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On Self Reflection: An Incomplete List of My Failures

In this installment of “Mouthful,” a monthly column at Hazlitt about the author’s relationship with food ten years into her recovery from anorexia and bulimia, Sarah Gerard examines failure. She recounts failing a stranger, a failed project, and her failed marriage and considers how these experiences have affected her outlook on life and her ongoing recovery.

I have no excuse for why I asked these questions at the end. I offer this story as an example of earning someone’s trust and then breaking it because I failed to acknowledge my own limitations. I had assumed the role of an expert but in fact would have needed to spend years researching in order to write the book I wanted to write. I gave M. the impression that it was safe to open up to me, and my last questions for her were exploitative and dehumanizing — I could see it in her face; she shut down. Her story had thrown me into a state of mind where old survival techniques took over: my anorexia needed a number to explain what it was hearing, to make it safe again. I was weak and unprepared. I fell back on bad patterns.

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The Successful Startup That Disrupts Using Bees Instead of Code

Photo by Stéphane Magnenat (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Bitter Southerner, Iza Wojciechowska profiles fifth-generation beekeeper Leigh-Kathryn Bonner whose startup, Bee Downtown, has 100 sponsored hives on the roofs of old tobacco warehouses in Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The hives house thousands of bees who do their part to pollinate the cucumber, apple, and berry crops that are staples of North Carolina’s economy. Bonner is not only helping the local economy and the environment, she’s bucking convention in the traditionally male-dominated apiary industry.

Bee Downtown emphasizes education and spreading awareness about bees and their role in our environment.

“To have these hives in places where people can see them, and being able to visit schools and have kids look at bees, that gets people excited,” Leigh-Kathryn says. “And people care about things that make them excited.”

And there’s good reason to want that. Honeybees are the world’s No. 1 pollinator, pollinating 80 percent of Earth’s plants. Conventional wisdom translates that number into about every third bite of food we eat. That means bees contribute more than $153 billion to the world’s economy every year. In North Carolina, honeybees are critical to the production of cucumbers, apples, and blueberries, which North Carolina produces in large quantities for the entire country.

“People think it’s a man’s job because it’s manual labor,” she says. “People tell me, ‘You can’t move a 50-pound beehive,’ and I’m like, ‘Watch me, I’ll do it in heels and a dress if I want to.’”

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On the Frontline of Disaster: The Volunteer Ambulance Drivers of Karachi, Pakistan

Pakistani volunteer Latafatullah Hassan, second from left, working at the Edhi Foundation, waits for visitors to claim dead bodies, at a morgue in Karachi, Pakistan, Sunday, Nov. 13, 2016. (AP Photo/B.K. Bangash)

At The Guardian, Samira Shackle profiles Muhammad Safdar, an ambulance driver in Karachi, Pakistan, where religious violence, workplace disasters, and multiple explosions are just another day on the job. The Edhi Foundation’s ambulance service, which refuses state money and donations from businesses it deems unethical, is funded largely by donations from “the common man.” Standard work shifts run between 18 and 36 hours, and drivers earn about $1.30 US per day.

The impact of the explosion sent Muhammad Safdar flying backwards. He looked up from where he had landed and saw that the windows of his parked ambulance had shattered. As he tried to pick himself back up, fellow volunteer drivers working for the Edhi ambulance service gathered around him; it looked as if Safdar was bleeding. But he had not suffered any external injuries. “Human flesh got stuck to me,” he recalls now, as we sit in the ambulance control centre in downtown Karachi. “My friends were checking me for injuries, but it was pieces of other people. I was trembling hard and I couldn’t hear my own voice when I spoke. It sounded juddering. I could only hear whistles.”

Sporting red T-shirts emblazoned with bold white letters reading “EDHI”, these workers are a familiar sight at Pakistan’s all-too-common disaster scenes. Here in Karachi, a megalopolis of around 20 million people, there is no state ambulance service.

Like other Edhi ambulance drivers, Safdar is technically a volunteer and works for a basic salary of 4,300 Pakistani rupees a month (£33). A private driver would earn 10,000–15,000 rupees. This basic salary covers the high-risk rescue work; the easier “patient services” jobs – moving people between hospitals and transporting corpses – incur a small fee, so drivers receive a commission of around 100 rupees (76p) per trip. Sometimes patients tip. But clearly, money is not the motivating factor.

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Sleepover: Three Strangers, Spending One Night Together

Sook-Yin Lee, host of the Sleepover podcast. (AP PHOTO/CP, Adrian Wyld)

Born of a piece of performance art, Sleepover is a podcast by Sook-Yin Lee. In the show, now starting its second season, three strangers spend a night together, sharing their stories in a bid to solve one another’s problems. At Bello Collective, Galen Beebe interviews Lee about the show. Equal parts documentary and social experiment, Sleepover is transformative as a listening experience, creating true human connection in world of constant online communication, where emojis and stickers rule and 130 character limits leave us skimming the surface of important issues.

Galen: I’m not surprised people might be reluctant to participate — they have to vulnerable to a huge audience, not to mention the three strangers in the room. How do you get your guests to be vulnerable?

Sook-Yin: Most interviews happen within ten minutes. They’re focused on sound bites; people enter and they mostly present their presentational self. Being in Sleepover, it may begin that way and we’re all pulled to put our presentational self forward, but just the sheer fact of being in there for so long, you can only fake that for so long. Everybody is together in this experience, and a challenging one at that! We’re co-creators together. We’re all under the same stresses and in the same shared, intense undertaking. It’s almost like we’re in a marathon together. So I think that vulnerability comes from that. And I think the vulnerability comes from actually expressing and sharing that which is meaningful or disconcerting or scary with one another, and when you see somebody and hear them open up in that way, you’re more inclined to do that.

I have noticed that people will come to a sleepover with what they think is the problem, but invariably there is a deeper level to their problem. So on the surface it might be like, I am lonely and I would like a friend. But when you get beyond that elusive friend, what is underneath that, you know, why are you wearing armor? What’s happening? What is it that’s disabling you from letting people in? And then probably when you figure out the sublevel of that problem, the sub problem of the problem and the more meaningful problem, there’s likely another one underneath there, so really problems are just another word for life.

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How Thieves Are Stealing 6500-Ton Ships Off the Sea Floor

The U.S.S. Houston (with President Franklin Roosevelt standing under the big guns in 1938) is being stolen by pirates off the sea floor, piece by piece. (AP Photo/George Skadding)

At Outside, Kathryn Miles reports on how pirates are diving down to wrecks on the sea floor in search of scrap and are stealing 6500-ton ships in their entirety, leaving only the imprint of the massive hulls on the sea floor.

What these divers should have found was a 6,440-ton cruiser, complete with tower, turrets, and catapult—a ship long and large enough to launch a seaplane. Instead, they found only the impression of a hull on an empty seafloor. The vessel that had once lain there had first been discovered in 2001. It was surveyed a year later. Since then, recreational divers had visited. And sure, ocean currents can drag debris from a downed plane or even cause a renaissance galleon to resurface. But this was a massive steel ship. The only way it was going to go anywhere was if someone—or lots of someones—had moved it.

The team’s search for other battle casualties in the area was no less haunting. HMAS Perch, a 300-foot-long Australian submarine, was gone. So were two British ships—the 329-foot HMS Encounter and the 574-foot Exeter. Another, the 329-foot HMS Electra, had been gutted. A huge section of the Kortenaer, another 322-foot Dutch warship, was also missing. Seven ships in all—either lost without a trace or grossly scavenged. An eighth, the USS Houston, was mostly intact, but it was clear pirates had begun gutting it as well.

Sunken warships remain the property of their country of origin regardless of where they are found. Laws regarding their stewardship vary a little from nation to nation, but in general, the ships—and everything on or in them—belong to that country’s navy. There are even more specific rules, both stated and understood, for vessels containing human remains. It’s a code of conduct among divers: Let deceased sailors rest undisturbed.

But even for all this disturbance, the vessels and the lost souls they carried remained mostly intact. Until they disappeared altogether.

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The Uncommon Sadness of the Common Miscarriage

Ton Koene AP Images

At BuzzFeed, Laura Turner grapples with losing a child at 13 weeks and learns that miscarriage is more common than she had originally thought: “Women were always talking about it. It’s just that most people weren’t listening.”

When someone you know and love dies, your life changes, and it is the change that fuels your grief. You can’t call them or see them like you used to; you can only smell their cologne on the clothes that still hang in their closet. But when it’s a fetus that has died, or a baby, or whatever you want to call it, your life doesn’t change, and that’s the strange part — because it was supposed to.

Your belly was supposed to grow, but it doesn’t. Your breasts were supposed to get more tender, but they return to their normal size. Your office was supposed to be turned into a nursery, and you resented that, but now the plans for a crib and a changing table are gone and nothing at all needs to change. The sadness is in how things stay the same.

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How the Canadian Government Tried to “Remove the Indian From the Child”

Residential school survivor Lorna Standingready is comforted by a fellow survivor in the audience during the closing ceremony of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on Wednesday, June 3, 2015. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP)

Betty Ann Adam was three years old when she was taken from her mother in what is known as the “’60s Scoop,” a period spanning 30 years in which indigenous children in Canada were removed from their homes to be placed with white families as church-run residential schools were closing. “The government’s stated intention with the residential schools was to ‘remove the Indian from the child,’ by removing them from their parents and having them educated by white Christians” — another horrific, government-endorsed attempt at cultural genocide.

At the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Betty Ann Adam recounts her abduction, her trials fitting into white society, and her trepidation — and eventual joy — at being reunited with her blood relatives.

I’m in a police car. It’s a hot summer day and the seat is burning my legs. The woman puts me on her lap. Next, I’m in an airplane looking down at tiny cars on the road. Finally, I’m at the farm where I find myself, without knowing why, living a new life.

I was part of the Sixties Scoop. I’m an indigenous woman who was raised as a foster child in a non-native home. My birth mother, Mary Jane Adam, attended Holy Angels Indian Residential School in Fort Chipewyan, Alta. She left the school in her teens but never returned to the reserve to live.

I realized my indigenous identity had felt like a shadow that followed me and that I had feared all my life. When I stopped running and turned to meet it, I saw a friend. I saw my family. I saw myself.

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Carol Blevins: The Confidential Informant Who is Now A Target for Murder

Crystal Meth. Photo by: David-Wolfgang Ebener/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

In this epic, seven-part feature from the Dallas Morning News, Scott Farwell tells the story of Carol Blevins, a heroin addict and “Aryan Princess featherwood” (property of a gang member) who became the FBI’s most important confidential informant during a massive, six-year investigation into the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas — an organized crime syndicate responsible for over 100 murders and a huge drug trade. Blevins’ keen eye for detail helped take down 13 members of the gang. Not only does she suffer post-traumatic stress from her undercover work, the gang has signaled the “green light” on her assassination in a bid for revenge.

She lived with the ABT, gathering information the Cold War way – by sleuthing, connecting dots, memorizing detail.

Her spy work offered broad views (the ABT’s strategy for moving meth with Mexican cartels) and small insights (serial numbers on stolen guns).

In covert text messages, she pre-empted murders and interrupted robberies. She led police to drug drop houses, snapped photos connecting criminals to unsolved crimes, and prepped police when it came time to arrest men predisposed to violence.

Carol’s work sealed 13 convictions, contributed key information to at least 16 others, and juiced the careers of her government handlers.

The feds use most spies like matches – to strike fast, burn hot and flame out. Others fill disposable roles in sting operations, as drug buyers or middlemen who fence stolen property.

But agents say the most valuable CIs augur deep inside, where they learn to live in another skin, to lie and believe the lie, to infiltrate silently and investigate invisibly – like a colorless gas filling an empty vessel.

Carol was like that. She would do or say or risk anything to gain favor with the feds.

Then they cut her loose.

Medical records suggest Carol suffers from a range of mental illnesses — bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder — as a result of her work as a confidential informant.

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The Gun Barrel and the Damage Done: A Profile of Trauma Surgeon Amy Goldberg

44 Magnum. (AP Photo/Kai-Uwe Knoth)

What exactly does a bullet do to flesh as it careens through the body? At Highline, Jason Fagone profiles Philadelphia trauma surgeon Dr. Amy Goldberg, a woman on the front lines of gun violence as she attempts to repair the broken bodies that arrive daily at Temple University Hospital. Dr. Goldberg doesn’t only fix the damage, she’s also working to prevent it. After a patient died the third time he was shot, she worked with friend and coworker Scott Charles to create a social program, Turning Point, which has been instrumental in stopping gun violence before it starts.

More than 30,000 people die of gunshot wounds each year in America, around 75,000 more are injured, and we have no visceral sense of what physically happens inside a person when he’s shot. (Dr. Amy) Goldberg does.

“The creation of a person, you know. It’s the heart beating and the lungs bringing air. It is so miraculous.” Surgery, for Goldberg, was a way of honoring the miracle. And trauma surgery was the ultimate form of appreciation, because a surgeon in trauma experienced so much variety. She might be operating on the carotid artery in the neck, or the heart in the chest, or the large bowel or small bowel in the abdomen, or the femoral artery in the thigh, at any given moment, on any given night.

“As a country,” Goldberg said, “we lost our teachable moment.” She started talking about the 2012 murder of 20 schoolchildren and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Goldberg said that if people had been shown the autopsy photos of the kids, the gun debate would have been transformed. “The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. Ten-year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails.”

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She Got Hacked So You Don’t Have To

Image by Christoph Scholz (CC BY-SA 2.0)

It happened to John Podesta; it happened to Paul Manafort’s daughter; it’s a type of computer hack called “spearphishing,” a much more sophisticated attack than the clumsy mass-mail attempts to gain your online credentials. Social engineers target you alone by masquerading as someone you know, using your natural proclivity to trust against you. At GQ, Sarah Jeong willingly got spearphished in a bid to understand and share the latest shady tactics of computer baddies.

I got a taste of what might have tricked Andrea Manafort when an e-mail from my friend, Parker, inviting me to look at a Google Doc, landed in my inbox.

It had taken several hours to get to that point, hours during which I had sat back, watching Quintin construct an attack against me. He went through my social-media accounts, rifled through my work information, skimmed through my latest articles. The idea was to slip into my shoes and construct an e-mail that I would click on without thinking. The tried-and-true method is to pretend to be someone the person already knows, using social media to scout out connections to impersonate.

Good social engineers persuade people to give something away without a second thought, because the request is so innocuous—like a friend asking me to look at his or her Google Doc. Spearphishing is just another form of social engineering.

But protecting yourself against social engineering is an ongoing chore, like living through an endless April Fool’s Day. Your paranoia must be constantly pitted against a hacker’s persistence. For now I’m turning on my two-factor and my password manager, and squinting at web addresses—living as though the Internet is out to get me. Every day I stake my digital life on the hope that any would-be hackers will run out of time, money, and attention before I run out of luck. And whether you know it or not, you do, too.

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