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“I’m very skeptical about the ability of people in positions of power and privilege—including intellectuals—to name truths about the world.”
The post Don’t Save Yourself, Save the World: A Dialogue with Vincent Lloyd appeared first on Public Books.
Today in the recurring series “America is Broken” — meaning, the news — three reporters at Pro Publica reveal that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted lavish gifts from Harlan Crow, a billionaire Republican donor. Thomas has flown on Crow’s private jet many times, gone on vacations to Indonesia and New Zealand on Crow’s yacht, and spent time at Crow’s compound in the Adirondacks. In doing so, Thomas has violated norms pertaining to judges’ conduct and possibly broken federal law:
Soon after Crow met Thomas three decades ago, he began lavishing the justice with gifts, including a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass, which Thomas disclosed. Recently, Crow gave Thomas a portrait of the justice and his wife, according to Tarabay, who painted it. Crow’s foundation also gave $105,000 to Yale Law School, Thomas’ alma mater, for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund,” tax filings show.
Crow said that he and his wife have funded a number of projects that celebrate Thomas. “We believe it is important to make sure as many people as possible learn about him, remember him and understand the ideals for which he stands,” he said.
To trace Thomas’ trips around the world on Crow’s superyacht, ProPublica spoke to more than 15 former yacht workers and tour guides and obtained records documenting the ship’s travels.
On the Indonesia trip in the summer of 2019, Thomas flew to the country on Crow’s jet, according to another passenger on the plane. Clarence and Ginni Thomas were traveling with Crow and his wife, Kathy. Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, decked out with motorboats and a giant inflatable rubber duck, met the travelers at a fishing town on the island of Flores.
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Bree Alexander was appointed clinical assistant professor and interim coordinator for the bachelor of social work degree program at the University of South Carolina. Earlier, she was a school-based therapist at the South Carolina Department of Mental Health.
Dr. Alexander completed her bachelor’s degree in psychology at Furman University in South Carolina. She earned a master of social work degree at the University of South Carolina and a Ph.D. in social work at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. She is the youngest person to ever earn a Ph.D. in social work at Baylor.
Cajetan Iheka is the new director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. He is currently a fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center and a professor of English at Yale. Dr. Iheka joined the faculty at Yale in 2019 after teaching at the University of Alabama. He is the author of two books that bridge African studies, literary and media studies, and the environmental humanities: Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021).
Dr. Iheka is a graduate of Imo State University in Nigeria, where he majored in English education. He holds a master’s degree in English language and literature from Central Michigan University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan.
Earl J. Edwards is a new assistant professor in the educational leadership and higher education development program in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. He had taught in the public schools in Providence, Rhode Island, and Los Angeles. Dr. Edwards is a co-author of All Students Must Thrive: Transforming Schools to Combat Toxic Stressors and Cultivate Critical Wellness (National Center for Leadership in Education, 2019).
Dr. Edwards is a graduate of Boston College, where he majored in sociology. He holds a master’s degree in school leadership from Teachers College at Columbia University and a Ph.D. in urban schooling from the University of California, Los Angeles
Early diagnosis of uterine cancer is known to improve a patient’s chances for survival. When diagnosed while the cancer is still confined to the uterus, nearly 95 percent of patients will survive for at least five years. But that rate drops to less than 70 percent once the cancer has spread to areas or lymph nodes nearby and plummets to around 18 percent once the cancer has spread to other parts of the body.
Previous research has found that Black patients are less likely to receive early diagnoses than people of other racial and ethnic groups. A new analysis by Yale researchers provides insights into why that is: They found that Black patients were more likely than their White counterparts to experience testing delays or to not receive recommended tests at all.
For their analysis, researchers included adult patients who had reported abnormal uterine bleeding to their healthcare providers and later received a diagnosis of uterine cancer. Abnormal uterine bleeding is the most common symptom of uterine cancer. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends several procedures to evaluate the cause of abnormal uterine bleeding, such as endometrial biopsy, transvaginal/pelvic ultrasound, and hysteroscopy, in which a physician examines the inside of the cervix and uterus with a small, telescope-like device. In the new study, researchers found that more than twice as many Black patients than White patients did not receive any of these procedures.
Further, of the patients who did receive procedures, Black patients were more likely than White patients to experience a delay of more than two months in receiving their first diagnostic procedure following their report of abnormal uterine bleeding. Ultimately, Black patients were more likely than White patients to experience a delay in receiving their cancer diagnosis. The researchers found that 11.3 percent of Black patients who had reported abnormal uterine bleeding waited more than a year to receive a uterine cancer diagnosis, compared with 8.3 percent of White patients.
The full study, “Racial Disparities in Diagnostic Evaluation of Uterine Cancer among Medicaid Beneficiaries,” was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It may be accessed here.
Michelle Robinson, an associate professor in the School of Dentistry, was given the added duties of senior vice provost for faculty affairs at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Robinson has previously served as associate dean for Health Information and Business Systems and interim dean of the School of Dentistry.
Dr. Robinson is a graduate of Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. She earned a doctorate in dental medicine at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey.
Charles D. Brown II is a new assistant professor of physics at Yale University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked on experiments with ultracold atomic gasses trapped in optical lattices.
Dr. Brown is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, where he majored in physics. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Yale University.
Patricia Smith was appointed professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, effective September 1. She is currently a visiting professor in creative writing at Princeton and a distinguished professor at the City University of New York, where she has taught since 2009. She is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (TriQuarterly, 2017), which won the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry.
Professor Smith earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing at the University of Southern Maine.
Angela Byars-Winston, a professor of general internal medicine in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin, has been given the added duties as chair of the newly established Institute for Diversity Science at the university. She also serves as associate director in the Collaborative Center for Health Equity and as faculty lead in the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research.
Dr. Byars-Winston holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in counselor education from San Diego State University and a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Arizona State University.
A new study found that undergraduate degrees from Princeton, along with Harvard and Yale, offer a leg up in getting a coveted Supreme Court clerkship.
I don’t love January for the usual reasons: holiday festivities are over, work resumes, and the weather is gray and cold and depressing. In January the year in front of me feels like a void. Confronted with a blank calendar, my instinct is to fill everything in, to make it mean something, to schedule my life into being busy and full and loud.
I’m trying to cope with my January existential crisis, and the way I cope is to read. Lately, my favorite author is French writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel prize in literature. I’d always had a book or two of hers lying around, always meant to read her in earnest, but it took me until this fall to get into her work — and now I’m obsessed. As she explores her memory and its reliability, Ernaux relaxes my melancholy into something closer to curiosity. As Sheila Heti writes in the New York Times: “Most memoirs operate as if the past were right there and can be looked at, like a painting on the wall. But Ms. Ernaux understands that one’s 18-year-old self is a stranger to one’s 70-year-old self.”
In Happening, Ernaux is haunted by an illegal abortion during her youth. She sets out to transcribe “an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me.” She writes, “I shall try to conjure up each of the sentences engraved in my memory which were either so unbearable or so comforting to me at the time that the mere thought of them today engulfs me in a wave of horror or sweetness.” Ernaux’s works foreground the difficulty of writing about the self, showing memory as just another way to cope with the void: the blank page, the unknown future, the open calendar squares that haunt me. Reading her work exposes the futility of my efforts to force things to mean something just to stave off the blankness of a new year. But there’s a glimpse of hope for me: Ernaux reminds me that sometimes things find their meaning only in hindsight, not in the present. You can relax and return to something later, able to see anew what it was all about.
This reading list brings together essays that question the stories we hold about ourselves, how we make our lives meaningful. There’s love, sex, heartbreak, returns to childhood, and deep grief that structure how we see ourselves and our lives. These writers, like Ernaux, travel into their own memories and sensations, confronting old versions of themselves and dredging up hidden habits, to see what makes sense.
Of course there’s one thing that makes our lives so meaningful: desire. Noor Qasim’s essay considers the narrative potential of desire — the stories we tell ourselves about it — by placing Annie Ernaux alongside the genre of the millennial sex novel, including books by Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani, and Alyssa Songsiridej. Qasim contrasts Ernaux’s novel Simple Passion, which appeared in 1991, with her recently published journals, Getting Lost, which she kept during the same period. What emerges is a picture of how desire moves us, how it makes our mind work, and how we might start to write about it.
As Ernaux lived the affair, she was aware of the sort of novel one might write — perhaps one rather similar to the novels of desire examined here. But she chose, instead, to craft a different story of desire, one based in fact, yes, though not in the particularities of her fraught and ultimately commonplace experience. In eschewing the logics of narrative, in refusing to even attempt to pin down the object of her desire and opting instead for something that might resemble a ‘testimony,’ Ernaux abdicates any responsibility to plot and its repetitive motions, freeing herself to focus fully on the phenomenon of desire instead. Getting Lost evokes the experience of desire through the mess of life; Simple Passion pares away context to reveal desire’s shape. And while the journals’ primary interest is as a supplement to the novel that arose from them, they also help to preserve a sort of elemental agony, the anxious movements of a mind that desires, and desires seriously.
I credit this essay by Alexandra Molotkow for introducing me to psychologist Dorothy Tennov, whose 1979 book Love and Limerence was quite a read. “Limerence” names an obsessive infatuation, and Molotkow examines how this infatuation can both bring us out of ourselves — “Limerence is a program running in the background of your days and nights, arranging your impressions in the shape of your fixation” — and how it also operates as a form of selfishness. We get drawn out of ourselves into the idea of another, but we only know that person through our own mind. Molotkow takes the messiness and ambivalence of a crush seriously, paying attention to how much we want to pay attention to someone.
I was born limerent, and my relationship to limerence itself is ambivalent. Crushes map life over with meaning and joy, and I’d always choose heartbreak over boredom. They can also gain on me like a frightening, unpredictable force that lifts me out of my life and drops me back, months later, with a lot of mess to clean. They feel disruptive and wasteful — a misallocation of emotional energies, a source of outsize pain for stupid reasons — and, though it’s partly the point, they alienate me from myself: crushing involves adopting a set of hypothetical standards against which I’m necessarily lacking.
Sarah Chihaya writes about reading Anne Carson in the wake of a devastating breakup. Every day for one summer in Oxford, she reread Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay” in the same spot every day. Her experience of rereading makes her question her own investment in reading as an academic and as a self-described “professional reader.” The practice of rereading Carson is both comforting and challenging, alienating and unifying all at once: It makes a stretch of time make sense, and Chihaya’s account of her own story reminds us what reading can do when it knits into the fabric of our lives.
After you walk away from a last good-bye, the terrain of everyday life is suddenly overlaid with the haunted geography of an entire relationship. Every space is layered with the fine sediment of recollection. Any time you trip and reach out for balance, your hand might accidentally slip “down // into time” and dredge up something beautiful or awful from those years or months or weeks past.
I love this Substack newsletter by Berkeley journalism student Kate Raphael, which reflects on the uncanny experience of being in your childhood bedroom, brushing up against the many past versions of yourself. Like Ernaux, Raphael’s access to the past is more complicated, more difficult to reach — until it’s not. She writes “I keep my distance from my younger self; I return home with my guard up,” but after sliding back into her past self, Raphael leans in. She rereads her childhood journals alongside watching the film Aftersun, which is set mostly within a child’s perspective and highlights a fragmented memory. Both the film and Raphael’s experiences foreground what returning to the past can give us, what meanings we can find there.
When I slip back into myself as a kid, when I snap at my parents or fall into an old pattern, I often think I am reverting to someone worse. I expect to react better and understand more now that I’m older, and I find that much of the time, I do not. In so many ways, I am still my younger self—a girl who surprises me by how much she understood, how deeply she felt things, while my current self surprises me by how much she still doesn’t understand.
In this essay for The Point, Elisa Gonzalez reflects on the death of her brother alongside artwork depicting resurrections, meditating largely on the biblical story of Lazarus. She considers the difficulty of writing about the dead, the pull the story of resurrection has on us, and the way grief reorders a life. Her attention to the way mourning morphs time takes on a distinctly Ernaux-like quality, Gonzalez reflecting that “Time, I suspect, will never move as it did before, even after I step back into it.”
Being thrown out of time or immured in a fixed point within it is a way of dying with the one who has died, an unwilled and yet welcome journey that brings us nearer to being dead. My brother was shot in the chest three times, and every day I shape a gun out of my hand and press it three times to my chest. This ritual is a way of entering the event that I can never live, though I survive it: his dying, not mine. That I go on living while he does not still surprises me. Yet I now think the living hasn’t been continuous. If I have found any resurrection for sure, it’s mine, not my brother’s: as soon as I said, to another sister, “Stephen is dead,” it was as if I, like Barthes, were one dead—and then I came back to life, changed, like Lazarus always and probably until my final death glancing at that vast distracting orb beyond.
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Bekah Waalkes is a writer and PhD candidate at Tufts University. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Cleveland Review of Books, Bon Appétit, and more.
Editor: Krista Stevens
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