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What should we do this weekend, go to the movies or sail a handmade raft to Polynesia?

The Joshua, one of the boats that competed in the original Golden Globe Race. (Photo by Jean-Pierre Bazard via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0).

Three week ago 17 skippers left the French port of Les Sables d’Olonne, all trying to circumnavigate the globe solo and with no technological assistance. The first (and only other) Golden Globe Race was in 1968. The race director for the 2018 edition, Don McIntyre, is not a man who shies away from a challenge — an understatement if there ever was one. The appropriately named Maggie Shipstead has all the detail in Outside.

McIntyre, an Australian, has made a colorful career for himself seeking out and facilitating adventure. In the 1980s, he started marine equipment importing and yacht-building businesses to fund his own participation in the BOC Challenge, a solo circumnavigation race with stops. McIntyre was second in his class in 1990. After that, he started running and guiding tourist trips to Antarctica; currently, he and his partner have a long-term lease on an island in Tonga, where they run whale swimming trips. McIntyre’s initial concept for the Golden Globe reboot, which first occurred to him in 1995, had been simpler: He would sail around himself for the 30th anniversary. At the time, he was spending a year in an 8×12-foot hut on Antarctica with his then wife. “I was sitting there in the box in the middle of winter thinking, what’s next, what’s next?” McIntyre said. He made plans and designed a boat, but life got in the way. He missed the 40th anniversary as well when he chose instead to recreate Captain Bligh’s 3,600-mile Pacific journey in a 24-foot open boat. These things happen.

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Searching for Caravaggio in the Kitchen

They say we eat with our eyes first — but is food nourishment, or art, or both? At Taste, art history professor Noah Charney tries to answer the question, looking at the similarities between professional kitchens and Renaissance artists’ studios.

Mechanically reproducing recipes well and consistently is all that most diners require. Cooking is largely a repetitive series of movements, following formulas we call recipes, and it can be taught at schools or through restaurant training. How to fillet sea bream, perfectly cook a steak, boil al dente pasta—these are attributes of disegno.

But it’s invenzione that distinguishes a great chef from a good cooks. “You have some chefs who are artists and have a vision, and those chefs are creative,” Ripert says. “They’re creative by inventing new techniques, by using new ingredients in new ways, by creating new flavors and consistencies, and so on.”

So let’s leave aside the good cooks and consider the great chefs. Are they up there with the great artists? Can Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner stand alongside Leonardo’s Last Supper, or Thomas Keller’s Oysters and Pearls beside Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring? And is David Gelb a modern-day Giorgio Vasari, filming, rather than writing, a sort of group biography of the greatest chef-artists of our age?

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Defined by Want

In “The Food of My Youth” at The New York Review of Books, Melissa Chadburn describes a childhood in which getting enough to eat was a much bigger concern than it should ever be. Eventually, she was removed from her mother’s care and put into a group home. There were regular meals there, but three meals a day doesn’t erase the scars of a childhood defined by want.

It was lonely there, but at least I didn’t have to worry about going hungry. I didn’t like to eat food prepared by other people—I was afraid I would taste their emotions—so I learned to cook the food provided by the county. It was largely frozen, prepared in bulk. Salad was a sturdy iceberg with sliced carrot slaw; the ground beef came in a fat tube. The group home kitchen, with all its canned food, and dates on plastic containers, resembled a bunker in the Midwest, as if we were all preparing for the apocalypse.

Only, for us, the explosions had already happened. The places we’d called home had been lit up and burned to the ground, with nothing left save for the blackened foundations of our past. We kids were screaming for love, for touch, for home. But we found ourselves in limbo, guarding our hearts, biding our time before the Unknown, waiting to see where we would end up. In that place of permanent temporariness, food was the only thing we had some control over; the rest was all court dates and social workers and group therapy and anger management.

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Welcome to the Jungle

Caitlin Moran, photo by chrisdonia via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In The Cut, Caitlin Moran tell us what it was like to be 18, newly in the big city (in this case, London), interested in sex, and with zero experience of men. Unsurprisingly, she learns quickly that there are a not-insignificant number of men whose “actual desire was just to be unpleasant to a woman somewhere private.”

Every woman I know has had a man like this; they’re a tollbooth you must pass through into true adulthood. The Classic Bad Man is a rite of passage. He should not have to be — it is not to womankind’s betterment that we learn to survive these things — but he is. And what I have observed is this: There are some men who simply desire to see unease and fear in a woman’s face. It is as if they get high off it. They huff it like cocaine. This is their addiction: making women scared. And they will spend their whole lives doing it. Do you know someone like this? I bet you do.

To be sure, there are also not-Bad Men, but interactions with them are frequently troubling as well — they’re working from a different cultural playbook:

This category of bad sexual experiences comes down to the fact that, at this point in history, men’s tabula for women is completely rasa, too. Every problem I had as a teenage girl, noncriminal men also have. There are no manuals about being a man who wishes to have swashbuckling sex adventures with his peers. There are no templates for how to approach a woman in a jolly and uplifting manner, discover her sexual preferences, get feedback while you’re rolling around naked, and learn from her without feeling oddly, horribly emasculated.

While my knowledge about the opposite sex came from MGM musicals and 19th-century literature, men’s tends to come from pornography and best-selling books by pickup artists. Men are working on the assumption they must either look like Burt Reynolds and bum a woman across a landing or else psychologically manipulate women into doing things they wouldn’t normally do, because sex is about, somehow, winning, rather than a collaboration between two people who delight in each other.

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Where Everybody Knows Your Pronouns

Someone holds a marshmallow stuck on the end of a wire over pile of flaming logs
Photo by Colby Stopa via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

T Cooper wrote about his experience at Camp Lost Boys, a retreat for transgender men, for Mother Jones magazine. Along with the hiking, campfires, water sports, and bonding came a new experience for some campers: the experience of being in a place where they didn’t have to make a point of specifying their pronouns.

The Colorado registration takes place in a log cabin where Rocco and Justin dispense bunk assignments, programs, backpacks, patches, and mugs emblazoned with the camp’s Park Service-­inspired logo. By the time a fifth camper lifts his Sharpie to ask whether we should put preferred gender pronouns on our nametags, Rocco looks set to explode: “No PGPs!” he yells, startling some new arrivals. “We are all men here!”

You can see the profound confusion in the eyes of the younger campers, who—unlike us older guys (many of whom transitioned more than a decade ago)—have marinated in a culture of inclusivity wherein every meeting or class begins with a roll call of names and pronouns so that everybody feels recognized. “To me, it’s not a courtesy to be asked your preferred gender pronoun,” Rocco continues, a bit more calmly now. He refers to the Lost Boys mission statement: “It’s been communicated explicitly that this camp is for self-defined men, even if being identified as a man can look different for everybody.”

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The Path to Healing is Lined with Small Bursts of Sweetness

Photo by LauralG via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Aaron Hamburger‘s essay in Tin HouseSweetness Mattered,” was our top #longread of the week last week, and with good reason. His story of gradual recovery from a vicious sexual assault, aided by Smarties candy, is equal parts heartbreaking and redemptive, told with simple, complete honesty. I won’t belabor things with any more of my words — go right to his.

Then the detective told us Bradley’s defense: I wanted it. Deep, hot color flooded my cheeks, and my voice caught in my throat. Still, I managed to choke out that it wasn’t true, that I kept telling him no, and the detective said quickly, “And I knew that, I just had to hear you say it.”

Later, as we staggered down the front steps of the police station, back to our car, I wondered if there’d been some kind of mistake. Had Bradley really thought I wanted it? I went over and over what had happened: his deep barking voice threatening to slice off my balls as if I were that dog his friends had mutilated, the knife he’d found in our kitchen drawer and held over me so it lightly grazed the surface of my skin, his fists finding the soft spots all over my body, the weight of his body pushing me so firmly against my parents’ bed I couldn’t breathe.

In all of these details of the actual events I was innocent. But in my mind, specifically that corner of my mind that knew that I liked boys and not girls, I felt guilty.

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You’re Not Clean Until You’re 110% Clean

A 35mg liquid dose of methadone (AP Photo/Kevin D. Liles, File).

Medication-assisted therapy (MAT) for drug addiction — that is, methadone or Suboxone — is a proven way to help addicts stay clean. Narcotics Anonymous programs offer community support that helps addicts stay clean, but turns away people who are using medication to aid their recovery. Why, if their goals are the same?

The misconception stems from the fact that most medications for treating addiction, like Suboxone and methadone, are opioid-based. With the correct prescription, an addict’s compulsive behavior, loss of control, constant cravings, and other hallmarks of addiction will usually vanish. But if you take too much, you will get high. The idea that MAT is just a replacement drug has been debunked countless times by medical organizations, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Nonetheless, Michael has been told that he is still a junkie, not only by people in the 12 Step meetings he used to go to, but also by friends: “They look at you like you are still using, that you are not sober, that you are basically still living the life of a drug addict, when you are not.” Michael has come to terms with the fact that he will probably have to take methadone for the rest of his life. He hates the stigma associated with his medicine, but he knows that he needs it to function.

Narcotics Anonymous requires complete detox, from all substances, before a person can enter the program. In The New Republic, Katrine Jo Anderson and Cecile Maria Kallestrup look at whether this stance actually exacerbates the opioid crisis — it not only keeps people apart from a potentially critical source of community support, but can be physically dangerous.

But what is accepted with grim resignation at the detox ward is a source of deep dismay for medical experts. “Detox without MAT is potentially dangerous,” said Bachaar Arnaout, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. “An overwhelmingly majority of people end up relapsing after detox. It’s a gamble with lives.”

When patients go through detox, their tolerance decreases drastically. If they fall off the wagon and take the dose of opioids they were used to, or even a lower dose, this can be enough to shut down vital body functions. This is especially the case today, Arnaout said, because the opioid epidemic is largely driven by fentanyl—an opioid up to 50 times more potent than heroin.

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The Law Is No Place for Ethics

Neal Katyal, the attorney who argued against the Trump administration in the case Trump v. Hawaii, speaks to the media outside the Supreme Court (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Lawfare‘s Quinta Jurecic does a close read of the U.S. Supreme Court opinion and dissents in Trump v. Hawaii, aka the Muslim travel ban case. The majority opinion upholding the ban might not be legally wrong according to the letter of the law — but should the SCOTUS look at what is just as well as what is legal?

While scholars of presidential power will debate for years to come whether the opinion of the court majority or Sotomayor’s dissent has the stronger legal case, Sotomayor’s opinion has a certain moral urgency of which Roberts and the majority have intentionally purged themselves. Roberts and Kennedy may be right as a technical matter that the president’s oath is not for the Supreme Court to judge. But their opinions, particularly by invoking Korematsu, raise anew the question that Jackson’s Korematsu dissent has long posed: What does it mean, in the face of profound ugliness on the part of the executive branch, to declare the judgment of that ugliness to have “no place in law”?

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The Little Franchise That Couldn’t

Photo by Julie Sweeney via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

In The Bitter Southerner, Keith Pandolfi introduces us to Miami trolley-based sandwich magnate Ollie Gleichenhaus, who worked for years to perfect the 36 herbs and spices that flavored his eponymous Ollieburger

Three decades later, to goose sales at his fledgling McDonald’s franchise in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, a former Bob’s Big Boy employee named Jim Delligatti… piled two beef patties, some “special sauce,” lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame-seed bun. He christened the burger “The Aristocrat,” but when he realized how difficult a time his customers had pronouncing the name, he came up with a new one — the Big Mac.

But those origin stories pale in comparison to the grandiose ambitions of Ollie Gleichenhaus, who professed an almost erotic connection to the burger he created.

“I started out to make the best hamburger,” he once told the Palm Beach Post. “It satisfies me … it turns me on.”

Eventually the same person responsible for turning KFC into a nationwide chain tried to do the same with the Ollieburger, working with Gleichenhaus to bring Ollie’s Trolley to every American. As you know if you’re traveled in the U.S., which is decidedly not dotted with Ollie’s Trolleys, it didn’t take off. Maybe that’s because America rejected the highly-spiced burger — or maybe it’s because the real secret sauce was Ollie himself, and there was no way to franchise him.

Most of the old newspaper reports about the Sandwich Shop make it clear that what drew those celebrities wasn’t just the burgers, but Ollie himself, whose caustic demeanor both entertained and, if what Gleichenhaus says is true, inspired them.

“Rodney Dangerfield used to write material in my place,” Ollie told the Post.

“He got all his material from me,” Ollie said of Rickles.

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The Good Guys Aren’t Always the Good Guys

Sadly, this issue is not a new one. Here, survivors of sexual violence, women’s rights advocates, students, jail reform advocates, transgender and gender non-conforming advocates, abolitionist organizers, and other community members and leaders rally on the steps of City Hall in New York on July 26, 2016 to call attention to the crisis of rape on Rikers Island. (Photo by Erik McGregor/Pacific Press)

At the women’s jail on Rikers Island, nicknamed “Rosie’s,” the lines separating criminals from victims from protectors are fungible: as John H. Tucker points out in his New York Magazine investigation into rape at Rikers, “about 50 of the 800 women housed at Rosie’s at any one time are being sexually victimized by staff,” leaving the women to try and look out for one another as best they can.

Any sex between an inmate and a guard, including so-called willing contact, is classified as victimization under federal rules, and under New York State law, it’s statutory rape. Darcell Marshall — who is for the first time telling her story, after anonymously suing the city and the guard she says assaulted her — had both consensual and nonconsensual experiences in the jail. Which in some ways isn’t a surprise: She arrived at Rikers having already spent years being sexually abused and bartering her body to get by. In the words of Dori Lewis, a supervising attorney for the Prisoner’s Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society, she was among the many Rosie’s inmates who “suffer an extraordinarily high incidence of trauma before entering jail” only to get locked up “and once again be subject to men taking advantage of their positions of power.”

This is precisely how Darcell Marshall’s abuse at the hands of Corrections Officer Santiago started: a woman who’d spent her teen years being pimped out, and an officer who knew that full well, and knew he had leverage.

“Your hair is so long and pretty. Your skin is smooth like chocolate — I love chocolate.” He told her he liked her lips. Then he said, “I’d like to see how they look wrapped around my dick,” according to Marshall’s deposition.

She was startled. Is he serious? Is this a setup by the prosecutor?

“What can you do for me?” she asked coyly, noting she needed commissary money for soap and deodorant.

“I’ll let you know,” Santiago replied.

Even if she were somehow being framed, Marshall wasn’t going to pass up the chance to get some things she needed. She’d gotten the standard-issue kit — a toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap with lye, which “burns your private parts up,” as one former Rosie’s inmate described it — but she had to depend on her commissary account for anything else. (That can include sanitary pads or tampons, access to which is controlled by guards who’ve reportedly rationed the supplies as a form of intimidation or punishment.) Inmates who don’t have friends or relatives to fund their commissary accounts, never mind to visit them, “have to hustle,” Marshall says, “like you’re on the street.”

Later that week, with most of the jail sound asleep, Marshall awoke to the pop of her cell door. Standing there was Santiago.

“You ready?” she remembers him saying. “I got the money.”

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