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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement," by Ashley Shew.

When people posit disability as a problem, they look for solutions. Disabled people can and do have problems, which sometimes include pain and dysfunction. However, many of our problems are social, structural, and practical problems that stem from the idea that disabled people are fundamentally flawed, unworthy of inclusion, broken, or inadequate. This is ableist thinking. We have to resist these kinds of assumptions, which produce simplistic disability stories that collapse disabled people into stereotypes.

I LOVE AMPUTEE COALITION OF AMERICA meetings, less for the educational sessions than for the experience of just being in a place where everyone is like me in some way. As I walk around the conference hotel, usually with my friend Mallory Kay Nelson (we road-trip it together, and I have not been to a convention without her), we end up casually looking at everyone we pass to see which limbs they are missing. It’s always a bit of a surprise to see non-amputees. Here, the nondisabled people are the minority—the odd ones out, not us. It’s honestly a relief.

The medical model is the idea that disability is a malady, something outside the norm that needs to be addressed, cured, eliminated, or remediated through medical or therapeutic intervention. Under this model, disability is something to root out, something to work against, something to fear or pity. Disability is framed as a problem that resides in individual disabled people—a problem that needs to be addressed. The solutions to this problem are different in different stories: examples range from early therapy interventions to technology like a prosthesis to preimplantation genetic diagnostics and elimination. Under this worldview, the role of a professional who “works with” disabled people is to identify the proper therapy, technology, or approach and deploy it in order to solve the problem. Nondisabled experts about disability make decisions about what disabled people need, about how to assess us and on what criteria, about where we belong (and make no mistake, they can institutionalize us if that’s where they decide we should be); about what benefits and technologies we qualify for; and about the trajectory of our lives—our life prospects, our job prospects (some of us are often pipelined into specific types of work); our education (including whether it’s worth giving us any education at all); even whether we can marry or have children. The Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell (1927) upheld the state’s right to forcibly sterilize disabled citizens, and it has not been overturned. 

There are lots of problems with the medical model. Foremost, of course, is that it doesn’t let disabled people talk back or have agency or make our own meaning. But there are other, more philosophical problems. For example, how do we even create a coherent category of disability? How do we define what counts as a disability and what doesn’t? The category of “disability” doesn’t fall simply along the lines of impairment: we don’t count most people who wear glasses as disabled, although they are visually impaired. And not everyone who is disabled is impaired: some people with dwarfism who are otherwise healthy experience the world as disabling simply because things are built too tall—from shelving in libraries and groceries to airport and bank counters to high-top restaurant dining (which, to be fair, is awful for most people). Categories of disability are constructed relative to our expectations and norms. 

As a good dis-orientation tells you, disability is a social construct—a mismatch between the self and a world that was designed to cater to normative bodies and minds. Disability is a made-up category. Of course, this made-up category has real effects, with enormous social, cultural, and personal significance and consequence. I’m obviously not saying disabilities aren’t real! I’m an amputee, and long before the idea of disability as a social construct captured me and others, people were born without limbs or were losing limbs—amputees show up in the fossil record. But why are an amputee, a person with dyslexia, a blind person, and someone who is bipolar all in the same category? (This sounds like the start of a joke.) What holds this category together? Disability, which today is a category of understanding, is actually a historical concept that developed relative to work, employment, and education. Historical and social factors underpin how disability is defined and how people are grouped. 

The wheelchair is the universal icon of disability. It’s on restroom doors, parking spaces, and ramps. Yet technologists are always trying to replace the wheelchair (which is itself a piece of technology). Exoskeletons and devices aimed at walking and climbing stairs—designed to make disabled people adjust to the world as it is, obviating the need for ramps or elevators or accessible doorways—are by far the most commonly covered mobility devices in mainstream media. The wheelchair, instead, requires the world to adjust to the disabled person. 

The Social Model of Disability insists that disability is a social phenomenon: the problems are not in the bodies or minds of people but in the stigmas and barriers erected by society. According to this model, people count as disabled or abled depending on social context, social structures, and the built environment. The categories of disabled and not disabled depend upon notions of normalcy, as well as philosophical ideas of what it means to be human and who is deserving of rights. Even today, definitions of disability can be porous. Some amputees deny that they “count” as disabled after they master prosthetic use; some Down syndrome advocates remind the public that not everyone in their community has extensive medical problems; and some little people point out that their biggest barriers are those that come from social stigma and those created by the built environment. These categories vary across cultures and over time. In fact, there are cultures and historical periods that have had no category of “disabled”—mostly times when many more people had what we would now call disabilities, due to disease, frostbite, or other harsh conditions of life. Today, many of our ideas about able-bodiedness and disability come from classifications based on who is suitable for plantation or factory work: we call people “disabled” when they can’t perform “normal” amounts of physical labor.

Some tropes are weirdly specific. When I work with students researching disability narratives, we find five main tropes as we sort materials about disability: pitiable freaks, moochers and fakers, bitter cripples, shameful sinners, and inspirational overcomers. These familiar, oft-repeated narrative arcs about the lives of disabled people show up in all sorts of media—books, film, viral social media memes, news. These tropes are stereotypes—limited and inaccurate frames of reference for people to consider the experiences of disabled people. They also get in the way of people listening to what disabled people have to say when it differs from these narratives.

Not every deaf child is a candidate for cochlear implants, and not every surgery is successful. And most new parents don’t know that the Deaf community resisted cochlear implants, or why. Videos of audiologists and medical professionals turning on a child’s implant for the first time—where a child jerks their head in the direction of the sound of their mother’s voice—have gone viral, serving as the only introduction to the subject for a wider public. These viral videos praise, sometimes explicitly but certainly implicitly, the power of technology to end disability. People reply in the comments with “praise hands” emojis and gush about the power of technology and thank God. 

But the videos don’t give any clue that not all Deaf people consider themselves disabled, that the child in the video will need years of interventions to be able to “hear” and communicate well with the cochlear implant, that having a technology for disability (even when it works) still means a great deal in terms of maintenance (batteries being sort of an everyday kind of worry, along with others), and that implantation removes any natural hearing a child may have. This technology story—highlighting just a few seconds or minutes of a surprised child (usually they show the videos where the child smiles, not screams or cries)—is given to viewers without context of the wider implications or any sort of follow-up and without any information from adults with cochlear implants about their various experiences.

This now-infamous fundraising commercial ends with replies from parents, siblings, and grandparents (notice: not autistic people themselves, who get no voice here) saying they are stronger than autism and united against it, ready to fight. The commercial first scares people, personifying autism as an evil force that steals children, comparing it to AIDS and cancer. This commercial frames autism as an outsider that ruins lives and families. But when you listen to autistic people talk, type, and write about autism, especially those supported and connected, you hear a different story. They talk about their brains as simply different, not scary, and about a world awash in misunderstanding for their expressions and behavior. To them, autism isn’t something to fight against; it is fundamentally part of who they are. 

We see in this commercial a deep ableism against autistic people, framing what autism is and what it does as a stigma. Up until very recently, Autism Speaks, a supposedly autism-serving charity, has had very few autistic members of their board of directors. Their funding allocations are also telling. They unfortunately put their money where their mouth is: they funnel funding in ways that reflect the same stigmatizing, harmful “awareness” rhetoric on display in their much-maligned commercial. In 2018, for instance, nearly half of Autism Speaks revenue was spent on awareness efforts and lobbying; 27 percent was spent on research, with 20 percent spent on fundraising and only 1 percent on family services (the category where spending would actually make the most difference for existing autistic people).25 And as one Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN) member with username Savannah wrote in 2015: “As a lot of that research is genetic in nature, prevention means research into selective abortion of fetuses with markers for autism. Not only does this not help autistics of any age, it encourages the idea that it’s better to not exist than to RISK being disabled (and in particular, autistic).” It’s easy to see the actions of Autism Speaks as both connected to historical programs of human improvement and as part of wider charity messaging about disability where disability is always equated with grave tragedy. 

In 2014, ASAN issued a joint statement against Autism Speaks’s hateful rhetoric, with support from the National Council on Independent Living, Not Dead Yet, Little People of America, and Down Syndrome Uprising. It’s heartening to see people speaking up and expressing/announcing their lived realities, though Autism Speaks still thrives financially as an organization and accounts for most top hits when you google anything about autism.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel," by Shahnaz Habib.

This has happened to me again and again. In a new place, I am never adventurous; I am cautious. It takes me a few days simply to get used to stepping out of wherever I am staying. At first, I stick to the neighborhood, like an animal getting used to a new environment. I want to be curious and intrepid; instead, I am confused and lonely. (Jet lag does not help.) And always I am conscious of what a waste of time this is. If only I could just get up and go do things, how much time I could save. I am basically the opposite of Anthony Bourdain.

A couple of million Americans visit Paris every year. Interestingly, the average American would not have thought of France as a tourism destination until well into the twentieth century. Prior to that, European travel from the United States was largely limited to the wealthy, soldiers, businesspeople, and diplomats. It was the twentieth century that made Paris an American destination, beginning with U.S. troops who carried back Paris’s reputation as a city of pleasures. In the flurry of postwar travels, many American writers and artists made themselves at home in Paris. A Moveable Feast and Tender Is the Night and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas captured the life of these expatriate American bohemians in the Left Bank. It was the beginning of an enduring American Francophilia.

The anxiety women feel in nature has additional layers for Black women, for other women of color, for queer women, for trans women, for women with disabilities—and none of it is because of snakes or slippery waterways. It is because the wilderness, too, has become a space where male privilege plays out. From hunting to natural science to wilderness tourism, men have claimed the landscape of wilderness and the metaphors of its ruggedness. The framing of wilderness as the antithesis of domesticity, of rule of law, of safety, has served men so well.

When we travel, we are not moving from place to place. We are moving from one moment in time to another moment in time. We are tricking ourselves into paying attention to the thing that is hardest to pay attention to. On the carousel and on the tourist trail, it is time that reveals itself. The present does not exist. Only the past and the future do. But on the border between those two, a border that is thinner than a hair, sharper than a sword’s edge, there is a moment. To call it the present would be to overstate it. But it is there: a microworld of galloping horses, overheard conversations, and bits of song. There is no now but now.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Jerusalem," by Alan Moore.

Odd phrases and occasional expressions would lodge somewhere in her mind, provide a coat-rack of precarious hooks from which she could drape tentative connecting strings, threads of conjecture and wild guesswork linking up one notion with another until Alma either had a sketchy comprehension of whatever she had eavesdropped, or had burdened herself with a convoluted and ridiculous misunderstanding that she would continue to believe for years thereafter.

One day soon he would be dead, reduced to ashes or else feeding worms. His entertaining funny mind, his self, that would just simply stop. That wouldn’t be there anymore. Life would be going on, with all its romance and its thrills, but not for him. He would know nothing of it, like a splendid party at which he’d been made to feel he was no longer welcome. He’d have been crossed off the guest list, he’d have been erased, as if he’d never been there. All that would be left of him would be a few exaggerated anecdotes, some mildewed poems in surviving copies of small-circulation magazines, and then not even that. It would have all been wasted, and … 

It hit him suddenly, the bleak epiphany, and knocked the wind out of him: thinking about death was something he habitually did as an alternative to thinking about life. Death wasn’t what the problem was. Death wasn’t asking anything of anyone, except for effortless decomposition. Death wasn’t the thing with all the expectations and the disappointments and the constant fear that anything could happen. That was life. Death, fearsome from life’s frightened point of view, was actually itself beyond all fear and hurt. Death, like a kindly mother, took the worrisome responsibilities and the decisions off your hands, kissed you goodnight and tucked you underneath the warm green counterpane. Life was the trial, the test, the thing you had to figure out what you should do with before it was over.

When he looked at it objectively, he saw that the real measure of his freedom was that he was free of the illusion of free will. He was unburdened by the comforting mirage that other men took faith in, the delusion that allowed them to take walks or beat their wives or tie their shoes, apparently whenever they should wish, as if they had a choice. As if they and their lives were not the smallest and most abstract brushstroke, a pointillist dab fixed and unmoving in time’s varnish, there eternally on an immeasurable canvas, part of a design too vast for its component marks to ever glimpse or comprehend. The terror and the glory of John Vernall’s situation was that of a pigment smear made suddenly aware of its position at the corner of a masterpiece, a dot that knows that it is held in place forever on the painted surface, that it’s never going anywhere, and yet exults: “How dreadful and how fabulous!” He knew himself, knew what he was and knew that this advantaged him in certain ways above his fellow squiggles in the picture, who were not so conscious of their true predicament, its majesty, nor of its many possibilities.

There it was. The madness in the family. That was a cheery thing to think about while you were waiting for your first child to arrive, but Tom supposed there was no hiding from it. It was just a fact, part of the complicated lottery of birth that would decide whether the baby had brown hair like Doreen or black hair like Tom, whether its eyes were blue or green, if it was to be tall or short, well-built or skinny, sane or insane. Nobody had a say in how their children would be born, but then nobody had a say with most of the important things in life. All you could do was make the best of what you had. All you could do was play your cards as they’d been dealt.

“There’s really only life. Death’s an illusion of perspective that afflicts the third dimension. Only in the mortal and three-sided world do you see time as something that is passing, vanishing away behind you into nothingness. You think of time as something that one day will be used up, will all be gone. Seen from a higher plane, though, time is nothing but another distance, just the same as height or breadth or depth. Everything in the universe of space and time is going on at once, occurring in a glorious super-instant with the dawn of time on one side of it and time’s end upon the other. All the minutes in between, including those that mark the decades of your lifespan, are suspended in the grand, unchanging bubble of existence for eternity. 

“Think of your life as being like a book, a solid thing where the last line’s already written while you’re starting the first page. Your consciousness progresses through the narrative from its beginning to its end, and you become caught up in the illusion of events unfolding and time going by as these things are experienced by the characters within the drama. In reality, however, all the words that shape the tale are fixed upon the page, the pages bound in their unvarying order. Nothing in the book is changing or developing. Nothing in the book is moving save the reader’s mind as it moves through the chapters. When the story’s finished and the book is closed, it does not burst immediately into flames. The people in the story and their twists of fortune are not disappeared without a trace as though they’d not been written. All the sentences describing them are still there in the solid and unchanging tome, and at your leisure you may read the whole of it again as often as you like. 

“It’s just the same with life. Why, every second of it is a paragraph you will revisit countless times and find new meanings in, although the wording is not changed. Each episode remains unaltered at its designated point within the text, and every moment thus endures forever. Moments of exquisite bliss and moments of profound despair, suspended in time’s endless amber, all the hell or heaven any brimstone preacher could conceivably desire. Each day and every deed’s eternal, little boy. Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally.”

Alma can’t see what all the fuss is over. She’s convinced that no one really needs free will as long as there is a sustainable illusion of the same to stop everyone going mad. It also seems to her that our perception of free will depends upon the scale at which we view the issue. Looking at a single individual, it’s obviously impossible to accurately forecast what will happen to that person during, say, the next five years. This would seem to support the argument for free will and a future that is not yet written. On the other hand, if we consider a large group of people, such as the few thousand souls inhabiting the Boroughs or an average modern sink estate, then our predictions become frighteningly easy and precise. We can state, near enough exactly, just how many people will get sick, get stabbed, get pregnant, lose their jobs, their homes, have minor triumphs on the Lottery, will beat their partners or their kids, will die from cancer or heart failure or sheer blind accident. It strikes her, sitting in the rich blue light and finishing her smoke, that this is the same quandary faced by the physicists, translated into a context of sociology. Why is free will, like quantum indeterminacy, only evident when we look at the microcosm, at a single person? Where does free will disappear to when we turn our gaze upon the larger social masses, on the populations that are the equivalent of stars and planets?

"It’s the only plan that works. Sooner or later all the people and the places that we loved are finished, and the only way to keep them safe is art. That’s what art’s for. It rescues everything from time."

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "When I Was Puerto Rican: A Memoir," by Esmeralda Santiago.

“Take these boards and lay them on the pile for the cooking fire,” Papi said. “Careful with the splinters.” 

I walked a broad circle around Mami, who looked up from her vegetable chopping whenever I went by. When I passed carrying a wide board, Mami asked to see it. Black bugs, like ants, but bigger and blacker, crawled over it in a frenzy. 

“Termites!” she gasped. 

I was covered with them. They swarmed inside my shirt and panties, into my hair, under my arms. Until Mami saw them, I hadn’t felt them sting. But they bit ridges into my skin that itched and hurt at the same time. Mami ran me to the washtub and dunked me among my father’s soaking shirts. 

“Pablo!” she called, “Oh, my God! Look at her. She’s being eaten alive!” 

I screamed, imagining my skin disappearing in chunks into the invisible mouths of hundreds of tiny black specks creeping into parts of my body I couldn’t even reach. Mami pulled off my clothes and threw them on the ground. The soap in the washtub burned my skin, and Mami scrubbed me so hard her fingernails dug angry furrows into my arms and legs. She turned me around to wash my back and I almost fell out of the tub. 

“Be still,” she said. “I have to get them all.” 

She pushed and shoved and turned me so fast I didn’t know what to do with my body, so I flailed, seeming to resist, while in fact I wanted nothing more than to be rid of the creepy crawling things that covered me. Mami wrapped me in a towel and lifted me out of the tub with a groan. Hundreds of black bugs floated between the bubbles. 

She carried me to the house pressed against her bosom, fragrant of curdled milk. Delsa and Norma ran after us, but Papi scooped them up, one on each arm, and carried them to the rope swing. Mami balanced on the floorboards to her bed, lay me beside her, held me tight, kissed my forehead, my eyes, and murmured, “It’s all right. It’s over. It’s all right.” 

I wrapped my legs around her and buried my face under her chin. It felt good to have Mami so close, so warm, swathed by her softness, her smell of wood smoke and oregano. She rubbed circles on my back and caressed the hair from my face. She kissed me, brushed my tears with her fingertips, and dried my nose with the towel, or the hem of her dress. 

“You see,” she murmured, “what happens when you don’t do as I say?” 

I turned away from her and curled into a tight ball of shame. Mami rolled off the bed and went outside. I lay on her pillow, whimpering, wondering how the termites knew I’d disobeyed my mother.

Men, I was learning, were sinvergüenzas, which meant they had no shame and indulged in behavior that never failed to surprise women but caused them much suffering. Chief among the sins of men was the other woman, who was always a puta, a whore. My image of these women was fuzzy, since there were none in Macún, where all the females were wives or young girls who would one day be wives. Putas, I guessed, lived in luxury in the city on the money that sinvergüenza husbands did not bring home to their long-suffering wives and barefoot children. Putas wore lots of perfume, jewelry, dresses cut low to show off their breasts, high heels to pump up their calves, and hair spray. All this was paid for with money that should have gone into repairing the roof or replacing the dry palm fronds enclosing the latrine with corrugated steel sheets. I wanted to see a puta close up, to understand the power she held over men, to understand the sweet-smelling spell she wove around the husbands, brothers, and sons of the women whose voices cracked with pain, defeat, and simmering anger.

Children fought in school in a way unknown to me at home. Delsa, Norma, and I often tied ourselves into punching, biting, kicking knots that only Mami with her switch was able to untangle. But fighting with other kids was different. When I fought with my sisters, I knew what was at stake, a prized marble, a ripe mango just fallen off the tree, a chance to be the first to color in the Sunday comics from Papi’s newspaper. But in school the fights were about something else entirely. 

If you looked at someone the wrong way they might beat you up. If you were too eager to answer the teacher’s questions you might get beat up. If you rubbed shoulders with the wrong kids you would get beat up. If you mentioned someone’s mother at the wrong time or in a certain tone of voice, you would definitely get beat up. Any number of subtle transgressions, from not saying hello when someone greeted you to saying hello to the wrong person, meant a beating. When I explained to Mami why I came home with a torn uniform and bruises, she made it clear that I was forbidden to fight in school. This made no sense to me at all. Not that Mami encouraged our fights at home, but she never said, “Don’t fight with your sisters.” Her injunctions were always about not punching them too hard. So I had to learn how to avoid the unavoidable, and when I couldn’t, I stripped to my underwear in the school yard to defend myself from kids whose mothers didn’t mind if their uniforms got dirty.

I determined not to cry, because if she asked me, I didn’t want to tell Abuela why. But the pressure was too much, and as the tears came, I looked around for something with which to hurt myself so that when Abuela asked, I could show her a reason for the tears. I put my hand in the doorjamb and slammed the door shut.

The baby was thirty days old, and we had to be careful about infections, foul breezes, and the evil eye. Mami had strung a nugget of coral and an onyx bead on a safety pin and attached it to Raymond’s baby shirt at birth. It was the same charm she had used on all of us, kept in a little box among her thimbles and needles between babies, to be brought out and pinned to the tiny cotton shirts, supposedly for the first forty days and forty nights of our lives. She claimed she didn’t believe “any of that stuff,” but each time, the charm stayed on long after it was supposed to.

“Don’t you ever, ever do that again,” she growled, and I wasn’t sure if she meant kicking a boy between his legs or letting him see my private parts. Because it seemed to me she knew what Tato and I did behind the latrine while she and Doña Lola talked about their lives. She knew, and she was waiting for me to do something worse than what I could imagine so that she could do something far worse than what I would expect. I let my body go limp to take her abuse, and part of me left my body and stood beside my sisters and brothers, their eyes round, tear filled, frightened, their fingers interlaced into each other’s, their skinny bodies jerking with every hit I took.

“Always iron the inside button and hole plackets first, then the inside and outside collar, then the cuffs.” We danced around the ironing board, with Mami guiding my hand, pressing down on the iron, and standing away for a minute to see me do as she’d taught. The steam rose from the shirt and filled my head with the clean fresh scent of sun-dried cotton, and bubbles of perspiration flushed along my hair line and dripped down my neck. But I pressed on, absorbed by the tiny squares in the weave, the straight, even stitches that held the seams in place, the way the armhole curved into the shoulder. 

“You’re doing a good job,” Mami murmured, a puzzled expression on her face. 

“This is fun,” I said, meaning it. 

“Fun!” she laughed. “Then from now on you do all the ironing around the house.” She said it with a smile, which meant she was teasing. And she never asked me to do it. But after that, whenever I wanted to feel close to Mami, I stacked wrinkled clothes into a basket, and, one by one, ironed them straight, savoring the afternoon when she taught me to do the one thing she most hated.

“I don’t like it when she goes away,” I cried into Abuela’s shoulder, the only place where I could express my loneliness, my fears. To have told Mami would have been wrong. She was overwhelmed by what she called “the sacrifices I have to endure for you kids,” and my love, expressed in demands, added a greater burden. I was keenly aware that she wasn’t my mother: I had to share her with Delsa, Norma, Hector, Alicia, Edna, and Raymond. But it seemed that somehow my share was smaller because I was the oldest, because I was casi señorita, because I ought to know better. 

I walked home from Abuela’s house feeling Mami’s absence as if she had already left. By the time I got home, I had wrapped myself in the blanket of responsibility she was about to drop on me. It felt heavy, too big for me, yet if I made the wrong move, I was afraid it would tear, exposing the slight, frightened child inside.

On the way to the bus, men stared, whistled, mumbled piropos. Eyes fixed straight ahead, she pretended to ignore the gallantries, but a couple of times her lips curled into a smile. I strolled next to her half proud, half afraid. I had heard men speaking compliments in the direction of women, but I’d never been aware of them going to my mother. Each man who did a double take or pledged to love her forever, to take her home with him, to give his life for her, took her away from me. She had become public property—no longer the mother of seven children, but a woman desired by many. I wanted to jump on those men and punch their faces in, to quiet the promises and the seductive looks, to chill the heat they gave off, palpable as the clothes I wore. During the entire bus ride home I was miserable, wrapped in a rage I couldn’t explain or think away. Mami chatted about New York, my cousins, movies, and tall apartment buildings. But I didn’t listen. I kept replaying the walk to the bus stop, her proud bearing, the men’s stares, their promises, and the nakedness her accessible beauty made me feel.

There were two kinds of Puerto Ricans in school: the newly arrived, like myself, and the ones born in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican parents. The two types didn’t mix. The Brooklyn Puerto Ricans spoke English, and often no Spanish at all. To them, Puerto Rico was the place where their grandparents lived, a place they visited on school and summer vacations, a place which they complained was backward and mosquito-ridden. Those of us for whom Puerto Rico was still a recent memory were also split into two groups: the ones who longed for the island and the ones who wanted to forget it as soon as possible. 

I felt disloyal for wanting to learn English, for liking pizza, for studying the girls with big hair and trying out their styles at home, locked in the bathroom where no one could watch. I practiced walking with the peculiar little hop of the morenas, but felt as if I were limping.

When she worked, Mami was happy. She complained about sitting at a machine for hours, or about the short coffee breaks, or about el bosso. But she was proud of the things she made. Often she brought home samples of the bras and girdles she worked on and showed us how she had used a double-needle machine, or how she had figured out that if you stitched the cup a certain way, it would fit better. But even though she was proud of her work, she didn’t want us to follow in her footsteps. 

“I’m not working this hard so that you kids can end up working in factories all your lives. You study, get good grades, and graduate from high school so that you can have a profession, not just a job.” 

She never asked to see our homework, but when we brought home report cards, she demanded that we read her the grades and then translate the teachers’ comments so that she would know exactly how we were doing in school. When the reports were good, she beamed as if she herself had earned the good marks. 

“That’s what you have to do in this country,” she’d say. “Anyone willing to work hard can get ahead.” 

We believed her and tried to please her as best we could.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Jane Eyre," by Charlotte Bronte.

“Come, Miss Jane, don't cry,” said Bessie, as she finished. She might as well have said to the fire, “Don't burn!” but how could she divine the morbid suffering to which I was a prey?

Bessie, when she heard this narrative, sighed and said, “Poor Miss Jane is to be pitied too, Abbot.” 

“Yes,” responded Abbot; “if she were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her forlornness; but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that.”

To this crib I always took my doll; human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doted on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was folded in my nightgown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise.

I regained my couch, but never thought of sleep. Till morning dawned I was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea, where billows of trouble rolled under surges of joy. I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah; and now and then a freshening gale, wakened by hope, bore my spirit triumphantly towards the bourne: but I could not reach it, even in fancy—a counter-acting breeze blew off the land, and continually drove me back. Sense would resist delirium: judgement would warn passion. Too feverish to rest, I rose as soon as day dawned.

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.”

Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent expectant woman—almost a bride—was a cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects were desolate. A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and fragrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead—struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive. I looked at my love: that feeling which was my master's—which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a suffering child in a cold cradle: sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not seek Mr. Rochester's arms—it could not derive warmth from his breast. Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted—confidence destroyed! Mr. Rochester was not to me what he had been; for he was not what I had thought him. I would not ascribe vice to him; I would not say he had betrayed me; but the attribute of stainless truth was gone from his idea, and from his presence I must go: that I perceived well. When—how—whither, I could not yet discern; but he himself, I doubted not, would hurry me from Thornfield. Real affection, it seemed, he could not have for me; it had only been fitful passion: that was balked; he would want me no more. I should fear even to cross his path now: my view must be hateful to him. Oh, how blind had been my eyes! How weak my conduct! 

My eyes were covered and closed: eddying darkness seemed to swim round me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow. Self-abandoned, relaxed, and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, and I felt the torrent come: to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. I lay faint, longing to be dead. One idea only still throbbed lifelike within me—a remembrance of God: it begot an unuttered prayer: these words went wandering up and down in my rayless mind, as something that should be whispered, but no energy was found to express them. “Be not far from me, for trouble is near: there is none to help.” 

It was near; and as I had lifted no petition to Heaven to avert it—as I had neither joined my hands, nor bent my knees, nor moved my lips—it came: in full heavy swing the torrent poured over me. The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass. That bitter hour cannot be described: in truth, “the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire: I felt no standing; I came into deep waters; the floods overflowed me.”

Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.

But where am I wandering, and what am I saying, and above all, feeling? Whether is it better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool's paradise at Marseilles—fevered with delusive bliss one hour—suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next—or to be a village schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England? 

Yes; I feel now that I was right when I adhered to principle and law, and scorned and crushed the insane promptings of a frenzied moment. God directed me to a correct choice: I thank His Providence for the guidance!

“Mr. Rochester, if ever I did a good deed in my life—if ever I thought a good thought—if ever I prayed a sincere and blameless prayer—if ever I wished a righteous wish—I am rewarded now. To be your wife is, for me, to be as happy as I can be on earth.” 

“Because you delight in sacrifice.”

 

“Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value—to press my lips to what I love—to repose on what I trust: is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice.”

Recommended Reads, 49th in a Quarterly Series

 

Books I've read lately that I would recommend:

Poverty, by America (Desmond). I can see why many of my peers have recently read this, as it offers a scathing and encompassing look at how we don't solve poverty as much as profit from it.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity (Price). As a parent of a child on the spectrum and someone who seeks to create space at home and work for the neuro-diverse, it was deeply helpful to learn more about the brain science and the lived experience.

Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime (Stallworth). What an incredible account of an almost unbelievable situation, except that alas it shouldn't be surprising that these things still happen in modern times.

Stay True: A Memoir (Hsu). I almost went to Berkeley in the mid-90s and have many friends who did, so these accounts were very close to home.

The Diary of a Young Girl (Frank). I felt a lot of different emotions reading this particular book at this particular time.

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Gabriele, Perry). I love books like this, which take a central theme across a huge swath of time and space, and in the process fundamentally change how I think about a part of history.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 423

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems," by Joy Harjo.

Time is a being, like you, like me. Monahwee made friends with time, shared tobacco with time, so when he got on his horse to race his beloved warrior friends he had a little talk with time. Time said, “Get on my back, and we’ll fly free.” No matter how fast all the others raced, Monahwee and his horse always arrived long before it was possible . . . those were the best times. 

Sunrise 

Sunrise, as you enter the houses of everyone here, find us. 

We’ve been crashing for days, or has it been years. 

Find us, beneath the shadow of this yearning mountain, crying here. 

We have been sick with sour longings, and the jangling of fears. 

Our spirits rise up in the dark, because they hear, 

Doves in cottonwoods calling forth the sun. 

We struggled with a monster and lost. 

Our bodies were tossed in the pile of kill. We rotted there. 

We were ashamed and we told ourselves for a thousand years, 

We didn’t deserve anything but this— 

And one day, in relentless eternity, our spirits discerned movement of prayers 

Carried toward the sun. 

And this morning we are able to stand with all the rest 

And welcome you here. 

We move with the lightness of being, and we will go 

Where there’s a place for us.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 422

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe," by Matthew Gabriele and David Perry.

Beginnings and endings are arbitrary; they frame the story that the narrator wants to tell. Our story is one that escapes the myth of the “Dark Ages,” a centuries-old understanding of the medieval world that sees it cast in shadow, only hazily understood, fixed and unchanging, but ultimately the opposite of what we want our modern world to be. So, let’s for now forget those traditional transition points between the ancient and medieval worlds, the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, the sack of Rome in 410, or the deposition in 476 of Romulus Augustulus as the “last” Roman emperor in the West. If we as a culture decide that the Middle Ages existed and had a beginning and end, we don’t need to start with decline, darkness, or death. We can start in this shining, sacred, quiet space. This doesn’t, of course, erase the violence of the past to replace it with naive nostalgia. Instead, it shows us that paths taken were not foreordained. Shifting our perspective brings people, traditionally marginalized in other tellings, into focus. Starting somewhere else shows us possible worlds.

The Dominicans in particular also served the papal mission against heresy, earning their sobriquet “hounds of the Lord” (literally, from Domini canes) for their ruthless pursuit of those deemed of questionable orthodoxy.

So, with the Inquisition burning across Europe, it perhaps would come as no surprise that in 1239 Gregory IX asked rulers throughout Christendom to investigate a book for possible heresy, worrying that it deviated from biblical truth. Most ignored the papal request, but the young King Louis IX of France responded enthusiastically and commissioned a tribunal. The queen mother would preside. 

And so in 1240, the still-young king took Gregory’s call to investigate this book, the Talmud, seriously and literally. The prosecution would be led by the chancellor of the University of Paris, alongside the bishop of Paris, the archbishop of Sens, and several friars. The defendants in this case weren’t alleged Christian heretics, but instead were rabbis from Paris, facing the charge that Jews who used the Talmud were heretics within Judaism, that this collection of commentary on the law and tradition was a deviation from the Hebrew Bible. 

The disputation had a foreordained conclusion, of course; the Jews of Paris would never have been allowed to prevail. Although they enjoyed a theoretically protected status in Christian Europe, that status was still bounded by intellectual antagonism that could—and often did—quickly slip into physical violence. Our familiar face Augustine had argued long ago that that the Jews’ subservient status “proved” Christianity’s truth, that history had demonstrated by the destruction of the Israelite Temple and rise of Christianity that God’s plan for the world was “punishment” for the Jews’ failure to accept Jesus. For medieval Christians, Jews needed to be reminded of their subservience, often through violence—harassment, segregation, and sometimes assault and murder. So, in a trial requested by the papacy, supported by the king of France, staffed by Christian churchmen, the outcome of the trial was never in doubt. 

The majority of the Christian jurors agreed that the Talmud was blasphemous and should be banned, its copies burned. So in June 1241, hundreds, if not thousands, of manuscripts were brought to the Place de Grève, stacked in a pile, and set alight. The fire may have burned so high it reflected off the stained glass of Notre-Dame across the river. Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg, who himself witnessed the book burning in 1241, would lament later in the thirteenth century that “Moses shattered the tablets, and another one then repeated his folly / Burning the law in flames . . . / I witnessed how they gathered plunder from you / Into the center of a public square . . . and burned the spoils of God on high.” Rabbi Meir, in anguish, related that the fire that burned so high, so bright in the City of Lights paradoxically “leaves me and you in darkness.”

In the past, we used to blame rats for the plague’s spread—or more specifically rats and ships, the story being that the bacterium hitched a ride in the gut of a flea or tick, which in turn hitched a ride on the back of a rat, which in turn hitched a ride on European (mostly Italian) merchant ships traveling from the Black Sea back to Europe. The fleas, the rats, the people, all facilitated the spread of the disease. Some of that still holds. Rats were almost certainly a vector for carrying the ticks to their ultimate hosts, and a more interconnected commercial world surely helped spread the disease. Yet the jump from animal to human seems to have first come from the furry marmot, hunted for both its meat and pelt, somewhere in modern Kyrgyzstan or northwestern China sometime after 1200. From there, carried on the horses, clothes, cartloads of grain, and bodies of the Mongols, the plague radiated outward.

In the Catalan town of Tàrrega in 1348, shortly after the arrival of the Black Death in early July, the Christian citizens of the town marched against their neighbors and slaughtered them, calling the Jews “traitors.” Mass graves excavated in 2007 confirmed the accuracy of the events described, revealing in the skeletons the injuries the Jews suffered and that some of the murdered were children as young as three or four. The report of the Christians calling Jews “traitors” confirmed the motivation, as the only person or thing the Jews could have “betrayed” in this instance was Jesus, and that betrayal, that supposedly continuous sin, echoed into the medieval Christians’ present and resulted in scores of mass graves, filled with Jewish men, women, and children. When leaders either cannot halt a crisis or choose not to do so, or at times they intensify that crisis, the most vulnerable are too often left behind or slaughtered. In the middle of the fourteenth century, elites too often chose conspiracy theories and scapegoating, which cost thousands their lives.

But just as we cannot sever Renaissance humanism from medieval intellectual life, we also cannot sever Renaissance horrors from medieval practices. The famous works of Renaissance art, whether civic, devotional, or personal, all required vast sums of wealth from a world becoming more unequal, profiting from centuries-old practices in quite new ways. Recent scholars, for example, believe that Leonardo da Vinci’s model for the Mona Lisa was the wife of a slave trader. We can look on “la Gioconda” and admire her smile and Leonardo’s brilliance but we can’t do so and ignore that the wealth of her class came at least in part from the intensification of an economy fueled by mass human trafficking. As we have seen throughout our history, at least some people were unfree in every medieval society. Being unfree could and did mean different things, with a wide variety of rights, protections, obligations, and pathways—or not—to freedom. Nevertheless, although chattel slavery—the buying and selling of humans—was more common in the urbanized Mediterranean than elsewhere, a factor of easier access to markets, the principle of buying and selling humans was known to medieval people, just as to ancients, just as to moderns. In the later Middle Ages, access to Black Sea ports brought new waves of enslaved peoples to the medieval Mediterranean and Europe—a trading culture common to Christians and Muslims, Italians and Egyptians. Medieval people also formed the foundational ideas about racial difference and otherness that underpinned the transatlantic slave trade, which brought so much misery. As scholars such as Geraldine Heng, Dorothy Kim, Sierra Lomuto, Cord Whitaker, and others have shown, the roots of modern white supremacy emerge not from the fantasy of a racially pure Europe (one that never existed) but rather from intellectual foundations in the Christian encounter with Jews, Muslims, and Mongols.

AI+I > I

 

Yesterday's entry was the April Fools post. "Sold for AI play" is an anagram for "April Fools." Not that there's anything wrong with AI-generated blog posts. In fact, I may even dabble. At work or in the classroom, why wouldn't you harness this tool? It's a brave new world out there, ever in need of the human touch, but overlaid with all the world's information to assist.

Not I, but AI

 

I have a confession to make. Off and on for a few months, and then exclusively for the past few weeks, "I" haven't written any of these blog posts. Curiosity about chatbot technologies and an increasingly busy schedule led me to dabble in and then fully utilize ChatGPT to generate content based on my past work: my pet issues, my urban observations, even the books and excerpts I like.

Of course, I had to teach and interact with it, so in a sense I'm still the author or at least co-author. But I figured I should come clean. I'm sold for AI play, at work and in the classroom and yes on social media. I hope you don't think less of me.