Which Mother for Isabella? Civil Union Ends in an Abduction and Questions
A look at the rights of same-sex parents after a mother abducts her daughter and heads to Nicaragua after a civil union dissolves:
“Isabella’s tumultuous life has embodied some of America’s bitterest culture wars — a choice, as Ms. Miller said in a courtroom plea, shortly before their desperate flight, ‘between two diametrically opposed worldviews on parentage and family.’
“Isabella was 7 when she and Ms. Miller jumped into a car in Virginia, leaving behind their belongings and a family of pet hamsters to die without food or water. Supporters drove them to Buffalo, where they took a taxi to Canada and boarded a flight to Mexico and then Central America.
“Ms. Miller, 44, is wanted by the F.B.I. and Interpol for international parental kidnapping. In their underground existence in this impoverished tropical country, she and Isabella have been helped by evangelical groups who endorse her decision to flee rather than to expose Isabella to the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ of her other legal mother, Janet Jenkins.”
Undead: The Rabies Virus Remains a Medical Mystery
For centuries, humans who were infected with the rabies virus had a fatality rate of 100 percent. A new treatment is providing hope, but its effectiveness is being called into question:
“Not long ago, the medical response to this grim situation would have been little more than ‘comfort care’: administration of sedatives and painkillers to ease the suffering. Untreated, this suffering can be unbearable to watch, let alone experience. That telltale difficulty in swallowing, known as hydrophobia, results in desperately thirsty patients whose bodies rebel involuntarily whenever drink is brought to their lips. Soon fevers spike, and the victims are subject to violent convulsions as well as sudden bouts of aggression; their cries of agony, as expressed through a spasming throat, can produce the impression of an almost animal bark. Eventually the part of the brain that controls autonomic functions, like respiration and circulation, stops working, and the patients either suffocate or die in cardiac arrest. A decade ago, the only choice was to sedate them so their deaths would arrive with as little misery as possible.
“But today, after millennia of futility, hospitals have an actual treatment to try. It was developed in 2004 by a pediatrician in Milwaukee named Rodney Willoughby, who, like the vast majority of American doctors, had never seen a case of rabies before. (In the US, there are usually fewer than five per year.) Yet Willoughby managed to save a young rabies patient, a girl of 15, by using drugs to induce a deep, week-long coma and then carefully bringing her out of it. It was the first documented case of a human surviving rabies without at least some vaccination before the onset of symptoms.”
The Piano
[Fiction, Aura Estrada short story contest winner] A Chinese American woman meets her neighbor under unfortunate circumstances:
‘So where are you from?’ the woman asked me.
‘We just moved up here from the city.’
‘No, I mean originally.’ I knew what this question meant.
‘I was born in China but I’ve lived in New York all my life. I came here before I even turned one.’
‘Oh, China. My sister took a trip to China last year. She said it was very beautiful.’
‘I’ve never been,’ I said. ‘Since I was born, of course.’
‘But your husband, he’s not Chinese.’ Her brow was furrowed as if she was trying to recall a complicated chronology of events. I was tempted to tell her that Daryl was Chinese, just to see if she would believe me.
‘No, he’s not Chinese.’
Don’t Wear Yum-Yum Yellow
A review of new book Demon Fish and the truth about sharks—from their mating rituals to the real odds of being attacked:
“There were 75 verified shark attacks last year, and 12 fatalities. Even in the US, a global hotspot, you are forty times more likely to be hospitalised by a Christmas tree ornament than by a shark. Meanwhile, to supply the shark fin soup trade alone, an estimated 73 million sharks are killed each year. Many shark populations have declined by 70 per cent or more in the last thirty years. One reason little is done about this is that although their fins fetch high prices, shark fisheries are of negligible economic value compared to, say, tuna or cod or herring, so little is done to protect stocks. And then of course humans tend to make more of a fuss over animals we can relate to – because they stand on two legs or live in charming family units, or are unthreateningly charismatic. One of the recent PR successes of the shark conservationists is the ‘walking shark’, which crawls along the sea bottom on its fins and has an appealing little face. The best-protected species are the big, peaceful filter feeders, the basking shark and particularly the whale shark, with its photogenic polka dots and mysterious long-range migration patterns. But we’re gradually becoming more enlightened. The third best-protected species is the great white, described approvingly here by E.O. Wilson as ‘one of the four or five last great predators of humanity’.”
An Inquiry Into the Very Public Private Marriage of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise
In celebrity journalism, what do we really know? Absolutely nothing, argues the writer, who constructs a counter-narrative that Katie Holmes has played everyone:
“They compare the pap-friendliness of various celebrities. Among the best are Cruise, in fact, and Hugh Jackman. Scarlett Johansson, who always runs, scowling, is ‘the worst.’ They scoff at the hypocritical attention-seeking of celebrities (‘Why do you think Alec Baldwin tweets his location?’). A middle-aged woman with curly gray hair, tinted granny glasses, and a Hawaiian shirt wanders over. She’s pet-sitting for someone in the building, and she wants to know why the media won’t pay this kind of attention to the problem of puppy mills. Craigslist has really become lax, she says. There’s a ‘secret kill site’ on 110th Street. There’s also—
“‘Katie! Katie! Katie!’
“Holmes, accompanied by a bald, burly off-duty police officer, has emerged from Whole Foods and begun the half-block walk back to the entrance of her building. She’s wearing a salmon blouse and blue jeans, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The puppy-mills lady is left talking to the air as eight paparazzi swoop in front of Holmes, forming a solid wall of jutting lenses that moves furiously backward, calling her name as their legs backpedal and their shutters snap, keeping a few feet ahead of her as she proceeds up the sidewalk, eyes down, her crooked half-smile fixed on her face, and then disappears inside the building.”
The Heretic
Long after the 1960s, a researcher into the effects of LSD makes the case for a return to studying it:
“On a Saturday last October, 45 years after dispensing those last legal doses, James Fadiman stood on stage inside the cavernous hall of Judson Memorial Church, a long-time downtown New York incubator of artistic, progressive, and even revolutionary movements. High above him on a window of stained glass, a golden band wrapped Escher-like enigmas around the Four Evangelists. Fadiman appeared far more earthly: wire frames, trim beard, dropped hairline, khakis, running shoes—like a policy wonk at a convention, right down to lanyard and nametag.
“A couple hundred people sat before him in folding chairs and along the side aisles of the hall. He adjusted his head microphone, then scrolled his lecture notes and side-stepped the podium. He felt fortunate to be there for many reasons, he said, including a health scare he’d had a few months back—a rather advanced case of pericarditis. ‘Some of you, I know, have experimented with enough substances so that you’ve “died.” But it’s different when you’re in the ER.’ He chuckled. ‘And you’re not on anything.'”
Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives
A look behind the scenes of Texas’s decision last year to cut funding for family planning and wage “an all-out war on Planned Parenthood”—and what that may mean for the future of women’s health care:
“It was a given that reasonable people could differ over abortion, but most lawmakers believed that funding birth control programs was just good policy; not only did it reduce the number of abortions, but it reduced the burden on the state to care for more children.
“That changed dramatically after 2010, when Republicans won 25 seats in the House, giving them a supermajority of 101 to 49 and total control over the law-making process. (The male-female split is 118 men to 32 women.) As the Eighty-second Legislature began, a freshman class of right-wing legislators arrived in Austin, determined to cut government spending—a.k.a. ‘waste’—and push a deeply conservative social agenda. At the same time, Governor Perry was preparing to launch his presidential bid, burnishing his résumé for a national conservative audience. It wasn’t a good time to be a Democrat, but it wasn’t a great time to be a moderate Republican either. Conservative organizations turned out to be as skilled at social media as your average sixteen-year-old, using Twitter and Facebook to chronicle and broadcast every move of the supposed RINOs. A climate of fear descended on the Capitol. ‘Most people in the House think we should allow poor women to have Pap smears and prenatal care and contraception,’ an aide to a top House Republican told me. ‘But they are worried about primary opponents.’
“The result, in Texas and beyond, was a full-scale assault on the existing system of women’s health care, with a bull’s-eye on the back of Planned Parenthood, the major provider of both abortions and family planning in Texas and the country. As Representative Wayne Christian told the Texas Tribune, in May 2011, ‘Of course it’s a war on birth control, abortion, everything. That’s what family planning is supposed to be about.'”
What’s It Like To Sing The Anthem At A Baseball Game? The Story Of One Man’s Perilous Fight
A sportswriter tries his hand at singing the national anthem at a baseball game:
“The anthem is designed to humble you. The anthem is designed to ruin your shit if you get too haughty, and that’s a good thing. In fact, it’s ready to challenge you from the very beginning:
“O say can you see …
“That ‘see’ is tricky. That’s your first high note, and you have to sustain it for a second. You can tell whether or not an anthem is gonna suck usually by the time the singer has finished with just this line.
“By the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed …
“Again, we have another trap. That high note on ‘proudly’ sneaks up on you, forcing you to jump up higher than many people are comfortable with.”
Did Football Kill Austin Trenum?
[Not single-page] A young football player kills himself after he sustained a concussion on the field:
Heading home, the Trenums stopped at the Chuck Wagon, a restaurant around the corner from their house, where the Brentsville High players gathered after games. Austin’s teammates recounted his sideline exchange with Scavongelli.
Scavongelli: “Do you know where you are?”
Austin: “Yeah. This is my field!”
Scavongelli: “No. Do you know what school you are at?”
Austin: “Yeah. My school!”
Scavongelli: “Do you know who you’re playing against?”
Austin: “No.”
Desperately Seeking Mitt
[Not single-page] What is Mitt Romney’s true personality? And can joining the press on his campaign bus for five months shed any light on it?
“When the speech winds down, I talk with a woman named Pam DeLong, who is a Tea Partier here in Laurens. She is for Newt because he’s for real, he’s a smarty, and because of stuff like the Jordan Cash moment. ‘When that little boy came over, he stopped and talked to him, and he was so natural, and then he just went back into his speech without missing a beat. Romney couldn’t do that. Newt knows what he’s talking about. He doesn’t let things fluster him, which is why I think he’d be the best guy to take on Obama.’
“In other words, Newt is an ideal candidate because when an infant pestered him, he hacked it, took it like a man, a pro. If it were Romney? And an infant started fucking with him? You know it would be bad, some pediatric version of the time he sang ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’ to black teens in Florida. ‘Hello, little organism different from myself. I will now make noises that I believe are comprehensible to your kind.'”
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