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Queer and Black and Hiking the Appalachian Trail: Rahawa Haile on Going it Alone

Photo by Tracy Keller (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Outside, Rahawa Haile shares her story of hiking the Appalachian Trail as a queer black woman in the spring of 2016 — traveling through hundreds of miles in states that staunchly supported Donald Trump in the election.

Heading north from Springer Mountain in Georgia, the Appalachian Trail class of 2017 would have to walk 670 miles before reaching the first county that did not vote for Donald Trump. The average percentage of voters who did vote for Trump—a xenophobic candidate who was supported by David Duke—in those miles? Seventy-six. Approximately 30 miles farther away, they’d come to a hiker ­hostel that proudly flies a Confederate flag. Later they would reach the Lewis Mountain campground in Shenandoah National Park—created in Virginia in 1935, dur­ing the Jim Crow era—and read plaques acknowledging its former history as the segregated Lewis Mountain Negro Area. The campground was swarming with RVs flying Confederate flags when I hiked through. This flag would haunt the hikers all the way to Mount Katahdin, the trail’s end point, in northern Maine. They would see it in every state, feeling the tendrils of hatred that rooted it to the land they walked upon.

There were days when the only thing that kept me going was knowing that each step was one toward progress, a boot to the granite face of white supremacy. I belong here, I told the trail. It rewarded me in lasting ways. The weight I carried as a black woman paled in comparison with the joy I felt daily among my peers in that wilderness. They shaped my heart into what it will be for the rest of my life.

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‘Hopely I’ll See You Again’: An Unlikely but Wonderful Love Affair

Photo by wp paarz (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Catapult, Noah Cho ruminates on why his mother, a “symbol of America, the homecoming queen,” was attracted to his father, a “barely-bilingual” Korean immigrant who came to the U.S. to pursue a career in medicine.

I’ve been thinking about how my parents met, and how unlikely it was that my Korean father caught the eye of my stereotypically “all-American” mom. Even now, forty years after they met, a partnership like theirs is still rare. The cutting remarks they heard have not entirely disappeared; queries my mother fielded about my father’s manhood from the white people around them still flicker in shows like The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and in films like The Hangover. Korean ahjussis still grunt in disapproval over their sons abandoning Korean blood quantum in favor of people Not Like Them, and therefore inferior.

I never got the full story from my father, who died when I was thirteen. Even before his death, he was a man of few words and seemingly fewer emotions. I have only ever been able to understand their courtship from the perspective of my mother, a white woman in love with an Asian man at a time when a war in Southeast Asia raged and the only knowledge the average American had of Korea were fleeting memories of newsreels, battles of a forgotten war.

Once upon a time, seeing my father in the hospital where they both worked brought her the greatest joy. As the whirring of machines tie him to what remains of his life, he is handsome to her even now—no matter that the chemo has taken his hair and the cancer has taken his weight, his voice, his lucidity. She looks at him, still in love, still seeing something wonderful in his face, but she also knows she has lost him. I see her sitting beside him after the ventilator is turned off, holding his hands the same way she used to during their smoke breaks, saying goodbye. Thinking, Hopely I’ll see you again.

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Why Dylan Matthews Donated His Kidney to a Stranger and You Should Too

Photo by ben alexander (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Dylan Matthews donated his left kidney to a perfect stranger, in what’s known as a “non-directed” donation. Dylan’s kidney initiated a donation chain in which four people received live-saving kidney transplants. Read his account at Vox.

On Monday, August 22, 2016, a surgical team at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore removed my left kidney. It was then drained of blood, flushed with a preservative solution, placed on ice, and flown to Cincinnati.

Surgeons in Cincinnati then transplanted the kidney into a recipient I’d never met and whose name I didn’t know; we didn’t correspond until this past month. The only thing I knew about him at the time was that he needed my kidney more than I did. It would let him avoid the physically draining experience of dialysis and possibly live an extra nine to 10 years, maybe more.

This is why getting a kidney is such a big deal: The recipient gains about a decade of life, on average. They get to see their children and grandchildren grow, to spend more time with their partner and their friends, and to escape a painful, exhausting procedure (dialysis) that would otherwise consume half their days. And the toll on the donor is tiny in comparison.

Before the surgery, one of the nurses told me that most patients get to a point, usually three to four weeks after the surgery, where they stop and realize that they feel completely normal again. I hit that point in my second week back at work. It was less that I felt something specific, and more that I didn’t feel anything weird or different anymore. My life was back to where it was pre-surgery. And it had happened really, really fast.

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Sesame Street’s New Autistic Character Could Be Groundbreaking

From left, actress Holly Robinson Peete, and Sesame Street character Abby Cadabby introduce the newest Sesame Street muppet Julia, a muppet with autism. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

At Vox, Dylan Matthews reflects on growing up with autism and reviews Sesame Street’s approach to raising awareness in its first episode featuring Julia, a new muppet who has autism.

Sesame Street doesn’t focus on Julia navigating her world, but rather on on Elmo and Abby Cadabby—a neurotypical monster and fairy, respectively—who help Big Bird understand why Julia plays and acts the way she does. Elmo and Abby revel in Julia’s style of play and in doing so, encourage Big Bird to join in the fun. Matthews posits that with Sesame Street’s clout among the young, and the research to back up the fact that the show “encourages prosocial, cooperative behavior among children,” Julia could have a real influence on how society embraces those with autism in the future.

And for children, it requires taking steps to deter bullying and encourage neurotypical children to accept and not ostracize autistic kids. The great thing about that message is that it’s a perfect fit for the overall Sesame Street ethos: that we all belong in the same neighborhood, that we can all get along and play together, that our differences should in no way inhibit our ability to act as a community. Sesame Street has never been about pity or pathologizing differences. It’s always been about inclusion.

“She’s not like any friend I’ve ever had before,” Big Bird tells the gang. “Yeah, but none of us are exactly the same,” Elmo responds.

“You’re a bird, Elmo’s a monster, and I’m a fairy,” Abby concurs. “We’re all different.” They end the segment with a rousing rendition of “We Can All Be Friends.”

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What it Means to be Korean in the West

Mu -- Spicy Korean radish. Photo by Tim Evanson. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

While searching for a Korean radish called mu to make her grandmother’s soup, Vivien Lee meditates on family and food—what it means to be Korean in the West—where the burning desire for individuality is at odds with the communal approach to life, food, and family in the East.

Every other New Year, I’ve withdrawn from the potentially memorable (or not so memorable) eve of clinking champagne flutes with strangers to rise soberly at 6 a.m. with my family in Virginia, for an ancestral food ceremony called jesa.

These early mornings usually begin darker than day; a Prussian blue while my father wakes to light candles, opening the window to call his late father’s spirit in. The table takes a few hours to set, glorified with plates of dried fish, rice wine, jujubes, persimmon, pear, liver, and rice cake soup for my grandfather. After three rounds of synchronized bows, my sisters and I sit by his portrait to whisper gratitude and think of the other Lees who came and left before us. Once our silence is pardoned, we eat. Just as everyone’s ready to be done, grandma surprises us with more food, this time, with bowls of radish soup. During the Korean War she’d known what starvation was, and since then she has made sure that no one ever leaves a table still hungry. Eat more, she always insists.

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Curiosity, Unfettered: Margaret Atwood as the Prophet of Dystopia

Photo by Larry D. Moore (CC BY-SA 4.0)

At The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead profiles Margaret Atwood, Canada’s prolific queen of literature. Mead and Atwood cover the resonance of The Handmaid’s Tale in Donald Trump’s America, Atwood’s approach to feminism, and the purpose of fiction today. Beloved for her incisive mind along with her works, Atwood uses unlimited curiosity as her approach to a life well-lived—whether that’s tenting while birding in Panama, engaging with her 1.5 million Twitter followers, or writing as a septuagenarian. “I don’t think she judges anything in advance as being beneath her, or beyond her, or outside her realm of interest,” says her friend and collaborator, Naomi Alderman.

Atwood has long been Canada’s most famous writer, and current events have polished the oracular sheen of her reputation. With the election of an American President whose campaign trafficked openly in the deprecation of women—and who, on his first working day in office, signed an executive order withdrawing federal funds from overseas women’s-health organizations that offer abortion services—the novel that Atwood dedicated to Mary Webster has reappeared on best-seller lists. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is also about to be serialized on television, in an adaptation, starring Elisabeth Moss, that will stream on Hulu. The timing could not be more fortuitous, though many people may wish that it were less so. In a photograph taken the day after the Inauguration, at the Women’s March on Washington, a protester held a sign bearing a slogan that spoke to the moment: “MAKE MARGARET ATWOOD FICTION AGAIN.”

Given that her works are a mainstay of women’s-studies curricula, and that she is clearly committed to women’s rights, Atwood’s resistance to a straightforward association with feminism can come as a surprise. But this wariness reflects her bent toward precision, and a scientific sensibility that was ingrained from childhood: Atwood wants the terms defined before she will state her position. Her feminism assumes women’s rights to be human rights, and is born of having been raised with a presumption of absolute equality between the sexes. “My problem was not that people wanted me to wear frilly pink dresses—it was that I wanted to wear frilly pink dresses, and my mother, being as she was, didn’t see any reason for that,” she said. Atwood’s early years in the forest endowed her with a sense of self-determination, and with a critical distance on codes of femininity—an ability to see those codes as cultural practices worthy of investigation, not as necessary conditions to be accepted unthinkingly. This capacity for quizzical scrutiny underlies much of her fiction: not accepting the world as it is permits Atwood to imagine the world as it might be.

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In the Shadow of a Fairy Tale: Overcoming the Evil Stepmother Stereotype

Photo by Jeff Christiansen (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Leslie Jamison is stepmother to Lily, age six. Lily’s mother died of cancer just before she turned three, and in this essay from the New York Times Magazine, Jamison explores fairy tale stepmothers both as the rare “port in the storm” and the much more common “stock villain” stereotyped by cruelty and abuse, as she navigates the fraught role of stand-in parent.

The evil stepmother casts a long, primal shadow, and three years ago I moved in with that shadow, to a one-bedroom rent-controlled apartment near Gramercy Park. I sought the old stories in order to find company—out of sympathy for the stepmothers they vilified—and to resist their narratives, to inoculate myself against the darkness they held.

My relationship with Lily, too, was not like the story we inherited from fairy tales — a tale of cruelty and rebellion—or even like the story of divorce-era popular media: the child spurning her stepmother, rejecting her in favor of the true mother, the mother of bloodline and womb. Our story was a thousand conversations on the 6 train or at the playground in Madison Square Park. Our story was painting Lily’s nails and trying not to smudge her tiny pinkie. Our story was telling her to take deep breaths during tantrums, because I needed to take deep breaths myself. Our story began one night when I felt her small, hot hand reach for mine during her favorite movie, when the Abominable Snowman swirled into view on an icy mountain and almost overwhelmed the humble reindeer.

For me, the stakes of thinking about what it means to be a stepmother don’t live in statistical relevance—slightly more than 10 percent of American women might relate!—but in the way stepparenting asks us to question our assumptions about the nature of love and the boundaries of family. Family is so much more than biology, and love is so much more than instinct. Love is effort and desire—not a sentimental story line about easy or immediate attachment, but the complicated bliss of joined lives: ham-and-guacamole sandwiches, growing pains at midnight, car seats covered in vomit. It’s the days of showing up. The trunks we inherit and the stories we step into, they make their way into us—by womb or shell or presence, by sheer force of will. But what hatches from the egg is hardly ever what we expect: the child that emerges, or the parent that is born. That mother is not a saint. She’s not a witch. She’s just an ordinary woman. She found a sled one day, after she was told there weren’t any left. That was how it began.

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Winnipeg’s Indigenous Bear Clan Patrol Protects the Vulnerable

drug parephenalia scattered on a sidewalk, black and white photo with splashes of red
Photo by Mr. Theklan (CC BY-SA 2.0)

After the body of 14-year-old Tina Fontaine was found in Winnipeg’s Red River in 2014, members of the community took action. At Vice, Geraldine Malone reports on the Bear Clan Patrol, a grassroots group that formed in Winnipeg’s North End neighborhood to walk the streets at night. Nearly three years later, over 530 volunteers act as “boots on the ground,” focusing on harm reduction by handing out condoms, offering rides, diffusing violent confrontations, preventing opioid overdoses by administering naloxone, and protecting the vulnerable to “get that village feel back,” as co-founder James Favel says. They’re “Trying to inspire people to care more about one another.”

Gathering in the small centre before patrol all of the volunteers grab their necessary gear: the bright yellow vests, plastic gloves and containers to store used needles they find on the street. There’s also bags of apples this night. A volunteer named Bob bought them and everyone fills their pockets with the fruit, a hot commodity on the streets, especially with kids. Sometimes they also have candy to hand out, the volunteers laugh that it’s a favorite of the kids.

One kid runs up with an envelope and whispers to a volunteer, “there are needles inside.” It’s taken some time for the Bear Clan to build this kind of trust. Favel says at first when they started people assumed it would be like most social efforts in this neighborhood—here one day and then gone the next. Good intentions with little follow through is something they know all too well.

Last fall they were in this same housing complex when a woman came outside screaming, Favel says. Two people had been drinking and got into a fight that escalated quickly when one of them brought out a machete. A guy had his fingers almost completely chopped off.

The Bear Clan Patrol have first-aid training and responded quickly, treating the severed fingers and calling for paramedics. It was because of that response the guy ended up keeping mobile fingers, Favel says.

Last November, many of the Bear Clan Patrol members were trained to administer naloxone, an overdose-reversing drug. Members carry the naloxone kits on patrol but they also work with paramedics if they come across someone who may be overdosing.

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How Tiny, Yet Über-Efficient Spider Brains Can Improve Computer Technology

Photo by Srikaanth Sekar (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In Scientific American, Erik Vance reports on how the orb weaver spider — a creature that weighs between .005 milligrams and three grams — has a brain that is just as adept at complex tasks as exponentially larger spiders. This “brain miniaturization” “may hold clues to innovative design strategies that engineers might incorporate in future generations of computers.”

The world’s smallest arachnid, the Samoan moss spider, is at a third of a millimeter nearly invisible to the human eye. The largest spider in the world is the goliath birdeater tarantula, which weighs 5 ounces and is about the size of a dinner plate. For reference, that is about the same difference in scale between that same tarantula and a bottlenose dolphin.

And yet the bigger spider does not act in more complex ways than its tiny counterpart. “Insects and spiders and the like—in terms of absolute size—have among the tiniest brains we’ve come across,” says William Wcislo, a scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City. “But their behavior, as far as we can see, is as sophisticated as things that have relatively large brains. So then there’s the question: How do they do that?”

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Month 13: What Happens After the Year-Long Syrian Refugee Sponsorship Ends?

Tima Kurdi, left, who lives in the Vancouver area, lifts up her 5-month-old nephew Sherwan Kurdi after her brother Mohammad Kurdi and his family, who escaped conflict in Syria, arrived at Vancouver International Airport, Monday, Dec. 28, 2015, in Richmond, British Columbia. Kurdi's three-year-old nephew, Alan Kurdi, drowned along with his five-year-old brother and their mother while crossing the waters between Turkey and Greece in September. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP)

It’s a year-long commitment to privately sponsor a Syrian refugee family in Canada, where sponsorship includes funding and helping the family navigate Canadian culture and society. Sponsors assist newcomers with daily tasks of living, including grocery shopping, banking, getting jobs, learning English, and ferrying families to appointments and activities. In the fourth and final installment of Refugees WelcomeThe New York Times’ year-long series on Syrian refugees in Canada — Jodi Kantor and Catrin Einhorn profile the Hajj family and members of their sponsorship group, reporting on what happens at month 13 — the point at which the sponsorship agreement officially ends.

Still, with the deadline nearing, the Hajj sponsors faced uncomfortable, nagging questions: Were they doing too much for the Syrian family? Should they stand back and stop acting as chauffeurs, planners and all-around fixers? Were they willing to let the family make mistakes? Even if they wanted to stop helping, would they be able to?

The sponsors, mostly retirees, had the time to help, and they thrived on their shared sense of mission. They wanted so much for the Hajjes: not just the basics, like language and literacy, but for them to participate in the mainstream of Canadian life. They could not bear the thought of the family becoming isolated, the parents marginalized, the children missing out on activities their own children had taken for granted.

One morning in February, Moutayam’s school bus failed to appear, so the boy dialed one sponsor after another until he got Ms. Karas, who rushed right over instead of letting his mother figure it out. She feared the boy would miss a day of school if she did not step in.

“The dependency comes from both sides,” said Sam Nammoura, a refugee advocate who observed similar situations in Calgary, Alberta, where he served as a liaison between sponsors and Syrians. “The newcomers fear taking risks, and the minute they take a risk, the sponsor thinks, ‘They don’t speak English, I will help them,’” he said.

Across the country, as Month 13 turned into Months 14 and 15, the early results of private sponsorship of Syrians looked a lot like Mr. Hajj’s progress — still tentative, but showing forward motion. According to early government figures, about half of privately sponsored adults were working full or part time.

As a group, they were outpacing the thousands more refugees who did not have sponsors and were being resettled by the government — only about 10 percent of them had jobs (on the whole, they were less educated and had higher rates of serious health problems and other needs). Previous refugees to Canada over the past decade — a mix of Iraqis, Afghans, Colombians, Eritreans and more — had followed the same pattern, with privately sponsored refugees more likely to be employed after a year at similar rates.

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