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storiesbyshelly · 5 years

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TW: violence, parental violence, coming out/sexuality

[october 12, 2007]

The house smelled like burnt toast and I was angry.

I was angry because I gave Adam one job: stand by the counter and watch it. He didn’t want to wait until I finished my homework and I could make it for him, since I knew what to do, so I told him if he makes it himself, he needs to stand by the toaster and watch it. Our toaster was old and wanky, sometimes you had to press the lever down three times just to get it to warm up, and other times it popped up after a minute completely black. You had to standby and pay attention. But he never paid attention.

The burnt smell was so bad it was stuck in between my nose and my mouth, making my face involuntarily scrunch up. It was so bad it snuck under the cracks of my closed bedroom door, which was all the way down the hallway from the kitchen. It was so bad that it somehow leaked into me and filled my body with unencumbered rage that he couldn’t follow even the simplest of directions. I swung my door open with such force that it bounced back after me, slamming shut as soon as I stepped out of it. The force of the door back into its frame shook a little reason back into me. I was still angry, but also aware enough to be embarrassed by my actions.

Adam sat on the couch playing his Nintendo, exactly as how I envisioned he’d be. Careless. My favorite teacher used to tell me to find my anger sometimes. When I was little I had a pretty bad temper, and when they’d call my dad to tell him whatever I’d done to some poor kid on the playground that day, he’d tell the vice principal he was going to take me out to ice cream later. The school didn’t know what to do with a parent so uncooperative, so I almost got kicked out of public school. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Taylor, used to tell me to find my anger. “Where is it today?” she’d ask. “Is it in your stomach? Your legs? Is it so stuck all the way up in your fingers that they have to curl up like this?” she’d ask while holding up her own clenched fist. Most days I think I just made up an answer because I found it funny. I liked it. Then she’d say “okay, Lulu, we found it. Now we sit with it until it passes through us. Tell me when you can feel it pass through. We’ll take deep breaths until then.” She always called me Lulu. I think she forgot my name at first, but then it became sort of comforting. Being Liv to everyone else, but Lulu to her.

Most people didn’t understand that, except Mrs. Taylor. When I got to middle school, Mrs. Taylor made some calls and set me up with the guidance counselor every week. The guidance counselor was named Jim and he let me call him that. He asked about my home life mostly. About my dad, and Pauline, and Adam sometimes. Adam was still at the elementary school but he was a bad kid, so everyone in the district knew about him. Actually, I guess they knew about us, the Clarke siblings, because we were both bad kids. I was getting better though. It was like Adam didn’t even care to try. Jim asked about my real mom once, and I didn’t have much to say because I never really knew her, but I told him the sadness was in my shoulders. He looked really confused and asked me to explain it more. I told him that when I thought about her, it felt like something was really heavy on me that I was trying to hold. We never talked about her again.

“Get up,” I yelled at Adam when I was still approaching the couch from behind, even though I knew he was going to ignore me. I kept going until I stood in front of the TV screen and I put my hands on my hip. “What did I tell you to do?!”

He grumbled at me to move. I felt furious that he wasn’t repenting and begging for forgiveness after he clearly made the mistake in this situation.

“MOVE,” he yelled. I shut the TV off instead, pushing his boundaries. I didn’t even register what was happening when he came at me with both hands and shoved me to the side. I was thirteen and he was twelve, but he was about fifty pounds bigger than me already. When I fell down, my shirt curled up enough to bare my stomach. It was my hip that froze Adam into place, the blues and purples bruising up the side of my torso. He stared at it for a long time. “What’s that?” he asked.

From last night, I wanted to say, because I was angry. When you were sleeping just fine. When Dad angrily sent us to bed, and we knew it was going to be a bad night, and I woke up to Pauline’s shrieking. She was crawling backward on the kitchen counter but she was up against the wall, out of space. Dad had a baseball bat in his hand. A baseball bat signed by some Yankees player he was obsessed with, one of his most prized possessions.

These are the moments that define us, maybe. What are you supposed to do when you see your dad coming at your stepmom with a baseball bat and they both scream at you to go back to bed?

I ran to the silverware drawer to get a knife. I wouldn’t use it, I don’t think, but I needed more power to stop him, and knife trumps bat. All I had to do was hold it up and scream at him to get back. Dad saw what I was doing too quick though, saw my fingers grip the black handle of the cutlery drawer, and he swung his most prized possession at me before I could move. He hit me right in the gut, right where it hurt, and I crumpled like an accordion, completely useless. I woke up on the kitchen floor early this morning, in the same position, untouched from last night. I wondered where Pauline went only briefly. Every man for himself.

“Nothing,” I start to answer Adam, then change my mind. “It’s all my anger,” I explain instead. “It’s all the anger in my body, stuck in this one spot.”

[january 15, 2012]

Things in the house were suspiciously quiet.

Two things had happened in the past couple of months. One: I received my early acceptance letters from Harvard, Cornell, and Dartmouth. Yale waitlisted me, but I wasn’t taking it to heart. The undeniable proof that I was leaving here and going to school was all I was ever really looking for. It never really mattered to me where. My guidance counselor suggested the Ivy Leagues and even helped me waive the admission fees because she knew I was too stubborn to ask my dad for help. Two: my dad walked in on Melanie and me making out in my room with just our bras on.

Melanie and I met our first year of high school. It was a mutually beneficial relationship at first and nothing more. I taught her academics, and she taught me how to dance. She was the captain of the dance team and failing chemistry, algebra, and English. I told her to pick a struggle, she laughed, and we made a deal.

I don’t think I ever really cared about dancing that much, but I liked learning when she was the one teaching me. I liked anything she did. But I really liked the way she put her hands on my hips, and rested her chin on my shoulder, and guided my body. Her hair was all the way down her back long, and naturally blonde but she dyed it auburn red, and it always smelled like lavender. Somehow when her grades picked up and we agreed I was never going to make it on the dance team, we kept hanging out anyway. None of our other friends understood, but they seemed to matter less and less anyway.

We’d joke about how we’re going to marry each other if we don’t find boys by the time we’re 25. We talked about our life together. Our wedding. Our kids. We talked and talked and planned it all as if it was just a backup plan. Even the kissing started as practice.

It just seemed that we never got good enough to justify stopping. We never had an honest discussion with ourselves about what we were to each other because somehow we knew we’d never be anything. We knew that she’d never be ready to love a girl and me, well, I’d never be ready to love anybody.

When my dad walked in on Melanie and me, I expected him to yell, but instead, he was a ghost, a shadow, watching us until we startled seeing him in the doorway, my bed a Petri dish. She picked up her shirt and left before putting it on. I was abandoned, I knew it, and I was right.

“I hate that you did this, Liv,” he said, with true exasperation, and then he looked down, and my eyes followed him to his boner. I curled my toes to prevent my body from recoiling with disgust. “I really hate this.”

I couldn’t help myself. I said, “it doesn’t look like you hated it.”

Anger flashed across his face and it was like seeing the only person I’ve ever truly known. I wasn’t afraid. Not when he charged at me on the bed. Not when he rolled his fist back and slammed it into my face and shouted, “you think I’m proud of this? I should fuck you right now. Maybe that’s what you need, huh? Faggot!”

“I will kill you,” I promised with dead eyes. “As soon as you fall asleep tonight.”

It’s on my tongue, I’d have told Mrs. Taylor. It’s in between my teeth.

[april 16, 2015]

All I can think about as they lower that coffin is how much I wish it was him inside.

I wish it had been a heart attack. I wish he had an aneurysm. I wish a drunk driver hit him head-on and ejected him from his seat, making his body splatter on the road like a cracked egg.

My body is so full of hatred for my own father that it vibrates when he speaks. He wipes tears away from his eyes and talks about the mother Pauline was, how she raised his daughter like her own and never thought twice or asked for a thank you. It’s true, I guess. She raised me just the same as Adam. She didn’t care for either of us because my dad made her whole life about her own survival. I don’t hate her. I hate him.

I stand about ten feet in the back, away from everyone else, even Adam and Maddie, because Adam told me he never wanted to see me again this morning. He’ll die defending our father, even if it means defending his mother’s murderer. He murdered her. Her life will never matter as much as his approval does.

I don’t know why I’m here except pity. It’s not out of love. I feel sorry for Pauline. I feel sorry in a deep way, in a way that’s in the middle of my bones, dead center, that her life never got better. She never escaped. I imagine going back to twenty years ago and telling her “this is it, until the day you die. You never get out.” She probably would have fed me some bullshit even if I could have said that to her. Some bullshit like “What makes you think I want to leave? I love your father very much Alivia.” She always called me Alivia. She loved that my mother was so original, and that’s why she picked out Adam. It went with my beautiful name, according to her. She never shortened it to Liv. She said that was a waste.

When I look to my right, there’s a woman about three feet away with long, straight, dark hair and blue eyes. She looks like she’s in her 40s. She’s got a freckle at the top of her lip and sunglasses on top of her head, even though it’s been cloudy and overcast for the past three days with no sign of clearing up. She’s beautiful. I’ve never met her before, but I know instantly. I feel it all over. I’ve only seen one picture of her, when she was in the hospital right after giving birth. She’s holding me and she looks like a ghost. She didn’t have that loopy new mom smile at all. It was like the whites of her eyes were see-through. Like the camera capturing her was a fluke, and she wasn’t really there. I don’t wonder why she’s here. I can feel that too. I’m sure she saw the funeral posted about somewhere and my dad’s name and recognized herself.

Recognized her death date if she had stayed.

I don’t go over to her. I don’t say hi.

When I think about that day actually, I don’t think I said a word to anybody.

[july 5, 2017]

The curtains broke last night. Somehow the rod broke in half and the curtains slid off right down the middle. If the window was a face, it would be sad.

I woke up at dawn to the sun beaming directly onto my eyelids, through my now curtainless window. I don’t have the money or time to deal with whatever made my curtain rod snap in half, which looks a lot like a leak from the ceiling dripping onto it and making the metal rust to the point of crumbling. I’ve consistently been a week late with rent since I moved in, which my landlord has ignored while somehow giving me the distinct feeling that the minute I cause any trouble for him, he won’t be so understanding.

I wish I could just get my shit together. If I could have just been able to pay my rent on time, I wouldn’t feel indebted to him, and I could call him and tell him about his shitty apartment and the outlets that always stop working, and the flickering bathroom lights, and the leaky ceiling breaking my curtain rods because I am certain the conditions I’m living in must be illegal. At least some of them.

It’s hard not to think about the curtains when I walk out of the hospital. It’s a coping mechanism, I figure, my brain’s way of protecting itself against something worse. If I think about this job too long, and how badly I want it, and how good I feel after this interview, I might start thinking that the job is already mine. And if I start thinking that, then it’s going to be a pretty big low when and if I don’t get it.

So I think about my curtains. I don’t think about the position as a researcher that would give me an amazing opportunity to fund my passion project. I don’t think about how I feel like I aced the interview, but there’s no one to call. I don’t think about the arm’s length I’ve forced everyone to stay at because I’ve been so afraid for so long I was born with bones that don’t bend.

If I lower my defenses now, they might break.

It’s better to not think about anything, I decide, as I’m already getting into an Uber with a bar plugged in as my destination. It does feel like a celebratory drink tonight. Why else would he keep me there for four hours, talking until the sun went down? I could tell he liked what I had to say when I pitched my research to him. The interest swam in his eyes, right up front, right where I could see them.

Once I get to the bar and start drinking I think about calling my ex. I think about calling Melanie too, and I even search for her on Facebook. Married now. Two young kids. Her son looks just like her, so much so that it feels like a squeeze around my heart seeing it. For a minute I know what our kids would have looked like. I wish I hadn’t drunk anything, because I was already feeling lonely and the alcohol only exacerbated it. I should have just gone straight home.

I call an Uber, then go out and look for it.

It feels hot first. Before it hurts or I can even register any kind of pain, it feels hot, like the temperature, all around my forehead. For half of a second, my drunk brain thinks it’s lava until my real brain figures out it’s my blood. I’m on the ground. Did I fall? My question is answered with feet. A deep, grainy voice yells at me to hand him my wallet. A shakier, higher-pitched one assures me they don’t want to hurt me.

“That’s funny,” I say, and both of them are too stunned to do anything but stare at me. It’s too bad they can’t appreciate how funny it is.

The deeper voice one kicks my side. I feel my body crumple like an accordion. He yells to give him my wallet, and I stare blankly. Deep Voice rolls me around by kicking me, and my body moves like a rag doll. He feels me up until he gets to my back pocket. I didn’t want to bring a purse into the interview so I slid my license and my debit card into my back pocket before I left. Deep Voice takes both and swears under his breath.

“Get her,” he commands Shaky Voice. Shaky Voice grabs my arms and twists them around my back, then pulls me up. He knocks into my back as he pushes me forward.

“My head hurts,” I state calmly, the blood from my forehead dripping into my mouth. Deep Voice tells me to shut up. It tastes hot if hot was a flavor. Ashy, like swallowing fire.

Deep Voice pulls out a gun when we get to the ATM. When I put my pin number in, my first tear escapes. Instantly I know it’s where all my anger is. It’s not real until my balance comes up in front of me, 907 dollars, and I realize it’s all I have. My rent of 1,000 dollars was due yesterday. So close. I had 920 before the bar. I was so stressed about those 80 dollars. 80 measly dollars. It seems so small potatoes now.

He cleans me out, then they leave. I should probably go to the hospital, I think, to get my head checked out.

But how would I pay to get there?

Who would I call to drive me?

I press my sweater sleeve up against the gash on my forehead.

I shiver and think about my damn curtains.

[february 14, 2019]

The thing that no one ever told Mrs. Taylor is that anger doesn’t pass completely through you. Every time it touches you, a little bit stays behind.

Anger has already touched every part of my body. It lives inside me, solid as a rock, all over, and this time, none of it is going anywhere. There comes a time when so much anger has passed through your system, it starts to rewire your DNA. It’s the makeup of who I am now, and it returns like an old friend every time I think we’ve both moved on from each other. I’ve been living inside of it for weeks, since the day in the cafeteria, when she told me she couldn’t do it anymore, that she didn’t want to hold me back, that she has to let me go, that I could never love her the way she needs me to love her.

Anger lives inside my research room now too, my happy place, because I took it back here. Work, which used to mean everything, seems to mean nothing anymore. I don’t even want to go back there.

When I finally do, there’s a note on my desk to come to the pharmacy. It’s in her handwriting. I don’t want to go. I have no idea what she wants and I don’t want to find out, because if she wants me to come to her so she can ask for some shirt back that’s stuffed at the bottom of my drawer and I forgot about, my anger might not stay so buried inside my bones. What could she possibly say to me? What could she say to make any of this go away?

What do I want to say to her?

How dare you, I would say first.

How dare you make the world finally feel like I place I want to be.

I’d tell her that she messed up and can’t take this back.

But please try.

I’d tell her that I love her with more love than I ever believed could live inside such a broken and battered body, and that I think about her every moment of every day, and mostly, that she makes the world finally feel cold and quiet.

The other thing Mrs. Taylor always used to tell me, my brain never held onto, because it felt too cliche and clucky, even in all my childhood naivety. After a few minutes of deep breathing, I’d tell her when it was all done passing through, and she’d say, “I know you don’t understand this yet, but all that anger inside of you right now is protecting you, and for good reason. Right now, you need it. But one day you won’t. I pray you’ll have the wisdom and the strength to recognize the day when it comes.”

I hadn’t thought about her saying that to me in years. I had accepted anger into my body like my genetic makeup, its unrelenting permanence. Not until I was standing at the pharmacy desk and Jack’s voice was like spreading warm butter on soft bread, telling me about the worst mistake she’s ever made.

And it felt like sugar in water, the way it all dissolved inside me. Like I never had any say in the matter.

And I cried. And cried. And cried. She put her arms around me, worried she had done something wrong, and all I could say to her was, “I hated that stupid fucking toaster.”

And confused, and still worried, she told me she’d buy me a new one, whichever one I wanted.

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news4dzhozhar · 6 years

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I FIRST MET Dzhokhar “Jahar” Tsarnaev in seventh grade, on the basketball court at the Cambridge YMCA in Central Square, where I played on weekdays & in a Saturday league. He went to the gym to use the weight room & shoot around. I disregarded him — he sucked at basketball.

Basketball helped me feel like an American, instead of a Muslim whose single mother dragged him here from Morocco looking for a better life, then worried constantly that we wouldn’t find it. Before basketball, I didn’t really fit in. I wasn’t particularly smart or witty. Worse, I had started second grade in Cambridge the very same month that the Twin Towers fell. On the playground, kids would call me “sand [expletive]” “Saddam Hussein’s son,” or “Abu,” after Aladdin’s monkey. One kid nicknamed me “Unicef,” which was brilliant, in a way: It rhymed with my name & alluded to my African heritage, financial situation, & emergent unibrow. When we were a little older, kids would come up to me, place fake “bombs” on my body & then run away making ticking noises. I got into a fair amount of fights until my mother, who worked three jobs, told me I had to stop. Even if it meant saying nothing when bullies taunted me, I had to exercise self-control. It felt completely debilitating.

My mom always made me stay in the apartment until I finished my homework. But she agreed that as long as I kept my grades up, I could play basketball after school. I began spending hours on courts across Cambridge. This freedom allowed me to meet a slew of people who helped me develop as a young man & truly feel a part of the culture of Cambridge. As I improved, I gained confidence, sociability, & friends.

I met Jahar again in high school, when we enrolled in the same lifeguarding course in my sophomore year, his junior year. Lifeguards were paid well for minimal effort: You sit in a chair & watch people swim, or so we thought. We were actually terrible swimmers, but our teacher stressed that if we failed during a rescue attempt, people could die. So we learned how to breathe while swimming with our heads in the water, & swam endless laps to get in shape. We took turns “drowning” at the bottom of the pool, holding our breath & waiting to be “rescued.” Jahar & I learned to trust one another in the pool — and that trust soon extended beyond class. After we became certified, a group of us from the class applied to be lifeguards at Harvard University during the summer of 2010. To our surprise, we each landed positions.

Jahar & I became part of a small group that would gather at “808,” a tall apartment building off Memorial Drive overlooking the Charles River. After dark, we frequented a party spot nearby that we referred to as the Riv. We were all classmates, peers, co-workers, & good friends who shared common interests. We called ourselves the Sherm Squad. We didn’t know that “Sherm” referred to Nat Sherman cigarettes dipped into liquid PCP (I didn’t even know what PCP was). All we knew was the word Sherm had a negative connotation. We used it to mean someone who messed up a lot; we called it being a Sherm. I felt Jahar & the Sherm Squad accepted me unconditionally; they became my home base of friends, almost an adopted family

My real family’s life centered on Islam. I was raised to follow the teaching of the Koran & the five pillars of Islam, which boil down to self-discipline, love for yourself & toward others, & growing your relationship with God. We typically went to the mosque on Prospect Street twice a week, plus whenever my mother forced me to come to some event she’d volunteered for. I never looked forward to it. Men & women separate when they enter the mosque, which drove home my lack of a father or other male role models (I have an older brother, but we haven’t talked in years). So I would sit by myself or with someone else I knew who didn’t want to be there, engaging only when the call for prayer was sung.

One Friday near the end of sophomore year, my mother yelled at me to go to prayer.

When I walked in, I did a double take — Jahar was sitting there, listening intently to the imam. We had been hanging out all that year & he had never mentioned being Muslim. I picked my way through the large crowd sitting on the patterned carpet & squeezed into a spot next to him. “What are you doing here?” I whispered. “You’re not supposed to be here!

He chuckled and whispered back: “I’ll tell you after.”

After we prayed, he told me his family were also Muslim immigrants who expected him be a model Muslim. We both were trying to maintain an image as wholesome Muslim youths at home while being normal American teenagers away from it.

Balancing our family & American lives was stressful. As a junior, I played point guard on Cambridge Rindge & Latin School’s famed basketball team, and Jahar, a senior, was the wrestling team’s co-captain. During the fierce month of Ramadan or on the fast day before Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, we might endure grueling sports workouts on empty stomachs & no water. At least we could complain to each other.

Maintaining separate Muslim & American lives sometimes meant keeping secrets from & even lying to those closest to us about our other life. We were shamed just for being Muslim by strangers, the media, & even some of our peers, just as our Muslim families shamed us when we were caught committing a sin. Jahar & I shared countless hours toking herb, hanging out, & hitting social events. We lived near each other, & often walked home together from parties. We’d hit Cambridge Street, dap each other up with a handclap and bro hug, then head off to our Muslim lives.

He was fun to be around — always cracking jokes, coming up with things to do. He was smart, warm, respectful & a good listener; and many of us admired his ability to “code switch,” moving effortlessly between social crowds & people of different races. He was also adept academically, holding his own in honors & Advanced Placement classes. He was generous, too. Whenever I ran short of funds, he’d give me money for lunch & crack “Stop being a broke boy!” in a way I found endearing.

Sometimes, when we were hanging out, he’d get calls from his older brother, Tamerlan, telling him to get home. Jahar mostly heeded these requests without question. (He admired his older brother, and I envied their seeming closeness.) At one point, Jahar told me that his family was arranging a marriage for him & he was considering it. All I could say was, “Well, it’s your life, bro.”

* *

IN SENIOR YEAR, my priorities were playing basketball, finding the right college, my fantasy basketball team, girls, watching the Celtics, partying with friends, the prom, & making sure to get my homework done. In the secular, diverse melting pot that is Cambridge, I had my American life at school & my Muslim life at home. Adhering to the tenets of Islam, especially the daily prayers, was a struggle, & it didn’t help that Jahar, one of my main confidantes, was off at college.

My mother still expected me to act like a strict Muslim, even though by now I was really only going to the mosque on the major holy days. She forbade me from attending “unwholesome” social gatherings, including school dances & any event held at the home of a female. I was not to swear, use drugs or alcohol, or flirt, among other vices. My mother knew little of what I actually did when I left the house, since I usually climbed out my bedroom window after she had gone to bed. But she often guessed at what I was up to, & frequently berated me as unworthy.

I was much more interested in my American life, where religion was immaterial. You were judged on your social standing, whether your personality added life to the party, and how you expressed yourself through fashion or music. When Jahar was back from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on breaks, it seemed like we picked up right where we left off, cruising the city with the homies in his green Honda, looking for a party. My future felt bright. I was going to attend Bentley University, & become an entrepreneur. I had fulfilled my mother’s American-immigrant dream of getting into college & building a real life in America.

* * *

DURING MY FRESHMAN YEAR at Bentley, I realized that I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in school. I took a leave during second semester & went back to Cambridge.

I was at a friend’s house on April 15, 2013, when the bombs went off on Boylston Street. We ended up on a nearby rooftop, watching the commotion — the helicopters scouring the city & flashing police lights everywhere. I felt angry & under attack. I wanted the monsters who had committed this atrocity to get what they deserved.

On the 19th, I was at another friend’s house and still up at 3 a.m. when I got a call. “Turn on the news!” my friend said. They were broadcasting a photo of the possible suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. “Just look at the picture, fam,” he said to me.

I looked at the blurry image on screen. “What am I supposed to be looking at, bro? I don’t know who that is.”

“Yo, doesn’t he look like Jahar!”

I thought that was outrageous. I fell asleep on the couch, & the next morning I woke up to see my friends huddled around the TV. I had never seen kids my age so absorbed in the morning news. I wondered if maybe a late spring snowstorm was approaching. They told me Cambridge residents had been asked to stay inside, and it did sort of feel like a snow day.

Suddenly, Jahar’s face appeared on the screen — there was no mistaking him this time. He was the bombing suspect still at large, the anchors said. Aside from the sound crackling on the TV, the room was dead silent. I felt like 10,000 volts of electricity were coursing through my body. It had to be a mistake. The Jahar I knew wouldn’t even do something mean, let alone commit an act of terrorism.

One of the girls’ cellphones rang; the call was from a TV newsroom where her sister’s friend was working. As our friend answered questions, her name appeared on the screen & we heard her voice come from the television. Within minutes, the doorbell rang. Our high school principal came into the house, along with two FBI agents wearing bulletproof vests. The FBI agents said they were looking for Jahar, and collected our cellphones. They had us sit in the living room & pulled us into the kitchen one by one to question us.

It didn’t take long for one of the FBI agents to step in the room and say, “To save time, which one of you knew him the best?” I raised my hand. In the kitchen, they asked what I knew about the bombing — nothing — where I thought Jahar was, whom he might try to contact. I answered their questions as best I could, and then they left.

Much later on that surreal day, a group of us were walking around Central Square, saying almost nothing. A pizza shop had its TV on & that’s where we saw a news update: A body had been found in a boat in Watertown, it said. Though we’d later learn he’d been captured alive, at that moment we believed our friend was dead. I remember a man riding toward us on his bike screaming like some sort of modern-day Paul Revere: “They caught him! They caught the bomber!”

This infuriated us, and we started screaming insults & epithets at him. I’ll never forget his shocked expression. That’s probably how most people reacted over the next few days when some of us defended Jahar, saying he was a good kid. But really, that’s the Jahar we knew.

* * *

SOON WE KNEW THE FACTS of the despicable acts Jahar committed with his brother, Tamerlan. We witnessed the heartbreak & loss suffered by those they hurt & by the families of those they killed. Jahar left behind an ocean of pain that is still washing across my city, & my country, sowing hatred & division between people who hardly know each other’s lived reality. Jahar wounded those he grew up with as well as millions who practice a religion he perverted with his crime. He made suspects of everyone who knew him.

Jahar put our safety & freedom in direct peril. Cambridge gave way to the real world, a place where I found myself feeling clueless. Like many of my friends, I did not have easy access to a lawyer. Later, I would realize I didn’t have access to what I needed even more: medical advisers, counselors, or therapists. Some of our mutual friends made bad choices & ended up in jail.

In the fall of 2013, I returned to Bentley to start my second semester, but I was still struggling to cope with the aftermath of the bombing, the FBI calls & questions. I felt guilty I even knew Jahar, after what he’d done. I was ashamed about what had happened to his victims — I still feel terrible for them. It feels awful that innocent people were hurt by a person I cared so deeply for.

That November after the bombing, three days before midterms, the FBI interrogated me for five hours, as far as I could tell simply because I had been friends with Jahar. I had nothing to tell them; I still felt betrayed by him, & knew he deserved the full brunt of the judicial system. After that interview, I found myself completely unable to focus on my studies. I asked my professors for extensions, but all of them made me take my midterms. I failed several of them, & soon after I took another leave.

This time I entered a downward spiral of addiction, insomnia, severe stomach pains, & depression, which fed off each other. I didn’t sleep more than a couple of hours a night for months. I felt paranoid & distrustful in every social interaction. Every aspect of my American life I had had to figure out on my own, and it seemed as though I hadn’t figured out anything at all. I felt like I had fallen behind my peers, unable to compete with their intelligence, their access, their privilege.

I was exhausted from maintaining multiple, often conflicting identities as a Muslim-American, from not being Muslim enough for my family, but too Muslim to feel secure in a hostile, post-9/11 environment. It was soul crushing; I felt I had lost touch with the person & identity I fought for years to establish. It got to the point where I could no longer follow a normal conversation. I lost around 25 pounds, and the ability to play basketball, which had been my sanctuary.

CONTINUED AT THE LINK

#jahar Tsarnaev #dzhokhar tsarnaev #tamerlan tsarnaev

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piscesfeet6-blog · 5 years

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Celebrity Admissions Scandal Exposes The Racism At The Heart Of College Sports

“There will not be a separate admissions system for the wealthy,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling vowed Tuesday as he announced his office’s indictment of dozens of people accused of paying huge bribes to help their children gain admission to elite colleges and universities.

The latest college admissions scandal is especially juicy because it involves the corruption-ridden world of college sports. Some of the parents allegedly faked their kids’ participation in sports like soccer, tennis and water polo, and coaches at big-name schools like the University of Southern California, UCLA, Wake Forest, Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and Georgetown were among those indicted. But this wasn’t exclusively a sports scandal.

“I wouldn’t single out athletics as being ripe for exploitation here,” said Natasha Warikoo, an associate education professor at Harvard. “What’s ripe for exploitation is the overall system.”

Rich people are going to do rich people things.

And in the cut-throat world of college admissions, one of the most common things rich people do is use athletics to gain access to elite academic institutions for which they might not otherwise qualify.

College sports have long provided a “separate admissions system,” to quote Lelling, that largely benefits the wealthy. Collegiate athletics have helped ensure that the higher education system is rigged in favor of wealthy, white people. Those rich, white, indicted folks who faked their kids’ athletic careers were exploiting a system that privileges even the rich, white folks who don’t cheat.

“The system is broken, and today is nothing but another example of the troubling dysfunctionality of college sports,” Don Jackson, a sports attorney and owner of The Sports Group legal practice, said Tuesday. “Especially because of the fact that none of these kids were really athletes.”

Associated Press

“There will not be a separate admissions system for the wealthy,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said at a March 12 news conference in Boston announcing charges against more than 40 people.

‘Purported Athletic Recruits’

It’s no secret that universities privilege athletes when it comes to the admissions process, and the nation’s most elite institutions are no exception. For years, a large donation to the athletic program or the right academic department has been an easy way for ultra-wealthy parents to get their aspiring young athletes into a school and onto a team.

This is, in essence, legal bribery. It was only a matter of time before a crafty huckster would figure out how to take it even further ― into illegal territory ― to benefit other rich people whose kids weren’t as good at sports or had no interest in filling the role of human victory cigar.

That is precisely what the U.S. Department of Justice says happened.

William “Rick” Singer, the founder of a for-profit college preparatory company, was the mastermind behind the scheme, according to the federal complaint. He positioned himself as a middleman who could take a cut of the money that had otherwise gone directly to the schools by convincing parents to go along with a scheme that benefited him, the coaches who helped, and the parents and students, too. (Singer pleaded guilty to multiple charges in federal court on Tuesday afternoon.)

At USC, one student gained admission ‘as a purported rowing recruit, even though she was not competitive in rowing, but instead was an avid equestrian.’

As Singer knew, schools like USC and UCLA “give consideration” to prospective students’ athletic abilities and may admit sports-focused applicants “whose grades and standardized test scores are below those” of other applicants, the complaint notes. Other schools, like Georgetown and Wake Forest, hold more than 100 admissions slots open annually for their coaches’ picks.

The complaint alleges that the conspirators, in some cases, exploited that system by paying bribes to college coaches to designate students “as purported athletic recruits ― regardless of their athletic abilities and in some cases even though they did not play the sport they were purportedly recruited to play.”

At Georgetown, Yale and UCLA, coaches took bribes ranging from $100,000 to $950,000 to help students gain admittance as athletes even though they hadn’t played the sports in question. At USC, one student gained admission “as a purported rowing recruit, even though she was not competitive in rowing, but instead was an avid equestrian.” Georgetown tennis coach Gordon Ernst and UCLA men’s soccer coach Jorge Salcedo are both facing racketeering charges.

USC water polo coach Jovan Vavic, meanwhile, accepted a bribe “to designate” a student “as a purported recruit to the USC men’s water polo team, thereby facilitating his admission to USC.” Parents sent fabricated awards and statistics to Vavic, who is now facing racketeering charges and has been fired. Vavic then argued to USC’s admissions officials that the student would be “the fastest player on our team.” That student withdrew from the water polo team after just one semester, according to the complaint. In another instance, a parent “sought reassurance that his daughter would not actually have to join the USC water polo team.”

Parents went so far as to photoshop a supposed water polo recruit into an image of someone else playing the sport. The absurdity was evident to everyone involved.

“Last year I had a boy who did the water polo, and when the dad sent me the picture, he was way too high out of the water,” Singer told one parent, according to the complaint. “That nobody would believe that anybody could get that high.”

But the fraud worked nearly every time.

“Is there any risk of this blowing up in my face?” asked Agustin Huneeus, a parent who is facing conspiracy charges after allegedly helping his daughter gain admission to USC as a fake water polo recruit, according to the complaint.

“Hasn’t in 24 years,” Singer replied.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sixty-five percent of Division I water polo athletes are white, an even larger majority than in D-I college sports as a whole.

‘Affirmative Action For Affluent White Kids’

Throughout college sports, and at the most elite institutions in particular, the primary beneficiaries of the privilege of playing on a team have been white students.

“College sports at elite schools are a quiet sort of affirmative action for affluent white kids,” The Atlantic’s Saahil Desai argued last year, adding that they “play a big role in keeping these institutions so stubbornly white and affluent.”

At many top-tier colleges, the admissions structure overwhelmingly benefits athletes. At Harvard, The Atlantic noted, non-athletes are admitted at rates “nearly 1,000 times lower” than athletes with comparable scores on the school’s admissions scale. Twenty percent of students admitted to Ivy League colleges each year are athletes, according to Columbia University professor Jonathan Cole.

This isn’t an accident. As Desai noted, schools value the economic and prestige benefits that come with successful sports programs. That gives coaches leverage to obtain students they want, even if those kids might not otherwise beat out other qualified applicants.

In 2012, a Dartmouth academics adviser told Business Insider that they were “constantly peeved by athletic admissions,” a process under which “coaches submit lists to admissions officers, ranking recruits, saying these are the kids we really want, and as you get to the top of the list you can be more lenient with academic standards.”

Most white student-athletes play sports like baseball and lacrosse, sailing and crew, soccer and tennis. While the Justice Department’s complaint does not mention the race or ethnicity of the more than 40 people charged, most of them were white people pretending that their kids played sports in which the overwhelming majority of Division I participants are white. In 2017-2018, according to the NCAA’s own numbers, 69 percent of Division I women’s soccer players were white. Eighty-two percent of Division I sailors were. For water polo and volleyball, it was 65 percent. (Overall, more than 60 percent of Division I athletes are white. At elite schools like the Ivies, white athletes make up an even larger majority.)

This flies in the face of what we think we know about college sports: The archetypal college athlete in most Americans’ minds is the black male student who makes up the majority of Division I basketball and football teams ― the athletes whose labor draws thousands of fans to arenas and stadiums and fills the coffers of university athletic departments with millions of dollars.

That the majority of black students at top colleges and universities tend to be athletes fosters the biased idea that sports serve as another form of affirmative action for black people ― that were it not for sports, most of the black students on college campuses wouldn’t be there at all.

You can hear this in the paternalistic tone the NCAA’s higher-ups use to remind us how many poor black kids they’ve helped. And you can see the ways that perception of the black athlete as a faux student is reinforced by the sports scandals that do grab our attention: the University of North Carolina’s Afro-American Studies academic fraud scandal that hit the school’s prominent football and men’s basketball programs, former University of Memphis star Derrick Rose’s questionable ACT and SAT scores, or the overly easy tests and fake grades handed to two University of Georgia basketball players in the early 2000s, to name but three.

But Tuesday’s news ought to shift our perceptions of who’s really benefiting from college athletics, or from the sort of bribery that some rich white folks turn to even when their kids aren’t athletes.

Sporting News

Men's basketball is one of just two Division I college sports in which a majority of the athletes are black.

What stood out to Jackson, the sports lawyer, was that each alleged athlete in the latest scandal appeared to get away with cheating so easily.

The NCAA requires anyone who wants to play college sports to register with its Eligibility Center, a clearinghouse that certifies academic eligibility and checks athletes for potential violations ― including suspicious test scores. (This part of the system applies to scholarship and non-scholarship athletes at the Division I and II levels.)

“If a kid makes a 12 on his first [ACT] attempt, and then a 12 on his second, and then a 29 on his third, you should probably red-flag that kid and take a long, hard look at his test scores,” said Jackson, who is also a law professor at Alabama’s Samford University. “On the other hand, I’ve represented African-American kids who took the SAT one time and made a satisfactory score, but the NCAA or a conference red-flagged that score, [and then] the testing service investigated it and canceled that score.” (In 2015, Jackson publicly complained about an instance in which a single test score from a black athlete he represented triggered a review by the NCAA Eligibility Center, telling The Sporting News that the center’s processes were “racist as hell.”)

And yet many of the “purported student-athletes” involved in Tuesday’s complaint apparently passed muster with ease, despite their parents allegedly paying a middleman to falsify their scores or help them cheat on entrance exams. It’s hard to imagine that the fact they were white kids pursuing opportunities in overwhelmingly white sports and, in some cases, overwhelmingly white schools wasn’t a factor.

“I feel to some degree of certainty that these kids, their test scores, were likely not questioned by the NCAA,” Jackson said. “Now that says something.”

The corrupt relationship between so many colleges and their sports programs perpetuates this unequal and racially biased system in one more way.

Especially at larger universities, the money made off football and basketball helps to fund all the other sports. Or as Jackson put it, “The revenue generators are African-American student-athletes, and the people who are benefiting are not.”

A federal government that wanted to ensure that college sports weren’t entirely rigged in favor of the wealthy could take action to fix that, particularly in its other major case involving college athletics. In 2017, the Justice Department obtained indictments against multiple college basketball coaches and shoe company executives as part of an ongoing probe into corruption and bribery within college basketball. The schemes involved alleged undercover payments to basketball players and their families ― a black market result of the NCAA’s refusal to pay players in top sports what they’re worth. But in that ongoing probe, the Justice Department took the side of the privileged and decided to effectively enforce the NCAA’s most pernicious rules.

Most of the basketball players who would benefit if the feds forced the NCAA to fairly compensate athletes for their labor are black.

Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/college-admissions-scandal-sports-ncaa_n_5c892f4be4b038892f49ab93

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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theinvinciblenoob · 6 years

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From its glass-lined offices in San Francisco’s leafy Presidio national park, six-year-old Mithril Capital Management has happily flown under the radar. Now it’s leaving altogether and relocating its team to Austin, a spot that has “enough critical mass of a technical culture, an artisanal culture, an artistic culture, and [is] not necessarily looking to Silicon Valley for validation,” says firm cofounder Ajay Royan.

The move isn’t a complete surprise. Royan, who cofounded the growth-stage investment firm in 2012 with renowned investor Peter Thiel, hasn’t done much in the way of public relations outside of announcing MIthril’s existence. Thiel and Royan — who’d previously been a managing director at Clarium Capital Management, Thiel’s hedge fund — largely travel in social circles outside of Silicon Valley. More important, the firm has always prided itself on finding startups that don’t fit the typical ideal of a Silicon Valley startup, too.

One of its newest bets, for example, is a nine-year-old dental robotics company in Miami, Fla. that says it performs implant surgery faster and more effectively, which is a surprisingly big market. More than 500,000 now receive implants each year. “It was a hidden team, because it’s in Miami, and it was a field that was under invested in,” says Royan, noting that one of the few breakthrough companies in the dental world in recent years, Invisalign, which makes an alternative to braces, caters to a much younger demographic.

Even still, Mithril’s departure is interesting taken as a data point in a series of them that suggest that Silicon Valley may be losing some of its appeal for a variety of reasons. One of these is so-called groupthink, which had already driven Thiel to make Los Angeles his primary home. An even bigger factor: the unprecedentedly high cost of living. As The Economist reportedly in a recent story about the Bay Area’s narrowing lead over other tech hubs, a median-priced home in the region costs $940,000, which is four-and-a-half times the American average. “It’s hard to imagine doing another startup in Silicon Valley; I don’t think I would,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, who cofounded the search and reviews site Yelp, took it public in 2012, and continues to lead the San Francisco-based company, to The Economist. Bay Area venture capitalists at TechCrunch’s recent Disrupt event also underscored the possibility that a shift is afoot.

Late last week, to learn more about Mithril’s move out of California and to get a general sense of how the firm is faring, we sat down with Royan at the space the firm will formally vacate next year, when its lease expires. We talked for several hours; some outtakes from that conversation, lightly edited for length, follow.

TC: You and I haven’t sat down together in years. When did you start thinking about re-locating the firm?

AR: In 2016. I started seeing a lot more correlation in the companies that we were seeing; they were looking more similar to each other than before, and the volume was going up as well. So to put that in context, 2017 was our largest volume in the pipeline, meaning the number of companies coming through the system. And it was also the year that we did the least number of investments. We made one investment, in Neocis [the aforementioned dental robotics company].

TC: You don’t think this owes to a lack of imagination by founders but rather serious flaws in the overarching way that startups get funded.

AR: The problem is what I call time horizon compression. So a pension fund is supposed to invest on a 30-year time horizon, but if you look at the internal incentives, the bonuses are paid on an annual basis [and the investors making investing decisions on behalf of that pension] are evaluated every six months or every quarter. So you shouldn’t be surprised when people do really short-term things.

There are very short-term versions of investing in the private markets, as well. It’s the 15th AI company, or the 23rd big data company, or the 256th online-to-offline services company. A lot of the people making these investments are very smart. The question is: why are they funding these companies? And why are people starting them? I would suggest it’s because both are under tremendous time pressure, and pressure not to take real risk. If you’re really smart, and you’re told that you’ve got to make returns tomorrow and you can’t take a lot of risk, then you do a me-too company and you look for momentum funding and you try to get out as quickly as possible. It’s a perfectly rational response to bad incentives, and that’s part of what we started to see a lot of in Silicon Valley. I think you have a lot of it going on right now.

TC: It feels like the “getting out” part has become a problem. The IPO market has picked up, but it’s not exactly vibrant. Do you buy the argument that going public limits what a team can do because of public shareholder expectations?

AR: I think that’s fake. Private investors are maybe even more demanding than public investors, because we have material amounts invested generally. Certainly, we do at Mithril. When it comes to governance at our companies, it’s pretty tough, and we get a lot of insight into their activities. It’s not like a public board, where you get a quarterly meeting and a pretty presentation and then people go home.

I do think it’s risk budget and time horizon, bottom line. So the ability to take risks in ways that are not supported by historical models would be: if it goes well, people are happy; if it goes south, the public markets I don’t think will forgive you.

TC: What about Amazon, which went out early, lost money for years, was hammered by analysts, yet is now flirting with a $1 trillion market cap?

AR: Amazon is like the sovereign exception that proves the rule. It’s like [Jeff Bezos] was structured to basically not care both in terms of governance, or he cared in the way that was actually constructive to building Amazon, which is, ‘I’m just going to keep reinvesting all my profits into things that I think are important, and you all can just wait,’ right? And not a lot of people have the intestinal fortitude to do that or the governance structure to sustain it.

TC: You’ve made some big bets on companies that have been around a while, including the surveillance technology company Palantir, which I recall is one of your biggest bets. How patient are your own investors?

AR: Palantir is still doing extremely well as a company. What’s interesting is 80 percent of our capital in [our first of three funds] is concentrated in, like, 10 companies. Our two biggest investments were Palantir and [the antibody discovery platform] Adimab [in New Hampshire], and I’d argue that Adamab is even bigger than Palantir. We actually helped them not go public in 2014 when they were thinking about it.

TC: How, and why was it better for the company to stay private?

AR: Adimab was founded in 2007, so it was already seven years old when we encountered them. And I was looking for a company that would be not a drug company but instead [akin to] a technology company in biotech, and Adimab is that. The’ve built a custom-designed yeast whose DNA was redesigned based on the inputs from a multi-year study of about 120 human beings, I think at Harvard, where they assessed the immune responses of the humans to various diseases, then encoded what they understood about the human immune system into the yeast. So the yeast essentially are humanized proxies for the immune system.

TC: Which means . . . .

AR: You can attack the yeast with disease, and the antibodies the yeast produces are essentially human antibodies. Think of it as a biological computer that responds to disease vectors. We now have a database of 10 billion antibodies that we can use to figure out how best to interrogate the yeast for the next generation of diseases that needed an immunotherapy solution.

TC: Is the company profitable?

AR: It is. They don’t need any new money. We’ve just begun a program to help them restructure their cap table so they can take out early investors.

TC: An 11-year-old company. What about employees who are waiting to cash out?

AR: They want more stock, so we’ve created the equivalent of stock options that are tied to value creation.

A lot of biotech companies go public very early on. If Adimab had, they would have been under tremendous pressure to actually build a drug company. People would have said, ‘Hey, if you’re discovering all these antibodies and they’re empowering other people’s drugs, why don’t you just make your own drug?” But the founder, Tillman Gerngross, who’s also the head of bioengineering at Dartmouth, he doesn’t want to be in the position of having to sell or be under tremendous pressure [to create a drug company] when he thinks the full impact of what Adimab is building won’t be realized for another decade.

TC: In Austin, you’ll be closer to this company and some of your other portfolio companies. But are you really certain you want to leave sunny California?

AR: The cost of trying is what I’m worried about [here]. It’s that simple. That applies to people who are starting jobs in someone’s company, or trying to start a company themselves. If it’s expensive for the company to take risk, it’s going be expensive for you to take risk inside the company, which means your career will take a different path than than otherwise

After [I was an] undergrad at Yale, New York was a natural place to go, but I never worked there. It just felt like a place that was externally very pressurized. You had to conform to the external pressures that dictated your daily life. Your rent was $4,000 to $6,000 a month for craziness for like a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen. Social structures were fairly set, like, you had to go to the Hamptons in the summer or something. There were these weird things that felt very dictated and you had to fit and you had to climb the pyramid schemes that people had established for you. Otherwise, you were out.

What made [Silicon Valley] really attractive was it was a one giant incubator as a society, with a lot of pay-it-forward forward culture and a low cost of trying. Now I’m worried about all three of those.

I’m not saying that just by moving, that gets fixed. That’s facile. But if you conclude that this is an issue that you need to think through, and try to find thoughtful ways to get around, you have to enlist every ally you can. And one of those allies might be reducing unidirectional environmental noise, and having more voices that you can listen to and being exposed to more lived experiences that are varied. . . It builds your capacity for empathy, and I think that’s important for good investing and being a good founder.

TC: What are your early impressions of Austin?

AJ: It’s a great town. Everyone’s been super friendly. I get to wear my cowboy boots. You can actually do a four-hour tour of food trucks without running out of food trucks. Also, most of the people I’ve met are registered Democrats and like, half of them own really nice guns. And these are not considered contradictory at all.

via TechCrunch

#IFTTT #TechCrunch

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fmservers · 6 years

Text

Mithril Capital Management, cofounded by Ajay Royan and Peter Thiel, is leaving the Bay Area

TC: You and I haven’t sat down together in years. When did you start thinking about re-locating the firm?

TC: You don’t think this owes to a lack of imagination by founders but rather serious flaws in the overarching way that startups get funded.

TC: What about Amazon, which went out early, lost money for years, was hammered by analysts, yet is now flirting with a $1 trillion market cap?

TC: How, and why was it better for the company to stay private?

TC: Which means . . . .

TC: Is the company profitable?

AR: It is. They don’t need any new money. We’ve just begun a program to help them restructure their cap table so they can take out early investors.

TC: An 11-year-old company. What about employees who are waiting to cash out?

AR: They want more stock, so we’ve created the equivalent of stock options that are tied to value creation.

TC: In Austin, you’ll be closer to this company and some of your other portfolio companies. But are you really certain you want to leave sunny California?

TC: What are your early impressions of Austin?

Via Connie Loizos https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

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nancygduarteus · 7 years

Text

America Experiences More Pain Than Other Countries

When T.R. Reid, an American reporter, went to his American doctor for an old shoulder injury, he got a very American recommendation. The doctor suggested a total shoulder arthroplasty, a Cadillac of a procedure that would saw off his shoulder joint, replace it with silicon and titanium, and cement into place.

Reid declined, then set off to get the same shoulder treated in five other countries, documenting the experience in his book, The Healing of America.

A French doctor demurred, saying a total shoulder replacement was only for those in constant pain. A British NHS doctor didn’t mince words: “You are living your normal life without much impairment. So [surgery] is not indicated.”

Reid’s book offers a frank look at how differently national health systems approach pain management. The Americans—zealously, expensively—and the British—stiff-upper-lippedly—came up with wildly different cures for the same problem. (The British doctor did agree to “maybe” some physical therapy—if Reid developed “acute pain.”)

Now, a new National Bureau of Economic Research paper explores how Americans also perceive and report pain differently from people in other countries. In other words, not only are our doctors more trigger-happy when it comes to treating pain. We seem to find ourselves covered in Bengay and sitting on the exam table more than most.

The paper, which is fittingly titled “Unhappiness and Pain in Modern America,” featured a question from a 2011 survey that asked people across 30 countries the following:

During the past 4 weeks, how often have you had bodily aches or pains? Never; Seldom; Sometimes; Often; or Very often?

About a third of Americans said they feel aches and pains “very often” or “often”—more than people in any other country. Australia and Great Britain came close, but in the average nation only about 20 percent gave one of those responses. In the Philippines or South Africa, just 11 percent felt pain that often.

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“Although on first hearing it seems hard to believe (and was for us),” the paper’s authors write, “there is evidence that Americans are in more pain than citizens of other advanced, and even not-so-advanced, countries.”

Of course, it’s worth noting that language and cultural differences can affect how people think and talk about their pain. But given that Americans are still seeking out both legal and illicit painkillers at an astonishing rate, it’s worth considering the root causes of all this pain. In my conversations with pain researchers, three leading theories emerged:

Obesity

“Americans are fatter than everyone else, and pain relates to obesity,” the Dartmouth economist David Blanchflower, an author of the NBER paper, told me when I asked him for his theory.

The idea was echoed by a couple other experts I contacted. The U.S. has one of the highest obesity rates in the world, and there is some evidence that obese people are more sensitive to pain in some parts of their bodies. It’s not clear why, but it could be because of inflammation, the stress the weight puts on their joints, or the disturbed sleep that comes from sleep apnea.

Too many painkillers

Other experts questioned how big of a factor obesity really is. Instead, some pointed out the fact that Americans consume so many prescription painkillers—nearly 80 percent of the global supply, by some measures. Paradoxically, opioids heighten the perception of pain, rather than dulling it.

Opioids can cause a sort of all over, neurological pain that gets overlaid on top of the original pain, said Eldon Tunks, a professor of psychiatry at McMaster University. Doctors in other countries are less quick to dispense opioids for pain, other than for major surgical procedures.

It’s all in our heads (sort of)

The NBER paper also found that Americans, especially those of low education levels, have been gradually growing less happy since the 1970s, according to the General Social Survey.

Happiness Among Different Educational Groups in the U.S.

Blanchflower

The pain that Americans report might be very real, but psychological factors might be contributing to it. As I’ve previously written, depression changes how the body releases its own, endogenous, pain-relieving chemicals, and it tends to exacerbate the perception of pain.

“Unhappiness and pain complaints go together, and the pain complaints didn’t always come first,” said Mark Sullivan, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington. In the U.S., freedom comes with expectations—and for some, disappointment, he added.

The use of opioids and hallucinogens increases during economic downturns, so some of these patterns could be cyclical: Working-class Americans lose their jobs, so they become unhappy, so they start using opioids, so they start to feel more sensitive to pain.

Carol Graham, a Brookings fellow and University of Maryland public-policy professor, makes a similar point in her recent book Happiness for All? She and her colleagues found that sadness, anger, worry, stress, and physical pain were all higher among the poor in the U.S. than among the rich.

Chattopadhyay and Graham calculations based on Gallup data from 2008-2013. In Graham, Happiness For All?

That might seem strange, given that prestigious jobs can appear demanding and stressful. But Graham suggests it’s just the opposite: “Stress that is associated with daily struggles and circumstances beyond individuals’ control—as is more common for the poor—has more negative effects than that associated with goal achievement—as is more common for those with more means and education,” she writes.

Tunks also pointed out that a sense of losing control—“Being abused, being in a subservient job, being in a country with a lot of people shooting each other,” as he put it—can lead to anxiety, which, in turn, amps up the likelihood of pain.

There lies, in this anxiety, yet another potential cause of Americans’ greater reporting of pain: The worry that something must be wrong, and the feeling that we’re not doing enough to treat it. Arthur Barsky, a Harvard psychiatry professor who researches hypochondria, says it’s uniquely American to think all sorts of aches and pains are treatable, rather than just being part of life. The thinking seems to be, “if we can transplant hearts, and do fetal surgeries, we ought to be able to cure those migraine headaches!” he said.

The internet has made it easier to research symptoms and “label something as a disorder or disease,” he said. Among two patients with the same level of arthritis, for example, one might think it’s basically fine, and the other might say, “I can’t stand this any longer.”

In Barsky’s view, the preoccupation with perfect health is impairing Americans’ ability to cope with a little bit of pain.

“Curable pain is unbearable pain,” he said. “It’s when you think you shouldn’t have to suffer it, there there should be some solution out there, that it becomes even more intolerable.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/12/america-experiences-more-pain-than-other-countries/548822/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 7 years

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America Experiences More Pain Than Other Countries

Reid declined, then set off to get the same shoulder treated in five other countries, documenting the experience in his book, The Healing of America.

The paper, which is fittingly titled “Unhappiness and Pain in Modern America,” featured a question from a 2011 survey that asked people across 30 countries the following:

During the past 4 weeks, how often have you had bodily aches or pains? Never; Seldom; Sometimes; Often; or Very often?

Obesity

“Americans are fatter than everyone else, and pain relates to obesity,” the Dartmouth economist David Blanchflower, an author of the NBER paper, told me when I asked him for his theory.

Too many painkillers

It’s all in our heads (sort of)

The NBER paper also found that Americans, especially those of low education levels, have been gradually growing less happy since the 1970s, according to the General Social Survey.

Happiness Among Different Educational Groups in the U.S.

Blanchflower

Chattopadhyay and Graham calculations based on Gallup data from 2008-2013. In Graham, Happiness For All?

In Barsky’s view, the preoccupation with perfect health is impairing Americans’ ability to cope with a little bit of pain.

“Curable pain is unbearable pain,” he said. “It’s when you think you shouldn’t have to suffer it, there there should be some solution out there, that it becomes even more intolerable.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

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blackkudos · 7 years

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Aaron Henry

Aaron Henry (July 2, 1922 – May 19, 1997) was an American civil rights leader, politician, and head of the Mississippi branch of the NAACP. He was one of the founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party which tried to seat their delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Early life

Aaron Henry was born in Dublin, Mississippi to parents Ed and Mattie Henry, who worked as sharecroppers. While growing up, he worked on the Flowers brothers' plantation, which was twenty miles east of Clarksdale in Coahoma County. Henry detested everything about growing cotton because of the hardships that it brought upon the African Americans working on the plantation. Henry’s parents believed education to be essential for the future of Henry and his family; therefore, he was able to attend the all-black Coahoma County Agricultural High School. After graduating from high school, Henry worked as a night clerk at a motel to earn money for college, but ended up enlisting in the Army. Three years in the army taught him that racial discrimination and segregation were common, many instances of which he described to Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?. At the same time, it confirmed his feelings that the desegregation was worse in his home state. He decided that he would work for equality and justice for black Americans as soon as he returned home after the war. When he returned to Clarksdale in 1946, a Progressive Voters' League had been formed to work for the implementation of the 1944 Supreme Court decision abolishing white primacy.

As a veteran, Henry was interested in the decision that the Mississippi legislature had exempted returning veterans from paying the poll tax. Under the poll tax laws, a person had to have paid his poll tax for two years prior to the time that he voted. Therefore, he tried to get black Mississippians to go down to the courthouse to register to vote. However, several veterans, who were non-white, were unable to register. When Henry went to the circuit clerk's office to register, he was rejected, as had been other black Americans. The clerk asked Henry to bring a certificate showing that he was exempt from the poll tax. Although he brought the certificate, the clerk said that Henry still needed to pass various tests to show that he was qualified to vote. He was finally able to register to vote after he read several sections of the state constitution and went satisfactorily through more tests. Henry used the G.I. Bill, a law that provided educational benefits for World War II veterans, to enroll in the pharmacy school at Xavier University. When he graduated in 1950 with a pharmaceutical degree, he married Noelle Michael and went into his own pharmacy business. As a businessman in Clarksdale, he became involved in local and state activities, particularly events such as African-American voter registration. He decided to organize an NAACP branch in Clarksdale because of the incident where two black girls were raped by two white men who were subsequently judged not guilty. W.A. Higgins, who was the principal of the black high school and already a member of NAACP, made the suggestion, and the NAACP national headquarters encouraged Henry and Higgins to organize a local branch of the NAACP. In 1959, Henry was elected president of the Mississippi organization, and served in the NAACP for decades. Henry became close friends with Medgar Evers, who worked as a secretary for the NAACP in 1950. On June 12, 1963, Evers was assassinated in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi and his assassination had a great impact on Henry.

Regional Council of Negro Leadership

In 1951, Henry was a founding member of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL). The main instigator and head of the organization was Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a prominent black surgeon, fraternal organization leader, and entrepreneur in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

The RCNL promoted a program of civil rights, voting rights, self-help, and business ownership. Instead of starting from the “grass roots," it sought to “reach the masses through their chosen leaders” by harnessing the talents of blacks with a proven record in business, the professions, education, and the church. Henry headed the RCNL's committee on "Separate but equal" which zeroed in on the need to guarantee the "equal."

Other key members of the RCNL included Amzie Moore, an NAACP activist and gas station owner from Cleveland, Mississippi and Medgar Evers, who sold insurance for Dr. Howard in Mound Bayou. Henry aided the RCNL's boycott of service stations that failed to provide restrooms for blacks. As part of this campaign, the RCNL distributed an estimated twenty thousand bumper stickers with the slogan “Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Rest Room." Beginning in 1953, it directly challenged separate but equal policies and demanded integration of schools.

Henry participated in the RCNL’s annual meetings in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1955, which often attracted crowds of over ten thousand.

Frequently a target of racist violence, Henry was arrested in Clarksdale repeatedly, and in one famous incident was chained to the rear of a city garbage truck and led through the streets of Clarksdale to jail.

Civil rights movement activism

While Henry remained active in the RCNL until its demise in the early 1960s, he also joined the Mississippi branch of the NAACP in 1954 and eventually worked his way up to state president in 1959. He started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). In 1961 he organized a boycott of stores in the Clarksdale, Mississippi area that discriminated against African Americans both as customers and employees. He chaired delegations of Loyalist Democrats to the 1968 and 1972 Democratic National Conventions.

In 1962, he was arrested for picking up an eighteen-year-old young man from Memphis, Tennessee. By 1968, after several appeals, the charge was not voided. In 1972, he was arrested again for soliciting sodomy from two undercover policemen.

Freedom Vote Campaign

While Henry served as president of COFO in 1962, he made an effort to organize the "freedom vote", which was the mock participation in the state gubernatorial election in November 1963. Henry worked this campaign with Allard K. Lowenstein, and they thought that showing black voters' willingness to vote in the mock election would make the nation realize that black Americans would in fact participate in the electoral process if given the opportunity. In this mock election, Henry was the candidate for governor, and Edwin King, who was a white Methodist minister at Tougaloo College in Jackson, was candidate for lieutenant governor. With Bob Moses, who managed the campaign, Henry and King tried to raise awareness of how Paul B. Johnson Jr. and Rubel Phillips, who were candidates of the actual election in 1963, ignored the Freedom Vote campaign and potential strength of black Americans' will to vote. Since they had only little experience in the political field, Henry and King needed people who knew about political elections. At that time, Joe Lieberman, who was an editor of the Yale Daily News, was in Mississippi to work with a series of reports on the activities and programs of SNCC. Lieberman found the Freedom Vote Campaign interesting, so he spread the word at Yale about what type of help the campaign would need. After a few weeks, students from Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Fordham came to help with the campaign. With their participation, the Freedom Vote Campaign gained enough awareness and was reported in a newspaper, "The Free Press", by Bill Minor and R. L. T. Smith. To tabulate the result of the campaign, ballot boxes were placed in churches, business, and homes. Voting took place over a whole weekend so that many church congregations could vote at Sunday services. Although there were incidents where several voters were arrested, the campaign finished as a great success in demonstrating the willingness of African Americans to vote, with the participation of more than eighty thousand people. Within a week of the freedom election, college volunteers by Lowenstein's efforts made plans for a massive influx for Freedom Summer in 1964. The campaign also encouraged Paul Johnson to hint at a change in Mississippi's official line on race. After this campaign, Henry helped to create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to address civil rights in Mississippi.

Later life

Henry was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1982, holding the seat until 1996. He died in 1997 of congestive heart failure at a hospital near his home in Clarksdale, following a stroke.

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#Aaron Henr #07-02 #05-19

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trendingnewsb · 7 years

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5 Signs Hollywood Has No Idea How College Works

As Millennials are set to become the most educated generation in history, it has never been so important to properly prepare young folks for how college truly works. Which is harder than you might think, because Hollywood is constantly filling their smartypants heads with the wrong information. For example …

“The Dean” Is In Charge Of So Much Less Than Movies Think

Ah, the dean — the end-of-level boss any fun-loving college kid has to deal with at some point in their education. But are they really gods on campus, Judge-Dredd-like adjudicators who wield absolute power over the lives of their students, kicking them out for the slightest infraction / date rape?

In Monsters University, Mike and Sully are immediately expelled by Dean Hardscrabble for their spooky hijinks without so much as a tribunal or a conversation with the university president.

Disney/Pixar And they become the best scarers, so college degrees are basically meaningless.

In Animal House, whenever one of the Deltas’ “pranks” goes awry, it’s always Dean Wormer who arrives to deal with the situation.

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“Hey, why are you going over our grades with us instead of our academic advisors?”

The dean in Necessary Roughness is in the process of shutting down the football program of a major college, which would be a feat slightly more impressive than teleporting the entire school to another dimension. Hell, the dean in Patch Adams has the power to punish Robin Williams merely for being too happy.