| | | The Senator is fighting against Trump, and for lowering the cost of college. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | May 23, 2017 | Letter No. 87 | | | | | | | | | | | | Dear Lennys,
In an effort to stop reading the news so incessantly, I started listening to more podcasts — that way I am still getting my mainlined political heroin, but I can also go outside and look around at the tulips wilting in the sudden, steamy heat. In general, I try to avoid hearing Donald Trump's voice (even parodies of his voice make me nauseated with rage at this point), but because I was listening to the New York Times' podcast The Daily', I heard a snippet of the President's preening, self-pitying speech to Coast Guard Academy graduates.
He does his blame-the-media shtick, but the line that chilled me was this: Trump told the graduates to never give up fighting, because if they don't, "Things will work out just fine."
It was delivered with his customary smug satisfaction, because of course Trump thinks "things will work out just fine," even as the West Wing crumbles around him. He is a narcissistic disaster of a 70-year-old man who, since the day he burst from the womb, Alien-style, into a pile of money, has never once had a problem that hasn't worked out "just fine." From his governing "style," if you can even call it that, it's clear that he has never given a moment's thought to the notion that for most people, things don't just "work out" no matter what they do, and there is collateral damage from cruel policies.
In this week's Lenny, our heroine Senator Elizabeth Warren discusses how our national policies from 1980 to today have resulted in a hollowing-out of the American middle class. She focuses, in particular, on the cost of a college education. When Senator Warren went to community college as a single mom decades ago, she paid $50 a semester. Now, student loans make up a whopping 10.6 percent of all household debt, compared with just 3.3 percent in 2003. Trump, along with his callous billionaire secretary of education Betsy DeVos, is allegedly planning to end student-loan forgiveness for public servants, eliminate $700 million in Perkins loans for disadvantaged students, and cut a $15 million program that gives child care to low-income parents in college. These are policies made by people with vast inherited wealth, who can blithely forget that there are millions of real Americans whose lives and choices will be curtailed by their heartlessness.
We also have a truly moving, thoughtful essay from Jo Piazza, who writes about learning that she is a genetic carrier for muscular dystrophy, and what that means for her desire to have biological children. Then there's a delightful piece by Trixie Garcia, Jerry's daughter, who writes about what it means to carry on her father's legacy. Additionally, we have an interview with the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, whose gorgeous portraits are not to be missed, and an interview with Anna Brones, the creative force behind the quarterly zine Comestible, which recently released a special edition called "Protest Fuel: The Revolution Must Be Fed."
I'm starting to have a glimmer of hope that things won't "work out just fine" for Trump after this latest series of self-inflicted disasters. And that hope provides me with new energy. We're gonna need it.
Xo Jess Grose, Lenny editor in chief | | | | | | | | | | | | Let's Make College Affordable Again | | | | By Elizabeth Warren | | |
Men like Donald Trump come to power when their countries are already in deep trouble. And more than 100 days into his presidency, I'm hitting alarm buttons everywhere I can. But before we talk about how we fight back, let's talk about how we got here.
I grew up in an America that invested in kids like me. My family didn't have much. My daddy sold lawn mowers and fences, and he ended up as a maintenance man. When I was twelve, he had a heart attack. My parents knew what it was like living paycheck to paycheck, and when the paychecks stopped, our whole world turned upside down. Every night as I went to sleep, I listened to my mother crying in the next room. Finally, my mom, who was 50 years old, pulled on her best dress and her high heels and walked to the Sears to get a minimum-wage job answering the phone. She saved our home, and she saved our family. I learned early on about the deep-down fear that we could lose it all — and just how hard a woman could fight back. But my mom couldn't have saved us without a minimum wage that actually provided enough for our family to live on.
I didn't set out to be a senator. My own path had plenty of twists and turns. I loved my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Lee. She was wonderful, and when she told me I could be a teacher, too, I set my heart on it. I never let go of the dream. There was no money for college so I got a scholarship — but then I took a detour. At 19, I got married and dropped out of school. But I received a second chance: eventually I graduated from a commuter college in Texas that cost $50 a semester, and I reached that dream of becoming a teacher.
I'm the daughter of a janitor who became a professor at Harvard Law School and a United States senator — I'm the product of an opened door, and I'm grateful down to my toes. It was a set of policies that our country adopted that opened that door for me and for millions of others.
Today, it's a different story. For far too many people, those kinds of opportunities have disappeared. Our country has stopped investing in its young people, and stories like mine have become rare over the past 35 years.
In my new book, This Fight Is Our Fight, I talk about the long arc of America's middle class from 1935 to the present. I split this arc into two sections: 1930 to 1980 and 1980 to today. From 1935 to 1980, Washington focused on strengthening the middle class and building opportunities for more and more people. Progressive taxation gave us a chance to invest in education, infrastructure, and basic research, and careful regulation meant we could level the playing field, creating opportunities for a lot of families — including mine. These progressive policies worked, and our country built the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. From 1935 to 1980, 90 percent of America received about 70 percent of all the income growth in this country. The pie got bigger, and everyone had more to eat.
Then came 1980. It was a turning point where we began to follow a very different approach. Ronald Reagan was elected president and, piece by piece, the policies in Washington, DC, took a sharp turn. Our financial markets were deregulated, and the big banks and Wall Street giants were turned loose to do pretty much whatever they wanted. Taxes were slashed for those at the top, and investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research shrank. And what were the consequences? The top 10 percent of this country received nearly all the new income. The 90 percent — in other words, the huge majority of America — got zero. Zilch. Think about that: almost ALL of the income growth from 1980 to today has gone to the top 10 percent.
In my book, I tell stories about real people affected by policies in Washington. These are stories of individuals who never expected to turn to their government for help. But they also never expected their government to turn against them.
While I was writing the book, I met Kai, an energetic young woman with dreams about her future. She said she had been playing video games since as long as she could walk, and she was driven to build a great career in technology and visual arts. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and she was pretty much on her own to figure out what would be the right school. She got tangled up in the trap laid by for-profit schools. In my book, I pick her up when she is 27 years old, has no diploma, and is carrying $100,000 in debt. Kai lives with her sister and works as a waitress, putting every penny of her paycheck toward her massive debt. Her dreams are gone.
Young people have been dealt a terrible hand. Those like Kai who don't make it through college have little chance of making it into the middle class. And those who do make it through college are often so swamped with debt that they begin their adult lives in a deep financial hole. There is no equivalent of a $50-a-semester second chance like I had. The failure to invest in education is trickle-down economics at its ugliest.
The very first piece of legislation I introduced in the US Senate was to allow students to pay the same rate on their student loans as the big banks pay when they borrow from the government. It turns out that our government makes a profit on student loans. That is just plain wrong, and this legislation would change it. I got every Democratic senator to sign on and some Republicans, too, but not enough. In 2014, Republicans filibustered the bill, and I acknowledge the bitter truth that we'll have to bide our time before we get enough votes and a president who is willing to sign it.
Policies made by government matter enormously. The interest rate on public loans? Set by elected officials. Tuition and fees, and how much a student needed to borrow to try to graduate, were heavily influenced by the level of funding received from the state and from the federal government — funding set by elected officials. America's middle class is under assault because policies have shifted in Washington for 30-plus years to keep favoring those at the top and dumping on everyone else. And now President Trump is poised to deliver the knockout blow to our middle class.
That's whywe must fight back. Our democracy is not a machine that will run on its own. It needs everyone out there fighting for what we believe in. And here's why: If elected officials don't hear from women like you here at Lenny, then policies will be set by the people they do hear from. And, believe me, they hear plenty from corporate CEOs, Wall Street, giant corporations, and others who spend lots of money to make sure that their interests are heard. It's your world, your future, that is on the line.
The good news is, we're not alone. That was clear the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated. Millions of women (and men, and children) came to Washington — and to cities and towns across America and around the world — to raise our voices. I was at the Boston Women's March, and what I saw was something people in dozens of towns and cities saw — we've got an army that's tough, smart, and above all full of hope. And I've got news for Donald Trump: up against our army, he doesn't stand a chance.
Elizabeth Warren is the senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Her eleventh book, This Fight Is Our Fight, is available now from Metropolitan Books. | | | | | | | | | | | | Coming Back From the Dead | | | | By Trixie Garcia | | |
My favorite thing to do as a kid killing time at a Grateful Dead concert was watching the fans from backstage. Their bodies pressed up against the railing, faces looking at the band, eyes entranced, some crying, some laughing … My young mind was equally entranced! I used to think to myself: How has this person lost control of themselves, stuck there staring at the stage or flailing about in the aisles?
The culture at Grateful Dead shows was different for the band than the fans; there was an "us and them" mentality between backstage and concertgoers. I mean, I had a pass, and they still wanted miracles. Not surprisingly, I ended up with a weariness of Deadheads, because I'd always been one of "Jerry's kid's." Sometimes a fan would get me alone and say trippy shit about the deep cosmic source of Grateful Dead music or what specific horseman of the apocalypse was coming.
I felt honored to be told all this really exclusive information, only available to people on LSD, apparently. It was probably very good for me to be given so many deep soul hugs by the velvet-clad earth mothers, too. Alas, it was still all about the band at the end of the day, and I wanted to find my own meaning.
In high school, Grateful Dead music was probably the least cool thing you could be into, as far as I was concerned. I remember giving Jerry a hard time for the clothes he was wearing. This was when rock stars were supposed to be glamorous … think David Lee Roth. I was so disappointed that my dad wasn't the cool kind of dancing, spandex-clad rock star and instead wore corduroy pants with orthopedic shoes. I wouldn't even call him a rock star at that time, maybe "cult leader in absentia." He must have thought my whining was hilarious, but I was dead serious.
Becoming a teenager and trying to rebel against my parents didn't just mean wearing matching socks; it also meant rebelling against nearly an entire genre of music. This I regret because I naturally love music and missed out on really appreciating my father's music while he was alive.
Instead, I got really into hip-hop music, which was and still is my antidote for that Grateful Dead residue. I certainly dug stuff like Peter Tosh, Led Zeppelin, and the Beach Boys. But I'd always stop just shy of getting into anything that was too similar to my dad's work.
Mind you, it wasn't that I hated the Dead. I just felt like if I listened to Grateful Dead like fans did, then there was the possibility that I would end up a Deadhead and become lost to the scene, absorbed and declared an untouchable by the band. I am half-joking here, but the roadies would've really given me shit!
When my dad died in 1995, everything changed. I was 20 and in art school, happily focused on my own pursuits, while my dad was playing arenas all over the country (except in Texas. Fuck Texas). Amid all the grief, we were inundated with lawsuits and drama.
Grateful Dead music went from being too close to home to being too emotionally charged. Suddenly I was listening to my father's voice from beyond the grave, and it was all just too much, unlistenable. I'm not the only one who was too grief-stricken and angry to want to hear the music or watch videos of my dad after his passing. The grieving of the community went on way too long. Things were deteriorating because everyone was so distraught and weirded out about the abrupt end of the scene.
Fast-forward to 2012, when my awesome and talented sister Annabelle decided she didn't care for the administrative work of running our family LLC that manages the rights, so she asked me to do it. Here was the Grateful Dead again, being a drag!
So in order to be more prepared for my new role, I decided to go check out the state of the scene. I found new energy in conversations with Deadheads. They reminded me how many people care about my father's legacy and what a special thing it is for them. They also let me know they were disappointed with the state of things and felt like no one cared, and I was beginning to agree. I asked them questions about what they wanted, what was missing, and how I could help. The most obvious symptom of neglect was my dad's website, which was a static page with a sad Jerry photo and some broken links. The album artwork was unimpressive, too, and the previous management had resisted getting music on iTunes, misguidedly fearful of people cherry-picking songs instead of buying whole albums.
In the five years since this renewed inspiration took hold, not only did the most amazing website get created at jerrygarcia.com, filled with all the stats and data that super-geeked-out fans crave, but we have also been slowly opening the floodgates, releasing recordings of Jerry Garcia Band shows and other unreleased music from Jerry's side projects in the vault.
We are also releasing rare interviews with Jerry and beginning to share his prolific body of artwork with the public. Just in the past year, I have helped put over 30 albums from my dad's back catalog online, where it's downloadable. The fans are excited to be able to hear these recordings and thank me wholeheartedly. I am pleased that by helping to make the music more accessible, more people will discover something to love.
I try to listen to all the new releases and just enjoy the music, but it's not always easy with so much history behind it all. I have learned what catharsis is all about; the pain of sitting through these songs is helping me get over it. I did some purposeful desensitization. I took this thing that had been a burden most of my life and embraced it. The healing power of music is an accepted fact in the Grateful Dead scene, and I am experiencing it now. I can give back to my dad and this scene by guarding their history, like a librarian or nun.
As an adult, I view Deadheads so differently than I did as a kid. They are freedom lovers, burrito sharers, and dream followers. I envy them, and I'm proud to say I've learned some of their secrets. I would tell you, but then they wouldn't be secrets. For the rest of my life, I'll look forward to hearing about new people discovering the Grateful Dead and how it will inevitably change their lives, too.
Trixie Garcia is the president of the Jerry Garcia Family LLC and a board member for Grateful Dead Productions and the Rex Foundation. She is currently living in Northern California and spending her free time gardening and trying to enjoy the moment. | | | | | | | | | | | | "I'm Not One of Those Puffy Art Stars" | | | | By Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite | | |
| (Toyin Ojih Odutola, Misunderstanding with the Mistress, 2016. ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York) |
Against stark black or white backgrounds, New York–based visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola's portraits look like a landscape scene mapped onto skin; the body becomes its own kind of canvas for the viewer to explore. Since receiving her MFA in 2012, Ojih Odutola has critiqued the notion of a universal black experience in portraiture. In her own work, she depicts blackness as something fluid and diverse, as malleable or as static as the practice of drawing itself.
The author Claudia Rankine sees this as a marker of Ojih Odutola's genius. "Odutola's portraits explore how to desegregate blackness from a fixed racial position and open it out to all the mythology, missteps, racism, beauty, and life that is held by the term," she writes in Aperture magazine's 2016 "Vision & Justice" issue, highlighting the multilayered themes of identity and history that permeate Ojih Odutola's work. In a recent solo exhibit at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco, A Matter of Fact, she takes her portraits in a new direction, bringing color and context to a longform series about a fictional African aristocratic family. Over the past few years, Toyin Ojih Odutola's work has gained attention in the art world and beyond: her piece Hold it in Your Mouth a Little Longer appeared on Fox's hit show Empire; she has a new book, The Treatment, coming out this year, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently acquired her portrait The Raven (2016).
| (Toyin Ojih Odutola, And Nothing Happened, 2014. ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York) |
Her portraits appear to be stripped-down and minimalist, but it's in the details of each work where Ojih Odutola's love of her materials — charcoal, pastel, and ballpoint pen — shine through. The intricate details of Ojih Odutola's pieces are breathtaking up close and in person, but she is generous with her digital audience as well — she writes long Instagram posts about her inspirations and her motivations, and she posts behind-the-scenes documentation of her artistic process and the research she does to build out new ideas.
I called Toyin Ojih Odutola on a snowy night while she worked in her Manhattan studio to talk about her process, developing her love of color, and her go-to work soundtrack.
Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite: How do you start planning a new piece or a series? Do you start with the materials or the concept?
Toyin Ojih Odutola: The real subject of my work is the line, the color, the composition. Portraiture is the genre I use as a platform. I have a very particular style, and I've always been interested in how to further that style, how to manipulate it, and how to morph it in a way to create a visual language out of it.
There's a lot of research involved when it comes to [creating] a longform series. I study a lot of different artists, usually from the past, and I do a lot of notes and outlines. And then I kind of throw that to the side, strangely enough. I need that scaffolding before I start. Then I go for it. When I first start, I have no idea what's going to happen. But then I see something formulating. I see a pattern. It just kind of builds from there, and suddenly the show is there, and I can finally go back to my notes with all this new information coming from the making, and then I can write what the show is about.
MA-S: What does it look like when you get energized and walk into the studio to start working?
TOO: I have two studios, one on the tenth floor of this building, [and] I have one on the sixth floor. On the sixth floor is all the charcoal, pastel … the messy stuff. And then the affair on the tenth floor's much more monochromatic work, so a lot of the white charcoal on black board. If I'm working on a series, I'm in one studio for two months at a time. Today I'm on the sixth floor. I'll tell you what, I splash some Solange and I'm good. I got some candles lit. I'm working with color now because there's a lot of interest in the color stuff right now. But I also am interested in it as well, and I want to see where I can go with it.
MA-S: You put a lot of that color work into your recent exhibit at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco. How did you come up with the concept?
TOO: It was incredibly freeing, because up to that point, I hadn't done … not only subjects with such a colorful background, but just surroundings in general, and [I got to present] a lot of African places that I never really depicted before. So the whole experience was just me seeing how far I could push for myself; it wasn't really to prove anything to anyone, it was only to prove it to me that I could do it. It was an opportunity to finally see what was possible. I'd been pigeonholed slightly as an artist for a while and I needed to expand what I could be as an artist and not have it be about a specific kind of narrative or a specific kind of aesthetic.
| (Toyin Ojih Odutola, Afternoon Tea, 2016 ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York) |
MA-S: Did you feel like you were making work for a particular audience or within a certain set of restrictions up until that point?
TOO: I think the thing I noticed from when I first started showing professionally to when I started working on A Matter of Fact was that I didn't exactly know what I was doing. I didn't really know how to frame the work. And so for me, the reads [from other people] were always so off from what I really was investigating.
I think the investigative nature of my work came forward, and it was less about Blackness with a capital B and the monolithic definition [of blackness], and more about how dynamic that definition is. It can become anything, especially within a composition that is polychromatic and so layered. So much of my work early on was very, very pared down and very, very restricted. So to expand the definition of the work was to expand the framework that people would view the work in.
MA-S: What are you working on now? What are you looking forward to?
TOO: I've been the behind-the-scenes kind of artist, just very slowly, very conservatively building up my … I guess, for lack of a better word, "brand" in the art world. And then last year, it just kind of exploded in a way. There's a lot of hot air [in that scene], which makes me kind of side-eye, because I'm not one of those puffy art stars. I don't want to be the one that's like, "Oh, please take a photo of me for Vogue."
Speaking of Vogue, there are some things Anna Wintour has said that I love. Someone asked her, "What's your favorite issue?" And she said something like, "It's the next one. It's the issue that hasn't happened yet." And I love that; I'm the same [way]. There are pieces from my past that I hold onto, but whenever people ask me, "What's the thing that really excites you about your work?," I say it's what's coming up, what hasn't happened yet. That's what excites me. That's what gets me up in the morning to just try something different every day.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite is a writer and editor living in Toronto. She has written for Elle, Jezebel, Lucky Peach, and more. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Genetic Mutation I Might Give to My Son | | | | By Jo Piazza | | | |
I flew home to Pennsylvania in December to tell my dad I was pregnant with my first child. By then it had been more than a year since my father had been able to get out of the hospital bed that had taken up permanent residence in my parents' living room. He could no longer stand, lift his arms to feed himself, or use the bathroom on his own.
"We're having a baby." I stood next to his bed and puffed my barely-three-months-pregnant belly toward him. He couldn't speak, but his entire face smiled. His hand trembled as he moved it toward my stomach to touch it.
"He kicked," I lied and made myself smile when he made contact. It was too soon for the baby to move. But I wanted to make him happy.
Two days later my dad went to sleep. He didn't wake up. He was 62.
The genetic mutation that caused Dad's muscular dystrophy, the disease that caused other diseases that ultimately killed him, lives on an obscure region of his fourth chromosome called q35. Growing up, our family doctors told me I couldn't inherit it. They were wrong.
I was married for six months when my husband Nick and I started talking to my doctor about having our own baby. The conversation covered all the standard genetics questions and the not-standard ones. Yes, my dad has this disease. No, I'm not a carrier. Are you sure? Actually, I wasn't. I couldn't remember the exact conversation with my family doctor. I couldn't remember if I'd long ago created the narrative in my mind that I wanted to believe.
They took a lot of blood. Six weeks later, I heard back from a chirpy genetics counselor named Violet.
"Hi, Jo! I was surprised by your results," she informed me in the same tone someone will tell you the winner of The Bachelor. "You do have the genetic mutation."
I'd read once that some people swoon, actually pass out, when they hear bad news. My joints turned to butter, and I sat down on the floor to listen numbly to her directions about what to do next.
Two voices fought for supremacy in my head.
The first: You should just give up. Stop working. Fuck it! Let your roots grow out, dye your hair green, and sit with the gutter punks down on Haight-Ashbury smoking crack … because why not?
And the second: It doesn't matter what the tests say. You'll fight. You're strong. You're stronger than you know.
The first voice was so clearly mine. The second was Nick's.
"You should divorce me," I said to my husband that night, my brand-new husband who loved skiing and hiking and climbing and riding things. "Maybe the good of being married to me doesn't outweigh the bad anymore," I said to him the night after I talked to Violet. "You should find a hot and healthy new wife." I paused. "Maybe not hot, but someone sturdy!"
He looked at me like I was nuts and scratched his head. "You know, I measured it. I had these tools to measure the good and the bad of being married to you, and I set up the machine and I did all of these calculations, and you know what happened? The damn machine broke, the good outweighed the bad so freakin' much."
I married a good man.
We met with a neurologist to determine whether the muscular dystrophy had already started degrading my muscles. He couldn't find anything tangible. Yet.
"Because this kind of muscular dystrophy affects the facial muscles, people often have a hard time smiling, and so people often think they're unhappy," the doctor said. "Do people often think you are unhappy?"
"So you're saying a symptom of this kind of muscular dystrophy is resting bitch face?" I made a joke because it was true. Weren't old men on the street always telling me to smile more? I'd spent most of my adult life being told to "wipe that puss off my face." I cut to the chase. "What about our kids?"
"They have a fifty-fifty chance. You can't screen for it in an embryo, so IVF won't help. You can test a fetus, but not until about twelve weeks, and then you have the option of terminating the pregnancy." The words terminating the pregnancy hung in the air like a storm cloud ready to burst any second. I opened my mouth but couldn't say anything. I pinched my thigh above the knee, hard. My nails curled into my skin. I needed to feel something. "We should go," I finally whispered to Nick. "I just want to go home. Please."
I couldn't wrap my head around it. I believe any woman should be allowed to choose to end a pregnancy for any reason. Many years ago, as a scared seventeen-year-old with a college-acceptance letter unopened on her nightstand, I did make that choice, and it's among the best decisions I've ever made.
But it wasn't the right choice now. I couldn't imagine wanting a baby, living with it in my body for three months, and then ending its brief life because of something that might happen to it in 40 or 50 years. It felt like playing God.
The doctors told us that if the child carried the muscular-dystrophy gene, they wouldn't show symptoms until midlife.
Like me.
As a mother, you want your child to come into the world with every possible advantage. Why would you choose to start their life at a disadvantage? But how do you stack the odds in your kid's favor? We knew we could adopt or use a donor egg, both expensive things that would have to be put on a credit card we might be able to pay off never. But even donor eggs and adoption come with risks, but they come without THAT risk. All genes come with their own drama. Borrowing someone else's DNA just meant strange new possibilities. They could get cancer, or Alzheimer's, alcoholism, schizophrenia. They could be predisposed to liking speed metal or wanting to be on reality television.
Then again,under most insurance classifications my muscular dystrophy would be considered a preexisting condition. That means my personal insurance premiums could go through the roof if companies were legally allowed to discriminate based on preexisting conditions. It meant my future child could have difficulty getting coverage right from the beginning of its life. It didn't escape me that the very people putting these restrictions on health care were simultaneously restricting abortion rights to make it more difficult for a woman to choose to have an abortion if she learned that her baby had one of these preexisting conditions. I didn't get a full night's sleep for six months from all the worrying.
"What if we didn't live our lives according to what might happen in the future?" my exhausted husband said to me one night as he was drifting off to sleep. Nick is steeped in optimism and trusts that things will turn out the way they are supposed to. I'm the child of an alcoholic. This means that, with most things in life, I'm convinced everything must be micromanaged in order to be safe. I worry. He has faith. Since our doctor's appointment, I had spent months convincing myself that if I just talked to enough doctors, if I just worked harder, if I just spent enough hours on the Internet reading medical journals, then I could find the solution to this problem. But there was no easy fix. "What if you stop trying to control everything?" Nick asked me. "You know we can't control everything. Can we please just live our lives?"
We stopped taking birth control last January. It took nine months for me to get pregnant. We didn't test him at twelve weeks. So far he's healthy. He does somersaults when I play Otis Redding and eat frozen Thin Mints. We'll run genetic tests when he's born. We'll find the best doctors to take care of us both. Any future is terrifying, but this one could also be promising and filled with the possibility of medical advances that could halt the progress of my own disease and eradicate it in a child.
Everything can go wrong when you decide to have a kid. We knew one possibility. For the first time in my life, I have to have faith. The best-laid plans can quickly turn to shit. I have to wait and see. I'm petrified and excited and I feel like I've just leaped off a very tall building, but I think that's the beginning of being someone's mom.
Jo Piazza is the author of the memoir How to Be Married. | | | | | | | | | | | | Political Sustenance | | | | By Alicia Kennedy | | |
"I love you all like cooked food," said a woman on the A train. She was yelling about our depressing political climate in the mode of a preacher, trying to incite the exhausted hordes to action; it was an odd feeling, to hear someone yelling on a subway who made sense. And that choice of words: "I love you all like cooked food," like a sense of home and comfort and nourishment — a love necessary to political resistance.
Revolution and food have gone hand in hand for centuries. Suffragettes used cookbooks to push women to fight for their right to vote. When the Bloodroot Collective, an ecofeminist restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, started to put out cookbooks in 1981, the first was called The Political Palate: A Feminist Vegetarian Cookbook. In all subsequent books, they begin with essays on feminism and the economics of running a collective, and you'll find a quote from Adrienne Rich beneath instructions on making nut butter. The co-author of their Best of Bloodroot collections, Lagusta Yearwood, furthers their work as an "antipreneur anarchist" at her New Paltz, New York, chocolate shop, Lagusta's Luscious, and café, Commissary; at the latter, the counter is branded with the words "Resistance is fertile." (For a taste of fertile resistance in New York City, stop into Confectionery in the East Village.) Beyond feminism and anti-capitalism, there are also anti-colonialist cookbooks like Decolonize Your Diet by the academic Chicanxs Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel, who focus on reclaiming the foods of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Recipes such as Chicano Power Chili Beans and Cashew Crema seek to connect health, flavor, and a responsibility to the land. It's a perspective I've seen in action in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, with chef Paxx Caraballo Moll's #queersinthekitchen hashtag on Instagram and the entire motivation of El Departamento de la Comida and Efecto Sombrilla, a café and store selling and cooking with local produce.
While the ties between food and resistance may have seemed theoretical to many before, the Trump presidency has created new urgency around any and all ways we can push back. This was especially apparent to Anna Brones, writer and publisher of the Comestible quarterly zine, which focuses on essays and recipes by women and nonbinary writers that explore issues like what we cook in the worst moments of our lives, or how we can create a class-inclusive food movement. Brones, an artist and author of the books The Culinary Cyclist and Fika: The Art of the Swedish Coffee Break, used this platform to release a special post-Inauguration edition, "Protest Fuel: The Revolution Must Be Fed." The pocket-size zine doesn't just have recipes, but essays on how food works into self-care and feeding your community. Chicanx food writer Teresa Finney's arroz rojo recipe is introduced by a brief essay on the humble food's ability to connect her to her roots in California no matter where she lives. "It's just basically super-important to me to remind anyone who will listen that Mexican immigrants deserve respect and care as human beings, not just as the people who make your fucking Mission-style burritos," she says. "This is what has made food political (and very personal) to me."
Anna and I talked recently about the project's inspiration.
Alicia Kennedy: When did your own journal come about?
Anna Brones: I'd had for a while the idea to do a small food magazine. I was just fed up with a lot of food media at the time — too much food porn, too little actual substance. So I had this idea for a quarterly journal, Comestible, an indie journal that has recipes but is heavy on essays and using food as a lens for looking at everything from gender to agriculture. It's more focused on food and food production than celebrity chefs. I crowd-funded that; did all the layout and stuff myself; I have it printed locally outside Seattle; I do all the fulfillment — it's definitely a one-lady show.
AK: What inspired Protest Fuel?
AB: When the election happened — or when all of last year happened — I was, of course, very sad, like a lot of people, and in that week after the election was like: What do I do? A friend had posted a photo on Instagram about protesting, and a comment there led to the idea of "protest fuel," and I was like, I should make a collection of recipes for that. It just spurred this idea, and I have this publishing experience and platform, and what better way to use that than for a cause-driven thing? I just reached out to my community and others, saying, "I'm doing this thing; I can't pay you; I'm going to donate all the proceeds; does anybody have anything they want to contribute? It can be an essay, a recipe, art. I know you're riled up, so channel that energy into something positive." That's how it came together. For me, personally, after having launched Comestible last year, you've just gotta fucking do it. Whatever idea you have, if you're stoked on it, just do it and don't worry. You can't think too far down the line because you'll just psych yourself out. You just have to throw yourself in.
AK: Why did you decide to donate the proceeds to the World Women's Environment and Development Organization?
AB: I knew I wanted to donate all the proceeds, and quite honestly, I think — this is gonna sound bad — but I don't think where I donated the money was necessarily the point. It was really important to me to donate to an organization that stood for the things that I feel very strongly about, but I think that the point was more to say: "Here is something that a lot of people contributed to all out of the good of their hearts, with the intention of wanting to create a better world. We are putting this into the world, and we are not taking a cut on this; we're giving the money away." There are so many amazing organizations out there, so it was really difficult to choose. Originally, I wanted to give money to the ACLU, but a friend of mine said, "Maybe find something else that's not getting as much attention or really speaks to you." The World Women's Environment and Development Organization, which was started back in the '70s by badass women that were part of the feminist movement — including [the scholar and activist] Vandana Shiva, who I have a lot of respect for. They work on more of an international policy level as opposed to grassroots, but they do work with grassroots organizations. For me, gender and environment go hand in hand, just like gender and every other topic go hand in hand, but that just kind of felt like a good place to give the money. Like I said, where the money went necessarily wasn't the main point. You're not going to raise tens of thousands of dollars from an indie zine. It's more that I really wanted people who were taking part to feel empowered to maybe even go on and do something else after doing this, and I wanted people to read it and take away, This is mostly focused on food, but it's meant to inspire action.
Arroz Rojo by Teresa Finney
Serves 4 to 6
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 small yellow onion (about ⅓ cup), diced
2 ½ cups white rice
1 (8-ounce) can tomato purée
16 ounces water or chicken broth
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon Mexican oregano
Salt and black pepper, to taste
1. Heat two tablespoons of vegetable oil in a medium-sized skillet over medium-high flame.
2. Add the diced onion and cook until tender and translucent.
3. Add the rice to the skillet, and stir until lightly brown and toasted. Next, add the can of tomato purée. Fill the empty tomato-purée can twice with water, chicken broth, or one of each. The rice should be covered with the liquid.
4. Add in salt, pepper, cumin, and oregano. Stir continuously until the liquid boils, then continue to let boil for 2 to 3 minutes to allow the rice to soften.
5. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and let the rice continue cooking for 10 to 15 minutes. You'll know when the rice is done when the liquid has evaporated. If there are any leftovers the next morning, add a fried egg on top and douse with hot sauce.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Alicia Kennedy is a writer from Long Island who focuses on food, politics, and rum. Her website is la-pirata.com. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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