Beacon Broadside

The Heckler's Veto at School

David L. Hudson, Jr. is a First Amendment Scholar with the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. He teaches at Vanderbilt University Law School and Nashville School of Law. He is the author of Let the Students Speak!: A History of the Fight For Free Expression in American Schools.

Dissenting opinions obviously don’t have the force of law that majority opinions do. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t better reasoned. Recall that Justice John Marshall Harlan (the first one) was known as “the Great Dissenter” in part for his solitary dissent in the abhorrent Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the Court sanctioned segregation and the noxious separate-but-equal doctrine.

Judge Rosemary Pooler’s March 22 dissent in the student-speech case Cuff v. Valley Central School District from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals may not rise even close to that level of prominence. Yet it brought some much-needed perspective to an area of law in desperate need of it.

The case involved a class assignment in 2007 for fifth-graders at Berea Elementary School in Montgomery, N.Y., to color in a picture of an astronaut and write anything on it they wanted. The teacher allegedly told the class: “When I mean anything you want, anything. You can write about missiles.”

Hearing this, 10-year-old B.C. — in juvenile cases often only initials are used — wrote on his picture that he wanted to “blow up the school with all the teachers in it.” He showed the picture to his classmates and they laughed.

It was no laughing matter to the teacher, and B.C. received a six-day suspension. His parents sued on his behalf, alleging a violation of his First Amendment rights. When the case reached the 2nd Circuit, the three-judge panel ruled 2-1 in favor of school officials.

Judge Ralph Winter reasoned that school officials must have broad authority to handle student-speech issues in order to prevent violence or a substantial disruption of school under the U.S. Supreme Court’s famous decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969).

“Courts have allowed wide leeway to school administrators disciplining students for writings or other conduct threatening violence,” he wrote. “The threat of substantial disruption was aggravated by B.C.’s sharing of his ‘wish’ with fellow students, an act reasonably perceived as an attention-grabbing device.” The reasoning was that other students might engage in distracting copycat behavior that would interrupt education at the school.

Judge Pooler disagreed with this line of reasoning, noting that Tinker requires at least a forecast of a substantial disruption. To Pooler, B.C.’s act created only a “minor disruption.”

She also warned that the majority opinion allows a speaker’s First Amendment freedoms to be determined entirely by listeners. She didn’t use the term, but the majority opinion sanctioned the idea of a heckler’s veto on speech.

“The First Amendment’s protection of free speech cannot hinge entirely on the reaction of a listener to a person’s speech,” she wrote. “If that were the case, the First Amendment would be only as strong as the weakest, or at least the most thin-skinned, listener in a crowd.”

Pooler did not say that the student should win the case. Disputed factual issues, such as the meaning and relevance of B.C.’s past drawings, required the case to go to jury, she said.

The majority seemed to declare that any student expression with violent themes justifies school punishment. Pooler dug deeper and questioned such unrestrained deference to school officials by the majority.

Her opinion brings to mind Justice Abe Fortas’ warning in Tinker: “[I]n our system, undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression.”

Adrienne Rich: 1929-2012

The poet Adrienne Rich died yesterday at the age of 82. We ran this post in 2007 for Jewish Book Month, looking at her poetry through the lens of her Jewish identity. The author is Stephen Burt, Professor of English at Harvard University and the author of Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf). We republish it today in memory of Rich and her transformative, challenging, and courageous body of work. 

Photo by Robert Giard

You can find Adrienne Rich in anthologies of Jewish American poetry, but most of her many admirers do not think of her first (if at all) as a Jewish poet: they think of her as a feminist poet, as a political poet, as a GLBT activist, as a talented artificer in traditional metrical forms (during the 1950s) as a maker of  harshly original free verse (during the 1960s), as a woman who challenged herself to overcome "the fact of being separate" (as she put it in the early 1970s) in order to speak to and about other people's needs. Though Rich's father was Jewish (as was her late husband), she did not identify herself with any religion for most of her writing life: in high school, she recalled, "I am quite sure I was seen as Jewish (with a reassuringly gentile mother) in that double vision that bigotry allows." Her ambitious, assimilationist father, however, "did not give me the choice to be a Jew."

Rich's 1982 essay "Split at the Root," from which those sentences come, describes her long-delayed decision to call herself Jewish in print. If you read Rich's poem "Jerusalem" (1966) you will see her view religious heritage as an excuse for violence and a trap: "What I dream of the city," she writes, "is how hard it is to leave." An even earlier poem, "At the Jewish New Year," insisted on Rosh Hashanah that "this day is merely one/ Of thirty in September," and that "whatever we strain to forget/ Our memory must be long": "we" here means not Jews but assimilated Jews, Jews who want to distance themselves (but cannot distance themselves enough) from their shared religious past. [Ed's note: The New Yorker has unlocked this poem in their archives.]

Rich's later poems, by contrast, show her reclaiming Judaism as something to which she says she might want to belong. These poems often address the Baltimore family in which she grew up. "Grandmothers" (1980), for example, pays belated tribute to Hattie Rice Rich, the poet's father's mother, whose "sweetness of soul was a mystery to me," but in Rich's youth "a convenience for everyone": "you rose with the birds and children, boiled your own egg," "took the street-car downtown shopping/ endlessly for your son's whims, the whims of genius," and "All through World War Two the forbidden word/ Jewish was barely uttered in your son's house."

Rich is a poet of confrontation, one whose imagination flares at shows of defiant strength, and in this poem she can defy her Jewish father by acknowledging, as he did not want to acknowledge, the hard and quiet work done by her grandmother in bringing him up, work that Arnold Rich (in his daughter's telling) overlooked.  Rich has two grandmothers, but "Grandmothers" has three parts: one part for her maternal grandmother, who "married straight out of the convent school," one part for Hattie Rice Rich, Arnold's mother, and one part for Adrienne herself, entitled "Granddaughter," in which she describes herself as "born a white woman, Jewish or of curious mind," and newly interested in "'blood,' the all-powerful awful theme."

By "blood" Rich means, here, not the shedding of blood (as she did in "Jerusalem") but the lines of descent, the passing down of habits and beliefs (accompanied, in this instance, by passed-down genes), which enable Rich, the daughter of a Jew and a non-Jew, to call herself Jewish, and to explore, in middle age, the aspects of Judaism that said the most to her. And that is what she did in the book she wrote after finishing "Grandmothers," the book she would call Your Native Land, Your Life.  That book includes Rich's most accomplished poem on a Jewish theme, "Yom Kippur 1984," named for the day of fasting, self-examination and repentance that occurs near, but not at, the start of each Jewish year.

"Yom Kippur, 1984" explores the twinned Jewish obligations—especially relevant on Yom Kippur— to consider one's own life, to reflect on one's actions inwardly, as an individual, and the obligation—for observant Jews, a matter of Jewish law; for Rich, perhaps, a matter of ethics—to be with other Jews at certain times (Jewish law requires a minyan, at least ten Jews praying together, before certain prayers can be said). "Yom Kippur, 1984" begins:

What is a Jew in solitude?
What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid
far from your own or those you have called your own?
What is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man?
In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert
what in this world as it is can solitude mean?

[Read the full poem at the Poetry Foundation website.]

Rich sees Jewish affiliation, the decision to call oneself a Jew, as one example among many of protective solidarity: "the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew/ the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street: Make those be/ a woman's footsteps; as if she could believe in a woman's god."  She then admits, vexing herself, that "I also love separateness." Like almost all poets, she needs some time alone, unhindered by what other people expect her to say, whether in a synagogue or at a dinner table. Can she identify herself with a group—with Jews, for example—and still preserve the solitude, the distance from expectations, which all poets need?  The poem ends not by answering but by repeating the question, and asking what it would mean in a just world, a world in which we no longer wanted group identifications—religions, nations, labels of many kinds—for mutual protection, and could no longer use them to keep other people away.

Not coincidentally Rich uses very long, end-stopped lines for this poem: she has said that she associates these lines not just with the poetry of the Hebrew Bible but with Walt Whitman, that great poet of connections among Americans, and with Robinson Jeffers, the Californian poet of American misanthropy and solitude. Neither Whitman nor Jeffers were Jewish, but Rich, here, says that she is: she takes a Jewish occasion to reconsider the choices she has made—about where to live, how to spend her time and energy, how to write—and in doing so identifies her own poetic practice with a kind of ethically oriented self-examination we might think of as Jewish too.  On Yom Kippur Jews are asked to consider the previous year as a series of acts and decisions taken or declined; the Kol Nidre prayer, in which we ask divine forgiveness for obligations that we could not have carried out, is part of the service, but so too is the reminder that if we owe something to another human being, we must fulfill our obligation to that human being, not to a divine substitute.

Rich has used her Jewish material here to think both about family and about herself alone, to think both about solitude and about obligation. She will choose solitary reflection over participation in rituals and social occasions that seem to her false or oppressive (that's one reason she famously refused to accept the National Medal for the Arts). And yet her temperament has always drawn her also to shared tasks, to the ways in which people can work together to improve their lot. That is the Jewish mitzvah of tikkun olam, often and rightly invoked as a religious justification for political activism, and it is one of the ways that Rich, "split at the root" and alert to her contradictions, finds herself, still, writing Jewish books.

Longreads Wednesday: Emotional Doctors, EJ Graff on Trayvon Martin,

Want to read something longer than a tweet but shorter than book? Here are today's recommendations from Beacon Press. (And of course you can always browse our Scribd page, where we post sizeable excerpts from our books. Check out our spring releases here.)

Danielle Ofri, in the New York Times, looks at how emotions can interfere with honest communications between doctor and patient:

By now, even the most hard-core, old-school doctors recognize that emotions are present in medicine at every level, but the consideration of them rarely makes it into medical school curriculums, let alone professional charters. Typically, feelings are lumped into the catch-all of stress or fatigue, with the unspoken assumption that with enough gumption these irritants can be corralled.

The emotional layers in medicine, however, are far more pervasive. Emotions have been described by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio as the “continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming ...” This basso continuo thrums along, modulating doctors’ actions and perceptions, while we make a steady stream of conscious medical decisions that have direct consequences for our patients. Emotions can overshadow clinical algorithms, quality control measures, even medical experience. We may never fully master them, but we must at least be conscious of them and of how they can sometimes dominate the symphony of our actions. (Read more)

In the American Prospect, E. J. Graff examines her own emotional response to the murder of Trayvon Martin:

Why, with someone dead, with the evidence of Zimmerman’s past vigilantism and domestic violence charges and arrests and anger management courses, with those horrifying 911 tapes, and all the rest, why is the man still walking around free? 

Look, Zimmerman may not be guilty of murder. He might indeed have shot his gun in self-defense. It’s horrifying that he’s being tried in the media. So let him be charged and tried in a court of law, with both sides’ evidence marshaled and presented for twelve people to review. Why isn’t that being done?

More personally, I’ve been puzzling over why I can’t get over Martin’s death. Two weeks after I first heard the story, I am still looking at pictures of that child’s face, ready to burst out crying. I see black kids walking up our street or shooting basketballs on the playground, and want to run over and protect them. (Don’t worry, I know how they’d react to the crazy white lady barreling at them—I do have some restraint.) My own little guy has been subjected to many more hugs and kisses than usual, which can make an eight-year-old very impatient. And despite deadlines, I’ve been taking afternoon breaks to build three-story Lego extravaganzas with him. (Read more)

On Guernica, Aimee Phan recounts her foreclosure story, and why she may not ever own a house again. 

After receiving numerous mailings touting the benefits of HAMP, we visited the local HUD agency armed with the required pile of paperwork: copies of our last three years of income tax returns, paystubs, bank statements and utility bills, cautiously optimistic at the possibility of financial relief. After looking at the condo’s devaluation and our monthly expenses, the HUD officer seemed confident that we could lower our principal balance, and negotiate a more reasonable monthly rate. We would no longer have to worry about our ticking time bomb adjustable mortgage rate.

Instead, Bank of America rejected our remodification request, since we were current on our payments. Due to our combined incomes, they believed we could technically continue to make our monthly payments—and even afford to pay more. Of course they didn’t consider our deflated home value or the fact that we had another dependent, and had to eat. (Read more)

 

Jungleland or Grassroots Recovery? The Lower Ninth Ward as a Symbol of Hope

Tom Wooten is the author of We Shall Not Be Moved: Rebuilding Home in the Wake of Katrina, forthcoming this summer from Beacon Press.Since graduating from Harvard in 2008 and moving to New Orleans, he has worked as a researcher at Harvard's Kennedy School, as a neighborhood volunteer coordinator, and as a fifth- and sixth-grade writing teacher.

Nathaniel Rich’s recent New York Times Magazine article about urban abandonment in the Lower Ninth Ward is called “Jungleland.” Fascinated by the process of “nature reclaiming civilization,” Rich describes a dystopian city neighborhood: alligators drink from leaking fire hydrants; shadowy figures emerge from derelict houses to rob and rape honest residents; everywhere, lush green vines envelop blocks that were once densely populated. There is truth to Rich’s Joseph-Conrad-meets-David-Simon portrayal, but it isn’t the whole story.

Life is being restored to significant portions of the Lower Ninth Ward, and the heroes of this effort are fiercely determined residents who have returned to their blocks and rebuilt their homes. Approximately a quarter of the Lower Ninth Ward’s 20,000 pre-storm residents are back, mostly concentrated in the southern half of the neighborhood on higher ground close to the Mississippi. Shortly after the storm, residents collaborated to reopen the K-8 Martin Luther King Charter School, one of the rare community success stories in an education system increasingly dominated by outsider-run schools. A grocery store is set to begin construction soon on St. Claude Avenue. Considering the unique set of challenges residents faced after the flooding of Katrina and Rita, their progress to date is noteworthy.

What obstacles have the 5,500 residents who have returned to the Lower Ninth Ward overcome? Because of a particularly severe levee breach, their neighborhood experienced the most concentrated physical destruction in New Orleans. Not only did they have to work harder and spend more to rebuild than other residents, but they also had to overcome a unique stigma. Although the Lower Ninth Ward was no more vulnerable to flooding than dozens of other low-lying neighborhoods, Americans incorrectly inferred that the area was particularly at risk, and a national debate ensued about the merits of rebuilding there. The neighborhood remained sealed off months after the rest of the city reopened, straining displaced residents’ finances and forcing many into permanent exile. Owing to controversy over the Lower Ninth Ward’s fate, utility providers were slow to restore service to hundreds of blocks in the neighborhood, forcing some families to wait for years to return and prompting others to give up and settle elsewhere. The federally funded and state-administered Road Home program awarded rebuilding grants based on pre-storm property values, a policy that yielded higher payouts for residents of wealthy neighborhoods and put black working class areas like the Lower Ninth Ward at a distinct disadvantage.

In light of these challenges, restoring life in the Lower Ninth Ward has been a collective undertaking by necessity. As occurred in other New Orleans neighborhoods, a remarkable coalition of residents rose up to help their neighbors come home. Patricia Jones founded The Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association in 2006, providing financial coaching, free architectural services, and volunteer labor to hundreds of returning Lower Ninth Ward families. After years of pre-storm work with the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, the late great Pam Dashiell teamed up with dozens of other residents to found the Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development (CSED). Mack Mclendon had the courage and vision to convert his newly purchased Lamanche Street warehouse into a multi-purpose community center, with the long-term goal of converting the space into a hub for neighborhood youth.

These community-based efforts are driving the Lower Ninth Ward’s recovery, and not only because of the direct services they provide. For one thing, they have created the social infrastructure needed for outsider-led groups to effectively do work in the neighborhood. Common Ground partnered closely with each of the above groups to provide them with volunteer labor. Brad Pitt’s meetings with CSED resident leaders helped to seal his Make It Right foundation’s commitment to the Lower Ninth Ward, and informed its focus on building physically resilient and energy efficient houses. More importantly, resident-led recovery efforts in the Lower Ninth Ward have given returning families confidence that they are not alone. There is a community meeting every Thursday night at the Greater Little Zion Baptist Church, and the optimism at each meeting is palpable. Every week, families who have just moved home are asked to ring the church bell to announce their return.

Unfortunately, the Lower Ninth Ward’s tremendous grassroots recovery efforts have not been enough to bring the neighborhood back, which explains the tableaus of abandonment that Rich explores in his article. The Lower Ninth Ward’s plight results from a failure of national will, and it fits into a broader pattern of divestment from American cities. Detroit, St. Louis, and other Rust Belt cities have been gutted from the inside out, and cities as diverse as Trenton and Colorado Springs have eliminated essential city services as a result of federal cutbacks. It doesn’t help when commentators contend that such urban decline is the inevitable result of market forces, or that struggling American cities have simply become obsolete. Similarly insidious is an emerging brand of post-apocalyptic voyeurism that revels in the decay of American infrastructure. The tour buses that rumble through the Lower Ninth Ward without stopping are prime offenders on this front; the winning Sundance film and a forthcoming documentary about scavenging scrap metal in Detroit seem poised to lead viewers into a similar trap.

So what should our orientation be to struggling urban environments? Without much prompting, Americans felt a profound sense of collective responsibility about rebuilding the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. We should apply the same sense of resolve and moral clarity to other sites. Cities are national treasures. They are centers of tremendous commerce and creativity; they are cultural and religious melting pots; they are humane refuges where Americans can live comfortably without cars. Like interstate highways and public universities, they serve a profound collective good, and they are worth maintaining even if their most direct beneficiaries cannot always foot the entire bill.

The Lower Ninth Ward is now internationally famous, often standing symbolically for the destruction wrought along hundreds of miles of the American Gulf Coast. With enough genuine will at the city, state, and federal levels, Lower Ninth Ward residents can transform their neighborhood from a symbol of abandonment into a symbol of hope.  

'Xanax' Nation? My Anti-Anxiety Meds Give Me Enough to Worry About

Kaitlin Bell Barnett is the author of Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up. She is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in numerous national and regional outlets, including the Boston Globe, New York Observer, Parents, and Prevention. This piece originally appeared at Huffington Post. 

Journalists love declaring that psychiatric medications symbolize some slice of the zeitgeist. So I can't say I was entirely surprised when I opened my mailbox the other day and saw New York magazine's cover article proclaiming that "If the 90s were the decade of Prozac, all hollow-eyed and depressed, then this is the era of Xanax, all jumpy and edgy and short of breath."

Translation: Depression is out, anxiety is in, antidepressants are passé (Statistics showing continued robust usage be damned), and anti-anxiety benzodiazepines, around since the 60s, are trendy again, the perfect no-commitment chill pills for a nation of "panicked strivers" contending with a new age of anxiety but without time or inclination to commit to actually changing their lives or going to therapy.

How convenient, I thought. My psychiatric problems -- and corresponding psychopharmaceuticals -- match up with the trends! First I was depressed and angsty and got Prozac, then I got anxious and got benzos! Of course, I happen to be getting depressed again lately, but one can't be completely on-trend all the time.

In fact, if you didn't know me better, you might well mistake me for one of the "functionally anxious" types who dominate journalist Lisa Miller's New York story, rather than the sort of person she quickly shuffles off into another category altogether -- the people with an actual, you know, anxiety disorder.

The people without anxiety disorders who do populate the New York piece are the sort most of us love to hate, but also can't resist reading about in these sorts of articles: Manhattanite professionals who in the Annie Hall era would have been called "neurotic" but who now like to describe themselves as "super stressed," like it's a badge of honor.

According to the article, they're turning more often these days to drugs like Xanax or Ativan when anxiety from their legitimately high-pressure lives gets to be too much. Prescriptions of these drugs, collectively referred to as benzodiazepines, are up 17 percent since 2006. The article does not mention that prescriptions for other psychiatric medications have increased, too -- antidepressant use in adults grew nearly 30 percent between 2001 and 2010 at Medco, one of the nation's largest pharmacy systems, and atypical antipsychotic usage grew a staggering 350 percent. Writing the New York article with a different thesis in mind, one could contend that we're all demoralized over the stalled economic recovery and turning to antidepressants -- or that we're frustrated and adding antipsychotics to our antidepressant regimens to give them a boost.

But back to benzos and anxiety.

The article makes it sound as though it's terribly easy to distinguish between the ordinary, high-functioning people who turn to benzos every so often when the stress of their lives overwhelms them and the people with diagnosed anxiety disorders. In fact, it can be quite complicated -- and that's why psychiatrists are fighting so bitterly over the definitions of the various disorders to be included in the DSM-5, the profession's diagnostic manual, which is under revision and due out in May 2013.

Doctors are curiously absent from the New York piece, though they are, of course, the ones responsible for actually doling out the prescriptions for benzos and all other drugs. They are quite rightly very concerned about how to determine which anxiety is pathological and overwhelming and warrants such a drug, and which kind might be better dealt with through other means.

This is a subject that has been troubling the medical profession for decades, In the 70s and 80s, benzodiazepine misuse became enough of a public health problem to prompt doctors to cut down on prescribing -- and publish a lot of anguished articles on the subject in medical journals. Some of the increase in use the New York article discusses may even reflect a return in doctor's attitudes to more comfort prescribing the drugs after years of shying away from them. (Recent articles in trade publications have made a case for their judicious use.)

All this difficulty distinguishing the casual users from the truly stricken lies in the nature of the conditions for which benzos are typically prescribed. Although sometimes given in high doses as sedatives to seriously agitated patients in psychiatric hospital settings, they are more commonly given to people whose anxiety is self-described and not necessarily readily observable to the doctor. This is true even when we are talking about anxiety of the sort that impairs people's day-to-day functioning, as opposed to the kind Miller focuses on in her New York article, which we might call the "just as easily dispatched with a glass of wine variety."

Anxiety is a funny thing, because although it seems the most all-consuming and obvious thing in the world when you are experiencing it, in fact it's actually quite difficult to detect. When I've been at my most anxious, I suspect that I've struck my psychiatrists and therapists as, at most, a bit agitated. Perhaps they've noticed some circles under my eyes, or that I look a little thin. Conceivably, I would talk a little faster than usual, or my eyes would dart around the room. But they have told me that, frankly, I don't seem all that different. I put on a good façade of normality.

In contrast, here is what I do experience: When I arrive at the psychiatrist for a "med check," I won't have slept a solid eight hours in weeks. I will have awoken early every morning with a jolt, my heart racing at some threat I can't place. It will continue that way all day until I go to bed. My stomach will churn and the room will spin and I'll be unable to eat. My thoughts will race from one unarticulated worry to another. I will feel desperate for companionship yet unable to listen or focus on conversation. I will feel constantly on the verge of tears. But I would have to tell my doctor all of this. She is not likely to go offering me a benzodiazepine prescription on the basis of some dark circles and a little hurried speech.

Once procured, such a prescription usually works magic, however. During the three periods of sustained anxiety I've suffered, I have taken a small dose of Klonopin, a long-lasting benzo, every few hours, as a way of keeping a steady level in my system. I've also taken it many other times when I've felt my anxiety flare on isolated occasions.

Despite the drug's effectiveness -- or perhaps because of it -- I never feel good about taking it. When my anxiety is pervasive, I need to constantly watch for a resurgence of panic. This makes me feel dependent, like a drug addict eyeing the clock for my next hit. When my anxiety returns in isolated episodes, I wonder if I'm simply the equivalent of the functionally anxious people in the New York article -- someone who happens to have a Klonopin prescription but who really doesn't need to be taking it and could just as well go to a yoga class. I tend to feel guilty about it until I get the telltale early morning waking -- and then I start to worry that I'm entering another terrible extended anxious phase.

The other reason articles like the one in New York make me cringe is that benzos, being controlled substances, already carry the taint of misuse, and talk of overworked PR execs popping pills to deal with anxiety over a work presentation or helicopter moms doing so to handle separation anxiety from their preschoolers is likely to make doctors, already cagey about prescribing, even more so.

Even for those of us with an anxiety disorder diagnosis and a history of benzo prescriptions, there's already an awkward dance involved in procuring a refill. Since benzos are controlled substances, doctors can't call in prescriptions (and may not have emergency appointments available go hand over the precious slip of paper). Anxiety, however, has a tendency to spiral -- and quickly. Many people find it useful, therefore, to have a bottle around in case of an emergency. But that means requesting a refill when you are not, technically, quaking under the covers in a fetal position.

Some doctors are sensitive enough to realize this, but, wanting to avoid tolerance and misuse, the responsible ones generally don't go around offering up refills out of the blue. For many people, especially young people in their 20s and 30s, who happen to be the group most likely to abuse psychotherapeutic prescription drugs according to federal government statistics, this makes asking for refills a delicate and awkward affair. I'm sure that my requests, for example, are accompanied by far too much justifying. One young woman I interviewed for my book on the topic of growing up on psychiatric medication suffered from debilitating anxiety and was so terrified of being judged an addict (She had a family history of alcohol abuse) that she refused to ask for benzo refills at all. This, even though it was patently obvious from the most casual encounter with her that some benzos would have done her good.

After my last psychiatrist's appointment, during which my doctor upped the dosage of my antidepressant to deal with a creeping recurrence of my depression, she ended the appointment by asking what I was doing for the rest of the day. I told her I was working on a column responding to the apparent news that benzodiazepines were the hot new drugs. She rolled her eyes as though this were the height of ridiculousness. "Benzodiazepines are the hot new drugs? Since when?" She did not ask if I would like a refill on my Klonopin.

Monday Media Roundup: Three strikes, the Lammys, and standing up at work

Judge Nancy Gertner (In Defense of Women) explains why Massachusetts doesn't need a three-strikes law:

So the notion of using a thermo-nuclear or a three strikes bill for the purpose of targeting the one or two people, who are slipping through the cracks, makes no sense and it’s not costless. I’m not just talking about the cost in terms of money. It’s not costless to send people away for a long time, they get out at some point and then we are dealing with, you know, the rubble of their lives… Massachusetts now has a geriatric prison wing, for people who have been 40 and 50 years. It’s not costless to over generalize in the way these bills do. (Radio Boston)

The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC spoke with Jonathan Metzl (The Protest Psychosis) along with Nicole Bell, Adam Serwer and Ron Allen about the Trayvon Martin murder.  

Why do more young adults live at home with their parents? 

A new solution for making ebooks and poetry play nice. 

Beacon Press has two nominees for this year's Lambda Literary Awards. Wouldn't it figure in the same category (LGBT nonfiction)? God vs. Gay by Jay Michaelson and A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski. Very proud to see both of them there!

Quote of the day: "As a historian, you can almost say the birth of heterosexuality is one of the weirder pieces of fallout that comes from the French Revolution." Hanne Blank interviewed in the Toronto Star. 

Trend piece of the day: "Many employees abandon sitting while working" at the Boston Globe. I type this post while standing at workstation, a change in work habits that has much improved my well-being. Are you standing or sitting at work?

Crippling Debt at Foxwoods Masks the Hidden Social Costs of Gambling

Today's post is an interview with Sam Skolnik, author of High Stakes: The Rising Cost of America's Gambling Addiction. Skolnik began his journalism career as a news aide and freelance writer for the Washington Post. He went on to report for the Legal Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Las Vegas Sun. He's won several national journalism awards and was selected to be a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow for 2007-08.

Skolnik spoke with Jessie Bennett, the editor of Beacon Broadside, via Skype earlier this week.

The New York Times Magazine cover story last weekend was about the financial problems faced by Foxwoods casino. I grew up in Southeastern Connecticut, where the Foxwood and Mohegan Sun casinos were seen as economic saviors for the region. But what are the hidden costs of gambling for regions that choose to embrace it?

In fairness to that story, it did raise some interesting points. I don't think that it had been widely known that Foxwoods was in trouble to the degree that it clearly is. And the article also raises points that are worth making, even for those like myself who are clearly skeptical about the long-term impact of gambling, about the fact that Connecticut has benefited from the jobs that have come into the state as well as from tax revenues. 

That said, there are always costs when gambling comes into a jurisdiction, and that is no different in Connecticut than it is anywhere else. New gamblers are created--this is always the case, even in the saturated market that we're in now. A new subset of gamblers are created: those who had never before gambled regularly, but because the casino or new gambling outlet is close to where they live or work, they start gambling. And what happens with those folks is, inevitably and as a result, there's another small subset of those folks who develop addiction problems. Independent studies have shown this to be the case time and time again. And so what happens when these folks become addicted is that it injures lives. Not just the lives of the gamblers, but the lives of their families, of their colleagues, of whole communities.

On a more concrete level, social costs related to gambling inevitably rise as a result of these new problem or pathological gamblers. You're right to label these as sort of "hidden costs" because, unlike other sorts of addictions, it can be tougher to determine if someone close to you has a gambling problem. The social costs range from indebtedness, home foreclosures, and bankruptcies, to crimes connected with  pathological gambling such as embezzlement and robberies, all the way to domestic types of crimes. And in the worst cases, these social costs include suicides.

Not so much in Southeastern Connecticut, but in other, more "mature" gambling markets like Atlantic City and Reno and especially Las Vegas, studies have shown that there is a direct connection between these rising social costs connected to pathological gambling and the advent of legalized gambling. Studies have shown that suicide rates are higher in Atlantic City, Reno, and Las Vegas than in anywhere else in the country, and the only conclusion that can reasonably be reached is that there is a direct connection between that and the advent of gambling.

Anecdotally, very soon after Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun opened up near my hometown—I was working there as a bank teller at the time—the murmuring about problems began. "This one gambled away the life savings… they're getting a divorce because he lost the family business at the casino." These are huge personal costs and they seemed to pop up very quickly. But, long-term, it continues to be a problem—these stories haven't stopped.

You raise a good point, because the stories that come from individual gamblers and those who are related to them are devastating. I think that the industry and their political supporters like to say, "When you talk about individual anecdotes, it doesn't represent a scientific trend." Well, first off, if you add enough of them together—as represented by an increase in the number of Gamblers Anonymous chapters—it does represent a trend. But if you look on an individual level, what happens is these problem gamblers and the problems that they create affect whole communities. All you have to do to see it is to sit in on a GA meeting—and by the way, there are more of them than ever, all around the country.

In a recent ten-year period, there was a fifty percent rise in the number of GA chapters around the country. This coincides with an explosion in the amount of legalized gambling, spearheaded by the casino industry, both commercial and Indian casinos like Foxwoods. It would take a huge state of denial to not see that these two trends are directly related.

The Times article examines the fact that Foxwoods has serious financial troubles to the tune of $2.3 billion in debt. Mohegan Sun just restructured their own one billion plus dollars of debt. There is increasing competition from neighboring states, states from which they have been importing many of their dedicated visitors. Do you think we're seeing a beginning of a move away from these huge destination casinos and towards a more localized style of gambling?

With the exception of Las Vegas, most gambling around the country already takes place in local gambling rather than destination casinos. The majority of gamblers almost everywhere in the country with the exception of the Las Vegas Strip are "localized" gamblers.

But, looking at Foxwoods... it was one of the first Indian casinos in the Northeast, and what happened since it opened was that, especially in the last five years, other jurisdictions have come to the conclusion that this is an easy and--they say--relatively painless way to raise revenues. Of course, it's not painless. But what this has done from a strictly economic standpoint is that states around the region have been trying to copy what Connecticut has done by signing new compacts for new Indian casinos. And what they've also done is to allow for commercial casino growth. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, New York State... almost every state in the Northeast has recently considered or has on the table new commercial casinos, stand-alone slot parlors, or "racinos." Race tracks have seen their revenues decline, so what they've been trying to do is add slot parlors inside the race tracks in order to compete.

So this might be one of the first signs that we're coming to—around the Northeast and around the country—a saturation point. There is a clear limit as to how much these new revenue streams are going to earn money in the ways that their state overlords think works for them. This isn't unprecedented. If you look back to starting before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, there have been about three big waves of gambling in the United States. From complete acceptance, proliferation, and even inundation throughout the country of various forms of gambling to almost complete prohibition.

As the author of High Stakes, it was never my ambition to advocate for one side or the other. I certainly don't believe in full-scale prohibition. I don't think it's possible, I don't think it's realistic and, as a gambler, I don't want that to go into effect. But I do think that the negatives are starting to increase at a significant rate, as well as the economic downsides of the inundation of gambling around the country. We might be peaking on this third wave, which started about forty or fifty years ago with the modern state lotteries, which started in New England, and with Nevada legalizing casinos.

The Northeast is the busiest microcosm of this inundation. It very well might be that over the next ten or fifteen years, especially if the economy gets healthier, we'll see fewer and fewer proposals for more legalized gambling. And we'll see more folks seeing the impact of gambling on loved ones and colleagues and their neighbors.

The economic arguments for casinos is that they'll employ people. But now internet gambling is becoming a big issue, as states debate whether or not to legalize it. But there are real risks involved with legalizing online poker but without the big jobs payoff.

Online poker and online gambling were semi-legal or quasi-illegal up until about six months ago. Congress never fully outlawed it, but there were portions of the financial end of things that could be considered illegal. Over the last decade, while millions of Americans were playing, there were these companies which were based off-shore, that were earning their money mostly off of Americans.

About six or eight months ago, what the poker world calls "Black Friday," the Justice Department shut down three of the biggest poker sites. But recently, the Justice Department appeared to open the door for the states to legalize online gambling and online poker in their jurisdictions. While states have proposals on the table to open bricks-and-mortar casinos, many of them also have proposals to legalize online gambling.

Now, if local casinos are "convenience gambling," online poker is the most convenient form of gambling there is. You could do it any time of day or night. While some of these companies have safeguards to prevent underage or pathological gambling, there are arguments that these safeguards are patently ineffective.

Studies have shown that electronic gambling—slot machines and online gambling—are the most inherently addictive forms of gambling. This is because of the speed of these games and the convenience of them, and it's also because electronic gambling draws those who are predisposed to problem gambling: older folks and young adults. Younger gamblers, who are drawn to online poker, have been shown to have fewer inhibitions. And seniors, when you look at slot machines, which are the primary economic driver inside the bricks and mortar casinos, seniors are the ones playing these games. And seniors have been shown to have the same lack of inhibition when it comes to developing gambling addictions at a faster rate.

These games are unfortunately hitting some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo was quoted in the Times article as saying, “In a perfect world, there would be no casinos... We have 29,000 gambling machines in this state, more than Atlantic City... You have gaming! You’re just in denial of the reality.” Do you think this is a logical argument, that people are gambling anyway, so you might as well benefit from it?

I think it's an unfair argument, and I think it's a false argument. And I've heard it time and again, from many proponents, including former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell. "Gosh, we're not creating new gamblers, we're just saving folks some gas money and keeping them at home in our state." Sure, there are some people who are already gambling who will shift their allegiances to a home-state casino. There is some credence to the argument, but the politics of casino expansion is that the gambling industry and the politicians they get on their side tend to ignore the downsides regarding the inevitable creation of new gamblers.

Many of these politicians should know better. Governor Cuomo's father, the former governor Mario Cuomo, even in times of economic hardship, felt that legalized gambling and casinos were clearly not the answer because of the social costs, because of the rising addiction rates, because of the fundamental changes in communities. Andrew Cuomo has come to what is a more expedient answer, but it is an answer that, in the long term, is going to do much more damage to that state.

From Fan Fiction to Best Seller: How an NSFW Twilight Tale Turned into a Dream Book Deal

Tanya Erzen is an Associate Professor of religion and American studies at Ohio State University. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Fanpire: The Twilight Saga and the Women Who Love It.

Edward Cullen is a twenty-something ruthless CEO who meets Bella when she interviews him for her college newspaper. They experience a magnetic attraction, but he harbors a nasty secret: the only way he can have a relationship with her is if she agrees to sign a written contract agreeing to be his submissive. Edward expects a recalcitrant Bella to engage in whippings, handcuffing, and other bondage games. At one point, when Bella asks, “Does this mean you’re going to make love to me tonight, Edward?” his response is, “No Isabella, it doesn’t. Firstly, I don’t make love. I f$#k . . . hard. ... Come. I want to show you my playroom.”

This delightfully predictable (at least in the world of porn) exchange is to be found not in he famously abstinent pages of the Twilight saga, but in “Master of the Universe,” formerly the most-read Twilight fan fiction story online, and now, in its new incarnation as Shades of Grey, a novel about to receive a 750,000 first print run from Vintage. MofU, as it was known to the fanpire cognoscenti, was written in giddily awaited installments by Snowqueens Icedragon or “Mistress Icy.” “MofU is my own special brand of heroin, an addiction I will have to go into rehab for,” one of the thousands of devoted readers raved. Now, in the first installment of the Fifty Shades trilogy (Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed), Edward and Bella have morphed into Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele (copyright!) and Mistress Icy is using her pen name, E.L. James. 

MofU was the gritty anecdote to Twilight’s relentless abstinence, part of the vast fan fic parallel universe where the most popular stories are what writers informally call “smut.” It's a genre that re-envisions the relationships in Twilight as sexually explicit and often raunchy. From “clean smut” to “hardcore,” instead of meadows and dazzling vampires, there is promiscuity, sexual abuse, incest, bondage, and sex addiction. In “The Training,” Bella “lives to serve her Master…” In "Never Sleep in a Strange Man’s Bed," Bella is awakened by a stranger named Edward who climbs into bed with her: “She was rubbing her firm little ass against me and moaning! Holy hell and all the devils in it!” In The List, a sexually frustrated Bella catalogues all the ways she’d like to have sex with Edward once they’re married. “To Do: Against the tree in the meadow, on our lab table, on his leather couch . . .” You get the idea.

The pleasure of reading the Twilight series for millions of fans resides in the books’ titillating fantasy of sexual postponement. Readers endure thousands of pages of erotic tension with Edward and Bella panting at each other with quivering lips and interrupted kisses. Even when they do have sex in Breaking Dawn, the final novel, Twilight fans only get a blank space between when Edward and Bella go to bed on their honeymoon and wake up to drifting feathers, a shattered headboard and her black-and-blue body.  

The stories that crowd the top-ten lists of fan fiction like MofU provide plenty of salacious sex but stick to a romantic premise. No matter if Edward is a dominant in a bondage relationship, a “smooth-talking motherfucker” who likes to pick up girls in bars for casual sex, or a commitment-averse architect who has never had a long-term relationship: Bella and Edward are soul mates, destined to be together forever. The insatiable demand for books like “Fifty Shades” speaks to the power of the fantasy of true love and the redemption of the damaged hero awakened by the love of the right woman who is either sexually innocent or virginal. Like Twilight, “Fifty Shades” delivers on the romance novel fantasy that a relationship initially based solely on sex will turn into blissful marriage. Anastasia’s virginity ensnares and entrances sexually voracious Christian Grey until he realizes that his feelings for her are emotional rather than just sexual, and his treatment of her becomes kind, solicitous, and caring.

The fairy-tale success story of James is also seductive for fans, especially the hundreds of hopeful fanfic writers who long to be the next Stephenie Meyer, whose first attempt at a novel was Twilight. Or, they could be the next Amanda Hocking, whose self-published vampire romance novels, My Blood Approves, landed her the million dollar book deal with St. Martin’s Press. And this takes us back to the real romance, to our contemporary narrative of hope and longing: that in our age of mundane and ubiquitous celebrity, the story you’ve written online could catapult you from obscurity to celebrated writer. And a seven figure advance.

Photo: Book page in a heart necklace by PrettyLittleCharmsUK on Etsy.

The Most Expensive Game in Town: The Rising Cost of Youth Sports and the Toll on Today's Families

Nearly 50 million kids play organized sports each year, and each of them has a supportive family that digs deep into its pockets to pay for the essentials-uniforms, equipment, league fees, travel to away games. But the buck doesn't stop there. With private lessons, elite sports camps, corporate-sponsored tournaments, and all the hotel expenses and tourist traps that come with them, youth sports is more than just a fun pastime. It's an incredibly profitable market, and it's become crowded with companies and individuals eager to reap the rewards.

Building on his eye-opening investigation into the damaging effects of the ultra-competitive culture of youth sports in his first book, Until It Hurts, sports dad and journalist Mark Hyman takes us behind the scenes for a startling look at the business of youth sports, how it has changed, and how it is affecting young Americans. Examining the youth sports economy from many sides-the major corporations, small entrepreneurs, coaches, parents, and, of course, kids-Hyman probes the reasons for rapid changes in what gets bought and sold in this lucrative marketplace. He takes us to tournaments sponsored by Nike, Gatorade, and other big businesses. He talks to parents who sacrifice their vacations and savings to get their (sometimes reluctant) junior stars to these far-off, expensive venues for a chance to shine. And he introduces us to videos purporting to teach six-month-old babies to kick a ball, to professional athletes who will "coach" an eight-year-old for a hefty fee, to a town that has literally staked its future on preteen sports. However, the story isn't all big business and bad guys. Hyman also turns the spotlight on individuals cashing in on the youth sports market, but whose goods actually provide (at least) some benefits to kids.

Through extensive interviews and original reporting, The Most Expensive Game in Town looks beyond the high-energy ad campaigns, the supposedly performance-enhancing sneakers, and the cute baby-sized jerseys to explain the causes and effects of the commercialization of youth sports-and to reveal how these changes are distorting and diminishing family life. The proof is in the price tag. Happily, Hyman unearths promising examples of individuals and communities bucking this destructive trend and using youth sports to uplift and enrich kids' lives, rather than to fill their own pockets.

Read the introduction on Scribd. 

Diving into the Wreckage: Our Schools and the Future Society

Today's post is from William Ayers, formerly Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and founder of both the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society. His is the author of several books, including Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom and A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court. This post originally appeared as the introduction to the Bankstreet College of Education's Occasional Papers Issue 27. 

Multiple Choice Question: A typical American classroom has as much to offer an inquiring mind as does:

A) a vacant lot
B) a country road
C) a street corner
D) the city dump
E) the custodian’s closet
F) none of the above

Analogy Test: High-stakes, standardized testing is to learning as:

A) memorizing a flight manual is to flying
B) watching an episode of Hawaii Five-O is to doing police work
C) exchanging marriage vows is to a successful relationship
D) reading Gray’s Anatomy is to practicing surgery
E) singing the national anthem is to citizenship
F) all of the above

Education is a perennial arena of struggle as well as hope: struggle because it stirs in us the need to look at the world anew, to question what we have created, and to wonder once again what’s worthwhile for human beings to know and experience; and hope because it gestures toward a possible future, toward the impending, toward the coming of the new and the strange. Education is where we ask how we might engage, enlarge, and change our lives; it’s where we confront our dreams and fight out notions of the good life; it’s where we try to comprehend, apprehend, or possibly even transform all that we find before us.

What does it mean to be human in the 21st Century? What are we? Where have we come from, and where are we headed?

Education raises these most fundamental questions again and again. It’s a yeasty and combustible brew and a contested space, an essential and natural site of conflict—sometimes restrained, other times in chaotic eruption—and it was always so. 

In the U.S. today, we are insistently encouraged to think of education as a product like a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a screw driver—something bought and sold in the marketplace like any other commodity. The controlling metaphor for the schoolhouse is a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little up-turned heads; within this model it’s rather easy to think that “downsizing” the least productive units, “outsourcing” and privatizing a space that was once public is a natural event; that teaching toward a simple standardized metric, and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately-developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the “outcomes,” is a rational proxy for real learning; that centrally controlled “standards” for curriculum and teaching are commonsensical; that “zero tolerance” for student misbehavior as a stand-in for child development or justice is sane; and that “accountability,” that is, a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools—but never on law-makers, foundations, corporations, or high officials—is logical and level-headed. This is in fact what a range of wealthy “reformers,” noisy politicians, and their chattering pundits in the bought media call “school reform.”

The magic ingredients for this reform recipe are three: replace the public schools with some sort of privately-controlled administration; destroy teachers’ ability to speak with any sustained or unified voice; and sort the winners relentlessly from the losers—test, test, TEST! The operative image for these moves has by now become quite familiar: education is an individual consumer good, neither a public trust nor a social good, and certainly not a fundamental human right. Management, inputs and outcomes, efficiency, cost controls, profit and loss—the dominant language of this kind of reform doesn’t leave much room for doubt, or much space to breathe.

The forces fighting to create the new common-sense-school-reform-normal are led by a band of dilettante billionaires—Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Walton, Eli Broad, the Koch brothers — who work relentlessly to take up all the available space. Preaching, persuading, and promoting, they often spread around massive amounts of cash to make their points. When Rupert Murdoch was in deep water in the summer of 2011, it came to light that Joel Klein, a leading “reformer” as head of the New York City public schools (and whose own kids attended private schools with small class size, well-resourced classrooms, opportunities for the arts, and more), was on Murdoch’s payroll. Apparently the two saw eye to eye on a core set of education principles: that charter schools needed to expand; poor instructors (the now-famous “lazy incompetent teachers”) should be weeded out; and the power of the teachers union must be curtailed. These new “marketeers” aim to create a certain kind of schooling aligned with a particular social vision.

Those of us who resist that narrow vision— who enter the contested space intent on fighting for more democracy, more joy and justice, and more diversity of thought and desire—and who hope to live in a more emancipated society, struggle to create and nurture robust schools. In a vibrant and liberated culture, schools would make an iron commitment to free inquiry, open questioning, and full
participation; access and equity and simple fairness; a curriculum that encourages independent thought and judgment; and a base-line standard that recognizes the humanity of each participant. As opposed to obedience and conformity, the foundational curriculum would promote initiative, courage, imagination, and creativity. Schools in an authentic and animated democracy would put the highest priority on fostering free people oriented toward enlightenment and liberation.

Schools for compliance and conformity are characterized by passivity and fatalism and infused with anti-intellectualism and irrelevance. They turn on technologies of control and normalization—elaborate schemes for managing the mob, knotted system of rules and discipline, exhaustive machinery of schedules and clocks, laborious programs of sorting the crowd through testing and punishing, grading, assessing, and judging—everyone in a designated place and a place for everyone. Knowing and accepting one’s pigeonhole on the towering and barren cliff becomes the only lesson one really needs, and all of this offends a robust sense of schooling for participatory democracy; it conforms more easily to schooling for a society at the end of empire, bent on permanent war and experiencing the fatal eclipse of the public square.

By contrast, teaching toward freedom and democracy is based on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being, and acts on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and, conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all.

We expect schools in a democratic society to be defined by a spirit of cooperation, inclusion, and participation, places that honor diversity while building unity. Schools in a realized democracy resist the overspecialization of human activity — the separation of the head from the hand, the heart from the brain, and the creative from the serviceable.

On the side of a liberating and humanizing education is a pedagogy of questioning, an approach that opens rather than closes the process of thinking, comparing, reasoning, perspective-taking, and dialogue. It demands something upending and revolutionary from students and teachers alike: Repudiate your place in the pecking order. It urges, remove that distorted, congenial mask of compliance: You must change!

The ethical core of teaching toward tomorrow is necessarily designed to create hope and a sense of agency in students. The big lessons are these: history is still in-the-making, the future unknown and unknowable, and what you do or don’t do will make a difference; each of us is a work-in-progress—unfinished, dynamic, in-process, on the move and on the make—swimming through the wreckage toward a distant and indistinct shore; you don’t need anyone’s permission to interrogate the world.

When the aim of education is the absorption of facts, the acquisition of knowledge becomes exclusively and exhaustively selfish, and there is no obvious social motive for learning. The measure of success is always a competitive one. People are turned against one another, and every difference becomes a potential deficit. Getting ahead of others is the primary goal in such places, and mutual assistance, which can be so natural in other human affairs, is severely restricted or banned.

On the other hand, where active work is the order of the day, helping others is not a form of charity, something that impoverishes both recipient and benefactor. Rather, a spirit of open communication, interchange, and analysis becomes commonplace. In these settings there is a certain natural disorder, a certain amount of anarchy and chaos, as there is in any busy workshop. But there is a deeper discipline at work, the discipline of getting things done and learning through life.

Knowledge is an inherently public good—something that can be reproduced at little or no cost, and, like love, is generative: the more you have, the better off you become; the more you give away, the more you have. Offering knowledge and learning and education to others diminishes nothing. In a flourishing democracy, knowledge is shared without any reservation or restrictions whatsoever. This points us toward an education that could be, but is not yet, an education toward complete human development—humanization—enlightenment and freedom.

This is the urgency: “Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witness they have,” writes the dazzling James Baldwin (in his essay "Nothing Personal" found in the collection The Price of the Ticket). “The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” This is the burning imperative for school people, parents, and all citizens today, and might become the measure of our determination now.

Multiple choice test photo from Bigstock.

Did You Follow the Crumbs? The White Bread Blog Tour

The White Bread blog tour has been sliced and wrapped, but you can still get a taste at the following blogs:

At Fannetastic Food, author Aaron Bobrow-Strain discussed how artisan bread baking is less scary than you might think.  

Stay at Stove Dad posted some ideas for getting kids involved with baking bread. "I was hooked after 'fiery hot' and 'asbestos gloves'—what a great project to try with kids!"

Read Aaron's "Ode to Stale Bread" at Wasted Food, including advice on tasty ways to use up day-old loaves.

Food Historian Rachel Laudan interviewed Aaron at her blog. "I discovered a strong sense that America’s diet of abundant industrial white bread made us somehow superior to other nations...  I also found a lot of people who believed that our system of churning out bread was a unique and important gift America had to offer the world."

Four Pounds Flour asks "What's So Great About Sliced Bread Anyway?"

And at Food Anthropology, Aaron looks at the "shining aura" that once surrounded the neatly sliced and wrapped loaf of white bread on the supermarket shelf. 

If reading all of these blog posts doesn't convince you to read a book that Raj Patel called "a social history that is better than sliced bread," you can listen to Aaron on NPR's Weekend Edition, read about how white bread became white trash on Salon, and watch this ridiculously fun book trailer made by film students at Whitman College. 

Why the Story of Adam and Eve Is Right and Kirk Cameron Is Wrong: The Religious Value of Love

Today's post is from Jay Michaelson, author of God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality. Michaelson is a writer, scholar, and activist whose work addresses the intersections of religion, sexuality, spirituality, and law. 

This post originally appeared at Huffington Post. 

"It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."

We've all heard the cliché, and we all know its meaning: that "male" and "female" are at the heart of God's plan for the world, and that heterosexuality is the only "natural" sexuality. Kirk Cameron, the former child TV star, made this point just a few days ago: that homosexuality is unnatural.

We know, too, that this is not a scientific claim. Actually, homosexuality is quite "natural"; it's present in hundreds of animal species and in every culture in the world. Sexual diversity is the rule, not the exception -- the plan, not the deviation.

But there is that myth, that story, of Adam and Eve. No matter the scientific evidence, no matter the countless lives of happy, healthy LGBT people, there's that story, that binary, and that claim.

Well, I'd like to take that story back -- to reclaim it for all of us, not just those of us who find love in heterosexual, monogamous life.

First, let's set aside the parts about God, the Bible, the whole theological aspect of this myth. Let's treat it just as literature -- as a text, sacred to many, but first and foremost a story of human origins and human purpose. All of us -- religious, atheist, agnostic, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, progressive, fundamentalist -- should be able to agree on that.

And in that myth, the pairing of Adam and Eve was the solution to a problem. In the more detailed version of the Genesis story, they don't just appear on the stage; human coupling is the result of divine fidgeting. God creates the human being, but then has to tinker with the original plan, because of the first flaw God finds with all of God's creation: loneliness.

"It is not good for the human being to be alone," God says in Genesis 2:18. In context, this is a shocking pronouncement. Six times, God had remarked how good everything is: light, Heaven and Earth, stars, plants, animals -- all of these are "good." The entirety of creation is "very good." Yet suddenly something is not good. Suddenly, God realizes there is something within the world as we find it that is insufficient, something that all of us experience in our own lives and that we all strive to transcend: the existential condition of being alone.

Notice, too, that Eve is not the first solution God attempts to deal with the problem of Adam's aloneness. God first presents Adam with every animal in the world -- birds, beasts, even those animals that would later become domesticated by people. But none suffices. Only then does the story of Genesis 2 tell us that God took the rib from man to make woman. Only human companionship solves the existential problem of aloneness, the first problem our religious traditions set out to address. And, finally, notice that Eve is not created, in this narrative, to make children with Adam; this story is about loneliness and love, not procreation and progeny. Indeed, Eve's femininity is not even essential to be what Hebrew calls an ezer kenegdo, and what antiquated King James English calls a "help-meet": someone able to be with Adam on equal terms and be a companion to him.

In other words, notwithstanding the many problems with this particular myth (it's been used not just against gays, of course, but primarily against women, by those who read it as setting up a gender hierarchy), this is a tale about the importance of human love and companionship.

Now, for most people, this love is indeed experienced in a relationship between a man and a woman. For about 5 percent of people (we can argue about the numbers; the range is usually 3 to 10 percent), this love is found in a relationship between two men, or between two women. And for some others, love may be found in either kind of relationship, and sexuality may be experienced as fluid.

Personally, I am one of that 5 percent. During my teens and 20s, as I struggled with my sexuality, I had relationships with women and, as much as I was able, fell in love. But something was always "off," even though at the time I couldn't quite identify it. (Maybe I knew, deep down. I don't know.) It took me 10 years of wrestling, cajoling, self-hating, and self-judging, and finally a serious car accident, which shook up my body and soul, to finally admit that if I wanted true love, the kind that the Song of Songs sings about, the kind that the Genesis myth says is so important, well, my Eve would have to be a Steve.

This is about much more than sex; it's about love. And that is the most natural thing in the world.

Now, if we do consider ourselves religious, this point matters, and it influences how we understand our sacred texts and traditions. Surely, a loving God could not want the tyranny of the "closet" -- an all-too-cozy metaphor for what is really a life of deceit, loneliness, and alienation. The Kirk Camerons of the world can still pretend that homosexuality is some kind of choice, pathology, or worse. But I have known both the life of the closet (for 10 years of my adult life) and the life of companionship. I know that my life with my partner is not simply about lust. It is exactly as the Genesis myth describes: a life of sharing, companionship, and love. Sure, for most people, "a man... shall hold fast to his wife." But in some cases, a woman shall hold fast to hers. And in some others, a man shall hold fast to another.

Of course, I know there are other Biblical texts that influence what some people think about homosexuality. In my book God vs. Gay?, I spend a long, long time parsing them out and show that they are obscure and ambiguous, and that they certainly do not contemplate loving, committed relationships. But anyone can interpret Biblical text; that's the easy part. As Shakespeare said, even the devil can cite scripture for his purpose. The hard, and more important, part is deciding which approach to take: one that leads to more love, or one that leads to more aloneness; one that leads to more of the holy, or one that leads to more of the shameful. As I approach these sacred texts, the story of Adam and Eve helps point the way, by reminding me that it is not good to be alone -- and it is very good to find someone with whom to share your life.

Adam and Eve from Bigstock.

That’s Right, You’re Not From Texas (but Texas Wants You Anyway)

Carl Elliott is the author of White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine. Elliott is a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, the Believer, Slate, the London Review of Books, and the American Prospect. His six previous books include Better Than Well, Prozac As a Way of Life, Rules of Insanity, and A Philosophical Disease.

This post originally appeared at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm blog.

If Texas ever decides to secede from the Union, I’d be mighty tempted to go along. Lightnin’ Hopkins, Molly Ivins, Bob Wills, Kinky Friedman, the 1966 Texas Western basketball team: Without the Lone Star State, American life would look pretty anemic. When Steve Earle declared, “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that,” I nodded and said, “Amen.”

Most of all, I like Texas crazy. There is no better value for your entertainment dollar. As a native South Carolinian, I claim some expertise in the topic. My brother says: What Mississippi is to the poverty index, South Carolina is to the index of crazy people. (Our unofficial state motto, provided by James L. Petigru in 1860: “South Carolina is too small to be a republic, and too large to be an insane asylum.”) For many years now, my Texan friend Kathryn Montgomery and I have had a contest over which state has a higher proportion of crazy people, and for many years, thanks to our remarkable politicians, South Carolina has been flat-out killing it. Over the last few months, however, Texas may have pulled ahead.

The reason is stem-cell tourism. It started when Gov. Rick Perry had a surgeon friend treat his back problems with adult stem cells processed by RNL Bio, a South Korean company famous mainly for its commercial puppy cloning business and “cosmeceutical” preparations such as Dr. Jucre’s Million Stem Cell Magic Concentrate (available online for $1,220.) Pretty soon an entire stem-cell operation called Celltex Therapeutics was up and running, partnered with RNL Bio and backed by a group of Texas oil and gas investors. Unfortunately for the company, there has been a minor bump in the road called “medical research.” Reputable stem cell researchers say there is little medical evidence to show that adult stem cells are effective for the conditions they are supposed to treat (which, according to a RNL Bio spokesperson, range from wrinkles to Alzheimer’s disease). Even worse, the cells may be dangerous. As Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell researcher at UC Davis pointed out recently, “The worst case scenario, even for autologous transplant, is death. The second worse case scenario is severe, life-changing injury.”

You don’t need a marketing degree to understand that “death” and “severe, life-changing injury” are not going to sell a lot of stem cells. So those words don’t appear in the patient testimonials RNL Bio uses to market its services. In fact, the stem cell treatments are illegal in South Korea, where RNL Bio is based, so the company partners with facilities in other countries such as China and Japan to exploit regulatory loopholes. Patients with debilitating chronic illnesses can travel to those countries for stem-cell treatment. Last week, we learned from Nature that Texas has joined that list of countries. A Houston doctor told a Nature reporter that he is paid by Celltex to give adult stem-cell treatments to patients with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, who may be charged up to $25,000.

A few months ago, I had reason to hope that South Carolina might be making a comeback in the craziness sweepstakes. An assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina was arrested by the FBI for supplying adult stem cells to an illegal operation in Mexico. But my hopes fell when I read the FBI press release. His co-conspirators, unfortunately, were from Texas.

‘Catch Me If You Can’: How Bush and Cheney Attempted to Protect Themselves, But Failed

Today's post is from the authors of Cheating Justice, Cynthia L. Cooper, an award-winning journalist and lawyer, and Elizabeth Holtzman, a lawyer, former prosecutor and former member of Congress who served on the House committee that investigated Watergate.

This post originally appeared at ACSBlog. 

When President George W. Bush and his team left office, mounds of misdeeds were left to fester. Some of their transgressions in office were so shocking – lying to Congress in order to embroil the nation in war and occupation, illegally wiretapping Americans without warrants, authorizing torture that had been outlawed by U.S. and international law – that he and Vice President Cheney probably should have been impeached and removed from office.

Instead, they completed their terms and sped away. Even though Bush publicly announced in his 2010 memoir that he had personally authorized waterboarding, a recognized form of torture  -- “Damn right,” he is quoted as saying – hardly a peep was heard about seeking accountability. But how can that be? Key to preserving our democracy is the concept that no person is above the law.

In order to ignite a national conversation on the topic, we set out to show how and why the president and vice president should be held accountable – especially, how they can be prosecuted. That meant looking at the available evidence, investigating precisely what laws are implicated and determining, as best as possible, whether a prima facie case could be made. We found enough to make a courageous prosecutor sit up and take notice, although the statute of limitations is ticking in some areas. We found clear problems under laws related to the conspiracy to deceive Congress, foreign intelligence surveillance and U.S. anti-torture laws – each of which needs prosecutorial attention.

Along the way, we found something else disturbing, too: a repeated pattern by which Bush and Cheney took extraordinary efforts to protect themselves from the sting of the law. In Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law, Plotted to Avoid Prosecution – And What We Can Do About It, we look at both: how the ex-president and vice-president can be held personally accountable, but, also, how they tried to manipulate the system from inside to keep themselves from being held to account.

Perhaps the most startling example of their extraordinary actions was the gutting of the War Crimes Act of 1996. This law was a healthy, robust and muscular law when President Bush took office. It had a proud history -- introduced in Congress by a Republican from North Carolina, passed by a bipartisan majority, signed by a Democratic president. The law implemented the Geneva Conventions for the U.S. and prohibited U.S. personnel from torturing detainees, and banned degrading treatment, cruelty, acts of humiliation and outrages against personal dignity.

To understand how far the president and vice president strayed from the War Crimes Act means facing what happened to some detainees. For example, at Guantanamo, Mohammed al Qahtani, a Saudi, was detained under blinding continuous light and extreme isolation, interrogated 20 hours a day, threatened by an aggressive dog, led around on all fours with a leash, exposed to life-threatening cold temperatures, subjected to beatings, forced nudity, forced enemas – and more. Other “approved” techniques included locking a detainee in a closed box and dropping in an insect. The pictures that eventually emerged from Abu Ghraib were only a sliver of the story.

The evidence shows that the president and vice president authorized and personally approved a scheme of cruel and inhuman treatment of detainees. But when the 2006 Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld said that the Geneva Conventions could not be summarily erased, Bush and Cheney knew that they might be held criminally liable under the War Crimes Act. They went into high gear to protect themselves, slipping a series of loopholes into another law, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, under the deceptive sub-heading of “implementation of treaty obligations.”

These changes shredded the War Crimes Act. Conduct that was previously illegal was suddenly made legal. For example, crimes of “cruel and inhuman treatment” were eliminated from the law in an apparent effort to legalize beatings, sensory deprivation, and the like. Even more astonishing, the law was made retroactive to 1997 -- something that may be unprecedented in U.S. history.

These examples of legal hocus-pocus are windows into the extent of the Bush efforts to create buffers of personal protection from the law. But, even in this area, other laws may still come into play, especially the U.S. anti-torture law and international human rights protections.

The actions of Bush and Cheney sully our democratic heritage and stain our constitutional system. If they are allowed to “get away with it,” nothing will be able to stop any future president or high official from similarly trampling on our rights and violating other criminal laws. It’s not too late, and people of conscience can make a case, knowing that the country as a whole will suffer if Bush and Cheney remain uninvestigated, unprosecuted and unaccountable.

Jumped In: What Gangs Taught Me About Violence, Drugs, Love, and Redemption

When Jorja Leap began studying Los Angeles gang violence in 2002, she encountered a myriad of proposed solutions to the seemingly intractable “gang problem” and set out to discover what was really going on. The stakes—then and now—could not be higher: a child or teenager is killed by gunfire every three hours—and homicide is the leading cause of death for African American males between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four.

In Jumped In, Leap brings us stories that reach behind the statistics and sensational media images to the real lives of those stuck in—and trying to escape— "la vida loca.” With the eye of an anthropologist and a heart full of compassion, this small, tough woman from UCLA travels some of the most violent and poverty-stricken neighborhoods, riding along in police cruisers and helicopters, and talking with murderers and drug dealers, victims and grieving mothers.

Through oral histories, personal interviews, and eyewitness accounts of current and former gang members, as well as the people who love and work alongside them, readers come to understand both the people pulled into gangs and those trying mightily to forge alternatives and help their community. In delving into the personal lives of current and former gang members, Leap aims not only to find out what leads them to crime and how to deal most effectively with gang activity, but also to hear the voices of those most often left out of the political conversation and to learn from leaders who offer a different kind of hope, through community outreach and jobs programs.

As she forges lasting friendships in this community and becomes immersed in others’ triumphs and tragedies, Leap’s personal and professional lives intersect in sometimes incendiary ways. With a husband in the Los Angeles Police Department and a daughter in adolescence, she faces plenty of family dilemmas herself. Ultimately, Jumped In is a chronicle of the unexpected lessons gang members taught her while she was busily studying them, and how they changed her forever.

Read an excerpt of Jumped In on Scribd.

Read "Girl Gangs: Female Members on Love and Motherhood" on Huffington Post

Watch Jorja Leap talk about her book on YouTube.

White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

What do you think about when you hear the words "White Bread"? The wonder food of the 1950s? Fluffy, bland, industrial food? Boring suburban life? Trailer parks and Daisy Dukes? Artisanal sourdoughs with a chewy crust and irregular holes? 

In this lively history of bakers, dietary crusaders, and social reformers, Aaron Bobrow-Strain shows us that what we think about the humble, puffy loaf says a lot about who we are and what we want our society to look like.

This week, you can follow the crumbs on the WHITE BREAD BLOG TOUR to some tasty food blogs. And you can watch, listen, and read some interesting media about White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf.

Click here to Tweet what "White Bread" means to you.

Read our Storify collection of our favorite #WhiteBread tweets 

Read "Atomic Bread-Baking at Home" by Aaron Bobrow-Strain in the Believer 

Read "The Rise and Fall of White Bread" on Salon.com

Listen to "American History Baked Into Loaves of White Bread" on NPR

Read White Bread "Chapter 1: Dreams of Purity and Contagion" on Scribd 

Watch the White Bread book trailer on YouTube

Media Roundup: Follow the Crumbs

The White Bread blog tour starts today, with a post at FANNEtastic Food. Check the Beacon website for the tour schedule. And White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf is on the Amazon Book of the Month list at Amazon.com

And, in the meantime, listen to this Weekend Edition interview to find out how American history is baked into loaves of white bread.

New accolades for Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States. It's a Booklist recommended title for 2012 “Over the Rainbow” list. And the Windy City Times monthly book column, “Between the Covers” said, "It is wonderfully readable and looks at the way we understand the history of the United States. The LGBT population moves from the margins to the mainstream and we see that the history of this country also is our history.” 

NY Times Book Review reviewed Katherine Newman's Accordion Family with Eric Klinenberg's Going Solo: “Klinenberg and Newman flesh out their subjects with expertise and devotion, but neither forgets that ‘accordion family’ and ‘going solo’ are always less definitive terms than rich and poor.”  

At Skidmore, a preview of Judith Jack Halberstam's forthcoming book, Gaga Feminism. 

Big Pharma Stands Strong, Funds "Research" Prizes

Carl Elliott is the author of White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine. Elliott is a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, the Believer, Slate, the London Review of Books, and the American Prospect. His six previous books include Better Than Well, Prozac As a Way of Life, Rules of Insanity, and A Philosophical Disease.

This post originally appeared at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm blog. 

The pharmaceutical industry gets a bad rap. To listen to the critics you’d think pharmaceutical companies are in the same sleazy category as oil, finance and tobacco companies. But pharmaceutical companies invent life-saving medications, not to mention countless other psychoactive products that many of us enjoy on a recreational basis.  Pharmaceutical companies get blamed for fraud, kickbacks, and research deaths, but they never get the credit for oxycontin.

That is why I was thrilled to see that GlaxoSmithKline is sponsoring the prize for the British Medical Journal's annual Research Paper of the Year. Sure, the pharma-bashers will whine like infants at the BMJ’s decision to brand a medical research prize with the name of multinational drug company, just as they’re whining about an American editor’s decision to re-locate a leading bioethics journal to the Texas headquarters of a stem cell tourism clinic. These people just don’t get it.  This is not about propaganda or corruption.  It is about developing innovative medications for diseases that we didn’t even know existed.

In that spirit, my nomination for the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Research Paper of the Year goes to a ground-breaking article about GSK’s very own antidepressant, Paxil, which was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.  The title of the article is “Efficacy of Paroxetine in the Treatment of Adolescent Major Depression,” but seasoned pharma-watchers know it better as Study 329. The data behind Study 329 showed that Paxil didn’t actually work in adolescents – that, in fact, it was no better than a sugar pill. However, as any marketer understands, bad data cannot be allowed to interfere with a good paper.  By the time Study 329 appeared in print, GSK had used the magic of biostatistics to transform the raw data into a gleaming advertisement for Paxil.  As a result, when FDA eventually decided that Paxil had a few minor side-effects, such as suicide, Study 329 had already done its work: getting a GSK product into the hands of troubled teenagers.  And wait, here’s the beauty part: although the published version of Study 329 was “authored” by leading academic psychiatrists, it was actually written by a GSK ghostwriter.

Of course, the pharma-bashers have been complaining about Study 329 for years.  Some of them even want the journal to retract it.  The lead “author” who signed the paper, Martin Keller of Brown University, has been beaten up by the Senate Finance Committee, harassed by the New York attorney general, and vilified in the press, all because he put his name on a ghosted article and forgot to report half a million dollars in pharmaceutical income.  To which I say: stand strong, GSK.  Ignore the naysayers and the nitpickers.  It’s about time you gave these good people some public recognition.  Yes, it’s true that Study 329 is eleven years old, but you’re paying the BMJ over $47,000 tosponsor this prize. Surely they can bend the rules, just this once.