| | | An ode to lady cannibal movies, an interview with Michelle Tea, and more. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | February 28, 2017 | Letter No. 75 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hi sweet Lennys,
This week, our editor, Jess, our CEO, Ben, and I went all over town hawking our Lenny wares. And by that I mean talking about all of you. We talked about your likes and dislikes, your keen insights, your political engagement, your favorite makeup tips. We told them how well-rounded you are, how rigorously vocal and honest. And, not for nothing, that you're all so damn smart. We felt lucky to be able to brag.
It was a highlight, in yet another week of so many lows. Trans teenagers had the right to use their preferred bathroom revoked. And as many memes said, it wasn't really about the bathrooms, just as it wasn't really about the water fountains back in the 1950s. Which is why we must continue to fight and take action every day we possibly can, Lennys. There's a historical precedent for all of this, and it's strong people like you who fought then too. And that's what we said about you when we bragged: that we knew you would, knew you could, knew you never back down from what's right.
Today's issue has a story from the cultural documentarian Candacy Taylor on the Green Book, a guide that kept black travelers safe from 1936 to 1967. It's an important piece of history that feels relevant, in the worst way, today. We have two wildly diverging stories on food and appetites. One is a look at female cannibalism in film by Francey Russell. Francey unpacks the unruly appetites of women who eat people, and while we don't condone eating your enemies, we love a lady with an uncontrollable hunger for life. The other piece includes some belly-warming simple recipes for the most delicious hearty Italian fare, inspired by the memory of Colu Henry's strong immigrant grandma.
Lennys, we knew you could handle both in the same newsletter, because that's who we know you to be: flexible and open thinkers.
We have an interview with Cathy O'Neil, the author of Weapons of Math Destruction. Cathy talks to us about big data, and because she uses Roger Ailes at Fox as a model to explain systemic sexism, even a math moron (and systemic sexism UNenthusiast) like myself could understand it.
Finally, on a lighter note, Kira Garcia interviews her old roommate, writer Michelle Tea, who not only defines queerness for a generation of women but also seems to have psychic powers. So that's pretty sweet.
We are all over the map this week, and why not? You are a diverse and multifaceted group of beautiful weirdos, and we love you for it.
Thank you for always being here. And for always being you.
Love,
Jenni | | | | | | | | | | | | Unspeakable Appetites | | | | By Francey Russell | | |
Nothing is more basic than the need for food, and yet for us humans, this need is never basic. Food straddles the uncertain border between the animal and the social, and what we eat, how, and how much is saturated with significance. Who we are and where we stand with others — both other humans and other animals — is expressed through appetite and consumption. Indeed, a fundamental change in how we ate occasioned a fundamental change in the kind of animals we are: the prehumans' decision to start cooking their food is what made it possible for our brains to develop as they did.
For contemporary humans, disordered eating is so ubiquitous — about 75 percent of American women ages 25 to 45 report an unhealthy relationship with food or their own bodies — that the idea of an untroubled human appetite is almost inconceivable. The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott once observed that "disturbances of appetite are common in psychiatric illnesses, but the full importance of eating is not recognized."
It is strange to be a creature with needs at once so simple and so incomprehensible.
This March, French filmmaker Julia Ducournau's controversial new movie Raw will hit theaters in the United States. There are rumors that audiences walked out at festival screenings. Others passed out and required medical assistance. Affectionately described as a "cannibal coming of age movie," Raw tells the story of studious, cautious sixteen-year-old Justine (Garance Marillier) in her first weeks of veterinary school, where she navigates new social expectations, new academic demands, and an unrelenting new appetite.
The school turns out to be an isolated, brutal society, with grueling hazing rituals, forced binge drinking, daily cruelties inflicted by her older sister, and unrestricted access to animal cadavers. Justine cannot quite make herself belong. At the first hazing, she consumes a raw liver and promptly develops a bright, scaly rash that she itches urgently and privately under the covers in her bed. Against her classmates, Justine makes a case for vegetarianism by arguing that animals and humans suffer pain in the same way. But by aligning herself with the animals, she only alienates her human peers. In a "seven minutes in heaven"–type scenario, shy Justine winces at her partner's embrace, and then bites his lip off.
Raw is just the newest film to join a small subgenre of serious movies about cannibalism. While the vast majority of cannibal movies—and there are hundreds—are nauseatingly graphic, cheaply made exploitation films, this extreme premise has been put to subtler use in films that hardly count as horror. These movies tend to be slow and thoughtful, aesthetically arresting, punctuated by only rare eruptions of gore and violence. The cannibals of these films are self-aware, curious individuals, with familiarly disordered relationships with what they want to eat, unable to embrace their appetite and yet unable, or unwilling, to ignore it. And strikingly, these young, searching cannibals also tend to be young, searching women.
Watching these films all together, it is striking how much they resist easy thematic summary. No two cannibals are alike. Some of these films involve women learning what they want and learning to embrace it; some involve women unraveling under the weight of envy and the need to have something they cannot; some allegorize the logical trajectory of capitalism and consumerism, while others explore the conditions of female desire under patriarchy. Perhaps one common thread is the idea, or fantasy, that human needs can feel frighteningly unmanageable, as though they might be so strange or so excessive as to have no place in the human world. These cannibals tend either to be internally conflicted—ridden with shame or guilt or nausea—or to stand in conflict with the rest of the world—isolated, on the run, or simply silent.
But if Winnicott is right that the role of eating in human life remains, at bottom, a mystery, and if therefore every person, family, and culture must manage their humanity by managing what, how, and who they eat, then we should expect movies about cannibals to reflect exactly that much variety. It seems clear that our stories of love and sex and death should display more diversity than unity, if they are to reflect the diversity of human experience. Why shouldn't the stories of our appetites be the same?
Last year Nicolas Winding Refn released The Neon Demon about a young new model, Jesse (Elle Fanning), navigating a glossy Los Angeles of feral jealousies and warped desires. Homely makeup artist Ruby (Jena Malone) wants to have her, while two blonde gazelles with gaping eyes and jutting bones, Sarah (Abbey Lee) and Gigi (Bella Heathcote), want to have what she has, whatever she's got that's making the fashion industry lose its collective mind for her. When Jesse refuses to yield to their desires [spoiler alert!] they kill and eat her.
In We Are What We Are (2013), Rose (Julia Garner) and Iris (Ambyr Childers) play the teenage daughters in an isolated family of cannibals, a family following an ancient tradition that involves the women taking care of the slaughtering and cooking at the behest of the men. The girls' father puts them to the task when their mother dies of Kuru disease (a neurodegenerative disorder resembling Parkinson's that comes from eating too many human body parts). Rose and Iris whisper their misgivings in secret They wonder not whether what they do is right, but whether it's what they really want. Yet when escape is finally possible, the girls do not just leave, and they do not just kill their father: they devour him, still alive, straight off his bones. It turns out, then, that the girls did not want to give up their appetites altogether, they just wanted out from under their father's rules, from his idea of what their appetites should be.
The best of the recent female cannibal films is Claire Denis's uncategorizable Trouble Every Day (2002). The film involves two storylines that cross over only intermittently: one involves Dr. Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and his strained, hollow relationship with his new bride; the other involves Coré (Béatrice Dalle) and her unmanageable compulsion to consume human flesh. The film is moody and patient, heavy with a Tindersticks soundtrack and modern malaise, an atmosphere twice disrupted by acts of extreme, stomach-churning carnage.
The most arresting, moving, and unwatchable scene involves Coré and her lover/victim: what begins as a sweet and affectionate tryst and then becomes playfully combative finally transitions seamlessly into an act of murder at once brutal and loving, childish and psychopathic. Coré rips flesh and then kisses the wound with motherly sweetness; she embraces her victim and then bats at him like a cat with a still-living mouse, as though she were trying to wake him back up to play with her, as though she were angry with him for not giving up what she was looking for, as though the simple fact of his remaining separate were tearing her apart. Dalle's wordless performance in this scene is breathtaking, for she makes these transitions between love and pleasure and fury and torture not just true to the character but familiar to us. Immanuel Kant defined the sexual impulse as "an appetite for another human being." This seems to be exactly what Coré knew and enacted, but ultimately couldn't live with.
It is bizarre and monstrous to be suddenly gripped by an appetite for flesh. To this extent these characters can seem either super- or sub-human, something other than us. But it is familiar and very human to feel overwhelmed by need and unable to manage it. When Coré implodes under the pressure of her needs — to feel, to feel connected — or when Justine responds to her new desire by drinking, and hiding, and crying at wanting so much, this is a kind of excess that we know. Having a real need can be a heavy burden. How strange to be a creature that feels its own needs as so fraught. How liberating it would be to be able to embrace them. This is why, when Justine first yields to her appetite, and the music swells and the camera zooms in, the scene is not only horrifying and unspeakably disgusting: it is also celebratory. If you can bring yourself to watch, you see a young woman finally recognizing the importance of eating, and of holding true to her desires.
And yet, even when yielding to cannibalism is presented as emancipatory, as in Raw or We Are What We Are, there is a cost, and that cost is real human relationships: Justine ends up hurting the one person she might really love, Rose and Iris have to leave everything they know, Sarah hardens and Gigi self-destructs, Coré self-immolates. In another French film that pushes the premise to its logical conclusion — In My Skin (2002) — the possibility of relationships is lost entirely, and cannibalism becomes self-cannibalism.
Despite these films' thematic differences, something common to them is that the worlds in which the characters exist are pictured as worlds to be rejected, whether the world is patriarchy or the nuclear family or consumer society or late-stage global capitalism. The films suggest, simply, that these worlds are not meeting our real needs, that these are not worlds for human bonding. And by placing women front and center, these films indicate that women bear the burden of these broken worlds in a particularly fraught way: at the level of desire, of knowing what they might need or what would really satisfy.
Francey Russell writes about art and film and is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Chicago. | | | | | | | | | | | | Rent Girl Grows Up | | | | By Kira Garcia | | |
I have had 38 roommates over the course of my life, including a girl who built a papier-mâché cave in her room to nap in and a 60-year-old community-college professor whose only house rule was that I couldn't use his shampoo. But Michelle Tea was the most memorable by far. We lived together in the very early aughts in a San Francisco flat that was, to put it generously, gross. We'd first met on a street corner when Michelle saw me and had a "psychic feeling" that I would be the roadie for Sister Spit, her all-female spoken-word collective. She was right. I spent the summer of 1999 traveling across the country with a band of mismatched female-bodied queer poets — what better luck could befall a women's-college sophomore?
Michelle is a writer in the deepest, juiciest sense of the word. Her books, including her memoirs The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America and Valencia, have helped define queerness for a generation of women. She's also rendered unsparing portraits of San Francisco in the 1990s. I was charmed, if not exactly flattered, when I realized I'd worked my way into her book Rent Girl as an uptight character named Marcia (of all the pseudonyms, "Marcia"? Really, Michelle??)
Her latest book, Black Wave, is an apocalyptic novel/memoir as bold and beautiful as anything she's written. In it, Michelle weaves strands of her own life story into a tragic narrative about a dying planet. I sat down with Michelle in her Los Angeles home to chat about the queer bubble we once resided in together, and how this book both departs from and expands on her earlier work.
Kira Garcia: First, I have to thank you because you completely changed the course of my life. Do you remember how we met?
Michelle Tea: I do! It was the only time I've had a psychic flash of info that was meaningful in any way.
KG: I was supposed to do this internship at the San Francisco Bay Guardian that was kind of a big deal and I dumped it. I was like, "Sorry, just kidding, I'm going to be a roadie because a lady on a street corner said she had a psychic feeling and I said OK." I've never had a moment's regret. Also it was big for my queer identity because previously I had thought, Oh, I'm a lesbian, that means I have to wear cargo shorts.
MT: I feel like San Francisco did that for a lot of people. It was astounding to me when I first saw actual punk-rock lesbians.
KG: And then we were roommates! I remember you sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, wearing your vintage slip, and writing in a notebook after partying all night, and I was like, "How is this possible?" I couldn't summon the strength to write anything, and you were SO prolific. AND I'm in one of your books!
MT: Which one are you in?!
KG: I'm in Rent Girl! If it's not me, I'm having an identity crisis. I'm pretty sure I'm Marcia.
MT: Who's Marcia?!
KG: I cleaned the house.
MT: Oh yeah, it's you. If she cleaned the house, it's you. Because that's how I remember you — as a force against the willful protected entropy of the house. That place was like a halfway house, and you were like Cinderella.
KG: Yes! OK, fast-forwarding to the present day and your new book, Black Wave: I want to be careful to distinguish between your personal history and the history of this book. To what degree would you call Black Wave a memoir?
MT: I would call it a memoir and I would call it fiction. I had no concern for the truth, but I was always going for emotional truth. So I made different things happen to me, but I wanted to talk about the same emotional situations.
KG: It feels like you weren't always empathetic with the Michelle in Black Wave. There were moments when I was like, "Does Michelle Tea like this Michelle?"
MT: I always feel like that. It's important to show yourself as flawed in memoir, and [using] third person made it so easy to be bald and humorous about what a jackass I often thought I was.
KG: And how did your use of the third person come about in Black Wave?
MT: I was sick of the "I," and I'd been working on a proper novel that was kind of fantastical, and in the midst, because of a breakup, I became really obsessed with writing my experience again. I ended up merging them but kept a lot of the tropes of fiction.
KG: There's a moment in the book where your character is talking to the character Quinn, her lover, and you break the fourth wall to say, "Oh, it wasn't you, it was somebody else who I moved to LA with, and they asked to be written out." Why make that process transparent?
MT: The person who was [originally] in it was like, "I don't want to be in your book," and I was like, "Fuck, I don't want you to be in the book either!" I have more sympathy for people's vulnerability than I used to. So I had to go into the text and rip the roof off of it to keep barreling through the narrative. And even though I knew it was the right thing to do, I still had this kind of rage-y energy inside me. So I took this crazy whack to the book.
KG: Which is much healthier than taking it out on the person who's mad at you.
MT: Totally. And it already had some fantastical elements. I'd sort of merged an apocalyptic story I was basing on the Ziggy Stardust album into this. The first song [on that album] is called "Five Years"; it's about how the planet has five years left. [Black Wave] was supposed to be about a girl who wanted to be a pop star before the world ended. Then I went through this huge breakup with somebody who had been interested in being a pop star and realized I didn't really care about her story in that way. I also became obsessed with impermanence. The backstory in my mind was that all the world governments had acknowledged that we're past the point of no return, so they decided to blow the world up so no one would be forced to have these hideous end times. It was kind of like a global suicide pact.
KG: And you're seeing everything through the narrator, Michelle, and she doesn't exactly have her shit together enough to find out what's going on with geopolitics. She's looking out her window and seeing people crash their cars on purpose.
MT: Yeah, that seemed like an easy way to kill the world.
KG: Well, easy and uncomfortably realistic! I also loved that passage about being over being poor. There's this old cliché about poverty being good for creativity. I'm wondering how you feel about that now?
MT: Having grown up poor and having come into adulthood really poor, there was this romanticized notion of poverty, which was great for me. I could see that I could be a writer or an artist. And in your 20s, everything's romantic, and I was drunk all the time, which made everything easier to romanticize. Once I got sober, it was just me and the bare reality of: "I don't have any money and I don't know how to get money. I don't want to live like this forever." It was a reckoning, and I didn't know what my next steps would be.
KG: I'm having this midlife moment — not that I'm planning on dying when I'm 80 — of tenderness toward myself in my 20s and 30s. Do you feel that too?
MT: I feel like I got to write really honestly about her. I was able to acknowledge and appreciate all of her weird bravado and problems and insanity and then also see the bigger picture. So the holistic-ness of it made me feel very tender about it, whereas when I wrote Valencia [Tea's Lambda Literary Award winning autobiographical novel from 2000], I was invested in presenting myself as a certain kind of person. I was angry and I wanted to impose myself on the literary world. This book, I thought, was stripped of that.
KG: There's something very profound about being so naked with your presentation of self. It's really beautiful. Oh, and one last thing! How do you feel about '90s nostalgia? It's fucking blowing my mind. Now I know how my mom felt when I wore thrifted bell-bottoms as a teenager and she was like, "Those are disgusting."
MT: [Laughs.] I have a few ideas about it. There's this fashion-world maxim that if you wore it the first time around, you can't wear it the second time, and I do kind of feel like that. Also a lot of the '90s clothing looks so ugly to me. Like those chokers!
KG: I hate those.
MT: It's like a garrote or something. But there's a nostalgia among queers for the '90s, and I'm really glad that era is being recognized as culturally important. I think things changed and got more materialistic on the heels of our scene. Some [younger] queers who have an activist heart say, "I missed the '90s." And I look back at, like, the Lower East Side and say, "Oh, I missed the '70s or the '80s." So it's nice to say, "Oh, I was part of this other scene," but I didn't know it at the time. I really saw that when people were shooting the Valencia film. They were recreating the '90s so lovingly. It was really cool to see that this era wasn't just important to me because of my youth.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Kira Garcia is a writer living in Brooklyn. She is old enough to remember when Ellen Degeneres was presumed to be straight. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Untold Story of Black Travel in America | | | | By Candacy Taylor | | |
"We should be doing no service to the Negroes if we did not point out that to a very large section of the white population the presence of a Negro, however well behaved, among white bathers is an irritation … Under the circumstances it would seem that the Negroes could make a definite contribution to good race relationship by remaining away from beaches where their presence is resented."
—The Chicago Tribune, Aug. 29, 1925
Eleven years after this was printed in the Chicago Tribune, Victor H. Green, a black postal worker from Harlem, published the Negro Motorist Green Book to help his race travel with dignity. The Green Book listed everything from hotels to restaurants to haberdashers that were willing to serve blacks. Mark Twain's quote "Travel is fatal to prejudice" graced the cover and advertisements inside boasted: "Just What You Have Been Looking For!! NOW WE CAN TRAVEL WITHOUT EMBARRASSMENT."
The Green Book did more than save black travelers from embarrassment; it was a resourceful solution to a horrific problem, and it saved lives. It was published from 1936 to 1967 — a time when automobile travel symbolized freedom in America. It was widely used during the Great Migration, but blacks who traveled north to escape legalized segregation quickly learned that Jim Crow had no borders and segregation was in full force throughout the country. Blacks couldn't eat, sleep, or get gas in many white-owned businesses. Even Coca-Cola had "White Customers Only" printed on their machines. Moreover, blacks had to carefully navigate a country with thousands of "sundown towns," which were all-white communities that banned blacks within city limits after dark. Some towns rang a bell at 6 p.m., alerting blacks that they had to leave, while others posted signs at the county line that read, "Nigger, Don't Let the Sun Set on You Here, Understand?"
Considering the terror blacks encountered on the road, the Green Book provided protection in an unsafe world during a shameful chapter in American history. People called the Green Book the "Bible of Black Travel" and a AAA guide for blacks, but it was so much more. It was a powerful tool that helped blacks persevere and literally move forward in the face of racism.
| (Courtesy of Candacy Taylor) |
Victor Green modeled his guide after Jewish travel guides created for the Borscht Belt in the 1930s, but the Green Book covered the entire United States, and later editions stretched to Canada, Bermuda and the Congo. Other black travelers' guides existed — Hackley and Harrison's Hotel and Apartment Guide for Colored Travelers (1930 to 1931), Travel Guide (1947 to 1963), and Grayson's Guide: The Go Guide to Pleasant Motoring (1953 to 1959) — but the Green Book was published for the longest period of time and had the widest readership. It was distributed by word of mouth, black-owned businesses, mail order, and through a national network of postal workers, led by Green, who sought advertisers on their postal routes. Esso (Standard Oil, which operates as Exxon today) sold the Green Book in its gas stations and assigned two of the company's black marketing executives to promote and distribute the guide. By 1962, the Green Book had a circulation of 2 million readers.
The vast American landscape had long, lonely stretches of perilously empty roads, and Green Book properties were vital sources of refuge. Today, they play a critical role in revealing the untold story of black travel in America. They are physical evidence of racial discrimination, providing a rich opportunity to reexamine America's story of segregation, black migration, and the rise of the black leisure class, but in light of gentrification and suburban sprawl, most Green Book properties have been razed and many are slated for demolition. That is why the National Park Service's Route 66 Preservation Program approached me in 2014 to document Green Book sites on Route 66 and to produce a short video. I've estimated that nearly 75 percent of Green Book sites have been demolished or radically modified, so it is crucial to preserve the sites that are left, nationwide.
One Green Book business that is still alive and well is Clifton's, a fabulous Depression-era cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles. Clifton's closed for a few years starting in 2011 to undergo a $10 million renovation before reopening last year. It is now possibly the largest and most unusual cafeteria in the world — with five floors of history and taxidermy and a giant fake redwood tree rising up through the center. In the evenings, classic drinks like absinthe are served at a bar that has a 250-pound meteorite sitting on it.
The original owner, Clifford Clinton — a white man, a Christian, and the son of missionaries — had traveled with his parents to China, where he witnessed that country's brutal and abject poverty firsthand. He couldn't understand how America, a country with so much wealth, could allow its citizens to go hungry. So he never turned away anyone — even those who couldn't afford to pay. Clinton followed what he called the "Cafeteria Golden Rule." His menu read "Pay What You Wish" and "Dine Free Unless Delighted."
One of the Green Book's most unusual sites was Murray's Dude Ranch. This lost gem was billed as "The Only Negro Dude Ranch in the World" — which it very likely was. The 40-acre ranch sat on the edge of the Mojave Desert, with Joshua, yucca, and mesquite trees dotting the landscape. A black couple, Nolie and Lela Murray, owned the property and offered black travelers on Route 66 much-needed lodging and some good old-fashioned Western recreation. Black and white celebrities visited, from Lena Horne and Joe Louis to Hedda Hopper and Clara Bow. Pearl Bailey ultimately bought the property in 1955 but sold it in the mid-1960s. Sadly, today there's no physical evidence that Murray's ever existed.
| (Courtesy of Candacy Taylor) |
Jack's Basket Room, also called Jack's Chicken Basket and Bird in the Basket, was an after-hours jazz club and restaurant in the heart of South Central Los Angeles. Jack's was open from 1939 to 1951 and was known as "the place where everyone comes to play." Cab Calloway's lyric "A chicken ain't nothin' but a bird" was painted outside. Inside, chicken, steaks, ham, bacon, and barbecue were dished out until 2 a.m. and the music lasted until dawn.
This legendary nightclub hosted the nation's top entertainers. It served the black bourgeoisie and was owned by Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion. Being at Jack's was an all night affair. Disc jockeys spun vinyl in the radio booth until 3 a.m. Other nights hosted Joe Lutcher's band and female impersonators entertained crowds with two floor shows between 12:30 a.m. and 3:15 a.m. People even stayed for the breakfast dance at 6 a.m.
After being repeatedly being denied rooms in white hotels, a prominent black dentist, Dr. John Alexander Somerville, built the Dunbar (named the Somerville at the time) in 1928. It's reportedly the first American hotel built expressly for black people, and for years it was one of the only major hotels in Los Angeles that served blacks. People called it the Waldorf-Astoria of black America.
It wasn't long before the Dunbar became the social and cultural hub for the black intelligentsia. During its illustrious reign, the brick and brownstone landmark served legendary talents such as Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Cab Calloway, Red Foxx, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington. Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald played next door at Club Alabam (also a Green Book business).
The Dunbar was listed in the Green Book for fourteen years along with the adjoining beauty parlor and liquor store. It fell into decline during the civil-rights movement, forced integration, and the Watts riots. In 1974, the building was shuttered because it didn't meet minimal fire codes, and by 1987, the Dunbar deteriorated into a graffiti-scarred ruin. The Community Development Department and Community Redevelopment Agency spent $2.9 million renovating the hotel in 1987, and today, the Dunbar is listed on the National Historic Register and operates as housing for low-income seniors.
The Green Book ceased publication a few years after the Civil Rights Act was passed. But the Civil Rights Act did not fix racism. Discrimination and institutional racism, enacted by the government, continued. The Federal Housing Association redlined neighborhoods and denied loans to blacks, preventing them from accessing wealth-building opportunities freely given to whites. Black veterans were blocked from the GI Bill, missing out on valuable educational resources. And since the 1970s, the black male prison population has skyrocketed by 700 percent. Justice Department data now predicts that one in three black male babies born in America will be incarcerated in his lifetime. The struggle is also apparent today with black travel companies, such as Noirbnb, that are developed in response to widespread discrimination experienced by black Airbnb customers. Clearly, America, we still have a problem.
Despite our attempt to ignore these staggering statistics, we are still seduced by the promise of freedom, equality, and the American Dream. Given this mass denial, it's not surprising that the country is weighted down, blanketed with nostalgia, and suffocating from an idealized America that never was. It's time to honor the past, not romanticize it. As Leonard Cohen says, "Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack in everything, that's what lets the light in."
Candacy Taylor is an award-winning author, photographer and cultural documentarian. Taylor's Green Book project has been commissioned and funded by the National Park Service, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation, the California Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the Schomburg Center for Black Culture. | | | | | | | | | | | | Big Data, Big Problems | | | | By Sarah LaBrie | | | |
Mathematician Cathy O'Neil holds a Ph.D. in number theory from Harvard, and she taught at Barnard for years before leaving to work in finance. She took a job at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in June 2007 but left the field soon after, embarrassed by the role bankers had played in the housing collapse. In 2011, she rebranded herself as a data scientist and went looking for a place where she could do math and feel good about it.
Before long, O'Neil landed a spot at an e-commerce startup, developing models to anticipate the behavior of visitors to travel websites. There, she was struck by the parallels she found between data science and the financial system that had just decimated the U.S. economy. "A false sense of security was leading to widespread use of imperfect models, self-serving definitions of success, and growing feedback loops," she writes in her new book, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.
Weapons of Math Destruction was nominated for a 2016 National Book Award. Lately, I've been recommending it to everyone I know, as both a key to understanding the present and a tool to ward off an increasingly dystopian-seeming future.
Sarah LaBrie: What is big data?
Cathy O'Neil: Big data means different things to different people. For the sake of the book, I meant it as the marketing campaign around the newfangled uses for data. It's a promise, and it's a hope. The promise is that once you have big-data algorithms, they are inherently fair and objective, and they are better than human beings at being fair. That's something that isn't always explicitly stated.
Then there's the hope, which is also often not stated, that we don't need the actual data around the thing we're trying to predict, that it's good enough to use proxies for that thing.
SL: What is a weapon of math destruction?
CO: A weapon of math destruction is an algorithm that is important but secret at the same time, and also destroys people's lives. It's being used for important decisions, and it's being used unfairly so that people's lives get ruined, or at least they get injured.
An example that really got my attention early on was the teacher value-added model. You had teachers whose jobs were on the line through secret teacher assessments that no one could explain to them and that were statistically flawed, so the scores were inconsistent. I found a teacher who scored a six out of 100 one year, and a 96 out of 100 the next year, without changing his methodology of teaching. When teachers tried to appeal their scores, they were told the scores were too mathematically complicated for them to understand. They were told, "You're not expert enough to question this."
SL: You write about how poisonous assumptions can be camouflaged by big data algorithms. Can you talk more about that?
CO: Data is a digital echo of culture. If we consistently arrest blacks for smoking pot at four times the rate we arrest whites for smoking pot, even though whites and blacks smoke pot at the same rate, the data reflects that bias. We have many more arrest records for blacks under the crime of smoking pot than for whites. What we don't acknowledge is that we haven't successfully measured crime.
When we use these arrest records as if they're a good proxy for the actual thing we're trying to measure, then we end up developing tools like predictive policing, which looks for locations of arrests and sends police back to those same places looking for more crime. Considering our history of overpolicing poor black neighborhoods, it's really a pseudoscientific justification for continuing uneven policing practices.
Another example I like to give is Roger Ailes. Ailes was kicked out of Fox News after two decades of systemic discrimination against women anchors. If Fox News wanted to improve its reputation for fairness by implementing a machine-learning algorithm to hire anchorwomen and anchormen, then it would undoubtedly train on that data.
Because Roger Ailes was there for 20 years, it would be trained to think women are not successful. When it was given an application by a woman, it would say no, let's filter her out, because she's not going to succeed at Fox News. That's an example of how you can codify past practices. Even if something changes, if you've automated past mistakes, they're going to continue.
SL: People tend to romanticize machine learning and the term algorithm. There's been a lot of boosterism around technology that doesn't take these problems into account or even consider them in any serious way.
CO: People have an idealistic vision of data as somehow cleaned of bias. There's a sense in which that's true. Algorithms do not play favorites. They're not going to favor their friend because they don't have friends. They're just going to look at the numbers.
Of course, society has already classified people into categories and treats people in different categories differently. A machine-learning algorithm will be expert at picking up those differences, even if they're subtle. If there is subtle discrimination, machine-learning algorithms can be counted on to pick that up and automate it.
Another way of saying that is, if we had a perfect hiring process, or if we had a perfect and fair and clean culture, then we would want machine-learning algorithms to automate those, because that would save us time and money. Nothing is perfect right now. Nothing is perfect yet.
SL: It almost sounds like a different approach would be to use algorithms to pick out what kinds of discrimination are being routinely practiced and then work on ways to combat that. Is that something that's happening at all?
CO: That's a really good point, and one I try to make. Instead of just blindly following algorithms as if they're set in stone and perfect, we should be scrutinizing them for bias and using them as an opportunity to explore that discrepancy.
Why are we hiring one class of people instead of another? In the case of recidivism risk algorithms, why are certain people so much more likely to go back to prison? How can we intervene to make that discrepancy smaller? What kind of support can we put into place so that they're less likely to end up back in prison? What exactly is it that is making their situation worse?
SL: What does all this mean for the future, and for the relationship between technology and democracy? Where do you see it leading?
CO: I'm optimistic, believe it or not. I think people are much more sensitized to these concepts now than they were, and I think we're going to start to see people and algorithms being held accountable.
It's been amazing to watch the response [to this book] because people have really woken up in the last couple of months, especially since the election. I feel like half the time people say "Wow, I learned a lot," and the other half of the time, people say "I was waiting for this book to be published." That's great. I want this conversation to be vibrant, ongoing, and I want it to have impact. I want shit to get moving. We've got no time to lose.
Sarah LaBrie is the editor of The California Prose Directory 2016: New Writing From the Golden State. | | | | | | | | | | | | Back Pocket Pasta | | | | By Colu Henry | | |
As a young girl, l knew that the kitchen was the place to hear my Nonni tell stories of my great-grandparents and the hardships that came with immigration. They arrived in this country from southern Italy at the turn of the century, and food was the thing that brought everything and everyone together. I loved hearing how my great-grandmother and namesake, Maria-Nicola (who also went by Colu), warmed day-old bean-soaking water and poured it over stale, toasted bread and drizzled it with cheese and olive oil for a makeshift "soup." Or how she rolled out ravioli dough with what was available in their tiny tenement–a broomstick. It was these tales and the recipes that were born out of poverty and necessity that stirred my passion for food. They taught me how much was possible with whatever we have access to.
Growing up with this heritage also came with a number of steadfast holiday traditions such as celebrating the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve and making Pizza Piena, a rich pie filled with eggs, cheese, and cured meats, on Easter. All year long, pasta was served two to three times a week, with sauces like tuna-clam, pasta e fagiole, and marinara in constant rotation.
Sundays were reserved for pasta with meat sauce, and those were my favorite days. I'd wake to the sputtering of hot olive oil as meatballs crisped in the pan while sauce simmered on the stove, its smell slowly making its way up the stairs to my bedroom, sweet and savory all at once. I would jump out of bed and race downstairs eager for a plate of sauce, a meatball, and lots of grated Pecorino cheese. It's still my favorite breakfast.
Pasta means comfort and it means family. It's the food I return to time and time again to celebrate a triumph and to drown my sorrows equally. But perhaps its greatest achievement in my life is that it's a constant reminder of who I am and where I came from. In these past few painful and unstable weeks, I have realized that we should never take that for granted. I am grateful that I have the privilege to carry these stories forward.
Marinara
Save this meal to make when you're weary from travel, just moved homes, or anytime in between. This has been my go-to comfort food for as long as I can remember. The sauce requires only a handful of ingredients, which I've been able to find everywhere I've lived. I remove the garlic after it turns to a pale gold so it flavors the oil but doesn't burn. Then I add it back with the tomatoes. I like to sprinkle lots of grated cheese and black pepper over my portion.
Serves 4
Kosher salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 small onion, minced
One 28-ounce can diced San Marzano tomatoes
¼ cup chopped flat-leaf Italian parsley, plus more for serving
Freshly ground black pepper
¾ pound cavatappi, or other pasta of your choosing
Grated Pecorino Romano or Grana Padano cheese, for serving
Crushed red pepper flakes (optional)
1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add 2 tablespoons of the salt and return to a rolling boil.
2. While the water comes to a boil, prepare the sauce: Heat the olive oil in a 12-inch skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and sauté until pale golden, about 2 minutes. Remove the garlic and set aside.
3. Add the onion to the pan and sauté, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 4 minutes. Add the tomatoes to the pan. Fill the tomato can halfway with water, swish the water around, and add it to the pan. Return the garlic to the pan along with the parsley. Season the sauce with salt and black pepper and bring it to a simmer.
4. Add the pasta to the boiling water and cook until al dente according to package directions. Scoop the pasta directly into the skillet and toss to coat, adding ¼ cup of pasta water or more (up to 1 cup), as needed to loosen up the sauce.
5. Serve in bowls with lots of grated Pecorino Romano and, if desired, additional chopped parsley and red pepper flakes.
Cacio e Pepe
With only three main ingredients, pasta, pepper, and cheese — which you should always have on hand, by the way — this classic Roman dish comes together in minutes. It's very important to use the best-quality ingredients you can find: freshly milled pepper from whole peppercorns and a wedge of sharp, salty Pecorino Romano. And although purists may object, I think part of the beauty of this recipe is that you can add to the dish to create interesting variations. I've thrown in roasted broccolini with lemon, nuts, leftover sausage, and other things lying about in my fridge. They've all worked.
Serves 4
2 tablespoons kosher salt
¾ pound long pasta, such as taglierini, bucatini, or spaghetti
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper, plus more for serving
1 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese, plus more for serving
1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add the salt and return to a rolling boil. Add the pasta and cook until al dente according to package directions.
2. When the pasta is about halfway done cooking, start the sauce: Melt the butter in a 12-inch skillet over medium-high heat. Add the pepper and stir until it is aromatic, about 2 minutes. Add ½ cup of the pasta water directly from the pasta pot and bring to a simmer. Stir together and cook for 1 minute, until the sauce emulsifies.
3. Reduce the heat to medium. Add the pasta and Pecorino Romano directly to the skillet, tossing vigorously until all strands are coated and the cheese melts. Add another ½ cup of pasta water and cook for 1 minute more.
4. Plate in bowls with additional grated cheese and black pepper, if desired.
Pasta Puttanesca
The name of this pasta cries shelf dinner (and plenty of other scandalous things). After researching the origins of this Italian dish, I still couldn't find a straight answer, but I think we all can agree that it uses many items that one should always have on hand: olives, capers, anchovies, and tomatoes. If you don't have anchovies, use tuna or sardines, or skip the fish altogether! No oil-cured black olives? Use whatever jar of cocktail olives is hanging around in your fridge. What's important here is a red, salty sauce with some funk — get down and dirty with it.
Serves 4
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
One 2-ounce can anchovy fillets
½ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes, or more if you like extra heat
1 tablespoon tomato paste
One 28-ounce can diced San Marzano tomatoes
1 cup pitted and halved oil-cured black olives
2 tablespoons capers, rinsed well if salt-packed
1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano, plus more for garnish
Kosher salt
¾ pound linguine
½ cup chopped flat-leaf Italian parsley, plus more for garnish
1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil.
2. While the water comes to a boil, prepare the sauce: Heat the olive oil in a 12-inch skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook until pale golden, about 2 minutes. Remove the garlic and set aside.
3. Reduce the heat under the skillet to low. Add the anchovies and red pepper flakes and sauté until the anchovies have melted and the red pepper flakes are aromatic, about 1 minute. Add the tomato paste and stir until dissolved. Return the cooked garlic to the pan and stir in the tomatoes. Add the olives, capers, and oregano, and allow the sauce to simmer while you cook the pasta.
4. Add 2 tablespoons of the salt to the pot of boiling water and return to a rolling boil. Add the pasta and cook until al dente according to package directions.
5. Add the pasta directly to the sauce and toss to coat, adding ¼ cup of pasta water or more (up to 1 cup), as needed to loosen up the sauce. Add the parsley and toss again.
6. Plate in bowls and garnish with additional oregano and parsley, if desired.
Colu Henry is the author of Back Pocket Pasta. She lives in Hudson, New York, with her husband, Chad, and their spaniel rescue mutt, Josh. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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