Monday, November 4, 2013
I Sing the Bike Electric
A long, long, time ago, when Twitter did not exist and the Winklevoss twins were still in high school, I got into biking. Though I was 48 when I started, I had the power and speed of a longtime features writer. Even on trips with people who appeared to be in their late 70s I was last. My last long trip, which I took with my friend Herb, was in California wine country, when the temperature was in the low 90s.
“Have you noticed that the migrant workers are sitting under the shade while the two New Yorkers are out here trying to get up the hill?” I asked Herb, somewhere south of Bodega Bay.
About a half-hour later, dazed with heat and exhaustion, I fell on a ragged piece of pavement and broke my thumb. The next year, Herb and I started renting a house in the country.
It was in these years I learned the big lie of bike tour advertising: “gently rolling hills.” There are no gentle hills in biking. If it’s not a big, fat geographic lump that can be viewed from space and just about kills you it is not a hill. I spent a lot of time in France and Northern California and New Jersey walking up gently rolling hills.
This was why I was enchanted, a while back, to notice that some bike tour outfits, like Butterfield & Robinson, were offering electric motorized bikes or e-bikes. I couldn’t rent any e-bikes in New York City because while the city now has a bike-share program that encourages helmetless tourists to drive into buses and federal law allows e-bikes as long as they don’t go over 20 miles an hour, riding an e-bike here can get you a $500 fine. You can buy the bikes here, you just can’t ride them. The impetus was said to be speeding food delivery guys, though from what I see on the street nobody told them.
I find an e-bike company called Pedego, based in Irvine, Calif., whose 56-year-old chief executive, Don DiCostanzo, arranges a loan. His boomer work-out philosophy:
“We want to get some exercise and we don’t want to work too hard at it.”
His Brooklyn-based dealer, Damon Victor, at Greenpath Electric Bikes, who sells throughout the northeast United States, delivers two bikes: the Step-Thru Interceptor and the City Commuter, both of which retail for $2,895. They are gorgeous, with leather seats and handlebars. They are also enormous, the Clydesdales of biking, both weighing in at just under 60 pounds. The bike I normally ride, a Terry Symmetry, is 22 pounds.
You can ride these bikes with no motorized assistance, with occasional assistance with the turn of a hand throttle adjacent to the right handlebar, or with the push of a button near the left handlebar, which gives you constant pedal assistance in four levels up to 20 miles an hour. My average speed is 8. Damon gives me a sidewalk lesson punctuated by my hollering when I switch into a power mode and the bike rockets off. I am not used to a bike doing so much when I do nothing. In a way, it’s like a vibrator.
“Have you noticed that the migrant workers are sitting under the shade while the two New Yorkers are out here trying to get up the hill?” I asked Herb, somewhere south of Bodega Bay.About a half-hour later, dazed with heat and exhaustion, I fell on a ragged piece of pavement and broke my thumb. The next year, Herb and I started renting a house in the country.
It was in these years I learned the big lie of bike tour advertising: “gently rolling hills.” There are no gentle hills in biking. If it’s not a big, fat geographic lump that can be viewed from space and just about kills you it is not a hill. I spent a lot of time in France and Northern California and New Jersey walking up gently rolling hills.
This was why I was enchanted, a while back, to notice that some bike tour outfits, like Butterfield & Robinson, were offering electric motorized bikes or e-bikes. I couldn’t rent any e-bikes in New York City because while the city now has a bike-share program that encourages helmetless tourists to drive into buses and federal law allows e-bikes as long as they don’t go over 20 miles an hour, riding an e-bike here can get you a $500 fine. You can buy the bikes here, you just can’t ride them. The impetus was said to be speeding food delivery guys, though from what I see on the street nobody told them.
I find an e-bike company called Pedego, based in Irvine, Calif., whose 56-year-old chief executive, Don DiCostanzo, arranges a loan. His boomer work-out philosophy:
“We want to get some exercise and we don’t want to work too hard at it.”
His Brooklyn-based dealer, Damon Victor, at Greenpath Electric Bikes, who sells throughout the northeast United States, delivers two bikes: the Step-Thru Interceptor and the City Commuter, both of which retail for $2,895. They are gorgeous, with leather seats and handlebars. They are also enormous, the Clydesdales of biking, both weighing in at just under 60 pounds. The bike I normally ride, a Terry Symmetry, is 22 pounds.
You can ride these bikes with no motorized assistance, with occasional assistance with the turn of a hand throttle adjacent to the right handlebar, or with the push of a button near the left handlebar, which gives you constant pedal assistance in four levels up to 20 miles an hour. My average speed is 8. Damon gives me a sidewalk lesson punctuated by my hollering when I switch into a power mode and the bike rockets off. I am not used to a bike doing so much when I do nothing. In a way, it’s like a vibrator.
by Joyce Wadler, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Pedego Electric Bike Company
‘As Long as You’re Watching People Have Sex, You Could Be Learning Something’
The character of Johnson (however closely she hews to her real-life counterpart) is both a galvanizing force and a lightning rod, who goes around upending people’s schemata and otherwise generally not fitting in. A mildly harried single working mother with limited resources — that is, an exemplar for what we would now call bad life choices — Johnson is nonetheless portrayed as by far the happiest, most satisfied, least frustrated character on the show. And the writers aren’t the least bit equivocal in this: She derives her happiness and satisfaction from asking nothing more and nothing less from sex than pleasure (unlinking it from money); and from being creatively engaged in her work.
Johnson’s charm upsets the absurdly brittle and buttoned-up Dr. DePaul (Julianne Nicholson), the hospital’s sole female doctor, who resents the way Johnson is allowed to flaunt her “beauty and allure,” whereas Dr. DePaul feels obligated to hide every aspect of her female self if she wants to be taken seriously as a professional. One idea “Masters of Sex” keeps returning to is how not in control of their sexual identities women were back then; how blithely they were sorted into slots; how casually idealized or debased; how easily reduced to a single function. Of course, the in-joke is that every respectable character on the show “deviates” in one way or another, or longs to. Only Johnson allows herself to be everything she is, which is why there’s something about her that feels somehow modern, even anachronistic.
At this early point in its life span, “Masters of Sex” is still dwelling in the moment just before control over women’s sexuality and reproduction began to shift from men to women. But from where we stand, we can observe another shift. Sex may be completely out in the open now, but for all its prevalence, as I learned at the pornography conference, it still feels schematic and hidebound. In the past 30 years, ideas about what makes women “sexy” have become narrower, more rigid and more pornographic in their focus on display and performance. The pervasiveness of the porn aesthetic is especially insidious for young girls’ self-perception, as they constantly absorb the message that the modern choice comes down to either abject invisibility or duck-faced selfies across a portfolio of social-media accounts. I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking at when I see Kim Kardashian or Miley Cyrus, or their millions of adolescent imitators. But I’m pretty sure it’s not liberation.
by Carina Chocano, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tom Gauld
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Herbal Supplements Are Often Not What They Seem
Americans spend an estimated $5 billion a year on unproven herbal supplements that promise everything from fighting off colds to curbing hot flashes and boosting memory. But now there is a new reason for supplement buyers to beware: DNA tests show that many pills labeled as healing herbs are little more than powdered rice and weeds.
Using a test called DNA barcoding, a kind of genetic fingerprinting that has also been used to help uncover labeling fraud in the commercial seafood industry, Canadian researchers tested 44 bottles of popular supplements sold by 12 companies. They found that many were not what they claimed to be, and that pills labeled as popular herbs were often diluted — or replaced entirely — by cheap fillers like soybean, wheat and rice.
Consumer advocates and scientists say the research provides more evidence that the herbal supplement industry is riddled with questionable practices. Industry representatives argue that any problems are not widespread.
For the study, the researchers selected popular medicinal herbs, and then randomly bought different brands of those products from stores and outlets in Canada and the United States. To avoid singling out any company, they did not disclose any product names.
Among their findings were bottles of echinacea supplements, used by millions of Americans to prevent and treat colds, that contained ground up bitter weed, Parthenium hysterophorus, an invasive plant found in India and Australia that has been linked to rashes, nausea and flatulence.
Two bottles labeled as St. John’s wort, which studies have shown may treat mild depression, contained none of the medicinal herb. Instead, the pills in one bottle were made of nothing but rice, and another bottle contained only Alexandrian senna, an Egyptian yellow shrub that is a powerful laxative. Gingko biloba supplements, promoted as memory enhancers, were mixed with fillers and black walnut, a potentially deadly hazard for people with nut allergies.
Of 44 herbal supplements tested, one-third showed outright substitution, meaning there was no trace of the plant advertised on the bottle — only another plant in its place.
Many were adulterated with ingredients not listed on the label, like rice, soybean and wheat, which are used as fillers.
Using a test called DNA barcoding, a kind of genetic fingerprinting that has also been used to help uncover labeling fraud in the commercial seafood industry, Canadian researchers tested 44 bottles of popular supplements sold by 12 companies. They found that many were not what they claimed to be, and that pills labeled as popular herbs were often diluted — or replaced entirely — by cheap fillers like soybean, wheat and rice.Consumer advocates and scientists say the research provides more evidence that the herbal supplement industry is riddled with questionable practices. Industry representatives argue that any problems are not widespread.
For the study, the researchers selected popular medicinal herbs, and then randomly bought different brands of those products from stores and outlets in Canada and the United States. To avoid singling out any company, they did not disclose any product names.
Among their findings were bottles of echinacea supplements, used by millions of Americans to prevent and treat colds, that contained ground up bitter weed, Parthenium hysterophorus, an invasive plant found in India and Australia that has been linked to rashes, nausea and flatulence.
Two bottles labeled as St. John’s wort, which studies have shown may treat mild depression, contained none of the medicinal herb. Instead, the pills in one bottle were made of nothing but rice, and another bottle contained only Alexandrian senna, an Egyptian yellow shrub that is a powerful laxative. Gingko biloba supplements, promoted as memory enhancers, were mixed with fillers and black walnut, a potentially deadly hazard for people with nut allergies.
Of 44 herbal supplements tested, one-third showed outright substitution, meaning there was no trace of the plant advertised on the bottle — only another plant in its place.
Many were adulterated with ingredients not listed on the label, like rice, soybean and wheat, which are used as fillers.
by Anahad O'Connor, NY Times | Read more:
Image: NBC News
A Wave of Good Indicators
We lived in Boulder, Colo., in a townhouse along a narrow creek. My boyfriend, Brian, and I, along with my three children, our dogs and cat, were shoehorned into the three-level home, with the children’s bedrooms in the basement.
The townhouse was too small for us, but moving presented problems I couldn’t predict, and because staying seemed so simple, we stayed. Then on Sept. 12 at 1:45 a.m., after more than a year’s worth of rain had fallen in a week, that narrow creek became a raging wave of debris. Thanks to the police scanner, we had a few minutes of warning.
My first response was to save what I could from the basement. As I stuffed clothes into bags, I could see the pressure building behind the big basement window, and water was pouring through the frame. When the glass exploded into the room a moment later, an airborne shard sliced into my calf. By the time I reached the stairs, the water was ankle deep. Within minutes, the basement had flooded to the ceiling and the cat litter box bobbed next to the washer and dryer.
Brian and I had met in the stands watching our sons play lacrosse. Brian’s son was like him, playing offense with such a lack of effort that it looked like play. My son was like me: intense, focused and driven. He wanted to understand and control the field.
I looked forward to seeing Brian in the stands, and knew I was falling in love with him, but I was playing it safe, keeping my emotions hidden.
Brian is a mechanic. He drinks beer. He hunts, butchers and eats elk and deer. I am a vegetarian health nut who prides myself on planning and articulating. He is the one at the party who starts the water-balloon fight that rages for hours and turns into a full-on soak down. I am the one who grabs all the cellphones and takes them inside.
When he first asked me out, I said no. I was too worried about how our relationship might affect our sons on their team. Instead I said, “Ask me again when the season’s over.”
We started talking on the phone every day. Eventually I said yes to a date, but I remained cautious. When we kissed the first time, it was behind a restaurant in a dim alley. This was my strategy: no one should find out. I was worried my children would have a hard time accepting a new man in my life, and I needed to be sure. I convinced myself that I could plan and then play it all out safely.
When Brian wanted us to move in together, I flipped out.
“What does this mean?” I asked. I wanted him to show me how it would work. I needed to find the flaws in the plan so I could prevent horrible things from happening. I needed the complete playbook for blending families.
Brian allowed me, with good humor, the time to worry, and he still made life fun. I saw where we were headed, and I was hoping to forestall the M-word for a while so I could get all my ducks lined up in a tight row. But when he asked me to marry him, I couldn’t say no. He’s the one who makes me laugh, makes me enjoy life — even vacuuming.
I said yes but asked, “What made you want to do this?”
by Michelle Auerbach, NY Times | Read more:
The townhouse was too small for us, but moving presented problems I couldn’t predict, and because staying seemed so simple, we stayed. Then on Sept. 12 at 1:45 a.m., after more than a year’s worth of rain had fallen in a week, that narrow creek became a raging wave of debris. Thanks to the police scanner, we had a few minutes of warning.My first response was to save what I could from the basement. As I stuffed clothes into bags, I could see the pressure building behind the big basement window, and water was pouring through the frame. When the glass exploded into the room a moment later, an airborne shard sliced into my calf. By the time I reached the stairs, the water was ankle deep. Within minutes, the basement had flooded to the ceiling and the cat litter box bobbed next to the washer and dryer.
Brian and I had met in the stands watching our sons play lacrosse. Brian’s son was like him, playing offense with such a lack of effort that it looked like play. My son was like me: intense, focused and driven. He wanted to understand and control the field.
I looked forward to seeing Brian in the stands, and knew I was falling in love with him, but I was playing it safe, keeping my emotions hidden.
Brian is a mechanic. He drinks beer. He hunts, butchers and eats elk and deer. I am a vegetarian health nut who prides myself on planning and articulating. He is the one at the party who starts the water-balloon fight that rages for hours and turns into a full-on soak down. I am the one who grabs all the cellphones and takes them inside.
When he first asked me out, I said no. I was too worried about how our relationship might affect our sons on their team. Instead I said, “Ask me again when the season’s over.”
We started talking on the phone every day. Eventually I said yes to a date, but I remained cautious. When we kissed the first time, it was behind a restaurant in a dim alley. This was my strategy: no one should find out. I was worried my children would have a hard time accepting a new man in my life, and I needed to be sure. I convinced myself that I could plan and then play it all out safely.
When Brian wanted us to move in together, I flipped out.
“What does this mean?” I asked. I wanted him to show me how it would work. I needed to find the flaws in the plan so I could prevent horrible things from happening. I needed the complete playbook for blending families.
Brian allowed me, with good humor, the time to worry, and he still made life fun. I saw where we were headed, and I was hoping to forestall the M-word for a while so I could get all my ducks lined up in a tight row. But when he asked me to marry him, I couldn’t say no. He’s the one who makes me laugh, makes me enjoy life — even vacuuming.
I said yes but asked, “What made you want to do this?”
by Michelle Auerbach, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brian Rea
Humans now have the technology to find and catch every last fish on the planet. Trawl nets, drift nets, longlines, GPS, sonar... As a result, fishing operations have expanded to virtually all corners of the ocean over the past century.
That, in turn, has put a strain on fish populations. The world's marine fisheries peaked in the 1990s, when the global catch was higher than it is today.* And the populations of key commercial species like bluefin tuna and cod have dwindled, in some cases falling more than 90 percent.
So just how badly are we overfishing the oceans? Are fish populations going to keep shrinking each year — or could they recover? Those are surprisingly contentious questions, and there seem to be a couple of schools of thought here.
The pessimistic view, famously expressed by fisheries expert Daniel Pauly, is that we may be facing "The End of Fish." One especially dire 2006 study in Science warned that many commercial ocean fish stocks were on pace to “collapse” by mid-century — at which point they would produce less than 10 percent of their peak catch. Then it's time to eat jellyfish.
Other experts have countered that this view is far too alarmist.** A number of countries have worked hard to improve their fisheries management over the years, including Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. "The U.S. is actually a big success story in rebuilding fish stocks," Ray Hilborn, a marine biologist at the University of Washington, told me last year. Overfishing isn't inevitable. We can fix it.
Both sides make valid points — but the gloomy view is hard to dismiss. That's the argument of a new paper in Marine Pollution Bulletin by Tony Pitcher and William Cheung of the University of British Columbia that weighs in on this broader debate. They conclude that some fisheries around the world are indeed improving, though these appear to be a minority for now.
"Several deeper analyses of the status of the majority of world fisheries confirm the previous dismal picture," they conclude. "Serious depletions are the norm world-wide, management quality is poor, catch per effort is still declining."
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Jane Jacobs
[ed. I've been thinking about Jane Jacobs today. The problems she identified re: urban planning aren't exclusive to big cities. Small towns suffer from a lack of cultural, economic, generational, and transportation diversity too. Finding just the right mix is the key to creating vibrant and sustainable communities.]
Born in 1916 and raised in the coal-mining town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Jacobs moved to New York in the mid-1930s and soon found her way to Greenwich Village. Untrained as a city planner, she rose to prominence in New York politics through her work as a neighborhood organizer, most famously opposing über-planner Robert Moses, who wanted to run a ten-lane expressway through lower Manhattan, a travesty of a project which, had it been built, would have leveled great swaths of Little Italy and Soho.
Moses, the Machiavellian central figure of Robert Caro’s biography The Power Broker, earns only passing mentions in The Death and Life and The Economy of Cities, but the books are in many ways an extended polemic against Moses and his vision for a 20th century New York. Moses and like-minded architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier sought to clear cities of squalor by replacing tenement slums with vast housing complexes surrounded by parkland and ribbons of highway. In practice, this meant razing entire neighborhoods and stuffing thousands of poor people into high-rise “projects” that soon devolved into crime-ridden towers of drug addiction and despair.
Jacobs’ first great insight was to see cities not as machines for living, but instead as living, breathing organisms. Future planners, she says in The Death and Life, must “think of cities as problems in organized complexity – organisms that are replete with unexamined, but obviously intricately interconnected, and surely understandable, relationships.” But if a city is a living thing, then it can die, and Jacobs’ second great insight was that cities are a self-propagating species. To dump money indiscriminately on a city from outside, in her view, is like sticking a feeding tube down a patient’s throat: it might keep the patient from dying, but it’s not likely to help him get out of bed. The best way to grow a city’s economy is clear away the impediments, architectural, governmental, and economic, that stand in the way of individuals working together to make things for themselves.
Jacobs begins her study of how cities function at the atomic level of a single block, using her own stretch of Hudson Street as her test tube. With a sharp eye and great good sense, she describes how a successful block attracts a diverse set of users, not just residents, but local shopkeepers and visitors from other areas of the city who, without really being aware they are doing so, look out for one another. When it works, she writes, a successful block is the setting for:
an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of a good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.Jacobs builds upon this image of a “sidewalk ballet” to tackle the knotty problem of how to create a city full of successful blocks. Streets should be short, with wide sidewalks, a good mix of old and new buildings, and a broad range of businesses likely to attract a true diversity of residents and business owners.
by Michael Bourne, The Millions | Read more:
American Beauty
Stranger in a Strange Land
The star you won't see associated with the film in any meaningful way is the book's author. Card, one of the modern-day giants of science fiction, has been invisible in the marketing lead-up to the film's release. This is both profoundly sad and completely understandable: Card has been an outspoken opponent of gay rights for many years, arguing vociferously against same-sex marriage and serving until recently on the board of the National Organization for Marriage.
In 2013, a person neither can nor should expect previous statements such as "laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books" to be overlooked without consequence. And there have been consequences. DC Comics put Card's Adventures of Superman anthology contribution on hold after fierce public reaction led the comic's artist to drop out of the project; the LGBT group Geeks OUT is organizing "Skip Ender's Game" protests; those associated with the movie, from Ford to director Gavin Hood to Lionsgate, have done the requisite dance, distancing themselves from Card's homophobic views while arguing that the author's bigotry should not detract from the movie's themes of inclusiveness and tolerance.
The movie's themes of inclusiveness and tolerance stem from the book's themes of inclusiveness and tolerance, which is what makes this entire episode so depressing. The book became an instant classic upon its release in 1985, winning both the Hugo and Nebula awards, science fiction's two highest honors. It also quickly won over millions of readers.
Including me. (...)
We all feel alienated at some point, but the book's message resonates even deeper with those who really stick out from the crowd. The empathy extends to the reader. There are no gay characters, but that is presumably because most of the characters are prepubescent children. (Ender is essentially asexual.) But there are girls at Battle School who play important roles; there are characters who are dismissed by other kids because they're too short; there are Jewish kids who get mocked for the size of their noses.
I am neither gay, nor a girl, nor short. I am, however, a Muslim who grew up in Kansas in the 1980s, and I struggle to think of a more perfect recipe for creating a sense of isolation in an American teenager. I literally did not know another practicing Muslim family in Wichita at the time. My best friend who recommended Ender's Game lived in Appleton, Wisconsin. I saw him once or twice a year, but because his dad and my dad emigrated from the Old Country together, I had more in common with him than with my next-door neighbor.
It was in the context of trying to find my place in the world, of struggling to reconcile my faith with my country when I had no role models to show me the way, that I encountered the following passage about Ender and his Battle School classmate Alai. It stopped me cold:
"I don't want to go," he said.
Alai hugged him back. "I understand them, Ender. You are the best of us. Maybe they're in a hurry to teach you everything."
"They don't want to teach me everything," Ender said. "I wanted to learn what it was like to have a friend."
Alai nodded soberly. "Always my friend, always the best of my friends," he said. Then he grinned. "Go slice up the buggers."
"Yeah." Ender smiled back. Alai suddenly kissed Ender on the cheek and whispered in his ear, "Salaam." Then, red-faced, he turned away and walked to his own bed at the back of the barracks. Ender guessed that the kiss and the word were somehow forbidden. A suppressed religion, perhaps. Or maybe the word had some private and powerful meaning for Alai alone. Whatever it meant to Alai, Ender knew that it was sacred; that he had uncovered himself for Ender, as once Ender's mother had done, when he was very young, before they put the monitor in his neck, and she had put her hands on his head when she thought he was asleep, and prayed over him. Ender had never spoken of that to anyone, not even to Mother, but had kept it as a memory of holiness, of how his mother loved him when she thought that no one, not even he, could see or hear. That was what Alai had given him; a gift so sacred that even Ender could not be allowed to understand what it meant.If you don't see the importance of this passage, I envy you. Alai is clearly a Muslim, and in the 1980s, Muslims were portrayed in American popular culture as one of three categories, if they were portrayed at all: crazy ayatollahs, greasy lecherous oil sheikhs, or bomb-wielding hijackers. Ender's Game was literally the first time I had encountered a positive portrayal of a Muslim character in American fiction. It floored me. I finally saw a positive image of myself in print, and it came not from a fellow Muslim but from a wildly popular Christian author who could trace his American lineage for generations.
I learned that I had more in common with Card than I had thought. Card is a Mormon; that lineage of his traces back to Brigham Young himself. Card and I were both devout believers in religions that were shrouded in stereotypes and inaccuracies. As white guys we were members of the racial majority, but we were also part of the religious minority, giving us the weird and vaguely uncomfortable ability to define ourselves depending on the needs of the moment.
Card's community had a far greater toehold in America, of course. Mormonism is an American religion at its fundamental core, while Islam was beaten out of the African slaves who practiced it centuries ago and wasn't revived in the African American community until the 20th century. Only after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 did America's shores open to immigrants from the Muslim world. There were no writers from the Muslim world to whom I could turn in the 1980s, no Khaled Hosseinis or Reza Aslans who had mastered the rhetoric of American culture and could present the Muslim community to their countrymen in a native tongue.
As far as I was concerned, Card was carrying the torch that my own community was too young and inexperienced to hold. And as a Mormon, he was no doubt familiar with receiving prejudice from fellow Americans who held bigoted and misinformed views on his faith. Certainly this was someone who appreciated the value of tolerance, of trying to understand other views even when you don't agree with them.
by Rany Jazayerli, Grantland | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Summit Entertainment
Card's community had a far greater toehold in America, of course. Mormonism is an American religion at its fundamental core, while Islam was beaten out of the African slaves who practiced it centuries ago and wasn't revived in the African American community until the 20th century. Only after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 did America's shores open to immigrants from the Muslim world. There were no writers from the Muslim world to whom I could turn in the 1980s, no Khaled Hosseinis or Reza Aslans who had mastered the rhetoric of American culture and could present the Muslim community to their countrymen in a native tongue.
As far as I was concerned, Card was carrying the torch that my own community was too young and inexperienced to hold. And as a Mormon, he was no doubt familiar with receiving prejudice from fellow Americans who held bigoted and misinformed views on his faith. Certainly this was someone who appreciated the value of tolerance, of trying to understand other views even when you don't agree with them.
by Rany Jazayerli, Grantland | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Summit Entertainment
Stripping on the Side
Whereas other clubs I’d worked in would hire girls of all sizes and descriptions, the girls who worked as Flashdancers had a certain look. Everyone was tan with long hair, long nails and drag-queen makeup. Most girls were tall, with big tits and small waists. No imperfections—no scars, no stretch marks, no body fat. With a little work, I fit the bill. Without it, I was a normal-looking girl with a normal woman’s body. Good enough, I remember thinking often, but not good enough for Flash.
The girls who worked at Flash were professionals. I was competing with women five inches taller than I was. Ten pounds lighter. Girls with advanced degrees. Girls from places where people only dreamt of making the kind of money a girl could make at Flash. At Flash, a girl could make as much as a thousand dollars a night. After our house fee and the requisite tipping—d.j., floor staff and house moms (the women in the dressing room who watched our stuff and did our makeup)—we kept whatever we made: twenty dollars per lap dance, plus whatever tips we were given while onstage.
When I arrived, the dressing room was packed. It was house policy that dancers not have tattoos, so we girls who had them—nearly all of us—had to cover them with makeup. I had five by then, all butterflies, zigzagging up my left side. I got my tattoos covered, tipped the house mom a twenty, and got in line.
The d.j. called Flashdancers “The United Nations of Strip Clubs.” At the beginning of the shift, we’d do the parade. Nearly one hundred girls from all over the world walked across the stage in a line as the d.j. rattled off our names in alphabetical order: Alex, Alexandria, Alexis, Amanda, Anna, Anita—the list went on and on.
After the parade, we congregated to the right side of the stage. Most nights, I sat down at a table with two Russian girls and a black girl named Snow. I started each shift with a cup of black coffee and a handful of Xenadrine. A month after I’d started taking them, I was up to four pills at a time—double the recommended dose. The effect was something like the revving of an engine or the booting up of a computer. When a group of guys walked in, Snow and I wasted no time.
by Melissa Petro, Narratively | Read more:
Image: Almaz Wilson
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