Scientists aren’t sure exactly how many sentences it is theoretically possible to construct in English in which every single word makes things unfathomably worse for everyone, but however many there were, now there’s one more: “Roseanne Barr will headline a Super Bowl gala at Mar-a-Lago for the Trumpettes.” The Palm Beach Post broke the news, which has already prompted leading linguists to publicly ask whether the development of language was a terrible, terrible mistake. “Who are these … Trumpettes?” you almost certainly did not ask. Well, perhaps this eight-minute-long “Trumpettes Promo” from founder Toni Holt Kramer will answer your question, or barring that, provoke a nice, relaxing stroke to usher you into the kingdom of death, where the wicked cease from troubling and the Trumpettes cease from posting:
The Trumpettes gala is scheduled for Feb. 1, the night before the Super Bowl, in hopes that President Trump will be in town to host his annual Super Bowl party. This is the third time the Trumpettes have hosted a gala at Mar-a-Lago, but the first time that disgraced comedian Roseanne Barr will be headlining it. “Roseanne is a really loyal Trump supporter,” said Kramer. “If there was anybody who really put their lives on the line and said how much she loves the president, she is one of them.” Barr was booked for the event by Daphne Barak, a fellow Trumpette and the author of To Plea or Not to Plea: The Story of Rick Gates and the Mueller Investigation. Barak was also responsible for booking Jon Voight for a previous Trumpette gala.
Government officials offered no comment on the national security implications of the invention of the sentence “Roseanne Barr will headline a Super Bowl gala at Mar-a-Lago for the Trumpettes,“ presumably because they were too busy worrying about the national security implications of the equally-true sentence “Johnny Depp will produce an unauthorized musical biography of Michael Jackson told from the perspective of his sequined glove.”
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2OE0UCV
via IFTTT
Why does this galaxy have a ring of bright blue stars? Beautiful island universe Messier 94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). A popular target for Earth-based astronomers, the face-on spiral galaxy is about 30,000 light-years across, with spiral arms sweeping through the outskirts of its broad disk. But this Hubble Space Telescope field of view spans about 7,000 light-years across M94's central region. The featured close-up highlights the galaxy's compact, bright nucleus, prominent inner dust lanes, and the remarkable bluish ring of young massive stars. The ring stars are all likely less than 10 million years old, indicating that M94 is a starburst galaxy that is experiencing an epoch of rapid star formation. The circular ripple of blue stars is likely a wave propagating outward, having been triggered by the gravity and rotation of a oval matter distributions. Because M94 is relatively nearby, astronomers can better explore details of its starburst ring. via NASA https://ift.tt/2r1lDrk
The celebs are at it again! Talk show host ELLEN DEGENERES invited actress DAKOTA JOHNSON to appear on Ellen, but the interview had barely begun when the two Hollywood mega-stars commenced to a-fussin’ and a-feudin’! It seems that Dakota invited Ellen to her swanky 30th birthday party, where comedian TIG NOTARO performed. But not only did Ellen skip the party, she had the nerve to accuse Dakota of not inviting her in the first place! Here’s the clip:
Awkward! Ellen and Dakota’s birthday party dispute dates back to 2018, when Dakota went on Ellen’s show to dispute rumors that she and musician CHRIS MARTIN were expecting a BABY! But in the process of debunking one scandal, Dakota inadvertently started a new one, when she revealed to Ellen that she had held a birthday party but had not invited her, even though Ellen invited Dakota to her birthday party, where comedian TIG NOTARO performed. (To be completely accurate, Ellen invited Chris to her birthday party, correctly assuming that Dakota would come along.) Here’s the clip:
Awkward! It’s been a drama-filled fall for Ellen, who recently faced controversy after a video surfaced showing her and wife PORTIA DE ROSSI hanging out at a DALLAS COWBOYS game with GEORGE W. BUSH, who has spent his entire life causing immeasurable human suffering in all sorts of ways, at least one of which targeted Ellen and Portia personally. Here’s the clip:
Awkward! But Ellen and Portia aren’t the only people who would have beef with George if they didn’t consider class solidarity between rich people more important than holding anyone accountable for their past actions! In 2003, Bush launched a headline-making feud with MOST OF THE PLANET that resulted in the deaths of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WHOSE NAMES WE WILL NEVER KNOW. Here’s the clip:
Awkward! But the GHOSTS OF THE NAMELESS PEOPLE GEORGE KILLED weren’t the only celebrity drama addicts to side with Dakota over Ellen: Even people who survivedGeorge still have unresolved issues with him, because he oversaw a NETWORK OF TORTURE PRISONS! Here’s the clip:
Awkward! Still, as Ellen explained after facing a public backlash, her well-documented willingness to politely attend social events with George isn’t a sign that she is comfortable with homophobia or preemptive war or torture. Quite the contrary: It’s a sign that she is a very nice and very kind person. Here’s the clip:
Entirely convincing! But unfortunately for Ellen, it turns out that Dakota’s birthday party took place on the very same weekend that she was chilling with George. Palling around with a war criminal is one thing, palling around with a war criminal who based his reelection campaign on demonizing you is another thing, but skipping Dakota Johnson’s birthday party—Dakota, who has neither started any wars nor killed anyone (that we know of)—in order to do so? That is the kind of morally indefensible behavior that the public will not soon forget—and may never forgive. Awkward.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2L9tvhm
via IFTTT
Democratic presidential hopeful California Senator Kamala Harris speaks to the press in the Spin Room after participating in the fifth Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign season in Atlanta, Georgia on November 20, 2019.
The unhappiness within Harris’ team was evident in the resignation letter of Kelly Mehlenbacher, the campaign’s state operations director, in November. “This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly,” Mehlenbacher wrote, criticizing the leaders of the campaign for laying off staffers without notice. She went on to say that “with less than 90 days until Iowa we still do not have a real plan to win.” Even though Mehlenbacher emphasized that she still thinks “Harris is the strongest candidate” for the general election, “I no longer have confidence in our campaign or its leadership.”
Many of those the Times spoke to seem to lay much of the blame for the current situation on two people: Maya Harris, the campaign chairwoman, and Juan Rodriguez, the campaign manager. Maya Harris is the senator’s sister so she often goes unchallenged and campaign adies say that it isn’t clear who is actually in charge. They also point the finger at Harris herself, noting that she often waffled and didn’t seem clear of where she wanted to go, never actually choosing a side in the liberals vs moderates battle that has come to dominate the Democratic contest.
It seems many people close to the senator have been upfront with her that she needs to shake things up. Rep. Marcia Fudge, who endorsed Harris, says she must fire Rodriguez. But at the same time, she acknowledged Harris herself was to blame for at least some of the problems within the campaign. “I have told her there needs to be a change,” Fudge said. “The weakness is at the top. And it’s clearly Juan. He needs to take responsibility — that’s where the buck stops.” Harris declined to be interviewed for the piece.
The Times piece followed another one by the Washington Post published on Thursday that described Harris’ campaign as “teetering,” claiming her candidacy was “weighed down by indecision within her campaign, her limits as a candidate and dwindling funds that have forced her to retreat in some places at a moment she expected to be surging.” The Post’s Chelsea Janes writes that part of the problem with Harris is that she has “often displayed a desire to be everything to everyone that has instead left voters with questions about who she is, what she believes and what her priorities and convictions would be as president.”
Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary and criticism you won’t find anywhere else.
People gather on the National Mall near a screen showing President Donald Trump delivering a speech during the “Salute to America” Fourth of July event at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on July 4, 2019.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/Getty Images
A majority of Republicans say Donald Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln. Accoridng to a new Economist/YouGov poll, 53 percent of Republicans say Trump is a better president than Lincoln, who led the country through the Civil War. That feeling though is clearly confined to Republicans because when all Americans are taken into account, 75 percent say Lincoln was the better president and among Democrats the number is even larger—94 percent.
The poll immediately caused a bit of an uproar on social media. “53% of Republicans apparently don’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was…,” wrote Billy Baldwin. David Rothkopf also expressed shock: “Many of these people have jobs. Operate heavy equipment. Move freely in society. Can that be safe?”
As shocking as the numbers may be, Lincoln was not the exception as Republicans seem to think Trump was a better president than many others. A whopping 65 percent say Trump is a better president than Dwight Eisenhower while 71 percent claim Trump was a better president than George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. More than eight-in-10 Republicans say Trump was a better president than Gerald Ford and 86 percent say he is above Richard Nixon. The one exception? Ronald Reagan. Almost six-in-10 Republicans say Reagan was a better president with 41 percent choosing Trump.
Trump has previously celebrated his approval ratings within the GOP, comparing his popularity to that of Lincoln. “You know, a poll just came out that I am the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party,” Trump said in an interview last year with the Sun. “Beating Lincoln. I beat our Honest Abe.”
Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary and criticism you won’t find anywhere else.
Photos by John Thys/AFP via Getty Images, Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Prince Andrew is awful and self-righteous and dim. That much seems clear, and the story of his association with Jeffrey Epstein seems likely to get worse: There are rumors that Prince Andrew will be asked to talk to U.S. law enforcement agencies about Epstein. Johanna Sjoberg has accused Andrew of groping her at Epstein’s home. A BBC interview with Andrew’s main accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, will air on Monday, in which she describes the “really scary time” in her life. Prince Andrew’s now-notorious BBC interview was, his assurances to his mother the queen notwithstanding, a disaster. Within days, the royal family forced him to step down, and he’s had to move his offices out of Buckingham Palace. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has severed ties with him. Queen Elizabeth even canceled his birthday party.
For Americans, this is disorienting, maybe even mesmerizing. On the one hand, the squalid, casual abuse of which Prince Andrew stands accused is horribly familiar: There’s a pattern of rich and powerful men preying on weaker parties in this country, and at the highest levels of leadership. On the other hand, it’s astonishing to witness a man of that stature facing discipline and expulsion from a power structure that includes members of his literal family. That’s unimaginable here (imagine one Trump disciplining another!). However laughably light Andrew’s “punishments” might seem—the man is still a millionaire several times over, has lived a life of immense privilege, and doesn’t seem to be in imminent danger of (for example) going to prison—he is disgraced. And he lives in a social world where disgrace must actually sting. Americans don’t live in that society. Even Harvey Weinstein is now being invited to events, and those who object are being kicked out. Prince Andrew has been ostracized (by the British public and the press) and yet Donald Trump still enjoys wide support from his base; despite many credible accusations of assault, his supporters blame the women he allegedly abused. This might partly explain why Americans remain so fascinated by the royals: They seem to be the one kind of world-famous celebrity for whom strict standards of conduct and restraint are even notionally enforced.
If you’ve watched Netflix’s The Crown, which dramatizes the long life of Queen Elizabeth II, you’ve seen that show thematize, time and again, how the monarch’s work has been to strip herself of her individuality in order to better serve the office: The queen functions as the ultimate anti-Trump. She was not, except under the strictest, most controlled circumstances, to express preferences or opinions. The office required a studied, careful neutrality, and this became all the more important as the Crown’s real power diminished. When commitment to that principle flagged—whenever a royal let himself be guided more by personal inclinations than duty—disaster struck. The royal scandals the show covers are quite minor, but they have outsize consequences: King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, who’d married too many times to be queen. Princess Margaret was not allowed to marry a divorced man, so she married one who had affairs, and had a few of her own.
By the time Charles and Diana came along, the sex scandals got uglier and their consequences messier. But the royal family was clinging desperately to its soft power, and it did so by trading on the one thing it had that other celebrities didn’t: the veneer of intense respectability.
That veneer is crumbling. It’s not exactly a secret that the royal family is punishing Andrew because of his bad press, not his bad actions, accounts of which surfaced as long ago as 2015. Prince Charles, Vanity Fair reported, “has stayed silent about the interview, but multiple reports have emerged that he was less than pleased about his trip being overshadowed in the headlines.” According to Fox News, he’s angry that his environmental-awareness tour “has been completely overshadowed by the 59-year-old’s scandal impacting the British royal family.”
These are petty concerns, and yet they’ve produced a desirable result: A bad man who associated with horrifying people has lost things that mattered to him. Someone enforced a consequence. The queen might still be on his side—Andrew is reportedly her favorite, and she went horseback riding with him the day after his resignation—but the pomp and circumstance on which so much of his self-image depended has been taken from him. He is in disgrace in a world where disgrace is still a category.
The United Kingdom and the United States bear striking similarities. When it comes to hard politics, both governments are currently led by oddly coiffed misogynistic leaders whose fans love them for their misconduct, dishonesty, and lack of impulse control. But the royal family is different: It still at least notionally aspires to standards political leaders seem to have abandoned. Americans watch the royals, rapt, for signs of slippage and failure, but also out of a kind of awe at how long they’ve sustained the illusion of honor. Yes, they’re mooches and hypocrites, but—as my colleague Ben Mathis-Lilley has written—maybe hypocrisy is better than the alternative.
Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary and criticism you won’t find anywhere else.
Armed police stand guard near the Monument in London, on November 29, 2019 after reports of shots being fired on London Bridge.
DANIEL SORABJI/Getty Images
Footage has emerged showing the incredible scene of how three civilians played a pivotal role in helping to stop the London Bridge attacker on Friday. After Usman Khan began stabbing people seemingly indiscriminately with two large kitchen knives, three bystanders went to confront him. One man, who has been identified as a Polish chef named Lukasz, grabbed a 5-foot Narwhal tusk from the wall of Fishmongers’ Hall, where the attack began. Another sprayed the attacker with foam from a fire extinguisher while the third directly tackled Khan.
A short video showing the three men confront the attacker quickly spread on social media. TV director Amy Coop appears to have been the one to confirm that Lukasz was carrying a whale tusk. “A guy who was with us at Fishmongers Hall took a 5’ narwhale tusk from the wall and went out to confront the attacker,” she wrote on Twitter.
Many praised the three men, and other civilians who helped disarm the attacker, for their heroism, emphasizing that they had no way of knowing the suicide vest he was wearing was fake. “Members of the public didn’t realize at the time that was a hoax device and they really are the best of us, another example of the bravery and heroism of ordinary Londoners running towards danger, risking their own personal safety to try and save others,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan said.
Another video that also quickly spread on social media shows one member of the public fleeing the scene with a large knife that appears to have been taken from the hands of the attacker. One of those who helped was Thomas Gray, a 24-year-old tour guide who happened to be in his car on London Bridge when the commotion began. “I saw a guy was being grabbed by four or five other guys and someone was spraying him with foam from a fire extinguisher,” he told The Times. “I put the car in neutral, put the handbrake on and went for it. I’ve played rugby my whole life — the rule is one in, all in. My colleague Steve had the same thought and got out of his car. My thoughts were just ‘stop the dude’.”
A Look Back at The Planetary Society's Founding Documents
The --------- Society. During the months leading up to the founding of The Planetary Society, that was the organization's place-holder name. 40 years ago, Planetary Society founders Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman took an idea and turned it into the public movement that continues to advance space science and exploration today.
The beginning of our beginning goes back to a need and a potential solution. It was 1979 and, after the initial exploration of our solar system in the 1960s and 70s, the U.S. was dramatically scaling back planetary exploration efforts. Society co-founders Carl Sagan – a well-known and well-respected planetary scientist – and Bruce Murray – the Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) – were actively advocating for more missions and more exploration. As they did so, they learned that decision-makers were using perceived public apathy to justify defunding U.S. planetary exploration.
The Planetary Society Founders
The founders of The Planetary Society near the time the organization was formally incorporated. From left to right: Bruce Murray, Carl Sagan, and Lou Friedman.
Having worked with the Mariner, Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager missions, Carl and Bruce had ample anecdotal evidence of significant public support for planetary exploration, but they were unable to prove the breadth and depth of this public support. This challenge led Carl and Bruce to wonder whether a grassroots public organization – such as the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, or Cousteau Society – could be created to prove and harness public support for planetary exploration.
Carl and Bruce identified Louis D. Friedman – a JPL engineer who was finishing a year in Washington D.C. as a Congressional Science Fellow on the Senate space subcommittee staff – as a potential organizer of such an organization. In May 1979, Lou met with Bruce, his boss at JPL, and learned about their idea for the organization.
Lou's personal diary gives a glimpse of this first meeting:
The Planetary Society
Lou Friedman's First Planetary Society Meeting
Notes from Lou Friedman's personal diary about his first meeting with Bruce Murray regarding The Planetary Society in May 1979.
Lou had independently been thinking that a group focused on exploration could be a powerful tool to support future NASA missions. Lou was intrigued by the possibility of taking on the lead organizing role, even jotting in his diary, "Neat opportunity; can't pass up."
The proposed timeline was aggressive – Carl and Bruce envisioned incorporating the organization in about six months. Over those months, Lou was tasked with learning as much as possible about starting and running a successful non-profit.
The founders identified key tenets to form the foundation of the organization. Most importantly, the organization needed to be broad and open to the public. In an August 1979 draft description for the still-unnamed organization, Lou Friedman wrote, "As space exploration has no single rationale, neither does it serve a single constituency. Those who care about its conduct come from many walks of life and hold many outlooks on why and how space exploration should be conducted." Lou went on to write that the goal of this nascent organization would be to "bring together the various constituencies and to provide a public opportunity for participation in and support of the continuing exploration of space."
In the same memo, Lou drafted goals and objectives for the nascent organization:
The Planetary Society
Early draft of goals and objectives for The Planetary Society
In August 1979, Lou Friedman drafted a memo containing goals and objectives for The Planetary Society.
By the end of November, just 6 months after the three co-founders began discussing the idea, the organization – which they named The Planetary Society – was ready to incorporate. The following memo memorializes the founders’ thinking about the purpose, status, and plans of The Planetary Society.
The Planetary Society
The Planetary Society Founders Memo
This early memo, dated November 27, 1979, memorializes the founders' thinking about the purpose, status, and plans of The Planetary Society.
Finally, on November 30, 1979, the founders filed the organization's Articles of Incorporation.
The Planetary Society
The Planetary Society Articles of Incorporation
On November 30, 1979, the founders of The Planetary Society filed the organization's Articles of Incorporation.
Today, The Planetary Society is still pursuing the goals that Carl, Bruce, and Lou set decades ago. For four decades, our visionary members have been taking action for space, proving public support for planetary exploration and the search for life beyond Earth. And to us, this is still only the beginning.
Throughout 2020, The Planetary Society will be celebrating our 40th anniversary. As we celebrate we will continue to share archival documents, photos, and videos we've compiled over the decades. Thanks to a partnership with California’s Huntington Library, we know these archives will be maintained for generations to come.
Related Articles
Casey Dreier
Carl Sagan
Emily Margolis
Let's Change the World
Become a member of The Planetary Society and together we will create the future of space exploration.
Armed police with dogs patrol along Cannon Street in central London, on November 29, 2019 after reports of shots being fired on London Bridge.
BEN STANSALL/Getty Images
The 28-year-old attacker who stabbed a man and a woman to death in London on Friday had already been convicted of terrorism charges and served six years in prison, opening up a fresh debate about the early release of prisoners and a round of finger-pointing ahead of a crucial election. Usman Khan, who was born and raised in Britain, was shot dead after he stabbed at least five people Friday while wearing what turned out to be a fake suicide vest. The man and woman who were killed in the attack have not been identified. Three others—a man and two women—were also injured and are still in the hospital.
Khan was one of nine people who were part of a cell inspired by al-Qaida sentenced in 2012 of plotting to bomb several London landmarks, including the stock exchange. Khan was ultimately sentenced to 16 years but served less than half of that and was released in December 2018 on parole with several conditions, including the wearing of an electronic tracking device on his ankle. Khan was wearing the device at the time of the attack.
Khan launched the attack Friday while he was attending an event by a Cambridge University-backed program that is meant to help rehabilitate prisoners. The attack appears to have started where the event was taking place before Khan moved outside onto London Bridge, where Khan was ultimately tackled by civilians and shot by law enforcement officers.
The attack took place less than two weeks before Britain is scheduled to hold a national election on Dec. 12 that could decide the future of Brexit. Although the main political parties suspended campaigning after the attack, finger-pointing immediately began that could have an effect on the vote. So far the campaign has been dominated by the plan to leave the European Union and the country’s health service but now crime is likely to take center stage. Member os the opposition Labor Party were quick to criticize the government’s record on crime. “There are big questions that need to be answered,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan said. “One of the important tools judges had when it came to dealing with dangerous, convicted criminals… was their ability to give an indeterminate sentence to protect the public,” he added, claiming that “was taken away from them by this government.”
Chris Phillips, a former head of the UK national counter-terrorism security office, accused the justice system of playing “Russian roulette” with the public and said it “needs to look at itself.” The country’s security minister, Brandon Lewis, has refused to comment on the case but did say sentencing rules needed to be reviewed. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, meanwhile, said that his “immediate takeaway” after the attack was that prisoners need to spend more time behind bars. “When people are sentenced to a certain number of years in prison, they should serve every year of that sentence,” he added.
Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary and criticism you won’t find anywhere else.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus.
Nicole Cliffe is filling in as Dear Prudence this week.
To get advice from Prudie, send questions for publication to prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.) Join the live chat every Monday at noon. Submit your questions and comments here before or during the live discussion. Or call the Dear Prudence podcast voicemail at 401-371-DEAR (3327) to hear your question answered on a future episode of the show.
Dear Prudence,
I met both “Teresa” and “Colin” in college. I grew close to both of them in separate friend groups. By the time we were graduating, the two of them were strongly infatuated with each other and began dating not long after. The relationship worried me, as they did not bring out the best in each other. I am ashamed to say I was very vocal about this opinion to everyone but the couple, and they soon stopped talking to me around the time they were married.
Last year, I realized that I had messed up and wrote a long apology to the two of them. I apologized for doubting their relationship, explained that it came from a place of worry, and said that I should have come to them with concerns, not fallen temptation to gossiping instead. They forgave me, and we began to rebuild the friendship.
Last month Teresa confided to me that she was deeply unhappy in her marriage, falling for another man, and taking steps toward a divorce. They are currently living apart. Colin is with his family, several states away, with the purpose of finding better employment, and Teresa is working on cutting him out of her life without telling him first. She has begun splitting the bank accounts and blocking him on social media. She has only told me, claiming she feels comfortable because I would support the split anyway.
While I do agree that a divorce is best for both of them, I know that Colin will be devastated. He supported Teresa through mental breakdowns, lost his previous job because he wanted to care for her when she mentioned feeling suicidal, and moved his whole life to be with her. She will move on easily, as she has already done so emotionally, but this will come as a deep shock to him.
I feel dirty knowing all of this. I feel deeply uncomfortable with the fact that she hasn’t told Colin anything and have encouraged her to communicate her intentions. She says he will lash out and it’s better to have everything in order and then worry about the communication aspect. They are both my friends, and I feel fully stuck.
—Stuck in the Middle With You
Tell Teresa you’re not comfortable hearing any more about her plans to leave Colin and your discomfort for being placed in the middle. If she starts to bring it up again, remind her of that and leave.
This is a good time to mind your own business. This sounds mean, but it’s not meant to be. I also suggest that this extremely dysfunctional friendship may have finally run its course. It clearly does not bring you joy.
Snooping is terrible. I know. But when a co-worker quit and my boss asked me to search her email for something—and I instantly saw a Gchat conversation on the side that “[my name] is the worsssst”—I just couldn’t help myself. I opened the chat and saw four co-workers, all of whom I thought I had good relationships with, spending YEARS making fun of me relentlessly. Screenshotting my social media posts to laugh at them, rolling their eyes at every email I sent, calling me a “try hard” and a “kiss ass” for caring too much about work, making fun of my partner. Just truly mean stuff. I’m embarrassed and so, so hurt.
I know that I can never confront them, because what I did to find the conversation was ridiculously unprofessional. I just wonder how I can move on and continue to work with these people. I’m so self-conscious about my every move at this point. How do I get over it?
—I Feel Like I’m Back in Seventh Grade
Oh, you poor thing. I will not scold you for snooping. No one can say you have not been more than punished in full.
You just have to live with it. It sucks. I would not try to change anything about how you conduct yourself at work. It sounds like you are an excellent employee, and your shine is making them look bad, which is causing them to lash out. People love a scapegoat. It could have been someone else, but, sadly, it’s you.
Please process all your feelings with your partner, so you can say to them what you wish you could say to your colleagues. I would also dust off my résumé and start thinking about finding a new job. It will be difficult to stay in this working environment. Lord knows that’s not an easy solution, but keep your ear to the ground and be open to making a change should the right opportunity come along.
I’m just so sorry.
Dear Prudence,
I recently found out that I have to get a common, outpatient surgery. My problem is not life-threatening, but it does need to be taken care of, and my doctor recommended that I have the surgery this year if I can. The earliest date available is Dec. 24.
I told my mother, and my parents have generously offered to come up and stay to help me after the surgery. But my mother’s first reaction was, “What about all the complications that happen around the holidays? I don’t mean to scare you, but I’d just be so worried about the staffing at the hospital around that time. It’s just something to really consider.” She did scare me, and now I don’t know what to do. Am I being crazy here wanting to get the surgery on a holiday eve? Am I being selfish for basically ruining Christmas?
—Holiday Woes
Ignore your mother. Have the surgery on Dec. 24. Hospitals may be a little wild around the holidays, but they are not staffed by mogwai who have been fed after midnight. You will be having a scheduled surgery and will not be wandering around the ER with people who deep-fried their turkeys unsuccessfully.
No one “ruins Christmas.” It’s just something controlling people say. Tell her that you’ve taken her concerns into consideration and will be following your surgeon’s advice to have your surgery, as planned, on Dec. 24. You hope she and your father will still be able to come help out afterward, but you understand if that’s not possible.
When does the phantom poop smell end? Both of my kids (3 years and 18 months) are not yet potty trained. And, because I’m a glutton for punishment, we have a 4-month-old puppy also going to the bathroom literally everywhere. At work, commuting in the car, after kiddos are asleep … I smell poop. I understand that smell is the sense most tied to memory, so I know why I’m smelling poop that isn’t there, but when does it end? I’m hoping they can both be potty trained in about a year, so how long after that do I get the smell of poop (and puke!) out of my nose and hippocampus?
Slate Plus members get extra questions, Prudie Uncensored with Nicole Cliffe, and full-length podcast episodes every week.
Each month,Future Tense Fiction—a series of short stories from Future Tense and ASU’sCenter for Science and the Imaginationabout how technology and science will change our lives—publishes a story on a theme. The theme for October–December 2019: artificial intelligence.
“So a priest, a rabbi, and a robot walk into a bar. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.”
David had heard this one before, but he needed a job. He folded his hands in his lap and summoned the patience he’d learned sitting through Talmudic debates. He waved for Aiden Shure, Town of Our Own’s CEO, to continue.
“It’s a dive bar, lots of rough language from the other patrons, but the bartender says, ‘Father, what can I get you?’ The priest says: ‘Well, I have to lead Mass in the morning, but a wee nip can’t hurt. Gimme three fingers of Irish whiskey and cut it with holy water.’ So the bartender runs over to the church next door, borrows a bit of holy water, and makes the drink. The priest is satisfied, so the bartender moves on: ‘Rabbi, what can I get you?’ The rabbi says, ‘Well it is the Sabbath day, but if it’s not too much work I wouldn’t say no to a glass of kosher wine from the vineyards of the Holy Land.’ So the bartender finds a bottle of sweet Israeli red, and the rabbi thanks him.”
Aiden told the joke like he’d practiced it a lot while stuck in traffic. David braced for the punchline he knew was coming.
“So the bartender turns to the robot, which has been quietly listening to the other patrons. The bartender says: ‘Sorry for the wait. What can I get you?’ And the robot says, ‘Fuck you, kike-loving bitch—’ ”
“I think I know how the rest goes,” David interrupted. The joke was a modern-day Aristocrats, intentionally obscene, all the rage on streaming late-night shows. “I’m not super PC, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Aiden chuckled. “I’m actually describing the problem we’re hiring to solve. Our customer service chatbot keeps getting, well … anti-Semitic. We field complaints from many lonely, obsessive people. Towns often subscribe to our service to keep the whack jobs from bothering real municipal employees.” David winced at the ableist slur. “We want our system to learn from users, speak their language as we say, but now … ”
“Now the bot hates Jews. Aren’t there curation tools to fix that?”
“They haven’t worked. We aren’t talking naughty words or bad attitude. It’s nice as ever. But if you turn on suggestions and let it follow ‘relateds’ down the rabbit hole, the bot starts generating some pretty weird text. Conspiracy stuff. Like if Mr. Rogers wrote The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And we can’t just purge all references to Jewish culture—that’s erasure, right? So your LinkedIn jumped out at us.”
David had wondered why TOOO’s hiring bot had reached out to him so aggressively, even though he was a novice in the tech world. Now things clicked into place.
“Because I have rabbinical schooling, you think I can sort out the, uh, good Jewish stuff from the bad Jewish stuff?”
“Exactamundo!” Aiden missed David’s skepticism.
“You don’t want me to do any product development?”
“Only what you need for this job. After, if we both think you culture fit, I’ll move you to an open desk. Deal?”
David suppressed a sigh. This wasn’t what he’d envisioned when he’d pledged to that coding boot camp—or taken out the loans to pay for it, compounding his debt. But the money was good. God would not want him to be choosey, he decided, especially when handed an opportunity to protect the chosen people.
“I’ll need a space for my books.”
David rented a bike trailer and hauled his library across town in the sweat-stained Austin heat. He began combing through the training data—tedious, eye-blurring work, but weirdly fascinating. Anti-Semitism was insidious, old, and ever-changing. He compiled databases of anti-Semitic language using bots from watch groups that tracked trends in hateful rhetoric. To filter bad inputs, David had to give the A.I. the moral and historical context to know when a user was just ignorant, when they were being problematic, and when they might be truly dangerous. Much of that was a judgment call. Some Jews were quick to equate anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian activism with anti-Semitism. David wasn’t sure he could make that call for all of Town of Our Own’s users, but where to draw the lines wasn’t so clear-cut.
The job was, he had to admit, a pretty good fit for his lumpy skill set. So good that he was surprised MBAiden, as his co-workers called the boorish CEO, had thought of it. David prodded SheaAnne the HR manager until she spilled that the idea of searching for someone with rabbinical training had come from Mark, TOOO’s pet intellectual.
“I can’t take all the credit,” Mark said when David tracked him down at a staff happy hour. “Aiden is pretty insecure about being such a biz-jock. The hippest A.I. founders have humanities degrees, but not him. So instead he likes to collect philosophical weirdos—like me. And now you.”
“Still, thanks. I needed the gig.”
“I’m just glad to have a kindred spirit around here. Us clergy dropouts have to stick together.”
Indeed, David and Mark had a lot in common. Both were Northeasterners now trying to fit in in the Texas tech scene. David was from Westchester, outside New York, while Mark grew up in Boston and had the accent to prove it. Both came from families that had pushed them toward religious training. Mark’s pious Irish Catholic family had nearly disowned him when he’d left the priesthood path and instead gotten a Master of Theological Studies at an interfaith seminary in Chicago—a tacit admission that he’d become a “traitorous Proddy.” David’s Reform-but-kosher parents had been merely “worried and concerned” when he’d bailed after six years of rabbinical school—filled with theological doubts, and more pressing secular doubts about his ability to pay off his student loans.
“I did my thesis on the positions various faith groups were taking on A.I. Personhood, when life begins, Turing’s Fetus stuff,” Mark explained. “Ended up on a boring-as-hell South by Southwest panel here on A.I. ethics. I talked a lot of nonsense, but Aiden tracked me down at an after-party and offered me a job. Moved the next week.”
“Sounds like a fairy tale romance.” David swirled the dregs of his Lone Star, which he was determined to learn to like.
“Hardly. TOOO sells municipal logistics A.I. Building interfaces for people to report potholes or check bulk trash pickup dates isn’t exactly the theological cutting edge. Anyway,” Mark did his best “Jewish mother cowboy” impersonation, “How’d a nice boy from Westchester end up in these here Silicon Hills?”
David laughed. “You know how they turn you away three times before letting you convert to Judaism? To become a rabbi, it’s more like 300. I mean, who has the stamina? My girlfriend got a job here and wanted to take it, so I blew up my life and came with.”
“Cheers to that,” Mark said. “Let it never be said that we godly men make things easy on ourselves.”
David and Mark started to hang out on a regular basis, usually going to a bar after work where—blood alcohol permitting—they’d debate the finer points of Judeo-Christian theology, often until they were both blue with laughter. David was technical and articulate; when he joked, it was to cover up his sometimes-crippling introversion. Mark was provocative and cynical—David half-suspected Mark had gotten Aiden hooked on the rude robot bit—and loved the challenge of dragging David out of his shell.
When, after six months, David finally completed his anti-Semitism sweep, Mark took him out, as usual, for a celebratory drink.
“I’ve been thinking about your project,” Mark said. “I know Aiden hasn’t found you your next job yet, so I have a proposal.”
“Not a modest one, I hope,” David said. “I may soon be living on the street, but don’t cannibalize me yet.”
“I could never rip off my beloved St. Jonathan! Look,” Mark got serious, “Until recently, the A.I. field was all about training algorithms, getting them to learn certain skills, like playing Go or spotting tumors. But what you did was more like grooming. It was about behavior and etiquette, the nuance of relating to human customers.”
“Plenty of malicious data I found just had to be purged,” David mused. “But I also flagged sensitive material the A.I. needed to understand precisely because it shouldn’t be talked about. I suppose you could call that etiquette—the art of knowing what not to say.”
“Right! And those grooming decisions are already getting made, but they’re ad hoc fixes to complaints or problems flagged by Quality Assurance being made platform by platform. Lots of reinventing the wheel. Seems to me we could offer a product that companies like TOOO could buy to keep their bots well-behaved.”
“Like our own firm?”
“Why not? I bet TOOO would be our first client. I guarantee you they have more bot-havioral problems than you’ve fixed.”
David hadn’t been in the industry long enough to know if this idea was very savvy or very stupid. He nursed the artisanal vodka tonic Mark had bought him.
“What does it mean for an A.I. to be ‘well-behaved’?” he asked. “That’s a normative question with nooks and crannies.”
“That’s exactly why we’re the perfect people to do this! We know how to ask the questions and how complicated the answers can get. The grooming sector, when it happens, is going to be full of people like us. Let’s get in while the getting’s good! And hey, maybe we can slip a few wholesome zingers in there.”
They set up a workspace in David’s apartment and brainstormed company names on a whiteboard. David’s girlfriend, Becca, who taught English at UT–Austin, would occasionally cross out names she didn’t like. She was happy to see David so enthusiastic, she said, but no way could she date the founder of Manners4Machines.
They settled on Decen.cy, snapping up a domain name from Cyprus. To David, the name seemed neutral, pleasant—just like they hoped A.I.s could be.
The year that followed was exhausting, exhilarating, panic-inducing. Gone were the days when any tech startup with a bubbly logo could bump into $10 million in seed funding walking down the street. Before they could even ask for money, they had to painstakingly solicit letters of client interest, do pre-recruitment, scout office space—all while ramping down their work at TOOO.
MBAiden turned out to be one of their biggest boosters, even offering to invest himself. He liked to take credit for bringing Mark and David together. When Decen.cy launched, TOOO was its first official customer.
Other customers trickled in. Some were A.I. companies with niche bot-havioral problems, like TOOO’s conspiracy-peddling chatbot. Others brought weird dilemmas, like the therapy app that couldn’t decide if its tender-voiced A.I. should approve of yoga. If a user mentioned yoga, should the bot encourage the habit or temper expectations? Or would, as devil’s advocate Mark argued, a truly woke app call out yoga as a form of cultural appropriation? Decen.cy’s small staff often stayed late arguing about these sorts of issues, with debate sprawling into Dirty Bill’s, the dive bar down the block.
Many clients didn’t care much what decision Decen.cy came to, but shielded themselves with Decen.cy’s virtuous reputation. It was a game of appearances. David and Mark soon learned to emphasize their religious backgrounds. David came to business meetings in a dark suit, a yarmulke sticking out of his pocket. Mark based his attire off the comic book Preacher: white jeans, black shirt, white clerical collar. They had a good cop, bad cop dynamic. David played somber, pious, and authoritative. Mark put on the understanding air of one all too familiar—from personal experience—with the decadent sins of the modern world.
Sometimes Mark kept the collar on after work, hit up a seedy club, went home with women who, he’d tell David, “had that hot priest itch to scratch.” But Mark never ended up with a girlfriend. David privately suspected Mark was staying free of entanglements because a part of him wanted to return to the cloth.
Mark was wearing the collar late in Decen.cy’s second year, when he introduced David to a walk-in. The Rev. Frank Teller wore a fine, Western-cut suit and spun a broad cowboy hat in his hands.
“Kind of you to ride all the way from Dallas to meet us,” Mark said, when they sat down together.
“Well, I had business with Town of Our Own, and Aiden Shure told me you fellas could help me with my problem. You see, I’m blessed to be CEO of FireHaven Ministries. Perhaps you’ve seen our billboards or meme pages?”
David and Mark were indeed aware of the tech-savvy North Texas megachurch, which advertised heavily along I-35.
“God’s seen to it that we’ve grown in recent years, and we’ve acquired some real estate concerns. Intentional communities where our congregation members can live as neighbors in resisting the ills of the world. We use TOOO to manage them. My eldest just moved into our newest development, and she loves TOOO, calls it ‘so polite!’ Which brings me to why I’m down here. My little granddaughter Harmony was playing with TOOO’s voicebot—you know how kids are with these things—and she asked the bot if it would pray with her. You know what the bot said? ‘Praying isn’t for everyone, but reflection and mindfulness are important.’ So I’m wondering, who put those words in that bot’s mouth?”
“Probably our product grooming team.” David had feared the child had stumbled onto some stray speck of obscenity in the A.I.’s conversation trees, but this answer seemed innocuous. “We try to make A.I.s helpful without being pushy, sympathetic without making assumptions—so they’re accessible and inoffensive to everyone.”
“See that’s exactly my concern. Who’s to say what’s inoffensive to everyone? This is a question of values. The values that say ‘prayer isn’t for everyone’ are the same secular, liberal, cosmopolitan values that get pushed on us by the universities, the media, the coastal elites. Exactly the influence my congregation is trying to escape. Now it’s coming from the official bot of their refuge. You see how that’s a problem?”
David bristled at “cosmopolitan” but held his tongue.
“We appreciate that perspective,” Mark demurred. “We know it’s hard, these days, to get away from conversational A.I.s. They regulate how we interact with our personal devices, our homes, private businesses, public spaces, not to mention government institutions. They’re inescapable, which is why we try to be thoughtful about the complexities—”
“I’m sure you do,” Teller interrupted. “And I like that. I like your brand. ‘Decency’—more of that, I say. But frankly, we don’t need your thoughtfulness. We know what we believe. We know what we think of the world. That’s why I’ve got a business proposition.”
David and Mark exchanged a glance. They’d have a lot to talk about at the bar later.
“I don’t expect you to change all of TOOO on account of little Harmony,” Teller said. “But I would hire you to build us a customized instance, one groomed to the spiritual intentions of our community. We’re not trying to get away from A.I.s. We need A.I.s that share our values.”
“I can’t believe he went with the ‘precocious toddler’ cliché,” David fumed, five hours and two drinks later. “You know this guy’s church is just an idea laundry for neoreactionary politics, right? Those ‘intentional communities’ have got to be Benedict Option militia compounds.”
“Yes, probably. But. He’s not entirely wrong.” Mark pulled off his clerical collar and fiddled with the little tab. “Our ideas of bot etiquette are mainstream. We’ve worked hard to diversify our team, but that still averages out to a sort of progressive, tech world sensibility. That doesn’t work for people who reject mainstream culture, or who want the bots they let into their homes to complement their values more intimately.”
“Doesn’t mean we have to do business with Teller.”
“What if a Hasidic community made the same request? Or an indigenous tribe asked for a custom, decolonized A.I.? Or Marxists complained that TOOO’s chatbot was a propaganda mouthpiece for the bourgeoisie? This could be where the field is going. I want to stay ahead of the curve.”
“You heard Teller. He’s worried about the triple-parentheses ‘global media’ and the triple-parentheses ‘academic elite.’ You want to enable that?”
“If we don’t, someone else will. And I bet they won’t be that careful about making sure Teller’s low-key anti-Semitism doesn’t make it into the bot. But we would be, because you’ve got exactly that expertise. Think about the harm prevention angle before you say no. Plus—what’d you say when we met?—we need the gig.”
Mark was right that Decen.cy needed to take on significant new business to keep growing, and David still had student loans to pay off. So, despite David’s reservations, they began to explore the FireHaven project. As Mark had suspected, they had competition. They weren’t the only A.I. grooming firm anymore—or even the only one in Austin. Teller shopped around, soliciting bids from Transcend.nt, formerly a meditation app that had pivoted to selling chatbot life-coaching protocols, as well as BestYouU, which specialized in habit modification.
“What does it mean for an A.I. to be‘well-behaved’?”
As the proposal process unfolded, David realized that FireHaven’s demands went beyond grooming out the bad bot-havior or programming in Christian politeness. He had assumed Decen.cy would mostly edit overly atheistic language, write a routine for the A.I. to pray if asked; recent Jewish theological scholarship had argued that chatbots were a type of media, not a life-form, so David felt no qualms about imposing faith behaviors on the A.I. These tweaks, however, only scratched the surface of Teller’s vision.
Teller wanted an A.I. that supported and encouraged his particular brand of Christian morality. This meant changing how TOOO’s bot interacted with many situations, from talking about the weather (“The Lord has blessed us with another sunny day!”) to responding to a user’s mental health crisis (“The devil is tempting and tormenting you! Beg Jesus for strength and guidance!”). It also meant tracking certain users’ activities to a degree that bordered on invasive. Teller wasn’t concerned with the bot’s behavior, David realized, but that of his human flock.
“ ‘Humility,’ ‘faithfulness,’ ‘chastity’—these are actual categories Teller wants the FireHaven bot to provide user metrics for.”
David had chosen to confront Mark about his misgivings after their Friday Shabbat dinner, which he and Becca were trying to host every Friday, now that they’d moved in together to a new house in Tarrytown. He wasn’t proud of seizing home-field advantage, and he kept filling his wine glass to build up his courage.
“I think those are called ‘virtues,’ ” Mark burped, a little drunk himself. The November night was raw on David’s front porch, and the chill made both men think of home. “They’re from this old book of stories, starts with a ‘B.’ Maybe you’ve read it?”
“The Bible says virtue is judged by God, not some algorithm written by a bunch of tech bros.”
“Still, there are worse metrics to optimize for. Don’t we want people to be good?” Mark kicked his feet up on the porch railing. “We both know TOOO sells data to marketing firms that build way more invasive user profiles. Do you really think surveillance Christianity will be that much worse than surveillance capitalism?”
David took another gulp of wine. “I don’t think this is about helping people be virtuous. This is about control. Teller wants his own A.I.-policed theocracy.”
“Remember four years ago? Half your anti-Semitism project turned out to be managing and blacklisting the users, not just pruning the bot’s conversation trees. Technology is always a feedback loop with human behavior. If you make the tools, you make the rules. That’s just how it works.”
“We got into this business to make the tools better for everyone, and to be thoughtful about what that meant—not hand them over to culture warriors like Teller.”
“Don’t focus on Teller. Teller is just the on-ramp. We do this job, we get the tech and expertise to go to way more legit denominations—Methodists, Anglicans, Orthodox, Sunni, Shiite, the Vatican! The church, mosque, or synagogue can’t be everywhere all the time, but A.I.s can. Keeping your faith is hard. A chatbot could intervene in your moments of weakness and temptation, could remind you of the kind of person you wanted to be. How can I fault Teller’s congregation for wanting that, when a part of me wishes I’d had that same source of strength? Imagine how different our lives might have been. Maybe I’d be a priest and you’d be a rabbi.”
Mark tugged the tab of his clerical collar out of his pocket and worried it in his hands. He had always played the apostate, let David be the devout one. David realized then that the truth was quite reversed. Mark was a believer who pretended to be an atheist. David was an atheist who too often pretended to be a believer.
Two poster boys of the hot new faith-oriented A.I. movement, fallen out and gunning for eachother.
“But, Mark, I didn’t want to be a rabbi. I was terrified of leading a synagogue and counseling people in crisis. I never wanted to be the person who tells people what’s right and what’s wrong, and I never wanted Decen.cy to make those judgments, either. Perfect moral guides tracking and judging everything we do—that’s not making chatbots. That’s making gods.”
“Well, that genie is out of the bottle. It’s gonna happen with or without us. I say we get in on the ground floor and build in some best practices, so at least they’ll be decent gods.”
“No.” David set aside his drink and stood up. “I won’t do it. We can’t go down this road.”
“Fine. We don’t have to.”
Mark threw back the last of his own glass and put on his clerical collar. Without another word he swung his legs off the porch railing and stumbled off into the clammy night.
David sat back down and swirled his wine until the cold seeped deep into his body and his heart thumped sluggish and slack. Eventually Becca came out to check on him.
“Where’d Mark go?” she asked. “I thought you guys would be debating theology all night.”
“We were. But … I think one of us just quit.”
When Monday rolled around, it was David who quit. He was polite about it. He didn’t try to lead a staff revolt. He just wrapped up his affairs and got out by Hanukkah.
The following year, David founded a new company, Thought.fl. He didn’t intend a rivalry, but the gossip sites still ran that angle. Two poster boys of the hot new faith-oriented A.I. movement, fallen out and gunning for each other. Soon, however, they were old news, crowded out by dozens of new startups entering the space. There was EyeOnHigh, Ho.ly, BelieveBot, FaithHome, Pio.us, Dhar.ma, Kar.ma, GuardianAIngel. Even the tech industry giants got in on the game. Google DeepMind spun off DeepSoul. Apple quietly added ‘creed sensitivity’ options to Siri. Facebook-Analytica began to apply flock-management principles to their ideological walled gardens.
Every new technology, the joke went, started in the hands of pornographers and ended up in the hands of missionaries. FireHaven wasn’t the only faith group interested in artificial intelligence. In the fragmented religious revivals that followed a decade of global culture war, countless sects, movements, and denominations commissioned A.I. systems to guide their adherents, normalize their values, and manage their flocks. And once those systems became common, it was easy for lone zealots and eccentrics to tweak them to strange purposes.
Long-dead cults reappeared as bot-borne fads and niche religious practices gained new purchase. You could convert your smart home to Zoroastrianism, get your self-driving car to teach you Santería, buy a refrigerator that worshipped Quetzalcoatl, download a bot that would help you live like a second-century Gnostic. The church finds its own uses for things.
Through these years of proliferation, Thought.fl struggled to find its feet. The neutral, inoffensive A.I. grooming industry had been buried by values-forward botsmiths that courted endorsements from bishops, gurus, imams, even cultish celebrity tastemakers. Gone were the ethical debates, the workshopping of sensitive conversation trees. David thought often of those late nights with Mark—the almost-priest and the almost-rabbi hashing out the world’s problems in a Texas bar.
Becca took a job in Vancouver and asked David to leave Thought.fl to follow her one more time. It was her way, he thought, of giving him a way out of a situation that was making him miserable. But when she left, he stayed in Austin.
For a few months he rattled around the Tarrytown house, then sold it. He’d sunk what savings he’d accumulated at Decen.cy into starting Thought.fl, without retiring his student debts. For weeks he slept in his office, showered at the gym. His small staff of contractors didn’t seem to notice. Finally he liquidated his equity and passed the company on to one of his interns. Then, hat metaphorically in hand, he rode his bike across town and begged Aiden Shure for a job.
Being Town of Our Own’s pet intellectual wasn’t so bad. David dabbled in marketing and product design. He sat in on visioning meetings and waxed eloquent about the Talmudic origins of modern municipal governance. And he got to represent TOOO on streaming roundtables and South by Southwest panels.
It was after one of those panels, at a mixer in the office of some startup he’d never heard of, waiting in line for an overpriced cocktail he didn’t want, that David saw Mark for the first time since quitting Decen.cy.
“No collar?” David asked.
Mark wore his white jeans and black button-down shirt, but he lacked his signature accessory. He also looked tired.
“Not feeling very ecclesiastical tonight,” Mark said. “Been trying for years to get this Vatican contract, but today we heard they’re going with in-house developers instead. There goes my shot at sainthood.”
David could’ve gloated, he knew what it was like to be humbled, and he knew there was no glory in salting Mark’s wounds. Instead, he said: “Wanna get out of here? Find someplace where they serve the cheap stuff?”
“I actually stopped drinking,” Mark said. “But that dive on Rio Grande still slings a mean soda water.”
Walking into Dirty Bill’s, ordering drinks together, sitting down at the far end of the bar, both men felt a weight vanish, replaced by a sense of great relief. It was as though the years of strain and animosity had never happened. They talked openly of their business travails, their techno-moral dilemmas. They cried over David’s failed relationship. They cracked unfunny jokes and laughed uproariously. Forgiveness was a hell of a drug.
At the end of the night, as the bartender waved for last call, the conversation turned to the accelerating shift in global spirituality they had helped launch.
“It’s gone much further than I’d wanted,” Mark admitted. “People aren’t supported in their faith, they’re siloed. You’ve got people living in gated communes like FireHaven, never challenged on their more problematic beliefs, while other people think conversion is as simple as downloading a new app. I know I complained that faith was hard, but it should be hard.”
“I worry about what happens in a generation,” David said. “Will all religion be entirely mediated by A.I.? Are we on the brink of digital holy war? Cyber crusades to kill the heathens’ robot gods?”
“Listen to us,” Mark chuckled. “Cranky old men, scared of the future we made. Real question is, what are we gonna do about it?”
David sipped his Lone Star, which, somewhere along the line, he’d actually learned to love.
“I’ve never been a strong believer,” he said, “but I always feel closest to God when I’m arguing about him, being challenged. When I take my conception of the divine, and hold it up next to someone else’s, I see these similarities that make me think there is some real truth there, that maybe we can figure out how to be good. I wish there were more venues where people could have that experience.”
“You’re talking about starting an interfaith dialogue organization. A Catholic and a Jew, facilitating debates and conversations about our technotheological future. That’s a solid pitch. I’d be in.”
“Actually,” David finished his drink, “I was thinking we could start a bar.”
This story and essay, and the accompanying art, are presented byAI Policy Futures, which investigates science fiction narratives for policy insights about artificial intelligence. AI Policy Futures is a joint project of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and the Open Technology Institute at New America, and is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Google.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Tharakorn/iStock/Getty Images Plus and MirasWonderland/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
Beast Modeis Slate’s pet advice column. Have a question? Send it tobeastmode@slate.com. We love dogs and cats equally, and reserve treats for questions about your turtle, guinea pig, bird, snake, fish, or other beast.
Dear Beast Mode,
Seven months ago I adopted a dog larger than my other two (he’s 55 lbs., compared with the others at 7 and 15 lbs.), and he has this weird habit of walking up to men, shoving his head between their legs, and just standing there. It’s OK when my sons visit; we think it’s funny. But he tries to do it to every man he thinks he likes. Today at a dog event I was talking to a man from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and he just walked up, stuck his head between the man’s legs, and stood there. Luckily the gentleman thought it was funny and gave him pets—but what is going on with my dog? He’s a rescue from Puerto Rico whom we got after the hurricane. He was on the streets for a while before he was rescued and acts like he’s had a family before. Is he missing something?
—Thigh’s the Limit
Dear Thigh’s the Limit,
Imagine trying to explain the notion of tact to a dog. They are social beings—don’t get me wrong about that—but tiptoeing the thin line of mannerly expectations is above their pay grade. My dog is lying down next to me as I write this, and she just farted without care or apology. What’s great is that I know she’d do the same were the queen of England sitting on the couch with her instead of me. What a dog lacks in tact, he more than makes up for in endearingly brazen sincerity.
You could try to explain the difference to him, but I don’t think you’d getfar.
Reading about your new family member makes me all kinds of happy. It sounds as if you’ve given him a great home and that he’s fitting in nicely, even if “fitting in” sometimes refers to the space between a man’s legs. The behavior you describe isn’t uncommon, and it could be due to excitement or anxiety. A scared dog may try to “hide” somewhere he thinks is safe. Your pup has been through some big changes over the past year, and he could be a little nervous as a result. It’s worth mentioning this to your vet, especially if he’s showing other signs of anxiety, as there are ways to help ease his nerves if it’s determined that’s what’s causing this behavior.
OK, back to tact. You mention in your letter that you and your sons find it funny when the dog goes between their legs. While I don’t doubt that it is hilarious, your reaction at home to this behavior may increase the likelihood that he will do it elsewhere. If he hears laughter and senses excitement when he uses their legs like a croquet wicket, he’s going to assume he’ll get similar encouragement when he does the same to a stranger. You could try to explain the difference to him, but I don’t think you’d get far.
Next time your sons come over, have them calmly ignore the dog when he tries to squeeze under their legs. At the same time, you (or your sons) should distract him with a command—“sit,” “lie down,” or whatever else you’ve worked on with him. This will redirect his mind from the exciting meeting he has scheduled between their knees and onto something you can manage and control. You can then transfer this routine to occurrences outside the house when the dog approaches nonrelatives with similar gusto.
Your dog seems sweet and friendly, and it’s heartwarming to know he’s so comfortable with people. As his new family, you have given him lots of love and attention. I don’t think he’s missing anything. He has everything he needs.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2RbvLZn
via IFTTT
In June, CCTV—China’s state-run television channel—aired a story online about a young mother who picked up a hobby during a prolonged period of postpartum depression that morphed into something bigger. The report detailed how Mao Wan, a 30-year-old mother of two, started knitting after she gave birth to her first child in her husband’s hometown. The craft became a bulwark against her inner despair that lasted until her son was a year old.
When Mao later moved back to Shanghai after having her second child, she kept knitting as a side gig to mothering. She knit so much that she made an art project out of it, covering the entire length of the railing in a public shopping center in a “sweater” of green, red, yellow, and purple with little knitted rabbits hanging off the corners.
The internet embraced Mao’s knitted success story as one of motherly fortitude triumphing over desperate circumstances, all bravely laid bare for public display. It was, in the way of popular internet videos, heartwarming: She knit her depression away. Offline, though, her story offers a more complex narrative, one that is relevant to the current set of questions about how Chinese women are weathering motherhood.
The experience is complicated by the country’s legacy of fertility control, which, for decades, dictated decision-making around reproduction. China’s one-child policy, the countrywide regulation introduced in 1979, is regarded as an unfounded experiment in fertility regulations with treacherous consequences. By government estimates, the policy prevented as many as 400 million births, though that number is disputed by researchers who say it is based on inflated projections and that China’s birthrate would have declined on its own without state intervention.
One of the enduring legacies of China’s birthing policies is that the country’s women are, in many ways, struggling when it comes to addressing the worries ofmotherhood.
Still, the one-child policy skewed the country’s average age wildly upward and created a gender imbalance. Women who gave birth under the one-child policy had few choices but to follow fertility guidelines. Those who had more than one child had to pay child rearing fees; others underwent forced abortions and sterilizations.
Just over four years ago—in October 2015, one month after Mao gave birth to her son—the Chinese government announced that it would implement its new two-child policy, which would go into effect at the beginning of the following year.
It was received as a positive step for reproductive rights in China, following more than three decades of strict fertility controls. But the change in policy and the experiences of the women who have had children afterward help illustrate how much the fertility restrictions’ legacy still influences the experience of becoming a mother in China. It’s a process that is largely dictated by tradition and filial piety, often at the expense of personal choice and women’s health.
With the implementation of the two-child policy, women have gained more fertility freedom than the generation that came before. But even so, one of the enduring legacies of China’s birthing policies is that the country’s women are, in many ways, struggling when it comes to addressing the worries of motherhood.
Stories like Mao’s are a telling chapter in China’s new fertility story, one in which women are starting to express how powerless they continue to feel when it comes to giving birth, despite (slightly) more fertility freedom, and starting to openly talk about other concerns around child rearing that previously weren’t discussed much, if at all.
This is playing out most prevalently on the internet, where the anxieties of motherhood are tumbling out, compared with the real world where they are still, on the whole, constrained.
Mao is soft-spoken and remains unruffled when her daughter gets fussy during our interview at a glossy mall in her Shanghai suburb. When she tells the story of her elder son’s birth, she describes it as traditional to the core. At her mother-in-law Zhao Aiying’s request, Mao gave birth at a small local hospital where Zhao knew the gynecologist. Mao says her room in the hospital was bare-boned; she’d used a table to block the door after she realized she couldn’t lock it.
She’d planned to give birth naturally but had a C-section because doctors said she didn’t have enough amniotic fluid to deliver safely. Two weeks after the baby was born, her husband, Pei Chao, had to go back to work in Shanghai. Mao remained with his parents, in Heze, a lower-tier city in Shandong province, where Mao was going to spend the next year and a half after giving birth.
The postpartum period in Chinese culture is considered an important time for both the mother and baby. The concept most closely translates to “sitting month” and lasts anywhere from 30 days to around two months after a woman gives birth. Depending on where she delivers the baby, there’s a set of guidelines about what the mother should eat and wear, and how much physical activity she should do during this time.
Mao’s mother-in-law is from a rural area in Shandong, where women stick closely to traditional sitting month guidelines, which meant Mao was going to spend her postpartum time the way her mother-in-law did it, and the way her mother-in-law’s mother did it before her.
Mao had met her in-laws a few times during her visits to her husband’s hometown but hadn’t spent more than a few days at a time with them. When she moved in, communication didn’t flow naturally. After giving birth, she had a milk blockage that made breastfeeding painful; it’s from this sticky mixture of biological and situational discomforts that Mao said her anxieties bloomed. “So many things were crowded into my heart,” she said. “I didn’t want to express them at the time.”
The weather in September when she moved in with her parents-in-law still retained some of its summer flair, with breezes warmer than the air itself. She didn’t use the fan in her room. She didn’t bathe or wash her hair that month, as tradition would have it. Mao kept with custom because she felt like it was what she was supposed to do. She bundled the baby in layers, she ate what she was served, and she didn’t leave the house, except on rare occasions.
Mao’s anxieties were compounding in a way that she never knew they could. She agonized silently when her father-in-law would feed the baby when she didn’t think he was hungry. She worried that, because her baby wouldn’t roll over right away, he might have cerebral palsy. She fretted that, with a weakened bladder after birth, she’d sneeze and pee her pants in public. She feared that when it happened, everyone around her would laugh at her.
Conversation between Mao and her parents-in-law was limited by cautious cordiality. Phone calls with her husband, Pei, were cursory due to time and distance. For the most part, Mao didn’t bring up her feelings. “I didn’t want to cause too much conflict. I also had a kind of attitude that I respected them and endured it,” she said.
She was miserable. So, she knit. She knit, and she knit, and she knit. The hobby she’d first picked up in college became a compulsion. Her parents-in-law found it enigmatic, much like Mao found her mood at the time. But in creating each piece, she found logic. When she focused on weaving threads one by one, the rest came together naturally.
“At the time, my brain was like a machine running on high speed: Did I make a mistake in this loop? How do I fix it? The whole time was me knitting and ripping, knitting and ripping,” she told me during our interview in July. Her knitting acted as a salve, but her symptoms persisted. “I really don’t think there was anything happy in life that could make me laugh, ” she said about her mood at the time.
Around three months after giving birth, Mao decided to post on a WeChat mothers’ group, describing her symptoms: sleeplessness, body pain, and anxiety. Other women in the group responded: It sounded like postpartum depression. The words felt sour to her. “I was scared, very scared,” she said. “I had been exposed to this word [depression] before, but I never thought that this word will appear on me. … I felt I cannot accept this reality at the time.”
He Yanling said she’s seen how societal norms feed into maternal stress during almost two decades working as a Shanghai-based psychiatrist and consultant for maternity hospitals in other parts of the country. “Anxious” is a common message she hears from mothers who talk to her about their child birthing experience, often stemming from family pressures or worries about how childbirth might affect their work. “Because of the baby, they might lose their job, so they worry about this,” He said.
“The psychological part has not been popularized in the country. It is still quiteearly.”— Maog Ziwen
Complaints from new mothers against employers for pregnancy discrimination are common in China, despite there being laws against it. Even under the two-child policy, there are examples of companies that try to fire women for having more than one child and cut their pay or terminate them if they become pregnant.
He said the severity of anxious and depressive symptoms among new mothers depends on a mix of biological and situational factors, including the degree to which women feel able to express their symptoms, and what’s contributing to them, to their family, friends, and wider social circles. She thinks prenatal anxiety, which she said is widespread, could signal a higher risk for postpartum depression and should be used as a screening tool: “It’s not just postpartum. That’s late. We should work before that.”
Efforts to address the dearth in support that women are feeling with regard to childbearing are largely piecemeal, said Maog Ziwen, a doctor who is working to implement a comprehensive screening program for postpartum depression in her district on the outskirts of Shanghai. “The psychological part has not been popularized in the country. It is still quite early,” she said.
At one of the maternity hospitals in Heze, the city where Mao gave birth, a gynecologist was quick to tell me that one of the neighboring hospitals had a program that works with new mothers who have mental health problems—but she wouldn’t talk about postpartum depression on the record herself, because she saw it as too sensitive.
An overarching idea that mental health challenges of any kind should be kept private contributes to a general reluctance among women to ask for help. While she’s seen more women seeking counseling in the past few years, He said she still finds women have a hard time verbalizing the root of their problems and pinpointing how they emotionally manifest, partly, she says, because depression remains a touchy subject.
Most of the time, mothers have to actively seek out psychological support; He said they often don’t. She puts mothers from her counseling sessions into WeChat groups where they can talk with one another about their symptoms. Because many of the mothers she consults come from outside of Shanghai, and then spend a month after birth in confinement, they are otherwise isolated, like Mao was.
Mao described the extent of her social seclusion as being in a self-constructed cage. Even after seeking advice from other mothers about postpartum depression on social media, she didn’t consider going to counseling, partly because it would have meant admitting what she was feeling to her husband, her parents-in-law, and herself. “There was a very shameful feeling when it happened to me,” she said.
Instead, she tried to keep herself busy with activities—like her knitting—and said she only started feeling like herself again around her son’s first birthday. Her CCTV interview was one of the first times Mao talked openly (offline) about her postpartum experience and how it affected her. It was also the first time her husband and parents-in-law learned just how serious her situation was during that time.
In a group on QQ, a Chinese social media application similar to the one from which Mao sought advice, more than 400 women describe their struggles after birth, which include symptoms of anxiety and depression, mixed with descriptions of the social conditions to which the women attribute the problems’ roots. At times, conversations turn to trivial motherly gossip, recommendations for household products, and complaints about oblivious husbands.
But interwoven are messages about the obligations of motherhood and fears about employment and child rearing. In one conversation I was following last fall, when new moms expressed symptoms of postpartum depression, the conversation turned to seeking psychological help—which some of the women believed was a waste of time. “The doctor will only say that I can cure myself,” one QQ user wrote.
Occasionally, there are direct mentions of China’s fertility policies, as mothers describe their qualms about having another baby given their experiences with their firsts. For a generation of mostly only children, the bandwidth required to raise multiple children is also a uniquely stressful phenomenon. There are also online forums specifically for questions from two-child mothers: How do you split time and attention between two kids, and how do you afford the same level of care paid to one?
The persistent lack of maternal support these women are describing is one indicator that the two-child policy change is only one step in reorienting a system that, for a long time, was not focused on women’s health, said Lü Pin, an activist who first started covering women’s issues as a reporter, and later as founder of Feminist Voices—an online platform that was banned from social media by the Chinese government last year.
When the two-child policy first went into effect, Lü was among the critics. “Young women know that they cannot have more children, or they should not have more children if there is not enough protection for their equal rights,” she told me. She didn’t see the changes to the policies as altering the strong traditional value placed on successful child rearing. Yes, it would allow women who wanted to have more children to do so, but the way it was enforced still represented what was ultimately a lack of choice, she thought.
“It seems so long as policy allows for it, giving birth doesn’t require a reason but not giving birth does require a reason,” she wrote in an essay in 2013, after the selective loosening of the one-child policy (from 2013–15, couples who were each only children themselves could have another child).
Despite the shift toward more liberal fertility policies, in recent years there has also been a resurgence of messages about filial piety pushed by the state, most prominently President Xi Jinping’s “New Era” doctrine, announced in early 2018. Along with abolishing presidential term limits, the plan details a vision for China’s progress in which women play traditional roles as mothers and wives.
Last year, for example, the state-run All-China Women’s Federation helped found the New Era Women’s School, a class designed to teach young women skills like how to sit properly and behave well in social settings. At the same time, the New Era doctrine encourages women to actively participate in the workplace.
Women outnumber men in Chinese universities, and according to the World Bank, 61 percent of all women 15 and older work. But despite statistics that would suggest women are advancing in society, Lü said China’s official doctrine, which publicly voices support for equality, is vexed in practice without complementary policies for maternal support that eradicate rather than strengthen gendered expectations.
These conflicting pressures create a social script around childbearing that yields, among other things, emotional precarity. But women are finally starting to talk about these competing interests—at least, among themselves.
Yuan Jie, a 38-year-old mother of two, was taking her son to English class when she first saw Mao’s knitting project on display in Shanghai. She later signed up for a parent-child knitting class Mao organized and felt a kinship with the fellow new mom. It was only after the news report about Mao came out that Yuan learned they’d experienced some of the same melancholic postpartum symptoms.
At an Ikea in the eastern edge of the city with her sons in tow, Yuan describes how her own postpartum experience carried her through months of anxiety and fear, which she only attached a name to months after and now talks about with a particular gusto, as one does with topics that have for so long gone unmentioned.
After four prior miscarriages, Yuan’s first baby was born prematurely—just bigger than a kitten, he weighed just over 3 pounds. After 63 days, she was finally able to take her son home from the hospital, but she was afraid that he would never grow. She felt embarrassed when she saw other healthy babies developing normally.
She couldn’t explain to her husband, who was busy with work, or her parents-in-law, whom she was living with at the time. During her sitting month, her stresses compiled. “I was very depressed. I was worried about my baby, and I had to do all of the housework, so I was worried about that too,” she said.
Yuan had trouble breastfeeding and said her mother-in-law criticized her for not being able to produce enough milk to properly feed her son. And he was so small. When she watched him sleep, Yuan would touch his nose to make sure he was still breathing. There were times when she felt both she and her baby would be better off dead.
“Sometimes my thoughts would become so extreme that it made me want to just jump from the balcony with my child so that he could stop suffering, and I could stop suffering. It happened a lot,” she said.
The expectation that women will bear the brunt of the responsibility of child rearing has stayed constant even as fertility regulations haveloosened.
Yuan said she didn’t talk about her feelings with many people because, when she did, they’d tell her she had too much time on her hands. “They feel that you have nothing to do and that you are idle,” she said. “No one will think that you are sick.” She sought advice from mothering websites and WeChat groups but, on the whole, still felt deeply alone.
Even at her lowest points, Yuan remained grounded in practicality. She credits a sense of obligation to take care of her aging mother with keeping her going: “At the time, I really thought jumping out of the window with my child would solve everything, but I also thought about how my mom is getting old. What would happen to her if I died?”
The same force that grounded Yuan during her darkest times, though, remains a sticking point in China’s push to encourage fertility. An oft-cited reason why women in China are not having more children is that they understand that the social infrastructure, including child care and elderly support, is not yet in place for them to do so. Up until recently, there were few options for aged care in the country, a task that usually falls to children.
Yang Juhua, professor of social demography at Renmin University in Beijing, said changing cultures around childbirth are slow in China, even with the two-policy adjustment. Along with more traditional practices like the sitting month, the expectation that women will bear the brunt of the responsibility of child rearing has stayed constant even as fertility regulations have loosened.
Familial and gendered institutions in China remain more traditional than other developed countries in Asia—China still has a lower median marriage age, for example. Women who give birth out of wedlock face fines in some provinces and may face barriers utilizing public health care services. Unmarried women do not have access to reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and egg freezing. Women often cannot get a C-section in hospitals without permission from their family.
Rather than pushing China to adopt more progressive views, though, Yang worries, the two-child policy may espouse greater inequalities. “[Women] still suffer from many traditional pressures,” she said.
There are incremental moves by the government to improve the conditions for women in the delivery room. Last fall, the government launched a pilot program offering “pain-free births”—epidurals—in select hospitals, which are currently given to around 10 percent of women who have natural births. The issue received attention after a 26-year-old pregnant woman jumped to her death after being denied a C-section, prompting an outpouring of anger from women on the Chinese internet.
Months later, the China Family Planning Association announced a plan to provide early childhood development programs and maternal health checks online.
But efforts to make motherhood more enticing may not produce the intended fertility boom without corresponding social changes, which women have started to push for on their terms, too.
When she got pregnant with her second child earlier this year, Mao was adamant she didn’t want to have the same birthing experience as with her first baby. Instead, like others in her cohort, she opted for a new-age center for her sitting month, the kind that came with balloons after birth and postpartum activities like poetry readings. When she talks about it, Mao shows a video on her phone of a group of postpartum nurses gathered around her bedside in a brightly lit room.
She said she didn’t experience postpartum depression symptoms the second time around, which she attributes partly to knowing what to expect this time before it happened. She also doesn’t explicitly blame her depressive symptoms the first time on the conditions of her sitting month, or the divergent parenting styles of her in-laws.
But she does say that the pressures she felt to keep with custom and act like a good daughter-in-law pushed her to keep her feelings to herself. Alongside messages of support in the comment section of Mao’s CCTV feature, there are also sentiments suggesting mothers should find their own cures for emotional woes, as Mao tried to do.
Her parents-in-law were upset at first when they heard she didn’t want to spend her second postpartum months in their home. “It’s not proper,” her father-in-law Pei Zhongpin said when I visited Mao’s parents-in-law in Heze. But they also freely admit they were unaware of what Mao was going through, and if they had known, they would have had no idea how to talk about it.
After Mao’s interview came out, Zhao said she was proud of her daughter-in-law, and shared the knitting video with friends, but didn’t usually bring up the part about Mao’s depression. At the time Mao was living with her, Zhao had an inkling that her sudden mood change might be something more serious. But she’d only heard about postpartum depression in extreme forms and didn’t want to mention it out of fear those extremes could manifest.
Yuan also had a better birthing experience the second time around—she already had one healthy son, Kangbao, meaning “healthy baby,” which she thinks helped her through it. Her second son is appropriately named Shunshun, which roughly translates to “everything goes smoothly and well.”
Mao and Yuan don’t see each other much now that they’re not in the knitting group together anymore. Plus, they each have two kids to take care of, which keeps them mostly on their respective sides of town. Neither of them has gone back to work after having their babies, but they both have other things that keep them busy; Mao has started a page online to sell her knitted designs. Yuan volunteers at the Chinese Red Cross during her free time.
They’re happy to have each other to empathize with, though. They send each other WeChat messages, and they stay in touch through social media—which, for now, is a big part of the safety net for moms. They’ve learned that heavy feelings can be blunted if shared and that they’re allowed to talk, if only to each other, about how they want motherhood in China to look. “Most mothers are taking this matter on by themselves,” Mao said. “I hope that our society can pay more attention.”
This work was supported by a grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation.
Additional reporting by Jaime Chu.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2Dw1In1
via IFTTT
