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Here’s the Ugly Side of Bipartisanship

by TWTKamwbbsdhe Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dylan Matthews, after running down all the obnoxious amendments to the omnibus spending bill currently wending its way through Congress, wonders aloud if it’s still worth supporting:

If you’re Barack Obama, or a liberal Democrat generally, most of these riders are setbacks, in some cases significant ones. Indeed, Obama’s condemned the Dodd-Frank and campaign finance provisions. He could, in theory, reject the deal and demand that Congress send him a bill without changes to Dodd-Frank, or one that doesn’t meddle in DC’s affairs, etc. And yet he has come out in favor of House passage of the bill.

Is he making a massive mistake?

This is one of those things that demonstrates the chasm between political activists and analysts on the one side, and working politicians on the other. If you take a look at the bill, it does indeed have a bunch of objectionable features. People like me, with nothing really at stake, can bitch and moan about them endlessly. But you know what? For all the interminable whining we do about the death of bipartisanship in Washington, this is what bipartisanship looks like. It always has. It’s messy, it’s ugly, and it’s petty. Little favors get inserted into bills to win votes. Other favors get inserted as payback for the initial favors. Special interests get stroked. Party whips get a workout.

That’s politics. The fact that it’s happening right now is, in a weird sense, actually good news. It means that, for a few days at least, politics is working normally again.

I understand that this sounds very Slatepitchy. But it’s true. Even at its best, politics is lubricated by venality, ego, and mutual backscratching. And you know what? By the normal standards of this kind of stuff, the obnoxious riders in the current spending bill are pretty mild. Really. The only one that rises above the level of a political misdemeanor is the provision that allows banks to get back into the custom swaps business, and even that’s hardly the end of the world. Swaps may have provided a tailwind to the 2008 financial collapse, but they were far from its core cause.

So should working politicians avert their gaze from the muck and vote to keep the government functioning? Of course they should. Government shutdowns are immensely costly in their own right, after all. This kind of crass calculus sucks, but that’s human nature for you. All things considered, I’d say we all got off fairly easy this time around.

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Here’s the Ugly Side of Bipartisanship

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The Horrifying Reason Why Your Fruit Is Unblemished

by FaithAEHxvuqw Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Back in 2010, I visited a labor camp that houses some of the migrant workers who grow America’s fruit and vegetables. I found people living densely in shanty-like structures made of scrap metal and cinder block, surrounded by vast fields and long rows of greenhouses. Strangers in a strange land who didn’t speak the language, hundreds of miles from home, they lived at the mercy of labor contractors who, they claimed, made false promises and paid rock-bottom wages. Like all Big Ag-dominated areas, the place had a feeling of desolation: all monocropped fields, mostly devoid of people, and lots of billboards hawking the products of agrichemical giants Monsanto and Syngenta.

You might think I had made my way to Florida’s infamous tomato fields, or somewhere in the depths of the California’s migrant-dependent Central Valley. Those places remain obscure to most Americans, but the gross human exploitation they represent has at least been documented in a spate of excellent recent books, like Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland, Tracy McMillan’s The American Way of Eating, and Seth Holmes Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. But I was somewhere yet more remote and less well-known: Sinaloa, a largely rural state in Mexico’s northwestern hinterland.

If most Americans have heard of Sinaloa at all, it’s because of the state’s well-earned reputation as a center of Mexico’s bloody drug trade. But in addition to the eponymous drug cartel, Sinaloa also houses vast-scale, export-oriented agriculture: farms that churn out the tomatoes, melons, peppers, and other fresh produce that help fill US supermarket shelves. And the people who do the planting, tending, and harvesting tend to be from the indigenous regions of Mexico’s southern states, Oaxaca and Chiapas, where smallholder farming has been ground down by decades of free-trade policies pursued by the Mexican government, which left millions in search of gainful work to the north.

In my brief time there, I found Sinaloa overwhelming: a scary cauldron of labor exploitation, industrial agriculture, and drug violence. Now, Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Marosi and photographer Don Bartletti have documented the grim conditions faced by workers on Mexico’s export-focused mega farms in a long-form investigation, after 18 months of reporting in nine Mexican states, including, most prominently, Sinaloa. The Times plans to publish it in four parts; the first, here, is stunning.

Marosi found that Mexico’s mega-farms adhere to the strictest standards when it comes to food safety and cleanliness, driven by the demands of big US buyers. “In immaculate greenhouses, laborers are ordered to use hand sanitizers and schooled in how to pamper the produce,” Marosi writes. “They’re required to keep their fingernails carefully trimmed so the fruit will arrive unblemished in US supermarkets.”

While the produce is coddled, the workers face a different reality. Pay languishes at the equivalent of $8 to $12 a day. Marosi summarizes conditions that often approach slavery:

• Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.

• Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.

• Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.

• Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.

• Major US companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

The piece includes excellent photography and is chockfull of stories straight from the mouths of farm workers. And it shines a bright light on a hugely important source of our food. The US now imports nearly a third of the fruit and vegetables we consume, and Mexico accounts for 36 percent of that foreign-grown cornucopia, far more than any other country. And we’re only growing more reliant on our southern neighbor—imports of Mexico-grown fresh produce have increased by an average of 11 percent per year between 2001 and 2011, the USDA reports, and now amount to around $8 billion. The Times investigations demonstrates, with an accumulation of detail that can’t be denied or ignored, that our easy bounty bobs on a sea of misery and exploitation.

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The Horrifying Reason Why Your Fruit Is Unblemished

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How Science Can Tell If Your Great-Grandparents Were Strikebreakers

by QuyenLabonte Posted on December 5, 2014

Mother Jones

An 1832 engraving of Newcastle William Miller/Wikimedia Commons

Geneticist Stephen Leslie kept coming back to a handful of data points that seemed out of place on his genetic map of Britain. “It was driving me absolutely insane,” he’s quoted as saying in Christine Kenneally’s new book, The Invisible History of the Human Race. No matter how many times he re-ran the analysis, double-checking the data and his code, the anomaly wouldn’t budge. So he figured that if his finding was true, there must be some logical explanation.

Some of the most important discoveries in science and technology have grown out of persistent and puzzling observations. Like when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the first evidence of the Big Bang while mapping radio signals from the Milky Way. At first they thought it was interference from urban Manhattan, or maybe from pigeon poop. But eventually they realized that the annoying noise was in fact the signal that the beginning of the universe left behind: cosmic background radiation. And so they won the Nobel Prize. Or when Pfizer developed a little blue pill to treat chest pain, whose surprising side effect is responsible for much of the spam in your inbox.

In Leslie’s case, the anomaly was the finding that an individual living near the English city of Newcastle had eight great-grandparents who were all from the faraway county of Devon. On a recent episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Kenneally explained why this was so strange—and what it might tell us about the history of England.

When scientists are trying to figure out the genetic basis of a disease, they need to know what else differentiates people who have the illness from those who don’t. That way, they can tell which DNA variations might be related to the disease and which ones are entirely irrelevant to that disease. So if a particular genetic signature is associated with a specific population, that information can be help researchers rule out aspects of genetic variation that have nothing to do with the illness in question. Characterizing this regional genetic map is one of the main goals of Leslie’s work.

Kenneally’s book tracks the ways in which this sort of data can also be used to illuminate history, and she describes the methods that Leslie and his colleagues used to map out genetic variation in large populations. Specifically, the scientists collected and analyzed blood samples from a population of about 4,500 people living in rural Britain. To be a part of the study, participants had to have four grandparents who who were all born near each other. These blood samples were then entered into a genome-wide association analysis. That means that instead of looking for a handful of “candidate genes”—the way many genetic studies had done in the past, with little success—the scientists employed a new method that allowed them to simultaneously compare tens of thousands of sites on the genomes of thousands of people. Using this analysis, they were then able to identify parts of the genome that characterize people from specific places.

To learn more about this “People of the British Isles” study, you can watch this short video:

The research produced some remarkable results, revealing that groups of people from specific parts of Britain had unique genetic markers. “They isolated at least 20 different groups,” explains Kenneally. “And one of the first things that this tells us is that people lived in those areas for a very, very long time—way back to 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. The local villagers were marrying each other; their children grew up, they married the girl next door, the boy next door.” This fact was borne out by the rest of Leslie’s dataset: Most people in the study shared similar DNA with their closest neighbors.

It’s important to understand that the regional differences identified in the study were minor. “All these people the entire sample, that is are almost entirely, exactly genetically the same, and these differences are extremely subtle, and they probably have no impact whatsoever on people’s health or traits or anything like that,” says Kenneally. “But they’re these tastes or flavors in the genome that tell us a little bit about the past.”

So what was it that drove Leslie nuts as he stared at his data?

“Once they had sorted Great Britain out into all these neat little groups, there was someone in Newcastle who looked like they shouldn’t be there,” says Kenneally. This person was born near Newcastle and had four grandparents who were also born in the area. But the individual in question had DNA that looked a lot like the the patterns found in people who were from Devon, 400 miles to the south. Indeed, the genetic data seemed to suggest that back in the 1800s, all eight of this person’s great-grandparents had migrated to the region from the same part of Devon. For some reason, these people had all intermarried, and their descendants had too—instead of marrying the locals, as would be expected.

“This just seemed really implausible,” explains Kenneally. There wasn’t an obvious cultural reason why the ancestors of the migrants from Devon would remain so isolated, with even the next generation intermarrying rather than mixing with the locals. After all, they weren’t ethnically or religiously distinct from most other residents of Newcastle. “If they were a religious group—if they were Catholics, or if they were Jewish people—it might perhaps make sense that…they would have continued to marry within their group.” But there was nothing special about those Devonians. “No offense to Devonians; it’s just that there was nothing binding them together,” adds Kenneally. “So, Leslie ran and re-ran his analysis over and over again. It was absolutely driving him mad.”

When science failed to provide the solution to the puzzle, Leslie turned to the ultimate source of information: the internet. Searching genealogical websites, he found an important historic connection between Devon and Newcastle: In the 1800s, both places relied heavily on the mining industry. In 1830, Newcastle’s miners formed a union, and the following year, they went on strike. The Great Strike of 1831 was a massive victory for the miners. But a year later, the owners of the mine brought in workers from other parts of Britain, including Devon, and starved the locals into submission. The union soon collapsed, and the mine owners began to systematically lower wages. Other strikes would follow in the years to come. The situation left the locals angry and bitter—and much of that anger was no doubt directed at the out-of-town miners and their families.

“These people were strikebreakers,” says Kenneally. “So they would’ve been really isolated from their new communities. People would not have wanted to talk with them, let alone to marry them and have children with them.” And that’s one likely solution to Leslie’s genetic mystery: The eight transplants from Devon—along with their descendants—may have been ostracized by the locals.

Leslie’s analysis demonstrates just how powerful genetic data can be. “In these tiny gaps where we’re different, where you have a few markers here and there, or maybe a few hundred or thousand markers here and there,” says Kenneally, “those markers can tell us something about not just our health, not just our individual traits, but the history of the human race as well.”

Update: Our interview with Kenneally was the second in a three-part series focusing on DNA and what makes us human. You can click below to listen to this week’s show, in which Cynthia Graber interviews Donald Johanson about our evolutionary origins. Johanson was part of the team that discovered the fossil Lucy 40 years ago; at that time, Lucy was humans’ oldest ancestral remnant who walked upright.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How Science Can Tell If Your Great-Grandparents Were Strikebreakers

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Jon Stewart Explains What Is "So Utterly Depressing" About the Eric Garner Grand Jury

by MeaganDunhill Posted on December 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last night, Jon Stewart began the Daily Show by dropping the comedy and expressing in very human terms the frustration and disbelief everyone (or (well, not everyone) is feeling after a Staten Island grand jury’s failure to indict the NYPD officer who put Eric Garner in a lethal chokehold on film.”If comedy is tragedy plus time I need more fucking time—but I would settle for less fucking tragedy, to be honest with you. What is so utterly depressing is that none of the ambiguities that existed in the Ferguson case exist in the Staten Island case. And yet the outcome is exactly the same.” Stewart says. “We are definitely not living in a post-racial society and I can imagine there are a lot of people out there wondering how much of a society we’re living in at all.” Pretty much.

Transcript after the jump:

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Jon Stewart Explains What Is "So Utterly Depressing" About the Eric Garner Grand Jury

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No, the Garner Case Doesn’t Show That Body Cameras Are Useless

by HeleneScorfield Posted on December 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Very quick note: ever since last night, a lot of people have been making the point that Eric Garner’s killing produced no grand jury indictment even though the whole incident was captured on video. So maybe the whole idea of body cameras on police officers is pointless.

This is ridiculous. There are pros and cons to body cameras, but only in the rarest cases will they capture a cop killing someone. Even if, arguendo, they make no difference in these cases, they can very much make a difference in the other 99.9 percent of the cases where they’re used. The grand jury’s decision in the Garner case means a lot of things, but one thing it doesn’t mean is that body cameras are useless.

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No, the Garner Case Doesn’t Show That Body Cameras Are Useless

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The Scary Mystery of Angela Merkel Is….Still a Mystery

by Juli34Bfuc Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last night I got around to reading George Packer’s long New Yorker profile of German chancellor Angela Merkel, and it turned out to be a surprisingly absorbing piece. Unfortunately, that’s due more to Packer’s skill as a writer than to anything he ends up revealing about Merkel. In fact, the truly astonishing thing is that he manages to write 15,000 words about Merkel without really enlightening us in any serious way about what makes her tick. Apparently she’s really that enigmatic. Here, for example, is what he says about why a sober-minded East German chemist, who had never before displayed any political ambitions, suddenly decided to visit a political group that had formed after the Berlin Wall fell to ask if she could help out with anything:

Merkel’s decision to enter politics is the central mystery of an opaque life. She rarely speaks publicly about herself and has never explained her decision. It wasn’t a long-term career plan—like most Germans, she didn’t foresee the abrupt collapse of Communism and the opportunities it created. But when the moment came, and Merkel found herself single and childless in her mid-thirties—and laboring in an East German institution with no future—a woman of her ambition must have grasped that politics would be the most dynamic realm of the new Germany.

Well, OK then. Packer reports that Merkel is smart, methodical, genuinely unpretentious, and “as lively and funny in private as she is publicly soporific.” But her political views? Apparently she barely has any:

Throughout her Chancellorship, Merkel has stayed as close as possible to German public opinion….“The Chancellor’s long-term view is about two weeks,” a Merkel adviser says. The pejorative most often used against her is “opportunist.” When I asked Katrin Göring-Eckardt, the Green leader, whether Merkel had any principles, she paused, then said, “She has a strong value of freedom, and everything else is negotiable.”

….“People say there’s no project, there’s no idea,” the senior official told me. “It’s just a zigzag of smart moves for nine years.” But, he added, “She would say that the times are not conducive to great visions.”

….The most daunting challenge of Merkel’s time in office has been the euro-zone crisis, which threatened to bring down economies across southern Europe and jeopardized the integrity of the euro….Merkel’s decisions during the crisis reflect the calculations of a politician more mindful of her constituency than of her place in history. When Greek debt was revealed to be at critical levels, she was slow to commit German taxpayers’ money to a bailout fund, and in 2011 she blocked a French and American proposal for coördinated European action.

….Throughout the crisis, Merkel buried herself in the economic details and refused to get out in front of what German voters—who tended to regard the Greeks as spendthrift and lazy—would accept, even if delaying prolonged the ordeal and, at key moments from late 2011 through the summer of 2012, threatened the euro itself. The novelist and journalist Peter Schneider compared her to a driver in foggy weather: “You only see five metres, not one hundred metres, so it’s better you are very careful, you don’t say too much, you act from step to step. No vision at all.”

It’s kind of scary, but all wrapped up in a hazy ball of pragmatism that’s hard to get a handle on. Take the eurozone crisis, for example. Over the past five years, Germany has seemed almost spitefully hellbent on destroying the European economy simply because Germans disapprove of the spendthrift southerners responsible for the mess—all the time self-righteously refusing to admit that they themselves played a role that was every bit as lucrative and self-serving in the whole debacle. Because of this, the European economy is now headed for its third recession since 2008.

Does Merkel share this view of things? Or does she recognize what needs to be done but simply doesn’t have either the will or the courage to challenge German public opinion? That’s never clear. And yes, I guess I find that a little scary. This is why I don’t quite get the comparison Packer makes between Merkel and Obama. Initially, he says, Merkel was put off by Obama’s lofty rhetoric:

As she got to know Obama better, though, she came to appreciate more the ways in which they were alike—analytical, cautious, dry-humored, remote. Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, told me that “the President thinks there’s not another leader he’s worked closer with than her.” He added, “They’re so different publicly, but they’re actually quite similar.” (Ulrich joked, “Obama is Merkel in a better suit.”)

During the Ukraine crisis, the two have consulted frequently on the timing of announcements and been careful to keep the American and the European positions close. Obama is the antithesis of the swaggering leaders whom Merkel specializes in eating for breakfast. On a trip to Washington, she met with a number of senators, including the Republicans John McCain, of Arizona, and Jeff Sessions, of Alabama. She found them more preoccupied with the need to display toughness against America’s former Cold War adversary than with events in Ukraine themselves. (McCain called Merkel’s approach “milquetoast.”) To Merkel, Ukraine was a practical problem to be solved. This mirrored Obama’s view.

Personality-wise, perhaps, Obama and Merkel are similar. “No drama” could apply equally well to either of them. But politically? I don’t see it. Obama doesn’t strike me as someone with no vision who hews as close as possible to public opinion. It’s true that he can’t always get what he wants, and obviously he faces the same constraints as any politician in a democratic system—especially one who presides over a divided government. But certainly his broad political views are clear enough, as are his political sympathies. He hasn’t been able to change the course of American politics, but not because he wouldn’t like to. He just hasn’t been able to.

So: who is Angela Merkel? After 15,000 words, I still don’t feel like I know. Is she really just someone who’s skilled at keeping her political coalition together and doesn’t much care about anything more than that? It’s a little hard to believe. And yet, that sure seems to be the main takeaway from all this.

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The Scary Mystery of Angela Merkel Is….Still a Mystery

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"Wild’s" Cheryl Strayed Becomes One With Reese Witherspoon

by Noelia4520 Posted on November 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Her pack was too heavy, her boots too tight. She didn’t know how to read a compass. But that didn’t stop first-time backpacker Cheryl Strayed, then 26, from embarking on a soul-searching 1,100-mile solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995, from Southern California’s Mojave Desert to the Bridge of the Gods in Oregon.

Yet the physical feat of the hike is not the true star of Strayed’s 2012 memoir about the journey, Wild. Rather, Strayed’s recovery from a near-addiction to heroine, a young divorce, and her mother’s death from cancer take center stage. The story so resonated with readers, they kept it at the number one slot on the New York Times‘ bestseller list for seven weeks straight.

Wild also captivated Reese Witherspoon, who purchased the rights and portrays Strayed in the film version directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club), out on December 3. Novelist Nick Hornby signed on to write the screenplay after reading the book and writing Strayed a tender fan letter. The film has garnered early praise, and speculation that it could lead to Oscar nominations for Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern, who plays Strayed’s mother in the film. After Wild premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August, the New York Times‘ A.O. Scott wrote: “Ms. Witherspoon is both an entirely believable modern woman, defying conventional categories and expectations, and also, for that reason, an excitingly credible feminist heroine.”

I caught up with Strayed to talk about Oprah haters, backpacker backlash, and her Hollywood mind meld.

Mother Jones: The movie version of Wild opens soon. Is Reese Witherspoon the first person you would’ve thought of to portray you?

Cheryl Strayed: It’s funny, it never occurred to me that a movie star would play me. But now that she is playing me, it’s like, of course, it couldn’t be anyone else! I don’t know if you’ve seen pictures of Reese and me and Reese and my daughter Bobbi, who’s named after my mother, and also plays me. There’s a kind of resemblance. What’s interesting is how much more perfect she’s become over time. Watching the movie for me is uncanny, because they have her wearing the clothes I wore. They put her hair in a barrette the same way I put my hair in a barrette. She just became me in a way that’s like, shocking.

MJ: How involved were you in the production?

CS: I was involved from the beginning. Reese was always very concerned that the film would honor my life and the book. And Nick Hornby, who wrote the script, had read Wild before he was involved, and out of the blue had written me the kindest fan letter. That just blew me away. When Jean-Marc Vallée, the director, came on board, it was just this wonderful piece of luck, because we have a similar artistic sensibility. The film was shot in Oregon and California, and I was welcome on the set. If the director had his way, I’d have been there every day. I’d give Reese tons of advice about the character and backpacking, and teaching her how to do this, that, and the other thing. The art department looked at pictures of my family and the prop people took my backpack. The gear I had on the trail—I have most of it still—they re-created for the film. I probably saw seven or eight versions, and I offered feedback, and Jean-Marc listened very seriously. Unlike every bad story you’ve ever heard about Hollywood from writers, with this everything was fun and golden.

Reese Witherspoon on the set of Wild Fox Searchlight

MJ: Were there any scenes you lobbied for or against?

CS: Let me think. I wanted to make sure that the love and respect was there that Cheryl felt for her mother, who’s played by Laura Dern. I weighed in pretty strongly that, even amid some tensions between mother and daughter, there’s a lot of love and tenderness. It mattered to me that they portrayed that accurately.

MJ: Your epic solo walk on the Pacific Coast Trail came more than a decade before Wild. How did you reconstruct it?

CS: I liken it to when you run into an old friend from high school and you get to talking and suddenly you’re remembering things you’d thought you’d forgotten. There are different patches that open up in the brain. I also kept a journal, not just because I was on the hike, but all through my 20s and 30s. When I would meet somebody, I would write the way a fiction writer or a memoirist writes about them. And I did research, the good old-fashioned, “Let’s see, what flowers were growing in that field when I might have passed by that time?” Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that’s the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.

MJ: You wrote, “I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.” What had you been told about the wilderness prior to setting out?

CS: I grew up in northern Minnesota on 40 acres of wooded land 20 miles from the nearest town, and so the wilderness was home. It was not an unsafe place. I had that advantage. But there are so many representations of the wilderness being dangerous. You know, depictions of wild animals attacking people. It’s like, “No, we kill those animals in far greater numbers than they kill us.” So on one hand, because the wilderness was familiar to me, it really helped me be brave. But it still was scary sometimes. I had to say to myself: “Chances are, you’re not going to be mauled by a bear.”

MJ: The people who get rescued from wilderness areas often turn out to have been ill-prepared. Do you worry that some people might take your book too literally and set off on a three-month hike with little preparation?

CS: If you want to read anything nasty about me, just go to the backpacker websites. I mean, lots of outdoor people love Wild, but there’s this kind of elitist branch where they really believe that I had no business going backpacking. I get blamed: “Oh, Cheryl Strayed, it’s her fault if somebody needs to be rescued.” First of all, things have gone awry in the wilderness well before Wild was ever published. Laughs. But I actually don’t have any fear of people reading Wild and going out unprepared. Because one of the best things that ever happened to me was that I went out unprepared. And when you really think about it, all I did wrong was that I took too much stuff, which is the most common backpacker mistake. The part that I wasn’t prepared for is the part you can’t prepare for. You can’t replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it. I had to learn how to do a lot of stuff on the trail, that’s true. But I was the one who suffered the consequences.

MJ: So you’ll be cool with it when your kids announce their plans to hike the Appalachian Trial alone?

CS: That would make me so happy! I would feel like I had parented them well. I would take full credit. Laughs.

MJ: NPR did a segment on a woman who read your book only to realize that you were her half-sister. Have you met her?

CS: I knew her first name, but she doesn’t have our father’s last name anymore, and I don’t either. Strayed chose her new surname in her early 20s after divorcing her first husband. When I got the email, she didn’t say in the subject line, “Hey, I think we’re related.” It was just like, “Wild,” and it seemed like just a fan email, and I sometimes will sort of skim those. She said what a lot of people say: “Oh, we have so much in common. Your life is so much like mine.” And just when I was about to move on, she says, “You know, I actually think we share a father.”

MJ: Way to bury the lede!

CS: Exactly! In the second or third paragraph, I’m not kidding you! I almost missed it. And I knew the moment she said my father’s name. So I wrote her back, and we bonded. I haven’t met her yet. She lives across the country, and we’ve not had occasion to get together because life is complicated. But yeah, isn’t that crazy?

MJ: Yeah! So let’s talk about Oprah. As someone who had gone through an MFA program and been to writers’ conferences, what was your view of Oprah’s Book Club before she asked to feature you?

CS: Oh, I have always been a great fan. I guess I got kind of politicized about it when that whole Jonathan Franzen thing happened: He was picked for the club, and then in interviews said things that seemed to be disparaging. I was really offended by that. I really hate snobbery, especially in literature. And I do think it’s funny: People get away with criticizing Oprah: “Her book club is low-brow,” or whatever. They forget that many of Toni Morrison’s books, two of Franzen’s books—Faulkner is an Oprah Book Club pick! I’d say 98 percent of the criticism directed at her, what they’re really saying is, “Well, her audience is female. So if women like it, it must not be high art.” Any time you have a group that is primarily women, there’s gonna be a whole bunch of snobs who step in and say, “Oh, that’s beneath me.” Is it such a terrible thing that a bunch of people read novels that no one would’ve read had it not been for her? Wild was a bestseller before she came along, but some books wouldn’t have ever had the audience they got. And it was all because of Oprah. That’s the first thing I said to her. I said, “Thank you so much for being such a supporter of literary fiction.”

MJ: So are you feeling hungry for your next project, or do you just need a break?

CS: Both. To me, a bit of a break would be getting to write again. My life has been so outward—the book is still on the best-seller list and all that stuff. So that’s been busy enough. But now with the film everything’s amped up even more. I am hoping 2015 is all about me going back into the cave and writing.

MJ: What are you working on?

CS: I’m sort of working on a novel and a memoir. I don’t want to talk about it too much. It’s kind of a prequel.

MJ: For a time, you also had a gig as Sugar, the advice columnist for the Rumpus, the online literary magazine. Is Sugar on hiatus, or has she retired?

CS: I don’t know. I really did mean for it to just be a hiatus when I took off with Wild and the book tour and all that stuff, but I’ve never not been busy, so I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I also started to reach a point where I feel like I’ve spoken my piece. If you read the “Dear Sugar” collection Tiny Beautiful Things, I so universally answer so many questions, there’d be a point where I’d start repeating myself.

MJ: If you were to seek advice from Sugar, what would you ask?

CS: “How do you say no?” It’s so much easier said than done. Because I’m being asked to do so much, and my friends are saying, Cheryl, you just have to say no. I like to be generous; it’s truly part of my personality, so to have to manage that in a way that keeps me sane and healthy has almost been impossible.

MJ: As Sugar, you’re frank and validating without being snarky. How do you avoid the snark trap, given how the internet puts a premium on humor with an attitude?

CS: That’s why I thought I’d be a failure with Sugar: I’m not funny and I’m not going to be able to be glib and all the stuff the kids like these days. I said, if I do this, I’m just going to have to be what I am, which is direct and candid and very sincere and very loving—and not hiding behind a kind of mask of cunning witticisms. Ultimately, Sugar makes you cry more than she makes you laugh. I was so afraid that people wouldn’t like the column because I wasn’t snarky, and it turned out that’s the reason they like it so much. People really were hungry for sincerity. And not just people, but young San Francisco hipsters who read the Rumpus. People who you would think would just roll their eyes. But no. They were like, “Oh Sugar, please help me.”

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"Wild’s" Cheryl Strayed Becomes One With Reese Witherspoon

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This Map Shows What People Are Most Thankful For In Every State

by DeweyIpnudblr Posted on November 27, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Earlier this week, Facebook’s data team crunched the numbers on what users say they are most “thankful” for. The top two overall results were predictably “friends” and “family,” which is heartwarming but sort of a snooze.

Facebook

The state-by-state breakdown, however, is pretty interesting in a meaningless but entertaining sort of way.

Facebook

Some observations:

1. To me the most disheartening is Kentucky where people are grateful for their “work family.”

2. There are apparently a lot of magicians in Ohio and Alaska who “don’t do it for the money.”

3. Maryland is thankful for having “a sound mind” which I can only take to mean some sort of criticism of its neighboring states. “Look, look, Delaware and Virginia are dispossessed. We’re just happy to be the state that keeps it all together.”

4. A lot of people in Illinois are apparently trying to passive-aggressively use Facebook to get out of the dog house with their significant other.

Head on over to Facebook for the methodology and some other cool visualizations.

(via The Atlantic)

Source:

This Map Shows What People Are Most Thankful For In Every State

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Thanksgiving Films, Ranked

by PearleneKfe Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Ho ho ho and merry Thanksgiving! Here is a ranking of twenty Thanksgiving films. What is a “Thanksgiving film”? For the purposes of this post it is a film that is both a) on Wikipedia’s list, and b) one I, Ben Dreyfuss, immediately recall seeing and have an opinion about.

1. Hannah and Her Sisters

2. Rocky

3. Scent of a Woman

4. Rocky II

5. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

6. Home for the Holidays

7. Avalon

8. The Ice Storm

9. The Morning After

10. For Your Consideration

11. Grumpy Old Men

12. Addams Family Values

13. Funny People

14. Spider-Man

15. The Object of My affection

16. The Other Sister

17. Bean

18. Son in Law

18. Tower Heist

19. Unknown

20. Jack and Jill

Disclosure: I haven’t actually seen Jack and Jill but I’m pretty confident it’s the worst. Also, The Last Waltz was not included in this ranking because though it is on the Wikipedia list of Thanksgiving films, it shouldn’t be. Still pretty good though!

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Thanksgiving Films, Ranked

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Map: Here’s How #Ferguson Exploded on Twitter Last Night

by PiperCasimaty Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

On Monday evening, news of a grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown erupted across social media. The announcement was made shortly after 8:20 PM CT and sparked massive protests around the country. The situation was particularly violent in and around the St. Louis area, with more than 60 people arrested overnight.

Using the hashtag #Ferguson, Twitter has mapped out how the conversation took place:

More from the chaotic scene:

Police gather on the street as protesters react after the announcement of the grand jury decision. Charlie Riedel/AP

Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother, is comforted outside the Ferguson police department as St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch conveys the grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of her son. Robert Cohen/AP

People watch as stores burn down. David Goldman/AP

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Map: Here’s How #Ferguson Exploded on Twitter Last Night

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