Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_content] => Changing attitudes and mentorship programs are nurturing an emerging generation of young women. 

Numana Bhat, 34, is a postdoctoral researcher at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego, where she focuses on understanding the biology that underlies the immune response to vaccines. Her husband, Raiees Andrabi, is Institute Investigator at the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research, a prestigious non-profit medical research center. Both are from Kashmir, the India-administered Muslim majority territory that has been convulsed by political violence for decades.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir, which is claimed by both countries. Meanwhile, the Indian military has put down popular insurgencies, which began in the late 1980s, with tactics that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have described as human rights abuses. Since 1989, more than 70,000 Kashmiris have been killed during these government crackdowns, while more than 8,000 have disappeared. Thousands of people have been detained without charge under the draconian Public Safety Act.

On August 5, 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP government unilaterally revoked the constitutionally guaranteed autonomous status of the region, further dividing it into two federally governed union territories. The military imposed an unprecedented lockdown, blocking internet access and phone lines and intimidating journalists. As a result, seven million people were cut off from the outside world for several months.

Given the obstacles created by the political turmoil and violence in Kashmir, Dr. Bhat’s academic success is remarkable. And she is not alone; a notable number of Kashmiri women have become prominent scientists, despite periodic and unpredictable outbreaks of militarized violence, a lack of resources, and the pressure of traditional expectations.

After completing her B.A. and Master’s degrees in Kashmir, Dr. Bhat earned a PhD in biomedical sciences from Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, a non-profit medical research center in La Jolla, California. There she discovered that “a fascinating molecule called Regnase-1 acts as molecular brakes in antibody producing cells and prevents autoimmunity.”

[caption id="attachment_2698" align="alignnone" width="300"] Numana Bhat in her laboratory.[/caption]

She credits her mother and a dedicated high school biology teacher for endowing her with the tools and curiosity to pursue a career in biomedical science. But other gifted young women are not as fortunate: opportunities and resources for higher education in scientific research are scarce in Kashmir, “although the people themselves, both students and mentors at the university level, are capable of doing great things,” she said.

She added that she had heard about “people in mentoring positions” who made “discouraging remarks” to female students— including explicit pressure to channel their energy into getting married and having children rather than into post-graduate studies.

Nevertheless, Dr. Bhat said, she has noticed an increasing number of young Kashmiri women pursuing graduate studies and careers in scientific research both in India and abroad. She added that younger people were going outside the sciences to choose careers in humanities, journalism and the arts, “which is also quite refreshing to see.”

More challenges for women

Masrat Maswal, 33, is an assistant professor in chemistry at a government college in central Kashmir’s Budgam district.

She grew up middle class in an extended family where attention and money were scarce. Her parents paid more attention to her in high school, where she excelled academically and won praise from her teachers. But she said that Kashmiri society does not make it easy for young women who want to pursue post graduate work and demanding research positions in the sciences. “From the day you are born as a girl in a family in Kashmir, they start to prepare for your marriage; so choosing a career—particularly in science, which needs patience, persistence, hard work, sacrifices and an ample amount of time—is really hard,” she said.

[caption id="attachment_2704" align="alignnone" width="300"] Masrat Maswal at home in Kashmir.[/caption]

Her female students are often deterred from pursuing graduate work in the sciences by social pressures to marry and settle down when they are in their twenties. “We are losing a lot of talent,” she said, “Due to the prevailing socio-cultural norms of our society.”

The lack of proper infrastructure and lab facilities in Kashmir’s colleges also undermines the enthusiasm of both students and teachers, she added.

Family support matters

Amreen Naqash, 31, moved to New Zealand in 2019 to study for a doctorate in pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Otago. In her spare times she mentors students in her native Kashmir who want to pursue graduate studies either in India or abroad. Women, she observed, are showing more interest in looking for fellowships and pursuing graduate work in the sciences at universities outside India.

[caption id="attachment_2702" align="alignnone" width="200"] Amreen Naqash in her lab.[/caption]

“I’m in touch with some promising female undergrads from Kashmir, which makes me so glad,” she said. “It is such a wonderful feeling to guide them as they are in their prime career stage.”

Omera Matoo, 38, has a PhD in marine biology. She is an assistant professor in evolutionary genetics and physiology at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where her research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Born and raised in Kashmir, Dr. Matoo earned her B.A. and Master’s degrees at Bangalore University, where she became friends with two classmates from different parts of India, both of whom came from families of scientists.

[caption id="attachment_2703" align="alignnone" width="300"] Omera Matoo in her lab.[/caption]

“Looking back, I realize that played a very big role in my career,” she said. All three of them decided to pursue doctorates in the sciences.

Limited opportunities

When Dr. Matoo applied in 2007 for a doctoral program at a university in the United States, she had to travel to New Delhi and Bangalore to take her GRE and TOEFL exams; at the time, there wasn’t a single coaching or test center in Kashmir.

The situation for prospective graduate students has since improved. Thanks to the internet, they can take standardized tests online. Mentoring initiatives like JKScientists have been established, with volunteers offering would-be graduate students help and advice.

“And then there are other Kashmiri scientists across the world who struggled along similar paths before making a mark in their chosen fields; and now they are giving back to their society by mentoring and guiding young students and aspiring researchers.”

Role models and social support structures, said Dr. Matoo, provide positive feedback for young people; this is especially true for female university students in Kashmir, who benefit from having their academic interests nurtured.

Dr Seemin Rubab, a professor of physics at the National Institute of Technology in Srinagar, is regularly approached by young girls from Kashmir for career guidance and counseling.

“Many times I’ve had to counsel their fathers and brothers to let them pursue their academic careers and avail themselves of opportunities outside Kashmir and India,” said Dr. Rubab.

Professor Nilofer Khan, acting Vice Chancellor at the University of Kashmir who has also served as Dean of Student Welfare and founder coordinator of Women’s Studies Centre, confirmed that for years a lack of family support has been a serious obstacle for women who wished to pursue doctoral studies, particularly when they were married with children.

“Very few females used to go for research studies in science subjects,” she said, adding that times were changing and female students were “proving their mettle” in the sciences.

The frequent government-imposed internet shutdowns are a serious problem for students facing application deadlines, said Dr. Matoo. Delayed exams and the lack of access to resources—“all these limiting things have a scale up effect, not to mention the consequences for mental health,” she said. But somehow these obstacles have not undermined the enthusiasm and academic focus of the young women from Kashmir who regularly reach out to her for guidance on making a career in science.

“I am constantly impressed and humbled by their resolve to make a bright future for themselves against all odds,” said Omera. “That gives me a lot of hope and in a way keeps me grounded.”
    [post_title] => Kashmiri women defy patriarchy & politics to pursue careers in the sciences
    [post_excerpt] => A notable number of Kashmiri women have become prominent scientists, despite periodic and unpredictable outbreaks of militarized violence, a lack of resources, and the pressure of traditional expectations.
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Kashmiri women defy patriarchy & politics to pursue careers in the sciences

by Majid Maqbool

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    [post_content] => The true bulwark against Trumpism is at the state and local level.

In the eyes of many locals, Nate McMurray’s campaign was a fool’s errand. He was running for Congress as a Democrat in New York’s 27th congressional district, where a greater percentage of residents voted for Trump in 2016 than in any other district in the state. District 27 is vast: it includes Orleans, Genesee, Wyoming, and Livingston counties, parts of Erie, Monroe, Niagara, and Ontario, suburbs of Buffalo and Rochester, and farm country; altogether, it is home to over 700,000 people. Around 42 percent of voters are registered with the Republican or Conservative parties.

McMurray is a fierce critic of former president Trump; he champions Medicare For All, gun control, and legalizing marijuana. When he first ran, he lost narrowly to Republican Chris Collins, who was then under federal indictment; Collins later resigned from Congress and pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Celia Spacone, a retired psychologist who was a McMurray campaign volunteer, told me in 2019, “Collins was indicted on felony charges, and people still didn’t want to hear about a Democratic candidate.”

After Collins resigned, McMurray ran against Republican nominee Chris Jacobs in a June 2020 special election to fill Collins’ seat, and again lost by a relatively narrow margin. When McMurray challenged Jacobs in the November 2020 general election, he lost by a much wider margin. (The presidential election boosted turnout across the board, leading to a surge of Republican voters.)

Recent research suggests that the Democratic Party might have benefited from McMurray’s willingness to run in a race that he was all-but-predestined to lose. The mere fact that a forceful, energetic candidate ran a high-visibility campaign in the district mobilized volunteers, energized Democrats, and might even have boosted Joe Biden’s vote share.

According to election data compiled by the Daily Kos, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 25 points in District 27 in 2016. District voters went for Trump again in 2020, but the margin narrowed significantly, from 25 to 16 points. There are a number of possible reasons for that shift, including the pandemic and/or local voters’ preference for Biden over Clinton. But the fact that a Democrat put up a fight was good for democracy—and good for the party. (Collins faced a Democratic challenger in 2016, too, but her campaign didn’t attract as much attention as McMurray’s, in part because her platform wasn’t as bold and Collins wasn’t yet under indictment; as a result, the race wasn’t as close.)

As a candidate, McMurray worked hard and made a point of courting supporters in often-overlooked rural counties. Rural Democratic county committee chairs were especially supportive of his campaign. “Nate brought a lot of energy and passion to his races that really excited a grassroots following,” Judith Hunter, chair of the Livingston County Democratic Committee, told The Conversationalist. “That was a very impressive thing and surely helped candidates up and down the ballot.”

Hunter also chairs the Democratic Rural Conference of New York State, which represents New York’s 47 rural counties (the state has 62 counties in total). It can be tough to get people to show up to volunteer and vote for down-ballot candidates, she said, and it was easier to recruit campaign volunteers for McMurray because he was running for Congress. Still, she added, “Once people understand what a campaign needs in terms of volunteer power, it’s something a certain proportion respond to, and they’re not going to go away.”

Recently, the progressive organization Run For Something partnered with data firms Kinetic21 and BlueLabs to analyze the effect of down-ballot races on Biden’s performance in the 2020 presidential election. They found that contested state legislative races—those in which both Democrats and Republicans ran, rather than just Republicans—yielded a small but notable (0.3-1.5 percent) boost for Biden. Even when a down-ballot Democrat loses, the fact that they bothered to run can benefit a presidential candidate. This is known as the “reverse coattails” effect—the reverse happens when a down-ballot candidate rides the “coattails” of a popular presidential candidate.

Ross Morales Rocketto, co-founder and chief program and recruitment officer of Run For Something, explained during a phone interview why progressive candidates should run, even in places where they are likely to lose. One reason is that doing so could boost the candidate at the top of the ticket. Another big reason, he said, citing an old sports adage, is that “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take.” Given how unpredictable the results of redistricting can be, the Democratic Party doesn’t know which races may turn out to be competitive. And given that the most recent census likely undercounted Latinos, Rocketto said, Democrats should rethink their tendency to avoid running candidates in deep-red areas.

“What ends up happening is that people who live in these areas only see Democrats as the caricatures they are on Fox News or Parler or Infowars or other conservative media outlets,” he said. “But when you have a candidate there, going to their door, they get to see one of their neighbors—somebody who actually lives in their community and likely shares some of their values—talking about another way [to address local problems].” It’s especially effective, Rocketto noted, when candidates stay focused on local issues. Rocketto sees ensuring that Democrats run for local office even in districts where they have little chance of winning as part of the long-term work necessary to reverse “some of the polarization that we currently see.”

In 2016, Leah Greenberg cofounded the progressive organization Indivisible, which she now co-directs, to help counter Trump’s agenda. Greenberg, whose family is from small-town Alabama, has also spoken about how powerful it can be for residents of red and/or rural areas to encounter self-identified progressives in their communities. Democrats who live in red states sometimes compare the experience of revealing their politics to friends and neighbors to LGBTQ peoples’ experience of “coming out.” As Hannah Horick, who chairs the Ector County Democratic Party in Texas, told Politico in 2020, a number of West Texas Democratic organizers are also openly LGBTQ. According to Horick, a friend once told her it was harder to come out as a Democrat in West Texas than it was to come out as gay.

Running as a Democrat in places that have historically been hostile to Democrats is less quixotic than it used to be. This is partly because voters of color have grown as a share of the electorate in recent years, while white voters, who are likelier to support Republicans, have declined. Hispanic voters account for increasingly large shares of the electorate, particularly in battleground states like Arizona, Florida, and Nevada, and red states like Texas. And thanks to the extraordinary efforts of local organizers and pro-voter registration, anti-voter suppression groups like Fair Fight, around 130,000 more black people registered to vote in Georgia in 2020 as compared with 2016.

The GOP has sought to counteract demographic shifts and efforts to expand the electorate by making it harder to vote. Since the record turnout of the 2020 election, Republican legislators have proposed over 250 laws that would limit mail-in, early, and Election Day voting in 43 states throughout the country. In March, Georgia’s Republican governor made it a crime to distribute food or drink to voters as they wait in line to cast their ballots. A recent Washington Post analysis characterized Republican efforts to restrict voting as “potentially…the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction.”

Steve Phillips, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, has long argued that the key to making Democratic gains in Republican strongholds is to register and mobilize voters, specifically black and Latino voters, most of whom vote Democratic. Millions of eligible voters, including many people of color, did not vote in 2016 or 2020. Youth turnout “surged” in 2020—53 percent of eligible young voters (ages 18 to 29) voted in 2020, versus 45 percent in 2016—but that still means nearly half stayed home. A perennial fight within the Democratic Party is whether to focus on winning over swing voters or mobilizing eligible voters who never or rarely vote, most of whom would theoretically vote Democratic.

Yet it would be short-sighted to assume that a diversifying electorate will eventually ensure that the Democrats remain in power indefinitely. In a country as large, diverse, and gerrymandered as the United States, the Party cannot rely on voters of color and/or young voters alone. Political demographer Ruy Teixeira recently reflected on a book he cowrote with John Judis in 2002, in which the two analysts posited that demographic changes in the U.S. would benefit the Democratic Party. “Democrats should take advantage of a set of interrelated social, economic and demographic changes, including the growth of minority communities and cultural shifts among college graduates,” he wrote of the book’s central argument, adding, “But we also emphasized that building this majority would require a very broad coalition, including many voters drawn from the white working class.”

That crucial nuance, Teixeira said, was lost. Instead of cultivating support among multiple groups at once, including working-class people of all races, “many Democratic pundits, operatives and elected officials have falsely come to believe that demographics are destiny.”

Ideological, ethnic, and generational differences within communities of color make it unwise to take these voters for granted. Just over a third of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters backed Trump in 2020, with the former president also gaining support among Latino and Black male voters. Conversely, as Nate Cohn noted in a recent analysis for The New York Times, Democrats have made gains among white voters in recent years, and Republicans can no longer take that constituency for granted.

None of these shifts happened overnight. That’s why dedicated and appealing candidates, especially those running for local office, can gradually increase Democratic viability in conservative areas. Even if they lose the first time, or the first couple of times, their campaigns can make a difference. In local races, if a candidate is known, trusted, and has a plan to improve their neighbors’ daily lives, that often matters more than their stance on national issues. Run For Something asks candidates seeking its endorsement whether or not they agree with a series of statements on racial justice, income inequality, immigration reform, LGBTQIA+ and gender equality, climate change, and gun violence. But candidates who emphasize local issues, Rocketto said, “tend to do better than folks who allow their races to become nationalized.”

Marché Johnson lost her first city council race in Montgomery, Alabama by just six votes, then ran again and won by 174 in April. At the end of the day, she told me, it’s everyday issues that matter the most. “Everyone needs their trash done on time, everyone needs their roads cleaned, everyone needs their lights up,” she said. “So I focus more on the problems and getting viable solutions.”

Raising money is one of the main challenges progressive candidates face in places where the Democratic Party is virtually nonexistent. “The issue this always comes down to is resources,” Rocketto said, “and competition for those resources.” The money, he said, is there, but it tends to go to high-profile candidates in widely watched races, rather than to local candidates whose races cost less and who are better-positioned to win with adequate support.

“If the Party had been treating state legislative elections with the same level of priority that we treated the U.S. Senate over the last 10 years, we probably wouldn't be struggling with [state-level voter suppression bills] today,” Rocketto said. It’s easy to convey the urgency of beating Trump, he added, acknowledging that doing so was equally critical to the Democratic agenda. It’s harder to explain that the true bulwark against Trumpism is at the state and local level. “People actually do care about this work,” he added. “They just don't always care about it with their money.”

Strong local candidates, he said, tend to be “super-charged organizers,” which brings its own set of benefits. He mentioned a candidate who lost a race in a small town in Missouri in 2017, and later harnessed the energy and contacts he had cultivated during that campaign to advocate for environmental issues before the city council. “It’s good for the civic health of a place to have these folks running,” Rocketto concluded, “even if you know they're going to end up losing.”
    [post_title] => How a political candidate can help their party win—by losing
    [post_excerpt] => Even when a down-ballot Democrat loses, the fact that they bothered to run can benefit a presidential candidate. 
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How a political candidate can help their party win—by losing

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_content] => A hardwired belief that it couldn't happen here has made it impossible to acknowledge the reality. 

On May 19 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell came out against the January 6th Commission, a proposed bipartisan investigation into Republican crimes. Kevin McCarthy, the GOP House leader, did the same on May 18. Thus the Democrats were once again stymied in their efforts to obtain answers under oath about the violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election results and reinstall Donald J. Trump as president. 

These provocations come on the heels of Liz Cheney's removal from her House GOP leadership position for having affirmed Biden's victory and for having criticized the "Big Lie"—i.e., that Trump won the election and the Democrats “stole” it— that led to the January 6th insurrection. It is a lie that the GOP continues to promote, as do the media outlets aligned with the party. Trump loyalist Elise Stefanik replaced Cheney. On Fox News Sunday, Cheney said that both McCarthy and Stefanik were complicit in Trump's lies.  

Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican congressman who also voted to impeach Trump, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he was “very disappointed” with his party’s leadership for ousting Cheney, saying: "We're not going to win unless we add to our base, not subtract from our base." 

In a functioning democracy, what Cheney and Upton said might make sense. But if their party’s strategy is to pack the courts, overturn elections, incite mobs, gerrymander, suppress votes, and otherwise harass the vulnerable, then the size of its base is not as relevant a concern. 

Authoritarians don’t want a big tent. They want—demand—a loyal, obedient cult of personality.  Exclusion is their power move. The GOP is an authoritarian party that has been open about its intent to establish minority rule by any means necessary. The Big Lie is going strong, part of a long tradition of racist Lost Causes.

As of April 1, Republicans introduced 361 voter suppression bills in 47 states.  As Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times: If It's Not Jim Crow, What is It? In Florida and Oklahoma, Republicans legalized hitting protestors with cars. Across the country, Republicans are engaging in an all-out legal assault on trans kids and their families. This past week, the Republican-installed Supreme Court agreed to take up a Mississippi abortion case that is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

Republicans have been on the path toward authoritarianism for more than two decades. Bush v. Gore, Citizens United and Shelby v Holder were way stations on the road to the insurrection. Trump just speeded up the journey and helped them blossom into their worst selves. 

American exceptionalism has distorted our perception of the GOP's turn to authoritarianism. The shocked surprise at each new escalation, the democracy experts Columbusing authoritarian studies—there are so many experts in so many countries to whom one could turn for years of accumulated wisdom if only the association were not considered so deeply offensive. A hardwired belief that “it couldn’t happen here” has made it impossible to acknowledge the reality: it has already "happened here."  

People continue to argue that America can't be fascist, as if semantics will save us from what's to come.  People said it couldn't be a slow-motion coup, and even if it was, that it would never succeed. How cavalier! In November, 2020 I tweeted,  "Not every attempted coup becomes a successful coup, but every successful coup was once an attempted coup. Why the fuck would you ever want to take the chance?"

People desperate for any semblance of the rule of law see principles in Liz Cheney's behavior. Others see her hard right voting record, her continued support for voter suppression laws and last name and wonder what she stands to gain. Her vote to impeach Trump was significant, and good for fundraising. In betting against the party, she must expect to survive long enough to see Trumpism implode. With the help of her backers, she is positioning herself and a few colleagues to pick up the GOP pieces. 

People have been betting since the 2016 primaries that Trump would collapse. What began as "he'll never be the nominee" morphed into "he'll never win"  which led to "he'll resign." By the end we'd hit a low: "he'll leave the White House." The latest version of this magical thinking: "He won't run again." 

Says who? How do they know? Have they met an abusive narcissist, let alone one with a personality cult who's had a taste of nuclear codes? What happens if Trumpism doesn't implode and the GOP further radicalizes? What happens if they regain national power? How much damage are they doing on the state and local level? Can you imagine a Republican Congress certifying a Democratic winner in 2024? 

On the bright side, Trump and the Trump Organization are embroiled in civil and criminal legal action. The Biden administration has shown more openness to unilateral action and structural change than many expected. Biden's stimulus bill was passed without bipartisan support through reconciliation. He's created a bipartisan commission to advise on expanding the Supreme Court. Previously against filibuster reform, Biden has since become open about its abuse and the need for change.  

But the administration has yet to overcome some exasperating hurdles. Senators Manchin and Sinema still oppose ending the filibuster, which effectively gives Republicans the power to block the January 6 Commission,  legislation securing the right to vote, PR or DC statehood, or an expanded Supreme Court. The myth of bipartisanship stands in the way of legislative mobilization to save our democracy.

Americans find it difficult to think of their country as anything other than a democracy. The reactionary backlash to the groundbreaking New York Times Magazine 1619 Project, which questioned how democratic a white supremacist America could truly be, most recently cost journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure at UNC— despite impeccable credentials that include having been awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2017 and a Pulitzer Prize in 2020.  

These trends did not arise overnight. America has a long history of legalizing atrocities, corruption and discrimination. Those efforts have been supported by white supremacist, nationalist myths like American exceptionalism and its imperialist predecessor, Manifest Destiny. 

If we're going to save our democracy, we must accept that Trump and the GOP are one, and that they pose a longstanding, violent threat to our democracy and human rights. American exceptionalism isn't real. We aren't special. Rule of law won't save the day. Propaganda works, and can't be easily undone.  

To start, it would help if people stopped expecting authoritarianism in the US to look like some other country’s version of it. We have our own white, capitalist, Evangelical version, built upon what Isabel Wilkerson persuasively calls the American caste system, rooted in indigenous genocide and chattel slavery.  The rest of the world knows it too. The Nazis studied American race laws, both state and federal, in order to write the Nuremberg Laws. In the case of the one-drop rule, even they found America too harsh. 

Too often, news analysis gives the impression that Trump is done and the authoritarian threat is past. But GOP displays of loyalty and escalations on Fox  News suggest otherwise. The base is holding Trump 2024 signs. 

We don't know how this will play out, or when Trumpism will implode, whether in two months or 10 years. But abusers don't quit, and it's a mistake to let our relief at the reprieve fool us into thinking we're free of him. 

 

 
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The fascism is already here, but we can’t see it through the lens of exceptionalism

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_content] => The ability to intuit the feelings of an emotionally uncommunicative man can make a woman feel strong—or not.

Recently I rewatched Bridget Jones’ Diary. It was one of my favorite films when I was a teenager, and now that I am 32—Bridget’s age in the movie—I’m more impressed than ever with the way the film and eponymous book capture the comic conundrums of the average woman. But there was one character that I viewed with new eyes: our leading man, the ever-diffident Mark Darcy.

I was a Jane Austen fan growing up, so I found his demeanor very appealing. The way he expressed feeling through actions rather than words, combined with his utter inability to demonstrate affection, struck me as thoroughly classy, strong and “masculine.” Now, another term sprang to mind: emotionally unavailable. 

My therapist asked me recently whether or not I have a tendency to gravitate toward emotionally unavailable men, and I told her that I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between “emotionally unavailable” and reserved. It seemed she didn’t know either, so we just stared at one another uncomfortably over Zoom for a moment. 

Truth be told, I’m not sure the modern take about people who are unable to express themselves emotionally—i.e., that they lack feeling—is accurate. My ex-boyfriend was (surprise!) a lot like Mark Darcy. The closest he ever came to being effusive was when he looked at me over the corner of his newspaper and gave a “Oh, very nice” nod. When we broke up, I was certain that he had never actually cared about me; I only changed my mind because his best friend told me that he didn’t leave his room for six months and subsisted on deliveries of beer and fried chicken. 

My father is (again, surprise!) another classic example. The man physically stiffens at any attempt at a hug, and I can count on one hand the number of times he’s said something affectionate. In fact, I’m not sure I remember him saying anything at all to me throughout my childhood other than, “You hungry? You want something to eat?” But if I called him at 3 a.m. to tell him I was stranded in Sheepshead Bay he said “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” no questions asked. My father is also an alcoholic in recovery. During a recent relapse, he sobbed and said he’d always loved me but didn’t know how to show it, and I could see the pain that inability had caused him. 

I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for Mark Darcy. I feel sorry for many of the men I’ve dated, and I feel a little like Wendy in Peter Pan, when she tells the Lost Boys that they’re all just little boys who didn’t have a mother. I feel as though my natural urge to nurture will compensate for whatever hole their mothers left, which it sometimes does and sometimes does not. When it doesn’t, I wonder if I’m falling into the classic Narcissist—Empath relationship, and whether I should feel a little sorry for myself as well, for once. 

Society often portrays women like me, who choose to deal with these men, as a little pathetic. People say we lack self-esteem, that we are tragically conditioned by our toxic upbringing and the unhealthy attachment styles it wrought. Some of that is (unfortunately) true. But I have to say—as someone who does a fair amount of deep digging into her psyche on a daily basis—it doesn’t feel that way. It feels the opposite. It makes me feel strong. 

Culturally, we only seem to acknowledge traditionally masculine forms of strength: power, money, status. I was raised to believe there are also equally important traditionally feminine forms of strength: patience, forgiveness, understanding. It gets tiresome, sometimes, to deal with the men that I deal with, and it frustrates me that the patience and understanding aren’t really a two-way street. I’m expected to be inherently “better” in some ways, more immune to proclivities, because I am a woman—a belief that has no logical basis in reality. But it certainly feels like a form of strength and it gives me a sense of pride.

I will also continue to argue, as I have done in the past, that people are a tradeoff and men like this have certain upsides that are difficult to find in today’s society. They take forming attachments very seriously, so you don’t have to worry about them love-bombing you and then promptly ghosting you the way some of the more “modern” men seem to have a tendency to do. They also feel a firm sense of responsibility and obligation toward a woman—you never have to worry about them waking up one morning and telling you that they’re moving to Thailand for a year to find themselves and that you’re both just on different journeys right now. 

I went to a book reading for Helen Fielding’s long-awaited third installment to the series, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and someone asked her why she (spoiler alert) killed off Mark Darcy. “I needed Bridget to be single,” she responded, “And Mark would never leave her.” There’s a sense of security to men like this that isn’t all that easy to find these days. 

Still, I find myself wondering how much of their actions comes from a place of love and how much of it stems from a sense of obligation, and whether or not there’s a difference between the two. 

I watched another movie recently that gave me pause: My Fair Lady. I’ve always adored Henry Higgins, so I texted a friend joking that it seems like my love affair with emotionally stunted, confirmed bachelors who try to mold a woman into their version of “the perfect woman” began early. Men like the ones I’ve described tend to get a lot of flak for being very controlling, and it is–truth be told—more than a little depressing to feel you will only be loved if you are a very certain way all the time. But I don’t mind it so much so long as we’re aligned on what that vision is, because I welcome any extra motivation to be my best self. I think there’s strength in that, too, because God knows it takes a lot of effort. 

And—try as I might—I can’t help but always find the ending scene romantic. Eliza leaves, and Higgins sings a song called “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” which seems to be the closest to admitting that he loves her that he can manage. He walks into his drawing room, and puts on an early recording of her because he misses her. She walks in at one moment, turns it off and says the last line out loud. “Eliza?” he rises from his chair, then settles back in, puts his hat over his face, and says, “Where the devil are my slippers?” 

It’s pathetic, really, the sexist statement and the fragility of his masculinity–the fact that he can’t simply tell her how happy he is that she’s back, and needs to lower his hat in order to hide his emotional response. It shows a lot of strength and self-esteem—I think—that she recognizes precisely what’s happening. It’s not a healthy form of love, for sure. But it is, nonetheless, love. 
    [post_title] => Mark Darcy and the allure of taciturn men who love with actions instead of words
    [post_excerpt] => Culturally, we only seem to acknowledge traditionally masculine forms of strength: power, money, status. I was raised to believe there are also equally important traditionally feminine forms of strength: patience, forgiveness, understanding.
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Mark Darcy and the allure of taciturn men who love with actions instead of words

by Diana Bruk

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    [post_date] => 2021-05-20 18:22:05
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    [post_content] => Has the proliferation of electronic echo chambers hollowed out our ability to separate facts from feelings?

In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” a seminal sequence in his Republic, the philosopher Socrates describes a group of people who have spent their lives chained in a cave, facing a blank wall. Through an opening above their heads, fragments of the outside world are projected in the form of shadows, cast by a fire. But because they have no knowledge of the true nature of the world, the people chained in the cave experience the shadow puppets as accurate depictions of the forms themselves.

It is one of the most famous passages in Western philosophy and, while its exact meaning has been debated for millennia, one of its central concerns  is clearly the role that knowledge—i.e., information, facts, and truth – plays in the construction of social reality. And, above all, in politics. How can we ensure that truth is the foundation for political decision making?

Plato’s attempt to puzzle through these questions, though written some 2,300 years ago, weighs heavily on the present. Today, we are in a halcyon era of disinformation and propaganda—much of which is state-sponsored. But our contemporary shadow theatre is disturbing not merely for the proliferation of “fake news,” or the widespread belief in hysterical, reactionary conspiracy theories like Q-Anon.

What’s truly alarming is that human beings are being evacuated from the political process. Artificial entities—bots, deep fakes, even artificial intelligence (AI)— are beginning to sway the perceptions of voters to such an extent that they are, essentially, being mechanized.

To be clear, actually existing citizens are still, nominally, forming opinions and casting votes. But they are being influenced by complex, malign algorithms to such an extent that they—we—are at risk of turning into mere push-button appendages. The bots cannot vote, of course, but they have enormous power to shape the perceptions of human voters. This is extremely dangerous.

Rather than living in a “simulated reality,” as tech billionaire Elon Musk recently speculated, we are seeing the dawning of something more plausible and more sinister: democratic politics shaped, moved, and determined by a simulated public.

Consider the case of Serbia. In April last year, Facebook identified and deleted more than 8,500 “troll” accounts which had systematically engaged in “inauthentic coordinated activity” to boost posts by Aleksandar Vucic, the country’s president, and his ruling SNS bloc. They were also used to swarm Vucic’s critics. This army of trolls had been at work for years, creating a “parallel reality where everything in Serbia is great, and critics are simply enemies of the state.”

A stark illustration of this new, synthetic political regime came a few weeks later, when in the context of the country’s parliamentary election campaign, Vucic held a bizarre, virtual kickoff rally. Surrounded by more than a hundred square monitors, ostensibly showing supporters of his government from all over the country—who, in true proto-authoritarian fashion, struggled to contain their exuberance at seeing their leader take the stage— Vucic stood alone and spoke to the wall of disembodied faces for 20 minutes. As the president spoke, he was accompanied by a soft melody that would shift in tenor to match the contents of his speech.


The pandemic forced Vucic and the SNS to abandon traditional mass rallies, but it also gave them the opportunity to experiment with something even better: a totally controlled environment, a panopticon of adoration for the great leader—complete with a stirring soundtrack.

In June came the payoff: the SNS won a crushing victory, securing 180 seats in the 250-member National Assembly. Its coalition partners won another 42 seats. The main opposition blocs boycotted the elections, but the results would probably not have been very different even if they had run. In the 2017 presidential elections, Vucic won the first round with 55 percent of the vote. His nearest opponent failed to crack 17 percent.

On one level, this is the familiar trajectory of an illiberal regime veering toward outright autocracy. Vucic’s control of the print and electronic media, for instance, is something he largely learned from his mentor Slobodan Milosevic. The use of mass media to maintain control and incite violence was not, of course, invented by Milosevic.

But the contemporary conflagration of bots, deep fakes, and extremism-promoting algorithms is more than the sum of its parts. And it is not unique to Serbia. All over the democratic world, large segments of the public have fallen under the sway of illiberal movements and regimes, who have in turn tightened their grip on them by unleashing massive digital influence and surveillance mechanisms. These are proving so adept at creating partisan echo chambers, that they are birthing a whole new form of political society.

Already, large segments of the American public believe, falsely, that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from Donald J. Trump through an elaborate, international conspiracy. That view is reinforced through an expansive ecosystem of right-wing disinformation media. Their stories are promoted by untold numbers of bot accounts that originate both inside and outside the United States.

In this maelstrom, the conspiracy theorists, the fantastical worlds they have collectively (if unconsciously) constructed via social media, and the politically-directed bots and algorithms that signal boost their alchemy, there is the appearance of frenetic public discourse. Except all of it is make-believe, all of it is a kind of synthetic idiocy.

The result of this combination of traditional and emerging forms of propaganda is not merely a more ignorant public than in decades prior. We are witnessing the emergence of forms of social control in (erstwhile) democratic societies that were previously reserved to totalitarian regimes—or science fiction. And genuine democracy cannot survive the production of such industrialized, mechanized ignorance.

Nor can civil society endure such a phenomenon. Our modern conceptions of that term originate with what Plato and other classical philosophers called the polis; meaning, literally, city, but conceptually signifying the idea of an informed, participatory society in which all citizens share the burdens of debating and resolving the issues facing the community. We have never quite achieved this level of enlightened egalitarianism, but the whole concept of modern citizenship, and accompanying theories of its rights and obligations, is rooted in this notion.

What Plato did not quite anticipate is a future in which the polis and the demos (the people) disappears entirely. Not because they have been silenced by a despotic king per se, but because have been convinced by digital phantasms to willingly march themselves into underground caverns, and chain themselves to the walls. And there they will sit, periodically raising their hands to affirm being governed by shadows.

This is more than the reverse of what the ancients believed the process of enlightenment would precipitate. Plato’s cave was an allegory for the process of intellectual liberation. The rise of this synthetic public discourse is dissolving the very idea of the public square and the rational, autonomous public. And it may soon leave behind a world inhabited only by automatons, ones of flesh and blood but of no agency.
    [post_title] => Digital disinformation is driving illiberal democracies toward authoritarianism
    [post_excerpt] => Human beings are being evacuated from the process of politics as artificial entities sway the perceptions of voters to such an extent that they are, essentially, being mechanized.
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Digital disinformation is driving illiberal democracies toward authoritarianism

by Jasmin Mujanović 

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    [post_content] => Whether organizations like the UN will meaningfully press China on the issue is not clear.

Humans have a real appetite for mass murder. The twentieth century produced at least eight genocides, and the last 21 years have featured three more. Genocides are now a casual part of politics, unfolding with little consequence or objection. Most troubling is confronting China’s systematic campaign against its Muslim Uyghur population, which is coming to a head after decades of discriminatory and abusive policies. The logic of the American-led War on Terror helped justify a tsunami of abusive policies against Muslims worldwide. The genocide in Xinjiang is only its logical conclusion.

The U.S., U.K. and some European states now confirm that China is committing genocide in Xinjiang. But beyond that are stillness and silence. The silence is loudest from leaders and countries who once professed solidarity for oppressed Muslims everywhere. This is partly a function of the authoritarianism in influential Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey—calling to protect the rights of Muslims elsewhere might give their own populations ideas. And anyway, Saudi Arabia is occupied with butchering journalists and Yemenis, the UAE is busy making peace with Israel (don’t mind the apartheid), and Turkey would rather deport Uyghurs back to China.

The ugly truth is that for all who wonder what they would have done as genocides unfolded in their time, the answer is largely nothing. The videos of Uyghur men shackled and blindfolded and put on trains to unknown destinations, the immense surveillance and detention infrastructure China uses to enforce obedience to Beijing, Uyghur women relating their rapes and abuse in internment camps, the fates of Uyghurs who have fled only for authorities to imprison their family members, the sharp decrease in Uyghur population numbers and birth rates—they are not a secret. Beijing has countered questions and criticisms from other states with unsubtle propaganda campaigns, outright hostility and assertions that it is fighting Islamic extremism.

No one knows how to confront a rising, antagonistic China. Global trade, commerce and financial markets all depend on a stable relationship with Beijing. Multilateral institutions like the United Nations no longer provide a meaningful forum to address vast crises and deal with atrocities like genocide as the UN Charter dictates. In any event, China is committed to a new multilateralism in the Eastern hemisphere where it can shape and influence the work of newer groupings such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and ASEAN. Moreover, through its flagship “Belt and Road Initiative” the Chinese government hopes to forge strong economic and political ties throughout Asia with billions in infrastructure investment. With these layered ties to its neighbors China is looking for more than markets: it needs as many allies as possible in a world where China’s authoritarianism is deepening.

Irrespective of how powerful China is or isn’t at this moment, it is powerful enough that it can subjugate a population of 14 million people, send one million of them to camps, and eradicate their religion and cultural identity without any repercussion from global actors. What’s clearer is that no one is prepared to find a way to end it. Beijing remains impervious, and hostile, to criticism about how its laws and policies violate political freedoms and basic rights, and especially so on Xinjiang. The most successful public campaigns that have managed to highlight an aspect of the Xinjiang crisis is the use of cotton harvested through forced Uyghur labor. As it turns out, major brands including Zara, Nike and Apple have all come under scrutiny for relying on Chinese supply chains that may well be relying on this labor too.

Not that many people are criticizing. Three years ago, the world looked on as Myanmar’s army displaced the country’s entire Muslim Rohingya population into neighboring Bangladesh, committing war crimes so monstrous that the UN deemed the campaign genocide. Despite an international outcry, the operation to push out the Rohingya from western Burma succeeded. Most Rohingya refugees remain in Bangladesh, living in squalid camps that lack basic amenities and infrastructure, without access to livelihoods or any prospect of returning safely to Myanmar.

Noting Henry Kissinger’s facetious and lazy advice not to tangle with China on human rights issues, the enormous question remains: how is the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang going to end? Who will end it? Does it end in mass graves and gas chambers, as with genocides before? Or is there a way, slow but painful, to push China toward a different relationship with is minority communities? Who is willing to make this a priority in state-to-state relations with China?

Perhaps it would be easier if the Muslims of Xinjiang had not been Muslim. Muslims have been the targets of so many wars in the last century that the notion of Muslims dying in far-off places—Chechnya, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan just in the latter half of the 20th century—is blasé and predictable. Even a state that traffics as aggressively in its Muslim identity as Pakistan has nothing to say about Xinjiang, despite the fact that the beleaguered province sits on the other side of Pakistan’s eastern border.

The US and European states have seriously damaged their own standing when criticizing the conduct of other states. The debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, apart from destroying those countries, set a comfortable precedent for states with total contempt for the concept of human rights. One lesson of those wars was that no one would be held accountable for overthrowing a government, war crimes or any serious abuses, especially if they were from the occupying army. Such reckless disregard for longstanding international norms about how states conduct themselves in war meant that Russia and Iran could act as violently as they chose when intervening in Syria’s war to sustain Bashar al-Assad. The global institutions meant to protect civilians, and investigate and prosecute war crimes, have largely proven themselves useless.

The Chinese government also looks at events like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and concluded its best defense against criticism for its gross human rights violations is to point that China’s opponents have no credibility on these points. This comes alongside a greater confidence that China can engage with the world on its own terms, and one of those terms is that outsiders have no say in China’s domestic affairs. The response to this cannot be silence.

The Chinese government works very hard to shut down any political discussion about Xinjiang, most recently demanding other UN member states not attend a discussion about the province, organized by the U.S., U.K., and Germany. Whether organizations like the UN will meaningfully press China on the issue is not clear. In the meantime, what of the world’s billion or so Muslims? Beyond a few Uyghur diaspora groups, Muslim advocacy organizations and governments are quiet. Confronting China on Xinjiang will have real material costs for states who want to sway Beijing’s policy, but ignoring an ongoing genocide means the destruction of an entire people is acceptable state conduct. That seems a much higher price to pay.
    [post_title] => We are watching real time genocide in China
    [post_excerpt] => No one knows how to confront a rising, antagonistic China. Global trade, commerce and financial markets all depend on a stable relationship with Beijing.
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We are watching real time genocide in China

by Fatima Ayub

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    [post_date] => 2021-05-13 21:55:31
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    [post_content] => Is Melinda Gates trying to get ahead of uncomfortable revelations about her husband's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?

When I read the news last week that Bill and Melinda Gates were divorcing after 27 years of marriage, my first reaction was empathy. The pandemic has been hard on all couples, I thought, even the ones who happened to have been quarantining in a 66,000-square-foot compound with 18.75 bathrooms called Xanadu 2.0. Melinda told The New York Times in October 2020 that being stuck working from home with her husband, after years of frenetic traveling, “was a piece that I think we hadn’t really individually prepared for quite as much.” This was somewhat relatable. No matter the size of your home, there is such a thing as too much togetherness. 

But then there were questions. Foremost among them: Why now? After all, thanks in part to the efforts of the Gates Foundation, which has donated more than $1.75 billion to Covid-19 research, 130 million people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of the vaccine. As we approach herd immunity, we are slowly emerging from our pandemic hidey holes. Businesses are reopening. People are talking about wearing jeans again. Couldn’t the world’s biggest philanthropists just carry on living separate lives, united by their passion for giving back? We already know that Melinda is pretty laissez faire when it comes to her marriage, allowing Bill to vacation every year with his ex-girlfriend. The couple owns a far-flung real estate portfolio with at least seven properties totaling $170 million. Melinda could take up residence at Xanadu 2.0 while Bill could stay in their $12.5 million home in Palm Desert, California, from whence he signed the divorce papers. Or they could resume traveling around the world, perhaps staying at the Four Seasons, which they own a large stake in through Bill’s firm Cascade Investment LLC. 

A few days after the divorce announcement, we started to get a possible answer to the timing question. The Daily Beast broke the news that Melinda was reportedly “furious” after her husband took her to meet with Jeffrey Epstein at his Upper East Side mansion back in September 2013. The anger is understandable given that one of Melinda’s top priorities at the Gates Foundation is to invest in gender equality and women’s empowerment—and Jeffrey Epstein at the time was a registered sex offender. The Wall Street Journal followed up this week, reporting that Melinda met with divorce lawyers in 2019 after the New York Times published a story detailing the extent of her husband’s relationship with Epstein. The Times reported that Gates sent an effusive email to his colleagues upon meeting Epstein, describing his lifestyle as “very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.” The Gates PR machine then went into full-on spin mode, telling the Times that Gates “was referring only to the unique décor of the Epstein residence.” Ah, yes, the unique décor! 

I remember reading that Times article in 2019 and shaking my head. Did I think it was creepy that Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein? Yes. Did I think that Bill Gates was raping girls who Epstein had trafficked? No, I did not. 

Given his wealth, power and involvement in scientific pursuits, Bill Gates has been a magnet for truly wacko conspiracy theories, such as the idea that he wants to use vaccine shots as a vehicle to insert trackable microchips into people’s bodies. Believers in QAnon, the umbrella conspiracy theory that holds that there exists a secret child trafficking ring run by Satan-worshipping Democrats—including President Biden, Hillary Clinton and George Soros–have been having a field day with the divorce announcement, speculating in chat forums that Bill Gates is either about to be arrested or that the breakup is intended to somehow cover up for the fact that both Gateses are dead (don’t ask). I can now see how these types of bonkers narratives had the unusual effect of pushing my mind toward the exact opposite explanation, which is that Bill Gates is a brilliant but oblivious man who, like so many others, unwittingly got swept up in Epstein’s net. 

But now I’m not so sure. Is it possible that Bill Gates’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein went beyond fundraising for philanthropic projects? It is. And the thing that makes me think it is possible is the extent to which Gates downplayed his links to Epstein, both to the press and, apparently, to his wife. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal tied to a Netflix documentary about Gates, he denied having any sort of relationship with the pedophile financier, saying “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him. I didn’t go to New Mexico or Florida or Palm Beach or any of that.” This turned out to be a big lie: Not only had the two men met many times over the years, but the Times report revealed that Gates flew on Epstein’s Gulfstream plane, known as “the Lolita Express” from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach in 2013. The New Yorker also reported that Gates made a $2 million donation to the MIT Media Lab in 2014, a donation that was said to be directed by Epstein. 

At the heart of any good conspiracy theory is a twisted kernel of truth. Could it be that there is, in fact, an elite illuminati-like pedophile ring running the world–except that, instead of being controlled by prominent Democrats, the cabal transcends any particular political ideology? If that turns out to be the case, then is it even remotely possible that Bill Gates, in collaboration perhaps with two other powerful Bills—Barr and Clinton—may have conspired to have Jeffrey Epstein murdered in jail, so that their involvement is kept secret? When my brain goes down these (admittedly speculative) rabbit holes, I start to feel like I’m getting swallowed up in the Matrix, until I remember that it’s one thing to be running around spouting nonsense about Pizzagate and frazzledrip, and quite another to see evidence of an actual conspiracy unfolding before your eyes. Because something here really does not make sense. 

We need answers as to why Bill Gates, the fourth-richest man on earth who runs the biggest charitable organization in history, needed Epstein’s “help” with philanthropy, even after his wife expressed serious reservations about interacting with him. We need to understand why the Gates Foundation’s former science adviser, a man named Boris Nikolic, was named executor of Epstein’s estate before he died. We need to know how Melanie Walker, a longtime adviser to Epstein, came to be part of Gates’s inner circle. Then there’s the question of Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer, who, according to Vanity Fair, palled around with Epstein in Palm Beach and Manhattan and was accused by Alan Dershowitz of having sex with one of Epstein’s underage victims. We need to understand why Bill Gates brushed off all these intersections between his orbit and Epstein’s, not to mention why he suddenly stepped down from the boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway last year. 

And before we let Melinda Gates off the hook, we need to understand what she knew and when she knew it. Any evidence of complicity should disqualify her from being an advocate for women and girls. 

Hopefully soon, we will get some answers. Last summer, Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested at a 156-acre property in New Hampshire and on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan announced that the trial will begin after Thanksgiving. It was originally slated to commence in July, but her lawyers argued that they needed more time to prepare after a new sex-trafficking charge was filed this year that alone carries a maximum sentence of 40 years. If anyone knows where the bodies are buried, it is Ghislaine Maxwell. Indeed, she may already be cooperating with investigators in exchange for leniency. 

Suddenly, the carefully coordinated Gates divorce announcement makes more sense as a calculated PR move on the part of Melinda to get ahead of the Epstein narrative and distance herself from its stench. If you are trying to run a foundation that advocates for women and girls around the world, being tied to a global child sex-trafficking ring is not exactly great for the brand. 

There’s no question that the $50 billion Gates Foundation, in its 21 years of existence, has done a lot of good work. Because of their work, the incidence of polio around the world has declined by 99 percent. They have prevented 1.5 billion cases of malaria and donated billions to fighting HIV and AIDS. And of course, the coronavirus. But we cannot ignore the fact that the Foundation has also helped launder Bill Gates’s reputation, transforming him from a ruthless Robber Baron 2.0 who built his success by crushing the competition (and foisting a sub-optimal product on consumers), into a champion of public health, an expert on climate change, a thought leader for the Davos set. As Anand Giridharadas put it in his book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” the only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens.

We as a society need to question whether relying on the voluntary largesse of an ascendant billionaire class is the best way to solve the world’s problems. Why should the takers, the hoarders of the world’s wealth, be presumed to be experts on giving? The Gates divorce reminds us that it might be more effective, more conducive to a thriving democracy, to simply raise their taxes. 
    [post_title] => What did Melinda Gates know—and when did she know it?
    [post_excerpt] => If you are trying to run a foundation that advocates for women and girls around the world, being tied to a global child sex-trafficking ring is not exactly great for the brand. 
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What did Melinda Gates know—and when did she know it?

by Rachel Dodes

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    [post_content] => Simons, who rose to fame as a glamorous television personality, leads an explicitly feminist, radical, intersectional party.

If you want to know how Sylvana Simons came to be the first Black woman in the Netherlands to head a political party elected to the House of Representatives, you’ll need to look back further than her glamorous 25-year career as a model, dancer, MTV host, television personality, and political activist. You’ll have to go back to when she dropped out of school and ran away from home at the age of 14 because there were “rules” she “didn’t agree with,” and then became a single mother at the age of 21, when she had not a penny to her name. 

It is this lived experience that informs Simons’ political views as leader of BIJ1 (“Together”), the explicitly intersectional, feminist and radical political party that she founded in 2016. Simons was elected to the House of Representatives in March, largely on the back of the urban youth vote. 

BIJ1 ran an impressively diverse list of candidates for parliament. Among the top 10 were five Black people, three of them women; a Muslim woman who is disabled; a trans woman; a sex worker; an artist and youth worker; and a woman of Indonesian background (Indonesia is a former colony of the Netherlands). The party’s manifesto breathed intersectionality. 

In April Simons made headlines with a scathing 5-minute speech in the House of Representatives on the failures of the government’s pandemic policies. “It turns out,” she said from the podium in the House of Representatives, “That allowing intensive care units to fill up with the goal of reaching herd immunity is harmful to the economy, harmful to our wellbeing, harmful to our freedom, harmful to our health, and has cost us many lives.” The government’s vaccine rollout had failed, she continued, and her party intended to pursue a parliamentary inquiry into the matter. 


The speech garnered applause and a rush of positive publicity.

For Simons, the pandemic debate was an excellent opportunity to show what her party stood for, and to push parliament to hold the government to account—an obligation she accuses them of having neglected. “What kind of country do we want to be?” she asked, rhetorically. “We propose systemic change. Do you want authorities to crush citizens, or to protect and help them?” 

Sylvana Simons was born in 1971 in colonial Suriname, four years before the South American country won its independence from the Netherlands—where her family has lived since she was 18 months old. She has been a well-known media figure since the mid-1990s, when she was a presenter for Dutch MTV. But in 2015 her fame morphed into notoriety when, as the host’s side-kick on the popular talk show De Wereld Draait Door (The World Moves On), she pushed back against a guest who used a derogatory term for Black people. The backlash was immediate: Simons was targeted with a tsunami of racist, sexist attacks on social media. 

Overnight, the popular media personality became the most hated woman in the Netherlands. The television guest appearances and invitations to give speeches at corporate events dried up, as the establishment rushed to distance themselves from the suddenly controversial Simons. But she told The Conversationalist that she has no regrets. “It was inevitable,” she said. "I had to practice what I preached: speak out if you are in a position to do so."

The feminist writer and activist Anja Meulenbelt chuckled appreciatively upon seeing Simons suddenly regaining some of her pre-2015 popularity in the wake of her speech criticizing the government’s failed pandemic policy. Meulenbelt, an icon of 1970s second wave feminism, was one of the first people to join BIJ1. “Sylvana is audacious; she is not afraid of anything,” she said.  BIJ1 had succeeded, asserted Meulenbelt, where the established leftist parties had failed: “We don’t talk about representation; we are representation. We do what other leftist parties [only] talk about.” 

The praise Simons received for her pandemic policy speech was remarkable for the frequency with which it was accompanied by disclaimers—such as, “I’m not a fan of hers, but..!” or “I didn’t vote for her, but..!” or “In general I don’t like her, but..!”

Simons believes those disclaimers are just temporary. She has the stage now, and no longer needs opinion leaders and journalists for exposure. “People think that because of my anti-racism, my politics are exclusive,” she said, adding that the opposite is true. “My politics aren’t exclusive, but inclusive. I act against power. Against a government and institutions that don’t care about citizens but treat them like tools to keep the economy going. That affects all of us, regardless of the color of our skin. And sometimes that means pointing out that the situation of some groups, like Black people or disabled people, requires extra attention.” 

Simons said that her now-famous speech had been “brewing” for a year. But the fluidity and incisiveness of her remarks reveal that she must have been thinking deeply for at least a decade about the issues she addressed so eloquently. Her words reflected a combination of heightened political awareness and outrage over not only the handling of the coronavirus pandemic but also over social justice issues like equality, humanity—and dignity.

Part of her impact is based on her understanding of performance, said Aldith Hunkar, an independent Dutch-Surinamese journalist who has known Simons for many years. “She knows like nobody else which camera is pointed at her, and at which moment to look into it,” said Hunkar, who conducted a video interview in English with Simons earlier this month. She added that Simons was completely sincere—as well as “hyper intelligent.”

Sheila Sitalsing, a Dutch-Surinamese political columnist for the veteran daily newspaper de Volkskrant, described Simons to The Conversationalist as “sensational,” adding that she has “flawless political intuition” and is “factual, calm, with a sharp eye for the rule of law.” 

Simons is a huge fan of Mona Eltahawy, the uncompromising and outspoken Egyptian-American journalist, commentator and activist, but considers herself to be a “diplomat.” In describing her approach, Simons said, “I can find common ground with everybody,” no matter what their background. “I am not bothered by who you are,” she said. “This has to do with my life path.”

Now 50 years old, Simons became a grandmother last year. Reflecting on her life as a high school dropout and single mother who started out as a TV dancer and worked her way up, she said. “I say with pride that I have hardly any formal education. I wasn’t flattened by a system that didn’t work for me. I overcame institutional hurdles, including racism and sexism, and despite society’s consistently low expectations of me. I learned to make connections with everybody. I consider that my strength.”

But how did that life experience transform into a solidly grounded intersectional worldview seemingly overnight? Where did the theory come from? 

Simons mentions Gloria Wekker, a Dutch-Surinamese professor emeritus in gender studies who authored the acclaimed seminal work on Dutch racism, called White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Wekker joined BIJ1, taking it upon herself to educate the new party leader—and was struck by how quickly Simons read and understood the texts.

 “I asked Gloria which books I had to read,” said Simons. “The books made scientifically tangible what I have lived and felt throughout my life.” 

Feminism is, naturally, a big part of the story. But Simons cannot answer the question of which comes first for her—feminism or anti-racism. During the interview, she chooses feminism: “But one cannot exist without the other and I may choose anti-racism next week.”

Simons’s feminist, anti-racist message disrupts the Netherlands, a country that sees itself as a beacon of tolerance and progressiveness. She is not the only one speaking out fiercely against Dutch racism. A decade ago, the campaign “Kick out Black Pete” started, aiming to abolish the blackface tradition that pollutes the Dutch Sinterklaas (Santa Claus) festivities. And last year the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were numerous and huge in the Netherlands. Momentum was building for BIJ1’s politics.

Surprisingly enough, Simons reveals that 15 or 20 years ago she defended Black Pete from foreign criticism. “I’d tell people to butt out of our traditions, even though I’ve hated Black Pete since I was a child. But I too suffered from internalized racism. You know, we are raised in the Netherlands to say that we don’t ‘see’ color, that it’s all kumbaya, but underneath that layer of kumbaya we deny identities.”

Foreigners, in other words, are not the only people surprised to discover racism in the Netherlands. The Dutch themselves are surprised, too. “Our tolerance was a facade we were collectively hiding behind and that has only now started to crumble,” said Simons.

Aldith Hunkar, the Dutch-Surinamese independent journalist, agreed. “The Netherlands has built this system over 500 years and it still refuses to see the implications,” she said. “It’s learning very slowly. Simons has changed the discourse already, but it reflects the rigid, dismal Dutch mindset that she is not yet on a pedestal.” Hunkar, 58, resigned in 2007 from a position she held for 14 years as a television presenter for NOS, the state broadcaster, after accusing it of racism in its editorial decisions. 

To know where Sylvana Simons is coming from, one must consider those 500 years of Dutch colonial, racist history. On March 31, the day she was inaugurated into parliament, the party gave its leader a present: a traditional Afro-Surinamese religious ceremony, held at a public square close to the parliament building. A priestess offered a libation to ask the ancestors and God to give Simons power and wisdom. 

[caption id="attachment_2609" align="aligncenter" width="840"] Afro-Surinamese ceremony honoring Sylvana Simons (center) on March 31.[/caption]

Simons said the ceremony made her feel honored: “I was carried by the ancestors. As a child of the colonies, as Simba, the chosen one, I was honored. It meant a lot to me but also for the people who brought me to this point. They didn’t vote for a politician but for their daughter, sister, mother, aunt, and it is completely emotional. It was about spirituality, about keeping the connection with the people who gave their lives for our freedom.”


Going forward, Simons will need all her strength. The same election that brought BIJ1 to parliament also handed victories to several fascist parties, some of which have been in the legislature for several years, pulling policies and the discourse to the right side of the political spectrum. Simons hopes to pull them back to the left. “Pictures of the ceremony were shared [online] and those on the extreme-right of the spectrum saw them too. Everybody saw that my community lifted me so high—who can touch me now? It gave me wings. I flew into parliament.”

The official inauguration was short. The office assigned to her turned out to be in the former Ministry of Colonies. “That is no coincidence,” said Simons. “It closes the circle.”
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A portrait of Sylvana Simons arriving "for a ceremony where Dutch King Willem-Alexander marked the opening of the parliamentary year with a speech outlining the government's budget plans for the year ahead at the Grote Kerk, or Sint-Jacobus Kerk, (Great Church or St. James' Church) in The Hague, Netherlands, Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021."

‘I act against power’: Sylvana Simons is proudly disrupting politics as usual in the Netherlands

by Fréderike Geerdink

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    [post_content] => A powerful argument that fat people should be accorded the same dignity that social movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter demand.

Aubrey Gordon’s What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is a book about being trapped. It is rooted in trauma and designed, at turns, to break your heart and open your eyes to the humanity of a scorned and maligned demographic. It is also another volume in the generally shouty, scolding, so-called “woke” rhetoric that has shot through the public discourse like a never-ending Reddit thread. 

The path to inclusion, apparently, is balling out strangers on the internet and hosting a podcast. Gordon excels at both. She first came to fame as the author of Your Fat Friend, which she wrote anonymously and subtitled “Essays on life as a very fat person.” As the title of her undertaking implies, Gordon has set herself apart from a default confrontational stance. Her tone is direct, earnest, informative—uninterested in trauma porn. The same cannot be said of her voice on Twitter, but such is life when expressed in a maximum of 280 characters. 

I first became acquainted with Gordon through a hilarious, often brilliant limited episode podcast about the dieting industry, which she co-hosts with Huffington Post journalist Michael Hobbes. Called Maintenance Phase, its tagline is “wellness & weight loss, debunked & decoded.” Much like Your Fat Friend, the tone of the podcast conveys to the listener that she is implicitly on the same team as the co-hosts: away we go, together, to laugh at the sick standards and twisted marketing schemes that warp our view of the world and threaten our psychic wellbeing! The duo’s takedown of Moon Juice (“What the fuck is an adaptogen?”) is one of the funniest things I listened to in the past year; the episode on the Twinkie Defense, exploring the moral panic behind the legal defense that exculpated Harvey Milk’s killer, is moving and especially well researched. 

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is not a memoir but rather “a mix of memoir, research, and cultural criticism all focused on unearthing our social and cultural attitudes toward fat people.” The aim is to accord fat people the same dignity and steps toward harm reduction that other social justice movements, like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, demand. 

First things first: I was almost giddy to read a book published in 2021 that tells public health experts—and pretty much everyone else—that they are dead wrong and can fuck off. After this pandemic year of public health obsession, shaming (e.g., for wearing or not wearing a mask), and broadly asking to speak to the manager, it is refreshing to see a woman stand her ground and explain fat shaming and the diet industry to me.

 
Gordon trashes BMI (Body Mass Index) as a racist, meaningless marker; she deftly explains how blaming fat people for being fat allows us to avoid taking collective responsibility for a widespread problem, to indulge our biases, and isolate fat people from equal pay, housing, and medical care. Her arguments bear the hard won credibility of a woman who has been mocked, menaced, and bullied online and off throughout her life and presently wears a size 26. Biography is Gordon’s chief credential, and her stories of discrimination and humiliation at the hands of anyone from landlords to flight attendants will make you shake with rage. On her podcast, she speaks of “the shitty economy of trauma” and how she needs to be “vivisected” for anyone to buy into her arguments. 

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is very much a book written by a woman. To be sure, we are all trapped in these flesh suits. To be alive as a woman, in particular, is to experience being judged on your looks before all else. Describing viral videos that shame fat people, Gordon writes, “It was surreal to watch it all unfold, this litigation of my body, a voiceless inconvenience, an inanimate obstacle.” As a woman in America, I must confess it was surreal to read that sentence. I understand my role is to be a reader, and not to place myself in Gordon’s lived and often excruciating narrative, but at several points in this book I felt lectured to about my own lived experiences as a woman in a way that baffled me. 

For instance: Gordon is at pains to define a difference between fatcalling and catcalling: “Catcallers do not consider themselves to be wooing me, concocting faux romances in their minds. I do not face the inconveniences of chivalry...Instead, I face...unsolicited disclosures of men’s rape fantasies.” As I read that paragraph, I couldn’t help but think, #MeToo, Aubrey! That’s exactly what it’s like! And, even if details differ, why spend pages denigrating the trauma of catcalling in favor of the paramount trauma of fatcalling? Why must we rank trauma? Why is it all a contest? Both things suck. 

Gordon indulges in moments of intersectionality, but male aggression on an empty street is also familiar in the forms of gay bashing or bigotry—as well as straight-up catcalling. We can (and should) create room for fat women in feminism without invalidating someone else’s narrative. And, while we are at it, I’d like to point out that dating apps are humiliating for everyone. 

No one wants to be pathologized; this is something the gay rights community has been teaching us for decades. Knowing Gordon is a fierce advocate both in the queer space and for reproductive freedoms, the following sentiment left me gobsmacked: 

“The world of straight-size people is a reliable one. In their world, services are procured. Healthcare offered is accessed. Conflict arises primarily from active decisions to provoke and is rarely—if ever—prompted by the simple sight of a stranger’s body. The biggest challenges with anyone’s individual body are their attitude toward their own skin, not issues of security, dignity, or safety from bodily harm.” 

This simply isn’t true. Americans are denied access to healthcare for a plethora of reasons that include race, income, sexuality, gender identification, and immigration status.  

Gordon is at her strongest writing about how cultural conditioning yields a cruel smugness: 

“Media messages about revenge bodies and baby weight and beach bodies abound, conditioning our feelings about our own bodies the ways that we treat those who are fatter than us," she writes. She references a damning Wharton study about how “obesity serves as a proxy for low competence,” and compellingly links this attitude to legalized weight discrimination in many states. 

“Anti-fatness,” Gordon asserts, “is a way for thinner people to remind themselves of their perceived virtue. Seeing a fatter person allows them to remind themselves that at least I’m not fat. They believe that they have chosen their body, so seeing a fat person eat something they deem unhealthy reminds them of their stronger willpower, greater tenacity, and superior character.” 

This line of thought is redolent of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic—it’s as American as it gets. In this vein, I am troubled by an underlying assumption that crops up again and again in this book: that we are empowered and enabled to participate in public discourse once we are consumers. Surely our humanity is not tied to our ability to participate in capitalism. Personally, I think people should aspire to a lot more than earning more money and being able to buy clothes in their size. I would like to see us dream bigger than a shopping spree. What else are we gunning for here? More invidiously, what industry will co-opt these upper tiers of obesity? Each June, the Gay Pride Parade boasts multiple floats from big banks and corporations: does fat acceptance look like a TD Bank ad? Can someone chart a course out of this capitalist trap?  

The book also contains the seeds of some serious fatalism, and, as it goes, a serious paradox.  

On the one hand, Gordon argues passionately against BMI as a valid metric and size as an indicator of health. At one point, she even lauds a few anti-diet dieticians. She writes of studies that point to vile and widespread medical bias against fat people, even in medical schools. Yet, she also insists that the prevalence of fat Americans is a consequence of substandard nutrition, processed food and poor education—deficits she traces back to New Deal agricultural policy and the Reagan Era’s war on obesity. 

So, we hold both of these truths to be self-evident: being fat is okay and not a threat to one’s health, but having a fat society is a problem we must collectively solve. 

Gordon also claims that 97 million Americans diet and it’s a $66 billion-industry. But, she says 98 percent of dieters fail. This made me wonder: what constitutes a failure? What constitutes a diet? Success metrics are strange, and their definition is often slippery to the point of slime. When my own father was dying of cancer, I learned that “success” at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is defined as living for another five years. If it doesn’t look like you’ll make it that long, they don’t treat you for fear of sullying their numbers. 

So: who is in these diet studies? What did they want to achieve? Where did they start? When I dove into the footnotes to learn the rationale behind the numbers, I was led to a Psychology Today author promo listicle: “6 Reasons Smart People Don’t Diet.” The statistical improbability of “success” pinned to these numbers allows for an ugly tendency to flay any follower engaged in weight loss. On her podcast, Aubrey says she believes it was a fair boundary to block anyone with an Instagram bio that states an aspirational weight—although she herself doesn’t do so. 

Isn’t it possible to both understand that the diet industry is largely shambolic and also leave room for people to try and change their bodies a little if they want to? A before-and-after photo is not inherently toxic. Perhaps social media is the bigger issue, with all of its attendant lies around displays of wealth and heteronormative couplehood—while we are on the topic. 

Somewhere between being resigned to genetic predisposition and indulging in the freak show that is The Biggest Loser, I’ve got to believe there is a middle ground where we have a bit more acceptance and agency. Call me an optimist. How can a writer as smart as Gordon so sharply point out the sly complicity in Heinz buying Weight Watchers, but come down so hard on Michelle Obama for her “Let’s Move” campaign and any poor schmuck trying to lose a little weight? In hanging readers out to dry at various points, Gordon lowballs the universality of her message. Movingly, she writes, “The war on childhood obesity had given up on me, and over time, I learned to give up on myself...At eleven, I clung desperately to the idea that my body could and would change—that, somehow, I would become thin. Then, and only then, could my real life begin.” Who didn’t feel that way in some capacity as a middle schooler? 

We need to treat fat people—and everyone—with more kindness and consideration. But there is nothing wrong with trying to grant those same people a sense of autonomy and agency to decide on their own definition of defeat or victory. For Gordon, it’s having the space to be the woman she is right now; for others, it might mean shedding 20 pounds put on during a stressful, sedentary pandemic. There must be room for someone trying to figure out what works for their own highly personal wants and needs. 

It breaks my heart that the end of this book must focus on harm reduction. In her final chapter, Gordon writes, “We deserve a personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect.” We do. And if we don’t find one that we all can fit in together as a nation and as a culture, it’s not so much that we will be trapped but, rather, that we’ll know for certain that it’s been a trap all along.
    [post_title] => Dreaming big: the politics of preaching body acceptance in a fat phobic society
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Dreaming big: the politics of preaching body acceptance in a fat phobic society

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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    [post_content] => As their home country is engulfed by a raging second wave of the pandemic, Indians living abroad feel helpless and guilty.

The live-in domestic help at my parents’ house in Mumbai got COVID-19. My neighbor’s entire family was infected. So was my husband’s elderly aunt in Ahmedabad. My friend's father was hospitalized for 12 days. Everyone in India knows someone who has been affected by the raging second wave of the pandemic.

And no wonder—as of today, India is the only country other than the U.S. to have 20 million coronavirus cases, and that is likely a vast undercount.

Crematoriums across India have so many bodies piling up that some are running out of wood to build funeral pyres. At Mumbai hospitals there are long waiting lists for beds; at one, the chief medical officer died of complications from COVID-19. She was 51 years old.

There is a thriving black market for medical supplies. In Mumbai, an oxygen concentrator is selling for Rs. 75,000 to Rs. 150,000 ($1,000 to $2,000) while in the capital city of Delhi, which has been even harder hit by the pandemic, it can cost as much as Rs. 250,000. ($3,400)—in a country where the monthly per capita income just before COVID hit was less than $150. But even at these inflated prices, demand far outpaces supply.

All over social media, people are posting their desperation, sharing shaky videos and pleading words, begging for a hospital bed, for oxygen, for someone to come and help. More than 100 Indian journalists have died of COVID, with one, Vinay Srivastava, live tweeting his declining oxygen levels until he died. Meanwhile, the Modi government ordered Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to take down posts critical of its handling of the pandemic.

We hear about the tragic stories of the sick and dying in India’s cities, but almost nothing from the rural areas, where roughly two-thirds of the population lives.

Meanwhile New York City, where I live, is opening up. It’s been opening up. Indoor dining. Theaters. Gyms. Now the CDC says the vaccinated don’t need to wear masks outdoors. After a year of living in sweats, I went shopping for sundresses last week. Awkwardly, we hug each other again.

In New York City, a return to normal

On a warm Saturday in April, Mayor Bill DeBlasio made a surprise appearance at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum where we were celebrating Holi, the Indian festival of color, with live musicians, dancers, and samosas for guests to snack on.

During the last half hour of our time slot, which was limited to comply with COVID precautions, the mayor and a dhol player led a procession to the park next door. We played Holi, flinging colorful powder in the air and smearing each other’s clothes and hair with red, green, yellow, and pink, while catchy Bollywood songs playing in the background.

But even as I laughed and shrieked with friends, grateful that the receding threat of COVID had allowed me to enjoy my favorite festival, I celebrated with a clammy feeling of guilt. How could I turn my face to the sun while my country was being battered by a vicious second surge of the virus?

How India's second wave happened

About 10 days before I celebrated Holi in Brooklyn, the Kumbh Mela took place in the northern Indian city of Haridwar. Government authorities estimate that approximately 3.5 million Hindu pilgrims traveled to the banks of the holy Ganga River for the days-long festival, despite a sharp increase in COVID cases in the country—and amid calls for the government to cancel the event.

But Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister, had already declared victory over the pandemic at the World Economic Forum’s Davos Dialogue in January. While the rest of the world warned that the number of cases was set to increase precipitously, Modi boasted that India had not only looked after its own population but was also saving lives by exporting 60 million doses of domestically produced vaccines around the world.

Even as the country was making global front-page headlines for its rising infection numbers, Modi and his home minister appeared without masks at massive political rallies leading up to state elections in West Bengal, where Modi expressed admiration for the size of the crowds. (The election results were announced Monday and Modi’s party, the BJP, suffered a major loss in the state.)

Last week, the Madras High Court handed down severe criticism of the Election Commission of India (ECI) for permitting political rallies during the pandemic. In response to a claim from a spokesperson for the ECI that COVID safety protocols had been enforced at the mass rallies, the chief justice asked, "Were you on another planet when political rallies were being held?" The justice underlined his outrage by adding that the ECI was “singularly responsible” for the massive second wave of COVID-19 in India, adding that commission officials “should be booked on murder charges” for sponsoring mass political rallies that turned into super spreader events.

Living in fear

At around the same time in Mumbai, the older sister of a close friend was running ragged trying to take care of her family. Her husband works at the airport and the docks, in “import-export.” His job is essential, since he oversees the import of critical supplies into the country, including oxygen, which is in desperately short supply. A colleague in the customs division has already succumbed to COVID-19. He himself is not fully vaccinated.

“He’s endangering himself every day, he has to travel for his job, and he can’t get the second dose, because they’ve run out,” my friend said.

My friend’s sister lives in a multi-generational home with her in-laws; recently, two of her in-laws’ cousins also came to stay with them. For a time, there were four elderly people at home, with 10 human beings squeezing into the three-bedroom apartment. Last week, one of the cousins, who was in her 80s, tested positive. One of my friend’s nieces has juvenile diabetes, which puts her at increased risk from the virus; her sister asked the elderly cousin to isolate at her own house. The woman died the next day.

Karna Basu’s maternal grandmother passed away before the second surge hit. His grandmother had COVID, but it was the cancer that took her life. The COVID made it hard for her to access treatment, though. They were close, and he regrets not being able to travel from New York, where he lives, to see her before she passed.

The news from his wife’s family is worse. For the last several weeks, the WhatsApp group of her extended family in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, has been bringing news of two new deaths from the virus each week.

“The family is getting depleted,” Basu says. “It’s so painful you don’t even want to think about it.”

An old classmate of mine in Mumbai is on a WhatsApp group full of wealthy professionals—the kind of people who, in India’s deeply unequal society, usually know someone in authority and thus are able to jump the queue. But even they are having trouble accessing resources.

“I’m reading their messages of desperation—they’re not able to get their hands on medicine and oxygen,” my classmate told me over the phone. “If they can’t do it, what is happening to the middle class and lower middle class in the country?”

When she had to get a hospital bed for her cousin, who tested positive a week before the state of Maharashtra went into lockdown, my friend realized just how dire the situation had become.

“We were hearing that there were no beds available, but only when I started calling hospitals did I realize how bad it was,” she said. The only reason they were able to secure a bed, she added, was because they knew someone high up in a hospital.

Even before the world had heard of COVID-19, India ranked 155 out of 167 countries in hospital bed capacity.

A New York friend spent a recent morning trying to find either medical oxygen or an oxygen concentrator, a device that take in ambient air and increases its oxygen concentration by stripping away the nitrogen, for a former employee of his in Delhi. He made 23 calls, only to be put on waitlist after waitlist. Eventually the employee found a hospital bed; she is now on a ventilator.

Aid is now coming into India now from several countries, including the United States, but President Joe Biden has been criticized for hoarding vaccines, while other wealthy countries continue to store vaccines in excess of their needs. In India, meanwhile, many states have run out.

My New York friend is angry at Modi’s government for not doing enough. “It’s all fucked up,” he says. “Not stockpiling enough vaccines is fucked up. Not having more structured lockdowns is fucked up. Silencing anyone who says anything bad about them is fucked up.”

Last year, the central government tried to force independent news outlets to submit their pandemic coverage to authorities for approval before publication. Just last month Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and a key Modi ally, directed police to confiscate the property of anyone who posted about oxygen shortages online.

Meanwhile an increasing number of countries have limited or suspended travel from India, with Australia even criminalizing its own citizens for returning home from the subcontinent. Indians who live abroad can’t go back to be with loved ones during their last days or mourn with their families.

Ann, an American woman married a South Indian man, is now barred from traveling to northern India to finalize the adoption of a teenage girl. This would have been the family’s second adoption, and fourth child. Meanwhile, the young girl they were supposed to bring back to Texas this month is having a hard time in her orphanage. She’s the oldest one there, close to aging out of care. Every time they speak on the phone, Ann says, the girl is either crying or holding back tears.

“The only thing I have to say to you is come get me,” she says on their weekly calls. “When are you coming?”

Sending money is the only thing you can do

On the WhatsApp groups that I’m a part of, we exchange the names of aid organizations on the ground. “Is it vetted?” people ask. “Can you send me a list of reputable groups?”

When you’re 9,000 miles away, sending money is about the only thing you can do.

Meanwhile, I got my second dose of the vaccine last week. In New York, the tulips are blooming. Over the weekend, I met friends for an outdoor lunch and then enjoyed the sun on my shoulders at a nearby park. Around us picnickers spread out on blankets; a guitarist riffed nearby. I felt the grass brushing my bare legs and played mock battles with my son. The shoulder where I got the jab was still sore, and I was glad for the pain.

Here is a list of 12 places you can donate to help India. 
    [post_title] => I celebrated Holi in New York while in India friends and family begged for hospital beds
    [post_excerpt] => The author's joy in celebrating the Hindu festival of Holi, which in her adopted city of New York coincided with spring weather and a recovery from the pandemic, was tempered by guilt and disquiet over the raging second wave of the pandemic in her home country. 
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I celebrated Holi in New York while in India friends and family begged for hospital beds

by Jayati Vora

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    [post_content] => A university professor, a funeral director and a pastor on how the pandemic changed them.

It’s been 14 months since we began to cope with the worst pandemic in a century, confronted daily by mortality, seeing every stranger—even our loved ones— as a potential vector of a lethal and terrifying disease.

Inevitably, we are emerging from this terrible year as changed people. Some of us have seen our lives transformed in ways we could never have imagined or predicted. Some have grown tougher and stronger while others find they have become much gentler with themselves and with others.

Kari Northey, a funeral director in Michigan, saw her life transform radically , both personally and professionally. She faced the challenge of doing her work safely, which includes embalming, though she had insufficient PPE. She had to fight for vaccines because the government did not consider her and her staff sufficiently essential, and she even struggled with a lack of available caskets.

Like many healthcare workers, she also faced the daily “moral injury” of being unable to honor her vocation and comfort her many grieving clients.

“As funeral professionals we are in a “yes” position,” she said. “Yes, we want you to see your loved one, have a funeral, celebrate their life, spend time with them, gather with friends, follow your heart to caring for your loved one, all which prepares your mind and soul to grieve and begin life without them.”

The pandemic made it impossible to gather with friends to mourn and to celebrate the life of the deceased. The bereaved could not participate in the comfort of mourning rituals.

Missing words “to say goodbye in a healthy way,” she said, adding: “The one that hurt the most to have to say was: ‘No, you cannot see your loved one again.’

“I fear how much unhealthy grief our world will be working through for the next many years.”

Home schooling her two young daughters gave Northey more time with them, but the year also brought divorce.

“It took some work to find the joys in the added time with the girls, but the longer snuggles and quiet moments were a bonus and benefit,” she said. “I was given a million more beautiful moments with my children. Those many added moments gave a solid foundation to my girls to get them ready for what was coming with their changing family.”

Until the pandemic hit, Amy Sterner Nelson spent most of her time building The Riveter, co-working sites in six states, and traveling constantly for her burgeoning business. So did her husband, a real estate developer. Their busy life was only possible because she employed two caregivers, in addition to the help her mother-in-law provided in caring for her three children, ages six, four, three and one.

“Before the pandemic started, one of us was traveling every week for work,” she said. “We lost our caretakers and schools shut. All of a sudden, our life was totally different. I was with the kids a lot more. I put them to bed, I get them up. I know their rhythms a lot more. I realized I missed part of my children’s lives. I didn’t see them play. I didn’t laugh as much or see their creativity.”

It’s been a sobering realization. “I don’t think I’ll ever travel as much [after the pandemic],” she said. “This has taught me to be present in a different way. I play with them now! I have the energy now.”

COVID-19 wreaked a special form of havoc in communities of color. Reverend-Doctor Jean Robinson-Casey, pastor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Christian Church in Reston, Virginia, presides over a 175-member congregation that is 95 percent Black.

“I think it’s changed our community because we have more than one epidemic at the same time,” she said. “Racism has been going on for years, and so for our people it’s been a double issue. What I had to do is lift my game and be creative.” She held an interfaith service last summer with Catholic, Unitarian, Baptist, Jewish and Episcopal members. “After that, we did a ‘get out the vote’ program. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been fruitful for us.”

“The leaders of the church have been galvanized as well, even though it was difficult. We were also right in the middle of back-to-back slaughters of young people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Everyone’s tired! We’ve been tired for decades.”

What keeps Reverend Robinson-Casey going? “God is with us every step of the way. He has never left us. And I have faith in those I plant around me, not just my own church.”

In the years he’s been teaching sociology at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, to undergrads and graduate students, Kevin Shafer always prided himself on being a bit of a hardass. The pandemic’s effects on his students have radically changed him and his teaching.

“I’ve totally given up on that,” he says, of his former rigidity in dealing with his students. “It has no value. As I’ve watched my students struggling with their mental health, I now try to do everything in my power to help them achieve academic success. I have the ability to help them achieve those goals and desires.”

Part of the change was his own willingness to be more open and vulnerable with his students. He wrote them a personal letter detailing his own struggles to manage the stress he felt while teaching remotely and parenting four children ages 12, 10, eight and six.

“When all hell broke loose [with COVID] I realized I have a lot of flexibility in my life and my students don’t. Their lives are much less stable than mine,” he said. Some of his students got COVID, some were hospitalized, and some are now asthmatic as a result. He also realized how intimidating and limiting standard office hours were and plans to hold them by Zoom from now on—even after a return to in-person teaching.

Shafer, who is Canadian, also admits to a deep weariness and disillusionment with how selfishly so many have behaved during the pandemic, nonchalantly infecting and possibly even killing others.

“I do think Canadians are raised with more communitarian sensibilities than Americans are. It’s our mentality of ‘we’re in this thing together’ so seeing this sort of individualism is so moronic!”

“The $64,000 question for me is in what way will I go back to what I used to be? What will I change?”

 
    [post_title] => 'No, you cannot say goodbye to your loved one': processing the pandemic year
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‘No, you cannot say goodbye to your loved one’: processing the pandemic year

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_content] => There is a nuanced case for wearing a mask in certain outdoor situations, for the health and safety of all.

Last week, a number of articles in U.S. publications questioned whether outdoor mask mandates should be lifted. One such article, published by Slate, argued that mask mandates should end because “briefly passing someone on the sidewalk just isn’t risky” while another, in the Atlantic, asked if outdoor mask mandates were “still necessary.” The New York Times published a piece in the Opinion page that presented several views on the matter—including one that considered the harm of masks on acne-prone skin. Missing from all these articles was the issue of high-risk individuals.

I accept the scientific justification for loosening outdoor mask mandates for those who have received a full vaccination. What I struggle with, however, is trusting that everyone not wearing a mask has actually been vaccinated. As a person living with chronic illness, over the past year I have had to learn to negotiate trust, often in the face of outrageous and risky behavior. So while I don’t expect vaccinated people to continue wearing masks forever, it is unfortunately all too reasonable to expect that there will be unvaccinated people flaunting these new rules. 



Furthermore, we now have enough data to show that some people, particularly those with certain cancers, are at high risk of vaccine failure. Other immune-compromised people might not mount as robust a response to vaccines, including the various COVID-19 vaccines, as healthy individuals. But the debate in the United States has virtually ignored people with chronic illnesses, focusing instead on getting back to “life as normal.” 

Following the slew of articles and ensuing social media debate, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued new guidance—smart, nuanced guidance—for fully vaccinated individuals on how to operate outdoors. 

"If you are fully vaccinated and want to attend a small outdoor gathering with people who are vaccinated and unvaccinated, or dine at an outdoor restaurant with friends from multiple households, the science shows if you are vaccinated, you can do so safely unmasked," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a virtual White House briefing on Tuesday.

This guidance echoes that of epidemiologists and certain commentators like Zeynep Tufekci, who has long argued for a nuanced approach to outdoor masking.  Yet on social media, the discourse is still polarized, with many balking at the idea of ending mask mandates for some.

From my perch in Berlin, this debate is fascinating. While some major cities in the United States have required outdoor masks at all times, here in Berlin—and regardless of vaccine status—we are only required to wear them in certain crowded zones; they are listed online and designated with posted signs and spray painted symbols on pavement. Other European locales have taken a different approach: In the Spanish Canary Islands, for instance, masks are required while you’re in movement, but when you’re seated (whether in a park or at an outdoor restaurant), you can remove your mask.

In Germany, only 7.4 percent of the general population has been fully vaccinated (while nearly 25 percent of residents have received their first dose). In Berlin crowded spaces are unavoidable, whether indoors on public transportation or outdoors on busy urban sidewalks. So a policy that might make sense in the wide open spaces of the American Midwest would not necessarily be appropriate in Berlin. Given the global reach and influence of the U.S. media, it seems careless to hyperfocus on the question of outdoor masking, when U.S. policy is bound to have international implications. 

A nuanced approach to outdoor masking makes sense. We know that outdoor transmission is rare, and that in open spaces—such as parks are beaches—the likelihood of getting close enough to someone outside of one’s immediate bubble is low. Crowded Berlin sidewalks like those of the Kurfürstendamm are a mask zone, in order to protect all pedestrians equally.

Although the CDC’s guidance doesn’t reference high-risk individuals directly, it does feel designed to protect us. In addition to the aforementioned information, vaccinated individuals are recommended to continue wearing a mask in crowded outdoor settings where unvaccinated people may be present. 

And yet, as a U.S. citizen who intends to visit home later in the year, I remain concerned about the polarized nature of the discourse around masks, both outdoors and indoors. The positions put forth in the Atlantic and Slate make sense in a society that can see beyond binaries. But in the United States, where everything seems to be viewed in black and white terms, I’m concerned that unvaccinated people will see an end to mask mandates as a free pass, and that their insouciance will put lives at risk. 

We are already seeing numerous American commentators—like Alex Berensen, the conspiracy theorist and former New York Times reporter, and Joe Rogan, the comedian and podcaster—spew misinformation about masks and vaccines. We’ve also seen plenty of Americans simply refusing to wear masks indoors, and a lack of will in some locations to enforce the rules (the same is unfortunately true here in Germany). And so, despite the rapid rollout of vaccinations in the United States, I fear for those of us for whom vaccines are either not an option or might not provide immunity. 

What we need is to accept that rules change—and are bound to change again in response to new variants and increasing vaccination rates—and that we might need to continue to adjust our behavior. As Tufekci argues, governments need to adapt their messaging to help individuals understand why they should continue to wear masks in certain situations. And finally, governments and commentators alike need to remember to take into consideration the needs of high-risk individuals. Our lives matter as much as yours, and we shouldn’t be forced to put our lives at risk because you find masks annoying or uncomfortable. 
    [post_title] => Why you should continue to wear a mask outdoors, even after you've been vaccinated
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Why you should continue to wear a mask outdoors, even after you’ve been vaccinated

by Jillian C. York

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