Author Archives: leorafalk

The Wolf of Wall Street Failed the Bechdel Test Spectacularly. And That’s a Problem.

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This post contains minor spoilers, though nothing in the movie was particularly surprising, so I think if you read this and then see the movie, you will not be upset.

Wolf of Wall Street Movie Poster

Oh Leo. Remember when you were a 90’s heartthrob?

To say that The Wolf of Wall Street fails the Bechdel test is a massive understatement. Women are almost all objectified, evaluated for their beauty and willingness to sell sex. The firm has some women too, but there is only a single actual mention of them outside of aforementioned objectifying. (I get distracted by things like this in movies, I kept trying to figure out why they wouldn’t all sue for sexual harassment/hostile workplace and then trying to figure out if that was even an option at the time, and then I think money. Tons and tons of money, which in this movie buys all other morals and solves most problems (see above, re: buying sex)).

Now, I understand that that is the point of the movie, and that you weren’t supposed to like the characters who were doing the objectifying, buying of sex, harassing, and, in one case, raping. BUT the movie was three hours long and the comeuppance (which also included some long-overdue sticking-up-for-herself from Jordan Belfort’s wife, Naomi (and some excellent acting from Margot Robbie)) takes place in less than an hour. And, it doesn’t seem to hurt Belfort all that much.

So, we are supposed to sit through three hours of movie with Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and come out saying, “God, what a sleaze ball.” Maybe we are also supposed to question the morals of Wall Street altogether (but haven’t we already done that?). But, when you spend three hours with a guy, and sometimes he’s funny, and sometimes you laugh with him, and sometimes you laugh at him, probably the directors wanted us to feel something for him other than hate? Maybe?

And, some people in the theater certainly did. For example, there is a scene where a night of debauchery that costs Belfort $2 million dollars ends with furniture destroyed and prostitutes and stockbrokers  asleep on basically every surface in a Las Vegas suite. Belfort walks through the room, uncovers a sleeping, naked prostitute, and squeezes her breast.

The guy sitting behind me in the movie theater (and presumably a few other people at least) laughed.

OK. I don’t even know what laughing man looks like, let alone what his morals are. Giving him full benefit of the doubt, let’s say he’d never in a million years engage a prostititute, and if he did, he would only do things she explicitly consented to. But he laughed, as in, haha, squeezing a breast.

The movie is set up in a way where the antihero sort of becomes the hero. Other than the prostitutes, a few of the wives, and one or two of the female employees, we don’t ever meet any of Belfort’s victims–the people he stole massive amounts of money from. His crimes are not victimless, but they kind of seem like they are. The Wall Street guys are supposed to be some strange combination of nebby and glamourous, and the Feds are just supposed to be angry and nebby.

Movies are entertainment, right? Escapes? And so the moral of a movie which is almost 100 percent about debauchery, is “imagine this life, where you can do anything you want. Sure, he’s sleazy, but look at all the sex he gets to have.”

And if we start laughing with him, instead of at him, isn’t the movie just glorifying it? Saying, “come along while we objectify and assault?” And isn’t that a problem? Isn’t that part of the culture that lead a man just the other night to grab my friend’s breast, and when she said, “did you just grab my breast?” he leered, “and I liked it,” and then just walked off?

Isn’t that why we should be talking about the Bechdel test even in a movie that didn’t even walk into the right testing center?

Three Generations Strong

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It’s been a while since I wrote here. (The last post was actually written in August). This summer has been monumental. I graduated the Kennedy School. I got a new job in a new field. My grandmother died.

My grandmother, the woman I hope to emulate, died at age 91. My grandmother, born two years after the 19th amendment was ratified, saw the world change in ways I can only begin to imagine. At 16, she went to work to help support her family after her father was killed in an accident. At 22, she travelled from Brooklyn to Temple, Texas to marry my grandfather, who was stationed at an army base there. During WWII, she worked for the military; I know from photos that at some point she sold war bonds, but I imagine she had a wide range of jobs.  When my mother, the youngest of two, was in elementary school, my grandmother went back to school and earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. She taught reading until, as she told it, she could no longer climb the stairs at the school. Then she retired.

She loved fully and devotedly. She was , in all the good ways, the stereotype of a grandmother. She baked brownies, and showered us with gifts and kisses and love. She shepped nachas. She told me over and over again, “I just want you to be happy.” And she meant it.

For most of her 69 years of marriage, she served my grandfather dinner every day, making sure it was ready when he came home. Until she was too frail to serve. Then my grandfather served meals and became her caretaker. Even then, she wanted to help out with preparing for holiday meals, and was frustrated when she couldn’t. But she could still offer advice, and food, and love to everyone. And she did.

My Grandma Miriam was a  woman of her era and of every era she lived through. It goes without saying, but I will say it anyway: I miss her terribly.

*  *  *

Today, I was in the  LOFT dressing room staring at myself in the large shared mirror, trying to evaluate a suit. A woman holding her granddaughter–a tiny baby wrapped in a pink blanket–looked on. “That’s a nice suit,” she said.  Do you wear suits to work?”

“I think so. I haven’t started the job yet.”

“That’s the kind of suit that the young women wear in my office,” she said. “I’m a corporate attorney.” We talked about suit jacket options, and she congratulated me on getting a job.

“She’s beautiful,” I said, motioning to the baby. How old is she?”

“One week. My daughter needed new jeans.”

On cue, her daughter came out for an opinion on a pair of jeans.

“Can  I ask you something else? Is this shirt is too low?” I asked the grandmother. It wasn’t.

“I would wear that to work, and I’m a corporate executive,” the daughter said.

I changed back into my own clothes, and congratulated the women on the baby. They congratulated me on the job. I bought the suit, shirt and all.

*  *   *

As far as I remember, I never went clothes shopping with my grandmother. Maybe I did, when I was a tiny baby wrapped in pink and my mother needed a new pair of pants.

The last time I visited my grandmother in her house, I came bearing a brand new dress that I planned to wear to my graduation. I modeled it for her and got her approval. She told me I looked good in it and that it wasn’t too short. “That’s how you know it really looks good,” my sister said. “Grandma would never tell you it looked good if it didn’t.” True.

As I write out today’s dressing-room conversation, it seems utterly mundane, but I think that’s why it thrilled me: the normality of the high-powered women, the way they were willing to offer fashion advice, which really was also career advice. The tiny, third-generation strong woman resting in her grandmother’s arms, still completely unaware of the blessings of the strong women that came before her. The blessings I am so lucky to have.

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My mother, me, and my grandmother.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Newspapers

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This is an old post that I never hit “publish” on, about the sale of the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos. In the name of actually starting to write things on this blog again, I am not going to update it to reflect Bezos’ visit to the newsroom or the Post’s coverage of today’s shooting at Navy Yard and the decision to drop the paywall for the coverage. For those people who are not journalism geeks, I apologize in advance for the references that will be confusing.

In college we talked about minutia and dreams. About em dashes and Oxford commas and deadlines. About race and gender and labor unions. About the mission of a Journalist to give the world part of what it wants to hear and part of what it ought to. About saving the industry, about rejection letters, about getting picked up in the college section of the New York Times. About newspaper politics and newspaper sex. About Woodward and Bernstein and Pulitzers and student-reporter-sized exposes.

In college, we were sentimental about newspapers without even realizing it. We were madly in love and mad.

And slowly we grew up.

Slowly. We went to work at newspapers. We stood in newsrooms as they celebrated Pulitzers, but more likely stood in newsrooms as the paper got bought and sold, as reporters got laid off. We joined unions. We read with awe about Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee and wrote inscriptions to each other about whether we’d give a ball to edit the Washington Post. We hatched plans to save Newsweek, and then stopped reading it altogether, and then it stopped publishing. We went to grad school and foreign countries. We moved across the country and got laid off. We got health insurance and new contracts. We gaped open mouthed at the super stars who considered leaving journalism and then we started doing it ourselves, separating ourselves into the people who really loved the job and the people who loved the idea of the job. We went to law school, to jobs in social media, to jobs in government telling ourselves that the industry changed and these things weren’t so unforgivable anymore, not like they were when we graduated, when so many of us were actually going into journalism. Not like they were when everyone knew that path to the Chicago Tribune was from the Peoria Journal Star to the Chicago Sun Times to the Chicago Tribune. And then, if you moved to Washington with the Tribune (were you lucky enough to follow Obama), you could go from the Chicago Tribune to the Washington Post, and then you’d have Made It. No one can tell you how to Make It anymore but sometimes they tell us to write for free.

“Two more years of this and I am going to do something that really makes a difference, ” one of my college coeditors tells me. Five years ago that would have been blasphemy. Now, I am also leaving. Or at least taking a break.

This is what newspapers talk about when they talk about newspapers, or specifically when they talk about the Washington Post:

They talk “politics, powersuits, and Woodward and Bernstein”. They talk about the “ossified world of newspaper publishing” and about the nostalgia of working for the Grahams. They talk about a “landmark in journalism,” about a microphone in Washington. They talk about Watergate.

They don’t really talk about the people, about the city that isn’t the beltway, about the metro newspaper, about theories of change or disruption. About Chandra Levy, or even “Top Secret Nation.” They don’t talk about questions of identity: a national newspaper versus a local newspaper. About whether all politics are really local, and whether it matters. They don’t talk about covering race or not covering it.

When newspapers talk about the newspaper industry, most of the stories are left untold.

It Wasn’t Enough. But It Was Something.

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The other day, as I walked to my apartment, I saw a couple on the sidewalk, across the street from me. At first it looked like they were embracing, but–even from my distance–something looked off. As I neared, I saw the woman break away, and the man grab and pull her. She yelled “stop!” He grabbed her around the neck. She struggled. She walked quickly away from him, but he caught up in short order and threw her to the ground. Both the man and woman went into a house together.

I called the police.

At this point, I will let the official police log take over the narrative:

“We met the witness, who stated that she observed an Asian male and female arguing in front of that address. A physical altercation transpired and they fled into their residence. However, we spoke with both individuals involved. They adamantly denied the physical altercation and stated it was only verbal. No injured were sustained.”

From my conversation with the police, I do think that they believed me. I also saw them interview the man and woman separately from one another. I also understand how hard something like this would be to prosecute, my word against the word of the couple. No injuries, no visible bruises.

And, I understand the huge number of factors that would lead a woman to deny that she had been hurt, culture, a belief that she “deserved it,” what ever happened before I arrived, societal expectations of women’s roles in relationships, and societal depictions of abuse and ideas about who it happens to and who it doesn’t happen to.

I read the Cambridge Police Department rules and regulations about reports of domestic violence. I know that my call and the ensuing report is supposed to show up if someone calls about this address or this person again. I take a little comfort in that, mixed with the heaviness that comes with knowing that it probably will happen again and the uncertainty about whether the neighbors will call or whether they will be reluctant to intervene in a “private” matter.

I am shocked by the brazenness of it, assault on the sidewalk, in the middle of the day, and then an adamant denial that any had occurred. And, I am afraid of the implications of what happened, the message that, if you push around a woman in broad daylight, if you wrap your arm around her neck, but you don’t leave any bruises, there isn’t much anyone can do.

I don’t have many readers, and I usually shy far away from advocacy. But, this platform is all I have. Maybe sharing this story of inefficacy is detrimental. But I share it because I believe that the only way things can change is if people stand up and say, “Bruises or not. This is unacceptable. We will call the police. Every time.”

When I was a teenager, the woman in my local flower shop had a huge amount of bruising around one of her eyes. I didn’t ask her if she was OK or what had happened. By the time I got home, I regretted not asking her. Not because I knew that she had been hit or that she would have told me if she had, but because she could have been, because abuse can happen to anyone. When it was just the two of us in the flower shop, I wasn’t brave enough to say something. The flower shop has since been replaced by a cupcake store. I have no idea what happened to that woman. But I know I should have said something.

This time, I did say something. And, nothing happened. But, saying something is the only option I had. And I’d do it again. And again. Maybe that woman knows that there are people who are looking out for her, who are watching him. Maybe not.

But if more people called the police. If more people stepped up, more assailants would know that their actions are unacceptable. More victims would know they have the law on their side. I’m left feeling like I didn’t do enough, even though I know I did exactly what I was supposed to do.

So, co-opting a slogan: If you see something, say something. If you hear something, say something. Domestic violence is violence. It’s against the law. It’s not a private matter. Even if saying something once doesn’t do anything, maybe the second or third time will.

At least I hope so.

The Brazenness of Wind, The Comfort of Silence

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I haven’t fully figured out what I want to say here tonight, but I know I want to say something.

First, because the names of the victims must always be more important than the names of the perpetrators (while noting that the Tsarnaev brothers are still officially alleged perpetrators), the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing are Martin Richard, 8, of Dorchester, Krystle M. Campbell, 29, of Arlington, and Lingzi Lu, 23, of Shenyang, China. And, MIT police Officer Sean Collier, 26, was shot and killed Thursday night at MIT. 

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I spent almost all of Thursday night listening to the police scanner, watching WBZ, and reading The Boston Globe on line, and looking for updates of Twitter. I live on a side street, but I could see the police cars speeding down the next main street down, sending spurts of blue light to my street.

I spent Friday on lockdown, listening to WBUR, and reading the Boston Globe. At some point, I had to give up on Twitter, and then for a bit, I had to turn off the news. There hadn’t been new information for a long time, and the constant news diet was exhausting and draining.

But on Friday night, at a low-key dinner with friends who live around the corner, after the lockdown was lifted, I kept wandering back to the television. And then it was confirmed:  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was in custody. When I got back to my apartment, my roommates and I discovered that the radio we had left on was actually on a timer, so it was silent in our apartment.

I was far enough from the scenes that  I hadn’t heard a lot of sirens on Thursday night and Friday, but the silence in our apartment late Friday night–without the news on, with the lightness that came from  knowing Tsarnaev was in custody–was palpable.

I could hear the wind, and it seemed both comfortingly familiar and shockingly new. And the word brazen popped into my head.

Cities that literally had been shut down would come to life again and move forward. Our hearts were torn, and our sense of security would be shattered, and for many the path to recovery will be long and painful.  But we would walk our streets again, attend sports games, go shopping, and go out to dinner.

Throughout it all, the wind had been blowing, but only now–the first time since Monday afternoon that I was in my apartment with both my radio and computer turned off–did I notice it. And the  wind, in its complete normalcy, its constancy, its lack of awareness of the terribleness of the week, sounded like a declaration of defiance, of above-it-all-ness, of brazenness. Which is something I needed to hear at that moment.

In so many ways we are still not OK. It will take a very long time for that to happen, and for the families of the victims and for the injured that day may never fully arrive.

In the weeks and months that follow, there will be tears, and arguments, and debates–about media, about the role of the Internet, about civil liberties and terrorism. But on Friday night, the wind died down, and as I fell asleep there was silence, not the eerie silence from empty streets. But the silence of a city feeling a tiny bit safer.

Photo of Boylston Street by Flickr user toddmundt http://www.flickr.com/photos/toddmundt/8664495840/ Some rights reserved

Photo of 200 Newbury  Street by Flickr user toddmundt http://www.flickr.com/photos/toddmundt/8664495840/ Some rights reserved

“Love That Dirty Water. Boston You’re My Home”

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My family lives near the bottom of Heartbreak Hill, named for its location in the Boston Marathon.

Photo by Jerome Gerrior Racing. Some rights reserved.

Photo by Jerome Gerrior Racing. Some rights reserved.

For a while, we were under the false impression that we, in fact, lived at the top of Heartbreak Hill and we would yell “congratulations! The hard part is over!” Oops. Sorry. (In our defense, the youth race is called “Heartbreak Hill Race,” even though it’s on one of the earlier “Newton Hills”).

***

Every year, my parents take a walk after the Passover Seder. One year, Passover fell out on Patriots’ Day. My parents took their walk late at night, long after every runner had finished. The streets though, were still littered with paper cups and orange peels, signs that at some point earlier, all along the route, people had held out cups of water and orange slices for runners to grab as they came past. As my parents walked down the street, a truck driver pulled up, clearly completely lost. My parents gave him directions, and the truck driver looked up and down the litter-strewn street. “Man, you guys sure know how to throw a party,” he said. I think of that story every year, my parents hosting a 26.2-mile party, and laugh.

I told that story to some friends last night, adding that I remember learning the proper way to hold out a cup of water: palm curled just enough so that the cup doesn’t fall out of your hand, but open enough so that when a runner comes by, he or she can grab it from you without slowing.

One of my friends said, “people just take cups of water from strangers? Anything could be in those cups! I would only take sealed bottles of water from official water stations.” I was totally confused: “But why would anyone put anything into the water? What would be the point?”

Every year people run past, right near my parents house. We cheer them on. We yell encouragement. We offer water or oranges. We see neighbors we haven’t seen in a while and buy lukewarm lemonade from little kids who have set up a stand in their front yard. Because, I guess, that’s what you do, when someone runs a marathon in your neighborhood.

***

Today was different. Today, I was on the T, trying to get to my parents’ neighborhood, when Hynes Convention Center T station was evacuated. The announcement came three times, uncharacteristically clear, and very calm. “This is an emergency. Please leave the station.” No one on the T itself moved, since it wasn’t clear if we should get off, or if the best way to leave the station would be to stay on the T. There were murmurs of confusion. And then, someone must have realized what was going on. The fourth announcement came. “This is an emergency. Please empty the train and leave the station.” And so we did.

People wearing Boston Marathon medals and wrapped in “space blankets” limped a little as they headed back up the steps. Others gave them sympathetic looks. Once outside, police directed us away from Copley, but had little other information to offer. So we walked. Alongside, but in the opposite direction of, the Marathon runners still heading towards the finish line. “Good job! You’re almost there!” spectators yelled, cheering on strangers.

We steered clear of the emergency vehicles racing down the street and of the cops on bicycles who easily made it clear that they were no longer just policing an ordinary race. At one point, one of the cops along the marathon route started telling runners he was going to direct them to one side so motorcycles could pass. Everyone moved aside but kept running.

It took a few texts from my family and then a stop in Dunkin Donuts to watch the news for me to fully grasp what was going on. I kept wondering if there was anything of use I could have done had I had a press pass, (I would have had to have crossed many police barriers to have gotten close to the scene).

But my first concern was contacting my parents, who knew I was supposed to be heading through Boston just as the bombs went off. (As far as I can tell, the T must have been under or just past Copley at the time of the explosions). Once I managed to convey to them that I was safe and that I had figured out a way to walk back to Cambridge, I joined the people walking over the BU Bridge. On the Cambridge side, some people–clearly not from the area, and now completely adrift –stopped me to ask, “what’s in this direction? If we walk this way will there be some place for us to go?”

“Yes,” I said.

“We’re all walking the same direction,” someone else crossing the bridge said, “so follow us.”

***

Later, home, I read that people who finished the Marathon as the bombs went off kept running to go give blood. That emergency personnel lept the barriers between the spectators and the runners so they could reach the wounded; they ran toward the explosions. People opened up their homes to stranded runners and checked in with people they knew. I was, throughout the day, completely impressed with how helpful, calm, and informative, cops along the Marathon route were.

It didn’t occur to me that anyone would ever have a reason to attack the Marathon. Even when the train had been evacuated, I assumed there was some sort of threat, but that it would turn out to be unsubstantiated. Because, who would do that?

But we step up. We offer water, and shelter, and blood, and information, and encouragement, and prayers, and comfort. Because, ultimately, that’s what you do when someone attacks a marathon in your neighborhood.

Our Children

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A memorial to a student killed in Chicago. Image from This American Life from their radio show on gun violence at Harper High School in Chicago.

“I’d rather have ten kids be killed in Chicago than have my house broken into…. Do you know how scary it is to have your house broken into when you are in it?”

I think my jaw literally dropped when a Harvard graduate student (at a non-HKS school) said that to me this weekend. He might have been saying that to get a reaction from me (it worked) but he said it, which was unfathomable to me whatever  his reason was.

The underlying argument doesn’t work from either side. It’s not clear that stricter gun laws alone will save Chicago’s kids, since most of the shooters don’t have legal guns anyway. The correlation between gun laws and number of guns also isn’t entirely clear; it (unsurprisingly) depends on the substance of the gun laws.The solution needs to be more comprehensive, for sure. And, it’s also not clear to me that guns prevent home invasions. I’ve had a really hard time finding data that showed that gun ownership leads to fewer gun invasions.

But the inflammatory statement isn’t really about gun control. It’s about empathy. It’s about the speaker not knowing anyone who was killed with a gun, but he does know someone whose home was broken into. That’s not surprising since the burglary rate is far higher than murder rate, but he also probably doesn’t know any public school teenagers living in Chicago, let alone living in the neighborhoods most affected by gun violence.

I was privileged to be able to take a class with Robert Putnam last semester. He spoke throughout the semester about the loss of a sense of “our children,” the sense that we are all responsible for each other, outside of our own families. It’s tricky to build the bridging social capital needed to make sure that people with immense privilege debating laws in Cambridge Massachusetts (who, regardless of background have immense privilege by virtue of being Harvard students, and who, obviously, includes me as well) know teenagers whose lives are so full of gun violence that they walk straight down the middle of the street so that they have a few more seconds to run if shooting starts. 

My friend, Tanveer Ali, just wrote an excellent article arguing for more coverage of the victims of shootings.  There are arguments to be made for not covering every murder in the newspaper. The arguments are sad, and generally stem from the idea that the murders are   common (506 in Chicago in 2012) but also have a more positive angle, that writing about every murder in the newspaper makes the city seem like one defined by murder.

But Tanveer’s argument is compelling: “by striving to treat all victims as human, journalists and their audiences may well seek out further information on social, economic, and other factors that play directly into the numbers of violence. And those results would be a good first step in changing the homicide numbers.”

I think the empathy argument, the one I’ve been mulling over all weekend, is a trickier one to pin down: I’d like the media to tell stories that make people inside the beltways and the ivory tower to feel a little bit more that all victims  of violence are valuable and more similar to us than dissimilar.  I don’t know how to get the people who are most likely to talk about only the statistics that support their point of view and only about their own experiences to read things that challenge them, to listen to radio that tells stories about lives completely unlike their own.  But that doesn’t mean that media outlets should stop trying. This American Life did an incredible job going deep into the effects of gun violence on the families, staff, and students of Harper High School in Chicago. At the very end of the two-part radio show, Ira Glass went back to the statistics, to make sure that listeners knew that the problems and struggles and tragedies of Harper High were not unique to Harper High or to Chicago. But it was the stories of the individuals that made the radio show.

How we in the news media expand empathy is something that has no easy answer, and I am sure there are a lot of people who say it’s not our job. But a lot of journalists are working on it. We’re a minuscule part of the solution (and I haven’t even broached the topic of race). But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try our absolute hardest to expand the definition of “our children.”

P.S. On the issue of the gun control debate there is surely a problem of neither side knowing the other, a problem that The New  Republic appears to have tried to tackle recently by running an essay about a gun owner, but the question of empathy for the victims of violence (which can be expanded to non-gun violence as well) seems to me to be a bigger one, because people can stand up and demand action out of a sense that something must be done, even if they disagree on how it should be done.

The Year of the Woman?

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The cover of the Atlantic issue featuring Slaughter’s article

Malala Yousafzai. Image via the New York Time’s Adam Ellick’s short documentary about her last week in school

There is a narrative to be woven about 2012 being the year of conversation about women–really important conversation, despite  evidence that there is still so much going horribly wrong.

In the media arena, there was  Anne Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” Atlantic article, and the movie Brave, for starters. (The movie is getting slammed as a disappointment in the year-in-review list-icles, but its messages about women’s strengths in diplomacy and more generally its “you go girl” vibe were clear and important). In the political arena, it was the year when a female Michigan legislator was banned from the State House floor for saying “vagina,” when Congress debated birth-control legislation, and when both parties tried to court the female vote in the presidential election (then there was the “binders full of women” comment, the meme, and the much more interesting discussion about hiring practices).  And that’s just what comes to mind right now.

Much of the conversation was enlightening and exciting (though I was surprised to see the number of people who appeared to have read only half of Slaughter’s article; reacting to the “can’t have it all” part but not to the solutions she suggested in the second half of the article). It’s easy to sit in the Ivory Tower and have lofty conversations about the issues, to get excited about the record number of women sworn in to the Senate and talk about how to keep that number rising. But the conversation seems so futile and disconnected from the world at large.

A record number of women in the Senate seems like a marginal accomplishment when a girl is shot by the Taliban for daring to advocate that she be allowed to attend school, when a woman in India is gang raped and left to die, when the women who want to protest in response to the crime are afraid of being groped. 

It was a smaller thing that reminded me of the differing levels of conversations about women (click image below to enlarge).

Photo from MissRepresentation Facebook page, captioned as "The 113th Congress, officially sworn in today, is the most diverse in American history - including a record-breaking number of women."

Luckily, we have capacity to have conversations about tragedies and accomplishments; to push for progress in ensuring safety of women all around the world while also pushing for the ( not entirely unrelated) election of more women. But conversations like the one that was had  on this (public) Facebook wall, reminds me that while we are having those conversations, while Biden points out a record number that is far from a representative number of Senators, we also still need to go back to the basics, to talking about WHY women should be serving in elected office. This David guy (whose post will get way more reads on Facebook than on this blog, so I don’t feel any concern about leaving up his name) might be a troll, and I know, I know. Don’t feed them. This is a snapshot of an online conversation about one issue–women in office–and doesn’t touch on the other issues at all. I don’t know any of the people in the snapshot, and I don’t know their views outside of what they expressed here.

Still, I can’t believe that this is still a conversation, let alone believe that in the 21st century, women’s safety is still so fragile.

Here’s to more conversation, and more progress, in 2013.

To Increase The Light

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On Friday night, someone asked why it matters what order light the candles–there is a debate in the Talmud as to whether we should add a candle for each night of Chanukah or start with eight and go down to one. The Jewish law is the former; we go up in number. On Friday night, I gave a somewhat flippant, academic answer. We go up in number because in these debates, we always come down on the side of the House of Hillel.

*   *   *

I read the next-day coverage of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, while the I watched the candles for the last night of Chanukah burn.

I don’t have anything  to say that hasn’t been already been said.  In line with my academic work, I thought briefly about what areas of policy need to be tackled, about whether there were ways to have discussions about policy that weren’t also political.

Ultimately, though, I was drawn back to the candles, away from my academic approach to life. We do determine law as argued by the House of Hillel. But Hillel argued that we increase the candles so that we could increase in holiness each night, we could bring more light into the world. Move into light, away from darkness.

For so many families and friends these have been days of darkness, at a time that should have been one of light.

Nobody has answers here. Only a wish for more light. IMG_5325

Deep In the Night Kitchen: On Childhood and Authors

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I’ve been thinking about authors today, particularly Maurice Sendak, who died today.

I’ve been thinking about authors and how children relate to them, or rather, how I related to them as a child.

Today, I watched Sendak on the Colbert report. It was Sendak’s last interview.  It is a thing of wonder, and it was amazing to me to see Sendak and his honest and curmudgeonly personality. I imagined showing the clips to kids who more recently had discovered Sendak. I realized they wouldn’t care.

Obviously, there are some children who are interested in the author. All the children who wrote to Sendak, for example. I am sure that, if prompted, I would have written to an author or two as a child. After all, I wanted to be an author.

But, the only memory I have about authors as a child was my discovery that not only had I read all of Edward Eager’s books but that he was dead and would write no more. The disappointment had nothing to do with Eager’s death 30 years prior, it had to do with the fact that there would be no more of those magical books, and that was quickly put aside when I learned his favorite author was E. Nesbit. It wasn’t the bit of biography, it was the book recommendations that were important.  Even when I knew about an author–I knew that Roald Dahl may have been anti-Semitic–my knowledge had no bearing on my enjoyment of the books. The only thing that mattered was: is the author alive? Will there be more if I run out?

Today, as an adult, I still haven’t met very many of my favorite authors. I learned an immense amount about creative writing from Mary Gordon, but I only read (and loved) her books once I had already met her as my creative writing professor. I can only think of one other fiction book signing I have attended (Jasper Fforde. Thankfully, he was hilarious in person too. (Thankfully? Why should I care? But I do believe I would have been disappointed).

I once wanted to write to Joyce Carol Oates after she wrote that she likes to think her students at Princeton has not read her writing. It seemed so preposterous. Not read her writing?

“I’ll write to her,” I thought. “I will tell her that  We Were the Mulvaneys was the first book not written for children that I remember that I chose to read without any input, guidance or recommendations from adults. That her books shaped my transition into adulthood and changed my ideas about what it was allowed to do with language.”

But, of course, I didn’t. Still, now, I want to know more about the authors I love. I love reading about the craft of writing. I follow Margaret Atwood on Twitter.

So, what is it about childhood authors? I think it is the sense of experience that is somewhat lost in adulthood. When I remember In the Night Kitchen, Where The Wild Things Are, and Pierre I remember them with fondness and a sense of safety that is not reflected in the text of the books. It comes from being read to. When I listened to a recording of In the Night Kitchen today, I heard my father’s voice even as another voice read the lines “I am not the milk, and the milk’s not me! I’m Mickey!” Reading  was an entirely immersive experience. It didn’t matter who the author was, because he was not part of my world at the moment. That world was contained in the book and in my parent’s lap. Later, when I was reading to myself, the book itself sufficed.

On the best days now, I can read for long enough and with enough intensity that the outside world–author and all–fade to nothing.

I have loved reading about Sendak’s life today. I was honestly sad to hear he had died, but I have to admit that the sadness was surely selfish, sadness  that a man who had created worlds of my childhood had died. That there would be no more books. After all, when we say someone was a “beloved children’s book author” isn’t it usually the books that are beloved? The worlds that are created?

Sendak offered so many worlds, and a lot more. Now, too late, I write to him:

Thank you, Maurice Sendak for the adventures, the escapes, the immersions into places and experiences both so recognizable and exotic.