that imagining such a world demands that we go far beyond the question of decriminalization. Legalizing marijuana is fine and good, but in no way does it acknowledge the centuries of work that went into the mass incarceration of black families and the systematic destruction of families like mine. One of the biggest takeaways from “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” is that it is no accident that the black family has, in many respects, been destroyed. Slavery may have been abolished in 1865, but various forms of unfreedom—the most successful version being mass incarceration—exist and operate today. Coates uses the narratives of individuals like Tonya (a woman who became an addict after years of abuse from her biological family and foster parents), and families like Patricia Lowe’s to show how mass incarceration is both a political and personal attack against the black family—a direct descendant of slavery and Patrick Moynihan’s 1950 report “The Negro Family.” What that means for many people like me is that there is now a piece of writing that functions as the beginning of an answer to a question all kids who have been in the system have asked: “Why did my family abandon me?” Coates offers up some statistics that help illuminate things: “From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000.” These numbers refer to people like my biological mother’s father, who was in and out of prison countless times during this time. “From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again,” he writes. During these years, at least one of her older brothers was incarcerated, too. My mother would go on to serve her own time as well. For me, these statistics offer up a helpful framing for the world that was in place in 1988 when Crystal Houston called the Department of Social Services in Boston and asked them to come pick up her six children.

***

If you ask my mother why she turned her six children over to the State, she will never speak of her struggles with drugs, and she will certainly make no mention of her being a victim of a system meant to criminalize black women like her and black men like those in her family, and those with whom she chose to create families. She will tell you one true story, and she will tell it over and over again, with the occasional variation in detail. When she was 23 and pregnant with her twins, her mother went missing for a couple of days. My grandmother had recently divorced her husband, my mother’s stepfather, and remarried. My mother grew worried and, along with her siblings, went looking for her mother. She visited the shoe store owned by her stepfather and mother. Upon finding him there, she asked if he knew where her mother was. She’ll tell you she saw something in his eyes, and in a panic, began searching through the store, and went into the back where she stumbled upon her mother’s corpse. The woman who’d always been there for her, the woman who never made her feel judged or like less of a person, the one who was helping her raise her children, had been stabbed to death in what a judge would later rule was a crime of passion. This is why she couldn’t raise her kids, she’ll tell you. She won’t tell you that she’d already developed a drug habit. She won’t tell you that her oldest daughter (still well under the age of 10) had already grown accustomed to being left alone for long stretches of time—sometimes days—with her younger brothers and her baby sister. She’ll just tell you that finding her mother’s body, while pregnant with the twins, was too much for her to bear. “I knew I was going someplace dark after that, and I couldn’t take you all there with me,” she once told me—the only allusion to her addiction I’ve ever been able to decipher in our conversations, which are few and far between. The words of Margaret Garner, the enslaved woman who became the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” are the first words Coates uses to begin his historical narrative: “Never marry again in slavery.” Garner was a mother who also had no desire to take her children where she was going. And while the connection between these two women might seem loose, I can’t help but marvel at how their boldest and most terrifying personal choices were rooted in political doctrine against the survival of the black family. My mother may not have been fully aware of it, but in the ‘80s, she was living in an era of unfreedom as well. That she was going to further shackle her wrists and ankles together with crack cocaine and heroin was, for her, all the more reason to find a different space for her children. Like Garner, she wanted a better life for those innocent bodies she’d brought into circumstances that would surely hinder them. Unlike Garner, she didn’t attempt to kill us. She probably thought that she was saving us — and in some way, I know she did. But the system, as Coates explains, isn’t designed to save individual members of the black family, no matter how well-meaning one’s parents might be. My two oldest brothers were separated from my sister and me, and put into a foster home. The twins went to live with their father and his family. My sister and I were separated after just one year together, when our foster parents believed she was showing signs of difficulty. Neither of us remember it this way (I have memories of her pinching the hell out of me, like big sisters have been doing to little sisters the world over, since the beginning of time), but if she showed any signs of anger or difficulty, it was certainly easier to move her into an institution than to get her help, so that’s what they did. When my brothers became too old or too difficult (or too much like preteens, or too black—whatever they were guilty of), they were also separated and sent to various group homes. It is a well-known fact that these places are, for many young black boys, a fast-track to jail and prison. After turning 18, the boys and my sister were all released from the State. All of them, including the twins, at some point or another, found their way back to our birth mother. Both of my older brothers and at least one of the younger   have served time, a fact that comes to mind when I read sociologist Devah Pager’s quote in Coates’ piece: “Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s most marginalized groups... Rather it has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood.” My oldest brother is inside right now. He’s been selling drugs for many years, and was recently caught with a large amount of heroin. My sister told me a story I still cannot believe—that he once sold to our mother. It’s probably true. If it is, Coates tells us, then this is also proof that the system is working just fine. Indeed, it may be an indictment of my brother’s character, but it’s also proof that some black men might become so destroyed by a system that set out to do just that, that they’d sell drugs to their own mothers. But this knowledge of a political system at work — at work when the men are in prison, and still at work when they are released — does not take away from the fact that this is personal. This is my family, my blood.

***

What’s strange about having been adopted by a historian is that even the intelligent, politically and socially aware mother who raised me would get angry with my biological family. Before she passed away when I was 15, every once in a while she’d go on a mini-rant about how she couldn’t comprehend an entire family letting four kids get swallowed up by the system. When I was 13, I met my biological father at my sister’s birthday party in Boston. My mother was furious that this had happened without her permission. How dare these people try to come back into your life after all these years (and, subtext: after all her hard work earning my trust and love). She was the smartest woman I knew, but looking back it seemed that even she couldn’t see how my blood family was not really flawed, but was instead a shining example that the American system was working. How could a whole group of children be lost to a system? Easily. Throw in a handful of incarcerated black men, a birth mother with better access to drugs than grief counseling, and a father who hadn’t even been made aware of my existence until I was already adopted (and who had his own struggles with drug abuse), and you have the Houston family—the product of a finely tuned environment. There are personal explanations for how my birth mother became a 23-year-old living in Brockton’s Southfield Gardens housing projects with four young children and a set of twins on the way, but there are political explanations as well. As the child of an impoverished black family in the ‘80s, according to the political forces outlined by Coates, that is precisely what she was meant to become. In the same way, she was also meant to become an addict, one who would go on to prostitute herself for money to support her addiction, and would then be arrested on such charges. She was born into—then brought lives into—a system designed to foster this. In taking on the prison system, Coates’ work shows us a world where laws, since the drafting of the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Clause, were literally made to break us; drug wars were declared and funded by government administrations who, either openly or behind closed doors, declared their hope for the end of the black family or, as President Nixon did, an end to those “criminal elements which increasingly threaten our cities, our homes, and our lives.” My mother may have grown up in the projects and may have become accustomed to her loved ones—those so-called “criminal elements”—going in and out of jail and prison, but she also grew up in a two-parent home, headed by her mother and stepfather. The parents who raised her were, to my knowledge, loving and fairly stable business owners. Although my mother was young and clearly troubled, she had a lot of help from my grandmother, a devout Catholic who did not believe in abortion, and would not permit my mother to have any, while raising her children during those first few years. My mother was loved, but because she still existed in an environment geared more toward her failure than her success, that love wasn’t enough. Perhaps she sought to fill those holes created by her biological father’s constant incarceration with the father of my oldest sister, and then again in the father of my oldest two brothers. And did the same, again, with my father, and again with the father of my younger brothers. For years I saw her as ignorant, disgusting, irresponsible and weak for deciding to have so many lovers and so many children—decisions I saw as the beginning of the end of a chance for my siblings and me to have a “normal” family life. But Coates tells me, as no one else ever has, that these choices were not merely in the hands of my mother. These decisions were part of a greater design.

***

Twenty-seven years since we lost our first family, my two older brothers, my sister and I have all gone on to create our own families in this age of mass incarceration. It’s telling that not one of us has created a nuclear family consisting of a father (husband), mother (wife) and child(ren). While some of my siblings have attended college, I’m the only one to have graduated. We’ve all been on public assistance at one point in time, and I believe we — unsurprisingly — all suffer emotionally from the abandonment of our birth mother. Speaking for myself I can say that, because of my experiences, the word “family” has an effect on me similar to those “Walking Dead” zombies: My stomach turns and I try to tell myself, sometimes, that it isn’t a real thing. Family isn’t real. That even as a mother myself, I don’t always see the value of the family unit because of my overwhelming disappointment in my first black family, is proof that a system designed to dismantle the concept of the Black Family—which has been deemed, in many ways, worthless—has been highly effective. That I had to fact-check many of the details in this piece with my older sister, the only blood relative with whom I have had fairly consistent contact, is also proof that this system has been highly effective—but isn’t infallible. In spite of it all, we laugh as much as we cry about what happened to us, partly because there are some pretty hilarious memories too (like how my foster parents let me wallpaper my room with NKOTB posters, or how—true story—this one prostitute who knew our mother got her nipple bitten off in a fight). But our relationship also highlights the fact that, even when I’ve had access, I’ve cowered from contact with my biological family. On one hand, it’s a defense mechanism and survival tool. But this personal fear is also political—a symptom of the rhetoric of white supremacists like Hinton Rowan Helper, who helped create the myth that gets its very own chapter in Coates’ work: I too came to believe that there was a “crime-stained blackness” inherent in my family. Whether I wrote them off as “ghetto,” or “hood” or “ignorant,” I did so with the faulty assumption that they chose their quality of life—they chose, in some way, to remain in poverty, addicted to drugs and/or incarcerated. That I held on to these beliefs tightly, and that it took the work of a scholar to loosen that grip, is further proof that white supremacy is a hell of a drug, and not one of us is immune. When I think about what the State did with us, I think of that quote from Belgian King Leopold II at the 1876 Geographical Conference on Central Africa: “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.” We, my siblings and I, were our own little continent, divvied up for the taking, though not worth near as much as that magnificent African cake proved to be. It reminds me that even when there is public, historical record of a body of land or a body of people being sliced into pieces, the world can go on as if it never happened, and those in power—those Clintons, those Bushes—can continue to reign as if they never played a hand in the damage done. Coates’ piece ends with a return to his call for reparations—repair for the damages done. Like him, I can’t help but ask who will pay for the damages done to the families highlighted in his piece? The Tonyas, the Lowes, the Newtons? And who will pay for what happened to the Houstons, the Davises, the Wrights—the four of us who went through DSS? The youngest two may have evaded one system by going to live with their paternal family, but how much better was it, in the end? Unfortunately, I wouldn’t really know — I haven’t met my younger brothers yet. Most likely no one, much less the American government, will ever pay. But the political acknowledgement of this failed system is not enough. An admission that the war on drugs and the war on crime failed is not enough. And yet, I fear that it’s the most I’ll see in this lifetime. While the American government may never do its part, I will do mine. I’ll no longer place the entire blame of the early childhoods my siblings and I lost, and the ongoing, unfolding results of that loss, on the family that never came to save us. That they were addicts, or grief-stricken, or incarcerated, or traumatized by the loss of their own family members to incarceration or drugs, or depressed and distracted by the realities of their own surroundings means that they were, like countless others, too busy trying to save themselves. And although they are not absolved of all wrongdoing and all mistakes, my broken black family deserves my understanding — and forgiveness, too, though I haven’t completely reached that, yet. In addition to providing us with a sharp historical, social and political perspective on the era of mass incarceration, Ta-Nehisi Coates gave me a necessary insight to the judgments I cast against a family that America had decided was never meant to survive or thrive. And even as I am eternally grateful for a second family and for second chances, and for the family I’ve started myself, the untold stories of my first family continue to haunt me. It’s not just my blood, but the potential of a people who might have flourished in a system designed for them to do so, that I will not stop mourning.If you think you feel pressured to watch all of the good TV out there, imagine having to watch for a living. It’s impossible to keep up — and here I will confess to having skipped the ratings juggernaut “The Walking Dead.” I can’t stomach zombies; I made it through about four episodes before I gave up. It wasn’t until I saw the movie “Requiem for a Dream” that I realized why. Now I know there are two types of characters on-screen I can’t watch—zombies and drug addicts. The terrifying, dark eyes, the sagging limbs—to me, they look precisely the same. They look like my mother. Or, I should say, they look like how I imagine my birth mother looked. Unlike my older siblings, I don’t have a strong recollection of our mother before she turned us over to the state of Massachusetts. And up until this point, I’ve never understood her, or the very large Houston family who looked on silently while she gave up six children, all under the age of 10. The only reason I can even begin to understand what happened to us now is because of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent article for the Atlantic, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Before that, an article about a possible end to the war on drugs and “The Wire’s" David Simon’s concerns about decriminalization already had me rethinking my biological family. My adoption at the age of 7 had, among other things, granted me the privilege of not having to consider certain things about the world I came from — I’d dodged that bullet. But today, the hypothetical question of whether my life and the lives of my five siblings would have been different in a society that treated drug users differently seems relevant. Coates argues that imagining such a world demands that we go far beyond the question of decriminalization. Legalizing marijuana is fine and good, but in no way does it acknowledge the centuries of work that went into the mass incarceration of black families and the systematic destruction of families like mine. One of the biggest takeaways from “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” is that it is no accident that the black family has, in many respects, been destroyed. Slavery may have been abolished in 1865, but various forms of unfreedom—the most successful version being mass incarceration—exist and operate today. Coates uses the narratives of individuals like Tonya (a woman who became an addict after years of abuse from her biological family and foster parents), and families like Patricia Lowe’s to show how mass incarceration is both a political and personal attack against the black family—a direct descendant of slavery and Patrick Moynihan’s 1950 report “The Negro Family.” What that means for many people like me is that there is now a piece of writing that functions as the beginning of an answer to a question all kids who have been in the system have asked: “Why did my family abandon me?” Coates offers up some statistics that help illuminate things: “From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000.” These numbers refer to people like my biological mother’s father, who was in and out of prison countless times during this time. “From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again,” he writes. During these years, at least one of her older brothers was incarcerated, too. My mother would go on to serve her own time as well. For me, these statistics offer up a helpful framing for the world that was in place in 1988 when Crystal Houston called the Department of Social Services in Boston and asked them to come pick up her six children.

***

If you ask my mother why she turned her six children over to the State, she will never speak of her struggles with drugs, and she will certainly make no mention of her being a victim of a system meant to criminalize black women like her and black men like those in her family, and those with whom she chose to create families. She will tell you one true story, and she will tell it over and over again, with the occasional variation in detail. When she was 23 and pregnant with her twins, her mother went missing for a couple of days. My grandmother had recently divorced her husband, my mother’s stepfather, and remarried. My mother grew worried and, along with her siblings, went looking for her mother. She visited the shoe store owned by her stepfather and mother. Upon finding him there, she asked if he knew where her mother was. She’ll tell you she saw something in his eyes, and in a panic, began searching through the store, and went into the back where she stumbled upon her mother’s corpse. The woman who’d always been there for her, the woman who never made her feel judged or like less of a person, the one who was helping her raise her children, had been stabbed to death in what a judge would later rule was a crime of passion. This is why she couldn’t raise her kids, she’ll tell you. She won’t tell you that she’d already developed a drug habit. She won’t tell you that her oldest daughter (still well under the age of 10) had already grown accustomed to being left alone for long stretches of time—sometimes days—with her younger brothers and her baby sister. She’ll just tell you that finding her mother’s body, while pregnant with the twins, was too much for her to bear. “I knew I was going someplace dark after that, and I couldn’t take you all there with me,” she once told me—the only allusion to her addiction I’ve ever been able to decipher in our conversations, which are few and far between. The words of Margaret Garner, the enslaved woman who became the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” are the first words Coates uses to begin his historical narrative: “Never marry again in slavery.” Garner was a mother who also had no desire to take her children where she was going. And while the connection between these two women might seem loose, I can’t help but marvel at how their boldest and most terrifying personal choices were rooted in political doctrine against the survival of the black family. My mother may not have been fully aware of it, but in the ‘80s, she was living in an era of unfreedom as well. That she was going to further shackle her wrists and ankles together with crack cocaine and heroin was, for her, all the more reason to find a different space for her children. Like Garner, she wanted a better life for those innocent bodies she’d brought into circumstances that would surely hinder them. Unlike Garner, she didn’t attempt to kill us. She probably thought that she was saving us — and in some way, I know she did. But the system, as Coates explains, isn’t designed to save individual members of the black family, no matter how well-meaning one’s parents might be. My two oldest brothers were separated from my sister and me, and put into a foster home. The twins went to live with their father and his family. My sister and I were separated after just one year together, when our foster parents believed she was showing signs of difficulty. Neither of us remember it this way (I have memories of her pinching the hell out of me, like big sisters have been doing to little sisters the world over, since the beginning of time), but if she showed any signs of anger or difficulty, it was certainly easier to move her into an institution than to get her help, so that’s what they did. When my brothers became too old or too difficult (or too much like preteens, or too black—whatever they were guilty of), they were also separated and sent to various group homes. It is a well-known fact that these places are, for many young black boys, a fast-track to jail and prison. After turning 18, the boys and my sister were all released from the State. All of them, including the twins, at some point or another, found their way back to our birth mother. Both of my older brothers and at least one of the younger   have served time, a fact that comes to mind when I read sociologist Devah Pager’s quote in Coates’ piece: “Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s most marginalized groups... Rather it has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood.” My oldest brother is inside right now. He’s been selling drugs for many years, and was recently caught with a large amount of heroin. My sister told me a story I still cannot believe—that he once sold to our mother. It’s probably true. If it is, Coates tells us, then this is also proof that the system is working just fine. Indeed, it may be an indictment of my brother’s character, but it’s also proof that some black men might become so destroyed by a system that set out to do just that, that they’d sell drugs to their own mothers. But this knowledge of a political system at work — at work when the men are in prison, and still at work when they are released — does not take away from the fact that this is personal. This is my family, my blood.

***

What’s strange about having been adopted by a historian is that even the intelligent, politically and socially aware mother who raised me would get angry with my biological family. Before she passed away when I was 15, every once in a while she’d go on a mini-rant about how she couldn’t comprehend an entire family letting four kids get swallowed up by the system. When I was 13, I met my biological father at my sister’s birthday party in Boston. My mother was furious that this had happened without her permission. How dare these people try to come back into your life after all these years (and, subtext: after all her hard work earning my trust and love). She was the smartest woman I knew, but looking back it seemed that even she couldn’t see how my blood family was not really flawed, but was instead a shining example that the American system was working. How could a whole group of children be lost to a system? Easily. Throw in a handful of incarcerated black men, a birth mother with better access to drugs than grief counseling, and a father who hadn’t even been made aware of my existence until I was already adopted (and who had his own struggles with drug abuse), and you have the Houston family—the product of a finely tuned environment. There are personal explanations for how my birth mother became a 23-year-old living in Brockton’s Southfield Gardens housing projects with four young children and a set of twins on the way, but there are political explanations as well. As the child of an impoverished black family in the ‘80s, according to the political forces outlined by Coates, that is precisely what she was meant to become. In the same way, she was also meant to become an addict, one who would go on to prostitute herself for money to support her addiction, and would then be arrested on such charges. She was born into—then brought lives into—a system designed to foster this. In taking on the prison system, Coates’ work shows us a world where laws, since the drafting of the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Clause, were literally made to break us; drug wars were declared and funded by government administrations who, either openly or behind closed doors, declared their hope for the end of the black family or, as President Nixon did, an end to those “criminal elements which increasingly threaten our cities, our homes, and our lives.” My mother may have grown up in the projects and may have become accustomed to her loved ones—those so-called “criminal elements”—going in and out of jail and prison, but she also grew up in a two-parent home, headed by her mother and stepfather. The parents who raised her were, to my knowledge, loving and fairly stable business owners. Although my mother was young and clearly troubled, she had a lot of help from my grandmother, a devout Catholic who did not believe in abortion, and would not permit my mother to have any, while raising her children during those first few years. My mother was loved, but because she still existed in an environment geared more toward her failure than her success, that love wasn’t enough. Perhaps she sought to fill those holes created by her biological father’s constant incarceration with the father of my oldest sister, and then again in the father of my oldest two brothers. And did the same, again, with my father, and again with the father of my younger brothers. For years I saw her as ignorant, disgusting, irresponsible and weak for deciding to have so many lovers and so many children—decisions I saw as the beginning of the end of a chance for my siblings and me to have a “normal” family life. But Coates tells me, as no one else ever has, that these choices were not merely in the hands of my mother. These decisions were part of a greater design.

***

Twenty-seven years since we lost our first family, my two older brothers, my sister and I have all gone on to create our own families in this age of mass incarceration. It’s telling that not one of us has created a nuclear family consisting of a father (husband), mother (wife) and child(ren). While some of my siblings have attended college, I’m the only one to have graduated. We’ve all been on public assistance at one point in time, and I believe we — unsurprisingly — all suffer emotionally from the abandonment of our birth mother. Speaking for myself I can say that, because of my experiences, the word “family” has an effect on me similar to those “Walking Dead” zombies: My stomach turns and I try to tell myself, sometimes, that it isn’t a real thing. Family isn’t real. That even as a mother myself, I don’t always see the value of the family unit because of my overwhelming disappointment in my first black family, is proof that a system designed to dismantle the concept of the Black Family—which has been deemed, in many ways, worthless—has been highly effective. That I had to fact-check many of the details in this piece with my older sister, the only blood relative with whom I have had fairly consistent contact, is also proof that this system has been highly effective—but isn’t infallible. In spite of it all, we laugh as much as we cry about what happened to us, partly because there are some pretty hilarious memories too (like how my foster parents let me wallpaper my room with NKOTB posters, or how—true story—this one prostitute who knew our mother got her nipple bitten off in a fight). But our relationship also highlights the fact that, even when I’ve had access, I’ve cowered from contact with my biological family. On one hand, it’s a defense mechanism and survival tool. But this personal fear is also political—a symptom of the rhetoric of white supremacists like Hinton Rowan Helper, who helped create the myth that gets its very own chapter in Coates’ work: I too came to believe that there was a “crime-stained blackness” inherent in my family. Whether I wrote them off as “ghetto,” or “hood” or “ignorant,” I did so with the faulty assumption that they chose their quality of life—they chose, in some way, to remain in poverty, addicted to drugs and/or incarcerated. That I held on to these beliefs tightly, and that it took the work of a scholar to loosen that grip, is further proof that white supremacy is a hell of a drug, and not one of us is immune. When I think about what the State did with us, I think of that quote from Belgian King Leopold II at the 1876 Geographical Conference on Central Africa: “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.” We, my siblings and I, were our own little continent, divvied up for the taking, though not worth near as much as that magnificent African cake proved to be. It reminds me that even when there is public, historical record of a body of land or a body of people being sliced into pieces, the world can go on as if it never happened, and those in power—those Clintons, those Bushes—can continue to reign as if they never played a hand in the damage done. Coates’ piece ends with a return to his call for reparations—repair for the damages done. Like him, I can’t help but ask who will pay for the damages done to the families highlighted in his piece? The Tonyas, the Lowes, the Newtons? And who will pay for what happened to the Houstons, the Davises, the Wrights—the four of us who went through DSS? The youngest two may have evaded one system by going to live with their paternal family, but how much better was it, in the end? Unfortunately, I wouldn’t really know — I haven’t met my younger brothers yet. Most likely no one, much less the American government, will ever pay. But the political acknowledgement of this failed system is not enough. An admission that the war on drugs and the war on crime failed is not enough. And yet, I fear that it’s the most I’ll see in this lifetime. While the American government may never do its part, I will do mine. I’ll no longer place the entire blame of the early childhoods my siblings and I lost, and the ongoing, unfolding results of that loss, on the family that never came to save us. That they were addicts, or grief-stricken, or incarcerated, or traumatized by the loss of their own family members to incarceration or drugs, or depressed and distracted by the realities of their own surroundings means that they were, like countless others, too busy trying to save themselves. And although they are not absolved of all wrongdoing and all mistakes, my broken black family deserves my understanding — and forgiveness, too, though I haven’t completely reached that, yet. In addition to providing us with a sharp historical, social and political perspective on the era of mass incarceration, Ta-Nehisi Coates gave me a necessary insight to the judgments I cast against a family that America had decided was never meant to survive or thrive. And even as I am eternally grateful for a second family and for second chances, and for the family I’ve started myself, the untold stories of my first family continue to haunt me. It’s not just my blood, but the potential of a people who might have flourished in a system designed for them to do so, that I will not stop mourning.

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Mary Karr on the “loser, outsider weirdos” of memoir and skipping the David Foster Wallace movie: “The whole St. David thing … it’s a little hard to take”

Twenty years ago, Mary Karr helped kick off the memoir boom with her book “The Liar’s Club,” which described growing up in a small East Texas town with a charming, mendacious father and deeply pious, hard-drinking family. (“They're Liars, and That's Just the Least of Their Problems” ran the headline of the New York Times review.) She’s written about her early years, her drinking, a divorce, and her recovery and Catholicism in two other memoirs, “Cherry” and “Lit.” A professor at Syracuse University’s prestigious writing program, Karr has just released “The Art of Memoir,” which is somewhere between a writing instruction book and a defense of the popular but sometimes controversial genre. Cheryl Strayed, whom Karr knew during the “Wild” author’s time at Syracuse, calls the book “astonishingly perceptive, wildly entertaining, and profoundly honest.” (Karr did teach Koren Zailckas, author of "Smashed: Story of Drunken Girlhood.") At the very least, Karr has managed to make a tome about a prose form as ornery as her books about sex, drink and sorrow. We spoke with Karr in San Francisco, where she was touring behind the book. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Do you think there’s still a bias against the memoir, for being not as serious or substantial as the novel? I do! Absolutely! When I was in grad school, I think I mentioned Geoffrey Wolff described it as like engraving the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice: It’s just a province of loser, outsider weirdos. As though novels aren’t. But yeah… There’s no danger of the American Academy calling me up to induct me. I’m seen as this low, trashy kind of creature, which is probably not that far from wrong. But certainly the readership for it has ratcheted up, which is a great thing. Why do you think it’s considered a less serious form? I don’t think there are any more bad memoirs than there are bad novels: Most novels are bad and most memoirs are bad and most poems are bad and most movies are bad… I just think genres rise and fall: When the novel began, [authors] were seen as morally reprehensible because it was made up. And [because they didn’t have] any interest in truth. Obviously you can tell great truths in a novel or you can lie in a novel. It’s like photography, which was seen as not an art until the latter half of the last century. That began to change. But [memoir] is filling a need of dealing with the real. As novels have gotten less real, our readership has grown. These days, we associate the memoir with pain or trauma or difficult childhood -- Isn’t that what all art is about? Isn’t all art about drama? I think there’s something about it being personal… A novel is seen as grander… Or that you could write a novel and your character and your values would not be on display, as they are in a memoir. Or that reality doesn’t inform a novel. As I’ve said, the best parts of David Foster Wallace’s fiction are nonfiction. Is a memoir a substitute for therapy? Does writing one help or help with the wound that sometime motivates it? I had a therapist ask me last night… I think therapy should be a requisite for everybody anyway. I had such a difficult childhood, I don’t know what a normal person, occupying a normal body, would feel like. For me, I had to be in therapy for 15 years before I could even start trying to write the story. In therapy, you pay them; in a memoir, hopefully, they pay you. I think it is true that writing a memoir is cathartic. But unless it’s cathartic for the reader, don’t publish it… It’s a bomb that doesn’t go off until the reader starts reading it. The other debate around the memoir is the role of reality and truth – how far is too far for embellishing details. How do you come down on this? You and other writers have been criticized for how you call it. I actually haven’t been criticized -- I’m talking about the Janet Maslin review. She made a mistake. I wrote her an email and said, You misread this. There’s a big difference between accidentally misremembering a small detail, and making up an event that didn’t happen. And if you’re doing something to trick or deceive people, you know when you’re doing that: It isn’t hard to figure out. Greg Mortenson [author of “Three Cups of Tea” and “Stones Into Schools”] didn’t misremember and think he’d been kidnapped by the Taliban: That wasn’t a mistake of memory. The truth is, the minute you begin to shape a narrative – to tell one story instead of another story – you’re shaping people’s opinions. That’s why I say memoir is not about external fact; it’s internal, psychological, flawed-by-your-experience. And that’s why I think voice is so important. One reason I stopped using quotes in “Cherry” and “Lit” is I didn’t want it to read like journalism. I didn’t want it to read like objective reportage. The mistakes that I make are mistakes of interpretation… Elie Wiesel in “Night” – there’s a terrible scene. His father is horribly sick and dying, and he’s calling out his name. And the SS guy comes in and essentially beats the old man to death for making noise. And Wiesel never responded to it. He said, “His last words had been my name, and I never answered.” But when I looked in subsequent versions of the book, I couldn’t find it, because he had cut it out. He said it was quote-unquote too personal. But he didn’t cut it out because it was too personal, he cut it out because he was ashamed. So I think the bigger problems we face as memoirist is being scrupulous with our own conscience. It’s one reason I say, unless you’re a worrier and a nail-biter, you just shouldn’t be writing one of these. It’s too easy to deceive yourself. So Maslin’s not wrong… But there’s a difference between inadvertent mistakes and making things up. I don’t advocate making things up! If you make things up, you deny yourself the truths that come from being really uncomfortable. Here’s a great writer who never wrote a memoir: David Foster Wallace. He’s become a hero or a martyr or something since his death. You knew him: Have you been surprised how he’s become a pop-culture figure? He’s a great genius and people love the work and it’s a terrible tragedy to lose a writer of that caliber. The whole St. David thing, to people who knew him (laughs)… it’s a little hard to take. David was a very troubled guy for most of his life, obviously. He flatlined before he was 21 years old. He was trying to kill himself; I had suicidal ideation, or I was depressed, I never had what he had. I think it’s a horrible, tragic story. Do people misremember him now? People who didn’t know him misremember him. People talk about how obsequiously polite he was. Like when I met him he called me “Miss Karr.” But it [was] kind of mocking almost, if you knew him. It was so insincere and Eddie Haskell. It was kind of a really… That’s not what he was like. He was snarky and snappish and difficult, you know… He was not that damn careful. The whole St. David thing, I don’t know. I loved him, it was a great tragedy, but the people who knew him well… He was not long-suffering; he was a pretty angry guy. At least, when I knew him. I believed he had gotten better. I believed his rap, what he told me. Obviously that was not true. Did you see the movie? No. As I understand it – I haven’t seen it – the family is dimly horrified. I don’t want to see it. Why don’t we close with you picking a memoir you admire, from any historical period, and describing what makes you like it so much? I think Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”… “Native Son” is a great novel, but for me as a reader, I think “Black Boy” is an even more artful book. And in some ways, he was the first semi-civilian to have this massive bestseller in the genre. It’s very hard to write with both tenderness and bitterness, and his ability to combine both those things… and to do it in a beautiful literary style, at times lyrical and poetic… And it’s never really mentioned. But I think it’s a great book.Twenty years ago, Mary Karr helped kick off the memoir boom with her book “The Liar’s Club,” which described growing up in a small East Texas town with a charming, mendacious father and deeply pious, hard-drinking family. (“They're Liars, and That's Just the Least of Their Problems” ran the headline of the New York Times review.) She’s written about her early years, her drinking, a divorce, and her recovery and Catholicism in two other memoirs, “Cherry” and “Lit.” A professor at Syracuse University’s prestigious writing program, Karr has just released “The Art of Memoir,” which is somewhere between a writing instruction book and a defense of the popular but sometimes controversial genre. Cheryl Strayed, whom Karr knew during the “Wild” author’s time at Syracuse, calls the book “astonishingly perceptive, wildly entertaining, and profoundly honest.” (Karr did teach Koren Zailckas, author of "Smashed: Story of Drunken Girlhood.") At the very least, Karr has managed to make a tome about a prose form as ornery as her books about sex, drink and sorrow. We spoke with Karr in San Francisco, where she was touring behind the book. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Do you think there’s still a bias against the memoir, for being not as serious or substantial as the novel? I do! Absolutely! When I was in grad school, I think I mentioned Geoffrey Wolff described it as like engraving the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice: It’s just a province of loser, outsider weirdos. As though novels aren’t. But yeah… There’s no danger of the American Academy calling me up to induct me. I’m seen as this low, trashy kind of creature, which is probably not that far from wrong. But certainly the readership for it has ratcheted up, which is a great thing. Why do you think it’s considered a less serious form? I don’t think there are any more bad memoirs than there are bad novels: Most novels are bad and most memoirs are bad and most poems are bad and most movies are bad… I just think genres rise and fall: When the novel began, [authors] were seen as morally reprehensible because it was made up. And [because they didn’t have] any interest in truth. Obviously you can tell great truths in a novel or you can lie in a novel. It’s like photography, which was seen as not an art until the latter half of the last century. That began to change. But [memoir] is filling a need of dealing with the real. As novels have gotten less real, our readership has grown. These days, we associate the memoir with pain or trauma or difficult childhood -- Isn’t that what all art is about? Isn’t all art about drama? I think there’s something about it being personal… A novel is seen as grander… Or that you could write a novel and your character and your values would not be on display, as they are in a memoir. Or that reality doesn’t inform a novel. As I’ve said, the best parts of David Foster Wallace’s fiction are nonfiction. Is a memoir a substitute for therapy? Does writing one help or help with the wound that sometime motivates it? I had a therapist ask me last night… I think therapy should be a requisite for everybody anyway. I had such a difficult childhood, I don’t know what a normal person, occupying a normal body, would feel like. For me, I had to be in therapy for 15 years before I could even start trying to write the story. In therapy, you pay them; in a memoir, hopefully, they pay you. I think it is true that writing a memoir is cathartic. But unless it’s cathartic for the reader, don’t publish it… It’s a bomb that doesn’t go off until the reader starts reading it. The other debate around the memoir is the role of reality and truth – how far is too far for embellishing details. How do you come down on this? You and other writers have been criticized for how you call it. I actually haven’t been criticized -- I’m talking about the Janet Maslin review. She made a mistake. I wrote her an email and said, You misread this. There’s a big difference between accidentally misremembering a small detail, and making up an event that didn’t happen. And if you’re doing something to trick or deceive people, you know when you’re doing that: It isn’t hard to figure out. Greg Mortenson [author of “Three Cups of Tea” and “Stones Into Schools”] didn’t misremember and think he’d been kidnapped by the Taliban: That wasn’t a mistake of memory. The truth is, the minute you begin to shape a narrative – to tell one story instead of another story – you’re shaping people’s opinions. That’s why I say memoir is not about external fact; it’s internal, psychological, flawed-by-your-experience. And that’s why I think voice is so important. One reason I stopped using quotes in “Cherry” and “Lit” is I didn’t want it to read like journalism. I didn’t want it to read like objective reportage. The mistakes that I make are mistakes of interpretation… Elie Wiesel in “Night” – there’s a terrible scene. His father is horribly sick and dying, and he’s calling out his name. And the SS guy comes in and essentially beats the old man to death for making noise. And Wiesel never responded to it. He said, “His last words had been my name, and I never answered.” But when I looked in subsequent versions of the book, I couldn’t find it, because he had cut it out. He said it was quote-unquote too personal. But he didn’t cut it out because it was too personal, he cut it out because he was ashamed. So I think the bigger problems we face as memoirist is being scrupulous with our own conscience. It’s one reason I say, unless you’re a worrier and a nail-biter, you just shouldn’t be writing one of these. It’s too easy to deceive yourself. So Maslin’s not wrong… But there’s a difference between inadvertent mistakes and making things up. I don’t advocate making things up! If you make things up, you deny yourself the truths that come from being really uncomfortable. Here’s a great writer who never wrote a memoir: David Foster Wallace. He’s become a hero or a martyr or something since his death. You knew him: Have you been surprised how he’s become a pop-culture figure? He’s a great genius and people love the work and it’s a terrible tragedy to lose a writer of that caliber. The whole St. David thing, to people who knew him (laughs)… it’s a little hard to take. David was a very troubled guy for most of his life, obviously. He flatlined before he was 21 years old. He was trying to kill himself; I had suicidal ideation, or I was depressed, I never had what he had. I think it’s a horrible, tragic story. Do people misremember him now? People who didn’t know him misremember him. People talk about how obsequiously polite he was. Like when I met him he called me “Miss Karr.” But it [was] kind of mocking almost, if you knew him. It was so insincere and Eddie Haskell. It was kind of a really… That’s not what he was like. He was snarky and snappish and difficult, you know… He was not that damn careful. The whole St. David thing, I don’t know. I loved him, it was a great tragedy, but the people who knew him well… He was not long-suffering; he was a pretty angry guy. At least, when I knew him. I believed he had gotten better. I believed his rap, what he told me. Obviously that was not true. Did you see the movie? No. As I understand it – I haven’t seen it – the family is dimly horrified. I don’t want to see it. Why don’t we close with you picking a memoir you admire, from any historical period, and describing what makes you like it so much? I think Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”… “Native Son” is a great novel, but for me as a reader, I think “Black Boy” is an even more artful book. And in some ways, he was the first semi-civilian to have this massive bestseller in the genre. It’s very hard to write with both tenderness and bitterness, and his ability to combine both those things… and to do it in a beautiful literary style, at times lyrical and poetic… And it’s never really mentioned. But I think it’s a great book.

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“My Brother’s Bomber”: The compelling personal crusade to crack the terror plot behind the 1988 Lockerbie explosion

This week’s issue of the New Yorker features an article by Patrick Radden Keefe titled “The Avenger: After three decades, has the brother of a victim of the Lockerbie bombing solved the case?” At first it seems that this lengthy piece scoops, sort of, the Frontline documentary “My Brother’s Bomber,” which is airing in three parts starting Sept. 29; there is little information in the documentary that isn’t covered better in the article. But really, the pieces accompany each other. Ken Dornstein is the force behind “My Brother’s Bomber” — he is its primary investigator and its primary funder — but because he is so close to the tragedy of Lockerbie, he is the force in front of the camera, too. “My Brother’s Bomber” is as much about his personal journey to come to terms with his brother’s death in 1988 at the hands of terrorists as it is an investigation of who really engineered the crash of Pan Am Flight 103. For the New Yorker, Keefe investigates the investigation; the Frontline documentary is the discussed endpoint of the journey, and the reporter independently analyzes a lot of the footage that Dornstein incorporated into the three-hour series. The result is not exactly two different snapshots of the same story; it’s two snapshots that blurrily overlap each other, taken with different exposures. Literally, snapshots. The promotional art released by Frontline is Dornstein on a cellphone, looking out the window of a car. The Libyan flag can be seen out the window, hovering in the background. It’s an intimate shot of him in a pensive situation. Meanwhile the photograph accompanying the New Yorker article is starker. Dornstein is looking directly at the camera, almost as if he is surprised at his work by the lens. The flashbulb casts a bright, interrogation room halo on him, and the room he’s standing in. And the room he’s standing in happens to be one of the two rooms in his attic devoted to the investigation, both of which have been turned over into full “Homeland” crazy-wall mode (see: the photo at the top of this story). The viewer is moved to ponder not just the mysteries of Lockerbie, but also to come to terms with what that scale of mystery and tragedy can do to people like Ken, whose older brother died at the age of 25, when Ken was a sophomore in college. “My Brother’s Bomber” is just another chapter in the story of Ken coming to terms with the tragedy; in 2006, he wrote “The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky,” about his brother David’s unstable charisma and mysterious death. (According to the New York Times, in a class, David actually wrote a draft of a “fictional autobiography”: “The story of an unknown young writer who dies in a plane crash, leaving behind a cache of papers and notebooks that the narrator stitches together into the story of the writer's life.” That is, of course, exactly what Ken ended up doing.) The Lockerbie crash of 1988 was not that long ago, but as the documentary demonstrates, in terms of national security, it was a palpably different era. The crash was particularly horrible, and the difficulty of finding the perpetrators was particularly complex. The bomb ruptured the fuselage of the plane, which then broke apart midair; it is thought that most of the passengers were alive for the six-mile drop, until they hit the ground. Personal effects and remains were thus remarkably intact: David’s passport and the pack of cigarettes on him were returned to his family. As Dornstein tells Keefe, the bodies of the children on the plane were found farther away from the crash site because the wind swept their smaller bodies further. The U.K. investigated the bombing, and the U.S. sent agents, but this terrorist act caught them flat-footed, and the additional problems of a divided Germany, a fading Cold War, and the iron fist of Muammar Gadhafi in Libya made finding the terrorists a delayed and ultimately thwarted endeavor. The New Yorker story relates how a fragment the size of a thumbnail—found miles away from the crash site—ended up leading investigators to the make and model of the timer attached to the bomb. The deceased David, shown in old footage put into the documentary, is ebullient, creative, larger than life. Ken Dornstein, by contrast, is a reserved man, one who can recede into the background. He pursued investigative skills and documentary filmmaking early in his career, with the puzzle of Lockerbie in the back of his mind the whole time. In 2009, the only man imprisoned for conspiring to bring down Flight 103 was released from Scottish prison on compassionate release, because the convict, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was thought to be dying of prostate cancer. That appears to have been the catalyst for “My Brother’s Bomber”—Megrahi was not just alive, but released. But Dorstein couldn’t travel to Libya while it was under the rule of Gadhafi. In 2011, during the world-changing Arab Spring, Dornstein found his chance, and enlisting the help of his contacts and a seasoned crisis-zone filmmaker (Tim Gruzca), he crossed the border into Libya in the back of a car. On premise alone, “My Brother’s Bomber” is compelling. In practice, it’s even more so, despite being far less clear. Frontline only released the first episode, saying that “Ken's reporting is still very much unfolding” for the following two episodes, which air Oct, 6 and 13. The first hour has the sensibility of going down a rabbit hole. The cinematography is superb—choppy, layered and of varying fidelity, as cameras go into homes or film from vehicles. The effect mimics Dornstein’s lifelong effort to sift through the layers of evidence to find what might be the essential truth of David’s death. In the months of collapse of Gadhafi’s regime, whole neighborhoods of Tripoli are abandoned; compounds are ransacked and abandoned. With frightening ease, Dornstein and his crew are able to find troves of interrogation tapes, caches of memos, and the libraries of Gadhafi’s inner circle. Dornstein has a list of likely suspects, all of whom were very close to Gadhafi; most are dead or disappeared, and as the regime collapses and another is built, some of his suspected accomplices end up in Libyan prison, awaiting trial. Much like Andrew Jarecki’s Emmy-winning “The Jinx,” the fact-finding mission is the spine for a less bounded and more haunting story. Unlike “The Jinx,” though, this story is one of a seemingly inexhaustible fount of grief, as tragedy begets tragedy behind borders and within walls. The political, as we say, is and has always been personal. Ken Dornstein’s story is a reminder of just how personal.This week’s issue of the New Yorker features an article by Patrick Radden Keefe titled “The Avenger: After three decades, has the brother of a victim of the Lockerbie bombing solved the case?” At first it seems that this lengthy piece scoops, sort of, the Frontline documentary “My Brother’s Bomber,” which is airing in three parts starting Sept. 29; there is little information in the documentary that isn’t covered better in the article. But really, the pieces accompany each other. Ken Dornstein is the force behind “My Brother’s Bomber” — he is its primary investigator and its primary funder — but because he is so close to the tragedy of Lockerbie, he is the force in front of the camera, too. “My Brother’s Bomber” is as much about his personal journey to come to terms with his brother’s death in 1988 at the hands of terrorists as it is an investigation of who really engineered the crash of Pan Am Flight 103. For the New Yorker, Keefe investigates the investigation; the Frontline documentary is the discussed endpoint of the journey, and the reporter independently analyzes a lot of the footage that Dornstein incorporated into the three-hour series. The result is not exactly two different snapshots of the same story; it’s two snapshots that blurrily overlap each other, taken with different exposures. Literally, snapshots. The promotional art released by Frontline is Dornstein on a cellphone, looking out the window of a car. The Libyan flag can be seen out the window, hovering in the background. It’s an intimate shot of him in a pensive situation. Meanwhile the photograph accompanying the New Yorker article is starker. Dornstein is looking directly at the camera, almost as if he is surprised at his work by the lens. The flashbulb casts a bright, interrogation room halo on him, and the room he’s standing in. And the room he’s standing in happens to be one of the two rooms in his attic devoted to the investigation, both of which have been turned over into full “Homeland” crazy-wall mode (see: the photo at the top of this story). The viewer is moved to ponder not just the mysteries of Lockerbie, but also to come to terms with what that scale of mystery and tragedy can do to people like Ken, whose older brother died at the age of 25, when Ken was a sophomore in college. “My Brother’s Bomber” is just another chapter in the story of Ken coming to terms with the tragedy; in 2006, he wrote “The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky,” about his brother David’s unstable charisma and mysterious death. (According to the New York Times, in a class, David actually wrote a draft of a “fictional autobiography”: “The story of an unknown young writer who dies in a plane crash, leaving behind a cache of papers and notebooks that the narrator stitches together into the story of the writer's life.” That is, of course, exactly what Ken ended up doing.) The Lockerbie crash of 1988 was not that long ago, but as the documentary demonstrates, in terms of national security, it was a palpably different era. The crash was particularly horrible, and the difficulty of finding the perpetrators was particularly complex. The bomb ruptured the fuselage of the plane, which then broke apart midair; it is thought that most of the passengers were alive for the six-mile drop, until they hit the ground. Personal effects and remains were thus remarkably intact: David’s passport and the pack of cigarettes on him were returned to his family. As Dornstein tells Keefe, the bodies of the children on the plane were found farther away from the crash site because the wind swept their smaller bodies further. The U.K. investigated the bombing, and the U.S. sent agents, but this terrorist act caught them flat-footed, and the additional problems of a divided Germany, a fading Cold War, and the iron fist of Muammar Gadhafi in Libya made finding the terrorists a delayed and ultimately thwarted endeavor. The New Yorker story relates how a fragment the size of a thumbnail—found miles away from the crash site—ended up leading investigators to the make and model of the timer attached to the bomb. The deceased David, shown in old footage put into the documentary, is ebullient, creative, larger than life. Ken Dornstein, by contrast, is a reserved man, one who can recede into the background. He pursued investigative skills and documentary filmmaking early in his career, with the puzzle of Lockerbie in the back of his mind the whole time. In 2009, the only man imprisoned for conspiring to bring down Flight 103 was released from Scottish prison on compassionate release, because the convict, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was thought to be dying of prostate cancer. That appears to have been the catalyst for “My Brother’s Bomber”—Megrahi was not just alive, but released. But Dorstein couldn’t travel to Libya while it was under the rule of Gadhafi. In 2011, during the world-changing Arab Spring, Dornstein found his chance, and enlisting the help of his contacts and a seasoned crisis-zone filmmaker (Tim Gruzca), he crossed the border into Libya in the back of a car. On premise alone, “My Brother’s Bomber” is compelling. In practice, it’s even more so, despite being far less clear. Frontline only released the first episode, saying that “Ken's reporting is still very much unfolding” for the following two episodes, which air Oct, 6 and 13. The first hour has the sensibility of going down a rabbit hole. The cinematography is superb—choppy, layered and of varying fidelity, as cameras go into homes or film from vehicles. The effect mimics Dornstein’s lifelong effort to sift through the layers of evidence to find what might be the essential truth of David’s death. In the months of collapse of Gadhafi’s regime, whole neighborhoods of Tripoli are abandoned; compounds are ransacked and abandoned. With frightening ease, Dornstein and his crew are able to find troves of interrogation tapes, caches of memos, and the libraries of Gadhafi’s inner circle. Dornstein has a list of likely suspects, all of whom were very close to Gadhafi; most are dead or disappeared, and as the regime collapses and another is built, some of his suspected accomplices end up in Libyan prison, awaiting trial. Much like Andrew Jarecki’s Emmy-winning “The Jinx,” the fact-finding mission is the spine for a less bounded and more haunting story. Unlike “The Jinx,” though, this story is one of a seemingly inexhaustible fount of grief, as tragedy begets tragedy behind borders and within walls. The political, as we say, is and has always been personal. Ken Dornstein’s story is a reminder of just how personal.

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“It’s not a women’s problem, it’s a workplace problem”: Anne-Marie Slaughter on the crisis at the heart of the “having it all” problem

Anne-Marie Slaughter was a big name in the field of public policy – former head of the International Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and the first women to hold the position of director of policy planning when she was appointed to that position at the State Department in 2009. Yet most of the rest of us hadn’t heard of her until her 2012 article in The Atlantic titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” That article, in which Slaughter wrote about the difficulty of balancing a high-powered political job with caring for her two sons, reignited a debate about just how far women’s current lives still were from whatever feminist dreams many of us had grown up with. In her new book, “Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family,” Slaughter expands the conversation to look at gender roles, the work world generally, and how public policy might help us reframe the issue around care – for children, for the elderly, and for the larger community. I spoke with Slaughter by phone, asking up front for her understanding if the two 9-year-old boys playing Super Mario on Wii in the basement interrupted us. “Well, if I don’t understand that, you’re sunk,” she laughed. Your book begins when you decided to leave your position at Princeton and take this position on the staff of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. What were the challenges you faced when you took that job working far from home, and how did you make the decision to return home from Washington? Well, it took me about three minutes to decide to take the job! That was not really an issue. I had always wanted to be in government. I tell people now, when your party is in power and you’re free, do it. Because when Bill Clinton won, I was getting tenure and when we won again I had a 2-month-old; in 2000 and 2004 my party didn’t win. So it’s like, if I’m ever gonna go, I’ve gotta go. We decided, as I wrote in the book, that [my husband and sons] should stay [in Princeton]. They had no interest in moving. We had just come back from a year in Shanghai, so they’d already been moved for a year. And both Andy and I thought that would be really bad for them, to put them in a strange town with him commuting back to Princeton and me trying to get used to a very high-pressure job. And so you made the decision that you would commute and go to Washington every week during the work week and come home on the weekends. Obviously, that’s a grueling schedule for anybody, but it sounds like in the book you sort of anticipated it was going to be hard on you, and maybe didn’t anticipate quite how hard it would be on your kids. I think that’s true. Part of it was, my kids were then 10 and 12; we had not been through the teenage years. Maybe now I would have a different view, but also teenage-hood is different for everybody. Basically, my older son had hit middle school. He’d been in middle school three months when I left. That was a big change. He’d gone from a small elementary school to a much bigger middle school, and he was 12, and it’s a difficult time. I was always traveling, even when I was a dean, so I though this wasn’t going to be that different. I had been working, but I’d been working down the street, so I could be pretty fully involved in their lives – I could go to teacher meetings and sports games and that sort of thing. Maybe I should have anticipated it, but I’d always managed to make it work, and I just assumed we would make it work this time. And it was of that experience – of realizing how hard it was to make it work – you wrote an article that appeared in The Atlantic in 2012. Were you surprised at how much conversation and debate it sparked? Absolutely. And I don’t think I said anything that other people hadn’t said before. It made an impact in part because I wasn’t writing in a women’s journal or a feminist journal, I was writing in The Atlantic, and I’m a foreign policy person and I’d had a successful career. But I think mostly it was that I’d caught a generational wave. Mothers and daughters have been debating exactly these issues. And a lot of young women were saying to their mothers, “hey, I don’t want to have to do what you did.” Or, “it’s just harder than it looks. And I’m not sure how I’m going to do this.” And a lot of mothers were saying, as I said in the book, “well, of course you can do it. This is what we fought for.” So this is the interesting question – that generational issue within feminism. You write about growing up imbued with this feminist promise that women could and should have it all. Do you think that feminism needs to – not that feminism is some monolith – I was going to say! But how do you think that women, feminism, all of us, should reframe the conversation in order to get the next generation better prepared to face the challenge of trying to have a family, trying to have a career? Do we need to reset expectations? Yes. That’s really the heart of the book, the hope of the book. Which is that we are at a point, in the second wave feminist movement, 50 years on, where it is now time to make this a conversation between mothers and fathers and daughters and sons, in which both the parents and all the children say, look, to have the best of what life has to offer, to have a fulfilling, meaningful, purposeful life, there are two sides to that. There’s the striving to pursue your own goals and invest in yourself. And then there is the love and connection to others, and investing in them and watching them grow, or caring for those you love. A good life – let’s not talk about having it all – a good life has both. But it is hard to combine them, and if one person has a really big job, the other person is going to have to be the anchor in any relationship. I’m not saying nobody can do it – sure, there are people who can do everything for their kids and have a high-powered job. They have, typically, tons of help. My husband says to our sons, “Look, having you has been incredibly important, we think it’s the greatest achievement of our lives, we would not have missed it; if you want this, then you’re going to have to figure out, with your partner, how, over time, you make room for both.” And only when men start thinking about that the same way that women think about it, are we going to get to any kind of equality. There’s a passage in the book where you’re talking to a young women shortly after the Atlantic article came out. You’re talking with her about equality in the home and being an equal partner, and she sort of wrinkles her nose at the idea of a house husband. Are we still too entrenched in gender roles to have equal partnerships on the home front? I’d say we are entrenched in gender roles more on the male side than the female side. We have changed dramatically the choices open to women – dramatically. But we have not changed the choices open to men. So a man who is the lead parent is still looked at not all that differently than he was looked at in the ’50s and ’60s. Even though "Kramer vs. Kramer" came out in 1979, here’s this hard-charging guy whose wife leaves, and he’s totally incompetent as a parent, and he learns how to be competent, and he’s actually a better father in many ways than she is a mother. And that’s emasculating? Really? There have been some very brave men who’ve said, "I want to have a different life than my father. I want to be with my children. I want to be a central figure in their lives." I see the men who have the guts to do that as the same kind of pioneers as the original women who went into offices and were called every sort of name, none of which are printable in Salon – I think everything is printable in Salon. Well, they were called ballbusters. They were attacked for being masculine. And they said no. I can be a woman and I can be a CEO. And the other issue is female sexism, or female insistence on these gender roles as much as men, and that’s the point of my husband’s piece. [Slaughter’s husband, Andrew Moravcsik, has an article in The Atlantic titled “Why I Put My Wife’s Job First.”] We are buying into this idea, too. What I’ve discovered is that my husband parents really differently than I do, and I don’t really love it a lot of the time. And also, gender roles aside, even in a same-sex marriage, if you’re raising a child with another adult person, you’re going to have differences. Yes. Right at the heart of the book is these two friends of mine who are a lesbian couple, and I write about the criteria they use [to decide who is lead parent] – who earns more money, who has a bigger career, who’s more ambitious, who wants to be more engaged with the kids, what are their temperaments, all those questions. Same-sex couples are actually leading the way to how all couples should think about these issues. You had an essay recently in the New York Times, drawn from the book, in which you talk about a work world that is toxic for everybody, and almost impossible to manage for workers who aren’t young, healthy, childless, unencumbered by any outside needs or demands. Is that a new thing? Yes. This is not just me saying this. The number of hours that white-collar workers work has steadily climbed. And that’s due to globalization and competition, there are a million reasons why. The point is about focusing on care rather than women – when we focus on women, we just count. And the question is, how many women do you have? When we focus on care, you see something quite different. We used to have a workplace where only guys could work, and now we have a workplace where there are men and women and they’re both working full-out, but there's no room for care. That just logically can’t work. You’d never have expected the "Mad Men" to be simultaneously getting clients and running home and picking up their kids from school, so how on earth do we essentially liberate women to be in the workplace without recognizing that that work still has to get done? It’s not a women’s problem, it’s a workplace problem. Right. Even on "Mad Men," whenever Don’s daughter inconveniently drops by, he pawns her off on the secretaries. They find a mom substitute right in the office. Exactly! Exactly. Speaking of the care economy, as a public policy expert you see a role outside of the family, a larger role of government or business, a societal role to help solve these issues. There’s a section in your book about what you call the infrastructure of care – childcare, eldercare and so on. These things all sound terrific, but they also seem highly unlikely in our current political climate to ever happen. I agree they feel highly unlikely, but I felt very strongly two things. Of the key messages in the book, one is around care, and one is around men, and the third message really is, we can’t do this alone. And I really feel this strongly. And that’s part of my issue with focusing on women’s confidence, or on what women can do – that’s great, I’m all for it. But that is never going to fix the system. I guess I’m also saying, enough with “we can’t do it.” We could do it, if every woman in this country, and a lot of men, said, Look, we cannot be working, although we'd like to be, many of us want to be – I’m not advocating going back to the 1950s – but we can’t do it without the same kind of infrastructure other developed countries have. One last question. Some of the reactions after the Atlantic piece noted that you’re educated, privileged, professional and in a very high-power position and you’re talking about people in high-powered, white-collar jobs. How much do your ideas translate into a blue-collar, working-class context? That is the biggest difference between the article and the book. In the article I said, point blank, I am a privileged, educated woman writing for other privileged, educated women, in a privileged, educated magazine. I heard from lots of women, women who wrote to me and many of the women I addressed in all these speeches I’ve been giving, and I really started thinking about how the early feminist movement was always more upper-middle class – I mean, that was the critique of  “The Feminine Mystique,” too. But Gloria Steinem, at the time she was first speaking, it was a time of social revolution and so she talked about solidarity with unions, and with civil rights there was a more unified sense. And all women had had the common experience of being sex objects. You could be on the factory floor or you could be a secretary, you know, you’ve been pinched or groped or whatever else. So there was more unity than there is now. And that is, again, why I think it’s so much more important to focus on care than to focus on women. As I said, when we focus on women, we start counting. And most of the things we can count are the women at the top: how many CEOs, how many surgeons, how many professors? Yet the majority of minimum-wage workers are women, and two thirds of shift workers are women. So If we’re really going to help women, my point is, when you focus on care then you actually do see links – because you see that high-powered lawyer who decided to go part-time to be home with her kids and is knocked off the track for partnership or managing partner, and you see much more, as I wrote in the Times, far more dramatically, the woman who has to stay home because her kid is sick, and then loses her job. And so this is the frame that I do think makes sense. All these policy solutions will help poor women much more than rich women, because rich women can buy their way out of it.Anne-Marie Slaughter was a big name in the field of public policy – former head of the International Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and the first women to hold the position of director of policy planning when she was appointed to that position at the State Department in 2009. Yet most of the rest of us hadn’t heard of her until her 2012 article in The Atlantic titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” That article, in which Slaughter wrote about the difficulty of balancing a high-powered political job with caring for her two sons, reignited a debate about just how far women’s current lives still were from whatever feminist dreams many of us had grown up with. In her new book, “Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family,” Slaughter expands the conversation to look at gender roles, the work world generally, and how public policy might help us reframe the issue around care – for children, for the elderly, and for the larger community. I spoke with Slaughter by phone, asking up front for her understanding if the two 9-year-old boys playing Super Mario on Wii in the basement interrupted us. “Well, if I don’t understand that, you’re sunk,” she laughed. Your book begins when you decided to leave your position at Princeton and take this position on the staff of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. What were the challenges you faced when you took that job working far from home, and how did you make the decision to return home from Washington? Well, it took me about three minutes to decide to take the job! That was not really an issue. I had always wanted to be in government. I tell people now, when your party is in power and you’re free, do it. Because when Bill Clinton won, I was getting tenure and when we won again I had a 2-month-old; in 2000 and 2004 my party didn’t win. So it’s like, if I’m ever gonna go, I’ve gotta go. We decided, as I wrote in the book, that [my husband and sons] should stay [in Princeton]. They had no interest in moving. We had just come back from a year in Shanghai, so they’d already been moved for a year. And both Andy and I thought that would be really bad for them, to put them in a strange town with him commuting back to Princeton and me trying to get used to a very high-pressure job. And so you made the decision that you would commute and go to Washington every week during the work week and come home on the weekends. Obviously, that’s a grueling schedule for anybody, but it sounds like in the book you sort of anticipated it was going to be hard on you, and maybe didn’t anticipate quite how hard it would be on your kids. I think that’s true. Part of it was, my kids were then 10 and 12; we had not been through the teenage years. Maybe now I would have a different view, but also teenage-hood is different for everybody. Basically, my older son had hit middle school. He’d been in middle school three months when I left. That was a big change. He’d gone from a small elementary school to a much bigger middle school, and he was 12, and it’s a difficult time. I was always traveling, even when I was a dean, so I though this wasn’t going to be that different. I had been working, but I’d been working down the street, so I could be pretty fully involved in their lives – I could go to teacher meetings and sports games and that sort of thing. Maybe I should have anticipated it, but I’d always managed to make it work, and I just assumed we would make it work this time. And it was of that experience – of realizing how hard it was to make it work – you wrote an article that appeared in The Atlantic in 2012. Were you surprised at how much conversation and debate it sparked? Absolutely. And I don’t think I said anything that other people hadn’t said before. It made an impact in part because I wasn’t writing in a women’s journal or a feminist journal, I was writing in The Atlantic, and I’m a foreign policy person and I’d had a successful career. But I think mostly it was that I’d caught a generational wave. Mothers and daughters have been debating exactly these issues. And a lot of young women were saying to their mothers, “hey, I don’t want to have to do what you did.” Or, “it’s just harder than it looks. And I’m not sure how I’m going to do this.” And a lot of mothers were saying, as I said in the book, “well, of course you can do it. This is what we fought for.” So this is the interesting question – that generational issue within feminism. You write about growing up imbued with this feminist promise that women could and should have it all. Do you think that feminism needs to – not that feminism is some monolith – I was going to say! But how do you think that women, feminism, all of us, should reframe the conversation in order to get the next generation better prepared to face the challenge of trying to have a family, trying to have a career? Do we need to reset expectations? Yes. That’s really the heart of the book, the hope of the book. Which is that we are at a point, in the second wave feminist movement, 50 years on, where it is now time to make this a conversation between mothers and fathers and daughters and sons, in which both the parents and all the children say, look, to have the best of what life has to offer, to have a fulfilling, meaningful, purposeful life, there are two sides to that. There’s the striving to pursue your own goals and invest in yourself. And then there is the love and connection to others, and investing in them and watching them grow, or caring for those you love. A good life – let’s not talk about having it all – a good life has both. But it is hard to combine them, and if one person has a really big job, the other person is going to have to be the anchor in any relationship. I’m not saying nobody can do it – sure, there are people who can do everything for their kids and have a high-powered job. They have, typically, tons of help. My husband says to our sons, “Look, having you has been incredibly important, we think it’s the greatest achievement of our lives, we would not have missed it; if you want this, then you’re going to have to figure out, with your partner, how, over time, you make room for both.” And only when men start thinking about that the same way that women think about it, are we going to get to any kind of equality. There’s a passage in the book where you’re talking to a young women shortly after the Atlantic article came out. You’re talking with her about equality in the home and being an equal partner, and she sort of wrinkles her nose at the idea of a house husband. Are we still too entrenched in gender roles to have equal partnerships on the home front? I’d say we are entrenched in gender roles more on the male side than the female side. We have changed dramatically the choices open to women – dramatically. But we have not changed the choices open to men. So a man who is the lead parent is still looked at not all that differently than he was looked at in the ’50s and ’60s. Even though "Kramer vs. Kramer" came out in 1979, here’s this hard-charging guy whose wife leaves, and he’s totally incompetent as a parent, and he learns how to be competent, and he’s actually a better father in many ways than she is a mother. And that’s emasculating? Really? There have been some very brave men who’ve said, "I want to have a different life than my father. I want to be with my children. I want to be a central figure in their lives." I see the men who have the guts to do that as the same kind of pioneers as the original women who went into offices and were called every sort of name, none of which are printable in Salon – I think everything is printable in Salon. Well, they were called ballbusters. They were attacked for being masculine. And they said no. I can be a woman and I can be a CEO. And the other issue is female sexism, or female insistence on these gender roles as much as men, and that’s the point of my husband’s piece. [Slaughter’s husband, Andrew Moravcsik, has an article in The Atlantic titled “Why I Put My Wife’s Job First.”] We are buying into this idea, too. What I’ve discovered is that my husband parents really differently than I do, and I don’t really love it a lot of the time. And also, gender roles aside, even in a same-sex marriage, if you’re raising a child with another adult person, you’re going to have differences. Yes. Right at the heart of the book is these two friends of mine who are a lesbian couple, and I write about the criteria they use [to decide who is lead parent] – who earns more money, who has a bigger career, who’s more ambitious, who wants to be more engaged with the kids, what are their temperaments, all those questions. Same-sex couples are actually leading the way to how all couples should think about these issues. You had an essay recently in the New York Times, drawn from the book, in which you talk about a work world that is toxic for everybody, and almost impossible to manage for workers who aren’t young, healthy, childless, unencumbered by any outside needs or demands. Is that a new thing? Yes. This is not just me saying this. The number of hours that white-collar workers work has steadily climbed. And that’s due to globalization and competition, there are a million reasons why. The point is about focusing on care rather than women – when we focus on women, we just count. And the question is, how many women do you have? When we focus on care, you see something quite different. We used to have a workplace where only guys could work, and now we have a workplace where there are men and women and they’re both working full-out, but there's no room for care. That just logically can’t work. You’d never have expected the "Mad Men" to be simultaneously getting clients and running home and picking up their kids from school, so how on earth do we essentially liberate women to be in the workplace without recognizing that that work still has to get done? It’s not a women’s problem, it’s a workplace problem. Right. Even on "Mad Men," whenever Don’s daughter inconveniently drops by, he pawns her off on the secretaries. They find a mom substitute right in the office. Exactly! Exactly. Speaking of the care economy, as a public policy expert you see a role outside of the family, a larger role of government or business, a societal role to help solve these issues. There’s a section in your book about what you call the infrastructure of care – childcare, eldercare and so on. These things all sound terrific, but they also seem highly unlikely in our current political climate to ever happen. I agree they feel highly unlikely, but I felt very strongly two things. Of the key messages in the book, one is around care, and one is around men, and the third message really is, we can’t do this alone. And I really feel this strongly. And that’s part of my issue with focusing on women’s confidence, or on what women can do – that’s great, I’m all for it. But that is never going to fix the system. I guess I’m also saying, enough with “we can’t do it.” We could do it, if every woman in this country, and a lot of men, said, Look, we cannot be working, although we'd like to be, many of us want to be – I’m not advocating going back to the 1950s – but we can’t do it without the same kind of infrastructure other developed countries have. One last question. Some of the reactions after the Atlantic piece noted that you’re educated, privileged, professional and in a very high-power position and you’re talking about people in high-powered, white-collar jobs. How much do your ideas translate into a blue-collar, working-class context? That is the biggest difference between the article and the book. In the article I said, point blank, I am a privileged, educated woman writing for other privileged, educated women, in a privileged, educated magazine. I heard from lots of women, women who wrote to me and many of the women I addressed in all these speeches I’ve been giving, and I really started thinking about how the early feminist movement was always more upper-middle class – I mean, that was the critique of  “The Feminine Mystique,” too. But Gloria Steinem, at the time she was first speaking, it was a time of social revolution and so she talked about solidarity with unions, and with civil rights there was a more unified sense. And all women had had the common experience of being sex objects. You could be on the factory floor or you could be a secretary, you know, you’ve been pinched or groped or whatever else. So there was more unity than there is now. And that is, again, why I think it’s so much more important to focus on care than to focus on women. As I said, when we focus on women, we start counting. And most of the things we can count are the women at the top: how many CEOs, how many surgeons, how many professors? Yet the majority of minimum-wage workers are women, and two thirds of shift workers are women. So If we’re really going to help women, my point is, when you focus on care then you actually do see links – because you see that high-powered lawyer who decided to go part-time to be home with her kids and is knocked off the track for partnership or managing partner, and you see much more, as I wrote in the Times, far more dramatically, the woman who has to stay home because her kid is sick, and then loses her job. And so this is the frame that I do think makes sense. All these policy solutions will help poor women much more than rich women, because rich women can buy their way out of it.

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The military’s secret military: Green Berets, Navy SEALs and the special ops you’ll never know about

You can find them in dusty, sunbaked badlands, moist tropical forests, and the salty spray of third-world littorals. Standing in judgement, buffeted by the rotor wash of a helicopter or sweltering beneath the relentless desert sun, they instruct, yell, and cajole as skinnier men playact under their watchful eyes. In many places, more than their particular brand of camouflage, better boots, and designer gear sets them apart. Their days are scented by stale sweat and gunpowder; their nights are spent in rustic locales or third-world bars. These men -- and they are mostly men -- belong to an exclusive military fraternity that traces its heritage back to the birth of the nation. Typically, they’ve spent the better part of a decade as more conventional soldiers, sailors, marines, or airmen before making the cut. They’ve probably been deployed overseas four to 10 times. The officers are generally approaching their mid-thirties; the enlisted men, their late twenties. They’ve had more schooling than most in the military. They’re likely to be married with a couple of kids. And day after day, they carry out shadowy missions over much of the planet: sometimes covert raids, more often hush-hush training exercises from Chad to Uganda, Bahrain to Saudi Arabia, Albania to Romania, Bangladesh to Sri Lanka, Belize to Uruguay. They belong to the Special Operations forces (SOF), America’s most elite troops -- Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, among others -- and odds are, if you throw a dart at a world map or stop a spinning globe with your index finger and don’t hit water, they’ve been there sometime in 2015. The Wide World of Special Ops This year, U.S. Special Operations forces have already deployed to 135 nations, according to Ken McGraw, a spokesman for Special Operations Command (SOCOM).  That’s roughly 70% of the countries on the planet.  Every day, in fact, America’s most elite troops are carrying out missions in 80 to 90 nations, practicing night raids or sometimes conducting them for real, engaging in sniper training or sometimes actually gunning down enemies from afar. As part of a global engagement strategy of endless hush-hush operations conducted on every continent but Antarctica, they have now eclipsed the number and range of special ops missions undertaken at the height of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the waning days of the Bush administration, Special Operations forces (SOF) were reportedly deployed in only about 60 nations around the world.  By 2010, according to the Washington Post, that number had swelled to 75.  Three years later, it had jumped to 134 nations, “slipping” to 133 last year, before reaching a new record of 135 this summer.  This 80% increase over the last five years is indicative of SOCOM’s exponential expansion which first shifted into high gear following the 9/11 attacks. Special Operations Command’s funding, for example, has more than tripled from about $3 billion in 2001 to nearly $10 billion in 2014 “constant dollars,”according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).  And this doesn’t include funding from the various service branches, which SOCOM estimates at around another $8 billion annually, or other undisclosed sums that the GAO was unable to track.  The average number of Special Operations forces deployed overseas has nearly tripled during these same years, while SOCOM more than doubled its personnel from about 33,000 in 2001 to nearly 70,000now. Each day, according to SOCOM commanderGeneral Joseph Votel, approximately 11,000 special operators are deployed or stationed outside the United States with many more on standby, ready to respond in the event of an overseas crisis. “I think a lot of our resources are focused in Iraq and in the Middle East, in Syria for right now. That's really where our head has been,” Votel told the Aspen Security Forum in July.  Still, he insisted his troops were not “doing anything on the ground in Syria” -- even if they had carried out a night raid there a couple of months before and it was later revealed that they are involved in a covert campaign of drone strikes in that country. “I think we are increasing our focus on Eastern Europe at this time,” he added. “At the same time we continue to provide some level of support on South America for Colombia and the other interests that we have down there. And then of course we're engaged out in the Pacific with a lot of our partners, reassuring them and working those relationships and maintaining our presence out there.” In reality, the average percentage of Special Operations forces deployed to the Greater Middle East has decreased in recent years.  Back in 2006, 85% of special operators were deployed in support of Central Command or CENTCOM, the geographic combatant command (GCC) that oversees operations in the region.  By last year, that number had dropped to 69%, according to GAO figures.  Over that same span, Northern Command -- devoted to homeland defense -- held steady at 1%, European Command (EUCOM) doubled its percentage, from 3% to 6%, Pacific Command (PACOM) increased from 7% to 10%, and Southern Command, which overseas Central and South America as well as the Caribbean, inched up from 3% to 4%. The largest increase, however, was in a region conspicuously absent from Votel’s rundown of special ops deployments.  In 2006, just 1% of the special operators deployed abroad were sent to Africa Command’s area of operations.  Last year, it was 10%. Globetrotting is SOCOM’s stock in trade and, not coincidentally, it’s divided into a collection of planet-girding “sub-unified commands”: the self-explanatory SOCAFRICA; SOCEUR, the European contingent; SOCCENT, the sub-unified command of CENTCOM; SOCKOR, which is devoted strictly to Korea; SOCPAC, which covers the rest of the Asia-Pacific region; SOCSOUTH, which conducts missions in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean; SOCNORTH, which is devoted to “homeland defense”; and the ever-itinerant Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command (formerly headed by Votel) made up of personnel from each service branch, including SEALs, Air Force special tactics airmen, and the Army's Delta Force that specializes in tracking and killing suspected terrorists. The elite of the elite in the special ops community, JSOC takes on covert, clandestine, and low-visibility operations in the hottest of hot spots.  Some covert ops that have come to light in recent years include a host of Delta Force missions: among them, an operation in May in which members of the elite force killed an Islamic State commander known as Abu Sayyaf during a night raid in Syria; the 2014 release of long-time Taliban prisoner Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl; the capture of Ahmed Abu Khattala, a suspect in 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya; and the 2013 abduction of Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaeda militant, off a street in that same country.  Similarly, Navy SEALs have, among other operations, carried out successful hostage rescue missions in Afghanistan and Somalia in 2012; a disastrous one in Yemen in 2014; a 2013 kidnap raid in Somalia that went awry; and -- that same year -- a failed evacuation mission in South Sudan in which three SEALs were wounded when their aircraft was hit by small arms fire. SOCOM’s SOF Alphabet Soup Most deployments have, however, been training missions designed to tutor proxies and forge stronger ties with allies. “Special Operations forces provide individual-level training, unit-level training, and formal classroom training,” explains SOCOM’s Ken McGraw.  “Individual training can be in subjects like basic rifle marksmanship, land navigation, airborne operations, and first aid.  They provide unit-level training in subjects like small unit tactics, counterterrorism operations and maritime operations. SOF can also provide formal classroom training in subjects like the military decision-making process or staff planning.” From 2012 to 2014, for instance, Special Operations forces carried out 500 Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) missions in as many as 67 countries each year.  JCETs are officially devoted to training U.S. forces, but they nonetheless serve as a key facet of SOCOM’s global engagement strategy. The missions “foster key military partnerships with foreign militaries, enhance partner-nations' capability to provide for their own defense, and build interoperability between U.S. SOF and partner-nation forces,” according to SOCOM’s McGraw. And JCETs are just a fraction of the story.  SOCOM carries out many other multinational overseas training operations.   According to data from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), for example, Special Operations forces conducted 75 training exercises in 30 countries in 2014.  The numbers were projected to jump to 98 exercises in 34 countries by the end of this year. “SOCOM places a premium on international partnerships and building their capacity.  Today, SOCOM has persistent partnerships with about 60 countries through our Special Operations Forces Liaison Elements and Joint Planning and Advisory Teams,” said SOCOM’s Votel at a conference earlier this year, drawing attention to two of the many types of shadowy Special Ops entities that operate overseas.  These SOFLEs and JPATs belong to a mind-bending alphabet soup of special ops entities operating around the globe, a jumble of opaque acronyms and stilted abbreviations masking a secret world of clandestine efforts often conducted in the shadows in impoverished lands ruled by problematic regimes.  The proliferation of this bewildering SOCOM shorthand -- SOJTFs and CJSOTFs, SOCCEs and SOLEs -- mirrors the relentless expansion of the command, with its signature brand of military speak or milspeak proving as indecipherable to most Americans as its missions are secret from them. Around the world, you can find Special Operations Joint Task Forces (SOJTFs), Combined Joint Special Operations Task Forces (CJSOTFs), and Joint Special Operations Task Forces (JSOTFs), Theater Special Operations Commands (TSOCs), as well as Special Operations Command and Control Elements (SOCCEs) and Special Operations Liaison Elements (SOLEs).  And that list doesn’t even include Special Operations Command Forward (SOC FWD) elements -- small teams which, according to the military, “shape and coordinate special operations forces security cooperation and engagement in support of theater special operations command, geographic combatant command, and country team goals and objectives.” Special Operations Command will not divulge the locations or even a simple count of its SOC FWDs for “security reasons.”  When asked how releasing only the number could imperil security, SOCOM’s Ken McGraw was typically opaque.  “The information is classified,” he responded.  “I am not the classification authority for that information so I do not know the specifics of why the information is classified.”  Open source data suggests, however, that they are clustered in favored black ops stomping grounds, including SOC FWD Pakistan, SOC FWD Yemen, and SOC FWD Lebanon, as well as SOC FWD East Africa, SOC FWD Central Africa, and SOC FWD West Africa. What’s clear is that SOCOM prefers to operate in the shadows while its personnel and missions expand globally to little notice or attention.  “The key thing that SOCOM brings to the table is that we are -- we think of ourselves -- as a global force. We support the geographic combatant commanders, but we are not bound by the artificial boundaries that normally define the regional areas in which they operate. So what we try to do is we try to operate across those boundaries,” SOCOM’s Votel told the Aspen Security Forum. In one particular blurring of boundaries, Special Operations liaison officers (SOLOs) are embedded in at least 14 key U.S. embassies to assist in advising the special forces of various allied nations.  Already operating in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, El Salvador, France, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Poland, Peru, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, the SOLO program is poised, according to Votel, to expand to 40 countries by 2019.  The command, and especially JSOC, has also forged close ties with the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency, among other outfits, through the use of liaison officers and Special Operations Support Teams (SOSTs). “In today’s environment, our effectiveness is directly tied to our ability to operate with domestic and international partners. We, as a joint force, must continue to institutionalize interoperability, integration, and interdependence between conventional forces and special operations forces through doctrine, training, and operational deployments,” Votel told the Senate Armed Services Committee this spring.  “From working with indigenous forces and local governments to improve local security, to high-risk counterterrorism operations -- SOF are in vital roles performing essential tasks.” SOCOM will not name the 135 countries in which America’s most elite forces were deployed this year, let alone disclose the nature of those operations.  Most were, undoubtedly, training efforts.  Documents obtained from the Pentagon via the Freedom of Information Act outlining Joint Combined Exchange Training in 2013 offer an indication of what Special Operations forces do on a daily basis and also what skills are deemed necessary for their real-world missions: combat marksmanship, patrolling, weapons training, small unit tactics, special operations in urban terrain, close quarters combat, advanced marksmanship, sniper employment, long-range shooting, deliberate attack, and heavy weapons employment, in addition to combat casualty care, human rights awareness, land navigation, and mission planning, among others. From Joint Special Operations Task Force-Juniper Shield, which operates in Africa’s Trans-Sahara region, and Special Operations Command and Control Element-Horn of Africa, to Army Special Operations Forces Liaison Element-Korea and Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Arabian Peninsula, the global growth of SOF missions has been breathtaking.  SEALs or Green Berets, Delta Force operators or Air Commandos, they are constantly taking on what Votel likes to call the “nation’s most complex, demanding, and high-risk challenges.” These forces carry out operations almost entirely unknown to the American taxpayers who fund them, operations conducted far from the scrutiny of the media or meaningful outside oversight of any kind.  Everyday, in around 80 or more countries that Special Operations Command will not name, they undertake missions the command refuses to talk about.  They exist in a secret world of obtuse acronyms and shadowy efforts, of mystery missions kept secret from the American public, not to mention most of the citizens of the 135 nations where they’ve been deployed this year. This summer, when Votel commented that more special ops troops are deployed to more locations and are conducting more operations than at the height of the Afghan and Iraq wars, he drew attention to two conflicts in which those forces played major roles that have not turned out well for the United States.  Consider that symbolic of what the bulking up of his command has meant in these years. “Ultimately, the best indicator of our success will be the success of the [geographic combatant commands],” says the special ops chief, but with U.S.setbacks in Africa Command’s area of operations from Mali and Nigeria toBurkina Faso and Cameroon; in Central Command’s bailiwick from Iraq andAfghanistan to Yemen and Syria; in the PACOM region vis-à-vis China; and perhaps even in the EUCOM area of operations due to Russia, it’s far from clear what successes can be attributed to the ever-expanding secret operations of America’s secret military.  The special ops commander seems resigned to the very real limitations of what his secretive but much-ballyhooed, highly-trained, well-funded, heavily-armed operators can do. “We can buy space, we can buy time,” says Votel, stressing that SOCOM can “play a very, very key role” in countering “violent extremism,” but only up to a point -- and that point seems to fall strikingly short of anything resembling victory or even significant foreign policy success.  “Ultimately, you know, problems like we see in Iraq and Syria,” he says, “aren't going to be resolved by us.”

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