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Professional writer, editor, napper, and dog-snorgler. Knows you are, but what is she?

Blithe, Euphoric, Grateful, and Over

I think often of the invisible but inextricable link between my grandmother’s experience of torturous starvation and, later, her robust appetite, an almost frenzied consumption of nearly anything. I think of the way my father adopted it, too, despite never having survived a mechanized atrocity. How does starvation make way for a bottomless belly, a belly that becomes enthusiastic and agreeable enough to create a genetic impact? While she purchased the cake, they both ate it, night after night, with unusual vigor.

The inclinations of the tummy are mysterious. Recent research has indicated the sugar high — that ubiquitous explanation for children’s hyperactivity mid-birthday — is not even a real phenomenon. So how does one account for that sudden giddy rush of energy? Is it just a sweets-induced joy? An appreciation for the ability to eat purely for pleasure, a gratitude made physical? I imagine this is what living looks like, sometimes: it is blithe and euphoric and grateful. And then it is over.

In Avidly, Monica Uszerowicz reflects on what living through the Holocaust does to a survivor’s relationship to food, hunger, and eating for pleasure, and how these relationships get passed on to successive generations.

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President Trump, Three Days On: The Sound and the Fury

Donald Trump caricature by DonkeyHotey (CC BY-SA 2.0)

By most standards, Spicer’s statement Saturday did not go well. He appeared tired and nervous in an ill-fitting gray pinstripe suit. He publicly gave faulty facts and figures — which he said were provided to him by the Presidential Inaugural Committee — that prompted a new round of media scrutiny.

Many critics thought Spicer went too far and compromised his integrity. But in Trump’s mind, Spicer’s attack on the news media was not forceful enough. The president was also bothered that the spokesman read, at times haltingly, from a printed statement.

Trump has been resentful, even furious, at what he views as the media’s failure to reflect the magnitude of his achievements, and he feels demoralized that the public’s perception of his presidency so far does not necessarily align with his own sense of accomplishment.

This story in the Washington Post — based on interviews with almost a dozen senior White House officials and and Trump advisors — paints a picture of an uneasy administration trying to stay in orbit around its hyper-sensitive leader and his insider cabal.

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Cultural Conflicts, Embodied: On Being Transgender, and Unsure

I don’t know that I’ll ever cross over the threshold into a true or authentic self, that I’ll ever pass as male or feel like a singular entity, rather than split. Being in a female body, being dismissed, patronized and emotionally abused in the ways women so often are, has shaped my understanding of human beings, of the ways we interact and exert control. I don’t want to become what I hate, to embody the monstrousness latent in masculinity, growing an extra layer of tissue separating me from my emotions and impairing my compassion for others in the process. I don’t want to be anything like my father.

A trans man I’ve become friends with describes his psychological state before starting testosterone, the inner chaos that rendered him absent from his own life, and the peace hormones brought him, a newfound balance due even more to neurochemical recalibration than bodily changes. I measure my vanity, my horror at the thought of being lonely and unwanted, against my health, my ability to participate in the world. I don’t know that I’ll ever stop hesitating in the wings, too shy of my own spirit, too afraid and unsure of whether I want to be seen for all of who I am.

Jason Phoebe Rusch, in Entropy, takes readers through an experience of being transgender that’s different from most of the narratives the media focuses on — different and difficult, with conflicting desires and fears that physical transition won’t solve.

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Who Was Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Martin Luther King Jr. was many things — a radical, a moderate, a peacekeeper, a hellraiser, a father, a husband, a crusader against the evils of capitalism, a proponent of love and also revolution. He was a man known to be deeply sensitive, sometimes misogynist, often depressed, blisteringly funny. He was all of these things and more. And like so many brothers and sisters before and since, his beautiful and rich mahogany tones have been flattened to the matte black of the history books that paint him as the friend of well-meaning whites and the moral opposition of angry blacks. And like King, we as black people are so much more than white supremacy would have us believe.

Who and what are we really commemorating on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day? Writing in The Establishment, Ijeoma Oluo unpacks the myriad ways Dr. King’s story has been softened and re-written to weaken black activism and bolster white supremacy.

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“Discourse Is a Battleground”

Photo by Ggia (CC BY-SA 4.0 ).

Discourse is a battleground, and we have to perceive it as such. It’s not simply a representation of what is happening; it’s a battleground. This is why it’s important to push for the revolutionary grassroots narrative that has been completely isolated, silenced, marginalized, and, for many, unthinkable. This is why, I think, we should highlight that struggle and make sure that people hear about it.

– In an in-depth interview in Jacobin, Yusaf Khalil talks with Syrian scholar Yasser Munif about the roots of the Syrian civil war, the role of on-the-ground activists, and the narrative disconnect between Syria and the West.

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What We Eat When We’re Eating at Christmastime: A Reading List

"Fruitcake" by Emily Balsley (CC BY-NC 2.0).

It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: “It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat.”

“A Christmas Memory,” Truman Capote

’Tis the season! A time for awkwardly posed Santa photos, awkwardly getting tipsy at office holiday parties, awkwardly offensive carols, and awkwardly feigning excitement over receiving a Harry & David fruitcake. For many of us who celebrate Christmas, foods are as closely bound to the experience as gift-giving. And making fun of fruitcake has become a time-honored tradition — though thanks to the success of this dedicated fruitcake besmirchment campaign, I suspect many of us have never actually tasted, let alone received or re-gifted, a traditional fruitcake.

This reading list celebrates oft-maligned holiday foods like fruitcake and mincemeat pie, along with unlikely new candidates like White Castle and KFC.

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‘My Name Is Emily, and I’m a White Supremacist.’

How am I a white supremacist? Well, I was born and raised in the United States of America, a country built by slave labor on stolen land, and every privilege I’ve ever enjoyed has come at the expense of someone else’s oppression. The education I received was white supremacist education, from its demand that I learn to write and speak “proper English” to its reliance on a literary, scientific, and artistic canon comprised of and curated almost exclusively by white men. My aesthetic tastes are permeated with subtle coding that extends subconscious preference to those who look like me and communicate themselves in a way I can identify with. I have interjected my unwanted, unwarranted opinion into conversations that are out of my lane, and I have chosen to look the other way rather than confront instances of racism because of cowardice, complacency, and a misplaced sense of politeness. The very foundations of my way of life are in white supremacy, and the list of microaggressions I have committed, and will no doubt continue to commit in spite of my “good intentions” for as long as I’m alive, is virtually endless.

Earlier this year, Emily Pothast penned a candid, introspective, and challenging essay in The Establishment exploring the ramifications of growing up in a culture saturated with racism. A good read when it was published in May, it has a renewed timeliness in light of last week’s US presidental election and the ensuing conversations about the impact of race and racism.

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An Uncomfortable Truth

Photo from Kheel Center, Cornell University (CC BY 2.0).

Instead of seeking aggressive racial-equality initiatives, Democrats too often have opted for a sort of trickle-down liberalism. If we work to strengthen unions, that will trickle down to you. If we work to strengthen health care, that will trickle down to you. If we work to make all schools better, that will trickle down to you. After decades of Democratic loyalty, too many black Americans are still awaiting that trickle…

Since first securing the right to vote, black Americans have had to be single-issue voters — and that single issue is basic citizenship rights. Maintaining these rights will always and forever transcend any other issue. And so black Americans can never jump ship to a party they understand as trying to erode the hard-fought rights black citizens have died to secure.

But it is also true that black Americans have not always been single-party voters, and they don’t have to remain so. If Democrats want to keep black voters, they need to work for those votes, because one day Republicans might wise up.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Nikole Hannah-Jones explores the rhetoric of Donald Trump’s appeals to black voters — noting that he’s “speaking more directly about the particular struggles of working-class black Americans and describing how the government should help them more than any presidential candidate in years” — and calls on the Democratic Party to stop taking black support for granted.

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Who’s to Blame for Trump? Media’s Socioeconomic Blind Spots

young women holding signs at a donald trump rally

It wasn’t poor whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the “war on drugs.”

Nor was it poor whites who conjured the specter of the black “welfare queen.”

These points should not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of society, but remind us that those horrors reside at the top in different forms and with more terrible power.

Among reporters and commentators this election cycle, then, a steady finger ought be pointed at whites with economic leverage: social conservatives who donate to Trump’s campaign while being too civilized to attend a political rally and yell what they really believe.

—  Who are the most fervent Trump supporters? Not necessarily the poor- and lower-class white communities you might think from reading the news. Writing in The Guardian, Sarah Smarsh — political liberal and native Kansan — picks apart the class bias fueling the one-dimensional media coverage of poor white communities who are “blamed” for the rise of Donald Trump. Spoiler alert: even in red states, there’s diversity and nuance.

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The Duality of ‘Home,’ or, a Life Both Lived and On Display

In Italy once, I was given a private tour of a beautiful castle, led by the owner through room after impeccably furnished room, only to glimpse at the end through a half-open door a tiny, cavelike space crammed with all the evidence — a gas stove, a television, a tatty sofa — of daily life: This was clearly where the family spent their time. I have often looked at photographs of writers in their elegant book-lined studies and marveled at what seems to me a mirage of sorts, the near-perfect alignment of seeming with being, the convincing illusion of mental processes on public display, as though writing a book were not the work of someone capable of all the shame and deviousness and coldheartedness in the world.

— In The New York Times Magazine, Rachel Cusk meditates on the ways our homes are simultaneously the places we live, and set pieces that we art-direct.

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