Beacon Broadside

Marian Wright Edelman on Howard Zinn

The following is an excerpt from Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors by Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund. Edelman was a student of the late Howard Zinn at Spelman College.

  Photo by Roslyn Zinn

HOWARD ZINN

The tall, lanky professor and I arrived at Spelman College together in 1956. He and his wife Roslyn and their two children, Myla and Jeff, lived in the back of the Spelman College infirmary where students felt welcomed to gather, explore ideas, share hopes, and just chew the fat.

Howie encouraged students to think outside the box and to question rather than accept conventional wisdom. He was a risk-taker. I am indebted to him for my first interracial experience with a discussion group at the YMCA on international relations and for going with his Black Spelman students to sit in the "White" section of the state legislature which stopped its deliberations to hoot and jeer and demand that we be removed. He lost no opportunity to challenge segregation in theaters, libraries, and restaurants, and encouraged us to do the same.

Howie not only lived what he taught in history class by breaching Atlanta's segregated boundaries, but stretched my religious tolerance beyond childhood limits. I felt shock and confusion when he announced in class that he did not believe in Jesus Christ. There were few Jewish citizens in my small South Carolina hometown. Through him I began to discern that goodness comes in many faiths and forms which must be respected and honored.

Helene Atwan: The Loss of Howard Zinn

Helene Atwan is the director of Beacon Press.

 photo by Robert Birnbaum

The death of Howard Zinn is an irreparable loss. His contributions to how history is viewed and taught, to political discourse, to activism will be celebrated in the coming weeks and months by the legions of people who were influenced by his work and by his example. Already some of those encomia are being published and posted; the list below represents only a sampling. I want to say just a little today about his enormous contribution to Beacon Press and to independent publishing.

Howard's first book with Beacon was SNCC: The New Abolitionists, the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee which he advised for many years, and which we published in 1964. It was his second book. It began a 46 year relationship with the press that was virtually uninterrupted. We didn't publish all of his books, of course, or all of the books he championed over the years, but we were proud to publish quite a few, including Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal and You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, his memoir. His last book, Three Plays: The Political Theater of Howard Zinn, was slated for publication in April 2010. Receiving his advanced copies just two weeks ago Howard wrote: "Hot off the press; looks great!" As always, he thanked us for our work. And, as always, we were the ones who owed him the thanks.

Alan Michael Collinge: The Way Forward on Student Loans

Alan Michael Collinge responds to the State of the Union and what the President promised to student borrowers. Collinge is the author of The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History—and How We Can Fight Back and is the founder of StudentLoanJustice.org.

Last night, President Obama's first State of the Union Address clearly showed a man determined to inspire bipartisanship from the Republicans. At the same time, he pulled no punches in repeatedly reminding us that the banking crisis can be blamed largely on the banks, and at times even seemed to take pleasure in unloading on Republicans from his well-stocked quiver of damning facts. On the student lending front, Obama described the Direct Lending program, the billions that will be saved by cutting out the middlemen banks, and repayment programs that will guarantee students an easy time of repaying their loans. This was one of the least controversial of Obama's initiatives over the year, and not surprisingly was met with relatively broad approval from the audience.

Given this, one might think that student advocates like me would be pleased, or at the least, have little to complain about. The reality, however, is that I am not pleased. In fact, I, and anyone fighting for the return of standard consumer protections to student loans couldn't be more disappointed. Obama's plan does nothing to bring back fundamental protections that were taken away during the past administration, and does nothing to address systemic problems such as college costs and government oversight.

Beacon Press Mourns the Passing of Howard Zinn

  Photo by Roslyn Zinn

The staff of Beacon Press deeply mourns the passing of Howard Zinn, historian, author, playwright, social activist, and friend.

In the coming days, we will share remembrances of Zinn, along with some of his own words. Until then, here are links to obituaries and some places where you can read Zinn's words online.

Boston Globe: Historian-Activist Zinn Dies

New York Times: Howard Zinn, Historian, Dies at 87

Democracy Now! Howard Zinn Tribute

Daniel Ellsberg: A Memory of Howard Zinn

The Nation: Goodbye, Howard Zinn

Guernica Magazine interview: A People's History of Howard Zinn

Danielle Ofri: Doctor-Writers: What Are the Ethics?

Danielle Ofri is a writer and practicing internist at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. She is the editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her newest book is Medicine in Translation: Journeys with my Patients (View the YouTube book trailer.) You can follow Danielle on Twitter and Facebook, or visit her homepage.

There is a veritable epidemic of doctor-writers out there. What is going on?

Are doctors suddenly in the kiss-and-tell mode? What about confidentiality? Professionalism? HIPAA?

As one of the aforementioned doctor-writers, I look upon this trend with both awe and trepidation.  I suspect that that this flourishing literary phenomenon relates to the public’s fascination and fear about all things medical. It also relates to the falling away of previous, pedestal-like images of doctors and doctoring. Lastly, it may have occurred to the medical profession-- and this has taken a few centuries, it seems-- that doctors have profound emotional reactions to the work we do, and that exploring these reactions may offer benefit to both patient and doctor.

Whatever the reason, this literary genre appears to be here to stay, and it is worth considering the ethical implications. Legally, there doesn't appear to be much beyond protecting identity and avoiding libel.

Adele Barker: Jaffna Rebuilds: After The Tsunami In Sri Lanka

Today is election day in Sri Lanka, and today's post is from Adele Barker, who was awarded a Ucross Fellowship for her work on her latest book, Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka. Barker has taught at the universities of Arizona and Washington, and is the author and editor of five books on Russian literature and cultural life. In 2001-2002 she received a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant to teach and write in Sri Lanka. After the tsunami she returned to the island where she traveled to the areas most devastated by the waves and by the thirty year old civil war between the Tamil Tigers and the central Sinhalese government. This post is part of a series, appearing at the Huffington Post marking the anniversary of the 2004 tsunami.

January 4, 2010

It's kite season on the Jaffna Peninsula in northern Sri Lanka. On the tip of the peninsula, people are flying their homemade kites along the sea's edge with a little help from the northeast monsoon winds. It's a good season up here for other things as well. Peace has come to the north of this war torn country. It's a very different place than it was three years ago when I was here. Sri Lankans from all over the island are now free to travel to the north. For foreigners it is still problematic. Small guest houses that had gone to ruin are being rebuilt. Just outside of town the land is being cultivated for the first time in many many years. People are busy turning the soil, and planting everything from onions to cabbage and chilies on land that was occupied by the military during war time. Each week more land is being released back to the population at large, something that is absolutely crucial given the number of people up here who need to be resettled.

Downtown Jaffna is booming with the kind of energy that tells you that this is an area intent on rebuilding. Three years ago when I was up here working on my book Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka, the center of Jaffna looked like a poster city for civil war, twenty-six years of it to be exact. Mostly the stores sold tools and twine, the markets were bare, textile shops sat waiting for the odd customer. The only shops that seemed to be doing well were the ones selling bicycle seats since petrol was both expensive and generally unavailable.

Jonathan M. Metzl: In Medical Records, a Story of the Racialization of Schizophrenia

Today's post is an excerpt from The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease by Jonathan M. Metzl. Metzl is associate professor of psychiatry and women's studies and director of the Culture, Health, and Medicine Program at the University of Michigan. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Metzl has written extensively for medical, psychiatry, and popular publications. His books include Prozac on the Couch and Difference and Identity in Medicine. 

Reading the medical charts of the patients of Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, I felt a mixture of responsibility and deep sadness. For better and largely for worse, the Ionia charts documented the lives of the marginalized and the forgotten in novel-like detail, and in ways that made the medical records of today seem impersonal and flat. This was because the charts recorded people in two conflicting ways: in their roles as patients and convicts, as defined by interactions with the state hospital complex and the courts, and in their roles as sons, daughters, fathers, husbands, wives, or loners, as defined by letters, cards, and other texts. The charts also documented in minute detail the tragedy of what it meant to be warehoused in a state asylum at midcentury -- and in particular, in an asylum where short sentences devolved into lifelong incarceration. A number of charts contained yearly notes from patients to their doctors voicing such sentiments as "Doc, I really think I am cured," or "Dear Doctor, I believe I am ready to go home," or "You have no right to keep me here after my sentence is over." These letters stacked thirty deep in some charts, signifying years of pleading and longing and anger, together with thirty years' of responses from clinicians urging, "You are almost there" or "Perhaps next year." Invariably, the last note in each stack was a death certificate from the Ionia coroner.

I visited the archive regularly over the next four years. With the help of my research assistant, I analyzed and catalogued hospital administrative records and the charts of nearly six hundred randomly selected patients admitted to the hospital between the late 1920s and the early 1970s, under the agreement that I significantly alter all personal identifying information about patients, as I have done in the case descriptions that appear in this book. Names, dates, and places have been changed, and vignettes represent condensed and extrapolated aggregates drawn from the rich case materials. All doctor-patient dialogue and text in quotation marks is reproduced verbatim. I also visited Ionia on numerous occasions and conducted a series of oral histories with surviving members of the hospital staff, though, perhaps tellingly, I located no surviving patients despite numerous attempts.

What stories boxes tell. Ionia was its own planet, walled off, orbiting, a place where real people worked and lived and died. Then came a series of public scandals, the advent of psychopharmaceuticals, and changes in legal systems and penal codes. Decreased public funding followed, along with encroachment by regional forensic centers. Finally, the transformation. The boxes were but light-years of this implosion, vapor trails, found poems, measurable heat. Disembodied voices that told silent stories of what it meant to be incarcerated, or neglected, or entrenched, or immured.

Link Roundup: Sri Lanka, Schizophrenia, The Abortion Wars

The Sri Lankan election is tomorrow, and the Toronto Star spoke with Adele Barker about the tensions and bitterness of the contest.

African-American men are diagnosed with schizophrenia at rates four to five times more than other groups. The Root talked with Jonathan Metzl about this issue and his new book, The Protest Psychosis.

Sophia Raday is now blogging at Military.com, contributing posts about her politically-mixed marriage.

Carole Joffe discusses the Abortion Wars with Salon.com.

The authors of Hollowing Out the Middle look at an Endangered Species: the American Heartland.

CNN Newsroom featured a live interview with Sonia Sanchez on Sunday. The five minute interview focused on the Smithsonian's Freedom's Sisters traveling exhibit, which features Sonia Sanchez and nineteen other 19th and 20th century African-American female activists. The video is embedded here, but if it doesn't appear, you can follow this link.

Carole Joffe: Health Reform, Violence and Blanket Warmers: The Status of Abortion on Roe V Wade Day

Today's post is from Carole Joffe, author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us (forthcoming in early 2010). Joffe is professor of sociology at the University of California-Davis and a researcher at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California-San Francisco, and she contributes to the blog at RHrealitycheck.org.

Taking stock of where the abortion issue stands at this, the 37th anniversary of Roe v Wade, its hard not to conclude that the present moment is one largely of disappointment and concern for abortion rights supporters. This disappointment is especially poignant, given the exhilaration that many felt a year ago, when Barack Obama took office. After eight long years of George W. Bush, a presidency whose record on abortion and other reproductive matters was so egregious, it is truly hard to parody (remember the proposal to provide health care for fetuses, not the pregnant women carrying those fetuses, or abstinence programs aimed at 18-29 year olds?), there were high expectations, perhaps unrealistically so, for the Obama presidency.

To be sure, some good things in the reproductive realm have happened in this new administration, particularly with respect to international matters. The notorious global "gag rule," which prevented U.S. funding for family planning services in countries or agencies that used their own funds for abortion-related activities, was quickly overturned. The State Department, under the leadership of Hillary Clinton, made clear that abstinence promotion would no longer be a centerpiece of this administration's HIV-AIDS policy. Clinton herself recently gave a powerhouse of a speech, in commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the landmark UN Conferences in Cairo and Beijing in the mid-1990s, reaffirming the administration's commitment to the empowerment of women globally, and the crucial role that reproductive health services play in this.

Domestically, however, there is much less to cheer about. Positions in the federal bureaucracy that may be obscure, but which are central to delivering good reproductive health care (and undoing the damage of the Bush years), such as the deputy assistant secretary for population affairs, the official in charge of all federally funded contraceptive services, remain unfilled while the administration has focused laser-like on health reform.

David Chura: "Zero Tolerance" Creates More Problems Than it Solves

Today's post is from David Chura, author of I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. Chura has worked with at-risk teenagers for forty years. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and multiple literary journals and anthologies, and he is a frequent lecturer and advisor on incarcerated youth. This post originally appeared at his Kids in the System blog.

 "Zero tolerance." It sounds like a good idea: "Put your foot down." "Get tough." "We're not taking it anymore."

The American public, worried about the purported drug and gun wars being fought in our cities in the 1990s, grabbed onto this concept. In turn, a number of states and municipalities adopted "zero tolerance" laws.

Since then "zero tolerance" has pervaded our culture.

Draconian drug laws impose harsh sentences on nonviolent offenders, glutting prisons and draining overextended state budgets, while leaving the people with drug problems untreated.

Our hard-hitting laws about who is a sex offender create a caste of people who will be a burden for the rest of their lives on the very society these laws hoped to shield.

Certainly citizens, young and old, need to be protected from real sex offenders, but consider the case of a 17-year-old I taught at the county jail.

Gail Dines: A Sex Robot as an “Ideal Partner”

Today's post is from Gail Dines, author of the forthcoming book Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. Dines has written and lectured on the porn industry for over two decades. She is professor of sociology and women's studies at Wheelock College.

For all those women who think men are interested only in sex and not conversation or intimacy, think again. A New Jersey based company, ironically called True Companion, has come out with what it calls the "the world's first sex robot". This is, according to news reports, a life-size rubber doll that has all the "necessary" orifices. Why the big news? After all, this is not the first time that the porn industry has come out with a sex doll. The company Real Doll has been around since 1996 and offers "an extensive list of options, including 10 female body types and 16 interchangeable female faces." Offering to customize the doll to the desires of the particular consumer – color and shape of pubic hair, fingernail colors, hairstyle, ethnic features etc., -- the company boasts that "If you've ever dreamed of creating your ideal partner, then you have come to the right place."

True Companion is trying to build a business on the deep insight that some men want more from their ideal partner than silent beauty. For about $8,000 True Companion offers a doll that actually talks in response to various stimuli, generating nuanced and complex sentences such as "I love holding hands with you." Douglas Hines, the owner of True Companion, wants the customer to be able to "talk and relate to" the doll because he has come to the great realization that "Sex only goes so far -- then you want to be able to talk to the person." At last, men have discovered that for most women -- and perhaps a few dolls -- conversation matters! Well, it's a start.

As ridiculous as this robot may seem to many of us, it actually makes perfect sense in a society saturated by porn, where the average age boys first view porn is 11 years. Boys and men are socialized by porn to see sex as lacking in connection, intimacy and emotion. Sex in porn is all about penetration; as chrisfjohn, commenting on the robot on the Huffington Post, said, "the great part about porn is that you don't have to deal with all of the emotions and drama of a relationship." For chrisfJohn the robot is a bit too emotionally connected -- he doesn't want to "have to listen to it talk." For Don E Chute, on the other hand, the price is a bit steep because, he calculates, for that amount he could buy "roughly, 80, $100 hookers." To be fair, many of the comments do see the problem with the robot-as-partner idea, but the misogyny still drips from their posts, as in the case of AZ85283, when he asks "Mothers, what the hell are you raising?"

Of course, it's not the mothers but the pornographic culture that is raising men who are increasingly seeing women as interchangeable with sex dolls. If a doll with three orifices can stand in for a woman, then it doesn't bode well for women who want to be seen as equal to men and deserving of full human rights. To see just how gender specific this is, can you imagine women shelling out thousands of dollars for a male doll, no matter what size his manhood, even if it did say, "can I make dinner for you"?

Martin Luther King, Jr.: The World House (excerpt)

Today's post is an excerpt from Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Martin Luther King, Jr. The last book written by Dr. King, it is one of the first, along with Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, to be released by Beacon Press as part of The King Legacy Series. In this prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering, asserting that humankind-for the first time-has the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.

Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: "A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together." This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great "world house" in which we have to live together-- black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu-- a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.

However deeply American Negroes are caught in the struggle to be at last at home in our homeland of the United States, we cannot ignore the larger world house in which we are also dwellers. Equality with whites will not solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world society stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war.

All inhabitants of the globe are now neighbors. This worldwide neighborhood has been brought into being largely as a result of the modern scientific and technological revolutions. The world of today is vastly different from the world of just one hundred years ago. A century ago Thomas Edison had not yet invented the incandescent lamp to bring light to many dark places of the earth. The Wright brothers had not yet invented that fascinating mechanical bird that would spread its gigantic wings across the skies and soon dwarf distance and place time in the service of man. Einstein had not yet challenged an axiom and the theory of relativity had not yet been posited.

Human beings, searching a century ago as now for better understanding, had no television, no radios, no telephones and no motion pictures through which to communicate. Medical science had not yet discovered the wonder drugs to end many dread plagues and diseases. One hundred years ago military men had not yet developed the terrifying weapons of warfare that we know today-- not the bomber, an airborne fortress raining down death; nor napalm, that burner of all things and flesh in its path. A century ago there were no sky-scraping buildings to kiss the stars and no gargantuan bridges to span the waters. Science had not yet peered into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space, nor had it penetrated oceanic depths. All these new inventions, these new ideas, these sometimes fascinating and sometimes frightening developments, came later. Most of them have come within the past sixty years, sometimes with agonizing slowness, more characteristically with bewildering speed, but always with enormous significance for our future.

Ann Braude: Remembering Mary Daly

Mary Daly, a world-renowned radical feminist philosopher, died on January 3rd. Today's post honoring Daly is from Ann Braude, Senior Lecturer on American Religious History and Director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School.

What color flowers do you choose for a memorial for Mary Daly? Deep red roses for radicalism and women's blood? The lighter roses seemed more calming and reflective, closer to my own mood. But would Mary have blanched at the prettiness, the conventional feminine associations of the pastels? Or would she have relished the playfulness of pink with baby’s breath? Or would she have hated the idea of roses altogether, decrying working conditions on Brazilian flower farms? I settled on deep coral roses with purple asters. The unconventional contrast seemed right, and, sadly, Mary would not be there to argue with the choice.

But she would still be arguing in my mind. Mary Daly made us think about everything: every choice, every action, every word. Because of her, generations of women and men questioned what had never been questioned before. Two dozen of us whose lives were changed by Mary Daly's work gathered on Tuesday at Harvard Divinity School to remember one of the most courageous and outrageous thinkers of the 20th century. Sitting in a circle, we recounted memories, crystalline in detail, of the extraordinary interventions of Mary and her work in our lives. Several brought missives from those who could not be present. While Mary's books are her legacy -- and all agreed that their importance has yet to be realized -- the change she wrought in so many souls is a powerful legacy as well.

Adele Barker: Tsunami Anniversary: A Christmas Without War

Today's post is from Adele Barker, who was awarded a Ucross Fellowship for her work on her latest book, Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka. Barker has taught at the universities of Arizona and Washington, and is the author and editor of five books on Russian literature and cultural life. In 2001-2002 she received a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant to teach and write in Sri Lanka. After the tsunami she returned to the island where she traveled to the areas most devastated by the waves and by the thirty year old civil war between the Tamil Tigers and the central Sinhalese government.

This post is the first of a series, appearing at the Huffington Post, marking the anniversary of the 2004 tsunami. This week's tragedy in Haiti calls painfully to mind the human loss and devastation of five years ago.

December 25, 2009

Everyone is complaining about the heat here, even the stalwarts who were born to it. Disgorged from mind numbing twenty-some odd hour flights, my son and I arrived to find the chocolates we had brought as Christmas presents liquefied into something the consistency of a post-rain mud flow. Vitamin capsules succumbed to the heat in Ziploc bags; lipstick lost its former identity as we moved to the tune of Christmas carols, bright lights and election streamers that dot the streets of this country just a heartbeat north of the equator. We are back in Sri Lanka. It's Christmas in Colombo!

My son Noah and I have come back to this island that was our home for a year after 9/11. Noah has not been back since 2002. I returned for eight months after the tsunami to work on my book about the island Not Quite Paradise. I thought I had finished the book in 2004, but then the wave hit. And everything changed. The book will be out in a few days. We both decided we needed to return, to put our feet on the island again, to take stock of a place that had so deeply defined our lives for that year and longer. In just days it will be five years since the tsunami. It feels to us as if it should be marked in some way, but so far there has been nothing in the press about it. Friends tell me that the country is too busy with other things, the upcoming presidential election in January for one. The kickoff to the campaign began the day after we arrived. For many this is going to be a bitterly fought contest between the incumbent president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and General Sarath Fonseka both of whom claim responsibility for the victory in May of this year over the Tamil Tigers. Some say this election is going to determine the future of this country. Others fear that the direction has already been charted and that nothing is going to change regardless of who is running the place. But this is what is garnering the attention these days as Noah and I thread our way through the traffic of Christmas shoppers and campaign throngs in downtown Colombo.

Crisis in Haiti: Ways to Give

In the terrible wake of the devastating quake in Haiti, we have heard this about long-time Beacon friend and supporter, author Edwidge Danticat, who was interviewed for this story about Haitian-Americans waiting for news of loved ones:

Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American author whose books about the country have won the National Book Award and the Pushcart Prize, gathered family and friends at her Miami home, which has become something of a command center.

"Some people are online, some are watching CNN, some are listening to Haitian radio," she said late Tuesday night. "There's a huge sense of helplessness about it. You want to go there, but you just have to wait. I think the hardest part is the lack of information."

She said that for years, Haitians wondered with trepidation what would happen if an earthquake hit.

"Life is already so fragile in Haiti, and to have this on such a massive scale, it's unimaginable how the country will be able to recover from this."

Those who want to pitch in are encouraged to check out these resources:

AMERICAN RED CROSS
Text “HAITI” to “90999″ to make a $10 donation.
2025 E Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20006
(800) REDCROSS (733-2767)

CARE
151 Ellis Street
Atlanta, GA 30303
(800) 521-CARE (521-2273)

DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS USA/MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES (MSF)
333 7th Avenue, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10001-5004
(888) 392-0392

OXFAM AMERICA
226 Causeway St., 5th Floor
Boston, MA 02114-2206
(800) 77-OXFAM (776-9326)

Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
PO Box 845259
Boston, MA 02284-5259
(617) 868-6600

Don Belton: Voodoo for Charles

This post is quite a bit longer than what we usually publish here at Beacon Broadside, but we hope that you'll take the time to read it in its entirety. The story is by author Don Belton, and was included in Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream, which was edited by Belton and published by Beacon Press in 1995. Don Belton's death on December 27th was a great loss, and we feel that this essay offers a fine example of the power and humanity of his work.

On Christmas morning in 1991 I telephoned my nephew. I have two nephews: Charles, who had only just turned nineteen the week before, and Wayne, Jr., who is somewhere in his middle twenties by now. These are the children of my brother's first marriage. My nephews grew up in Newark, New Jersey, where much of my early childhood was spent, but that was before the conflagration of the 1967 riot and the razing of what remained of the city by the local, state, and federal governments in the name of an urban renewal which is yet to come. While Newark was not an easy city to live in, it was still, in any case, from the late 50s to the mid-60s (when I lived there with my great-grandmother in the black district called the Hill) a city. Today Newark is the ghost of a city. Its statistics for AIDS, black-on-black crime, infant mortality, and unemployment bear witness to dissolution.

Charles was living in Newark in 1991. I had not spoken to him in over four years. I hadn't seen him in a longer time. The last time we'd spoken was by telephone. (For several years now, I seem to talk to the members of my family only on the phone.) By 1991 I still felt unresolved about our last conversation. I had been visiting my parents' house in Philadelphia, while they were away on a trip. "Uncle Don," Charles had said to me on the phone back then, "Where's Grandad and Gramma? I want to tell them I got shot."

Jeremy Adam Smith: Dads Should be a Voice of Sanity in Sports

Today's post is from Jeremy Adam Smith, editor of Shareable.net and author of The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family. He blogs about the politics of parenting at Daddy Dialectic and at Mothering.com, where this post originally appeared as part of his series: "25 Ways for Dads to Change the World."

"Keep yer stick on the ice!" yelled one dad, his voice filled with anger.

"Come on, number fifteen!" yelled another. "You skate like a girl!"

Liko and I were watching a youth hockey game at the Yerba Buena rink in San Francisco. We were surrounded by fathers watching their boys play hockey... and, man, was it ugly.

As the kids battled on the ice, you could feel the tension rising among the parents.

Then I heard a lone, small voice from the other side of the bleachers:

"Have fun!" it said.

I looked up, and so did the other parents.

There stood a fellow on the top bleacher, smiling down at us. The smile said, C'mon, guys, lighten up.

I chuckled, and a ripple of laughter spread through the stands. We did lighten up.

One of the (few) moms yelled, "Have fun keeping your sticks on the ice!"

"Have fun skating like a girl!" shouted a dad.

Link Roundup: Crazy or Nonconformist? Plus more...

Melissa Harris-Lacewell asks: Who Are You Calling Crazy? in her review of Jonathan Metzl's The Protest Psychosis.

Patricia Harman discussed The Blue Cotton Gown with WYPL's Book Talk. Listen to the podcast here.

On "The Choice" blog at NY Times, Alan Collinge calls for consumer protections on student loans.

Carol Joffe's Dispatches from the Abortion Wars is the book of the week on DoubleX.

The mammogram debate should be about science, not emotions, says Danielle Ofri. Dr. Ofri had a fantastic book launch for Medicine in Translation--congratulations!

David Chura: Kids in Juvenile Detention Centers are at High Risk of Sexual Abuse

Today's post is from David Chura, author of I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. Chura has worked with at-risk teenagers for forty years. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and multiple literary journals and anthologies, and he is a frequent lecturer and advisor on incarcerated youth.

The numbers are disturbing. During 2008 through 2009, 12 percent or 3,220 of the kids locked up in state or privately run juvenile detention centers reported that they had been sexually victimized by another kid or by facility staff.

Even more disturbing is that 10.3 percent stated they had had sexual contact with an adult staff member. Of that number, 1,150 kids said that sex or sexual contact was forced on them. All this according to the recently released National Survey of Youth in Custody (NSYC) report mandated by the Department of Justice as part of the Prison Rape Elimination Act.

Statistics have an odd way of getting to us.

On one hand, they're just numbers; cut and dry; lifeless; boring to read; easy to lose track of. Yet they’re potent, almost like talismans that draw our attention to the truth beneath them.

Amy Seidl: Copenhagen: Mind the Gap

Today's post is form Amy Seidl, author of Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World. Seidl has taught in the environmental studies programs at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont. She is currently a research scholar at Middlebury and is at work on a book about adapting to climate change. She lives with her family in Huntington, Vermont, in a solar- and wind-powered home.

Before the holidays, I attended the Copenhagen Climate talks, if virtually. From my Vermont office I fed hourly on an array of media: streaming video, updated reports, panel discussions, protest vigils, and live feeds from the delegates' plenaries. It was as good as being there minus the jet lag and Danish hospitality.

What's clear from my desk-chair participation is this: the connection between the final accord and contemporary climate science is almost nil, it's not even a gap: it's a gulf.

The scientific consensus is that 350 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide is the safe upper limit to ensure life on the planet. Simple really. By making 350 our target, nations commit to collectively reverse the upward trend of emissions and safeguard the planet–and human and nonhuman life–against extreme and perilous effects, a rational and scientifically-grounded approach.

In contrast, the outcome at Copenhagen was that nations "took note"–a kind of formal nod–of an agreement in which no emissions targets are listed, no time tables are set and, while two degree Celsius increase in temperature is listed as a goal, no one is held legally accountable to it. Given the impotence of this pact, we can assume that the trajectory of annual increases in atmospheric carbon will continue. Indeed, the U.S.'s offer to reduce emissions by a mere 4% by 2020–when a 40% decline is necessary to achieve 350 ppm–is further evidence of our lack of belief in the science. The gap expands.